For someone growing up in the 1990s, the name Amitabh Bachchan was a perplexing one. It rarely ever signified one man or a single style. It was more a cumulative feeling : an old-world emotion and distinct sound; sensory evidence of the fact that Indian civilisation existed before we did. I didn’t see those days, but I sensed them when adults said his name.
Around the time I began to realise that parents — the joyless oldies — control our childhoods, his withering legacy became my tiebreaker. In my mind, parents had assumed an assertive alpha-male status — well-meaning antagonists who won against us far too much. It was only natural that they swore by this angry-young-man “superstar” who had defined their early years. Almost in furious retaliation, I chose an edgy and upcoming romantic hero, Shah Rukh Khan. It was now a competition.
Whenever we watched a new SRK movie at the local drive-in theatre, I’d mentally pump my fists and question the “oldies” triumphantly: What will your Bachchan do now? Are Mrityudata, Laal Baadshah and Major Saab the best you can produce against my Baazigar, DDLJ and Dil Toh Pagal Hai ?
The muted pain in their eyes thrilled me. It didn’t matter to me that their hero was struggling to make the transition from one Bollywood to another. My choice trumped theirs. The comparison was impossibly skewed, but tell that to a 12-year-old desperate to find fault with the concept of authority.
Amitabh Bachchan then wasn’t a holy, reverential term, but more of a beatable hand in a generational card game. In a way, even before I recognised the significance of his legend, he made me a winner — by losing , through that decade of identity crisis.
The second innings
For some reason, I stopped enjoying these victories. In fact, fate might have dealt me an unfair hand by manufacturing me at the twilight of what many considered a “once-in-a-lifetime” career. All I could see were the scarcely identifiable remnants of an invisible past. Nobody was winning .
A still from 'Paa'
Irrespective of Hindi cinema’s gender-centric durability, once a male star physically outgrows the “hero” phase, there is always an awkward tug-of-war between the “elder brother” and “brooding parent” stages.
I never knew the roguish heartthrob and his glory-day Sholays, Deewars and Namak Harams ; the celebrity I saw was torn between growing old in life and staying young on screen. Even the beard — in Major Saab, Lal Baadshah, Sooryavansham — was wild and unruly, dyed in asymmetrical streaks, as if he weren’t entirely sure about its relevance.
It is widely accepted that the year 2000 changed everything for the 57-year-old actor. Perhaps he had turned old enough to not look back any more. Kaun Banega Crorepati and Mohabbatein appeared within months of each other, and just like that a “comeback” was celebrated.
But on closer observation, he had never gone. Amitabh Bachchan’s more popular roles in this new phase weren’t very different from his sanskaari -authoritarian turns in the late 1990s.
If one Khan opens his arms and the other bares his chest, Bachchan sharpens his deep baritone
The only difference being he chose to act for the next generation of filmmakers — younger voices who were keen to advance his image instead of preserving it. Nostalgia wasn’t an option because they had never worked with him before; their parents had worked around him.
He moved from the “oldies” — the K.C. Bokadias, Tinnu Anands and Veeru Devgans — to the youngsters: Aditya Chopra, Karan Johar, Farhan Akhtar, Sanjay Gupta and Ram Gopal Varma.
This surrender was total, extending across a vast gamut of gazes, even flirting with the inventive extremes of an experimental Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra ( Aks ) and an unpredictable Kaizad Gustad ( Boom ); a Yash Chopra and Rajkumar Santoshi would occasionally be interspersed in between as comfort food, familiar prestige projects amidst the exciting unknown.
He was everywhere — almost as if he had suddenly discovered a hungry artist beneath the star, determined to cash in on this temporary “cheat code” before it expired.
But time wasn’t running out; in fact, time had led to this. Somewhere along the way, this bonus stage became a full-fledged, self-sustaining career — a prolific exercise in performance arts — on its own. The second innings had become the only innings.
A still from the movie 'Benaam'.
Everyman’s father
Seventeen years later, it is perhaps ironic that the only Amitabh Bachchan I’ve known is not the one our parents loved, but the one that fashioned a genre out of epitomising those parents.
He became all of them — sometimes the ones that won, and often the ones I had beaten: the stubborn disciplinarian ( Mohabbatein, Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham ), flawed leader ( Aankhen, Kaatein, Deewar ), upright professional ( Dev, Lakshya, Khakee, Eklavya ), unconditionally selfless patriarch ( Baghban, Veer Zara ), crabby patriarch ( Piku ), disillusioned griever ( Viruddh, Te3n, Wazir, Pink ), hipster dad ( Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna ), relentlessly idealistic teacher ( Black, The Last Lear, Aarakshan ), lavish narrator ( Lagaan, Jodhaa Akbar, Parineeta ), a city’s father ( Sarkar ) and even the perilously ageless non-father ( Nishabd, Cheeni Kum ). He became the people we were designed to resent – and humanised their avatars so dramatically that I wanted to scold the fool who had once revelled in defeating parenthood.
These various faces make me feel like I’ve been guided into adulthood by him: by a man working hard to be a father, and not by a father trying hard to be the ultimate man.
His finest performances have not shied away from being “performances,” from being effortful and difficult and theatrical and overzealous — the kind his cinema-hating Shakespearean stage-veteran character, Harish Mishra, in Rituparno Ghosh’s The Last Lear , would blindly endorse.
And as all of them, from Mishra to Debraj Sahai in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Black , from a progeria-afflicted “young old” boy in R. Balki’s Paa to the hypochondriac septuagenarian in Shoojit Sircar’s Piku , Bachchan has elevated the reluctant-mentor template by juxtaposing his traditionalism against the behavioural culture of diametrically opposite generations. He has prepositioned the new world, equipping his fragile prototypes with the capacity to change as well as be changed, to care for as well as be cared for — figuratively mirroring the full life-cycle of the quintessential Indian parent.
Even when catering to a child’s worst fears, as a deluded widower or eccentric loner, he has somehow made “oldness” aspirational in a culture notoriously wary of retirement. He continues to be a hero — a mortal one, not the invincibly macho brands — for an entire batch of parents-turned-grandparents.
A scene from 'Piku'.
Made to act
There have, however, been times when he has succumbed to the temptation of cashing in on his reputation. If one Khan opens his arms and the other bares his chest, Bachchan sharpens his deep baritone. The misfiring Shamitabh was manufactured around this voice, while some of his trademark monologues ( Pink, Satyagraha ) mistake aura and volume for diction and coherence.
He doesn’t communicate; he advertises and delivers . The whispery rumble is his version of reminding us that like most filmy icons, he too is a product of his own history. That he has earned the right to acknowledge his own status. And that his tireless craft is an accidental consequence of his fame and not vice versa.
But the truth is a little less egotistical; it becomes a little more evident with each wrinkle on his face. He was made to act his heart out. He was made to make it show. Everything, including his world-ruling superstar years and subsequent fading, seemed to have been designed only to create today’s Grand Old Man of Bollywood — like a testing internship preceding the actual gig.
Only at 57, after three decades in the industry, the name became just a name. It was not a sound any more. It was certainly no contest. Because Amitabh Bachchan was perhaps just a late bloomer.
When not obsessively visiting locales from his favourite films, the writer is a freelance film critic.
