Backing and advancing

My Mirror column:

Has the mature woman with a marriage in her past finally become a legitimate recipient of romance in Hindi cinema?

Irrfan Khan and Parvathy in a still from Qarib Qarib Singlle (2017)

Tara (Shefali Shah) runs her own small Mangalorean restaurant, drives herself around Mumbai, and has been a single mother to her two children since her husband’s death twenty years ago. But when this highly capable, independent woman gets home at the end of the day and her grown-up daughter asks her if the restaurant landline is working, Tara feigns ignorance, brushing the question off quickly. The phone relationship she has struck up with the almost-divorced actor Amar (Neeraj Kabi) is, for some reason, a guilty secret.


The idea that their desires are illegitimate is buried so deep inside most Indian women’s heads that even to acknowledge them can feel like taboo. To want companionship, romance, intimacy — and yes, sex — is perfectly natural, but still fraught with the possibility of social censure, especially for a woman past a certain age. So Kanwal Sethi’s atmospheric film Once Again, released last week on Netflix, gives us in Tara a rare Indian heroine: a woman who has walked the slow path towards recognising her needs.

And yet how little it takes to propel her back into guilt. Caught on camera by a paparazzi photographer while out walking with Amar, Tara finds herself to be the target of childish anger from her adult son as well as humiliating barbs from his prospective mother-in-law. Once Again eschews melodrama for piercing looks and pregnant pauses, but Tara’s samdhan manages to get in her critically frosty line: “In our family, we place our children’s desires far ahead of our own.”



Watching even the self-possessed Tara crumble under the pressure, I thought of another recent film in which a woman finds it hard to tell a judgemental world that she’s dating again. Released in 2017, Tanuja Chandra’s romantic comedy Qarib Qarib Singlle starred the well-known Malayali actress Parvathy as Jaya Shashidharan, a 35-year-old woman who’s been alone for so long that she’s forgotten she has the right to move on.


Unlike Tara and Amar in Once Again, whose relationship is conducted through lovely old-school means such as as landline conversations, handwritten notes and home-made meals, Jaya meets her suitor Yogi (Irrfan Khan) via a dating website. As a match for the tastefully turned out, punctual Jaya, Yogi seems an eccentric and unlikely choice at first: a self-published shayar with a fondness for mangoes, banter and running — invariably running late. But Chandra’s idea of romance is all about entertaining unlikely possibilities: before we know it, Jaya has joined Yogi on a tripartite journey to visit his three ex-girlfriends, and romance is afoot.


Despite many dissimilarities between the two films, it struck me that both the female protagonists are widows, not divorcees. And the films imply —sometimes humorously, sometimes with pain — that neither woman has been in any sort of intimate relationship since their husbands died. These social double standards are acknowledged by the way the characters are written, too: Irrfan has no compunctions chattering on about his exes to Jaya, from the sweet, quasi-familial terrace romance of his childhood to the sultrier adult one (with Neha Dhupia) — but he is rendered speechless when Jaya digs up an adolescent boyfriend of her own.


The figure of the still-youthful, attractive widow has a history in Hindi cinema — though much less of a history than proportionate reality would demand. Off the top of my head, I can think of Nutan as the translucently lovely widow Mahjubi in the 1973 Saudagar, whom a duplicitous Amitabh Bachchan marries for her talent in making the best palm gur, and Padmini Kolhapure as the exploited young creature whom Rishi Kapoor takes it upon himself to save in Raj Kapoor’s 1982 social melodrama Prem Rog (interestingly, Kamna Chandra — who is Tanuja Chandra’s mother — has partial writing credits for both Prem Rog and Qarib Qarib Singlle).


A much more radical portrayal of a widow who has desires was, of course, last year’s Lipstick Under My Burkha. Ratna Pathak Shah brought both comic flair and a tragic edge to the 55-year-old Usha Parmar, whom the world knows only as the stentorian Buaji, but who yearns to be recognised as someone altogether more tender. Usha’s secret life involves not just reading steamy Hindi romance novels and learning to swim, but also falling for her buff and youthful swimming instructor. Her secret phone conversations with him, unlike those between Shefali Shah and Neeraj Kabi, are unabashedly sexual. And yet when the veneer of anonymity is shattered and Usha suffers public humiliation, it is hard not to think of all those dozens of Hindi films we grew up on, in which the illusions of romance cultivated by the spinsterish figure of Lalita Pawar would turn out to be nothing but illusions.


It will be a while yet before Buaji swims free.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 9 Sep 2018.

The Life Poetic

My Mirror column:

The 1957 classic Paying Guest still feels young as it turns 60. But there are things in its frothy shairana universe that now seem almost worthy.

There's a delicious little scene in Paying Guest when the penurious tenant Ramesh (Dev Anand) has returned home to pursue his newly-minted courtship with Shanti (Nutan), who also happens to be the daughter of his landlord. For several seconds, they look deep into each other's eyes, each uttering the other's name in typically soulful lover-ly fashion. "Shanti." "Ramesh." "Shanti?" "Ramesh?" But Ramesh wants more than sweet nothings. "Bolo?" he urges. At which Shanti flutters her eyelashes and says — in the same dulcet tones as before — "Kiraye ke paise laaye? [Did you bring the rent money?]" "Kaisi gair-shairaana baatein karti ho! [What unpoetic things you speak of!]" responds Ramesh, pretending to go off in a huff.

The scene doesn't do very much by way of plot, but it is typical of the sort of bantering courtship, of romance between witty equals, that makes the film such fun. Very little that is gair-shairana -or gair-shararati - is allowed in the Paying Guest universe. The delightful 1957 film was directed by Subodh Mukerji, but its spirit was the product of Nasir Hussain's penmanship. Hussain, for whom this was the second collaboration with good friend Mukerji (the first being Munimji, 1955) - produced with the script and dialogue here a perfect balance between banter and poetry, between sharpness and sweetness. It was this lightness of register would go on to characterise his films as director, starting with Tumsa Nahin Dekha, his directorial debut, which also released in 1957.

Akshay Manwani, in his detailed and thoughtful book on Nasir Hussain's cinema, suggests that it was Husain's writing that allowed Dev Anand to metamorphose into the witty, flirtatious, charming trickster figure that became almost his signature in the latter part of his career. Some of Anand's earlier 1950s films - the noirish ones like Baazi, Jaal, Taxi Driver and House No. 44 -had lent him "a certain brazenness", but as "a man of the streets, a survivor who is at home in the urban underbelly." It was Hussain - with his scripts for Munimji and Paying Guest and later Jab Pyaar Kisise Hota Hai (1961), which he directed as well - who set him free to play the fun-loving young man, dashing and quick-witted and happy to turn his energies to romancing the heroine with an enviable lightness. Manwani goes further, citing the writer and lyricist Javed Akhtar to argue that Husain was responsible for Hindi cinema's departure from the melancholy or dramatic protagonist to the carefree, urbane, contemporary hero (embodied first by Dev Anand and then by Shammi Kapoor from Tumsa Nahi Dekha onwards).

The marvellous silliness of Dev Anand in disguise as an old man - something Husain and Mukerji had had him do with great success in the more intricately plotted Munimji a couple of years before - is one of the harmless pleasures of Paying Guest. Ramesh is a lawyer, with not very much work on his hands but with the gift of the gab, and Anand proves surprisingly good at delivering Husain's witty repartee and make-believe tales, both as the youthful Ramesh and in the doddering Mirza Wajahat avatar which enables him to successfully rent a room from Shanti's watchful father. In the context of Lipstick Under My Burkha's marshalling of our squeamish response to an older woman romancing a young man, one must note that Paying Guest is probably one of the earliest Hindi films to establish the trope of the hero, ostensibly desexualised by age, flirting with the young heroine; here for instance Anand-as-Mirza-Sahab constantly calls Nutan "Aziza" [dear], telling her father that the house feels like his sasural, and pretending to rescue her from the attentions of his own younger avatar.

Watching Paying Guest in 2017, exactly sixty years after it was made, one notes many other things with a sense of wonder and not a little sorrow. There is, first and foremost, the fact that a young professional with a Hindu name thinks nothing of first renting a room in the house of an old Muslim gentleman (where a Hindu father and daughter have been tenants for decades). And when, for the purposes of romantic plot, he needs to dress up as an old man, his first recourse is to conjure up another old Muslim gent. To take a room in the house of Babu Digambarnath, his most innocuous disguise is as Mirza Wajahat.

The second setpiece I enjoyed thoroughly was a public 'debate' between Shanti and her college classmate Chanchal (Shubha Khote), on the subject of whether love or money is more essential to the success of a marriage. Conducted in a combination of prose, recitation and sung couplets, the linguistic pleasures of the debate are really those of baitbaazi - a traditional form of poetic competition that was part of Urdu literary life.

This is, it should be noted, a film set in Lucknow, where Mukerji and Husain had both studied. Perhaps the particular history of that city was responsible for some of the ease of these characterisations - a world of lawyers and students who whether they were Hindu or Muslim, shareef tenants or shareef landlords, men or women, could partake of Urdu repartee. But the film was a hit, and not only in the shairana world of Lucknow. In the India of 1957, it seems, there was nothing here to remark on.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 7 Aug 2017.

Picture This: A Long Shot on Delhi

Householders and house-owners in 1963 Delhi. My BLink column from last Saturday:

A still from Tere Ghar ke Saamne

Growing up, I often wondered what it was like to see Hindi films as a Bombay person. To have roads and landmarks you knew be part of an on-screen iconography seemed immeasurably glamorous. So I’ve enjoyed watching my own city, Delhi, begin to find its place in the cinematic sun. Sure, the road to filmi fashionableness has been paved with the tediously same-old Old Delhis and distressingly prettified college campuses. But there have also been gems like Do Dooni Char, Vicky Donor and Band Baaja Baraat, and at the top of the heap, Dibakar Banerjee’s Khosla ka Ghosla and Oye Lucky Lucky Oye.

Delhi in film is a subject for a much longer piece. Recently, though, I watched two Delhi films from long before they became a vogue — and was struck by how their Delhis of half a century ago still resonate today. Merchant-Ivory’s The Householder and Vijay Anand’s Tere Ghar ke Saamne, both released in 1963, and are preoccupied with homes. But how differently!

The Householder opens with a glorious long shot: an Old Delhi terrace, smoke rising from somewhere, the sound of the azaan emanating from the striped dome of the Ghata Masjid. Cut to a close-up of the two figures: Prem (Shashi Kapoor), asleep on a charpai, is gently woken by his pert-nosed young wife Indu (Leela Naidu). This is a world in which the prospect of attending a wedding in Mehrauli makes Indu sit up. “We will sit in a bus and go,” she says with childlike joy, before her brow furrows in contemplation of which of her two good saris she will wear. Prem is a lecturer at a small college, and much of the film — based on Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s novel — revolves around his anxieties about making a living.

A still from The Householder

The dialogue dwells continually on money, the naming of sums echoing the way Prem must count every rupee. His monthly salary is ₹180, his rent ₹60 and repairing the ceiling fan will cost a princely ₹10. Eventually Prem gathers the courage to appeal for a raise, but he is shooed away by his principal’s shrewish wife. When he begs his landlord (Pinchoo Kapoor) to reduce his rent, the alcoholic Sehgal reads his petition, only to break into a bizarre drunken soliloquy. “The cost of living has gone up terribly. Sixty rupees for a bottle of whiskey!” And as poor baffled Prem looks on, Sehgal continues as if in a trance: “Sugar one rupee a seer, rice one for a seer, oranges three rupees a dozen, apples four rupees a pound...”

Tere Ghar ke Saamne talks money, too. And if Sehgal’s spending the whole of Prem’s rent on a bottle of Vat 69 seemed ironic, TGKS evokes a world even farther from the lowly lecturer’s. The film opens at a government auction for “Dehli ki behtereen locality ka behtareen plot”. Lala Jagannath (Om Prakash) outbids Seth Karamchand (Harindranath Chattopadhyay) on a highly valued front-wala plot. But the pugnacious Karamchand, not to be outdone, returns to bid the same amount on the lesser-valued back plot. As he announces to his appalled wife, “Shaan bhi koi cheez hoti hai (there is such a thing as grandeur).”

The level of irrationality is as high as the stakes. When Dev Anand (playing the foreign-returned architect Rakesh) asks about the adjoining plot, Nutan (playing Karamchand’s daughter Sulekha) wrinkles her nose in disgust. “Don’t talk about that.” “But why?” “Because it’s cheaper than ours. Theirs is two lakh, and ours two lakh one thousand!”

Yet Tere Ghar ke Saamne was one of 1963’s biggest hits, its effervescent comedy of manners and still memorable songs making it the year’s sixth highest grossing Hindi film. And The Householder, despite its affecting subject, flawless photography by Subrata Mitra (Satyajit Ray’s longtime collaborator) and a final cut apparently by Ray himself, never transcends its stilted characters and caricatured subplots. And it doesn’t help that everyone speaks in English, with no attention to inflections of class.

The Householder, even at its best, has a stodgy, one-note quality. TGKS seems to invite multiple readings. When Prem and Indu get off their bus amidst the ruins of Mehrauli, Prem remarks with pleasure on how quiet it is. But it is only an instant before his brain begins to count paisas again: “I’m sure rents are low (here). It would be economical for us.” Meanwhile, when Rakesh and Sulekha in Tere Ghar ke Saamne whiz past the same Mehrauli ruins in a car, they arrive in a village home. Rakesh offers to pay for the home-cooked meal, the old woman refuses. It’s a cue for him to applaud the non-money-mindedness of the poor as against the unprincipled avarice of the rich — before leaving money “for the oil that burns in the diya she lights for God”. The possibility of cloyingness is averted a minute later, when Sulekha rejects his proposal and a miffed Rakesh declares he will be waiting for the ₹5 he’s just spent on her roti — the money-mindedness of the rich has just been brilliantly, ever-so-lightly underlined.

The song-less film whose characters reminisce about watching Hindi films is the one that got reviewed in the New York Times. The mainstream hit was seen as mere fluff. But somehow the film about elite houseowners tells us more things about ourselves than the one about the sad householder.