Among the new biopics the most promising are of less-known but still great Indians
Truth is better than fiction, especially in Bollywood. Perhaps, as they say, there is now more experimentation and less “inspiration.” in the film world. Predictability of plot and the habit of making Indian avatars of Hollywood films are still problems at the big-budget end. Saviours, however, are in sight. They are not (or not only) young and innovative filmmakers and scriptwriters. Rather, they are (more often than not) interesting dead people, who make excellent subjects for biopics.
Gauhar Jaan, for instance. She was a singer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and one of the early Indian “celebrities”. She was born Eileen Angelina Yeoward, an Armenian Christian. Her father died when she was young, and she converted to Islam. Gauhar Jaan became one of the best-known tawaifs and singers of Calcutta, patronised by the deposed Awadh ruler Wajid Ali Shah (1822-1887), himself a poet, singer and dancer. She developed a broad and deep musical repertoire.
As she grew famous, Gauhar Jaan also developed a lively reputation. She was associated with wealthy lovers. She became rich, and was notorious for driving around in a carriage drawn by six horses —not a privilege permitted to ordinary Indians, but she happily paid the fine. Postcards with her portrait on them were sold in Europe. She even made musical recordings, starting in 1902 when she became probably the first Indian singer to have her voice recorded. The crackly three-minute recording still survives, and is the basis for the revival of interest in Gauhar Jaan. By 1920 she had made over 600 records.
Of course, her life took a tragic turn. Eventually she lost her wealth, her lovers and her patrons. She ended her life at the Mysore palace, a mere court musician. She died in 1930.
Now what could make a better subject for film or book? You can’t make up a story like hers. Yet the book had to come first. A young techie from Bangalore named Vikram Sampath published a biography of her a year ago, titled My Name Is Gauhar Jaan! (This is what she said at the end of every recording.) The book was launched to unusual fanfare. As many as three well-known film makers are said to be interested in filming Gauhar Jaan’s story, including Kiran Rao, director of Dhobi Ghat.
Sampath says, “Many people have shown an interest.” But he does not want his protagonist “cheapened” by a typical Bollywood portrayal. On the other hand, he points out that “it would be a dream role for any woman actor”. Without his book, however, there would be no story to film — Gauhar Jaan has received little scholarly attention and as Sampath says, “the music world has more or less forgotten her. She left no lineage, family or students.”
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Bal Gandharva (real name Narayan Rajhans), the great Marathi stage singer and actor of the same era, was one of Gauhar Jaan’s lovers. He is the subject of a just-released Marathi film — among the most expensive and technologically advanced — directed by ad filmmaker Ravi Jadhav (who released Natarang in 2010, a film on tamashas, the popular Maharashtrian performance form). But Bal Gandharva would not have happened if the actor who plays him, Subodh Bhave, had not read a biography of the star while researching a role for a play and then approached producer Nitin Desai with the idea of a biopic.
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Not surprisingly, biopics have tended to be about big names. Out now, for instance, is a biopic titled Gandhi To Hitler which looks at the German dictator’s last hours with lover Eva Braun in his Berlin bunker. There are two films on the last Iraqi dictator, including The Trial of Saddam Hussein. Ram Gopal Varma has said he is working on Terror Turns to Horror: Al Qaeda Part II in which Osama bin Laden returns as a ghost to haunt the White House. (Really.) The Ramakrishna Mission is planning a biopic on Swami Vivekananda (Bernardo Bertolucci was name-dropped).
Also not surprising, old film personalities offer subjects for new films. Three (or four) films are being made on Kishore Kumar. One by Anurag Basu features Ranbir Kapoor as Kumar and Katrina Kaif as Madhubala. Rajinikanth, Silk Smitha (played by Vidya Balan), Salman Khan, Rekha and Suchitra Sen (in Bengali) are some upcoming star subjects.
Potentially more interesting, however, because they are based on little-known but great people, are films on cultural stars like painter Raja Ravi Varma (focusing on his love life), Malayalam poet P Kunhiraman Nair (who loved “nature and women”), and Maharashtrian musical prodigy DV Paluskar, who died young. The first two follow from books, a biography and an autobiography. The third was filmed by an independent Pune scholar named Anjali Kirtane who released her Marathi “docu-drama” Gaanyogi and a fat biography of Paluskar on the same day last year.
A biopic of the great runner Milkha Singh (whose family was killed during Partition) and of Noor Inayat Khan, a Tipu Sultan descendant who was one of England’s most useful spies in Nazi-occupied France during the 1940s and died in a concentration camp, have both come out of recent books — Singh’s Hindi and Punjabi memoirs and historian Shrabani Basus biography, The Spy Princess. These is also big money — Singh has said he was offered Rs 1-1.5 crore for his story, though he settled for Rs 1 and a share of the profits for his charitable foundation.
With already famous subjects, filmmakers have to pick an angle. It is the lives of the less-known names, rediscoveries of modern scholars, that offer the most meat. They offer mild name recall, a terrific story that is still fresh and combines achievement with tragedy in an inspirational or satisfying way, that illuminates history or the present, that derives from more or less rigorous scholarship, feeds our taste for nostalgia and celebrity anecdote, and finally, gives us something to be proud of. No wonder the immediate future looks good for biopics.
