The recently released Agent Vinod has a scene where the eponymous spy (Saif Ali Khan) looks into the eyes of a girl named Ruby (Kareena Kapoor) and quizzically recites the lyrics of a beloved 1960s Hindi film song: “Yeh jheel si neeli aankhen/ Koi raaz hai inmein gehra?” (“These lake-blue eyes/ Is there a secret deep inside them?”)
The lines work in the given context — this is a world of double-crossers and triple-crossers, and Vinod (probably not his real name) doesn’t know if Ruby (definitely not her real name) can be trusted — but the seasoned viewer will catch another, more playful layer. The girl who was serenaded thus in the 1960s film — Kashmir ki Kali — was played by Saif’s real-life mother Sharmila Tagore. Incidentally, the actor who sang those lines was Kareena’s real-life grand-uncle Shammi Kapoor. A few months ago, the film Rockstar paid explicit tribute to the recently deceased actor by replicating part of the same song, with another young Kapoor — Ranbir — imitating Shammi’s famous gyrations.
If any of this confuses you, you are clearly new to the world of Hindi movies. In an industry dominated by the cult of the star personality and built on dynasties — with star children and grandchildren proliferating everywhere — it isn’t surprising to find sly little allusions and homages of this sort. Nor is this necessarily a new phenomenon: sticking with the Kapoors, one wonders if Raj Kapoor was being a touch devilish giving his grandfather Dewan Bashwanath a tiny part as a judge in his 1951 film Awaara, considering that the old man had once “decreed” that no one from his family would join films!
Much has been written on mainstream movies indulging their stars, even if it means winking at the audience at the cost of a narrative’s internal rhythm: I’ve lost count of the number of times Amitabh and Abhishek Bachchan have appeared together in “cameo” scenes that exist merely to add to the family-video collection (Ram Gopal Varma ki Aag and Delhi 6 are the most embarrassing instances). But nudge-nudge moments can exist even in lower-profile films — the ones we tend to associate with integrity.
Early in the 1987 movie Jalwa, two friends see each other from a distance and engage in a bit of playful name-calling. “May your mother-in-law run away with a eunuch!” one yells. “May your sister-in-law marry a gorilla!” the other replies. An innocuous buddy-buddy exchange, you’d think, but there’s a subtext. The actors playing this scene — Naseeruddin Shah and Pankaj Kapoor — were related by marriage in real life; they were wedded to each other’s sisters-in-law, and their mother-in-law was the venerable actress Dina Pathak. There is probably a minuscule chance that the dialogue is coincidental, but we should know better.
Shah and Kapoor were — then, as now — the sort of performers who are expected to sink into their parts and leave “themselves” behind, but both have appeared in films that contain inside jokes. In fact, Kapoor’s character in Jalwa is named Albert Pinto, which is a reference to one of Shah’s better-known early roles; the name has also been used in other non-mainstream films such as Jaane bhi do Yaaro.
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Like I said, I have little patience with films that overdo the self-referencing at the expense of the narrative. But the line can be a thin one — it’s worth remembering that when movie characters are played by people we are very familiar with, we rarely experience them as blank slates anyway. On a conscious or subconscious level, we bring what we know of them — their real lives, their previous roles — to the experience. It’s part of what can make movie-watching intimate and unreal at the same time. You smile indulgently at the Saif-Sharmila reference, but for that moment you also forget about Agent Vinod.
Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based writer