The Hrithik/Abhishek ‘Couple’

(updated here because of traffic!)


It might seem at times that one is forever reading too much into ‘the movies’ (!) but people react unconsciously to what they see if not wholly consciously. Movies in any case contain ‘meaning’ in code and not just in obvious ways. A movie like Krrish makes perfect sense in a post-90s India. You have the ‘global’ Indian who can save the world! And the character is played by an actor who certainly feeds into this structure of new found nationalism! In other words, Hritik Roshan is the hero every Indian can be proud of. He’s good looking, tall, fair etc! Bachchan himself fed off a similar structure when he re-invented himself. Again here was an actor who could be offered as a response to the De Niros and the Pacinos in terms of his physicality, his talents, and his sophistication!

With Abhishek on the other hand there is always a ‘return of the repressed’ sense. Even with all his popularity there is far more ambivalence than would be the case for any other actor in his position. Because on the one hand people like him but on the other hand they are disturbed by the fact that he also represents the continuation of the Bachchan monopoly, a strange sort of return to the past.

If Hrithik is the new, Abhishek is new as recycled ‘old’. On the plus side he seems to suggest more stability and ‘permanence’, on the debit side he is ’sensed’ as the one who impedes the new whether by way of Hrithik or otherwise. But this is also a stumbling block for Hrithik who is not enough of a brand-name for a genealogy obsessed culture. He is the ‘entrepreneur’ more or less but Abhishek represents lineage and history. This incidentally plays out in terms of physicality as well to the extent that Abhishek represents the other to the Hrithik ‘aspirational’ model.

In a related way one could say that Amitabh now needs Abhishek even more than Abhishek needs him. Because the more successful the latter gets the more enriched and extended the former’s legacy becomes! To paraphrase Emerson Amitabh Bachchan is the horizon beyond which we still do not see. Abhishek extends that horizon for a generation.

To get back to the initial point though the Abhishek/Hrithik couple is to be taken very seriously because it reflects a kind of split in a wider cultural sense. The ‘new’ India that loves the entrepreneur, the ‘self-made’ individual, in a way this is the importing of the ‘American’ myth (itself not surprising inasmuch as this goes hand in hand with an American corporate ethos that is increasingly ‘definitional’ in India). Now Hrithik of course does boast of a lineage and it could even be argued that being Rakesh Roshan’s son has helped him in more tangible ways (not just in terms of the perfect launch but also later on when his career was in ‘crisis’) but juxtaposed with other far more illustrious names (not just Bachchan but Dharmendra, the Kapoors and so forth) he is able to evade that ‘burden’. In a sense he has it both ways. He reaps the advantages of a significant film connection but can always appear ‘under-privileged’ when juxtaposed with Abhishek. Here again the latter enables the ‘story’ of the former. And again one could flip this around. The same ‘new’ India is also (and still) quite beholden to notions of bloodline, tradition, class and so forth. All of which are perfectly encapsulated by Abhishek. Similarly inasmuch as Hrithik best typifies a contemporary ideal of the ‘gym body’, the ‘achiever’ etc he enables the total other in Abhishek.

Another crucial point here is that both stars aim for box office success and both also aim to be ‘good actors’. Once again it is Hrithik who is the bona fide box office force and universally accepted as such even as he sees diminishing returns on his ‘prestige’ as actor, this despite attempts at the ‘serious’. Jodha-Akbar for example does not really advance the idea of Hrithik as ‘serious actor’. Meanwhile Abhishek is patchy at the box office by any measure but keeps increasing his acting credentials. Again each completes the other. There is a structural analogy here with the earlier split I highlighted. Abhishek’s perceived easygoing attitude is considered to be the ultimate index of his class (‘India’s first family’ as it is often dubbed). He does not have to ‘work for a living’ to rely on certain bourgeois categories. Hrithik on the other hands models his career on the hardworking guy who puts in his very best every single day in terms of sheer physical effort. The former is really what the latter aspires to be. The bourgeois classes try to get more and more ‘upscale’ but can never quite reach ‘class’ defined in the truest sense (this not just in India but every other society as well). Resentment is built into this structure. We resent most what we would like to become but cannot. At the same time we also keep chasing this idea. This entire paradigm enables Hrithik’s greater magnitude as ‘star’ but equally enables Abhishek’s greater prestige as ‘actor’. Incidentally this too reflects a post-Aamir ethos among multiplex audiences where the increasing reliance on a Hollywood model ensures that ‘prestige’ can make up the box office deficit to a great degree (note how Abhishek suffered a setback with JBJ after Guru but doesn’t really seem to be in a worse position today despite having three under-performers or flops in Sarkar Raaj, Drona, D6.. Dostana being the one silver lining and one where the cultural impact it’s made exceeds the pure gross).

The final point to be made here is that unlike Shahrukh both Hrithik and Abhishek can never represent the completely ‘normal’ or ‘mundane’. The argument seems rather obvious for Abhishek but Hrithik himself to the extent that he represents an ‘ideal’ has to appear ‘extraordinary’ in his films (one could neatly correlate his box office success with the latter; whenever Hrithik is ‘ordinary’ his box office suffers). One can see this in the films. Hrithik tries to outdo his previous stunts and dances each time while Abhishek does ‘weirder’ stints as an actor. So if Hrithik is doing salsa and jumping around on trucks in Kites Abhishek is playing father to his father who in turn has a ‘strange’ condition. Not that each does sometimes tread on the terrain of the other for better or worse.

[As an aside I should add that Aishwarya Rai ‘Bachchan’ occupies a rather interesting space here. She also satisfies ‘Hrithik cravings’ for the same audience and of course she arrived before Hrithik. At the same time she becomes a ‘Bachchan’ and hence marries these two paradigms. There is then the D2-like tussle with the husband on one side and the ‘imagined’ transgression on the other. There is a bit of a moral to this ‘story’ and it is a somewhat sobering one. I will end on this cryptic note…]

[Another aside: the SRK/Aamir split is also loosely similar in that it pits the ‘star’ against the ‘star-actor’ but is also unlike Hrithik/Abhishek in that it is a tussle between two ‘entrepreneurial’ models. Aamir turned out to be on the right side of history here even as SRK has been more ‘definitional’ in terms of ‘new India’ and diaspora audiences. Hrithik has more or less followed the SRK model with a strength genre and the ‘different’ attempted as a way of padding the resume while Abhishek has followed the Aamir one where the box office is risked to achieve a ‘prestige’ brand-name. The stakes are higher of course for Abhishek because he carries a unique historical burden called ‘Bachchan’!]