Sometimes death makes us revisit what seems like closed chapters. The demise of Jagdeep last week made one wonder what if the actor tweaked the iconic dialogue from Sholay that immortalised and pigeonholed him, and asked the world, ‘ Mera Naam Jagdeep Aise Hi Nai Hai ’. Why is it that Syed Ishtiaq Ahmed Jaffrey had to adopt a Hindu name for the screen? Of course, he was not alone, the list is long, starting right from the thespian Dilip Kumar. For a generation born during the era of the three Khans, they might just seem like interesting curios for a quiz session but if you dig deep, it reflects a social divide that didn’t spare even the creative spaces, after Partition.
In hindsight, we could say the directors who renamed them or the actors who rechristened themselves faulted on the side of caution by doubting the secular credentials of the Indian audience, but you never know.
But why was it that Badaruddin Jamaluddin Kazi had to be renamed Johnny Walker. Didn’t it typecast him as a comedian, who would perform a drunkard with consummate ease, for life?
Interestingly, if heroes were renamed, they were given a generic surname like Kumudial Ganguly became Ashok Kumar, Harikrishna Goswami became Manoj Kumar or in some cases, the surname was dropped altogether like in the case of Jeetendra (Ravi Kapoor) and Dharmendra (Dharam Singh Deol). It was done, perhaps, to rise above the caste or regional barriers.
Some simply wanted to correct the mistakes of their parents. How the youth would have connected to Dev Anand if he were called Dharamdev Pishorimal Anand? As Harihar Jethalal Jariwala, Sanjeev Kumar would have lost some of his versatility!
Comedians hardly ever got the luxury of flaunting a surname. From Gope (Gope Vishasdas Kamlani) and Agha (Aghajan Baig) to Mehmood (Mehmood Ali), the audience always knew comic actors on a first-name basis. Same for the heroines.
Raaj Kumar and Meena Kumari in Kamaal Amrohi's ‘Pakeezah’
From Nargis and Madhubala to Nutan and Nanda, they hardly had the luxury to carry their true or complete identity in film credits. However, there was one actress who didn’t compromise on her name. One of the conditions that Waheeda Rehman put before Guru Dutt before signing CID was that she would not change her name for something that sounded sensuous.
That insiders were allowed to retain the family surname even in the 1950s and 1960s reflect that nepotism existed in some form even in the Golden Era. The Kapoor clan is an easy example to cite but the fact that Joy Mukherjee could carry his surname, something his uncle Ashok Kumar could not, tells us the power of influence.
Love for Urdu
Coming back to Jagdeep, the actor got his first dialogue because he knew Urdu. Picked up from a street in Bombay to be part of a crowd of children in B.R. Chopra’s Afsar , Jagdeep was promised three rupees. When the child actor on stage could not deliver his lines in Urdu, assistant director Yash Chopra started looking for an alternative. Jagdeep famously asked the child sitting next to him, how much would he get if he could justify the lines. “Six rupees,” pat came the answer. Rest, as they say, is history.
Those were the days when Urdu didn’t belong to a religion. In fact, Hindi cinema played an important role in keeping Urdu ticking in the heart of India without any credit in the Censor certificate.
Recently, one came across a Facebook post that said how would Amitabh Bachchan’s famous dialogue, ‘Don Ko Pakadna Mushkil Hi Nahin, Namumkin hai’ would have sounded in Hindi: ‘Don Ko Pakadna Kathin Hi Nahin, Asambhav Hai’. As Javed Akhtar often says as long as we understand it, we think it is Hindi but the moment a difficult/Persian origin word comes, we shout, it is Urdu!
But one doesn’t completely agree with him for one belongs to a generation which left no leaf unturned to understand the meaning of Gulzar’s ‘zihal-e-miskeen mukon-ba ranjish, bahaal-e-hijra bechara dil hai’ ( Ghulami, 1985 ), set to the music by Laxmikant Pyarelal. Go figure!
