Minding the Gap: Thoughts on Gulabo Sitabo

My Mirror column:

Gulabo Sitabo mines what remains of old Lucknow for visual atmospherics and banter, but both its laughter and its nostalgia come at a cost

A screenshot from the film Gulabo Sitabo (2020)

Twenty minutes into Gulabo Sitabo, the film's septuagenarian protagonist Mirza Chunnan Nawab (Amitabh Bachchan with a prosthetic nose, a cotton-puff beard and a bent back) makes his creaky way up to the room that his rent-witholding tenant Baankey Rastogi (Ayushmann Khurrana) shares with an otherwise all-female household. The family is prepared. The youngest sister lies down immediately, another places a white bandage on her forehead, the third stands by gravely. The mother emerges on cue with an empty atta tin, while Baankey holds up an old blender they could sell to buy food. It's a fine performance, and even the suspicious Mirza is fooled. As he turns to leave, though, a loud ping breaks the melodramatic silence. It's the microwave with the family's actual dinner.

Things are not quite what they seem.

That gap between appearance and reality is the recurring motif of Shoojit Sircar's new film – and not always a consciously adopted one. At first glance, Juhi Chaturvedi's script appears to concern itself with an old nawabi Lucknow, centred on a decaying but still impressive old haveli and its khandaani Muslim inhabitants. But that Lucknow, of inherited feudal grandeur and flowery late-Mughal culture, has been in the grip of slow stasis since at least the mid-1800s, when the British exiled its beloved ruler Wajid Ali Shah, he of the brilliant shairi and thumri and kathak -- not just a connoisseur of the arts but an actual artist. What little survived of that culture through a century under the British has crumbled to nothing in the 70 years since independence. And so the characters that Chaturvedi and Sircar prop up as representatives of that past cannot live up to our imagination of it.

We may want crabby old Mirza and his 94-year-old wife, Fatima Begum (the inimitable Farrukh Jaffar, Bollywood's resident Sharp-Tongued Old Lady from Peepli Live to Photograph) to be all quiet gentility and noblesse oblige. But given that their sole resource is a building they don't have the money to repair, why is it surprising that they are instead skinflint, petty creatures -- one handing out coins as if they mean something, and the other actually exchanging them for tenners?

Amitabh Bachchan as Mirza sells off pilfered odds and ends in a scene from Gulabo Sitabo

Right from the start, the film's constant refrain is that Mirza is laalchi (greedy) and miserly. But there's something pathetic about a man who spends every day trying to redeem paltry rents from ever-dodging tenants, money he doesn't even control when he gets it. It is clearly because he has no money that he is reduced to thievery. So limited is his experience of cash that even calculating the sum of 30,000 rupees is difficult for him – and when the chaatwala pronounces the amount, Mirza falls over in shock. A much larger sum, later in the film, is entirely beyond his comprehension.

Yes, he speaks rather hopefully of the Begum's impending death (and Sircar and Chaturvedi milk every drop of humour from Bachchan's goggle-eyed shock when she recovers from every physical setback). Yes, he confesses to having married the Begum essentially for her haveli. But he has also stayed married to a woman a decade and a half his senior, and looked after her and her house as best he could, receiving little for his pains, his younger and ghar-jamaai status keeping him at semi-attendant level.

Thinking of Mirza as a villain, even a comic villain, or as a greedy heartless sort, seems to me to miss the wood for the trees. And as the film proceeded, it became increasingly clear to me what that wood is -- a whole city full of people on the make, using whatever they can to climb that one rung up the ladder that might insulate them from the vagaries of fortune in the economically vulnerable, socially depleted, politically compromised world that is present-day Lucknow. The small-time lawyer (Brijendra Kala) who thinks he can make a deal on Fatima Manzil with the local mafioso builder, the Department of Archaeology official (Vijay Raaz) who wants to get it declared heritage property, Baankey's girlfriend who ditches him for a richer match, or his sharp younger sister Guddo (Srishti Srivastava), perfectly matter-of-fact about sleeping with a useful contact – they're all in it for what they can get. Strangely, none of them get labelled greedy. 

Waning Moons, a recent PSBT documentary watchable on Vimeo, features two real-life Nawabi descendants, Mirza Nasir Abbas Maliki and his sister Naaz, who describe their father as having lost all their money because of his “seedhapa” (straightness). Naaz, who was never really sent to school, describes an actual haveli roof collapse that destroyed many antiques. But somehow, those selling their antiques for a pittance are greedy -- not those who re-sell them at massive mark-ups?

It is not just the chandeliers of Fatima Manzil that are disappearing. The city that held them up is gone, too. Even the overblown nazaakat that 1950s and 60s Hindi cinema capitalised on -- in Lucknow-set Muslim socials like HS Rawail's Mere Mehboob (1963), poetic romances like Mohammed Sadiq's Chaudhavin ka Chand (1960) or joyfully bantering ones like Subodh Mukherjee's marvellous Paying Guest (1957) – has long disappeared, leaving a shell in its stead.

Abhishek Chaubey's Dedh Ishqiya (2014) played the perfect double game with that fact, creating a dark comedy that seemed to cater to our fantasy of gorgeously-dressed, poetry-spouting old-world romance, only to ruthlessly undercut it. Let it be noted that Gulabo Sitabo's ostensibly gentle comedy about an old Muslim Lucknow, with its gratitude to the Uttar Pradesh Police, UP's Minister of State for Minority Welfare and the ex-Vice President of the BJP's Youth Wing, comes to us in the midst of a pandemic during which Muslims have been constantly attacked by both media and the government. Nostalgia and mockery combine well, not just on screen.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 28 Jun 2020.

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.