Amongst all the many books on Hindi cinema I’ve read over the years, most have been about actors, or (rather more occasionally) composers, singers, or even lyricists. Biographies, autobiographies, analytical insights into their work. Meena Kumari, Balraj Sahni, Asha Bhonsle, Rajesh Khanna, Ashok Kumar, SD Burman, Majrooh Sultanpuri, Sahir Ludhianvi, Helen, Lata Mangeshkar, Dev Anand, and many others. By contrast with these, I can count on the tips of my fingers the number of books I’ve read about directors. Hrishikesh Mukherjee (by Jai Arjun Singh), Basu Chatterji (by Anirudha Bhattacharjee) and Nasir Hussain (by Akshay Manwani); even an autobiography by Kidar Sharma. But other than that?  Not too many. Or none that I’ve read (though, I will admit, I am yet to read both Nasreen Munni Kabir’s and Sathya Saran’s books on Guru Dutt).

I was keen, therefore, to read Manek Premchand’s ‘Director’s Chair: Hindi Cinema’s Golden Age’ when its publisher, Blue Pencil Publishing, offered to send me a complimentary copy. I am of the firm belief that a director plays a huge role in making a film what it is: yes, everybody plays their part, but how so many disparate elements are brought together, how the sum becomes greater than its parts, is up to the director.

Director’s Chair is a bulky book, close to 600 pages, and I will confess I approached it with some trepidation: I envisioned a long slog. This book, after all, covers hundreds of directors (and no, as Premchand explains in his introduction to the book, that does not by any means include everybody who ever directed a Hindi film: just those who directed even one film that is by some measure noteworthy).

As its subtitle clarifies, this book focuses only on the directors of Hindi cinema’s golden age. Not all Indian cinema (though there are occasional glimpses of exemplary work being done in regional cinema, mostly in the context of directors like Satyajit Ray, SS Vasan, etc, who may have made forays into Hindi cinema but did their best work in a regional language). Not even Hindi cinema in its more-than-a-century of existence; only Hindi cinema from its inception up to 1980 (though in this case too there are passing mentions of films directed after 1980 by directors, such as Govind Nihalani or Muzaffar Ali, who first made a mark for themselves before the cut-off date for the book’s focus period).

After his introduction (in which Premchand also explains something of what a director really does, and is responsible for, plus how that differs from a producer’s job description), Premchand goes on to the first part of the book. This, The Early Masters, covers the starting years of the Hindi film industry and includes people like Dadasaheb Phalke, Ardeshir Irani (the director of India’s first talkie, Alam Ara) to other, equally successful and talented, directors who might have been forgotten by most over time. Chandulal Shah, for instance; or Baburao Painter. There is an interesting anecdote in the context of Baburao Painter which caught my eye: how it is thanks to him that entertainment tax began to be levied on films in India!

The directors enumerated in The Early Masters have been listed in alphabetical order, with (depending upon each director’s importance in the realm of Hindi cinema), something about the films they directed; a brief synopsis (where logical) of a landmark film or two; any pioneering films or innovations; and so on. For most of the directors, there is also some level of personal history involved, and it’s interesting to see what varied backgrounds these men (and a very few women, like Fatima Begum) came from, what careers they abandoned to enter cinema, and how cinema evolved in India.

The second section of the book, The Significant Virtuosos, is the largest section of Director’s Chair, spanning all of post-independence Hindi cinema up to 1980, and taking up more than 400 pages. This is where almost all of the more familiar names, the titans, come in: Bimal Roy, V Shantaram, Vijay Anand, Nasir Husain, Mehboob Khan, Raj Kapoor, Guru Dutt. And hundreds of others, from actors-turned-directors (Sunil Dutt for Yaadein and Reshma aur Shera, for instance) to flash-in-the-pan directors whose works have far outlived their makers.

The last few sections of the book are relatively shorter. There’s The Honourable Others, including people who directed the one-off film, or whose films didn’t make much of an impact. This is followed by Special Notes, which include films made by comedians (and so many of these! It seems pretty much all the comic actors, even those not especially successful, ended up directing films); films based on or inspired by published works; foreign nationals who directed Hindi films; remakes of films; various statistics about Hindi cinema across the decades, and other such trivia.

I enjoyed this book a lot. As I mentioned, it’s a long book, but one aspect of it which really works (besides Manek Premchand’s writing, which is easy reading) is that it’s not monotonous. If Premchand had discussed each director in exactly the same way, if the same format had been followed for all, it might have swiftly become a question of plodding through one biography after another. But that’s not how Director’s Chair is. Instead, what Premchand does is to keep it fluid, keep it varied. There are excerpts from reviews (that acerbic Baburao Patel is in evidence, but so are others). There are anecdotes, there are quotes.

For the big guns, the Mehboob Khans and Guru Dutts and Shantarams of the film world, there are detailed (and often extremely interesting) biographies, with fascinating insights into their lives and their work. There was trivia here that I hadn’t known. For example, that Mehboob Khan had done some pretty daring stunts in the days of the silent films, or that—if things had worked out differently—he might have been the star of India’s first talkie, Alam Ara (1931).

Or that Bimal Roy’s cinema had become very popular in the Soviet Union, or even that Kishore Kumar had been the (so hard to believe, despite Naukri) initial choice for the eponymous Anand of the Hrishikesh Mukherjee film. Or that Hemen Gupta (director of films like Kabuliwala, Ferry and Anand Math) was so ardent a freedom fighter, he even went to jail for his anti-British activities.

There is no set pattern, so a quick list of films, with a birth and death date, may suffice for one director, while pages and pages may be devoted to people like AR Kardar, Raj Kapoor, Vijay Anand and Chetan Anand, etc.

I won’t say that everything is completely flawless. There are a couple of slip-ups. Nargis’s character in Miss India, for instance, is described as a ‘frolicking tomboy’ in one place, a ‘flippant urban tomboy’ in another, both pretty much opposite to what this character really is, despite Jaise ko taisa nehle pe dehla. 1984 has been credited to Aldous Huxley (not George Orwell, its actual author); Shammi Kapoor’s character in Professor has been described as having been employed to tutor the two young women played by Kalpana and Praveen Choudhary (not actually; he is employed to tutor their little brothers; him ending up teaching the women Sanskrit happens as an afterthought).

But yes, there were few (very few) errors and just the occasional repetition: nothing, really, that came in the way of my enjoying this book. I liked it a lot: it was informative, engrossing, entertaining, inspiring. And I liked that Premchand doesn’t go overboard with the praise. He is very level, factual, and generally fairly objective when it comes to discussing these directors. For instance, he gives praise where it is due, and doesn’t hesitate to criticize the same director where that’s in order.

While reading this, I kept having to go online to check if possibly so-and-so film was available for viewing. By the end of it, I had added around five films to my watch-list on YouTube (and had searched for many more, all of which I have had to give up on as being among the ‘lost films’ of India).

Highly recommended. If you are interested in Hindi cinema of the yesteryears, do get this book: it’s not just a very good tribute to the directors who made all those films, but also, in its way, a guide to the cinema of those decades.