Evidently, she was always on a collision course. And not necessarily in front of the camera. At Mumbai’s mind-spinningly busy Bandra railway station, I was just about to alight from a taxi when a woman insisted on getting in first, smothering my face with her shopping bags, not to omit her enormous girth. Howled she, “I am late. You’re in a taxi, stop loitering inside as if you’re in a public park.”
Before I could go “ouch”, she had yanked me out. All shook up, I peered at the formidable passenger. It was the lady who had tickled my funny bone as long as I could remember. I gaped with disbelief to which she yelled, “Ghurta kya hai Hanh main hoon Tun Tun.” Redeemingly she added a bemused, “Bye bye” topped by her trademark cackle of laughter.
That bulldozer of a brief encounter I cherished yesterday (July 11), on the occasion of her 93rd birth anniversary. It has been 13 monsoons since the first acknowledged comedienne of Hindi cinema passed away at the age of 80. I’m not sure that the new millennium generation knows that she had spectators rock 'n' rolling in the aisles with her way-over-the-top slapstick humour.
For those who grew up in the 1950s and ’60s though, she remains one of a kind, bringing joy by poking fun at her own expense. To be fat was to be uproarious. She reveled in being India’s female answer to Oliver Hardy, while her movie partners — more often than not played by character actors Sunder, Agha, Mukri and Johnny Walker — were meek, submissive Stan Laurels. She was boss.
Her armoury of comic weapons was limited perhaps to biting her tongue, laughing deliriously, brandishing a rolling-pin, enlarging her eyes and narrowing them into slits, behaving ultra-coyly (see the suhaag raat sequence of Heeron ka Chor (1982) in which she weds an ageing midget) besides batting out sly sexuality (the funsters would woo her as if she was the personification of unblemished beauty). She’d address timid men as “laalipoops” and bop the daylights out of rustic ne’er-do-wells as well as urban chisellers. A bustling domestic help, a lovelorn bachelorette, a telephone operator, a tribal belle, she portrayed them all.
Tun Tun’s USP, like it or not, was her obesity. And if that wasn’t off-putting it was because she was comfortable with her weight, whether she was asked to break into a thunderous dance or extricate herself out of a much-too-narrow doorway.
Moreover, the scriptwriters and directors shawled her characters with warmth, instead of making her a target of rude insults. Of her stock of 200 films, the ones which employed her joie de calories best were none other than Guru Dutt’s Aar Paar (1954), Mr and Mrs ’55 (1955), Pyaasa (1957) and Kagaz ke Phool (1959). Indeed, the legendary Dutt considered Tun Tun and Johnny Walker as his mascots. Their roles in his film were integral to the plot and not mere sidebar comedy tracks. In the Raj Kapoor-produced Jagte Raho (1956), edged with realism, she made her presence felt with a cameo.
The transition from black and white to colour cinema was achieved fluidly, except that her make-up became chalky and her costumes, garish. The roles became repetitive, and in quite a few films, she was merely cast as the mandatory Fat Lady. Imitators popped up, too. For instance, there were Indira Bansal and her brother aptly called Polson after the now defunct butter pack, to be followed by Guddi Maruti. Could they ever come close to Tun Tun Not a snowflake’s chance in hell.
Tun Tun’s life and career is documented, though not sufficiently. All that’s known about her today is that she was born Uma Devi Khatri in a small town of Uttar Pradesh. Orphaned in her teens, she left for Bombay to make it as a singer. Helped by actor-director Ashok Ahuja and his wife singer Nirmala Devi (actor Govinda’s parents), she knocked on the doors of the famed composer Naushad at his oceanfront home. She threatened to fling herself into the waves, if she was rejected.
That cheeky gambit launched a successful career of Uma Devi Khatri as a playback singer, her most imperishable hit being Afsana likh rahi hoon dil-e-beqarar ka picturised on Munawar Sultan for A.R. Kardar’s Dard (1947). A radio listener was so entranced that he proposed marriage. And voila! The proposal was accepted. Little is known about the husband except that she called him “Mohan”. Their two daughters were kept away from the whirligig of showbiz.
The songstress belted out hits galore till she made a boo-boo of sorts. She breached her contract with Kardar when she sang for S.S. Vasan’s Chandralekha (1948). Subsequently, Naushad asked Dilip Kumar to get the jobless singer an acting role in Babul (1950) to go with her bouncy personality.
Dilip Kumar, the lore goes, renamed her Tun Tun. And the fun began. If she ever spoke about herself, in some depth, with the magazines and newspapers of yore, alas those records aren’t readily accessible.
Which is why I cherish the fact that I did get a glimpse of the real Tun Tun during that taxi encounter, at the end of which she waved, “Bye bye.”
Khalid Mohamed is a journalist, film critic and film director
