Opinion Passage from India

Saeed Jaffery.

From the lehza of an Awadhi nawab to the diction of a Delhi paanwala, Saeed Jaffrey could do accents like few others. He once adapted Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy for radio and played all 86 characters. His career, spanning several British and Indian film productions, as well as theatre, radio and television, mirrored that versatility. He played roles as different as Sardar Patel in Gandhi and a Thatcher-loving Brit-Pakistani in My Beautiful Launderette. At a time when actors of a certain religion are asked to choose between India and Pakistan, between Giriraj Singh’s growls and a Hafiz Saeed hug, Jaffrey’s life is a reminder that the actor’s only creed is multifariousness.

Born in Malerkotla, Punjab, in 1929 to a doctor father, Jaffrey would have been a civil servant if he had listened to his parents. He found his way to All India Radio as an English language announcer. In the US, he became the first Indian on Broadway and toured the country with Shakespearean plays. He arrived in Britain in the 1960s, which had little to offer Asian actors at the time. But his rich voice and a felicity with languages, especially Urdu, made him perfect for radio. Slowly, the roles trickled in. In shows such as Tandoori Nights and later, A Jewel in the Crown, he would go on to become the face of multicultural England — even if he seemed to play himself over and over again.

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He was the brown actor Western filmmakers loved. Within the limitations of that label, he found many challenging roles: In Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi (1982); as Billy Fish in John Houston’s The Man Who Would Be King (1975), and Nasser in My Beautiful Laundrette. As his autobiography revealed, he was a man of appetites, unafraid to confess his sexual peccadilloes. In Hindi cinema, he played hyper-real uncles and fathers with gusto, hamming with panache when he needed to. Saeed Jaffrey’s passage from India to London is one of our most memorable crossover tales. That is how we should remember him.