A high-brow critic once remarked how he was surprised by the use of an eagle on Amitabh's arm in Coolie. Apparently, this is an erudite Muslim symbolism, and janaab high-brow was surprised to find it in a 'trite' (that was the word he used) film like Coolie.
This best betrays our somewhat schizophrenic attitude to Manmohan Desai. As receptive children, we loved his movies; as cynical adults, we remember him with a mix of embarrassment and patronizing nostalgia-like we'd remember a Chandamama or a Chacha Chaudhary comic.
But, like those comics, his stories had morals and socio-political commentary. His cinema worked not because it was trite, but b
ecause we are a sophisticated audience. We understand, if only implicitly, the metaphor for a divided people in Amar, Akbar Anthony. MD had read a newspaper story about three brothers being separated from each other, which inspired him to make a movie about children of the same mother (India) who grow up with different faiths. If that isn't creative genius, what is? The father in Amar, Akbar Anthony reunites with his son by literally digging up a buried past they share: a gun. There is a message, here, for a country whose violent divisions are buried by official history. And mother India can only be literally blind not to see her own flesh and blood: after all, she survives because sons of all faiths literally give her their blood. 
Divisive forces were MD's villains- the smuggler, Robert, in Amar, Akbar Anthony; and the jilted lover, Zafar in Coolie. Both were wealthy and drunk on power; they lusted after their desires and divided us, the people. MD's heroes were classic Davids who fought the Goliaths of their times. In Mard, a prince is reduced to a taangewaala and turned against his own father by the British. Father and son fight each other, as the sadistic outsider looks on. Here, mother India loses her voice after the British invade (What a telling metaphor!). But the father has left a proud, indelible mark upon his son's breast-the literary equivalent of DNA. This will help them discover both, their mutual kinship and their real enemy. If Mard taught us the strengths of biological kinship, Parwarish showed us its weakness. What better comment on caste than to show that your blood isn't always pure blood? In Shahenshah, a cop who is corrupt by day turns into a crime-fighting superhero by night, beating up the very goons who bribe him. MD saw the paradox in a corrupt society-the hand of the law being fed by the very forces it was supposed to crush-and turned it into a literary device. If this was his brilliantly original superhero, his earlier Saccha Jhuuta used the classic look-alikes device to make a 'Jekyll & Hyde'ish comment on human nature.
Manmohan Desai's work, like our best epics, was driven by imagination. With an innate acumen for metaphors, he created a magic real world of his own. Garcia Marquez would've been proud.
(Cool IMDB trivia:The line, "sophisticated rhetorician intoxicated with the exuberance of your own verbosity" that is spoken by Anthony when he emerges from the Easter egg is an almost exact quotation from a speech given by Benjamin Disraeli in 1878. Disraeli (who was referring to W.E. Gladstone) used the word "inebriated" rather than "intoxicated".Wonder of wonders!)
