An interview with Mohnish Bahl

Alas, I was not the person who interviewed Nutan's son! But thanks to Seema, my desi Nutan-collaborator, I would like to indicate the recent interview which appeared in Filmfare. You'll find it here. It's by Farhana Farook, whom I'll thank in advance for a few significant extracts.

What strikes first is Mom's presence and authority. It isn't that she exerted anything excessive towards Mohnish, but she does come out as slightly bossy when she advises him: "Once, I was supposed to be at the studio for a 9 am shoot. When Mom saw me at home at 8 am, she inquired why I hadn’t left. I said I had to shave. She said, “Go there and shave. Your unit shouldn’t be left stressing whether you’ll turn up or not.” and somewhere else she tells him that his nose is too long, and that he should tread step by step. Clearly she looked at his acting performances with a critical eye, and refrained from any facile praise: "When she saw Itihaas (1987), she didn’t say how great or horrible I was. She only remarked, “Open your mouth and pronounce the words. It’s ‘Maa’, not ‘Ma’." She cautioned me against speaking Hindi with an English accent."

It's quite lovely, of course, that we can "hear" Nutan's opinions about her son like that after so many years. But one trait of hers is nonetheless apparent here: her demanding professionalism. The cinema for her meant a sort of discipline which went far beyond playing the roles with feeling and understanding, and doing what director and text require from an actor. This being on the set so that the team doesn't have to worry about whether the lead actor will turn up or not shows an attention to others and a personal involvement which indicate how seriously she worked. People may wonder why she was so dedicated. After all, one might tolerate from an actress an amount of amateurishness which for example a surgeon or a judge cannot display. Hasn't the time-honoured practice of using actresses on screen shown that, provided they're charming and pretty, one doesn't expect much more? Nutan's professionalism certainly understood these questions, and her attitude obviously imply that women can and should act, should be relied upon not for their looks but for their work, and being serious and respectful to all the trades (no matter how menial) was clearly a way to demand the same treatment for the likes of her. It is in this sense that she was a progressive feminist, in spite of all. (see the comments of this article).

In the interview, there are some fun parts where Mohnish reminisces about his upbringing, especially those where animals are mentioned. "My earliest memory of her is of her playing an ‘animal’ game with me. For instance, she’d say ‘bear’ and then come and give me a bear hug. Or startle me pretending to be a chipkali (lizard)... She loved spending time in our bungalow at Mumbra. I’d tag along with her. She’d call me her dum (tail). " [You can go here to see pictures of Nutan and her animals]. I think this playful love of animals is part of her loving nature, which extended to all living things, her shikar practice notwithstanding (loving animals is partly a cultural acquisition). Expressing her love towards her boy in this animal-related fashion testifies to her understanding that innocent and loving animal creatures have a lot to teach us, and that's how she's behaving too. Introducing animal tricks in her education meant she had recognized the fundamental goodness of creation, and perhaps even the godlike dimension of all creatures (Mohnish says in the article "She had understood there was something way larger than us"). Perhaps she would have wanted to be reincarnated as a poodle? She fancied having a dum, at any rate!

Another interesting passage is when Mohnish speaks about watching his mum's movies. "But as a kid, I hated watching her films. I’d wonder why she was going through so much pain. Today, when I see her films, I admire her as an actor. At the same time, it’s not a happy feeling. Tears well up. You don’t see the actor; you see your mother. I can never watch her films at a stretch. They remind me of her. Why visit those memories?" We learn that as a yougster and even now as a grown-up man, he doesn't really manage to watch her in films, because he cannot dissociate the actress and the mother. Perhaps this is natural. What's striking is that the first thing he mentions is "going through so much pain". What is he referring to? So much work? So much negative emotionality in her roles? So many difficulties as a woman in a man's world? Whatever he means, he underlines (I think) that Nutan the actress meant to be real, to achieve a realistic and therefore not fanciful stance about what she was doing and saying. When one is grounded in reality, it can sometimes hurt, and it hurts because it goes against one's escapist dreams and fancies, which too often the cinema tries to promote. One would like the heroes to be innocent, lovable and victorious; this isn't to say that Nutan had never chosen any such heroines. But she did choose anti-heroines too. In Bandini or Sujata, her heroine goes through the pains of loss and guilt.

So I don't know if Mohnish understands fully that being an actress doesn't mean necessarily being a pleasant moving image on the screen. He admires his mother... but does he see what it took for her to be admired? Certainly Nutan was this (very) pleasant woman, but she also was much more. She's not the only actress to have stretched the paradox to its extremes, I mean the paradox of being a beauty and using it, and at the same time fighting for the recognition of the importance of acting skills. Over here in the West, many actresses have made this paradox into an asset. I can name some Indian actresses who have succeeded in doing the same; but I wonder if the public at large understands all this, and even if it does, recognizes the need for it.

Here are some pictures of Nutan and son which also (for some) appear here on this blog:

I wonder how much this airplane birthday cake cost! (is the glaring boy Mohnish?)

One last word coming from Mohnish, what he remembers his mum had said upon learning about her cancer : ‘Chalo ismein bhi kuch achcha hoga’ ("Come on, there will be something good in it too"), the "too" being perhaps relative to the good coming from opening the Gita at random, and she saying that “I open any page of the Gita and I find the answer I’m searching for.” We are left to ponder on that good which she, as a believer, thought would come out of an evil.