The simple code of special Nagaich

His is an untold story. The special effects wizard Ravikant Nagaich, who passed away at the age of 60 in 1991, was miles ahead of his time. Born in Aligarh, anchored in Chennai, a serial-hit confectioner in Mumbai, he has hardly been accorded a footnote in the chronicles of Indian cinema. No interviews with him can be located on the Internet, books or magazines. Perhaps he avoided publicity like the bubonic plague, like Aditya Chopra does today. Or else, the media shunned him.
Surprising that, since he gave career-boosting roles to the top actors of the 1970s, including Dharmendra, Rajesh Khanna, Amitabh Bachchan and Jeetendra. Neither have any of these actors spoken extensively about him, if at all, in their flashbacks to their glory days that were. Come to think of it, unless high-profile film personalities accord due credit to them, even the most successful directors are forgotten. A more recent case in point: Mukul S. Anand, who was acknowledged as an unequalled technician, before his premature death at the age of 45 in 1997, it is said, because of the pressures that accompany filmmaking.
Nagaich played with special effects at a time when they were associated with low-budget mythological movies featuring cobras playing sitars and tablas, assorted bow-and-arrow clashes in mid-air and magic carpet rides galore. The cinematographer-turned-director brought FX into the realm of other genres, principally espionage thrillers and the fastest-paced love stories you can find anywhere in the world. Evidence: The Train (1970), with Rajesh Khanna courting Nanda to the beat of R.D. Burman’s Gulabi aankhen. The camerawork went totally ballistic.
Reviewers of the time either dismissed that as “technical gimmickry” or refrained from commenting on a style, which at times, came close to experiencing an acid-trip. No exaggeration that. Check out the little-known Rani Aur Lalpari (1975), a children’s fantasy on the lines of Alice in the Wonderland, which was chockablock with illusionary tricks. To be sure, frequently the technical legerdemain resulted in pure kitsch: prismatic shots, strobe lights and purple-pink lighting schemes. But isn’t this kitsch being canonised today? Take the glut of home store cushions, coasters and quasi-vintage furniture imprinted with yesteryear’s Bollywood visuals. The more they look like calendar art, the brisker the sales.
Yet, Nagaich could tone down the garishness in sync with the film’s subject. Consequently, the romantic truffle Mere Jeevan Saathi (1972) was candy-coloured. And Keemat (1973), dealing with the rising flesh trade from India, can boast of the most accomplished underwater imagery. That the auteur’s signature was inspired by Hollywood movies is obvious, but he didn’t ape them blindly. There was a remarkable element of the indigenous and home-cooked about his body of work, recipes that he had learnt on the job as it were.
He was a quick learner. Starting out as an assistant cameraman to the Tarzan-like adventure Zimbo (1958) — in which his name is credited as Ravi Nagaich Pereira — he then photographed the mythological Sri Sitha Ram Kalyanam (1961) featuring N.T. Rama Rao. Direction had to be the next step. He chose to debut in the Hindi language. Result: Farz (1967). To date, it packs in more unbridled entertainment than the New Age spy adventures, be it Agent Vinod or Ek Tha Tiger, which bank solely on their leading men’s star value.
Farz, in fact, established the upcoming Jeetendra as a crowd-pulling star. He sported his trademark white shoes, dressed flamboyantly and jumping jackflashed into the part of Agent 116. Here was a fusion of James Bond and the French spy OSS 117. Indeed, Farz became the actor’s as well as his director’s calling card, and the number 116 became a lucky charm. Mithun Chakraborty also adopted the same numerical identity when he took over as the next desi Bond in Nagaich’s Surakshaa (1979). B-town’s spies danced as expertly as they handled the guns and bullets.
The Nagaich code was simple: the nationalist hero taking on hostile counter-agents was unbeatable, possessed of all skills and knowledge. He may find himself in peril at regular intervals. But this peril exists only as contrast for his triumph, saving the nation from irreparable destruction.
However, during the 1980s when multi-starrers and pure vendetta tales amidst mafia dons and the underprivileged dominated the audience’s imagination, the director’s code became much too repetitive. His spy’s stunts and disco moves were much too déjà vu. More fatally, he sought to present Govinda, associated with knockabout comedy, as a tough cop in Duty (1986). This miscalculation brought the curtains down on a career that had spanned three decades.
Ravikant Nagaich was never feted with awards for his craftsmanship. The man’s attitude, as gleaned from his work, was humorous, inventive and yet deeply rooted in the soil of popular mainstream cinema. After a point, he couldn’t make the twain of the uncoventional and the formulaic meet, spending his last years in the shadows. His films cry out for laurels, though, even if these are posthumous.

The writer is a journalist, film critic and film director