Waking up to the news of Nana Patekar passing away at 75 is strange. It’s the kind of thing that isn’t supposed to happen. Not only because the sudden loss of a pivotal artist is hard to grasp, but also because the timing feels unnatural. For habitual moviegoers, it’s against the run of play — anticlimactic almost. The year is 2026. It isn’t the finest moment for modern Hindi cinema, but one of the few surprising themes has been the re-integration, the return, of Nana Patekar.
It’s not like he wasn’t on screens all along, but there’s been a sense that the right makers and writers had figured out how to use the distinct actor in post-streaming Bollywood. He appeared thrice: a striking retro cameo for Anil Kapoor in Suresh Triveni’s Subedaar, a wry supporting turn as a cop in Vishal Bhardwaj’s O’Romeo, and a lead role as the powerful Chadragupta-coded mentor in Prakash Jha’s series Sankalp. It felt like the beginning of a third innings. A comeback was well underway.
For many of us who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, Patekar represented a purist alt-stardom of sorts: a ‘parallel’ force of nature who somehow morphed into the wild card of mainstream Hindi cinema. His presence allowed a movie to go in any direction, without context or reason, and more often than not, this changed the game. In terms of this persona, he became the unusual answer to the question: What if Basu Chatterjee’s Amol Palekar had an unpredictable and angry twin whose patience ran thin with the middle-class India around him?
He was almost intimidating to watch, a mercurial ball of energy who scoffed at conventional notions of dialogue-delivery and dramatic beats and body language. Every time the three rising Khans of the decade lulled us into fandom and aspirational masculinity, Patekar often came as a barnstorming antidote to escapism. A generation of future Bollywood enthusiasts started to see him as a ‘Peak Acting’ meme before memes (and the internet) existed; he invariably became our first brush with no-frills, disruptive and scenery-chewing acting. He was refreshing in a post-liberalisation industry full of extremes, because it widened our perspective of homegrown entertainment and protagonists. Unlike other greats (Anupam Kher, Naseeruddin Shah, Paresh Rawal), he sidestepped the ‘burdens’ of talent; he was seldom typecast as the father or the campy villain or the gifted character-actor. If anything, he invented a sweet spot between the volume of a commercial lead and the indie rawness that movies often avoided.
Only earlier this year, a screening of Sriram Raghavan’s diploma short The Eight Column Affair (1987) revealed to me a young Patekar as a knife-wielding crook from the pages of a newspaper; to see the late Shiv Subrahmanyam fend him off felt wistful enough. But my first experience of a Nana Patekar performance threatened to be my last. I blamed my parents for letting my little brain ‘enjoy’ Anna, the ruthless gangster in Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s haunting Parinda (co-written by Subrahmanyam); it took me a while to enter bedrooms without fearing the sight of bloody bedsheets and bullets. One of my earliest memories of watching a Hindi movie on cable television was his directorial debut, Prahaar, where he played a stern Maratha regiment officer who takes justice into his own hands when he visits the grieving town of a late student (echoes of his Subedaar cameo); the film stayed with me through my childhood, mostly because his mad righteousness felt soothing after the stark madness of Parinda.
I went through the routine beats of registering Patekar’s presence after that: the hot-headed integrity in Tirangaa, the breathless and cynical monologues of Krantiveer, the parental angst in Khamoshi: The Musical, the patriarchal horror of Shakti, the deadpan horror in Darna Mana Hai and Bhoot, and the Daya Nayak-inspired curtness of Ab Tak Chhappan. His turn as an unhinged Mumbai cab driver in Taxi No. 9211 acquired cult status during my college days, as did his unexpected buffoonery in Welcome as lovelorn don Uday Shetty. Like any good ‘serious’ actor, he had a knack for weaponising that poker-face and reframing comic-relief as a satire on himself. I was convinced that the roots of his Welcome act stemmed from the blankness on his face during the ‘romance’ of Krantiveer. Rajneeti was perhaps his last significant Hindi role, but I remember him more as a song-loving senior cop — a mentor again — betrayed by his own protege in Tigmanshu Dhulia’s Shagird.
Speaking of mentors, the thing about artists like Nana Patekar is that they were around even when they weren’t. For instance, I watched Satya at such a formative age that I was often under the impression that it was Patekar who stole the show as ‘Mumbai ka king’ Bhiku Mhatre. Only later did I learn of the name Manoj Bajpayee. Patekar’s influence loomed large over a whole crop of upcoming talent: Bajpayee, Irrfan Khan, Rajkummar Rao, Nawazuddin Siddiqui. You could see and hear him in many of them, but more notably, the glass ceiling was broken for a generation of performers who strived beyond the binaries of fame and superstardom. They carved their own paths, but the tracks were his. The prospect of advancing solely on the merit of craft could co-exist besides the high-pitched excesses of Hindi cinema; it was Patekar’s trajectory in the 1990s that made this possible. If not for his foot in the ivory door, perhaps nobody else might have had the blueprint — a reference point — to blow open that door.
It’s not all sunshine and roses, though. As an inherently reverential people wired to idolise our favourite sports and movie stars, the responsibility of recognising their complications fall upon us too. We tend to erase and edit out the uncomfortable parts. It’s the convenient thing to do when we explore our relationship with celebrities and their public legacies. In that sense, Nana Patekar’s legacy cannot be acknowledged without its thorns. In 2018, actor Tanushree Dutta accused Patekar of sexual harassment during a movie shoot in 2008. The case was later dismissed for lack of evidence, but the allegations became a flashpoint for India’s #MeToo movement.
The incident catalysed a series of survivor voices and calls for accountability in Bollywood and beyond. One can debate the legitimacy of claims or the legal structure that isn’t equipped to punish power abuse, but the formidable actor’s name remains inextricable from the wave that followed. As someone who admired his career until 2018, and as someone who writes on cinema for a living, I’d be lying if I said that one is mutually exclusive of another. A comeback may have been cut short, but perhaps the truth is that Nana Patekar was never gone. For the screens he lit up, the boundaries he widened, and for the implications he defined. That’s how it will — and should — always be. After all, some artists are destined to be around even when they aren’t.