The many shades of Dev Anand: The most loved hero, who was also a flamboyant anti-hero

Remembering Dev Anand, the style icon of the Hindi cinema

At a time when Hindi film actors were crying over heartbreak and struggling to live up to Nehruvian idealism on the big screen, there emerged a flamboyant anti-hero who filled the audience with optimism. With a cap dangerously perched on puffed-up hair, a smile on his face and a song on his lips, Dev Anand straddled the space between the good and the bad, old and new, sometimes as a rakish cab driver and at others as a debonair con artiste seeking redemption.

Untouched by self-pity, his characters effortlessly serenaded confident urbane women on screen and flirted with those besotted by his luminous charm in the darkness of theatres. Across generations, every girl got the impression that Dev is in love with her but perhaps there is one more competitor in the fray!

Since his films didn’t have an overt message, they were often dismissed as just entertainers by critics of the time but over the years we have come to realise that the image of a restless, romantic hero who loved to dress up in black suits in the black & white era was carefully crafted by him, his left-leaning elder brother Chetan Anand and the visionary Guru Dutt, his good friend from the Prabhat Studio days perhaps as a counterpoint to the idealism and bucolic innocence that Dilip Kumar and Raj Kapoor presented.

In Baazi (1951), the second film of Navketan, the production house that the Anand brothers co-founded, when Anand as Madan, an incorrigible hustler, enters a cigarette-smoke-filled gambling club for a promised job, the lackey of the don asks him to keep itminan (patience) and tashreef (sit with respect). Madan retorts he doesn’t have time for either of the two. Directed by Guru Dutt, the film brought a wave of Hollywood noir to Hindi cinema in the 1950s with elements of song and dance, humour and a plot reminding how idealism got corrupted and woven into the narrative so that the flawed hero could easily find mass acceptance. When as a club dancer Geeta Bali jives to Geeta Dutt’s voice in ’Tadbeer se bigdi hui taqdeer bana le’ in Baazi (contrive when fortune doesn’t work), we get the implicit message through Sahir Ludhianvi’s sharp verse composed by S.D. Burman. With music complementing technique, in Taxi Driver and C.I.D. they brought Hindi film narratives out of the sets and let them breathe in the sea breeze of Mumbai.

In C.I.D, a Guru Dutt production starring Dev Anand, ‘Ae dil hai muishkil jeena yahan...ye hai bambai meri’captures the business-like approach of the metropolis and it is followed by ‘Leke pehla pehla pyar’ to showcase the joie de vivre in the same city. Interestingly, following the Western pattern, both songs are not lip-synced by the main actors. The frequent presence of nightclubs and gambling dens also helped in creating realistic song situations where a sensuous performer would try to entice the hero.

Baazi was followed by an even more noirish Jaal (1952) followed by Taxi Driver where Dev is called Mangal but his friends in the film call him Hero, perhaps to check the growing shades of grey. The immense success of the film meant that House No 44 (1955), Funtoosh (1956), Kala Pani (1958) followed the trend. When Guru Dutt and Chetan Anand moved on to follow their more profound pursuits, Dev’s younger brother Vijay Anand carried forward the image with Nau Do Gyarah (1957) and Kala Bazar (1960). Even when he played a law enforcer in C.I.D., Dev Anand didn’t play an infallible hero and carried the trait when he gradually moved on to more mature roles in the 1960s with Hum Dono (1961) and Guide (1965) — the acme of his creativity with which Dev Anand not only transcended geographical borders but also went on to describe the philosophy of his life.

At Navketan, he provided a platform to a new breed of musical talent in the Hindi film industry that played a crucial role in creating the abiding mystique of Dev Anand. From the plaintive ‘Jayen’ to ‘Jayen kahan’ (Taxi Driver) and the beseeching ‘Abhi na jao chhodkar’ (Hum Dono) to the moving ‘Khoya khoya chand’ (Kala Bazar) and the mournful ‘Hum bekhudi main tumko pukare chale gaye (Kala Pani), Dev Anand performed myriad moods of romance that continue to evoke emotions decades after they were composed.