Nana Patekar died in the early hours of Thursday, 8 October 2026 of a cardiac arrest at his home in Goa. He was seventy-five.
Four days earlier, at a function near Panaji, he had spoken of death without theatre. “We all have to go someday. I don’t know whether I will be here tomorrow… But before the time comes… we have to think… am I able to do what I want to do? Have I made the effort?” Then, The Indian Express reports, he danced with a troupe and told a fan who asked for a Krantiveer dialogue that none would leave his throat until he heard the jingling of money in his ears.
Frank, funny, faintly dangerous, and honest about the clock: that was Nana to the last.
I keep a short roll of honour among the world’s actors: Gregory Peck, Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Dilip Kumar, George C. Scott, Donald Sutherland, Sir Anthony Hopkins, Charles Chaplin, Alec Guinness, Jack Nicholson. Nana Patekar belongs on that roll, and not as a courtesy of nationality. He was an essayist of characters. Each of his men arrived as a thesis, made its case in a rasp or a silence, and left the audience altered.
Look at the range. In Salaam Bombay! (1988) he was Baba, a drug dealer and pimp without a flicker of pity. In Parinda (1989) he was the crime lord Anna Seth, whose maniacal laugh won him his first National Award. In Krantiveer (1994) he turned anger into a public argument against corruption and won Best Actor. In Khamoshi: The Musical (1996) he played a deaf-mute father with no dialogue to lean on; the Express called it “pure performance, the hallmark of a true actor.” In Ab Tak Chhappan (2004) he was a police inspector “so obsessed with cleaning up crime that all semblance of balance disappeared.” In Natsamrat (2016) he became Ganpat “Appa” Belwalkar, the stage legend who neglected his family in his prime and found they had little time for him in old age.
What I prize in the men on my roll is economy: a pause doing the work of a paragraph. Nana had it. His villains were never cartoons, and his heroes never forgot they were angry men.
Honorary ranks are often treated as ornaments. Nana Patekar’s was not.
He came to my Regiment first through a film. In Prahaar (1991), which he co-wrote, directed and starred in, he played Major Chavan of the Maratha Light Infantry, a hard taskmaster to his cadets. By several accounts he prepared by training with the Regiment for about three years. He joined the Territorial Army as an honorary Captain around 1990, and held his honorary commission, rising to Lieutenant Colonel, until 2013.
Then came 1999. He asked to go to the front and was told that only the Defence Minister could permit it. So he telephoned George Fernandes, who agreed. He reached the Line of Control in August, weeks after the Kargil war was officially declared over, and did the unglamorous work: a base hospital, a quick-response team, patrols. He did not play at being a combatant.
Kashmiri readers will know the places. By his own telling, his travels took in Dras, Leh, Kupwara, Baramulla and Sopore. I know that belt. Kupwara is my home district, and Baramulla is where I commanded my battalion on the Line of Control. “When I reached Srinagar, my weight was 76 kg,” he recalled. “When I came back, my weight became 56 kg.” In a recent interview he said of that time, simply: “I felt happy. I could at least do this little bit for the country.” That is how soldiers speak of service: without ornament.
There is a coincidence I cannot leave alone. In 1978, the year I was commissioned into the 16th Battalion of the Maratha Light Infantry, Nana Patekar made his screen debut in Gaman. Two roads began that year, and they met in one Regiment. A regiment is a family of obligations. Whoever wears its uniform and means it, belongs to it. Nana meant it.
He knew his own faults. “I get violent,” he told the Express in 2016. “That’s the difference. I lost so many things because of that.” Few public men name their flaw so plainly. In the same breath he said: “Acting is not just a profession for me. This is how I breathe.”
His generosity was quieter than his temper. In 2015 he and Makarand Anaspure founded the NAAM Foundation to help drought-hit farmers and their families in Maharashtra. And when he learnt that the young shooter Anjali Bhagwat and two teammates were sharing one rifle and one kit for want of money, he stepped in. “He is the first sponsor of my career,” she says. To newcomers on the range he would say, on the spot: “Take my ammunition and shoot.” No glove? “Here, take mine. I’ll get a new one.”
I must also set down a private regret. I have created and written a screenplay of an eight-episode feature for Netflix that marries Dostoevsky’s quiet pathos to the reckonings of love in King Lear. Its lead is an ageing patriarch who reeks of lust and greed. My sponsors offered a distinguished shortlist of the country’s finest actors. I insisted on Nana Patekar.
My reason was what I call the Al Pacino frequency: volatile, razor-edged, soul-piercing. Nana had an innate, unpredictable savagery. In Parinda it announced itself. In Apaharan, as the MLA and underworld don Tabrez Alam, it learned to wait. Even in The Vaccine War, in a very different part, he kept his power in reserve. With age the fire had hardened into something more dangerous: a quiet, sardonic, bone-chilling cruelty. I wanted that savagery of intent dripping from my patriarch’s face and eyes before he spoke a word. I could not imagine another face carrying it.
Every writer has a role written for one particular face. Mine was his. Now it is my loss, and a regret I will carry for life.
He was cremated late on Thursday night at his farmhouse in Donje village, outside Pune, with full state honours and a 21-gun salute, before more than a thousand mourners. The salute fitted. He had worn two uniforms, the actor’s and the soldier’s, and neither was a disguise.
Rest well, Colonel. The Regiment remembers you.
Bol Shri Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj ki Jai.
(The writer, a retired Colonel of the Maratha Light Infantry, is a strategic analyst and author.)
About The Author
