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.

Not quite by the book

My Mirror column today:

As the Jaipur Litfest unfolds, here's a look at publishers and publishing -- as projected onto the Hindi film screen.

Guru Dutt and Rehman in Pyaasa (1957)

For much of its history, popular Hindi cinema took literature seriously. Until the 1960s and 70s, screenplays were often adapted from existing literary work: plays, novels, short stories. Even after this stream of literary inspiration began to dry up, the writer/poet protagonist remained a figure of admiration and romance. But what about the publisher? It's fascinating: the publisher in Hindi cinema was invariably a petty, money-minded sort, either too stupid or too evil to appreciate the worth of the writer-hero. 

Perhaps the most memorably villainous publisher of Hindi cinema is the urbane Ghosh Babu of Guru Dutt's Pyaasa (1957). Played by the accomplished Rehman, Ghosh Babu starts off dapper and inscrutable, a potential godsend for the talented but impoverished Vijay (Guru Dutt), whom he invites to his office after hearing him do an impromptu recitation of one of his poems on stage. But we soon realise that his intentions are far from noble. Having somehow caught a whiff of Vijay's long-past relationship with his wife Meena (Mala Sinha), Ghosh wants to rub the younger man's nose in the dirt. He dismisses his nazms as "the nonsense of a novice", publishing a soap advertisement in the empty spot in his journal; he invites him to a party only to make him wait on guests. 

Abrar Alvi, like so many 1950s screenwriters, drives an ideological wedge between characters, deepening Pyaasa's personal conflict into a battle between the idealistic socialist who hopes to change the world, and the unscrupulous capitalist for whom status quo is profitable. The prosperous Ghosh is clearly literate enough, but the books that line his rooms do not touch his unscrupulous soul. For him, the best poet is a dead poet - one who can claim no share of the profits. 

Pyaasa actually begins with another publisher, of the too-stupid variety. A sherwani-clad old man in a small, haphazard office, he tells Vijay only a fool would publish his 'rantings against unemployment'. "Aap shairi karte hain ya hajaamat (Are you a poet or a barber?) Poetry is another name for delicacy. Gul-o-bulbul pe sh'er kahiye... jaam-o-suraahi pe sh'er kahiye (Write couplets on the birds and blossoms... on the wine flask and the goblet)," he urges. Vijay collects his manuscript from the wastepaper basket and leaves. Later, watching Ghosh's well-heeled guests applaud precisely such stock offerings, we recall the publisher's words. 

And yet, [Spoiler Alert] by Pyaasa's end, Vijay's poems - ostensibly too serious, too critical, too political—have been published to massive success. True, Rehman only prints them because he thinks Vijay is dead—and a dead poet is more easily turned into legend. But the film has scored another point against publishers - by showing that the public appreciates good literature, if only publishers would let them have it. 

The main thing about publishers in the Hindi film universe is that they make money. Royalties and profits appear in many different films. One silly caper called Chori Mera Kaam (1975) features the late comedian Deven Verma as a shady publisher who stumbles onto a professional thief's account of how to commit fool proof crimes: the book becomes a countrywide bestseller. The socially-conscious tearjerker Aakhir Kyon (1985) featured a rare writer-heroine: Smita Patil as an ill-treated wife who takes to writing under a pseudonym. The film's most dramatic turnaround features Rakesh Roshan, Patil's villainous exhusband, discovering that the celebrated writer Asha Shree, whose novel he hopes will revive his failing publishing business, is actually his abandoned spouse. Patil's character agrees to give him her next manuscript, and surrenders her royalties to help finance her own daughter's wedding. 

None of this is surprising. The Nehruvian consensus about money lasted for decades: the Hindi film hero could not aspire to wealth unless it came his way by a stroke of luck. Wealth was a temptation, businessmen were dishonest—and publishing was a business. In Raman Kumar's sincere 1982 marital drama Saath Saath (produced, interestingly, by David Dhawan), the pressures of domesticity push an idealistic aspiring writer, Avinash, (Farooq Shaikh) into a career in his friend's publishing firm. Having once entered this space, he finds himself becoming precisely what he had so despised as a writer - commercially savvy and morally bankrupt. Saath Saath does offer up an alternative ethical model of publishing: a newspaper run by Avinash's retired professor (who else but AK Hangal), though it seems unlikely to be financially stable. 

In post-liberalisation Bollywood, no AK Hangal options exist. Publishers appear infrequently, and they are cutthroat and corporate. In 2005, Leena Yadav directed a terrible film called Shabd, in which Sanjay Dutt plays a Booker-awarded author (yes, quite) plagued by performance anxiety. After one of his books does badly, his posh publishers refuse to even take his calls. In the more recent Happy Ending (2014), too, a failing writer (Saif Ali Khan) is unceremoniously jilted by his publishers. Desperate to revive his fortunes, he takes on a screenwriting job. 

Here, as in the fun indie Sulemani Keeda, we see talented screenwriters stuck in bizarre Bollywood vanity projects. From that perspective, book publishing seems like a bed of roses. Sulemani Keeda, for instance, ends with one aspiring screenwriter abandoning the Versova rat race to write a book. But of course this is the imagination of the young film-wala in the trenches, for whom book publishing can now only be less corrupt than Bollywood.

Published in the Mumbai Mirror, Sun 24 Jan, 2016.

Bitten by the film bug

My Mumbai Mirror column:

The funny, warm indie Sulemani Keeda shows us a world of Bollywood aspirants, but it isn't so much a film about that world as a voice from within it.

Last month, Bollywood gave us Happy Ending, a self-proclaimed takedown of rom-coms in general and happy endings in particular. In it, Saif Ali Khan's bestselling writer hero — assailed by the worrying thought that he might have actually fallen in love —was urged out of the house by his imaginary alter-ego, in pursuit of the departing girl. The film's 'airport scene' (as the film's makers labelled the cliche they were making fun of) was allowed to end in the girl leaving—but only to create room for the real, apparently inescapable, happy ending: the boy flying to India to convince the girl. It was a glib, unconvincing claim that they'd avoided the cliche. 

Last week, in Amit Masurkar's Sulemani Keeda, I watched as the protagonist Dulal, having confessed he's in love with a girl he met three days ago, was urged by his friend, housemate and screenwriting partner Mainak to go to her house and stop her leaving for America. "Bahut ho gaya ye chori chori pyar. Daaku ban, daaku!" exhorts Mainak, and even though we, the audience, know better than Dulal that Mainak is far from being sincere, we can't but egg the boy on, towards the distant possibility of a happy ending. But equally, it's impossible not to be charmed by what follows: let in by a surprised Ruma, the lovestruck Dulal first begs her not to go. Then, before she can say anything in response, her parents emerge from the other room to see who this boy is, and Dulal falls to his knees, declaring his love for their daughter. 

This is the scene as it ought to have been played; a moment that captures both the intensity of feeling that Dulal has built up in all sincerity, and the insane filminess of it—reflected in Ruma's parents' quiet bemusement (casting Uday Chandra as her father is a stroke of genius), and in Ruma's own gentle but firm refusal to change her carefully laid-out plans for a boy she thinks is sweet, but whom she barely knows. 

The funny thing is that Sulemani Keeda doesn't set out to rewrite 'romedy'. In fact when the Ruma angle begins to take over, Masurkar manages to sneak in a funny line about how she was supposed be the side track, not the main track. 

The film has been described in the media as a "bromance", and its opening moments—the two young men asleep in their unkempt apartment, and the camera moving from the magazines upturned on their stomachs to the posters on the wall and the books in their bookcases, until a girlfriend calls and wakes one of them up—reminded me of Delhi Belly. Plenty of films have used this young-men-living-scruffily-together setting since: I can think of Pyaar ka Punchnama and Go Goa Gone. But the film to which Sulemani Keeda seems to truly doff its hat is the original bachelor comedy, Sai Paranjpe's Chashme Buddoor. Mainak is the Rakesh Bedi-cum-Ravi Basvani to Dulal's sincere Farooque Shaikh, providing comic relief, trying to woo the ladies a little too obviously, and throwing in some amusing untruths along the way. There's even a scene where Mainak drives 'Oona from Poona' home in a hopeful horny haze, and we see him ascend her staircase, doing the ridiculous almost-jig that Baswani made unforgettable. And his quick-footed retreat at the sight of her muscley boyfriend immediately brings Deepti Naval's threateningly large brother to mind. 

The film is self-aware without being smart-alecky and warm without being mushy. It experiments with form in zany animated sequences and slow-mo black and white interludes, yet is consistently well-observed, whether in the male-female dynamics of its chilled-out house party or the hilarious interactions with Pokhriyal, the landlord's poet-aspirant son. Perhaps this is because of how close its director and actors are to the world they're recreating here. Masurkar, whose 30-lakh-rupee directorial debut this is, has spoken in interviews of how he came to write a film about two screenwriting hopefuls doing the rounds of Bollywood's important people in the hope of a break. "Generally what happens when you're writing is that you write with a director in mind. This was something I wrote with people in mind," Masurkar said. Many of these people are real: famous people like Mahesh Bhatt and Anil 'Gadar' Sharma (though their cameos as themselves I thought were the film's most amateurish sections), as well as Dulal and Mainak, played by Masurkar's friends Mayank Tiwari and Naveen Kasturia, both working their way through Bollywood in real life. Himself a film and television writer who moved to Versova in 2009, Masurkar's film is an unvarnished, wry, but not quite bitter look at the world of culture industry aspirants he inhabits. 

These young men have come to Bombay (in this case from Delhi) to become 'writers', and they appear torn between an aspirational literate milieu of bookshops and open mics, and a Bollywood world that will seemingly only reward them for not pushing the envelope. There's also an all-too-real moment where the aspiring young filmwalas come to blows with TV-walas they're in the process of insulting for having sold out. The film doesn't make a big hoo-ha about it, but the tug of war between making it and being true to yourself is definitely its "main track". One hopes all its protagonists can stay on it. That really would be a happy ending.