Of late, Top 5 lists have been a hit on Facebook. Catching the virus from friends, I too tried to come up with my list of Top 5 films that I would "watch over and over again". It is true that lists make me nervous, but I can assure you that that had nothing to do with the fact that there was just one Hindi film in my Top 5. And that film was "Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro".
I am not a child of the Bollywood generation. Thankfully. Perhaps it is a good thing that I grew up at a time — the Eighties and very Early Nineties... and then I think I stopped growing — when Bollywood churned out its lowest and most forgettable crop of films. Had I been a teenager in the late Nineties and early years of the new millennium, would I have thought very highly of "Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro"? Unlikely. I wonder if I would even have "discovered" it. A lot of young boys and girls I know haven't. They don't even know that it is possible to attempt social satire in films. It is either the Prakash Jha or Nana Patekar brand of "corruption-politics-moral bankruptcy" films, or the Johnny Lever brand of slapstick humour. To mangle a phrase from Dante's "Divine Comedy", the middle way has been well and truly lost, and we are in a very dark wood, methinks.
So brace yourselves, I'm not quite done yet!
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When we were in school, and Doordarshan was our sole window to entertainment, there was a primetime programme called Eno Show Theme. It was a cluster of film clips, really, strung around a theme, let’s say, brothers-in-law, or police-chase. One evening at my grandparents’ house — my parents had decided that not buying a TV would be their contribution to my intellectual advancement — I caught an episode of Eno Show Theme. And in it I saw the Mahabharat sequence of Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro for the first time.
This was 1988, if I remember correctly — a good five years after Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro released. Come to think of it, I don’t know anyone who watched Jaane Bhi Do (this is what I shall call the film hereon, because it seems a sacrilege to call it JBDY in the way one says KANK or OSO these days) in the theatres when it had released in 1983.
The first film of Kundan Shah, even though it was full of raring-to-go young men and women, got a very modest response. I would like to think that it would have been different had I been old enough to go to theatres.
I saw the film a year or so after I saw the Mahabharat sequence, again on DD, and again at my grandparents’. I remember being disappointed, because the Show Theme clip hadn’t prepared me at all for the film’s dark underbelly. Neither could I catch the fun of the digs at people (Bhakti Barve’s Shobha Sen referring to glam-editor Shobha Dé), tributes to masters (Antonioni Park, where the murder of municipal commissioner DeMello is chanced upon, à la Blow Up), and the crazy ping-pong with names (cast and crew members (Vidhu) Vinod Chopra, Sudhir Mishra, Kundan Shah lending names to characters, Albert Pinto ko Gussa Kyon Ata Hai becoming a secret code, and so on).
The larger part of the first viewing was spent waiting for Naseeruddin Shah (forcing himself on to the stage as Duhshasan) to say, “Draupadi jaisi sati nari ko dekh kar maine cheer-haran ka idea drop kar diya.”
The most slapstick scenes — Naseeruddin and Satish Kaushik talking to each other on the phone inside the same room, Om Puri entreating the dead-as-a-dodo Satish Shah to push his stranded car, or the entire cast running up and down the stairs of the guest house looking for DeMello’s body — gave the greatest delight. And I was convinced that the dead body which had such a strong will of its own would definitely come alive in the end and expose the dirty dealings of Tarneja, Ahuja, Srivastav & Co. (By the way, does anybody hold a candle to Satish Shah in playing dead on Indian screen? And has any Indian film toyed with the revolutionary idea of cross-dressing a dead body?).
Jaane Bhi Do as a political satire revealed itself much later, over subsequent viewings. The appeal of the physical comedy waned a bit, the power game became more apparent in the amorous exchanges between Bhakti Barve and Naseeruddin Shah, the women seemed too few and too negative, and the refrain of Hum honge kamyaab became an anthem for the naïve and sentimental Indian.
By the mid-Nineties, Jaane Bhi Do had already become distant by lightyears. The reason was not so much the years in between as the changes brought about by the opening up of the economy. Cynicism was replaced by feel-good. Small budgets meant an inability to think big. Investigative journalism in newspapers gave way to sting operations in the electronic media, but nobody remembered to thank the film which had shown the way.
In the sleek, polished world of Hindi cinema today, the street theatre feel and Eighties look of Jaane Bhi Do is a misfit. It is not as if we have left behind unscrupulous builders, corrupt public servants or opportunistic editors. It is just that our cinema chooses to hit out at them differently now. It summons Nana Patekar.
Jaane Bhi Do turns 25 this year. Not too old for Kundan Shah (the closest he came to Jaane Bhi Do was the DD serial Nukkad) to think of getting its cast and crew together again. And the group does have some of the best actors and technicians that Indian cinema has produced.
But do I want to see a sequel to Jaane Bhi Do? Thanks, but no thanks. For the same reason that I would not ask Maradona to take the field today and expect the 1986 magic.
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