Thoughts on Chhoti Si Baat

A languid November afternoon spent watching a minor classic from the 70s.

Chhoti Si Baat is a delightful film about a diffident man and his pursuit of love. Essentially an underdog film, it tells the story of Arun, who is unable to confess his love to Prabha. Things get more difficult for him when Nagesh throws his ring in the hat. How Arun learns to outdo Nagesh, and win the girl he loves, with more than a little help from a certain Colonel Julius Nagendra Nath Wilfred Singh, forms the rest of the film.

It harkens back to a simple era, devoid of electronic communication. Romance revolves around waiting for each other at the bus stop, having a little nervous small talk and riding that high throughout the day. And the humour is simple. Simple but by no means easy. There is a sequence which feels like a blown-up version of a skit where Arun is fooled by a bunch of motor mechanics into buying a crappy secondhand bike. It’s the kind of humour that transcends geographical and temporal boundaries, which lends it a certain guileless and timeless charm.

The film remains timeless but the Bombay of that time is long gone. Restaurants where key scenes in the film takes place are closed. Samovar, located in Jehangir Art Gallery, downed its shutters in 2015, after being a part of the city’s cultural fabric for fifty years. Flora, the Chinese restaurant, where Arun one-ups Nagesh (played by Asrani), closed three years later in 2018. There’s also a mention of Gaylord’s and Eros, the cinema hall. While these two still exist, they have undergone heavy renovation. It’s a film which is very well aware of the city it is stated in, and uses that knowledge to great effect. A fair amount of romantic tension in the beginning takes place at a bus stop, where Arun and Prabha wait in a queue next to each other. Where else would you see people queueing up to board a bus? Anyone who has lived in Bombay would recognise almost all locations that the film is shot in. And it’s also commendable that that a lot of it has been shot on the roads of the city, and not inside film studios.

Amol Palekar seems perfectly at ease, playing a man clearly not at ease with himself. He had perfected playing diffident, urban middle-class men in the 70s when the landscape of Hindi cinema was dotted with angry young men. And he has played this part to perfection in this film as well. Palekar’s Arun has problems. But his problems are not the problems of the society at large. They are much more personal, more domestic problems. Like the peon at the office won’t salute him, his subordinates in the office don’t see him as an authoritative figure, and that he can’t bring himself to confess his love. The hero is the same as the person watching him on screen. Arun is the everyman, content watching Dharmendra woo Hema Malini on screen and imagining Prabha there. Arun does display some stalker-ish tendencies in the film, but there’s something deeply unserious about Arun’s unthreatening moustache and his nervous tic of rubbing his nose which make him look perfectly harmless. Plus, it is to Palekar’s credit that his antics seem no more than a beguiling attempt to start a conversation with Vidya Sinha’s character, Prabha.

And what still seems strikingly modern is the agency that Prabha has in the film. Something that was missing in most of the mainstream 70s Hindi cinema. When Arun does not move beyond stalking her at the bus stop and following her to her house, she decides to take matters in her own hands. She goes to his office, ostensibly, to complain about him. She enjoys seeing him all riled up. What could have been construed as stalker behaviour becomes innocuous in the deft hands of the director, Basu Chatterjee. It’s still a fine line but the film generally stays on the right side of it.

When Arun seems all out of options, he seeks out retired Col. JNW Singh in Khandala. To show the audience how legitimate this guy is, Amitabh Bachchan comes in as himself, to ask the Colonel for advice. If there was any doubt in Arun’s mind whether the trek to his house was worth it, or the audience’s mind, it’s assuaged now. Ashok Kumar is brilliant as the eccentric Colonel, playing the part with aplomb and hilarity. Not only does he teach him how to woo Prabha, he also teaches him how to be a gentleman who commands respect. Including how to use chopsticks. Later Arun uses this to one-up Nagesh in a restaurant. Most of us would benefit from picking a thing or two from the Colonel. There’s always surface-level civility and niceness between the Arun and Nagesh, but the undercurrents are muddier. The faux camaraderie brims with subtext. Even when Arun loses deliberately in chess, he makes himself look good by praising Nagesh for his acumen. Arun’s self-assuredness throws Nagesh off. It’s a competition not only for Prabha’s affections but to also prove oneself to be a better man than the other. Their idea of masculinity is not typical of that time, but the bedrock virtues of courage and confidence stand.

It may escape that easy categorisation but Chhoti Si Baat was one of the very few rom-coms made in Bollywood before the age of rom-coms started around mid to late 2000s. Before Imran Khan, there was Amol Palekar playing the boy-next-door in simple romantic comedies. Wholesome, breezy family entertainers devoid of any overtly sexual overtones. It would be not be particularly insightful to say that Bollywood does not make these types of films anymore. And perhaps it does not. But that spate of rom-coms probably owes a little something to movies like Chhoti Si Baat. Maybe Bollywood would still do well to pick up a thing or two from it.