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There are those mega-stars who are the box-office blue chips through the course of their careers. At the other extreme, there are non-starters or early burn-outs. And there is a third category of ‘career’ actors who neither command the top rung of lead roles nor get pushed out of business. Through ego-less self-evaluation, they find their optimal slot in the ladder. And then, by applying hard work, demonstrating flexibility and adaptability, by being disciplined and generally nice to people, they stay there and flow with the tide for decades, ageing gracefully.
We are almost defining Shashi Kapoor.
He merely knuckled on and believed in doing his job as well as he could. And quite intelligently, he chiseled out for himself the brand of a part art-house actor and theater artiste. And by doing so, he had ‘opted out’ of the Bollywood box-office race.
Aseem Chhabra’s biography Shashi Kapoor: The Householder, The Star is a well-intended effort to pay a tribute to this karmayogi of Indian cinema. Chhabra is correct when he says that the nostalgia that is Shashi Kapoor is confined to the generation of movie-goers between 1960 and 1990. One also agrees with Chhabra’s observation that Shashi Kapoor was the most suave, charming and handsome of the Kapoors.
In the first few pages, one can smell the pink-blue moments of an early romance between Shashi and Jennifer, those ‘slow-motion’ moments of their first meeting at the theater back-stage, their elopement and a quick-fire marriage. Chhabra’s portrayal of Jennifer as Shashi’s partner and a moral support through thick and thin, her personal and professional sacrifices, and her admonishing love for her husband till her death accurately characterizes the lady as the ‘background’ heroine in Shashi’s life.
But on the professional side of things, the author has tried to over-sell Shashi Kapoor. This has led to hasty oversights, for example the book says that while Shakespeare Wallah (released in Dec 1965) was being conceived, “…(Shashi) had become a prominent star in the Hindi film galaxy”. Whereas Shashi’s first hit Jab Jab Phool Khile was released in January 1965 and would have been registered as a hit no earlier than end-Feb 1965. Assuming that Shakspeare Wallah was being conceived towards the end of 1964, there was no way that Shashi could have been “a prominent star” by then.
Big banners with deep pockets like those of Yash Chopra also helped in creating the distribution momentum. But Shashi on his own was rarely an independent big box office draw.
The fan in Aseem Chhabra becomes a road-block to objective and unbiased analyses. As a result, there seems to be a rush to ascribe every commercial failure of Shashi Kapoor to external factors like absence of multiplexes etc.
One sorely misses the in-depth analyses of Shashi’s association with leading filmmakers he had worked with, like Manmohan Desai, Prakash Mehra, Nasir Husain, Subhash Ghai. Or, the behind-the-scene stories of how Shashi patched up with the Sippys later in the 1970s after being rudely replaced by Rajesh Khanna in Anand.
Shashi blames it on director Hrishikesh Mukherjee, but what was the inside story? Did Shashi ‘inherit’ the lead role in Nasir Husaain’s Pyar ka Mausam from his elder brother Shammi, who had played the lead in Dil Deke Dekho and Teesri Manzil?
Yes, there are those anecdotes around the making of The Householder, Bombay Talkie, 36 Chowringhee Lane, Kalyug, Junoon, New Delhi Times, In Custody, Heat & Dust, Jinnah and a few others. But in a biography dedicated to one single person, the reader would expect the author to go to Red Rackham-ish depths into at least all the significant films.
Shashi Kapoor’s role as an assistant director in films like Post Box 999 and Shriman Satyawadi too find no mention.
Shashi Kapoor: The Householder, The Star seems to have been written with a fast-approaching deadline in mind. It is shallowly researched and jumps back-and-forth chronologically. Halfway into the 178-page manuscript, one stops expecting anything that even a casual follower of Hindi films would not know.
But there is always a scope for a second edition to set these right.
(Anirudha and Balaji, engineers by education and IT consultants by profession, are film addicts who find time to sing, quiz and discuss songs of the 1950s through to the 1980s. They won the National award for “Best writing on cinema” for their first book in 2012 : R D Burman, the Man the Music. Their 2nd book : Gaata Rahe Mera Dil, won the inaugural “Excellence in writing” award at the Jio MAMI film festival in 2015.)
(At The Quint, we question everything. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member today.)