JOIN USIrrfan Khan & Rishi Kapoor, gone too soon
Two actors passed away this week, and in their passing reminded us that they each embodied a different way of talking about Bollywood.
How should we remember somebody like Rishi Kapoor? Variously, I should think.
I am going to bookend my memories of Rishi Kapoor between moustaches. I’m a little allergic to the somewhat feline, I’ve-drunk-up-all-the-cream smirk that he kept breaking into across his career, but more of that later. Let me just say that the moustaches are a mercy when it comes to giving him a fair assessment.
If you’ve watched Puttanna Kanagal’s ‘Zehreela Insaan’, a retelling of his Nagara Havu, you will remember the entrance Kapoor makes in the film. The teacher is hippity-hopping among the Chitradurga rocks yelling his name while Kapoor lolls, with glossy moustache for consort, beneath, or perhaps, between the rocks in a prefiguring of the reptile he ends up becoming.
That film didn’t do very well — audiences perhaps liked things uncomplicated about their stars, and all this darkness got the thumbs-down. Pity. Because Kapoor could have become a different actor, and Kanagal could have found the bigger audience he so eminently deserved.
The other bookend is a song from Chintu Ji, a namoona of a moment in which Bollywood nutmegged world cinema while nobody was looking. The song begins with the lines ‘Akira Kurosawa Vittorio De Sica’, and then has numerous ridiculous parsings of the names of Fellini, Leone (Sergio, that is), Truffaut, and Woody Allen among others. The song has many ladies jumping around to these words while some tied-up representative of our civilisation looks on in shock. The other, more approving witness is Rishi Kapoor wearing what must be a party frock in Bollywood’s imagining of the tribal world. He also wears an elaborately curlicued mush, a beard that was probably the first 3D printed artefact to emerge from the Internet of Things, and does very little except make loud, approving, monosyllabic interjections.
That then is one way of sending him to the archives, as this force of nature who breezily woo-wooed his way between tragedy and farce, or indeed as a man who defined for himself an ambitious gamut that we can only describe as A to absolute zero on the Kelvin scale.
Another way of talking about him is to look at what sits in the middle of this gamut. Rishi Kapoor’s work through the 1970s embodies the adolescence of the Indian republic, an unfreezing of permissions, an effervescent, hormonal whoosh that came bursting out of a tightly corked bottle. An age of innocence, perhaps, that preceded the Emergency, and the coming of the darker Angry Young Man period. It is this dream-time that we get to revisit in films such as Bobby, Khel Khel Mein and Rafoo Chakkar.
Zehreela Insan has a song shot in slow-motion titled ‘O Hansini’ that best typifies this moment.
Kapoor lived off the energy of this moment for a long time after it should have been decently interred, but to be fair to him, we wouldn’t have had the benefit of being able to sing XY ‘Pyar Ka Dushman Hai Hai’ at sundry V-day protests, or indeed the film Saagar, if he hadn’t persisted. The other interesting thing about the work he did was attempting to move beyond the high jinks in later films like Tehzeeb, Chintu Ji and Agneepath.
And yet, we must admit that Rishi Kapoor’s career teaches us that entitlement can have chubby cheeks and be inordinately charming while continuing to be just that and no more. He arrived into the position of a star, which had been assembled and held warm for him by prior generations, and all he had to do after that was not mess it up too much.
There are stars, and there is the more complicated business rendering the ordinary, the complicated and the difficult in convincing ways. Irrfan Khan was what we might call a man for all seasons when it came to this demand.
Watching Irrfan Khan doing interviews is a somewhat tiring experience. Because he understands the question, and starts finding a way of answering it, and then never quite gets there. A carefully chosen word, or a well-placed phrase might nail it for everybody, but he tends always to say other things, and to thus go off at a tangent.
This inability, paradoxically, is what enabled him to be one of the greatest actors of his generation. He was constantly approaching characters, never defining them. And so, what is frustrating in the context of an interview, ends up in performance as mysterious, elusive, always within reach, and yet never entirely within grasp.
Asif Kapadia’s ‘The Warrior’ is a film that I find myself returning to repeatedly in fascination. In this 2001 film, he plays a wordlessly unhappy man sparked out of a violent way of life by a momentary flash, a vision of snow, and then he wanders far and wide making new choices and taking back his life in the process. We are offered no psychologising of this quest through the film, and so we wander in wonderment behind him, looking for clues in the arid landscape, in his heavy-lidded features, and hanging on to every word that is uttered as a mystery unfolds at its own pace around us.
This Irrfan, who settles on a moral compass, is someone we meet quite often in global cinema. It is a somewhat different beast from the one we might meet in films closer home.
His surprising durability in our films seems to subsist in his being self-made —not as a cliché, or a destination, but as a process involving bits and pieces, mistakes, rejigs and refittings. He described it once, quite memorably, as ‘See the mahaul, and do it spontaneously’.
To watch him in ‘Maqbool’, or indeed in ‘Karwaan’, is to find one’s appetite for his next moment on screen grow.
In a context where looking a certain way is part of the narrative of cinematic success, Irrfan’s victory was in changing the conversation from Who’s Your Daddy to making it about how to allow a character to emerge by feeding off the others in the frame.
(The writer heads the department of English Literature at St Joseph’s College, Bengaluru)