Upendra Trivedi

He was born in Indore, not Gujarat. The family came from Kukadia village near Idar, moved to Ujjain where he finished school, and he ended up in Bombay living with his elder brother. His father worked in a mill and was paralysed, so the son carried loads as a coolie and took a job in a factory that made umbrellas. He was one of four siblings and he got an arts degree out of Bombay University while doing it.

The acting started in college plays and the early film work was taken for the money, supporting parts in Gujarati films that paid his fees. Vanraj Chavdo and Mendi Rang Lagyo are on that list. Nothing about the first decade suggests a leading man. It suggests a man who needed the shift.

The break did not come from a screen test. Ravindra Dave gave him the lead in Jesal Toral in 1971 after seeing him in Abhinay Samrat, and the title of that production is the title Gujarat then hung on him for life. He played seven different roles in the Gujarati play of that name, which is the sort of thing an actor does to prove a point, and the point got proved.

Jesal Toral was a commercial success and he played Jadeja in it. He was thirty five, which in an industry with a working star system would have been late. In this one it was simply when the machinery finally noticed him. From there the workload becomes the story: Kadu Makrani, Ranakdevi, Malavpati Munj, Santu Rangili, Halaman Jethvo, Amarsinh Rathod, Jivi Rabaran, Mehulo Luhar, Machchhu Tara Vaheta Pani, year after year of Kathiawadi legend and rural drama.

Read his filmography next to the national award record and something uncomfortable appears. In the years he was busiest, the country's juries were finding nothing in Gujarat worth a Silver Lotus. The award for Best Feature Film in Gujarati went unawarded for sixteen consecutive cycles from 1973 to 1988. That is the exact stretch in which he was making five to eleven films a year.

This is not a charge against him. It is the shape of the trap. The Gujarat government of that era paid producers a completion-linked benefit, so finishing a film mattered more than making one worth finishing, and the men who could act were kept employed by a market that had no reason to stretch them. He was the most bankable face in a system built to reward speed. What he did about it took another twenty years.

In 1993 he took Pannalal Patel's 1947 novel Manvini Bhavai, about Kalu and Raju in the famine of 1899 and 1900 that Gujarat remembers as the Chhappaniyo Dukal, and made it happen from every seat at once. He produced it with Aashish Trivedi, he directed it, and he played Kalu opposite Anuradha Patel. It won Best Feature Film in Gujarati at the 41st National Film Awards, and the official citation reads, in full, for depicting the drought-torn lives of villagers through the eyes of the protagonist.

Then the door shut behind him. From the 1994 cycle to the 2011 cycle, eighteen consecutive years, the category went unawarded again. Between 1990 and 2011 the Gujarati award was given once, to him, for a film he had to fund and direct because nobody else was going to. Most great careers are a story of an actor being used well by an industry. His is the story of an actor doing an industry's job for it.

He joined politics in the 1980s and won Bhiloda for the Indian National Congress in 1985 and 1990, then took the same seat as an independent in 1998. He served as deputy speaker of the Gujarat legislative assembly from 31 March 2000 to 19 July 2002. He had already produced Jher To Peedhan Jani Jani from Manubhai Pancholi's novel, and he wrote an autobiography, Upendra Trivedi: Atmakathan ane Anya Aalekh.

He came back for Maa Baap ne Bhulsho Nahi in 1999, pairing with Naresh Kanodia for the first time, and received the Kavi Kag Award in 2012. He died in Mumbai on 4 January 2015 after respiratory arrest, married, with two sons, and with a younger brother, Arvind, who had been Ravana on national television since 1987. Gujarat likes to call him Abhinay Samrat and leave it there. The harder compliment is that for forty years he was the only piece of infrastructure the industry could count on.