He was boss. His cardboard cut-outs, crouched to kick-bash his opponents, were as much a part of the Mumbaiscape as the bare-chested vinyl posters of Salman Khan today.

The busy Vallabhbhai Patel Stadium at a diagonal angle to the Haji Ali durgah was the venue for weekend wrestling combats. Thronged by excitement-seeking hoi polloi, India’s Rustam-e-Hind would display his killer kenchi-grip there, his legs gripping his rival’s neck like a scissor. That the grip proved to be fatal for a combatant back in the 1970s can’t be authenticated but it is a part of sport lore. Also, whenever he had to battle the Hungarian-born King Kong — Emile Czaja — tickets weren’t accessible for thrills or money. King Kong would snarl in the cultivated cruel style to be later perfected by the WWF fighters.
Dara Singh throughout the 1960s-70s was undefeatable. Yet the crowds hoped that King Kong would score — once in a while he did to prevent audience fatigue — leading to the allegations that the bouts were rigged. For these championship evenings, taxis on the roads dwindled drastically. The cabbies would be at the stadium, cheering for yet another triumphant blow from Rustam — predictable but thoroughly adrenaline-pumping.
Whatever the conjectures may have been, on his own terms Rustam-e-Hind cut the profile of an upright, clean-as-a-whistle sports person who bifurcated to the Bollywood movies as an actor-producer-and-director. The badshah of the B-grade flicks — mostly in black-and-white completed on peanut-shell budgets — may not have made it to the snazzier cinema halls. His bash-‘em quickies — Saat Samundar Paar, Sikander-e-Azam and Watan se Door to cite random titles — were released at the danker cinema halls of the city located on the tough streets of Playhouse (called Peela House, in a twist of pronunciation).
Be it a period swashbuckler, a jungle drama, a dacoity drama or even a riff on Tarzan, the rough-hewn products established Dara Singh as the uncontested action hero. The cabaret delight Helen would be his biceps-candy, and the soon-to-be the A-list glam queen, Mumtaz, fetched up as his “mehbooba” in as many as 16 films. B-graders are a distinct genre which are recalled with affection for their simple-mindedness, rudimentary but effective technique and studio-bound art-décor in Hollywood. In B-town, however, the Dara Singh mass entertainers haven’t received even a semblance of an appraisal.
On quitting the B-grade movies, India’s precursor to Rambo produced and directed Punjabi films, setting up a studio in Mohali, Punjab. If he got a call from the Bollywoodwallah-s, it was to employ his towering 6 feet 2 inch personality in brief but impactful cameos most notably by Raj Kapoor (Mera Naam Joker), Manmohan Desai (Mard) and Feroz Khan (Dharmatma). Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Anand featured him in a cameo, in which he hilariously uttered a cuss word without actually saying it.
Among his last batch of films, there were pleasant patriarchal turns in Kal Ho Naa Ho and Jab We Met. In TV, of course, he was the endearing Hanuman of Ramanand Sagar’s Ramayan.
Never a dramatic, histrionics-friendly actor, Dara Singh did have a screen presence, which alloyed with his personality of a wrestler . His was a farmland-to-riches story which he narrated in his somewhat mild-mannered autobiography, keeping quite a few anecdotes untold. Like the time the knee-high Rajiv and Sanjay Gandhi with Amitabh Bachchan, sought the Rustam’s autograph and posed for keepsake pictures, when he had visited Indira Gandhi.
The one time I saw Dara Singh was in his capacity as a BJP-nominated Rajya Sabha MP (2003-09). Sitting alone in the lobby of New Delhi’s India International Centre, he appeared to be worried, his forehead creased. My attempt to initiate a conversation evoked monosyllabic answers. He was “fine”. Did he enjoy politics? “Yes, yes.” And why was he looking so tense? The answer to that was slightly more elaborate, “Nothing, nothing. I am waiting for a car to pick me up. No one’s punctual in Delhi,” he laughed, adding, “or anywhere.”
The invincible Rustam-e-Hind was still in the lobby an hour later, looking restless, very unlike those cardboard cut-outs outside Mumbai’s Vallabhbhai Patel Stadium.