Milky ways - the many faces of the Hindi-movie maa

[Here's the full text of the essay I did for Zubaan's anthology about motherhood. The book has plenty more in it, of course, including excellent pieces by Anita Roy, Manju Kapur, Shashi Deshpande and others. Look out for it - gift, spread the word etc.

Note: the "Motherly vignettes" section was meant to be a stand-alone thing, published either as a box or in different font, to mark it from the rest of the text, and perhaps to mirror the detours and interludes so often present in mainstream Hindi cinema. Didn't work out that way, but I've included it here]

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Around the age of 14 I took what was meant to be a temporary break from Hindi cinema, and ended up staying away for over a decade. Years of relishing masala movies may have resulted in a form of dyspepsia – there had been too many overwrought emotions, too much dhishoom dhishoom, too much of the strictly regimented quantities of Drama and Action and Tragedy and Romance and Comedy that existed in almost every mainstream Hindi film of the time. Besides, I had developed a love for Old Hollywood, which would become a gateway to world cinema, and satellite TV had started making it possible to indulge such interests.

One of my catalysts for escape was Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, a film that is – among many other things – about a strange young man’s special relationship with his equally strange mother. I won’t bother with spoiler alerts for such a well-known pop-cultural artefact, so briefly: Norman Bates poisons his mom, preserves her body, walks around in her clothes and has conversations with himself in her voice. In his off-time, he murders young women as they shower.

None of this was a secret to me when I first saw the film, since a certain Psycho lore existed in my family. Years in advance, I had heard jokes about “mummification” from my own mummy – apparently, in the early 60s, her school-going brother had returned from a movie-hall and informed their startled mother that he wished to keep her body in a sitting position in the living room after she passed on.

Hitchcock’s film had a big effect on the way I watched and thought about movies, but I must admit that my own relationship with my mother was squarer than Norman’s. We quarrelled occasionally, but always in our own voices, and taxidermy did not obtrude upon our lives. Looking back, though, I think we could be described as unconventional in the context of the society we lived in. I was a single child, she was recently divorced, we had been through a lot together and were very close. But we were both – then, as now – private people, and so the relationship always respected personal space. We didn’t spend much time on small talk, we tended to stay in our own rooms for large parts of the day (and this is how it remains, as I type these words in my shabby freelancer’s “office” in her flat). Yet I always shared the really important stuff with her, and I never thought this was unusual until I heard stories about all the things my friends – even the ones from the seemingly cool, cosmopolitan families – routinely hid from their parents: about girlfriends, or bunking college, or their first cigarette.

Some of this may help explain why I was feeling detached from the emotional excesses of Hindi cinema in my early teens. In his book on Deewaar, the historian Vinay Lal notes, “No more important or poignant relationship exists in Indian society than that between mother and son, and the Hindi film best exemplifies the significance of this nexus.” That may be so, but I can say with my hand on my heart (or “mother-swear”, if you prefer) that even at age 14, I found little to relate to in Hindi-film depictions of mothers.

Can you blame me though? Here, off the top of my head (and with only some basic research to confirm that I hadn’t dreamt up these wondrous things), are some of my movie memories from around the time I left the mandir of Hindi cinema:

* In the remarkably bad JamaiRaja, Hema Malini is a wealthy tyrant who makes life difficult for her son-in-law. Some of this is played for comedy, but the film clearly disapproves of the idea of a woman as the head of the house. Cosmic balance is restored only when the saas gets her comeuppance and asks the damaad’s forgiveness. Of course, he graciously clasps her joint hands and asks her not to embarrass him; that’s the hero’s privilege.

* In Sanjog, when she loses the little boy she had thought of as a son, Jaya Prada glides about in a white sari, holding a piece of wood wrapped in cloth and singing a song with the refrain “Zoo zoo zoo zoo zoo”. This song still plays incessantly in one of the darker rooms of my memory palace; I shudder whenever I recall the tune.

* In Aulad, the ubiquitous Jaya Prada is Yashoda who battles another woman (named, what else, Devaki) for custody of the bawling Baby Guddu, while obligatory Y-chromosome Jeetendra stands around looking smug and noble at the same time.

* In her short-lived comeback in Aandhiyan, a middle-aged Mumtaz dances with her screen son in a cringe-inducingly affected display of parental hipness. “Mother and son made a lovely love feeling with their dance and song (sic),” goes a comment on the YouTube video of the song “Duniya Mein Tere Siva”. Also: “I like the perfect matching mother and son love chemistry behind the song, it is a eternal blood equation (sic).” The quality of these comments is indistinguishable from the quality of the film they extol.

* And in Doodh kaKarz, a woman breastfeeding her child is so moved by the sight of a hungry cobra nearby that she squeezes a few drops of milk out and puts it in a bowl for him. The snake looks disgusted but sips some of the milk anyway. Naturally, this incident becomes the metaphorical umbilical cord that attaches him to this new maa for life.

As one dire memory begets another, the title of that last film reminds me that two words were in common currency in 1980s Hindi cinema: “doodh” and “khoon”. Milk and blood. Since these twin fluids were central to every hyper-dramatic narrative about family honour and revenge, our movie halls (or video rooms, since few sensible people I knew spent money on theatre tickets at the time) resounded with some mix of the following proclamations:

“Maa ka doodh piya hai toh baahar nikal!” (“If you have drunk your mother’s milk, come out!”)

“Yeh tumhara apna khoon hai.” (“He is your own blood.”)

“Main tera khoon pee jaaoonga.” (“I will drink your blood.”)

Both liquids were treated as equally nourishing; both were, in different ways, symbols of the hero’s vitality. I have no recollection of the two words being used together in a sentence, but it would not amaze me to come across a scene from a 1980s relic where the hero says: “Kuttay! Maine apni maa ka doodh piya hai. Ab tera khoon piyoonga.” (“Dog! I have drunk my mother’s milk, now I will drink your blood.”) It would suggest a rite of passage consistent with our expectations of the über-macho lead: as a child you drink mother’s milk, but you’re all grown up now and bad man’s blood is more intoxicating than fake Johnnie Walker.

Narcissists, angry young men and deadly guitars

All this is a complicated way of saying that I do not, broadly speaking, hold the 1980s in high esteem. But that decade is a soft target. Casting the net much wider, here’s a proposal: mainstream Hindi cinema has never had a sustained tradition of interesting mothers.

This is, of course, a generalisation; there have been exceptions in major films. Looming over every larger-than-life mother portrayal is Mother India, which invented (or at least highlighted) many of the things we think of as clichés today: the mother as metaphor for nation/land/nourishing source; the mother as righteous avenging angel, ready to shred her own heart and shoot her wayward son if it is for the Greater Good. Despite the self-conscious weightiness of this film’s narrative, it is - mostly - possible to see its central character Radha as an individual first and only then as a symbol.

But a basic problem is that for much of her history, the Hindi-film mother has been a cipher – someone with no real personality of her own, existing mainly as the prism through which we view the male lead. Much like the sisters whose function was to be raped and to commit suicide in a certain type of movie, the mother was a pretext for the playing out of the hero’s emotions and actions.

Anyone well acquainted with Hindi cinema knows that one of its dominant personalities has been the narcissistic leading man. (Note: the films themselves don’t intend him to be seen thus.) This quality is usually linked to the persona of the star-actor playing the role, and so it can take many forms: the jolly hero/tragic hero/romantic hero/anti-hero who ambles, trudges or swaggers through the world knowing full well that he is its centre of attention. (Presumably he never grew out of the maa ka laadla mould.) So here is Raj Kapoor’s little tramp smiling bravely through his hardships, and here is the studied tragic grandiosity of Dilip Kumar, and here is Dev Anand’s splendid conceit (visible in all the films he made from the mid-1960s on) that every woman from age 15 upwards wants only to fall into his arms. In later decades, this narcissism would be manifest in the leading man as the vigilante superhero.

A maa can easily become a foil for such personalities – our film history is dotted with sympathetic but ineffectual mothers. Though often played by accomplished character actors such as Achala Sachdev and Leela Mishra, these women were rarely central to the movies in question. If you have only a dim memory of Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa, for example, you might forget that the self-pitying poet (one of the most doggedly masochistic heroes in our cinema) has a mother too – she is a marginalised figure, watching with some perplexity as he wanders the streets waiting for life to deal him its next blow. And her death adds to the garland of sorrows that he so willingly carries around his neck.

While Dutt made a career out of not smiling, the protagonist of Raj Kapoor’s bloated Mera Naam Joker earned his livelihood by making people laugh. Essentially, however, Raju the clown is as much of a sympathy-seeker as the poet in the gutter is. Mera Naam Joker includes a magnificently maudlin scene where the joker continues with his act (“The show must go on!” growls circus-master Dharmendra) just a few minutes after learning that his mother has died. As he smiles heroically through his pain, his friends watching backstage wipe their tears – cues for the film’s viewer to do the same.

Speaking of Raj Kapoor, I often wonder what impression Russian movie-watchers must have of Indian men and their mother fetishes. If Kapoor was the most popular Hindi-film star in the former Soviet Union, an improbable second was Mithun Chakraborty, the stature of whose 1982 film Disco Dancer in that part of the world is among the profoundest cinematic mysteries. (Possibly apocryphal stories are still told about how Indian visitors to the USSR in the Iron Curtain days could clear borders by warbling “Jimmy Jimmy” whereupon stern guards would drop their rifles and wave them through.)

Among Disco Dancer’s many pleasures is the most thrilling mother-related dialogue in a Hindi film. Even today, I would walk many a harsh mile to hear the following words echoing through a movie hall: “Issko guitar phobia ho gaya hai. Guitar ne isske maa ko maara.” (“He has developed guitar phobia. A guitar killed his mother.”)

This demands some elucidation. Jimmy (Mithun) has become so popular that his disco-dancing rivals scheme to electrocute him with a 5000-volt current. But his widowed maa, having just finished her daily puja for his continued health and success, learns about this fiendish saazish. She reaches the venue in time to grab the tampered guitar before Jimmy does, which results in the most electrifying death scene of a Hindi-movie mother you’ll ever see.

The subtext to this surreal moment is that the hero is emasculated by the removal of his mother. As one inadvertently Oedipal plot synopsis I have read puts it, “After his mother's death Jimmy finds himself unable to perform. Will he be able to recover from the tragedy and start performing again?” (Note the contrast with Mera Naam Joker’s Raju, who does indeed “perform” just a few seconds after his loss – but no one doubts that he is now a hollow shell of a person.)

As these scenes and countless others indicate, Hindi cinema loves dead moms. In the same year as Disco Dancer, there was an overhyped “acting battle” between Dilip Kumar and Amitabh Bachchan in Shakti. It played out through the film, but never as intensely as in the scene where the mutinous son tries to reach out to his policeman dad in the room where the dead body of Sheetal (wife and mother to the two men) lies. In the context of the narrative, the mother’s corpse becomes the final frontier for a clash of ideologies and life experiences.

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I’m surprised at how long it has taken me to arrive at Bachchan, given that all my early movie-watching centred on him – and also given that no other major Hindi-film personality has been as strongly associated with filial relationships. But perhaps I’ve been trying to repress a memory. One of the last things I saw before forsaking Bollywood in 1991 was this scene from the fantasy film Ajooba. Bachchan (makeup doing little to conceal that he was playing half his age) brings an old woman to the seaside where a dolphin is splashing about, beaming and making the sounds that dolphins will. With sonly fondness in his eyes and a scant regard for taxonomical accuracy, AB says: “Yeh machli meri maa hai.” (“This fish is my mother.”)

This could be a version of post-modern irony, for Bachchan had come a long way from the star-making films in which he played son to the long-suffering Nirupa Roy. Unlike the “mother” in Ajooba, Roy was a land mammal, but she seemed always to have a personal lake of tears to splash about in at short notice.

Was that too irreverent? (Am I failing the test of the good Indian boy whose eyes must lower at the very mention of “maa”?) Well, respect should ideally be earned. The mothers played by Roy are good examples of the ciphers I mentioned earlier, and though she often got substantial screen time, I don’t think it was put to much good use.

Consider an early scene in Prakash Mehra’s Muqaddar ka Sikander. When the orphan Sikander recovers Roy’s stolen purse for her, she expresses a wish to be his new mother: “Beta, ab se main tumhari maa hoon.” “Sach, maa? Tum bahut achi ho, maa,” (“Really, mother? You are very nice, mother”) he replies. Having rushed through these lines, they then exit the frame together in the jerky fast-forward style of the silent era’s Keystone Kops. There is a reason for the haste: the audience wants to see the adult Sikander (Bachchan), so the preamble must be dispensed with. But the result is the trivialising of an important relationship – we are simply told that they are now mother and son, and that’s that. It’s a good example of character development scrubbing the shoes of the star system.

Manmohan Desai’s Amar Akbar Anthony is another movie very dear to my heart (and a genuine classic of popular storytelling), but it would be a stretch to claim that Roy’s Bharati (you know, the woman who simultaneously receives blood from her three grown-up sons) is a fleshed-out person. Medically speaking, she scarcely appears human at all: in the first minutes of the film we learn that Bharati is suffering from life-threatening tuberculosis; a while later, she carelessly loses her eyesight and the TB is never again mentioned; years pass and here she is, distributing flowers, haphazardly stumbling in and out of the lives of the three heroes; eventually her sight is restored by a Sai Baba statue.

But it is well-nigh impossible to write about Bachchan and his mothers without reference to Yash Chopra’ sDeewaar (and to an extent, the same director’s Trishul). Deewaar is to Hindi cinema what the James Cagney-starrer White Heat (“Made it, Ma! Top of the world!”) was to Hollywood: the most quoted and parodied of all mother-son movies. In no small part this is because the film was a fulcrum for one of our most iconic movie personalities, the angry young man Vijay.

Speaking for myself, childhood memory and countless spoofs on music channels had turned Deewaarinto a montage of famous images and dialogues: Bachchan brooding outside the temple; a dramatic pealing of bells and a prolonged death scene; Shashi Kapoor bleating “Bhai” and, with nostrils flaring self-righteously, the famous line “Mere Paas Maa Hai.” But when I saw it as an adult, I was surprised by how powerful the film still was, and how its most effective scenes were the quieter ones. One scene that sticks with me is when the mother – Sumitra Devi – is unwell and the fugitive Vijay can’t see her because police have been posted around the hospital. He waits in a van while his girlfriend goes to check on the level of security. She returns, tells him things aren’t looking good; and Vijay (who is wearing dark glasses – a chilling touch in this night-time scene) says in a deadpan voice, his face a blank slate, “Aur main apne maa tak nahin pahunch sakta hoon.” (“And I can’t even reach my mother.”) There is no overt attempt at pathos or irony (how many other Indian actors of the time would have played the scene this way?), just the stoicism of a man who knows that the walls are closing in.

In another scene Vijay hesitantly calls his mother on the phone, arranges to meet her at the temple, then tries to say something more but can’t get the words out and puts the receiver down instead. The film’s power draws as much from these discerning beats of silence as from its flaming Salim-Javed dialogue. However, little of that power comes directly from the mother’s character. Sumitra Devi is defined by her two sons, and to my eyes at least, there is something perfunctory and insipid even about the moral strength she shows.

There is a tendency, when we assess Hindi cinema, to make sweeping statements about similar types of movies. Frequently, I hear that Deewaar and Trishul are the same film because both are built around the theme of a son trying to erase his mother’s sufferings by rising in the world – even literally, by signing deed papers for new skyscrapers, the constructions she once worked on as a labourer (Vijay, like James Cagney, is trying to make it to “the top”). But there are key differences in the central character’s motivations in the two movies, and I would argue that Deewaar is the superior film overall because it is more tightly constructed.

However, Trishulscores in one important regard: it is one of the few Bachchan films where the mother has a personality. Cynically speaking, this could be because she dies early in the film and isn’t required to hold the stage for three hours, but I think it has a lot to do with the performance of Waheeda Rehman – an actress who made a career of illuminating mediocre movies with her presence.

“Tu mere saath rahega munne,” sings this mother, who has been abandoned by her lover – the song will echo through the movie and fuel her son’s actions. “Main tujhe rehem ke saaye mein na palne doongi” (“I will not raise you under the shade of sympathy”), she tells her little boy as she lets him toil alongside her, “Zindagani ki kadi dhoop mein jalne doongi / Taake tap tap ke tu faulad bane / maa ki audlad bane.” She wants him to burn in the sun so he becomes as hard as steel. He has to earn his credentials if he wants the right to be called her son.

With a lesser performer in the role, this could have been hackneyed stuff (in any case the basic premise is at least as old as Raj Kapoor’s Awaara), but Rehman makes it dignified and compelling, giving it a psychological dimension that is lacking in all those Nirupa Roy roles. It’s a reminder that an excellent performer can, to some extent at least, redeem an unremarkable part. (I would make a similar case for Durga Khote in Mughal-e Azam, which – on paper at least – was a film about two imperial male egos in opposition.)

Motherly vignettes (and an absence)

In discussing these films, I’ve probably revealed my ambivalence towards popular Hindi cinema. One problem for someone who tries to engage with these films is that even the best of them tend to be disjointed; a critic is often required to approach a movie as a collection of parts rather than as a unified whole. Perhaps it would be fair then to admit that there have been certain “mother moments” that worked for me on their own terms, independently of the overall quality of the films.

One of them occurred in – of all things – a Manoj Kumar film. Kumar was famous for his motherland-obsession, demonstrated in a series of “patriotic” films that often exploited their heroines. (See Hema Malini writhing in the rain in Kranti, or Saira Banu in Purab aur Paschim, subject to the controlling male gaze that insists a woman must be covered up – after the hero and the audience has had a good eyeful, of course.) But one of his rare non-patriotism-themed films contains a weirdly compelling representation of the mother-as-an-absent-presence. The film is the 1972 Shor, about a boy so traumatised by his mother’s death that he loses his speech, and the song is the plaintive Laxmikant-Pyarelal composition “Ek Pyaar ka Nagma Hai”.

In too many Hindi movies of that time, ethereal music is played out to banal images, but this sequence makes at least a theoretical nod to creativity. The visuals take the shape of a shared dream-memory involving the father, the little boy and the mother when she was alive; the setting is a beach and the composite elements include a violin, a drifting, symbolism-laden bunch of balloons, and Nanda. Mirror imagery is used: almost every time we see the mother or the boy, we also see their blurred reflections occupying half the screen; occasionally, the lens focus is tinkered with to make both images merge into each other or disappear altogether. Even though the setting is ostensibly a happy and “realist” one, Nanda is thus rendered a distant, ghostly figure.

I’m not saying this is done with anything resembling sophistication – it is at best an ambitious concept, shoddily executed; you can sense the director and cinematographer constrained by the available technology. But the basic idea does come through: what we are seeing is a merging of past and present, and the dislocation felt by a motherless child.

[While on absent mothers, a quick aside on Sholay. Ramesh Sippy’s iconic film was heavily inspired by the look of the American and Italian Westerns, but it also deviated from the Hindi-film idiom in one significant way: in the absence of a mother-child relationship. The only real mother figure in the story, Basanti’s sceptical maasi, becomes a target of mirth in one of the film’s drollest scenes. Most notably, the two leads Veeru and Jai (played by Dharmendra and Bachchan) are orphans who have only ever had each other. We tend to take Sholay for granted today, but it’s surprising, when you think about it, that the leading men of a Hindi movie of the time should so summarily lack any maternal figure, real or adopted.]

In Vijay Anand’s thriller Jewel Thief, a clever deception is perpetrated on the viewer. Early on, Vinay (Dev Anand) is told that Shalu (Vyjayantimala) is pining because she has been abandoned by her fiancé. This provides a set-up for the song “Rula ke Gaya Sapna Mera”, where Vinay hears Shalu singing late at night; we see her dressed in white, weeping quietly; the lyrics mourn her loss; our expectations from seeing Dev Anand and Vyjayantimala together in this romantic setting lead us to assume that what is being lamented is a broken love affair. But later, we learn that though Shalu’s tears were genuine, she was really crying for a little boy who has been kidnapped (this is, strictly speaking, her much younger brother, but the relationship is closer to that of a mother and son, and the song was an expression if it). It’s a rare example of a Hindi-movie song sequence being used to mislead, and changing its meaning when you revisit it.

There is also a lovely little scene in a non-mainstream Hindi film, Sudhir Mishra’s Dharavi. Cab-driver Rajkaran, his wife and little son are struggling to make ends meet as one mishap follows another. Rajkaran’s old mother has come to visit them in the city and one night, after a series of events that leaves the family bone-tired and mentally exhausted, there is a brief shot of two pairs of sons and mothers, with the former curled up with their heads in the latter’s laps – the grown-up Rajkaran is in the same near-foetal pose as his little boy. It’s the sort of image that captures a relationship more eloquently than pages of over-expository script.

Breaking the weepie mould: new directions

One of the funniest mothers in a Hindi film was someone who appeared only in a photograph – the madcap 1962 comedy Half Ticket has a scene where the protagonist Vijay (no relation to the Angry Young Man) speaks to a picture of his tuberculosis-afflicted mother. TB-afflicted mothers are usually no laughing matter in Hindi cinema, but this is a Kishore Kumar film, and thus it is that a close-up of the mother’s photo reveals ... Kishore Kumar in drag. This could be a little nod to Alec Guinness and Peter Sellers playing women in Ealing Studio comedies of the 50s, or it could be a case of pre-figuring (since the story will hinge on Kumar posing as a child). Either way, it is a rare instance in old cinema of a mother being treated with light-hearted irreverence.

But as mentioned earlier, the more characteristic mother treatment has been one of deification – which, ironically, results in diminishment. When the maternal figure is put on a pedestal, you don’t see her as someone with flaws, whimsies, or heaven forbid, an interior life. (One of Indian cinema’s starkest treatments of this theme was in Satyajit Ray’s 1960 film Devi, with the 14-year-old Sharmila Tagore as a bride whose world turns upside down when her childlike father-in-law proclaims her a reincarnation of the Mother Goddess.) And so, if there has been a shift in mother portrayals in recent times, it has hinged on a willingness to humanise.

Around the late 1980s, a certain sort of “liberal” movie mum had come into being. I remember nodding in appreciation at the scene in Maine Pyaar Kiya where Prem (Salman Khan) discusses prospective girlfriends with his mom (played by the always-likeable Reema Lagoo). Still, when it came to the crunch, you wouldn’t expect these seemingly broad-minded women to do anything that would seriously shake the patriarchal tradition. In her younger days Farida Jalal was among the feistiest of the actresses who somehow never became A-grade stars, but by the time she played Kajol’s mother in Dilwale Dulhaniya le Jaayenge, she had settled into the role of the woman who can feel for young love – and be a friend and confidant to her daughter – while also knowing, through personal experience, that women in her social setup “don’t even have the right to make promises”. The two young lovers in this film can be united only when the heart of the stern father melts.

Such representations – mothers as upholders of “traditional values”, even when those values are detrimental to the interests of women – are not going away any time soon, and why would they, if cinema is to be a part-mirror to society? An amusing motif in the 2011 film No One Killed Jessica was a middle-aged mother as a figure hiding behind the curtain (literally “in pardah”), listening to the men’s conversations and speaking up only to petulantly demand the return of her son (who is on the lam, having cold-bloodedly murdered a young woman). It seems caricatured at first, but when you remember the details of the real-life Jessica Lal-Manu Sharma case that the film is based on, there is nothing surprising about it.

But it is also true that in the multiplex era of the last decade, mother representations – especially in films with urban settings – have been more varied than they were in the past. (Would it be going too far to say “truer to life”? I do feel that the best contemporary Hindi films are shaped by directors and screenwriters who know their milieus and characters very well, and have a greater willingness to tackle individual complexity than many of their predecessors did.)

Thus, Jaane Tu...Ya Jaane Na featured a terrific performance by Ratna Pathak Shah as Savitri Rathore, a wisecracking mom whose banter with her dead husband’s wall-portrait marks a 180-degree twist on every maudlin wall-portrait scene from movies of an earlier time. (Remember the weepy monologues that went “Munna ab BA Pass ho gaya hai. Aaj agar aap hamaare saath hote, aap itne khush hote”?) One gets the sense that unlike her mythological namesake, this Savitri is relieved that she no longer has to put up with her husband’s three-dimensional presence! Then there is the Kirron Kher character in Dostana, much more orthodox to begin with: a jokily over-the-top song sequence, “Maa da laadla bigad gaya”, portrays her dismay about the possibility that her son is homosexual, and she is even shown performing witchery to “cure” him. But she does eventually come around, gifting bangles to her “daughter-in-law” and wondering if traditional Indian rituals might accommodate something as alien as gay marriage. These scenes are played for laughs (and in any case, the son isn’t really gay), but they do briefly touch on very real cultural conflicts and on the ways in which parents from conservative backgrounds often have to change to keep up with the times.

With the aid of nuanced scripts, thoughtful casting and good performances, other small bridges have been crossed in recent years. Taare Zameen Par – the story of a dyslexic child – contains an uncontrived depiction of the emotional bond between mother and child (as well as the beautiful song “Maa”). At age 64, Bachchan acquired one of his most entertaining screen moms, the then 94-year-old Zohra Segal, in R Balki’s Cheeni Kum. A few years after that, the somewhat gimmicky decision to cast him as a Progeria-afflicted child in Paa meant he could play son to Vidya Balan, who was less than half his age. There is quiet dignity in this portrayal of a single working mother, though the film did kowtow to tradition (and to the ideal of the romantic couple) by ensuring that she is reunited with her former lover at the end.

One of the last Hindi films I saw before writing this piece – another Balan-starrer, the thriller Kahaani – has as its protagonist a heavily pregnant woman alone in the city, searching for her missing husband. This makes for an interesting psychological study because the quality of the film’s suspense (and the effect of the twist in its tail) depends on our accumulating feelings – sympathy, admiration – for this mother-to-be, laced with the mild suspicion that we mustn’t take everything about her at face value. I wasn’t surprised to discover that some people felt a little betrayed (read: emotionally manipulated) by the ending, which reveals that Vidya Bagchi wasn’t pregnant after all – the revelation flies in the face of everything Hindi cinema has taught us about the sanctity of motherhood.

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Given Vinay Lal’s observation about the centrality of the mother-son relationship in Indian society, it is perhaps inevitable that our films have a much more slender tradition of mother-daughter relationships. Going by all the gossip over the decades about dominating moms accompanying their starlet daughters to movie sets, the real-life stories may have been spicier than anything depicted on screen. And in fact, one of the scariest scenes from any Hindi film of the last decade involves just such a portrayal.

It occurs in Zoya Akhtar’s excellent Luck by Chance, a self-reflective commentary on the nature of stardom in Hindi cinema. The young rose Nikki Walia (Isha Sharvani) is doing one of those cutesy photo shoot-cum-interviews that entail completing sentences like “My favourite colour is ____.” At one point her mother Neena (Dimple Kapadia in an outstanding late-career performance), a former movie star herself, barges into the room and peremptorily begins giving instructions. We see Nikki’s expression (we have already noted how cowered she is by her mother’s presence) and feel a little sorry for her. “Neena-ji, can we have a photo of both of you?” the reporter asks. Neena-ji looks flattered but says no, she isn’t in a state fit to be photographed – why don’t you shoot Nikki against that wall, she says, pointing somewhere off-screen, and then sashaying off.

A few seconds later the shoot continues. “Your favourite person _____?” Nikki is asked. We get a full shot of the wall behind her – it is covered end to end with a colossal photo of Neena from her early days. “My mother,” Nikki replies mechanically.

The younger Kapadia in that photo is breathtakingly beautiful, but as a depiction of a child swallowed up by a parent’s personality, this brief shot is just as terrifying to my eyes as the closing scene of Psycho, with Norman Bates staring out at the camera, speaking to us in his mother’s voice – for all practical purposes, back in the womb. Luck by Chance contains other scenes suggesting that the predatorial Neena is bent on putting her daughter through everything she herself had experienced in the big bad industry. Do these scenes get additional power from the viewer’s non-diagetic knowledge that in real life, Dimple Kapadia herself entered the film industry at a disturbingly early age? You decide. Still, with the history of mainstream Hindi cinema being what it is, we should be grateful for this newfound variety, for stronger character development, and for at least some maternal representations that aren’t drenched in sentimentalism.

We’ve always had the noble, self-sacrificing and marginalised mothers and we’ll continue to have them – in cinema, as in life. So here’s to a few more of the other sorts: more Neena-jis, more sardonic Savitris, a few moms like the hard-drinking salon-owner in Vicky Donor, not-really-mothers like Vidya Bagchi – and even, if it ever comes to that, a desi Mrs Bates staring unblinkingly from her chair, asking her son to please go to the kitchen and make her some chai instead of ogling at chaalu young women through the peephole.

Our films, our selves: thoughts on the upcoming Bombay Talkies

[From my new cinema column for DNA newspaper. The e-paper version is here]

The enthusiastic if somewhat diffused celebrations around the 100th anniversary of Indian cinema found a new focal point last month, with the unveiling of the trailer for Bombay Talkies. This is an anthology film made up of short movies – each around 25 minutes in length – by four of our best-known directors; Karan Johar, Zoya Akhtar, Anurag Kashyap and Dibakar Banerjee were each given choice of subject and treatment, as long as it had something to do with cinema. So Kashyap’s film, for instance, is about a man from Allahabad on a mission to meet his hero Amitabh Bachchan.

While a celebratory project can be expected to run along such lines, it is worth noting that much of modern cinema is about cinema anyway. It feels like we have been living in an age of meta-film for a while, where movies constantly reference other movies (and in some cases are impossible to properly appreciate unless you are familiar with those reference points). Even remakes, while updating a story, miss no opportunity to make nudge-wink allusions to our cinematic past. I haven’t seen the new Himmatwala yet, but I wasn’t surprised to hear the dialogue where the hero tells the heroine how to bandage his wound: “Yeh 1983 hai, yaar. Pallu phaado aur baandh do.” The patronising tone is almost enough to make one feel defensive about the terrible 1980s.

As it happens, two of the four directors in the Bombay Talkies project have already made feature-length films that can be viewed as tributes to cinema. Anurag Kashyap’s epic from last year, Gangs of Wasseypur, was – to me at least – less noteworthy as a straight-faced depiction of gang wars in Dhanbad, and more stimulating as a commentary on how people interact with their popular culture, even modelling their own personalities and relationships on what they see in movies. (In one of that film’s many witty little touches, the sole character who is uninterested in cinema is played by a real-life director, Tigmanshu Dhulia. Naturally, this grinch is also the story’s primary villain.) Zoya Akhtar’s excellent Luck by Chance, on the other hand, was explicitly about the workings of the movie industry – a sympathetic yet hard-edged tale about the fortunes of two aspiring actors, neither of whom are to the manor of a filmi khandaan born. The multiple cameos in that film by real-life actors and directors might easily have become tiresome, but they were marvellously done. Two of the most delightful, in fact, were by Akhtar’s Bombay Talkies co-directors: Karan Johar played himself as someone darker and more intriguing than you’d ever think from watching his actual movies, while Kashyap played a writer whose artistic cravings are rudely snuffed out by money-minded producers. Such are the ways in which an industry comments on its own underpinnings.

Of the four short films, the one I’m most looking forward to is Dibakar Banerjee’s updating of Satyajit Ray’s story “Patol Babu, Film Star”, about a small-time actor and dreamer who is hired to play a tiny part in a film. (It is a pleasing coincidence that Ray’s story was first published in 1963, Indian cinema’s half-centenary year, though I doubt he had that in mind while writing it.) I met Banerjee last year during one of the script sessions, and learnt that his alterations included making the protagonist younger (the original Patol is 52), putting in a little subplot about emu-farming, and shifting the setting to contemporary Mumbai. But what I thought most interesting was his stated intention to bring elements of non-fiction filmmaking into fiction, to “explore the method of serendipity of documentaries within the format of a pre-written story”. 

Part of the idea was to work with an actor who might relate to Patol Babu’s struggles – someone whose own emotional trajectory resembled that of the character. It seems appropriate then that the role is being played by Nawazuddin Siddiqui, a short, dark-complexioned, “non-hero type” who has gone from being a bit-part player to one of our most respected performers, and a poster boy for the heart-warming (if illusory) idea that if you have talent, you can make it big no matter what. The last I heard, Banerjee and his collaborators were plumbing Siddiqui’s own background for cues to the updated Patol, though I don’t know how much of this has made it into the final film.

What Banerjee probably realised was that the line between fiction and non-fiction can become very blurred in a context where cinema is commenting on cinema. Two of the best documentaries I have recently seen are not part of the 100-year celebrations, but they could easily have been. Faiza Khan’s affectionate Supermen of Malegaon chronicles the struggles of small-town filmmakers as they make a superhero movie on a tiny budget with basic computer technology; this is a story about people fighting the odds (the plural “supermen” in the title refers to director Nasir Shaikh and his team in Malegaon), trying to highlight their daily problems – poverty, pollution, apathy – while also indulging their passion for filmmaking.

Even more compelling is Jagannathan Krishnan’s Videokaaran, about the world of underground video parlours. The lead character here – he is a real person, but one instinctively thinks of him as a “character” – is a colourful young man named Sagai, and as he addresses the camera, holding forth about his life, analysing his own personality, we see that (like the people in Gangs of Wasseypur) he is partly a construct of the movies he loves. As he and his friends argue passionately about the relative merits of Rajinikanth, Amitabh Bachchan and other heroes, it is obvious that they are already performers themselves – the cockiness, the braggadocio, the smart one-liners come easily to them. If they watch Bombay Talkies, they are likely to see their own movie-obsessions mirrored in it.

When Sambha danced - on the strange fame of Mac the naif

In his most famous movie role, he sat atop a big rock with a gun in his hand and replied to his master’s calls of “Arre O Sambha”. It was a small part, but it became so iconic that his profile could be used as the sole image on a “minimal Bollywood poster”, and anyone would know instantly that the film was Sholay. Yet what did the actor MacMohan himself feel about being defined and shadowed by that tiny role for the rest of his career?

I ask because a few weeks ago I caught a glimpse of an alternate future for the man, via a song from a 1964 film titled Aao Pyaar Karein. In the sequence (which you can and must see on YouTube here), the young MacMohan dances – daintily play-acting as a woman – with the movie’s leading man Joy Mukherjee, while their friends sit around clapping, shaking their heads and generally being baboons. Minus the distinctive beard and the streak of white hair, dressed in a formal suit with a bow-tie, filmed in black-and-white, MacMohan is unrecognisable from the screen persona he would eventually inhabit. His movements are lithe and graceful even during a strip-tease that ends with him in vest and striped shorts; with the always-affable Mukherjee giving him company, it doesn’t seem in poor taste (the woman who makes occasional appearances in the scene is more problematic).

Watching little Mac here is a reminder that a performer with disparate talents might get so pigeonholed that it becomes impossible to imagine him doing anything else. At this point in his career he was probably a young actor hoping for a big break, and on this evidence he might have had a future as a reliable supporting player: as the hero’s foil or a genial comedian. If he had been more personable and good-looking (whatever those words might mean in the context of the dubious physiognomic history of the Hindi-movie leading man, about which more in Mukul Kesavan’s essay “The Ugliness of the Indian Male”), he may even have hoped for something better. 

Something else that’s amusing about the Aao Pyaar Karein scene: clowning about on the periphery – as one of the other buddies – is the young Sanjeev Kumar, years before his stardom. In other words, here are two bit-part actors on level ground, long before their respective destinies in Hindi cinema were set, and a decade before they found themselves on opposite sides of the law – and at opposite ends of the fame continuum – as dacoit-minion Sambha and upright hero Thakur Baldev Singh.

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In a way it is fitting that one of MacMohan’s last screen appearances – 45 years after he danced with Joy Mukherjee – was in Zoya Akhtar’s Luck by Chance, a film that knows about the serendipitous moment; about the combination of events – a chance encounter, a portfolio that happens to make its way to an office at just the right time, catching the eye of this rather than that person – that can make the difference between good fortune and continuing struggle. It is a film with sympathy for the underdogs, has-beens and never-weres of the movie industry, and it gave MacMohan the respect of a bona fide cameo part (as opposed to the anonymous sidey roles he played in so many films). Playing himself, he visits an acting workshop, where he is asked by enthusiastic students to speak the line that made him famous. He looks down, pauses for a moment, looks up and says “Poore pacchaas hazaar”.

It’s a touching moment, a view of a career summarised in – and frozen by – three words. The cynical might look at his worn expression and at the students' grinning faces and say this is a case of a man invited to participate in self-parody. But you can also see a performer making a serious effort to “act” for the two seconds or so it takes him to say the line. In its quiet acknowledgement of the dignity of labour, the scene reminds me of Satyajit Ray’s fine short story “Patol Babu, Film Star”, in which a middle-aged man hired to play a part in a film discovers that he is required to say nothing more than “Oh” in his scene, but then gets over his disappointment by uncovering the possibilities contained in the single word:

Patol Babu uttered the word over and over again, giving it a different inflection each time. After doing this for a number of times he made an astonishing discovery. The same exclamation, when spoken in different ways, carried different shades of meaning. A man when hurt said “Oh” in one way. Despair brought forth a different kind of “Oh”, while sorrow provoked yet another kind. There were so many kinds of Ohs – the short Oh, the long-drawn Oh, Oh shouted and Oh whispered, the high-pitched Oh, the low-pitched Oh, the Oh starting low and ending high, and the Oh starting high and ending low...Patol Babu suddenly felt that he could write a whole thesis on that one monosyllabic exclamation. Why had he felt so disheartened when this single word contained a golden mine of meaning? The true actor could make a mark with this one syllable.

I wonder if MacMohan, in his post-Sholay life, sometimes quietly muttered “Poore pacchaas hazaar” to himself, examining the phrase for depth and meaning, and reflecting on the strangeness of his fame.

P.S. the "Patol Babu" excerpt above is from Ray’s own English translation of the story, most recently published in Classic Satyajit Ray. Incidentally, this is also the story that Dibakar Banerjee has adapted for his short film for the 100 Years of Cinema project. As mentioned in my Banerjee profile for Caravan, Nawazuddin Siddiqi - an actor who struggled for years before breaking into the big league - is playing the lead role in that film, which will incorporate elements from Nawazuddin's own real-life story.

And an anecdote from an email exchange: probably not something one should read too much into, but then again who knows. A few months ago a photo of the young MacMohan from the Aao Pyaar Karein song was doing the rounds on the internet; movie buffs were asking each other to identify the man, “who became unexpectedly famous in the 1970s”. A friend tells me she was astonished by how many of her correspondents wrote back asking if the picture was that of a skinny young pre-stardom Rajesh Khanna, because “the smile is the same”. Perhaps the angle of the photo was particularly flattering to MacMohan, or perhaps this was because Khanna had recently died and everyone had him on their mind. But as my friend put it, “even if they were seeing things, clearly in that snap he did look hero-like enough for them.” (Or nearly as hero-like as Rajesh Khanna, which is not an unequivocal compliment.)