- 06 Apr 2025
Manoj Kumar espoused causes that the nation and its builders held dear. His best-known films captured the minds and hearts of moviegoers in a nation making its way through the first few decades of its independence from British rule. He personified patriotism and it paid off.
His career unfolded in an era in which a newly-free people struggled with poverty, unemployment and a lopsided system manipulated by the powerful. There was anger and frustration in Manoj Kumar’s films but they were shorn of jingoism and steeped in secular values.
Deep-rooted humanism, if only of a rather simplistic kind, ran like a thread through his films, in which he often became the voice of the common man. The actor-director played Bharat – an alternative name for India – in five films, starting with Upkar (1967) and ending with Clerk (1989), the last film that he helmed with himself as the male lead.
Manoj Kumar achieved stupendous success with his patriotic films, which included Purab Aur Paschim (1970), in which he employed broad strokes to harp upon a clash between East and West; Roti Kapada Aur Makaan (1974), which zeroed in on a middle-class family at the crossroads of ethics and expediency; and Kranti (1981), a historical drama about India’s first War of Independence in the 19th century.
These films and the characters he played him in them gave him a distinctive persona that placed him in a slot far removed from the ones occupied by the two reigning stars of the 1970s – eternal romantic Rajesh Khanna, who stormed the industry with Aradhana and Do Raaste in 1969, and angry young man Amitabh Bachchan, who soared to superstardom with Zanjeer (1973) and Deewar (1975).
Manoj Kumar’s peak as a crowd-puller in the mid-1970s coincided with the advent of Mumbai multi-starrers, led by Sholay (1975), which changed the course of Hindi popular cinema. But to the actor-director goes the credit of mounting Mumbai’s first true multi-starrer in the form of Roti Kapada Aur Makaan.
The story of a man and his family grappling with financial strife and its repercussions featured Manoj Kumar, Shashi Kapoor, Amitabh Bachchan, Zeenat Aman and Moushumi Chatterjee in stellar roles. The title of Roti Kapada Aur Makaan came from a phrase often used by the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to denote the bare necessities of life that the masses needed.
It was an earlier Indian Prime Minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri, who inspired Manoj Kumar with another slogan, Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan (Hail the soldier, hail the farmer), which gained currency in the aftermath of the Indo-Pak war of 1965. The film that resulted, Upkar extolled the contribution of farmers and soldiers to a nation’s well-being. It gave birth to Bharat, a man unwaveringly committed to the principles of equity and integrity.
There was, however, significantly more to Manoj Kumar than the overtly nationalistic cloak that he donned on the screen. Working with many other directors (Raj Khosla, Shakti Samanta, among others) and with an array of top leading ladies, he featured in numerous box-office hits that made him a bankable star of the 1960s and 1970s.
He acted opposite Waheeda Rehman, Hema Malini, Saira Banu, Asha Parekh, Mala Sinha, Vyjayanthimala and Nanda without necessarily forming an abiding screen pair with any of them. His career successes both as an actor and a director came independent of the people that he collaborated with.
Besides being an actor with a string of successes to his credit, Manoj Kumar was an accomplished craftsman. He edited several of the films that he directed, including the superhits Roti Kapada Aur Makaan and Kranti.
Particularly noteworthy was the manner in which he picturised songs and mounted dramatic scenes. His goal was to make the strongest possible impact as well as a statement aimed at underlining the theme of the film. Witness Mere desh ki dharti (Upkar), Baaki kuch bacha toh mehngai maar gai (Roti Kapada Aur Makaan, sung by Lata Mangeshkar, Mukesh, Narendra Chanchal and Jani Babu Qawwal) and Zindagi ki na toote ladi (Kranti) as cases in point.
Born Harikrishan Giri Goswami in Abbottabad in 1937, he migrated to Delhi as a 10-year-old boy. When still a teenager, he moved to Bombay to try his luck in the movie industry. He debuted as an actor in 1957 and in the next five years appeared in a series of films that did little to further his career prospects.
It was not until 1962 that Manoj Kumar tasted genuine success. The film was Vijay Bhatt’s Hariyali Aur Rasta, co-starring Mala Sinha. In the next few months, more hits (Shaadi, Dr Vidya, Grahasti) put him on the path to stardom. His first major hit, Woh Kaun Thi? (1964), in which he played the main lead opposite Sadhana, catapulted him to the big league. It was followed by Shaheed (1965), in which he was Bhagat Singh, one of India’s most revered martyrs. The heroism of the real-life freedom fighter hero clearly seeped into the films that Manoj Kumar went on to direct.
Manoj Kumar faded away from the public eye after directing his son Kunal Goswami in Jai Hind in the late 1990s. The film sank without a trace. But the work that he did in earlier decades kept him alive in the popular consciousness, as it likely will until Hindi cinema lives.
The writer is an award-winning Indian film critic.