The history and the importance of character in Bollywood

While watching reruns of some cult Bollywood films, a thought occurred to me. That how interesting and well crafted characters, more than anything else in those films, have always fascinated the Indian audience and perhaps those characters were the single most important factor in ensuring success and their following even till now. If I think about many cult Hindi films starting from the 50’s, I see a common thread wherein an interesting and an identifiable character- reflecting the times- had always been at the center of those films’ success; when I say success, I mean either box office or critical, and many a times, it was both.

The newly independent India of the 50’s, a nation not only recovering from the bruises of partition & the long colonial rule but also facing many problems- economic and otherwise-, found echo with such characters as sensitive poet Vijay (played by Guru Dutt in the film Pyaasa) or with Devdas (played by Dilip Kumar in the film Devdas). Both characters are love-lorn, misunderstood and also doomed, but both were immensely loved by the audiences for the same reasons; the intensity of these characters and also for some sort of identification with such fatalistic characters. This brilliantly worded song by Sahir Ludhianvi, from the film Pyaasa, captures the ethos of one such character. Other notable examples of this period where the character dominated: The character of Nargis in Mother India and the affable and the Chaplinesque Raj Kapoor in many of his films.

Luck By Chance (2009)

As if it was not enough for Farhan Akhtar, the director, to charm us with his cool films, he has now also donned a role of an actor with films such as Rock On and Luck By Chance. I didnt like Rock On much; I thought that even though the film was well made, it was quite predictable and safe in the end. Luck by Chance, however, I found very rich and well crafted. The mind behind Luck By Chance, Zoya Akhtar, goes introspective by turning the cameras on the industry she has grown up in (Zoya is the daughter of legendary writer/lyricist Javed Akhtar & the talented screenwriter Honey Irani & she is also the sister of Farhan Akhtar) and in the process tells us a story set in a world where destiny, talent, egos and little chances all converge to make or break people.