When Best Actor trophies crowd Manoj Bajpayee’s shelves this season, they make two emphatic statements. The first is that the boys of Bihar have not only settled down comfortably in the world of make-believe and make-up but that each of them also has a distinctive quality and personality of his own.

For decades, Bihar was renowned only for placing bureaucrats and politicians at high levels in every known public department. They were men who wielded immense power but they didn’t have that touch of glamour, and the world of matinee idols seemed to welcome only the robust and the rosy-cheeked from Punjab.

That’s why, when the baritone from Bihar, Shatrughan Sinha, burst upon the scene with his stylised acting in the 70s, he became the pride of his state. As Lalu Prasad once told me, after giving Shatru’s mother a state funeral, “She was our Bihari Babu’s mother, he’s Bihar ka gaurav.” To Shatru’s eternal credit, he was the first actor from Bihar to make it as a star in Hindi cinema and among the first to break the fair-and-handsome mould of the big screen hero. As he often crowed, it was only after his arrival that Hindi film heroes went from being called Kapoor, Kumar and Khanna to Shrivastava and Sinha.

Unfortunately, Shatru remained the sole star of Bihar for a very long time. Even Shekhar Suman’s entry in 1984 with a sensuous Rekha-starrer, titled Utsav, could not make the tally of Bihari celebrities go up in Mumbai. Although his father was a celebrated surgeon in Patna, Shekhar was known more as a Delhi boy than a lad from Bihar. He also struggled to make a mark in his initial years because becoming a feature film hero was his sole aim when the universe had earmarked fame for him for a very different gift that he possessed — the gift of the gab. Shekhar, articulate in Hindi and English, could think on his feet and had a great sense of repartee, gifts that he took a while to acknowledge as his true calling card. It was only then that fame and fortune began to favour him.

Shekhar Suman thus became the second celebrity from Bihar to make a unique place for himself in the glamour world.

In the new millennium, the Bihari who really made it to the top rung as one of the 10 most saleable heroes of Hindi films was the ill-starred Sushant Singh Rajput. Although parochial noises were made by Bihari celebrities, which fetched them prime time mileage after his death, the truth was that none of them had ever met him or called him over even for a cup of tea, let alone help him with his career. Among the many credits to his name, Sushant neither flaunted the Bihar card nor needed his regional compatriots’ support as he climbed to stardom on his own. Again, unique and different from the rest of the Bihar brigade. Unfortunately, we all know that those are not the qualities that this boy from Bihar will be remembered for.

With neither Shatrughan’s imposing personality nor good-looking Shekhar’s wit, it was tougher for a fairly nondescript boy who was not even born in a city like Patna.

Born in a small village in Champaran, Manoj Bajpayee too has found a niche of his own. His is not the Sushant kind of stardom that draws the theatre-going audience in large numbers but his name today is the one that draws attention, applause and respect across platforms.

Apart from further establishing him as a Bihari celebrity, Manoj’s Best Actor trophies at a clutch of awards functions make another vital statement. That a Bihari made such a believable Marathi manoos in Bhonsle, a film that looked at the Bihari versus Maharashtrian politics that was played out in the western state a while ago.

But in a world where “whitewashing” means whites should be questioned for playing a non-white role and Salman Khan won’t be allowed to play Lord Rama, the basic meaning of acting, which is playing who you are not, gets mangled. The instances are many and the stories so gory that they’ll make for an interesting discourse on another day.

Bharathi S. Pradhan is a senior journalist and author