From angry young man to cool old gentleman, 50 years of Amitabh Bachchan

From playing the angry young man in the 1970s to the cool old gentleman in recent years, Amitabh Bachchan has extended his superstardom more than anyone before him.

Precisely at six one evening in 1969, young Amitabh Bachchan — recognisable then only from the headshots he had been sending around — arrived to meet Khwaja Ahmad Abbas in Mumbai. The director had assumed the aspiring actor was a local but he had travelled from Calcutta. He left behind a handsome job there, Rs 1,600 a month, to make that appointment because “one has to take such chances”. In a Nehru jacket and churidar, his six-foot-two-inch frame looked further elongated, a picture that had fazed some filmmakers. “They all said I was too tall for their heroines,” he is quoted saying in Abbas's memoirs. 

Fortunately, the romance in Abbas’s film was to be of revolution, not of heroines. The actor’s appearance as one of Saat Hindustani (Seven Indians) for Rs 5,000 would set off 50 busy years on screen. His earnest Anwar, the Muslim guerrilla always under a cloud of doubt, got a special mention in the National Awards. At the premiere, Meena Kumari praised him. People were seeing potential even if his releases over the next three years came up short. “He is a better actor than several matinee idols,” wrote Abbas of his protégé.

This was widely acknowledged first with Zanjeer (1973), his first major success as the lead star. In it, Bachchan, he of staid upbringing and notable discipline, threw punches and kicked chairs. It is said the writing duo of Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar was impressed with a fight scene from Bombay to Goa (1972). They recommended casting him after several bigger stars had turned down their violent idea of a suspended cop who becomes vigilante. The line “Jab tak baithne ko na kaha jaye sharafat se khade raho (Do not sit down until you are asked to)”, delivered in a ringing baritone with a cold-blooded stare, was the beginning of decades-long collaboration.

As the formula was rinsed and repeated, Bachchan played a wronged member from various working sections — a dockyard worker whose family was persecuted (Deewar, 1975) or a miner recovering from past humiliation (Kaala Patthar, 1979). Circumstances pushed Bachchan’s characters, often named “Vijay”, to seek justice by going rogue. In 1970s India, disillusionment was beginning to form with the government failing to check corruption and unemployment. In the repression of the Emergency years, people were able to participate vicariously in anger and protest through Bachchan’s “Vijay”. 

Rajesh Khanna, who was the reigning star when the two worked in Anand (1971), found that Bachchan had become a rival by the time they filmed Namak Haraam (1973), observes Yasser Usman, who wrote a biography of Khanna. The clean-cut romantic characters popularised by earlier stars gave way to the “Angry Young Man”. He became a reference text for changes in the country’s sociopolitical milieu, encouraging research for years. Scholar Vijay Mishra has compared this misunderstood figure to the Mahabharata’s tragic antihero Karna. “(Bachchan) was the hope for the black sheep in the audience, and for the dark horse who was still to be discovered,” says Bhawana Somaaya, senior journalist who has written three books on the actor. She points to how that converted his uncommon “palm-tree” height and “intense brooding eyes” into positives. In that sense, his following is comparable to the mass hysteria Rajinikanth enjoys.

The disenfranchised labouring classes and impressionable collegians were equally dazzled. Costume designer Anju Modi, who dressed the actor for the upcoming Telugu film Sye Raa Narasimha Reddy, says his long bell-bottoms and shawl drapes are iconic, while movie critic Anupama Chopra notes that the tied-up blue shirt in Deewar became a rage. His lookalikes often sport the patterned waistcoat and gamchha from Don (1978) or a chained arm sleeve like the dreaded Shahenshah (1988). 

Even if All India Radio famously rejected him, Bachchan’s was a radio voice that allowed him to make an entire language out of the word “hain”. In his utterance, it could mean an interrogation, a smirk, a tickle, an emotional gut-punch. He used that strength to get away with barking questions at Shiva in a temple (Deewar) and Jesus in a church Amar Akbar Anthony (1977), or to set off laughter. In the latter film, he even converses with his own reflection in a scene that expertly brings the popular “mirror comedy” routine of silent stars like Max Linder into the talking era. 

His cultivated characters in Hrishikesh Mukherjee films like Abhimaan (1973) and Chupke Chupke (1975) were closer to his privileged roots. Mukherjee and other directors like Manmohan Desai, Yash Chopra, Tinnu Anand and Mukul Anand cast him habitually into the 1990s. “No other Bollywood actor has been called a one-man industry,” says Chopra. Memorably, when he fell into a condition described as "coma-like" after being accidentally stabbed on the set of the film Coolie (1983), it is said the country rose in prayer. He was better a few days later.

Like all good things, however, Hindi cinema ruined the vigilante arc by overuse. After the gore and ugliness of the eighties, Akhtar noted in an interview with Tehelka, people wanted soft, sweet cinema again. The days of the anti-establishment hero were numbered.

By the time he was nearly 60 in 2001, Bachchan had assumed God-like status. Fans in Kolkata led by Sanjay Patodia — who has tattoos of the star and has named his children after Bachchan’s — built him a temple where they gathered to chant the Amitabh Chalisa. "Hey Harivansh Gyan Gun Sagar / Apse Hue Ek Avtar Ujagar (Oh Harivansh, ocean of wisdom / You brought to light a divine incarnation)," it began. 

In the 1990s, however, such cult fandom was endangered by the star’s tainted outings in politics and business, as well as his fading youth. On a chat show with childhood acquaintance Simi Garewal in 1998, Bachchan showed rare vulnerability, admitting that he had not gone after better roles and that he feared failure.

Two things happened at the turn of the millennium. He was cast in Karan Johar’s Mohabbatein (2000) as an ageing father, and he forayed, somewhat controversially, into television as the host of the Indian version of “Who wants to be a millionaire”. It could have gone either way, Somaaya reminds us. “Had Kaun Banega Crorepati not worked, he might have been typecast as the sombre patriarch.” But the game show gamble proved to be a lifeline. His blushing reception of compliments and the way he respectfully personified a machine “computer ji” delighted viewers. He bridged East and West because, as the show’s creator Siddhartha Basu notes, of “his rootedness in language and sanskaar (values), and on the other hand his urbane polish and elegance”.

It is a Wednesday at Studio 12 in Goregaon’s Film City, but Jitendra Bathia and his family from Limdi, Gujarat are in their Sunday best. They have just watched “Big B” host KBC for a second time in five years. On set, Bachchan, whose team declines interviews, is tended to by his makeup man of 45 years, Deepak Sawant, and a personal set of photographers. Unlike the reserved host of before, he now shares anecdotes with participants and listens to their stories. Several years in, he still disappears into the vanity van between shooting sessions to read the bios of contestants and go over questions. 

The actor mingles more with the audience now, say the Bathias who got to tell him they like his Gujarat tourism advert. At the end of filming, he takes a walk around the dazzling spaceship-like set, as if in a slow victory lap, smiling and assuring people: “Aayenge, aapke paas aayenge (I will meet you).” Indeed, afterwards, it is said he obliges many with pictures. This is similar to his Sunday sightings outside the family bungalow, Jalsa, in Juhu, where he waves to fans who still gather in the thousands.

This is Amitabh Bachchan now, the Cool Old Gentleman. He has hosted 10 of 11 KBC seasons, with Shah Rukh Khan taking over for one lacklustre year in 2007 when the former was ill. It became evident that entire families still adored Bachchan enough to spare an hour Monday to Friday for his quizzing and banter. Work poured in again and filmmakers had ideas on what to do with the star. He has done voiceovers for 15 films since 2000. He has also appeared in over 60 films since – an average of three releases a year. Remarkable among these were his turn as the persistent teacher in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Black, the menacing Subhash Nagre in Ram Gopal Varma’s Sarkar trilogy, and Buddhadev Gupta, the arrogant chef who finds love in his 60s, in R Balki’s Cheeni Kum. Young directors also began remaking his major works with new stars, leading to weaker versions of Don, Agneepath and Zanjeer.

Movie theatre and TV screens still fill up with his face during commercial breaks. Bachchan has lent his wild fame to everything from public service announcements on polio and Hepatitis B to promotions for jewellery and search engines. He raps too. He is social on internet media, posting “stories” on Instagram, and numerically coded tweets on Twitter.

While words are considered Bachchan’s best asset, director Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury points to a less-discussed skill — the actor’s silences in films like Mili (1975) and Sholay (1975). “What he does with unspoken words is amazing. Less is more.” In Pink (2016), the director put the two qualities together. Through most of the film, the protagonist Deepak Sehgal observes ongoings, speaking only briefly until the end when emotions send him into a powerful monologue. Roy Chowdhury swears there were real tears in the eyes of some junior artistes on the day they filmed the speech. The small-budget film benefited from Bachchan’s celebrityhood, which “took it to every corner of the world”. 

In Pink as well as the more recent Badla (2019), he played star lawyers who come out of retirement to take on new cases. In the actor’s own career, though, retirement seems nowhere in sight. The Telugu film mentioned above and Shoojit Sircar’s Gulabo Sitabo are expected later this year. If it were possible, Roy Chowdhury says both he and his friend Sircar, who previously directed Bachchan in Piku (2016), would cast the actor in every film of theirs. “It is addictive to work with him.”

Amrita Singh contributed to this report