Manmohan Desai's Enchantment of the Mind

by Connie Haham

  Today’s chauvinistic warriors, so common in recent Hindi cinema, bear little resemblance to Master Dinanath. His last words to his son make leprosy into a metaphor for the true enemy of the country, i.e., corruption:

  Tumhaari maa to kor se mar gai, bete. Magar, magar, is bhaarat maa ko kor mat hone dena. Is ke sine par kor phailaanevale vatan faroshon ko khatam kar dena. Khatam kar dena un vatan faroshon ko.

  (Your mother died of leprosy, son, but, but don’t let our motherland become leprous. Those who would sell our country and spread this leprosy, take them from among us and be done with them.)

  If corruption threatens the nation, so too do the centrifugal forces pulling the nation apart. In Desh Premee Master Dinanath arrives delivering oil in the basti Bharat Nagar (literally, India town), clearly a symbolic name. He is met by discord, embodied by four leaders—a Bengali (Uttam Kumar), a Muslim (Parikshat Sahni), a Punjabi Sikh (Shammi Kapoor), and a South Indian (Prem Nath)—each with a separate accent, war cry, and religious symbol. All resemble one another, however, in their dishonest dealings and in their determination to gain advantage for their group at the expense of others. A heated argument erupts over who will be served oil first. Master Dinanath responds with the title song, ‘Desh premion, aapas men prem karo, desh premion’ (you who love your country, love one another), a strong message to any who threaten to rend the Indian union. Much later, having been won over by Master Dinanath’s courage, the leaders turn their aggression away from one another and toward the common good, protecting their basti from outer villainy. Yet their specificity is maintained and dignified. When they are attacked, each in turn summons strength from a different source, the Bengali from Kali Ma, the Muslim from Mecca, the South Indian from Lord Balaji, the Punjabi from Guru Nanak. Symbols of differentiation and friction are transformed into positive forces to serve in a collective effort to combat evil. Communal harmony in Desai’s films is most often associated with the three-religion theme which has its foundation in the understanding that the ‘Mother land’ of India is mother to all. Ignoring the variations that exist within Hinduism, researchers generally encompass over 80% of the Indian population under the appellation ‘Hindu’, while Muslims are thought to make up some 11% of the population, and Christians, 3%. The Sikhs, sometimes mentioned and occasionally present on screen, form an even smaller minority with only 2% of the population of the country, though their geographic concentration and historic importance increase their visibility. Polls have apparently not been taken nor statistics compiled concerning the possible positive effects of communal harmony messages in films. There are, however, opinions. A Filmfare reader from Goa, for instance, J.V. Abul Barkeeth, wrote in November 1981, ‘Communal riots take place in every part of the country. In my opinion filmmakers do a lot to prevent these riots through their films which exhibit love and affection between different communities.’

  Amitabh Bachchan voiced a similar view when he defended Hindi films precisely for their role in national integration, arguing that just as in films the hero and heroine overcome difficulties and love triumphs, in real life people should overcome caste and other differences and love should triumph. ‘Hindi films are important to national integration. All over India people see the same films and sing the same songs even though they speak different languages and have different customs,’ he said. Sociological studies on the effects on the public of such positive film messages would be most interesting. In their absence we are left with conjuncture about audience reactions to none other than Amitabh Bachchan as John Jani Janardhan singing, ‘Yeh tinon naam hain mere; Allah, Jesus, Ram hain mere.’ (These three names are mine; Allah, Jesus and Ram are mine.) A question must also be asked, a quarter of a century later, about the relative rarity of such inclusive messages coming from Bollywood today. Times have changed. The trend towards chauvinistic films is incompatible with the Hindu-Muslim bhai-bhai messages of the past. More recent films have, instead, focused on stories of tragedy resulting from love across religious boundaries. Mani Ratnam’s Bombay (1995) and Lateef Binny’s Dahek (1999) though clearly denouncing the ills wrought by narrow minds, nevertheless allow the narrow minded an opportunity to voice their intransigence towards ‘the other.’

  When Desai moralized, he remained true to a long-standing tradition, he brought the public sought-after values, and he was faithful to himself and to his own beliefs. One wonders, when Desai called Billy Wilder his god, the director from whom he learned the most valuable filmmaking lessons, to what extent Desai’s admiration was of Wilder’s form, to what extent of his content. Billy Wilder had tightly-knit stories, good editing with an intelligent use of ellipses, and a marvellous sense of comedy, all of which Desai appreciated. Yet it was perhaps, above all, as a moralizer that Wilder distinguished himself, and it was perhaps by putting his techniques into the service of his moral world view that Wilder most attracted Desai’s admiration. In The Apartment Dr. Dreyfus advises Baxter (Jack Lemmon), ‘Be a mensch, a human being.’ In The Big Carnival the newspaper editor, representing unbending values, has ‘Tell the Truth’ stitched in needlepoint above his office desk; not surprisingly, he refuses to condone Chuck’s (Kirk Douglas) unethical methods of self-advancement. In Sunset Boulevard the character played by William Holden is almost swayed from his self-destructive self-seeking by his colleague, a young woman who refuses to compromise her principles. Wilder would seem to have had enough cynicism to understand (and to make us understand) his morally flabby characters. At the same time, all of his characters have enough moral fibre to be touched by examples of integrity. In his tragedies his characters face their consciences too late. In the comedies the lesson is taken just in time. Hovering in the background would seem to be the Jewish proverb, ‘If I don’t think of myself, who will? But if I only think of myself, what good am I?’ The emotional power of Wilder’s films most often comes as his characters suffer while searching for moral courage.

  Wilder’s characters face their consciences in a more individual way. Desai’s characters are not alone; they draw the strength necessary to stand firm or to reform from the family, an immutable value. In Desh Premee, Raju’s family is at the heart of his reform. Because of his father’s noble example, because of the memory of his mother, because of his wife’s patient, faithful love, and for the sake of the son she bore him, Raju becomes the person he was always expected to be. In Bluff Master, typically, the mother reigns as the ultimate bastion against moral weakness. Ashok (Shammi Kapoor), a happy-go-lucky character, shamelessly goes about telling lies until his mother confronts him with the tangled maze he has constructed through deceit. She first screams of the need to uphold family honour, and then moving from the verbal to the physical, she beats her son, falls down unconscious herself, and awakes only at the sound of her repentant son’s sobs and his promises never to lie again.

  Families are valued, but they are not shown to be ideal. As Desai shows brother fighting against brother (Bhai Ho To Aisa, Parvarish, Dharam-Veer) or wives mistreated (Bhai Ho To Aisa, Suhaag, Coolie), we are far from the saccharine vision of family as a haven of peace. Surprisingly often, the father is shown to be a threatening figure, someone who would (unwittingly) kill his son were he not stopped in the knick of time (Dharam-Veer, Naseeb) or who would (intentionally) subvert his daughter’s happiness; in Aa Gale Lag Jaa, Preeti’s (Sharmila Tagore) father separates her, first, from the father of her child, and then from the child she must bear out of wedlock. Interestingly, Manmohan Desai saw himself in the other father in Aa Gale Lag Jaa, Prem (Shashi Kapoor), warm loving, the biological father who adopts his own son:

  Yes, it (Aa Gale Lag Jaa) should have been called Father And Son. Father and son, just like Ketan and me. You know, people cannot believe that we are father and son. We are so close. We laugh and joke together all the time.

  Alcoholism has long been seen as both cause and symptom of a family in trouble. One of the all time classic illustrations of the doom and degradation accompanying alcohol use—which in Indian cinem
a almost always supposes abuse—is in the Guru Dutt production Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam, directed by Abrar Alvi in l962. When the heroine (Meena Kumari) takes to drink, she forsakes her religious principles and becomes a slave to a force that would require superhuman power to overcome. Though alcohol is frequently present in Hindi cinema, generally associated either with villainy or with moral collapse, rarely has it appeared so regularly, so insistently, and, above all, with such increasing intensity as in Manmohan Desai’s work. Desai was a vegetarian and a non-drinker. His brother died of cirrhosis of the liver. One may assume that the song ‘Chal Mere Bhai’ in Naseeb, in which Sunny (Rishi Kapoor) pleads with his older brother (Amitabh Bachchan) to give up the bottle and come along home, gathers part of its strength from Desai’s personal situation and heartfelt concern. From the time of Amar Akbar Anthony to the filming of Coolie, alcohol is seen as ever more debilitating and addictive. Anthony’s drinking is above all an excuse for humour. Like Anthony, Amit in Suhaag is a funny drunk, but his habit prevents him from immediately implementing his decision to join the police force. Reducing his daily intake is not an option. Only total withdrawal, as painful as for any heroin addict, can make him a free man. Amitabh’s talent for doing variations on the comic drunk is probably one reason for the recurrence of the alcohol imbibing character. However, when he plays the drunk for the third time for Desai in Naseeb, John Jani Janardhan’s drinking provides laughter in only a couple of scenes; his attempts to box while drunk, on the other hand, merely elicit pity. Likewise, the liver ailment his friend Vicki (Shatrughan Sinha) suffers from is deadly serious; continued drinking, his doctor warns, will kill him. The song ‘Chal Mere Bhai’ in Naseeb blends two moods into tragi-comedy. The soft lighting and the old fashioned musical style mix a nostalgic sadness with a host of gags as Sunny begs, bullies, and then offers his drunken brother the ultimate, clinching argument: a threat to follow the brother’s example and take to the bottle himself. In Coolie alcohol offers no laughs. Sunny’s (Rishi Kapoor) health problem is even more serious than was Vicki’s in Naseeb. Only a kidney transplant will save his life. Like many sick alcoholics, Sunny ignores the warnings given by his own body, by the doctors, and by his friends. With what appears to be suicidal determination, he continues to drink beyond all pleasure, beyond all logic. Significantly, it is his father who saves Sunny’s life by donating one of his own kidneys. The (good) family—with its extension to brother-like friendship— is shown as the only solid ship that can help in weathering life’s terrible storms. The solution, however, is a bit too neat, and we are left with a troubling sense of a family racked, in fact, by issues as grave as any faced by the characters in the Mahabharata.

  Lessons of nobility, generosity, courage and self-sacrifice require counter examples. In Parvarish villain Mangal Singh (Amjad Khan) is incapable of any concern for humanity in general, limited as he is to thinking only in terms of blood. Though he has considered Kishan (Vinod Khanna) his son for years, Mangal loses all interest in him the minute he learns that it is Amit rather than Kishan, who is his true descendent. He then pleads melodramatically for Amit to join him, but when, rather than answer the call of the bond of blood, Amit follows the teachings of the Mahabharata, remains a duty-bound police officer and attempts to bring his criminal father to justice, Mangal Singh reacts with utter cynicism. As he escapes, he turns to the young man to whom he has rather hypocritically offered his love only moments before, ‘Afsos bete’ (Sorry, son); Amjad Khan’s intonation perfectly projects the mean spirit of Mangal in whom not even a sense of family can foster a spirit of self-sacrifice. Karna is generous. ‘Me’ and ‘mine’ are Mangal Singh’s only lasting values.

  exclusion

  In earlier decades, romance collided with caste barriers in films like Bombay Talkies’ Achhut Kanya (Untouchable Girl, l936) and Bimal Roy’s Sujata (l959). Certain New Wave directors, too, centred their films on problems that dalits have faced (as Ketan Mehta did in Bhavni Bhavai, 1980). Like the majority of other commercial filmmakers of his generation, Desai never mentioned caste explicitly. His films do, however, make indirect references to questions of exclusion. If one extracts the smuggler-policeman-comedy elements from Parvarish, it has at its heart a reworking of the story of Sujata. Like Sujata, Amit is not related by blood to his parents; he is from a low family, a family of outlaws. Unlike Sujata, though, he is warmly welcomed by generous parents who make no distinction between their true son and their adopted son. The scene in which the parents in Parvarish decide to keep Amit, the daaku’s (dacoit) baby, is worth observing in detail, so strikingly does it differ from the way in which, after her parents die, Sujata is permitted to stay in the high caste family’s home, hesitantly, conditionally, and at a safe distance from the mother of the family and her own blood daughter. In Parvarish Shammi Kapoor plays a police officer who has been entrusted with the dacoit’s child by its dying mother. When he arrives home, he finds his wife Asha (Indrani Mukherjee) nursing their son Kishan. He explains who the child is and expresses regret at the idea of sending the baby to an orphanage. Asha responds by suggesting they take the boy in. The police officer sighs with relief, saying that that had been his wish all along, but that he hadn’t dared to ask. The child is the son of a dacoit after all; he has criminal blood running in his veins. She answers, ‘To kyaa huaa. Insaan to hai na? Khoon kuch nahin hotaa… . Aaj is ghar se sirf vahi pyaar, vahi haq, vahi parvarish milenge jo mere Kishan ko milta hain.’ (So what? He’s a human being, isn’t he? Blood has nothing to do with it… . From now on he will have the same love, the same rights, the same care my Kishan has.) Her husband smiles broadly and responds in English, ‘Asha, I’m so proud of you, so proud of you.’ And he takes the son Asha has been nursing, places him beside the dacoit’s baby and says, ‘Aa Kishan beta, yeh le, aaj tujhe ek nayaa bhai milaa hai.’ (Come, Kishan, son, today you have a new brother.) The following shot shows the title Parvarish, i.e., ‘nurture.’

  Sujata’s parents never let her forget her lower status. She is introduced repeatedly with the painful phrase, ‘Sujata meri beti jaisi hai.’ (Sujata is like my daughter.) In Parvarish, Asha accidentally reveals to the adult Amit that he was adopted and then adds, ‘Tu meraa betaa zarur hai, lekin mainne tujhe janam nahin diyaa.’ (You are indeed my son, but I didn’t give birth to you.) Despite the differences in the two films, both Sujata and Parvarish are built on the same message, that one’s bloodline does not determine one’s character. Manmohan Desai loved Nutan as a performer and chose her for his first film Chhalia, which he made only one year after Sujata was released. One can only surmise that he was influenced by her role in Sujata. That Desai did not name untouchability per se as an issue in any of his films does not lessen the power of his message. When Stanley Kramer made Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner in 1967, the story was exclusively about race: a white girl brings home the Negro man (Sidney Poitier) she wants to marry and is astounded that her parents find this problematic. In contrast, in 1992, when Kevin Costner makes love with Whitney Houston in The Body Guard, the script makes no mention of shades of skin colouring. He’s a handsome man; she is a beautiful woman. The story is elsewhere. Similarly, Parvarish makes only a brief mention of the subject that guides the plot of Sujata. Manmohan Desai’s touch may be light, but his message carries weight.

  An even bolder and unprecedented statement against exclusion in Desh Premee has not received the praise it deserves. Leprosy, a disease that more than any other has historically been seen as punishment from God rather than as the work of a bacteria, has, it would seem, never before nor since been featured in Hindi popular cinema. Though the mother (Sharmila Tagore) is afflicted with leprosy as the result of villainy and clearly not by divine retribution, she suffers as an outcast, spending the rest of her life far from the gaze and the touch of others. When one dark, rainy night she stealthily ventures into Bharat Nagar, she is seen, and when discovered to be a leper, is stoned by the basti dwellers. Though she lives apart and considers herself unclean, her daughter, her hu
sband and her son all come in contact with her by chance 20 years after she has disappeared from their lives, and though they do not recognize her, none shrinks from her touch. The message is subtle, but powerful. If his stance in favour of communal harmony was recognized, Manmohan Desai’s other messages against exclusion went unnoticed or at least unmentioned, perhaps because his fame as an entertainer so captured the attention of the viewing public and critics alike.