The blind, mute hero comes of age

There was a time when physically and mentally handicapped protagonists hardly ever showed up in our films except as marginalised props in highly dispensable sub-plots, reports

Subash K Jha

The year 2005 has been a watershed year for Hindi cinema. As Suniel Shetty in the process of re-inventing his career to keep up with the changing needs and trends said, "I've never seen so many exciting things happening all at once. This is the best time to be in Hindi films." Suniel is right. This is the year of films with versatile topics. We have Madhur Bhandarkar's Page 3, Onirban's My Brother Nikhil, Ananth Mahadevan's (unreleased) Staying Alive and Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Black, which shocked box office pundits by breaking free of its art house karma to become one of the solid successes of the year.

Post-Black, filmmakers have hit upon a rather strange and disturbing formula for success. Protagonists who suffer from an insurmountable physical or psychological handicap are being thrust forward as role models. No harm in that, except that physical and emotional impediments are threatening to turn into formulistic props. Sanjay Suri gave a brilliant performance in Onirban's My Brother Nikhil as a gay HIV positive swimming-champion. Until recently, it was unimaginable that a Hindi film hero could be a man with such monstrous blemishes. In Hrishikesh Mukherjee's 1969 classic, Satyakam, Dharmendra surprised his fans by coming "first class second" in the university.

Back then, our heroes were always first in everything they did! Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Devdas gave us the first new millennium hero and that too played by 'King' Khan Shahrukh, who drank hysterically, lost his love, spent all his time at a prostitute's place and finally died on his beloved's doorstep, diseased and depressed. What Devdas said was, “Hey guys, it's okay to be a loser as long as you win the right to make your own choices in life.”

After watching Rani Mukherjee as a blind and deaf man in Black, it was Shreyas Talpade in Nagesh Kukunoor's Iqbal whose unsentimental deaf-and-mute act left audiences stunned. In Ashwini Chowdhary's Siskiyan, Neha Dhupia was a traumatised rape victim. While Anupam Kher in Jahnu Baruah's Maine Gandhi Ko Nahin Mara, like Amitabh Bachchan in Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Black, suffers from Alzeheimer’s disease, Meghna Naidu in Amol Shetge's Rain was born blind and spent her 'blackened times writing on a braille typewriter.

All similarities with Black are, of course, purely coincidental. Or are they? Has the success of Black and Iqbal compelled filmmakers to focus on the darker side of the human condition to elicit sympathy from the habitually indifferent audience? Subhash Ghai denies any inspirational ambitions in his production Iqbal. "Nagesh Kukunoor wrote his script long before Black came. And though Iqbal is about a physically challenged protagonist, our approach to the hero's handicap is very different." Point out to Anupam Kher that he plays a casualty of Alzheimers disease, just like Mr Bachchan in Black…and Anupam takes a deep breath. "With due respects to Mr Bachchan, my interpretation of the disease is entirely my own. Why can't we look at my character as being a totally different person from the one in Black?" Anupam does admit that Black opened the doors to portraying protagonists with darkened areas in their physical and psychological make-up.

There was a time when physically and mentally handicapped protagonists hardly ever showed up in our films except as marginalised props in highly dispensable subplots. Satyen Bose's Dosti and Gulzar's Koshish were rare instances of films focusing on the trauma and travails of the children of a lesser God. Blind protagonists weren't that hard to come by. From Dilip Kumar in Deedar to Urmila Matondkar in the recent Naina, blindness has created much drama and suspense in mainstream cinema.

But now, filmmakers no longer have to wait until dark to evoke elementary emotions on screen. Protagonists and their sufferings are being brought out of the closet without a thought for traditional definitions of heroism. Kareena Kapoor plays a deaf and mute girl in Priyadarshan's next. And Mahesh Manjrekar plans to cast Sanjay Dutt and Kareena in a love story about a disfigured man and a blind girl. More to the point…Sammir Dattani will play a young man with an amputated leg who dares the Mumbai marathon race just to prove that life isn't over for the physically incapacitated. And Mr Amitabh Bachchan's pet project? To play the role of the disfigured masked recluse in an Indian adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom Of The Opera.