Why Amitabh Bachchan still remains a powerhouse in his 80th year

Deewar

Bachchan is still the Big B, and as busy as his much younger co-stars, if not busier. His contemporaries have either retired or have passed on. His long-running TV show Kaun Banega Crorepati is in its 14th season. Then, there are the advertisements, public service and private enterprise broadcasts, and print and television presence. His social media accounts are densely populated by his doings. At an age when most people have hung up their boots, Bachchan is indefatigable, non-stop.

How did this man, who entered the Hindi film industry in 1969 with Saat Hindustani, ensure that he is still a force to reckon with, in 2022? What is the secret of his enduring appeal, more than half a century later? That question may have several answers. But from a long-time film critic’s perspective, Bachchan still matters because he spoke for us, and to us, those many years ago, in films which turned iconic even as they were playing for the first time in the ramshackle picture halls of the ’70s.

Anthony

He was an unstoppable force of nature, as he leaned against a locked godown door in that knotted shirt and beckoned the baddies to do their best, as he schooled a ginger-haired Pathan in civility, as he walked slo-mo towards us as the mounds of barood exploded behind him, as he popped out of a giant Easter egg and burst into a delightful nonsensical ditty, and so many other unforgettable scenes. I welcome you to add yours here.

With his height (too tall, said some dismissively, the moniker ‘Lambu’ had to work hard to travel from derision to affection), and his unconventional looks (not handsome enough, said others), he was not like the pretty boys that lorded over Hindi cinema at that time. In the age of the clean-cut Rajesh Khanna with his neat guru kurtas and crinkly smile, Bachchan was the classic rumpled disrupter we were waiting for. For the first time in Hindi cinema, we welcomed an anti-hero with open arms; the only other superstar who came after him, Shah Rukh Khan, had to open his arms to gather us in. But by SRK’s time, India was a different country, liberalised, aspirational, where sanskaar (tradition) once and for all trumped bagaawat (rebellion).

Chupke Chupke

Bachchan was the OG as far as a rebel-with-a-cause went. Once he hit his stride, with the immortal troika that came out in ’74-’75 – Zanjeer, Sholay and Deewaar – he changed every single rule of engagement. His unsmiling visage with the long sideburns, the rage that rocketed out of the screen, those explosive moves: he shifted the needle so decisively that he became the only imprimatur of Hindi cinema after 1975, a time when India had begun emerging from the battering it received during the Emergency.

The people needed both a deliverance and a cleansing, and Bachchan exemplified Vijay or victory, of the common man. The blow-hot-and-blow-cold anger of the Angry Young Man, created by writers Salim-Javed by tapping into the zeitgeist, became ours, a potent weapon to push back against the inequalities heaped upon us by a crumbling, corrupt state.

Abhimaan

After his near-total sway over the ’70s, when coiled-spring action accommodated loopy comedy and everything else in between, too many of his films may have veered between being indifferent and plain bad. Too many of them may have come attached to slushy scripts and assembly-line products that existed only to hop on to the Bachchan Bandwagon. He may have had a rocky stint as a parliamentarian (1984-87), where his reputation, along with his powerful friends, was sought to be tarnished. He may have been at the helm of an ambitious production house, Amitabh Bachchan Corporation Limited (1996), which failed. He may have vanished from our sights for some time. But he is the only one of his era who reinvented himself, and came roaring back. This time to stay.

As someone who’s watched almost every film that he’s done, I sometimes feel that his anger got so much press that his comedic chops got lost in broad-stroke burlesque. And I can safely say that not one of the younger directors in the last decade or so have managed to create a role that breaks out of the latter-day Bachchan persona. Switching between the benevolent or authoritarian patriarch seems to be the only option for these filmmakers who use both kid gloves and reverence to cage this actor who is one for the ages, who was once phenomenal, and is now being made to do more of the same.

Kaala Paththar

How about breaking free, and letting him be? No one can deliver dialogue the way he can, and that voice, oh, that voice, is still as powerfully seductive. How about an all get out comedy? How about a late-stage romance? In his prime, Bachchan was blow-your-socks-off sexy. He still is. Not a young spirit that sears the throat, but a mellow wine that goes down easy, and settles in our crevices. Anyone out there, brave enough?

In his last outing, Brahmastra, he was Raghu the Guru, one of the mighty weapons the film’s mythic universe dreamt up in the fight of good against evil. This may have happened in 2022. But those who have been tracking him since he arrived in Hindi cinema know that, in his best work, he has been instrumental in pulping the bad guys out of existence.

Don

The residue of those years still reverberates in cinematic memory and our viewing DNA. As Bachchan, who has worked with yesteryear leading ladies like Waheeda Rehman to spanking new stars like Alia Bhatt, continues to stride across the screens that have metamorphosed from the raucous single screen thousands to the swish multiplex hundreds, he has become a continuum, reminding us of the time that was, and the promise of a time to come.

Amitabh Bachchan is still a work in progress. And if that’s not something to celebrate, I don’t know what is.