The only equal of J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, the boy who was stuck in perennial childhood, is our very own A. K. Hangal. Only in reverse. Like Pan, Hangal has been the eternal old man, a man who was born to be old and remained so, in India’s collective consciousness. Believe it or not, he too was young once!
In most of his roles, he was the good old man, the man who could do no harm, and everybody could rely on him for a sympathetic meal of niceness. The public virtually remained oblivious to Avtar Kishan Hangal, the man who had a substantial political spine.
Born on February 1st in Sialkot of British India, he spent his growing up years in Peshawar. While his family was in government jobs, he refused to work with the establishment. Instead, he learnt tailoring. In a short span of time, not only did he master the art, his political activism made him form the trade union for all the tailors in Peshawar.
Meanwhile, Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) also caught his fancy. When India became independent, and the partition led to exodus, he decided to stay in Pakistan. He was arrested and jailed for his communist ideologies. After spending two years in prison, he was asked to leave Pakistan and go to India. When he refused, he was given an ultimatum of 12 hours to leave Pakistan by the Muslim seniors of his party. With Rs.20 in his pocket, Hangal reached Bombay.
He got a job as a tailor, and his skill with fabric soon earned him a reputation so good that he would deal with premium customers like the Nawab of Pataudi and foreigners. With a salary as high as Rs. 500, he was doing very well for himself, but he wanted something more out of life. He hunted down the IPTA members, and started rebuilding the association. With the help of Kaifi Azmi and Balraj Sahani, he rented a place for stage rehearsals. His colleagues Sahani and Chetan Anand were fans of his stage work, and coaxed him to join films.
After shunning the idea for long, Hangal finally agreed to play Raj Kapoor’s brother in Basu Bhattacharya’s Teesri Kasam, but the role was edited out in the final cut. But post that unlucky beginning however, there was no looking back. His film career that began in his 40s made him one of the most sought after character artistes. Thus we got the grand old man of Hindi cinema, a father figure everyone wished to have.
In 1993, Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray branded him a traitor. He faced a two-year ban for attending a Pakistani Day function. Eventually, things returned to normal, but his frail health kept him away from work, and he took up very few films. His last major films were Lagaan in 2002 and Paheli in 2005.
In the post globalised India, his Rahim Chacha and several other characters became the staple diet of the mass consuming old classics on TV. And everyone forgot about the real him. He was pulled out of oblivion when the news of his illness and lack of money for treatment made headlines. Help poured in from all corners, and he also faced the camera for the last time for Madhubala, a TV show.
Hangal, despite being an actor of calibre, never got roles off the beaten track. And that’s a real tragedy. Because a film like Shaukeen, in which he played the tricky role of a lecherous old man, proved what an able actor he was, and it’s the short-sightedness of our cinema that it wasn’t able to view him beyond the image of a good old man.
(This story was first published on August 26, 2015)
(The writer is a journalist and a screenwriter who believes in the insanity of words, in print or otherwise. Follow him on Twitter: @RanjibMazumder)
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