Manmohan Desai's Enchantment of the Mind

by Connie Haham

  Ray’s films I’ve seen. Okay. But not my style. One thing about the man is he gets superb performances from his artistes. He has his own class.

  Later, talking to Alpana Chowdhury for Filmfare, he rated Satyajit Ray even higher, ‘If any one person has the right to criticize anybody else’s work, it is Satyajit Ray. Nobody else in India.’8

  Let us now turn our attention to Manmohan Desai’s oeuvre. Of the 20 films Manmohan Desai directed between 1960 and 1988, many might merit individual in-depth examinations. I have, however, limited full-chapter studies to two pivotal films in Desai’s career—Amar Akbar Anthony and Coolie.

  two films

  in close-up

  amar akbar anthony

  becoming a producer

  Amar Akbar Anthony was a turning point for Manmohan Desai. Three other successful releases in 1977 had already made the public familiar with his name. With Amar Akbar Anthony he moved from being a well-known director into the role of a producer-director who wielded a great deal of power in the Hindi film industry. Manmohan Desai explained the inception of the film and his own new role:

  I didn’t want to produce Amar Akbar Anthony. I didn’t want to become a producer because I’m too outspoken, too blunt. I call a spade a spade and don’t take any shit from anybody. But a producer has to be patient and diplomatic. Unfortunately, I’m not a diplomat. That’s one of the major reasons why I’m not popular. I was afraid I’d have trouble with my artistes. But my wife and Prayag Raj said, ‘No, become a producer.’ When I did, nobody gave me any trouble.

  We were sitting here (in his office). Prayag Raj came by. He wanted to take the keys to my farm 50 miles from here to spend the weekend there with his wife. I said, ‘Have a drink.’ And between 7.00 and l0.00 p.m., I swear, we made the plot for Amar Akbar Anthony—the title, the characters, the story. Prayag was drunk. He said, ‘Come on Manmohan, the films you’ve made for others, you can make for yourself.’

  I said, ‘No, no, I’m scared.’

  My wife said, ‘Come on, make it.’

  My little boy put in his word. He also joined the chorus, ‘Yeah, make it, make it, Daddy; produce it.’

  I don’t drink, but they gave me a little half-peg of whiskey and I think I was intoxicated with that. So I was carried away, and I said, ‘Okay, I’m making it.’ At l0.30 in the night I decided to produce this film. In three hours the rough plot of Amar Akbar Anthony was formed here.

  Desai went on to explain that Amar Akbar Anthony was partially rooted in fact:

  I got the idea for Amar Akbar Anthony from a news item in an evening paper. An alcoholic named Jackson was fed up with life and one day packed his three children in a car and dropped them off in a park. I twisted this around, forgot the alcoholic bit and separated the three children. I also built in a miracle, the blind mother gets her eyesight back. This isn’t bunk. Miracles have taken place, haven’t they? There are faith healers, pundits, astrologers. Why do people believe in them?

  The inspiration for Anthony came from someone closer to home:

  There was a narrow strip of gutter between those two buildings across the street. Antav, the Anthony character, came from there. He used to wear a funny hat and was very rowdy. That’s where the bootlegging went on for twenty years. All the Anthony characters used to operate there out in the night, out in the roads.

  Because of the technical finish of Amar Akbar Anthony and the cleverness of the script, because it was the first time that Amitabh had so shone as a comedian, and because it went on to a Golden Jubilee, the critics took note of the film. Many did not like it, but some did, and the film became a reference point in Indian cinema history, mentioned whether in admiration or in horror, along with Sholay, as one of the most prominent films of the seventies. Since then, it has gone on to become a classic, recalled in admiration by many and discovered by newer generations.

  The combination of hard work, luck, and a spark of genius that made Amar Akbar Anthony such a success was perhaps not independent of the general boom of the Hindi film industry in the second half of the seventies. Those were the Amitabh years, the big money, big cast and big audience years. Cinema was still flourishing before video started eating away at the market and before the initial force and inspiration behind the top films of the period were buried under the debris of some lifeless imitations.

  the plot

  The plot of Amar Akbar Anthony is almost mathematical in its logic, almost geometrical in its complexity. The first twenty minutes before the credits constitute a prelude during which we follow Kishanlal (Pran) through a series of misadventures that bring about the separation of all five members of his family. This first part of the film has a somewhat rougher look than the rest and is flawed by an excess of speed and melodrama, especially in the sound track. Those twenty minutes, nevertheless, set the stage for all that is to follow. The nature of each character is established and many detailed bits of information are introduced which will later prove significant in linking the dispersed family members. This introduction to Amar Akbar Anthony also represents the essence of Desai’s work inasmuch as the number of happenings and turnarounds in that one event-filled day is mind-boggling. Each individual scene is necessarily very short as the story line moves from the fate of one family member to another in quick succession. Let us examine the beginning, then, scene by scene.

  Kishanlal is released from the Central Jail.

  Upon returning to his humble street, he learns from a neighbour that his wife has contracted tuberculosis. In their two-room house his three young sons are fighting over a bit of bread. He distributes presents to them; the oldest son buries the toy pistol he is given to prevent the second son from stealing it away. His coughing wife Bharti (Nirupa Roy), with deep circles under her eyes, explains that Robert (Jeevan) went back on his word, refusing to give even one coin to the care of Kishanlal’s family, this despite the fact that Kishanlal, as Robert’s chauffeur, had taken the blame for an accident Robert had caused.

  Enraged, Kishanlal goes to Robert’s luxurious house to find him elegantly dressed, surrounded by strong men and calmly sipping imported whiskey. ‘Don’t you remember your promise?’ Kishanlal asks.

  Robert callously answers that he remembers nothing except that he has forgotten the ice for his whiskey. Then pouring a bit onto his shoe, he orders Kishanlal down on his knees to dry it off. Afterwards, adding insult to injury, he smugly tosses Kishanlal a one-anna coin and tells his men to throw him out. In a fury Kishanlal grabs a gun from a guard and shoots Robert in the chest. Robert slumps over, then rises with a triumphant laugh and dramatically opens his shirt to expose his bulletproof vest. With a couple of karate chops, Kishanlal frees himself and crashes through a window. In the garage he steals one of Robert’s cars. Robert, horrified that Kishanlal has chosen a car with gold hidden in the boot, orders his men out in quick pursuit.

  Fearing for his family’s lives, Kishanlal stops at his home. Bharti has disappeared, leaving behind a suicide note and a Jai Santoshi Mata medallion on a chain. Kishanlal gathers the three children and hurries off in the car. A policeman neighbour, seeing them, gives a look of surprise and then a shrug. A hot chase follows until Kishanlal comes to Borivali Park where he leaves the three boys at the foot of the Mahatma Gandhi statue. Amar, the oldest, at first agrees to stay in the park, but when he sees his father drive away, he runs behind until he is knocked down by the car carrying Robert’s men.

  Bharti, running madly along a tree-lined street, is caught in a sudden storm. Lightning strikes and a branch falls, knocking her unconscious.

  Back in the park the baby is crying inconsolably. The second son offers to find his little brother some food.

  Kishanlal runs off the road; his car slides down a hill. The boot of the car springs open. The gold flies out, and the car bursts into flames. Robert’s men prepare to go down to recuperate the gold when the police arrive and forbid access to the burning car. One of the policemen at the site is Kishanlal’s neighbour who now suppose
s Kishanlal and the three boys to be dead.

  At the park again, a Muslim kneeling on a pray mat, hands uplifted, is finishing his prayer when the baby’s cries catch his attention. He gently lifts the child, then, lamenting what a sorry world it is in which parents abandon their offspring, takes the baby home with him.

  The middle brother now returns to the park with a bit of bread, but he finds himself all alone.

  The Muslim, driving down the street, finds the road blocked by a fallen branch. When he tries to move it out of his way, he discovers Bharti. She regains consciousness, but realizes that she has become blind. God has punished her thus, she believes, because she wanted to kill herself. The Muslim kindly drives her home. In the car she hears, but cannot see the baby he has just adopted.

  Kishanlal seems to have been miraculously thrown clear of the wrecked and burning car because when the flames die down, he is seen stealthily gathering up the box of gold before making his way back to town.

  Back at the park, a sudden downpour forces the lonely middle brother to seek refuge on the nearby church steps where he sits shivering, cold and afraid.

  Bharti arrives at her empty home and is informed by her neighbour of the death of her husband and children.

  The next morning a priest opens the door and finds a feverish little boy.

  A passing patrol jeep comes upon the oldest son still lying wounded on the street. A police inspector, with a look of pity and concern, carries the boy to his jeep and drives away.

  Kishanlal returns to the park, and beneath the Gandhi statue he calls out for his sons; the park remains silent and empty.

  In the church the middle child, looking a bit older, is kneeling beside the confession booth. He tells the priest who has adopted him that he has sold his schoolbooks. ‘What! Sold your school books!? Why??’ the priest scolds the child.

  ‘I sold them to give money for a funeral,’ he answers, and the priest smiles tenderly, warmed by the boy’s good heart.

  The next cut serves to make the 22-year jump through time that takes us into the main story of the film. We see an aged priest and a grown Anthony (Amitabh Bachchan), still kneeling in confession. Thus ends the prelude proper, but the film credits are several scenes away.

  The priest begs Anthony to give up the alcohol trade before he finds himself in serious trouble with the police. Anthony answers, pointing to Christ on the cross, that the matter is between himself and his ‘partner’ to whom he gives fifty percent of his earnings. The priest accuses him of trying to bribe heaven, but before their discussion can continue, Anthony is called outside. A woman—Bharti—is lying on the ground, the victim of a hit-and-run accident. Anthony whistles for a taxi to take her to the hospital.

  At the police station the grown older son Inspector Amar (Vinod Khanna) receives a call informing him of the accident and of the name of the hospital where the woman has been taken.

  Akbar (Rishi Kapoor) is at the hospital for his daily visit to the pretty doctor Salma (Neetu Singh). She listens to his heart with a stethoscope, announces he is perfectly fit, and tells him to leave. Akbar admits he has only come to hand deliver her invitation to his qawwali programme. She would like to attend, she says, but her father will refuse unless the entire household accompanies her. A nurse interrupts to say that the wounded woman needs a blood transfusion. Salma asks Akbar, as a personal favour, to help. For Salma, Akbar declares, he would willingly give not only his blood, but his life!

  In another ward, a man in a white coat with a patient chart asks Salma the names of the three men stretched out on hospital beds, red tubes leaving their arms as they donate blood. Salma answers, ‘Their names are…’ The camera travels from bed to bed as the young men announce in turn, ‘Amar,’ ‘Akbar,’ ‘Anthony,’ while below each appears the corresponding actor’s name. An echo after the names heralds our entry into an epic world, clearly not meant to be mistaken for reality. Irony is central in the song that accompanies the credits, ‘Khoon khoon hotaa hai paani nahin’ (Blood is blood, not water) comes the line, ‘Yeh sach hai, koi kahaani nahin’ (This is true; it’s no story). The camera guides our eyes about the room. Bharti, a bandage on her head, is lying on a table to the front and centre. Medical reality yields before symbolism. Three separate tubes carry the men’s blood to a suspended bottle from which only one tube relays blood into Bharti’s vein.

  The song and the credits end. The main story begins in earnest.

  The plot line proceeds with the implacable logic that only fiction can provide. The three young men continue to come in contact. Anthony attends Akbar’s qawwali show. Amar, the policeman, jails Anthony, the barkeeper, for withholding information about the smuggler Robert. The mother, thankful to all three for saving her life, appears with flowers for each. The three brothers, of course, must find true love. Amar saves Lakshmi (Shabana Azmi) and her grandmother from her wicked stepmother (Nadira) and conniving stepbrother (Ranjeet) and has the two move in with him. Akbar sings and dances to woo Salma; her father (Mukri) firmly refuses the match until Akbar comes Tarzan-like to the rescue of father and daughter caught in a burning building. Anthony and Jenny (Parveen Babi) fall in love, but Jenny’s bodyguard Zebisco (Hercules) and her real father, the gangster Robert, interfere; the final fight removes the barriers to their romance, sends the bad guys to jail and provides for the originally separated family’s happy reunion, the only letdown being that Kishanlal, having turned smuggler himself, must go to jail along with Robert.

  the religious component

  In contrast to certain other Desai films in which religion receives barely a passing nod, in Amar Akbar Anthony it is constantly present, whether for its own sake or for the sake of promoting tolerance and mutual respect among those of different religions. That the separation of Kishanlal and his three sons should take place at the foot of Gandhi’s statue is appropriate given Gandhi’s role both as preacher of communal harmony and as father of the movement to end colonial rule. Kishanlal’s family is broken up precisely on Independence Day, August 15, a day that in Indian history evokes both the joy of freedom and the pain of Partition with a subsequent legacy of rioting, massacres and the massive relocations of population. An individual family melodrama includes a national morality tale. Though circumstances have given the three boys different religions, they have remained brothers. An extrapolation could easily be made, the lesson quickly understood, that all Indians, regardless of religion, are brothers. The three-religion theme in Amar Akbar Anthony— four when there is a mention of the Sikhs—is insistent and carefully repeated throughout the plot, in the dialogue, through character traits, and also in the visuals. During the credits, for example, in the blood transfusion scene in the hospital, behind Amar’s bed is a window looking onto a Hindu temple; behind Akbar we see a mosque; behind Anthony, a church.

  All three religions are represented. Nevertheless, with scenes shot on location at a church in Bandra and with Amitabh playing the role of the Christian, the film appears weighed towards Christianity. Statues in the church are used dramatically to underline two moments of crisis. First, when the future Anthony is found on the church steps, the priest gathers him in his arms, takes him inside, and says, ‘The Lord will protect you.’ The camera focuses and rests on a statue of Mary holding the infant Jesus. Later, when Robert lifts his knife menacingly against the priest, we do not witness the fatal stabbing as such. Instead, a cut is made to a statue of the crucified Christ from whose wounds blood has begun to flow.

  Islam is present, above all, in Akbar’s speech, which is peppered with allusions to his faith. Interestingly, Akbar is a pacifist. During the final fight he supports his battling brothers from the sidelines, using the rhythm of his accordion to punctuate their blows. When he is about to deliver the final, decisive punch that lands Robert in jail, he first apologizes to Allah; up to that point, he says, he has only lifted his hands in prayer. If a certain warrior tradition exists historically in Islam, delving into Islam in South Asia reveals a situation of great
complexity. Akbar is perhaps a reminder of the wide impact of the Chisti Sufis with their emphasis on love and devotion and their openness to accommodation. Also, consciously or unconsciously, Akbar’s portrayal may be intended to soothe and comfort those in the audience who could feel threatened by a more aggressive stance from a member of a large minority.

  Hinduism in the film is more personal and more diffuse. Beyond clear evocative markers like Amar’s hands formed for prayer or Bharti’s Jai Santoshi Ma medallion a certain Hindu worldview, exemplified by tolerance and respect for other religions, sets the tone of the film. The theme of communal harmony has often been present in post-colonial Indian cinema but has never been so memorably illustrated as in Amar Akbar Anthony. Responding to a question concerning the communal harmony message urged in the film, Manmohan Desai said:

  Had I stood on a platform preaching ‘Hindu-Muslim bhai-bhai, Hindu-Christian bhai-bhai (brother-brother),’ they would have said, ‘We don’t want to hear that bullshit from you.’ So I said, best give it in a very palatable, say, homeopathic pill. We gave a sugar-coated pill; they took it. They liked it. So we had communal harmony in it.

  But is the Hindu worldview that emphasizes tolerance at times prone to religious immobility in Manmohan Desai’s films? The Hindu Kishanlal kidnaps Robert’s baby daughter Jenny, yet he has her raised as a Catholic like her father. Unlike for both Muslims and Christians, conversion, for Hindus, is a term without meaning. Akbar and Anthony, though raised in other religions, are still considered Hindus by Hindu viewers. Therefore, as Desai explained, even though Akbar and Anthony marry a Muslim and a Christian respectively, it was preferable not to offend sensibilities by actually showing the wedding ceremonies taking place.

  If religious tolerance has often existed side by side in India with an insistence on maintaining distinctions, these two features have often paradoxically and interestingly combined with a third, that, in appearance, is in direct opposition to the other two, i.e., a tendency towards syncretism. A confusion over the boundaries between different religions is used to comic effect when Anthony, disguised as a priest, leaves the villains perplexed by claiming to have performed Akbar’s four weddings. A more serious form of religious overlapping is found in the figure of Sai Baba. In a small country temple decorated with symbols of both Hinduism and Islam, Akbar leads a group of the faithful in a song of worship, ‘Shirdiwale Sai Baba.’