Watching Gulzar’s 1972 film Koshish on DVD the other day was a reminder that that even when solemnity is the dominant tone of a movie, a light interlude can be effective and revealing. Koshish is the story of two speech-and-hearing-impaired people (apparently it isn’t politically correct to say “deaf and dumb” these days, though no one told the subtitle-writers this) who meet, get married and face the many challenges of their shared condition. Needless to say, this makes for a sombre film with many emotional scenes, underlined by an insistent background score.
And yet, there is also an unusually whimsical, light-hearted moment early in the film. Hari (Sanjeev Kumar) and Arti (Jaya Bhaduri) are tentatively getting to know each other. After watching a man talk into a public phone, they enter the booth and make prank calls — dialling numbers randomly, pretending to speak and listen. A succession of befuddled people answer the line at the other end, and finally there is a charming cameo: Dilip Kumar (presumably playing himself) walking down a stairway in a large house, looking around with mild annoyance at having to pick up the phone himself.
After listening to Hari make indecipherable sounds for a while, the thespian mumbles “Yeh toh mujh se bhi maadhyam bolte hain” (“This guy speaks even more softly than I do”) and puts the phone down. I couldn’t help imagining this was meta-commentary of a sort, with the famously “understated” actor of an earlier generation (Dilip Kumar) marvelling at the (even more) understated actor of the present day (Sanjeev Kumar).
Subtextual analysis aside, this sequence might seem to be frivolous, but it’s an important scene for the film because it shows us Hari and Arti in a light moment, sharing the kind of intimacy that they can’t share with anyone else — it’s almost like they are waggling their thumbs at the “normal” people who can speak and hear. It makes it easier to believe that these two can grow to love each other and that they will be able to have some fun too — that their married life won’t be one struggle after another. It shows a side to the relationship that we don’t get to see much of later, as the film becomes increasingly glum.
Koshish has a reputation as one of the more sensitive dramas of its time, and indeed there are many good things in it, starting with the heartfelt performances of the two lead actors. However, it’s hampered by the abruptness of its final 20 minutes and an unconvincing resolution where the protagonists’ son Amit is emotionally bullied into marrying a deaf and dumb girl. It’s obvious the idea was to dole out a moral lesson — to tell the audience handicapped people shouldn’t be treated “differently” and that they are capable of leading normal lives. But at the individual level, surely it should be possible for a young man to turn down a proposal without having to endure his father putting him through a ferocious guilt trip? The scene feels forced and sends out very mixed signals about responsibility and obligation.
There is much to admire in Gulzar’s movies — he chooses atypical subjects and has a feel for the arc and complexity of relationships between men and women — but some of his work has a hurried, not fully thought out quality to it. I thought Koshish erred on the side of heavy-handed moralising when it could have spent more time showing the growth of the special relationship between its two central characters. In short, I wish there had been a little less preaching and more scenes like the phone-booth one.
Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based writer