Sarabhai’s Indu, Bollywood’s funny bone — Satish Shah remembered

Everyone’s dying, read a post, sharing the news of Satish Shah’s death.

It sounded maudlin, but it was true. In the past month, among so many others across the world, we had lost Asrani. Then, Piyush Pandey, the adman gave us the ads that never left us. And then, Satish Shah, a face that if you grew up seeing, you knew that you would just be entertained.

For a ’90s and 2000s child, Satish Shah was practically in every film—similar to the omnipresence of Johnny Lever, though while Lever brought the laughs, Shah often gave more weight to the plot. He could be the ladoo-eating uncle in Hum Saath Saath Hain, the snobbish father in Saathiya, or even pop up in the gloriously odd Prem Aggan. He moved through every kind of role: the Anglo-Indian half in Kaho Naa Pyaar Hai, or Shah Rukh Khan’s frosty advisor in Chalte Chalte.

And then, a possible favourite: The teacher from Farah Khan’s Main Hoon Na, which was almost an epoch in Bollywood---it was also a reflection of a time when you didn’t really care if a story made sense or not; it brought you joy, just owing to the silliness of it all. And Shah contributed immensely to that, with his spit-spewing avatar: ‘Put your feet on the chair. No, no I insit,” his dripping sarcasm, literally, was one for the books. Another line being, “I’ll spit on you and I’ll spit on you, I say,” as he told a harrowed Sushmita Sen.

Along came Sarabhai vs Sarabhai, which set the benchmark for television, because truly, no show since then has ever been that scathing, witty, sharp or observational in comedy. While Ratna Pathak Shah played the ever-acidic Maya Sarabhai, an upper-class woman less than impressed with her new daughter-in-law, Satish Shah was her husband---Indrovardhan (yes, you can hear the tone too).

Indu, as he was fondly called, was snarky to his wife and poem-reciting son Rosesh, but a lot more forgiving to Monisha, (Rupali Ganguly), his daughter-in-law. The comedy in the show was usually near perfect and Shah knew how to get the laughs without being slapstick or using old-school humour: One particular episode being, when Rosesh gets kidnapped, and a solemn Indu tries to bargain with the kidnappers about the ransom, confusing the wits out of them.

The years Shah gave us—from the ’90s to the early 2000s—were deeply formative. They helped shape a certain idea of Bollywood and comedy that many of us grew up with. The bar was set high, and as time went on, Shah appeared in fewer films—the last being the largely forgettable Humshakals in 2014. Comedy and Bollywood haven’t quite felt the same since. Perhaps they evolved in new directions, but for those of us who came of age in that era, the old zing was gone.