The relevance of Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro
You know those email forwards that begin with the line “You know you’re getting old when…” and go on to provide a list of proofs (e.g. “…when you enjoy hearing about other people’s operations”)? Well, one item I would add to the list is “…when you hear about the 25th anniversary of a film that you can easily recall seeing during its initial run”.
Late 1983 carries many associations for me as a movie watcher. It was the year of Masoom and “Lakdi ki kaathi”, of Darth Vader attaining redemption in Return of the Jedi and our house acquiring its first video player. Much of my time was spent listening to classic compositions like the “chooha billi” song from Sharaabi and “Ding Dong” from Hero. Amitabh’s movie career had begun a slow descent but his political career was taking off, and there was an unfortunate mid-air collision in Inquilaab, which ended with a ludicrous scene where the Big B solves India’s problems by the simple expedient of locking all corrupt politicians in one room and taking a machine-gun to them.
But another film made that year dealt much more maturely with the theme of corruption, treating it not as something that could be clinically isolated, tucked back into a little Pandora’s box and vapourised but as something that was deeply embedded in the fabric of our lives — perhaps too deeply embedded to be successfully countered. But hey, we could always cut our losses by laughing at our collective predicament.
It was startling to realise that Kundan Shah’s breathless, madcap satire Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro — the story of two idealistic photographers who get involved with corrupt builders, corrupt law enforcers and a corrupt magazine publisher — also turned 25 this year. The print on the DVD I saw recently was faded and jerky, and watching the film itself is like entering a time machine (the Fiats and Ambassadors, the ancient telephones, the quaint magazine office), but in many vital ways JBDY is just as fresh as it was all those years ago. Watching the scene where a newly built flyover collapses because “the builder mixed cement into sand instead of mixing sand into cement”, I thought about Gurgaon’s potholed roads and the recent, thoroughly avoidable Metro accident. The more things change…
If your only recollection of the film is the climactic Mahabharat skit, go watch it again. As it happens the movie itself plays like an amateur-troupe skit in places, and though this was probably necessitated by the low budget, it perfectly fits the absurdist tone. This is a film that does away with irrelevancies such as credible scene setups and narrative logic and cuts straight to the heart of an idea. It’s best watched as a series of lunatic episodes placed end to end.
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The amazing thing about JBDY is how much it got away with: the cheerful chronicling of dishonesty in high and low places (and turning it into a joke rather than making speeches about it); the bawdy lack of respect for holy cows such as dead bodies and mythological epics; the deflating final scene (played out to the ironical strains of the patriotic song “Hum honge kaamyab”) with the magnificently surreal shots of the “framed” photographers dressed in prisoners’ clothes but walking alongside a crowd of people near the Gateway of India — a direct visual shorthand for the idea of the common man being in chains.
The film probably got away with all this because it was a comedy — a loud, “unrealistic” slapstick comedy at that — and was therefore seen as unthreatening. But like all great satires Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro deserves to be taken very seriously indeed, and despite its occasional college-production feel, it has aged much better than most other movies from 25 years ago.
