Shelf Life: Do Clothes Make the Woman?

The August edition of my column for The Voice of Fashion, on clothes seen through the prism of literature:

A story from Nisha Susan’s The Women Who Forgot to Invent Facebook and Other Stories casts clothes as signifiers of selfhood

All the world's a stage, but not all men and women are players. Meena, Annie and Nayantara – the self-declared “goddesses” of Nisha Susan's story 'The Trinity' – clearly are. Susan's deftly-drawn Kochi undergrads are all crackling confidence, their position atop the social pyramid propped up by each other's presence. Even before their 'fusion dance' choreographies start to win gold medals and glory, the trio is already living out their lives before an imagined applauding public. “In college, when the three of us walked in, I used to feel like we were in those campus film-like slow motion scenes,” says the story's narrator Nayantara. “Not like the fat twenty-five year-old heroines in Malayalam campus films, but Hindi film heroines.”

Costuming, of course, is crucial to a successful performance – and the trinity is always ahead of the curve, not part of the herd: “We were thin and tall before anyone else was thin and tall... We had good sunglasses, not those big, ugly Gulf-return ones. We wore ghagras at weddings before anyone else did. We draped dupattas over our elbows casually, even though our arms ached by the end of the day.” Sometimes their clothes stage liberatory forms of public disguise. On a trip to Thiruvananthapuram, they walk around “pretending to be NRI Malayalis who did not understand Malayalam”, their tight jeans and sunglasses a license to do things that local girls might attract censure for, like inspecting the city's famously naked giant mermaid statue. At other times, they design costumes for an actual stage – on the same Thiruvananthapuram trip, their combining of sleeveless sari blouses and salwars with tightly draped dupattas electrifies and scandalises the Malayali youth fest audience. (“Malayalis have this thing about 'sleeveless'. Sleeveless means bad girl. Usha Uthup-voice bad girl. Never mind that stomach and back and breasts are showing when you wear a regular sari blouse.”)

'The Trinity' is part of The Women Who Forgot to Invent Facebook and Other Stories (Westland, 2020), Susan's debut collection. The book's unifying thematic premise is India's digital landscape: it couldn't be more contemporary. But reading it made me think of a story from 132 years ago: Rudyard Kipling's 'A Second-Rate Woman', first published in 1888, and reissued most recently in a selection of Kipling stories named for a recurring character, Lessons for Mrs. Hauksbee (Speaking Tiger, 2017). Mrs. Hauksbee is the toast of colonial Simla (or Shimla), her very name a suggestive nod to her eagle eye and her queen-bee-like talent for gathering the young and bright around her. 

In this particular story, Mrs. Hauksbee is preoccupied with a recently-arrived Mrs. Delville, who is drawing disproportionate male attention in Simla society. This is grossly unfair, says Mrs. H, because Mrs D always looks like she “stood in middle of the room while her ayah – no, her husband – it must have been a man – threw her clothes at her”. “To dress as an example and stumbling block for half Simla... and then to find this Person... draws the eyes of men,” she rages, “It's almost enough to make one discard clothing.” So “disgustingly badly dressed” is Mrs. D, that Mrs. H labels her the Dowd – and the man paying court to her the Dancing Master. Back to Susan's opening paragraph: “We used to have names for everyone, and everyone had names for us.”

That bitchily competitive fashion-first vibe, the ruthless gaze the cool girls turn upon uncool ones, has apparently been around forever – and isn't going anywhere. Mrs. D's bonnet is terrible, her Terai sunhat has elastic under her chin, and “if she ever darkened these doors, I should put on this robe... to show her what a morning wrapper ought to be,” says Mrs. H to her friend Mrs. Mallowe. Whether the stage is the stiflingly small British circuit of 1880s Simla – the Mall, Library, horse rides to Jakko (Jhakhoo), dances at the Viceregal Lodge – or the equally tiny Indian college fest scene circa 2000, it seems that clothes remain our top signifiers of selfhood. When Mrs. M ventures timidly, “Do you suppose that the Delville woman has humour?”, Mrs. H scoffs at the possibility: “Her dress betrays her. How can a Thing who wears her supplément under her left arm have any notion of the fitness of things – much less their folly?” I thought of the goddesses with dupattas over their aching arms.

A vintage image of Lower Bazaar, Simla (Shimla).

When persona is crafted from clothes, getting them wrong makes one non grata. In both stories, though, it is the sharp dressers that get it wrong. The Dowd turns out far stauncher than Mrs. Hauksbee imagines, telling men off and saving babies, provoking Mrs. H to declare, “I love that woman in-spite of her clothes.” Meanwhile the goddesses conducting feisty sex lives on the internet – without getting caught on camera like their silly college-mates – abruptly become arranged-marriage wives. Perhaps clothes can only tell you so much. 

And yet sometimes they catch up with our inner selves, when we are not looking. We used to call girls with white lace hankies Kerchief Kumaris, says Nayantara at the start of 'The Trinity'. When, she wonders, did she start carrying one?

Published in The Voice of Fashion, 27 Aug 2020

Once more, with feeling

My Mirror column:

On the centenary of Ingmar Bergman’s birth, it’s worth thinking about what made him one of the greatest filmmakers of all time.

A still from Persona (left).  Ingmar Bergman (right).

Ingmar Bergman, who would have turned hundred on July 14, has a super-serious image. To someone who has never seen a Bergman film, just the names that make up the great Swedish director’s filmography can come off sounding a tad intense. To wit: the first feature he helped write was called Torment and his own directorial debut in 1946 was called Crisis. Future titles included It Rains On Our Love (1946), Prison, Thirst (both 1949), This Can’t Happen Here (1950), Sawdust and Tinsel (1953), The Devil’s Eye (1960), Hour of the Wolf, Shame (both 1968) and Cries and Whispers (1972).
Alright, I’m cherry-picking a bit here: Bergman’s 60-odd films (many made for television) did also include Smiles of a Summer Night and Summer with Monika. (The summer allusion, in a Scandinavian country with long dark winters, isn’t too complicated). There was even a film called To Joy. But those are the exceptions. Roll around on your tongue the names of the 1961-1963 films in his ‘trilogy’: Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light and The Silence and you imagine an austere world, with depressing things unfolding in a bleak, wintry, black-and-white landscape. And you wouldn’t be entirely wrong.

Titles, of course, are the least of it. Perhaps best known outside film-nerdistan for The Seventh Seal, in which a man conducts a chess game with Death to stave off his demise, Bergman’s films returned again to again to existential subjects. His themes were the great themes of human life: mortality and ageing, faith, identity and loneliness, the meaning of life and the fear of death. He did not shy away from the terrifying things that might scare off more superficial artists: being a parent, grappling with desire, or with disability.


And yet Bergman was rarely ponderous. He was too personal to be that. His films plumbed the depths of the human soul with an excavatory zeal, with the family often emerging as the stage on which sexual and other longings were dramatically played out. So Through a Glass Darkly, in which a troubled young woman envisions god as a spider, is also about her flirtatious, eventually incestuous relationship with her brother, while the fraught relationship between the sisters in The Silence is founded on a comparison of their fundamentally different approaches to sex. Cries and Whispers, which might be among the most intense cinematic portraits ever made of relationships between sisters, is also a powerful film about sex and shame.



“The manifestation of sex is very important... for above all, I don’t want to make merely intellectual films. I want audiences to feel, to sense my films. This to me is much more important than their understanding them,” Bergman told Playboy in a 1964 interview. Many of Bergman’s characters, especially women, spoke of their sexual yearnings with a candour that was unprecedented in the cinema of his time — and might be unequalled even today. If he created some women with repressed inner selves, his films could also function like therapists’ couches: places where these characters found themselves unburdening themselves of secrets.


In his affecting, inscrutable 1966 film Persona, for example, a young nurse called Alma (Bibi Andersson) is appointed to take care of a famous actress called Elisabet (Liv Ullmann) who has suddenly stopped speaking. The slim, almost boyish Alma is clearly struck by the uber-femme, full-figured Elisabet, while Elisabet somehow manages to make her silence welcoming enough to draw out increasingly confessional monologues from Alma, including a description of a transformative erotic threesome she once entered into with perfect strangers on a beach.


Persona is also a good entry-point into the genre that was, for many years, Bergman’s métier: a psychological unravelling that could take you to the brink of horror. Exploring the inner workings of the human mind, through dreams and fantasies, can often reveal our ugliest selves. Bergman’s cinema is an unforgiving mirror, making us see how we are most cruel to those we love. And sometimes, of course, we cannot love at all. In films as varied as Persona, Wild Strawberries and Autumn Sonata, Bergman produced brutally precise portraits of parents who cannot give of themselves, who hide from the neediness of their children. His own father was a Lutheran minister with harsh ideas of parenting; his ideas may have made their way into the figure of the stepfather in Fanny and Alexander, a bishop who constantly tells the children that he is “punishing them out of love”.


That bishop is as close to a villain as Bergman ever created. Made in 1982, Fanny and Alexander’s rather performative contrast between the pleasure-seekers and the self-punishers was a shift of register for him. Bergman’s cinema showed again and again how thin the line was between attraction and repulsion, pleasure and pain. The point, he seemed to suggest, was while knowing that, to continue to seek out experience; to feel whatever one did with passion.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 15 July 2018. 

A Muted Sharpness

My Mumbai Mirror column:

The brilliant Jaya Bhaduri, who turned 70 earlier this month, once specialised in being the thinking man’s girl-next-door.

Utpal Dutt and Jaya Bhaduri in her Hindi film debut, Guddi (1971)

Some years ago, on a long taxi ride with a bunch of near millennials, the conversation veered around to Jaya Bachchan, nee Bhaduri, and I found myself in the shocking position of having to defend something I had always assumed was beyond doubt: Jaya’s actorly brilliance. This was despite the fact that by the 1980s, when films first started percolating into my consciousness, she’d already done her decade of top-notch performances, married Amitabh Bachchan, and given up her career for motherhood. But through my childhood and teenage years, if a film of Jaya Bhaduri’s was on television, or in the video rental parlour, it was always watched. And there was never any doubt that Jaya would make it worth watching.

In particular, my mother (not an easy-to-please viewer) had a soft spot for Jaya – and I’ve only recently begun to see that that admiration may have extended beyond her acting to a (subconscious) identification with her screen persona. If my mother was a North Indian girl growing up in Calcutta, Jaya Bhaduri was a Bengali girl from Jabalpur, and there was a recognisable set of elements that made up the bright girl-next-door aesthetic. This included tasteful, unfussy cotton saris, draped perfectly over well-fitted (but never too revealing) blouses; the thick straight black hair worn in a loose long plait, or a bun at the nape of the neck (unlike the fashionably bouffant-crowned Sharmila Tagore, or the more free-flowing hairstyles adopted by a Neetu Singh or a Zeenat Aman), the kaajal, bindi, large hoop earrings – and sometimes even spectacles!

Jaya Bhaduri, who turned 70 this April, made her screen debut in Satyajit Ray’s Mahanagar (1963), as part of a fine ensemble cast, playing the hero Anil Chatterjee’s teenaged sister. That very particular mid-twentieth century Indian image of youthful femininity: the school-going girl on the cusp of womanhood, enthusiastically learning to wear a sari and cook the family meal, clearly struck a chord with both viewers and directors. In the 1971 Bangla film Dhanyee Meye, she played Uttam Kumar’s sister-in-law. Though by then she had graduated from the Film and Television Institute of India as a gold medalist, Bhaduri’s first Hindi film role –the title character of Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Guddi (1971) – also had her playing a teenager, this time one besotted with films in general and Dharmendra in particular. So did her second: as the tomboyish child-bride Mrinmoyee in Uphaar, the Barjatya Productions version of Tagore’s short story ‘Samapti’ (filmed by Ray on Aparna Sen as part of his Teen Kanya triptych).

In Gulzar’s Parichay and Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Bawarchi, both 1972 releases, or later Chupke Chupke (1975), she remained the innocent young woman coming of age in the middle class family setting – whether as Didi to a gang of children, or the younger sister whose marriage is to be fixed. In Basu Chatterjee’s heart-warming Piya ka Ghar (1973), Jaya was the shy young bride catapulted into a crowded Bombay chawl by arranged marriage. Here the family setting was the new sasural: a loving but boisterous home full of card games and theatre rehearsals, cricket and silly jokes.
Another commonality in many of these early roles was her status as the favourite of a father/elder brother figure: Sanjeev Kumar in Parichay, Rajesh Khanna in Bawarchi, Raja Paranjape as her tauji Gauri Shankar in Piya ka Ghar, and later AK Hangal in the sensitive marital drama Kora Kagaz.


In all these depictions of girlhood, however, Jaya’s shyness encoded a certain sexual innocence, a quiet reserve that did not ever involve being coy or silly. This meant she could also be feisty or tomboyish or self-willed, like in Guddi or Uphaar, while always conveying something I can only call character. Whatever she did, we knew that deep down, she was a good girl. It’s that inner quality of non-frivolity that allowed her to so convincingly inhabit the streetsmart role of the memorable “chakku-chhuriyan tez kara lo” girl in Zanjeer (1973). Even when she is first being bought off as a witness by the villain’s henchmen and says something coolly cynical like “For this much money I could turn dumb for a lifetime,” we do not quite believe in her essential badness.

And of course the film makes sure she changes over to the right side of the law quickly, as well as moving from her street performer self to an appropriately sari-clad love interest for the policeman hero – Amitabh Bachchan, whose career as Hindi cinema’s ‘angry young man’ first took off with Zanjeer, and whom Jaya Bhaduri married in June 1973, the year of Zanjeer’s release. Whether Bachchan ever acknowledges it, he was the struggler who married a supremely talented actress at the peak of her powers – and within less than a decade, her career had ended while his, legendarily, carries on into the present.

That real-life narrative is not unusual for India, of course. What perhaps makes Jaya Bhaduri’s case remarkable is that there are at least two films in which she acted out versions of sympathetic fans imagined to be her real life: Abhimaan, in which marital tensions emerge from precisely the sort of unequal fame that Jaya and Amitabh had, and most bizarrely Silsila, in which a version of the love triangle of Rekha-Jaya-Amitabh played out on screen, and after which Jaya stopped acting for decades — only returning to the public eye as the mother figure of Hazaar Chaurasi ki Maa and more depressingly, K3G. Even her political persona has wife-and-mother written all over it. Perhaps some day someone in Bollywood will pluck up the courage to cast her in a version of the rest of her life.


Published in Mumbai Mirror, 22 Apr 2018.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 22 Apr 2018.

The Confidence Man

Yesterday's Mumbai Mirror column:

Emraan Hashmi has perfected a persona whose unapologetic appetite for the good life (both sex and money) makes him a rarity in Bollywood - and crucial to it.

Emraan Hashmi is Bollywood's under-acknowledged seamy side. Over his decade in the film industry, he has built a massive devoted fan following. Most of his films come from the Mahesh-Mukesh Bhatt stable, (Mahesh Bhatt's mother and Hashmi's grandmother were sisters, and Emraan began his career assisting on Vishesh Films' Raaz). 

Many of them are franchises - films that bear a common name and broad theme (Raaz, Jannat, Murder), but whose plots, narratives and cast changes completely from one film to another. The one thing that unites them is Emraan. 

We're talking of an actor who is the main draw for a stream of films that are as close to dependable moneymakers as is possible at our notoriously fickle box office. And yet he and his films are barely mentioned in the growing list of synthesizing books about Bollywood, or the column inches regularly devoted to the transformation of Hindi cinema. We go on about the 100 crore club, and act as if the Bhatt films don't really count. 

Yet Hashmi is probably among the most successful leading men in the industry. And more importantly, he has a persona that seems to give him rather more moral leeway than most mainstream heroes still have. 

I'm not talking just of erotic action, which has been almost expected of Hashmi ever since his breakthrough hit Murder (2004) saddled him with the silly 'serial kisser' tag. But his characters do enjoy a degree of sexual openness rare in Bollywood; his audience seems to forgive him whether he is a frequenter of whores (as in Jannat 2), the obsessive stalker of another man's wife (as in Murder), or the rakish lover who dismisses the heartbroken woman he's been sleeping with for three years as an "aadat, aur kucch nahin" (as in Murder 2). 

The films themselves are less judgmental or apologetic about sex than most of contemporary Bollywood, where sex still must come attached to love. A Murder may not advocate an extramarital affair, but it seems to understand it. Murder 2 by no means romanticises the flesh trade, but its money-minded pimps and resigned call girls produce a slightly less black-and-white version of that world than say, a Mardaani. 

The moral leeway with regard to sex is even greater when it comes to money. Hashmi is always a smooth-talking hustler. And he's always the lower middle class man with a heart of gold -- at least as far as the poor and the "deserving" are concerned. But whether he's a small-time cardsharp or pulling off multimillion dollar cons, he is never plagued by high-minded ideas about honesty. Not for him the staid middle class job, or even the relative risks of binness (think a Rocket Singh or a Band Baaja Baraat). 

No, for Emraan it must be a gamble, and with the highest stakes. "Jeb khali ho tabhi toh sapnein dekhne chahiye (It's when your pockets are empty that you should dream)," says his character in an early scene in Jannat (2008). A little later in the same film, he falls in love with a girl wandering through a mall because of the sadness on her face as she admires objects she can't afford. Their whirlwind romance involves his using his roommate's flat deposit to buy her a diamond ring he saw her gazing at, then swamping her telephone-shopping helpline with so many credit card purchases that her monthly target is met in an hour. Their first romantic duet involves sneaking into a shuttered Home Store and trampolining on a display bed that has 'Sale 20%' off signs all around it. 

Hashmi's hero is always out to inhabit the good life - beaches, yachts, fast cars and beautiful women, whom he wines and dines and most crucially, beds, in immaculate hotel rooms from Turkey to Capetown. "People who save money are those who don't know how to make enough of it," says Raja in this week's Raja Natwarlal. But even if they don't necessarily make an appearance - like in the joyous heist pulled off in Raja Natwarlal - there are hidden costs to this good life. So Emraan Hashmi's cinema toggles constantly between a surface sheen and the darkness that is its necessarily obverse - porn, sex work, adultery, trafficking, kidnapping, murder. 

Credit is what makes this world go round. Dons show their creditors 'trailers' of the violence that awaits them if they default on payments (Jannat). Loving mentors might only be pretending to tot up loans in blank notebooks (Raja Natwarlal), but even unwritten debts can accumulate. "A man's body burns when he dies, but not his debts," goes a dialogue in Murder 2. 

I wonder if the films of Emraan Hashmi are the 21st century inheritor of the 70s Amitabh Bachchan legacy: the bad boy with a good heart, who wants to live the good life at any cost. Only the bets are bigger, and the heroines purer arm candy, who must ask no questions about the provenance of the money showered on them. 

Two things have changed, though. One, it no longer matters that he doesn't have Ma (in fact parents are usually long dead, unable to stop our hero hurtling into his future). And two, he doesn't have to die at the end. Instead of Bachchan's celebrated tragic deaths, Emraan Hashmi has perfected the art of staging his own death. Plenty to think about there.

A Kapoor by Chance

My tribute to Rishi Kapoor, published in Open magazine in 2012:

Rishi is the least Kapoor-like of the Kapoors: shorn of the family mannerisms and preoccupation with their image. Now, on the eve of turning 60, he is getting the roles of a lifetime and relishing them, too.

On 26 January, 2012, India’s Republic Day, Karan Johar’s Dharma Productions released Agneepath, a much-trumpeted remake of the 1990 cult classic of the same name. Among those who watch and wait for Hindi films, there was a buzz of anticipatory questions: what was Karan Johar thinking, remaking father Yash Johar’s most beloved movie? Could debutant director Karan Malhotra’s vision ever live up to the memories of Mukul Anand fans? How could the too-beautiful Hrithik possibly step into the impossibly large shoes of Bachchan’s caustic, sneering Vijay Dinanath Chauhan?

By afternoon, however, as the first-day-first-show folk got to their computers, everyone was talking about something else. Trending on Twitter was not #HrithikRoshan, #KaranJohar or even #Agneepath, but #RishiKapoor.

After a lifetime of being typecast as a baby-faced love machine, the 59-year-old actor’s concentrated villainy as Rauf Lala has surprised Hindi film fans. Both gloriously filmi and entirely convincing, Rishi Kapoor’s performance is not only Agneepath’s biggest talking point, but also the one thing about the film on which everyone agrees.

As proprietor of an empire in which meat exports form a front for a sleazy business of underage female flesh and cocaine, Kapoor’s Lala has the task of embodying unmitigated evil while also being the father-substitute under whose watchful eye our hero grows to full gangsterhood. He must be both the ruthless kasai (butcher) with glowering eyes and the portly Muslim patriarch, mai-baap for the poorest of his community. At one point in the film, Rauf Lala is double-crossed and loses his son, and despite the terrible things his character does in running his unsavoury empire of business, Rishi makes you feel, for a moment, something akin to grief. I cannot think of anyone else who could have done it.

There is something about Rishi Kapoor’s face that makes you believe. It was true in 1970, when he was the slightly overweight teenager in Mera Naam Joker who made his entry by falling clumsily into the middle of a ring of expertly-skating classmates—and falling as clumsily in love with his sophisticated young teacher Miss Mary (Simi Garewal); it was true through the 1980s and 90s, when he managed to convincingly romance a long line of nubile actresses who kept growing further away from him in age. And it is more true than ever today, when he seems increasingly able to transform himself from Rishi Kapoor into the charming Sardar uncleji of Love Aaj Kal (2009), the anxious producer Romy Rolly of Luck By Chance (2009), or the hapless maths teacher of Do Dooni Char (2010).

Perhaps Lata Mangeshkar was onto something: she once called Rishi the most talented of the Kapoors, because his performances came without the baggage of mannerisms—without the bombast, melancholic excess or ada (stylish charm) so integral to the star personas cultivated by his grandfather Prithviraj, his father Raj, or his uncle Shammi. But despite his fine, often nuanced work, many of us who grew up in the 80s and 90s simply took it for granted that this man, whose cherubic face retained an uncanny vulnerability despite the legendary Kapoor kilos having begun to fill out his Fair Isle sweaters, should continue to dance his way through the hearts of younger and younger heroines. After all, he was the original loverboy.

Rishi Kapoor’s indisputable-and-eternal claim to that title was established with Bobby (1973), in which his father created for him a persona which was to last him for decades: the boyish, vulnerable young man who suddenly finds himself terribly, irredeemably in love. Love just happened—often at first sight—and then there was nothing you could do about it except summon the courage to tell the girl. And then the families. Despite the grandness of the romantic ideal—especially when, as in Bobby or Prem Rog (1982), love demanded full-on rebellion against all social and familial strictures—there was always an endearing artlessness to Rishi’s wooing of the heroine, and a light, frothy, friendly sort of relationship thereafter. Think of Monty in Karz (1980), announcing his love in song almost as soon as he meets Tina Munim, or Ajay in Khel Khel Mein (1975), where he and Neetu’s friends-as-much-as-lovers relationship was exemplified in the song Khullam Khulla Pyar Karenge Hum Dono.

Growing up, though, it was the ragged, edgy angularity of Amitabh Bachchan that had my exclusive attention. I only registered the aching, intense beauty of Raja in Bobby as a 20-something adult sitting in the US. I found myself—because of all the Rishi-love arising from an emergent Bollywood blogosphere dominated by White female fans—in possession of an inexhaustible stack of images of Rishi in all his technicolour glory: the wine-red bellbottoms, the blue bobble-cap, the oversized sunglasses, the sideburns, and oh, the lips.

Even in a cinematic culture known to make heroes of fair-skinned men with red lips, one would imagine that if you looked as delectably baby-faced as Rishi, it would have been a huge concern not to be thought of as what Enid Blyton might have called namby-pamby.

And yet, Rishi has never seemed insecure about his non-macho looks. He is happy to play innocent, though he often belies that first impression with an act of  daredevilry. In the first scene of Khel Khel Mein, the reigning college dadaVikram (Rakesh Roshan) rags the baby-faced new boy so relentlessly and successfully that Neetu Singh and the other girls beg him to stop. Just when you aren’t expecting it, though, the ‘so sweet’ new boy turns around and matches the bully blow for blow. (Later in the same film, he gives a perfect rendition of stage fright before delivering an impromptu performance, complete with guitar and trademark muffler.) So secure was Rishi about his prettiness that he spent at least one film largely in drag: Rafoo Chakkar (1975). In this silly and rather charming adaptation of Some Like it Hot (1959), Rishi alternates between two fake identities. He’s wonderful as the bumbling millionaire in a red-and-white chequered blazer who walks a wide-eyed Neetu Singh onto someone else’s Srinagar houseboat with an “Aaiye, aaiye, sab mera hai—bagh, phool, pani, scenery”. But he seems even more ridiculously effervescent when he’s camping it up in mini-skirts and feathery headdresses as Neetu’s fellow dancer and confidante Devi. 


That’s the other thing about Rishi: he always managed to give the impression of having a rollicking good time. Dancing seems to have come naturally to him, and it is remarkable how often he actually plays a performer in his early films: a small-time musician in a band, an enormously successful pop star, a qawwali singer. He was an entertainer actually playing an entertainer.

There’s a self-referentiality there which may or may not be deliberate. But Rishi Kapoor’s roles over the last few years have contained much cannibalising of his cinematic persona: singing Main shayar toh nahi with screen-son Saif Ali Khan in the Yash Raj production Hum Tum (2004), or doling out advice on how a proper love affair ought to be conducted— again to Saif Ali Khan—in Imtiaz Ali’s Love Aaj Kal.

The most remarkable self-referential role of all, though, is in the tragically under-watched Chintuji (2009), a wishful parable about modernity, corruption and the nature of celebrity in India. Director Ranjit Kapoor (a Hindi theatre veteran whose previous association with the film industry was as a dialogue-writer for such memorable films as Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, Bandit Queen and Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa) casts Rishi as a semi-fictitious version of himself. The filmstar Rishi Kapoor, affectionately known to his fans as Chintuji, is invited to the charmingly unspoilt town of Hadbahedi, where—according to the film’s narrative—he happens to have been born. The townsfolk hope to make their town better-known, while Chintuji, accompanied by a likeable young PR agent called Devika (Kulraj Randhawa), wants to make Hadbahedi the first rung of his future political career. But the more the good people of Hadbahedi try to please their honoured guest, the more unbearably Chintuji behaves: insisting on airconditioning when there’s no power, demanding desi murga (chicken) and whisky of his vegetarian, teetotalling hosts, and only looking happy when he’s told that the painted wooden cut-out of him that’s been created for the occasion is a full 35 feet (higher, he is assured, than the 25 foot one of Amitabh in Allahabad and the 30 foot one of Rajnikanth in Chennai). The actor who apparently refused Yash Chopra’s Darr (later made with Shah Rukh Khan) because he felt his audience didn’t accept him in negative roles has clearly come a long way.

Among the odder pleasures of Chintuji is a sequence where a B-movie director (Saurabh Shukla) shoots a song with Rishi as a feather-bedecked tribal chieftain thumping happily away to lyrics that go: ‘Tarantino, Wilder, Capra/ Ozu, Bertolucci, Peckinpah…’. But Chintuji also contains the filmic reunion of Rishi Kapoor with Kseniya Ryabinkina, the Russian dancer who played Marina, the second love of Raj Kapoor’s life in Mera Naam Joker. The coming together of the two actors 40 years later is so spectacularly unlikely that it cannot but be affecting. But the real purpose of Kseniya’s appearance is to create a self-referential cinematic moment, one in which the lying, cheating Chintuji of the film is transformed because an old Russian woman—a character from another film—exhorts Rishi Kapoor to become as ‘good’ a person as his real-life father. It is a point at which the real and the imaginary come together to create a true Hindi cinema moment, a moment at which one cannot but wonder what it is like to be Rishi Kapoor.

In a wonderfully unusual 1975 Filmfare profile of Raj Kapoor and his sons, the well-known non-filmi columnist Behram Contractor (better known as Busybee) described the beginning of the interview thus: ‘Rishi was nervous, tongue-tied and timid, and Daboo was respectful. Raj Kapoor is known to have this sort of influence on his sons… Seeing them sitting together opposite me, I had the strange impression that I was the principal of Campion School and Raj Kapoor had brought his two sons to be admitted.’ Later, Busybee asks ‘the boys’ if they had ever thought of doing anything other than being in films. The responses are revealing. ‘Daboo said, ‘I was destined to be in films. Therefore I was born in the Kapoor family.’… Chintu said, ‘Same’. And he looked at me with eyes which said, Why-don’t-you-stop-pestering-me-with-questions-when-my-father-is-here.’

Growing up in the shadow of a legend is never easy. Even the otherwise sympathetic Busybee thought Rishi was a bad actor, ‘except when directed by his father, when he is super’. But what Busybee’s sharp eye caught was not just a shyness in front of his father, but a refusal of braggadocio remarkable for any actor, especially a Kapoor.

Rishi Kapoor has spent a lifetime refusing to spin grand narratives around his work. “I didn’t make a great effort. I just did what I was told,” he says in The Kapoors (Penguin, 2005). “My father used to show me what to do and I did it.” But his father has been gone for nearly 24 years, and he had established himself independently of his father’s films many years before that. Now, watching him in Agneepath, an amiable patriarch presiding over a qawwali-carpet-chandelier song of the sort his younger self made so energetically his own, one feels the grand narrative has been spun for Rishi Kapoor.

Published in Open magazine, 2012.