Subhash K Jha looks back at the Amitabh Bachchan and Dilip Kumar brilliant drama, Shakti, directed by Ramesh Sippy, which released 43 years ago today!
Though Sholay continues to be Ramesh Sippy’s signature work it is to many of his admirers an inferior work to Shakti which he made seven years after Sholay became a landmark and benchmark for successive generations of Indian filmmakers .
But sorry, Shakti ,it is for me. And it’s not just about the historic union of the mighty Dilip Kumar with his greatest successor Amitabh Bachchan. It’s a lot more. The sheer velocity of the screenplay, the structuring of the father-son conflict, the deeply contoured sketching and execution of the characters as they hurl towards an amazing nemesis, simply make Shakti the most powerful script that the awesome twosome Salim-Javed ever wrote. This is a far superior screenplay to the duo’s other celebrated Bachchan films including Zanjeer and Deewaar. This was one of Dilip Kumar’s last really great performance. Like the rest of the humanity from the entertainment industry, the Big B and director Ramesh Sippy were in awe of the mighty Dilip Kumar. But they never allowed their reverence to come in the way of keeping the plot and characterizations balanced. The father-son conflict never gets tilted.
How stupid and shortsighted we were to let Ramesh Sippy’s Sholay dwarf the intricate merits of Sippy’s Shakti, a tense and majestic cops-and-robbers tale. And how dumb of us to devote all our analytical energies to deciding who among the two titans—Dilip Kumar and Amitabh Bachchan ‘ate’ whom.
Cinema isn’t a kabaddi match. If we hadn’t treated it as such, Shakti would have been judged on its own merits as one of the most brilliantly scripted and staged morality tales . Amitabh Bachchan returned one more time to play Salim-Javed’s Vijay. In a way, Shakti extended the character from Zanjeer and Deewaar , thereby making this the third monument in Salim-Javed’s great Vijay trilogy.
Here, Dilip Kumar steals the rhetorical thunder as the irksomely righteous police officer Ashwini Kumar who would stop at nothing to nab law-breakers. His own son Vijay is perpetually caught on the wrong side of the law, for no fault of his . The father and son’s moral confrontations are aesthetic feasts. Amitabh’s silent cynical, iconoclastic. Dilip Kumar verbose, moralistic and idealistic. Salim-Javed’s pithy dialogues cut through the two looming figures, nourishing and bathing the screen in images and words that are incomparably sublime.
Though undoubtedly the Amitabh-Dilip conflict gives a centrality to Shakti, there’s a lot more in the tale than a father and son divided on moral grounds. The two main female characters of Amitabh Bachchan’s mother and sweetheart are peripheral but sharply sketched.
Women are never treated as shadowy playthings in Salim-Javed’s scripts. Smita Patil’s character of the single , economically independent Roma who offers a cup of coffee to the man who rescues her from hecklers on a local train (watch out for those eveteasers, they include Satish Shah and Irfan Khan) and the becomes his girlfriend, is warmly conceived and played.
As for Raakhee, she took a great career risk by playing Amitabh Bachchan’s mother at her prime, and during the same year as Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Bemisal in which she was cast as Amitabh Bachchan’s love interest. But she insisted on playing the woman caught between the interests of her of husband and son “because I wanted to act with the great Dilip Kumar at least once.”
1982 was the year of great acting opportunities for actors all over India. Shabana Azmi shone in Mahesh Bhatt’s Arth, Kamal Haasan and Sridevi were marvels of naturalness in Balu Mahendra’s Moondram Pirai and Om Puri made us choke in Chokh.
In its own genre and style, Shakti contained incomparably sophisticated performances. Ramesh Sippy’s direction never over-states the case. The confrontations are always controlled and therefore doubly compelling. The climax on the runway of an airport where the self righteous father (how misplaced his zealous morality looks in today’s world!) guns down Vijay, is stylish and energetic.
In most vital ways, Sippy succeeded in going beyond Sholay in Shakti. Salim-Javed have admitted that Shakti was almost flawless as a script. Ramesh Sippy never floundered in delineating the central relationship. Though the media spent a lot of time and ink comparing father Dilip Kumar’s performance with son Amitabh Bachchan, the two performances complement each other perfectly.
Not many people know that Shakti had ‘competition’ from K. Raghvendra Rao’s South India-produced Farz Aur Kanoon where Jeetendra played both father and son. This potboiler version of Shakti was a hit while Shakti was not! To producer Mushir-Riaz goes the discredit for producing the most mammoth supposedly foolproof misfires of the 70s and 80s—Vijay Anand’s Rajput, Asit Sen’s Bairaag, Shakti Samanta’s Mehbooba.
Even less known is the fact that Anil Kapoor played the brief role of Dilip Kumar’s grandson and Amitabh Bachchan’s son in Shakti. The events in the plot are narrated to Anil Kapoor in a flashback. Kulbhushan Kharbanda who played the sympathetic underworld don in Shakti was cast as the leading man in Mahesh Bhatt’s Arth during the same year.
