The Big Bad Shah

The memoir of Hindi cinema’s enfant terrible brings out in vivid colours the turbulent early years of an exceptional talent

The memoir of Hindi cinema’s enfant terrible brings out in vivid colours the turbulent early years of an exceptional talent

Naseeruddin Shah’s account of his life up to age 32—or 33, since Shah himself is unsure whether he was born in 1949 or 1950, and says this allows him to be whichever age it suits him to be on any particular day— is one of the two best books I have read by, or even about, an Indian actor. The other one is Dev Anand’s ego project Romancing with Life. That might sound like a flippant comparison (and it may even be a little insulting to And Then One Day). After all, could two performers be more different? One was a larger-than-life movie star who spent decades joyfully embracing his own fame and ‘connecting’ with his adoring fans; the other is a non-starry actor who determinedly eschews larger-than-life-ness, prioritises a character’s inner truth and says he turned a corner in his career when he became conscious of his own arrogance. But the memoirs have this in common: you can almost hear each man saying the words as you read them. Anand’s book was florid, often narcissistic, always sanguine about how others viewed him (even as he continued to make embarrassing films in his last years) and founded on a certainty that he had a moral duty to live up to the Image. Shah’s is hard-hitting, caustic, constantly aiming for self-awareness, and often uncertain and self- deprecating in the process: ‘What this book will mean to anyone I have no clue but I had to get it out of my system’.

The elliptical title ‘And Then One Day’, implying a story constantly in progress (the words don’t refer to a single episode in Shah’s life), is apt for a book about someone who expects never to stop learning about himself and his craft. This doesn’t mean Shah is completely averse to narrative creation. Trying to explain his passion for acting, he writes, ‘It does seem like an aberration of behaviour to want to be someone else all the time, and I think it happens to people who, like me, can find no self-worth early in life, and thus find fulfillment in hiding behind make-believe.’ Describing being backstage before a performance, and the opening of the curtain, he says: ‘Suddenly the womb was gone and I was staring into a black void.’ And here is the rationalist mesmerised by a childhood memory of an actor (or was it a clown, or are they the same thing?): ‘I have since steadfastly believed that the only magic that happens in this world happens on the stage.’

Shah has shown himself to be a fine essayist before (as in an anthologised piece he wrote about actors in Bimal Roy’s cinema) and his talent is palpable early in this book, when he describes his first school, St Joseph’s College, as a version of Transylvania—‘Nainital’s rains, gusty winds and frequent mist probably reminded these Irish adventurers of home, but all it needed was rider-less carriages and giant bats flying around at dusk to complete the picture’—and himself as a pre-teen, afflicted by a stammer during a class play. His lifelong love for cinema began here, mainly through regular screenings of American and British movies, but also a dubbed Sivaji Ganesan-starrer he hated; it would be a while before he was properly introduced to Indian films.

In these early chapters, he writes about a conflicted relationship with his father (one that would see a form of closure only years after the latter’s death), a series of academic failures, the raging of hormones in a time ‘before prudery became fashionable’, a first sexual tryst at 15 when he was still ignorant about masturbation (‘I must be one of very few guys who had sex before learning to worship at the altar of Onan’), and the advent of marijuana in his life. Some of these early sections— accounts of property-related bloodshed in his extended family, a failed trip to Bombay where he got to play an extra in two movies—are meandering and repetitive, held together by his wry, unsentimental narration. But by the time he arrives at the National School of Drama (NSD) in the late 1960s—a period that coincides with a rushed wedding to a woman 14 years older than him—and later at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), the narrative has coalesced, and ‘All that David Copperfield kind of crap’ (the first chapter’s title, channeling Salinger) has made way for a portrait of a young man on the cusp of self-realisation.

One gets the impression that Shah is organising scattered memories, articulating them for himself. There is a breathlessness in the writing, long paragraphs with few visual breaks and parenthetical asides (describing a tonga ride in Ajmer, he mentions, apropos of nothing, his envy of the horse’s ability to defecate ‘while running full pelt’). A nerve-wracking physics exam runs as follows: ‘There was a question on the Wimshurst machine (if I’ve got the name right and an astrophysicist I know assures me I haven’t), an object the size and shape of a knife-sharpener’s wheel with what looked like a number of cut-throat razors attached to it in circular fashion. I had spotted the accursed thing in a physics lab and had always left it well alone, as evidently had the rest of the class. What it is used for I still couldn’t tell you but I managed that night to chew the cud and ingested enough information to regurgitate it all on to the paper the next day and scrape through by the skin of my whatsits.’ Anyone who has spoken with Shah will recognise the voice immediately; it is exactly as he might tell the same story at a party, in a tone that manages to be eloquent, casual and sing-song at once.

Shah doesn’t skimp on the admiration when discussing personal heroes like English actor-manager Geoffrey Kendal—who combined humility and purity of purpose with a missionary-like zeal for teaching Shakespeare—or mentors such as director Shyam Benegal and FTII professor Roshan Taneja. But there is also casual irreverence, whether he is disclosing his love for corny old Dara Singh films with titles like Fauladi Mukka or his regard for the eccentric Raaj Kumar; ‘not for his acting which was dreadful, but for the way he safeguarded his interests, prolonged his career and sent all Follywood for a flying fuck to the moon whenever he felt like it’. He is frank, even cutting about people he worked with—from Satyadev Dubey to Peter Brook—but reserves some of the sharpest barbs for himself: admitting his inability to be a father to his first child, Heeba (‘I completely shirked my share of the duties’), realising at FTII that he had become complacent (‘I had grown only in my conceit’) and dismissing his own work in films like Albert Pinto ko Gussa Kyon Aata Hai (‘I had gone all Elvis Presley and James Dean when it was street cred that was required’).

One of the most affecting things in this book—all the more so because Shah himself doesn’t get maudlin about it, though much of it must have been deeply upsetting when it happened—is his account of a friendship with an actor named Rajendra Jaswal. The two were so close at NSD that they were treated as a single person and even referred to as ‘Jaspal/Shah’, but the intensity of the relationship had ugly repercussions, as Jaspal, a talented actor undone by his own insecurities, became pathologically obsessed. Things came to a head with a murderous attack on Naseer at a dhaba, culminating in a surreal scene— more ‘filmi’ than anything in the movies Shah was doing at the time—wherein clueless policemen smacked a wounded Naseer about before taking him to the hospital. So dramatic is this story (in terms of its inherent content, not the telling) that I briefly wondered if Jaspal —about whom an initial online search revealed nothing— was an invented doppelganger, a sort of sly literary device incorporated within an otherwise factual memoir, as a comment on the perils of too much proximity (something Shah himself is wary of as an actor; he has little patience with theories that demand ‘immersion’ in a character). The story is true though, and it’s tempting to compare ‘Jaspal/ Shah’ to the Mozart-Salieri legend, except that this would amount to romanticising a dismal tragedy. Also, Shah has never been anything like the archetype of the genius possessed with God-gifted brilliance. As he repeatedly stresses, passion, hard work and constant curiosity got him where he is, along with a measure of sheer good luck (perhaps things would have been tougher if he hadn’t been a fluent English-speaker, or if his FTII years hadn’t coincided with the beginning of Benegal’s feature film career and the emergence of a new kind of cinema).

Even after becoming a ‘star’ in the parallel film circuit, Shah continued his efforts to find inner truth as an actor, which led to a disillusioning stint with the theatre innovator Jerzy Grotowski in Poland, complete with a bizarre workshop in a forest, pretentious talk about reaching the ‘primal state’ and (there is a neat, circular irony here) a variation on the personality cults he was constantly trying to escape in the big bad world of Bombay cinema. (‘This had the smell of proselytizing and prophet-building.’) And so, poignantly, And Then One Day closes by recounting a series of failures or uncertainties: the disenchantment with Grotowski; the falling through of Shah’s dream of playing Gandhi in Richard Attenborough’s film; an apprehensive reunion with the daughter he hadn’t seen for 12 years, at precisely the point (though this isn’t emphasised) where he is preparing to shoot Masoom, in which his character must take responsibility for a son he has never met before. His relationship with Ratna Pathak, whom he married in 1982, has brought some emotional grounding by this point, but the impression as the narrative ends is that of a man and actor still trying to find his way forward.

For me, the main value of this book is that it provides a fuller, more elaborate view of Shah’s sharp, searching mind than one gets from interviews—and this is particularly important for a subject whose default mode is to be critical, even rude. The short newspaper or TV interview can never do such a person justice, and indeed Shah has sometimes come across as one-dimensionally condescending in such interactions. (The journalistic tradition of condensing quotes as sensational headlines adds to this.) Here, he shows his more measured aspect.

There are many glimpses here of Naseeruddin Shah the curmudgeon (and who would have it any other way?) but there is also a clear sense of where those qualities stem from. During a conversation a few years ago, I inwardly bristled when Shah snapped: “This Auteur Theory, it’s bloody rubbish!” Yet, when you read about the details of his strife- ridden time at the FTII, the struggles of actors who were treated as outcasts by the establishment and not given the respect due to every other element of filmmaking, it becomes easier to understand his anger towards self-important directors. Also, his later experiences in the film industry; being peremptorily called for a meeting by big-money producers, for instance, and informed that he had been selected for a big film, which would naturally mean abandoning, midway, the ‘small and inconsequential’ project he was working on.

Shah is upfront about doing certain films purely for money, but I have always been a little foxed by just how bad he has been in some of his commercial ventures. Take the 1992 Tahalka; in a film packed with dreadful performances trying manfully to outdo each other, his is arguably the worst, less credible even than Aditya Pancholi’s. There may be a part explanation in the book: ‘My attitude to Hindi cinema turned even more condescending, possibly because I couldn’t see myself fitting in […] Being effective in popular movies requires a certain kind of sensibility and an unshakable belief in them, neither of which I possessed.’ It is possible to disagree strongly with some of his opinions—such as his contempt for the personality-driven acting that has been an essential, vitalising part of movie history for over a hundred years, and his scoffing at critics who read meaning into Sholay and ‘other equally shallow films’ (as if serious analysis must be reserved only for the works of Ray or Fellini) while at the same time appreciating that someone of his stature, someone hard to ignore, is willing to be an enfant terrible in an industry intent on self-congratulation, political correctness and celebrity adoration.

More than once, he expresses doubt about the wider appeal of this book, implying it is a selfish exercise, ‘an exorcism’, something his children might read ‘if they wish to understand me better’. Which could be a euphemistic way of saying that he gives a flying eff whether or not you, dear reader, find any of it useful. But his candour, and the sharpness of thought and expression that accompanies it, are what make this memoir so readable. Don’t trust the crabby old man trying to short-sell his authorial gifts—trust the tale instead.

(Jai Arjun Singh is the author of Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro: Seriously Funny Since 1983)

And then One Day: A MemoircinemaNaseeruddin Shah