An ode to Mithun da

In the 1970s, a young Bengali boy left his modest middle-class home to become a Naxalite

In the 1970s, a young Bengali boy left his modest middle-class home to become a Naxalite. Not long after, his brother died and he came back homeu00a0- and somehow ended up in a movie, where he played a village archer. I saw him first, where I saw so much of what was outside the mainstream: on Doordarshan. A gleaming dark body carrying rage and bewilderment with lean grace.

The movie was called Mrigaya and it won himu00a0- Mithun Chakraborty - a national award.

For those who never glimpsed that avatar, Mithun was not gleaming darkness but glaring whiteness: white bell-bottoms, gilt-studded belts, the rather too suggestive pelvic thrust and flowing step-cut hairstyle. He was Gunmaster G-9, synonymous with a certain B-cinema - Suraksha, Disco Dancer, Dance Dance, cavorting with surname-less Stardust girls like Kim, Ranjeeta, Mandakini.

Nascent arty type and closet Chitrahaar obsessives agreed alike that Mithun Chakraborty was infra-dig. No one missed him when his star dipped. It took the pop culture revival of the 1990s to reinstate him as a campy-cult figure.

But even so, we knew there was something about the way his body unfurled on screen, the way his smile would spread incandescence across a frame. It showed us that so much in cinema is just about how actors communicate entire histories and geographies with their bodies. As if the body has memorised all the places it has been, things it has seen, people it has encountered. Actors are notional shape shifters: occupying a seemingly recognisable body while implying and convincing us that it is actually another. And of course Mithun was just very sexy, a chemistry quite clearly his own - of course a big part of what makes a star.

I was reminded of this again while watching him in a small Bengali film called Shukno Lanka where he plays Chinu Nandy, an aging, penurious junior artiste clinging to his dream of getting a real role where he'll show everyone what he's made of.

What a relief it was to watch him carry his body without the stiff arrogance and inability to abandon past stardom that so many of our older cult actors do. How wonderful that rather than the vain, overweening roles basically written to flatter stars and praise middle-class consumers for empty acts of consumptionu00a0- there was a heroic character and story about real fear, vanity and desire, a serious movie with a happy ending!

During the big lightmen's strike of the 1980s, only two actors offered public support -- Jackie Shroff and Mithun Chakraborty. For years, Mithun would organise an evening of Diwali fireworks for the kids from the bastis surrounding his place in Bandra.

Perhaps you must travel such times and places for it to show up in your body. Perhaps you must hold some convictions, to convince us about the life you play on screen. In the film, Mithun's character says: there must be some place where a man is not judged by how much money he has. Surely I could be somebody in that kind of place, no? Surely, it must be small movies with real stories where such actors too can be somebody.

Many of our actors leave you with that strangely insubstantial feeling - as if when you reach past the designer costumes, erase the ripped muscles you will touch only air, an absence of any reference points.

Or to put it in Mithun's words: There are two types of actors in the industry -- one says; 'Look, I'm here', and for the second, people say 'Look, he's here'. I've always liked the second more." Me too, Mithun-da.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer, teacher and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at https://www.parodevi.com/

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