Hrishikesh Mukherjee: A Lie Less Ordinary

by Shamya Dasgupta

There is a Bengali trope, or maybe it is more universal: grandfathers spending lazy summer afternoons spinning yarns, the silver in their hair and the slowness of their limbs the only giveaways as they became friends, or an older brother at times, to their grandchildren. There was a lot of storytelling and role playing, fooling the in-between generation — -typically a son and a daughter-in-law — -with tricks and tall tales.

There are a fair few examples of this in Bengali literature and cinema (and, of course, from life itself). The grandfather-grandson tag-and-gag team finds expression in Satyajit Ray’s work, for instance, all very real to anyone who has grown up in the non-nuclear set-ups of a certain time.

In Joy Baba Felunath, the grandfather-grandson pair plots to prevent a crime by hiding a precious Ganesha figurine in the mouth of the lion in the family’s Durga idol. The story treads slightly different paths in the book and the film, but both are planned to fool the real criminals and, in the case of the film, challenge the detective. With prodding from his older partner, the younger aide provides riddles for Feluda to work out. And the playful deceit goes up another notch when it emerges that the patriarch was, in fact, playing a trick even on his partner.

In Pikoor Diary, the old man is less of an active participant, bed-ridden as he is, but assumes the role of the grandson’s confidante as the boy roams around the house, observing but not quite absorbing the goings-on in the lives of the adults.

In Agantuk, a globetrotter comes to visit the family of his niece, her husband and their son. The whole story, a short by Ray, is mired in deceit, real and perceived, but for the child, it is the granduncle who opens his eyes to the world beyond the immediate, teaching him words, wordplay, being the friend the boy’s parents cannot be.

But, above all, there is the cinema of Hrishikesh Mukherjee — -middle-of-the-road cinema, the average Indian family and friends; stories of humour and sensitivity, of simplicity and warmth. Those are words I’ve read and heard being bandied about when it comes to Mukherjee’s cinema, but, of course, it isn’t easy trying to place the work of someone who has made Satyakam and Anuradha, as well as Musafir and Bemisal, and Gol Maal and Khoobsurat. (A shout out here to my friend Jai Arjun Singh’s book The World of Hrishikesh Mukherjee: The Filmmaker Everyone Loves, which teases out the many complexities of the director and his cinema.)

I suppose one could say that his was the cinema of the educated bhadralok, his own milieu. Mukherjee had studied science, worked as a teacher of mathematics, and then turned to theatre and cinema, initially as a cameraman and editor and then, in Bombay, as assistant to Bimal Roy in Do Bigha Zameen and other films. The serious young man he was in his early cinema appeared again and again and again, even in his funniest films. But, almost from the start, when he was still in his 40s, the Mukherjee who was having a little fun with his audience was what stood out for me.

Not in-jokes or laugh-out-loud gags, no, certainly not. A montage of the funniest scenes in Hindi cinema might include only a handful of Mukherjee handiworks, including, maybe, the Dharmendra-Om Prakash exchanges from Chupke Chupke. His brand of humour was — how best to put it? — that of an older man sitting down in a gathering, saying ‘Let me tell you a story’, chuckling to himself, and then making up an elaborate lie over the next many minutes.

There has to be a target, of course. Maybe someone who claims great intellect, or has a dictatorial way, or is rich and powerful, or has a character quirk that needs fixing. And then the trickery plays out, taking centrestage. Even as the others in the mix clue in on the game, the target stays blissfully unaware.

I recall my otherwise dignified father once getting irritated about a man who claimed to be an expert on alcohol of all kinds, and proceeding to treat him to country liquor — -Bangla, it’s called — -served from a porcelain sake bottle and in appropriate cups. The man was blown — -in many ways — -by the wonderful ‘sake’ that Mr Dasgupta had acquired specially for him from the Japanese embassy. Sake, being what it is, is served neat — -and so was the Bangla, which meant a rather early and unpleasant end to the evening.

Very Mukherjee-esque, no?

To me, the venerable filmmaker was, above all, a prankster.

The earliest signs of this were probably in the two 1961 films, Mem-didi and Chhaya, and then, to a lesser extent, in Asli-Naqli, in 1962. But these were pieces of trickery or deceit, part of a larger narrative. He had already directed Musafir and Anari and Anuradha and was yet to make Anupama or Aashirwad or Satyakam, or even Guddi — -all serious films. So it was early days. But he had time for Biwi Aur Makaan in between, his first full-fledged attempt at sitting back and having a great laugh. It was 1966, he was between Gaban and Anupama, and Mukherjee gave us the story of four men pretending to be two married couples so they could fool the landlord into renting them the house. A grand deceit. But, as always in Mukherjee films, with no harmful intent. Just a greater good, if only to give the trickery legitimacy. As the story pans out, the lies and gags add up and get unwieldy because the original trickery was never good enough to last the distance.

That — gags taking the narrative forward — -is something we find again in the tragic Anand, where Rajesh Khanna’s memorable character routinely walks up to random people with his “Arrey o Murarilal … Qutab Minar pe beer pila ke out kar diya tha” line. He tries it on Johnny Walker, who cottons on and comes back with “Arrey Jaichand!” The two then proceed to banter even though they both know the joke’s over — -the lines flow, the imagined story builds, and then, for a few precious seconds, Amitabh Bachchan’s grumpy Dr Bhaskar Banerjee becomes the target as Khanna and Walker introduce each other to the good doctor. As schoolfriends Murarilal and Jaichand, of course. The entire sequence lasts less than a minute, from the time Khanna catches hold of Walker to when the latter walks away: a lesson in not stretching a good joke too long.

Yet, Mukherjee effortlessly stretches a gag to last the length of a film, and nowhere better than Chupke Chupke, Gol Maal and Naram Garam, all released between 1975 and 1981, and then the two coups de grace in 1983: Rang Birangi and Kissi Se Na Kehna. Small stories all of them — no grand middle-class messages or the mantle Mukherjee seemed to be stuck with: reflecting changing mores in a changing world. Instead, we had David (David Abraham), mainly, and Ashok Kumar in Khoobsurat, and Saeed Jaffrey in a brilliant performance as Lala-ji in Kissi Se Na Kehna — all playing the sutradhaar, the older man with the heart of a youngster, as gags and tricks make up the story. Not to forget the regulars, Amol Palekar and Farooque Sheikh, and others like Dharmendra or Amitabh Bachchan, Deven Varma and Asrani and Om Prakash, Dina Pathak and Lalita Pawar, adapting magnificently to Hrishi-da’s very particular brand of mischief. A poker face the greatest weapon.

Towards the end, in 1985, came Jhoothi and then the unnecessary 1998 Jhooth Bole Kauwa Kaate, the titles underscoring Mukherjee’s love for the lie — -lies of varying shades, lies with different intents.

Through the tears of Anand, the poignancy of Satyakam, the drama of Namak Haram and Mili, the stunning songs and all else from what is as stellar a filmography as one is likely to encounter, it’s really the jhooth that has stayed on for me. I don’t know if that’s unfair to him. I hope it’s not. For, above all, I admire the effortless simplicity of his cinema — -“It is so simple to be happy but so difficult to be simple,” said Khanna’s bawarchi … who knows, maybe that was the answer Mukherjee sought through his movies. Laughter, yes — -it helped.

Watching Gol Maal, Naram Garam and Kissi Se Na Kehna, I can’t help but imagine that Mukherjee had a rigid Utpal Dutt-like uncle or someone at home, some poor chap that was the target of a few real-life gags.

Indeed, I wonder what Mukherjee was like in real life. Wickedly funny, I imagine — -it would have been fun to know him.