A child's view of the world through a train ride

This is the sixth column in my ongoing series on trains in Indian cinema. (Periodic reminder for new readers of this blog: I write a weekly column on cinema which appears in TOI Plus, as well as in Bangalore Mirror, Pune Mirror & Mumbai Mirror.)

-- In Gulzar's Kitaab, the railways are a route and a rite of passage for a child trying to find his place in the universe --

There are probably few films in any language that have been titled 'book'. But lest you think a film called Kitaab might be bookish (which in the eyes of many movie-viewers translates to boring), Gulzar's 1977 screen adaptation of Samaresh Basu's story begins in breathless motion. Gusts of black smoke rise into the sky, a train whistles, and the familiar “chooka-chook” of the moving carriage takes over, interspersed with a child's voice. He is making up a chant to match the train's rhythmic sound: Kidhar ja, kidhar ja, kidhar ja? Bhaag chala, bhaag chala, bhaag chala [Where d'you go, where d'you go, where d'you go? Running away, running away, running away].

It is only after this that we see him: Master Raju, ubiquitous and irreplaceable child star of 1970s Hindi cinema, squatting on the train's floor, in the space between two lower berths. Above him, in the upper berths, two children pass a notebook to each other, conducting a silent game of knots and crosses. Even before we know anything of what the film is about, Gulzar has communicated how marvellous train journeys could feel for the middle-class child -- the adults asleep below, while you looked down from the deliciously unsupervised space of the upper berth, the holidays stretching ahead of you. The train journey was a time out of time.

As it turns out, Gulzar is only pointing to that sense of sweet interregnum, secured at both ends by middle-class cushioning, as a contrast. What makes Kitaab memorable is the real-life adventure on which it launches its boy hero – but here, too, the railways are crucial. Bored with school and misunderstood at home, Babla runs away from the city home he shares with his didi (Vidya Sinha) and brother-in-law (in an odd bit of casting, Uttam Kumar!). He gets on the train to go back to his mother in the village. But when shoved out for being ticketless, the 12-year-old suddenly finds himself in the real world he's been so impatient to enter.

In flashback, we see Babla and his best friend Pappu bunking school to wander the city, entranced as much by the street magician as by the halwai making jalebis. Again and again, they try to apprentice themselves to these men, who greet their enthusiasm with mostly indulgent disbelief. On the surface, these scenes evoke laughter: The boys, it seems, will do anything to get out of having to go to school. But the camera's attention to the men's practiced movements and the boys' rapt gazes tell a different story: These artisans are indeed masters of their craft. The children, watching them, grasp that fact instinctively – and any craft so consummately carried out seems worth learning. If classroom education has failed to engage these young minds, Kitaab suggests, it has also not yet infected them with the casteist, classist belief that manual work, no matter how skilled, is unworthy of admiration.

It is people like these that adopt the runaway boy -- the railway engine driver and his assistant, the station's resident midget, and Shreeram Lagoo playing a blind singer of the sort that could once be met on every train in India. Asking very few questions, they simply add him into their lives. The middle class passengers ignore the unclaimed child in their midst, but the engine driver gives him the last of his tiffin, the blind beggar buys him tea and food. The instinctive humanity with which they share what little they have is moving – yet Gulzar doesn't let things turn maudlin. We smile at little things and big ones: The little boy and the dwarf literally sizing each other up; the hackneyed phrases people use for emotions. When someone says “Bechara anaath hai [He's a poor orphan]”, Babla adopts the phrase, trotting it out for a quick dose of sympathy, often to hilarious effect. “Bechara anaath hoon [I'm a poor orphan],” he tells one ticket checker -- just before saying he's headed to meet his mother.

 

Much of the bittersweet pleasure of Kitaab comes from watching the child watch the world go by – and learning from it as he does. And although Babla was curious, observant and sensitive at school and at home, it is the train that offers him a sense of what the world is really like. The network of trains and railway stations is like a pathway through the world, and a microcosm of it. As Babla negotiates his way through this network, he encounters old age and disease, blindness and deformity -- and death. Like a latter-day Siddhartha, the protected middle class boy is confronted with the sight of suffering, and is shaken by it.

Unlike Siddhartha, though, the experience doesn't lead him to renounce the world – but to return to it richer. One could read Kitaab as a cop-out: Issuing a challenge to middle class pieties and normative barriers, but turning back before risk turns to danger. But one can also see it as an expansion of the child's universe, an initiation into life that acknowledges the inevitability of sorrow -- while not undermining the value of the safety net. As the blind train singer puts it, “Gaadi chhutne ka gham mat kariyo, baalak. Station na chhutne paaye [Don't mourn the missed train, child. Just don't let the station get away from you.]”

Published in TOI Plus, and three editions of Mirror -- Pune, Bangalore and Mumbai.

Letters to an audience

My Mirror column:

An evening with Gulzar, poet, lyricist, filmmaker, centred on a discussion of three of his films, offers clues to his sustained relevance.

The audience assembled at the India Islamic Cultural Centre auditorium on Friday evening would be any writer’s dream. I don’t mean in numbers (though it was packed: one middle-aged Bengali couple zoomed in on the last vacant seats in my row after circling the auditorium without success, risking the visible ‘Media’ signs with a throwaway “Dekha jabe”). I mean it in terms of the degree of emotional identification – one might call it attachment – to a writer’s words.

The organisers – HarperCollins Publishers, who had planned the event around three slim books they’ve published about three of Gulzar’s films, Angoor, Aandhi and Ijaazat – kicked off the evening by running short video clips from the films on a side screen. People laughed out loud in recognition as they watched the bhanged-out Deven Varma sway before a hypnotic bouncing ball in Angoor. When Sanjeev Kumar told Suchitra Sen he'd been reciting Urdu poetry in mushairas since the age of 12, the younger woman next to me mouthed Sen’s on-screen reply along with the actress.

 

Even before the event began, the room had begun to radiate an almost universal admiration, and something more intimate, something a little like love. By the time Gulzar walked on stage in his trademark spotless white kurta-pajama, we were primed for nostalgic happiness. He took his seat alongside Sathya Saran and Saba Mahmood Bashir, authors of the books on Angoor and Aandhi, respectively, and the moderator, publisher Udayan Mitra. Gulzar remains unbelievable spry for an 84-year-old, and when he rose to display the books for the camera, he raised them above his head. It was a quiet gesture, but one of childlike joy.

A conversation about the three films followed. “Aandhi had run 22 or 23 weeks when an article was published that said, ‘Watch the life of Indira Gandhi on screen’ and the film got banned by the government,” said Gulzar, recalling that the news reached him while he was in Moscow for a film festival. “We all know Mrs Gandhi's life. The film had no resemblance to it. But in that era, the only female politician an actor could use as a model for her performance was Mrs Gandhi.” The film bore the brunt of that, especially since it released when Mrs G was at her thinnest-skinned: Emergency was declared soon after.

Bashir pointed out, correctly, that Aandhi wasn't so much a political film as a personal film in which the protagonist happened to be a politician. And yet the film contains what might be one of Hindi cinema’s more political songs: “Salaam kijiye, aali janaab aaye hain, yeh paanch saalon ka dene hisaab aaye hain,” in which a trio of young men dog the footsteps of Suchitra Sen’s campaigning Aarti Devi. Like another lyric from another of his films, Mere Apne (1971), “Haal chaal thheek thhaak hai”, it is the voice of the citizen-voter raised in song, the gentleness belying the sarcasm. “The things I said then were comments on my time, but they are apparently more than relevant today,” said Gulzar, reciting these lines: “Kaam nahi hai varna yahan, aapki dua se sab theek-thhaak hai.”

He didn't flag the rest of it, but here is another stanza that seems even more chillingly appropriate: “Aab-o-hawa desh ki bahut saaf hai, Kaayda hai kanoon hai insaaf hai/ Allah miyan jaane koi jiye ya mare, aadmi ko khoon voon sab maaf hai.”

What the filmmaker-lyricist did want to flag about Aandhi was his keenness to create a female character who would “be equal to any male politician” – and some of that equality was channelled into her freedom to smoke and drink without being labelled a vamp. Sure enough, the shot of an ashtray next to her as she works, and in another scene, a glass of something alcoholic kept near her, caused a stir.

Ijaazat, in which a once-married couple – Rekha and Naseeruddin Shah – run into each other years later, in a railway waiting room, also had a rare female protagonist. “Heroine ki toh aakhir mein jaakar shaadi hoti hai,” said potential producers as they rejected the script. The film eventually got made, to our collective good fortune, and remains an unusual, affecting love triangle, as Saran pointed out, for its refusal to apportion blame.

Yet Gulzar retained an acute understanding of how far his audience would travel with him. Sometimes this disappointed his more radically egalitarian fans: one gentleman yesterday stood up to say that he had never understood why Rekha in Ijaazat and Aarti in Aandhi touched the feet of their respective husbands. Gulzar accepted the question as a legitimate one, but his answer was almost banal in its simplicity: “It was what the character(s) would do. It was natural to the character.”

Another such perspicacious moment came when he explained why he needed Shashi Kapoor to appear as Rekha’s second husband. He needed the audience to back her decision, not think “Usse toh wahi accha thha, yeh kahan chali jaa rahi hai”. There is something quite striking here, and it involves the writer working in the cinematic medium – he has a character he backs as an author, and yet he understands so clearly that the power of that character will depend a great deal on the Hindi film audience's relationship to particular actors. It might be this ability to stay with his audience, push people a little bit beyond themselves but never quite alienate them, that makes Gulzar that increasingly rare thing in our times: the writer who is popular but doesn't pander.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 2 June 2019.

Friend and Lover

My Mirror column:

Vinod Khanna’s star persona combined sexy shirtless masculinity for the female gaze with an intense rendition of male friendship.

A male film star, people might assume, is a man whom women like. By that account, all our heroes ought to be sexy. But of course it isn’t so simple. One, because plenty of Hindi film heroes are men whom other men like. In Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur II, Tigmanshu Dhulia, playing the mining mafia don Ramadhir Singh, offers a pithy rendition of this gendered history of film heroes: “First men liked Dilip Kumar, and women liked Dev Anand. Then men liked Amitabh Bachchan, and women liked Rajesh Khanna." In more recent years, it’s been men liking Salman and women liking Shah Rukh. And two, because Indian women for many years weren’t quite allowed to confess to liking sexy men. It was more socially legitimate to like the sweet, enthusiastic good boys, or the dramatically tragic ones.

The late Vinod Khanna seems to have managed the rare feat of being both: a man’s man, as well as the sexy creature that women couldn’t stop looking at. Watching Qurbani after Khanna’s death this week, I was struck by how clear Feroze Khan seems to have been about the sexiness quotient of both the film and his friend Vinod. The highest grossing film of 1980, Qurbani is filled with the hotness of Zeenat Aman, and the camera caresses her curves in exactly the way you’d expect, in song after song as nightclub dancer Sheela. It was only two years after Satyam Shivam Sundaram and Khan ensured that he got Aman into a drenched sari: in Qurbani the excuse is an innocent little girl spraying her with a garden hose. In the legendary Hum tumhe chahte hain aise song, the already betrothed Aman looks sadly and sexily away as Khanna’s Amar turns upon her the full blaze of his yearning look.

But director Feroze Khan makes sure that in his film, Khanna is not only the owner of the lustful gaze, but also its object. Qurbani has at least two sequences that have passing women characters giving Khanna’s fit bod the once-over: one is a Parsi lady who casts appreciative glances in his direction even as her husband picks a faux-fight with him (Bawa masculinity is comically derided); the other is a youthful nurse who gives Khanna the most loving spongebath ever (when he’s recovering from grave injuries in the hospital).

Qurbani also homes in on the other crucial aspect of the Vinod Khanna persona: the loyal friend. In Qurbani, having been twice the recipient of Feroze Khan’s life-saving skills, it is Khanna who performs the film’s titular sacrifice – giving up the girl as well as his life. In Muqaddar Ka Sikandar (1978), where he played second lead and loyal friend to Amitabh Bachchan, it was Khanna’s character who got to save Bachchan’s life early on, in exchange – this might be the necessary way the trope worked – receiving both the love of the heroine (Rakhee) and the longer life.

Friendship and loyalty also had a crucial role in Khanna’s persona in at least two of the star’s important earlier films, both directed by Gulzar – Mere Apne (1971) and Achanak (1973). In those though, it was the reverse side of it –betrayal – that made the character what he was. In Mere Apne, Shyam’s neighbourhood friendship with Chhenu (Shatrughan Sinha) turns sour and their enmity becomes a defining feature of his life. In Achanak, based on a KA Abbas story somewhat inspired by the Nanavati case, Khanna plays a loving husband and army man who murders his best friend in cold blood when he discovers that his wife has been having an affair with him. In both these films, the women are disloyal – one is weak and leaves his side out of family pressure, while the other’s actions are minimally explained as those of an incorrigible flirt.

To cynical postmodern eyes, films like Muqaddar ka Sikandar or Qurbani may seem to brim over with an emotional excess most of us think we’re too cool for. Think of Farooq Qaiser’s lyrics to the film’s titular song about friendship as sacrifice, sung by the two heroes, Khan and Khanna – in real life, one a Muslim and one a Hindu, both playing Hindus on screen and yet shown dancing on Eid in the house of a character called Khan Baba:

“Yaar khadein hain seena taan,
Aandhi aaye ya toofan
Yaar khadein hain seena taan,
Yaari meri kahatee hai
Yaar pe kar de sab qurbaan
Ho qurbani qurbani qurbani
Allah ko pyari hai qurbani”

And later, in extending its ode to friendship to
the bond between religions:

“Do haathon ki dekho shaan
Ye allah hai yeh bhagwaan.”

And yet, clearly we imbibed something from those filmi definitions of friendship, something that continues ineffably to shape our understanding of reality. No wonder that the death of Khanna on April 27 was remarked upon, over and over again, as having taken place on the same date as that of his friend Feroze Khan, eight years ago. In life – which is to say in death – Khanna seemed to prove, yet again, that he was the extraordinary friend.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 30th April 2017.