“Comedy and cruelty often go hand in hand,” said Kundan Shah (born on October 19, 1947) to journalist and writer Jai Arjun Singh. At the time, the latter was working on his book Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron: Seriously Funny Since 1983 about the the director and filmmaker’s journey to make one of the funniest films in the history of Indian films.
Expectedly, Shah followed the life of a good Gujarati boy from a baniya family. He took up Commerce in college and even secured a stable nine to five job. But at 25, Shah found himself despite little knowledge of films, the second eldest student of ten (chosen from 130 candidates) at the FTII’s direction course.
The Road To Comedy: The Alchemy Of Humour
...Interestingly, many people who know Kundan insist that he isn’t an inherently funny person. ‘He has no sense of humour!’ says Satish Shah. ‘He doesn’t believe in jokes or in wit — he’s just a passionate film-maker, like a horse with blinkers on.’ Kundan himself admits as much today. ‘I’m not too interested in humour for its own sake, though, of course, I respect those with the talent to make others laugh — that’s an art in itself. But personally I use it as a medium, a vessel.’ He has lately discovered videos featuring the work of stand-up comedians George Carlin and Bill Hicks on YouTube, and enjoys the way they use comedy for political and social commentary. The first drafts of his own scripts tend to contain a lot of ideology, as well as explicit references to serious literature.
But what emerged out of his efforts in his final year at FTII was a manic twenty-three-minute short that knocked a large hole into the image of the typical diploma film—earnest, self-conscious, over-concerned with ‘social relevance’ — and made many people sit up and take notice.
BONGA!
How does one summarize Bonga ? Part of the film’s charm is that it resists explanation. The story, such as it is, involves five people attempting a bank robbery (and sporadically high-fiving each other and yelling ‘ Bonga !’, the only word spoken in the film); but what’s really important is its rhythm and exuberance, and its almost effortless flow. It’s a tribute to silent-era comedies as well as the American gangster film, with a nod to some of Godard’s early movies. (Kundan was very taken by the charming little dance scene in a café in Bande à part — a scene that, incidentally, also inspired the dance between Uma Thurman and John Travolta in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction .)
B. Chandavarkar, who taught at the institute, wrote a lovely, whimsical music score for Bonga . His reworking and remixing of old Chaplin tunes perfectly complement the performances of pantomime and physical comedy by a cast that includes a clean-shaven and relatively lithe Satish Shah, and an almost-slim Rakesh Bedi (nearly a decade before they acted together in the universally loved TV comedy Yeh Jo Hai Zindagi , also directed by Kundan). There is a tiny role for the young Suresh Oberoi and a blink-and-miss appearance by Om Puri. All these actors were enrolled in the FTII’s acting course at the time. Oberoi, playing a bank teller, improvised a funny little action where he starts tapping his fingers against his desk while counting out currency notes — a reflexive response to another character drumming on a nearby table. Other contributions by the cast showed Kundan how vital actors were to comedy, though he also learnt that you had to be careful not to let them get carried away!
The use of slapstick and absurdity to heighten the impact of a situation; goofiness interspersed with moments of emotional truth; scenes that play like a visual representation of the most inspired nonsense verse . . . it’s all there in this little movie, and it all points to something bigger that was to come years later. Like many other FTII diploma films, Bonga was a collaborative effort by young students who loved movies and who had fun pushing the limits of their creativity—bouncing ideas off each other, improvising and multitasking. Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro would hinge on similar camaraderie.
Saeed Mirza and Naseeruddin Shah were among the many FTII students who were taken aback by Bonga . ‘It was a revelation,’ says Mirza. ‘Kundan always looked so serious, and the film was completely at odds with his persona: you’d look at him and think, “Ah, he’ll make a certain type of film,” but what emerged was very different.’ Naseer remembers being ‘intensely curious about what it would be like if this man were to make a serious film’.
Bonga was a culmination of sorts for Kundan, though the film has remained little seen over the decades and has only recently been made available on DVD (in a poorly preserved print). It’s clearly a movie made by someone with an understanding of film grammar as well as the boldness to pull off something that might have been dismissed as being too flippant for a diploma film. But if it was a triumphant end to Kundan’s stint at FTII, it was also the beginning of a new period of struggle. Two years later, the man who made Bonga was working as a typist on weekdays and in a bakery on weekends, trying to pay off his debts. His brush with cinema seemed a thing of the past…
Don’t Make Ice, Make Snow
…It was a nervous time for Kundan. As the prospect of directing his first feature film—from a script he had written himself — drew nearer, self-doubt began to creep in. Writing a madcap comedy is one thing, but it’s another thing to be present while other creative artists are scrutinizing it, even speculating about how it will be received by a large audience…
…So he decided to play a confidence trick by going to Akhtar Mirza, Saeed Mirza’s father, who was on the NFDC committee at the time. ‘I knew Akhtar saab quite well through Saeed, so I thought the easy thing to do would be to go to him and casually tell him: “We’ve changed the script slightly to make it better”. That way, I would at least have it on record that I’ve conveyed this to someone in the NFDC.’ The senior Mirza listened to Kundan for half an hour without saying a word. At the end of it, he spoke two lines, lines that resonate with Kundan to this day: ‘Your script is like snow, so it’s floating. If you put all this logic into it, it will become ice and sink.’
…‘I went back to my original script and threw out the artificially implanted logic,’ says Kundan. There was to be no going back—not even when Naseeruddin Shah, the biggest star in his film, repeatedly conveyed his dissatisfaction with certain scenes.
The extract has been taken from Singh’s book, Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron: Seriously Funny Since 1983 , courtesy the author, Jai Arjun Singh and Harper Collins India.
