Nehru's Hero Dilip Kumar

by Meghnad Desai

Nehru’s Hero is about how you relate politics and cinema, how a non-didactic, non-academic medium reflects a political era. It’s about how film roles change, how the social aspect of life is always changing people’s idea of what India was and the ideal of manhood, what your hero should be like. His early films are tragic, he’s losing the woman and crying and groaning and singing. It’s all about forces beyond his control shaping his destiny. But later he is a do-something hero, facing challenges and getting the girl. He is fighting the world and succeeding. In the mid-50s India became more hopeful, I think. People felt they could do something about their situation.