Indian Writing

Film researcher Praba Mahajan sent me this slim volume of tributes to Renu Saluja. It’s a lovely little book put together by friends and colleagues. But how does one “review” a set of personal memories? I’ve put together some extracts from the tributes in the collection so that they become a kind of voice-over for Saluja’s editing career. This is the first part of the post. I’ll post the next part soon.

This post is cross-posted at Naachgaana.
—————-

Invisible: the Art of Renu Saluja is a volume of tributes brought out by GraFTII, the alumni association of the Film and Television Institute, Pune, on the occasion of a festival of Saluja’s films in June this year.

Nine feature films were chosen for the festival, including Saluja’s first major works, both pathbreaking - Ardh Satya and Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, (both 1983), her first major commercial work Parinda (1989), Maya Mamsaab (1992) and Bandit Queen (1995). These nine were picked from a body of work in Saluja’s tragically brief career (she died at 48 of stomach cancer) that included over forty feature films, several documentaries, short films and television work.

Putting together a set of films for a festival is one thing; it is a harder project to get busy film people to sit down and write about their interactions with an individual. In an industry that is always busy planning its next venture, there is little time spent in taking stock and documenting. This little volume (100 pages, Rs 50) began with Praba Mahajan’s effort to bring out a monograph on the festival films. An appeal on the FTII alumni mailing list brought in more contributions. Not only was there clearly much to say about Saluja and her work – some of the film-makers who began writing about their memories of Renu Saluja were also inevitably writing about an entire, exciting period in Bombay film history.

The final section of the book contains a partial chronology of Saluja’s work. She won four national awards within one decade – for Parinda (1990), Dharavi (1992), Sardar (1994) and Godmother (1999). A note at the end of the volume states that this is a list “based on collective memory�? and not exhaustive. As a tribute, Invisible is a warm and affectionate enterprise, and one to be cherished; at the same time, one hopes that Bombay film history, and the contributions of all those associated in the making of films, will be recorded in a more systematic way.

*****

*****

Saluja began working in the seventies, in television and short films, before doing Saeed Mirza’s Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyon Aata Hai? Chandita Mukherjee recalls the early post-FTII days:

There was no TV channel looking for EPs (Executive Producers), nor any NRI financier ready to lay out money if you could sign on the stars. The only jobs were at Films Division or Doordarshan, for which most of us were unfit! Along with a handful of people, Renu saw her struggle as the act of creating an experimental cinema that would also be popular. It was a favourable time for offbeat films… the dominant culture seemed to believe that films could be in some way beneficial to society.

Simla House neighbour Khalid Mohammed remembers Saluja’s early interest in film:

That she was immersed in cinema – to the point of exclusion of everything else in her life – was apparent to me. We stayed together in the same apartment complex – Simla House, a crowded township of sorts, on a less-affluent tip of Malabar Hill. If she dropped in over a weekend, it was to borrow a book (Ingmar Bergman scripts were her favourite) or to berate me on why I had not liked a certain film she had liked.

Kundan Shah remembers his first meeting with Saluja. Saeed Mirza had invited Shah to the Eros preview theatre for a screening of Arvind Desai Ki Ajeeb Dastan. After the screening, Mirza offered Shah the chance to assist him in his next project, Albert Pinto. He then took Shah across to the Alliance Francaise where Vinod Chopra and Renu Saluja had gone to see a film.

Vinod, Renu and Saeed were thick as thieves in those days and very soon, I became the fourth… Every director thinks he is God. So did I. And if you’re from FTII, even God is inferior to you. So there were three Gods – Saeed, Vinod and me. As for Renu… well, she was just an editor.

Shah continues:

As an assistant director, I was entitled to attend the editing. It had two advantages: Rs 10 which was given as conveyance and of course, free lunches and dozens of cups of tea. I don’t know when, but sometime during the editing, I started noticing that the onus of being a God had shifted from the director to the editor. Renu was totally in command.

Saluja was involved with the low-budget project – Albert Pinto was made on a three lakh budget - right from the scripting stage. Shah found himself being drawn into Saluja’s process:

There were no budgets for assistant editors those days in FFC films. So Renu did everything. She ordered me to follow all her rules, of keeping rushes, cuts, etc in properly labelled cans. We were making cement joints then, and the nightmare was in taking care of the frames. But this is more than just being methodical. What Renu did was to discover a method to become one with the film, to get to its soul through the mechanical art of editing.

Shah’s account of those days transports us back to a time when the process of making movies was very different, and when so much of movie history – Ardh Satya, Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron and much more – was still to be made. “We breathed films, with tea and more tea, faffing and more faffing, plans and more plans.�?

****