Back to the Shalimar I & II

Posted on November 17, 2014 by admin

Shalimar is unlike any other Indian film. Rishi Majumder revisits a non-classic.

PART I

History rewards victory, not ambition. Pyaasa, Mughal-e-Azam, Sholay, Deewar, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge and, now, a Happy New Year, are likely to be celebrated decades after their release. There will be endless analysis around what made them hits or critical successes, nostalgia pieces on their 50^th anniversaries, new books around their making, and interviews with ageing stars and filmmakers

Not that these aren’t useful. I would really like to know, for instance, what made Happy New Year a hit. All I have to thank the film for, after three painful hours, is that it brought back memories of Shalimar, a 1978 movie quite unlike anything Bollywood has ever seen, and a financial and critical disaster.

In a tribute to Shalimar, Happy New Year revolves around a group of people trying to steal diamonds by beating the ‘Shalimar Security System’, introduced to viewers with Shalimar’s title song—Mera Pyaar Shalimar—playing as a hat doff.

Also, the bunch of thieves in Happy New Year are described repeatedly as “losers” who’re trying to be “winners”. This is reminiscent, perhaps unintentionally, of Shalimar’s maker, Krishna Shah.

A creature of lesser Hollywood, the filmmaker has to his credit smaller genre movies (comedy and horror) such as Hard Rock Zombies, Evil Laugh, Ted & Venus and American Drive-In. A UCLA and Yale graduate, before Shalimar Shah had adapted the play The River Niger, and directed on and off Broadway theatre (one of them Rabindranath Tagore’s The Dark Chamber which won two Obies). He’d written for TV too (Six Million Dollar Man, The Flying Nun and The Man From UNCLE) and produced the animated Ramayana in 1992, and one of India’s early ‘indie’ films Hyderabad Blues.

Yet Shah never made it to the Hollwyood A list. Shalimar was his only attempt at a big blockbuster. Indian papers were full of news about him then, especially after he signed Rex Harrison. But everything was forgotten soon after the movie bombed.

The plot of the film involves four master thieves entering into a contest with one another to try and steal the “Shalimar ruby” from the biggest master thief of them all. Four master thieves and Bollywood strongman Dharmendra, who gatecrashes the competition.

It’s atrocious, but has an audacity to it that’s endearing: it features Hollywood actors like Rex Harrison, Sylvia Miles and John Saxon alongside Hindi film stars Dharmendra, Zeenat Aman and Shammi Kapoor— something no other Hindi film has done to this extent. It was released in Hindi in India and in English in the USA (as Raiders of the Sacred Stone). Both versions failed.

One really wonders what prompted Rex Harrison—Tony, Golden Globe and Oscar winner for Best Actor—after having played the iconic parts of Julius Caesar, Henry Higgins, Pope John Paul II and Dr. Dolittle, to agree to portray a Bollywood arch-villain. One imagines Harrison—now, sadly, no more, then nearing 70—would have prepared for Shalimar alongside Staircase (with Richard Burton) and Crossed Swords (with Charlton Heston). So around the same time he was essaying the considerably more complex roles of an ageing gay Londoner running a barbershop and the 16^th Century Duke of Norfolk, Harrison also played Sir John Lockheed— a retired but paranoid master-thief living on an island, with many tribal slaves and Dharmendra to handle. Not that the other two movies did much better. Both were critically panned and turkeys at the box office. Harrison himself reportedly hated Staircase. It would be interesting to find out what he made of Shalimar.

Then there’s Sylvia Miles of Greenwich Village. If you ask around New York, the story you’re most likely to hear about Miles involves her throwing a plate of food on critic John Simon’s head. Simon, now 89, remembers it being steak tartare. Miles, 82, remembers “steak tartare, coleslaw, potato salad, and cold cuts.”

The provocation for this was that Simon had referred to Miles as “one of New York’s leading party girls and gate-crashers” in a review. “How could I crash anything? I was invited to everything! I was the Gwyneth Paltrow of the day,” Miles has said.

This isn’t true. Miles won two Oscar nominations for Best Supporting Actress that she received for minuscule six and eight minute appearances in the movies Midnight Cowboy and Farewell My Lovely respectively. And she had a role in Andy Warhol’s underground film Heat, a parody of Sunset Boulevard, written and directed by Paul Morissey, where she plays a has-been Hollywood starlet, seduced and used by an LA Hustler.

True to her ‘party girl’ reputation, Miles was seen at so many public events with Warhol and Morissey that ventriloquist and puppeteer Wayland Flowers remarked in one of his shows: “Sylvia Miles and Andy Warhol would attend the opening of a sewer.” Also, that Miles herself would “attend the opening of an envelope”. Flowers used his puppet, ‘Madame’, to express these thoughts, now subsumed in Manhattan lore. Clever way of sidestepping the tartare.

Miles had spoken about Shalimar to Roger Ebert, in between chewing a honey dew slice and lighting a cigarette, at a 1980 LA brunch. Interestingly, she referred to it as the film with Harrison and Saxon without mentioning any of her Indian co-stars, not even the film’s protagonist, or maybe Ebert didn’t care to report that she did. She was in her mid-forties then. She plays a trapeze artist and master thief called Countess Rasmussen. Shah establishes this with a flashback that shows Miles trapeze into a museum, wearing a bright red outfit to steal Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. Later, the Countess swings like Tarzan to access windows that seem as if they could simply have been climbed into. For the purpose of knocking out a guard, or avoiding capture, she prefers summersaulting to simple hit and runs (where Dharmendra scores).

The original choice for Miles’ role in Shalimar was Gina Lollobrigida, Italian actress, photojournalist, sculptor and sex symbol of the fifties and sixties. In The Shalimar Adventure, a forgotten 1979 book on the making of the film by publicist Bunny Reuben, a chapter titled The Battle of the Boobs reports a cleavage contest of sorts between Zeenat Aman (in her late twenties) and Lollobrigida (touching fifty at the time) at an early press conference for which the European actress had traveled to India. One doesn’t know what the import of this is. Anyhow, Lollobrigida finally walked out.

The third Shalimar actor from the Hollywood circuit, the now 79 year old John Saxon, is best remembered as Bruce Lee’s comrade-in-arms from Enter The Dragon. Saxon, born Carmine Orrico, was set to be Hollywood’s next big thing when he broke into the movies with meaty roles in Running Wild (he was 20 then) and The Unguarded Moment (21). But this was not to be, and Saxon acted, instead, in innumerable sci-fi, action and horror movies and TV shows. He was nominated for Best Supporting Actor at the Golden Globes for his portrayal of a Mexican bandit in Appaloosa. He played a similar part in Joe Kidd, co-starring with Clint Eastwood and Robert Duvall. Saxon also went on to do Italian spaghetti westerns and police thrillers.

Saxon was just past 40 when he was signed on for Shalimar, though he looks as if he is in his thirties. He plays a master thief called Colonel Columbus.

Dharmendra and Zeenat Aman, both pretty much at the top of their careers, and Shammi Kapoor, the ex-hero who had aged by then and become a prolific supporting actor, made up the Indian end of the cast. Reports say Shah had approached Amitabh Bachchan to play Dharmendra’s part, but the superstar kept delaying things still Shah gave up.

Also, Shalimar had OP Ralhan, the producer-director and sometimes actor behind big Bollywood grossers like Phool Aur Patthar and Talash. Ralhan plays a character named KPW Iyengar, alias ‘Romeo’, a master thief who has robbed the Bank of Singapore. Kapoor’s character, Dr. Dubari, is a thief who poses often as a religious figure, who has stolen St. Timothy’s precious cross from Jerusalem (like the Shalimar ruby itself, this is fictional). He cites religious writing from the faiths to justify crime. Aman plays Sir John’s (Harrison) nurse and Dharmendra’s ex flame.

Shalimar is full of bloopers and irrationalities but then such problems abound in other successful heist films of the yesteryears too, such as Topkapi or The League of Gentlemen. What really does the film in is that it’s overlong, has dully paced scenes and a plot that’s just plain boring: devoid of well-conceived twists and turns and utterly predictable.

It does have some memorable Hindi film music from RD Burman. Hum Bewafa Hargiz Na Thay by Kishore Kumar, for instance, or One, Two Cha Cha Cha—by Usha Uthup—a longish cha-cha-cha number and dance sequence that the film begins with.

There’s also Asha Bhosle’s Mera Pyar Shalimar a title-track that sounds as though it belongs to a Bond film. And like with the Bond movies it should really have been played during the opening credits. Instead, it has been used, wastefully, in sporadic bursts, in laughably futile attempts to drum up pathos or fear.

There is one well-executed sequence in the film: where Dharmendra (Spoiler Alert) paints himself in black and white to blend in with the walls and floor of the hall where the Shalimar ruby lies, as a kind of camouflage. Harrison realizes the big chequered blob inching towards his ruby is Dharmendra upon staring at a chess board with a game they’ve left unfinished. Believe it or not, it’s actually pulled off quite well.

And there is a clever reference. The fictional island, in the Indian Ocean, where the thieves meet is named Saint Dismas, the name assigned to the penitent thief crucified with Jesus Christ, as per the Gospel of Luke.

PART II

Besides these, Shalimar throws up quite a few treasures for lovers of camp. There are Hindi masala film tropes that have been used here like nowhere else. This makes for novel ‘oh-it’s-so-bad-it’s-good’ moments, as opposed to Happy New Year where, for all its eighties Bollywood references, there is mostly only the ‘it’s-so-bad-it’s-bad’. Here are some gems (Many Spoilers Ahead):

Rex Harrison’s voice, in the Hindi version, is dubbed by the one and only Kader Khan— who has penned dialogues for the film as well.

Yes. The same that wrote and said:

“Dukh jab hamaari kahaani sunta hai toh khud dukh ko dukh hota hai.”

A feeble attempt at translation: When sadness hears my tale, then sadness itself feels sad.

And:

“Whiskey mein soda ya pani milane se uska taste kharaab ho jaata hai. Whiskey mein Whiskey milaake peena chahiye.”

Translation: Mixing soda or water with whiskey ruins its taste. One should mix whiskey with whiskey before drinking it.

And:

“Tumhaari yeh baat sunkar mera dil Hyderabad ke tarah aabaad ho gaya.”

Translation: Impossible.

Some perspective. A doyen of eighties Bollywood dialogue writing and delivery, Khan has played a significant part in propagating the ‘angry young man’, Hindi Cinema’s most remembered stereotype, that Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar created for Amitabh Bachchan. Ganga Jamuna Saraswati, Sharaabi, Coolie, Lawaaris, Suhaag, Muqaddar Ka Sikandar, Amar Akbar Anthony, Mr. Natwarlal, Satte Pe Satta, Hum and Agneepath are some of the famous Bachchan films Khan has written dialogue for.

As an actor, Khan was Prometheus Unbound, set in Hindi film masala. So over the top, even for an industry that routinely demanded a degree of overacting, that he made Dolby Surround seem altogether unnecessary when it came to India. Here, however, the ham extraordinaire displays remarkable restraint, almost as if he wore a horse bit for the dub. Khan’s ‘Sir John voice’ for Harrison is understated and alternates between quietly menacing to a sardonic murmur. To discover this avatar—Kader Khan The Murmurer—can be such a delight for followers of eighties Bollywood that they could watch Shalimar for this reason alone.

I’m not quite sure who dubbed Sylvia Miles’ voice—or whether she did it herself—but she sounds like Helen trying to sound like an Italian trying to speak in Hindi. This is coupled with political incorrectness. In one scene she greets Ralhan with “My Idlee, Dowsaaa!” punctuated by (what else) a summersault.

Two foreign master thieves communicating in Hindi is more than enough, perhaps, so Col. Columbus, John Saxon’s character, is left mute. Saxon speaks in sign language throughout the film and only Dharmendra, or S. S. Kumar, understands sign language. So he translates for others. This raises a question. Dharmendra was never meant to be on the island in the first place. He cheated his way in, taking another invitee’s place. How exactly had the master thieves planned on communicating with Columbus without Dharmendra?

In the latter half Saxon’s character acquires an added shade of complexity. He dies and because the tribals on the island feel they heard him scream after his death they dress up the dead body and worship it as their god. He still doesn’t get any dialogue though.

Let’s address the question of how Dharmendra gatecrashed the gathering. One must give credit where it’s due. Shalimar is possibly the only Hindi movie where Dharmendra doesn’t fool anyone by disguising himself as a Sikh. Yes, he dons a fake beard and moustache and wears a turban, pretending to be the son of Raja Bahadur Singh— yet another master thief who was invited but, sadly, shot before he could make the trip. However, after a day of watching him conspicuously pilfer trinkets from under their eyes everyone bursts into laughter when he claims to be royalty. Why they then allow him to enter the Steal-The-Shalimar Contest, instead of sending him off to be treated for kleptomania, is a mystery. Must be the sign language.

Coming back to voices, when Dharmendra says “Sir John” he sounds either as if he is saying “Mausi (Aunt)” in Sholay or “Kuttay (Dog)” in every other movie. Aman is less versatile. She addresses everyone in that sultry whine she had perfected in her time in Bollywood, a studied mix of complaint and seduction.

Harrison displays so much serenity in the middle of all of this that one wonders whether he was wearing earplugs. There is mild amusement writ on his face, which may have come naturally, and a detachment that makes you suspect he was actually mentally rehearsing lines for the Duke of Norfolk.

The Shalimar ruby itself is assigned an intriguing fictional history. Existing since Vedic times (whenever that may be), it was taken by Alexander and then returned to Chandragupta Maurya by Seleucus I. Then it went missing and was discovered in Srinagar’s Shalimar Gardens by the Mughals. From here it went to the Portuguese and then the English. Then it went missing again. The newspaper clipping that informs us of this is from UK’s Sunday Mirror. The headline reads: “Who Has Plucked The 100 Crore Rupee Plum?”

The “100 Crore Rupee Plum” which actually looks like a snazzy red disco ball that got cut all wrong. This makes for great tragicomedy when juxtaposed with expressions of anguish on the faces of people who die trying to procure it, to the tune of Mera Pyar Shalimar. They don’t look like they’ve lost it because of the stone. They just look mad.

In the end, Dharmendra is a CBI officer. We learn of this because he tells Aman that he had squandered her life’s savings and eloped with some American girl not because he didn’t love her, but because he had to get the Shalimar ruby back for the CBI. He tells her this casually, before saying into the phone purposefully: “This is Agent 3694”.

The tribals under Sir John’s command—he saved 45 of them from death so now they’re his slaves for life—are a cosmopolitan lot. Some of them resemble Africans, some East Asians, and one of them is Mudhu B. Shetty. Shetty, better known as Fight Master Shetty, or, simply, Fighter Shetty—an iconic Hindi film stuntman and action choreographer—would often appear in the action sequences he created as a dark bald hulking goon who would be beaten up by heroes half his size. Here he merely glowers in snatches, in a ridiculous outfit that makes him look like a Red Indian at a fancy dress ball. There is no explanation for this, and viewers unacquainted with the cryptic genre that is the Hindi masala movie may be at a loss as to why, in the middle of so many scenes depicting tribals in ridiculous ways, they are repeatedly confronted with shots of Shetty glaring at them angrily.

Enlightenment arrives at the climax, which comprises a fight between Dharmendra and Shetty who ambushes him—and the audience—with a sword in one hand and a spear in the other. It then dawns that the previous shots were simply Shah’s way of saying: “Here is Shetty. He may be dressed like the next enslaved tribal but wait and see.”

Not that the tribal dress code is uniform— those higher in the hierarchy wear headgear reminiscent of Greek legions while lesser ones wear single feathers. They paint their bodies, light up torches and chant “Jhingalala Hoon Hoon” while marching to nowhere in particular. This makes Dharmendra break into a song, in rhythm with this chant, about his failed relationship with Zeenat Aman.

10.

To be fair, tribals aren’t the only constituency Shalimar offends. If the movie is to be believed, erstwhile rulers of princely kingdoms committing themselves to grand larceny was a worldwide trend in the seventies. Two of five master thieves invited to try and steal the Shalimar—Countess Rasmussen and Raja Bahadur Singh—hail from nobility. And then there’s Sir John. The last government in possession of the Shalimar ruby was supposedly British. Has anyone told Queen Elizabeth II she’s being shown to have knighted someone who ran off with England’s most precious jewel?

Alok Nath Uninterrupted

Posted on October 29, 2014 by admin

Last year, TBIP documented the work and lives of some of India’s best known ‘character actors’, through a series of photographic portraits and in-depth interviews. In the second part of that series, we present Alok Nath.

Alok Nath, 58, is one of Hindi cinema’s most recognizable ‘character actors’. A National School of Drama alumnus, he is well known for essaying the role of a kindly patriarch in many Bollywood films in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, among them the blockbusters Maine Pyar Kiya (1989), Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! (1993) and Hum Saath-Saath Hain (1999). Also, Nath has won acclaim for his turn as Haveli Ram in Doordarshan’s television series, Buniyaad.

Last December, jokes and memes based on characters played by Alok Nath—mostly on the ‘sanskaari’ (morally upright) and ‘kanyadaani’ (father of the bride) nature of his on-screen avatars—went viral on Twitter and Facebook, leading to the actor’s name trending on social media for no apparent reason, prompting online marketing case studies on the phenomenon.

The shoot and interview takes place at his apartment in Lokhandwala, Mumbai. We sit on velvet upholstered sofas in his sitting room, chatting about the highs and lows of his journey as an actor, interrupted occasionally by the snores of his pet Boston terrier sleeping on a chair nearby.

One of your first roles was in Gandhi. What were your thoughts while working on the movie with actors like Ben Kingsley, Roshan Seth, etc. Do you have any special memories of it? How did you get the role?

When I joined Hindu college, at Delhi University, I was very active in college theatre as well as in the Ruchika theatre group. I also kept doing television. After college I chose to take up acting professionally. My parents had wanted me to be a doctor—my father is a doctor—but they stopped interfering and left the decision to me once I took up humanities instead of science in college. After graduating I joined the National School of Drama in Delhi. I did three years there and even in my spare time and during the holidays continued with professional theatre and television in Delhi. Towards the end of my time at the National School of Drama (NSD), in 1980, Dolly Thakore from Bombay came to our school looking for actors for small character roles in Gandhi, being directed by the great Sir Richard Attenborough. We were told to represent the National School of Drama in the auditions and have a nice bath, wear clean clothes, shave, oil our hair… Getting the role or not was immaterial. Just to see Richard Attenborough in the flesh—he used to do theatre too and we were in awe of him—was a big high. When I met him at the Ashoka Hotel I was shivering. He looked me over and seemed to contemplate, as if he was buying a horse or cattle. His eyes were piercing into me and I was dying, frankly, because I wasn’t getting any reaction that revealed whether he liked me or not. He finally said, “Yeah Dolly looks good.” Dolly lead me into an adjacent room and said, “You’re on Alok. So this character is called Tyeb Mohammed, one of Gandhi’s associates and friends when he was in South Africa and involved in the coal miners’ agitation. So you got the role.” I said, “That’s great. But what do I do for it?” And she said, “See you look the role, that’s why Attenborough chose you.”

Later I realized I must have been chosen because I had that mean hungry look those days, the look of a frustrated theatre actor who is a committed revolutionary, a Commie theatre enthusiast.

She asked me “How much will you charge?” In those days, in television, for a play for which you had to rehearse for a week or 10 days and then record, we would get 60 rupees. Nobody had asked me what I would charge. I was just given whatever pittance and I took it. So I was like, “Madam Dolly…” Dolly was a nice looking young woman, very Westernised. And here we were, the lesser humans visiting a posh Delhi hotel, who had never been to a five star hotel suite, and my feet were like jelly but I couldn’t say that I haven’t done a film before so I don’t know how much to charge. Also I couldn’t say I used to get 60 rupees or she’d give me 100 rupees or something. So I just kept quiet. She finally said, “Okay will over 20 be alright?” I almost got a heart attack because I used to get 60 and now 20? Then she said, “Twenty thousand rupees. Should we close the deal?” My expression was like… I literally shat in my pants. I was like, “Yeah 20 is fine, it should be good.” And as I was calculating how much 20,000 rupees was, she took out a wad of notes for 10,000 rupees. “Here is an advance and you’re on.” And she made me sign some papers. So that was how I got Gandhi. I went out of the room, kept the money in my pocket, left the hotel, then took the money out and checked if they were real notes. I kept the wad under my armpits and the whole way back I took an auto-rickshaw (I used to travel by bus normally). I went home and gave the money to mom. My parents too were shocked. “Thank God you didn’t become a doctor,” they said. Because my father didn’t earn 10,000 rupees in a year.

You had only one film as a hero, Kamagni. Why were you not considered for the lead more often back then? Because I’ve seen younger photos of you. And…

Just say it. That I was good looking.

You were good looking. Why were you not offered leads?

Between Gandhi and Kamagni there were five to six years. I struggled in Bombay for almost two years and got nothing but constantly kept doing theatre at Prithvi Theatre with Mrs. Nadira Babbar, Raj Babbar’s wife. Raj, an NSD alumnus, had suddenly become an overnight superstar and signed some 30 to 40 odd films. That was also one of the reasons for this exodus of a lot of Delhi actors to Bombay. They wanted to get into the gold rush of cinema by which Raj Babbar, a Delhi theatre actor, had become a hero.

During that span of doing theatre in Prithvi with Nadiraji, a lot of film people used to come and watch our shows. I got some small roles in films. My first break was with Mr. Yash Chopra in a film called Mashaal with Anil Kapoor—it was also one of his first films—and Dilip (Kumar) saab. I played a journalist and he later gave me a role again in his film Lamhe and then I got a role in Aaj Ki Awaaz, a B. R. Chopra film.

Also, in those days the TV serial business had begun in a big way here. There was a serial made in Delhi called Hum Log, the first Indian soap. And people lapped it up like crazy. In the wake of that, more serials started getting made in Bombay. So 26 and 30 episode serials were being made. I started getting work in these serials starting with one by Basu Chatterjee, then by Nadiraji herself doing a serial and then Mr. Ramesh Sippy’s company making a serial on journalism, a caricaturist kind of show called Chapte Chapte. I played a cranky, grumpy editor, and then Buniyaad happened.

Buniyaad was a major milestone in my life which catapulted me into the acting space. I was compared to the greats of those times. The press suddenly put me on this pedestal and I got great acting offers but the condition of Buniyaad, also made by Mr. Ramesh Sippy, was that you had to give one year to them in which you would concentrate on this one show. With Buniyaad it was like I had gotten my voting card for Bombay, that read: ‘Alok Nath, Actor’.

And yet the irony of Buniyaad was I couldn’t do other work, so a lot of offers went rejected. And while people wanted to work initially, things changed. Let me explain. When I started Buniyaad I was 26-27 years of age and it started with me playing a young revolutionary, an honest, good looking guy, falling in love with a woman. Then we married, had children, they grew up, they got married, they having children and we became grandparents. All of this in one year. So in one year I lived 60 years of my life. In that one year the younger Haveli Ram, the character in the serial which got all these offers, was forgotten and at the end the image of a masterji, growing old, remained in the audience’s mind. The last shot of the serial, that has lasted in people’s memory, was that I am walking with two grandchildren into the horizon. An 80 year old man, balding, with white hair. That was the lasting image of Alok Nath.

Hum Aapke Hain Koun.. ! established you as a sort of household name. What was it like working on that film? Hum Aapke… also affected the tone of movies made in Bollywood in the nineties. Did you anticipate the effect that it had?

Before that was Maine Pyaar Kiya and even before that was Saraansh in 1983, produced by the same Rajshri Productions. In the early eighties I was doing doing a play at Prithvi called Sandheya Chaya. It’s about an old couple in their late 60s or 70s, whose children have left them for their work, staying abroad. And how they make friends with people who visit them, or the postman, or the next door servant or some person who’s dialed them by mistake. So I was playing one of the old couple and Raj Babbar was doing some Rajshri film. The people from Rajshri saw a performance. So the next day Mr. Babbar had left a message with the paanwalla asking me to call him immediately. We never had phones in those days so the paanwalla at the corner would take our messages and paid him a little extra in return. So I called Raj Babbar and he asked me to turn up at the Rajshri office.

When I landed up I was shown into a room and it was Rajkumar Barjatya, Sooraj Barjatya’s father’s room.

I introduced myself, saying: “My name is Alok Nath. Mr. Raj Babbar has asked me to come and meet you.”

He said, “Lekin par kyon (But why)?”

I’m amazed at this man. He has called me all the way from Juhu and he’s not even recognizing me.

A little agitated, I said, “Sir I am Mrs. Nadira Babbar’s actor. We have a group called Ekjute. Yesterday some people from your office came to see the play and then I got a call.”

He said, “You were in the play last night?” I said, “Yes sir.” He asked, “What were you doing in the play?” I was on the edge, also reaching the end of my patience. “Sir I was acting in the play, playing the lead.” He said, “Tum toh… lekin woh buddha tha (But, he was an old man)!” I said, “Sir, he was an old man, but I am a young man. I was acting in that play as an old man. But I am 25 years old.”

He finally recognised me, then said, “Good, good. But very sad.” He said he couldn’t give me the role. “This film we are making, we need an older man in this. But don’t worry Mr. Alok. We will always work with you.” So this is my history with Rajshri. I didn’t get that role, Anupam Kher got it. Bastard! He is just one year older than me. The only solace I got was that he must have been looking older than me. They gave me a small role in that film, a sadhu’s role. And since that film, I have worked in every film of theirs except Main Prem ki Diwaani Hoon.

Were you wary of getting typecast? Did you try to resist it?

I was aware of it, not much initially because initially there was the thirst of getting into the groove of films, being a part of this cinema world. I accepted what I was offered. Refusal would mean that the offers would stop coming, because it’s a small industry and people take offence if you refuse them.

When I was in it, I was doing it with all my honesty. By the time I realised no yaar, I think I’m on the wrong bus, I could not change things.

There were some offers, but they were not out and out different. A good man turning villain in the end, at the climax, so people will not think that he’s a villain— those kinds of roles. But even they did not work with the audience. The films worked, but I didn’t get any recognition, so I was stuck in this scenario where I would do only goody-goody roles, older roles, big brother roles, the uncle, the father, now the grandfather… It’s ok. It’s paid my bills, I’ve bought my own house, my car, I had the courage to get married, have children, give them a good education. At the end of the day, the creativity got a little dejected but survival was funded by these films.

In Hindi cinema it’s not just an actor but also a role that gets typecast. What have been the characteristics of the traditional Indian father? Is that image changing today?

A father is a person who is always looked upon as a positive person from the hero’s point of view because we have an Indian tradition of following in your father’s footsteps. So if the father is good the hero is good and the hero is always good so that means the father should always be good. If the father is bad then there are influences of that in the hero which get corrected during the process of the film. Goodness prevails. But the father figure is mostly pujya. Pujya matlab (Pujya means) a respected person. Whether he is poor or rich he is listened to, his values are cared for, his directives are obeyed.

But now, also, over the last decade our cinema has gone through a lot of churning. The whole genre of filmmaking has changed in which the family has suddenly taken a back seat. There’s less of pitaji or bauji or babuji, and more of ‘mom-dad’. The ‘Yo!’ kind of generation has emerged. And the generation gap between children and their parents doesn’t seem to show much, even literally, because of facilities such as beauty products, various options in clothing, technologies like hair weaving etc. So the parents look young and happening now, which is a kind of role I don’t fit into.

Also the heroes of the last two decades have now become fathers, though they still want to be heroes. But unfortunately their children have become heroes too, so they have had to graduate to fathers. So automatically those fathers have taken up more cinema space and left little for outsider fathers like us.

Finally, there are ‘lesser parents’, for subjects where parents are not really required. Here they are just like furniture in a film, with small roles. Maybe just passing by or with two or three scenes. Or they’re shown in albums or photographs, things like that. So, often, parents are now not an integral part of Indian cinema.

You once mentioned some particular mannerisms or thought processes that you may have that make people cast you as an older person? What did you mean?

You can’t defy age, though I did do so in the opposite direction. I played father to heroes elder to me. I’ve done almost 500 films till now in my 30 to 35 years in Bombay and almost 95% of them have been in older roles— older than my present age. And I have never said no to a film. The only film I refused around 20 years ago was one from Madras. I was asked to play Mr. Jeetendra’s father to which I said nahin (no) yaar, this is too much. He must be about 15 years older to me.

You also mentioned in an interview that you had certain goals when you came to Mumbai but you hadn’t achieved what you set out to do. If you could re-do your innings as an actor, what changes would you make to it?

In any sphere of life you have to have a goal post and you have to aim well to score. Anybody who comes in at an early age, wants to become a star, a hero. When you brush or shave in the morning there’s nobody better looking than you. You’re the ultimate. You’re Don Juan. I also came in thinking like that. But your dreams get shattered slowly, till you realise you need to face the world, face reality. This is it, accept it or leave it. At this one stage of life you’re a beggar so you can’t be a chooser because it’s a question of survival. In addition you have your family’s baggage: What the hell, you’ve left us! You’ve gone to Bombay to become a hero! What’s happening? No news! Nothing’s happening! Everybody’s shining, you’re not shining!

You get frustrated, you’re in a foreign country and you lap up the first opportunity just to prove to somebody back home that: No, no. See, that show is coming, or that film is coming. Watch. It’s me. So in doing so you accept a little defeat thinking that if you prove yourself in that little role maybe in the next film the same people will say, “He performed well, he’s a good man. He behaved well while shooting, let’s give him a better role.”

And things keeps improving too but, in doing so, time passes. To relive the past, to recycle, to change goal posts, is not easy. Obviously anybody would want to be a star, live young like a hero, sing nice songs, dance with beautiful girls, fall in love with them on screen, different women, different films, different directors. That karishma (miracle), that aura, the almost demi-god feeling… that I missed.

Bollywood can limit actors like yourself and yet you have been a part
of it for many years. What keeps you going?

With acting the biggest reward was that it was my hobby which turned into my passion and then my passion turned into my profession. And it’s paying you, with money, recognition, adulation, love and respect from the audience. The money makes it a very cushy life that way.

You’ve done work recently with well known online comedy groups. What was it like exploring this new aspect? Also, did your newfound spurt of fame on social media affect your life in any way?

Comedy is not an integral part of an Indian household. We don’t laugh too much or too often unfortunately. There is a lack of humour in our lives. When I was in school, in the initial stages of theatre, I used to do a lot of comedy in school functions because you are young and your audience is young. There was laughter, gaiety and even more slapstick, bizarre and over the top comedy.

But then seriousness happened to me, age happened, so the comic aspect of my personality got buried. People think: He’s a serious bugger, he doesn’t laugh much, he doesn’t make people laugh much.

So with people making fun of me in the social media what can I do? It’s good! It takes a lot of work to squeeze out something funny from a serious wood like Alok Nath. Why take offense? I laugh at jokes made on other people.

Now my daughter, who’s studied filmmaking abroad, was working with AIB (All India Bakchod). One evening, she seemed very serious. “Papa, they’re making sketches and caricaturish stuff on you and Kejriwal. I don’t think I’ll be assisting them on this one.” When I asked why she said, “They’re making fun of you. You’ll be saying funny things to him and your voice will be speaking from your portrait.” I said, “So what? So much of that has happened already (on social media).” She said, “Yeah but doing it to your own father, I’m not feeling quite good about it.” I said, “That’s your call. But it’s your work. I’d say go ahead and do it.”

Then I said, “Suppose I do it? Instead of the portrait, if I was there? Then would you do it?” She immediately called those people: “Hey my dad says that you can take him.” And they went crazy. Really? Alokji will do it? Then they called me and thanked me. I went and shot it and I enjoyed it. It went viral, got some 35 lakh views. Then some other company called Gray made some jokes, some rap songs to promote some project. Then the 9X people, Comedy Central, Channel V… So I said, chalo karo (come lets do it). That hidden bug of comedy is coming alive so let’s give it a different shape. I’m enjoying it.

Talking Films with Yash Chopra

Posted on October 18, 2014 by admin

An interview of Yash Chopra by Rafique Baghdadi, done after he had made Mashaal in 1984.

Yash Chopra has been making films from the last thirty-five years. Most of his films have been successful— from Dhool Ka Phool, Waqt, Ittefaq, Deewar, Trishul, Kala Patthar, Noorie, to his Mashaal, which has been favourably received by both the public and the press.

Your film Dharamputra (1961) was close to the partition experience. How were you personally affected by the events during that period?

I studied in Lahore, but I had to come to Jalandhar after my primary school. Things happened on both sides. Hindus were killed there, Muslims were killed here. I saw massacres with my own eyes and lived through the frenzy, the foolishness and the madness of the time. It was not necessary to be in Lahore to experience the trauma. What I saw in those days I used in Dharmaputra, but I didn’t make Dharmaputra because of what I saw. When I read the novel, something of that experience must have spurred me to make the film. The scenes in the film looked realistic because I had witnessed those scenes myself. Today, if an Indian director has to portray war, it would be based on what he has read about it, or heard about it or as he has seen it in the foreign films. In India, in the recent past, we have not experienced war.

The thematic content of your films have usually been something new and original. Even your earliest films, like Dhool Ka Phool (1959), Dharmaputra (1961) and Waqt (1965), broke new grounds in terms of their themes which had not been tackled by filmmakers in India till then.

At that time we had a story department. They would come up with stories and if we liked the stories we would turn them into films. Now that set-up has gone. Different writers come to us with stories from which we select what we like. I feel that even after I branched out on my own, after Admi Aur Insaan and Ittefaq, I showed in Daag how a man under certain circumstances is landed with two wives. The treatment was emotional and romantic but what I wanted to say was that fate plays a decisive part in our lives and that we have to make compromises with it. In the film, the three people, who had each other, had to make a compromise and decide to live together. Life is a compromise. In Kabhi Kabhie, I wanted to say that the social binding of the tradition should be broken. When a couple gets married no one has the right to go back to the girl’s past, and drag it into her present. No one does that to a man. If a man has an affair before marriage it is not held against him. Why should we hold it against a woman? Deewar was a very well written script; and in Trishul, I showed the conflict between father and son and the son’s obsession with destroying his father. The film has a new angle of revenge. I think that was the first film with that theme. Others followed. Sometimes people do not see the newness in a commercial film with a big cast. Similarly, Silsila presented a different subject— extra-marital relations, which has been followed by Arth, Yeh Nazdeekiyan and others. So, from ’59 to ’84, in the twenty-five years that have passed, I have come out with new subjects as society changed.

Would you have achieved your success without your brother’s support?

I don’t think so. Whatever I am, I owe to my brother…

Your films are usually clean. You avoid rape and cabarets. How did you bring in these elements in Joshila?

I think that was the only film in which I showed those scenes and I’m not happy about it. The film was made at a time when I was at a crucial stage in my life. I was making the film for Gulshan Rai and something of Johnny Mera Naam must have influenced me. Also in those days I had separated from my brother and was emotionally upset and unbalanced. A stage like that comes in everyone’s life, I suppose. I had this feeling of insecurity. But in all my romantic films I don’t find the need for a villain or a vamp. Life itself plays a role, in a strange way. The theory that directors have is that for any victory there has to be a powerful negative force. I like to make a film which the whole family can enjoy watching together. Even the romantic films should be done with aesthetic taste.

Ittefaq was a well-controlled film. Why do you not make more films in this genre?

I feel a suspense or a comedy film is not a very lasting thing for a filmmaker. The moment the suspense is over, the next audience knows what it is all about. Very few suspense films are made in the world today. Films where basic emotions are involved last longer. Suspense films involve a lot of technical gimmicks. The heart is less there. The basic plot should be emotional, action should come later. We should not have action for action’s sake.

Love is predominant in your films as well as ‘Punjabiness’! Could you comment?

I love to make romantic films. I don’t like crime films. My projects are all based on emotion. In Mashaal I showed slum boys, and the underworld mafia, so action was in-built in to the film. If I take a film like Kabhi Kabhie, the atmosphere changes. You can blame me for the ‘Punjabiness’. I know more about Punjabi music and culture than I know of other languages and this I present because I know it best. I may not be able to handle what I don’t know.

How did you come to make Mashaal, which is neither a commercial film nor an art film?

I liked the basic theme which was expressed in a dialogue. It referred to the reversal of roles. The good had turned bad, and the bad had turned good and their goals changed consequently. The situation is compared to a football game where, after half-time, the goals change. Secondly, I was influenced by the likely emotional impact of Waheeda’s death in the film. I think the central idea is important, both for a commercial filmmaker, and an art-maker, to train the film’s appeal. I had made a soft film, Silsila. I wanted to make a hard, realistic film.

But it was risky?

I felt the film would run. Of course the inherent risk was there. Kabhi Kabhie was a risk. I had a new idea. But a soft film with a small idea, with a small budget, may not look risky. Silsila was risky. It was the first film on extra-marital relations. But it did not seem risky because film was filled with big stars. My mistake was in the casting which made the audience look for something which was not there in the film. If the girls were different in that film, people would have taken the film as any other film.

How do you view reality in Mashaal? Events are apparently shown to extract the maximum dramatic impact.

I don’t make very realistic films, or art films or experimental films. By reality, I mean that everything in the film should look normal. You should feel you know the characters, that you’ve seen or met the people. In Mashaal you should take the sequence into account which shows that his (Dilip Kumar’s) press has been burnt and his house taken away. These are cinematic liberties taken as we want to make him look isolated and alone. The rain delays them. Now I have witnessed the following scene many times. On a rainy night, if you try to get a lift, you are not likely to be successful. The reality is there, but we have taken cinematic liberties. Given the circumstances, I feel the subsequent events can happen. It rains, they go for help and are alone on the road. Please don’t stop to give them a lift. His wife dies. I don’t think the events sound unreal.

How closely do you work with your scriptwriter?

I cant work unless there is a close and complete rapport with anyone. Kabhi Kabhie and Silsila were my ideas which we developed. Deewar was a complete script given by Salim Javed (Saleem Khan and Javed Akhtar). Trishul and Kala Patthar we worked on together. Mashaal was suggested to me by Javed and we discussed and developed it.

Except for Dharmaputra, you have not based any film on a novel.

I feel we don’t have good writers or stories in Urdu or Hindi literature. Copying English novels would be foolish. There is really a dearth of good writers.

What about Vijay Tendulkar, Mohan Rakesh… and others?

When the script takes the shape of a film then one realizes the extent of the risk. Why take the risk when one is spending big money? These scripts are suitable for small-budget films. The scripts have new ideas, but because the film is made in a small budget, the risk is reduced.

What do you think about small-budget films?

There is only good cinema and bad cinema. Everything finally boils down to commerce. A small-budget filmmaker will feel that he can take only so much risk and so he reduces his budget, takes his cast accordingly, calculates his likely earnings and is satisfied. A big-budget filmmaker thinks if he takes small people he will not get the kind of success he is spending for. All filmmakers finally come down to commerce. Even the art filmmakers.

What about the new language of their cinema?

I beg to differ. I have seen the work of Govind Nihalani, Satyajit Ray and Shyam Benegal and they are good but there are some filmmakers whose so-called new language of cinema is an insult to cinema language. Cinema is an art and it is a combination of all the arts. I must have some aesthetic taste for photography, dialogues, clothes, poetry, music, scripts, song, acting, screenplay, locations. I have no right to abuse this art. They just want to be different. People bold enough can change the language of cinema.

Have you seen their films?

I have seen them all. Ardh Satya, Junoon, Ankur, Manthan say something brilliant. They are not abusing language. The subject has to be good. Not the technical shots— that is gimmickry. See the last shots of Ankur. I take my hat off to Benegal. 36 Chowringhee Lane was good. Even Baazar said something.

You have been in the film industry for twenty-five years. What kind of memories do you have?

Twenty-five years is a long time. I have tasted the mixture of good, bad, indifferent, bitter and sweet memories. I have only one love and that is film. I don’t have many diversions except for poetry, music and reading. As long as I am making a film I am on top of the world. I have worked with everybody and it’s a matter of good luck that most of them have been nice and kind to me. I’m not involved in any politics or controversies; in calculations and manipulations. The moment I get my script and my casting, the other world fades out. I have pleasant memories and only a few which are bitter, but they are of a personal nature.

Back to the Movies

Posted on September 18, 2014 by admin

Pragya Tiwari revisits three films she grew up on to find that she can no longer love them as she once did.

Cinema is a gift that keeps on giving. Over time it becomes more than itself— a part of collective and individual memory, personal histories, common language; a phantasmagoria of images that reflect what we know of life, love and loss. There are films we go back to and films that find their way back to us. These journeys also measure the distance we have traveled as people.

The Dreamers

I was an undergraduate in Cardiff when I first saw Bertolucci’s The Dreamers. Set against the 1968 student riots in Paris, the film evoked everything I had learnt to idealize as a child growing up in post-Naxalism Calcutta. It fueled my belief that everything is political, that middle-class morality is anathema to imagination and that poetry is petition. It reminded me that it is important to rebel, to put your life on the line even if it counts for nothing. It also convinced me more than ever that there were answers to be found in the French New Wave and that films should only be seen from the first row. Six years later when I saw the film again it had shifted from being the manifesto of my life to a nostalgic mood piece. I had a more nuanced understanding of the past and of politics by now. This time around I saw Bertolucci less as an uncompromised ideologue and more as an artist who couldn’t tell the follies of youth apart from glory days. It made me question every generation’s need to romanticize its revolutions and wonder if we will ever know the truths of history. It also made me miss the comfort of being able to see the world in solid monochromes.

Pyaasa

I was 13 when I first saw Pyaasa and was instantly in awe of Guru Dutt’s character, Vijay— a great poet first rejected then exploited by an opportunistic, bourgeois society. It was around the time when I had begun to wonder why I identified more with male protagonists in most Hindi films than I did with the women. It must be me, I thought. I am different. Of course I was not. The problem, as I now see, wasn’t with me but with the abysmally shallow portrayal of women in most Hindi films. Even in the eyes of a master director like Dutt, a woman could either be a prostitute-fan or a changeable, greedy heartbreaker— both created as mere circumstances in the hero’s narrative, with no stories of their own. Over time I also began to see through Dutt’s fetishization of suffering, self-pity and victimhood a little. The world is what it is and it will give you ample opportunities to change your narrative. Ye Duniya Agar Mil Bhi Jaaye To Kyaa Hai is beautifully written, composed and shot. But it also signals clinical depression, which you ought to take to a doctor. I certainly wish Dutt had.

Casablanca

When I first saw Casablanca at the age of 18 it broke my heart. I wanted Rick and Ilsa to end up together so bad I began to feel the design of its narrative was intentionally perverse. How could anyone walk away from Bogart? For the life of me I couldn’t understand why Ilsa would leave with her husband, Victor. She still loved Rick, she said, then why should anything else matter? In my understanding of things love was one of life’s great causes and true lovers could never separate of their own volition. But of course, I knew very little of relationships then. Now when I see the film I can fill Ilsa’s silences with things she did not say. That romantic love is a luxury, an indulgent pleasure, so inconsequential in the larger scheme of life. That conscience is a greater cause than love. That loyalty has nothing to do with attraction. That the relationships you desire and the relationships you can sustain are usually not the same. That Casablanca is a place we must all visit but hold on to the letters of transit that will bring us back to reality and our larger purpose eventually.

Inside the Colourful and Disturbing World of Guddu Rangila

Posted on September 5, 2014 by admin

A profile of Guddu Rangila, one of Bhojpuri cinema’s most popular stars, known particularly for the offensive and lewd songs he sings.

On March 28, 2013, as the country was immersed in Holi celebrations, 35 year old Santosh Kumar was shot dead in Devsadih, a village in Bihar’s Sheikhpura district. He died for what may seem like a very strange reason. Kumar protested the playing of lewd Bhojpuri songs during the festivities. As revelers around him drank bhang, splashed colour on one another and danced to music blaring from loudspeakers, Kumar found himself in the middle of a brawl. 10 people were injured. And Kumar lost his life.

On the same day, just 250 kilometres away in the district of Sitamarhi a similar set of events occured. Reports don’t mention the names of the victims or assailants or even the exact location. Just that a man was shot dead. The reason? He had objected to the playing of profane Bhojpuri songs.

Also on the same day, Guddu Rangila released a music album named Chhokari Baaj Holi (A Holi for Womanizers). As expected, it was a smashing hit. Rangila, 38, one of the Bhojpuri music industry’s most well known voices, is famous, or infamous, for the obscene songs he writes and sings. Holi, the festival of colour, is known also to lend itself to a degree of sexual frivolity. Frivolity which appears to challenge, sometimes, ideas that lie at the heart of Indian traditions and society. For instance, some of the most ribald jokes cracked on the festival in the Hindi heartland revolve around the relationship between the devar (brother-in-law) and the bhabhi (sister-in-law).

But Rangila’s forte lies in taking what’s a spot of irreverent fun and pushing it, slyly, across the line that separates it from the disturbing. Last year’s Holi came close on the heels of the outrage that followed the tragic ‘Delhi Rape’ of December 16, 2012. So Rangila recorded for his album a song called Balatkar Hota Hai Rajau (Someone is being raped).

He shot a video too. In the beginning, Rangila is shown standing between two sari-clad women. He delivers a monologue, speaking about how incidents of rape have shot up in the country of late. He talks of love, consent and evil. He sings:

“Ehe haal dekh ke sabke aankh nam ba, sach to ehe ba ki aisan aadmi ke phansiyon ke saza bahut kam ba.

(Everyone‘s eyes are moist after seeing such atrocities/But the truth is that even death by hanging isn’t punishment enough for such people).”

Then, he gets to it. To describing a wife who’s alone at home because her husband is away. As she watches news of rape cases on TV, the maugi (housewife), says Rangila “Ke kuch kuch huwa ta aur ka kehlas ki (Gets aroused and you know what she says)?” He ruffles his hair, leans towards the woman on his left, smiles salaciously. The dholak, tabla and harmonium begin to play, signaling the impending arrival of a refrain you must listen for.

“Dekhat ho par TV ghare chhod ke biwi balatkaar hota hai aye Rajau. Arre uhe khati Holiya me Dewara ke haathe humaar hota aye rajau

(The wife’s watching TV, which broadcasts news of rape cases/And she says that during Holi, my brother-in-law does the same to me).”

The two women on either side of Rangila break into a kind of sedate twist, clapping their hands, wide grins on their faces.

There were widespread protests against the lyrics of Yo Yo Honey Singh after the Delhi Rape, to the point of a petition for the cancellation of his concert. But fewer people know, perhaps, of Guddu Rangila.

Rangila has been a Bhojpuri singer for over 16 years. He has recorded, he says, “more than 250 albums” and sung “more than 2000 songs”. He burst into the consciousness of the Bhojpuri music hearing public with his fifth album Ja Jhar Ke (What A Swagger) in 1999. His most successful albums since, Humra Hau Chaheen (I Want ‘That’), Jeans Dhila Kara (Loosen Your Jeans), Hum Lem (I Will Take) and, of course, Rasdaar Holi (A Saucy Holi) are brimming with sexual allegories that are even more vulgar than they sound. In case you think that isn’t possible here are a few examples. A ‘Mango Frooti’ (a popular processed mango pulp drink) in a Guddu Rangila song implies a pair of breasts, as do ‘lemons’. ‘Laal rasgulla’ (red rasgulla) is a euphemism for a vagina. ‘Maal’ (commodity), in Rangilaspeak is a girl and a pichkari (Spray) a penis and so on… Rangila’s popularity mushroomed over the years and in 2004 T-Series—a big Indian music company that has been a huge beneficiary of his rocketing album sales—christened him the ‘Diamond Star’. He is the only Bhojpuri singer to have been bestowed the title so far. He began singing as well as acting in Bhojpuri movies in 2006, and has since played the lead in five of them. His recently released film Ghayal Sher (Wounded Lion), saw him starring opposite Rani Chatterji, one of the highest rated actresses in the Bhojpuri film industry. Around five years ago, he founded his own company, Sanjivani Entertainment, that earns lakhs of rupees a month via both online and offline album sales as well as YouTube revenue.

***

“I think I should wear a shirt.”

Rangila has unruly shoulder length hair and a rotund chubby face. He has just walked into the centre of the living room of a two-bedroom-hall-kitchen flat in Bhayandar, Mumbai, where he is putting up. He wears a grey vest and faded brown knee-length shorts. On his wrist is a red kalaava (a sacred Hindu thread) and a slim bracelet. There are a couple of astrological rings on his fingers. But the most striking thing about his appearance is a long fake pearl necklace that hangs from his neck, stopping just above his navel. The vest is tight for him, especially around his bulging stomach. It also reveals an immense amount of chest hair. Interestingly, he chose to walk in wearing just that and a pearl necklace and thought of a shirt only when he realized there was a photographer in the room.

He looks around the room, hoping for a reply. Besides the photographer and me there is also his assistant, but no one says anything. He disappears back inside the house.

His assistant stares blankly into space. He has shoulder length hair too, only freshly combed. “I am Mritunjaya Mastana,” he says, when I introduce myself. “I am Guddu Bhaiyya‘s (Bhaiyya means elder brother) manager, shishya (disciple), accountant and assistant.” Mastana accompanies Rangila to live shows. He opens for him with bhajans, or devotional songs. “I charge Rs. 10,000 for an hour,” says Mastana. He says Rangila charges Rs. 50,000 for an hour. He performs for about three hours at every show.

“Bhaiyya‘s live shows are something else,” Mastana continues. “People go mad. Someone’s head gets smashed, someone falls from the rooftop. The tickets range from Rs. 100 to Rs. 500.”

Rangila reappears wearing a dark blue shirt with the first two buttons left open. He settles on a black rexine sofa, opens a packet of Miraag khaini (chewing tobacco), pours and crushes some of its contents with his thumb and declares, to no one in particular, “I like eating readymade khaini.” He puts the tobacco in his mouth, dusts his hands and sinks deeper into the sofa.

On a small table to his right is a packet of Marlboro lights and a tall glass with crushed cigarette butts. Under it is a black motorcycle helmet. On its back are printed the words: “Hira Handa”.

This is Rangila’s world, one he carries with him wherever he goes. His wife and children live in Dwarka, in Delhi. But Rangila spends a lot of time outside the city, especially in Mumbai and Patna. Here, stuck on the wall of a rented apartment with uneven adhesive tape is a poster of his film Ghayal Sher. Rangila is at the centre, looking furious, blood dripping from his forehead, his fist raised. “Nayak, Diamond Star, Gayak Guddu Rangila (Actor, Diamond Star, Singer Guddu Rangila),” it reads on top. On the bottom: “Nirmatri: Deepa Yadav (Director: Deepa Yadav)” has been printed in small font.

On another wall are portraits of the Hindu gods Lakshmi and Ganesh and the Sikh guru Gobind Singh. A plaque, larger than any of these portraits, hangs next to them.

“Shree Guddu Rangila ji, Bhojpuri gaayak, Diamond star. Aapko yeh samman samaaj me utkrusht karyakon ke liye sanstha dwara sammanit kiya jaa raha hai (Shri Guddu Rangila ji, Bhojpuri Singer, Diamond Star. This respect has been accorded to you by the committee to honour you for your uplifting social work),” it reads.

On a tiny plastic stool in the room is a VCD Player with a few VCDs lying untidily on it. VCDs with videos of Ranglia’s own music albums—Lahanga Lutayil Holi Mein (She Was Robbed Of Her Skirt, On Holi), and Chhituaa Ke Didi, Tani Pyaar Kare De (Chhituaa’s Sister, Let Me Love You) as well as those of another Bhojpuri singer, Khesari Lal. What sticks out is the only non-Bhojpuri album in the lot: 50 Super Hit Songs of Kumar Sanu.

***

Before Guddu Rangila became ‘Diamond star’, before his risqué numbers began topping all the Bhojpuri music charts, his name was Sidheshwara Nand Giri. And Giri wanted to sing “soft romantic songs. Just like Kumar Sanu”. Sanu, from the state of West Bengal, neighbouring Bihar, was a leading Bollywood playback singer in the nineties, with innumerable hits and awards to his name. Incidentally, he too had changed his name— from Kedarnath Bhattacharya. He has since then faded into obscurity while Giri’s star continues to rise, even if not for “soft romantic songs”.

Giri was born in Chainpur, a hamlet in Bihar’s Siwan district. He went to a co-educational school where, “girls used to sit in the front and boys in the back”. Rangila remembers that only the students who did well in class by studying hard could talk to the girls, on the pretext of “exchanging notes”. Giri wasn’t one of them. “Nakal bhi akal se hota hai na (Even for cheating you need brains, right)? Everyone used to memorize the answers. I used to memorize the pages which contained the answers in the book I would cheat from,” he smiles. “I got decent marks from the first to the tenth grade— solely by cheating.”

Giri started to sing when he was 11. “I began by singing Ashtjaam songs, where you have to continuously sing ‘Hare Rama Hare Krishna’. And even in Ashtjaam, I used to sing like Kumar Sanu. What’s there in your mind is not easy to forget,” he says. “Then I began singing songs for Ram Leela and Shiv Leela (plays held during festivals celebrated in honour of the gods Ram and Shiv). So I slowly started getting offers for bhakti (devotional) songs.”

A few years later, Giri switched to singing kirtan (a genre of devotional songs), but this wasn’t his forte. “Kirtan isn’t just about singing songs. It requires you to act and do comedy. I saw I wasn’t able to do it properly, so I stopped singing kirtan,” he says. Then he sang nirgun gaan— monotheistic devotional Bhojpuri folk songs about one God who is formless. “But I saw I would be ‘medium’ (not very good) in nirgun gaan as well. So I stopped singing that too.”

Meanwhile, his father wasn’t happy he was wasting his time singing. “My father wanted me to become an SP (Superintendent of Police), DSP (District Superintendent of Police) or a (District) Collector.” So Giri enrolled in a college. But he finally left Chainpur for Delhi in 1993 at the age of 17. He wanted to be a Bhojpuri singer who sang for T-Series.

“At that time,” says Rangila. “Swarg me jaana aur T-Series me gaana ek hi baat tha (Singing for T-Series was like to going to heaven).”

“I had hit upon an idea,” he says. “In those days, dholak and jhaal (traditional Indian instruments) were prominent instruments in Bhojpuri music. ‘Musical’ nahin tha us samay (There was no concept of ‘musical’). So I thought, ‘Let’s do a new thing. Let’s sing ‘musical’ Bhojpuri’.” ‘Musical’ is what Rangila calls songs which are composed using contemporary Western instruments “such as the guitar, the keyboard or the mouth organ”.

In 1995, Giri went to the T-series office in Noida on the outskirts of Delhi. He said to the guard at the front door that he wanted to meet Gulshan Kumar (the T-Series’ founder). He wasn’t allowed to pass. “What else would the watchman have said?” says Rangila. “‘Who are you? What are you worth?’ It’s a company where so many musicians would have gone looking a chance to make it. But he didn’t let me enter, so that was the end of it.”

He adds: “On my journey back, Poore raaste gaali dete hua aaye T-Series ko (I kept on cursing T-Series during my entire journey).” Giri didn’t approach any other recording company. “T-Series hi sab kuch tha (T-Series was everything),” he reiterates.

To support himself financially, Giri took up a job in a Delhi garment shop, trimming extraneous threads from clothes. Every day at work, he would “remove threads from 30 to 40 shirts”. He earned Rs. 750 per month. Simultaneously, he kept singing ashtjaam and kirtan songs at local performances. In 1995, at one such show at the Sagarpur Shiv Mandir in Delhi, Giri held his own against a kirtan singer who was notorious for heckling his competitors. At the end of the show, Sharma (Rangila doesn’t remember his first name), an owner of a fledgling music company called Ganga Music, gave Rangila his card. “I thought: Now the company guy himself is calling me! Now I’ll become a star!”

Giri reached the address given on Sharma’s card. He had expected something like the T-Series building and was dejected when he realized that Sharma’s office was merely a section of his modest home. “But I was sure I wanted to sing songs my way. So I told him to do a ‘musical’,” says Rangila. There was a catch. Producing a ‘musical’ album would cost Rs. 40,000 and Giri was a new singer. So Sharma made him sign a bond for Rs. 40,000, which Giri would repay by recording his first four albums with Ganga Music for free.

The means for producing an album were in place. But Sidheshwara Nand Giri, known as Guddu Giri then, needed a new name that would appeal to a younger audience. “Guddu was my pet name back in my village,” says Rangila. “Lekin blood mein jo ho jaata hai naa ki humko aisa geet gaa kar youth ko khush karna hai (But there’s this thing that happens in your blood, right? That you want to sing songs that make youngsters happy).” The big Bollywood hit running in the theatres at the time was Rangeela (meaning ‘Colourful’). “That Rangeela film had done quite well,” Rangila recalls. “Toh lagaa diye (So I took the title for my surname).”

Rangila’s first release was titled Jawaani Ka Toofan (The Storm of Youth). “Log 100% sure hote hain na, main 300% sure tha ki yeh album hit hoga (People are 100% sure sometimes, right? But I was 300% sure that my album would be a hit),” he says. According to Rangila, the album must have sold more than “1.5 lakh copies”. “Uske baad sapna poora hua (After that, my dream got fulfilled).”

Rangila recorded his next three albums with Ganga Music in a span of two months. But they couldn’t surpass the success of Jawaani Ka Toofan. They were all, as he puts it, “medium”. But it was Rangila’s fifth album, Ja Jhar Ke, that was his big ticket. Rangila had already recorded four albums with Ganga Music for free, and now was the time to cash in. But Sharma refused. “Jhagdaa ho gaya Ganga company se (I fought with Ganga company),” he says. “He wanted that I keep on singing for free for him. Par tab tak T-Series ko bhanak lag gayaa thaa (But by that time T-Series had noticed me).”

In 1998, Rangila re-recorded Ja Jhaar Ke with T-Series. He was paid Rs. 25,000. “Back then 25,000 was worth what 25 lakhs is worth now.” He also re-recorded his first four albums with T-Series. Rangila was a singer with T-Series now. “Phir toh kya tha? Phir toh raaj chalne laga humaara (Then what? Then I started ruling the roost).”

***

The story of Bhojpuri music, in our times, is inextricably linked with the story of Bhojpuri cinema. In 2003, the Bhojpuri film industry was enthused with the release of Sasura Bada Paisawala. Made on a budget of Rs. 35 lakh, the film made more than Rs. 4.5 crore at the box-office. Since then, the Bhojpuri film industry has evolved from being a cottage industry to a behemoth that makes more than 100 films a year, hosts its own award shows, and has enlisted big Bollywood stars like Amitabh Bachchan, Ajay Devgn and Hema Malini to act in its films. Avijit Ghosh, the author of Cinema Bhojpuri, examines the coming-into-its-own of the industry in a Times of India article titled Mofussil’s Revenge. “The Bhojpuri film industry’s revival isn’t only about a regional genre finding its market,” he writes. “The [hinterland] audience seems to be telling mainstream Bollywood: We want our own smells and sights in the movies. As in post-Mandal politics, regions and communities are asserting themselves through cinema that suits their aesthetics.” As Bollywood turned its gaze westwards as well as towards a more urban multiplex audience, Bhojpuri cinema took over some of the ground it ceded. It fulfilled the desire of a section of Indian rural and rurban populace for entertainment rooted in the hinterland. Bhojpuri music—both film and non-film music—is the product of a similar demand and an expression that most from its home state can easily identify with.

Also, the market for Bhojpuri music and cinema isn’t just people living in Bihar, but also many migrant workers in states such as Delhi and Maharashtra. These songs remind them of what home sounds like in a foreign land. “Jiska des, uska bhes (A person’s culture is determined by his or her homeland),” says Pankaj Thakur, who hails from Katihar, in Bihar, and works in Pune as a cook. “Maharashtrian people understand Marathi songs. Similarly Biharis understand Bihari songs. Even now I have around 300 songs on my mobile.”

This Bihari diaspora accounts for a more widespread audience for the songs of singer-songwriters like Rangila. Songs which are now being rediscovered on the internet. In the last few years, aided by YouTube, Bhojpuri songs have re-surfaced online and acquired cult status. For segments of the Indian and international urban audience, comprising both Biharis and non-Biharis, these songs—owing to their sub-standard production qualities and crude lyrics—have become a source of amusement and derision. Surabhi Sharma, the documentary filmmaker whose documentary Bidesia in Bambai explores the lives of Bihari migrants in Mumbai empowered by Bhojpuri music, finds this sort of simplistic outlook problematic. “If you see singers like Guddu Rangila or Rampat Haraami (another popular singer of risque Bhojpuri numbers), I will be still wary of dismissing them as misogynistic,” she says. “Of course, there’s a misogynistic angle to it. There’s a desire being created out of objectifying a woman. That is central. But the reason why a VCD or a YouTube link to a Guddu Rangila song really looks irksome and disturbing is because it exists outside of any context. There’s a lot more that you can listen to in songs beyond the literal text. To pull out the lyrics of the song and try and evaluate the entire musical tradition through it, that becomes a huge problem.”

True. It could be argued, however, that it’s not the VCDs or YouTube videos that place these musical traditions out of context as much as singers like Rangila themselves, simply with the lyrics they choose to pen, which alters the nature of the song drastically.

Playful irreverence, often bordering on vulgarity, has been an ingredient of folk songs that have been part of the Indian hinterland’s longest held traditions. For example, Gaari (derived from the Hindi word gaali, which translates into ‘swear’) songs are integral to Bihari weddings. One of the many rituals in such a wedding is a Dwar Puja— performed to welcome the groom as he arrives with his baraat (the groom’s family) at the bride’s door. The bride is led to the mandap by her friends and cousins and they sing cheeky, coarse songs, flouting ideas of conventional familial propriety, to taunt the groom and his family. The songs are quite unsparing and target especially the bride’s future father-in-law. In fact, the 1986 Bhojpuri film, Dulha Ganga Paar Ke, contains one such gaari song, Chala Sakhi Mil Ke, which opens with the lines: “Swaagat me gaari sunayin, aa chala sakhi mil ke/ Inka ke langte nachayin, aa chala sakhi mil ke (We will welcome with swearing/ Come friends, all together now/ We will make them dance naked/ Come friends, all together now)… ”

This tradition helps see the gender roles in a renewed light—here the women are assertive and vocal—and cautions one against the easy sanctimony listeners often adopt while hearing anything that’s even remotely bawdy. Gaari songs are examples of how perceived vulgarity can function instead as an agent of creativity, possibly, and even social cohesiveness or simply great fun.

What becomes unsettling, however, is when the explicit content has sprung up not purely out of tradition or a creative urge, but from a need to pander to the base demands of as large an audience as it is possible to usurp— for profit.

Manoj Tiwari, a prominent actor and singer in the Bhojpuri film industry (he played the protagonist in Sasura Bada Paisawala), has often lashed out against obscene Bhojpuri songs. “I have always maintained that our state should have its own censor board,” says Tiwari. “So that if there are people who are singing vulgar songs then someone will stop them. I feel such songs must be banned. Songs can make you laugh but they should not shame someone. And if there are people who are singing those songs, then they should be punished.”

“I am not in favour of banning anything,” says Avijit Ghosh. “Banning books, music, films… Once a culture of ban starts then you don’t know what to ban and what not to. So this whole trajectory of debate goes into a different realm.”

Talking specifically about Rangila, Tiwari says, “He has also sung some good songs. But he couldn’t understand which songs of his were liked the most. 1998, 1999 was a good phase of Guddu Rangila, when he had sung Ja Jhar Ke. It was that song that made him big. Ja Jhar Ke didn’t have any vulgarity as such. But the problem was he saw it is a vulgar song— so he couldn’t understand what made him successful.”

Tiwari also feels that such songs project an image of the state and the language that is misleading. “These songs cause a lot of harm to the Bhojpuri region. For instance, I was doing a show on Life Ok, Welcome – Baazi Mehmaan Nawazi Ki, which had a lot of actresses like Ragini Khanna, Negar Khan. And whenever I used to talk about Bhojpuri and whenever someone wanted to put me down, people gave me examples of those (vulgar) songs,” says Tiwari. “But, the fact is, there are also many singers (in the state) such as Bharat Sharma, Sharda Sinha, who have sung many great songs, and their fans are all over the world.”

Kalpana Patowary, who hails from Assam, is another famous mainstream Bhojpuri singer. Like other mainstream Bhojpuri singers, she also began her career by singing a lot of songs with overt sexual connotations. But, unlike others, she didn’t get stereotyped and managed to diversify her oeuvre. One way she did this was by singing different kinds of songs in various languages— Hindi, English, Marathi, and a host of other regional languages. She’s appeared in Coke Studio’s Season 3 and has performed for music festivals such as the Rajasthan International Folk Festival and the NH7 Weekender. In 2012, she released The Legacy of Bhikhari Thakur, a Bhojpuri folk album based on the songs of the celebrated Bhojpuri playwright, Bhikhari Thakur. But, today, 11 years later, Patowary finds herself disillusioned with the very music industry that catapulted her to fame: “Today the state of (Bhojpuri) music is such that often I have to leave the studio, refusing to perform. I have to return the money. I have to leave a lot of songs just because of the lyrics,” says Patowary in the documentary, 50 Years of Bhojpuri Cinema. “Recently, there was a song where the lyrics were about a crooked button on a blouse and it also mentioned the word petticoat. I felt that was cheap. Later they changed the lyrics though. If you want to show sexual pleasure then of course you should, because it’s a part of our life, but it should be shown in an aesthetic manner.”

What is the reason for such songs continuing to flood the market then? One answer could be that the social, economic and cultural realties of more affluent and educated Biharis have little in common with their poorer counterparts. “Do you think the white-collared Biharis—the IAS officers, the management executives—identify with Bihar at all? They are not very comfortable with their Bihari identity,” says Ratnakar Tripathy, Senior Research Fellow at the Asian Development Research Institute. Tripathy believes the “white-collared Biharis refuse to support Bhojpuri” as a language and culture, and “when someone does it, they rubbish them”. He says: “It’s a very strange relationship between the lower classes and upper classes in Bihar. The Bihari elite doesn’t patronize Bhojpuri and the ones who patronize Bhojpuri tend to vulgarize it, at times. So this is a cultural dead-end.”

Patowary adds: “I have seen in the towns of Bihar that the younger generation says: ‘In our homes, we speak Hindi. We don’t know Bhojpuri.’”

In 2009, when Sneha Khanwalkar and Varun Grover went to Bihar to research sounds and music from the state for Gangs of Wasseypur (Khanwalkar was the music director, Grover the lyricist), they did so, according to Grover, “with a blank slate”. While digging, they discovered how the local popular culture had shaped and dictated the aspirations of Bihar’s youngsters. Grover has an interesting story.

When Khanwalkar and Grover met the 16 year old Deepak Kumar for the first time, he was a “very simple kid, very timid. He wasn’t even sure if he could sing. He had come with his Guruji, and was carrying a harmonium,” remembers Grover. “In fact, he wasn’t even a chela (disciple), because his Guruji had said that, ‘He has just started singing. It would take him years.’” As Guruji’s more experienced disciples auditioned in front of Khanwalkar, Kumar stood quietly in a corner. Despite his Guru’s reservation, Khanwalkar persuaded him to sing. He said he would sing a song of Pawan Singh (a popular mainstream Bhojpuri singer, known for a song named Lollypop Lage Lu or ‘You Look Like A Lollypop’). Khanwalkar liked his voice and Kumar ended up singing two songs in Gangs of Wasseypur I: Moora and Humni Ke Nagariya Chhoda Re Baba.

Khanwalkar and Grover met Kumar six months later for another recording, when Gangs of Wasseypur I’s music had already been released. By this time Kumar had become a ‘star’ of sorts in Bihar. “He came with the CD, and he said, ‘Bhaiyya mera na apna CD, apna album aa gaya hai (I have got my own CD, my own album released).’ The first album he got as a 16 year old was called Petticoat mein… some Bhojpuri word, I don’t remember,” says Grover. “So that’s what, no? The moment you become popular, you get to do this kind of lewd stuff. He didn’t get to do another album like Gangs… though he had proved himself in that kind of genre, that kind of music. All he still got to do was this kind of crude stuff. And he grabbed that opportunity.”

***

Naigaon is one of Mumbai’s Northern suburbs but the ease with which it flouts most Mumbai rules makes you wonder whether it’s a part of the city at all. For instance, all the auto-rickshaws at Naigaon station ply on a ‘sharing basis’. When you hail one, the driver refuses to budge till he has three passengers seated at the back and two at the front, including himself. As you drive off, cramped, you see many open spaces— mostly lush green fields. The buildings, just a few storeys high, are nowhere near Mumbai’s skyscrapers, but they look as though they’ve been around for a while. The roads are rocky and uneven. There are not too many people or cars around. In fact, Naigaon could easily pass of as suburban Patna.

It’s here that Guddu Rangila chose to buy a flat. It is a modest space with just one bedroom, a living room, a kitchen and a bathroom. It’s been over a month since my last interview with Rangila who’s still asleep even though it’s late in the afternoon. Instead, eyeing me suspiciously from his perch on a couch in the living room is a man wearing a white vest that clings to his protruding stomach and a pair of blue baseball shorts. Mritunjaya Mastana keeps bustling in and out of the room, looking busy, putting things in order before “Bhaiyyaji” wakes up.

Rangila has moved in recently. The furniture in the living room seems awkwardly arranged. The couch with the man in the blue shorts is at one end while another similar sofa is placed as far away from this one as possible— so that people seated on each would have to yell at each other to be heard. A table with a glass top is sandwiched between this other sofa and a TV set. Huge posters of new or upcoming Guddu Rangila movies take up most of two of the walls: Sasuro Kabhi Damaad Rahal (Because The Father-in-Law Was Also Once The Son-in-Law), and Piritiya Kahe Ke Lagawla (Why Did You Fall In Love With Me?).

“Aap kyun aaye hain yahan? (Why have you come here)?” asks the man in the blue shorts.

“Interview ke liye (For an interview),” I say.

“Usse humara kya fayeda hoga (How will it help us)?”

While switching on my laptop, I say something about the importance of knowing where an artist comes from and what bearing this may have on his work.

“Yeh Apple ka sign mein light jalta hai kya (Does the Apple sign glow)?” He stares intently at the laptop. “Shining bahut hai ismein. Lagta hai radium laga hai (It shines a lot. I think it has radium).”

I nod.

A few minutes later, he asks for my laptop and notices that I have jotted down our conversation on a word-file. He seems uncomfortable with this at first, but eventually this gets us talking.

His name is Deepak Mandal. He heads a “tours and travels” company in Mumbai. Before that, he says, “Main naacha karta tha (I used to dance).” He smiles slightly, stealing a quick glance at the bedroom, where Rangila is sleeping. “In Kalpana Patowary’s group.” He had wanted to act in films, but had learnt that it would cost him Rs. 20,000. So he decided to try his hand at the transport business instead.

A few minutes later, Mastana runs into the living room, looking very harried. “Bhaiyyaji uth gaye hain. Unko cigarette chahiye (Bhaiyyaji has woken up. He needs a cigarette),” he says. Mastana manages to find one and rushes back out. Ten minutes later, Rangila enters. Mandal vacates his couch for him and sits next to me. Rangila’s eyes are puffed. He looks out of the balcony and lights a cigarette.

An odd silence floats through the room. The interview begins. Mandal remains sitting next to me like a watchful bodyguard, peeking curiously at times into my list of questions, often answering, out of turn, questions put to Rangila.

But this isn’t the only thing that makes striking up a conversation with Guddu Rangila difficult. Rangila has three ways of dealing with tough queries. Either he remains non-committal, like a politician, and says: Apni apni soch hai (Each person has his or her own point of view).

Or, when feeling more verbose, he comes up with bizarre non-sequiturs. Here are a few of the most commonly employed:

Mard ko dard nahin hota (A man doesn’t feel any pain).

Dulhan wahi jo piya mann bhaaye (An ideal bride is the one who pleases the husband).

Chalti ka naam gaadi hai, nahin chala ton kabaadi (If it works, and moves, it’s a car, if it doesn’t then it’s rubbish).

He utters such sentences, often out of context, as if they’re the smartest one-liners on earth, then sinks back into silence.

As a third option, as if this wasn’t enough in itself to make you flee, he loves to reinterpret Hindu mythology. He frequently cites absolutely irrelevant tales of the gods Shiv and Parvati or—and this is an obsession—how we are living in the wrong yug (age), and how kalyug is utterly rotten, to validate his actions and beliefs.

We begin by talking about his detractors. “People who are above the age of 50 don’t like my songs,” says Rangila. “In fact they shouldn’t even be alive. They should all die. They are just a burden on this planet.” That simple. “They would like all songs related to Gods,” he continues. “But they won’t have anything to do with girls. So, I tell them that in your age, you would have also played a lot of gilli ganda, done a lot of things. Now you should sing bhajan and earn punya.” Gilli danda, a popular Indian game akin to cricket, is a euphemism for sex for the purposes of this conversation.

I plod on. Rangila’s songs and videos are obsessed with a woman’s physical attributes. She is an object to be in awe of, possessed or lampooned. There are constant references to her body parts, how she’s being a tease, or how the male (in most cases this is Rangila himself) will win her over finally. But that could be just Rangila the performer, playing to the gallery. What does Rangila, the person, believe in, really, when it comes to the opposite sex?

These pearls of wisdom:

“A girl and a boy can never be friends. If there has to be friendship, then it should be either between boys or between girls.”

“You fall in love only after you are married. Anything that’s before marriage is meaningless.”

“You should love whom you get married to. What kind of love is there before marriage? I didn’t even know of something called a girlfriend before marriage. Anyway, it’s a wrong system. What’s the need?”

For someone who writes and sings the most lewd lyrics imaginable, Rangila’s personal outlook is surprisingly conservative. He was married in 2002. “It was an arranged marriage,” he says and appears reticent when I ask him for further details. He has two children.

“I fall in love every day,” he says. “I had closed pyaar ka (love’s) factory in 2002. There’s no love in this world. There’s only selfishness.”

‘Closed love’s factory’? I ask him to elaborate.

“In 2002, in my album Humra Hau Chaheen, there was a dialogue: Tell me one relationship, which doesn’t revolve around selfishness? When a girl is born to parents, they are not that happy as opposed to when a boy is born to them. Why is it like that? Isn’t that selfishness? Because a girl will get married and go away while the boy will take care of them even when they are old. The love between a husband and wife is also centered on selfishness. Why don’t a boy and boy get married? See, when it comes to husband and wife, if you don’t earn do you think the wife will care about you? She wouldn’t. You would have to earn. Isn’t that selfishness? If you won’t earn, what would she eat? A girl gets married to a boy because she can’t earn. There’s selfishness everywhere.”

I ask Rangila about his own marriage again, and whether he believes it follows this principle. “When you get a lot of love and respect outside, you won’t get the same at home, and vice versa,” is all he says. “Because if you’re getting a lot of adoration from outsiders you won’t have time to devote to your family.”

When I ask him about the obscenity in his songs, he comes up with the strangest suggestion. “Recently, I sang a song, Ghus gayil, phans gayil, adas gayil (It went inside, got stuck and stayed there),” says Rangila. “People would think that it’s vulgar. What do they know what I have written? I have actually written this song about Asaram Bapu. It’s absolutely clear.” I stare at him, puzzled. Rangila has a smile playing on his lips.

I ask him about another song. The lyrics go: Khol ke dikha de gori laal rasgulla, toh ke karayeb hum dudhwa ke kulla (Show me your red rasgullah/ Then I will make you gargle with milk).

“What does that mean?” I ask him.

“This song is not mine. I don’t think I remember this song,” says Rangila.

I tell him the video of this song on YouTube features him and also the vocals are unmistakably his.

Rangila’s reply: “No song is bad. The kind of sunglasses you wear determines the kind of song you will see. If you wear red sunglasses and think you will see black, then that’s not possible. If you wear green, you can’t see white.”

Rangila’s songs are disturbing not simply because they are hyper-sexualized and cater to his audience’s baser instincts, but because they eschew any female participation. In most of his songs, there are no female vocals. The only role for a woman in a Guddu Rangila music video is to evade the advances of a plethora of men. She is on guard, and never voices her opinion. An unsettling power equation to say the least. We never really know what a woman is thinking about when Rangila talks about her body parts, expresses his discontentment about the fact that she might not be a virgin, or points towards her clothes and demands that she takes them off.

This absolute absence of consent—or conversation—in his songs is telling. Take Ae Tengra Ke Didi (Hey, Tengra’s elder sister), from his album, 80 Na 85 Humra 90 Chaheen (I don’t want 80 or 85. I want 90), Rangila places his fingers close to the girl’s breast and sings: Nibuwa gotail bate ras khacha khoch ba, gadrol jawani dekhi man humar gach ba (The ripe lemon has enough juice, and seeing your nubile body makes me happy). The camera zooms in. All this, while the girl makes it quite clear that she’s not interested— resisting his advances, rolling her eyes. Rangila appears to acknowledge this for a moment. He sings: Jabbe hoi man tor tabbe chahi (I want it only when you are ready).

But, soon after, he changes his mind: Prince guddu maani nahi chahe hoi phaansi, ihe baate pahile tor ijjat ke naasi. Guddu ke jab mann hoi tabbe chahi (Prince Guddu will not listen to you even if that means he’s hanged, he will be the first one to ravage your honour. Guddu will get it when he wants it). At the end of the song, the girl finally lets herself be heard. And she says, “Jab na maanbe tab chal (If you don’t agree, then what’s the point. Let’s go)”. A thought here. What if she had refused?
I ask him about this and the recurring imagery in his songs and videos— of a woman hounded by him or by hordes of men, trying desperately to resist their advances, then yielding. “It might be the thinking of people who criticize me. The world doesn’t revolve around what some people think about my song. Don’t you think?” Rangila retorts. He is opaque, calm, his face almost expressionless.

Then, his voice booms: “Ladki cheeze aisa hai, sab koi dekhta hai (A girl is such a thing, everyone looks). Is there any harm in looking? God has made something good so that it may be seen. Of all the pleasures in the world the most beautiful is nain bhog (the pleasure you get from looking at things). If I don’t see, then that means I am insulting her. God will feel bad. He will think, ‘I made someone so beautiful and no one is looking at her’.”

It’s not so much the outburst that’s disturbing as the way he says it. I wait for Rangila to break into a chuckle at the end. He doesn’t. He is staring at me with great sincerity, with an almost grim demeanour. His manner resembles that of a priest at a sermon.

In the last couple of years, Rangila’s songs have begun featuring a few female playback singers at times. He is unhappy about this: “When I used to sing everything by myself it was better. I used to sing the female parts as well. Now, people’s points of view have changed,” says Rangila. “Lekin woh faaltu hai (But that is rubbish).”

“I have written a line on this too,” says Rangila, when I bring him back to the subject of his portrayal of women and women’s issues. “Original balatkaari ke yadi ye duniya me talaasi huile to sabse pahile dewara sabke phaansi bhaile (If there’s a search for the ‘original’ rapists in this world, then brothers-in-law will be the first ones to be hanged).” He hates brothers-in-law apparently. I mention that he has a similar reference in his song Balatkaar Hota Aye Rajau for last year’s Holi. “Shuraat toh wahi sab karta hai (They are the ones who start it),” He says.“Now, a bhabhi (sister-in-law) is like a mother. But people of kalyug are such that they think that the bhabhi belongs half to them. This is wrong. This system is wrong. How can you have fun with your bhabhi?”

Kalyug and brothers-in-law. And the system. That’s what it boils down to. “I merely sing about what’s happening in kalyug,” says Rangila. “Accha hotaa hai to accha gaate hain, kharaab hotaa hai to kharaab gaate hain (If good is happening then I will sing about good things, if something bad is happening then I will sing about bad things).”

He orders an assistant to get him paan (betel leaf). The assistant, who was listening at the door so far, breaks out of his reverie. He goes into the kitchen and returns with a glass of water. “I had asked for paan not paani (water)),” says Rangila. He shakes his head, distraught. I wonder if he will bring up kalyug again. He doesn’t. The minion, flustered by now, runs out to find paan.

Rangila carries on: “I just say what happens. Even Manoj [Tiwari] sang a song… I think the lines were Goriya Apna Dupatta Sambhaal (Fair girl, Mind Your Stole)… I don’t remember exactly. So, he’s saying what’s happening,” says Rangila. “What’s wrong in this? If there’s an odhni (stole), you should cover yourself with it. You are sending a message.”

I ask him what message he had intended to convey with the lines: Bada jaldi badh gayil goriya tohaar mango frooty re, jaldi batawa hum se ki ras kab choosi re (Girl, your Mango Frooty has grown too soon. Tell me quickly, when will I be able to suck its juice)? “There’s a lot of message in that song,” he says. “Now everything can’t be explained. Paani paani ka dosh hota hai (A Hindi idiom that roughly translates into: Every kind of water has its own unique fault).”

“Explain?” I ask him

“It’s better that you don’t understand.”

I coax him. Finally, he says: “You can understand it like this: “Umar ke hisaab se sab kuch badhta ghatta hai. Usi ke anusaar badhna ghattna chahiye. Usse zada kuch bhi badhega ghatega toh wo bura kaha jayega (According to one’s age everything increases or decreases in size. And things should increase or decrease according to age only. If things increase or decrease more than one’s age entitles them to, then they will be criticized).”

There’s that saintly expression again. Rangila is now smiling benignly.

There’s more. “For the festival of Holi, girls should only put colours on girls, same with boys. If a boy puts colour on a girl, it’s wrong. I don’t like that system,” he says. This, despite the fact that almost all his Holi songs milk the sexual flippancy that’s synonymous with the festival. In one of his most curious videos, Kutta Pos Diha (Domesticate a dog by my name), a man is on all fours, barking like a dog while Rangila has a leash around his neck, and is patting his head. There’s also a girl, naturally, surrounded by a bunch of men. In a matter of seconds the music kicks in and everyone begins to gyrate vigorously (except, well, the man on all fours). Rangila sings: “Holi me personal maal bhi ho jaala sarkaari. Abki Holi chahe chale goli, Likh ke kahin khons diha. Taara haun me na rang lagawni tah, mora naam pe kutta pos diha (During Holi even personal belongings become public. In this Holi, even if bullets fire, write this down somewhere: If I don’t put a colour right ‘there’, you can domesticate a dog on my name).”

Mandal, unable to hold himself any longer, interrupts the conversation with his two bits: “If people didn’t like his songs, then how did they become such huge hits? What Bhaiyya said was right— that if you think about the song Ghus gayil, phans gayil, adas gayil (the song “about Asaram Bapu”) in some incorrect way, then where will your mind wander? If people don’t like the song then why are they watching it? They should ignore it.”

This idea, that Rangila sings as he does not for gain but for the people, has been asserted by the singer himself. In song, no less. Rangila sang Bhaasa Bhojpuri Ke (The language of Bhojpuri) which had the line: “Bhaasa Bhojpuri ke uthayi kaise ho? Sabbe suna ta hi oohi to sunayi kaise ho (How do I uplift the language of Bhojpuri? If everyone listens only to those [profane] songs, then how can I make them listen to something else)?”

But today he contradicts this thought. In all these hours spent with him, there has been only one brief moment of honest exchange.

“I wanted to sing like Kumar Sanu,” says Rangila. “But I saw this wasn’t possible, so you have to find a way somewhere. What matters is what the public likes. Public is janta janardhan (almighty). You sing for them, not for yourself.”

But did he ever try to sing those soulful romantic numbers he had dreamt of singing as Giri? To sing “like Kumar Sanu”? “To produce a another album like Bewafa Sanam (‘Unfaithful Lover’, one of Rangila’s rare successful romantic albums) it would take me anywhere close to 6 months,” he lets out. “On the other hand, if I need to make a ‘double meaning’ album, even 15 days are more than enough. In 15 days, I can write around 8 such songs, record them. Bewafa Sanam took around 3 months to write. Because every line has to be powerful. No line can be less powerful than the previous; it has to come from the heart.” He isn’t sermonizing now. He falls silent after this.

Then: “Till 2010, the trend of ‘double meaning’ songs was okay. But now it has become too much. In fact, kalyug itself is ganda (dirty). If we were really pure we would never have been born in kalyug.”

I ask him to define kalyug. “Kalyug is the yug when what we planned doesn’t come to be, and what happens instead is something we didn’t think of in our wildest imaginings,” he says. “It’s the yug where what you’re seeing isn’t really taking place. And what’s happening actually— you cannot possibly see. Don’t you think this is unfortunate?”

It is. As is Rangila in kalyug. Stuck between Kumar Sanu and his ‘double meaning’ songs, between his khaini and his Marlboro Lights, between himself and Sidheshwara Nand Giri.

Our conversation comes to an end. He leaves. Mandal follows him to his room to discuss some business. Mastana enters the living room and plops down on the sofa where Rangila was seated. Dusk has settled in. Since no light was turned on during the interview the living room has grown steadily darker and through the darkness I hear Mastana’s voice: Har kalakaar ka alag alag rutba hota hai, khwahish hota hai (Every artist has his own style, his own forte, his own desires).” I nod silently, still jotting down Rangila’s definition of kalyug.

Then:

“Be it Manoj Tiwari or Pawan Singh, no one has been marked ‘Diamond’ yet in the world of singing. But he’s a ‘Diamond Star’.”

There is a pause. Then Mastana asks me pointedly: “You understand what a diamond is, don’t you?”

Q – TBIP Tête-à-Tête

Posted on August 15, 2014 by admin

Q loves to subvert things. Often, without a cause. He believes wholeheartedly in shock for shock’s sake, as an artistic tool. He is unabashed about this, matter-of-fact about making a mission of his metaphors. The adman who went by the name of Qaushiq Mukherjee arrived on the international and Indian alternative cinema scene with films like Bishh and the provocative and acclaimed Gandu, which, unsurprisingly, failed to get a commercial release in the country. Unfazed, he formed Gandu Circus, an indie rock band against censorship along the lines of what the film stood for. Now he’s hoping to make a graphic novel of it, tentatively titled Gandu Goppo. His last feature, Tasher Desh, an adaptation of a Rabindranath Tagore play, is both a tribute to and a subversion of the original play and has won critical appreciation at home and abroad. More bafflingly, one of his documentaries Love In India, on repressed Indian sexuality and, among other things, a quest for the perfect orgasm, won a National Award for ‘Family Welfare’. Q remains unfazed, if a little amused. He sees this as another redefinition, an idea he seems to enjoy. In fact, he redefines himself quite a few times in this interview, on his life and work so far, providing incisive and compelling arguments for each time.

The Song in Her Heart

Posted on July 18, 2014 by admin

Here is TBIP’s pick of five Urdu poems by the actress Meena Kumari, with an introductory note from their translator Noorul Hasan.

Meena Kumari needs no introduction. As a matinee idol and diva of the mid-twentieth century, and despite her untimely death in 1972, at the age of thirty-nine, she remains a legendary heroine of what is known as the golden age of Hindi cinema. It’s not for me to elaborate that point.

However, not many know that she had a way of her own with the pen as well. Soon after her death, Gulzar sahib arranged for Hind Pocket Books to publish a collection of her poems. I chanced upon this slim paperback volume at the Howrah Railway station the same year and have had the pleasure of dipping into that now more than moth-eaten prize paperback for over three decades.

What struck me most about the poems was their amazing immediacy, their power to take you in without any fuss and bother. Plain as conversation Meena Kumari’s poems strike an uncanny intimacy or rapport with the reader. Her imagination hovers over a wide range of subjects from the very personal and idiosyncratic to the more objective though equally heartrending, as expressed in poems like ‘The Dumb Child’ or the ‘Empty Shop’. Hers is an art without artfulness. The sheer audacity of her statements is the raison d’être of her poetry. Her unadorned, screaming verse reminds me of snatches of Donne, Firaq, Wordsworth, and Ghalib. This is not to say that she is anywhere near the dizzying heights scaled by that august fraternity. Her poetry is slight, casual, a kind of intermittent adventure or a holiday she allowed herself from her self-consuming stardom.

As a poet she resembles her screen persona, coming across as a wayward, sensuous, sacrificial lamb kind of woman. Her imagery is soaked in the immemorial customs and traditions of an ageless India. Her voice is very often the tremulous, quavering voice of an invincible Indian woman in the direst of straits. She writes the poetry of ‘some natural sorrow, loss or pain/that has been and may be again’, of ‘some old, unhappy, (not) so far off things’, if you know what I mean. The overwhelming impression one is left with after reading this poetry is, in Firaq’s unforgettable words, ‘Maine is aawaz ko mar mar ke pala hai…’. She is a poet because she has an inimitable personal voice.

I never planned to translate her into a language she would have thought so far removed from her field of light. I used to see the odd poem of hers translated into English in lifestyle magazines or poetry journals. Initially I translated some as an experiment and after several readings I began to feel that there was something of the cadence and clarity of the original in those random translations. So I decided to translate as many as I could. It was very kind of the poet Jayanta Mahapatrara to have published a number of these translations in his journal Chandrabhaga (12/2005) with the kind permission of Gulzar sahib. It’s a strange coincidence that translations of some of Gulzar’s own lyrics appeared in the same issue of Chandrabhaga as well.

In trying to put these translated poems together in a volume I hope to contribute to conveying another image of Meena Kumari which deserves as universal an acknowledgement as her immortal image as the queen of the Bollywood firmament of yesteryears. Her flirtations with the pen are as seductive as her universally celebrated femininity and resourcefulness as an iconic Indian woman actor in film after unforgettable film for nearly three decades during which she could slip with ease and spontaneity from the role of a skittish Miss Mary to that of the soulful and haunting Pakeezah.

A chameleon actor she is, equally spontaneously, a ‘chameleon’ poet.

—Noorul Hasan

Ma’zi aur Ha’l

Har masar’rat

Ek barba’d shuda gham hai

Har gham

Ek barba’d shuda masar’rat

Aur har tariki ek tabah shuda raushni hai

Aur har raushni ek tabah shuda tariki

Isi tarah

Har ‘ha’l’

Ek fana shuda-ma’zi hai

Aur har ‘ma’zi’,

Ek fana shuda ha’l

Past & Present

Each happiness

Is a devastated grief

Each grief

A devastated happiness.

And each darkness is a raped light

And each light a raped darkness.

Likewise

Each present

Is an annihilated past

And each past

An annihilated present.

Aaj ka Insan

‘Ideal insan’ kitabo’n ki

Zakheem jildo’n ke waqt khurda safhat ki

Mahdood dunia mein muqaimad hai

Woh

Bahar ki dunia mein qadam nahin rakh sakta

Bas,

Apne boseeda workon ke jharokhe se

Tumhen dekhta hai

Ishar’e karta hai

Aur

Tumhen aziat mein jhonk deta hai

Man Today

The “ideal man” is imprisoned

In the closed world

Of the time-torn pages

Inside the hard covers

Of books.

He does not step out

Into the world

Just

Peers at you

From the cracks

In his tattered pages

And says

“Go to Hell”.

Suhani Khamoshi

Kabhi aise pursukoon lamhat bhi ayenge

Jab

Mai’n bhi usi tarah so jaungi

Woh khamoshi

Kitni suhani hogi

Maut ke ba’d

Agarche mahaz khala hai

Sirf tariki hai magar

Woh tariki

Is karb – angez ujale se

Yaqeenan behtar hogi

Kyonki

Mai’n

Un zindagion mein si hun jinhen

Har subah nihayat qaleel si raushni milti hai

Um’meed ki itni – si kiran ki

Sirf din bhar zinda rah saken

Aur jis din

Yeh raushni bhi na mil saki to – ?

Enchanted Silence

There will be a day

Of such tranquility

I shall instantly go to sleep

That stillness

Will be so enchanting

Even though

There is just a void

After death

Nothing but darkness

But that darkness

Should still be better

Than this precarious light

For

Mine is one of those lives

Lit by a measly light

Each morning

Barely enough

To last the day

And the day

Even this light plays truant

Then…?

Ghazal

Tukr’e-tukr’e din beeta, dhaj’ji-dhaj’ji ra’t mili

Jiska jitna anchal tha, utni hi saugat mili

Rimjhim-rimjhim boondo’n mein, zahr bhi hai aur amrit bhi

A’nkhe’n han’s di dil roya, yeh ach’chi barsat mili

Jab chaha dil ko samjhe’n, han’sn’e ki a’waaz suni

Jais’e koi kahta ho, lo phir tum ko ma’t mili

Mate’n kaisi ghate’n kya, chalt’e rahna aath pahar

Dil-sa sathi jab paya, bechaini bhi sath mili

Honto’n tak aate-aate, jan’e kitn’e roop bhar’e

Jalti-bujhti a’nkho’n mein, sadi si jo ba’t mili.

Ghazal

The day passed in fragments, followed by a tattered night

As far as you can spread your cloth, that’s your share of light.

The pattering raindrops are honey too, are poison

What a monsoon! My eyes were smiling, my heart cried

Whenever I try to hear my heart, there comes a mocking laugh

As though someone were saying: look, you’ve been defied.

Despite defeats and betrayals, I press on undeterred

When your heart is your companion, agony is your right

It took so many different forms before it could be spoken

The utterly simply thing in your cold yet smouldering eyes.

Chalo…

Chalo kahin chale’n

Ghoomti hui sarak ke kinare

Kisi mor par

Raushni ke kisi khambhe ke neeche baith kar

Bate’n karen

Chalo, kahin chalen

Apne-apne mazi ke

Nuche ghute gharaudon se doo’r

Kisi sookhe nal’e ki pulia par baith kar

Bate’n karen

Chalo, kahin chalen

Darawne jangal ki andheri pagdandion par

Ratjaga manayen

Zindagi ke har marhale par bahas karen

Jhagren

Dher sari bate’n karen

Chalo kahin chalen

Chalo!

Let’s Go

Let’s go somewhere

To some edge of the revolving road

And sitting

Under the shade of some

Pillar of light

Let’s talk

Let’s just go somewhere

Far from the ravaged shanties

Of our past

Just sit on the culvert

Of some dry canal

And talk

Just let’s venture out

And sitting on the pathways

Of the forests of the night

Let’s spend the entire night

Discussing all the imponderables of life

Quarrel

Talk our hearts out

Just let’s go somewhere

Come on! Be a sport

Let’s go.

Excerpted from Meena Kumari the Poet: A Life Beyond Cinema, courtesy of Roli Books. You can buy the book here.

Also read Inhi Logon Ne, on Meena Kumari and all that was lost with her here.

The World Before Her

Posted on June 17, 2014 by admin

The World Before Her explores the very distinct, very disconcerting universes of the Miss India pageant on the one hand and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s women’s wing, Durga Vahini on the other. On the surface they tell the stories of two different Indias but when you look hard, at length, similarities begin to surface. Both these spaces are inhabited by women seeking to carve a space out for themselves in a near misogynist society. Both these spaces are run by people seeking to colonise the woman’s body and use it as a tool to further a patriarchal agenda in the guise of offering them tentative independence.

The documentary was released in select theatres across the country after winning laurels at the Tribeca (Best Documentary Feature), Traverse City (Best Foreign Film), Warsaw (Special Mention, Documentary Competition), Guantanamo (Special Mention) and San diego Asian (Special jury Award) Film Festivals and winning Best Canadian Feature at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival (North America’s largest). Viewers and critics have lauded the film and director Nisha Pahuja is all set to take it to an even wider audience now. At this critical point in the journey of the film we asked Pahuja two important questions. (each question jumps to the corresponding video segment above)

1) What is the real aim of a film like this? Can all the energy generated from the responses to the film be harnessed for a more sustained, fruitful dialogue on gender rights in India? .

2) What are some of the ethical and moral dilemmas Pahuja dealt with while making the film? .

Her answers are fascinating and thought-provoking.

House of Light and Shadows

Posted on June 10, 2014 by admin

The story of Regal Theatre, where the history of cinema meets the history of the country.

The really odd thing about Regal Theatre is the numbers on the back of its seats. Walk by behind a tattered row in the front stalls and you will most likely find them out of sequence. ‘6’ comes after ‘9’. Then ‘11’, and so on. Like torn pages from a history book, shuffled, till you suddenly have Jawaharlal Nehru staring you in the eye.

In the early 1940s Nehru had come in to Delhi from Rangoon, with a film called Delhi Chalo on the war of liberation Subhas Chandra Bose was fighting against the British in the East. His relative, Rajan Nehru, requested Rajeshwar Dayal to show the film at Regal. “I did not realize the risk involved in screening this uncensored film,” Dayal wrote on the theatre’s Golden Jubilee, in an article in a film journal called Screen, in 1988. It had been barely a few years since he had taken over the lease for the cinema in 1939. “I was surprised when I found that the full Congress High Command including Pandit Nehru came to this film,” he writes. The authorities found out. Dayal was sent a showcause notice asking why his license shouldn’t be cancelled. He rushed to Nehru for help. Finally, City Magistrate Kanwar Mahinder Singh Bedi bailed them out. That Nehru, seen as being at odds with Bose during this period, would go to such lengths to screen a film showcasing his work may seem strange. But nuances tend to emerge when you shuffle history.

There were palm trees at Regal’s porch back then. The foyer had chandeliers. The staff would don dinner suits and, on occasion, bow ties. Scotch and soda was available for seven and a half annas. Tickets for anything between eight annas to three rupees. Everyone would stand in queue, including the Deputy Commissioner of Delhi, the highest local authority at the time. “A thick maroon velvet curtain adorned the stage,” writes Dayal. When the Viceroy or Governor General visited, a red carpet would be laid out.

Located today in the middle of the crazy bustle that is Connaught Place, Regal, say reports, was the first building in the area. It was built in 1932, by Sobha Singh and designed by British architect Walter Sykes George (Dayal also credits Herbert Baker, who was working, along with Edwin Lutyens, on what would come to be known as Lutyen’s Delhi, for inputs.) Called the New Delhi Premier Theatre in the beginning, Regal, as it was renamed shortly after, came up with a large central porch, a sloping roof and brick masonry throughout. It went on to host, along with Hollywood movies, Western Classical maestros, Russian ballet and British theatre groups. On the top floor was a restaurant called Davicos (later ‘Standard Restaurant’) that was the toast of the town. “Is there truth in the rumours that New Delhi has become more cosmopolitan?” Hindustan Times columnist Captain P. L. Rau had asked after visiting Connaught Place in 1936. This cinema, the cultural epicenter of not just Connaught Place but also the new capital, formed a part of the answer.

“Kisi se nahin mila. Main chay baje chalaa jaataa hoon. (I met no one. I leave at six o’ clock in the evening).”

Amar Singh Verma has been working as an accountant at Regal since 1977. The lease of the cinema was transferred from the Dayal family to Vikas Mahajan—a hotelier from Jammu who spends his time in between the city and Delhi—in 2006. Verma, 73, is the only one around in the theatre who has witnessed Regal’s past years of glory, a meticulous citation that keeps reappearing on pages from its history, recounted in innumerable articles. He is wiry but dignified in the way that gentlemen from another era are, with grey hair combed neatly back, a shadow of a moustache and rimmed glasses. He is wearing a cream coloured shirt and dark brown trousers. He retired 12 years ago but still oversees things at the theatre, continuing in a kind of informal employment, because he feels he “is not employed but belongs here”. He lists dignitaries who’ve visited the theatre. “Lord Mountbatten, Pandit Nehru, Dr. Rajendra Prasad, Dr. Zakir Hussain, Indira Gandhi… kisi se nahin mila,” he says, matter-of-factly, without a trace of regret. “Main chay baje chalaa jaataa hoon.” The dignitaries, apparently, always watched night shows.

The corridors and staircase of the cinema hall are lined with large black and white photographic portraits of stars from the yesteryears. Dev Anand, Meena Kumari, Nargis, Raj Kapoor… “Raj Kapoor and Nargis would spend time in this room,” says Verma. We are at his office, a tiny wood and glass cabin at the entrance to the cinema. “If someone intruded on their privacy they would scold them and shoo them away.” He giggles faintly. A stoic man, this is the first time his eyes light up. He remembers there being a line all the way to Malik Sweets, a few blocks away, for Raj Kapoor’s films. Verma saw Kapoor during the premiere of Satyam Shivam Sundaram (1968). He had not been working here then. “The whole theatre was decorated with flowers,” he remembers. “There was a havan (a Hindu ritual in which fire is worshipped) before the film began.” Among the first films Verma remembers watching here are Dilip Kumar’s Leader (1964) and the social drama Khilona (1970). The latter, a tale of how a tabloid editor gets ensnared by a politician-criminal nexus he then exposes, was a movie Kumar agreed to do after doctors advised the actor against taking on any more tragic roles as they were sapping him emotionally. “It shows you how political leaders exploit people and how they get their comeuppance, as they should,” says Verma with some feeling. He is disillusioned with the films of today. He cites the absence of social messages and a change in the conventional aesthetic of filmmaking as two reasons for the disconnect he feels from contemporary cinema. “Dance ke naam pe yog hota hai (in the name of dancing, you have people doing yoga on screen),” he says.

Dayal, one of the early champions of Hollywood in India, was not quite as conservative. In 1938, he travelled to Calcutta to book British films. He met Metro Goldwyn Mayer’s representative in India, Arthur Rolland Jones, who later became his “guru”. “For the first six, seven years, I used to type, myself, advertisements in newspapers,” Dayal writes. One of these was for Greta Garbo’s Ninotchka (1939) which had its North India premiere in Regal in December, 1940. Like with Leader and Kumar, the film was a departure from Garbo’s sombre and melancholy image. “Garbo Laughs!” the advertisement for it read. “Garbo Blushes!” “Garbo Loves!” Dayal would hang out with stars like Kenneth More and Lauren Bacall when they visited Delhi. Regal eventually also became a coveted venue for international film festivals. Eventually, besides English movies, Dayal began screening Russian films too. He remembers Mrs. Indira Gandhi had come to the theatre with her grandchildren for Operation Tiger.

There are other reminiscences in his account of those days. Dayal and his family would travel to Russia, often, as invitees at the Tashkent and Moscow Film Festivals. The Indian ambassador to the Soviet Union then, I. K. Gujral, who later became Prime Minister, was a friend of his. Dayal and his wife Niranjan Rani visited London to attend the world premiere of A Queen Is Crowned, shortly after Queen Elizabeth’s coronation in 1953. They were guests of Lord J. Arthur Rank, Chairman of Rank Pictures and Pinewood Studios. The screening was “graced by the Royal Family”, Dayal writes.

“Woh shauq se, izzat se picture dikhaatay thay (He would show people movies with passion and with grace),” says Verma of Dayal. “Woh samay aisa thaa— picture dikhaatay toh kaam ho jaata tha (Those were the days when, if you showed someone a movie, they would do your work for you).” Verma doesn’t make any bones about saying that it was primarily because of running Regal that Dayal had many friends in high places, in India and abroad. He passed away in 2005, at the grand age of 93.

His son Sidheshwar Dayal, who passed away four years ago at the age of 71, has an article in the same issue of Screen on Regal and off-beat cinema. Born in the year his father took charge of the theatre, Sidheshwar’s life runs parallel to the Dayal family’s association with Regal. “I was considered lucky for my parents because my father, in that very year, signed a contract with MGM,” he writes.

Sidheshwar’s writes that his earliest memories of cinema are the films Chandralekha (1948), Andaz (1949) and Barsaat (1949) as well as a party the Dayals threw for Raj Kapoor at their house after the premiere of Barsaat. He believed the films of the fifties and sixties were “a beautiful blend of art and commerce”. Later, however, Indian films degenerated rapidly into “make-believe entertainment, stereotyped stories… ” “Situations were increasingly being shoehorned into every film,” he writes. It was at such a time that Regal screened Mrinal Sen’s Bhuvan Shome (1969) on December 4, 1970. It received “wide appreciation” and did “reasonably well at the box office too”. Films that followed at Regal include Basu Chatterji’s Sara Akash (1969), M. S. Sathyu’s Garm Hava (1974), Shyam Benegal’s Ankur (1974) and Nishant (1975), Govind Nihalani’s Aakrosh (1980), Shekhar Kapoor’s Masoom (1983) and Mahesh Bhatt’s Saaransh (1984). The Film Finance Corporation, NFDC’s predecessor, sought out Regal to stage a festival of its films.

“There are either good films or bad films,” writes Sidheshwar, while talking of the distinction between commercial and art cinema. “In principle, there is no such distinction,” he says.

Speaking about the cinema of the seventies and the eighties, Sidheshwar says, “The dream of every filmmaker was not to make a good film but a box office hit by hook or crook.”

A sweeping statement perhaps, but the other pages of Screen, where this article appeared in 1988, seem to stand testimony to his words. They too present a history of sorts. One has an advertisement for Khatron Ke Khiladi, where Dharmendra, the face of so much remarkable cinema in the sixties, plays a vigilante dressed like Zorro with a machine gun. On another page is a poster of Tohfa Mohabbat Ka with Kimi Katkar wearing a swimsuit, her hand on the shoulder of a young Govinda, who is wearing a pair of gaudy sunglasses and a muffler and holding a revolver. Elsewhere in the poster Katkar appears in something that looks like a tribal crown, designed, possibly, by Bombay’s Maganlal Dresswalla in the eighties.

Shuffle again. There are stories about Asha Parekh directing a Gujarati TV series for women and Mithun Chakraborty being “hand-in-glove” with the Left government in West Bengal (he’s with the Trinamool Congress now, the Left has been routed in the state) and organizing a gala event for them. On another page, next to a photograph of Meenakshi Sheshadri marching to Vaishnodevi, Chakraborty appears again. Apparently he and the actress Neelam got into a bit of a tiff on the sets of a film they were shooting, because she couldn’t understand the English he spoke. “I beg your pardon,” she would keep saying. So he decided to mimic her. On hearing this Neelam “said ‘hell’ and walked out into the lawn”.

The report goes on to say:

“The photographers who had accompanied us followed her and she continued to pose for all of them, if only to be away from Mithun.”

Another actress, Sonam, was also on set: “She replied in monosyllables looking far into the sea. As if immersed in some deep thought which needed greater attention.”

The issue of language creeps up again, on the same page, in a report on Tamil producer K. L. Baase producing a Hindi film whereas he “is not at all conversant in the language.”

The reports form part of a column called ‘Sound, Camera, Clap’ by Jivraj Burman. He makes everyone in the film business sound insane.

As I look over these pages the audience begins to line up outside Regal. The first show of the day is about to begin. Heropanti is showing presently. The popcorn and soft drink counters are being readied. “We will have a good house,” says Verma. “We have a good house still, sometimes. But not the same crowd.”

Sidheshwar’s wife Chandni Dayal, 70, is the only surviving member of the family to have actually seen Regal’s heydays. She and Sidheshwar were without child. They adopted a son but, according to Verma, “He had no interest in the theatre business and is now managing Sidheshwarji’s other businesses instead.” Chandni is reticent when asked about why the family sold the theatre. “Sidheshwarji’s health was not keeping up. He had constant bouts of asthma,” is all she offers by way of an answer. One of her earliest memories of the theatre is watching Raj Kapoor’s Bobby (1973). “The havan, Raj Kapoor coming over to their house to talk to Sidheshwar” are things she remembers besides the film itself.

But more precious to Chandni than her own memories are the stories. Stories of how Regal would run practically empty during the summer months in the forties, when the British would retreat to Shimla. The showing of the 1939 epic Gone With The Wind. How soldiers would flock to the theatre during the war to see films like Pride and Prejudice (1940), The Great Dictator (1940) and Madame Curie (1943). How the cinema would be requisitioned by the Army in the mornings for secret and confidential lectures. “What can I tell you,” says Chandni. “You should go and speak to those who were there then.” As if Rajeshwar Dayal, Jawaharlal Nehru and Raj Kapoor were still sitting around Regal’s dusty misnumbered seats, waiting for a movie to begin. “All I have is stories I’ve heard from my father in law,” she says. “I married into a family with many stories.”

On the Back of a Movie Poster

Posted on May 12, 2014 by admin

Shenky, a film poster seller in Daryaganj, sees the film memorabilia collection his father left him as an inheritance that is his ticket to a better station.

“Rakh de rakh de wahin pe bhai, tere kaam ka nahin hai. Aage jaa.”

At the Sunday Book Bazaar in Old Delhi’s Daryaganj, where everyone is desperate to sell, Mohammad Suleiman dismisses a prospective customer who has stopped at his Hindi film poster collection. “It’s not for you, move on,” he says to the young man leafing through a booklet of songs from the 1982 Dharmendra starrer Teesri Ankh. It has been an uneventful day so far for Suleiman. He has not sold anything.

Opposite a board announcing the availability of ‘Sabse Sasti Magazines’, next to a heap of ten rupee second hand books, Suleiman has set up shop on the pavement, like everyone else in this bazaar. He sits on a stool, surrounded by film booklets and A2 size posters. “This is made by hand,” remarks a passerby, referring to a poster of Boot Polish at the centre of it all.

Suleiman, who sells posters, song booklets and film memorabilia, is looking for a particular kind of customer. “My customer is royal,” he says. “He is a VIP. He is one who is a lover of the old and the antique.”

This rules out most of those who pause before his collection at the bazaar— students interested in cheap school textbooks or simply those out for a Sunday stroll. Suleiman’s visiting card calls him a ‘Cinema Poster Historian’. Also, ‘Shenky’, a name he has adopted because his own is “too heavy” for New Delhi’s “high society”, a society Shenky aspires to sell to.

It was, in fact, on a visit to a regular haunt of this society two years ago—an expensive poster store in Hauz Khas Village—that Shenky, now in his forties, discovered he had had “a treasure” back home all along.

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Shenky’s family hails from Nainital originally, but his father, Ali Hassan, was born and brought up in the nearby locality of Chandni Chowk. He was a factory supervisor. In the picture Shenky paints of him Hassan appears to have had three interests above all else: his work, smoking beedis and Hindi films.

Almost every day, after work ended at 5 pm, Hassan and his friends would be at one of the single screen theatres in the Old Delhi area. “Such as Excelsior, Jagat, Novelty or Jubilee. Raj Kapoor and Rajesh Khanna were his favourite actors,” Shenky says. Cinema halls used to be different back then. Says Shenky, “There was no other entertainment at that time. We did not have the hausla to go anywhere else.” Hausla, or courage, which was needed even for leisure in a society that remained feudal in its outlook. Connaught Place, nearby, was “hi-fi” in Shenky’s words. He recalls the apprehension they felt in visiting such localities where one would have to be mindful of what one wore. The single screen cinemas of Old Delhi provided for a kind of parallel space, a shield of sorts from the harsh class divisions in society.

Hassan was also a collector of film memorabilia. By virtue of his close association with cinema hall owners, many of whom he did odd jobs for, and because of his friends being on the staff of these theatres, he was able to eventually build a collection of 3,000 posters. “He would not show the collection to anyone.” Not even to Shenky, even though he was the only one from the family Hassan took along to watch films. “He would collect whatever he could lay his hands on.” Those days song booklets would be sold during the intermission, as part of the heavy print publicity distributors relied on. So these too found their way to Hassan’s home. Shenky has added steadily to this personal collection, which he sees as a legacy of his father’s Hindi film “deewaanaapan”, by frequenting kabadiwalas and cinema halls to look for more collectibles.

But till that fateful visit to Hauz Khas Village Shenky had never thought of these as having business potential. Perhaps because they didn’t, for a long time. Ranjani Mazumdar, in an essay on the Bombay film poster, writes that in a “strange twist”, the “once ordinary” hand painted poster acquired the status of an “art object” as it disappeared from streets and public places. Once, it had been “seen plastered on walls in various parts of the country and available for a price of five rupees in the streets till the early 1990s”. With its disappearance, it has “acquired the status of an ‘art’ form as collectors enter the field of preservation, display and sale of the traditional poster”.

What Shenky saw that day was the possibility of bridging the class divide he found himself on the wrong side of. “I initially sold to the Hauz Khas Village poster shop. But they were paying me too little, so I decided to start on my own.” He used to work at a shoe shop in Old Delhi. Now he could hope to work for himself. Shenky recognized, however, that this transition would rely on people of means willing to invest in his collection. To begin, he rented a flat in Daryaganj.

Two years later Shenky is at the weekly Sunday Bazaar, still trying to make that transition. “All this came to me because of my father, otherwise I would have been working at the mercy of someone else.” What started for his father as a hobby has become for Shenky an inheritance, the capital on which he hopes to build his future.

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Among those selling at the bazaar, Shenky is the object of quiet envy. Even though most people walk by his collection, everyone is convinced he is making a lot of money. Rehan, who sells stationery next to him, is hesitant in disclosing his surname. He was intrigued when he first saw Shenky set up shop. “Initially, Shenky would distribute his visiting cards to whoever cared to give his collection a look and we would wonder why he is doing this,” Rehan says. Shenky knows he can’t take every old poster to the market so he puts on display a few samples from his collection and distributes his contact information to whoever expresses interest, hoping they are back sometime. If they are, he leads them to his flat, behind the market, where the posters are stored.

“Then we got to know he is famous,” Rehan continues. “He has been written about in the papers. There’s a lot of money in this. He doesn’t have to rely on everyday customers. People must be approaching him directly.” Shenky sells each poster for between Rs. 300 and Rs. 400. The song booklets are for Rs. 100. He says this is cheaper than what most people offer, that the karigiri (workmanship) of the posters makes them worth it. “Painting involved hard work and love,” says Shenky as he points to a poster of Night Club from 1958. He says he earns between “Rs. 6,000 to Rs. 7,000 per month”. Sometimes, for weeks, there is no buyer. Then, suddenly, there are orders for many posters. He has also begun to sell small antique items. He claims to be doing sufficiently well for his family of four— himself, his wife and two sons. His daughter is married.

On some days customers have specific requests, such as one who had insisted on a Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro poster. “These days people have also started gifting posters as wedding presents. DDLJ is very popular.”

In her essay, Mazumdar also speaks of the “power of nostalgia within modernity”, fuelled by the release of old films on television.

Advocate Sanjay Hegde, one of Shenky’s clients, has the poster of Zamaanat, an unreleased Amitabh Bachchan film, framed and displayed in his office chamber. “I have not collected with the intensity of a ‘collector’,” says Hegde. “But sometimes you want a film poster because of a certain memory associated with it.”

Today, a man and woman stumble upon Shenky and his posters while looking for books. The two posters they ask for—of the films Mughal-e-Azam and Kaagaz Ke Phool—are among the 12 he has chosen to bring to the market. “These are for my mother,” the woman says. “We think she’ll like them.”

Regular customers drop by as well. Syamantak, a designer, has bought three posters from Shenky. “I’m a regular at this market. One day I saw these posters,” he says. “I bought Shree 420, Shatranj Ke Khilari and Anand.” A NIFT student, he is interested more in the posters themselves, because they are “hand painted and old”, than in the cinema they advertise. Syamantak is unconcerned about where the posters come from. He says he couldn’t care lesser if “Shenky paints them himself”.

Accompanying him is his friend Aman Nigam, a software developer, who chances upon a song booklet of the 1990 Tamil film Anjali. “I have seen this film on television when I was a kid,” he says, humming a song from the movie.

There are also customers whose choices Shenky doesn’t understand. Leena, a Ukranian living in India, visits his stall every Sunday. She seems to be looking for something specific today but isn’t able to explain what it is to Shenky. She can’t speak English, only broken Hindi. She sifts patiently through two piles of movie song booklets, leaving out classics and picking out ones from more recent films. She doesn’t like the painted posters and prefers movie stills instead. Shenky shows her one of Amitabh Bachchan in Deewaar but she waves it aside. “A collector would pay so much for this,” he says. She ends up buying 10 song booklets of films she hasn’t seen.

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“I am thinking of setting up shop in South Delhi,” Shenky announces suddenly. “Kaisa rahega?” Today “hi-fi” areas like Connaught Place aren’t half as intimidating to him as he said it was for his father.

Nevertheless, he will head to an Old Delhi favourite, Delite Cinema in Daryaganj, later this week, to catch one of the latest Hindi releases. He likes Delite, he says, because it caters to “both the old and new”, by which Shenky means audiences from Old and New Delhi.

Film scholars wonder whether technology will enable a reproduction of these posters from the yesteryears in greater numbers, as well as a more democratic distribution, freeing old movie posters from the clutches of collectors and galleries. But Shenky, who has built his dreams around the novelty of the vintage Indian film poster, would not like this to happen. At least, not till he has discharged his father’s collection of 3000. So far, he has only sold “about 300”.