Govinda, Great Gatsby

There’s a story about Govinda and the Oscars. In an obscure TV interview the starexpressed his desire to win the coveted trophy for him-self and the country—he wasnot able to specify that he wanted to win an Oscar; he just kept saying that he wantedthat (vahi) International thing (cheez). It was like a schoolboy desirous ofwinning a prize for Virar. Or, better still, like the supercool dude in Kadd Ditti Jaan,his first self-acted, self-sung, smash hit of a video track, he wanted the girl who‘tries to run away from him’—but ‘in vain’. In this avatar as asinger Govinda has kept alive the audaciously casual, self-ironical sense of reaching outfor the seemingly impossible, which marks his career as an entertainer. Indi-pop now hasits first anti-lyrical, anti-emotional number while the star invites an uncanny (again,seemingly impossible?) parallel with a great figure of American fiction.

In another country and in another time, a man stood near his house, longing for hisseparated girl, hoping to reach her some day. The man had money but tainted antecedents,his rise peopled by a range of devious individuals and undetermined circumstances. Hisconsequent courting of the world was outrageous, enlivened by raucous parties. The kitchenmachine could extract the juice out of two hundred oranges in half an hour and the mainhall bar had real brass rails. But some of the gins and liquors were so old as to be longforgotten by the younger guests and the Rolls Royce often became an omnibus while cartingpeople.

This was the garish, re fined, conservative and radical world of the American neo-richin the 1920s—the world of the gorgeous Jay Gatsby, symbol of American culture itself.His personality was ‘an unbroken series of successful gestures’, from saying‘Nick, old sport’ (his takia kalam) to his final sacrifice for a pastdream.

India’s personality of gestures arrived in the ’90s, as  Govinda—the actor who from early on shunned cliched mannerisms or‘talent’, and refrained from making a virtue of hairless woodenness. When theelite were going crazy setting up a revivalist agenda, discovering greatness in bloodlessfamily values, this character played a village yokel who says—if my father has abull, I will defy him, ride the bull like a hero, and raid the village. And if girls gocrazy over style, I will become a lawyer or police inspector or a retarded patient.

The ‘Raja Babu’ did not know much except how to communicate are ciprocal masti.He tamed the city shrew not by the whip or the moral sermon but through gumption andhumour. This revolution upturned the conventions of Hindi cinema and dissolved codesseparating the high and the low. The lubber told the high-class lass: "For you I willtear my jeans and say ‘I Lobe you", with a wicked, charming grin. He thus stoleher heart, caricatured the rival city lad and established his own self-knowledge of thesituational joke in one go. The elite went on a tizzy, leap-frogged into Govinda’sparty—consequently levelling Indian society— in the company of the paanwaala andthe craminal.

Jay Gatsby too invited the charms of sad, upper class women of the ’20s. Theyneeded to be consoled and loved, not by a man of their own class (he was reserved formarriage), but by an outsider, belonging preferably to the peasantry. But the Americans,as F. Scott Fitzgerald, the author of The Great Gatsby reminded us, were willing tobecome serfs, but obstinate about being peasantry. So Gatsby, the small-town army officer,was left behind as a faded chapter in a rich woman’s tale of woeful nonchalance.

He replied by turning up as a neo-rich with an open heart, solid mettle and unendingreveries, at a time when his richer, cultured contemporaries—like the ’90sIndian elite—hoarded wealth, beat up mistresses and spoke about the rise of colouredpeople. His parties saw celebrities, underdogs, brokers— legitimate and illegitimatepeople—chewing the same food, drinking the same champagne, even fretting about thehysterics of womenfolk using the same exclamations. In one great swoop Gatsby levelledAmerican society for the first and last time in history, creating an unfathomable space oflaughter, longing and tragedy.

The tragedy arrived in wake of the triumph, after the married girl came back to Gatsby.He ended the party, giving precedence to sentiment over spunk, little realising that thecareless elite smash parties and retreat, leaving others to clean up the mess. Thejealous, egotistical elite, such as the girl ’s husband, delivered Gatsby to death atthe hands of a raving man looking for his wife’s killer. The wife (actually thehusband’s mistress) was killed in a smash-up with Gatsby ’s car. But the gallantAmerican hero never disclosed he wasn’t driving that day, dying alone and unsung (notone man from the party days turned up for the funeral).

For Govinda the party which began in the ’90s is showing signs of fatigue. Thebrash and gaudy world he helped to create, mocking tradition and modern i t y, is nowlooking for respectability. There are honest, neo-rich fellas, politicians, industrialistsand conmen, advancing towards an unknown horizon in their Toyotas and Opel Astras, manycorrupt men pursuing incorruptible dreams. Sex was once great fun but now they are lookingfor marriage, perhaps with an ‘image’ of the warm beloved, something that wasonce a remote part of the novels the cultured friends read . Latest reports indicate thatGovinda is trying to get arty, turning the smart yokel into a vague intellectual or asentimental city yuppie. He is best advised not to escape his fate and break the chain ofsuccessful gestures. And if he is patient, one day he will be cast as Jay Gatsby, in a newversion  of Fitzgerald’s novel, and carry the Oscar home.