Dilip Kumar: The Substance and the Shadow

by Dilip Kumar

  With Ashok Kumar – lifelong friends.

  Ashok Kumar came out of the floor and called out to one of the boys to open his make-up room. As the boy ran to fetch the door keys, I recognized another young man walking towards us. That was Raj Kapoor, who was justly shocked to see me there. He was his wonderful jovial self as he gathered from me that I had joined the studio as an actor. ‘Does your father know?’ he asked me mischievously. I did not reply because both Ashok Bhaiyya and Devika Rani were standing by our side and they were pleasantly surprised to learn that Raj and I knew each other. Raj gave a short account of our football days at Khalsa College, which made Devika Rani observe: ‘That’s indeed nice. It’s a game I wished I could play like the boys at school.’

  Devika Rani left us to chat with one another and walked briskly back to her office. There was an informality in the way Ashok Kumar and Raj interacted, which I liked. It was not like an office where you addressed somebody senior as ‘sir’ and spoke only when spoken to. Here Raj was talking continuously, describing our escapades at Khalsa College and I thought he would give away the secret that I had joined the studio without Aghaji’s knowledge. It was something I did not want the people in the studio to know just then because it would have created an impression of my doing things secretly. Fortunately, he did not bring up the subject and I was relieved. There was no doubt that Raj was happy to see me and welcome me into the profession. He knew how painfully shy I used to be in college and he must have wondered how I would fit into a profession that was not for shy, reserved people.

  At the studio the next day, I was introduced to one Shah Nawaz Khan. He came across as a crude, rough man to me. He asked me if I was a Pathan and when I replied in the affirmative, he bellowed and laughed as if I had told him something incredibly funny. He said he knew about my being a Pathan from the colour of my cheeks and my aloofness. So, if he knew it, what was so funny that he had to laugh like a neighing horse, I wanted to ask him. He next asked me how many brothers I had. I told him I had five. He went into a fit again and I was sure I was wasting time with a crazy man. He said: ‘Tum agar chhe bhai hote to mera kya bigaad lete?’ (This can be roughly translated as: ‘Even if you are six brothers, what can you do to me?’) Now it was getting too much and too personal, so I just got up and went to see Devika Rani and told her how stupidly the man had spoken to me. She did not say anything; she simply patted me on the back and sent me home.

  After my departure, she must have given him a piece of her mind because, the next day, he was apologetic and said he wasn’t meaning to offend me. Such jibes were common at Bombay Talkies, he added. I wondered if he was telling me the truth because the people I had met like Ashok Bhaiyya and David Abraham (a noted character actor) were ever so civilized and soft-spoken. I realized that David knew what Shah Nawaz had told me. We were a few days away from Bakhri Eid. ‘Do you exchange greeting cards on Eid?’ David asked us when he saw me avoiding Shah Nawaz.

  On the day of Eid, I received a greeting card from Shah Nawaz. It was accompanied by a small yellow packet with a tiny note: this is for your pubic hair. I was speechless with horror. At first, I wanted to go and show the note to Devika Rani. Then I thought it would be very stupid of me to do so. I did not show any trace of anger and I just left for home. When I arrived at the studio the next day, I went up to David and I left the small yellow packet with my pubic hair on his table along with the card and the note. When David saw the materials on his table, he called Shah Nawaz and showed him the mess. They laughed and laughed for quite a while. After that, Shah Nawaz told me: ‘Now you are one of us. We thought you needed some ragging to make you overcome your reticence.’ He spontaneously embraced me and assured me that there wouldn’t be any more ragging.

  *Nautanki is a drama form from Uttar Pradesh. It also means acting.

  9

  LIGHTS, CAMERA, ACTION!

  I … became aware that an actor needed to strengthen his instincts because the duality between the real and unreal cannot be sorted out by the mind, which is more concerned with truth and logic in any normal situation. The mind will always tell you this is nonsense …. It is only instinct that will help you to absorb what you have to absorb from the script and drive you to render a performance coated with realism and conviction despite the knowledge of it all being fiction and drama.

  BOMBAY TALKIES WAS THE BEST THING THAT HAPPENED TO ME at that juncture in my life. I couldn’t have found a better job than the one offered to me by Devika Rani. Sure, I had no clue what acting in front of a camera was. It was something to be studied and learned and practised. What was delightful was the ambience of the studio, which was a mix of what one would seek and find in a university or any educational institution and what one would expect to find in a fantasy world straight out of one’s fertile imagination of houses, façades, artefacts, streets, gardens and so on, which I got to know were the permanent sets created for the shootings. It interested me to know how all that I was seeing would be used in shooting a film. So, for the first two months, Devika Rani made sure that I was present at all the shootings. I arrived at the studio every day in the morning and went straight to those sets where shooting was going on.

  Ashok Bhaiyya was shooting for the final portions of Kismet (released in 1943) those days and there was a lot of activity going on as Gyan Mukherjee, the director, and his assistants moved the equipment on the sets according to the lighting pattern. Ashok Bhaiyya was a very successful star as I came to know from the assistants. His 1941 film Jhoola, opposite Leela Chitnis, had become a huge success and the same director was making Kismet. So, the excitement was palpable and it was all so new to me because I had no idea how a film became a huge success and earned money for the studio and the producer.

  I realized I was in the presence of a very well-known star when Ashok Bhaiyya came on the set and began talking cheerfully to the director, Gyan Mukherjee, and the producer, Shashadhar Mukherjee (popularly known as S. Mukherjee), with whom he appeared to be at ease. When he saw me, he came up to me and began talking informally as if we had known each other for years. He said he knew why I was there. ‘It is all very simple,’ he continued, as he walked with me to the door and stepped into the open area outside the studio floor. He called for chairs and the studio hands came hurriedly to attend to him. He went on: ‘You are a handsome man and I can see that you are eager to learn. It’s very simple. You just do what you would do in the situation if you were really in it. If you act it will be acting and it will look very silly.’

  He noticed the confusion on my face and began to laugh. There was genuine warmth in his laughter and his words gradually began to make sense to me. In the scene that I had observed the previous day, sitting unobtrusively with the assistants of the cameraman behind the camera, he had laughed exactly the way he had just done. He reacted to a response very naturally as he just did to my puzzled look.

  Ashok Bhaiyya soon introduced me to Shashadhar Mukherjee Sahab, who was his brother-in-law. (Ashok Bhaiyya’s sister Sati Devi was married to Mukherjee Sahab and that explained the informality between them.) Ashok Bhaiyya’s nature was such that he did not resist friendship with strangers and went all out to make things easy and comfortable for everybody in the studio from the canteen boy to the technicians and actors who worked with him. I met him every day and he treated me like a younger brother who had to be led and protected. My shyness and reticence began to recede in his company and his friendliness and affection for me were a fillip for me to be on the sets while the shooting of Kismet was going on.

  I quite liked what I was watching and I thought it was more interesting and absorbing than office drudgery or the work Aghaji would have given me to do in the fruit business.

  Ashok Bhaiyya lived nearby and so did S. Mukherjee Sahab. It was a period of transition for Bombay Talkies as Devika Rani, who had been managing the studio after the death of her husband and co-founder of the studio, Himanshu Rai (on 16 May 1940), was planning to marry the famous Soviet painter Svetoslav Ro
erich and leave the management of the studio in the hands of S. Mukherjee Sahab and Amiya Chakraborthy.

  She used to visit the sets during shootings and give pertinent suggestions. She had substantial knowledge of everything related to film making, having worked as a trainee at the Universum Film Aktiengesselschaft (UFA) in Germany. She was not only trained in acting but was also well versed with the art of make-up, set design and costume design. Always elegantly attired, she radiated a dignified charm when she interacted with all of us. She was happy I was bonding very well with Ashok Bhaiyya and S. Mukherjee Sahab. Most of the personnel kept quiet when she made her entry during the breaks in filming and the German cameramen, who were handling the cinematography, talked to her in their mother tongue and it was delightful to hear her reply in the same language.

  Ashok Bhaiyya was learning French those days as a pastime to add to the growing list of foreign languages he could converse in. He used to join in the conversation between Devika Rani and the German cinematographers while S. Mukherjee Sahab and I would stand by silently.

  By now I had established a reasonable rapport with S. Mukherjee Sahab who was a refined and polished gentleman. He asked me one afternoon if I could recite Urdu poetry well. I replied that I could recite Persian verses too with ease since I had grown up in an environment where my educated aunts and uncles enjoyed poetic exchanges in Persian and Urdu when they got together in our house in Peshawar. He nodded and said: ‘Today, when we meet for tea after pack-up I am going to egg you on to recite some Persian and Urdu verses. You oblige me casually. I want to see how he reacts.’ I knew S. Mukherjee Sahab was referring to Ashok Bhaiyya and the purpose of it all was pure fun since he sometimes overdid his linguistic showing off. That evening as the sun began to slip inch by inch behind the large trees that lined the studio’s compound boundaries, Ashok Bhaiyya, S. Mukherjee Sahab and I sat down on cane chairs outside the stage as we always did. S. Mukherjee Sahab then asked me to recite some Urdu verses. ‘It’s such a beautiful evening. Yousuf, let us hear some Urdu poetry from you,’ he said casually. I was naturally ready and I recited the lines that I often used to when my brother Ayub Sahab was confined to bed after his accidental fall from a horse in Kashmir. Ashok Bhaiyya listened attentively and, surprisingly, it was S. Mukherjee Sahab who was more engrossed and lost in my recitation.

  After I had finished, Ashok Bhaiyya rose from his chair to give me a standing ovation and, to my surprise, S. Mukherjee Sahab also stood up to applaud me. As expected Ashok Bhaiyya was clamouring for lessons in Urdu from me. He said he was prepared for a deal. He would teach me whatever French and German he knew and, in return, I should teach him Urdu. We agreed mutually, but the surprise element was the reaction of S. Mukherjee Sahab. He said he wanted me to meet all the writers, especially those from Bengal. ‘I want you to be there at all our story meetings and be a part of our writing teams. You have the grasp of the language that is wanting in our Bengali writers,’ he pointed out.

  I thought it would be awkward for me to be participating in the discussions pertaining to the dialogues for the stories written by such eminent directors as Amiya Chakraborthy and Gyan Mukherjee. However, it wasn’t so. At least S. Mukherjee Sahab had made it both easy and friendly for them and me in his own genial way. It was something I had least expected. Here, I was, a rank newcomer who hadn’t even faced the camera for a trial shot, and I was sitting with experienced writers as an equal. They were brilliant in their mother tongue, Bengali, and they were gracious in their admission that due to their lack of proficiency in Urdu they needed the fine-tuning that I could offer to the dialogues with my knowledge of that language.

  Everybody in the studio respected S. Mukherjee Sahab. He was held in high esteem for his superior academic qualifications and for the facility with which he communicated in English. He had been brought to the studio by Himanshu Rai, the founder of Bombay Talkies, who had met him accidentally in Bombay where S. Mukherjee Sahab (a brilliant professor of physics at the Allahabad University) had come to meet an academician who had the required information and contacts to get him admission in the faculty of his choice in a foreign university. Himanshu Rai was then on the lookout for a qualified person to set up the sound department at Bombay Talkies and he felt S. Mukherjee Sahab was the man he was looking for. He convinced the scholarly Bengali professor to abandon the idea of going abroad for higher studies in physics and become a part of his dream to set up a professionally managed film studio in India on the lines of the UFA Studios in Germany where he had worked as a producer and was the only Asian to be in charge of an entire production unit with directors like Fritz Lang and Josef von Sternberg.

  S. Mukherjee Sahab always drew parallels between our individual destinies that brought us to a profession that was not in our wildest imagination. He was a product of Western education having studied in the English medium from his school days in Jhansi (now in Uttar Pradesh) and so was I with my schooling at the Barnes School at Deolali, which was very, very English in its curriculum. He conversed mostly in English except when we were with the Bengalis, of whom there were quite a few in the studio. My regular witnessing of shootings and my interactions with Ashok Bhaiyya were preparing me for my debut. I had begun to observe Ashok Bhaiyya closely when he would be rehearsing or facing the camera. I noticed that he had made calculated movements before the camera, which he had worked out all by himself. For example, he would hold a cigarette between his lips without lighting it and he would look around searchingly. He would then take the cigarette off from his lips, walk two steps, then put the cigarette back between his lips and light it and speak the given dialogue looking into the camera. It was all very fascinating for me and I could figure out what he meant when he told me that the secret of a good rendering of a scene was not to act before the camera. Ashok Bhaiyya had hit upon the secret of ‘non-acting’ but he had a definite calculation in his mind when he performed and the arithmetic of that calculation was entirely his. I began to understand that I would have to arrive at my own approach to the whole business of simulating feelings and emotions.

  When I got a chance to speak to S. Mukherjee Sahab alone, I mentioned my observation to him and he suggested that I go and view as many feature films as I could so that I could observe how different actors attained their levels of competence before the camera in rendering long-winded and difficult scenes. I thought there was a point in what he was saying but it was difficult to go straight from the studio to a cinema theatre and watch a film and go home late in the night. Besides, if someone saw me going to a theatre and reported it to Aghaji, it would raise questions in his mind because he knew I had no interest in the amusement offered by films. In his eyes, I was an athlete and a passionate soccer player who derived pleasure and thrill from a good game of soccer or cricket in any open ground in the city.

  I would leave for home every evening at about six, taking a local train to Churchgate from Malad. I had a second-class season ticket, which gave me the comfort of travelling without being elbowed by passengers getting in and out. From Churchgate, I boarded a bus, and alighted at Crawford Market and walked to our residence at Nagdevi Street. On the way, every day, I met friends who asked me casual questions about the job I was doing and I always told them it was a company that was doing well and had around 1500 employees and I was learning the ropes. I never waited to prolong the conversation and pretended to be in a hurry to get home.

  At home, Amma would be bustling around to give the family or the visiting relatives whatever they desired. I don’t remember seeing her ever taking a nap or sitting pretty, making frivolous conversation. She asked me a couple of times about the work I was doing and I gave her the impression that it was a good, honourable job and I was quite happy. She was so preoccupied with the responsibilities of running the large household that she did not question me any more. My elder sister, Sakina Aapa, was the curious one. She was nosy enough to get deep into everything that everybody did, be it in our home or in the neighbour’s home. She seldom
extended help to Amma in the kitchen and Amma never complained for fear of provoking a senseless argument with Sakina Aapa. Every time Sakina Aapa tried to probe, I told her different things and successfully confused her about my employment. She was happy when she heard about the salary I was going to bring home and generally remained content with that knowledge.

  My brother Ayub Sahab was well aware of what I was doing because I had confided in him. Ayub Sahab was very close to me and we shared a bond that was inseverable. As noted earlier, he was an extremely intelligent and sensitive person whose voluminous reading of Urdu and English literature had made him a kind of scholar and littérateur. He was excited about my job but he also feared whether I would be successful in my vocation being the shy, reserved person I was. More than anything else, he wondered what would be Aghaji’s reaction when he would learn about my job. I assuaged his fears by telling him what I tell anybody who worries about the outcome of something he or she is about to do. I told him I would not think too much about what could happen because that could distract me from my efforts to do my job to the best of my ability.