A tall classical dancer was asked by her guru to play Krishna, Vishnu and the ultimate male, Lord Shiva, in a variety of dance ballets. After she had successfully mastered the art of transforming her body to carry off a range of male roles, her guru damned her by observing, “Now you can’t play a woman.” It hurt her so badly that she swore to teach him a lesson and worked so hard at her craft that she could soon sway sensuously as Krishna’s queen consort Satyabhama and thunder as Shiva as well. Sixty years later, she is still a consummate classical dancer who can switch gender gears and perform without losing her rhythm.
It’s gruelling for dancers and actors when they have to gender bend and perform to perfection. How did fitness freak Tota Roy Chowdhury, a man who had once aspired to go into the army and is trained in martial arts, bring an effeminate touch to his role in Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahani (RARKPK)? The audience that had drooled over him as Rohit Sen in the recently-concluded serial Sreemoyee sat up when he did the Dola re dola dance with Ranveer Singh with such feminine grace. Tota had, so far, not even been the traditional chocolate boy of Bengali cinema.
It wasn’t like social media influencers who wore a ghagra and danced to Dola re dola strictly for kicks on a New York street (check out Jainil and Alex Wong’s video on Insta). Or like south Indian hero Chiyaan Vikram’s film Kanthaswamy (2009), where he pretended to be a seductress and danced to numbers like Dola re dola while bashing up a bunch of lecherous baddies. The dance by Ranveer Singh and Tota Roy Chowdhury was a well-rehearsed, gracefully performed Dola re dola.
How did Tota pull off a slightly effeminate role? Back to sporting salt-n-pepper facial hair, he replied that it wasn’t tough because of the faith he had in Karan (Johar). Maybe, shrugged Tota, he also explored his own feminine side.
Coming up later this month will be Ayushmann Khurrana’s Dream Girl 2. But, like it is in most films, the hero’s sari-wearing, sensual swaying are acts put on by a man. Tota’s Kathak-dancing Chandon Chatterjee in RARKPK wasn’t a macho guy putting on an act. That’s the difference which has taken everybody by surprise. Chandon was poignant, not comic.
Utterly tragic has been the death by suicide of renowned art director Nitin Desai, who had cajoled the Hindi film industry to move to Karjat for big canvas shoots because he built his ambitious 52-acre ND Studio 62km away from Mumbai. I remember Hrithik Roshan used to take a chopper to Karjat every day to shoot for Jodhaa Akbar.
Few know that Ramanand Sagar’s farm shares a boundary with ND Studio. Once, when Nitin had created Mohammed Ali Road in his studio for a famous ad campaign, he had inadvertently spilled into Sagar’s land. Instead of ugly flare-ups and court cases, son Prem Sagar and Nitin had amicably solved it with the art director giving some of his land at the back to his neighbour. In fact, it was when they went to register the deal with the local tehsildar that Prem Sagar saw first-hand how popular Nitin was with all the locals and the authorities who treated him with rare bonhomie. ND had given much employment to the locals around the studio.
Lalbaghcha Raja, Mum-bai’s most famous and most-visited Ganpati during Ganesh Chaturthi, was one of Nitin’s prestigious annual assignments. Enjoying the friendship of politicians across the board not only in Maharashtra but in Delhi too, it is odd that Nitin hanged himself because of mounting financial distress. People with far less political clout in the film industry have managed to wriggle out of financial difficulties. Wonder if investigations will throw up something unexpected.
Meanwhile, it was at ND Studios that Nitin celebrated his daughter’s wedding early this year, which was attended by Hema Malini, Madhur Bhandarkar and Ashutosh Gowariker.
It was here that he was found hanging from a ceiling fan. And here that he was
cremated too.
Om Shanti to a gifted, creative soul.
Bharathi S. Pradhan is a senior journalist and author
