Manmohan Desai's Enchantment of the Mind

by Connie Haham

  Why should I show them down, depressed. That’s what they are undergoing every day of their lives. They’re facing poverty, misery, everything. Why can’t I give them an escape hatch? My films are an escape hatch.

  Desai understood the function of his cinema. The escape he offered is rather like that provided by a carnival. At least once a year in nearly every culture throughout the world the need is felt to turn the rules inside out, to throw restraint to the wind, to offer an outlet for the tensions that build up because of the rigidities of society. People dress up, temporarily take on new identities, thumb their noses at rules and at those in power, and finally, fill their lives with colour, gaiety, and music.

  One could reasonably object to the whole notion of the escape hatch, arguing that the time and energy that goes into the making and the consuming of such mass entertainment could more profitably be used to transform society in fact rather than in fiction, that real-life problems might be solved actively and permanently rather than vicariously and temporarily. Many new cinema directors hoped to force people out of the conscience-easing denial of surrounding misery. They may have succeeded at times; at others, their best intentions backfired. A case in point is Govind Nihalani’s Ardh Satya (l983) in which a policeman turns senselessly violent, rotted by his own desire for self-preservation. Acclaimed by many as an accurate view of the police force and, more broadly, as a typical example of the corruption so rampant in society, the film reached a relatively wide audience and provoked much reaction. Judging from the letters to the editors of film magazines, however, the audiences seemed to interpret the film as a confirmation of the inevitability of corruption and violence. Viewers were apparently left with a sense of increased helplessness rather than with a will to change.

  cross-fertilization

  In spite of the chronically strained relations between art and commercial cinema in the seventies and eighties, there was nevertheless a certain amount of cross-fertilization between the two camps. Shyam Benegal and Manmohan Desai had two very different approaches to filmmaking. Benegal, a socially committed director, has often used cinema to search into reality. The endings of his films have rarely been happy. At best, they are awakenings with his characters becoming aware or perhaps taking a stand. In spite of their differences, however, Shyam Benegal and Manmohan Desai have shared common ground. Both have looked to the epics for inspiration. Both have moralized. Both have appreciated and insisted on excellent performances from actors. And both have treated some of the same themes: the cruelty of zamindars, the separation of family members, the evil of drink, the love triangle, illegitimacy, and communal relations. The similarity of themes and the difference in treatment have sometimes made their films like Alice In Wonderland looking-glass images of each other. A case in point is to be found in Benegal’s Arohan (l982) which treats only the ‘lost’ side of what in a Desai film would be a ‘lost-found’ story. Hari Mondal’s (Om Puri) brother Bolai (Noni Ganguli) is forced off the family plot of land by the local zamindar (Victor Bannerjee). Leaving behind all the members of his family and also his sweetheart (Srila Mazumdar), Bolai goes to Calcutta, resolved to make an honest living in the big city. Faced with harsh realities, he soon joins a gang and spends time in and out of jail. In the meantime, Bolai’s former girlfriend also comes to live in Calcutta. One day from a moving bus, she chances to see him walking along the road. She screams desperately from the window but fails to attract his attention. And then it is too late; the bus has rolled on leaving him far behind. Chance never brings them together again. Later, Hari Mondal too comes to Calcutta in what proves to be a fruitless search for his brother. After three weeks he returns to his village in despair, accompanied only by a profound sense of loss.

  In a Desai film, villagers who go to the city do well. They maintain their village integrity. The separation of family members is temporary; trials and hardships are passing. In Sachaa Jhutha when Belu comes to Bombay looking for her brother (Rajesh Khanna), she is almost raped and barely escapes being run over. Later, she is taken hostage by the calculating criminal who is a perfect likeness of her brother. Yet in the end, the criminal is brought to justice; brother and sister are reunited, and both find love with the promise of a happy-ever-after future.

  In Sachaa Jhutha and in Arohan Desai and Benegal present opposite sides of the same coin, the coin in this case being the disruption of relationships caused by rural exodus. In spite of the fact that Sachaa Jhutha and Desai’s other lost-found stories are far-fetched, they find favour with audiences, probably in part because real life happy endings do exist. Newspapers and magazines in India have regularly held out the carrot of possible wealth and well-being in articles on inspiring personal success stories and happy reunions that take place against all odds. Desai’s happy endings are not entirely false; they are only statistically improbable. Arohan’s sad ending probably comes closer to the experience of the majority.

  Manmohan Desai regularly criticized art films and their directors; in his films, however, there is no reference to the new cinema phenomenon. The New Wave directors, on the other hand, took their stand against commercial cinema both on screen and off. Films which attempt to reflect reality are naturally forced to show the importance of commercial cinema in people’s lives. Rabindra Dharmaraj’s Chakra (l98l), based on the novel by Jaywant Dalvi, is a memorable illustration of the connection between life and cinema. Looka (Naseeruddin Shah) has much in common with the Anthony character in Amar Akbar Anthony. Like Anthony, Looka is the ‘dada’ (the big man) of his neighbourhood. Like Anthony, too, Looka strikes fear in his less assertive neighbours. Both resort to violence to insure justice. Both have their troubles with the police. Both have a certain charm. Anthony talks Bombay street Hindi. Looka does too, but his Bombaya is heavily influenced by Hindi film diction and dialogue. ‘Jo dar gaya, samjho mar gaya,’ (Whoever is afraid will die), he says, quoting Gabbar Singh (Amjad Khan) from Sholay. Looka is the product of the cinema fantasy he has absorbed just as Anthony-Amit-Raju are inspired by real Looka types. The distinction between life and fiction is blurred as each feeds off the other. The effect is a mirror image of a mirror image. Finally though, Looka’s fate and Anthony’s diverge widely. Anthony enjoys precisely the happy ending that Looka fancies for himself. Anthony knows the pleasure of love with a beautiful, rich girl. He makes peace with the police. He is reunited with his long lost, loving family. He beats the true bad guys, proves his valour and gains a fair amount of respectability in the process. Importantly, he never looks the worse for the rough life he has led. He has his cake and eats it too. Looka, on the other hand, pays dearly for his fights, his illicit liquor dealings, and his attraction to women. Not surprisingly, he contracts syphilis and becomes a haggard shell of the man he was. Finally, he carries his violence to its logical conclusion and kills an innocent pharmacist to procure the medicine he needs but cannot afford to buy. The character who loses in Chakra is almost sure to lose sooner or later in real life. With this thought in mind, it would be interesting to know the fate of Antav, the bootlegger who once worked out of an alley opposite Manmohan Desai’s office and who inspired the Anthony character in Amar Akbar Anthony.

  Jabbar Patel’s Umbartha, a Marathi film made in l982 (entitled Subah in its Hindi version), shows women watching an outdoor projection of Amar Akbar Anthony during one of the peaceful moments in the centre where they live. With them, we watch a bit of the song ‘Humko tumse ho gaya hai pyar’. Like the women she is responsible for, Smita Patil, playing the director, is laughing and enjoying the sight of Amitabh Bachchan and Parveen Babi speeding along in a motorboat off the Bombay coast. Yet the idyllic film scene presents a harsh contrast with the daily sadness and humiliation the women face at the centre. The inclusion of the popular cinema excerpt could be interpreted negatively as a comment on the tremendous (and unwarranted?) gap between real life and films. Or again, it could be seen positively as a moment of pleasure-bringing fantasy that temporarily brightens the lives of those with little
real-life enjoyment. Certainly in post-Taliban Afghanistan cinema functions thus. Sanjeev Srivastav reporting from Kabul, on the programme ‘World Update’ in the BBC World Service radio, said that music and pleasure have returned, particularly in the form of Hindi popular cinema. Interviewees on the street commented, ‘I like the songs and dances in Hindi films. Everything is nice. Everybody in Afghanistan loves Hindi films.’10

  How not to regret the universal need for escape—in every culture and at all times? And how not to be thankful that artists, storytellers and filmmakers have known how to give us that escape? Ambivalence would seem an inevitable response. Maithili Rao’s observations are particularly pertinent:

  We bring confused perceptions to our definition of cinema. We seek magic and metaphor in these transient images of our own distorted reflections in the movie mirror… . Distortions often seem more useful to us than drab ‘realism’ because they both reveal and cloak our cultural schizophrenia. Our films enthrall and exasperate us. The enthrallment comes from the desire to see ourselves as we want to be and the exasperation arises precisely because desire outstrips achievement.11

  women

  Many thought-blurring generalizations have been made concerning the negative effects of popular Hindi cinema on the status of women in India. A closer look may not reveal the negative appraisals to be unfounded but will surely show a more nuanced portrayal of the feminine screen presence than the cliché would lead us to expect. Before turning to Desai’s women characters, it might be helpful to consider some of the more pronounced screen images of women in wider Hindi cinema.

  Among those filmmakers who have in some way distinguished themselves are those who might be dubbed ‘the patriarchs’ and who tend to see women either as demure characters with little say over their destinies or as naughty children who need reprimanding. The mother figure may be conveniently absent, or if present, may herself be highly imperfect. In Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Khubsoorat (1980) a young woman played by Rekha flirts with rebelliousness and must atone during much of the film. The mother (Dina Pathak) in the film, meanwhile, is a tyrant to whom the entire family pays strict obedience.

  A tradition of woman-centered films also exists. V. Shantaram’s Duniya Na Mane (1937) and Mehboob Khan’s Mother India (1957) focus on the hard lives of women who struggle courageously, never succumbing to hopelessness despite the tribulations life may cast their way. Like Mehboob Khan, Bimal Roy was a filmmaker from the period often referred to as popular cinema’s Golden Age. Bimal Roy confounds us, however, with films such as Sujata (1959) or Bandini (1963) in which Nutan, though front and centre and ever so beautifully lit, nevertheless projects through her dialogues the message of the long-suffering woman who glories in servility. Salim-Javed gave us macho, super-hero scripts at a time when Amitabh Bachchan was at his zenith. The result, inevitably, was less footage for women. In a series of vengeance stories, the male character captures audience attention. Yet, surprisingly, Salim-Javed screenplays—especially those made into films by Yash Chopra and Ramesh Sippy—leave room for strong women who are persons in their own right, who do not need a male for their survival, but who, through their inner force, can often tilt the male character towards a moral stance at a key moment, e.g., in Trishul (1978), Kaala Patthar (1979), Shakti (1982), and even in Sholay (1975).

  This he-man period also saw a flourishing of women as sexual bait. The vamp flouts the good-girl rules but pays for her lack of conformity, generally by being eliminated, as happens, for instance, to Helen in Chandra Barot’s Don (1978). The good girl, herself, is sometimes sacrificed to serve as a catalyst to the hero’s action, as when the main character’s sister is raped and killed in Narendra Bedi’s Adaalat (1977).

  Some New Wave filmmakers ignored the trend of the hero-oriented seventies and eighties and drew portraits of complex heroines against a background of pointed social criticism. For example, in Shyam Benegal’s Ankur (1974) our concern is poured on Shabana Azmi’s character rather than on the cowardly young zamindar played by Anant Nag.

  There are those who would add a young woman to a script as one might add a brightly coloured silk scarf to the pocket of a staid business suit, to enliven the visual effect. In T. Rama Rao’s Inquilaab (1984), to name but one example, Sridevi plays just such a frivolous, one-dimensional character. Mukul Anand’s 1991 Hum reflected the trend towards increasing violence in Hindi cinema in the eighties and early nineties. The strange result is a female lead who is a vamp, a playful sex object, a rape victim, and a good woman on a moral crusade, all woven into one confused character. Though Jumma (Kimi Katkar) is not physically raped, she is degraded by a virtual rape as she dances alone in male territory (a warehouse), surrounded by dozens of leering men who spray her violently with water during the distressingly memorable song ‘Jumma Chumma De De’.

  More recently, Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Devdas (2002) offers an array of women characters who, even as they remain bound by the strictures of the day, make their immense strength felt both through dialogue and body language. Whether it be Paro’s wronged mother (Kiron Kher), who calls down divine retribution on her haughty neighbours, Paro herself (Aishwarya Ray) whose feelings of self-worth are never in doubt, or, above all, Chandramukhi (Madhuri Dixit), shakti (feminine force) is present throughout the film. Khalid Mohamed’s Fiza (2000) offers a modern, urban, educated version of a similarly powerful heroine.

  How, one might ask, do Manmohan Desai’s screen women fit into this schematic view of women in Hindi cinema?

  the mother

  If Desai’s young heroines present a certain variety, the mother figures offer solid dependability. It is important to remember Shyam Benegal’s assessment of Manmohan Desai: ‘He takes stereotypes and turns them into archetypes.’ Many Hindi films have shown us strong central mother figures. Desai’s, however, achieve the status of irreproachable super-women who appear much too good to be true. Interestingly, for Desai it was his mother characters who were drawn from reality; the young women he dismissed as merely fictional. As evidence of the claim, Desai described the women who served as his models. Of his wife Jeevanprabha he said:

  She was very god-fearing, too god-fearing. This woman was in a class all of her own… . My characters of the mother are all like her, good, solid, noble characters, strong women. She fights for her husband. In Suhaag she fought for her husband; when Amitabh and Shashi come to rescue her, she said, ‘Leave me. Save my husband.’

  We may have had our spats, our quarrels, our differences, but if anybody said one word against me, she would tear that person apart. So maybe subconsciously I always brought mothers of that type in my films. I never put a bad mother in my films, or a bad woman.

  Actually, this is not quite true. There is a vamp in Raampur Ka Lakshman, another in Chacha Bhatija, and there are two evil stepmothers, one in Budtameez and one in Sachaa Jhutha. Desai rightly prided himself, though, on not showing women being raped, and in fact, when the villain of the story does attempt to attack the heroine, e.g., in Dharam-Veer or in Suhaag, the hero, or, more satisfyingly, the heroine herself, quickly fights the man off.

  Desai listed another, unexpected source of inspiration:

  I have seen my wife’s mother. Normally, the association of the mother- in-law is not good, but I respect my wife’s mother. I think she is one of the greatest women I have ever encountered in my life. How she brought up her seven daughters. Then my own mother…she fought like a tiger after my father died. She never made me feel I had no father, so that’s when I started respecting the mother because the mother looks after the home, looks after the kids; she gives her life for the kids. The father may not. The father goes out; he may do anything. The father will womanize, drink, he will do anything, but the mother in our country will rarely do that. That’s why the mother figures are very strong in my films, and I don’t have much respect for a father figure, maybe because I have not seen my father; I was only four when he died, so I’m not able to identify much with the image of a father.

>   Nirupa Roy (d. 2004), who appeared in Desai’s Roti, Amar Akbar Anthony, Mard, and, above all, Suhaag, was Screen Mother par excellence. In over 35 years in the cinema industry, Nirupa Roy acted in more than 250 films. Desai felt that her larger-than-life super-mother image came in part from the fact that early in her career she played in many mythologicals. An aura followed her as she moved into other roles:

  I feel she (Nirupa Roy) is one of the finest actresses that we have ever had in this country. Her image is that of a mother… . Believe me, every film where she has played the mother to Amitabh has clicked. There is a good rapport between the two because they are strong actors.

  The Nirupa-Roy screen-mother was enriched by the actress’ long experience, her professional skill and her capacity in real life to project a warmth equal to that on screen. Being in her presence, one felt blessed by her smile. Durga Khote, Indrani Mukherjee, Sharmila Tagore, Waheeda Rehman, Desai’s other screen mothers, also beautifully fleshed out these characters who were models of goodness. As Rosie Thomas explains, the Mother is someone who ‘largely defines (and usually concretely embodies) the field of good, that of the villain, the field of bad’.1

  Sudhir Kakar describes the idealized mother of Hindi cinema as a ‘paragon of maternal perfection’.2 He speaks of the child’s perception of, on the one hand, ‘an overwhelming and overpowering “too much mother”’ of early childhood, who later becomes the ‘rejecting and withholding—the “too little”— mother,’ and he analyses: ‘The content and sequence of both these fantasies parallels the developmental fate of boys in Hindu families—great indulgence of the child in infancy followed by an abrupt separation from the mother in later childhood.’3

  For Desai, then, the ‘paragon’ is real; for Kakar she is fantasy. Nirupa Roy came down in the middle, considering the screen mother to be an exaggerated reflection of reality. When a mother is so good, one naturally wants her ever close. Longing, a word for which a large body of vocabulary exists in Hindustani, has been explored and elaborated on by generations of Urdu poets and has, quite naturally been incorporated into Indian cinema-powerfully so in Mani Ratnam’s Dil Se (1998). It normally finds its source in thwarted love, whether on the physical or the metaphysical plane; the Laila-Majnu story is its most memorable illustration. Longing exists in Desai’s films, but it tends to be reserved for a son who feels the pain of separation from his mother (the pain of ‘too little mother’ that Kakar describes?). That pain can even be a driving force for a Desai hero, (significantly not for the heroines). In Coolie Iqbal has no more than a picture to remind him of his lost mother Salma (Waheeda Rehman). Like an icon, she watches over him from inside her frame year in, year out. Desai was convinced of the appeal of the missing mother. One cannot but wonder if the filmgoers do (or did?), in fact, respond to this theme as strongly as Desai believed, and if so, whether viewers could be fantasizing the horror of losing their own good mothers or could be identifying with the screen hero, either because their real-life mothers have likewise disappeared or because the women who bore them fall painfully short of the ideal. With this thought in mind, it is interesting to note that wholly fallible—but not wicked—mothers have begun to appear on screen in recent years, particularly in Shyam Benegal’s Zubeida (2001) and Khalid Mohamed’s Tehzeeb (2003).