a very interesting Desai interview from '84 (a friend alerted me to it):

http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/money-that-i-spent-is-seen-on-my-films-manmohan-desai/1/361334.html

two passages stand out for me:

"Cinema is a medium of illogic. Here, you re-create physical reality with a series of lies – the night that you show in films may be day; the fights may be the result of brisk cutting; the passage of time may have been created at the laboratory, with a technique called dissolve. So, you have illusions available to you. Why must you always create something out of them that looks like life? It can be anything, as long as it touches a chord."

and then this:

"Before Amar Akbar Anthony, my concept of a hero was almost entirely modelled on Raj Kapoor whom I had cast in my very first film, Chhalia, made in 1959 when I was just 22. It is only in Amar Akbar Anthony that Amitabh got Raj Kapoor out of my system. Now I have got Amitabh in my system and cannot think of anyone other than him. What happens now is that I think of scripts with Amitabh in mind. It is very difficult to conceive of an alternative, though I agree that an alternative must come up."


and in this context I am going to shamelessly reference some older comments of mine from different places because I’ve long felt this to be a hidden link in Desai’s work. A kind of ‘unthought’ of his oeuvre (which is to say something he instinctively got and perhaps understood at some conscious level but certainly that which has eluded his critics), the bridge between Raj Kapoor and Amitabh Bachchan.

[ The John Jani Janardhan Naseeb song was weakly misread by Farah Khan in Om Shanti Om. The former isn’t really about ‘number’. What is noteworthy about the Naseeb song is that it precisely does not feature ‘everyone’. Some of the obvious ‘exclusions’ are Dilip Kumar, Dev Anand, Ashok Kumar, Rajendra Kumar, Shashi Kapoor, Rishi Kapoor, Jeetendra, Vinod Khanna. A similar list could be made for the actresses as well.

So what’s going on? Presumably some of these stars must have been busy on their own assignments but there’s something else too.

The stars that do feature in the song are Dharmendra, Rajesh Khanna, Raj Kapoor, Shammi Kapoor, Sharmila Tagore, Randhir Kapoor and so on.

Well all the stars that feature in the song had acted in Desai’s films (though I am unable so far to account for Rakesh Roshan! Well he can be the exception that proves the rule!). Shammi Kapoor did Bluffmaster, Dharam did Chacha Bhatija as did Randhir, Dharam aslo did Dharam Veer, Rajesh Khanna did Sachcha Jhoota and Roti, Sharmila Tagore did Aa Gale Lag Ja. Raj Kapoor of course was the great ‘teacher’, Desai had been assistant to him and later began his career directing the legend in Chalia.

So this a bit humorous, even a bit subversive. The event is a jubilee function for Dharam Veer. Normally the whole industry shows up for such an event but here the list is rather selective (of course Shashi Kapoor is not here and Rishi couldn’t be as he in the same film as a character, however no one who did not work with Desai is there!). It’s actually a bit of a Desai ‘family’ gathering!

But the fun doesn’t end here. The ultimate star, Bachchan (the one man industry by that time) is just a waiter here and dreams of becoming a star! Desai is craftier still. In a very important symbolic moment Raj Kapoor is at the center of things because he is asked to ‘play’ the harmonium (as he did in his films, most famously in Sangam). The great showman is therefore given his own ’show’ within the show! And the man who hands him the musical instrument and begs him to play is Bachchan! So Bachchan is connected in a very critical way to Raj Kapoor here.

Let’s not forget another bit of symbolism to the song. The ‘Allah Jesus Ram hain mere’ refrain. Bachchan is everyman of every(Indian). of course in Desai’s films Bachchan is most famously Anthony and Iqbal and the NAseeb character with 3 names. Raj Kapoor is the ultimate ‘humanist’ of Hindi cinema. If there is an actor before Bachchan who could represent the truly secular, the truly ‘classless’, if there was someone who could represent the ‘lack’ of proper markers of religion and ethnicity and so on it was Raj Kapoor.

Connecting Raj kapoor to Bachchan is therefore brilliant because Bachchan himself functions as another kind of everyman to the extent that he does not represent a religion or an ethnicity to the audiences. As I’ve pointed out before many of Bachchan’s canonical roles are coded with ‘minority’ signs. In the most canonical one of all Deewar, we see the nominal Hindu (Vijay) who has a quarrel with God and therefore refuses to enter the temple but on the other hand accepts the ‘talismanic’ significance of the ‘786′ badge (an important number in Islamic numerology as it denotes the ’sacred refrain’ that must begin every reading of the Koran or in a more general sense every ‘auspicious’ act, Yunuz Parvez's character in Deewar explains as much). But then the badge actually protects him when he’s shot and significantly he only dies at the end when he loses the badge. One should take this a bit further. Bachchan does enter the temple later in the film when his mother is ill but to once again ‘quarrel’. The God in the temple functions in Deewar as an almost malignant force whereas the talismanic ‘786′ protects. This is powerfully, even dangerously subversive.

As an aside I should add that Desai picks up on the potency of this symbolism and Deewar and really takes it to a logical extreme in Coolie. There are credible accounts that Bachchan was supposed to initially die in Coolie. Then Bachchan almost died in real life and due to public pressure Desai changed the ending. As the film now stands Bachchan writes in his blood the basic proclamation that qualifies one as a ‘Muslim’ after he is shot. Later of course he survives. As the film originally stood this might have been the final ‘confession’ of Bachchan! But even in this revised version it is very potent. Nowhere else in Hindi cinema does one find such powerful ‘religious’ subversion.

Raj Kapoor and Bachchan are for Desai guarantors of the secular Nehruvian India of which Desai himself is the last true representative as ‘director’.]


[ Chalia is Desai’s debut and it clearly illustrates the director’s future path though one that was kept in suspension after this film as he worked with Shammi Kapoor and Rajesh Khanna and so forth.. till he got to Bachchan. I’ve said this before but in a very crucial sense Desai makes Bachchan also the inheritor of the the Raj Kapoor ethos. One wouldn’t normally think of these two together but Desai establishes a connection. Chalia at any rate deals with the partition trauma directly as well as the AAA kind of message with ‘chalia mera naam… hindu muslim sikh isai sab ko mera salaam’. But with Raj Kapoor he couldn’t have gone further than this. The latter’s Chaplinesque persona was much more that of the unmarked everyman. He was always the ultra-humanist and was always quite far from any mode of religiosity.

The question of the ‘Nehruvian’ can be reintroduced here. You have hinted in one of your responses here (and I take up the lead!) that Desai’s world might not necessarily be one that Nehru would have endorsed. Nehru from all that we can gather had at times even a certain hostility to bourgeois religiosity. of any kind. On the other hand Desai is quite happy to wallow in precisely this even if he is quite fair to the minority, indeed tilts towards the minority almost everywhere (Suhaag is a film populated only by the majority and it is easily his darkest film). Raj Kapoor’s unmarked ‘hero’ might have been more to Nehru’s taste. At the same time one perhaps has to recognize the greater ‘wisdom’ of Desai’s move. Because Raj Kapoor’s ‘universal’ operated by effacing the particulars or religion and caste. A valuable move in itself but one not entirely consonant with his nation’s contemporary concerns. Note how Chaplin emerges at a point in history when the old European feuds over religion and class and so forth had been mostly played out, when societies were transitioning from an older aristocratic order to a new democratic one. Chaplin was in many ways the detritus of the older system. He is what survives the ravaged past. In his vulnerability and ‘exposure’ he even looks ahead to an even greater conflict yet to come. Chaplin could be ‘Jewish’ man. As these old hierarchies crumble Chaplin stands ‘naked’. I have never seen him as part of the lumpen masses who were newly empowered in these political transitions. Raj Kapoor recreated this ‘type’ in India and as I’ve just stated there were risks to this.

I would like to think that even if it might have made him a bit queasy at points Nehru would have recognized the significance of Desai’s wager, given the masala format of cinema and its excesses of pitch and tone. While Nehru wasn’t exactly a fan of any sort of religiosity it is fair to say that the majority kind (being the most powerful one) perhaps concerned him far more than the rest. But also he disliked what he defined as superstition more than anything else. The Gandhi way if you will of connecting social and political maladies to larger disturbances in the moral or ethical order. For example a famine or riot could be in Gandhi’s worldview the price paid for a greater ‘sin’. This is the sort of linkage Nehru simply detested.

But Desai never follows such an economy. His carnivalesque atmospheres and the fact that his films are essentially comedies in a structural sense but often literally so allows him to indulge in all manner of religiosity by marrying it to a theater (dare I say circus) sense of the world. And yes he does move away from Raj Kapoor’s or Chaplin’s or Chalia’s broader humanism to a cultural and religious specificity that is de-linked from any nationalistic program. Desai’s films in fact often seem like fairy tales because he keeps them extremely vague or unmarked in political terms. These fairy tales are to my mind Nehruvian, true to the Nehruvian idea of India, true to that quasi-mystical myth of a timeless melting pot land.]

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