In 1980, there was a car mechanic called Albert Pinto. He was angry at the evil industrialists. Saeed Mirza, who made the film Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyon Ata Hai, explained to a generation of Indians that anger is a virtue. Today, Mirza is loudly wondering why Indians are not angry enough.
His new book, I Know the Psychology of Rats, is, however, not about anger. It’s about friendship. It’s a deeply felt ode to his beloved friend and filmmaker Kundan Shah, who gave us the evergreen cinematic gem Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron in 1983. A quirky, maverick filmmaker, Shah used ‘humour, the absurd and the grotesque” to unravel the times, Mirza writes in the book. “He was also a man who started out thinking all Marxists were a..holes and ended up being more Marxist than Karl Marx.”
He also made the runaway TV hit Nukkad (1986) and the Shah Rukh Khan starrer Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa (1994).
Kundan Shah died in October 2017.
“Why am I writing this book? Is it because I feel it is necessary and my time is running out? Perhaps that is true. It is becoming more and more difficult to remember the conversations, camaraderie, intellectual debates and dialectical upheavals with a friend…I don’t know, but I have to get this off my chest. I have to present this wonderful, crazy, vulnerable friend of mine to the world because he deserves it,” Mirza read from the book.
The hall at Delhi’s India International Centre was packed, and some sat on the floor. Sudhir Mishra, M.K. Raina, Saeed Naqvi, Swara Bhaskar, Danish Husain and senior editors heard every word, and so did Manoj Kumar Jha, Dev Benegal, Romila Thapar, Sohail Hashmi and Prabhat Patnaik. The organisers had to even keep the garden-facing gate open to accommodate latecomers, some of whom stood in the cold to listen to Mirza. It was mostly an audience of fawning fans and like-minded intellectuals. Except one. A furious young man who implied that Mirza was a fake communist and had defiled his politics by joining Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra. A collective gasp followed.
“I am not a Congressman. I am too irreverent to belong to any party. But I liked the idea behind the yatra,” Mirza told the man while assuring him he had the right to be angry.
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A meandering memoir
The evening began with a scene from Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron, in which Naseeruddin Shah and Satish Kaushik agreed on the password ‘Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyon Aata Hai’.
That was Shah’s hat tip to Mirza’s film. The two films were just three years apart. India’s anger had descended to despair and absurdity in that time.
The book is a memory. It is not linear. And like memory, it meanders through film school experiences, watching Battle of Algiers (1966) on campus during the Emergency, conversations about filmmaking, democracy, riots, budgets, scripts, pandering to the audience and the plastic globe that Charlie Chaplin kicks in The Great Dictator (1940). And that unfinished conversation about Donald Trump and Narendra Modi still haunts the author. Mirza calls the book a ‘literary installation’. It is richly illustrated by Nachiket Patwardhan, and the rat is a sort of sutradhar or narrator. But why rats? Because it turns out that Kundan Shah knew a thing or two about rats.
“The book talks about what is freedom, whose freedom, what’s the relationship between the artist and the citizen,” said Githa Hariharan, the moderator at the event. “The heart of it all is this friendship between Saeed Mirza and Kundan Shah. And this friendship is the signpost of all things political.”
The two geniuses didn’t bond instantly, there was even annoyance at first.
Kundan Shah was a nerd at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII). He was constantly taking notes—in classrooms and even inside dark cinema halls. Mirza found this irritating.
“I was noting down entries and exits. Camera angles and continuity jerks,” Shah explained later.
“What?!”
He once even asked Ritwik Ghatak how one becomes a good director.
Ghatak’s answer was simple but sublime. “A good director retains his childhood in one pocket, and a bottle of alcohol in the other.”
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Shah couldn’t bear injustice
Saeed Mirza’s last film was Naseem (1995), set in the backdrop of the Babri Masjid demolition in 1992. The poetry was over, never to return, he said.
Shah had gone from being apolitical to seeing politics everywhere by then. He even apologised to Mirza for the 2002 Gujarat riots. What did he have to do with it? Mirza asked.
“I am a Gujarati and a Hindu, aren’t I? Someone has to take the responsibility.”
Two decades later, Mirza doesn’t understand why Indians are not speaking up against injustice.
“What is the fear? I cannot understand. There is a conspiracy of silence all around. What is the reason? Unless there are skeletons in your closet, you should be speaking.”
Former newspaper editor Bharat Bhushan responded by asking: “Is politics only for the pure, perfect and the moral then?”
Mirza tweaked his position and said those who have skeletons should also speak and say, “despite the skeletons, I am speaking.”
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A class-defying friendship
Saeed Mirza and Kundan Shah were “poles apart”.
Mirza came from an urban background, elite school and college, while Shah came from “the other side of the tracks”, the son of a trader from Yemen. He had to study harder than others in college to get the scholarship to pay his fees for the next semester. The two debated art, painting, cinema, revolution, Marx, literature, and architecture. And Shah always felt like he was an outsider who had to catch up, recalled Mirza. Shah made him realise that most of the voluble, visible Leftists at FTII were English-speaking, privileged elites who discussed ideas that did not come from their lived experiences.
“Don’t contaminate us, we are free,” Shah would say, accusing Mirza and his comrade friends of seeing politics in everything.
And then Shah made his 20-minute diploma project film about bank robbers. The entire auditorium was spellbound and applauded and whistled, said Mirza. “It was a masterpiece of controlled anarchy.”
After graduating from FTII, Mirza went to Mumbai. He heard that Shah had become a trader in England. “What a waste, what a waste,” I had said.
But eventually, Kundan Shah returned to cinema.
“He couldn’t become a trader,” Mirza chuckled. “He had tasted poetry.”
Rama Lakshmi is the Opinion and Features Editor at ThePrint. She tweets @RamaNewDelhi. Views are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)