From Anand to Bemisaal — variations on a Mukherjee theme

this one’s for Rajen.. the greatest fan of both films on this blog.. hopefully the following meets his standards..

Roughly midpoint through Anand Bachchan’s character, Dr Bhaskar, expresses surprise that the terminally ill Anand does not have any family to lay claim to. He is told by his friend, Prakash, that Anand is a child left orphan by Partition in Delhi. This is a remarkable moment in the film though as with so much else in Mukherjee’s work it is presented in the most unobtrusive fashion. Anand, as the expiring offspring of a tragic Partition is a suggestive metaphor.


The film also pays homage to presumably the director’s romance with the city of Bombay. There is not very much of the ‘outdoors’ in the film but it begins with one of the best credit sequences in Hindi cinema (with a superb score as well). Mukherjee offers a dedication to the city and his master, Raj Kapoor (it should not be forgotten that another illustrious protege of the legend, Manmohan Desai, started his career with a Partition film in Chalia and the resonances of which stayed with him throughout his career) with a marvelous montage of iconic Bombay sites (eventually the frame is reduced so it is almost as if one is watching all of this in a screening room with the editor.. one moment must be spotlit.. the one with the double deckers swishing across the screen, wipes of a kind, a memory that maybe stayed with Rohan Sippy when he did something similar in Bluffmaster). This city is most often privileged in the director’s work.

But something kept fascinating Mukherjee with the theme of the terminally ill lead protagonist. He of course re-interrogated this space in Mili, another film with the lead character giving the film its title, another film which begins ‘at the end’ and ‘rewinds’ the time of the film. Because Anand has a definite ending we learn at the very beginning that the lead character in in fact dead. Mili however remains open ended and is to this author the greater film even if Anand has the greater iconic claim.

Each film offers the literal physical decay of the patient as a response to a larger socio-political set. If Anand is the child of Partition he is also a victim of the post-Independence experiment where the cynicism of commerce has quickly replaced the idealism of the Independence era (this connects Mukherjee to Raj Kapoor’s oeuvre, one especially thinks of Shree 420). The ‘dialog’ between Dr Bhaskar and his colleague cum friend, Prakash, is central to the film and erupts at more than a few points. If Rajesh Khanna’s character is the film’s philosopher advising us on how to live life the conflict itself is staged between the two friends who are in different ways not completely reconciled with their profession. Bhaskar is especially a tortured soul. It is this humanism that Anand, that Raj Kapoor also represented by way of his Chaplinesque self in Shree 420, that has been forsaken in post-Independence India.

Anand is the great foundational film of Mukherjee’s career and he returns to some of its central concerns from time to time. It could be argued that in some ways his vision also grew darker in later works though the director never quite lost his affection for the bourgeois world he otherwise satirized or critiqued in both his ‘serious’ films and his comedies. Mili is a darker film than Anand because it operates in a universe of greater social specificity and hence the sickness of its eponymous protagonist winds a more immediate correlative. One thinks of the obvious scandal at the heart of the film that crystallizes the larger social malaise of that social system. The even later Jurmana also operates with such a ‘given’. By the time we get to the really late Bemisaal, in many respects the most ambiguous and certainly most unsettling of the director’s works, the circle that began with Anand is in a sense complete. Here too the clinical and disease are twinned with the failure of a socio-political project. Interestingly here it is a disastrous abortion that leads to the film’s climactic crisis. One cannot stop here. There is the all important ‘double’ of the film, rather muddled as a narrative element but one that is thematically quite important. But one must backtrack a bit here and reflect on the space Amitabh Bachchan occupies in Mukherjee’s oeuvre.

Bachchan is always the ‘out of joint’ personality in Mukherjee, always the character who unhinges the film a little bit. We see this in Anand where his character is always angst-ridden and where Anand’s otherwise simplistic worldview finds a much more sophisticated expression in his character. In fact Bhaskar is led to his own ‘project’ because of his acquaintance with Anand. One knows that he will lead a fuller life for having known Anand even if the latter himself (though a great star outing for Rajesh Khanna and also one of his most endearing ones) often seems no more than an index of the gestural without ever convincing completely as a diagnostician. Anand’s project at any rate depends on Bhaskar. As an aside I should add that the re-coding of Anand in recent times as a Bachchan film seems either completely ridiculous or at least a sad reflection on how passe Rajesh Khanna is at the present time but in the light of the reading I’ve just offered it at least becomes more comprehensible.

Moving a bit quickly now in Namak Haram once again Rajesh Khanna has the title role and seems to bring about the crisis but the greater ‘political’ gesture is handed over to Bachchan. Rajesh Khanna’s ‘betrayal’ is in a way pre-ordained in as much as he remains truer to his social class by going down this path. It is Bachchan however who atones for it and who offers his ‘corporatist’ father the ultimate price. He represents the apotheosis of his friend’s dream and subsequent ‘sacrifice’. This move was of course repeated years later in Bemisaal, a film which even as it completes the circle begun with Anand also reunites all the threads that first emerge in the latter and find varied expression throughout the 70s work of Mukherjee. Here too Bachchan pays the price for a very different betrayal that his friend-brother engages in. It is only in Bemisaal where the ‘doctor’ who treats and the one who kills are symmetrically offered in the same narrative. The medical practitioner ‘arrives’ at Bemisaal’s site as the possessor of a ‘pharmakon’ in the Plato-Derrida sense of the term which is to say as the bearer of a drug which is equally medicine and poison. The same social model engenders and it paralyzes, it opens up possibilities but it also murders in each instant. This is always Mukherjee’s lesson (which is why for example Anand’s death is almost necessary much as Dharmendra’s is in Satyakam… the social compact demands this sort of blood sacrifice from those who would seek to reorder it by taking its ‘morals’ a bit too seriously.. if there is a bourgeois principle to Mukherjee’s films it is this — mores must always trump morals.. a truth that leads both to comedy as well as tragedy and Mukherjee was a master in both modes). Sometimes madness might also be a result. Again let me get to this a bit later.

Abhimaan offers an ‘unhinging’ of Bachchan and later on he is once again the only one in the tale who can set things right. Jurmana’s crisis is yet again ‘manufactured’ by Bachchan who is the surest cynic starting out and in essence a great casualty of his social framework. At least before her reforms. Alaap finally has the complete abdication of social ‘responsibility’ for the higher pleasures of art. And finally Bemisaal, the film where Bachchan must be split into two. One the one hand Sudhir, possibly Mukherjee’s most enigmatic character, one who with everything else that might be said about him also operates at the boundaries of bourgeois sexuality. The director is extraordinarily bold here for Bachchan’s relationship with Raakhee always functions in a twilight zone where lover and sibling frequently change roles. There is a definite ‘coupling’ here. Bachchan starts out being attracted to the woman, perhaps. Then he sacrifices her for his best friend/brother, perhaps. Finally he begins a very strange, even unsettling tango with his sister(-in-law)-lover. There are moments in the movie where Bachchan seems to be ‘acting’ and yet something real always transpires between the two in these instances and Raakhee’s character is not unaware of the strange charge of this relationship.

But Mukherjee also puts forth in his darkest move the mad brother (a victim of feminine sexuality perhaps in keeping with what has just been discussed.. towards the end of the film there is a point at which the principal character also appears a bit unhinged as he stages a kind of sexual overture with his sister-lover) who functions as the double of the ‘rational’ one. The ultimate price is paid by these brothers. One repeats the earlier Namak Haram sacrifice. The other ends up in an asylum. A rational medical professional and his literally unhinged patient brother/other. The role the woman plays in each instance is not unproblematic.

What begins with physical disease ends with madness. This entire journey is also peppered with Mukherjee’s great comedies where again the bourgeois order is always lampooned affectionately. Khubsoorat in the wake of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency and subsequent return to power might contain the most overt political statement. Amol Palekar meanwhile in many of the films retains an element of subversion that reminds me in other contexts of Mohanlal’s ‘double’ (Srinivasan… this actor even exhibits a troll-like menace at points which is beyond Palekar..) in many of the comedies he did.

To reiterate Anand remains Mukherjee’s authentic beginning. One only has to consider an earlier successful film like Anupama to reflect on the gulf between the two. Mukherjee really invented himself with Anand but also found an appropriate site to take some of Raj Kapoor’s themes in a new direction. He was ever the social commentator in inimitable style though one can render him bland by only insisting on this and ignoring his more profound designs. My aim here was to rather chaotically rush through some of this history. Not a formal exercise by any means but hopefully one that opens up some areas for reflection. If I have attempted something like a thesis here it points in the direction of magnifying the equation Mukherjee sets up between physical ailment and social malaise (itself a rather novelistic idea) and for which his rightly classic Anand offers a canonical beginning.