Indulgence, adulation make star memoirs what they are!
When the long-overdue autobiography of a 92-year-old movie legend hits the stands, there is reason for enthusiasm, but the literary critic can also find himself gnawing at his knuckles apprehensively. Such a book can easily turn out to be an exercise in self-importance, selective memory and misjudged nostalgia. People who have spent most of their lives being worshipped are apt to become preachers doling out nuggets of wisdom, portraying themselves as a well of inspirational stories from which the reader may draw endless quantities of ganga jal for his own benediction.
Which is why I was relieved to find that the just-released Dilip Kumar: The Substance and the Shadow is predominantly a grounded, dignified work. It is written very much in the style of the classic memoir, with Dilip-saab (or Yousuf Khan, to use his birth name) taking the reader through episodes from his life in linear order, without thickly underlining their larger significance. A certain degree of quiet pride in his achievements is visible—for instance, in a passage where he discusses his prefilm days working at the British Army Club in Pune, and using his initiative to set up a sandwich and fruit stall for the officers. But even here, there is selfdeprecating humour; he recalls being forced by the British soldiers to strip and join them in the shower room, and being so mortified by his own hairiness that he made sure to always keep his shirt on as a leading man.
Actually, the tone of the writing fits the understated Dilip Kumar screen persona—the actor who often spoke so softly that you strained to hear him. (In her Introduction, Udayatara Nayar, to whom Kumar narrated the book, says that the thespian disliked talking about himself and didn’t want to do a memoir “because that meant the profuse use of the capital I, which he abhorred”.) Which brings me to a very different type of star memoir that also matches the personality of its subject: the 2007 Romancing with Life, written by Dilip Kumar’s great contemporary Dev Anand.
This is one of the most entertaining books I have read in the past decade—and I don’t mean that as an unqualified compliment. Romancing with Life is overwritten, meandering and often unintentionally funny, but it is almost without question Dev Anand’s own work. It is full of the uninhibited, narcissistic floridity that marked everything the man did, and that no ghostwriter would have been able to simulate. How could anyone but Anand himself have produced a sentence like this one: “Those I am closest to, those who like and love me and I them, call me ‘Dev’, just ‘Dev’, short and sweet and possessive, godly and sexy, and intimate to the extreme, in bedrooms, in drawing rooms, in the streets and in public squares.” The reviewer’s stock complaint “this book should have been better edited” is completely irrelevant here, for Romancing with Life is an immediate representation of Dev Anand on the page in a way that a better written, better edited book could never be.
Interestingly, while Anand employs an almost soft-porn tone while describing his first sexual encounter with an anonymous woman on a train, his candour is selective—when it comes to public figures, he doesn’t kiss and tell to the same degree, which can make this a disappointing book for Stardust-collectors. And this is another thing about many of our film-star memoirs, which gives them a sterile, vapid quality: people are cautious about revealing too much. When a Hollywood legend like Kirk Douglas enters the terrain of self-analysis (with The Ragman’s Son, one of the most absorbing and frank memoirs I have read), he can almost matter-of-factly mention a brief sexual liaison with a much older actress, and admit to his own less than exemplary conduct in the situation; but our stars are more mindful of their public image, more respectful of “middle-class morality” (even if they haven’t adhered to it themselves). Thus, in Conversations with Waheeda Rehman, Nasreen Munni Kabir’s book-length series of interviews with the legendary actress, every time the interviewer broaches the subject of Rehman’s much-talked-about relationship with the actor-director Guru Dutt, she is met with either a wall or an evasion. (“Guru Duttji was good to me. He was caring and protective. But in truth, he looked out for everyone.”)
My point is not that our actors and actresses must openly discuss their private lives—it is their prerogative not to. But when a politically correct tone is used to describe a particular incident, one starts to wonder about how honest they (actors) are being about other things as well.
In this sense, one of the most atypical books I have read about an Indian film star is Jessica Hines’s Looking for the Big B: Bollywood, Bachchan and Me. This isn’t a biography or a serious attempt to examine Amitabh Bachchan’s legend: it is a book about the author attempting to write such a book but eventually giving up and opting to write about herself instead. Hines, a small-time English actress, is best known in India for an alleged affair with Aamir Khan a few years ago. If you read Looking for the Big B, take one thing as a given: she’s on air-kissing terms with many people who matter in Bollywood, and was on reasonably close terms with Bachchan himself for many years. Don’t bother about the whys and hows, just accept the name-dropping.
Almost by accident, this book provides a fresh view of Bachchan. One wouldn’t have thought this possible, given how ubiquitous the man has been in our lives in the last three decades, but Hines has the advantage of the outsider’s perspective; she doesn’t bear the burden of adoration that the average Indian does, and this seems to make her subject more relaxed when he’s in her presence. She speaks of Bachchan with an offhand flippancy that we haven’t encountered before in thousands of pages of magazine articles and books; it’s almost as if she were describing a Regular Guy!
She writes of him fixing her in a stare that’s “a cross between a monitor lizard and Paddington bear”. In the more inspired passages of this sort, she gives us the unlikely spectre of a maller-than-life Amitabh. And if the book works (I’m still undecided about that, to be honest), it is because of this demystification: Hines takes the Star of the Millennium, the cynosure of a billion pairs of eyes and turns him into a supporting player, with herself cast in the lead role. Perhaps such authorial selfindulgence is the best approach to writing about a big movie star.