As I write this, my city, Mumbai, is holding its collective breath. The great monsoon drama is building up, clouds massing on the horizon, sudden gusts of cooler breezes stirring up the dust of May, but no rain. For most old Hindi film fans, the iconic rain song would be, I suppose, Raj Kapoor’s Barsaat Mein Humse Mile Tum Sajan…forgetting perhaps that the entire song passes without a drop of rain falling.[1]
Nor is there a drop of rainwater through the whole of Ab ke sajan saawan mein from Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Chupke Chupke of 1975, which is set in a middle-class drawing room where a young woman declares her passions with only a trace of Sharmila Tagorean coyness. By contrast, there is not a word about the rain in the lyrics of that quintessential rain song Pyar hua ikraar hua from Shri 420 (1955) which ends with three little Kapoors in Duckback raincoats. Then there was Dum dum diga diga — truly Raj Kapoor, that quintessential Mumbai mulga (boy), understood what the rain meant to the city.
There is such a host of lovely semi-classical songs about the rain but one of my favourites is from Parakh (Bimal Roy, 1960): Barkha bahaar aayi, ras ki puhaar laayi. And should you want to hear a rain song that plays on the Tansen lighting the lamps and his daughters bringing the rain myth, try Lapak Jhapak Tu Aa Re Badarwa with David in jail singing up a storm. This is Boot Polish and when the singer has brought the clouds and the rain, when he has made it rain—with another convict playing the koel—he remembers his young friends, their vulnerability to the rain. It is a moment that we should all think about when the drumming of rain on the chhajjas brings to mind only hot chai and onion pakoras; millions of others in our cities will huddle under the ubiquitous blue plastic sheets.
Rain dances, deep lyrics
While we are waiting for the rain, I am cast back to the waiting in Shor (Manoj Kumar, 1972), a film we all seem to have forgotten except when it comes to antaakshari. Halfway through a brutal strike, there is a moment when the food has run out and the water taps are dry. And then the rains come down and the tension is released in a full-fledged Bacchanalia. Of course, it is a wet-sari sequence but perhaps you should look at it again[2] simply because it is a study in contrasts. Most rain dances were sexual fantasies played out for the audience to watch as the heroine’s clothes began to get stuck to her body. By contrast, here, Jaya Bhaduri walks through the sequence decorously draped from neck to knee. The camera is respectful of this. It is the extras who take the brunt of the male gaze.
I remember seeing the film for the first time in a small theatre in Dadar called Sharda. I think, even then, I was struck by the lyrics by Inderjit Singh Tulsi.
Paani re paani tera rang kaisa
Jisme milaaye bane us jaisa
That seemed deep but then it was still the era of the great lyricists, the Urdu poets from North India, the progressives who made their living by writing songs for the crass commercial films of Bollywood (how one longs for them now). The lines go on:
Is duniyaa mein jeenewaale aise bhi hai jeete
Rookhi-sookhi khaate hai aur thanda paani peete
Teri ek ghoont se milta hai Jannat kaa aaraam
Oh paani, paani re paani
The poor? Can you imagine the poor getting a mention in a Yash Johar film? But then this was Manoj Kumar, the director who would give us Roti Kapda aur Makaan two years later which ran for more than a hundred weeks in a city where the cost of living has always been a brutal balancing act for everyone except the super-rich who have always been working long hours to keep the imbalance. There is another line in the song that makes my heart ache. Water is compared to Duniya banaanewaala Rab jaisa and I think, yes, water and faith, mingling easily, and Philip Larkin comes to mind:
If I were called in
To construct a religion
I should make use of water.
(Water)
But more than that it reminds us of a prelapsarian Bollywood which was wedded to the idea of a syncretic India, a land where we Amar, Akbar, Anthony (Manmohan Desai, 1977) could coexist all together. This is not to say that there were no bigots in the 1970s; it was just that they did not get to spread their poison. The money, even the callous, let’s-put-in-one-more-song money was on the idea of India where we could much more than live with each other, we could love each other. Today, the same money wants to back savage attacks on minority communities. How’s the josh, Bollywood? What happened to your participation in nation-building?
Dark side of water, mischief in rain
That was not the first use of rain. Mother India (Mehboob Khan, 1957) can be read as a paean to the elements: there is the earth that the aged Radha raises to her face in the opening sequence where she is invited to inaugurate the opening of a dam which will make the villagers less dependent on rain, perhaps but also signals the Nehruvian vision of the dams as the new temples of India. This is water restrained and put to work but the film has shown us the dark side of water, the torrential rains that come down bringing snakes and hunger and which drives her, almost, into the moneylender’s arms. Finally, there is the fire at the end, the haystacks burning in a terrifying ring that might have cost Nargis her life but won her a real-life husband.
At the other end of the spectrum of gravitas was Ek Ladki Bheegi Bhaagi si[3] with Kishore Kumar and Madhubala. The camera stays with Kishore Kumar who could conjure mischief out of a spanner and a smile. For those of us who remember, this has another level of poignancy. Madhubala was one of Kishore Kumar’s bandariyas—she was also from Bandra—the woman he married when he knew she was dying.
Rain and romance have a natural connection. One of the lovely songs of viraha from Pakeezah (Kamal Amrohi, 1972), Mausam hai aashiqana has the camera pan over clouds until it comes to rest on Meena Kumari warning us:
Kali ghata ke saaye
birhan ko dhas rahi hai
Dar hai na maar dale
Saavan ka kya thikana?
Fertility, pathos, the silly
The double-edged sword of rain: it might bring death but it also brings fertility and so Bharat Bhooshan singing Zindagi bhar nahin bhoolegi woh barsaat ki raat over the radio to Madhubala again seems a natural thing in Barsaat Ki Raat (P L Santoshi, 1960). Love is one of the many things that grows in the rain. This trope has run through cinema down to Chameli (Sudhir Mishra, 2003) where the rain turns Kareena Kapoor into an impressionist masterpiece in a car window.
Rain is also made for pathos, for pathetic fallacy, where the external elements reflect the antaraakaash (the interior landscape) of the protagonist. I can think of two beautiful examples. One comes out of Pyaasa (Guru Dutt, 1957). It is a scene where Mala Sinha is being driven home in her car. She has chosen privilege over poetry and her life is a barren wasteland. She asks the driver to turn the windscreen wipers on but there is no rain. It is her tears she has mistaken for rain.
The other is in Anubhav (Basu Bhattacharya, 1971). The opening strains of one of Kanu Roy’s tune for Mujhe Jaan Na Kaho Meri Jaan[4] look like an expressionist painting animated. Rain falls in darkness, tiny illuminations on leaves. (Only Satyajit Ray would do it better in Pather Panchali but you remember the sadness and silence with which that rain sequence ends.) Inside, the actors—Sanjeev Kumar and Tanuja—enact an intimacy that is rare and beautiful, and ends when they go out into the rain and get wet. Even so, Tanuja’s body is shielded from our gaze by the seasoned bulk of Sanjeev Kumar’s body. We only see her gamine and beautiful face as the water runs down.
Rain runs through the films of the 1980s; there were the silly ones: Ek chhatri aur hum hai do, ab kya ho, kuchh to karo, Hema Malini would implore Shashi Kapoor in Maan Gaye Ustaad (1981, Shibu Mitra). Eventually, the umbrella would blow away and the lyrics would follow down this very Mumbai path: Ek chhatri thi, ud gayi woh, ab kya ho?
You probably have your own rain songs. You have your favourites. You’re probably humming one now. That’s the lovely thing about writing about Hindi film songs, you know you’re bringing the reader into the zone of shared memory. ‘Here I come and there you hum,’ as my friend Raju Bharatan once wrote. I can think of Aaj rapat jaaye to humein na uthaiyo from Namak Halal (Prakash Mehra, 1982) because of the sheer lunacy of thinking Smita Patil would be happy doing a rain dance. Contrast this with Manzil’s Rimjhim gire saawan with Amitabh Bachchan and Moushumi Chatterjee actually having a good time, kicking up waves in Mumbai’s Oval Maidan. But then it took both Basu Chatterjee and Prakash Mehra to make Bollywood.
Photo: Jashvitha Dhagey
The city in rain
Stop for a moment and look at those rain dances. They were out in the open. They were filmed on actual streets. Part of the magic of Rimjhim gire saawan is the city unspooling behind the lead pair. They begin by the sea and what better place where three forms of the same element meet: the vapour in the deep bank of clouds, the brine of the ocean and the pure water of the rain. They wander past a canyon in Nariman Point with a sedate government building as a backdrop; it was another age, when a shoot could happen near the seats of power.
Of course, they follow an imaginative geography going from the line of Art Deco buildings near the Oval to the flyover at Marine Drive in a single shot with a double-decker bus trundling past. Flyovers? Oh yes, they were still symbols of what the metropolis offered, the ability to swoop over the railway lines and come shooting out into a vista of the horizon, the sea beneath, Malabar Hill in the distance and Raj Bhavan planted in one of the last patches of island-city green. Then, they are back in the Oval Maidan with the Rajabai Tower and the courts as smears in the background, fogged over by rain.
Next stop: Flora Fountain where the only ones unprotected from the drizzle—it is a drizzle now—are our lead pair; everyone else is under the black umbrellas/humble brothers that punctuated the monsoon back then. Through it all, Amitabh and Moushumi run and prance like children. Love and rain do that to us; it gives us the chance to re-enter the magic of believing in magic. The song fades into a Bombay clinch: you can snuggle but you cannot kiss. Amitabh’s face reminds you that he is a poet in the film, it is intense and softened by love.
By contrast, Aaj rapat jaaye is about lust; it opens with a quick homage to Raj Kapoor before the umbrella turns into a screen that allows the audience to imagine what is going on behind it. (Whistles and catcalls from the audience in the stalls.) The umbrella flies away, Smita Patil’s sari gets caught in one of the buttons of Amitabh’s coat and starts a vastraharan. She draws the sari back and reels him in, a kachcha dhaaga of love.
City has faded out
But slowly the songs began to withdraw into sets. This was easier to control. The mechanics of the spraying and the quality of the celluloid had improved considerably. No one had to rely on the rain as Basu Bhattacharya had. Now you are invited into a glass house, a set-up for the strange ‘Baadal yoonh garajta hai’ from Betaab (Rahul Rawail, 1983) which launched the careers of Sunny Deol and Amrita Singh. There were some lines in the song which seemed particularly interesting:
Baahar bhi toofaan, andar bhi toofaan,
Beech mein do toofaanon ki, yeh sheeshe ka makaan,
The first time I heard it—and this was the time we still heard the songs on the radio in the praayojit karyakrams in the night, I thought it was a metaphor for the human body, a fragile glass thing, battered by the world’s storms and those generated within. When I saw the film, I discovered that there was an actual glass house in which the young protagonists found themselves caught and the thunder and lightning caused Amrita Singh to leap into Sunny Deol’s arms from time to time.
I remember enjoying Thodasa Roomaani Ho Jaayen (Amol Palekar, 1990) simply because it actually dealt with the dread, dry waiting for rain but then it turned into a metaphor for the heroine’s love life and we were all invited to indulge in a little romance and believe that Nana Patekar could magic rain from non-existent clouds. From there to Ghanan-ghanan in Lagaan (Ashutosh Gowariker, 2001), the rains or lack of them have been with us as a constant.
The rain song seems to have begun to fade perhaps because we no longer need the hypocrisies of umbrellas and drenched saris. The upper half of the male body, beginning with Sunny Deol, has become part of the visual landscape; the female protagonists no longer drape saris when they fall in love in order to demonstrate that their wild woolly ways are now behind them and they are ready to take their place in the bourgeoisie. (Consider the last scenes of Rakesh Kumar’s Mr Natwarlal in 1979, where the delightful Shanno played by Rekha turns into a hausrau.)
The long slow fadeout went past Ijaazat with flashes in the water can when Aamir Khan executed his homage to Gene Kelly in Tip tip tip tip baarish shuru ho gayi. Today an Aashiqui 2 may have a Tum hi ho but it’s rare.
No one needs the rain dance now. Perhaps this is all to the good. The hero and heroine can only dance in potable water; anything else might expose them to the threat of disease and the health of the stars is paramount to the health of the industry. And in a country where 35 million Indians lack access to clean water, this might be a visual luxury we might all want to forgo.
Jerry Pinto has lived all his life in Mumbai and though he had to walk home in chest-deep water in the 2005 floods, he still retains an affection for the Hindi film rain song. He is the author of Helen: The Life and Times of a Bollywood H-Bomb (Speaking Tiger) and co-wrote Leela Naidu’s memoir, A Patchwork Life (Penguin Random House). He is the author of Bollywood Posters (Pictor/Thames & Hudson) and the editor of The Greatest Show on Earth; Writings on Bollywood (PRH). He won the National Award for the Best Writing on Cinema in 2006.
Cover photo: Abhisek Sarda/ Flickr
