A-plus for Big B

He is not usually given to pop sociology, but this week Amitabh Bachchan neatly summed up three decades of Indian life. He singled out his first and his most recent successes to bookend a career which mirrors half this nation’s life since Independence. Zanjeer, he told a global gathering of advertising gurus in Jaipur, became a mega-hit because it instinctively catered to an unspoken need of the early seventies: an angry young man who’d epitomise their disillusion with the betrayals of post-Nehru India. Similarly, he said, Kaun Banega Crorepati became a national ritual instead of a mere gameshow because it reflected the new consumerism.

Hindi cinema has always reflected socio-political trends — from the heady optimism propelling early nation-building in Mother India, to connections with those on the periphery in the early hours of Independence in Awara, to first intimations of fragmentation of the national project in Pyasa. But it’s on Bachchan’s watch that vast masses of viewers, cutting across region, age and class, really gained identification with popular cinema. It’s on his persona that they projected hopes as well as frustrations. It’s through him that they lived out their failures and sought redemption. It was the early seventies, and India was agitated. Dissonance between rhetoric and practice was stark. The Nehruvian spirit of reform had given way to expediency and doublespeak. Big B, for a few hours in darkened theatres, unburdened them of their lonely battles and fought grand crusades. For just a little while he treated them to the exhilaration of breaking the rules and winning. In Zanjeer his angry young cop smouldered and took on the mafia. In Deewar his dockyard-worker-turned-construction-king waded through social hypocrisies and corrupt business practices. In Sholay — whose audiotapes were ironically utilised by Sanjay Gandhi’s Emergency team to tempt folks to sterilisation programmes — his jailbird-turned-hired-muscleman nuanced the categories of villainy.

Soon thereafter, till KBC, he became a blur — perhaps reflecting our own bewilderment amidst fresh economic churnings. It would be premature to deem this a closure in a unique career. But we wonder, will anyone ever again present our world to us with same elan and empathy?