Just a few days ago, the country saw how Jaya Bachchan stormed out of the Parliament after Rajya Sabha Chairman Jagdeep Dhankhar kept referring to her as Jaya Amitabh Bachchan, by her husband's name, and rightfully so, even after she objected to it. Her feminist roots go way back.
In Angry Young Men, a new documentary series on Prime Video, on Hindi cinema’s greatest screenwriters, Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar, who shaped the ’70s Bollywood decade, actress Jaya Bachchan (then Bhaduri) says that she was reluctant and didn’t want to be cast in Zanjeer, which she calls “a male-centric film” and Bhaduri, already a star, was known for helming the films she did until then, from Guddi (1971) to Bawarchi (1972), being a key in plot changes.
In Zanjeer, Jaya is the street performer Mala, she is, like many Salim-Javed heroines (an exception was Seeta aur Geeta), was strong, not namby-pamby, and a professional earning her own bread, has a promising background, but once the hero comes on screen, she is there to propel his story.
But Jaya conceded to playing the role when Salim-Javed came to her after other heroines said ‘no’ and told her she could not refuse them. “They were the stars, they were the…brats,” Jaya says in the docu series. There was an additional reason to act in Zanjeer. Her co-star, Amitabh Bachchan. That she’d get to spend some time and romantic moments with him. Their collaboration on Zanjeer culminated in a blockbuster success and a month after its release in June 1973, Amitabh and Jaya tied the knot.
Director Prakash Mehra’s Zanjeer (1973) launched many a first. It launched the Angry Young Man in Hindi cinema and it launched the writing career of Salim-Javed. The duo, two industry outsiders, who came like a bolt from the blue and changed cinema as we knew it. They changed industry norms, too, in the process of witnessing a meteoric rise, delivering 22 blockbusters of the 24 movies they wrote together. An unprecedented, un-repeated feat. Until their advent, screenwriters were not given their due respect. Zanjeer was also a turning point for South Indian cinema, with Bachchan’s acting inspiring Tamil actor Rajinikanth. If there was no Zanjeer, there wouldn’t have been a Dhoom or Krrish decades later.
Dissent that was seen on the streets with the onset of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency in 1975 came on the screen, in Hindi films, two years prior to that, with Zanjeer. A brooding hero fighting, on behalf of the powerless, against injustice and an oppressive system, thus capturing the zeitgeist of the ’70s. Zanjeer marked the first of the many uproarious success that the duo Salim-Javed would taste and establish them as a force to reckon with. When the posters of Zanjeer were put up across Bombay, after not finding their names on it, Salim-Javed hired a painter and created a stencil to plaster their names across all posters. History was created that day.
In Zanjeer, a young boy witnesses the murder of his parents, during a Diwali celebration, by an unknown man with a white stallion on his bracelet. The horse would come to haunt him in recurring nightmares. Two decades later, that child who grew up into a reticent, brooding adult, becomes an inspector in a dishonest town, and receives complaints against a local who runs gambling dens, Sher Khan, the iconic character played by Pran. That inspector was Vijay Khanna, the first of the many Vijays that Amitabh Bachchan would go on to play in the 1970s. With Zanjeer was born the iconic Angry Young Man, who doesn’t sing and dance or say extraneous things, but sticks to his brief and delivers short, crisp, memorable dialogues and solid action-packed punches. The hero’s absent parents also hark back to Salim and Javed’s own absent parents (dead mothers) as they struggled in Bombay.
Salim-Javed had gone to watch Mahmood-produced film Bombay to Goa (1972), where a gum-chewing actor landing punches on the villain gave them the idea to go narrate their script to this actor (Bachchan) who will be made a star overnight by these changemaker duo.
Vijay Khanna’s (Bachchan) days are spent shutting down gambling dens and locking up gang members, until an outburst of gang violence kills a group of innocent children. Jaya’s Mala is the sole witness to the crime but she’s been paid off by the gang members. Vijay’s his harsh matter-of-fact way brings a change of heart in a guilty Mala and that that puts both her life as well as his own in danger at the hands of the villain and oil-mafia head Teja (Ajit).
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