ONE of the unspoken attributes defining their calibre among the older Indian actors was that they all spoke excellent Urdu, which was advertised for a variety of reasons as Hindi cinema.

On the other hand, most of the younger lot, if we are sensitive enough to notice, can’t pronounce their own names properly, more so if they happen to be one of the popular Khans.

Amitabh Bachchan, Rajesh Khanna and most other superstars of recent vintage were atrocious with their pronunciations.

Nasiruddin Shah and Om Puri stand out among the rare exceptions with correct sheen and qaaf. They knew how to say the words in their lines.

Ditto for womenfolk: the younger ones have lost the feel for the spoken word and I don’t believe it has anything to do with their more evolved sense of gyration. I hear Hema Malini sends her actor daughter to an Urdu teacher to improve her diction, which only underscores the problem.

Dev Anand, who died a youthful 88-year-old in London on Saturday, would be a lesser actor had he not had his facility with Urdu. In fact, Shahid Lateef, husband of peerless Urdu novelist Ismat Chughtai, directed the movie that launched him to fame in 1948. The film Ziddi (Stubborn One) saw him lip-syncing a popular ghazal by Prof Moin Ahsan Jazbi, a close friend of Majaaz.

In his more celebrated film Guide, Anand persuades his suicidal heroine to be positive by quoting Allama Iqbal! “Khudi ko kar buland itna ke har taqdeer se pehle, khuda bandey se khud poochhay bata teri raza kya hai.” Even if the context was inappropriate, the love and feel for Urdu was unmistakable.

Among the older actors, I have always found the less discussed Motilal and Balraj Sahani the more formidable performers on the silver screen. They delivered a dialogue as you would hear it at home or among college friends. They were solid in their first language, Urdu, which allowed them to experiment successfully with other dialects. Balraj Sahani as the Pathan in Kabuliwala and poor peasant-turned-rickshaw-puller in Do Bigha Zameen is an example.

Their contemporaries, the so-called troika of Dilip Kumar, Raj Kapoor and Dev Anand that ruled the Bombay film industry for three generations, approximating with India’s independence, were greater heroes, the mega stars, but acting was an offshoot of their personalities.

Dilip Kumar won applause with the soft mumble of a confused lover. Raj Kapoor wooed his heroine, usually Nargis, by mouthing idiomatic Urdu sentences. Dev Anand spoke as though he was mesmerised by the lines he mouthed.

(However, none of them were up to scratch in the scale of talent and sheer rapport with their audiences as Kundan Lal Saigal and Kanan Devi were in their time, in the 1930-40s. Of course, Saigal and Kanan Devi were singer-actors, a talent that lost its purpose with the rise of ‘playback’ music. In any case, the genesis of ghazal-singing lies somewhere around Saigal’s footprints.)

Of the troika, Dev Anand was the most flamboyant, charismatic and readily loveable. Yet, after hearing him speak extempore some years ago, I was disillusioned. He appeared to me to be the weakest among his contemporaries in keeping an organic bonding with his times.

Raj Kapoor played a village bumpkin with socialist leanings in Jis Desh Mein Ganga Behti Hai while Dilip Kumar could teach a dacoit or two the art of wearing the traditional dhoti even as he got his Tamil Brahmin heroine in Ganga Jamuna to speak in chaste Bhojpuri. Has anybody seen Dev Anand experiment with a dhoti, not speak of trying his hand at a different dialect?

For all his charm and winsome smiles, embellished by the famous missing premolar, Dev Anand came to represent an intellectual gawkiness that was to become the hallmark of a vast segment of the Indian middle classes in the 1960s and 1970s.

His world was replete with cops and robbers, crooning vacuously around trees, with rock ’n’ roll thrown in as ‘item’ numbers.

In other words, there was a noticeable lack of evidence of a link to the monsoon, which embodied an entire Indian culture of dance and music, not to speak of a socio-political idiom associated with the annual life-sustaining event.

They say Dev Anand was an urbane actor. The fact is that if we did some of the things he did to emphasise his urbaneness we would be locked up under the Goonda Act.

The late poet Majrooh Sultanpuri would agree. He was asked by director Subodh Mukherjee to write a song for a gentleman riding a bicycle behind the heroine. The hero happened to be Dev Anand attired in flared pyjamas and sherwani, once identified with high culture.

“They rejected six versions of my song. So I asked Subodh Sahab to explain the background better. It turned out that a well-attired lout was teasing a girl.” The song became famous as Mana janaab ne pukara nahin.

One of the failings of Indian cinema and probably its saving grace in a strange way is that its actors are mostly remembered for the songs they sang or the dialogues they delivered with panache in their individualistic style. Any tribute to an actor on TV channels would start and end with clips of him or her crooning — someone else’s songs, in someone else’s voice.

Do we mostly remember Marlon Brando or Gregory Peck for speaking this writer’s lines or lip-syncing that lyricist’s songs?

Brando’s laurels rest on playing Godfather and also the brutalised army officer in Apocalypse Now.

Similarly, while Peck excelled as Atticus in Harper Lee’s novel on racialism in southern America, we will adore him more as the erratic American journalist he played who mistook a princess for a waif in Roman Holiday.

The intellectual rigour of Hollywood has mostly eluded mainstream Indian cinema, which largely depended on capable writers and musicians to sustain the films.

Dev Anand was fortunate to have Sahir Ludhianvi, Majrooh, Shailendra and Sachin Dev Burman to bail him out. Without them, the idea of Dev Anand and the middle classes he wooed would be jostling with real life, just as Urdu has been battling for survival in today’s cinema halls and outside.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.

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