A few days ago Irrfan made a statement that Muslim clerics of the country took offense to – he had questioned fasting during the holy month of Ramzan and appealed, instead, for introspection. That didn’t deter him from expressing himself after the recent terror attack in Dhaka. “ Quran ki aayeten naa janne ki wajeh se Ramzaan ke mahine mein logon ko qatal ker diya gaya. Haadsa ek jagah hota hai , badnaam Islaam aur poori duniya ka musalman hota hai (sic),” he wrote an impassioned post on social media, “ Aise me kya Musalman chup baitha rahe aur mazhab ko badnaam hone de ?” This isn’t just a generic celebrity response after a global-scale terror attack. When I met him for an interview a couple of weeks ago, while talking about his experience of shooting in Bangladesh he seemed genuinely disturbed by the political climate in the country that has been brought upon by a wave of murders of secular writers, academicians and religious minorities in the last couple of years. “I don’t want to say much about it, but politically it’s scary what’s happening to Hindus there. I think India should do something about it. [We] are neighbours.”
Irrfan went to the country to shoot for Bangladeshi indie filmmaker Mostofa Sarwar Farooki’s No Land’s Man , a film about a man’s search of identity in a world increasingly isolated by technology and intolerance. It is fitting that this interview was arranged for publicity of the actor’s upcoming release Madaari , a film with the template of “a common man taking on the corrupt system motivated by a personal tragedy”. One of its songs, ‘Dama Dama Dam' , has politically potent lyrics that don’t spare anyone: not the current government, neither the opponent, nor the rich and powerful industrialists.
No labels please
“You can’t describe the film with the terms you generally use. You have to create a new one. You can’t call it a thriller. You can’t call it a socio-emotional thriller or something because it is a little bit funny too,” he says drolly as if he finds the media’s tendency to attach a label to everything slightly disconcerting.
Although Irrfan can take pleasure in the way his career has shaped in the last decade; it has become increasingly difficult to bracket him. The thinking actor with star-wattage, the most sought-after crossover actor at the moment, Irrfan’s repertoire is as wide-ranging as Sunny Deol ( Right Ya Wrong ) to Wes Anderson ( The Darjeeling Limited ). The best thing about the 49-year-old actor is that he seems to be reaching his peak at an age when most leading male actors in the country struggle. Irrfan is so determined about his individuality that he has let go of the most popular surname in the Hindi film industry.
“It’s just that at some level, I was being made to feel that I am one of the Khans (Shah Rukh, Salman, Aamir). I was also struggling with so many Irfans on the Internet. Someone said there is an Irfan in Hollywood too. I thought I’ll change it for convenience,” he explaining the transition from Irfan Khan to Irrfan.
Elements of cinema
We are at a producer’s studio in Andheri on a rainy Tuesday evening. He isn’t in the freshest of appearances. But then Irrfan’s appeal was never in the clean-cut, metrosexual sense. Perhaps fatigued by the series of interviews, he lets out the words slow and calm. With his longish hair, beard and those big, striking eyes, as he rolls his cigarettes in the soft glow of the twilight, Irrfan sometimes comes across more like a Sufi artiste rather than a Bollywood movie-star. “I discovered that water and sand have similar features,” he muses about Song of Scorpions , where he plays a camel trader in a story about the mystical world of scorpion healers in Jaisalmer, Rajasthan, like an explorer back from his travels moved by the profound effects of nature, “They feel the same when you touch them. That’s why both the elements have a wavy, flowing quality. For the first time in my life, I realised what an open sky and the vast expanse of desert can do to you. You can feel sound travelling, unlike here where it gets obstructed and creates cacophony.”
In the film he will be seen opposite Golshifteh Fahrani, the internationally renowned Iranian actress of rare beauty and versatility. “When I saw her in Sweet Pepper Land , that was playing at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival, I told Anup (Singh, the director) that if he is planning to make the film, it has to be her. Her face is like a landscape.” He plays husband to her character, a shaman singer who heals scorpion stings with music. “A thousand-year-old tradition of a symbiotic relation between human and animals still exists there, but it will vanish soon,” he rues. These are not vacuous words. Irrfan’s love and concern for nature, unlike the attention seeking activism of many of his colleagues, reflects in his work. Few know about the fact that he was offered to voice the character of Shere Khan, the villainous royal Bengal tiger in the year’s biggest blockbuster, The Jungle Book . But he declined to play the role because he couldn’t agree with the idea that a tiger is a threat to man.
It’s a jungle out there
“You can’t connect to the idea in today’s world – it may have been relevant during the time The Jungle Book was written. Their state in the Indian forests is pathetic. They are surviving somehow and we are happy inflating their numbers,” he says recalling the Government’s tiger conservation initiatives launched a few years ago.
“The tiger is the protector of nature, a symbol of virgin forest. Every year when I go to the Jim Corbett National Park, I see less and less spotted deers. Where are they going? The food chain is being increasingly disturbed. I can give you in writing that in the coming years, you will hear more and more about tigers turning into man-eaters. And once they turn man-eaters, they are either killed or put in a zoo. That’s the most inhuman thing we can do to the creature. Who’s accountable for all this? We are really lucky to have such a rich wildlife. Sometimes I really wonder what other countries would have taken care of the forest better. It frustrates me. What can we do except talk about it?” he says, sounding almost helpless, ironically unlike his character in Madaari , who singlehandedly takes on the system.
In The Jungle Book , Irrfan eventually chose to play Baloo because he came across as the most ‘layered’ character of all. “He is laidback, cunning; there is playfulness in him. I liked him a lot, my son agreed.” It’s not the only time Irrfan has refused to play a character and instead asked for another one from the same film. After he read the script of Ron Howard’s Inferno , an adaptation of the Dan Brown novel, where he features alongside Tom Hanks, he found the character of Harry Sims much more interesting. “I told Ron about it and he got back after two months. He said the way I was seeing the character, it only makes sense that I play it.” It is the ultimate testimony to the fact that the actor is at a stage where he chooses only those roles that he wants to do. “It has been a pretty tedious journey to create that space for myself where I don’t have to sign films for money.”
What lies ahead
He has a handful films – including a romantic film produced by his wife, Sutapa Sikdar, and Saket Chowdhury’s Hindi Medium , a rom-com that also deals with an ‘issue’. It leads to a question that is likely to have occurred in the minds of anyone who keenly observes Hindi cinema. Or it may have also been fuelled by rumours of a tiff with the director: why has the actor not worked with Anurag Kashyap yet? The actor clarifies. “He offered me a character in Black Friday but I couldn’t do it because I was not willing to go in that space at the time. After that nothing came our way but we keep talking about doing something together. Before Bombay Velvet he told me about a subject he wanted me on. Whenever it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen.”
