Bade Bhaand To Bade Bhaand

The Spirit Of Rajasthan

It is due to a woeful lack of awareness of literature in regional languages, that Vijaydan Detha is not better known. The great writer and folklorist (who passed away in 2013) was once a contender for the Nobel Prize for literature, and has often been called the Shakespeare of Rajasthan, with that unfortunate tendency of  measuring every Indian’s achievement with a western yardstick.

Detha or Bijji as he was affectionately called, belonged to a family of Chaarans or folk bards. Through his remarkable literary career, he won every major award, but he never sought such honours. He spent most of his life in his village Borunda, and dressed in simple dhoti-kurta. If someone wanted to work with him, they would have to go there.  Shyam Benegal made a film called Charandas Chor on Detha’s story, which Habib Tanvir turned into a lively folk play—and both went to Borunda to interact with him. Prakash Jha’s Parinati, Mani Kaul’s Duvidha and Amol Palekar’s Paheli  were based on his stories, but this is just a tiny fraction of his vast body or work, that involved collecting, interpreting and retelling folk stories from his native state.  If the language, lifestyle, caste, class and gender issues of Rajasthan are to be understood, their essence is to be found in Detha’s stories.

Detha's work was shared at lively Ek Tha Detha session at Chaupaal. This wonderful cultural organization that started in 1998, meets regularly with such literary evenings devoted to sharing and discussing the works of beloved writers through readings, anecdotes and performances. A group of friends—Atul Tiwari, Rajendra Gupta, Shekhar Sen, Chadraprakash Dwivedi, Ashok Banthia and Ashok Bindal had established Chaupaal, and this meeting one Sunday a month has been an unbroken tradition.  

Folk tales, proverbs, aphorisms have been passed down the centuries in an oral tradition, which Detha lovingly gathered, nurtured and narrated for a modern age—these stories of astonishing boldness and compassion. He best known work is Bataan Ri Phulwari, a fourteen volume collection of stories inspired by Rajasthani folklore.  It’s surprising that more of his work has not been performed—they are rich in poetry, metaphor, observation and nuance. He and his collaborator Dr. Komal Kothari set up Rupayan Sansthan, an institution that has done a great job of researching and archiving Rajasthani folk literature. (His grandson Komal was present at the event, obviously named after Detha’s lifelong friend.)

At the Chaupaal event, the very talented Ajay Kumar (who had won international acclaim as Puck in Tim Supple’s celebrated production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, performed a brilliant  Detha story Rijak Ki Maryada  as Bade Bhaand To Bade Bhaand. With live musicians, and a few props Kumar did an energetic one-man nautanki-style show about a Bhaand  (folk performer), who is so adept at the Swaang style (in which the actor takes on the form of the person he is portraying) that his audiences cannot distinguish him from the character he is playing.

A rich man who mistakes Shankar Bhaand for a real holy man offers him all his wealth in a gesture of renunciation inspired by the ascetic. The Bhaand refuses to accept—he just takes what is due to him. His fame reaches the royal court and he is called to perform there.  The king and courtiers order him to play the role of a Daayan  (witch).  Shankar pleads with the king not to force him to do this role, because once he took on this guise, he could rip out a man’s heart and drink his blood.

The sly courtiers and the foolish king (“rulers are thick-headed”) compel him perform as a witch and when he arrives in court, so convincing is his look that everyone runs away in terror except the king’s drunken brother-in-law. As he had predicted, Shankar as the Daayan rips out the man’s heart which causes his death. The queen demands that the Bhaand be executed for killing her brother or she will not touch a drop of water.  In all fairness, the king cannot punish the performer who not only excelled in the part, but also warned him of the pissible outcome. The evil barber (in folkore, the barber is often portrayed as cunning) suggests that the Bhaand be made to play a Sati. As expected the proud Bhaand perishes in the flames, while playing the role to perfection. (Ajay’s Kumar’s soot smeared body twitches in a terrifying manner.)  The king’s honour is saved, but the Bhaand proves to be a better human – a man true to his word, a trait much valued in the Indian tradition.

A story deftly blends humour and pathos to create a work that says a lot about class conflicts in feudal India than any scholarly treatise could.  The greatness of Vijaydan Detha’s writing comes across perfectly.

Timepass Talkies

Fun With Bloopers

Readers of a Filmfare would remember a column called Readers Don’t Digest, in which people would write in with gaffes they spotted while watching movies. Mostly continuity errors like the heroine’s hair style changing during the course of one scene, or the make and number plate of a car changing in mid-scene.  Made you wonder whether people were watching the film or looking for blunders. Now, of course, there are websites that serve this function.

Screenwriter and film buff Kiran Kotrial used to see films multiple times, and after the first time, look around the frame and catch goofs, some of them hilarious.  Once when he saw a particularly bad film, and almost fell of his chair laughing, he thought that this experience should be a communal one. He hired a hall, put in about 60 chairs and invited friends to watch the film with him; by the time it ended, word had gone around, the audience had doubled.

Over the next decade, Kotrial started having private shows of his collection of funny scenes and gaffes from films, the audience growing by word of mouth—friends telling friends about the show, and his fan following grew.  Film people started chipping for the venue and snacks; some (like a very sporting Sachin Pilgaonkar) turned to make fun of their own ‘ham’ scenes. 

Admirers of the show urged Kotrial to have a ticketed public show and that’s how Timepass Talkies reached a Bandra stage.  Even though it is a random collection of scenes, the show is screamingly funny, and has potential to grow into a really enjoyable comedy show. Kotrial keeps it simple and though he is making fun of Bollywood, it is not insulting or nasty.

Some scenes are obviously due to carelessness of the continuity people – like the scene from Department, in which Sanjay Dutt starts getting into building with his hair in a crew cut, and with every floor he climbs, his hair grows a little and by the time he reaches the terrace, he has a full head of hair.  But to catch some mistakes needs a really keen eye, like the one from Manzil in which Amitabh Bachchan is singing on stage, with a man sitting behind him, nodding his head; the camera cuts to the audience, and there’s the same man in the audience, wearing a suit and trying to look appreciative. The camera cuts to the entrance of the hall to get a shot of people entering, and there’s the man, who Kotrial jovially called “producer ka rishtedar” amidst the audience on the other side of the aisle. It would take a very careful viewer to catch a face in the crowd.  And the film was directed by Basu Chatterjee, who let it slip, or didn’t notice how the junior artistes were seated.

Kotrial has another very funny clip to do with junior artistes, from the film Holiday, in which, he says, a bunch of girls must have been instructed to look casual and do something with their hair, which results in a comical background when dozens of girls are frantically stroking their hair!

Goofs slip past the undoubtedly vigilant eyes of the best directors—like the last scene in Yash Chopra’s masterpiece Deewar, in which Shashi Kapoor calls his mother on stage where he is receiving an award for bravery. Nirupa Roy was sitting in the audience with Neetu Singh, she walks up to the stage, turns around to look at the audience and there she is sitting in the same place.  And there’s the scene from Ramesh Sippy’s Saagar, in which Rishi Kapoor in singing with a band behind him, without anybody noticing that half of them are just standing holding their musical instruments not playing them; or the scene of a baraat in which the drummer in the band is beating on the drum with great enthusiasm when the stick flies out of his hand, he looks non plussed for a second and carries on hitting the drum with his hand.  There is a funny lapse in Sholay, when Amitabh Bachchan lies dying before a distraught Dharmendra; a man doing his business behind the bushes in the distance starts to get up, sees the scene on and quickly sits down.  There’s a scene from Don in which Amitabh Bachchan binds, gags and locks Arpana Chaudhary in the bathroom and goes out to sing the Main hoon Don number. The actress is seen frantically trying to open the latch inside; and as Kotrial points out, if the bathroom is locked from the inside, did Amitabh get out? Or the one from Baby in which Anupam Kher watches a news clip in which the camera shooting the anchor is visible.

There are several such scenes that Kotrial has collected, along with bad dance moves, (see Dharmendra dance to Yehi hai tamanna from Aap Ki Parchhaiyan, to have a giggling fit), or hammy acting which Rajendra Kumar aces. And there’s a truly priceless one of Shammi Kapoor dancing to Baar baar dekho in China Town, with a bunch of chorus dancers —every time he is in the vicinity of a particular dancer, she lets out a cussword that can easily be lip-read.

Timepass Talkies ends with clips from a film called Shaitani Dracula, which has reached cult status as arguably the worst film of all time, but that’s another story. Kotrial has a hit on his hands, a show which, he says, is the only one of its kind in the world. That may well be so— it is a show by a Bollywood fan for Bollywood fans.

A Friend's Story

Message To Go

A revival of Vijay Tendulkar’s Mitrachi Goshta in English (Gowri Ramnarayan’s translation), as A Friend’s Story (directed by Akash Khurana) was austere in its presentation but powerful in impact.  (Disclosure: I work for the NCPA that produced this play, so the following words are about the play, not the production).

Tendulkar’s play was provocative and so relevant that it could have been written yesterday, but for period details that set it in the 1950s. The playwright had taken it upon himself to puncture accepted social norms, and under special attack was middle-class sexual hypocrisy. Mitrachi Goshta was written at time when there was so much confusion about homosexuality.  The women’s movement was just about taking off, and though women were being encouraged to study, get involved in the arts and sports, ultimately they had to marry a man their families chose and put an end to their own aspirations.

 Sumitra, or Mitra (played by Sayalee Phatak) as she likes to be called, is not like other girls her age, and in a burst of self-awareness rare for one so young and a time when coming of the closet was not an option – the existence of a closet was not even known to women—she understands that she can’t be a man’s woman.  But lack of a support structure and openness about alternate sexuality results in her behavior being aggressive, obsessive (towards the girl she loves, played by Parna Pethe) and reckless. The narrator of her story is her sympathetic friend Bapu (Abhay Mahajan), who tries very hard to help her, but after a point, even he is baffled by her and unable to withstand the gale force of her passion. The loss of Nama, the hate attacks by Nama’s jilted boyfriend (Dhruv Kalra) and finally the withdrawal of Bapu’s friendship pushes Mitra into an abyss of hopelessness.

Back in 1981 when the play was first performed in Marathi (Rohini Hattangady courageously played Mitra) a girl like Sumitra would be lost in a haze of ignorance and incomprehension; today, over three decades later, she would probably not be so alone, but unless she had an unusually enlightened family, she would still be trying to get a fix on her identity, amidst all the token noises of understanding the ‘rainbow’ spectrum.  Which is why Tendulkar's play was, and remains, significant.