I don’t know about you, but one Bollywood cameo that forever has my gratitude is Sunny Deol’s in Damini. In the film that completes 25 years today, the film’s titular character (played by an exquisite Meenakshi Sheshadri) has been through hell and back. A key witness in a rape case, Sheshadri’s Damini is dog-tired of fighting a system where speaking the truth is met with what-is-wrong-with-you looks.
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Deol’s introduction scene is probably the big brother of all introduction scenes. Sheshadri is fending off a bunch of goons sent by her own in-laws to ‘finish the job’. After a long chase-sequence, Damini is out-of-breath, cornered and on the brink of giving up. That’s when she runs into a drunk lawyer who will change her life. Sunny Deol turns around and gives Damini one of its most iconic moments.
This scene comes a close second to the other iconic scene of the film- the Tariq-pe-tariq rant.
There’s a certain musicality to it, where the prose is punctuated with the sound of a whip. Santoshi clearly pays tribute to the whip motif of Ritwik Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara, making it his own along the way.
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Like a crossover between a shayar and an ‘edgy’ slam poet, Deol not only offers a timeline of the case but also delivers an indictment on the Indian judiciary system. Santoshi’s lines have an unnerving directness to them, like when Deol uses his no-modulation voice and calmly says, uss tariq se pehle sadak par koi truck mujhe maar kar chala jaayega, aur case banega road accident ka. (Before the next ‘tariq’, I’ll be bumped off by a truck on a road, and yet another case of a road accident will added into the clogged drains of the Indian judiciary)
And that leads him to his punchline – Tariq par tariq, tariq par tariq, tariq par tariq milti rahi hai, lekin insaaf nahi mila my lord… insaaf nahi mila. Santoshi even includes a taali-maar line – Do tariqo ke beech yeh kanoon ka dhandha karte hai, dhandha… jahaan gawaah khareede jaate hai, tode jaate hai, maar diye jaate hai. (Between two ‘tariqs’ these people have turned justice into a business, where witnesses are bought, broken or killed.)
This ability to deliver a melodramatic, playing-to-the-gallery scene that still managed to affect its audience, is a lost art. And Rajkumar Santoshi was one of the better ones at it. Remember the climax from Santoshi’s directorial debut Ghayal, where Deol’s character Ajay is being pulled by half a dozen policemen as he strangles Balwant Rai (played deliciously by Amrish Puri) using his dhai kilo ka haath. The brawl takes a while to break up, and Ajay’s rage embodies the picture of every commoner continuously let-down, and ‘turned’ through years of systemic abuse.
An assistant to Govind Nihalani on Ardh Satya, it is easy to see where Santoshi got his ability to pull no punches in a scene.
Rajkumar Santoshi’s women too, have gotten powerful monologues like when in Ghatak when Meenakshi Sheshadri’s character tears her own clothes in a police station and subverts the whole aurat-ki-izzat trope in Hindi movies. In 2001’s Lajja, Santoshi dares to (inconceivable in a post-2014 India) to reinterpret the patriarchal nature of Ramayan. He reimagines the agnipariksha sequence. It is also to the credit of an in-form Madhuri Dixit, who burns the screen with Santoshi’s ballsy vision and fine lines.
Santoshi also gave Amitabh Bachchan one his greatest acting moments on screen. In 2004’s Khakee, Bachchan’s DCP Amit Kumar Srivastava schools a corrupt cop on ‘farz’ and ‘duty’. A done-to-death sequence, Santoshi imbues the scene with such a ferocious righteousness that it is hard to not be reminded of where it all began – Tariq Pe Tariq. Sadly, no writer-director (including Santoshi himself) has been able to exploit Bachchan’s powerhouse like in Khakee.
It’s during this stellar monologue that Bachchan says the immortal words – Issi duty ke naam par hum pichhle 48 ghanto se maut se joonjh rahe hai, aur humaara department humaari thokne pe tula hua hai. (In the name of this ‘duty’ , we’ve been putting our lives in danger for the past 48 hours. And our very department is trying to screw us over!)
As Damini completes 25 years today, it would do some of us good to think of Rajkumar Santoshi – the writer of terrific dialogue, the creator of ‘filmy moments’ that were both over-the-top and relevant at the same time. Alas! Even two and a half decades later, we have no worthy successor to the ‘Tariq Pe Tariq’ rant. No one writes monologues like these anymore.
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