Johnny Walker

Despite our re-assuring self-glorification about having one of the biggest and most vibrant cinemas in the world, film studies in India are in such a sterile state that we cannot say whether Johnny Walker was born in 1924 or 1925. Both versions have been reported in the Mumbai media!

Born to a mill worker at Indore, it took Badruddin, alias Johnny Walker, some 25 years to discover that the cinema is one of the more democratic economies in modern India; that there one could metamorphosize a bus conductor into a comic star - provided one met the wizard in time. In his case, Guru Dutt.

He was luckier than most others, in that he was born at the right time. The nineteen-fifties was the glorious decade that gave birth to the hitherto undefined world of pop culture. Not just in India. Across the seas, rock-n-roll music exploded as a new genre in the early years of the same decade, through the likes of Bill Haley and Elvis Presley. If Elvis Presley’s wriggle shocked old world prudes in the USA and Europe, in India Johnny Walker’s personification of street-culture sent conservative aesthetics on a roller-coaster blast!

He was a born-contortionist. He didn’t have a straight bone in his body. He only had to shrug a shoulder or bend a knee while taking a stroll to create a slow-motion distortion from respectable middle-class society. He was the first modern-day comic star of the Hindi cinema. At the first instance, a breakaway from the lineage of comedy that preceded him in Indian cinema and urban theatre.

We need to but juxtapose the incontrollable dance of distortions by Johnny Walker and compare him with the satirical profile of Master Vinayak in films like Brahmachari, or the rhythmic grace of Bhagwan – to realize that Johnny Walker was the inhabitant of the new social landscape where machines and mechanics, the tring-a-ling of bicycle bells and the screeching tyres of ham-handed omnibuses had taken over from the hoof-beat cadence of tongas and bullock carts.

Much as Charlie Chaplin wove his “boogie ballets” around the artifacts of new machines in the 1930’s and the 1940’s, Johnny Walker helped us recognize and re-adjust to our confusions and vulnerabilities in the big city - while crossing a road into the future, in the frightening face of roaring motorcars, trucks and lorries, public transport buses and the tramways.

He turned our traumatic confrontation with the new machinery into a philosophic teaser : ‘Main, main, main’ he sang, ‘Main Qaartoon! Bajjh raha hai baar baar, dil ka telephoon! ….” He would, and so therefore could we, adapt the new gizmos to the emotional body of everyday life.

To truly understand Johnny Walker’s phenomenal difference with his predecessors, we must remember that he had entered the film world at a time when a fairly large number of old style comedians held center stage: Bhagwan and Master Vinayak were lead players with a tremendous comic flair; then there was Yukub, albeit at the fag end of his career, and Gope, Kanhaiyalal, Agha and Dhumal, all of whom held a status of no small importance as comedians.

It was because Johnny Walker’s innate, weirdly elastic personality was of such a different mould that he was able to quickly establish a new line of comedy in films, whose influence pervaded the decades to come, right down to Asrani and Johny Lever, and Vijay Raaz (Monsoon Wedding).

Nor should we forget that he thrived in an era when comedy blossomed like a thousand flowers on the Mumbai scene. The seeds of the legend that Johny Walker became were sowed at a time when he had such formidable contenders to reckon with as I.S. Johar and Kishore Kumar; even as Mehmood lurked in the wings. Let us not forget that those were the years when two of our cinema’s greatest comedies, Chalti Ka Naam Gaadi and Bewaqoof, were made.

Despite the brevity of his debut in Baazi in 1951, within the next two years he was accepted as a major comic star. By 1956 he became a veritable superstar – telling us, much like Shakespeare’s Fool: ‘Ai dil, mushkil, jeena yahan….’

As Guru Dutt’s extraordinary scriptwriter Abrar Alvi once pointed out, what we admire as “a Guru Dutt film” was in fact a cinema procreated by the brilliance of a small, core, group of creative minds.

This core creative group evolved within the unit of the Guru Dutt Films production company in the early ‘fifties; and as we can see in Johnny Walker’s accompaniment to Guru Dutt’s rendering of the song Dil Par Hua Aisa Jaadu in Mr and Mrs 55, they are as one onscreen, in the way a singer and a table player are one at a music concert.

Johnny Walker seemed to be the perfect “cubistic” counterfoil to Guru Dutt. It is a chemistry rarely seen in the cinema; perhaps because, as hinted by Guru Dutt’s own performances in Aar Paar and Mr and Mrs 55, there was a Johnny Walker inside Guru Dutt!

In the academically classical Kaaghaz Ke Phool (1967) what stands out is the ease with which Johnny Walker slipped into the sardonic character of a young man from the upper crust. In sharp contrast to the earlier personifications of the street-smart, urchin style, city-dweller, in Kaaghaz Ke Phool Johnny Walker turned his image around and became a member of a snooty and stiff-upper lip family that looks down on such low people as those who work in films.

In the year of C.I.D., Johnny Walker also presented a marvelous parody of the by-now over-familiar character of the political agitator. The film Chori Chori offered one of the many hilarious “item numbers” that we associate with the legend of Johnny Walker, as he leads his enormous family squad to the beat of Left, right, dhibree tight – All line kil-lear!

There is no doubt that as a social iconoclast in the cinema, Johnny Walker was particularly lucky to be working in an era when the film world at Mumbai was also home to some of the great poets of the modern era: Sahir Ludhianvi, Hasrat Jaipuri, Shailendra, Kaifi Azmi, Majrooh Sultanpuri, etc..

These were poets who reveled in the excitement of transforming street-slang. They took it to the transcendental ambiguity of great poetry – as T.S. Eliot put it, transcending from the ridiculous to the sublime. They were all somber, often melancholic, poets in the literary world. But they also reveled in the “rejuvenation of language” and revealed a talent quite removed from their literary seriousness when they wrote film songs and lyrics. To this unexpected realm of literary playfulness, Johnny Walker provided the appropriate caricature and he gave it flesh and bone, because there is a satirical musical rhythm to his very expression and in his comic timing – e.g. the masseur’s fingers drumming on a scalp with the nonchalance of a tabla player for the song Sar jo tera chakraaye (Pyaasa).

Guru Dutt was not the only one among the socially alive film-makers of the era who found Johnny Walker irresistible. In the early years of his career, there was Aandhian (1952), Taxi Driver (1954) and Joroo Ka Bhai (1955) directed by Chetan Anand, Munna (1954) by K.A. Abbas, Railway Platform (1955) by Ramesh Saigal, Paigham (1959) by S.S. Vasan, Naya Daur (1957) by B.R. Chopra, and Sitaron Se Aage (1958) by Satyen Bose,

Few top directors missed out on Johnny Walker in those years. We saw him in Roop K. Shorey’s Aag Ka Dariya (1953), Devendra Goel’s Ek Saal (1957), P.L. Santoshi’s Paheli Raat (1959), Kamal Amrohi’s Dil Diya Dard Liya (1966), even a role in the 1954 film Shaheed-e-Azam Bhagat Singh. Hrishikesh Mukherjee cast him in Aashiq (1967) and he starred in Bimal Roy’s great popular classics Devdas (1955) and Madhumati (1958). There was even a passing cameo in K. Asif’s Mughal-e-Azam (1960).


After Guru Dutt, it was Dilip Kumar who quite saw in Johnny Walker the requisite counterfoil to his occasionally ponderous demeanour. We know that Dilip Kumar’s comedy style was both deliberate and cultivated. Perhaps, there was an inhibited Johnny Walker inside Dilip Kumar too!

Johnny Walker was the leading man of as many as nine films – by my count. The first of these was made as early as 1956, Chho Mantar. Shyama was the actress he was most faithful to, being at cross-purposes in most of these nine movies. Director M. Sadiq’s Duniya Rang Rangili and Johnny Walker – yes, a film dedicated to his screen name - followed in 1957. In 1958 he broke all manner of box-office records with the Mr Qartoon M.A. (director Ved-Madan) and M. Sadiq’s Khota Paisa and Naya Paisa. In 1959 came another two lead roles – Inder’s Mr. John and N.A. Ansari’s Zara Bachke; then in 1960 his swan-song as a leading man, Shanker Mehta’s Rikshavala.

He continued to act in comic roles long after and surprised his fans in Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Anand (1970). The Kamal Haasan starrer Chachi 420 marked his last appearance on the silver screen.