Do you know who wrote your favourite film?

My TOI Plus/ Mumbai Mirror column for Sun 25 July:

Writers barely get the credit they deserve — a new book on women screenwriters in Bollywood illuminates a hazy corner of the glittering silver screen

Screenwriter Herman J Mankiewicz ('Mank') and director Orson Welles, whose real-life collaboration and battle over writing credit for Citizen Kane is the subject of David Fincher's 2020 film Mank.

“Film is thought of as a director’s medium,” the great Billy Wilder once said, “because the director creates the end product that appears on the screen. It’s that stupid auteur theory again, that the director is the author of the film. But what does the director shoot — the telephone book?”

Wilder, a Jew who managed to escape Nazi Germany for the US in 1933, became famous as the director of Hollywood classics as various as Sunset Boulevard, Some Like It Hot and The Apartment. It’s no surprise, though, that he started as a screenwriter, his films forever filled with unforgettable characters and memorable lines.

The full version of the Wilder quote above ends with a sentence that dates him (perhaps even more than his mention of the telephone directory): “Writers became much more important when sound came in, but they’ve had to put up a valiant fight to get the credit they deserve.”

Cinema has now been around for over a century, and the first ‘talking picture’ was The Jazz Singer in 1927 — but most screenwriters still don’t get the credit they deserve, even when the film is a grand success. 
Last year, in a rare reframing of film history, David Fincher — known for directing The Fight Club, Zodiac, The Social Network and Gone Girl, himself as much an auteur as Hollywood has ever had — devoted a whole film to a screenwriter who had to fight for credit for what’s often listed as the greatest American movie of all time – Citizen Kane (1941).

Until Fincher’s Mank (2020), most people who had heard of Citizen Kane (CK) saw it as a film ‘made’ by Orson Welles — not ‘written by Herman Mankiewicz’. Of course, Welles will remain a legend, as he should. But at least a larger cross-section of film-goers now know something about the sharp ex-New Yorker who first created the story of a newspaper magnate rising to power by manipulating public opinion during a war.

Within the smaller community of film nerds, the story of how Welles and Mankiewicz came together — and fell apart — in the making of CK has been talked about for much longer. Around CK’s release in 1941, the director and the screenwriter became embroiled in an ugly battle, with Welles eventually giving Mank shared credit for the Oscar-winning screenplay. In 1971, the influential film critic Pauline Kael wrote a 50,000 word essay foregrounding Mankiewicz’s script contribution as much greater than Welles’ — but Kael’s take, too, has since been challenged, drawing on the many drafts of the CK script in the archive.

The relationship between screenwriter and director need not always be this conflicted. The creative collaboration between them is often the bedrock of great filmmaking, with people sometimes establishing working partnerships that last for years. And yet, as film lovers or enthusiasts, we know far too little about the writers responsible even for what we might consider our favourite films.

Scripting Bollywood: Published by Women Unlimited, New Delhi, 2021. 300pp. 

Anubha Yadav’s stellar new book Scripting Bollywood: Candid Conversations with Women Who Write Hindi Cinema (Women Unlimited, 2021) is a great step in the right direction. The lacuna she addresses is two-fold. One, the writer’s job in Indian cinema has been even more invisibilised than in other film industries, for many reasons, discussed at length in my 2011 longform piece "Death by Dialogue". A primary one, as the screenwriter Anjum Rajabali rues (in his Foreword to Yadav’s book) is that” filmmakers as well as audiences in India treated cinema as an extension of pre-existing narrative performing art forms”, like tamasha, sangeet natak and Urdu theatre, so for decades, the best we had by way of a script was the director breaking down the story into incidents and getting dialogue written for the characters. More often than not, Hindi cinema was created on the studio floor, with the writer or writers being drafted into a highly informal set of collaborations, where someone might or might not be credited for ‘story’ and a writer was credited at best for dialogues, often because those had to be written in Hindustani/Hindi, which was often not the director’s mother tongue.

Now add to this already non-formalised working milieu, where the contributions of writers are barely documented, the possibility that that writer is a woman — and imagine how much power or influence she might be able to wield. That is the second reason why Yadav’s book is so important — she addresses a gap in the archive that we have barely begun to sketch the contours of.  

Yadav’s suggestive first chapter draws on new scholarly research as well as doing some independent detective work to open up the historical conversation about the women whose names we do know: Fatma Begum (who was also the mother of India’s first talking star Zubeida), Jaddan Bai (also the mother of Nargis), the utterly fascinating Protima Dasgupta (who collaborated with her sister-in-law Begum Para, making her a star) and the slightly better known Ismat Chughtai (who collaborated with her husband Shahid Latif). All these women performed multiple roles, often creating their own film companies with family members to try and achieve greater creative control.

The rest of Yadav’s book is devoted to long, thoughtful conversations with 14 contemporary female screenwriters, from veterans like Shama Zaidi — associated with such classics as Garm Hava, Shatranj Ke Khilari, Umrao Jaan and a host of Shyam Benegal films — and Kamna Chandra (Prem Rog, Chandni) all the way down to Juhi Chaturvedi (Vicky Donor, Piku, October and Gulabo Sitabo). Collectively, these writers represent the whole gamut of what might be called Hindi cinema, and sometimes extend beyond it — like Zaidi’s work with Satyajit Ray, or the younger writers branching into web series, like Sanyuktha Chawla Shaikh’s work on Delhi Crime, or Devika Bhagat’s on Four More Shots Please.

Almost every interview is studded with insights into not just each individual’s working process, but also the multiple ways in which films get made. Urmi Juvekar talks about the power of listening to the script (after it is written) to give it final shape, while Sooni Taraporewala talks of learning through the process of doing commissioned work (Salaam Bombay, Such A Long Journey, Ambedkar).

The nature of each collaboration is different, too — while Zaidi has worked primarily with three filmmakers, Muzaffar Ali, Shyam Benegal and her husband MS Sathyu, Chaturvedi’s work thus far has been with the director Shoojit Sircar. Sabrina Dhawan, who wrote Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding, has also been an integral part of many Vishal Bhardwaj films. Reading Dhawan’s account of how she rewrote Vidya Balan’s character Krishna in Ishqiya to be the one that was playing the two men (rather than merely responding to them as in the draft Bhardwaj and Abhishek Chaubey brought her), or Urmi Juvekar’s candid but careful account of working with Dibakar Banerjee for four films before Detective Byomkesh Bakshy! ended their collaboration, even the most sceptical film-goer might start to pay a little more attention to screenwriters.

The story of Mank is instructive about the inevitable push and pull of the writer-director relationship. David Fincher was the one who read Kael’s essay and suggested Mank as a protagonist to his ex-journalist father Jack Fincher. But in a 2020 interview, David described his father’s first draft as “an anti-auteurist take” and “kind of a takedown of Welles”. “What the script really needed to talk about was the notion of enforced collaboration…" Fincher told the interviewer.

A writer is unlikely to get her idea on film without a director, but most directors need a script to work from, too. And so the process of collaboration carries on: complicated, sometimes fraught, but almost always indispensable to the making of cinema.

Published in TOI Plus/ Mumbai Mirror, 24/25 July 2021. 

A half-told tale

My Mirror column:

Nandita Das’s ambitious biopic of Saadat Hasan Manto feels like a showreel of what could have been.

Many Indian film heroes have drunk themselves to death over a lost love. Manto might be the first one to do so over a lost city. Bombay was not the place of his birth, but Manto thought of the city as both muse and workplace. Its streets spawned many of his strongest stories and its film industry gave him both livelihood and community.

He was clearly profoundly shaken by Partition, writing several stories about how the new boundaries around nations and religions were also carving up human beings. Still, given Manto’s strong attachment to Bombay, his departure remains somewhat inexplicable — and it appears as such in Nandita Das’s biographical film about him.

Das’s ambitious tapestry of a script weaves Manto’s fiction in and out of the life he may have lived. So some of his most well-known Partition stories — ‘Khol Do’, ‘Thanda Gosht’ — are interwoven with moments when the communal divide inserts itself between Manto (Nawazuddin Siddiqui, for once a bit out of his depth) and his best friend, the actor Shyam Chaddha (the sadly wooden Tahir Raj Bhasin). We also hear, at a filmi party, the jibe that Bombay Talkies — the film studio where Manto worked — had “too many Muslims” in its employ.

More interestingly, in a scene set on the eve of Partition, we see Manto witness a conversation in a Bombay shoe shop where his wife Safia is shopping. “Mera toh watan Bhendi Bazaar hai. Main isse chhod kar Grant Road na jaaoon, aur tu mujhe Karachi bhej raha hai?” Manto hasn’t said the words himself, but the idea of the locality as stand-in for the nation has been introduced — allowing us to think of it later, when Manto’s nostalgia and sense of exile moulds itself around a city rather than a country.

In real life, Manto wrote scathingly and prophetically about the directions in which Pakistan’s politics would go. But the film fails to establish why he never felt at home in Pakistan — barring glimpses of his obscenity trial and a single scene based on one of Manto’s ‘Letters to Uncle Sam’ (lit up by Neeraj Kabi’s performance), there is little of his political bite on screen. Instead Das focuses excessively on Manto’s rather performative mourning. Like a dramatic lover trying to forget a past relationship, he refuses to even open letters from Bombay written by friends like Shyam and Ismat Chughtai. When a policeman rifles through his desk and says rudely, “I believe you write many things, where is it all?”, Manto’s retort is to hand him a scrap of paper. “Ismein toh Bambai ka pata likha hai,” says the Lahore cop. “Wahin toh hai sab kucch,” mutters Nawaz’s Manto. A cinematically stereotypical descent into lovesick madness follows, with Nawaz pricking up his ears and saying he hears a melody that Shyam used to sing.

Das’s film succumbs to another familiar filmi motif: muftkhor drinking partners whose appearance foreshadows the hero’s decline. These hangers-on, who serve to insulate the hero from self-realisation in films as disparate as Muhafiz / In Custody (also about a writer in free fall) and Guide, are here concentrated into the single figure of Shaad (Shashank Arora). But even the talented Arora cannot breathe life into this one-note character, whose only brief appears to be to provide Manto company as he drinks more, and more darkly.

Another of the film’s themes — because it was one of Manto’s longstanding fascinations — is the sex worker. The film opens, for instance, with one of his finest stories: ‘Ten Rupees’, in which a young girl is taken out by three older male clients. The scenario has the whiff of doom, but Manto does something unexpected: he preserves Sarita’s marvellous state of innocence till the story’s end, depositing us and our fears at the edge of a precipice. In another fictional segue, we see Tillotama Shome as a sex worker pushed to the brink by her pimp (Paresh Rawal).

The segments enacting Manto’s fictions contain the film’s better performances (Ranveer Shorey, Divya Dutta, Vinod Nagpal). But their near-pulpy high drama throws into relief the dullness of the rest of the film. Das tempts the cultural-historical junkies among us with a period recreation of a mythical Bombay in which Progressive Urdu writers mingled with film folk. But the interactions are flat; the characters —Krishen Chander, Ismat, Himanshu Rai, Ashok Kumar — cardboard cutouts. Only one, Ila Arun as the courtesan-turned-filmmaker Jaddan Bai (Nargis’s mother), has any spark. The only other interactions that achieve any immersiveness are those between Manto and his wife Safia (the excellent Rasika Dugal).

Given that so much of Das’s dialogue is provided to her by her inimitable protagonist, it is a shock when it falls flat. Even Manto’s sharpest barbs — “Agar aap mere afsaanon ko bardaasht nahi kar sakte, toh woh isliye ki zamaana hi na-kaabil-e-bardaasht hai (If you can’t tolerate my stories, it is because the age is an intolerable one)” or “Accha toh tum bhi tarakkipasandon ki tarah is daur mein bhi optimistic rehna chahte ho? (Oh, so you’re like those Progressives who want to stay optimistic even in this era?)” — fail to offer the non-Manto-knowing viewer a bridge between our times and his. Like Toba Tek Singh, Manto remains stuck in a no-man’s-land.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 30 Sep 2018.

Speaking of Sex

My Mirror column:

For the women in Lipstick Under My Burkha, words are a necessary weapon on the quest for desire – but they can also wound.

Sometimes a film can start a conversation. Lipstick Under My Burkha, about which I wrote in these pages last week, definitely has. I suggested in the previous column that what makes Lipstick stand out in the long history of Hindi cinema is that it allows us to see women as erotic beings, with their eroticism shorn of the necessary veneer of long-term romantic love. Certainly writer-director Alankrita Shrivastava and her co-writers Gazal Dhaliwal and Suhani Kanwar have crafted a film in which women have more of a relationship with sex than our female characters have ever been allowed to.

But thankfully, unlike a particular sort of feminist girl-gang movie recently emerging from India with English titles – think of Pan Nalin’s infuriatingly flimsy Angry Indian Goddesses (2015), or Leena Yadav’s overly-choreographed rural drama Parched (2016) – the women in Lipstick experience sex in a variety of registers. Repression and bawdiness, set up as polar opposites, are not the only modes of being sexual.

Yes, the film uses the unabashed excesses of Hindi erotica to unbutton our tightly-laced selves, as well as casually dropping references to husbands getting excited by a ‘Brazilian’. But there is a tendency to imagine that women who speak freely – of sex, or anything else – are necessarily empowered. Lipstick, I was overjoyed to find, recognizes the range of possibilities that exist in the gulf between silence and staging.

The woman whom we see suffering through the worst sort of sex with her husband, Konkona Sensharma’s Shirin, is also the one who most needs to produce the pretense that all is well. The brave front she puts up is a recurring theme in the film. Early on, a woman to whom Shirin is selling a pest-control gun turns it towards her husband’s portrait, asking if it will work on this sort of pest. Shirin smiles a secret smile and says her ‘pest’ stays in control – even without a gun. We have not yet met her husband, so we – like the customer – are taken in.

Later, after the film has let us view the humiliations of her marital bed, we hear her produce another bit of light-hearted repartee, this time to explain to her gynaecologist why she keeps getting pregnant. “We get so caught up in the moment that it’s hard to stop and make him wear a condom...,” she says, looking at us rather than the doctor. This time, neither the doctor nor we are fooled.

That depiction of her husband as being swayed by desire offers, in fact, a sinister contrast to the brutally mechanical way in which we see him use her body. It is cold comfort that Shirin is also the only character who speaks – if only once, and fearfully – of sex as pain. “Jalan ho rahi hai,” she says as her husband enters her without the slightest kiss or caress, or even an affectionate word. And yet to hear her say those words is shocking, because it brings into a Hindi film soundscape a female body’s response to forced sex – not couched in the dramatically over-determined register of rape, violation, or even fear, but as physical pain made ordinary.

The emotional impact of that recurring physical hurt, on the other hand, is not something even Shirin can summon up words for. We see her, in the aftermath of the worst such scene, stuffing her mouth in silent anger – a cake she baked hoping to sweet-talk her husband into giving her ‘permission’ to work is now merely something to help her swallow her own tears.

The film’s feistiest character, Leela, is someone to whom words come easily, whether it is in wooing potential clients for a new business idea, or seducing her photographer lover. She is the opposite of years of Hindi-movie coyness when she appears in her lover’s room and says with beguiling candour: “Sex toh kar le.” And yet all the power of that openness is easily turned against her, as soon as the man decides to demean the woman’s desire by calling it ‘merely’ physical.

The Rehana segment, otherwise weakened by its excessive cool-girl stereotypes and its overly obvious dialoguebaazi (“jeans ka haq, jeene ka haq”), has one wonderful scene in which sexual tension is created with words. She is drinking with a flirtatious senior (Shashank Tiwari) when he gestures casually in her direction and asks, “Virgin?” Rehana freezes – and only relaxes when he indicates it is only her alcoholic virginity he was inquiring about.

Perhaps the film’s most challenging narrative is that of Usha, who uses two kinds of verbal covers – the words of a fictional character called Rosie, and the anonymity provided by the telephone – to carry on an increasingly torrid affair with a younger man. Words are what enable the 55-year-old widow to articulate a long-dormant, long-frustrated erotic self – but the man seduced by her “sexnuma awaaz” is quick to turn against her when he realizes who she ‘really’ is.

But all this talk of the body is a way of exposing the innermost corners of our minds – and that can make us incredibly vulnerable.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 30 July 2017.

Starring Scripts, Scripting Stars

My Mirror column:

What made Salim-Javed so unique as screenwriters in Hindi cinema? 

 Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar during their partnership days 

Early in Diptakirti Chaudhuri's book, Written By Salim-Javed, Javed Akhtar recounts the tale of his first ever script narration. He had gone to a producer called Baboobhai Bhanji, having got an appointment with many sifarishes. "[T]he man had listened to the script without interruption. After finishing, a nervous Javed Akhtar respectfully enquired what the producer thought of the scene." "Darling," [came the reply], "your story is good, but there is a big risk involved...this hasn't been used in any film yet."

Telling this story to Chaudhuri decades later, Javed — who went on to form one half of Hindi cinema's most famous screenwriting duo — adds a half-joking postscript, an explanation for his future success in the industry: "I never wrote a story that has not come before." Later, Chaudhuri quotes Salim Khan as saying that he does not believe there is any story that does not derive from something older, except the Ramayana and Mahabharata. "Originality is the art of concealing the source," Salim says.

But what's interesting is that the duo have never actually tried to hide their borrowings. In his first job as a writer, as assistant to Abrar Alvi in the late 1960s, Salim says he "used to suggest ideas he had read in popular novels or seen in Hollywood films". Chaudhuri's book is a film buff and trivia lover's tribute and delights in digging out Salim-Javed's influences, from James Hadley Chase novels to Ibn-e-Safi's Urdu detective stories. Their script for Majboor, for instance, was an emotional reworking of a thriller called Zig-Zag, in which a dying insurance executive frames himself for a murder in such a way that his wife and daughter can benefit from the reward money. Instead of a wrong diagnosis, as in Zig-Zag, Amitabh Bachchan in Majboor is dramatically cured by an operation, but the resolution is very similar.

Even with Sholay, their most famous film, the duo have never shied away from speaking of their sources of inspiration. The coin toss scene to decide the course of action is something Salim attributes to a card scene in a film called Garden of Evil; the massacre of the Thakur's family was inspired by Once Upon a Time in the West; while Viru's famous tank scene drew on an Anthony Quinn film called The Secret of Santa Vittoria. The main idea of convicts hired as vigilantes to defend a village wasn't new either — Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, reworked into The Magnificent Seven, had already spawned such Hindi films as Mera Gaon Mera Desh.

It is also undeniable that Salim-Javed plots were full of recurring tropes. Some of these had a longer history in Hindi cinema, but became signature elements of their repertoire: a solidarity with the working class against the rich; the poor hero who would rather break than bend; the mother who raises her children alone; a family lost and then found; the thief with a code of honour; relatives pitted against each other by duty.

And yet, the writing partnership which began in 1971 managed to redefine the course of Hindi cinema, in a single decade. The innovation they are usually credited with is thematic: the figure of the Angry Young Man, whose intense rage against the system had a starkly different tenor from an older Hindi film hero, whose disillusionment was in a more soulful register (think of Pyaasa).

But I think it wasn't so much new plots, but new ways of presenting them and snappy, witty dialogue that made their films seem fresh. And, as with their scripts, it was the 'how' rather than the 'what' of their careers that really made them gamechangers: because unlike pretty much all Bombay screenwriters before them — and most who came after — Salim-Javed managed to position themselves as sole custodians of their scripts.

"Earlier when writers put together a script," says Salim Khan, "it had contributions from the novelist from whom the story was taken, the director who would make the film, the actor who would act in it. When we started working together, we said we will give you the complete script. You will neither interfere in the writing, nor change the finished script."

It was remarkable. They may have cobbled together ingredients from everywhere, but their recipe was sacrosanct. This confidence — which many in the industry perceived as arrogance — began to seem more justified as film after film became a box office hit.

Salim-Javed also took it upon themselves to ensure that their contribution was publicised, often putting their money where their mouth was. They were perhaps the first screenwriters to pay for trade advertisements in their own names. The most famous one appeared in the same Trade Guide that had forecast Sholay as "a sad experience for distributors". It said, "This is a prediction by Salim-Javed... Sholay... will be a grosser of Rupees One Crore in each major territory of India".

Amitabh Bachchan in Zanjeer (1973)

In their story of their rise — which sounds quite like one of their films — they got Rs 10,000 for their first film, and Rs 55,000 for Zanjeer. "After the success of Zanjeer, we decided to increase our price to Rs 2 lakh and did not sell a script for nine months." But eventually they did and by the end, their fee matched that of the top-grossing star in the film, Amitabh Bachchan — exactly as Salim Khan had once told Abrar Alvi it would.

But here's a final question: why did this achievement, stunning as it was, not translate into similar conditions for other writers? Had Salim-Javed simply been co-opted by a star-struck industry, which conceded them individual stardom — but left the ordinary writer as underpaid and overlooked as ever?

Published in Pune Mirror, 25 July 2016.

That Filmi Family Feeling

My Mirror column today:

Sometimes stars become a way of cementing relationships between real people.

Amitabh Bachchan and Rajesh Khanna in the film Anand

Last week, I took a pool-taxi. The pool-taxi is the upscale equivalent of the share-auto. What you pay more for, I'd thought, is the safe distance between warm bodies -- and companionable silence. But sometimes, as happened on this particular ride, the unspoken rule about not soliciting conversation is broken. This time, the person who broke it was the cab driver. "Aap Dilli ke hain, sir?" he inquired of my travelling companion, a young man in his early thirties. "Haan, lekin Bambai mein rehta hoon," came the reply. The driver's rejoinder was a classic piece of North Indian banter. "Tab toh Bachchan sahab ke ghar aana-jaana laga hi rehta hoga (Then you must be going to Bachchan Sahab's house all the time)," he said, chuckling into the mirror. 

Things could have ended there, but the young man's pride had been lalkaaro-ed. How could he be taken seriously as a bonafide Bambai denizen without having a Bollywood connection to impress the Dilliwalas with? Out came a satisfied smirk, and a cellphone photo of himself with the Big B. Apparently the young man's sister worked at the production end of Kaun Banega Crorepati, so his entire Delhi-based family had managed to get themselves on the show at some point. "This is my wife, my mother, father, uncle," his voice trailed off, culminating with an account of the niceness and greatness and deservingness of India's biggest superstar. "Bachchan saab knows everybody on set. Personal interest lete hain woh sab mein..." 

The taxi driver was not to be outdone. "I have met Bachchan saab, too" he said, "But I've met him in my dreams." We were then treated to a detailed description: twice he had dreamt that he was in the Bachchan home, being served "coffee-shoffee" and pakoras by Jaya ji, while Amit-ji introduced him to Aishwarya. "And Abhishek?" I couldn't stop myself asking. "Oh, he was not there!" said the driver, looking mildly irritated that I'd made the real-life son and husband intrude into this technicolour vision of khatirdari, starring himself in the jamai-raja role. 

The rest of the journey passed as it was fated to. I was informed of Amitabh Bachchan's actual level of thinness, his health issues and how they began with an infected bottle of blood during the Coolie incident. This was followed by comparisons of Amitabh and Shah Rukh's differential niceness on the KBC set (SRK is apparently too demanding, especially about cigarettes), segueing into more general comparisons of how much of a nice guy each one's favourite star was (Salman won. Of course.) 

But the taxi-driver's dream sequence, if I may call it that, left me thinking. About how we're so steeped in Bollywood lore that we adopt filmi families as our own. More frequently, of course, it is our real-life family members who acquire a sort of rosy glow in the reflected light of the silver screen. I'm thinking of the great-aunt that everybody said looked like Nimmi, and who I always think cultivated a slightly melancholy air for this reason. 

Or the other great-aunt who abandoned the name her parents gave her and named herself after a famous sixties actress. There was the great-uncle who sang Cliff Richard songs in a perfect deep baritone, and his elder brother who once wanted to be a Hindi film hero. And my dad's old college friend, Anglophone and Bengali to all outward appearances, who I've been told once modelled himself on the careening Shammi Kapoor. 

Sometimes stars become a way of cementing relationships between real people. I'm talking about the friend whose parents - one UP-ite and one Gujju, both from Calcutta, and both Hindi movie buffs - fell in love at least partly because they saw their favourite stars in each other. If one seemed like Waheeda Rehman, the other seemed like Dev Anand. 

Some other times, stars can intrude on real relationships between real people. Like the great-aunt who was so huge a fan of Raj Kapoor that when she bumped into him on her honeymoon, she could barely believe her luck, and spent half the honeymoon on the set. 

And sometimes we get a film that takes this beautiful relationship between the reel and the real, and feeds it back into the cinema so we can watch our filmi selves on screen. If you've watched Neerja, one of the sweetest things about it was Neerja's supposed obsession with Rajesh Khanna. 

From the star's Anand dialogue ("Life badi honi chahiye, lambi nahi") being used to gesture to Neerja Bhanot's own to-be-truncated life, to the other Rajesh Khanna line that becomes Neerja's final message for her mother ("Pushpa, I hate tears"), Ram Madhvani's film routes at least some of its heavy-weather emotion through our relationship to an older melodramatic tradition. The lines might be filmi, but the feeling is real.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 13th Mar, 2016.

Post Facto: The Brave New World of Brooklyn

Today's Post Facto column is about a book I recently fell in love with.

There are books you can read all the way through without knowing what you think of them—like some people. There are books that annoy you from the word go—also like some people. And there are the rare ones that reach out and touch you, surprising you with the warmth you feel towards them though you've just met. I knew Brooklyn was one of these by page 40.

I'd only heard of Colm Tóibín, I'm ashamed to admit, when he was nominated for the Booker Prize for The Testament of Mary in 2012, and even then I did not follow up on my curiosity. But on a recent visit to a bookshop, Brooklyn leapt out at me. Bookshops, one is sadly in danger of forgetting, can be magical places. Suddenly, instead of shadow beings to be conjured into being with the guilt-ridden clicking of my mouse, real creatures beckoned from the shelves, each displaying its particular attractions: lightness or heft, honest blues or mysterious purples.

I cannot say whether it was the faceless girl on the cover who intrigued me, with her summer dress stopped from billowing by objects on either side, or whether the lovely diner-style type in which it said 'Brooklyn' in gold letters triggered in me a subconscious nostalgia for a New York five decades before I lived there. All I know is that I put away my biases – 'a book about the Irish in the 50s must be a tragic tale of poverty and I don't feel like one of those', or 'oh, an older man writing a book that seems almost entirely about a young woman character, how good could that be?' -- and bought it. 

And a novel hasn't felt so right to me in ages. You feel like you know Eilis and everyone in Wexford—and by extension, what it felt like to live in an Irish small town in the 1950s. Tóibín has a way of making his characters come alive through the words they speak, and without the use of anything so trite as adjectives. One of the first people you meet in the book is Miss Kelly, who runs a grocery shop where Eilis works part-time. Here's a sample of Miss Kelly's dialogue, as she initiates Eilis into the job: “Now there are people who come in here on a Sunday, if you don't mind, looking for things they should get during the week. What can you do?”

But Wexford is only one of the novel's locales. The other, of course, is Brooklyn. It is a fairly standard story – the family needs money, and there's no proper job for Eilis in Ireland. So her mother and sister arrange to send her to America via the good

offices of an Irish priest who assures them that it's safe. “Parts of Brooklyn,” Father Flood replied, “are just like Ireland. They're full of Irish.”

And so they are. Before long, Eilis is ensconced in a Brooklyn lodging house run by the Wexford-born Mrs. Kehoe, where her co-boarders are Irish or Irish-American, and her social life is dominated by the Friday dances at Father Flood's parish hall.

And yet this is a brave new world, where things are certainly more mixed up than back home in Ireland. At Bartocci's, the department store where Eilis works as salesgirl, a new brand of stockings in Sepia and Coffee shades is a deliberate invitation to the hitherto-invisibilised clientele of “coloured women”. Eilis' night classes include a Professor Rosenblum, who makes “jokes about being Jewish”. And after she meets Tony, her experience opens up to what is clearly the other big community of Brooklyn immigrants: the Italians. One of my favourite scenes in the book is the first time Eilis is invited to dinner at Tony's, where among the first things his little brother does is to declare that “We don't like Irish people”. As you might expect of Italians, the fact that a family of six is packed into two rooms does not preclude the serving of a magnificent meal. To read Tóibín's description of Eilis puzzling over the bitterness of the coffee, and trying to eat her spaghetti “using only a fork, as they did” is to recognize the surmounting of cultural barriers I hadn't thought of.

The delineation of Eilis's coming of age, both her growing confidence and her fears, is wonderfully fine-grained. There is an enormous sense of quiet in this book, and yet we feel each moment of Eilis's anxiety. 

Massive changes are taking place in her life, and yet we see her searching for events she can put into the letters she writes home. There is too much she cannot tell. Most obviously, about Tony. Then she goes back to Ireland, and now she cannot tell Tony...

Tóibín is a writer of great emotional intelligence, laying out in deceptively unruffled manner a young woman's gradual recognition that the shape of the man she marries is the shape of her future. The choice between two suitors and the lives they represent is of course at least as old as Austen. But this made me think of Rajnigandha, Basu Chatterjee's 1974 film. Rajnigandha moves between Delhi and Bombay, while the story it was based on, Mannu Bhandari's 'Yahi Sach Hai', located itself in Calcutta and Delhi. Eilis's dilemma is made even deeper by the near-unbridgeable gulf between continents.

Eilis's combination of determination and naivete held my interest completely. She isn't perfect, but Tóibín's delineation of her imperfections is done with such tenderness as to draw you even closer to her. I can hardly wait to read Nora Webster.

Published in the Sunday Guardian, 6th Sep, 2015.

Things I Found Out About Fanny

Yesterday's column for Mumbai Mirror (also Pune, Ahmedabad, Bangalore Mirror):

If we are going to make films in Indian English, we need to recognise that it has dialects. But then, slipping accents aren't the only disappointing thing about the movie Finding Fanny.

I was as excited about Finding Fanny as everyone else. “Everyone”, that is, who belongs to that minuscule class of people in this country who can be described as English-speaking, and would like Bollywood to occasionally acknowledge that 1) they exist and 2) that actually it is, too. I was particularly excited because Homi Adajania had already shown, back in 2006, that he could make fully Indian characters speak fully in English, and make it funny, too.

Admittedly, he still felt the need to set his narratives in communities that everyone concedes as English-speaking. In Being Cyrus, that narrowly circumscribed milieu was Parsi Panchgani (with detours into Parsi Bombay), and now, in Finding Fanny, it is Catholic Goa. Sure, many more non-posh Parsis and Goan Catholics are comfortable with English than your regular middle-class North Indian family, and so it doesn't ring false when family squabbles or lovers' tiffs among them take place in English. Certainly no more false than the absurdly translated-sounding conversations that Bollywood produces so often now, with Hindi words greater than three syllables sticking in the gullets of characters (and actors) who would in real life be speaking largely in English.

But really, watch Finding Fanny and tell me that you didn't feel it had travelled too far over to the other side, just exchanging a forced Hindi for a forced English. Everyone speaks English all the time, transforming what I'm sure is a vibrantly polyglot Goan world into a monolingual one. On the possibly five occasions where a phrase of Konkani is spoken, English subtitles appear. Of Hindi there is not a word. Not even a cussword. Worst of all, though the actors strive diligently for a not-too-correct informal delivery, they don't sound Goan. Barring Pankaj Kapur, they all sound like themselves: big city Bombay/Bangalore people, most with North Indian inflections to their English, trying to sound small-town Goan, and failing.

If we are going to make films in Indian English, we need to recognize that it has dialects. Everyone who is reading this article knows this. The way English is spoken in Goa is different from how it's spoken in Delhi, or Nagpur, or Kottayam. And I'm not even going into how its inflected by class and community and generational influences – how the Irani cafe owner speaks English is different from how the Chinese beauty parlour lady does; the retired Bengali Anglophile has an accent and vocabulary rather distinct from his granddaughter in Bombay.

The slipping accents aren't the only disappointing thing about Finding Fanny. The quirkiness Adajania put to such stellar use in the darkly funny and genuinely surprising Being Cyrus seems to have been regurgitated in a kind of baby-food version. Secrets here aren't held up for the great reveal, they're confided to trustworthy friends. So when sweet old Pocolim postman Ferdie (Naseer) realizes he's been single for forty-six years because a letter in which he proposed to the love of his life never actually reached her, he tells Angie (Deepika). Angie, being the angelic daughter Ferdie never had, decides to do a good deed by arranging a road trip to find Ferdie's long-lost love, Stefanie Fernandes, alias Fanny. The widowed Angie's own long-lost childhood flame Savio (Arjun Kapoor) is designated driver, and along for the ride, for different reasons, are Angie's busybody mother-in-law Rosalina (Dimple Kapadia) and Don Pedro (Pankaj Kapur), a supposedly 'world-famous' artist who's set his painterly sights on Rosalina's posterior.

Sadly, these characters spend the film drifting in search of Stefanie Fernandes -- and of a plot. And their oddball eccentricities, while making us giggle occasionally, never make us cry or want to scream. Only Kapur's Don Pedro, deliverer of grandiose compliments with a crazed gleam in his eye, provides a glimpse of true cruelty. And elicits a moment of pure devastation from Dimple's Rosalina. But the power of that scene is not allowed to stay with us: it is as if Adajania wants us to forget it as soon as it happens, literally get in the car and move on. The wicked pleasures of Being Cyrus are gone, lusty intrigue replaced by an almost soppy quest for love.

In 2012, when Adajania directed Cocktail, a loose-limbed, good-looking love triangle based on a script by Imtiaz Ali, many critics said he'd sold out to Bollywood. I'll save my defence of Cocktail for another piece, but whatever you thought of its politics, for Homi Adajania that film was a risk. As he said around that time, making a full-on romantic Hindi film, complete with songs and heavy-duty conversations, was a challenge – and he acquitted himself admirably, managing to leaven the film's emotional heft with a cocky humour that was all his own.

Finding Fanny, on the other hand, feels like he's lost his bite – or worse, thinks it's too risky to have truly dysfunctional characters, so they're all reduced to sweet old biddies or fresh-faced hopefuls. With a picture-perfect Goa that feels frozen in time, its vague air of melancholy wrapped in an uplifting soundtrack that is in Punjabi-Hindi for obvious reasons, I think it's this film that's the sell-out. And it might just be working. As the two Punjabi ladies said to each other as they walked out ahead of me, “Very cute film, hai na?”.

Manto's moviedom, moviedom's Manto

Sa'adat Hasan Manto may be long dead, but in his writing, the 1940s Bombay film world remains brilliantly alive.

Manto wrote himself an epitaph to rival all epitaphs, "Here lies Sa'adat Hasan Manto and with him lie buried all the secrets and mysteries of the art of storytelling... Under tons of earth he rests, still wondering who among the two is the greater story writer: God or he." But Manto's sister decided that his grave could do without unwelcome attention from God's little soldiers, and had it replaced with a Ghalib-inspired line - something to the effect of not having been the last word upon this earth. It is deliberately innocuous, quite the opposite of Manto. 

Whether Manto was or was not a greater story writer than God, I think he is the greatest writer to have written about the world of Bombay cinema. This is no small thing, given that the pieces I'm referring to - published in Urdu as Ganjey Farishtey, translated into English as Stars from Another Sky - were written between 1948 and 1954, over sixty years ago. 

Their world is one Manto had himself been part of, as a journalist and a studio screenwriter. When he first moved to Bombay in 1936 to work at Nazir Ludhianvi's weekly film newspaper Musawwir (The Painter), he was 24. Over the next decade and a bit, he worked as Editor of Babu Rao Patel's film magazine Caravan, and at the Imperial Film Company, Film City and Saroj Movietone. From his own references, it seems he also worked on films for Filmistan, Chitra Productions and Hindustan Cine Tone, among others. 

In line with the archival abyss that we Indians live in, very, very few of the 2000-odd films made in the 1930s and 1940s have survived - and none of those Manto was part of. How wonderful it would be to read what Manto wrote in Musawwir and Caravan - reviews of contemporary films? - but I doubt any of those exist either. 

But what we do have in Stars from Another Sky are sparkling accounts of some of the people Manto knew, and through them, a picture of the Bombay film industry that feels warmer, more intimate and acute than pretty much anything that has been published on it since. And none of it is touchy-feely. Some of the people Manto writes about remain instantly recognisable - Nargis, Ashok Kumar, the golden-voiced Noor Jehan and kathak danseuse Sitara. The latter, whom Manto labelled 'Dancing Tigress from Nepal' and who lives into her 90s as the venerable Sitara Devi, was the subject of his most unabashedly sensational piece. But here, too, Manto exhibits what I can only call his unique charm. Having gone on about her sexual appetite and her relationships for several pages, he ends, "Sitara, of course, would be angry, but after some time, she will forgive me because...she, too is a bighearted woman... I do not know what she thinks of me but I have always thought of her as a woman who is born once in a hundred years." Believable flattery is a very rare thing. 

The Nargis piece is one of my favourites: a remarkably unforced portrait of someone forced to live two lives. On one hand she is the naive young woman who enjoys girlish gossip, comparing notes about convent school life and asking for recipes for "toffee with raw sugar" (this turns out, in my Devanagari version, Meena Bazar, to be called gur ki bheli). Almost the whole piece is devoted to this unstarry Nargis, so starved for the company of ordinary girls her age that she actually seeks out those she encounters via an anonymous phone call (these happen to be Manto's saalis). But then it swerves, as if without premeditation, into a different space: Manto takes some visiting young men to Jaddan Bai's house to see Nargis. She emerges reluctantly, and her manner with these admirers is completely at odds with what we've seen so far. 

"Nargis's entire conversation was pure artifice. The way she sat, the way she moved, the way she raised her eyes was like an offering on a platter... It was a boring and somewhat tense meeting." Later he describes her talking money. The piece is among the most vivid portrayals of a star persona ever - alternately lonely and haughty, childish and businesslike. 

Other pieces describe personalities largely lost to public memory, like Rafiq Ghaznavi ('The Ladies' Man') or Neena ('The Inscrutable Housewife'). But Manto's unabashed narratives are not only about these protagonists - they are full of drinking sessions, tangential affairs and breakups, and the everyday life of the Bombay film studio - writing sessions, shooting hazards, comic interludes. 

Perhaps the book's most moving essay is about the actor Shyam, Manto's close friend who had died. But it is not Shyam's death that makes the piece moving. It is the fact that in writing it, Manto relives the events leading up to his 1948 departure from Bombay "where the communal atmosphere was becoming more vicious by the day". He describes advising Ashok Kumar and Vacha to dismiss him from service because "the Hindus thought" he was the one getting so many Muslims into Bombay Talkies. His description of his relationship with Shyam as Partition riots erupt is among the most powerful accounts of how individual lives can get folded into wider - that is narrower - identities. Nothing happens - it is just the inescapable feeling that it could. 

If Manto had lived, he would have turned 102 on 11 May, 2014. He died ridiculously, sadly young at 43, having spent his last six years in sorrowful exile from his beloved Bombay. May Bombay's moviedom keep his spirit alive in our difficult times.

This column was published in Mumbai Mirror.

Film Review: Vicky Donor

Vicky Donor is that rare thing: a laugh-out-loud Hindi movie that has both irreverence and soul. Screenwriter Juhi Chaturvedi and director Shoojit Sircar have taken a hush-hush subject that most people would tiptoe around, and placed it bang at the centre of a film that’s both hilariously funny and wonderfully honest – without ever feeling sleazy.

The plot is as follows. Vicky Arora, 25, lives with his widowed mother Dolly and his grandmother Biji in a small house in the very middle class neighbourhood of Lajpat Nagar IV. He seems like a nice boy, but he doesn’t have a job and isn’t trying terribly hard to look for one either. He seems more-or-less content to spend his days mall-hopping and playing cricket in the park with his buddies, while effectively living off his mother’s earnings from the beauty parlour she runs downstairs. Enter Dr Baldev Chadda, who runs a fertility treatment clinic and sperm bank in Daryaganj, and is always on the lookout for sperm donors who can come to the aid of his stressed-out, “insecured and highly ambitious” clients. Chadda spies Vicky when he’s in the process of fobbing off his pet white Spitz on someone (because it failed to bark at a thief), and decides at first sight that this is the man to solve his current crisis of ‘quality sperm’. “Shakal dekh ke bande ka sperm pehchaan jaata hoon,” as he says to the bewildered Vicky. So begins Chadda’s long and hilarious campaign to convince the reluctant Vicky that donating sperm is neither funny nor obscene, but simply a natural thing that he can do – and earn good money doing.

Chaturvedi’s hilarious dialogue for Dr Chadda is absolutely spot-on, from assuring Vicky that sperm donation “is an ancient science” to telling him that he’ll be doing a social service. But it’s the brilliant Annu Kapoor who breathes life into this amalgam of bizarre Aryan race purity theories and sheer dogged business sense, turning him into a character who’s as familiar as he is memorable. Ayushmann Khurana, a television star and ex-IPL anchor making his filmic debut here, is a complete natural as Vicky, combining the requisite Dilli macho bluster with an artless vulnerability that has thankfully little drama about it.

In fact, Vicky Donor steers clear of high drama for most of its running time. The relationship between Vicky’s rum-swigging mother (the superb Dolly Ahluwalia) and eccentric old grandmother (Kamlesh Gill), for example, brings to life a daughter-in-law–mother-in-law dynamic that’s often hilarious while staying refreshingly honest: “Hangover jitta banda kucch bhi keh jaanda hai (When one has a hangover, one can say anything at all),” says a drunkenly apologetic Beeji in advance for being crabby in the morning.

Even Vicky’s persistent wooing of pretty bank employee Ashima (debutante Yami Gautam) stays light and frothy almost all the way through, even with the romance culminating in the inevitable over-the-top Bengali-Punjabi family face-off. The caricatures that Vicky’s mother and Ashima’s father (veteran theatre actor Jayanta Das) respectively draw of the ‘other’ community are broad and predictable – loud, uncultured Punjabis who flaunt their money, versus miserly monkey-cap-wearing Bengalis who don’t know how to have a good time – but the sharply-scripted wedding negotiation scene seems entirely believable. And by the time you’ve gotten to the end of their happily tipsy wedding, you’re really not likely to complain.

The post-interval section is somewhat less fun, mostly because the filmmakers up their drama quotient as they propel us towards a fuzzy feelgood climax. But the emotional twist in the tale – which I’m not going to give away here (other than to tell you that Chaturvedi wanted to call her film Phool Khilein Hain Gulshan Gulshan) – does give everyone a chance to display their acting chops. Gautam turns a tad too screechy (and then perhaps a little too maudlin), but Khurrana acquits himself marvelously, as do Ahluwalia and Gill.
It’s also worth mentioning that Vicky Donor is a Delhi film, though like with everything else about it, it wears its city-ness lightly. It doesn’t make too big a deal of its locations – the Daryaganj clinic with its slightly dodgy associations, the Lajpat Nagar terrace across which Beeji quarrels incessantly with the bitchy neighbour ‘Pepsi Aunty’, or Dr. Chadda’s terrace with its too-good-to-be-true view of the Jama Masjid – but each of them is nicely captured. And the dialogue is a pitch-perfect rendition of Dilli-Punjabi-speak, studded with English words in exactly the right places: “Gents ko samjhein aisi ladies bhagwan ne banai kitthe hai? (Where has God made the sorts of ladies who will understand gents?)”

Vicky Donor shares with last week’s Bittoo Boss a likeable debutante hero, a script that’s almost wholly in Punjabi and a desire to address a serious topic with a light and frothy touch. Unlike Bittoo Boss, though, Shoojit Sircar’s second directorial outing (after 2005’s watchable Kashmir-shot romance Yahaan, in which Minissha Lamba made her suitably coy debut) the emotional-moral core of Vicky Donor never feels like a politically correct add-on. Sure, it doesn’t cling very hard to the possibility that there might actually be people who don’t need children to feel ‘complete’, and neither does it want to argue too aggressively against the desire for biological children rather than adopted ones – but then every film must pick its battles. Vicky Donor has picked one, and fights it most disarmingly.

Published in Firstpost.