Sholay (1975) - The First Review

It was a lot of fun translating this early review of Sholay from the Hindi, published in the Delhi based magazine Sarita in 1975. Sarita, a popular magazine since 1945 was always read for its serialized fiction, short stories, non-fiction pieces and articles based on social, and lifestyle issues and continues to thrive. In this review of the film that would later become iconic, the anonymous writer excoriates nearly everything he/she sees. There is neither pussyfooting nor excessive deference to the film and its makers and is a piece of history itself.

Review of Sholay in Sarita, 1975

Producer: G P Sippy

Director: Ramesh Sippy

Main Actors: Dharmendra, Sanjeev Kumar, Amitabh Bachchan, Hema Malini, Jaya Bhadhuri, A K Hangal, Satyen Kappoo, Leela Misra, Amjad Khan

Former police inspector Thakur Sahab (Sanjeev Kumar) is in need of two such thugs who could trounce fifteen or twenty assailants at a time. Thakur Sahab knows that Viru (Dharmendra) and Jai (Amitabh Bachchan) are such lowlifes, but they are full of courage and steeped in humanity (All hail writer duo Salim Javed). Both brave men reach Thakur's village. It's inevitable that there should be someone to ferry them to the village. So, this time, there is a 'tangewali', Hema Malini (Basanti), and Hema's mare 'Dhanno', who seems quite well-trained, and fills the role of Hema's sister or friend. The remaining story of the dacoit Gabbar Singh (Amjad Khan) is an Indian adaptation of a masala mix made up of bits of 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid', 'The Good, the Bad and the Ugly' and 'The Secret of Santa Vittoria'.

The film is just about OK until the interval, and, to an extent, entertaining. But after that, it seems that the director of this 'khichdi' film and its writer duo Salim Javed are afflicted with seizures of fights and violent bloodletting. But the fact is that these scenes of fighting and violence are both lifeless and unexciting. 

There are several sets inspired by Hollywood films, but these are largely ineffective. This is because Indian set designers have not yet learnt to mimic solid masonry with walls made out of paper. In the story, a water tank has a prominent role, but it is difficult to understand how water rises to the tank, as the village has neither electricity nor diesel engines. And where does the water go from this tank? There are several examples of such ridiculousness in the film.

Considering the kind of films that Sanjeev, Dharmendra and Amitabh are acting in today, it is difficult to take them seriously in their various roles in 'Sholay'. Dharmendra and Amitabh neither look like thugs nor horses for hire. Seeing Dharmendra's bare chest or his arms does not put you in mind of his character in 'Phool aur Patthar'. Now he looks like a Hindi-film actor quite full of himself. Amitabh is quite striking in his white clothes, and is even effective to an extent, but he most certainly does not look like a killer for hire.

Sanjeev is considered an actor with a remarkable 'range', but in 'Sholay' he completely fails in his efforts to become like (Hollywood's) Omar Sharif. The sounds emanating from his throat are like the characters speaking from those haunted house type of films.

And what can be said about Hema Malini and her constant 'Yaani ki' and 'Yunhi ki'? She neither looks like a young girl nor like a full-grown woman.

In other roles, Hangal and Satyen Kappoo reprise their usual crying/chest beating acts resembling fifty-year-old antique chachajis, mamajis and nanajis, with their cloying 'Kaise ho beti?' style. The new villain Amjad has not made up his mind whom to ape - his late father Jayant, or Dilip Kumar, or Pran or Premnath. Of course, his bellowing makes the 70mm stereophonic sound system quite meaningful.

There is a lot of strength in Dwarka Divecha's camerawork. In any case, Salim Javed take stock of all their earlier successful films to concoct a new screenplay. Director Ramesh Sippy has been quite effective in some portions of the film. But watching so many rubbish parts one does not feel that such a man (or woman) can be a film director at all. Rahul Dev Burman's music misses the point. Anand Bakshi's lyrics are more of the same old stuff.

In summary, 'Sholay' stands because of some technical competence. Otherwise, it is quite a crime to spend a crore of rupees on this rubbish film, and all those who made these films are accomplices to this crime as also those who, goggle-eyed by its advertising campaign, went to see it with such enthusiasm and returned home wringing their hands in regret.

Priya Sarukkai Chabria, Noorul Hasan, Athena Kashyap- 3 book reviews

Bombay/Mumbai: Immersions
Priya Sarukkai Chabria and Christopher Taylor 
Niyogi Books, 2013

The central display at my favourite Bombay bookshop, Kitab Khana, is creaking under the weight of new books on the city. It is difficult to know just what else can be added to the oeuvre before it collapses completely. I remember a time when the only books on Bombay that were available were Gillian Tindall’s history, City of Gold (1982) and Dom Moraes’ contemporary – and then, controversial – account Bombay (1979), commissioned by Time/ Life books. And then, apres Mehrotra/Dwivedi, le déluge.

On a slightly nativist note, I think any new book on Mumbai should pass muster with Mumbaikars first. Priya Sarukkai Chabria and Christopher Taylor’s immersive account – history, travelogue, ethnography, picture book and prose-poem does so, giving us a sense of Mumbai as it is today. Poet and photographer, both accepting the version of Indian time as a kaalchakra, retread and retrace the city to reclaim it: “What one saw at noon must be seen again in starlight; that which was seen in summer reveals another aspect in the monsoon.” This appreciation of multi-dimensionality, both in time and in space, articulates what Chabria calls the hard and the soft city – the city of data and materiality and of imagining and desire. Immersion is the wearing down of shoe soles, going forth to meet its very many “yesterday’s outsiders and today’s natives” (a phrase from Ranjit Hoskote’s preface) and submerging into the known and unknown to be ultimately renewed, much like the city’s annual Ganesh visarjan.

Using this “cross-genre” approach allows the reader to make a non-linear journey through the city, observing many simultaneities and palimpsest layers, the initial southern heart and the developing northern and eastern limbs, using voices from the past (Chitre, Dhasal, Surve, Pasolini and Paz are all evoked) and the voices of the present from the streets, bylanes, chawls and slums. Chabria narrates the many lives with gentleness and honesty bringing “all its denizens together” like the city at low-tide, who “all alike smell its tidal spoor”.

The book is a pas de deux between text and images, and co-author Christopher Taylor’s photographs, taken the old fashioned way using negative film to make silver gelatin prints, bring out the texture, grittiness and veracity of this mad megalopolis. His images punctuate the narrative and carry it forward, not with panoramas but vignettes of a city largely unseen. Not an underbelly, really (we’ve had enough of faux noir-imaginings of the big, bad Mumbai Nagariya) but more a quotidian presence. Taylor’s is a visual account of the occupied city.

Chabria un-riddles the city’s various etymologies, which become the access to some of the oldest and now dwindling communities and their physical artifacts: homes, religious places, cemeteries as with the Chinese, the Armenian Jews, the Irani Shias all centred around Mazgaon. Taylor photographs the newer communities – the drivers of “kaali-peelis”, the service industry that accommodates migrants “like the city accommodates high tide”. The vast, unlamented backroom industry that forms the bulwark for the Hindi film world is explored, as are some of the city’s geographies that we do not talk about much – the ferries and the forests. Chabria ends with a prose poem, “Cab ride through Bombay/Mumbai”. Here, like the book, ruminations, memories and the views outside meld together like a seething traffic jam, filling the senses like exhaust, making the eyes blink and water – and ultimately clear the vision.

-Reviewed by Mustansir Dalvi in Time Out Mumbai

Meena Kumari: The Poet 
A Life Beyond Cinema
Noorul Hasan
Roli Books, 2014

During the golden age of vinyl, when shelves of record stores were filled with albums of songs from Hindi films, a patronizingly small space was accorded to the “non-filmy” album. I remember two of these—one was the eponymously titled Bachchan Recites Bachchan, the other I Write, I Recite, an album of recordings of Meena Kumari reciting her own poetry with music by Khayyam. In her sonorous, somewhat breathless voice, she spoke of love and loneliness. Quite like the tragedy queen she was in her films. That was 1972.

Now, Noorul Hasan, a former professor of English with interests from Thomas Hardy to Firaq Gorakhpuri, has brought together several of Meena Kumari’s verses, published in English translation for the first time. Most of her poems share the themes commonly found in Urdu ghazals and nazms—loss, solitude, the contemplation of death, the futility of words. Meera Kumari’s enduring reputation is that of a tragic doyenne. Her poems are not rooted in specifics, and are written in a rhetorical style that does not offer a reader much to hold on to. One is therefore obliged to juxtapose this with the context of her life for a full appreciation of the poems.

Hasan has also curated additional material that includes essays on her verse and several appendices with archival interviews and reminiscences that range from the fanboy thrill of meeting the Garboesque diva (by Afsar Jamshed) to the raking up of a mildly salacious past. Naushad Ali’s short biography, Actress Meena Kumari: From The Cradle To The Grave, summarizes her life—her beginnings as a child actor, her debut in the stunt movie called (of all things) Leatherface, her rise to fame as an adult actor with Baiju Bawra, her unrequited love for a leading man, her marriage with, and divorce from, a leading director, her slide into isolation and alcoholism, and the fixing of her image as a tragedienne with Pakeezah, all allow one to indulge in reading these into her poems: “Life is a scattered tale of grief/ And my story is nearing its end.” Hasan’s translations are accompanied by Roman transliterations that allow the multilingual (but Urdu-challenged) reader access to Meena Kumari’s original words, and these are very welcome: “Din doobe hai ya doobi baraat liye kashti/ Sahil pe magar koi kohram nahi hota” (Is it sunset or has the wedding barge capsized/ There is no hue and cry on the shore all the same).

Meena Kumari’s poems are steeped in melancholy, rarely allowing even a spark of cheer or good humour. She often acknowledges her own self-indulgence: “I sit and brood for hours/ About which heartbeat/ I should turn into poetry”. Out of her accumulated outpourings of angst she is on occasion able to convey an image of some beauty: “This night/ Was merciful like/ Miriam’s warm cloak/ And like a dreaming Christ/ Drowned in sleep—innocent”. While several of her ghazals tread familiar landscapes, it is her nazms, short and long, that yield the most. Here, she is at her most confessional: “My own dreams poisoned me/ My own imaginings stung me to death.”

Few books subvert their own title. Meena Kumari The Poet: A Life Beyond Cinema is one. In a sense that is what makes the book most engaging. Approached with the full awareness that this is a collection of poems by a famous actor of the Hindi screen whose image surpasses her performances and her life, these verses add to and sustain her persona. Her poems become enjoyable reading, evoking the many visual memories we have of Meena Kumari. Indeed, the book has several iconic images from her films. I would take issue with the opening essay, where Philip Bounds and Daisy Hasan describe her poetry as a critique of popular culture. Asserting that “her poems tell us as much about Bollywood as they do about herself” is clearly overstating the case, as their defence is entirely rooted in her life in cinema.

It is her later chroniclers, it would seem, who cannot let go of the baggage of her “filmy” career, instead of attempting to read her verses for what they are. Meena Kumari herself puts it best. The best of the “bonus features” that enrich this book is “My Likes And Dislikes”, a throwaway interview that she seems to have given to some film magazine. “A closed book is very enticing because it is silent”, she says, “but once you start reading it its entire character begins changing slowly and imperceptibly.” Like the famous Kuleshov effect of cinematic montage, this book, like the actor herself, cannot escape its proximity to Meena Kumari’s films, her times, and the long shadow she casts as an eternally suffering doyenne.

-Reviewed by Mustansir Dalvi in Mint Lounge, Sat, Jun 28 2014

Crossing Black Waters
Athena Kashyap
Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2012

In her debut collection of poetry, author Athena Kashyap references “black waters” to evoke two separate “crossings”: the first, when the author moved to the United States from the country/city of her formative years, and the second, when her great-grandfather uprooted his family from Lahore and made the crossing to India.

Embedded in the poems, which move back and forth between the Indian subcontinent and America, is a longing for “home” that is realized in the mind. However, when the poet finally returns to her abandoned family home in Pakistan, she finds that what was left behind is just “half of everything.” Even the fulfillment of her longing is faltering, uncertain: “Of all the seeds planted / by great-grandfather in Lahore, / only trees remain— / clinging on.”

The backdrop of San Francisco, on the other hand, represents a more abstract existence, an occupation rather than a belonging, a perpetual halfway house. Kashyap declares her position succinctly: “I am knot.” There is a sense of slow loss in her America-centered poems, in a country where, according to the poet, she is so free that she floats away: “I am diluted, having left one world to live and travel in / others. My skin grows permeable, breathable.” It is at this plane of osmosis, of skin as filter, that the experience of America occurs. Her poems situated beyond the black waters absorb the local, but the specifics of a home left behind intrude: the taste of tandoori, of sweet Gujarati food, snippets of Hindi film songs, and the memories of Mumbai trains all collide with the present.

The poem “Zero Generation” addresses immigrant loneliness as a collective experience, in that it speaks to those who “long to belong, but also long to return / back to where we once belonged.” The desire for making a world in a foreign land is inherent, but described here is an immigrant experience that just does not settle, and Kashyap’s poems simmer at this cusp. She references a popular line from a film song, “Aye dil, hai mushkil jeena yahaan,” which translates to, “My poor heart, how difficult it is to live here!” While the “here” in the context of the song refers to Bombay, the author borrows the expression to refer to life in America. This move by the author achieves the effect of making the hard reality of urban living there—or here—universal.

Kashyap writes of sundering, separations, crossings, reunions, and uncertain reconciliations. The break with an imagined home is never forever; return is always a possibility yet remains unsatisfying whenever it occurs. Crossing Black Waters is a many-layered book about the simultaneity of multiple existence that is becoming more frequent in our modern world, where all our online networks are no substitute for being “there,” and being there is no longer an end in itself.

-Reviewed by Mustansir Dalvi in Jaggery Lit, Issue 1, Fall 2013

An Architect Reviews Ram Gopal Verma's 'Bhoot'

This is a piece I wrote in June 2003. I am posting this here in the nature of archive particularly after brainstorming with Chirodeep Choudhary today about his project on the views from/out of high rises. I wonder how many of you saw 'Bhoot' and if you did, how many remember it at all.

Just saw ‘Bhoot’ this evening, and this set me off wondering how architecture is depicted in films. There are many film theories, but let that go for another time. I enjoyed this film, and here are some ruminations about its effective use of space.

The first half is the more effective. An ordinary high-rise residential apartment building (definitely not Hafeez, could be Khareghat) is one of the main ‘actors’ in the film, It is shot though various distorting lenses to give it a Bhootly appearence, but what makes it menacing is its utter ordinariness. What hits you is the view from the terrace: the horizon is filled with buildings- each ordinary and mediocre, you cannot differentiate one from the other. The skyline is jagged, and there are no landmarks to give it focus. Is this the view that most of the upper classes in Bombay look at out of their windows?

The ordinariness is reflected in the couple (Ajay Devgan and Urmila Matondkar) who move into a duplex flat with a terrace on one of the building’s upper floors. The fact that they have to rent the apartment is itself an act of disassociation. They have come from somewhere, we don’t know. They live in the anonymity of an apartment that belongs to someone else in this building that, apart from 1 landlord, 1 Bai and 1 watchman, no one else seems to inhabit.

This vulnerability is seen in the well crafted initial scenes. All they have is each other and the flat. When Ajay goes to work Urmila has the house to herself, with its double height spaces and the ambient sound of the many channels on cable TV. It is a big house for one person to inhabit alone for the day. A prime target for attack: whether voyeuristic, in the form of the watchman, or supernatural in the form of the Bhoot.

The spaces in the flat are interesting. The double heights allow for a bottom up and top down shots which reminded me of Escher once in a fleeting shot with Victor Banerjee and Ajay Devgan. The duplex’s stairs to the upper level figure prominently. There is an unstated menace in the steps, that are unprotected (no railing). Other aspects of the flat show a fuzzy line between safety and danger: the windows have no grilles, the terrace no protection above the standard parapet. The main door seems to open for everybody. But there seems to be no one in the building. The basement parking lot has cars but no people. There is unfinished RCC here and there with the reinforcement bars poking out like knives ready to put out some one’s eyes. The street outside has no character at all. All told, this is a chillingly unfriendly habitat, which nevertheless is home. A particularly dangerous place for children, or the mentally imbalanced.

Seeing the film, I realised that the effect of the depiction of architectural space in Ram Gopal Varma’s ‘Bhoot’ is not in what he shows, but what you see. The uneasiness you feel is by reflection. Your everyday fears are ignited by the shots of detail and the relentless roving camerawork: The fear of being alone, the deja-vu feeling that someone else is in your home besides you, the fear of falling off an unprotected terrace or window, the fear of intruders, of attack from outside (the vulnerable main door), the fear of hurt (the jagged corners of the duplex’s stairs), even the fear of being in a public place full of strangers, and suddenly finding yourself naked. All these fears are experienced by a viewer while seeing the film.

Another quality that brings about the effectiveness of the interior spaces is that this film is shot on location: this is a real apartment, this is a real building, there are no sets, even the basement parking lot is authentic enough, except for perhaps the jagged reinforcement (for what is an unfinished column doing in a basement?) The apartment is not very well finished and it is these nicks and burrs that in fact drag us into the story by implying that this could be any one of our own homes. Nothing is perfect; this is no idealized ‘Hum Aapke Hain Koun’ world. That’s what makes this place spooky. Also the ‘interior decorashun’ seems hurriedly thrown together, with a mix of fresh furniture (a rather usefully designed bed, and some horrendous and large paintings) and pieces left over (a mirror, what else?) from the earlier owners. This is a house that has not yet become a home, not for the couple.

A home is something one needs to root ones self in. A protected space to return to, to take for granted. If the home itself is perceived to be oppressive or menacing, there is no where you can go. This is a clear subtext in the film, as the couple hardly ever leave the apartment throughout. By extension, if one of the partners becomes the object of fear and suspicion, how can you resolve conflicts?

The apartment and the building, as I mentioned earlier, become characters in the film, ‘acting’ along with the rest of the cast. That’s what makes the film enjoyable. Ambient space design that suggests the authenticity of life can go a long way to make a film realistic. The film that comes to mind here is ‘Alien’, the first one that showed the inside of spacecraft as ‘dirty’. Most of the space films that came before, such as 2001 and the Star Wars series showed a clean, well lighted interior, more a virtual mindspace rather than the real world. They always made you aware that this was a set. I can’t remember the last time spaces were so integral to a Bollywood film. The only example I remember with great fondness is the inside of the Qutub Minar shown beautifully with spiralling camerawork around Dev Anand and Nutan in the song ‘Dil ka Bhanwar kare Pukar’ from Tere Ghar Ke Saamne.”

June 2003

The right of women to do as they damn well please

My review of ‘Why Loiter? Women & Risk on Mumbai Streets’,  by Shilpa Phadke, Sameera Khan and Shilpa Ranade, Penguin Books, 2011.  The review is published in the latest issue of Indian Architect & Builder.


(excerpt)
'Why Loiter?’ is about the ultimate freedom a woman demands in an urban space: the freedom to do exactly what a man is allowed to do. Mumbai, the progressive city, denies this just by being what it is.  Perhaps the most important liberty a megalopolis should offer is the choice to do nothing. To loiter. To have fun. To be a flaneur, to go walkabout, to regard the city and its life as it happens, with no purpose in mind at all. The problem is, if you are not some kind of useful cog, you are a deviant, and a surveillance obsessed society will not accept this. It is difficult enough for men in Mumbai to loiter without being seen as vagabonds.