Wearing a goatee, a cassock and a church hat, the hero Anthony Gonsalves comfortably infiltrates the villain’s lair passing off as Fr Anthony. (Yes, he didn’t even think it necessary to be careful enough to change his name). And a muslin thin Arabesque veil was good enough for the heroine in Kartavya (1979) to start dancing with the villains with no fear of getting recognised — not even by her boyfriend!
To add to these silly tropes there were facial disguises of a different variety too in the Bollywood of yore.
- In Khoon Bhari Maang (1988), Rekha playing Aarti Verma dethrones Sonu Walia to emerge as the fashion queen. Curiously, the then 24-year old Sonu Walia had won the Miss India in 1985 i.e. three years earlier. And she gets beaten in the contest by a then 34-year old Rekha playing a mother of two.
Spooked by threat of his life being taken away, Nadeem in Aankhen (1968) confesses of his true identity. To prove this, he reaches out for something under his shirt collar….. And peels off his mask to reveal his real face. Now, why his voice would change instantly upon the removal of the mask is something only director Ramanand Sagar can explain. The ‘same-voice’ coincidence was somewhat feebly explained in Ab Kya Hoga (1977) in which the moll-in-the-mask was shown to have a unique skill of imitating others’ voices to a nicety. In The Train (1970), the mask helped save lives and loves. CID Inspector Shyam Kumar’s anguish at the knowledge that his girlfriend Neeta is a criminal is put to rest when she peels off her mask to reveal that ‘Neeta’ is actually Lily, the moll. The fad of the mask continued in 5 Dushman (1973) as the cop peels off the mask from the hero’s face to reveal the villain’s true beneath a façade of the hero – never mind that villain was at least 4 inches taller than the hero. In the relatively more slick Woh Main Nahin (1974), it was a ‘peel-off’ with a difference – underneath the false face, the criminal’s face was a replica of the hero’s face (with Navin Nishchal in one his career-best performances).
In certain films, the faces actually changed – yes, without masks. In the delightful entertainer Bundalbaaz (1976) the thug Ranjeet, in order to win over the heroine, creates an illusion to transform himself to look like the hero Raja. But the friendly genie in the lamp lands up in time to engineer a reverse illusion ... and disposes the thug to where he belonged – the municipal dustbin.
With passage of time, faces weren’t getting hidden behind masks – they were getting altered. In Yeh Vaada Raha (1982) Sunita’s face gets horribly disfigured in a road accident. Thanks to some deft reconstruction by a plastic surgeon, Sunita gets a beautiful new face — but it is a different one altogether! Plastic surgery was necessitated for Aarti Verma in Khoon Bhari Maang (1988) because ferocious crocodiles had mutilated her face. Unlike Sunita, Aarti not only gets back her original face but is also rid of an ugly birthmark on her face —and Aarti goes on to become the most successful fashion queen about town!
And there have been a few mature scripts in which the ‘same-face’ theory has been more symbolic of split personalities and internal conflicts….
In Aks (2001), Raghavan, wearing the mask of Inspector Manu Verma assassinates a VIP. But Aks wasn’t about the mask. It was about the spirit of Raghavan (upon his death in police custody) entering Manu Verma, leading Verma to behave like Raghavan – the same hyena-like laughter and the sinister cocking of the head et al. Manoj Bajpayee shares, “Manu Verma and Raghavan were chemically one and the ‘same’ person. Any man has both good and evil in him. In creating Raghavan we were trying to show the impact of what would happen if evil were to be separated from the good. Aks was Hindi filmdom’s first psychological villain-based film. People mistook it for a ghost movie.” Aks resembled the Hollywood hit Face/Off (1997) starring Nicolas Cage and John Travolta in which the cop and the killer ‘swap’ faces.
A similar symbolism was observed in Shaitaan (1974) in which one of the twin brothers Anand is a cop and the other, Ashok, a hormone crazed serial rapist. “I am the face of the badness in every human”, admits Ashok. Interestingly, Shaitaan was initially conceived with just one Shatrughan Sinha in a ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ role. Chemical experiments can go horribly wrong as Dr. Wilson in Chehre pe Chehra (1977) discovered. In trying a similar good-bad separation, he gets a hideous face and an even more evil character.
And finally, there was this young introverted Delhi boy Gaurav who nurtures his insane obsession with the Bollywood film star Aryan Khanna every breathing minute. And then the Fan (2016) Gaurav, bitterly disappointed at Aryan’s behaviour in their face to face meeting, wishes to extract revenge. Frankly, it is nigh impossible that a nerdy, middle-class, nondescript boy can take on the might of the megastar Aryan Khanna. But wait, Gaurav resembles Aryan Khanna.