COOLIE
Connie Haham
Manmohan Desai can be said to have defined the Bollywood masala movie as we know it. Desai’s caper movies, revolving around a song-dance-action-emotion-comedy routine, were great fun to watch and immensely popular: at one point in 1977, he had no less four silver jubilee hits simultaneously playing in theatres. On the sets of Desai’s Coolie, where Amitabh Bachchan played a Muslim railway porter, the superstar had a near-fatal accident; for months, the entire nation prayed for his recovery—and then, almost miraculously, the prayers were answered. This chapter recounts those tense and heady times.
Manmohan Desai claimed a lifelong fascination with Islam and Islamic culture. Living just blocks away from Bhendi Bazaar, the largest Muslim neighbourhood in Bombay, he was always in contact with Muslims. He wanted to make a film for his 100 million Muslim compatriots. Manmohan Desai described the inception of Coolie:
My office is in a crowded area near Bombay Central, so we’d see these coolies in their red shirts and dhotis and pyjamas in and out, in and out. Very often we’d see them when we’d go by train. They are very fascinating characters. They would never go out of turn. They would sit in a queue, then run when the train comes. Each one would take his compartment. They all have their badges. There’s no infighting amongst them. And I’m told, as a matter of fact, towards the end of the day they all sit together, they pool their money, and then they divide the money equally. I said, look, Amitabh has been identified as Anthony (the bootlegger); Amitabh has been identified in Naseeb as a waiter, why, not bring the characters down to earth so people can identify with them easily … I said, I have not touched upon a Muslim social, so why not bring in a Muslim character? I told it to the writer Prayag Raj, and the whole fabrication of Coolie was started. Then we felt, why not bring in a falcon? That is the national emblem of the United Arab Emirates. So we brought all these things that appeal to the Muslims, and we put one Hindu character there, Chintu, that is, Rishi Kapoor.
Interestingly, in his piece ‘Muslim Ethos in Indian Cinema’ critic Iqbal Masud enriches the interpretation of the falcon and proves yet again that no matter what film a director may intend to make, the interaction between the story on-screen and the accumulated knowledge and experience of each individual member of the audience is such that a personal and partially unique film will be constructed in the mind of each viewer. Iqbal Masud says:
The old Mehboob syndrome of Muslim radicalism is reproduced in Coolie. Amitabh carries a hawk named Allah Rakha on his wrist. This is a direct reference to poet Iqbal’s hawk (Shaheen)—central symbol in his poetry. Shaheen for Iqbal represented the aspiring, soaring spirit of man as in the line, Tu Shaheen hai parwaz hai kaam tera (you are a hawk, your destiny is flight).
Along with his noble motives, Desai, as usual, combined good business sense. Muslims are moviegoers, regular clients who could fill the coffers of the box offices, and Muslims live throughout India. Desai thus hoped to have in Coolie an even bigger grosser than his extremely successful Amar Akbar Anthony. Desai’s detractors ignored his higher motives altogether and accused him of simply pandering to the moneybags of Middle Eastern countries. And though 1983 to early 1984 was a relatively calm time communally, the centrality of a Muslim figure did not seem to please everyone. Certain airport workers, for example, stated stiffly that, because of its emphasis on Islam, they would not see Coolie. Still, it was impossible to imagine at that time that less than a decade later, Bombay would be in flames as politicians played the communal card and public discourse turned towards rejection of ‘the other’.
A wide public did, however, accept Desai’s film with its portrayal of a poor Muslim hero, women realistically wearing burkhas and praying five times a day, and in which Muslim festivals play a central part. This is not to say that the Muslim hierarchy immediately felt honoured by the attention paid to Islam in the film. The pre-release publicity alone almost gave rise to riots. On posters plastered around Bombay, Amitabh Bachchan was shown with the Koran at his side rather than, as the religious leaders felt seemly, above him in its rightful place. Under pressure, Desai ordered all of the posters in Bombay torn down and replaced with less offensive publicity. Even on the new posters, though, Amitabh Bachchan was draped, as in the film, in a sacred shawl normally reserved only for holy men. Desai again tried to placate the leaders by telling them to see the film before passing judgment. After a great deal of official Muslim reticence, the tables turned drastically. The Muslim public began to see the film, and like the Christians at the release of Amar, Akbar, Anthony, they were overjoyed, ‘See our Coolie; see our Iqbal Bhai!’ Manmohan Desai added:
Trade journals are saying now that this is a Muslim mythological. The correct impression of the impact of Coolie on Muslim audiences comes from watching the film at the Alankar Theatre (at the edge of the Bhendi Bazaar neighbourhood). I knew that once the ladies in pardah started filling that theatre, making the house full daily, that the film was a hit. The Muslims have taken that film to their hearts. Otherwise, the Muslim ladies wouldn’t be out there. They’re very orthodox. They’re not allowed to see any Tom, Dick and Harry film by the family, unless the male members see it and approve.
Manmohan Desai, thrilled at its success, said, ‘I wish I could make a pilgrimage to Mecca to offer thanks.’ As always, a magnanimous caring for the masses for whom his films were destined and a concern for quality film-making concurred with very real, bottomline self-interest: a film must bring in crowds; it must make money. This Coolie did, being one of the biggest grossers of 1983–84 (or the biggest, depending upon the figures to which one refers).
Video Threat
After the threatened Muslim boycott, another menace loomed over Coolie, just as over all films post-1980. The long-feared video threat finally materialized into a real loss of revenue at the box office and dried up a once booming Indian film circuit. Foreign markets, especially in England and the Middle East, gave way almost entirely before a cheap, easily available, abundant stock of films on cassette. Films were soon being released on video, either in official or in pirated form, well before theatre premieres.
For several years, industry planners blithely continued to bank on the domestic market, the logic being that in a country as poor as India, the masses would never have access to video technology. Human ingenuity proved the forecasters wrong. Tea-stall owners, even in the heart of slums, went into debt to buy video players; the money from increased business quickly made repayment possible. Servants, who had before negotiated access to television, began giving first preference to employers with VCRs. The irony, of course, is that people the world over began watching many more Hindi films at a time when making them was becoming an increasingly precarious business.
Like other film directors of the eighties, Desai was petrified of the video menace. In his fighting moments he wanted to see video pirates flogged. When feeling more resigned, he said simply, ‘You can’t fight technology.’ To a certain extent, though, he did fight, and, at least for Coolie, he won a minor victory. Draconian measures, including police raids of video shops, were taken to insure that no pirated copies reached the shelves until several weeks after the Coolie’s theatre release. Even in Europe Coolie was seen on big screens before entering people’s living rooms.
The Making of the Film
Coolie was the first film that Manmohan Desai co-directed. His long-time associate Prayag Raj sat in the director’s seat for many of the scenes shot. Coolie is an MKD film, produced by Manmohan’s son Ketan Desai. Like Amar Akbar Anthony and Naseeb, Coolie had the benefit of Desai’s own financing. Desai believed in spending money on a film if the expense could be made to show. With many on-site locations, a huge cast including 2,000–3,000 extras, and a record 245 prints of the film distributed simultaneously, no expense was spared in the effort to make Coolie stand apart from the rest of popular film production. Because of the huge investment Coolie represented, Manmohan Desai was biting his fingernails, so to speak, before its release and telling journalists that his new film had better be a hit because otherwise he and his son Ketan might find themselves working as coolies at Victoria Station.
Manmohan Desai described the budding of the idea for Coolie, the efforts needed to give the film authenticity, and the organizational skills necessary to turn an idea into an on-screen reality:
I decided to construct a story on a railway porter, but after constructing it, we realized it was going to be very difficult to shoot with Amitabh Bachchan at any railway station. It would be absolutely impossible. How to control the crowds! Then we decided to go to Bangalore. We had a friend called Manjunath Hegde in Bangalore who came to our rescue. He said, ‘I’ll make all the arrangements with the police and the necessary permissions; you can shoot in Bangalore.’ Believe me, we had our hearts in our mouths. We shot there for twenty days, and the government gave us a lot of facilities. We had about 350 armed policemen at the railway station … People down south are more cultured, refined. They have seen a lot of shooting of their regional films, so it was nothing new to them. They were so well behaved that when we used to request them to move out when we were coming in for a shot, they would listen. We hardly had any problems for twenty days. The railways were also kind enough to let us shoot there … We thought we would never be able to get the long shots, but with the good crowd arrangement, the good response of the people and the railways, we could shoot everything, and I don’t think anybody before this film had ever shot like this on a railway station, and I don’t think anybody can do it again … Let’s just say, we were very, very lucky, and we thanked Manjunath Hegde and the government of Karnataka at that time to allow us to shoot this film.
We had to take a lot of extras, junior artistes, from Bombay. We gave them the clothes of the coolies and we asked them to study the habits of the coolies. We used to linger around the railway stations for days together, much before the shooting, and see how they would smoke the bidi … They would sit in a line when the train would be approaching the railway station, and then they would run towards it … We have made the junior artists study them, and it looks so very natural that nobody has been able to make out that they were not the real coolies.
Cities mean crowds, and we make generous use of extras because if you do not use extras, if you try to crib and cringe and try to save money on them, you cannot create the atmosphere … A station is always crammed, so we had to bring extras. The extras that we used at the station were from Bangalore itself. We didn’t get them from Bombay. The only junior artists we took from Bombay were to play the coolies. We took about twenty of them, and that was quite sufficient for the Bangalore city station. I used a lot of extras, and that was how we could create the impact … That’s why I have five to six assistant directors, and they would look after the extras, and instruct them. These assistant directors have to instruct the junior artists about what they should do, and it was quite easy to organize the extras in the song Saari duniya because they were briefed much in advance as to what each one had to do.
A Media Event
Coolie was not simply a film. It was an important media event and as such was well publicized entirely by chance long before its release. It was on 25 July 1982 on the sets of Coolie that Amitabh Bachchan had his near-fatal accident; an overly realistic punch in the stomach and a fall against a sharp-edged table led to lifeendangering complications. Coolie might very well never have been finished. On the one hand, Desai deplored the morbid publicity—‘publicity not paid for by me’, as he said. On the other hand, following a well-established pattern, he brought reality into the fiction of his film to let the public participate through the film in the miracle of Amitabh Bachchan’s recovery. ‘Cashing in on the accident,’ his detractors called it. ‘Satisfying the public,’ Desai considered it. Amitabh Bachchan not only recovered, but he returned to the sets of Coolie to take up the fight at the place where shooting had left off. As this fight appears on the screen, two freeze shots have been included to let viewers know exactly the jab in the belly and the landing on a table corner that were responsible for Amitabh’s ruptured intestine. Printed on the screen in English, in Hindi, and in Urdu is, ‘This is the shot in which Amitabh Bachchan was seriously injured.’ If we place ourselves well into the future or far in space from India and Indian audiences, the intervention of reality in the midst of a screen story might seem an unnecessary distraction, but for the masses of India who had prayed for Amitabh Bachchan’s recovery, Manmohan Desai knew that speculation about the moment of the accident would be inevitable. By freezing the action and informing the public of the exact moment the blows took place, he was clarifying what could have continued to be clouded in rumours and guesses.
Iqbal Coolie, the character played by Amitabh Bachchan, was originally scripted to die at the end of the story. However, after Amitabh’s brush with death, Desai did not feel he could maintain the fatal ending of the story and still face his ever-faithful child audience. He could imagine them cornering him with, ‘Uncle, we prayed and Amitabh Bachchan lived and now you have killed him.’ Iqbal’s experience, then, was infused with details from Amitabh’s real-life experience. In the film we see Hindus, Muslims, Christians and Sikhs praying for Iqbal’s recovery, just as in real life members of the four major religions prayed for Amitabh Bachchan. Iqbal’s recovery, like Amitabh’s, borders on the miraculous. At one point, Iqbal waves at the crowd from the balcony under which we see the sign ‘St Philomena’s Hospital’, a reference to the hospital in Bangalore in which Amitabh Bachchan was first operated on before his transfer to Breach Candy in Bombay for another two-months’ stay. Around Iqbal’s neck are symbols of the four religions. In real life Amitabh Bachchan returned, once he was well, to St Philomena’s on a pilgrimage and prayed at each of the centres of worship, giving thanks to all of those whose prayers had, it seemed, reached their destinations.
Part of the original idea for Coolie was inspired by the true story of a family separated by religion. A woman had been married twice. One husband was Jewish, the other Muslim, and with each she had a son. One husband forbade his son to enter the house of the other husband, and yet the two stepbrothers, despite their different religions, were secretly the best of friends. Simple and altogether real, that seed—two youths whose friendship was blind to religion—flowered into a story as complex as the cast of Coolie is large.
The Story
Arch-demon Zafar (Kadar Khan), a villain who knows no bounds, bursts a dam and floods a village in order to kill Aslam (Satyen Kappu) and steal his wife Salma (Waheeda Rehman). Her son Iqbal (Master Ravi) is left motherless. A family friend Maruti (Nilu Phule), a Hindu coolie separated from his own wife and baby during the flood, raises Iqbal to follow in his footsteps, carrying heavy loads at Victoria Terminus in Bombay. Allahrakha, the almost magic falcon who has always served Iqbal’s family, remains Iqbal’s special pet, ready to swoop down whenever Iqbal is in need of rescue or counsel. Salma, mute and amnesiac, spends her life with the tyrannical Zafar.
Salma and Zafar’s adopted son Sunny (played as an adult by Rishi Kapoor) is, in accordance with Desai’s logic, none other than the lost son of the coolie Maruti. The boy grows up to be an alcohol-imbibing newspaper reporter, forever blue after being separated from his childhood sweetheart Deepa (Shoma Anand), who likewise turns alcoholic during her years of pining for Sunny.
The rich heiress Julie (Rati Agnihotri) has a conspiring legal guardian (Om Shivpuri), a building promoter involved in housing frauds. He would like his son Vicki (Suresh Oberoi) to marry Julie in order to gain lasting control over her fortune. Fate, of course, has her fall in love with Iqbal (Amitabh Bachchan), the penniless but fearless and dashing coolie. Julie refuses to marry anyone, however, until she has avenged her father’s (Amrish Puri) murder, committed—she believes—by Aslam, Iqbal’s real father, who was taken on in the service of Julie’s father after surviving Zafar’s attempt on his life. Aslam is, of course, innocent, having been framed by the wicked Zafar. The first half of the film introduces the characters, defines their relationships and sees them separated. In the second half, little by little, they are reunited, and, finally, justice is made to reign through the death of Zafar and his colleagues in crime.
Desai describes his films as old wine in new bottles. Indeed, we are on familiar ground in Coolie with one more convoluted lostfound story and a careful blend of the nine rasas (sentiments or aesthetic pleasures), the criteria that have been the basis for wellrounded drama since the beginnings of Sanskrit theatre. While Coolie contains ingredients to please many and varied tastes, three elements are salient: religion, revolution and comedy.
Religion, Revolution and Comedy
Numerous details lend a Muslim religiosity to Coolie. The opening scene has Iqbal’s father presenting his mother a green scarf for Id (a Muslim religious festival). Later, when Iqbal, still a child, returns alone to his flooded, abandoned house, the Koran falls from a shelf into his arms, a sign for him not to give up hope or belief. Having grown to adulthood and become a coolie, Iqbal’s porter badge bears the holy number 786. And the magic falcon Allahrakha wears a gold necklace with sacred lettering.
The exaltation of religious feeling is also central to the ongoing plot. Salma overhears Zafar scheming to take Iqbal’s life; she runs to warn Iqbal of the impending danger and in the process is hit by the bullet meant for him. As she wavers near death in the hospital, the reflection of Allahrakha’s necklace shines on Iqbal’s face and the sound track changes to a chant ‘Allah Huma’ (the community of Islam), a formula that incites Iqbal to attempt a pilgrimage to Mecca to pray for his mother’s life. The emotion-filled scene that follows, though strictly Muslim, appeals across the barriers of formal religions. Iqbal is prepared for his journey, but before he can enter the ship with thousands of other faithful, the official travel doctor declares him too feverish to make the voyage. A maulvi (religious leader) recommends that he use his ticket wisely, that he give it to someone too poor to make the Haj (pilgrimage); his good deed will insure that his prayers are heard. As fate would have it, the man the maulvi indicates is none other than Iqbal’s own longlost father. When the ship departs carrying his father and the other blessed pilgrims, Iqbal sings, ‘Mubarak ho tum subko haj ka mahina, na thi meri kismat ki dekhoon Madina; Madinewale se mera salaam kehna.’ (May the month of Haj be auspicious for you all. It was not my destiny to see Medina; give my greetings to the Prophet.)
Near the end of Coolie it is a religious miracle that restores Salma’s speech. As she visits Iqbal’s empty home, a heavy draft and rattling walls caused by a passing train chance to send down the holy plaque above the door hard onto her head. After twenty years of silence Salma cries her first words: ‘Ya Allah!’
The final fight scene in Coolie takes place in the Haji Ali shrine in Bombay. The villain Zafar Khan mounts the steps to escape from Iqbal. A wind carries the green holy shawl off the durgah (shrine) and drapes it around Iqbal like a shield. Zafar’s bullets penetrate the shawl and wound Iqbal, but like one obsessed, Iqbal fights on, invincible. With each shot Iqbal cries out sacred verses in Arabic from the Koran. An echo and a crescendo produced by a heavenly choir chanting in minor key increase the impression that we are witnessing a divine intervention. With superhuman force Iqbal topples Zafar from the highest floor of the minaret and then falls into his mother’s lap and haltingly uses his bloodied finger to write the name of Allah on a nearby wall.
Religious feeling in the film is not limited to Islamic fervour. Maruti fights off a villain (Puneet Issar) with a mace (the symbol of Hanuman or Maruti). Also, when the wicked Zafar carries off the virtuous Salma, Hindus are reminded of Ravana capturing Seeta. As in the Ramayana, a bird (here Allahrakha) reacts to this infamy by attacking Ravan’s chariot in the sky (here Zafar’s helicopter). The evil that Zafar represents is total and irredeemable. And like Ravana, he must be eliminated entirely.
The most powerful message, however, is not for one religion or another, but rather to all religions. Once more, Desai makes a plea for communal harmony. A Hindu boy is raised by a Muslim mother and a Muslim boy by a Hindu father. Iqbal and Sunny share Salma as their mother, just as Hindus and Muslims share one motherland and should for this reason—the message is clear— look upon one another as brothers. The presence of Julie, the Christian girl, provides a nod in the direction of the second-largest minority in India.
If religion is close to the hearts of most viewers, the triumph of the poor and downtrodden is equally cheered. The bustling train station is shown as the place where coolies wait for trains, carry heavy loads, wash up, eat, celebrate religious festivals, find themselves mistreated, go on strike, and even lie down in front of a moving train to obtain recognition for their just cause. Talking freely about revolt and the fight for justice, Manmohan Desai expressed his interest in the Polish situation as it obtained in 1983:
What’s happening in Poland is very nice. They’re being oppressed, and they want to come out for solidarity; it’s good drama material: revolution and religion mixed together. I’m saying revolution and God exist together. If you can do that, like in Coolie, you can have box office success.
Desai makes another historical comparison:
The coolies storm that house; they bash things up. It’s nothing but October Revolution, storming the Winter Palace. It’s been done in history by the masses. In their small way these people are doing the same thing.
Of course, the ‘revolution’ in Coolie does not change the status quo. Iqbal shouts, ‘Kal tumhara, aaj hamaara!’ (Yesterday was yours; today is ours.) Tomorrow is not mentioned, and really it need not be since Hindi carries the unusual ambiguity of having the same word (kal) to express both yesterday and tomorrow. Iqbal’s slogan in Hindi has no verb, hence no tense. ‘Today is ours’ is dear, but ‘kal tumhaara’ could mean either ‘yesterday was yours’ or ‘tomorrow will be yours’ or both. In fact, the coolies have only a temporary victory; in keeping with the carnival spirit, they reign only one day. Manmohan Desai admitted:
I’m not encouraging revolution. I say let them let their steam off. Don’t oppress them all the time so that they can never rebel, so they can’t speak their mind or express themselves. Let them speak out. Let them also feel for a change, ‘All right, we are somebody.’ Why do you want to make them suffer, to grind them to dust all the time. They (art directors) are trying to grind their characters deeper and deeper into the ground. Let the steam be vented. It’s not the October Revolution; it’s not storming the Winter Palace, but in their own small way, the coolies have a great time there. They’re asking for their deeds; they were cheated out of their houses. They say, ‘We will not leave till we get our money back or we get our homes; if not, we’ll have a spot of fun.’ It’s done everywhere in the world, and I’ve shown it in a lighter way. If I showed the same thing in a serious way, nobody would like it. In a lighter way, people laugh; they enjoy it. The chap on the ground, down on the street, says, ‘Ha! We’ve shown that imperialist chap; we’ve shown that rich man a thing or two.’
Interestingly, Mani Ratnam’s Tamil film Nayakan (made four years later) has a scene which, though similar, is played, like the entire film, in total seriousness. The slum dwellers who invade the rich man’s house also begin by breaking a chandelier and a mirror before they go on to destroy all his furniture in a chilling act of intimidation that ensures the slum dwellers will not be displaced to make way for a factory. Mani Ratnam gives us a slice of reality. Desai gives us a lighter version in keeping with the mood of his film, the result both of his desire to entertain and of his iconoclastic streak. Yet one can never tell how the poor in the audiences might react even to such sugar-coated messages, whether they will simply laugh and forget or whether they will feel emboldened to fight in turn. Certainly, some governments found even this circus-like revolution to be threatening: scenes with the hammer and sickle were preventively cut before Coolie was sent to certain sensitive Middle Eastern countries.
The second half of the film deals more seriously with issues faced by the poor and the oppressed. Desai had decided to update his formula; everyone, he felt, was tired of cops and smugglers. In Coolie the bad guys are the corrupt politicians, chit-fund embezzlers, and dishonest housing promoters. These villains seem to have learned a cynical lesson, that robbing the poor is more profitable than robbing the rich; the wealthy may possess more money per capita, but the poor, simply because of their numbers, offer a boon that can be milked to greater advantage. In response, Iqbal gives up his railway platform to stand on the election platform. As Iqbal urges the voters to elect him, his speech includes the line ‘The world belongs to the poor!’ To this, the cinema audiences at the time in India responded with enthusiastic applause. Having Amitabh Bachchan play the electioneering Iqbal showed prescience. ‘All the workers will vote for you,’ Iqbal is told. In real life, after having denied for years that he would ever leave acting for politics, Amitabh Bachchan stood for a seat in parliament in the late 1984 election that followed Mrs Gandhi’s assassination and Rajiv Gandhi’s step into power. In his hometown of Allahabad all the workers must have voted for him because his victory was indeed sweeping.
Some might accuse Desai of compliantly following a trend in Coolie in bringing politics to the fore. The years 1983–84 were fertile years for politically oriented films. Yet as early as 1974 in Roti political shenanigans were denounced. ‘Public jo public hai sub jaante hain; andar kyaa hai; baahar kyaa hai; ye sub kuch pehchaante hain.’ (The public knows all; they recognize the difference between what is on the inside and on the outside, i.e., what appears to be and what is.) So sings the character played by Rajesh Khanna as he shines light on those who talk of public service but who act in their own self-interest.
Coolie is not actually a revolutionary film, but a certain attitude is nevertheless recommended: a simple person can refuse to submit humbly to injustice. Our principal focus throughout the film is on super-coolie Amitabh Bachchan, who, faithful to his persona, can right all wrongs single-handedly. However, the film’s strike sequence, though it lasts only a few minutes during the credits, shows coolies achieving their goal of justice without the help of a superhero. Amitabh Bachchan is missing, and yet by using their numbers and their cohesive strength, the coolies carry through a serious revolt, not simply a carnivalesque one-day seizure of power. Those in the comfortable confines of society are forced to realize to what extent they are dependent on those ‘who carry the loads of the world’. Well-dressed arriving passengers puff, pant and wipe sweat from their brows as they manage their own bags. The coolie strike effectively reminds those at the top of society’s hierarchy that they must not take for granted the services of those at the bottom. Such a scene was most uncharacteristic of popular cinema of the period. The very notion of ‘hero’ is largely incompatible with democratic group action. The next major cinematic reminder of the effectiveness of a pooling of efforts would come in 2001 with Ashutosh Gowariker’s Lagaan.
Desai did not consider images of revolt to be his principal contribution to the underprivileged among his audiences. Rather, he hoped to lighten their loads by entertaining them. And the comedy in Coolie is droll. From broad slapstick, which keeps even the youngest enthralled, to more subtle visual and verbal humour that engages alert minds, Coolie overflows with clever comic ideas. After the coolies invade the building promoter’s house, Iqbal captures the rich heiress Julie, slings her over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes and carries her to his home. Handcuffed in place, she is to serve as collateral, not to be released until her uncle has fumed his promise to sell homes to the coolies at the originally agreed-upon prices. After playing the tough, smart, unbeatable hero, however, nonsense becomes dominant and Iqbal morphs into a bumbling idiot in this young woman’s presence. While Iqbal is trying to prepare a French omelette by following the instructions of a radio cooking lesson (to the letter), Julie discovers that a slight nudge to the knob will tune in a yoga lesson; by switching quickly back and forth from station to station she can regain the upper hand. In a series of short gags with enhancing sound effects we see him, for example, breathing pepper deeply until steam comes out of his ears, trying to throw an onion into the frying pan while standing on his head, or sitting on an egg he has placed on the floor … till out hatches a baby chick. The handcuff key then falls from his pocket; Julie fishes it over and frees herself while Iqbal remains immobilized, his legs inextricably entwined about his neck.
Desai’s humour was not without a cutting edge. High and low alike could find themselves victims of his wit. Many journalists felt that Desai made the Rishi Kapoor character Sunny into the caricature of a newspaperman in order to mock the people of the press with whom Desai had every reason to want to settle scores. Sunny arrives along with the coolies at the rich promoter’s home. When the promoter asks, ‘Who are you?’ Sunny retorts with smug self-assurance, ‘What! You don’t know me? I’m Sunny, the great reporter!’ He then flaunts the power of the press, i.e., the prerogative to give bad publicity. During the circus of an interview his questions are singularly lacking in substance. The tone is lighthearted and funny, but some journalists bristled at what they suspected to be a real undercurrent of aggression.
Coolie, in many ways, is one of Desai’s most accomplished films. Camera angles enhance the viewers’ emotions. Transitions are often clever and elaborate. The music is memorable, and the song picturizations show thought, care and a mastery of the medium. This being said, scripting continued to be Desai’s weakness. Certain basic plot assumptions, though fundamental to the development of the story, are incomprehensible. Sunny is born a Hindu and adopted as a baby by a pious Muslim woman who, we are led to believe, considers the baby entirely her own. Sunny himself obviously does not know of his Hindu origin since we see him flabbergasted to learn over halfway through the film that he is not Salma and Zafar’s child. Yet he never shows any sign of having been taught a single feature of Muslim worship. Through such plot illogic Desai no doubt achieves his primary goal, that of not offending Hindu spectators who consider Sunny to have remained a Hindu. The drawback, however, is that Sunny’s character is greatly weakened by the basic confusion over precisely who and what he is.
Coolie’s pacing, too, is faulty. At moments, the film simply offers too much of a good thing—one too many fights, one too many hospital scenes, one too many songs at close intervals, and a final chase scene that attempts to force a sense of suspense. Judicious cutting could have given a shorter, stronger film.
Reactions to Coolie varied. One Bombay dweller saw coolies in a new light, ‘Before, I felt coolies were just a normal part of the environment of a train station, but after seeing the film, I look at each one as an individual.’ Among the press, reactions were rather predictable. All the critics who disliked Desai’s work generally, and this included the majority of Indian reviewers, were no more favorable to Coolie than to Desai’s earlier films. In Europe Coolie attracted more positive attention. It was shown as part of the official selection of the twenty-first Mostra Internationale del Cinema Nuovo (the Pesaro Film Festival) in Italy in June 1985. This is not to say that its presence was appreciated by all. Several invited Indian film-makers representing New Wave cinema (Mani Kaul among others) expressed their shock that the festival would serve as a forum for such ‘crass commercial cinema’. Coolie nevertheless ran to a full house in Pesaro where the local townspeople made up an important part of the apparently contented audience. Afterwards, Desai showed his usual verve when speaking of Pesaro, ‘I couldn’t go to the festival because I was down with flu; if I had been there, I would have definitely pulled off Mr Mani Kaul’s dhoti!’
In other areas abroad the reception of Coolie depended on the particular situation of the communities of Indian origin who were often the principal viewers of exported Hindi popular films. In certain parts of Africa where Muslim–Hindu tensions are close to the surface, the film could not be publicized at all for fear of exacerbating communal discord. In sections of East Africa the title itself was objectionable, ‘coolie’ being a derogatory term applied locally to all Indians.
Back in India, Desai assessed Coolie’s strong points and analysed its success in view of his following film Mard:
The first half is all nice comedy. The first three reels of the film, I feel, are brilliant. The flood scenes are something new for the audience. Also, there’s the sentiment for the mother, and the scene of the yoga where the radio line changes. Then the sequence of the Haj; I think it’s a classical sequence for Hindi films. It’s considered very pious if you send your parents on a pilgrimage; this boy unintentionally sends his father on a pilgrimage. This along with the election scene where Amitabh Bachchan hits out at the rich—it’s a sure formula here. There are 80 per cent poor and 10 per cent rich, right? And then the Haji Ali shrine sequence with the name of God upon his shoulder, when he recites the lines of the Koran. These things have clicked in a big way. That’s why I’m trying to fashion Mard on that line, but I’m not getting it that way.
The Haj reel is an immortal reel in my opinion. I’ve incorporated a Hindu item in Mard, a very beautiful reel, but it will not be in the class of this Haj sequence. This just happens, you know. It’s like a masterpiece. You don’t plan a masterpiece. It just happens. You can’t reproduce that thing again. So I’ve become very conscious of my film Coolie now. Will my film Mard have the same items? Will it have the same appeal as Coolie? Coolie is first-half comedy; first three reels are emotional, comedy, comedy, comedy, then … emotion, drama, action, everything going in like this in correct portions.
Extracted from Enchantment of the Mind: Manmohan Desai’s Films.