(NOTE: This is a reprint of a story published in the India Today edition dated July 14, 1997)
There’s an awkwardness about a newly bald man: he looks like a plucked chicken or has that mourning-after look. Baldness, however, sits with dignity on Danny Denzongpa in his new avatar.
The 50-minus actor from Sikkim, one of Hindi cinema’s favourite baddies, shaved his head a few months ago to play regent to the child-Dalai Lama for Jean-Jacques Annaud’s Seven Years in Tibet, to be out by year-end.
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The film was to be made in India. But after the Chinese put pressure on New Delhi, Annaud (Name of the Rose, Lover, Quest for Fire) carted off his cast, including David Thewlis and Hollywood heartthrob Brad Pitt, to a make-believe Tibet in Argentina.
Dzongrila, Danny’s sequestered Juhu home, is a world away with its feudal-manor air and silently shuffling servants. The actor lives here with his rarely seen wife Gawa, a scion of the Sikkim royal family.
But as he talks about his experience in Latin America, you can’t help but think that part of him is still there. He hasn’t yet grown back his hair: it has more to do with nostalgia than style. And his voice with its mellow gravitas tapers off as if he were talking to himself. Dreamlike, as he describes how good he felt doing it.
“It was not a lengthy role but it was a strong and lovely character. There was a dignity about the rulerâæ” The role may be closer to him than he imagines. Possibly, he feels more himself, bald and lama-like. It is instinctive: Danny’s family comes from a long line of lamas. His father, Rinzing Yongda, was the rather imperious head of Pemayangtse, a Red Sect Buddhist monastery in Yuksom in west Sikkim, and two of his elder brothers were lamas for a brief spell. His father was also the village head and the family had over 500 horses. “Even the servants had them,” he proudly explains.
That may explain Danny’s don’t-mess-around-with-me air. Film directors tread softly around him. “You don’t mess with dates, you don’t change his lines at the last minute. He comes bang on time and has never altered a Sunday for anybody,” says an admiring Mukul Anand, who’s directed him in five films.
In fact, during the making of one of them, Aitbar, Danny kicked a door until it broke because the handle didn’t turn easily. It takes little to set off the tantrums. Danny with his penchant for perfection had borrowed an army hat which he wears in 1942, A Love Story. But somebody sat on it and seeing the little dent, he stormed off, refusing to shoot for six hours. He didn’t attend the wedding of his best friend, producer-actor Romesh Sharma: a shirt button was missing, so he tore the shirt off in a huff and sat at home.
Danny is a thousand snarls and a hundred films old. It began a quarter-century ago when the Darjeeling-educated boy graduated from FTII and landed a role in Gulzar’s Mere Apne. He’s played villain to Raaj Kumar’s Hero and, down the decades, to stars like Sunny Deol, Sunil Shetty and now hunk-debutant Akshaye Khanna. Yet there’s something alien about him. As if he doesn’t quite belong. And as he slips into the reverie mode, it is easy to see why his present is a mirage. More real is the childhood in a village with no school: “We had to cross many bamboo bridges on top of the rocks. I was wrapped round my servant with a shawl and would close my eyes while we crossed those swaying bridges.” Mumbai for him is like a “nasty jungle”; sometimes he thinks that life as a star is not real. “Somewhere I feel it’s not me. It has to do with my past life. Look at me, I’m an alien: how could I be Shashi Kapoor or Daboo’s brother? It’s as if some guy from Africa or Poland were to act in Hindi films.”
Danny’s not joking about his past lives: a practising Buddhist, he believes in reincarnation and is still angry about his brothers forsaking the lama’s robes for business. Not that he’s not an astute businessman: his breweries in Sikkim produce two popular beers, Dansberg and Hit. “Danny is convinced he was a samurai in one of his past lives,” says Anand.
Well, if he was, it shows. There’s an elegance to his evil, a stylised dignity about his volcanic screen outbursts, however trite and tinny the dialogue. Underneath the oriental calm is a restlessness, a straining at an invisible leash. Which friends like Sharma attribute to an anger against himself. “He must be thinking, why am I here? He has name and fame but there’s this urge to do more, a creativity, an artistic urge. I think he should direct his own script now.”
Until then, he saves his passion for perfection for his paintings and his terrace garden with its rare bonsais and mountain plants-where Sharma and Amitabh Bachchan and the rare few meet for a drink and chat after their ritual game of ping-pong. No fuss or fetish is minor. “He’s the sort who, when he gets up, would put on his dressing gown and comb his hair before looking into the mirror,”‘ says Sharma.
And why is he such a perfectionist? Well, Danny wanted to be in the army ever since he can remember: “My first hero was this 6 ft 1 inch soldier in a smart uniform. I would sit on a stone and wait for him to emerge from the hills as if from eternity.” The soldier, now lame, works on Danny’s farm and the star still hankers after the army. His mother, having heard stories about soldiers being tortured in the war with China, didn’t let him become a soldier. The imperial Danny may just be a facade for beneath it is nature’s own child, Rousseau’s noble savage, whom Anand found one day on his haunches playing the Nepali flute “as if he were on a mountain and not on a plush hotel carpet.” Or director Pankuj Parashar, while shooting in Dalhousie, saw him “pouncing on a cactus and drinking its milk … he said it was good for the liver.” So who is the real Danny? Everything that he is and wants to be.
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