Stories, songs, and socialism
As we celebrate Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s birth centenary this year, his films, often loosely labelled as middle-of-the-road cinema, deserve a more engaged appraisal.
CHUPKE CHUPKE IS PLAYING on TV, my mother is making rotis for our joint family in the kitchen and “Jijaji” Om Prakash is asking “Driver” Pyaaremohan Allahabadi (Dharmendra) if he has eaten. “I have eaten at…” says the hero and my mother completes the sentence with that magical name for trains which Gulzar’s fertile pen had crafted. Rolling out the dough, she happily intones: “Lauhpadgamini vishraamsthal” (resting spot for she who moves on feet of iron, that is, a railway station).
We do not really need to see
Chupke Chupke any more; we can recite most of the film and enjoy its flavours even with the TV switched off. The same goes for Gol Maal; cries of “Beta Ramprasaaad” fill the air whenever Utpal Dutt appears in this one-sided love story between a boss and the new employee, Amol Palekar, out to impress him. (“You will not marry the man you love,” Dutt tells his daughter firmly. “You will marry the man I love.”)
A few years later, in university and tentatively trying to understand the world through other people’s words and opinions, I came across a review of a Hrishikesh Mukherjee film by a learned critic who said that Mukherjee’s films were seen only by middle-class women. “Middle-class” was bad enough, but “middle-class women” was clearly the nadir in terms of a fan base! Indeed, the director himself agreed: “I am basically a middle-class man with middleclass values, and I can make no other kind of films.”
BEYOND LABELS
Just as the suffix “da” never left Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s name, the labels “middle of the road” of
“middle-class” never stopped pursuing his cinema. But what did “middle” mean in the context of Mukherjee’s cinema? Was it a label given in hindsight to films that were obviously not commercial in their use of action and glamour but that did not find their leading characters among the poor and the oppressed either, in the way, say, Shyam Benegal’s films did? Did it indicate that his films were mainly comedies like Gol Maal or Chupke Chupke, which revolved around the problems, foibles, and relationships of people who lived in pukka houses and had jobs?
In his 100th birth year, the man the entire film industry knew as “Hrishida” deserves a more engaged appraisal. “Middle-of-the-road”, with its wishy-washy aroma of being neither here nor there, describes neither the man nor his work. As Amitabh Bachchan, the bachelor English professor pretending to be a married botany expert, explained to Jaya Bhaduri whom he discreetly loved: “Jo jaisa hai, wo kaee baar nahin hota” (what seems like is often not). One of the few times the word “bourgeois” has been used in a Hindi film is in Guddi. “Aap to jaante hain hamari bourgeois press ko….woh to paisa kamaana chahte hain” (You know what our bourgeois press is like … they just want to earn money”). Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s heroes fought for issues like wage payment to workers (Satyakam) and preferred to declass themselves, not as an act of nobility but as one of genuine inner transformation (Namak Haraam and Alaap).
His frequent collaborators were progressive writers like Rajinder Singh Bedi, Gulzar, and Nabendu Ghosh, as well as IPTA (Indian People’s Theatre Association) members Salil Chowdhury, Inder Raj Anand, and Utpal Dutt. This reflected routinely in the films: from Simi Garewal explaining socialism to a bored Amitabh Bachchan (Namak Haraam) to Rekha singing “Inquilab zindabad” even if in the context of domestic tyranny (Khubsoorat) to Amol Palekar’s friends shouting “Ye democracy ke khilaaf hai” and “Down with personality cult” when
one of them picks who he will take to a football match (in post-emergency Gol Maal). However, Mukherjee who identified himself with “a generation which cherished nobility, sacrifice, justice and honesty” and “passionately believed in them” was often self-critical about not having been true to his values in his cinema: “I never had the nerve to break away from the commercial structure. So how can I be proud of my work?” He also said: “I am consistently making compromises.”
VARIETY OF FILMS
In a career in which he directed 42 highly varied films—from Musafir (1957) to Jhooth Bole Kauwa Kaate (1998)—perhaps it is worth looking for the “real” Hrishikesh Mukherjee through the prism of the films he was most invested in, the films he wrote himself: Anupama (1966), Aashirwad (1968), Anand (1970), Abhimaan (1973), Namak Haraam (1973), and Alaap (1977), and the film that he said was his favourite: Satyakam (1969).
It has been 53 years since Satyakam was made and I still tear up a bit when I see its hopeful young engineering students on the cusp of Independence. The enthralled Satyavir (Dharmendra) says:
“Bhookh, bekaari, black marketing, sab khatm ho jayega” (hunger, unemployment, the black market … all will end). But he finds that he is wrong and dies fighting the “system” with an increasingly bitter refusal to compromise. Mukherjee was dejected by Satyakam’s failure and despondent because of its truths: “I had thought corruption would end when we became independent. But this was not so. Then I thought there was nothing to do but laugh. Which is why I made Gol Maal, Naram Garam, and Chupke Chupke.”
One of Mukherjee’s best realised films, Namak Haraam, explores the experience of Somu (Rajesh Khanna), who pretends to be a worker to avenge his beloved friend Vicky (Amitabh Bachchan). Somu seeks to replace the union leader in Vicky’s father’s factory. But soon, traumatised by the hunger and poverty he witnesses, he is unable to return to the bewildered Vicky’s world. Characters like Vicky’s socialist friend (Simi Garewal), the union leader (A.K. Hangal), and the despairing alcoholic poet (Raza Murad) speak explicitly against inequality and injustice.
The musical Alaap is also centred around economic inequality. A rich and arrogant Om Prakash seeks to