Borderline Conditions

My Mumbai Mirror column:

Watching Happy Bhaag Jayegi is an enjoyable way to think about the Indo-Pak relationship in Hindi cinema.

Somewhere in Amritsar, a wedding is in full swing. The bridegroom (Jimmy Shergill) has arrived in all his glittering regalia, and is halfway through a hardworkingly rehearsed solo dance performance, glancing intermittently for approval at his gorgeous bride-to-be, Harpreet alias Happy (Diana Penty). She is laughing a lot, and it looks rather as if she is laughing at him. By the end of the song, our suspicions — and the faint glimmer of them in the dulha's rather thick head — are confirmed: the dulhan has disappeared.

The runaway bride is a recurring motif in contemporary Hindi movie comedy, appearing in variants as different as the 2011 Salman Khan-Asin starrer Ready and 2013's Shuddh Desi Romance. But although this is the comic premise with which Happy Bhag Jayegi begins (and from which it takes its name), the film's more significant humorous track draws on a different Bollywood subgenre: the cross-border comedy.

Penty's long-limbed, moonhphat Happy ends up, by a stroke of bad luck, in a getaway vehicle that leads her not to her lover's embrace, but to Pakistan. The morning after her truck-ride, she wakes up in a grand mansion belonging to a father-and-son politician duo. Played by Javed Sheikh and Abhay Deol, the Ahmeds are known to their loyalists and hangers-on—meaning apparently all of Lahore—as "Janaab Senior" and "Janaab Junior".

The rest of the film involves the hapless Janaab Junior (Deol) trying to restore Happy to her layabout Amritsari beloved, Guddu (Ali Zafar). With the aid of his faithful family retainers—Mamu and Iffat Bi, right out of an '80s Pakistani teleserial, his fierce and aristocratic fiance Zoya (Momal Sheikh) and a wonderfully crackpot policeman by the name of Usman Afridi (Piyush Mishra), Janaab Junior (Deol) must contrive to keep Happy out of sight of his domineering father (Sheikh) — while subverting attempts at abduction by her jilted groom Bagga (Shergill, marvellous in a tweaked version of his stood-up-at-the-mandap character from the Tanu Weds Manu films). The writing is nowhere near as funny as screenwriter Himanshu Sharma's TWM, and Penty is inconceivable as a paratha-making Punjaban, but the film remains an enjoyable bit of silliness.

Watching Happy made me realize that Bollywood's cross-border plots devolve into two broad kinds. One is the nationalist we-will-go-across-and-kill-the-terrorists plot, usually containing RAW and ISI agents, secret identities, and wish-fulfilment of both the revenge and romance variety: think of Baby, Ek Thha Tiger, Agent Vinod and Phantom among others. The other kind tends to be grounded in the idea of people from both countries being able to establish a warm human connection, despite the obstacles placed in their way by politics, religion and highly-policed state borders.

Interestingly, this second plot often plays out through a specific narrative. That narrative involves a character being stuck on the wrong side of the border — and having to be rescued or helped to return to the right side. The grand romantic version of this is probably the Yash Chopra love story Veer Zaara, in which the Indian stuck in Pakistan is the film's hero — Shah Rukh Khan as Squadron Leader Veer Pratap Singh — and he's stuck not just in Pakistan but a Pakistani prison.

Recent variations have sidestepped the romance for something different. Nitin Kakkar's 2014 Filmistaan centred on an aspiring Indian actor who is mistakenly abducted by terrorists and finds himself tied up in a Pakistani village. The huge 2015 hit Bajrangi Bhaijaan made the person stuck in the wrong country a child — and she is imprisoned not by the state or by other people, but by her lack of language. She is mute, and so cannot tell the good Hindustanis that she comes from Pakistan.

By having their protagonists unable to tell that they're not in India, these films underline our cross-national similarities. "Yeh Pakistan hai?" Filmistaan's abducted Sunny (Sharib Hashmi) inquires of his burly captor (Kumud Mishra) in disbelief — there's little about the desert village he's in that suggests he's in another country. In Bajrangi Bhaijaan, it is the adults around the mute child who can't imagine that she might not be Indian.

Happy, too, falls into this category. "Main Pakistan mein hoon?" asks a shell-shocked Diana Penty, having been so far unable to tell that her unwilling hosts are Lahori. Later in the film, unsuspecting uncles accept Happy as a visiting cousin from Karachi, and we tour a Lahore that combines strolling camels, park joggers and laughter clubs like any north Indian city.

But twinned with similarity comes difference. In Bajrangi Bhaijaan, it was an overly simplified version of 'Pakistani' culture: burkha-clad women, non-vegetarian food, etc. In Happy, it's a highfaluting register of Urdu that is milked for laughs: Piyush Mishra induces many giggles as he speaks of refraining from maikashi (drinking), inquires if this is Guddu's nasheman (nest) and recommends a qailulah (an afternoon nap) to Bagga.
  
The leg-pulling isn't one-sided: if the film's Pakistani elite is feudal, pompous and thinks nothing of calling in the army and police to solve personal problems, the Urdu-uncomprehending (if reluctantly impressed) Punjabi listeners are loud, boorish and lawless. And yet everyone's really quite good at heart. In these times of high-decibel nationalist nastiness, Happy's gentle ribbing seems welcome.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 21 Aug 2016.

Men Aren't From Mars

In today's Mumbai Mirror, I return to the subject of Tanu Weds Manu Returns. This time, the men:

Tanu Weds Manu's male characters are definitely flawed, but they are also profoundly recognisable.

Last week, I wrote about Tanu Weds Manu Returns, its take on the double-role heroine and how it made me think of Hitchcock's Vertigo. Much newsprint since has been expended on the film. But we've been so busy thinking about the women that no one seems to have bothered to think about the men. 

And yet the men are crucial to Anand L Rai's vision. They were perhaps given more space when Rai first set out to create this world, in 2011. If TWMR spins around Manu Sharma's struggle to decide between two models of womanhood (both embodied by Kangana Ranaut), the pivot of the first film, Tanu Weds Manu, was Tanu's choosing between two models of masculinity. On one hand was her old love Raja Awasthi, a sharp-shooting Lucknow boy with a tongue to match. On the other was Manu Sharma, a suitable boy of the obedient sort who became a doctor because his parents wished it and was now set to marry the same way. 

Jimmy Shergill, arguably the most underrated leading man of our time, effortlessly produced the tough guy exterior and inner vulnerability that made Raja so affecting. Shergill's "introduction" scene was among the quiet marvels of the 2011 film: the Awasthi family is in the midst of the ritual humiliation of displaying their daughter to a prospective groom (Manu) when Raja returns home, carrying fresh scars from some street battle. Embarrassed and angry, his father berates him for being a goonda. Shergill's response captures a superbly specific Indian lihaaz that can still bind our most loutish young men: his eyes flash, but he does not answer back. For what seems like an eternity, as his father speaks, he holds out the bag of samosas, and holds his tongue. 

A minute later, we see another possible reason for Raja's silence: cast in the role of ladkiwala, with a sister who has a slightly deformed left hand, he knows he cannot jeopardise her chances any further than he already has. And then, in a moving statement that marks our surprise nowadays at anyone who isn't pulling rank, Raja tells Manu that he seems like a good man - "Nahi toh kahan aise milte hain London ke aadmi hum Lucknow walon se?" 

Screenplay writer Himanshu Sharma has created characters whose roots extend deep below the visible. Without stating it in so many words, the film makes apparent that the contrast between Raja and Manu isn't only one of temperament (though it is that, too). Both are born into middle class families, but Raja, coming of age in '80s Uttar Pradesh, has arrived (perhaps correctly) at the conclusion that good breeding isn't quite going to cut it in contemporary Lucknow. Manu, whom one imagines as shielded from the cut-and-thrust of the Indian street by good marks and an academic bent, has further removed himself from it by living in London. 

But what was remarkable about the face-off between Raja and Manu was that it reversed the usual hierarchy of masculinities, in which status is determined by who gets the girl. "Getting the girl" has long been the subject of heterosexual male discourse, and every cultural milieu generates informal categories to predict who the getters will be. Siddharth Chowdhury's unabashed novel Day Scholar described one such concept in rather graphic terms: "Just like every door has a dwarpal every ch*t has a ch*tpal. A ch*tpal never gets the ch*t just like the dwarpal never gets to sleep in the master bedroom. Every good girl needs at least one ch*tpal, to run errands for her and listen to her bitch about her mother." Whether one finds the terminology unpalatable, it is clear that the concept has currency. And so, having shown the obliging Manu escort Tanu to the beauty parlour and help her shop for dupattas, as the bride-to-be of another man (Raja, who wouldn't be caught dead doing either), Rai's decision to have Tanu eventually reject Raja's heroic histrionics for Manu's almost boring sweetness was nothing short of radical.

TWMR continues to deal in similar categories. Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub, playing the smitten young fellow who provides chauffeur-service when Tanu gets Manu's divorce notice, describes himself with touching self-knowledge as the "kandha", literally "shoulder" -- but is somehow still enraged when his affections aren't reciprocated. And there is Deepak Dobriyal's hysterically funny Pappi, whose misconstruing of Komal's messages reveals yet another example of how easily Indian men, starved for interaction with the opposite sex, confuse friendliness with love. Rai's Raanjhanaa pushed this premise to its utmost, casting Dhanush as the boy who thinks stalking a girl all the way to Delhi reveals the persistence of his "love". 

Rather than the high drama of Raanjhanaa, or even TWM, TWMR goes for a lightness of tone, and I think Rai is better served by it. Among the delights of the new film is the updated Awasthi, performing rituals like a proper Hindu householder though he hasn't found a bride. Shergill has acquired a moustache and lost some of his fire, but his pronouncements retain the cut-the-crap hilarity of old. The mellowness suits him -- and he's certainly more self-aware than the other men in Rai's world. Can the next film be about him, please?

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 31 May 2015.