Manmohan Desai's Enchantment of the Mind

by Connie Haham

  Desai did not consider images of revolt to be his principal contribution to the underprivileged among his audiences. Rather, he hoped to lighten their loads by entertaining them. And the comedy in Coolie is droll. From broad slapstick, which keeps even the youngest enthralled, to more subtle visual and verbal humour that engages alert minds, Coolie overflows with clever comic ideas. After the coolies invade the building promoter’s house, Iqbal captures the rich heiress Julie, slings her over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes and carries her to his home. Handcuffed in place, she is to serve as collateral, not to be released until her uncle has fulfilled his promise to sell homes to the coolies at the originally agreed upon prices. After playing the tough, smart, unbeatable hero, however, nonsense becomes dominant and Iqbal morphs into a bumbling idiot in this young woman’s presence. While Iqbal is trying to prepare a French omelette by following the instructions of a radio cooking lesson (to the letter), Julie discovers that a slight nudge to the knob will tune in a yoga lesson; by switching quickly back and forth from station to station she can regain the upper hand. In a series of short gags with enhancing sound effects we see him, for example, breathing pepper deeply until steam comes out of his ears, trying to throw an onion into the frying pan while standing on his head, or sitting on an egg he has placed on the floor…till out hatches a baby chick. The handcuff key then falls from his pocket; Julie fishes it over and frees herself while Iqbal remains immobilized, his legs inextricably entwined about his neck.

  Desai’s humour was not without a cutting edge. High and low alike could find themselves victims of his wit. Many journalists felt that Desai made the Rishi Kapoor character Sunny into the caricature of a newspaperman in order to mock the people of the press with whom Desai had every reason to want to settle scores. Sunny arrives along with the coolies at the rich promoter’s home. When the promoter asks, ‘Who are you?’ Sunny retorts with smug self-assurance, ‘What! You don’t know me? I’m Sunny, the great reporter!’ He then flaunts the power of the press, i.e., the prerogative to give bad publicity. During the circus of an interview his questions are singularly lacking in substance. The tone is light-hearted and funny, but some journalists bristled at what they suspected to be a real undercurrent of aggression.

  Coolie, in many ways, is one of Desai’s most accomplished films. Camera angles enhance the viewers’ emotions. Transitions are often clever and elaborate. The music is memorable, and the song picturizations show thought, care, and a mastery of the medium. This being said, scripting continued to be Desai’s weakness. Certain basic plot assumptions, though fundamental to the development of the story, are incomprehensible. Sunny is born a Hindu and adopted as a baby by a pious Muslim woman who, we are led to believe, considers the baby entirely her own. Sunny himself obviously does not know of his Hindu origin since we see him flabbergasted to learn over half-way through the film that he is not Salma and Zafar’s child. Yet he never shows any sign of having been taught a single feature of Muslim worship. Through such plot illogic Desai no doubt achieves his primary goal, that of not offending Hindu spectators who consider Sunny to have remained a Hindu. The drawback, however, is that Sunny’s character is greatly weakened by the basic confusion over precisely who and what he is.

  Coolie’s pacing, too, is faulty. At moments, the film simply offers too much of a good thing—one too many fights, one too many hospital scenes, one too many songs at close intervals, and a final chase scene that attempts to force a sense of suspense. Judicious cutting could have given a shorter, stronger film.

  Reactions to Coolie varied. One Bombay dweller saw coolies in a new light, ‘Before, I felt coolies were just a normal part of the environment of a train station, but after seeing the film, I look at each one as an individual.’ Among the press, reactions were rather predictable. All the critics who disliked Desai’s work generally, and this included the majority of Indian reviewers, were no more favorable to Coolie than to Desai’s earlier films. In Europe Coolie attracted more positive attention. It was shown as part of the official selection of the twenty-first Mostra Internationale del Cinema Nuovo (the Pesaro Film Festival) in Italy in June 1985. This is not to say that its presence was appreciated by all. Several invited Indian filmmakers representing New Wave cinema (Mani Kaul among others) expressed their shock that the festival would serve as a forum for such ‘crass commercial cinema’. Coolie nevertheless ran to a full house in Pesaro where the local townspeople made up an important part of the apparently contented audience. Afterwards, Desai showed his usual verve when speaking of Pesaro, ‘I couldn’t go to the festival because I was down with flu; if I had been there, I would have definitely pulled off Mr. Mani Kaul’s dhoti!’

  In other areas abroad the reception of Coolie depended on the particular situation of the communities of Indian origin who were often the principal viewers of exported Hindi popular films. In certain parts of Africa where Muslim-Hindu tensions are close to the surface, the film could not be publicized at all for fear of exacerbating communal discord. In sections of East Africa the title itself was objectionable, ‘coolie’ being a derogatory term applied locally to all Indians.

  Back in India, Desai assessed Coolie’s strong points and analyzed its success in view of his following film Mard:

  The first half is all nice comedy. The first three reels of the film, I feel, are brilliant. The flood scenes are something new for the audience. Also, there’s the sentiment for the mother, and the scene of the yoga where the radio line changes. Then the sequence of the Haj; I think it’s a classical sequence for Hindi films. It’s considered very pious if you send your parents on a pilgrimage; this boy unintentionally sends his father on a pilgrimage. This along with the election scene where Amitabh Bachchan hits out at the rich—it’s a sure formula here. There are 80% poor and 10% rich, right? And then the Haji Ali Shrine sequence with the name of God upon his shoulder, when he recites the lines of the Koran. These things have clicked in a big way. That’s why I’m trying to fashion Mard on that line, but I’m not getting it that way.

  The Haj reel is an immortal reel in my opinion. I’ve incorporated a Hindu item in Mard, a very beautiful reel, but it will not be in the class of this Haj sequence. This just happens, you know. It’s like a masterpiece. You don’t plan a masterpiece. It just happens. You can’t reproduce that thing again. So I’ve become very conscious of my film Coolie now. Will my film Mard have the same items? Will it have the same appeal as Coolie? Coolie is first half comedy; first three reels are emotional, comedy, comedy, comedy, then trrrrraaa…: emotion, drama, action, everything going in like this in correct portions.

  a wide angle on

  manmohan desai’s work

  kaleidoscope

  chhalia

  Very early, Desai established his own preferences as a filmmaker and, to varying degrees from film to film, left his cinematic signature on his work through recognizable recurring marks of his style. At a glance, the differences between Desai’s first film, the l960-released Chhalia and his big hits of the seventies and eighties are striking.1 Chhalia, in black and white, is a simple triangular love story with three main characters and two minor ones, quite unlike the multi-layered, complex maze of subplot within subplot that would distinguish most of Desai’s later stories. Chhalia has the look of the fifties. Drama is central. There is no farce, and comedy is reduced to passing moments. Yet a closer look at Chhalia will reveal that it bears the Manmohan Desai imprint as surely as does Coolie.

  At the heart of the film is the problem of communal conflict set against Partition and its aftermath. Shaanti (Nutan), a young Hindu woman finds herself in Pakistan where she bears her husband’s (Rehman) child. The Hindu child has been given the name Anwar and raised as a Muslim. In his dual religious allegiance, he is a forerunner of Akbar in Amar Akbar Anthony, and to a certain degree, of John Jani Janardhan in Naseeb. Anwar’s father refuses to believe that Anwar is his son. Imagining that his wife has been unfaithful during her stay in Pakistan, he casts her out as unjust
ly as Ram sent Sita on her lonely way. Desai’s reference to the epics situates him within a long tradition in popular cinema. The homeless Shaanti is befriended by Chhalia, a character played by Raj Kapoor as a continuation of Raju from Raj Kapoor’s own Shree 420 (l955).

  The error of communal bickering is driven boldly home in a powerful scene. Little Anwar, following the lead of his Hindu schoolmates, throws rocks at a passing Pathan. Then, catching a glimpse of the Pathan’s face, he realizes that his victim is none other than his ‘father,’ the Muslim who raised him during his time in Pakistan and one of the people he most cherishes in the world. He runs to Akbar Khan (Pran), throws his arms around him and cries that he will never throw rocks at anyone again.

  Another recurring, highly emotive element in Desai’s cinema is the absent mother, the lost, longed-after one. Little Anwar is separated from his mother early on and spends much of the film pining for her. He finds himself studying in a boarding school where, by chance, his real father is the teacher. During reading class one day, Anwar is called upon to read a text about a mother. The boy breaks down sobbing midway through the lesson. His father-teacher, who has so far remained cold towards the child, is touched to the point that, in spite of himself, he consoles his rejected son. Anwar’s response is similar to young Rahul’s later in Aa Gale Lag Jaa; he refuses to accept his father’s love if he cannot also have his mother’s.

  Certain Desai heroes are hopelessly romantic. Like Prem (Shashi Kapoor) in Aa Gale Lag Jaa or Dharam (Dharmendra) in Dharam-Veer, Chhalia is unabashedly in love. Yet such is his nobility and his respect for fidelity, that he unhesitatingly steps aside, yielding before his beloved’s desire to remain true to her husband, cruel though the husband may earlier have been. Religion is a constant; family is another, and the reunification of this separated family—of Anwar, his father and his mother—is essential.

  Already in Chhalia, Desai strikes a balance between his portrayal of the rich and the poor. Both husband and wife come from well-to-do families; when her future husband first calls upon Shaanti, he arrives in an expensive automobile. But later, when Chhalia gives her shelter in his humble hut, Shaanti joins the ranks of women whose lives are full of toil and devoid of luxury.

  Desai’s strengths are clear from his first film. The songs are lovely and are beautifully filmed. Ellipses create speed and a sense of magic. In the song ‘Dum dum diga diga,’ for instance, the ladder Chhalia is climbing starts to fall, but in the following shot he is comfortably seated, as if by miracle, on the shoulders of a passing man. At another point, Shaanti has prepared Chhalia’s supper and is waiting for him to eat. She timidly lowers her eyes. In the next shot, she is lifting her head, but time has passed; she is now outside praying that her husband will return. Briefly and cinematically, the conflict between her current situation and her desire to be reunited with her husband is made clear.

  If many of Desai’s qualities as a director are apparent from the beginning, what will prove to be a lasting weakness is also present in his first film. Like much or perhaps most of Hindi popular cinema, Desai’s films testify to more care having gone into individual scenes than into plot lines as a whole. The result is that one can take pleasure watching a film out of order; likewise, certain scenes can be outstanding enough to draw spectators again and again. The disadvantage is that holes often appear in the story line; some questions remain unanswered; other answers defy common sense. Shaanti, for example, inexplicably seems to forget, when she attempts suicide, that she has a son to care for. Also, as Pran, the actor who played the Pathan, pointed out, it is the Pathan who should finally bring Shaanti and her husband back together; only he can explain what happened to her in Pakistan. Instead, in the last scene, he remains in the background as Raj Kapoor, the star playing Chhalia, runs to rescue Shaanti from the toppling figure of a fiery Ravana before dramatically forcing her into her husband’s arms.

  One could compare Desai’s work to a kaleidoscope with its seemingly infinite possibilities for change within precise limits. In the toy, amazing variety in geometric form and colour is produced with bits of glass that, themselves, never change but are simply rearranged. In the same way, Indian fabrics exhibit elements of predictability in patterns and colours; yet intricate variations assure each textile design surprising individuality. So it is that from film to film Desai wove similar themes, characters and, at times, even identical lines of dialogue. As he emphasized certain motifs, refined others and elaborated upon still others, each film became distinct.

  self-plagiarism

  Desai is not the only filmmaker to have repeated himself. Alfred Hitchcock recognized and ennobled the artist’s tendency to feed off of himself. ‘Self-plagiarism,’ he said, ‘is style.’ Several of Howard Hawks’ films, too, (e.g., Only Angels Have Wings, To Have And To Have Not, and Rio Bravo), though of different genres, have similar plots, themes, interrelationships between the sexes, and often repeated bits of dialogue. Repeating oneself can be a sign of laziness, of consistency, of prudence, of the need to make a point or to exorcise a problem, or indeed, simply a matter of style. Shabana Azmi, when asked how she would classify Manmohan Desai’s films, answered, ‘The genre is a Manmohan Desai film.’ His critics, of course, used words such as ‘rehash’ to describe this repetitive tendency, which in a more positive light, could be seen as an opportunity for a second chance, an opportunity to improve. Examples of Desai’s returning to similar ideas abound in his work. In Roti Jagdeep is forced to swallow a housing deed; in Coolie Rishi Kapoor gets even more laughs when he is force-fed a newspaper. In one scene in Amar Akbar Anthony Amitabh Bachchan comes out of an Easter egg to dance at a party; in another scene, he is dressed as a priest and is playing a violin. In Mard the two ideas are joined when Amitabh Bachchan comes out of a birthday cake— violin first—dressed as Father Anthony and repeating several lines he spoke in the earlier film.

  Animals are frequently used as part of the narrative. Both the secular falcon in Dharam-Veer and the more religious falcon in Coolie have semi-magic powers that allow them to swoop down to their masters’ rescue. Dogs, cobras, horses and tigers recur. Music is also re-used, sometimes as an economy measure for the producer, sometimes to create an in-joke with the audience. First heard in Suhaag, the ‘chappal’ music is the background against which Amit (Amitabh Bachchan) repeatedly pulls off his leather sandal and poses the riddle of his shoe size as an excuse to lay into the unwary and witless characters he encounters. In Desh Premee the same music clues the audience to an oncoming confrontation between Raju (Amitabh Bachchan) and a couple of petty criminals who, listening to Raju’s polite formal speech, do not realize that blows are about to rain. In Coolie the musical warning takes a third distancing step; it would appear that this time the screen villain, too, has seen Suhaag and Desh Premee. It suffices that Iqbal (still Amitabh Bachchan) take off his sandal to the well-known tune to restore a man faking a heart attack (Om Shivpuri) to good health.

  Whenever past material is reused, the formula is generally followed only to a certain point. The repeated lines, the evocative costumes, the background music or other inside references become a succinct form of communication, little telegraphic messages sent to audiences, the equivalent of the mean-looking stranger entering the local saloon in a cowboy film or the beautiful but dangerous-looking brunette trying to entice the detective in a film noir. An interesting film noir or a good cowboy film will show the cliché but will not stop with it. The time saved through the use of the familiar is, at best, spent developing the novel or unexpected. If Desai’s detractors railed against him for repeating himself, Amitabh Bachchan’s assessment was different:

  It’s interesting seeing him going back to some of the stuff he’s already made. There’s no harm in following a given technique or a given formula. You know that what you’re seeing is totally illogical, but he has always managed to put it forward in such a convincing manner that you tend to forget logic. And so beautifully done. You can see the pains that he’s taken in puttin
g something so illogical into something which you eventually tend to believe within the course of three hours. That must surely be the work of a genius.

  kinetics

  He doesn’t like wasting time… . He wants a lot of pace in whatever he does.

  —Amitabh Bachchan, April 1987

  energy

  If the focus in certain periods and among certain directors has been on the tragedy of the human condition, e.g., as illustrated in Bimal Roy’s Devdas or in Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa, another important trend in Hindi cinema has been toward light-hearted, lively exuberance. Desai, no doubt because of his own speedy temperament, carried this tradition a step further. A fast talker, a quick mover, Manmohan Desai constructed his cinema in keeping with his own inherent impatience. As Shabana Azmi noted, when a cameraman tried to do some slow trolley work during one of his shootings, Desai immediately yelled, ‘Hey, what are you doing? This is not a Bengali film; this is a Manmohan Desai film!’ His films are not meant to be watched languidly, one’s eyes caressing the screen. Rather, many scenes are so rich in detail and so quickly paced that multiple viewings are necessary to grasp their full content.