“Track down a young man of Pune institute, passed in '74. Tall, dark, well-built, Bengali, name starts perhaps with M. Catch him and ask him to send me a photograph as early as possible. A portrait without any make-up. Must be very recent.”
This is what Mrinal Sen wrote in a telegram that he sent to his cameraman KK Mahajan when the maverick genius was planning to make Mrigayaa (1976) but wasn’t able to find the right actor for the lead role – a young tribal man named Ghinua.
A few days later, Mithun Chakraborty landed up at Sen’s home in Calcutta, unannounced. With a smile on his face, he told Sen, “I’m here, now tell me what you want me to do!”
It’s an incident which perfectly defines Mithun and his career because he was never really hailed as the biggest star or the greatest actor of his generation, even when he was delivering one commercially successful film after another. He even remains the only lead actor to have won the National Award for his debut film – Sen’s Mrigayaa.
On 8 October, the veteran actor-turned-politician is all set to receive the prestigious Dadasaheb Phalke Lifetime Achievement Award – India’s highest award in the field of cinema. Conferred by the Union Ministry of Information & Broadcasting, the award will be presented during the 70th National Film awards ceremony.
'Poor Man's Amitabh Bachchan'
Mithun himself has gone on record to recall how he was called “the poor man’s Amitabh Bachchan”. But he never failed to show up – for his films, his roles (however ridiculous they might have sounded on paper; in the 1999 film Shera by TLV Prasad, his hands turn into snake heads during action sequences and kill his enemies), and most importantly, for his ticket-buying audience (which in his case often were daily-wage earners and blue-collar workers). An audience that often felt ignored by mainstream Bollywood.
B Subhash’s Disco Dancer (1982), the film which changed his fortune, was not only a huge success in India, but also became the second highest-grossing film ever in the Soviet Union when it released, making Mithun an overnight international sensation.
The film gained immense popularity in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Turkey, and Africa, too, thanks to an unforgettable soundtrack composed by Bappi Lahiri and the lack of Hollywood and Western European films due to the Cold War. It also became the first Indian film to earn Rs 100 crore worldwide.
These are records which if a major star was able to break today with any of their films, they would be flashed across social media platforms for days.
A popular anecdote from 1986, when USSR leader Mikhail Gorbachev visited India, is that the then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi introduced him to Bollywood actor Amitabh Bachchan, referring to him as “the biggest superstar in India”. To which Gorbachev supposedly replied, “But my daughter only knows Mithun Chakraborty."
Pyar Jhukta Nahin, directed by Vijay Sadanah and co-starring Padmini Kolhapure, was one of the three biggest hits of 1985. He was electric as Krishnan Iyer in Mukul S Anand’s Agneepath (1990) and nearly stole Amitabh Bachchan’s thunder. It was also the era of the Mithun Chakraborty-Bappi Lahiri partnership which produced several musical hits within a short period of time, such as Dance Dance (1987), Guru (1989), and Prem Pratigya (1989).
He went ahead to win two more National Awards after Mrigayaa, for Buddhadeb Dasgupta’s poignant film Tahader Katha (1992) and for playing Ramakrishna Paramahansa in GV Iyer’s Swami Vivekananda (1994).
The Other Side to Mithun the Actor
It’s in his gentler, quieter performances in which Mithun’s real caliber as an actor shines through.
Whether it’s playing superstar Rohit Roy in Rituparno Ghosh’s Titli (2002), or a melancholic father in Buddhadev Dasgupta’s Kalpurush (2005), or his unforgettable turn as newspaper editor Manik Dasgupta in Mani Ratnam’s Guru (2007) – which was supposedly inspired by the founder of The Indian Express, Ramnath Goenka.
Even at the peak of his stardom, he tried to experiment by starring in an alternate kind of cinema with a veteran like Basu Chatterjee – with films such as Shaukeen (1982), Pasand Apni Apni (1983), and Sheesha (1986). But none of them became as memorable as some of the filmmaker’s other films, and hence didn’t have an enduring effect on Mithun’s career.
In the 1990s, when producers of low-budget action films – revenge-dramas with a bit of song and dance – would happily shoot their movies near The Monarch hotel in Ooty, which Mithun owns, he was able to churn out films at a pace which could have even put PT Usha to shame. These films were neither reviewed by prominent critics nor watched in the big cities, but in smaller centres they used to run for weeks and become profitable for all concerned.
While it’s true that this hurt his status as a leading man and turned him into a B-movie star at the time, it’s also simultaneously a truth that he paid more tax than any other Bollywood star in the country between 1995 and 1999. Another dichotomy in his filmography which is near impossible to decipher.
Filmmaker Ravikant Nagaich once called Bappi Lahiri and mentioned about a “naya ladka”, describing Mithun as “John Travolta meets Bruce Lee”.
Whether he’s remembered that way, or as the "Disco King", or even the “poor man’s Amitabh Bachchan”, the only certain thing is that he’ll be remembered for as long as films continue to get made in India. And perhaps in Russia as well!
(Sayantan Ghosh lives in New Delhi, and is executive editor at Simon & Schuster India. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)
(At The Quint, we question everything. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member today.)