Writing about themselves, few actors can circumvent lapsing into narcissism, emotional self-justifications and half-truths. Two such autobiographies that immediately come to mind are Songs My Mother Taught Me, Marlon Brando with Robert Lindsey (1995) and the less-cryptically titled Romancing With Life: An Autobiography (2007), Dev Anand. Forgive movie stars for not being able to approach the condition of literature—or satire—while writing about themselves. With Nails: The Film Diaries of Richard E. Grant (1996) could possibly be the lone satirical memoirs ever by an actor. How does a man or woman so worshipped, sift from the accolades and the tabloid impeachments, a kernel that he is himself supposed to have preserved? How does he look beyond how the world looked at him? How does he fall, and yet be interesting?

View Full Image With Dev Anand.

Mumbai of the 1940s and 1950s, the years that followed Yusuf Khan somewhat guiltily becoming Dilip Kumar, are monumental in Hindi cinema history. This book is not the one to look for a portrait of that time because Dilip Kumar was most probably never that outward-looking. For a biography of that time, of a film industry nascent and vibrant, but already used to shortcuts and star-worship, read Balraj Sahni’s short memoir, Meri Filmi Atmakatha, which I recently discovered. Sahni, also a man from undivided Punjab (Rawalpindi) like Dilip Kumar, Dev Anand and Raj Kapoor, writes almost like a chronicler—as much about studio-owners, production managers, theatre directors, supporting actors and the Indian People’s Theatre Association movement (he explains in detail how IPTA changed his views on acting and performing), as about his contemporaries and the stars of the time. Dilip Kumar looks inward—his book is about a fussy and passionate man, trying to make cinema and the world his own.

The actor talks peripherally about directors he worked with except for Mehboob Khan and Bimal Roy, who chiseled him into the mindful and sensitive dramatizer he became—consciously choosing roles that were fuelled by a fragile male ego, an intricate self-pity and a sense of being wronged. As recounted in magazine articles and many books, the actor was painfully ‘method’. To make a role perfect, he involved himself in everything that went into it. In some of these pages, most of his directors come across as magnanimous father figures allowing Dilip Kumar free reign. The chapter on the making of Gunga Jamuna is a refreshing exception. It details the location hunts that Dilip Kumar undertook himself. He lucidly recalls doing things like running continuously for half an hour before appearing on the set for a scene. His long-term memory is obviously elephantine.

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With Saira Banu before they got married.

He is among the most political of stars in Hindi cinema—although that’s still not much of a political animal. He recounts inadvertently going to jail while he was running a canteen in Pune—describing it as a sort of ritualistic Gandhian act. Nehru picked Dilip Kumar to directly help him and his party, and the actor jumped right in, first campaigning for VK Krishna Menon who was contesting from North Bombay in 1962 general elections. His oratory skills, of which the actor writes in a jarringly self-congratulatory tone, were practised first in this campaign. Later on, he gave speeches at cardiology conferences as well as erudite Urdu mehfils in India and Pakistan. He remained a lifelong friend of the Congress Party, and went on to become Mumbai’s sheriff and a member of the Rajya Sabha. In the book, he equates political entitlement with philanthropy rather than standing up for an ideology or a world view, or like most evolved politicians, for what he opposed: “I have always strongly endorsed the necessity for actors to possess a reasonable degree of social responsibility. In the next page, he reiterates, “I do not know if it is in my genes or if it is something I assimilated from the environment I was brought up in. It gives me great contentment and joy to espouse a good cause." Mumbai’s ruling Saffronite in the 1980s, Shiv Sena leader Bal Thackeray, accused him of being anti-national when Dilip Kumar accepted Pakistan’s highest civilian honour, the Nishaan-e-Imtiaz. He writes a paragraph or two about this incident and dismisses it as a small stumbling block in an otherwise cordial, lifelong relationship with the Thackerays.

View Full Image Dilip Kumar: The Substance and the Shadow: Hay House, 465 pages, Rs 699.

Dilip Kumar’s love for his mother is staunch—it is the only relationship that emerges in the book as one with enough emotional truth. The book begins with a reminiscing voice that is truthful, gentle, observant and candid. Peshawar, where he grew up, was the most important city of the North West Frontier Province. It had a punishingly cold winter. It also had bright red and orange apricots trees in bloom and a busy market called the Kissa Khwani Bazaar with meandering streets. He had many visiting chachas of various professions and temperaments, but Yusuf was the darling of his family’s women—the matriarch, his grandmother, his mother who he remembers as a silent worker (a woman of “ungrudging slogging", he writes grudgingly) and his sisters, of various abilities. He recalls holding on to his mother’s dupatta and going mostly anywhere she went. He loved to visit his maternal grandparents: “My nani and nana (maternal grandmother and grandfather) were anything but severe and, for the first time, I was seeing Amma being attended to and given the rightful position at the table during meal times. It gave me great happiness to see Amma laughing and being very much a part of the merriment that was going on continuously till it was time to hit the beds covered with silk quilts." The first few chapters of the book have the architecture and visual breadth of a novel.

Until the family’s changing fortunes in Mumbai, where Yusuf was determined to excel as a football player and his introduction to Devika Rani and Ashok Kumar at Bombay Talkies—a phase elaborately chronicled in all the other books written on him—Dilip Kumar writes about himself with self-deprecating honesty. As a young man, he was shy, evidently made more so by his friend Raj Kapoor, who he remembers as witty and dashing, the kind women fancied. Take this deadpan ode to his own hirsutism: “My hairiness was also the despair of mosquitoes, which got entangled in the thick clusters of my hands and legs. I would see the helpless creatures trying to escape from what could be like an African jungle to them and I always felt sorry for the poor insects and helped them fly out. So in all fairness to the unsuspecting mosquitoes and the aesthetic senses of whoever might set eyes on my ape-like appearance in a swimming pool, I had sensibly decided not to ever descend into one."

Given the tone of the book until it reaches this interesting and awkward phase of youth, middle age and late life read like parodies. A voice so different, it seems someone else took over the project entirely. The last section of the book is a series of tributes to the man by close friends from and outside the film world—a strange section to have in an autobiography.

Political Animals is a fortnightly blog on the intersection of politics and culture.

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