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What’s age got to do with it? Love, that is. Some years ago I asked Amitabh Bachchan, then in his late 50s, whether he would consider playing an older romantic lover onscreen. Think Sean Connery, think Clint Eastwood, I prompted. This was at a time when he was in that curious in-between stage that inevitably becomes the fate of an ageing Indian actor: when he can no longer play a leading man and is not yet reconciled to the role of a character actor. Bachchan thought for a long moment and then shook his head. “No, the Indian audience is not ready,” he said, “for a romantic story about two mature lovers.” Nor, he seemed to imply, were there any feasible scripts on the subject of romance among the grey-haired.

Perhaps, he was right. The Bridges Of Madison County may have triggered a tsunami of tears and sighs amongst the romance-addicts as a book, but when the screen version of the novel was shown in India some years ago the embarrassed silence that greeted the slightly schmaltzy story of a very brief adulterous affair between a middle-aged housewife (Meryl Streep) and an even older photographer (Clint Eastwood) was only broken by wolf whistles and jeers when the couple made love. Needless to say the film flopped here.

But was Bachchan right for the wrong reasons? Could it be that he was at the time not quite ready — or willing — to romance a woman who was well past her prime? Ageing Lotharios believe that young eye candy on their arms will slough off decades from their age. In other words: you are the age of the company you keep.

Consider the two films this year in which he has been paired with women much younger than him. In Ram Gopal Varma’s Nishabd the Lolita-esque Jiah Khan was almost young enough to be his granddaughter. And now in Cheeni Kum, Tabu is about three decades younger than him: he a sexagenarian chef in London and she a customer three decades younger.

Nishabd had its moments and Bachchan has given a powerhouse performance. But the audience gave it a thumbs down. At least on screen they were not ready to accept an old man infatuated — and we are not talking just lust here — with a teenager, even though life sadly enough offers too many examples of old men marrying girls barely out of puberty.

But what did work for Bachchan — something our filmmakers have usually shied away from — was the portrayal of love in the time of old age. In the film Baghban, Bachchan and Hema Malini portray a couple, old enough to be grandparents, forcefully separated by their ingrate offspring since none of their sons had enough room to keep them both.

Not only were the two actors the leading pair of the film, (there were no other stars except Salman Khan in a cameo) the film was a huge success at the box-office. Even those with grey hair and wrinkles had the right to “love”, and for whom separation would be as poignant as it would be for adolescent lovers. Of course, the fact that the two were married may have something to do with the warmth with which this five-hanky film was received. The old jodi clicked, despite Bachchan’s earlier misgivings.

It could be that we may be getting ready to see oldies romancing on screen — men in the winter of their lives felled by women in the spring of theirs. I can’t quite recall any mainstream Indian film with a middle-aged woman romancing a man less than half her age. The closest we may have got to that is Dimple Kapadia playing the object of Akshaye Khanna’s love in Dil Chaahta Hai. And even here she was really not much older than her younger lover. We still haven’t created a Mrs Robinson (The Graduate) in Indian cinema.

The older woman-younger man syndrome is still somewhat of a taboo topic in our films. Can you imagine Waheeda Rahman today playing an older woman in love with a man half her age? Forget any of the Khans — they are too old. Think of her being romanced by John Abraham. Never.

Email: jain_madhu@hotmail.com