70s Doubles or How to Tackle Impostors!

The whole Kalicharan set of references in one of the other threads prompted this comment but as usual it got too long and I thought that it might as well get its own thread!

watch below around the 2.07.30 mark

On the question of Kalicharan notice how a certain kind of ‘double’ keeps popping up in Hindi cinema. The pre-70s Bombay films usually had the uninteresting doubles. Sometimes you’d see the ‘Neverland’ princely setting with someone substituting for the heir or the ruler. This was the Hollywood trope, the adventure story married to a bit of exotica. The Prisoner of Zenda deal. You had either some ‘mythic’ place in Eastern Europe or else in India or some such thing. Or the bourgeois manifestation of the same in for example Dev Anand’s Hum Dono. No exotica here but the same sort of substitution nonetheless. Of course there were films where there wasn’t any substitution or where it took place for parts of the narrative and was based on misunderstanding rather than an actual plot or conspiracy. Ram aur Shyam comes to mind. This entire dynamic leads to lot of engaging, enjoyable narratives but not much more than this.

But something different and more politically charged (as always!) happens in the 70s. I am not interested here in the usual and stale doppelganger debates. The whole psychoanalytic school of thought on what such doubles mean and much more on the precise coding in these 70s instances. Of which Kalicharan is an example, the greatest one is of course Don, but there are other Bachchan films and lesser 70s works along the same lines.

Essentially what happens here is that quite often the two halves of the double are not really biologically connected in any sense. There is no lost and found formula (there are some of those things as well but I am not principally interested in them here). What you get really is an extreme disparity between the two physical ‘copies’ in terms of their class and social coding and/or the politics implicated in each sense. So for example in Don there is the very refined, ‘upper class’ , urban villain and on the other hand the very rustic, ‘rude’ (I mean this word in a somewhat archaic sense which is to say he completely lacks a certain gentility), ‘bumpkin’ if you will. Two orders of Indian representation therefore collide. And note how it often comes down to the rooted, authentic (by this definition) Indian to save the day. And so when the substitution plot makes another appearance it is the ‘unrefined’, even savage type who has to be domesticated to perform the task at hand. A move which is incidentally more ambiguous than it might seem. Because it is never clear whether what the rustic type learns in this sense can ever be unlearned. Usually these films had a fake, comedic moment at the end where the now ‘gentrified’ hero would return to his older self one last time. But it always came across as a joke. Never entirely plausible. The solution always hinted at was that (and as in Don) the final character who would survive from that double would be neither the villain Don nor Vijay but in a sense Vijay as the space between the two. Or Vijay-Don as a hyphenated identity. In learning the urban the older rural or ‘lowbrow’ ways are lost forever. Again in Kalicharan the ‘impostor’ finally accepts the family as his own, he can never return to his former world.

On the one hand therefore a certain non-urban India was idealized. On the other hand there was also the admission that it was too late to be just that and a compromise was necessary. Because to operate in these new national urban spaces one needed to be learn these ways. Mother India no more!

But all of this is also laced with a bourgeois discourse. For it isn’t just that the rural gets absorbed by the urban or the ‘lowlife’ by the upscale society but also the nomadic figure who even if authentic in one sense is literally ‘unrooted’ in another who has to be brought into the fold or properly domesticated. This is what happens in very many of these films. Take Kasme Vaade. The rogue must be taught the virtues of family life and he then reforms. He gets the wife he never had, the brother he never had and so on. In other words if was the loss of family life that made him a rogue! But of course the rogue and the criminal are always needed to secretly provide the guarantee of the bourgeois order!

Again some other doubles could be discussed here including something like Adalat where even though it’s one character this entire dynamic is evident across the length of his biography. But its in any case one more instance of just how ‘interesting’ the imagination of the 70s always was. On the other hand when some of this stuff is reinvented in the present the very same tropes lose all of their force because there isn’t a proper rethinking of the meaning of the same. In other words one can do a mechanical remake as in the 2006 Don with snazzy camerawork and so on and you can even add a desperate twist or two. But what’s missing is the ‘meaning’. Or rather a coherent set of contexts. Again in the new Don the ‘desperate’ (because absurd) twist of the film that’s revealed at the end means that rather than the downmarket character of the original impersonating someone much above his social class you have the exact opposite. We learn that Vijay too was Don all along. But then there is really no double at all! Or rather one who shows up briefly and is knocked off. The whole film belongs to Don. Leaving aside problems of characterization (is it plausible that Don could live that kind of life of impersonation?) the text of this film is just not coherent enough even in other ways. Given the ‘globalization’ paradigm of this film with all the international sites and Russian gangsters and so forth the problem is really this: there is no place for that other India represented by Vijay here! He is completely superfluous to this world. Only in this perverse sense is that twist justified. But he shouldn’t have been in the film in the first place! It represents a certain ‘new Indian’ imagining of national space and certainly of the urban kind where various economic and social minorities are simply absent. The new Don doesn’t redress the balance in this sense. It makes that minority even more expendable!

But isn’t all of this nonetheless a level of meaning present in the film? Yes but it works in a way where much like the plot there are ideological ‘cheating’ elements in the work. It is not that I dislike the politics of the film (that would form a different debate). The latter just isn’t coherent enough. To this degree Don 2 is the sort of film that the earlier installment (2006) should have always been. This is all that Farhan Akhtar really wanted to make!

To make the point clearer any film of course ‘means’ something. But the question is whether it ever rises to the level of coherence and furthermore whether it engages with its contexts (however these are defined) in any relatively profound sense. Now this doesn’t have to be the goal of any film but my entire point here is that the ‘double’ offers yet another pathway into this greater ‘meaning’ of 70s cinema and as a contrast the contemporary and supposedly ‘updated’ versions lack that more serious purpose or coherence.