Nana Patekar’s breakthrough as a mainstream hero did not begin with a star deal. It began, in N Chandra’s telling, with an actor who offered to sit silently in a corner if he could play one of the four boys in Ankush.
The hat-trick that made a leading man
Chandra was a first-time director after a decade assisting Gulzar and a known editor. Before Ankush, Patekar’s Hindi film work of note was Ravi Chopra’s Aaj Ki Awaaz; his reputation came from the stage play Purush and the Marathi film Bhalu.
Patekar agreed to do Ankush for the lowest possible remuneration—a crucial concession for a production so underfunded that Chandra sold his flat and his sister’s jewellery to make it. Later, Patekar helped the debutant through the final leg by getting a cooperative bank to sanction a loan without collateral.
The result was a superhit and a character, the roughneck Ravi, who has stayed a favourite with young audiences since.
Choosing character over size
The partnership produced three films:
- Ankush (1986): Patekar played Ravi, the hot-headed and rebellious friend, in the low-budget superhit that changed his career.
- Pratighat (1987): Offered the main villain Kali Prasad, he chose Karamveer, the constable who loses his mental balance after his wife’s murder.
- Wajood (1998): Written as an obsessive villain called Malhar, the part was played by Patekar as a hero.
Chandra says he was surprised that Patekar took the supporting role in Pratighat instead of the main villain. “But that was Nana.” When handed a wig for his Nashik traffic-signal scene, Patekar first refused any appendage, then agreed on the condition that the print was developed overnight for him to review. He kept the wig.
No camps, no Mumbai, no compromises
Chandra did not cement the partnership into a camp. He cast actors by story, working with Anil Kapoor (Tezaab, Humlaa), Sunny Deol (Narsimha) and Mithun Chakraborty (Yugandhar). Patekar, he recalls, did not change over the years—except to soften.
Usually mentioned among Hindi cinema’s angry young men alongside Amitabh Bachchan, Sunny Deol and Shah Rukh Khan, Patekar at 76 had become milder. He left Mumbai, its luxuries and the roles he could have played, and moved to Pune to live like a farmer. Anyone who wanted him for a film had to travel to his farm and narrate the story there.
The script that arrived too late
During the pandemic, Chandra completed four or five scripts. One follows a son who returns from the US for his father’s last rites and, while waiting for the father’s friend Vinya to arrive, discovers that the man he resented had sold their home and taken a loan to set up a friend’s business—a friend who now wants to gift the son a three-bedroom Mumbai apartment. By the end, the khadoos baap has turned into a hero in his son’s eyes.
Chandra says he saw Patekar as the father while writing. Before he could offer it, Patekar died after a sudden heart attack. “But before I could sound him out, he departed from this world.”
That unoffered role now feels like the right coda: a stern father revealed as something warmer, just as the actor’s own later years were.
Source: Rediff.com
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