Charlie and the Bean

“You can’t take it with you,
All the wise men said
Where you’re going you can’t use it
They meant after you’re dead
I thought they meant money
But, friends, I was wrong
And though I’ve not any
They meant love all along.”
From Rothi Surath by Bachchoo

My nephew was showing me and some friends his favourite comic fights on YouTube (which facility I had heard of but till that moment had thought was spelt “U-Tube” — and now of an instant the narcissism of it came

home!). One of the boxing bouts on this net cinema featured a G.I. who fancied and preened himself before the camera, doing splits and throwing punches and feints like Jean Claude van Damme. He was then shown being humiliated by a volunteer opponent who stepped up to him in the ring with his arms by his side and, standing almost still, whacked our hero one in the chops causing G.I. Joe the Dynamo to flop unconscious onto his back. If seeing a man beaten comatose can be funny, this was. It was largely because of the deflation of the visual boast, the fall of hubris.
The computer on which we were watching the fight was on the dining table in my niece and nephew’s flat in Mumbai and having just eaten a hearty lunch, the plates and dishes were being cleared away by their young staff of cook and housemaid who would pause and glance at the screen as they came and went from the kitchen.
The next fight my nephew showed us was a comic clip from a silent film, an expertly choreographed piece of screen drama. The boxers enter the ring and one shakes hands with everyone present, the seconds, the towel-bearers, pail-carriers etc. As the bell goes for the first round, he dodges behind the referee keeping him nimbly in a rotation round the ring firmly between himself and the lumbering, threatening opponent.
Now Mandha, the housemaid I mentioned, is a village girl who must be in her early 20s. She speaks Marathi and Hindi after the Mumbai fashion and has no English.
“Ah, Charlie!”, she says as she pauses to watch with us.
How did she know it was Charlie Chaplin?
Over 50 years ago my aunts in whose house in Pune I lived, had a cook called Hukam Ali. He was illiterate and could only speak Hindustani. He had been a military orderly in Ethiopia in the 1930s when Indian troops were sent to rebuff the Italian invasion. His favourite comic, less surprisingly, was Chaplin and he too referred to him as “Charlie”.
Mandha’s instant identification of Chaplin was something of a surprise. I asked how she knew of him but she merely replied that everyone knew Charlie and her tone clearly implied that I should stop patronise her knowledge of the world and desist from asking silly questions. So the rest was silence.
The papers report that Chaplin’s house in Switzerland is finally being converted into a museum exhibiting his personal effects, letters, writing, costumes, designs and films. It will become a major attraction in that part of Switzerland. His son Michael, who was interviewed at the house, recalled that the family moved there after his father was refused entry into the United States and faced prosecution there under the anti-Communist McCarthyite indictments.
Chaplin moved to Switzerland and lived there till the end of his life with his wife Oona (daughter of playwright Eugene O’Neill). He had eight children by her and Michael was the eldest boy with a sister older than himself.
One Indian story goes that after a film festival in Europe at which their film won several accolades, Nargis surprised Raj Kapoor by suggesting that they holiday in Switzerland. Raj agreed and was taken to a chateau whose door was answered by none other than Raj’s all-time hero, Charles Chaplin. They made friends.
Michael Chaplin remembers his father taking great joy in walking down to the town to buy a packet of cigarettes without being recognised as a world-renowned celebrity.
With Chaplin and silent movies, a brand of universal humour was invented or discovered. Is it remarkable that, through the medium of film, several Western stars, including Chaplin, have made some message, some way of being or way of laughing plain to the whole world, including Hukam Ali of Pune and Ethiopia and Mandha of Yari Road in today’s Mumbai? Indian filmstars, though known in very many peasant societies, from the early birth of film in India to the present day, have not resonated with John Smith or Banjo Barnes in the Balham pub. And never will.
Yes, there are British aficionados who watch Satyajit Ray films and there are the rare ethnic-specialist Brits who will view a Hindi film if the multicultural journalists of the British press extol its credentials. But that’s the limit. Ask the man or woman in the Prince of Wales or even at the university lectern and he won’t know Raj Kapoor from Raj kaput.
Chaplin’s humour was not “British” in the sense that it contained verbal irony, but it was very British in that it pioneered the comedy of the little man ranged against modernism or other superior forces, be they machines, systems or larger muscles, and invited the aam janata to laugh at their own clumsiness and frailty. This is a far cry from the kind of “comedy” one sees on Indian TV or in Indian films where the fat man or woman is the butt of the joke and wobbly cheeks or jaws and crossed eyes are to be laughed at as grotesques. It’s witless humour, the equivalent of the Western comics who relied on the custard-pie-in-the-eye to raise a laugh.
Now Rowan Atkinson, who plays Mr Bean, has reputed rubber features which graphically and precisely exaggerate complacency, confidence, puzzlement, unwarranted self-satisfaction etc. He may have wobbly cheeks and can, I am sure, cross his eyes in a funny way, but never resorts to these to make one laugh. His Bean is like Chaplin’s Charlie, also the bewildered every man who in the face of a complex and confusing world takes the path which we know leads off the cliff.
Now next time I get to Mumbai, I must, I tell myself, ascertain whether Mandha has come across Bean and get her assessment of him.