The king of Indian tragedy is dead. Actor Dilip Kumar was famous for his natural gravity, which got him to play an incredible number of serious roles, some sixty in half a century. Also known to excel in expressing emotions. He bowed out on Wednesday July 7, at the age of 98, in a Bombay hospital.
Dilip Kumar, whose real name is Mohammed Yusuf Khan, has structured cinema in the Hindi language, of which Bollywood is the anchor point in the subcontinent. He has influenced his life for generations of comedians and will continue to do so for decades, commentators assure. “An institution has gone and I lost my idol, tweeted Amitabh Bachchan, twenty years his junior and current godfather of the seventh art in India, when the history of Indian cinema is written one day, there will be a “before” and one “after” Dilip Kumar ”.
For Akshay Kumar, another megastar, the disappearance of the legendary actor leaves a big void in the film industry: “In the world, a lot of actors can be heroes. For us actors it was “the” hero ”. Sign of the singularity of the star, the prime ministers of India and Pakistan both reacted to his disappearance. “He was blessed with unparalleled talent, which captivated audiences of all generations. His disappearance is a loss for our cultural world ”Narendra Modi tweeted. “He was the tallest and most versatile of actors”, said Imran Khan.
Double identity assumed
Born in 1922 in Peshawar (Pakistan), under the British Indian Empire, Dilip Kumar is the only actor to have been deeply touched by the partition which gave birth to India and Pakistan in 1947. He has about ten it was only years when his father, a fruit seller, took his family to Bombay. Very quickly, the young man rejected the idea of taking over the family business, especially since in 1944, the actress Devika Rani (1908-1994) gave him the opportunity to shoot in his first film, Jwar bhata, from director Amiya Chakravarty.
If he has not embraced an international career, it may be because he refused to play the title role proposed by David Lean in Lawrence of Arabia (1962), giving way to Omar Sharif
His mentor persuades him to take an assumed Hindu-sounding name, in order to get into the cinema without his father’s knowledge. The Muslim actor with Pakistani roots will courageously assume his double identity. According to Raza Rumi, director of the Park Center for Independent Media at the American University of Ithaca, the actor embodied the ethos of India in all its diversity and complexity, from Sufi Muslims to Hindu sadhus, by demonstrating ‘a remarkable “Open-mindedness”. “Today, it would be inconceivable that an actor could be so honored by two hostile nuclear powers. It would be even more unthinkable for an actor to resist the demand of a political formation, the Shiv Sena [extrême droite hindoue, de rendre le prix décerné par le gouvernement pakistanais, et que nul autre qu’un premier ministre du BJP [droite nationaliste hindoue], Atal Bihari Vajpayee, intervenes to settle the question “, he emphasizes.
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