Hrishikesh: Success sans compromise

The retrospective of seven of veteran director Hrishikesh Mukherjee?s finest films at the 36th International Film Festival of India (Goa, November 24-December 24) will be a tribute as much to an entire era of popular Hindi cinema to an individual?s creative oeuvre.

The retrospective of seven of veteran director Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s finest films at the 36th International Film Festival of India (Goa, November 24-December 24) will be a tribute as much to an entire era of popular Hindi cinema to an individual’s creative oeuvre.

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For the ailing, octogenarian editor-writer-director, who hasn’t made a single feature film since 1998, remains one of the most resplendent representatives of a stream of filmmaking that, in the 1970s, wedded creative integrity with commercial viability with a degree of success that has rarely been replicated.

Mukherjee’s contribution to the evolution of a sort of Hindi cinema that provided intelligent entertainment, exuded emotional energy and rested on thematic substance without seeking to cheapen itself cannot ever be overstated. The fact that a film festival that has been striving for all-out commercialism and is seeking to position itself as a glamour-driven jamboree – that probably is a need that the organisers of IFFI can ill afford to ignore – has homed in on a filmmaker of Mukherjee’s ilk is a reinforcement of the importance of the kind of filmmaking that he stood for.

The question is: can the sort of films that Hrishikesh Mukherjee and some of his likeminded contemporaries specialised in continue to survive in this age of purely commerce-driven moviemaking? The answer, unfortunately, is no. Hence, we are already talking of Mukherjee’s remarkable corpus in the past tense.

Mainstream, big-banner Bollywood movies are today primarily designed as high-gloss, lowbrow products aimed at inveigling the urban masses. In this scenario, the likes of Mukherjee can only be shadowy relics of the past. For an industry forever struggling to deliver real artistic quality on a consistent basis can only imperil its own future if it neglects the vision that fired the cinema of Hrishikesh Mukherjee.

Having started his career first as a lab assistant, and then as an editor, in New Theatres, Mukherjee graduated to working closely with legendary director Bimal Roy. His first assignment as an independent director, Musafir, made in 1957, was a collaborative effort with Ritwik Ghatak and Salil Choudhury. Mukherjee’s early mentors and associates were enormously gifted individuals who left an indelible mark on his creative vision.

Mukherjee’s first box office hit was the memorable Anari, starring Raj Kapoor and Nutan. He followed up on that rousing triumph with two critically acclaimed heroine-oriented films – Anuradha and Anupama at a time when male stars dominated Hindi films almost completely.

Anuradha and Anupama remain high watermarks of his illustrious career. The former was a brilliantly edited but conventionally sentimental reworking of Madame Bovary with accomplished performances from Leela Naidu as a successful dancer who gives up her thriving career for marriage, and Balraj Sahni in the role of an idealistic rural doctor.

Anupama, a well-crafted psychological drama, dealt with a guilt-ridden woman (Sharmila Tagore) who is constantly made to feel responsible for the fact that her mother died while giving birth to her. The sympathy of a sensitive writer, played by he-man Dharmendra in a clear break from his screen image, helps her emerge from her emotional trough.

Mukherjee, whose cinematic output includes powerful social dramas, intense family melodramas and wonderfully modulated comedies, has always had a way with actors, both male and female. Some of the best performances delivered by megastar Amitabh Bachchan have been in films directed by Mukherjee – Abhimaan, Alaap and Bemisaal, among others.

It is unanimously believed that the finest performance of Dharmendra’s career was in Mukherjee Satyakaam, which, unfortunately, failed to ignite at the box office. That forced him to gravitate towards a more popular genre – comedy. But here, too, he achieved unprecedented success with films like Guddi, Bawarchi, Chupke Chupke, Khubsoorat and Golmaal.

Mukherjee strength lay in the fact that he had his finger on the pulse of the people but unlike many of his contemporaries and successors, he never felt the need to sell his soul in order to pander to lowest common denominator tastes. He made films on his own terms. That is a rule that Bollywood’s millennial showmen have lost sight of.