Film Biographies – A call to arms
Ever since I became a passionate fan of Hindi Cinema, I also felt the tingling desire to know these dream merchants who light up the canvas, up close and personal. The idiosyncrasies associated with each actor, the journey to fame for every artist and the real woman behind every starlet intrigued me. Was Shammi Kapoor who engendered the image of the rebel hero in the 1960’s, anything like all those characters he played in Junglee, Prince or Teesri Manzil? Who or what inspired the legendary Madan Mohan to belt out hit after hit that he became the undisputed czar of the ‘ghazal’ in Hindi film songs? Why did Manna Dey always have to live in the shadows of Rafi, Mukesh and Kishore?
Sadly, other than having an answer to the first of my queries, precious little has been done by way of biographies to document the lives of most of our film personalities. Also, the few biographies that do manage to hit the bookstores are invariably about the big guns of Indian cinema, the heavyweights of the film industry – the Guru Dutt’s and the Amitabh Bachchan’s. At last count there have been over half a dozen books on the man behind classics such as Pyaasa and Kaagaz ke Phool, and a similar number on the Angry Young Man of Indian Cinema. Like in reel life, the heroines who accompany our larger than life heroes are forgotten memories, because of the absence of any real literature on them. So even while Guru Dutt has tributes pouring his way, there is little to nothing on Waheeda Rehman – the woman who starred in at least one successful/critically acclaimed film in every decade since the 1950’s to this day – Pyaasa (1957), Guide (1965), Kabhi Kabhie (1976), Mashaal (1984), Lamhe (1991) and Rang De Basanti (2006)
However, a worse fate awaits the people behind the cameras. Yes, the Yash Chopra’s, the Vijay Anand’s and the Manmohan Desai’s have had people document their journey to the pinnacle of fame. But what about the rest of the crew? Would Raj Kapoor’s films ever have the same social flavor had it not been for Shailendra’s rustic lyrics? Similarly, it could also be argued that Guide without S D Burman’s music would have robbed the film of its spiritual quotient. A couple of generations down the road, movie buffs may have to struggle to trace the legacy of legends such as Binod Pradhan and Santosh Sivan – men who changed the manner in which films are shot in Hindi Cinema.
Why does this happens – this tendency to celebrate only the big wigs, the reluctance to document the journeymen, the absence of proper literature on our doyens of many years – is difficult to explain. Prima facie, the big names do sell and it makes inherently more commercial sense to have a book on Lata Mangeshkar than on any other playback singer – dead or alive. But even while it is only a handful of personalities that find themselves in the pages of a book, there is a tendency to sugarcoat the subject matter. Seldom does one come across a biography that discusses the protagonists’ fallout with people from within the industry or any other matter that may reopen old wounds. To that extent most of these books are only flowering tributes, bereft of any of the controversial anecdotes that may really interest the reader.
Nevertheless, there is a silver lining in an otherwise dark and gloomy sky. Over the last few years there have been a few brave attempts to preserve the inheritance of our stalwarts for coming generations. Bunny Reuben’s authorized biography on Pran Saab – And Pran (HarperCollins 2005) is a wonderful history of this great villain-cum-character actor of Hindi Cinema. The book is peppered with interesting anecdotes about Pran, his standing amongst his peers, the Be-imaan controversy and the real man versus his reel image. Then there was Helen – The Life and Times of An H-Bomb (Penguin Books India 2006) by Jerry Pinto. Even though the book was completed without the author getting an opportunity to meet the original item girl of Hindi Cinema, it is so well researched and written that it won the National Award for the Best Book on Cinema in 2007.
(Penguin Books India 2008) written by Ganesh Anantharaman, also makes for an excellent read. Over the course of the book, the author outlines the evolution of the Indian film song by means of a small write up on many of the personalities that formed part of the trio that exists between music director, film lyricist and playback singer. And so you have the careers of every artist associated with the melody in our films sketched out over a few pages – from Anil Biswas to Sahir Ludhianvi to Bappi Lahiri to Javed Akhtar to Udit Narayan.
But a lot more definitely needs to be done. There is an entire gallacticos of luminaries waiting to have their biographies penned (authorized or otherwise). Naushad Saab, Raj Khosla, Balraj Sahni, Majrooh Sultanpuri, Salim-Javed, Sanjeev Kumar and Smita Patil are but to name a few. Even while we celebrate the films of the aforementioned names, it is important to preserve their work through the written word. For it is only by way of a good biography that one appreciates the other’s success. A glimpse of each artiste’s tribulations through printed material makes their triumphs on screen look all the more special. Anything less would rob posterity of the man behind the mask.
Tags: Binod Pradhan, Biography, Guide, Guru Dutt, Helen, Literature, Pran, S D Burman, Santosh Sivan, waheeda rehman
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
Good post dude
….Totally agree with that…Is there a bio on Kishoreda?
Very well post. Artists like K.L.Saigal, Shamshad Begum, Meena Kumari etc. have not been documented properly not documented at all..
The problem is about pricing as well. Down south (specifically Kerala)you have biographies on personalities that are priced just right and there is an instinctive desire in the populace to read. If there is no market, then there is no publisher ready to publish it. Some of the biographies are priced too much for any ordinary reader to pick it up and buy.
Great great great post, thanks!!
if you with a South Asian heritage are frustrated by the lack of ways to learn more about the details of these lives, multiply that by a hundred for people who somehow discover Indian cinema via some other route (than being born to it) and long to find out more.
One super-obvious observation, there are people alive now whose memories reach back into film history, and it will be so sad if their knowledge isn’t at least gathered and saved, even if nobody is ready to use it in a specific book project. So I am hoping there are at least oral history projects going on, even though I’m sure a biographer ideally prefers to do his or her own interviewing.
Editorial note, title of book by Anantharaman got left out of text.
Virginia..the title was not mentioned in the article that was submitted. :-(
Thanks Om!! – I did what I probably should have done in the first place, I looked it up – Bollywood Melodies: A History of the Hindi Film Song
http://books.rediff.com/bookshop/buyersearch.jsp?Ganesh-Anantharaman-Books&lookfor=Ganesh%20Anantharaman
http://www.amazon.com/Ganesh-Anantharaman/e/B001J6EPGO