Why I adore Dilip Kumar
He was the star of my favourite film ‘Madhumati’. It was the first-ever film shot in the Kumaon hills near our town of Nainital when I was in school. For weeks, all of us strained our ears above the nasal droning of lessons to hear the song, ‘Aaja Re’. It was shot multiple times at the ‘location’ (a new word for us Paharis then) and reverberated for long among the mountains that cupped Nainital like a thousand temple bells. The film was pre-booked in the local Laxmi Theatre as soon as it was launched, and songs from ‘Madhumati’ became synonymous with our town to us.
The cocky young students in senior school took to lurching with a Dilip Kumar gait, with their sweaters tied around their necks. “Bhoot lag gaya sabko Dilip Kumar ka!” our old guard, Deb Singh, muttered angrily, “ab ho gayi inki zindagi khatam!” (They are like men possessed and that’s the end of their lives!).
Dilip Kumar was a mega star by the 1950s and remained a part of the big triad of Dilip, Dev Anand and Raj Kapoor for at least three decades thereafter. Our nubile young aunts awaiting marriage created picture albums with cuttings from Filmfare, where Dilip Kumar appeared and reappeared on cover and centrespreads regularly. I now realise, maybe the same forces that had led a similarly home-confined Emily Bronte to create a Heathcliffe, the restrictive Indian society of the 1950s, where love was a four-letter word, actually willed the Hindi films to throw up a brooding, intense and tragic hero like Dilip Kumar so girls awaiting marriage could let their angst flow with hot tears.
I judge Dilip Kumar as a great performer by putting him to a simple test I have created for locating nuggets of gold in the dirt of our popular culture: how much pleasure does he/she give versus how low do we have to stoop to receive the said pleasure?
The answer vis-a-vis Dilip Kumar is not that low really. A good example being his film ‘Devdas’. A hero dreamt up by the Bengali novelist Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyaya has generated several films in Bangla and Hindi, the latest being Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s operatic rendering of doomed love. But, to me, Dilip Kumar’s Devdas stands head and shoulders above a KL Saigal, a Prosenjit Chatterji or Shah Rukh Khan. Bimal Roy’s Hindi version has Dilip Kumar playing Devdas to the ethereal Bengali actress Suchitra Sen as Paro, with Vyjayanthimala playing the gold-hearted courtesan who takes a broken young lover under her wings, only to lose him to heavy drinking. Dilip Kumar’s ‘Devdas’ created a whole template for musical films based on tales of unrequited love (‘Aah’, ‘Madhumati’, ‘Dilwale’ to ‘My Name is Khan’), where young love is doomed from the start.
Truth be told, how many of us in India know when we are young, what to do with the two competing equally true pulls and counter-pulls of duty and a grand love? One of the most popular marching songs in the 1950s (‘Watan Ki Raah Pe Watan Ke Naujawan Shaheed Hon...’) was actually sung at the funeral of Dilip Kumar (in film ‘Shaheed’) for a man who had left his beloved and laid down his life for his country. Dilip’s ‘Shaheed’ and later Shehzada Saleem (in K Asif’s magnum opus ‘Mughal-e-Azam’) still throw this question in our face.
‘Mughal-e-Azam’ is one of the greatest musical semi-historical tropes: a larger-than-life father ambitious of turning his heir apparent into a future emperor of Sultanat-e-Mughalia. It is an Oedipal film. Dilip Kumar and the veteran Prithviraj Kapoor give memorable performances. But, Dilip, to my mind, is subtler. One silent but withering glance of his undoes a thunderous oratory emanating from a furious father’s royal lips.
Later, Dilip Kumar amazed us in films like ‘Gunga Jumna’, ‘Ram Aur Shyam’ and ‘Saudagar’, where he was pitted against another domineering actor, Raj Kumar. His old-world pessimism was now combined with a new-world optimism in ‘Imli Ka Boota, Beri Ka Ped’ and his obvious love for the young lovers turned the film into a rather endearingly comic one. There was a repeat of the magic when he sang a Bhojpuri song in ‘Gunga Jumna’: ‘Nain Lad Jaihen To Manwa Maa Kasak Hoibe Karee, Prem Ka Chhuti Hai Patakha To Dhamak Hoibe Karee…’
Recollected in the tranquility of a ripe old age, Dilip Kumar’s films are really about the dream lives the people of this subcontinent have led for the decades following Independence. They encapsulate bits of us that are still important, but to which we have the least access. The anger and love coexisting in the hearts for our flawed parents and an equally problematic democracy. Contrast it with those weekend box-office, record-making OTT hits resonating with the dirty talk of gangsters and gangster-like policemen, politicians, foul language flowing from mouths full of pan masala. Compare a Suchitra Sen as Paro looking into her lover’s eyes while striking a match to light a kerosene lamp and forgetting where she is till it burns her finger, to that lusty lurch of an England-returned SRK and an overdressed Paro played by a former Miss World. You get the drift. Dilip’s quizzical half-smile and unblinking eyes are as astute about the state of being totally in love as it is possible to be. He needs no elaborate lighting of a cigarette under the shadow of a felt hat.
Is Bollywood, drained of its fresh language and imaginative vernacular-speaking script writers and actors, recycling everything? SRK turned into Dilip Kumar, Ranbir Kapoor into Raj Kapoor, Ranveer Singh into a latter-day Dev Anand. And that’s a poisoned chalice. That easy sense of entitlement, a graceful presence that refuses to break into superficial gestures, and a genuinely submissive attitude to female beauty was special to Dilip Kumar and cannot be duplicated. He is a lover who treats his women with deference bordering on the platonic. As an actor, you see him mostly reacting to their overtures instead of aggressively wooing them himself as an alpha male. This astute ploy keeps his vulnerability intact in the eyes of the female audiences while making him an adorable symbol of the dark handsome man whose still waters run deep.
As a thespian, it will be impossible to do a biopic on him with pithy and use his life as a parable of a Muslim who gave himself a Hindu name and created films like ‘Shaheed’ and ‘Gunga Jumna’. There was nothing sterile or vain about him even when he had crossed his eighties and lived the life of a recluse, loved and cared for by his lovely faithful wife.
Goodbye Dilip Kumar, the creator of so many of our first youthful dreams of love. Bollywood doesn’t get the likes of you anymore.
— The writer is a veteran journalist
