A Muted Sharpness

My Mumbai Mirror column:

The brilliant Jaya Bhaduri, who turned 70 earlier this month, once specialised in being the thinking man’s girl-next-door.

Utpal Dutt and Jaya Bhaduri in her Hindi film debut, Guddi (1971)

Some years ago, on a long taxi ride with a bunch of near millennials, the conversation veered around to Jaya Bachchan, nee Bhaduri, and I found myself in the shocking position of having to defend something I had always assumed was beyond doubt: Jaya’s actorly brilliance. This was despite the fact that by the 1980s, when films first started percolating into my consciousness, she’d already done her decade of top-notch performances, married Amitabh Bachchan, and given up her career for motherhood. But through my childhood and teenage years, if a film of Jaya Bhaduri’s was on television, or in the video rental parlour, it was always watched. And there was never any doubt that Jaya would make it worth watching.

In particular, my mother (not an easy-to-please viewer) had a soft spot for Jaya – and I’ve only recently begun to see that that admiration may have extended beyond her acting to a (subconscious) identification with her screen persona. If my mother was a North Indian girl growing up in Calcutta, Jaya Bhaduri was a Bengali girl from Jabalpur, and there was a recognisable set of elements that made up the bright girl-next-door aesthetic. This included tasteful, unfussy cotton saris, draped perfectly over well-fitted (but never too revealing) blouses; the thick straight black hair worn in a loose long plait, or a bun at the nape of the neck (unlike the fashionably bouffant-crowned Sharmila Tagore, or the more free-flowing hairstyles adopted by a Neetu Singh or a Zeenat Aman), the kaajal, bindi, large hoop earrings – and sometimes even spectacles!

Jaya Bhaduri, who turned 70 this April, made her screen debut in Satyajit Ray’s Mahanagar (1963), as part of a fine ensemble cast, playing the hero Anil Chatterjee’s teenaged sister. That very particular mid-twentieth century Indian image of youthful femininity: the school-going girl on the cusp of womanhood, enthusiastically learning to wear a sari and cook the family meal, clearly struck a chord with both viewers and directors. In the 1971 Bangla film Dhanyee Meye, she played Uttam Kumar’s sister-in-law. Though by then she had graduated from the Film and Television Institute of India as a gold medalist, Bhaduri’s first Hindi film role –the title character of Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Guddi (1971) – also had her playing a teenager, this time one besotted with films in general and Dharmendra in particular. So did her second: as the tomboyish child-bride Mrinmoyee in Uphaar, the Barjatya Productions version of Tagore’s short story ‘Samapti’ (filmed by Ray on Aparna Sen as part of his Teen Kanya triptych).

In Gulzar’s Parichay and Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Bawarchi, both 1972 releases, or later Chupke Chupke (1975), she remained the innocent young woman coming of age in the middle class family setting – whether as Didi to a gang of children, or the younger sister whose marriage is to be fixed. In Basu Chatterjee’s heart-warming Piya ka Ghar (1973), Jaya was the shy young bride catapulted into a crowded Bombay chawl by arranged marriage. Here the family setting was the new sasural: a loving but boisterous home full of card games and theatre rehearsals, cricket and silly jokes.
Another commonality in many of these early roles was her status as the favourite of a father/elder brother figure: Sanjeev Kumar in Parichay, Rajesh Khanna in Bawarchi, Raja Paranjape as her tauji Gauri Shankar in Piya ka Ghar, and later AK Hangal in the sensitive marital drama Kora Kagaz.


In all these depictions of girlhood, however, Jaya’s shyness encoded a certain sexual innocence, a quiet reserve that did not ever involve being coy or silly. This meant she could also be feisty or tomboyish or self-willed, like in Guddi or Uphaar, while always conveying something I can only call character. Whatever she did, we knew that deep down, she was a good girl. It’s that inner quality of non-frivolity that allowed her to so convincingly inhabit the streetsmart role of the memorable “chakku-chhuriyan tez kara lo” girl in Zanjeer (1973). Even when she is first being bought off as a witness by the villain’s henchmen and says something coolly cynical like “For this much money I could turn dumb for a lifetime,” we do not quite believe in her essential badness.

And of course the film makes sure she changes over to the right side of the law quickly, as well as moving from her street performer self to an appropriately sari-clad love interest for the policeman hero – Amitabh Bachchan, whose career as Hindi cinema’s ‘angry young man’ first took off with Zanjeer, and whom Jaya Bhaduri married in June 1973, the year of Zanjeer’s release. Whether Bachchan ever acknowledges it, he was the struggler who married a supremely talented actress at the peak of her powers – and within less than a decade, her career had ended while his, legendarily, carries on into the present.

That real-life narrative is not unusual for India, of course. What perhaps makes Jaya Bhaduri’s case remarkable is that there are at least two films in which she acted out versions of sympathetic fans imagined to be her real life: Abhimaan, in which marital tensions emerge from precisely the sort of unequal fame that Jaya and Amitabh had, and most bizarrely Silsila, in which a version of the love triangle of Rekha-Jaya-Amitabh played out on screen, and after which Jaya stopped acting for decades — only returning to the public eye as the mother figure of Hazaar Chaurasi ki Maa and more depressingly, K3G. Even her political persona has wife-and-mother written all over it. Perhaps some day someone in Bollywood will pluck up the courage to cast her in a version of the rest of her life.


Published in Mumbai Mirror, 22 Apr 2018.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 22 Apr 2018.

Starring Scripts, Scripting Stars

My Mirror column:

What made Salim-Javed so unique as screenwriters in Hindi cinema? 

 Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar during their partnership days 

Early in Diptakirti Chaudhuri's book, Written By Salim-Javed, Javed Akhtar recounts the tale of his first ever script narration. He had gone to a producer called Baboobhai Bhanji, having got an appointment with many sifarishes. "[T]he man had listened to the script without interruption. After finishing, a nervous Javed Akhtar respectfully enquired what the producer thought of the scene." "Darling," [came the reply], "your story is good, but there is a big risk involved...this hasn't been used in any film yet."

Telling this story to Chaudhuri decades later, Javed — who went on to form one half of Hindi cinema's most famous screenwriting duo — adds a half-joking postscript, an explanation for his future success in the industry: "I never wrote a story that has not come before." Later, Chaudhuri quotes Salim Khan as saying that he does not believe there is any story that does not derive from something older, except the Ramayana and Mahabharata. "Originality is the art of concealing the source," Salim says.

But what's interesting is that the duo have never actually tried to hide their borrowings. In his first job as a writer, as assistant to Abrar Alvi in the late 1960s, Salim says he "used to suggest ideas he had read in popular novels or seen in Hollywood films". Chaudhuri's book is a film buff and trivia lover's tribute and delights in digging out Salim-Javed's influences, from James Hadley Chase novels to Ibn-e-Safi's Urdu detective stories. Their script for Majboor, for instance, was an emotional reworking of a thriller called Zig-Zag, in which a dying insurance executive frames himself for a murder in such a way that his wife and daughter can benefit from the reward money. Instead of a wrong diagnosis, as in Zig-Zag, Amitabh Bachchan in Majboor is dramatically cured by an operation, but the resolution is very similar.

Even with Sholay, their most famous film, the duo have never shied away from speaking of their sources of inspiration. The coin toss scene to decide the course of action is something Salim attributes to a card scene in a film called Garden of Evil; the massacre of the Thakur's family was inspired by Once Upon a Time in the West; while Viru's famous tank scene drew on an Anthony Quinn film called The Secret of Santa Vittoria. The main idea of convicts hired as vigilantes to defend a village wasn't new either — Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, reworked into The Magnificent Seven, had already spawned such Hindi films as Mera Gaon Mera Desh.

It is also undeniable that Salim-Javed plots were full of recurring tropes. Some of these had a longer history in Hindi cinema, but became signature elements of their repertoire: a solidarity with the working class against the rich; the poor hero who would rather break than bend; the mother who raises her children alone; a family lost and then found; the thief with a code of honour; relatives pitted against each other by duty.

And yet, the writing partnership which began in 1971 managed to redefine the course of Hindi cinema, in a single decade. The innovation they are usually credited with is thematic: the figure of the Angry Young Man, whose intense rage against the system had a starkly different tenor from an older Hindi film hero, whose disillusionment was in a more soulful register (think of Pyaasa).

But I think it wasn't so much new plots, but new ways of presenting them and snappy, witty dialogue that made their films seem fresh. And, as with their scripts, it was the 'how' rather than the 'what' of their careers that really made them gamechangers: because unlike pretty much all Bombay screenwriters before them — and most who came after — Salim-Javed managed to position themselves as sole custodians of their scripts.

"Earlier when writers put together a script," says Salim Khan, "it had contributions from the novelist from whom the story was taken, the director who would make the film, the actor who would act in it. When we started working together, we said we will give you the complete script. You will neither interfere in the writing, nor change the finished script."

It was remarkable. They may have cobbled together ingredients from everywhere, but their recipe was sacrosanct. This confidence — which many in the industry perceived as arrogance — began to seem more justified as film after film became a box office hit.

Salim-Javed also took it upon themselves to ensure that their contribution was publicised, often putting their money where their mouth was. They were perhaps the first screenwriters to pay for trade advertisements in their own names. The most famous one appeared in the same Trade Guide that had forecast Sholay as "a sad experience for distributors". It said, "This is a prediction by Salim-Javed... Sholay... will be a grosser of Rupees One Crore in each major territory of India".

Amitabh Bachchan in Zanjeer (1973)

In their story of their rise — which sounds quite like one of their films — they got Rs 10,000 for their first film, and Rs 55,000 for Zanjeer. "After the success of Zanjeer, we decided to increase our price to Rs 2 lakh and did not sell a script for nine months." But eventually they did and by the end, their fee matched that of the top-grossing star in the film, Amitabh Bachchan — exactly as Salim Khan had once told Abrar Alvi it would.

But here's a final question: why did this achievement, stunning as it was, not translate into similar conditions for other writers? Had Salim-Javed simply been co-opted by a star-struck industry, which conceded them individual stardom — but left the ordinary writer as underpaid and overlooked as ever?

Published in Pune Mirror, 25 July 2016.