It was 1972, and the Indian New Wave was coming along nicely. The
government-funded Film Finance Corporation (FFC) was handing out loans
to directors who wanted to break away from the escapist and formulaic
movies being churned out by the Hindi movie dream factory. Some
film-makers were more interested in nightmares, among them M.S. Sathyu,
who had earned a name for himself lighting and designing sets and
directing plays for the stage. A script submitted by him to the FFC was
rejected, so he handed in another one—a story about a Muslim family that
chooses to stay back in India after Partition in 1947 but gets uprooted
from within in the process.
Balraj Sahni plays Mirza Salim, the family patriarch, in Sathyu’s film.
That script became
Garm Hava,
one of the best-known examples of cinema about Partition. Sathyu’s
directorial debut is routinely included in “Best Films” lists, but its
finely etched characters and deeply felt humanism have been largely
hidden from public view since its theatrical release in 1974. The movie
disappeared from sight—no VHS tapes or DVDs were made—surfacing
occasionally on Doordarshan. All that will now change with the
completion of a privately funded restoration process that started over a
year and a half ago. A restored version of
Garm Hava will be
re-released in theatres within the next few months. The picture and
sound quality in the close to 200,000 frames that make up the movie have
been individually treated. The original negative has been cleaned up,
and the sound has been digitally enhanced to suit the latest formats.
“It’s like a new film now,” says Sathyu. The rebirth of
Garm Hava is
the result of passion, doggedness, and deep pockets. The process was
started by Subhash Chheda, a Mumbai-based distributor who runs the DVD
label Rudraa. Chheda approached Sathyu a few years ago, asking for
permission to produce DVDs from the film’s negative. The negative had
aged badly and was damaged in many places. The idea then took root of
expanding the scope of the project—to re-release the film in theatres
and re-introduce audiences to its sobering pleasures.
It marked the film debut of theatre director M.S. Sathyu. Photo: Aniruddha Chowdhury/Mint
“The
film was visually corrected in consultation with Sathyu,” Chheda says.
“We have also upgraded the sound. Dolby digital, 5.1, whichever format
is there, the film is now available. People should not feel that they
are watching a dated film.”The project, which cost 100 times
more than the movie’s budget, was bankrolled by Pune-based developer
R.D. Deshpanday, whose businesses include the company Indikino
Edutainment Pvt. Ltd. Indikino ploughed close to
Rs.
1 crore into the restoration, supporting its picture spruce-up by
Filmlab in Mumbai and the sound quality improvement by Deluxe
Laboratories in Los Angeles, US. “The voice enhancement alone has cost
us a fortune,” Deshpanday says. “It’s like adding sugar to milk and then
separating the milk from the sugar.” He wants to organize domestic and
international premieres of the movie, and has approached Kodak Theatre
in Los Angeles for a screening. A book titled
History’s Forgotten Footnote,
written by journalist Satyen K. Bordoloi, will be released along with
the movie. Blu-ray discs and DVDs are also in the pipeline.
“We
are keen on bringing other timeless Indian classics to the surface,”
Deshpanday says. “The film touches upon a very live subject. If you show
Garm Hava today, anybody will think it’s a contemporary film. It has that kind of depth and timelessness.”
Heat wave: Garm Hava, which captures the decline of the Mirza family.
The attention lavished on
Garm Hava is
a bit ironic, considering that the film nearly didn’t make it to movie
halls. The Mumbai office of the Central Board of Film Certification
rejected the film, citing its potential to stir up communal trouble.
Sathyu used his contacts to approach the then prime minister, Indira
Gandhi. She ordered the film to be released without any cuts. But even
the all-powerful Gandhi—she was only a year away from imposing Emergency
on the nation and revoking the democratic rights of citizens—couldn’t
ensure a smooth theatrical release. “N.N. Sippy took up the film’s
distribution, but he backed out when we showed the film at a festival
ahead of its release,” Sathyu says. “I eventually approached a friend in
Karnataka who owned a distribution company and a chain of cinemas, and
he released the film first in Bangalore.” Only then did other
distributors step in to ensure that movie goers saw for themselves the
tragedy of a Muslim family that opts for India over Pakistan.
Garm Hava is
about choices and consequences. Salim Mirza, a shoe manufacturer in
Agra, has elected to stay back in India after Partition, but his
decision gradually tears apart his family. A prospective son-in-law
migrates to Pakistan, while business suffers because lenders don’t want
to advance money to Muslim traders who may up and leave without repaying
their debts. His daughter, Amina, decides to marry a suitor, but has
her heart broken a second time when he too migrates. The Mirzas lose the
mansion in which they have lived for generations. Salim Mirza is
plagued by self-doubt. Should he have left in 1947 itself? Where is
home—and what does it mean to be a Muslim in India? The movie’s original
title was
Wahaan.
A poster of the film.
Shama
Zaidi, Sathyu’s wife and the screenplay writer of several Shyam Benegal
films, based the script on a conversation she had with Ismat Chughtai,
the Urdu novelist who has written extensively on Partition. Chughtai
shared with Sathyu and Zaidi accounts of her family members, including
an uncle who worked at a railway station and watched Muslim families
gradually leave India in hopeful search of a better welcome across the
border. The couple showed the script to poet and writer Kaifi Azmi, who
wrote the dialogue and added to the screenplay his experiences of
working with shoe-manufacturing workers in Kanpur. The movie was made on a minuscule budget even by 1970s standards—a loan of
Rs. 2.5 lakh from the FFC and
Rs. 7.5 lakh borrowed by Sathyu from here and there. Like so many movies produced on the margins of the Hindi film industry,
Garm Hava was
made possible by the kindness of friends. The film was shot by
cinematographer Ishan Arya—also making his debut after working in plays
and advertisements—with a second-hand Arriflex camera loaned to the crew
by Sathyu’s friend, Homi Sethna. Sathyu’s involvement with the Leftist
Indian People’s Theatre Association (Ipta) resulted in parts for many
actors from Ipta troupes in Delhi, Mumbai and Agra. The only real star
on the set was the venerated Balraj Sahni in the role of Salim Mirza.
Sahni, whose immensely dignified performance is one of the movie’s many
highlights, was paid
Rs. 5,000
for his efforts. Shama Zaidi doubled up as the costume and production
designer. Ishan Arya co-produced the film apart from creating its
memorable images, which include a lovely moment of Amina and her new
lover, Shamshad, consummating their relationship on a riverbank opposite
the Taj Mahal. “We were all in tune with the kind of film we were
making,” Sathyu says. “Ideologically, we were all alike and that is
important.”
The film’s restoration cost nearly Rs. 1 crore.
The
cast included Geeta Kak as Amina, Jalal Agha as Shamshad, Shaukat Kaifi
as Amina’s mother Jamila, and Farooque Sheikh, also making his feature
film debut as Sikander. Sheikh was 24, and was completing his law degree
alongside appearing in Ipta productions. “We were the young and useless
lot at Ipta—we used to act in small roles and shift backstage
furniture,” he says. “The FFC gave Sathyu a loan that was inadequate, to
put it mildly, and that too, in bits and pieces, so he was looking for
people who would work for free or very little money. It was a real
labour of love.” Sheikh was paid all of
Rs. 750 for his role as Sikander, Salim Mirza’s rebellious son—his signing amount was
Rs. 150. “The film made history, and my contract must have too,” he says. Despite
having a pool of Ipta actors to dip into, Sathyu struggled to find the
right woman to play the small but pivotal part of Salim Mirza’s aged
mother. He wanted to cast the Hindustani classical singer Begum Akhtar,
but she turned down the role. Help came from unexpected quarters. The
Mirza mansion, a symbol both of the family’s social standing and their
fall from grace, was hired from a Mathur family. “The man who owned the
house told me that previous generations of his family had patronized
dancing girls,” Sathyu says. “I felt that these dancers must still be
around in Agra, so I asked Mr Mathur to take me to a brothel.”
The
brothel was run by an old woman who used to be a prostitute. After much
persuasion—and vociferous denials that they were film-makers rather
than customers—she opened the door to Sathyu and Mathur. Her name was
Badar Begum. “When I asked her if she would act in my film, she started
crying,” says Sathyu. Badar Begum told the director an incredible story
of how she always wanted to be an actor. She ran away to Mumbai at the
age of 16 to work in the movies, ran out of money, managed to wangle a
part as an extra in a Wadia Movietone film, used her payment to return
to Agra and eventually became a prostitute. “She did her part very well
even though she was in her 70s and nearly blind because of cataract
problems,” Sathyu says. Her voice, however, was dubbed, by the actor
Dina Pathak. The dialogue and background sounds in the movie were filled
in after the shoot at a studio in Mumbai. “The whole film was shot
silent, and the sound dubbed in post-production because we couldn’t
afford recording equipment,” Sathyu says.
Garm Hava was a
personal milestone but also something of a millstone for Sathyu, who is
now 82 and lives in Bangalore. “When you hit a peak with your first
film, everything else you do is compared to it,” he says. He has made
nine feature films in different languages, including Hindi and Kannada,
and is trying to cobble together the finances to make a multilingual
musical. He continues to work in theatre, and will stage a production of
the Ipta classic
Moteram Ka Satyagraha in Mumbai on 7 September. “
Garm Hava is
a sentimental story—it brings tears to people’s eyes, which is what
people like,” he says self-deprecatingly about his debut.
Apart
from showcasing a gem from the treasure trove of Indian cinema, the
restoration refocuses attention on Indian New Wave cinema, which
produced serious-minded, issue-oriented films against severe odds. The
collective approach that made
Garm Hava possible, the monetary
sacrifices by its cast and crew, and the passion for creating cinema
that leads to social change have all but vanished. The creative ferment
of the time is nicely captured by Ipta member and actor Masood Akhtar in
his feature-length documentary
Kahan Kahan Se Guzre, which will
be shown in Mumbai in August. Akhtar’s film contains valuable
information about Sathyu and the theatre scene of the 1970s and 1980s as
well as personal insights into the director (his real name is
Sathyanarayan, he is a charming flirt, his daughters call him “Sathyu”
rather than “Daddy”.) “I consider myself his assistant, and the film is
my tribute to him,” Akhtar says.
The documentary ends with the dramatic but appropriate Latin words
“O tempora! O mores!” Thanks to the restoration of
Garm Hava, the times and the customs of a near-forgotten phase of cinema will return, if only briefly.
**************
Separate lives
From Ritwik Ghatak to Yash Chopra, our leading film-makers have variously interpreted Partition
Indian
cinema has focused on Partition deep enough to merit the subgenre
“Partition cinema”. There are the movies of Bengali director Ritwik
Ghatak, who confronted head-on the trauma caused by the division of
Bengal into West and East Bengal (which later became Bangladesh). His
debut
Nagarik, made in 1952 but released only in 1977, deals with
the misery of a family that migrates to Kolkata from East Bengal. The
theme of geographic and spiritual displacement is further explored in
Meghe Dhaka Tara (1960), Komal Gandhar (1961) and
Subarnarekha (1962). In 1973, Ghatak revisited the country of his birth with
Titash Ekti Nadir Naam, about fisherfolk who live on the banks of the Titas river in Bangladesh.
Cloud of gloom: Ritwik Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara.
The division of Punjab has featured directly and obliquely in the works of Yash Chopra.
Dharmputra
(1961) spans the period before and after independence. Shashi Kapoor
plays a Hindu fundamentalist who discovers that he is actually a Muslim
who was adopted by Hindu parents at birth. In Chopra’s
Veer-Zaara (2004),
Zaara comes to India to immerse the ashes of her Sikh nanny. She falls
in love with a Hindu pilot, who later crosses the border to find her. It
is said that every Hindi movie about children or siblings separated
from their family members is actually about Partition. Could the
earthquake that splits the family of Kedarnath in Yash Chopra’s
Waqt (1965) actually be an indirect reference to Partition? There is no such coyness in
Gadar: Ek Prem Katha (2001),
Anil Sharma’s chest-thumping and eardrum-shattering movie about the
romance between a Sikh man and a Muslim woman during the tumult of 1947 .
A saner, and altogether quieter movie told from the Pakistani
perspective is Sabiha Sumar’s
Khamosh Pani (2003). Set in the
1970s, the movie recounts the dilemma of a Sikh woman who marries the
Muslim man who abducts her, but is forced to confront her past when her
son becomes a religious fundamentalist.
Pinjar (2003),
Chandraprakash Dwivedi’s glossy adaptation of Amrita Pritam’s novel, is
also about the experiences of a Punjabi Hindu woman whose family rejects
her after she is abducted by a Muslim man.
Literature has given film-makers ample material to work with. Pamela Rooks’
Train to Pakistan (1998) is based on the Khushwant Singh novel, while Deepa Mehta’s
Earth (1998) is taken from Bapsi Sidhwa’s
Ice Candy Man. Bhisham Sahni’s
Tamas,
a novel about pre-Partition madness in Amritsar, led to Govind
Nihalani’s television series of the same name—one of the best ever works
on the period.
