A dead Satish Shah who goes places in a coffin and plays Draupadi, an unscrupulous builder who strikes deals aboard a moving crane, photographers who accidentally capture a murder on roll — the madness of Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron is what veteran Kundan Shah will be best remembered for.
Till his last day as a 69-year-old (he would have turned 70 on October 19), he never lost the spunk that made trenchant satire a matter of belly-clutching laughter and simultaneously a savage, anti-establishment hitback.
Beneath the laughter, Shah’s epic managed to strike a chord — for a reason. It still does. The systemic flaws in India haven’t changed much and Shah saw it from the cartoonist’s viewpoint, much like laxman’s Everyman whom he admired. In an age of loud stand-up acts and below-the-belt-humour, his was still a clean comedy that chewed and aerated at the same time. Moreover, the film was not arthouse but structured within a racy mainstream format that was rather rigid at the time. When the movie was screened 30 years after its release in 2012, the theatre erupted in laughter in anticipation of the scene that was to follow. Nobody minded as there was no suspense that was to be revealed. People had watched reruns on YouTube but were there to see it yet again. It even became a ComicCon favourite.
The dark satire on the rampant corruption in Indian politics, bureaucracy, news media and business was made possible because of the manner it was tackled. And if one wants to put it in context, one needs to remember that during the 1980s, Indian cinema was busy in making melodramas with their versions of suffering mothers and their angry young sons. A satire simply didn’t feature in the list.
The comical characters who were almost caricaturish in visage and behaviour could make a statement without rubbing people the wrong way. With them, Shah dared to go where not many directors could have even hoped to tread. While it made the audience laugh, at a deeper level it sharpened their gaze on the corruption around. Woke them up in a sense, decades before social media could generate a Mexican wave of opinions.
The scene where a very dead Municipal Commissioner D’ Mello (played by Satish Shah on screen) is playing Draupadi on stage could have in the hands of another director raised hackles and got the culture police going. But when something like that became the most iconic scene from the movie, one realises the brilliance of Shah.
The protagonists of Shah’s comic caper, Sudhir Mishra and Vinod Chopra (who were incidentally the names of his assistants who went on to be successful directors in their own right) were played by the immensely talented Naseeruddin Shah and Ravi Basvani. Bhakti Barve, Neena Gupta, Pankaj Kapur, Satish Kaushik, Om Puri were the other actors who went on to shine ever so brightly as individuals and as an ensemble.
The film did not become a box office success but Shah received his first and only National Award for it, one which he returned during the student protest in his alma mater FTII in 2015.
Though he could not replicate the perfection of Jaane..., he never stopped thinking out of the box. He revolutionised television content in 1986 with the popular series Nukkad, a narrative around lowly riff-raffs in a chawl, who never lost their humanity, though forced by circumstance.
In 1988, he directed the sitcom, Wagle Ki Duniya, based on RK laxman’s character, the common man. The underbelly struggles came through brilliantly in Circus, which ingrained the talent of one Mr Shah Rukh Khan in every home, post his Fauji success. So when the director made his Bollywood comeback in 1993 with Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa, he could only think of Shah Rukh to play the naughty, bewildered, devious hero who innately had a heart of gold. We fell in love with his impish vulnerability.
His next film was Kya Kehna (2000). Starring Preity Zinta, Saif Ali Khan and Chandrachur Singh, the movie became a surprise hit as it talked about pre-marital sex in the mainstream format. Though Shah made several films after that, commercial success eluded him. But he lived on, as he will, in the fluidity and verve of independent cinema of all time. Though, as SRK tweeted, “this world will laugh less now. RIP.”
In the end, Shah could not be defined with “isms” but the people he impacted. As director Sudhir Mishra, who assisted him, said, “Kundan, my teacher, friend, once my partner and always a inspiration. Was wise, crazy, academic, imaginative and mourned the impossibility of true love.” Finally, the tribute to a mentor: “Kundan touched me as a 22-year old kid, held my hand and guided through the terrible, scary journey of finding oneself.”