MANOJ KUMAR:PATRIOTISM PERSONIFIED

Manoj Kumar's peak as a crowd-puller in the mid-1970s coincided with the advent of Mumbai multi-starrers, led by Sholay (1975), which changed the course of Hindi popular cinema.

- Saibal Chatterjee

Manoj Kumar espoused causes that the nation and its builders held dear. His best-known films captured the minds and hearts of moviegoers in a nation making its way through the first few decades of its independence from British rule. He personified patriotism and it paid off.

His career unfolded in an era in which a newly-free people struggled with poverty, unemployment and a lopsided system manipulated by the powerful. There was anger and frustration in Manoj Kumar's films but they were shorn of jingoism and steeped in secular values.

Deep-rootedhumanism, if only of arather simplistic kind, ran like a thread through his films, in which he often became the voice of the common man. The actor-director played Bharat - an alternative name for India - in five films, starting with Upkar (1967) and ending with Clerk (1989), the last film that he helmed with himself as the male lead.

Manoj Kumar achieved stupendous success with his patriotic films, which included Purab Aur Paschim (1970), in which he employed broad strokes to harp upon a clash between East and West; Roti Kapada Aur Makaan (1974), which zeroed in on a middle-class family at the crossroads of ethics and expediency; and Kranti (1981), a historical drama about India's first War of Independence in the 19th century.