How Dilip Kumar Let It All Out on the Screen

Kumar's approach was fruitful but taxing, as we learn in this excerpt from The Man Who Became Cinema, a new biography of the actor

- Ashok Chopra

By the time Indian cinema entered its classical phase in the late 1940s, Dilip Kumar had completed his self-discovery as an actor to a large extent. The basic features of his hero were earmarked: an introvert who had been wronged, takes it to his heart and generates a complete catharsis of a whole range of emotions. He portrayed the search for an ideal self—one proclaiming true emancipation through love but desires it to be materialized only in a just society; and as that is not possible in actual reality, the self has to perish to validate this idealized conviction. The actor, in fact, represented the popular novelist Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay's model of a vulnerable, self-destructing hero in Bengali literature.

Several of his films depicted Dilip Kumar as an unrequited lover seeking a kind of liberation from the unjust world through a prolonged internalized suffering (often ending in death) as seen in S.U. Sunny's Mela, S.K. Ojha's Hulchul (1951), Nitin Bose's Deedar and Gunga Jumna (1961), Ram Daryani's Tarana (1951), Bimal Roy's Devdas, S.U. Sunny's Uran Khatola (1955), Hrishikesh Mukherjee's Musafir (1957) and K. Asif's Mughal-e-Azam (1960). In contrast, he, during this phase, was also seen in somewhat morbid anti-hero characters such as in Shaheed Latif's Arzoo (1950), S.U. Sunny's Babul, Mehboob Khan's Andaz and Amar, and R.C. Talwar's Sangdil (1952).