Gabbar and the lost art of villainy

Gross villainy, that extremity of human nature, persists in Indian as well as international cinema. After all, there is no simpler — and digestible — method to thrill the audience than the depiction of the triumph of virtue over vice. This season’s special effects extravaganza The Avengers techno-flashes the victory of a horde of goodies over a beastly badly. At home, be it Agneepath or Bodyguard, it’s all about one David-like dude vanquishing the ghastly Goliath.
Stories by the fireside, recounted by our grandmothers, followed this epic route as well. So has ageless mythology. If anything has changed, it’s the names of the dramatis personae and the nature of conflicts. Curiously, though, A-list heroes no longer mind donning black robes for a change from their usually vanilla white designer apparel. Consequently, movie entertainment no longer plays host to the traditional tyrannical “khalnayak”. Indeed, Pran, Ajit and Amrish Puri are remembered essentially by the over-30s generation.
In this context, you do wonder if there’s sufficient recall value for another formidable actor, who is recalled largely for breathing terror in Sholay (1975). Gabbar Singh lives on. But Amjad Khan? Again it’s principally the senior generation which flashbacks to his other accomplished movie performances — for instance, in Muqaddar ka Sikandar, Qurbani and Shatranj ke Khilari — or is aware of his contribution to Mumbai’s culturescape as a theatre actor, his forays into film direction and, significantly, his role as the chief of the Actors’ Guild Association.
Amjad Khan, who died at the age of 51 in 1986, would have been 71 this July. And you suspect he would still have been zipping in and out of the studios as well as theatre arenas. A road accident on the Mumbai-Goa highway had led to a fatal dependency on medication, the actor became obese, eventually succumbing to a heart seizure.
During his last months, he was toying with the then-bourgeoning art of videography and had begun shooting documentaries. One of them was screened unofficially at Germany’s prestigious Oberhausen Film Festival and brought the house down with laughter and applause. The irrepressibly sarcastic Khan had filmed the shoot of a Bollywood action flick, frequently panning the camera swiftly from the hero’s face to the backside of a horse. As for the heroine, she was caught while throwing a tantrum at her make-up staff. At the end of the candid film, Khan had dubbed in his voice to state, “This is not the negative side of my country’s film industry. We’re human, we are in love with ourselves… and backsides.”
He was from a film family. His father was the redoubtable character actor Jayant. Unlike most “star kids”, however, Amjad Khan first took to the stage during his college years before being cast accidentally in Sholay, when Danny Denzongpa made his life’s biggest goof-up in rejecting the part. Khan did encash on the super success of Sholay, even showing up in a commercial which caricatured Gabbar Singh as a glucose biscuit-happy bandido.
That was amusing enough but sorrily the actor accepted far too many B-grade projects which reprised him as an old Gabbar in new celluloid. In addition, he was typecast in the A-grade projects as either Amitabh Bachchan’s buddy or opponent. The fatigue factor set in. Cynicism towards his metier was inevitable, but not without a touch of humour. When a critic wrote him off as a “dead duck”, he called her on the phone to go “quack, quack, quack”, and immediately disconnected.
Sensibly, Amjad Khan changed gears to the stage, and performed to “house full” shows in an adaptation of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. It was a renewed lease of life for an actor jaded by repetitive roles of the villain. Prithvi Theatre lore has it that the actor, who a teaholic, asked for his umpteenth cup of chai from the canteen before a 9 pm performance to be informed testily that the kitchen had run out of milk. The next evening he brought two buffaloes to the theatre, to ensure that the canteen wouldn’t be short of the milk of human addiction.
Truly, here was a fine actor who in his private life could be quite self-deprecatory and bemused. Perhaps, he was aware that his end was close and became somewhat reclusive. Result: he hasn’t been sufficiently canonised. If he has been given a semblance of an iconic status, it is has been singularly for the Gabbar Singh performance. A pity because he was much more. Auspiciously, his daughter Ahlam has been acting on stage in meaningful, socially concerned dramas. In the course of the approaching year celebrating the 100 Years of Indian Cinema, how you wish that the revelry will take note of the fact that there is so much more to Amjad Khan than Gabbar Singh.

The writer is a journalist, film critic and film director