41 Years Of Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron : A Retro Look At A Cult Film

Kundan Shah (1947-2017) graduated from FTII, Pune, and got the National Film Development Corporation to produce his first film Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron (1983) that had no romance, no item number, no heroine, but lots of black humour that struck home as it was pinned with low-key doses of satire on corruption between and among builders, real estate people, promoters, the top brass of the police and even the police commissioner. Within this scenario, two struggling photographers set up a photo studio and get caught up in one messy situation after another. Their naiveté is construed as stupidity and in the end too, even when they show the police who the real villains are, they are shunted out and jailed and the villains go scot-free.

A young Naseeruddin Shah and Ravi Baswani play the bumbling photographers forever being fooled and taken for a ride by the two-timing, corrupt editor (Bhakti Barve) of a paper named Khabardar and the takes are so hilarious that the audience goes into side-splitting laughter in every other scene. The municipal commissioner (Satish Shah) who gets murdered becomes the funniest of corpses in the history of Indian cinema as the two photographers struggle with his dead body as proof to nab the real estate culprits (Pankaj Kapoor and Om Puri) and end up in a small theatre where Mahabharat is being staged and the dead body is decked up in a sari to play Draupadi!

The film did not meet with much commercial success when first released, but over time, it acquired the status of a cult film and its digital version was released in 2012. Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron fetched Shah the Best Director for First Film Award as well as the Filmfare Award which also bestowed the Best Comedian of the Year award to Ravi Baswani. With Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron, Kundan Shah actually opened a new window to show the film industry and the audience that Hindi cinema had greater alternatives to provide entertainment than defined by the clichéd dishoom dishoom action, songs and dances around trees and the hero-villain-heroine triangle. Even the villains evoked laughter and the exaggerated artifice of the promoter’s girl (Neena Gupta) who he uses as a honey trap for corrupt government officers triggers laughter instead of anger.

Every act of corruption and bungling had satire punched into it cleverly veiled with humour. The two immortalized scenes in the film are – the act put on by the two photographers a they find themselves trying handle the funniest corpse in the history of Indian cinema and two, the climactic scene of the staging of Draupadi’s vastra cheeran scene in the end where the corpse is draped in a sari with the end pulled down to hide the face, thus, killing two birds with the same stone – a corpse is made to stand erect enough to play Draupadi and this corpse happens to be a tall man!  When things get messy on stage, the curtain is pulled down and then pulled up again to stage a scene from Anarkali with the same corpse now playing Anarkali!

Harper Collins India Limited published a book on the film in 2010 authored by Jai Arjun Singh a freelance journalist based in Delh who later wrote a book in Hrishikesh Mukherjeei. Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro is now a byword for the sort of absurdist, satirical humours that Hindi cinema just hasn’t seen enough of. This is the story of how it came to be despite incredible odds – and what it might have been. Jai Arjun Singh’s engaging take on the making of the film and its cult following is as entertaining as the film itself,” goes the blurb on the book.

A 1983 film made on a shoe-string budget of Rs.7 lakh, Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron hobbled and stumbled its way to its finish. Today, it is being re-released because of its tremendous popularity among the Internet generation. The massive Y-generation that has bloomed in the world of the internet, You-tube and blogs, have watched, downloaded and replayed the film many times. Just one site shows a hit of 1, 25,000-plus hits and there are many others you can hit and watch the film in with bigger hits.

In an underplayed manner, the film focusses on failures more than on successes, on scamsters more than on honest people and on the changing meanings of honesty and corruption within the given scenario. The two protagonists are city bumpkins who cannot get a job right and begin to look for short-cuts to earning money. The story is straightforward, simple, narrated without any special gimmicks with side-splitting laughter all the way.

The credits spell out a veritable Who’s Who of good Indian cinema and also evolves into an excellent promotional platform for the Film and Television Institute, Pune on the one hand and the National School of Drama, Delhi on the other. Most of the cast and crew are household names not only in India but also beyond Indian shores. Naseeruddin Shah who portrayed Vinod Chopra said in an interview on a television channel that wherever he goes, be it to England, USA, Poland, Dubai, locals identify him with three films – Monsoon Wedding, Masoom and Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron.

In an underplayed manner, the film focusses on failures more than on successes, on scamsters more than on honest people and on the changing meanings of honesty and corruption within the given scenario. The two protagonists are city bumpkins who cannot get a job right and begin to look for short-cuts to earning money. The story is straightforward, simple, narrated without any special gimmicks with side-splitting laughter all the way. A photographer-duo, named Vinod Chopra and Sudhir Mishra – you can guess where the inspiration has come from - starts a studio, only to find wrong things happening from the moment of its launch. However, their photographic assignments lead them to shady facts about the city's builders, municipal officers and others. Long before the linkages between and among real estate dealers, promoters, builders and municipal officers turned into headline news in the print media, this film exposed these underhand deals openly and in an extremely funny manner.

Sad that a man of the calibre of Kundan Shah who not only created his own genre of black comedy but also introduced actors who became famous names later on, had to pass away not only so young, but almost in invisibility and the humiliation of forced retirement.

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