How to Act the Part

My Mirror column last week:

A theatrical riff on Shammi Kapoor inspires thoughts on moustaches, masculinity and performing the self.

My first Shammi Kapoor moment was watching Dil Deke Dekho on video in my nani's house in Calcutta and prancing around for weeks with the title song emblazoned on my heart: “Pooccho pooccho pooccho parwaane se zara, dheere dheere jalne mein kaisa hai maza...” Even at age 10, I knew immediately that I preferred this rose-tinted hero (and this music and this general mahaul) to whatever was then on offer by way of Hindi movie masculinity (mainly Anil Kapoor, with lashings of Jackie and Sunny).

Recently, watching the Patchwork Ensemble's sly, delightful play The Gentlemen's Club [aka Tape] brought that childish Shammi-love back to me. The 70-minute play, written by Vikram Phukan, sets us down in a fictitious Mumbai, a just-slightly-altered universe in which there are drag clubs with long-running acts — and the reigning king of the city's drag kings is a woman called Roxanne, who's spent practically all her life defining and refining her Shammi-inspired stage persona called Shamsher.

Pooja Sarup's magnificent rendition of the role alternately contains and peels back the layers that constitute her particular character. So sometimes we just see Shammi, sometimes Shamsher, sometimes Roxanne — and sometimes the whole shebang, meaning Pooja playing Roxanne playing Shamsher playing Shammi. 

The layers are as tightly wound as those of the duct tape that binds her recalcitrant breasts into submission — but Sarup can make you conscious of them at will. And so even as the play's infectious enthusiasm has you giggling and singing along and irresistibly tapping your feet, it is impossible to not also think in a Judith-Butler-inflected way about how gender is a constant performance – for each and every one of us, not just Shammi Kapoor.

But there is also something specific about Shammi's masculinity and persona — and the play, without ever going heavy on the 'research', taps right into the heart of it. As the son of Prithviraj and the younger brother of Raj, by the mid-1950s, young Shamsherraj Kapoor had spent many years and as many as seventeen flop films trying and failing to distinguish himself from his illustrious family. Akshay Manwani, in a recent book on Nasir Husain's cinema, points us to the rather tragicomic fact that Shammi's early status as a Poor-Man's-Raj-Kapoor was remarked upon not just by his reviewers and audiences, but actually within the space of his films: Shashikala in Jeewan Jyoti (1953) says to Shammi's character: “Haaye, ab toh moocchen bhi nikal aayi hain. Oh ho jaise bilkul Raj Kapoor. [Haaye, now you've grown a moustache as well. Oh ho, just like Raj Kapoor.”

Manwani doesn't quite make the connection, but when he tells us that Shammi's pencil moustache had been the crux of his unwilling public identification as Raj's younger brother, and that the immensely successful new persona crafted for him by Nasir Husain in Tumsa Nahi Dekha (1957) involved getting rid of the moustache, it all begins to come together. Because of course Shammi Kapoor needed to shed the moustache in order to shed the well-defined aura of an older masculinity — including but not limited to a virile, serious, intense Kapoor masculinity — so as to be able to embody the new. The exaggerated wooing and deliberate effrontery, the cocked eyebrow, the full lips and swoon-inducing banter were all integral to a new kind of romantic hero—a man who might sometimes seem to be trying too hard, but was having a rollicking good time doing it.

The connection with Elvis Presley has been made before, and Manwani adds to this historical context by informing us that Husain (who was initially saddled with Shammi by his producer S. Mukherjee, and wasn't quite convinced of his talents) specifically told Shammi to observe Presley's style, though not to consciously copy it. The Presley inspiration was also half-consciously articulated by Shammi's roles as a Western-style musician in several films: Dil Deke Dekho, Teesri Manzil and Chinatown. (By way of personal anecdote, it seems significant that while in college in early 1960s Calcutta, my father had a close friend who modelled himself on Shammi, while my mother's best [female] friend was besotted with Presley. The zeitgeist included both.)

There is another remarkable thing I learnt from The Gentlemen's Club: a year before he transitioned to his new frothy, excessive, almost-drag masculine persona, Shammi Kapoor starred with his wife Geeta Bali in a film. It was called Rangeen Raatein (literally 'colourful nights'), 1956, directed by Kidar Sharma. Geeta Bali was a bigger star than he was, and in fact Husain was far keener on her accepting a role in Tumsa Nahi Dekha than her then-ill-fated husband. But what the play throws at us is much more subtle than some Abhimaan type husband-wife competition: it is that Geeta Bali's role in Rangeen Raatein was as a man.

Puja Sarup as Shammi, alias Shamsher, alias Roxanne in the superb play The Gentlemen's Club

In a memorable moment in The Gentlemen's Club, Roxanne/Shamsher tells, for the umpteenth time, the story of how her Shammi act first emerged not from her own desire to play him, but as a suggestion from a particularly flamboyant drag queen whose nazaakat she admired. "It's what I tell people, you know: I didn't choose Shammi, Shammi chose me."
The real-life Shammi Kapoor, too, spent the rest of his career playing the frenetic, impish, Westernised character that he had been inserted into by Nasir Hussain. Is there a lesson here about lives and selves and performance? Perhaps. Perhaps none of us can really choose our own parts. All we can do, though, is act the hell out of them.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 20th Nov 2016.