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A Century of Bollywood
17
57. 1978—Bollywood superstars share celluloid space with Hollywood star
power in Krishna Shah’s thriller-caper Shalimar (The Precious Stone).
Leading Bollywood stars of the 1970s—Dharmendra, Zeenat Aman,
Shammi Kapoor, and Prem Nath—acted alongside Rex Harrison, John
Saxon, and Sylvia Miles in their first and only Bollywood outing. The
English version of the film, titled Raiders of the Sacred Stone, was unsuccessfully
released in theaters, but gained cult status when it came out in
a home video format.
58. 1980—Auteur of reformist social dramas, B. R. Chopra’s Insaaf Ka Tarazu
(The Scales of Justice), plumbs new depths of depravity with two long and
graphic rape sequences, the latter featuring a fifteen-year-old Padmini
Kolhapure. Irrespective of the declared intentions of the director to
the contrary, the critical consensus is that the outcome is unabashedly
titillating.
59. 1982—The nation’s collective heart skips a beat and fans line up for continuous
prayers at churches, temples, mosques, and gurudwaras when
India’s biggest superstar of the day, Amitabh Bachchan, has a near-fatal
accident on the set of Manmohan Desai’s Coolie (1983). Prime Minister
Indira Gandhi flies down from Delhi to Bombay to visit him. Puneet Issar,
the young actor who had been playing opposite him in a fight sequence—
and had inadvertently delivered the killer punch—becomes an instant
national pariah with the film industry treating the struggler with a barge
pole, in an illogical reaction to the mass hysteria. Issar’s acting career is
later revived on television towards the end of the decade as the lead villain
Duryodhana in a popular TV series based on the epic Mahabharata.
60. 1983—Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi becomes the most popular foreignlanguage
film at the Indian box-office, proving as popular as the domestic
films.
61. 1983—The last of the golden era’s movie moguls Kamal Amrohi’s costume
drama, Razia Sultan, is released. The film is about a Muslim empress,
Delhi’s first lady ruler. A ruler with bisexual leanings, she sings a suggestive
lullaby, ending with actress Hema Malini (as Razia) and her onscreen
confidant/bodyguard Parveen Babi in an embrace. It marked the first
time sapphic love had been depicted in a Bollywood film. In the middle
of the lullaby, the duo disappears behind a fan for a mysterious interlude
with the hint of a kiss. “LESBIANISM,” screams the headlines, but director
Amrohi insists that this is not so. The song is eventually cut for the home
video release.
62. 1983—Southern superstar Rajnikanth makes his Bollywood debut in a
social-drama-cum-crime-thriller Andha Kanoon (The Law is Blind), opposite
the biggest stars of the day, Amitabh Bachchan and Hema Malini. He,
however, has to wait for nearly decades to extend the frenzy surrounding