The thespian and the politician
Syed Badrul Ahsan reads of a Pathan in the movies
Dilip Kumar keeps stirring your emotions. And that despite the fact that his era of heroism, on celluloid of course, is long past. But there is that certain addiction we all suffer from, at certain points of our life or for an entire lifetime. For people of my generation, Dilip Kumar belongs properly to the era of our fathers. That is easy to follow, seeing that he was born in 1922 and grows into an increasingly ripe age. These days one does not quite see him as one used to. But that inimitable charm, the memory of the impeccable Urdu with which he regaled us both in the movies and outside, the manliness he symbolized before his screen women --- all of these have remained firmly implanted in our minds. And that is a huge reason why Dilip Kumar never ages. If Suchitra Sen has been uncompromising in her belief that her image, as it used to be in the movies, should be the standard to which we should hold her and her memory, Dilip has done precisely the opposite. Where Sen has not been seen in public since she went into seclusion long ago, Dilip has been a figure constantly on the move. Till recently, when the clear encroachment of age began to tell upon him, he was out there on stage cheering a new generation, for which he is a repository of grandfatherly affection, on. The seasons have taken their toll on Dilip's generation. Most of his contemporaries --- Raj Kapoor, Dev Anand, Rajendra Kumar, Guru Dutt and others --- have moved on to a region beyond life. Dilip has gone on. And yet the bells have begun to toll for Dilip Kumar. Even so, Dilip remains an iconic representative of the glorious past that was Indian cinema. Lord Meghnad Desai, unlike the usual biographer, gives us a refreshingly intellectual perspective on the thespian in Nehru's Hero: Dilip Kumar In The Life of India. The title of the work is wide open to interpretation. He was a favourite with India's first prime minister; or Desai's story consists in a juxtaposition of Dilip Kumar's career on screen with the reality of an India being administered by Jawaharlal Nehru. The prime minister was busy steering the ship of state toward newer, often unknown shores. In much the same manner, Dilip Kumar was beginning to cast a long, benign shadow over all of us by his educated portrayals of men in the movies. Desai points to the parallelism which appeared to be working in any assessment of Dilip's movies vis-à-vis Nehru's politics. A point of reference here could be Dilip's populism-based role in Leader and Naya Daur. In these movies, Dilip or, more specifically, his characters clearly seemed to be going hand in hand with the populist pitch Nehru was pushing in actual life. Dilip Kumar's movies were watched for more reasons than one. And, of course, they were not all box office hits. Not all stories were of the riveting kind. But there was that certain tragic quality in his appearance which, translated into a tragic appearance on screen, turned him into an eminently lovable, even magical character. How that love came to be transformed, in our perceptions of ourselves, into self-love in us is what Desai gives us a glimpse of: 'Dilip Kumar towered over that era and filled our lives. We emulated his dress, his hair, his mannerisms, and his dialogues. But above all, the characters he played in the various roles portrayed ideals, which we absorbed.' The writer does not let go of the bonding which Dilip Kumar enjoyed with the Nehru era. That, you will admit, is certainly a new, different kind of thought. Perhaps it is the only time in recent history or in the entirety of history when an actor's rise to artistic prominence has coincided with the energy a head of government has brought into the business of running a government. In simple terms, the years between partition in 1947 and Nehru's death in 1964 were a celebration of idealism. Here was Nehru presenting India in all its cultural-political resplendence before the world. And there was Dilip Kumar reaching out for the peaks of stardom. It was in the Nehru era that 36 of the actor's 57 films were made. The characters he played in the movies were a splendid study in human life, giving Dilip an aura of invincibility. His versatility was in the demonstration of his power to portray human suffering as well as human failings. Meghnad Desai takes the reader through the entire gamut of Dilip Kumar's life. The child of a Pathan fruit dealer with roots in the North-West Frontier Province (today's Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa), the young Yusuf Khan was to easily come to terms with his dual role as a son helping his father in business and at the same time looking for an opportunity to carve a separate area of activity for himself. He became, in the movies, Dilip Kumar. His command over Urdu was to be remarkable, even unassailable. It was his chaste use of the language that would turn out to be an important factor in his unstoppable climb to stardom. It all began with Jwaar Bhata and over the years such films as Andaz, Aan, Daagh, Gunga Jamuna, Ram Aur Shyam, Kohinoor, Leader, Mughal-e-Azam and Sagina Mahato streamed into the Indian consciousness. Not for Dilip Kumar the vain battles waged by other actors, his contemporaries actually, to defy age and continue playing the dashing young man beside all those damsels in distress. Not for him a replication of Raj Kapoor and Dev Anand in what should have been their middle age and then dotage. Desai draws a long portrait of the actor in league with movies that conform to his age. Read on. There is good research done here, turning Dilip Kumar almost into a school of thought. Culture, in its more sophisticated form, has always defined the man. And that is just as it should be.
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