Film | Back story MS Sathyu’s ‘Garm Hava’, a New Wave icon, is being restored and is set to release in theatres. With it, a near-forgotten phase of cinema will be resurrected

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.
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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.