Picture This: Signs of the Times

My BL Ink column: on watching Naseeb in demonetized India.

I watched Manmohan Desai’s 1981 hit Naseeb, and it spoke strangely to the world we live in.

Kader Khan and Amjad Khan as paired villains in Naseeb (here being quizzed by uber-villain Amrish Puri, who is not visible in the image)

This week, for no reason, I had a sudden craving to watch Naseeb. It is a film I’d definitely seen in childhood. But all I remembered were the songs: Hema Malini crooning ‘Mere Naseeb Mein Tu Hai Ki Nahi’ to an already besotted Amitabh Bachchan; Reena Roy twirling with impeccable tragic swag to ‘Zindagi Imtehaan Leti Hai’; Rishi Kapoor’s hilarious ‘Chal Mere Bhai’ night-walk trying to get Bachchan off his drunken high horse — as well as an actual equestrian statue; and the requisite pre-climactic dress-up song: the wonderful ‘Dhoom Machaake Jayenge’, in which Bachchan and Hema finessed the flamenco into the perfect villain’s den dance, while Rishi did a rather sweet Chaplin impersonation.

Sometimes one doesn’t know why a particular old film beckons. I certainly didn’t have a reason to watch Naseeb. But as I sat embarrassingly glued to YouTube in the middle of the day, a few things about why my subconscious so wanted the comfort of Naseeb began to click into place.

First things first. Naseeb is a Manmohan Desai film, made four years after Amar Akbar Anthony, and clearly intended to replicate the specificity of that magic. Like almost all Desai films in that era, it is a multi-starrer with a labyrinthine plot whose many tentacles allow for the incorporation of as many heroes, heroines and comedy sequences as ridiculously villainous villains.

One of the assured pleasures of watching mainstream Hindi cinema in the ’80s was, of course, predicting who would play what — or better yet, predicting the arc of the character’s on-screen life based on our recognition of the actor. So when, in the film’s opening moments, we saw Kader Khan (an established villain, apart from being the film’s dialogue writer) and Amjad Khan (whose very entry into Hindi cinema was as the immortally evil Gabbar Singh of Sholay) as supposedly ordinary men, pretending to be close friends of Namdev (Pran) and Jaggi (Jagdish Raj), our guard went up right away. No good, even the smallest child in the cinema knew, could come of having Amjad as a friend. And as expected, none does.

Within the film’s first 15 minutes, a lottery ticket has been won, one good man murdered for it and a second falsely implicated in his death — while the certified villains we identified at a glance have taken the money and transformed themselves from lowlife criminals into hi-fi seths, whose shiny suits and Black Dog-stocked bars carry no traces of their original sin.

Perhaps it was these villains I really wanted to see again. As we crawl through the daily indignities of the Modi era — in which at a FICCI event in central Delhi, a Niti Aayog bureaucrat was heard telling an audience of suits to encourage digital payments among their “servants” — perhaps I simply wanted to be allowed again the comfort of a world in which everyone already knew that big men in suits are guilty until proven innocent, slimy until proven straight. And the fact of having risen up from the street — Amjad’s Damu starts as a smalltime photographer, Kader’s Raghu as a tangewalla — did not make them honest men. In Naseeb, they give the falsely implicated Namdev’s little boy a waiter’s job in the hotel built from their ill-gotten gains, and keep trying to stop him from educating his younger brother. They do, in other words, exactly what the big men of our time are doing: patronising the poor, closing off their options, while all the while telling them it’s for their own good.

The other thing which the Desai film serves up with heart-imploding ease is the lost world of bhai-bhai secularism. Unlike Amar Akbar Anthony, where brothers separated at birth are raised in three different religious traditions, Naseeb gives us all-Hindu heroes and a single Christian heroine. But Desai is a master craftsman — he takes the smallest tokens and builds from them a highly emotive multi-religious climax. Three signet rings worn by Namdev — one each from Islam, Christianity and Hinduism — allow each religion’s God to punish at least one of the villains, as well as functioning as pulleys that eventually save our heroes’ lives.

The three different rings with religious insignia that Pran wears in Naseeb (and that save lives)

That combination of the religious-emotional register and a kind of faux-scientific jugaad marks the film in general. There is a fascination with distances and the use of technology to bridge both time and distance. A 20-year-old photograph is produced as proof of the real murderer. A telephone is used by a villain to stage a fake dying confession that implicates Namdev. A telescope is used by one of the heroines (the forgotten Kim Yashpal) to lipread what the villains are saying across the street. The camera is constantly swooping down from a height — sometimes from the perspective of a killer (Shakti Kapoor trying to shoot Amjad from a hilltop, through layers of glass) and sometimes a rescuer (Shatrughan Sinha’s view of a boat on the Thames, on which Hema Malini is being harassed).

Something about all of this reminded me of Mr Modi’s hologrammed appearances, and a recent much-touted speech he gave at a UP rally, via the phone. We are supposed to have grown up, as a country and as a cinema audience. But sandwiched between (real) counterfeit currency, (false) rumours of notes with chips implanted in them, and non-calibrated non-working ATMs, it’s clear we haven’t left the Manmohan Desai universe. Only the secular bhaichara, sadly, now needs our nostalgia.

Published in the Hindu Business Line, 16 Dec 2016.

Not Losing Our Religion

My Mirror column today: 

The success of 'Bajrangi Bhaijaan' is a testament to our faith — in uncomplicated national myths, and in miracles.

It might seem up-to-the-minute, with a song about selfies and a narrative arc involving YouTube (courtesy Nawazuddin Siddiqui, doing a brilliant reprising of his Peepli Live turn as a TV news stringer). But Bajrangi Bhaijaan is a masterclass in old-style Hindi movie melodrama: slightly stupid golden-hearted hero, ridiculously winsome little mute girl, and that lost-child-of-unknown-religion plot that we warm to subliminally, from watching all those Manmohan Desai movies. At least one important political commentator has written a ridiculous piece that professes to expose the film's "unreal" aspects and then attacks it for a premise it does not profess (that India and Pakistan are the same). 

If you went into this film seeking "realistic" depictions of society or state on either side of the border - or of how the border itself operates - well, you might as well stop reading now. What Kabir Khan's film does - and does with some aplomb - is to produce an Indo-Pak narrative that speaks simultaneously to the worst and the best in both our countries. It does this by stripping down to the bare essentials - and weaving around them a film with enough broad-strokes to keep the laziest viewer in on things, and yet with enough sly detail to surprise you if you're falling asleep. 

The essentials, to make things even easier, are presented to us as binaries: India, Pakistan; Hindu, Muslim; veg, non-veg; saviour, spy; good, evil. None of these binaries is as clear-cut as the film makes out. But this simplistic mapping of the world - made a little more believable by being presented through the eyes of a man we're told isn't the brightest, but is "dil ka saaf" - makes possible an equally simple unravelling of kattar positions. 

So Indianness is represented by Hinduness, which is represented by the Hanuman-bhakt son of an ex-shaakha-pramukh (the second time this year that we've had a Hindi film hero shown trying to toe the RSS line and not quite succeeding - the first was Ayushmann Khurana in the wonderful Dum Laga Ke Haisha). Pavan Kumar Chaturvedi, affectionately known as Bajrangi after his favourite god, is Brahmin, vegetarian, asexual and generally vice-less, and Salman Khan plays him as a combination of goodness and stupidity that brings to mind a long list of anaari Hindi film heroes (think Ishwar). Meanwhile Pakistan is represented by a Kashmiri family in which the father has fought in the Pakistani army, but the grandfather remembers being taken to Delhi's Nizamuddin Dargah as a child. The family's devout Muslimness does not preclude a belief in Sufi shrines - it is a visit to a dargah that precipitates the child getting lost and being found, and even the discovery of her religious identity. 

The binary most clearly enunciated - and clearly dealt with - is the veg/non-veg one. The same smell, of meat cooking, that makes Pavan sniff suspiciously is so attractive to little Shahida that she follows it to the "Mohammedan" neighbours' house - and is happily being fed when Pavan discovers her. He drags her away, but what's fabulous is what happens next: an outing where Pavan can eat veg food, and the child can eat her fill of meat. The infectious Chicken song, couched as a tribute to "Chaudhary Dhaba" - "Aadha hai non-veg, Aur veg hai aadha, Spasht kijiye, kya hai iraada" - is as good a philosophical position as you can find on how to live successfully with others. There's some good-humoured mockery of upper-caste purity-pollution notions -"Thodi biryani bukhari, Thodi phir nalli nihari, Le aao aaj dharam bhrasht ho jaaye", followed by a funny but firm admonishment to those who might marshal culinary choices into divisive politics - "Sabhi ek plate mein adjust ho jaaye," go Mayur Puri's wonderful lyrics. 

The matter of the child's fair skin, too, is dealt with in this good-humoured way: showing up the ridiculousness of people's community-based stereotypes, but without being snide about it. Pavan's assumption that she must be Brahmin is based, he says, on how "gori" she is. When she reveals her meat-eating side, he decides she can't be Brahmin (never heard of Kashmir Pandits, or Bengalis, has he?). So, thinks Mr Genius, she must be Kshatriya: they're fair, and legit non-vegetarians. 

There are several themes which Bajrangi Bhaijaan shares with another recent film about an Indo-Pak encounter, Nitin Kakkar's Filmistaan (2014). One is cricket, another is the border. It's interesting how similar the Bajrangi scene of the child celebrating the Pakistani cricket win is to Filmistaan's scene of Sunny's joy at the Indian victory: both the spontaneous joy, and the irrational, violent anger it evokes in those of the other country. 

The border we see several times, and each time in a different register. First up is the bureaucratic border, policed by firm but human officials, who try to help but cannot bend the law. Next is the military border, manned by men with guns - but undercut by men making money. And last is the border as pure metaphor: a geographical point at which people gather to see themselves mirrored in the eyes of those on the other side. 

In fact, it is only in this respect that the film suggests that Indians and Pakistanis are alike- as human beings. Otherwise, Pavan's arrival in and journey through Pakistan is almost a version of PK's in an alien universe: an isolated desert landing, early encounters with unsympathetic, disbelieving residents, and a series of culture shocks involving religion and cross-dressing. What makes the film work, in fact, is its deliberate, almost mythical magnification of our differences - and a mythically pure human connection forged across them. Let's not think too much about Pakistan being represented as helplessly bezubaan, while India is the moonhphat saviour.

Secular Masala Zindabad

My Mumbai Mirror column today: 

Remembering the Big-B starrer Coolie - an iconic film that became famous even before it was made - and mourning the death of the miraculous world of filmmaker Manmohan Desai.

It used to be a quiz question (probably still is): what happened in Bangalore on July 25, 1982, that nearly changed the fate of the Hindi film industry? 

That 32-year-old event remains the industry's most famous accident: Amitabh Bachchan's injury during a fight scene on the sets of Manmohan Desai's Coolie. After an emergency surgery in Bangalore, Bachchan was flown to Mumbai in a specially re-jigged Indian Airlines plane and operated upon for a ruptured intestine. Bachchan's week between life and death was a week on hold in the nation's life, too - with Prime Minister Indira Gandhi (also a family friend) postponing a foreign trip to visit him, while millions prayed for his survival. 

Manmohan Desai, who arguably gave the Hindi masala movie its most entertaining, well-crafted form, was ever attentive to his audiences. He knew people would never forgive him for having Amitabh die in the movie when he had survived in reality. Reel life needed to echo real life. And so the film's ending was changed to have Bachchan's character recover from a final life-threatening battle, and greet his followers from a balcony that said 'Philomena Hospital', the hospital where he was first operated in Bangalore. 

The film also marked Bachchan's return from near-death in another way, by retaining the infamous fight scene and inserting two freeze frames to let viewers in on the facts of the accident. "This is the shot in which Amitabh Bachchan was seriously injured," reads an accompanying text on screen in English, Hindi and Urdu, turning the film - at least for that instant - from fiction into documentary. 

Both these moves were the logical culmination of the relationship between the star and his fans. The off-screen phenomenon was incorporated on screen, pushing forward the ongoing cycle of fandom. 

Apart from displaying all the hallmarks of Manmohan Desai's cinema - bachpan mein bichhadna, amnesia, good poor people and villainous rich people, ridiculous but irresistibly goofy humour, the reuniting of families, and the ultimate power of destiny - Coolie was also Desai's overt overture to Muslims. He worked close to Bhendi Bazaar, Bombay's most iconic Muslim area, and claimed a lifelong love of Muslim culture. By casting the industry's biggest superstar as a poor Muslim railway porter, Desai also hoped to cash in on the Muslim audience, believed to be regular movie-goers. 

What makes Coolie remarkable is that it does not just have a token Muslim hero: it is steeped in a Muslim milieu. The film opens with the loving husband Aslam (Satyen Kappu) presenting his wife Salma (Waheeda Rehman) with a green joda for Eid. Note that evil, too, is personified by a Muslim. When the villainous Zafar (Kader Khan, also the film's dialogue-writer) creates his artificial flood, Salma is swept away while doing her namaaz. 

There is also a generous Desai-style sprinkling of religious signs - when the child Iqbal returns, sobbing and bereft, to his sodden shell of a home, a Quran falls into his hands, as if to suggest that God is looking out for him, even if no-one else is. The same Quran and a piece of Islamic calligraphy feature again, in a scene where Salma's memory and speech miraculously return after 20 years. There is also, of course, Iqbal's Billa No. 786, and the element that made Coolie unforgettable for children, an important part of Manmohan Desai's family audience - Allah Rakha the falcon, who magically comes to Iqbal's aid whenever needed. Desai has spoken of choosing the falcon because it was the symbol of the United Arab Emirates and would "appeal to the Muslims". There is also an iconic Haj sequence (and song), and a climactic scene at Haji Ali Dargah. 

But while Coolie brims with Muslim religiosity, it also fits the Desai model of Hindu-Muslim bhai-bhai. Right from the first scene, the Muslim family is shown fraternising with a Hindu Maharashtrian family, and it is that Hindu coolie Nathu (Nilu Phule) who brings up the orphaned Iqbal. Later, in the stupendous happenstance that makes Desai's movies so satisfying, the adult Iqbal (Amitabh) becomes best friends with Sunny (Rishi Kapoor) - who, it turns out, is not just the son that amnesiac Salma has raised as her own, but also Nathu's long-lost child. 

So the Muslim boy is raised by a Hindu father-figure, and the Hindu boy by a Muslim mother. There's also Rati Agnihotri's Christian heiress Julie, raised by Hindus. The message of all these foster children might have been that blood doesn't matter. But in fact, blood shines through - it is the biological son who will send his father on Haj, and the biological father who will give his alcoholic son his kidney. 

And yet, the lack of blood ties between Amitabh and Rishi does not matter; the Muslim and the Hindu are brothers at heart, and there's an obvious nod to their having the same mother(land). 

More powerful than this overt secular bhaichara, though, is the fact that Desai's own iconography seamlessly transcends religious specificity. When the unconscious Salma is being flown off in the evil Zafar's helicopter and Allah Rakha tries to stop him, the echo of the Ramayana - Jatayu battling Ravana to save Sita -- could not be more clear. 

We definitely could not make a Coolie today. But this Eid might be the perfect time to revisit it.