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Journalism of Courage
IF YOU shift your gaze and focus from notions of what constitutes womanhood — a constant preoccupation with any patriarchal society — masculinity offers a fascinating and varied range of models. Each male star of Bollywood’s heyday of the 1950s defined his own idiom of masculinity. Raj Kapoor was earnest and sought an Indian authenticity that was quixotically doomed to failure. Dilip Kumar was intense and romantic, a project that in upper case — as a Romantic — was never more beautiful than in failure. And Dev Anand was a cosmopolitan whose success lay in the refusal to acknowledge failure.
The cosmopolitan is, by definition, outward looking. It is fragile when it rejects tradition, resilient when it embraces the new and incorporates it into its past. When Dev Anand arrived in Bombay, his landing must have been padded by being one of a band of brothers. The films he made with Chetan and Goldie are the meat of his career. He acted in other films too but in all of them, he presented us with a cosmopolitan masculinity. The Anand brothers knew enough to keep their cosmopolitanism rooted in the melodrama of Bollywood. But Dev Anand brought to it a new sophistication.
It was a sophistication that verged on the effete. Watch him lolloping, loose-limbed, in some of his songs and he is almost playing it for gay laughs. Watch him in the climactic fighting sequence and you see someone who could not believe what he was doing but was doing it anyway. For the rest of the film, he relied on sprezzatura, that peculiarly Italian presentation, where achievement must be artistic but even more importantly, effortless.
Thus was a triangle of men created, thus was an Indian masculinity generated: Raj Kapoor with his eyes on the distant horizon where Maya and Vidya did battle; Dilip Kumar with his eyes fixed on his antaraakaash, his interior landscape, while Chandramukhi and Paro faded into insignificance; and Dev Anand with his eye on the main chance, the guide, the black-marketeer, the taxi driver, the small-time hood with the conscience that could be awakened.
My generation of men knew two Dev Anands and they seemed to bear no relationship to each other. There was the black-and-white Dev Anand whom we watched on Doordarshan on Sunday evenings, often at someone else’s house. This was who we wanted to be: debonair, elegant, at ease in the world. We sang, Main zindagi ka saath nibhaata chalaa gayaa because we wanted to be able to deal with our worries by blowing smoke rings at them, even as a batman attended to our trousers and we buttoned our shirts left-handed. We hummed Hai apna dil to aawaaraa and Khoyaa khoyaa chaand, because we knew that these were excursions into the countryside and we would all soon return to the city where we, and Dev Anand, belonged.
Then there was the Dev Anand in colour. They were released in theatres and reviewed in the papers with increasing bemusement. After Loot Maar and Des Pardes, there were no hits. There was just a strange presence marked by a Himalayan self-belief; it seemed to keep him moving from film to film, past one failure to the next. This was certainly not how we wanted to grow old. There was deep affection for this strange figure who could conceive of a film in which one man (who else) can be head of the Board of Cricket Control of India and the head of the Criminal Investigation Department. There was also deep distaste for the ways in which he presented women, specially the young female actors, because he was Dev Anand and they were just starting out in the industry.
But masculinity in India is schizophrenic. It is given to bouts of worship and violence in equal measure. We learned to separate the black-and-white Dev Anand we remembered from the technicolour failure of the last years in which he taught us one important lesson: if one must deceive the self, then the deception must be total, the belief must be complete. One must live inside that bubble but the psychic expenditure on maintaining that bubble is so great, where would there be energy enough to produce art?
Jerry Pinto’s latest novel is The Education of Yuri (Speaking Tiger)
