Ehsaan-e-mand hoon zabaan-e-Urdu tera/ teri zabaan mein bayan-e-ehsaas-e-dil aa gaya
I am grateful to you O Urdu for I have learnt to express my emotions through you
—Dharmendra
“When I first saw Dharmendra many years ago, I wondered to myself, ‘God, what if you’d made me like him: so handsome with heavenly eyes’.” The praise came from none other than the legend, Dilip Kumar, while presenting the lifetime achievement award to Dharmendra at the 42nd Filmfare Awards way back in 1997. What he said next was perhaps the highest point of Dharmendra’s personal and professional lives. “A simple man is great at portraying tragedies, and I thought he will now surge ahead of me,” confessed the thespian to a visibly emotional Dharam.
Dharmendra’s almost seven-decade-long career saw many highs and lows, and he battled numerous controversies, but he never lost the love and support of his numerous fans, not even after the widely criticised remark he made during his 2004 election campaign in Bikaner, saying that people should elect him so that he could become a “dictator” and enforce moral discipline in society. Ultimately, the budding politician in him lost out to the seasoned actor, and Dharmendra made a graceful, and grateful, exit from politics.
The ruggedly handsome actor was in love with love itself, and that showed in his personality—in the way he smiled, in the way he talked, and in the way he looked—and his poetry. It is no surprise then that he became a heartthrob of countless women, both on and off screen, be that his childhood crush Hamida, tragedy queen Meena Kumari, Dream Girl Hema Malini, who became his second wife, actress Anita Raj, or his wife of 70+ years, Prakash Kaur, who remained by his side till the very end.
In his book, Dharmendra: Not Just a He Man, author Rajiv Vijayakar writes about the relationship Dharmendra shared with actress Meena Kumari, “Most of the industry believes—and perhaps, rightly so—that it was the star-crossed actress, bereft of enough love and affection in real life, who took a fancy to the strapping young man she had come to know since the time they began shooting for Purnima… Dharmendra had a very promising box-office track record that had already given him an edge over contemporaries and some seniors, so we must say that the idea that Dharmendra used Meena Kumari for career advancement does not hold water. As for their coincidental biggest hit together, Phool Aur Patthar, it was Dharmendra’s work and physique (strictly in that order) that zoomed his status way up when the film was loved.”
For his part, Dharmendra always maintained that he was not in love with the great actress but was her fan. “If you call the relationship between a fan and a star as love, then consider it as love,” he said in an interview years ago, putting an end to the controversy once and for all. But there’s no denying that Meena Kumari was crazily in love with the handsome newcomer, a fact corroborated by the famous ‘Maut Mubarak’ letter Nargis wrote after Meena’s death in which she gave a glimpse into Meena Kumari’s personal life. “If Meena ever turned crazy in love for someone, it was Dharmendra,” the letter boldly states.
If there was ever a blemish on Dharmendra’s impeccable character, it was his relationship with the bottle. The actor loved his drink a tad too much, especially at the peak of his career, so much so that once he grabbed his father by the collar in an inebriated state. For the man steeped in family values and traditions, such an act was simply unpardonable. And the memory of that incident haunted him for the rest of his life. But his love for the bottle continued unabated. There are many instances of him drinking on the sets or arriving drunk for shooting. But no one can recall him misbehaving. In fact, it was his undeniable charm that made thespian Ashok Kumar break his strict rule of not working on January 1. Despite the warning from the senior actor to stay away from new year celebrations and alcohol, Dharmendra did the opposite, and when a drunk Dharam fell into Dadamoni’s lap while shooting a scene and pleaded with folded hands that he was unable to work, the senior actor was magnanimous enough to give him time to recover. Such was his charm. The film was the 1966 blockbuster Mamta.
Unfortunately, in his long career of more than 300 films, spanning six decades, Dharmendra never received a single award for acting despite giving some memorable performances involving different genres from comedy to action to tragedy, a hurt he carried in his heart throughout. Dilip Kumar was not wrong about his remarkable ability to portray tragedies superbly. Anyone who has watched him portray the character of Satyapriya in the movie Satyakam would vouch for that. The sensitivity with which the character has been approached is testament to the underlying genius of the man whose greatness, unfortunately, remained restricted to his physical appearance in an industry besotted with beauty.
With his charismatic personality, unbridled charm, and childlike enthusiasm, no other actor has, perhaps, portrayed romance so beautifully as the He Man of Bollywood did. And he was not averse to experimenting in films either, even if it meant being intimate on screen at the ripe old age of 87. The widely discussed “kiss” in Rocky Aur Rani ki Prem Kahani (2023) that created as much controversy as excitement was brushed aside by the actor as merely a film requirement. One recalls another incident where while enacting a romantic sequence, Dharmendra reached down and planted a kiss on his heroine’s back in the flow of the moment. The film was Mamta, and the heroine was none other than the iconic Bengali beauty, Suchitra Sen. The moment was unscripted and left Suchitra feeling embarrassed and displeased. But the spontaneity of the action was so captivating that the act was retained in the final cut. Of course, being a thorough gentleman, he later apologised to his disgruntled leading lady.
The one thing that remained unchanged in Dharam’s long journey from a humble farmer, Dharminder Singh Deol, to superstar Dharmendra was his connection to the soil. Amid the glam and glitter of the showbiz, here was a man who remained true to himself and his village compatriots. And it was this connection that kept him sane in a world that is as superficial and make-believe as the films it produces.
The writer oversees the edit page at FPJ and is an author.
