Mr. India: Feeding the Poor and Saving the Day With Superhero Hijinks - Reactor

Mr. India (1987). Directed by Shekhar Kapur. Written by Salim–Javed. Starring Anil Kapoor, Sridevi, and Amrish Puri.

Many film directors work in different careers before working their way into the movies, but Shekhar Kapur might be the only one I’ve read about who was an honest-to-goodness office-job-suit-and-tie accountant before he decided to get into filmmaking.

That’s a pretty staid early career path for a director who would come to be successful in both Indian and international film circles, but the movie business does run in the family. Kapur’s uncles on his mother’s side include legendary Bollywood actor Dev Anand and producers Chetan and Vijay Anand. (I’ve clarified this before when talking about Indian cinema, but in this case, I am using “Bollywood” precisely to refer to Hindi-language Indian films produced in Mumbai.) Perhaps because of the family’s deep involvement in show business, Kapur’s parents strongly discouraged him from following in his uncles’ footsteps, which led to his lengthy detour through a career in corporate number-crunching.

It didn’t last, and he got around to making movies anyway. Outside of India, Kapur is probably best known for his 1998 British period drama Elizabeth, which stars Cate Blanchett as a young Elizabeth I; that movie was nominated for (and won) a pile of awards, in spite raising eyebrows due to the many liberties it takes with history. But his reputation within India was well-established before that. Kapur took his first acting role in a film produced by one of his uncles in the mid ’70s. He acted in a few more movies, but in the early ’80s he turned to directing. His first film was the family drama Masoom (1983), which was well received and garnered some favorable attention.

Among those who liked it was Boney Kapoor, a fairly new Indian film producer who was on the lookout for his next project. Kapoor wanted to make a wholesome family movie about kids, while Kapur had a lifelong love of comics he wanted to bring to film, and that’s where Mr. India was born. They brought on Hindi-language screenwriters Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar, together known and credited as Salim-Javed, to write the film; the pair had written more than twenty films together, including the epic action film Sholay (1975), one of Indian cinema’s original blockbusters and most enduringly influential films. Khan and Akhtar were nearing the end of their extremely successful partnership by the time they wrote Mr. India, and it would be their last screenplay as a duo.

As I’m sure many of you remember, superhero movies weren’t really a big thing yet back in the ’80s. In the United States, the Superman films starring Christopher Reeve were popular and mostly successful, and in Japan some superhero storylines were making their way into tokusatsu films and television in the form of the Kamen Rider franchise, but it would be a while before movies about superheroes would become ubiquitous anywhere in the world. In India in the early ’80s there were maybe two superhero films, one of which was a remake of Superman (1978). It was simply not a genre that Indian cinema—even fully embracing its genre-blending “masala” style—had much interest in.

That would change after Mr. India, which was a box office hit and would go on to enjoy an enduring legacy as a beloved classic.

Mr. India tells the story of the good-hearted but perpetually broke Arun (Anil Kapoor). With the help of a cook named Calendar (Satish Kaushik), Arun spends all of the money he makes as a musician on providing a home for ten boisterous orphans. Problems arise when the landlord of their oceanfront home tries to evict them—not just because Arun has failed to pay the rent, but because the landlord works for nefarious supervillain Mogambo (Amrish Puri, who was haunted by fans demanding he say the villain’s catchphrase for the rest of his life).

In between his busy schedule of melting his henchmen in a vat of acid, Mogambo wants to either take over India as a king or destroy it entirely. (His ultimate plan is unclear.) His many schemes include running illegal gambling dens, acquiring weapons on the black market, and flooding the food markets with rice and lentils that have been contaminated with pebbles. I’m not a criminal mastermind, so I don’t know if rice and lentil contamination is the most efficient way to make the money required to take over a country, but I do think it is one of the more wicked schemes a cinematic supervillain could come up with.

To keep the landlord and the pebble-rice-selling shopkeeper off his back, Arun takes in a lodger to earn some extra money. The new tenant is a plucky crime journalist named Seema, who is played by the beloved and iconic Indian actor Sridevi. Surprisingly absolutely no one, a single journalist’s rent payment is not enough to put off a supervillain, so Arun also goes looking for an invention of his late father’s to see if he can patent it.

The invention turns out to be an invisibility device, so instead of selling it, Arun decides to use it to help people and thwart criminals. That’s how he becomes Mr. India, the invisible hero. His heroic antics inevitably catch the attention of Mogambo, who wants the invisibility device as much as he wants the mysterious Mr. India to stop ruining his business.

What follows are all the hijinks and shenanigans one might expect of such a scenario, most of which are pretty amusing in spite of being overly long. (I know this is mostly a matter of what we’re used to, but I do struggle with the length and pacing of many Indian movies.) The movie took almost a year to film, which Kapur has said is largely because of the technical challenges of the practical effects behind the invisibility—which do, to his credit, look quite good. There may be strings or other giveaways visible in places, but I wasn’t looking for them and didn’t notice any, because there was usually enough going on to keep the eyes occupied. There is also at least one turn in the story that I really wasn’t expecting, which made me look at it from a slightly different angle.

But first I want to talk about the absolute best part of the movie, which is Sridevi as the always curious, often silly, hijinks-prone reporter Seema. I love it when acting legends are legendary for a reason, and that is the case here. Sridevi was already a huge star in films across India at the time; she had gotten her start as a child in Telugu and Tamil language films from South India before moving into Hindi films during the Bollywood boom of the ’70s and ’80s. Kapoor and Kapur wanted her in the role from the start, and Kapoor was willing to pay to make it happen; apparently Sridevi’s mother—who was her manager—asked for ₹1 million, thinking the filmmakers would negotiate downward, but instead they offered ₹1.1 million. (That was equivalent to about $85,000 in the mid ’80s. Please don’t ask me to look up any more historical currency exchange rates. In other news, I now know more about the long-term devaluation of the Indian rupee than I knew yesterday.)

And it’s easy to see why! She’s marvelous. She’s charming and funny and captivating every moment she’s on screen. From what I’ve read, it seems like the dance performance of “Hawaa Hawaai” was a particular favorite among critics and audiences, but we’ll just glide right over that thanks to the deeply unfortunate blackface on the backup dancers. I’d rather focus on a scene I like a lot more, which is the entire comedic sequence when Seema, with the help of one of the children, infiltrates a gambling den dressed up as Charlie Chaplin, while an invisible Mr. India helps her cheat extravagantly.

Those scenes took a full month to film. It was meant to be a quick sequence of just a couple of scenes, but Sridevi was a longtime Chaplin fan, and Kapur loved her impersonation so much—and the cast and crew were apparently having so much fun—he kept expanding it to be a major setpiece in the film. It’s easy to see why. The whole thing is just an extremely fun, extremely silly sequence in the best vaudevillian slapstick tradition.

It’s a pretty severe contrast to what happens later in the film, when Mogambo decides to escalate his nefarious plans by placing bombs across India. I would say that I’m not entirely sure how killing random people helped his plans, but I’m an American living in 2025, so there is nothing that a megalomaniacal Bollywood supervillain can do that I will find too nonsensical or over-the-top. One of Arun’s kids, an adorable little girl named Tina, is badly injured when a bomb explodes on a playground. (According to IMDb, Tina was played by Huzaan Khodaiji, but the children are mostly not credited in the film itself.) I will admit I was absolutely not expecting Tina to actually die. I thought I knew the rules of this kind of movie, and those rules state that a precious little orphan moppet does not die in a senseless act of brutal violence.

But she does, and I was shocked. Nor was I the only one. In a 2012 interview, Kapur talked about how people still wrote to him upset about Tina’s death. His reasoning for the choice makes sense: he felt that Mogambo’s villainous deeds needed to have a more direct impact, because otherwise he was a villain who isn’t actually doing all that much. I’m not sure the abrupt tonal shift completely works, but I admit that it got my attention and made me think about the film’s context a little bit more.

Mr. India is not an overtly political film, no more than any earnestly well-meaning family-oriented superhero movie tends to be. It’s not that Indian cinema shies away from being political, as political and social realism are foundational themes in India’s film history. It’s more that this movie’s villain is not meant to be read realistically. Mogambo is basically an old-school Bond villain, with the secret island lair and a pit of acid and so on.

But there is still a bit of too-real sharpness when he monologues about how the people of India are too busy fighting amongst themselves to fight greedy and destructive forces in their midst. Indians watching the film in 1987 would have felt the weight of those words all too well. The 1970s had started with yet another war with Pakistan (the third of four officially declared wars), followed by the nearly two years of the so-called “Emergency,” when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s government declared a state of emergency that allowed it to suspend civil rights, censor the press, imprison political opponents, criminalize unions and strikes, and cancel elections. The Emergency ended in 1977, but things didn’t have much chance to settle down.

After Gandhi was re-elected in 1980, she was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards in 1984, in retaliation for ordering military strikes against Sikhs and Sikh temples in the state of Punjab. In the aftermath, riots broke out targeting Sikhs, and several thousand people were killed. As if that weren’t bad enough, 1984 was also the year of the horrific industrial chemical disaster at the American-owned Union Carbide pesticide plant in the city of Bhopal; during a single night in December, more than half a million people were exposed to the toxic gas methyl isocyanate. The death toll from the gas leak depends on who you ask and how they counted, but by any measure it is well into the thousands.

None of this is mentioned or even suggested in Mr. India, but it wouldn’t have needed to be for audiences in 1987. The movie doesn’t need to explain that an unemployed musician takes in orphans because there’s nowhere else for them to go, or that organized crime is rampant, or that foreign businessmen are making money in India without caring for who gets hurt. The movie has a fairly light tone throughout, but that tone is nestled in with the overarching idea that for a lot of people who crave wealth and power, a human life—such as that of an innocent little girl playing on a playground—is very cheap.

Just as significant, I think, are the kind of heroic actions Arun takes when he’s acting as Mr. India. He starts out protecting Seema, and in truth he never pursues a higher level of crime-fighting. He uses his invisibility to take food from a wealthy criminal and give it to a poor family, and to recover money stolen from a family to help pay for their daughter’s wedding. He never goes looking for Mogambo; the eventual confrontation only happens because Mogambo abducts the whole lot of them in order to get the invisibility device.

That makes Mr. India a superhero in a rather “friendly neighborhood Spider-man” kind of tradition, as it’s clear he really would rather be helping people around town than dealing with a supervillain. All the rest of it—the henchmen and bombs and plans for domination—that’s all the schemes of a violent madman.

But Mr. India is just a guy who wants to feed his kids and help his neighbors, and I think that’s part of why the movie remains so beloved decades later. It’s in the nature of superhero movies for the heroics to escalate as the threats escalate, and that often inadvertently comes with a sense of the hero not caring as much about small problems anymore. There is something comforting about a story that doesn’t take that turn. Because, after all, when everything is chaotic and violent, and powerful and wealthy people wreak havoc without consequences, the world still needs the guy who will feed a starving family on the street.

What do you think of Mr. India? How do we feel about adding songs and dances to all superhero movies? I’m prepared to make it a requirement.

Next week: Make yourself a nice meal and get ready for Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro’s Delicatessen. Watch it on Kanopy, Hoopla, Amazon, and many other places.