Yash Chopra: A Deewar none can climb

When Yash Chopra walked into the sunset, 53 years after he blazed a trail with Dhool Ka Phool, he was a ripe old 80. At this age, even if the loss is huge, inevitability shrouds the shock of it. But, his passing away came as a huge shock, so unannounced it was.

Shock was, incidentally, a concept Yash Chopra had most meticulously camouflaged in his brand of cinema — be it in his socially-relevant films of the 60s, his version of the imploding 70s or the sensuous romances which defined him in later years. For, this great filmmaker believed in the ultimate kind of packaging — say the most potent thing you want to, but in style and with acceptability; couch your belligerence, your frustration with issues in subtleties which win audiences, not alienate them. That’s what he preached — and always practised.

Though worshipped for the seductive chemistry of picture-prefect-locales-chiffons-and-beauty he brought to romance on Indian screen, and often accused of having lost his way navel gazing in Switzerland, fact is that Yash Chopra’s brilliance lay in the multi-layered and nuanced look-in he gave to all brands of cinema that caught his imagination — cinema, when he was a 20 something in a just-partitioned Independent India, or when he was an 80-year-old-wise man of wholesome saleability. Chopra was a genre that moved with the times, a force most willing to blend with generational change, a man who had the vision to show how society is meant to graduate fromMain pal do pal ka shayar hoon... to the go-getter Gen-X mores of a Mere hotey koyi aur kare tere baar gaur, yeh na hoga kisi taur chahey chaley chhuriyaan….

Kabhi Kabhie, in that sense, was no mere romance. It was Chopra’s most subtle advice to change with the times, to let bygones be bygones, to accept relationships in their present and not badger them for their past, to be young but committed, to be old but indulgent, to not give up on love easily but once sone, to move on with grace.

A heady mix of an old-time romance gracefully bowing to parental pressure with the brand new sizzling intent of Tujhe laoonga main ghar chahey chale chhuriyan could not have been more seamless than in the this perfectly packaged simili on change being the ultimate force of Nature.

As Shashi Kapoor put it aptly, Yash Chopra was entirely unique because he was a rare ‘practical dreamer’ — one who caught the pulse of the time, much ahead of time. In 1959, when he debuted as director with Dhool Ka Phool, he did so audaciously. There was everything in his venture that was unacceptable — pre-marital sex, unwed motherhood, a Muslim bringing up a Hindu child — outrage was written all over the subject. But that did not deter a young Chopra from packaging his potent speech against societal chasms in the cushion of acceptability.

Chopra made this film at a time when India was still young with Independence, a fledgling society fighting westernisation and desperately stitching up the torn fabric of traditionality. Unwed mothers back then were symbols of imperialistic wantonness and Hindu-Muslim unity lay torn at the altar of Partition. Yet, the intricately woven saga of emotions navigated through pre-marital indiscretions to soar in popular mindset as a

Hindu-Muslim unity symbol (tu Hindu banega na musalman banega, insaan ki aulaad hai, insaan banega) and that got Manmohan Krishen his first Filmfare Award.

Chopra’s Dharamputra, however, was one of those inevitable films that had to come from most Lahore-evicted families of Partition, and Chopra was one of them. With Shashi Kapoor as a Hindu fundamentalist (something that this side of India would fume against) it made a mega statement against intolerance and bloodshed. Born Muslim but raised by a Hindu family, the dharamputragets his most scathing lesson in secularism when he is about to kill his biological parents only to realise he is their blood. It was a message Chopra patented to bag the National Award for Best Film.

Chopra’s dalliance with meaningful cinema sporting a dash of newness found a rich and path breaking turn with Waqt in 1965 — the first-ever multi-starrer and a blockbuster telling you how time and destiny are forces you can’t curb. The film came wrapped in soulful (Aage bhi jaane na tu, peechey bhi jaane na tu) as well as foot-tapping (Aye meri zohar zabeen) music that has no rival even 50 years later, not to mention dialogues that made Raj Kumar’s delivery famous for all times to come.

If 1965 was Chopra’s blockbuster year with Waqt breaking box office records and he getting the Filmfare lady for best director, it was truly in 1975 that he became a force to reckon with.

Indeed, with Deewar and Amitabh Bachchan, Chopra untied a force that swept away every remnant of a soft romantic hero to wring in an angry generation.

Chopra, in my view, should be defined and assessed by Deewar rather than the heartbeats he painted as a sheer romantic in his later movies. Deewar is etched in memory not because it won eight Filmfare Awards that year but because it was a turning point at many levels and as Danny Boyle was to say decades later, “the absolute key to Indian cinema.” Those were times when India had moved several furlongs away from British hegemony. It was around three decades of Independence and this decade was altogether different. If hopes of reconstruction and optimism dotted the 50s, the 60s had braced dawning hopelessness by rallying around as a nation patriotically brushing aside domestic woes to untie against the Chinese attack and the Indo-Pak War.

But by the late 60s, the winter of discontent was setting in. From being a symbol of nationalism, the Congress Party had started showing the chicanery of politics.

Food shortages due to failed monsoons, Bangladeshi refugees eating into reserves and rising prices were making society implode with inflation and unemployment. The joy of Independence was over and in its place there was anger, a deep-seated anger, emanating against the system which was taking its first big step into corruption and crime. Labour and student movements were shaping mindsets and Chopra was in the middle of it all.

Deewar was an encapsulation of all this anger and it is to Chopra’s unmatched cinematic genius that you may still be debating what genre it was — an action thriller, a family melodrama or a radical soiree against a subversive system.

Then there were the other strands — good versus bad, system vs rebellion, acchaa beta vs bura beta, brother vs brother, and not the least of them all, mother vs son and God vs Amitabh.

Not to mention, Parveen Babi made the most uninhibited statement for an alcohol drinking, cigarette smoking woman who has no guilt around sleeping with a man without marriage.

Chopra’s keen view of life as it was, found a window in Deewar which exploded all over Bollywood to change film-making mores forever. One can, without doubt, attribute it to also being the most blatant “uterine view of Indian man” ever where the only unmatched possession was “mere paas maa hai”.

So, in one sense, Deewar showed what Yash Chopra was really capable of — he was one man who could weave one little moment in your life as a three-hour gripping saga. Over the years, he also showcased how he could make stars out of actors (Amitabh), he could bring stars down (ended the reign of Rajesh Khanna kind of films), he could set trends (Waqt, the multi-starrer), he could package as no one else (his locale hunt was already legendary and his tie-up with Sahir Ludhianvi adorned films in song and dance as never before, his astounding worship of womanhood (Rakhee as the ultimate, ageless beauty in Kabhi Kabhie is as unmatched as Madhuri in Dil To Pagal Hai or Sridevi as and in Chandni).

Indeed, his Chopra wali love stories would make us wish he was always alive — like his films. He was always ageless — like his films.

Source: Published in Foray, Sunday Pioneer, October 28, 2012