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When the Tragedy King introduced joyous Bhangra on silver screen
As the peppy tonga driver wooing the pretty Vyjayanthimala, Dilip was the first hero to dance on the Bhangra on screen.
Chandigarh The story of legendary actor Dilip Kumar known for his intense melancholic roles in films like Devdas, Andaz, Milan, Daag and many others, cannot be complete without knowing that he introduced the Bhangra to Bollywood. This happened at a time when his co-actors, Raj Kapoor and Devanand, who, along with Dilip, formed the trio of super stardom clowned and flirted on screen with elan.
Dilip’s Bhangra came in BR Chopra film Naya Daur, which was based on the theme of Man vs Machine, with the villagers successfully resisting the advent of the bus.
As the peppy tonga driver wooing the pretty Vyjayanthimala, Dilip was the first hero to dance on the Bhangra on screen. The duet was penned by none other than lyricist Sahir Ludhianvi to the peppy musical score of OP Nayyar, ‘Udein jab jab zulfein teri’ (Whenever your tresses dance in the wind). The song and dance remains popular to date; the audience loved the star even more in his new Avtaar.
It was a Markfed employee late Avtar Singh, who had played a major role in popularising the Bhangra on stage post-Independence who was called upon to choreograph this cheery number. When this writer interviewed him on the experience of teaching the steps to Dilip and Vyjayanthimala, he said, “Dilip was a Peshawari boy equally at ease in the Pakhtoon and Punjabi cultures and took to the steps at once; Vyjanthimala, from the South, too mastered the Punjabi rhythm.”
The greatest compliment to Avtar came from yesteryear heroine Nargis, who exclaimed, “This is the first time that men have danced like men in a Hindi film!” Today, the Bhangra is an integral part of Bollywood.
Punjabi singer Pammy Bai says, “There was a bit of Bhangra sequence with actor Manohar Deepak, brother of Avtar Singh, in the film Jagte Raho in 1956 but Dilip Kumar (Yusuf Khan) put the star stamp on the folk dance of Punjab.”
In the mid-1990s when the then Punjab chief minister honoured Punjabi stars in Bollywood at the Mohali cricket stadium, it was Dilip who stole the show giving an emotive speech in Punjabi, saying: “The soil of the film-world in Mumbai was very hard and we Punjabis held it with our teeth!”
