We took Mithun Chakraborty quite lightly, because he was far from handsome, quite dark-complexioned and had a voice that was grating to the ear. But he proved us wrong. We felt he was a better dancer than an actor, but again he proved us wrong, winning three National Awards, showing that he was no flash-in-the-pan and was here to stay. Shoma A. Chatterji remembers her interactions with the iconic actor and details why he is so deserving of the coveted Dadasaheb Phalke Award
I hate to stand in long queues waiting for my turn to interview a star at press conferences. But it has become a trend. Journalists are bound by deadlines, but I’m an independent writer and do not face any pressure from editors. Even so, I feel it is undignified to have to wait in a queue to interview an actor, as we have mutual interests. I have interviewed Mithun Chakraborty three times over the past decade or so, standing in queues, and on two of those occasions he called me in ahead of turn – maybe because of my grey hair and stooped form. He is an actor I have come to respect deeply for the way he fought against every imaginable challenge and won – again and again and again.
An actor becomes a sort of miracle when he takes his audience by surprise with the range of his performances over a span of films as different from each other as chalk from cheese. Mithun Chakraborty personifies such a miracle – he swiftly changes colour like a chameleon from Chinu Nandy in Gaurav Pandey’s Shukno Lanka to Buddhadeb Dasgupta’s Phera to the Dev-produced Projapoti. Or, to step back in time, from Partho Ghosh’s Rehmat Ali to Suman Ghosh’s Nobel Chor.
I recently watched Mithun in Mrinal Sen’s Mrigaya (1976) in which he played an oppressed tribal. It was adapted from an Odia short story called Shikar by Bhagbati Charan Panigrahi. The tale, set in the 1930s, describes the tough lives of a tribal community. The story evolves against the backdrop of a rebellion. Mithun, then barely 26, with his dark complexion, rugged looks and bare body, put in such a spontaneous performance in his debut film that he bagged the National Award for Best Actor along with leading lady Mamata Shankar, while K.K. Mahajan bagged the Best Cinematographer Award the following year.
This is Mithun’s 48th year in films. The journey was far from easy, since he came from a middle-class Bengali family living in a corner of a Kolkata suburb, with not the remotest connection to films, either Bengali or Bollywood. He had no funds to back him, no patronage. Yet, after the National Award, Mithun or Gauranga Chakraborty, decided to come to Bombay and test the waters. He had never trained as an actor. It was only by the kind offices of Shakti Samanta who gave him an itsy-bitsy role in a film that he got to do a crash course in acting at the FTII, Pune. Now, whenever he meets a struggler, he says, quite coolly, “If I can do it, anyone can.”
We took Mithun quite lightly, because he was far from handsome, quite dark-complexioned and had a voice that was grating to the ear. But he proved us wrong. We felt he was a better dancer than an actor, but again, he proved us wrong, winning three National Awards, showing that he was no flash-in-the-pan and was here to stay. In some of his not-so-big films too, Mithun did extremely well. In Boxer,he fails to be a boxer and inKasam Paida Karne Wale Ki, he has a double role. His versatility is magical. He can switch from one role to another in different studios on the same day within hours. About his approach to a role, he says, “I first look at the framework the director gives me, and at the script. Then I add my own inputs without diverting from the model the director has provided me. Within that framework, I play around with dialogue, costume, tagline, make-up and so on.”
About Bhanu, the poor farmer of Bolpur he portrayed in Suman Ghosh’s Nobel Chor, Mithun said, “I have become a bit choosy about my acting assignments. I try to pick only those films that suit my sensibility. But Suman (the director) flew down to Mumbai just to meet me. The name of the film sounded wonderful. I loved the script and agreed to slip into the shoes of Bhanu. The film charts Bhanu’s journey to Kolkata for the first time in his life where he tries to sell the Nobel medal he found in Bolpur. He meets people from all walks of life, crossing barriers of social class, educational levels, and so on. He has adventures, some hilarious, others sad orsatiric. Suman has done a very good job of the script.”
And what happens when a film in which he has played the major role flops? “Of course I do feel frustrated and disappointed. But it is a part of the entire ball game in films,” Mithun says. “As an actor, I cannot do anything about it. This is the reason why the prospective commercial viability of a film is the main criterion before accepting an assignment. This is the reason I say ‘yes’ to films like Rehmat Ali, which had commercial prospects. It gives me tremendous satisfaction because it will reach out to the masses, to a huge audience. What more does an actor want? True that at times, with the best of strategic planning, things fail to work out. But the aim must be commercial success and mass acceptance.”
Mithun has had one of the widest repertoires as an actor over four decades. How does he manage to switch from a character like the one he played in Guruto the one in Rehmat Ali? Says Mithun: “It comes with long practice and experience. Practice, for me, is the bottom line. If I cannot switch from one role to another, I have no right to call myself an actor, do I? Besides, for a totally commercial film, there is practically no homework to be done. I speak the same lines in similar situations but maybe I use a different approach. To be frank, we have approximately five storylines that cover every kind of film within the mainstream. One just changes the permutations and combinations to give a certain slant to a given script to make it a little different from the others. I have taglines in Bengali commercial films and they have done wonders to the box office value of the films. I had one in Rehmat Alitoo (laughs) – Naameraage Rehmat, pawre Ali, Sare jannat bajaye taali. The audience loves these taglines.”
Mithun Chakraborty is in the Limca Book of Records for 19 movie releases as lead actor in 1989, a feat which remains unmatched in Bollywood. Some critics feel the Dadasaheb Phalke Award he won was influenced by the fact that he is a leading MP of the BJP. Yes, he is that too. But no one can take away from the fact that he has been one of the outstanding actors in the Indian film industry. At 74, he is still busy working in several Bengali films, some Hindi movies and one in Telugu. Can anyone really point at him and say, “This guy does not deserve the Dadasaheb Phalke Award?”
(The writer is a senior journalist and film historian based in Kolkata.)