PremiumOnce known as Yusuf Khan, he made his debut as Dilip Kumar in 1944 with Jwar Bhata, before freedom, but reached a career zenith much later, with Naya Daur, a 1957 movie that had a horse-cart racing a motor car in a rural setting
Dilip Kumar (1922-2021), who died on Wednesday, was an actor many in the Hindi film industry credit with having taught them the word ‘thespian’. Not literally, but for want of a more accurate biographical tag. Once known as Yusuf Khan, he made his debut as Dilip Kumar in 1944 with Jwar Bhata, before freedom, but reached a career zenith much later, with Naya Daur, a 1957 movie that had a horse-cart racing a motor car in a rural setting. It was about the dilemmas posed by free India’s pursuit of modernity and industrialization. His box-office grip, though, must be credited to his versatility, as evident in the wide spectrum of roles he played.
Our cinema took a global turn with the opening of a closed economy in the early 1990s. Screens now had a sports car in a romantic race of pulses against the Swiss Alps, and Dilip Kumar had a fan-turned-star in Shah Rukh Khan, who, unlike our famed thespian of post-Partition times, apparently saw no need for a ‘more marketable’ screen name. Liberalization had heralded another new era. Today, as filmmakers face the prospect of stricter censorship than ever, might yet another celluloid shift be upon us?
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