The Final Cut

JULY 2002 - So Jamil Dehalvi triumphs in a London High Court and wins the case he filed quite sometime back to recover what he stated then was his fee – the sum of 49,000 pounds sterling. Allah be praised – there is some justice in those British courts – can’t imagine what would have happened here though the 125th adjournment is not too improbable a thought. The wheels of justice move in the land of the pure slowly. Some say, the glaciers in the Arctic move faster – not a bad thought in these days of mind-melt.

Jamil Dehalvi, like many others fell for Dr. Akbar S. Ahmed’s rope-a-dope trick, the oldest trick in the book, when the good doctor persuaded him to shoot the great masterpiece he had drudged up, the life and times of Mr. Jinnah. We are of course not privy to what actually transpired between the two and it is quite probable that Dehalvi might even have expressed a great desire to be part of ‘history making’ but once the work was over – it would not be right to call what emerged later a ‘film’, there was the usual squabble over money. The good doctor has, it seems an equal love for Islamic anthropology and crisp bank notes and on the going evidence, just as strong an aversion to let any money go. And Jamil Dehalvi, the film maker settled in England, was not the only one who was recruited by the good doctor. The Pakistan government at the time, though who were ruling the pigsty I cannot quite recall now, fell over each other to accommodate the project, giving it just about the same importance as they might have, were Mr. Jinnah to have come calling personally for funding. The number of bureaucrats, army brass - some polished, some not, that dreaded species found in large numbers only in Pakistan, the ‘intelligentsia’, editors, journalists, financiers, image hunters – all rallied round Mr. Akbar S. Ahmed, impressed to death by his intellectual showmanship, his chair at Cambridge – no this was not a chair in his living room, but the coveted Iqbal Chair which Mr. Ahmed had occupied for so long that it carried his seat mark permanently like a scar. The dream of putting Richard Attenborough’s ‘Gandhi’ right where it belonged; in history’s trash bin, was bait enough. Government functionaries were ordered to abandon their much-loved red tape and get on with it, providing Mr. Ahmed and his film crew with all the settings that he required so that Pakistan’s cinematic answer to Gandhi could be delivered internationally with a punch between the eyes.

Everyone who was anyone – and in Pakistan, it is mostly everyone who is really no one, got on the Akbar S. Ahmed merry go round, wining and dining the good doctor and his trail blazing international film crew. I recall that following some critical pieces that appeared in the English press here at the time, I spotted the good doctor lunching with many of Lahore’s well-placed and affluent set, including a clutch of that dreaded intelligentsia. The late Mr. Suleri was there cutting away at Punjab Club’s finest filet while Dr. Ahmed wove paintings in the air with his hands as he unfolded the panorama of his vision, the resurgence of the Islamic faith heralded by the movie epic that he had all but created even then. It was a long lunch and everyone had a good tuck in. The afternoon was probably well worth it because there were support pieces thereafter and the shooting moved along. Those of us who were sceptical were labelled non-patriotic, petty minded with personal agendas and large blunt axes that we aspired to grind. The high moral ground had only one occupant. You were, like Bush many years later, with the great dream or you were not. Cut.

Arguments that Mr. Jinnah, charismatic leader that he was, didn’t quite make it on celluloid were dubbed as rubbish and the fact that the author of this epic was none other than Mr. Ahmed in person (wearing one of his many hats) received rebuffs. Similarly, the almost single-minded mission of the film’s makers to demolish the aura of greatness cultivated by the film Gandhi and show the world who was the real leader and who was the villain of the piece, was far fetched to put it kindly. Mr. Attenborough’s film had taken about 19 years and Mr. Ahmed’s 19 days and there was the awful comparison between the filming credentials of the two people – cheese and chalk is a poor description -- cheese and chalk dust perhaps. While we had Christopher Lee playing a robust father of the nation, the Indians had Ben Kingsley whose credentials do not include biting people in the neck when they are not looking. The scale of Gandhi was as large as Asia and our response just as puny. There were numerous other disasters, some happening, some waiting to happen.

Money was in constant short supply and believers in even shorter supply. Some Pakistani doctors who were doing well in the USA were roped in including Dr. Nasim Ashraf who helped raise finances for the doomed project. In the end, after all the hype, all the tall tales of global distribution and storming of box offices across six continents, Jinnah sank like a stone without even attaining the dignity of a ripple on the pond. Here and there, a select few, invited by urgent phone calls and intermediaries, showed up dutifully to witness Dr. Ahmed’s saga. Even a nationwide release in Pakistan, in Urdu and English, only established the fiasco that was evident from the moment Dr. Akbar S. Ahmed had uttered prophetically, ‘I have an idea about a film.’ The finale was delivered when Junoon, whom I admire as a performing group, sang a perfectly hysterical anthem led by Salman’s wife in a new role singing an off-key theme, which just about gave the film its final death blow. Since then, Jinnah the leader continues to live in the hearts of the people, even more so as his dream vanishes, while Jinnah the film is buried in the sands of oblivion. And there it will stay.

Like all failures, hardly had the last frames run, when accounts of financial mismanagement and irregularities began to emerge. The good doctor had off shore accounts which were denied then brazenly admitted; the doctor who hadn’t charged a nickel (because he loved Pakistan) then revealed that his family had all pitched in with their talents and had been paid for services rendered, one son pocketing a cool 50,000 of the Queen’s crispest. There were other details that were just as sleazy. Arguments, claims, counter-claims began to emerge and as details of the financial disaster came out, the skeletons in the cupboard started a samba. In all this Jamil Dehalvi ran here and there asking for his wages, whereupon the good doctor did a hatchet job on the man crediting him with all things foul. In no time at all, Dr. Ahmed faded away into the sunset and undoubtedly to another Chair somewhere and Jamil Dehalvi went to court where the decree was announced in his favour recently. Dr. Ahmed was in court. Well played Mr. Dehalvi.