In the skin of characters

Memoirs by film actors can be either revealing or disappointing. Good ones are those that offer us more than what nuggets online can collectively offer us, while the disappointing ones are those that are cautious, often barely scratching the surface of the public personality that we are familiar with. The questions triggered by memoirs are: Can the actor provide revelations rather than mere rhetoric? Do her reflections give us a better understanding of her craft?

Reading Dilip Kumar: The Substance and the Shadow, I was curious to find out how a shy Pathan from Peshawar transformed himself into an acting institution. How did he develop his ‘method’ and evolve a style distinct from the theatricality that most of our actors had inherited from Parsi drama?

The book gives some hints. Kumar’s mastery over multiple languages, his love for literature, and his habit of reading for a role as opposed to merely relying on spontaneity gave him a reliable repository of emotions. He says this began when Nitin Bose, the director of his third movie Milan, asked him to go beyond Noukadubi — the Tagore story on which the film was based — to write down the range of emotions that he would deploy for a specific situation. As Kumar’s career progressed, this emphasis on groundwork led him to take an active part in the writing of scripts; he touched his peak when he wrote Gunga Jumna.

Kumar’s contemporary Balraj Sahni was an activist and short story writer before he got into acting. In Balraj Sahni: An Autobiography, Sahni credits his acting prowess, like Kumar, to a grounding in good literature and an understanding of the Zeitgeist of his youth. Marxism helped him develop a clear “intellectual vision” and adopt a scientific approach, he says. He emphasises that a scientific study of histrionics is necessary to succeed.

The need for a scientific approach is what Naseeruddin Shah, in And Then One Day, calls the search for “psychological truth”, a concept he borrows from Konstantin Stanislavski. Like the Russian actor-director, Shah wanted to develop a system for himself that did not rely too much on the mood of the actor at the moment. He also wanted to prove that looks and lineage were not necessarily deterrents to becoming successful in acting. And so his focus on “psychological truth”, which required him to empathise with the character and create multiple reference points around him.