Mumbai, India – Waking up to the news of Nana Patekar passing away at 75 is strange. It’s the kind of thing that isn’t supposed to happen. Not only because the sudden loss of a pivotal artist is hard to grasp, but also because the timing feels unnatural. For habitual moviegoers, it’s against the run of play—anticlimactic almost. The year is 2026. It isn’t the finest moment for modern Hindi cinema, but one of the few surprising themes has been the re-integration, the return, of Nana Patekar.
It’s not like he wasn’t on screens all along, but there’s been a sense that the right makers and writers had figured out how to use the distinct actor in post-streaming Bollywood. He appeared thrice: a striking retro cameo for Anil Kapoor in Suresh Triveni’s Subedaar, a wry supporting turn as a cop in Vishal Bhardwaj’s O’Romeo, and a lead role as the powerful Chandragupta-coded mentor in Prakash Jha’s series Sankalp. It felt like the beginning of a third innings. A comeback was well underway.
For many of us who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, Patekar represented a purist alt-stardom of sorts: a ‘parallel’ force of nature who somehow morphed into the wild card of mainstream Hindi cinema. His presence allowed a movie to go in any direction, without context or reason, and more often than not, this changed the game. In terms of this persona, he became the unusual answer to the question: What if Basu Chatterjee’s Amol Palekar had an unpredictable and angry twin whose patience ran thin with the middle-class India around him?
He was almost intimidating to watch, a mercurial ball of energy who scoffed at conventional notions of dialogue-delivery, dramatic beats, and body language. Every time the three rising Khans of the decade lulled us into fandom and aspirational masculinity, Patekar often came as a barnstorming antidote to escapism. A generation of future Bollywood enthusiasts started to see him as a ‘Peak Acting’ meme before memes existed; he invariably became our first brush with no-frills, disruptive, and scenery-chewing acting.
Unlike other greats—Anupam Kher, Naseeruddin Shah, Paresh Rawal—he sidestepped the ‘burdens’ of talent; he was seldom typecast as the father or the campy villain or the gifted character actor. If anything, he invented a sweet spot between the volume of a commercial lead and the indie rawness that movies often avoided.
Must Read: Nana Patekar Passes Away at 75
I went through the routine beats of registering Patekar’s presence after that: the hot-headed integrity in Tirangaa, the breathless and cynical monologues of Krantiveer, the parental angst in Khamoshi: The Musical, the patriarchal horror of Shakti, the deadpan horror in Darna Mana Hai and Bhoot, and the Daya Nayak-inspired curtness of Ab Tak Chhappan. His turn as an unhinged Mumbai cab driver in Taxi No. 9211 acquired cult status during my college days, as did his unexpected buffoonery in Welcome as lovelorn don Uday Shetty. Like any good ‘serious’ actor, he had a knack for weaponising that poker-face and reframing comic relief as a satire on himself.
