Tin Pan Alley Guitar Epics

Bollywood is going places, at least in the publishing industry. There has been a surfeit of books on the world’s largest film industry in the past few years. From an ageing diva not­orious for her scandalous aff­airs to a nearly forgotten film-maker known for churning out kitsch, everybody appears to be ‘worthy’ of a biography now. Alas, most of them turn out to be hagiographies.

We have had few books that give a glimpse of the colourful, cloistered lives of stars and film-makers beyond what’s common knowledge, with all their foibles and peccadilloes. But the tendency of biographers to paint their sujects as infallible worshippers of their craft with little or no vices often makes the books dull reads.

Akshay Manwani makes it very clear at the outset that his book “is not a biography which looks at (Nasir) Hus­ain’s personal life in great det­ail. Instead, it focuses on Husain’s cinematic craft.... If one is looking for sensational accounts of Husain’s personal life or his life beyond films, this is not that book”.

But then, what was Husain’s craft? Man­wani himself admits that it is hard to rationalise a book on Husain’s cinema. “He is not Mehboob Khan, V. Shantaram, Guru Dutt, Raj Kapoor or Bimal Roy, the high priests of Indian cinema who merged social consci­ousness with box-office trappings,” he wri­tes. Husain, according to him, is not even Yash Chopra, Ramesh Sippy, Man­mohan Desai or Ram Gopal Varma, and yet he has found his oeuvre worthy of a book simply because Manwani considers him a pioneer of sorts for making fun-filled musicals—a far cry from the heavy-duty stuff dished out by many of his contemporaries in the two decades after independence.

To an inveterate Bollywood aficionado from the millennial generation, Husain may be known as Aamir Khan’s uncle, but anybody who has grown up watching commercial Hindi movies in the 1960s and 1970s knew him as a prolific filmmaker who considered cinema primarily to be a medium of entertainment rather than an effective tool to disseminate a serious social message.

In fact, he directed some of the breeziest entertainers of his time, right from Tumsa Nahin Dekha to Hum Kisise Kum Nahin, with such conviction that he set the trend for his brand of cinema—musicals revolving around identical themes, having a mischievous hero wooing his lady love with a chartbusting number, mostly in picturesque Darjeeling or Shimla. Even when he collaborated with Salim-Javed for Yaadon Ki Baraat, he did not give up on his favourite set-pieces, like ubiquitous musical contests. Husain wor­ked with big stars, but his movies bore his unmistakable stamp. And when he tried to change his signature style with Baharon ke Sapne, he came a cropper.

The book traces the journey of Husain from Bhopal, where he grew up, to Pali Hill in Bombay, where he establis­hed himself as a formidable film-maker delivering hit after hit. It consists of interesting episodes from his early days, including an anecdote about how his family sought the help of Maulana Azad, one of his relatives, to dissuade him from joining the film industry.

The book quotes Husain’s son Mansoor Khan (director of Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak) and nephew Aamir Khan, who has written the foreword, extensively to understand his cinema. It also throws light on the lasting relationships that he built with Shammi Kapoor, Rahul Dev Burman, Majrooh Sultanpuri and all others who were part of his long career.

Manwani’s biography of a film-maker as unapologetically commercial as Husain is a pointer to the growing acceptability of books on popular Hindi cinema, which was always dismissed disdainfully by film historians in the past. Hope other hit-makers of Husain’s time, such as Vijay Anand, who directed Teesri Manzil (which Husain produced), get their due in print soon!