Biradari (1966)

A confection that may not suit all palates. Although my own was initially satisfied, it was frustrating to discern the outlines of a near-classic here, restrained from real excellence by a few peculiarities of storytelling style plus a poorly handled heroine. Faryal is done no favors here. As soon as one thinks up a better way for things to have shaken out, what one has been handed no longer satiates. Ah, well! The rest was still a delight. Krishan Chander and Ram Kamlani wrote the screenplay from a story by O. P. Datta; Kamlani produced and directed the film for Gope Productions.

Rajan (Shashi Kapoor), who is a shoe salesman, hooks Seema (Faryal) up with a new pair of chappals. Seema, whose mother owns a building, hooks him up with a new apartment. At any rate, she attempts to; Rajan only slimly succeeds in talking said mother (Lalita Pawar, devoid of character name) into letting Seema keep her word. She’s less a matronly landlady than a patronlike one, regarding her tenants as something close to vassals whose wellbeing she is honor-bound to ensure–in return, of course, for their loyal tolerance of her own eccentricities. Sensing her tenants would be booted onto the footpath in favor of some newer, niftier construction project, Lalita denies all offers to buy the land her building occupies. Her equal and opposite reaction is developer Bihari (Pran), whose own professional honor is affronted by Lalita’s unbudgeableness. He is so tetchy about her refusals to sell as to actually go undercover, so to speak, as a lodger in the chawl while strategizing some way to buy it up after all. The longtime tenants, led by rotiwala Chandu (Mehmood) and dudhwala Ram Murthy (Kanhaiyalal), are other than welcoming of this newest neighbor. Whereas complicity in the anti-Bihari agitations fully naturalizes Rajan into the neighborhood, Seema is of a mood to side with anyone who sides against her mother. Nor does it take Bihari long to identify Seema as a chink in the building’s communal spirit, or to start scheming his way into the line of inheritance for this plum piece of real estate.

I appreciated that the denizens of this storybook chawl make the effort to be good to one another without precisely liking each other. Rajan, a little jokingly but also out of real exasperation, suggests dividing up his zone of the apartment from Chandu and Ram Murthy’s. If by drawing a line countries are created, why wouldn’t it be the same with rooms? The other two are opposed to lines outright and only sporadically constrained by the walls of the place; in the tamasha-style song “Beta Jamure Ke Duniya Ko Lalkar Ke,” Chandu refers to the “nafrat ki deewaar” against which people needlessly break their heads. Rajan eventually gives up. Circumscribing one’s self into an ever more rarefied corner could not provide reliable insulation from Chandu and Ram Murthy’s irritations, nor from other unpleasant people. All it might accomplish would be abnegation from their “mutual watch and care,” to adopt a Christian phraseology. Even their first morning sharing an apartment with Rajan, having teased him mercilessly through the previous evening, Chandu and Ram Murthy consider it a matter of course to fix up a breakfast for him to eat when his much-later workday begins. Though it might not be advisable to be so up in other people’s business as Lalita is, other characters understandably admire and imitate her sense of responsibility over everyone in, so to speak, the shared bedroom of the world.

While tonal variety is a matter of course in massy films, this one seems to actually occupy two narrative registers simultaneously. Its pared-down plot gives the feel of a parable; the first analogy that came to my mind in that regard, summoned by the class-minded moral and presence of Shashi Kapoor, was Yeh Dil Kisko Doon. Yet characters are not archetypal. Lalita was immediately identifiable as the moral core of the film so, based on the style of storytelling, I expected her to be a benignly caring mother to her community; in fact, her kindnesses are almost perversely un-nice. When she finally agrees to rent a spot to Rajan, she refuses the month’s advance he offers as a matter of pride. She has to pass the door of another tenant on her way to settle Rajan in. This fellow has been out of work and in arrears for months, which does not prevent Lalita from demanding his back rent immediately. Upon realizing that one of the children in the family is sick, however, Lalita stomps across the balcony to demand a deposit from bewildered Rajan after all, immediately delivering it back to the other tenant’s wife. You would need the patience of a saint to abide this particular saint! Individual scenes of Biradari read as realist social comedy, while those scenes strung together still form something out of Aesop. I found that combination of elements puzzling without being overtly off-putting, though I expect it would be so for some viewers. The fabulous mechanics of the film’s conclusion, for example, deliver a cogent emotional arc and bring to glorious visible reality an article that, till then, had merely been a motif in characters’ conversations. That storytelling belongs to fable-land–a pleasant place, surely, but scarcely the native environment of the people who populate Biradari.

That admixture leaves me reluctant to recommend this film to others. What prevented me from unreservedly loving it myself is, alas, the Seema Problem. The money-mindedness that leaves her vulnerable to Bihari’s manipulations comes off as uncomplicatedly, uninterestingly selfish. One wonders how Lalita, Rajan, or anybody else would be inclined to stick by her once her greed turns so visibly harmful; my own patience for her was up about half an hour in. Her most emblematic grievance is when she rips a shellac record off her old horn-topped phonograph, pouting that all her friends own a proper radiogram these days.¹ I think I glimpse the outlines of a more engaging Seema just under the surface of the film. Her meddling in Lalita’s administration of the chawl might have been played less as straight avarice and more as eagerness for the responsibilities she’s been denied. Late in the film, when Seema has proven herself decidedly untrustworthy, Lalita issues an overt injunction: so long as she’s alive, Seema will have nothing to do with managing the property. Yet Seema has been doing just that surreptitiously through the whole film, since back when she first shoehorned Rajan into the building. She had been eager simply to show prospective tenants around unoccupied rooms when Lalita was away. Naturally Seema would want to be involved in the building, her primary rival for Lalita’s attention. Besides courting her mother’s interests, she has also presumably spent her life watching the rent income flood straight back out of the household according to the whims of maa’s unpredictable charity. Developing these threads could also have made for an engaging parallel to Rajan, whom we learn in passing aspires for a career independent of his parents’ business. Seema’s greedy of him, too. She tells Rajan she’s only jealous of everybody because she loves him too much—common enough as a filmi sentiment, but I don’t believe I’d heard it from a heroine before.

A confident lead actress might have added greater depth of motivation or an additional veneer of charisma sufficient to make Seema appealing. Faryal is terribly timid—it’s difficult to blame her, given that Biradari was her second film!—and fares poorly outside of the initial meet-cute segment. There, at least, she has some of the charm I expect from her mature roles. When they first meet in the train car, he offers her a section of his newspaper, chucks it into her lap, and curls up cheerfully to read the remainder. They tease each other by both “reading” imagined stories out of their respective segments of the paper. I am surprised to announce, however, that Mehmood and Kanhaiyalal were obviously the MVPs of this movie. There is so much of Mehmood in this film—his enormous eyebrows won’t stop wriggling—and almost all of it had me cackling. He and Kanhaiyalal (“malik” and “taata,” as the characters refer to each other) make for an adorable pair of chums and played perfectly first against and later with Shashi as their straight man. The minute politics of their room-sharing situation had me in stitches, not least because all parties involved usually have a good point. When they are squabbling over lights-out, Rajan would seem to have the home-turf advantage with the switch being in his corner of the room—but the light fixture itself is not, and Chandu is not above unscrewing the bulb. Without doubt, this is the Mehmood performance I’ve most wholeheartedly enjoyed.

I was excited to see Chiragupt’s name as composer in the credits. Helen’s languorous sharaabi song “Saagar Ko Choom” and the tragicomic “Dekhi Anadi Tori Preet Re” (in which Chandu laments that his fishmonger girlfriend is tormenting him like a squirming fish!) both featured prominently on my playlist after watching this film. My favorite song, though, has to be “Tum Jo So Ho Lekin Khuda Toh Nahin.” When Bihari throws a housewarming party, Chandu and Ram Murthy—after quizzing Rajan on the meaning of this unfamiliar term—host a competing “cold” party of their own. They assert that the rooftop ought to belong equally to all tenants, and they are bally well going to draw a chalk line down it—yes, like Rajan tried to do to the apartment once—and have their own shindig on one such delineated side. Bihari smokes aloofly about it and Seema, embarrassed, stays glued to his side—but most of the his invitees are perfectly happy to jive to Chandu and Rajan’s song. The Western-style band that Bihari had hired joins in on the instrumental interludes. I love the cute melody that one of the tenants plays on the whistle, which transitions smoothly into a swing-style break from the saxophonists in the band. Honorable mention for when Rajan skips excitedly through Lalita’s apartment singing “Hum Toh Mohabbat Karega” and bearing two tickets to the “first-class” film Hatimtai Ki Chhathi Aulad. “Color picture hai, Cinemascope mein!” He rattles off a series of stars, touring through Shashi’s own family… aur do kaun hai? Dilip Kumar, Dev Anand. Suffice to say that this fanciful picture is not to be confounded with the perfectly real 1965 Randhawa-Mumtaz flick Son of Hatimtai!

¹ All right, I’ll grant that I laughed when, borrowing one of her mother’s saris for a function, she anticipates being made fun of for wearing “the style of 1857.”