Timeless Titans

Heaven must be awash with a splash of colour and the lilt of birdsong, and the gods must be in thrall. Earthlings in our part of the world have reason to mourn the demise of five of the sturdiest pillars of Indian popular culture. But the pantheon that watches over us is, as you read this, probably savouring the most robust repertoire of music and performance that the hands of fate have ever assembled up there in the course of a single year.

From June 9, the day Maqbool Fida Husain breathed his last, to December 3, when Dev Anand passed away, the world of Indian art and entertainment has been dealt blow after cruel blow as five timeless Titans have walked off the stage for good.

In the span of just six months this year, besides the barefoot art maverick who breathed his last in London and the evergreen romantic who, too, chose London for the final act of his life, Hindi cinema’s beloved rebel star Shammi Kapoor (August 14), dulcet-voiced ghazal maestro Jagjit Singh (October 10) and the multi-faceted balladeer of the Brahmaputra Bhupen Hazarika (November 5) passed on into another world.

With Dev Anand having swaggered into their midst last week, it might not be too fanciful to imagine that the departed quintet would have gone into overdrive and whipped up a celestial rhapsody of art and music of the kind that even the Gods would be finding impossible to resist. It must be heaven!

The touch of the heavenly was unmistakable when these remarkable trailblazers from different domains of creativity went about entertaining, enriching and exciting millions of admirers across the subcontinent and beyond for six decades and more – that, in fact, is how long India has been an independent nation.

With the once-ubiquitous Husain no longer in our midst to rustle up the most dramatic brushstrokes of inspiration or with the miraculously age-defying Dev Anand able no more to transmit the embracing warmth of his innate vitality all around him, India, indeed the world that we inhabit, will never be the same.

What was it about these true-blue artists that set them apart from the crowd and made them such influential cultural figures of modern India?

To put it simply, each of them was a phenomenon in his own right, a creative force endowed with the power to alter our world just enough to make it a better place.

Every canvas that Husain painted was a moment frozen in modern Indian art history. Every soulful tune that Hazarika composed, every sonorous song that he sang had immortality written all over it. And every defiant shrug of a rakish Shammi Kapoor's shoulder and every romantic ditty that the stylishly jaunty Dev Anand lip-synched on the silver screen left an indelible imprint on the minds and hearts of Hindi movie buffs the world over.

Rebels all, these men reveled in setting off in directions all their own, scripting the kind of timeless fables of success and fame that only the truly accomplished can cram into a single lifetime.

These five artists, creators and performers, each in his own special way, defined the spirit and substance of India as the nation set out in search of its voice and feet in the years and decades following Independence.

At least three of these personalities were in business even before the historic midnight hour: Hazarika recorded his first song in 1936 as a ten-year-old, Dev Anand made his debut as a screen actor in 1946 at age 23 and the flamboyant Husain, who was already in his 30s when India attained freedom, joined the Progressive Artists’ Group in 1947 after cutting his teeth as a film poster painter.

It was on their shoulders that the burden of carrying the story of a newly-independent India forward fell. Through their respective modes of self-expression, these men embodied the nation’s innate aspiration to greatness.

MF Husain, prolific and free-spirited, quickly emerged as the India’s most celebrated artist; Dev Anand, film actor, producer and director who appeared to be propelled by an unseen fount of unending energy, rose to become a showbiz institution by himself; and Assamese composer, songwriter, singer and filmmaker Bhupen Hazarika brought the northeast closer to the national mainstream, putting it on India’s cultural map with his compositions and songs.

Symptomatic of a young nation determined to make its presence felt in the global arena, none of the three men was comfortable being confined within the limits imposed by geographical boundaries. They saw themselves as citizens of the world. They were easy travellers and they left their mark wherever they went.

While studying in Columbia University, New York, Hazarika met American singer and civil rights activist Paul Robeson and was influenced by him to employ music as an instrument of social change and anti-establishment politics. So Ol' Man River assumed the form of Bistirno Parore and set sail.

When Hazarika sang 'I’m a gypsy/From Brahmaputra through Mississippi I’ve seen Volga/From Ottawa through Austria I’ve embraced Paris', he was articulating the global vision that was to stand India in good stead in subsequent decades of the 20th century and in the new millennium.

It was around the time that Hazarika was making his first moves as a cultural force that Shammi Kapoor burst on the Mumbai showbiz scene in the mid-1950s and yanked Hindi cinema away from its traditional moorings.

Jagjit Singh, on the other hand, broke into a terrain dominated on the two sides of the Indo-Pak border by the likes of Malika Pukhraj, Begum Akhtar, Mehdi Hassan and Talat Mahmood sometime in the 1960s and gradually sang his way into the collective consciousness of ghazal fans by the 1970s never to look back.

He crooned Ab to mere khuda mujhe jalwa dikhaiye/Apne namaaziyon ka kaha maan jaiye and the historical divide between two hostile nations melted away in a magical jiffy, and that miracle occurred every time Jagjit Singh uncoiled his voice and spoke to our anguished hearts. Ineffable!

The influence they exercised over their respective crafts, and on their fans, cannot be measured in easily quantifiable terms. But, yes, it can be gauged from the sheer depth and longevity of their respective reigns.

What will always bind them together, besides the coincidence of the year of their demise, was the fact that Husain, Dev Anand, Hazarika, Shammi Kapoor and Jagjit Singh were non-conformists who rebelled against the established social and artistic orthodoxies of their time and taught their countrymen the virtues of individuality in an era of painstaking Nehruvian nation-building where playing by the rules was of significant importance.

By daring to dash off in uncharted directions in their fields of endeavour, they showed us the many alternative routes that were available to us as a people and as a nation. In that sense, they laid the foundation of several of the elements that eventually went into the making of the India of the new millennium, brash, bold, bursting with optimism and driven by a bare-knuckles spirit of derring-do.

Very little that Dev Anand, for instance, did in his heydays was anchored to the safety net of instant social acceptance. He cultivated an image that was unabashedly westernised at a time when being a denizen of 'jis desh mein Ganga behti hain' was the most desired trait.

He either starred in or helmed many a film that was at least a couple of decades ahead of its time. He may have been a never-say-die lover boy all his life who was led by his heart into many wondrous romantic adventures on the screen and off it, but he also had a sharp and constantly ticking mind that latched on to topical themes yielded by the social and political developments unfolding around him and, often aided by his actor-director younger brother Vijay Anand, turned them into memorable movies.

Who else but Dev Anand could have been the driving force behind the Vijay Anand-directed Guide, which celebrated a spirited woman out to secure freedom from a loveless marriage, way back in 1965? Well before Bollywood was flooded by blinkered NRI romances in the 1990s, he had directed Des Pardes, which laid bare the many pitfalls of indiscriminate migration to foreign lands.

And, of course, who can forget 1971’s Hare Rama Hare Krishna, a watershed film that helped commercial Hindi cinema wake up into a new dawn of adulthood and achieve a sense of comfort in its own skin.

An English literature grad, Dev Anand was a voracious reader, a fact that was often reflected in his cinematic inspirations. In 1971, the year he directed his second film, Hare Rama Hare Krishna, which delved into the world of the hippies who had swept into India from the West in search of liberation, Dev Anand also starred in an equally significant film, Tere Mere Sapne. Vijay Anand directed the script adapted from Scottish writer AJ Cronin’s 1937 novel, The Citadel, which addressed the contentious subject of medical ethics.

In 1980, the Dev Anand starrer Man Pasand was obviously inspired principally by the Hollywood hit My Fair Lady. But the dedication in the film was to eccentric Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, the suggestion being that the film was based on the play, Pygmalion. Dev Anand knew the distinction. He was a globally clued-in actor-director-producer who looked at the world with a degree of unprecedented freshness and intelligence. He lost his touch as an entertainer in the last two decades of his career but he never lost his zest for life.

If Dev Anand, who was in the thick of the action for 65 years without a break, ushered popular Hindi cinema into the modern era with his brand of free-flowing urbane entertainers infused with a sensibility that embraced the entire globe, Shammi Kapoor helped the Mumbai movies break free completely from the shackles of conservatism.

Kapoor’s box-office reign lasted no longer than a decade and a half – from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s – and his films did not really rewrite the rules of the medium in terms of either form or substance. Yet he was a showbiz icon whose reverberations we have continued to feel decades after he went into retirement as an actor.

What is that defines the timeless Shammi Kapoor aura? His acts of on-screen rebellion came well before their time: he defied the dominant creative norms of the golden era of Hindi cinema represented by his elder brother Raj Kapoor and the supremely gifted Dilip Kumar and not only got away with it but also built an entire mythology around his 'wayward' ways.

Pretty much in the manner of Dev Anand, Kapoor may have passed away and will henceforth be spoken of in the past tense, but in the here and now of the Mumbai movie industry he still continues to be a constant presence owing to the spirit of rebellion that he so aggressively and so unabashedly embodied.

Many in contemporary Bollywood still play, and will continue to play in the foreseeable future, by the rules that he laid down way back in the 1960s.

So we will continue to see the reflections of Shammi Kapoor in starry mannerisms on the big screen and in the strains and rhythms of Hindi film music in one form or other as long as Bollywood, as we know it, survives.

In his screen avatar, Shammi Kapoor personified the bold, brash post-economic liberalisation breed of young Indians all of three decades before it actually came into existence. Rock drummer, nightclub crooner, well-heeled gadfly, lovelorn dandy, loquacious, loose-limbed, livewire lady-killer – he was all this and... well, he was just this and nothing else. He had no pretensions and he made no bones about it. And that is precisely what made Shammi Kapoor what he was, rather what he is and will always be...

Cool, unapologetic and debonair: these adjectives would sit equally pretty on another Indian great who passed away in 2011: former cricket captain Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi. He was instrumental in giving Indian cricket a new spine, a new vein of confidence. He was a born leader of men who taught us to play for victory even when things weren’t really going our way.

The new India will forever be indebted to this epitome of style and elegance, as it will be to all the other magnificent men featured in this write-up. They are all gone from our midst, forever. But their giant footprints will continue to illumine India's channel to the future.