In Sai Paranjpe’s movie, Sparsh (Touch, 1980), the character played by Shabana Azmi, Kavita, similarly becomes engaged to a blind headmaster (Naseeruddin Shah), and because she seems too devoted to him, gets called by that name. This puts the movie in the context of the movements for woman’s emancipation, but with a twist, since in the sacrifice of Sati, the widow who joins her husband on the funeral pyre obviously doesn’t remarry. In Sparsh, not only is the context a remarriage, but Anirudh, the blind headmaster of an institution for blind children, warns Kavita against turning into a new Gandhari. He wants no such devotional sacrifice. And yet, this denial doesn’t seem to carry the weight of the film’s message: clearly Kavita’s sacrificial attitude is justified by the director. So could it be that Sparsh is more traditional than what it seems at first sight?

Several first-rate reviews of this little jewel exist on the web: for Carla the film, in spite of its slight defects, is sweet and touching, whereas Banno is more attentive to the educational dimension and A2line declares her enthusiasm at Naseeruddin’s acting skill. You can go and read the story first if you haven’t seen the film. But I’ll still have to say a few things about it, because some of its minor events carry an important significance. And we’ll come back to Gandhari bye and bye. You probably know that the drama at the centre of the story is Anirudh’s decision to break the engagement that he had started with the demure Kavita: having met by accident, the two notice each other at a party, and the teacher asks her if she might come and join the team of child-minders in his Institution. After some hesitation, the young widow decides to join, and quickly becomes very successful, both with the children and the staff. Until then lost in a withdrawn, nostalgic past, she finds a new present, and the promise of an undreamt-of future.
Even if Anirudh is a proud, demanding person, she senses this must hide a soft spot and soon enough she finds it. It means accepting a reorganisation of her values, first: she mustn’t consider the children or anyone at the Institution as “poor souls”, or handicapped victims, but as persons who need some help. No compassion please. Anirudh explains:
She is very much in need of involvement, and soon the pleasure and life-lines coming from the children win her over. Her personality blooms, and quite naturally she becomes closer to the man responsible for this. Anirudh cannot refrain from noticing her engaging character, her natural and warm nature. The way their budding attraction for one other is filmed makes it very interesting to watch, because one constantly wonders about the unusualness of the match. Everything seems to be going perfectly at first, and then little hitches occur, triggered by remarks overheard by the blind man. Kavita’s a real goddess, she’s sacrificing herself for him, how lucky for him, she will be able to do everything he can’t… Unwittingly, she’s rubbing in what he’s been trying to evade all his adult life: dependence and pity.
And that’s where he balks. Pity: for him pity is an attitude he will not harbour; pity makes him feel how much he’s been fighting against himself to be self-reliant and grown. If other people feel pity for him, the conclusion is that he’s not been successful in projecting an autonomous persona for himself. If people pity him, then he’s still the child he suffered to be all those years. Pity means inferiority, inadequacy and failure. How dare these people feel pity for him who has, so much more than able people, fought successfully to the top and reached the position of headmaster of an educational institution?
Anirudh’s refusal of pity and sympathy shows he doesn’t see the reasons why others might pity him, and also indicates how far he still is from real independence. He doesn’t see that love contains pity, essentially. Love needs to give itself, to pour itself on wounds and complete what is incomplete. Love is so soul-searching that it can accept to maim itself in order to be accepted and loved in return. This is what happens to little Paplu: this young boy, who isn’t blind, is a pupil at the Institution and helps his blind friends to read. He therefore has an advantage which he sometimes uses for his personal ends. But when Kavita comes to the school, and makes the blind children less dependent, he’s less used, and less loved, and this is what his father comes to the headmaster to complain about:
 And as a result we have the very funny and touching story of the lovely princess in her devilish Castle who one day sees her Prince rush in with his Chariot and fly to her rescue. Such is the power of love that it provokes sacrifice, because it contains it. Loving means sacrificing one’s ego on the altar of the beloved. But if this ego isn’t yet built, how can one sacrifice it? It becomes suicide. Anirudh has a colleague, Dubey (played by a young Om Puri), whose wife is ill, then dies, and whose grief we witness: 
When Anirudh puts together his growing feeling of unease because of Kavita’s insisting presence, (which he can’t understand as her attraction to himself), and Dubey’s realization that now he’s going to have to become independent again, as he had been before his marriage, something clicks inside his darkness: “she’s trying to “understand” me, she’s doing what I have set to do for myself, because nobody else can do it: make sense out of my suffering, find meaning in the pain and humiliation. She wants to educate me, I am a child once again”: 
  Anirudh’s drama is that he cannot “see” like a child sees, through love. He hasn’t yet reached the point where he can “change and become as little children” (Matthew 18,3). Indeed, such a change requires one to have gone through a process of abandonment; to reach this state where you can see the Others around you as divine images and become their child, so to speak, you must accept who you are, you must even forget who you are, forget your indulging quest for yourself, and extract yourself from yourself. He hasn’t yet suffered enough, perhaps, or conversely, he has suffered too much and isn’t healed yet. He cannot see that Kavita’s love is this healing. He believes he can heal himself on his own, through his own efforts. Conversion is precisely that: accept to be healed by another. “Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.” healing comes when one recognises that efforts alone, no matter how in earnest, cannot save us.
Now Kavita too has suffered: but what makes the difference between the two of them? How come she’s the one who “sees”, whereas he’s “blind”? She’s also been shut up in herself, and has had to reconstruct a broken ego. Why can she love authentically, and not him? The answer is in the film’s title: Sparsh, touch. Kavita’s change (her conversion) has come about through a touch: she’s been touched, that’s how children have converted her and brought her to the school, where she’s sloughed off that old nostalgic self. We often see Kavita’s hands, they’re the physical and at the same time spiritual means which has saved her, and why she will be able to save Anirudh: she’ll touch him, and cure his sickness, she’ll finally be able do that miracle. (Well, in fact the last move will be operated through Manju, Kavita’s friend, but in essence, everything Kavita has done before has enabled Anirudh to finally open his ears to what Manju tells him, and let go of himself).
The theme of touching has been the subject of other “meditations” on this blog (Sujata, for example, or Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable). Blind people operate with hearing, smell and touch. Hearing is of course the primary sense for them, but touching is much developed too. What’s therefore surprising is that Anirudh’s sense of touch isn’t as sensitive as Kavita’s, who normally doesn’t need it so much and, according to the Darwinian law of need creating the function, shouldn’t have developed it all that much. One clue is the conversation which they have around the theme of darkness, at Kavita’s house one day. “Please leave me alone in my city of darkness”, says Anirudh, hurt because he cannot make her understand he isn’t ready for her love. “I too am living in the dark”, she answers. And then she suggests:  
A beautiful passage indeed, which demonstrates Sai Paranjpe’s art as a writer, but which also explains the two different uses of touch exemplified by the two characters. Anirudh’s blindness has made him develop a certain sense of touch, of course, but he’s been blind to realities which have also stunted it. Kavita, on the other hand, has felt her way out of her darkness thanks to the light of love, and now she knows the way out. If only he’d let her, she could teach him how to feel his way out from the sombre pit of anger and self-pity. Anirudh is locked in the cave of his own making, and it’s all the more poignant as he’s so keenly in need of her touch: 
      

For me, the photo on the right shows a very distressing moment, when Anirudh tries to make the miracle happen. In the gospel, the divine healer also had put his hand on the blind man’s eyes, mixing it with dirt, and this had healed him. It seems here that Anirudh is trying to reproduce that moment, and wanting love to perform the same miracle. Out there on the lawn, in the famous scene when the pair evoke Kavita’s beauty, everything was so right: Anirudh had perfectly understood (= his blindness had wonderfully prepared him to understand) that real beauty belongs to the invisible realm of the person’s inner sanctum. Even if the film-maker makes us at that moment contemplate Shabana Azmi’s flamboyant physical beauty, even if the scene, as somebody says somewhere, is full of erotic magic, nevertheless it opens onto the silent world of touch, where we are all equal, all children of one Creator of velvety softness. 
One last discovery in Sparsh: at one point, Kavita declares something which is misunderstood by Anirudh. For her “love isn’t everything in life”, and she explains that she has a “duty” to perform: she has remained too long pent-up in herself. Now is the time for opening up, doing something no longer for herself alone, but for “everybody”, as she puts it, and Anirudh is part of that plan. She will no longer think about herself anymore. But he sees that as nothing more than a sacrifice; in fact he has a simplistic understanding of sacrifice. He cannot perceive its transformative process, how it enables somebody to merge into a vast and infinite dimension. Kavita for him is only involved in a pact with herself. And so logically he refuses that. He refuses her to become Gandhari, who, according to the myth, was said to have had one hundred children! 100! I think the incredible record for a single woman is 68, astounding as it sounds. But one hundred, this figure clearly means that Kavita is going to love and nurture as many children as she can, she is going to multiply her attention to reach out and help as many as it takes. Perhaps Anirudh confusedly feels this “sacrifice” in fact sacrifices him!
To round off this long review, just to say that the two leads are excellent, perhaps Shabana Azmi even greater than Naseer, who pulls off a superb performance. We can actually see in him Anirudh the blind headmaster, and he’s very convincing. But Shabanaji, ah, she’s perfect, there a dedication, an effortlessness in her acting which distinguishes her as one of the magnificent actresses of her age. Her Kavita is a constant delight to watch and one falls in love with her promptly: anyway, she’s said it: she’s going to love everybody!

I thought at first I wouldn’t have much to say about Peepli live (Anusha Rizvi, 2010), but as I started writing, the following article poured out very easily! I had told myself that the film wasn’t much more than a properly engineered denunciation of the antidemocratic shifts in today’s India, plus the scathing condemnation of an economic system that lets its farmers die for lack of any viable support, and somehow I wasn’t very enthusiastic. Perhaps the film was too much of a documentary nature? It’s true that this is one of my limits: I do enjoy a certain amount of glamorization, and lo! There isn’t any in Peepli. The film is also rather dry on beautification, and perhaps for the good reasons: it wants to underline how much the mediatisation of drama turns into a dramatisation of the media, and there isn’t any need to show beauty within that blueprint. Anusha Rizvi goes about her business of constructing her cinematographic argument, and it works all the better as it stands out, like a sharp blade, unhampered by any other intentions.

But the film’s point doesn’t lie with the idealistic and honourable Rakesh. It focuses on what Nandita answers him, when he asks her what importance Natha has for the media:
- A farmer is committing suicide because he’s in debt. You don’t think that’s important?
- Yes, it’s important. But there are other farmers too in this village. Aren’t they equally important?
- You don’t just abandon a story midway Rakesh, and move on to something else. No. You’ve got to follow it right to its conclusion.
Rakesh then tells Nandita about Hori Mahato, how he died from absolute abandonment and misery. Nandita answers:
- Let me try and explain this to you. Research shows our audience is interested only in Natha. Do you know why? Because he is the original live suicider. Do you have any idea how big this is?
So now we have it. Here we can understand what the film is doing. Natha is the “original live suicider”. I don’t need to underline the fantastic paradox for a man to be considered a “live suicider”; what is clearly important to the media is the “live” dimension. Hori wasn’t seen dying live. But Natha holds the promise of doing so. Not only that, but he represents a “story”, that is to say he can ensure the media importance and purposefulness. Thanks to him, a channel gets to be watched as much as its “hero”. In fact, it gets to be watched more so, because it can multiply news items around the hero (interviews with the hero’s family, specialists speaking about hero-related problems, updates on the hero’s likes and dislikes…). Nandita’s channel is thus guaranteed a life thanks to the promise of death. Vulture-like, the journalist watches (and directs its spectators towards the show – its cameras are like loaded guns) what it has reason to believe is a dying prey, and what everybody needs to see as a result is no longer the sociological or political unravelling of the causes explaining why such a man is going to die, but an “original” event which  normally belongs to the intimacy of the self and perhaps close family and friends – a man’s decision to end his life on this Earth.
So the film’s strength lies in this powerful exposure of the media carrion-feeder’s status. Its “live” film-mode doesn’t mean it’s showing any authentic or real objects: it’s a killing process. It isn’t interested in poverty, exploitation or oppression. It isn’t a democratic tool aimed at bettering the lives of people thanks to its confrontational methods or its uncovering of untruths. It is pandering to a lecherously prying audience, which as a result isn’t educated to a better understanding of society and social ills – one of the upheld “noble” aims of the media, this indispensable fourth power of any serious democracy. Instead it creates exactly the opposite. It hides the social injustice and oppression by focusing on the sensational and voyeuristic desire of common people to see in other people’s minds and hearts. It panders to that transgressive urge to know what should remain private and intimate. It is procuring this drug to an already addicted audience, and this makes it as tragically blind as the audience who believe what they are shown because it’s apparently professionally done.
What do people want to see most? Sex and death. This association of primal violence corresponds to a deep and elemental anguish: where do I come from? Where am I heading to? Sex correspond to the mystery of birth, and Death to the enigma of life. Nandita speaks about Natha as being “the original live suicider”. “Original” refers to both life and death, because our origin as human beings belongs as much to birth as to death. Both have an essential connection to our essence as men. You cannot speak about a man until it is born, of course, but what would a man be if he didn’t die? He would be a god, not a man. If one can watch death happening, as under a telescope, perhaps it will help relieve our quest and our fear a little. And if it’s done on this truth-revealing machine that we call the TV, then it possesses an attraction which cannot be resisted.
Natha is transformed into a man who will commit suicide in the face of the media. Note that he is made to be that; he himself isn’t willing at all. So what we see then is the hysteria of a whole nation involved in the observation of the impending suppression of a man’s self. If a whole nation is made thus to observe one such man magnified to national proportions, doesn’t it come close to observing itself dying? This is perhaps the ultimate phantasm: kill yourself and watch yourself doing so, whereas normally death is precisely what stops you from watching any more. One cannot watch one’s own death. And if one does, one dies. Now I realize that these statements are symbolical, but symbols have a lot of power.
One scene that had me in fits was the one following Natha’s disappearance. Taking advantage of the dawn when everyone including the soldiers, the journalists and the family, is busy more about themselves than others, Natha goes to relieve himself. He’s nevertheless spotted by one journalist who sends his cameraman up the makeshift tower to film him. We see him at first, but then: he’s gone! The scene that follows is pure delight. The whole nation seems to wake up to the shock. We see newspapers boys crying the event, anchormen analysing it, politicians taking their varied stances about it, and on the spot where Natha was last seen pushing hard, one senior reporter (Nandita’s rival channel’s head reporter) gets the essential piece of news:
It’s a great joke, but with a sting in it, don’t you think? Oh, and another great one: one day, crimson-scarf Pappulal, the leader of the dalit party comes to Peepli to honour Natha as the fighter of the cause of the poor – guess what he presents him with?
And last but not least, these are the most important words of the speech he delivers:

(1).  The film brings in Naseeruddin Shah as Salim, the soft-spoken, wily minister of Agriculture. See top pic!

(2). A piece of information coming from Deepti Sharma, one of Carla’s commentators on her blog : this name is a reference to “Munshi Premchand's celebrated novel Godaan. Many decades ago, this beautifully written Hindi novel explored the sad plight of debt-ridden farmers as well as the great divide between urban and rural India. The old farmer in this film is even named after the protagonist of that novel, Hori Mahto. Much like his namesake, Hori in the novel fights a losing battle against debts throughout his life, and towards the end, deprived of his land, is reduced to undignified labor at a road construction.”

What is the soul of poetry? Isn’t it a kind of universal music which, universal as it is, springs fresh and clear from a homely and unique source of inspiration? When Tagore writes:

Nahin kisi ko pata kahaan mere raja ka rajmahal

Agar jaante log, mahal ye thik pata kya ek pal

I hear a very Indian voice evoking a king’s palace and telling us that even if it is made of gold and silver, in the reality of whispering truth it stands “at the corner of our terrace where the tulsi-plant grows”. The tulsi is that traditional little tree in the centre of the courtyard, the same aromatic plant we in the West know as Basil (etymologically the king) which means immortality in Hinduism, and is associated to Lakshmi, the home-Goddess, and Sita the perfect wife (see here). So this evocation is localized, but universal too because it comes in the shape of a common mystery: nobody knows where my king’s palace is… and if they knew, it would vanish into the air… this palace is really a corner of our terrace where the sacred tulsi stands… All lovers of poetry can recognize the theme of knowledge, unattainably noble and intimate, yet simple and close at hand, present in the secret of everlasting life.

Why I have started with Tagore and tulsi will hopefully soon come clear in this presentation of Ritwik Ghatak’s classic masterpiece Subarnarekha (1962) which tells of the dramatic life of Bengali refugees near Calcutta in the aftermath of the Partition of Bengal in1947. We start with the life inside a refugee camp where two teachers, Haraprasad and Ishwar, are setting up an Indian school for the camp’s children. The first will teach Sanskrit and Bengali, the second English and History. This is to be part of a newly established Hindu settlement of refuges in India’s West Bengal province. From the start one feels the anguish of exile and homelessness; the theme of the lost home is constant. We focus on Ishwar’s “sister” (is she really, though, because she calls Haraprasad her brother too), young Sita, and Aviram, the boy of a low-caste woman from Dacca who tries to get admission in the camp, but is refused, because of the ever present Hindu caste system (“If we can’t keep the difference, what are we left with?”). But an incident happens: some thugs of a local landowner come to move the refugees off his (uncultivable) lands, and Aviram’s mother gets caught in this batch of people. “New Life colony” starts as all new settlements, amid deprivation, hope and strife.

Around the period of Gandhi’s assassination (which makes Haraprasad say “somewhere we have been duped”), educated Ishwar soon gets a job offer from an old college friend of his who works in the neighbourhood. He is to supervise some business at a foundry in a village (Chhatimpur) in the country. The pay is meagre, and he hesitates, but then accepts for the sake of the children. Haraprasad libels him as a coward and a deserter. For him, he is leaving the cause of the foundation of a new Bengal. But Ishwar isn’t an idealist; he’s an anxious, meditative, withdrawn sort of man. The first part of the film shows him in a very positive light, full of care and warmth, smilingly attentive to the children he has to look after, and very close to them. He sends Aviram to college and makes sure that the boy doesn’t mind; he agrees to have Sati instructed by a music-teacher. He keeps Aviram with him in spite of his low-caste, and only changes when his boss, a very religious man, has noticed the problem and this threatens his job.

But from then on, things alter. Ishwar becomes caste-conscious and this triggers a series of transformations around him: Aviram, who has fallen in love with his childhood friend Sita, is forbiddent to marry her, and has to leave for Germany to study engineering, whereas he wants to be a writer. Ishwar, who has recently been promoted at the foundry, starts asking suitors to come and see the girl. In spite of fierce opposition from Sita, he hastens the wedding day, but before she is tied with her brother’s choice of a husband, the two young lovers run away to Calcutta, where they start a family. The story resumes some years later, Sita now has a 5 year old boy, Binu, and Aviram finally finds a job as bus-driver (writing hasn’t brought him anything – a scene at the beginning, where we saw a rookie journalist being asked to cheat if he wants to stay in the job gives the key to this passage). But then a catastrophe occurs: the company gives him a brakeless bus, and he runs over a little girl. The angry crowd burns him alive in his bus. Sita stays alone.

All this time back in Chhatimpur, near the Subarnarekha river, Ishwar has been on his own, guilt-ridden and sombre. One night, he decides life isn’t worth living any more. But he’s interrupted by a ghost from his past: Haraprasad, who’s lost everything as well and has come to see the old “deserter” because the latter has the advantage of being much wealthier than him. He stops him from committing suicide, and takes on a “devil’s” tour of the night-life in Calcutta. Ishwar, who had been dejected and miserable, but had kept his honour, now loses that in despair. He leaves the river’s edge to follow his old enemy and tempter. In Calcutta, half lucid, half raving, they transgress all the rules, they party, drink, revel end up at a brothel. Ishwar has miraculously driven there because his glasses have fallen and been broken in a bar. At the brothel, he is led to a girl for whom it’s her first client (a well-sought after bonus), and he doesn’t see who she is. The coincidence (but with an obvious heavily symbolical significance) is that it’s Sita, who of course recognises him immediately and slices her throat before he can touch her. He then recognizes her and then breaks down madly, accusing himself of having murdered her.

The epilogue happens two years later, after a legal struggle has proven him innocent of his sister’s death, and he gets to look after Binu. He goes back to Chhatimpur, and even if he learns en route that he has been dismissed, he nevertheless continues onwards towards the new home that he has promised to give little Binu, and where the boy hopes to be reunited with his mother and father. What a grim story, one might say. The director explains (here) he had to face his contemporaries’ opinion that he’d shot a pessimistic, desperate portrayal of India’s origins, and we can understand why. The movie didn’t meet with success, and had to wait for the audiences to mature and see its worth. What then has ensured Subarnarekha’s fame? Why is it recognised as one of Indian cinema’s undying masterpieces?

I believe it’s because it has a universal content, and that what is shown of West Bengal’s origins can refer to all stories of origins. There is an archetypal value in Ishwar’s foundation of a new home away from his own, with his two little ones who (like in Ray’s Pather panchali) discover and recreate the world’s beauty with their childhood’s innocence while the grownups struggle in the fallen world of men. But more than Ray, Ritwik Ghatak insists on the opposition between the potential of recreation and the destructive forces of society. The opposition between youth and middle-age is thus fierce and unforgiving. It is represented by the feud between Ishwar and Sita, which begins when Ishwar believes he has to separate her from her lover, and he reverts to violence whereas until then he had never had with her but tenderness and affection.

The conflict is so unexpected and sudden that the spectator has to bring in other subterranean force to explain his reversal. We have this sublime scene when Sita agrees to represent Ishwar’s mother because he says he has lost her, and she bends over him and, lover-like, brushes the words against his ear, and soon after there is this exchange of iron-cold stares between them. Ishwar’s kind face becomes frigidly fierce, and Sita shows hers in the achingly false bridal attire which she puts on to show her beloved brother how changed he has become. In Subarnarekha, a lot happens on the characters’ faces. The facial symbols are strong, from the nightmarish apparition of the harlequin in Sita’s dream-like childhood, to the evil transformation on Ishwar’s face in the second half, and Sita’s final transfixed Fear. There are also the timeless instants when Sita sings and the universe stops for a time at her voice.

Then film explores the silence of closed eyes, for example when, in a scene of absolute purity and beauty, the two lovers, both grown and yet delicately chaste, go out in the woods and, sitting among the forest of frail white trunks, are felt to rise inwardly towards their common sky, and we know this is their revelation, this is when their soul blooms and its perfume wafts out towards their mate. Certain rare flowers in high lost places also have this fleeting moment of fecundity when their species can propagate before shutting back into undifferentiated greenness. Those who are lucky to witness this moment keep it as a beautiful secret.

The tragedy of the story (which transmutes into its hope) lies in Sita’s curse: it seems that from the start, she is doomed to grow up too fast, and confront the sinful reality of violence, desecration and death. Her figure, saintly and achingly beautiful, falls and suffers so much that one wonders if and wherefrom any redemption might come. The forces of evil erupt and seize Ishwar so fiercely that one is left with only tears and desolation, it seems. Have exile and loss and absurdity been too strong? Have their poison been too virulent? The author, most surprisingly says no, life, struck and cripple as it is, continues to flower and bring forth its immemorial hope that one day, the garden will again be open and men will live there in peace. Little Binu represents this frail new life, with its amazing resilience.

Finally Subarnarekha, which documents the calamity of displacement and exile, touches because this historical account rises to a universal and beautiful portrayal of men exiled on Earth and forced to live the violence of birth, love and death. There is little freedom in such a life; one quickly thirsts for the eternal home which was lost long ago, and there is barely enough time to see all the beauty of life before it shuts your eyes once again. The winner in the cyclical movement of birth and rebirth is Life itself, and humanity in its essence, more than the fragile individual: « Victory to man, to this newborn, ever living ».

The movie can be seen in 13 instalments on youtube.

In Chhalia (Manmohan Desai, 1960), we have another of Raj Kapoor’s avatars: his character personifies a “chhaliya”, translated by

Chhalia intervenes when Shanti – Sita like - has been rebuked by both her family and her husband, who both had come to meet her at her arrival in the refugee location in Delhi. Her father considers she is now a stain on the family (probably because she’s stayed so long in Pakistan, land of the Ravana-like Muslim arch enemy) and refuses to acknowledge her as his daughter; and her husband, who had wanted to welcome her back (and had parted with his family for her) now shuns her because the 5 year old son she bore him is called by an Islamic name (Anwar) and says his father is “Abdul Rehman”. But nothing Shanti can say softens the outraged Kewal-Rama! Chhalia saves the desperate young woman from committing suicide, brings her to his shack where she recovers somewhat, especially when she realises that her son has been admitted in the school where her husband, whom she hopes to reunite with some day, is a teacher.

What happens next is Chhalia struggling to express his love for Shanti and at the same time being forced to hide it, perhaps at first because he feels it isn’t requited, and later when she tells him she’s faithful to her husband’s love, he recognises he had been foolish. And because she’s called Shanti (peace), the political allegory is clear: continuing rivalry and enmity are wrong between the two countries who should be united like husband and wife. So it’s a surprise when Abdul Rehman, the grave Pathan, arrives on the scene, and tries to settle an unexplained feud with Chhalia. But the latter represents India, which is perhaps the real cheat, politically speaking. So their fight must represent the war between the two cross-border foes. And of course it is Shanti who stops the fight. Rehman recognises her voice from when she used to stay with him, and abandons his futile warring. He goes back, and meets with his lost sister on the train. So his sheltering of Shanti during the five years when she was in Pakistan finds its reward.

Chhalia now understands his mission. Forgetting his selfish love, he now does everything he can to reunite the wronged Sita to her Rama, who is still brooding about his cheated situation. The first thing he does is make Kewal-Rama accept his son, who figuratively means the fruit of peace. He goes to Kewal’s dwelling, and confronts him with his boy. And when Kewal rebuffs him saying he doesn’t have any proof of his fatherhood, Chhalia cleverly challenges this misplaced appeal for proof:

Man cannot prove much, says Chhalia (who could be Manmohan Desai’s mouthpiece here), and the more he tries to reduce human relationships, which must at all cost be based on trust, to a proof-based contract, he destroys the necessary bond of confidence between men. The lesson of Rama accepting Sita back after her trial of fire (note the choice of this version of the Ramayana, as opposed to the one in which Sita isn’t trusted and not reunited with her husband) corresponds to India accepting Pakistan after the ordeal of war, and basing the new political reality on the fruits of peace.

The film’s climax is the moment when Chhalia manages to reunite the estranged couple, and this is done thanks to the symbolical burning of the formidable figure of Ravana, and the fright it creates for Sita’s life, as Shanti is narrowly saved from the falling burning effigy. The crowds at the Vijayadashami festival could represent the Indian population agreeing to reinstate peace within its midst. The power of cinema is that of a political utopia: that of proposing a future for the two new neighbours based on peace and enduring trust.

A few words about the two main actors; Raj Kapoor does his best to second Nutan, and occasionally reaches moments of convincing characterization, for example during the classic song Dum dum diga diga, where he saunters under the monsoon rain, and playfully dances with the passers-by:

But the palm undoubtedly goes to Nutan, who once again carries the movie, not only symbolically as the flag of peace, but professionally. Her acting is flawless, and thanks to her we suffer when she suffers (for example when she’s rejected by her relatives upon arrival in India):

we rejoice when she rejoices (the moments when she unwittingly waxes tender with Chhalia):

and we hope and dream when she too hopes and dreams (the moment when she’s looking at Kewal taking little Anwar in his arms and in effect adopting him):

She’s our interpret, she carries our emotions and expresses them to their realistic maximum. And there are some moments when she has been almost amorously caressed by the camera:

When one is familiar with the political and historical level of meaning of her adventure, one cannot refrain from loading everything that happens to her with that meaning, and her story becomes beautiful indeed. In the history of the subcontinent, Peace was indeed first espoused, and then wilfully rejected, before it became once again the object of hope and negotiations. The purpose of peace is also greater than what was historically achieved: peace is always ahead of its limited realizations; it is always greater than the flawed attempts which bipartisan negotiations implement. It acts as a ferment, as an incentive, as a desire which is always working from inside in our efforts towards accomplishment. Nutan was wonderfully chosen for such a mission.

The cinematographic monument Mera naam Joker, which was directed, produced and starred by Raj Kapoor took 6 years to complete, cost millions and was a catastrophic flop when it came out in 1972 (see the wikipedia page). No wonder: the first version was more than 5 hours long! And even in its present length of 3 hours 44 minutes, it has two intermissions. Each of its three main episodes could almost be a full feature. Yet the movie has everything one could wish: Raj Kapoor at the steering wheel, a crowd of great actors and beautiful girls, romance, humour, great moments of showmanship: so why the disappointment? On Imdb somebody comes up with this explanation: “This supposedly autobiographical epic tale from Raj Kapoor broke all film-making conventions of '70s India. It was too long, there was no constant heroine and the hero never won.” Indeed, the movie is probably too raj-kapooresque for its own good. It seems it must be an essential piece of incriminating evidence in the enduring blogosphere RK bashing… or is it? Well, here goes, let’s see!

It opens on a clever piece of self-promotional derision which probably contains the key to the movie’s enigma: some important people, whom at first we now nothing about, are welcomed to the first seats of a circus and when the show begins, we are told in a grandiloquent manner that this is the final show of the company’s well-known clown, Raju. And sure enough, he soon pops out of a heart which represents his love of the stage, of life… and perhaps of himself. But a real funny scene follows: a bunch of hysterical surgeons, as clownish as Raju himself, rush to explain that his heart is too big, he has to undergo an operation, otherwise he will die! He protests, but they drag him to the operation table and in an accelerated Chaplinesque way, fight and fuss around his reclining body before uniting to pull out (with a huge pair of tweezers) the swollen heart. All this while, the VIP onlookers have been seen to wonder at the allegory, which of course is clear: the film is going to be an exploration of Raju’s overgrown heart; we are going to be shown what it costs to love too much. But before we enter the movie per se, let’s listen to Raju’s answer. It sums up both his mission as a clown, and the ambiguity of freedom vs determinism. Whose fault is it if he has loved to excess?

It’s never a simple task to tell one’s own story. By definition, one is still alive when the task is attempted. So even if one starts with the beginning, childhood, then youth, etc. one is quickly assailed by questions such as: do I say this? Do I leave that unsaid? What will “he” or “she” or “they” think if I dare speak about this event, and what if I don’t? Very cleverly, Raj Kapoor has chosen an avatar of himself, the joker, to deflect what might have been too personal in the story of his life; he has also decided to focus on only three, symbolical, episodes; and unless one knows his real biography, it’s difficult to say whether these episodes even refer to real relationships. Clearly though, there is a progression. We go from aching initiation (Mary), to pure love (Marina), and finally to deceitful seduction (Meena). In itself, this sequence contains a pessimistic teaching: love and happiness do not go hand in hand; one cannot both have a heart and master it. The fact that RK has built his film around these three women also reveals both his strength and his weakness. Any true hero would have been faithful to one only. But the realism of these three figures gives the movie a power that legend doesn’t have. An undercurrent of confession lurks beneath the archetypal characters. Besides, which man, even if happily married all along to one single wife, has loved only one woman in his life? (The same works for women of course). For all its allegorical dimension, Mera naam Joker is thus founded on serious stuff: life itself.

First icon in the gallery: Mary (Simi Garewal, who cannot act, but this won’t be held against her), the perfect teacher of love. When she arrives in Raju’s class one day, they’re all prepared: this replacement teacher is going to be lampooned big time. But she enters the room coolly, and upon looking at her caricature on the board, says: is this me? Every representative of the male sex present in the room only has to look at her, and then back to the board to admit there’s a huge difference… And she laughs them all into exquisite submission. From then on, a slightly podgy Raju (young Rishi Kapoor) will pour all his love on this not so old educator, just because she has a certain sense of justice and believes everyone should be treated equal, whether lean or fat. The fatso will grow to become the best student in the class because nobody else has ever paid attention to him, and this beautiful teacher will become his guru: simple, isn’t it? Well, only on the surface. Because there are enough signs from Raj Kapoor the string-puller at the back that whatever is presented as a coming-of-age story was in fact (perhaps) a more sombre story. At least for young Raju, if not for Mary herself (whoever she is hiding). Look for instance at this picture of her wedding:

Isn’t this almost panicky glance, half-hidden behind the white veil, the sign of a secret which young Raju cannot fathom (or openly admit to)? His question, “What must I do?”: who is actually asking it? Isn’t it Raj Kapoor himself, confronted to existential choices for which his film is a kind of answer? Shouldn’t we understand this interrogation as passing through all the film? What must I do if life and love have made me who I am? Should I hide what I think is most magnificent and transcendent for a man in this world: the love for women and their beauty, just because religion, morals and propriety oblige us to hide it? Of course we have to respect women themselves, their intimacy, their feelings, their own desires. But we owe them the truth which their social role denies them so often. Is it wrong to suggest that a young teacher, the moment she’s getting married, feels an attraction for one of her students? What should I decide (RK might have been saying), knowing that my films are going to reach millions and that what I say, perhaps too daringly, will remain in the public’s memory and shape the educational standards of the next generations? In fact this question of choice or decision is recurrent in the movie: 

Raju himself, and many other characters, are faced with the moral question of which way to choose or which decision to take. In this sense, Mera naam joker is an adult’s movie, and it perhaps isn’t very surprising that it flopped: as a rule, audiences come to watch pictures with a child’s mind: they want clearcut options of what is good and bad, they want goodies and villains, reward and punishment. The kind of complexity which is apparent in the first episode, with Mary the temptress teacher and initiator to desire, is hardly meant for them. 

The second episode with Marina is morally less difficult; it’s more in the aesthetic field. It owes its attraction to Kseniya Ryabinkina, an actual Russian ballet dancer from the Bolshoi, whom RK probably got to know because of his huge success in the USSR, where hits like his Awaara were appreciated. She’s a Madonna type beauty, a Leonardo, with her hair neatly parted on each side, and her wistful airs from a faraway North. Her charm also comes from her ignorance of Hindi, and the slow progress she makes throughout the episode with her funny accent (it was great, I could understand everything she said! I mean, in hindi, not in Russian!).

It’s clear she represents ideal love; she’s an archetype for a love so wonderful and simple that it somehow doesn’t belong to this Earth. Otherworldliness was clear in her job: Marina is a flying trapezist, she swings and jumps far too high for a clumsy clown like Raju to bond with her. Yet the story makes her notice him and, like the legend of the worm in love with a star, she befriends him and caresses him like only angels can. It is within her story that Raj Kapoor focuses on the fourth feminine figure of his film, Raju’s mother. Of course like all mothers, this one desires her son to marry and continue the cycle of life. A lot of good feelings there, perhaps too many for the movie’s good, but well, this is RK’s sensitive chord. He allows himself to show his self-pity in such a way that it’s almost painful. We have to watch Raju moping, Raju whining, Raju’s dejected looks…I wish RK hadn’t let himself become overwhelmed by this sentimentality, and I wonder whether he indulged in it because he thought it would make people love him more, or whether he wanted to expose his fragility and thus get rid of it?

Nevertheless, what Marina does in the story, the figure she cuts, all this is almost nearly always merry and fun. In spite of the mother scenes, with all its crying and imploring, and in spite of Raju’s self-pitying moments, everything that happens when she is there is bathed in an optimistic light which makes the rest of the film look sombre in comparison. No wonder Raju is so desperate when she leaves. No wonder he is so nostalgic (it is during this episode that we are shown extracts of Shree 420 and Awaara): it is 1972 and for the man he is now, the road is more downhill than uphill. His great successes are behind him, and the kind of love, the kind of fulfilment embodied by Marina belongs to the past. At 48, he cannot hope to find love again.

I don’t know whether she represents somebody in particular, Nargis for example, with whom RK had an affair; I think I don’t care. Of course if it was clearer, it would have to be taken into consideration. But I believe Marina’s more a construction, an idealization which Raj Kapoor has used in order to represent one aspect of love, and of his loving soul. She comes from Russia: he could easily have imagined that his well-known screen persona had burnt itself in the heart of an innocent and dreamy dievouchka, and from there imagine Marina’s character. Apart from being an angel (the airborne and sauntering Marina leaves on board a plane in a very insistent scene), and a fairy – that’s what Raju’s mother calls her,- Marina is Raju’s poetess and interpreter. She literally translates his message to the world, and makes him understand that, like Jesus leaving his disciples and telling them that if he doesn’t go, how will they receive the Holy Spirit, she has to leave him in order for him to continue his mission as clown and more than clown:

Marina’s love belongs not to earthly desire, but to the aspiration towards purity and elevation that we all harbour in our lives. She is the visiting angel which each of us, perhaps, has been lucky to meet once, even if only fleetingly, she is the twinkling star which we can always look up and watch and who can inspire us to be better human beings. After she leaves, Raju and Ustad are observing the departing plane, and Raju, visibly aged and reminded at that moment of the famous song “Awaara hoon” (“my heart is filled with pain, but I wear a smile on my face”), looks straight at the camera and at us, perhaps to ask for forgiveness and compassion:

After Marina’s departure, Raju has left the circus, or at least that’s what we guess because he’s wandering alone aimlessly. He’s deserted the company of his fellow men, and he’s an orphan in more than one sense. The moment is ripe for his meeting with his last feminine figure, who nevertheless appears to him as a man, or rather as a boy. (We have to accept Raju’s delusion, because for us spectators, Padmini is so obviously - I was going to say gorgeously - feminine, even with her short hair, that we cannot mistake her for a boy!) This encounter is perhaps the most developed, the most meaningful and probably the deepest in terms of autobiographical content (could she represent Vijayanthimala, with whom RK had shot Sangam, and who, even if she denies it, probably had an affair with him). Meena’s story is a complete chronicle of illusion and delusion, of trust and betrayal, which could have justified a movie in itself. Raj Kapoor has portrayed it with consummate art, and including it in Mera naam joker has elevated it to a universality which leaves one wondering what were for him the links of life and the screen. Somehow we’re not so far from Guru Dutt and his meditation on their connection (see kaagaz ke phool). A sense of tragic nostalgia pervades both works.

So Raju meets a boy, called Minoo, and they enter a kind of contract: s/he has a dog, they could train it and start up a travelling circus sort of business. He’s a clown, s/he has a shack where they could live. Soon nevertheless this contract breaks down: Raju discovers Minoo is in fact Meena. He decides to leave her, but she tells him she loves him, and so they stay together. This time she plays feminine roles and is so successful that their little drama shows attract more and more people, among whom professionals who ask them to perform in real showrooms here and there around the country. Finally, one day, Meena is spotted by a cinema producer (Rajendra Kumar) in search for “new faces”: she must choose between her association with Raju and her dream of becoming a movie-star, idolized and famous, at last. The temptation is too strong, and she leaves him.

There is something profoundly pathetic in Meena’s episode; she genuinely loves and needs Raju, who tells her the truth about herself (“enter the world as your real self”, he says while gifting her a sari), yet she is manipulated by her ambition and thirst for self-accomplishment to the point that she will break his heart, a heart swollen from its love-disease. Inside her, a kind of devil was present from the start, and she has listened to it too much. At least this is what I believe Raj Kapoor is telling us. There is in some women (in men too, arguably, but in women it seems more catastrophic perhaps) a desire to use the beauty and power they have been given from above for their own personal use, and because they have so long and so constantly been deprived of the possibility, they somehow get their revenge on men this way. Such an interpretation of Meena’s attitude is perhaps too strong, but RK’s pessimistic attitude makes me say this nevertheless.

(this is the moment of revelation, the Kaagaz ke phool / ray of light moment when Meena becomes Paro!)

Naturally things could also have been disenchanted by Raju’s despair and diseased mind: he has been initiated to the intoxication of love and to women’s power, and this makes him a half-consenting victim. He falls into Meena’s ageless trap very easily; her charms operate on him only too easily! And Raj Kapoor delights at both showing them to us (it seems he’s saying: “look how adorable she was”), and denouncing them (“she’s like a devil, she’s impossible to resist”). RK possesses perhaps even more a Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde ambiguity as Meena herself! Here’s Meena in all her glory:

And here she is in her treachery:

There’s even a picture where I fancy RK wanted her to appear almost snake-like, where she implores Raju with her tongue between her teeth:

Do you remember this scene? It’s when she wanders after him, alone in her close-fitting sari through the strangely empty and misty streets and in which, it seems, by her very appearance, she causes that extraordinary storm to happen. She first wanders solitary, and finally she finds Raju brooding inside one of the concrete pipes lying around their unfinished neighbourhood: but what a brilliant piece of cinema! It’s both expressionistic and oneiric, reminiscent of the scene of the Fall (Genesis 3) where Adam and Eve, after their sin, are chased away from the garden of Eden by a wrathful God and must seek protection against new forces with no other help than their own, hampered by their guilt and misery, and watched by the frightening new power of their conscience (here in the shape of an enormous eye):

There’s a drama in this scene which doesn’t seem to correspond to the story. After all, what has happened? Only Raju discovering Meena was in fact a woman… Why does he disappear like that? What is he escaping from? From love? Yes, but isn’t it as much Raj Kapoor himself as his clownish double who is running away? And if this is so, isn’t he making an autobiographical and retrospective statement about the love he has given, perhaps unwisely? Raj Kapoor multiplies, mirror-like, all his warnings and curses against the dangers of excessive love:

And at the same time, he underlines the various avatars in which Meena appears. Her transmutation from “uncut diamond” to priceless (media) jewel is used to warn his audience against the maya of feminine beauty for which he has, it seems, paid such a heavy price.

We are left, at the end of this long review, with the question: What’s a joker? Raj Kapoor fancied himself as a clown, a joker. He has his joker doll which he passes on to each of the feminine figures he meets in his life, but they all reject it. None of them will keep it. It’s difficult to say whether RK wants us to accept this as his destiny, or whether it’s a result of his unlucky starlit life. In one scene with David, Mary’s fiancé (1st episode), he suggests that “God is the greatest joker of all”. I don’t think we should take this assimilation to mean that RK seems himself as god on Earth (at one stage, he’s even “found guilty of being human”), but rather that what he has tried to do, luck and unluck put together, has been a divine mission, that of entertaining crowds through art and fun. Of course the difficulty of passing on this message about himself doesn’t quite merge with the actual entertainment. One doesn’t go to the cinema to have the director tell us, even through a namesake, what mission he thinks he has! So it’s logical MNJ didn’t have for the public the importance it had for RK himself. But being a joker carries also the sorry acknowledgment that RK might have been only that, nothing more… Women don’t want to become the partners of a clown, and perhaps Raj Kapoor’s disillusioned goodbye in the end is telling us that his star-studded path has in fact been more Hell than Heaven? Watch the film and decide for yourself.

I owe Sharmi an IOU because she’s the lover of “threadbare movies” who watched and beautifully reviewed Satyajit Ray’s Kanchanjangha (1962) on her blog and made me want to watch it! Well, everybody whose review I read (check here and here) calls it a great cinematographic experience, some because of the fact that the film’s story wonderfully fits in the time it takes to be seen, some others because the characters (especially Chhabi Biswas) are so good, others again for…other reasons, but all seem in fact rather puzzling. They do appreciate the movie, that’s for sure, but then why can’t they pinpoint a striking, convincing reason? It’s almost as if they the film’s good on the sole basis that it’s by Satyajit Ray!

First a quick summary of the story if you haven’t seen it. It deals with a well to-do family of five on their last day in Darjeeling: Industrialist Indranath Chowdury, his wife Labanya, their two daughters, younger Monisha (courted by a smart and promising M. Bannerjee) and older Amina, who’s married to dissatisfied Shankar, and with him has a child, little Tuklu; and then there’s Anil who takes advantage of the stay to try his luck at chatting up lady-tourists. On the scene, there’s also Jaganath, Indranath’s brother in law, a widower, and finally young Ashok, who’s introduced to the family by his mentor, who once was Anil’s tutor. and who, upon spotting Indranath, he believes he can secure a job for his charge. The five members of the Chowdury clan are all pursuing something, it seems, or hiding something. Anil is pretending to be jolly in front of his prospective lady-friends, but as soon as they’re out of sight, he’s glum and full of spite. His sister Amina (above), a fine looking woman, hides an affair with a lover she believes her husband knows nothing about, and has to go out in order to read his letters. Her young sister Moni is labouring to elude the insisting courtship of her parents’ approved suitor, and is apparently waiting for something to free her from the trap prepared for her. Their mother, a rather forlorn and brooding lady is clearly hiding her own secret opinions, less because we don’t know them but because they run against those of her husband, formidable Indranath Chowdury. And so, what about him? Is he hiding something too?

The whole film takes place in the late afternoon of the last day of their stay, and we are, like them, plunged in a state of expectancy, even suspense. What for? For the lifting of the mists which are hiding mount Kangchenjunga, India’s highest range and peak, which, as all visitors to Darjeeling know, forms the crowning glory of the resort. But today there are mists, and nothing can be seen, as Indranath tells a fellow visitor at the beginning. So all the events in the family will occur against the background of this potential revelation, when Kanchanjungha will at last reveal its splendour in the skies. Because of this long waiting, everything takes on a note of unfinished business which only the uncovering of the beautiful sight will be able to appease. So revelation is the key word here: revelation is what happens when the veils (the mists) are lifted, when reality or truth appears from behind appearances, when nothing is hidden any more. Revelation is what will happen at the end of the day, when all the protagonists’ stories are unravelled.

Which revelation happens in the story, apart from that of the mountain? First, Kanchanjungha’s apparition at the very end symbolizes the family itself (its name means “the five treasures of snows”: ie, each member will discover their own treasure, up there in the snows), a family who has gotten rid of their pretences and self-screening illusions. Anil must face the fact he isn’t going to succeed with women (and in life) by pretending to be somebody he isn’t. Monisha, thanks to Ashok (it’d be wonderful if his name could somehow be associated with the winds chasing the clouds!), will get rid of her half-truths concerning who she has to marry and obey; Amina of course manages to find the strength to give up her old love “which doesn’t represent anything any more”, and face the truth of her life with Shankar, in spite of his shortcomings. Both their lives had been based on hypocrisy and pretence, so now things can perhaps move forward really. Labanya (the mother), after a moment of solitary meditation but also with the help of her brother in law, finally finds her own solid core when she realises she must support her daughter’s choice of a partner, and so she now has the strength of spirit to confront her husband.

And Indranath also finds his truth, which takes the shape of a young man’s refusal of his advice and help, contrary to everything he had so far assumed belonged to himself in terms of values and merit. Because Ashok refuses to accept Indranath’s offer of a job, and seems to relish in the freedom such a refusal has given him, old Indranath learns the sobering lesson of his own limits. He is suddenly turned into nothing more than the old man he has become, with his outdated aristocratic pride and obsolete colonialist opinions, not unlike the ageing zamindar played by the same Chhabi Biswas in Jalsaghar. This is what his respectable-looking pater familias figure was hiding: a shameful allegiance to a collaborationist past glory which modern India has to learn to shake off, in order to reach maturity “through [its] own efforts”, as Ashok says to Indranath before laughing at him. Real independence is at that price. The price that Ghandhi’s satyagraha paid, and which many still find too costly and too demanding even today.

In Kanchanjungha, Ray is suggesting that there are moments in life, when circumstances combine to transform our lives, and denounce our old comfortable lies and pretences, our half-accepted enslavements to customs and traditions: sometimes, all of a sudden, a light shines and we see how imprisoned we had accepted to become. A family can be the worst of prisons. But it is first and foremost composed of individuals, who have a right to decide for themselves which path leads to happiness, who have a conscience and a heart to guide them towards their accomplishment. Nothing poisons relationships more than half accepted, half baked submissiveness. A voluntary acceptance of dependence (in spouses) and a recognition of authority (in children) can and must go hand in hand with the overall respect for individual choice, once the subject is responsible enough to decide for himself. Perhaps there was a time when the standard Indian family needed to be reminded of this lesson?

A number of elements in the film are the catalysers of this necessary revelation and ensuing transformation. I’ll choose just two of them, but there are probably more. Birds, first, and children. Jagadish the bird-watcher draws our attention towards the fact that birds, especially migratory birds, can be heard, but are difficult to watch or catch. They stand for the free individuals who can fly for thousands of miles to nest, but are vulnerable in today’s nuclear age and could easily die if too much caging up is forced upon them. Birds are often invisible, but what beauty when you can observe them in their freely chosen environment! Children likewise are one of the film’s powerful symbols: first little Tuklu, who circles round and around her parents, protecting them by her invisible thread of need and love, and then the little native boy who hovers around the group like a tame birdy, and gets the chocolate M. Bannerjee had intended for Moni as he abandons his courtship. One is reminded of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence:

Sound the flute

Now it’s mute

Birds delight

Day and night

Nightingale

In the dale

Lark in sky

Merrily

Merrily merrily to welcome in the year.

Little Boy

Full of joy

Little girl

Sweet and small

Cock does crow

So do you

Merry voice

Infant noise

Merrily merrily to welcome in the year.

What struck me in Kanchanjungha is Ray’s entomological approach to the various people under his observation: each one of them seems isolated and detached on his or her background. Very rarely do we see them touch and reunite. There’s this picture of the father and his girl, but unless I’m wrong, otherwise they’re all separate and solitary, like the five peaks of the Kanchanjungha range, with the formidable father rising higher than all of them. But well, they all find their meaningful position and purpose in the end as the slanting rays of sunset reveal India’s highest peak.

PS: Just wanted to redirect those of you who know Matthieu and his Indian voyage: he'd been to watch the "moment of revelation" in Sikkim in March 2010: link

I have read so often about Raj Kapoor’s last movie, Ram teri Ganga maili (1985, Ram, your Ganga is sullied), that I wanted to have a personal opinion about it. The movie has itself been sullied as obsessively concerned with Mandakini’s nakedness and the director himself as a scandalous and ageing admirer of young feminine beauties. If you haven’t seen the movie, and you google the film’s name, you’ll inevitably summon up the “hot” waterfall scene, of course quite innocuous by today’s movie standards, but which sparked the censors’ condemnation. We can start talking about that, and get it out of the way.

Ganga (which refers both to the girl and the river) was born in the Himalayan Mountains, and lives up there a rustic life until she meets Naren (Rajiv Kapoor), a kindly lad from Calcutta, where the river flows into the Ocean. He’s full of naïve ideals (his heinous Industrialist Daddy cannot understand why he reads about Vivekananda and rejects the values of money), and so is she, of course, born as she is near the heavens and bathed by the pure icy streams. Well, precisely, not so icy because, even though she’s got a hard skin that the poor city dweller doesn’t have (reference to a totally corny scene where she crosses a river barefoot, and he whines and pouts, until she kisses him), she can shower near the glacier with only a see-thru thing on her… Right, so yes, this scene is not very useful in terms of the movie’s message! But it does help attract him to her: they marry and consume their union, in spite of an incredible family feud, which ends in a bloodbath while they are busy lovemaking in the temple that night!

But it would be a pity to restrict the film to RK’s lasciviousness (because, they’re right, there is that other breast-baring scene in the train!!). The film’s idea, for example, I found a rather good one: it’s a parallel between the river Ganges flowing from its pure sources to its polluted estuary in Calcutta, and Ganga’s downfall from innocence to ruin, as she follows the river on her way to find the father of her child in the capital.

          
On the way, we see her fall prey to profiteers and thieves, who notice her beauty and charms; she’s saved by the wife of a lecherous priest in Benares, and put back on the train by a considerate policeman; but en route she’s spirited away to a music school (a “blind” tout has noticed her singing on the train), where her talents are noticed by high-flying politicians who are paying a visit.

She’s already been considered a prostitute for going around with a child on her own, and now in the music-school, where tawaifs were so common, her downfall from grace has been acted out. Anyway, this is where her story rejoins the film’s other story: Jeeva, Naren’s dad (Kulbhushan Kharbanda, pretty good) is busy obtaining political support for his capitalistic and polluting factory, and has befriended the candidate for a local election soon to take place around the theme of Ganges depollution. This new politician, Bhagwat Choudary (Raza Murad), manipulated by Jeeva, has a daughter who they agree Naren should marry, and the preparations had started just before he left for the Himalayas on an expedition where he was to meet Ganga…

         
Well! So who are the politicians who have just come to listen to Ganga’s improving talents at the music-school? Bhagwat’s gang of course, and as soon as they eyes on her, they stop dead and wonder how they can appropriate her…I think this is Raj Kapoor’s film’s second strength: the gallery of villains. Of course their appearance underlines this, but not only, there’s a real and scathing criticism of vice in the film. Greed, debauchery, vicious cruelty, selfish thirst for power, wilful humiliation of vulnerable human beings, gratuitous slander, and when these wrongs are performed by the powerful, it’s almost impossible to expose them and reform the ills which their power has established in society. In the movie this is done by a rather unexpected righter of wrongs, played by a spirited Saeed Jaffrey.  He’s Kunj, Naren’s uncle, and his reputation is that of an openly recognised brothel owner, so he’s looked down upon by the rest of the family who keep up appearances, at least Jeevan, the corrupted and scrupleless tycoon.

I think the interest of this character is that even though he’s morally degraded, he doesn’t hide it, and therefore unlike the others, doesn’t add hypocrisy to his vices. He’s the only one in the movie who seems neither sanctimoniously candid nor ferociously beastly. In short, he’s an average human being, with his vice but also his honesty and his courage. In fact it’s probably because of his own sins that he has the guts to stand up and denounce the far greater ones of his sanctimonious brother and his hidden corrupted plans: he has no reputation to lose.

Kunj is Raj Kapoor’s spokesman. Raj Kapoor might be equated to a lecherous old man, as is often said: but this has perhaps enabled him to say things unpleasant to see and admit, because falling from grace is never pleasant. Perhaps living in the real world boils down to that: reality isn’t only music, dancing and simplistic, sugar-coated feelings, like too much of Bollywood would like to have it. Under luxury and glitz, there’s money; under money, there’s greed; under greed, there’s the growl of power, there’s the wolf waiting for the lamb. This might sound cynical especially when one knows that RTGM was RK’s farewell to the silver screen, but well, it’s also the voice of experience.

The “lamb”, in Ram teri Ganga maili, after being compared to her predators, comes out rather human. Her trip to Calcutta provides us with the right portrait of her. If you have in mind the Ganga from the first half of the film, she’s pathetic; but the battling, sneering mother of the second half shows the little that Mandakini was able to do. Unfortunately, even that little doesn’t come from Rajiv Kapoor who, I hear, didn’t pursue a very long film career … BTW, had he lived, I wonder what Raj Kapoor would have felt in front of Aishwarya Rai: his filming of a radiant Mandakini certainly feels like he had a tender spot for the likes of her:

Abhijan (the Expedition, Satyajit Ray, 1962) is the story of Narsingh (dependable Soumitra Chatterjee), a Kshatriya taxi-driver, who after having had his professional license taken away from him for imprudent overtaking, becomes jobless, and heads towards the Shyamnagar province in Bengal. There he gets involved in opium trading. A man he had given a lift to, Sukhanram (Charuprakash Ghosh, very good), is the one who lures him into the business, and that same man also deals in buying women for a time because he has the money. This time he has Gulabi (Waheeda Rehman) with him, and she, aware of her plight, tries to catch the attention of Narsingh who seems to her an honest guy, so as to escape her present master and her future downfall. But Narsingh isn’t interested in her; he looks upon her as a cheap prostitute. He has dreams of respectability, and together with his projects of association with Sukharam, he plans on gaining the attention of the local schoolteacher, Milli (Ruma Guha Thakurta). She happens to be the sister of a distant relative he has encountered upon arriving in this Bengali village of the hills.

This man’s name is Joseph (Gyanesh Mukherjee), a name he has been given after he became a Christian. Alas, unfortunately for the valiant taxi-driver (who by the way has the privilege of owning his 1931 model Chrysler), Milli is secretly engaged towards another man, a one-legged fellow who, believing he was punished as a result of being “naughty” when a boy (he fell down a cliff), is now busy with good deeds and pious reading. Narsingh doesn’t know this, and asks Milli to teach him English, so he can rise socially. She accepts, and we have pleasant hopes for both until they are dashed one day with Milli asking Narsingh to enable her and her cripple to elope together. He agrees to it, but he’s hard hit, resumes drinking, and, perhaps as compensation, asks Gulabi to his bed.

Meanwhile, his affairs with Sukharam are moving ahead, and after some moral wrangling, he decides to take the risk of becoming his partner. He will continue to deliver the illegal cargo of opium, and gets tied to Gulabi (who’s lent him by Sukharam!). He has in effect fallen into the spider’s web, and willingly, but he can only blame himself. On top of that, he’s a rather solitary, haughty guy who thinks himself better than, for example, other taxi cabbies. He’s wounded by his wife’s having left him for another man (we learn this at the beginning of the movie). He’s imbued with the notion that his caste (the Kshatriyas, or warriors) obliges him to a certain social and personal standard. He refers to his “blood”, that doesn’t allow him to stoop to ask the policeman’s favours, or his ancestors' code of values according to which he cannot let himself cheat others. In fact he’s fundamentally an ambitious, proud man, who has dreams of grandeur, and who feels limited in his purposes by obstacles he wishes he could overthrow. His caste has put him at an intermediary social level, and he resents this position as insufficiently rewarding.

The film tells the story of his being tempted, and his resisting, his hoping and his yielding. One symbolic moment is when he is seen sitting against a tree practising his English reading. The word he is spelling is “SLY”: this seems to me as a good definition of who he is. A smart, cunning intellectual (he’s often criticised for “acting smart”), but full of devious compromises with the values he isn’t simple enough to accept at face value. He’s in stark opposition with Rama (Robi Ghosh, excellent), his diminutive hand, who represents unsophisticated loyalty and practicality. Rama proudly looks after his boss’s grand vehicle, cleans it incessantly, wards off the swarms of fascinated children that continuously run after it, and relishes the moments when Narsingh, tired or busy, lets him drive. He’s developed an adoration for the Chrysler, and fancies himself responsible for it as you would a religious object. When at one stage, his master speaks about selling the car, we see his face aghast as if the order of the Universe had broken apart! Rama is like a faithful dog, happy and quick. But Narsingh is the sly wolf.

On the other side of the moral divide, there are the Christians: Joseph, Milli, her lover, their mother. They are egalitarian, caste-critical people full of generosity and disinterestedness, and they delineate Narsingh’s shadiness all the more. Milli loves with a cripple, thus living out Christ’s call to be on the side of the poor and the destitute. Her love, socially, means social salvation for him. Thanks to her and her profession, he won’t be obliged to depend on alms or worse. Joseph too saves his new friend out of a nasty brawl with jealous taxi cabbies in which he has got involved, and warns him about Sukharam’s opium trade. At his arrival in Shyamnager, he takes him to see his family, and they walk past the “Uncle-nephew”, or rock of sins, because a travelling preacher had commented that this unusually balanced rock looked like the weight of sins ready to crush the sinner underneath. At one stage, Narsingh asks Milli about that Christian God of hers, and gets told that the outcome of sins is death. So we are in a moral or religious perspective all along. The film could almost be a sort of Indian Pilgrim’s Progress. This would tie in well with the title of the movie, “the Expedition”: we could then see Narsingh as a kind of Everyman driving himself on the road towards self-accomplishment and truth, now falling into the traps on his way, now being saved by his God-sent friends. But the pious simile stops there, because Ray has made him into a more complex character than the XVIIth century roadside hero.

There is for example the powerful theme of competition in Abhijan. Because of Narsingh’s fiery spirit, he constantly fights (he’s a “warrior”) against other drivers – on the road: the taxi-drivers, the bus-drivers, but also on the rail, and we witness a superbly filmed race between the Chrysler and a train in which he recognises the driver. This vanity makes him of course take risks, and endanger his passengers’ lives. Ray films their faces during one such race, and subtly makes us understand that they are torn between the fear of an accident and pride of having chosen a faster and technologically superior form of transport than the bus and all riff-raff. But when he drives, Narsingh is transformed, he becomes a fearless warrior like his ancestors used to be (Ray at one stage visualizes for us his horseman’s dream), and then knows no rule but speed and bravery. But this attitude attracts the attention of others: the police inspector who takes away his licence (causing him to wander off, deprived of the professional safeguards which a regular job gives) and Sukhanram the opium dealer who sees in his zeal something he might manipulate to his won ends. The risk-taking also has a moral twist to it, because that’s exactly what Sukhanram hints at, saying in a clever sophism that no business is ever straight through and through. If one deals with money, one somehow deals with soil, one has soiled hands. The good businessman is the one who can adapt to the necessary compromises which business demands… In other words, cheating is part of dealing, and one would say, isn’t he right? Who said capitalism was, not the best, but the least bad economic system we had?

Cheating was precisely what Narsingh thought he could not do. The virtues inherent to his caste forbade him any such practice. But Na rsingh doesn’t believe in these virtues deeply. He wishes he could become a warrior once again, because when a warrior wages war, the moral constraints can be shifted due to the existence of higher, war-connected imperatives. What’s the good of a warrior in peace-time? Right at the beginning of the film, in this revealing talk with a barman who tries to talk him into a business partnership, we can see Narsingh in the broken mirror (his flawed personality?) saying:

And this line shows his essential distrust of others, and his solitude as a result. Perhaps this is why, in spite of his unpleasant character, we still feel interested in him: he’s a wounded loner, and one wonders how he’s going to find peace. All he has is his horse, that is, (as he himself jokes to Joseph) the 26 horse-power of his car. That car for him comes to represent his independence, his superiority, and the frequent night-rides that we see him use it for are like his secret in-roads into forbidden lanes. Interesting that Ray films the headlights from in front, so that when Narsingh drives at night, all we see are the two glaring (almost drunken) lights, but the car and himself disappear. Just as the lights shine too brightly in the dark, obscuring everything else around, so does his alcoholic habit blot out his conscience and prepare him for his shady deeds. He hesitates before deciding to accept Sukhanram drug-offer, but the drug of his sick will was already inside him.

So one might say that the film is a drive, a drive around cheating, then deep into cheating and then finally out of cheating. Along this night-drive, he meets the Devil (Sukhanram), whose laughter should have chilled his spine, and whose gun-shaped lighter should have warned him that sin meant spiritual death. He also meets his guardian angel, Joseph, who does all he can to protect him and keep him on the right path. He meets Milli, the bright star, but her light shines in heavens too far above his cloudy gloom. Then he meets Gulabi. She doesn’t seem a positive influence at first sight; compared to Milli the Christian schoolteacher, she’s a tainted woman who is trying to ingratiate herself with Narsingh. The latter’s dreams of elevation can hardly hope to succeed with her. But she is the one he holds on to in the end, isn’t she? And I think the clue to her moral importance in that story she tells about her orphan youth, when she was molested and shut up in a room and almost committed suicide, but found the strength to remain in life in spite of what the future held. She’s really an innocent girl, and if at one stage she’s seen trying to seduce Narsingh, it isn’t, as I’ve read that she’s ready for physical intercourse, but she’s doing this out of a survival instinct. She’s hoping Narsingh will keep her, and anything is better than being some rich man’s pleasure object. Anyway, he’s saved thanks to love, thanks to Gulabi’s love.

Narsingh changes his trajectory when Joseph discovers he’s lied to him. It’s a powerful scene, the warrior’s fall is painful to see, and Ray makes him pathetically run after his guardian angel in order to explain, to say he’s sorry… His head is delineated against the blackening sky, and compared to the Rock of sins close by. But the Rock is also the symbol of Christ (cf. 1 Cor 10,4) who has accepted to carry all men’s sins (2Cor 5,21), so that, when he confronts Joseph’s denouncing eyes, Narsingh is like Peter in the gospel, he cannot but understand that everything he’s done was betrayal. He understands his guilt, and knows he was sinfully proud and vain. He goes back to Sukhanram’s place, gives back the opium he was supposed to deliver, and wrenches Gulabi from her master.

Needless to say that Abhijan is another one of Ray’s masterpieces; this guy has apparently done nothing but that. The special quality of the film is the superb symbolism it displayed and integrates into the story. The car allegory for example contains a wealth of meanings and emotion; it’s almost a living being. And the atmosphere and geography of the Bengal countryside lends the film an eerie quality which sticks to it and isn’t easily forgotten.

Bimal Roy’s Parakh (Test, 1960) is an experiment. Not so much in democracy, as some people say, even though they’re right, it does contain an implicit criticism of democratic processes, but this is only a side-issue. It’s an experiment in morality or in human nature. What happens when a community is asked to determine who is the best man in its midst? What is virtue? And how does one make one’s worth known to the group? True, the means to trigger this test is rather risky: a 5 million rupee reward! In effect, this proposal is bound to wreak complete havoc in the moral organisation of any community, and probably create the wrong experimental conditions. Furthermore, with such a sum at stake, isn’t the experiment rather dangerous? This is what the originator of the idea, the millionnaire JC Roy (Motilal), says towards the end of the film, when he’s aghast upon realising the consequences of his gesture.

But well, after all, it wasn’t his idea, but his deceased father’s, and good son as he is, he’s decided to do what Pops had planned, give the village where he came from the chance to develop thanks to this amount of money, to be entrusted to an honest man who wouldn’t misappropriate it! Once the decision is taken, he gets employed as the assistant post-master in the village, and watches incognito the effects of his “test”. As soon as he receives the letter telling him about the deal, the post-master organises a reunion of 5 of the village’s luminaries: the landlord, the money-lender, the doctor, the pandit (priest) and the school-master. Before the arrival of the letter, we had already been introduced to these paragons of virtue: the landlord is pestering against the difficulties of getting his taxes from such a stingy community; the doctor tells a penniless father whose daughter is dying and who comes to beg for his help that he has to pay his dues first; the zamindar fishes in the pond where he hopes to spot young girls bathing; and the priest doesn’t want the steps of his temple soiled by the untouchable feet of peasants who come to ask for help.

The school-master alone actually works for the betterment of the village. He’s presently involved in a project of eradication of malaria which means the filling of an infested pond that happens to belong to the zamindar, and has trouble continuing the project because the latter has just put some fish in it, he says! There is a clear generational target in the movie, because on top of the young school-master, the movie focuses on his love-interest, the Post-master’s second daughter, pretty Seema (Sadhana). Her father is deep in debt from having borrowed a lot to marry his first daughter, and he’s under pressure to get Seema married to his lender, but relents out of consideration for her, and prefers his indebtedness, even if his sick wife would prefer the wedding proposal to go through! All this to say that when one morning he receives the check, he could well have used it for himself!

Anyway, the experiment begins, of course with the four eager candidates thinking of (and finding) means to makes themselves more popular: freebies and writings off, mainly. The sham doesn’t deceive the villagers, who are heard saying that all this is only happening because of the prize, and that the usual cruelty will come back as soon as somebody gets the cheque. They can’t be fooled: there is only one good man, according to them, that’s the village school-master. He’s the one to vote for. But unfortunately, this piece of wisdom is overheard by the priest, who goes to one of the other candidates: they realise flattering and fawning won’t be enough, they’ll have to use other means. First they have to get the school-master out of way: they try buying him, so that he backs out of the race, but it doesn’t work, he’s too principled for that. Then they try to demoralise him: knowing that he’s courting Seema, they succeed in pushing between them the zamindar’s sister in law, who’s recently come to the village. Seema falls into the trap, and shrinks away from him. Finally they hope to trap him: the money-lender’s bailiff comes to the post-master’s house one day, and sets about to auction the family’s property. Seema rushes to her lover’s house (they’ve made up in the meantime) and asks him for help: that’s when she meets with Ajanta, the sister in law playing her treacherous role. Seema runs away home, desperate (thinking her lover unfaithful), but the trick works nevertheless: the school-master, understanding the impending disaster, goes to the zamindar, buys his defection from the election, and brings her the money to pay for her father’s debts!

All this however, will be of no avail: on the day of the election, after everything has been tried to make one the four compeers shine in the eyes of the general community (the funniest trick being the pandit’s “miracle” growth of Goddess Lakshmi out the ground, pushed up by a bucketful of germinating gram-seeds!), the furiously partisan lines of supporters of either zamindar, doctor, landlord or priest all start fighting one against the other, and JC Roy himself, understanding the danger of the situation, has to intervene, uncover his hidden identity and tell the assembled and quieted people to do the designation without voting. They hesitate, but quickly choose… not the expected school-master (which perhaps has been sullied in their eyes by the slanders?), but the postmaster, who has all the time stood at the back of everything, and taken part in none of the electoral rumpus.

Bimal Roy makes with Parakh a clear moral statement: virtue can never be created under pressure. It needs no motive but itself, and whoever does otherwise is a hypocrite and a fraud, and his fraud will lead him to greater sins needed to cover up the fraud once it’s divined. Of course money and riches are very risky demonstrators of these truths, because many honest people can become corrupted if faced with temptation of choosing between honesty one the one hand, and comfort, good health and some advance cash on the other. When circumstances are difficult, virtue is also difficult, and you can’t blame the poor for being dishonest (see the debate on Bollywhat about this question here, and you can also check my review of Shree 420 ). Still, this problem isn’t really developed in the movie, which focuses on another issue.

This issue is that of human excellence. It’s interesting to see that the man who’s finally awarded the prize for best value calls himself an “ordinary man”: as if Bimal Roy wanted to show that human worth doesn’t lie in anything extraordinary, and as one character says laughingly at one stage, “everyone is a good man”: and indeed, if value is in ordinariness, it’s the case. As Pascal says, whoever wants to pose as an angel, acts as a beast. Humanity is in the middle. There’s an egalitarianism here which flies in the face of common sense, because we all know, as do the villagers in the film, that some of us are “better men” than the rest. Does it mean that some are more ordinary than the others? No, but probably less selfish, more community-minded. And at the same time, man’s value does not depend on his achievements or qualities. All men are equal in the sense that all have equal dignity because they are each of them an individual and unique person. Given a certain degree of ordinariness (you do have exploiters and oppressors), theoretically, or politically, all men are indeed the same. This is pretty much the lesson we gather from other Bimal Roy movies, Sujata for instance.  

In societies (and the Indian more perhaps than others) where social class is defined by wealth, this lesson certainly has an importance, even if doing nothing more than reminding one of it will change nothing. There is such an ingrained habit in considering that rich people MUST be superior to poor people, such an entrenched feeling that when one can show signs of gracious living, one is entitled to the corresponding recognition…Those that don’t buy this spurious equivalence are considered fools and anyway they are no threat to the injustice of the system: let them philosophize! At best, say the affluent, you need such sadhus an ascets to remind you the relativity of things, and everything is in its right order.

I’ll round off this review by insisting like others have done (See bollyviewer, Sharmi, Upperstall and Banno who, in fact, doesn’t say so) that the two or three songs in the movie are very wonderful, especially the rain song (O Sajna Barkha Bahaar) sung by Seema as she reaffirms her right on her “best man”, the schoolmaster. At one stage she cups her hand under the precious water curtaining down from the night skies, and I thought: that’s where the real treasure is to be found. All fight in the film to be able to close their hands on a fistful of rupees. Only she has opened her hand to receive the riches that Heaven gives freely, the water of life and of love.

Tere ghar ke samne (1963) has a Molièresque quality to it. I don’t know if English-speaking readers know about Molière, but this story of two young lovers who want to marry in spite of their cantankerous fathers immediately made me think of L’Avare, or Le bourgeois gentilhomme, where such situations are standard fare. The line that made the connection was this one, where Sulekha (Nutan)’s father, Seth Karamchand, actually admits he was a fool to counter-bet his arch-enemy Lala Jagganath, for the purchase of a plot where to build his future house:

But foolishness doesn’t stop these rich neighbours from waging a very serious war, a war of influence and bad-tempers, a war of old men stuck in their seriousness. Old men indeed, because both young folk and womenfolk denounce their foolishness, but even if they themselves see it, they won’t budge. Old age is when you are stuck in foolish attitudes which hurt yourself and others, and that you don’t want to change because you think it will imperil your dignity. Compared to some more recent movies, where the stubbornness of fathers seemed rather easily overturned (even if at first it looked formidable), in TGKS it takes an enormous amount of energy, and only the confrontation with the whole town, invited to a wedding which neither father was going to accept, and the public singing of words which appeal to their sense of humanity, make them change finally and accept the dreaded marriage. But the refusal had formerly been so absolute, that in fact the reversal looks a little contrived.

Anyway, the feud between two grumpy grandpas wasn’t, you faithful readers know it, why I had been watching this film. (Here we go again, another Nutan eulogy!!) (I thought he'd gotten over it) (No, sadly he's still smitten) (How can one be so  Nuts about Nutan?) Ahem. Nutan shot this film in 1963, after she had taken leave from the movies to marry and have her son, Mohnish, born on Feb 14 of that year. The film shows how right she was to have come back, and how glorious maternity made her. I could also say, how little it shows that she’d just been a mum. It shows in fact how much she wanted to return to the cinema, because TGKS is a delightful Dev + Nutan powerhouse. Nutan’s exquisite looks are complimented by Dev the charmer’s expressions, and they form a perfect couple. I don’t know what Lieutenant-Commander Behl thought about this quick return to the dazzling limelights! Just look at this:

Doesn't she seem tenderness incarnate? One word has got to be said for the famous scene (and song) in Qutub Minar, the inside of which I have read somewhere has been reconstructed in studio (so that when I was watching the movie, and called my boy to come and have a look because last year when we went there, the tower was no longer open to the public, he probably did not see what the inside really looked like!). The ascent to heaven it represents, with the pauses at the various levels, is peppered with songs filled with allusions, jokes, innuendoes and gags: in short it’s so full of fun that it’s pure joy to watch and rewatch. There’s this delightful moment when Dev is ordered to hush because, taking advantage of their seclusion, he starts praising her appearance. So he complies, and walks up behind his mirthful companion with a finger on his mouth, and she just melts at seeing him.

At one level, hearing all noise fade throughout the building, she stops:

And she says "can you hear the sound of silence?" As far as I'm concerned, I could hear many silent thoughts and feel many silent aspirations... But the expressions on her face, as she focuses on the stillness of the moment, and then on Dev’s remarks that the only noise he can hear are the beats of his heart, are almost too much for a lover of her looks. We have other hilarious moments when they banter and are surprised by other visitors, and they play, like children, pretending they’re suddenly serious, or hide under Dev’s overcoat. At one stage, he gives her his binoculars to watch her brother and his girlfriend flirting down in the grounds. She takes a peep, but Dev is gone somewhere else, and she hands the binoculars to a stranger, before realising he’s accepted the offer, and she has to wrench the thing away from him! She turns around, and her back to him, shakes her hand in a gesture which means, wow, silly me, quick, let’s leave! And she rushes back to an expectant Dev.

They exchange looks, smiles, pranks, reproaches, impressions, giggles, his coat, his cap, her love of life, her fears, her girlish seriousness and her mature fun-loving candour. This climb and descent belongs to the anthology of cinema. It’s probably been done before, but who cares, both actors have pit-patted their way to the top of fame in this scene.

I should perhaps also underline how much Nutan reigns again here. As it’s said later in the film, she’s the granddaughter of the queen of Ayodhya, or perhaps the queen of Ayodhya herself! Nobody’s sure. But what’s sure is that we do have a queenly person in front of us! It’s not because she’s called Rani, but the only person I can think of who comes a little close to Nutan’s charming and fun persona in today’s Bollywood is Rani Mukherjee. She’s perhaps a little too much on the side of fun (Kajol would be too much), and not enough interiorised as an actress, but who else do you see as her aunt’s successor? Nutan is rivalled really only by actresses of her times: Nargis, Meena Kumari, Waheeda Rehman, Madhubala. Shabana Azmi is greater than her in her serious roles, but I’ve yet to see her in lighter ones where Nutan is as much at ease as in her dramatic roles.

As for Dev Anand, I like him more and more. He had a genuine knack for comedy, that’s where he’s at his best, perhaps. And romance. I don’t know too much about drama though. Has he played in more sombre films? I haven’t seen him in any of his later movies. In this one, at any rate, he shines as the dependable young urbanite, whose authority and sense of responsibility manage to tilt the stubbornness of foolish elders.

Here's the song:

I’d like to attract your attention (and at the same time extend my thanks) to Harvey, who recently has made on his blog a wonderful selection of songs on the occasion of Nutan’s birthday. And if you want to see more of Tere ghar ke samne’s photos, refer to the icon on the left banner!