Burning bright: A new documentary, titled The Bengal Tiger: The Rajbansi Story, is directed by Arish Sirkissoon and co-written by Rajbansi’s wife Shameen Thakur-Rajbansi. What part of the colourful and controversial South African politician Amichand Rajbansi’s story will it foreground?
In death, as in life, Amichand Rajbansi refuses to fade quietly into history. The controversial and colourful politician — dubbed the “Bengal Tiger” for his fiery temper, relentless ambition and flair for political theatre — is once again centre stage, this time roaring to life on the silver screen in a biographical documentary.
Yet as audiences prepare to watch The Bengal Tiger: The Rajbansi Story, the life and times of the man who led the Minority Front (MF) and ruled the apartheid-era House of Delegates under his National People’s Party, one is compelled to ask, “Will this film show the good, the bad and the ugly of Rajbansi’s chequered career, or will it declaw one of South Africa’s most polarising political animals?”
The rise and roar
Rajbansi’s life was made for cinema. Born in Durban in 1942, the son of working-class Indian parents, he was a self-made man who broke barriers in sport, business and politics.
A schoolteacher by profession, he dabbled in football administration, was a no-nonsense soccer referee, climbing the ladder in the city of his 1860 indentured labouring forebears and the national political world.
It was this drive and flamboyance that first earned him the nickname “Bengal Tiger” — part admiration, part warning, with the full glory of the menacing beast on his party logo.
By the late Seventies and early Eighties, Rajbansi had become a household name, especially among South Africans of Indian descent.
He was one of the first Indian politicians to emerge prominently in the new tricameral parliamentary system devised by the apartheid state — designed to divide and co-opt Indians and coloureds into powerless chambers, while excluding the black majority. Many Indians boycotted it. But Rajbansi seized the opportunity.
In 1984, he was elected to the House of Delegates, where he quickly established himself as a consummate political operator. His booming voice, aggressive debating style and unapologetic pragmatism drew admiration and scorn.
He styled himself as the champion of Indian South Africans, claiming he was “taking crumbs from the apartheid master’s table” and turning them into bread for his people.
The good
Rajbansi’s supporters argue he delivered in ways no one else dared. Under his watch, Indian schools thrived — teachers and heads were promoted — and hospitals were refurbished; small business development was pushed and scholarships opened opportunities for working-class youth.
He was particularly attentive to pensioners, widows and Hindu temple organisations, winning him loyal grassroots support that kept him in office well into the democratic era.
For ordinary constituents in Chatsworth, Phoenix and Maritzburg, Rajbansi was accessible, colourful and ever ready to attend weddings, funerals and temple festivals.
He relished being called “the Tiger” and his political brand thrived on personal connections, handshakes and symbolic gestures — a somewhat smiling death demeanour. He was, in many ways, a populist long before the term became fashionable.
The bad
Yet for every tale of service, there is a counter-narrative of opportunism. Rajbansi’s time in the House of Delegates became synonymous with horse-trading, patronage politics and controversial alliances. His critics accused him of exploiting the powerless Indian chamber to enrich himself and his cronies, rather than to fight the injustices of apartheid.
The James Commission of Inquiry in the late Eighties investigated allegations of corruption, nepotism and maladministration linked to Rajbansi.
Though the inquiry tarnished his reputation, the Tiger’s survival instincts were unmatched. He wore censure like armour, insisting he was targeted for daring to play the game in a system stacked against him.
His political longevity owed much to his willingness to strike deals with anyone. In apartheid’s twilight, he flirted with the ruling National Party, then with the ANC in the democratic era.
Critics dismissed him as a “political mercenary”, but Rajbansi shrugged off the label, arguing Indian South Africans needed a seat at every table.
The ugly
The documentary may struggle with Rajbansi’s ugliest moments. His fiery temper, often played for the cameras, sometimes tipped into humiliation.
Who can forget his finger-wagging pose to a white policeman at the airport en route to his House of Delegates parliamentary debut, or the spectacle at the multi-party Codesa negotiations in the early Nineties, when Rajbansi was slapped by the far-right Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging leader Eugene Terre’Blanche during a chaotic scuffle, tossing his toupée?
The Tiger, who prided himself on bravado, became the butt of jokes in the press.
There were also allegations of heavy-handedness within his own MF, where family squabbles, factionalism and claims of autocratic control plagued his leadership.
In his personal life, controversies swirled around divorces, allegations of domestic strife and his larger-than-life appetite for wealth and flamboyance. To his detractors, these flaws exposed the Tiger’s hypocrisy; to his admirers, they were mere scars of a warrior who dared to fight in the political jungle.
With the advent of democracy in 1994, Rajbansi and the MF reinvented themselves. While other tricameral politicians were discarded as collaborators, Rajbansi’s ability to tap into Indian identity politics ensured his survival.
The MF won seats in KwaZulu-Natal’s legislature and municipal councils, where Rajbansi positioned himself as a broker between the ANC and opposition parties, a lone seat in the National Assembly.
He supported the ANC at crucial moments, winning cabinet posts — MEC for sports, arts and recreation — in the KwaZulu-Natal provincial government. Yet this alliance, too, was fraught with tension, with many hardline ANC leaders privately dismissing him as unreliable.
By the 2000s, Rajbansi’s influence was waning. He remained a master of political theatre, staging press conferences with oversized portraits of Gandhi or temple backdrops, but his power base shrank as new generations of Indian South Africans aligned with mainstream parties.
Sanitising the Tiger?
The forthcoming documentary is billed as a celebration of Rajbansi’s “never-say-die” spirit. It will probably highlight his grassroots connections, his survival instincts and his claim to have given Indian South Africans a voice in apartheid and democratic politics alike.
But will it confront the contradictions?
History is rarely kind to polarising figures, yet cinema often is. Rajbansi’s charisma and theatricality lend themselves to a heroic arc. But if the film neglects the full story — the betrayals, the opportunism, the moments of ridicule — it risks turning political history into hagiography.
Rajbansi died in December 2011, leaving behind both loyal followers and embittered critics. His widow, Shameen Thakur Rajbansi, inherited the leadership of the MF, and the party has declined into obscurity.
The Bengal Tiger’s true legacy is complicated. He was a pioneer, a populist and a survivor, but also a man who thrived on division, controversy and spectacle. He embodied the contradictions of South Africa’s transition: a collaborator who claimed resistance, a pragmatist who styled himself as a visionary, a man of the people who too often played politics for himself.
As the lights dim, and audiences watch his story unfold on screen, they should remember that documentaries, like politicians, are rarely neutral. The Tiger roared, but he also clawed, bit and sometimes betrayed. To understand him fully is to embrace the messiness of history — the good, the bad and the ugly.
In the end, perhaps that is Rajbansi’s truest legacy — not as a saint or a villain, but as a political animal who played the jungle of apartheid and democracy with unmatched ferocity, even rat-like cunning, leaving scars that South African politics still bears today.
As a frontline journalist then, I view it as a valuable archive — flawed, partial, but necessary.
Rajbansi was never a footnote; he was a headline. Whether roaring or fading into echo, his story remains central to understanding the theatre of South African politics.
The Bengal Tiger: The Rajbansi Story is not the definitive account of Amichand Rajbansi. It cannot be. But it is a valuable provocation, a reminder of a politician who always commanded attention, always demanded headlines and always forced us to confront uncomfortable questions about power, race and survival in South Africa.
The Bengal Tiger may be gone but his roar still unsettles the silence.
The Bengal Tiger: Tne Rajbansi Story is out at Nu-Metro on 3 October. Marlan Padayachee, a member of Sanef, is a veteran political, foreign and diplomatic correspondent. He is a freelance journalist, photographer and researcher.