Explorer
Inkaar
This edition of Classic Corner takes a relook at Raj N. Sippy’s Inkaar (1977) that adapted a Japanese original so well that it’s hard to separate the original from the inspired.
Remakes, official or otherwise, are such an intrinsic part of popular Hindi cinema that it could be considered a genre unto itself. While most might think Hollywood largely started inspiring Hindi cinema in the late 1960s or early 1970s, it was as early as mid 1950s when Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934) and William Wyler’s Roman Holiday (1953) were merged to create Chori Chori (1956). The manner in many filmmakers are often lauded for ‘Indianizing’ the story such as Subhash Ghai for Karz (1980) seems to not just exonerate plagiarism but even inspire filmmakers to come up with the best version. In some cases, such as Raj N. Sippy’s Inkaar (1977) the original was so well adapted that for years no one knew could believe that the film was ‘inspired.’
While remaking or adapting Hindi cinema has been equally comfortable at both - picking up portions or plot points as inspiration or lifting the entire film – and even though one can’t get over the fact that Inkaar is an almost shot to shot replica of Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low (1963), the manner in which it’s localized is truly commendable. The legendary Japanese filmmaker had based his story of a businessman (Toshirô Mifune) who is in a dilemma whether to pay a kidnapper’s ransom after realizing that his driver’s son was abducted instead of his own on Ed McBain’s book King’s Ransom. What makes the self-made businessman’s predicament worse is that he needs the astronomical ransom amount to save his business from going into the hands of his greedy financiers. Cutting between well-detailed police procedural that goes into the finer details of detectives toiling to track the kidnapper and the moral conundrum of the businessman to save his driver’s son or his business, Kurosawa furthered layered the story by exploring the impact of an individual’s social strata on their actions.
In Inkaar Raj Sippy got his writers Jyoti Swaroop and Sagar Sarhadi (dialogues) to focus on the character of the chief investigative officer Amar (Vinod Khanna) instead of the Mifune character from the original that was played by Dr. Shreeman Lagoo. Besides this shift that led to the creation of a ‘hero’ in the form of a cop, who wasn’t the lead in the original, Inkaar also created the character of the businessman’s sister, Geeta (Vidya Sinha), who was formerly romantically involved with Amar. But the most significant difference between High and Low and Inkaar is the raison d’être for the kidnapping. In Inkaar the kidnapper is a former employee of the businessman who does what he does with the idea of settling an old score while in High and Low the abductor is a poor man who can’t take the social disparity between him and the faceless businessman who lives an air-conditioned life while people like him have to scrounge for everything.
Although Inkaar’s visual treatment is heavily inspired by the Kurosawa original it is still a wonderful watch and even after three and a half decades doesn’t seem as aged as some of it’s contemporaries. It’s not as much as Raj Sippy’s blocking or the choreography of Anwar Siraj’s fluid camerawork that makes Inkaar worth relooking as much as the inclusion of police procedural in the narrative and Amjad Khan’s bravura performance as the Raj Singh, the kidnapper. The vocation of the hero in Hindi cinema often determines the course of the narrative and perhaps that’s why it’s easier to imagine Vinod Khanna as a cop as opposed to a middle-aged businessman. And traditionally the hero of 1970s’ Hindi films rarely displayed layered ambiguity and therefore when compared to Toshirô Mifune’s Gondo, Amar is restrained but hardly opaque. The only drama when he’s not chasing the kidnapper is the silence that he shares with his former love, Geeta, and of course, the flashbacks where he and Geeta sing songs. With Inkaar Amjad Khan finally got a character that didn’t rely on typical Hindi film villain histrionics and for someone who could never undo Sholay’s (1975) Gabbar Singh this was something some worth biting into. Khan had played a decent villain in Charas and Hum Kisie Se Kum Naheen and had even graduated to playing nuanced character parts such as Wajid Ali Shah in Satyajit Ray’s Shatranj Ke Khiladi (1977) but in Raj Singh he found someone who could be minimal yet highly effective, a rarity for Hindi cinema baddies.
It’s unfortunate that in spite of many interesting elements including Rajesh Roshan’s intriguing background score, Inkaar today is largely recalled for the foot-tapping Usha Mangeshkar number O Mungada, Mungada, which is also one of the last great Helen songs. The American playwright William Inge once said that ‘originality is undetected plagiarism’ and while the reality of Inkaar being rehashed High and Low is an inescapable reality once you get to know it, there is a lot in it to forgive the trespassing. Inkaar was later remade into Telugu as well as Dongala Veta (1979).
Remakes, official or otherwise, are such an intrinsic part of popular Hindi cinema that it could be considered a genre unto itself. While most might think Hollywood largely started inspiring Hindi cinema in the late 1960s or early 1970s, it was as early as mid 1950s when Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934) and William Wyler’s Roman Holiday (1953) were merged to create Chori Chori (1956). The manner in many filmmakers are often lauded for ‘Indianizing’ the story such as Subhash Ghai for Karz (1980) seems to not just exonerate plagiarism but even inspire filmmakers to come up with the best version. In some cases, such as Raj N. Sippy’s Inkaar (1977) the original was so well adapted that for years no one knew could believe that the film was ‘inspired.’
While remaking or adapting Hindi cinema has been equally comfortable at both - picking up portions or plot points as inspiration or lifting the entire film – and even though one can’t get over the fact that Inkaar is an almost shot to shot replica of Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low (1963), the manner in which it’s localized is truly commendable. The legendary Japanese filmmaker had based his story of a businessman (Toshirô Mifune) who is in a dilemma whether to pay a kidnapper’s ransom after realizing that his driver’s son was abducted instead of his own on Ed McBain’s book King’s Ransom. What makes the self-made businessman’s predicament worse is that he needs the astronomical ransom amount to save his business from going into the hands of his greedy financiers. Cutting between well-detailed police procedural that goes into the finer details of detectives toiling to track the kidnapper and the moral conundrum of the businessman to save his driver’s son or his business, Kurosawa furthered layered the story by exploring the impact of an individual’s social strata on their actions.
In Inkaar Raj Sippy got his writers Jyoti Swaroop and Sagar Sarhadi (dialogues) to focus on the character of the chief investigative officer Amar (Vinod Khanna) instead of the Mifune character from the original that was played by Dr. Shreeman Lagoo. Besides this shift that led to the creation of a ‘hero’ in the form of a cop, who wasn’t the lead in the original, Inkaar also created the character of the businessman’s sister, Geeta (Vidya Sinha), who was formerly romantically involved with Amar. But the most significant difference between High and Low and Inkaar is the raison d’être for the kidnapping. In Inkaar the kidnapper is a former employee of the businessman who does what he does with the idea of settling an old score while in High and Low the abductor is a poor man who can’t take the social disparity between him and the faceless businessman who lives an air-conditioned life while people like him have to scrounge for everything.
Although Inkaar’s visual treatment is heavily inspired by the Kurosawa original it is still a wonderful watch and even after three and a half decades doesn’t seem as aged as some of it’s contemporaries. It’s not as much as Raj Sippy’s blocking or the choreography of Anwar Siraj’s fluid camerawork that makes Inkaar worth relooking as much as the inclusion of police procedural in the narrative and Amjad Khan’s bravura performance as the Raj Singh, the kidnapper. The vocation of the hero in Hindi cinema often determines the course of the narrative and perhaps that’s why it’s easier to imagine Vinod Khanna as a cop as opposed to a middle-aged businessman. And traditionally the hero of 1970s’ Hindi films rarely displayed layered ambiguity and therefore when compared to Toshirô Mifune’s Gondo, Amar is restrained but hardly opaque. The only drama when he’s not chasing the kidnapper is the silence that he shares with his former love, Geeta, and of course, the flashbacks where he and Geeta sing songs. With Inkaar Amjad Khan finally got a character that didn’t rely on typical Hindi film villain histrionics and for someone who could never undo Sholay’s (1975) Gabbar Singh this was something some worth biting into. Khan had played a decent villain in Charas and Hum Kisie Se Kum Naheen and had even graduated to playing nuanced character parts such as Wajid Ali Shah in Satyajit Ray’s Shatranj Ke Khiladi (1977) but in Raj Singh he found someone who could be minimal yet highly effective, a rarity for Hindi cinema baddies.
It’s unfortunate that in spite of many interesting elements including Rajesh Roshan’s intriguing background score, Inkaar today is largely recalled for the foot-tapping Usha Mangeshkar number O Mungada, Mungada, which is also one of the last great Helen songs. The American playwright William Inge once said that ‘originality is undetected plagiarism’ and while the reality of Inkaar being rehashed High and Low is an inescapable reality once you get to know it, there is a lot in it to forgive the trespassing. Inkaar was later remade into Telugu as well as Dongala Veta (1979).
- Gautam Chintamani is the author of the best-selling Dark Star: The Loneliness of Being Rajesh Khanna (2014) and Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak – The Film That Revived Hindi Cinema (2016) | Tweet him – http://www.twitter.com/gchintamani
- www.youtube.com
- Bollywood Googly- http://www.bollywoodgoogly.com/blog/vinod-khanna-brilliant-crossover-villain-hero/
- Discogs- https-//www.discogs.com/Rajesh-Roshan-Inkaar/release/6720870.JPG
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