Across his 25 years in Hindi cinema, Shah Rukh Khan has played every kind of lover imaginable. I still remember chancing upon Anjaam (1994) while left to my own devices one night and being mortally afraid for Madhuri Dixit’s life. While we were glad we weren’t called Kiran when he portrayed a jilted, psychotic lover in Darr (1993), Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa (1994) saw his rather endearingly played Sunil get tragically friend-zoned by the woman of his dreams. Those were, of course, the pre- DDLJ days when he was still dabbling on the fringes of love. Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995) was that watershed in the history of Hindi cinema that gave Indian audiences a romantic hero who became the stuff of collective dreams.
Next there was Rahul (of Dil To Pagal Hai and Kuch Kuch Hota Hai fame) who was perpetually spoiled for choice, while Mohabbatein (2000) saw him playing the ultimate love guru imparting lessons to ickle teenagers in the face of an Amitabh Bachchan-shaped adversity. He then pined away and died in lavish drunkenness in Devdas (2002), but when death came knocking at his door in Kal Ho Naa Ho (2003), he embraced it with open arms.
From navigating the not-so-happily-ever-after territory in Chalte Chalte (2003) and Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna (2006), to romancing in both human and non-human forms in Paheli (2005) and becoming an overnight dancing sensation in Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi (2008), Indian cinema’s king of romance has done it all for love. He has played its every mood, sung its every song, coloured its every subtle detail.
Cupid calling
Returning to the love story yet again with Imtiaz Ali’s Jab Harry Met Sejal , the actor admits in an exclusive interview that playing troubled characters in recent films like Fan (2016) and Raees (2017) was exhausting and that he had wanted to take up something lighter. The trailer and songs of JHMS confirm that the film has all the ‘Ali essentials’ — real and metaphorical journeys, Punjab with all its boisterous offerings, and the boy-meets-girl theme so obviously declared in the director’s recurrent choice of titles. Add Khan to this potent mix, and we can’t help but think of DDLJ .
When I tell him so, and ask him if the new film, in some way, marks a return for the dreamy and much-desired Raj, he is quick to assure, “He would return if he had gone somewhere… his shadow looms so large over me, let alone everybody else.” While admitting that viewers may find the film has a feel of DDLJ , he says it engages in a kind of exploration of two very different personalities that the earlier film did not accommodate. In the former, Khan believes there were very specific things — differences in class and exposure, small-town limitations versus urban freedom, issues of tradition and modernity, and of choice and control — to make the protagonists look different. But the new film, he thinks, explores how the characters remain distinct even when the specifics are taken away. “Those issues don’t need to be the mainstay of the film; in relationships sometimes those are the least important issues,” he says.
Being his own man
Instead of a revival then, he prefers to see his character in JHMS as an extension of the lover he has played on film — lending, to some extent, his own maturity and experience to the 40-something Harry. “I am playing who I feel right now,” he shares. And as he has grown older, he admits his attitude to love has changed, too, as has his way of playing a lover. “If I was to play Raj today, I don’t think I’d be able to… but Harry I feel like playing. I feel more akin to him now,” he shares.
Asked about the essential contradiction between the widespread popularity of his image as a romantic hero on the one hand and it being called a trap that he keeps falling into on the other, Khan believes that he ultimately needs to follow his own instincts. “When people have seen you so often, they have seen most of you,” is the characteristically unapologetic reply. After 25 years of putting in an average of 16 hours of work a day, he knows that the thing that keeps him going has nothing to do with fame or commerce or people’s reactions; it is purely driven by his own choices as an actor.
Exploring new depths
Khan shares that he finds Ali’s language and mode of expression very modern, and feels it was the simplicity of the script that drew him to it. Love stories in Hindi cinema are often sprawling larger-than-life extravaganzas, and, while admitting that he may be partly to blame for them, he believes that “the time has come… because I have kids and I listen to them talk… [when] a love story need not be mounted on that scale”. Working within the bounds of commercial cinema, he accepts that one may have to hold on to its trappings, but the new character has offered him a way of assessing the evolution of the romantic hero he has played so often on screen: “I have Raj and Rahul riding on my either shoulder every year and every day of my life — maybe it’s time I said let me see if I have evolved as a lover.”
Gauri Shinde, who directed the 51-year-old in last year’s Dear Zindagi , admits that she’s always wondered about how he took this genre and completely owned it, at least in our generation. “It has to do with who he is in real life, a thorough gentleman. He is not afraid of giving equal or sometimes more space to his co-stars, especially to the women he works with. His leading ladies have shone equally along with him; they are not just arm candy or there for a dance number,” she says, adding, “Shah Rukh is a very driven man; very intelligent, talented and versatile. With that combination, he had to have accomplishhed all this, and there is more to come. His love for film and his love for the craft is far bigger than who he is.”
Staying positive
Speaking of the highs and lows of his career and his plans for the future, the actor feels that, overall, it has been a high, although there have been some strikes. But no matter how life-threatening they may have seemed at the moment, he cheerily declares, “Like my films, as strange as it may sound, anth me sab theek hi ho jata hai (everything becomes okay in the end).” I ask him his thoughts on why he has endured in the hearts and minds of millions over a quarter of a century. He assigns it to the years of hard work and the excitement he has always felt for the work. He says he has often told his children that one should treat every shot as if it were the first, while also knowing that it may just as well be the last.
It is that rigour and intensity that has shaped his remarkable career. “I work like that; I think that could be the enduring quality. Or it could just be my dimples and outstretched hands. I don’t know,” he chuckles. Rounding off delightfully with the kind of sparkle one has come to associate with him over the years, the actor likens his career to a good film: “A good end is when people wait for the credit titles to role. I should have an end like that.”
