Razak Khan, the actor who succumbed to cardiac arrest on Wednesday, first came to a degree of prominence in 1993’s Roop Ki Rani, Choron Ka Raja as one of Anupam Kher’s villainous henchmen. But in the two decades since, he came to be the Indian silver screen’s human punchline in a series of implausibly iconic roles: Pappu Kanghi, Faiyyaz Takkar, Babu Bisleri, Ninja Chacha, Manikchand, Munna Mobile. The list is endless.
Few people in Bollywood had as many nicknames as Khan did. Occupying a quirky spot in comedy, he specialised in playing oddball roles with his unforgettably kooky mannerisms.
Almost always typified as a tapori , with his bony frame Khan made for the unlikeliest strongman on screen, a role he was often cast in. Take his role in 2002’s Ankhiyon Se Goli Maare , where he took on Govinda as Faiyyaz Takkar a.k.a Takkar Pehlwaan.
In the absence of any visible physical strength, Khan played a head-butting goon who eventually knocks himself out on Govinda’s instructions. Though he was on-screen for barely over five minutes, that hilarious scene is arguably the only memorable bit of that Mickey Blue Eyes rip-off.
Though he had debuted earlier, the first of Khan’s memorable roles came in a television series, Chamatkaar , playing Makodi Pehlwaan. Hilarious as Farooq Sheikh’s enthusiastic sidekick, Khan quickly gained Bollywood’s attention and landed a string of similar roles on the big screen. With the David Dhawan brand of comedy at its prime, Khan punched well above his weight even amongst bigwigs like Johnny Lever, Kader Khan and Shakti Kapoor, and was a constant fixture of comedies around the turn of the millennium.
His best year, perhaps, was 1999. Featured as the inept Manikchand opposite Shah Rukh Khan in Badshaah , as the kung-fu fighting Ninja Chacha in the Salman Khan starrer Hello Brother and in a relatively smaller role as one of the villain’s henchmen in Govinda and Sanjay Dutt’s Haseena Maan Jayegi . The year saw Khan go toe-to-toe with almost all of Bollywood’s A-list brigade of the time.
Perfect foil
Though the David Dhawan school of cinema went out of vogue thereon, Khan continued to make his mark with the likes of Priyadarshan, who cast him in the 2003 film Hulchul as the perfect foil to a neurotic Rajpal Yadav and nicknamed him Babu Bisleri.
With the shift in audiences’ tastes though, Khan slowly found his star fading too, and did few comic turns of note in the last decade, the most prominent being Popat Laundrywala in the Kya Kool Hain Hum series of sex comedies.
In more recent times, he returned to television with a featured role as Golden Bhai on Comedy Nights with Kapil Sharma .
Though he was one of the most prominent comics of Hindi cinema in the last two decades, it’s a pity that Khan couldn’t make a mark as himself within the industry, always relegated to a few minutes of screen space amongst bigger names. The recall value he afforded to his best roles is proof of his comic talent and one wishes that filmmakers would have made better use of his screen presence. On his passing, director Hansal Mehta tweeted that his best role to date lies unreleased in the cans of filmmaker Aditya Bhattacharya’s Dubai Return opposite Irrfan Khan. Given the way indie cinema is using actors like Sanjay Mishra and Rajesh Sharma today, one wonders if Khan could have been more than just a punchline in a different age. More a name than the face that he became.
Nandan Kini is a documentary film researcher and journalist based in Mumbai. He tweets at @bombilfry and has booked his face at Facebook.com/nandan.kini
