Pure Evil: A Book Review

For no reason at all, a picture of Amrish Puri from a 1980s potboiler called Loha.

Thanks to the ever-growing need for content and the insatiable interest in Bollywood, listicles (how I hate this word!) are now at a point where they are being produced (or recycled) at a velocity higher than the audience can consume. Since the authors are only a tad older than Generation Z, these lists tend to have a very heavy post-1990s bias, with just a smattering of the all-time classics and no representation of the many films that make Hindi cinema what it is today. 

A book like Pure Evil arrives as almost the exact antithesis of such hastily prepared lists that must appear before midday on Amrish Puri’s birthday. Nearly a decade in the making, this book is meticulously researched with interviews with writers, directors, actors, fans, historians, sociologists providing heft to the narrative. It is interesting that in some cases where the creator is not alive (V Shantaram, for example), the author has interviewed the next of kin instead and managed to glean out a few nuggets about the character/film in question. 

The book is a ‘chronological’ story of the villains of Hindi cinema. Starting with our British rulers, it goes down the decades covering foreign powers, social and familial villains, zamindars and moneylenders, dacoits, industrialists, politicians, gangsters and mafia with two sorties into the mentally ill and the anti-heroes. Javed Akhtar had once said that the history of a country can be best understood by studying the evolution of villains in its popular culture. That way, this book is also a tangential history of post-Independence India (as is probably evident from the roll call of villains mentioned above). 

Just to give a flavour, the corrupt policeman appears in the following steps:

• Starts with an unknown historical perspective (the first corrupt cop appeared in 1949)
• Explains the institutional reluctance to show policemen as villains or even morally weak (again, an unknown nugget about how CID officers couldn’t be shown in a certain way in the film CID)
• Points out the continued clichés of the police appearing late and the comical presence of hawaldars 
• And, finally, covers the full-blown corruption and villainy of policemen that started in the early 1980s (often in conjunction with corrupt politicians) 

This explanation of a trend that unfolded over several decades is a great mix of research, socio-cultural understanding and smart writing. The writing is important because it strikes a fine balance between nudging the reader to remember the well-known films and explaining what happens in the obscure ones. 

While reading this chapter, I remembered Ajit’s character in Zanjeer hinting at corruption in the police. When his henchman tells him that one of his trucks has been detained by the police, he smoothly explains to his moll, “Kabir keh raha that kissi inspector ko paise ki zaroorat hai”. This hint of corruption in a 1973 film became a trend in less than a decade. 

The book’s biggest strength is that it is exhaustive without being dry. That the book covers every conceivable aspect of villainy is apparent from the table of contents. The real fun was that every time I thought of a particular villain within a chapter, it popped up in a subsequent paragraph or page. For a Hindi film fan, this is a very gratifying experience. 

The book should have come with an index. Making searches quicker is critical because this is the kind of book you must refer to when you’re having volatile arguments with friends about the name of the guy who played Peter in Deewaar. (Yes, I do have such arguments. You don’t?) Some photographs would have been better, especially of the older periods which are not very well served by the internet. And who doesn’t want to see yet another photo of the Amrish Puri’s saucer-like eyes, anyway?

But these minor quibbles apart, this is a great addition to the library of books on Hindi cinema. It manages to be that wonderful balance between being authoritative and being fun!