Of Purani Dilli And Kimam Ki Khushboo: The Timeless Charm Of Kajra Re

I remember watching a TV show on the night of December 31, 2005, where the anchor was sitting amongst groups of audiences on the street and ranking the best songs of the year. The show was structured in a way that each segment between the ad breaks would eliminate the last song on the ranking list as the list grew smaller. The very last segment was a contest between the final two songs on the list—Dus Bahaane from the film Dus (2005), and Kajra Re from Bunty Aur Babli (2005). I was on team Dus Bahaane then, having spent a considerable amount of time that year perfecting its hook step, but not exactly getting it. However, to my surprise, despite a lot of support for Dus Bahaane, the enthusiasm for Kajra re was staggering. I could also sense that my parents, who were watching the show with me, were firmly on Team Kajra Re too. While my twelve-year-old self found Kajra Re catchy and fun, its madcap energy, unusual structure and considerable length (eight minutes!) overwhelmed me. The whimsy nature of Gulzar’s lyrics that married ornate Urdu with everyday slang didn’t help the cause either.

The middle-school boy from 2005 would be shocked to find that his older version has danced to the entire song countless times since then, mouthing those lyrics from the opening shaayari to the pacy jugalbandi towards the end, without missing a word. That his first visit to Chandni Chowk as an adult was spent looking for “Daribe Talak”, till someone told him that the area was called Dariba Kalan. That he was not embarrassed about copying the adaayein (gestures) of the ethereal Aishwarya Rai Bachchan in the song.

As many have claimed since the release of the film, the song is timeless and stands apart from the rest of the already-excellent album of Bunty Aur Babli. Recent reports have quoted the composers Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy talking about how the initial reception to the song within the studio was muted, apparently ranking last in the internal rankings within the album. Amitabh Bachchan, too, had reportedly suggested dropping it. But Shaad Ali was confident he had a chartbuster at hand.

Kajra Re, in certain ways, is one of those rare, lightning in the bottle moments that popular Hindi cinema produces, where a mix of cultural forces pull their weight together to create a phenomenon that completely captures the imagination of the masses—where the film text recedes into the background for a little while and the screen operates in the realm of pure desire. It can even be argued that the song is almost entirely superfluous to the narrative of Bunty Aur Babli, so much so, that the titular Babli goes off-screen for the entirety of the song. But if one looks at the song a little obliquely—allowing oneself to submit to the abstractions of love and cinema and the love of cinema—one could make the argument that the song fits in perfectly with the rest of the film.

To understand this, a brief description of the structure is necessary. The film is essentially divided into two parts: the first part is about two individuals—Rakesh (Abhishek Bachchan) and Vimmi (Rani Mukerji)—from small-town India, trying to hustle their way to fame and popularity by committing fraud using the aliases Bunty and Babli; the second part is more stylised, in the nature of a chase film, where Dashrath Singh (Amitabh Bachchan) is pursuing the duo. Kajra Re, interestingly, is towards the end of the film, and is also the first time the three central characters meet, without knowing the stakes involved. Rakesh and Vimmi meet Dashrath at the bar of a restaurant they have just purchased. They don’t know that he’s a policeman, and he does not know that they’re the ones he’s after. Vimmi leaves the scene just as Rakesh and Dashrath begin to get drunk. In a conversation about the vagaries of love, Dashrath narrates his own brief tryst with it, which began in an exchange of glances with a woman in the buses of Delhi and ended in her marriage—to someone else. At this moment, a female voice calls, “Oye handsome!” and the camera moves to reveal Aishwarya Rai Bachchan—a courtesan who speaks in Urdu couplets and then glides into her dance, sensuous and teetering on the edge of a proverbial knife. 

Bunty Aur Babli, in some ways, wears its cinematic influences on its sleeves. A Bonnie and Clyde-style caper set in an India that has new economic dreams, but the Indian ‘heart’ intact. The film’s primary narrative conflict is a spatial one—the idyllic small town is the space where those who seek safety suffocate those who seek the thrill of danger, prompting them to leave and go to cities. As the story nears its end, it lands up in this bar—a cross-between a posh lounge, a shady dance bar and the tawaif’s kotha. This where son and father (Abhishek and Amitabh) appear as co-stars for the first time, and the sequence takes on a rhythm of its own, where text and metatext bleed into each other. This is exemplified for example in a dialogue exchange where Dashrath asks Rakesh where he’s from, and he says ‘Allahabad’, referencing Amitabh’s roots in Allahabad. From there, the conversation moves to Dashrath’s doomed love story in Delhi’s streets, until Aishwarya makes her entry.

Kajra Re begins with a melancholic couplet, and then turns into a mujra, eventually merging with the folk form in the refrain “Kajra re, kajra re, tere kale kale naina.” If read into the text of the film, it mobilises a different history of the city—of Islamicate cultures and carefully practised expressions of love and desire that have so graciously been brought to us in Hindi cinema of the past. For eight minutes, the film abandons its characters—a policeman chasing two criminals from small towns, who’re making it big in post-liberalisation India by committing fraud—in service of a romp where the past and the present sing and dance together, forgetting about the ambitions of the 21^st century. Shankar Mahadevan, the singer, recently talked about how the refrain is almost devotional, taking inspiration from sankirtan, a public form of chanting God’s name within Hindu tradition. But the song also frequently crosses over into the realm of the other, more profane category of the item song, where loads of men gyrate around a single woman dancer—one that evokes the masculinities of the village and the small town. Towards the end, the song quickens its pace and adopts the temporal progression of the qawwali, becoming a jugalbandi between the men and the tawaif. The song, thus, ends with a high that, in a sense, the film doesn’t really recover from when the narrative takes centre stage again in the final con job Bunty and Babli attempt.

Gulzar has stated in interviews that he modelled his lyrics for the song on the rather colourful couplets one would often find written on trucks rattling on Indian highways. Maybe, like the song, the highway truck also works as a metaphor for Hindi cinema’s hybridities—a large, carefully designed, kitschy commercial vehicle that connects India’s big cities to its “chhote chhote sheher.” I now understand why Dus Bahaane, a groovy and timeless track in its own way, lost that day to Kajra Re. It had many things, but as Gulzar would say, lacked the kimam ki khushboo that makes Kajra Re a classic.

Piyush Chhabra is a Ph.D Scholar of Cinema Studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He works on the entanglements between law and different media forms.