Daaru as dawa – On liquor and its many uses in cinema, especially popular Hindi cinema

By Jai Arjun Singh

For someone who grew up in the shrine of popular Hindi cinema in the 1980s, here is an indelible moment. Amrish Puri and Prem Chopra are seated in a dim-lit bar – the former looking villainous as can be, the latter a bit subdued by his own high standards of leering badness. Moments earlier they ran into sweet, fair-complexioned Meenakshi Seshadri. Now, as a waiter comes bearing a Chivas Regal bottle, Puri – in his booming voice – demands a Black Dog instead. Chopra asks for the reason behind this choice, and Puri replies with the immortal words: “Jiss din main koi gori titli dekh leta hoon, mere khoon mein sainkdon kaale kutte bhaunkhne lagte hain. Uss din main Black Dog peeta hoon.” (The English translation, which does no justice to the line, or to its grand delivery: “The day I see a white butterfly, many black dogs start barking together in my blood. Then I order a Black Dog instead.”)

This has to be the rapiest product plug ever, says a comment below the video, and who could disagree with that assessment? Even though this is a respectable mainstream film for the time – the Amitabh Bachchan-starrer Shahenshah, directed by Tinnu Anand, with a story credit for Jaya Bachchan (one assumes she didn’t come up with the above dialogue!).

But then this was also a cinema of archetype and myth, with characters who were neatly classifiable as heroes and villains, victims and aggressors, as opposed to multi-dimensional people. In Shahenshah’s Wikipedia entry, Amrish Puri’s character JK is described simply as “the crime boss of Bombay” – which is exactly what he is. No detailing necessary.

And in these films, alcohol often became an easy shorthand for vice. An unforgettable scene in the 1971 Elaan gives us, in just a few seconds, these wondrous sights: a topless Madan Puri (Amrish’s older brother) on a massage table, white-skinned girls in floral bikinis cooing at him, fake currency notes hanging from a ceiling… and on a nearby table a Vat 69 bottle, the ultimate symbol of perdition in a time of import restrictions and nation-betraying smugglers. But similar things could be found in dozens of other films. Dons stocked illegally procured liquor in their ornate lairs (to go with the spiky walls, rotating floors, acid pools or predatory sharks that made up the rest of the decor). Clinking Scotch glasses and cackling, they made diabolical plans. Their molls, including the film’s main vamp, imbibed too – they were clearly defined counterpoints to the virginal good girl, the heroine.

However, despite its archetypes and formulas, popular Hindi cinema could encompass different modes and provide multiple energies within the same film. In Deewaar, the brooding anti-hero Vijay shares a drink in bed with his girlfriend Anita, a woman with an unsavoury past, initially identifiable as a vamp or at least a femme fatale. On the surface, their cocktail of pre-marital sex, cigarettes, liquor and atheism (Vijay stays pointedly away from temples) spells Vice – we know these are not goody-two-shoes protagonists, they won’t get a happy ending. The one time Anita says no to Vijay pouring her a drink, it is because she’s pregnant, and hoping to enter a life of social legitimacy. And yet, even when they are living outside the law, they are sympathetic figures, and we have more emotional investment in them than in the conventional romantic couple elsewhere in the film.

Meanwhile, an exuberant, fun-loving personality like Helen could cause us to rethink our notions about the vamp – especially when she was lighting up the screen, whiskey glass in hand, in musical sequences that transcended the rest of the film. Helen could briefly even tempt the Good Heroine into her shadowy world, as in a Gumnaam song where her character gets leading lady Nanda drunk and hic-hic-hiccing away.

There are other special cases when it comes to the drinking woman. The once-straitlaced Choti Bahu (Meena Kumari) in Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam isn’t someone you’d expect to become alcoholic (she goes down that slippery slope to retain the companionship of her drunkard husband), but when this happens she remains tragic and haunting for the viewer (even as she is condemned by her milieu). There are mild parallels here, incidentally, with an American film made that same year, 1962 – Days of Wine and Roses, in which a couple sink together into an alcoholic vortex.

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A few other manifestations of the Hindi-movie drinker bypassed the good-bad binary. There were those who were seen as existing outside the Indian mainstream – as in the stereotypical portrayal of Anglo-Indians as jolly eccentrics who always had a bottle in their hand (Prem Nath as the titular heroine’s father in Bobby, Om Prakash in a similar part in Julie). There were lovable character actors like Johnny Walker (supposedly a teetotaller in real life) and Keshto Mukherjee, who could slur and sway and bumble comically without ever having to present the darker aspects of alcoholism.

And above all, to use a phrase of the time, there was the tragic hero or anti-hero, rendered brooding or self-pitying by unrequited love – the Devdas template, recycled through Indian-film history – or by the more general barbs of life, as was the case with Bachchan’s Angry Young Men. Set against this, and often going alongside it, was the funny-drunk hero – though to pull this off you need someone with the comic skills of a Dharmendra (on the water tank in Sholay, or going crazy in the “Yamla Pagla Deewana” song in Pratigya with one hooch bottle tucked into his crotch and another in his hands). Or a Bachchan, who famously became a one-man army, often balancing sad-drunk and funny-drunk in the same film.

This brings me to another point: alcoholism in cinema – even the addiction variety, not just social drinking – can be more “fun” than alcoholism in life. As a child I delighted in Bachchan’s many antics in films like Naseeb, and adored the “chooha-billi” song from Sharaabi – sung by a drunk hero, extolling the virtues of inebriation – despite the fact that in the real world I was frightened of an alcoholic father capable of violence. Someone else in this situation may have been badly triggered, but for me the drunkenness of characters in films was something abstract and removed; in a way it may also have been therapeutic, substituting the “fun” drunkard on screen for the one I was living with.

Naturally, as Hindi cinema has moved towards greater realism and sociological detail in the past two decades, there have been more nuanced depictions of drinkers: films about people succumbing under work stress or peer pressure, or using liquor to submerge their loneliness (as the sad old professor, persecuted for his sexual orientation, does in Aligarh). But my childlike preference remains for films that manage to incorporate a certain over-the-topness in their liquor scenes.

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Thematically, alcohol is associated with certain cinematic genres or sub-genres. For instance, drunkenness is a common motif in films with a redemption arc – where a washed-up cop or sports coach gets one more chance. Or a bomb-dismantler, as in the 1949 British film The Small Back Room, made by the great team of Michael Powell-Emeric Pressburger. What is notable here is that kitchen-sink realism merges with surrealist fantasy. Though mostly a gritty, dialogue-driven production, the film contains a nightmare scene with imagery worthy of Dali: conveying the hero’s fevered state of mind through twisted shadows, a ticking clock, and an impossibly giant, misshapen bottle of liquor.

Then there is the crime film. If the smuggling of vilayati sharaab was a trope of 1970s Hindi cinema, internationally too alcohol has long been associated with the gangster genre. One can even argue that this major Hollywood form was founded on the liquor trade, with the first wave of 1930s gangster films (among them The Public Enemy and Scarface) dealing directly with Prohibition. Though perhaps the wittiest, most economical depiction of that era’s zeitgeist comes in the opening sequence of a much later comedy, Billy Wilder’s Some Like it Hot. This is an almost wordless car chase featuring a vehicle that seems to be carrying a coffin – until bullets hit the wood, liquid spills out, the lid is opened to reveal not a body but dozens of bottles… and then the words “Chicago, 1929” appear, telling us all we need to know.

For every instance of liquor-consumption being associated with style or coolness – take James Bond and those shaken-not-stirred martinis – there have been reminders, even in popular films, of the ill effects: in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, Cary Grant –more suave than any Bond could be – is force-fed alcohol by the villains, to make plausible their story that he accidentally drove his car off a cliff. There is a caveat here, though: while the film makes it clear that Grant has a drinking problem, part of the reason why he survives the murder attempt is that he is a habitual drinker with a very high threshold.

Many films touch on this aspect of liquor – that it is harmful in obvious ways, but nourishing or life-enhancing in other ways. The Danish film Another Round – about a group of teachers in a mid-life crisis – presents a view of alcohol as something that can destroy lives, must be moderated, but can also make life more focused – and bring you closer to your real, unbridled self.

Which brings us back to popular Hindi cinema and its own particular brand of “nasha” – offering escape into a realm where anything seems possible. Think about it: many of our song-and-dance sequences can be viewed as constructs of an imagination high on possibilities. Or consider a two-fisted hero beating up the bad guys to restore order to an unfair world, and then in the next scene staggering about playing the fool. What if all that justice-dispensing is the fevered imagining of a man who has been turned into a superhero (in his own head) by booze? With such subtextual analysis, even a deliriously over-the-top Manmohan Desai film can seem like stark realism.

And so, let the last word belong to a legendary character actor. In Amar Prem, as a pani-puri vendor is about to put imli ka pani into the hollow “puri” for Om Prakash, the latter stops him, extracts a whiskey flask and says: here, use some of this “pani” too. Masala cinema and liquor makes for an equally pungent combination.