Des Pardes
Meghnad Desai
Meghnad Desai
Posted: Sun Dec 18 2011, 02:27 hrs
=================================================
Just within one weekend last week, there was the sudden departure of two artistes—Dev Anand and Mario Miranda. Each in his own way, was iconic and lovable; each in his own way, defined his place as an Indian uniquely.
These were two people who filled our lives over fifty-plus years. I recall seeing Baazi when I must have been about 12 and then the many other films which we used to try and catch first day first show. This meant Friday 3.30 p.m. There were tickets for five annas and ten-and-a-half annas and for a Dev Anand release, the queues were always long. It was thus that I saw Jaal, Taxi Driver, CID, Nau Do Gyarah, Milap etc. I am perhaps in a minority to have seen the box office disaster Insaniyat, the only film Dev Anand made with Dilip Kumar.
The three iconic actors of the Fifties—Dev, Raj and Dilip—shaped our consciousness. We formed our ideals about our relationship with the other sex from their on-screen personas. We copied their behaviour and dreamed that some beautiful girl would mistake us for the real thing. Some hope! They also defined that heady first decade of the Indian Republic, embodying in different ways the way India saw itself. Dilip Kumar played a variety of characters—rural and urban, modern and historical—but all had a connection with Nehruvian politics. Raj Kapoor had managed, thanks to Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, to take a Left line in Awara and was lionised by the Soviet Union and its allies. Dev Anand’s roles were largely unpolitical, but he and his brother came from the Indian People’s Theatre Association which was committed to progressive ideas.
This is how Dev Anand played characters, always young urban men, who never walked a completely straight path, and often had a brush with those in powerful positions fighting for justice. Yet Dev Anand never became identified with any political parties in the Fifties, except perhaps to canvass for Krishna Menon in the 1957 North Bombay election. But he did protest about the Emergency and fought for freedom against authority as he had done in his films. He also wrote an elegant and perhaps the frankest memoirs any public person has written in India since independence.
I met him in his last three years in London. His was a totally cosmopolitan personality. He was as at home in London as he must have been in Mumbai. He had no visceral anti-British sentiments a la Manoj Kumar film. He could be British in London with ease and still charm you with the old world good manners of a Lahori. His last rites were performed in a Chapel in the Putney Vale crematorium and was fittingly a Christian ceremony despite pandits reciting slokas alongside. He refused to compromise even then.
Mario Miranda was another artist whom I learned to admire and appreciate in the Fifties and then I got to know him during the last decade. He was, of course, cosmopolitan by birth, combining a long heritage of Portuguese India through generations of Mirandas and a life spent in India. His formation as an artist and indeed his happy breezy demeanour owed much to Goa, Bombay, Lisbon, London. Mario was as Indian as he was Western, and, indeed, even more than either, a Goan. In his beautiful ancestral home in Lotulim, the oldest Portuguese village in Goa, the walls were filled with posters from art galleries and exhibitions around the world as well as originals by some world famous artists including himself. His wife Habiba brought her own Hyderabadi aristocratic nonchalance and they entertained friends from around the world.
In the years in between the Fifties when being a cosmopolitan Indian was possible and the subsequent decades when the anxieties of Indira Gandhi or the intolerance of the Parivar made xenophobia patriotic, India has lost much. Then was a confident hopeful India, poor but relaxed. Today, it is richer and even globalised, yet xenophobia has become the badge of the political classes. The iconic stars today may roam round the world but they better not say they feel at home abroad, lest someone files a PIL against them!
=================================================
Just within one weekend last week, there was the sudden departure of two artistes—Dev Anand and Mario Miranda. Each in his own way, was iconic and lovable; each in his own way, defined his place as an Indian uniquely.
These were two people who filled our lives over fifty-plus years. I recall seeing Baazi when I must have been about 12 and then the many other films which we used to try and catch first day first show. This meant Friday 3.30 p.m. There were tickets for five annas and ten-and-a-half annas and for a Dev Anand release, the queues were always long. It was thus that I saw Jaal, Taxi Driver, CID, Nau Do Gyarah, Milap etc. I am perhaps in a minority to have seen the box office disaster Insaniyat, the only film Dev Anand made with Dilip Kumar.
The three iconic actors of the Fifties—Dev, Raj and Dilip—shaped our consciousness. We formed our ideals about our relationship with the other sex from their on-screen personas. We copied their behaviour and dreamed that some beautiful girl would mistake us for the real thing. Some hope! They also defined that heady first decade of the Indian Republic, embodying in different ways the way India saw itself. Dilip Kumar played a variety of characters—rural and urban, modern and historical—but all had a connection with Nehruvian politics. Raj Kapoor had managed, thanks to Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, to take a Left line in Awara and was lionised by the Soviet Union and its allies. Dev Anand’s roles were largely unpolitical, but he and his brother came from the Indian People’s Theatre Association which was committed to progressive ideas.
This is how Dev Anand played characters, always young urban men, who never walked a completely straight path, and often had a brush with those in powerful positions fighting for justice. Yet Dev Anand never became identified with any political parties in the Fifties, except perhaps to canvass for Krishna Menon in the 1957 North Bombay election. But he did protest about the Emergency and fought for freedom against authority as he had done in his films. He also wrote an elegant and perhaps the frankest memoirs any public person has written in India since independence.
I met him in his last three years in London. His was a totally cosmopolitan personality. He was as at home in London as he must have been in Mumbai. He had no visceral anti-British sentiments a la Manoj Kumar film. He could be British in London with ease and still charm you with the old world good manners of a Lahori. His last rites were performed in a Chapel in the Putney Vale crematorium and was fittingly a Christian ceremony despite pandits reciting slokas alongside. He refused to compromise even then.
Mario Miranda was another artist whom I learned to admire and appreciate in the Fifties and then I got to know him during the last decade. He was, of course, cosmopolitan by birth, combining a long heritage of Portuguese India through generations of Mirandas and a life spent in India. His formation as an artist and indeed his happy breezy demeanour owed much to Goa, Bombay, Lisbon, London. Mario was as Indian as he was Western, and, indeed, even more than either, a Goan. In his beautiful ancestral home in Lotulim, the oldest Portuguese village in Goa, the walls were filled with posters from art galleries and exhibitions around the world as well as originals by some world famous artists including himself. His wife Habiba brought her own Hyderabadi aristocratic nonchalance and they entertained friends from around the world.
In the years in between the Fifties when being a cosmopolitan Indian was possible and the subsequent decades when the anxieties of Indira Gandhi or the intolerance of the Parivar made xenophobia patriotic, India has lost much. Then was a confident hopeful India, poor but relaxed. Today, it is richer and even globalised, yet xenophobia has become the badge of the political classes. The iconic stars today may roam round the world but they better not say they feel at home abroad, lest someone files a PIL against them!
================================================
No comments:
Post a Comment