How Yash Chopra helped Amitabh Bachchan reinvent himself on the big screen – Times of India

Yash Chopra, Mukul Anand and Game Changers


Yash Chopra
When at the turn of the millennium, Amitabh Bachchan faced a paradox of fate, namely having won the title the Star of the Millennium and falling into an impossible debt trap with the failure of his company, the ABCL, it seems by his own account, that one morning he walked into Yash Chopra’s office and asked him for a job. Yash Chopra cast him in a lead role in the film Mohabbatein directed by his son, Aditya Chopra, a film based on the Dead Poet’s Society, a Peter Weir film, based on a novel by Thomas Schulman and bearing a very close resemblance to Tagore’s play, Red Oleanders. This film turned Amitabh Bachchan around and made him ‘cast ready’ to act in a slew of films that was supposed to start a whole new phase of his life. Yash Chopra no longer directed him nor did Aditya Chopra, but many film makers especially Ram Gopal Varma, Ravi Chopra, Sujoy Ghosh and even Farhan Akhtar ‘picked up the stocks’ again.

Yash Chopra’s Mohabbatein was interesting, for it observed that the rebel image of the young Amitabh was somewhere a self-involved and a self-absorbed person who grew perhaps self-righteous and moralistic and became rigid. Indeed, David Reisman in his book, The Lonely Crowd, says that the inner directed man, a category that best defines Amitabh Bachchan’s roles in films, is one who learns by experience rather than by socialising, and one who turns to himself for his own strength, a self-made man but one who also tends to be rigid, punishing and unyielding. While Yash Chopra had explored the inner directedness of Amitabh in terms of his reflections and

meditations, he also explored the rigid side of the hero. We see the first attempts at exploring the inflexibility of the character in Mohabbatein. The man who challenged institutions has now, due to the success of his revolution, become the order, perfect and very rigid in that perfection. He builds a world with the high walls of ideals, which exiles the concrete reality, and hence becomes the same hegemonic power that he, in his youth, would attack.

Mohabbatein raised the same paradoxes as Deewar would raise, namely the dissociation of the ideals from the lived in concrete of the reality. In Deewar, Amitabh challenged the system by pointing out that the law imposed conditions from above, without considering the context of human actions. But in Mohabbatein, he has himself become the system, who now rigidly holds on to his ideas without any regard of how the world changes around him. Yash Chopra created a whole new slot for the hero to be sought after again; those directors who were not fortunate to be around at the time of Amitabh seemed to have got into a new phase of opportunity to work
with this legendary figure. Yash Chopra’s discovery of Amitabh Bachchan, who could become his own contradiction, was thus a major invention, as big an invention as the angry young man of Deewar.

Among all of Amitabh’s directors, I would say that Yash Chopra was perhaps the unlikeliest of them all and this is despite the fact that he directed Amitabh in films that should be counted among his best, namely Deewar, Kala Paththar, Kabhie Kabhie, Trishul and later Silsila. Yash Chopra is a man of romance while Amitabh Bachchan appears to be a cynical man, sardonic and even downright contemptuous of love, lust and conjugality, whether in romance or in marriage. Perhaps this is why Yash

Chopra was successful in identifying in Amitabh, a man who purposefully avoids romance, steels his heart to passions, skips his instincts and resolves to engage in only work in order to single-mindedly achieve his goals. One wonders whether a man less romantic than Yash Chopra could have identified this romance-shunning side of Amitabh Bachchan. Usually heroes in Hindi popular cinema treat romance as a routine, the song and dance being the expected thing in the bouquet of entertainment

they offer; Amitabh seemed to be an exception to this. Yash Chopra created this exception and in separating romance from Amitabh, further split the image of the hero. In the essays discussing Amitabh’s image, we have already mentioned that the split in the hero’s image created a certain kind of ‘lack’ or ‘absence’ that needed to be filled up. In the Amitabh romances, namely Kabhie Kabhie and Silsila, the hero wrenches himself out of his desires and emotions and settles into a life of heart rending tragedy.

There was also another split that Yash Chopra was successful in bringing about in Amitabh Bachchan, but this was more the doing of Salim Javed, which was to create a hero displaced from a life which he deserves, a man who is derailed from his providence, making his life a journey of struggle, of settling scores, of revenge

and retribution.

(Published with permission by Bloomsbury India).