Hindi cinema has had a “rich” tradition of naag films
It’s considered very impolite to refer to India as a land of snake-charmers (oh no, we’re all about the slumdog millionaires these days), but this hasn’t prevented movie producers from commenting on the social and sartorial habits of the famed ichadhaari naag (a snake that can transform itself into a human and back again). I say this apropos a quote from a recent newspaper interview with Govind Menon, co-producer of a film titled Hisss: “The nudity is justified because when you transform into a snake, you can’t have a dress or even a piece of jewellery on you!”
Ah, such sagacity — the result, no doubt, of years of extensive research. The nudity that Mr Menon is justifying is that of Mallika Sherawat, and his quote is a nice companion piece to the patented ones we’ve heard from Bollywood starlets for decades. “What do you expect me to wear in a swimming pool, a burkha?” is so passé, whereas “What do you expect me to wear while turning into a snake, leather tights?” has a nice ring to it.
However, this also got me thinking about Hindi cinema’s rich tradition of naag films. The best-known of these is probably Nagina, in which (a mostly clothed) Sridevi wriggled about the floor while snake charmer Amrish Puri blew purposefully into his “been” and hoped nobody would notice he was chuckling to himself. But my personal favourite is Rajkumar Kohli’s 1976 multi-starrer Nagin, which begins with Jeetendra dressed in a short skirt — a piece of attire that was arguably even more radical for its time than Ms Sherawat’s birthday suit is today.
Kohli was a master at the lost art of gathering middle-aged former stars together and giving them the money that might otherwise have been wasted on a script. In this underground classic, two snake lovers turn into Jeetendra and Reena Roy whenever they wish to sing Laxmikant-Pyarelal songs. The man-snake is cruelly shot down by a group of friends (they probably figured he was just a regular snake in a mini-skirt), so his bereaved spouse goes on the revenge-trail. This means finding new and innovative ways to dispose of each culprit, but the hardest task is that she occasionally has to disguise herself as her victims’ girlfriends — which means simulating the facial expressions of Rekha, Mumtaz and Sulakshana Pandit. Would you wish such a fate on a girl? On the upside, she gets to try out a variety of 1970s cocktail gowns.
However, Kohli outdid himself in his own remake of Nagin 25 years later. Titled Jaani Dushman — Ek Anokhi Kahaani, this remarkable film featured a host of balding 40-plus actors (Sunny Deol and Aditya Panscholi among them) trying hard to be college students, a buxom Manisha Koirala as a wronged ichadhaari nagin and, best of all, the director’s expressionless son Armaan as her lover from centuries ago. On this occasion, alas, the snake-man is dressed more conservatively, in an overcoat that looks like one of Darth Vader’s rejects from the Star Wars films.
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But in this, as in most things, you can trust Rajinikanth to have the last word. The much-hyped Robot was built on a dubious premise (why cast the Tamil superstar as a multifunctional android when he has for years been playing omnipotent human characters who do things that the most sophisticated robots wouldn’t dare attempt?), but it did have a spectacular, CGI-driven climactic sequence where hundreds of evil Rajini robots arrange themselves into various menacing shapes. The final and most impressive one: a giant mechanical cobra that opens its jaws and swallows cars and helicopters whole. This truly awesome ichadhaari snake makes all the others look like measly little earthworms. Ms Sherawat, whether clad or not, has quite a challenge ahead of her.
[Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based freelance writer]