A lifeline, but also a harbinger of doom

The third column in my series on trains in Indian cinema, for Mirror/TOI Plus:

In the cinema of Bimal Roy, the train is often a site of unfolding tragedy

Fiction necessarily derives its motifs from reality. There’s a reason why the road movie is a thing in Hollywood, while it barely existed in India until quite recently. Trains, on the other hand, have been integral to our cinema as sites of romance, drama and - more often than you might expect – sorrow.

When Sanjay of 27 Down launched himself on an endless train ride to combat his melancholia, he was following in the footsteps of Indian cinema's original tragic romantic hero, Devdas. The original Bengali novel, published by Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay in 1917, has been adapted for the screen many times. The classic, in my opinion, remains the 1955 Bimal Roy version, starring Dilip Kumar and Suchitra Sen as Devdas and Paro: Childhood friends whose romantic union as adults is prevented by their caste-minded, convention-bound families -- and by their own stubborn, childish miscommunication. Paro anchors herself in the duties of her arranged marriage, while Devdas' anchorlessness is depicted in his constant wandering. We see him sometimes dramatically departing for Calcutta in a horse-drawn carriage, then almost immediately returning. Later, having turned alcoholic, he wanders the village shooting birds with an air gun. Bimal Roy makes elegant cinematic use of several modes of transport: The unending bullock-cart ride at night, or the beautifully conjoined shots where Paro is urged to ascend into her wedding palanquin just as Devdas is being urged to descend from his – at the house of the tawaif, Chandramukhi. But it is the train sequence that is iconic, with our still-youthful but sunken-eyed hero lolling about in his compartment as the train transports him across the country.

Trains possibly work best for Devdas' character because they let him move while having to expend no energy. And he never seems to actually get off the train, though we see the names of stations that mark the country's biggest cities, other than Calcutta, where he started: Delhi, Madras, Bombay, Lahore. (It's interesting that Roy puts Lahore in there, because it marks the setting of his film as before Independence and Partition. It's even more interesting when one watches the 1935 PC Baruah version of Devdas and finds that the train sequence there has a similarly aimless Devdas traversing a slightly different geography: Delhi, Agra, Lucknow, Banaras.)

The spoilt son of a rich zamindar, Devdas naturally travels first class, accompanied by a trusty feudal retainer. Poor old Dharamdas retires to some less comfortable class of compartment by night, leaving Devdas his privacy – but also leaving him vulnerable to being lured back to drink by his thoughtless friend, Chuni Babu. In one of Roy's much-applauded visual juxtapositions, the train's engine is stoked by a shovelful of coal just as Devdas' cycle of self-pity receives fresh alcoholic fuel.

The train appears in many of Bimal Roy's other films. In Do Bigha Zamin (1953), the railway is the link between the city and the village, as it must be. But it is also the site of dramatic meetings and equally dramatic separations. When Shambhu sets out for Calcutta to try and earn money, he discovers his little son has secretly stowed himself away on the train. Later, when Parvati sets out on another train to search for Shambhu, she is separated from her travelling companion Ramu – to tragic effect. Madhumati (1958), which begins with a car journey disrupted by a landslide, ends with a train accident. There are a few tense moments before we see that it is to be the site of a happy reunion.

It is in Naukri (1955) that Roy puts the tragic potential of trains to full use. The film's job-seeking hero Ratan (played by Kishore Kumar, before he was relegated to purely comic roles) tries to keep his spirits up - and there is at least one bit of silly humour on a train ride, where he gets on without knowing the name of the firm that has offered him a job.

But in the city, Ratan finds himself living with a bunch of similarly jobless young men, placed in a section of a lodge called 'Bekar Block'. It is in this dispirited world that we first see the train as a harbinger of doom. Three suicides are attempted in the film, all of them by unemployed young men throwing themselves on the railway tracks. In Naukri, two out of these three young men are saved.

Still, I couldn't help but think of an odd little scene in Do Bigha Zamin, where Shambhu is listening to two men on the train pontificate about how we need to return to India's villages to save our people. “Each and every one will die!” comes a loud voice from behind them. It turns out to be a man selling a pesticide to kill bed bugs. But there's something rather dark about the scene's humour, given how Do Bigha Zamin turns out. Even as they take you closer to something, trains in Bimal Roy's cinema always foretell possible tragedy.

Published in Mirror (2 May 2021) & in TOI Plus (1 May 2021)

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.

Not Papered Over

40 years old today, Kora Kagaz remains a powerful portrait of cracks in a marriage.

Sometime last week I stumbled upon Kora Kagaz playing on TV. So unusual did the film feel - powerfully emotional yet largely shorn of melodrama; a serious subject dealt with seriously, yet far from being a studied 'art' film - that I watched straight through till the end. It turns out that Kora Kagaz released on 4 May, 1974 - exactly 40 years ago today. In an industry that still invariably prefers its films to end at the mandap, it remains a rare portrait of the attrition of a marriage.

Some truly great films have been made about troubled marriages: John Cassavettes' astonishing, brutal masterpiece A Woman Under the Influence released the same year as KK, Ingmar Bergman's superb Scenes from a Marriage a year before that, in 1973. More recently, Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams brought such searing honesty to their marital breakdown that Blue Valentine (2010) was painfully hard to watch.

In contrast, Kora Kagaz was pitched at a mainstream Indian audience, for whom separation and divorce was taboo. In some ways, that balancing act is what makes it interesting. It is a grown-up film, one which doesn't shy away from depicting sharp words or ego clashes, or the passive-aggressive behaviour of one partner that keeps resentment simmering in the other, waiting to boil over in a terrible tragic denouement. And yet it was No 22 at the 1974 box office and won a National Award for "Feature film with mass appeal, wholesome entertainment and aesthetic value". Kalyanji-Anandji got a Filmfare Award for its music, and Jaya Bhaduri's understated, affecting performance won her the second of three Filmfare Best Actress awards.

Like Abhimaan (1973), also starring Bhaduri in a narrative about marital breakdown, the film's central conflict stems from the husband's prickly sense of self-respect, or - depending on how you look at it - his profound insecurity, aided by a childish uncommunicativeness. KK was a remake of the iconic Bengali film Saat Pake Bandha (1963), itself adapted from Ashutosh Mukhopadhyay's novel. (Mukhopadhyay's work was popular with Bengali directors, and three got remade in Hindi: Charachar as Safar, Deep Jwele Jaye as Khamoshi and Ami Se O Sakha as Bemisaal) As Archana, Bhaduri had a tough act to follow: Suchitra Sen's impeccable depiction of the heroine's transition from disbelief to anger to hurt - and hurtfulness won her Best Actress at the Moscow Film Festival. Unlike the irreducibly glamorous Sen, however, Bhaduri played the role in a lower key, replacing Sen's hint of arrogance with a quieter, stubborn air of waiting it out.

Of course, Kora Kagaz, like SPB before it, makes it quite clear that it is the woman for whom a marital breakdown feels life-altering. So though Archana's separation from Sukhendu/Sukesh is followed by a First Class First MA and a teaching job, her heart is not in it: she would much rather be having her own children than teaching those of others. An older colleague might congratulate Sukhendu/Sukesh on having a high-achieving student for a wife, but the film makes clear she must be a wife first.

Within this social world, it is Archana who is expected to make adjustments, she who's seen as having failed to save her marriage. Genuinely concerned though she seems, Pishi/Phuphi, the widowed old aunt who urges Archana to be the calm-headed one if her husband isn't, can sound to our ears like a sexist busybody. For she recognises the errors of her nephew's ways, but barring once, she does not chide him - instead, she appeals to his wife's better sense. Because, of course, men don't have any.

At one level, you could say KK doesn't depart from the female character types of countless Hindi films. In this schema, Archana would be the bade baap ki good-looking beti used to having her way, her mother the shrewish wife dominating the helpless, good-hearted husband, and Phuphi the sacrificing mother figure who suffers in silence. But KK doesn't quite fit that bill, because its characters aren't ever that black and white: the young bahu is really quite adjusting, the mother who keeps putting her son-in-law down with references to his salary doesn't actually wish him ill, and Phuphi does occasionally speak up and take decisions.

The changes from the Bengali to the Hindi version are telling. KK does away with the Rajasthan-Banaras honeymoon, so appropriately integral to the Bengali marital romance. The Hindi version also contains more efforts at reconciliation: Archana rushes to the station to find Phuphi first, and only then confronts Sukesh; Sukesh tries to visit Archana but is turned away by her brother. And unlike in SPB, where a "mutual separation" is first mentioned by Archana (and greeted with shock by Sukhendu), in KK it is Archana's brother who initiates the process.

On the other hand, KK does not have Sukhendu's colleague blame Archana for "wasting a life", as SPB did. But perhaps that is only because the Hindi version does not allow for any 'wasted' lives. Where SPB ended with Archana vowing herself to a life of solitude, Kora Kagaz lets the estranged couple re-unite at that most romantic of cinematic locations: the railway waiting room. Before you judge that re-written ending as a cop-out, let me say this: would you really rather have your heroine spend a solitary lifetime 'atoning' for her 'bhool', or have a happy ending in which the man takes his fair share of the blame before reaching out to re-build a relationship? Sometimes, just sometimes, Hindi cinema can surprise you.

Published as my Mumbai Mirror column yesterday.

Post Facto - Beauty is the beast

My Sunday Guardian column for March 1st:

Suchitra Sen

In a sketch that's part of the Tadpole Repertory's superb play Taramandal, a nervous young woman arrives at the office of a Bollywood agent. She nods when asked if she wants to be a star. But she doesn't speak Hindi — and for the most part of her time on stage, doesn't speak at all. The more he talks, the more terror-stricken she looks. Eventually he suggests, not unkindly, that she sign up as a Junior Artist, commonly known as an extra. "It'll be work. And with your looks, you'll get slotted as A-Class."

The aspiring star is played by a strikingly attractive actor, and to hear that fact referenced in the dialogue — "aapki looks" — seems appropriate, even necessary. It both acknowledges her beauty and dismisses it as not being enough. But is it really not enough, one wonders? And suddenly that idea — that beauty isn't all it takes to become a star — begins to seem a little bit like the wishful thinking oftheatre-wallahs. Because in fact, the film industry seems to declaim from rooftops that beauty is all. Talent, if at all it counts, is secondary.

The young Suchitra Sen — then plain Krishna Dasgupta — apparently once sat on a school bench and announced that she would be remembered long after her death. An ordinary middle class girl who was one of nine siblings, and an average student bereft of any artistic talent, all Sen had was her looks. But apparently, that was enough. "She was conscious of her great beauty... and behaved as if she... deserved every bit of the natural selection," wrote Susmita Dasgupta in a thoughtful Facebook note. At the time, a wealthy groom was the biggest prize a middle class girl could expect for her beauty. Krishna got that, too. But her stardom, says Dasgupta, came about because she believed she was meant for bigger things. Beauty was her claim upon the universe. Hindi film star Juhi Chawla recently described entering the Femina Miss India contest when in college. "I knew I was good," she said, but "there were prettier girls in my class and that always kept me grounded."

Women are constantly being rated on grounds of beauty — and rating ourselves, too. The sad thing is that it isn't just those who aspire to be models or actors, professions that overtly reward bodily perfection, who buy into this hierarchy. Seemingly, it's everyone. And that ingrained sense of superiority or inferiority, based on how you think other people think you look, can coexist with an otherwise well-formed intelligence. I was distressed to hear recently of a bright, high-achieving woman being thrilled that a college reunion still rated her among the hottest girls in her batch.

Men are rated on other things: intelligence, talent, wealth, power. Looks, not so much. That criterion, seemingly, they reserve for us. Off the top of my head, I can think of a boy in high school whose unsolicited rating of three female friends as "cute", "pretty" and "beautiful" I have never forgotten. Another male friend introduced someone a decade after college as "one of the hot girls in college". What's worse is the enshrining of this stuff as popular culture — in university fests, college mags and so on. In St. Stephen's College, premier educational institution of the land, it was long considered a "fun" thing for male students to regularly produce "chick charts" — a list of the top 10 "chicks" in college, based on their physical attributes. In 1984, soon after the pogrom against the Sikh community, they produced a "Sardine" chart — the top 10 female Sikh students rated on their looks. Filmmaker Saba Dewan, then a student there, wrote in 2012 of the uproar that followed, the all-out gender wars in which the authorities sided with the male "pranksters" against women students protesting objectification, who were termed troublemakers. St. Stephen's College in the late 1990s, when I went there, no longer had "chick charts", or at least not public ones. But very similar issues existed, and came to a head around "Miss and Mr Harmony". Ostensibly gender-neutral, it was, in practice, a contest of wit for boys, but looks for girls. The gender wars of my time ended with the entry of women into residence at St. Stephen's, for the first time in its history.

Re-watching Imtiaz Ali's Rockstar the other day, I had a moment of shock. Ali — who went to Hindu College himself — had decided that the best way to introduce his Stephanian heroine to us was to show her topping the chick chart. And the only woman we see respond to it says merely, "Dekhna kya hai? Jab tak yeh St. Stephen's mein hai, yeh hi hogi na No. 1". There it was — a thing so many women had fought so hard to get rid of, shorn of all its history, reinstated as instigator of the beauty myth.

A day after that, a friend said to me she identified with much of the rule-breaking fun that Ali's heroines had, but his actresses were too pretty. "They do what girls want, but they look like what boys want." Ah, no surprise there.