Seeking stardust

My Mirror column:

An intriguing new documentary on actors who impersonate Bollywood stars offers insights into stardom and selfhood. 

Mahesh Waghela has built a career out of impersonating Rajesh Khanna. A still from the documentary 'Hubahu'.

Acting is usually understood as a successful imitation of life. But there are actors we watch less for their ability to play new fictional characters and more for a consistent, even predictable performance of themselves. We call them stars.

From Dilip Kumar’s perfect enunciation to Shah Rukh Khan’s romantic gestures, from Amitabh Bachchan’s baritone to Kareena Kapoor’s pout, our attachment to those we anoint as stars is usually based on particular elements of a screen persona. Every star worth the name is actually a constellation of signature vocal tics, repeated bodily gestures and stylistic choices: a particular haircut, a recognisable walk, an oft-repeated item of clothing.

And in our film-mad country, all of us have known someone who actually modelled themselves on a favourite star. It might be your father’s friend who, as a college student in the ’60s, took to flicking his hair and arching an eyebrow like Shammi Kapoor. Or your friend who adopted the tinkly Madhuri Dixit laugh along with the dance moves. Or the great-aunt who looked like Nimmi – and may have acquired something of her winsome air of naivete from that perceived connection.

Imitation, they say, is the highest form of flattery. Ramsha Alam’s documentary Hubahu, funded by the Public Service Broadcasting Trust (PSBT) and screened last Friday in Delhi as part of PSBT’s Open Frame Film Festival, zeroes in on three people who have taken this adage to its logical conclusion: for whom the imitation of their chosen star has become a lifelong, life-altering commitment.

Whether it’s Rais Khan, who works as ‘Junior Shashi Kapoor’, or Seema Motwani, who has played Hema Malini in countless advertisements and TV shows (MTV’s Fully Faltu employed her for seven years), or Mahesh Waghela, who has built a career out of impersonating Rajesh Khanna, Hubahu paints a fascinating portrait of the world of the Bollywood lookalike.

One of the things that Alam’s chosen subjects have in common is that the resemblance was first pointed out by someone else, and then gradually internalised. In Khan’s case, his mother first told him his teeth were like Shashi Kapoor’s. Khan, then young and impressionable, gradually began to see traits of Shashi in himself, and then worked extremely hard to improve on what he had. He spent years, for instance, training his straight hair into Shashi-like waves by tying it up in a handkerchief at night, using circular combs and so on, until it finally succumbed to his efforts. With sunglasses on, his now wavy hairstyle and slightly toothy grin makes him instantly ‘recognisable’ as Shashi. In Seema Motwani’s case, it was her co-actors, many of them already working as lookalikes, who told her that she could channel Hema Malini. For Waghela, it was a friend with a dance troupe who persuaded him to use the physical resemblance to his advantage.

Waghela’s story begins, like most lookalikes, with physical resemblance fanned by fandom. Just not his own. It was Waghela’s elder brother who was the Rajesh Khanna fan in the family, adopting the superstar’s look and hairstyle at the peak of his fame in the 1970s. The story suggests the endless loop into which mimesis can launch you: did the youthful Waghela start out copying Rajesh Khanna – or was he just a young man copying his elder brother, who happened to be copying a superstar?

“It takes a lot of effort to become a lookalike... though people just dismiss us as duplicates,” Waghela says ruefully. His brother had never performed. Stage fright drove Waghela off-stage, too, the first three times. But once he started performing Khanna’s famous songs and dialogues with the superstar’s signature moves in place, the audience roared its approval. There was no going back.

At the core of that feeling of gratification is the public adulation. The lookalike is perfectly aware that what the public is responding to is a performance (in fact, a performance of a performance), and yet something of the magic of the star rubs off on him or her. People’s unguarded, often emotional responses to a star-lookalike, especially in non-metropolitan areas, conjure up memories of public responses in the 1990s to actors Arun Govil and Deepika Chikhalia who played Ram and Sita in the televised Doordarshan Ramayana.

Bound already by the film industry's semi-feudal conventions in which artistes are classified as “senior” and “junior”, Khan, Motwani and Waghela have also come to identify deeply with their chosen star. Their investment in upholding the star’s image is total, lending them an air of gravitas – and dare I say, purpose. “I am careful never to wear revealing clothes, or do anything that would take away from Hema ji’s dignity,” says Motwani. Waghela regularly refuses comic routines centred on mocking Khanna. “When I’m earning because of him, why would I demean him?” After Khanna’s death in 2012 and Kapoor’s in 2017, there is a powerful sense that they are keeping a great man alive.

That process could be seen as subjugating their real selves. Waghela shaved off his moustache against his wife’s wishes, to look more like Rajesh Khanna. Motwani says she makes sure not to put on too much weight, so as to keep Hema Malini’s aura intact. But watching these actors talk to Alam – the barely suppressed teariness with which Motwani describes her own struggle, or listening to Khan’s eternally cheery manner, so reminiscent of Kapoor – it often feels like these are now part of their real selves.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 22 Sep 2019.

That Filmi Family Feeling

My Mirror column today:

Sometimes stars become a way of cementing relationships between real people.

Amitabh Bachchan and Rajesh Khanna in the film Anand

Last week, I took a pool-taxi. The pool-taxi is the upscale equivalent of the share-auto. What you pay more for, I'd thought, is the safe distance between warm bodies -- and companionable silence. But sometimes, as happened on this particular ride, the unspoken rule about not soliciting conversation is broken. This time, the person who broke it was the cab driver. "Aap Dilli ke hain, sir?" he inquired of my travelling companion, a young man in his early thirties. "Haan, lekin Bambai mein rehta hoon," came the reply. The driver's rejoinder was a classic piece of North Indian banter. "Tab toh Bachchan sahab ke ghar aana-jaana laga hi rehta hoga (Then you must be going to Bachchan Sahab's house all the time)," he said, chuckling into the mirror. 

Things could have ended there, but the young man's pride had been lalkaaro-ed. How could he be taken seriously as a bonafide Bambai denizen without having a Bollywood connection to impress the Dilliwalas with? Out came a satisfied smirk, and a cellphone photo of himself with the Big B. Apparently the young man's sister worked at the production end of Kaun Banega Crorepati, so his entire Delhi-based family had managed to get themselves on the show at some point. "This is my wife, my mother, father, uncle," his voice trailed off, culminating with an account of the niceness and greatness and deservingness of India's biggest superstar. "Bachchan saab knows everybody on set. Personal interest lete hain woh sab mein..." 

The taxi driver was not to be outdone. "I have met Bachchan saab, too" he said, "But I've met him in my dreams." We were then treated to a detailed description: twice he had dreamt that he was in the Bachchan home, being served "coffee-shoffee" and pakoras by Jaya ji, while Amit-ji introduced him to Aishwarya. "And Abhishek?" I couldn't stop myself asking. "Oh, he was not there!" said the driver, looking mildly irritated that I'd made the real-life son and husband intrude into this technicolour vision of khatirdari, starring himself in the jamai-raja role. 

The rest of the journey passed as it was fated to. I was informed of Amitabh Bachchan's actual level of thinness, his health issues and how they began with an infected bottle of blood during the Coolie incident. This was followed by comparisons of Amitabh and Shah Rukh's differential niceness on the KBC set (SRK is apparently too demanding, especially about cigarettes), segueing into more general comparisons of how much of a nice guy each one's favourite star was (Salman won. Of course.) 

But the taxi-driver's dream sequence, if I may call it that, left me thinking. About how we're so steeped in Bollywood lore that we adopt filmi families as our own. More frequently, of course, it is our real-life family members who acquire a sort of rosy glow in the reflected light of the silver screen. I'm thinking of the great-aunt that everybody said looked like Nimmi, and who I always think cultivated a slightly melancholy air for this reason. 

Or the other great-aunt who abandoned the name her parents gave her and named herself after a famous sixties actress. There was the great-uncle who sang Cliff Richard songs in a perfect deep baritone, and his elder brother who once wanted to be a Hindi film hero. And my dad's old college friend, Anglophone and Bengali to all outward appearances, who I've been told once modelled himself on the careening Shammi Kapoor. 

Sometimes stars become a way of cementing relationships between real people. I'm talking about the friend whose parents - one UP-ite and one Gujju, both from Calcutta, and both Hindi movie buffs - fell in love at least partly because they saw their favourite stars in each other. If one seemed like Waheeda Rehman, the other seemed like Dev Anand. 

Some other times, stars can intrude on real relationships between real people. Like the great-aunt who was so huge a fan of Raj Kapoor that when she bumped into him on her honeymoon, she could barely believe her luck, and spent half the honeymoon on the set. 

And sometimes we get a film that takes this beautiful relationship between the reel and the real, and feeds it back into the cinema so we can watch our filmi selves on screen. If you've watched Neerja, one of the sweetest things about it was Neerja's supposed obsession with Rajesh Khanna. 

From the star's Anand dialogue ("Life badi honi chahiye, lambi nahi") being used to gesture to Neerja Bhanot's own to-be-truncated life, to the other Rajesh Khanna line that becomes Neerja's final message for her mother ("Pushpa, I hate tears"), Ram Madhvani's film routes at least some of its heavy-weather emotion through our relationship to an older melodramatic tradition. The lines might be filmi, but the feeling is real.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 13th Mar, 2016.

A Star Fell From Heaven

My Mumbai Mirror column today:

A recent biography of Hindi cinema's first superstar retraces the outlines of what could not be a more dramatically filmi life story. And yet things are never as meteoric as they seem.

A Stardust cover that asked 'Is Rajesh Khanna married?'

In one of the marvellous set pieces in Naseeruddin Shah's recent memoir, he describes how sometime in his final year in school in Ajmer, he was reading the fortnightly Screen in a barbershop when he came across "an ad for something called the Filmfare-United Producers Talent Contest". He promptly cut out the attached application form, though it wasn't at all clear where he would find the money for 'three cabinet size photographs; one front face, one profile and one full figure'. His ten-rupees-a-week pocket money certainly wasn't enough, and he never gathered up the courage to ask the couple of adults who might have helped. "[T]hat application stayed in my pocket, and the dreams in my head, as long as I was in school," writes Shah. 

Then, just after his school final exams, sitting in the same shop, he came across the results of the contest. Shah remembers comparing his teenaged reflection in the barbershop mirror with the winner's face in the magazine. "The man in the photograph already looked like a star: square-jawed with coiffed hair, perfect teeth, clear eyes and the confidence of having the world at his feet... I had to consciously check another strong attack of resentment at nature for not having given me a face like his. He was twenty-one years old and went by the name of Rajesh Khanna. And so that, as they say, was that." 

Shah's telling is true to his angular relationship with the popular Hindi film world: occasional fascination leavened with a long-lasting disdain for its self-referentiality and lack of respect for anything outside itself. Gautam Chintamani's just-published biography of Rajesh Khanna offers us another viewpoint on that Filmfare contest. This time we are situated not in some small-town schoolboy fantasy, but at the centre of the action. The who's who of the commercial Hindi cinema world -- including BR Chopra, Bimal Roy, GP Sippy, HS Rawail, Nasir Husain, J. Om Prakash, Mohan Saigal, Shakti Samanta and Subodh Mukherji -- had come together to form the United Producers' Combine, and the winner of the Talent Contest would be cast in the lead role in one film made by each of them. 

Jatin Khanna, pampered favourite son of a family of successful railway contractors who had moved from Lahore to Bombay in 1935, was then biding his time at the city's KC College while he did small-time theatre and waited for his big break. As the scion of a well-to-do family that was willing to support him financially, he was the sort of 'struggler' who drove a sports car to auditions and had a monthly allowance of a thousand rupees. He filled the form for a lark, and was shocked to reach the final round. Producer J. Om Prakash remembers that he asked so many questions about the scene he was given that GP Sippy told him, "Kucch bhi kar do." Khanna chose a monologue from a play he had done, and (though it sounds pretty damned awful), apparently managed to impress the pants off the judges, thus beating some 10,000 participants to the prize (including his closest contender Vinod Mehra, who lost by a single point). 

Chintamani does not say so, but competition seems to me to drive everything in Rajesh Khanna's life. Vinod Mehra does not appear again in the book, barring one brief mention -- one can only wonder whether two extra points might have changed the fate of this appealingly gentle actor, whose persona had none of the bombast or mannerisms that Khanna cultivated. (But then again, the film industry's big daddies picked the kind of actor they thought would be a star. And they were right.) But many other actors were competition for Khanna. Ravi Kapoor, his schoolmate in Girgaum and later at KC College, got his break before Khanna did, in V. Shantaram's Geet Gaya Pattharon Ne (1964), taking away the screen name Khanna wanted: Jeetendra. Another contemporary was Hari Jariwala, whom Khanna seems to have seen as a rival right from their theatre days till years later, when Jariwala had achieved acclaim as Sanjeev Kumar. Screenwriter Salim Khan remembers Khanna actually coming around to Mehboob Studios with a magazine in which Khan had named Sanjeev Kumar as among the brightest actors around, and demanding to know if he thought Kumar was better than Khanna. 

In his personal life, too, one-upmanship was crucial. Coming home after an angry break-up with long-time girlfriend Anju Mahendru, he told a visitor that he was looking to get married. The visitor suggested his teenaged daughter, then about to debut as an actress. Dimple married Rajesh soon after. The wedding was so much on the rebound that Khanna is said to have re-routed the wedding procession to go past Mahendru's house. 

The most legendary competitiveness, of course, was with Amitabh Bachchan. The biography repeats the well-known tale of Khanna, then at his height, mocking Bachchan as "manhoos" (unlucky) on the sets of Bawarchi, making Jaya Bhaduri angry enough to announce that only time would tell who was going to be the lucky one. We all know which way that went. The lanky newcomer Khanna took for granted in Anand (1971) had all but eclipsed him by Namak Haraam(1973). But it is not true that Bachchan's rise wiped out Khanna and his kind of cinema: Khanna began in 1966 with Chetan Anand's Aakhri Khat, and delivered hits like Souten and Avtaar till the mid-1980s. His career lasted much longer than the meteoric three years before Bachchan. As always with Rajesh Khanna, the legend was larger than the man.

An older column on Rajesh Khanna's appeal to women, here: 'Rajesh Khanna and the women who loved him'. 

Post Facto: Hindi Cinema and the Curious Case of the Disappearing Servant

Kantaben in Kal Ho Na Ho

My column in the Sunday Guardian:

The recent death of AK Hangal led to many pieces about character actors: some waxing nostalgic about old favourites, some pointing to their low status in the industry hierarchy. Baradwaj Rangan, in a characteristically thoughtful piece, argued that there is no place for an actor like Hangal in today's India "where social-media platforms have weaned a tetchy, independent, wisea** citizenry that has little use for being fussed over by a faithful family retainer". As always, social-media platforms seem to be getting more importance here than they deserve — but there's no doubt that the old servant who was "an unshakable link to the values of a long time ago" has disappeared from contemporary Hindi cinema.

But if you think about it, the kind of family retainer who "took charge of feeding you the way your mother would, while also being the father you could turn to during life's bleakest moments" has been gone for much longer than we seem to realize.

As early as 1973, Hrishikesh Mukherjee's Bawarchi (itself based on Tapan Sinha's 1966 Bengali film Golpo Holeo Shotti), heralded the appearance of the servant as a service provider you had to seek out, rather than someone you inherited. The "you" here was, of course, the modern, urban, middle class householder, who could no longer count on wives and daughters and bahus to do the housework (the grandfather in Bawarchi makes a memorable cross-linguistic wisecrack about how bahus are now "daughters-in-law" and who wants to deal with the law early in the morning). The changing middle class woman is a definite subtext, but Bawarchi's humour hinges more directly on the perceived difficulty of finding (and keeping) servants in a post-feudal world. We also get a glimpse into a discourse about urban crime in which the (newly anonymous) servant has already begun to feature as a potential trickster/thief/ murderer. It is this fear that makes the family's reaction to Rajesh Khanna's Raghu so ambivalent — the more talented and hard-working he seems to be, the more suspicious they get.

Of course, since this is a Hrishikesh Mukherjee film, their fears are never realized. The ever-smiling Raghu Bhaiya — cook, cleaner, errand-runner, quarrel-resolver and instiller of family values for a changing world — is a wish-fulfilling figure whose cinematic function is precisely to fill the space left empty by the absence of a Ramu Kaka.

Through the 80s and some part of the 90s, the servant continued to exist in the Hindi film family, often providing the parallel-but-separate comedy track that was so essential to the classic Bombay cinema tradition. Many narratives made the shift to a younger-brother figure — think of everything from Deven Verma in Gulzar's Angoor (1982) to Laxmikant Berde in Maine Pyaar Kiya (1989) — which elided the question of the servant's real status even more. In 1997, Bawarchi was remade as Hero No. 1 — but in Hero No. 1, there is no suspense about Govinda's social status: he is no longer an anonymous reformer but a rich boy in disguise, out to win over his girlfriend's family.

This fictional cooption of servants into the family is something perhaps unique to our cinema. Our fictions never seem to have the distance between upstairs and downstairs that is fairly standard, say, in British depictions — from the Wodehousian comic version to Ishiguro's Remains of the Day, to Robert Altman's Gosford Park, the British mansion is a place where masters and servants inhabit different worlds, and the breaching of boundaries is either surreptitious or radical. But at the peak of our princely mansion stories, our Shammi Kapoor moment, we manage to create a bridge between classes through the imagined figure of a dai ma. We still haven't given up on this — Bol Bachchan(2012) has a scene where three old ladies appear simultaneously to play Abhishek Bachchan's mother in a real-life drama, and he labels them Ma, Dai Ma and — in mindboggling bad taste — Bai Ma.

But other than the occasional Kantaben-style figure of fun (Kal Ho Na Ho), the servant has more or less disappeared from our films, though quite obviously not from urban middle class lives. Other than a masterful exception like Shanghai (where Kalki Koechlin's maid turns out to be the one real cross-class relationship she has — and fails at), what we get by way of a 'realistic' depiction of servants is an NRI version which is more often than not, bland and devoid of all complexity. After Deepa Mehta's Fire and Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding, the most recent is Prashanth Nair's annoyingly black-and-white Delhi in a Day, where the bourgeois family 'upstairs' is not only inhuman but also hypocritical and crass, and the fictitious family-ness is transposed onto the 'downstairs', creating a world of servants-as-victims, shorn of all internal tensions — political or sexual or economic.

Deanie Ip in A Simple Life

Even the servant-as-family trope needn't necessarily be a middle class self-deception. Among the finest films I saw this year is Hong Kong director Ann Hui's A Simple Life, a moving yet completely clear-eyed depicton of the evolving relationship between a 30-something man and his ageing family cook-cum-housekeeper. In a country where having domestic help is still very much the middle class norm, shouldn't we have equally nuanced stories to tell?

Read this column in the Sunday Guardian, here.

Post Facto: Rajesh Khanna and the women who loved him

From my fortnightly Sunday Guardian column:

Like everyone else, I too have an aunt who was besotted with Rajesh Khanna in her adolescent years. The day before her Higher Secondary exams, the news came that he had married Dimple Kapadia. My masi remembers spending the day of her history exam weeping bitter tears with her girlfriends – had he married Anju Mahendroo who was more-or-less his age, their logic went, that would be one thing. But if he was going to marry a teenager, then oh god, why couldn't he pick one of them?

As a teenaged old-Hindi-movie buff myself, I never quite 'got' Rajesh Khanna. He always seemed to me a little like Dev Anand: entertaining enough, but so invested in the perfect rendition of his carefully cultivated style that no performance of his ever moved me. When he wasn't being maudlin or 'disturbed', there was a twinkle in the eye whose appeal I could see. But both Khanna and Anand seemed to me like some people's preening boyfriends: if pressed, I might grant their good looks, but really they just weren't my type.

When he died, the academic Susmita Dasgupta (author of Amitabh: The Making of a Superstar) wrote a wonderful Facebook 'note', in which she explained, among other things, why she had never been a Khanna fan, despite being surrounded by people who swooned over him and copied his looks: "Frankly, I remained out of all this. Khanna invoked femininity. I was not a pursuant of such sentiments. So when Bachchan came, I took to him like fish to water. I also revelled that he, and not Khanna, was the superstar."

What does it mean to say that a hero "invoked femininity"? In Gangs of Wasseypur II, Ramadhir Singh does a neat recounting of history-through-heroes, which features the same idea: "First men liked Dilip Kumar, and women liked Dev Anand. Then men liked Amitabh Bachchan, and women liked Rajesh Khanna." If one wants to take Ramadhir Singh's idea forward, I suppose we might agree that men like Salman and women like Shah Rukh.

Perhaps there's something there. But what does such a binary make of all the women who loved Bachchan and all the men who modelled themselves on Khanna? Are they to be considered traitors to their gender: masculine women and effeminate men? Do they gesture to the possibility of many kinds of masculinity? Or is the greater identification by one gender something to do with the kinds of films in which they starred?

The more Dasgupta worked on Bachchan, the more uncomfortable she felt about not being able to analyse Khanna as a phenomenon. She eventually met the latter, and her post contains some fertile speculation about the real-life Jatin Khanna. But what is fascinating is her theory that his star persona, as first created by Aradhana and Kati Patang, was the outcome of director "Shakti Samanta's search of a lover for his young widowed mother". He was "a saviour who comes in to breathe life and loveliness into women, ignored and isolated". The tragic figure of the young widow is at the centre of both films. Samanta's father was in the air force, and died in the line of duty in 1947, like Arun Varma in Aradhana, who dies leaving a pregnant fiancé behind.

I watched Aradhana last week at a Rajesh Khanna Retrospective, and Dasgupta is certainly on to something. From scraps of childhood memory, I had imagined Aradhana to be a standard-issue romance, and I was quite surprised at how completely our experience is filtered through Sharmila Tagore's character, Vandana. The first Rajesh dies early on, having provided a few weeks of loving, the memory of which Sharmila must live off. The second appears 25 years later, as Vandana's grown-up son. The two Rajeshes get plenty of screen time, but it is always through Vandana's eyes that we see them: the perfect lover, the yearned-for husband and the adored son.

In contrast, think of the many Bachchan movies in which the mother-son relationship is absolutely crucial – even when the mother is the one who stays alive and ages through the film, the film's point of view is always that of the son. In Yash Chopra's Trishul, for instance, the narrative thrust comes, just as in Aradhana, from the figure of the unwed mother who decides to give birth to the child. But when the son is Bachchan, a mother figure as strong as Waheeda Rehman must die. She can be a symbol in whose name he can fight, but she cannot be the one whose battles we witness.

Whether you're male or female, you can only experience the tragedy of Trishul — or Deewar or Zanjeer ­— through Bachchan's eyes. In a Rajesh Khanna movie, in contrast, you always see him through the heroine's eyes. He is the ultimate hero of heterosexual romance: the man you can soothe, and even better, the man who soothes you.

You can also read this column here.