Celluloid betrayal

We need to preserve our cinematic heritage.

I was watching Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Namak Haraam the other day. This film is a key work of its time, for a number of reasons. For starters, it was the second movie — after Mukherjee’s Anand — to bring together Hindi cinema’s incumbent and future superstars (Rajesh Khanna and Amitabh Bachchan respectively), and it can be argued that the director’s use of their contrasting personalities represents a progression from the way he used them in the earlier film. (This is not to undermine Anand, but simply to point out that Khanna was more obviously the leading man and the focus of attention there.)

Namak Haraam (official English title “The Betrayal”) is one in a series of Mukherjee films — others include Chupke Chupke, Gol Maal and Baawarchi — that explore how a certain type of role-playing, even one that begins for selfish reasons, can turn out to be liberating, cathartic, perhaps even ennobling. The plot has Sonu (Khanna) taking up a job as a worker in the factory run by his rich friend Vicky (Bachchan) so that he can help Vicky get revenge on a union leader who had slighted him. But Sonu’s experiences living with the workers and their families has a transforming effect on him and changes the equations between the friends. This set-up is used to comment on the master-servant relationship, the class divide and the nature of soft socialism in the country — and all this is done not shrilly or didactically, but in the characteristic gentle Mukherjee style.

This film also marks one of Bachchan’s most interesting pre-stardom performances. It’s possibly the first time he played a character who could be described as a loose cannon; one sees here the seeds of the rage that would become familiar in his later “Vijay” roles. However, the anger in this case is driven not by righteous indignation but by the petulance of a spoilt rich boy who flies into a tantrum when things don’t go exactly as he wants them to.

The reason I’ve listed these points of interest is because I was dismayed by how bad the print of the film was, even on a DVD produced by a respected company. It was scratched or blurred in several places. Ugly spots appeared periodically, a couple of seconds of film were missing every now and again, and the sound quality was poor. In fact, throughout the second half, the sound wasn’t even in sync with the visuals — a problem with the DVD recording.

Which returns us to the question: whither film restoration? Internationally, the salvaging of movies is being taken very seriously. It’s encouraged and aided by prominent film personalities such as Martin Scorsese, and though it’s a demoralising job — given the thousands of negatives that are in a badly damaged state and the amount of time required — restorers work tirelessly to do the best they can. High-definition prints are then released in classy DVD packages that whet a viewer’s interest and bring the movies to a new audience.

I doubt we’ll have the resources or the technology for the same level of preservation in India anytime soon, but I have to say this: if the print of a film like Namak Haraam — less than 40 years old, and starring two of the giants of Hindi cinema, one beginning his decline, the other on the ascendancy — is in such a poor state, one shudders to think of the hundreds of low-profile gems that don’t feature big-name actors. Or films of a much earlier vintage, from the 1940s and 1950s. It’s already a matter of record that the original print of Alam Ara, the first Indian talkie, no longer exists. Much of our cinematic heritage could be lost before we can say “decaying nitrate”.

[Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based freelance writer]