Language is leverage. Not a very original or revolutionary perception really. Our ancestors had grasped the principle two or three thousand years ago. The word for culture and tradition was sanskriti. Those who spoke Sanskrit had sanskriti. What about the rest of the folks? Well, what about them, they spoke Pali or some such dialect and ate crow. Did they have any choice in the matter?
There is only one difference between then and now. Sanskrit was the language of the gods, thirty-three million gods and of Parameshwar or Everlasting God (our great great grandfathers were certainly aware of the difference between small-time, easy-come, easy-go gods and the Big One) and of Brahmins. As go-betweens, middle-men, spiritual hustlers and keepers of our deities, Brahmins had exclusive and total rights to God. Since they coined the words and phrases, they called themselves Brahmin or the people who know Brahman or God. Dynaneshwar, the boy saint who finished his life’s work by age twenty-one and bid goodbye to the world, may have caused a few hiccups when he translated the Bhagawad Gita and wrote a commentary on it in the 13th century in a local and young language called Marathi, but that didn’t lessen our grudging respect and admiration for the learning, erudition and culture of the Brahmins. But Goan Catholics were not even Brahmins. They had not learnt the Puranas by heart nor discoursed on the Upanishads, nor had they preserved and perpetuated our culture. And yet without in any way earning it but doing what they so aptly call ‘bugger all’ they had English on their tongue. Just like that.
The fact is there is no justice on earth.
There is one other difference between the Hindus and the Catholics. Or at least there was at that time. Hindu boys and girls and their parents saw Hindi movies. Catholics wouldn’t dream of it. They went to English films. It was the kind of difference that would take Ravan and Eddie further apart than they already were.
At the end of the fifties, Ravan’s life took on a new colour and complexion. It changed the landscape of his mind and the way he viewed the world more deeply and pervasively than any revolution or traumatic experience could have.
Vivekanand met Ramakrishna Paramhansa, Mephistopheles found Faust, the Buddha sat under a pipal tree and gained enlightenment, the Virgin Mary woke from a deep sleep with an immaculate conception, Ravan saw Dil Deke Dekho.
It was Subhash Vachnani’s birthday and he was taking the entire 5.30 a.m. tae kwon do class to a movie at Broadway cinema. He would have liked Mr Billimoria to come along but Mr Billimoria was more snooty than the Catholics and would never deign to see a Hindi film. And anyway he had classes in the evening.
Ravan was no friend of Subhash’s but certain privileges accrued to all members of the tae kwon do fraternity and Subhash’s mother was not one to stint on a few balcony tickets and chocolate ice-creams and packets of popcorn because some of the boys did not belong to their social milieu or were not in Subhash’s inner circle of friends.
Dil Deke Dekho was not Ravan’s first film. At the yearly Ganapati festival, they always showed at least one film as part of the celebrations. During municipal elections, some of the candidates hired a projector and showed some ancient film on the main road after 9 p.m. The film would keep breaking off, the speakers would crackle and flutter with every treble note and sometimes the projector would pack up halfway but it was unthinkable for anyone from Mazagaon not to be there for a free show. Ravan had seen Mela with the young Dilip Kumar as the hero. He had fallen asleep during the second reel though he was deeply impressed by the villain Jeevan who spouted letters from the English alphabet as if they were full-fledged words. The cobras and other snakes in the mythological Naag Panchami had kept him awake through the movie and through the next ten nights for fear that one of them would turn up in his bed. There were a few others, but he had forgotten them.
Then came Dil Deke Dekho. No English translation will do justice to the alliteration, pacing or ellipsis of the Hindi. ‘Give your heart away’ is the closest one can get to the meaning.
Most Hindi commercial films in those days were love stories but they were sad and woebegone. And even if they weren’t tragic, their heroes and heroines were mature adults. Dil Deke Dekho was revolutionary. It was about youngsters, teenagers.
A Not So Short and Utterly Unnecessary History of Romantic Comedies in Hindi Films in the 1950s and 60s
Dil Deke Dekho started a trend that is revived every few years in Indian cinema. It was the brainchild of Subodh Mukherjee, an old pro from the world of Hindi cinema who had decided to make films under his own banner called Filmalaya. Filmalaya was meant to be a film institute, not just a production company.
Filmalaya would train young people to be actors, actresses, directors, music directors, scriptwriters, cinematographers and technicians in its own school and then give them breaks in its own films.
Dil Deke Dekho was everything Mukherjee had promised. Barring its hero and director, it featured unknowns in their late teens or early twenties.
Mukherjee was taking an enormous gamble handing the job of music director, and that too of an out and out musical, to a newcomer and he compounded the risk by giving it to a girl who was very likely the first woman music director in Hindi films.
Director Nasir Hussein and hero Shammi Kapoor were the only veterans in the film.
Let’s pause a minute here and survey the contribution of Hussein and Kapoor to Hindi cinema. Commercial Hindi cinema was rarely expected to make sense, and to its credit it never pretended to, either. Hussein made the same film over and over again. He mostly kept clear of social relevance, neo-realism and family dramas. His films were romantic comedies. He had a light touch and he kept the intermittent plot moving with music, romance and masala. The masala could be anything: suspense, smugglers, comedy, mystery, children and parents separated by the machinations of villains.
For the longest time, the music and stars in Hussein’s films played a major role in giving him hit after hit. They said he had a special feel for music. Maybe he was just lucky in the music directors he chose. But the magic was bound to pall at some time and it did. Not because the next generation of film-makers had anything new to say or said it differently. No, they just imitated him better than he could.
The one thing nobody could do was imitate his star, Shammi Kapoor. He was one of a kind, a phenomenon. He came from a family of thespians.
Shammi Kapoor was the second of three sons. His older brother, Raj Kapoor, joined his father’s theatre company, moved to films and became a matinee idol. Within a short time he established his own film production company. He was Charlie Chaplin, Frank Capra and Vittorio de Sica all rolled into one.
As a director, he had a superlative instinct for the box office. Along with his critics and audiences, he confused worthy themes and profound shallowness with social commitment and artistic cinema. He played the same character, Raju, in almost all his films. He was the eternal hobo or vagabond with a heart suppurating with emotion; a naïf and waif among the corrupt and the rapacious who brought about a change of heart even among hardened criminals and walked away with the heroine. He was the clown and the joker who made the whole world laugh while concealing his own sorrow.
Raj Kapoor rolled up the cuffs of his trousers and appropriated the mantle of Charlie Chaplin in India. It was a smart move. It effectively shut up his critics. Questioning him meant questioning the great Chaplin. His humour, if you could call it that, was elementary and jejune. Devoid of Chaplin’s powers of sharp observation, irony, and visual and verbal wit, he improved upon his shortcomings: the soft sentiment and the easy tear.
Shammi Kapoor grew up in the shadow of his flamboyantly successful older brother and joined the world of films when he was barely twenty. He was a tall, athletic man with a swashbuckling Errol Flynn moustache. Try as he might, his star wouldn’t rise and flop followed flop.
One day he took off his moustache and his career took off. Is there a nexus between the two? Who is to say, we are talking about Hindi commercial movies here. Overnight with Tumsa Nahin Dekha, Shammi became
a cult figure. Nasir Hussein and he were made for each other. Shammi rarely ventured into serious or social films. He didn’t have the sensitive or romantic good looks of his brother Raj Kapoor. He had an unfinished face as if someone had lost interest while working on its lines, bones and structure and had never got back to it. An unlikely face for romantic comedies, so Shammi Kapoor changed the nature and content of the form itself. The romantic heroes of Hindi films before him were soft, shy, tentative or intense. They were gentle and appealed to genteel, middle-class audiences, especially women. Shammi Kapoor was not just the exact opposite, he was unthinkable and inconceivable till he happened.
One of his later films was called Junglee. That’s what he was, wild and uncouth. He was not a conscious actor but he had instinctively carved out his own niche. The older generation of cinema viewers shunned him and the critics were superior and found his antics tasteless and risible. But his market was the young people, the working classes and the lower stalls. They went berserk when he appeared on the screen. Short of throwing coins and notes at him, a practice which was reserved only for nautch girl sequences, they showed their appreciation in every other way. They hollered, whistled and interspersed catcalls with raw, bawdy comments.
Cinema and not religion had become the opium of the masses after the country won independence and Shammi Kapoor gave the people of the smaller cities and towns a high that no other celluloid hero could.
Shammi seemed to suggest that it was all right to work in a restaurant or a band and not belong to the hoity toity classes. You could still make it and get the girl. What he had was a total lack of self-consciousness. He was uninhibited and utterly indifferent to making an ass of himself. He didn’t give a centipede’s shit about how absurd you thought he was. Quite the contrary. He rejoiced in the knowledge and cocked a snook at you and went on to perform even more ridiculous capers.
His clarion call was an apt and symbolic one though chosen without any conscious sense of irony. It was a ‘yaa-hooo’. It echoed in theatre halls and wherever he went. He could never sit still. He was perpetual motion and distortion. He had a putty face and his ears, nose, throat, eyes and lips seemed to be interchangeable. He was slim, boneless and made of polyurethane foam. He turned and twisted upon himself, tied himself in knots and undid them all in the same breath. He could not say a simple yes or no, much less a full sentence without going into a series of contortions, raising and wrinkling his brows, pulling a face, dropping a shoulder, running his hand over his slicked-back hair.
Shammi never needed a pretext to be outlandish but he really came into his own in song sequences and his films were strewn with them. He threw a tantrum in mid-air, he landed on his butt and thrashed his legs. He flung his head back, he yelled ‘yaa-hooo’, he rolled in the snow, he went stiff as a flamenco dancer, he sank to his knees, he dislocated and fractured his body in a dozen places. He walked mincingly, dropped in a dead faint, his narrow mouth went all over his face—all in the course of one song.
Indian critics never tire of saying that Raj Kapoor was the ultimate showman. His brother Shammi may be underrated but he was no side-show either.
When the lights went out, Ravan saw a houri, an apsara, a celestial creature in black and white of incredible beauty and vivacity. He was hard put to understand how such a rarefied and refined aesthetic experience could induce such painful tightness and tension in his groin. He would have been horrified if anyone had opined that her thick lips gave the impression that they were just a trace out of synch with the words she spoke or that the slacks she wore only helped to emphasize the magnificence of her hips. How could anybody be so gross about a creature so ethereal? His dilemma was altogether different: would Neeta, the heroine of the movie who was so mischievous, carefree and adorable, fall in love with the hero or would the villain get her? But if Neeta rocked the earth under Ravan’s feet, the hero Raju swept him off his feet at gale winds of 700 m.p.h. Raju was a musician, a singer who played the drums. He had hands that could caress the drums, turn them into flurries of rain or avalanches of intricate rhythms that rolled in, wave upon wave and dispersed as a fine mist of sound.
He was a rascal, a real badmash who could do no wrong and he had a hundred tricks up his sleeve. He was a one-man fancy dress competition and changed personalities, accents and his dress so fast that nobody, not even Neeta, realized he was the same person. He was a magician in a goatee one minute, a fat old mullah with a beard that reached to his belly and a tummy that extended a yard ahead of him, the next. He was so funny and such fun and so handsome, Ravan decided to adopt him as an older brother.
For a moment there, things looked extremely dicey and Ravan had some anxious moments. It was like this: Raju had been separated from his mother since childhood. Now the villain had convinced the mother that he was her long-lost son, Raju. It was so complicated even Ravan couldn’t always get it straight. And then by chance, imagine, what fantastic luck, the real mother and the real son were standing face to face but oh God they didn’t know it and Ravan bit his fingernails almost to the knuckles and nearly shouted, Raju, Raju that’s your mother, the real, actual, long-lost mother you’ve been pining for.
The audience including his classmates went bananas when there was a song. They knew every word and they sang every word while keeping perfect time by clapping their hands. Ravan sat back in his chair in a state of rigor mortis. They had forgotten to close his eyes and mouth before he died. He had the sensation that he was breathing the songs, swallowing mouthfuls of them. He felt them going down his throat. Both the sound and visual flow entered directly into his bloodstream and lit him up. His body had become transparent, the veins and arteries in it glowing brightly like the filament in an electric bulb. He dared not move for fear that the spell would break. There was little doubt in his mind that he was in heaven. His five senses had got together and created a sixth one that had to be divine. His whole body, every pore in it and every hair, was standing on end playing the songs. He became weightless. He lost all awareness of his body. He was no longer a medium for iridescence. He was light and joy and they were the same thing.
The next day Ravan asked his mother for two rupees to see Dil Deke Dekho.
His mother could not contain her astonishment. ‘But you saw the filim yesterday.’
‘I need to see it again. It’s important.’
‘No way. Who’s going to do your homework?’
‘If not today, how about Sunday? I’ll finish all my school work on Saturday.’ He used patience and restraint with this woman who seemed incapable of understanding the momentous nature of his request.
‘Is your father going to shell out the money so you can see the same filim again and again?’
‘How about on the first when all the customers have paid you?’ Ravan endeavoured to accommodate his mother and keep open the pathways for a mutually acceptable solution.
‘Mention that filim once more and I’m going to whack you. Why don’t you open your books instead and study? Came forty-third in the class last time and you still want to see a filim, not any filim but the same one you saw yesterday. If you are that keen on going to the cinema, come among the first ten in your next exam. I’ll take you to see the filim myself, that’s a promise.’
Ravan smiled. He felt that the hopes and expectations of human beings should be rooted, however tenuously, in reality. Stand among the first ten in class? Might as well expect him to climb Mount Everest or be Tarzan. After that day he did not broach the matter of DDD again. First he sold his books, one after another. Next, he took money from Parvati without asking or telling her. When that was used up, he considered taking money from his father’s stash at the bottom of the papad tin but decided against it. His normally inert father could fly off the handle without warning. It was best to steer clear of him. Ravan sold one of his mother’s gold earrings. If the need had arisen, he would have undone the clasp of the mangalsutra from around her neck while she slept, and pawned it. Luckily, Dil Deke Dekho was take
n off after celebrating a silver jubilee and Parvatibai’s mangalsutra stayed around her neck.
In all, Ravan saw Dil Deke Dekho seventeen times. And there was nothing Parvati could do to stop her son who had turned into a full-fledged thief overnight. She whipped him across his back, caned him and hit him with her shoes; she scratched him with her nails. She singed his calf with burning coal, almost cracked his kneecap with a rolling pin. Ravan passed out. Parvati kept him without food and water for two days. The beatings exhausted her. She felt faint and giddy. She told him regularly that he was going to be the cause of her death.
‘If you stop pounding me, you won’t die.’ Ravan ventured to tell her this a couple of times, but his counsel had unfortunate consequences.
‘Here my blood is rising and you’ve got the gall to give me advice?’ Even a truncated ailment sounded so much more dire and desperate in English. With renewed zeal she returned to her task. She fell upon him with the strength of eleven elephants. Six to box and bash him and invent new modes of pulverizing him. Three to call upon her parents, her recumbent husband, Sai Baba and any other baba and guru she could recall, upon God in all his incarnations and to scream murder until she went black and blue in the face and lost her voice. The last two to sigh and moan in a ghastly manner. Parvatibai was a tigress, no, she was the goddess who rode the tigress in her most malevolent avatar. From time to time she would call out the name of her son whom she had so recently mangled and almost mutilated. ‘Ravanya, ayyayyayyayya, just see what you’ve done to me. There’s not a bone left in my body that’s not broken and bruised. Are you listening, you wretch? Don’t you have any feelings for your poor mother?’ Again that sky-rending ayyayyayyayya. ‘Don’t just lie there, press my body.’ Shameless Ravan. He complied. He massaged, kneaded and soothed his mother’s hurting and aching body.
Ravan and Eddie Page 17