How Amitabh Bachchan went broke at fifty-seven, and what actually got him out
By the end of 1999 the most famous man in India was broke.
Amitabh Bachchan was fifty-seven. The company he had built a few years earlier had collapsed, leaving something like ninety crore rupees of debt behind it and dozens of legal cases attached to his name. Creditors came to the house. His son Abhishek left Boston University and came home, because the family could no longer justify the fees.
He has never softened the description. The company, he said, “went bankrupt and it bankrupted me.”
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The anger that made him
To understand what that cost him, you have to remember what he had been.
In 1973 a film called Zanjeer handed him a police inspector named Vijay, a man who had watched his parents killed and grew up wanting the people responsible. Established stars had turned the part down. India in the seventies was short of jobs, short of food and short of patience, and heading into the Emergency. Into that walked a very tall, very quiet man who had been wronged and did something about it.
Two years later came Deewaar, where he was a dock worker turned smuggler arguing with his policeman brother about which of them had done better out of independent India. That argument is what the film is still remembered for.
He played a character called Vijay in more than twenty films. For about a decade the country did not so much watch him as use him.
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The corporation
In the mid-1990s he decided to stop working for the film industry and own a piece of it instead.
Amitabh Bachchan Corporation Limited was meant to be a modern entertainment business: production, distribution, events, artist management. In 1996 it staged the Miss World pageant in Bangalore, an enormous and expensive undertaking. Its films did not work. Mrityudaata, made to put him back on screen after five years away, sank.
Money went out faster than it came in, and when it stopped coming in the debts stayed exactly where they were.
The morning he walked to Yash Chopra’s house
What he did next is the part worth keeping.
He went to see Yash Chopra, a neighbour in Juhu who had directed him in Deewaar more than twenty years before, and told him plainly that he had neither money nor work. Chopra put him in Mohabbatein, which his son Aditya was directing. It came out in October 2000 and was the biggest film of the year.
He has said that what held him together through those months was something his father had told him. Harivansh Rai Bachchan, the poet, held a government job and took a second one at night, and when the boy asked why he came home so late, he said that money is not easily got.
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The chair
The thing that actually cleared the debts was not a film.
In July 2000 he began hosting Kaun Banega Crorepati, the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Friends advised him against it. Film stars did not go on television, and going on television at fifty-seven looked like an admission that the pictures were finished with him.
It worked the other way. Week after week he sat across a small table from schoolteachers and clerks and shopkeepers, asked them questions, waited while they thought it through, and gave away money. He was courteous to every one of them, and the courtesy was the whole appeal.
Within weeks it was the most watched programme in the country, and the debts began, slowly, to move.
The country that had needed him furious in 1975 turned out to want him kind.
What the anger was for
He is eighty-three, and has been in that chair, on and off, for twenty-six years.
The usual version of this story files it under perseverance, and that is not quite what it is. The Angry Young Man was always a fantasy: a man with nothing who takes on the system and wins. In 1999 Amitabh Bachchan was genuinely a man with nothing, and there was no system to hit.
What got him out was a neighbour who gave him work, a line his father had said to him in a doorway about money being hard to come by, and a willingness to sit down in front of the country and be ordinary with it.
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If you think you have remembered everything about this topic take this QUIZ
Results
#1. What was Amitabh Bachchan’s birth name given by his parents before it was changed?
#2. Which 1973 film established Amitabh Bachchan as the “Angry Young Man” of Bollywood?
#3. Amitabh Bachchan suffered a near-fatal intestinal injury in 1982 while filming a fight scene for which movie?
#4. Amitabh Bachchan made a historic television comeback in the year 2000 as the host of which show?
#5. What is the name of the character name that Amitabh Bachchan played in over 20 films?
#6. Before becoming an actor, Amitabh Bachchan worked as a freight broker in which city?
#7. Which prestigious French honor was conferred upon Amitabh Bachchan in 2007?
#8. In the 1980s, a comic book series was published featuring Amitabh Bachchan as a superhero. What was it titled?
What was Amitabh Bachchan’s first movie?
His debut film was Saat Hindustani, released in 1969.
How many National Awards has Amitabh Bachchan won?
He has won four National Film Awards for Best Actor (Agneepath, Black, Paa, Piku).
What is Amitabh Bachchan’s real name?
His birth name was Inquilaab Srivastava, but his father later changed it to Amitabh Bachchan.
When did Amitabh Bachchan suffer a near-fatal accident?
He suffered a life-threatening injury on July 26, 1982, while shooting for the film Coolie in Bangalore.
Who is Amitabh Bachchan’s wife?
He is married to veteran actress Jaya Bhaduri (Jaya Bachchan).
Sources & References
Encyclopaedia Britannica (“Amitabh Bachchan”) — his early career, Zanjeer and the Angry Young Man years.
India Today, The Big Comeback — the ABCL collapse, the approach to Yash Chopra and the first season of Kaun Banega Crorepati.
Directorate of Film Festivals, Government of India — his four National Film Awards and the Dadasaheb Phalke Award of 2018.
Encyclopaedia Britannica (“Harivansh Rai Bachchan”) — the poet, his working life and his influence on his son.
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