In Abbas’s Ghar
Written by: Ahmer Nadeem Anwer
(This is an article on K.A.Abbas, written by his grandson. We thank him for giving us permissions to republish the article on pustakam.net. This is a slightly modified version of the original article that appeared in Bihardays.com, as a part of K.A.Abbas centenary commemoration essays. – pustakam.net)
My working connection with the honorand was as a child actor in his film Hamara Ghar, yet in fact the association with him was deeper, more global and more extensive, even lifelong. Khwaja Ahmed Abbas, whom all in our home knew simply as “Mamoo Bachhoo” (he being my mother’s uncle), was a part of my birth family’s world for as long as one can remember. In the 1950s my parents had worked as translators in Moscow, bringing the great fictional classics of 19th century Russia to Urdu readers. This was the very time that Raj Kapoor’s Awara, penned by Abbas like the bulk of Kapoor’s finest films, had gained a kind of cult popularity in Russia, taking to new heights the Hindi-Russi love affair of the period. Everyone hummed “Awara hoon” in the streets of Moscow. In this atmosphere of warm and coruscating good relations and feelings, Abbas launched his Indo-Soviet production Pardesi, based on Renaissance merchant and traveller Afanasy Niketan’s sojourn in India. Afanasy’s love affair with a young woman hailing from his adopted country served as a metaphor of the special and enduring relationship between the Russian and the Indian peoples.
During part of the filming Abbas spent time in Moscow, and this was when he became a ‘presence’ in our home – a phenomenon that was to last decades. During off hours, he and occasionally crew members would converge at our place, among them Nargis, and the author-filmmaker would conjure up his trademark culinary concoction, which consisted in cooking a mound of vegetables, meat and rice, hurled all together inside a large cooking utensil. I of course was too young to remember such apocryphal details which I only heard later at ‘second hand’, and I don’t really have a very clear recollection of him from this time. However, the indelible awareness of Abbas, a sense, not to say sensation of him as a special and unusual person, had already taken root.
Over time, that early and amorphous, yet somehow mysteriously powerful impression began to gather flesh and a kind of compelling specificity. My parents returned to India in 1960, and after some curious perambulations my father relocated to Bombay as editor of the Urdu edition of Blitz, for which Abbas contributed one of the longest running of commentative columns, the celebrated, and often searingly unsparing ‘Last Page’. In Urdu it appeared under the rubric of ‘Azad Qalam’, which is as good a sobriquet for Abbas’s intrepid journalistic life as any that could be found. The spirit of liberty breathed in his pen. It was indeed the commitment to certain core values, among them the ideal of egalitarianism, the primacy of an engaged and combative authorial pen, the sense of membership of the progressive writers’ tryst with a socially committed inscriptional destiny, a non-negotiable investment in the idea of a secular and pluralistic India welcoming of, and just and fair unto all its constituents and peoples, including those from different faiths or no faith – all this created a special bond of shared beliefs between Abbas and my father Urdu author Anwer Azeem, so that my father’s work as founder editor of Urdu Blitz and Abbas’s ‘Azad Qalam’ led a parallel life of partnership and solidarity that matched their mutual affection, comradeship and fellow feeling.
Such friendships, indeed, were part of the history of a time, the history of a nation still in a process of becoming and making its choices of character and identity, and hope and promise had yet to vanish from the dreams of the dedicated. Perhaps this was the reason that my father, a bon vivant who like Abbas was serious about the things he valued, but not so much as to lack a sense of humour about it all, found in the latter a kindred spirit and a mentor he could both honour and enjoy. Though Abbas was my mother’s uncle on the maternal side, he and Anwer Azeem had a separate and independent relationship of their own, and in some ways I benefited from this double connection.
Not long after we moved to Bombay in 1963 a complication arose. I had found the whirlwind peregrinations from Moscow to Delhi to Aligarh, then back to Delhi, and thence to Mumbai/Bombay to be more than I could cope with, and, after jumping a class, managed the rather remarkable feat of flunking every subject on the report card. After struggling to make a go of my study life with some solid practical tips thrown by my mother’s wonderfully benevolent aunt ‘Apa Chhadi’, suddenly a situation developed that would throw this uncertain fledgling academic career into a fresh crisis.
At this time I was staying back for extra classes at Besant Montessori in hopes of pulling up my frankly desperate grades, and would repair thence to the Abbas home in Juhu nearby. Just then a scheme was tabled, I’m not sure how or whence. It seemed K. A. Abbas wanted to cast me in a forthcoming film and the carrot dangled was that the part was to be a pivotal one in the production. In Bombay, at least in those circles, the talk was all about movies, and the prospect of being a ‘hero’ in one, albeit a juvenile one, was a temptation not easy to dismiss. Unsurprisingly, I bit, having no idea how I’d manage to balance my precarious study life with the film’s shooting, which was to take some four or five months, mainly on Madh Island in the city’s suburbs. That Abbas had recently won the national award for best film of the year for Shehar Aur Sapna (a film where also the struggle for a “ghar” was centrestage) clinched matters as far as I was concerned.
The planned new film spoke volumes about the kind of filmmaker, and indeed the kind of man, Abbas was. He was more than offbeat; he was a movieland maverick who took unimaginable commercial risks with his films, mostly financed from earnings from his indefatigable journalistic labours. Nobody made movies about or with children in Bombay cinema proper. Yet Abbas, going against the grain, had already experimented with feature films centered on child protagonists, such as the highly acclaimed Munna, as well as the idea behind Boot Polish, scripted by him for RK. However, in Hamara Ghar, Abbas would go still further and depart from the Bollywood norm altogether, by choosing to make a full-length feature with an all-juvenile cast. To create an entire world populated exclusively by children, they would have to be ejected literally out of adult-constituted mainstream society as we know it.
In 1954, the year of my birth, the English novelist William Golding had published his classic Lord of the Flies which went on to earn its author a Nobel Prize for literature; in 1963 the novel was filmised and drew critical notice at Cannes. The narrative action of Lord of the Flies, owing something to children’s adventure tales such as Coral Island yet vastly different in tone and outlook, takes place against the imagined outbreak of nuclear war in Europe. A bunch of English schoolboys have been evacuated to a desert island in hopes of escaping the holocaust, and the story traces their efforts at preserving their reliably solid British liberal and honourable boy-scout training heritage in the ‘new world’, wherein they find themselves. As it turns out, the efforts of a minority of the children to live decently and in a spirit of sharing and camaraderie come a-cropper pretty soon, thanks to the speedy ascendancy of seething atavistic drives that surface when those young persons are placed in a “state of nature”. Golding’s sense of basal human nature as embodied in the child is disturbingly counter-Rousseauvian and dark.
As some of those marooned and societally deracinated children regress to brutal power struggles and efforts at dominance, narcisstic self-aggrandisement, and, in the end voodoo ritual worship and cannibalisitic feeding on their weaker fellows, the point is made clear: the reason fascism, or nuclear holocaust, can become real in adult Europe, is that those adults merely play out on the platform of sophisticated technology the dark instincts of the children they once had been… Life and human instinct are Hobbesian, a relentless and unsparing war of each against all, and children’s instincts are as beastly as those of their more technologically equipped elders. Humanity’s chances, given such a profoundly gloomy envisioning, would appear to be bleak….
Abbas took on this sinister reading of human nature and especially of the nature and inclinations of children.
n Hamara Ghar (1964) [The picture to the left is from the movie shoot], which is clearly designed as a systematic and principled counterblast to the radical anti-humanism of Golding’s vision but sharing many structural, situational and plot homologies with the latter’s unsettling novel, Abbas creates a meta-comment that implicitly re-reads Golding’s narrative as a kind of bestial and tendentious, and no doubt scripturally shadowed, canard on the root ‘evil’ of the human species itself, as embodied in the ‘ignoble savagery’ of childhood.
I suspect there were many reasons for Abbas’s metatextual attitude. For one thing, I think he really liked children, enjoyed their company, their chatter, their dreams, their fears and hopes. I haven’t met too many adults, especially males, who could really talk and interact with persons half a century younger the way he could. For another, I think that he, like Golding, yet in a diametrically different way, saw the child as the key to the propensities of humanity at large, and to the prospects of modern mankind on a nearly prophetical level. In particular, after the internal holocaust and civil butchery of Partition – the parallel to Europe’s nuclear crisis in Golding – India then was struggling to offer to the world the image of a society that could overcome a terrible history of fissiparous internecine hostilities and violence, and essay a fresh beginning that would help it to survive in a spirit of acceptance, coexistence and altruistic affirmation of its different ethnic and religious groupings, real difficulties notwithstanding. One wouldn’t pretend the difficulties out of existence, but one might confront and tame them. Perhaps a band of children could offer to the adult world a lesson worth learning.
Hamara Ghar takes the Lord of the Flies situation, and imparts to it a very different unfolding and denouement – an altogether variant ‘edge’. A group of schoolchildren are to go by steamer on a fun-trip to Goa; but en route things start to go wrong. A turbulent sea storm flings their rescue lifeboat upon a desert island, stranded on which they must now attempt to survive unaided. The struggle for survival, as in Golding, entails not merely surviving the beasts and manifold dangers of the forest and sea, or the securing of food and habitation, but more importantly, taming the beast within.
Abbas declines to accept Golding’s presumption of a Calvinistic sin-proneness within every human child and heart. But his less theological, more ‘socialised’ envisioning of our behaviours does contend with the reality that society and its forces seem divided up between on the one hand decently inclined and gentler beings, who often end up dominated and disempowered, and, on the other hand, the more openly bellicose and domineering drives and ambitions of those seeking unbridled power and a monopoly of advantage and surpluses. In the film, the latter tendencies are personified through the oldest of the male children (who is a chronically class-repeating young man, in fact, a dandyish chap born with a silver spoon, whose identity from the beginning rests on a pride of acquisitions and rank based on status symbols and unabashed conspicuous consumption).
Abbas is concerned to show that the idea that some can bully and rule the roost must be ruinous when life is pared down to the basics: a band of school kids sourced from different strata, regions, religions and genders and needing to cohabit and pull together can no more afford such power plays and animosities than can a nation and subcontinent of hundreds of millions. Some other principle of living must be found or fashioned. And while fortunately the rage of dominance, greed and megalomania infects only a minority of the marooned children, many more are susceptible to the would-be exploiters’ blandishments, cunning divisive ploys, and plain blackmailing and bullying tactics.
Yet Abbas does not, in the end, show the malefactors succeeding, and his band of stranded survivors do manage to find their way out of the looming maelstrom, thus avoiding the inescapability, in a sense, of the fate of Golding’s youngsters, who must both literally and metaphorically feed and prey upon one another, as their ‘inevitable’ perceived modus vivendi and means of survival.
How is this avoided? It requires a human agency – an intervention by somebody who cares, and understands enough to bother and try to make things work just when nothing seems to. This blood-bath averting agency was assigned to a boy who on the face of it seemed an unlikely choice, lacking as he does the advantages the other children can take for granted. It is a motherless Dalit boy who has been able to finance his trip only by his extra hours as a shoe-shine (the work with which he funds his studies too). It is this boy who in the film embodies the defiance of those who shall not accept their exclusion from education, work, self-respect – or even recreation and pleasure: this is his father’s bequest to the boy, Sonu, and the son takes his blind, yet all-seeing, all-understanding Tiresias-like father’s message seriously. And so he joins the band of boys and girls on the missed Goan holiday. Children who end up, trying like India itself since 1947, to muddle through an uncertain tryst with destiny under often insalubrious challenges.
The critical point is that Sonu, being who he is, has perhaps more stakes in the survival of the cooperative-supportive vision of sociality and communal living, than do some of his more privileged schoolfellows. And so when, egged on by Ghanshyamdas Sonachand, the sneering, swaggering scion of a filthy rich clan, the children have been pushed to the brink of destroying their collective home and habitation, their “hamara” ghar, Sonu confronts the mob and attempts to reason and argue with them. Reason, though, is a weak brake upon unleashed fury and ‘emotive’ arousal by clever manipulators of people’s emotions and insular ideas of self-advantage, and it takes the flow of empathy for a nearly drowned Sonu to return the hyper-incensed children back to their senses. One near-death experience, though, is enough to remind them that not just their experiment in pulling together with decency and mutual caring, but life itself was now at fatal risk, and a decision must be made. Luckily, they decide in the least damaging way. As in Golding, the children are ultimately rescued – but unlike in Golding sufficiently in time for utter horror to be averted.
I played the part of Sonu who helps obviate horror. I don’t believe Abbas chose me for the role because he thought I had some histrionic ability that the others did not: some of the youngsters, such as Noel who shinnied up coconut trees at top speed, or Larry, the Jewish boy who later migrated to Israel, had undoubtedly more acting talent than I, and they showed it on screen in slimmer parts. The reasons I landed the plum role were twofold (I suspect). First, although Abbas deplored the implicit hierarchies of the star system, he was nonetheless secretly partial to those he loved, befriended and was close to in real life, and often cast the children of close associates in meaty parts in his movies – and serendipitously, some of those so favoured went on to prove what stellar talents they really were (not I, but I’m thinking of some really famous names).
In that set of children who were cast in Hamara Ghar, I just happened, by virtue of my parentage, to be the most closely associated and related! Second, although no great actor, I, a person who never essayed an acting attempt before or since, seemed for some reason to fit his imagination of the part and plot function he meant to be assigned to Sonu. A close view of the matter might say that Sonu is somewhat too good to be true for a child, talks and preaches in fulsome moral sermons, and while he can be victimised, he cannot counterattack. His near tragedy, or his near martyrdom, is what saves the children from regression to hell and nightmare, but such moral leadership verges on hyper-idealisation and a goody-two-shoes simplicism and naivete. In general, Abbas’s films were designed by very clear moral antinomies, almost on the pattern of a Morality Play, where demons and good angels play out clearly divided parts, and characterological ambivalence and complexity are a rarity.
All this may contain a grain of truth, but in Hamara Ghar it may have been necessary. I did hear that Abbas commissioned the leading Urdu fiction writer Krishan Chander to sculpt the part with me in mind. And yet, strangely, though I was nowhere near being the ideal, totally ‘good’ and fault-free child Sonu is, there were a few homologies of temperament and outlook; at any rate the moment when Sonu finally loses his cool and plunges into the waters biting back his tears yet staying angry and defiant, used something I used to have as a child and young person. In this, Abbas and Chander (both knew me and Krishan Chander had evidently been sharply briefed) were uncannily perceptive and observant.
In retrospect, I’ve sometimes wondered, how much of myself went into the delineation of Sonu, and how much of Sonu, consciously or unconsciously, helped shape me? Critics were kind, and the reviewer of the Times of India Bombay edition forecast for me (inaccurately so) a bright child-actor career, but actually I was mostly playing myself (being way too young to ‘think’ through the matter), and the casting instincts of Abbas in that sense were the main reason why it may have come off for me.
Looking back, it was an extraordinary learning experience. I have never lived in quite this way, with such a sense of community, among peers of so many kinds, such wide gaps and differences of age, group identity and cultural background notwithstanding. In a very real sense, Abbas recreated on location and during the filming the very ideals of mutuality, reciprocity and altruistic-cooperative community living which he made the conceptual principle of his narrative. Each morning, a ramshackle half bus would wind its way across town picking up child after child – no one found any special favours there, and I as a family member got none either. So about four hours of the day we were in transit, making for a long but productive working day, punctuated by songs, dances, impromptu wrestling matches, and community lunches in which everyone, the director included, joined in without the slightest element of hierarchy or stuffiness. (At times things could go too far in this direction though, as when the socialistic sharing out of realistically unwashed shorts triggered an outbreak of jock itch among the juvenile cast members, my own self included!)
This went on, day after day, in an unbroken rhythm for the entire duration of the filming, though my mother did come on the set a few times to help me with my books for the school test, and also when the nocturnal storm scene was to be filmed (I fell asleep cold and exhausted, and Abbas seized the opportunity to filmise me in a realistic state of post-drowning ‘unconsciousness’!).
However, Abbas’s obsessive penchant for ‘realism’ did result in one skirmish between him and myself. At the point where Ghanshyam leads an angry and violent mob to wreck the collective home of the children, a shack made with love, care and hard work by themselves, the ten year old Sonu steps in their path. Ghanshyam thrusts aside the younger boy and rushes forward leading the others, and Sonu is sent hurtling – they just jump over his prone form. I was instructed to ‘mime’ the fall when I’m lightly pushed.
But privately Abbas instructed Ghanshyam to hit and push me as hard as he could. At an athletic eighteen or nineteen years Ghanshyam was already a young man, and eager to prove his pugilistic prowess and possibly carried out his instructions with even greater enthusiasm than the director had in mind. Be that as it may, I was sent flying and crashed my head against a tree with some considerable force. There was a heavy concussion of the head, I blacked out, and the headache lasted days. But more than the physical injury, it was the shock of “betrayed trust”, the sense that I’d been deliberately set up and made a fool of, that upset me most, and I threatened to quit the film midway, because I felt that ‘Mamoo Bachhoo’ for the sake of his blasted realism had put my safety at risk, but even more so, had taken unfair advantage of my young trust.
To his credit, he came home a few days later, on Diwali, and tendered his apologies along with a generous supply of sweetmeats, and even some festival time gift money, though remuneration was no part of the deal. Of course I’d known all along that I’d eventually relent, although I was hurt and furious, since I did not plan to ruin the film, much of which had already been filmised, and this gesture on his part was enough to open the way to the truce that led to a peaceable conclusion of the film’s making. When it opened in a theatre the name of which I now forget, I was thrilled, jumped forward to shake as many as possible of the first show viewers’ hands, and walked around on a cloud for a while.
When the film was screened at Rashtrapati Bhawan in Delhi, and my sister and female cousins set up a boohooing wailing “Pasha doob gaya, Pasha mar gaya”, I presented myself to them with something of a dramatic flourish after the show was over, grinning widely and pleased as punch with a scale of importance I’d never before enjoyed. That Abbas trusted me enough to give me the part gave me a surge of confidence, and in the glow of all that I even finally forgave him the tree bump! Soon, the sober realities of life, study and work took over, pushing filmland and its wonders firmly to the background, and I continued my journey to my life as a student of literature and a pedagogue, which has its pleasures and compensations, though the arc lights and public notice are not among them…Sometimes, when I read lines from a play in class, or a powerful passage in a poem, I recall with a touch of affection and nostalgia, my brief brush with acting, and remember the man who made that possible…
Many years later, I renewed with Abbas one more working encounter, though briefly and limitedly. I had recently joined the teaching profession after finishing my Master’s, and Abbas was doing a book project on the Emergency. This strange rupture in free India’s democratic history helped politicise me, as well as my response to my academic discipline, literary studies. I was nothing if not scathing on this quasi-fascistic interregnum with its suspension of civil liberties and citizen rights, and the neutralization, often in jails, of a political opposition.
Abbas was a little taken aback by the vehemence of what I said I think. His own allegiance to Nehru and by extension Nehru’s daughter made it difficult for people like him (and my father) to quite make sense of what had happened within their conceptual, but also their emotional frame. But I quickly realised then that my great-uncle was a rigorous, and rigorously honest researcher and journalist, for he could set aside his own mental habits sufficiently to really listen and connect to a different view, even if this upset many verities that he had taken for granted all his life.
At that moment to the qualities I’d always known in him – his courage, his indomitable spirit and fierce defiance, his good humour and wit and his bon vivant charm with the ladies (I’d witnessed some of that magic during after preview dinners at Moti Mahal in Delhi), was added yet another, and one that arguably may have been K. A. Abbas’s greatest quality: unswerving intellectual and professional integrity. This was a special person indeed, and I was privileged to know him.
Of course, he wasn’t without contradictions, which only made him human. He theoretically despised the star system, yet he secretly had his favourite stars; for instance his unquestioning loyalty to Raj Kapoor. He also had his favourite actress, also a big star in Bombay. On Children’s Day during the shooting of Hamara Ghar, a snow white Mercedes Benz drew up at the seaside location where the film’s action was shot. Out of the car emerged Meena Kumari like some ethereal deity from a magic chariot. We were mesmerised, little knowing that this acting genius had only recently completed her life’s crowning acting triumph in Sahib, Bibi aur Ghulam. The great actress insisted on knowing “film ke hero kaun hain?” Abbas for his part insisted that his film had no hero and no heroine, and as in Orwell’s Animal Farm, all the child-animals were equal. But she would have none of it, and in the end he grudgingly looked my way. She drew me to her and tousled my hair for a bit, and I smiled shyly at her, and then glanced gratefully at K. A. Abbas for breaking his rule. I had, for a moment, been touched by divinity.
Updated – August 07, 2014 04:27 pm IST
At a time when progressive rhymed with communist in popular imagination, Khwaja Ahmad Abbas walked the tight rope between brackets. The rope was well-oiled and his soul searching acts over the rich-poor divide proved to be entertaining and probing at the same time. At a young age he wrote to Mahatma Gandhi to revisit his ideas on the relevance of cinema for the society. When Hindi cinema was busy romanticising the ills plaguing the society, Abbas used his pen like a scalpel. As the challenges remain the same, several publishers and Khwaja Ahmad Abbas Memorial Trust are trying to resurrect Abbas in public imagination during his birth centenary year. Om Books has recently launched two books: Sardarji and Other Stories and An Evening in Paris and Other Stories. Edited by seasoned documentary filmmaker and critic Suresh Kohli, they take us close to the craft of the master practitioner of prose . Kohli says he usually wrote his film scripts as novels and novellas and ‘Mera Naam Joker’ was one such attempt which was published as novelised version. Harper Collins has brought it back as ‘Mera Naam Joker’: The Complete Story and has put Bobby’s love story between covers.
Deeply aware of the syncretic traditions of our culture, Abbas’introduction to stories happened by reading Premchand and Ratan Nath Sarshar in Urdu. When he went to Los Angeles in 1938, his aim was not to see Hollywood but meet writer Upton Sinclair. A much feted alumnus of Aligarh Muslim University, he had to spend nights on the pavements of Bombay. Years later, the contradiction reflected in his writing and his choices as a filmmaker. Not as a protest but as an attempt to make sense of who we are. In the process he rubbed many, including some of his progressive writer friends, the wrong way. After Partition when Abbas wrote that every community should look within they found him anti-people, only to apologise later.
August 3, 2014
A prolific journalist, screenwriter, playwright and director, Khwaja Ahmad Abbas set the bar for those who came after him
As centenary celebrations of Krishan Chander and Majeed Amjad are being planned in Pakistan, it is befitting to recall that the centenary celebrations of Khwaja Ahmad Abbas are being held in India. He was born in the year 1914 and then went on to become a novelist, short story writer, journalist, playwright, screenplay writer and film maker. In all he wrote 73 books in English, Urdu and Hindi, made 13 films which in many ways were groundbreaking, a departure from the usual song and dance format of subcontinental cinema.
But in those days the movements like the Progressive Writers Association were in full bloom and generally the arts were all infected by the sweeping ideology of Marxism. With India so close to independence, the same ideological imperatives were also consciously visible in the other art forms mainly drama and film. When Abbas made Naya Sansar in the early 1940s it was a new experiment that was lauded greatly at least by the few who wanted the arts and cinema to play a more overtly purposeful role in character and nation building.
But as it usually happens with such ideological movements they tend to become dogmatic and, in later stages, to meet with the changing realities on ground the battlefield is laid between the competing interpretations that are thrown up in the process.
The first to be affected are creative writers and artistes. Abbas had great trouble in dealing with the dogmatic reading of Marxism and was sort of expelled from the organisation and debarred from editing their magazine. But he continued undeterred writing novels, short stories besides hectic journalistic assignments.
He found journalism and literature to be conjoined twins for he was often accused of being journalistic in his fiction and films. His inspiration came from writers like Upton Sinclair and many others who were also journalists.
Laurels & awards
K A Abbas won many laurels such as Padma Shri, Haryana State Robe of Honour for literary achievements, Ghalib Award for his contribution to Urdu prose/ literature, Vronsky Literary Award of the Soviet Union, Urdu Academy Delhi Special Award, Maharashtra State Urdu Academy Award and the Soviet Award for his contribution to the cause of Indo-Soviet Friendship.
Nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes in France for the script of Neecha Nagar, National Film Award For Best Feature Film Shehar Aur Sapna, All India Certificate of Merit for the Second Best Children Film Idd Mubarak, Bengal Film Journalist Association Awards(BFJA) for Naya Sansar.
He was also nominated as director at Palme d’Or at Cannes for Pardesi, International Film Festival Award Santa Barbara for Hamara Ghar, Maharashran State Award for Fakira, Nargis Dutt Awards for Saat Hindustani, Nargis Dutt Awards for Do Boond Pani, Golden Awards for The Naxalites.
Cinema was seen by many as the medium that had the greatest outreach. Since it was primarily visual and oral, the people who were uneducated in the formal sense could also be influenced by it. It could be used for propaganda as well as for purposes of education. The great directors showed the world the potential of cinema in raising the consciousness of the people at large.
Khwaja Ahmed Abbas and V. Shantaram were the first who opted to treat cinema in line with their ideological commitments. The first truly realistic films were made in India in the 1940s. After Naya Sansar he made Dharti Ke Lal, and wrote the script for Dr Kotnis Ki Amar Kahani and Neecha Nagar which was nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes in France.
India fortunately had a very vibrant film industry, the most vibrant and the biggest in the colonies and the people’s appetite for viewing cinema too was insatiable. Some of the films had coded messages or encryptions which the people read and understood differently from the ones that were overtly screened.
Censorship too made the producers use a subtext and an underlying meaning different from the one presented on surface but these films by Abbas were not encoded and wrapped in song and dance format but were clear, open and uncompromising. This stark realism was not liked by the people but adulated by the discerning many across the subcontinent.
But Abbas was not to be deterred. He continued to make films — Munna, Anhonee, Do Boond Pani, Saat Hindustani, Bambai Raat Ki Bahoon Main, Aasman Mahal, The Naxalites, Shehar Aur Sapna, picking up many awards, national and international without even joining the ranks of popular money making producers of almost the biggest film industry in the world. Though as part of the film world he was successful in writing scripts and dialogues for blockbusters like Awara, Shri 420, Mera Naam Joker, Bobby and Henna.
Unlike Pakistan, the distance between show business and serious ideological work or working for a cause was not that great in India. Many from the very beginning were involved in making films, writing scripts, dialogues and songs for films even in popular cinema which in many ways uplifted the general quality of films. Manto, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Majrooh Sultanpuri, Akhtar ul Iman, Kaifi Azmi, and Sahir Ludhianvi, along with Ismat Chugtai and Raja Mehdi Ali Khan worked for the films without any accusations. Abbas too was busy in the film world as much as he was in literature and journalism.
He also worked in a Soviet-Indian joint production Pardesi which was filmed both in Soviet Union and India. Released in both languages Hindi and Russian it was based on the travels of a trader Afanay Nitkin who visited India in the 15th century.
Among his journalist commitments was a weekly column on the last page that he wrote consistently for more than 50 years, first for the Bombay Chronicle and then Blitz. He kept writing short stories and novels.
His novel Inqilab was written in English in the early 1950s but could not find a publisher. It was published in the Soviet Union and then translated into many languages like German. It was finally published in India and Hindi and Urdu versions followed later. He also wrote his autobiography — I Am Not An Island.
Many who came later and are recognised as greater film makers like Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, Shiyam Benegal, Ritwik Ghatak, Basu Bhattacharya, and Gulzar owed a great deal to the pioneer film makers of alternative cinema like Abbas. His films may not have been as suave, subtle or understated as that of the later film makers. Films that came later had a pedestal to stand on and that pedestal was made or put in place by the likes of Abbas. His contribution like that of all pioneers was great and no wonder he is being remembered even 27 years after his death.
As the only producer in the history of the Indian cinema who challenged the Censor Board on an earlier occasion by taking it to court, Abbas, in an interview with India Today’s Sunil Sethirelates how the censors struck down his new film.
Although they gave him no reason, Abbas feels that the theme of Naxalites and revolution provoked the censors to initially ban the film; but it was only his public campaign that saved it. It took him nearly six months of fighting before his film was certified for release, though he has still to find buyers for it. Excerpts from the interview:
So I started a signature campaign and began to show the film privately to groups of people. Then the chairman of the Censor Board rang me up and said: “I hear you are starting a signature campaign?” “Yes,” I said, “is it illegal?” But I had already represented against the board’s decision, and said that I would make the rest of my representaion orally to the board.
Then I was asked to deliver a print for screening to Home Ministry officials. The Censor Board summoned me after that and I went armed with files and fat law books and carefully-rehearsed arguments. They didn’t have a choice: I would have built up a national campaign for the release of my film.
Published By:
AtMigration
Published On:
Jan 8, 2014
1947 At about noon our little plane landed on the Srinagar air strip. We were met by several army trucks and a jeep which seemed to have been sent for me. It was driven by a handsome young Kashmiri who was in woollen khaki trousers, thick boots, a buttoned up jodhpur coat, a fur cap, and a warm muffler round his neck. He also carried a rifle slung over his shoulder. “I am Deepee,” he said which, at that time, meant nothing to me. But on the way to Srinagar he introduced himself more thoroughly as D.P. Dhar, one of Shaikh Abdullah’s young men who seemed to be doing a dozen things—from training Kashmiri boatmen and farmers into a militia to keeping track of the infiltrators who were still prowling about the valley, and looking after the intellectuals who were coming in every day. “There are already nearly twenty of them and the guest house number three is fairly chock-full of them. But it doesn’t matter. We will get another of the royal guest houses opened for you and those who come after you.”
Later on, I came to know that he was Lucknow-educated (which meant the slightest Kashmiri accent), was a member of the Students Federation, and a friend of Sardar Jafri about whom he made solicitous enquiries. Finally, he revealed that he was the Deputy Home Minister in Shaikh Abdullah’s Cabinet and, again, I was reminded of Spain where, young intellectuals were also drafted into ministerial positions and went about carrying rifles, at the time during the heroic (but, alas, hopeless) struggle against fascism!
“Guest house number one” proved to be a palatial affair, and the suite that was opened for me was last occupied by (if I remember right) the Maharaja of Patiala.
“But what does it matter?” D.P. told me when he unexpectedly jeeped in in the evening. “It’s a revolution. The Maharaja has run away, and the people have taken over. Come on, let me take you to the other guest house where all your writer friends are staying—then I will leave you for my other work.”
I was indiscreet enough to ask, “What is your work?”
Hunting,” he simply said, patting his rifle, “along with Bakhshi Saheb. We have heard of some raiders hiding behind the airport.”
He jeeped me through frost on the ground—it hadn’t begun to snow then to the other guest house where a dozen or more writers were gathered round the fireplace—Ramanand Sagar, (who has since become a successful film producer) who was then completing his novel about partition, Aur Insan Mar Gaya; Rajinder Singh Bedi who was collecting material for Namak, his epic story of salt, and its importance in the life of Kashmir; Mrs Chandrakiran Sonrexa who was a short story writer but was now writing a novel; Navtej Singh, the Punjabi writer of short stories and the son of the famous Punjabi writer Gurbaksh Singh of Preet Lari; Sher Singh (or was he Sher Jung?), fighter and writer, who went about in a jeep in riot-torn Delhi, shooting at sight any arsonist, rioter or would-be murderer. Raj Bans Khanna (a nephew of Balraj Sahni by marriage), an intellectual and a leftist, who was the head of the Kashmiri national militia and had taken leave from his duties to spend an evening with the writers. The atmosphere reminded one of Spain and the International Brigade where, it was said, writers had come to live their books, and poets had come to die for their poetry! The creativity of these writers was infectious and rashly I promised to read my latest story the next evening. As I walked back to my own guest house, the first snow-fall of the season was like a soft white carpet on the ground, glistening in the starlight. I decided there and then to complete a story in less the twenty-four hours and read it to my writer friends the next day. That story was Sardarji which, through a sheer misunderstanding, involved me in a court case and several adventures. But at that time these events were far off, in the womb of time. It gave me a great creative satisfaction to finish that story by the next night, and to read it to a group of appreciative friends, who all liked it very much—specially the three Sikh friends, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Navtej Singh, and Gurmeet Singh the photographer. At the end of it, a young army officer told me, “The story is very good, very effective in conveying its message of humanity. But if I were you I would not publish it for some years.” I wish I had followed his advice!
Through the courtesy of D.P. and a National Conference worker, Gandarbali, I was lucky enough to visit the Uri front which was within a mile or so of the Pakistani forward lines. On the way, we passed through Baramulla, seeing the ruins of the once prosperous town (including the chapel which was in shambles) and were shown where Maqbul Sherwani, the young and intrepid National Conference worker, was tortured and ultimately shot.
The Uri sector was then under Brigadier (later General) Sen who was most cordial and cooperative. He even sent us with some soldiers to inspect the site of a skirmish the previous night, where some Pakistani raiders’ dead bodies were still lying. There were three of them, presumably ignorant tribal people of the Frontier province and the cry of Jehad had brought them to their death in Uri. I was surprised, however, to find the Indian soldiers refer to them as “Musallahs” and not as Pakistanis! The subtlety of the correct nomenclature entirely eluded them. After all this was the war which was being waged with the help and assistance of the people of Kashmir, most of whom were Muslims and, thanks to their leader, the redoubtable Shaikh Abdullah, anti-Pakistanis.
This was the war in which, only a few miles away, a Muslim called Maqbul Sherwani rather died than give up his secular and pro-Indian attitude.
I took up the matter with Brigadier Sen and he expressed his helplessness in the matter. He said in effect, “It is difficult to change the thinking of these soldiers who are ignorant of the principles of secularism.” I wanted to ask him: then what is this war about? What am I, a “Musallah,” doing here? But I preferred to keep my mouth shut, making a mental note fit for reference to Jawaharlal Nehru, if and when I got a chance to discuss the matter with him.
We had our lunch in an orchard where apples hung invitingly low, and just then, we were presumably, sighted by the Pakistanis through their field glasses for two mortar shells fell dangerously close to us. This was real war, and we could have all died there and then, as Brigadier Usman was to die in another sector–the most important Muslim to lay down his life for secularism and Kashmir. Yet, I was not afraid of death in that moment. Was it because of the company I had—Marg-e-Amboh jashn na darad (When you die in a group, there is no celebration!)—or was it some sort of contagion of bravery? Anyway, when we returned to Srinagar along the hairpin bends of the serpentine hill road, we left the war behind. The danger of our jeep falling down the khud was more imminent and frightening than any Pakistani mortar shells could be!
That night or, maybe, a few nights later, I and D.P. discussed the chances of winning the plebiscite—if there was one. D.P. asked me what did I think of the chances? I told him the climate of Srinagar at that time was definitely against Pakistan. I had talked to Kashmiri craftsmen, boatmen, paddy farmers, porters—almost all of them Muslims—and they all had unpleasant experiences of the raiders who were uncouth fanatics who knew nothing. I could personally vouchsafe for this, for I had met a raider in Srinagar jail who could not read or write or articulate except to say that he was sent to save the Kashmiri Muslims from the tyranny of the Maharajah. When I told him that there was no Maharajah and the “big man” in Srinagar was Shaikh Abdullah, he remained silent and sullen. Evidently, he had not heard of the Shaikh Saheb’s name.
“If there is going to be a plebiscite—and I find Panditji had committed himself to it before the international public opinion—India should hold it within a month.” This was an opinion which I could express between friends. “Let India fix the date soon and give an ultimatum to Pakistan to clear out of the occupied territory—if they don’t, they will be responsible for the consequences. India would hold the plebiscite wherever its writ runs—and then declare the results to the world. I don’t think we can go wrong, provided we work fast and don’t allow the ‘Islam in Danger’ cry to be raised!”
D.P. said thoughtfully, “You know, Khwaja Saheb, many of us here are also thinking along the same lines. Will you discuss it with Shaikh Saheb and, if he agrees, will you go to Delhi to suggest it to Panditji?”
I was afraid of Panditji, but willing to stick my neck out, and I said as much.
D.P. fixed the appointment with Shaikh Saheb the next day. Shaikh Abdullah was surrounded by a big Durbar-farmers, and boatmen, fishermen, craftsmen, everyone could walk into his house, without much ceremony. He had known his people since the days he was a school teacher, and they knew him, and there was a democratic rapport between them. He was a five times-a-day praying Muslim and that gave him a solid base for his leadership. The Kashmiri Muslim is essentially religious, and it was a miracle that Shaikh Abdullah had persuaded them that their salvation lay in working together with their Hindu compatriots, and so he had converted them to secularism, turning his original Muslim Conference into a National Conference.
“Who came to our help in the time of need, defying the power of the maharajah?” he would ask in his orations after Friday prayers.
The people would reply in chorus, “Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru!”
And Shaikh Abdullah would drive the shaft home by saying, “Not Jinnah Saheb, who was too busy hobnobbing with the maharajas and nawabs.”
The Shaikh was a simple man, simply dressed in the style of the upper middle class Kashmiris, and he spoke to the people in Kashmiri, their own language. It was obvious that they loved him and adored him.
When I came in, he excused himself and led me on to a verandah which was flooded with the cold-weather sunlight.
“I am glad you have come again, Khwaja Saheb,” he said, referring to my earlier visit when he was in jail. “I suppose we can give you slightly better hospitality.”
“Khwaja Saheb has some suggestion regarding the plebiscite,” said D.P., afraid that our talk would drift into a series of polite exchanges.
“Yes?” Shaikh Saheb gave me the cue. Then he heard me patiently as I proposed my theory about an early plebiscite. “I feel that now is the time when the whole valley is reverberating with Humla-awar khabardar—Hum Kashmiri hain tayyaar! that the plebiscite should be held. It should not be postponed.”
“I will not say yes. And I won’t say no. Panditji must have his own reasons for delaying the plebiscite. It is better to discuss it with him first. Though you have made a plausible point, I will only do what my leader says.”
K A Abbas: Man with a message legend DHNS Last Updated : 05 May 2012, 19:22 IST
Reassessing the work of her estranged husband, the late Uma Anand described Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, in her book Chetan Anand: The Poetics of Film — “Abbas was a valuable friend and a patron to innumerable young hopefuls during these years (1944-45) of he…
Reassessing the work of her estranged husband, the late Uma Anand described Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, in her book Chetan Anand: The Poetics of Film “Abbas was a valuable friend and a patron to innumerable young hopefuls during these years (1944-45) of hectic activity.”
Her brother-in-law, the famous star-producer Dev Anand, who enjoyed Abbas’s hospitality for six months after landing in Bombay from Lahore, reluctantly acknowledges it in his autobiography Romancing with Life – “Abbas was a very famous journalist…and later, my association with him was a matter of great pride for me…(he) had good contacts with some important film folks.” It was Abbas who had given him a break in his play
Zubeida and opened doors for his entry into the big bad world of Bollywood.
Abbas is known today for having given Amitabh Bachchan a break in his Saat Hindustani. Bachchan has confessed elsewhere that he would have gone back to Calcutta and restarted work in his old company had he not got that break. In his foreword to the new edition of Abbas’s autobiography, I am Not an Island, Bachchan observed: “Abbas saheb was a principled individual. Forthright and honest.
He was never tempted by great commercial expectations or desires. He existed in his minimum requirements and never craved for more, or deliberately worked towards it. He was one who would sacrifice his own to assist the other he was also one who would give freely without asking for anything in return. If he had it, he would give, if he wanted, he would never ask.”
No book on Indian cinema, especially Hindi cinema, can be complete without a reference to the man who came to be recognised as an island by himself. Yves Thoraval, a Paris-based curator-cum-writer, observed in his book The Cinemas of India: “Khwaja Ahmad Abbas was a major influence in the film industry… The first great Indian realistic film was K A Abbas and his film Dharti ke Lal which was acclaimed in the Pravada by Pudovkin… the first cinematographic ‘manifesto’ of Indian ‘realism’.”
And B D Garga, one of the country’s most eminent film scholars and founder-member of the National Film Archives, and almost a devotee of Abbas, observed in The Art of Cinema: “Abbas’s faith in the final victory of man is undying. He is an inveterate optimist who believes that come what may, ‘We shall overcome’. His cinematic credo is closer to that of John Grierson than Godard and, like Grierson, he uses cinema as a pulpit to project his vision and propagate his ideas.”
Abbas had been more successful as a script-and-dialogue writer than a filmmaker, and even though many of his productions won national and international awards, none of them were as successful at the box office as the ones he wrote for other directors, notably V Shantaram and Raj Kapoor. In fact, the latter went on record and said, “Abbas saheb taught me how to use my voice.”
Together, they worked magic in films like Awara, Shree 420, Boot Polish, Jagtey RahoMera Naam Joker, Bobby, and partially in Ram Teri Ganga Maili and Henna. Filmmaker M S Sathyu emphatically stated that “the credit for meaningful films coming out of certain political and ideological leaning goes to Abbas saheb who could be dubbed somewhat as a pioneer.”
Kishore Valicha wrote in Dadamoni, the only authorised biography of Ashok Kumar, who was also, at one time, a partner in Bombay Talkies: “A 1940s war-effort film which caught everyone’s attention was the clever work of an astute journalist named Khwaja Ahmad Abbas. K A Abbas, as he was better known, was a journalist attached to the Bombay Chronicle.
He had scripted Naya Sansar (this later became the banner under which he made his neo-realist films) for Bombay Talkies in 1941, which had attracted attention. It was seen as one of the first progressive films to come from the commercial film world. Abbas got an image overnight. He was seen as a new revolutionary with mild leftist leanings.”
Abbas liked to describe himself as a communicator of ideas and, perhaps, therefore, deployed -with reasonable success all means of expression. As a journalist, short story writer and a novelist, he drew inspiration from Ernest Hemingway; his films were influenced by the Russian neo-realist directors and inadvertently got incorporated in the kind of screenplays he went on to author for himself and others.
He was a great human being, helpful and generous to a fault. He seldom compromised on his social or political thinking which, at times, made him a crusader of sorts. He liked to take these little battles to the bitter end. “My motivation (despite commercial failure of films) remains the same. To communicate my thoughts to as large a public as possible,” he told this writer from his sick bed, when Ek Aadmi was nearing completion; his last interview, published posthumously in Filmfare.
His was a curious case. He would often joke that the hardcore scribes would describe him as a better short story writer than a crusading journalist; the filmmakers found him to be a better scriptwriter than a filmmaker, and the creative writers found him to be better at everything except producing creative fiction. But he did not mind any of these labels. He said his purpose was to communicate and he used every medium to convey his message.
Carol J Slingo, bemoaning Abbas’s death, wrote in Jump Cut (USA): “Politically, Abbas was part of a generation who were cultured in socialist and communist thought and organisations, and who had to make sense of the vast changes taking place in their own lifetime, most dramatically focused before, during and after national independence.
Dear Garga,
This is to place on record (as it needs to be done) my grateful thanks for the very principled and fraternal stand you have taken on the issue of the refusal of the Censor Board to give a ‘U’ certificate to my documentary, A Tale of Four Cities. Your letters to the editors of various newspapers, and more particularly your open letter to the Chairman of the Censor Board, will remain memorable episodes in the struggle for freeing the creative film-makers from the stranglehold of bureaucratic, unenlightened and reactionary censorship.
This particular documentary may eventually get past the Censors due to the campaign that we have launched (though the damage has already been done. As the FAB and Films Division will scarcely touch a film which has raised such a public controversy), but as I see it, it will be a long and arduous struggle. You can count me among your comrades and allies in this struggle which is part of the campaign to get the necessary freedom in which artistes can breathe and work and create.
With affectionate regards
K.A. Abbas
