Manmohan Desai's Enchantment of the Mind

by Connie Haham

  School I hated! I detest it even now. My logic is very simple. If a father and mother are paying their school fees on time, why should the school fail a student? …I don’t agree to the exam system either. You teach, you do your job, and get lost. All that studying is going to give children big heads and underdeveloped bodies.

  A scene in Naseeb gives a witty illustration of Desai’s disdain for the grading system. Sunny (Rishi Kapoor) is twice a rogue when he threatens the headmaster (Jeevan) by saying that he will jump from the roof if the headmaster does not raise his grade to passing. First, he blackmails the teacher, ‘If I jump, I’ll die. If I die, it will be in the papers. If it’s in the papers, the school will get a bad name. If the school gets a bad name, parents won’t send their children here, and the school will have to close.’ Secondly, the threat is but pretence. Sunny has a rope carefully tied around his waist to prevent even an accidental fall. It is significant, too, that when the girls arrive from the neighbouring school, the boys scurry away, leaving Sunny to argue his case alone. Chasing girls is not only more important than schoolwork; it is also more important than Sunny’s ‘life-and-death’ spectacle.

  Manmohan Desai put his own pranks on screen so that we who have joined the serious world of adults might go back to childhood for a short time during his films. His playfulness was rooted in his lively imagination, the positive side of the illogic with which his name was almost synonymous. Children are thrilled by the outlandish: ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if the sky were green and trees were blue, if snow were hot, and if we had two mouths, one for eating and one for talking so that we could do both at the same time?’ It is as though Desai played the ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if?’ game on screen. As he gave implausible or impossible situations, he awakened our imaginative, un-staid selves, the part in each of us that knows how to enjoy, the same part, in fact, that is open enough to consider the world with fresh eyes, to learn, and to be creative. Desai gave us provocative possibilities: suppose someone could learn to read lips and could then use a telescope to decipher the plans of a group of evil doers talking in a building across the street (Naseeb); suppose a villain could immobilize an entire gathering of police by serving a hypnotic drink that would turn each person into a statue momentarily (Sachaa Jhutha); suppose a pet falcon could break an arrow in mid-flight in order to protect its master (Dharam-Veer).

  The structural basis of each of Desai’s films is the result of a game of wild hypotheses. Games, though, are also present in a more prosaic forms in many of the films. Desai never put his own favorite game, cricket, on screen. (One wishes he could have lived to see Ashutosh Gowariker’s 2001 cricket-centered film Lagaan.) Desai, nevertheless, regularly filmed other forms of play. From the beginning, this inclination was clear. In Chhalia during the main song sequence, ‘Chhalia Mera Naam,’ Raj Kapoor takes a little spin around the bazaar on a child’s push scooter. In Naseeb young men and women play ‘hu-tu-tu-tu’ as a choreographed song and dance. And an imaginative game of musical chairs was one of Desai’s favourite scenes from Aa Gale Lag Jaa.

  ‘Let’s pretend’ is repeatedly played with dress-up added to enliven the game. Dharam in Dharam-Veer dresses as a jyotishi, an astrologer, to convince the hesitant princess that her kiss is needed to bring the supposedly dead Dharam back to life. The dress-up found throughout Desai’s cinema is especially delectable to the children in the audience. First, the surprise element of an apparently new character on screen awakes us. Then comes the job of recognition, a process which for adults may take only a split second, but which may last several seconds, even minutes, for children. Finally, there is the expansion of identification. Children play dress-up in order to try on different identities. Through disguise, the screen characters split and multiply, providing spectators with an abundance of personae to respond to. There is an expansion, too, of wishful thinking. Wouldn’t it be nice if in real life one could trick the bad guys through costume and play-acting? Life is indeed a stage, but not always the bard’s tragic sort. Rather, it can be full of fun and delight and a child’s sense of discovery. To give us this sort of experience, Desai had to appreciate pleasure; he then had to toil to bring it to the screen.

  comedy

  There’s a lot to be said for making people laugh.

  —Gerald Mast1

  Aclue to Manmohan Desai’s ability to make his audiences laugh might be found in his vivacious, yet rather anxious nature. Asked whether he saw his films with audiences, he revealingly replied:

  No, no, I’m petrified. I’m petrified because if anyone gets up to go to the loo, I feel he’s doing it intentionally. And then I might pick a brawl. I almost did. Can you believe that when Amar Akbar Anthony was running the 70th week in the Opera House, I used to go to see songs? But anybody who’d get up, well…I called one man and said, ‘Why are you getting up?’ He said, ‘I’m going to the bathroom.’ I said, ‘Don’t go to the bathroom in my song!!! You want to make loo, you do it here. Don’t go to the bathroom!’ He said, ‘But I want to go to the bathroom!’ So then the manager said, ‘Look, Mr. Desai, you can’t do that. You see, they’ve paid money.’ And I cooled down, and I realized I better not go to theatres. I’ll sit at home and hear the reviews. Since then, I’ve never seen any of my films in the auditorium. I won’t see them. I get damned scared if anyone gets up.

  Like many people with a comic gift, Desai was not a light-hearted, easy-going person. And if he recognized his flair for music, he could be somewhat dismissive in describing the humour in his films. ‘Gags,’ he called them, ‘nonsense.’ He certainly did not see himself as a maker of comedies. Amitabh Bachchan agreed, ‘You wouldn’t put Amar Akbar Anthony into the comic cadre. It was a complete film. It had shades of almost everything.’ Yet if one defines comedy as ‘the comic element,’ and if one remembers that the cream of the comic genre are films structured to keep the audience passing in and out of various emotions, then Desai would deserve to be remembered as the ‘King of comedy,’ for no other Hindi film director has regularly matched his wit.

  Comedy gives us immediate pleasure. We are caught in the moment. Our laughter is spontaneous and instantaneous. We find ourselves in the situation of a two-year old crossing a colourful field. An adult would, above all, be interested in arriving at the road beyond. A small child, on the other hand, is concerned with the step-by-step process of walking and the pleasure of seeing along the way. A truly frivolous, superficial comedy is nothing more than a passing moment, a genial jaunt across a field, but one that leaves no memory. A comedy with substance, offers the instant delight of watching and the pleasure of having watched, as bits of food for thought—often tucked almost out of sight—continue to nourish us long after the theatre lights go out.

  Manmohan Desai’s films could never be considered profound; yet neither could they be dismissed as merely transitory, agreeable moments. At the beginning of Dharam-Veer, wickedness is on the loose. The plotting brother (Jeevan) of the queen (Indrani Mukherjee) would win power and save himself at the expense of his sister’s happiness, even her life. Though neither the Mahabharata nor Manmohan Desai would use the term ‘dysfunctional family’, we find ourselves plunged into such resulting dark feelings—the makings of a tragedy—with Fate playing a major role. Yet the mood that reigns in Dharam-Veer, as in the majority of Desai’s films, is light and funny. The heavier moments lend a fullness and depth to the canvas on which comedy is painted brightly in the foreground. The effectiveness of comedy in the film comes precisely from the interweaving of the serious and the nonsensical. Early in Dharam-Veer the evil character played by Jeevan hurls his sister’s newborn baby from a high castle window into the void below, to certain death… . Yet out of nowhere a magic falcon appears and snatches the falling bundle from its doom. And the audience laughs! We laugh in surprise at the unexpected twist; we laugh, too, to realize we have entered into a realm beyond logic where fear is only a passing emotion. Desai explained his philosophy thus:

  There are a lot of problems on
this earth, like where the next meal is coming from, but the man who spends even four rupees to see a movie has every right to my esteem… . The person who comes to the movies should be happy to see whatever he’s seeing.

  the nobility of laughter

  Desai was not alone as he manned the barricades in defence of the pleasure principle. The 1982 award-winning comedy Tootsie is based on similar reasoning. Actor Michael Dorsey (Dustin Hoffman) wants to raise the money necessary to put on his roommate’s deep and meaningful play, The Return of the Love Canal. His agent (played by the director Sidney Pollack) tries to make Michael see financial reality, ‘Nobody is going to do that play.’

  ‘Why?’ Michael asks.

  ‘Because it’s a downer; that’s why. Because nobody wants to produce a play about a couple that move back to Love Canal.’

  ‘But that actually happened!’ Michael insists indignantly.

  ‘Who gives a shit! Nobody wants to pay $20 to watch people living next to chemical wastes. They can see that in New Jersey!’

  We also feel the jab at naturalistic, profound, arty theatre as we watch the writer and future director (Bill Murray) of Return of the Love Canal pontificating self-righteously, ‘I don’t want a full house… I want 90 people who just came in out of the worst rainstorm in the city’s history. These are people who are alive on the planet until they dry off.’ His pretentiousness is nauseating. We the audience of Tootsie, of course, never see the heavy and sobering Return of the Love Canal. We simply see a brilliant comedy.

  Looking back in time, a comparison could be made between Desai’s comic entertainment and that of Hollywood during the 1930s. With the Depression at its deepest and 25% of the U.S. working population unemployed, America was enthralled by musicals and screwball comedies. Fred Astaire danced in coat and tails; Ernst Lubitsch gave us unlikely romances between rich, continental sophisticates (Ninotchka, released in 1939, to name but one). Howard Hawks had Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant chasing about after a millionaire widow’s pet leopard in the ultimate screwball comedy, Bringing Up Baby(1937). America had a sobering reality to escape from and Hollywood offered joy-inducing fantasy to escape to. Such cinema is obviously not on the cutting edge of social reform; yet it is in its own way lasting. In the 1970s, the decade when cinema appreciation was at its height, it was in art theatres that a new generation found an opportunity to jubilate over the quality-made nonsense of Hollywood in its heyday.

  Tagore’s proverb, ‘God respects me when I work, but he loves me when I sing,’ could be applied to our perception of movies. ‘Serious’ films, i.e., drama and tragedy, by their very nature, tend to be held in regard. Comedies, though often loved, are rarely respected. Comedy is often distinguished from drama not so much in the material and themes treated as in the distancing effect offered to the audience. A solemn film might treat the same lost-and-found family traumas that Desai’s films are noted for. Yet with calculated regularity, Desai seriously involved us with a character’s dilemmas only to have us stand back a moment later and laugh. In Parvarish Inspector Amit (Amitabh Bachchan) has finally cornered the smuggler who has been eluding him for months. In a darkened hotel the end of the chase is near; Amit shoots the offender in the leg. During the man’s resulting temporary paralysis, a light falls upon his face, and Amit realizes that the long-pursued criminal is none other than his own brother Kishan (Vinod Khanna). The cliché would have been a lightning bolt to indicate the emotional blow Amit receives upon learning the truth. Instead, we join Amit for a moment in his horror and agonize with the tracked and desperate Kishan. Then, in the midst of this intense scene we are visually whisked away, outside the hotel, outside the story and inside the director’s visual language joke: above the roof a neon sign is flashing ‘Bhai-Bhai (brothers) Hotel.’ Audience identification cannot continue. The heavy mood is broken. The director pulls the viewers to his side to laugh along with him at his story that, he reminds us, is after all only a story. Desai’s ‘in’ jokes are like a director’s winks at the spectators.

  Double meanings, sight gags, pratfalls, mockery, twists, and satire are but a few of the tools in Desai’s comic bag. Parody is another. One of Desai’s favourite scenes in Amar Akbar Anthony was the confrontation between Amar (Vinod Khanna) and Anthony (Amitabh Bachchan) in Anthonywadi. Pyarelal’s musical score offers a brilliant pastiche. As the two he-men stand threateningly face-to-face in the open air at mid-day, drums roll, like the call to war on an 18th-century European battlefield. Next comes the Mexican-style trumpet followed by the guitar in a perfect evocation of Morricone’s famous spaghetti western music. Amar begins the fight with a judo flip that sends Anthony sprawling behind him and the Italian western notes immediately give way to shades of the Far East, bringing to mind Bruce Lee and his fellow martial arts experts. Amitabh Bachchan clowns his way through the scene, playing off straight man Vinod Khanna who remains true to the tough, macho image of the fight films— as well as maintaining his elder brother status. The music adds an extra, nonsensical dimension to Amitabh’s clowning; as we hook in to the two literally deadly genres evoked, the contrast between their seriousness and Amitabh’s lack of it gels in our minds into something absurdly incongruous, the essence of parody.

  the comic actors

  — Those who create laughter on the stage or on the screen do not stoop. Quite the contrary. Bringing laughter into the hearts of those who return from the fields, their hands too calloused to close, those who leave their offices bent-shouldered, having forgotten the pleasure of breathing, those who come back from the factories hanging their heads, their nails broken, the cracked skin of their fingers black with oil; to make those laugh who have lost their mother or who will lose her…

  — And who are they?

  — Everyone. Those who have not lost their mother will lose her one day. He who for one minute causes them to forget little hardships, fatigue, worry, and death—he who brings laughter to people with so many reasons to cry, gives them the strength to live, and they love him as a benefactor.

  — Even if to make them laugh he degrades himself before them??

  — But if he must degrade himself and if he consents, his merit is even greater because he sacrifices his pride to lighten our suffering. We should say that to Molière. We could say that to Charlie Chaplin.2

  Thus in his 1937 film The Schpountz, writer-director Marcel Pagnol has Françoise (Orane Demazis) convince the hesitant Iréné (Fernandel) of the worthiness of playing the clown. If the comic is a noble character according to Pagnol, the laughter the comic elicits is equally estimable: ‘Laughter is God-given and belongs only to human beings, perhaps to console them for being intelligent.’

  Shammi Kapoor acted in four Manmohan Desai-directed films, Bluff Master, Budtameez, Parvarish, and Desh Premee. In the sixties, before becoming the ‘older man,’ Shammi Kapoor was a much-in-demand hero. The high point in his career, however, corresponded with Manmohan Desai’s low. It was between the time of Bluff Master in 1962 and Budtameez in 1966, both starring Shammi Kapoor, that Desai waited in vain for a producer to knock at his door. It is interesting to speculate what the cinematic results might have been if both Shammi Kapoor and Manmohan Desai had hit their peaks simultaneously, and Shammi Kapoor had starred not in two, but in four or five Desai films. Given their evident compatibility, such a series would no doubt have been memorable. Shammi Kapoor himself looks upon Bluff Master as the best Desai-directed film in which he has acted. But in Budtameez, too, he is extraordinary, his style of clowning fitting perfectly into Desai’s circus-like entertainment.

  An actor brings his whole being to his work. How expressive a face and voice, how finely tuned a body, how bright a mind and how much of an inner spark he has are measures of an actor’s capacity. As a star, Shammi Kapoor possessed all of these. With a contagious vitality, he literally threw himself into his roles, displaying openness, generosity, and gay abandon. At the summit of his popularity he was capable of a surprising variety of entertaining, if not subtl
e, facial and body movements, including a Groucho Marx-style duck walk! His size and shape, even at that time, led one to expect awkwardness. And, occasionally, he did stumble about. But soon afterwards this same man was showing grace, ease and a wonderful sense of rhythm.

  Shammi Kapoor, the star, had a gift for comedy that Shammi Kapoor, the character actor, has not lost. Asked to remember his best acting moment from Parvarish, Shammi Kapoor and his wife in real life gave their best marks to a comic scene: playing a police inspector, he lectures his wife (Indrani Mukherjee) and two grown sons on the importance of taking precautions against pickpockets. He scolds them from the lofty perch of his own smug self-assurance. How could they have been so foolish as to lose their belongings to two young women?! But pride, we know, goeth before the fall. When he checks his pocket and finds that he has no watch at the end of his chain, he realizes that he too has been duped. His eyes grow wide, and we can almost imagine him as a Tex Avery cartoon character on whose forehead the word ‘chump’ blinks in green and red neon.

  Amitabh Bachchan was Manmohan Desai’s other special comic star. The director recognized the actor’s potential early on: