By Swapan Dasgupta
When I joined St Stephen’s College as a fresher
exactly 40 years ago, we were subjected to certain rites of initiation. In the
main these consisted of imbibing lewd songs—the exposure of mollycoddled public
school boys to a crude, real world. One of these was a parody of the well-known
patriotic song of the 1950s: “Aao bachcho tumhe dikhaye jhankee Hindustan kee.”.
The verses of this ribald variation of Pradeep’s
legendary offering to a newly-independent nation hardly bear repetition. What
was interesting, however, was the chorus. Instead of Vande Mataram, the
genuflection to the motherland, the salacious version had inserted an
invocation to the loin of Dara Singh, often with the added garnishing, “Jai,
Jai Hindustan”.
Despite the obvious crudities of the exercise, the
allusion to India’s Rustom-e-Hind was fitting. Till the macho heroes of an
increasingly glitzy Bollywood began dominating popular culture, Dara Singh was
more than a pehelwan who also starred in films: he was the personification of
rustic, home-grown manliness. Like Milkha Singh the ‘flying Sikh’ who was
synonymous with speed, Dara Singh became a generic term for strength. In mythology
there was Hanuman and Bheem; in the contemporary world there was Dara Singh. To
an India suffering from a deficiency of national power, the wrestling champion
from Punjab personified muscular nationalism and associated saintliness.
This may not have been easily apparent to the cosmopolitan
elite that gave the early films of Dara Singh—with evocative titles such as
‘Trip to Moon’ and ‘Tarzan comes to Delhi’—a very wide berth. However, to
audiences in villages and small towns, both unfamiliar and suspicious of the
trappings of secular modernity, the B-films screened in the rundown cinema hall
next to the railway station, were the logical extension of the bioscope and the
mela on festival days.
Viewed from a 21st century perspective,
the early Dara Singh films were farcical, almost in the genre of a Monty Python
skit. In ‘Tarzan comes to Delhi’, where Helen performs one of her early item
numbers, Dara Singh is seen swinging all the way from Qutub Minar and landing
on the ramparts of Red Fort. In ‘Trip to Moon’, made just two years before Neil
Armstrong took a big step for mankind, the moon-based astronauts are shown with
basic crash helmets and Converse All-stars (which was known to Indians those
days as hockey boots). The robots under the control of the villain looked
strangely like metallic variants of Rajasthani puppets.
The film-makers, it would seem, were always anxious
to link fantasy with something familiar. The fight scenes invariably involved
Dara and another pehelwan and were attempts to re-create the magic of real-life
exhibition wrestling matches (attended by crowds of over 10,000). Therefore,
instead of the dhishum-dhishum that
became the hallmark of films after the 1970s, there was much thigh slapping and
grappling. The bush telegraph had created a legend out of Dara Singh’s
encounters with King Kong, as the Hungarian-born giant Emile Czaja was
popularly known, and the fights on the screen became old-fashioned wrestling
matches for tamasha-hungry people.
Of course, there was the inevitable touch of the
absurd. In ‘Trip to Moon’, after Dara had resoundingly knocked out the bad
pehelwan and rescued the heroine clad in an incongruous ball gown, the villain
unleashes his final weapon: a rhinoceros who staggers dopily on to the screen
before being felled by the Rustom-e-Punjab.
Sunday Times of India, July 15, 2012
1 comment:
Having grown up on the streets of Calcutta in the 70s with lot of slum children as friends, I always thought I knew all the dirty parodies that were worth knowing, until I read your column on Dara Singh. With my curiosity aroused I had to find out the parody you alluded to. And my goodness, you have put me to shame :-) I was really missing something in life. Thanks for enlightening me. But one question lingers - would you really call that Dara Singh's loin?
Post a Comment