More than three decades since its release in 1983, Kundan Shah's Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro is a shining example of the fact that classics cannot be planned; they just happen from nowhere
Growing up in the late 1980s, one had very few things to cherish in the world where money was a bad word and consumerism an absolute pariah. Such was the hold of these povertarian/ socialist thoughts that it took us more than a year to convince our parents to get a television set at home. “TV would spoil us,” was the common refrain. We promised that we would watch the UGC programmes daily, then aired for an hour during the noon. We, however, couldn’t keep our word. It’s not that we didn’t want to, but the telecast would invariably bore us to sleep! Today, when I look back, I wonder what was there to spoil us — Chitrahaar, Hum log, Wagle ki Duniya, Buniyaad, Ramayan, MahabharatIJ And, yes, there was Kundan Shah’s film, Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, which would be telecast almost invariably — just the way we encounter Singham and Housefull 2 nowadays. We grew up with the 1983 flick, but interestingly the meaning of the film too evolved with the passage of time.
Take, for instance, the immensely popular ‘thoda khao, thoda phenko’ scene, where Commissioner DeMello, played by Satish Shah, throws away bits of an expensive cake he is eating. As a kid, it was interesting because that’s what food would mean to me, much to the fury of my mother — thoda khao, thoda phenko (eat a bit, throw a bit). As I grew up and supposedly became mature, I thought the scene was an indictment of consumerist culture, and not just an absurd David Dhawan-isque humour. likewise, as an adolescent, I was quite fascinated by the blow-up scene where the protagonists Vinod and Sudhir — played by Naseeruddin Shah and Ravi Baswani respectively — minutely examine and enlarge a film negative that shows DeMello’s murder being committed by the builder Tarneja (Pankaj Kapur) just because he passes the tenders of his competitor, the perpetually drunk Ahuja (Om Puri), for bigger bucks. The scene took me to my own flight of fancy wherein I would put myself in place of the two protagonists and revel in the adventure at the ‘Antonioni Park’. But why AntonioniIJ I could hardly pronounce the name then. Much later did I realise that the scene was inspired by Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film, Blow Up. Thinking that he would eventually be charged with plagiarism, Kundan Shah included the ‘Antonioni Park’ signboard in the very next sequence, when Vinod and Sudhir go to the park at night!
Today, more than three decades after it was first released, Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro has attained a cult status. Jai Arjun Singh writes in his book, Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro: Seriously Funny Since 1983, what an enthusiastic movie watcher tells Kundan Shah: “You know, people watch the Mahabharata scene and they laugh their head off; but the sad thing is that they don’t get the real meaning behind it... metaphor... symbolic... irony... poetry of the underdog.” The filmmaker is astonished. He later tells Jai Arjun, laughing: “I didn’t say anything to that person... If somebody is telling me there’s a meaning, how can I tell there isn’tIJ” Kundan Shah, however, confesses that his aim was simply to make audiences laugh.
Not just was the profundity of Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro fortuitous, even its classic status was accidental. like the ever-eternal Sholay, it could just be made because it was destined to be made; no one had any preconceived notion of how it would ultimately turn out to be. In the original script of Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, for instance, there was no Mahabharata scene. Instead, there would be a short chase in a video-game parlour, followed by a conventional confrontation on the 22nd floor of a skyscraper! Today, it’s the Mahabharata climax that is the high-point of the film. People just can’t stop laughing when Duryodhana’s character is made to stand for the sanctity of Draupadi, as he says: “Nahi, Draupadi jaisi Sati nari ko dekhkar maine cheer haran ka idea drop kar diya hai. Jai ho aisi Sati nari ki, jai ho (I drop the idea of disrobing Draupadi, keeping in mind her purity).” The Pandavas, led by Yudhisthira, on the other hand, want the Kauravas to go ahead as per the script, as they say: “Draupadi tere akele ki nahi hai. Hum sab shareholder hain (Draupadi is not anyone’s personal property; everybody is a shareholder).” In between one gets the masterstroke from the blind Dhritarashtra: “Yeh sab kya ho raha haiIJ (What’s happeningIJ)”
Interestingly, during the scripting phase, there was another thing which had excited Kundan Shah beyond words — a talking gorilla. The original script had Vinod and Sudhir going to a cement godown to take photographs of Tarneja’s black-marketing operations; there, they encounter a gorilla which has just escaped from the circus. Terrified, they try to placate it by offering cigarettes and biscuits, but then it turns out that the gorilla can talk. While describing his encounters during the day with different people, the gorilla fails to understand why only a few people live luxuriously while the majority are wretched and poor. Disappointed with the world, it decides to return to the circus. Kundan Shah, in fact, was so excited about this part of the script that he himself wanted to play the gorilla’s role. Thankfully, Raj Kumar Kohli, who had made an utterly awful film Jaani Dushman (1979) in which a werewolf-like creature was shown to be abducting young brides from a village, refused to give his loud ‘gorilla’ costume to Kundan, and the idea was shelved.
There was, however, one character which I believe would have enriched the film — the Disco Killer. According to the original script, Tarneja hires the city’s biggest contract killer to eliminate Vinod and Sudhir. Interestingly, the killer’s eyesight is so bad that he sees four people instead of one when he doesn’t have his glasses on, and two people instead of one when he is wearing them! Reading the Disco Killer scenes, almost everyone envied Anupam Kher for being chosen to debut with the role. Eventually, the scene was deleted to reduce the film to 2 hours 24 minutes (NDFC films that were under the 2 hours 25 minutes in length had a different tax slab), and Kher went from being one of the most envied members of the cast to the most unfortunate.
More than three decades since its release, Kundan Shah’s magnum opus remains as relevant to the contemporary Indian landscape as it was in the 1980s. Corruption persists, so is the common man still taken for a ride. Also, it’s an apt manifestation of how classics cannot be made through planning; they just turn out from nowhere. Sholay saw it happen when Danny Denzongpa refused it for a run-of-the-mill Dharmatma, forcing Ramesh Sippy to sign Amjad Khan. Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, on its part, was all about accidents — happy accidents.