Lockdown classics: Subhash Jha on Raj Khosla and struggle to keep the joint family together

Raj Khosla whose 29th death anniversary falls on June 9, was unarguably one of the most underrated filmmakers of our country. The sheer variety displayed in his films, his vast range of themes and genres, and his astounding command over the language of cinema was so unique and distinctive that one could recognise his stamp even if the director’s name was missing from the credits.

The prolific career of Khosla could be segregated into sharply polarised genres. He directed some noire-ish suspense thrillers - CID, Kala Pani, Solva Saal in the beginning of his directorial career. Then, he did his trio of whodunits – Woh Kaun Thi, Mera Saaya and Anita, all featuring Sadhana as the mysterious woman in white restlessly roaming the night singing Lata Mangeshkar’s haunting melodies.

The germs of Raj Khosla’s later concerns about the Other Woman were sown in these wandering souls whose songs of nomadic lament - Naina barse rimjhim, Lag ja gale se, Tu jahan jahan chalega and Qareeb aa yeh nazar phir mile na miley - epitomised the eternal search for love. It’s interesting to see Khosla hop genres which were completely antithetical to one another.

If he liked suspense thrillers and the whodunits, he also loved dacoit drama and thus made his career’s second-most successful film, Mera Gaon Mera Desh. Subsequently, he returned to dacoit drama with another fine but underrated film – Kachche Dhaage - which curiously didn’t do well. By the time, Khosla’s career was on a decline.

Do Raaste, released in 1969, was the biggest hit of Raj Khosla’s career. The germs of the Man, Woman and Mistress theme that occupied centrestage towards the end of Khosla’s career were to be traced back to this utterly transparent and moving family drama about a man given the responsibility of looking after his step-siblings after his dying father takes a vachan from his eldest born that he would look after his stepmother and her children like his own.

Based on Marathi writer Chandrakant Kakodkar’s celebrated novel Nilambari, the film detailed the struggle of Nabendu (Balraj Sahni) to keep the family together when it begins to disintegrate after Nabendu’s foreign-re- turned stepbrother (Prem Chopra) marries the girl of his choice.

Significantly, the novel was named after the shrewish home-breaker Nilambari. In Do Raaste, the character that holds the plot together ironically destroys the family unit. Bindu who went on to make the hottest negative Jodi with Prem Chopra in a series of films was here in her element, hamming to the hilt, as Balraj Sahni underplayed his character’s anguished and silent acceptance of his stepbrother’s inappropriate choice for a wife.

Sahni’s signature song in Do Raaste is K L Saigal’s Ek bangla bane nyara. The film’s producers acquired the immortal Saigal song’s right to use it as a theme structuring the destruction of the joint-family by an out- sider, here the archetypal evil ‘bahu’ who first seduces the son (we see Prem Chopra openly and enthusiastically lusting for his new wife after the family dinner) and then cajoling him away from his father-like Bade Bhaiyya and the family.

Especially poignant is the matriarch Veena’s helplessness. In her death scene, she mistakes her laadla stepson Nabendu for her youngest son Satyen (Rajesh Khanna) and tells him, “Your elder brother has spent his entire life looking after the family. It’s time for you to look after him. Promise me you will.”

The poignancy of the situation where the patriarchal brother hears his stepmother tell him that he needs to be looked after is to this day immensely moving, more so now than way back in 1969 when families lived and suf- fered together. Do Raaste is all about loving one’s family long before Karan Johar discov- ered this route to box office nirvana.

Raj Khosla’s platinum-jubilee hit is a wrinkle-free family drama. It spawned numerous parivarik melodramas in the 1970s by director ranging from Mohan Kumar to Kalpataru who conceived sagas about the blissful joint family com- ing apart as the bitchy Bahu steps into the blissful family portrait.

Raj Khosla loved to experiment with characters and actors.

He would often cast big names against their image. The romantic Rajesh Khanna who was on the threshold of a kind of super-stardom never seen before or after, was here cast as Satyen, a very angry young man who took on his shrewish sister-in-law and her henpecked husband (his elder other) headlong. Some of the film’s most interesting scenes are in the family living room where Satyen, young, hotheaded, stubborn and stubbled, ticks Neela off in front of the family and her high-society friends. Khanna got his applause even when he was not the central character.

What doesn’t work that well is the romance between Rajesh Khanna and Mumtaz, who coincidentally plays Bindu’s younger sister. Khosla compensated Mumtaz with one of Lata Mangeshkar’s career’s biggest hits Bindiya chamkegi which, though not relevant to the plot, became the film’s biggest USP.

Though Do Raaste belongs to Balraj Sahni, Bindu’s Neela dominates the female characters. There are some other finely-etched women in the film. Veena as the mother and Kamini Kaushal as Balraj Sahni’s devoted and supportive wife strike the right notes. Even Leela Mishra as Bindu’s scheming mother is vividly etched. But Bindu’s domineering Bahu act gives the drama that zing and flavour which make the other extra-sweet charac- ters appear human after all.

That fine actor, Jayant (Amjad Khan’s father) does a fine turn as Balraj Sahni’s devoted Muslim friend. He is a stereotypi- cal goodhearted and boisterous Pathan. But never over-the-top. Never over-done. Every character has a life beyond the writ- ten word. Raj Khosla hated cardboard characters. In Do Raaste, he makes sure that the family that stays together doesn’t get lost in the say-cheese studio portrait.

What stays alive is the sound of Saigal’s Ek bangla bane nyara, as Balraj Sahni, looking every bit the concerned, worried, tired but undefeated patriarch, tries to protect the family from disintegra- tion. Today when the joint-family system is all but dead, Balraj Sahni’s valiant fight to keep the home from breaking up still causes a lump in the throat.