In praise of naram Dharam

Saw bits of Sholay on Zee a few nights ago, through poor cable reception. Like many Indians of my generation, I can’t remember a time when this film wasn’t part of my life. And though I’ve watched so many movies from around the world -- in every genre and on every rung of the ladder of Cinematic Importance -- since that anonymous day in Bombay sometime in the early 1980s when I first saw Sholay (I’m assuming there was a first time that I saw it; logic dictates there must have been), I still can’t think of any other film in which all the parts came together so perfectly.

Most Sholay-lovers I know feel much the same way. Watching it again though, I mulled one opinion I have about the movie that no one else seems to agree with (or at least come out of the closet about). But surely I’m not the only one who thinks that the second-best performance in the film (after Amjad Khan as Gabbar; that’s something no amount of pseud revisionism can change) comes from good ol’ Dharamendra?

Always given (and this is a point that can’t be made too often) that Sholay is much greater than the sum of its parts, I’ve often guiltily felt that Dharmendra’s rakish, exuberant Veeru is the beating heart of the film. He supplies a joie de vivre the movie badly needs; take him away (or replace him with a more stereotyped, humourless macho lead) and the film might’ve tilted right over into gloom -- what with Gabbar’s evil, the Thakur’s morbid waiting for his day of revenge, the doomed relationship between the Widow and the soulful harmonica-playing second lead, the stench of waste and decay that generally hangs over the film.

The conventional opinion (alas, tired, mediocre convention!) is that the Actors’ Bout in this movie was fought between Amjad Khan and Sanjeev Kumar, as the Thakur. But this perception has more to do with the role – the Thakur is stiff and solemn, a "serious" character, not your standard romantic, fighting leading man – than with Sanjeev Kumar’s workmanlike performance. Extended, this critical myopia is also responsible for Kumar’s exaggerated reputation as one of India’s greatest actors; he was often credited for Intention -- he eschewed ‘hero’ roles for tight-lipped ‘character’ roles early in his career -- rather than for Execution. (This is a universal malaise: Nicole Kidman might have given a number of fine performances wearing her own face in mainstream movies -- check To Die For -- but put a prosthetic nose on her, dowd her down and get her to play Virginia Woolf in a dreary, deadeningly portentous film -- and wham! there’s the best actress Oscar all stitched up.)

One of the neatest pre-packaged bytes used to explain the "greatness" of Sanjeev Kumar’s performance is: it’s so difficult for an actor to emote without the use of his hands, he had to rely only on his eyes. Well, yes, Timothy, got that, profound observation, clap clap etc, but did you ever bother to stop and see what Dharmendra actually does with his hands in the ‘chakee peesing’ scene or the scene in the temple where he ‘plays God’? This is a superb physical performance by a man who – I’ll admit -- was never a consistently good actor. He is the film’s clown prince and its hero rolled into one, and he balances the two parts flawlessly.

Dharmendra’s long, many-phased career is among the most interesting in Indian cinema, and it has been shamefully neglected. In recent months we’ve seen a spate of biographies on Bollywood stars of the past, including three -- three -- on Dilip Kumar, another slightly overrated thespian who, for one reason or another, has become the Patron Saint of every Hindi film actor with "serious" aspirations. I don’t know when we’re going to see a dedicated biography of Dharmendra, one that examines his place in Hindi film history, but I suspect it won’t be anytime soon. He was relegated to non-actor status a long time ago and late in his career he made a series of incredibly puerile choices, playing a revenge-seeking, red-eyed, snorting bull in a long line of mediocre multi-starrers. His entire career seems now to have been condensed into a series of SMS jokes (Question: Why are Indian dogs so thin? Answer: Dharmendra has drunk up all their blood) and caricatured radio soundbites. (The man himself happily went along with the lampooning, in the tradition of aging Punjabis who start behaving like children when the younger generation shows any sort of interest in them. Result: statements to media like "I’ve acted with heroines in the 1960s and 1970s, then I acted opposite Sunny’s heroines and now I plan to act with Bobby’s.")

But there’s much more to his career. He may have been an average performer with a limited range, but it wasn’t as limited as legend has it. Even very early in his career, still raw, he gave a decent enough account of himself when pitted against the great Balraj Sahni in Haqeeqat. And I had myself seen far more films from Dharmendra’s "badle ki aag" phase than from his early days when I got an interesting and unexpected insight from my mother. In the late 1960s, she told me, when the Rajesh Khanna madness had just begun, the girls, at least in her school and extended friends’ circle, were decidedly polarised. Dharmendra was the serious woman’s crush, the intense, poetic hero who appealed to the mature schoolgirl, while the giggly, giddy-headed ones could have their Rajesh Khannas and their Jeetendras.

Twenty years before he committed himself to divesting dogs of their blood, Dharmendra was potentially one of Indian cinema’s great romantic heroes. Think about it, it isn’t so far-fetched. This is the man who Meena Kumari – epitome of brooding gravitas among Hindi film heroines – was involved with offscreen. And in Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Guddi, one of mainstream Hindi cinema’s most searching commentaries on the relationship between life and art, another serious, level-headed actress, Jaya Bhaduri, played a young schoolgirl besotted with a movie star (Dharam, essentially playing himself). Bhaduri’s character was the sort of well-grounded, mature schoolgirl my mother imagined herself and her small circle of friends to be like. Try imagining Guddi with Rajesh Khanna as the object of her adoration!

There’s much more doubtless that can be said here by people who have studied trends in Hindi cinema more closely. A point can be made that even in that egregious late-1980s phase of his career Dharmendra showed he could do interesting things when challenged (I’m thinking of J P Dutta’s underrated gangland movie Hathyar in which Dharmendra, Sanjay Dutt and Rishi Kapoor were all in peak form). And of course there’s little doubt that given good direction he was an excellent comedian.

But I’m content to stick with Veeru. Still reiterating that Sholay is far greater than all its constituents; but if one does get around to analysing the individual parts, Garam Dharam shines among the brightest. It’s an iconic performance by a man who has never got the attention he deserved.

P.S. (being forced to write this by colleague holding a Swiss knife and frothing at the mouth) Sanjeev Kumar fans, I’m not saying the man wasn’t a good, (arrgh, knife cut) okay very good, actor, just that he wasn’t as good as his reputation suggests. And anyway, my point is that his finest moment might easily have come in a movie where he played the conventional, singing, dancing hero -- but if it had, it would never have been acknowledged as such, even by the actor himself.