Opinion The Third Edit: Mithun Chakraborty, people’s star

Long before the 100-crore club became coveted territory and a benchmark for an actor’s viability, Mithun Chakraborty was the first star to have been there, done that. That too, on a disco high, dressed in a glittering pantsuit, lip-syncing to Bappi Lahiri’s ‘Koi yahan nache’ and to Vijay Benedict’s runaway hit, ‘I am a disco dancer’. B Subhash’s Disco Dancer (1982) would gross over Rs 90 crore in the erstwhile Soviet Union alone. It would also be proof of Chakraborty’s versatility — he had already won a National Award by then, for his debut film, Mrigayaa (1976). But the film industry in Mumbai was still tricky terrain. In the decades that followed, Chakraborty, this year’s Dadasaheb Phalke winner, would turn this reputation on its head, choosing projects that guaranteed mass appeal and box-office returns. It turned Bengal’s Mithun da into a working-class icon holding his own in the era of the Angry Young Man.

There is a certain kind of cultural elitism that scoffs at the cinematic representation of the tapori, a class sensitivity that overlooks the campy for the arthouse. Chakraborty’s artistic success has been such that he can mould himself seamlessly into the demands of both. He has played Ramakrishna Paramahansa in G V Iyer’s Swami Vivekananda (that won him his third National Award) with the same ease with which he slipped into the skin of MLA Fatakesto in Swapan Saha’s eponymous movie, spawning a second-generation fandom that looks past the political vacillations that took him from Naxalism to TMC to the BJP.

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Chakraborty has spoken often about his hardscrabble beginning — going hungry and sleeping on pavements, facing rejections. After the Dadasaheb Phalke award, he reiterated it once again — “…a man from literally nowhere, a nobody, made it”. Could there be a stronger pitch for talent and perseverance?