The End

Soft popcorn intervals no more. The death of middle class cinema is real, though it resurrected for a fleeting moment with Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s final farewell

Partha Chatterjee  Delhi

It is often said these days that the middle class cinema of ‘Old Bombay’ is dead. Numerous instances are cited, of directors like Basu Chatterjee, Gulzar and Hrishikesh Mukherjee, whose films are no longer part of the celluloid landscape. The last mentioned, of course, cannot make films anymore: he died quietly on August 27, 2006.  But the fact is that the gentle, ‘thinking and feeling cinema’, dealing with middle class values, has had a make-over like Bombay in metamorphosis, now renamed Mumbai.

Much before the multiplexes and the malls came up and the single screen cinema hall ruled the roost, there was room for the well-made Hindi film which had good songs to act as commercial buffers.  Basu Chatterjee, Gulzar and the late Hrishikesh Mukherjee had a fairly long run of steady success. They worked with stars (or was it the other way around?) and made films that could be watched by the whole family, and yes, together.  Had their films not done reasonably well consistently, there was no way that any of them could have survived in the dog-eat-dog world of box office-driven, crassly commercial Bollywood.

Those days, the Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) did not really have such a strong presence in the US and the UK, Australia or Canada.  And the population of Indian origin in the West Indies and South Africa were often  keen to see on screen a jazzed-up version of the Nautanki, a folk form familiar to their forefathers. Surely, the struggles of a nation and its (relatively) educated middle class with modernity did not interest most migrant Indians abroad.

Life was hard, though money could be made by the sweat of one’s brow.  English language cinema was largely about an engagement with life of which the Indian away from home already had too much. Indian films, which succeeded overseas, were escapist in nature.  Aan by Mehboob Khan, Mughal-e-Azam by K Asif and Raj Kapoor’s Sangam were immensely popular in the 1950s and 1960s.

Messrs Mukherjee, Chatterjee and Gulzar did not ever find an abiding place in the hearts of the NRIs. Their audience was mostly domestic and mainly urban, perhaps, in the metropolitan cities and small towns of India, especially in the north. They are the ones who paid to see their films and kept them busy. These filmmakers were also capable of making reasonable money for the producers in the long run. 

Suresh Jindal, a chemical engineering graduate from Caltech, came home from America in the early 1970s and produced Rajnigandha with Amol Palekar and Vidya Sinha, directed by Basu Chatterjee, who had already made the evocative Saara Aakash in black and white, financed by the National Film Development Corporation of India (NFDC). Rajnigandha was a romantic comedy about a middle class couple and the problems they face in the course of their relationship.  It was a runaway hit. The incredible song, Kai baar yun hi dekha hai, yeh jo man ki seemarekha hai… (composer Salil Chaudhary, lyrics Yogesh, singer Mukesh) remains a favourite with discerning lovers of Hindi film songs till this day.

Chatterjee had three hits in a row after this film. Piya Ka Ghar with Jaya Bhaduri and Anil Dhawan, about a joint family in Bombay living in cramped quarters and the travails of a newly married son and his bride trying to find a little space and privacy for themselves; Choti Si Baat, with Amol Palekar and Vidya Sinha, about a bachelor’s reluctance to get married, with an immensely popular song by Lata Mangeshkar

(composed by Salil Chaudhary set to Yogesh’s lyrics) Na jaane kyon.; Chitchor for Rajshree Pictures with Amol Palekar and newcomer Zarina Wahab in the