The period from 1985 to 1994 was Bollywood's darkest phase. Movies were made with dubious sources of money from crime syndicates, good scripts were hard to come by and everything became very formulaic. The formula was to show the triumvirate nexus between business, police and politicians almost like the bad version of the Hindu philosophy of create, protect , destroy i.e hoard, hide and harm as the main villain, have the heros or heroine's personal life get knotted with this nexus and make him seek revenge after a few mandatory scenes like a rain song with the heroine.
In this formulaic mode, the idea was to enhance the villainy with names that make you shudder and tremble with fear. Soon they became funny just like 'aweful' turned to awwwwful. Starting with Shakal in 80, Dr,Dan in 84, Mogambo in 87, it degenerated to Ajgar Jurraat, Chatur Singh Chita , Gibran and many such names that emerged from a hyper stimulated rat.
In this villain infested zone, it became a rat race to show off various forms of villainy - like feeding crocodiles and such expensive and occult hobbies. So in a critical breakthrough, Mahesh Bhatt a director who leveraged some of his extremely outrageous views on sexuality to create the ultimate diabolical villain - the Eunuch. Played boldy by Sadashiv Amrapurkar who pretty much straddled the entire villainy value chain from brutal in Ardh Satya (1983) to a variety of roles by the 90s. was chosen to play the most interesting villain in Indian Cinema- Maharani in a movie called Sadak. Sadak had amazing songs that every rickshaw wala will play with Jhankar beats ( adding base to the music). It was that classic case of tweaking the template just enough to extract more entertainment than the run of the mill.
Leading a brothel and tied with politicians and also an informer for the police , Maharani indulged in what economists would call rent seeking behaviour. Maharani managed the information flow to trade favours and extract the best value of that information and convert that money flow to further trading income. The Morgan Stanley of Kamathipura.
Watch this intro scene of this villainy act of the 90s.
Scene description :
The eunuch gives his introduction as the person who does the business of women to serve men. The king of this trade who is actually the queen bee. The hapless girl who is sold into the trade by her evil uncle ( another standard plot device of this era) protests but Maharani convinces her that she is in better hands now.
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