The thespian extraordinaire, Dilip Kumar (Muhammad Yousaf Sarwar Khan), who had looked vulnerable for several years, could no longer delay the end.

No mortal can go on living. He had been in and out of hospital as if sending signals to his fans about the impending finale. He prolonged the battle against the inevitable until July 7, when he submitted his physical self to the will of Almighty.

He lived quite a full life spanning over almost 99 years. The laurels he won and the feathers that adorned his cap are far too many to be enumerated. No one could surpass him in the art of acting for as long as he was professionally active. Some will say no one surpassed him later either.

For the last three decades he had been leading a retired life at his Bandra residence, Qila. His last flick was in 1998. He underwent a bypass surgery in 1999 and ever since was never his previous self. For the last several years, he had been in the news only because of his ill health.

More than once there were rumours of his passing away. This time, the news was a bitter truth. When the news of his turning his back on the world was broken, the space appeared to have become vacuous and the time appeared to have come to a standstill.

In the genre of art called acting, he was head and shoulders above his peers. He remained the best for five decades. This alone makes him unique. Hardly could anyone who ventured into the world of cinema escape his influence. Indeed, another actor of his calibre would have made Bollywood too crowded.

Talking strictly with reference to the subcontinent, the only other artist comparable to Dilip Kumar in terms of wielding influence over the people of his trade was Asad Ullah Khan Ghalib. Has there been an Urdu poet since him who has escaped the influence of Ghalib? My answer is in the negative.

Referred to as the Tragedy King and The First Khan, he has been credited with bringing a distinct form of method acting technique to cinema. Kumar holds the record for most Filmfare awards for best actor. He was also the inaugural recipient of the award.

The general perception is that method acting began with Marlin Brando’s performances in movies like A Streetcar Named Desire, Viva Zapata, On the Waterfront, Mutiny on the Bounty, and Last Tango in Paris. Bollywood writer and poet, Javed Akhter, contests this view however and asserts that Dilip Kumar was the originator of the trend. Film maker Satyajit Ray, too, paid him that complement.

Method acting is a technique used by actors to identify completely with the people they are going to portray. Within the practice, the actor “becomes” the role and frequently stays in the character for an extended period of time. One is encouraged not to compartmentalise and fake feelings but to feel the actual feelings needed in each scene.

This can lead to changes in psyche and behaviour for as long as an actor inhabits a role. Dilip Kumar spent more than two years learning how to play sitar for a single scene in Koh-i-Noor. To perform the role of a blind man in Deedar, he befriended a blind man who begged for a living at the Bombay central station and spent quite a bit of time to study his mannerism.

Dilip Kumar mostly acted in tragedy films. In the end he started experiencing tragic feelings in real life. His mental condition was getting affected after films like Devdas and he had to be taken to a psychiatrist who advised him to stop working in tragedy films and instead do films with lighter content. Ram Aur Shyam, a superb comedy, followed.

How could he do such intense roles? Several critics came up with different set of answers. Dilip Kumar was fastidious in conceiving the roles he was to perform. What distinguished him from the rest was his wont to observe social phenomenon around him very closely. Reading philosophy, particularly existentialism and Vedanta, the Hindu counterpart of Wahdat ul Wajud, must have helped him study individual traits of his characters.

Watching some of his performances, particularly in Devdas, Deedar and Andaz, influences gleaned from the philosophy of Jean Paul Sartre, literary works of Albert Camus and psychological theory of archetypes propounded by Carl Jung seemed to have a profound rub on the characterisation(s) of the roles Dilip Kumar performed. When Dilip was touching the Olympian heights of his acting career, existentialist philosophy with Sartre as its principal exponent had taken the world intelligentsia by storm.

These influences lent a great deal of complexity to his style of acting. He also worked diligently on his pronunciation. This was evident when he spoke, particularly when he recited poetry. Those who want to learn how to recite poetry must listen to him.

Along with Ashok Kumar, he was instrumental in bringing Bollywood cinema out of the theatre mode. Dialogue delivery with a high pitched voice typical to theatre popularised by Agha Hashr Kashmiri and Suhrab Modi was substituted by realism. Expressing oneself with a minimum of speech became Dilip Kumar’s forte.

He worked assiduously at grooming himself and calibrating his speech with facial expressions, spending a lot of time watching foreign movies and taking yearly trips to London to go and watch rehearsals at the Royal National Theatre. Dilip Kumar was also a greater believer in dialectics and considered it absolutely imperative for a good and successful movie. That probably was the reason that in most of his blockbuster movies Pran featured as his anti-thesis. With him the conflict could be sharpened.

To conclude this column, I must mention that acknowledging that the greatness of Dilip Kumar has been a very rare fact on which the states of India and Pakistan have agreed. The prime ministers of both the countries paid tribute to him in glowing terms. This speaks for his greatness. I end by quoting from Shakespeare, “His life was gentle, and the elements so mixed in him that nature might stand up to say to all the world, ‘This was a man,’.”