Deven Varma looked frail as he came slowly down the stairs, and I worried my arrival was an intrusion. I was visiting the actor in his Pune home early this year, and given his poor health — as well as all those stories about famous comedians being reticent in real life — it seemed too much to expect him to be cheery.
Within a few minutes though, the old spark was visible, and as he reminisced about his film career, images came flooding back. The pleasant-looking youngster who settled into second-lead parts in the 1960s. The comic talent that made him one of Hindi cinema’s finest and most atypical funny men in the 1970s and 1980s, most memorably in the works of Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Basu Chatterjee and Gulzar — films in which he provided a counterpoint to the loud, over-the-top humour in the industry.
Here is an emblematic image of Mr. Varma: he stands near the edge of the frame, one hand raised, mouth half-open as if he has forgotten what he was going to say at the exact moment his lips parted. He seems worried that he may be interrupting something important. He is not the “cool” guy in the picture — he is the sidekick, or the jovial brother-in-law. But when at last he speaks, what he says is so outrageous you feel you have been plucked out of the universe of this sweet middle-class film and deposited on the border of Groucho Marx land — if you can imagine a roly-poly Groucho with an earnest look on his face, saying subversive things as if accidentally. Ghisi-hui, purani, bekaar si cheezen — jaise tumhare pitaji (“Old, faded, useless things — like your father”), he says in Kissi se na Kehna , explaining the meaning of “antique” to a girlfriend. In Bemisaal , he congratulates a doctor who has opened a new clinic with Bhagwaan se praarthana karta hoon ke shahar mein beemaari phaile aur aapka nursing home safal ho (“I pray to God that illness spreads in the city and your nursing home is very successful”). But it is not enough to put these lines down on paper, as they can seem trite: you have to watch him say them in such an effortlessly genial tone. As the actor-director Raakesh Roshan once observed, “When Deven says something, it automatically becomes funny. But when one of us says exactly the same thing, no one laughs.”
Mr. Varma came from a Marathi theatre tradition built on wordplay and deadpan expressions rather than physical comedy, and he told me this chimed well with the sensibilities of directors like Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Mr. Chatterjee. “The quality of comedy in a film depends on a director’s tastes. I can never imagine them saying ‘Sit on a donkey in your underwear, or fall into a cake.’ And I too was very clear about the things I wouldn’t do in the name of comedy.”
As he discussed his own directorial ventures and run-ins with money-minded distributors who wanted “punch and sex,” it was clear that his humour was intact. Talking about his 1978 film Besharam , he said, “Oh, that was a big failure,” but then added, sotto voce , “Still, it probably did better than this new Ranbir Kapoor Besharam .” And then he widened his eyes and pursed his lips ever so slightly, in that trademark style that made him the perfect jester in so many fine films.
