Dev Anand

Dev Anand: The Evergreen Star of Hindi Cinema

He never learned to retire. In September 2011, at eighty-eight, Dev Anand released *Chargesheet*, a film he had written, produced and directed himself. It was a critical and commercial failure, and it did not matter to him in the slightest, because for six and a half decades the point had never been the verdict—it had been the next picture. When Amitabh Bachchan learned of his death that December, he said simply: "An era has come to an end. Dev Anand leaves a void never perhaps to be filled again."

A Punjabi Lawyer's Son

Dharamdev Pishorimal Anand was born on 26 September 1923 in the Shakargarh tehsil of Gurdaspur district in Punjab, British India—land now in Pakistan. He was the third of four sons of Pishori Lal Anand, a lawyer and freedom fighter of the Arya Samaj, and his wife Indravati. He took his B.A. in English literature from Government College, Lahore, then moved to Bombay in the early 1940s, where before the movies he reportedly worked briefly as a clerk. His brothers Chetan and Vijay Anand would become distinguished filmmakers, and his sister's son, Shekhar Kapur, a director of international standing.

The Rise of a Star

His film debut came in 1946 with *Hum Ek Hain*, a plea for Hindu-Muslim unity. Commercial success followed with *Ziddi* (1948), but the film that changed the direction of Hindi cinema was *Baazi* (1951), a crime thriller now regarded as the forerunner of "Bombay noir"—the shadowy urban genre that Dev Anand's bold choices did more to establish, one modern director argued, than any star since. Across the 1950s he was almost never off the list of top-grossing films: *Taxi Driver* (1954), *C.I.D.* (1956), *Paying Guest* (1957), and *Kala Pani* (1958), which brought him his first Filmfare Award for Best Actor.

Navketan and the Family Enterprise

In 1949, with his brother Chetan, Dev founded Navketan Films—"new banner"—which would produce some thirty-five films and become one of Hindi cinema's great incubators of talent, launching directors such as Raj Khosla and Vijay Anand and nurturing the composer S.D. Burman. It gave Dev Anand something few stars possessed: control over his own myth. He produced, and later directed, the vehicles that carried his persona, and used them to introduce a stream of new actresses—Zeenat Aman, Tina Munim—to Indian audiences.

Guide and the Peak

The masterpiece arrived in 1965. *Guide*, his first color film and an adaptation of R.K. Narayan's novel, cast him as Raju, a garrulous tour guide whose life bends from petty opportunism toward reluctant sainthood. It won the National Film Award for Best Feature Film in Hindi and remains the performance by which he is measured. He reunited with his director-brother Vijay for the glittering thrillers *Jewel Thief* (1967) and the blockbuster *Johny Mera Naam* (1970). His own directorial breakthrough, *Hare Rama Hare Krishna* (1971), captured the hippie counterculture and made a star of Zeenat Aman. Hits such as *Des Pardes* (1978) kept him a leading man into an age when most of his contemporaries had long since aged out of romance—earning him the epithet that stuck: the Evergreen Star.

The Style That Launched Imitators

Dev Anand was Bollywood's first true fashion icon. The puff of hair, the scarves and jackets, the rapid-fire delivery punctuated by a bobbing nod of the head and a sudden smile—these mannerisms were copied by a generation of actors and mocked affectionately by the rest. Critics reached for Gregory Peck as a comparison; Dev Anand refused it flatly. "I don't want to be known as India's Gregory Peck," he said, "I am Dev Anand." One writer called his off-screen persona "the modern Indian citizen created by the new state of India"—urbane, Western-facing, optimistic, restless.

The Private Man

The showman's most quoted heartbreak was real. Between 1948 and 1951 Dev Anand loved the actress-singer Suraiya, proposing with a diamond ring; her family opposed the interfaith match, and Suraiya, who never married, remained the woman he later called his "first true love." In 1954, during the filming of *Taxi Driver*, he married the actress Kalpana Kartik in a quiet ceremony; she retired from the screen, and they had a son, Suneil, and a daughter, Devina. The private losses seemed only to feed the public appetite for work.

Why Dev Is Called a Genius

Dev Anand's claim rests on craft and instinct rather than intellect, and the honest description of the craft is specific. His talent was twofold: an inimitable screen charisma—the film critic Anupama Chopra called him "the most dashing hero Indian cinema has ever seen," noting that "in 77 years, Dev Saab hasn't had a true successor"—and, less obviously, an unusually sharp eye as a producer for material, genre and new talent. It was his backing of *Baazi* and its successors, the director Sriram Raghavan observed, that "shaped what is called the Bombay noir," a claim of influence beyond mere stardom. He is enshrined with Raj Kapoor and Dilip Kumar as one of the "golden trio" who ruled Hindi cinema for a quarter century. The counter-case is equally clear. His acting rested on a fixed, mannered persona rather than the chameleon transformation prized in later stars, and his refusal to stop working left a long tail of self-indulgent, poorly received late films, *Chargesheet* among them, that dimmed his final decades. What he possessed was not the intellect of a theorist but the surer gift of a showman: taste, timing, and a magnetism that survived four decades of changing fashions. On the terms proper to a movie star, the word fits.

Legacy

Honors gathered late and deservedly: the Padma Bhushan in 2001, the Dadasaheb Phalke Award—India's highest cinematic honor—in 2002, four Filmfare Awards, and a commemorative postage stamp issued during the centenary of Indian cinema. Dev Anand died of cardiac arrest in London on 3 December 2011, with his son Suneil beside him; his ashes were immersed in the Godavari. He had made more than a hundred films and had played the lead in over ninety of them, second only to one man in Hindi cinema's history. He never retired, and in the memory of Indian audiences he never quite ages.

Achievements

• Educated at Government College University
• Worked as film actor, film director and film producer