Parodies of Indian blockbusters are a rage across the border

In Pakistan’s port city of Karachi, a few crew members of a leading TV channel meet their bosses every once in a while over biryani. They discuss the latest Bollywood blockbusters, brainstorm their potential, and then pick one. This becomes the subject of their next spoof. The selection criteria: the source material has to be a huge cinema hit (not in India, but in Pakistan), it must have chartbuster music, it must have everything that makes for good parody, and it must feature a Khan. No compromise can be made on this; if it is Salman, rather than Aamir, Saif or Shah Rukh, so much the better, the spoof will be a surefire success, they are assured.

All of Salman Khan’s recent releases, including Wanted, Dabangg and Bodyguard, have found favour among Pakistani audiences. The spoofs, starring Sikandar Sanam as always, an old hand at theatre and a pioneer of parody, have performed equally well. These spoofs are generally made for ARY Digital channel, which premieres them at prime time on weekends on Pakistani cable (with Salman send-ups recording spikes of viewership), and tend to reach the rest of the world by going viral on the internet, thanks to YouTube and other social media platforms. They are also available on pirated discs in India, even though ARY never releases them on DVD (or in theatres for that matter). Other than Pakistan, Bangladesh and India, the Middle East is their big market, popular as they are among immigrants from the Subcontinent.

A Pakistani filmmaker who does not want to be named calls these films “time-killing software”, but to their fans, it is time killed very well indeed. To call them ‘hilarious’ would be an understatement. One of the chief pleasures on offer here is Sikandar himself, the actor who plays Salman—as the very antithesis of the Bollywood star. Salman is brawny; Sikandar is wiry. Salman swaggers; Sikandar is self-deprecatory. Salman slugs the bad guy; Sikandar is unheroic. And it’s all done with such great sincerity that the spoofs are all the funnier for it. Take this famous scene in the Tere Naam spoof (titled Tere Naam 2). In the original, Salman receives fatal blows at a railway yard, his head hit repeatedly by an iron rod. In the spoof, Sikandar is wounded on being hit by balloons. This scene is one of the reasons that Tere Naam 2 has become a comedy classic.

It touched a bone, an experience that audiences couldn’t get enough of, and a flurry of spoofs is now made every year, attracting more stars into the fray. Other than Sikandar, the genre’s popular actors are Shakeel Siddiqui and Rauf Lala, both of whom were content as theatre artistes until send-ups of Bollywood films caught their fancy.

Speaking over the phone from Karachi, Sikandar sounds no-nonsense. “Salman bhai has a six-pack,” he says, “I don’t even have half a pack. It is this lack of heroic qualities that the audience laughs at.” On screen, his manner may seem serious, but that is part of the game. “How to make the public laugh,” dictates every move.

Sikandar thought of concentrating on spoofs around 2002-03, while doing skits and performing songs. He recalls slipping into a Salman Khan get-up for a show in Karachi on Eid. The reception to that act was so rousing that he saw a vast market for such comedy waiting to be captured.

“Bollywood has always been big here,” Sikandar says, “It began as a very small idea. A producer from Heera Video had liked my skit on Bollywood, and he suggested doing a full movie. At first, it was too big a thing for us, as we were small players in drama. But once the initial apprehension went away, we seriously started working on spoof ideas.” Thus was Tere Naam 2 conceived.

The film made quite an impact. In about a decade since its release, its opening clip has clocked over 617,405 hits on YouTube so far. An online legend, the scene has Sikandar make his entry as Radhe seated on a bicycle parked in the middle of a playground with an out-of-place firecracker background score. “Mazaak mazaak mein hum ne woh film bana di, bhai (We made that film just like that, in humour, brother). We had little idea that it would start a whole cycle of spoofs,” says Sikandar, “Masha Allah, film acchhi ho gayee aur hamari sawaari, Allah ke karam se, chal padi (The film did well, and our journey, by God’s grace, began).” And to think the film was made on a pitiable budget of Rs 2 lakh, with most of its actors not even paid their full fees. The girls, including the heroine, had to get their own make-up boxes to the film’s sets.

Since the super success of Tere Naam 2, Karachi’s spoofsters have produced innumerable remakes such as Munna Bhai MBBS 2, Ghanjini 2, Billu 2, Sholay 2, and even Rambo 007, inspired by the Sylvester Stallone series.

Encouraged by its early successes, ARY upped its budgets from Rs 2 lakh to Rs 30 lakh, improving production values and expanding its film crew. At one time, it had just four or five people on the sets; now, it often has as many as 30. ARY, which remains the biggest player in this market, typically commissions its own inhouse directors—who hold the copyrights—to make these films for it.

It is a profitable venture. Dabangg 2 cost about Rs 20-25 lakh, but logged large profits within minutes of its satellite broadcast. Director Kamran Khan, who makes the show Comedy Kings for ARY, was roped in to direct not only Dabangg 2, but also Singham 2 and Don 2. He is on the channel’s payroll, but is allowed complete creative freedom as a director. “The channel is only interested in a good film,” says Kamran, “It doesn’t care how it is made, or who contributes the most.”

Since Sikandar writes most of his own films, and there is nearly always a bound script and screenplay, the actual shooting often takes less than a month. According to Kamran, around 70 per cent of the shooting takes place on real locations in and around Karachi, and 30 per cent on a set.

But the team never travels beyond Karachi because that would prove too costly for the channel. “We are now working on Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge 2,” says Kamran, “Shah Rukh Khan comes from the UK to a small village in Punjab, India. We are skipping the whole UK episode and instead showing our hero Sikandar travel from Karachi to a village.”

Those familiar with the operations of the Malegaon film industry in northern Maharashtra will discern a similar pattern in the Karachi spoof industry. In Malegaon, too, cinema fanatics spin out Bollywood spoofs at the drop of a cap. Like in Malegaon, where content is adapted to local sensibilities, the Karachi spoofs are localised for Pakistani consumption. The language is a mix of Sindhi and Punjabi but is mainly Urdu. A keen observer of Pakistani society, Sikandar has for years studied the mannerisms of an assortment of Pakistani people: Sindhis, Punjabis and Pathans. While writing, he claims to draw from memory, adding a personal touch to scenes and dialogues.

Sikandar says he watches the spoof’s target at least 30 times before he sits down to pen his own version. He replaces the original lines with trendy catchphrases of local extraction. In most cases, the invective is as old as the hills, but since it has never been used in cinema before, its novelty has its own appeal. For instance, in the original Munna Bhai MBBS, Sanjay Dutt calls everybody “mamu”. But in the spoof, which starred Sikandar as Munna Bhai, mamu gives way to “nesti” (Pakistani term for panauti, a bestower of bad luck). Similarly, most spoofs have a mention of a “gadha gaadi” ; at times, the hero is depicted hitchhiking on one. “In Pakistan,” says Sikandar, “there is this culture of using a [donkey cart] as a mode of transport, which those watching elsewhere may not know of. But they laugh, nonetheless, because they think, ‘Ya Allah, hero gadhe pe aa raha hai (Oh God, the hero is arriving on a donkey).’ ”

In another instance, Salman Khan’s popular punchline as Lovely Singh in Bodyguard, “Mujhpe ek ehsaan karna, ki mujhpe koi ehsaan na karna”(Do me a favour, don’t do me a favour) is rephrased as “Mujh par ek ehsaan karna, fitra/zakat mujhe hi dena” (Do me a favour, give only me alms).

Much of the humour is slapstick—‘chhichori comedy’ as Pakistanis would say—but is never the kind that cannot be watched with one’s family, says Sikandar. “I have sat with my own family and watched these films, and I have never felt embarrassed,” attests Wali Sheikh, a regular character actor in these spoofs who is known to Indian TV viewers as the bald sidekick to Sikandar on The Great Indian Laughter Challenge 4.

The spoofs, only about 90 minutes long, try to retain the essence of the original, evoking laughs more through their cartoonish depiction of the hero than sarcasm. In Don 2, Shakeel Siddiqui refuses to take off his sunglasses on being frisked, explaining: “Isse rehne doh yaar, isi se toh don lagta hoon.” (Please leave these on. It’s what makes me look like a don.) In contrast to the mafia kingpin status of Shah Rukh Khan’s Don, Shakeel’s don is a small-time crook, a mobile phone snatcher for whose capture the government has earmarked a reward of Rs 500.

“In every spoof,” says Sikandar, “you can see the hero taking digs at himself.” In most, the protagonist is so poor that he lives on langars (charity food servings) at nearby shrines. In some of them, neighbourhood sissies get away insulting the hero with “zaleel”, “tharrebaaz”, “laanat hai tujh par” and other indignities. In others, he steals hens (at times, a packet of half-eaten biryani) and gets beaten up for it.

There are laughs to be got from the physical appearance of the characters as well. In Bodyguard 2, Lovely Singh’s uniform is a purple jacket worn over a garish pink Pathani suit, prompting the heroine to call him, “Pink Panther”. The idea is usually to parody the look of the original heroes, which means retaining the broad outline of the get-up with a local touch thrown in here and there. On occasion, too close a similarity between the original and the impostor does not go down well with viewers. “For Singham 2,” says Sikandar, “I tried to keep the same thick moustache and parted hair as Ajay Devgn. But some kids who had seen both films told me they didn’t laugh as much as they had expected because my get-up was too close to Ajay’s. That’s why in a spoof, a hero has to look like a caricature of the original: we play on stereotypes associated with the star and amplify his mannerisms.”

The heroines are depicted in Bollywood style too, just contorted around the edges for a Pakistan pushing women into purdah. They wear trendy clothes (by B-grade movie standards), and dance. It’s just that they also have snide jokes cracked at their expense. In Don 2, a self-proclaimed “brod-maiind” (broad-minded) character tells the protagonist, “Meri biwi duniya ko sambhal rahi hai, main kyun sambhaloon usko?” (My wife is managing the world, why should I manage her?)

Music, of course, is another important aspect. Given the existing copyright laws, spoof makers employ a full-time lyricist and music composer to come up with new songs and tunes. The hook remains the same, though. In the Ghajini send-up (titled Ghanjini 2, with an ‘n’ because of copyright fears), the song Tu Meri Adhuri Pyaas Pyaas is twisted to Ho Tera Satyanaas with such cheesy lines as “Ganjaa hoon toh hua kya, nanga hoon toh hua kya, mujhse tu darna nahin” (‘So what if I am bald and shirtless, don’t be scared of me’). The lines that follow are about mosquitoes dying of having ingested the hero’s impure blood or some such thing. It is simply untranslatable.

Imran Sajan, the lyricist, composed those lines in ten minutes. “I am a fast writer,” says Sajan, who writes for radio and music albums. He has trained under lyricists like Mohammed Nasir, Fouq Ludhianvi and Alam Nashad. But he bemoans a lack of creative opportunities for a lyricist of his experience: “Masha Allah, I have a background. Personally, I don’t enjoy writing such lyrics. But what can I do? It’s what the audience demands. When you write for spoofs, you have to catch the mood and let the artiste in you take a backseat.”

Not everyone is a fan of Pakistani parodies, and certainly not in India. Indian comedian Suresh Menon’s grouse is that Pakistani humour “gets very personal”. He says, “The problem is that we look at everything that Pakistan does in an ‘extending a friendly hand of peace’ sort of way. So, even if it is not funny, we laugh just to reassure them. If you look at it objectively, their humour is below-the-belt and vulgar.”

Ketan Singh, creative writer behind the spoof Actor Calling Actor on India’s 92.7 Big FM, feels that these Karachi spoofs lack originality. “I have tried to share links of Dabangg 2 and Don 2 on Facebook, but I have never got a positive reaction. Spoofs generally work with [viewers], but we know how capricious public taste can be. From whatever I have seen, these spoofs are lame. Only once in a while you get a gag or two that is laugh-worthy.”

Singh says that the Karachi spoofs borrow liberally from the original concepts of Umer Sharif, Liaquat Soldier and Moin Akhtar, three leading lights of Pakistani theatre. “You would be surprised just how much of Bakra Qiston Pe and Buddha Ghar Pe Hai there is in the spoofs. That’s why Umer Sharif will survive and have recall value, but the same cannot be said of these spoofs. Maybe one or two will last.” But then, he adds, “You can never guess what people will like.”

For Sikandar, a school dropout from an impoverished family that migrated from Jetpur in Gujarat to Pakistan in the 1950s, this hard-earned position as a poor man’s Salman Khan is a triumph against the odds. What began as a means of survival is now serious business. But this is not the real reason that he or others like him are in the parody business. “I am a slave to my passion,” he says. Pakistani society, he maintains, has a condescending attitude towards humour. Comedians are treated with contempt. This means that doing comedy demands more than just a sense of humour, it requires a streak of social defiance as well.

Sikandar works on films by day and does stage shows by night. His phone, email and website are bursting with show requests. It seems spoofs are just a small part of his utilitarian idea of comedy, a part of his larger aim to have every Pakistani home reverberate with laughter. “Insha Allah, yeh silsila jaari rahega (God willing, this thread will go on),” he says. Then the Bollywood fan in him awakens, and he softly asks, “Bhai, do you think Salman bhai will like our spoofs?”