60 years of RK Narayan’s The Guide: A tale ahead of its time

My piece for the Hindustan Times:

Sixty years ago, RK Narayan published his remarkable novel, The Guide. The celebrated screen version is known for its unconventional heroine, but she is nowhere as radical as the book’s Rosie; the hero too is more Dev Anand than he is Raju Guide

In her 2014 book-length interview with Waheeda Rehman, the journalist Nasreen Munni Kabir asked the actress which of her characters was closest to her real self. “I think I am most like Rosie,” said Rehman. As every Hindi film fan probably knows, Rehman was referring to the remarkable role she played in the 1965 classic Guide. By the standards of popular Hindi cinema, Rosie was triply unusual: a woman who walks out of an unhappy marriage, begins a romantic relationship with a man who isn’t her husband, and simultaneously embarks on a successful career as a dancer. She would be an unusual Hindi film heroine even today.

But the Rosie who made it to the Hindi film screen was nowhere near as radical as the original Rosie – the Rosie created by RK Narayan, in his novel The Guide, published 60 years ago in 1958.

Narayan was already an established author when he wrote The Guide. It was his thirteenth book and eighth novel. Like all Narayan’s novels, beginning with the delightful Swami and Friends in 1935, it unfolded in Malgudi, the sleepy South Indian town that Narayan had dreamt up as a setting for his fiction. The book’s protagonist, Raju, grows up on the town’s periphery, the son of a small shopkeeper who makes a living selling tobacco, paan and peppermints to peasants and bullock-cart drivers. Then the railway station is built opposite, and Raju’s father gets a shop there. Young Raju stops going to school to run the station shop.

“I began to be called Railway Raju. Perfect strangers, having heard of my name, began to ask for me when their train arrived,” writes Narayan. This is neither an evil man, nor a particularly good one, only a man who accepts the opportunities that come to him. People ask him questions, and he can never bring himself to say, “I don’t know.” His flaws are simply the flip side of his talents. From being the go-to man at the station, it takes but a step to become a guide to the sights – and as Narayan gently suggests, just one more to become a guide to the spirit.

Raju’s childhood and youth don’t appear in the film. Part of the reason lay in popular cinema’s need to be larger than life. All the small town specificity of Malgudi was erased. The station with its “noon train from Madras and the evening one from Trichy”, the crumbling caves with their unstudied rock paintings, the nearby Mempi Hills topped by a glass-fronted bungalow from which wild game could be observed (a location in which much of the book’s romance unfolds) – these were replaced by a tableaux of pan-Indian locations from Udaipur to Elephanta.

But it wasn’t only the locations, the scale and the general tenor that shifted from page to screen. It was the characters themselves. And yet, in his 2007 autobiography, when Anand describes first reading The Guide, he thought Raju so “extraordinary” that he immediately decided this was the story he wanted for his international collaboration.

So what happened? What was so special about Rosie and Raju as Narayan imagined them, and why did they have to change so much on screen? Reading the book, I had an epiphany: Raju’s life encompasses the four normative stages of Hindu life, varnashrama dharma – but in adulterated form. For Raju, brahmacharya, the student stage, unfolds not in school but on the street. He embarks on grihastha, the householder stage, with another man’s wife. His ‘vanaprastha’, the departure to the forest, is forced upon him by prison – and then, by a series of misunderstandings, he finds himself propelled towards moksha, salvation. It is a remarkable structure, of a piece with Narayan’s view of the world: thoughtful, even philosophical, but underpinned by a sense of the human comedy.

Narayan’s character had chutzpah, but he had his awkward moments. But the film was a star vehicle for Dev Anand, and its hero had to be more Dev Anand than Raju. So Anand’s Raju Guide has no self-doubt. He is never worried about the hairiness of his chest. He never wonders if he could be bold enough to woo Rosie. It is in relation to Rosie that he is most transformed – because Rosie herself has changed.

Narayan’s Rosie is no sophisticate, but her ambition is never in doubt. Nor is the carnality of Raju’s interest in her, or her reciprocation of it. The novel has none of the high-mindedness that Hindi cinema forced upon its heroes and heroines, so Raju can tell us the truth: he is attracted to Rosie; his support of her dance begins because it is the clue to her affections.

“I told her at the first opportunity what a great dancer she was and how she fostered our cultural traditions, and it pleased her... Anyone likes to hear flattering sentiments, and more than others, I suppose, dancers.” And later, “Her art and her husband could not find a place in her thoughts at the same time; one drove the other out.”

The book’s Rosie is full of plans; Raju need only support them. But Vijay Anand’s film, keenly aware of his conservative audience, turns his Rosie into a bundle of nerves who tries three times to commit suicide, only to be saved each time by Raju, and berated: “Tumhari haalat aaj yeh isliye hai ki tumne apni haalat se baghaavat karna nahi seekha.”

Yet in order for Waheeda’s Rosie to leave her husband without being judged, the boring archaeologist of Narayan’s book has to become unmitigatedly evil. So the film’s Marco is callous as well as impotent, while also mysteriously managing to frequent sex workers. And even after she leaves Marco, Waheeda is shown studiously maintaining a separate bedroom from Raju. Romance was allowed, but sex could not be suggested until marriage. And despite exhorting women to envisage a life without marriage (“Aadmi ghar nahi basaata toh kya ghar basaane ka koi aur tareeka nahi?” Raju once yells at Rosie), the cinematic Rosie’s first impulse when asked to marry Raju is to offer to give up her growing career.

The other sociological element that makes both book and film fascinating is that Rosie is a devadasi by birth, and her reclaiming of dance in a new secular public form formed a fictional counterpart to the actual national reclaiming of Bharatnatyam. Here, too, the film has Marco insult dance, while Raju delivers a lecture on how artists are no longer bhaands.

At one level, the film externalises what is immanent in the book into explicitly pro-woman and anti-caste messaging. But unlike in the book, its agent has to be Raju. Sixty years after she was created, perhaps it is time for Narayan’s original Rosie to rise from the ashes.

Published in Hindustan Times, 28 Oct 2018.

Note: A previous piece on how The Guide came to be put on screen, and why RK Narayan was not happy.

A brief guide to Guide

My Mirror column:

60 years ago, RK Narayan wrote a novel that became a Hindi film classic. But he was not happy. Ahead of his 112th birth anniversary, let’s ask why that might have been.

Most readers of this column have probably seen the 1965 Guide: Dev Anand plays a dapper tour guide who falls for an unhappily married Waheeda Rehman. But this Hindi film classic was based on an even earlier literary classic: RK Narayan’s 1958 novel The Guide.

The film retains most elements of Narayan’s narrative, and yet it is almost unrecognisable. For instance, the Waheeda we first meet in the film is a sad lady in a big car; all we know is that she’s the hero’s love interest. In the book, Rosie has more scope for surprise: because we learn about her slowly, she comes into her own in remarkable ways.

Reading The Guide, one can see why Dev Anand, who set things in motion by reading the book in London, was entranced. Railway Raju, as his character is called in the book, is a disarming layabout who runs a shop at Malgudi Station, but soon finds himself in demand as a tour guide. He falls for Rosie and helps launch her as a dancer before landing in jail, and eventually being anointed a saint.

The novel is already a fifth of the way through when Raju says: “There was a girl who had come all the way from Madras and who asked the moment she set foot in Malgudi, ‘Can you show me a cobra — a king cobra it must be —which can dance to the music of a flute?’” Within four pages, the resourceful Raju fulfils this whimsical farmaaish, and the two are face to face with the snake. “The whole thing repelled me, but it seemed to fascinate the girl...” writes Narayan. “She stretched out her arm slightly and swayed it in imitation of the movement; she swayed her whole body to the rhythm — for just a second, but that was sufficient to tell me what she was, the greatest dancer of the century.”


In Vijay Anand’s Guide, this half-a-page encounter between the cobra and Rosie (for that, of course, is who she is) became the sequence described on YouTube as “Serpent dance by Waheedaji”. Like the men in the scene, two generations of Hindi film viewers have gaped admiringly as Waheeda Rehman turns from primly elegant memsahib into a woman seemingly possessed by the sapera’s flute. Things delicately suggested in the novel — Rosie’s dancing talent, her repressed passion, the snake as sexual symbol — become full-blown in the film. The heroine’s suppressed erotic energy is channelled into the popularly understood naagin theme.

Otherwise, too, the sequence is emblematic of how the English novel was altered to make the popular Hindi film. What in Narayan’s tragicomic description was a forlorn place — bare-bodied children gaping at the arriving car, the poor snake charmer wearing nothing but a turban and “a pair of drawers” — gets amped up into Hindi cinema's familiar ‘tribal’ setting: thatched huts around a convenient circular clearing, with a ghaghra-choli-clad dancer present so that the heroine can join in.



An English version was also made, with the famous novelist Pearl S. Buck collaborating on the script with director Tad Danielewski, and the Indian cast speaking in English. (Buck apparently helped Rehman with her English.) RK Narayan described his brush with cinema in an essay called 'Misguided Guide'. The tone is characteristically mild, but the sarcasm is palpable. Danielewski and his crew requested the writer to show them the locations that had inspired his book. After the tour, however, Narayan was informed that the film was now to be shot a thousand miles away, in Udaipur and Jaipur. He tried to suggest that Malgudi, the imaginary South Indian small town in which he had set all his novels, was nothing like those places. His brother RK Laxman, the cartoonist, tried to suggest that real, filmable monuments on screen would undercut Raju’s character, since his talent was conjuring up historical grandeur out of nothing.



But the filmmakers would have none of this. “We are out to expand the notion of Malgudi,” they told a nonplussed Narayan. “Malgudi will be where we place it, in Kashmir, Rajasthan, Bombay, Delhi, even Ceylon.” In the Hindi film, this national tableaux idea gets underlined when Dev Anand's Raju takes groups across Rajasthan, speaking Punjabi to the Punjabis, Gujarati to the Gujaratis — and of course, farraatedaar English to the British.



The English film version is hard to find. Though screened at Cannes in 2007, I've never seen it, nor met anyone who has. But a contemporary review by New York Times critic Bosley Crowther suggests why it sank in America. “The script is sluggish and uncertain, and Mr. Anand, who seems throughout to be modeling his style of acting on one of the more romantic Hollywood stars, bouncing about in boyish fashion and wearing his hat on the back of his pompadoured hair, is stumped by the staggering requirement of acting the weird, ironic twist,” wrote Crowther. “He leaves us feeling that we, as well as the people of this poverty-stricken area, have been hoaxed.” The externalised quality of Hindi film emotion clearly did not translate for an American audience.



What is remarkable, though, is that the American critic found the film authentic precisely for the “Indian scenes” that Narayan had so cringed at: “a succession of colorful views of sightseeing spots, busy cities, temples, dusty landscapes and crowds”. As Railway Raju says: “One thing I learnt in my career as a tourist guide was that no two persons were interested in the same thing.” Our satisfaction depends, I suppose, on what we most wish to see.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 7 Oct 2018.

Disenchanted Nights

1957’s second-highest Hindi grosser is much watched but little understood. Pyaasa may have been filled with poets and poetry, but it’s true, bitter subject was money.

Pyaasa started life as a story idea called ‘Kashmakash’ (‘Dilemma’), which Guru Dutt first put to paper in 1947 or ’48, when he was just 22. It was nine years later, once he had established a name with films like Baazi and Mr & Mrs 55, that Dutt returned to his tale of a struggling poet. By then he had his team in place: writer Abrar Alvi (clearly responsible for a great deal of Pyaasa’s script, although he is credited only for dialogue), lyricist Sahir Ludhianvi, and cinematographer VK Murthy — all of whom reached deep into themselves to transform Dutt’s germ of an idea into one of Indian cinema’s abiding gems.

Casting our eyes back sixty years, it seems remarkable that this melancholy piece of filmmaking, with a hero afflicted not just by romantic or familial tragedy but by a near-total disenchantment with the world, could become the second-highest Hindi grosser at the box office. We clearly had a greater appetite for tragedy then – and greater empathy for a hero who dreamt of escaping the material condition.

The film opens with the young poet Vijay (Guru Dutt) lying serenely in a garden, composing beautiful verse as he looks at the flowers and bees around him. Suddenly he rises anxiously, and we see him dwarfed by the dark shadows of trees. In the next scene, he must rescue his folder of nazms from a smalltime magazine office: his responses to the poverty and exploitation around him have found their way into the dustbin. “Aapki bakwaas koi shaayari hai? Pad gaye bhookh aur berozgaari ke peechhe latth leke! (Is this rubbish of yours poetry? You’ve taken a stick and gone after hunger and unemployment!),” mocks the smarmy old sherwani-clad editor, before waxing lyrical on what ‘proper’ poetry should be: “Gul-o-bulbul pe sh’er kahiye, jaam-o-suraahi pe sh’er kahiye... (Write a couplet on the flower and the nightingale, write one on the goblet and the wine flask...)”

Vijay scorns this unctuous injunction and walks out with his poems. But preserving this independence of mind, the film suggests, is not easy – especially if the body needs to be preserved first. A penniless Vijay tries his hand at manual labour, placing a dhoti-clad gentleman’s purchases in his car and earning a coin for his services. But when he presents the coin as payment for a meal, it turns out to be fake. Later, hopeful of having his poems published, he accepts ajob as an assistant in a publishing house, which sometimes requires him to serve in the home of the boss, Mr Ghosh (Rehman). It is worth noting here that Dutt and Alvi display an unreconstructed middle class horror at the idea of the educated young man performing menial labour – a horror amplified in women’s eyes, whether the ex-lover watching Vijay serve drinks, or Vijay’s mother imagining him having to take care of himself.

Poetry may lie at the centre of the plot, but Pyaasa’s driving theme is money. Whether it’s a poet or a sex worker, the world seems intent upon making them sell themselves. While suggesting this analogy, the film thankfully also recognises how deeply one’s freedom is inflected by class. At one end of the scale are those whose survival depends on finding clients, for which they might have to resort to deception: the streetwalker Gulabo (Waheeda Rehman) sings a seemingly romantic song only to lure Vijay, whom she assumes is a potential customer; the maalishwala Abdus Sattar (Johnny Walker) is often seen tricking people into a head massage. These are people on the margins, and the film does not judge them – in fact it offers what might be among the most acute depictions of a streetwalker’s life in the scene where Gulabo is thrown out of a moving car, and when she demands her money, thrown into the jaws of ‘the law’: a beat havaldar.

It is much harsher on the middle class woman – Meena (Mala Sinha), who has left Vijay for the security of marriage to a richer man (Rehman). Vijay pronounces her shallow and greedy; only VK Murthy’s remarkable camerawork that allows us to see her position with any degree of empathy. In the scene where she talks to Vijay in the lift, she ends by saying agitatedly, “Arrey, main toh bhool hi gayi, mujhe toh upar jaana hai” — and we watch the elevator doors close over her made-up, bejewelled visage: the rise to the top for a woman like her involves giving up her freedom. In another scene, Murthy takes an almost operatic pleasure in showing us Meena as the memsahib in the white limousine, emerging hurriedly from this lap of luxury when she sees Vijay in the distance. But in Murthy’s framing, the liveried Sikh chauffeur who opens the car door also bars the memsahib’s path to her old love.

The film adopts a properly romantic stance, with the hero picking obscurity and freedom over worldly fame and wealth. In a society where the only good poet is a dead poet, Vijay literally chooses social death.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 10 Sep 2017.

Book Review: Modern love, ’50s style

Published in BL Ink:

What was Hindi cinema’s ‘Golden Age’ all about? A new book wants us to take off our nation-focused spectacles and open our eyes to how the ’50s Bombay film world shaped the modern Indian idea of romance.

Film scholar Aarti Wani shows how the public conversation around star pairs shaped our response to their onscreen romances. Seen here are Guru Dutt and Waheeda Rehman, with colleagues Dev Anand and Raj Khosla
(The Hindu archives)

The Hindi cinema of the 1950s has received so much attention, both scholarly and popular, that it seems an over-ploughed field. But film scholar Aarti Wani has written a book that casts fresh light on this familiar terrain. Rather than looking again at the ways in which 1950s cinema spoke to — and of — India’s new nationhood, Wani examines the models it constructed of romance. In fact, she argues, “the category of the national”, while explicating several aspects of post-Independence Hindi cinema, such as the creation of a national geography through travel and landscape, or of a moral economy based on a certain portrait of tradition, has failed to “account for the 1950s films’ overarching investment in romantic love.”

Wani’s principal argument is that love and romance were Hindi cinema’s fantasy of the modern in the ’50s. She starts with an obvious but important point — while romance was the ubiquitous narrative content of ’50s cinema, there was very little space for romantic love in the lived experiences of most Indians who watched these films. Of course, such an imbalance has existed with regard to literary depictions of love long before cinema. Sudipta Kaviraj has suggested that novelistic depictions of love “create an impression of commonplaceness of such action and behaviour”, whereas in fact, love relationships continued to be extremely rare in the society that was being described in these novels.

This modernity was signalled, among other things, by the fact that in contrast to films from later decades, ’50s Hindi films were marked by the relative absence of family. Most ’50s heroes had no father or mother, that is, no parental family. And most ’50s heroines, Wani argues, either had non-oppositional, even supportive, families, or they were shown with villainous fathers/father-figures from whom they needed to be rescued. Films like Awaara, Devdas and Mughal-e-Azam are exceptions. Very few ’50s film protagonists lived in joint families — thus freed from the “crippling family ties that would thwart romantic aspirations in real life”.

This cinematic vision of romantic love, Wani’s argument continues, was entwined with the experience of urban modernity; the city functioning as a site of “unexpected meetings and romantic encounters between strangers”. In contrast to love affairs in rural settings, which often had tragic ends — Arzoo(1950), Deedar (1951) or Devdas (1955) — the urban fabric seemed to allow for young men and women to choose and court potential partners. The primary locale for these filmi encounters, of course, was Mumbai (though Calcutta did feature in films like Pyaasa and Howrah Bridge).

The urban modern was closely tied to spatial exploration. Pointing to the many romantic connections made aboard trains, in taxis and buses, and in garages, Wani makes a rather lovely point: that romance in the ’50s film did not need transportation to an exotic or foreign location — “the dream remained eminently quotidian”. Of course, women and men — even those on the silver screen — did not have equal access to these city spaces, especially in a host of films that played up a noirish iconography, in which gambling, bank heists, thefts, kidnapping and even murders were deployed as sources of excitement. Still, Wani analyses some very interesting films — like 1958’s Solva Saal, starring Waheeda Rehman, and 1957’s Gateway of India, featuring Madhubala — in which the frisson is produced by the female protagonist’s adventurous, even dangerous, brush with diverse spaces in the city.

The other female figure identified with the cosmopolitan spaces of the city is, of course, the club singer/dancer. Wani notes that the role of the vamp/gangster’s moll in ’50s films was not reserved for particular actresses as it later became. The actress singing in a club might be the leading lady of that film — think Madhubala in Howrah Bridge — Geeta Bali, Sheila Ramani and Shakila all had roles that spilled across these boundaries.

Madhubala as a nightclub singer in Howrah Bridge (1958) was the film's heroine

Perhaps the most remarkable reworking of the split between the ‘heroine’ and the ‘other woman’ is in Pyaasa. Guru Dutt crafts a melancholic critique of the city as a calculating, inhospitable place based on the opposition between two female figures. But here the prostitute Gulabo (Rehman) is the true romantic, an appreciator of poetry, while the college-educated bourgeois woman (Mala Sinha’s Meena) is the faithless, money-minded one. (In a related aside, Wani points to the rising anxiety about women marrying for status rather than love, a fear expressed in mid-’50s films like Mr and Mrs 55 and Paying Guest.)

Wani’s next section, about the role of the song in the creation of a modern Indian romantic sensibility, is the book’s weakest. Several classic songs — ‘Yeh raat yeh chandni’ from Jaal, ‘Dum bhar jo udhar moonh phere’ from Awaara, ‘Do ghadi woh jo paas aa baithe’ from Gateway of India — are analysed in detail, and these analyses are usually interesting, if long-winded in a predictable academic way. Wani spends several pages, for example, on the framing of the Christian Maria in the Jaal song, and while I found fascinating the antecedents she claims for this character (in Ramamoorthy’s analysis of the interracial ’30s ‘Modern Girl’), I was often stopped in my tracks by sentences like “The spectacle of nature that frames the drama of this seduction marks Maria’s sexuality as natural” or “Maria’s performance, her expression, gestures and movement, along with the black and white mise-en-scene of the night saturated by the insistent sounds of the song give spatiality to desire that is cinematically spectacular and provides parallel moments of pleasure and identification”.

The rest of this section makes a shifting set of arguments about how space is used in the ’50s film song. Among Wani’s most specific claims is that duets were very rarely sung in a closed room (“which in fact offers a spatial setting for its possible consummation”). More broadly, she argues that romantic songs made for a fantasy in which the ‘public’ sphere could be occupied “for non-public, personal ends”. Moving onto songs of sorrow, she seeks to map songs sung by the heroine onto closed spaces and those by the hero onto open spaces — “a river bank, a sea shore, on a bench in a park, or on a rooftop”. I was less persuaded by Wani’s claims about how sound spills out of “the edges of the frame”, making songs in general a way of destabilising our perception and experience. Her conclusion seems particularly strange, using as it does a quotation on Hollywood “producing a new common sense about how love looked and what was required to overcome the manifold dangers that threatened it” to make her point about the film song. None of this is wrong, but it feels terribly unspecific. Perhaps the problem is songs are too slippery to stay put in neat analytic boxes — Wani herself goes from categorising the song as “a conduit of narrative meaning” to something that stakes claims “in excess of what the narrative allows”.

The final third of the book is where Wani abandons her laboured shot-by-shot analytic technique for a lively weaving together of film texts with journalistic and anecdotal texts about stars who had attained cinematic and public status as romantic pairs. Drawing on Neepa Majumdar’s pathbreaking work Wanted Cultured Ladies Only (2009), which locates the phenomenon of stardom in ’40s India within the context of a deep social ambivalence about cinema, Wani scrutinises how Bombay film stars in the ’50s were anointed as experts on love and romance — being asked to write articles and answer readers’ questions.

Returning to her framing argument about the rarity of love relationships in Indian society at the time, she suggests that stars began to be seen as authorities on the subject both because they performed love on screen and because they were among the very few people with any real-life experience of love affairs. Wani’s study of 1950s film journalism in English, Hindi and Marathi is attentive to detail, distinguishing between the different registers — sympathetic, gossipy, or judgemental — in which the stars’ love lives were produced as artefacts for public consumption.

Finally, Wani zooms in on the four legendary star-pairs of the decade — Guru Dutt-Waheeda Rehman, Nargis-Raj Kapoor, Dev Anand-Suraiya and Dilip Kumar-Madhubala. Her mapping of the contours of their real-life affairs onto some of their famous cinematic romances produces some of the most fascinating readings of these films. In moving beyond the official narrative on screen to the unofficial knowledge of stars’ lives which, without a doubt, informs the way we watch films, Wani offers an immensely productive lens with which to look at Hindi cinema. Work on Chiranjeevi and his fans, by SV Srinivas, offered a complex and thoughtful reading of film texts in the light of stardom and fan-expectations. Wani’s work is an allied but original project.

Despite its sometimes meandering and repetitive prose, Fantasy of Modernity is a thoughtful and enjoyable book, which contains several careful readings of films and offers a persuasive way of looking at both ’50s cinema and 20th century Indian ideas of romance. The many typographical errors — misspelled proper names, like ‘Ashish Nandi’ instead of ‘Ashis Nandy’, or ‘Chidanand Dasgupta’ instead of ‘Chidananda’, recurring errors like “libratory”, and completely erratic Romanising of Hindi lyrics (what should be spelt ‘anbujh’ is instead spelt, on the same page, alternately as ‘anbooz’ and ‘anbhujh’) — are extremely unfortunate distractions from an otherwise rich and immersive read.

Published in the Hindu Business Line, 11 June 2016.

In her own name

My BL Ink column for February:

Waheeda Rehman turned 78 this month. Nasreen Munni Kabir’s book-length interview is a treat for fans of the veteran actress.

If Raj Khosla had had his way, there might never have been a star called Waheeda Rehman. At the meeting where the debutante actress was to sign her contract with Guru Dutt Films, Khosla — the director of CID (1956), her first Hindi film — declared that her name was too long. But the quiet 17-year-old was no pushover. “My parents have given me this name and I like it,” she answered. “I won’t change it.” Khosla, Rehman remembers, “got all het up” (“He was a Punjabi, you know, and they can get all excited.”) When he pointed out that ‘everyone’ had changed their names, from Dilip Kumar (Yusuf Khan) to Nargis (Fatima Rashid), Meena Kumari (Mahjabeen Bano) to Madhubala (Mumtaz Jahan), she was adamant: “I am not everyone.”

The name stayed. On February 3 this year, the bearer of the name turned 78.

Sixty years after CID, it is impossible to imagine Hindi cinema without Waheeda Rehman. The innate self-possessed quality that helped her resist a filmi naamkaran also gave her the confidence to venture happily into roles more timid heroines might have run from. She seems to have had no compunctions starting out as a vamp (CID’s Kamini is the villain's moll, though she has a change of heart), or later, accepting the role of Rosie in Guide — a woman who leaves her neglectful husband for another man and a life as a dancer, and later leaves the lover too — or playing the mother of Amitabh Bachchan in Trishul (1978) when she played his wife in Kabhie Kabhie just two years earlier. (It’s also remarkable that in both these films, her characters are unwed mothers.)

Yet the reticent actor has never spent much time impressing the undeniable fact of her ‘difference’ upon us. The documentary filmmaker and writer Nasreen Munni Kabir took nearly a decade to persuade her to be interviewed. Although Kabir asks no tough or critical questions, the book that resulted —Conversations with Waheeda Rehman (2014) — is charming and thoughtful. Rehman firmly refuses, as she has done all her life, to speak of her relationship with Guru Dutt — whom she refers to throughout as ‘Guruduttji’, using the first half of his formal name, Gurudutt Padukone. But about almost everything else, she is quietly candid, turning a considered eye upon the industry as it once was. Her starting salary from Guru Dutt Productions was Rs.2000 a month, later increased to Rs.3500. “For Solva Saal, my first film as a freelancer, I received Rs.30,000. The highest I ever earned in my career was 7 lakh for a film.”

One of her recurring subjects is her relationship with dance. She started to learn Bharatanatyam as a nine-year-old in Rajahmundry. An asthmatic child, Rehman's first guru said dancing might help her lungs expand, and her mother “started regarding the dance lessons as a kind of treatment”. Her father, a government employee, not only disregarded the criticism of relatives who felt dance was not an appropriate activity for Muslim girls, but in fact encouraged the young Rehman and her sister Sayeeda to take the stage at for an official function in honour of Governor General C Rajagopalachari, just after Indian independence.

Rehman’s recall of how films were made in her time, especially of song-picturisations, is sharp: the innovative tracks created for the camera to film the circular shot at the end of her famous ‘snake dance’ in Guide, or the re-shoot of the ‘Chaudhvin ka Chand’ song in new colour technology, during which she had to dip chamois leather in an ice bucket and dab it on her face to keep the studio lights from burning her skin. She also makes striking general observations: the fact that male actors weren’t really required to dance in her time, or how film dances were often a melange of styles, with movements tailored to suit the frame.

There are several interesting accounts of male colleagues’ protectiveness: Rehman (the character actor) in the post-Pyaasa phase, ushering her and her mother out of parties where people were likely to drink till late; Raj Kapoor at the end of the Teesri Kasam shoot angering an assembled crowd at Bina Station by refusing to let them see Rehman, because “Why should they look at a woman anyway?”; senior lyricist Majrooh Sultanpuri telling her she shouldn’t have taken a taxi alone all the way to Madh Island. Rehman does not say it in so many words, but the safeguarding of virtue was clearly crucial to a suitable public persona. Almost all her mentions of costumes, for instance, have to do with not wearing something inappropriately revealing.

Female colleagues appear as close friends. Nargis is seen in several of her personal photographs, including a remarkable one with her and Sunil Dutt at the Berlin Film festival, 1973, beaming as they sit on either side of Satyajit Ray — the same Ray Nargis criticised in 1980 as having grown famous by showcasing India’s poverty to the world. In more recent holiday pictures, we see the oft-discussed Bollywood girl gang which has sadly lost two members since the book’s release — Asha Parekh, Sadhana, Shammi, Helen, Nanda and Waheeda Rehman herself.

Kabir’s book-length interview suggests many possible follow-up conversations. It would be a joy if Rehman were persuaded to have them.

Published in the Hindu Business Line, Feb 12, 2016.

Fan Club Deptt: Waheeda’s elegance transcended Bombay cinema, now charms Delhi

From my Sunday Guardian column.

One correction before we begin," announced Mukul Kesavan to a packed house at the India Habitat Centre. "Waheedaji is not 'one of the best' actresses we've had in Hindi cinema — she is the best actress we've had."

The orange curtains of the Stein Auditorium had just gone up, and a visibly excited Kesavan — columnist, writer and a history professor at Jamia — was about to begin his conversation with the actress Waheeda Rehman. It was the inaugural evening of the seventh edition of the Habitat Film Festival, which included a retrospective of films of the 70-something Rehman who had already been described that evening (by a 70-something IHC director RMS Liberhan) as "the ultimate symbol of grace and beauty".

Rehman has always tended to evoke superlatives; she is clearly used to them. Whether it's the virtual certificate from Amitabh Bachchan, who has always said she's his favourite actress, or the usually sharp Kesavan, who gushed at the privilege of speaking to her ("Like most of you in the audience, this is something we would fight to do..."), she accepts the praise with her quiet grace — somehow neither embarrassed nor coy.

Perhaps some of the chief guest's innate tehzeeb has rubbed off on the Delhi audience that evening — there are no ushers or 'Reserved' signs, but an informal self-censorship of the anonymously civilised leaves the front row free for assorted dignitaries. By the time the crowd has settled in, the first seat on the right contains a bespectacled Sharmila Tagore, so unostentatiously dressed that the lady to my left feels the need to confirm with me who she is. When Liberhan insists on mentioning Tagore in his welcome address, I see the actress spread out her right hand in a helpless gesture. The auditorium breaks into applause.

It's that sort of evening. Kesavan, whose writing and public appearances are always in English, declares that with the permission of the audience, he is going to conduct this conversation "in Hindi" or "at least in a sort of khichdi". One of his first questions to Rehman is about language, too: she grew up in Madras, but the language spoken at home: was it Urdu? It was Urdu, she says. (It is fascinating how Kesavan refers to the language he is speaking as 'Hindi' and the language in which Rehman responds as 'Urdu'.)

Her fluency in what was still the language of Hindi cinema seems to have been crucial to Rehman's career. It was why Guru Dutt, stumbling upon a function in Hyderabad celebrating a Telugu film called Rojulu Maraayi, became interested in casting the lovely-looking girl who'd done a much-talked about folk dance number for it. The daughter of a district commissioner who had grown up in south India — and most unusually for a Muslim girl in the '50s , learnt Bharatanatyam — Rehman says she forgot about her meeting with Dutt until a few months later when she received a message saying that he had asked her to come to Bombay.

"Mere walid sahab ka intehkaal ho gaya thha," says Rehman, remembering both her own excitement and her mother's fears about sending her to a strange city. But she finally went, and Dutt told her she would star in CID, opposite the already iconic Dev Anand. The 17-year-old Rehman couldn't believe her luck. Fans of Bombay cinema have never got over theirs.

Right from those early years, Rehman alternated with great success between the tragic intensity of films like Pyaasa (1957), Kaagaz ke Phool (1959) and later Chaudhvin ka Chand (1961) and more lighthearted romantic ones opposite Dev Anand — CID (1956), Raj Khosla's Solva Saal (1958), which contains Hai apna dil toh awara, and Kala Bazar (1960) — or Sunil Dutt (Ek Phool Chaar Kaante, 1960). By 1965, Rehman had even starred in a Satyajit Ray film (Abhijaan, 1962). She was confident enough to take on the unconventional character of Rosie in Guide (1965) – a devadasi's daughter, a married woman who falls in love with a guide and sets out to fulfill her dreams as a dancer.

R.K. Narayan, whose celebrated novel Guide drew on, later wrote a hilariously scathing piece about how the filmmakers rejected all the real locations he showed them (which, as he points out, would have been free) in favour of expensive sets created in Rajasthan, and how the performances of his small-town "exponent of the strictly classical tradition of... Bharatanatyam" became "an extravaganza in delirious, fruity colours and costumes".

Watching Guide today, there is no getting away from its posturing and corniness and desire for spectacle. Dev Anand, as always, walks some line between ridiculous and devotion-worthy that only a Bombay star could have figured out, and Rehman's passionate dances are Hindi movie classics precisely because they are no Bharatanatyam pieces. And yet there is something true that emerges from all this. That something even Narayan recognised when he apparently said to Rehman, "I saw my Rosie in you."

We see her still.