In his 1955 essay, The Face of Garbo, French literary critic Roland Barthes wrote of the American actor, Greta Garbo, “[she] belongs to that moment in cinema when capturing the human face still plunged audiences into the deepest ecstasy, when one literally lost oneself in a human image… when the face represented a kind of absolute state of the flesh, which could neither be reached nor renounced.”
Barthes certainly did not write with Dharmendra Kewal Krishna Deol in mind. Garbo preceded Dharmendra by at least thirty years. She retired from Hollywood three years before the son of a school teacher and a homemaker left his village, Dangon, in Ludhiana, for Mumbai (then called Bombay) to participate in a talent hunt organised by an entertainment magazine. And yet, his face too, was singular in its impact on his audience: not flesh, but platonic beauty; his was the visage of the ideal romantic figure; the “human image” in which women —and perhaps many men, too — could “lose” themselves.
Garbo’s tendency to remain private about her life — she retired in the mid 50s, spent the rest of her life in her New York apartment, rarely attended events, and died in 1990— only aided Barthes’s analysis. Hers was a face that belonged to a time when the audience drew awe and existential meaning from cinema. That changed as time, and cinema, progressed, Barthes contended. Audrey Hepburn, another great on-screen beauty, did not further the archetype of the existential beauty, but rather, of the “substantive individual”, recognised for its own traits, its own lyricism.
Dharmendra, one might say, straddled both archetypes. His visage may have indeed seemed sublime when he first made his debut in the 1960 film, Dil Bhi Tera Hum Bhi Tere (opposite Kum Kum), and in the subsequent heroic roles he essayed in Anpadh (opposite Mala Sinha), Bandini (opposite Nutan), and Anupama (opposite Sharmila Tagore), but he had no pretensions for mystique. Over time, Dharmendra’s visage, too, lent itself easily to newer archetypes — He-Man, Son of the Soil, Witty Comical Hero, Heartthrob.
And then came Ramesh Sippy’s Sholay in 1975, where he portrayed all these archetypes in one role, the blue safari suit donning Veeru.
What makes a film or a book or a pop icon cult, Italian semiotician and novelist Umberto Eco famously pondered. In 1984, analysing the Humphrey Bogart-Ingrid Bergman wartime cult film, Casablanca, Eco wrote that in order for a work to transform into a cult object, the film or book “must be loved, certainly” but it must also “provide a completely furnished world so that its fans can quote characters and episodes as if they were aspects of the fan’s private sectarian world, a world about which one can make up quizzes, and play trivia games, so that the adepts of the sect recognise through each other a shared expertise”. The viewer or reader must be able to “break, dislocate, unhinge [the work] so that one can remember only parts of it, irrespective of their original relationship with the whole,” Eco wrote.
Sholay inspired all this and more. The fact that Amitabh Bachchan, another (living) iconic figure, and Dharmendra played the characters of Jai and Veeru, only lent weight to its cult status. Their faces came to symbolise newer archetypes: the hopeless romantic was the perfect foil to the angry young(er) man. And paired together, their brand of friendship cut short only by death, continues to inspire the modern myth of brotherhood between men, whose version we are most familiar with as the bro-code.
New technology and an emerging film magazine culture certainly played a part in generating the cult of Dharmendra. By the late '60s, Dharmendra, whose face routinely caused a thousand sighs, was accessible in full technicolour on the big screen. Stardust, which was started in 1971, printed stories about him with headlines like ‘Love Is …. Being Aas Paas’ [on his relationship with his co-star Hema Malini, whom he later married] and ‘Dharmendra’s Wife Defends her Husband!’ [on his first wife, Prakash Kaur].
In the obituary she wrote for the Hindustan Times, former Stardust editor Shobhaa De, describes how “at one time, during the early ’80s, housewives from Delhi would jump on an early morning flight, rush to whichever studio Dharmendra was shooting in, and demand a private audience in his dressing room. He always obliged. “How can I disappoint any woman?” he would simply shrug.” De, who coined the term “Garam Dharam” to describe the actor’s sensual appeal, wrote that Dharmendra “famously admitted it was his “duty” to make every woman feel desirable and special.” “But,” she added, “there was nothing slimy or lecherous about him. Far from it. Old fashioned and chivalrous, Dharmendra was incapable of offending the ladies who flocked to meet him.”
