An Actor Repairs

Sometimes the sheer scale of an event requires in our articulation of it- a well worn cliché. It is particularly so if the event was the passing of a person who had come to symbolize an age. The demise of a person who stood for something so exalted that its expression of it always sounds trite or banal. The recent death of the legendary thespian Dilip Kumar (7th July, 2021) was one such event.

???????????To some of us of a particular vintage, Dilip Kumar epitomized all that which is graceful, all that which is romantic, all that which is soulful, so valued by us simply because he was far beyond the reach of the average human male. So he came to be the Gold Standard of masculinity without consciously trying for it.

???????????And he was the complete package. The swashbuckling image of the man was a given. He was Yousuf Khan who came from Peshawar, just beyond which lay the magical land wherein lay the Khyber and the Bolan Pass, stuff of which legends were made in our youthful imaginations. And then, driven by a passion for the then still young medium of cinema in India, he came to the then Bombay and became Dilip Kumar, in a nation not yet independent, still trying to forge an identity for itself.

???????????On a more personal note, a high point of my rather unremarkable life was that, as a child, I got to see the man. The film was the Bimal Roy classic Madhumati (1958), and I couldn’t have been more than six at the time when the film was being shot around the North Indian hill station of Nainital, where my family lived at the time. Though the only shooting I remember having seen, a dim recollection of it, was the Muhammad Rafi song “ Jangal mein mor naacha…” filmed on Johnny Walker, a few miles outside Nainital. But I did get to see the great man himself, sitting in a chair, on another day around that time.

???????????And just as the event was a watershed in my life, realized fully only years later, ‘recollected in tranquility’, the film itself was momentous, for more than one reason. Rarely has the Hindi film seen an assemblage of greats such as this one. It had Bimal Roy as director, Ritwik Ghatak as the story and screenplay writer, Hrishikesh Mukherjee as the editor and Salil Chowdhury as the music composer. And there were Dilip Kumar and Vyjayanthimala as the lead players.

???????????Thematically as well, the film had something that added to its classic stature. It was perhaps the first time that the theme of reincarnation was introduced in Hindi cinema, and it also strengthened the device of the ‘framed narrative’ or the ‘story within the story’ used often in Indian cinema, and perhaps first used in the early Bombay Talkies classic Achhut Kanya (1936).

???????????But that was the film. The legend of the actor kept growing till he became the brightest star in the Indian firmament.

???????????They don’t make men like Dilip Kumar any more. And they don’t make films like Madhumati any more either. I wish they did. ?