Celebrating 46 Years Of Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Beloved Comedy Gol Maal

Hrishikesh Mukherjee loved telling the truth about people who lied. In Anand Rajesh Khanna makes up a friendship with strangers on the road pretending to have met them in fictitious encounters. In Khubsoorat Rekha circumvents Dina Pathak’s authority by sneaking fun sessions on the terrace with the oppressed family members. Hrishida later made a whole film on the art of lying Jhoothi with his favourite Rekha in the lead. Gol Maal is a very popular portrait of deception. It still has a certain tongue-in-cheek recency to its humour.

Gol Maal came in the year of Raj Kumar Kohli’s unabashedly commercial Jaani Dushman and the acutely realistic marital drama Grihapravesh. It came at the peak of the Bachchan wave. 1979 was the year when the Big B’s Mr Natwarlal , Kala Patthar and Suhaag swept the boxoffice. And yet Gol Maal held its own. To this day it invites spinoffs.And we aren’t speaking only of Bol Bachchan.

David Dhawan recently admitted to me that two of his Govinda hits Hero No 1 and Coolie No 1 were inspired by Hrishida’s Gol Maal. “Whenever I ran out of ideas I’d look towards Hrishida’s cinema, “ David confessed.

Hrishida’s Gol Maal is a study of an imagined double identity. Amol Palekar handles the complexities of the comedy of errors with an élan eschewing over-statement. He is Ramprasad, a closet- musician struggling to find a 9-5 job in the tumultuous post-Emergency Mumbai of the 1970s. Enter the disciplinarian Bhawani Shankar (Utpal Dutt) who has a job, but also an autocratic attitude to anything that’s frivolous or fun-filled. To Bhawani Shankar any young man who has shaved off his moustache is not serious about life.

In a fit of desperation Ram pastes a mouche on his upperlip, puts on a Kurta borrowed from Asrani’s wardrobe (that’s a long story) and poses as the sedate god-fearing regimented office junkie.

Bhawani Shankar loves the boy.If you’ve seen Bol Bachchan you would know what follows. What really puts Hrishida’s Gol Maal leagues ahead of the humour extended into Bol Bachchan is the aura of innocence that pervades the comedy of errors . No one means any real harm. Not even Ramprasad’s fictitious twin Laxman /Lucky who shows up as Bhawani Shankar’s daugher Urmila (Bindiya Goswami)’s music teacher.

In Gol Maal the humour was generated from a sense of smothered outrage rather than its loud and overt manifestation. Hrishida shot the whole comedy as one stretch of humour emanating from the invention of a double to appease a boss who is almost tyrannical in his beliefs.

The spoilsport disciplinarian was a favourite Hrishida character.Tarun Bose in Anupama,Veena in Aashirwad, Dharmendra in Satayam, Dina Pathak in Khubsoorat, Om Prakash in Chupke Chupke-they all tried to play the party-pooper. But did that stop the other characters from having fun!

The thing about inventing one’s own imaginary twin is that it provides endless comic possibilities. Even if Hrishida’s characters pulled out all stops, he never got carried away. In Gol Maal Amol Palekar’s relationships are defined purely by his interaction with Utpal Dutt. The two are inseparable in their interactive energy. And it’s hard to imagine the film without Utpal bossing over the timid Amol in a way that would in today’s work space by defined as harassment.

Both Utpal and Amol shared a very special rapport with Hrishida. They both did 5 films each with the director. But none was as successful as Gol Maal.

To what do we attribute the enduring appeal of this comedy of mistaken identity?

It’s partly to do with the idea of wish-fulfilment through a doppelganger. As a child we often invent an imaginary ‘other’ for ourselves who does all the things that we are forbidden from doing so. Hrishida played on that childhood fantasy . There was a child within him waiting to have fun as soon as the churlish disciplinarian stopped looking. Amol Palekar played that child.

R D Burman’s music and Gulzar’s lyrics also played a big hand in the film’s success. Kishore Kumar’s Aane wala pal jaane wala hai and RD and Sapan Chakraborty’s title song were chartbusters.

Amol Palekar recalls Gol Maal with much fondness. “It’s always heartening on one level and embarrassing on another level that people still remember me in Gol Maal. When people still talk to me about it I am surprised. I rate Gol Maal very high, one of my five best performances, the other being Akriet, the film I directed. It came immediately after Gol Maal and was so different and dark. The third favourite performance would be Tapan Sinha’s Aadmi Aur Aurat. My association with Tapanda continued even when he was no longer directing and I was no longer acting.”

He continues, “Then there is Shyam Benegal’s Bhumika where I played a black character. My fifth favourite roles is a tie between Bhim Sain’s Garaonda and Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s Khamosh. In Gharaonda I played a grey financially challenged character who suggests to his girlfriend that she marry an older woman and carry on an affair with him. I had to make my character desperate rather than slimy. As for Khamosh I gave a ‘killer’ performance (laughs). That too was an exciting challenge. When Vinod re-released Khamosh recently I told him it was his best work. Not one frame can be taken out of the narration. The results Vinod got in spite of the budgetry constraints were staggering.”

He allso talks about how Gol Maal was his biggest hit. “A dear friend pointed out to me that Gol Maal was the first time when a comic performance was taken seriously. I got the Filmfare award for best actor. All other earlier heroes like Kishore Kumar and Mehmood never got awards for best actor. Sadly I missed out on the National award for Gol Maal because they argued that I had got the popular award. This was the first film Hrishida and I did together. When he called me to meet him I was determined to refuse his offer.I had heard he was a disciplinarian on the sets. I was also told he doesn’t give a script to his actors. But since I had tremendous respect for him I went to meet him. He started chatting and I realized he knew everything about my work and my personal life. He even knew exactly what was happening in my daughter’s life.”

“During our conversation Hrishida’s mother brought in nariyal ke laddoo. Hrishida’s mom’s laddoos were used in Gol Maal. They were from coconuts in his own backyard.. Then Hrishida said he wanted to make five films with me. He narrated those five films to me. We eventually made all of them. Gol Maal was the first.My resolve not to work with him dissolved.I told him I about my misgivings. He had a hearty laugh. He said what I had heard about him was true. But he said the equation with me would be different from what he shared with other actors. And it was,” he ends.