Dev Anand’s dreamy modernity

How did you think you could become a movie star asks Simi Garewal in her wonderful interview with Dev Anand ldquoI must have looked in the mirrorrdquo he replies with only a hint of selfdeprecationSeptember 26 marks Dev Anandrsquos centenary and what is it a century of Dev Anand dreamt himself up a dream of modernity quintessentially queer I donrsquot use the word queer to mean sexual orientation or even refer to the camp that grew to sometimes dismaying fullness in his declining years I use it rather to indicate his slightly ungraspable quality Simultaneously exuberant and moody he was made up almost entirely of style The famous puff of hair the gangling dangling walk and dropped wrists the ruched up jacket sleeves the gaptoothed smile the peculiarly declamatory lilt the quizzical look all added up to urbane heartthrobOften asked how he devised this stylised persona he responded with that was me that was how I was ldquoIrsquom a citybred man and Irsquom not ashamed of it Sophisticated liberal I was full of dreams I was always excited I never bothered Irsquom a man belonging to the world I am a detached man Intelligent sharp but quiet a loner and liking itrdquo As Muzaffar Ali recently wrote of Asha Bhosle always ready to fall in love with himself So able to maybe needing to be aloneIn a time where the Hindi film hero represented selfsacrifice and nobility in service of nation and family Dev Anand provided a very different masculinity urbane individualistic romantic uncategorised He played a series of essentially itinerant characters never settling in place often on the edge of legality and respectabilitymdashblack marketers pickpockets impersonatorsmdashbut also taxi drivers men on the run cops with flexible morals paying guests and funtooshes People interested in money desire coolness and the world who had not much use for shame and proprietyAlthough famed as a romantic heartthrob itrsquos my observation that Dev Anand fans were primarily young menmdashmy father certainly was and the fathers of most of my friends Their reason was simple style He gave them a vocabulary of style with which to dream up a different contemporary self outside of what convention might propose a poetic self outside the prosaic ordained destinies and schemas of identityAlthough acknowledged as significant Dev Anand often becomes a subject of nostalgia or is celebrated by a gentsvariety cinephile for his part in creating Bombay Noir which well he did But it is his poetic urbanity which made his persona so influential It is a cinematic persona composed of style rhythm ambiguity and ambivalence so elusive in the somewhat blunt cinema of our times which exists in concentrated form in the songs he himself considered central to his cinema The romantic ambivalence of ldquolikha hai teri ankhon meinrdquo lsquokaise na ho meri har baat adhuri abhi hoon aadha deewanarsquo the balletic topangle walkdance among sleeping streetdwellers in lsquoduniya ki gadi ka pahiya paison ka raja rupaiyarsquo the sexual yearning in Shokhiyon mein ghola jayersquos line ldquohar dam kare jo intezar woh pyaar hairdquo are filmscapes and dreamscapes composed by many gifted artistes the directors lyricists composers but rendered into form by the figure of Dev Anand We revisit themmdashas he insisted a song should ask us to domdashto rediscover ourselves Our deflatingly literal times need some of this poetic modernityParomita Vohra is an awardwinning Mumbaibased filmmaker writer and curator working with fiction and nonfiction Reach her at paromitavohramiddaycom