An unbuttoned shirt, typically knotted at the bottom and a silk scarf was his signature outfit. Gopal Bedi, who went by the stage name of Ranjeet, will perhaps be remembered as the most famous and fashionable rapist in Bollywood. Or how about Ajit, one of the classiest villains that Bollywood ever saw? It is enough for someone to say “Mona darling” aloud to evoke the image of a gritty baddie who delivered evergreen lines through clenched teeth, like Sara shehar mujhe loyan (lion) ke naam se janta hai! from the movie Kalicharan. For that matter, Amrish Puri as Mogambo in Mr India and the clinically wicked Amjad Khan as a ruthless Gabbar Singh in the curry western Sholay made the bad look really bad. And people loved them.

But Bollywood has come a long way. There are no more memorable one-liners of Gabbar Singh (Oh Sambha, kitna enam rakhe sarkar hum par?) or of Mogambo (Mogambo khush hua). And there are no more baddies worth remembering. Which is the last villainous character that you remember distinctly from Bollywood? The archetypical villains seem to have disappeared into thin air.

Veteran actor Anupam Kher agrees that the classic Bollywood villains that India has grown up watching have disappeared.

“In the past, everything was obvious about the Bollywood villain. He was larger than life and we could recognise him from a kilometre away. Whereas today villains are much more real and they are normal people,” Kher, who played Dr Dang in the Subhash Ghai-directed Karma, says.

According to him, these changes are due to people having access to various types of entertainment across different

formats. “Be it 24-hour news or reality television, today people are seeing things round the clock they once saw only

occasionally on the large screen,” he said.

Amole Gupte, filmmaker and the creative director of the popular film Taare Zameen Par, tends to agree with Kher. “All those characters were 6-ft tall and it was a time of one-door entertainment,” Gupte, who played a villain (a Maharashtrian mafioso) in Vishal Bhardwaj’s Kaminey, says.

He goes a step further to offer a more plausible explanation why those villains attained such cult status and are still remembered. “There was nothing much to choose from by way of entertainment apart from movies. People watched the same movies over and over again. We had movies that celebrated silver, golden and diamond jubilees. It was an era of no competition. Today it is all about the first weekend.”

Writer and filmmaker Paromita Vohra, who wrote the screenplay for Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Khamoshi: The Musical, thinks today the economic logic of the film industry is one in which a film is treated as a commodity that can be successfully marketed rather than made. Would that explain Abhishek Bachchan’s cameo as Beera in the Mani Ratnam-directed flop Raavan? According to Vohra, the figure of the villain belongs to a storytelling form in which there are strong central conflicts — in which there is actually something essential at stake.

“So the release weekend collections and satellite rights sort of take care of the film, hence the focus is more on the elements that help with this sort of marketing — songs and star cast essentially and a setting which is aspirational rather than recognisable — than on strong script driven films,” she says.

The changing dynamics of the industry has its impact on the way Bollywood villains have been created by filmmakers, perceived by the audience and admired by fans. Everyone agrees that each decade in Hindi cinema is different and today the black characters are not dark anymore but more grey perhaps like Boman Irani’s Virus in 3 Idiots.

Trade analyst Vinod Mirani believes that Bollywood is getting back to offering movies with strong villainous characters. He argues that a list of successful movies in the past such as Ghajini, Wanted and Dabangg are examples of the industry wanting to offer the audience something they have missed for long. “The hero in a film is only as big as the villain,” said Mirani.

Anuvab Pal, playwright and screenplay writer, who considers Shakaal his favourite Bollywood villain, argues that there are fewer villains in our movies today. “I think we do a lot less hero-versus-system stories nowadays,” says Pal. “I don’t think in today’s cinema enough time is spent on creating a great villain with his own world. No time is spent on creating some modicum of credibility about why someone is bad.”

According to Pal, in the ’80s, they knew what they were doing. “They wanted to create a character that was 100 per cent evil, simple. It didn’t make sense, the things the villain did or wore or said were mad. Ajit, for example, tried to steal a submarine from the Indian navy. But we loved it.”

Of course, once in a while we do get impressive villains such as Manoj Bajpai as Bhiku Matre in Satya or grey characters such as Pradeep Rawat in Ghajini or Arjun Rampal as Prithviraj Pratap in Rajneeti. But, apart from occasional feeble instances, villains of the calibre of Gabbar Singh or Mogambo are all but dead.

“I think it’s because producers think people don’t want to see preachy angry young man versus injustice any more. Maybe they’re right but we also don’t believe in those values anymore. Not that they were outstanding values but there was a moral underpinning. As a byproduct, we lost some brilliantly created super villains of the ’80s,” says Pal.

If films are a reflection of our society then the death of the classic villain points to the blurring distinction between the hero and the villain.