Between the 'Cad' and the 'Angry Young Man'
Thoughts on the recent Salim-Javed documentary. This is an expanded version of the article published in Indian Express a few weeks ago, including some of what I have gathered and refined since then.
Early on in Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, two young women use the slang Cad for a good-looking young man. As Seth’s narrator explains, the term is derived from Cadbury’s chocolate. Just as chocolate goes from milk to dark, the term Cad accommodates all kinds of skin colour. Given the novel’s setting in a khatri1 milieu in the post-Independence, post-Partition years, the novel’s characters might show a discomfiting preference for fairer skin tones, but they are alive to the possibility of a dark Cad being ‘bitter but sustaining’, as the novel’s main woman, Lata, says.
Only a few months after this assessment, on the day of Holi, the aforementioned Cad gets himself high on bhang and molests his brother’s pregnant wife, who is the elder sister of one of the two young women. After ‘fondling her a bit’, he ‘[rubs] the moist powder onto her kameez over her breasts, laughing all the while.’ Seth doesn’t spend too much time on these actions and their meaning, for his plans with these characters take him further and elsewhere. But nothing stops us from pausing here.
In itself, the diptych illustrates a degeneration—from Cad to caddish—from desirable to detestable—from mint to varmint—that the young women of this country, whether from the previous century or from this one, are all too familiar with. Young men are never too far away from the reprehensible.
Set in early 1950s India, A Suitable Boy was first published in 1993. Preceding the novel’s publication by a generation, and following its fictional world by a generation, another set of fictional worlds—operative in a different language and a different artform, set amidst milieus quite distant from Seth’s, and with rather massy aspirations—delivered a category of good-looking man radically different from the Cad: the Angry Young Man.
The category—or at least its appellation—wasn’t an original Indian construction, as I learnt from Twitter after sharing the first version of this article. It derived from a post-war aesthetic movement in British novels and drama. In Britain the Angry Young Man had his heyday in the 1950s, and the work that formed and informed the term the most was John Osborne’s play, Look Back in Anger2. The movement was coterminous with what was called ‘kitchen sink realism’, which meant a concern with lower-class themes.
In India the trope—a decade and a half late in coming—was laced with melodrama. Faced with an indifferent and corrupt system, alert to injustice big and small, and full of hardboiled witticisms and dollops of machismo, the Angry Young Man was easily violent. Additional drama was sourced from his mother worship, his daddy issues, his rags-to-riches or riches-to-rags sagas, and whether he found himself on this side or that side of the law.
Salim-Javed, the screenwriting duo credited with engendering the trope of the Angry Young Man in the country, have recently been afforded some old-celebrity treatment in a three-episode documentary streaming on Prime Video. By old-celebrity treatment, I mean the cultivation of an air of low-volume, soft-yellow-light applause, the curation of retrospective flourishes that expertly conceal their hagiographic intent (presenting days of ‘struggle’ with more specific detail, say, than days of success-led delirium), and a general, well-paid-for aversion to exploring the subject matter from challenging and contrarian vantage points. The men are called bratty and arrogant a few times, but these admonitions are resolutely mild, slathered as they are with the narratives of pioneering bravado and meteoric rise. The old men’s not-so-young children have produced the documentary, so perhaps it is advisable to curtail one’s expectations. By the end, the whole thing inevitably comes to resemble a tastefully done family video.
The only stray squeak of critical inquiry I noted in the documentary was on the question of how Salim-Javed conceived women. One of the talking heads avers that female leads were peripheral to their cinematic vision and even those women who started out with strong backgrounds never got to do anything significant in the storyline. The film gets immediately anxious with this little insight, and feels it necessary to snip any unintended thought-streams in the viewer’s mind by making other talking heads (one of them Javed’s daughter) offer anodyne explanations.
The effect is comic. Elsewhere, the same film draws its dividends from suggesting that Salim-Javed’s personal lacks and longings had seeped into their writing and were crucial to the creation of the Angry Young Man. Here, however, no linkage to their personal worldview can be allowed: they suddenly become men who are products of their times rather than men with claims to shaping an entire era of popular cinema (and, therefore, the populace). One wonders about the nature of apprehensions behind the need to offer this snap-critique and its snap-smudging. I read in them a desire to lend to current generations a tint to view the legacy rightly.
Shifting our attention from the creators to the creation, we arrive at another question: Is the Angry Young Man far from the reprehensible? Is the Angry Young Man beyond treating women badly? Not sure the answers are in the affirmative. On Holi, for instance, it may be a stretch to believe that the Angry Young Man would not assume the same licence as the rascal in Seth’s novel. In his review of the documentary in Outlook, Tanul Thakur takes issue with the same anxiety, and offers an alternative to what should have followed a talking head raising the point of Salim-Javed’s dispensation towards the women they created:
… what should have really followed was a clip from Sholay (1975), where Veeru (Dharmendra), in the guise of ‘teaching’ Basanti (Hema Malini) how to fire a gun, keeps touching her, much to her initial confusion. It’s a complicated scene, where a woman’s discomfort is first played for laughs (as Jai says, “Maine toh aankh pehle hi band kar rakhi hai”) but ends with her berating Veeru. How tough was it for this documentary to imply that, regarding female characters, Salim-Javed’s oeuvre tells a more complex story? But no, it must contrive a disingenuous endorsement-criticism-endorsement sequence to squash our doubts.
There is also the question of touting anger as the single biggest quality for a man, for that leaves little to look forward to other than violence. The scansion from right violence to righteous violence to Right-O violence is always imperfect, and the model itself comes with no specified limits. The same cocktail of injustice and daddy issues that creates Deewar’s Vijay or Trishul’s Vijay can devolve into Animal’s Vijay. How? Well: lift the trope from the gestalt of poor v. rich and plant it in the arena of the rich fighting an internecine war, amp up the machismo, and what you get is a rank distortion that is not the same as the Angry Young Man but still responds to the moniker. We must also ask which real event or situation is Animal’s Vijay, and the perversions it represents, in correspondence with, given that we note the dialectic of Salim-Javed’s many Vijays and the real mid-70s event of the Emergency (Javed reminds us of it in the documentary).
In culture and in life, insofar as the two remain patriarchal, our hopes are better placed with the Cad. Why? Because it’s a term that includes both women’s gaze and women’s judgement. Maan Kapoor, the bhang-addled brute of Seth’s novel, must be read as an exception that fails to dent the rule. In movie terms, perhaps we are back to doffing our hats to those dozen-odd years by Shah Rukh Khan—a benign, albeit flawed3, path for Indian masculinity. Until a new, and better, model, combining kitchen sink realism and an emphasised good attitude towards women, is created.
In case you didn’t know: khatri, a name for a group of castes in undivided Punjab, is actually a way of saying kshatriya, which is one of the four varnas (categories) of the unfortunately persistent Hindu social structure.
My last novel, Manjhi’s Mayhem, which profits from the Angry Young Man trope, was reviewed in the New Indian Express with the title ‘Look Back in Anger’. I never understood what the title meant to convey until I read about Osborne’s play.
Flawed simply because it is limited in class consciousness. No SRK character in those years was underprivileged or represented the concerns of the lower classes or castes. My favorite SRK movie is ‘Raees’. Everything changed with ‘Raees’.