Cover to Cover

A 'Perspectives' piece for The Caravan, about books in Hindi cinema. 

"People in Hindi movies don’t read many books. When you do see a character with a book, it’s often just another accessory: as meaningless as the brand of sunglasses they’re wearing, or the kind of sofa in their living room. Sometimes the book in a person’s hand seems incongruous—think of Nushrat Bharucha’s Chiku, the spoilt, screechy caricature of an upper-class young woman in Pyaar Ka Punchnama 2, holding a copy of Marjane Satrapi’s plucky graphic novel Persepolis. Sometimes, though, book-spotting can be more fun, when the choice of title is meant to function as shorthand for a character’s personality, or as a sideways comment on a situation.

In the 1965 hit Jab Jab Phool Khile, for instance, when we meet the protagonist Raja, a poor Kashmiri boatman played by Shashi Kapoor, he proudly displays a shelf of classics in his houseboat to a guest, Rita, played by Nanda: “Ismein Tagore hai, Shakispeer … aur Munshi Premchand hai. Bahut accha log hai ismein, memsaab!” But the memsahib merely rolls her eyes. A little later, we see Rita—her high-heeled feet on a divan and a string of pearls around her neck—absorbed in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, a 1950s American novel about a man’s sexual obsession with a young girl. The besotted boatman, slate in hand, cajoles her into giving him Hindi lessons, and the two later begin an unlikely romance. But once you’ve seen that book in Rita’s hands, you know that this modern woman will soon find herself struggling to deal with this traditional Indian man.

A more recent instance of book-as-comment occurs in Imtiaz Ali’s Tamasha, when Tara (Deepika Padukone) picks up a half-read copy of Joseph Heller’s classic Catch-22 from the floor where Ved (Ranbir Kapoor) left it the previous night. Strangers in Corsica, they have embarked on a fling on conditions of impermanence and anonymity. Her quick, knowing smile on reading the book’s title suggests an internal dialogue, an unspoken note to herself on their predicament. She checks the flyleaf for a name. (If there had been one, their agreement would have fallen through—as would have half the film’s plot.) But all she finds is a stamp from Social, a fashionable “urban hangout” with branches in Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru. Years later, that remembered stamp becomes Tara’s clue to finding Ved.

It is a sign of the times that the book now functions merely as a form of product placement—and not for its publishers, but for a café and bar chain. But perhaps the real thing to note about the book in Tamasha is how little it matters. In a film that’s all about celebrating the power of stories, the printed word is barely a blip. It is the oral tradition of Urdu storytelling, dastangoi, as practised by Piyush Mishra’s character, that leaves an impact on our hero. And even that crabby old man tells his stories for money.

Books were not always so inconsequential in Hindi films..."

Read the whole essay on the Caravan site.

Shashi Kapoor, the perfect partner

My Mirror column today: 

Whether paired with Amitabh Bachchan, Shabana Azmi or his wife Jennifer onscreen, the understandably secure Shashi Kapoor always made for a compelling foil in the movies.

I think he's completely deserving of it, but Shashi Kapoor might seem an unusual choice for the Dadasaheb Phalke award. Unlike his larger-than-life father, Prithviraj, whose grand passion for theatre and cinema started the Kapoor clan off on their path to show business, and unlike his two elder brothers Raj and Shammi, both of whom - though not comparable - carved out distinct, individual niches for themselves in an unforgiving film industry, Shashi has always been the perfect foil. Never an actor who sought to have the spotlight turned solely on him, he has always been someone who gave himself wholly and freely in partnerships. And rarely, in the world as in cinema, is that quality given the applause it deserves. 

One of his earliest romantic pairings, with the lovely late actress Nanda, lasted through the whole decade of the 60s, with seven films, starting with Char Diwari (1961) and ending with Rootha Na Karo (1970). The most successful of these, of course, was Jab Jab Phool Khilein (1965), in which he went from being a carefree Kashmiri boatman singing 'Pardesiyon se na ankhiyan milana' to being the wealthy Nanda's uncomfortably suited-booted husband, singing 'Yahan main ajnabi hoon' at the sort of piano-centred party that Hindi cinema so often used to depict the terrible un-Indian debaucheries of the rich. In an interview in the 90s, Shashi said Nanda was his favourite heroine. Nanda, who was by far the bigger star when they started acting together, returned the compliment. The figure of the ghuta-hua poorer man to the little rich girl of 60s cinema was one Shashi repeated the following year, in Waqt, where he played Sharmila Tagore's educated-but-poor lover who must work as a driver to support his mother. 

A very different sort of partnership, with Amitabh Bachchan is, of course, legendary. The two did so many films together that Jaya Bhaduri once apparently referred to Shashi as her "soutan", because he spent more time with her husband than she did. The Amitabh-Shashi on-screen relationship ran the gamut, from estranged brothers (most famously in the 1975 classic Deewar, but also in other films like 1979's Suhaag), to servant and master (Namak Halal, 1982), blue collar worker and white collar boss (Kala Patthar, 1979), sometimes even sort-of-rivals for the love of a woman (Kabhie Kabhie). Much as I loved watching Shashi's sunny, ethical engineer play off the brooding Amitabh in the fictionalised prevention of a real-life mining tragedy that was Kala Patthar, my favourite of their performances together is probably the ridiculously enjoyable Do Aur Do Paanch, in which they play rival thugs who've taken jobs at a school, pretending to be music teacher and sports teacher respectively, in order to kidnap a little boy. 

Amitabh being the spotlight-grabber that he is, it took a persona as secure as Shashi's to remain completely unthreatened. Which he did, despite the conspiracy theories floated in film magazines of the time, about Shashi's role having been cut down to size in Deewaar. In a short but rather remarkable 1975 interview to Bikram Vohra in Filmfare, Shashi categorically refused to add any fuel to that fire: "[I]t's ridiculous to say that Amitabh's role [in Deewaar] was engineered to show me up. After all, before I took the role I knew I was playing the second lead. So the idea of a conspiracy against Shashi Kapoor is Bullsh*t. And in any case why do we have this hang-up in our country? About always coming out as heroes. In the West great names like Olivier, Burton, Harrison frequently played second roles. There's nothing demeaning about that." 

Another of Shashi's most interesting - if somewhat unlikely - romantic pairings was with Shabana Azmi. The films they did together that remain embedded in my mind are both literary adaptations. They played husband and wife in the memorable Junoon (1978), Shyam Benegal's adaptation of Ruskin Bond's A Flight of Pigeons, and many years later, in the 1993 In Custody (Muhafiz), the Merchant-Ivory adaptation of Anita Desai's novel by the same name. Shabana plays the neglected, petulant wife in both films, but Shashi's roles could not be more stunningly different: a fiery young 1857 mutineer called Javed, and an aged, overweight poet whose world is crumbling. As an aside: it's funny to think of the fact of these actors as people who've known each other for ever - that same Bikram Vohra interview from 1975 has Shashi tossing off a remark about how he told Shabana that she's a great actress but not very goodlooking (as opposed to Parveen Babi, to whom he apparently said the opposite). 

But perhaps Shashi's oddest and most interesting film pairings were with his wife Jennifer Kendall. The first one I recall is also in Junoon, where as the troubled Javed, Shashi becomes obsessed with the teenaged Ruth (an exquisitely young Nafisa Ali) and his potentially dangerous attentions are only kept at bay by Jennifer, playing Ruth's mother Miriam. The second is in the 1970 Merchant Ivory production Bombay Talkie, where he played a Bombay film star who has an affair with the visiting American novelist Lucia Lane (Jennifer). These were not performances that let on that the two actors were, in fact, husband and wife. 

I don't know very much about their real-life relationship, but the same 1975 interview paints a picture of the Jennifer-Shashi household as one where Shashi was forced to eat organic breakfasts at 7.30 am, and occasionally, at least, have vegetarian stints. This seemed unbelievable to the Filmfare journalist in 1975. But it fits perfectly with Sanjana Kapoor's memory of growing up in a house where three things were banned: aerated cold drinks, comics and film magazines. Clearly, Shashi's lifelong ability to keep the Hindi film world he was born into at a safe, sane, distance owed something to Jennifer. But that would need another column.

Nanda: Not So Simple

Today's Mumbai Mirror column:

The late actress Nanda is usually remembered for her girlish innocence. But that wasn't all there was to her.

Nanda's death in March this year was mourned by the industry. But as in life, so in death: she didn't really get the critical attention she deserved. 

Nanda was that rare actress whom the usually inflexible Hindi film industry allowed to graduate from one slot to another, embracing her first as a child artiste (in films like Mandir [1948], Angaarey, Jaggu [1952] and Jagriti, then as the younger sister (in V. Shantaram's Toofan Aur Diya [1956], Bhabhi [1957], Dulhan [1958], Chhoti Behen [1959] and Kala Bazaar [1960]) and finally as a romantic heroine (after Dev Anand kept a promise made during Kala Bazaar and cast her as his heroine in Hum Dono [1961]).

Despite this, there is a Nanda stereotype. We think of her as the achchhi ladki, the simple girl who could be coyly romantic but not sensual. The childlike innocence that had worked for Baby Nanda segued seamlessly into chhoti behen roles (younger sisters have always been infantilised by Hindi cinema) and seemingly clung to her even as she transitioned into playing romantic leads. Her good girl image was also a result of the sharply moral heroine-vamp divide that characterised the era. The heroine had to exemplify 'Indianness'; the vamp was 'Western', if not racially then culturally. The heroine's non-threatening sexuality meant being virginal, and putting her charms on display only for the hero. This was in stark contrast to the vamp's open display of desire (invariably unfulfilled), which in conjunction with her other sins -- smoking, drinking and alcohol – had, of course, to be punished.

One of my favourite Nanda appearances is in an unusually sophisticated version of the good girl-bad girl narrative: Teen Devian [1965]. Nanda plays the wholesome middle class girl, literally the girl next door, but her rivals are not cabaret dancers – a category the audience knows can never succeed with a hero -- but liberated memsahibs. Both Simi the well-connected socialite and Kalpana the famous actress flirt outrageously with our music-shop-salesman-turned-poet. Whereas with Nanda, it is Dev who flirts and Nanda who coyly accepts his overtures. Though perhaps this is not quite true either. In an adorable and surprising early scene, on their first coffee date, Dev asks to see Nanda's hardworking secretarial fingers. “Is this just an excuse to hold my hand?” asks Nanda. “Aur agar kahoon haan?” says the unflappable Dev. “Then I will oblige you,” says Nanda in English.

In the more mainstream Gumnaam (1965) and The Train (1970), Nanda's good girl Indianness is produced at least partially by being pitted against our most memorable vamp: Helen. Usually the heroine and the vamp never share the same space, it being a given that the vamp's netherworld of lowlit restaurants and hotel bars is not one in which a respectable Indian woman would ever find herself.

But both Gumnaam and The Train are slightly unusual in this respect. In Gumnaam (a pretty awful cannibalising of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None), Nanda and Helen, bearing the religiously-marked names Miss Asha and Miss Kitty, appear in the same frame quite early on. They are both on the fateful plane ride that will seal the fate of its ten passengers. Of course, Nanda wears white, and Helen red. Then, though both swiftly acquire boyfriends among the men they're marooned with, they keep their distance from each other. The bad girl spends most of her time with a drunken Pran, the good girl with a constipated-looking Manoj Kumar. But having put this effort into keeping them apart, the filmmakers decided some frisson would arise from having them bond. So we get Helen, who has spent many scenes before this refusing to drink with Pran, deciding to get drunk -- with Nanda! And they have a blast, until Nanda is violently shaken back to reality by Manoj Kumar, who being Mr. Bharat cannot be expected to enjoy himself. What I thought was fascinating was MK's sarcastic heroine-shaming dialogue, uttered in full hearing range of the vamp: “Ab bhi tum mein aur Kitty mein thoda sa fark baaki hai”.

In The Train [1970], which like Gumnaam was a murder mystery, cabaret dancer Helen (Lily) is the rotten apple, and Nanda (Nita) the misjudged goody-goody one. So Helen gets to throatily proposition Rajesh Khanna, while Nanda only gets to lie with his head in her lap. But then Nita gets a job as a hotel receptionist, letting her into the same space as Lily. And then the film does something truly unexpected: it gives us a glimpse of the 'bad' Nanda. Instead of the saree-clad version with a long choti, we suddenly see a 'Westernised' Nanda with a stylish haircut, the hushed voice and swaying derriere now those of a seductress in a murderous plot.

It seems to me that Nanda's overt innocence was precisely what enabled directors to use her to play on this “fark” between the heroine and vamp -- clearly thrilling male audiences but being careful to eventually re-establish moral order so as not to alarm them.

But remarkably, Nanda didn't stop there. In order to see where this fascinating trajectory took her, watch Yash Chopra's Ittefaq. The vamp-virgin divide is hopefully gone forever, but Nanda needs to be given some posthumous credit for having crossed the line when she did.

Published in the Mumbai Mirror.