My Name is NOT Rahim Chacha & I Have No Religion

There seems to be an international conspiracy afoot. The Wikipedia page on Sholay says that AK Hangal played “Rahim Chacha” in the film. The Youtube video of Hangal's funeral is headlined “AK Hangal (Rahim Chacha of Sholay movie) Funeral”. Both the Hindustan Times and Times of India, on the day after his death, agree that it is Sholay’s Rahim Chacha who has passed away (yet other obituaries elevated him to “Bollywood’s Rahim Chacha”). Director Kabir Khan says so as well, writing on Muslim identity for the Indian Express, as does academic Rachel Dwyer on her blog. And a quick look at three studies on the presentation of Muslims in Bollywood sustains the enigmatic figure of Sholay’s Rahim Chacha.

Who, me?

Or me?

Only, no such person exists. Hangal did not play anything remotely like a Rahim Chacha in Sholay. He was the village Imam — though Ramgarh did not seem to have any other observable Muslim villager — and he was respectfully called “Imam Sahab" by everyone (except, of course, Sachin, who called him Abba). 

Presumably, like “Ramu Kaka”, “Nawab Sahab", or “Lalaji”, Rahim Chacha too was a useful stereotype, both in film​makers’ and viewers’ minds, invoking a benign “good Muslim” character who would provide aid or affection to the lead characters in the film. Or simply add the feel-good factor of idyllic religious harmony to the community of people being shown. As for the facts of Rahim Chacha’s existence, two Bachchan films actually did include a character by this name, but neither of them was Sholay.

One was Khuddar and it was, in fact, Hangal who played Rahim Chacha in this film. But far from being a mild mannered ‘good man’, he entered the scene as an assertive youngish man with black hair (!) saving two young runaway boys (who grew up to become Amitabh Bachchan and Vinod Mehra) from a begging mafia. He challenged the criminals, looked them in the eye, and declared “Main inka chacha hoon”. He then proceeded to adopt the two youngsters as part of his family.

The film in which Hangal actually played Rahim Chacha -- Khuddar

In the other film, Deewar, it was Yunus Parvez who played Rahim Chacha, a senior coolie at the docks where Amitabh worked before he took to a life of crime. Unlike Khuddar’s Rahim, this one had no instinct about standing up to criminals. He worried for Amitabh’s safety, advising him to pay the protection money being demanded by the mafia and fretting over his belligerence.

Another Rahim Chacha, Yunus Parvez, fusses affectionately over Amitabh in Deewar

AK Hangal too played a role in Deewar, a cameo of a retired school master whose son is shot in the leg by Shashi Kapoor, a police inspector, when the boy is caught stealing some food. Hangal’s wife berates Shashi for shooting the impoverished young boy even as rich black-marketeers with godowns full of food flourished. Hangal, however, shuts her up, making a noble statement: Theft is theft, never mind how small; thousands of people go hungry everyday in Hindustan, should they all become thieves?  “I have no complaints against you” he tells Shashi Kapoor. Though he played a Hindu character in the film, Hangal’s ‘religion’ was effectively brought out in the ethical stand he took, in the portrait of Rabindranath Tagore presiding on the wall of his ramshackle house, and in Shashi Kapoor’s tribute: “Such a profound lesson could only have come from a teacher”.  

Masterji, with Rabindranath Tagore in Deewar

It is a mystery where the AK Hangal-Rahim Chacha reference in Sholay arose from, but once it entered cyber space it seems to have kept growing. For someone who has seen the movie more than 40 times (started at the age of 7 and never stopped since), it can be quite exasperating to come across yet another instance on the net every time I research the film!

Hangal’s role in Sholay goes beyond that of a good-hearted, avuncular blind figure. In a crucial scene, Imam Sahab acts as the voice of the village’s conscience; his moral authority is towering. Often congratulated and questioned about this role, the old IPTA veteran — who had joined films at the age of nearly 50 after doing years of leftist theatre — explained that he used psychological techniques of preparation. “He imagined the feeling of blindness by going back millions of years to the beginnings of evolution, when all life that was to come was contained in sightless single-celled organisms swimming in the dark waters. Once there he would grope and search for sight. He kept the searching movement through the scene of Ahmed’s death” (Anupama Chopra, Sholay.)

Rehearsing for Imam Sahab's most crucial scene

The Sholay gang

The crux of AK Hangal’s role in Sholay is that his son Ahmed​ has been tortured to death by the sadistic dacoit Gabbar, and the body sent back to the village as a warning to the locals: they must throw out the fighters Jai and Veeru. The villagers’ anxieties express themselves as hostility towards Jai and Veeru. But Imam Sahab gently intervenes that he, who has lost a son, would prefer that the two men stay and fight for the village’s right to live with dignity. He wishes he had another son to martyr for the sake of the village.  He brings decency, perspective, and rectitude to the proceedings.

These qualities went spectacularly missing in a very troubled episode from the actor’s life, when the Shiv Sena decided that he should be boycotted for attending a Pakistan Day function at the Pakistan High Commission in 1993. (Hangal had been invited for the event because he was in regular touch with the High Commission at that point, since he needed a visa to visit Pakistan for his autobiography). After the boycott call, his scenes had to be cut from screenings of Sholay, then running in a Bombay hall, and he received many threatening phone calls. Hangal attributed this hostility to his credentials as a well-known secular activist. Unofficially, there was even a vague misunderstanding that the actor was a Muslim — a tribute to his famous turn in Sholay, possibly helped along by the fact that he hardly used his full name Avatar Kishan Hangal, and possibly even because ‘Hangal’ was not a surname easily ‘placed’ by the rest of India. The actor had no work for nearly two years. 

As a practising communist, Hangal could not care less about which religion he was supposed to belong to and his idea of patriotism is most movingly narrated in his own words. Put in jail for communist political activities in newly independent Pakistan, Hangal and his mates resisted being deported to India when prisoners were being divided along religious lines. This was something that some other prisoners, who belonged to the RSS, could not understand. “But we had commitments to fulfil — we were involved in the trade union movement, cases were pending in court (for instance, the Karachi Tailoring Workers Union case), we had ties with the common people — and we could not leave them in the lurch. This was our idea of Matrabhoomi — real ties and concern for the people of one’s birthplace.”

Old comrades: At a protest with Shaukat Kaifi, the veteran theatre actress and activist
(who happens to be Shabana Azmi's mother)

AK Hangal did not know his date of birth, and when he gave an interview to a cine magazine early in his film career and was asked for a date, he laughingly suggested 26th January. The interview was being held in March so the editor asked for a date not so far away! “In that case, you may write 15th August, the day India was reborn”. They laughed, the date got published and the actor went on to receive wishes and bouquets from all over the country on his ‘birthday’ ever since. 

However, we do know that the Padma Bhushan awardee, who acted in more than 200 films, was born in 1917 and would have been a hundred years old this year. Perhaps we can begin the celebrations by editing the Wikipedia entry on Sholay before the 15th of August?