{"id":5746,"date":"2016-03-14T15:11:52","date_gmt":"2016-03-14T09:41:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/13.201.39.237\/?p=5746"},"modified":"2026-07-17T21:50:02","modified_gmt":"2026-07-17T16:20:02","slug":"amol-palekar-hindi-cinema-middle-class","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/13.207.105.184\/?p=5746","title":{"rendered":"Come for the Moustache, Stay for the Decency: Why Amol Palekar Remains Hindi Cinema\u2019s Wholesome Middle-Class Snacc"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<span class=\"dropcap\">S<\/span>omewhere along the halfway mark in <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.arre.co.in\/bollywood\/rajnigandha-choti-si-baat-vidya-sinha-girl-next-door-basu-chatterjee\/\"><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Rajnigandha<\/span><\/i><\/a> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(1974), we are suddenly watching a movie within a movie. Looking at the screen are our friends Sanjay and Deepa, played by Amol Palekar and the late Vidya Sinha. Despite Sanjay\u2019s best attempts to distract them with confectionary and conversation, Deepa and her family are focused on the cinema screen where the 1968 potboiler, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Kahin Din Kahi Raat<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> is playing out. Suddenly, Helen and Biswajeet break out singing \u201cQamar Patli, Nazar Bijli,\u201d prompting Sanjay to scoff that it didn\u2019t take the characters even a moment to go from crying to dancing.\u00a0\n\nIt\u2019s true, the moment is ridiculous: Biswajeet is wearing a blonde wig, Helen is dancing under large chandeliers that were once Hindi cinema shorthand for opulence. The scene is so far removed from reality that it throws the ordinariness of <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Rajnigandha<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u2019s middle-class protagonists into sharp relief \u2013 particularly Sanjay, whose aspirations are so provincial that he hopes to get only pass marks in his BA exams.\n\nOf course no one breaks into song and dance in the world of <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.arre.co.in\/social-commentary\/government-amol-palekar-muting-artistic-freedom-india\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Amol Palekar<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, the paragon of People Like Us. That would reek of artifice, and there isn\u2019t a blade of that in the many PLUs that Palekar would go on to play in subsequent years, even when he was literally conning folks on screen. Forty-five years later, it is tough to believe that <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Rajnigandha<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> is Palekar\u2019s first major role in a \u201cNew Cinema\u201d film, so completely does he inhabit \u2013 rather, own \u2013 his mundanity.\n\nTo fully comprehend the appeal of Palekar\u2019s pencil-moustached characters, it is important to zoom out a little. The cinema of the 1970s, both at home and abroad, was a wild buffet of machismo. In Hollywood, the decade had begun with <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.arre.co.in\/bollywood\/kaminey-shahid-kapoor-vishal-bharadwaj-bollywood\/\"><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Godfather<\/span><\/i><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> and ended with James Bond, via the \u201cGolden Age\u201d of pornography and a genre that came to be known as \u201cBlaxploitation\u201d. Each of these offerings was characterised by violence and sex, the twin forces propelling a hot lava explosion of masculinity. Bollywood came up with more of the same, except our storylines had the added layers of socio-economic inequality and the rot within India\u2019s bureaucratic and moral heart. Even this yielded a plethora of one-note heroes whose sum total of a personality could be signified by a moniker \u2013 Vijay, a model of such dashing, disproportionate manliness, generations of young men would attempt, and spectacularly fail to live up to it.\n\n<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/13.201.39.237\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/1574596050.jpg\" alt=\"Amol Palekar\" width=\"652\" height=\"407\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-56596\" \/>\n<figcaption>\n<p>I\u2019d still watch <em>Chhoti Si Baat<\/em> any time to be able to gaze upon Palekar, who plays the painfully timid Arun Pradeep, small fry in a small company, who is gypped by everyone.<\/p>\n<p>B.R. Films\/ NH Studioz<\/p>\n<\/figcaption>\n<\/figure>\n\nNo one wanted to live up to be Amol Palekar \u2013 but as things stood, you just were Amol Palekar, whether you liked it or not. In the same decade as <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.arre.co.in\/bollywood\/30-years-of-shahenshah-amitabh-bachchan-vigilante\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Amitabh Bachchan<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> and <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.arre.co.in\/bollywood\/happy-birthday-paaji-dharmendra-is-like-your-grandpa-on-instagram\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Dharmendra<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> proved to be the engines of the industry, pushing forth prototypes of outsize heroism, versions of everyman Palekar chugged along.\n\nWhere the Vijays were police officers or vigilantes outside the purview of law, Palekar\u2019s characters were short kurta-wearing, collar-clutching, mousy pen-pushers that wore mop tops and full-bodied smiles. In film after film, in <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Chhoti Si Baat<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> and <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Chitchor<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> and <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Baaton Baaton Mein<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, in the universes of Basu Chatterjee and <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.arre.co.in\/pop-culture\/hrishikesh-mukherjee-lymphosarcoma-heart-anand-film-rajesh-khanna\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Hrishikesh Mukherjee<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, on public transport and in Bandra apartments, he played the man on the street. I once read \u2013 with a complete lack of surprise \u2013 that Palekar used to work as a clerk in the Bank of India by day while he pursued painting by night. Who else could essay a white-collar worker with the soul of a poet who you might meet on a train or a bus, if not him? Who else would Vidya Sinha, dressed in a Patola sari, walk to college with, if not him?\n\nMuch of the action in Chatterjee\u2019s <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Chhoti Si Baat <\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(1976) takes place on public transport or the iconic Samovar restaurant. I am not sure the film has entirely stood the test of time \u2013 in fact, viewed through modern glasses, some of it is downright problematic. But I\u2019d still watch it any time to be able to gaze upon <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.arre.co.in\/bollywood\/hrishikesh-mukherjees-gol-maal\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Palekar<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, who plays the painfully timid Arun Pradeep, small fry in a small company, who is gypped by everyone. Arun has to be taught how to be a \u201creal man\u201d ergo, a douche, by a colonel that lives in an old Parsi bungalow in Khandala. Even when he is no longer the \u201cnoble savage\u201d, Palekar brings a certain refinement, a genteelness, to the assholery he metes out to his colleagues and rivals.\n\nSo finely did Palekar hone his Sanjays and Aruns and Tonys, that they became completely copacetic. By 1979, Palekar had perfected the poor sod role so well, that he could afford to parody it. In Mukherjee\u2019s <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Gol Maal<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, and his best-loved role(s), he was able to play both the idealised Ramprasad he\u2019d been essaying through the decade, as well as \u201cLucky\u201d, a realistic inversion of that ideal. <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Gol Maal <\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">has been interpreted as a critique of the Emergency, but it\u2019ll go down in history as the film that consolidated Palekar\u2019s allure. He was, as millennial Twitter might put, a wholesome middle-class snacc. You came for the dopey moustache and printed nylon shirts, but you stayed for the decency.\n\n<blockquote class=\"quote--center\"><p>No one wanted to live up to be Amol Palekar \u2013 but as things stood, you just were Amol Palekar, whether you liked it or not.<\/p><\/blockquote> \n\nAnd now, that exists only on the fringes of nostalgia. We\u2019ve lost the Aruns and Sanjays, and the time capsule that they lived in. To hanker for Palekar is to hanker for an era. It is going looking for a pre-hyper-congestion Bombay and the simple sophistication that went with it, an Edenic past where the monsoon could still be romanticised and even stalking seemed acceptable. Where ordinary people with job titles like \u201cSupervisor Grade 2\u201d at companies with fanciful names like Jackson Tolaram, could afford to live in Khar West houses with balconies.\n\nNow, however, the monsoon is rubbish. Khandala is overrun by wax museums, and old Parsi bungalows are mildewed. No one wears a Patola sari to college anymore. Just like Samovar, the people that existed in these movies are gone. Even that angle of the sunlight is gone.\n\nPalekar has gone on to do so much more. He\u2019d direct <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Daayraa <\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(1996), which would go on to win several international awards, but never get a theatrical release in India. He\u2019d make <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Paheli<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, India\u2019s entry to the Oscars in 2005, and <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Thodasa Roomani Ho Jaayen <\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">(1990), which would be memefied more than it would be watched. He\u2019d refer to acting as his \u201csecond love\u201d. And years later, he\u2019d find himself in the <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.arre.co.in\/columns\/rearview-pulwama-attack-amol-palekar\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">centre of a controversy<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> for expressing a mildly critical opinion of the establishment, and be asked to stick to the script.\n\nBut every time, you saw a terrazzo floor with glass grouting, you\u2019d think of Amol Palekar. When you rifled through old pictures of your parents in oversize goggles and flared pants, you\u2019d see Amol Palekar. You\u2019d walk the leafy lanes of Bandra, and find the world Amol Palekar once walked in a peeling paint job and a lopsided name plate. And that <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.arre.co.in\/social-commentary\/middle-class-mentality-indian-families\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">middle-class<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> hero will always be ours.\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In film after film, in Chhoti Si Baat and Baaton Baaton Mein, in the universes of Basu Chatterjee and Hrishikesh Mukherjee, on public transport and in Bandra apartments, Amol Palekar played the man on the street. Who else could essay a white-collar worker with the soul of a poet, who you might meet on a train or a bus, if not him?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":5749,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[702,7593,9677,8895,9678,9679,1777,9680,8060],"class_list":["post-5746","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-people","tag-amitabh-bachchan","tag-amol-palekar","tag-baaton-baaton-mein","tag-basu-chatterjee","tag-chhoti-si-baat","tag-chitchor","tag-dharmendra","tag-gol-maal","tag-hrishikesh-mukherjee"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.0 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Come for the Moustache, Stay for the Decency: Why Amol Palekar Remains Hindi Cinema\u2019s Wholesome Middle-Class Snacc<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In film after film, in Chhoti Si Baat and Baaton Baaton Mein, in the universes of Basu Chatterjee and Hrishikesh Mukherjee, on public transport and in Bandra apartments, Amol Palekar played the man on the street. 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