The nadir had come in January 2003, when a fire ripped through the NFAI vaults. As many as 4,000 priceless reels had gone up in acrid smoke, 450 of them from before the 1950s. The Indian losses were irreplaceable: early talkies in Marathi and Hindi, the first Indian film to win an award at Venice … It was said the fire had started because flammable reels had been stored in unsafe conditions.
‘So many times I brought these things to notice, but they keep on arguing, “Oh, he is now not in the organisation. He is keeping on criticising,” you know. So I thought of stopping that.’
I suddenly realised why it had been so hard to get inside the place. Everyone I had spoken to back in Mumbai agreed the archive was in danger. But what to do about it, that was the issue. India had so many pressing problems …
‘So when you ask am I worried, yes, I am worried,’ Nair said. ‘I have real worries.’ He seized his crutch and clenched it as if it would break. ‘Every day, as far as I know, some film is getting damaged beyond repair.’
It was after 9 p.m. by the time I got back to the hotel: early by Indian standards, but I couldn’t face finding a restaurant outside. There was a café of sorts in the lobby. I dumped my bag on the closest table and, not bothering to glance at the menu, ordered the largest beer they had and a portion of daal and rice. Aside from a fleet of waiters checking their phones, there was just one other diner, a porcine businessman in a striped shirt pecking at his laptop.
It is a hazard of travelling alone that one’s emotions become Himalayan extremes: the highs exultant, the lows desperate. But I reasoned that I had some cause to feel despair. Granted, I had managed to see Hamlet, the oldest surviving Shakespeare film in India – but that a movie from the mid-1950s was considered uniquely antique had come as a shock.
By the evanescent standards of my usual trade, theatre, film had always seemed to me almost alarmingly permanent: all you needed to do was hang on to the stuff. But it appeared almost no one, bar P. K. Nair and a few others, wanted to bother. There he was, in his gloomy little room, while films rotted into nothing a few hundred yards away. The thought was incalculably depressing.
No doubt films were being preserved, and the chances of a few lost reels popping up in someone’s attic were really rather high. Digitisation made it harder to delete things. India was at the forefront of technology: the wi-fi on the train to Pune had been faster than it was in my London flat. But in its scrambled hurry to modernise, the country seemed sometimes to regard its own past as an impediment. I remembered a line I’d read somewhere. ‘India has a rich past, but a poor history.’ It was a cliché, but hard to deny.
I thought back to C. J. Sisson’s essay, the point at which I had begun my journey. One of the things he most admired about Parsi theatre was how it resembled Elizabethan drama: its exuberant commercialism, its restless creativity, its bumptious optimism. In Mumbai, he had written, ‘[Shakespeare’s] plays … are still alive and in the process of becoming new things, being ever born again.’ That was surely true, and true about Bollywood too – but what was also true was that this hunger for invention turned the industry into an inattentive custodian of the old. If you could simply remake a film, why bother to save the original? It was just last year’s movie, just cluttering up someone’s floor.
But then, as I’d discovered at the Folger library, the Jacobethans hadn’t been much good at preservation, either. If the First Folio hadn’t been published in 1623, eighteen of Shakespeare’s plays would probably never have survived. The overwhelming majority of Renaissance playscripts are in exactly the same condition as India’s silent cinema: long since lost in action.
Not quite everything was lost. Back in Mumbai a few days later, on my way to interview another film-maker, I felt my phone buzz. Nasreen. The text was mysterious: a postal address in Mumbai and a phone number. I was wondering what on earth this signified when the phone buzzed again. ‘MALA SINHA,’ the message read. ‘NO IDEA IF STILL CURRENT. GOOD LUCK!!!!’
Mala Sinha: the beauty on the film poster clutching Raj Kapoor, the unexpected heroine of Sahu’s Hamlet – the great screen actress herself. I tried calling from the rickshaw and couldn’t get through. Once the phone seemed to be answered, but the line was so poor it was difficult to tell. The voice on the other end – if it was a voice – was a faint susurration in a language I couldn’t understand. The whine of the engine, reverberating through my teeth, made me wonder if I was imagining it.
I had a flight to Kolkata booked in a day and a half’s time and a diary full of appointments. But the address was only a few miles away, in the upscale district of Bandra. On a whim, I decided to cancel my film-maker and direct the rickshaw to Bandra instead.
Forty minutes later, damp with sweat, I was there. The area had a grand past, judging from the rambling deco-style villas either side of the road. One or two were in fine condition, their cream and sorbet-yellow paintwork spotless, like steamers with matronly lines. Others had been converted into boutiques or business centres. One was in the process of being torn down, presumably to make space for the twin of the brusque new tower to its right.
I went past the address several times before I registered it behind a dark screen of rain trees. Even by the standards of genteel shabbiness unique to Mumbai, the house – a villa that might once have been even grander than its neighbours – looked like a ruin. Mould blackened the exposed plasterwork around the front door and porch. Lines of damp stretched along the frontage in great grey waves. Dark windows gazed blankly out. I’d arrived half a century too late. If this had once been a film star’s house, it was now in Sunset Boulevard territory. Actually, it wouldn’t have made a bad set for Sunset Boulevard … I took a few photographs to commemorate my near-brush with stardom.
A stray impulse made me try the gate. It wasn’t actually sealed as I’d thought, but wedged with a screw. I prodded the screw, which clattered to the ground on the other side. The gate yawned open with a slow, horror-movie creak. Perhaps someone did still live here.
Heart thudding, I ducked through. All I could hear was the traffic and the rustling of the trees. No one came past.
Reasoning that I might as well, I tiptoed across the drive and tried the bell: nothing. I wasn’t even sure it had rung. I pressed my ear to the door. Still nothing. I pulled out my notebook and started scribbling a note. How did one address a ‘yesteryear star’? Miss? Mrs? Mala? Did she come from the era before cutesy Bollywood nicknames?
Suddenly, there was a ferocious roar in my left ear and I felt the security screen in front of the door buckle and thrash. A dog was corkscrewing wildly behind it, barking as if desperate to be let loose. Instinctively I flinched away. When I looked back up there was a pair of narrow eyes, human, glaring at me from around the door.
‘What’ – bark – ‘think’ – bark – ‘doing here?’ – bark – ‘who do you’ – bark, bark – ‘trespass’ – bark, bark, bark – “bitten’.
Attempting to recover my composure, I squawked a reply: I was a British writer, deeply sorry, had been hoping to leave a message …
Steadily the barking subsided, then ceased with a gruff sound as the dog’s owner grabbed its collar.
I put on my most haplessly English voice. I was actually trying to get in contact with Mala Sinha, the actress, I explained. Did she still live here?
A curt silence.
‘She might,’ said the voice, which was female.
‘Is there any way I could talk to her?’
Another curt silence.
‘She’s sick. She can’t talk to you today.’
‘Another day? Any day at all?’ In desperation I reached for my trump card. ‘I’m an enormous fan. I’ve come out all the way from London to meet her.’
This time the silence seemed warmer. The door yielded another few inches. Behind it was a woman in her indeterminate forties, wearing jogging bottoms, hair scraped back. One hand held the collar of a large, shadowy dog.
‘I’m sorry about him. He’s very excitable, are
n’t you, darling?’
She crouched down and started to kiss its nose. It growled, unpersuaded.
I kept talking, going heavy on the fandom. Information trickled back. Mala Sinha did live here, but she was elderly now. She didn’t accept many callers. She never talked to journalists. But perhaps a young man who had come all the way from London just to meet her …
I did my best to look like a young man who had come all the way from London just to meet her.
‘I can’t promise anything, I will be honest. But I will ask her. You may call me tomorrow.’
As she scribbled down the number in my notebook, I studied her face: something familiar about the eyes.
‘I’m Pratibha,’ she said, keeping her gaze on me as she handed back the pad. ‘The daughter,’ she added.
When I called the number, I was astonished that the phone was answered immediately. I could make tea? 4 p.m. that afternoon would do?
But what to wear for tea with a Bollywood film star? Anxious to present myself as an ordinary, personable human being who didn’t make a habit of breaking into gardens, I had dug out my least crumpled shirt and left it hanging in the hotel bathroom; but my jacket was so hopelessly crushed that it hardly mattered. In the heavy heat on the doorstep, the sweat was trickling down my back. In a gesture of what I hoped might be interpreted as sophistication, I had bought macaroons at a cake shop nearby. I strongly suspected they were already melted.
After a few minutes, the door swung open, this time mercifully canine-free. Behind it was a tiny figure, wearing a cream-coloured silken sari, black hair neatly tied back, eyes dark behind thin gold glasses. It was really her: Mala Sinha. She was almost indistinguishable from the teenage girl I’d been watching in faded black-and-white in Pune a few days before. With a quiet smile, she ushered me through. She moved lightly, thin silver bangles tinkling on her bare arms.
Given that it looked from the street like a wreck, the house’s interior took me unawares: a rococo fantasy of pink-veined marble, glossy walnut and rosewood panelling. Against one wall of the huge reception room, next to a curved art-deco bay window, was a bar that would have looked fully at home in a Los Angeles country club. Next to that was a cabinet filled with statues in shimmering silver and gold. A spiral staircase wound down from a mezzanine floor above. Bollywood goddesses really did live in palaces.
‘You are very welcome here,’ Sinha said formally, gesturing me towards a sofa the size of an aircraft carrier. Pratibha, clad in a dark-blue summer dress, materialised from a side door followed by an elderly labrador, which waddled over to join us. This must have been the fearsome creature that had menaced me the day before. It began to sniff the underside of the sofa. Sinha’s husband, Chidambar, came in with a tea tray.
Ten minutes later, I was showing Sinha clips from Hamlet I’d surreptitiously recorded on my phone. She had only ever seen the film once, she said, at the glitzy Mumbai premiere in 1954. That was nearly sixty years ago.
‘I am singing, the mad girl?’ she said, watching the screen greedily. ‘This is my own voice, you know. My own singing voice.’
She pointed a slender finger at the phone. ‘Why am I becoming mad?’
I explained it was because Hamlet had left her, then murdered her father.
‘Oh,’ she said, then looked quickly back. ‘I was very beautiful then.’
Having grown up in Kolkata in a Nepalese Christian family, Sinha had been spotted by the great Bengali director Ardhendu Bose, who had persuaded her father to let her act. Sahu – then one of the most renowned names in Indian cinema – saw her, and decided he had found his Ophelia. When she came to Mumbai, she was unknown. She was just sixteen.
She laughed; a girlish laugh, unrestrained. ‘I was very scared of him. He was a perfectionist, very strict – always down-faced, you know. We said that he was happy when he looked unhappy!’
We settled into a rhythm: my questions, Mala’s answers, Pratibha’s interjections-cum-translations, polite entreaties from Chidambar to take more tea, the barking of the dog. Little by little, memories released themselves, like bubbles wobbling to the top of a glass of water.
Though Hamlet had been savaged by the critics, it had made Sinha’s name. Offers flooded in from Bollywood and abroad.
‘They wanted her to go to Hollywood,’ said Pratibha. ‘She had international looks, but her father wouldn’t let her go.’
So Sinha had become a star right here in Mumbai. She appeared in another four movies in 1954 alone. Her work rate was formidable; by the end of the fifties she had made over thirty more. Comedies, social movies, spy thrillers, the majority Hindi, some Bengali – often filmed simultaneously, dashing between sets for different takes. She was one of the first female stars to have roles bigger than her male counterparts, and get top billing. She had known everyone, acted with everyone, for everyone.
She had even worked with Sohrab Modi of Khoon-ka-Khoon fame, and remembered him as a brute. ‘Very hard taskmaster. When he used to pass through my make-up room, he would tell us to stop smiling. He said, “This is working place, not joking place.” Just like headmaster. But he was a very stylish actor.’
Gently I guided her back to her own Hamlet. She remembered that a man had come specially from London with the costumes. Her dress was almost too heavy to walk in, the wig itchy and hot under the lights.
Her hands flew suddenly to her lips. ‘I remember my drowning.’
The scene had been filmed in, of all places, Mumbai Zoo. ‘I jumped into the pond. It was very dirty water, above my head, with all the ducks.’ She nodded decisively. ‘Whatever my director told me to do, you know, I did.’
I wondered if she missed it – the attention, the energy of it all? She insisted not, but I sensed a tinge of regret.
‘You must keep moving,’ she said firmly. ‘That is the secret to a long life.’
Still, a touch of the diva remained. Curious to see what had become of her at the Phalke awards, I checked online when I got back to Britain. With regal magnificence, she had spurned her lifetime award at the last minute. The organisers had insulted her by forgetting to put her name on the invitation card. ‘I am an artiste,’ she told the press. ‘An artiste never dies.’
Shakespeare Wallah was never intended to be the last word. After the movie’s unexpected success in 1965, James Ivory and Ismail Merchant toyed with the idea of a sequel, and commissioned a follow-up script from Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. It was called A Lovely World and it followed Felicity Kendal’s character Lizzie Buckingham back to England, to her new life in newly swinging London. Struggling to make it as an actor, she eventually renounces the stage, settling instead for a conventional marriage with a ditchwater-dull older man – pining all the time for the India she has lost.
In the end, A Lovely World never got made; the only records of it now are eight thin folders in Ivory’s archives at the University of Oregon. But although the Kendals, too, were long-departed – Laura died in 1992, Geoffrey in 1998 – they hadn’t entirely disappeared from India. In fact I’d heard there were sightings of them near Juhu beach, very much alive.
The place was called Prithvi Theatre. A stone’s throw from the beach in the well-appointed middle-class north of the city, Prithvi has a reputation as one of India’s most important centres for new drama, running a manically busy series of performances, workshops, seminars and festivals, nearly 600 shows a year. In a city whose heart is at the movies, it is a busy outpost of live theatre.
A travelling company called Prithvi had been set up in 1944 by the pioneering film and theatre actor Prithviraj Kapoor. Bankrolled by Kapoor’s film work, the troupe – sometimes eighty strong – took consciousness-raising drama in both Hindi and Urdu on the road, aiming to unite the fledgling nation. Before it finally shuddered to a halt in 1960, the company had performed an estimated 2,662 shows in over 100 towns across the subcontinent. Prithviraj was also the father of the great Kapoor acting clan: Raj was his eldest son, Shashi his youngest. Even now, the Kapoors were re
garded as the first family of the Indian film industry. As so often in India, everything connected.
If this story of travelling actors sounds familiar, there is a reason. While in Kolkata in 1956, Shashi had met Jennifer Kendal, Geoffrey and Laura’s eldest daughter, then acting with Shakespeareana. They fell in love and – in defiance of their families – married two years later. Twenty years on, Jennifer’s parents having returned to England, they united the companies too, and built a permanent theatre on land that Prithviraj had earmarked for the purpose. If Shakespeare Wallah had a legacy in India, it was in front of me: a 200-seat auditorium in a grey building the size of a small barn, overlooked by apartment blocks and shaded by palm trees. It, too, had become Indianised.
At Prithvi I met Kunal Kapoor, Shashi’s son, who had run the place with his sister Sanjana after their mother Jennifer’s early death. Now in his fifties, built like a bison, with a jet-black moustache that wouldn’t have disgraced a Texan ranch owner, he was invigorating company. For an hour on my last evening in Mumbai we talked about his father Shashi, his uncle Raj Kapoor, his grandparents the Kendals; and, of course, about Shakespeare. ‘What you have to understand is that Shakespeare is in our DNA,’ he said.
As we climbed the teetering stairs to his attic office – more ship’s gangplank than staircase – he pointed out water-stained costume drawings from the Shakespeareana days: an earringed Petruccio with his arms around Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew, Tony Lumpkin in She Stoops to Conquer sporting hunting pinks and a skew-whiff horse-riding helmet.
Why did Kunal feel that India had such a connection to Shakespeare?
‘So many reasons. Education from the nineteenth century onwards, the mission schools, people being forced to learn it by rote. But it’s more than that. Perhaps it sounds bizarre, but these are Indian stories, you know? The love, the jealousy, the loyalty, the melodrama, the sense of family – they’re such identifiable Indian values. In some ways the plays make more sense here. Tybalt and Juliet are cousins – the intensity of that relationship, I’m not sure it makes sense instinctively in Britain or America. Put them into an eastern setting, India or wherever, and it all starts to be much more real.’
Worlds Elsewhere Page 32
