When Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s Animal came out, many wondered what made the film’s protagonist Rannvijay a hero — what was it about him that appealed to such a large section of the audience? The answer probably lies in our real life. When Sanjay Dutt first achieved stardom in the early 1990s, the actor was known for his bad choices, some of whom landed him on the wrong side of the law. He was jailed for allegedly conspiring with terrorists, his public struggle with drug abuse, he filed for divorce from his first wife Richa while she was still recovering from cancer, and his reputation in front of his audience was anything but pristine. Yet, Sanju, as he is fondly called, remained one of the biggest stars of the era.
In India, the words ‘star’, ‘hero’, and ‘actor’ are often used interchangeably, and Sanjay has always been described as someone with the personality of a ‘star’. His starry persona didn’t save him from his real-life troubles, but they solidified his myth. Sanjay grew up at a time when celebrities were completely unfiltered in their interviews, but this was also a time when gossip tabloids printed bizarre stories about them. Sanjay might not have been an ideal man, but he appeared to be an honest one who was misguided in his youth and was struggling to get out of the mess that he had created.
Much like Ranbir Kapoor’s Rannvijay in Animal, Sanju acted on his impulses and if the consequences weren’t ideal, so be it. Sanjay has been very open about his drug addiction. He spoke about how he was hallucinating under the influence when his mother Nargis Dutt was in the hospital in New York, and also about the time when he went up to his father Sunil Dutt, and asked to be sent to rehab.
In the early 1980s, he was once found shooting his gun inside the premises of his house. He later claimed in a chat with Stardust that he was “cleaning” his gun and “fired two shots to see if it worked.” However, a statement from the police, also printed by the magazine, claimed that “‘Sanjay was feeling too lonely that night and he’d had too much to drink,” as reported by Yasser Usmaan’s Sanjay Dutt: The Crazy Untold Story of Bollywood’s Bad Boy. He was yet to establish himself as a movie star but the stories around him made him sound like a man who did whatever he wanted without considering consequences.
But the highs were accompanied by the lows. Sanjay wore his heart on his sleeve and fell in love deeply, more than once. When he met and married Richa Sharma, the Dutts were happy. Sanjay, too, was excited to begin this new phase of his life. Richa, however, got diagnosed with cancer right around the time when Sanjay’s career was taking off, and he found himself in a dilemma. He couldn’t devote as much time to her and stories of affairs with co-actors further dented his marriage; his statements made matters worse.
His idea of masculinity was archaic and even though he knew he sounded like a “chauvinist,” he stuck with his beliefs. “I don’t mind the idea of my wife working as long as she has her own business or boutique and is her boss. But I would not want my wife to be an actress. We would never have time together. I would not like to come home in the evening and find out she has gone for a night shoot. If I am shooting at night and she wants to wait for me, well, that’s the way it is. OK, I have double standards here and if you want to call me a chauvinist now, go ahead, I am one. Today I can accept that,” he said in a chat with Showtime magazine in 1994.
Talking to India Today in 2017, Sanjay said that he had three girlfriends at the same time and he never got caught because he made sure that all his girlfriends were always in the dark about the other women. It almost seems as if Sanjay’s life, as it played in the public eye, worked as an inspiration for Sandeep Reddy Vanga who knew how to get away with a hero who isn’t faithful to his partner.
