Hindi Cinema's Nehruvian Tryst: 2.Age of Vanishing Illusions

Darius Cooper

“:…Hindostan Hamara/ Rehene ko Ghar Nahin Hai/Saara Jahan Hamara” Sahir Ludhianvi

n April 18, 1955, President Soekarno of Indonesia inaugurated the first Non-Alignment Conference at Bandung. Twenty-nine countries attended, including China, India, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, Egypt, Ethiopia, Laos. Chou-en-Lai, Nasser, Soekarno, Prince Wan of Thailand, were in attendance. But the man who had brought them here was Nehru. From 1948 onward, he had striven to put independent India on the international map by proposing a foreign policy, not only within Asia, but also across the world. India, he declared, would not align herself with any Great Power, neither in her good nor in her bad times. She would stand for herself and by herself at all times. He presented to the world a new kind of nationalism forged as a self-sufficient ideology that would not tolerate any kind of colonialism and would insist always on equality, mutual benefit, and peaceful co-existence.

Ramesh Saigal’s 1958 film Phir Subha Hogi dared to critique Nehru’s newly defined non-aligned liberalism. Its Dostoevskian hero was caught robbing the safe of a vicious old moneylender and in the confusion that ensued he killed the man in self-defense. When a wrong man was arrested for the “crime,” his own conscience and a cunning custodian of the law “punished” him and forced him to confess. This enabled the hero, at the end, to make a moving declaration on behalf of all the insulted and the injured regularly victimized in this new India by those people who had the power, the connections, and the money to dictate terms and ruin them. This criticism came through very strongly, especially in Sahir Ludhianvi’s great song, “Cheen-Arab hamara/Hindusthan Hamara/Rehnein Ko Ghar Nahen Hain/Saara Jehan Humara” or “China and Arabia are ours/ The whole of India is ours/We don’t have a home to live in/But the whole world is ours.” The references here were barbs aimed at the so-called friendly visits to India, on Nehru’s invitation, of China’s Chou-en-lai and Egypt’s Nasser. Nehru’s promise of India needing nobody’s help seemed problematic when its own justice system was rotten and not prepared to help that Indian who had fallen on hard times and slept on the pavement under the new nation’s free skies.

In 1959, America entered Nehru’s India, first on February 10, when Nehru welcomed Martin Luther King, as the leader of the Black Civil Rights Movement. On December 9th of the same year, Nehru was again at the Delhi airport welcoming the President of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Both, the liberal democrats and the conservative republican were allowed to visit and actually see Nehru’s new India, especially its Americanized influence that the Indian Prime Minister was so proud to exhibit. The IITs for example, had campuses. Not only were they architecturally constructed like their American counterparts, but their students received grades instead of marks and they studied in semesters and not in terms. But perhaps the biggest spheres of American influence lay in the rock an’ roll music explosion and the surfacing of the first India/American rock an’ roll star, Shammi Kapoor, in Hindi film.

He burst on the screen in Nasir Hussain’s rock an’ roll musical Dil Deke Dekho (1959). The film’s traditional Indian plot was merely an excuse to mount the actor’s extraordinary American persona. Here was a new kind of hero that Nehru must have really chuckled at, secretly. He had no Indian tradition buried within him. He was loud, obnoxious, and displayed an enormous amount of passion even when performing simple gestures like passing his fingers over his long disheveled hair. He refused to play hide and seek, especially in his hot pursuit of the females. And when he sang, he sang with his entire body and not merely his mouth. There was nothing noble or Apollonian about him. He was a pure Dionysian force, constantly on the prowl. He ate and drank with grand abandon and often expressed his wild mood swings in either frantic songs accompanied by gyrating females, or stalked the stage in mournful solos, accompanied by a single throbbing saxophonist called Darius!

The songs that were written for him carried with them a new kind of semantic fusion that hysterically pitted the occident and the orient together, and in Mohamed Rafis’s naughty and titillating voice, Shammi Kapoor found the perfect playback singer. The title song of alliterations in Del Deke Dekho was borrowed outright, by music director Usha Khanna, from the popular chewing-gum American ditty “Sugar in the morning, sugar in the evening, sugar at suppertime” with the obvious pun on “sugar” as “sweet morsel” and “sweetheart.” In another borrowing, Paul Anka’s “Diana” became Shammi Kapoor’s “O, meri Deenaa.” In the film’s most popular song, our hero flatly demanded of his reluctant heroine that “if she loved him, then she should simply say the English word YES or if she didn’t, then simply say the English word, NO!” In the Hindi song that translated as: “pyar ho to keh do YES; pyar nāhin, to keh do NO.”

In another film Tumse Aacha Kaun Hain (1969), Shammi began a provocative song with the single word “KIS”? In Hindi,”Who?” but this is also a pun on the English word “kiss.” So when he sang, “Kis Ko Pyar Karu?” or “who should I love?” both connotations were implicated. In Kashmir Ki Kali (1964), when Shammi was wooing Sharmila Tagore (in her very first Hindi film), he was in a tiny shikara or a boat, and in the famous song, “Yeh chand sa roshan chera” or “O, this beautiful face like a moon,” he found a dozen different creative ways to offer his entire body to her, every time, he had to pay her beauty a new compliment or a taarif. In 1962’s China Town, he actually did a very fine impersonation of Elvis Presley, especially in the song “Bar bar dekho” or “Keepa-keepa looking,” where again, every verse ended with his asking the appreciative crowd to “talli ho” or “clap now,” and when they did, to mimic immediately his role of the lothario hunter with the pun on those two exclamatory words now shifting to the proverbial English hunting call meaning of “Tally-ho!”

[Read here Part I : Hindi Cinema’s Nehruvian Tryst: I. Age of Tangled Optimism]

In 1960, Nehru’s patient encouragement of the largest minority community in India, the Muslims, was richly rewarded in the Hindi film world by two very popular “Muslim social” films. The first was the Guru Dutt produced and M. Sadiq directed Chaudvin Ka Chand. Essentially about male friendship between a poor Muslim Aslam and a rich Nawab, it focused on the interminable suffering caused by a woman Jamila that both men fell in love with. Since the film showed the intricate functioning of the prevalent custom of the purdah, which forbade a woman to show her face to men outside her immediate family, a series of mishaps had Aslam unwittingly marry Jamila, not knowing that his best friend was also deeply in love with her after having accidentally glimpsed her unveiled face. When he learnt of this, Aslam tried to sacrifice his overwhelming love for his wife by deliberately pursuing liquor and the company of whores in the hope that she would leave him and find happiness with the Nawab. But when the Nawab realized how much pain he had let loose in his best friend’s marriage, he committed suicide.

A sentimental tear jerker, and with Guru Dutt’s directional presence revealed only in some of the song visualisations, the film had nothing much to offer narratively except an authentic rendering of everyday Muslim life in Lucknow, in all of its carefully researched and presented nuances. It was refreshing to hear the Urdu alfazasses or terms of ‘ammi jaan’ for mother and ‘abba jaan’ for father and even the vernacularized “yaar” sounded much nicer than the regular “dost.” The mehefils were really presented as Muslim gatherings, and the Kothas and the havelis had a Muslim essence that came through the elaborate studio props representing them.

It was K. Asif’s Mughal-E-Azam, however, that, in the same year, invoked a consummate Indo-Islamic spell over the entire nation. The story revolved around Prince Salim, Akbar’s son from his Hindu wife Jodabai. Salim fell madly in love, first with the statue of a female slave, and then with the live dancer who inspired that statue, the beautiful Anarkali. When Salim wanted to marry this woman, doubly disgraced by her lowly slave origins and her profession as a cheap dancer, Akbar pressurized Anarkali to give up Salim. In the film’s memorable “Sheesh Mahal” or “Palace of Mirrors” dance sequence, Anarkali salaamed Akbar by defying his hegemonic commands through her tactless song “Pyar kiya to darna kya” or “what is there to fear? All I have done is to love.” Salim’s disobedience soon turned dangerous. He challenged Akbar to a battle and was soon defeated. The proud Akbar condemned his son to death, but Anarkali intervened. She offered herself to be walled to death, instead.

While the film was overtly bloated, extremely awkward, and full of long pompous speeches it had its moments, particularly the erotic one that critics gleefully singled out, which is when Dilip Kumar’s love besotted Salim tickled the smoldering libido of Madhubala’s Anarkali, but only with a white feather!

What interests me, however, is the peculiar parallel this film evoked of a similar love drama that was actually taking place within the Nehru household itself! Nehru’s only daughter Indira had fallen madly in love with a lowly Parsee by the name of Feroze Gandhi. In spite of his liberalism, Nehru had opposed this match with all the zeal of an Akbar, but had finally agreed to it. Nehru, as we know, had never been on good terms with the Parsees, and even a gentle Parsee giant like JRD Tata had suffered Nehru’s wrath. Now, saddled with a brash Parsee son-in-law, the Parsees of India, especially in Bombay, had just begun to celebrate their own Parsee-E-Azam when Feroze (actually) did a salim, instead of a salaam, to his famous badsha father-in-law. Right after his marriage, Feroze went out of his way, to sit under the Prime Minister’s nose, in the very first bench of the opposition in the Lok Sabha or the Peoples‘ section of the Parliament. And from there, he daily issued a series of critical and negative diatribes against Nehru and his Nehruvian policies. This so enraged Nehru’s Akbarian efforts that he issued a final ultimatum to his daughter: either she come with her two sons and live with him and look after him (since he was getting on in years), or the doors of his house would be permanently closed to her and her children, if she chose that namak haram or not worth his salt Parsee. Indira, of course, was no Anarkali. Sensing her own dreams of one day sitting in her father’s chair, she obeyed and left her husband. Stunned by this betrayal, Feroze took to excessive eating and drinking (in typical Mughal style), suffered and died of a massive premature heart attack on September 8, 1960.

In 1963 Hindi cinema presented yet another “Muslim social, Mere Mehboob, directed by H.S. Rawail, to convey a reawakened nostalgia for early Twentieth Century Lucknow, along with its attendant class differences and conspiratorial family intrigues that plagued the two lovers, Anwar and Husna. The hero always had a rose tucked into his third Sherwani or coat button-hole, in exactly the same way Nehru had made that into his famous fashion trademark, soon to be imitated by many a young man in India and abroad. Naushad’s shayari or poetic music and the film’s famous title song “Mere Mehboob tuje meri mohabat ki kasam” or “I pledge my oath of love to you, o my beloved” succeeded, in spite of the artificiality of the studio straining to evoke a bygone era. The grace of Lakhnavi manners and the sheer mellifluousness of Urdu cast its spell once again, even dispelling the wooden performance of the leading pair. What held the film together was the dignified enactment of Ishq or Love. The particular ways of falling in love and then conducting a love affair with its own determined kind of exalted nobility and generous graciousness is what this film succeeded in communicating, especially to a predominantly Hindu India that had still much to learn from a culture it often crossed swords with and always considered as inferior

In 1961, under Nehru’s direct orders, on December 19th, the Indian army moved into Goa Daman Diu, the remaining Portugese colonies in India and in twenty-four hours, the Portugal surrendered them and they were declared Indian union territories. What is surprising, however, is that with the sole exception of one Hindi film, Tu Hi Meri Zindagi, made in 1965 by Ronodeb Mukherji, the Goan struggle for liberation from their Portuguese colonizers had never evoked any interest in the Hindi or Indian film industry.

This sole film is not even mentioned by any historian. I, fortunately, happened to see it, quite accidentally in Bhusawal’s Pandurang theatre. I was there on a six month sabbatical, awaiting the opening of Bombay’s colleges in June 1966, after sitting for my Senior Cambridge exams in December of 1965 in Poona. What I can remember from this blazing black and white revolutionary saga was the slim and angry hero, all clad in black leather, leading the Goans to repeated acts of sabotage on a magnificent white horse, and the awkwardly played out theatrical scenes of torture and interrogation between a sadistic Portuguese colonizer called, I think, Salazar, and the hero, refusing to bow his head, before this “Por-tu-gaal.” I liked the way he spat out that infamous name. It also had rousing songs and fiery speeches and a lot of aerial shots of Goa’s magnificent beaches. It was meant to launch, yet another Mukherji hero in Deb Mukherji, but neither the film nor the hero must have made any impression in the big cities. That is why tiny sleepy railway-colony towns like Bhusawal got to see it.

Goans, on the whole, were not properly represented in Hindi films. They were always stereotypically ridiculed as drunks or henpecked landlords with viragoan wives like Tun Tun in Guru Dutt’s Mr and Mrs 55. There are two exceptions, though. The Maharashtrian actress Lalita Pawar, who often played the scheming and shrew-like older relative in many Hindi family melodramas, turned in two memorable performances, first as the wise and kindhearted Goan landlady Mrs. D’ Sa in Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Anari (1954) and again as Mem Didi, another Mukherjee film, where she befriended and supported two aging petty criminals and conmen, one a Pathan, and the other, a fellow Goan from the taunts and ridicule of the respectable people in her neighborhood.

On October 23, 1962, Nehru’s India was alarmed to learn from its morning newspapers that India was actually “at war with China.” The “Hindi-Chini-Bhai Bhai” or the “Brotherhood Pact of India and China” that Nehru and Chou-en-lai had so emphatically and publicly demonstrated was suddenly over. Six hundred Chinese troops had made their first moves and defeated the unprepared Indian army at strategic places in the mountainous Ladakh region in the North. Both, Nehru and his Defense Minister V.K. Krishna Menon, were caught napping. On October 31, 1962, pressure was brought on Nehru to relieve Menon of the Defense portfolio, and shoulder that responsibility himself. Nehru tried, but ultimately failed to stem the tide of Chinese aggression that just kept getting bolder in inflicting defeat and swallowing up more Indian territory. By November, both America and Russia were willing to offer Nehru substantial help to stem this tide, but the worst had already been done. Even though China finally announced a cease fire on November 21, it still continued to hold some 2,500 square miles of Indian land. India in general and Nehru in particular, had been taught a very bitter lesson by their Judas border-brother. China’s resounding defeat of India was an event that Nehru took personally as a betrayal. 1962 ended with Nehru, a very broken and bitterly disappointed man.

The Hindi film Haqeeqat, directed by Chetan Anand in 1964, was actually dedicated to Nehru because the 1962 debacle with China had seriously punctured and nullified many Nehruvian ideas of non-alignment. The war had also demoralized India’s military capabilities in defending its borders from its neighbors. The Hindi film industry had to rally the troops and establish this Chinese betrayal to rebuild national confidence. This film focused on a small platoon of Indian soldiers who sacrificed themselves like those three hundred Spartans, by holding the powerful Chinese army at bay, while the rest of their comrades retreated to safety. The film was openly anti-Chinese, and often in a stinging polemical way. While an Indian soldier actually bayoneted Mao’s Little Red Book malignantly, a commanding officer openly denounced the Chinese against a documentary footage showing Chou-en-Lai’s friendly visit to India.

As the camera picked out the dead and martyred bodies of the brave Indian soldiers, Kaifi Azmi’s powerful song “Kar Chale hum fida jaan-o-tan saathiyon” in Mohammed Rafis’s agonizing epitaphed voice bade farewell to these martyrs and personified movingly India’s nationalized grief. Added to this elegiac moment, were documentary shots of Nehru himself addressing the troops of his confidence in them at the Republic Day Parade.

China, however, had entered Hindi films in other peculiar ways as well. China’s first glimpse is to be found in V. Shantaram’s 1946 film, Dr Kotnis Ki Amar Kahani. This was the true story of Dwarkanath Kotnis who was a member of a medical team sent by India during World War II, to fight with the Chinese and against the Japanese invasion of China. We see Kotnis, portrayed almost in a Pearl Buck kind of the good earth tradition. He provided medical relief to the wounded, married a Chinese woman (unconvincingly played by an Indian actress, Jayshree, who was Shantaram’s wife), was captured by the Japanese, and finally died in battle while developing a cure against a threatening epidemic. Shantaram, in his typical bombastic way, pulled out all the stops. His hero could do nothing wrong. He even put a glorified speech into his dying hero’s mouth that spelled out for his Chinese wife and their son the amazing things she would “see” when she actually got “home” to India. This scene was then over hyperbolized by having it clumsily intercut with actual documentary footage of Nehru seen as India’s new saviour and hero. It was for Nehru that Doctor Kotnis ultimately sacrificed himself. That became Shantaram’s final pontificating conclusion.

In Shakti Samantha’s Howrah Bridge (1958), the Hindi film ventured into the immigrant space of the specified area of Chinatown that sprang up in many of India’s leading westernized cities. The Chinese immigrants, in addition to introducing Indians to Chinese cuisine, were well known in India for their dentistry and shoemaking skills. But in this film, it was their trafficking in crime that registered their “other” presence. Helen, the popular cabaret dancer, who usually portrayed the Anglo-Indian vamp with the proverbial heart of gold, disguised herself in this film as a Chinese dancer and sang and danced the film’s famous cabaret number, sung by Geeta Dutt, “Mera naam (“My name is”) Chin Chin Choo…Chin Chin Choo…Baba Chin Chin Choo…Dastaan mein Mai Aur Tu…Hello Mister, how do you do?”

In 1962, the same director made Chinatown, which was set in the Chinatown area established by the Chinese as Second World War refugees, just outside the city of Calcutta. The film’s mise-en-scène was full of smoke-filled bars (one could literally smell the opium in the air), exotic dancing clubs, shadowy criminals stalking the streets, and fat businessmen, both, with round and with slanted eyes, wheeling and dealing, often with fat cigars clamped to their lips. There was, if I remember, even a shoemaker called Ching Lee, who knew the good twin hero from the bad one.

The year 1963 was a quiet year for the exhausted and ailing Nehru. One of his senior congress leaders, K. Kamraj, advocated a plan for purging the old governing guard and revitalizing Nehru’s Congress party with new blood. Nehru urged Parliament to approve the continued use of English as an official language when racist linguistics opposing the angrezi or English tongue suddenly started appearing in various parts of India. The Hindi cinema took a quiet respite as well. It did not have much to offer that year. Manmohan Desai’s Bluff Master seemed to be the only relevant film. It followed the odyssey of a chronic liar, played by Shammi Kapoor, but this time as a street-smart, anti-culture lumpen proletariat. Forced by his circumstances to adopt many masquerades, he is shown learning a lot about himself and the world in which he functioned. Taking a lot of personal hits, he finally reforms, wins his woman, and finally vanquishes her suitor. In an oblique way, it was a film that stressed the purging of old habits and the infusing of new blood into worthwhile activities. What could happen on the individual level could easily, then, be transferred to the national level. Krishna, as Govinda the naughty God, was, in fact, advocated as the new model for our resurrected hero to follow and emulate. The film’s most popular song, “Govinda ala re” or “Govinda has finally come” which the hero performed in the streets along with its characteristic pavement dwellers, echoed like a second coming for Nehru’s future plans for India. But, it was not to be.

Repeatedly attacked by senior members of his own Congress Party, like the ultra conservative Moraji Desai, for preparing his own daughter, Indira Gandhi, to take over his coveted prime-ministership, Nehru at the age of seventy-four in 1964, saw the end finally approaching. On January 6th, he suffered a stroke. On May 27th, at 6:00 a.m., he collapsed with a rupture of the aorta. He slipped into a coma, and at 2:00 p.m. he was pronounced dead.

Perhaps the Hindi film that best personified his sad and lonely exit was Sunil Dutt’s Yaadein or Only the Lonely that came out in 1964. In the expanse of two hours, a successful businessman was shown returning to his home that had steadfastly emptied itself of all the happiness it had once contained. His wife and two children had left him. Only their memories lay, scattered all over. The other woman that he had turned to, was also gone. Her traces, however, remained. Trying to find excuses and victims for his own self-justification, his gnawing prejudices slowly turned inwards. And when his childrens’ toys started attacking him in his hallucinations, the nadir was finally reached, and he hanged himself with his wife’s discarded sari. In the words of A.K. Ramanujan, this man, came into his house:

to lose (himself) among other things
lost long ago among
other things lost long ago.

Both he and Nehru seemed to have arrived at a point where they realized that they had lost all their plans and all their dreams, which they had once designed for their homes and their nation. Memories were now painful and hopeless because they only produced a long parade of scapegoats. One finger may have pointed at the world, but there were three others which were bent and pointing to the self. Some battles were won, but many had been lost. And there were miles to go before one slept…miles to go…but what had really happened?…Where, o where was that desh or that nation in which the Ganges or the ganga had once flowed?

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Author Note:
All background material related to Nehru and all the events that transpired during his long tenure from 1947 to 1964 are taken from India/50:  The Making of a Nation.  Edited by Ayaz Memon and Ranjona Banerji.  Bombay:  Ayaz Memon & Book Quest Publishers.  1997.
All material related to selectively chosen Hindi films that best represent the Nehruvian era are taken from Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema.  New Revised Edition by Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willemen.  New Delhi:  Oxford University Press, 1999.
What was truly amazing was how both these books with their valuable information and insights released from my own psyche, stored and buried memories of events, actual scenes from films, and songs that I had literally witnessed, heard, and experienced, having been born in 1949 and having lived both with Nehru's vision and the ones expressed by the Hindi cinema of that period.

Darius Cooper teaches Critical Thinking in the Humanities at San Diego Mesa College, California, USA.  His essays, poems and stories have been widely published in several film and literary journals in USA and India
A sample: Between Tradition and Modernity:  the Cinema of Satyajit Ray (Cambridge University Press).In Black and White:  Hollywood Melodrama and Guru Dutt(Seagull Publications).Beyond the Chameleon’s Skill (first book of poems) (Poetrywalla Pub).A Fuss About Queens and Other Stories (Om Books).