Opinion Happy Birthday Amitabh Bachchan: Hero at 80
The actor, who turned 80 today, changed the image of the hero, overcame the fluid and volatile loyalties of the audience, and continues to show that he is more than his image.
Amitabh Bachchan is practicing for 26/11 event at St Andrews at Bandra in Mumbai in 2019. (Express Photo by Pradip Das) 
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I interviewed him three times. Once, during the shooting of a film at Mehboob Studios in Bandra. The second time, at his Juhu residence. I just played a game of Word-Association-Response. He responded to questions like “marriage”, “music”, “cinema” and so on for the Pooja Annual of a well-known Kolkata daily. The third time, the interview happened at his house in Delhi. In 1991, both he and I won the National Award, he, his first National Award for Best Actor in Agneepath and Main Azaad Hoon and I for the Best Film Journalist of the Year.
I recall meeting a Polish journalist in 1999 at Mannheim in Germany who proudly told me he had had the good fortune of interviewing Bachchan for a leading Polish radio station. He came away with greater awe than he went in with. He informed me how popular Bachchan was even in Poland. At Cairo, in 2010, I discovered, with shock and surprise that the masses identify “India” with “Amitabh Bachchan” though, since Hindi films were barred in Egypt for 20 years, they had no idea that their icon had aged and was no longer the tall, dark and handsome star with the golden honey baritone. The posters they were selling on the streets displayed huge images of Bachchan as the “angry young man.” Small kids pronounced his name proudly as “Amitabachchan.”
Bachchan has successfully transcended every audiovisual medium in India and reportedly holds a world record in endorsements of goods and services — having endorsed everything from paan masala to chooran to diamond and gold jewellery. He is running the 14th season of one of the most successful game shows on the small screen and has been a brand ambassador for god alone knows how many commodities, services and even the state of Gujarat. He has triumphed over every controversy that dogged him and has come out almost unscathed, venerated with a temple in Kolkata. He continues to draw crowds wherever he goes for whatever occasion and special security has to be arranged.
On November 7, 2019, Bachchan celebrated the golden jubilee of his career in Hindi cinema. The Dadasaheb Phalke Award conferred on him that year was justified for his rich contribution to Indian cinema firstly, because of his durability in an industry where short shelf lives are common and secondly, for overcoming the fluid and volatile loyalties among the Indian audience. Add to this the number of films he has worked in, the milestone performances among them, his versatility as an actor, his adaptability to the changing demands of cinema and, most important, his innovative redefining of the conventional hero of Hindi cinema — dominated by romance, family values, melodrama, villainy and song-dance numbers that had kept the Indian audience in its comfort zone for a long, long time. He drew them out to acknowledge and respect the “Angry Young Man.”
Bachchan as the anti-hero changed the image of the hero in Hindi mainstream cinema. In Deewar, directed by Yash Chopra, in a fictionalised characterisation drawn from the real-life story of Haji Mastaan, an underworld don, he stood the conventional image of the Hindi film hero on its head. In Ramesh Sippy’s Shakti, less well-known than Sholay, Bachchan, along with Dilip Kumar, delivered a unique perspective on the father-son relationship in Hindi cinema though, in multiple layers, it also charted the story of a lonely young man who embraced negative values in the misconception that his father did not love him.
Bachchan rose from commercial flops like Pehli Nazar and Bansi Aur Birju. He was hardly noticed in Sunil Dutt’s Reshma Aur Shera. I saw his brief performance in K A Abbas’s Saat Hindustani as one of the seven “Hindustanis” crawling under the barbed wire fencing and though he hardly had any lines, the seeds of a great actor were visible even in that small role.
Bachchan is an institution. He can be course material in film studies. He has risen from the grassroots to reach the top, remained there for three decades, quit for five years and came back to fail miserably when the audience rejected his comeback films.
But he rose again like a Phoenix from the ashes. Bachchan brought respectability to the ageing hero. He gained the most through characters he would never have imagined playing when he was young – Baghban, Ek Ajnabi, Viruddh, Veer Zaraa, Black, Sarkar, Bhootnath, Aks, Mohabbatein, The Last Lear, Family, Bunty Aur Babli, Khaaki, Deewar, Kabhie Khushi Kabhie Gham, Kaante, Pink, Piku, Aankhen and so on.
Then, turning the clock full circle to show that he is greater than his star image, he played the main role in Paa. He was a 13-year-old boy desperately seeking his father, wishing to be acknowledged by him and reuniting his estranged parents. The boy was born with progeria, also known as Hutchinson–Gilford progeria syndrome, is an extremely rare, severe genetic condition where symptoms of ageing are manifest at an early age. At his age, Bachchan sat for hours for the painstaking make-up. The portrayal fetched him his fourth National Award.
Until Bachchan, the Hindi film hero had been represented in its varied forms, first by Ashok Kumar followed by the golden trio of Raj Kapoor, Dilip Kumar and Dev Anand. In the 1970s, as Bachchan rose, he defined, shaped and dictated the terms of the character he portrayed. The swashbuckling hero, directly inspired by Hollywood, was popular among the Indian audience, epitomising goodness as he fought against and destroyed evil to restore peace and love in a restive world.
The writer is a film scholar and critic
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