2023 Wrap: Animal to Khufiya, the Fine Art of Cigarette Acting

In the slaughterhouse that is Animal, the scene transition between the characters of Vijay (Ranbir Kapoor) and Abrar (Bobby Deol) — one image moving up for another to take its place — is filled with smoke. Vijay is puffing in his potbellied angst, and cigarette clouds are lit by the harsh afternoon light; Abrar is also smoking, but there is a cleanness in the frame, even as the same harsh afternoon light rushes in; the anti-hero and the villain, both shrouded in tobacco. 

There might be psychological and narrative, even metaphoric reasons for characters to whip out a cigarette and ember it, but I am uninterested in that. What excites me is what the cigarette does to the surface of a scene — the chaos of Vijay and the clarity of Abrar.

A Gesture, A Mood

On the one hand, the cigarette allows for swag-stained gestures. The act of parking it between the lips, as Vijay does with a cigarette holding it between his index finger and thumb, perching it right before he fires the big bad machine; the act of ashing it, of holding it between two fingers — the index and the middle finger, or sometimes, the index and the thumb — as you walk around; the act of flicking the cigarette away. Then, there is the storage of these cigarettes, where Vijay folds the box into his sleeve, like a character in Jigarthanda Double X, who keeps his cigarette dug into his folded sleeve. It adds a strange texture to the image, as though the character is being constructed one habit at a time. It also changes the body language. When Vijay is walking with his entourage to gun down his brother-in-law, he is holding the cigarette away from his body, between the index finger and thumb, walking with his arms angled ahead. It is such a propulsive, precise posture, aided and allowed by the cigarette. 

The cigarette has a long association with the hero in cinema, in fact the history of Indian cinema itself is clouded in smoke, from the puffs of Guru Dutt, Ashok Kumar, Dev Anand, and Raj Kapoor in the Fifties and Sixties. As the 2003 WHO study on the portrayal of tobacco in Indian Cinema notes, in these decades smoking on screen was “associated with romance, style, tragedy and rebellion”. While in the later decades, the Seventies and Eighties, Amitabh Bachchan would wield the cigarette as a gruff arrow in his anti-hero quiver, Tamil superstar Rajinikanth was busy choreographing the cigarette into his repertoire of style. As Javed Akhtar noted, in the Nineties and 2000s, however, “the hero is much younger than what he used to be. In the Sixties, Seventies, the hero was a ‘man’. Now, the hero is a ‘boy’." That, and because of the changed morality of the censors, cigarette smoking started diminishing in cinema. Director Ramesh Sippy attributes this to the “round of feel-good films, family films, so there wasn’t any reason to show smoking.”

As the decades flipped, the cultural shift in genres has allowed the cigarette to be resuscitated. It would be impossible, for example, to thumb our way down the iconic images of this year without passing our hands over Captain Vikram Rathore (Shah Rukh Khan) in Jawan making his entrance, pre-interval. Having watched the film on the big screen, IMAX, the cigarette warning sticker — my height — has never felt more emasculated than when Khan makes his entrance chomping on his cigar; no bigger humiliation than being made to look like a fool. Throughout the scene, one where he bludgeons men with his muscular pizza cutter, accessorised as a saw, the cigar burns on his lip. During the almost three-minute scene during which he also swallows and exhales it, the length of the cigar is left undiminished, an elaboration of his heroism, a new kind of heroism for a new kind of time. 

If Bachchan perfected the art of making the cigarette a bastion of gruff, lonely masculinity, one that Vikram Rathore embodies by elevating it to a more obvious, class-agnostic, stylistic choice, Sidhant Gupta made of it a tender plaything. When we first see Jay Khanna (Gupta) in Jubilee, he is dancing with a cigarette dangling from his lips, a hat he keeps shuffling in place, with a smile that invokes the ghost of Shashi Kapoor’s youth. When he is speaking to Binod Das (Aparshakti Khurana), who rescues him from the clutches of the railway police, he rattles off his resume, “Backstage, costume, set design … acting,” with a cigarette jutting out of his face, his words made that much softer by it. There is something extraordinarily, immediately charming about this character and his cigarette, the way he, initially, tends to hold it between his middle finger and thumb, with his index finger as a protective hood; the way, with fame and money, he dangles it between index finger and middle finger. 

The Romance of Smoking

Then, there is what a cigarette does to the silences of a scene. A cigarette is a measure of time. How long does it take for it to ash closest to the finger, at which point its heat singes the skin — of the finger, of the lip? That is the length of time you can extend. A cigarette after a date; after sex; with a friend; a colleague downstairs. It is saying, how do I extend time with you without filling it with things, words, labour? Just smoke, and some silence. 

In cinema, to see characters smoke is to see them either extend time, allowing for “nothingness” in the narrative, for space in a conversation. It changes the cadence of speech itself. In Khufiya, when KM (Tabu) and Charu (Wamiqa Gabbi) are talking on the phone, and she asks about her marriage, her past, KM lights a cigarette and smokes it — “smokes it” is putting it lightly, she sucks on it, hollowing her cheeks, giving all the psychoanalysts who have written about the cigarette as a phallic symbol a run for their money; she’s a lesbian. It allows for the pauses to feel less heavy, and for thought to take more time to become words. 

A question itches. Are we seeing more actors smoke on screen? From Sushmita Sen pursing a cigar in Aarya to Gulshan Devaiah’s cigarette antics in Guns & Gulaabs to Shah Rukh Khan biting at its end in Jawan, there is a growing sense that smoking has become more commonplace in an industry with a testy history with cigarettes. Incidentally, in the early years of Khan’s career, smoking was part of his on-screen presence, including Fauji (1989), his debut in television where it was an integral part of his style. As he leant into romance, the cigarettes left his pocket. 

A smoking ban proposed by the Ministry of Health, that prohibited films and TV show actors from smoking on screen, went into effect in October 2005. Calling this a form of censorship, the Delhi High Court overturned the ban in January 2009. Many actors filed themselves on either side of the debate. The “smoking kills” sign, instead, scarred the surface of our films. 

Streaming, then, has produced an alternative image-making untouched by such moral preciousness. Just the image of a man, whose throat is slit open, demanding a boy who found him lying bleeding to fish out his cigarette and matchbox, inhaling the fumes, only for it to exit through the drawn curtain of his open throat, just that image from the opening of Guns & Gulaabs. Cigarette smoking is injurious to health, yes sure, but what if he was dying, anyway?