How Amitabh Bachchan united generations of British Asians

I was probably 12 years old the first time I saw an Amitabh Bachchan film. It was the early 80s and video players were relatively rare. My family did not own one so my father would, like many Asians at the time, hire a machine, which he would pick up on a Friday evening and return on Sunday. The cost of the video hire was, I recall, £5, and my dad and I would also select three or four films to watch on the Friday and Saturday evening. Invariably, these films would star Amitabh Bachchan. Bollywood movies – especially those released in the 70s and 80s – are today often viewed as gaudy kitsch, but the pleasure I derived from titles such as Coolie, Naseeb and Sholay was entirely unironic. In part this was because Bachchan, known as the Big B, offered such a startlingly different version of what it meant to be Asian compared with what was on our TV screens. Asians hardly featured on British television, and when they did it was mostly as the butt of jokes on shows such as Mind Your Language and It Ain't Half Hot Mum – both of which my family enjoyed, as it happens – but Bachchan was submissive to no one, and he always got the girl. My father and I did not have much in common. He was a traditional first-generation working-class Pakistani authoritarian father, and I was wrestling with what it meant to be a second-generation British Asian kid. But the moment an Amitabh Bachchan film started, there would be an immediate ceasefire in our generation clash: he was the one thing we could all agree on. Bachchan was the anti-establishment rebel who was respectful to his faith and his family; he was a lover and a fighter; he was all things to all people. I remember doodling his name in the margins of my exercise book and in the back of my teenage diary. I would walk around the school playground singing songs from films such as Yaarana and Suhaag. Bachchan was nothing less than a god to me, and in that I was hardly alone. Amitabh Bachchan's films from that era were undoubtedly escapist, but they were also reflective of the time. His rise coincided with the imposition of India's state of emergency, introduced by Indira Gandhi. Screenwriters such as Salim-Javed began to write scripts that reflected the frustrations of its people. Bachchan, the son of a poet, became a working-class hero: the ordinary man who was willing to stand up and fight against the injustices of the establishment. Those films are seared into the consciousness of all of us who saw them and it is their greatness that explains the adoration he still commands. When he suffered a near-fatal accident while filming Coolie in 1982, it provoked an outpouring of national grief: Indira Gandhi visited his hospital bedside, fans went on hunger strike and someone even walked backwards for 300 miles as penance. Bachchan survived the accident but his film career stalled in the late 80s, marred by a disastrous entry into politics and some ill-advised business ventures. I stopped watching his films: I had discovered other gods, and did not want to see a man in his 50s trying to play the part of an action hero. It may have seemed that he was on his way out, but a rebirth arrived: he was asked to present the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?. The hysteria that ensues when someone discovers Amitabh Bachchan is on the phone to them is considerably greater than anything Chris Tarrant has generated. The show is massive in India and so, again, is Amitabh Bachchan. Today, Bachchan is the head of a film dynasty that includes his son, Abhishek, and his daughter-in-law, Aishwarya Rai. He is still making films but, for me, it is his 70s and 80s classics that remain unsurpassed. In recent years, I have taken to watching those films again and, much to my delight, they have stood the test of time: they really are as good as I remember them. But there is a difference. When I watched them as a child, they yielded unalloyed pleasure; today, it is a bittersweet sensation. I recall how I watched the same films with my whole family. My father is long dead and my family has fractured – partly as a result of the choice I made in whom I married. I never see my older sister and I hardly talk to my older brother. The picture I have from my childhood of a family happy and united is gone forever, my life has changed for good and the only thing that has remained constant are those films. I was recently lucky enough to interview the man himself over the phone. Afterwards, I went over to my wife, who is not Asian, and told her about the conversation. I tried to explain why I had been so excited. I told her about watching those old films and how I had never been happier than during those days when my dad was around. As I was speaking I realised that, suddenly and without warning, I was crying. • The Big B at 70, presented by Sarfraz Manzoor, is on BBC Radio 4 on 27 October at 10.30am.