Harper Cinema Omnibus: Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro; Gangs of Wasseypur; Mother Maiden Mistress

Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro

Gangs of Wasseypur

Mother Maiden Mistress

Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro

Seriously Funny since 1983

Jai Arjun Singh

HarperCollins Publishers India

For the girls: mum, dadi, Abhilasha, Foxishka,

and in memory of nani

Contents

Introduction

Part 1. The Men Who Wrote the Madness

1. The Artist as Store Attendant

2. The Music of Chance

3. Two Men and a Photo Studio

4. The Idiots Who Financed the Madness

5. A Meeting of Minds

6. Outtakes from the Shadow Films

7. Serious Relief

Part 2. Assembling the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party

8. A Cosy Little Unit

Part 3. Shooting the Madness

9. The Action Begins

10. A Nightmare at Beach House

11. Exploitation Film

12. Naseeruddin Shah Ko Gussa Kyon Aata Hai?

13. Photos that Blow Up, Bombs that Don’t

14. The Home Stretch

Part 4. Post-production

15. A Final ‘Rewrite’

16. Post-mortem

17. Jaane Bhi Do …

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Picture Section

About the Author

Copyright

Introduction

For a Hindi-movie buff who grew up in the early 1980s, there’s a large bank of memories to draw on. Though we didn’t know it yet, Hindi commercial cinema had just entered its vaguest, most shambolic decade, one with little pretension to ideology, without any figure even remotely as emblematic as Amitabh Bachchan’s Angry Young Man had been in the 1970s. The next six or seven years would be marked by a relative lack of star power, films with shoddily thrown together fight scenes and isolated comedy tracks, and soundtracks that were so uninspired (or, in some cases, so obviously ‘inspired’) that we often pressed the fast-forward button on our video players when a song sequence came on.

A generation of young actors was just starting to make its presence felt: the fresh-faced Sunny Deol and Amrita Singh in Betaab, Jackie Shroff and Meenakshi Seshadri in Hero, Anil Kapoor, Sridevi, Sanjay Dutt. For the first time, the term ‘star son’ could be applied to people from outside the Kapoor family. Meanwhile, Amitabh, still the subject of most of our adoration, was moving on to newer things. His political career was just taking off, and real life met reel life in a muddled sort of way in a film called Inquilaab, which ended with a heavy-handed scene (we loved it at the time!) where the Big B solves all of India’s problems by simply locking the country’s corrupt, self-serving politicians in one room and taking a machine-gun to them, much like your pest-control guy cleaning up a termite colony.

Around the time Inquilaab was being completed, another, much less heralded film had a quiet release in a few movie halls in Bombay and in Sheila in Delhi. One of the lead characters in this movie would express his impotent rage towards the System by exclaiming ‘Jee karta hai machine gun leke sab ko …’ (‘I wish I could take a machine gun and …’), but the sentence would be left incomplete, the fantasy unresolved, because the quick-fix solutions of mainstream cinema had no place in this movie. This was a film that dealt with inequality and injustice more matter-of-factly—not as things that could be isolated, tucked back into a little Pandora’s box and vaporized, but as elements deeply embedded in the fabric of our lives. Too deeply embedded, perhaps, to ever be successfully countered. But hey, we could always make the best of a bad situation by laughing at our collective predicament.

This is what Kundan Shah’s breathless satire Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro helped us do. It used humour for potent social commentary and to skewer holy cows. It made us chuckle along with it, even as it held up a distorting mirror to society.

The story is easy enough to summarize. Two idealistic photographers, Vinod (Naseeruddin Shah) and Sudhir (Ravi Baswani), try to earn an honest living by setting up a small photo studio, but gradually get drawn into a situation involving corrupt builders, corrupt law enforcers and a corrupt magazine publisher. An editor named Shobha (Bhakti Barve) hires them to spy on the underhand activities of two rival construction magnates, Tarneja (Pankaj Kapoor) and Ahuja (Om Puri), both of whom are in cahoots with the crooked commissioner of police, DeMello (Satish Shah). When the commissioner is murdered and the photographers find evidence that Tarneja is the killer, the corpse becomes the focus of a manic chase that ends in a theatre house where an episode from the Mahabharata is being staged. The police intervene and the two photographers think all their hard work will finally bear fruit, ending in the arrest of the guilty parties. Instead, dishonesty wins the day; in a bleak ending ironically set to the strains of their favourite inspirational song ‘Hum honge kaamyaab’ (‘We shall overcome’), they find themselves implicated.

But these bare bones can’t begin to explain what made Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro tick. It is difficult to describe this film to someone who hasn’t experienced it first-hand (and this book isn’t meant for such philistines anyway!). You can methodically list the many modes of humour that it employs or the templates that it draws on: slapstick, surrealism, black comedy, the Theatre of the Absurd and the Keystone Kops among them. You can speculate that the people responsible for conceiving and executing it were influenced at various times by the silent movies of Chaplin and Keaton; the endless non sequiturs of Groucho and Chico Marx; the physical comedy of Kishore Kumar, Mehmood, Abbott and Costello and the wry political humour of 1960s’ Czech cinema. But even if you do all this, you can’t convey how the film brings all these elements together, mixes and mashes them, throws in bizarre sight gags and leaps of logic; how it plays like an amateur-troupe skit in places, with some scenes that appear hurriedly scripted or improvised just minutes before the cameras rolled; how it segues between wordless slapstick and rapidly delivered one-liners; how it frequently does away with credible scene set-ups and narrative logic and instead cuts straight to the heart of an idea, with some characters that are deliberate caricatures rather than nuanced people—and yet makes perfect sense, providing a final knockout punch that has rarely been equalled in Hindi cinema (and certainly never in a comedy).

For one thing, there’s scarcely anything you can compare it to. Though it wasn’t a mainstream film by any standards, its tone was unlike anything made by the ‘art’ brigade.

Hindi movies fell into two broad categories at the time. On the one hand, there were the mass-market entertainers based on assembly-line scripts, simplifications of human behaviour, and the romantic notion of the superman hero coming along and solving society’s problems with his fisticuffs (or machine gun, as Amitabh’s immortal ‘Vijay’ did in Inquilaab). On the other hand, there was the Cinema of Struggle, made up of socially conscious (and in some cases, very self-conscious) films that were labelled ‘parallel’ (or, worse, ‘art’) movies. Conventional wisdom has it that there was a clear division between the two forms, but the lines did blur at times. For example, it isn’t always easy to know how to classify the gentle social dramas and comedies of Hrishikesh Mukherjee—especially the ones that featured big-name stars like Dharmendra, Amitabh and Rekha. Some of Basu Chatterji’s and Gulzar’s works present a similar problem. And what to make of Shekhar Kapoor’s carefully crafted Masoom (which also released in 1983)—starring the first couple of art-house cinema, Shabana Azmi and Naseeruddin Shah—which became hugely popular with both children and adults, with the song ‘Lakdi ki kaathi’ turning into an anthem of its time?

Posterity has further muddied the waters. Movies like Mukherjee’s Gol Maal and Sai Paranjpye’s Chashme Baddoor may have been comparatively low-budget, with low-key actors, but their popularity has turned out to be more enduring than that of many box-office smashes that were released at the same time. In fact, some of these films are so accessible, so clearly non-elitist, that it’s difficult to believe they were ever considered off the beaten track. In almost any other major cinematic culture, even the Hollywood of the 1930s (with its narrative-driven films and popular genres such as the screwball comedy, the musical and the Western), they would have been part of the mainstream.

In other words, ‘parallel cinema’ was an umbrella term that could embrace such vastly different films as Govind Nihalani’s Aakrosh, Shyam Benegal’s Bhumika and Paranjpye’s Sparsh, films that only had this in common: their scripts and characterizations were more grounded than those of commercial cinema. But even amidst all these films, Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro is one of a piece. It defied classification. It was nearly as accessible as most mainstream films, but it was also just as provocative—and arguably more durable than— as many of the earnest but drab propaganda features of the time. It wasn’t at all ‘realistic’ in the superficial sense of that word, but it was real in a deeper sense.

To truly understand the phenomenon, one has to understand what a rare thing political or social satire is in India. This is not a country that has a grand tradition (in film, at least) of using humour to depict the stark realities of everyday life. But Kundan Shah’s movie combined extreme lightness of tone with extreme seriousness of purpose. It’s one of the funniest films ever made in India but also one of the darkest to come out of the Hindi film industry. Beneath the laughter is cold fury, even nihilism.

Of course, we didn’t realize this when we saw it as children.

A PERSONAL JOURNEY

When it comes to local pop culture, there’s a homogeneity to the experiences of my generation of urban, middle-class Indians who were growing up in the early and mid-1980s. It was the era of a single TV channel and mostly black-and-white TV sets. The idea of ‘home entertainment’ was in its infancy: only a few of us had video cassette players in our houses. (When my family got its first VCP, at least a dozen neighbours from around the building laid siege to our living room for the inauguration, done with a Mithun Chakraborty starrer called Muddat.)

Since we weren’t swamped with TV channels and other entertainment options—DVDs, multiplexes, video games, the Internet, cell phones—it follows that today, when people of my age gather to discuss that time (and generally behave like doddering 120-year-olds going on about the ‘good old days’), we have a limited, but very vivid, corpus of associations and memories to draw on. There’s Chitrahaar and Hum Log. Giant Robot and DD’s Comedy Show. Star Trek on Sunday mornings. The Sunday-evening Hindi movies. Rajani, Nukkad and the Lalita-ji commercials.

And then there’s Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, a film that, for most of us, is linked with television viewings rather than with a movie hall. I first saw it around the age of seven, with most of the family sitting in a semicircle around the glowing rectangular box in the drawing room. This scenario would repeat itself every few months or so, for Doordarshan seemed to enjoy telecasting the film almost as much as we enjoyed watching it. Its title soon became a byword for something funny, something that made you smile when you heard it—much like the TV show Yeh Jo Hai Zindagi. And because it was telecast so often over the years, we saw it at different stages of our lives, and it came to mean something different to us each time.

It can be a mistake to try and analyse the responses of your child-self to a film, but I think one reason why the film appealed so much to us when we were little was that it unfolded like the class plays we were familiar with in school— episodic, disjointed, a bit juvenile. This made it instantly identifiable, and also reassuring in a way, because it wasn’t too often that we got to see ‘grown-ups’ playing the fool in quite this way. Adult men and women (some of them smartly dressed in bandgallas and saris) running down the road after a corpse on roller skates? Arbitrary shooting about with guns, with no one getting hurt? The tomfoolery with the mixed-up telephones? Some of us had seen this kind of thing in Chaplin comedies on TV, but not in a contemporary, home-grown film with situations that we could directly relate to. To our young minds, the shenanigans in Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro were sillier than the dhishum-dhishum scenes and vigilante supermen in mainstream movies; we took those very seriously indeed! This was comedy, and wasn’t comedy something we could be patronizing about?

Nearly every Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro fan I know remembers being enthralled by the ‘thoda khao, thoda phenko’ scene, where Satish Shah’s Commissioner DeMello is encouraged to throw away bits of the ‘Switzerland ka cake’ he is eating. For children, this scene combined something we loved (chocolate cake) with something that was fun to do (throw stuff at people), and it was an instant winner. Long before we could understand the scene in grown-up terms—as an indictment of consumerist culture, a commentary on obscene wastage in a society where the gap between the haves and the have-nots was already insurmountable—it worked for us at a primitive level. The deeper meaning was secondary and, for many of us, it would remain incidental even when we watched the film as adults.

Even at a young age, the movie wasn’t all funny though. Hard as it is to believe today, there were parts that we found genuinely frightening as little children. The scene where Vinod and Sudhir discover the commissioner’s body became the stuff of nightmares for many young viewers. ‘I was scared of flyovers for days after that,’ a friend tells me. ‘I felt sure there must be bodies concealed under them.’ (It bears mentioning that flyovers were a novelty for those of us living in cities like Delhi, where a number of these concrete dinosaurs had been finished just in time for the 1982 Asian Games.) Some of the other humour was too subtle or deadpan for us. When the smarmy builder Tarneja, holding forth on the many benefits of a newly constructed bridge, says, ‘Aage jaake log iss flyover ke neeche apna ghar basaaenge,’ (‘People will make their homes under this flyover in future’) most of us didn’t register the irony. We were so inured to the sight of poor people living like this that we simply took the statement at face value.

As slightly older children, we would be fascinated by the blow-up scene where the photographers minutely examine and enlarge a film negative that shows a murder being committed—it was our introduction to the idea that this could even be done. (We didn’t know that the scene was inspired from an Italian film, but why would we care anyway?) The mid-section of Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, including the scene with the matching cufflinks that help the partners discover the body’s whereabouts, had the feel of an investigative thriller. (‘It was so vivid and exciting,’ says a commenter on a blog post I wrote about the film, ‘that I remembered the whole thing as a detective movie.’) Later, when we would have access to videotapes of the film, we would look carefully at the scene where the partners photograph the monkey in the park—using the pause button or slow-motion—to spot the scuffle going on in the background.

An abiding memory from those drawing-room viewings is of everyone waiting for the Mahabharata scene to begin: it was the ultimate pay-off, a cultural touchstone for our generation; so much so that I’ve met many self-proclaimed ‘die-hard Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro fans’ who remember little else about the film (and others who misremember that the scene was nearly forty-five minutes long when it was really under fifteen minutes in its final cut). The guffaws that accompanied the blind king’s every cry of ‘Yeh kya ho raha hai?’ (‘What is happening here?’) are so burned into my mind that, honestly speaking, I don’t even find the line funny any more.

Then came the last shot of the film, the scene that made both children and their parents uncomfortable. Up to this moment, there was reflex laughter every minute or so, but when the partners made their appearance in prison clothes a hush fell over the room. As the two ‘bali ka bakras’ (scapegoats) stared directly into the camera—at us—with a resigned, or perhaps accusing, look and made that chilling throat-cutting gesture, some of us averted our eyes. It took the rug out from under our feet: it was as if the film had played its final cruel joke, telling us, ‘Had a good time laughing, did you? Well, here’s what all that absurdity leads to.’

Parents would try to be reassuring in their banal way. ‘Don’t worry, they don’t really die,’ they would say, or otherwise try to divert our attention, but we couldn’t disregard the evidence of our own eyes. Already, we knew that Vinod and Sudhir were atypical leading men (compared to the heroes of mainstream cinema) who weren’t going to beat up dozens of goons in fight scenes, but at least they were likeable characters. ‘Do they get killed in the end?’ my wife remembers wondering as a little girl. ‘That’s so sad and so wrong, because throughout the film they made us laugh.’ When the editor Shobha turns out to be a bad egg, it was disorienting; this sari-clad lady didn’t fit our idea of what a vamp should be like. Nor could we process the negative connotation given to a patriotic song that we recited so proudly at school functions. All this made the downbeat ending more difficult to swallow.

Actually, many children (and adults) who shudder at the throat-cutting gesture in the final shot don’t realize that the scene isn’t meant to be taken literally: Vinod and Sudhir don’t really die, they only go to jail (supposedly for six months, but more on that later) and this scene is pure symbolism. But through adult eyes, it’s possible to see that the idea of the common man perpetually having his head in a noose—or held by puppet-strings being manipulated by dimly perceived larger forces—is even more terrifying than two innocents being literally sent to the gallows.

Today, revisiting the film is like entering a time machine—the Fiats and Ambassadors on Bombay’s roads, the ancient telephones, the quaint production room of the magazine Khabardar— but it remains painfully topical in ways that matter. Watching the scene where a newly built flyover collapses because ‘the builder mixed cement into sand instead of mixing sand into cement’, one thinks about the countless similar incidents we read about in newspapers every day. Corruption and inequality are things that we now take so much for granted that the pessimistic ending of Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro seems more pertinent than ever.

Any movie is necessarily a collaborative effort, and even a casual viewer should be able to tell that Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro marked a coming together of many top-notch talents. Some of the country’s finest actors worked in it, playing a variety of roles in different but complementary styles. The credits list reads like an honour roll from theatre and non-mainstream cinema, with the likes of Renu Saluja, Ranjit Kapoor, Binod Pradhan, Vinod Chopra and Sudhir Mishra contributing in vital ways to the film’s conceptualization and execution. But, as I realized when I began the spadework for this book, to truly understand Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, to delve into its lunacy and its darkness, it is essential to enter the world of the mild-mannered man in whose head the film first took shape.

Part 1

The Men Who Wrote the Madness

1

The Artist as Store Attendant

‘Take this hypothetical situation,’ Kundan Shah tells me at our first meeting in his Bandra office. ‘You want to write a book about this film I made years ago. So you call repeatedly and ask me to meet you and I keep putting you off, and you’re getting fed up but you aren’t in a position to say anything. You’re the underdog in our relationship.

‘Then, finally, I do call you over at a very inconvenient time, say ten thirty at night. You travel a great distance to get here, but then find that I’m busy—I have people over. I brush you off with the words: Hey listen, can you come later?. It’s an inconsequential matter for me— your book isn’t going to make my twenty-five-year-old film more popular than it already is—but for you, it’s as if the world has come crashing down.

‘But you don’t want the people sitting around to see that you’re hurt. So you put on a brave face, turn the whole thing into a joke. Okay, sir, you say with a deadpan expression, should I go back and come again at one a.m.? So now your humiliation has been transferred into another medium—sarcasm, whatever. And it’s for me to respond because, suddenly, I’ve become the butt of the joke.’

Comedy and cruelty often go hand in hand, stresses the man who wrote and directed a very funny film that ends with its two most likeable characters heading for the hangman’s noose. ‘When a person slips and falls, he might—speaking realistically—have broken his hip, or worse, but people laugh. You create humour out of something painful.’

Kundan’s ‘hypothetical situation’ was only partly derived from real-world experience: he was brusque the first couple of times I spoke to him on the phone, but he opened up soon enough. His tone is that of a man who knows what it’s like to be an underdog, and one who hasn’t dissociated himself from the feeling. One senses that if he really thought of himself as a big-shot director who was entitled to play with the sentiments of persistent writers, he wouldn’t be able to talk about it openly.

Besides, he’s aware of the many little twists of fate that added up in unknowable ways to turn him into a public figure—a man responsible for one of the best-loved Indian movies of all time.

There are all indications that Kundan Shah was destined to follow the path taken by scores of good Gujarati boys from baniya families: pursue commerce in college and then join their father’s import-export business or start something of their own. Looking at him even today, you realize how well he would have fit the part.

‘If he were to walk past you, you’d take him for an accountant,’ Naseeruddin Shah wrote in an article for Tehelka magazine, and nothing in Kundan’s appearance or routine disproves this idea. Conservatively dressed, he goes to his two-room office (located a couple of buildings away from his house) in the morning and maintains the hours that you would expect from someone in a non-creative profession. Those who have dealt closely with him say that he is a workaholic who revises and re-revises his scripts and makes detailed notes and drafts for everything he does; but outwardly, there is little hint of that fabled beast, the Temperamental Artist. At first glance, he resembles the titular everyman from Wagle Ki Duniya, the popular TV serial he directed in the 1980s. (In an amusing black-and-white photo taken on the sets of that show, Kundan looks more Wagle-like than Anjan Srivastava, the actor who played the role.) It’s no surprise that he was pitch-perfect in his one-minute, two-line role as a mild-mannered pharmacy-store attendant scared of a ruffian in Rabindra Dharmaraj’s 1981 film Chakra.

But it’s when you start talking to him that you feel the full force of his rage and curiosity, the willingness to hold a magnifying glass to things most of us take for granted—rare qualities in a man now in his sixties, an age where even the most radical people tend to slip into quiet acceptance. He rants about the crippling hegemony of power, condemns the nexus between politicians, big business and media, directs colourful abuse at just about anyone in a position of authority (industrialist, politician, media baron), wonders aloud whether Marxism might not have been the best idea after all (‘Communism has become a bad word because of Stalin and others, but at least it was based on good intentions’) and whether we should all go back to the single-TV channel era, given the rubbish on the tube these days.

Politically, it’s obvious that Kundan leans towards the Left, but there’s something abstract about his criticisms—he isn’t anti-Congress or anti-BJP, he’s against any party that has become so big that it has lost touch with the struggles of the man on the street. No wonder that the idea of the ‘little person’ carried along by a tide beyond his control, struggling just to make it from one day to the next, runs through much of his work. There’s a wonderful scene in his dialogue-less short film The Hero, where Deepak Dobriyal, playing a sprightly commuter on the bridge connecting two platforms of a suburban station, is swamped by the sea of humanity that has just emerged from a Mumbai local train. The shot immediately evokes scenes from Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro: Vinod and Sudhir at the inauguration of Beauty Photo Studio, being ignored by—almost overrun by—a group of people headed for the photo studio next door; the spectacular aerial shot of hundreds of ordinary people scurrying about their daily lives while the powerful builder Tarneja holds a self-aggrandizing press conference dozens of feet above them; the final image of Vinod and Sudhir, dressed in prison clothes, walking amidst a large office-going crowd.

But for all Kundan’s outpourings, it doesn’t take much for a childlike enthusiasm to show itself—as when he excitedly discusses the conspiracy theories outlined in the cult Internet film Zeitgeist (which he greatly admires): was 9/11 an inside job? Does a secret clique of people really control practically everything in the world? ‘Don’t you agree that we live in a banana republic?’ he asks after pausing for breath. Then he lightens up, chuckles. ‘Being frustrated is part of my job,’ he says. ‘If I’m not frustrated I can’t write.’ Most people know him as the director of Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, but arguably his bigger contribution was writing the story and co-writing the screenplay.

Reading has been vital to Kundan’s life and writing career. In his office room, two cupboards have been converted into makeshift bookshelves and the titles on display range from dozens of crumbling James Hadley Chase thrillers, pulp fiction and ‘cult fiction’ anthologies to Pauline Kael’s 5001 Nights at the Movies, and a multi-volume World Literature Classics series. He makes copious notes about passages that interest him. Even when he discusses a book that he claims not to have liked, he picks out stray things that he found stimulating; one sees that he’s taken the trouble to engage with the work.

Until he was thirteen, his family lived in Aden, where he studied in a Gujarati-medium school, and some of his earliest memories are of the children’s magazines supplied by a ‘mobile librarian’ who would go from door to door. Thrillers were his entry point into the world of literature and they also provided him with a means of articulation. ‘Our school textbooks were boring—textbooks always are—so I began entertaining myself by using the language of thrillers and pulp fiction to answer questions in school … and I would even get good marks as a result of it! Obviously, one had to read the textbooks to know the material, but I didn’t care to write my answers in the same, dull language.’

Decades before he demonstrated that a serious film about social injustice could be forged out of slapstick and black comedy, Kundan Shah was— without even realizing it—learning something about the difference between content and form, between the ‘what’ and the ‘how’.

When the family shifted to Bombay and he joined an English-medium school, he struggled with the new language for a while and then, once again, turned to thrillers for education as well as nourishment. Even as he moved to more highbrow books, he maintains that he came to literature through pulp fiction. ‘Machiavelli, Camus, Stendhal, I read them all, but I read them as pulp,’ he is fond of saying.

It isn’t immediately clear what he means by this, but over the course of our talks I realize that he is wary of critical analysis and the language of academia: he can discuss the actions of characters such as Raskolnikov or Kirilov with zest and intelligence, but being asked questions like ‘Why is Dostoevsky a psychological writer?’ makes him uneasy. Later, I will find that this discomfort extends to subtextual analysis of his own film too. ‘When people talk to me about the deeper meaning of the Mahabharata scene, I don’t know what to say to them.’ Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro has been given many labels—black humour, nonsense comedy—but Kundan himself doesn’t think too much about them. ‘Comic instinct tells you that something is correct—you can’t intellectualize humour.’

There were no playgrounds in Sion, but there were movie halls. Old movies would be clubbed together—there would be a ‘Filmistan week’, for instance, where films like Munimji and Paying Guest would play as a double bill. ‘We went for morning shows, mainly. It was pure entertainment.’ Though he didn’t yet have a professional interest in films, at a subconscious level he was registering little things about what made them tick. And an early, intuitive understanding of comedy grew around the same time, even though he had no special interest in the genre.

A light-hearted scene from the Dilip Kumar– Vyjayanthimala starrer Paigham was his introduction to the idea of the ‘comic foil’—the person who has to be the butt of a joke and through whose predicament the audience gets its laughs. In the scene, which has nothing to do with the main narrative of the film (‘It could easily have been left out, but it stayed and became a beautiful, fortuitous moment’), Dilip Kumar and Vyjayanthimala are sitting together, having just sung a song. ‘There must have been other girls beside me in your life?’ she asks him casually, not a commonplace topic of conversation in a 1950s’ Hindi movie. Kumar assures her that she’s the only one, but when she keeps probing, he invents a story about a fantastic love affair. As Vyjayanthimala starts getting more and more jealous, comedy develops.

Kundan believes that the reason the scene worked so well was not so much Dilip Kumar’s wry telling of the story but Vyjayanthimala’s playing of the foil. ‘If your foil is not working, the whole scene can fall flat. In real life nobody wants to be the victim of a joke, but in cinema it’s an art.’ In comedy, it often looks like one person is doing the main work but the other person—who is apparently passive—can be equally or more important. It’s all about one performance offsetting and enhancing the other. (Another example of the passive character is the famous scene between Mehmood and Om Prakash in the 1965 comedy Pyaar Kiye Jaa where the former enthusiastically narrates the script of a film he wants to make while the latter simply reacts quietly, his uncertainty reflected in his eyes.) Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, a film made up of actors who worked with rather than competed against each other, would draw on this lesson.

But outings to movie halls were at the periphery of Kundan’s life; the central thread seemed predetermined. When the time came for deciding what subject to take in college, the school headmaster asked everyone in the class what they wanted to do. ‘I was petrified, I had no idea what to say when my turn came.’ His turn never came. The headmaster just looked at him, said, ‘Oh, you’re a baniya’s son, so you’ll take commerce’, and moved on to the next boy.

One can picture a young lad manfully defying expectations. ‘No, sir!’ he declares, jumping up from his seat and slapping his hand dramatically on his desk. ‘I won’t take boring, soul-sapping commerce. I’ll become a movie director and make the looniest film this country has ever seen.’

The boy stuck to the prewritten script and took commerce. But he kept reading books and watching movies.

2

The Music of Chance

A dazed and confused young man is sitting in the Deccan Queen heading from Bombay to Pune. Having spent nearly four years working in the promissory department of a publishing house—a secure, orderly, 9-to-5 job—he is on his way to the Films and Television Institute of India (FTII) for an interview, driven by a compulsion even he can’t understand. He’s nervous: he doesn’t know much about world cinema beyond popular American and British films. But here, in his compartment, is a boy reading a book about a 1940s’ Italian film called Bicycle Thieves. ‘Fuck, this is my competition,’ he thinks. A while later, when the scenery outside becomes picturesque, he sees a poet manqué sitting on the steps and gazing out dreamily. ‘Another of those artistic types!’ He loses hope.

When Kundan talks about his early life and how he became a film-maker, it’s hard to miss the role played by serendipity. Getting into English medium after he joined school in Bombay was a ‘fluke’, which set him on an improbable reading trajectory that led to Dostoevsky via James Hadley Chase. After he graduated in 1968, he spent nearly a year whiling away his time—until, one day, the building secretary offhandedly asked him: ‘Tu kya Romeo ki tarah pura din ghoomte rahta hai? Life mein kuch karne ka ya nahin?’ (‘Why do you keep roaming around all day like a Romeo? Don’t you want to do something with your life?’)

‘He probably just said it on the spur of the moment, without really meaning anything,’ Kundan surmises. ‘Maybe he was annoyed about something else and took it out on me.’ But the young ‘Romeo’ was galvanized into action. He wrote letters to publishing houses asking for a job, and, soon after, joined a company called Popular Prakashan, at a starting salary of Rs 225 a month.

Three years into this job, one might suppose Kundan had found a calling that he was comfortable with, but one day a friend mentioned something about an institute in Pune—‘You know, a lot of film-makers are passing out from there’. ‘Kya bakwaas kar raha hai, yaar. Why do you want to go for a film course?’ Kundan said dismissively, but the conversation was still fresh in his mind fifteen days later when he happened to see a newspaper advertisement inviting applications for the FTII. ‘Normally, I would have overlooked that ad, but since my friend had referred to it recently, it was in my mind.’ He applied, partly out of a sense of mischief—let’s see what happens.

He panicked when the interview call came. ‘My knowledge was very limited. The most I knew was David Lean—to me, that was the peak of cinema.’ The international films being commercially shown in India at that time were the classical variety, including studio-produced epics from Britain and Hollywood, and it was understandable that Lean— the director of films such as Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago, which were both respectable and mass-audience friendly—was a big name for a middlebrow movie buff. The edgier, more experimental worlds of the French Nouvelle Wave, the Czech New Wave, the New German Cinema (spearheaded by Rainer Fassbinder, Werner Herzog and others) and the exciting young American student-directors (the ‘Kids with Beards’—Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg) were out of reach, though these were movements having a big impact on international cinema at the time. Visiting libraries for film-related books didn’t help either; there was so much to catch up on and so little time. ‘Godard, Truffaut … these were just names to me. I can’t begin to tell you how lost I was.’ When he read a letter to a newspaper condemning the films currently being shown in movie halls and asking why works by Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini weren’t available, he thought to himself: ‘Who the hell are all these nis?’

When he describes his train journey to Pune, I think about the poker-faced Buster Keaton in The General, sitting on the crossbar of his locomotive, lost in thought, barely aware that the driver has started the engine. But what also emerges—in the descriptions of his fellow passengers and his first experience of the institute—is Kundan’s ability to locate humour in the minutiae of life. At the campus, he discovered that even facial hair carried an authority of its own in cultural circles: nearly everyone else was wearing beards that made them look serious and scholarly, and Kundan was clean shaven since he was working in a regimented job. He had never been in this sort of milieu before.

‘There was a bunch of interviewers sitting in this fucking big semi-circle,’ he says; among them was Hrishikesh Mukherjee, the highly regarded director of such films as Anupama, Satyakam and Anand. Luckily, they didn’t ask him questions about Fellini or Antonioni; instead, one of the professors who taught scriptwriting started discussing literature with him, and this was an area where he felt at home. A smooth throwaway line helped too: when the principal warned him that film-making could be a frustrating profession, Kundan replied, ‘But frustration is a part of every creative activity—you have to turn your frustration into creativity.’

An MBA aspirant mouthing platitudes about leadership qualities couldn’t have done better.

‘Imagine my luck,’ Kundan says. ‘I had one per cent of knowledge and the whole interview got conducted on that one per cent.’ He was selected for one of the ten seats in the direction course (there had been 130 candidates, most of them well bearded). His father was worried that he was giving up the security of a job, but Kundan’s idea was to while away three years at the institute and see whether he was any good at it or not— otherwise, he would start over again. The fee, after all, was just Rs 160 per term.

Thus it was that the commerce graduate who was working with a publishing house now found himself in one of India’s premier cultural institutes, in the company of hirsute youngsters who could talk Vittorio De Sica, Jean-Luc Godard and agitprop film-making in their sleep. At twenty-five, Kundan was the second-eldest member of his batch. The eldest was a reticent twenty-nine-year-old named Saeed Mirza.

THE ROAD TO COMEDY:

THE ALCHEMY OF HUMOUR

‘The invisible grammar of comedy has to be discovered—you play with it and you have to burn your fingers. With every film you do, you only learn how not to make a bad comedy. You don’t learn how to make a good comedy.’

We’re talking about one of Charlie Chaplin’s short two-reelers, probably a film Kundan first saw during his FTII days. The scene has the Little Tramp in jail, sitting next to a hefty criminal at dinnertime. The big guy looks down at Chaplin and Chaplin looks up at the big guy, and it’s obvious who the underdog is. There’s a loaf of bread for each of them. The fat man picks up Chaplin’s loaf and keeps it on his own side of the table.

‘Now see the subtlety here—if he was to hold it in his hand and look down at Chaplin, it would turn into a physical challenge and it would become uncomfortable, not funny, because these guys are physically mismatched.’

Anyway, Chaplin distracts his adversary, makes him look elsewhere, retrieves the loaf and puts it back where it was.

‘But he doesn’t eat it—this is important, because if he ate it immediately the gag would end right there.’

And so the scene turns into a continuing game of one-upmanship, the balance tilting first one way, then another.

In workshops where actors improvise a comic script through free-flowing conversation, an important guideline is that a player should go along with whatever proposition his partner makes. Never reject an idea. If one person says something absurd like ‘The elephants in the Amazon have wings so they can fly over the tree tops’, the other person mustn’t retort with a ‘No, they don’t!’— this is likely to bring the skit to an awkward end, or interrupt its flow. Instead, he might say something like ‘Only the ones with orange trunks’ or ‘Yes, but they mustn’t crash into the armadillos’, and his partner will then build on this. Watching silent comedies, Kundan learnt something about how a comic scenario could be extended, simply by not doing anything that would break its rhythm.

‘That Chaplin scene, and many others like it, showed me how to build a gag on a gag on a gag on a gag on a gag on a gag until you have a pyramid of gags. And finally, when you’re ready for it, you give the viewer a pay-off.’

At some point during his second year in FTII, comedy became his Muse. There was a dialogue exercise where the young directors had to write their interpretation of a given situation and shoot a five-minute film out of it. And five minutes was a big deal. ‘Even for a two-minute silent film, everybody would write as if they were making Ben-Hur and it was going to be the last film of their lives.’ The situation he was given was that of a young man in love with his best friend’s sister and trying to convey his feelings to her.

The playwright–actor Girish Karnad, who was supervising the dialogue exercises, liked Kundan’s script, but something went wrong in the execution. ‘I was trying too hard—the film was woolly and bookish, it had too much of the baggage of all the stuff I had read.’

Having failed at this attempt to make a ‘serious’ film, he realized he had to try for a new perspective. The next big project—the biggest of them all— was the diploma film that the direction students had to make at the end of the three-year course, and Kundan was determined to begin work on it as early as possible.

Up to this point, he hadn’t paid much attention to comedy. ‘Chaplin used to be shown on a projector, and you laughed and then forgot it. If I had a choice between a B-grade melodrama and Chaplin, I would choose the former.’ But now he began taking these films more seriously, began studying the many little things that went into the creation of humour.’ And gradually, his own writing started becoming funny—almost by accident, he was discovering that he had a knack for exaggerating the things he saw around him.

Interestingly, many people who know Kundan insist that he isn’t an inherently funny person. ‘He has no sense of humour!’ says Satish Shah. ‘He doesn’t believe in jokes or in wit—he’s just a passionate film-maker, like a horse with blinkers on.’ Kundan himself admits as much today. ‘I’m not too interested in humour for its own sake, though, of course, I respect those with the talent to make others laugh—that’s an art in itself. But personally I use it as a medium, a vessel.’ He has lately discovered videos featuring the work of stand-up comedians George Carlin and Bill Hicks on YouTube, and enjoys the way they use comedy for political and social commentary. The first drafts of his own scripts tend to contain a lot of ideology, as well as explicit references to serious literature.

But what emerged out of his efforts in his final year at FTII was a manic twenty-three-minute short that knocked a large hole into the image of the typical diploma film—earnest, self-conscious, over-concerned with ‘social relevance’—and made many people sit up and take notice.

BONGA!

How does one summarize Bonga? Part of the film’s charm is that it resists explanation. The story, such as it is, involves five people attempting a bank robbery (and sporadically high-fiving each other and yelling ‘Bonga!’, the only word spoken in the film); but what’s really important is its rhythm and exuberance, and its almost effortless flow. It’s a tribute to silent-era comedies as well as the American gangster film, with a nod to some of Godard’s early movies. (Kundan was very taken by the charming little dance scene in a café in Bande à part—a scene that, incidentally, also inspired the dance between Uma Thurman and John Travolta in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction.)

B. Chandavarkar, who taught at the institute, wrote a lovely, whimsical music score for Bonga. His reworking and remixing of old Chaplin tunes perfectly complement the performances of pantomime and physical comedy by a cast that includes a clean-shaven and relatively lithe Satish Shah, and an almost-slim Rakesh Bedi (nearly a decade before they acted together in the universally loved TV comedy Yeh Jo Hai Zindagi, also directed by Kundan). There is a tiny role for the young Suresh Oberoi and a blink-and-miss appearance by Om Puri. All these actors were enrolled in the FTII’s acting course at the time. Oberoi, playing a bank teller, improvised a funny little action where he starts tapping his fingers against his desk while counting out currency notes—a reflexive response to another character drumming on a nearby table. Other contributions by the cast showed Kundan how vital actors were to comedy, though he also learnt that you had to be careful not to let them get carried away!

The use of slapstick and absurdity to heighten the impact of a situation; goofiness interspersed with moments of emotional truth; scenes that play like a visual representation of the most inspired nonsense verse … it’s all there in this little movie, and it all points to something bigger that was to come years later. Like many other FTII diploma films, Bonga was a collaborative effort by young students who loved movies and who had fun pushing the limits of their creativity—bouncing ideas off each other, improvising and multitasking. Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro would hinge on similar camaraderie.

Saeed Mirza and Naseeruddin Shah were among the many FTII students who were taken aback by Bonga. ‘It was a revelation,’ says Mirza. ‘Kundan always looked so serious, and the film was completely at odds with his persona: you’d look at him and think, Ah, he’ll make a certain type of film, but what emerged was very different.’ Naseer remembers being ‘intensely curious about what it would be like if this man were to make a serious film’.

Bonga was a culmination of sorts for Kundan, though the film has remained little seen over the decades and has only recently been made available on DVD (in a poorly preserved print). It’s clearly a movie made by someone with an understanding of film grammar as well as the boldness to pull off something that might have been dismissed as being too flippant for a diploma film. But if it was a triumphant end to Kundan’s stint at FTII, it was also the beginning of a new period of struggle. Two years later, the man who made Bonga was working as a typist on weekdays and in a bakery on weekends, trying to pay off his debts. His brush with cinema seemed a thing of the past.

3

Two Men and a Photo Studio

‘I had no money in my pocket, so thank heavens I got a car ride back to town. When these guys found out I had graduated from the film institute, they were impressed: Oh, you’ve held Hema Malini’s hand? they asked. All the way back, I had to tell them stories about Hema Malini!’

FTII alumnus Ravi Ojha was talking about his photo studio misadventures and Kundan was laughing so hard that he was in tears. There was nothing essentially cheerful about the story, but there was no escaping its anecdotal funniness—or the wry, resigned way in which Ojha told it.

Ojha and Kundan were among the youngsters who had started the Cinema Commune after graduating from the FTII in 1976. This was a cooperative body for editors, cinematographers and directors who would otherwise have been lost in the big bad jungle of the Bombay film industry. They went to Hyderabad, made short films on budgets of Rs 3,000 (‘We never dreamt that a day might come when we would make feature-length films’) and stayed at the YMCA without money for food.

When the struggle became too grim, the commune disbanded. But Ojha and another colleague, Rajendra Shaw, stayed back and opened a photo studio; they had to earn a living somehow. At the institute, they had harboured dreams of becoming serious film-makers one day, creating works that would transform India’s cinematic landscape. Now here they were, a long way from those dreams. Industrial photography was one of their specialties and, within the constraints of this drab field, they squabbled for the right to do ‘creative’ work. Since they didn’t have proper lights, they used makeshift reflectors to help light up the machines. ‘You don’t know how to hold reflectors,’ Shaw would say. ‘I didn’t fucking go to the film institute for three years to learn this!’ Ojha would snap back, in a pre-echo of the excitable Sudhir in Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro. At other times, they would stand outside colleges and try to persuade girls to model for them.

Sometime in 1980, Ojha came to Bombay, stayed at Kundan’s house and narrated stories. ‘He was talking about his suffering,’ Kundan says, ‘but there was a lot of black humour, and we were hysterical.’ One incident Ojha described in detail was having to go and photograph some Buddhist statues on an island near Nalgonda, where the last boat left at 3.30 pm; if you missed it, you had to stay overnight on the island. This wasn’t an option since he had no money, so he carefully timed his schedule. But around 3.15, just as he was ready to leave, he realized that he had left his camera in a shack a long way off. The result: a race against time that would have sat proud in a Keystone Kops movie, with heavy rain adding further drama to the situation. Luckily for him, another ferry came along and, eventually, he managed to hitchhike his way back to the main town—with a little help from Hema Malini!

For Kundan, the way Ojha described these incidents was very stimulating. It seemed to encapsulate the tragicomic condition of the ‘little man’, struggling to get by in the face of great odds, trying to make light of his frustrations. The next morning he said, ‘Ravi, I want to write a script around this.’

By this time, Kundan knew a thing or two about frustrations and thwarted dreams himself. After the Cinema Commune fell apart, he had moved to England with his family and spent a year and a half doing odd jobs to pay off debts that had accumulated due to his cinematic adventures—his days at FTII were a distant memory. But shortly after he returned to India, his old friend Saeed Mirza offered him the job of assistant director on his film Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyon Aata Hai. Kundan began spending a lot of time with a small band of movie-loving radicals which included Mirza, the editor Renu Saluja, her husband Vinod Chopra, a promising director, and a young assistant director/all-purpose set-hand named Sudhir Mishra. Close friendships were formed and soon the artistic adrenaline was back.

‘We were all considered viral infections by mainstream film-makers,’ Sudhir Mishra quips today, but the group had other things in common: most of them were Left-leaning liberals and part of a generation that was coming of age in the late 1960s, when the starry-eyed dreams of the post-Independence era had started to turn sour. They were angry about recent political and social developments, including the stifling of freedom during the Emergency years—a time that Mishra would later chronicle in such films as Yeh Woh Manzil Toh Nahin and Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi. ‘We were upset with the world, upset about capitalism, upset that America seemed to hate us,’ he says, ‘but we were passionate about cinema and what it could accomplish. We thought we could use it to change the world.’

Then came a day of reckoning for Kundan. Around the time that Ravi Ojha’s photo-studio stories had planted the seed of a movie script in his head, he got an offer from Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi, which was then under production. The job involved crowd-controlling and a couple of other responsibilities, the salary amounted to around a lakh rupees for six months of work—an unreal sum given his situation. And it was a very prestigious project.

But Kundan knew that if he was ever going to write the script swirling about in his head, he had to do it now; the Muse wasn’t going to wait. Besides, he had to take a first step towards making his own film: Mirza had already shot two features (the first was Arvind Desai Ki Ajeeb Dastan) and Vinod Chopra, who was only in his mid-twenties, was planning one too (Sazaye Maut, in which Kundan would assist). There was a conflict of interest here.

‘What should I do?’ he asked Mirza. ‘Don’t be a fool. Write your own script,’ Mirza replied, and with a heavy heart Kundan turned down the Gandhi offer.

The script that would eventually have audiences roaring with laughter was founded on anger and despair. ‘Knowing that I had just sacrificed a great deal of money, I slapped my head and said, "Fucker, now you have to finish this thing!"’ He would go to Sudhir Mishra’s place every day, sit alone for the whole day, and write. ‘Most of what I produced was crap,’ he says. ‘Six out of every ten hours were being whiled away. Writing involves a very different discipline compared to anything else—you have to cajole it, maybe go for hours without getting anything worthwhile done, feel horribly guilty … Anyway,’ he adds, pointing at a file lying on his desk, ‘that’s how this bloody thing got done.’

‘This bloody thing’, also known as Opening Ceremony, was a script about two photo-studio partners stumbling from one mishap to another.

TWIN EARTHS

One of Kundan Shah’s favourite short stories is Dostoevsky’s ‘Dream of a Ridiculous Man’, which includes a vision of a planet that is a twin to the Earth—a world ‘untarnished by the Fall … a paradise as that in which, according to all the legends of mankind, our first parents lived before they sinned’. An early draft of his sequel to Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro draws on this idea when Vinod and Sudhir—released from prison after twenty-five years—discuss a dream in which they fly through space and land on just such a paradise. No Tarnejas, Ahujas, underhanded deals or collapsing bridges; no exploitation of the helpless by the powerful.

If twin earths or parallel universes do exist, there must be one where, at this very moment, an audience is gasping with laughter at a film titled Opening Ceremony. The story of this film is similar to that of the film Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro that was released in our own universe in 1983. But there are differences in the plot specifics.

For example, there’s a romantic track between Sudhir and Anna (Tarneja’s moll, an early version of Priya in our JBDY) that mirrors the one between Vinod and Shobha and ends similarly, in betrayal. There are poisoned puddings marked with cherries and a wine bottle filled with photographic solution (which a group of people accidentally drink and enjoy!). A lengthy telephone conversation involving a fake Margaret Thatcher and a fake Ronald Reagan. Another phone conversation where one character blows smoke into her instrument and it comes out through the receiver of the other phone. A talking gorilla who reveals the secrets of the ‘human condition’ to Vinod and Sudhir in a cement warehouse. The shadow of a dancing ‘Yama Deva’ on a wall, engineered by Ashok to intimidate Shobha. (‘But why is it dancing?’ she asks. ‘You fool, don’t you know about the dance of death?’ he shouts.) A brilliantly conceived vignette where Vinod and Sudhir, snooping around in Tarneja’s apartment late in the film, find a line of closets, each of which literally contains a human skeleton. (They wistfully conclude that none of these can belong to the commissioner, since he hasn’t been dead too long.)

Since this twin film is rawer, more ingenuous than the film we are familiar with, some of its characters are more blatant references to real-life figures. The commissioner is named not DeMello but Rebello, after the then Mumbai Police Commissioner Julio Ribeiro. There is a high-society type called Palaq Adamsee—presumably a dig at ad man Alyque Padamsee—in a scene where the introduction of ‘khujli’ seeds during a photo competition causes a snooty crowd to start itching furiously. One change that wouldn’t take place is in the name of the two protagonists. Kundan jokingly named Vinod and Sudhir after his close friends Vinod Chopra and Sudhir Mishra, both of whom would eventually work on the film. He thought the names could be changed afterwards, but it never happened.

Towards the end of Opening Ceremony, there is a macabre game of blind man’s bluff set on an island where Vinod and Sudhir narrowly escape death. Most significantly, the Mahabharata climax doesn’t exist. In its place is a short chase in a video-game parlour, followed by a relatively mundane confrontation on the twenty-second floor of a skyscraper, where the commissioner’s body ends up in a large barrel and the partners are tricked into giving up the incriminating photo negative. They return from jail six months later to find that the two girls who duped them have just inaugurated the ‘Honest Estate Agency’. Thus, the film ends as it began, with an opening ceremony.

The story of the two photographers was just the kernel of an idea; around it, Kundan built a plot based on local concerns—the poor quality of building construction—as well as larger issues facing the country, such as corruption in high places and the decaying of idealism. And, of course, there was personal experience—all the sewage water he was expected to drink, for one thing …

GUTTER KA PAANI, PEENE KA PAANI:

DISTORTION AND REALITY

When Commissioner DeMello solemnly tells Tarneja and his cronies that America is a very advanced country because ‘wahaan peene ka paani alag aur gutter ka paani alag’ (‘their drinking water and sewage flow in separate pipes’), most viewers roar with laughter. But if you’re the secretary of a building where a break in a pipe has resulted in sewage water leaking into the water tank, the funny side of things is not immediately evident. Quick measures are required: the first thing to do is get the pipe fixed, but this being an era of cement shortage and rationing, you need a permit to buy more than five bags. And your architect has told you that a whole wall has to be broken and reconstructed for the pipe to be diverted—ten bags needed, minimum.

So you go to the local office of the department that looks after these things and explain the situation to a man sitting with his feet up on the desk. After a twenty-second pause where it is unclear whether or not he has heard you, he scratches his neck, gazes into the far distance like Ghalib in the act of composing, and says philosophically: ‘Aadha Bombay gutter ka paani pee raha hai; tu mujhe kaunsi nayi baat bataa raha hai?’ (‘Half the city is drinking gutter water; what new insight are you giving me?’)

‘A lot of the anger I felt at moments like this went into the Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro script,’