by Connie Haham
During the making of Parvarish I realized this man has a fantastic sense of humour, an uncanny sense of humour… . So then we made this script of Amar Akbar Anthony… . And I asked Amit, ‘Could you please do this film?’ He said, ‘By all means.’ And I said, ‘I’m giving you a comic image, and the only thing is the language.’ He said, ‘What language?’ I said, ‘Look, this is the language which I’ve been used to hearing in my school… . This is the language people speak in Bombay… .’ I said, ‘You speak this line.’ And he did it so beautifully. I said, ‘Just speak the way I’m speaking it.’ And he did. And the fantastic timing he has for comedy! The whole role became hilarious.
Indeed, Amitabh Bachchan’s gift for comedy was never so consistently and rousingly summoned forth as in Desai’s films. Salim-Javed’s scripts introduced us to Amitabh as Vijay—police officer, gangster or poor-boy-turned-rich—usually in trouble with family or society or both. Circumstances are cruel both to Vijay and to Amit or Anthony or John Jani Janardhan. But we ache with Vijay. We laugh with (and at) Amit-Anthony-John. It is not by chance that in real life a little girl in a near-coma state after a fall from a second story window mysteriously called out for a certain ‘Anthony.’ When the name was decoded, Amitabh Bachchan was contacted…and the star came in person bearing flowers.
A certain vein of Hindi cinema would have us laugh at pitiful characters. Desai gave us Amitabh Bachchan who is noble enough and fearless enough that we can wish to emulate him, and who is, at the same time, simple enough and silly enough in his weaker moments that we both identify with him and laugh at him. Amitabh Bachchan’s frequent lack of dignity on screen forms a lively contrast with his real-life power and prestige. In Amitabh we have a man whose public and private images have been indelibly traced on the minds of many of his compatriots. Privately, he is known to be rich, handsome, intelligent, well educated, sensitive, from a good family. Publicly, he was the seventies’ ‘angry young man’, the avenger, a man at odds with society, a hero who rights wrong with physical might—and who must often die in turn. The incongruity of seeing such a figure making a complete fool of himself doubles our laughter. To go back to Marcel Pagnol, ‘If he must degrade himself and if he consents, his merit is even greater because he sacrifices his pride to lighten our suffering.’
As Amitabh Bachchan himself lists his favourite moments from the various Manmohan Desai films in which he worked, he as often as not mentions a highly sentimental scene like the one in Desh Premee in which, as old Master Dinanath, he is reunited in a prison cell with his long-lost leprous wife (Sharmila Tagore) only moments before she dies in his arms. Still, it was a comic scene in Amar Akbar Anthony that for both Manmohan Desai and Amitabh Bachchan, headed the list of unforgettable moments: for trying to drink and fight at the same time, Anthony has been punched up, brought down, and (temporarily) beaten out of his girl. Steadying himself in front of his mirror back home, he surveys the results of his own inanity, soundly berates himself, and then doctors his cuts and bruises by carefully applying iodine and a bandage…to the mirror! When all is said and done, the Manmohan Desai- Amitabh Bachchan association is likely to be best remembered precisely for this distinctive, highly perfected style of comedy that Desai so cleverly imagined and organized and that Amitabh Bachchan embodied and brought to life on the screen.
serious undertones
Good entertainment values account for much but not all of the success of Manmohan Desai films. Substantive issues pepper his films—individual morality, the role of family, poverty, politics, law, and patriotism. Many of these elements appear to be intended to increase emotional effect. However, if questions such as those of good and evil can rouse viewers to heightened emotional response, they can also encourage thought. Empathy, an emotion filmmakers generally seek to encourage, can flow from scenes that also involve social commentary. The suffering of innocents offers rich possibilities for audience concern. The ill not brought on by diabolical fiends is frequently wreaked by nature; flood and famine drive peasants off the land and into the city (Sachaa Jhutha, Suhaag) where they are prey to cunning confidence artists (Sachaa Jhutha, Shararat, Raampur Ka Lakshman). Behind the widespread hunger are the grain hoarders, the profiteers of misery who fabricate scarcity in order to push up prices (Roti, Chacha Bhatija). Politicians offer hollow promises of improvement in exchange for votes (Roti). Housing is precarious; a basti (slum) can be razed, its dwellers left hearthless, in order to make way for a high-rise apartment building for wealthy residents (Chacha Bhatija).
Desai’s innocent characters are victims of individual selfishness and greed, of an unjust system, of cruel elements and, often, of sadistic, even demonic violence. The attention Desai gave to the lambs among the wolves maintains a certain tradition in Indian cinema. Mehboob Khan’s Mother India (l957) and Bimal Roy’s Do Bigha Zamin (l953) are two classics centred on good, honest people who are put to harsh tests by evil men and pitiless nature, but who stand firm, resisting the temptation to sacrifice their principles. However hard their lives may be, their dignity and self-esteem remain intact and serve as rewards for these courageous souls. Desai did not rely solely on cinematic tradition for his inspiration. His understanding of the problems of simple folks also came from his own Khetwadi neighbourhood:
I stayed here. I was raised here, and up to four years back, on Sundays I used to play cricket on the lanes and bylanes here. You’re not allowed to play on the streets. But on Sunday there’s no traffic One day we were arrested. We were all put in a police van, the whole team, and taken to the police station. The inspector told me, ‘Mr. Desai what are you doing here?’
I said, ‘I was arrested with the other boys.’
The constable said, ‘Let Mr. Desai go.’
I said, ‘No, you let all the boys go, not me alone. We have committed no crime. There is no playground. That’s why we have played here. If you arrest them, you put me in, or else, free all of us.’
…I know their frustrations. I know their likes. I know their dislikes. I know what makes them beat. Small things make them happy. You see, all my characters are from the lower middle class, characters who are down-to-earth, who have seen life in the raw. If I had been born an aristocrat, I could never have made it.
For perspective, let us look at the way some of Desai’s contemporaries treated the poor on screen. One angle, generally limited to a small percentage of films from alternate cinema, has been to wallow in wretchedness, to concentrate only on society’s poorest, their pains, their hopelessness, their no-out existence. Another tendency has been to ignore the poor totally; extrapolating from such films to all of society, one could imagine India to be inhabited exclusively by the westernized well-to-do. (It must be remembered that Hollywood has often given a correspondingly false image of America.) Still another group of filmmakers have presented the poor as conniving, low-class villains out to dispossess the rich—with whom we are made to side—of their legitimate wealth. Desai is an excellent representative of other filmmakers who have woven their tales around poor, but not ignoble characters and who have included many of these people’s everyday concerns in their films. Some films in this category are dramatic, seeing the hero to his tragic death. Others—and most of Desai’s films could be catalogued here—give improbable, if not impossible, solutions to the characters’ problems. In Jack-and-the-Beanstalk-style happy endings villains are disposed of, material worries are vanquished, and blessed couples are formed. K.B. Pathak, one of Desai’s regular screenplay writers (Shararat, Raampur Ka Lakshman, Bhai Ho To Aisa, Aa Gale Lag Jaa, Roti, Dharam-Veer, Naseeb, Desh Premee), defended this approach to the dispossessed:
The atmosphere in the slums is repulsive. The art film people show it just like that. We, on the other hand, look into every hut for the good feature in this dirt. Finally, we find it. It may be a little girl nursing her sick father. Maybe she works in a mill in the day and goes to a night school in the evening. We are the real idealists. No matter whether the film is a stunt film, a socia
l, a historical or mythological, the one common feature that you will find in them is the victory of good over evil. Our hero wins single-handedly against twenty villains because he has the power of truth with him. This is the message which the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Koran and the Bible give.1
screen violence
A qualification now must be made concerning Desai’s portrayal of the innocents and their problems. Police brutality raises a moral dilemma. In Amar Akbar Anthony, Parvarish, and Desh Premee the use of torture in order to extract information is seen as normal, even valorous, inasmuch as our strong heroic police officer is doing the beating, and then only for the worthy cause of assuring the downfall of dangerous criminals. In spite of the fact that such scenes remain macho without actually becoming gory, the message conveyed is one of tacit permission to ignore basic human rights, which include freedom from torture. Desai himself had no second thoughts and no regrets about his portrayal of the prisoner-beating police officer. To his mind, such practices were both commonplace and justifiable. He was apparently immune to any concern that police brutality, with its contempt for human beings, might corrupt society as a whole. Accessorily, it is a bit mysterious that over the years the Censor Board has, it seems, not taken exception to the police officer depicted as torturer, be he hero or anti-hero, whether in Desai’s films or in those of other directors.
Media-caused or media-influenced violence, though widely studied in the U.S. and Europe, remains a subject fraught with controversy. Psychologists have never been able to prove to the satisfaction of U.S. courts, for instance, that a film can cause someone to act violently. A particularly notorious case was filed against Oliver Stone and the producers of the film Natural Born Killers (1994) for ‘product liability’ and incitation to murder after a couple of young people saw the film, dropped acid and went on a multi-state rampage. Interestingly, the case went through several levels of the court system before being struck down on the basis of First Amendment rights. A decade after the film’s release, discussions continue, particularly on the large number of websites devoted to the film.
In ‘The Trend of Violence on the Indian Screen & Its Influence on Children’ Kanti Kumar (1999) reviews the literature on screen violence and expresses personal concern over its effect in India:
If violence is glamorized, sanitized or made to seem routine, then the message is communicated that it is acceptable, perhaps even desirable… . The types of violence that affect children depends on their age, but children of all ages are at risk of learning to be aggressive when they see:
‘heroes’ winning by being violent
violence being presented in a humorous way
violence not causing pain
violence inflicted on children, adults and animals
Research conducted over the past 40 years leads to the inescapable conclusion that televised violence does affect viewers’ attitudes, values, and behaviour. In general, there seem to be three main classes of effects: aggression, desensitization, and fearfulness.2
The word ‘risk’ is important in Kumar’s discussion. Speculation is great, and much anecdotal evidence is indeed troubling. More clear-cut is the case against the film industry and the depiction of cigarette use. In ‘Bollywood Told to Stub It Out’ the BBC reported that the UN World Health Organization had studied Bombay films of the last 10 years and found that three fourths showed tobacco use and that teenagers who watched films in which stars smoked were three times more likely to try cigarettes.
It also said teenagers whose favourite star smoked on screen were 16 times more likely to have positive attitudes towards cigarettes. It is estimated that 15 million people a day watch Bollywood films, either at the cinema or on television. Many see the stars as a leading cultural influence. India now accounts for almost a third of the world’s smoking-related deaths.3
Given this data on films and tobacco, one could extrapolate and assume that other actions and attitudes on the part of film heroes and heroines, e.g., a proclivity for violence, are likewise imitated. A thoughtful, society-wide discussion of the issue of film violence could be beneficial. Interestingly, the Health Ministry reacted to the 2003 WHO smoking report by controversially introducing in May 2005 what seems to be the world’s first on-screen smoking ban. The result was an impassioned debate as the media, the public and the film industry expressed diverging opinions on the wisdom of such an initiative and tried to imagine what enforcement might imply.
self-sacrificing or self-seeking
The subject of courage is omnipresent in cinema. In a discussion about art with friends, Ike, the Woody Allen character in Manhattan (1979) mocks himself even as he promotes a position that is recurrent in the director’s films:
Talent is luck. Tsch. I think the important thing in life is courage… . Listen to this example I’m gonna give. If the four of us are walking home over a bridge and then there was a person drowning in the water, would we have the nerve, would one of us have the nerve to dive into the icy water and save the person from drowning? …Because that’s a—that’s a key question. You know, I—I, of course, can’t swim, so I never have to face it.
For all of us who have found ourselves in a crowd, observed the surrounding faces and attempted to guess who, if anyone, might come to our aid were we in need, were we, say, attacked by a mugger or should we faint, the question of courage is, indeed, ‘the important thing in life’. The next and particularly poignant question arises as to how much courage we could summon when confronted by someone else’s distress. These two basic questions—the courage of others and our own—pose challenges to us all. The quality is both rare and difficult to delineate. Shattered Glass, the 2003 film by Billy Ray, based on a true story, appears to focus on the young journalist Stephen Glass (Hayden Christensen), who is found to have fabricated half of his articles before he is dismissed from his magazine. In fact, the dishonest Glass, though flamboyant, is only of minor interest. Our hearts go out rather to his editor Charles ‘Chuck’ Lane (Peter Sarsgaard) who must grapple, painfully, with how best to exercise his own power fairly and to maintain the ethics of his profession. Had he been less courageous, he would have followed the comfortable path and ignored the situation entirely. ‘I, of course, can’t swim, so I never have to face it.’
Literature, according to our rhetoricians, must instruct people; it should tell them that ‘one should live as Rama did, and one should not live as Ravana.’ Because it is literature, the same instruction is expected from drama as well.4
Thus Adya Rangacharya describes the moral and pedagogical function of traditional Indian theatre. Indian cinema, in keeping with these injunctions, was, at its beginnings, religiously and morally based. D.G. Phalke, considered the father of Indian cinema, constructed Raja Harishchandra, his first feature film (l9l3), on an episode from the Mahabharata. Since that time, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata have not ceased, directly or indirectly to inspire filmmakers. Desai readily acknowledged the Mahabharata as his principle source and called it ‘the greatest piece of literature in the world, one hundred stories in one!’ Karna from the Mahabharata was Desai’s model:
Karna was a noble character. He was a gallant man who believed in charity. Krishna came to him dressed as a beggar to trick him into giving up the power that could help him win the war. Karna knew it was Krishna, but he gave anyway and said, ‘Never let it be said that Karna did not give.’ And that Krishna also waited to attack Karna when the wheel of Karna’s carriage was stuck. It was against the rules of valour of the day. When you talk about a god, you talk about good and perfect. Krishna is no god for me.
I wanted to make Dharam as Karna (in Dharam-Veer), but I realized that people wouldn’t like it if he were killed. I rate Karna that high in my life. When I say Billy Wilder is my god for filming and scripting, so I say Karna is my hero who I acknowledge as a master, a man who is charitable.
Charitable and also courageous. Martin Esslin in his An Anatomy of Drama (1976) says that an essential purpose of all
forms of dramatic art is to present spectators with a variety of role models and thus to prepare them for situations they have not yet confronted in real life. Desh Premee (The Patriot), despite its many moments of fun and silliness, is arguably Desai’s most serious, most message-filled film. Courage is central. Early on, when Master Dinanath (Amitabh Bachchan) sees that his school is being used as a warehouse for smuggled arms, he confronts Thakur Pratap Singh (Amjad Khan), the all-important man in the village. In exchange for silence, Thakur offers Dinanath a stack of bills which, though most tempting, would, if kept, destroy Dinanath’s vision of himself as a man of principle. Throughout the night Dinanath ponders. The medal that he won as a freedom fighter against the British is hanging in the window, swaying in the breeze. It catches the light of the moon and shines on Dinanath’s confusion, making his decision clear. Patriotism, he realizes, means not only fighting heroically in times of war but also being honest and working for the common good in times of peace. He takes his stand the following day by returning the money and exposing Thakur’s doings to the police. Far from earning congratulations, his courage brings him great suffering. In retaliation, Thakur has Dinanath’s house burned down and his wife (Sharmila Tagore) and daughter kidnapped. He is told that both have died. Homeless and penniless, his family devastated, Dinanath and his son must attempt to rebuild their lives in a dusty slum. As a freedom fighter who almost lost his life in his resistance to the British, he received respect and support for his courage and his efforts. When he uses the same moral standards and the same backbone to confront post-colonial corruption, the fickle public, often a bad judge of character, abandons him to his lonely fate. Being courageous means being prepared to accept the consequences.
At this point in his life, the patriot’s miseries are temporarily eased. Yet many years later he must face a new disappointment, the realization that his own son Raju (Amitabh) has grown into a scoundrel, involved in extortion and counterfeiting and lacking the decency even to acknowledge the woman to whom he is married (Hema Malini). The ever-present, self-sacrificing hero of Hindi films often follows his ideals— being faithful to a friend, keeping a promise, refusing tyranny—to their logical conclusion. Master Dinanath dies by stepping in front of his newly repentant son Raju and taking a bullet in his stead. The good and courageous among the older generation protect the younger generation even to death if need be. We have only a second to dwell on Dinanath’s tragic end however. His ‘Hai Ram’ is followed immediately on the sound track by a baby’s cry—Dinanath’s grandson is born, a reminder of the continuity of life. For in spite of all the tribulations that Dinanath suffers, the film does not end on a pessimistic note with the older generation’s sorrows and the younger generation’s corruption. Like Ramesh Sippy’s Shakti (l982), Desh Premee suggests hope for the future. In each film the sons repent, and the grandsons follow the paths traced by their honest grandfathers. After the young grandson proves his honesty by returning a dropped wallet, his father Raju, now reformed, hugs his son, takes him before the statue of the deceased Dinanath and proclaims, ‘Who says you are no longer in this world? Patriotism cannot die. It is immortal. Today it has been born again in this house. Look at this child.’ The uprightness of past generations is not lost. It has simply skipped a generation. In Shree 420 (l955) the Raj Kapoor character passes through the same three stages in a few short years of his own life; first an honest villager, he becomes a crooked, street-wise city man, only to regain his lost integrity as the story ends.