-Brian Mendonça
Deewar
(Walls) was released in 1975 when I was 10.
The blockbuster Hindi movie with sterling performances by Amitabh
Bachchan, Sashi Kapoor and Nirupa Roy set a benchmark for Hindi film of the
70’s. It gave rise to the idea of the hero and his journey. It made that
journey more vivid to the ordinary citizen of the India of that time.
Here, recreated on celluloid were the sights and
sounds of my childhood. Sights and sounds you no longer hear now. The beautiful
scenes of the train pulling out of the station are a metaphor of life itself.
‘We have our entrances and our exits and one man in his life plays many parts,’
wrote Shakespeare.
The father of Ravi and Vijay is a leader of the
coal workers and is blackmailed into short-changing their demands. As a result
he is ostracized by the village. Like in Nirmonn
(and Ulysses) he leaves home and
wanders around in trains, broken and defeated. His last scene is in the 3rd
class compartment of a train. The sweeper comes to him and says, ‘Yeh toh aakhri stop heh.’ [This is the
last stop.] Indeed it is the last stop of his life as well.
So the children are brought up by their mother.
She works as a construction labourer to make ends meet. Later on when the elder
brother Vijay is flush with money from his illegal activities, he purchases the
entire skyscraper and decides to gift it to his mother. He does this as a token
of his love. It is also a symbol of the pelf and privilege he now enjoys in the
Mumbai underworld.
As the children grow up – Mein pheke hue paise nahi uthaata. [I don’t pick up money that is
thrown at me.] – they grow apart. This deewar
changes the matrix between the brothers. One becomes the hunter, the other the
hunted.
It is the single mother who struggles to hold them
together. Increasingly the temple becomes the leitmotif in the film where
all the crises unfold. With Shiva’s statue as witness the lives of these three
– and the conflict between them --plays out.
In a twist of fate one brother becomes a smuggler
and the other a police officer. The screenplay is so tight that it is difficult
to delete any scene thought the film is almost three hours.
It was only last week that I realized that the
entire film is a flashback. The younger brother Ravi is being conferred a
gallantry award for apprehending (and shooting) a criminal wanted by the state.
It is incidental that this criminal, this human being, is Vijay his brother.
In a moment of self-doubt Ravi reaches back to the
episode in the Bhagavad Gita where
Arjuna asks Krishna for advice on the battlefield of Kurukshetra. Kinship does
not matter, ethics does, is Krishna’s sage advice. But Sashi Kapoor’s heart
reneges and he keeps repeating, ‘Mein
Arjun nahi hoon.’ [I am not Arjun]. The rest is film history.
-------------------------------------------------------------------Published in Gomantak Times Weekender, Panaji, Goa on Sunday, 17 November 2019. Pix Still from Deewar featuring Amitabh Bachchan and Sashi Kapoor. Courtesy movies.ndtv.com
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