The man behind 'Amar Akbar Anthony': The three characters India can't get over
March 1 was director Manmohan Desai's 25th death anniversary. A director who was never in the arty creative club but who knew his audiences, and defined Indian secularism.
The most imaginative metaphor describing and decorating India’s composite identity was not thought of by any patriotic poet, earnest activist, or even a rhetorical politician. This is the legacy of Manmohan Desai, the ultimate potboiler filmmaker — in the form of the title of his 1977 blockbuster Amar Akbar Anthony.
Amar Akbar Anthony redefined the lost-and-found formula by making the ridiculous somehow sublime through its underlying message. The story is about an entire family — three brothers and their parents —getting separated due to a series of incidents, reuniting two decades later. Films like Waqt (1965) and Yaadon ki Baraat (1973) too have parents and three brothers separating and then reuniting.
But Desai’s twist was that the three brothers are raised by different guardians of different faiths — a Hindu police officer, a Muslim tailor and a Christian priest.
The boys grow up to become the eponymous protagonists: Amar (Vinod Khanna), a Hindu policeman; Akbar (Rishi Kapoor), the youngest, a Muslim qawwali singer; and Anthony (Amitabh Bachchan), the middle-born, a Christian liquor dealer. (Note: The movie title is not in chronological order but according to the demographics of the religion).
We all know that the father, Kishanlal, (Pran) resurfaces, the mother, Bharti, (Nirupa Roy) regains her lost sight, and the family reunites following a series of convoluted plot twists. In the meantime, our three heroes go about their lives fighting demons and rescuing damsels until they come together again under the diaphanous aanchal of Mother India (Desai’s always-suffering mother figure, epitomised by Roy).
For the discerning, a Christian bootlegger and a flashy Muslim qawwal are unpalatable cinematic clichés. But the clichés can be an effective narrative device — especially in the irreverent hands of a director who values robustness over respectability.
The brawling, boozing and strutting Anthony is played by the superstar of the day, who romances the uber-glam Jenny (Parveen Babi), belts out the “My name is Anthony Gonsalves” number, and squanders his ill-gotten gains on the downtrodden. And the colourful, rhythmic Akbar gets three solo songs picturised on him and glorifies himself with the qawwali, “Main hoon Akbar Allahabadi”, a poet and lover of beauty. The beauty in question is Dr Salma (Neetu Singh).
Policeman Amar, with his khaki uniform and serious demeanour, is symbolic of the neutral, law-keeping elder brother (the Gandhian-Nehruvian ideal of a responsible ethnic majority) under whose watchful eye minorities flourish, bad guys crumble and society gets reformed — he also rescues and rehabilitates Laxmi/Shabana Azmi from the clutches of a life of crime.
Before the final reunion, the three brothers keep getting pushed together by the hand of destiny.
In one such scene, we see the brothers lying in hospital beds, alongside each other, donating blood through direct transfusion to an unknown blind woman (who, of course, is their blood mother). Desai could thus convey — visually and figuratively — to his “front-benchers” (a word once used to describe the lowest common denominator of the movie-going public, which was in fact the group which made super-hits exactly that) a potent message — behind a professed faith, the fact of brotherhood is an undeniable bond.
Desai’s bewildering storyline and populist motifs harped on the literal brotherhood of blood (or nationhood) that overrides the divisions of religion.
Amar Akbar Anthony kept the turnstiles turning enough to be followed by the best form of recognition — imitation. Regional versions Shankar Salim Simon (Tamil, 1978), Ram Robert Rahim (Telugu, 1980) and John Jaffer Janardhanan (Malayalam, 1982) filled the Southern screens.
The year 1977 crowned Desai as the reigning box-office badshah. While Amar, Akbar, Anthony was the biggest grosser of that year, his other films, released the same year — Parvarish, Chacha Bhatija and Dharam Veer — were among the top grossers. Desai made 20 films in a career of 29 years (1960–1989), of which 13 films were huge hits.
Though Desai is remembered by over-the-top, multi-starrer, big-budget films, his debut film Chalia (1960), has a quieter theme. It tackles the subject of recovery operations, where the Indian and Pakistan governments worked at reuniting women separated from their families during Partition.
The buffoonery and implausible plots in Desai's movies aim for pure entertainment. But there is an honesty and decency in his cinema. His movies embody what was once termed as “suitable for family viewing.” Besides, there is always a social message under the outrageous storylines.
Roti (1974), as the name evokes, is the story of crime and compromise for the sake of livelihood. And superstar Rajesh Khanna dances and sings while blaming society for its indifference to poverty. Parvarish (1977) takes on the debate of nature versus nurture. In true Desai logic, a dacoit’s son is bought up in the household of a top-level policeman along with his own son. And you guessed right — the “brothers” switch professions.
Naseeb (1981) is about four friends who buy the fate (a lottery ticket) of a drunkard in lieu of settling his restaurant bill. The lottery hits bulls-eye but the entwining lives get disrupted. Lesson: One man’s fortune cannot be passed on to other hands without creating discord.
Desai's movies are good-natured parodies that flirt with complex issues — but the sub-text gets easily digested in the fluff.
He was not in the league of creative, artistic movie makers. But it doesn't look like he would mind. Desai was famously believed to have said that he didn't make movies for the critics. His frantically paced movies are for those who willingly suspend disbelief and can see the internal logic of his screen canvas unfolding.
In Desai's wonderland, anything is possible — as long as it entertains.
The man himself said: “There are a lot of problems on this earth, like where the next meal is coming from…The person who comes to the movies should be happy to see whatever he’s seeing.”