Lounge 04 may 2013

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Saturday, May 4, 2013

Vol. 7 No. 18

LOUNGE THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE

A collage from Tracing Phalke, a book about the cinema of D.G. Phalke

by Kamal Swaroop.

METHOD AND MADNESS >Page 5

THE VOICE OF INDIA

The life of Lata Mangeshkar is all guts and glory >Page 9

100 YEARS, 100 MEMORIES

THE DIRECTOR’S ACTOR

Waheeda Rehman reveals the steel beneath the silk >Pages 12-13

To Hindi cinema, with love and exasperated fondness

FOLLOWING DHARMENDRA

Director Sriram Raghavan on one of his favourite actors—the broad-chested, dreamy-eyed movie star >Page 19

THE NINETIES’ MISS BUBBLY

Kajol is a present-day yummy mummy with no time to waste >Page 22

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LOUNGE First published in February 2007 to serve as an unbiased and clear-minded chronicler of the Indian Dream.

LOUNGE EDITOR

PRIYA RAMANI DEPUTY EDITORS

SEEMA CHOWDHRY SANJUKTA SHARMA MINT EDITORIAL LEADERSHIP TEAM

R. SUKUMAR (EDITOR)

NIRANJAN RAJADHYAKSHA (EXECUTIVE EDITOR)

ANIL PADMANABHAN TAMAL BANDYOPADHYAY NABEEL MOHIDEEN MANAS CHAKRAVARTY MONIKA HALAN SHUCHI BANSAL SIDIN VADUKUT SUNDEEP KHANNA PANKAJ MISHRA ©2013 HT Media Ltd All Rights Reserved

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A century of

cinema W

e can already read the hate mail.

“How dare you ignore ____ (fill in the name of your favourite actor/director/ singer/musician).” “You don’t know anything about Hindi film history.” “Why have you ignored Tamil cinema?”

This special issue celebrates the centenary of Hindi cinema, a hundred years since the screening of Dhundiraj Govind Phalke’s Raja Harishchandra. We have chosen to look at the most popular language industry in the country, which is Hindi. As for who made the list and who didn’t, there is a ready explanation. The list of a hundred memories is, by definition, deeply personal and idiosyncratic. We’re not aiming to provide a summary of a century of film-making, nor are we analysing specific films. Rather, we have chosen to explore our soft corners for certain movies, storytelling conventions

and personalities. Based on our collective memories, we have drawn up a list of a hundred ways in which we look back on our movie-going experiences, which are marked by genres (tragedies, for instance), marquee names (from Ashok Kumar to Kajol) and musical scores (composers, singers). We have rediscovered our nostalgia for clichés and tropes that are slowly beginning to fade out (such as policemen landing up on the scene a few minutes before the end credits). We have also found it extremely hard to restrict ourselves to a hundred memories—we can go on forever, but at least we have made a start. Send your feedback—hate emails and praise are equally welcome.

THE CINEMA ISSUE

Nandini Ramnath Issue editor

LOUNGE LOVES | 15 MIN MOVIES

Short cuts: The Dirty Picture, now also a quickie.

Condensed cinema Fifteen-minute movies perfectly suited for attention-deficit youth

I

f you can be world-famous for at least 15 minutes, then you shouldn’t need more than 15 minutes to watch a Hindi movie.

You can do so on the YouTube channel 15 Min Movies (www.youtube.com/ user/15minmovie). Run by Shemaroo Entertainment, the channel posts 15-minute versions of some of Hindi cinema’s best-loved titles. If a movie is part of Shemaroo’s catalogue, as are Awara, Amar Akbar Anthony, Namak Halaal, Bobby, Company and Ishqiya, it’s likely to be on the list. The short versions are supposed to work like condensed milk— they give you a taste of the original.

Originally aimed at mobile phone users, the channel was set up in 2009, says Jai Maroo, director, Shemaroo Entertainment.

“In the US, people had started putting out mobisodes (mobile episodes, or content meant to be viewed on cellphones),” he says. “We brought the idea here to initially target mobile phone users who mostly watched songs or film scenes on their phones.” Rather than burdening them with a whole movie, it made sense to give them an extended trailer instead. “People said it wasn’t possible—that they would need at least 45 minutes,” Maroo says. “We proved that it was creatively possible.”

A team of editors and creative producers distils a movie to its basic three-act structure, key scenes and songs. The songs, in fact, are often not dropped, though you might think they would be among the first things to go. “I watch the full movie, understand the basic story,” says editor Krishna Kumar. “Then I

make a first cut of about an hour or so, which further comes down to 30-40 minutes. We watch it again three-four times. If there are songs, we keep them.”

Kumar’s challenge is to ensure the sanctity of such popular classics as Mughal-eAzam and Gol Maal. “It’s not just about trimming the film,” he says. He is particularly proud of The Dirty Picture, the story of a 1980s starlet. The team created two versions, he says. “One is from start to finish, another focuses on scenes that showcase her personality and her life.”

The idea is to ensure that the most important scenes are captured within 15 minutes, adds Mahesh Newalkar, head of content planning and delivery at Shemaroo. “If there is an important dialogue, it is retained.”

The team adds a voice-over whenever necessary—the 15-minute video of Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Mili, for instance, opens with a narrator who outlines the basic plot, which is about the relationship between an alcoholic loner and a terminally ill woman. “We call it 15 minutes, but the films are actually between 13 and 18 minutes at times,” Maroo says.

The edited films are test-screened for different age groups, especially young people.

For, the exercise targets an under-30, attention-deficit generation. “It is perfect for snacking consumption,” Maroo says. “It is aimed at users who don’t have the time to watch a full-length film as well as youngsters who have not heard of these films, are curious, but might not want to engage with a 3-hour movie.”

What do the film-makers think of all this?

“In most cases, we have the rights to edit the films,” Maroo says. “So far, we have not run into objections.”

Nandini Ramnath

ON THE COVER: IMAGE COURTESY: ‘TRACING PHALKE’ BY KAMAL SWAROOP/NATIONAL FILM DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION CORRECTIONS & CLARIFICATIONS: In “The forgotten diva”, 27 April, ‘Khazanchi’ was released in 1941; and R.D. Burman worked with Shamshad Begum after 1960.

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100 great

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movie memories

To Hindi cinema, with love and exasperated fondness

By Nandini Ramnath nandini.r@livemint.com

Clockwork cliché s Or, the comfort that comes from

COURTESY SUBHASH CHHEDA

Man to man: Vinod Khanna and Dharmendra in Raj Khosla’s Mera Gaon Mera Desh (1971).

watching formula films

Policemen who are courteous enough to arrive only after the hero has single-handedly pulped the baddies. Protection-free sex followed by tearful announcements of a pregnancy. Tense moments outside an operation theatre, ending with either a) Congratulations, he/she will live or b) Please pray to the Lord. Memory loss following a knock to the head, usually articulated through the words “Where am I?” Emotional reunions at train stations or airports. Irate soliloquies before an idol in a temple. Drunken monologues. Interruption of nuptials, either by a spurned lover or dowryhungry in-laws to be.

Dilip Kumar Cinema’s greatest Mr Sensitive Hindi cinema was bursting with talent in the 1940s, so if Dilip Kumar became one of the brightest lights of this decade, and the one that followed, it had everything to do with his commitment to the craft of acting, and the sensitivity and intelligence he brought to his characters. Find out how, and why, in our essay on Page 5.

Un­historicals Low on facts, high on atmospherics To demand that Hrithik Roshan should resemble Akbar just because he is playing the Mughal ruler is to miss the point about madein-Mumbai historicals.

Since little is known about the Akbar-era singer Baiju Bawra (1952), it is perfectly okay for Bharat Bhushan to play him, especially since the movie’s real draw is Naushad’s tour de force score. Hema Malini as Razia Sultan?

Why not? Razia Sultan (1983) is a Kamal Amrohi production with lurid colours, a superb score by Khayyam and a black-faced Dharmendra. Roshan is as convincing in Jodhaa Akbar (2008) as the emperor as, say, Jason Schwartzman as Louis XVI. But Roshan also makes for a delectable ruler, whereas Schwartzman looks like an overgrown American teenager who has been teleported into Versailles.

Our historicals are about spectacular sets, heavy costumes, impressive musical scores, declamatory dialogue, stirring romance and palace intrigue. How can a movie possibly have all these elements as well as a performer who actually looks like the real person?

Swimming pools Bathing beauties, both men and women One of the earliest images from Hindi cinema is of women (actually men dressed as women) splashing about in a pool of water. The images are part of the surviving footage from pioneering filmmaker Dhundiraj Govind Phalke’s Raja Harishchandra from 1913.

Swimming-pool scenes flood us with discomfort, usually because they are meant to titillate audiences and bypass censorship. Given the prurience with which most film-makers shoot poolside sequences, and the easy association made between swimsuitclad characters and loose morality, it’s not surprising that most actors put no-swimsuit clauses in their contracts (right after the no-kissing condition). Madhubala kept her clothes on while prancing next to a swimming pool in the song Thandi hawa from Guru Dutt’s Mr & Mrs 55 (1955).

Madhuri Dixit looked happier thrusting her boobs in various songs than wearing a one-piece swimsuit in Tezaab (1988). But Sadhana had no such inhibitions in Waqt (1965); nor did her co-star, Sunil Dutt. Yash Chopra’s movie treats swimming as a physical activity that isn’t any different from walking

or cycling. Sadhana and Dutt were watched by a glowering, suited and booted Raaj Kumar (who covets Sadhana).

We all know what to expect when women get near a water body—they will either be humiliated (Kajol in Bekhudi, 1992) or have a Bo Derek moment (Zeenat Aman in Qurbani, 1980, and Dimple Kapadia in Saagar, 1985). But the swimming pool proved useful to men in another way in the 1970s. Nefarious characters conducted a majority of their business by the poolside, clad in bathing robes, with a scantily clad woman (often blonde), cigar and whisky glass for company. The rooftop pool in the luxurious hotel was the place to be in that decade.

Amitabh Bachchan emerged from one in a rare moment of candidness in Don (1978). Even Rahul Bose, several years later, emerged from the depths in jet-black, tiny briefs in Govind Nihalani’s otherwise serious drama Thakshak (1999).

The real traffic-stopper in the pool was, of course, Vinod Khanna.

Vinod Khanna Sexy beast One of the most famous tracks from Feroz Khan’s Qurbani is Hum tumhe chahte hain aise, the one

in which Zeenat Aman and Vinod Khanna stand on a beach transfixed by each other. Who can blame him, for she is dressed in a fetching floralpatterned bikini top and a wrap-around skirt.

And who can blame her, for he is mouthing words that translate into English as, “I will take you to that place.”

Yes, V.K., yes.

Khanna has given us many such moments of combustibility. There is his upright, wronged husband in Achanak (1973) and his nasty, moustachioed dacoit in Mera Gaon Mera Desh (1971). There is a double role in Lahu Ke Do Rang (1979). There are at least two glorious leg-baring instances, one from Shaque (1976), a drama about the corrosive effect of suspicion on a marriage, and another from the trashy crime movie Maha Badmaash (1977), whose villain, one Mogambo, was resurrected in name in Mr India 10 years later.

Khanna has done more than strut about and nuzzle with various beauties, of course. He has delivered the goods as a villain, a romantic hero, a wronged man and later as a troubled soul in offbeat films (for example, Aruna Raje’s Rihaee, 1988, and Gulzar’s Lekin, 1990). If he hadn’t checked out of the movie business between 1982 and 1987 to pursue Bhagwan Rajneesh, what could have been?

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LOUNGE THE CINEMA ISSUE ESSAY | SANJUKTA SHARMA

An inspiration to some of India’s greatest actors,

DILIP KUMAR is unmatched in craft

Dark spirit: Dilip Kumar and Motilal (as Chunni Babu) in Bimal Roy’s Devdas (1955).

g

rief swelled between his lines.

The Dilip Kumar characters that occupy every fan’s mind are from the films he did from the late 1940s to 1960. Dilip in Andaz, Ashok in Babul, Vijay in Jogan, Shamu in Deedar, the eponymous Devdas, Devendra/Anand in Madhumati, Ganga in Gunga Jumna—they are self-conscious, egotistic and rebellious characters, but what sets them apart is an intricate self-pity. The great actor found his energy in this doomed combination; in their being wronged.

Indians love sad stories. The sweet, sorrowful film song is sweeter after two pegs.

There is veneration and solipsism in the way people say in casual conversation, “Dilip Kumar is the ultimate tragedy king.” A random search on Google Trends revealed Devdas’ angry alibi for dipsomania in Bimal Roy’s 1955 film—“Kaun kambakht hai jo bardaasht karne ke liye peetaa hai…”—was more searched (between 2005 and 2011) than Manmohan Singh. So Yusuf Khan from Peshawar (now in Pakistan), besides being one of our greatest actors, is perhaps also one of our drunk-surfing favourites. Statistics can’t prove that.

Then there is the unquantifiable oeuvre spread over more than 60 films. That number is thin compared to most male superstars of Hindi cinema. Dilip Kumar chose to work less, and work immersively.

After his films with Mehboob Khan in the 1940s (Andaz, Aan) and Bimal Roy in the 1950s (Devdas, Madhumati)—two directors who shaped a lot of what he was to mature into—Dilip Kumar progressively became involved in every aspect of film-making.

“Nitin Bose, who directed Gunga Jumna, was a proxy director almost,” says Sanjit Narwekar, author of the book Dilip Kumar: The Last Emperor, which came out in 2002, the year the actor turned 80. For Gunga Jumna, Dilip Kumar himself cast a teenage boy to play the young Ganga. He rehearsed with the boy for months. For him, it was an exercise in acting. By sculpting the young Ganga, he made the character more convincing and detailed for himself. In later films, he would often ask directors to shoot his back to the camera because he wanted to test his voice as an emoting tool. Dilip Kumar’s films are free of the obsessive attention that the camera often gives to a star’s face making close-ups meaningless.

Journalist Udaya Tara Nayar, who is writing Dilip Kumar’s autobiography with him— due to be released soon—recalls what she saw on the sets of Subhash Ghai’s Saudagar (1991)—one of Dilip Kumar’s last roles, a patchy phase beginning with Manoj Kumar’s Kranti (1981), when he came back to films after a six-year hiatus. Nayar says: “He has the habit of observing what is going on while a shot is being set up. So a shot was ready to be taken, Subhash Ghai called him to the set. Dilip saab said with the lighting that was set up, his moustache would not be visible.”

Ashok Mehta, the cinematographer, retested, and lit up the shot differently to ensure it was visible.

By the 1960s, Dilip Kumar was trapped in his own image—tragedy was in his veins.

Around 1966, he frequently visited a psychiatrist in London who helped him overcome a short but intense bout of clinical depression. The doctor prescribed staying away from the melancholic roles. He took the advice seriously and forced a change of template. The buffoon in films like Gopi (1970) backfired—ill-chosen, slapdash and devoid of soul, some of these films were box-office whimpers. But during that period, another film won the fan back.

Abdul Rashid Kardar’s Dil Diya Dard Liya (1966) is a petered down Wuthering Heights. As Shankar, he had to find Heathcliff’s dark beats in Naushad’s music and Shakil Badayuni’s lyrics (Koi sagar dil ko bahalata nahin; Phir teri kahani yaad ayi).

Dizzy in love with Waheeda Rehman’s gorgeous Roopa, Dilip Kumar gave the battered lover’s role all the gravitas.

Satyajit Ray had famously called Dilip Kumar “the ultimate method actor”. A few years older than Marlon Brando, who is considered the greatest method actor ever, Dilip Kumar’s obsession with over-rehearsed histrionics made him an idol for famous Indian actors who have followed the kind of dramatic pitch that they saw in Dilip Kumar. They are actors who have largely been arbiters of their own careers.

Amitabh Bachchan, Naseeruddin Shah and Kamal Haasan talk profusely about imitating the Dilip Kumar of 1940s and 1950s— they have moved through some of their own best work, aware of Dilip Kumar’s record and potential.

Acting was Ashok Kumar’s gift to him.

After he took up a job at Bombay Talkies in

1940—for the money, as he has said in interviews—he watched Ashok Kumar on set every day. Devika Rani christened him in the early 1940s at her Bombay Talkies office, then in Pune, because then a Muslim name was anathema to producers. Ashok Kumar even gave him formal lessons on acting. In 1944, when Dilip Kumar’s first film Jwar Bhata, a musical romance, released, the critics were largely indifferent. In the late 1940s, Mela and Andaz swung his career around.

Raj Kapoor was already on the rise and Dev Anand was to arrive two years later. The charismatic matinee idol in Hindi cinema was born at this time, as was the steely, sensitive and mindful Nehruvian hero. Lord Meghnad Desai overstretches this idea by deconstructing Dilip Kumar as the epitome of the Nehruvian man in his book Nehru’s Hero: Dilip Kumar in the Life of India (2004).

Women loved Dilip Kumar. Up to his 30s, he was tall and wiry but he always looked older than his age—the ingrained seriousness shadowing his high forehead. Sometimes a clump of hair covered the forehead.

The smile deepened his eyes. Rinki Roy, director Bimal Roy’s daughter, recalls with glee: “We lived in the same area in Bombay and every time we saw his car pass by, a blue Impala, we would swoon. I remember the car number; 2424.” Dilip Kumar’s love affairs with Kamini Kaushal and later Madhubala were long, much publicized and heartbreaking. In his early 40s, he married actor Saira Banu, 20 years younger than him.

His early life was fairly humdrum. Soon after he graduated from college, the fortunes of his family of fruit merchants in Mumbai’s Crawford Market ebbed. Yusuf had to quickly find a job. The 17-year-old set up a sandwich stall in Pune’s Wellingdon Club, a British army club. A passionate cook already (film journalists of that era say that while Dev Anand picked on one roti and a bowl of salad for a meal, Dilip Kumar’s sets had a wide spread, usually his favourite Awadhi style of kebabs and biryani, for everyone), Yusuf learnt how to make sandwiches the English way. The stall became popular. A group of ladies who used to visit the stall would fondly call him “chico”, a “lad” in Spanish. Saira Banu often still calls him “chico”.

Pakistan made Dilip Kumar their own— it’s a country he has never lost despite having shifted from there when he was a young boy. But Mumbai remains his home.

Through the 1980s, he faced unfair public scrutiny from the Hindu right. A friend of the Congress party and a former nominated member of the Rajya Sabha, he was never in electoral politics. His secularism, questioned on many occasions, is in the broadest sense of the word—a philanthropist, he has fought against the censorship establishment, and for freedom and human dignity.

In Gunga Jumna, the censors wanted the last words of his character, “Hey Ram”, cut— how could Dilip Kumar, a Muslim, use the same last words as Mahatma Gandhi, even if it was only on screen? In the 1980s, he was accused of being a Pakistani spy based on some bizarre grounds. He was the target of the late Shiv Sena leader Bal Thackeray’s ire when Pakistan bestowed its highest honour, the Nishaan-e-Imtiaz, on him. By then, he was in his 70s, and unwilling to fight.

Now, on rare occasions, the 90-year-old actor appears in commemorative photo shoots or visits celebrity parties with Saira Banu by his side. Most of the time, says Nayar based on her close interactions with him, he loves watching sports on TV or reading newspapers and books. His blog is a casual chronicle of the people who visit him, or friends he has lost over the years. “When it comes to films, Dilip saab does not miss a Rajkumar Hirani film even if it is on TV,” Nayar says.

His clipped, halting manner of speech, in proficient Hindi, Urdu or English, gives away much of him. He has chosen his passions mindfully, and chiselled them to exemplary standards.

Dilip Kumar is beautiful. For a fan like me, there is no other way of saying it. sanjukta.s@livemint.com

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Best couples The rare meeting of chemistry and biology

In no order of importance, our favourite pairings in Hindi movies are as follows. Waheeda Rehman and Guru Dutt, unforgettable in Kaagaz Ke Phool even though they don’t live happily ever after. Waheeda Rehman and Sunil Dutt in Mujhe Jeeno Do and Reshma Aur Shera. Raj Kapoor and Nargis, with Barsaat at the top of the list. Dev Anand and Nutan, especially in Tere Ghar Ke Samne. Shashi Kapoor and Sharmila Tagore, although he kept getting paired with Nanda. Kapoor and Amitabh Bachchan, as warring brothers in Deewaar, as partners in crime in Do Aur Do Paanch and Shaan. Bachchan and Rekha (Mr Natwarlal, Silsila). In fact, is there any woman Bachchan didn’t look good with?

Anil Kapoor and Amrita Singh in Chameli Ki Shaadi and Saaheb. Shah Rukh Khan and Kajol in every movie in which they appeared. Irrfan Khan and Konkona Sen Sharma in Life In A… Metro. Irrfan Khan and Tabu in Maqbool. Farooq Shaikh and Deepti Naval, the parents you wish you had. Dharmendra, with whomever he smouldered against. Dilip Kumar and Madhubala, better in Tarana than in Mughal-e-Azam. Madhubala and Ashok Kumar in Howrah Bridge; Madhubala and Kishore Kumar in Chalti Ka Naam Gaadi; Madhubala and Dev Anand in Jaali Note (what a professional). Kareena Kapoor and Shahid Kapoor in Jab We Met, about a couple that gets together after many adventures, performed by a couple on the verge of a break-up. Shankar Nag and Neena Gupta in Utsav, whose tangles inspire Vatsyayana to write the Kama Sutra. Kamal Haasan and Sridevi in Sadma and Zara Si Zindagi, having already proven their incredible comfort with each other in Tamil cinema. Rishi Kapoor and Neetu Singh (of course), but also Rishi Kapoor and Dimple Kapadia (better Saagar than Bobby). Dimple Kapadia and Vinod Khanna in Insaaf and Lekin; Dimple Kapadia and Jackie Shroff in Kaash and, heck, even Ram Lakhan. Sanjeev Kumar and Tanuja in Anubhav. Govinda and Kader Khan in the David Dhawan comedies (or is that a love triangle?). Madhuri Dixit and Anil Kapoor, made for each other. Ashwini Kalsekar and Vinay Pathak in Johnny Gaddaar, looking like they’d been married forever.

Ditto Shefali Shah and Manoj Bajpai in Satya. Aishwarya Rai and Hrithik Roshan, he brought warmth to her icy eyes in Dhoom: 2 and Jodhaa Akbar. Ajay Devgn and Kangana Ranaut in Once Upon a Time in Mumbaai. Ranbir Kapoor, hungry for love, no matter who he is with.

Two to tango: Farooq Shaikh and Deepti Naval in Sai Paranjpye’s Chashme Buddoor (1981).

Horror of horrors Creaking doors, heaving bosoms and that scary mask

The set-up would usually be the same: a woman bathing, a creaking door, thunder and lightning, and the camera travelling inordinately long before reaching the woman. A screech, followed by a close-up of a disfigured face, and tonnes of orange paint depicting a splash of blood—this was the horror genre of the 1980s and 1990s. The Ramsay Brothers, pioneers in the field, used shocking visuals as a means to scare despite low budgets and poor production values; by the time Ram Gopal Varma started to frighten people, technological advancement helped him use sudden sound for the same effect. But the combination of mysticism, mythology and moral positioning ended with the horror of the 1990s.

In the Historical Dictionary of Horror Cinema, Peter Hutchings described the Ramsay Brothers as the “closest thing to horror specialists that Indian cinema ever had”. They made films like 1984’s Purana Mandir, in which the monster disrobes women before killing them, and Bandh Darwaza (1990), where a vampire-like thing would emerge from a coffin to haunt unsuspecting youngsters (for some reason, young lovers from these films would always choose to romance in an abandoned temple at night). In Veerana (1988), a girl is possessed by a spirit and goes about seducing and killing people. In Purani Haveli (1989), a bear-like creature keeps necking unsuspecting women, and there are dialogues like: “Maut ke andheron mein zindagi ke ujale ki talash mein hoon (In the darkness of death, I am searching for the light of life)”.

The B- and C-grade films gave fringe actors like Puneet Issar, Mohnish Bahl, Arti Gupta and Priti Sapru, among others, a chance to display their histrionics. Sex was central to the plot—the curse of death in Purana Mandir comes with childbirth which is, you guessed it, a consequence of sex—and not just to titillate. The man who usually “presented” these films had a name with an attitude: F.U. Ramsay.

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Style quotient Little to do with fashion, and

intense and lyrical. Anil Biswas, who produced the finest of these in the 1940s, the golden era of Hindi film music, had few hits. Even big projects like the Indo-Russian Pardesi (1957) didn’t make any money. He retired early, in 1963, attributing his decision to declining musical standards and ethics in the Bombay film world. The unfortunate genius is remembered today only by Dil jalta hai (Pehli Nazar, 1944) and Seene mein sulagte hain armaan (Tarana, 1951).

Primarily self-taught, Biswas ran away from Calcutta to Bombay in 1935, and was instantly noticed as a music director. Independent assignments came pouring in after Dharm Ki Devi. Pujari more mandir mein aao, sung by singer-actors Surendra and Bibbo in Jagirdar (1937) and Hum aur tum aur ye khushi, sung by Surendra and Wahidan Bai (actor Nimmi’s mother) for Alibaba (1940), were his early hits.

The blockbuster of all times, Kismat (1943), really changed things: Door hato aye duniyawalon, Hindustan humara hai and Dheere dheere aa re baadal were anthems. He launched careers, either by giving singers their first film songs or first major hits: Zohra, Begum Akhtar, Mukesh, Roshanara Begum, Lata Mangeshkar, Talat Mahmood and Sudha Malhotra.

Biswas missed the opportunity of having heavyweights K.L. Saigal and Noorjehan sing his composition Jeevan sapna toot gaya—the film had to be shelved owing to Saigal’s ill-health and Noorjehan’s departure after Partition.

never short on trends

Nahin Sunder, nahin,” she says, covering her lips lest they betray her. An expression that combines karmic shock and worldly disbelief, a sequinned sari with a high-necked, sleeveless blouse and funky armlets. An elaborate hairdo, big jhumkas that protest sweetly while she sobs like only a Hindi film heroine can. That is Vyjayanthimala as Radha in Sangam (1964), when fate announced that she would marry Raj Kapoor and not Gopal, her true love, played by Rajendra Kumar. Her saris—worn carelessly, sweepingly, lovingly, as she twisted twigs and sang with Kumar earlier in the film—suddenly acquired a formality and mature sensuousness. Both looks rocked and they had little to do with fashion’s haughtiness.

Cut to the Sadhana Cut, the frilly fringe of the 1960s heroine, which in Waqt (1965) veiled and unveiled her coy desire for Sunil Dutt even as Raaj Kumar watched with melancholic longing.

Now don’t cut. Stitch instead a filmi collage or direct one of your own takes on style—Zeenat Aman’s flower-powered look with tinted glasses, likhai-printed kurtis and flower garlands in Hare Rama Hare Krishna (1971); Jaya Bhaduri’s white cotton saris with heavy Banarasi zari borders in Abhimaan (1973); Neetu Kapoor’s flaring bellbottoms worn with awfully short, front-knotted blouses in Parvarish (1977), Rekha’s plain China silk saris worn with cap-sleeve (they were incidentally called mega sleeves) blouses in Silsila (1981), Yash Chopra’s assorted heroines, on permanent loyalty programmes, cavorting in white bling, or Sridevi’s very sexy, blue diaphanous sari in Mr India (1987).

A standing ovation for Madhuri Dixit’s enviable choli collection—the dhak dhak of fantastic cardiac symphony in Beta (1992), Ek do teen’s shimmering, sequinned choli-top in Tezaab (1988), the choli of all decades in Khalnayak’s Choli ke peechhe kya hai (1993) and the heavily embellished blockbuster purple blouse in three-quarter sleeves worn with a matching purple sari for Didi tera devar deewana in Hum Aapke Hain Koun... (1994) that formally turned this country’s shaadi fashion into an industry. In our collective and individual minds, these styles form a clear blur that had little to with fashion’s reasons or seasons, yet became trendy, dictating our wardrobe choices.

Bollywood has always been creating and curating its own fashion. Of course when Aki Narula served his mad and merry patchwork kurtis for Rani Mukerji in Bunty Aur Babli (2005) and Manish Malhotra gave the chiffon sari a reason to look beyond Yash Chopra’s virginal enslavement, the place of these designers in Bollywood’s style history got underlined. Yet, there was something compellingly freer (Saira Banu in Junglee, 1961) and fiercer (Mumtaz in Brahmachari, 1968) in Indian style in the days of costume directors Laxman Shelke and Bhanu Athaiya, respectively—theirs was called the costume and wardrobe department—than it is today. Never mind Priyanka Chopra’s fashionable fire in Fashion (2008) or Dostana (2008).

There is something sexy and alluring about “unstyled style” that beats much ado about the form, fit and fashion of a pretty gown flown from Paris—something about a desi mix free of the seasonal look-book. The reason why Kareena Kapoor’s salwars worn with T-shirts in Jab We Met (2007) and Vidya Balan’s Charulata blouses in Parineeta (2005) became hysterical hits, as compared to Sonam Kapoor’s Aisha.

We are a filmi nation, sold to the jugaadu mix and match of Bollywood style. Sorry, Sonam Kapoor.

Lata Mangeshkar Voice of India

Did she slay the competition? Did she squash her sister Asha Bhosle’s chances? Was she too aggressive? Questions abound about Lata Mangeshkar, but about her vocal abilities there is no doubt or debate. Read our essay on the impossibility of drawing up a list of great Hindi songs without mentioning Lata on page 9.

Sanjeev Kumar Effortless, versatile, powerful

Haribhai could effortlessly make you cry, laugh, feel pain, sometimes all of it at the same time. If the man-next-door Amol Palekar was usually the victim of circumstances, portly, man-next-door Kumar could be the victim or could be in complete charge. Through the 1970s and first half of the 1980s, before his untimely death, Sanjeev Kumar held his own irrespective of how smart or silly his role was, or who he shared screen space with. He could ridiculously sing Thande thande paani se semi-naked in Pati Patni Aur Woh (1978) or have you in tears from laughter in a double role as twins who are constantly being mistaken for the other (Angoor, 1982). You feel his shame and anger as he shivers in the wind that blows his shawl away in Sholay, cheer for him as he seeks revenge in Qatl (1986) with a murder, and sympathize with him because of his cheating wife in Silsila (1981). He taught a generation of actors how to use their voice and why it did not matter what your waist size is.

Ram Gopal Varma Best viewed in flashback mode (before 2005), but what flashbacks indeed

Amol Palekar

It’s possible to pinpoint the moment when Ram Gopal Varma went from being in the driver’s seat to a receding object in the rear-view mirror. That moment arrived with Naach in 2004. For every movie since then, Varma has relied more on atmospherics than screenplays. He has occasionally chomped on his own tail, like the mythical ouroboros, rehashing movies he has made or produced. He has severely abused the hand-held camera, much after other film-makers have overcome their love for the technique.

However, Varma has also given us some truly remarkable films. The movies he directed and produced in the 1990s and early 2000s under his cheekily named banner The Factory were a much-needed counterweight to the fluff and escapism of the decade.

Aamir Khan’s career-best performance is in Rangeela (1995), Varma’s fairy-tale tribute to the movies. Satya (1998) and Company (2002) are accomplished explorations of organized crime in Mumbai. Varma elevated the horror film to respectability with Raat and Bhoot and nurtured the talents of Sriram Raghavan (Ek Hasina Thi, 2004) and Shimit Amin (Ab Tak Chhappan, 2004). It was too good to last.

Your next-door neighbour on the big screen

Amitabh Bachchan towered over the 1970s and 1980s, but a shorter and altogether happier man didn’t do too badly either.

Anjan Srivastava might have essayed cartoonist R.K. Laxman’s Common Man creation on television, but Amol Palekar had already embodied the character many years ago in his movies with Basu Chatterjee and Basu Bhattacharya. Palekar, who cut his teeth in Mumbai’s experimental theatre, first played the little man with big dreams in Chatterjee’s Rajnigandha (1974). His everyday looks, foolish grin and unbridled enthusiasm were used to superb effect in films like Chhoti Si Baat (1975) and Chitchor while he showed off his comic chops in Gol Maal (1979). Palekar was far more interesting when cast against type: a possessive minder of Smita Patil’s character in Bhumika (1977), a manipulative factory owner in Tarang (1984) and a two-faced movie star in Khamosh (1985). Palekar also directed a bunch of offbeat Hindi and Marathi films, including Thodasa Rumani Ho Jayen (1990) and Bangarwadi (1995), before running out of steam in the 1990s. One of the enduring images of middle cinema in the 1970s is of Palekar in Gharaonda (1977), wandering around Mumbai with his lady love (played

by Zarina Wahab) and whistling a tune together, without a care in the world.

Dharmendra Brawn and beauty

Broad-chested and dreamy-eyed—no other actor has combined muscle and mush like Dharmendra, as is evident from our essay on the superstar on page 19.

The interval Just when we were

Rebirth movies

Or, if you can’t get it right in this life, try again in the next

beginning to settle down…

There are various theories on why Hindi movies are split down the middle by the interval. One is that filmgoers need to empty their bladders, especially since movies tend to run for well over 120 minutes (more often than not for no reason at all). Another is that the interval allows word of mouth to ferment, whether by the soda fountain or inside the bathroom stall. A third, more serious explanation by film scholar Lalitha Gopalan in her 2002 book Cinema of Interruptions is that the mid-point break “defers resolutions, postpones endings and doubles beginnings”.

Although movies are now shorter, the interval will survive simply because multiplexes love the mid-movie rupture more than single screens— more opportunities to shove overpriced snacks and drinks down your throat.

Anil Biswas The genius who made pain and yearning sound beautiful

Hailed by critics and connoisseurs, his melodies were rounded,

COURTESY YASH RAJ FILMS

Next-door norms: Rani Mukerji’s kurtis in Shaad Ali’s Bunty Aur Babli (2005) dictated retail fashion; and (top) Amol Palekar and Utpal Dutt in Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Gol Maal (1979).

Who needs science fiction when you can be born again and do in the next life what you couldn’t in this one?

Linked closely to themes of lost-andfound, lookalikes and doubling is the rebirth movie, in which good takes a whole life cycle to triumph over evil.

Like the horror film and its subset, the rebirth movie flies in the face of rationality even as it holds out the prospect of justice, happiness and peace. Usually, it’s a painting that triggers off memories of previous avatars, such as in Bimal Roy’s Madhumati (1958), ripped off by Farah Khan in Om Shanti Om 49 years later. Or else, nightmares do the trick, as in Subhash Ghai’s Karz (1980), in which Rishi Kapoor’s singer avenges the murder of his previous avatar. If a character loses sleep, tosses and turns in bed, and sees bad dreams in lurid colours, you know that it’s time to jump into the time- travel machine, as did Rakesh Roshan’s riveting vendetta drama Karan Arjun (1995).

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English lyrics in Hindi song

ESSAY | AAKAR PATEL

Singer and actor

Sometimes crazy, sometimes awful, but always memorable

KISHORE KUMAR belongs to every age, every generation

THE HINDU

Age­defying: Kishore Kumar’s music is not rooted in a period or mood, and is the most remixed among songs by male playback singers.

I am a disco dancer, sings Mithun Chakraborty, with a twist of his shimmering pelvis in Disco Dancer (1982), nimbly propelling himself to superstardom.

All izz well, sing the three idiots in 3 Idiots (2009), and the phrase becomes an urban motto that spreads like forest fire.

English phrases in Hindi film songs have the peculiar tendency of becoming iconic lines, acquiring radioactive half-lives and instant recall value. Think Amitabh Bachchan in a top hat stepping out of an egg and performing an exceptional verbal pirouette in English, before declaring that his name is Anthony Gonsalves. Or the radiantly beautiful Helen (watched by a dapper Ashok Kumar) singing Mera naam chin chin choo.../Raat chaandni main aur tu, hello mister how do you do? in Geeta Dutt’s driving swing jazz number from Howrah Bridge (1958). Sridevi channelizes that spirit and pushes it to its slapstick extreme almost 30 years later in Mr India, singing Hong Kong King Kong, I see no see, you see Lucy, assi tussi. In some kind of postcolonial retribution, English in Hindi film songs is used mainly to provide absurd, screwy humour. Sometimes that humour can be beautifully romantic, like Kishore Kumar and Nutan’s musical sparring in C A T Cat, Cat Maane Billi in Dilli Ka Thug (1958).

Not every English incursion is good (though it’s almost always memorable), and Akshay Kumar and Rekha’s In the night, no control from Khiladiyon Ka Khiladi (1996) is perhaps the worst it can get. From Rekha’s excruciating opening line—even naughty girls need luuurve—to the tune, lifted from Madonna’s Secret and Laura Branigan’s Self Control, the song has the charm of a nail being dragged across a blackboard.

But the usage of English is now losing its clownish aspect and becoming more mainstream. From the earnest Give me some sunshine from 3 Idiots to the dance-floor favourites It’s the time to disco or Radha likes to party, the mix of English and vernacular is the new urban reality. A phenomenon best exemplified in Gangs of Wasseypur (2012): Mera joota fake leather/Dil chichha-ledar/Wo humse poochey whether/I like the weather, or, Jo bhi wrongwa hai usey/Set right-wa karo ji/Naahin loojiye ji hope/Thoda fightwa karo ji...

Honorary mention: The 1975 song Julie from the film of the same name, which is perhaps the first Hindi film song entirely in English. It’s a romantic song with nursery-rhyme lyrical simplicity, sung by Preeti Sagar.

Kishore Kumar He made college boys cry Kishore Kumar travelled the emotional spectrum from immense joy to uninhibited sorrow. Which is why boys do sniffle when he gets going, says our essay (left).

i

wish I could properly explain to the foreigners reading Lounge what Kishore Kumar means to Indians.

The easy and accurate way to do this is to say he was an actor and our most famous singer, who died at the age of 57, depriving us of at least another five years of his talent.

By way of biography, he was the youngest of three Bengali but Hindispeaking brothers, of whom the eldest, Ashok, became a filmstar in the 1940s.

This drew his brothers also into Bombay’s cinema, which was not then called Bollywood.

Kishore says what he wanted was only to sing, but he was forced to act as well because producers thought, correctly, that Ashok’s charisma would transfer.

His singing model was Kundan Lal Saigal, whose pathic style he copied for his early work. Saigal died in 1947 and Kishore recorded his first song a few months later, aged 19.

As an actor he was very animated and physical, in the fashion of Hollywood performers like Danny Kaye. This was unusual among Indian lead actors whose stance was usually petrified because they cleaved to a fixed, heroic persona irrespective of the script.

Because of this physicality, he was unpredictable for the audience and charismatic. His only equal as a character actor was Mehmood. When together, their lunacy swept aside even the central characters, like poor Sunil Dutt in Padosan, and Shashi Kapoor in Pyar Kiye Jaa, two of Bollywood’s five finest comedies.

He stopped acting at some point, showing that his dislike of acting was real.

His singing had by now made him the Saigal of his time, and more.

A couple of years before he died, he gave more than a glimpse of his eccentricity to Pritish Nandy in what is my favourite Bollywood interview. It shows him as a proper star, unfathomable and unreachable, and dead at the height of his fame.

This, then, was Kishore Kumar.

But it isn’t a satisfying description. All

right, consider this, foreign reader: Make a list of all the songs you loved from childhood to puberty to adulthood and today. All the hit numbers by all the bands from The Beatles and Frank Sinatra in the 1960s to Led Zeppelin and Abba in the 1970s to Duran Duran in the 1980s to whoever else you listened to as your interests shifted over the decades and as you matured. Now imagine that half of all those hits were sung by one man.

That man is Kishore Kumar. Not just a great singer for many desis, but THE singer. The voice most remembered in antaksharis across the land.

He gave hundreds of millions of illiterate and half-literate Indians including me their first sampling of good poetry.

Lines they could feel unlike the verse of Shakespeare, Milton and Blake they were forced to memorize but which didn’t draw out any particular emotion.

His voice, extroverted after he let go Saigal, was a great vehicle for the cool lines of Gulzar and those of Sahir Ludhianvi and Anand Bakshi.

His voice was a presence which understood what you felt and which expressed it better than you could yourself.

Kishore Kumar made college boys cry.

In a culture where the sexes casually mingled little till a few years ago, he brought some element of romance, even if it was fantasy, into the lives of generations of pathetically grateful young men.

Few are the rooms of hostels in India which have not hosted nights of cheap whisky and Kishore on the cassette player.

His best songs for me are the grand ones, those with sweep. Not situational songs but those about the bigger things, the important things, the sort of songs that become anthems. Almost inevitably, they contained our Hindustani word for life.

Songs optimistic (Zindagi aa raha hoon main), and pessimistic (Zindagi ke safar mein guzar jaate hain jo maqam), on loss (Tere bina zindagi se koi shikwa to nahin), and on fate (Zindagi ke safar mein raahi, milte hain bichhad jaane ko).

His ability to appeal to many

generations, about which more later, is the reason why he came to dominate what is called remix, the fusion of a classic tune with modern arrangement.

The other thing about remix is, of course, the outrageous talent of R.D. Burman, a composer who wrote more hit tunes than Beethoven, The Beatles and Abba combined. But those songs need the temperament and style of Kishore Kumar.

Technically he was first rate and with great control, as someone with deep classical training (which he didn’t have) might be. He had that absolutely priceless asset vital for any singer of Indian music—the ability to convincingly communicate emotion.

The woman who sang with him most, Lata Mangeshkar, said in an interview a few months ago that Kishore had the most virile voice of any singer she knew. I hadn’t thought of that aspect to him, but when I read what she said I knew instantly what she meant.

His talent was so lightly held and so casually deployed that he could be astonishing even to his peers.

A story will illustrate this. Some years ago Pioneer editor Chandan Mitra interviewed Manna De and the subject turned to Kishore. De spoke of the time he was recording the duet Yeh Dosti for Sholay.

Kishore took the first line as the intro faded.

“His singing was so effortless,” De said, “and I was so awestruck that I almost missed my cue because I just stared at him.”

Kishore Kumar died 25 years ago but his voice is not dated. It is, in fact, current and because of that, unique.

Unlike Saigal from 75 years ago, Rafi from 50 years ago and Kailash Kher 25 years from now, Kishore’s singing isn’t rooted in a period and its particular mood.

This is why it isn’t received differently by the next generation.

The word Kishore means youth. Kishore is always of this time and he sings the song Indian.

Aakar Patel is a writer and a columnist. lounge@livemint.com

Obvious undertones: Saif Ali Khan and Akshay Kumar in Main Khiladi Tu Anari (1994).

Great bromances Beyond a great friendship lies true love In Silsila (1981), Amitabh Bachchan and Shashi Kapoor are in the shower together when one of them drops the soap. The other says he will not bend down to pick it up because of “what happened last time”. If the sexual innuendo is clear—never mind that the two are brothers in the film, which brings in other complications—it probably wasn’t when the film was made over 30 years ago. This bromance with sexual undertones will never fully be accepted by scriptwriters or directors, but seen in the modern-day context, these have been so obvious that they almost seem progressive. If romances are best told through songs, then Akshay Kumar does it with pelvic thrusts as he sings with Saif Ali Khan (whose shampooed hair blows sensuously) in the 1994 film Main Khiladi Tu Anadi: Ladki ladki karte karte ho na jayein diwane, aisa na ho ki hum khud ko hi na pehchanein (Let’s not go crazy over girls and forget who we really are). In Dharam Veer (1977), Jeetendra, effectively effeminate, sings to Dharmendra, dressed in a short skirt: Chodi yaaron ne duniya par yaar ki baah na chodi (Friends have died for each other but never let go of the other’s hand). Hoshang Merchant writes in the introduction to his book Yaraana: Gay Writing From South Asia: “In Mehboob’s Andaz, Nargis comes between Raj and Dilip…. In Raj Kapoor’s remake of it, Sangam, Raj loves Rajendra (Kumar). Rajendra loves Raj’s girl, Vyjayanthimala. Rajendra has to commit suicide to resolve the love triangle. In Sholay, it is the Amitabh-Dharmendra love story that is centre stage.”

Naushad

The Lucknow boy made the classical accessible When it comes to creating Indian raga-based movie songs, Naushad Ali is the first and the last.

To break rules, you need to know them. Setting new yardsticks, Naushad put Malkauns in Man tarpat Hari darshan ko aaj, Kedar in Bekas pe karam kijiye sarkar-e-madina and Bhairav in Mohe bhool gaye sanwariya. He worked with almost every playback singer, big or small. Great classical vocalists like Bade Ghulam Ali Khan, D.V. Paluskar and Amir Khan have sung his songs.

The Lucknow lad travelled a long way from Mala and Prem Nagar, his first 1940 releases, to Taj Mahal, his 200th movie. No composer can parallel his line-up of jubilee hits versus output, which includes Ratan, Shahjahan, Anmol Ghadi, Mela, Andaz, Deedar, Baiju Bawra, Aan, Uran Khatola, Mother India, Mughale-Azam and Gunga Jumna. Exploiting rural folk idioms, he maintained a beautiful balance between poise and grandiosity, sophistication and ornate orchestration.

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COURTESY SUBHASH CHHEDA

On a mission: Amjad Khan in Qurbani (1980).

Nadia

Hindi cinema’s fearless alpha-woman

By the time Wadia Movietone, a production behemoth in 1930s Bombay that factory-made action and stunt films, met Mary Ann Evans, she had a formidable résumé: horse rider, hunter, circus master and ballet dancer. She was born in Perth, Australia, in 1908 and grew up in Peshawar and the North-West Frontier Province in undivided India. She was ready to be a star.

Jamshed and Homi Wadia took their chance.

Nadia was first cast as a slave girl in the early 1930s in Desh Deepak. In 1935, she stormed the screen with figure-hugging pants, boots and a whip with Hunterwali. Producers were wary of this film, but the Wadias pushed their luck, and it was an instant hit. The blue-eyed white girl with a whip stood up for the Indian Everyman on screen—the beginning of a one-woman formula and an icon. In Hurricane Hansa (1937), she is an untouchable who speaks up, in Lootaru Lalna (1937), she is a crusader for Hindu-Muslim unity, in Punjab Mail (1939) and Diamond Queen (1940), she is a champion of women’s rights. In later films like Circus Queen (1959), Nadia straddled femininity and bravado with ease. Wadia Movietone has archived her legacy with great curatorial vigour.

Bimal Roy The real deal

Rickshaw pullers, murder convicts, low-caste women, haunted men—Bimal Roy’s cinema focused on real people and their universal conflicts. He was famously inspired by Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, but his idiom was unmistakably Indian. In such films as Madhumati, Sujata, Bandini, Devdas, Parineeta and Parakh, Roy dexterously wove together realism and melodrama, giving us understated films with shaded characters and complex explorations of moral and emotional dilemmas. His ear for music, realized perfectly by S.D. Burman, meant that he always made space for a great tune. Jalte hain jiske liye, the song from Sujata in which Sunil Dutt serenades Nutan over the telephone, is both simple and sublime, like much of Roy’s cinema.

Waheeda Rehman A black-and-white star with shades of grey

She played the dancer, the professional seductress whose virtue is fair game, the corner of the triangle again and again. Each time, Waheeda Rehman did it differently. Like many actors of the 1950s, she had the ability to mine deep reserves of joy and sorrow, to suggest an ocean of emotions churning beneath the surface, a dimension not immediately apparent. She made her debut as a woman with shifty morals in CID. She was a large-hearted prostitute in Pyaasa; an actor wounded by her impossible love for her married director in Kaagaz Ke Phool; a professional dancer in Teesri Kasam and Mujhe Jeene Do; a nurse who falls in love with her patients in Khamoshi; a stifled Bharatanatyam dancer in one of her best films, Guide. In all these films, her intelligence and empathy were as much in the foreground as her luminous beauty, which

survived from black and white film to colour. She was no poppet, however, as is evident from a previously unpublished interview on pages 12-13.

Ashok Mehta Light was sacred for this hands-on legend

Those who have worked with Ashok Mehta say he would always be quietly, furiously at work, hidden under his trademark hat. Off sets, he was a wryhumoured mentor. Mehta’s adventure with natural light spans all genres—Shyam Benegal’s Trikal, Girish Karnad’s Utsav, Shekhar Kapur’s Bandit Queen, Subhash Ghai’s Khal Nayak, M.F. Husain’s Gaja Gamini. The last of the hands-on cinematographers in Hindi cinema whose style influenced many of this generation, Mehta died in August. He directed his own film, Moksha, in 2001.

Born in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in 1946, he sold boiled eggs on the street in Mumbai before he became an assistant to cinematographer M.J. Muqaddam. In 1967, he filled in for a Shyam Benegal documentary when Muqaddam fell ill. He worked until 2011, leaving behind an ethos that resisted artificial light tricks and respected the camera’s ability to create sweeping beauty. Revisit Bandit Queen to see his best work—subtle and aesthetically uncompromised.

Nargis A natural wonder

As colourful off screen as she was on it, Nargis was one of a kind. Read our essay (on page 15) on 10 ways to regard the 1950s star, best known for her association with Raj Kapoor and her role in Mehboob Khan’s Mother India.

Sridevi She wears the pants

Tamil, Telugu and Hindi—Sridevi conquered three film industries with her industry. She started off as a child actor in Tamil films and returned to the screen as a pleasantly plump, plum-nosed adult who displayed sensitivity and intelligence in the urban morality tales and rural dramas in which she appeared. In the 1980s, she moved to Mumbai via Hyderabad, and worked her way through egregious, misogynistic roles that required her to wear leather pants, dance alongside pots and be slapped around by the leading man (usually Jeetendra). By the end of the 1980s, Srivedi had extracted her revenge.

Her nose got sharper, the acting assumed depth, the popularity moved upwards despite her grating, childlike voice (usually dubbed for her by Naaz). She powered movies like Nagina (1986), Mr. India (1987), Chaalbaaz (1989) and Chandni (1989) at the box office. Her off-screen image, of a socially inhibited woman who comes alive only before the camera, was dexterously channelled by director Gauri Shinde in the star’s comeback movie, English Vinglish (2012).

Child stars A star no higher than the knee

Child actors have provided welcome distraction from the antics of marquee stars, even if some of them are so annoying that you want to jump into the screen and

smack them. They are most trying when they open their mouths to spout profound dialogue. Chetan Anand dispenses with dialogue in Aakhri Khat (1966), a movie that, several years before Baby’s Day Out, lets an adorable infant loose in the city.

Curly-haired Buntu takes off as far as his plump little legs can carry him after his mother dies, wandering through the streets of Mumbai and depending on the kindness of strangers to get by.

There are the chirpy children from Prakash Arora’s Boot Polish (1954), played by Naaz and Ratan Kumar, who smoothly blend melodrama and realism. Then there are the real street children playing themselves with rare honesty in Mira Nair’s poignant Salaam Bombay! (1988). There are the adorable tots from Shekhar Kapur’s Masoom (1983) and Mr India, both rare instances of movies that let children be children. There are the smarter-than-adults diminutive souls from Santosh Sivan’s Halo (1996), and Amole Gupte’s tearinducing hero from Stanley Ka Dabba (2011).

Amjad Khan Gabbar Singh was only the beginning

Few actors have both ultra-violent dacoit and effete king on their resume. But then, there have been few performers like Amjad Khan, who was a convincing villain, a charming comic, and a nuanced character actor whenever he got the opportunity.

Two years after playing the arch villain in Sholay (1975), Khan appeared in Satyajit Ray’s Shatranj Ke Khilari as Kathak-loving aesthete and Awadh ruler Wajid Ali Shah. He laboured away at a time of milk-white heroes and coal- black villains. His crisp diction, imposing bulk and ability to summon deep reserves of nastiness resulted in many seriously bad men parts, including in Muqaddar Ka Sikandar (1978), Mr Natwarlal (1979) and Barsaat Ki Ek Raat (1981), and those of dacoits, usually named something or the other Singh, such as in Jwalamukhi (1980).

In between, there were lighter roles, such as the wisecracking policeman in Qurbani (1980) who steals the show from Feroz Khan, Vinod Khanna and Zeenat Aman, Kama Sutra author Vatsyayana in the superb Utsav (1984), and the progressive lawyer in Chameli Ki Shaadi (1986) who unites two young lovers.

Rajinikanth There is truly nothing Rajini can’t do Such is the power of the southern superstar that he has inveigled himself into a list that celebrates

Hindi cinema.

Rajinikanth enlivened Mumbai cinema in the 1980s with his atrocious Hindi accent, cigarette flipping actions and the habit of whirling his sunglasses in a manner that, like Helen’s dance moves, is better seen than described. His closest rival in Tamil cinema, Kamal Haasan, also appeared in several Hindi films like Ek Duuje Ke Liye and Sanam Teri Kasam, but whereas Haasan was trying to prove a point that he was as good, if not better, than his northern counterparts, Rajinikanth was merely having fun. He sashayed his way through Andhaa Kanoon, John Jaani Janardhan and Chaalbaaz, reprised the glory in Hum, and then had his revenge with the success of the dubbed versions of Sivaji and Endhiran.

RD Burman Nobody did sexy as well as this ‘Western’ composer

For most of his career, from 1961-94, the wonder boy of film music was unfailingly accused of being “too Western” and a plagiarizer. His original score in the 1966 Shammi Kapoor film Teesri Manzil shattered every convention that composers and listeners honoured. The gifted son of S.D. Burman set new benchmarks in the Nasir Hussain musical—a sound, unparalleled in novelty and energy. Aaja, aaja, main hoon pyar tera, O haseena zulfonwali and O mere sona were followed by Piya tu ab to aaja (Caravan, 1971), Dum maro dum (Hare Rama Hare Krishna, 1971), Jaane jaan dhoondta phir raha (Jawani Deewani, 1972), Duniya mein logon ko (Apna Desh, 1972), Mehbooba (Sholay, 1975)—these are staggering hits even today. R.D. Burman’s “Indian” outputs in Amar Prem (1971), Aandhi (1975), Ghar (1978) and 1942—A Love Story (1994) quietened his harshest critics. They admitted to his dexterity and understanding of all kinds of music.

Kid you not: Partho Gupte in Amole Gupte’s Stanley Ka Dabba (2011).

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The life of

LATA MANGESHKAR is all guts and glory PHOTOGRAPHS

COURTESY ‘L ATA

MANGESHKAR...IN HER OWN VOICE’

BY

NASREEN MUNNI KABIR/NIYOGI BOOKS

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Thin and thick: Lata Mangeshkar has sung at least 27,000 songs in 36 languages; and (top, right) Lata with sister Asha Bhosle.

t’s a little difficult to write about Lata Mangeshkar when you’ve just heard news of the death of Shamshad Begum and you would rather think of Saiyan Dil Mein Aana Re than Saiyan Bina Ghar Suna. But one of the biggest reasons to love Lata is that the start of her success marks the best time in the history of the Hindi film song.

Lata is the Lata we know in a great part because of the genius music composers (all from different parts of India) she worked with and the astounding voices she sang alongside in Hindi film’s golden era, in the two decades after independence. Of course this doesn’t mean that Lata had nothing to do with her extraordinary success; all the singers and composers of that era were lucky, and gained much from being at the same place at the same time.

In books written about Lata, there’s often a separate section on the people she worked with. When fan boy Ganesh Anantharaman was granted an audience for his book Bollywood Melodies: A History of the Hindi Film Song, Lata shared memories of her fellow singers. She grew up humming K.L. Saigal’s songs and was deeply influenced by the man she believed was the only one among his contemporaries to have all the four qualities necessary for a good singer: a powerful voice, phenomenal range, the understanding of music and good diction. Mukesh was like a brother who moved her with the honesty of his singing. Mohammed Rafi had the finest voice with the maximum melody and articulated sadness beautifully, she believed.

Kishore Kumar was the best because he had energy, enthusiasm, gut feel and adaptability. “Most singers have musical limits,” she told Anantharaman. “Kishore is one playback singer without any limits.”

She was less complimentary about the female singers of her time.

Everyone’s favourite female voice Noorjehan was her inspiration and many believe Lata’s story might have been different if Noorjehan hadn’t moved to Pakistan after Partition. Lata tells Nasreen Munni Kabir, in Lata Mangeshkar…In Her Own Voice, how Noorjehan often called her from Karachi and asked her to sing Dheere se aaja ri ankhiyan mein. Soon telephone operators started eavesdropping on these musical calls between the two women. In the early years, Lata even made an effort to sing like Noorjehan, but if you ask me, Lata could have crushed any competition.

Her voice may have been thinner than the gorgeous deep throats of that era, but it was easily more versatile than any of her contemporaries (many including Lata believe Asha Bhosle is the more versatile one, I know). Think of any key word from

patriotic to devotional to heartbroken to children’s songs, and Lata will always make it to the top three of that list. Hers will be the only name that features on all the lists you can possibly make. Even Bhosle has said that her composer husband R.D. Burman gave the best romantic songs to her elder sister. Lata also had the most haunting voice of them all, literally. In The History of Indian Film Music, author Rajiv Vijayakar lists Lata’s rather substantial spooky songlist that began with Mahal in 1949 and went all the way up to Lekin in 1991.

But there are so many more reasons to love Lata. As I grow older in an India that doesn’t seem to budge to accommodate its women, I’ve come to respect Lata’s competitiveness and aggression. She had the stamina to stay put (without the assistance of alcohol), to fight her professional battles and hide her personal heartbreaks. She was one of those rare famous female film personalities who was never manipulated by a family member. Lata fought with Filmfare to create special awards categories for male and female playback singers. She fought with Raj Kapoor and Rafi over the issue of royalties. She argued with producers to get her real name on the gramophone record credits instead of the name of the actress.

Stories of her differences with Bhosle have been documented extensively. Even S.D. Burman and Lata didn’t talk for six years. In an interview with Mumbai Mirror on the occasion of her 83rd birthday, she confessed: “I have a fierce temper. I’ve mastered it over the years but when I’m angry, no one can force me to do anything I don’t want to.” I wish more professional Indian women would get angry like Lata.

Lata was just 13 when her father Deenanath Mangeshkar died in 1942. She tells Munni Kabir that she cried, then went completely silent, and then asked her mother:

Movie mothers Mommy dearest

It became a bit difficult to take Salim-Javed’s seminal dialogue exchange “Tumhare paas kya hai? Mere paas maa hai (What do you have that I don’t? I have mother)” seriously after a music channel spoof that replaced the query with a cheeky alternative: Can you repeat the question?

Scriptwriters Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar fruitfully explored the Oedipal relationship between a mother and her tortured son (played

by Amitabh Bachchan) in Deewaar and Trishul.

The long shadow cast by Bachchan over the movies has meant that Nirupa Roy will forever be the mother of all mothers—Vijay’s noble, widowed mother, who stands between a virtuous but poor life and a sinful but prosperous one.

Mother worship in the movies has allowed female actors like Durga Khote (Bobby, Mughale-Azam), Waheeda Rehman (Phagun, Trishul, Namak Halal) and Nanda (Ahista Ahista, Prem Rog) to stay employed even after they were declared past their prime date.

The flip side to mother worship is the strict, unbending mother (Lalita Pawar in Mr & Mrs 55; Dina Pathak in Khoobsoorat) or the rasping stepmother, best embodied by Aruna Irani in the Anil Kapoor starrer Beta.

Mothers and mothers-in-law have now moved to television. Screen moms are now as hip as their children, like Ratna Pathak Shah in Jaane Tu... Ya Jaane Na. They dress in kurtis and trousers, they wear funky spectacles on the top of their heads, and they don’t dictate their sons’

Mamma mia: Kirron Kher (centre) is mother to Abhishek Bachchan (left) in Dostana (2008). lives. Thanks, therefore, are in order to Kirron Kher, whose exaggerated maternal instincts in Dostana and Om Shanti Om helped bring back the son-obsessed, handkerchief-wringing mom, even though she was a figure of ridicule rather than respect.

Kher has also played one of the more complex mothers in Khamosh Pani—it isn’t technically an Indian film, but its Pakistani director, Sabiha Sumar, lives in India. Its scriptwriter Paromita

Vohra is Indian, as is one of the actors, Shilpa Shukla. Kher plays a troubled Pakistani mother who nurses a secret that erupts into the open when her son becomes a religious fundamentalist.

Film fathers Our most loved and most hated patriarchs

“Ofo daddy!”

You can picture the scene without resorting

“Where can I work? How do I earn money?”

She began acting and singing in Marathi films. Lata’s first big break was when composer Naushad thought she (and not more established singers such as Shamshad Begum) would be perfect as the voice of Nargis in 1949’s Andaz. Mukesh introduced them. Andaz got her a place in Barsaat, Raj Kapoor’s first hit, and when these two films along with Mahal were released in the same year, Lata’s name was forever carved in the history of Hindi cinema. In The Kapoors: The First Family of Indian Cinema, Madhu Jain writes, “Lata Mangeshkar was the aural incarnation of the poetic soul of Raj Kapoor in his early days.” She became another woman in white, says Jain.

Lata has logged at least 27,000 songs in 36 languages. In other words, she’s outlived and outworked all your male and female musical heroes. Manna Dey, the only other music legend from that era who is still alive, told Munni Kabir that “when Lataji sang with me, I was aware I had to improve my own singing because she was a perfect sort of singer”.

So many of our intimate memories are set to song courtesy Lata Mangeshkar. If I had to name one person in Hindi cinema who has given me the most happiness it would have to be Lata. I will always remember singing Hawa mein udta jaaye with my maternal grandmother, translating the lyrics of Jalta hai badan for American boys and teaching my toddler Chal mere ghode tik tik tik, Lara lappa and Ichak dana bichak dana. My mother still recalls a long phase in my youth when I answered her every question with a vintage Hindi song, many of them sung by Lata. Four generations of happy memories. Now that’s a worthy representative of the Voice of India. priya.r@livemint.com

to YouTube prompts. A young lass tosses her pretty head, stamps her foot and tells her father to stop running her life. The daddy in question is usually Nazir Hussain or Om Prakash. He is typically a wealthy man with a bungalow in the hills and a fondness for wide-bottomed cars and cigars. He hands across a blank cheque to the impoverished hero to kick him out of his daughter’s life, and invariably fails.

He can be a comic figure, like Utpal Dutt, whom Amol Palekar takes for a ride in Gol Maal, or Anupam Kher, whose eccentric millionaire in Dil Hai Ki Manta Nahin encourages his daughter to elope to find true love.

He can be a terrible so-and-so, usually Amrish Puri, unmoved by romance (Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge). If he is Prithviraj Kapoor, he can be both a judge (Awaara) or emperor Akbar himself (Mughal-e-Azam). He can be hidebound by honour (Dalip Tahil in Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak) or sometimes a willing participant in his daughter’s ruination, like Anupam Kher in Tezaab.

In the hands of contemporary film-makers, he becomes an even more complicated figure.

Dibakar Banerjee’s social climber thief in Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! finds that wherever he turns, he runs into his father, whether it’s in his criminal boss or in his business partner (the illusion is aided by a triple role for Paresh Rawal). All the gloves are off in Vikramaditya Motwane’s Udaan, in which Ronit Roy is chilling as an authoritarian, alcoholic father who insists that his son call him “sir”.

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KAMAT FOTO FLASH

and quite the disruption. Bachchan is there to steal the show and the necklace, and he does just that. In Jahan teri yeh nazar hai, from Kaalia, two crooks fight over the prize and the claim to being the best jewel thief.

P.L. Raj’s choreography lends Bachchan irreverence. In one smooth move, Bachchan breaks the Khan-heiress dancing couple and launches into a sequence that involves him clicking his fingers, twirling and doing something akin to changing two light bulbs simultaneously.

By the time Kaalia released in 1981, Raj already had more than 20 years of dancing and choreography experience under his belt. He had developed a style, the strongest features of which were the way in which a sequence began—the scene segueing into song organically—and how it added to the characterization.

Sample this: Shammi Kapoor rubs sleep from his eyes and looks out of a log-cabin window. Bad weather has confined him and Saira Banu to the cabin, and he expects to see the same bleary sky again. Instead, the storm has passed. He throws his head back and yells “Yahoo”. Saira Banu slides down a slope, and Kapoor follows suit, except that he slides on his stomach and bounces off the snow to land on his knees.

These song sequences have also gained popularity independent of the films they were created for. Part of the success of a Bachchan move in Don, also choreographed by Raj, where he takes a minute to tie a safa (turban) around his head and put a paan (betel leaf) in his mouth, is that it is at once imitable and instantly recognizable as a cultural reference. The choreography is not so much about being technically perfect as it is about dancing with abandon. The idea seemed to be to just enjoy the movement.

For much of the 1950s-70s, Raj shared the dance stage with greats like Lachhu Maharaj, who choreographed songs for films such as Mahal and Mughal-e-Azam. Lachhu Maharaj’s classical-inspired sequences were distilled from Kathak. In a way, Raj broke away from this tradition. His work was perhaps closest to that of Surya Kumar, under whose dance direction he swung the dance icon Helen around the stage of Mera naam chin chin choo.

Gulzar The master of visual metaphors

“Ballimaran ke moholle ki woh pechida daleelon ki si woh galiyan…”

A bust of the great Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib sits prominently in the room where Gulzar does his writing. The film-maker, writer, poet and lyricist once told an interviewer how the imagery he used for television to describe the complex web of lanes Ghalib wandered through, in Old Delhi’s Ballimaran area, was inspired by a famous line from another great poet, T.S. Eliot: “streets that follow like a tedious argument/of insidious intent”.

Hindi film music at its best has always been enriched by superb lyrics, and the metaphorical brilliance of Gulzar is as attractive as the melancholy romanticism of Shailendra or the passionate dissent of Sahir Ludhianvi. Even outside of Ballimaran, streets seem to fascinate Gulzar, be it in the film Aandhi (Aandhi ki tarah udd kar, ek raah guzarti hai) or in Gharaonda (In umr se lambi sadkon ko).

Consider some other examples of how Gulzar used beguiling metaphors in the songs he wrote: Roz akeli aaye, roz akeli jaaye, chand katora liye bhikharan raat (Mere Apne); Hamne dekhi hai un aankhon ki mehekti khushboo (Khamoshi); Kaanch ke khwab hai, aankhon mein chubh jayenge (Ghar); Sooraj ko masalkar main, chandan ki tarah malti (Anubhav); Ek baar waqt se, lamha gira kahin (Gol Maal); … Aur meri ek khat me lipti raat padi hai (Ijazzat).

With a conjuror’s wand, Gulzar has created metaphors to blend what can only be experienced (love, fragrance, night, dreams, time) with what one can touch (a letter, the body, tears, streets), and given us songs that are unique in their paradoxical imagery.

Unhappy endings Romeo and Juliet, where art thou?

We’re not sure if it’s a good thing or a bad thing that couples don’t die any more on the big screen. They continue to in real life at any rate, either escaping debt or the stranglehold of caste or religion.

When they do in reel life, as did Hrithik Roshan and Barbara Mori in Kites, the result is risible rather than moving (at the screening we were at, exasperated viewers hooted at the screen and made for the exit with the grace of stampeding elephants). Nobody likes unhappy endings in liberalizing India which, goes the rumour, is a land of great hope and possible dreams. Anurag Basu, the director of Kites, was about two decades too late.

News reports of me-too suicides following Ek Duuje Ke Liye might have dampened the enthusiasm of film-makers to bring Romeo and Juliet to India, but it’s not like they haven’t tried.

Encouraged by William Shakespeare and folk heroes closer home like Sohni-Mahiwal and Shirin-Farhad, several lovers have perished in the name of love. Mansoor Khan’s first and finest film, Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak, successfully Indianizes the Montagues and Capulets of Romeo And Juliet.

Lovers also die for nobler causes than love.

Rajesh Khanna and Mumtaz shed blood and their lives on a snow-clad mountain in Roti to uphold goodness. Shah Rukh Khan blows himself up with his suicide bomber love interest, Manisha Koirala, in Dil Se to save the nation, though we suspect he simply couldn’t bear to be

Mehmood Comic artiste par excellence

There was once a bit-part actor who, through dint of sheer hard work, became the leading comic actor of his time. He was so popular that several stars refused to work with him because he would steal the movie from under their noses. Hard to believe? Read our essay on page 17.

Script is king: (top) Amitabh Bachchan and Iftekhar in Deewaar (1975), written by Salim-Javed; and Aamir Khan’s first starring role in Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak (1988), a love story with a sad ending. parted from her any more. Romeo and Juliet were most recently located in Uttar Pradesh in Ishaqzaade, whose healthy box-office performance suggests that the idea of young lovers using their bodies as weapons against the cruel world still has a lot of currency.

his career had Salim-Javed not parted ways in the early 1980s. Perhaps the rest of the decade would not have been such a disaster.

Salim­Javed The real angry young men

There’s a reason the film world, in the oldfashioned way, still calls him “Shyam babu”.

Benegal is the last great from the 1970s’ filmmaking heyday who is still at work—and working with changing audiences in mind. In 2008, his Welcome to Sajjanpur started at the box office as a sleeper hit and went on to run in metro theatres for more than a month. Box-office success is, of course, not the right index to measure Benegal’s contribution to Indian cinema. Like his guru Satyajit Ray, Benegal’s cinema is stripped to the basics—idea, casting, storytelling, and a socialist zeal to narrate the ordinary man’s story from the ordinary man’s point of view. Like Ray, he is also a bhadralok and renaissance man. Benegal is known to wrap up his shots without fuss.

Of course, he got gifted actors to boost his oeuvre. In 2002, during a retrospective of his films at the National Film Theatre, London, Girish Karnad had a public conversation with the director. “Even though Smita (Patil) and Shabana (Azmi) have been compared in various ways, I always thought their rivalry was for your affections, actually, as a director,” Karnad said.

Ankur (1974), Manthan (1976), Bhumika (1977), Mandi (1983), Trikal (1985), Suraj Ka Satvan Ghoda (1993), Sardari Begum (1996), Zubeidaa (2001), Welcome to Sajjanpur (2008), Well Done Abba! (2010)—Benegal’s best works are primarily about womanhood. In 1988 he made Bharat Ek Khoj, a lengthy, staggering adaptation of Nehru’s Discovery of India, for Doordarshan. Born in 1934 in Hyderabad, Benegal became a film-maker after watching Ray’s Pather Panchali. He made commercials for many years before he made Ankur. He has not looked back since.

The 1970s, after India had fought two wars, was a period plagued by rising inflation, shortage of essential goods and a devalued rupee that made money so much more important and harder to get. This was still newly independent India, trying to rebuild, and clearly struggling with corruption and crime. Public anger was rising and two men thought it best to bring that resentment to the screen. Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar already had a bunch of writing credits with the energetic Seeta Aur Geeta (1972) and an ever-popular lost-andfound story in Yaadon Ki Baaraat (1973). But it was a year later, when their brooding, imploding protagonist found a collaborator in film-maker Prakash Mehra, who cast an unknown scrawny young man in Zanjeer (1973), that Salim-Javed truly arrived.

Highlighting the topical issues afflicting society in those times, Salim-Javed’s golden run continued with other film-makers like Yash Chopra—Deewaar (the villain is a gold smuggler; Amitabh Bachchan’s character was based on Haji Mastan), Trishul (the construction industry), Kaala Patthar (the coal mining industry)—and Ramesh Sippy—Sholay (the Chambal valley dacoits) and Shakti (again, smugglers) as Bachchan gave voice and vent to the angry young man fighting the bad system. People cheered as evil rich men and arrogant businessmen got beaten up by the poor, starving, sometimes fatherless, hero.

Their dialogue was loaded, a comment on social issues, one man’s war against the world, and so memorable that fans remember it nearly 40 years after the films released. “Kitne aadmi the,” “Mere paas maa hai,” “Main aaj bhi pheke hue paise nahin uthata” have all found their way into everyday consciousness. The duo’s names often came just before the director’s in the opening credits, an assessment of their significance at the time. Bachchan once said that he has wondered what would have happened to

Shyam Benegal A director with rigour, range and adaptability

PL Raj Fancy footwork that fit right in

It’s a high-society party. The guests are ballroomdancing on a gleaming black dance floor. Amjad Khan asks a wealthy heiress to dance, with the intent of stealing her diamond necklace. In floats the hero—Amitabh Bachchan. It’s quite an entry,

Raj Kapoor’s socialist phase From socialism to ‘chochialism’

By the time he produced Jis Desh Men Ganga Behti Hai for his regular cinematographer turned director, Radhu Karmakar, the influence of the socialists on Kapoor seemed to be on the wane.

His character in the dacoit drama mispronounces the political ideology as “chochialism.”

“Chochialism” is what leavened Kapoor’s early films, all of which routinely pop up in Hindi Movies to See Before You Die lists. Awaara, Shree 420, Jagte Raho and Barsaat mix together matters of the heart with meditations on the state of affairs in post-independent India. The success of these films is in no small measure due to the company Kapoor kept in those years. K.A. Abbas wrote the screenplays, while revolutionary poet and conscience-keeper Shailendra penned the lyrics. The teamwork at RK Films resulted in beguiling films about love, social responsibility and moral choices. Kapoor eventually moved away towards colour, greater sentimentalism and voyeurism. The delicacy of Awaara gave way to the vulgarity of Ram Teri Ganga Maili.

Love triangles A loves B, but B and C are an item

One of the most well-known three-way battle of hearts isn’t what it seems. In Muqaddar Ka Sikandar, Amitabh Bachchan loves Rakhee. She loves Vinod Khanna. He seems to love her, but he positively blooms when Bachchan is around.

Love triangles are more than an excuse to cast three stars together and then move them around till the climax. In Gharaonda, Amol Palekar loses Zarina Wahab first to the creepy Shreeram Lagoo and then to pragmatism. His quest for a place to call his own in Mumbai makes him a mad-eyed mope, while she decides that her husband is the more practical choice. Anil Kapoor’s love for Padmini Kolhapure similarly withers in the face of the institution of marriage in Woh Saat Din. The contest is more straightforward in Saagar, in which Kamal Haasan’s Chaplinesque hero never really stands a chance with Dimple Kapadia against Rishi Kapoor. Gulzar’s Ijaazat tries to intellectualize the triangle, with the marriage between Naseeruddin Shah and Rekha coming apart because of his attachment to Anuradha Patel. Far less complicated, is Katha, in which Deepti Naval falls for the trickster charms of Farooq Shaikh, samples the goods, and then settles for conventional matrimony with her dependable neighbour, Shah.

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FIRST PERSON | KUNAL KAPOOR

Popular actor, of course, but

SHASHI KAPOOR was a maverick producer too a

ctors-turned-producers are now the norm, but there weren’t too many of them around in the 1970s. The cinematic alternatives to the Mumbai entertainment industry were largely funded by government bodies like the National Film Development Corporation.

Enter Shashi Kapoor.

In 1979, the popular actor, inspired by the Merchant-Ivory Productions films he had appeared in, embarked on the first of six projects under the Film-Valas banner. The name was inspired by “Shakespeare Wallah”, the title given to Shashi Kapoor’s father-law Geoffrey Kendal (also the subject of Shakespeare Wallah, a movie by James Ivory, and starring Kapoor).

Shashi Kapoor and his wife, Jennifer Kendal, wanted to make accessible arthouse films, says their son, Kunal Kapoor. Starting with Junoon, through 36 Chowringhee Lane, Kalyug, Vijeta and Utsav, and ending with Ajooba, Film-Valas briefly but indelibly contributed to the cinematic landscape. However, the company earned more praise than profit, and its poor state of finances forced Kapoor to set aside his dreams of producing.

Shashi doesn’t give interviews any more on account of his poor health. Kunal, who runs an advertising film company as well as the family owned Prithvi Theatre in Mumbai, was an actor and assistant on his father’s productions. He spoke of his father’s passion for cinema, a grand folly that resulted in a handful of beautiful movies.

Edited excerpts from the conversation: Our family always had breakfast together, and the conversation was about either food or films. Dad was always looking for ideas.

He used to get prints from the Film and Television Institute of India sent over to the Liberty preview theatre in Bombay. All my parents did when they went to England was to watch two films and a play every day.

The first step was to open a distribution company. He distributed the Japanese anime film, A Thousand And One Nights. It was an adult film, it was very sexy. It had Aladdin stranded on an island with women and they were all naked. It was a disaster.

Dad also set up Vidushak Arts, a small unit inspired by Ismail Merchant (of Merchant-Ivory Productions). He got a camera, lights and recording equipment.

Films like Hum Paanch and a couple of Shyam Benegal’s films were made with that camera unit.

He started a friendship with Shyam, which

is how Junoon happened. It was a period in which my mother was personally interested.

She did the costumes for the movie. Junoon cost `34-odd lakh. It was a happy experience even though he didn’t make any money on it. Junoon eventually covered its investment.

It would have even made a profit had he been a good businessman.

My dad was the world’s worst producer— he never said no. It wasn’t about a brand or anything, it was just him. He wasn’t doing it for the money. He distributed (Raj Kapoor’s) Bobby in Delhi and Uttar Pradesh through a partnership. But he didn’t make any money out of it. He wouldn’t even know how much money he had in his pocket.

Then there was Kalyug and 36 Chowringhee Lane. Aparna (Sen) came to them with the story. They loved the script, and they wanted Shyam to direct it, but she said she was going to. That was a suicidal film—it was in English, made for between `18-24 lakh. (Its) cinematographer Ashok Mehta wasn’t cheap to work with. Vanraj Bhatia gave the music—whatever was state-of-the art had to be used. Dad never compromised.

The movie was a regular release. It did well critically. Mom got a Bafta (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) nomination alongside Vanessa Redgrave.

Vijeta happened, and Utsav. Girish Karnad had written a great script. Dad wanted Amitabh (Bachchan) to play the part he eventually played. But Amitabh couldn’t do the role. The movie got postponed because of dates. In January, Dad went to Delhi for a film festival, where he met Dilbagh Singh, chief of air staff of the Indian Air Force. The Air Force was celebrating its golden jubilee.

Dilbagh Singh said, I will give you whatever you want to make a film promoting the Air Force. Govind (Nihalani) too wanted to do something on the Air Force. Vijeta happened overnight. We started shooting in April. The Air Force provided the facilities, but Dad paid for the film.

Dad always supported the directors, he never fought with them. I thought Vijeta was too long. We had our own Steenbeck (editing machine). I re-edited Vijeta by 22 minutes. Govind threw a fit, so 12 minutes were put back in. Vijeta would have made money had he been Ismail Merchant or Ekta Kapoor. It struck a chord, but it wasn’t marketed well.

Utsav started on a disastrous note. A set near Udupi in Karnataka was blown off in a cyclone. The income-tax department raided Rekha on the first day of the shoot. It cost `2

crore, though it was originally supposed to be about `1.2 crore. Utsav also had an English version, so there were two takes of everything. We dubbed the film in London. My Mum was in hospital at the time (Jennifer Kendal was suffering from cancer, and died in London in 1984).

Dad also made a huge set at Filmcity in Mumbai, which he offered to the authorities to convert into a tourist attraction, but it was demolished.

At that time, nobody in the international market was interested in that period in India. The movie was neither arthouse nor commercial. I imagined it to be a Douglas Fairbanks kind of adventure. I think Girish (Karnad) should have made the film more glamorous and sexy. There was some nudity in the English version. In the Hindi version, some of the positions that Amjad Khan (who plays Vatsyayana) sees were cut out. I am restoring both versions.

Dad was financially wiped out by Utsav.

Instead of filling our coffers, it worked us into a completely negative zone. The film did well in Hyderabad, though.

Then, Ajooba happened. Dad had gotten a little frustrated at giving other directors everything on a silver platter. He needed to do a commercial film to get out. I was 26 at the time. An Indian distributor in Moscow, Maganbhai, took me under his wing and said, let’s make an Indo-Russian film. Mosfilms was involved, as was Gorky Film Studio, which did kids’ films.

The principal star cast would be Indian, the bulk of the shooting was supposed to happen in Rus-

sia. Dad decided that he was going to direct the movie. We did an extensive recce in Kashmir and Rajasthan. The Russian guys came over for a meeting where I remember saying, let’s call off the film, it has already gone over budget. The movie didn’t work, Dad got carried away.

Amitabh took the distribution rights for the Delhi-Uttar Pradesh territory. The movie was a hit there and nowhere else! Amitabh Bachchan was destined to make money, but Shashi Kapoor was not.

Ajooba wasn’t and isn’t a good film. We didn’t let him make another one after that.

We were so much in debt. Sanjna (Kunal Kapoor’s sister) was still a child. Karan (his brother) and I were supporting the house. I started making commercials. We are all bad businessmen. We are brilliant at spending money.

I have a script that I want to direct myself.

It’s an expensive film to make, and I need a new cast. But I won’t fund it myself. I will get a studio to put in the money.

As told to Nandini Ramnath. nandini.r@livemint.com

Unbridled: Shashi Kapoor in a selfproduced film, Shyam Benegal’s Junoon (1978).

CREDIT

Ghost stories Or, I will always love you

The spooky ghost story has been replaced by the full-out horror film—what a pity. Climate change, presumably, has snatched away the fog that envelopes the characters in Woh Kaun Thi? and Mera Saaya, while property redevelopment must be responsible for the disappearance of the sprawling mansions that are home to the wandering spirits of Mahal and Lekin.... The idea of a woman (rarely a man) who clings on to love and refuses to pass into the other world

until she has settled matters in this one, hasn’t been fully exploited.

Cops Men in khaki

The distinguished-looking Iftekhar was saddled with a police uniform and holster in so many films that it’s hard to dissociate him from the khaki colour (though a white suit suited him just fine in his villainous roles). Iftekhar represented law and order (or aarder, as they say in so many films) so perfectly that every other Unflinching: Om Puri (left) and Sadashiv Amrapurkar in Govind Nihalani’s Ardh Satya (1983), a gritty police story.

actor was a me-too. Including Jagdish Raaj, who also looked like he stepped into a uniform right after his shower.

Leading men have also played policemen roles, including Dilip Kumar, Sanjeev Kumar, Amitabh Bachchan, Shashi Kapoor and Vinod Khanna. The older actors usually represented authority, both in public as well as in private, while the younger actors exorcised private demons or simply fought the good fight. Om Puri’s tortured inspector battled his authoritarian father and feelings of personal inadequacy in Ardh Satya. The superlative police drama influenced the crime movies that Ram Gopal Varma directed and produced in the 1990s and 2000s. Policemen behaved like gangsters or vigilantes in uniform in Varma’s productions like Ab Tak Chhappan and Shool. Another Varma production, Sriram Raghavan’s Ek Hasina Thi, sees Seema Biswas as a doughty officer on the trail of Urmila Matondkar’s avenging angel.

One of the most charismatic police officers in recent memory is Salman Khan in Dabangg, but it’s not clear why he does what he does. Khan’s Chulbul Pandey is a police officer for our ambiguous times; he works mainly for himself and follows a personal code of law and ardour.

Alcohol What’s your poison?

You don’t need to watch Amitabh Bachchan talking to his reflection in the mirror in Amar Akbar Anthony (a send-up of Robert De Niro’s conversation with himself in the 1976 Hollywood movie Taxi Driver) to know that Indians cannot hold their drink.

Perhaps in recognition of this fact, drinking was a greater vice than smoking until recently.

Villains quaffed Vat 69 whisky even during the

day; melancholic men drowned their sorrows in drink; an opened bottle led to confessions and confusion between couples. When a woman lifted her glass, you knew that the end of the world was near (except when she was Sridevi).

If alcohol was taboo, it followed that the places where they were served were no-go zones too.

Bars were shady places, with garish interiors, vulgar people and seductive music. Characters with well-stocked bars at home were on their way to signing up with Alcoholics Anonymous. That’s why it’s so refreshing to see Dolly Ahluwalia down a drink before bedtime in Vicky Donor. Not only can the woman hold her drink, but she can also rattle off superb dialogue while she’s at it.

Sibling love Oh brother, where are you?

When heroes aren’t busy circling the greenery or rolling down slopes, they are worrying about their sisters (cue a rakhi ceremony song).

Amitabh Bachchan’s devotion to his wheelchairbound sister in Majboor pushes him towards crime. At least his intentions are nobler than Dev Anand’s in Bombai Ka Babu, in which he is mistaken for the brother of the character with whom he falls in love.

Dev Anand is stirred to action when his sister, the incredibly hip Zeenat Aman, falls in with bong-wielding hippies in Hare Rama Hare Krishna. Their interactions are infinitely more interesting than Anand’s half-hearted romance with Mumtaz. Just like in Mansoor Khan’s Josh, which audaciously casts Shah Rukh Khan and Aishwarya Rai as fraternal twins. If you don’t remember who either character lands up with (Priya Gill and Chandrachur Singh, respectively), blame it on their crackling chemistry.

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Amitabh Bachchan A man for all seasons

Amitabh Bachchan has always been what audiences want him to be, whatever the decade.

In the 1970s, they wanted him to wait, so he did.

Indira’s India hadn’t yet lost its taste for sweetfaced men like Rajesh Khanna, Rajendra Kumar and Dev Anand. Bachchan wasn’t sweet-faced.

He worked very, very hard before his breakthrough movie in 1973, Zanjeer, playing a mute Rajasthani villager in Reshma Aur Shera, a martial arts trainer of Aruna Irani’s masked vigilante in Garam Masala, and an obsessed lover in Parwana. India rewarded him by embracing him to the exclusion of most of the rest.

In the 1980s, they still wanted him. But he wanted to be a politician. He failed, but fortunately for him, there were a bunch of young men who were watching his films in cinemas and on television, and for whom Hindi cinema came to be characterized as Before Bachchan and After Bachchan.

In the 1990s, they didn’t want him, but he needed them. So he converted himself into a brand and later, a television icon.

In the 2000s, they wanted a refuge from the relentless push of global capital, some gravitas to balance the pervasive slickness. He stood for experience, perseverance, and the ability to make a smooth transition.

In the 2010s, nobody knows what they want, so he will do an even better job of surviving. He is a mascot for Narendra Modi’s Gujarat, the seller of hair oil and cement, and a blank canvas on to which contemporary film-makers project their memories and fantasies. The Angry Young Man is now a Dependable Old Man.

The Shah Rukh Khan effect The outsider who became the ultimate insider

The conundrum about Shah Rukh Khan is that his acting skills are limited and many of his performances unmemorable, but it’s hard to talk about post-1990s cinema and ignore him.

High points: Smita Patil in Ketan Mehta’s Mirch Masala (1987); and (above) Kalki Koechlin in Anurag Kashyap’s Dev.D (2009).

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He has a handful of good roles—Idiot, Josh, Dil Se, Swades—but has mostly stuck to playing a yuppie, soppy loverboy who embodies the aspiration of post-socialist India. His villainous turns in Baazigar and Anjaam suggest an ambiguity that hasn’t been fruitfully explored.

His impact is mostly off-screen. He is the industry outsider who became the ultimate insider, much like Amitabh Bachchan. He has used the media’s fascination with celebrityhood to superb effect, turning himself into a brand and lending his marketability to such events as cricket’s Indian Premier League. He was a man for the consumption-driven 1990s, which explains why he has been on shaky ground in recent years.

Audiences and consumers want fresh produce.

Hotels Turn that fan this way, will you?

The Ramsay Brothers probably didn’t intend it that way, but their horror film Hotel offers a neat aside to the way hotels have been used in popular cinema. The hotel from the title is built on a graveyard, so naturally the quality of room service can best be described as nightmarish.

Hotels have played a strange role in movies as places that are one step removed from brothels. The murder that drives the plot of Teesri Manzil takes place in a hotel. Unsavoury people lurk in the dining hall and corridors; exotic women with names like Monica and Shabbo own the dance floor; gangsters lurk by the pool and at the gambling den and bars.

Often, Helen is a permanent guest.

The message is clear: Stay at home or walk along Marine Drive if you are decent folk.

Most hotels in movies like Caravan and Namak Halaal are actually sets, but real starred establishments have also prominently featured in the movies. Film-makers have set key sequences in prominent Mumbai hotels like Sun-n-Sand, Horizon and the Oberoi, and in doing so have provided many generations a glimpse of the high life. Countless characters have gazed longingly upon the façade of the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel in Mumbai’s Colaba neighbourhood—Bachchan even danced in front of the last word in luxe hospitality in a checked lungi in Don. When Aamir Khan’s Munna wants

to impress the love of his life Mili in Rangeela, he takes her to a five-star hotel and even buys a taxi-yellow suit for the occasion. Of course, he ruins the day by asking the waiter to turn the fan in his direction. Movie-hotels are clearly not meant for everybody.

Smita Patil Acting brilliance, cut brutally short

Bindu in Manthan, feisty milkmaid. Usha in Bhumika, jumping from bedpost to bedpost in a never-ending quest for meaning and salvation.

Roma in Shakti, who lives and loves on her own terms. Sonbai in Mirch Masala, whose resistance to a lecherous government official inspires a minor revolution. Amma in Chakra, a tough slum-dweller with two lovers. Jyotsna in Ardh Satya, conscience-keeper who rejects her violent policeman boyfriend.

Smita Patil started appearing in films when she was 19; she was 31 when she died from pregnancy-related complications. In a short span of time, through a variety of roles in Hindi, Marathi, Kannada, Bengali and Malayalam, she crystallized the hopes and dilemmas of independent-minded women all across India like no other actor in parallel cinema.

SATURDAY, MAY 4, 2013° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

Tragedies

INTERVIEW | SHIVENDRA SINGH DUNGARPUR

Or, I love tears

Actor

WAHEEDA REHMAN reveals the steel beneath the silk COURTESY SHIVENDRA SINGH DUNGARPUR

When was the last time you had a good cry at the movies, and not because you were ruing the day Sanjay Leela Bhansali decided to anoint himself the king of heartbreak?

Keep a set of handkerchiefs ready for Shakti Samanta’s Amar Prem, an old-fashioned tragedy packed with sorrowful men, women and genuine pathos at their condition. Let your cheek muscles twitch at the sight of Waheeda Rehman enduring heartbreak twice in Khamoshi. Don’t declare that you hate tears after watching Rajesh Khanna die young in Anand. Let it all out for Rakhee in Tapasya as she sacrifices everything to support her family.

Shed a few tears for Amitabh Bachchan’s agony in Deewaar as his mother rejects him, his brother turns against him, and his one true love dies. Then shake a fist at contemporary film-makers, who can approach the expression of sorrow only through the prism of camp.

Helen A mononym and synonym for exuberance

She is best seen rather than read about. She is hard to put on a page because she will dance right off it. A superb dancer and a consummate professional with a lovely, innocent face, a mischievous grin and a tremendously elastic body, Helen paved the way for vamps like Aruna Irani, Bindu and Kalpana Iyer, but also for dancing stars like Madhuri Dixit. “Helen achieved a kind of immortality from the sidelines, which is a much greater achievement than the achievements of those acknowledged as stars,” observes Jerry Pinto in his book Helen: The Life And Times of an H-Bomb.

“Where cinema sought to slot her into a small, well-defined space, she simply burst out of those confines. When she was given silly stuff to do, she did it with great panache.”

Bit­part actors Small role, big impact

What links Johnny Walker, David, Sudhir, Mac Mohan, Asit Sen, Deven Verma, Asrani, Viju Khote, Avtar Gill, Mushtaq Khan, Deepak Tijori, Deepak Dobriyal, Jameel Khan and Piyush Mishra?

All of them are supremely effective bit-part actors who haven’t allowed the limited duration of their screen time to come in the way of recognition. They have worked hard to distract audiences from the stars in the centre of the frame and scored impressive goals from the sidelines.

Fatal females Vamps, molls, bad girls

AR Rahman The brick-by-brick builder of a tune

It’s unfortunate that A.R. Rahman’s global fame should come from Slumdog Millionaire, a film that was easily not among his best works. It’s equally unfortunate that, seen from an international perspective, his exceptional work in lesser-known Tamil films like Thiruda Thiruda, Gentleman and Duet may go unnoticed. But Rahman’s contribution to music goes beyond films and entertainment; like R.D. Burman a generation before him, he redefined contemporary music by his choice of instruments and use of technology, apart from his obvious skills as a musician.

While Burman was already using electronic instruments like synthesizers in the 1970s, Rahman decentralized the studio system and recorded single performers at a time, instead of the entire ensemble, to construct the song at a later stage. He manipulated singers’ voices with sound to perfect them; and recorded voices and instruments piecemeal to mix and influence styles. His knowledge of Carnatic, Western classical, Hindustani and Sufi music helped him fuse traditional Indian instruments with electronic dance music; from ballads to rap songs to anthems—he did them all. To identify Rahman’s magic, listen to the saxophone in Anjali anjali from Duet or wait for the tabla strings towards the end of Yeh jo des hai mera from Swades.

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Nimble feet: Waheeda Rehman and Sunil Dutt in Mujhe Jeene Do.

w

aheeda Rehman set foot in the movie business in 1956 with CID, directed by Raj Khosla for Guru Dutt Movies Pvt. Ltd. She plays Kamini, a woman of questionable reputation. Waheeda next appeared in Pyaasa, one of Guru Dutt’s—and Hindi cinema’s—most iconic movies. After Dutt’s death in 1964, she worked with several noteworthy film-makers, including Kidar Sharma, Vijay Anand and Yash Chopra.

Waheeda doesn’t give too many interviews any more, but in July 2007, she chatted at length about her experiences with Guru Dutt for a biopic that film-maker Shivendra Singh Dungarpur was planning at the time (the biopic was pushed indefinitely). Dungarpur met Waheeda at her Mumbai residence, where she spoke candidly about her sartorial arguments with Khosla in CID and her experiences during Pyaasa. The edited excerpts of the interview, which hasn’t been published before, show Waheeda’s spark, forthrightness, and determination to hold her ground despite being a newcomer to the movies—the steel beneath the silk.

You had a bit of a problem about wearing a dress in ‘CID’.

Yes. I was too shy. And there was a lace blouse for Kahin pe nigahein kahin pe nishaana. So I told them that I’m not going to wear the dress. It’s too lacy. It has to have some lining, or give me a dupatta. So he (Khosla) said: “No. You are a vamp and you are trying to seduce the villain. So I said: “No, I don’t care.

I’m not going to wear the dress like that. I won’t come to the sets.” What had happened was, when the contract was getting signed, I had two clauses. I couldn’t sign the contract because I was a minor. So my mother had to sign it.

So I told them about the clauses I wanted to add. They were shocked.

They said: “We are giving a chance to a new girl and she is adding more clauses to the contract? Anyway, tell us what they are.” So I told them that if I didn’t like a particular costume or if I didn’t like a particular action, then I won’t do it. And then they wanted to change my name.

What did they want?

That they didn’t say. So I asked them why. So they said that everyone does it, Madhubala’s name wasn’t Madhubala.

Nargis’ name isn’t Nargis. So I said, “They are they and I am me.”

Guru Duttji himself said this?

Yes, he only said this. Raj Khosla, Guru Dutt and lots of people. They said that my name was very long. So I said, “See, the name will come on the screen, na?”

They said, “Who will call you Waheeda Rehman?” So I told them to call me Waheeda. I’m still young. You don’t have to call me Waheeda Rehman. Rehman was my father’s name and it’s not like I have run away from home or something. And my mother was with me. So why should I change my name?

Did you do all the talking?

Yes, So they told my mother: “Mrs Rehman, do one thing. Take your daughter back and make her study further and make her a lawyer. Because the way she argues, ‘Not like this, not like that.’” Raj Khosla said, “Guru, just think about what you are getting into.”

Later, when we were going home, all the assistants were standing. Someone said, “Wow, you are such a young girl, just be firm like this only.” So I said, “Yes, I’ll remain firm.” So the contract didn’t get signed for a whole week after this incident.

Guru Dutt was not on the sets when you said you wouldn’t wear the costume?

He was out of Bombay. Writing the script for Pyaasa. Raj Khosla said, “Dev Anand is waiting.” So I said, “I wait for him every day, let him wait.” I put my foot down. I thought that if it didn’t work out, I would go back. I wanted to work. I was dying to work. But I had certain limitations. This much and no more kind of a thing.

So did he come back and tell you anything?

Yes he had to. Raj Khosla, the whole unit called Guru Dutt saying SOS, there is a drama unfolding on the sets. So he rushed back. He came and spoke to me and my mother, “What’s happening?”

So I said: “I have that clause written in my contract. I don’t like this costume.”

So he said, “But it’s not vulgar.” It had full sleeves. But it was a lace blouse and I didn’t want to wear it. I said: “You give me a dupatta, I’ll do it. Or you give me lining.”

Now, the problem was that it would take a whole day to put lining, And Dev was going to Switzerland. So one whole day went. Dev Anand was sitting there and me, a newcomer, sitting there. They thought that the fastest would be to give her a dupatta. Guru Dutt said, “God, what kind of a woman is this?

Did you not feel nervous at all with so

many people around you?

No, only at times when my voice wasn’t loud enough, I would get nervous. At times when I would feel that I wanted to stick by my beliefs, I wouldn’t want to give in to anything. Because I felt that if it didn’t work out I would go home.

That was like my trump card. But at the same time I wasn’t arrogant. So finally they came and gave me a dupatta.

One of the reasons we are so inspired

by Guru Dutt is because of ‘Pyaasa’ as a film. But did he narrate the story to you before he shot with you or did he just tell you your role?

Raj Khosla was very unhappy with me after CID. He complained about me saying that I was not willing to do particular actions, wear particular clothes.

“She doesn’t even act well,” he said.

Anyway, when Pyaasa’s shooting was taking place, we went to Calcutta. The assistant director said, “Guru Duttji is very happy with your work.” So I said, “Ya? Raj Khoslaji isn’t too happy with me.” So yes, both the directors were very different from each other.

With Raj Khosla, the thing was that he couldn’t handle a newcomer. And I was too raw. He used to say, “Be very careful it’s a big close-up. Don’t move.”

So I used to become stiff. So he used to ask me, “Why are you becoming so stiff?” I said, “You only told me not to move.” So he said, “No, no, what I mean is stay relaxed and just make sure you don’t get out of the frame.”

Whereas Guru Duttji, he sometimes didn’t even tell me how much of a close-up it was.

He was very gentle as a director.

Yes, he was very gentle. And he would say, “Why are you so stiff?” So I told him that I had heard that he was doing a close-up. So he said, “What difference does it make to you?” I said, “No, no, I mean that I thought I’m not supposed to move.” He replied, “No, no, you relax, I will see all that in the camera.”

So I was relaxed.

Were you conscious at that time, that you were acting, and had that seriousness come into you by then? The film went on to be a classic.

At that time I don’t think that even Guru Dutt was aware that it was turning out to be such a classic. You are putting in your best. You are thinking a lot, you are passionately in love with that movie.

But you are not aware. If you would be aware then the beauty of the film will go away.

In ‘Pyaasa’, one song picturized on

you, ‘Roop tere’, was removed. Where was that shot?

In Calcutta. In a boat. I think after the news that Vijay has passed away. When the trial (of the scenes) was happening, (S.D.) Burman dada and everyone was there. I said, “The song sounds really nice but it looks very boring.” Dada said, “Waheeda, is it really a bad song?” I told him that it was a beautiful song. He asked me, “Why is it boring?” I told him, “According to me dada, this picture is based on the hero, not anybody else. His character has to be highlighted.

Now the news has come that he has died, and she is sitting here and crying and singing. It’s dragging the script too much.”

Guru Dutt also had this habit of asking every single person from the peon to the biggest actor, “What do you think about it?” Abrar (Alvi, screenplay writer) sahib used to ask him: “Why are you asking the valet?

What does he know?” Guru Dutt would say, “No, he’s one of the audience. So don’t say that.”

My mother and I both said the scene seems to be dragging too much. It feels too heavy. Dada got angry. I said, “Sorry dada, I didn’t mean to say anything wrong against your song.” Mala Sinha tried to explain to me, “You are a newcomer, you are cutting out your own song?” I said: “It’s so boring! I wouldn’t want to watch it.”

Everyone there was very sweet, but it was like, “God knows where this girl has come from.”

Guru Dutt just became quiet. Dada only got angry, upset, hurt and all that.

Then the picture released. It was the second week, and Guru Duttji called up.

He spoke to my mother. By then he had started to call her Mummy. “Mummy, I want to tell you something. What you mother and daughter were after, cutting out the song, we cut that out.” She said: “Oh Guru Dutt, I’m so sorry, we didn’t mean to create any problems. We don’t know anything about film-making.” He said: “No, you were right. Only the two of you were right.”

At that time they used to call certain songs “cigarette song”, which means that when the song comes up, everyone goes for a cigarette break. So that turned out to be a cigarette song, and he cut it out. They realized that a film has to be good in totality. lounge@livemint.com

If the word vamp can be considered a contraction of vampire, then Bindu had the sharpest fangs of them all.

Joshila doesn’t have any shortage of glamour, both male and female. There is Dev Anand, wagging his head, Hema Malini dressed to the nines, Rakhee in a pop-up part.

All of them pale in comparison to Bindu, whose unbridled sexuality is clearly aimed not at the immovable Anand, but at male viewers.

The song Sharma na yun follows the template for the vamp song. The hero won’t succumb despite tremendous temptation. The vamp won’t get her way even though

Body linguist: Helen in Shakti Samanta’s The Great Gambler (1979).

she goes to great lengths, at times even debasing herself (Bindu again, as a nymphomaniac in Hawas).

The formula-driven world of Hindi cinema until the 2000s created a corner for vamps, femme fatales, dancers, prostitutes and molls who introduced the prospect of sex in an otherwise sex-less landscape. They represented the road not taken, and provided a counterpoint to the saintliness of the female leads. In the masochist fantasy Kati Patang, in which Asha Parekh’s character goes through one miserable experience after another, Bindu steals the scene yet again as a blackmailing dancer (Bindu’s unlimited serves for meanness, which she conveyed through her sharp voice and curling lips, made her the perfect monster mother-in-law in the 1980s).

Vamps were indecorous, needy, scheming, shameless and transgressive. Many of them provided a false illusion of female agency and power, and they never stood a chance against virginal virtue, but there were exceptions. Helen played pivotal roles in several of her movies, notably Teesri Manzil and Don, apart from appearing in sensuous dance numbers. Aruna Irani, a fine character actor who has run the gamut of roles from prostitute to vigilante, plays a cleavage-baring singleton in Mili who ticks off the hero when he comments on her dress sense (before eventually slipping into a white sari).

Kim’s moll switches sides in Andar Bahar to help the good guys. Parveen Babi, although a lead actor, also did vamp duty as a hooker who picks up Amitabh Bachchan in Deewaar and a hotel dancer in Namak Halaal who gets the best prize of them all—the hotel’s owner.

Anurag Kashyap And how he galvanized a generation

Everyone who was somebody in Mumbai’s feeble independent cinema sorority in the early 2000s now claims to have met and befriended Anurag Kashyap. He was irascible and indignant. Kashyap had just co-written Ram Gopal Varma’s Satya. Varma’s compelling, sophisticated gangster dramatics of that period had a new, forceful language, and Kashyap understood it and imbibed it. A short film made in a moment of disenchantment, Last Train to Mahakali, got him the directorial push he needed in 1999, but the next six years went mostly in trying to get his first feature film Paanch released—it never was.

The media loved his promise, and the articulate, self-conscious movie brat he was.

After Black Friday released in 2007, with Kay Kay Menon, Pavan Malhotra, Aditya Srivastav and Nawazuddin Siddiqui in lead roles, he was unstoppable.

His style is often derivative, and the films speak more of other movies than of life, but with the absurd and metaphorical No Smoking (2007), the edgy and sad modern Devdas retelling Dev.D (2009), up to last year’s hefty gangster drama Gangs of Wasseypur I & II, Kashyap has already built a body of work that demands informed judgement.

In the last decade, when Kashyap turned to producing, his reputation as a phenomenon—as the poster boy of independent cinema—got cemented. He co-produced films with big studios and now partners Phantom Films. Kashyap steers conversations with mercurial wit and has a remarkable fanbase.

Who doesn’t love an outsider who storms the mainstream on his own terms?

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Amitabh Bachchan A man for all seasons

Amitabh Bachchan has always been what audiences want him to be, whatever the decade.

In the 1970s, they wanted him to wait, so he did.

Indira’s India hadn’t yet lost its taste for sweetfaced men like Rajesh Khanna, Rajendra Kumar and Dev Anand. Bachchan wasn’t sweet-faced.

He worked very, very hard before his breakthrough movie in 1973, Zanjeer, playing a mute Rajasthani villager in Reshma Aur Shera, a martial arts trainer of Aruna Irani’s masked vigilante in Garam Masala, and an obsessed lover in Parwana. India rewarded him by embracing him to the exclusion of most of the rest.

In the 1980s, they still wanted him. But he wanted to be a politician. He failed, but fortunately for him, there were a bunch of young men who were watching his films in cinemas and on television, and for whom Hindi cinema came to be characterized as Before Bachchan and After Bachchan.

In the 1990s, they didn’t want him, but he needed them. So he converted himself into a brand and later, a television icon.

In the 2000s, they wanted a refuge from the relentless push of global capital, some gravitas to balance the pervasive slickness. He stood for experience, perseverance, and the ability to make a smooth transition.

In the 2010s, nobody knows what they want, so he will do an even better job of surviving. He is a mascot for Narendra Modi’s Gujarat, the seller of hair oil and cement, and a blank canvas on to which contemporary film-makers project their memories and fantasies. The Angry Young Man is now a Dependable Old Man.

The Shah Rukh Khan effect The outsider who became the ultimate insider

The conundrum about Shah Rukh Khan is that his acting skills are limited and many of his performances unmemorable, but it’s hard to talk about post-1990s cinema and ignore him.

High points: Smita Patil in Ketan Mehta’s Mirch Masala (1987); and (above) Kalki Koechlin in Anurag Kashyap’s Dev.D (2009).

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He has a handful of good roles—Idiot, Josh, Dil Se, Swades—but has mostly stuck to playing a yuppie, soppy loverboy who embodies the aspiration of post-socialist India. His villainous turns in Baazigar and Anjaam suggest an ambiguity that hasn’t been fruitfully explored.

His impact is mostly off-screen. He is the industry outsider who became the ultimate insider, much like Amitabh Bachchan. He has used the media’s fascination with celebrityhood to superb effect, turning himself into a brand and lending his marketability to such events as cricket’s Indian Premier League. He was a man for the consumption-driven 1990s, which explains why he has been on shaky ground in recent years.

Audiences and consumers want fresh produce.

Hotels Turn that fan this way, will you?

The Ramsay Brothers probably didn’t intend it that way, but their horror film Hotel offers a neat aside to the way hotels have been used in popular cinema. The hotel from the title is built on a graveyard, so naturally the quality of room service can best be described as nightmarish.

Hotels have played a strange role in movies as places that are one step removed from brothels. The murder that drives the plot of Teesri Manzil takes place in a hotel. Unsavoury people lurk in the dining hall and corridors; exotic women with names like Monica and Shabbo own the dance floor; gangsters lurk by the pool and at the gambling den and bars.

Often, Helen is a permanent guest.

The message is clear: Stay at home or walk along Marine Drive if you are decent folk.

Most hotels in movies like Caravan and Namak Halaal are actually sets, but real starred establishments have also prominently featured in the movies. Film-makers have set key sequences in prominent Mumbai hotels like Sun-n-Sand, Horizon and the Oberoi, and in doing so have provided many generations a glimpse of the high life. Countless characters have gazed longingly upon the façade of the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel in Mumbai’s Colaba neighbourhood—Bachchan even danced in front of the last word in luxe hospitality in a checked lungi in Don. When Aamir Khan’s Munna wants

to impress the love of his life Mili in Rangeela, he takes her to a five-star hotel and even buys a taxi-yellow suit for the occasion. Of course, he ruins the day by asking the waiter to turn the fan in his direction. Movie-hotels are clearly not meant for everybody.

Smita Patil Acting brilliance, cut brutally short

Bindu in Manthan, feisty milkmaid. Usha in Bhumika, jumping from bedpost to bedpost in a never-ending quest for meaning and salvation.

Roma in Shakti, who lives and loves on her own terms. Sonbai in Mirch Masala, whose resistance to a lecherous government official inspires a minor revolution. Amma in Chakra, a tough slum-dweller with two lovers. Jyotsna in Ardh Satya, conscience-keeper who rejects her violent policeman boyfriend.

Smita Patil started appearing in films when she was 19; she was 31 when she died from pregnancy-related complications. In a short span of time, through a variety of roles in Hindi, Marathi, Kannada, Bengali and Malayalam, she crystallized the hopes and dilemmas of independent-minded women all across India like no other actor in parallel cinema.

SATURDAY, MAY 4, 2013° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

Tragedies

INTERVIEW | SHIVENDRA SINGH DUNGARPUR

Or, I love tears

Actor

WAHEEDA REHMAN reveals the steel beneath the silk COURTESY SHIVENDRA SINGH DUNGARPUR

When was the last time you had a good cry at the movies, and not because you were ruing the day Sanjay Leela Bhansali decided to anoint himself the king of heartbreak?

Keep a set of handkerchiefs ready for Shakti Samanta’s Amar Prem, an old-fashioned tragedy packed with sorrowful men, women and genuine pathos at their condition. Let your cheek muscles twitch at the sight of Waheeda Rehman enduring heartbreak twice in Khamoshi. Don’t declare that you hate tears after watching Rajesh Khanna die young in Anand. Let it all out for Rakhee in Tapasya as she sacrifices everything to support her family.

Shed a few tears for Amitabh Bachchan’s agony in Deewaar as his mother rejects him, his brother turns against him, and his one true love dies. Then shake a fist at contemporary film-makers, who can approach the expression of sorrow only through the prism of camp.

Helen A mononym and synonym for exuberance

She is best seen rather than read about. She is hard to put on a page because she will dance right off it. A superb dancer and a consummate professional with a lovely, innocent face, a mischievous grin and a tremendously elastic body, Helen paved the way for vamps like Aruna Irani, Bindu and Kalpana Iyer, but also for dancing stars like Madhuri Dixit. “Helen achieved a kind of immortality from the sidelines, which is a much greater achievement than the achievements of those acknowledged as stars,” observes Jerry Pinto in his book Helen: The Life And Times of an H-Bomb.

“Where cinema sought to slot her into a small, well-defined space, she simply burst out of those confines. When she was given silly stuff to do, she did it with great panache.”

Bit­part actors Small role, big impact

What links Johnny Walker, David, Sudhir, Mac Mohan, Asit Sen, Deven Verma, Asrani, Viju Khote, Avtar Gill, Mushtaq Khan, Deepak Tijori, Deepak Dobriyal, Jameel Khan and Piyush Mishra?

All of them are supremely effective bit-part actors who haven’t allowed the limited duration of their screen time to come in the way of recognition. They have worked hard to distract audiences from the stars in the centre of the frame and scored impressive goals from the sidelines.

Fatal females Vamps, molls, bad girls

AR Rahman The brick-by-brick builder of a tune

It’s unfortunate that A.R. Rahman’s global fame should come from Slumdog Millionaire, a film that was easily not among his best works. It’s equally unfortunate that, seen from an international perspective, his exceptional work in lesser-known Tamil films like Thiruda Thiruda, Gentleman and Duet may go unnoticed. But Rahman’s contribution to music goes beyond films and entertainment; like R.D. Burman a generation before him, he redefined contemporary music by his choice of instruments and use of technology, apart from his obvious skills as a musician.

While Burman was already using electronic instruments like synthesizers in the 1970s, Rahman decentralized the studio system and recorded single performers at a time, instead of the entire ensemble, to construct the song at a later stage. He manipulated singers’ voices with sound to perfect them; and recorded voices and instruments piecemeal to mix and influence styles. His knowledge of Carnatic, Western classical, Hindustani and Sufi music helped him fuse traditional Indian instruments with electronic dance music; from ballads to rap songs to anthems—he did them all. To identify Rahman’s magic, listen to the saxophone in Anjali anjali from Duet or wait for the tabla strings towards the end of Yeh jo des hai mera from Swades.

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Nimble feet: Waheeda Rehman and Sunil Dutt in Mujhe Jeene Do.

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aheeda Rehman set foot in the movie business in 1956 with CID, directed by Raj Khosla for Guru Dutt Movies Pvt. Ltd. She plays Kamini, a woman of questionable reputation. Waheeda next appeared in Pyaasa, one of Guru Dutt’s—and Hindi cinema’s—most iconic movies. After Dutt’s death in 1964, she worked with several noteworthy film-makers, including Kidar Sharma, Vijay Anand and Yash Chopra.

Waheeda doesn’t give too many interviews any more, but in July 2007, she chatted at length about her experiences with Guru Dutt for a biopic that film-maker Shivendra Singh Dungarpur was planning at the time (the biopic was pushed indefinitely). Dungarpur met Waheeda at her Mumbai residence, where she spoke candidly about her sartorial arguments with Khosla in CID and her experiences during Pyaasa. The edited excerpts of the interview, which hasn’t been published before, show Waheeda’s spark, forthrightness, and determination to hold her ground despite being a newcomer to the movies—the steel beneath the silk.

You had a bit of a problem about wearing a dress in ‘CID’.

Yes. I was too shy. And there was a lace blouse for Kahin pe nigahein kahin pe nishaana. So I told them that I’m not going to wear the dress. It’s too lacy. It has to have some lining, or give me a dupatta. So he (Khosla) said: “No. You are a vamp and you are trying to seduce the villain. So I said: “No, I don’t care.

I’m not going to wear the dress like that. I won’t come to the sets.” What had happened was, when the contract was getting signed, I had two clauses. I couldn’t sign the contract because I was a minor. So my mother had to sign it.

So I told them about the clauses I wanted to add. They were shocked.

They said: “We are giving a chance to a new girl and she is adding more clauses to the contract? Anyway, tell us what they are.” So I told them that if I didn’t like a particular costume or if I didn’t like a particular action, then I won’t do it. And then they wanted to change my name.

What did they want?

That they didn’t say. So I asked them why. So they said that everyone does it, Madhubala’s name wasn’t Madhubala.

Nargis’ name isn’t Nargis. So I said, “They are they and I am me.”

Guru Duttji himself said this?

Yes, he only said this. Raj Khosla, Guru Dutt and lots of people. They said that my name was very long. So I said, “See, the name will come on the screen, na?”

They said, “Who will call you Waheeda Rehman?” So I told them to call me Waheeda. I’m still young. You don’t have to call me Waheeda Rehman. Rehman was my father’s name and it’s not like I have run away from home or something. And my mother was with me. So why should I change my name?

Did you do all the talking?

Yes, So they told my mother: “Mrs Rehman, do one thing. Take your daughter back and make her study further and make her a lawyer. Because the way she argues, ‘Not like this, not like that.’” Raj Khosla said, “Guru, just think about what you are getting into.”

Later, when we were going home, all the assistants were standing. Someone said, “Wow, you are such a young girl, just be firm like this only.” So I said, “Yes, I’ll remain firm.” So the contract didn’t get signed for a whole week after this incident.

Guru Dutt was not on the sets when you said you wouldn’t wear the costume?

He was out of Bombay. Writing the script for Pyaasa. Raj Khosla said, “Dev Anand is waiting.” So I said, “I wait for him every day, let him wait.” I put my foot down. I thought that if it didn’t work out, I would go back. I wanted to work. I was dying to work. But I had certain limitations. This much and no more kind of a thing.

So did he come back and tell you anything?

Yes he had to. Raj Khosla, the whole unit called Guru Dutt saying SOS, there is a drama unfolding on the sets. So he rushed back. He came and spoke to me and my mother, “What’s happening?”

So I said: “I have that clause written in my contract. I don’t like this costume.”

So he said, “But it’s not vulgar.” It had full sleeves. But it was a lace blouse and I didn’t want to wear it. I said: “You give me a dupatta, I’ll do it. Or you give me lining.”

Now, the problem was that it would take a whole day to put lining, And Dev was going to Switzerland. So one whole day went. Dev Anand was sitting there and me, a newcomer, sitting there. They thought that the fastest would be to give her a dupatta. Guru Dutt said, “God, what kind of a woman is this?

Did you not feel nervous at all with so

many people around you?

No, only at times when my voice wasn’t loud enough, I would get nervous. At times when I would feel that I wanted to stick by my beliefs, I wouldn’t want to give in to anything. Because I felt that if it didn’t work out I would go home.

That was like my trump card. But at the same time I wasn’t arrogant. So finally they came and gave me a dupatta.

One of the reasons we are so inspired

by Guru Dutt is because of ‘Pyaasa’ as a film. But did he narrate the story to you before he shot with you or did he just tell you your role?

Raj Khosla was very unhappy with me after CID. He complained about me saying that I was not willing to do particular actions, wear particular clothes.

“She doesn’t even act well,” he said.

Anyway, when Pyaasa’s shooting was taking place, we went to Calcutta. The assistant director said, “Guru Duttji is very happy with your work.” So I said, “Ya? Raj Khoslaji isn’t too happy with me.” So yes, both the directors were very different from each other.

With Raj Khosla, the thing was that he couldn’t handle a newcomer. And I was too raw. He used to say, “Be very careful it’s a big close-up. Don’t move.”

So I used to become stiff. So he used to ask me, “Why are you becoming so stiff?” I said, “You only told me not to move.” So he said, “No, no, what I mean is stay relaxed and just make sure you don’t get out of the frame.”

Whereas Guru Duttji, he sometimes didn’t even tell me how much of a close-up it was.

He was very gentle as a director.

Yes, he was very gentle. And he would say, “Why are you so stiff?” So I told him that I had heard that he was doing a close-up. So he said, “What difference does it make to you?” I said, “No, no, I mean that I thought I’m not supposed to move.” He replied, “No, no, you relax, I will see all that in the camera.”

So I was relaxed.

Were you conscious at that time, that you were acting, and had that seriousness come into you by then? The film went on to be a classic.

At that time I don’t think that even Guru Dutt was aware that it was turning out to be such a classic. You are putting in your best. You are thinking a lot, you are passionately in love with that movie.

But you are not aware. If you would be aware then the beauty of the film will go away.

In ‘Pyaasa’, one song picturized on

you, ‘Roop tere’, was removed. Where was that shot?

In Calcutta. In a boat. I think after the news that Vijay has passed away. When the trial (of the scenes) was happening, (S.D.) Burman dada and everyone was there. I said, “The song sounds really nice but it looks very boring.” Dada said, “Waheeda, is it really a bad song?” I told him that it was a beautiful song. He asked me, “Why is it boring?” I told him, “According to me dada, this picture is based on the hero, not anybody else. His character has to be highlighted.

Now the news has come that he has died, and she is sitting here and crying and singing. It’s dragging the script too much.”

Guru Dutt also had this habit of asking every single person from the peon to the biggest actor, “What do you think about it?” Abrar (Alvi, screenplay writer) sahib used to ask him: “Why are you asking the valet?

What does he know?” Guru Dutt would say, “No, he’s one of the audience. So don’t say that.”

My mother and I both said the scene seems to be dragging too much. It feels too heavy. Dada got angry. I said, “Sorry dada, I didn’t mean to say anything wrong against your song.” Mala Sinha tried to explain to me, “You are a newcomer, you are cutting out your own song?” I said: “It’s so boring! I wouldn’t want to watch it.”

Everyone there was very sweet, but it was like, “God knows where this girl has come from.”

Guru Dutt just became quiet. Dada only got angry, upset, hurt and all that.

Then the picture released. It was the second week, and Guru Duttji called up.

He spoke to my mother. By then he had started to call her Mummy. “Mummy, I want to tell you something. What you mother and daughter were after, cutting out the song, we cut that out.” She said: “Oh Guru Dutt, I’m so sorry, we didn’t mean to create any problems. We don’t know anything about film-making.” He said: “No, you were right. Only the two of you were right.”

At that time they used to call certain songs “cigarette song”, which means that when the song comes up, everyone goes for a cigarette break. So that turned out to be a cigarette song, and he cut it out. They realized that a film has to be good in totality. lounge@livemint.com

If the word vamp can be considered a contraction of vampire, then Bindu had the sharpest fangs of them all.

Joshila doesn’t have any shortage of glamour, both male and female. There is Dev Anand, wagging his head, Hema Malini dressed to the nines, Rakhee in a pop-up part.

All of them pale in comparison to Bindu, whose unbridled sexuality is clearly aimed not at the immovable Anand, but at male viewers.

The song Sharma na yun follows the template for the vamp song. The hero won’t succumb despite tremendous temptation. The vamp won’t get her way even though

Body linguist: Helen in Shakti Samanta’s The Great Gambler (1979).

she goes to great lengths, at times even debasing herself (Bindu again, as a nymphomaniac in Hawas).

The formula-driven world of Hindi cinema until the 2000s created a corner for vamps, femme fatales, dancers, prostitutes and molls who introduced the prospect of sex in an otherwise sex-less landscape. They represented the road not taken, and provided a counterpoint to the saintliness of the female leads. In the masochist fantasy Kati Patang, in which Asha Parekh’s character goes through one miserable experience after another, Bindu steals the scene yet again as a blackmailing dancer (Bindu’s unlimited serves for meanness, which she conveyed through her sharp voice and curling lips, made her the perfect monster mother-in-law in the 1980s).

Vamps were indecorous, needy, scheming, shameless and transgressive. Many of them provided a false illusion of female agency and power, and they never stood a chance against virginal virtue, but there were exceptions. Helen played pivotal roles in several of her movies, notably Teesri Manzil and Don, apart from appearing in sensuous dance numbers. Aruna Irani, a fine character actor who has run the gamut of roles from prostitute to vigilante, plays a cleavage-baring singleton in Mili who ticks off the hero when he comments on her dress sense (before eventually slipping into a white sari).

Kim’s moll switches sides in Andar Bahar to help the good guys. Parveen Babi, although a lead actor, also did vamp duty as a hooker who picks up Amitabh Bachchan in Deewaar and a hotel dancer in Namak Halaal who gets the best prize of them all—the hotel’s owner.

Anurag Kashyap And how he galvanized a generation

Everyone who was somebody in Mumbai’s feeble independent cinema sorority in the early 2000s now claims to have met and befriended Anurag Kashyap. He was irascible and indignant. Kashyap had just co-written Ram Gopal Varma’s Satya. Varma’s compelling, sophisticated gangster dramatics of that period had a new, forceful language, and Kashyap understood it and imbibed it. A short film made in a moment of disenchantment, Last Train to Mahakali, got him the directorial push he needed in 1999, but the next six years went mostly in trying to get his first feature film Paanch released—it never was.

The media loved his promise, and the articulate, self-conscious movie brat he was.

After Black Friday released in 2007, with Kay Kay Menon, Pavan Malhotra, Aditya Srivastav and Nawazuddin Siddiqui in lead roles, he was unstoppable.

His style is often derivative, and the films speak more of other movies than of life, but with the absurd and metaphorical No Smoking (2007), the edgy and sad modern Devdas retelling Dev.D (2009), up to last year’s hefty gangster drama Gangs of Wasseypur I & II, Kashyap has already built a body of work that demands informed judgement.

In the last decade, when Kashyap turned to producing, his reputation as a phenomenon—as the poster boy of independent cinema—got cemented. He co-produced films with big studios and now partners Phantom Films. Kashyap steers conversations with mercurial wit and has a remarkable fanbase.

Who doesn’t love an outsider who storms the mainstream on his own terms?

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Could have been stars Why not Padmini Kolhapure?

She looked lovely, acted from the heart, and could perform the regulation dances with efficiency. Why, then, did Padmini Kolhapure not get more play? She is marvellous in Woh 7 Din, Prem Rog and even Vidhaata, a film with so many male characters that it takes some gumption to stand out.

Our list of talented actors who have been unfairly relegated to second-rung status or shunted into the arthouse cellar includes Rehman, whose strong features doomed him to villainous roles (Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam, Chaudhvin Ka Chand), Nadira, whose striking beauty and frank sexuality doomed her to seductress roles (Aan, Shree 420), Danny Denzongpa, too exotic for heartland audiences, and Irrfan Khan, who has leading man credentials (ask his female fans).

Theirs is a story of how popular movies have often pigeonholed actors and created unshakable expectations about heroism and villainy. Of course, there are always subversives. See Amitabh Bachchan and Shah Rukh Khan.

Vijay Anand Style and substance

The title of Sidharth Bhatia’s book Cinema Modern: The Navketan Story says everything there is to say about the Anand brothers Vijay, Chetan and Dev. They were modern, and they were a storied banner.

All three brothers directed films for Navketan, but Vijay Anand was leagues ahead of his siblings, as well as other film-makers. Anand liked movies with stylish actors, evocative sets, memorable songs, and busy plots. We’re torn between Johny Mera Naam and Jewel Thief—the former has superb songs, Dev Anand in top form and Premnath, while the latter has wild sets, Ashok Kumar, Vyjayanthimala and Sikkim.

He knew how to Indianize the crime thriller and make it seem as though the genre had sprung from Indian soil. He had a rare talent for that particular Indian trait, song picturization. In song after memorable song, in movie after movie, he tried out new things—Helen seen through large cut-outs of the letters ROCKY in Teesri Manzil; Dev Anand and Hema Malini canoodling in a greenhouse in Johny Mera Naam. His movies were modish without being flitty. In Guide, directed for Navketan before Anand stepped out to work with producers like Nasir Hussain and Gulshan Rai, he achieved the perfect balance between style and substance.

Imitating life: Naseeruddin Shah in Shyam Benegal’s Nishant (1975).

Naseeruddin Shah He made acting a sacred canon

Anger, lust, despair, self-flagellation, resentment, fear, joy—there’s a Naseeruddin Shah moment in all these emotions. The greatest actor of his generation, Shah, now 62, has the Hoffmanesque flair for what Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willemen, in their Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema, call “hesitant speech and casual gesture”. What hasn’t he portrayed? And portrayed with honesty, truth and intelligence which, in acting, means being the character he portrays. As the ageing superstar Suryakanth in The Dirty Picture (2011), Shah recently showed us that even for the character of an over-the-top buffoon, a great actor can show something hidden under the buffoonery without really overtly acting it out. Tungrus in Shyam Benegal’s Mandi (1983), Mike Lobo in Govind Nihalani’s Ardh Satya (1983), Albert in Saeed Mirza’s Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyoon Aata Hai (1980), and Anirudh Parmar in Sai Paranjpye’s Sparsh (1980), the only convincing blind man in Hindi cinema, are some of the earlier roles that established him as an acting canon unto himself.

He now looks back at the “parallel cinema” phase with bitterness; commercial cinema gave him money and reach, Kamal Haasan gave him the role of Mahatma Gandhi on screen (Hey Ram), which had dominated his wish list for a long time. As long as Shah continues accepting roles, the benchmark for Hindi cinema will always move a few notches higher.

Double roles When once is not enough

Does an actor charge extra if he or she is cast in a double role? Just asking.

It takes some skill to play a double role, so we have the deepest regard for newbie Arjun Kapoor, who plays a gangster and a lookalike policeman who is sent in his place to infiltrate a criminal gang in the 17 May release Aurangzeb. The movie has illustrious predecessors—China Town with Shammi Kapoor, Kalicharan with Shatrughan Sinha, Amitabh Bachchan with Don and Mithya with Ranvir Shorey.

Arjun Kapoor’s uncle, Anil Kapoor, did his own double act in Kishen Kanhaiya, itself inspired by Ram Aur Shyam, which also spawned Seeta Aur Geeta, and the far more exuberant ChaalBaaz, in

which Sridevi takes the floor as the coy Anju and the wicked Manju.

The theme of childhood separation of twins because of a natural calamity used to be the standard way to give audiences two for the price of one. Amol Palekar invents a twin in Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s brilliant comedy Gol Maal. Gulzar’s Angoor, based on William Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors, takes the idea of separated twins to a hilarious extreme, giving us two Sanjeev Kumars, two Deven Vermas, and twice the fun.

pathos-laden songs, Shankar-Jaikishan have made many nations hum and dance to their tunes.

Through their almost 200 films and albums, they remained one of the most successful names in Hindi cinema. Using their favourite scale, Bhairavi, and heavy orchestration to compose simple tunes, they ruled the airwaves and inspired so many future double-barrel, musical partnerships.

NSD­style natural acting Ebrahim Alkazi’s enormous talent pool

There is no shortage of high-wattage names in his clan. His father was thespian Prithviraj Kapoor, his illustrious brother Raj Kapoor made some of the most significant movies of the 1950s. Another brother, Shammi Kapoor, had his own fan following for his exuberance and energy. Shashi Kapoor went his own way. He did his share of romances, capers and dramas. He appeared as a sponge that absorbed some of Amitabh Bachchan’s intensity in the 1970s and 1980s. But he also showed his maverick side, producing intelligent and sensitive movies of lasting value, like Kalyug and Utsav. Read our essay on Kapoor’s production adventures on page 11.

Naseeruddin Shah, Om Puri, Pankaj Kapur, Seema Biswas, Irrfan Khan, Nawazuddin Siddiqui—the best actors of Hindi cinema owe substantially to one man: Ebrahim Alkazi. In 1959, when the Sangeet Natak Akademi—The National Academy for Music, Dance and Drama was born with the National School of Drama (NSD) as a constituent unit—37year-old Alkazi had just graduated from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, UK, and returned to Delhi. Alkazi served as NSD’s director for 15 years, braving the political and bureaucratic interference endemic to government-supported institutions.

Alkazi worked with his students for long hours, insisting on meticulous attention to detail. The first few batches of NSD returned home or went to Mumbai with an expertise that produced natural, gimmick-free acting in theatre and in front of the camera. The acting also fuelled realistic storytelling—much of it seen in the films of Shyam Benegal, Govind Nihalani, Ketan Mehta and other directors of the 1970s and 1980s. Today’s Siddiqui is proof that training can glean staggering talent. The Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune, which had opened two years earlier with an acting diploma among many other courses in film technique (Shabana Azmi, Jaya Bachchan, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Shatrughan Sinha are alumni of the acting course), stopped it in 1978 and resumed it with a new approach in 2004.

Shankar­ Jaikishan A perfectly tuned partnership

Known for frothy, romantic but also intensely

Shashi Kapoor Our favourite Kapoor

Dev Anand Forever young

Attractive, urbane, slim, seemingly light on his feet and of heart. If Dev Anand had retired from the screen in the 1960s, we might have loved him some more. Until then, he had a superb run, headlining romances (Tere Ghar Ke Samne) and thrillers (Jewel Thief), and, less successfully, dramas (Bombai Ka Babu, Guide). His performances depended greatly on the film-maker—it helped if his brother, Vijay Anand, was in charge—but his ability to light up the screen with his presence was very much his own.

Middle cinema The middle way

Hindi cinema was an exciting place in the 1970s and 1980s. There was mainstream cinema, parallel and experimental cinema. Then there was middle cinema, best represented by the films of Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Basu Chatterjee and Sai Paranjpye. They excelled in gentle satires and witty comedies that poked fun at middle-class values and hypocrisies.

The films had none of the heaviness of parallel films—they stayed away from politics, were characterized by a light touch and, despite modest budgets, tried to qualify as popular entertainment.

The honour roll includes Chupke Chupke, Gol Maal, Chhoti Si Baat, Chashme Buddoor and Saath Saath.

Middle cinema’s influence can be felt most strongly today in mid-budget dramas and comedies like Bheja Fry and Vicky Donor—neither arthouse nor mainstream, just comfortably in between.

COURTESY MOHAN CHURIWALA

Dapper hero: Dev Anand in Raj Khosla’s Kala Pani (1958).

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The non­kiss And the resulting erotic frisson

ESSAY | RACHEL DWYER

One of Hindi cinema’s brightest stars,

NARGIS, seen through 10 images

COURTESY SUBHASH CHHEDA

On-screen favourites: favourites: Raj Kapoor and Nargis in Jagte Raho.

Raho.

Yes, Indians don’t kiss. They skip foreplay, as is evident from the number of babies being born every day.

The banishment of the kiss from the movies, although it wasn’t uncommon in the 1930s and 1940s, led to mind-boggling acts of sublimation, suggestiveness and substitution. Songs became an important vehicle of sexual desire, often containing emotions, thoughts and imagery that were absent from the rest of the movie.

By the 1980s, the choreography simulated sex itself, in a desperate attempt to show the unshowable.

Without the crutches of lyrics, cinematography, camera movements and editing cuts, most film-makers didn’t quite know how to justify mutual passion. The ones who did banished the songs to the background and focused on what was in the foreground. In the sensuous feather sequence in K. Asif’s Mughal-e-Azam, Dilip Kumar and Madhubala consummate their love as Bade Ghulam Ali Khan’s Prem jogan ban ke wafts over them.

Vijay Anand too liberates his married couple from lip-syncing Mile mile do badan in Black Mail. In a truly startling moment, Dharmendra and Rakhee reaffirm their love by making out while hidden inside a pile of logs even as various criminals hunt for them.

Chemistry abounds in the songs in Mani Ratnam’s Dil Se. Shah Rukh Khan and Manisha Koirala don’t just smoulder for each other in the tracks Satrangi re and Ae ajnabi. They come perilously close in several moments, including a charged near-kiss in a sequence set in Ladakh. Lovemaking in Hindi movies usually involves the couple vigorously hugging each other and rubbing their faces together.

There’s no question of undressing. Girish Karnad’s Utsav dispenses with such inhibitions. The encounter between Rekha and Shekhar Suman, which begins with the divesting of jewellery, deserves its place as one of the best erotic scenes in Hindi cinema (the effect is enhanced by Suman’s gobsmacked expression).

Yin and yang: Shekhar Suman and Rekha in Utsav (1984).

Guru Dutt When the world is your enemy

n

argis Dutt was such a pre-eminent figure in the history of Indian cinema that her life and work are well known. Here are the 10 images I have chosen to acknowledge one of my favourite stars.

Nargis is perhaps remembered best for her role as Mother India in Mehboob Khan’s great epic. The film’s poster shows Nargis shouldering the plough as a beast of burden, a woman taking on the role of an animal and later a machine. The identification of Nargis with the new nation, as the heroine of a new national epic, also occurred when she moved from cinema to a new role as a wife, mother and member of the Rajya Sabha, before her terrible suffering with cancer. It says much about what a great star she was that winning the National Film Award for Best Actress, a high point in any career, which took place 10 years after Mother India, with Satyen Bose’s Raat Aur Din, is seen as being after her greatest days. We might wonder also about other films she could have made with Khan, who had introduced her in Taqdeer in 1943, following her earlier roles as a child artiste.

My second image of Nargis is an offscreen shot of her throwing her head back in laughter, a modern Bombay woman in her capri pants with her hair styled like a Hollywood star—much like Katharine Hepburn but possibly inspired by Nargis’ own favourite, Joan Fontaine. Her early life typifies the glamour of 1940s and 1950s Bombay, then, as now, a cosmopolitan and stylish city, even though she was born in Calcutta to north Indian parents. Her father, Mohan Babu, a Mohyal Brahmin (the same caste as Sunil Dutt), was eclipsed by her mother, the fascinating Jaddan Bai, a singer and courtesan of Allahabad, later one of India’s first film producers. While her name, Fatima Abdul Rashid, reveals her mother’s religion, she adopted the stage name Nargis, “daffodil”, a more “modern” name though, unlike many of her contemporaries, such as Meena Kumari and Madhubala, one which still was evidence of her Muslim heritage.

One of my favourite films of Nargis is

Khan’s Andaz, where she shines between the two heroes, Raj Kapoor and Dilip Kumar. It is said that Kapoor did not want her to act with Dilip Kumar—another of the great pairings of Hindi cinema—in films such as Mela, Anokha Pyar and Jogan. Two kinds of masculinity which dominate Indian cinema are presented here—the restrained hero who suffers through no fault of his own, played by Dilip Kumar, and the manchild who cannot handle his emotions, played by Raj Kapoor.

The fourth image is of Nargis as the third heroine in Raj Kapoor’s Aag, who first appears dishevelled and half-mad, saying she has no name and no home but has come from hell (narak), meaning Punjab, which has been consumed by the fires of Partition violence—one of the first mentions of Partition in a mainstream film.

This is very different from the fifth moment in Barsaat when, as Reshma, the daughter of a Kashmiri boatman (seemingly Hindu although the boatmen are Muslims, again possibly referring to Partition), she hears her beloved Pardesi Babu (Raj Kapoor) playing the violin, abandons her housework and rushes to him to fall into his arms, a moment captured in the logo of RK Studios.

In the sixth moment, the famous dream sequence from Awara, where Rita is, located in heaven, singing Ghar aaya mera pardesi, as Raj struggles to find his way out of the hell his life has become. She reaches out to him and seems to lift him to heaven, offering the possibility of redemption in a mixture of mostly Hindu but also Christian imagery, only for him to fall back into his nightmare.

The seventh image is my favourite. In Shree 420 Nargis had few glamorous moments, but the image of her and Raj Kapoor in indisputably one of Hindi cinema’s greatest love songs, Pyaar hua ikraar hua. The glamour of a rainswept Bombay and the star couple, R.K. and Nargis (as well as his children, who appear in their raincoats), is framed by a comic-pathetic sequence in which he cannot afford to buy his beloved even a cup of chai (tea) from a street stall, while the catchy music orches-

trated in a modern style is set to profound lyrics about the dilemma of love.

The eighth image of Nargis is when she appears at the end of Jagte Raho, singing Jago Mohan pyare, where she appears to R.K., a man lost in a cruel world who finds solace in the kindness shown to him by a child and then a woman associated with the new dawn. Her song to Krishna also addresses R.K. as the innocent, while she bears the security of tradition as well as beauty and eroticism.

The ninth is more a moment than an image, namely that of Nargis in the Rajya Sabha, where she attacked Satyajit Ray in her maiden speech, saying that his films were giving images of India that the West wanted, namely those of abject poverty, which were incorrect depictions. When pushed by a journalist about how India should be shown on screen, she said she wanted images of modern India, suggesting these were represented by dams, as indeed in Mother India. In The Moor’s Last Sigh, Salman Rushdie returns to these various themes of Nargis the star and as Mother India, the quarrel with Ray and the reading of the star text into the movie, in an episode in which the actress visits the narrator’s mother.

Lastly, the family image of Nargis Dutt— the wife of Sunil Dutt, and mother of three children, including Sanjay Dutt, whose life reads like a Greek tragedy.

Nargis is remembered today by the road named after her in Bandra and by the Nargis Dutt Award for the Best Feature Film on National Integration. There are also books written about her, by T.J.S. George and Kishwar Desai. I would like to see two more memorials. One is a blue plaque on Chateau Marine, which I look out for every time I drive along Marine Drive, and the other is a biopic. To play Nargis? My first choice is Kajol.

Among the greatest sequences ever shot in Indian cinema is one of Guru Dutt, standing in the doorway with his arms outstretched, in dark silhouette with light streaming in from behind him, Mohammed Rafi’s voice singing in a rising tempo, Yeh duniya agar mil bhi jaaye to kya hai, in Pyaasa. The camera zooms out as the audience in the hall, assembled, ironically, to mourn his death, stands up and turns around. The brooding, ultra-sensitive Dutt, a film-maker ahead of his times and an actor you constantly wanted to ask if he was all right, defined the 1950s and 1960s before his untimely death. He was a master craftsman, using light and camera better than anyone could imagine in the era of black and white films. His world view was romantic with tragic inclinations; the world of an artiste constantly in conflict with society. The story famously plays out in Pyaasa (1957), one of his best films along with Kaagaz ke Phool (1959), Mr & Mrs 55 and Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam (1962), in which he is the struggling poet who is hard done by a capitalist world that wants to exploit him. His films remained largely unappreciated at the time, but have become classics since. He gave us actors Waheeda Rehman and Johnny Walker; writer Abrar Alvi and cinematographer V.K. Murthy; he gave us moonlit nights and alcoholic escapism; he gave us Waqt ne kiya kya haseen sitam; cinemascope; and told us that love can be very, very painful.

Ketan Mehta A cinema of art, theatre and music

Ketan Mehta’s recent filmography doesn’t inspire too much confidence, but to get a measure of the Film and Television Institute of India-trained director’s talent, you need to go back to 1980, when he wove together a musical, a critique of caste, and the Bhavai performance tradition into one of the most assured debuts of all time.

Bhavni Bhavai is dedicated to Goscinny and Uderzo and Bertolt Brecht, and it lists art historian Jyotindra Jain as a consultant. Mehta’s next film, made five years later, adapted Mahesh Elkunchwar’s play Holi, about a group of adolescents running riot at their college hostel, into a movie by the same name. In his best-known film, Mirch Masala (1987), Smita Patil headlined a superb ensemble cast of villagers in pre-independence India who teach a lecherous government official the lesson of his life.

He has made a few ill-advised glossy films and is now resting his hopes on the yet-to-be-released Rang Rasiya, about the life and times of Raja Ravi Varma. It’s nowhere as impressive as his earlier films, but Mehta’s quest to make arthouse films in an Indian idiom is hopefully not yet dead.

COURTESY SHIVENDRA SINGH DUNGARPUR

Rachel Dwyer is professor of Indian cultures and cinema at SOAS (the School of Oriental and African Studies), University of London. lounge@livemint.com

Power of two: Geeta Bali and Guru Dutt in Baaz (1953).

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COURTESY SHIVENDRA SINGH DUNGARPUR

Timeless: Madhubala, resplendent in Guru Dutt’s Mr & Mrs 55 (1955).

COURTESY SUBHASH CHHEDA

Chowdhury, for example.

There has been no shortage of singers who perform in the style of the greats of yesteryear, be it Mohammed Rafi, Mukesh or Kishore Kumar, but Talat has been irreplaceably unique, as Biswas once pointed out. That tremor in his velvety voice brought out innocence, fragility and tragedy with equal ease. It has not been replicated.

Nutan A heroine who defied all screen stereotypes

Nutan sways gently to Chhod do anchal zamana kya kahega in Subodh Mukerji’s Paying Guest (1957)—with an irrepressible smile and elegant playfulness. The verbal duel between her and Dev Anand’s character is one of Hindi cinema’s unforgettable duets. Much of that refreshingly natural acting style (in an age of staged histrionics) defines her films in the 1950s and 1960s. But she had a serious, restrained actor in her that did justice to the roles of some unforgettable women characters in Hindi cinema.

In 1955, she displayed powerful acting skills as Gauri, an imprisoned and orphaned slave girl fighting for her survival in Amiya Chakrabarty’s Seema. This versatility proved to be her signature in a career that spanned more than 70 films, which includes Bimal Roy’s Sujata (1959) and Bandini (1963)—both of which got her awards, praise from critics, and a place in film history.

The original bad guy: Premnath plays the lusty villain in Vijay Anand’s Johny Mera Naam (1970).

Madhubala The magic of big eyes and an easy smile

She could play the part of an apparition and enchant her screen suitor into thinking he wanted to be with her, even if it meant his own death. She could be light-hearted, skipping to the tune of songs such as Haal kaisa hai janab ka. She understood when her lover came with baggage, as in Kala Pani. She could transform before our eyes from a fiery champion of the women-are-better-offwithout-men philosophy to a girl who desires the security of a relationship—the old Shakespearean theme of the taming of the shrew. And she could throw caution to the winds because she would much rather die for her prince than live in fear of an emperor’s wrath.

Madhubala made acting look effortless. The starcrossed lovers of Mughal-e-Azam, played by Madhubala and Dilip Kumar, won over the audience. But it is Madhubala’s Anarkali and her defiance in the face of social order and royal decree that stay with you. At the start of the song Pyaar kiya to darna kya, she is surrounded by the splendour of the Mughal court. But by the end, she has thrown an open challenge to the emperor himself, smirking in his face. As the ceiling mirrors multiply her image manifold, her twirling figure overwhelms even the beautiful scenography.

Villains Our favourite baddy-two shoes

...and Pran, the title of the actor’s biography

written by Bunny Reuben, refers to the way in which the actor got credited in his movies. Pran’s lengthy reign as a villain is justifiably celebrated, but his peak came early in his career, as the wicked timber estate owner in Madhumati who preys on Vyjayanthimala’s virtue.

The list of great villains, both men and women, who became stars in their own right because of the relish with which they attacked their roles is long. In the right movie with the right script, they provided welcome relief from the nauseating goodness of the main leads. In no order of importance, here are some of the people we love to hate to love. Premnath in Johny Mera Naam, consumed by lust for money and women.

Raghuvaran in Shiva, conveying nastiness by flaring his nostrils. Amrish Puri in countless roles, especially Shakti. Paresh Rawal in Naam, in archvillain mode after playing bit parts for years.

Naseeruddin Shah as a deranged government functionary in Mirch Masala. Jeevan as a scheming brother in Dharam Veer. Prem Chopra in Kati Patang, at his beady-eyed best. Vinod Khanna in Mera Gaon Mera Desh, a no-holdsbarred dacoit. Anupam Kher as a two-faced politician in Arjun. K.N. Singh in Dilli Ka Thug, mean mean mean. Madan Puri, unconvincing as a Chinese man named Chang in Howrah Bridge but dastardly nevertheless. Danny Denzongpa in Agneepath, smooth as silk. Simi Garewal as a scheming wife in Karz. Saif Ali Khan in Ek Hasina Thi, unrepentant till the end.

The importance of villains can be judged by the fact that the directors of later films like Ram

Lakhan and Tridev felt compelled to provide a gallery of rogues with such bizarre names as Bad Man, Sir John, Jibran and Tyson.

Talat Mahmood His voice quavered like a windswept candle

A quiet evening, a cool breeze, good whisky, and the voice of Talat Mahmood in the background— few of life’s little pleasures can match this one: Phir wohi sham, wohi gham, wohi tanhai hai…

Mahmood is the least remembered male singer from the golden age of Hindi film music, but his fans make up for their lack of numbers with the intensity of their passion for the original ghazal king. Most of his singing was telescoped into the few hundred songs he sang in about 10 years.

Mahmood burst on to the scene with a nonfilm song, Tasveer teri dil mera behela na sakegi, composed by his mentor Kamal Dasgupta in Calcutta. He moved to Bombay in 1949, and took the film world by storm. In those early years, he was the voice of Dilip Kumar in some of the greatest tragic roles played by the actor, in films such as Daag, Devdas, Shikast, Foot Path and Sangdil. They were as made for each other as Raj Kapoor and Mukesh or Dev Anand and Kishore Kumar, but the partnership did not last for long.

He chose his songs carefully, insisting that the lyrics should be poetic, a path that ensured he lost out in the more noisy 1960s. A few music composers remained faithful to him: Anil Biswas, Madan Mohan and Salil

Love in cold places The romance of hill stations and Kashmir

There’s nothing like checking out of big city life and heading to the hills. You might fall in love, for one thing, with a boatman played by Shashi Kapoor (Jab Jab Phool Khile) or a businessman’s son played by Shammi Kapoor (Kashmir Ki Kali). You will be able to wear winter clothing, like Saira Banu does in Junglee or Shabana Azmi in Lahu Ke Do Rang.

The path to finding love far away from home is a well-trodden one—it lets audiences travel without leaving the cinema, gives film-makers an excuse to showcase exotic locations, and allows characters to behave in ways they wouldn’t otherwise imagine. Kashmir was the ultimate romantic getaway before the pro-independence movement exploded in the 1980s. Movies like Kashmir Ki Kali, Waqt and Bemisal promoted its picture-postcard vistas and introduced several heartland Indians to the pleasures of snow and houseboats. Kashmir did face some competition from Shimla. Movies like Daag and Love in Simla did more for tourism to the hill station than any government or private effort. If there is one culprit for Shimla’s ruinous construction boom, it is Hindi cinema.

Indians now lose their hearts in other places—Manali (Jab We Met), Goa and Sydney (Dil Chahta Hai), New Zealand (Kaho Naa...

Pyaar Hai) and Spain (Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara). Travel does broaden the mind—and improve prospects.

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ESSAY | HEMANT MORPARIA

o

One would never know how far

MEHMOOD would go COURTESY SUBHASH CHHEDA

Comic perfection: In Padosan, Mehmood steals the limelight from the film’s leading actors.

Sahir Ludhianvi The poet of ‘Pyaasa’

The Western world has “We don’t need no education”, but when Indians want an antiestablishment song, they turn to Yeh mehlon, ye takhton ye taajon ki duniya, written by Sahir Ludhianvi for Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa in 1957.

Ludhianvi (his real name was Abdul Hayee) was among those poets and lyricists who gave Hindi cinema many anthems. For those in need of hope, there is Woh subah kabhi toh aayegi (Phir Subah Hogi, 1958); for fighters and smokers, there is Main zindagi ka saath nibhata chala gaya, har fikr ko dhuein mein udata chala gaya (Hum Dono, 1962); for the down-trodden, there is Saathi haath badhana (Naya Daur, 1957); for fathers of brides, Babul ki duaayen leti jaa (Neel Kamal, 1968); for the secularists, Tu Hindu banega na Musalmaan banega (Dhool ka Phool, 1959); for lost lovers and a tribute to the love of his life, writer Amrita Pritam, Chalo ek baar phir se ajnabi ban jaaye (Gumrah, 1963). Oh, and he has even written an item number, Ni main yaar manana ni chahe log boliyan bole (Daag, 1973), that can beat the living daylights out of Sheila and Munni.

Nasir Hussain Link between Shammi Kapoor and Aamir Khan

He made a mini empire out of romance and rock-nroll in the 1960s. Bhopal-born Nasir Hussain joined Filmistan Studio in 1948 as a scenarist and wrote sporadically before directing Tumsa Nahin Dekha (1957), the film that skyrocketed Shammi Kapoor to fame. This was the beginning of a musical romance style with Mohammed Rafi’s voice adapted to rockn-roll music. As the producer of Nasir Hussain Films, he made many love stories, including Jab Pyar Kisise Hota Hai (1961) and Yaadon ki Baaraat (1973). Hussain scripted and produced his nephew Aamir Khan’s debut as a hero with Qayamat Se

ne would never know how far Mehmood would go. This factor underscores two important components of humour: discomfort and unpredictability. The premise of any joke rests on creating a situation that generates anxiety and discomfort (with the punch line providing mirthful relief). Also, the most entertaining jokes are ones that are fresh, ergo, not predictable.

Mehmood was a master of both. He was the classical back-bencher prankster of your school days who enjoyed rebellion, anarchy and attention. His humour was cheeky, bold and loud. It came across as spontaneous and authentic. It was overthe-top, sometimes scatological. It was also a no-holds-barred, politically incorrect variety of humour. And it happened to be very, very funny.

Mehmood belonged to a time when there existed in Hindi cinema a category called the comedian. Like the vamp, this category has more or less vanished, having been usurped by the hero/heroine/item number. Comedians provided a parallel tract to the main story, largely unrelated to it, but serving various useful functions, one of which was to simply provide comic relief, particularly when the main story got emotionally heavy and serious.

But Mehmood’s humour could be disruptive and irreverent. This irreverence sometimes even extended to the hero of the film. This obviously did not go down well with the stars. Many popular heroes of his time refused to work with him since he was the quintessential scene-stealer.

Mehmood had no other option but to make movies himself, with him as the lead, and a lesser hero (often it was Vinod Mehra) in a supporting role. Mehmood did not feel the need to have any leading female actor as well, since it did not matter who else was in his movie.

Mehmood the comedian could not be separated from Mehmood the man. He was the source of his material. The comedy sprang from him rather than from the script. He was a guest on Phool Khile Hain Gulshan Gulshan, the television show hosted by Tabassum in the 1980s.

The opening shot has him facing a wall, legs spread, with his back to the camera and his hands in front of him just below waist level. An alarmed Tabassum tells him, “Arre bhaijaan, toilet udhar hai, idhar nahi (the toilet’s that way, not here).” He turns around and shows her the wad of cash he has been counting.

When he and Mukri were hosting the same show later, his constant entreaties, book in hand, to Mukri, in a child’s voice, were “Main padoo?”, a reference to a line from his Chhote Nawab. Later, for several months, this Mehmood-inspired, gasattack threat was our response to our parents when we were asked to study. His

radio programme promoting the movie Do Phool began with him mocking the “Hum All India Radio se bol rahe hai” with “Hum moo se bol rahe hai.”

For all the coarseness and physicality of Mehmood’s humour, there was little innuendo. He was rarely risqué. I can only think of a single scene from the funniest Hindi film ever, Bombay to Goa, where he plays a bus conductor named Khanna (the driver’s name is Rajesh). Khanna is flirting with Manorama’s daughter. Manorama gets irritated and tells him to get back to his seat. “Kamaal hai,” Mehmood complains. “Jab main khada ho jata hoon to bitha deti hai, jab main baith jata hoon to khada kar deti hai (It’s amazing. When I stand, she forces me to sit, when I sit, she makes me stand)” Mehmood made us laugh out loud, for physical comedy causes a physical response. The cerebral kind of humour did not work for him. Mehmood’s comedic genius operated from a lower centre—the gut. Like Charlie Chaplin, Mehmood combined comedy and sentimentality beautifully. The object of the sentimentality was never the love interest (how would that ever work?) but a child (Mastana, Kunwara Baap) or the mother (Main Sundar Hoon). The lullaby “Aa ri aa ja, nindiya tu le chal kahin” causes many grown men to burst into tears, Sonu Nigam, Johnny Lever and myself included.

Mehmood could sure express sentimentality well, but he could not be entirely serious. In the last scene in his Sabse Bada Rupaiya, where he is pontificating on real wealth and fake friends, he provides as an example an emaciated, uniformed man, his driver, who has an unusually bulbous nose. “Inko dekho, itna shareef hai yeh bechara mera driver (look, how humble my poor driver is)” and can’t resist adding, “yeh Anand Bakshi”.

Recently I was in Rome and saw buskers dressed as performing Indian fakirs near the Coliseum. Who else but Mehmood came to mind, with his line from Humjoli, in which he mimicked Prithviraj Kapoor, who is scandalized by his grandson’s alleged affair with one Lilly (“Lilly, tu mujhko kyun milli”). The grandpa says, disparagingly, “Hari oooom!

Yeh bhaaarat hai yaaa hai Rooome!”

Mehmood set the bar high for low comedy. For him, his successor was Johnny Lever, a claim contested by Lever himself.

“He was the king, and when he died he took the throne away with him,” Lever said. I agree. Using Mehmood’s own techniques of reprise, Lever sang, “Mehmood mere, Mehmood mere, tu hai to duniya kitni haseen hai, joh tu nahi to kuch bhi nahi hai.”

Hemant Morparia is a cartoonist with Mumbai Mirror. lounge@livemint.com

Qayamat Tak (1988). His son Mansoor Khan took over the reins after his death in 2002.

The city film Bombay then, Delhi now

Bombay, and later Mumbai, has monopolized the city film for decades for obvious reasons. Mumbai is where the movies get made, and dreams get made and unmade. For years, it has adopted many avatars depending on the times—the city of gold, a beacon of modernity, an escape from oppressive conditions, a willing and unwilling destination for migrants from small towns and villages, a cesspool of immorality and crime, a graveyard of hope.

As movies got out of the studios and into real locations, Mumbai started broadcasting its wares to the rest of India. Movies in the 1950s, like Chetan Anand’s Taxi Driver and Guru Dutt’s Aar-Paar, celebrate Mumbai’s wide, welcoming streets and beaches—Taxi Driver even lists “The city of Bombay” in its credits. The romance of Bombay’s open-air charms continued into the 1970s, into such films as Basu Chatterjee’s Chhoti Si Baat and Baaton Baaton Mein. Other films like Kismet (1943), Shree 420 (1955), CID (1956) caution against falling for the city’s trickster charms. Mumbai is where men and women with flexible morals abound (Kala Bazar, 1960; Gharaonda, 1977), migrants lose their bearings (Deewaar, 1975; Gaman, 1978), corruption is rife (Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, 1983) and gangsters run amok (Satya, 1998).

It’s hard for one city to shoulder so many interpretations, which is probably why filmmakers have started exploring other cities. The emergence of Delhi as a cinematic muse has to do with the recent transformations in its infrastructure, as well as a change of image, from a carpetbagger-run, conspiracy-guided capital (New Delhi Times, 1986) to a cool place with cool people (Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!, 2008); Vicky Donor, 2012). What’s next? Ahmedabad?

Iconic: (from left) Nargis, Rajendra Kumar and Sunil Dutt struggle through rural life in Mother India.

Village movies Once upon a time in rural India

It’s not only the city (usually Mumbai) that gets a rap in the movies. Rural India too isn’t necessarily the best of places in which to pursue your dreams, fall in love, or bring up your children.

Rural India might have people who are bound more tightly to their roots than their Westernized counterparts, but they have their own set of enemies to face. They have rapacious moneylenders like Sukhi Lal, who tries to violate Radha’s honour in Mother India, and manipulative landlords who drive a wedge between brothers (Gunga Jumna). They have dacoits (Mera Gaon

Mera Desh) and not-so-innocent women (Teesri Kasam). They have caste discrimination (Ankur) and bonded labour (Paar).

Popular cinema’s sceptical attitude towards rural India continues. In Ashutosh Gowariker’s Swades, Shah Rukh Khan’s US-returned engineer finds that the India he left behind hasn’t changed as much as he hoped. The opportunistic characters in Shyam Benegal’s Welcome to Sajjanpur have even fewer illusions about their future. Benegal neatly shatters any idealistic notions urban viewers might nurse about their rural counterparts. The satire spoofs the alleged merits of rural life and the very idea of the rural film itself.

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INTERVIEW | NANDINI RAMNATH

The outcome of film­maker

KAMAL SWAROOP’ S magnificent obsession with Dhundiraj Govind Phalke MANOJ PATIL/MINT

Single-minded: Swaroop’s immersion in Phalke’s life began in 1990.

t

he centenary of Indian cinema marks a hundred years since the first screening of Dhundiraj Govind Phalke’s Raja Harishchandra in Bombay in 1913. By the end of next year, Phalke and other pioneers will have been returned to the vaults, but Kamal Swaroop’s project on the director will continue to take new and fascinating turns.

“People think a hundred years are over, I say it is only beginning,” Swaroop says.

On 3 May, the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC) copublished Tracing Phalke, a collage of images, observations and digressions put together by Swaroop and his collaborators. The book gives a taste of the infinite and idiosyncratic nature of Swaroop’s Phalke project. It is by no means a linear account of the life and times of the magician, inventor, publisher, artist, photographer and film-maker, who died in 1944 at the age of 73. For Swaroop, Phalke is a process rather than a project, a means to examine the mechanics of film-making and mythmaking, an opportunity to tinker with forms of storytelling, a platform from which to address the thin boundary between fiction and non-fiction.

Swaroop’s magnificent obsession with Phalke, which began 23 years ago, has resulted in an outpouring of words and images. He has made short films on the time Phalke spent in Bombay, Nashik and Benares. At least two more films are in the pipeline, set in Kolhapur and Pune.

“The question is, should I end it here, or continue? The zero is beginning again, so I will start counting again,” says the 60year-old film-maker.

The films, like the book, merge research and fiction while carrying out digressions into the mental and geographic landscapes of Phalke. For instance, the film about Nashik includes footage of the places Phalke talked about in his writings, reimagines the experiences he had there, and merges this footage with fictional episodes drawn from the film-maker’s life, which were scripted by the participants in the workshop. “There is information about Phalke but we have to fictionalize it in order to store it,” Swaroop says. “It’s a process, and it’s not about the final product. It never ends, but it will keep shifting.”

As tributes go, it’s safe to say that there’s no project quite like this one.

Swaroop has set himself a deadline of 2016 to make his cherished Phalke biopic.

“I will be looking for funds the way he looked for them,” Swaroop says. “Phalke tapped crowdfunding and political parties, he got money from his patents. In 2016, when I script his life, I will go through the phases he went through.”

Swaroop’s immersion in Phalke’s life began in 1990 with a timeline that mapped events in his life on to actual historical incidents. Out of that timeline flowed a documentary, Phalke’s Children, a comic book on the same subject for the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, and the website PhalkeFactory. Swaroop collected a group of like-minded filmmakers and set out on a Phalke pilgrimage. “We focused on his lifespan from zero to 73, but also the lifespan of the cities he lived in,” he says. Swaroop created his own personal Phalke timeline, mapping his life on to the multi-hyphenate director’s. He started reading up on Phalke’s areas of interest, like printing and photography. “I go through the learning process by following his life,” he says.

Swaroop has made other fascinating discoveries along the way, which will find their way into the project one way or another. “What happened during the early years of cinema is what is happening during the early years of the digital camera, in terms of the kind of equipment, the way images are being recorded,” he says. “I am trying to crack this mutation—what different kind of technologies will emerge, and how people will think about them.”

Swaroop’s maverick approach to an equally maverick film personage is not one bit surprising. His only fictional feature, Om Dar-B-Dar, is a brilliant avant-garde tribute to Ajmer, where Swaroop grew up. Produced by the NFDC in 1988 for `10 lakh, Om Dar-B-Dar was never released and rarely seen until 2005, when it was screened at Experimenta, an experimental film festival in Mumbai.

Clips from the movie, which exist online, are enough to send viewers into paroxysms of ecstasy. The NFDC is currently restoring the movie, and will bring out DVDs in a few months.

The stream of consciousness narrative is about a schoolboy, Om, and his fantastical impressions of his small-town life, which is “set in a mythical small town in Rajasthan, akin to the Jhumri Telaiya

from whence stem the largest number of film music singles addressed to All India Radio’s commercial channel”, according to the authors of the Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema. Paul Willemen and Ashish Rajadhyaksha write that the “jerky, fast-moving and witty film proceeds by way of symbolic imagery including tadpoles, skeletons and fantasies derived from Hindi movies, advertising, television, and the popular Hindi novel”.

The tadpoles are used in a dissection sequence that invited the wrath of animal rights activist Maneka Gandhi at the time.

“Maneka Gandhi wrote an article in The Illustrated Weekly about it, she said this guy is pathological,” Swaroop says. “I bought 500 frogs for four annas each from Agra and chloroformed them.”

Swaroop studied film direction at the Film and Television Institute of India in Pune. He made educational and science programmes for the Indian Space Research Organization, worked on documentaries and movies, and wrote Hindi copy for advertising agencies. His instinctive understanding of the workings of popular culture led to freelance assignments with Channel [V], where he produced parodic movie shows and promotional fillers.

“People working in the channel in those days were young and wanted to express themselves, which they did by retreating into their early memories—the posters and matchbox wrappers they saw as kids, the games they played,” he says. “Most of them were also from small towns, so they were expressing themselves from their impressions. Childhood and adolescent memories were being parodied, but it often didn’t go beyond that.”

One of the series he did much before Shemaroo Entertainment’s 15 Min Movies on the YouTube channel was called Mini Movies, in which he compressed popular Hindi films into 5 minutes. “We did a Manmohan Desai festival in 4 hours,” he says.

Om Dar-B-Dar came out of his own adolescent experiences. “It’s not a grown man’s fantasy,” Swaroop says. “It’s about Ajmer as well as a fantastical remembrance of it. There are memories, but also small-town observations and comments. I got news about a castecertificate racket in Karnataka. I went into census reports. I had an uncle whose name was Mathoo, then he converted to Christianity and called himself Mathew, and then he moved to Rajasthan and became Mathur.” The script took three years to write, during which time Swaroop, following in the footsteps of Dadaist thought, tried to “remove familiarity” and “explore the uncanny”.

He says: “Om Dar-B-Dar is not trying to hypnotize you through illusion. There is an authenticity about Ajmer that comes through. I took total fiction and tried to impose it on a real space. The real space is going to reject something it can’t absorb. There will be a transformation of the fiction.”

Even he was surprised by the movie, he says. “People connected with it physically—it became like a totem, something that helps people resurrect their adolescent memories in their own way.” He has written scripts since, including Miss Palmolive All Night Cabaret and Om And the Satellite City, but he can’t be bothered to make them and has posted them on the Internet for free.

“When I was doing fiction, it needed a high level of concentration, it was too much stress,” he says. “I will feel nice if somebody else makes them and I don’t have to.”

Besides, if he starts making fiction films, what will happen to the allconsuming Phalke project? “Phalke keeps me busy,” he says. “What will I do otherwise? nandini.r@livemint.com

Dolled up: Sharmila Tagore in Shakti Samanta’s Amar Prem (1972).

Sharmila Tagore Drama, melodrama, swimsuits and saris

There are two types of Sharmila Tagore fans. Cinephiles don’t want to look beyond her nuanced work in four Satyajit Ray films, including the remarkable Devi. Admirers of Shakti Samanta’s ornate melodramas will forever associate Tagore with the filmmaker (also a Bengali, like Ray), especially because of Amar Prem and Aradhana.

Both directors defined Tagore’s screen image like no other. One buttoned down her vivid beauty; the other dressed it up. For Ray, she wrapped herself up in Bengali cotton saris; for Samanta, she wore swimsuits, chiffon saris and bouffant wigs. Between the two directors, she completed an arc of expression, beginning with cerebral restraint and ending with irrational abandon.

The melancholic hero Devdas and friends Melancholic heroes are dismissed as navel-gazing wimps who can’t commit to anything—their family, love, work, society. Bring them on, especially in a decade dominated by comic book heroes and hyper-masculine men.

The best acolyte of writer Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s creation Devdas, which has been filmed several times in several languages, can only be another Devdas. Although Abhay Deol’s stoner version of the character in Anurag Kashyap’s Dev.D (2009) provokes neither pathos nor disgust, he provides much needed relief from his overachieving screen counterparts. The oldfashioned lot, who were unafraid to wet their craggy faces with tears, fared far better. Dilip Kumar, with his ability to suggest interiority and sensitivity, was born to play the part. Amitabh Bachchan never appeared as Devdas, although he would have been wonderful, but he did lite versions, such as Muqaddar Ka Sikandar and Mili.

Anil Kapoor The Everyman star

You are not supposed to pant at the mention of Anil Kapoor’s name. That’s why he is teamed up with the hunky Jackie Shroff in so many films (Ram Lakhan, Parinda, Andar Baahar).

Kapoor resembles a sweet-natured and enthusiastic neighbour, but he can also be the loafer your parents warned you about.

Therein lies his strength—his ability to convincingly portray common folk on screen. He was undoubtedly a star by the time he was eclipsed by Shah Rukh Khan in the 1990s. Draw up a list of the more respectable movies in the 1980s and Kapoor will be in several of them, from Woh 7 Din to Chameli Ki Shaadi, Mr India to Parinda.

Everyman: Anil Kapoor in Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s Parinda (1989).

Govinda Comic star No. 1

He danced, he beat up people, he lip-synced romantic numbers. But audiences took Govinda most seriously only after he teamed up with David Dhawan and, aided by Kader Khan’s unmatched talent for dreadful puns and relentless wordplay, became the Mehmood-cumDada Kondke of his generation. Govinda’s unflagging energy and fundamentally innocent image allowed him to rise above Dhawan’s love for double-entendre material. He could be a decent dramatic actor when he wanted to be (see Shola Aur Shabnam; Hum), but audiences wanted him to play the clown, so he did.

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PHOTOGRAPHS

COURTESY

SUBHASH CHHEDA

TRIBUTE | SRIRAM RAGHAVAN

A director on one of his favourite actors,

DHARMENDRA, the broad­chested, dreamy­eyed movie star

a

child on a bridge is watching the rail tracks below. His parents have been killed and his brothers separated. A train is approaching.

In one continuous 360-degree shot, the camera moves from the child to the oncoming train and moves back to his feet.

Only, the feet now belong to a man. The camera tilts up and it’s Dharmendra. There was no Dolby then but the movie hall was drowned in a thousand whistles.

Raj N. Sippy’s Sitamgar introduces Dharmendra taking a snooze on the roof of a moving train. In one of the bogeys, a hardcore criminal is guarded by a posse of policemen. The screen is somewhat shrunk and I wonder if there is a projection mistake.

Then Dharmendra wakes up and stretches his hands…and the screen goes CinemaScope.

For the past two days, instead of cracking the climax of my upcoming script, I’ve been watching YouTube songs and clips featuring Dharmendra and wondering what I can write that is new, about the most handsome and definitely most underrated Hindi film star ever.

Kuch dil ne kaha from Anupama is one of my 10 best songs ever. We see a young Dharmendra watching Sharmila Tagore sing in her garden. He is a young, sensitive, middle-class poet who falls in love with the introverted girl, whose father blames her for his wife’s death. Tick “Subtle, restrained performance”.

My next watch is the same pair, this time in Chupke Chupke. Ab ke sajan saawan mein. Dharmendra, as driver Pyaremohan hiding behind a curtain and listening to Sharmila and playfully biting her finger. Tick “Great comic timing”.

Cut to Bachke kahan jaoge, a highenergy cabaret number from Yakeen, a spy drama directed by Brij, perhaps the only film in which Dharmendra plays a villain—in a double role, of course. Tick “Macho, action hero”.

The train sequence from Sholay, which shows his prowess in drama, action and comedy. Don’t we love the moment when, in the midst of the action, he takes a swig

from the bottle and blows the train whistle?

I revisit Rafta rafta, O meri mehbooba with Zeenat Aman, Kuch kehta hai yeh sawan from Raj Khosla’s Mera Gaon Mera Desh, another of Dharmendra’s action blockbusters, with a terrific Vinod Khanna as the dacoit.

The film is an edgy precursor to Sholay.

That’s macho, He-Man Dharam wooing his ladies. Just to show how Dharmendra’s sensitive eyes create an intriguing romance, check out Aap ke haseen rukh pe aaj from the Guru Dutt production Baharen Phir Bhi Aayengi. Dharmendra on a piano serenading two lovely ladies, Mala Sinha and Tanuja, in black and white. Just tell me who is in love with whom in this clip.

The poster of O.P. Ralhan’s Phool Aur Patthar has a bare-bodied Dharmendra looming over Meena Kumari. It’s the most striking image of the film that catapulted him to stardom. Nutan, Suchitra Sen, Mala Sinha and Meena Kumari were actors who had strong, women-centric roles written for them.

Dharmendra, with his sensitive face and eyecandy looks, was the perfect male choice in these films.

Chemistry—how often do we see it today?

Tera peecha na, main chhodunga soniye, Dharmendra and Hema Malini in Jugnu, in which Dharmendra plays an urban Robin Hood. Or Tera sheeshe ka samaan, also with Hema Malini, from Manmohan Desai’s Chacha Bhatija.

One of my biggest profits from Johnny Gaddaar was that I got a chance to work with Dharmendra. I once asked him about how he dealt with song sequences, especially the robust dancing ones. He said, whenever I have to do a song, I just think there’s a tiger in front of me. Either I take him under control, or else he’ll eat me.

The magazine Stardust called him “Garam Dharam” in 1970. Thirty-five years later, my 19-year-old assistant met him for the first time on the sets of Johnny Gaddaar. Her first words were, “Oh, he is so hot.”

I chance upon a clip from Guddi, Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s coming-of-age film about a schoolgirl with a crush on a film star.

Dharmendra plays himself and makes it look so effortless that we simply miss the fact that

it’s a terrific performance.

I dug out my DVD of Pratiggya, a loose remake of Guns for San Sebastian. It’s a dacoit revenge drama dressed as an overthe-top comedy. The sheer joy and abandon of Dharmendra’s performance is that much more enjoyable because we don’t see the skill and effort behind it. Pratiggya is one of the dozen-plus, super-duper hits of Dharmendra with Hema Malini. It’s also got the terrific Mohammed Rafi number Main jat yamla pagla deewaana.

There was a time in the 1970s when three Dharmendra films were running simultaneously in theatres to full houses. This was at a time when Rajesh Khanna was on top and Amitabh Bachchan had just arrived.

Many stars got sidelined, but Dharmendra was the rock that wouldn’t budge.

Dharmendra is a hungry actor and gave us superb improvised moments in Johnny Gaddaar. More important, he was there to give cues to other actors with the same enthusiasm. It’s this humility to the medium that makes him so enduring and endearing.

Did the sensitive jail doctor in Bandini expect that one day he would be wearing a black frock and indulging in lance fights in Manmohan Desai’s El Cid type swashbuckler Dharam Veer? Dharmendra told us that it was his father’s favourite film.

Dharmendra tried his best not to get trapped in any image. He did Aankhen, a spy blockbuster, in the same year as his most sensitive film Satyakam. He played a shy poet in the Vijay Anand thriller Black Mail. The same year also had Rajinder Singh Bedi’s Phagun and A. Bhimsingh’s Loafer. He shone in three terrific late 1980s films that didn’t get their due. J.P. Dutta’s Ghulami, Hathyar and Batwara were serious dramas that showcased a mature Dharmendra.

However, Anil Sharma’s masala action film Hukumat broke all records in 1987 and finally trapped him in the action star image that he is unfortunately most known for today.

Far away from home: Raj Kapoor in Around the World (1967).

The globetrotting Indian Never really leaving home

This one is a list for the masochists.

There is a healthy set of movies in which Indians make asses of themselves in the public squares of the world’s greatest cities. When Indian film-makers land up in Paris, London, Moscow and Tokyo, they invariably place the actors in front of famous monuments and start dancing, much to the bemusement of bystanders. The Indian characters don’t mingle with foreigners (unless they are undercover spies or criminals). They seek out fellow Indians wherever they go (and find them too), and then stick with their own. Except for the dancing, that’s exactly what several Indian tourists do when they travel abroad even today.

Among the more embarrassing films on the list are Raj Kapoor’s Around the World (1967) and Yash Chopra’s Lamhe (1991). Kapoor introduced travelstarved Indians to the wonders of the world, while Chopra made Switzerland the Kashmir of the West.

But their handling of the locations proves that the Indian is never at home anywhere—except at home.

Kajol

Oh, by the way, she’s a star

Kajol was the most casual of stars, all the more alluring because she didn’t care about her appearance. She dressed like she was in a 1980s production, but her naturalistic acting is straight out of a 1950s movie. The last of the old-fashioned actors has now undergone an image makeover, but she remains as idiosyncratic as ever. Read our essay on page 22.

The 1990s were not the best times for Hindi cinema and Dharmendra did a lot of bad films in that period. I think he did those films simply because he wanted to be in the midst of what he loved best—the shooting of a film.

It’s the time for trivia lists in the 100th year of Indian cinema. If we were to make a list of the 100 best Hindi films, we’ll find a lot of Dharmendra in them.

Abhi to haath mein jaam hai from Ramesh Sippy’s Seeta Aur Geeta is buffering.

Sriram Raghavan directed Dharmendra in Johnny Gaddaar in 2007. The film-maker has also directed Ek Hasina Thi and Agent Vinod. lounge@livemint.com

A stud for all seasons: He could play the action star or the sensitive hero, but Dharmendra also had great comic timing.

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KAMAT FOTO FLASH

Smart move: Madhuri Dixit in her career-altering number Ek do teen from N. Chandra’s Tezaab (1988); and (below) Irrfan Khan in Tigmanshu Dhulia’s Paan Singh Tomar (2012).

poster-pretty effects, sometimes with shafts of artificial light enveloping characters, or hues of natural light captured in amazing detail.

SD Burman The bardic voice

“Wahan kaun hai tera, musafir jayega kahan, Dam lele ghadi bhar, ye chhaiyaan, payega kahan” This lilting, existential ode to the traveller from Vijay Anand’s Guide is in the voice of Sachin Dev Burman. Composed also by him, the raw and raspy sound adds to the song’s appeal. Burman voiced and composed many other haunting beauties such as O re majhi from Sujata and Mere saajan hai us paar from Bandini. He has composed all kinds of songs in Hindi cinema—from Sujata and Bandini to Tere Ghar Ke Samne, Jewel Thief, Guide, Aradhana and Mili. Burman’s idiom was distilled from the folk traditions of Bengal (especially the Bhatiali tradition, which is about depicting a mood which may have philosophical connotations) but made mainstream seamlessly.

The living room Drawing inspiration from the hall

Madhuri Dixit The two-step formula to success

Heaving bosom, swinging hips and sighs indicate Sushma’s longing for her love in Sailaab. She lies gasping and writhing under a fish net. She is sensuous bordering on risqué as she sings Humko aajkal hai intezaar, koi aaye leke pyaar. She is at once hopeful and shy; mysterious and accessible.

Of course we understand her anguish—she is Madhuri Dixit.

Dixit, with immeasurable help from choreographer Saroj Khan, made reel magic time, and her dance sequences acquired a life of their own, quite separate from the movies. Growing up in the 1990s, there was an element of watching something forbidden in some of their partnerships.

The “Dhak dhak” girl wooed her simpleton future husband by thrusting her breasts in 1992’s Beta. Of course there’s a technical term for that move in dance—it’s called isolations—but it falls so woefully short of describing the abandon with which Dixit threw herself into the performance.

Dixit’s dance was more than the sum of its parts. In Khel the same year, she rendered the Idli doo song in two ways—the cabaret version poking gentle fun at the genre, and the bhajan version also poking gentle fun, but at the gullibility of the other characters. It didn’t matter that the film about three con artistes was borrowed heavily from a successful Hollywood picture. Dixit made the moves her own.

Of course, Dixit had her misses. There was the aerobics-like dance routine in Tamma tamma loge in Thanedaar (1990)—a fast-tempo number choreographed with jazz hands (fingers splayed out), jumps and disastrous attempts at the hitchkick and flat back. But for all that, the number went viral—in the limited way things went viral back then, before so many had access to high-speed broadband and YouTube videos, watching movies and film songs on that now extinct animal called a VCR and during parties with school friends.

Meena Kumari A ‘bibi’ like no other

Really, it is just that one shot in the song Na jao saiyan from Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam (1962). Meena Kumari slants a look up at Rehman, asking him to stay on, and, in the process, defines sexuality in black and white Hindi cinema forever. Some say her performance as a neglected wife starved of love and sexual attention is her best ever. When you see “Chhoti bahu”, as she is known, alternate between hope and hopelessness, you cannot but feel her agony being transferred to you with every passing frame. Waheeda Rehman told Dinesh Raheja and Jitendra Kothari, authors of Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam: The Original Screenplay, that she was keen to play the role, but that both producer Guru Dutt and director Abrar Alvi refused. All we can say is that a major miscast was averted.

Bollywood jazz Putting the swing into film music

It started with love on a Sunday, but it didn’t take long for India to start loving Hindi film tunes

inflected with jazz—the world’s first pop music— every day of the week. For two decades after C. Ramchandra wrote Sunday ke Sunday for Shehnai in 1947, almost every movie seemed to contain a tune or two revved up by jazz, featuring wailing clarinets, searing saxophones and hot trumpets.

Traces of the African-American style are everywhere if you’re listening: jazz throbs insistently when the credits roll, in the incidental music that accompanies car-chase sequences or walks along Marine Drive, Mumbai, but especially in the cabaret songs, signifying boldness (and badness).

Jazz travelled a circuitous route to Bollywood.

African-American musicians performing in Bombay’s luxury hotels in the 1930s filled a whole generation of Goan musicians with a passion for the melodies of New Orleans. After independence, many of these Goans found jobs in the Hindi film studios, assisting composers to score their tunes so that orchestras could play them, and as performers in the ensembles. The result was Mera naam chin chin choo, Eena meena deeka and a whole genre that’s now being recognized as Bollywood jazz.

Irrfan Khan The actor who redefined ‘crossover’

In 1988, fresh from training at the National School of Drama, Irrfan Khan got a small role in Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay!. His scenes did not make it to the final cut. Khan had to survive many such disappointments early in his career. Success came late to this actor—who can be a seriously instinctive actor as well as someone who excels in Hindi film style “dialoguebaazi” acting. But to call him a late bloomer is to miss the point about his mettle, chiselled over the years. When parallel cinema lost its champions and the term “crossover cinema” became a joke, Khan gave both these genres a new gravitas. After The Warrior in 2001 and Haasil in 2003, Khan did not look back until his big lead in Tigmanshu Dhulia’s Paan Singh Tomar in 2012. Like all great actors, it is difficult to pigeonhole Irrfan Khan. You never know what is coming next.

Mohammed Rafi Ask the fans, they know best

Aside from Kishore Kumar, Mohammed Rafi is probably the singer most remembered in our cities today. Just attend any of the musical shows organized on his death anniversary, 31 July, and watch dapper men—company secretaries and media planners by day—don their embroidered jackets and toodle Rimjhim ke tarane in humid auditoriums populated mainly by well-dressed, lively senior citizens. Often the celebrations take place in odd locations, such as the banquet hall of the Kerala legislative assembly in Thiruvananthapuram. Older men do their Shammi Kapoor moves on stage (usually under a rotating light) and belt out those super-hit romantic songs.

Rafi’s voice and Shammi Kapoor’s histrionics together felled an entire generation of women.

Catchwords like Yahoo and Uff Yuma provided that

requisite shiver.

In Mohammed Rafi My Abba—A Memoir, Yasmin Khalid Rafi recalls how Kapoor would tell her father-in-law: “Rafi Bhai, I will act the way you are singing.” When Rafi sang Dil ke jharoke mein tujko bithakar, it was Kapoor’s idea to sing the first verse of the song in one breath. The relationship, which began with Tumsa Nahi Dekha, with O.P. Nayyar as music director, went from chartbuster to chartbuster.

Why just Kapoor? Rafi was the voice of every big star from Dilip Kumar to Dev Anand to, yes, even Rajesh Khanna.

Personally, we prefer the sad songs. Don’t laugh but Babul ki duayen still has the power to make us cry. And all that angst he channelled in Dosti (1964) will never be forgotten. From childhood, Rafi was always sure he wanted to be a singer. He came to Bombay in 1942 and lived on railway platforms, like all the strugglers before and after him. He finally got his first big break singing with Noorjehan in Jugnu. Who can forget the scorching Yahaan badla wafa ka where he was the voice of a very gloomy Dilip Kumar. Who can forget Mohammed Rafi.

Santosh Sivan When camera became the script

No Indian director-cinematographer other than Santosh Sivan has been praised with these words: “He scripted the movie with his camera.”

Sivan did, in 1999. The Terrorist, which was feted at film festivals around the world, is an unforgettably

searing portrait of a young terrorist played by Ayesha Dharker. Sivan’s camera enters his character’s mind, revealing her inner workings of guilt, anger, sadness and fear without dialogues. Sivan has made many films thereafter. He told Lounge in an interview in 2008, prior to the release of his film Before the Rains, that the light in his home state Kerala is the light he knows best, and that his best works are done there. That is the Malayali boy speaking. He has shot around 50 films under various conditions and experimented with a variety of visual templates, which include a particularly pioneering collaboration with director Mani Ratnam (Iruvar, Dil Se, Raavan, among others). Sivan’s wizardry with the camera can create extremely glossy and

If Hindi movies had their way, every single scene could have been shot in the living room aka drawing room aka the hall and we would not have missed any of the fun. Take Maine Pyar Kiya (1989), for instance—the girl’s father leaves her in the boy’s living room, the boy rides around on a bicycle while his beloved and his mother plan his wedding while shelling peas in the living room, the boy and girl declare their love in a dance sequence in the living room, the boy’s father throws out the girl and her father from his living room…. Whew!

Dancing (Mumtaz and Shammi Kapoor in Brahmachari, 1968), singing (Sadhana traipsing around her living room singing Kaun aaya ke nigahon mein, Waqt, 1965), fighting (Pran and Rishi Kapoor quarrelling, as well as Premnath and Pran’s epic battle in Bobby, 1973), plotting (Lalita Pawar in Sau Din Saas Ke, 1980), birthday celebrations (Shashikala on the piano while her friends sing Tum jiyo hazaaron saal, Sujata, 1959), weddings (Salman Khan and Kajol in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, 1998), defying parents (Shashi Kapoor and Mumtaz in Le jayenge le jayenge, Chor Machaye Shor, 1974), and of course barbed complaints (Guru Dutt singing Jaane woh kaise log the, Pyaasa, 1957)—the living room has proved that no Hindi film can ever be complete without this one grand set. And while in the earlier days curved staircases, sometimes with two flights of steps, Renaissance statues, large sofas and Steinway grand pianos were a must, the living rooms in this decade of moviemaking seem to be shrinking, with pianos disappearing completely.

Shailendra Conscience-keeper

What Shailendra was doing to Hindi film lyrics in the 1950s and 1960s is something that’s all the rage now—infusing local words, thoughts and cultural elements from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh into folk-style songs. Who can forget the haunting Chadh gayo paapi bichhua (Madhumati, 1958), the peppy Chalat musaafir moh liya re pinjare wali muniya (Teesri Kasam, 1967) and heartbreaking Ab ke baras bhej bhaiya ko babul (Bandini, 1963), or the one song that almost always must be sung at any antakshari competition—Ramaiya vasta vaiya (Shree 420, 1955), which apparently was inspired by a folk song sung by building workers in Mumbai.

A vital part of the Raj Kapoor, ShankarJaikishan and Hasrat Jaipuri quartet, Shailendra almost did not end up in movies because he had refused to sell some of his early poems to Kapoor. It is hard to imagine Hindi cinema or, for that matter, even Kapoor without these iconic songs: Awara hoon (Awara, 1951) Sab kuch seekha humne (Anari, 1959), Mera joota hai Japani (Shree 420, 1955), Dost dost na raha (Sangam, 1964), Yeh raat bheegi bheegi (Chori Chori, 1956). As much as Shailendra wrote for Kapoor’s wrongedby-the-world, common-man characters, he is also the man behind songs that portray Raju and Rosie’s (Dev Anand and Waheeda Rehman) tormented love (Aaj phir jeene ki tamanna or Tere mere sapne ab ek rang hai, Guide, 1965) or Shekhar’s (Shammi Kapoor) crazed antics (Chahe koi mujhe junglee kahe or Aai aai ya sukoo sukoo, Junglee, 1961).

Also, perhaps no other lyricist has serenaded the moon as beautifully and as many times as Shailendra did: Khoya khoya chand (Kala Bazar, 1960); Ruk ja raat, thehar ja re chanda (Dil Ek Mandir, 1963) or Ae chand zara chhup ja (Latt Saheb, 1967). Wait in the wings, Varun Grover and Piyush Mishra (Anurag Kashyap’s lyricists for Gangs of Wasseypur), while Shailendra takes a bow here.

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Om Puri Face the truth

Producer

KAMAL AMROHI was the master of old­world elegance and heartache

KAMAT FOTO FLASH

He says next to nothing in Govind Nihalani’s Aakrosh, but he doesn’t need to. His expressive eyes and haunted face effectively communicate centuries of oppression. Om Puri, who trained in acting at the National School of Drama, Delhi, and the Film and Television Institute of India, Pune, could always be counted upon to convey injustice. He was part of the Gang of Four in parallel cinema. Along with Naseeruddin Shah, Smita Patil and Shabana Azmi, Puri appeared in every Indian New Wave film of note. He was the go-to actor for tribal or rural parts in such films as Arohan and Aakrosh, and is also superb as the corrupt and perennially drunk builder in Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro and a photographer of porn pictures in Mandi. We also love him as the monster dad in East Is East and the conflicted taxi driver in My Son the Fanatic.

Maverick moviemakers March of the avant-garde

Of all the non-Bollywood film cultures in India, none has suffered as much as the experimental stream. The works of directors like Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahani have barely been seen for years, and it’s only now, with the National Film Development Corporation restoring some of their movies, that they have re-emerged in public view. Influenced by their mentor Ritwik Ghatak, they set out to make films that experimented with the language of cinema rather than telling stories. They examined aesthetics rather than politics—see Kaul’s Uski Roti, finally available on DVD, for a still-fresh handling of sound, image and pacing. Among their acolytes was Kamal Swaroop, who made the wondrous Om Dar-B-Dar. Read our essay on page 18.

Renu Saluja Parallel cinema’s cutting edge

HINDUSTAN TIMES

amal Amrohi’s Mahal (1949) has been variously described as India’s first horror film, a pioneer of the reincarnation genre and a good example of what came to be known as Bombay gothic. Serious film students have analysed its debt to German expressionism and noir and history buffs know it kickstarted the careers of Madhubala and Lata Mangeshkar.

All this is true. But most of all, Mahal is about unfulfilled love, of a yearning so deep that it goes beyond life and death.

Hari Shankar and Kamini are doomed lovers who never get to live happily ever after and are caught in an endless cycle of death and rebirth.

In a sense, all of Amrohi’s films told us stories of lovers who were unable to cross the barriers imposed by social convention (Pakeezah), royal traditions (Razia Sultan) or marriage (Daera). He directed films of note that were made with elegance and style—stories about his obsession with detail are legendary. Even as a writer, his contribution to films like Pukar and Mughal-e-Azam has been masterly. He was a published poet, but most of his film songs have been forgotten, save Mausam hai aashiqana.

Yet this renaissance man, with a career bookended by Mahal and Razia Sultan—one a monster hit, the other a flop—has been forgotten today. His name is faithfully invoked whenever there is any mention of Pakeezah, but cinema historians, somewhat over-obsessed with Guru Dutt and Raj Kapoor, with an occasional nod towards Bimal Roy and Mehboob Khan, tend to overlook him. The fact is that as far as Hindi cinema history is concerned, Amrohi has fallen through the cracks.

Amrohi’s fame has been forever linked with the grand, Muslim cinema of the Pakeezah kind, which beautifully evoked the atmosphere of Awadhi culture, with its mannered ways and plush, if gaudy, lifestyles. But that does him a disservice.

It is said that Amrohi, who had had to suspend the shooting of Pakeezah for over a decade because of a falling out between him and his wife Meena Kumari, had poured his heart, soul and personal fortune into the film. Carpets, jewellery and chandeliers were bought at great expense to lend an authentic look. Even the junior artistes, who appear only in long shots, were picked up for their dancing skills; this is plainly visible in the song Chalte chalte. When the film was released—to a lukewarm reception initially—the effort showed. On screen, the effect was mesmerizing, the period authenticity stunning. Though no specific

Put to the sword: (above) Meena Kumari in Pakeezah; and Kamal Amrohi.

k

Kundan Shah’s Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro was a mess. We’re not saying that—its director, Kundan Shah, has said so himself in countless interviews. Enter Renu Saluja, the mistress of economy. She sat in on the shoots and told cinematographer Binod Pradhan what kind of shots to take so that it would make her job easier. Saluja’s assembly and pacing surely contributes to the narrative rhythm of Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, which doesn’t have a shot out of place.

An editor is only as good as the material he or she gets.

Saluja, who was also friends with several of the Indian New Wave film-makers who used her services, threw herself into the movies she edited. Her name is in the credits of some of the best-known parallel films, including Ardh Satya (the custodial torture scenes), Parinda (the sequence in which Anil Kapoor’s character commits murder to impress his new crime boss) and Bandit Queen (the infamous parading scene).

Remakes When done well, they can be really good

era is mentioned, one can assume that it is set sometime during the 1920s-30s, an interesting period when the nawabi way of life had still not completely faded away and the more modern and educated among the upper classes had moved into the administrative services. Raaj Kumar’s forest officer is at the cusp of that change, while his family is still steeped in its oldworld patriarchal ways. The menfolk continue to visit the nautch girls while expecting the women to cover their heads. Amrohi himself had come from that kind of world and it is said that the character of the stern grandfather was based on his own father, with whom he had quarrelled and then left behind to study Persian in Lahore.

Razia Sultan effectively put the seal on Amrohi as the maker of films with Islamic themes. For all its grandeur and superb music, it was an insipid film, marred by poor casting (though its implied kiss between two female stars got it iconic status in the queer community). Hema Malini just couldn’t rise to the heights the role required and her pronunciation left a lot to be desired.

Amrohi did not direct any film thereafter, though he had grand plans to make “Majnoon” with Rajesh Khanna.

Mahal having long being forgotten, Amrohi became, for all practical purposes, a director of Muslim stories. But it would be a pity to view him merely through the prism of that kind of cinema. Amrohi knew the Lucknavi universe of formalized language and etiquette but was not a slave to it and his first film is a good example of his eclectic sophistication.

It is to Mahal that we must return to reevaluate Amrohi’s singular contribution to Indian cinema. He was barely 30 when he pitched the story to Ashok Kumar, then running Bombay Talkies, insisting that he

wanted to direct it. Kumar took the lead role and the heroine was a 16-year-old Madhubala with no worthwhile films to her name till then. Josef Wirsching’s chiaroscuro lighting and Khemchand Prakash’s moody music were deftly used by Amrohi to make a classic gothic story, full of chiming grandfather clocks, stray black cats and mysterious girls rowing boats on the lake in the moonlight.

Any memory of the film is dominated

by The Song, but there is more to Mahal than Aayega aanewala. Watch Mushkil hai bahut mushkil, sung on screen by Madhubala; the entire song has been filmed in one single shot, with smooth but minimal camera movement. The viewer gets drawn in, slowly and compellingly, as Kamini sings of her despair; it is a mesmerizing sequence that bears repeat watching. The film itself, seen six decades later, is slow and full of plot holes, but effectively set up the model for reincarnation films to come.

Amrohi followed the successful Mahal with Daera, about a young girl married to an old man and dreaming about the young man next door, but by all accounts it was a flop. He then turned all his attention to Pakeezah, which was to be his magnum opus but which took over a decade to complete. With just a handful of films as director or writer, his portfolio remains woefully inadequate, but is enough to show that he was a man of refined sensibilities. The centenary of Indian cinema is a good time to remember Kamal Amrohi for giving us films that are landmarks on that journey.

Sidharth Bhatia is a columnist and the author of Cinema Modern: The Navketan Story. lounge@livemint.com

Remakes are big business these days. Film-makers in Chennai, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Kochi routinely watch films made in each other’s languages, make their choices, and then send over a lawyer with a contract. The tradition of remakes dates back to the early days of cinema, when films made in Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Mumbai were routinely remade into other languages. Thanks to the robust remake culture, we got movies like Mr Sampat (the Hindi version of the Tamil movie starred the brilliant Motilal), Padosan (Bengali, Tamil and Telugu before Hindi), Ek Duuje Ke Liye (initially made in Telugu) and Sadma (originally in Tamil).

The acting landscape also got more interesting with the crossover of Vyjayanthimala, Sridevi, Kamal Haasan and Rajinikanth. That’s not the case any more, though—Chennai is welcome to keep Asin.

Chennai express: Sridevi and Kamal Haasan in Sadma (1983).

Saeed Mirza The welcome outrage of Saeed Mirza

Saeed Mirza likes long, fabular titles, like Arvind Desai Ki Ajeeb Dastaan, Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyoon Aata Hai and Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro. He also likes to set his stories among the middle and working classes of Mumbai. He shoots on actual locations, which give them texture and character, apart from making them valuable time capsules on the city that once was. Between Arvind Desai Ki Ajeeb Dastaan (1978) and Naseem (1995), the Film and Television Institute of India graduate looked at the issues that roiled pre-liberalization Mumbai—housing, unemployment, communalism and Muslim radicalism. To find out what Bombay was like, and why Mumbai is the way it is, pop the disc of Salim Langde into the DVD player and sit back for a career-best performance by Pavan Malhotra.

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INTERVIEW | NANDINI RAMNATH

COURTESY PRASAD NAIK

The nineties’ Miss Bubbly,

KAJOL, is a present­day yummy mummy with no time to waste

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t’s the summer vacation, and a new strain of the flu is in the air.

Kajol is having a mommy moment—she has to ensure that her daughter is suitably entertained during the school break and that her son recovers from a weather-related illness.

One of the brightest stars of the 1990s now spends most of her time arranging play dates and making movie plans for her 10-year-old daughter, Nysa, and tending to her three-year-old son, Yug. “I am sitting and organizing my daughter’s social life—I feel like a secretary,” she says without a trace of regret.

Of course, no matter how hard she tries, Kajol can’t just fade into mommyhood. The 39-year-old actor took a five-year break after getting married to actor Ajay Devgn in 1999 and reappeared in Fanaa in 2006. The terrorism-themed drama, also starring Aamir Khan, was a blockbuster.

Subsequent films like U Me Aur Hum (2008) and We Are Family (2010) didn’t set the Arabian Sea on fire, but My Name Is Khan (2010) was a career-best performance, with a particularly effective scene in a morgue where she mourns the death of her son in a hate crime. “I did the movie for that one scene,” she says.

Meanwhile, Kajol has dramatically altered her appearance. Even at the height of her career, she was usually as well turned out as a female member of the audience who had braved a crowded train to get to the cinema on time. Kajol circa 2013 is an altogether different creature—svelte, with swept- back hair and light make-up that matches her outfit for the interview (ivory top, hot pink slim-fit pants, beige platforms). There is no trace of the frumpy clothing and devil-may-care hair.

Fortunately, no make-up artiste has been allowed to take a tweezer to the famous unibrow—yet.

It’s ironic, but also typical, that Kajol has opted for fashion magazine cover-worthy looks only after she stepped down as a leading lady. She has a reputation for being headstrong and brash, for caring a fig for the limelight even when she was at the centre of it. She isn’t out to exploit her recently acquired modishness, at least not for the movies. Kajol is by no means a recluse—she makes several public appearances and appears in advertisements and television shows—but she is choosy about interviews. “I am really boring—no

offence to the journalistic community,” she says about her low-fi engagement with the media. “You end up answering the same questions again and again and trying to sound interesting. I’d rather not do that. My life is truly and utterly and fabulously boring. I love it that way.”

She is even choosier about movie projects. Directors and writers who are aching to cast Kajol will have to make sure that their scripts are epic enough to distract her from motherhood. She is watching her children grow into “interesting people”, she says, and she wants to be around them. “I have a full life—two kids, a husband, inlaws, that is a huge, big life that doesn’t involve work,” she says. “When people say why aren’t you working, I say I am, but I’m just not doing what you think I am supposed to be doing. It’s just that I am not getting paid for it.”

Any fleeting urge to get back under the arc lights is tempered by the need to be around her children. “I had my kids so that I could bring them up myself, not so that somebody else could bring them up,” she says. “If I have to do a film and take time out, it has to be something I really want to do and believe in.” Kajol fans can take heart from the fact that she is looking at a few scripts, and might make up her mind over the next six months.

Kajol’s well-documented insouciance has remained a constant through a career that started off unremarkably with Bekhudi in 1992, and then soared upwards with a series of hits, many of them with friends and film-makers whom she knew and trusted. Many of the people Kajol has worked with are second- or thirdgeneration members of film families, just like her own. As the new lot on the block took their first tentative steps in the movie business, a bunch of them opted for the comfort of familiarity and associated themselves with people they had grown up with or those who had equally famous parents. While Kajol has acted in a range of movies, her best efforts have been reserved for projects by her buddies, like Aditya Chopra (Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge) and Karan Johar (Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham...). She has been cast opposite several men, including Devgn, but her most magical on-screen partnership is with another friend, Shah Rukh Khan.

“I am more comfortable working with friends, I need to be comfortable with

whoever I am working with,” Kajol explains.

“You are able to communicate more easily, and it adds to your character and role. It’s not that I haven’t experimented, but it’s just that I need a connect with the director. It’s hard to create a connect after you start working.”

Whenever Kajol has stepped out of her comfort zone, the results have been interesting. One of her favourite roles is in the 1994 family drama Udhaar ki Zindagi, which few people watched but many appreciated for her performance as a woman trying to reach out to her estranged grandfather. She also appeared in Rajiv Menon’s Tamil movie Minsaru Kanavu in 1997 (the movie was also dubbed into Hindi as Sapnay) as an aspiring nun who steals the hearts of Arvind Swamy and Prabhudeva. Rajiv Menon’s wife, advertising film-maker Latha Menon, suggested Kajol’s name to him. “She is a peculiar combination of somebody who is a tomboy but is also very feminine,” Rajiv says. “There is an air of impatience about her, a don’tbullshit-me attitude. She also represents the joie de vivre of the decade (the 1990s).”

Kajol’s widely praised spontaneity and effortlessness suited the parts she chose just fine, but her disinterest in pushing herself too hard has prevented her from having “that one great film, her own Mother India”, Rajiv suggests. “When you think of her, you see her as the girl in the mustard field.”

Kajol dismisses any backward glances at her filmography, and says she approaches her craft through instinct rather than design. “I am pretty much instinctive, I don’t script what I am supposed to,” she says. “Acting has to be instinctive if it has to be good. The minute you plan it, it’s on your face, and the camera won’t lie.”

She appears to have worn the burden of her lineage lightly, but the great granddaughter of the 1930s actor and singer Rattan Bai, the granddaughter of Shobhna Samarth, the niece of Nutan, and the daughter of Tanuja and film-maker Shomu Mukherjee says her journey wasn’t any easier because of her storied family.

“The fact that I got my first film may have owed something to my lineage, but that’s how it is for star kids—at the end of the day they have to prove themselves,” she says. Her lodestar—and pressure point— was her mother. “My mum was so wellloved and respected that I always felt the need to protect her name and carry it forward,” Kajol says. “My mum brought

Workers Blue-collar chic

Among the character types we have lost to globalization is the industrial worker. It’s hard to imagine a leading man as a blue-collar beast of burden, played by Amitabh Bachchan in Deewaar, or as a union leader, played by Rajesh Khanna in Namak Haraam. Parallel cinema, especially Saeed Mirza, focused on workers but the inevitable entry of global capital into India meant that movies set in factories, mines and mills didn’t fit in any more.

Mukul Anand’s Hum, then, is a fitting tribute to the Deewaar days. The 1991 movie features the steel containers, rusting ships, overall-clad men and union leaders who’ve all but disappeared.

Real camerawork In vino veritas

The Indian New Wave liberated film-makers from glossiness and forced brightness. Influenced by neo-realist cinema and the French New Wave, but also by 1950s Hindi cinema and Satyajit Ray, parallel cinema’s cinematographers went all over India in their quest for authenticity. They attached cameras on to cars and captured street life in Mumbai; they invaded the fields of rural India; they shot in available light.

Parallel cinema threw up several star cinematographers. Govind Nihalani shot Shyam Benegal’s films till 1981, building up a distinctive lighting and framing style through the rural drama Ankur and the period film Bhumika. For his own

me up by saying that whatever I do today or tomorrow will always reflect on her. I didn’t want anything I did or said to come back to her. It was a different kind of pressure—I have to be on time, I have to be professional, my work has to be top of the line.”

She hasn’t seen too many of her mother’s films or, for that matter, too many other movies either. “I was very bad, I hated watching her movies where everybody else called her mom,” Kajol says. “In any case, I am not a big movie fan, I would rather pick up a book. But I love to discuss bad films.”

She hasn’t kept pace with much of new Bollywood either. “I must have seen three films in the last year,” she says. “I even bunk some of my husband’s films, though I have seen Himmatwala, Bol Bachchan and Son of Sardaar.” She coasted through the movies in the 1990s, and she is similarly wafting through life, running after her children and waiting for the one bright idea that will draw her back into public glare.

“What I have been given, I am grateful for,” she says. “It’s not mine to wish for or want.” nandini.r@livemint.com

current realist specialists, among them Rajeev Ravi and Shanker Raman.

The Muslim social Grace under pressure

On board: Rakhee and M.K. Raina in 27 Down. films as director, the tones got darker, the compositions starker. Aakrosh (1980), in which a small-town lawyer defends a tribal on a murder rap, is bathed in black tones. The custodial torture scenes from Ardh Satya are lit low to enhance the faces of the actors and the general darkness of the world inhabited by the protagonist inspector.

K.K. Mahajan worked with film-makers of all persuasions. He lensed the experimental films Uski Roti and Maya Darpan. He shot the unforgettable Mumbai vistas in Chhoti Si Baat and the evocative ruins of Khandhar.

Virendra Saini’s textured camerawork in the films of Sai Paranjpye (Sparsh, Chashme Buddoor) and Saeed Mirza (including Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro and Naseem) established him as one of the most sensitive pair of eyes in parallel cinema. A.K. Bir’s camerawork in 27 Down and Gharaonda made Mumbai and its characters come alive. The cinematographers eased the way for Bollywood’s

In the game: Kajol’s last film as an actor was 2010’s We Are Family.

A Muslim social is a not a gathering meant only for Muslims. It refers to a genre that has now made way for the Islamist terrorist thriller. We’re talking about courtesans (Pakeezah, Umrao Jaan), Urduspouting gentry (Chaudhvin Ka Chand, Mere Mehboob) and historicals (Mirza Ghalib, Mughal-eAzam). You will get exactly what’s been promised: sumptuous sets (with chandeliers, water fountains, the works), lovely costumes, poetic Urdu dialogue, ornate songs and swooning romance. They hark back to a lost world of grace and beauty.

One of the greatest Muslim socials came from the arthouse circuit—Garm Hava, M.S. Sathyu’s drama about a Muslim family torn apart by Partition. Films like Garm Hava and Mammo were “shorn of nostalgia for the past”, explain Richard Allen and Ira Bhaskar in Islamicate Cultures of Bombay Cinema. “The idiom of New Wave films is a realist one…yet the nobility of self and depth of culture…resonate still.”

V Shantaram From hands to pots

If there was ever a film that really did not need a written title for its opening shot, it has to be V. Shantaram’s Do Ankhen Barah Haath (1957). A large cut-out of two eyes on a wall, followed by six

Sanjukta Sharma, Arun Janardhan, Kushal Gopalka (a Mumbai-based musicologist and musician), Seema Chowdhry, Chanpreet Khurana, Niranjan Rajadhyaksha, Shefalee Vasudev and Rudraneil Sengupta contributed to this story.

pairs of hands on the same wall on which falls the shadow of a barred window—there really could not have been better usage of symbolism for a film about a jail warden who reforms a bunch of prisoners. The man who was so keen to present new ideas through cinema (Teen Batti Chaar Raasta) was also behind films on classical dance in India such as Jhanak Jhanak Payal Baaje (1955) and Navrang (1959). Lead actor Sandhya’s movements might seem jerky, but she did balance 11 pots on her head, thrash about in water like a fish, and match beats with a ghungroo-wearing elephant.

Smugglers Goods in, goods out

Smugglers don’t make too much sense in a globalized economy, but they were all over the movies in earlier decades, especially in the 1970s, when luxe goods were as foreign as exotic cheese.

There were the good smugglers who were forced to sneak in watches and gold (usually in the form of bars), like Dilip Kumar’s noble criminal in Vidhaata. Amitabh Bachchan supervised the loading and unloading of various cartons, but halted his actions when a higher cause beckoned, like a woman or his mother. But there were also the sleazy types (Ajit in Zanjeer), who brought in liquor, gold and, later, drugs. The ill-gotten goods usually landed at Versova, a patch of sand and water in Mumbai that locals call a beach. The smugglers also sent out Indian treasures, like antiques (Premnath, brilliantly despicable in Johny Mera Naam). Then came along a thing called liberalization, which forced them to find other means of making money.