Durbar (19 page)

There were just 12,000 cinema halls in India in the seventies but cinema was the only entertainment for the masses, the only brief escape into a fantasy world of dream sequences and happy endings. At least that is how it was until two young script writers, Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar, collaborated to invent the character of Amitabh Bachchan as the eternal rebel who could take on the richest, most powerful men and always win. To understand how Bollywood films had turned political with the invention of Amitabh as India’s angry, young man we went to meet Javed Akhtar. Javed had come to Bollywood as an impoverished aspiring poet who hoped that his father, Jan Nisar Akhtar, a successful lyricist for Hindi films, would introduce him to Bollywood. But his father had struggled hard to climb the ladder of success and believed his son should do the same. He offered him no help, and Javed spent years struggling to find work, sometimes sleeping on park benches, and sometimes, because of the kindness of a watchman
in Mehboob Studios, in a dressing room filled with costumes and props from films of yore. It was the invention of Amitabh Bachchan as India’s symbol of protest that finally brought him fame and fortune.

We met Javed in his sparsely furnished apartment that offered a magnificent view of the Arabian Sea. He sat on a low, white diwan that looked like mattresses piled on the floor. With a head of thick, wavy hair and his brooding, romantic look, he was every inch the poet. I remember him as being very political and quite an angry young man himself. He was by then as successful as Bachchan and although it was never certain how much anyone got paid in Bollywood, it was rumoured that Salim–Javed made as much money for a script as Bachchan did for playing the lead role in a film. What was certain was that they earned more than scriptwriters had ever been paid before.

Javed had agreed to meet us for an interview through the good offices of a mutual friend, but treated us as Bollywood stars in those days treated film journalists. With disdain. I remember asking him an innocent question like what he attributed his fame to and him saying, ‘It is because I am brilliant. I am the most brilliant person I know.’ Many years later, when I got to know him as a friend, I asked him whether he had invented Bachchan’s character as a response to the Emergency and the general anger in the country against our political leaders. He said he had not done this consciously. The character he created for Bachchan was not political but that of an ordinary man fighting everyday repression by corrupt officials, politicians and other people in power.

Everything went well for us in Bollywood except for one thing. My day with Bachchan nearly did not happen. I called Rosy, as he had asked me to, soon after arriving in Bombay, and I continued to call her every day for more than a week before a date was finally set for our day together. Bachchan was so busy at the time that I am certain it was only because the introduction had come through Sonia that he agreed to see me at all. But when Rosy finally set up the appointment and told me to be at his home in Juhu at 6 a.m., I arrived to find quite a different man to the one I had met in Delhi. He treated me to an icy stare and barely said hello while his Mercedes was loaded with pillows, cold drinks, water and food. His wife, Jaya Bachchan, a star in her own right, stood in the doorway of their house with his lunch box in her hand and she made up for his unexpected coldness by smiling and making friendly conversation.

Then we got into his dark blue Mercedes and set off for the first ‘shift’ of the day. When I tried to ask him the sort of questions that interviews usually begin with, he replied with either a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ and made it clear that he would rather read his newspaper than talk to me. So I shut up. When we stopped at traffic lights on the long drive to the studio, street children recognized him and swarmed all over the car gleefully shouting his name. He became, for that moment, cheerful and friendly. Then it was back to long, uncomfortable silences.

When we got to Film City, where his first shoot was, I tried to follow him to his dressing room but he stopped me and said he would prefer it if I waited in the studio canteen. So I did. The canteen smelled of fried snacks and instant coffee and its plastic chairs were occupied by young actors and extras who chatted noisily over ‘masala’ omelettes and glasses of tea. When I introduced myself as a reporter from Delhi, they were eager to tell me their stories of struggle and failure and the elusiveness of success in Bollywood. There was a 95 per cent failure rate, they said, but once you came into the ‘industry’ you became addicted to it and unable to work elsewhere. They could not explain what it was that stopped them from finding ordinary jobs and living more regular lives. But said it could be because the fantasy world that exists inside the studios was so seductive.

When Mr Bachchan next appeared, he was in full make-up and went straight for ‘his shot’ with Shashi Kapoor who was the other star in the film. A man held a clapper-board before the camera that said, ‘Dewar Films –
Do Aur Do Paanch
. Scene 108B – shot 1 – 8.9.79’. In a shot that had taken all morning to set up, Bachchan had a single line of dialogue, ‘
Kahan ho Faquirchand Khachramal?
’ Once the shot was over I was summoned back to the blue Mercedes and we drove in another uncomfortable silence to Vasant Studio, to shoot for a film called
Naseeb
, which went on to become a huge hit.

It was late afternoon by the time we got to the studio and the crew, who included the actor Rishi Kapoor and the director Manmohan Desai, were gathered in the shade of a garden pavilion eating together in convivial, chatty harmony. In their company Bachchan became a different person. He was full of stories and jokes and very much the soul of the party. He did not touch the food we ate and restricted himself to eating the simple vegetarian fare that was in the lunch box he brought from home. It took an endless amount of time for the shot to be readied but Bachchan seemed
used to this. He joked about how in Hollywood actors ‘put their meter down’ from the minute they arrived on set.

Finally, when the director was satisfied that his shot was ready, the star was asked to wander down a street lined with fake shop fronts and lit by fake streetlights, drunkenly singing a song. Rishi Kapoor, his younger brother in the film, followed in his wake and helped him up each time he fell. By the time this ‘shift’ was over, dusk was falling and I had given up all hope of interviewing Bachchan, so I said goodbye and told him that I would take a taxi back. He asked where I was staying. ‘Colaba,’ I said. He told me that I should go with him since his next ‘shift’ was in town and he would be driving to the Oberoi Hotel. So I stayed more for the convenience of the ride home than from any expectation of an interview.

On the drive to the Oberoi darkness fell and when it was too dark for me to take notes or turn on my fat tape-recorder, Bachchan started to talk about his life as an actor and its difficulties in the most spellbinding way. He talked of how, when you spent your whole time playing different roles, the lines between reality and fantasy blurred, and how there were times when he was not sure if the emotions he felt in real life were any more real than what he felt when he was acting. It was the sort of stuff that journalists dream about when they interview famous people and all I could do was make notes in my head on the long, smoggy drive into the centre of the city.

It took us an hour to get to the Oberoi during which he talked endlessly and I listened, as carefully as I could, too frightened to put on my tape-recorder in case it broke the spell. When we got to the Oberoi we went up to the suite that was reserved for him and collapsed on the bed looking as if he would be happy for the day to end there and then. But, although he had worked for more than twelve hours, he still had another shoot to do. His last ‘shift’ was for a film called
Dostana
. The producer sent up a home-cooked, vegetarian meal and a message that they would be ready to shoot at 10 p.m. This gave us an hour to talk and Bachchan talked tiredly about the difficulties of being India’s only superstar. When I asked him why he needed to work such long hours day after day despite being the biggest star in Bollywood, he said, ‘Why do we do it? I don’t know. It’s just the system. If only the film press were interested in more than bedrooms and champagne they would see the other side, the blood and sweat. It’s hot and sticky in the studios and you have to fight with a guy three times your
size, and then you go to the next studio and you have to sing a song in the rain and you get all wet. By this time you’re physically drained and you’re working on sheer willpower – all this switching on and off characters and roles – and there is this heaviness in the head, and after all this you finish work at 11 p.m. and someone comes up and asks for an autograph and you say “I’m tired”, and they think you’re being snobbish and uppity.’

It was after 10.30 p.m. that Bachchan, in dark trousers and a grey leather jacket, began his last shift of the day. It involved shooting an ‘action shot’ in a dark Bombay back street. This sequence had the star dodging a speeding car and finally being thrown on to the bonnet on his chest. It took five takes to satisfy the director. And the small crowd of spectators who had gathered to watch taunted the star with comments like, ‘If you can’t do it, Amit, then let me take a shot at it.’ It was 2 a.m. before the shift ended and when the producer still wanted ‘a few more shots’, he finally said he could do no more. Bollywood’s superstar had worked for nearly twenty-four hours by then.

By the time he dropped me home at 4 a.m. we had become friends. As for me, I had fallen in love. When I did try to ask a couple of political questions, in between shots, I asked mostly silly ones. I asked if it was true that he had influenced Mrs Gandhi to censor certain Bollywood films, a widely believed rumour during the Emergency. He laughed and said, ‘Didn’t they also tell you that I was responsible for declaring the Emergency?’ The questions I should have asked, about his being the most important symbol of opposition to the established political order while remaining so close to the Gandhi family, I have to sadly confess I never did. On the train back to Delhi Madhu, heavily pregnant and not very sympathetic, said she did not think I was fit to write about a day in Amitabh Bachchan’s life since I seemed to have developed a ‘silly crush’ on him.

It was not one of the finest moments of my journalistic career.

C
haran Singh’s dream of becoming India’s prime minister came true but only for twenty-three days though he remained caretaker prime minister from August 1979 to January 1980. Having engineered the collapse of Morarji Desai’s government on account of silly prophecies and uncontainable ambition, and deluded about how much support he really had, Charan Singh set off for Rashtrapati Bhavan to declare that he was in a position to form a new government. He was invited by the President to do so, on 28 July 1979, on the condition that he establish in Parliament within a month that he did indeed have the support of a majority of the Lok Sabha. He would not have made it even as far as the gates of Rashtrapati Bhavan if he had not been assured by Indira Gandhi that he could rely on the ‘outside support’ of her MPs. But, in the days that followed, Mrs Gandhi discovered that the new prime minister had no intention of doing away with the special courts that had been set up by Morarji Desai’s government to try Sanjay for his ‘excesses’ during the Emergency. Realizing that she had no need of him she withdrew her party’s support to Charan Singh’s government a day before Parliament was due to meet on 20 August.

When the government fell and an early general election was announced it caused unexpected problems for Vasundhara Raje. Her mother, the Rajmata of Gwalior, decided to contest personally against Mrs Gandhi in Rae Bareli, which led to Vasundhara Raje’s brother protesting angrily against what he called their mother’s reckless determination to destroy the family. Madhavrao Scindia had joined the Congress Party after returning from self-imposed exile during the Emergency. This political decision was probably influenced by the fear that Mrs Gandhi would find ways to deprive
him of what was left of his inheritance. Much had been lost, many palaces surrendered to the state and vast sums paid in taxes, but enough property and wealth remained for him to be nervous about the government’s future actions against him as a member of the Jana Sangh. It was not paranoia that made Madhavrao Scindia react this way but his understanding of the reality that the Indian state had immense power and that Mrs Gandhi had grown accustomed to using that power against her opponents. The Rajmata had chosen, instead, to spend the Emergency in Tihar Jail where she was put in a room reserved for prisoners facing execution. Through the iron bars of her cell she had a view of the jail’s execution chamber but it did not seem to frighten her in the least.

The Rajmata was a woman of cheerful, indomitable courage. The sort of courage that comes effortlessly to those who believe they are fighting on the side of right. I had got to know her a little because of my friendship with her daughter, and every time we met she talked to me of nationalism and the glory of India as if there was nothing else in the world worth talking about. She told me that when she was a few days old she had lost her mother and as she grew older and felt the loss, in those heady times of the freedom movement when nationalism permeated the air, she was comforted by the idea that Bharat Mata was her real mother. Her mother was of royal Nepalese blood and her father from an ordinary Rajput family in Uttar Pradesh. He worked as a provincial official in the British Raj.

The Rajmata had become a maharani by a romantic accident. An uncle worked in the palace of the Maharaja of Gwalior and when the young maharaja started searching for a bride he slipped a photograph of his beautiful niece among those of Maratha princesses and other suitably high-born girls. The maharaja fell in love with her photograph and announced that he would marry only her. Black-and-white photographs of the royal wedding show her as a tall, beautiful bride gazing adoringly at her fairy-tale maharaja. But life measured in small doses the happiness that it gave Rajmata Sahib and she became a widow in her thirties. So it was again Bharat Mata and her service to which she turned for solace. She joined the Jana Sangh and donated vast sums to build schools and spread the cause of Hindu nationalism, and she allowed the palaces of Gwalior to be used for what she considered noble causes. When I asked her why she had chosen to contest against Mrs Gandhi in an election she was bound to lose, she
said simply, ‘I am a loyal soldier of the party and the party asked me to do this. How could I refuse?’ Many people admired the Rajmata for her decision but her son was not one of them. Vasundhara found herself torn between her brother and mother and resolved the problem by not taking sides. She did not campaign for either of them.