Naseeruddin Shah was in town last week for the French Film Festival organised by the Alliance Francaise du Bengale. When he and Goutam Ghose met on the sidelines of the festival, the two engaged in an adda on the experience of shooting Paar, which completed 40 years last year. t2 took part in the informal chat between the veteran actor and his one-time director.
“I lost a lot of weight for that role,” Shah travelled down memory lane during an impromptu backstage chat with Ghose, the man who had directed him in Paar. The 1984 Hindi film, costarring Shabana Azmi and Utpal Dutt, had won Shah the Volpi Cup at the Venice Film Festival and the National Award, for his role as a labourer rebelling against injustice and becoming a fugitive from the law in the process.
Goutam Ghose and Naseeruddin Shah during The 2nd edition of French Film Festival Kolkata inagural ceremony at Nandan on 22.02.2025. The Telegraph picture by Bhubaneswarananda Halder
He also admitted to have worked hard to acquire a tanned look for the role. “I would rub coconut oil all over me and be in the sun. I have this advantage that I would get tanned and detanned quickly,” he said. The weight loss regimen involved both exercise and what he calls “a very scientific diet”. “I realised that there would be scenes where I would have to take my shirt off. I used to watch the labourers who worked on the road. They had bodies like in school diagrams.”
Another inspiration came from a childhood memory. “As a child, I used to watch my grandfather, a landlord, interact with the labourers who worked on his land. He was quite ruthless. He was also an influence when I did Mirch Masala,” he recalled. In that film, Shah played an arrogant subedar or colonial-era tax collector.
“After each shot, though everything had gone perfectly, he would still look at me and nod like this. I call him a positive nervous actor,” said Ghose, mimicking Shah’s dissatisfied expression and breaking into a laugh.
Naseeruddin Shah and Shabana Azmi in a scene from the last sequence of 'Paar'
We asked them how it was managing the pigs which had to be transported across the river in the climactic scene by Naurangia (Shah’s character) and his pregnant wife. “I thought Goutam would go mad. After one take, he wanted to shoot another angle from the back. But the pigs would not return. They simply kept going into deeper waters,” Shah exclaimed. “In the first schedule, after a few days of shooting in Naihati, I told them: ‘Let’s do the climax. If we succeed we will do the film. Else we will drop it,’” Ghose shook his head at the memory.
There were other challenges too. Shah initially didn’t know how to swim and picked up the rudiments of the skill for the role. “Goutam kept one chap to save me in case I drowned,” he chuckled. “It was one of the civil defence life savers. But the passion of the actors for a good role is unbelievable,” Ghose reflected.
The crossing of the river with the pigs, Ghose pointed out, was a metaphor for human endurance. On being asked how deep the water was, Shah recalled it being pretty deep at the centre of the river. “The undercurrent was quite strong,” he remarked, to which Ghose added: “It was high monsoon, in July.”
Azmi, who played Shah’s pregnant wife, was not Ghose’s original choice. “Smita Patil said she could not swim and backed out. Then I sent the script to Shyam (Benegal). He loved it. He must have told Shabana. I knew Shabana’s father (Kaifi Azmi) but not her,” said Ghose.
He recalled how the role fell in Shabana’s lap. “I had acted in Buddhadeb Dasgupta’s film Grihajuddha (1982). When it was shown at the national panorama in New Delhi, Shabana came up to me to congratulate me on my performance. ‘Let’s go for a cup of coffee,’ she said, and asked what I was working on. As soon as I mentioned that I was working on a new film, she quipped: ‘I know swimming’.” Azmi too had bagged the National Award for Best Actress for her performance in Paar. “She too worked really hard for the role,” Ghose reflected.
“The most incredible thing that happened while shooting that sequence was we thought we had reached the other side. But soon it struck us that the other side was still further away. Goutam decided to keep that footage,” Shah said. “We used to shoot on celluloid in those days. I had used two cameras to shoot that sequence. It turned out to be a most dramatic moment in the film,” Ghose added.
Name your favourite Naseeruddin Shah films. Write to t2@abp.in