The Good,Bad and Ugly

Back home,he pondered over the meeting. It inspired him to write a book about Hindi cinema’s villains. “Heroes and superstars are always in the limelight. How much do we know about the talented actors who play the role of villains?” says Ghosh,62. In the early ’90s,he wrote to Shyam Benegal,to seek help from the filmmaker to spearhead his dream book. He wanted to explore the cinematic politics of good versus evil. “Back then,the characters were divided. Our heroes were our saviours and the villains were catalysts for them,” says Ghosh,recalling Benegal’s excitement about the subject.

After almost two decades,now,Ghosh’s book Bollywood Baddies: Villains,Vamps and Henchman in Hindi Cinema (Sage publications,Rs 395),is in the market. Divided into three parts,it chronologically discusses the socio-aspects of our villains,from as early as Ashok Kumar’s role in the 1943 film Kismet to Kancha Cheena in 2012’s Agneepath. “It took so long because several films have been written about,from Mother India,Kalicharan and Kati Patang to the more recent Mirch Masala and Karma. I watched all these films from front to back,” adds Ghosh,who has previously written two books — Rabindra Tagore: Forms of Popular Culture Rabindranath Tagore,and a screenplay adaptation of The Old Man and the Sea,both written between 2003 and 2007.

While a lot of information in the book on villains comes from his observations while watching films,Ghosh also met actors such as Amrish Puri and Prem Chopra. He recalls Puri asking about “his obsession with turning bad guys good”. Chopra was roped in to pen the foreword. “After all,he was a journalist before the release of Teesri Manzil,” says Ghosh,who has also analysed the equally-ignored vamps and henchmen in Bollywood. “Back in the day,vamps were only treated as objects of male gaze. They remain,essentially,Indian women who went wayward,” says Ghosh,who makes us grudgingly compare yesteryears Bindu with Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct.

New-age Bollywood,where the black and whites are slowly merging into a widely publicised grey area and where villains aren’t necessarily all evil,is also documented. “I have spoken about complex films like Omkara,which blur the lines of good and bad. Now our villains are not human characters but institutions and concepts,like the establishment or the power system,” says Ghosh.

His favourite villains in Bollywood? Mogambo and Sanjay Dutt’s Kancha in Agneepath. “Mogambo for sheer love of villains,and Kancha for the sense of robustness that he brings to the idea of an antagonist,” says Ghosh. His love and respect for the bad boys in Hindi Cinema is visible,as the book is dedicated not to his loved ones but these unsung heroes. As his book so passionately quotes,“It’s our villains who make our protagonist the hero we admire.”