In memoriam: Farooq Sheikh and his style of cinema

Soumabrata Chatterjee reminisces about Farooq Shiekh, his style of cinema and what made him so unique and special….

Recently, a colleague of mine introduced me to a Japanese anime named Rurouni Kenshin. It is basically about the wandering escapades of a samurai who uses a reverse blade sword to protect people. Despite the action-packed plot what attracted me the most was its underlying philosophical moorings. In one of the most iconic scenes in this anime, Kenshin, the wanderer meets his mentor Seijuro Hiko to learn the final technique of his style of swordsmanship. However, he cannot master this technique as long as he doesn’t master his inner contradictions or at least put a lid on them. In a philosophical exchange of the highest quality, the master imparts his final lesson, “The will to live is stronger than the will to die.”




The reader might wonder why I started my piece with this anecdote when I should have introduced my love for Farooq Sheikh. But this line is immensely important to my understanding of the style of cinema that accommodated Farooq Sheikh. We cannot pinpoint the precise commemoration of the Indian new wave which was inspired by the Italian neorealism. We can however gauge: it was maybe Shyam Benegal’s Ankur (1975) which started the parallel cinema movement with which Farooq Sir was so intimately attached. But why the philosophical phrase? The reader still wonders …

When I was a kid I was a fan of those angry young man films where Amitabh Bachchan stood against the society and burned down its well-established codes of moral conduct and showed us the true nature of our frivolous existence. Anger was abundant, along with it the idea of revenge and transgression. But this philosophy represented for me the ‘will to die’ part. While I was absolutely fascinated by the towering figure of Mr. Bachchan I wondered how he did it. Rather, I tried to imagine what it would be to act like an angry young man… Is his anger so violent, so blood curdling that it has an element of self-annihilation in it? When I saw Deewar, I was convinced that for the angry young man the society is not an object which can be regenerated…it is utterly disgusting and derelict and can only be destroyed…This ultimate mode of destruction is preserved for the self as well. Mr. Bachchan resembles Jimmy Porter of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger or Stanley in A Streetcar named Desire. However, while Porter’s and Stanley’s anger was quiet impotent and devoid of any substantial physical action, the Indian angry young man was less intellectual and brawnier. This difference can be attributed to the fact that the latter had the mainstream quotient. However, what defined the Indian angry young man was the ultimate Greek quality of a tragic hero, action. The hero has to act. He has to result in a movement of transgression which carries him beyond the macro-narrative and destroys it after all. In that way, the angry young man is very Macbeth-like…

But then I always wondered why Godard talked about cinema being truth.  He is not indicating that cinema provides truth in its unadulterated form. Rather he is talking about cinema’s potential to create truth, maybe reform it from within… it is this therapeutic mode that I associate Farooq Sheikh with..

Silent, unassuming, non-violent, pensive … these are the adjectives which characterise Farooq Sheikh’s brand of cinema. His brooding style, his curls, his eyes which can look truth in the eye, his speech pattern which is almost playful and his enchanting smile… all this and a lot more makes Farooq Sheikh a blue-eyed boy of Indian parallel cinema. But he is a lot more… According to me, his gharana of cinema is even more transgressive than the angry young man. Why? Because it represents the ‘will to live’ ….

How is it different? Just imagine a person steamrolling his way through society, crushing everything, dilapidating everything, mangling those very puritan values which make us differentiate between fellow humans on the basis of caste, class, sex and otherwise… But society strikes back in some way, he dies… but his physical death doesn’t impede his transgressive motif… There will be another Vijay Dinanath Chauhan… and consider the second style… the middle-class man fighting for basic securities, his identity which seems to be broken into multiple fragments through the numerous spiritual deaths he lives through.. yet he represents hope, he stands for that thin ray of hope which separates the barbaric from the beastly… it is a difficult thin line, yet he traverses it in order to create a better society, in order to reform what we have lost, what wrong turn of modernity we took…everything is not to destroyed according, his transgression is therefore intimately personal, yet political..he wishes to strive, to seek, to find and never to yield. This Ulysses-like spirit without the masculine pride and this revolving nuanced morality which informs the style of this paragraph too is what makes Farooq Sheikh so special, so unique… his characters may die…but his will to live is eternal… It is that flickering match which lights up the whole room…

He made his debut in the iconic film Garam Hawa where he played the youngest son of Balraj Sahni. The film revolves around a Muslim businessman who decides to stay in India after Partition and half of his family going to Pakistan. This film is one of the most heartrending ones made on the issue of Partition and the minority problem. His role in the film led to his working with Ray in Shatranj ke Khiladi where he played the role of Aqeel. His pairing with Deepti Naval in multiple films signified the quintessential middle class couple who strived for a better way of living through honest means. The song ‘Ye tera ghar ye mera ghar’ will resonate in our ears as we remember Farooq’s brand of films giving a new dimension to the usual kitchen-sink dramas in mainstream Bollywood.

He was an accomplished stage actor as well as his stage play opposite Shabana Azmi named ‘Tumhari Amrita’ consisted of a narrative created through love letters. Till now, the reader might have noticed how Farooq’s films touched the nerve of human existence in multifocal inconsistencies and fragmented desires.. His coy lover failed to impress Surpiya Pathak in Bazaar and in Chasme Baddoor he falls in love with Deepti Naval who comes in to sell detergent powder. Such subtleties and comic undertones revealing a society which is rapidly changing according to western values… Farooq Sheikh is that bridge between generations, the man in whom modernity took different turns….His role in Muzaffar Ali’s directorial debut Gaman which took upon the issue of migration and the city of dreams and its ultimate failure is Sheikh’s magnum opus… He played Ghulam Hasan with effortless ease yet his struggle for survival, to bring his wife to him, to face the burden of poverty…the journey goes on….

His characters live to tell a tale…they come together; try to create another world where there is mercy, where humanity is not so materialistic, where the essence of survival is not contaminated by capitalist greed. I am trying to discern a single thread of potentiality that connects them all. This is not to say that his politics is simple.. Rather it is more complex than the angry young man syndrome. His politics is about reading between the lines, even start writing under the page rather than on it… yet its simplicity evades all understanding… That is Farooq Sheikh for me… the man who defined the parallel cinema movement…one who epitomises the will to live, to strive, to struggle …