Dilip Kumar reflected Nehru�s ideals, but it was the passion he brought to his craft that worked magic Not too long ago  at a function held on the death anniversary of a music exponent. He spoke of the times gone by � being gone! He felt posthumous. Yet even that sadness he tinged with humour: ”Aaj kal ke young log aisi angrezi bolte hain, ke angrez bhi na samjhen!” (Today’s youth speaks an English language even the English wouldn’t understand!)  He had brought to our screens just about the sexiest acting Hindi cinema’s ever had � and he was funny! Most biography worthy material.

Lord Meghnad Desai decided to do a book on Dilip Kumar, which is great. Now Desai decidedly appears to be �fun�! On the back-cover of the book, he smiles an immediately likeable, cherubic smile that one can safely conclude belongs to a man full of passions, opinions and convictions. Then why, oh why, can’t this coming together of two such colourful people result in a book that’s a blast? A biography that could sweep the cinema-loving reader into a grand, dramatic, giggle-ride through a life well-lived, well-loved and certainly deserving to be well-chronicled?

It could perhaps be because Desai didn’t get the opportunity to really sit with Dilip Kumar and explore the man’s heart. At the very outset we are told that their ‘’schedules did not quite match”, and that led to this book which is �half an exercise in nostalgia and half in social science�. He warns that those looking for gossip should look elsewhere. Fair enough. But surely as almost a borderline-obsessive lover of Hindi films, whose �heart was in commercial cinema�, Desai must know the importance of bringing the very qualities he loved about Dilip Kumar’s films to his book? Those films of high drama and intensities, films which palpitated with longings and ideals, which nakedly portrayed the helplessness the hero felt and the hungry emotions he wrestled with, the causes he stood up for, and the social systems he fought against�all this communicated through beautifully spoken words, whether Urdu or Bhojpuri, or through burning silences that threatened to explode the screen�all this surely needed to be poured into the book with the same, deep feeling that the actor felt?

And when Desai does do that, every now and then, believe me, the words become immediately arresting. As when he talks about Dilip Kumar being the first male Muslim star of the country, who changed his name from Yusuf Khan because �he feared his father would not approve of him appearing in films under the family name�. Or when the writer talks of the star being politically active, without ever holding political office at the national level; of him being a representative of the Muslims victimised in the 1992-93 riots in Mumbai and bravely giving them shelter and support. Or when, for a minor reason, Dilip Kumar was jailed overnight in 1942, and he refused to eat the toast, eggs and tea offered to him for breakfast because Gandhiji was fasting at the same time! Or when he talks of the raid on Dilip Kumar’s house after the police arrested �a boy suspected of being a Pakistani spy, and in his diary they found Dilip Kumar’s name and address�. �No one came to his aid, not even Nehru,� he writes. Or when Desai so intelligently concludes that a film like Mughal-e-Azam can �never be made again not because of the cost or even the cast but because that confident Muslim culture of India which gave us the film has disappeared�.

It’s facts like these that bring the book to life. Although the analyses of the films are lucidly written, it’s the person behind the persona we’re most interested in. Yes, the new angle of Nehru’s politics that he says Dilip Kumar incorporated into his films is noteworthy, but it’s the depths of the fruit merchant’s son who had acted in 16 films by the age of twenty-eight that we’re dying to know about. What made his performance in Ganga Jamuna so near-perfect, and after so many years, what made him still break our hearts in Shakti? The man who during an interview had to stop talking about the communal riots because the talk was making him sick, what was this man all about? Although reader-friendly, I so wish Desai’s book could have taken a bigger leap of love.

There is one passage, however, at the end of the book which moved me deeply and I’d like to quote it at length: �There has been no respite (for Dilip Kumar) since 1993. He is now a targeted man as far as the Shiv Sena is concerned. His one Pakistani award, the Nishan-e-Imtiaz, rekindled all the old animosities. That Morarji Desai and Atal Bihari Vajpayee have been also honoured by Pakistan does not count. They are Hindus; their loyalty is beyond doubt. He is a Muslim; for some that is a synonym for disloyalty. Having imaged the best of India in fantasy, it is Dilip Kumar’s fate to live its grim reality as Yusuf Khan.�

(The author Tanuja Chandra is the director of movies like Sangharsh and Yeh Zindagi Ka Safar)

sources : http://www.indiafm.com