To live in our times is to have lived in the era of Amitabh. Over the past five decades he is a phenomenon that has transcended movie stardom and the 70mm to become a defining force of contemporary India’s popular culture and a unifying myth sustained across the entire Indian diaspora. To understand what he represents to our collective consciousness is to take a deep look within ourselves.

To live in our times is to have lived in the era of Amitabh. Over the past five decades he is a phenomenon that has transcended movie stardom and the 70mm to become a defining force of contemporary India’s popular culture and a unifying myth sustained across the entire Indian diaspora. To understand what he represents to our collective consciousness is to take a deep look within ourselves.

The secret to Amitabh’s invincibility perhaps lies locked in a moment frozen in time on the silver screen. Though his meteoric rise to fame as Indian cinema’s ‘angry young man’ had already fetched him the title of ‘one man industry’ by Francois Truffaut in the 70s, it was his near catastrophe in Coolie that catapulted him to present legendary status. While Amitabh fought for his life in the ICU, his fans across the country fought en masse with God. Like the mythical Savitri, they performed harsh austerities to bring their hero back from the dead. They undertook padyatras from the ends of the nation, kept fasts, offered their limbs in sacrifice and prayed as one for Amitabh’s recovery and return to them. The moment of AB’s accident went on to became the one that changed the course of his fate on several counts. Coolie was released with a different ending from the original script – since it would have been sacrilege to kill on screen the man raised from the grave by the penance of the nation. The movie was released with a pause at the critical moment, in acknowledgement of this momentous reversal of fortune. In a figurative sense, it became the moment when Amitabh Bachchan the superstar died in order to realize his true destiny – an immaculate conception, bound to life by the common man’s prayer.

Buoyed by the power of our unflagging fervour, Amitabh has thrived in the liminal spaces of Indian ethos ever after.

In a time when the high ideals of the freedom struggle had given way to a questioning of our fundamentals, we resurrected him and committed ourselves to the Hindu version of original sin – questioning the unimpeachable power of the patriarch. We restored in him our disappointment with authority and the father figure (the government, the ‘system’, the law…) in more ways than one. For instance, Amitabh was elected to political office with the highest margins in general election history, only to be forced to abdicate in the face of one of our biggest political scandals. However, his return to his masses as Shehanshah, India’s first superhero and ironically flipped nemesis of her ‘terrible patriarch’ in a sense bettered his political fantasy. Shehanshah metamorphosized Amitabh from forsaken son to avenging father and in doing so matured the disillusionment of the impotent sons of India into a potent backlash, creating a law unto itself ("one who doesn't hold a cop's job but does the same work; one who apprehends criminals himself, conducts the trials himself, and, pronounces and executes the sentences himself"). Amitabh as Shehanshah finally delivered poetic justice to the disappointment and anger that marked Vijay.