Darshan Jariwala

His mother was Leela Jariwala, a veteran of Gujarati acting, and his father was Vidyasagar Jariwala. That is a household where the stage is a trade rather than an ambition, and his early record reads accordingly. Hatheli Par Baad Baaki, Patro Mitro, Mulraj Mansion and Andhalo Pato in Gujarati, a Hindi play called Uncle Samjha Karo, and English theatre in Going Solo 2. Three languages, all of them live.

The credit older Gujarati viewers name first is not a film at all. It is the television serial Narsinh Mehta, in which he played the fifteenth century saint poet whose devotional verse every Gujarati household already knows by heart. Playing a figure the audience can recite along with is a specific kind of exposure, and he did it long before anyone asked him to play the Mahatma.

Feroz Abbas Khan wanted him for Gandhi in the play Mahatma v/s Gandhi. Dates did not work and the actor had to let it go. Directors normally recast and move on. Khan did not. When he made the film Gandhi, My Father in 2007, produced by Anil Kapoor and released on 3 August that year, he came back for the same actor for the same historical figure, and this time got him.

The film is about Gandhi's relationship with his eldest son Harilal, played by Akshaye Khanna, with Bhumika Chawla as Gulab and Shefali Shah as Kasturba. It was shot in South Africa, Mumbai and Ahmedabad. Philip French in The Guardian called it one of the most revealing and courageous movies ever to come out of India. That is the frame he was working inside: a Gandhi film that is not a Gandhi film, where the Mahatma loses.

He won Best Supporting Actor at the 55th National Film Awards, and the official citation is worth reading in full because of what it chooses to reward. For truthfully portraying the angst of a great historical figure, Mahatma Gandhi. The Father of the Nation stands defeated in his personal relationship with his own son.

No jury language about resemblance, dignity or the burden of the role. The award is for angst and for defeat. Shefali Shah, who played Kasturba in the same film, took Best Supporting Actress at the same ceremony for The Last Lear. Two Gujarati-connected actors on one ceremony's supporting list, which had not happened before and has not happened since.

Then came the part of the career that pays for the other parts. Chedilal Chaturvedi in Saas Bina Sasural, produced by Vipul D. Shah for Optimystix, ran on Sony from 18 October 2010 to 6 September 2012, in a household of seven men with no mother in law in it. Nearly two years of daily broadcast makes a face that millions of Hindi viewers recognise instantly and cannot name.

Around it sits a working actor's ledger across formats: Honeymoon Travels Pvt Ltd, Guru, Phata Poster Nikla Hero and Humshakals in Hindi film, Baa Bahoo Aur Baby and Adaalat on television, Permanent Roommates on streaming in 2016, and Ram Nair in The Good Karma Hospital in 2017. He goes where the work is and does not appear to mind which medium it is in.

His theatre company is called Leela Theatres, which tells you what he thinks the source of the career was. It co-produced the English play Salt and Pepper, written and directed by Vikranth Pawar, with him in it alongside Mandira Bedi, Kuki Grewal and Vikram Kochar, and produced the English comedy Your Place Or Mine?. It also produced Ramesh Aakhi Raat, a Gujarati double bill of two one-act plays built from Ramesh Parekh's writings.

That last item is the one that separates him from every other National Award winner who says nice things about theatre. Ramesh Parekh was a Gujarati poet. One-act plays made from a poet's work are not a commercial proposition in any language. Producing them is a decision to spend money keeping a form alive. In 2014, at fifty five, he joined the new urban Gujarati cinema in Abhishek Jain's Bey Yaar, a film that ran fifty weeks. He did not arrive as a returning veteran. He arrived as someone who had never actually left.