Tales of the arch tippler

In a recent press release, spirit maker Diageo has announced the re-launch of the legendary VAT69. According to company sources, the iconic dark green, sherry-shaped bottle is a tribute to its creator William Sanderson. Is it? We all thought it was a tribute to Ajit and to Ranjeet, the arch filmy villain and his ‘rape-happy’ sidekick. Or may-be even to Pran, Prem Chopra and oh yes, even to the red-eyed, drooling, baritoned slosh of one Mr Amitabh Bachchan.

Textbook history, boring as it is, says that till five decades ago, the iconic Scotch came in a dark green bottle, secured by a red ribbon attached to the cork and a red wax seal depicting the emblem of the Sanderson family, the Talbot Hound. The new packaging will reflect the iconic bottle with the trademark rectangular black label including the white, stenciled, boldly loud VAT69 burnished in gold embellishments. In 1882, William Sanderson in a bout of heightened imagination, prepared one hundred casks of blended whisky and hired a panel of experts to taste them. The batch from the vat with number 69 was judged to be the best —giving the famous blend its name. And thus was born VAT69. But then that’s the official story.

For us, the inmates of the land of Bollywood — of great men and women in the finest fineries and effervescent and evergreen deportment — there is another story of VAT69. Because once when Mumbai was still Bombay and when bell bottoms were fancy and fancy cars meant soft-top Morris Minors, VAT69 was the preferred bottle of scotch for villains. Those villains wore large golden rings, resided in psychedelic dens in unnamed estates, flirted with mini-skirted molls, kicked ass with a bare-bellied Helen and were guarded by bald minions in red suits. They were those bonafide smuggler villains who dealt, all their life, in the morally ambiguous contraband stuff and bootlegged alcohol and at best, in gold. In those days, the amber coloured liquor that came with a strange name was their favourite prop. The pairing of that of the villains and VAT69 is an enticing plot in itself.

In a recent essay in Time Out Mumbai, senior journalist Sidharth Bhatia analyses the rise of the ’60s and ’70s villain in Bollywood saying: “The smuggler was the master criminal who provided Indians with many of the essentials that were not available in the socialist economy but which apparently they could not do without – everything from imported cheese to razor blades to synthetic textiles. These goods came in through a variety of sources: airline staff, travelers and the independent supply chains set up by smuggling gangs along the country’s vast coastline. Filmi smugglers, of course, did not bother with small change. They dealt mainly in liquor, drugs and gold, for which Indians had a voracious appetite.”

In a conversation, Bhatia clarified that this liquor was essentially VAT69 — “the scotch that symbolized both the aspirations of a closed economy and not the elitism of it, because people did not know their Glenfiddich from their Chivas and in the confusion, VAT69 stood out, more perhaps because of the blingy look of its bottle, the large lettered logo and the amber liquid inside. VAT 69 was the ambassador of the arch-villain.”

It all started with Rehman in the black and white era. Guru Dutt, the bhadrolok that he was, got drunk on single malts and even on his insatiable thirst for poetry but never on VAT69. Ajit picked up from Rehman and apart from imported cigarettes and Mona ‘darling’, VAT69 was his pet companion. He was followed in quick succession by Prem Chopra, Pran and Ranjit, who ‘mastered the art’ of raping hapless women only when sloshed with few pegs of VAT69.

But there were other more intriguing examples of this encounter. In the hoary days of Pran, Ajit and Ranjit came Don, Chandra Barot’s blockbuster with Amitabh Bachchan. In the entire section of the film when the merciless Don was alive, VAT69 was his favourite drink, so that there is no mistake that the man is not the hero of the film but actually the leading man playing the villain. Mr Bachchan immortalised VAT69 in another famous scene in Deewar, when he is contemplating his future with the sexy and seductive Parveen Babi in his bedroom, all the while sipping on VAT69. Don and Deewar passed into collective memory and took VAT69 along with them.

There are other examples too, put aptly by Mumbai based author Kankona Basu, who says “Whether it was Pran pouring himself a stiff one after a satisfactory job of villainy, whether it was the lackey pouring Dev Anand his night cap so that he could burst into the exquisite ‘Din dhal jaaye hai’ or Meena Kumari weeping into its amber depths, the regal VAT69 had stood the test of time and emerged the true star of Hindi films”.

In fact, many in those days, wooed less by the respectability and more by the visibility of the product on the big screen started to ask their bootleggers for the VAT69 bottle, but essentially VAT69 had a filmy reputation and was not much welcome in the discerning bars and drawing rooms of the dilettante. No wonder in my years of taking a drink or two in public and in private I have never found mention of VAT 69, even as a possibility. If one reason was its sparse availability, the more potent was the fact that in our collective adolescence memory of the early-nineties and since, VAT69 was another Bollywood construct, as readily recallable as most of its other spectral excesses but never to be desired in real life.

But then, VAT69 is banking on its recall value to make a dent in the Indian market. Bollywood is indeed fearsome cultural memory and even if the associations are not always agreeable, VAT 69 is well aware that it has an edge over its rivals in India. It has this retro feel, attractive in strange ways — as a throwback to the past, like the retro-chic cinema which is becoming fashionable in Bollywood. No wonder the competition is taking notice. In a report, an executive of Pernod Ricard, Diageo’s chief rival in India, admitted that VAT is a “challenger brand” and one they’d have to keep an eye on.

As Hindi cinema modernised, and as Bhatia correctly puts it, after the Emergency, filmy villains became ‘politicised’. And later, after the stints of the Omrish Puris, Kader Khans, Rawals and Amrapurkars, card-carrying villainy, with some exceptions, exited from mainstream cinema. More importantly, liberation happened and the liquor market opened up, drawing in a flood of foreign liquors. Slowly but surely VAT69 vanished from the scene — literally and metaphorically.

Will its return in a new bottle mean a return to the arc-lights? Will Ranbir and Shah Rukh look drearily at that amber bottle again? Unlikely. Because like Ajit’s white suits and shoes, the scantily clad molls and the assorted red lights that made up the baddie’s den, VAT69 is best remembered as part of a Golden era of the filmy villains that has vanished forever.