The Loneliest Superstar Ever (Open Magazine on Rajesh Khanna)

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You know Rajesh Khanna, don’t you? If you are a young man or woman reading this, you may have heard of him as Akshay Kumar’s father-in-law or Dimple Kapadia’s husband or Amitabh Bachchan’s one-time co-star. At a pinch, you might also be somewhat familiar with his work: such classics as Anand, Aradhana, Amar Prem, Aavishkar and Bawarchi, which play on TV now and then. But to know and understand what and who Rajesh Khanna is and was, ask your mother. Chances are, she may have harboured a secret (maybe even an open and zealous) crush on Rajesh Khanna in her youth. My mother did. In truth, it was an entire female generation’s adulation of this actor that was at the centre of the Rajesh Khanna phenomenon.

Since the onset of his undisclosed illness, brought to popular notice by his weak frame in a recent TV commercial for Havells fans in which he announces that nobody can take his fans away from him (he can rest assured of that), wellwishers have wondered whether all is okay with the Lord of Aashirwad, that ocean-front shrine in Mumbai that has been his home. But the commercial has served its purpose. It has turned the spotlight back on him, just as he wanted. One of his reasons for doing the commercial was to subtly remind people of his days of refulgence, the time when he more or less owned the word ‘superstar’, a term coined especially for him by Devyani Chaubal of Star & Style magazine.

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The Rajesh Khanna story is without parallel. It never had a prequel and can never have a sequel. It stands alone as one with extreme alienation at its heart. He was a soft, uncannily romantic hero at a time of Dharmendra-like masculinity. That look in his eyes, that hint of a smile and that nod of his head all had a magical effect on women. Some of the praise that the critic Pauline Kael once lavished on Cary Grant can apply to Khanna as well: that he was a male love object, and that men wanted to be as ‘lucky and enviable’ as he was, and that ‘women imagined landing him.’ Add chartbuster songs to romantic mannerisms, and—voila—you had a star few women could resist.

In a chapter on the actor in the anthology Bollywood’s Top 20: Superstars of Indian Cinema, Avijit Ghosh writes that without music, ‘Rajesh Khanna became an actor without his best lines.’ There was a touch of the poet-philosopher, notes Ghosh, in the characters he played. In this, as in other things, it was as if Khanna stood alone, like an outsider trying to break into a charmed circle.

Several of his co-stars, including Amitabh Bachchan, have testified to an inability to put in words the extent and reach of his stardom. It’s hard to imagine it now, but there was once a time when Bachchan’s claim to fame was that he had worked with Khanna. The irony of this, however, is that while Bachchan has retained a relevance in another era of cinema well past his prime, Khanna’s appeal remains frozen in its old frame of the mid 1960s till the mid 1970s.

If at all, it is Khanna’s films with Hrishikesh Mukherjee that help him cross over to different generations and lend him longevity as an actor—mind you, only as an actor, not as a superstar. His success is a story cherished only by those who were young when he was at the peak of his power. For today’s youth, he is at best a relic from the past who continues to be his own enemy, trapped as he is by a false sense of propriety and his own image, one who lives in that dream mansion in the comfort of a stardom that is now only illusory at best. In other words, he lives in a hopeless time warp, and in that, he may easily be real life’s closest equivalent to Sunset Boulevard’s delusional ‘I-am-big’ centrepiece.

What happened to him was something rather Norma Desmond-like. Not that the pictures got small (they got big, in fact), but he refused to acknowledge that he was fast fading away. Khanna—or Kaka as he was affectionately nicknamed—and Desmond appear to be lonely inhabitants of their own fame and misfortune. As fellow travellers, separated by nearly half a century, they are prisoners of their own respective worlds of make-believe, even as everything else moves on. Is it their fault that nobody told them about it?

For any superstar, being loved by audiences is nothing short of a life-affirming need, but for Rajesh Khanna, that alone wouldn’t do. There was a time when almost all of India loved him. Not to be left out—and quite in tune with the rest of the country, to be fair—Rajesh Khanna fell in love with himself. The bedazzler of fans had bedazzled himself. It was an act of narcissism, say critics, that needed only one sort of divine sanction: his own.

“At one point, Rajesh Khanna was a god, but the trouble with him is that he started thinking he was one,” says Ali Peter John, a senior film journalist who has known Khanna for a long time.

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