One of the pivotal characters in Nandita Das’ Manto is Sunder Shyam Chadda, an actor who had a brief fling with movie stardom in the 1940s, and was Saadat Hasan Manto’s close friend and confidant. In the film, Das frames a conversation between the two as the spark that might have prompted Manto’s decision to emigrate to Pakistan post-Partition.
Tahir Raj Bhasin plays Shyam with a mix of comradely yearning and dapper affectedness typical of the mannered film stars of that era. Theirs was a Hindu-Muslim pairing, and a connection that was almost too tender, cemented over frivolous ‘Mantoisms’ (like ‘hiptullah’, popular once more) and a shared predilection for expensive liquor.
Untimely exit
Shyam’s early death in 1951 in an equestrian accident on the sets of Bibhuti Mitra’s Shabistan , when he was just 31, is depicted in the film as a fleeting newspaper headline that catches Manto’s eye belatedly. It’s a moment that underlines the utter irreconcilability of severed connections.
There is another pan-subcontinental legacy faintly linked to Shyam. His wife, Mumtaz ‘Taji’ Qureshi, moved to Pakistan and raised their children there. Shyam’s daughter is the noted Pakistan TV personality, Sahira Kazmi, who directed Dhoop Kinare , the Pakistani serial that was such a tremendous success on both sides of the border, avidly watched on bootleg VHS cassettes by Indians, with some video stores even maintaining long waiting lists, such was the demand. This was 1988, long before cable television rekindled old cultural linkages. The title is borrowed from a poem by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, and some of his geets were sung by Nayyara Noor, becoming signature tunes for a whole generation. Scripted by Hasina Moin, the serial featured Marina Khan and Sahira’s husband Rahat Kazmi.
Going strong
Thirty years on, Dhoop Kinare continues to hold on to its allure, especially in South Asian immigrant communities that have become a melting pot of sensibilities in a way the geographical neighbours haven’t quite managed even seven decades after Independence. Marina’s Zoya Ali Khan and Rahat’s Ahmer Ansari were doctors caught up in a star-crossed affair with shades of Pride and Prejudice .
Legacies handed down over generations play an important part in the serial. The family home that Ahmer lovingly built with his foster father is bequeathed by the latter to his granddaughter Zoya, child of the daughter he had once abandoned. This sows the seeds of discontent that make for a love story where adoration and resentment are equal players. Moin is certainly true to the tropes of romance, but her well-observed themes possess emotional gravitas, which might explain the longevity of Dhoop Kinare ’s appeal.
For Indians, attuned to Doordarshan’s social realist programming, this was a soap opera that married soft-focus romanticism with a progressive outlook — women as independent working professionals who were guided more by their own volition rather than societal pressures. Although the characters in Moin’s universe were decidedly upper class, their worlds lacked the feudal ostentatiousness of their Indian counterparts in cinema, or in the glitzy soaps soon to be imported from the West.
In Manto , the friendship between Manto and Shyam is almost a metaphor for the filial connection between two countries riven apart at the seams. Das infuses their scenes together with an emotional frisson that perhaps held no currency at a time when bloodshed was rife and identities were being desecrated. In many ways, Das’ biopic is an important document that encourages us to think about the pluralism and inclusiveness that is still an important part of the subcontinental psyche, obscured but not obliterated by petty politicking and raucous TV debates.
The writer sought out cinema that came at least two generations before him, even as a child. That nostalgia tripping has persisted for a lifetime.
