Shekhar Kapur on Dev Anand: He taught me about hope, adventure, the perils of stardom
The superstar’s nephew looks back on his first project, his uncle's trysts with flops and failure, and a chance encounter at Connnaught Place with Raj Kapoor.
In the early 1970s, I had quit my job as a chartered accountant. I was in my early 20s, and I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life.
My mother was very worried that I was becoming “a hippie”. So she asked Dev Uncle (Kapur’s mother Sheel Kapur was the sister of Dev Anand) if he could find me some work in one of his films.
At the time, I had wanted to backpack across Africa. But once work on Ishk Ishk Ishk (1974) began, I got really into it. It was a romance set in the mountains, about a young man who finds love while trying to find his place and purpose in the world.
We shot most of the film in small towns and cities in Nepal. We kept climbing further into the mountains. I remember Fali Mistry, the cinematographer, saying: “Arre, Dev Saab ko roko yaar. Woh kahan jaa rahein hai (Someone stop Dev Saab. Where is he going)?”
There were locations we had to walk to for days, and no one was happy about that. Dev Uncle was already in his 50s at the time, but there was no stopping him.
I can still so palpably remember his thirst for adventure. That’s when I realised how similar we were. Except, he had found what he wanted to do and I was still looking.
Ishk Ishk Ishk premiered in Bombay. Everyone present congratulated him and praised the film. This continued on phone calls once we were in his hotel room at The Oberoi.
Then the real calls started coming in, with distributors saying the halls were empty and tickets weren’t being booked. I was the only one with him when he learnt that his big release had flopped on its first day.
He looked absolutely devastated. He had invested a lot of his own money in it too. He said to me, “Shekhar, picture flop ho gayi. Paisa gaya (The movie’s flopped. The money’s gone),” and walked into the bathroom. He was in there for some time, but when he walked out, he was smiling again.
He said he had an idea for a new film, and started discussing it. This, perhaps, is my most important memory of him, and a lesson that I am still trying to learn.
But spending time with him, I also learnt something else: the importance of not being taken in by one’s own public image. Do that, and you become that image. And it becomes increasingly difficult to separate the two. Most of time, I couldn’t tell if I was talking to Dev Anand my uncle or Dev Anand the star, because the two personas had merged. That aura also then becomes a shield one has to force one’s way past, if one wants to get through to the person inside; to make a human connection. I’ve seen this happen to many others as well.
Even in his films, it is the ones where he wasn’t “playing himself” — films such as Munimji (1955), Funtoosh (1956) and Hum Dono (1961) — that I enjoyed the most.
The Hindi version of Guide (1965; starring Dev Anand and Waheeda Rehman; directed by his brother Vijay Anand) was his greatest performance. His transformation from Raju to Swamiji was inspired. It was fresh. It followed the story, rather than the story following the star.
For all that, he was greatly in tune with the industry and the world, and always looking for ways to link the two. His films invariably reflected what was going on at the time.
He wanted to go international. It was he who got in touch with [author and Nobel laureate] Pearl S Buck about turning RK Narayan’s novel into an English screenplay.
At his home in Bandra, I met Gregory Peck, the man he was constantly compared to. On another occasion, I remember being privy to a conversation between David Lean (the Oscar-winning director of Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago) and him. They talked about movies, and how Indian cinema could go international.
My earliest memory of Dev Uncle is from my early childhood, when he would visit us in Delhi (Shekhar Kapur’s father Kulbhushan Kapur was a doctor in that city).
We were driving around Connaught Place one day, when he suddenly called out to the driver to stop. We were outside Gaylord Restaurant. Uncle got out and joined a man who was sitting on the steps outside, and the two of them started singing. Much later, I realised that the man was Raj Kapoor.
Another memory I have is from when I was seven or right and he took me to a film set for the first time. I met Madhubala there and was just struck, even as child, by her incredible energy and beauty. Someone took a photograph of the three of us that day. It is likely lost now.
The last time I met Dev Uncle was at his editing studio in Mumbai. I was seeing him after a long time, and when I went up to hug him, he flinched. For a second, I was taken aback and hurt. Then I felt how thin he had grown, how much older.
He still wanted to maintain the façade of eternal youth, so he never complained or spoke of his ailments. I remember when he passed away, there was a real sense of shock among his fans. How could someone you believed was “evergreen” die?
In some ways, he was evergreen. Good, bad or terrible, he never stopped making films. He never stopped loving cinema with a passion that drove him to create.
His son Suneil Anand, who was with him when he passed away in London, told me that he was writing a script that day. He always wrote in a register. Suneil stepped out of the room and when he returned Dev Uncle had passed on, the register still in his hand.
(Shekhar Kapur is the BAFTA and National Award-winning director of films such as Mr India, Bandit Queen, Elizabeth and, most recently, What’s Love Got to Do with It?)
(As told to Karishma Upadhyay)
Continue reading with HT Premium Subscription
