I can imagine the headline — “Welcome Actor Nana Patekar Passes Away”, or the sub-heading — “Nana Patekar, known for his role in Welcome, passed away this …”.
I can also imagine the agony around that framing. Welcome (2007)? Really? That is the film you want to foreground, in a career that spanned the brute gangster of Parinda (1989), all that vile villainy in kolhapuri chappals and a starched kurta pajama; or the mute and deaf father in Khamoshi: The Musical (1996), howling in grief, wrung out, flinging the cross into the Arabian Sea in a moment of profound faithlessness; or the crabby cab driver in Taxi No. 9211 (2006) whose irritation you want to inhabit, but keep getting pushing away from; or the consummate and bitter artist figure in Natsamrat (2016), coasting on fumbling nostalgia?
It would be like the newspapers referring to the late Girish Karnad as the actor who was in Ek Tha Tiger. Except, it isn’t. Patekar’s turn as the gangster in Welcome — lusty, playful, exaggerated, endearing, intimidating — was very much at home in his filmography, home enough to become its hallmark. Patekar’s filmography never expressed itself as a vacillation between art and commerce. It expressed itself in his singular, distinctive voice — that baritone. His presence in films like Housefull 5 (2025) was not at odds with some pristine artistic presence etched in films like Hu Tu Tu (1999) — the way, say, Naseeruddin Shah’s presence in Jackpot (2013) might feel at odds with his general oeuvre.
That is testament to Patekar’s cinematic presence, at home in the worlds it inhabited. True, Welcome might not be the most respectable way to remember his craft, but there was no schism between the popular and the respectable, in the tenor of his performance or in the gravity of his presence. No one shirked a shoulder when he dubbed in Tamil for Kaala (2018). It just belonged. Actors tend to rise to their characters. Patekar, instead, found them in him.
His film choices reflect this attitude of being at home. Film scholar Ravi Vasudevan writes in Neither State nor Faith: The Transcendental Significance of the Cinema, “While Patekar has increasingly come to be associated with a machismo regional and national right-wing politics … the actor’s screen persona is not so straightforward.” Vasudevan notes, for example, his presence in films like Ankush (1986), Prahaar (1991), which he directed, and Krantiveer (1994) — films where he gave, as an Indian Express review noted, “forceful, full-blooded performances”. These did not contradict the social-realism of films like Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay (1988) and Sai Paranjpaye’s Disha (1990), of which, too, he was an integral part.
If he would play a Muslim gangster as a villain in Angaar (1992), he would play a Muslim gangster as a hero in Ghulam-E-Musthafa (1998). In Krantiveer, he will exhort a vision of Hindu-Muslim unity, lighting the fire for some force of collective action, a forceful, melodramatic puncture. It felt like an extension of Patekar himself, who during the Kargil War, requested George Fernandes, then Defence Minister, to let him serve on the frontlines with the Indian Army.
With Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s Parinda (1989), Amol Palekar’s Thodasa Rumani Ho Jaye (1990), Aziz Mirza’s Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman (1992), and Parto Ghosh’s Ghulam e Musthafa (1998), he laid out what Vasudevan called a “tapestry of types. These include the psychotic gangster, the emissary of the monsoon and romance, a narrator-character retailing scathing social critique for the ‘‘small man’’ of an earlier socialist imagination, a Muslim gangster who sends up Hindu middle-class mores.” Each was made in his image. He wouldn’t disappear into characters, as much as let characters appear through him.
There was never any contradiction, because his cinema came to be associated not with any ideology — political, moral, filmic, aesthetic — but with his voice. He was always believable. Even when a section of fans didn’t want to believe, like Tanushree Dutta’s #MeToo allegation against Patekar, and the stories around him being a mercurial, profane actor, scuffling with Vidhu Vinod Chopra, feuding with Bhansali, threatening Sai Pranjpye.
In Purush, his last stab at Marathi theatre, he played the role of a villain. 1981 onwards, he did over 1800 shows. Women would throw their slippers at him, so convinced his presence as an evil character was, indeed, an evil presence. It was a performance whose details he cobbled together by noticing others, and stealing their tics for his character — he remembered how the playwright Vijay Tendulkar used to sit, his hands raised, resting on his head, and borrowed it to build a perfectly real, perfectly evil character.
It was during a performance of Purush at the Shivaji Natya Mandir in Dadar that the director Vidhu Vinod Chopra snagged at his presence and cast him in Parinda. “Phir natak mar jaata hai (then theatre died),” Patekar noted in an interview. Parinda would be his big break, he won his first National Film Award for Best Supporting Actor, and he took to cinema, performing roles as silly as Welcome and as stoic as Rajneeti (2010). It was a belonged presence. Nothing seemed exceptional, because nothing struck out as uncharacteristic. It was all him.