Nana Patekar Dies at 75: Before “Raw Acting” Became a Buzzword, Nana Patekar Was Already Doing It

Nana Patekar Dies at 75: In times today, we have words for everything; we make Instagram carousels about an actor’s “range”; we watch somebody cry without looking conventionally beautiful and call it raw; a character loses his temper, breathes heavily and stares into the middle distance, and suddenly we have a vocabulary for their “emotional complexity”.

Bollywood actor Nana Patekar was doing all of this before we had a manual and the vocabulary became fashionable. He died on October 8, at 75, at his Goa home, reportedly of cardiac arrest, leaving behind a filmography that is particularly difficult to summarise because he never seemed interested in making his characters easy to summarise either, and perhaps that makes his acting feel different.

Nana Patekar Dies at 75: He Was Raw Before “Raw Became an Aesthetic” 

The current obsession with “raw acting” often has an aesthetic attached to it. Perhaps what qualifies is a no-makeup makeup look, a trembling voice, messy hair, crying, looking exhausted, a character who seems vaguely broken, which can absolutely make up for a raw performance with absolute brilliance.

Nana Patekar, however, never needed to announce that his performances were raw; they simply were. His characters could be ugly in the much more uncomfortable sense of the word; they were human. People shouted because they were angry; they said cruel things because they were hurt, behaved irrationally, were hypocritical, and they could be decent in one scene and absolutely unbearable in another. Nowhere was this more obvious than in his portrayal of anger.

Bollywood has always had a template for the angry man: the one who had a reason for his rage, was wounded, righteous, misunderstood and eventually even vindicated. The anger was almost heroic. But Patekar’s anger was rarely clean. It could be petty, embarrassing, frightening, self-destructive and could come from humiliation, helplessness, ego, frustration or the inability to communicate what was actually hurting.

Nana Patekar played anger man with a very different mask. He performed what anger does to a person. There were interruptions in speech, impatience, sudden loss of control, the way a person becomes cruel because they have run out of better ways to express their grief. The approach itself made him rather different.

His Characters Were Allowed to be Difficult

This is probably the most interesting part about Nana Patekar. He was never particularly obsessed with making his characters likeable. He, in fact, played Vishwanath in the 1996 thriller Agni Sakshi, which portrayed him as a chilling, cold-blooded character, making him one of the most toxic antagonists of Hindi cinema. Patekar even portrayed the central protagonist as Inspector Sadhu Agashe in Ab Tak Chappan, where he depicted anger in an ice-cold, quiet and deep sense rather than fitting himself into the Bollywood template.

Today, we are increasingly desperate to explain difficult characters, give them a vulnerable scene, a redemption arc and tell the audience why they behave badly so that we can still love them. Nana Patekar often did something more difficult: he let the character be wrong.

In Purush, he played a corrupt politician, a role he performed for years, which created a sense of angst in the viewers. That is not a neat, marketable version of a “morally grey” character. The character was not necessarily asking to be understood, but Nana Patekar made him legible, and there is a difference.

A character does not have to be good for an audience to recognise something emotionally true about him, and that was one of Patekar’s great strengths. The actor not only delves into angry characters but has an absolute fun element in his filmography.

Patekar played the character of a street philosopher, best friend to Shah Rukh Khan’s character Raj Mathur, aka Raju, in Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman. He played Uday Shetty, a fierce yet hilariously underworld don in Welcome, along with many other characters as well. The “range of acting” that is often talked about in today’s world is something Nana Patekar was depicted back in the days when we had not popularised the vocabulary for it.

His men could be arrogant, bitter, violent, selfish, selfless, proud, frightening, funny, vulnerable and even strangely tender. Sometimes many of those existed in the same character because that is usually how people are.

Then Came the Bollywood Machine

Looking at Nana Patekar’s career through today’s celebrity culture is almost strange. We now expect actors to be constantly visible: airport photographs, red carpets, gym videos, interviews, social media updates, “candid moments”, edits; the actor is no longer just the person who acts but also the product. Patekar always seemed a little outside the machinery, not making some grand statement against it but just not seemingly interested in being an Instagrammable version of himself.

He could look tired, irritated, old, ridiculous, frightening, vulnerable; he could play the serious, tortured Ganpat Belwalkar in Natsamrat and then give us Uday Shetty in Welcome without seeming worried that comedy might damage his “serious actor” reputation. The characters did not need to belong to one consistent celebrity brand; they only needed to belong to themselves.

Perhaps That Is Why Flawed Characters Felt Human

We often misunderstand relatability. A character is not relatable because they are nice, but because their emotional logic makes sense to us and Nana Patekar understood it well. His roles were not necessarily the ones with heroic qualities but were the human ones, and his performances allowed them to exist without immediately correcting them. 

That is why characters could stay with us; they were not aspirational, not always admirable, but recognisable and sometimes uncomfortable.

Perhaps this is the reason why Nana Patekar feels increasingly relevant. He was never particularly “cool” but was interesting. The coolness requires a little distance, but Patekar’s performances often removed that distance completely. Nana Patekar knew how to play the mess before “messy characters” became a compliment, “raw acting” became a caption, “character actor” became a flowery phrase used in interviews.

Nana Patekar was already giving us people who were difficult to love but impossible to ignore, and perhaps that is the part of the actor’s career that would live as his legacy. The iconic actor is gone, but the performances remain, and somewhere between the shouting, silences, ugliness, comedy, monologues, there is a very old-fashioned idea of acting left behind: a man who looks like a naturally complex human being on-screen.

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