Written by Salim-Javed: The Story of Hindi Cinema’s Greatest Screenwriters

by Diptakirti Chaudhuri

  This was a major emotional setback for the duo because their confident—bordering on brash—attitude and their impatience with the established Holy Cows of the industry had made them a fair number of enemies. In an industry where heroes are made or unmade every Friday, this was a dicey position to be in because people were waiting to pull them down.

  This angst was visible in a very curious ad Salim–Javed took out the day Immaan Dharam released. The full-page ad had just one line: ‘Immaan Dharam is the answer for all criticism’ and it carried a small footnote: ‘Issued by Salim–Javed, Bandstand, Bandra’. This was their trademark show of confidence, cocking a snook at their rivals. The dismal performance of Immaan Dharam in the wake of this smug ad must have made Salim–Javed’s disappointment even more unbearable. Salim Khan says, ‘We were very proud and confident of our work in Immaan Dharam, which is why we announced it with much fanfare with the ad in Screen. But it did not run as per our expectations.’

  Salim–Javed’s story was far from over, though. Their next release was with a director who was finding his mettle with multi-starrers and zany comedies. And after the intensity of Zanjeer, Majboor, Deewaar and Sholay, Salim–Javed finally got a chance to show their funny side, last seen in Seeta Aur Geeta. This film too was another double-barrelled title: Chacha Bhatija.

  Chacha Bhatija

  In many ways, 1973 was the turning point for Salim–Javed, Amitabh Bachchan and their partnership. The release and subsequent success of Zanjeer—their first film together—convinced Salim–Javed that this lanky, intense actor was the right person for their films, which depended more on anger and action than romance and music. This was also the year when they recommended Amitabh for Sholay and unknowingly laid the groundwork for another superhit partnership.

  The Sholay script bounced around between the Sippys, Manmohan Desai and Prakash Mehra. When Manmohan Desai (and his producer Baldev Pushkarna) refused the script, Salim–Javed sold them the concept of Chacha Bhatija. They were writing the film in Juhu’s famous Sun ’n’ Sand Hotel and during one of the sessions, they praised Amitabh a lot and called him over to introduce him to Manmohan Desai. Apparently, the director was quite aloof during the meeting and Amitabh felt awkward, so he left quickly. After he left, Desai is said to have even made a slightly derogatory comment about the actor. Salim–Javed predicted that, one day, the director would be compelled to work with the talented actor. In fact, Manmohan Desai’s first production—Amar Akbar Anthony—released a month after Chacha Bhatija. And the bond between the producer–director and the actor became so strong in such a short span of time that during the shooting of Amar Akbar Anthony, Manmohan Desai promised Amitabh Bachchan that he would never make a film without the star.

  Returning to Chacha Bhatija, the story of the film is credited to Prayag Raj, long-term associate of Manmohan Desai, while Salim–Javed got the credit for the screenplay and dialogues. In the sentimental world of Hindi cinema, one is never sure who is credited for what exactly and there are several instances of relatives, close friends and associates being credited for what is actually very little work. Given Salim–Javed’s stature at the time and the possessiveness they displayed over credit, it is unlikely that Prayag Raj was just a passenger on this one. He most likely came up with yet another lost-and-found story, one that was neither about brothers nor about fathers and sons; it was about an uncle and a nephew.

  Seth Ranbir Singh Teja (Rehman) lives happily with wife Seeta (Indrani Mukherjee) and younger brother Shankar. This idyll is disrupted when his manager, Laxmidas (Jeevan), and the manager’s cousin, Sonia (Sonia Sahni), cause a massive misunderstanding. Teja throws his wife out of his home, unaware that she is pregnant. Shankar, who is very devoted to his sister-in-law, also runs away from home. Seeta tries to commit suicide but is saved by a good Samaritan, Gul Khan (Anwar Hussain); Shankar is given shelter by a Christian woman (Durga Khote). Seeta gives birth to a son while Teja marries Sonia, who is already pregnant from a previous affair but manages to convince Teja that the child is his.

  A grown-up Shankar (Dharmendra) turns out to be a black marketeer but reforms to become a taxi driver. Seeta’s son Sundar (Randhir Kapoor) is offered a job by Teja, who meets him at a friend’s party. Sundar joins Teja’s company in Bombay and meets Shankar. Their initial admiration for each other turns into hostility when Teja’s company tries to take over Shankar’s slum. When they are each other’s throats, Seeta reveals their identities and they join hands to expose the villains around Teja. Shankar and Sundar enter the household as servants. Their plans are thwarted when Laxmidas learns of their ruse and kidnaps Seeta. In a climax involving horses on multi-storeyed buildings, they manage to rescue Seeta, save Teja’s property from the villains and reunite the extended family.

  The script played the two stars—Randhir Kapoor and Dharmendra—well against each other, something that had become the writers’ forte. In a review of Amar Akbar Anthony, Hindustan Times gave Salim–Javed the credit for ‘popularizing’ double-hero films. ‘The time when a Bombay film could draw crowds with one hero and one heroine is long past. Even the pairing of two heroes and two heroines, popularised by Salim–Javed, seems to be on the wane.’

  Chacha Bhatija opened very strongly and an advertisement (about four weeks after its release) called it ‘The glorious victory march of the biggest box-office hit of 1977’—though that record was broken by the director’s next film.

  With three of his films—Amar Akbar Anthony, Dharam Veer and Parvarish—featuring among the top four of the year, 1977 proved to be a golden year for Manmohan Desai. Chacha Bhatija was a relatively lesser success but still seventh in the list of top grossers of the year. All four films were essentially lost-and-found sagas, with only Parvarish deviating slightly from the formula of a family breaking up in the first reel and reuniting in the last.

  Chacha Bhatija’s reviews were lukewarm (as was probably expected) but Hindustan Times’ reviewer K.M. Amladi assigned credit for the lost-and-found formula to the writers, though in a backhanded manner: ‘The scriptwriting team of Salim–Javed is the hottest thing going in Bombay film industry nowadays and, it is said, producers pay through their nose to sign them for their pictures. The secret of their success can be summed up in two words: Lost . . . Found. Their plot structures seem nothing more than a strident variation on these two—the long storyline littered with the strangest of coincidences. Not that the other screenwriters don’t indulge in this but what makes Salim–Javed click is the apparent ease with which they construct characters as parts of some jigsaw puzzle, the life-pattern neatly fitting in the end.’

  The lost-and-found formula—which Manmohan Desai became synonymous with—was Salim–Javed’s forte, with films like Seeta Aur Geeta, Yaadon Ki Baaraat and Haath Ki Safai to their credit before they wrote Chacha Bhatija. However, they were not the originators of the formula; both Yash Chopra, who made the ultra-glamorous Waqt, and Manmohan Desai, who made Rampur Ka Lakshman, had most effectively orchestrated the separation and unification of the characters in their films.

  Chacha Bhatija is a case study of scenes with estranged family members meeting multiple times—without knowing their true relationship—and making loaded statements! When Sundar and Shankar clash, the nephew threatens the uncle with an angry reference to their blood ties: ‘Itna yaad rakhna, agli baar mile to bataa doonga ki in ragon mein utna hi garam khoon daud raha hai jitna tumhare ragon mein.’xxvii Shankar and his taxi are just in time to receive Sundar at the station but he just misses Seeta, his sister-in-law (and Sundar’s mother), when she arrives there. When Seth Teja defends Sundar, his second wife retorts, ‘Tarafdari to aap aise kar rahe hain ki Kiran nahin, Sundar aapka beta ho.’xix This goes on and even the climax—the way in which the various strands unravel—is quite complex and, dare I say, intelligent, unlike the facile resolution in Desai’s later films. This did not necessarily make the film more successful, for sure, but it showed Salim–Javed’s natural penchant for adding a spot of intelligence
in ‘ghisa-pita’ stories. Add to that their overt socialist messaging—where Shankar gives up his illegal business and takes up arms against hoarders—and you have a significantly different treatment.

  However, one major complaint against Chacha Bhatija is the regressive treatment of women and the promotion of outdated ideas. This is quite a departure from Salim–Javed’s sensitive handling of strong, modern female characters. The film depicted a clearly subservient role for women, in which the characters yearned for male children and even rejected the idea of adoption outright—traits that seem way out of sync with Salim–Javed’s mature sensibilities.

  In the Times of India, columnist Haimanti Banerjee compared Chacha Bhatija, Dharam Veer and Amar Akbar Anthony and found these films to be similar in many ways. ‘Going by the rules of the game prescribed by Mr Desai, whatever is old and dated, must win . . . Are the masses entertained by something which critically analyses existing values, and, in the process, evolves more progressive and dynamic ones? Or are they entertained by the confirmation of traditional norms and notions, so that they are spared the embarrassing realisation of having held on to outmoded, and therefore, regressive values? Going by the sustained and thunderous success of Mr Desai’s trilogy, the obvious answer is that the people, both the elite and the illiterate, have unanimously voted for the second proposition . . . Mr Desai proposes to resolve the inevitable and healthy dialectics between tradition and modernity by clinging to the former, at the cost of the latter.’

  While the columnist put the blame at Manmohan Desai’s door, it’s actually Salim–Javed who ought to take on most of it. After all, they were the star writers, who prided themselves on bound scripts that remain unchanged throughout the shooting.

  Chacha Bhatija can, however, be considered an aberration because their next film had a female character quite unparalleled in Hindi cinema till then. Her modernity, her strength and her fierce independence would stand out in a film known for its three heroes. As would the film itself: Trishul.

  Trishul

  After the monumental success of Deewaar, which was still running three years after its release, the same producer-writer-director combination came up with Trishul. Promoted as the Three Faces of Man, it brought together the two male stars of Deewaar along with Sanjeev Kumar. Originally, Sanjeev Kumar’s part was written for Dilip Kumar but Sanjeev’s performance in the film ensured that audiences did not miss the thespian even a little bit.

  Trishul was the first film Salim–Javed wrote keeping Amitabh Bachchan specifically in mind, given the actor’s growing marketability and the producers’ confidence in him. He was part of the script-narration sessions right from the beginning.

  This was Salim–Javed’s thirteenth film and it was also the first time they revised a script. Writer–director Sriram Raghavan says, ‘They were not writing the scripts the way we do drafts. They got it down pat in one go . . . It is amazing that the first time they wrote a second draft for a film was Trishul, which was much later in their careers.’

  The fact is quite stupendous in itself and a testimony to their genius in delineating a story completely right from the beginning—and their ability to defend their scripts!

  Post the success of Deewaar and Kabhi Kabhie, Yash Chopra was a far more confident director and shot the film in one schedule in Delhi. He wanted to take the cast away from the distractions in Bombay, and help them get into the characters better. It was a fantastic experience and everyone enjoyed every moment of the shoot in Delhi. Amitabh Bachchan remembers, ‘Yashji was so activated during the shooting of Trishul that he would keep punching and pummelling the air; he was a threat to the lives of his assistants and cameraman!’

  Though the first shooting schedule was wonderful for the actors, the results were not as great. When the core team came out of Rajkamal Studios after seeing the first rushes of Trishul, they were very disappointed. The four of them—Yash Chopra, Gulshan Rai, Salim and Javed—were absolutely quiet on the drive back. At last, Gulshan Rai asked, ‘Salim sahib, is there any way to salvage this film?’ Salim replied with his typical dark humour, ‘One way is not to release it at all.’ Gulshan Rai was most depressed and called Yash Chopra later that night to complain about the writers’ almost cold-blooded indifference. Yash Chopra, who was familiar with Salim–Javed’s cocky faÇade, assured the producer that the writers were extremely concerned about the film as their reputations also hinged on it.

  Yash Chopra met with Salim–Javed at the Holiday Inn hotel the very next day and identified different points in the film that needed to be improved. They calculated that the portions would take about fifteen days to reshoot. This was about one-third of the time they had taken to shoot the film already and they felt it would be too much for the producer to digest. Therefore they decided to tell Gulshan Rai in instalments of five days to reduce the overall shock. After the first five days, they would say ‘just a wee bit more’ and shoot for five more days and then shoot for the final five. Salim Khan laughingly remembers, ‘We decided to give him the news in instalments in the same way he used to pay us in instalments.’

  The ambulance scenes were inserted in this rewrite and gave the frontbenchers some ‘taali-seeti’ moments. The rewrite resulted in a much stronger film and the pre-release buzz was very good. The film was launched with a series of ads in trade magazines and as had become the norm by now, Salim–Javed’s names were listed right after the director’s.

  In the film, R.K. Gupta (Sanjeev Kumar) is an ambitious executive in a construction firm, who is in love with Shanti (Waheeda Rehman). But when the firm’s owner offers his daughter’s hand in marriage to R.K. Gupta along with a partnership in the firm, he falls for it and abandons Shanti, despite knowing she is pregnant with his child. Shanti leaves town and gives birth to a boy, Vijay. When he grows up, Vijay (Amitabh Bachchan) comes to Delhi after Shanti’s death to exact revenge on his father. R.K. Gupta is now a construction tycoon running his business along with his son, Ravi (Shashi Kapoor). Vijay starts his business off with the impossible task of recovering a piece of land that R.K. Gupta owns but has been encroached upon by a goon. After that, Vijay uses fair and foul means to take away contracts from his father’s company. He is soon a tycoon in his own right and continues to make R.K. Gupta’s life hell. When a major construction project comes up, R.K. Gupta bets his entire life’s savings to build it but Vijay starts another project that could potentially ruin both of them. Vijay comes to R.K. Gupta and announces their relationship, offering to save him from financial doom, but R.K. Gupta has already hired a contract killer to eliminate Vijay. In the climax, the father manages to save the son but is killed himself. The film ends with the two business families uniting.

  This was probably the first Hindi film to be set in a corporate world. While characters in Hindi cinema had always been seen running small businesses, this was first time they were managing large corporations, with references to tenders and board meetings peppering the dialogues. Obviously the real intricacies of the corporate world were simplified to a large extent, but Salim–Javed successfully brought the glamour and mystique of high-stakes business to the masses. In fact, they cleverly incorporated current business terminology into regular conversations. For example, when Ravi (Shashi Kapoor) returns from abroad, he refers to his father’s secretary Geeta (Rakhee) as ‘Computer’—one of the first times the word was used in a Hindi film—because she ‘knew the answer to every question’. When R.K. Gupta reminds Ravi about his potential, he refers to a ‘business administration course’ he has just completed abroad. There were throwaway lines about ‘meetings with auditors’ and ‘cement quotas’ and ‘court hearings’ as well, concepts common in the world of business at that point of time but not outside it. And of course, there is the adrenaline-charged sequence where Vijay steals a contract from R.K. Gupta by submitting a tender that is lower by just one rupee.

  These were very new things that Salim–Javed brought into Hindi cinema and indeed, films on the corporate world are still
few and far between. This is not to say that Trishul was a very realistic depiction of the business environment but the writers managed to take a very personal battle between a father and son and make it ‘business’.

  After the regressive stereotypes of Chacha Bhatija, Trishul set new standards in the depiction of women in Hindi cinema.

  About Shanti, Javed Akhtar says, ‘We did break new ground in Trishul: it’s the first film in which the heroine sleeps with the man in her life without feeling guilty.’ Shanti was an exceptionally strong, modern, yet dutiful working woman. Her character had very little screen time but effectively directed the course of the film, and is probably Salim–Javed’s strongest female character.

  And not only Shanti. The film had two other working women—Sheetal (Hema Malini) and Geeta (Rakhee)—both of whom were very real. They were honest, hard-working, well-dressed women, who didn’t need to be rescued by the heroes!

  The hero of Trishul, Vijay, was even more groundbreaking than the leading ladies. Javed Akhtar calls him ‘the first “real” illegitimate child on the Hindi screen. His parents are not seen going to some abandoned temple where they exchange malas to show they are married in the eyes of God.’ And the anger Salim–Javed invested in Vijay was something else. He was almost like a psychopathic villain, stalking his father’s family and doing everything in his capacity to make their lives hell. Usually in Hindi films, the code of honour dictates that the families of the warring heroes are left out of their battles. In Trishul, Vijay throws that code to the winds and does things like trying to steal his stepbrother’s lover and convince his stepsister to elope.

  Right from the first scene where he saunters around a dynamite-laden mine, his anger is so powerful that it almost unnerves you. And that rage permeates Salim–Javed’s lines. Every time he has to use it, Vijay almost spits out his father’s name—and always his full name, R.K. Gupta. In a pivotal scene towards the end, he introduces himself and calls R.K. Gupta his ‘naajayaz baap’ (illegitimate father). This is an interesting twist to the standard lingo where it is always the child who is referred to as illegitimate.