The acting he learnt was science; the acting he did was art. No school, no teacher could have made him emote the way he did on screen. Here was a man who had breached the line between the real and act, writes RAJESH SINGH
Truth can be devastating but even half-truth is unsettling. In 1998, Satya exposed the grey zones of the underworld and made Manoj Bajpayee the actor, a star in his own right. Fifteen years earlier, in 1983, had come Ardh Satya, which made Om Puri, the actor, a star. There is no comparing the trajectory of the two performers after these landmark films hit the audiences in the face; nor can there be an analogy of the acting prowess of the two — though one suspects Bajpayee will not mind the attempt. After all, which actor worth his salt will object to a comparison with Om Puri! He was the benchmark — and will remain a benchmark.
The comparison between the two films by virtue of their names is also a sleight of hand. While Ardh Satya refers to half-truth, Satya is named after a character in the film. Om Puri would have loved the mix and match, the attempt to find common ground in the midst of variables, the desperation to make a valid point while being rooted to invalid assumptions, and the starkness of reality that both challenges and exposes one’s limits.
Om Puri had learnt acting as a subject; he had been to acting schools. There are millions of literature students in the world, but they do not become Graham Greene and VS Naipaul. There are hundreds of students passing out from acting schools, but they do not become Marlon Brando or Robert De Niro. Om Puri could have been one of those thousands who land in films with a diploma, do some notable work and for the most part become of the mainstream that churns out forgettable stuff. But he was slated to be different — he decided to be.
The acting he learnt was science; the acting he did was art. No school, no teacher could have made him emote the way he did in Ardh Satya. No training could have made him express the rage and the impotence of a man grappling with a failed life, a failed system, and pour out that anger with such force. Here was a man who had breached the line between the real and the act.
He was police officer Anant Velankar in Ardh Satya. Hindi films are full of police officers, and few are remembered. But Velankar has become a metaphor for the finest piece of acting; there has not been and will never be another Anant Velankar, or another cop film of that calibre. If there is anything more to be said, it is that more than three decades after Ardh Satya, people remember it for Om Puri although it had a cast of the country’s best acting talent — Naseeruddin Shah, Smita Patil, Sadashiv Amrapurkar, Amrish Puri, and Shafi Inamdar.
A still from the film, in which Om Puri, in police uniform, with a demonic though frustrated expression, beats an accused, remains etched in memory. It’s at once his personal anger and the fury over a compromised system in which he is compelled to work. He gets into the system as a means to get out of it, and the uniform he wears becomes a symbol of enslavement as much as it is a way to wreak vengeance on slavery.
The other landmark in his career has to be Tamas. The television serial — easily among the three best Indian works television has had till date — reflects the stark tragedy of Partition. Om Puri played the role of a man from low caste, who makes a livelihood skinning dead animals.
If Ardh Satya had dark shades, Tamas, as the name suggests, was all darkness. What was there in darkness that brought out the best in this enigmatic actorIJ As Nathu, Om Puri becomes a pawn in the politics of communal violence with established elders from all sides not just inciting discord but also engineering it. He is the quintessential hapless Indian enticed into an act whose import he does not understand, nor can he grasp the deviousness of those who lure him into it. When Bhisham Sahni wrote his novel with the same name, he must not have imagined that some day, one Om Puri would translate his words into visible sentiment in a way that prose and cinematic expression become one, like the waters of the Ganga, Yamuna, and the Saraswati at the Sangam. let it be said that Tamas is as much Bhisham Sahni’s as it is Om Puri’s.
The third on the list is Aakrosh (1980). In a way it was a precursor to what we were to expect three years down the line in Ardh Satya. The English translation has it as ‘The Cry of the Wounded’, but the cry is muted; in fact, not there for the ears but for the heart. Om Puri is stunned into silence when faced with a system, including the judiciary, which fails to deliver justice after his wife is raped; he is framed in a crime to suppress his attempt at justice; and his wife commits suicide to escape the shame. Nearly all through the film, lavanya Bhiku (Om Puri), goes speechless — hit by the calamity, of course, but also perhaps realising that nothing that he says will have any meaning. The might of the system greased by the influential was immune to the call of the suppressed.
When an actor is robbed of the chance to deliver dialogues, what then is left to display histrionicsIJ There have been actors who have made careers out of melodramatic, and often ridiculous, dialogue deliveries. For Om Puri, if speech was just one form of expression, silence was another. His bland face and his blank stare said it all. But the rage was within and it continued to grow. In the final part of the film, at his wife’s funeral, when he sees a man looking lustfully at his sister, the dam of silence breaks.
He kills — not the man but his sister, to save her and perhaps himself from further torture. And then finally screams and screams and screams, looking upward. The sky signifies the endless boundaries of his anguish, and a vast emptiness. It’s perhaps also his final appeal to all those who are supposed to reside upstairs as Gods: “This is what you have done to me. This is what I have done to myself.” Even today, somewhere, someplace, lavanya Bhiku lives on — not one but many Bhikus.
It can be speculated that there must have been something deeply troubling in Om Puri’s life that made him live and breathe the tragic characters he played with such stunning realism on the screen. Actors before him had had issues after portraying tragedy, or in doing so. It is said that Dilip Kumar was so affected by the series of tragic roles he portrayed that he needed psychiatric help and switched to lighter characters to exorcise the grim demons. Guru Dutt was not so lucky. His reel life and real life tragedies enmeshed and led to the end of his life.
If there was indeed something of the kind, Om Puri’s later career decisions surely did not betray it. His best performances came in the eighties, when the so-called new wave cinema was the toast of the town. Along with Naseeruddin Shah, Smita Patil and Shabana Azmi, Om Puri represented the trend of ‘realistic’ films that moved away from the song-and-dance variety, depicting life situations as they existed, without superficial embellishments. These films were recognised abroad, won national and international acclaim, but were also derided by a section back home for betraying the audiences which came to the theatres to escape the drudgery of life rather than be confronted with it.
But a middle ground was being found too, as Ardh Satya showed. This was not an ‘art film’ nor was it ‘commercial’ in the generally understood term. Many of this kind came — Saaransh (1984) was one of those. Also, the three other actors who formed the ‘new wave cinema’ quartet had begun experimenting with mainstream cinema as well, with varying levels of success and as leading characters. Om Puri was no exception. But what he did as a turnaround was truly astounding. He swung to the other extreme — the comedy genre.
It is often said that the most anguished and pained often come out as outwardly the happiest. One is reminded of the lines: “Tum itna jo muskura rahe ho/kya gham hai jisko chupa rahe ho…” Was there, therefore, indeed something in Om Puri’s life that made him do Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron, Hera Pheri, Malamaal Weekly, and Singh is KinngIJ The answer is: We don’t know. But his close friend Naseeruddin Shah told the media that Om Puri’s “personal problems — in which I did not intervene at all — had left his mental and physical health in a shambles”. He added, “I know for sure that Om was really suffering during the last few years.”
What we do know is that Om Puri excelled in the comic roles, and it became difficult to believe that this was the same man we saw as the tragic figure earlier. The Mahabharata scene in Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron, with Om Puri in sun glasses portraying a mythological character, has to be one of the classic comedies ever. Kadak Singh in Hera Pheri was rib-tickling, while in Chachi 420 (1997), he was hilarious as a crooked secretary.
His foray into foreign films was no less impressive, though it met with relatively limited success. East is East, My Son The Fanatic, City of Joy, and The Hundred-Foot Journey were films where he left an imprint. Om Puri was an actor without boundaries, and his reputation too did not limit itself to geography. He was admired in Pakistan as much as in India, respected in the West as deeply as in what we refer to as Bollywood.
like a tormented soul which is constantly in search of enlightenment, Om Puri was possessed with a desire to excel, and once was not enough for him. So, apart from Aakrosh, Tamas, and Ardh Satya of Govind Nihalani, there wasArohan by Shyam Benegal. Om Puri played Hari Mondal, an oppressed farmer in a remote Bengal village gripped by the Naxal movement. In Ketan Mehta’s Mirch Masala, he played Abu Miyan, an old Muslim gatekeeper of a spice factory where a village girl (played by Smita Patil) takes refuge to escape the amorous advances of the village subedar. Abu Miyan refuses to yield to the appeals of village elders to open the gates of the factory and let the girl out. He stands strong against threats too.
To say that Om Puri lived the role of a physically hapless but morally resolute guard is an understatement. He was the kind of gatekeeper that society needs in many numbers today, given the shameful incidents of recent years, including the Bangalore mass molestation case.
The last few months before his death, Om Puri waded into a controversy that many believe he should have kept away from — or at least been more sensitive in responding to — that of patronage by the Hindi film industry to Pakistani artistes in the wake of the Uri attack. Perhaps he ended up conveying what he did not mean to, or had got carried away by the liberal arguments. But he did himself no favour by making certain shocking remarks on television which ridiculed the sacrifices our soldiers make to keep us secure. He, of course, made amends by visiting the family of one of the martyred jawans, wept profusely and apologised for his earlier insensitivity. That ended the episode, but to this day, it remains a mystery as to how somebody of Om Puri’s stature and sensitivity could have been so offensive.
But then, perhaps, he had to respond in whatever way he thought fit. He was of that kind. As actress Sarah Bernhardt said; “He who is incapable of feeling strong passions, of being shaken by anger, of living in every sense of the word, will never be a good actor.” Only a fool can say Om Puri was not a good actor.
