Indian Film Culture - 16.cdr - federation of film societies of india

The resistance to Nehruvian technology and the
threat to abolish old agrarian ways was also
expressed very openly in B.R. Chopra's Naya
Daur in 1957. While electric machinery and
automobiles threatened to retire the plough and
the bullock cart permanently from the Indian
landscape, a race between a petrol-driven bus
and a horse-drawn carriage was waged to prove
the merits and demerits of both, traditional and
the newly manufactured machine, technology.
In the final analysis, humanism prevailed, with
the farmers learning how to manage the new
forces and instruments of industrialization that
would multiply their harvests and add a different
kind of verdure and plenty to their primitive
serene fields.
1958, Hindi films began with a revival of the
carnivalesque spirit that Guru Dutt had
inaugurated in 1954/1955. This time the filmmaker
was Satyen Bose, and the film was Chalti
Ka Naam Gaadi. It introduced, perhaps for the
only time, Hindi film's one very valiant attempt
at rivaling the anarchic antics of Hollywood's
very famous trio: the Marx Brothers. Bose
presented us with India's own version of
Groucho, Chico, and Harpo in the familiar
trinity of the Bengali Ganguly brothers. The
eldest, portrayed by Ashok Kumar, was good at
two things. He ran a garage with his two
brothers, and when not tinkering with cars,
loved to box and was a confirmed misogynist.
He came through as a curious combination of
Groucho, especially in all his nasty asides about
the world, and possessed the haughty demeanor
of the stoical Margaret Dumont. The middle
brother, portrayed by Anoop Kumar, was the
dumb one and the constant bumbler. He took on
the Harpo mantle and had to have his acts of
anarchy actually explained to him by his
brothers since he was constantly complaining
"Manoo, aab mere Kya hoga" or "Manoo, what
will happen to me?" It was the youngest
brother, played by Kishore Kumar, who with his
combination of Chico's chicanery and
Groucho's irreverence really unleashed the
Marxian iconoclasm directed against the
respectable likes of Raja Hardayal and his son
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Kumar Pradeep. Aiding them in their
deliciously riotous enterprise was a voluptuous
heroine played by Madhubala, and a 1928
Chevrolet jalopy. While the former had to bear
the slings and arrows of the two elder brothers
plus the cupid darts of the youngest one who had
fallen madly in love with her, the later
functioned with all the oiled panache borrowed
gleefully from Hollywood's Mack Sennet
silent-film tradition of comedy, speeding up and
slowing down the zany action from Bombay's
Nariman Point to its Bandra suburban garage.
Even the superbly composed and rendered
musical numbers by S.D. Burman showed a
skillful and clever adaptation of popular western
songs. Burman's sexy "Ek laadhki bheegi
bhaagi see" or "a lady, wet and running in the
rain" was based on Tennessee Ernie Ford's hittopper
"Sixteen Tons," but in the context of the
film was orchestrated brilliantly by musical
sounds all created from common garage
implements and tools, some weighing less and
some weighing more than sixteen tons!
On April 18, 1955, President Sokarno of
Indonesia inaugurated the first Non-Alignment
Conference at Bandung. Twenty-nine countries
attended it. But the man who had brought them
here was none other than Nehru. He presented
to the world a new kind of nationalism forged as
a self-sufficient ideology that would not tolerate
any kind of colonialism and would insist always
on equality, mutual benefit, and peaceful coexistence.
June 2012
Phir Subah Hogi
Indian Film Culture