NEW YORK: He’s been crowned the biggest film star in the world, but Indian movie legend Amitabh Bachchan has no illusions — and no regrets — about the limitations of his fame and celebrity. The subject of a week-long film retrospective at New York’s Lincoln Centre, Bachchan, 62, enjoys a vast international fan base from South Asia to the Middle East and Africa.

Among mainstream western audiences, including American filmgoers, he remains largely unknown. It’s a state of affairs he loses little sleep over.

“You know, I just never really expected it,” Bachchan said with a shrug, adding that Hollywood had never exerted that much of a pull.

“I think that every actor who sets off, thinks about his home first. If I was starting off now, I would remain home. That’s where my sights would be,” he said in an interview.

Such was Bachchan’s pre-eminence as a movie star in the 1970s and 80s that he appeared to carry the entire Indian film industry on his imposing six-foot, two-inch frame.

The adoration of his millions of fans has, at times, verged on religious worship.

In 1982, as Bachchan lay in intensive care after an accident on a film set, thousands of people gathered every day outside the hospital in Bombay to pray for his recovery.

The then Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi visited his hospital bed, and one fan ran backwards for around 805 kilometres as a devotional gesture aimed at preventing his death.

Bachchan is dismissive of the “world’s greatest film star” tag, which arose from a 1999 BBC online poll that saw him voted Star of the Millennium, ahead of Charlie Chaplin and Laurence Olivier.

“Obviously this is unbelievable. It should not be taken seriously,” he said.

What he does take seriously is his craft, and he is an eloquent defender of popular Indian cinema which, with its melodramatic storylines and song-and-dance routines, has often been dismissed in the West as trivial and formulaic.

“In the past, there was a lot of criticism and cynicism about the way we made our films and their content, but now they are finding the place and audience they deserve,” said Bachchan, who bridles at the suggestion that Indian cinema should adapt its style to cater to western tastes.

“It would be a sad day if our films were to become in some way ‘less Indian’,” he said.

“Either the West realises that this is what Indian films are all about and says ‘Okay, we like it and we’re going to watch it’, or it doesn’t and it rejects it,” he said. “Either way, we shouldn’t change what makes our films so unique.”

Richard Pena, a professor of film studies at Columbia University and an organiser of the Lincoln Centre retrospective, believes American audiences would warm to commercial Indian cinema if they simply had more exposure to it.

“The fact is that they just haven’t seen it. It’s probably the first major film movement that people know through parody and not the actual product,” Pena said.

The dozen movies on offer at the Bachchan retrospective represent just a tiny fraction of his prolific output which comprises over 150 films spanning three decades.

After a slump in the 1990s, Bachchan’s career has enjoyed a resurgence in recent years, due in part to a hugely successful move into television as host of the Indian version of the quiz show “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?”

With interest in Indian cinema growing overseas, Bachchan is also optimistic that the domestic industry can survive the box-office challenge posed by imported Hollywood blockbusters.—AFP