One of our first “dudes” waves goodbye

Joy Mukherjee: 24 February, 1939 – 9 March, 2012

To look back at the transition of Hindi cinema from the 1950s to the 1960s is to witness the transformation of chalk to a particular kind of cheese. Here were Dilip Kumar, Dev Anand and Raj Kapoor (along with Balraj Sahni and Ashok Kumar), steadying the escapist tendencies of our mainstream movies with the ballast of Indian reality. And then came the heroes who blithely jettisoned every semblance of real-world concern and steered their vehicles into the purest realms of fantasy. Not for them the myriad shades of grey that shaded the most prominent protagonists of the black-and-white era. The films were now in colour, and an entire generation of young Indians, far removed from the sombre shadow of Independence and the Partition, demanded sunny stories celebrating life, youth, carefree living, and the rock ‘n’ roll pictures from Hollywood (Jamboree, Rock Around the Clock) that were essentially a set of music videos taped together with the merest pretence of narrative.

Joy Mukherjee, who died yesterday in Mumbai at the age of 73, was one of the leading lights of this realigned firmament. He hailed from a film family (his father was the producer Sashadhar Mukherjee; his uncles were Ashok Kumar and Kishore Kumar), and he made his debut in 1960, with Love in Simla. The title told the audience everything they needed to know about what they were in for: a love story set in Simla. (Another love story, a few years later, was set in Tokyo. You don’t need to be reminded what that film was called.) Love in Simla, which also featured a first-time heroine named Sadhana, was essentially a Cinderella story, where a plain Jane gets a makeover and ends up in the arms of Prince Charming, and the film’s enchanted aura settled on Mukherjee’s biggest hits. Shagird. Ek Musafir Ek Hasina. Phir Wohi Dil Laya Hoon. Ziddi. Fairy-tale locales. The tiniest twist in the tale. A buoyant ride into the sunset. Happily-ever-after.

These films demanded of Mukherjee not the ability to portray complex characters but the attitude of a clotheshorse. (And the kinds of films he repeatedly worked in suggest that he had a good estimation of his limitations.) Nobody went to a Joy Mukherjee movie to see him act. They went to see how he looked and imagine themselves in his lucky shoes, romancing the likes of Saira Banu and Asha Parekh. Mukherjee had the height and the looks of a ramp-walk Romeo, and he – with his colleagues from the era (especially Biswajeet, who, in many ways, was Mukherjee’s twin, both for the films he appeared in and the roles he played in them) – transformed the Hindi-film hero from a flapping figure in a kurta or ballooning baggy pants to a cool customer in form-fitting clothes. T-shirts. Sweaters. Cigarette pants. Rakish hats. If nothing else, Joy Mukherjee will be remembered as one of the first “dudes” of our cinema.

But there is something else, of course. He had the good fortune to burst into Hindi cinema in an era of glorious music, where – even today, after all these years – the name of an actor conjures up a ceaseless stream of hits. Bahut shukriya badi meherbani from Ek Musafir Ek Hasina, Woh hain zara khafa khafa from Shagird, Husn se chand bhi sharmaya hai from Door ki Awaz, Aa jaa re aa zara from Love in Tokyo, where he woos Asha Parekh in a snazzy printed shirt that looks like the love child of an orchid garden and a Persian carpet. Joy Mukherjee’s reign was short-lived, and he switched to a mostly ill-fated stint in directing as his audience switched to younger stars like Dharmendra and Rajesh Khanna. But it is as an exuberant musical star that he will pass into history, someone whose gift to his audience was exactly what his name promised.

An edited version of this piece can be found here.

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Posted in: Cinema: Hindi