WHEN RAJINDER SINGH BEDI, THE GREAT WRITER REFUSED TO CHANGE A LINE IN BIMAL ROY'S "DEVDAS"

-Ali Peter John

Could my mother who built her hut in a jungle and which later attracted a crowd of workers from the various mills and factories that came up in the village we lived in because of the kind of liquor she distilled ever imagine that her hut would one day attract writers like Rajinder Singh Bedi and then many years later, my guru,K.A Abbas and Gulzar? It may sound like an imaginary scene, but it is a reality that time will and can never deny...

I had heard about the name Rajinder Singh Bedi from my Hindi teacher in school, Mr R.B Singh when he used to read out passages of the translations of well-known Hindi and Urdu writers like Nirala (the poet who asked Amitabh's father, Dr Harivanshrai Bachchan to change the name of his son from Inqilab Shrivastav to Amitabh who later got Bachchan as his surname), Premchand, Dinkar and Bedi among others. I was more familiar because Mr Singh mostly made me read out the passages as he kept sitting in his chair and gave the class some kind of an explanation of what the writers wanted to say in what they had written. The man who taught me Hindi in college was also a Mr Singh and he read the passages himself because he could not make a class of hundred and fifty students listen to one student reading, but Bedi was a common writer we had to study both in school and college. Little did I know then that Bedi would have a very important part to play in my life and my career...

I had a neighbour called Zaheer.D.Lari who lived in a hole of a room for which he paid thirteen rupees as his rent for a month and had a number of books on a table, most of which were written in a language I could not decipher and only later came to know was Urdu. Lari was a Muslim from Hardoi in Lucknow and told all his neighbours that he was a writer and not many in my compound knew what working as a writer meant. They even couldn't understand how a man could make a living by writing and that is why one of my Christian neighbours, Mr Joseph D'souza who openly showed his dislike for Muslims who he called ‘laandiyas'told everyone that Lari was a liar and the only other man to agree with him was my younger brother, Roy who had shown signs of being a non-believer even when he was only seven or eight.

I was however totally carried away by Mr Lari because I always had some kind of a near fatal attraction for the words, writer, lekhak, poet, shaayar and playwright. I was very carried away by the way Mr Lari wrote something on white sheets of paper and his photograph in black-and-white with his hand on his face which was how I had seen photographs of most writers and under his photographs was a line in English which went, “the moving finger writes and having written, moves on". Mr Lari had taken a fascination for me and we had developed a very good friendship till Allah came in the way. He told my mother that he was teaching me Urdu and all was well till my mother, a staunch Christian, heard me repeating “Allah Allah"after Mr Lari and she couldn't control herself and for into the room of Mr Lari and thrashed him till he begged for forgiveness, but their relationship as mother and son had come to an end because she did not trust him any longer after the Allah incident.

My mother died very young and my brother and me were left alone to fend for ourselves. I had the good fortune of studying at two of the best colleges in Bombay, SIES and the Bhavan's College in Andheri and my interest in writing and being known as a writer increased and soon I had started writing letters that were published in ‘The Times of India' and I had written my first article in the Free Press Bulletin and if there was one man who was very happy for me, it was Mr Lari who was known for his loud mouth kept telling everyone that I was becoming what I was because of his influence and I let him believe in what he was saying about me.

It was this feeling for him that made him take me to different studios and to the offices of some leading filmmakers like Ramanand Sagar and Rajinder Singh Bedi. I was totally flabbergasted to see Bedi in flesh and blood and my first impression was that I had never seen a ‘sardarji'who looked so handsome. It could have been because all the earlier ‘sardars' I knew were taxi drivers, mechanics and ‘dhabha' owners. Bedi had a very neatly tied colourful turban,a very well trimmed beard, a very good style of dressing up, a very good sense of humour and above all, he smoked India King's cigerattes and was a chain smoker which quite shocked because I knew that smoking was a sin for ‘sardarjis'.

Mr Lari was sitting with him when I met him and introduced me to him as a ‘landlord' and his neighbour. Mr Bedi introduced Mr Lari to me as his chief assistant director for the film with which he was making his debut as a director after being known as one of the best writers, screenplay writers and especially dialogue writers who had written films for screenwriters like Bimal Roy, Amar Kumar and Hrishikesh Mukherjee. In that one moment when Mr Bedi introduced Mr Lari to me, my neighbour, Mr Lari grew in my esteem for me and that was the beginning of my own personal visits to Mr Bedi's office at 38,Tardeo Air-conditioned Market which I later came to know had the offices of many more filmmakers, the most prominent one being the office of Nasir Husain and his partner and girlfriend, the very popular actress Asha Parekh.

My visits to Mr Bedi's office became regular and I one day asked him if he would give me an interview for my campus magazine called ‘Campus Times' which had become very controversial because of the rebellious streak we had followed and I remember the four lines I had written for the inaugural issue which was a ‘tribute' to the then vice-chancellor of Bombay University, Prof.T.K.Tope and my lines went,“we welcome Mr Tope, and we hope Tope is our hope and not a dope". I had told me Bedi about these lines and he was impressed and said, “for these lines, I will not only give you an interview, but also my permission to write a book about me".

I was happy, the interview was published, Mr Bedi was happy and little did he or I know that the interview would be my marksheet to pass the three minute interview his friend and comarade, Mr K.A Abbas had put me through in my first and only life-changing meeting and interview.

Then one day came a request from Mr Lari. He told me that Mr Bedi wanted to have all his morning meetings with him in his house and he would not be able to make Mr Bedi comfortable and so asked me for permission to have his meetings with Mr Bedi in my house which was also a hut, but four times bigger than the ‘kholi' Mr Lari was living in. The meetings became regular. Mr Bedi was a strange visitors to my village which had only seen sardars as taxi drivers and were now seeing a very rich and handsome sardar driving a black, large Chevrolet. At one of the meetings, he presented me with a leather portfolio with his visiting card in it and I kept it as a treasure till it decided that it had enough of me.

It was during one of our drives back from M. Ali House (the name I had given my hut after my mother's death and my younger be, Roy had decided to renovate my mother's hut and built it like a pucca cottage) that Mr Bedi showed me a trace of his sense of humour. His Chevrolet had to stop at the signal of Vile Parle station and he was in a hurry and the signal man was not in a mood to let the signal go green. He said, “abhi dekho, main kaise Indian jaadoo dikhaata hoon". He asked us if we had a twenty-five naya paise coin on us. Luckily, I had one, as that was the only kind of money I could afford to have. He called the signal man and just placed the coin in the palm of his right hand and the signal man smiled and within a minute the signal had gone green only for Mr Bedi's Chevrolet to pass and then it was the red signal again. He told me I would have to learn all these tricks if I had to live in the kind of life I was living in and there was no hope of this life changing soon as Mr Bedi said.

That morning Mr Bedi was in high spirits and said, “I have only written films, I don't know anything about making films and like a fool, I am going headlong into the making of ‘dastak' with Sanjeev Kumar who I think is a greater actor than Dilip Kumar". He had taken both me Lari and me by shock because we both liked Sanjeev Kumar but worshipped Dilip Kumar. Mr Lari could cry like a child if anyone said a word against Dilip Kumar.

But I came to know why Mr Bedi was so angry with Dilip Kumar. He told me a story I can never forget. He said he was the dialogue writer of Bimal Roy's “Devdas" and Dilip Kumar the hero. The legend was known for his changing the dialogue of the films he was working in during the shooting and there was no change in his attitude towards the writing of dialogues by most writers. He as usual kept changing the lines me Bedi had written for Devdas, Chandramukhi or Paro. Mr Bedi who was considered one of the leading writers in Indian literature and in films decided to teach the legend and Bimal Roy a lesson. There was one line which he just didn't let either the legend or Bimal Roy change. The entire unit pleaded with me Bedi to change the line but Mr Bedi was adamant and the shooting had to be done with Dilip Kumar speaking the line Mr Bedi had written. At the end, when everything was over with the making of “Devdas", Mr Bedi was asked why he was so adamant about that one line and Mr Bedi looked very straight-faced and said, “kyonki woh ek hi laawaris line baki thi jo meri likhi hue thi, baaki toh sab Yousuf ne likhi thi. Woh Devdas ke dialogue writer hain, main kaahaa?"

The shooting of “Dastak" started and on the very first day, his cinematographer Nando Bhattacharya asked him, “Bedi Sahab, camera kaha rakhna hai?"and Mr Bedi said, “Kahi bhi rakh do, lekin dekhna ki jagah bahut saaf suthri ho"and the whole unit burst into laughter and that was the spirit in which “Dastak" was made and is considered to be a classic. The heroine, Rehana Sultan who had been working with a director called B.R Ishara who gave her the first break in “Chetna",a film that shocked the industry and the whole of India because of its bold and even a nude scene done with Rehana (Ishara and Rehana did several films together and ultimately even got married). Rehana won the National Award for the best actress for her performance in the film and Satyajit Ray was the first to write a letter to her, congratulating her. She was very excited and wanted a letter of thanks to be written to Ray, but neither she, nor anyone close to her nor Mr Lari who was now her secretary could write a letter in English. Mr Lari ultimately came to me and I was privileged to write a letter to the great Dr Satyajit Ray, so what if it was for Rehana.

Mr Bedi was spurred on to make two other big films like “Phaagun" with Dharmendra, Waheeda Rehman, Jaya Bhaduri and Vijay Arora who was the leading star working with almost all the big heroines of the time. The film was a big flop and Mr Bedi who was a very emotional man vowed never to make a film with big stars again. He made smaller films like “Nawab Sahab" and his last film as a director was “Aankhin Dekhi" which had an entirely new cast of Suresh Bhagat who later became a big producer and Suman Sinha with whom Mr Bedi fell in love madly. The film marked the end of Mr Bedi's career as a director, but he continued writing dialogue and his affairs with literature was only growing stronger. The last film he wrote the dialogue for was Hrishikesh Mukherjee's “Abhimaan" starring Amitabh Bachchan and Jaya Bhaduri in which his dialogue was a highlight. He made a very good team with Hrishida and wrote the dialogue for some of his best films.

My last meeting was a very strange one. I had now become quite a known name in film journalism and Mr Bedi had pointed a PRO for “Aankhon Dekhi". He asked his PRO if he could get a journalist called Ali Peter John to talk to him. The PRO was a friend and the meeting was arranged in his King's Circle bungalow which was in the neighborhood of the one-time greats like Prithviraj Kapoor, K.L Saigal, Kidar Sharma, Madan Puri and many others. When he saw me, he was surprised and said, “arre, tum hi woh teen naamwale aadmi ho, phir interview kahe ke liye. We drank the best Scotch till late into the night and he spoke about his long-standing face off with his son, Narinder Bedi and was bitter about his not giving him work when he was one of the leading directors and the favourite of Amitabh Bachchan, Jaya Bhaduri and Rajesh Khanna. He spoke about all his affairs and the weekly holidays he had in Lonavala with different women at different times and how he couldn't adjust with the changes in the industry ‘where Kadar Khan was considered a greater writer than Rajinder Singh Bedi'.

He took to heavy drinking, besides his love for India King's(he was once surrounded by a group of young sardars outside the Regal cinema where he was smoking and was even threatened with violence, but was allowed to go because he was the writer of the Punjabi novel,‘Ek Chaadar Maili Si' which was translated into several languages and was even made into a film with Hema Malini and Rishi Kapoor and was earlier even shot with Geeta Bali who died of small pox during the making of the film.

He was a very lonely man towards the end of his life. To add to his misery, his son, the successful Narinder Bedi died of a mysterious ailment which shattered Mr Bedi and some of his best comrades at his funeral said that it would not be long before Mr Bedi would follow his son and their prediction came true when the colourful, controversial and carefree Sardar Rajinder Singh Bedi died after he had shifted to his son's house on Linking Road.

I cannot forget that evening. I was returning from the maternity hospital where my daughter, Swati was born. It was close to where Mr Bedi lived. I saw a shrunken ‘sardarji' walking all alone in Linking Road. I decided to follow him. I knew he couldn't be anyone else but Mr Bedi. I did not have the courage to go up to him and talk to him. I had seen him in all his glory. I couldn't imagine seeing him walking towards the sunset and the darkness that followed..

The next morning every newspaper of any worse carried the news of the death of me Bedi who is actually alive if you look for him in his literature and his films. It is very difficult to talk about men like Mr Bedi add ‘the late' because he had made sure that he would be alive till there was life.

There is a plaque outside the one-time house of Narinder Bedi which carries the name of Mr Bedi and it reads,“The late Padmashri Rajinder Singh Bedi Marg" and every time I pass that ‘Marg' I am filled with memories of the great Sardarji and knowing his wit, humour, sarcasm and his ability to laugh at himself, I wonder what he would have said if he had seen that aluminium plaque with his name on it.

HOW MANY OF YOU KNOW ABOUT THE MAN AND HIS CONTRIBUTION TO LITERATURE AND FILMS, RAJINDER SINGH BEDI? IF YOU HAVE NOT, YOU BETTER DO, IF YOU HAVE NOT TO BE CALLED NAMES.