Om Puri in/and 1980s Hindi cinema: narrating the ‘nation’ and the ‘subaltern protagonist’

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article focuses on analysing the 1980s Hindi cinema through Om Puri’s (1950–2017) text. Much awarded, feted and internationally known for acting in Hollywood and British productions, Puri’s text needs to be mapped critically. If Bachchan’s star text has acquired a metonymic status typifying the 1970s, then the 1980s can be termed as the Om Puri decade as his cinematic text navigated across New Wave films housing the politics and praxis of the ‘subaltern peasant body’, inhabiting the disenchantment of the times in films such as Aarohan, Ardh Satya, Aakrosh, Susman, Mirch Masala, etc. This article analyses Aakrosh (1980) and Aarohan (1982) and his biography, Unlikely Hero (2009), and attempts to uncover the nodes of Puri’s actor/star text as a crucial site for excavating the much-neglected history of the subaltern male actor/subaltern-citizen in the New Wave Hindi cinema of the 1980s. The critical questions for the article are: Can one move away from the towering Bachchan phenomena and chart out a different trajectory of the male actor for the Hindi film hero/protagonist? How can one locate the emergence of this male actor with a different idiom of masculinity that typifies the 1980s Hindi cinema, borrowing Peberdy’s argument on masculine performative angst in American films of the 1990s? Can Puri’s text that navigated the parallel and the popular be used to map the emergence of another node of the actor/star such as Nawazuddin Siddiqui for the contemporary Hindi cinema?