People in Hindi movies don’t read many books. When you do see a character with a book, it’s often just another accessory: as meaningless as the brand of sunglasses they’re wearing, or the kind of sofa in their living room. Sometimes the book in a person’s hand seems incongruous—think of Nushrat Bharucha’s Chiku, the spoilt, screechy caricature of an upper-class young woman in Pyaar Ka Punchnama 2, holding a copy of Marjane Satrapi’s plucky graphic novel Persepolis. Sometimes, though, book-spotting can be more fun, when the choice of title is meant to function as shorthand for a character’s personality, or as a sideways comment on a situation.
In the 1965 hit Jab Jab Phool Khile, for instance, when we meet the protagonist Raja, a poor Kashmiri boatman played by Shashi Kapoor, he proudly displays a shelf of classics in his houseboat to a guest, Rita, played by Nanda: “Ismein Tagore hai, Shakispeer ... aur Munshi Premchand hai. Bahut accha log hai ismein, memsaab!” But the memsahib merely rolls her eyes. A little later, we see Rita—her high-heeled feet on a divan and a string of pearls around her neck—absorbed in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, a 1950s American novel about a man’s sexual obsession with a young girl. The besotted boatman, slate in hand, cajoles her into giving him Hindi lessons, and the two later begin an unlikely romance. But once you’ve seen that book in Rita’s hands, you know that this modern woman will soon find herself struggling to deal with this traditional Indian man.
A more recent instance of book-as-comment occurs in Imtiaz Ali’s Tamasha, when Tara (Deepika Padukone) picks up a half-read copy of Joseph Heller’s classic Catch-22 from the floor where Ved (Ranbir Kapoor) left it the previous night. Strangers in Corsica, they have embarked on a fling on conditions of impermanence and anonymity. Her quick, knowing smile on reading the book’s title suggests an internal dialogue, an unspoken note to herself on their predicament. She checks the flyleaf for a name. (If there had been one, their agreement would have fallen through—as would have half the film’s plot.) But all she finds is a stamp from Social, a fashionable “urban hangout” with branches in Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru. Years later, that remembered stamp becomes Tara’s clue to finding Ved.
It is a sign of the times that the book now functions merely as a form of product placement—and not for its publishers, but for a café and bar chain. But perhaps the real thing to note about the book in Tamasha is how little it matters. In a film that’s all about celebrating the power of stories, the printed word is barely a blip. It is the oral tradition of Urdu storytelling, dastangoi, as practised by Piyush Mishra’s character, that leaves an impact on our hero. And even that crabby old man tells his stories for money.
Books were not always so inconsequential in Hindi films. For the better part of Hindi cinema’s history, there was a powerful idealism associated with literature, and films regularly featured writers—especially poets—as heroes. Think of Guru Dutt as the heartsick poet in Pyaasa, forced by his financial situation to work in the house of the nasty publisher Rehman; or Dharmendra in Anupama, the sensitive writer who could make you believe in the idea of being poor but happy. Amitabh Bachchan’s once-frequent writerly avatar is still fondly remembered: as the intense young Bengali doctor who novelises Rajesh Khanna’s character’s life story in Anand (1971), the absent-minded English professor in Chupke Chupke (1975), or the soulful playwright-poet of Silsila (1981). The late Farooq Sheikh’s bookish turns are also memorable: in Sai Paranjpye’s delightful comedy Chashme Buddoor (1981), and the more serious Saath Saath (1982), where his character’s fiery socialism wins college debates, but earns rejection slips from publishers.
If earlier films gave us only high-minded writers, post-liberalisation Bollywood has swung in the opposite direction. Whether it’s Sanjay Dutt’s abysmally unconvincing Booker winner in Shabd (2005), or Saif Ali Khan and Ileana D’Cruz as Indian authors of runaway American bestsellers in 2014’s implausible Happy Ending, writers in today’s films are either making headlines or cynically playing the market. If they struggle, it is only against writer’s block.
Book-loving heroines have been in much shorter supply than bookish heroes, though female characters were usually amenable to being wooed with poetry. This could range from Shakeel Badayuni’s elaborate shairi in Mere Mehboob (1963)—where Anwar and Husna’s first meeting involves the dropping and picking up of books—or Amitabh Bachchan’s more straightforward efforts, which win over Rakhi in Kabhie Kabhie and Rekha in Silsila. Even the traumatised Uma (Sharmila Tagore), in Anupama is successfully drawn out of her shell by the hero writing a book about her.
When thinking of women reading books in Hindi cinema, many think of Tagore first. Her most famous such scene was the “Mere sapnon ki rani” song in Aradhana (1969), where we see her on the Darjeeling toy train, trying hard to look interested in her book while an amorous Rajesh Khanna serenades her from a car driven alongside. (Midway through the song, when she raises the book coyly to cover her face, its author is revealed to be Alistair MacLean, the Scottish adventure novelist.)
In Waqt (1965), Tagore is a rich man’s daughter, whom we see holding a book titled Six Modern Novels. We never learn which six, but perhaps the word “modern” points to her worldview; she freely romances a poor classmate, even when he becomes her family chauffeur. A decade later, in Chupke Chupke, Tagore had another on-screen affair with a chauffeur: she plays a botany student whose admiration for her textbook turns into a passion for its author (Dharmendra), who later poses as a chauffeur.
It is much rarer for a woman in a Hindi film to actually be an author. Other than D’Cruz in Happy Ending, I can only think of Shabana Azmi in Muhafiz (1993), and Rekha in Umrao Jaan (1981)—both unhappy poetesses—and Smita Patil in Aakhir Kyon (1985). Patil’s Nisha Sharma, too, only becomes a writer after her life takes a tragic turn. When the film opens, she has just published her fiftieth book: a memoir whose story is also the plot of Aakhir Kyon. In contrast, we have the unforgettable Shilpa Shetty with big nineties hair in Baazigar, shunting a book out of Shah Rukh Khan’s hands with the insistent lyric “Kitaabein bahut si padhi hongi tumne, kabhi koi chehra bhi tumne padha hai? (You may have read a lot of books, but have you ever read a face?)” Disappointingly, the filmmaker never lingers long enough to show what book has Khan so absorbed as to prefer its charms over Shetty’s.
Mostly, though, the Hindi movie heroine stands somewhere in between, neither bookish nor book-hating. The book in her hands is often just a distraction, a shield against the hero’s gaze, or a way to pretend that she is otherwise occupied. Even Vidya Sinha’s character in Rajnigandha (1974), supposedly writing a PhD thesis, only picks up a book to pretend that she hasn’t been pacing up and down her living room, waiting fretfully for her boyfriend.
Two other films, far apart in their settings but made around the same time—1942: A Love Story (1994) and Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (1995)—deploy a similar comic device. In 1942, Manisha Koirala’s Rajeshwari tries valiantly to seem unmoved as Anil Kapoor’s character literally runs rings around her in the library, but in her bashful confusion, finds herself holding the library book upside down. In DDLJ, too, Simran (Kajol) buries her bespectacled nose in an upside-down book while trying to ignore the attentions of Raj, played by Shah Rukh Khan.
Simran seems terribly innocent, but does her choice of book—a racy historical romance called The Scarlet Temptress—suggest she might be up for something steamy? Perhaps only in the realm of the imagination. A decade and a half on, at the opposite end of Hindi cinema from Aditya Chopra, Anurag Kashyap’s Dev D (2009) gave us two frankly sexual heroines. The classic Chandramukhi character was played by Kalki Koechlin as a sulky teenager whose life plummets after an MMS sex scandal. Banished to her father’s rural ancestral home, we see her accosted by her nasty grandmother for reading Alberto Moravia’s Contempt, a 1954 novel still striking for its openness about sex. “Yeh jo sab gandagi padhti rehti hai na tu Angrezi mein, isliye barbaad hoti jaa rahi hai tu” (All this filth you keep reading in English, this is what is ruining you), she declares, clearly imagining the worst from the image on the cover.
Another of Kashyap’s heroines, Huma Qureshi’s Mohsina in Gangs of Wasseypur 2, is shown with a copy of Jaal, a 2008 murder mystery by the reigning king of Hindi pulp, Surender Mohan Pathak. Pulp also makes an appearance in the 1982 comedy Angoor, Gulzar’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors (via a Bengali play-turned-film called Bhrantibilas). When we first meet the unmarried Sanjeev Kumar, he is in a train compartment, gripped by his copy of Agyaat Apraadhi—a novel by Ved Prakash Kaamboj, one of Pathak’s important predecessors. The scene sets us up perfectly for a character so influenced by mystery-reading as to treat everything around him with suspicion.
On the whole, though, popular Hindi fiction, despite—or perhaps because of—its wide reach, does not often appear in our cinema. As ideals that viewers are meant to look up to rather than identify with, Hindi film protagonists usually read books perceived to have aspirational value: textbooks, English books, or high literature. One example of the latter is Kalidas’s Meghdoot, which Nurse Radha (Waheeda Rehman) in Asit Sen’s Khamoshi (1969) clutches through the song ‘Tum Pukar Lo.’
The power of books to reflect social status is a key part of Shor in the City (2011). A trio of young conmen in Mumbai decide to pirate bestsellers, even kidnapping a Chetan Bhagat-like character for his unpublished manuscript. The film repeatedly marks the stark barriers between the pirates and the world of the books they print: the chain bookstore in the mall, the book launch with champagne flowing. In one scene, Tilak (Tusshar Kapoor) startles a salesman by telling him to wrap up a stack of thick English books that he plainly cannot read. Later in the film, Radhika Apte, playing Tilak’s new bride, Sapna, startles him by telling him that she can. The book that transforms Tilak and his marriage is Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist.
The 2014 independent film Sulemani Keeda, about two young screenwriters in Mumbai, shows them torn between an aspirational literary world of open mics and bookshops, and Bollywood, where they would like to have their writing welcomed. Indian English publishing is more realistically depicted here than in Shor in the City, as an elite universe with limited reach.
But Sulemani Keeda’s highlight is its bookshop scene—one of the most fun book-related moments in Hindi film. Our heroes arrive at a Crossword store and begin to size up women based on the books they’re browsing. “Politics ki kitaab padh rahi hai (She’s reading a book about politics),” says one. “Leftist intellectual feminist type hogi (Must be a Leftist intellectual feminist type)”, says the other. A woman in the religion section is dismissed by one as “kaafi conservative type ki ladki (a pretty conservative type of girl),” before the other points out that she’s looking at a book by Osho, the spiritual guru who was known to have unorthodox views on sex. They decide a woman reading Orwell’s 1984 must be “disturbed,” though this doesn’t stop them from hitting on her. “Like Wodehouse?” says one, leaning in far too close. The woman flees.
Later, he approaches a young woman turning the pages of The Healthiest Meals on Earth with an equally bad pick-up line: “Are you health-conscious?” She does a double take, but is polite. Before the scene ends, the tables have been turned: a book he’d distractedly picked up was about treating erectile dysfunction, and the woman insists on giving him a number for her uncle, a sexologist. Now it is his turn to flee. It is a juvenile scene, but still funny. Most of all, it is a deliciously silly subversion of the enduring trope in Hindi cinema—that the book in our hands could possibly define us.