Museum of Art & Photography
Text by Namrata Chhabria
In Hindi films, the double role had a commercial rather than a narrative purpose. It gave a big, saleable star more footage and ensured a better popular response. By 1970, having a living double in a Bollywood film seems to have become almost a genre in itself. This exhibit traces how the dual - role in Bollywood became particularly driven by commercial forces such as the phenomenon of the “big star”, and the varied and discrete articulations, brands, or even caricatures of masculinity. This is contrasted with modes of working with the double role that did not privilege a commercial or iconic motive, but rather served the narrative of the film. The visual language of film posters provides an unparalleled discourse of the commercial strategy and positioning of a film, and acts as an industrial medium of dissemination, indicative of the filmic narrative from a market perspective.
Technology of the Double Role
Double roles began playing an important role in Indian films after filmmakers discovered the art of masking the camera lens. The technique of having the doubles face each other involved a simple method of masking one side of the lens, as first the actor or actress performed as one character. Then the same filmstrip, with the second half of the lens masked, was used to shoot the actor playing the “double”. There used to be a fine dividing “line” visible in the earlier films at the point that the lens was masked.
Cinerama - 3 Dimensional Film At Broadway Theater (1952-09) by Ralph MorseLIFE Photo Collection
As techniques improved, the “line” was removed in the laboratory. With advanced computerisation, the doubles did not have to be at “arm's - length”, but could be seen as seamlessly moving around each other.
Commercial function of the double role
The commercial logic of the industry and the articulation of a specific type of masculinity find a prominent intersection in Amitabh Bachchan, whose “superstar” status has been documented widely, both by journalists and by academics. In her analysis, Ranjani Mazumdar points to the rise of this iconic presence of a single actor as a signifier of major transformations that were taking place in the film industry from the 1970s onwards. The idea of the “complete actor” indicated an overwhelming consolidation of industrial practices around one figure. The most prominent industry discourse positioned the star as a “complete actor”, or a one-man performer, who could handle action, romance, comedy and in Bachchan’s case, even stunts without recourse to a stunt double.
Film poster for 'Desh Premee' by Narayan Artist (artist)Museum of Art & Photography
This ushered in a marginalization of comedians and several other peripheral characters who had traditionally provided interruptive relief, on the margins of the main story. In addition to the totalising discourse of the one-man industry, the double role also became a vehicle for characters that created a polarity between an ideal “good” hero and his or her “bad” antithesis to provide relief and contrast. For instance, in Desh Premee (1982), Amitabh Bachchan played Master Deenanath, an ex-freedom fighter, and his son Raju, who is seemingly lost to the dark side.
The film opens with Master Deenanath being imprisoned and tortured, with defiant cries of, “Inqilab Zindabad!” and barbed wire wound tightly around his body, an acute and direct depiction of inherent martyrdom and patriotism, as depicted centrally in the poster. The multi-star ensemble of the cast is highlighted in this densely detailed poster in which Bachchan’s anguished face is surrounded by other characters.
This is contrasted with the character of his son Raju presented in a ‘modern’ jacket, hinting at a colonial regression in a post-colonial context. The split is made more explicit when Raju is positioned, conversely, as “corrupt” and colludes with the nefarious arms smuggler and ex-British landlord Thakur Pratap Singh (played by Amjad Khan). He also conspires with other outlaws, signified by their regional identities as the Punjabi, Madrasi, Bengali, and Muslim “dons”, who are arranged radially in the poster around the traditionally Hindu Masterji’s dominant visual and ideological centrality.
Film poster for 'Desh Premee' by Narayan Artist (artist)Museum of Art & Photography
Raju is romantically involved with Asha, played by Hema Malini, a cabaret dancer, positioned as non-ideal by her visual and filmic association with the corrupt Raju in the poster.
Film poster for 'Don' by UnknownMuseum of Art & Photography
Don (1978)
The apotheosis of Amitabh Bachchan’s portrayal of the double role, is, unarguably, Don (1978), in which he plays the suave, charismatic and amoral criminal and his guileless double, a village entertainer (Vijay).
The poster generates movement and evokes the action genre with guns and a mise-en-scene of violence.
Zeenat Aman is placed on the bottom right corner, holding a gun to suggest an action sequence by a female character, while Bachchan’s charged, kinetic movements and expressive faces occupy, and even overwhelm the frame. Bachchan’s doubling here signifies a singularity of stardom, brushing past the multi-star form towards a greater consolidation of the iconic image.
Film poster for 'Adalat' by UnknownMuseum of Art & Photography
The Angry Young Man
In Adalat (1976), perhaps by virtue of the trope of the double role, Amitabh Bachchan essayed the part of an ageing man, with grey hair and grown up kids, as part of a father-son pair. In subsequent years this was to become a rarity, as the all-pervading ‘angry young man’ image consumed him. Bachchan’s image as the “angry man” circulated widely and gained the status of a modern myth.
Never before had an actor had this kind of presence, personifying the social and political unrest of his time. Writing about the actor in 1996, journalist Avijit Ghosh sums up the moment well: “The hollowness of official slogans like Garibi Hatao ["Eradicate Poverty"] reflected itself everyday in rising prices, growing unemployment and rampant corruption.
Cynicism bred easy, accentuated further by the State’s insensate treatment of the JP student movement. But there was also a sense of helplessness that spawned a bitter and impotent rage. It simmered until Amitabh Bachchan showed how the underdog and the underprivileged could strike back. When his clenched fist and baritone boom burst with primeval intensity, in darkened cinema halls smelling of sweat and urine, a nation’s eager fantasy came to fruition.”
Film poster for 'Jaise Ko Taisa' by Posibly Jain OffsetMuseum of Art & Photography
The Jumping Jack
With the consolidation of industrial practices around one central figure, masculinity became refigured as a multiplicity. To jostle for space in the competitive one-man show business, actors represented particular and mutually exclusive personas. If Bachchan was known as the iconic “angry young man” and embodied the constructed masculinity of the action hero, Jeetendra represented an altogether different masculine articulation.
He was known for his dance sequences as the 'jumping jack’ of Indian cinema, as evidenced in the film poster for Jaise Ko Taisa (1973). The film used doubling as a device to re-signify rural themes in a contemporary urban context, a thematic preoccupation of Indian films in the 70’s to reflect an urban audience and changing aspirations.
Jeetendra plays a pair of look-alike twins separated at birth and raised in different environments, one a farmer in tough surroundings and the other with a wealthy family in the city. The poster emphasizes his status as a dancer rather than the narrative of the film, with even the hint of an action sequence appearing choreographic in the scheme of the poster.
The 'He Man'
The double, or sometimes even playing three identities was a strategy to represent another prominent articulation of masculinity in Indian Cinema, that of the hyper-masculinized, “He Man”, championed by Dharmendra as seen in Do Chehere (1977) and Professor Pyaarelal (1981).
Film poster for 'Professor Pyarelal' by Perfect Printers (printer)Museum of Art & Photography
The poster of Professor Pyaarelal, echoes the formal composition of the poster of Adaalat, with the overwhelming face of the big-star occupying a major portion of the frame, separated from a litany of miniaturised characters by an equally overblown gun.
Film poster for 'Ek Se Bhale Do' by J.P. Mehta & Sons, BombayMuseum of Art & Photography
Narrative function of the double role
While the project of the double-role, and its effect of compressing the hero and the villain toward the creation of one iconic star, threatened to efface the very possibility of the character role, no actor has resisted this flattening like the iconic Amjad Khan, who immortalised Gabbar Singh in Sholay (1975). In a lesser known film Ek Se Bhale Do (1985), even though Khan played a double-role, as father and son, it was not a formulation designed to perpetuate the commercially driven stereotype of the big star.
He shared screen-time with Kumar Gaurav, known for his character in Love Story (1981), as alluded to in the poster which is considerably different in its visual composition. The faces of both actors are arranged on either side of the film title and the large central rearing horse, which acts as a suggestive and symbolic carrier of the tensions of the revenge narrative.
Film poster for 'Yudh' by Singhals (artist), Dnyansagar Litho Press, Bombay (printer)Museum of Art & Photography
The poster of Yudh (1985), echoes this triangular formula. In Yudh, Anil Kapoor plays a double-role (of twins separated at birth, who grow up to become a notorious hitman and a public prosecutor) alongside Jackie Shroff, in a plot driven by vengeance and a tenuous relationship between the two protagonists, because of the presence of the criminal double.
The unchallenged visual supremacy of the one-man hero is replaced by a more ambiguous formulation, which evokes a narrative suspense that ensues from a villain (played by Danny Denzongpa) manipulating one of the featured character’s hidden double.
Film poster for 'Do Kaliyan' by UnknownMuseum of Art & Photography
The poster of Do Kaliyan (1968) becomes an illustration when pushing further into the domain of films that use the double-role for narrative, rather than commercial purposes. Neetu Singh plays Ganga/Jamuna in the film, which is a remake of The Parent Trap (1961), a Walt Disney Technicolour film. The film employs the double role atypically, as it ceases to be the driving theme in the service of a ‘big star’, or an industrial trope .
By virtue of being a remake, there is a different historical convention and industrial approach to employing the double role. This is apparent in the hierarchy of the poster which centres around the romance of Mala Sinha and Biswajit, interceded by the string of characters arranged at the bottom of the frame.
The two faces of Ganga/Jamuna make a vestigial appearance above the title on the left side of the poster, a remnant of doubling as a genre in itself, necessitated by its particular commercial currency and iconic potency.
Ranjani, Mazumdar. “The Man Who Was Seen Too Much: Amitabh Bachchan on Film Posters.” Tasveer Ghar, www.tasveergharindia.net/essay/amitabh-bachchan-posters.html
