The Most Memorable Goodbye Turns 50

‘Garm Hava understands that the scorching, hate-filled, doubt-filled affair between Hindus and Muslims is our national love affair.’

Sreehari Nair revisits M S Sathyu’s classic film, featuring the incomparable Balraj Sahni at his finest in his final role.

IMAGE: Balraj Sahni in Garm Hava.

It’s time we designated Balraj Sahni’s walking stick in Garm Hava as a cultural treasure.

In M S Sathyu’s grainy, Partition-era masterpiece, Sahni plays Salim Mirza, the kind of sweet-souled gentleman for whom the walking stick was probably invented.

Mirza never goes anywhere without his walking stick and to him, it is something more than just a provider of secure footing. The stick is by turns Mirza’s last-ditch attempt at brandishing a status symbol, his instrument of casual mischief, his Excalibur. He wields the damn thing like Luke Skywalker wields his lightsaber.

As a prop, the walking stick completes Mirza. More importantly, perhaps, it has some of the same charms as Garm Hava; that is to say, a marvelous period quality as well as an aura of timelessness.

Watching Mirza, a failing manufacturer of footwear, as he ambles through the narrow streets of Agra, it’s evident that the stick in his grip is a shorthand for glorious days now long gone.

His business is sinking and his haveli is falling to pieces but once inside his mansion, he tries to maintain his good spirits, poking his stick at his favourite daughter on the wing, getting her attention, and reminding her that she is his ‘little witch,’ a charming yesteryear expression of hardboiled warmth.

When Mirza dispels his son’s doubts with an ‘Inshallah, everything will be all right,’ his fervor is so total that he points his stick to the sky, as if it were an antenna to God.

 

IMAGE: A scene from Garm Hava.

In Garm Hava, Salim Mirza and his companion of stunning chestnut wood are mostly captured in wide shots, but what a tale they tell!

In a beautiful, beautiful scene of behavioral acting, Mirza starts to set himself down at his creditor’s office, and then, taking heed of a note from his creditor, he stops just inches short of his chair, resting his entire weight on his walking stick, and holding that stance for a good seven seconds.

The movie features some of the finest instances of ‘being in the moment,’ as showcased by the least self-conscious actor India has ever produced.

You hardly hear the man raising his voice, let alone uttering apercus or aphorisms, and yet, the one time he fixes a miscreant with a stare, he makes it count.

Balraj Sahni is so assured and so relaxed here that his performance feels less like a classic from the vault and more like something that might have dropped on a streaming platform just last week.

And now that I have established his relevance to our age, let me break it to the uninitiated reader that Garm Hava, which turned 50 this year (it was premiered in India in 1974), was Sahni’s last hurrah (he died on the day he had finished dubbing for the film).

Watching it again recently, I wound up asking myself if the Indian silver screen has witnessed a more memorable goodbye.

IMAGE: A K Hangal, Balraj Sahni and Farooque Shaikh in Garm Hava.

Goodbye makes for a recurring motif in Garm Hava. The movie opens with Salim Mirza at the railway station seeing off a loved one, and this soon develops into a routine, a spell, a curse, as one after another Mirza’s relatives board the train to Pakistan.

Off they go, and Mirza waves at them through the smoke and the Agra haze. He might as well keep waving, for Mirza loses something or someone valuable through the entire length of the movie.

He first loses his brother, then his haveli, loses a son to migration and a daughter to heartbreak, and loses his social standing when charged with espionage. But through all this, he never loses his khushnumai.

Trailing his stick through Agra’s over-thronged streets, dressed in his superbly tailored suits and his astrakhan cap, which he later loses in a riot, he refuses to lose his delicacy and his noblesse oblige.

He’s a dandy trying to keep his poise in the face of a tragedy, and this is what makes him so irresistible. Montaigne could well have been thinking about Salim Mirza when he wrote, ‘Cheerfulness is the surest sign of wisdom.’

Mirza’s cheerful inertia transcends patriotism, and M S Sathyu is attempting something quite singular here: He is using the aristocrat and his silent pride to make clear to us the costs of Partition.

Garm Hava‘s episodic structure and its openhanded staging of scenes carry us along on this journey — the technique of the film may not correspond with a polemicist’s way of approaching a historical event, but it’s every bit a poet’s way.

IMAGE: Dinanath Zutshi and Balraj Sahni in Garm Hava.

Salim Mirza is interminably bound to the land of his birth because he is afflicted by nostalgia and lethargy (a delicious combination that has inspired a whole range of artists from Cervantes to Truffaut).

Other members of the Mirza household, the ones who are not wired like Salim Mirza, do not however suffer from this affliction; and as they hop on the train to Pakistan, they leave behind a trail of confused rhetoric.

There’s the elder brother Halim Mirza, for instance. Down to his last teeth, Halim Mirza speaks at Muslim League rallies about his right to live in India.

You see Halim at these rallies wallowing in his own image, marinating in it (‘There’s Khuda above and Halim down here,’ he says, thumping his chest at one point), and when somebody so grand and so impossibly theatrical decides that he can no longer stay in India, you can tell how bad the situation is.

When our liberals try to enter the debate about Muslims’ loyalty toward this country on sentimental grounds alone, they do not do the Indian Muslim community any favour.

Garm Hava, on the other hand, is a heart-rending tale told by a hard-as-nails realist.

The movie understands that the scorching, hate-filled, doubt-filled affair between Hindus and Muslims is our national love affair. It takes us back to a time when this affair was at its boiling point, and it gets at a pungent truth: The decision to migrate or stay back was more often not a pragmatic decision, one that was based largely on practical considerations.

IMAGE: Balraj Sahni in Garm Hava.

When Salim Mirza’s seven-year-old grandson boards the train, you can see how the kid’s innocent dinnertime question, ‘Abbaji, do they fly kites in Pakistan?’ is about to be answered.

And it is this pragmatism that Salim Mirza lacks.

Though he may declare for effect, ‘Business is business; it knows no borders,’ he wouldn’t stray too far from the narrow lanes of his childhood, or from the Tomb of Chishti.

Later, when he says to a landlord, ‘I am Salim Mirza. I am a Muslim. Are you still interested in leasing your house to me?’ we can see how reedy and shrill the idea of patriotism is when pitted against a man who just wouldn’t move.

This is Ismat Chughtai’s lyric hard-headedness speaking through Kaifi Azmi and Shama Zaidi’s lacquer-free evocation of an era. Look closely, and the movie fingers our liberals and our right-wingers in equal measure; it pooh-poohs Meghna Gulzar’s wailing heart as much as it does Neeraj Pandey’s ever-suspicious eye

There’s another key difference between the sensibility that informs Garm Hava and the salon sensibility of those Indian film-makers who have tried to show us the Muslim way of life.

In our cinema, building a case for Muslims has always amounted to portraying them as a pious, scary, misunderstood lot. M S Sathyu does not turn the Muslim-in-peril into a snowflake; if he has a strategy it’s not to reduce his characters into treatise-worthy subjects but to widen their range of meaning.

The Muslims in Garm Hava have the gift for life and for holding nothing in reserve.

IMAGE: Abu Siwani, Balraj Sahni, Farooque Sheikh, Geeta Siddharth, Shaukat Kaifi, Ramma Bains and Badar Begum in Garm Hava.

There may even be an excess, a ‘too-muchness’ about these characters — as evident in Salim Mirza’s mother, a catty old woman who has nicknames for all her children and a measure of everyone’s weakness (she has graded them just about right).

In her irritations, the old crone is immensely likeable, and you assent to her belief that left to her, the Partition business would have been handled more efficiently. The tough materfamilias, she desperately wants to know what her children are saying about her, and even when you laugh at her everyday anxieties, you laugh out of the wrong side of your mouth.

It’s true that Garm Hava may seem out-of-touch with this age of victim commemoration.

Sathyu does not confer automatic sainthood upon his victims of history, and you know them better through their delusions and miscalculations, through the fire in their side glances or the ribbing that happens between husbands and wives.

Salim Mirza’s begum, for example, wouldn’t cede an ounce of her self-respect, not to her mother-in-law, not to her impoverished dandy. Mrs Mirza sews all day, and by night is left with no energy for domestic patchworks; so when Mr Mirza throws a minor fit one evening and announces that he’s going to bed without dinner, she chomps on her rotis and lets him keep his roza.

There’s enough poetry in such bickerings but there’s also actual Urdu poetry waiting to trip you at every corner, and for every skillful poet, there exists a clumsy poet with a talent for spoiling a fine verse by poor enunciation.

This is a Partition-era movie, sure, but it’s also an Agra movie, and that sense of artistic pursuits commingling with the harsh realities of life is close to perpetual.

Even the period details are striking and unflinchingly so.

Among the workers at Mirza’s shoe factory are little children who go about their duties with a stoic face. The shots of those child labourers are deeply disturbing, and the power of the imagery is magnified many times over by Sathyu’s insistence on presenting it without a trace of garnish. His attitude to such upsetting trinkets from the past is clear-eyed but humane.

He seems to be saying, ‘These are the plain facts. They have to be uttered.’

IMAGE: Farooque Sheikh in Garm Hava.

M S Sathyu is above all a realist — this is his blessing and his burden — and as with all committed realists, he cannot help but make the sentimental portions downright clunky.

The two doomed romances of Salim Mirza’s daughter (played by Gita Siddharth, that dew-drop beauty) are maddeningly constructed, as are the unending professional woes of the youngest son (a wiry and very skittish Farooque Sheikh).

When Sathyu has to drive home the point of the Mirzas’ being treated as second-class citizens, he goes woefully off-kilter, even to the point of garishness.

A terrible close-up of Balraj Sahni biting his lower lip in anguish reminded me of how effortlessly statuesque the same man had looked in a shot of his sleeping with an Urdu newspaper covering his face.

Sathyu is no laureate of the obvious. It’s also pretty clear that he’s not so much a storyteller as a man nurturing his curiosity.

Even the greatest of films, such as The Godfather, are very carefully calculated to deliver their intended wallop. Sathyu’s calculating side, the mechanist side of him, is palpably weak.

But there’s an undercurrent of constant awe about how Mysore Shrinivas Sathyu (a Hindu) looks at the Muslim way of life, and the truly brilliant parts of Garm Hava are charged with a sense of discovery.

There’s a scene in which a young member of the Mirza household makes a brief return from Pakistan, and the camera dances up and down in that scene, it whizzes past a procession of faces appearing from many rooms, as a mixture of aadabs and hellos and salaams slowly fills the haveli.

I may not know what ‘pure cinema’ is, but I can make out those moments when cinema becomes ‘purely about the love of people,’ and Garm Hava is packed to the gills with such moments.

IMAGE: A Garm Hava poster.

Come to think of it, Sathyu shows us the costs of Partition without giving us a single scene of slaughter or bloodshed. The movie is proof that the emotional investment of an artist is enough to expand his audience’s sympathy.

And at the very epicentre of the great churn is Balraj Sahni’s Salim Mirza, a lapsed romantic, as tragic a figure as the last Mughal.

The noble bearing masks his exquisite frustrations, and his walking stick hangs about him as if it were his coat of arms.

I have friends who consider the sweaty, sinewy rickshaw puller of Do Bigha Zamin to be Sahni’s finest hour on screen, and there are others who believe that the kindly, bearded Pashtun of Kabuliwala has a quiet force that can never be surpassed.

But I would always like to remember Balraj Sahni as Salim Mirza, steady, slow-moving Salim Mirza, ripe on the streets of Agra, thinking, deliberating, calculating his losses, even as the world around him takes to pamphleteering or waits for the next train.

Garm Hava may have been his goodbye but Balraj Sahni’s final performance, rich and flowing like a river, offers the perfect counterpoint to death. It makes you feel the sheer ecstasy of being.