Reliving the aura of Don Abbaji…

Pankaj Kapur as Don Abbaji in Vishal Bhardwaj’s 2003 drama ‘Maqbool’

Back in the early to mid-2000s, master-actor Pankaj Kapur tells me, he'd been on the TV sitcom Office Office for long, already.

Crew was great. So was the pay. Show was popular, plus acclaimed. But something was bothering him enough that he admitted to his wife, Supriya Pathak, that he'd had enough.

Pankaj reasons, "There was hunger for the kinda work I wasn't getting to do. Plus, that I was getting kicked around by six characters, over eight days, on Office Office, was weighing on my psyche!"

This is around when director Vishal Bhardwaj approached him for Maqbool, an adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth, set in Mumbai's underworld.

Pankaj carried that script along to a shoot abroad, and returned to decline the role - eventually played by Piyush Mishra.

This time on, though, Vishal offered Pankaj the main villain, Jehangir Khan, aka old don, Abbaji, instead. This was first offered to Kamal Haasan. In the same way that Kay Kay Menon was the original choice for Macbeth/Maqbool. Naseeruddin Shah had recommended Pankaj for Abbaji's part.

To which Pankaj needed another month to go through the script, through another lens. Further, he held a series of discussions with Vishal and his co-writer, Abbas Tyrewala, "to go over details; a couple of which were missing."

For instance, Pankaj recalls, "Abbaji is a dreaded don. But we never see him in action." Which explains that iconic scene, later added by Vishal, of Abbaji on the swing, forcibly stuffing paan into the mouth of politician Palekar: "Gilori khaya karo Gulfam, zubaan qaboo mein rehti hai!"

Pankaj says this reflected a blooded animal, residing within Abbaji, with potential to be triggered, any moment. Likewise, there was a line in the script, where Tabu as Nimmi/Lady Macbeth, Abbaji's mistress, groans about being grossed out by "the animal he looks like, once he takes his clothes off."

To which Pankaj suggested to Vishal, "Allow me take my kurta off, once, if I can make [Abbaji] look like the beast, before a young lady."

He didn't put on weight for Abbaji's part: "It was just the posture - stomach protrudes, back slouches, height decreases, slightly, as a result." The filth is felt.

Another "request" from Pankaj - and he merely makes requests - was to cast Abbaji's bodyguards as seriously tall men, so he looks even smaller: "Huge people saluting you makes the menace [resonate] more." It's complete!

Consider that subtle toothpick scene, where Abbaji is dislodging a supari stuck between his teeth: "Everyone waits around. It's only once he's done, and the supari thrown away, that they carry on [with life]." Also, the fact that Abbaji wears simple salwar-kurta, and a hat that Pankaj had once picked up from Mumbai's Mohd Ali Road, lying in his office drawer since, added an inexplicable aura to Abbaji.

"It made him, externally, pure, and regal - the redness of paan, the handkerchief that becomes bloody… I don't know if any critic noticed the filling of the blanks," Pankaj quips. What everyone remembers, of course, is Abbaji's gruff voice.

That, as per the actor rendering it, intuitively, came from years of consuming paan-supari: "People have to strain to hear Abbaji. But he's in a position of authority, and used to being heard." Real power is rarely announced.

In another day and age, Pankaj was the Hindi voice of the Mahatma in Richard Attenborough's Gandhi (1982) - his first film that he got kicked out of National School of Drama's (NSD) repertory company, for picking up an external assignment; ending, thus, his day-job in theatre.

Pankaj couldn't possibly have been centrepiece through most of '80s-'90s starry/mainstream Bollywood. What followed, for him, first, was a profitable, prolific TV career that staggeringly ranged from the iconic detective, Karamchand (1985-88), down to the poppy Philips Top 10 (1997-99)! Kids (of my vintage) hold special love for Pankaj.

By the turn of the millennium, when Indian TV itself was getting taken over by saas-bahus sagas, Pankaj feels, mercifully, Hindi movies had begun to turn for the better.

Maqbool's a classic case in point. It premiered at the Toronto film festival, September 10, 2003. It ran for several weeks in theatres, upon release, January 30, 2004.

It primarily starred NSD alumni - Om Puri, Naseer, Piyush, besides Irrfan as Maqbool, whom Pankaj had co-starred with in the art-house, Ek Doctor Ki Maut (1990).

My only grouse with Maqbool is you barely watch Mumbai in it - for a film that's about its underworld. That was, evidently, a budgetary concern. It was mainly filmed in Bhopal.

Nitpickers also compared Don Abbaji to Don Corleone (Marlon Brando) from The Godfather that Pankaj was "taken aback by", and that every interpretation of the character, as revealed, emerged from the script, and he had to look no further.

He says, "Acting is like miniature painting - from the distance, you see the complete impact, but when you get closer, you observe the minor strokes. That's what worked, greatly, in Maqbool." True. Devil was, literally, in the detail.

Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture. He tweets @mayankw14
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