Tag Archives: Majrooh Sultanpuri

Aar-Paar (1954)

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I saw this on the big screen, on August 10, 2025.

Given that getting to see a Hindi film as old as this on the big screen, as a proper commercial release (re-release, in this case), is a very rare treat, it needs to be put up front.

To mark the birth centenary of Guru Dutt, the National Films Division Corporation of India (NFDC) and the National Film Archive of India (NFAI) collaborated to restore and re-release several of Guru Dutt’s films. These were shown at PVR and Cinépolis cinema halls across India on August 8th through to 10th. Left to myself, I would happily have seen all the films that were being screened; but duty calls. August 9th was rakshabandhan, and we had family coming over for lunch. I was busy all through the previous day cleaning and cooking and generally preparing, and then again through half of the next day. But, once our guests had eaten, I scurried off cinema-wards to watch Sahib Biwi aur Ghulam. The following day, I managed to watch Aar-Paar.

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Baaz (1953)

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Today, July 9, 2025, marks the 100th birth anniversary of one of Hindi cinema’s best-known film directors. Born in Mysore on this day in 1925 as Vasant Kumar Shivshankar Padukone, Guru Dutt studied in Calcutta before joining Uday Shankar’s India Culture Centre (in Almora, present-day Uttarakhand) to train in dance. By the time he turned 19, he had moved to Pune, where he began working as a choreographer for Prabhat Studios. By the time Prabhat Studios folded up (in the early 1950s), Guru Dutt had formed a close friendship with Dev Anand, because of whom he received his first break as a director: in 1951, he directed Navketan’s Baazi, starring Dev Anand, Geeta Bali and Kalpana Karthik in a noir thriller that was to become a defining film for Navketan: edgy, stylish, dark, very urban.

Guru Dutt is today revered more for the hard-hitting, cynical cinema he made: films like Pyaasa, Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam and Kaagaz ke Phool hold up the mirror to a world that is selfish, cruel and opportunistic. These are bitter films, films that plumb the depths of human nature; films that—despite following most of the standard tropes of commercial Hindi cinema (a romance between the lead couple; a fair number of songs; a comic character invariably played by Johnny Walker)—were quite different from other Hindi films.

These, too, are the films for which Guru Dutt is mostly remembered today. Is that because over the decades, people have seen how the tragedy and turmoil of Guru Dutt’s personal life was probably reflected in films like these? Is there a voyeuristic tendency to try and spot the man behind the director?

But Guru Dutt also made other films, on other subjects. This one, for instance, an adventure/patriotic film set on the high seas, with Geeta Bali starring as the eponymous ‘Baaz’ (falcon), a woman who becomes a pirate to free her land of a colonial tyrant.

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Kaala Paani (1958)

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Today is the 100th birth anniversary of one of my favourite Hindi film directors, the suspense-specialist Raj Khosla (I hasten to add: I am well aware that that’s a generalization, since Khosla made a lot of films, too, that had nothing to do with the thriller/suspense genre: Mera Gaon Mera Desh, for example; Chirag, Main Tulsi Tere Aangan Ki, Do Badan, etc). But it is Khosla’s prowess with this particular genre that I especially admire, a skill and talent he showcased in classics of the genre such as Woh Kaun Thi? ((1964), Mera Saaya (1966), CID (1956) and Kaala Paani (1958). In each of these films, he managed to combine the classic elements of the Hindi masala film—a romance, a comedic side track, lots of fabulous songs—while making sure that the suspense remained (mostly) taut, the mystery a solid one.

To commemorate Khosla’s birth centenary, I wanted to review one of his suspense films. Several of these (CID, Mera Saaya, Ek Musaafir ek Haseena, Woh Kaun Thi?) I have already reviewed; I was torn between some of the others: Solva Saal, Kaala Paani, and Anita, all of which I have seen at some time or the other. I decided, eventually, that it was time to rewatch Kaala Paani, a film that I’ve watched several times, but too far back to have reviewed it on this blog.

The story begins on a night in Bombay, with a woman (Mumtaz Begum) hurrying through the streets to the home of a family friend, Mr Kapoor (?). She is in great distress, and confides in Kapoor: Karan has discovered the truth. What this truth is we discover when Kapoor hurries to Karan’s home to find Karan (Dev Anand) sitting, looking bereft. He has found out (how, we aren’t told) that his father Shankar Lal has, for the past fifteen years, been incarcerated in Hyderabad jail for the murder of a tawaif named Mala. Not, as Karan has been led to believe all these years, dead.

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Police (1958)

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If you’ve been reading this blog some years, you probably know by now that I am a fan of Madhubala’s. I’ve watched most of her films (several of which I have not got around to reviewing on this blog), I’ve done lists of my favourite songs of hers, and I have waxed eloquent every now and then about how much I like her.

One of the things I dislike about much of the online (at least) raving about Madhubala is that the praise is invariably just about her beauty. How gorgeous, how exquisite. Yes, indeed; but Madhubala’s beauty, I think, often comes in the way of people appreciating what a good actress she was, too. Watch her performances in films like Mughal-e-Azam and Amar, for instance, and if you can look past her face, you will see how well she holds her own against heavyweight thespians like Dilip Kumar and Prithviraj Kapoor.

And she was a fantastic comedienne too. The madcap way she matches Kishore Kumar in Chalti ka Naam Gaadi, for example. Or her airhead character in Mr & Mrs 55. Interestingly, Madhubala is often compared to Marilyn Monroe, almost entirely on the basis of their beauty and popularity; but I think the two stars had one more thing in common: both could portray the ditzy beauty very well. This, in fact, is just the type of woman Manju, of Police, is: nutty, silly, a clown. But so endearing too (and, it goes without saying, so gorgeous).

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Chalti ka Naam Gaadi (1958)

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In response to that unwarranted comment about me ‘wasting my time watching silly Indian films’, I’ve done something (reviewed Bhabhi ki Chudiyaan and Devi) to uphold my contention that all Indian films are not silly. Now it’s time to look at Indian films which are silly, but where the silliness is intelligent, and deliberate.

What, after all, is wrong with silliness, or with humour? For me, the stuffy idea that humour is somehow low is very irritating. Some humour may be unpalatable to certain people (I, for one, find nothing humorous about sexist or racist jokes, or toilet humour), but humour can be sophisticated, it can be the result of a great intelligence.

As, I think, comes through in this delightful film about three brothers, all motor mechanics, who run a garage.

Brijmohan Sharma ‘Bade Bhaiya’ (Ashok Kumar), as he’s known, is the eldest of the three, and he rules with an iron fist in an iron gauntlet.  Bade Bhaiya is a hard taskmaster, and lords it over Jagmohan ‘Jaggu’ (Anoop Kumar) and Manmohan ‘Manu’ (Kishore Kumar), as also their apprentice Maujiya (Mohan Choti). One important aspect of Bade Bhaiya’s personality is his aversion to women: he sees red even when Maujiya hangs up a calendar with a painting of a woman on it.

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Book Review: Manek Premchand’s ‘Majrooh Sultanpuri: The Poet for All Reasons’

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Three years ago, celebrating lyricist Majrooh Sultanpuri’s birth centenary on my blog, I wrote that it was a tough ask to select just ten songs from the more than two thousand that he wrote in the course of a film career that spanned a whopping five decades.

For a blog post, restricted (admittedly by its writer) to just ten songs, that can be a challenge; but it is also a challenge for a full-length book to do justice to a colossus of the size and stature of Majrooh. It’s not even as if, when discussing Majrooh, one could get away with just talking about the songs he wrote for Hindi cinema: to be able to portray, with any veracity, not just the poetry of Majrooh but also his personality, the man he was, the work he did, how he thought—all of this requires a lot of research, a lot of organization and careful planning.

Manek Premchand’s Majrooh Sultanpuri: The Poet for All Reasons (Blue Pencil Publishers, 2021) is an ambitious project, an attempt to capture, within the pages of a book, the life and career of one of Hindi cinema music’s greatest personalities.  

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Aakhri Dao (1958)

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This was one film where I had a tough time making up my mind: should I review it? Should I not? It’s not a great film, but it’s not absolutely abysmal either. And it has a luminously lovely Nutan, plus some superb songs (courtesy Madan Mohan and Majrooh Sultanpuri) to compensate for other drawbacks in the film. It’s also a film about a murder (as macabre as that may sound, always something that catches my attention).

If for nothing else, as an example of a film that could have been pretty good but ends up a damp squib, this, I decided, was worth reviewing.

The story centres round Raj Kumar Saxena ‘Raju’ (Shekhar), a mechanic who works in a garage, and lives in a tiny room above the garage along with his friend and colleague Popat (Johnny Walker). Popat has been having a chat with a wealthy customer, Muthuswami Chetiyar (Mirajkar) and is keen on getting Muthuswami to invest in a garage for Popat. The incentive Popat offers is a match for Muthuswami’s daughter: Raju, he says, will be a fine bridegroom. Because he guesses Muthuswami will not be eager to marry his daughter to a mechanic, Popat takes care not to let on that the groom he has in mind is that figure hunched over a car at the other end of the garage…

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Apradhi Kaun (1957)

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The world of Hindi cinema is peppered with names that anyone familiar with the industry (at least the industry of the 50s and 60s) can quickly slot into categories. Star. Villain. Comedian. Character actor. There are many, many names that automatically fall into (almost exclusively) one of these categories. Those that have shifted from one category to another—like Pran, for instance, once the quintessential villain but in later years the more interesting ‘good man’, or Ajit and Premnath, both initially hero and later villain—have again usually not done too many shifts.

Abhi Bhattacharya is one of those relatively rare individuals who seem to have appeared in a wide variety of roles, a wide variety of films. He was the idealistic school teacher of Jagriti, the ‘other man’ of Anuradha. The kind-hearted, principled example of the bhadralok in films like Amar Prem, and the straying older brother of Dev Anand in Love Marriage. He played Krishna and Arjun and Vishnu (the latter in a slew of mythologicals). He even played the villain, in the Vinod Khanna-Yogita Bali starrer, Memsaab.

This year marks the birth centenary of Abhi Bhattacharya (as far as I’ve been able to find out, he was born in 1921, though I’ve not been able to discover exactly when in 1921). To commemorate his career, I wanted to watch a Bhattacharya film, but a dilemma presented itself: which one? Hindi or Bengali? (since Bhattacharya had what seems to have been a very successful career in Bengali cinema as well). Eventually, I homed in on this film, a rare whodunit in Hindi cinema that’s pretty well made too.

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The Clerk and the Coat (1955)

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Aka Garam Coat, though The Clerk and the Coat is the title as it appears in the credits of this film, and is also the title for which the Censor Certificate was issued.

This film had been among my bookmarks for a long time, but I’d been putting off watching it because I had a suspicion it would turn out to be very depressing. And I’ve not been in a state of mind conducive to being able to watch depressing cinema. But after having watched several rather ho-hum films (Kismat ka Khel, Passport) I figured I should take the plunge and watch something good, even if not exactly frothy and cheery. Garam Coat, after all, was written by Rajinder Singh Bedi, for whom I have a great deal of respect.

The story is set in an unspecified North Indian town, where Girdhari (Balraj Sahni) lives with his wife Geeta (Nirupa Roy) and their three children: two girls and a pampered toddler named Chanda. Girdhari is a clerk at the post office, where he handles money orders. His two best friends are his colleagues Munilal ‘Muni’ (Rashid Khan) and Sher Khan (Jayant). Girdhari’s salary is so meagre that he and Geeta have to carefully monitor every paisa. This for the rent, this for the milkman, this for the kiraane ki dukaan from where they buy their groceries. This much for the insurance premium, for the electricity bill, for the girls’ school fees.

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Ten of my favourite Majrooh Sultanpuri songs

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1919 was a good year for Hindi film music (though, at the time, Hindi cinema—then only six years old, since Dadasaheb Phalke’s Raja Harishchandra was released in 1913—did not know it). Because this year saw the birth of several people who went on to define the music of the industry from the 1940s onwards. From singers like Shamshad Begum and Manna Dey, to music directors like Naushad and Sudhir Phadke—and three of Hindi cinema’s finest lyricists: Kaifi Azmi, Rajendra Krishan, and Majrooh Sultanpuri.

I have already, in the course of this year, posted tributes to Kaifi Azmi and Rajendra Krishan; today I celebrate the birth centenary of Majrooh Sultanpuri.

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