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

by Diptakirti Chaudhuri

Hindi film buff K.Y. Thomas, who was an avid cine-goer in the 1970s, remembers Salim–Javed’s dialogues serving another purpose. He says, ‘There used to be radio programmes that played short audio snippets from forthcoming films and invariably Salim–Javed’s films had dialogues that peaked our curiosity. I did not know them by name then but now I remember all their lines from radio programmes that made me want to see the films.’

  Lines that filled memories; lines that filled seats. What more can you ask from a writer?

  God in the Details

  ‘Life is strange. Sometimes if you look back, you feel like editing your life, rewriting it. You want to change Scene 12 which is less pleasant, but the story is so well knit, you realize Scene 32, which is the highlight of the story, will also have to vanish. It is not possible to retain Scene 32 because it has some connection with Scene 12’—Javed Akhtar talking about his childhood

  What Javed said about his life is also true for Salim–Javed’s scripts. Even in the weakest of their scripts, a Scene 32 would not have been possible without a Scene 12, in which it had its genesis. And it wasn’t only the links between scenes—every small character had a name, every location had a landmark (often with directions to get there), every motivation had a backstory.

  Aakhri Daao begins in the offices of a safe-manufacturing company. Ravi (Jeetendra) is a consultant with the company who has just managed to open their latest safe in seven minutes. He now advises the company’s engineer on how to make the design and actually talks about levers and making some part more compact and so on. These simple details—unlikely to have any connection to a real safe’s design—established Ravi’s expertise in safe designing, his modest demeanour and hinted at the crux of the film.

  Deewaar’s Vijay (Amitabh Bachchan) is the proverbial ‘lambi race ka ghoda’, christened so by smuggling kingpin, Davar (Iftekhar). The scene in which this epithet is delivered begins with two men—Davar and Jaichand (Sudhir)—buying two race books from a stall before getting their shoes polished. In a crisp bit of conversation, Davar is established as the expert on races, especially on horses that run the first half of the race slowly but leave everyone behind once they pick up speed. Their shoes shined, they toss a coin to the shoesshine boy which falls on the ground. Salim–Javed’s script has the boy Vijay (Master Alankar), snap back about the way in which he has been paid and thus get labelled as the ‘lambi race ka ghoda’.

  Trishul ’s characters talked about cement and steel quotas, meetings with lawyers, hobbies of the rich and famous and other such details. Geeta (Rakhee) rattles off file numbers and exact payment details to vendors, all of which add little nuggets of realism to the script. One can argue that much of these ‘high finance’ conversations are not technically accurate but in the popular format, it was enough to give a very real feel of the corporate world to the common man.

  Salim–Javed did not create the lost-and-found formula nor were they its most famous exponents. However, they always managed to insert an innocuous detail in the initial part of the story that would be picked up in the latter part as a vital clue.

  In Haath Ki Safai, the connecting link between the lost brothers is a photograph (of the two of them as children). But how would two street urchins get a photograph taken? The writers built in a scene where the younger brother Raju (who grows up to be Randhir Kapoor) steals a foreigner’s Polaroid camera. When his elder brother Shankar (later played by Vinod Khanna) finds out, they run back to the station to return the camera. The grateful tourist clicks a picture of the two of them and gives it to Shankar. This small sequence not only creates the ‘lost-and-found link’ for the film, it also establishes the contrasting characters of the two brothers.

  In both Yaadon Ki Baaraat and Haath Ki Safai, a train separates the brothers. In the former, it is a relatively simple matter of one brother unable to hop on to a departing train. In the latter, the whole drama is elaborately orchestrated with the two brothers getting on to two different bogies of a goods train, which are separated in the night while they are asleep.

  Salim–Javed also invested considerable thought into the names of their characters, even the supporting ones. When asked about the sound of a character’s name, Javed Akhtar gives an example: ‘Take the name Davar. Davar is an Indian name. Because it starts with a “D” and ends with an “R”, it has a certain ring of Western sophistication . . . So crisp. It’s possible that a villager may be called Davar. But I wouldn’t give a villager such a name, neither would I name a paan-eating man Davar.’

  When Sholay’s Mausi exclaims to a villager, ‘Arre kaise haan kar doon, Dinanathji? ’xciii you realize the nondescript villager could have only been a Dinanath. Just as Viju Khote—in black clothes and sporting a thick moustache—could only have been a Kaalia!

  Not only characters, every place got a name too. Sholay, for example, is full of places like Jamalpur, Daulatpur, Belapur, Haripur, Pipri, Naopur, Fatehgarh—places that not only had a name but also a clear direction and were at known distances from other areas. Deewaar’s gold landed at Versova40, which was also the location of Narang’s (Kulbhushan Kharbanda) warehouse in Shakti. In Majboor, the location for the final rendezvous—involving a lot of money and a murder—is explained in meticulous detail: ‘Kasara ghat se pehle . . . chhota sa bridge cross karne ke baad . . . daine haath ko kachcha rastaa . . . nadi kinare ek toota-foota cottage’,xciv adding flesh and blood to the skeleton of a story.

  Salim Khan often talks about the Mahabharat when highlighting the importance of details. A small detail in Karna’s early life (where he lies to his guru) comes back to haunt him in the most crucial battle of his life (when he forgets his learnings).

  This has a parallel in many of their films—most important being Deewaar, where they encourage the audience to invest emotion into an initially insignificant object by slowly building detail around it. Vijay’s dockyard token—‘billa number 786’—is first featured in a conversation that explains its religious significance. It then manages to save Vijay from a bullet and then again during another attempt on his life. The final time it appears is in a tragic situation, when the billa slips out of Vijay’s hands, effectively signalling the end of his run of good luck. The build-up of detail was so effective that the number 786 became a national phenomenon with people asking for the number for their cars or wearing necklaces with the number.

  Breaking Up the Films

  ‘Humne ek set of characters liya. Humne ek khaas haalaat dikhaye jo seedhi chalte chalte ek jagah kahin aisi ghoomi ke ab samajh nahin aa sakta ki yeh ab kidhar jayegi . . . woh moment interval ka hona chahiye’—Javed Akhtar

  Film critic Shubhra Gupta makes a case for doing away with the interval when she says, ‘It forces the storyteller to create a faux climactic moment, at a pitch higher than the rest of it till then, whether the plot allows for it or not. And then to have to resume from where it was left off, sometimes having to repeat the last few scenes for those stragglers who return leisurely from loo breaks and concessionaire stands.’ Of course, her point of view is based on the films of 2010s that are increasingly experimenting with form—length, songs (or the lack of them), the traditional problem-resolution structure—to a great extent.

  The interval has always been a part of the Hindi film and, rather than challenge the set notions of commercial cinema, Salim–Javed played with it, often using it to heighten the drama of the storyline. Javed Akhtar says, ‘In India, we still follow the Victorian script structure because even today we have an interval in the middle of the film. So once you find an interesting interval point, you can weave the story back to the beginning, and then you can develop the second half of the story at a later point.’ As is evident, they weren’t too happy about the forced break but they invested considerable thought in it and actually made it bigger, thus making the intervals of their films points of tremendous dramatic turmoil.

  In Kaala Patthar, the interval arrives at the exact moment where Vijay (Amitabh Bachchan) and Mangal (Shatrughan Sinha) have ju
st had a high-voltage fight and are bring separated by Ravi (Shashi Kapoor). The freeze frame happens with the two fighters being held apart by their collars, signifying the moment when Vijay and Mangal will suspend their hostilities as bigger calamities befall them.

  In Deewaar, the film breaks for the interval just when Vijay has moved into his new mansion with their mother and Ravi rushes in excitedly to announce his induction into the police force. The two brothers have been going down separate paths right from their childhood but this is the moment when the audience realizes their paths will now cross and it will not be pleasant. Again, a moment of heightened emotional suspense.

  Sholay probably had the most dramatic interval post the revelation of Gabbar’s brutal revenge on Thakur. While the first half establishes Jai and Viru’s prowess, they are still hired guns out to make a quick buck by catching a bandit. At the halfway point, their motivation changes with the knowledge of Thakur’s misfortune and they too become emotionally invested in the cause. This was again an important signal to the audience, telling them to start expecting an upping of the ante.

  The other device Salim–Javed specialized in was the montage sequence. Their tales of lost-and-found siblings and children growing up to take revenge meant there was a fair amount of growing up to be shown—preferably depicting the heroic nature of the main character.

  In Haathi Mere Saathi, four elephants are shown playing football with a child who kicks the ball in the air. When the ball lands, we see Rajesh Khanna—still as much in love with the elephants as he was as a kid.

  In Yaadon Ki Baaraat, we have the child Shankar stealing a fruit, running away and stopping to rest on a railway overbridge. As he looks at the passing train, the camera does a 360-degree turn and comes back to Dharmendra.

  In Deewaar, we leave a defiant little boy at the steps of the mandir and follow a young mother and her younger son inside. As the bells kept pealing, we return to dockyard coolie Vijay and educated unemployed Ravi—just as they embark on their two separate paths.

  In Chacha Bhatija, a young Shankar starts selling tickets in black for the Dilip Kumar-starrer Yahudi (1958). As he keeps muttering ‘ek ka do’ under his breath, the camera pans away from the boy, and in the next scene we see the poster of Raj Kapoor’s Bobby (1973), tickets to which Shankar (Dharmendra) is selling at the rate of ‘teen ka chhe’—probably the best way any film has depicted the passage of fifteen years.

  In Shakti, child Vijay kicks a can in depression on his way to school. The next person to kick the can is the adult Vijay (Amitabh Bachchan), who is sullenly walking past the romancing couples on Marine Drive, lost in his thoughts.

  In most Hindi films, these montages would have been planned at the director’s level and executed in the manner best suited to heighten the drama and excitement associated with a hero’s first appearance in the film. But given Salim–Javed’s penchant for detailed description of scenes (and even shot division in some cases), most of these critical scenes were written by the duo in the script itself.

  Masters of creating several emotional highs in every film, Salim–Javed used these two points—the hero’s first appearance and the interval—as key moments in the narrative to whip up audience frenzy through carefully choreographed sequences of events. The dramatic tension was palpable whenever they did so.

  Part V:

  IMPACT AND LEGACY

  A Brief History of Hindi Screenwriting

  To better understand the impact Salim–Javed had on Hindi cinema, it would be instructive to first briefly consider the screenwriting legends who preceded them and how their legacies shaped the evolving screenwriting conventions in the industry. This will also allow one to assess how much—or how little—has changed in the intervening years.

  Salim Khan says his biggest influences are from aeons ago. ‘I feel very strongly there has been no screenplay better than Mahabharat and no story better than Ramayan. Apart from the great situations and characters, the stories are full of small things—weaknesses—planted at one point that emerge at the end to become key to the narrative.’

  And that is indeed the starting point of most Indian stories. Screenwriter Kamlesh Pandey says, ‘We are the oldest storytelling country in the world and perhaps the richest. Our storytelling was originally verbal and there is not much difference between verbal and visual storytelling, which is cinema. Our cinema came from the folk theatre and that’s why music plays such an important part. Folk theatre, like the Indian thali, would have a little bit of everything—song and dance, lyrical dialogue, spoken dialogue, comedy, action and so on.’

  Starting with Raja Harishchandra (1913), and for nearly a decade after, all the films made in India were based on themes drawn from mythology and history. After the talkies began (in 1931), the source material expanded to picking up stage plays and filming them. Some of the earliest screenwriters, thus, were playwrights from popular theatre traditions. Parsi theatre, for example, produced many such writers and its style of rhetorical dialogues became somewhat institutionalized in Hindi cinema. After mythological and historical themes came literary influences. In 1936, Devdas (starring K.L. Saigal), with its combination of unrequited love, popular music and a familiar story, became a superhit film. This would be a popular formula (which, some may say, has carried on till this day) for Hindi cinema—a plot that is reasonably familiar, a screenplay that leaves room at regular points in the story for a few hit songs of varying moods. Devdas’s script also represented another common feature of Hindi films—a director who wrote the screenplay.

  Hindi cinema has always seen directors working with a team of writers, many of whom put to paper the broad vision of the maker. Film critic and writer–director Khalid Mohammad says, ‘Most Hindi directors formed long-lasting teams with writers that produced great scripts. Raj Kapoor had V.P. Sathe and K.A. Abbas, Guru Dutt had Abrar Alvi.’ Most leading directors of the time (Bimal Roy, Mehboob Khan and the like) had a team of talented writers (many of whom started writing independently or even directed films later on in their careers) which became the starting point of the ‘story department’ where the writers were mostly anonymous and shared credit. Sriram Raghavan expresses his bemusement over this system: ‘The studio system of the 40s and 50s had dissolved into another system where every prominent director/production house had a select group of writers working in an atmosphere of insulation and camaraderie—the story department. I have no idea how they actually functioned. Perhaps they were a group of people who read a lot of books, brainstormed all day and eventually zeroed in on an idea.’ Also, they were all on a monthly salary that had no connection to the fortunes of the films they wrote.

  The influence of literature on Hindi cinema grew as films based on popular novels or plays became successful. Saratchandra Chattopadhyay’s works were a big favourite, with hits like Devdas, Parineeta, Biraj Baju and Majhli Didi in the 1950s. Kamlesh Pandey says, ‘In the 1950s, a lot of Urdu writers from literature came in to cinema and they enriched our cinema. Manto, Abbas, Krishan Chander, Akhtar Ul Iman and even Prem Chand came for a while. Mukhram Sharma, Kamleshwar, Rahi Masoom Reza were all from literary backgrounds. Lyricists like Sahir and Kaifi were also from the literary world.’ Writers with a literary bent—writing in Bengali, Urdu and Hindi—began arriving in the film industry and eventually became forces to contend with.

  However, there was also the other end of the spectrum and often that formed the bulk of the industry’s output. At that end, film-makers were interested in churning out quickies based on existing stories—either ripped off from successful films or popular novels—for which they did not seek talented writers. They wanted hacks who could write cheaply and quickly, without any intellectual bearing so that they were amenable to changes in the script as per the demands of the market. And such writers were aplenty. Kamlesh Pandey explains, ‘The writer became a default option. Someone came to become an actor, could not succeed and he became a writer. And the mediocrity began at that time and still rules in writing. Writin
g often became the weakest link in a film.’

  Writers without any creative conviction were also poorly paid—often not paid at all. Salim Khan says, ‘The writer always had to give an excuse to ask for money. My kid’s school fees are due. I need to pay the monthly rent. The money was not a right, neither was credit. We have written films where the director or the producer has been given credit for the screenplay even though we wrote it.’

  There is another curiosity of Hindi cinema that was brought about by the cultural and linguistic diversity of India. The script was never conceived as a whole, written from start to finish. Typically, the director or producer got the source material—which could be a popular novel or a ‘plot’ (usually described in a few lines). After that, a writer associated with the makers wrote a detailed screenplay of how the film would unfold. Often, this was ‘polished’ by the director or a ‘senior’ writer. Finally, there would be dialogue writer who would create the exact lines that would be spoken in every scene. A large proportion of the early directors (and their associates) were not Hindi-speaking and, therefore, were unable to write the full script, complete with Hindi or Urdu dialogues.

  For example, Bimal Roy’s Parineeta credits Saratchandra Chattopadhyay for the story and the director for the ‘scenario’. It names four people as ‘scenario assistants’: Asit Sen, Nabendu Ghosh, Kamal Chowdhury and Moni Bhattacharjee, and credits Vrajendra Gaur for dialogues. Likewise, K. Asif’s Mughal-e-Azam credits the screenplay to the director and Aman while Kamal Amrohi, Ehsan Rizvi and Wajahat Mirza are credited with the dialogues. Multiple dialogue writers often meant that different scenes were written by different people, and held together by the common vision of the director.

  While the process of writing was rather chaotic and the direction of the story largely resided with the director, this did not mean the quality was poor. The 1950s was a period of idealism and the stories told had great social resonance. Khalid Mohammad summarizes this: ‘I was weaned on cinema of the 1950s, justly described as the glorious era of Hindi-language cinema. There were great stories endowed with humanism, entertainers which were uncontaminated by vulgarity, stories which had credibility and on occasion, a literary source. Hollywood and world cinema did influence Bombay products but not as indiscriminately as they would in the decades to come. The stars and the stories mattered, of course, more than the technicalities of the script. Yet the names did register in one’s adolescence, names like Pandit Mukhram Sharma, K.A. Abbas and V.P. Sathe who collaborated with Raj Kapoor, and Sachin Bhowmick whose plots were thoroughly formulaic and yet enjoyable. The scripts of Mehboob Khan, V. Shantaram and Guru Dutt also had an unparalleled resonance which continues to this day and age.’