The Court Jester of Bollywood

Naseeruddin Shah is the court jester of Bollywood, the nickname of Hindi Cinema, which, despite being
derogatory (meaning senseless imitation), it embraced in vigour. The reason why everyone else comes
only second to Shah in being a wise clown is that unlike most actors in the Hindi cinema world, Shah is
not a fool whose meager intelligence is somewhat compensated by bulging biceps and synthetic six-packs.
He is well-read and has lots of experience from toiling on the streets of India (not a spoilt brat, so to say).
Despite being 65, he is a young man-not on account of his pairing with Vidhya Balan in many films, but
because of his readiness to learn the niceties of acting and his willingness to adopt challenging roles and
to adapt to any conditions.
Nasreeruddin Shahs memoir And Then One Day is all about the son of a civil servant, born one year after
independence, turning inured to stage and screen on account of his inborn distaste for schooling and
disciplines. In order to slowly arrive at the realization that acting was his calling, Shah had to uproot
himself from the cozy, promising surroundings of his home and to cling to a life of toils and hardships.
Rebellion was his forte and choice, right from the time he starts smoking in school, from visiting brothels
in his college days, to staging protests in the film school.
To be a clown in the Bollywood is merely the consequence of his being a rebel there. He has spared no
stars in the industry. But his diatribes against Bachchans and Khans are not motivated by jealousy of their
stardom. Shah was primarily a man of theatre. Films take you captive, they feed you everything on plate,
the legerdemain they create transports you into a state where you may as well be dreaming, but theatre
takes you into a world where your imagination is stimulated, your judgment is unimpaired and thus your
enjoyment heightened. His distaste for technology-induced celebrity value stems out of his nose for the
stuff and worth of his calling. Also, he brushes aside all those that stardom offers: awards, money and
celebrity status. I began to loathe all competitive awards, particularly those which are an excuse for the
film industry to indulge in its annual orgy of mutual jerking off.
But it is to be asked why such a wise critic of the seedy underworld of celebrity-staffed Hindi cinema has
acted in many films, though not as many as Bachchans and Khans did (like as many good ones as they
did)? Why cant he escape from those terms and conditions in the industry which make gifted and
talented artists into money-making buffoons? This is because of that vital quality of a court clown which
we find terribly missing in Shah (at least in the course of 316 pages of his well-written memoir): the
amazing potential of self-criticism. Everywhere we see him attacking others from that pedestal of high art
and we realize, with him being unaware, that the pedestal stands on the slough of the very industry he
attacks. There is such a holier-than-thou approach in his critique that he appears to be hypocritical and
that his words are not taken seriously (of course their humour aside).
However, there are many junctures in his life, as the memoir reveals, where he might as well be selfcritical. According to this reviewer, the most crucial point is where Shah showers scorn on his ex-wife for
being a fundamentalist Muslim without realizing his role in it. If a woman, whose husband does not visit
her in the hospital where she is waiting for the delivery of their baby but visits, instead, brothels, prefers a
fundamentalist as husband, she cant be blamed. But self-criticism could have rendered Shahs rebellion
not only as more pungent but also as more effective.