Montage of a Bollywood legend

Book review of A Patchwork Quilt: A Collage of My Creative Life

A black-and-white photograph from the sets of the 1981 hit film  Chashme Buddoor has circulated on social media for a while. In it, director Sai Paranjpye demonstrates how to light a cigarette with some style while actors Farooq Shaikh and Saeed Jaffrey look on. For a keen lover of Bollywood films, Sai Paranjpye is a legend — and for good reasons. Her films such as Sparsh (1980), Katha (1983), and Saaz (1998), created a niche for themselves among the formula films of the 1970s and 1980s, with their realistic, empathetic humour. They not only brought in bagsful of national and international awards but also set the box office jingling.

Their director herself was a trailblazer of sorts — when she was making these films, few women helmed productions in Bombay. 

Ms Paranjpye is a sort of predecessor to Mira Nair, Deepa Mehta, Zoya Akhtar, Nandita Das and many other women who direct films now. The book under review is an excellent addition to the large number of biographies and autobiographies — most indifferent, some excellent — of Bollywood personalities that have been published in recent years. Kishwar Desai’s The Longest Kiss: The Life and Times of Devika Rani and Yasser Usman’s Guru Dutt: An Unfinished Story have been published over the past few weeks.

A film lover or Bollywood historian would find enough in this book to satisfy them. Each of Ms Paranjpye’s famous films have a chapter devoted to them. These chapters provide a window into the processes of one of Bollywood’s most accomplished directors. Take, for instance, the following example from the sets of  Sparsh, where Ms Paranjpye was directing two of India’s leading actors — Naseeruddin Shah and Shabana Azmi:

“Nasser was applauded for his role in Sparsh, and rightly so. But Shabana did an equally compelling job, without any outer aid. An amusing incident will be ample proof of her talent.

“Anirudh leaves after breaking off their engagement. The camera is on Kavita.

 ‘Will she not weep?’ asked Shabana.

 ‘Well, not copiously,’ I said. ‘Perhaps just one rebellious tear.’

 ‘Right!’ said Shabana. ‘One tear! Left eye or right?’

 ‘Umm… make it the left.’ I laughed.

 “The camera whirred. Shabana in close-up. Her face bewildered. Her eyes brimming with tears. One tear escapes and trickles down her cheek. Her left cheek.”

A Patchwork Quilt: A Collage of My Creative Life 

Author: Sai Paranjpye

Publisher: HarperCollins

Pages: 438; Price: Rs 599

There are several other humorous incidents as well, such as when Tanuja  drives Ms Paranjype to the house of actor Sanjeev Kumar. “Tanuja drove herself. I will always remember the drive from Santacruz to Khar,” writes Ms Paranjype. “If any other driver or pedestrian crossed the path, she would stick her head out and let fly a most colourful barrage, cursing his maternal ancestry. I consider myself quite blasé and shockproof, but even I flinched a few times to hear Tanuja’s colourful vocabulary.”

 But before brushing shoulders with famous actors and directing them, Ms Paranjpye had a long apprenticeship in theatre, radio and TV. She was once a student in one of the early batches of the National School of Drama (NSD) in New Delhi, where she was under the tutelage of the legendary Ebrahim Alkazi. Credited with mentoring generations of Indian stage and film actors — Shah, Om Puri, Manohar Singh and Rohini Hattangadi to name a few — Alkazi provided Indian theatre with a new metaphor.

 Ms Paranjype provides us with a glimpse into his working process: “Seeing Alkazi tackle the production of a play — any play — was an eye-opener.  …Rehearsals of an Alkazi production began four months before the show was due to open. And that, too, with full regalia. Lights, sound FX, music, décor, props, costume — everything had to be in place. Every detail was meticulously worked out. Even a shoelace was scrutinized.”

The greatest strength of her autobiography, however, is unflinching commitment to truth — like her films. “Truth be told, I was never an Alkazi favourite,” writes Paranjype. “I like to think that he would turn to students he could shape in his mould, rather than those who had some individuality of their own. I may well be wrong. But the fact remains that I decided to be the Eklavya to his Dronacharya.” Dronacharya Alkazi would have been proud of Eklavya Paranjype.

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The reviewer has published a novel, Ritual.