Right Ends, Wrong Means: The Anti-Hero In Indian Cinema

This story was published as part of Outlook's 21 October 2024 magazine issue titled 'Raavan Leela'. To read more stories from the issue, click here

Towards the end of Raavan (2010), Raagini’s (Aishwarya Rai) husband, Dev (Vikram), accuses her of infidelity, ordering her to take a polygraph test. “Beera told me that his hands may be dirty,” he says, “but your wife isn’t pure gold as well.” She pulls the chain of the train and gets off. She meets her abductor, Beera (Abhishek Bachchan), and thunders, “What did you tell Dev?” Delirious with disbelief that Raagini has returned to meet him, he walks towards—and gawks at—her, as the scene cuts to a flashback.

Beera on a creaking bridge, holding Dev’s hand. “I can kill you for your wife,” he says, “and I can save you for her.” He scowls: “Gold—your wife is gold. My hands are dirty, yes, but I’ve protected your gift with all my heart.” At that moment, both Raagini—and the audience—realise that Dev, the cop, is cruel, while Beera, the criminal, is kind. This scene upends the whole film, making us ask: Who is the hero, who is the villain? Who deserves our empathy, who deserves our scorn? And if Raavan-like Beera, avenging his sister’s death, is both virtuous and vicious, then what does that make him?

An anti-hero. A character who, honouring his own moral codes, bends the rules, mocks the law, and gets what he wants—someone with the right ends but the wrong means. (Unlike the hero, he’s also funny, charming, and suave, questioning our own fealties to good and evil.) But such a figure wasn’t organic to Indian cinema, for it’s had a long history of venerating heroes—and stars. Just consider the country’s first film, Raja Harishchandra (1913), modelled on a king so virtuous that he never lied. In the next two decades, dominated by mythologicals, heroes and villains—inspired by gods and demons—had little moral ambiguities.

That changed with Kismet (1943)—featuring Ashok Kumar as a con man—which, earning more than Rs one crore, was Indian cinema’s first blockbuster. Criminality tailed another leading man (Raj Kapoor) in Awaara (1951), which, pivoting on the nature versus nurture debate, also ruled the box-office. Then came hat-wearing, cigarette-smoking Dev Anand, as a gambler and a smuggler, in Baazi (1951) and Jaal (1952). Inspired by Hollywood noir, they, too, became money-spinners. Like Kapoor and Anand, Dilip Kumar appeared as an anti-hero in the blockbuster Gunga Jumna (1961). Centred on two brothers—a cop and a dacoit—it inspired many movies, including Deewaar (1975), and was inspired by an iconic drama, enlivened by another anti-hero, Mother India (1957).

Two more factors shaped the contours of such characters: Prohibition and organised crime. Call it the tale of two cities: Bombay and New York, the ’50s and the ’20s, the real and the reel, had collapsed into one. “As in the US during Prohibition,” writes Uday Bhatia in Bullets Over Bombay, “gangs in Bombay started distributing liquor.” So different gangsters emerged—Karim Lala, Haji Mastan, Varadarajan Mudaliar—mirroring their American counterparts: Al Capone, Salvatore Maranzano, and Lucky Luciano. If the latter inspired Scarface (1932, Capone) and Little Caesar (1932, Maranzano), then the former sparked Deewaar (1975, Mastan) and Nayakan (1987, Mudaliar).

The first wave of Bollywood anti-heroes arrived with Salim-Javed’s “Angry Young Man”, immortalised by Amitabh Bachchan in the ’70s. Besides the actor and the conditions precipitating such a character (inflation, corruption, organised crime), these dramas shared something else: a lack of fathers. In Zanjeer (1973), the protagonist’s parents are murdered. In Deewaar, the father, a trade union leader forced to cut a deal with the factory owners, leaves his family and town out of shame (much like the father in Mother India), making his son a figurative ‘orphan’. Vijay grows up to not remember his dad as much as the tattoo on his forearm: “Mera baap chor hai”. In Trishul (1978), Raj (Sanjeev Kumar) leaves his girlfriend, and subsequently their child (Bachchan), to marry a rich heiress. This crisis of masculinity met a figure like Bachchan who assuaged the lack in every way possible: through his commanding physique, tall frame, rich baritone.

In the next decade, the anti-heroes continued to roar. “On an average, the commercial industry in the 1980s produced about 130 films annually,” writes Ajanta Sircar in Framing the Nation. “Of these, roughly nine per cent were commercially successful. The love-story and the anti-hero genres, however, consistently produced at least one major hit each year, right through the decade.” Unlike the ’70s though, here the fathers played more visible—and complicated—roles. Take, for instance, Shakti (1982), where the father (Dilip Kumar), a cop, is so self-righteous that he doesn’t even save his abducted son (Bachchan), who becomes a resentful gangster. Or Ardh Satya (1983), whose hero (Om Puri) has grown up seeing his father, a constable, assault his mother. Unable to protect her, this ‘impotent’ man lives with his anger as an adult when, as a cop, he sees his seniors, like his father, violating their duties. And it’s the metaphorical father in Karma (1986), played by Kumar, a police officer, who enlists three wrong men—convicts in his jail—to do the right thing.

The ’90s, just like the ’70s, welcomed another actor as an anti-hero: Shah Rukh Khan. Less political and more ruthless than the Angry Young Man—Khan flings his girlfriend off a building’s terrace in Baazigar (1993)—his roles comprised an obsessive lover in Darr (1993), a vengeful son in Baazigar, and a gangster in Ram Jaane (1995). The Mumbai underworld kept fuelling the gangster genre in the ’90s, which culminated in the blazing anti-hero drama Satya (1998).

As Khan left such roles to pursue the romantic hero stardom, the team of Satya stuck around: its director (Varma), its writer (Anurag Kashyap), its music director (Vishal Bhardwaj). Inspired by The Godfather (1972), Varma directed Sarkar (2005), modelling Bachchan on Bal Thackeray, making the star’s career come full circle. Bhardwaj produced a searing anti-hero, played by Saif Ali Khan, in Omkara (2006). Five years later, the filmmaker gave a new spin to the character, hinging a drama on an anti-heroine, Priyanka Chopra, in 7 Khoon Maaf (2011). In 2014, adapting Shakespeare for the third time, Bhardwaj gave us Haider, an anti-hero who didn’t hesitate to be anti-state. A similar figure drove Paan Singh Tomar (2012). Kashyap’s penchant for violent, complex characters scaled new heights in the delirious ensemble Gangs of Wasseypur (2012), where heroes were conspicuous by their absence.

Mainstream Bollywood, meanwhile, produced the Dhoom series, which valorised the anti-hero so much that it reduced its heroes to sidekicks. Every film changed the antagonist and increased his cinematic billing—moving from John Abraham to Hrithik Roshan to Aamir Khan—sustaining substantial interest in the franchise. A year after the first Dhoom movie, an anti-hero and -heroine appeared in Bunty Aur Babli (2005), pricking the ‘India Shining’ bubble with memorable verve and humour. Once Upon a Time in Mumbaai (2010), inspired by Mastan and Ibrahim’s lives, harked back to ’70s masala, replete with delicious dialogues and calibrated melodrama.

Around the same time, a new character entered Hindi cinema: the deceptive anti-hero. In A Wednesday (2008) and Kahaani (2012), the villain is a hero and the hero a villain, concealing their true identities from the people inside (and outside) the films. In Special 26 (2013), a ‘CBI officer’ (Akshay Kumar) first fools the investigating officers and then, in the climax, fools us along with them. In the next few years, even bigger stars surfaced as anti-heroes. Sridevi played a vengeful mother in her swansong, Mom (2017), punishing her daughter’s rapist. Raees (2017) had Shah Rukh Khan as a Muslim don, who, after rising in the bootlegging business, enters politics—a Bollywood character showing rare political bite in post-2014 India.

The recent anti-heroes, though, haven’t emerged from Bollywood but south Indian cinema. The Malayalam thrillers Drishyam and its sequel (remade in Hindi starring Devgn) doubled up as ingenious suspense dramas and social commentary, where the ‘little man’ flips the bird to the cops. The Tamil thriller Vikram Vedha (2017), based on the Vikram-Betaal folklore, complicated the notions of good and evil, featuring an anti-hero so charming and compelling—Vijay Sethupathi in the original and Roshan in the remake—that he elicited both smiles and gasps. But the most successful anti-hero films gave Bollywood an existential crisis: the KGF series (2018, 2022) and Pushpa (2021). The anti-establishment machos are back in Hindi films, too, as evidenced by Khan in Jawan (2023), where he plays an Army officer father and the vigilante son.

But in today’s Bollywood, reduced to a propaganda factory, it’s difficult to find true anti-heroes, as there’s little difference between the heroes and the villains. Consider, for example, Thackeray (2019): a hero, an anti-hero, or a villain? Or Thalaivi (2021): a hero, an anti-hero, or a villain? Or Swatantrya Veer Savarkar (2024): a hero, an anti-hero—you get the drift. But even beyond them, Hindi cinema has produced so many protagonists with nauseating entitlement—men who stalk women, disregard their consent, objectify them—that those heroes, in fact, look like villains. So it’s only natural that, honouring such ‘tradition’, Kabir Singh (2019) and Animal (2023)—escalating vile masculine instincts—have hit the box-office jackpot. At a cursory glance, sure, you can call them anti-heroes, as these amoral protagonists are discontented and angry. Angry at what though? A typical anti-hero protested the status quo. In these movies, the anti-heroes, representing the status quo, wallow in self-pity and imagined grievances, projecting themselves as victims. Maybe this, too, makes sense, for it represents a cultural point so low that even anti-heroes snub it.

(This appeared in the print as 'More Than the Hero')