Dilip Kumar: The Substance and the Shadow

by Dilip Kumar

  The regret apart, the wound I have nursed for years, about the five years of self-imposed absence from the screens across the country and elsewhere, which has mystified those who have followed my career graph avidly, is that I could not focus attention on the scripts I had written for myself and Saira to act as a lead pair in films that I wished to launch. The most engrossing of them, ‘Kashmir Valley’, was written for Saira to co-star with me before we married. It had a spectacular backdrop and a canvas comparable to that of David Lean’s epic creation Dr Zhivago (1965). I had thought of producing it after Bairaag. The other scripts included ‘Kali Sarson’, which focused on a dark-skinned girl’s saga and was also written with Saira in mind, apart from ‘Kala Aadmi’ and ‘Babajan’. The last mentioned had a riveting, suspense plot centering on a schizophrenic banker’s diabolic bid to rob a bank. I had several meetings with Jabbar Patel to whom I wished to entrust the direction of ‘Babajan’. I had to shelve all the projects for which financiers were more than willing to loosen their purse strings.

  With Shatrughan Singh in Kranti (1981).

  It was during the fag end of this trying phase that Manoj Kumar came to me with the idea of Kranti. I have already explained in an earlier chapter how and why I agreed to work in Kranti without reading the full script.

  By the time Kranti was released in 1981, I was once again seized with the urge to bring the curtains down on my acting career and go on a holiday. Destiny, however, would not have it my way. Subhash Ghai came to me with the story of Vidhaata. He met me a few times and he impressed me with his credentials and his sincerity. He was honest that his previous film was not a success and he said he hoped to make that setback the stepping stone to his future success. I liked his optimistic enthusiasm and his passion. The subject was interesting and offered the actor in me the scope to do some good work. What was more, like my role in Kranti, the role in Vidhaata was of an earthy character, a railway engine driver, who becomes the axis of the screenplay as the protagonist.

  By the time we finished work on Vidhaata, we were ahead of its completion schedule and Subhash was very triumphant and bubbling with joy like a schoolboy who had received a good report card. The reason was that some of his friends in the industry had told him that a film with Dilip Kumar would sap him of all his youth and energy and he would be an old, tottering man when the film would be complete. Just the opposite had happened. His so-called well-wishers had made me out to be an ogre who would destroy him. He disclosed this to me on the last day of the last schedule for the film. I laughed and told him that it should teach him not to believe all that is said about anyone and it was always prudent to judge people by one’s own discernment.

  With Amrish Puri in Vidhaata (1982).

  Subhash was even more thrilled when the film became the highest grosser of 1982. It was the beginning of an enduring friendship between us that made it possible for me to feel at home and engage myself in two more productions, Karma (1986) and Saudagar (1991), which he directed.

  Curiously, Subhash came to me each time with an apprehension tucked away in his mind. When he approached me for Karma, he was afraid that I would ask for an astronomical remuneration since Vidhaata had become a blockbuster. After some casual conversation, he came to the point. It naturally irked me because I expect a director to talk about the basic premise of the script he wants the actor to read or a different treatment of the script he was planning to employ. Money and money talk should have no place in such a conversation.

  With Anupam Kher in Karma (1986).

  Since we had established a rapport by then and Subhash was looking up to me as an elder brother, I took the liberty of telling him he should not be talking the language of a trader in the commodity market and he should be talking like a director. He took my mild reprimand in the right spirit and did not broach the subject thereafter, but he defended himself saying it was just the industry norm that he was following. I certainly agreed with his point, but I told him I was happy not to be a part of the norm. We had a good laugh after that and our bond was strengthened.

  When Subhash visited my home to talk to me about Saudagar and he briefed me about the interesting plot revolving round two thick friends that he was developing, I could see that he was slightly fidgety and he was waiting for the right moment to say something that was on his mind. Sure enough, he came out with it when he was about to leave. He told me rather nervously that he had the veteran Raaj Kumar in mind to play my friend who turns hostile in the dramatic twist that would surface in the critical juncture of the plot build-up. Apparently, he expected me to react adversely. I eased his mind by telling him it would be a pleasure to work with Raaj and I had quite enjoyed his company whenever he was on the sets of Paigham (1959). Instead, I suggested he should ask Raaj if he welcomed the idea of working with me. Smiling naughtily, Subhash said he had already spoken to Raaj, who was looking forward to working with me.

  To my delight, Subhash also had a love for shooting outdoors and he found picturesque and eye-filling locations to film not only the song situations but also some demanding dramatic sequences. For Saudagar he had selected sylvan locations in Himachal Pradesh’s Kulu valley as backdrop for some crucial dramatic sequences, which made the rendering more impactful than it would have been if they had been shot indoors. After a long schedule in the Himachal location, we moved to Mahabaleshwar (a hill station in Maharashtra). It was like a long picnic and it must be said to Subhash’s credit that he understands the need to keep his actors in good humour and extends the kind of hospitality few film makers care to.

  The media was on the alert during the entire making of Saudagar to smell any kind of conflict between me and Raaj, thanks to the many silly stories circulating about Raaj’s temperament. Come to think of it, in some ways, Raaj was different from most of us actors of his age. During the shooting of Saudagar, he insisted on two heavy vehicles following him to the places marked by the art director and cameraman for the shooting. Raaj sat in a car alone, in solitary splendour, without an attendant while the vehicles trailing behind his car carried the entire wardrobe of costumes created for him for the entire film with his browbeaten attendant in charge of the suitcases and trunks filled with items such as clothes, footwear and wigs. It amazed me and the others and led to all kinds of hush-hush talk behind his back. Subhash stoically dismissed it as a quirk and had given standing instructions to his assistants to see that the vehicles were ready each day and the clothes and accessories were transported exactly as Raaj wished.

  With Raaj Kumar in Saudagar (1991).

  One evening at Mahabaleshwar, the cameraman, his assistants and all the young spot boys were in a nervous flutter because Raaj was missing at the actual location and they had found him seated on a chair on the perilous edge of a cliff. If he took one step forward from the chair, it would have plunged him into the dark mysterious chasm below. The boys came running to Subhash and the rest of us seated comfortably at the shooting spot to tell us what they had seen. Subhash asked them what they thought he was doing there and they said he was seated on his chair with a faraway expression in his eyes that were fixed on the misty horizon.

  Subhash requested me to accompany him to the spot where Raaj was sitting. We went up to him quietly and engaged him in a conversation, which distracted him from the hazy horizon he was staring at. Fortunately, he always responded to me in a friendly manner. So I managed to bring him back to the shooting location without much ado.

  Raaj, I could see, was a thinking man. He preferred to be alone at times perhaps to immerse his mind in thoughts. He also read books and discussed the contents with me when he was in the mood to do so. He was known for his idiosyncrasies and eccentricities but I found him always very normal and gentlemanly. He was among the many friends who arrived early at my house on the day of my nikah (marriage) with Saira. When Saira and I invited him to our silver wedding anniversary, he came to attend the party with his wife but seeing the large gathering of film personalities, he left quietly without mee
ting us. He was perhaps not keen to mingle with the others. He left a gift for us, a beautiful silver platter with an inscribed message: ‘To Lalay and Lalay ki Jaan, many happy returns!’

  With Amitabh Bachchan in Shakti (1982).

  All the films I selected at this juncture, be it the period film Kranti or Vidhaata or Shakti (1982) or Karma or Saudagar or Mashaal (1984), were chosen because they offered me the satisfying pivotal role in the script. Kranti was set in the period of India’s freedom struggle amidst the turbulent upsurge of patriotism in the hearts of even simple, toiling masses whose love for the native land surpassed everything else in their life. But the rest of the films that I picked had themes that celebrated the courage of the central character to stand up to odds. I was drawn to the characters and I felt I could make them inspiring and unforgettable if I applied myself to rendering them with conviction and realism.

  I was intrigued by the basic premise of Shakti, which evoked thoughts on the wisdom of ordinary individuals practising the moral principles of dharma. The question was raised provocatively in the script through the character of one of the two heroes, a police officer, who places his duty to be honest and gritty above his duty to rescue his young son who is kidnapped by criminals.

  The plot had a deceptive simplicity at the surface level, yet its power to move the audience emanated from several forceful sequences that bared the emotional wounds the police officer endured as a consequence of his adherence to his principles of dharma. It was Salim Khan (of the acclaimed Salim-Javed script and dialogue writer duo) who narrated the story to me. (Later, Salim and Javed parted company.)

  I learned from Salim that Ramesh Sippy would be the director. I was very close to Ramesh’s father, G. P. Sippy, who was my ally when I sought to resolve several issues my colleagues had with the producers’ body, Indian Motion Pictures’ Producers Association (IMPPA), over which he reigned as president for many years. However, I was frankly unsure initially whether I would be comfortable under Ramesh’s direction since I hardly knew him apart from the brief greetings we had exchanged at his father’s house. All through my career, I had worked with directors I had close personal ties with.

  The lurking doubt made way for immediate confidence when Ramesh met me and had a long chat with me, during which he revealed that he intended to cast Amitabh Bachchan as the parallel hero, the police officer’s unforgiving son, who is lured to crime by the very criminals who had manoeuvred the kidnapping. The simmering tension between the father and the son who does everything his father dislikes in order to punish the latter for not rushing to his rescue when the kidnappers threatened to kill him could be brought to the surface on the screen by a younger actor of great calibre. I congratulated Ramesh, I remember, for the appropriate casting as no other actor of the time would have fitted the part and added immense value to the product as Amitabh. Quite understandably, there was huge media attention and speculation when the casting of the film was announced.

  The mahurat was watched not only by the entire Fourth Estate but also by avid fans who gathered on the beach at Juhu (in Bombay) to get a glimpse of what was going on. I could see the happiness and excitement on Ramesh’s face as he prepared to direct the first shot featuring me and Amitabh.

  The common element in Shakti and Mashaal, which I took up a year later, was the integrity and guts the characters enacted by me possessed. Both films had unforgettable sequences that reverberated in public memory and became reference points for directors and actors. In Shakti it was the sequence where the officer’s wife (played by the talented Raakhee) is slain by the criminals and he talks senselessly standing beside her lifeless body and the ensuing sequence in which he breaks down when his alienated son walks into the house to have the last darshan of the mother he loved dearly. In Mashaal, there was this sequence shot on a desolate road at night amidst pouring rain, in which the honest and intrepid journalist Vinod Kumar (the character played by me) tries to stop passing vehicles to take his dying wife to a hospital, but in vain. It was a sequence that demanded a convincing rendering as it reflected the unenviable plight of a less privileged citizen with no vehicle of his own on a bandh day in a heartless city like Bombay when an emergency arises in his life.

  Both the sequences turned me inwards into the deep recesses of my mind for a trigger to bring forth the emotions I had to simulate. As mentioned in an earlier chapter, the deep pain I saw on Aghaji’s face when my brother Ayub Sahab breathed his last and the helpless cry for immediate medical aid from Aghaji once when Amma fainted after a bout of breathlessness, as he held her listless body in his arms, were images that surfaced from my subconscious to spur me. No matter how much an actor may have in his emotional reservoir as personally experienced moments to build his make-believe responses before the cameras, when it actually comes to giving a final take, it takes all that he has and much more to render the scene credibly and powerfully. I think the sequence in Shakti turned out the way it did because Amitabh was as intensely tuned in as I was.

  I was running a high fever when I arrived for the shooting of the much-written-about sequence of Mashaal on the first of the four days it took to film it on a rain-swept street on actual locations at Ballard Estate in Bombay. The director, Yash Chopra, asked me if I was up to it and I told him I would rather go back to the room at the Taj Palace I had occupied to save commuting time from Bandra to the location every day. I needed the rest since I had told Yash I would render the entire scene without an interruption once the cameras rolled on the location. I kept my commitment and completed the scene unhindered on the third day.

  When we completed the work, it was pretty late in the night and I could see moist eyes all around me and there was an eerie silence. For a second or two it disturbed me. Yash came up to me and I could see that he was unable to say whatever he wanted to say because he was choked with emotion. After a while, everybody relaxed and the admiration surfaced. There is no greater award for an actor than the genuine appreciation of his colleagues. Yash too could speak now and he disclosed to me that it took three decades for him to approach me with a subject that he felt I would not refuse.

  As noted earlier, my friendship with Yash began during the production of Naya Daur (1957). He was assisting his brother B. R. Chopra Sahab. He was young and eager to learn direction and as he was much younger than the senior Chopra, he kept a low profile and took instructions obediently from his elder brother. One of the instructions given to him was to look after me. So, the first time he came to see me at my house the instruction was to ask me what time a car should be sent to me to take me to Poona where the first schedule was to start. He told me a limousine would pick me up and he would follow me in a small car so that if I needed anything he would be close enough to attend to me. I asked him if I may travel with him in his car as I did not desire to travel alone in another car.

  Yash was visibly taken aback but he agreed. The journey to Poona was wonderful and it marked the beginning of a long and genuine friendship between us. We discovered many common interests, food being one of them.

  In the early 1970s, when Yash branched out on his own and began making an impact as an independent producer and director, I often visited him at Rajkamal Studios in Bombay where he had a small, cosy office and planned most of his films. The office served as a store room for all sorts of trappings used in the shootings as well as for the large tin cans that contained the reels of the footage shot. He sat amidst all the bric-a-brac behind a small table. He used to open a tiffin carrier and place the food sent from his house on the table and eat quickly straight from the tiffin bowls and wash it all down with a glass of buttermilk ordered from the canteen.

  With Anil Kapoor in Mashaal (1984).

  He had his dreams as most young visionaries have, but the exceptional quality in Yash was that he pursued his vision. It was his dream to build a studio like the studios he had visited in Hollywood and in the United Kingdom. It was a great moment of wish fulfilment for Yash when he started working from his own Yas
h Raj Studios. He invited me to inaugurate the studio and it was such a pleasure for me and Saira to see his enthusiasm as he showed us around.

  We met often and whenever he felt like sharing his deepest thoughts, he telephoned me unhesitatingly more like a brother than a friend. It was a pleasant surprise, therefore, when he dropped in casually one evening and gave me the script of Mashaal, saying Javed Akhtar had developed the protagonist’s character painstakingly, keeping me in mind and, it was after years of waiting for the right subject that he had found something that could be brought to me. ‘Please read it, you will like it,’ he mumbled before leaving.

  When I began to read the script I could see that the character of Vinod Kumar, the firebrand journalist, had some streaks of my character in him especially in his resilience and fearlessness in dealing with unscrupulous social elements. The protagonist was, for a change, a middle-aged character, an upright editor of a daily newspaper who understood the ethics and responsibilities of investigative journalism and had the courage to oppose the mafia. He dealt with attempts by the powerful sections of society to manipulate and stifle the truth, which he exposed through news items published on the front page every day. What appealed to me in the script was the unyielding spirit of the journalist and the sensitivity with which Javed had loaded high-voltage drama into some of the starkly realistic situations.

  I am glad I made up for the loss of five years of my professional life by doing the aforementioned films and derived job satisfaction from them.

  25

  FAMILY MATTERS

  … the first goal I set out to achieve when I had attained my own target of securing myself in my profession and gaining a reputation for my work … was to give my brothers and sisters the best education in the fields they chose, be it in India or abroad. There was no doubt that each of them had his or her individual intellectual strengths and flair and they had the potential to become achievers. What they needed, I felt, was motivation and facilities.