A House on Carter Road
Sadanand Menon on Hrishikesh Mukherjee and the house on Bandra’s Carter Road:
Not only has Hrishida (as he is universally called) lived on Carter Road, Bandra, for almost fifty years now, but he must be the one person whose house (former house, now) ‘Anupama’ (opposite Otter’s Club) has featured the most in Indian cinema. He had moved into the house in 1960, soon after Anuradha, the successful remake of Madam Bovary, with Leela Naidu and Balraj Sahni. The shoestring budgets on which he made his films on the one hand, and the debilitating Gout condition which used to frequently immobilize him since the late 1970s resulted in his making a series of ‘home-bound’ films like Golmaal and Khubsoorat in which the main set was his own house. There was a period when, for some five years at a stretch, every time you visited the house you could lose your way as major portions of it would have been remodeled for a set.I love the picture. It’s from Outlook, and the crow is sitting in HM’s hand.Hrishida said it was cheaper than hiring studios. I remember rushing in through a door where I was sure a toilet existed and stopping petrified at the sight of Utpal Dutt sitting in an easy chair rehearsing his lines for a shot. He looked up, understood the situation in a jiffy, and returned to his reading with a bemused shrug. The toilet had been ‘redesigned’ to look like an office room. It was an oblong, barrack-like, one-storied house whose best feature was the front portico with its swing and coconut palm and its room-size balcony upstairs, from where you could sit and gaze at the sea and the tides and sunsets over Danda beach for hours on end.
That house must’ve had some warmth, otherwise, how does one explain the sheer happy earthiness of his films.
Comment by Anil — September 2, 2006 @ 2:56 pm
Oh, that is a great pic.
Comment by Sharanya — September 2, 2006 @ 4:23 pm
Anil, Sharanya: yes!
Comment by Uma — September 4, 2006 @ 12:46 am
Hi Uma,
I was a bit puzzled by the crow—it looked a bit artificial or maybe its just a young one—so I took a closer look. Not easy to figure out, but looks more likely not to be a real one than otherwise. I could be wrong, of course. Also, it is not sitting in his palm, but he seems to be grasping it. Almost as if it were a toy. Any idea about the origin of this photograph?
Best
Comment by Glass Half Full — September 5, 2006 @ 12:53 pm