A superstar in real life as well

Aradhika Sharma

Amitabh bachchan’s is a life well lived and well chronicled. So, what’s new about this book on the mega star by authors Pradeep Chandra and Vikas Chandra Sinha? Nothing much, really. However, it’s a well-researched book on the star’s life, that has seen many twists and turns of fate and cast him in many roles, on screen and in real life — the son, the father and the grandfather, the actor, the superstar, the politician, the businessman, the TV anchor and one of the most beloved, admired and respected icons in India.

The authors seek to introduce newness by including personal anecdotes from the star himself and comments from his family and friends and colleagues. The problem — if you could call it that — is that Bachchan is himself a master chronicler, specially since he started using social media and got himself a Twitter handle. He now frequently shares his views, photographs and vignettes from his daily life with his fans in the form of his blog posts and tweets. Says Bachchan: “I’m writing every day, without break and getting an average of 300-400 responses each day…(I) have a very committed and generous fan presence that I speak and listen to each day.”

Thus, to hold the attention of the reader, the authors, ironically, will have to compete with the star himself. But as the authors frankly admit “we do not lay claim to originality” but have “leaned heavily on the works of real scholars of films, journalists and film insiders to fashion a narrative…”

Chandra and Sinha have arranged the chapters according to the ‘roles’ or ‘avatars’ that Amitabh has taken in his chequered life and career; the subtitle of each chapter is named after a film. The chapters are categorised as The Family Man, The Writer, The Star of the Millennium, The Divine Baritone, The Nation’s Paterfamilias.

The book is remarkable in the volume of research it has undertaken, delving into hundreds of publications and photographs of their subject. The photographs indeed deserve a special mention — many of which are quite fascinating insofar as they are yet unseen, which seems to be quite an admirable feat as Bachchan is so well documented. The authors have delved deep to find and quote from essays by British journalist, Sarfraz Manzoor (2015), who wrote that in the 1980s “Bachchan mattered because this was a time when there was so little representation of Asians on television. Many of us were struggling to find reasons to be proud of our heritage. Bachchan’s hyper-masculine heroism and aggressive idealism showed us there were other ways to be Asian on screen than as a victim.”

They quote Shashi Tharoor who is reported to have said that the only portraits displayed in the city of Damacus that were as big as those of the then President Hafiz Assad, were those of Bachchan. Similarly, there are references to the comments by Shoma Chatterji, Mahesh Bhatt, Dr Subhash Chandra and so on. Pritish Nandy’s famous January 1989 edition of The Illustrated Weekly Of India that had a dejected Bachchan on the cover with the headline declaring “FINISHED!’ which fuelled the star to struggle out of the abyss he found himself in during that period, and for which Nandy apologised years later, is also given due space.

The book, thus, is an end-to-end chronological record of events of the life of the superstar who has had a huge impact on the course of Hindi film industry and has reinvented himself in myriad ways. As one of his directors said, “Perhaps, he is lucky because he is brilliant or maybe he is brilliant because he is lucky. Let the Gods decide. For us, his fans, he is indeed a Muqaddar ka Sikandar.”