A trailblazer with a gentle touch: Poonam Saxena writes on Sai Pranjpye

Her comedies are iconic, winsome, loveable. They serve as abiding love letters to a certain time in the lives of Delhi and Mumbai, Saxena says.

She hated being called a “woman director”.

In Katha (1983), set in a Mumbai chawl, Paranjpye cast her main actors against type. The cultured Farooque Shaikh was a conman; Naseeruddin Shah was an earnest but dull clerk. It won a National Award, but Paranjpye’s body of work has never really got its due.

“To the eternal question that I am plagued with – what is the main disadvantage of being a woman director – my answer is: being endlessly harangued with this very question,” she writes in her memoir, A Patchwork Quilt (2020).

But the truth is that Sai Paranjpye, now 86, was the only woman directing Hindi films when she made her iconic first three movies: Sparsh (1980), Chashme Buddoor (1981) and Katha (1983).

I recently read that she has donated her collection of original, handwritten drafts and screenplays to Ashoka University’s Archives of Contemporary India. I am glad they will be preserved.

Looking back at the early 1980s, Paranjpye’s achievements are even more impressive.

The ’70s were momentous years for Bollywood, and the effects of that remarkable decade spilled over into the early parts of the next one too. Amitabh Bachchan still ruled mainstream cinema, with hits such as Namak Halaal (1982), Satte Pe Satta (1982) and Coolie (1983). Giants of parallel cinema such as Govind Nihalani and the late, great Shyam Benegal were a force to be reckoned with. What we called “middle-of-the-road cinema” had giants in its own right, such as Hrishikesh Mukherjee, who made films imbued with humour and humanism (Khubsoorat, 1980; Rang Birangi, 1983).

Sai Paranjpye.

Paranjpye waded into this male-dominated space with her winsome, lovable comedies. Even the more serious Sparsh, her first feature, had a light, delicate touch.

Where did she get the chutzpah to do this? It helped that she came from an unusually accomplished family, and had a very talented, unorthodox mother.

Paranjpye’s maternal grandfather, RP Paranjpye, was the first Indian to top the Mathematical Tripos at University of Cambridge. He would go on to have a career as a mathematician and a diplomat, and was India’s first high commissioner to Australia. His only daughter, Shakuntala Paranjpye, graduated from Cambridge, went to work with the International Labour Organization in Geneva, fell in love with a Russian painter (Youra Sleptzoff) and married him. She lived in Europe for two years, before her marriage broke up and she returned to Pune with a six-month-old Sai.

Back home, she even acted in films, the most famous being V Shantaram’s Duniya Na Mane (1937). She went on to serve as a state legislator and a member of the Rajya Sabha, but through it all, she maintained a laser-sharp focus on her daughter.

She taught Sai Sanskrit and swimming, took her to art and music classes. When she spotted her talent for storytelling, she set up a routine where Sai wrote a story a day. She then published them as a book when Sai was just eight.

“What little I was able to accomplish in later years… was strictly due to her exacting regime. Her footprints can be seen in all of my creative efforts,” Paranjpye writes.

Her own early career — she began in radio and Doordarshan, moved on to theatre and then to films — served as an important influence too.

Sparsh had its seeds in a telefilm she made at Doordarshan in Delhi, on the lives of the children at a home for the blind. She was impressed by the brilliant principal, also blind, who had returned to India after earning a PhD in the US. In her jewel of a film, the principal (Naseeruddin Shah) falls in love with a grieving young widow (Shabana Azmi).

It had been hard for Sai to get someone to produce the film. She’d met stalwarts of the industry such as BR Chopra and Tarachand Barjatya without any luck, until filmmaker Basu Bhattacharya stepped in. But Sai had a bitter experience with him, which she recounts in her book.

For Chashme Buddoor, she was luckier. Film distributor Gul Anand had seen Sparsh and liked it, and agreed to finance her second film.

This film was also based on a telefilm made at Doordarshan, about three good-for-nothing college friends sharing a barsati (Delhi’s famed terrace flats of the time). She tweaked the story a little, put together an appealing cast (Farooque Shaikh, Deepti Naval, Rakesh Bedi, Ravi Baswani, Saeed Jaffrey) and created one of Bollywood’s most-loved comedies (and an abiding love letter to Delhi).

The success of Chashme Buddoor meant that Paranjpye was suddenly in demand in Bombay. But even the big-banner producers she met there, such as GP Sippy, would only grant her a meagre budget. “They would happily squander huge amounts for an item song, but would expect me to deliver a full-fledged feature film for half the sum. It was ironic, depressing and demoralizing. Was it because I was a woman? Or was it because I lacked business acumen? I could not figure it out,” she writes.

She finally found her producer in Suresh Jindal, who had also backed Basu Chatterjee’s Rajnigandha and Satyajit Ray’s Shatranj ke Khilari.

Jindal wanted a comedy and so Paranjpye made Katha, set in a Mumbai chawl. She cast her main actors against type. The cultured Farooque Shaikh was the conman Bashu and Naseeruddin Shah was the earnest but dull lower-middle-class clerk.

Katha won Best Feature Film in Hindi at the National Awards. Even so, her body of work never really got its due.

While Paranjpye may hate the term, the truth is she was a pioneer on whose shoulders new generations of women filmmakers stand.

(To reach Poonam Saxena with feedback, email poonamsaxena3555@gmail.com)