The varied shades of villainy
By M.L. Dhawan

IN 1939 Pran Kishan Sikand was in Lahore learning still-photography when a chance meeting with a well-known film-maker Mohammed Wali outside a paan shop changed the course of his life forever. Mohammed Wali cast him as a villain in Punjabi film Yamla Jat followed by Chaudhary. The films were superhits. Pran’s work was appreciated and applauded. He arrived as a villain on the film scene with a bang.

In 1942, Dalsukh M. Pancholi cast him in a romantic lead role opposite singer-actress Noor Jehan in Khandaan. The film was a knock-out hit. Pran was flooded with offers of lead roles but he declined these offers as he did not like running around trees and chasing his heroines. Pran did about 22 films in Lahore. The Partition in 1947 brought an abrupt end to his budding career. The young actor, alongwith his wife and one-and-a-half year old son landed in Bombay in search of new moorings.

In Bombay he got the role of a villain for Shahed Latif’s Ziddi. This was followed by Grahasti and Apradhi. Finally D.D. Kashyap’s Badi Behan established Pran as industry’s baddie No 1. Pran did not look back and went on to establish his supremacy. He ruled the roost for more than four decades without an equal and without any threat to his fiendishness on screen. He wanted to explore evil. The intensity and passion that a negative character exudes always fascinated him. There has never been a bad man in films like Pran.

He was known as the incarnation of all that is evil,venomous, crooked and crafty. He always struck terror and drove his audience into a frenzy of hate. Girls, women and children shuddered at the mere sight of him. He made such a devastating impact that parents did not name their sons as Pran.

What set Pran apart from other villains of his time was that he enjoyed playing negative characters and wanted to provide as many different shades to villainy as possible. Portraying the title role in Halaku he sent shivers down the spine of cinegoers. His rolling eyes, his booming voice reduced his opponents to bleating and that ice-in-the veins demeanour earned Pran a permanent place in celluloid’s Hall of Infamy.

Who can forget the superbly created Raaka in Raj Kapoor’s Jis Desh Mein Ganga Behti Hai running his hand over his neck, time and again, a subconscious gesture to emphasise his fear of the hangman’s noose?

In Kab, Kyon Aur Kahan, he played a dead man who returns from the dead, his pupils dialating horribly, giving jitters to the audience. The perverse glee his character displayed in films like Afsana, Bahar, Adalat, Sheesh Mahal, Tum Sa Nahin Dekha, Junglee, Ram Aur Shayam and more recently, Heer Ranjha etc... While torturing his victims was a new low in human debasement. Pran was the meaner-than-sin villain who always mixed vile with a smile.

There was hardly a heroine starting from Nargis, Nutan, Nimmi, Nalni Jayant, Meena Kumari, Madhubala, Mala Sinha, Vyjynthimala, Sadhana, Geeta Bali, Suraiyya, Bina Rai, Begum Para, Veena and Nadira etc who was not molested by Pran in one film or the other.

A hero was not considered heroic unless he had Pran to fight against in a film. Whenever he was spotted on roads, he was greeted with taunts like badmash, lafanga, goonda and haraami etc. For a change, he played the role of good doctor in Raj Kapoor’s Aah, but the film did not do well and Pran decided to continue to murder and molest in films.

Pran — the villain with a style of his own ruled as the villain as long as he wanted. But Manoj Kumar’s magnum opus Upkaar proved to be a turning point in the Pran’s career. Pran — the artiste and actor par-excellence who (unknown till then) played Malang Chacha like his very life and career depended on it.

The impression and opinion of the cinegoers about Pran as an actor changed after they saw the power, and obsession with which Pran played the role. Malang Chacha of Upkaar is one character which will always stay immortal and so will man who made the role an unforgettable one. When Manoj Kumar approached Kishore Kumar for rendering Kasme wade pyar wafa sub baten hain, baton ka kiya, he bluntly refused to sing the song as it was to be picturised on Pran. Even Kalyanji-Anandji were distraught when they learnt that this song was not to be picturised on the hero of the film. After the release of the film all of them were so impressed by Pran’s histrionics that they admitted that most stars sing their songs with their lips but Pran was the only one who had sung it from the heart with all the feeling he could put into his voice.

It was a tragedy that Pran never got another chance to make the kind of impact he did in the role of Malang Chacha. One could not believe if Malang Chacha was the same man who had been wasted in every other film as the savage with no saving grace.

Pran turned over a new leaf in his career and switched over to major positive roles in films like Parichay, Ansoo Ban Gaye Phool, Kasauti, Dus Numbri, Kalia, Don, Naseeb, Victoria No 203 and Amar Akbar Anthony. Zanjeer is remembered as much for its angry young man as it is for Pran’s dialogue delivery which had a whiplash ferocity.

Pran mesmerised the cinegoers with a foot-tapping qawwali, Yaari hai iman mera yaar meri zindgi. Equally unforgettable is Majboor’s frisky Goan song-dance sequence Phir na kehna Michael daru pee ke danga karta hai.

Fifty seven years in the industry and a gallery of different roles with different actors. It has been a long innings for one of the Hindi cinema’s most hated bad man. In real life Pran is a fearless person as he proved when he wrote an article against the Emergency. For this he had received a letter of appreciation from George Fernandes smuggled from the jail.

Pran is disenchanted with system. Ask him about the future of Mera Bharat Mahaan and he bemoans Her shakh Pey ulloo baitha hai anjam-e-gulistaan kiya hoga.