‘It took two years to make that film. And I wrote nothing. Not one single line. I will swear by anything you want that I didn’t write a single line. I just kept listening to his rubbish every second day, and I kept saying, “Wonderful!”
‘I was making 10,000 rupees a month for saying yes to him. That was what everybody else was saying to him. This great man used to live in a very strange world. If you are a star you live in a very strange world. You manufacture a world where everyone keeps on saying yes to everything you say. If you say no, you are out of that world. And permanently. The rejection is like Jehovah’s revenge or something. They live in this world, and they lose touch with reality, with the audience, with the audience’s taste. That’s why so many films fail. And when they don’t run, there’s always a fall guy.
‘He would call me into his office apparently for a story session, and I would listen to him talking about the wonderful films he was going to make. These people, their heads are like a bubbling kettle. I would listen to him for anything from two hours to seven hours, eight hours. And this went on for two years.
The film came out. My name was on the credits. But I hadn’t written anything, I swear to you. Because there was no written script. This was what I learned: that films can be made from scraps that come out, scraps of conversation. In fact, a writer was looked down on. A film writer was supposed to talk – to be a talker of scenes, rather than a writer. So that they could get a feel of the scenes without having to read. Because reading is something nobody in the film world does. The writer is the odd man out.
‘They talk about stories. They talk about scenes. Even if you write a scene, they shoot it differently. They change while editing, while shooting. And all actors here fancy themselves to be writers. An actor may come and, if he’s got clout, he may change a line.
‘This was in 1972. I was thirty, and everybody thought I was a brilliant young man. Until the film came out. And it flopped. It didn’t run at all. And I learned another lesson: that when a film doesn’t run, invariably the writer has to take the blame.’
‘How much had been spent on the film?’
‘Close to nine million rupees. It was extraordinary. Huge houses would be erected for the village scenes. Places where even maharajas wouldn’t stay, and those houses were supposed to be village huts. The hero was an unemployed village youth. The clothes he wore in the film had been stitched at a cost of a lakh of rupees. And he would stand in those lovely clothes, and employers would tell him, “This job is not for you.” The man saying that – playing the employer, the owner of the factory – he would be an extra, earning 30 rupees a day in those days. And he would be wearing shabby clothes of his own – because you don’t have to find clothes for an extra.
‘I hated every moment of it. I hated myself for doing it.’
I said to the writer, ‘But you knew what Hindi films were like.’
‘Yes and no. I saw Hindi films, but I didn’t know how they were actually made. And they’re still being made the same way. How can it be otherwise? Nobody who made a film went to see a cinema show with the audience. In those days they would have this private viewing theatre. They never saw the film with the sweaty audience. The halls are terrible. They are advertised as air-conditioned, but the air-conditioning often doesn’t work, and it’s hot and humid and sweating and it’s packed.
‘So I took the blame, and I went away from Bombay. And I drifted around for a while, mostly in Calcutta and Bengal. I didn’t want to return to the film industry at all.
‘But it’s hard to leave the film industry. A friend wanted to make a film in Bombay. So I came back, and started up again. At that time I had the reputation of being a very good script-writer, without having written a script. Many of the things I had worked on had remained at the ideas stage, and ideas can be brilliant. Then this friend, with four disasters behind him, wanted to make a quick, cheap film. He wanted to make it just to survive – a film which we could make quickly.
‘There was a well-known actress who was a friend of the group. We thought we could cash in on her name. So we started shooting without knowing where the next day’s money was going to come from. After eight days the money ended, and the shooting stopped. We didn’t know what to do. And then – you wouldn’t believe – a man came and said he wanted to back the film. He was acting for somebody, and I actually believe we got the backing because the person for whom the man was acting liked the story of the film.
‘It was the story of a husband’s adulterous affair. In Hindi films the standard treatment of this kind of story is that at the end, after the affair, the husband cries and goes back to his wife, and she cries and takes him back. In our film, when the adulterous man came back crying to his wife, she sent him away. This was the story, and for some reason it appealed to someone and they wanted to back it.
The film was made. It ran – to our surprise, and the surprise of everybody else. At the end of the film, when the wife kicked the husband out, women would stand up and clap. This wasn’t only in Bombay; it was in some smaller cities as well.
‘We made two other films. Both were very great successes. We became quite famous, in fact. And at that point my friend wanted to cash in on the fame – he wanted to make big-budget films. Offers were coming.
‘So it was back to square one. The commercial cinema – saying yes to distributors and stars. And yet at that time we had the clout to keep on making good films.
‘So I gave up, and I left Bombay again. But there is something you should know. A film writer gets used to working with a particular director. He knows the director’s style, and the director knows the writer’s ways. It isn’t easy, after this kind of relationship, for a writer to team up with another director.
‘So after four years I came back – to team up with the same man, after he’d had another four disasters. Much bigger disasters than the four he’d had when we met and did the quickie. I’ve been here for a year now.
‘How did I manage during those four years? I starved. I did odd jobs. Ghost-writing. I became involved in projects that didn’t take shape. And here I am back. And while I was starving I got married – I thought it was just the right time.’
His silent Bengali wife, in a fresh green sari, brought out tea from the kitchen area behind the curtain – where she had been for much of the time – and she laid the tea on a little side table. Subroto was lounging on one of the beds – there was no other place for him in the room.
I asked the writer to describe the apartment where we were.
He said, ‘We are in an apartment in Mahim. It’s a rented apartment, in a standard four-storeyed Bombay block. We have one room. It’s 10 feet by 10 feet. It’s a one-roomed kitchen apartment, as they call it.’
He stood up and raised both arms – in his loose cotton tunic – and looked at the ceiling. The gesture filled the little room.
He said, ‘This is my room. This is my only room under the sun.’
The room faced west. It was full of light. The verandah was so dazzling that Subroto at one stage thought of closing the door to it.
The writer said, ‘I’m working on three films now. It’s very difficult in India to survive on one film. This time I’ve discovered that although they don’t follow a screenplay, they have more respect for it. I hope it will last.’
‘You think you’re a better writer now than you were at the beginning?’
‘When I first came I had great notions of what a film writer should be. I was wrong then. I thought that a screenplay was close to a novel or a play. I really thought it was a novel that got shaped up into a play. What I’ve realized is that a film writer has to know a lot about film technique – the limitations, for instance, and where you can do away with words totally. We write visuals – that’s what a screen writer is supposed to do. The screen writer is actually a link between all the crafts of film-making, and I’m talking of the actors as craftsmen also. Much of it is in technical shorthand – it’s much better if you write it
like that. The technicians understand the technical shorthand. They understand it emotionally. The cameraman understands not only the visual of a close-up, but also the emotion. To the layman that kind of writing might be boring – it’s like reading the blueprint of a bridge, but that blueprint is full of meaning for an engineer. A script-writer had better learn that part of the technique. Or he’s wasting his time, and other people’s time. The writer’s contribution is really to give a conceptual vision of the whole film – because the technicians can only work one shot at a time. Actually, it’s a director-writer team that makes a film.
‘So now I’ve been back for a year. The first six months were hard. People were indifferent, because I’d left the club.’
‘Looking back now at your first experience, with the actor, don’t you think that something might be said for talking a film – as he used to do?’
The writer was unforgiving. ‘That is the enemy. That complacent attitude – that is the enemy.’ He jumped a thought or two and said, ‘I think I will make money this time. I’ve got enough for the next month, from the film work I’ve been doing. At the moment I’m clearing debts.’
‘Who are the nice people in the film business?’
‘Everybody and nobody. It’s totally success-oriented. They worship success. And the success is very concrete, you see. A film opens on a Friday, and by Monday you know the fate of the film. You know the box-office figures. There’s nothing abstract about that. It’s all there in cold figures. And if the film runs, people are very nice to you.’
At the beginning he had seemed full of rage, with an irony that sometimes threatened to turn to bitterness and self-pity. But he had grown softer as he had talked. When he had talked about the nature of film writing, he had become contemplative, working through to the right words, and he had seemed then to be even at ease with himself.
I felt his attitude to the film industry might have changed.
He said, ‘I’m losing my cynicism about it.’
I said, ‘It may be because you have a new feeling for the art.’
‘People make bad films or good films. But one can’t say there is no such thing as screen-writing. There is. And one thing you do learn is that life goes on. There is no such thing as failing in life. You fail at a particular point. The joy of an artist is not to think of success or failure, but to just go on.’
I asked about his way of working.
‘We rent a hotel room for five days or seven days. And we talk out the film. Then I’m left alone, and I’m given four weeks or six weeks to write the treatment – basically, scenes without dialogue, in sequence. And then we get together for another three days. And then I’m left alone again. This time it comes out with dialogue, and it takes about two weeks.’
He then said something which made me wonder whether, in spite of what he had said about making money this time, he hadn’t with one part of himself given up ideas of succeeding again in the cinema. He said his thoughts had been turning to real writing, the writing of prose, for the printed page. And he wanted to know whether he could send me things he had written or might write.
I said my judgement would be worthless. I had given all my adult life to writing; I had thought about it every day. I wrote, and experienced, in my own way; the two things were linked. My judgements were good only for myself.
He smiled. ‘My judgements on other people’s screenplays are worthless too.’
Subroto and I left soon after. We went down the narrow, twisting concrete staircase, half-walled on one side and rubbed to shininess. We saw again through open doors the life of single rooms: the people, and the great amount of clothes that in those small spaces couldn’t be put away or stored. The smells from the rooms became stronger lower down, the grime more perceptible.
When we stepped out into the bright, dusty yard, there was a call from above, and we looked up at the writer and his wife in her green sari looking down at us from their balcony, one of the 40 balconies of the apartment block: like theatre boxes, from where we were. The sun fell on their heads and faces. Like people suddenly playful, they both smiled and gave small waves.
At the end of the dusty yard there was a tree with a circular, concrete-walled, earth platform at its foot. On this platform, against the trunk of the tree, was a small black image garlanded with marigolds, and there appeared to be a man watching over it. The image was a living deity, and it had fresh holy marks, of sandalwood paste, on its forehead. Past that, we were in the dusty street.
We began to walk to Dadar railway station. It was only a short walk, and Subroto apologized more than once for not taking a taxi. Outside the vegetable market, where the smells were high, boys were lifting wet vegetable rubbish with their bare hands into Ashok Leyland garbage-compacting trucks. Dadar station – with its high, gloomy platforms, its crowd, the echoing sound of the crowd, the stalls, the shoeshine boys and men, the twist of slow-burning rope tied to a metal pillar for people to light their cigarettes from – gave a feel of the big city: as though trains and the constant movement of people had the power, by themselves, to generate excitement.
I asked Subroto, ‘Do you think he is going to make it this time?’
‘He isn’t going to make it.’
We went over the footbridge to the platform on the other side of the rails. Everything in that footbridge was worn, without identifiable colour, years and years of dust seeming to have eroded and dulled metal and to have got into the heart of every piece of timber.
Subroto said, ‘He’s not positive.’
By that Subroto meant that the writer, in spite of what he had said about making money now, was as he had always been: he didn’t really want money or possessions. Even if, with marriage, the writer had changed, Subroto said, the writer’s old reputation was now working against him. He had been too scornful of people in the business; he had made too many enemies. There was an influential man, influential in films and in politics, the kind of two- or three-sided figure who was now appearing in Indian public life, who had wanted the writer to do a treatment of a particular story. The writer, Subroto said, had read the outline in the great man’s office and then, in a rage at having been asked to work on such rubbish, quite literally thrown the sheets of paper with the story outline in the great man’s face.
All the way back to downtown Bombay, against the metallic clatter of the big, open coaches, Subroto talked of art and design and the work he hoped to do. He lived in Bombay only as a paying guest; he didn’t think that would ever change. But his talk of his vocation and what he might do was selfless; what he had said about the unworldliness of the writer seemed to be true about him as well.
The shacks and shanties beside the railway lines went by; the dusty light turned golden. I thought of Subroto, and I thought of the writer in his apartment: such a setting for a man who talked of his craft with so full a heart and mind, such refining of his artistic experience: such a mismatch between dreams and setting. It was what had struck me on that first morning in Bombay when, on one side of the road, I had seen the long, patient line of people waiting to honour Dr Ambedkar, and, on the lamp standards on the other side of the road, the small, repeating posters for a new film, a product of the Bombay commercial cinema.
I had heard, vaguely, some years before, of the Dalit Panthers. I had got to know little of them beyond the name, which had been borrowed from the Black Panthers of the United States. It was a romantic borrowing; it encouraged the – too simple – belief that the Dalits (or scheduled castes or harijans or untouchables, to take the wounding nomenclature back through its earlier stages) were in India what black people were in the United States.
I heard now, from Charu, in our many taxi-rides up and down Bombay, of the man who had founded the Dalit Panthers. He was Namdeo Dhasal; he had a parallel reputation in Bombay as a Dalit poet. He was now about forty-seven, though he wasn’t sure of the exact year of his birth. He had been born in a village 100 miles or so inland, and he had migrated to Bombay 30 years befor
e. He had lived for a long time in the brothel area, among criminals and prostitutes. Golpitha was the name of that area, and it was the name of Namdeo’s first book of poems, written in Marathi, and published in 1974, when he might have been twenty-seven. In that same year Namdeo had founded the Dalit Panthers, and he had immediately become a man of some political standing in Bombay.
The poetry side was a surprise to me. It was surprising that, in the small spaces of Bombay, and with the crowd and frenzy, there was a living Marathi literature, with all the high social organization that such a literature implied: the existence of publishers, printers, distributors, critics, buyers. It was as surprising to me as the idea of the Maharashtrian gymnasium had been, when I had heard about it from Mr Raote.
Namdeo had not been the first Dalit to write. There had been earlier Marathi voices from the depths. But they had written in received, literary Marathi. Namdeo’s great originality was that he had written naturally, using words and expressions that Dalits and no one else used. In his first book of poems he had written, specifically, in the language of the Bombay brothel area. That had caused the sensation; he had been praised and condemned.
Charu, who was a Maharashtrian brahmin, and quite learned in Marathi writing, said there were a number of words in Namdeo’s poems that he couldn’t understand. He gave me this translation of a poem called ‘The Road to the Shrine’, from Namdeo’s first collection.
I was born when the sun became weak
And slowly became extinct
In the embrace of night.
I was born on a footpath
In a rag.
[And the ‘crude’, Dalit word used for ‘rag’ was chilbut.]
On the day I was born I was an orphan.
The one who gave me birth went to God.
I was tired of this ghost
Haunting me on the footpath.
I spent most of my life
Washing away the darkness in that sari.
India: A Million Mutinies Now Page 13