Book Review: Urdu Memoirs

A short book review published in India Today:

Yeh Un Dinoñ Ki Baat Hai: Urdu Memoirs of Cinema Legends by Yasir Abbasi; Bloomsbury India; Rs 699; 448 pages

Here's a bit of film trivia: which Indian actor (other than Rajinikanth) worked as a bus conductor? Would it help to tell you he was originally called Badruddin Qazi? Or that he landed his first major role because Balraj Sahni suggested he enter Guru Dutt's office pretending to be drunk? Or (last clue) that his inebriated act was such a hit that he later named himself after a popular whiskey brand?

Yes, it's Johnny Walker.

Yeh Un Dinon Ki Baat Hai: Urdu Memoirs of Cinema Legends is full of such tales. Editor-translator Yasir Abbasi's excavation of old Urdu film magazines lays out a new matrix of origin myths, loving details and vicious gossip involving not just actors, but directors, writers, singers and lyricists from what used to be called Hindi cinema.

Some get to tell their own stories, which means elisions and self-aggrandisements or, at least, careful public presentations of the self. Johnny Walker is keen to establish that he's really a teetotaller. Writing in Shama magazine in 1981, the 1940s star Veena lists the many famous films she almost did: Anmol Ghadi, Udan Khatola, Mughal-e-Azam, Jogan, Mother India, even an abandoned early version of Mahal. Dharmendra mentions a close "friendship" with Meena Kumari, but completely avoids his role in ending it: "it never occurred to me back then that one day she... let's just leave it at that."

Others are described by friends and admirers, or by writers who happen to be friends and admirers. So the brothers Ganguly (Ashok Kumar and Kishore Kumar) get a tribute from the actor Iftekhar, Hindi cinema's once-perpetual police officer. The composer Naushad tells of the director K. Asif's grand ways, including the tale of how Bade Ghulam Ali Khan was persuaded to be Tansen's voice in Mughal-e-Azam. Dialogue writer and playwright Javed Siddiqui has a charming fanboyish piece about working with Satyajit Ray on Shatranj ke Khilari. K.A. Abbas writes with acuity about Raj Kapoor, for whom he wrote many films: "If he loves just himself, then why do all of us still love him? Well, that's because there's something else that he places even before himself -- his work, his art."

The crisscrossing narratives sometimes produce a Rashomon effect. Eg: Dharmendra's coy elision is matter-of-factly undercut by Nargis, who frankly appraises Meena Kumari's passion for him and her heartbreak when he left. Whether reading that piece, or Ismat Chughtai on the singing star Suraiya, or the memoirs by Nadira, Shyama or Meena Shorey, it's clear that the Hindi film industry awarded its actresses particularly lonely, difficult lives.

I have many quibbles with his translation, but Abbasi has done film buffs a service.

Published in India Today, 18 Jan 2019.

The Sharpshooter

My Mirror column:

Ismat Chughtai would have turned 107 on August 21. Who was she and why should she be the subject of a column on cinema?

The Urdu writer Ismat Chughtai (right) in a still from Shyam Benegal's 1857-set drama, Junoon (1978). Also seen: Jennifer Kendal Kapoor (left) & a very young Nafisa Ali

It was in 1942 that Ismat Chughtai wrote what still remains her most talked-about story. ‘Lihaaf’ (The Quilt) first came out in an Urdu journal called Adab-e-Lateef and then in a collection of Ismat’s short stories published by Shahid Ahmed Dehlvi.

In December 1944, Ismat and her literary contemporary Saadat Hasan Manto were charged with obscenity. The second and definitive hearing in the case took place in Lahore in November 1946. Here is Ismat, in her autobiography Kaghazi Hai Pairahan, recounting with not a little relish how the case fell apart in the courtroom:

The witnesses who had turned up to prove “Lihaaf” obscene were thrown into confusion by my lawyer... After a good deal of reflection one of them said: “This phrase ‘… drawing lovers’ is obscene.”

“Which word is obscene, ‘draw’ or ‘lover’?” The lawyer asked.


“Lover,” replied the witness a little hesitantly.

“My lord, the word ‘lover’ has been used by great poets most liberally. It is also used in naats, poems written in praise of the Prophet. God-fearing people have accorded it a very high status.” “But it’s objectionable for girls to draw lovers to themselves,” said the witness. “Why?” “Because… because it’s objectionable for good girls to do so.”

“And if the girls are not good, then it is not objectionable?”

“Mmm… no.”

“My client must have referred to the girls who were not good. Yes madam, do you mean here that bad girls draw lovers?”

“Yes.”

“Well, this may not be obscene. But it is reprehensible for an educated lady from a decent family to write about them.” the witness thundered.

“Censure it as much as you want. But it does not come within the purview of law.”

The issue lost much of its steam thereafter, writes Ismat. The implied sexual relationship between an aristocratic woman and her devoted maid which made 'Lihaaf' so controversial in its time still remains a hot-button topic. Abhishek Chaubey’s Dedh Ishqiya (2014) made a sidelong reference to Chughtai’s story while depicting the bond between Begum Para (Madhuri Dixit) and her maid Muniya (Huma Qureshi). A proper film adaptation by Rahat Kazmi is also in production, starring Tannishtha Chatterjee.

The division of the world into good girls and bad girls had always been of abiding interest to Ismat. The ninth of ten children, she grew up learning to ride and shoot and climb trees alongside her six brothers and three sisters. Her father, a deputy collector in places like Agra and Aligarh, was a remarkable man who gave all his children an education and the freedom to speak of anything under the sun. In a 1972 interview, Ismat attributed her early success as a writer to her frankness, and that frankness to her upbringing. “We were all frank, my father, my brothers, all of us. We never used to sit in separate groups, women in one place, men in another... We were all considered bold, rude and quarrelsome,” she told the Mahfil interviewer.


But her autobiography makes clear that her forthrightness was highly unusual for a young woman, getting her “bashed up often for telling the truth”. “Purdah had already been imposed on me, but my tongue was a naked sword,” she writes. Here is an example of Ismat’s sword, piercing through the hypocritical veil of 'decency': “The apparently shy and respectable girls... allowed themselves to be grabbed, hugged and kissed in bathrooms and in dark corners by young men who were related to their families. Such girls were considered modest.”


Ismat’s first visit to Bombay was as an inspector of municipal schools. She took the opportunity to reconnect with Shahid Latif, whom she had met in Aligarh and who worked in Bombay Talkies. Upon her urging, he took her to watch a film being shot. The lure of the cinema was a powerful one, and Ismat soon began writing scripts for films. Her first script — Ziddi — was bought by Ashok Kumar, then helping to run Bombay Talkies, for the highly impressive sum of Rs 20,000. To offer a comparison, Ismat tells us the heroine Kamini Kaushal, then already a star, was signed on for Rs 20,000, while Dev Anand — for whom this was one of his first roles — got Rs 6,000.

Between the late 1940s and late 1950s, Ismat went on to write scripts for many other films in Bombay. Of these, Aarzoo, Sheesha, Buzdil, Fareb, Darwaza, Lal Rukh, Society and Sone ki Chidiya were all produced and directed by Shahid Latif, who was by then her husband. But while some of these (Buzdil, Aarzoo and Sone ke Chidiya) were both commercial and critical successes, it is clear that Ismat's screenplays were necessarily a toned-down version of her literary self. (Asked by the 1972 Mahfil interviewer if there was “any adverse effect on writers who get involved in film writing”, Ismat burst out, “how can I say anything against films because it's through films that we’ve been fed!”)
The one film through which one can experience the unexpurgated Ismat is MS Sathyu's Garm Hava, whose portrait of a Muslim family remains the most nuanced cinematic depiction we have of the effects of Partition.

But Ismat also wrote about the film world. Her novel Ajeeb Aadmi ('A Very Strange Man') is about the talented director-producer Dharamdev, his Bengali wife Mangala who is a talented playback singer, and his affair with the actress Zarina which ends up devastating all their lives. The central characters were entirely recognisable, embedded though they were in a sharply realised fiction that shows exactly how power works in the film industry. They remain recognisable today, even though two of the three are long dead. Perhaps some day soon, someone will make the film, and Ismat’s naked sword will again shine in use.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 26 Aug 2018.

The fictions of filmdom

My Mirror column:

Rahi Masoom Raza's biting 1977 novel Scene 75 is a brutally frank and funny account of the Bombay film industry -- and of our need to tell stories.

“Ali Amjad was saying that they should take Rajendra Kumar. Harish was saying that Rajendra Kumar was a fool. He didn't know how to act... Slowly their voices grew louder. Harish Rai was the director. Ali Amjad the writer... VD said, 'There's a new boy. Rajesh Khanna. You'll get him cheap...”

Four decades after it was first published, Rahi Masoom Raza's marvellous novel Scene 75 – just out in Poonam Saxena's pacy new English translation – can still plunge us headlong into the hectic, gossipy universe of Bombay filmdom. Raza's prose has the infectious quality of the born raconteur, somehow managing to combine circuitous, detailed backstories with new characters introduced -- and parted from -- at breakneck speed.

But unlike say, Ismat Chughtai's Ajeeb Aadmi -- a rather thinly disguised version of the unhappy Guru Dutt-Geeta Dutt-Waheeda Rehman triangle -- Raza does not place us at what we might think of the centre of the action. Yes, big names are dropped with elan, but it is not their lives that Scene 75 wants us to enter.

Real-life stars, producers, character actors, from Asha Parekh and Sanjeev Kumar to David and Manmohan Krishna, only provide the matrix of instant credibility for Raza's fictional protagonists, who are people on the fringes of the industry: aspiring screenwriters, starlets on the make, housewives desperate to wrangle film premiere invitations.

This is the seamy underbelly of Bollywood, fed on crumbs dropped by the rich and famous. Sometimes these crumbs are literal, like the supposedly jinxed royal bed from the set of a film called Adle-Jahangir that becomes the centrepiece of the flat shared by the book's four struggling friends -- or the transparent nightie deemed too small for Hema Malini that makes its way to Radhika, wife of the failing screenwriter Phandaji, and practically changes her life.

More often, though, they are tidbits of information that offer access to the filmi duniya. Scene 75 derives much of its juiciness from the interactions between various classes of hangers-on, who have different degrees of this access, and most of whom are pretending to have more than they actually do. So, for instance, we have the grave, revolutionary VD acquiring new skills of deception when it comes to showing a young Anglo-Indian woman called Rosy dreams of a future as heroine: 'Today BR Chopra made a pukka commitment to give you a break in his next film. And Nasir Husain said, “Bring her over right now, I want to sign her for my next film.” But he makes such escapist films. I won't let you work there...' VD's friends – particularly the book's central protagonist Ali Amjad, who seems partly modelled on Raza himself -- are upset with his bald-faced lies. 'Why are you showing the poor thing these false dreams?' Ali Amjad demands to know. VD's answer is a counterquestion that really has no answer: 'But why does she see them?' 

Why does she, indeed? Scene 75, especially as it moves towards its tragic denouement, emerges as a book full of cynical truths, truths which it would be unfair to describe as takedowns because they don't seem to contain malice (even when, as with the book's many lesbian characters, they bear the burden of prejudice).

But even as Raza's humour transitions from dark to pitch black, and his heroes mock themselves for their loss of idealism, I had the impression that Raza could not entirely condemn his fantasising characters. Because he understood their need for fiction.

That need for fiction appears over and over again in the book – whether in Bholanath Khatak's desire to make his wife Rama dress like Waheeda, or in journalist Pancharan Mishra turning of the cook-turned-screenwriter Ramnath into Ramanathan, complete with a detailed life-story.

“Because of his father's sudden death, Ramanathan had been unable to take his MA exam. The memory of his university days still filled Ramanathan with sadness. The glory of those tennis lawns, the revelries of the drama club...” “Everyone knew it was lies,” writes Raza. “But everyone had had similar things written about them, so no one bothered to check the truth.”

Earlier in the book, we encounter the wonderful Mai's Adda, where everyone from Sahir Ludhianvi to Raj Kapoor had drunk alcohol and eaten fried fish on credit. Fiction here runs like a rich vein through fact; if you cut off the supply of make-believe, it might kill us.

“Whenever one of her debtors became famous, Mai would hang his photograph in her adda and talk about him as if he were her own son...” When D'Souza buys up Mai's Adda, he lets Mai masquerade as if she is still the actual owner. Then when the real Mai dies, people can't quite adjust to life without a Mai -- so they begin to call Mrs. D'Souza 'Mai'. That desperate desire to keep up appearances is also at the crux of Ali Amjad's titular Scene 75, in which a character called Abulkhair's mother is dictating a letter to a munshi at a streetcorner. “Everyone is unwell. Why are you making me say that everything is all right?” says the munshi.

This then, might be the truth at the heart of Scene 75, and perhaps Raza's comment on our cinematic fantasies: When is a lie not simply a lie? When it's what we need to believe to live.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 4 Feb 2018.

Writing Filmi Fictions

Today's Mirror column:

Though we speak of great Urdu writers shaping Bombay's cinema, we forget how much cinema also shaped their writing.

It is a fact often remarked upon that the Bombay film industry of the 1940s and '50s was a place of prodigious literary talent. A list of those who wrote lyrics and scripts and dialogue for Bombay cinema reads like a veritable who's who of modern Urdu literature - Ismat Chughtai, Saadat Hasan Manto, Krishan Chandar, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Khwaja Ahmed Abbas, Kaifi Azmi, Jan Nisar Akhtar, Majrooh Sultanpuri, Ali Sardar Jafri, Majaz, Meeraji. Some of these are now better known as film people, while others, even while writing for the cinema, retained their primary identity as litterateurs. Chughtai, for instance, wrote 12 film scripts, including Ziddi, Buzdil, Sone ki Chiriya and later, Garm Hava, but she is primarily known as a writer of books.

A young Ismat Chughtai

But while discussing how much these writers shaped the cinematic milieu of the time, what is often forgotten is how much that cinematic milieu shaped their writing. This writing could be non-fiction: A famous example is Manto, whose classic collection Ganjey Farishtey (translated as Stars from Another Sky) offered his readers a possibly embroidered but ostensibly factual glimpse of the '40s film world as he knew it. Or a writer might channel their experience of the film world back into it. Ismat Chughtai's script for Sone ki Chiriya (1958), directed by her husband Shahid Latif and starring Nutan and Balraj Sahni, was one such - the tale of an actress who becomes the golden goose for her exploitative family was believed to echo Nargis' real life. 

More often, however, these writers turned the film industry into a setting for literary fiction. Some of these stories and novels offer insightful, sometimes humorous, often brutally honest depictions of what life in the Bombay film world was like. Manto, whom Salman Rushdie once identified as an author of "lowlife fictions", wrote several stories featuring men and women who inhabit the lower echelons of this world, or just hover hopefully around its fringes, trying to angle their way in somehow. 

A youthful Manto

In his famous story 'Babu Gopi Nath', for example, we are introduced to the eponymous protagonist as "a great good-for-nothing" who "after sitting around doing nothing in Lahore" has "decided to grace Bombay with his presence, and...brought a Kashmiri dove with him". It turns out that Babu Gopi Nath's project in Bombay is to introduce this young woman, Zinat, into the film industry. "[Ghaffar Sayyan] told me to take her to Bombay because he knew two prostitutes who'd become actresses there," Babu Gopi Nath tells the narrator, who is called Manto and edits a newspaper like the real-life Manto. When Zinat's many meetings with men who "were only pretending to be directors" don't translate into film roles, Babu Gopi Nath decides to secure her future by marrying her off to a young Hyderabadi landlord from Sindh. 

Upendranath Ashk

Another Manto story called 'Janaki' also centres on a young woman who is dispatched from Peshawar to try and break into the movies. "Get her into a film company in Pune or Bombay. You know enough people. I hope it won't be too difficult," runs the letter from a friend that presages her arrival. The story's narrator (again a version of Manto, this time called "Saadat Sahib") is a little worried: "I had never done anything like that before. Usually the men who take girls to film companies are pimps or their like, men who plan to live off the girls if they can get a job." But having tried and failed to get her a job in Pune, he dispatches Janaki to friends in Bombay, where she manages to get a yearlong contract with a studio at 500 rupees a month. 

In a third story set in filmdom, called 'Director Kripalani', Manto describes a similar situation - but from the opposite side. Here it is the film producer - the Seth, in Manto's terminology - who tells Director Kripalani that he has a girl in mind to be the heroine of the film. She turns out to be a young Sindhi woman from Kripalani's hometown, with a rather implausible connection to him. The other woman in the story is a successful actress playing the main part in another of Kripalani's films, whom he gets thrown out of the role because she tries to seduce him. 

The women in these stories can scarcely be said to be similar in social background: Zinat Begum is a Kashmiri girl who has been "rescued" from a Lahore brothel by a rich man; Janaki comes from Peshawar where she was the mistress of a married man called Aziz, while the Sindhi girl seems from an educated middle class family. Yet all of them seem to have arrived from great distances away, with different levels of ambition and ability, to knock at moviedom's doors, and wait for them to magically open. And though he is too worldly-wise to be outraged by their free-and-easy ways, Manto clearly thinks of these women as occupying a tricky moral terrain. 

In a 1948 story called 'Formalities' ('Takalluf'), the writer Upendranath Ashk (who switched from Urdu to Devanagari on Premchand's advice, and who spent a few years working in Filmistan Studio in the '40s) mentions yet another such young woman of dubious morals. This "Miss Shameem", an upcoming actress whom we never actually meet, is described as having arrived in Bombay from Lahore. When she is "having a great deal of trouble finding a house", "Director Qadir" offers to put her up, only to find that she has promptly made herself at home - and shows no signs of leaving. 

Unlike Manto's wannabe actresses, who seem like gullible creatures despite all their gumption, Ashk's Miss Shameem is a shamelessly manipulative type. So, it turns out, are Director Qadir and his wife. Perhaps I'm reading too much into a few stories, but Manto and Ashk do serve up two possible readings of the film world that Madhur Bhandarkar may not balk at - either everyone's a crafty manipulator, or everyone's a gentle victim. Unlike Bhandarkar's, though, their takes are perfectly believable.

Published in the Mumbai Mirror, Oct 11, 2015.

An ill wind: Revisiting Garm Hava

Last Sunday's Mirror column:

Newly restored, MS Sathyu's iconic film about post-partition times resonates more than ever in our polarised present.

A restored version of Garm Hava released yesterday under the PVR Director's Rare banner. It is nowhere near as wide a release as this 1973 film deserves, but if it is playing anywhere near you, go watch it. Because Garm Hava remains, nearly forty years after it was made, the most affecting, nuanced film we have yet produced about the experience of Partition.

It is by no means a flawless film, but this column isn't about that. There are too many reasons why you should watch it. Garm Hava is not just MS Sathyu's first feature as director, but also Farooque Shaikh's first film role - and Balraj Sahni's last. Sahni, who delivers an exceptionally subtle performance as an ageing shoe manufacturer called Salim Mirza, is the pivot around whom the film revolves.

Based on an unpublished short story by Ismat Chughtai, the screenplay (co-authored by the poet Kaifi Azmi and the screenwriter Shama Zaidi, who is also Sathyu's wife) steers Mirza through the bitter months of 1948, as his quiet determination to stay on in the place of his birth receives one body blow after another.

"Full-grown trees are being cut down in the wind," muses Mirza to a tangawallah, as he returns from having seen off yet another branch of his family that is moving across the border. "It is a scorching wind," responds the horse-cart driver, "Those who do not uproot themselves will wither away."

The film is set in Agra, but shot through by the idea of Pakistan. But 'Pakistan' here is an empty signifier, denoting nothing except departure. From the very first scene, where Mirza sees off a train, with a hand gesture somewhere between benediction and goodbye, we are inserted into a world in which people are either leaving, or thinking about it - and if they are not, then there's someone telling them they ought to.

One of the leavers is Salim Mirza's elder brother, Halim Mirza, whose doublespeak is captured with economy by Sathyu's technique: splicing moments from his rabble-rousing 'nationalist' speeches, denouncing as cowards those Muslims who have "abandoned their heritage" by going to Pakistan, with him telling his wife that there is no room left for Muslims in India. It is clear that he is as opportunistic as the Muslim Leaguers he condemns. Another Pakistan-bound character is the duplicitous Fakhruddin, though not before switching loyalties from the League to the Congress, and placing as many obstacles in Salim Mirza's path as possible.

But the film does not for a moment suggest that all those who left for Pakistan were somehow opportunistic, or cowardly. Garm Hava is astute enough to show us multiple points of view. When the business seems impossible to revive, Mirza's elder son succumbs to the chance of greater opportunity in a Muslim-majority country.

Salim Mirza may hold out against going, but Garm Hava produces a powerful sense of how difficult it had become to stay.

The same picture is painted by a book called In Freedom's Shade, a recent exemplary translation of Azadi ki Chhaon Mein, Begum Anis Kidwai's enormously thought-provoking memoir of the immediate post-Partition years. Kidwai's encounters were largely with a poorer class of Muslims than the Mirzas, people who had even less economic ballast to keep them where they were. They are either people in camps who have fled their homes with few belongings, or poor peasants from the villages around Delhi. But what Garm Hava shares with Azadi ki Chhaon Mein is its depiction of how little the formal assurances of the secular state were backed by people's lived experience. What Gandhi and Nehru promised (and tried to do) was one thing, and what state functionaries did was quite another. Again and again, Kidwai encounters poor, uneducated Muslims who have been told by officials - senior army men, thanedars, patwaris - that they must leave, because the Indian government can no longer be held responsible for their safety.

Like Azadi..., and unlike the corpse-filled trains that have become numbingly overused shorthand for Partition, Garm Hava doesn't want to shock us with our history of violence. (The only physical attack in the film is a brick that hits Mirza during a minor riot; even the blaze that engulfs his karkhana is barely shown, though Sathyu has recently suggested that he might have done these scenes differently if he had the budget.) 

What it shows us instead is how enmeshed religious identity is in the socio-economic climate -- right from this foundational moment of our nationhood. The baniya moneylender and the bank both refuses Mirza a loan, since Muslims may go off to Pakistan, leaving behind unpaid debts. The family haveli, registered in the name of his brother Halim, is seized by the Custodian of Enemy Property, and goes to a Sindhi businessman (AK Hangal in an unusual role). Meanwhile, prospective landlords turn Mirza away with that phrase we have so often heard thereafter: "We don't take non-vegetarian tenants." Even young Sikandar (Farooque Shaikh) must deal with job interviewers who make unsolicited suggestions that he might do better in Pakistan.

Sathyu's decision to keep these landlords and interviewers invisible is an interesting one. One wonders whether it is meant to insert us, his viewers, uncomfortably into the place of these interlocutors. And then one wonders why more films in this country don't set out to make us uncomfortable, just once in a while. God knows, we need it.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 16 Nov 2014.