When it comes to celluloid fathers, the first image that comes to my mind is the late actors Nasir Hussain and A. K. Hangal sobbing into their screen-daughter’s hearts with mom memorials that began with, “Agar aaj tumhari maa zinda hoti… (if only your mother were alive today…).”
Time to put the groan out of the parental zone with a look at dads who were different from the norm. Think of different dads, and the first image that comes to mind is Tarun Bose in Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Anupama, who hated his daughter from birth, even if she looked like Sharmila Tagore (who would hate a daughter that gorgeous?) because his beloved wife died at childbirth.
Hrishikesh Mukherjee told me this uncool dad was based on a real character.
Years later, Anupam Kher played a variation on the daughter-hating dad in Saajan Ka Ghar. He wouldn’t even look at daughter Juhi Chawla on her wedding day. Anupam told me he felt really awful playing such a father since he doesn’t have a daughter of his own and would love to have one.
Amitabh Bachchan had one in Piku and that too the leggy and lovely Deepika Padukone. But all he did was grumble, grumble, grumble and make her life miserable. Mr. Bachchan found it “very difficult” to play a nag in Shoojit Sircar’s Piku because in real life he gives everyone in his family space. Strangely, when I saw Anthony Hopkins in The Father many years later, I thought of Mr. Bachchan in Piku and his boundary-less bonding with his beleaguered beti.
The Bachchan-Padukone father-daughter act was so much more convincing in Prakash Jha’s Aarakshan. Jaya Bachchan felt her husband and Deepika actually looked like father-daughter in Aarakshan. In Piku, he behaved like her landlord.
Fun dads are rare in Hindi films. One of the earliest Daddy Cool in Hindi cinema was Murad (father of actor Raza Murad) in Mehboob Khan’s 1949 psycho-drama Andaz. Murad not only gave his daughter the freedom to choose her own husband, she was also allowed to have male friends in gender-free associations. It seemed shockingly progressive at that time.
Much later, Amitabh Bachchan in R. Balki’s Cheeni Kum befriended an 8-year-old neighbour named Sexy (Swini Khara). The two spoke like adults about life and relationships sitting on the doorstep of their homes.
I think Mr. Bachchan in Cheeni Kum was the coolest father-figure I have ever seen in a while.
A close second would be Shashi Kapoor in Yash Chopra’s Kabhi Kabhie. Shashi shared drinks and girlfriend-secrets with his screen son Rishi Kapoor. Yash Chopra told me the Shashi-Rishi father-son bonding was a wish fulfilment since he was not friendly with his own sons Aditya and Uday.
Balraj Sahni and the little girl Mini in Kabuliwala is yet another filial bonding that stood out in a sea of schmaltzy father-daughter relationships. Little Mini reminds the dry fruit seller in Kabuliwala of his own daughter back in Afghanistan. Some years later, Hrishikesh Mukherjee cannibalized the Kabuliwala father-daughter relationship in Aashirwaad, with Ashok Kumar befriending little Sarika in the park. In present times, this beautiful bonding between a stranger and a little girl would be considered creepy.
The father-daughter equation, with all its inherent warmth and compulsive complexities, remains largely unexplored in Hindi cinema, obsessed as it is with the mother who is even part of the word cinema.
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