The benign menace of Bollywood’s cult ‘monster’
(BBC) “Don’t do a horror film unless you’re the monster. Horror audiences come to see the villains, and they come back again when those villains are in the sequels,” wrote The Economist magazine, listing things an actor should never do.
In India, many of the best-known Indian “villains” got into cinema hoping to be the hero. Things didn’t go to plan and they spent their screen-time plotting fantastic heists and murders, eyeing the heroine and getting beaten up. With some notable exceptions, like Vinod Khanna and Shatrughan Sinha - villains turned heroes - this was the norm. What about monsters then? In India, the movie monster became a staple of horror films made by a group of brothers called, simply, the Ramsay Brothers. Five of the seven brothers are still around, and one of them, Shyam, is still quite active.
Between 1972, when they made their first proper movie Do Gaz Zameen Ke Neeche, literally “six-feet under”, and 1994, when they made their last big movie, Mahakaal, the Ramsay brothers churned out movie after B-grade horror movie.
The tropes were more or less consistent, the quality of the acting veered between good and poor depending on who they managed to sign on, but the production values were remarkable, considering the constraints. They haven’t aged well though, it has to be accepted.
They worked on incredibly low budgets at times, treating the process like a business: the income must justify the outlay.
There were no compromises with the monsters though, always the best part of their movies.
And no-one better than Anirudh Agarwal - the man synonymous with their movies, with a cultish following among cine-lovers. He acted in only three Ramsay films, playing a monster in two of them.
He went under the screen name Ajay Agarwal back then. By the time he acted as Babu Gujjar, who brutalises Phoolan Devi in director Shekhar Kapur’s Bandit Queen (1996), Agarwal was using his own name.
In many other mainstream Hindi films, like Mela (2000), as well as a smattering of Hollywood films that needed some sort of a wild, monstrous “Indian”, Agarwal did his menacing with aplomb.