Nana Patekar, who died on 8 October at 75, was an actor who bent Hindi cinema’s frame without ever occupying its conventional centre. He was not the poster hero, not simply the villain. For three decades, films moved toward him because he carried something the industry had spent years trying to make glamorous: the weight of ordinary, middle-aged grievance.
A voice from the ration queue and the local train
Where the leading men of late-1980s Hindi cinema had deep, polished voices, Patekar had a rough, clipped rasp—a sound that belonged to the ration queue and the local train. Trained as a painter at the JJ School of Art and shaped in Marathi theatre, he made his debut in Gaman (1978) and spent a decade in small parts, including a drug dealer in Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay! (1988).
The shift came with Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s Parinda (1989). As the gangster Anna, Patekar found menace in stillness. The role won him a National Award and forced the Hindi film villain to learn restraint.
That restraint became his instrument. He spoke in short, low bursts, held pauses a beat too long, and gave dialogue none of the customary swagger. In Krantiveer (1994) he turned the angry-young-man speech into a list of charges against the country; in Yeshwant (1997), a speech about a mosquito became one of Hindi cinema’s most quoted passages.
What the silence and the weariness showed
Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Khamoshi: The Musical (1996) took his voice away. Cast as Joseph, a deaf-mute father, Patekar gave one of his gentlest performances—proof that his intensity was about control, not volume.
His commitment to craft was most visible in Prahaar (1991), which he acted in, co-wrote and directed. To prepare, he spent nearly three years with the Maratha Light Infantry. Later, Ab Tak Chhappan (2004) fixed his image: Sadhu Agashe, a Mumbai encounter specialist with 56 kills, played moral exhaustion as a day job. Ram Gopal Varma, who produced the film, said it could not have been made without Patekar.
- Parinda (1989): Anna made the Hindi film villain quiet.
- Prahaar (1991): Actor, co-writer and director; prepared with the Maratha Light Infantry.
- Khamoshi (1996): Joseph removed the voice and revealed the control.
- Ab Tak Chhappan (2004): Sadhu Agashe made moral exhaustion a day job.
The second ledger
In later years, the temper became a punchline. As Uday Shetty in Welcome (2007) and Welcome Back (2015), he made audiences laugh, and some purists wince. He kept returning to Marathi cinema in between, giving the middle-class Marathi man—the clerk, the chawl resident, the person with strong views but little power—a face on the national screen.
A fair account must also carry the other record. In 2008, Tanushree Dutta accused him of sexual harassment on set; she filed a complaint with the Cine & TV Artists Association that March and repeated the allegation in 2013 and 2018. Her account is widely credited with bringing #MeToo to Bollywood. Patekar denied the allegation. He lost Housefull 4 in the fallout and was working again soon after.
That allegation will keep sitting beside the films. It is uncomfortable, and it should be. The work remains; so does the record. That, too, is part of the difficulty of Nana Patekar.
Source: The Federal
Comments