A Muted Sharpness

My Mumbai Mirror column:

The brilliant Jaya Bhaduri, who turned 70 earlier this month, once specialised in being the thinking man’s girl-next-door.

Utpal Dutt and Jaya Bhaduri in her Hindi film debut, Guddi (1971)

Some years ago, on a long taxi ride with a bunch of near millennials, the conversation veered around to Jaya Bachchan, nee Bhaduri, and I found myself in the shocking position of having to defend something I had always assumed was beyond doubt: Jaya’s actorly brilliance. This was despite the fact that by the 1980s, when films first started percolating into my consciousness, she’d already done her decade of top-notch performances, married Amitabh Bachchan, and given up her career for motherhood. But through my childhood and teenage years, if a film of Jaya Bhaduri’s was on television, or in the video rental parlour, it was always watched. And there was never any doubt that Jaya would make it worth watching.

In particular, my mother (not an easy-to-please viewer) had a soft spot for Jaya – and I’ve only recently begun to see that that admiration may have extended beyond her acting to a (subconscious) identification with her screen persona. If my mother was a North Indian girl growing up in Calcutta, Jaya Bhaduri was a Bengali girl from Jabalpur, and there was a recognisable set of elements that made up the bright girl-next-door aesthetic. This included tasteful, unfussy cotton saris, draped perfectly over well-fitted (but never too revealing) blouses; the thick straight black hair worn in a loose long plait, or a bun at the nape of the neck (unlike the fashionably bouffant-crowned Sharmila Tagore, or the more free-flowing hairstyles adopted by a Neetu Singh or a Zeenat Aman), the kaajal, bindi, large hoop earrings – and sometimes even spectacles!

Jaya Bhaduri, who turned 70 this April, made her screen debut in Satyajit Ray’s Mahanagar (1963), as part of a fine ensemble cast, playing the hero Anil Chatterjee’s teenaged sister. That very particular mid-twentieth century Indian image of youthful femininity: the school-going girl on the cusp of womanhood, enthusiastically learning to wear a sari and cook the family meal, clearly struck a chord with both viewers and directors. In the 1971 Bangla film Dhanyee Meye, she played Uttam Kumar’s sister-in-law. Though by then she had graduated from the Film and Television Institute of India as a gold medalist, Bhaduri’s first Hindi film role –the title character of Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Guddi (1971) – also had her playing a teenager, this time one besotted with films in general and Dharmendra in particular. So did her second: as the tomboyish child-bride Mrinmoyee in Uphaar, the Barjatya Productions version of Tagore’s short story ‘Samapti’ (filmed by Ray on Aparna Sen as part of his Teen Kanya triptych).

In Gulzar’s Parichay and Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Bawarchi, both 1972 releases, or later Chupke Chupke (1975), she remained the innocent young woman coming of age in the middle class family setting – whether as Didi to a gang of children, or the younger sister whose marriage is to be fixed. In Basu Chatterjee’s heart-warming Piya ka Ghar (1973), Jaya was the shy young bride catapulted into a crowded Bombay chawl by arranged marriage. Here the family setting was the new sasural: a loving but boisterous home full of card games and theatre rehearsals, cricket and silly jokes.
Another commonality in many of these early roles was her status as the favourite of a father/elder brother figure: Sanjeev Kumar in Parichay, Rajesh Khanna in Bawarchi, Raja Paranjape as her tauji Gauri Shankar in Piya ka Ghar, and later AK Hangal in the sensitive marital drama Kora Kagaz.


In all these depictions of girlhood, however, Jaya’s shyness encoded a certain sexual innocence, a quiet reserve that did not ever involve being coy or silly. This meant she could also be feisty or tomboyish or self-willed, like in Guddi or Uphaar, while always conveying something I can only call character. Whatever she did, we knew that deep down, she was a good girl. It’s that inner quality of non-frivolity that allowed her to so convincingly inhabit the streetsmart role of the memorable “chakku-chhuriyan tez kara lo” girl in Zanjeer (1973). Even when she is first being bought off as a witness by the villain’s henchmen and says something coolly cynical like “For this much money I could turn dumb for a lifetime,” we do not quite believe in her essential badness.

And of course the film makes sure she changes over to the right side of the law quickly, as well as moving from her street performer self to an appropriately sari-clad love interest for the policeman hero – Amitabh Bachchan, whose career as Hindi cinema’s ‘angry young man’ first took off with Zanjeer, and whom Jaya Bhaduri married in June 1973, the year of Zanjeer’s release. Whether Bachchan ever acknowledges it, he was the struggler who married a supremely talented actress at the peak of her powers – and within less than a decade, her career had ended while his, legendarily, carries on into the present.

That real-life narrative is not unusual for India, of course. What perhaps makes Jaya Bhaduri’s case remarkable is that there are at least two films in which she acted out versions of sympathetic fans imagined to be her real life: Abhimaan, in which marital tensions emerge from precisely the sort of unequal fame that Jaya and Amitabh had, and most bizarrely Silsila, in which a version of the love triangle of Rekha-Jaya-Amitabh played out on screen, and after which Jaya stopped acting for decades — only returning to the public eye as the mother figure of Hazaar Chaurasi ki Maa and more depressingly, K3G. Even her political persona has wife-and-mother written all over it. Perhaps some day someone in Bollywood will pluck up the courage to cast her in a version of the rest of her life.


Published in Mumbai Mirror, 22 Apr 2018.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 22 Apr 2018.

Calling Up a Time

Screen presence: Patanga (1949) and Queen (2014)

My Mumbai Mirror column today:

Landlines to mobiles: The phone has evolved, but its cinematic effect remains strong as ever.

The telephone must be one of the most beloved cinematic devices. Think of the countless films in which the hero/heroine (and we, the audience) hears a murder, or a mysterious voice, after which the line is cut off, leaving them (and us) on tenterhooks. Or think of how the phone became indispensable to filmi love. It lets on-screen lovers conduct secret love lives, pulling landlines into bedrooms, hiding cordless phones under pillows to wait for the late-night call, setting up assignations rife with possibilities for identity confusion. 

In some ways, the experience of using a telephone was akin to the experience of cinema itself. In the words of the cultural theorist Iain Chambers: "Like the city and the cinema, and so many other institutions of modernity, [the telephone] allowed you to be somewhere you were not. Perhaps it allowed you to be someone you were not or someone you hadn't known you were yet." 

Filmmakers loved the telephone because it allowed you to play around with two components of the film medium, the visual and the aural. Between two people having a phone conversation, sound is necessarily present, but the image can be absent or obscured. Or at least, different from what the person on the other side imagines. 

In Hindi films, the telephone has run the gamut from the charming silliness of long-distance romance - Shamshad Begam's 'Mere piya gaye Rangoon, wahan se kiya hai telephoon' for Patanga (1949) - to excitement, even danger - 'Aaj ki raat koi aane ko hai' in Anamika (1973), featuring Helen, a hoodlum and a telephone booth in the rain - until the sound of the phone is itself sexualised ('Telephone dhun mein hasne wali', Hindustani (1997). 

But some of the most effective filmic uses of the telephone have been in domestic space. 

A film I wrote about recently, Kora Kagaz (1973), uses the telephone astutely, both to amplify its themes and direct its plot. The relationship between the inexperienced husband and wife (Vijay Anand's Sukesh and Jaya Bhaduri's Archana) is already splintering when the telephone arrives to drive a deeper wedge between them. An expensive proposition for an underpaid college teacher in the 1970s, it works, first and foremost, as a symbol of class. Archana's busybody of a mother decides her daughter needs a telephone, and she will pay for it if her son-in-law can't afford it. 

The film plays out the installation itself - the digging up of a road, the laying of lines, the decision over where the instrument will be placed in the house - as an upheaval in the household. Later, the phone becomes the embodiment of the unbroken link between Archana and her natal family. But director Anil Ganguly's finest touch is to turn the instrument's persistent tring-tring into an alarm bell of sorts, its shrill ring rupturing the peace of Archana's marital home. 

In accordance with lived reality, the landline in cinema has been replaced by the cellphone. An early cinematic tribute to the cellphone was Kabir Kaushik's Sehar (2005), with its droll subplot about a bumbling professor (Pankaj Kapoor) hired to help the UP Police figure out the new mobile phone technology that gangs are already using. A more recent example is Dedh Ishqiya, where Arshad Warsi woos Huma Qureishi with iPhone banter. 

Some films feature mobiles more than others. But three recent films have been noticeable for their absence. The first is Dekh Tamasha Dekh, which I wrote about last week, is a cleverly absurdist take on the politicisation of religion, and one doesn't want to hold it to dull realist standards. But really, if a film releases in 2014 and doesn't set itself up as a period piece, it cannot show us a world full of landlines and payphones. It is impossible to take seriously now a climax that depends on the cutting off of phone lines. 

The second cellphone-less film is last year's runaway indie hit, The Lunchbox, in which a neglected housewife and a lonely widower make a chance connection. Through the film, the two characters communicate through a mis-delivered lunchbox. The whole plot is dependent on the absence of instantaneous communication. 

The frisson lies precisely in the chanciness, in the will-he, won't-she quality of the message deliveries. A mobile does appear once, but this world of cassette players, neighbourhood shoutouts and handwritten notes is really held out to us as a world without cellphones. But it works, because we are willing entrants into this deliberate romanticisation of an older style of communication. The whole film seems, in fact, a nostalgic tribute to a phenomenon that only existed in the landline world: the cross-connection. 

The third film is Ankhon Dekhi, whose domestic conversations and crises could be described as a throwback to the'80s (there is some resonance with Humlog). But the gathering on the old Delhi terrace has pink-frosted cake. Still, you don't quite miss the cellphones until you see that Bauji's travel agency has computers on every desk. After that, the landline-only house feels contrived. Doubtless, the rift between brothers - based partly on their refusal to call each other - is more convincing without cellphones. But once the thought's in your head, it doesn't leave you: how can they not have mobiles? 

By way of contrast, a recent rift in another Hindi film, between Rajkummar's Vijay and Kangana's Rani in Queen, feels so much more believable because the cellphone is integrally woven into it: the selfie she sends him by mistake, her not taking his calls, his appalled enumerating of his missed calls echo what is now the stuff of our everyday life. A contemporary world imagined without the cellphone, it appears, can no longer ring true.

Not Papered Over

40 years old today, Kora Kagaz remains a powerful portrait of cracks in a marriage.

Sometime last week I stumbled upon Kora Kagaz playing on TV. So unusual did the film feel - powerfully emotional yet largely shorn of melodrama; a serious subject dealt with seriously, yet far from being a studied 'art' film - that I watched straight through till the end. It turns out that Kora Kagaz released on 4 May, 1974 - exactly 40 years ago today. In an industry that still invariably prefers its films to end at the mandap, it remains a rare portrait of the attrition of a marriage.

Some truly great films have been made about troubled marriages: John Cassavettes' astonishing, brutal masterpiece A Woman Under the Influence released the same year as KK, Ingmar Bergman's superb Scenes from a Marriage a year before that, in 1973. More recently, Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams brought such searing honesty to their marital breakdown that Blue Valentine (2010) was painfully hard to watch.

In contrast, Kora Kagaz was pitched at a mainstream Indian audience, for whom separation and divorce was taboo. In some ways, that balancing act is what makes it interesting. It is a grown-up film, one which doesn't shy away from depicting sharp words or ego clashes, or the passive-aggressive behaviour of one partner that keeps resentment simmering in the other, waiting to boil over in a terrible tragic denouement. And yet it was No 22 at the 1974 box office and won a National Award for "Feature film with mass appeal, wholesome entertainment and aesthetic value". Kalyanji-Anandji got a Filmfare Award for its music, and Jaya Bhaduri's understated, affecting performance won her the second of three Filmfare Best Actress awards.

Like Abhimaan (1973), also starring Bhaduri in a narrative about marital breakdown, the film's central conflict stems from the husband's prickly sense of self-respect, or - depending on how you look at it - his profound insecurity, aided by a childish uncommunicativeness. KK was a remake of the iconic Bengali film Saat Pake Bandha (1963), itself adapted from Ashutosh Mukhopadhyay's novel. (Mukhopadhyay's work was popular with Bengali directors, and three got remade in Hindi: Charachar as Safar, Deep Jwele Jaye as Khamoshi and Ami Se O Sakha as Bemisaal) As Archana, Bhaduri had a tough act to follow: Suchitra Sen's impeccable depiction of the heroine's transition from disbelief to anger to hurt - and hurtfulness won her Best Actress at the Moscow Film Festival. Unlike the irreducibly glamorous Sen, however, Bhaduri played the role in a lower key, replacing Sen's hint of arrogance with a quieter, stubborn air of waiting it out.

Of course, Kora Kagaz, like SPB before it, makes it quite clear that it is the woman for whom a marital breakdown feels life-altering. So though Archana's separation from Sukhendu/Sukesh is followed by a First Class First MA and a teaching job, her heart is not in it: she would much rather be having her own children than teaching those of others. An older colleague might congratulate Sukhendu/Sukesh on having a high-achieving student for a wife, but the film makes clear she must be a wife first.

Within this social world, it is Archana who is expected to make adjustments, she who's seen as having failed to save her marriage. Genuinely concerned though she seems, Pishi/Phuphi, the widowed old aunt who urges Archana to be the calm-headed one if her husband isn't, can sound to our ears like a sexist busybody. For she recognises the errors of her nephew's ways, but barring once, she does not chide him - instead, she appeals to his wife's better sense. Because, of course, men don't have any.

At one level, you could say KK doesn't depart from the female character types of countless Hindi films. In this schema, Archana would be the bade baap ki good-looking beti used to having her way, her mother the shrewish wife dominating the helpless, good-hearted husband, and Phuphi the sacrificing mother figure who suffers in silence. But KK doesn't quite fit that bill, because its characters aren't ever that black and white: the young bahu is really quite adjusting, the mother who keeps putting her son-in-law down with references to his salary doesn't actually wish him ill, and Phuphi does occasionally speak up and take decisions.

The changes from the Bengali to the Hindi version are telling. KK does away with the Rajasthan-Banaras honeymoon, so appropriately integral to the Bengali marital romance. The Hindi version also contains more efforts at reconciliation: Archana rushes to the station to find Phuphi first, and only then confronts Sukesh; Sukesh tries to visit Archana but is turned away by her brother. And unlike in SPB, where a "mutual separation" is first mentioned by Archana (and greeted with shock by Sukhendu), in KK it is Archana's brother who initiates the process.

On the other hand, KK does not have Sukhendu's colleague blame Archana for "wasting a life", as SPB did. But perhaps that is only because the Hindi version does not allow for any 'wasted' lives. Where SPB ended with Archana vowing herself to a life of solitude, Kora Kagaz lets the estranged couple re-unite at that most romantic of cinematic locations: the railway waiting room. Before you judge that re-written ending as a cop-out, let me say this: would you really rather have your heroine spend a solitary lifetime 'atoning' for her 'bhool', or have a happy ending in which the man takes his fair share of the blame before reaching out to re-build a relationship? Sometimes, just sometimes, Hindi cinema can surprise you.

Published as my Mumbai Mirror column yesterday.