To Sir With Love.... And Respect Prof. Roshan Taneja Was An Institution In Himself

The industry was living in a world created by some of its founding fathers. There was a set pattern of going about making films. There were only

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By Team Bollyy
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Ali Peter John

The industry was living in a world created by some of its founding fathers. There was a set pattern of going about making films. There were only a limited genres of films that were being made and no filmmaker wanted to take the risk of going against the set traditions (except Satyajit Ray, may be). There were just a few actors male and female who had formed their own styles and ways of acting. There was a Dilip Kumar school of acting and there was a Raj Kapoor school of acting and there was a Dev Anand school of acting, and there were other actors who followed these schools, some succeeded in their own ways, but most failed, but the industry went on with the resources it had in the field of acting.....

It was in this atmosphere that one man decided to know an alternate way of acting and that young man was Roshan Taneja who was destined to create a revolution in the sphere of acting. It was a daunting task to go against the privailing system, but Taneja decided to take that big and risky step...

He was always interested in acting, but he was not satisfied with the way acting was understood in Hindi films. He was still in college when he decided to learn another way of acting and without knowing what he was looking for, he took his own steps, one leading to another....

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After graduating, Taneja, who wanted to train as an actor, discovered that there were no training academies for actors in India. He wrote to eight institutes that offered acting courses in the US, got a scholarship, and set off to New York, where he immersed himself in the art of acting. The Neighbourhood Playhouse School of Theatre, founded in 1928, had already become a leading theatre training institute. There, under the guidance of Sandford Meisner, Taneja learnt the intricacies of the art and craft and about the various perspectives on acting. The techniques of method acting were a revelation to Taneja. Taneja discovered the Stanislavski system, the precursor to method acting:‘What makes a truly moving performance?’ Stanislavski discovered that the really great performers functioned in a realm completely divorced from most of the actors. They seemed to be ‘waay’- hypnotically immersed in their character and circumstances of the play. They had forsaken those well woven mannerisms which indicated intent to an audience, but never their feelings’.

In practice, the ‘method’ is nothing more than a personal perception applied to the art of acting. Acting is the art of the self; the supreme revelation of the self. It is the ‘self’ that feeds the actor and ‘self’ which is fed by the actor.

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After four years in New York, Taneja returned to Bombay. An actor trained in New York, he was an oddity. After some years of struggle and of doing bit roles, he found his niche through a series of coincidences and landed the job of teacher of acting at the newly set up Film And Television Institute of India. It was the beginning of the most important phase of his life. It was at FTII that Taneja trained many actors who went on to establish themselves in the film industry and with  some of them even growing into legends and icons like Subhash Ghai, Jaya Bhaduri, Shatrughan Sinha, Danny Denzongpa, Mithun Chakraborty, Asrani and Paintal… The list is long and illustrious. In the early years of FTII, acting was a two-year course and the class comprised 10 male and 10 female students. By the late 1960s, the hugely popular course began drawing thousands of applicants. The auditions happened at four centres -- Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta and Madras, and the list was whittled down to 1000 individuals, who were then asked to come to Bombay for the final auditions.

In 1976, Taneja shifted to Bombay and started his acting school, where he trained a number of actors, including almost all the star sons who were launched in the 1980s. The list of actors that Taneja has trained reads like a who’s who of the Hindi film industry.

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Among some of the illustrious stars who came under his influence and got their chance to grow into more than just the normal actors were Anil Kapoor, Aamir Khan, Ajay Devgun, Abhishekh Bachchan, Ranbir Kapoor, Sharman Joshi, Emraan Hashmi, Rani Mukherji, Sonam Kapoor, Juhi Chawla, Tabu, Manisha Koirala Gulshan Grover, Sanjay Dutt, Sunny Deol and Bobby Deol .

“Sir"as he was popularly known initially had difficulties in finding a place to have his acting school. He had his schools in a building called“Ramesh Mahal"near the houses of Balraj Sahni and Sahir Ludhianvi. He then shifted to an old bungalow in the now famous Yari Road area and finally established his school in one of the bungalows in MHADA in Four Bungalows. He was growing old and was joined by his sons, Rohit and Rahul. He used to attend the school even till the very end.

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The most important achievement of Prof. Taneja was his making the industry accept the fact that acting could be taught. But soon Prof. Taneja saw his own students like Asha Chandra, Kishore Namit Kapoor, and others like the late Navtej Hundal, Asrani and other bigger actors like Anupam Kher take to having their own schools, institutes and academies of acting. One of his earliest students, Subhash Ghai even went on to build a massive acting school with many other branches of filmmaking called the Whistling Woods International, which is ranked among the ten best schools of filmmaking.

It was a tough struggle for Prof. Taneja to get his dream come true in the industry, but he never gave up and the way filmmakers now ask every actor,“from which school of acting"? Is the greatest victory and a tribute to the pioneering work of a“Sir"who his students, whether it is Subhash Ghai, Shabana Azmi and Naseruddin Shah or whether it is Mithun Chakraborty, Danny Dangzonpa or Asrani, treated with the greatest respect and Shabana said the last word about him when she said he was the only man whose feet she touched.

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What more could Prof. Taneja ask for? He was a completely content man and I think it is this feeling of having achieved something in life and making a change in so many lives that did not let him suffer and even death was respectful towards him when it took him away while he was at peace and was sleeping after one more day of hoping and still dreaming of his sons taking his dream to greater heights.

The only time Prof. Taneja failed was when he tried to direct a film with some of his students working in it. He never directed any film again. It was only some time ago that he wrote his autobiography, and the way every star found time to attend the release of the book once again showed how much they respected him, even after years had passed and they were stars and superstars, but when it came to“Taneja Sir", they were still his students.

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Farewell, sir, your students cannot and will not ever forget you and even the generations to come will have no other way but to remember you for what you gave to the industry to make it better and rank among the best in the world.

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