Gunda, Garam Dharam: A look back at the memorable gutter film genre

As award acceptance speeches go this was a pretty lame and grammatically incorrect one Mujhe bahut khushi hui hai yeh milke sic No doubt still this was a rather emotional moment historic even The award show anchor after delivering a 20 frickin minutes long introduction asked audiences to give a standing ovation to the winner Everyone instantly got up The filmmaker Id always wanted to meet but never knew what he looked like longish frizzy hair in tight green tee and cockbuster jeans got on stageHis busty muse Sapna from a career spanning 50plus films over a decade and half was presenting her mentor his first award in his life ever that too for lifetime achievement at the selfexplanatory Golden Kela Awards in Delhis FICCI auditorium in 2012 Kanti Agrade hai she rightly exulted from the dais We clappedLeft to right Mohan Joshi Pote Mukesh Rishi Bulla Shakti Kapoor Chuttiya Deepak Shirke Bhigona in GundaKanti kaun Kanti Shah Well how does one best describe him but to say that between Kanti Shah Gunda and Kundan Shah Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro you can basically map the entire spectrum of intentional or unintentional comedy in Bollywood But thats fairly cryptic stillSo let me introduce you to the infamous legend around Kanti that everyone in Lokhandwala is only too happy to recount Back in the mid90s when Dharmendras stardom had naturally faded and he could do with some work if not extra cash he did a string of scintillating Cgrade films some of them directed by Kanti Loha Veer Phoolan Haseena Ramkali Munnibai besides others like Aatank Smuggler Mafia and Paappi Devataa about half a dozen every yearKanti once approached Garam Dharam with a heartattack scene for his film that would take him just a day to wrap and the remuneration would be handsome if not princely Dharam agreed He came he palpitated before the camera and leftFew weeks later which is how long it took to go from set to screen when the film first released in Punjab what Dharam Paajis fans saw was the old man orgasming in bed with a naked woman from an Xrated movie superimposed next to him The specifics of exactly what Dharam had shot change depending on whos recounting the story apparently it was a horseriding sequence wherein Kanti only shot the sexagenarian heros galloping face and morphed those images with him riding the heroineinsteadEither way Dharams son Sunny Deol got wind of this He called Kanti over to his office in Juhus Sunny Super Sound under the pretext of a script narration and gave him a dhulai with his dhai kilo haath that Im told still echoes in that fourth floor soundproof room Another Kanti story although unverified that does the rounds is about him inviting Govinda over to his set once since the actor was shooting nextdoor He kept his camera switched on while Govinda arrived and thereafter used that footage with Govinda starring in his picture eventuallyNow if merely the legends around a filmmakers life are that interesting one doesnt need to overstate the entertainment derived from his movies Frankly a lot of 90s kids in North India Im certain have experienced a Kanti Shah moment on video or big screen whether or not theyre aware of it It was an odd rite of passage something that Vikramaditya Motwane captured perceptively with a bunch of boarding school kids rushing to catch Kanti Shah Ke Angoor in a local theatre for fun but chiefly to celebrate advent of puberty My Kanti Shah moment Daku Ramkali happened in Dehradun with school friends on a trip since our train back to Delhi was delayed and the seedy theatre close to the station and the poster of heroine Sapna was impossible to resistAll I recall from that film is a corny rape scene in the ravines and Daku Ramkali on horseback in a black shirt with ample cleavage showing seeking revenge Effectively these films were to the 90s what the Ramsay Bros grindhouse horror were to the 80s which they made redundant by the way merely upping the sex quotient to deranged levels sometimes Its like the relatively sane Right Wing testing limits of perversion with Alt Right in politicsIf it wasnt for throwbacks on the Internet in the early 2000s Kanti wouldve got buried in public memory along with apocryphal anecdotes about him in Andheri At some point thanks mainly to LAN Local Area Networks in Indian engineering campuses Kantis Gunda suddenly developed a cult of its ownIt hit a tipping point a puzzling moment in popculture when something hopelessly relegated among us suddenly becomes a thing of cool wherein a whole new audience rediscovered and was mesmerised by a demented pic entirely written in verse set in a surreal world where rape is a sport and the main rapist characters introduce themselves looking straight to the camera Chuttiya on Vitamin Sex the transgender Shakti Kapoor supposedly named for his ponytail Bulla who does everything khullam khulla Pote Baap ke bhi nahin hoteThe only reason Gunda was a Bgrade film rather than C was because of Mithun Da the poor mans AB Apparently disgusted by constant runins and extortion calls from the underworld in the late 80s actor Mithun Chakroborty had locked his home in Bombay packed his bags and moved to Ooty for goodFrom the cold climes of the South Indian hillstation the actor perhaps unwittingly spawned a completely fresh genre in Hindi cinema the Mithun Da movie The revenue model was quite simple Mithun would charge R1 lakh a day for the shoot The crew as per contract had to lodge in Hotel Monarch that he owned in OotyThis film industry had a dream run in the 90s with almost nine releases every year many of them cracking it in theatres in Bihar Uttar Pradesh BiharBengal border and singlescreen cinemas in big cities serving working class villagesmalltown migrants Films like Chandal 1998 Yamraaj 1998 and Mard 1985 maxed their returns on investmentDid it matter what the audiences watched in those films where Mithun Da alternatively played a cop or sadak chhapinevitably avenging his sisters rape Most of these subaltern classics I reckon were antidote to NRI movies of the 90s that used to leave most of India wholly cluelessAlso one needed to watch something between Govindas No 1 comedies or Akshay Kumars Khiladi pictures or Sunny Deol Salman or Ajay Devgans weepy actionromances The 90s were simple times We went to the movies because it was there Who cared for anything moreDuring a dance sequence for the film Shapath 1997 once Mithun kept getting his steps wrong Pissed and naturally pressed for time given how many movies he worked on in a month the hero blasted his dance director Abe yeh step theek karunga toh picture hit hogi kya Kahani aage badha They went ahead with shit steps Shapath became Mithuns biggest hit among 90s lowbudget curios