The man who turned his back on stardom
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Avijit Ghosh
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As An Actor, He Kept Switching Between Formula And Offbeat
Vinod Khanna, who pas sed
away in Mumbai on Wednesday , was headed for superstardom before he
heeded another, more spiritual call. His pairing with Bachchan was a
distributor's dream come true. Even those who sold cinema tickets in
black in India's dingy bylanes felt the same. The duo ensured serpentine
queues before the counters for weeks, for films like Parvarish, Khoon
Pasina, Hera Pheri and Muqaddar Ka Sikander. Two other major winners in
his resume, sans Bach
chan, were Raj Khosla's Main Tulsi Tere Angan Ki and Feroz Khan's
Qurbani. Incidentally , Khan also passed away on April 27, eight years
ago.
Khanna wasn't content doing formula commercials. He had a
penchant for the offbeat--Gulzar's Achanak, Madan Sinha's Imtihan,
Aruna-Vikas's Shaque and Aruna Raje's Rihaee, to name a few. Many
enjoyed watching him as the cop probing a kidnapping in Raj Sippy's
Inkaar, inspired by Akira Kurosawa's High and Low.
As a young actor, he played villainish roles in superhits such as Rajesh Khanna's Aan Milo Sajna. His best performance then came in Mera Gaon Mera Desh (1971) in which he played Jabbar, a vicious dacoit who terrorises Chambal.
The transition from bad guy to good guy was gradual.In Gulzar's Mere Apne (1971), Khanna was leader of a bunch of wayward, unemployed youth typifying the angst-ridden political and social landscape of India in early 1970s.
The same year he had the opportunity to play a solo hero in Hum Tum Aur Woh in which he also sang the superhit Sanskritised song, `Priya praneshwari'. By 1973, he had made the transition to action hero although the flops outnumbered hits such as Kach che Dhaage. It was in the multistarrer that he found his métier.
But Khanna shock ed tinsel world by forsaking it all to jo in Rajneesh's ash ram in Pune in the early 1980s. He beca me one of his closest disciples.
Just when Bolly wood had given up on Khanna, he retur ned in 1987 with Saty amev Jayate and In saaf, both moderate ly successful films.He was good as a mafia boss in Dayavan, inspired allegedly by reallife don Varadarajan Mudaliar, though ma ny insisted that Kamal Haasan was better in the Tamil original, Nayakan.
Towards the later part of his career, he took up character roles. One of the memorable ones was of Prajapati Pandey , Salman Khan's father in Dabangg (2010). The tension between the two was one of the film's more nuanced tracks that got drowned in the knuckle-crunching action.
Khanna seemed to find work-life balance after joining BJP . He was asked to contest Lok Sabha polls in 1998 from Gurdaspur, then a Congress citadel. He made it his own.Khanna also loved cricket and seldom missed watching a Test match in his younger da ys. For charity games, he was dressed in impeccable cricket overalls. “The public may think I am just another filmstar, but there was a time when I played fair cricket with (Test player) Budhi Kunderan. Later I played with Eknath Solkar at the Hindu Gym. I used to bat at no. 4 but settled for films the moment I realised I couldn't be a Vishwanath! Even so cricket, not films, is my first love,“ he wrote in The Illustrated Weekly of India in 1979.
Actor, seeker, politician and avid cricket lover--Khanna journeyed through life with the same abandon that he landed blows on bad guys. Until felled by the Big C, he lived life to the brim like few Bollywood stars have. He deserves a compelling biography .
As a young actor, he played villainish roles in superhits such as Rajesh Khanna's Aan Milo Sajna. His best performance then came in Mera Gaon Mera Desh (1971) in which he played Jabbar, a vicious dacoit who terrorises Chambal.
The transition from bad guy to good guy was gradual.In Gulzar's Mere Apne (1971), Khanna was leader of a bunch of wayward, unemployed youth typifying the angst-ridden political and social landscape of India in early 1970s.
The same year he had the opportunity to play a solo hero in Hum Tum Aur Woh in which he also sang the superhit Sanskritised song, `Priya praneshwari'. By 1973, he had made the transition to action hero although the flops outnumbered hits such as Kach che Dhaage. It was in the multistarrer that he found his métier.
But Khanna shock ed tinsel world by forsaking it all to jo in Rajneesh's ash ram in Pune in the early 1980s. He beca me one of his closest disciples.
Just when Bolly wood had given up on Khanna, he retur ned in 1987 with Saty amev Jayate and In saaf, both moderate ly successful films.He was good as a mafia boss in Dayavan, inspired allegedly by reallife don Varadarajan Mudaliar, though ma ny insisted that Kamal Haasan was better in the Tamil original, Nayakan.
Towards the later part of his career, he took up character roles. One of the memorable ones was of Prajapati Pandey , Salman Khan's father in Dabangg (2010). The tension between the two was one of the film's more nuanced tracks that got drowned in the knuckle-crunching action.
Khanna seemed to find work-life balance after joining BJP . He was asked to contest Lok Sabha polls in 1998 from Gurdaspur, then a Congress citadel. He made it his own.Khanna also loved cricket and seldom missed watching a Test match in his younger da ys. For charity games, he was dressed in impeccable cricket overalls. “The public may think I am just another filmstar, but there was a time when I played fair cricket with (Test player) Budhi Kunderan. Later I played with Eknath Solkar at the Hindu Gym. I used to bat at no. 4 but settled for films the moment I realised I couldn't be a Vishwanath! Even so cricket, not films, is my first love,“ he wrote in The Illustrated Weekly of India in 1979.
Actor, seeker, politician and avid cricket lover--Khanna journeyed through life with the same abandon that he landed blows on bad guys. Until felled by the Big C, he lived life to the brim like few Bollywood stars have. He deserves a compelling biography .
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