by Connie Haham
Desai spoke about Sai Baba and explained how the saint found his way into Amar Akbar Anthony:
It was never clear about Sai Baba whether he was a Hindu or a Muslim. Until now it is not clear who he was because he believed in both Islam and in Hinduism. Hence he did not get himself cremated. He attained samaadhi (liberation) and he was entombed in a place. So Muslims also believe in Sai Baba, as do Hindus and Parsees. Sai Baba is considered a very big saint in Maharashtra. The pilgrimage place is in Shirdi which I visit every year on the 13th of April, the day my wife died. I go to pay homage and to pray for my wife’s soul. She was a great, great believer in Sai Baba. I remember having many photos of Sai Baba in my house. She used to read Sai Baba granth (book), and whenever my son would fall sick, she would always say, ‘Sai Baba, Sai Baba.’ She would get vibhuti (ashes) from a temple and put it on my son’s forehead.
She was a great believer in Sai Baba; hence that rubbed off on me. She said, ‘Why don’t we bring Sai Baba into our film?’ And so when we had to show a deity who performed a miracle in Amar Akbar Anthony, I thought why don’t we show Sai Baba. Quite a few Muslims, Parsees and Hindus go to Shirdi.
Sai Baba, then, represents harmony and syncretism, a site and a symbol of the meeting, blending and intertwining of religions. What carries one interpretation in India, however, can provoke different reactions abroad. The sight of Akbar singing and praying along with other believers before a statue in a human form comes as a shock to some Muslims. One Pakistani, for instance, found the encompassing nature of the Hindu religion as shown in Amar Akbar Anthony to be a threat to his religion and expressed his concern over the tendency of people from his country to incorporate Hindu practices into Islam as a result of regularly viewing Hindu-based films from India. A Kuwaiti, having seen the same film, took a more casual view. Questioned specifically about the scene in which Akbar prays to Sai Baba, he said, ‘According to my religion, I’m not even supposed to go to the movies. What difference does it make what I see when I get there?!’ In another Muslim country, Dubai, the censors failed even to notice or to object to the more essential Hindu nature of the film, drawn as they were by the more obvious, concrete presence of the church.
The Sai Baba scene is one of the richest in the film. At one level, it is simply good cinema—well acted by both stars and junior artistes, well filmed, with good music, good special effects, and with a good balance between action and emotion. The scene is also pivotal to the story line. Bharti, still blind, is being chased by Robert and a member of his gang. The singing from Shirdi attracts her; she makes her way inside in search of safety. The gangsters who try to pursue her are stopped when a cobra on a sacred mission suddenly blocks the entrance to the shrine, menacingly puffing out its hood. As the music swells with emotion, two small, flickering flames appear, first in the eyes of the Sai Baba statue, and then in Bharti’s eyes. Slowly, Sai Baba comes into focus for her, and superimposed, are her three young children beckoning her forward. She crawls to the statue, kisses it in deep gratitude, and announces the miracle to the amazed gathering. Cinema audiences over the years have either marvelled at or been annoyed by this miracle. Actor Om Puri, for example, complained:
If Manmohan Desai were to deal only with fantasy, I would have more regard for him. But he claims to base his films on newspaper clippings and real happenings. In Amar Akbar Anthony he has a scene where the blind Nirupa Roy goes to a temple. Two shafts of light emerge from the eyes of the deity and Nirupa gets her sight back. These sorts of miracles are very dangerous things to show. Filmmakers have no right to play around with people’s blind faith.1
Manmohan Desai revealed his own feelings about blindness and the miracle of sight regained thus:
You see, blindness, I feel, is the real curse of God. There is no greater handicap than blindness. My heart always goes out to somebody who is blind. A person without hands, legs can exist, can see. Just imagine a person who cannot see, who can hear—who can hear the laughter of children, hear a river or brook—they can hear so many nice things but they cannot see… . It’s a curse of God. And I have always felt that if you show a blind person (on screen), there are millions of people like me whose heart goes out for the blind. And if you show a blind person regaining his sight…! I wish there was some way that all the blind people in the world could see, as there is no greater handicap or torture. I have used blindness time and again because, as I said, my sympathy goes out for them and whatever I may be doing in my life (in the way of charity), I try to do it for the blind.
losing and finding
While Amar Akbar Anthony is rich in thematic goals, the ambitions of the plot are simpler: to reunite the separated family members, to bring love to the three brothers of the story and to give the spectators a bundle of surprises in the context of an otherwise predictable cops-and-robbers, lost-found story. This last goal is reached brilliantly in a number of scenes. One astute sequence is worth noting.
A group of coolies are transporting smuggled goods up from a boat on the waterfront. Among the men struggling under a heavy load is Robert, now greatly reduced from his former position of money and power. Robert trips over the foot of a well-dressed man. The camera travels up to the man’s face and we discover that the smuggling chief is none other than Kishanlal, present to supervise the handling of the latest shipment of contraband. Robert is wearing a simple white uniform, just as Kishanlal was at the beginning of the film, and Kishanlal is wearing exactly the same elegant black pin-striped suit, red vest, white shirt, red silk tie, and dressy black shoes that Robert wore when he was first introduced. Robert throws himself at Kishanlal’s feet, begging to know the whereabouts of his daughter Jenny. ‘Don’t you remember?’ Robert asks before recounting how Kishanlal stole his child away while she was just a baby. Kishanlal answers in a perfect imitation of Robert’s voice and accent, precisely as he was told 22 years earlier, ‘Oh yes, I remember; I forgot to put ice in my whiskey.’ Some has spilled on his shoe; he has Robert stoop down on his knees to clean it off. He then tosses a one-anna coin to Robert, exactly the same coin that Robert cruelly threw to Kishanlal at the beginning of the story. In a split second Robert’s pleas turn to anger and, like Kishanlal before him, he grabs a gun and shoots Kishanlal in the back. Kishanlal slumps over, but soon stands up straight, takes off his jacket, and, as we might have expected, reveals his bulletproof vest. But now comes the punch line, ‘Robert, I knew that against you I had to cover my back, not my chest.’ Kishanlal, then, has become like Robert, but only up to a point. Like many other Desai fathers, Kishanlal is moderately good. He has indeed become a smuggler, having metamorphosed into an apparent carbon copy of Robert; yet he retains a sense of integrity. He must go to prison, but he will go honorably.
Making a good lost-found story requires talent. Desai described the difficulty:
It is the art of losing in the first two reels and how you reunite them; that is the secret; that is the catch. If you do it beautifully, it holds the audience’s interest. Many other people have done it, but they haven’t been able to make it click It is very difficult to bring about the union in a different way every time.
Rarely has any rejoining involved the complexity it has in Amar Akbar Anthony. The lost individual with an identifying mark is a timeworn gimmick in Indian cinema. Amar Akbar Anthony explodes this device into a huge array of crucial props and signs and key bits of information, as varied as the cast is large. The toy gun provides the link between Amar and his father; the Jai Santoshi Ma medallion and the suicide note join Kishanlal and Anthony; Akbar’s photo taken soon after his adoption serves as proof to Bharti that he is her son. Salma overhears Robert name Bharti as Kishanlal’s wife; Akbar then helps Bharti find her lost husband.
All the pieces fit into the puzzle just in the time for the three brothers to band together to save Jenny from her father who, to save himself, wants to marry her to the calculating Zebisco. The title song mocks the villains congregated for a wedding—that will not take place—and cons
ecrates the reunion of the three young men, accompanied by the women they love: ‘Ek, ek se bhale do; do, do se bhale teen…Amar Akbar Anthony.’ (Two is better than one; three is better than two…Amar Akbar Anthony.) The song ends. A fast and funny fight begins. Amar and Anthony send Robert’s strong men banging against one another as though they were billiard balls. Akbar’s blow lands Robert in jail, in the same cell as Kishanlal. Bharti cries outside his cell, sad to have found her husband only to lose him again. Kishanlal consolingly reminds her that she has her three sons once more and three daughters-in-law too. Kishanlal receives permission to hug his sons. And the three young couples go riding off into the sunset in Akbar’s car, to the refrain of the title song ‘Amar Akbar Anthony.’
Amar Akbar Anthony’s importance is multifaceted. Certainly, though, one lasting effect of the film’s success was to confirm Amitabh Bachchan’s box office supremacy and to solidify the Manmohan Desai-Amitabh Bachchan working relationship. Let us, then, give the final word to Amitabh Bachchan who, while listing his favourite Manmohan Desai film roles in January l984, evaluated his part in Amar Akbar Anthony thus:
Well, I would certainly put the one in Amar Akbar Anthony as something that’s right on top of the list because it was something totally fresh from the point of view of filmmaking, of commercial filmmaking in India. It was also very fresh as a role for me because I hadn’t done something that light-hearted, something as frivolous as that. I’d been doing some rather intense work before that and it opened up a totally new field for me and a new kind of audience. And ever since then I think that particular characterization has always been very popular. At least as far as Manmohan Desai’s concerned, we’ve always tried to bring some shades of that (character) back into all his films because he (Manmohan Desai) is one who believes in trying to go back to something that’s already proved successful once. And his logic and his thinking haven’t proved wrong so far.
coolie
Manmohan Desai claimed a life-long fascination with Islam and Islamic culture. Living just blocks away from the Bhendi Bazaar, the largest Muslim neighbourhood in Bombay, he was always in contact with Muslims. He wanted to make a film for his 100 million Muslim compatriots. Manmohan Desai described the inception of Coolie:
My office is in a crowded area near Bombay Central, so we’d see these coolies in their red shirts and dhotis and pyjamas in and out, in and out. Very often we’d see them when we’d go by train. They are very fascinating characters. They would never go out of turn. They would sit in a queue, then run when the train comes. Each one would take his compartment. They all have their badges. There’s no infighting amongst them. And I’m told, as a matter of fact, towards the end of the day they all sit together, they pool their money, and then they divide the money equally. I said, look, Amitabh has been identified as Anthony (the bootlegger); Amitabh has been identified in Naseeb as a waiter, why not bring the characters down to earth so people can identify with them easily… I said, I have not touched upon a Muslim social, so why not bring in a Muslim character? I told it to the writer Prayag Raj, and the whole fabrication of Coolie was started. Then we felt, why not bring in a falcon? That is the national emblem of the United Arab Emirates. So we brought all these things that appeal to the Muslims, and we put one Hindu character there, Chintu, that is, Rishi Kapoor.
Interestingly, in his piece ‘Muslim Ethos in Indian Cinema’ critic Iqbal Masud enriches the interpretation of the falcon and proves yet again that no matter what film a director may intend to make, the interaction between the story onscreen and the accumulated knowledge and experience of each individual member of the audience is such that a personal and partially unique film will be constructed in the mind of each viewer. Iqbal Masud says:
The old Mehboob syndrome of Muslim radicalism is reproduced in Coolie. Amitabh carries a hawk named Allah Rakha on his wrist. This is a direct reference to poet Iqbal’s hawk (Shaheen)—a central symbol in his poetry. Shaheen for Iqbal represented the aspiring, soaring spirit of man as in the line. Tu Shaheen hai parwaz hai kaam tera, (you are a hawk, your destiny is flight).1
Along with his noble motives, Desai, as usual, combined good business sense. Muslims are movie-goers, regular clients who could fill the coffers of the box offices, and Muslims live throughout India. Desai thus hoped to have in Coolie an even bigger grosser than his extremely successful Amar Akbar Anthony. Desai’s detractors ignored his higher motives altogether and accused him of simply pandering to the moneybags of Middle Eastern countries. And though 1983 to early 1984 was a relatively calm time communally, the centrality of a Muslim figure did not seem to please everyone. Certain airport workers, for example, stated stiffly that, because of its emphasis on Islam, they would not see Coolie. Still, it was impossible to imagine at that time that less than a decade later, Bombay would be in flames as politicians played the communal card and public discourse turned towards rejection of ‘the other.’
A wide public did, however, accept Desai’s film with its portrayal of a poor Muslim hero, women realistically wearing burkhas and praying five times a day, and in which Muslim festivals play a central part. This is not to say that the Muslim hierarchy immediately felt honoured by the attention paid to Islam in the film. The pre-release publicity alone almost gave rise to riots. On posters plastered around Bombay, Amitabh Bachchan was shown with the Koran at his side rather than, as the religious leaders felt seemly, above him in its rightful place. Under pressure, Desai ordered all of the posters in Bombay torn down and replaced with less offensive publicity. Even on the new posters, though, Amitabh Bachchan was draped, as in the film, in a sacred shawl normally reserved only for holy men. Desai again tried to placate the leaders by telling them to see the film before passing judgment. After a great deal of official Muslim reticence, the tables turned drastically. The Muslim public began to see the film, and like the Christians at the release of Amar Akbar Anthony, they were overjoyed, ‘See our Coolie; see our Iqbal Bhai!’ Manmohan Desai added:
Trade journals are saying now that this is a Muslim mythological. The correct impression of the impact of Coolie on Muslim audiences comes from watching the film at the Alankar Theatre (at the edge of the Bhendi Bazaar neighbourhood). I knew that once the ladies in pardah started filling that theatre, making the house full daily, that the film was a hit. The Muslims have taken that film to their hearts. Otherwise, the Muslim ladies wouldn’t be out there. They’re very orthodox. They’re not allowed to see any Tom Dick and Harry film by the family, unless the male members see it and approve.
Manmohan Desai, thrilled at its success, said, ‘I wish I could make a pilgrimage to Mecca to offer thanks.’ As always, a magnanimous caring for the masses for whom his films were destined and a concern for quality filmmaking concurred with very real, bottom-line self-interest: a film must bring in crowds; it must make money. This Coolie did, being one of the biggest grossers of 1983-84 (or the biggest, depending upon the figures to which one refers).
video threat
After the threatened Muslim boycott, another menace loomed over Coolie, just as over all films post-1980. The long-feared video threat finally materialized into a real loss of revenue at the box office and dried up a once booming Indian film circuit. Foreign markets, especially in England and the Middle East, gave way almost entirely before a cheap, easily available, abundant stock of films on cassette. Films were soon being released on video, either in official or in pirated form, well before theatre premieres.
For several years, industry planners blithely continued to bank on the domestic market, the logic being that in a country as poor as India, the masses would never have access to video technology. Human ingenuity proved the forecasters wrong. Tea-stall owners, even in the heart of slums, went into debt to buy video players; the money from increased business quickly made repayment possible. Servants, who had before negotiated access to television, began giving first preference to employers with VCRs. The irony, of course, is that people the world over began watching many more Hindi fi
lms at a time when making them was becoming an increasingly precarious business.
Like other film directors of the eighties, Desai was petrified of the video menace. In his fighting moments he wanted to see video pirates flogged. When feeling more resigned, he said simply, ‘You can’t fight technology.’ To a certain extent, though, he did fight, and, at least for Coolie, he won a minor victory. Draconian measures, including police raids of video shops, were taken to insure that no pirated copies reached the shelves until several weeks after the Coolie’s theatre release. Even in Europe Coolie was seen on big screens before entering people’s living rooms.
the making of the film
Coolie was the first film that Manmohan Desai co-directed. His long-time associate Prayag Raj sat in the director’s seat for many of the scenes shot. Coolie is an MKD film, produced by Manmohan’s son Ketan Desai. Like Amar Akbar Anthony and Naseeb, Coolie had the benefit of Desai’s own financing. Desai believed in spending money on a film if the expense could be made to show. With many on-site locations, a huge cast including 2000-3000 extras, and a record 245 prints of the film distributed simultaneously, no expense was spared in the effort to make Coolie stand apart from the rest of popular film production. Because of the huge investment Coolie represented, Manmohan Desai was biting his fingernails, so to speak, before its release and telling journalists that his new film had better be a hit because otherwise he and his son Ketan might find themselves working as coolies at Victoria Station.
