The phoenix of Bollywood

People love watching Amitabh Bachchan dance. Which isdoes not suggest that the most durable star in the history of Hindi cinema is celebrated for his fancy footwork. In fact, apart from his undoubted acting skills and the sheer magnitude of his masculine charisma, he is most admired for his verbal gifts: the deep sonorous baritone and the flair for mimicry which he exploits as one to adopt authentic Bombay street slang in his gangster roles. He is also one among the few Bollywood stars who has recorded his own playback tracks. But when he dances, Amitabh Bachchan is a great actor. Decked out in what looks like a gaucho outfit in Don (78), prancing and preening next to the staggering Zeenat Aman, he looks a lot like a man enjoying himself, and enjoying life.

Bachchan who tried to trade up to acting in the late Sixties from his job as a shipping company executive was at first dismissed by producers as "too thin and too tall." His roles in early films often shows him slumped over tables or sitting behind desks, playing brooding young poets and doctors, roles which echoed his own patrician upbringing as the son of the famous Hindi poet Harivansh Rai Bachchan. Though at 6'3", Bachchan is not really all that tall by International standards and doesn't tower over his co-stars. But with his short-waisted, long-legged physique he looked downright gangly, and becomes an honorary giant when strategically photographed.

Bachchan has such a classic standing-tall entrance in Yash Chopra's Trishul (78), using his cigarette to light a fuse and then walking calmly away as a mountainside erupts behind him. The script for Trishul was one of several, beginning with Zanjeer(73) which the writing team of Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar formulated the Angry Young Man persona. Trishul's Vijay isn't a natural rebel but a man with a mission, setting out systematically to destroy his own father (Sanjeev Kumar), a megalomaniac industrialist who committed an even greater violation of abandonind, an unwed and pregnant mother of Vijay. This betrayal lays the groundwork for the financial empire his son attempts to destroy.

Even when Bachchan was playing proletarian characters he always walked "with the gaite of an aristocrat." What is often most thrilling about his confrontations with authority is his easy assumption of equality and this guy never feels outclassed. "You see a certain grace about that character," suggests Akhtar. "So many other actors have tried to ape Amitabh, but they've failed. Because they don't have the sophistication and the culture that he grew up with. As an actor, Amitabh's anger was never ugly. Other actors mix anger with arrogance. Amitabh's anger was mixed with hurt and tears . . . But I'm afraid that in later pictures even Amitabh developed that arrogance."

By the mid-Eighties this screen image had dissolved into that of a superhero myth in pictures like Coolie (83) and Mard (85), garish big-budget cartoons aimed squarely at the masses. The Bachchan heroes in these films are proletarian demi-gods, the sweat-stained masters of all they survey. We can tell that Allah directly looks upon Bachchan's Iqbal in Coolie because this Muslim railway porter is assisted in his journey for justice by a magical falcon that dive-bombs the labor leader's sneering enemies. And in Mard Bachchan's mother-fixated tongawalla leads the oppressed masses to victory with the help of both a faithfull dog and a superintelligent horse.

These films though are best viewed today as comedies, Bachchan's performances in them have an unmistakable glint of irony, and, like director Manmohan Desai, he seems to have thrown himself into them mostly as a lark, much similar to his earlier comedies like Amar Akbar Anthony (77). On the other hand, it's possible that an element of cynical calculation came into play in terms of their impact on the mass audience. This was also the period, after all, in which Bachchan was elected to India's Parliament as a Congress Party candidate from his hometown of Allahabad, and the films do somewhat resemble the flat-out mythologicals that helped confer an aura of godlike infallibility upon the South Indian actor-politicians M.G. Ramachandran and N.T. Rama Rao.

Within even the worst of his movies Bachchan remains an honorable performer, and in his best roles he leaves his superstardom at the door. In Ramesh Sippy's Shakti (82), which was made only a year before the rabble-rousing Coolie, Bachchan worked earnestly to serve a project in which he was bound to be overshadowed by his legendary co-star, Dilip Kumar, a revered veteran of the Golden Age and one of Bollywood's all-time greatest actors. In Salim-Javed's script, Bachchan's Vijay is the son of a rigidly dutiful police inspector, an unbending Father India figure who refused to negotiate with the ganglord (the late Amrish Puri) who kidnapped Vijay when he was a child. The boy managed to escape on his own only because another member of the gang (Dalip Talil) took pity on him and looked the other way. As an adult, Vijay goes to work for this man, who is now a notorious smuggler - "The man who saved me," he tells his outraged father, "when you were willing to let me die for the sake of the law."

Shakti is the most nuanced and lacerating of the Angry Young Man films, because the pivotal conflict is located not outside the hero, in the realm of plot mechanics, but within: "The only person I am afraid of is myself." Bachchan seems to deliberately damp down his trademark fiery acting style in order to harmonize with Kumar's understated naturalism, and he has some lovely courtly romantic interludes with New Cinema icon Smita Patil. But while the film won several Filmfare awards, including Best Screenplay, it was not a commercial success - in part, it seems, because it did not give Indian moviegoers the sort of iconic Bachchan they had come to expect. "In spite of being a megastar," Akhtar says, "Amitabh did not let his stardom come in the way of playing the son. And he played the son and looked submissive, or passive, or frightened, or intimidated as a son should look in front of a powerful father. He showed that he's an actor first, then a star."

But if Amitabh Bachchan the man could at times have made better use of his fame, a couple of other things need to be said: Bachchan has never gone in for the jingoistic Hindu nationalism favored by action stars such as Manoj Kumar in the Seventies and Sunny Deol since the Nineties. He has played Muslim and Christian characters in several films, and at the peak of his almost unimaginable popularity he was not all that protective of his glowering heroic image, alternating action roles with high-stepping comedies like Namak Halaal (82) or moody middlebrow romances such as Yash Chopra's Kabhi Kabhie (76) and Silsila (81). He may not have been pro-active in the modern manner in terms of developing projects for himself, but he does seem to have been open to almost any kind of good role that came his way.

The mid-Eighties marked the pinnacle of Bachchan's superhuman stardom: news of his near-fatal accident in 1982 on the set of Coolie brought the country to a standstill. But his Olympian eminence proved short-lived: he was implicated falsely in the Bofors bribery scandal that crippled the post-Emergency government of his childhood friend Rajiv Gandhi, and the yellow press turned against him. The situation looked even more dire when a high-profile multimedia production company launched in the mid-Nineties, Amitabh Bachchan Corporation Ltd. (ABCL), collapsed following by a series of commercial miscalculations. Most of his Nineties films were not successful, which seemed to confirm the widespread suspicion that Bachchan was a spent force. He was not easy to replace: in the mid-Nineties it took all three of The Three Khans (Aamir, Shah Rukh, and Salman) to fill the vacuum created when The Big B dropped off the A List.

Bachchan was able to work his way back into the limelight toward the end of the decade with a run that, when first announced, sounded like a comedown prompted by financial desperation: appearing as the host on Kaun Banega Karorepati, the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? And then, in the steamroller hits of the first phase of his comeback, such as Aditya Chopra's Mohabbatein 2000) and Karan Johar's Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (2001), Bachchan reinvented himself as an imposing patriarchal figurehead of Hindu Family Values.

A pretty useless shot early in Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham drew affectionate chuckles from the mostly-NRI crowd: Bachchan's real-life wife Jaya standing on a chair to adjust her husband's necktie. The effect depends on a number of factors in addition to the star's famous height. It plays upon the Indian public's sense of the Bachchans as one of Bollywood's most durable couples, and upon the affection due to Jaya herself as a performer, a diminutive firecracker whose headstrong teenage characters in the Hrishikesh Muhkerjee films Guddi (71) and Mili (75) brought a recognizable type of modern, urban woman to the Hindi screen for the first time. Jaya and Amitabh met when he played a strong second-fiddle role in Mili, at which point she was much the bigger draw. But by 1999, one year after their 25th anniversary, Amitabh had been certified as the most popular movie star of all time in an online poll conducted by the BBC - a feat that was trumped when he became the first and only Indian actor memorialized in wax at Madame Tussaud's in London.

Cynics might suggest that Bachchan looked like a wax dummy in some of his post-comeback films. In more than a few of them he seems to have been cast mostly for his nostalgia value, stuffed and mounted on a pedestal. But in the best of them, as the rigid headmaster of an exclusive men's college in Mohabbatein, he looks more like something carved from granite. Bachchan clearly works hard to serve writer-director Aditya Chopra's conception of his character, Narayan Shankar, as a man so stiffened by disappointment that he's virtually immobile. In dramatic terms, after all, that's exactly what Shankar is: an immovable object for obstreperous co-star Shah Rukh Khan to hurl himself against. It actually works for the movie that Bachchan looks like a strange visitor from another era, the stern father figures his Vijay characters rebelled against in the Seventies.

Over the past few years, and against all odds, Bachchan has managed to build upon his initial comeback status as a serviceable senior character actor. He is once again, in his sixties, a major leading man, a feat that is certainly rare enough in the annals of world cinema to be noteworthy. Many of these roles look like middle-aged "veteran" versions of character types he has been embodying all his life: conflicted criminals in Kaante (03) and Boom (04), flawed honest cops seeking redemption in Khakee (03) and Dev (04), and patriotic military icons in Lakshya (04) and Deewaar (04). But these days he plays even these hyper-masculine roles as men close to his own age, happily long-married patriarchs with grown children. Perhaps this is the upside of living in a traditional society - that people who would long since have been put out to pasture in the West can still be seen as the "author backed" subject of the narrative.

His charisma is sorely needed, as no one in the current crop of younger actors has anything like Amitabh Bachchan's moral authority, which is the grown-up distillation of his youthful anger. When the New Cinema stalwart Govind Nihalani (Ardh Satya, 83) made Dev, his Bollywood expossure of political complicity in communal violence, there was really only one viable choice for the voice-of-reason title role, an honest policeman fending off both Muslim and Hindu demagogues. Meanwhile, the Three Khans seem to have skipped over the seething Bachchan persona altogether in their search for role models, harking all the way back to the Shammi Kapoor hip-swivelers of the Fifties and Sixties who cajoled and schemed and danced their way to comfortable happy endings. And in a period in which the typical Bollywood blockbuster is designed to reassure the rising Indian middle class, the younger males (Vivek Oberoi, John Abraham, Arjun Rampal) are well-groomed good sons in expensive sweaters. In his best latter-day vehicles Bachchan relishes dispensing fatherly advice to these whelps, and to our delight, he is dancing again. In Yash Chopra's Veer-Zaara (04) he is an irrepressibly affirmative role model. He almost single-handedly redeems Sameer Karnik's formulaic Kyun! Ho Gaya Na... (04) with a high-stepping comic turn as a compulsive practical joker.

In Mohabbatein, Shah Rukh Khan, as a warmhearted music teacher, predictably wins his running battle with Bachchan's harsh task-master, who has turned his back on the possibility of love and happiness. But in the film's final sequence Khan still feels compelled to bend over and touch the feet of this literally monumental figure. Although Amitabh Bachchan's prodigious stature is now partly an optical illusion, it can't be denied that in his sunset years he looks mightier than ever.