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Sheikh’s choice of roles was truly impressive. But what most endeared him to film-lovers was his ‘common man’/ ‘Aam Aadmi’ image.
Consider the following four characters that he played: Siddharth Parashar in ‘Chashme Baddoor’ (1981), Avinash in ‘Saath Saath’ (1982), Pashu Bhatt in ‘Katha’ (1983) and Jeet Saxena in ‘Rang Birangi’ (1983).
For me, these were four of the best roles that Farooq Saab played. And there is a thread running in all of them: All these characters were middle class ones.
In Sheikh, India’s middle classes saw their own reflection. Siddharth Parashar is an eligible bachelor in Delhi of the 1980s. He stays with two buddies in a barsati, soon finds a job and becomes a success and finally falls in love too. How the love story of this boy-next-door threatens to unravel even before it has begun forms the content matter of the hilarious rom-com ‘Chashme Baddoor’.
Or Avinash in ‘Saath Saath’. He is caught in a moral dilemma and has to decide which path he must take: that of leading a modest life based on socialist ideals that eschew greed and glorify poverty or a consumerist, ‘evil’ and corrupt lifestyle.
Or Pashu Bhatt in ‘Katha’. Set in a Mumbai chawl, Katha is about two friends, Rajaram (Naseeruddin Shah), the naive simpleton and Pashu, the devilish yet lovable and street smart scounderel.
Sheikh’s very first role was also a middle class one: the pathbreaking ‘Garam Hawa’ (1973). The story is on the plight of middle class and poor Muslims who were left behind in the Republic of India even as their elite co-religionists migrated to Pakistan during the Partition. Sheikh plays the role of Sikander Mirza, the youngest son of Salim Mirza (the legendary Balraj Sahni in his last role), a shoe manufacturer in Agra.
Middle class roles apart, Sheikh was equally good at playing characters from other classes as well. Take for instance, his performances in ‘Shatranj Ke Khiladi’ (1977), ‘Gaman’ (1978), ‘Umrao Jaan’ (1981) and ‘Bazaar’ (1982).
Sheikh came from a family of land owners and had fairly good looks. He put them to good use in playing regal roles in ‘Shatranj...’ and ‘Umrao Jaan’. In the former, he played Aqueel, the nephew of one of the two main protagnists, Mir Roshan Ali (Saeed Jaffrey), a member of the decadent nobility of Oudh on the eve of its takeover by the British in 1856.
Aqueel is a philanderer, who is having an affair with his uncle Mir’s wife, Nafisa (Farida Jalal), even as Mir passes his entire time playing chess with his best friend, Mirza Sajjad Ali (Sanjeev Kumar).
In ‘Umrao Jaan’ based on Mir Muhammad Hadi Ruswa’s seminal work of the same name, Sheikh was Nawab Sultan, a minor princeling from Oudh, who is sensitive but pussilanimous, and hence loses Umrao even though he loves her, due to familial pressure.
In ‘Gaman’ and ‘Bazaar’, Sheikh played characters from the opposite end of the spectrum. In ‘Gaman’, he is Ghulam Hussain, from a peasant family in North India. Due to extreme poverty in his village, Hussain is forced to come to Mumbai (then Bombay) and work as a taxi driver. The film tackles complex themes and narratives of poverty and migration on a canvas of 1980s rural and urban India.
‘Bazaar’ also tackles the theme of extreme poverty, this time in Hyderabad, where poor Muslim parents are forced to sell their daughters to rich men in the Gulf.
Among his later roles, I especially like his performance in Dibakar Banerjee’s ‘Shanghai’ (2012). As Kaul, the oily civil servant who is forever ready to do the bidding of his political masters, Sheikh is fabulous.
Along with his contribution to Bollywood, Sheikh’s performances in theatre and television are equally impressive. I remember growing up watching his serial ‘Chamatkar’ (A laugh riot with Mushtaq Khan) and ‘Ji Mantriji’, a Hindi remake of the BBC’s ‘Yes, Minister’, where Sheikh is an Indian version of Paul Eddington’s Jim Hacker to Jayant Kripalani’s Sir Humphrey Appleby.
In theatre, we all recall his stellar performance in ‘Tumhari Amrita’, where he acted alongside fellow Parallel Cinema artiste, Shabana Azmi.
In his later years, Sheikh also appeared on various news programmes, voicing his opinion on various topics like the condition of Muslims in India, radical Islam across the world and the Hindu Right in India. He usually would walk into television studios, a pair of spectacles on his face, dressed in white kurta pyjama, his face and body now portly, a sharp contrast to the slim physique of his younger days.
During those days, to me, Sheikh looked the very personification of a person who had achieved everything in his life and yet was still full of it. An established actor in film, television and theatre, an outspoken critic on prickly issues confronting our society, a spokesperson of India’s syncretic Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb, and most importantly, a polite, affable and down-to-earth individual with no airs about himself - a standard which we all set for ourselves, but few achieve. Sheikh Saab achieved all that.
And now, this delightful individual is no more with us. Taken away so early. His death due to a cardiac arrest once again reaffirms that Hindi saying: He, who God likes, He calls early.
We have lost a jewel of a person. Rest in Peace, Farooq Saab. You will be missed, a lot.
