Fretful about the time, I tried to extract the phone number of my producer contact from the tangle of notes and figures on my pad. I’d got lucky, getting this interview (which is to say it had taken a phalanx of phone calls and the intercession of a friend of a friend). I was in danger of losing my slot.
Vishal Bhardwaj was high on my Bollywood hit list. A composer-director from the rural northern state of Uttar Pradesh, he had burst on to the international scene in 2003 with his film Maqbool, a startling remake of Macbeth that translated the play into a sleazy underworld version of modern-day Mumbai. Renowned Bollywood tough guy Irrfan Khan played a hit man bent on taking over a Muslim crime gang; the Witches were recast as corrupt cops obsessed with kundli astrology. Bhardwaj had followed this surprise hit with the lavish Omkara (2006), in which a muscle-bound enforcer called Omkara/Othello – the illegitimate son of a low-caste mother – romances the high-born, ‘fair-skinned’ Dolly, played by the screen siren Kareena Kapoor.
Smartly contemporary, made with an eye on the box office as well as anxieties about crime rates and caste tensions, Bhardwaj’s were a new breed of Indian Shakespeare adaptation. They had made the outside world at long last pay attention to the fact that Shakespeare was a major presence in the subcontinent.
After several phone calls and twenty minutes’ searching, I located VB Productions on the fifth floor of an accommodation block marginally more run-down than the rest. Released from the tiny cage elevator, I was rushed through a dark apartment, crammed with young faces crouched over laptops. It looked more like a student flat share than a movie office.
Near the back was a space roughly the size of the front room in my one-bed London flat. It had been converted into a recording studio. In a glass booth on one side, not much larger than a phone box, a teenage male singer with bee-stung lips was pouting into a microphone. On the other, sitting in front of a small red harmonium and surrounded by a bevy of technicians, was Bhardwaj himself: a small figure with plump, genial features and a pudding-bowl haircut frizzed with grey. I was issued a cup of sweet tea and directed to a corner stool to observe.
They were halfway through recording one of the songs for the new VB movie, a ghost thriller called Ek Thi Daayan (‘Once There Was a Witch’). Seeing them record was a drama in itself. Bhardwaj would issue a stream of instructions in rat-a-tat Hindi, his right hand cresting the air in little curlicues and waves. The singer watched him apprehensively, as if trying to remember a complex series of road directions. Then a pre-recorded guitar track, a sultry love ballad, would blast out at full volume. The singer would croon a couple of notes, whereupon Bhardwaj would interrupt to correct some indiscernible accent of phrasing or gesture – a shade more vibrato here, less of a swoop there. They would go again, Bhardwaj occasionally demonstrating on the harmonium. There was one English word I understood amid the Hindi. ‘Heartfelt,’ he kept saying. ‘Heartfelt.’
They spent fifteen minutes on the first section of the first phrase alone. Many popular Indian films relied on a hit song – and the free air time and advertising – to turn a profit, but it wasn’t just this: the songs Bhardwaj wrote were miniature masterpieces, crafted with the kind of care that was going out of fashion in mainstream Hindi film. Watching him at work was like seeing a poet in the frenzy of creation.
After half an hour, the wrung-out-looking singer was dispatched to take a break, and Bhardwaj guided me through yet another door to a corner office. It contained little more than a desk and two chairs, with a scruffy divan folded in the corner.
He was an accidental Shakespearian, he admitted. He’d been forced to learn Shakespeare in English Literature lessons at school, but hadn’t thought much of him – deadly boring, painful to read. He mimicked throttling someone. ‘If you see him alive, you want to kill him.’
All that changed in the early 2000s when Bhardwaj went to collect his godson for the holidays. They’d been travelling on a train to Mussoorie in the far north, a five-hour journey. Casting around for something to read, Bhardwaj had borrowed his godson’s Tales from Shakespeare.
At the time he’d been trying to develop a gangster film, a tribute to The Godfather with shadings of Japanese noir. He’d been stuck: no plot. But when he found himself reading, then rereading, Charles and Mary Lamb’s 1807 prose adaptation of Macbeth, he realised there could be a script that combined this story with hints of Coppola and Kurosawa, all set in Mumbai. Back in the city, he got hold of a copy of the play itself. He had his script.
I’d watched Maqbool again on DVD a few days before coming out; what I hadn’t realised before arriving was how it caught the mood of the city: its stifling atmosphere, its swampy mist and murk, the sea always lapping at its ankles.
Bhardwaj laughed shyly. ‘Yes, the city became the character, the hero of the film, almost. But I was ignorant. I didn’t know the weight and burden of Shakespeare.’
Did he really find it a burden?
‘Obviously, who doesn’t respect Shakespeare, but I try not to keep him on that pedestal, do you know? When I see British or American films, they are so over-burdened. I treat him more like my co-writer.’ He waved distractedly at his office: the divan, the pile of papers in the corner. ‘I ask him to come down and sit with me and have a drink, let’s talk it out.’
Had Shakespeare’s name been good for box office?
He looked incredulous: clearly I didn’t understand the first thing about Indian movies. ‘With Maqbool, one of the financers told me, “Script is good. But one thing – please – I will give you money – take out Shakespeare’s name. If people see that it is being based on Shakespeare, they won’t come to watch the film.”’ He laughed. ‘Money-minds think all alike. Lucky he was wrong.’
Shakespeare’s presence had been a blessing in disguise; not only had Indian audiences watched and enjoyed the film, it had got Bhardwaj noticed on the international festival circuit. Maqbool had been invited to Toronto, Omkara shown at Cannes: rare honours for a non-art-house Indian film-maker.
He was currently on the hunt for another play to adapt. He was wavering between Hamlet and King Lear.
His eyes glittered. ‘You tell me, you are the scholar. Which one should I do?’
Both could be interesting prospects, I said. What was he looking for?
‘For me, character is important. Like in Macbeth, I find Lady Macbeth the reason to make the film; in Othello, Iago was the reason. If I make Lear, Edmund will be the reason. Sleeping with both the sisters, the sisters kill each other …’ He laughed. ‘This father–daughter thing is fine, but for me Edmund is the person. Oh God, he’s so full of masala – spice, you know.’ He wriggled his head. ‘Such a good character.’
Given that he was a Kurosawa fan, I wondered if he had seen The Bad Sleep Well, a skulking 1960 adaptation of Hamlet that recast the Prince as a quiet salaryman adrift in a world of grief. Its downbeat mood, set in the shadows of postwar Japanese society, might appeal.
‘A contemporary work?’ He scribbled something on a pad. ‘It will be very interesting to see.’
Months later, I read that Bhardwaj had announced his next film. Hamlet it was to be.
On 7 July 1896 the event occurred that would, eventually, change Parsi theatre for good. A French chemist and entrepreneur named Marius Sestier, en route to Australia via Mumbai, staged an exhibition showing off the brand-new gizmo he had brought with him. The Times of India carried adverts for ‘the marvel of the century, the wonder of the world’. The venue was Watson’s, one of the city’s grandest hotels. Only Europeans were allowed entry.
The device Sestier brought was ingenious. A wooden box the size of a small briefcase, it had a lens at the front and a hand crank behind. Pointed one way, it was a motion-picture camera; opened up, with a magic lantern shining through, it became a projector. Sestier’s employers, Auguste and Louis Lumière, called it the ‘Cinématographe’. The new art form it made possible – moving images captured wherever the camera could be taken, and replayed for a watching audience �
� they christened cinématographie.
The machine had only previously been seen in Paris, Brussels, New York and London. On the bill in Mumbai were the short films that had astounded French audiences: the thirty-eight-second La Mer, with its haunting depiction of waves piling on to the beach and bathers leaping into the flood. The fifty-second L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat, whose depiction of a moving train had caused, according to one witness, ‘fear, terror, even panic’ when it was shown in France. (In Mumbai, L’Arrivée seems to have been watched with equanimity, its inhabitants perhaps more accustomed to the goings-on of railways.) The Bombay Gazette was particularly taken with Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory, which brought ‘a whole crowd of moving humanity onto the canvas’. Within weeks, shows were a near-nightly occurrence. India’s movie craze had begun.
Among the audiences for an early screening – one that admitted Indians – was a photographer from Maharashtra called Harishchandra Sakharam Bhatvadekar, better known as Save Dada. Entranced by what he saw, Dada ordered a motion-picture camera from London and used it to film what was around him – Indian scenes of ‘moving humanity’, ones that would appeal to local audiences. Dada’s first ‘Topical’ was a wrestling bout at Mumbai’s Hanging Gardens, and in December 1901 he shot the return from Britain of the Indian mathematics student Raghunath Paranjpe, who had scored triumphant success at Cambridge.
But Indian audiences were also hungry for fiction. A thousand miles east in Kolkata, another photographer, Hiralal Sen, and his brother, Motilal, had the idea of doing something novel with the new technology: filming plays. The Sens’ first moving picture seems to have been a dancing scene from the popular drama The Flower of Persia filmed in 1901. Intrepid entrepreneurs, they were responsible for another first, making perhaps the earliest Indian cinema adverts, for Edward’s Tonic and Jabakusum hair oil.
One of the biggest names in early Indian cinema, the legendary J. F. Madan, professionalised the movies and made them into an Indian industry. Brother of the famous ‘Pesu Avan’ who had starred in that Parsi Pericles, J. F. had begun his career as an actor in Mumbai, playing Shakespearian adaptations. Later, he became a ferociously successful businessman, and in the 1890s, acquired the Elphinstone and Khatau-Alfred Parsi theatre companies. By 1902, as well as motley interests in insurance, pharmaceuticals and food-and-drink imports, he had relocated to Kolkata to set up what became Madan Theatres, an early theatre monopoly. When the company decided to retain the services of two enormously successful Parsi playwrights – Narayan Prasad Betab and Agha Hashr Kashmiri – the Shakespearian circle was complete.
Betab’s name I recalled from that perplexing-sounding version of The Comedy of Errors set partly in a coal mine; Hashr, meanwhile, would be the one who most clearly bridged the gap between Shakespeare and cinema, and whose life story reveals much about changing tastes in Indian entertainment.
Born in Varanasi in 1879 to a Kashmiri family of shawl-makers, Hashr became fluent in both Urdu and Hindi, later learning Persian and Arabic. He published his first play at the precocious age of eighteen, whereupon he decamped to Mumbai and began writing for Parsi troupes. A photograph of Hashr taken in his late thirties or forties depicts a studious, otherworldly-looking man at his desk, a book open on his knees. But the plays that made his name were anything but academic. Bilwa Mangal is named for a poet who falls in frenzied love with a prostitute; Aankh ka Nasha (‘Intoxication of the Eyes’) is set in a brothel. Hashr’s Urdu adaptations of pre-existing texts went further, pushing the boundaries of what it was acceptable to show on the Indian stage.
Scholars have dismissed him as a hack, but I found Hashr’s reinterpretations of Shakespeare engrossing. He raided the plays with encyclopaedic efficiency, ransacking them for hair-raising moments and effects but paying almost no attention to context. Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene crops up almost verbatim in his Khwab-e-Hasti (‘Dreams of Grandeur’) from 1909, fitted into a plot that bears little relation to the original; while Said-e-Havas (‘Captive of Desire’, 1907) filches a melodramatic scene from King John, in which the virtuous young Prince Arthur is threatened with murder by an assassin, and squeezes it into a storyline drawn from Richard III. Even ostensibly original plays by Hashr are so suffused with Shakespeare that scholars can’t agree whether they are adaptations or not.
Hashr’s Shaheed-e-Naz (‘Martyr to Charm’, 1902) is an eloquent example. It borrows many of the elements of Measure for Measure – disguised ruler, lecherous deputy, sinful brother, virtuous woman – but rearranges them as if on a chessboard. Instead of Duke Vincentio adopting disguise to spy on his morally dubious deputy Angelo (who falls for the virtuous Isabella when she comes to plead for her brother’s life), Hashr’s play opens with a bodyguard attempting to murder a ruler who has been too merciful to the man who propositioned his sister. Only then does the ruler adopt disguise.
Despite the contortions of this new plot, it is hard not to feel that some things are an improvement – notably the bed trick in which the Angelo character is gulled into sleeping with the wrong woman. In Measure for Measure, as in All’s Well That Ends Well, the device strains credibility (would a man not realise?) but Hashr accomplished it easily: his Isabella character simply gets the Muslim, non-drinking Angelo drunk.
After working for various organisations in both Mumbai and Kolkata, Hashr decided to form his own troupe around 1910. In tribute to the writer who had gifted him so much, he called it the Indian Shakespeare Theatrical Company. In time Hashr became known as Shakespeare-e-Hind, the ‘Shakespeare of India’. In 1916, he joined Madan Theatres, then busily remaking itself into a film company.
Initially, Parsi troupes coexisted peacefully with the movie industry, particularly during the silent period: little competition from grainy black-and-white shorts. But when a director called Dadasaheb Phalke released the first full-length Indian feature film, the forty-minute Raja Harishchandra (1913), based on the same mythological sources that furnished many Parsi playwrights with material, theatre-makers began to panic. Actors and writers decamped; dramatic companies rushed to rebrand themselves as film studios.
In March 1931, when synchronous sound finally arrived in India with the spectacular historical drama Alam Ara, billed as ‘all-talking, singing, & dancing’, it was the death knell. Not only did the movie boast seven songs, beating the theatre companies at their own game, it was based on a popular Parsi play. A film made the following year, Indrasabha (‘Indra’s Court’), had an awesome seventy songs. The Parsi troupes that were left either folded or were unceremoniously thrown out of their theatres so that they could be converted into cinemas. By the mid-1930s the movie business was second only to textiles as the main industry in Mumbai.
Hashr, though, was fortunate: film, which he’d been wise enough to join early on, conferred on him a kind of immortality. When the playwright passed away at the age of fifty-six on 28 April 1935, cinemas and studios across India closed their doors in mourning. Shakespeare-e-Hind had become the most famous playwright, poet and screenwriter the country had ever known.
If modern Hindi films had a Hashr, I was told, it was a man known as Gulzar. As writer, screenwriter, lyricist and director, Gulzar saab had bestridden Bollywood for decades: the nearest thing Mumbai movies had to a living patron saint. He was about to be given the Dadasaheb Phalke prize, the highest award in Indian cinema, adding to the Oscar and the Grammy for lyrics he’d composed for a song in Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire. Nearly eighty, he had been in the business for fifty years – old-school Bollywood royalty.
After weeks of correspondence that made my attempts to track down Vishal Bhardwaj seem effortless, I was finally granted an audience. Nasreen, a British Indian documentary-making friend who had helped with the fraught late-stage diplomacy, offered to help translate. I suspect she doubted it would actually happen.
The house was in the exclusive suburb of Pali Hill, a winding incline draped prettily with gulmohar and almond trees that made the mania in the re
st of Mumbai seem like a bad dream. As the electric front gate hushed closed behind us, a female assistant welcomed us into a cool, shaded entrance hall and whisked away our shoes. We were ushered through yet another antechamber into the main office-cum-lounge, lined with books and expensive-looking objets. From a wall full of DVDs, the sculpted bust of what looked like Nefertiti gazed implacably out.
Next to Nefertiti, and nearly as forbidding, was a ramrod-straight figure in a white kurta. He sat behind an enormous black desk crowded with books and papers. His white hair was swept into a high fringe; a luxuriant moustache, also white, gave him an austere, schoolmasterly air. He placed down his iPad, and inclined his head modestly to greet us.
The reason I’d been eager to interview Gulzar is that he had kept alive a tradition begun by writers like Betab and Hashr, one that seems near-impossible in the cinematic world of the west: making Shakespearian comedy into big, broad box office.
One of his most famous films was Angoor from 1982, a classic starring the late-lamented star Sanjeev Kumar. The remarkable thing about Angoor (remarkable at least to me) was that it is a faithful update of The Comedy of Errors – two pairs of identical but separated twins, mistaken identities, shipwreck, the lot. Barring the Rodgers-Hart musical The Boys from Syracuse and the BBC’s earnest television version of 1983 (a contractual obligation of their complete-works series), The Comedy of Errors has never been filmed in anything like its original form in the west. To have made it into a movie at all, still less made it a commercial success, seemed an unlikely achievement.
In India, however, Gulzar explained, the story has always been a hit. Fittingly for a script about multiple sets of twins, something like six separate cinematic versions had been made in the past fifty years. Angoor itself was based on two earlier movies: a literary Bengali version called Bhranti Bilas (1963); and a Hindi one wittily called Do Dooni Char (‘Two Times Two Equals Four’, 1968).
Worlds Elsewhere Page 27
