Mithun Chakraborty: Star of the People

FROM HIS FIRST FILM as a rebellious tribal and ace archer in Mrinal Sen’s Mrigayaa in 1976, where he spent most of the movie barechested, Mithun Chakraborty, who was honoured with the Dadasaheb Phalke Award, epitomised the subaltern body. Dark-hued, happy to show skin in traditional langot or later gold lamé body suits, he was the gatecrasher who became a star on the back of his physicality. His pelvic thrusts, inspired by Elvis Presley, in Disco Dancer (1982) made him the rage at home and in the USSR. The dancing, along with the action in the James Bond clone movies, Surakksha (1979) and Wardat (1981), made his Gunmaster G9 the muse for a new generation of filmmakers growing up in and around small-town India. They would then reference him in their movies, whether it was Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur (2012) or Anurag Basu’s Ludo (2020) or even Raj & DK’s series Guns & Gulaabs (2023).

Guns & Gulaabs is set in the 1980s, which is when Mithunda, as he is universally known, was at the height of his powers, swimming in a sea of films, some good, many memorably bad. They were enough for a generation of young men who looked like him to want to sing and dance in the movies, as he himself admitted in a TV interview. “I was a bad influence,” he said with a laugh. Not so much bad, as a liberating influence, a possible role model, and a potential exemplar, who could segue easily from Mrinal Sen to Ravikant Nagaich, from Buddhadeb Dasgupta to B Subhash, from low-brow to high-brow to low-brow.

A north Kolkata boy, Mithun, now 74, is famously mysterious about being a Naxalite in his youth at a time when youngsters in West Bengal were highly radicalised. An acting diploma at the Film and Television Institute of India got him the role in Mrigayaa when Sen, who was visiting, noticed him. The film won him a National Award for Best Actor but no roles. Again, he is not vocal about his struggle in the film industry, but it is evident in his unstinting support for the Cine and TV Artistes’ Association, and perhaps an acknowledgement of his time as a glorified extra on the shoot of Amitabh Bachchan’s Do Anjaane in 1976.

Bachchan was forever the North Star Mithun was compared with. But Mithun’s career had a different trajectory, mixing prestige roles in artistic cinema with garden-variety parts in movies that he said would secure his children’s futures, so that they wouldn’t suffer the way he did. This then led him to develop a hospitality chain, a school, and several dance competition formats on Hindi and Bangla television channels. The latter were laboratories for many Mithuns to rise to the national spotlight, using their natural talent and diligent bodies to win laurels and escape the circumstances of their birth.

In a late-career comeback, he played a version of Ramnath Goenka in Mani Ratnam’s Guru (2007), reminding people of the gravitas he could bring to the screen. He also managed to parody himself in a series of laugh riots starting with Rohit Shetty’s Golmaal 3 (2010). Mithun’s political career has oscillated from the left to the right. But it is in his role as an entertainer that he has proved himself to be a people’s star. Add to that his image as a self-proclaimed “married bachelor”. It always kept him in tabloid headlines at a time when there was no social media. Whether it was an alleged affair with Sridevi or a quick divorce from Helena Luke, his first wife, he was always the subject of gossip. When he finally married again, it was to Yogeeta Bali, an actor dubbed as asli ghee for her generous dimensions in unkind gossip columns. Together they have four children, to whom Mithun has dedicated his fortune.

In Disco Dancer, while challenging a woman, he calls himself a sadak chhap (person born of the streets). It is a label he wears with pride. He came of age in the narrow winding streets of Kolkata, and it is to the people of those streets that he belongs.

About The Author

Kaveree Bamzai

Kaveree Bamzai is an author and a contributing writer with Open

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