Subhash K Jha takes a look back at 2011’s Dum Maaro Dum, directed by Rohan Sippy and starring Abhishek Bachchan, Bipasha Basu, Rana Daggubati, Prateik Babbar, and Aditya Pancho in a new installment of This Day That Year. He also shares how the makers of the action film shocked, angered, and hurt Dev Anand.
Welcome to the Other Goa. The one that we don’t see in Hindi cinema. Unless we look really hard and come up with Pankaj Parasher’s Jalwa 24 years ago, there, too, Goa became the scene of a watchable drug-busting drama. In Rohan Sippy’s Dum Maaro Dum(DMD), the characters in Goa are constantly up to something self-destructive. You really can’t afford to take your eyes off the screen as the lives of three unlikely ‘heroes’ — one a redemptive cop, the other a student who sells his soul for a scholarship, and the third a musician trapped in discordant notes — converge in most unexpected ways. But then the ‘unexpected’ is only expected in a film that addresses the uneasy nexus between crime and conscience in hedonistic Goa without taking sides.
DMD avoids getting judgemental. The writing, by Sridhar Raghavan, doesn’t assume a position of moral superiority over Goa’s inglorious crime syndicate. Probing into the anatomy of the global drug racket in Goa, the film sweeps us with a violent jolt into a world of doom and damnation where the innocent must perish, and the incorrupt must suffer.
Abhishek Bachchan’s cop’s role as ACP Kamath acquires an interesting moral ambivalence. Yup, the celluloid cop has evolved from the seething simmering Bachchan persona in Zanjeer to the laconic, almost-cynical and acutely suffering law enforcer in DMD who must make hard decisions not in the last reel but Reel Now.
The vehement violence and illicit wealth of the crime syndicate and the immediacy of its annihilation are brought into one jagged but unified line of vision. Often, Rohan Sippy’s direction seems to favour the craggy, uneven route. But hey, that could just be Amit Roy’s moody cinematography capturing the crowd sweat and greed of the Goan drug cartel.
Sippy displays a tremendous partiality for restless visuals. The characters are always on the move, though their destination is a mystery even to themselves. Maybe their aspirations are overrun by their greed. The narrative never stops long enough to let us come near to the characters to feel the heat of their hurt. A breathy, wheezing anarchy rules over the universe that Rohan Sippy’s arching cinema embraces.
Some of the characters sneak in a warm regard for their individual space in unguarded moments of vulnerability. Abhishek Bachchan’s mourning for his lost family runs through the film like an aching limb that cannot be amputated from the proceedings, no matter how hard it tries. To the cop, Kamath’s role, Abhishek infuses a kind of supple laconism that makes this suffering cop remarkably free of self-guilty, not to mention the khaki uniform.
How one wishes Kamath’s relationship with the troubled world around him was allowed to grow. The only time we see him in an interactive mood is with his subordinate Mercy, who, true to stereotype, gets bumped off.
Has the film been edited (by Aarif Shaikh) too tightly, sacrificing the need to let the characters space for emotional growth for the sake of getting on with the process of cracking the case?
Very often, we want to enter the pain-lashed soul of the characters, the underage boy played by Pratik Babbar (vulnerable, again!), who gets caught in the airport while trying to smuggle out drugs. The musician Raba Daggubati (striking debut, this) who loses love to crime. The crime lord’s mistress, Bipasha Basu (fetching in her trauma), who is in a haze of numbing alcohol and drugs, wonders when she lost her innocence. That is a question that runs through the plot. And runs too fast.
On some deeply ironic level Dum Maaro Dum celebrates that loss of innocence which haunts the beaches of many touristic paradise. And yet, we see glimmers of stark humanity in Rohan Sippy’s characters. It’s not in the way the actors play these people. It’s in the way fate plays with the characters’ dreams.
Rohan Sippy’s Goa is an irreversibly blemished paradise. Though visually plush, the hard-hitting content is not overpowered by style. And yes, the only time the disappointing soundtrack comes alive is when strains of R.D. Burman’s ‘Dum maro dum’ play in replicated splendour, reminding us of the poor quality of the rest of the music.
By the end of it all, only one love story comes to a happy ending in Dum Maaro Dum. Maybe one is not allowed to say which. What one can safely say without the risk of sounding like a spoilsport is that love is not a popular emotion in the world that Rohan Sippy’s edgy thriller encompasses. If one loves in this hell-hole of pleasure, then there’s only a dead end to look forward to.
This film is certainly not a ride for the squeamish. Violence dominates the proceedings.
Rohan Sippy’s Dum Maaro Dum, released on April 22 in 2011, would have been forgotten were it not for the controversy over the new-age subversive version of the timeless ‘Dum maro dum song’ from Dev Anand’s Hare Rama Hare Krishna.
No one had bothered to ask Asha Bhosle, who sang the original ‘Dum maro dum’ or Dev Anand, from whose film Hare Rama Hare Krishna the song was taken, what they felt about the new-rage version of their anthem song from the 1970s.
Without a by-your-leave Sippy, music composer Pritam and lyricist Jaideep Sahni created their own distinctly crass version of the classy hip-hippy chant from the original. As Deepika Padukone (in a guest appearance) slithered to the song immortalized by Zeenat Aman, the word she sang Aaj dheel chod raha hai, kal khudi rokega Aaj mere liye chair kheech raha hai, kal meri skirt kheechega made Dev Anand see red. This was the only time I saw him angry.
“This is sheer desecration. They didn’t have the decency to ask me before using ‘Dum Maro Dum’ as they wished. What about R D Burman, Asha Bhosle, Anand Bakshi, and me? What about the people who actually created ‘Dum Maro Dum’? Why copy what is already done? I could pluck timeless songs like ‘Aaj phir jeene ki tammana hai’, ‘Khoya khoya chand’ and ‘Dum maro dum’; or I could remake my classics like Guide, Hare Rama Hare Krishna and Prem Pujari and get the audience instinctively interested. But I choose to be original every time even at the risk of my fresh work being compared unfavourably with my old work,” Dev Saab fumed at director Rohan Sippy and music vandal Pritam who was responsible for the atrocity.
It made Dev Anand (God bless his innocent soul) very upset. For the first time in his 70-year career, Dev Saab threatened to sue. I knew he wouldn’t. He was too soft-hearted to get into an ugly squabble with anyone. But even today, I feel angry when I remember how insulted Dev Saab felt at being bypassed by a filmmaker who knew nothing about respecting cinematic history.
