Friendship Day: Hindi Cinema And Its Many Stories Of 'Dosti'

Jab jis waqt kisi ka, yaar juda hota hai
Kuch na poocho yaaron dil ka haal bura hota hai
Dil pe yaadon ke jaise teer chalte hain

(Whenever a friend separates, arrows pierce the heart)

Kishore Kumar immortalised these lines, sung by Rajesh Khanna on screen in Namak Haram (1973). The lyrics are not so deep, but R.D. Burman and Kishore weave their magic to make the song a favourite in any college reunion, which a Kishore clone will alw­ays croon. Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s film about two friends—Vicky (Amitabh Bachchan), the son of a mill owner, and Somu (Khanna), whose sympathies are with the workers—was a big hit. In the beginning, they are just two happy-go-lucky young men but in a plot twist Somu lives with the workers for a while and gets seeped into their struggle. Khanna is portrayed as the namak haram or traitor, and Bachchan is just getting into his angry young man groove. This is the second and the last film the two superstars were seen together in.

Two years earlier, they were paired in Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Anand as friends but with no deewar between them. Anand, terminally ill with cancer but full of zest for life, breezes into Dr Bhaskar Banerjee’s staid and sober settings. The film is about these diametrically opposite characters, and for such a morbid theme, it’s very unsentimental for most parts. It’s a celebration of life through Anand’s character rather than a rumination on death. It does get a little mawkish towards the end but Khanna and Bachchan are too good to slip into hamming. In the last scene, Bachchan (Babumoshai, as Khanna in the titular role calls him) has run to get some last-minute medicines; but before he returns, Khanna has died on his bed. In an emotional outburst, Babumoshai urges him to wake up and talk to him, the chatterbox that he has been all his life. Suddenly, there is Anand’s voice calling, ‘Babumoshai…’ when everybody in the room jumps, as well as those watching the film. But it’s only from a tape that the two friends had recorded a few days ago. The scene is a tear-jerker, but even here Mukherjee is careful to keep it on the better side of maudlin.

Anand is one of the few Hindi films about two men where no woman comes between them, money doesn’t play a part or one doesn’t become a don and the other a cop—the usual tropes of films about two friends. And they are usually about men (it’s only decades later that Bollywood will make a female buddy movie like Veere Di Wedding). The other is Sholay. Nothing can come between Jai and Veeru till death does them apart—they fall for different women, have a common enemy and agree on most things.

The most common cliché in Hindi films about two male friends is the dost, dost na raha syndrome—one of the friends betraying the other for a woman. The problem always is how to keep all the characters in the shade of white. An early film is Sangam (1964) in which the iconic song Dost, dost na raha is picturised, and sung with gusto by Mukesh to Shankar Jaikishan’s rousing orchestra. But I have always wondered why is Rajendra Kumar the betrayer. The film’s plot is too complicated to describe here but briefly Sundar (Raj Kapoor), Gopal (Rajendra Kumar) and Radha (Vyjayanthimala) are close friends. Sundar is crazy about Radha. Radha is lukewarm to him. Gopal also burns for her, but quietly. Radha loves him back. But Sundar is the first to profess his love, so Radha relents and Gopal recedes. Many twists later, Sundar, now a fighter pilot, is presumed dead on a mission. Radha and Gopal come close again and are planning to get married when suddenly Sundar reappears in one piece. Once again, Gopal gives in. Radha and Sundar get married, but he finds out about Gopal’s love for her. But how is the poor silent, sacrificing Gopal dost, dost na raha?

This is broadly the template—the eternal love triangle—for many films to follow later, like Saagar or Saajan. It’s usually two men and a woman, but there is the inverted triangle too, like Silsila or Devdas. But coming back to friends, my favourite is the madcap Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, Kundan Shah’s biting satire. Naseeruddin Shah and Ravi Baswani are a hoot as Vinod Chopra and Sudhir Mishra (named after Shah’s friends and filmmakers of the same names in real, all buddies at FTII, Pune), two out-of-luck photographers dreaming of making it big in Bombay. Their escapades lead them to corrupt cops, opportunist editors, unscrupulous builders, biased bureaucrats, criminal industrialists. The climatic Mahabharata sequence is the most talked about part of the film, where Draupadi is a very dead, swaying left to right Satish Shah, but before it reaches there it’s full of brilliant set pieces and one-liners, a la Marx Brothers.

When a newly-built flyover collapses, its builder Tarneja’s rival Ahuja quips: “I mix sand in cement. But he mixes cement in sand. Of course, the flyover will come down.” When Tarneja’s sidekick Ashok falls off a sofa and tells Vinod who is on the phone with him, “Sorry, mein gir gaya tha (I fell off),” Vinod replies: “Bahut gire hue aadmi ho tum (you are a low life).” When the police commissioner D’Mello, who is supposed to have set right the city’s sewage system in his tenure, is killed, Tarneja makes a speech in D’Mello’s tribute: “He lived for the gutter and he died for the gutter. He had only one mission in his life, gutter, gutter and gutter.”

There have been many other hits like Dosti, Dostana, Yaarana, Jalwa, Tere Mere Sapne, and more recently, buddy films like Dil Chahta Hai, Three Idiots, Kai Po Che and so on. There have been a few about friendship among children. Gulzar’s Kitaab (1977) captures the confusion and vulnerability of the growing up years, where Babla’s (Master Raju) antics with friend Pappu land him in all sorts of trouble. They do everything else except study. When complaints from the school reach home and his aunt with whom he is living in the city scolds him, Babla runs away to his village. He comes of age when on the way, on a cold night, he sleeps alongside an old woman, pulling her blanket over him. The next morning there is a crowd gathered around her—the old woman has died, Babla realises he had slept next to a corpse.

Killa (2014) by Avinash Arun is a brilliant Marathi film about schoolboys growing up in a small coastal town in the Konkan region.  Eleven-year-old Chinmay has only his mother as a friend when they move to the new town after his father’s death due to an illness. At first, the boys at the school he enrols in are hostile to him but soon they veer towards him, as children do, and the band of boys is up to fun and games. Arun keeps the bonhomie, the little jealousies, their fights very real and understated. Amrutha Subhash as Chinmay’s mother is superlative. The film, shot in the rain-drenched Konkan coast, has a luminous, liquid quality.

Films on women friends like a Dor or Pink are few and far between. It will take some more years to write on them.

(This appeared in the print edition as "Magic of Bromance")