This month marks the birth centenary of actor-director Bhagwan Abhaji Palav, more popularly known as Master Bhagwan or Bhagwan Dada. Over the decades, many film lovers have chosen to give him the sobriquet ‘one-film wonder’. However, a look at just some of his accomplishments in a five decade-plus career would force us to have a rethink. He was arguably the first Indian filmmaker to have made a film, Vanamohini , with an elephant in a lead role; the first to have made a horror movie, Bhedi Bangla and among the first to have made comic-actor-being-the-hero narrative acceptable. However, the invention he is most admired for is a unique genre of dance that would go on to inspire many stars - among them the biggest of all, Amitabh Bachchan.
Bhagwan, unlike his name, had a very earthly persona. Born in a family of modest means, he was bitten by the cinema bug early in his life. An admirer of silent cinema star Master Vittal, he acted in some silent films himself. However, the film that would gain him fame as well as prove to be an albatross around his neck was a sobriquet which summed his skills as actor-director the best: Albela .
The year was 1951. Four years into India’s independence, Nehruvian idealism was in the air. Some of it rubbed off onto Hindi cinema. Raj Kapoor came up with the year’s biggest hit Awara , creating, with the help of Khwaja Ahmed Abbas, a lead-character image of the good-hearted tramp - a la Charlie Chaplin. Guru Dutt made his directorial debut with the noir-thriller Baazi , with his friend Dev Anand - playing a gambler - in the lead. That was the year’s second-biggest hit.
Though both films had the key protagonist being a declasse, there was certain ‘make believe’ to it, a certain verisimilitude.
However, Albela ’s lead character, Pyarelal, was a romanticised version of Bhagwan Dada’s real-life self. Ambitious, wanting to become an actor, making it big in the industry - these were very much a part of his early career. Having an aging but starry-eyed physiognomy, Pyare gently swayed to the tunes of C Ramachandra in Albela .
His persona was anything but photogenic. Diminutive and stout, he made no claims of being a debonair. However, his gentle — to the point of being lazy — and overtly un-classical style of dancing captivated the audiences. So did his avuncular mannerisms, his relatable comic timing and his never-say-die spirit.
Instead of shringaar or veer rasas , his minimalist dancing style was peppered with shades of haasya rasa (comedy) and an implied shok rasa (tragedy), imparting a certain Chaplinesque pathos to his humour.
He dreamt for a living
Albela -- a happy-go-lucky individual, a wastrel, a naive artist, a talented performer -- these are the attributes that would go on to define him in his career. The movie was in a sense a bellwether, a harbinger for what lay in store for Bhagwan.
Throughout the film - beginning with a song, shama ne pukara to parvana aa gayaa , and ending with another, shola jo bhadke dil mera dhadke -- there is a sense of the director immersing himself into a set of dreams and living them. The stage performances are Pyare’s dreams and he effortlessly hops from one to the other, thanks to some timeless music by C. Ramachandra and singing by Lata Mangeshkar. Even the girl he imagines working with in his dreams is the one he embraces in real. These dreams are interspersed with the film’s narrative, so Albela is kind of a ballad in the form of a film, a musical in true sense.
Bhagwan Dada, in real life, was very much the simpleton portrayed. Pyare - and through him Bhagwan - recognises in the film that his fame would be short-lived. Was Bhagwan having a premonition here? The play staged toward the end in Albela shared its name with a disaster Bhagwan would go on to direct later, Jhamela .
Though films like Bhagam Bhag had some success, he never recovered from the Albela high and the post- Albela low. However, the man he inspired with his dancing, Amitabh Bachchan, in whose successful career his dancing played no small part, never shied away from crediting him. Govinda too, made use of the style, trying to make use of the movie name as well - his 2001 Albela , though, was not much of a success.
Bhagwan ended his career just as he began it - in penury but without any qualms. In one of his final interviews, he said “ sabko maaf kar diya ”.
Following his success as third-biggest hit of 1951, Albela , a well-informed cinephile-friend Divya Solgama said, was an even-bigger hit in its second run. However, Bhagwan Dada didn’t have as much success with his second innings, where he was reduced to making special appearances, playing a caricature of its Albela self.
I chanced across a two-volume chronicle Hero , by culture writer Ashok Raj whose first part has reference to Hindi cinema’s black and white heroes. Bhagwan finds himself mentioned in just three places, including one under the category, ‘super clowns’ inspired by Chaplin. Bhagwan was not a ‘hero’ in the conventional sense; he didn’t have any ‘superhit’ apart from Albela ; he did not having any ‘star power’. Perhaps, he was too heterodox to be contained in the term ‘hero’.
However, he is surely the subject of a biopic, being made in Hindi. Directed by debutant Niranjan Patvardhan, who has done assistant direction for Madhur Bhandarkar’s films, it was launched last year and is set to release sometime this year, the birth centenary of the late actor. The team behind the film says that the film would be on Bhagwan Dada’s early life covering the era of silent films and early era of talkies, ending in 1951. The name of the film?... Albela .
This article was corrected for a factual error.
