Dharmendra was an outsized hero who made the movies larger
There are so many Dharmendras to love. Our tribute to the actor whose casual charm belied his larger-than-life aura
He was the first person to give me an autograph. I was eight. I had handed Dharmendra a notebook with a novelty cover that made it look like a sandwich, and in his massive hand, this looked like a crouton. He smiled as he signed it, and I stared. This gorgeous 50-something man wore a black sleeveless shirt, showing off the kind of sculpted arms I only knew from my action figures, and was instantly unforgettable. He had an immense aura but wore it casually, a giant nonchalantly larger than life. A giant who knows he’s a giant. An aunt who sang in the movies had taken the family to a filmi function, and I was seated next to Dharamji. (This marked the only time in my life that my mother was envious of me.)
Decades later, he tweeted at me. I had co-written the 2022 film Chup with R. Balki, and Sunny Deol was a part of the film. The day the trailer launched Dharmendra posted about it saying “Yakeenan yeh ek khamosh cheekh hogi" and wishing the crew the best, to which one of his fans posted about his “guest appearance" in the 1969 film Khamoshi and the sublime song Tum Pukar Lo, where Dharmendra is never fully glimpsed. Several months later, Dharmendra replied to the fan: “I am the hero of film Khamoshi."
This is an odd, unexpected clarification. Khamoshi stars Waheeda Rehman as a nurse in the psychiatric ward of a hospital, while Dharmendra plays a patient (Patient No.42). He is the romantic hero she idealises in her head, but Rajesh Khanna is—traditionally—the film’s leading man. Dharmendra’s presence is striking, and the way he flits through the song Tum Pukar Lo, showing his gait and his silhouette and the back of his head, is magical. For him to feel the need to correct a fan, after all these years, about this hierarchy, may seem strange. It does vividly demonstrate one thing: a refusal to be forgotten.
Not that we ever could. Between the Dharmendra of 1969 and the Dharmendra of 2022, and indeed the Dharmendra signing my notebook in 1989, stood a man of dramatic contradictions. He was a man with a fine ear for shayari, a man who needed his movie scripts written in Urdu, yet it feels blasphemous to imagine “kuttey, main tera khoon pi jaaoonga"—his action-hero refrain through the 1980s—written in that language. I remember seeing Dharmendra on a Salman Khan gameshow where Khan asked him what he would do with the prize money of a lakh or two, and he candidly laughed, saying he would drink it away. I also remember him on a news channel speaking thoughtfully about a Muslim woman who was disappointed that he had joined the BJP, and how he had assured her that he was going to the party as a representative of the Muslims, a true secularist.
Every Dharmendra we saw was the real thing.
How he entertained us, how he gave us someone to stare at, how he made our movies larger than they were, as if they had to make room for this outsized hero. And—as demonstrated by Dharam Veer, where he played a gladiator who rose to be king—how good he looked in a skirt.
Fifty years of Sholay also marks 50 years of Chupke Chupke, for many of us our most rewatched Dharmendra film. The hero is in flawless screwball form as a professor pretending at being a chauffeur in that comedy about language and class-distinction, plaintively asking whether chauffeurs don’t have hearts, or demanding that his salary not be cut. In my favourite scene, Dharmendra bonds briefly with a burglar who imagines him to be a fellow creature of the night, sneaking into a bedroom. Dharmendra howls with outrage but his fury is instantly undercut by his concern for the burglar. Get out, he instructs, but go safely.
Dharmendra’s work with Chupke Chupke director Hrishikesh Mukherjee remains his most enduring. He was lovely as the quietly supporting male lead in Anupama, had a superb cameo in Guddi as the matinee idol, and Mukherjee’s Satyakam—a film about an idealistic engineering graduate getting disillusioned by modern India—may be Dharmendra’s finest, most sensitive performance.
There are so many Dharmendras to love. An underrated actor, he let his eyes tenderly wash over with longing for his heroines, let his smirks do the heavy lifting, held the screen with furious intensity. In Phool Aur Patthar he lands punches like exclamation marks, broad-shouldered haymakers that seem aimed at the horizon. In Anpadh he turns courtly, all tilted head and apologetic eyes, wooing with a gentleness that instinctly makes his co-star preen. Look at him in Johnny Gaddaar, barking orders and slapping around heroes, all authority and hardboiled experience. Watch him lip-sync Main Jat Yamla Pagla Deewana in Pratigya, every shrug and eyebrow matching the dhol, like he’s conducting the orchestra with his exuberant shoulders. And then, in Shalimar, this macho star literally dresses as a chessboard to steal a ruby… and somehow still looks cool.
We’ll always have Sholay. Where Dharmendra made denim on denim look better than ever, where he stood behind an idol and pretended to be a god, where he fell in love with a fast-talking girl, and where he stood high up next to a water tanker, threatening to kill himself if kept away from the aforementioned fast-talker. I was reminded of this weeks ago when grisly rumours about the actor’s demise were prematurely circulated by several of our inept news outlets, only for them to be shamed when it was instead announced that Dharmendra was being discharged from hospital and being taken home. As Veeru had said once the threats had paid off, “Aaj marna cancel." Cancel, indeed.
He’s gone now, but what a way to go. A movie reference in one hand, a movie trailer in the other. His swansong Ikkis releases next month, and I hear the actor is lovely in the film. I’m most grateful that this man—this impossibly beautiful man—went out on his own terms. He performed for us across seven decades, and finished the job with his boots on. Thank you for the movies, Dharamji, and thank you for that autograph.
Raja Sen is a Lounge columnist.
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