The Pakistani Prism

Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy, 34, is a documentary filmmaker who was born and raised in Karachi and now lives between Canada and Pakistan. She has been in the news for having won the Oscar for her film Saving Face— a documentary on women who have been victims of acid attacks in Pakistan. She is also the recipient of a number of other highly coveted awards, including the Emmy (for Pakistan’s Taliban Generation in 2010) and was included in the Time Magazine’s annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world last year. But Sharmeen’s body of work transcends the glory of recognition. She has made over a dozen films in 10 countries focussed on human rights and women’s issues— consistently trying to give voice to marginalized people. After Saving Face she has gone on to make a film on Transgenders in Pakistan and a television series, Ho Yaqeen, that features ordinary citizens who fight for justice and change in her country. She is currently working on a film called Sounds Of Sachal, on an orchestra from Lahore that is reviving and reinventing traditional Pakistani music.

 

What attracted you to journalism in the beginning?

 

I always knew I would work in the field of journalism. While I did not have an inclination towards film back then, I have been writing for various news sources since I was fourteen.

 

 

Did you study film-making? Where and what?

 

I have never studied film-making.

 

 

The Academy Award might be the biggest milestone in your career so far, but personally what do you consider your biggest achievement?

 

When I look at my daughter, Amelia, I feel that she is my biggest achievement. Despite all the fulfillment that my work brings me, nothing can rival the joy spending time with my husband and daughter brings me.

 

 

Your efforts to showcase what is wrong with your society are foremost a voice against cynicism— the ‘what will change’ question. While complete change might take very long to come, what are some of the smaller consequences you wish would come of your cinema? What might be some of the (however small) changes that your films have managed to bring about anywhere?

 

Through film my aim is to raise awareness about hidden issues, and to provoke people into questioning their preconceived notions and rethink the way they see a community or phenomenon. For example my film, Transgenders: Pakistan’s Open Secret, sheds light onto the customs and traditions of the transgender community in Pakistan from a humanist perspective. I hope that it will force Pakistanis to reconsider their current disposition towards them.

 

Saving Face has already stimulated worldwide attention on the topic of acid violence. Attacks are now being reported at a higher rate in Pakistan, and a lot of financial support has been directed towards the rehabilitation of survivors.

 

 

What are the kinds of films that have inspired you? What might be some of the films you treat as text-books for visual storytelling?

 

Iraq in Fragments and The War Tapes are very powerful documentaries in the way that they highlight human suffering. Buena Vista Social Club, on the other hand, captivates the audience through the immense beauty that it captures.

 

 

A lot of people say your films have made them cry. What are some of the films that always make you cry?

 

Classics like Gone with the Wind tend to get me going.

 

 

What advantages does the visual medium have for a journalist over the written medium? What, on the flipside, are some of the constraints of film?

 

Film transcends all other mediums by portraying the subject in its most natural setting. It breaks all barriers between the subject and its audience and diminishes the possibility of embellishment. However, capturing all the different constituents of a phenomenon on camera is very challenging. It requires you to always be in the right place at the right time.

 

 

Do you see your role more as a journalist— an objective chronicler of reality, or as an activist— someone who uses the medium of films to inspire and orchestrate change?

 

I see myself as a careful mix of both. While as a journalist I must be cautious to report on issues without my own opinion seeping through, my intention is that of an activist. I document phenomena that needs to be brought to the world’s attention so as to stimulate critical discourse and facilitate change.

 

 

Tell us about some of the technical/ logistical roadblocks you have had to overcome while filming.

 

While working in conflict zones there have been times that my crew and I have had to abandon scheduled interviews and shoots at the last moment, due to fear of being kidnapped. While shooting in places such as Saudi Arabia I have encountered officials who see a woman with a camera as blasphemous and have had to convince them to allow me to proceed with my work. Other than that I have been very lucky and have also developed an intuition over the years that warns me against particularly risky situations.

 

 

Tell us about some of the moral dilemmas that you’ve dealt with while filming documentaries.

 

While the aim of my documentaries is to facilitate change in the lives of those who are in the same circumstances as my subject, I often question whether the film will positively affect the life of my subject specifically. Another constant challenge is ensuring that I am a passive observer in the life of my subjects, and that I do not influence their decisions in any way.

 

 

And yet, it cannot be easy to not get involved with your subjects given the amount of time and empathy you invest in their lives. How did this dilemma of involvement play out vis-à-vis your film on Transgenders?

 

As a documentary filmmaker, I have been trained in maintaining an objective approach when interacting with the subjects in my film. However, this is much easier said than done, especially when working with vulnerable communities. I try and channel my empathy towards making sure that subjects are represented accurately in the film, and that they are given the opportunity to tell their own story.

 

 

You make your films for a global audience. Have you ever had to explain a cultural context to accommodate them? Is that a constraint?

 

Using film as a medium I am able to capture my subject in their natural surroundings and this usually accounts for context. I always try to capture adequate background information about my subjects as well as their environment so as to provide an accurate and all-encompassing picture. I have always worked this way and so I do not see it as a constraint.

 

 

Have you considered fiction features? Can they be as effective as documentaries for telling untold stories and creating awareness that might lead to change?

 

Producing fiction films allows for more flexibility in portraying a story and can deeply impact the audience. I would love to make fiction features and feel that they too can effectively raise awareness about uncovered issues. Till now I have continued to engage in documentaries for the reason that it allows me to provide silenced communities with a voice that brings their personal stories to a global platform.

 

 

What according to you are some of the qualities that a good documentary filmmaker/journalist should possess?

 

Good filmmakers/ journalists must have the ability to make their subjects feel comfortable around them. They must also be able to see beauty where no one else can, and make that beauty come alive on screen.

 

 

Is gathering finances for a documentary always an uphill task? Has it become any easier with all the changes that have taken place in the digital and electronic media?

 

Gathering funds for production has definitely become easier as appreciation for the documentary form is on the rise. It is also easier, now more than ever, to access financiers from all around the world. Advances in electronic media allow for people with common interests to reach out to one another and engage in projects.

 

 

Name one (or a couple of) reason(s) why this is a good time to be a woman filmmaker in Pakistan.

 

Women of profession in Pakistan have always been respected, and there is no ceiling for them in the workplace. It is also a good time to be a filmmaker in Pakistan as our media has more freedom now than ever before. The number of private television channels has grown exponentially, and cinema houses that show more than just mainstream films are sprouting up in urban areas.

 

Securing funds locally for independent filmmaking is still a challenge, but this is an issue for filmmakers in Pakistan in general.

 

 

What does the term ‘woman filmmaker’ mean to you. In your own assessment, what has being a woman brought to your cinema/storytelling?

 

Being a woman filmmaker I have access to twice the subject matter that a man would have access to. Women let me into their homes and personal lives and really allow me to survey their existence, which is essential before filming a subject. When speaking about sensitive matters it is also sometimes easier for subjects to trust a woman. On the other hand, being a woman has also been advantageous when working in territories that women do not usually frequent, such as the Taliban areas. A woman being an anomaly in such an environment, the men resort to treating me like a man. Hence, the term ‘woman filmmaker’ means higher access to me.

 

 

While there has been a lot of buzz about Pakistani literature (particularly in English) over the last decade, Saving Face was one of the few instances that put Pakistani cinema on the international map. Can you think of a couple of films/ filmmakers you would like to recommend from your country?

 

Mehreen Jabbar is a notable veteran of the Pakistani film industry, but in recent years more independent filmmakers are emerging in Pakistan. Shoaib Mansoor has recently made two fiction films that focus on social issues in Pakistan, and Ali Kapadia is another up and coming filmmaker.

 

 

Why has filmmaking in Pakistan not caught on as one might have expected it to?

 

Filmmaking has caught on in some ways, you will find many up and coming filmmakers who are experimenting with new styles and are producing exceptional independent projects. There is a distinct rift however, between our commercial films and the growing indie film industry; our talent is most evidently seen through our television programs, or on the internet, not on the big screen. We need more avenues for promising filmmakers to find funding and access the resources to pull off international quality cinema; we have the skill, we just need the means to see our projects through to completion.

 

 

Post the Oscars one of the things you were looking forward to was using Saving Face as an educational tool in Pakistan. But despite your Oscar win, you’ve faced opposition against releasing the film in Pakistan, and not released it despite having a legal right to. How do you balance interests when making a decision regarding something like this? How do you deal with it on a personal level?

 

Daniel Junge, the co-director of Saving Face, and I both agree that the safety of the women in the film is paramount. Even though we have chosen not to show the film in Pakistan, we will go ahead with the educational outreach component. We have designed public service messages that will be broadcasted on television and radio channels in the Saraiki belt of Punjab, where the acid attacks in Pakistan are concentrated. We will also be disseminating educational materials in this region. Although these materials are not linked to Saving Face, they announce the penalty against acid crime and provide information about support for survivors.

 

 

You’ve directed a TV series called Ho Yaqeen about ordinary citizens from Pakistan fighting for justice and change. What was your primary motivation here? Also, were you at any point wary that your subjects, mostly women, might face the sort of repercussions that threatened your subjects from Saving Face? How did it all turn out?

 

A common complaint in Pakistan is about a lack of role models and mentors who can inspire our youth and give them a figure to aspire towards and emulate. We remain unaware of all the extraordinary individuals who dedicate their lives to bettering Pakistan regardless of the obstacles placed before them. My aim behind Ho Yaqeen was to choose the stories of six individuals who embody the core values of a progressive Pakistan; these people are brave, determined, ambitious, and refuse to take no for an answer. I wanted their stories to be documented so that their voices are heard and their struggles are celebrated. I hope that their narratives inspire others to take similar actions within their own communities.

 

Safety is always given top priority when making documentary films, and Ho Yaqeen was no different. We had to be extra cautious as many of the characters featured in Ho Yaqeen are involved in civil rights battles, and often face stern opposition when fighting for equality and justice. Our subjects were asked to only share the parts of their lives that they were comfortable with, and we maintained anonymity of certain participants when it was deemed necessary to their security.

 

 

If you could recommend any one documentary—from anywhere, any era, that you feel everyone must watch—which one would you recommend and why?

 

My film, Iraq: The Lost Generation, looks into a society engulfed in war. From all the films that I have made this one was the most emotionally challenging due to the subject matter. I think it is important for everyone to realize the devastation that comes out of war and so I would recommend this film.

 

Iraq – The lost generation, Trailer
 

 

Promo for Transgenders

 

Trailer, Saving Face

 

Ho Yaqeen – Episode 1 (Sabina Khatri) PART 1 

 

Ho Yaqeen – Episode 1 (Sabina Khatri) PART 2

 

 

 

For Real

TBIP’s documentary film recommendation 

Bom or One Day Ahead of Democracy by Amlan Datta is a very curious study of the lives of the people of Malana, an isolated village in the Himalayas, in the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh. These people, known for making the best Hashish in the world, also sustain what is said to be one of the world’s oldest democracies. They believe Malana is a republic in its own right, to be governed by a locally elected council which bears no allegiance to the hegemonic Panchayati Raj structure that the panchayats of other villages in Himachal Pradesh subscribe to. They worship their own deity, make their own laws and their politics is independent of the Indian state. I call this a ‘curious’ study, because, unlike other documentaries on the village like Malana: Globalization Of A Himalayan Village or Malana, A Lost IdentityOne Day Ahead Of Democracy is not an objective anthropological account, even if for Amlan it began that way. What began with a smoker’s interest in where this amazing hash comes from, and a visit to the village with Election Commission officials, went on to become a personal journey. He stayed back in the village even after the officials left. He befriended the head of the village council, was adopted into one of the families there and ended up adopting two children from Malana. As a result Amlan’s documentation of the villagers’ way of life becomes an argument for it. His account of Malana’s reluctance to be a part of the Indian electoral system, its suspicion of a power plant that has sprung up nearby and its abhorrence of the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) officials who continue to raid it – progresses from the outside-in to the inside-out. So the film also becomes a study of the filmmaker himself who, over the course of filming, becomes an integral part of his subject. This extreme subjectivity of the filmmaker fascinates me.

TBIP Take

Closing The Universe 

On the 6th of May, 1954, a young doctor took a train from London to Oxford and ran a mile in 3 minutes, 59.4 seconds. He had trained for 8 years and given the Olympics a shot before he became the first man in recorded history to run a mile in less than four minutes. The record he made that day has had a strange history. Roger Bannister didn’t run much after that and spent his life as a self-effacing, highly successful neurologist. 46 days after he first did it, his arch rival John Landy ran the mile in 3 minutes 58 seconds. Sport records have an odd way of making commonplace the superhuman. Since Bannister over 1100 male runners have run the sub-four minute mile. His best has been lowered by 16 seconds. Schoolboys have done it and so have forty-year-olds. While no woman has yet broken four minutes for the mile, the current record stands at 4:12.56 by Svetlana Masterkova in 1996. Like in the Cole Porter song, birds, bees and educated fleas all have an eye on that mile.

 

Do those in the arts have similar burdens and compulsions of constant variation on elegant themes? Certainly there seems to be truth, universally acknowledged, in that Shakespeare can only be staged with radical political intervention and, preferably, in Croatian blank verse. On the other hand, no one seems to mind Austenian heroines come as they are, as they please. Filming Pride and Prejudice is treated like sponge cake— a classic challenge for the expert. The arts have a way of allowing the artist to amble along at the ten-minute mile if s/he has a respectful expression.

 

One might argue that the record-breaking athlete is powered by something more internal, not the gaze of the spectator. Even if this is taken as wholly true, the spectator of sports is powered by a desire for excellence, by that Daft Punk refrain for more. The spectator of the arts though is a tolerant creature, easily charmed and sometimes actively hostile to surprises. What would we do if Subodh Gupta stopped tossing stainless steel bartans in the air?

 

In 1981 a young Salman Rushdie gave the world a book of great beauty, of imaginative pleasures, a compulsive story. 1981 was the year of Chariots of Fire, the film that told the true story of two runners in the 1924 Olympics—Eric Lidell and Harold Abrahams, who incidentally was Bannister’s timekeeper when he ran the mile—but don’t be distracted. In the years since Midnight’s Children these are some of the things that have happened to the cinema and television viewer: Indiana Jones, E.T., The X Files, the Star Wars trilogy, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Twilight, the gargantuan Harry Potter empire, a whole lot of Almodovar, Terminator 2, Avatar, Rajinikanth, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Inception, Life of Pi and the internet. It is not clear that Deepa Mehta and Rushdie, as screenplay writer in the making of Midnight’s Children, have taken cognizance of the images already burnt into our brains.

 

Let’s not compare the beauty and strangeness of the five hundred-odd children who assemble in Saleem’s head from his tenth birthday, over 500 pages, with the poor sods who are extras in Midnight’s Children. By the time they started appearing (aside: what was that Bharatanatyam costume?) I had the uneasy feeling I was watching one of the trashier episodes of Heroes. Any minute Hayden Panettiere was going to turn up in Saleem’s room with her cheerleader costumer and a snotty (sorry, Saleem) attitude. When Satya Bhabha’s Saleem listed the ‘werewolf from Nilgiris’ people in the audience sniggered, so unthinkingly close (and yet so far) was it to the ‘assembling the A-team’ sequence of every caper movie. The pity of it was that, by staying in Saleem’s room, the movie didn’t give us the cheap thrills of showing us the gifts of the children either, in a way that this silly Hyundai ad does.

 

Midnight’s Children—the movie—ignores cinema audiences ready and ripe for the blurring of truth and magic. It’s an odd object, this movie— stiffly pedantic where the novel was fluidly cinematic. It ignores all the wild possibilities of flitting around the country (which the novel does bindaas from sentence to sentence) and when it does it is to show the tired old footage of Nehru making a tryst with destiny. Or to do embarrassingly saturated colour in a ‘Delhi slum’. Here I go, comparing it to the novel again. Ignore that. Let’s stay in cinema.

 

In 2009 a young woman called Lucy Alibar co-wrote the screenplay Beasts of the Southern Wild, an adaptation of her one-act play. In 2012 the movie has won everything in sight and been nominated for everything else. Its lead Quvenzhané Wallis is nine and the youngest actress to ever receive an Oscar nomination. Wallis plays Hushpuppy, a girl who lives in ‘Bathtub’, a southern Louisiana bayou community which is hit by a storm. Hushpuppy’s exteriors and interiors are full of the startling. She hangs with pigs and chihuahuas, lives in a shack of her own, a bell-ringing distance away from her father, and eats roast chickens whole. We hear the echoing heart beats of animals as she hears them. When we hear the noise of the approaching storm we could choose to think of this film as a response to Hurricane Katrina or just believe what Hushpuppy sees: the breaking of the polar icecaps and arrival of the aurochs. It’s a film that blooms magic realism at high speed like flowers in time-lapse photography. It allows, like Marquez’s Macondo, the space for both the ascension of Remedios the Beauty and the fear that the train is a frightful “kitchen dragging a village behind it”.

 

Rushdie once quoted an image of a dog barking in Saul Bellow’s The Dean’s December. “The central character, the Dean, Corde, hears a dog barking wildly somewhere. He imagines that the barking is the dog’s protest against the limit of dog experience. ‘For God’s sake,’ the dog is saying, ‘open the universe a little more!’ And because Bellow is, of course, not really talking about dogs, or not only about dogs, I have the feeling that the dog’s rage, and its desire is also mine, ours, everyone’s. ‘For God’s sake, open the universe a little more.’”

 

Midnight’s Children was Rushdie’s way of opening the universe. And like Bannister’s mile it lay open and luminous. This movie on the other hand has not even attempted to crack a window.

Gaza and the Greatest Love Story Ever Known

Civil Rights Attorney Radhika Sainath wrote this piece in Gaza, on November 9, 2011. Not much has changed since then. In November, 2012, a ceasefire was declared between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas, which controls Gaza. Last month, according to a report, Israeli soldiers fatally shot four Palestinians in the West Bank and at least one in the Gaza Strip. The report identifies the deceased as Anwar al-Mamluk, 20, Udai Darwish, 21, Samir Awad, 17, Saleh al-Amarin, 15, and Lubna al-Hanash, 21. 

Palestinians in Gaza love Indians. They love Indian dancing, they love Indian music, they love Indian clothes. Whenever I walk out of the house, someone inevitably asks “hiyya hindeyee?” Is she Indian?  ”I knew it!” they say when the response is in the affirmative. “Bheb al Hind,” I love India.

Regular people here in Gaza know a lot about India—far more than the average American or European–which is really surprising given Israel’s closure of Gaza and its isolation from the world. So why this love for India?

Is it because, nearly a decade before India’s independence from Britain, Mahatma Gandhi rejected the Zionist colonial endeavor in Palestine, writing on November 11, 1938:

What is going on in Palestine today cannot be justified by any moral code of conduct. The mandates have no sanction but that of the last war. Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home.

Or is it the fact that India opposed the partition of British Mandate Palestine at the United Nations General Assembly in 1948, was the first non-Arab country to recognize the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) as the sole and legitimate representative of the Palestinian people in 1974, and did not extend full diplomatic relations to Israel until 1992?  Could it be that Yasser Arafat, whose visage can be seen on many a Gazan wall, billboard or door was warmly welcomed in India?

No, no, no and no.

But I had a sneaking suspicion I knew the answer after I recently showed a photo of my Indian-Canadian husband to a family I was visiting in a village in the southeastern part of the Strip a couple of weeks ago.

“Oh, handsome,” said 43-year-old Layla, gazing at the photo I had taken of Suresh on the subway. Layla’s orange, lemon and olive trees had been bulldozed by the Israeli army about ten years ago when Israel created a “buffer zone” within the Strip. Her family had to vacate their farm home because the kids were terrified by the nightly Israeli army gunfire.  “I’ve seen him on the television.”

The kids came around and looked at the photo, “He was on the television, he was on the television,” declared 12-year-old Samaher, pointing at the small T.V. “Raj Kapoor,” she added, naming the famous Bollywood actor from the 1950s and ‘60s.

“Tell him he’s invited to Gaza,” added Layla.

I was pretty sure that my husband had not been featured on Palestinian television in the month I had been away. The mystery continued.

Then on Monday, I visited a Sammouni family for the Eid holiday in the Zaytoun neighborhood of Gaza. I had last visited that neighborhood in February 2009, in the aftermath of ‘Operation Cast Lead’ when Israel had killed 48 members of a single extended family and turned the entire neighborhood into rubble.

I brought a big plate of sugary sweets and my wedding pictures. The women went nuts. “It’s just like in the Indian films,” they cooed, “Amitabh Bachchan. Kareena Kapoor,” they added.

It all seemed to be coming together. Amitabh Bachchan was largely responsible for my popularity, along with Kareena, Aishwarya, Hrithik Roshan and the whole gang.

Then yesterday, a woman I had met at a memorial event marking the five-year anniversary of Israel’s shelling of a row of houses in Beit Hanoun, in the north of Gaza, invited me to a pre-wedding henna party.  We laid a wreath on the graves for the 19 killed—which included 14 from the same family—and then delivered Eid sweets to Bedouin families living near the buffer zone. Afterwards, we headed to a modest home to see the bride.

I told the women at the party I had just gotten married five months ago. A grandmother who appeared to be in her early seventies gave a short speech in Arabic which I interpreted as “Do you and your husband love each other a lot?”

“Of course,” I declared, thinking she must have found it odd that I came to Gaza so soon after getting married.

“What she means,” another woman translated, “is that Indian people, they have great love stories, she has seen it in the films, and she says that you and your husband, must have had a great love story too.”

Everyone leaned in, arms held out so as not to smudge the intricate lines of green henna drying on their hands. I reflected on our time together… was it an action romance adventure with moustached villains and elaborate choreographed dance scenes?

“Um, yes,” I said, wondering if they wanted more details. They turned to more important questions.

“Do you know Kareena Kapoor?” one woman asked in Arabic.

“We love Indian films,” declared another.

Dhoom 2 is my favorite,” added one recent college graduate.  “But I also love Jodhaa Akbar.”

So Amitabh, Abhishek, Aishwarya, Aamir, Hrithik, Kareena, Salman, Shahrukh, if you’re reading this, how about a shout out to 1.7 million of your biggest fans in the Gaza Strip?  Israel has forbidden pasta, tea, cement and freedom flotillas from entering Gaza, but it hasn’t stopped Bollywood. We watch you under the Israeli drones and the F-16s, after being shot at by the Israeli navy and army while fishing, picking olives or going to school.  You bring a sliver of joy to people living under the world’s longest occupation in the world’s largest prison, and for that we thank you.

In the gallery: Glimpses of life in Gaza, by Ruqaya Izzidien. Izzidien is a British-Iraqi journalist and photographer

Shonar Cinema

Bangladeshi photographer Kauser Haider spent a year shooting a 72 year old cinema hall in Old Dhaka that is said to have been named by Rabindranath Tagore. Here are some of the images he came away with

Photographer’s Note

“I’ve loved cinema halls since I was a child. Theatres were where I watched most movies back then— I was fascinated by the posters, the dark exhibition room, the projection of the characters I was so enthralled by, on a giant screen… So, in the second year of my photography course at Dhaka’s Pathshala South Asian Media Institute, in November 2010, I decided to photograph the Manoshi Cinema at Old Dhaka. Why? Because the theatre has stood for 72 years now, and documenting it would mean documenting a significant chunk of Dhaka’s film watching history, right through Bangladeshi cinema’s ‘golden age’— which is said to have existed from the 1960s up to the 1980s. This was the era of acclaimed Bangladeshi filmmakers like Zahir Raihan, Khan Ataur Rahman and Alamgir Kabir, each of whose works I have grown to admire.

“Also, interestingly, Manoshi’s manager said to me that it was given its name by India’s poet laureate Rabindranath Tagore. He said that the theatre’s owner had known Tagore, and that when the former had asked the poet to suggest a name Tagore had suggested the title of one of his poems: Manoshi, meaning ‘very dear’.

“The manager had refused to let me shoot inside the theatre at first. It took me many hours of persuading to convince him to allow me to. Before beginning my essay I also spoke at length with the staff at the theatre— some of whom have been working here for more than 50 years. And I chatted with those who would come to watch movies at Manoshi. Even after I began photographing the theatre, I would catch people in the movie intervals and chat casually about what they made of a movie, or who their favourite actor was.

“Since the last decade the kind of films that show at Manoshi are, mostly, low-budget action movies. The audience which earlier comprised families from the middle or upper classes (during the ‘golden age’), has transformed now into men from lower income groups. Shakib Khan is the favourite hero of most Manoshi regulars. Khan, who made his debut in 1999 with Anonto Bhalobasha (Unending Love), is today the highest paid actor in the Bangladeshi film industry. He is especially known for action blockbusters like Tiger Number One, or Boss Number One. Both these movies, released in 2011, were among the year’s biggest hits.

I shot this essay over a year, and still keep visiting the theatre, whenever I have time, to see if I can add to it. The most difficult part was shooting the audience while a movie was on. Arifur Rahman Munir, a classmate, would accompany me, carrying a flash bulb. I’d like to mention here that without Munir’s help I wouldn’t have been able to complete this essay. Sometimes, when we used the flash on viewers during a movie, they would get very angry. They would threaten to rough us up. But it was worth it. For me, since childhood, cinema’s most attractive sound has been the reaction of an audience. The cheers and jeers. The whistles, hoots and applause. Shooting the audience while they watched these movies was my way of resurrecting this magical sound, and memory, on camera.”

Kalki Koechlin – TBIP Tête-à-Tête

TBIP Tête-à-Tête is a series of in-depth and intimate interviews with film personalities who are critical to this era of filmmaking. It is an attempt to understand their body of work. And their minds. Because who they are intrigues us just as much as what they do. Because what they do is because of who they are. In certain cases, despite who they are. Because integral to the love of cinema is the love of cinema’s idols— the chosen few whose mystique remains intact despite the tabloids’ obsession with their lives.

Kalki Koechlin, 29, is an Indian actress of French descent who has portrayed a gamut of roles on screen. In life, she is seen as being one of the actors at the helm of what the media calls ‘New Bollywood’, or a Hindi cinema that is grittier and more real, and which deals with more challenging subjects than its mainstream counterpart, while still doing well financially. Also, Koechlin is married to a filmmaker who is seen as one of the driving forces behind this new kind of Indian movie— Anurag Kashyap.

Here she speaks of her relationship with cinema and theatre, a medium she performed in before she took to the movies. She tells us what she makes of the Hindi film industry and how it has evolved in recent years and traces her unlikely and wondrous personal journey.

Video Credits- Host Wardrobe Courtesy – ZARA

Read the transcript:

Pragya Tiwari: So I’m going to start with the one thing I find the most interesting about you that growing up, and you’ve spoken about this in a lot of interviews, there was no box for you. You always had to identify your identity so to speak, as a Tamil speaking girl at home, inwardly in India, but not outwardly, and vice versa, in France. Even though you’ve spoken a lot about it, I’ve often found myself wondering what it was really like. Teenage is tough enough, we all feel like we don’t belong, what was it like for you, was there angst to deal with?

 

Kalki Koechlin: I don’t know, I think you just deal with what’s in front of you. especially when you’re a kid. You think less about it when you’re a child, but I think the thing I found myself doing when I look back is that I would always try and fit in all the time. So I would always be these different avatars, I was never really myself. I was actually a very shy person, but outwardly I would put on this show of being very entertaining, clowning; you know I would make people laugh. That was my way of getting people to just get over me, not ask me too many questions, so that’s one kind of protective barrier I used to have. The other thing is obviously growing up, you know, on the one hand I was always made to feel different and special, because I’m white. So boys would hit on me or people would sell me drugs, because I’m white. There was a certain approachability that came with being this white girl, and at the same time I would retort in Tamil, and I would give it back to them and they would be like oh, no, no, you know, we can’t mess with her. It gave me almost a freedom to be able to shift between being this foreign looking girl who’s all naïve and doesn’t know what’s going on and then to being this girl who actually knows everything about what’s going on and what you’re saying about her behind her back, so it gave me perspective.

 

PT:      Was belonging a big deal, was there a search for belonging ever?

 

KK:      Of course, I still do. It’s the most frustrating thing for me to not belong.

 

PT:      No, outside of your identity as a foreigner in India, in general as well, is that a big thing?

 

KK:      Yes, I think so.  Now not so much, in the sense that I think I’m much more confident about myself now than I was as a kid. But growing up it’s normal, you want to be part of the cool group, you want to be accepted for things and all of that.

 

PT:      So you would say you don’t have a quest for home now?

 

KK:      Home, no. I’ve made my own home, I’ve made my own space.

 

PT:      Is it inside your head mostly or do you feel like you belong in Bombay now?

 

KK:      It’s mostly inside my head, but it’s definitely a belonging in India, not definitely Bombay, because I have a love-hate relationship with this city.

 

PT:      You feel like you’re passing through?

 

KK:      I feel like I love the city for the people and I love the city for the work, but every time I can escape, I do. Because I find it very hard to have peace of mind. Things like writing, I find it very hard to write in Bombay. I grew up in the mountains in Ooty, I grew up in Pondicherry, so I grew up in very rural areas and I like that peace, so I need time out of the city, so in that sense. But I definitely feel very attached to India, having lived abroad for five years and coming back, this is home. This feels home whenever I come back home.

 

PT:      When I say growing up, what comes to your mind I mean when you look back can you see at least a couple of bends that changed the direction of your life? It doesn’t have to be a concrete thing.

 

KK:      It means painful things, like when I was really young I used to have a French accent, so I used to say things like concombre which made my school friends laugh at me, so then I quickly changed and I started speaking English properly, and then I spoke Tamil but it wasn’t cool to speak Tamil in school, so I would keep quiet about that. It also meant braces for four years, so no chance of flirting with any guys. I was a bookworm, I found the stage quite early actually. In school we used to have these drama festivals and I think, my first role, I played a sheep, so not the best role. But I very soon found myself very involved, by the time I was eleven I was doing lots of plays and I was very enthusiastically involved with the drama section of our school. It was an extracurricular thing, it wasn’t a subject, so that was a release for me. It was really like a place to be all these other people, who I, at the same time, couldn’t be, wanted to be. It also was an escape from myself, since I didn’t know who I was. I don’t think any of us really know who we are, you know, we’re still figuring it out. So for me it’s being able to become somebody else. Like now even when I go on stage, if I go on stage as a character, when I’m doing my theatre, I have no issues, I go on full confidence, but if I go on stage as myself, and I have to speak, my legs are shaking and I’m so nervous.

 

PT:      That’s very interesting. Tell me about Goldsmiths.

 

KK:      Goldsmiths was a tough learning experience, really tough actually. I learned everything about life in London. First of all there was the whole culture shock, first time I’m going abroad, I’m living abroad, at 18. I’m alone, and I had to earn my own money so I had to get a part time job while I was at university, as a waitress, and it was like I didn’t belong.  Obviously I looked white, but the minute I started speaking people were like: where are you from? You’re not English are you? Or, you don’t sound French either, where the hell are you from? And then I said: I’m Indian— and you don’t look Indian, so again I didn’t fit into any box, so it was funny. And I found it hard to understand the culture. I didn’t know about the TV shows. I didn’t know about the jokes. A lot of things. The first year was a tough year. I had to learn to make my own money, pay my own bills, cook my own food. I got so fat in my first year, I put on eight kilos. I would just eat those fish and chips and terrible things. I learnt to drink, lots of ales, and I don’t think there was much studying going on in the first year, it was more about just handling life. But second and third year I started really settling in and sort of very quietly finding my way in drama and theatre. I started meeting people who had similar interests and we started a theatre company called Theatre Relativity, and we started doing plays around England. It was a love-hate relationship again, because it was all about growing up and learning to be on your own and at the same time not rejecting my identity, because I couldn’t be English, I couldn’t be that culture, so I found myself more and more writing about India or doing stuff that had to do with India, and that’s why I came back, because it’s inside me.

 

PT:      I was actually going to come to that, but before that, I’m also interested in how different the world of theatre might have been for you, having belonged to theatre and then going to a culture where suddenly theatre can feel alien, because of the text and the approach and the way it all is. Did that happen?

 

KK:      No, the good thing about Goldsmiths is it was a very sort of left wing university, so it wasn’t Shakespearean theatre. We weren’t sitting there doing this archaic voice and projecting and all of that. We did yoga, we used to hug trees, it was like this whole hippie thing going on. We learnt about kathak and we learnt about Butoh, Japanese theatre, so we had a really mixed cultural, social education, and it was very academic as well. We did feminism in theatre, translation of theatre, things like that. So I was a little lost, I didn’t know what I was doing or what exactly I wanted to do.  I did script writing and acting and set designing. So I was always a little lost, but what it did, is it gave me perspective. When there are so many people all doing the same thing, you realize your own differences and you start seeing that as a good point, rather than a bad point. So you start specifying those things that make you different and you start using those. Doing theatre there was really tough, ’cause again the kind of writings that I would come up with were always a little bit alien for them, so I ended up doing pantomime and doing stuff that was very English as well. It was a mixture.

 

PT:      Every student who studied abroad, all of us, have to at some point answer the question, do you want to stay back and work here for a bit, or do you want to go back.  And for a lot of us one major factor has been the kind of work we want to do or what field we are in, so to speak. How was that decision made for you professionally, because a lot of Indian looking actors come back, because its difficult for them to find work there which might not have been the case with you. Was that an easy decision, was that a more… an impulsive decision?

 

KK:      It was an emotional decision. It wasn’t an intellectual decision. It was wanting to come home. It was a feeling of I can do more with the kind of creativity that I have, and the kind of thoughts that I have. I can do more in India, because it’s related to India. The stories I think of are Indian. And generally I just missed home. I just wanted to be back here. It wasn’t such a clear cut decision, like I’m planning to do this kind of thing, and I’m going to make it like an actor. There was no plan. There’s still no plan.

 

PT:      Which is good.  But you came to Bombay to do theatre initially right…

 

KK:      Yes.

 

PT:      So why Bombay, why not Bangalore? Bangalore also has a really vibrant…

 

KK:      I came straight back to Bangalore, because that’s where my family lives.

 

PT:      Okay, so you did theatre in Bangalore as well.

 

KK:      I did a little bit of theatre, but mostly just work-shopping and stuff in Bangalore. And I found it very difficult financially to survive in Bangalore, because I was doing theatre, but I wasn’t making any money. I wasn’t getting any other way of making money and I was living off my brother, I was living in my brother’s house. So for about eight months I was in Bangalore and then I auditioned for a play which was happening in Bombay and I got it, so I came to Bombay for that play.

 

PT:      What play was that?

 

KK:     The play was called Hair, but it was for this international theatre festival called ‘Contacting the World’, where they chose the…

 

PT:      Was Hair the adaptation of Rapunzel?

 

KK:      Yeah, that one.

 

PT:      Oh, yeah, I reviewed that play, oh yeah you were in it, oh my God I had completely forgotten that, that was so long ago.

 

KK:      Yeah, it was a while ago. So that play was going to a festival in Liverpool, because each country had to present a play and we were chosen to present a play. So I got selected in that audition, I came for that and stayed at a friend’s place and then I started doing some ads and stuff and I found it easier to make money while still acting and stuff, so that was the main reason for moving to Bombay. And a bit of independence, because once you’ve lived away from home it’s always hard to come back home, you know.

 

PT:      I want to ask you a little bit about experimental theatre in India, particularly in Bombay, it’s always existed, but every generation of experimental theatre practitioners have had their own sets of issues and celebrations, whatever you might like to call it. How do you see where experimental theatre is at right now? Any thoughts?

 

KK:      I sound very negative, but there’s not much standard for theatre in India. We have our folklore stuff which is very strong in rural areas, our regional theatre and stuff like that, commercial stuff.

 

PT:      But no one’s adapting it any more. The Habib Tanvirs have gone so no one’s contemporizing it any more.

 

KK:      Yeah, what I’m saying is, we don’t really have much of new theatre or contemporary theatre in my opinion. And so the standards are very low. So anyone doing something different is like oh, yay, that’s something different, you know? And I find that depressing a little bit, but at the same time I think there are some geniuses around, l mean, Anamika Haksar and Rajit and Atul Kumar, they are people who are pushing the boundaries.  Atul has opened this theatre residency in Kamshet.

 

PT:      Do you feel one of the reasons might be that because Bombay is also the Bollywood town, so it’s harder to get youngsters involved, you know, the kind of commitment that theatre needs?

 

KK:      There is a lot of hopping from theatre to films, a lot of actors just do theatre, so that they can do films.

 

PT:      As a stepping stone.

 

KK:      It’s a stepping stone…

 

PT:      How do you balance the priorities?

 

KK:      It’s hard. I mean obviously in the last couple of years the priority has become film more than theatre, because there’s just been more films happening and less theatre happening.

 

PT:      And this is a new thing for you so… ?

 

KK:      This is a new thing for me, but then again I’m hoping to start a new play soon with Atul, very soon, so it goes through phases. There are phases where the films go and then there’s always a dip as well, there’s a lull where you’re not really getting any good scripts and stuff, so then I’m really lucky to have theatre as a backup. Not backup, but it’s a place to keep going and not feel the pressure of having to take every script, because I have this confidence in theatre and there’s always so much to do. I’ve written a new play as well, which I don’t know when I’m going to start, because right now I’m owned by Ayan Mukherjee.

 

PT:      Have you directed?

 

KK:      I haven’t directed, but this play I want to direct.

 

PT:      That sounds like fun. Okay, if I were to ask you why you couldn’t leave the stage, don’t give me an intellectual reason, give me an emotional reason. It could be a smell, it could be anything. Why you’re hooked to it?

 

KK:      Why I can’t leave the stage— it’s my gym as an actor. It’s just, you know, how some actors need to go to the gym to build up their muscles, I need to go to the stage to build up my acting, it just sharpens everything. It’s that gut feeling, even now when I go on stage before my shows I go to the loo every time before my shows, I get the runs. Because I’m so nervous, ’cause it’s a live audience, nothing can beat that. There’s nothing like that, being in front of other human beings and giving them that and taking from them as well, because you take their laughs and take their reactions. It’s like a play between actor and audience, and every show is different, every single show. Your film once it’s done, it’s done, and there’s nothing you can do to change it. Your play, it changes every night, depending on your audience. If it’s an older audience they’ll just be like (sedate laughter) you’ll be a little more serious. If it’s a young audience, you might be playing with them more, interacting with them.

 

PT:      Yeah, it changes with the auditorium.  It changes between Prithvi (Theatre) and NCPA (National Centre for the Performing Arts).  One thing that the screen can give you that the stage can’t?

 

KK:      Interiorization, like I feel with theatre you can… very often, because it requires this loudness and to be able to reach to the last row in the audience, it’s easy sometimes to not feel it. Especially ’cause you’re doing it every day, so there are nights when you just don’t feel it from inside. Whereas if there’s a close up on you, your eyes can’t hide, they don’t have anywhere to hide. So you have to interiorize it, and you have to feel it. So that’s a discipline that I’m still grabbing a hold of, I’m not quite there. There are days when you just feel numb. Do you make yourself laugh or cry for film?

 

PT:      Talking of screen, we spoke earlier about your not having a readymade box for yourself. Did that struggle of the early years come back as your career in movies started progressing, did you deal with it any differently, because again there wasn’t a very easy box for you to fit into when you joined the movies.

 

KK:      Right.

 

PT:      Did it feel like déjà vu, the same struggle that you had been through in your teen age, coming back in your career, of trying to find your place, of trying to make your identity?

 

KK:      A little bit I suppose, I mean I don’t analyze it so much.

 

PT:      But I meant more experientially. Did it ever feel like this is it, all over again?

 

KK:      I mean I always feel like the geek that I am inside, the brace faced geek. There’s ups and downs, there are times where I get a confidence which is unexplainable and there are times where I’m that little, shy girl again and everything anyone says about me I take to heart and I get upset by it. That’s life. It’s normal. I think it makes you human, you know, to be able to feel things. I, at least, believe very strongly in being in touch with the world, not cutting myself off to the point where I’m always in an AC car in an AC hotel, wearing sunglasses. I want to be able to go and talk to my watchman. I want to be able to be normal.

 

PT:      Lead your own life.

 

KK:      I have to have contact with the world. I think it’s easy in our world of Bollywood to get completely cut off, when we’re moving from AC cars to airports to hotels. We don’t read the papers, we’re just shooting nights. Right now I’m shooting all nights, I sleep through the day. You don’t find out news until much later and things like that.

 

PT:      I was also talking more in terms of moulds, the Hindi film industry has always worked according to moulds, you know, there is this kind of an actress…

 

KK:      Yeah, stereotypes.

 

PT:      And then the big thing is for an actress to break that mould.

 

KK:      Right.

 

PT:      But you didn’t come in a mould, you know. Everyone comes in through something and then they all go on to something. So I’m just wondering, I’m sure you don’t walk in with that kind of consciousness. I’m sure one thing leads to the other, but, somewhere in the middle—you’re quite a few films old—how are you thinking about it now?

 

KK:      Yeah, like you said there wasn’t a plan and definitely I never thought of myself as different, and I’m going to come and be the quirky actress or anything like that.

 

PT:      But did you never even get it from the people?

 

KK:      I mean now I get it all the time, everybody’s like you always do dark, different films and you’re quirky and your style of dress is quirky and this and that, so I play on it sometimes, I wear my Charlie Chaplin hat and play on being different. But at the same time I don’t fit into a mould and I definitely think it’s scary for an actor, because you are an actor, you have to be everything. You cannot be stuck doing the same thing, however comfortable and safe it is.

 

PT:      But, Kalki, that imagination also has to be in the person who’s casting you, and directors for example…

 

KK:      That’s the problem, right.

 

PT:      That is what I was actually talking about. Have you had experiences where there could be a role which you know you’re absolutely good for, but you will not be considered for it because of the way you look or are perceived or something like that?

 

KK:      Definitely. Actually I have a terrible weakness for romantic comedies and I watch all these terrible films Hollywood romcoms and stuff, and I do this clown play in theatre, and I have this very funny side to me, and this very chirpy bubbly side to me. But I don’t think anyone for a while is going to consider or has considered, there’s no scripts that come to me with that sort of ditzy, bubbly, happy, girl next door vibe. And I think that’s because they see me as this intense actor or whatever. It’s a slow process. Ayan’s film, for instance, I’m playing a little more of a loud, happy kind of Bombay girl. So for the first time not somebody negative. So that’s a small change. It’s something that’s come happily to me.  I’m very happy and I’ve welcomed that, but at the same time I’ve got to do what I’ve got to do.

 

PT:      Other than that, do you feel like it’s a good time to be a part of the film industry? There’s so much talk of new wave and new direction, do you feel like it’s a little bit more hyperbole or do you feel like it is an exciting time?  I’m sure it’s a mix of both so I’d like to hear both sides.

 

KK:      It’s exciting for me, ’cause I’m here. I’ve got a career and in the nineties I probably wouldn’t have had the kind of career, being who I am. I would have probably have to mould myself to something else, so it is a good time for me, it’s very exciting. It’s one of those times where you feel like people are ready to take risks a little bit more. I have to tell you though, I read nine scripts out of ten that are terrible and I’m depressed. I’ve read some eight scripts in recent months and just no, no, no, no. So it’s not all fine and dandy.  But at the same time I just see that there are those few filmmakers who are just going for it with really radical ideas and they’re struggling. Like most of the filmmakers whose films I do want to do, have no money for those films, because they’re the kind of films which are really tough to make and won’t make money. So we are still in that zone. But it’s a balance, I do commercial cinema as well and from that hopefully you can push a little bit the barriers of what’s alternative.

 

PT:      What’s most frustrating other than the fact that you spoke about you know the…

 

KK:      Identity crisis, apart from that?

 

PT:      Yeah, or people not being imaginative enough to give you the kind of roles that you easily might be able to do, other than that what’s most frustrating?

 

KK:      I don’t know, I mean that’s it really. I think what’s frustrating is the mediocrity. It’s the lack of interest from everybody around you. I don’t want to be sounding a little vain here, but I am an ideal actor for a director because I’m begging for work. I’m like tell me what to do, I’ll go research this, this, this…give me homework, I’ll do everything, you know? I’m that kind of actor, I’m very hungry for my work. And most people are like: don’t intellectualize it, don’t work too much, make it neutral, don’t intimidate the audience with your acting. I don’t want to intimidate anyone, I want it to be real, I want it to be connectible. And I find that mediocrity all around, even in plays, people are just like: let’s just do a play, it costs nothing and we can just put it up and like, whatever.

 

PT:      Though you’re less likely to hear the phrase ‘don’t intimidate the audience’ with your acting in theatre.

 

KK:      Yeah, maybe a little less, that’s true, so that’s the frustrating thing.

 

PT:      Okay, what in your assessment are your strongest and weakest points as an actor?

 

KK:      Okay, weakest points, the language barrier for sure. Because Hindi becomes like a mental block now. It’s like I speak Hindi and I understand Hindi completely, but I don’t have that freedom to improvise, so, you know, how sometimes you just want to add a line and you just want to say something extra, so I’ll always say that in English, and I wish I could do that in Hindi. The looks, it’s not a weakness, but the looks are also limiting, obviously for that reason. But what else are my weaknesses— I get bored of repetition, so if I’m doing the same kind of role too many times or if I’m doing the same play for too long, then I get very frustrated, I’m like, we need to jazz this up, we need to do something else, we can’t keep doing it, I’m sick of myself, people must be sick of me, ’cause I’m sick of myself. I always want change and I’m impatient, that’s another weakness. My strengths as an actor, as I said I think it’s the hunger that I have. I’m just nonstop, I’m always ready to learn more, I’m always ready to do another workshop and go out and do my research.  And I really strongly believe that you should do too much research, collect it all, and you’ll never use all of it, but it just gives you enough to pluck from. It’s like having the choice so that you can just pick and choose what you need, it gives you that freedom. What else is my strength— I guess I try and stay grounded, try not to let the ego take over and only listen for praise. I try to take the criticism seriously and do something about it.

 

PT:      Is there an upside to being a celebrity as well?

 

KK:      Yeah, of course.

 

PT:      What?

 

KK:      Many things.  First of all you get wonderful sunglasses, wonderful shoes. You get a certain amount of attention and freedom.

 

PT:      How freedom?

 

KK:      Freedom in the sense that people are ready to listen to what you have to say. So if you have something intelligent to say then you can use your position to do something. I’m not saying that I’m such a big actor or anything, but maybe I can use my position to bring in a different kind of script that we wouldn’t normally see most actresses, or women oriented films that we don’t see very often here. So just small little things like that I think which are important.

 

PT:      Having grown up outside of Bombay, outside of the industry, how long did it take you to adapt to the trappings of being an actor in the industry, the PR machinery, the press, and all of that, do you have a way of coping with it?

KK:      I have a very simple way of coping with it. I believe in being very honest and straightforward and I know it’s extremely naïve of me, but it’s actually working.

 

PT:      But has it come back to haunt you?

 

KK:      No.  Sure, there are always going to be some people who write bad stuff about you, and who don’t even call you, just write stuff without, even, from sources or whatever. They do, so you do have that. I’ve had that from the beginning. But I’m also very approachable and people have realized that more and more. So I don’t go through ten people, my PR manager, this person, that person, to get an interview, I just talk directly to a journalist and that’s how I am. If somebody really wants to talk to me they can, whoever they are— if they’re a student or some person in the industry or some random, ordinary person. So, unless you catch me on a really bad day when I’m just ‘leave me alone’, but you know most of the time I’m quite approachable, and I believe in staying that way. What I do to protect myself is I stop reading stuff, I don’t read those page threes, and I keep in touch with friends on Twitter, but even there it’s a very detached thing, I come and go on Twitter. I don’t spend a lot of time on it.

 

PT:      And you don’t have a Google alert on your name?

 

KK:      I don’t have a Google alert. I do not want to know what’s written about me most of the time, because you can chase after people, you can get back at people, but it’s like a big void. You’re just throwing things in the dark. And I’m the one throwing that energy out, and I need that energy for the work that I do. I need it to act.

 

PT:      Okay, I’m going to talk a little about the physical self, you know the other thing about the industry, or any cinema actually, not just the Hindi film industry, is its emphasis on beauty. Has your relationship with how you see yourself physically, changed?

 

KK:      Yeah.

 

PT:      And how? And I want to address the beauty and the style element here.

 

KK:      Yes, it’s gone full circle. Because I had this new found confidence when I came into the industry and suddenly I got all this attention, and suddenly I was like, oh, people think I’m pretty, but at the same time I went and did a film like Shanghai, where I had to look very de-glammed and no makeup and all of that, and with this funny haircut, and then it was like you’re so ugly. And I got all this criticism for the way I looked, and that’s actually how I am, I actually am this ugly kid from school with braces. So it was like being back to teenage, shy girl. And now I know I am not like some hot model. I don’t see myself, nor do I behave like one of those very, very glamorous and so self confident, fuck me now kind of… that kind of confidence there’s not that about me.

 

PT:      Not that, but did you never have moments of wanting to be Rita Hayworth for a minute?

 

KK:      No, because I get a chance to do that all the time, when I do a magazine shoot or even in certain films. Like in Zoya’s film or in Ayaan’s film where I’m made to look beautiful. And it’s fun. I love it. But I also love the de-glam. I love to be in pajamas. I love to be raw, if a role requires it. I’m ready to be all these different things. I don’t think everybody else is ready to accept women like that. You know, a guy doing an ugly role, if he’s looking rough and dirty, it’s all fine but if a girl is doing it…

 

PT:      Well, Emraan was doing that in Shanghai as well.

 

KK:      Right, but if a girl is doing it, it’s less accepted, because we have a certain idea of what a woman should be, and I do want to break that. There’s a certain angry side to me, where I’m like, fuck you guys, I’m just going to be who I am and I will have those kind of roles, if it’s a powerful role. And at the same time, as a person, there will be days when I want to go to Prithvi (Theatre) in my pajamas, so I’m not going to be all fully decked up and make-up and everything, and there are days when I go on a red carpet and I wear a gown and I love it, you know, and I look like a diva and I love it. So, yeah, I am comfortable with myself, I’ve learned to be it. I go through ups and downs, of course. You get affected by what people say, and you start to wonder and all of that, but I think I’m still confident enough to sort of keep doing it, just keep being myself. It’s constant work to keep being yourself actually.

 

PT:      Are you comfortable with using beauty as a tool?

 

KK:      Yeah, you have to.  There’s a certain amount of power that you get.

 

PT:      And this is not specific to films, I think this is a question for every woman.

 

KK:      Yeah, there’s a certain amount of power that you get when you’re looking a certain way. It might be because you’re looking really beautiful, suddenly you’re attracting everybody’s attention, you’re getting people to talk to you and they’re listening and whatever. At the same time it could be an intimidating thing. You could wear a hat and a man’s suit and suddenly people treat you very intellectually. So it’s all like how society is built and it’s part of that game, but at the same time I’m ready to break that at any point.  Like I don’t want to be attached to that, I don’t want to be needing my beauty in order to get things, I find that very scary. I want to be able to transform at any point, I want to be able to let go of beauty and that kind of thing.

 

 

PT:      But do you use it for self expression outside of your profession as well?

 

KK:      Yeah, definitely. There are days where I want to make a statement in the sense that I want to be that chick who doesn’t care, or I want to be that chick who is tough or I want to be that chick who’s really chilled out and hippie, it could also be like really glamorous, you know, depending on my mood.

 

PT:      It’s fun.

 

KK:      Definitely, it is fun, I think everybody does that, especially women. We’re manipulative little creatures, aren’t we?

 

PT:      Are we. Ismat Chughtai had said that, what on earth are women going to use if they’re not even allowed to use their wiles, what do they have but that?

 

KK:      That’s true.

 

PT:      That aside. Completely changing the topic, I’ve read n number of articles, n number of interviews about how you’ve brought a certain level-headedness to Anurag’s life, to your husband’s life, as in that you’ve calmed his life. Even before I knew I was going to interview you, I have always read that and wondered, what was your side of the story? You were young, was it…

 

KK:      He’s not level-headed.

 

PT:      Is it easy to deal with, I mean it isn’t, I don’t even know why I’m asking, but how did you deal with emotional baggage, and how did the relationship mould you, I somehow haven’t read enough of that?

 

KK:      You know, it’s been like a roller coaster ride with Anurag. I’ve learned a lot about myself, like I found myself changing a little too much in the beginning, because I was actually a very disorganized person for instance, very very unorganized and messy. But when I moved in with Anurag, he was so much worse than me, that I found myself being the organized person, you know, being the cleaner, the person who fixes things, the person who organizes the trips, or the holidays and all these things. And I’m like wait a minute this is not the person that I am. I’m a cool, hippie like, chilled out person, I believe in keeping the peace and not getting all tense and everything. That happened because suddenly I was with this person who was so chaotic, you know, and I was like, oh, yeah, yeah, I need some balance in my life. But I think I went through that phase and now I’ve come out of it and now I’ve really learned how to be my own person and it’s because of Anurag, also. It’s because he’s such an overpowering person in a way. First, he’s been around for so long in the industry, he knows everything about it… blah, blah, blah. And I am very dead straight about not wanting his influence, not wanting his attention too much. Of course, if he thinks I’m a good actor he should audition me.

 

PT:      That’s an overall problem with dating an older person, I mean it’s not just specific to the industry, ’cause they’re so set in their ways.

 

KK:      Yeah, they’re set in their ways and they keep saying I’ve been around for a long time, I know how this works…

 

PT:      And they can’t really change, because even if they’re saying they will, I don’t know how much they can.

 

KK:      They can’t, yeah. So that was something very difficult for a while, it still is difficult, because he also is very protective. He always wants to make sure I’m okay and if some sleazy producer comes to me, hey, what’s his name, you tell me, I’ll sort it out. And I’m like, I’m not telling you, it’s my business, I can deal with it myself, I’m a tough chick. So in a way I’ve had to stick to my guns a lot more because I’m with Anurag. I’ve had to be my own person a lot more. And now it’s at the point where we both have started respecting that space that we need. We’re still struggling with how much do we need to come together and how much do we need to separate, but I think we understand that love in the end is nothing to do with egos. And you’ve got to let the other person make their mistakes, and you’ve got to let the other person do their thing, but you’ve got to be there whenever they need you as well, so it’s just…

 

PT:      Yeah. Anurag has also said in several interviews that when you met him he wasn’t in the best of spaces in life. Did you ever feel like that could take a toll on you, just dealing with a partner’s issues can be, what did you offset that with? I mean I know a lot of this might be personal, so answer what you can.

 

KK:      You’re saying how did I deal with having to handle him?

 

PT:      Having to calm someone down.

 

KK:      Like I said I became the responsible one. I’ve also always had a very nurturing element to me, all my friends know me as this nurturer. I always cook for them and I always do a lot for people. I make things for them and I go out and do stuff so I ended up…

 

PT:      And that’s never gotten to you?

 

KK:      Yes and no, you know, there are moments when I flip and I become extremely selfish. I’m like I want I want this, this, this and I want you to leave me alone and whatever.  So I think there is that flip side to every coin. But I can’t help it, I am a nurturer. I end up doing things for people if I really like them and it just becomes normal, natural. There’s no easy answer. It’s a constant day to day struggle.

 

PT:      What is one big thing you’ve learnt about relationships in the last five years that you didn’t know before?

 

KK:      I guess that you’re never going to be able to be happy because of somebody else, but you have to be happy because of yourself, because you will constantly start blaming the other person. I mean sure somebody can make you happy, but if you’re unhappy with your work and you’re unhappy with who you are and what your decisions are, then automatically you will start seeking that from somebody else. You’d want them to tell you that you’re great and you’d become that dependent person. So I think that actually relationships are all wrong in our society and marriages are all wrong in the sense that there’s this constant thing of the woman should depend on the man. Literally when I got married suddenly men stopped talking to me, suddenly they would talk to Anurag. And any question, they would ask me through Anurag, and people would send scripts to Anurag for me. People would take photographs of me, but they would ask Anurag, and I was furious. Why have I suddenly become this little mouse? I’m still just Kalki and Anurag is still Anurag. So I think it’s very important that at least the two people in the relationship get it, that you two guys are strong people on your own.  After that of course you share things and you depend on each other for stuff, but you have to be able to stand on your own two feet.

 

PT:      How do you see his journey as a filmmaker from the time you’ve known him?

 

KK:      Dev.D time was really coming out of a really low point, I think, after No Smoking and everything. He was just at a really really low point, and even during the process of Dev.D, even after the film, I think that film was a bit of a turning point, because he changed the ending of that film during the shoot. It had a very depressing ending and he changed it and that was a very symbolic thing because his whole life was also sort of taking a turn. So I think that was a gray thing. I still feel that he can go so far if he challenges himself to do a lighthearted film. He’s still in a very dark zone, (Gangs of) Wasseypur is a brilliant film, I love it. The humor that’s come out, I think is unbeatable, compared to all his other films, which is the beginning of lightheartedness, you know, that you can still have humor in that darkness.  I’ve not read Ugly, that he’s shooting right now. I like to see his films when they’re done, so I’m waiting, but I’ve heard it’s very dark. So I think that’s still a little evolution thing that he’s going through, where he can take serious heavy subjects and still bring some hope or some lightheartedness to it. With (That Girl in) Yellow Boots, we had many, many arguments, but one of them was whether she should kill her dad or not. And I said, you know, she shouldn’t, because I feel that’s the harder thing to do, you know, to let go and to sort of move on rather than just get into that hole of unending sort of darkness. So that was the reason for the little bit of hope at the end of the film that she drives off. So that’s something that he can definitely explore as a director, and that he is exploring as a director, otherwise I think he’s going for it man, he’s so confident and he’s so happy I think for the first time in many, many years, he’s getting to do what he really wants to do and he’s going for it.

 

PT:      Do you give him a lot of feedback?

 

KK:      I do, when I watch the films.

 

PT:      Well, also maybe about the way he works. You know, Anurag is right now not just a filmmaker, he’s also…

 

KK:      An image, yeah.

 

PT:      I mean more than an image, it’s just not an image, he’s also a facilitator and he is at the centre of whatever change is happening for better or worse. He is at the centre of it.  Do you give him a lot of advice or do you think that there is a need to draw a line there?

 

KK:      I mean he has to figure it out for himself at the end of the day, but there’s one thing that I’ve noticed…

 

PT:      Is it frustrating as a partner, I mean you want to tell, and then you also want to not tell him?

 

KK:      It is, but see one thing I’ve noticed in the last year or so is that he’s suddenly become this flag holder for all independent cinema, the flag holder for anything that’s alternative. And he’s telling me he’s feeling like a prostitute, he says I’m feeling like a whore, because I’m just running from one promotion to another of films which I’ve had nothing to do with. And it’s taken up all his life. He’s unable to write, he’s unable to create and at the end of the day he’s a director, so all this other stuff that he’s doing, it’s wonderful and wow and all that, but he needs to do what he really does well, which is direct. So of course there are times when I’ve told him this, but also he’s also right in the middle of it, there’s nothing you can do right now— it’s a process right? He’s going through this thing where he has to start giving responsibility to other people.  You know he started nurturing these new filmmakers Vasan (Bala) and Shlok (Sharma); Peddlers that went to Cannes and stuff, so these are filmmakers who spread their wings and can also help other people, so it’s at that point where right now he’s at the top of the pyramid and he slowly needs to come down and let everybody come to more like a semi circle, less of a pyramid, so he doesn’t have all the pressure on him. So that’s going to take a while, and that requires patience for sure, I’m just like, just tell them to fuck off and do your own thing. I want to spend time with him, I want to be with him. Right now we don’t see each other at all, so it’s tough, but you’ve got to wait it out, I think there’s nothing better than time to really get through things.

 

PT:      Have you ever acted in French in theatre or …

 

KK:      Never. In fact, two years ago I went for this cultural festival in France. They invited me because it was all about this exchange of cultures and because I’m French and Indian and all, I had to do the opening speech and I realized this was the first time I was doing a speech in public in French. I was so nervous, it was ridiculous. But it was a good thing to do actually, because I ended up, I had written out this very long and worked out proper little speech, in the end, at the last minute I just put it away and I just said what I wanted to say, and it was the best thing I could have done, because it was just so formal and so prepared, it was much better that I talked and people really liked it, you know, that I just said…

 

 

PT:      Can you imagine a life without movies— not watching movies, but being a part of movies?

 

KK:      Not any more. You know, I was so stubborn about acting, I knew I wasn’t making any money, for a very long time. For seven years I didn’t make any money off my acting and I was just about making ends meet, like getting other jobs and stuff. So it wasn’t a practical thing, it came from somewhere else. It was this hunger, as I said, this want to do it, and this excitement for it. So that’s something that I can’t imagine living without, not to want to do what you love to do, and not to want to follow what you love to do, to just accept your job and not particularly like it.

 

PT:      And what about not working at all?

 

KK:      No, I’m a workaholic, I don’t mean earning money, but I have to keep my hands going, I have to keep doing something. If I’m not doing a film then I’m writing, or I’m going out and learning some workshops, I’m going to Adishakti. I’m going to different parts of the world to study something to do with acting. It’s endless. It’s limitless.

 

PT:      Going to do this for the rest of your life?

 

KK:      Yeah, till I’m old. I want to have a walking stick and still be…

 

PT:      But movies or acting?

 

KK:      Acting. I mean movies is a part of that for sure, and I’m very grateful to it. I love working in films and I hope to sort of keep going in that as well. But acting, I mean, you know, I don’t know, any type of acting, maybe there’s more, maybe we have to discover a new kind of medium other than films and theatre.

 

PT:      I’m sure it will come. Well writing for one, I mean that’s something that you do and you should possibly do more of.

 

KK:      Yeah.

 

PT:      Okay, absolutely last question, tell me about films that have had an influence, which was not craft related, a movie that could have changed your perspective on something or taught you something about living life, or deeply emotionally moved you, made you want to pursue something, read something, influences other than on your acting.

 

KK:      I watched Bandit Queen when I was probably too young to watch it and that film has never left me. I mean obviously, because I was about 14 when I watched it and just the visual elements and the toughness of the film really hit me hard, but it also made me so angry about this country. I wanted to do something about this, women cannot be treated like this anywhere and it cannot happen. That was one film that really, really impacted me.  I think one of the strongest impacts in my life. Other than that there’s this film, it’s called Contact, I don’t know if you’ve seen it, it’s with Jodie Foster, and it’s not a particularly amazing cinematic film, but there’s something about the conviction in that girl’s character, obviously it’s also her performance, but the way she believed in something which didn’t exist or which she couldn’t prove, and that pursuit, and that wanting to keep going. And that relationship between the guy who’s a religious man and her who’s completely scientific and how they still found a place to meet, because they were both looking for something that they couldn’t prove. That is a philosophy that I love, you know, fighting for something that you know exists, even though you can’t prove it, so that’s another film.

 

PT:      Name one romantic comedy that is integral to your idea of love.

 

KK:      Oh, man, romantic comedy that’s integral… I think I was very effected by Pride and Prejudice, although it was not a comedy, but it was extremely romantic and again that amazing, you know, having to deal with society, and the behaviors and everything and then still finding that way to express yourself and holding back and all of that, I just love it, I’m a big sucker for it, I’m totally in love with Colin Firth.

 

 

 

 

 

The Migrants and a Movie Hall

Farrukh Dhondy reconstructs the history of Indian and Pakistani immigrants in London, through the story of one cinema hall

The first time I went to the Liberty Cinema, at some forgotten date in the early seventies, was not to watch a film but for an afternoon political rally. One of the conspicuous buildings in Southall (Pronounced ‘South-Hall’ by its residents and ‘Sudhhll’ by the snooty English), West London, with its ludicrous Chinese-dragon facade and its rather fetching art deco interior, it sits between the two shopping hubs of the Punjabi suburb.

 

Almost opposite it is a park and the main road proceeds over a railway bridge under which is Southall station with a connection to West London’s termini. It descends the railway bridge, passes a very famous pub with figures of men with sashed turbans stuck on the exterior called Glassy Junction and pronounced ‘Gill-arsyy Junkshin’ and runs a quarter of a mile to the High Street.

 

If one ignores the simplicity of the Victorian and Edwardian worker’s-cottage-terrace architecture this High Street with its garish signs selling sweetmeats and DVDs could be a market street in Ludhiana. The large groceries of the High Street flow onto the pavements with, to Britain, exotic fruit and vegetables: karella, kuddhoo, methi, different kinds of mirch, bunches of dhania and cardboard boxes of the various varieties of mangoes when in season.

 

The other road from the cinema leads to another shopping centre with equally sumptuous supermarkets for groceries, fineries and jewellery, past a tiny park where the old men, whom as a passer-by I always think of as Sikh veterans of the Second World War, gather of an afternoon. Then on to various gurdwaras and out of the suburb to the M4, a motorway that connects London to Bristol.

 

The Liberty cinema was the venue for the first of several rallies I attended. It was, when not showing films, the hub of political agitation, meetings and rallies invariably called by one of the Indian Workers’ Associations. If you guessed that there were three or more factions of this organisation, owing allegiance and sending money to the Congress, the Communist Party of India, to the Communist party of India (Marxist) and to the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) you can give yourself a pat on the back. That these organisations hated each other and have now, with the integration of the new generations of Southall into British life and away from strictly Punjabi factional politics, melted away without significant numbers or significance, is also true.

 

I went with others to Southall from London proper—or improper considering the nature of the districts in which we lived—as a pamphleteer, agitator and member of other immigrant organisations such as the British Black Panther Movement and Race Today.

 

The one mass meeting held in the Liberty Cinema in the late seventies was to protest the death of a young man called Gurdip Singh Chaggar, fatally assaulted, it was alleged and never proved, by three skinhead youths. At the time the leading neo-fascist party of Britain was called the National Front. One of its leaders John Kingsley Read, commenting on the killing of Chaggar publicly pronounced “One down— a million to go.”

 

All of Southall, as other parts of the country, came alive and demanded action and justice from the police and government. The militant factions of Asian youth, that marched, declared Southall a no-go area for racists. It was 1976.

 

Three years later, in April 1979, the National Front decided to hold a rally during the general election of that year in the town hall in Southall. It was a stunt to get attention as they had no members in the area but wanted to make a gesture of propagandist defiance by holding their meeting in the heart of an immigrant community.

 

Their main platform was the repatriation of immigrants, and the police who gave them permission to hold a meeting and a march on those streets in an Asian suburb were well aware of the certain provocation and threat to civil order this posed.

 

The cops were out in force, with vans parked in several side streets, and patrols and contingents numbering hundreds with riot shields and vizored helmets lining the High Street to hold back the counter demonstration of anti-fascists.

 

A school-teacher called Blair Peach joined this counter-demonstration under the banner of the National Union of Teachers, a professional union to which I earning my living at the time as a schoolteacher belonged. I knew Peach as he was an activist in the Union and we met in left-wing organisations. At the time the male sartorial fashion was flared trousers and shoulder-length hair with perhaps a growth of beard in imitation of the rock stars of the day. It is embarrassing to recall how both of us looked like that!

 

The police with riot shields fought off the young Asian crowds who attempted to stop the National Front members who sought the protection of vans and buses in their passage to the Town Hall. All hell broke loose and by the late afternoon several street battles had been fought and very many young Asians and others arrested.

 

At around 6 pm, when things were quieter, Blair was attempting to make his way away from the troubled High Street, taking a short cut through the terraced Edwardian houses of Southall, when he passed a police patrol getting into their van.

 

One copper left his van, ran up to Peach unprovoked, according to witnesses, and bludgeoned him with his baton. Peach fell to the ground and was assisted by Asian bystanders who witnessed the assault from their garden. They called the ambulance but Blair died from the cracked skull and injuries to his brain an hour or so later.

 

The newspapers denounced our anti-racist demonstrations instead of taking the police and the National Front to task for this needless provocation and mass civil disturbance in which three people had their skulls cracked open and many others suffered injuries.

 

The murder of Blair Peach was the singular tragedy and injustice of this street battle. My colleagues and I went to a protest meeting again at the Liberty cinema. By then the hall was in a decrepit condition with the stuffing emerging from the split seats and the paint dull, with perhaps the smoke from cigarettes patrons lit up, ignoring the non-smoking signs. There was no heating as I remember. The rhetoric was brave enough.

 

The film that was showing at the time was called Baton Baton Mein starring Tina Munim, Pearl Padamsee and Amol Palekar. I recall reading the poster and thinking of the irony. An English person would read ‘baton’ not as ‘baathon’—‘conversation’ in Hindustani—but as the police’s bludgeoning weapon and ‘mein’ as the possessive pun in German. It was an idle thought and certainly one that hadn’t occurred to anyone else.

 

The demonstrations of the late seventies were symptoms of the incipient upward mobility and growing demands of the second generation of South Asians who form today, with their children, a third and even fourth generation of immigrants, 65 percent of the population of the suburb.

 

Those demonstrators in the late seventies were not going to accept any form of second-class status in British society and they were making it clear that those forces antagonistic to their presence would be met with the sort of retaliation that film heroes such as Amitabh Bachchan or Mithun Chakraborty would dish out in the potboilers produced in those days.

 

*

 

It was not always so. The Asian inhabitation of Southall began, so the legend goes, when a British officer of the former Raj who had returned to West London after Indian independence and set up a small factory—some say a bakery—invited the retired Sikh soldiers he knew to join him as workers in Southall.

 

The suburb is close to Heathrow airport which today uses Asian labour in various capacities, from lavatory attendants to baggage handlers, security guards and the staff of packaged-meal suppliers to airlines.

 

In the years between 1950 and the mid sixties Southall grew through the untrammelled, at the time legal, influx of the families, relatives and village neighbours of the dominantly Punjabi workers who arrived in Britain and took up these jobs which didn’t require any great familiarity with England, its culture or language.

 

The community built on itself, opening the small-trade shops of imported food and ‘native’ goods. It became a settlement, though never a ghetto, with the white population moving out and the Punjabis, from both sides of the Indo-Pak border but predominantly from Amritsar, Jullundur and Hoshiarpur, moving in and acquiring the relatively cheap terraced housing.

 

Of course there had been Indians in Britain before the 1950s. They were mostly from aristocratic and upwardly mobile families. Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Lord Sinha, Shapur Saklatvala and later Nehru, Jinnah and Gandhi had all passed through and made their mark.

 

But here now was the ex-peasantry of India, in Britain not to study and return to its leadership but to settle and work, mostly at the jobs that the British white working class had abandoned—‘shift work and shit work’—after the Second World War.

 

India was a newly independent country and was consciously searching for its identity. Indian film was now the lingua franca of the country. A pioneer of the industry Raj Kapoor was compellingly aware that what he was doing in telling his stories and portraying his characters on screen, or presenting Nargis and other actors with himself, was defining what an Indian is or should be. From Aag, Barsaat, Awara and right through his films of the sixties, Raj Kapoor is creating the new myths of what an Indian man is. The patriotism emerges in the songs:

 

Mera joota hai Japani

Yeh patloon Inglistani,

Surr pey lal topi Russi

Phir bhi dil hai Hindustani…

 

It’s an anthem that recognises that India may not yet manufacture all the externals—the shoes, trousers, hats—but the heart that beats within…

 

And then the defining of the man with a simple heart caught up in the turmoil of modernity and conquering it with the simplicity of the Awara, the Shree 420 or of Raju who lives where the Ganges flows:

 

Mera naam Raju,

Gharaana anaam

Behti hai Ganga

Jahan mera dhaam.

 

The peasant, the wanderer is the generous heart of the new nation:

 

Mehmaan jo hamara hota hein

Wo jaan sey pyara hota hein…

 

And it goes on to pronounce the mantra of survival of a country that knows itself as poor. Indians will survive by steely humility and not through materialism.

 

Zyaada ki nahin laalach humko

Thodey mein guzaara hota hein…

 

The characters he creates, the lovable rogue, the bewildered villager wandering into the city with a Chaplin-like innocence and conquering the evils and complexity of city-slickers and their plots are an off-shoot of the Gandhian vision of spinning wheels and simplicity. Of course these mythical virtues exclude chastity or there’d be no scope for the seductiveness of Nargis.

 

The ideal is constructed on a nationalistic myth.

 

Jahan hoton pey sachchayi hoti hein

Jahan dil mein safai rehti hein

Hum us desh key vaasi hein

Jis desh mein Ganga behti hai.

 

One can be certain that, with some part of their minds, the children of the new republic were conscious that our lips were not constantly endowed with indelible truth or our hearts clean as the driven snow. Only the geography of the lyric was dead accurate: we did live in the country through which the Ganges flows.

 

Then there was Nargis who broke away from Raj and acted in Mehboob’s extravagant Mother India. If Raj defined the Indian man in that immediately post-independence decade, the years of the first Indian settlement of Southall, Nargis’s role harked back to the message of Krishna in the Mahabharat. She surrenders her son, who has turned to dacoity, for the sake of the greater truth. Her karma remains in the service of dharma.

 

Godliness is for Gods and however strong our self-image as created by the films of the fifties was, the nation should have realised that films were merely incarnate ideals and entertainment— and that’s how we liked them. If films allowed in too much reality they became ‘art’ and who needs to go to the cinema for that? We get enough of it at home!

 

*

 

The Himalaya Palace, the most recent name of the Liberty Cinema around which I have attempted a peripheral and deficient history of Southall, began life in 1912 showing silent British and American films. With the severe and relatively swift change in the demographic by the early sixties, the owners screened some Hindi films on weekends. It was renamed the Godeon, then altered to the Godina— perhaps to reflect in its first syllables a version of the Punjabi pronunciation of ‘Godeon’.

 

In 1972 it became the Liberty Cinema and by then it was London’s only Hindi picture palace. It was where I, with friends from bed-sitter central London, went to see Kamal Amrohi’s Pakeezah and Manmohan Desai’s Bhai Ho To Aisa. Both films were extremely popular though one noticed a distinct difference in the clientele. The Pakeezah audience were older men and very many women. The love story, the pathos and the nostalgia for even an enclosed Muslim haveli culture was evident.

 

The Manmohan Desai film, devoid of the classical grace of Pakeezah, was stuffed with stunts and imitations of the cheaper tricks of contemporary Hollywood. The outrageous plot, reminiscent of Marie Corelli’s bad nineteenth century novel Vendetta, gets the hero to fake his own death and reappear as an avenging dacoit to kill his brother who tried to kill him. The audience for Bhai Ho… was packed with young males and they followed the action with howls of approval and seemed silently willing to suspend their disbelief when faced with the absurdity of the plot.

 

*

 

In 1979 I gave up my steady job of teaching a South London school in order to write my fourth published and, I hoped, succeeding books. Writing didn’t immediately pay the bills so I farmed myself out as a ‘supply’ teacher, one that’s assigned to a school to cover the classes of teachers who are away through illness or other circumstance.

 

As it happened I was assigned to a girl’s school in Southall. I had to travel the fifteen miles from my home to the west of London each day, but the actual teaching was a surprise.

 

I had known and met the citizens of Southall in several capacities but they had all been men, young and old or they were the shy and retiring older ladies who were occasionally my hostesses when I visited some grandee of the Indian Workers’ Association or some activist on the Asian Left. They spoke in Punjabi accents and served tea and parathas and sarson ka saag.

 

Here in the girl’s school was a captive second or even two-and-a-half-th generation— daughters of some first generation immigrants or of their offspring who had been brought to England from the Punjab at a young age and had grown and married and sent their girls to school.

 

All the girls, 90 percent of them Asian, spoke in London English accents and some of the sixth form to whom I had to teach Keats and E. M. Forster (no, not Passage to India) had somehow, possibly from their British teachers, acquired middle class accents, a sort of preparation for a smooth entry into the professions. The statistics were telling. This predominantly Asian school got far better exam results than a hundred others in the boroughs around.

 

“So will you go to university?”

Six of the twelve would.

 

“And then will you return to Southall?”

They looked at each other. Where else would they go?

 

I knew what they meant. Southall was the world, they knew no other and they hadn’t come to terms with the fact that they were probably fated to be the first to break out of it.

 

“You never know, as in the Foster novel, you leave home, you fall in love and romance carries you away.”

They giggle.

 

“It happens all the time in the Hindi films doesn’t it?”

 

Yes, they admitted, it did and they loved Hindi films and I heard the yearning for the possibility in their answers. But they didn’t go to the Liberty cinema anymore even with their families. It was too rough and the cinema showed the sort of films that only boys like. Two or three of them illustrated the point by saying “dhishoom, dhishoom!”

 

And those who wouldn’t go to university even if they got good grades at A level? One said her father wanted her to join his estate agency, two of the others said they would be sent to college in the Punjab “where it was safe”.

 

My few weeks at the school were a snapshot of the advancing and turbulent culture. The girls would go home and speak Punjabi. In the playground I heard some of them swear like cockney troopers. Most of the girls in the school wouldn’t get to the sixth form. Those who didn’t would remain in Southall, probably marry and make families and homes there.

 

By the beginning of the eighties Southall was not just Little India, it had spread as those who could afford it. Those who had money through prosperous business on the central streets, or through the warehouses on the periphery, had moved outward to Hayes, away from central London, and to Greenford and Ealing, a mile or two towards it.

 

*

 

By the early eighties the Liberty had shut down and an enterprising businessman had bought it and set up a market of stalls. The enterprise was doomed. It was too far away from the main trading centres and market streets and the community had no preference, as may have been exercised in a pretentious white area of London, for shopping in an art deco converted interior over finding the cheapest bargain on the stalls of the High Street. The market didn’t last.

 

The coming of Channel 4 to national TV and the proliferation of Hindi films on video were the last sharp and decisive nails in the coffin of Southall cinema. Both of these happened in 1982. Channel 4 began showing classic Hindi films in ‘seasons’ of twelve each, with one or two new releases thrown in. It was free to air and as the Channel 4 executive responsible for choosing, buying, contracting, subtitling and transferring the films to transmittable media I gathered the statistics. 80 percent of Southall accessed our Indian film seasons. Hindi films were by that year on video anyway and the popularity of electronic media was beginning to kill the potential of cinema.

 

A couple of years into my job as a commissioning editor of Channel 4, I received a phone call from a fellow who identified himself as a young filmmaker who had to produce a short film to qualify as a director. Could he have one of my short stories set in Pune, India—and then—would I also write the script. He began to explain that he had no money and was asking me to give him my story and adapt it as a script for free. I thought it over and, out of the goodness of my hard heart, I agreed.

 

He said in the days to come that he was going to capture on camera the Indian milieu in Southall and I tried in vain to explain that Pune in Western India, on the Deccan Plateau, bore little resemblance to the British-Punjabi setting of Southall. He said he had reconnoitred the Liberty cinema and it was ‘perfect’. His team persuaded him that it was not.

 

I wrote the script and he shot the film in a mall cafe that doubled as Pune. It was his first film and he was, though very British, determined to reach out to the world as he did starting with filming in Southall and moving to more international climes and becoming, as Michael Winterbottom is, a famous director.

 

Michael may have seen the charm of the cinema hall that had fallen into desuetude, but couldn’t really stage a Pune tea cafe in it. It was derelict and worse.

 

British sentimentality and aesthetic nostalgia came to the rescue of the ruined setting, the beacon of different dreams in Southall. English Heritage, a national organisation that safeguards architectural treasures looked at the faux-Chinese exterior and the deco interior of the building and decided to spend £135,000 on its restoration.

 

In 2001 the building reopened as the Himalaya Palace with three screens devoted to Bollywood blockbusters. The theatre was now as swanky as anything in the West End with the added attraction of the restored architecture of George Coles who designed its present appearance in 1929.

 

Sitting in the Himalaya Palace to watch Singh is Kinng sometime in the first decade of this century was strange. My friends and I had gone for the experience of the deco theatre, to appreciate as well as be sardonically critical (to take the piss, to be truthful) of the film and then eat at our favourite restaurant— the Brilliant. The theatre was virtually empty. The film was of the genre of pure entertainment that more and more cynical Indian audiences, seeking the definition of their souls and roles from realms and dimensions other than filmistan, watch.

 

Why weren’t they watching this one? Three good reasons. Any number of video channels by then aired any Indian film you wanted, even the latest ones on some demand arrangement. Then, Southall is by most measures the largest DVD bootleg market for Hindi films in the known world. Perhaps the most important factor of all is that the young, from teenagers to people in the third of their Shakespearean seven ages, and perhaps even those in their fourth and fifth, watch American and British films. Less attention on the Hindi. They are in that limited sense bicultural.

 

The Himalaya Palace terminated business in 2010. Pass the site now and you find the plywood boards on the windows and signatures of graffiti artists on the walls.

 

The fortunes of the Himalaya Palace building with its ups and downs is not a metaphor for the progress of Southall which is a settlement that has, octopus-like, spread through West London and is a measure of the prosperity and mobility of the Asian community that converted this characteristic outlying limb of London into a muscular demonstration of the city’s global dimension and growth.

 

Indian cinema, while worshipping and pouring the money of unimaginative producers into blockbusters is fast evolving new genres of film that take observation of reality rather than the construction of myth as their raison d’etre. I am thinking of the films like Dhobi Ghat and Peepli Live or the more commercial but still observed films of Anurag Kashyap such as Gangs of Wasseypur. There are a growing number of others. These films have come to Britain but are, as of now, festival fare.

 

The coming year or two will determine whether Southall has a segment of its population that will begin to support their commercial exploitation in Britain. Will that lead to the Palace of the Himalayas having a new lease of life?

A small news clip covering the clash between the police and the predominantly asian community in Southall, London (April 1979)

The writer’s latest novel London Company has more on the times he writes about in this report and is now available in stores and online.

Third Eye

Film and theatre photographer Nemai Ghosh began his journey into the medium with photographs of the filmmaker Satyajit Ray and his movies, which he is best known for. Here is a selection of 24 of these photographs, and an extract from his book Manikda: Memories of Satyajit Ray where he talks of his first meeting with the auteur as well as his first tryst with the camera.

 

Certain episodes reshaped my life and changed its course entirely. I know not who makes such incidents happen. But whosoever he might be, I am eternally grateful to him. My tryst with the camera is one such episode. Let alone photography, I didn’t even know how to click a camera. It was probably 1967 or 1968. A card session was on in full swing in my house.

 

Most of my friends, Shubhendu (Chattopadhyay), Bhanu-da (Ghosh), Bansi (Chandragupta), were associated with films. I was never any good at cards. It was sometime in the afternoon. Snacks were being served— the card game and light refreshment going on together. I stood near the window and was munching some muri (parched rice). I was to leave for rehearsals a little later. I was completely immersed in theatre at that time. A friend of mine suddenly turned up and said that someone had left behind a fixed-lens camera in a taxi. Another friend of his had already offered him a sum of six hundred rupees for the camera. Something clicked in my mind, and I told him, “Look, you owe me two hundred forty rupees. You give me the camera and the loan is as good as repaid. Now, you better decide which to choose— business or friendship.” Sure enough, he left the camera with me. I examined it but could make nothing of it. Realizing my predicament, one of my friends, Jaipratap Mitra, an assistant cameraman, decided to help. Bhanu-da suggested he would arrange for film rolls. Thus, with the help of my friends, in a short span of time, I started viewing everything through the lens of my camera.

 

***

 

My friends and I were in the habit of spontaneous outings. Let me mention here that this habit has never left me, despite advancing age. To tell the truth, I have never devoted much time to any of my three children. But still they have been brought up well. The full credit for this goes to my brothers and my wife Sibani. In fact, we all lived together. And perhaps it is because of the benefits of living in a joint family that I could, and even now can, take such risks. I met Sibani only after our wedding and we have been together for over fifty years now. Meanwhile, I quit my job, stopped acting on stage, spent thousands on film. When fathers of other children escorted them to examination halls, I would perhaps be out on some outdoor shooting or, intoxicated with photography, on the lookout for some other shoot. My wife has never complained about such escapades. Even when I missed many social functions she took responsibility and made excuses for me. She has always demonstrated ample faith in me and my pursuits.

 

One Saturday, we boarded a train for Barddhaman— the Canon camera and two rolls of film with me. What awaited us there was beyond our wildest dreams. Our host at Barddhaman—a friend of mine—told us that Satyajit Ray was shooting for Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne at nearby Rampurhat. Robi-da, the director of our drama group Chalachal, was playing an important role in the film. I thought, well I could try killing two birds with a stone: see him on the job, and take his photograph also. We were all quite excited! But having reached there we learned that the shoot had been cancelled for the day. The unit was busy rehearsing a shot, one that later fascinated film lovers the world over— the shot in which drops of water drip from leaves and fall on Bagha’s drum. I don’t know what possessed me then. As if in a trance I felt my finger pressing the shutter on the camera. I finished both rolls of film. We returned to Kolkata the following day. I went straight to the then famous Studio Renaissance in Ballygunj, owned by Bhupendra Kumar Sanyal, more popularly known as Mej-da. Leading filmmakers and creative artists of the time like Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, Ritwik Ghatak, Tapan Sinha and Ravi Shankar used to frequent his studio in those days. Perhaps my association with theatre gave me the courage to go to the studio to develop my films, for there was no reason he would pay any heed to a small fry like me. It transpired that Mr. Sanyal had seen me on stage and liked my performance too. That is why I could gather enough courage to hand over the two rolls to him. He took them and with a grave face entered the darkroom.

 

I waited in eager anticipation, my heart thumping against my ribcage. Each moment seemed like an endless hour. Mej-da was sure to come out and say in his enigmatic voice, “Well, you were doing fine in theatre. Why then this sudden craze for photography?” Mej-da came out of the darkroom. The first thing he did was pinch me on the belly and then he kissed my forehead and said, “Go ahead, you will succeed in photography.” I couldn’t believe my ears. Had I heard it right? This, after just a few days of holding the camera in my hand for the first time. His words still ring in my ears. Praise from such an experienced man in the field gave me a lot of strength and encouragement.

 

My excitement knew no bounds. I went on showing those pictures to others. I still vividly remember my joy and surprise at the pleasant response to those photographs. Of course, I did not have the slightest inkling even then as to how the camera would change my life completely. It was then that Bansi Chandragupta, who used to address Satyajit Ray by his first name, suggested to me that I show Manik-da the photographs. “Whom?” I asked him in amazement. He replied, “Why! Manik, of course. He is shooting for Goopy Gyne… these days at Tollygunj. Just drop in sometime with these pictures.”

 

***

 

One afternoon a few days later, I dropped by at the studio at Tollygunj, Bansi-da took the packet and said, “Manik, have a look at these photographs.” While Manik-da looked at the photographs, I hid behind Bansi-da, nervously watching the six-foot-two-inch man as he attentively went through the photographs shot by an amateur like me. To say I was excited would be an understatement. He finally spoke. “Who has taken these photographs?” Bansi-da moved aside, pointed towards me and said, “This boy, he is Nemai, Nemai Ghosh.” Manik-da looked at me and in his deep baritone said, “You have done it exactly the way I would have, man, you have got the same angles!” I was ecstatic! I remember having gooseflesh out of sheer thrill and suspense. Much time has passed since then, but that excitement, I can still feel within me. Even today, when I write about that incident I feel that same excitement so palpably. Then he himself escorted me to the sets. And that was my initiation. Soon I found myself in the company of experienced people with modern cameras in hand. It took me a while to get used to the whole ambience. That I could, was perhaps because of the towering personality of Manik-da, which overshadowed everything around him. Completely overwhelmed by all that I saw around me, I was fascinated by my subject— the magnetic presence of the filmmaker as auteur. My lens captured various poses of that intense, self-contained man— the minute trembling of his fingers; the way he sat, walked, the poise with which he stood. I still held in my hand that Canon fixed-lens camera.

 

***

 

Some members of Manik-da’s unit used to meet in the evening at a shop in our neighbourhood. Present at such a gathering, were his art director Bansi Chandragupta, sound recorder Sujit Sarkar, production controller Bhanu Ghosh and many others. They usually discussed the minute details of the day’s shooting and also the artistic skills of the filmmaker. In time, I too became a part of the adda. I found myself drawn to it every day on my way back home from my rehearsals. It was like an addiction. However, to begin with, I was only a listener. I wondered when I would know enough to be able to discuss the nitty gritties of working with Manik-da. It used to depress me a little, but I would invariably gravitate to their adda every evening. In retrospect, I realize that this adda acted like an inspiration for me. It would remove the pain of being away from Manik-da. I could feel his personality radiate through his work and the various discussions on it. And that was what kept me going. It gave me a sense of confidence. Someday, I would also be able, like they were then, to tell his story.

 

***

 

Meeting Manik-da on the sets was like a dream for me. But there was a big gap between that dream and reality. I was the eldest of my brothers and was married about ten years prior to my first meeting with Manik-da. As the head of a joint family, married, and having children of my own, I had many responsibilities. I was always worried whether I would ever be able to devote myself fully to the fulfilment of my dream. On the one hand, there was my stable, ten-to-five job which would sustain my family, and on the other hand was my first love— theatre. Even in the face of such harsh realities, I visited Manik-da’s set whenever I had spare time. When Bhanu-da told me that Manik-da had framed the photographs I had taken and hung them in his bedroom, I was greatly motivated.

 

***

 

After that first meeting when I showed him my photographs, I met Manik-da again on the sets of Goopy Gyne... I was there for about seven or eight shoots. But even within such a short span of time, I saw the man in some of his lonelier moments. Usually, Manik-da never left the sets during lunchtime. Since I was not a member of the unit, I couldn’t accompany the others during breaks. As a result, I studied him from a distance, through my lens.

 

Once, I saw him standing alone and playing a dundubhi (a kettledrum). On another occasion, I saw him lying on the floor and looking at the ceiling; at times I would see him raising his hands above his head in deep contemplation. I noticed that a sign of his deep anxiety or serious contemplation was biting a handkerchief or the pipe. Sometimes, he would whistle a tune, oblivious to the surroundings. For my photographs of Manik-da which show him laughing heartily, I am deeply indebted to my actor friend Kamu Mukhopadhyay. While I would take different positions—sometimes sitting, sometimes lying, or even standing at precarious angles—Kamu would stand behind me and imitate my pose, making Manik-da break into a loud guffaw. One morning I came to know that he was leaving for Santiniketan the next day by an early morning train, travelling first class. I bought a third-class ticket and boarded his compartment. He was deeply engrossed in reading a book. I was sure he had not seen me. I clicked away. It was much later that I realized that he had seen everything. When the train halted at a station, he alighted, bought two earthen cups of tea and offered me one. Manik-da was an early riser. I used to visit him at his place at six-thirty in the morning. In fact, that was the only time he was free and did not have visitors. Later on, of course, there was no fixed time for me to visit his house. His door was always open. He was always at work. I hardly ever saw him sit idle. Manik-da would get ready by six and come to his drawing room where I would present him with all the contact sheets of my photographs. He would scrutinize these and mark the ones he liked. I still retain those contact sheets. There were occasions when Manik-da would not tick certain photographs that appealed to me. When I asked him, he would explain, like a teacher instructing a student, why those were not good in all respects. Some shots might have been good but the background was not proper. This is how I learnt the art of perfect photography from him.

 

One thing surprised me then and it strikes me even now. Despite all the name and fame he had attained, he had an uncanny ability to guide any newcomer towards his goal. But he used to get annoyed if someone wanted him to demonstrate how to do something. His mantra was ‘do it yourself’, though he would act as a guide every step of the way. He would judge a man through his attempts and then guide him in a manner that he could easily follow. In my judgement, he was one of the best actors in the world. I can prove it through my photographs.

 

Excerpted from Manikda: Memories of Satyajit Ray by Nemai Ghosh, courtesy of Harper Collins. You can purchase the book here

These photographs are part of Nemai Ghosh’s archive of nearly 1,20,000 images, built over a lifetime of work, now housed at the Delhi Art Gallery. The gallery is currently showing an exhibition titled ‘Nemai Ghosh: Satyajit Ray and Beyond’. The exhibition showcases Ghosh’s photographs of Satyajit Ray and his films, as well as his lesser known, but equally extensive documentation of both mainstream Hindi as well as Bengali cinema. It is on till January 28, 2013 at Delhi Art Gallery, 11 Hauz Khas Village, Hauz Khas, Delhi, from 11 am to 7 pm. The exhibition can also be viewed at www.delhiartgallery.com

The Wondrous Histories of Zippy The Chimp and Pedro The Ape Bomb

Rajesh Devraj is the author (with Meren Imchen) of  the recently released Sudershan (Chimpanzee), a graphic novel about a simian star in sixties’ Bollywood. In this article, he shares his notes on the real-life counterparts of his fictional character. 

 

I. A CHIMP IN CHENNAI

 

Zippy the Chimpanzee arrived in India on a hot June day in 1955. No ordinary monkey, he was a bona fide American star who had been imported by S. S. Vasan, the legendary founder of Gemini Studios, to star in his upcoming Hindi film Insaniyat alongside actors Dev Anand and Dilip Kumar. Gemini Studios’ publicity people, who had learned a thing or two from their counterparts in American studios, created a blitz around Zippy’s Indian sojourn. In Mumbai, he was welcomed with a traditional garland by the film’s heroine Mohana, and photographed by the Associated Press, among other journalists. Filmindia ran a picture of Zippy perched on Mohana’s side, along with the kind of suggestive copy that was the magazine’s speciality. “Zippy is a loyal lover”, read the caption. “On arrival at the Santa Cruz airport he kissed Mohana and stuck to her till he departed. That proves that Zippy believes in cushioned comforts. So do many but they are not as fortunate as Zippy…”

 

Relinquishing Mohana’s ample charms, Zippy next made his way to Chennai, where filming on Vasan’s big-budget movie was already underway. “No film star in recent times received such a tumultuous reception as was accorded to Zippy, the chimpanzee, at the Meenambakkam airport when he arrived with his trainer and owner”, wrote The Hindu’s news editor Rangaswami Parthasarathy in his column. His curiosity had been aroused by the figures of Zippy’s earnings that Gemini’s savvy publicity men had released to the press. These, according to a report in Life the previous month, amounted to around $55,000 from television shows, nightclub engagements, merchandising, and sundry promotions where the talented ape demonstrated his skills at typewriting, roller-skating, finger-painting, and playing the piano. So lucrative was the Zippy enterprise that its owner Lee Ecuyer had multiple chimpanzees on the roster for TV appearances and roadwork . It is therefore not clear whether the Zippy who came to India with his trainer Ralph Quinlan was the same celebrity who had appeared on Howdy Doody and The Ed Sullivan Show, or played the sidekick Cheeta in Tarzan’s Hidden Jungle earlier that year.

 

Nevertheless, the Chennai press was aware that Zippy was no street juggler’s monkey, but a highly paid talent, deserving of as much attention as Insaniyat’s leads. A consummate showman, Vasan had already pulled off a huge casting coup by signing up two of the Hindi film industry’s biggest stars. But halfway through the shoot, he had decided there was something missing in his movie. It wasn’t surprising that he thought of introducing a performing animal to his rather heavy costume drama: earlier, Vasan’s epic Chandralekha (1948) had featured a canine actor briefly, and he had also used elephants in his Avvaiyar (1953). So when an art director diffidently suggested using a monkey,  Vasan promptly seized on the idea. Living up to his reputation as India’s own Cecil B. DeMille, the movie mogul turned his sights west, and struck an overseas deal. Before the month was over, the chimp from Hollywood was on his way to India.

 

Landing in Chennai on that June day, Zippy was an instant hit with the pressmen and the throngs who had been awaiting his arrival. As a news report in The Hindu noted the next day, ‘the patience of the crowd was amply rewarded when they had the fun of seeing the chimp walk and do things like a boy, and shake hands with all those who wanted to do so. With close fitting dress and boots, Zippy delighted the people by his mannerisms”.  The paper’s news editor Parthasarathy was not as impressed. He thought that the American star, “dressed as though he was going to take the field in a football match”, looked bored and oblivious to the tremendous excitement he was causing all around him. Vasan’s team was also considerably underwhelmed. “On first appearance, Zippy was an acute disappointment”, remembered the well-known Tamil writer Ashokamitran, a Gemini employee at the time. “No one knew how big a performing monkey ought to be, but everyone felt Zippy was too small, standing hardly a foot and a half from the ground”. Ashokamitran’s account of Zippy, which appears in his memoir of S. S. Vasan titled My years with Boss at Gemini Studios, goes on to describe the stratagems Gemini technicians devised to compensate for their performer’s shortcomings. Scenes featuring the chimp were shot slightly lower than eye level, so cleverly that the audience never realized that the action on screen was physically impossible for such a small creature.

 

Notwithstanding the special efforts required for Zippy’s scenes, Vasan changed the tightly worked out script considerably to give his imported talent more screen time. Not for the last time in Indian cinema, the comedy track was extended into a parallel storyline, and Zippy got not one, but two songs with the comedian Agha. He was allowed to mug shamelessly, reducing good dramatic scenes to farce in Ashokamitran’s opinion. While Dev Anand was not allowed to question the director’s wisdom in making him wear a silly moustache, his simian co-star had a lot more leeway. For the month that he stayed in Chennai, Zippy received royal treatment. Lee Ecuyer, in a New York Times interview, recounted people “bowing at our feet as though he really was royalty”. Ashokamitran, who had the responsibility of escorting important visitors around the Gemini lot, observed how the cream of Chennai’s society lined up to meet Zippy. The chimp posed for photographs, “pretending to smoke a cigar big enough to send Samson reeling”, and his crazy pranks were duly advertised in weekly bulletins to an eager public. When the movie was at last released, it was Zippy’s appeal, not the lure of Mumbai’s biggest stars, that packed in the curious crowds. Their verdict was unanimous: the chimp had stolen the film.

Call me a monkey’s nephew: Comedian Agha bonds with Zippy in Insaniyat

 

 Zippy steals the show in Insaniyat, even as the movie’s stars Dev Anand and Dilip Kumar look on.

 

II. THE MONKEY AND THE ORGAN-GRINDER

 

I met Nanabhai Bhatt in 1997, while putting together Toofan TV, a show about Hindi B-movies that aired on Channel [V].  I’d worked out the concept of the show and the initial research, commissioning a fellow B-movie enthusiast, the late Pankaj Advani, to produce and direct the series. Nanabhai, who had been a prolific director of stunt films and mythologicals in the fifties, was one of our first interview subjects. At the shoot, he took over from Pankaj with a veteran’s nonchalance. Calling out to lights, sound and camera to bear witness, he began to narrate the story of his life in a florid, filmi style. Startlingly, it appeared to be the story of Indian cinema itself.  Nanabhai had arrived in Mumbai around the same time that sound came to Mumbai’s movies. His brother had been an assistant on India’s first talkie, Alam Ara. He knew who actually directed that film, and who got all the credit. Our eyes popped, and Pankaj let the beta-cam roll on, till the old man himself called “Cut!”.

 

I am ashamed to say that I remember very little of what Nanabhai said that day. Yes, it’s all on tape somewhere—the lowdown on his career, his film-making family, his son Mahesh Bhatt—but my mind is quite blank on the details. Even more embarrassing, what I do remember from that encounter is not any significant film history, but the picture of a chimpanzee. The photograph, which had pride of place in Nanabhai’s album, showed a slightly manic-looking creature posing for the camera. The old man described the chimp as his favourite actor. Why? Because he never questioned his director’s instructions, that’s why! His name was Pedro. Pedro the Human Chimpanzee, a.k.a. the Ape Bomb.

 

Allow me now to present some obscure,  trivial facts about this performing monkey’s career, and sink further in your esteem. As far as I know, Pedro made his debut in Homi Wadia’s jungle film Zimbo (1958), which was loosely derived from the director’s own Toofani Tarzan, released in 1937. The older film did not feature a chimpanzee: as the producer J. B. H. Wadia later explained, Professor Deval’s Circus had no trained apes, so the role of Tarzan’s loyal companion was offered instead to Boman Shroff, a former stunt hero. Unfazed, Shroff proceeded to play his character ‘Dada’ as a sub-human, semi-simian creature in blackface, a caricature that has been described by one reviewer as “the single most amazingly offensive racial stereotype I’ve ever seen on screen”.  As it happens, Toofani Tarzan was not unique in its political incorrectness, and in subsequent years, the jungles of Bollywood were thick with grunting men in gorilla suits, frenziedly scratching their armpits. By the late fifties, however, Homi Wadia must have known that it was time to move on to the real thing. Perhaps Zippy’s reception among Indian audiences was on his mind when he decided to cast an actual chimpanzee in Zimbo.

 

Pedro’s portrayal of Dada in the 1958 film is naturally an improvement over the original performance, considerably more realistic in tone. With a mysterious ‘Mr and Mrs Joe Neufeld’ as his trainers, he plays it straight for the most part; just the average, loping sidekick from countless jungle movies. As the plot ambles along, however, he comes into his own, donning the heroine’s clothes for a jazzy comedy number, and brandishing a gun manically in the climax. The movie was a hit, and Homi Wadia’s Basant Pictures cashed in with a couple of sequels starring Pedro, as well as dubbed Tamil and Telugu versions. Of all the Zimbo films, it is Nanabhai Bhatt’s Zimbo Comes to Town (1960) that remains the chimpanzee’s finest hour (or two) in Bollywood. In appearance, he is older and bigger, and perhaps less winsome than Zippy—certainly, his presence is a shade darker.  Nevertheless, Nanabhai focuses a substantial part of the movie on the chimpanzee’s stunts and comedy routines. Pedro gets to perform all kinds of circus tricks (“such acts that left the audience breath-taken and struck with awe”, according to the film’s promotional booklet). He plays peacemaker in a musical tiff between comic couple Bhagwan and Shammi, and in another song, he’s a lounge lizard with a lolling tongue, going wild with the maracas on a nightclub stage. It’s a wonder anyone took the lead actor Azad seriously after this film, because Nanabhai gives his compliant animal star so many of the hero’s scenes. It is Pedro who rescues the heroine from a gang of kidnappers, Pedro who drives the jeep in a thrilling chase, and bashes up the villain in the end. He even gets a floating head-shot on the poster, wearing a fez, and if you know these things, that’s a symbol of chimp stardom right there.

 

How popular was Pedro in his time? Based on his rather obscure filmography, it would seem that 1960, the year of the epic Mughal-e-Azam, was also the Year of the Ape Bomb.  Several of his starrers are dated 1960, including one named after the star himself: the movie Pedro, which from its synopsis seems to be another one of those run-of-the-mill jungle adventures featuring evil sorcerers, uranium-seeking villains, giant Cyclopean monsters, and yes, an obligatory comedy number with the lyrics “Hello, hello, Mr Pedro”. Bollywood’s hottest jungle star may have swung into southern forests as well during this period, if the Pedro sighted in this Malayalam film is indeed the Ape Bomb himself.  Also in 1960, Nanabhai Bhatt churned out his Zimbo movie, as well as another chimp-in-the-city flick, the thriller Police Detective, in which Pedro had a central role, investigating crime and bringing a murderer to justice. The latter film may have been a home production for Nanabhai Bhatt, since his brother Balwant is credited as producer. The Bhatt brothers teamed up again the next year for Teen Ustad (1961), a costume drama in which the titular characters are played by “Mushtaq (Horse), Tiger (Dog) & Pedro (Ape Bomb)”. Following this burst of starring roles, the filmography more or less runs dry, apart from a couple of jungle movies. There’s Tarzan aur Gorilla (1963), where Pedro appears to be playing second fiddle to a man in a gorilla suit, of all things.  And then there’s the last of the Zimbo films (Zimbo Finds a Son, 1966), where many of his scenes appear to be spliced together from previously shot footage.

 

It is tempting to think of Pedro as a Bollywood victim, a minor star who was discarded ruthlessly at the end of a run of exploitation hits. But fanciful speculation aside, what was he truly like, the monkey beyond the arc lights? In a 1984 interview for Star & Style, Homi Wadia’s wife, the legendary stunt actress Fearless Nadia, remembered Pedro as an affectionate if overly excitable companion who would do the craziest things. It was true that he could get violent at times – there had been an incident in which she was attacked and her vision had been temporarily impaired – but in the end, he was a loving soul whose death affected her deeply. In the murky world of performing animals, identity can be a fluid thing. If one Zippy died, or was retired to the Bronx Zoo as he grew older and more aggressive, another cuter one would take his place, and people would be none the wiser. Fourteen chimps played Zippy over the years, but it’s unlikely that there was ever more than one Pedro. “It took me some time to get over his death”, Nadia said.

 

Pedro does the obligatory comedy number with actor Sheikh in Zimbo

 

 Pedro in Nagarathil Jimbo, the dubbed Tamil version of Zimbo Comes to Town

 

Pedro lays down the law for Bhagwan and Shammi in Zimbo Comes to Town

 

Rajesh Devraj would like to thank Ashokamitran for his help in identifying Zippy’s trainer, and Michael Barnum at the Pedro the Ape Bomb blog for sharing the quotes from Nadia’s interview.

You can read an excerpt from Sudershan (Chimpanzee) here

You can buy the book here 

 

Outtakes

“I took this picture on the sets of Mr. Hot Mr. Kool in May 2006. A song sequence was being shot where these extras were supposed to woo the male leads of the film, Zulfi Syed and Yash Pandit— exuding oomph as they closed in on them. In a dark corner of the set a helping hand from the light department was watching unnoticed— the film’s first captivated audience.”

– Fawzan Husain