IPTA@75
Gautam Kaul
BALRAJ Sahni has remained a ghostly figure in the history of
Indian cinema. This is because he was for most of the time away from the gossip
circuit. He hardly gave any personalised interviews and there was no publicist
who promoted him to producers. He found work from those who belonged to the
theatre movement in the country and from friends who respected his talent.
Garam Hawa
He is remembered best today for his last film, Garam Hawa.
But his innings in cinema have been long and meritorious. Balraj was not his
original name. His parents named him Yudhishthir and the name remained until he
went to school. His ancestral home was in Amritsar, where he spent his early
years with his brother Bhisham, and his sister. Balraj was a studious child and
studied long for his first postgraduate degree in English from the Panjab
University, Lahore. He followed this with a graduation course in Hindi and
moved up to get another postgraduate degree in Hindi. In 1936 the "over
educated" Balraj married Damyanti, and moved to Shantiniketan to
work as a teacher in both English and Hindi.
In 1938, Balraj was noticed by Mahatma Gandhi who asked him
to join his secretariat. In 1939, Gandhiji recommended him for a job in the BBC
in London in the Hindi language broadcast section. He sailed from Bombay
and joined his new duties just before things became less certain in Europe and
England. When War broke out in 1939, Balraj was telling his Indian
listeners in India on the rise of Hitler in Germany and his campaigns.
It was while he was a staff broadcaster in BBC, that he was
joined by another woman broadcaster, the daughter of wealthy parents and
a bohemian. She had moved out of her parents’ home early in life to roam the
world becoming a failed actress, a better pamphleteer and a well-respected film
editor. That was Marie Seton.Within BBC, the erudite Balraj caught Marie's
attention, and she invited him to meet her friends. The only thing that
interested Balraj was her film connection, and Marie obliged. She introduced to
Balraj Sahni the world of Soviet Cinema and the works of the film maker S.
Eisenstein. There was also more European cinema, which Balraj saw. The
more he saw the cinema of cause, Balraj was hooked in his search to study the
works of Marx and Engels. Between 1941 and 1943, he was transformed into a
committed communist worker and returned to India in the end of 1943. He joined
the Indian People Theatre Association (IPTA) as a regular worker and a
card holder of the CPI.
Leftist thinkers
Through IPTA, Sahni entered the circle of Leftist thinkers,
writers and artists and became an associate of Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, Munshi Prem
Chand, Salil Chowdhury, Tripti Mitra, Badal Sircar and others. He acted
in plays created by IPTA members, but found he had limited audiences for the
messages that were important. IPTA also started making feature films. The first
IPTA production, Insaaf, in which Balraj performed failed. IPTA moved to
Calcutta for the next production and made Dharti Ke Lal in1946. The film was
directed by K.A. Abbas and narrated the real story behind the Great
Famine of Bengal in which more than one million poor people died of hunger.
In 1947, Balraj lost his wife Damyanti to death. It was the
first big loss that he suffered. His relatives suggested he remarry for the
sake of his small children and he married one of his cousins, Santosh Chandhok.
But Balraj did not forget the famine. He became more determined to use the
medium of cinema to move further into the masses and kept a minimum time
devoted to working amidst labour and peasants. During the shooting of the
film Dharti ke Lal, Balraj Sahni came to know more leftist artists working in
Calcutta. His associates in IPTA were equally involved in theatre and
pamphleteering and Balraj eked out a small living from these activities.
Do Bigha Zameen
In 1952, when the first International Film Festival was
organised, Balraj was also present in many of these film shows.
Some of the film themes fortified his resolve to engage with meaningful
cinema. Salil Chowdhury, also from the IPTA repertoire, wrote a
short story and Balraj was asked to play the main role of a farmer who had to abandon
his fields due to poverty and move to Calcutta to work as a rickshaw-puller.
The film was Do Bigha Zameen.
Balraj practised for a whole week to perfect the style of
pulling the rickshaw properly and in the crucial scene he also got
injured. This film rode to a silver jubilee run, and won at the state
awards. It was shown in 1955 to Marshall Stalin in Moscow, who was less
impressed and called the film, “a pseudo-socialist documentary”. The remark
hurt Balraj who expected a more sympathetic observation from his communist
icon.
The 1950s saw Balraj portraying varied roles. He
was associated with some silver jubilee or important films, like Seema (1954),
Aulad (1954) Pardesi (1957), Sone ki Chidiya, Kathputli (1958), Choti behan and
Satta Bazaar (1959). Pardesi, an Indo-Soviet film production anchored by K.A.
Abbas, despite being in colour and cinemascope, failed to impress the
Indian audiences but had a good commercial run in Soviet Russia.
Balraj Sahni the writer
He wrote a series of books in Punjabi. Mera Pakistani
Safarnama and Mera Russia Safarnama are considered good writing. Balraj also
took to directing IPTA plays and his most successful directional work was
Zubaida. He also attempted a film as director in Lal Batti, which was a
failed venture. However, writing of the screenplay of film Baazi,
directed by Guru Dutt, brought him prominence. Balraj was interested in
improving the working conditions of the labour involved in film studios. He
took issues with the government on matters that agitated him. He
also suffered imprisonment for his Leftist views.
During the post Sino-Indian war, Balraj found himself in a
dissenting position to that of the the CPI on the war. He accepted a
role in Haqeeqat (1963-64), which depicted a pro-India position and his leftist
colleagues resented his participation. When Jawaharlal Nehru died, Balraj
was vocal in his praise for Nehru's contribution to nation building. Balraj was
criticised for this praise within IPTA. Balraj continued to be associated with
meaningful cinema from Bombay, but he was not much in demand for commercial
films.
He remained dependent on the goodwill of his leftist friends
for his livelihood. As we look back on his film career, we find that he is
present in most of important films of the era. In 1969, the actor was given the
Padma Shri, the only official award. However, popular awards still eluded
Balraj.
Political work & fruitful
decade
In 1970, he worked with P.K. Vasudevan Nair to create a new
Leftist youth organisation, the All-India Youth Federation, the youth wing of
the CPI, with him as its first president. In 1972, he was invited
by the
student's union of Jawaharlal Nehru University, a leftist stronghold, to
address the annual student's convocation. His speech is considered a landmark
event in the University's campus politics.
The decade of the 1960s was most the fruitful for him and he
played character roles. Big and small films like Waqt, Ek Phool Do Maali, Ghar
Sansaar, Hindustan Ki Kasam, Pavitra Paapi, Aman, Naunihal, Aaye Din Bahaar Ke,
and two Punjabi films — Satluj De Kande and Nanak Dhukhiya Sab Sansaar.
Anuradha, Kabuliwala and Garam Hawa are Indian cinema’s top-of-the shelf
classics. He acted in a total of 93 films, including two which were released
after his untimely death. As work in cinema tapered off, Balraj also took a
backseat in life.
He died of a broken heart
Following the India-Pakistan War of 1972, he took the vocal
political position & endorsed Indira Gandhi's waging a war against Pakistan
to liberate East Pakistan. The CPI strongly disapproved of this and felt Balraj
was not a faithful and loyal member of the Communist Party of India. A
resolution was passed to throw him out. The job to inform Balraj that he was no
more a member of the CPI, was given to some of his closest friends in Bombay.
They came to him and handed over the copy of the resolution. He had recently
suffered an emotional setback due to the untimely death of his daughter,
Shabnam. He suffered a massive heart attack from the compounded stress. As he
lay on his deathbed, Balraj asked his wife to get a copy of Das Kapital, the
communist movement's bible and put it beside his pillow. The same night, Balraj
died of a broken heart!
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