Naseeruddin Shah at KLF, Kozhikode
| Photo Credit: K. Ragesh

Few actors express the emotions of a character the way Naseeruddin Shah does, with every subtlety, every nuance. Fewer use the voice the way he does.

When he speaks, on Kozhikode Beach on a pleasant Thursday evening (January 23), you are reminded of all those characters made unforgettable by him – D.K. Malhotra (Masoom), Bhola (Manthan), Sarfaraz Khan (Junoon), Salim (Bazaar), Mahendra (Ijaazat), A Wednesday! (Common Man)…

Most of those films came at the peak of the middle cinema in Bollywood, back in the 1970s and 80s. He was very much the superstar of meaningful cinema, pioneered and perfected by Shyam Benegal, who passed away recently.

“As an actor, I owe him everything,” Shah tells The Hindu in an interview. “If it were not for him, I don’t know what direction my life would have taken. He cast me in films at a time when nobody else would touch me. That, too, in ground-breaking films like Manthan,Bhumika, and Junoon.”

He says he loved him dearly. “He always was very fond of me,” says Mr. Shah, who came to the city to speak at the Kerala Literature Festival. “One sees this kind of enthusiasm in film festivals which I don’t usually attend because there are too many people. It is not surprising because there is such a love of reading in this State. I feel envious of the people in Kerala because they live in such beautiful surroundings, and they are all educated and very theatre-literate.”

Shah has acted in one Malayalam film – Ponthan Mada, directed by T.V. Chandran. “I remember struggling with my Malayalam dialogues,” he says. “I would sit up all night and learn the dialogue and the next morning I’d go to the set and tell the director, ‘Sir, just listen to my lines’, and before I would hardly have said one word, he would say ‘No’. So I had an uphill task.”

Mr. Shah says he enjoyed working with Mammootty in that film. “He is a great actor, and he is a great star, but he doesn’t carry his stardom around too heavily,” says Shah. “Malayalam is lucky that Mammootty and Mohanlal have used their stardom to act in good movies. And, because of the presence of either of these gentlemen, for the last 30 years, they have been ready to work with newcomers, in parallel cinema, with small budgets. It is very rare anywhere in India for stars of that magnitude to do these things. I wish some of our Hindi stars had that much sense to not only propagate themselves but also to participate in movies which should be seen.”

Mr. Shah is impressed with some of the younger crop of Bollywood actors, like Rajkumar Rao and Nawazuddin Siddiqui and the late Irfan Khan. “These actors are much better than we were at that age,” he says. “I really admire them, and I envy them because they’re getting wonderful films and roles. I don’t watch Bollywood films much, but I enjoy once in a while watching a film by Rajkumar Hirani, who, I think, is a very fine director. I like his films.”