Sometime back I chanced upon a moth-eaten book at a relative’s place. The author’s name on the spine had caught my eye and I was sure I had struck gold as I gingerly pulled the paperback out from under a pile of books that were meant, quite possibly, to be disposed of. The writer was, to me, one of the greatest names in Indian cinema. His repertoirSometime back I chanced upon a moth-eaten book at a relative’s place. The author’s name on the spine had caught my eye and I was sure I had struck gold as I gingerly pulled the paperback out from under a pile of books that were meant, quite possibly, to be disposed of. The writer was, to me, one of the greatest names in Indian cinema. His repertoire can be summed up in one word – life. It embodied just one element – people.
It was a volume worth filching, and that I did. After all, we live in times where most books on mainstream Indian cinema are unabashed and obsequious eulogies. Probably meant for the consumption of people with single digit IQs. Or else, these books are written by people who are so self-absorbed that after zipping through the first few paras you will be filled with revulsion. The first are penned by a lot who have it beyond them to make their readers feel the pulse of the narrative, whatever be it. The second feel the pulse of only their own conceited selves. If something is amiss, it is the feel of life.
And life was what this book was all about, I realised as I read through Mad, Mad, Mad World of Indian Films. Word by word. Comma by comma. Para by para. You stay glued to a book like that – especially if it has been written by Khwaja Ahmed Abbas, or KA Abbas as he was better known. The 1977 paperback in question was a collection of 30-odd write-ups – most of them had been published earlier in Cine Blitz, Filmfare, Screen. When anecdotes, impressions like these are collated they effectively become an untold history of people who made Bollywood.
You would have doubtless heard of Prithviraj Kapoor, one of the first stars of the Bombay film industry. What you might not have, is what Abbas writes in this obit:
I remember Prithvi giving an impromptu rendering of Shylock before two of the world’s greatest masters of the screen and stage – the late VI Pudovkin and Nikolai Cherkasov. There was no stage, no lights, no costume. Prithvi was in his usual flowing, toga-like white khaddar dress. But as he began to intone Shakespeare’s well-known lines, one could vividly imagine the black-robed Jew, standing in the Roman court, surrounded by hate and racial ignorance. And the same lines which would have been rendered by many actors in a hundred languages of the world to satirise and ridicule the Jew, now became (as doubtless Shakespeare intended them to be) the voice of a persecuted, humiliated, embittered race, charged with pathos, with the memory of centuries of humiliation and persecution, with suppressed anger and resentment, climaxing in an outburst which demanded not personal vendetta but vengeance on behalf of an outraged people.
When Prithvi finished, exhausted by the very intensity of his performance, Pudovkin had tears in his eyes, Chirkasov was embracing and kissing the Indian actor, and the audience of barely a dozen sat spellbound by the magic of the actor’s art.
You too remain spellbound, as you flip over from his recollections about Prithviraj Kapoor to his sketch of Balraj Sahni, who Abbas says was the only one in India who ever deserved the title of a “people’s artiste.”
Balraj Sahni was not trained in a film institute. He was a student of English literature. Where, then, did he acquire his phenomenal acting skill? It was in the school of life that he learnt to observe human beings, their follies and their foibles, their weaknesses and their strength, their mannerisms and their modes of dress. And what an astonishing school it was. Consider his multifarious experiences and accomplishments.
Abbas, of course, would know and understand. His own screenplays, films, books were always about people. About life. He was not one who just wrote about people, he stood by them too. When his Shehar Aur Sapna (1964) won the President’s Gold Medal, Abbas shared the cash award with 12 other technicians and artists and the gold in the medal was given away in the marriage of the daughter of a long-time domestic servant.
The filmmaker-screenwriter- journalist was a multi-faceted man who wrote in English and Hindi, besides also being known as one of the leading lights of the Urdu short story. Abbas once wrote, “The novelists look down upon me as a short-story writer, while the short-story writers condemn me as nothing more than a scribe, while all of them together would contemptuously say that I am nothing more than a film-wallah.”
His tryst with Indian cinema began as a 21-year-old part-time film critic with the Bombay Chronicle in 1935. It happened perchance. The film critic of the paper, who needed to attend an art exhibition one evening, handed over the screening invite to Abbas. The film was V Shantaram’s Duniya Na Mane. The year was 1937, and Abbas reminiscences, “I wrote a long and, I think, readable review, the first piece of film criticism penned by me, which did not escape the notice of my editor.”
He would review another of Shantaram’s films subsequently – Admi. This would prompt the filmmaker to invite him to come and see the film once again “with him for I had concluded in my review with the statement that I would need to see the film several times to appreciate fully its artistic and social intelligence.” Abbas, in fact, would go on to write the screenplay/story for Shantaram’s Doctor Kotnis Ki Amar Kahani. This he did after writing two scripts – Naya Sansar and Chetan Anand’s Neecha Nagar, besides directing the landmark Dharti Ke Lal.
Abbas gets moved, he gives you respect, but he does not get carried away. This is what he has to say about the films Shantaram made later:
At seventy-two, one wishes still many, many years of fruitful, creative activity to one of the most youthful and evergreen master spirits of our cinema. But (as I once publicly said in Shantaram’s presence) one wishes that the old classics like Duniya Na Mane, Admi and Padosi could be seen and studied more often by the students of the cinema and by our filmmakers – including V Shantaram himself!
He and Raj Kapoor made one of the greatest screenwriter-filmmaker pairs in Indian film history. Who then would be better to comment on Raj Kapoor than Abbas himself:
Above everything else, he is interested in – himself…. Why do his friends, colleagues and contemporaries tolerate this supreme self-love and egoism of Raj Kapoor? If he loves only himself, why do we love him?
Abbas feels, thinks, analyses, and provides the answer:
This is the self-love of Narcissus who saw himself reflected in a pool of water and fell in love with – himself. This is not commonplace selfishness but a hankering for self-realisation which, in a materialistic environment, unfortunately must express itself in terms of material success.
Not everyone, on the other hand, could dare question Dilip Kumar. Abbas did:
He has tried his hand at writing and direction in several movies and they were, artistically and commercially, all flops. Must he insist in doing something for which he has neither the natural gift nor special training? That would not matter so much (after all, in the film industry there are any number of glorified amateurs wasting the financier’s money and the cinegoers’ time) but this writing and dabbling in direction spoils the work of Dilip Kumar the actor.
This is at once a tragedy and scandal. Nobody – not even he himself – has a right to crucify such a distinguished artiste on the cross of his ego!
Abbas, in his own words never wanted to make films, unlike Dilip saab.
I was involved and dragged into film production, almost against my nature, my inclination and my better judgment, I was originally a film critic when many producers, stung by my reviews, threatened to stop advertising, and my editor compromised by “kicking me upstairs,” promoting me to be editor of the Sunday edition.
Abbas wrote, directed and produced Dharti Ke Lal for the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) which carried the slogan “People’s Theatre Stars the People.” There were no stars in the film. Balraj Sahni, Shombhu Mitra, Tripti Mitra were all to become greats only later. Thousands of real peasants and workers enacted themselves. The film opened to packed houses. But on the second day, communal riots broke out in Bombay. Dharti Ke Lal, even this day, is reckoned as one of the significant creations of world cinema. The film, nevertheless, became a casualty of the riots and it took Abbas five years to pay off his debts. But the man remained resolute.
I was foolish enough to be committed, before commitment became fashionable in literary and film circles. It is this commitment that is sometimes sneeringly referred to as “pamphleteering” and “propagandising,” but I wear it like a badge of honour.
He was committed, and like all good journalists knew the value of deadlines. His last column “Last Page” arrived at the Blitz office a few hours after his death on June 1, 1987. And like all good journalists, he could not be bought off either. When Rajiv Gandhi commissioned him to write the history of the Congress party in its centenary year, Abbas did not shower accolades on either Indira Gandhi or Rajiv. The government refused to publish the paper. Abbas promptly returned the sum of Rs25,000 which he had been given for this assignment.
Over the years he made lesser films, but his commitment did not flinch:
Art, to my mind, is a social activity – and the cinema is the most social of all the arts. I say this not to uphold the formulas of box-office but to urge the new filmmakers to realize the power and the social significance of the great art medium. Great cinema, like all great art, must serve the spiritual needs of the people, express their unexpressed thoughts and emotions, their joys and sorrows, their urges and aspirations. It must make the people laugh and cry, it must occasionally make them think, it must stimulate their imagination, make them indignant against social injustices, must help them to understand life and its complexities, it must help man to understand himself.
In many different ways and styles of expression, this can be done, has been done, and will be done. New wave, old wave, all waves emerge from that ocean, and all waves return to the ocean. The people are that ocean!
If you have read through 1700+ words, this piece is in all likelihood going to leave you thinking. Meanwhile, I have something important to do. I need to figure out how to preserve this book. The pages have become brittle, they threaten to crumble the moment I touch them. I need to preserve it – they don’t write books like this anymore.e can be summed up in one word – life. It embodied just one element – people. It was a volume worth filching, and that I did. After all, we live in times where most books on mainstream Indian cinema are unabashed and obsequious eulogies. Probably meant for the consumption of people with single digit IQs. Or else, these books are written by people who are so self-absorbed that after zipping through the first few paras you will be filled with revulsion. The first are penned by a lot who have it beyond them to make their readers feel the pulse of the narrative, whatever be it. The second feel the pulse of only their own conceited selves. If something is amiss, it is the feel of life. And life was what this book was all about, I realised as I read through Mad, Mad, Mad World of Indian Films. Word by word. Comma by comma. Para by para. You stay glued to a book like that – especially if it has been written by Khwaja Ahmed Abbas, or KA Abbas as he was better known. The 1977 paperback in question was a collection of 30-odd write-ups – most of them had been published earlier in Cine Blitz, Filmfare, Screen. When anecdotes, impressions like these are collated they effectively become an untold history of people who made Bollywood. You would have doubtless heard of Prithviraj Kapoor, one of the first stars of the Bombay film industry. What you might not have, is what Abbas writes in this obit:
I remember Prithvi giving an impromptu rendering of Shylock before two of the world’s greatest masters of the screen and stage – the late VI Pudovkin and Nikolai Cherkasov. There was no stage, no lights, no costume. Prithvi was in his usual flowing, toga-like white khaddar dress. But as he began to intone Shakespeare’s well-known lines, one could vividly imagine the black-robed Jew, standing in the Roman court, surrounded by hate and racial ignorance. And the same lines which would have been rendered by many actors in a hundred languages of the world to satirise and ridicule the Jew, now became (as doubtless Shakespeare intended them to be) the voice of a persecuted, humiliated, embittered race, charged with pathos, with the memory of centuries of humiliation and persecution, with suppressed anger and resentment, climaxing in an outburst which demanded not personal vendetta but vengeance on behalf of an outraged people. When Prithvi finished, exhausted by the very intensity of his performance, Pudovkin had tears in his eyes, Chirkasov was embracing and kissing the Indian actor, and the audience of barely a dozen sat spellbound by the magic of the actor’s art.
You too remain spellbound, as you flip over from his recollections about Prithviraj Kapoor to his sketch of Balraj Sahni, who Abbas says was the only one in India who ever deserved the title of a “people’s artiste.”
Balraj Sahni was not trained in a film institute. He was a student of English literature. Where, then, did he acquire his phenomenal acting skill? It was in the school of life that he learnt to observe human beings, their follies and their foibles, their weaknesses and their strength, their mannerisms and their modes of dress. And what an astonishing school it was. Consider his multifarious experiences and accomplishments.
Abbas, of course, would know and understand. His own screenplays, films, books were always about people. About life. He was not one who just wrote about people, he stood by them too. When his Shehar Aur Sapna (1964) won the President’s Gold Medal, Abbas shared the cash award with 12 other technicians and artists and the gold in the medal was given away in the marriage of the daughter of a long-time domestic servant. The filmmaker-screenwriter- journalist was a multi-faceted man who wrote in English and Hindi, besides also being known as one of the leading lights of the Urdu short story. Abbas once wrote, “The novelists look down upon me as a short-story writer, while the short-story writers condemn me as nothing more than a scribe, while all of them together would contemptuously say that I am nothing more than a film-wallah.” His tryst with Indian cinema began as a 21-year-old part-time film critic with the Bombay Chronicle in 1935. It happened perchance. The film critic of the paper, who needed to attend an art exhibition one evening, handed over the screening invite to Abbas. The film was V Shantaram’s Duniya Na Mane. The year was 1937, and Abbas reminiscences, “I wrote a long and, I think, readable review, the first piece of film criticism penned by me, which did not escape the notice of my editor.” He would review another of Shantaram’s films subsequently – Admi. This would prompt the filmmaker to invite him to come and see the film once again “with him for I had concluded in my review with the statement that I would need to see the film several times to appreciate fully its artistic and social intelligence.” Abbas, in fact, would go on to write the screenplay/story for Shantaram’s Doctor Kotnis Ki Amar Kahani. This he did after writing two scripts – Naya Sansar and Chetan Anand’s Neecha Nagar, besides directing the landmark Dharti Ke Lal. Abbas gets moved, he gives you respect, but he does not get carried away. This is what he has to say about the films Shantaram made later:
At seventy-two, one wishes still many, many years of fruitful, creative activity to one of the most youthful and evergreen master spirits of our cinema. But (as I once publicly said in Shantaram’s presence) one wishes that the old classics like Duniya Na Mane, Admi and Padosi could be seen and studied more often by the students of the cinema and by our filmmakers – including V Shantaram himself!
He and Raj Kapoor made one of the greatest screenwriter-filmmaker pairs in Indian film history. Who then would be better to comment on Raj Kapoor than Abbas himself:
Above everything else, he is interested in – himself…. Why do his friends, colleagues and contemporaries tolerate this supreme self-love and egoism of Raj Kapoor? If he loves only himself, why do we love him?
Abbas feels, thinks, analyses, and provides the answer:
This is the self-love of Narcissus who saw himself reflected in a pool of water and fell in love with – himself. This is not commonplace selfishness but a hankering for self-realisation which, in a materialistic environment, unfortunately must express itself in terms of material success.
Not everyone, on the other hand, could dare question Dilip Kumar. Abbas did:
He has tried his hand at writing and direction in several movies and they were, artistically and commercially, all flops. Must he insist in doing something for which he has neither the natural gift nor special training? That would not matter so much (after all, in the film industry there are any number of glorified amateurs wasting the financier’s money and the cinegoers’ time) but this writing and dabbling in direction spoils the work of Dilip Kumar the actor. This is at once a tragedy and scandal. Nobody – not even he himself – has a right to crucify such a distinguished artiste on the cross of his ego!
Abbas, in his own words never wanted to make films, unlike Dilip saab.
I was involved and dragged into film production, almost against my nature, my inclination and my better judgment, I was originally a film critic when many producers, stung by my reviews, threatened to stop advertising, and my editor compromised by “kicking me upstairs,” promoting me to be editor of the Sunday edition.
Abbas wrote, directed and produced Dharti Ke Lal for the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) which carried the slogan “People’s Theatre Stars the People.” There were no stars in the film. Balraj Sahni, Shombhu Mitra, Tripti Mitra were all to become greats only later. Thousands of real peasants and workers enacted themselves. The film opened to packed houses. But on the second day, communal riots broke out in Bombay. Dharti Ke Lal, even this day, is reckoned as one of the significant creations of world cinema. The film, nevertheless, became a casualty of the riots and it took Abbas five years to pay off his debts. But the man remained resolute.
I was foolish enough to be committed, before commitment became fashionable in literary and film circles. It is this commitment that is sometimes sneeringly referred to as “pamphleteering” and “propagandising,” but I wear it like a badge of honour.
He was committed, and like all good journalists knew the value of deadlines. His last column “Last Page” arrived at the Blitz office a few hours after his death on June 1, 1987. And like all good journalists, he could not be bought off either. When Rajiv Gandhi commissioned him to write the history of the Congress party in its centenary year, Abbas did not shower accolades on either Indira Gandhi or Rajiv. The government refused to publish the paper. Abbas promptly returned the sum of Rs25,000 which he had been given for this assignment. Over the years he made lesser films, but his commitment did not flinch:
Art, to my mind, is a social activity – and the cinema is the most social of all the arts. I say this not to uphold the formulas of box-office but to urge the new filmmakers to realize the power and the social significance of the great art medium. Great cinema, like all great art, must serve the spiritual needs of the people, express their unexpressed thoughts and emotions, their joys and sorrows, their urges and aspirations. It must make the people laugh and cry, it must occasionally make them think, it must stimulate their imagination, make them indignant against social injustices, must help them to understand life and its complexities, it must help man to understand himself. In many different ways and styles of expression, this can be done, has been done, and will be done. New wave, old wave, all waves emerge from that ocean, and all waves return to the ocean. The people are that ocean!
If you have read through 1700+ words, this piece is in all likelihood going to leave you thinking. Meanwhile, I have something important to do. I need to figure out how to preserve this book. The pages have become brittle, they threaten to crumble the moment I touch them. I need to preserve it – they don’t write books like this anymore.
