Larger Than Life

No one dies on screen in Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam. The tragic end of the ill-starred Chhoti Bahu (Meena Kumari), implicit in the discovery of her skeleton under the Chaudhuri mansion’s ruins, with a gold bangle on its wrist, becomes emblematic of the downfall of the landed aristocracy. And it’s Chhoti Bahu’s confidante, Bhootnath (Guru Dutt), representing a new rising middle class, who is the unwitting harbinger of her end.

In Do Bigha Zamin too, death is a metaphor for societal transition, but here the collapse of the old order and the coming of a new one is a change for the worse. The death of Shambhu’s (Balraj Sahni) wife Paro (Nirupa Roy) parallels the loss of his treasured piece of land. The factory takes over the farm, the agrarian gives way to the industrial economy. The newborn modernity signifies no more than drudgery, exploitation, and dehumanisation.

Pyaasa and Kaagaz Ke Phool mourn the death of creativity in a world peopled by insensitive philistines. Pyaasa probes societal hypocrisy: how it recognises a genius only when he is no more. The resurrected poet Vijay (Guru Dutt) mocks at his own posthumous fame and makes a subversive call to destroy the world itself: Jala do ise, phook dalo yeh duniya. Kaagaz Ke Phool is structured as a slow build-up to the final moment of death of filmmaker Suresh Sinha (Dutt), as he gradually loses everyone and everything: his wife, daughter, beloved, his fame and fortune. Both films reflect Dutt’s fascination with death. In his melancholic world, it is a romanticised entity, offering the artist an assurance of fame and a release from pain.

Death redefines the dynamics of the eternal father-son relationship in Mughal-E-Azam and Awara. In Awara, Raj Kapoor murders his surrogate father and then tries to kill his real father in the pivotal plot device that spotlights the film’s core debate: are criminals born or is it their upbringing that turns them into one? In Mughal-E-Azam, Prince Salim (Dilip Kumar) challenges his father, Emperor Akbar (Prithviraj Kapoor), to battle. All for his love for courtesan Anarkali. He is defeated and condemned to death. Though Akbar eventually relents, what jolts the audience is a father ordering his own son’s death. It’s the ultimate test of his love for his child. But, more importantly, it underscores the unbending principle of royalty which the film celebrates unabashedly: that the Emperor will do away with anyone who threatens the stability of his empire, even if it’s his own son.

The mother-son conflicts in Mother India and Deewar climax in death. Nargis does the ultimate sacrifice of killing her own defiant son and in Deewaar, the prodigal son dies in the arms of his mother. In both, the son’s death signifies a restoration of order, traditions and value systems personified by the mother. Death is a return to innocence, a journey back to the womb.

There are too many deaths to remember in Sholay; after all, death is the business of its driving force, Gabbar (Amjad). There’s Kaalia’s macabre end in a crescendo of wild laughter, the blind A.K. Hangal groping for his son Sachin’s corpse, the massacre of the Thakur family, choreographed to the sound of horse hooves and a screechy swing. The most poignant, of course, is the end of Jai (Amitabh), engineered by himself through the fraudulent toss of a coin. No other film has turned death into such a magnificent spectacle.