(This article by Anna
MM Vetticad was first published in the November 23, 2012, issue of Forbes India
magazine)
BEYOND WHITE CHIFFONS & PICTURE POSTCARD ROMANCES
There was more to Yash Chopra than saris fluttering in the
breeze, Swiss mountains, tulip fields and pretty frames
By
Anna MM Vetticad
“King of Romance (1932-2012)”
says the Amul ad, quick to mark a milestone in Indian history yet again. The
iconic Amul girl sits on the floor of a snow-laden forest, a guitar slung
across her chest, her bright eyes resting on an elderly gentleman seated before
her, while the copy reads: “Main har ek
pal ka shayar hoon, har ek pal meri kahani hai”, a take on a song from Kabhi Kabhie, the memorable 1976 film
about ill-fated lovers, directed by Yash Chopra.
No doubt there is great poignance
in that visual, paying tribute as it does to one of Indian cinema’s greatest
and most successful producer-directors on his demise. In a sense, it’s apt too:
After all, Chopra was a master of weaving perfect frames, pretty visuals and
lyrical songs into languid romances. But, in another sense, the picture is
incomplete. For as much as he has been lauded in obituary after obituary as
Hindi filmdom’s King of Romance, the title fails to do justice to his vastly
varied filmography that frequently showcases a forward-thinking mind, whether
his audiences were ready for it or not. Romance is not an easy genre, but if we
insist on pinning a single label on this man, then in all fairness let it be
King of Versatility.
To fully grasp this idea, rewind
to 1959, the year Chopra made his directorial debut. Dhool Ka Phool – produced by his elder brother B.R. Chopra – revolves
around a young Hindu couple. While the boy is coaxed into marriage with someone
else by his father, the girl discovers that she is pregnant and gives birth to
a baby who she abandons. The child is brought up by a kindly Muslim man whose
good intentions can do little to protect the foundling, or himself, from social
opprobrium. In an India too hypocritical even today to admit that pre-marital
sexual intimacy is a reality, it takes little imagination to appreciate that Dhool Ka Phool made 53 years ago was a
revolutionary film.
In the years since, Hindi cinema
has very occasionally revisited the theme. Each foray has emphasised exactly
how progressive a thinker Chopra was all those years ago. More than four
decades after Chopra’s film, Kundan Shah released the qualitatively
average-in-comparison Kya Kehna,
starring Preity Zinta as a college girl who gets pregnant after an affair. In
2000, the story was still uncommon enough for the subject to be described as
“an uncomfortable issue” by reviewers.
Imagine then an India just 12
years after independence, when the young and idealistic Lahore-born,
Mumbai-based Chopra dwelt on pre-marital sex, the social ostracism of unwed
mothers and prejudices faced by children born out of marriage, while also
throwing Hindu-Muslim animosity into the blend. When the wounds of Partition
had yet to heal, imagine the impact on the Indian psyche, of a Muslim gentleman
singing to a Hindu infant: Tu Hindu
banega na Musalman banega, insaan ki aulad hai insaan banega.
But Chopra would not rest there.
In 1961, he made Dharmputra – also produced
by B.R. Chopra – in which he flung himself right into the fires of
pre-Partition Hindu-Muslim tensions. Here, the child of an unmarried Muslim
couple is taken in by a loving Hindu family but grows up to be a Muslim-hating
bigot. Dharmputra was steeped in
overt symbolism and subcontinental politics. A Hindu family and a Muslim family
co-existing peacefully served as metaphors for the two nations that would
subsequently be torn out of one, and the hope that India and Pakistan could
look beyond their painful history.
To those tempted to dismiss these
scenarios as simplistic, or as exaggerated and melodramatic, it would be
appropriate to point out that the release of both films would be fraught with
risks even in 2012, when religious “sentiments” are still so easily “hurt”.
As it happens, the situations in
both films find echoes in real life. As recently as 2011, the press reported
that a Hindu couple in Hyderabad trying to adopt an orphaned Muslim baby was
being harassed by both communities. The Indian secular ideal of ‘Hindu Muslim Sikh Isaai, hum sab hain bhai
bhai’ is not quite the rosy reality that we would like to believe. And
Chopra chronicled this truth at a time when most Hindi films preferred to
pretend otherwise.
Sadly, like so many of Chopra’s
hard-hitting films of the pre-1975 era, Dhool
Ka Phool and Dharmputra are often
lost in the flutter of chiffon saris that came to characterise his later works.
That the gloss of those post-1975 films curtained off the vision of so many
film commentators is partly the fault of a widespread tendency to judge books
by their pretty covers, to assume that what is pretty is not gritty.
Chopra himself must take some
of the blame though. Too many films released by his production house Yash Raj
Films (YRF) in the first decade of this century tried to replicate the glitz
that came so naturally to him, without the depth of writing that Chopra brought
to most of his directorial ventures. Lustre bereft of logic – like an impoverished home with
colour-coordinated walls and furnishings – did those films in, and Chopra
cannot be absolved for such transgressions even if the reins of YRF were by
then largely in the hands of his son Aditya.
There are those who believe
that Chopra’s most socially and politically conscious films were the ones produced
by his equally illustrious sibling. Yet, this too is not entirely true. While
he owes much to his brother, his success is also inextricably linked to the
great lyricist Sahir Ludhianvi; to the scriptwriting team of Salim Khan and
Javed Akhtar; to Amitabh Bachchan whose Angry Young Man status in Bollywood was
further cemented
– after
Prakash Mehra’s Zanjeer – by Chopra’s 1975 film Deewaar (not produced by the elder
Chopra); and to Shah Rukh Khan with whom the director found remarkable
box-office success from the early 1990s. The Deewaar protagonist’s angst against the system, reflecting
off-screen India’s disillusionment with the establishment that had failed to
deliver on the promises of Independence, indicated Chopra’s ability to sense
the mood of the nation. When a similar anger and violence became the norm in
Hindi films, Chopra continued the trend with films like Trishul (1978) and Kala
Patthar (1979) while also repeatedly breaking away with poetic odes to
love.
It was with these romances that
his penchant for stunning pictures came to the fore. But the enduring image of
Rekha and Amitabh wandering through acres of tulips in Silsila should not take away from the courage Chopra showed in
acknowledging marital infidelity in that film. It’s also a measure of how
influential he had become that he was able to persuade Rekha, Amitabh and his
wife Jaya Bachchan to play out on screen what many believe is the story of
their own lives. Naysayers feel Chopra “chickened out” in Silsila’s final reels when the erring husband goes back to his
pregnant wife, giving audiences a socially acceptable climax. The other way of
looking at it though is that the film’s ending is a reflection of the most
probable outcome of such a situation in middle- and upper-class real India.
It’s a different sort of
courage that we see in Chopra’s 1991 Sridevi-Anil Kapoor-starrer Lamhe, applauded by critics yet a
box-office failure at home. Indian audiences, it was found, were uncomfortable
with the story of a man falling in love with the daughter of a woman he had
once been in love with.
“Lamhe was ahead of its time,” a friend wrote on Facebook the other
day. “Incest as a theme was not acceptable in the nineties.” But there was no
incest in Lamhe. The girl that
Kapoor’s character falls in love with a second time was not his child but the
daughter of a woman he never married.
“Well yes, not in clinical
terms,” my friend wrote back, “but the romance between a man and a girl his
daughter’s age perhaps did not find many takers.” The box-office rejection of Lamhe is the clearest evidence of
audience double standards in Chopra’s career. This was the 1990s, when Bachchan
had already spent several years romancing heroines who were young enough to be
his daughters in real life. The difference between Lamhe and Bachchan’s films was that the Big B was usually playing
the part of a man much younger than his real age. Apparently, the pretence of
no age gap between the hero and heroine was acceptable to viewers, but the
fictional depiction of an age gap in Lamhe
was intolerable.
In the 1960s, Chopra had earned
success with the thriller Ittefaq. He
returned to the genre in 1993 with the psychological drama Darr, turning Hindi film convention on its head when he made SRK’s
anti-hero in effect the hero of the film. In the 19 years that followed, Chopra
directed just three films: Dil To Pagal
Hai (1997) starred reigning superstars SRK, Madhuri Dixit and Karisma
Kapoor. 2004’s Veer-Zaara once again
starred actors ruling Hindi filmdom at the time: SRK, Rani Mukerji and Preity
Zinta. And Chopra’s swan song Jab Tak Hai Jaan (to be released on November 13) stars SRK, Katrina Kaif and Anushka
Sharma.
Dil To Pagal Hai and Veer-Zaara were entertaining, eye-catching films that earned mega
money at the box office, none of which comes easy to any filmmaker. Veer-Zaara also marked a return to
Chopra’s pre-occupation with Hindu-Muslim ties, this time through a
cross-border love story. However, the visual grandeur, casting and excessive
sentimentality of these films have clouded much of the assessment of this great
film-maker’s body of work and earned some criticism from even his admirers that
he had become formulaic post-Darr.
It must also be pointed out
that in Veer-Zaara, like other Hindi filmmakers
before him who had dealt with inter-community romances, Chopra too played it
safe by ensuring that the minority community member in the relationship was the
girl who – as dictated by Indian social
norms – could be brought over into the Hindu fold. It’s hard to tell whether there is an unspoken diktat on this
matter from Indian audiences, but it’s disheartening that the man who made Dhool Ka Phool and Dharmputra would turn out to be a conformist, albeit in a
well-meaning film.
Still, it’s crucial to
emphasise that several films emerging from Chopra’s production house in the
past decade have continued to raise significant points about the man-woman bond
and inter-religious harmony. In Hum Tum,
a woman is offended when her boyfriend apologises to her for their consensual
pre-marital sexual encounter (such an apology would have been the order of the
day in films of earlier decades). Fanaa
mentions the unkept promise of a referendum made to the Kashmiri people. Sadly,
the seriousness of these films is not widely acknowledged by the film-going
community.
Even Chak De! India’s pathbreaking feminist tale of religious and gender
prejudice in Indian sport could do little to erase the widely held impression
continuing from the mid-1990s, that YRF was more about brilliant packaging than
issues which resonate with India.
Indian cinema lost a colossus
when Yash Chopra passed away on October 21, 2012. Good-looking stars, chiffons
flying about in the wind, Swiss mountains and fields of flowers are no doubt a
part of his legacy. Let’s not forget though that so too was that great mind
much ahead of his time.
(Anna MM Vetticad is on Twitter as @annavetticad)
Note: This photograph was not
published in Forbes
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