An unapologetic madcap entertainer

Comedy has seen many variations in popular Hindi cinema but, unfortunately, the concept of a bombastic laugh-a-thon hasn't been celebrated as much. And, if you were to talk of something called the ‘sex comedy’ then the less said, the better

Bollywood rarely understands how to deal with the fine line between a mindless ‘care a damn’ laugh riot that could be politically incorrect in the name of good, senseless fun, and something that is outright gross besides being gender or racially insensitive.

Although there have been a few such as ‘Shaukeen’ (1982) and ‘Anubhav’ (1986) that explored the territory with some kind of thoughtfulness but this could largely because the narrative didn’t solely focus on you-know-what.

In the recent past, films like ‘Masti’ (2004) and ‘Kya Kool Hai Hum’ (2005) might have had a few good moments but the sum isn’t worth remembering. Interestingly enough, a single year, 1972, saw two films that perhaps sowed the seeds of the genre and also continue to remain the best that it had to offer. While Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s ‘Sabse Bada Sukh’ (1972) is largely forgotten and barely recalled in the light of the iconic filmmaker’s oeuvre, the other, ‘Jangal Mein Mangal’ (1972) is mainly remembered for all the wrong reasons.

With actors like Kiran Kumar, Narendranath playing the lead and Sonia Sahni sharing the screen space with Pran, who had a double-role unlike ever before where one of the roles featured him as a long-haired, mustachioed effeminate college dude and a plot that went from a comedy to a murder mystery to a harebrained battle of the sexes with a dash of cheesy horror, the film spreads itself too thin and is ignored by the present generation. But, deep within there are few films that come as close to being utterly pointless and yet great fun.

A bunch of college guys – Rajesh (Kiran Kumar), Baldev (Narendranath) and Raghu (Pran) and others – accompanied by their strict ex-Army Colonel in-charge (Pran, again) land up at the same guest house where Professor Laxmi (Sonia Sahni), a misandrist, has camped along with her assistant, Sister Sophia (Meena Roy), a nun, and her girls - Leela (Reena Roy), Saroj (Jayshree T) and Lata (Meena T).

While the boys start wooing the girls the elders end up falling for each other while trying to keep them apart and running parallel there is a plot of Sophia’s father, Thomas (Barlaj Sahni) being murdered in the same village but later revealed to be alive and imprisoned by the local strongman and the villagers fighting him to retain the treasure that was found while excavating an old temple in the area.

The three boys end up supporting the villagers and alongside there is a ghost that is out on a killing spree. The multiple plotlines converge towards the end and the mystery unravels but at its core, ‘Jangal Mein Mangal’ is an unapologetic madcap entertainer made better with 1970s’ campiness thanks to tie-dye, bellbottoms and the multicoloured shiny shirts, et al.

The film had a few memorable Shankar-Jaikishan tunes like “Tum kitni khoosurat ho” (Kishore Kumar, lyrics- Gulshan Bawra) and utterly absurd “Ae baagh ki kaliyon sharam karo” (Md Rafi, Kishore Kumar, lyrics: Hasrat Jaipuri) with lines like – “Hai rang nirala gori ka”, “Hai ghosla sar pe panchhika”, “aur usme anda murgi ka murgika, haye kya hai tukda barfi ka barfi ka” (her complexion is rare, she has a cuckoo’s nest on her head with a hen’s egg in it, what a barfi (dense milk based sweet) this one is).

On the popular blog Memsaab Story, Memsaab calls ‘Jangal Mein Mangal’ ‘zany’ and offers ‘Scooby Doo and Friends’ as a brilliant comparison to the antics in the film, which pretty much sums it up.

It is often said that the template that mainstream Hindi cinema or Bollywood adapts often renders it impossible for the narrative to include any messaging but that isn’t entirely true. Even in an absurd film like ‘Jangal Mein Mangal’ where characters are typical and barely layered such as an old-school Colonel can’t be anything but a strict disciplinarian and a misogynist, the college boys mischievous, bratty and sex starved, the girls coy and playful and the spinster lady professor distant, there are instances where not only does the character transform but also offers social messaging.

The scenes where Pran’s Colonel Das confesses to Laxmi that men should change their attitude with time, the three good for nothing college boys prance into the Thakur’s den and command the local corrupt cop (Bharat Kapoor) to not harm the villagers and such illustrate that social messaging doesn’t need to be high brow. Be it ‘Masti’, ‘No Entry’ (2005) or ‘Kya Kool Hai Hum’ or ‘Hunterrr’ (2015) most sex comedies end up standardising men as perverts and women as objects, thought the last in the list did try, and to some extent succeed, in treating the female characters as something more than items, which is a disappointing thing considering that it’s been over forty years since a ‘Sabse Bada Sukh’ and ‘Jangal Mein Mangal’. Comparatively recent films try to be cool and contemporary with copious amounts of sexual moments and yet don’t achieve an iota of what ‘Jangal Mein Mangal’ managed even without trying.

By:Gautam Chintamani is the author of the best-seller ‘Dark Star: The Loneliness Of Being Rajesh Khanna’ (HarperCollins, 2014) / tweet him -@gchintamani