The persona of a man at odds with society and law was consolidated in Yash Chopra's Deewar (1975) through the character of an anti-hero who defies established norms in an ill-fated attempt to carve out happiness for himself in the face of strong resistance from his immediate environs. Even before Deewaar was made, Amitabh had emerged as a brooding, bitter, despair-filled misfit, if not as an outright deviant, in films like Abhimaan, Namak Haraam, Saudagar and Majboor. But it was Chopra's film that marked the apotheosis of the angry young man.

The ire in his soul, directed at both family and society, took on Oedipal dimensions in yet another Yash Chopra film, Trishul, in which Amitabh played Vijay (that was the name of his Deewaar character as well and it was to become his most common screen name), a young

man firm in the belief that his father had wronged his mother and his determination to make the former, a wealthy businessman, pay for his sins.

The angry young man syndrome enabled Amitabh to develop a special kinship with filmgoers, who saw his on-screen heroism as a three-hour escape chute from the hardships of their own lives. But the image soon turned into caricature as producers and directors sought to cash in on the actor's immense popularity by casting him in half-baked, exploitative films that merely used the revenge motive as a superficial plot device sans the social-political implications that were inherent in Zanjeer, Deewar and Trishul.

The pulping of the Bachchan persona was best exemplified in T Rama Rao's Inquilaab, a film that coincided with the actor's first election campaign. In the climax of the film, a remake of a south Indian hit, the angry hero wrests political power. After he is anointed Chief Minister he guns down all the members of his Cabinet.

The sequence was projected as a revenge of the proletariat on a corrupt and cynical ruling establishment but it made little sense in the context of the fact that, by opting for politics in real life, Bachchan had chosen to join the very forces that he had fought on the screen. It was no surprise that his films began to flop left, right and centre.

Between 1988 and 1992, a span of five years, he had nearly 15 releases. Only two of them, Tinnu Anand's Shahenshah and Mukul S. Anand's Agneepath (both had him playing avenging angels, the first as a flashily-attired vigilante, the second as a gangster forsworn to wiping out all evil from this world) succeeded at the box office.

A large percentage of these badly made films did not manage so much as a decent initial. Among the duds were several films that are barely remembered today - Ganga Jamuna Saraswati, Toofan, Jaadugar, Ajooba, Indrajit and Akeyla. If these failures did not put Amitabh out of circulation completely it was because as a star and a one-man industry he had no peer. But most important, he had the good sense to withdraw from the scene when the going got tough. That created a vacuum - and a renewed demand.

So the Amitabh Bachchan saga continues to this day…

Saibal Chatterjee

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