History Remains a Mystery for Bollywood

Talking Pictures
RAJEEV MASAND

One of the reasons why audiences haven’t quite been able to digest Santosh Sivan’s Asoka is because Shah Rukh Khan simply didn’t look like the invincible emperor. Our history books might not provide us with ready reckoners on how Ashoka (Sivan can choose to spell it anyway he wants, but in our text books it will always remain Ashoka with the ‘h’) looked but it’s highly unlikely that he was the wimpish, waspish, androgynous ruler that SRK played him out to be.

The actor, of course, falls back on the oldest excuse of all times: ‘‘The look of the character is exactly the vision of Santosh Sivan.’’ And by now we’ve been told a hundred times that ‘‘the film is not a period piece or a biopic, merely Sivan’s personal interpretation of this man’s life’’. So there — please stop harping about historical accuracy!
As much as one hates to do this, it’s imperative to look at how Hollywood handles history. For the role of the legendary boxer Muhammad Ali, Men In Black star Will Smith not only put on several extra kilos, but actually spent months in the ring learning to pack a few punches. Apart from the physical preparation, he claims to have read several Ali biographies, and values above all, the time he spent with the legendary Ali himself.

SCREEN PREEN: Will Smith as Muhammad Ali (below), Shah Rukh as Asoka

Put history aside for the moment. Even while breathing life into Helen Fielding’s hit character Bridget Jones, actress Renee Zellweger agreed to beef herself up to fit into the baggy nightsuit of the 30-something British singleton. Again, while preparing for the part, the actress spent some weeks training at a publishing house in London to get under the skin of the character she was playing.

Like it or not, truth is that back home when mainstream actors take on historical roles, or even roles that require physical transformations, they are unable to rise to the occasion. Either you end up having the historical character modelled on the star’s look, or at best they’ll use props like prosthetic make-up, fat pillows and even fake beards to ‘‘get under the skin of the character’’. Sigh.

Right now, Ajay Devgan has signed up to play Bhagat Singh in a biopic by director Rajkumar Santoshi. And before you let your imagination run wild, wondering how the now thin-as-a-stick Devgan is going to fill Bhagat Singh’s Size 44 khadi shirts, the filmmakers promise that the actor will physically transform himself to look like the late freedom fighter. ‘‘You can’t do it any other way,’’ says Devgan himself, who reveals that he’s chalked out a gruelling schedule, which involves not only getting into shape for the part physically, but also learning to speak like they did at the time.

Santoshi explains why mainstream Bollywood stars will never ‘‘become’’ the characters that they play. ‘‘It’s really quite simple. They’re doing so many movies at the same time, they can’t afford to make physical changes for the sake of one picture, because that would naturally affect their look in the other films.’’

And that, in turn, brings us right back to one of the oldest problems plaguing Bollywood: Actors can’t concentrate entirely on any one role because they’re playing about five different parts in any given week. How do you solve that, you ask? Well, that’s another story.