Wife Maanyata whispers to Sanjay Dutt at the Lucknow roadshow on Saturday. (PTI)

Jan. 18: Politician Sanjay Dutt has set himself a daunting goal by invoking mother Nargis’s legacy in his Lok Sabha campaign as Samajwadi Party candidate.

The actor has said he wants to contest from Lucknow to serve his naanihal (home of one’s maternal ancestors), where Nargis’s mother Jaddan Bai had lived for some time.

He did not mention that his father Sunil Dutt, a former Union minister and Lok Sabha member, had taken the first step in his media-showbiz career with All India Radio in Lucknow.

Sanjay’s stress on Nargis, a Rajya Sabha member who died in 1981, rather than the more “successful” politician Sunil Dutt, is significant, friends of the Dutt family say.

They believe the move underscores Sanjay’s deep emotional ties to Nargis and may reflect a desire to subtly distance himself from the legacy of Sunil Dutt, a staunch Congress loyalist whose seat of Mumbai North West is now represented by Sanjay’s sister Priya.

Sanjay’s friends in show business said the actor’s main task would now be to try and live up to the standards Nargis had set in public service.

Nargis with Sanjay (top) and Indira Gandhi

In 1958, Nargis, then in her late 20s, was awarded the Padma Shri. Her proximity to then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and his daughter Indira Gandhi was well known, so there was a buzz about her impending entry into politics.

Nargis, instead, took up the cause of the disabled. As a girl, she had yearned to be a doctor; and Sunil Dutt had told his friends that after their marriage, she wanted to go abroad and become a qualified nurse.

Along with her husband, Nargis ran a school for poor children in Bandra and another for special children. When the Spastics Society of India was established, Nargis was selected as a promoter. She never took the position merely as a social feather in her cap.

Nargis also got associated with Bharat Scouts and Guides, the War Widows Association and the Meena Kumari Memorial for the Blind, and often spent her own money to help them.

She never let any of this come in the way of her duties to her three children.

After Nargis had settled down as wife and mother, leading filmmaker S.S. Vasan of Gemini Studios in Madras had approached her with a film offer. Nargis had already scaled the heights of her acting career with Mother India (1958), where her performance, according to family friend Dilip Kumar, was on a par with that of Marlon Brando in The Godfather (1972).

Vasan was reputed to have never approached a star directly. He flew to Bombay making an exception for Nargis, hoping the gesture alone would clinch the matter.

A version of their meeting goes like this: Vasan pushes a blank cheque towards Nargis, who smiles and says, “Vasan saab, I am completely tied up with three films. They are called Sanju, Anju (Namrata) and Priya. I just cannot do another film now.”

Yet, when war broke out between India and China in 1962, the young mother and Sunil Dutt organised cultural tours to entertain the jawans on the border.

Perhaps in recognition of all this, Indira Gandhi, then Prime Minister, nominated her to the Rajya Sabha in 1980.

The snippets column of a magazine edited by Indira Gandhi’s younger daughter-in-law Maneka had at that time speculated that the move had upset Amitabh Bachchan’s mother Teji Bachchan, known to be close to the Gandhis. Indira Gandhi, however, had insisted Nargis deserved the recognition more than anyone else.

If Sanjay wants to live up to his mother’s example, his friends and well-wishers feel, he has to be much more than Munnabhai MP.