Revisiting Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro

While our country has a colossal and overwhelmingly influential film industry, there is a surprising dearth of writers who turn a nuanced eye to the making of these films. Jai Arjun Singh, who also writes for The Mint, The Hindu, The Caravan among other publications, belongs to the tribe that is tackling this void. Besides The World of Hrishikesh Mukherjee: The Filmmaker Everyone Loves, he’s also penned Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro: Seriously Funny Since 1983.

Though Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, which remains among my favorite Hindi films, was released as far back as 1983, it has retained a cultish following of fans – viewers who watch it again and again and perhaps share tidbits and nuggets on online forums. Aimed at the fervently devoted and the moderately curious, the book stitches together anecdotes and little tales that went into producing the film.

Just to recap the story, for those who haven’t watched it and for others who might need to hit “refresh” on their memory banks: It starts out with two dreamy and hopeful photographers who are trying to set up a small photo studio (played by Naseeruddin Shah and Ravi Baswani). The word “hustle” is not yet commonly used, but that is exactly what they are trying to do: to forge some kind of ramshackle enterprise with which they can make ends meet. Like the frequently befuddled, well-intentioned “common man” etched by R.K. Laxman in his cartoons, they are trying to survive in a landscape already cratered with other forces: a sluggish bureaucracy, a frightening nexus between the mafia and real-estate big wigs, as between the media, police and criminals. 

At this stage, a magazine editor induces them to spy on two construction magnates, who are in cahoots with a corrupt police commissioner (played by Satish Shah). After a series of tragic-comic twists, the commissioner is murdered and his “corpse becomes the focus of a manic chase,” which interrupts a staged Mahabharata scene.

In the end, the two photographers are wrongfully nabbed by the police while the song, Hum Honge Kaamyaab plays in the background. Given that the very song was a Hindi version of the gospel song, “We Shall Overcome”, a song sung by forces during the Civil Rights Movement, the irony couldn’t be starker. As Singh writes in his book, Kundan Shah’s movie “used humor 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.”

Jai Arjun observes that there are many reasons for the film to be not taken seriously. The characters for one are not necessarily rounded or layered, with many being “deliberate caricatures.” Yet, the slapdash manner in which the movie was cobbled together – almost like a school play, with ad-hoc scenes and an amateurish thrust – makes a statement that is as compelling as the ending.

The nation, by then, is a patchy setting, where “jugaad” is the only means of getting ahead; where corruption and political intrigues can draw even the innocent or well-intentioned into conspiratorial webs. But it’s the ending, in particular, as the author observes, that offers a “final knockout punch that has rarely been equaled in Hindi cinema.”

The movie also defies easy categorization in other ways. It’s neither “art” nor “mainstream”. It isn’t a potboiler with mushy songs. Nor does it feature a gun-toting hero who can resolve all social tangles with a decisive burst of gunfire – like Amitabh Bachchan seems to in Inquilab. Yet it’s hugely entertaining. Without being blithe by any means. “Kundan Shah’s movie combined extreme lightness of tone with extreme seriousness of purpose,” as Singh puts it. “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.”

A Writer’s Changing Relationship With the Film

Singh himself grew up in the 1980s, when the country still had a single TV channel (Doordarshan) and most Indians owned black-and-white TV sets. Those were also the days of Chitrahaar and Hum Log, of Star Trek on Sunday mornings, of breathlessly-awaited Hindi movies on Sunday evenings, of Rajni, Nukkad and Lalitha-ji commercials. Since DD televised Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro at least a few times over the years, he watched it at different stages in his own life.

Each viewing imparted a different perspective. In the early years, it felt like the disjointed plays performed at school. It was also funny, in the manner of old slapstick films – a corpse being chased by men and women on roller skates, guns being fired with no one really getting shot.

Slowly, other interpretations started creeping in. The crossing of telephone wires representing the bureaucratic maze that both propped up and chained its inhabitants. Satish Shah’s famous cake scene as Commissioner D’mello – “thoda khao, thoda phenko” – signifying more than the merry flinging of cake.

Singh realizes that it’s “an indictment of consumerist culture, a commentary on obscene wastage in a society where the gap between the haves and have-nots was already insurmountable.” Others lines in the movie started becoming starker, in their critique of authority figures or of uncaring developers.

Like when the smooth-talking builder Tarneja recounts how a newly constructed bridge will serve many: Aage jaake log iss flyover ke neeche apna ghar basaaenge,” (People will make their homes under this flyover in the future). One needed to be of a particular age to get that this wasn’t a bland fact or even a joke, but a jeer. Ironically, around the time the movie was released, the city of Delhi was constructing some of its first flyovers for the 1982 Asiad Games.

Kundan Shah: An Idealistic Director

The director, Kundan Shah, who passed away in 2017, came across as someone who might have been in some other profession. In something nondescript. As Naseeruddin Shah wrote in a magazine article, “If he were to walk past you, you’d take him for an accountant.” Born to a Gujarati family, Shah would possibly have been steered to such a career, if he hadn’t stumbled on an ad for the FTII, Pune, soon after hearing about it from a friend.

Jai Arjun, who interviewed him for this book, many decades after the film was made, observes that Shah sustained a seemingly fastidious and boring routine, spending hours at his two-room office, repeatedly revising scripts.

Even in his 60s, the director was filled with “rage and curiosity” – expressing his ire at figures of authority, and of the sustained impotence of common folk. He didn’t support any of the larger parties – neither Congress nor the BJP – sensing that all political parties had lost sight of ordinary lives. He also realized, at a meta-level, that staying frustrated was critical to fuel his creativity and writing. He read extensively, taking detailed notes and interacting actively with his texts. Remaining deliberately indiscriminate with his reading, he ran through pulp fiction and classics. But was skeptical of jargon-filled analyses: As he put it to Singh, “Machiavelli, Camus, Stendhal, I read them all, but I read them as pulp.”

Kundan Shah shrugged off the accolades that continued to pour in from the film’s cultish fans. He did not even wish for it to remain so revered as a cult classic: “There should have been many more like it. If this film is such a pedestal, all it tells me is that Indian cinema hasn’t achieved enough,” he said.

Some Film Trivia For the Fans

·      Many of the cast members became famous after the film: Vidhu Vinod Chopra and Sudhir Mishra became directors in their own right. Others like Neena Gupta, Pankaj Kapur, Om Puri and Satish Kaushik forged distinctive acting careers.

·      Despite bearing a strong anti-establishment message, the film was funded by the NFDC and repeatedly relayed by Doordarshan.

·      The film was shot on a very low budget, so the quality of food handed out to crew members was memorably poor. Sudhir Mishra later complained that his acidity problems had originated from being constantly fed vada pao on the sets.

·      Anupam Kher’s cameo as a “disco killer” was excised. A talking gorilla was also edited out.

References

Jai Arjun Singh, Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro: Seriously Funny since 1983, Harper Collins India, 2013