Dilip Joshi

He began acting at twelve and was still a student when the Indian National Theatre gave him its Best Actor award, which he collected while doing a BCA. The professional start after that was not glamorous. He worked as a backstage artist on commercial stage productions for roughly fifty rupees a role, and at one point co-owned a travel agency, which is what an actor does when the acting does not cover the month.

That is the correct order in which to read him, and Gujarati Wikipedia gets it right where the English entry does not. It lists him as an actor of the Gujarati stage first, television second, films third. Everything national that happened to him later ran on training that was paid for in fifty rupee instalments.

In 1992 Sanjiv Shah made Hun Hunshi Hunshilal, a Gujarati musical political satire released internationally as Love in the Time of Malaria. It is set in the kingdom of Khojpuri, where a king is being driven mad by mosquitoes that stand in for everybody beneath him, and a doctor's son moves to the capital to work at a laboratory dedicated to wiping them out. Joshi played Hunshilal. The title role. Renuka Shahane played the scientist he falls for, Mohan Gokhale played the king, Manoj Joshi is in the cast, and Rajat Dholakia composed forty five songs for it in two days.

This credit gets left off almost every list of Gujarati actors, including the ones that put him on the strength of a Hindi sitcom. It should not be. It is a lead role in one of the few genuinely radical films Gujarati cinema has produced, made in the middle of the industry's worst decade, and it establishes that the man playing a shopkeeper for a national audience once carried a satire about class and power in his own language.

He was Ramlal in Maine Pyar Kiya in 1989 and Bhola Prasad in Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! in 1994, two of the biggest Hindi films of their era, in named parts rather than crowd work. In 2023 he told The Indian Express that the work did not come after Hum Aapke Hain Koun, that he had assumed his life was set and the film did not do for him what he expected. That is a rare admission from an actor who is now on television every week.

What follows on the record supports him. Yash in 1996, Sar Aakhon Par in 1999, Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani and Khiladi 420 in 2000, One 2 Ka 4 in 2001, then Humraaz, Dil Hai Tumhaara and Kyaa Dil Ne Kahaa in 2002. Named characters, respectable films, no career. Being in the biggest film of the year turns out to be no protection at all if the industry has already decided what shape you are.

Taarak Mehta Ka Ooltah Chashmah premiered on Sony SAB on 28 July 2008, adapted from Tarak Mehta's weekly column Duniya Ne Undha Chasma in the magazine Chitralekha, produced by Asit Kumarr Modi. He took Jethalal Champaklal Gada, who runs an electronics shop in a Mumbai housing society, and has not stopped playing him since. The show is one of the longest running television series India has made. Around him the cast has turned over repeatedly, three actors have played his son Tapu, two have played Taarak Mehta himself, four have played Sonu. He has not been replaced once.

Five Telly awards and three ITA awards sit against the performance. The numbers are not the interesting part. The interesting part is the durability of a comic character over eighteen years of daily-format writing, which is a discipline closer to a long theatre run than to film acting, and which is exactly what fifty rupees a role on the Gujarati stage trains a person to do.

Here is the case for putting him on a Gujarati site, made without help from a birth certificate. His English biography records no family origin. There is no documented ancestral village, no lineage into the Gujarati film trade, none of the connective tissue that most names on this site come with. What there is instead is the work: a title role in a Gujarati film, a lifetime on the Gujarati commercial stage, and a Gujarati-language encyclopedia that files him as a stage actor before anything else.

And then the thing only he has done. Jethalal is a Gujarati businessman played for a national Hindi-speaking audience, and the trap in that part is enormous, because Indian comedy has a century of habit around the thrifty Gujarati trader and it is not a flattering habit. He plays the man rather than the type. He is loud, greedy, sentimental, frightened of his own father, and never once a joke about Gujaratis. Millions of Indians who will never watch a Gujarati film have spent eighteen years liking a Gujarati man. No film on this website has moved that many people, and no other actor got them there.