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No One Writes To The Prison Doc Anymore |
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A Jat playing bhadralok? Could it have been that he acted so well that we didn’t even notice? |
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| Mukul Kesavan in Outlook - Excellent article | ||
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From Dil Bhi Tera, Hum Bhi Tere to Johnny Gaddar,
Dharmendra acted in nearly two hundred and fifty films and never won a
Filmfare Best Actor award despite being discovered in a Filmfare
talent spotting competition. He won a consolation prize, a Lifetime
Achievement award in 1997, but the magazine didn’t give him one for an
individual performance. This couldn’t have been because he didn’t star
in successful films, or didn’t turn in celebrated performances. Haqeeqat, Bandini, Phool aur Patthar, Satyakam, Chupke Chupke, Mera Gaon Mera Desh, Seeta aur Geeta and Sholay
were outstandingly successful films, made by A-list directors and
largely powered by Dharmendra’s presence, but he never got the big
prize.
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with
the fact that Dharmendra acted in heroine-oriented films in the early
part of his career. He was paired with major actresses like Nutan, Mala
Sinha, Meena Kumari and Suchitra Sen who got the credit for the films
they made together; Bandini, Anpadh, Phool aur Patthar and Mamta
are good examples. He played the romantic foil and because he was so
comfortable in his skin, so effortlessly the good-looking, honourable
male lead, his audiences ended up thinking that his roles didn’t
require real performances. Then, in the early ’70s, some of his
signature performances came in multi-star films.
In Chupke Chupke, while he carried
the film, he shared screen time with Amitabh, Sharmila, Jaya Bhaduri
and Om Prakash. Similarly his great comic turn in Sholay had to share attention with Sanjeev Kumar’s eye-rolling histrionics, Bachchan’s tragic end and, of course, with Amjad Khan’s extraordinary debut as Gabbar Singh.
It’s possible to find semi-plausible
reasons, then, for Dharmendra being overlooked in the acting stakes,
but these aren’t good reasons. When you consider that Rajesh Khanna was
celebrated for his performances in Anand and Namak Haraam,
performances that are hard to watch today without giggling or cringing,
when you think of the millions of movie-goers and critics who thought
Sanjeev Kumar’s kit bag of theatrical mannerisms made him Bombay
cinema’s greatest actor, when you recollect the endless variations on
vigilantism that installed Bachchan in our memories as an acting Atlas,
it’s hard to believe that Dharmendra got so little credit for so much
good work. Even Sunil Dutt, who was no one’s idea of a great actor, got
two Filmfare Best Actor awards in the early ’60s.
The main reason why Dharmendra wasn’t given
his acting due was because he was good-looking in a conventional North
Indian way. He was an early pioneer of male sex appeal in a cinematic
tradition where the hero generally treated his body like an optional
extra. It was the women that were sprayed into tight clothes: the men
could be any shape they chose and generally were. Shammi Kapoor,
Rajendra Kumar, Raj Kapoor in his middle period, Dev Anand and Rajesh
Khanna kept their bodies all covered up and the world was a better
place for it. Dharmendra was an early adopter of the bare-torsoed
moment (Phool aur Patthar) and paradoxically, his rugged, clean-cut appeal worked against him as an actor.
The
reason for this is that Hindi film critics tend to see actorly ability
as a compensatory talent: thus histrionic ability is granted to actors
who are either unconventionally attractive (Bachchan, Naseeruddin Shah)
or positively plain (Sanjeev Kumar, Om Puri).
Dharmendra, light-skinned, rugged, with the
perfect Colgate smile, didn’t fit the mould. Though no one would have
mistaken him for Shashi Kapoor (who had desperately crooked teeth),
they were both received as good-looking men who got by in films on
account of an easy charm. So while Shashi was cute and Dharmendra was
rugged, they were rated by their physical appeal rather than their
ability to act. Which is a pity because while Shashi Kapoor genuinely
couldn’t act at all, Dharmendra was, for a dozen years, the outstanding
actor-hero in Hindi cinema.In the ’60s, Dharmendra represented
moral seriousness in Hindi cinema; in film after film, the characters
he played tried to reconcile the conflicting demands of love,
advancement and integrity.
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of Shammi Kapoor, Dharmendra swam against the tide by carrying forward an older tradition of social realism and concern.
Bimal Roy had been the great master of that tradition; having acted in Bandini,
it was fitting that Dharmendra joined forces with Hrishikesh Mukherjee
(who had apprenticed as Bimal Roy’s assistant director through the
’50s) to make a series of middle-of-the-road films that wrestled with a
particular dilemma: how was a man to lead an honourable life in a world
made oppressive by traditional injustice and modern corruption?
The fascinating aspect of this phase of Dharmendra’s career is
that he became the vehicle for Bengali literary realism in Hindi
cinema. Just as Guru Dutt’s Sahib, Bibi aur Ghulam was a Bengali film in Hindustani drag, so too were Bandini, Anupama, Manjhli Didi and Satyakam.
That a strapping Jat hunk managed to play the bhadralok protagonist
with such intensity and conviction is an achievement for which
Dharmendra gets too little credit.
This part of his career peaked with Satyakam, made in 1969, the year Mrs Gandhi split the Congress and decisively inaugurated a post-Nehruvian era. Satyakam
was Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s best film and a landmark in the history of
Hindi cinema. Dharmendra plays a civil engineer, Satyapriya, and it is
arguably the most affecting and powerful performance by a male actor in
that decade.
In Satyakam, the ideals of anti-colonial nationalism
are lived by Satyapriya in everyday life, regardless of consequence. He
marries Ranjana (Sharmila Tagore) who has been raped and made pregnant
by a debauched prince and eventually destroys himself trying to
reconcile his ideals with the dogmatic asceticism of his grandfather
who had raised him and who refuses, till almost the very end, to accept
his daughter-in-law’s illegitimate son. Satyakam is at once the
most rigorous examination of lived idealism in Hindi cinema and an
elegy that mourns the death of republican innocence.
Satyakam is the necessary prelude to Zanjeer (1973), just
as Dharmendra prefigures Amitabh. The great baton change in Indian
cinema is not between Rajesh Khanna and Amitabh (Rajesh Khanna is a
brief detour into the box-office potential of male whimsy and
self-pity), it’s between Dharmendra and Bachchan, between the
self-sacrificing idealist who dies in the cause of a fairer, better
world, and the disillusioned vigilante who visits vengeance on an
irredeemably corrupt one.
The transitional phase between 1969 and 1973 was owned, in terms of stardom, by Rajesh Khanna, starting with Aradhana and ending with Namak Haraam.
But Hrishikesh Mukherjee has a claim to being this period’s pre-eminent director.
Between 1969 and 1973, Mukherjee sidelined
Dharmendra to direct a series of successful films with the two main
heroes of this time: Rajesh Khanna and Amitabh Bachchan, the reigning
superstar and his successor. He made Anand, Bawarchi, Abhimaan and Namak Haraam.
Looking for a firm foothold in the souffle cinema of the ’60s,
Mukherjee tried to slide past love stories and their tree-hugging
conventions by making movies about all-male love. By framing Rajesh
Khanna’s awesome capacity for self-love in stories of male bonding with
tragic resolutions (Anand, Namak Haraam), Mukherjee managed to transmute Khanna’s narcissism into charm, his sickly appetite for suffering into twinkling endurance.
He tried to make Bachchan a Bengali hero as he had done with Dharmendra
and it worked upto a point. Bachchan’s babu moshai character in Anand was a critical and popular success. Three years later, when Mukherjee reprised the Khanna-Bachchan pairing in Namak Haraam,
he moved away from the individual melodrama of Anand to a grittier
social setting, industrial class conflict. The movie was a success but
Bachchan’s first outing as the Angry Young Man was just round the
corner, and once Prakash Mehra’s Zanjeer became a monster hit,
the mainstream of Hindi cinema changed course, leaving Hrishikesh
Mukherjee marooned in a low-budget tributary.
Dharmendra made an appearance in Mukherjee’s Guddi,
playing himself to the star-struck delight of the film’s debutante,
Jaya Bhaduri. Meanwhile, he held his own with a series of hits: Mera Gaon Mera Desh, Seeta aur Geeta and Yaadon ki Baraat. Then, ironically, he turned down the opportunity to make the film that sent Bachchan’s career into orbit, Zanjeer.
As Prakash Mehra tells the story, Dharmendra had bought the script of Zanjeer
from Salim-Javed. He gave it to Prakash Mehra to produce and agreed to
play the main role. Then Dharmendra became busy producing a film to
launch his brother’s career, couldn’t find the dates for Mehra and
opted out of the film. The rest, as they say, is history.
1973
is a watershed in the history of the Hindi film for many reasons. It
was the year the ‘parallel’ cinema was born, with the release of Ankur and Garam Hawa. It was the year of young love, flagged off by Bobby.
But mainly it was the year that Salim-Javed, the authors of Bachchan’s
Angry Young Man persona, changed the nature of Hindi cinema for the
next 20 years.
Like Mukherjee, Dharmendra was a casualty of
this change. Not immediately: two of his best performances were still
ahead of him. Hrishikesh Mukherjee gave him a comic opportunity in Chupke Chupke
(1975), which he seized with both hands, playing with great brio a
professor of botany, impersonating, for obscure reasons, a driver. It’s
hard to think of a role further removed from Satyapriya in Satyakam than that of Prof Parimal Tripathi, but Dharmendra had the range to carry both off with conviction.
Compared to Sholay, though, released in the same year, Chupke Chupke
was a minnow. So it is Dharmendra’s role as Veeru, Jai’s (Bachchan’s)
buddy and Basanti’s (Hema Malini’s) lover, that we should consider his
swan song. He was cast by Ramesh Sippy who had scored a hit with him
and Hema Malini in Seeta aur Geeta.It was a remarkable
performance: comic, romantic, fraternal, tough. Watching it today is a
bit poignant because Dharmendra was never to star in anything
worthwhile again. Though he continued to work as a hero till the end of
the century, developing a tough new Garam Dharam persona along the way,
the films he made were consistently appalling and by the time he went
into semi-retirement in 2000, he was a B-grade movie star. It’s one of
the many ironies of his career that he did his worst work when he
reverted to his roots and began playing the Jat hero, fighting feudal
Thakur oppression in films like Ghulami, Yateem, Batwara and Kshatriya.
There are three styles for playing the hero in republican Hindi cinema:
idealism, hedonism and cynicism. Historically, they don’t succeed each
other in perfect sequence, though one or the other style dominates
particular periods. The dominant mode through the ’50s and early ’60s
is idealism. Roughly around 1964, with Shammi Kapoor and his cohort,
hedonism takes over. Dharmendra keeps the idealist tendency going till
the end of the ’60s, and after the feverish Rajesh Khanna interlude,
cynicism sails in, with Bachchan in the van. If a Martian had been
asked to cast the principled idealist and the two-fisted vigilante,
there’s no question that he’d have chosen Harivansh Rai Bachchan’s
tall, intense son as the former and the splendidly built Jat as the
latter. It is a tribute to the Hindi film’s inexhaustible ability to
surprise that in real life, it happened the other way round.
JAI SWAMI HRISHIKESHANAND - JAI DHARMINDER SAYS ASHWIN
Thank you Mr.Mukul
hi please when you are talking about someone like dharmendra ,you have to research very well , he has given many hits than any actor in bollywood past or now. ,he appreared in more than 32 succesful films in the 60s only . do you want to tellus that films like dharam veer is not good, audience accepts films of dharmendra post 1975, are you telling me that they are fools to watch that kind of films. please do your research well
Thank you piyush,navanita and bimal.Any ideas how to take it forward?
great piece, well researched, well written…
not bad and it also proves that you are a big dharmendra fan.
good findings