Today, as we mourn the loss the actor, Muzaffar goes down memory lane to recall his first encounter with Nana. Nana Patekar was all of 25 when filmmaker Muzaffar Ali spotted him for the first time at a stage play. Hewent on to cast Nana in Gaman, his debut as an actor, and the rest is history.
“It was in 1976, when I was casting for Gaman, that I saw a Marathi version of The Threepenny Opera in Dadar. I was mesmerised by the nimble, sharp performance of a young twenty-five-year-old actor. He was like a Kalari sword—swift, precise and dangerous—in his words as much as in his body language. From that day, Nana Patekar became vital to my life,” Muzaffar tells HT City in an exclusive chat. Muzaffar further recalls how Patekar stood out to him amid the emerging pool of Marathi talent that he encountered during the making of the film, “He was a phenomenon beyond the cliched metaphors of Bollywood. A parallel world of extraordinary Marathi talent was emerging from the soil of Maharashtra, and I was keen to absorb that energy into Gaman. Nana was one of the young forces I discovered there. Their association went beyond the film, with Nana also contributing to the visual and publicity aspects of Ali’s work, Muzaffar recalls. For Ali, Patekar’s roots in theatre and Maharashtra were central to what made him such a distinctive performer. He was not manufactured for Bollywood. He arrived from another tradition—from the theatre, from Maharashtra, from a culture of performance where the actor had to command the stage before he could command the camera. Like Smita Patil, he represented a new face of Indian cinema emerging from Maharashtrian soil. He carried with him the raw intelligence of theatre and the instinctive immediacy of the street. He did not merely act a role; he occupied it. His words had an edge, his silences had weight, and his body seemed to speak even when he was still. For Ali, however, Nana’s significance ultimately extended beyond his work as an actor. “For me, Nana remains more than an actor I encountered while making Gaman. He became part of a journey in which theatre, cinema, design and friendship constantly crossed paths. He leaves behind a vacuum that is difficult to fill. A debt we can never repay.”
He says, “There was something wonderfully irreverent about him.
