Stuck in the memory

With technology half a century old, and studio sets incredibly amateurish, was it a film that still hypnotised the old and the young? MEENAKSHI MUKHERJEE viewed 'Pyaasa' again to find out the truth for herself.

THE entire auditorium wallowed in collective nostalgia as the nine-day Guru Dutt festival in Hyderabad came to a close with the screening of "Pyaasa". I had missed most of the other films for various reasons but made a special effort to see this 1950s classic whose memory has got blurred in my mind - as I would imagine in the minds of most people of my generation - in a romantic haze as part of the lost world of black and white innocence, when love and longing were the staple of life. After being hardened by decades of clear-eyed existence of a more mundane kind, I was curious to view it again, to figure out exactly how its magic worked. More important, to see if it works any more in our post-globalisation ethos. After all the film valorised a hero who put poetry before material success, and but for the creative fire in him could well be seen as a Devdas-like figure whose attraction is supposed to lie in his opting out of society. Can anyone sympathise with such an idealist dreamer in today's achievement-oriented culture?

"Pyaasa" has attained a sort of iconic status in the history of commercial Hindi films - something akin to "Kismet" in the 1940s or "Sholay" in the 1970s. Undoubtedly, the film owed much of its phenomenal popularity to its haunting songs. The irresistible combination of Sahir Ludhianvi's lyrics, Sachin Dev Burman's music and the voices of Geeta Dutt, Rafi and Hemant at their best, has never been repeated. During the screening it seemed to cast its spell not only on the sizeable number of senior citizens in the audience who had in any case come to re-live their youth, but equally on the younger people, weaned on madder music and a louder din. It might have been a discovery to them that songs can captivate with so little or no background music.

But if it were for the songs alone, why take the trouble of travelling in pouring rain to sit through 35 reels perched on uncomfortable chairs? There are easier ways of enjoying music. Not a single person got up to leave before the movie was finally over at 10 o'clock, not even my reluctant companion who came on condition that he would walk out the moment he felt bored. In "Pyaasa" the technology is half a century old, the studio sets seem incredibly amateurish today - the park where Johnny Walker peddles his champei ka tel and the lanes of the brothel where the drunken Guru Dutt sings his memorable "jinhe naaz hai hind par" song, are tacky to say the least; a duet uses props that must have been hackneyed even then - billowing vapours engulf the hero and the heroine as they dance with haloes around their head produced by backlighting - but people sat glued to their seats without a murmur, as if hypnotised. In fact even the elderly viewer who had been causing us much distress by his loud out-of- tune humming while the songs were being played in the auditorium before the movie began, surprised us by lapsing into a profound silence when the actual screening started.

The film has all the clichs of Bollywood films that we have grown up with - the prostitute with the golden heart, Hindu-Muslim friendship (the only true friend of Vijay is Abdul Sattar), the capitalist as villain, the ending where a destitute hero and a prostitute heroine walk away into the mist towards the far horizon - door, bahut door. But some elusive component still holds the film together. The late Iqbal Masood once wrote a line very casually in his column that has stuck in my memory. Masood's definition of an Indian was a person who cannot remain unmoved by the film "Pyaasa". He did not explain why. Is it sentimentality? Is it the capacity for a temporary suspension of the motivating desires of real life - making money and enjoying a good life - in order to idealise renunciation?

Seeing the film today, I was baffled by an incidental question about location and language. For a long time the Bombay film had tried to erase the regional identities of its characters to construct a homogenous Indian ethos. That is why the heroes and heroines seldom had second names that might reveal specificities of caste and language. But Guru Dutt was not like most of his contemporaries. He lets us know very early that the proprietor of the Modern Publishing House, who is also the editor of a highbrow Urdu magazine, is called Mr. Ghosh, and his assistant is Chatterjee - unusual names for patrons of nazm writers. It is not clear why the film should be set in Calcutta when the protagonist is an Urdu poet. In fact for quite some time the director was not sure that the location should be specified at all and most of the film was shot inside the studio in any case. But slowly we begin to recognise the place, specially when in a cameo role Tulsi Lahiri, that wonderful character actor, whose work in several Satyajit Ray movies remains unforgettable - is made to speak a sentence in an obviously Bengalised Hindi. Gradually the secret is out when in one of the infrequent outdoor shots we have a glimpse of the Howrah Bridge.

Calcutta was a city where Guru Dutt spent many years of his life and apart from the influence of Pramathesh Barua, he was marked in many other ways by the city and its culture. He makes a Bengali Vaishnavi sing "aj sajan mujhe anga laga lo" in a kirtan mode - perhaps because the eroticism of the lyric could be permissible only in the context of Radha's love for Krishna. The poignant use of this song when Waheeda Rahman stands on the terrace unseen by Guru Dutt is something that stays in the memory long after other details of the film are forgotten. When the sex- worker Gulabo nurses Vijay Babu back to health, suddenly she becomes a Saratchandra heroine, her cotton sari worn in the traditional Bengali way, her wet hair hanging loose. A women's virtue conveyed through sartorial tropes has since then become a familiar device in Hindi films. At that time, for whatever reason, Hindi film-makers, including Guru Dutt, seem to have found the visual image of a traditional Bengali woman an effective signifier for purity and innocence. The hero's clothes, it so happens, never carry any symbolic value. The poet wears trousers and jacket more often than dhoti-kurta, but no subtext of meaning is encoded in his changes of apparel.

The radical elements in the film include the laying bare of the economic compulsions behind prostitution through a stark image - a sick child's cry disturbing the mother's mujra. But a bigger protest is against the entire economic system, exemplified by the commodification of poetry. Long before the idea of a book as a consumer product got accepted and applauded in our society, Guru Dutt imagines a scenario where a volume of poets becomes a profit-making artefact, fought over by competing contenders, eliminating the poet in the process. When the poet understands what is happening, instead of gloating over the amount of royalty he can extract now, in a grand gesture he forsakes this world of buying and selling. The film articulates and confirms the belief that art and money cannot co-exist. Not many would endorse this view today because art is very often big money, but for the duration of the film it seems an emotionally convincing idea. If the film still moves the viewers it is because of the director's passionate sincerity in presenting a portrait of the artist in a market driven civilisation.

The writer is a noted writer and literary critic based in Hyderabad.

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