Jaane Bhee Do Yaaro

Introduction

For a Hindi-movie buff who grew up in the early 1980s, there’s a large bank of memories to draw on. Though we didn’t know it yet, Hindi commercial cinema had just entered its vaguest, most shambolic decade, one with little pretension to ideology, without any figure even remotely as emblematic as Amitabh Bachchan’s Angry Young Man had been in the 1970s. The next six or seven years would be marked by a relative lack of star power, films with shoddily thrown together fight scenes and isolated comedy tracks, and soundtracks that were so uninspired (or, in some cases, so obviously ‘inspired’) that we often pressed the fast-forward button on our video players when a song sequence came on.

A generation of young actors was just starting to make its presence felt: the fresh-faced Sunny Deol and Amrita Singh in Betaab, Jackie Shroff and Meenakshi Seshadri in Hero, Anil Kapoor, Sridevi, Sanjay Dutt. For the first time, the term ‘star son’ could be applied to people from outside the Kapoor family. Meanwhile, Amitabh, still the subject of most of our adoration, was moving on to newer things. His political career was just taking off, and real life met reel life in a muddled sort of way in a film called Inquilaab, which ended with a heavy-handed scene (we loved it at the time!) where the Big B solves all of India’s problems by simply locking the country’s corrupt, self-serving politicians in one room and taking a machine-gun to them, much like your pest-control guy cleaning up a termite colony.

Around the time Inquilaab was being completed, another, much less heralded film had a quiet release in a few movie halls in Bombay and in Sheila in Delhi. One of the lead characters in this movie would express his impotent rage towards the System by exclaiming ‘Jee karta hai machine gun leke sab ko …’ (‘I wish I could take a machine gun and …’), but the sentence would be left incomplete, the fantasy unresolved, because the quick-fix solutions of mainstream cinema had no place in this movie. This was a film that dealt with inequality and injustice more matter-of-factly—not as things that could be isolated, tucked back into a little Pandora’s box and vaporized, but as elements deeply embedded in the fabric of our lives. Too deeply embedded, perhaps, to ever be successfully countered. But hey, we could always make the best of a bad situation by laughing at our collective predicament.

This is what Kundan Shah’s breathless satire Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro helped us do. It used humour for potent social commentary and to skewer holy cows. It made us chuckle along with it, even as it held up a distorting mirror to society.

The story is easy enough to summarize. Two idealistic photographers, Vinod (Naseeruddin Shah) and Sudhir (Ravi Baswani), try to earn an honest living by setting up a small photo studio, but gradually get drawn into a situation involving corrupt builders, corrupt law enforcers and a corrupt magazine publisher. An editor named Shobha (Bhakti Barve) hires them to spy on the underhand activities of two rival construction magnates, Tarneja (Pankaj Kapoor) and Ahuja (Om Puri), both of whom are in cahoots with the crooked commissioner of police, DeMello (Satish Shah). When the commissioner is murdered and the photographers find evidence that Tarneja is the killer, the corpse becomes the focus of a manic chase that ends in a theatre house where an episode from the Mahabharata is being staged. The police intervene and the two photographers think all their hard work will finally bear fruit, ending in the arrest of the guilty parties. Instead, dishonesty wins the day; in a bleak ending ironically set to the strains of their favourite inspirational song ‘Hum honge kaamyaab’ (‘We shall overcome’), they find themselves implicated.

But these bare bones can’t begin to explain what made Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro tick. It is difficult to describe this film to someone who hasn’t experienced it first-hand (and this book isn’t meant for such philistines anyway!). You can methodically list the many modes of humour that it employs or the templates that it draws on: slapstick, surrealism, black comedy, the Theatre of the Absurd and the Keystone Kops among them. You can speculate that the people responsible for conceiving and executing it were influenced at various times by the silent movies of Chaplin and Keaton; the endless non sequiturs of Groucho and Chico Marx; the physical comedy of Kishore Kumar, Mehmood, Abbott and Costello and the wry political humour of 1960s’ Czech cinema. But even if you do all this, you can’t convey how the film brings all these elements together, mixes and mashes them, throws in bizarre sight gags and leaps of logic; how it plays like an amateur-troupe skit in places, with some scenes that appear hurriedly scripted or improvised just minutes before the cameras rolled; how it segues between wordless slapstick and rapidly delivered one-liners; how it frequently does away with credible scene set-ups and narrative logic and instead cuts straight to the heart of an idea, with some characters that are deliberate caricatures rather than nuanced people—and yet makes perfect sense, providing a final knockout punch that has rarely been equalled in Hindi cinema (and certainly never in a comedy).

For one thing, there’s scarcely anything you can compare it to. Though it wasn’t a mainstream film by any standards, its tone was unlike anything made by the ‘art’ brigade.

Hindi movies fell into two broad categories at the time. On the one hand, there were the mass-market entertainers based on assembly-line scripts, simplifications of human behaviour, and the romantic notion of the superman hero coming along and solving society’s problems with his fisticuffs (or machine gun, as Amitabh’s immortal ‘Vijay’ did in Inquilaab). On the other hand, there was the Cinema of Struggle, made up of socially conscious (and in some cases, very self-conscious) films that were labelled ‘parallel’ (or, worse, ‘art’) movies. Conventional wisdom has it that there was a clear division between the two forms, but the lines did blur at times. For example, it isn’t always easy to know how to classify the gentle social dramas and comedies of Hrishikesh Mukherjee—especially the ones that featured big-name stars like Dharmendra, Amitabh and Rekha. Some of Basu Chatterji’s and Gulzar’s works present a similar problem. And what to make of Shekhar Kapoor’s carefully crafted Masoom (which also released in 1983)—starring the first couple of art-house cinema, Shabana Azmi and Naseeruddin Shah—which became hugely popular with both children and adults, with the song ‘Lakdi ki kaathi’ turning into an anthem of its time?

Posterity has further muddied the waters. Movies like Mukherjee’s Gol Maal and Sai Paranjpye’s Chashme Baddoor may have been comparatively low-budget, with low-key actors, but their popularity has turned out to be more enduring than that of many box-office smashes that were released at the same time. In fact, some of these films are so accessible, so clearly non-elitist, that it’s difficult to believe they were ever considered off the beaten track. In almost any other major cinematic culture, even the Hollywood of the 1930s (with its narrative-driven films and popular genres such as the screwball comedy, the musical and the Western), they would have been part of the mainstream.

In other words, ‘parallel cinema’ was an umbrella term that could embrace such vastly different films as Govind Nihalani’s Aakrosh, Shyam Benegal’s Bhumika and Paranjpye’s Sparsh, films that only had this in common: their scripts and characterizations were more grounded than those of commercial cinema. But even amidst all these films, Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro is one of a piece. It defied classification. It was nearly as accessible as most mainstream films, but it was also just as provocative—and arguably more durable than— as many of the earnest but drab propaganda features of the time. It wasn’t at all ‘realistic’ in the superficial sense of that word, but it was real in a deeper sense.

To truly understand the phenomenon, one has to understand what a rare thing political or social satire is in India. This is not a country that has a grand tradition (in film, at least) of using humour to depict the stark realities of everyday life. But Kundan Shah’s movie combined extreme lightness of tone with extreme seriousness of purpose. It’s one of the funniest films ever made in India but also one of the darkest to come out of the Hindi film industry. Beneath the laughter is cold fury, even nihilism.

Of course, we didn’t realize this when we saw it as children.

A PERSONAL JOURNEY

When it comes to local pop culture, there’s a homogeneity to the experiences of my generation of urban, middle-class Indians who were growing up in the early and mid-1980s. It was the era of a single TV channel and mostly black-and-white TV sets. The idea of ‘home entertainment’ was in its infancy: only a few of us had video cassette players in our houses. (When my family got its first VCP, at least a dozen neighbours from around the building laid siege to our living room for the inauguration, done with a Mithun Chakraborty starrer called Muddat.)

Since we weren’t swamped with TV channels and other entertainment options—DVDs, multiplexes, video games, the Internet, cell phones—it follows that today, when people of my age gather to discuss that time (and generally behave like doddering 120-year-olds going on about the ‘good old days’), we have a limited, but very vivid, corpus of associations and memories to draw on. There’s Chitrahaar and Hum Log. Giant Robot and DD’s Comedy Show. Star Trek on Sunday mornings. The Sunday-evening Hindi movies. Rajani, Nukkad and the Lalita-ji commercials.

And then there’s Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, a film that, for most of us, is linked with television viewings rather than with a movie hall. I first saw it around the age of seven, with most of the family sitting in a semicircle around the glowing rectangular box in the drawing room. This scenario would repeat itself every few months or so, for Doordarshan seemed to enjoy telecasting the film almost as much as we enjoyed watching it. Its title soon became a byword for something funny, something that made you smile when you heard it—much like the TV show Yeh Jo Hai Zindagi. And because it was telecast so often over the years, we saw it at different stages of our lives, and it came to mean something different to us each time.

It can be a mistake to try and analyse the responses of your child-self to a film, but I think one reason why the film appealed so much to us when we were little was that it unfolded like the class plays we were familiar with in school— episodic, disjointed, a bit juvenile. This made it instantly identifiable, and also reassuring in a way, because it wasn’t too often that we got to see ‘grown-ups’ playing the fool in quite this way. Adult men and women (some of them smartly dressed in bandgallas and saris) running down the road after a corpse on roller skates? Arbitrary shooting about with guns, with no one getting hurt? The tomfoolery with the mixed-up telephones? Some of us had seen this kind of thing in Chaplin comedies on TV, but not in a contemporary, home-grown film with situations that we could directly relate to. To our young minds, the shenanigans in Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro were sillier than the dhishum-dhishum scenes and vigilante supermen in mainstream movies; we took those very seriously indeed! This was comedy, and wasn’t comedy something we could be patronizing about?

Nearly every Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro fan I know remembers being enthralled by the ‘thoda khao, thoda phenko’ scene, where Satish Shah’s Commissioner DeMello is encouraged to throw away bits of the ‘Switzerland ka cake’ he is eating. For children, this scene combined something we loved (chocolate cake) with something that was fun to do (throw stuff at people), and it was an instant winner. Long before we could understand the scene in grown-up terms—as an indictment of consumerist culture, a commentary on obscene wastage in a society where the gap between the haves and the have-nots was already insurmountable—it worked for us at a primitive level. The deeper meaning was secondary and, for many of us, it would remain incidental even when we watched the film as adults.

Even at a young age, the movie wasn’t all funny though. Hard as it is to believe today, there were parts that we found genuinely frightening as little children. The scene where Vinod and Sudhir discover the commissioner’s body became the stuff of nightmares for many young viewers. ‘I was scared of flyovers for days after that,’ a friend tells me. ‘I felt sure there must be bodies concealed under them.’ (It bears mentioning that flyovers were a novelty for those of us living in cities like Delhi, where a number of these concrete dinosaurs had been finished just in time for the 1982 Asian Games.) Some of the other humour was too subtle or deadpan for us. When the smarmy builder Tarneja, holding forth on the many benefits of a newly constructed bridge, says, ‘Aage jaake log iss flyover ke neeche apna ghar basaaenge,’ (‘People will make their homes under this flyover in future’) most of us didn’t register the irony. We were so inured to the sight of poor people living like this that we simply took the statement at face value.

As slightly older children, we would be fascinated by the blow-up scene where the photographers minutely examine and enlarge a film negative that shows a murder being committed—it was our introduction to the idea that this could even be done. (We didn’t know that the scene was inspired from an Italian film, but why would we care anyway?) The mid-section of Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, including the scene with the matching cufflinks that help the partners discover the body’s whereabouts, had the feel of an investigative thriller. (‘It was so vivid and exciting,’ says a commenter on a blog post I wrote about the film, ‘that I remembered the whole thing as a detective movie.’) Later, when we would have access to videotapes of the film, we would look carefully at the scene where the partners photograph the monkey in the park—using the pause button or slow-motion—to spot the scuffle going on in the background.

An abiding memory from those drawing-room viewings is of everyone waiting for the Mahabharata scene to begin: it was the ultimate pay-off, a cultural touchstone for our generation; so much so that I’ve met many self-proclaimed ‘die-hard Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro fans’ who remember little else about the film (and others who misremember that the scene was nearly forty-five minutes long when it was really under fifteen minutes in its final cut). The guffaws that accompanied the blind king’s every cry of ‘Yeh kya ho raha hai?’ (‘What is happening here?’) are so burned into my mind that, honestly speaking, I don’t even find the line funny any more.

Then came the last shot of the film, the scene that made both children and their parents uncomfortable. Up to this moment, there was reflex laughter every minute or so, but when the partners made their appearance in prison clothes a hush fell over the room. As the two ‘bali ka bakras’ (scapegoats) stared directly into the camera—at us—with a resigned, or perhaps accusing, look and made that chilling throat-cutting gesture, some of us averted our eyes. It took the rug out from under our feet: it was as if the film had played