“Shyam babu's number? Yes, I think I have it”, said Ziya us Salam, the editor of The Hindu's supplement Metroplus in Delhi, in response to my request. This was sometime in June-July 2010, in the middle of my three-year stint in Delhi-NCR. I was working on the manuscript of the non-fiction Pure Evil – The Bad Men of Bollywood (Harper Collins) and needed to interview leading filmmakers and actors as part of my research. I got through to Shyam Benegal and received his first blessing immediately. “I am in Delhi this week. You can meet me here,” he said, saving me the cost of travelling to Mumbai.
As my book RD Burman: The Man, The Music was still undergoing edits and the release was a year away, I was not a published author yet. “I am a freelancer for Metroplus and am co-authoring my first book on RD Burman. And I am writing one more on the grey shades of characters in Bollywood,” was the only truthful introduction possible when I entered his study. The choice of the phrase “grey shades” was deliberate as I needed his wisdom on a specific section on the ambiguous characters of Hindi cinema. I pressed the ‘Record' button on my portable Sony cassette recorder.
How Villains Evolved
“The face of villains has been changing for the last 60 years. Do you believe it has represented the changing society?” was my first question. “Of course it has,” the ‘Professor' began. The student sat up attentively. “Any kind of performing art has a long history and has had a moral at the end of the story because it's very closely tied to the way we live and the ideas we are supposed to inculcate. In our films, too, we designed our villains likewise because that is part of our tradition. A hundred years ago, when we started to make our own films, we took everything lock stock and barrel from our earlier entertainment traditions and from the West. But since the late 1960s, the whole definition of heroes and villains has changed. Now you're looking at people as human beings in various shades of grey. Earlier, we had a clear morality tale. But now, we are shifting gears from the Ramayana kind of morality tale of shining goodness to a more sophisticated, a more complex, a more difficult morality tale of Mahabharata.”
“But sir, from Kismet (1943) itself, haven't there been anti-heroes in every other decade?” the student questioned respectfully. Clarified Benegal, “If you study those films, they appear to be so, but they are not so. Eventually in Kismet and Awara (1951), the hero is still the shining good man. It is only in the last 30-40 years that Indian audiences have come to accept a much more sophisticated rendition of characters and an acceptance of people without labelling them immoral. If you look at Anurag Kashyap or Dibakar Banerjee's films, the characters are amoral and not immoral; for example in Dev D (2009), he is amoral, not immoral.
A poster of the movie Kismet, featuring Ashok Kumar and Mumtaz Shanti
And at that moment I learnt something new—the nuances of the two words in the context of films. But I was still searching for that central idea of anti-heroes. Benegal continued, “In the early 70s, there was also this American film Dirty Harry, which defined a certain kind of hero/anti-hero (which came into Amitabh Bachchan's Zanjeer) who used the methods of evil men to destroy evil. That came to stay. The evil person himself did not need any fresh definition. He remained a villain. But the hero was shifting. He had grey characters. Hitherto, the heroes were all unblemished ones. But now the hero was not the totally morally, unblemished hero anymore.”
Amitabh Bacchan in Zanjeer
“Sir, are you saying that the anti-hero is the person with good intentions? Then who is the villain? Is he the bad guy with a bad motive?” I sought clarity.
“Our original heroes followed the Gandhi way, the right way. That's a typical hero—right ends by right means. To get to the right ends by any means—that is anti-hero,” he explained. And that was the ‘Aha!' moment. I knew I had got the peg for my anti-heroes section – ‘The differentiator between a villain and an anti-hero is in the motive. The villain has a bad motive. The anti-hero has a good motive with improper means to achieve it.'
What discussion on grey shades of characters would be complete without us speaking about his masterpiece Kalyug (1981)? Benegal told me, “There was no villain in Kalyug. Not even Dhanraj who played Duryodhana. He was justified in what he was doing as he felt that he had far greater legal rights to the business. After all, it was his father who had created it.”
“And Karna?”
Explained Benegal, “Karan Singh (the equivalent of Karna in Kalyug) was the most interesting character. He finds himself on the wrong side. But his loyalty for Dhanraj (the modern version of Duryodhana in Kalyug) gave him his identity and acceptance, which even his mother didn't. And the complexity came when Karan Singh found out that he was the eldest of the Puranchand family (equivalent of the Pandavas), and this fact was a conflict of interest with his loyalty to Dhanraj, the rival of the Puranchand family. Karan suffered neglect all his life and, in the end, was killed by trickery by Bharat (equivalent of Arjuna) of the Puranchand family. Karan was not at all a villain. He was the tragic hero.”
Shashi Kapoor and Amrish Puri in Kalyug
“Sir, please give me a minute,” I apologised. I rewound the cassette recorder and replayed the last 20 seconds to check for any malfunction in the recording. “…Karan was not at all a villain. He was the tragic hero,” it played. All well.
“Yes, sir, my next question,” I continued.
Among other films, we discussed, needless to say, Ankur, Nishant, Junoon and Bhumika. A few pearls of wisdom were…
“What Surya in Ankur went through in school and college was the acceptance of feudal relationships; that he was the boss and others were his slaves. But even in a master-slave relationship, you're responsible for the slave because there is a human relationship as well. But he falls into the pattern and then he cannot take the responsibility. Therefore, willy-nilly, he becomes a villain,” he told me. About Nishant, he said, “Those landlord brothers could do exactly what they wanted. But Sushila recognises her own sexuality (even though she has been raped) and her own love for the young man who acts eventually as her saviour (Vishwam, the youngest landlord). It is a very complex idea. No characters like these were ever created in Hindi cinema. Sushila was conscious of her own sexual power.”
Anant Nag and Shabana Azmi in Ankur
I could sense that we were at the end of the hour assigned to me. “Sir, what is the future of the Hindi cinema villain?” I asked.
“There will be no such thing as a permanent villain or a permanent hero. It will depend on situations. Circumstances change. With the shift of the positions of people, they are seen as villains or heroes. IPL is an example. In the first three IPLs, everybody saw Lalit Modi as a brilliant marketing strategist who delivered the most brilliant entertainment coup of all time. A week later, he was seen as the worst villain you could possibly see. Things are constantly moving. This is how perceptions change. These are things that constantly go through the minds of us filmmakers,” Shyam Benegal summed up.
I took his blessings and left, filled with a sense of light and warmth that had nothing to do with the Delhi afternoon sun.
(Balaji Vittal is a National Award-winning and MAMI Award-winning author, columnist, podcaster, TEDx speaker and Bollywood commentator. He can be reached on X @vittalbalaji. His website is www.balajivittal.com.)
Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author
