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.

The White Noise of an Urdu Poet

Very happy to report that I started a new column called Shelf Life, down at TVOF. A monthly look at literature through the prism of clothing. Here's the first piece!

In fiction and film, Urdu poets find their distance from the mundane through pristine white, mostly a kurta pyjama. Time perhaps to dye them differently? 

In Anita Desai's magisterial 1984 novel In Custody, which was adapted into a Merchant Ivory film in 1993, a small town college lecturer sets out to interview a great poet. The lecturer, Deven Sharma, teaches Hindi for a living, but dreams his literary dreams in Urdu—and Nur Shahjehanbadi is his idol.

Almost from the beginning, Desai uses clothes to mark the gulf between the two, to show us who they are and sometimes who they are trying to be, but failing. 

When Deven first knocks timorously at his door, Nur is lying there, “like a great bolster laid on a flat low wooden divan”. But even without words, in semi-darkness, the poet exudes a certain charisma, a grand visibility that has something to do with being dressed entirely in white, his “white beard splayed across his chest and his long white fingers clasped across it.” To Deven's awestruck eyes, his size and immobility suggest a marble statue, “large and heavy not on account of obesity or weight, but on account of age and experience."

Nur's all-white kurta-pyjama emerges as a signifier of his distance from the mundane, his separateness from the crowd. When Deven begins to doubt his gaze, Nur reappears “freshly bathed and looking truly poet-like in fresh, starched white muslin clothes, loose and flowing and free...”. He is a vision of purity, but purity in danger of being soiled by the lowly chaos around it. That metaphorical image is one Desai draws out fascinatingly, given that this is a Muslim man being described by a Hindu one: “It was clear to Deven that these louts, these lafangas of the bazaar world—shopkeepers, clerks, bookies and unemployed parasites lived out the fantasy of being poets, artists and bohemians here on Nur’s terrace, in Nur’s company... what was astonishing was that the great poet Nur should be in the centre of it, like a serene white tika on the forehead of a madman.”

It is Deven's hero-worshipping gaze that keeps Nur “poet-like”, even after he soils his clothes. So it should be no surprise that the gaze Deven turns upon his own clothes is one of self-loathing, a tragic combination of economic deprivation and aesthetic despair. His Urdu department colleague Siddiqui Sahib has both the money and the taste for “a fine muslin shirt” to wear to college, Deven's only new shirt is a pale green nylon one from his in-laws. When his wife brought it, “he had tossed it on to the floor in an obligatory fit of temper--the meek are not always mild—saying the colour was one he detested, that the buttons did not match, that the size was too large—how could they have chosen such a cheap garment for their son-in-law?” Now, setting out on what feels like the most important assignment of his life, he feels he has no better option—though Sarla smirks when he asks her for it. 

Om Puri, the superb Deven of the film, gets a better deal. We see him in a Nehru jacket over a khadi kurta-pyjama, and once even a dark sherwani. Ismail Merchant seems to have decided that no Indian literary man—even a mere lecturer with a penchant for Urdu poetry, who keeps announcing self-deprecatingly that he is “only a teacher”—can be clad in the cheap bush-shirts and trousers that Anita Desai wrote.

But how do we understand Merchant's decision? Is there a self-Orientalising gaze here? Of course, the Urdu poets of the late Mughal court wore even finer clothes: Shamsur Rehman Faruqi's The Mirror of Beauty spends pages describing Zauq's mashru tunic and wide pyjamas, or Dagh's five-pointed black cap. But does associating present-day Urdu poets with the imagined uniform of a long-gone Muslim nobility celebrate that historical culture, or is it a form of othering we could really do without now? 

The great film lyricist Gulzar said in a 2017 interview that he has worn white since his college days, and it would “feel false” to wear colour now. But when asked if he feels most himself in a kurta-pyjama, he said he has never worn a pyjama! He wears a Punjabi-Pathani shalwaar on Sundays, of the sort worn in his home-town of Dina in Pakistan, and earlier often wore a dhoti. But what he wears almost all the time is “a regular pair of trousers, with the front crease and everything...” said Gulzar. “It’s just because I’m an Urdu poet that people assume I’m wearing a pyjama with my kurta.”

Photo: AFP PHOTO/STR STRDEL/ AFP

Poet and lyricist Gulzar at an exhibition in Mumbai.

Who is this fictional Urdu poet, who must wear only white, or even only kurta-pyjama? The image may have been truer when In Custody was written, but even the 84-year-old Gulzar has spent a lifetime playing tennis, wearing shorts. The young Urdu poets you might meet at a mushaira in Delhi, at Jashn-e-Rekhta or one of the city's many literary festivals, might be software engineers or tourist guides, TV journalists or government school teachers. They may be “of the bazaar world”, but are no lafangas. And you cannot identify them by their clothes.

Published in The Voice of Fashion, 2 July 2019.

Letters to an audience

My Mirror column:

An evening with Gulzar, poet, lyricist, filmmaker, centred on a discussion of three of his films, offers clues to his sustained relevance.

The audience assembled at the India Islamic Cultural Centre auditorium on Friday evening would be any writer’s dream. I don’t mean in numbers (though it was packed: one middle-aged Bengali couple zoomed in on the last vacant seats in my row after circling the auditorium without success, risking the visible ‘Media’ signs with a throwaway “Dekha jabe”). I mean it in terms of the degree of emotional identification – one might call it attachment – to a writer’s words.

The organisers – HarperCollins Publishers, who had planned the event around three slim books they’ve published about three of Gulzar’s films, Angoor, Aandhi and Ijaazat – kicked off the evening by running short video clips from the films on a side screen. People laughed out loud in recognition as they watched the bhanged-out Deven Varma sway before a hypnotic bouncing ball in Angoor. When Sanjeev Kumar told Suchitra Sen he'd been reciting Urdu poetry in mushairas since the age of 12, the younger woman next to me mouthed Sen’s on-screen reply along with the actress.

 

Even before the event began, the room had begun to radiate an almost universal admiration, and something more intimate, something a little like love. By the time Gulzar walked on stage in his trademark spotless white kurta-pajama, we were primed for nostalgic happiness. He took his seat alongside Sathya Saran and Saba Mahmood Bashir, authors of the books on Angoor and Aandhi, respectively, and the moderator, publisher Udayan Mitra. Gulzar remains unbelievable spry for an 84-year-old, and when he rose to display the books for the camera, he raised them above his head. It was a quiet gesture, but one of childlike joy.

A conversation about the three films followed. “Aandhi had run 22 or 23 weeks when an article was published that said, ‘Watch the life of Indira Gandhi on screen’ and the film got banned by the government,” said Gulzar, recalling that the news reached him while he was in Moscow for a film festival. “We all know Mrs Gandhi's life. The film had no resemblance to it. But in that era, the only female politician an actor could use as a model for her performance was Mrs Gandhi.” The film bore the brunt of that, especially since it released when Mrs G was at her thinnest-skinned: Emergency was declared soon after.

Bashir pointed out, correctly, that Aandhi wasn't so much a political film as a personal film in which the protagonist happened to be a politician. And yet the film contains what might be one of Hindi cinema’s more political songs: “Salaam kijiye, aali janaab aaye hain, yeh paanch saalon ka dene hisaab aaye hain,” in which a trio of young men dog the footsteps of Suchitra Sen’s campaigning Aarti Devi. Like another lyric from another of his films, Mere Apne (1971), “Haal chaal thheek thhaak hai”, it is the voice of the citizen-voter raised in song, the gentleness belying the sarcasm. “The things I said then were comments on my time, but they are apparently more than relevant today,” said Gulzar, reciting these lines: “Kaam nahi hai varna yahan, aapki dua se sab theek-thhaak hai.”

He didn't flag the rest of it, but here is another stanza that seems even more chillingly appropriate: “Aab-o-hawa desh ki bahut saaf hai, Kaayda hai kanoon hai insaaf hai/ Allah miyan jaane koi jiye ya mare, aadmi ko khoon voon sab maaf hai.”

What the filmmaker-lyricist did want to flag about Aandhi was his keenness to create a female character who would “be equal to any male politician” – and some of that equality was channelled into her freedom to smoke and drink without being labelled a vamp. Sure enough, the shot of an ashtray next to her as she works, and in another scene, a glass of something alcoholic kept near her, caused a stir.

Ijaazat, in which a once-married couple – Rekha and Naseeruddin Shah – run into each other years later, in a railway waiting room, also had a rare female protagonist. “Heroine ki toh aakhir mein jaakar shaadi hoti hai,” said potential producers as they rejected the script. The film eventually got made, to our collective good fortune, and remains an unusual, affecting love triangle, as Saran pointed out, for its refusal to apportion blame.

Yet Gulzar retained an acute understanding of how far his audience would travel with him. Sometimes this disappointed his more radically egalitarian fans: one gentleman yesterday stood up to say that he had never understood why Rekha in Ijaazat and Aarti in Aandhi touched the feet of their respective husbands. Gulzar accepted the question as a legitimate one, but his answer was almost banal in its simplicity: “It was what the character(s) would do. It was natural to the character.”

Another such perspicacious moment came when he explained why he needed Shashi Kapoor to appear as Rekha’s second husband. He needed the audience to back her decision, not think “Usse toh wahi accha thha, yeh kahan chali jaa rahi hai”. There is something quite striking here, and it involves the writer working in the cinematic medium – he has a character he backs as an author, and yet he understands so clearly that the power of that character will depend a great deal on the Hindi film audience's relationship to particular actors. It might be this ability to stay with his audience, push people a little bit beyond themselves but never quite alienate them, that makes Gulzar that increasingly rare thing in our times: the writer who is popular but doesn't pander.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 2 June 2019.

Prisons of the Mind

My Mirror column:

At 25, Ismail Merchant's In Custody (Muhafiz) remains a striking vision of poetry amidst pettiness, as well as a memorable tale about Urdu and Hindi.  

In 1984, Anita Desai was nominated for the Booker Prize for a novel called In Custody. It was a marvellous book about a shaggy old poet called Nur, whose last days we observe through the eyes of a college lecturer called Deven. Desai wrote her story in crystalline English, but the world she captured was that of the death throes of Urdu – as witnessed by a teacher of Hindi.

A decade later, the novel was made into a film by Ismail Merchant, starring Om Puri as the nervous, embattled Deven, and Shashi Kapoor – who had been a Merchant Ivory favourite from The Householder (1963) through Shakespearewallah, Bombay Talkie and Heat and Dust (1983) – as the teetering but still somehow charismatic Nur.

Interestingly, Desai agreed to adapt her book for the screen, collaborating with Shahrukh Husain, to whom we owe the fluid Urdu/Hindustani/Hindi in which Desai's imagined universe is translated back to life. Desai, the daughter of a German mother and a Bengali father who had been to school and college in Delhi, had set her novel between the hubbub of Old Delhi and the dusty provincialism of the fictional Mirpore, a trading town not far from Delhi. The film kept the poet's locational moniker “Nur Shahjehanabadi”, but transposed him (and the hole-in-the-wall magazine office run by Deven's friend Murad, which is angling for an interview with him) from the gullies of Shahjahanbad to Bhopal.

It was probably a practical decision, and certainly a more visually pleasing one. The circuitous route to Nur's house no longer went past “the reeking heart of the bazaar”, “evil-smelling shops” or the “lane lined with nothing but gutters”, but into a picturesque part of Bhopal. And the cinematic version of the haveli has a certain charm, despite the dysfunctional lives lived in it. The downstairs is presided over by the poet’s first wife, the perfect Sushma Seth, who spends her days supervising the fine chopping of onions and the utaaroing of nazar, while the upstairs is the preserve of the younger second wife, the complex, high-strung aspiring poetess Imtiaz Begum (Shabana Azmi).

Deven arrives with a very different vision of the life poetic than the one he finds being led by Nur. The film distils Desai's sharp-edged observations into something quite brilliant. An admirer of Nur's verse, Deven initially sees the great poet as trapped: when he seeks to escape the petty domestic squabbles of his household, his escape is limited to a circle of lowbrow sycophants. The delicacy of Nur's poetic imagination, it seems to Deven, cannot be nurtured by the coarseness that surrounds him. There is clearly an echo of recognition here – Deven, too, has aspirations to poetry, which he still writes – in Urdu. He feels defeated by having been tied to the mundane: the teaching job – in Hindi – that pays his bills but forces him to suffer the sly, mocking glances of students for whom romance tends more to dark glasses and motorbikes than literature; the harried, put-upon wife who does not understand poetry or the desire for it; the little son whose abilities seem too ordinary and unliterary to attract Deven's attention.

But Desai is not so one-sided as to allow even her favoured protagonists to get away with such easy self-delusion. The film incorporates these layers beautifully into the performances. We watch Deven's petulant, unnecessarily bossy behaviour with his wife Sarla (a superb Neena Gupta, who responds with the perfect balance between silent reproach and jaded complaints). We observe Nur’s own flaws: his indiscipline, his indulgence of the senses, his addiction to the excesses of alcohol and rich Mughlai cooking and late hours kept in the company of flatterers whose crude verse is so obviously no match for the quality of his. If coarseness there is, it is as much of Nur's making. And if the women are insecure, jealous, petty even when they have some ambition, In Custody is astute enough to show us that they cannot really be blamed: the limits of their imaginations are the limits of what their civilisation has allowed them.

The book went into much greater detail about the politics of Hindi and Urdu, with the poet often mocking Deven's employment in a Hindi department: “Forgotten your Urdu? Forgotten my verse? Perhaps it is better if you go back to your college and teach your students the stories of Prem Chand, the poems of Pant and Nirala. Safe, simple Hindi language, safe comfortable ideas of cow worship and caste and the romance of Krishna,” he derides Deven, in a line that seems bizarrely blind now. There are complaints about the Congress having placed Hindi and the Hindiwallahs atop the literary establishment, while Urdu is imprisoned in “those cemeteries they call universities”. Thirty-five, even 25 years ago, the fictional Nur and his bazaar hangers-on – largely Muslim, young, unsophisticated of taste and insecure of income – could still mock a Hindu lecturer of Hindi who had come to pay his respects to Urdu. If Nur stood for the decrepitude and self-delusion of Urdu, Hindi was represented by the innocuous wannabe poet Deven. That equation has changed, perhaps forever.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 21 Apr 2019.

Not Papered Over

My Mirror column:

New Delhi Times depicts an Indian media threatened by the growing nexus of business and politics — thirty years ago.

Shashi Kapoor and Sharmila Tagore in New Delhi Times (1986)

In Ramesh Sharma’s New Delhi Times, a Delhi-based news editor called Vikas Pande (Shashi Kapoor) is caught in a communal riot in his hometown of Ghazipur. Being driven to safety in a police jeep, he jumps out to rescue a photojournalist friend being accosted on the street. Back in the quiet of the Circuit House room, the photojournalist Anwar (played by theatre director MK Raina) tells Vikas that he’d come to shoot a photoessay on opium smuggling, but on hearing of a riot, took his camera and jumped into the fray: “Mazaa aa gaya!”

“Tumhe riot mein mazaa aata hai?” Vikas chastises him. “Amaa miyaan,” drawls Anwar, “You know what I’m saying! You get a good story, I get some good photographs: what else?” Vikas looks disturbed. He says: “You know, Anwar, sometimes I feel a strange fear – that we professional journalists simply bypass the real tragedy of whatever we’re covering. We don’t even feel it.” Anwar looks up gravely, his veneer of easy cynicism gone. “We used to feel it,” he says. “When it happened once in a while, we felt it very deeply. But now, now that it is an everyday spectacle, we feel nothing at all.”

New Delhi Times (1986) was an early portrait of the Indian media: how the growing nexus between business and politics threatened its independence. Although it won Sharma the Indira Gandhi award for the Best First Film, and Shashi Kapoor his only National Award for Best Actor, it was then seen as political hot stuff, and Doordarshan chickened out of screening it at the last minute. So much water has flown under the bridge since that Sharma’s chilling expose now doesn’t make us bat an eyelid. As Anwar puts it: “Now that it is an everyday spectacle, we feel nothing at all.”

There are other ways in which the film hasn’t aged well: Louis Banks’ background score is incongruous, and the pace often laboured. Several sequences – a hotel striptease (the plump dancer is a nicely realistic ‘80s touch), or black and white freeze frames interrupting a riot – might now seem so overused as to make your eyes glaze over.

But the strength of New Delhi Times, based on a script by Gulzar, is its web of believable characters, each one a type that somehow steers clear of seeming a caricature. And while real-life versions of these exist even today, the difference thirty years make is apparent. The urbane English-speaking editor in 1986 smokes a pipe constantly, but remembers being taught by a Maulvi saab and retains close links to his well-off UP origins. His nationalist father (AK Hangal) is still a respected figure in Ghazipur, even if his clear-eyed view of local politics makes him cognizant that their honouring him is a way of coopting him. Vikas’s genteel lawyer wife Nisha (Sharmila Tagore) fights dowry death cases but also – an Indian Mrs Dalloway – arranges the flowers herself. Jagannath Poddar, the newspaper owner (Manohar Singh) is happy to entertain a rising politician at home, but feels no need to kowtow to him in the paper.

Vikas Pande also seems from another age because of his fearlessness-—which today might be called naivety. Even after being roughed up by unidentified men, threatened by anonymous callers and having his house cat gorily killed, Pande can tell his employers that management has no right to interfere in editorial decisions. Where does this strength come from? From his belief that another paper will gladly print his piece, and his skills are valued enough for him to keep his job.

The film is clear that a fearless journalist like Vikas Pande can only thrive while there are still men like Jagannath Poddar, who not only has the financial clout to run a paper, but also the moral fibre to not treat the media as equivalent to other forms of moneymaking.

“Baaki sab vyopaar hai, vyopaar ki tarah chalta rahta hai. Is akhbaar ko main dharam maankar chalaata hoon. (The rest is business, it runs like businesses do. This newspaper I treat as my religion.)”

But generational change is afoot: Poddar’s son Jugal (Kulbhushan Kharbanda) wants Vikas’s hot-button allegations off the front page, and tries to tempt him off the paper with a new magazine to edit. And while the film does not focus on it, in the Hindi heartland, the rot has long set in: “If we publish the headlines as we see them,” the local Ghazipur editor laughs wryly, “our paper supplies may suddenly dwindle, or our press shut down.”

The Ghazipur editor may not be out and about in a curfew, but Vikas Pande will be escorted into town in a police jeep – not just because of who he is, but who his father is. While not making that the centre of its politics, New Delhi Times seems inherently aware of how networks of privilege, old and new, cocoon its club-going, squash-playing protagonists. It is the poor chowkidar, the bike-riding young reporter, the Scheduled Caste MLA who die unsung deaths. The honest bourgeois hero suffers profound disillusionment, but no palpable losses.

But Sharma’s film also points the way to our present. At one tense moment, Vikas meets his immediate boss, who laughs off any real threat to an eminent journalist like him. Vikas looks unconvinced. “Anything can happen now. These people can do anything.” he says. That may or may not have been true in 1986, but it does seem true now.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 16 Apr 2017

Cover to Cover

A 'Perspectives' piece for The Caravan, about books in Hindi cinema. 

"People in Hindi movies don’t read many books. When you do see a character with a book, it’s often just another accessory: as meaningless as the brand of sunglasses they’re wearing, or the kind of sofa in their living room. Sometimes the book in a person’s hand seems incongruous—think of Nushrat Bharucha’s Chiku, the spoilt, screechy caricature of an upper-class young woman in Pyaar Ka Punchnama 2, holding a copy of Marjane Satrapi’s plucky graphic novel Persepolis. Sometimes, though, book-spotting can be more fun, when the choice of title is meant to function as shorthand for a character’s personality, or as a sideways comment on a situation.

In the 1965 hit Jab Jab Phool Khile, for instance, when we meet the protagonist Raja, a poor Kashmiri boatman played by Shashi Kapoor, he proudly displays a shelf of classics in his houseboat to a guest, Rita, played by Nanda: “Ismein Tagore hai, Shakispeer … aur Munshi Premchand hai. Bahut accha log hai ismein, memsaab!” But the memsahib merely rolls her eyes. A little later, we see Rita—her high-heeled feet on a divan and a string of pearls around her neck—absorbed in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, a 1950s American novel about a man’s sexual obsession with a young girl. The besotted boatman, slate in hand, cajoles her into giving him Hindi lessons, and the two later begin an unlikely romance. But once you’ve seen that book in Rita’s hands, you know that this modern woman will soon find herself struggling to deal with this traditional Indian man.

A more recent instance of book-as-comment occurs in Imtiaz Ali’s Tamasha, when Tara (Deepika Padukone) picks up a half-read copy of Joseph Heller’s classic Catch-22 from the floor where Ved (Ranbir Kapoor) left it the previous night. Strangers in Corsica, they have embarked on a fling on conditions of impermanence and anonymity. Her quick, knowing smile on reading the book’s title suggests an internal dialogue, an unspoken note to herself on their predicament. She checks the flyleaf for a name. (If there had been one, their agreement would have fallen through—as would have half the film’s plot.) But all she finds is a stamp from Social, a fashionable “urban hangout” with branches in Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru. Years later, that remembered stamp becomes Tara’s clue to finding Ved.

It is a sign of the times that the book now functions merely as a form of product placement—and not for its publishers, but for a café and bar chain. But perhaps the real thing to note about the book in Tamasha is how little it matters. In a film that’s all about celebrating the power of stories, the printed word is barely a blip. It is the oral tradition of Urdu storytelling, dastangoi, as practised by Piyush Mishra’s character, that leaves an impact on our hero. And even that crabby old man tells his stories for money.

Books were not always so inconsequential in Hindi films..."

Read the whole essay on the Caravan site.

Shashi Kapoor, the perfect partner

My Mirror column today: 

Whether paired with Amitabh Bachchan, Shabana Azmi or his wife Jennifer onscreen, the understandably secure Shashi Kapoor always made for a compelling foil in the movies.

I think he's completely deserving of it, but Shashi Kapoor might seem an unusual choice for the Dadasaheb Phalke award. Unlike his larger-than-life father, Prithviraj, whose grand passion for theatre and cinema started the Kapoor clan off on their path to show business, and unlike his two elder brothers Raj and Shammi, both of whom - though not comparable - carved out distinct, individual niches for themselves in an unforgiving film industry, Shashi has always been the perfect foil. Never an actor who sought to have the spotlight turned solely on him, he has always been someone who gave himself wholly and freely in partnerships. And rarely, in the world as in cinema, is that quality given the applause it deserves. 

One of his earliest romantic pairings, with the lovely late actress Nanda, lasted through the whole decade of the 60s, with seven films, starting with Char Diwari (1961) and ending with Rootha Na Karo (1970). The most successful of these, of course, was Jab Jab Phool Khilein (1965), in which he went from being a carefree Kashmiri boatman singing 'Pardesiyon se na ankhiyan milana' to being the wealthy Nanda's uncomfortably suited-booted husband, singing 'Yahan main ajnabi hoon' at the sort of piano-centred party that Hindi cinema so often used to depict the terrible un-Indian debaucheries of the rich. In an interview in the 90s, Shashi said Nanda was his favourite heroine. Nanda, who was by far the bigger star when they started acting together, returned the compliment. The figure of the ghuta-hua poorer man to the little rich girl of 60s cinema was one Shashi repeated the following year, in Waqt, where he played Sharmila Tagore's educated-but-poor lover who must work as a driver to support his mother. 

A very different sort of partnership, with Amitabh Bachchan is, of course, legendary. The two did so many films together that Jaya Bhaduri once apparently referred to Shashi as her "soutan", because he spent more time with her husband than she did. The Amitabh-Shashi on-screen relationship ran the gamut, from estranged brothers (most famously in the 1975 classic Deewar, but also in other films like 1979's Suhaag), to servant and master (Namak Halal, 1982), blue collar worker and white collar boss (Kala Patthar, 1979), sometimes even sort-of-rivals for the love of a woman (Kabhie Kabhie). Much as I loved watching Shashi's sunny, ethical engineer play off the brooding Amitabh in the fictionalised prevention of a real-life mining tragedy that was Kala Patthar, my favourite of their performances together is probably the ridiculously enjoyable Do Aur Do Paanch, in which they play rival thugs who've taken jobs at a school, pretending to be music teacher and sports teacher respectively, in order to kidnap a little boy. 

Amitabh being the spotlight-grabber that he is, it took a persona as secure as Shashi's to remain completely unthreatened. Which he did, despite the conspiracy theories floated in film magazines of the time, about Shashi's role having been cut down to size in Deewaar. In a short but rather remarkable 1975 interview to Bikram Vohra in Filmfare, Shashi categorically refused to add any fuel to that fire: "[I]t's ridiculous to say that Amitabh's role [in Deewaar] was engineered to show me up. After all, before I took the role I knew I was playing the second lead. So the idea of a conspiracy against Shashi Kapoor is Bullsh*t. And in any case why do we have this hang-up in our country? About always coming out as heroes. In the West great names like Olivier, Burton, Harrison frequently played second roles. There's nothing demeaning about that." 

Another of Shashi's most interesting - if somewhat unlikely - romantic pairings was with Shabana Azmi. The films they did together that remain embedded in my mind are both literary adaptations. They played husband and wife in the memorable Junoon (1978), Shyam Benegal's adaptation of Ruskin Bond's A Flight of Pigeons, and many years later, in the 1993 In Custody (Muhafiz), the Merchant-Ivory adaptation of Anita Desai's novel by the same name. Shabana plays the neglected, petulant wife in both films, but Shashi's roles could not be more stunningly different: a fiery young 1857 mutineer called Javed, and an aged, overweight poet whose world is crumbling. As an aside: it's funny to think of the fact of these actors as people who've known each other for ever - that same Bikram Vohra interview from 1975 has Shashi tossing off a remark about how he told Shabana that she's a great actress but not very goodlooking (as opposed to Parveen Babi, to whom he apparently said the opposite). 

But perhaps Shashi's oddest and most interesting film pairings were with his wife Jennifer Kendall. The first one I recall is also in Junoon, where as the troubled Javed, Shashi becomes obsessed with the teenaged Ruth (an exquisitely young Nafisa Ali) and his potentially dangerous attentions are only kept at bay by Jennifer, playing Ruth's mother Miriam. The second is in the 1970 Merchant Ivory production Bombay Talkie, where he played a Bombay film star who has an affair with the visiting American novelist Lucia Lane (Jennifer). These were not performances that let on that the two actors were, in fact, husband and wife. 

I don't know very much about their real-life relationship, but the same 1975 interview paints a picture of the Jennifer-Shashi household as one where Shashi was forced to eat organic breakfasts at 7.30 am, and occasionally, at least, have vegetarian stints. This seemed unbelievable to the Filmfare journalist in 1975. But it fits perfectly with Sanjana Kapoor's memory of growing up in a house where three things were banned: aerated cold drinks, comics and film magazines. Clearly, Shashi's lifelong ability to keep the Hindi film world he was born into at a safe, sane, distance owed something to Jennifer. But that would need another column.