For an actor who commenced his journey in the post-liberalisation era with saturation coverage in the media, Shah Rukh Khan is a tough subject for a biography, for there is little we don’t know of his life, his family, his films, and of the cricket team he owns or everything else he does. One wonders, then, what can be new in Mohar Basu’s book on Shah Rukh Khan.
For starters, Mohar, a film journalist with Mid-Day, says it’s a compilation of intimate stories and fan accounts from all over the world peppered with snippets from articles and interviews he’s given over his three-and-a-half decades in films to understand how he has influenced their lives and why he continues to inspire them.
The first chapter is a fan slogan, ‘The Return of the King’ and narrates the dramatic comeback SRK made in 2023 with his two back-to-back Rs 1,000 cr box office hit films, Jawaan and Pathaan. It captures how despite facing immense backlash and many challenges, personal, political, and cultural, the movie Pathaan pressed through relentlessly to break records at the box office. Coming after a four-year sabbatical forced on him due to a string of flops for nearly a decade that wrote his unceremonious obituary, SRK’s return to form is celebrated as the one which has finally relegated the pandemic to a distant memory and brought the audience-starved cinema theatres in the country, back to life.
A mythological hero
Mohar likens SRK’s career to be of a mythological hero – one whose life is full of obstacles but who always has the Gods shining on him to help him fulfill his dreams.
The book focuses largely on his films; a brief chapter, pieced together from various interviews SRK gave to Simi Garewal, Filmfare, Stardust and from his speeches at award nights and film premieres, details how the SRK-Gauri romance blossomed, how he chased her to Mumbai and eventually persuaded her family to agree to the inter-caste marriage. Another one collaged from his interviews with David Letterman, Anupama Chopra and Farida Jalal summarises his childhood. Nothing new, just that the whole story is compiled smartly into one piece.
If there’s a missing POV, it’s that of SRK himself. Mohar hasn’t interviewed him for this book, so much material is from secondary accounts sourced from media.
So, what is the reason for his fandom? SRK’s fans believe it’s his ordinariness. The fact that he wasn’t a good looking, chocolate hero like his peers, nor did he have any film industry lineage, that he was just that - a normal guy, an outsider, who came to Mumbai and with his hard work earned a place amongst the stars. He makes them believe it’s possible to dream of doing something big and to achieve it.
Mohar chronicles the early beginnings of SRK as an anti-hero as he took upon roles others refused to do. As distinct from the villain, an anti-hero has justifications for the dark shades in his character. He would be a passionate and obsessive lover, selfish and violent for his love, an avenger and a victim at the same time, thus endearing himself to the audiences. SRK frequently added his own improvisations to the characters he was playing, like adding the stammer or having the mentally unstable man chat with his dead mother in Darr.
Landmark film
The biggest landmark of his film career, SRK admits, is Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenga (DDLJ), a film that contemporised the fight against patriarchy and set up the image and cult of SRK. In contrast to the stories of Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak where the patriarchal fight ends in tragedy or Maine Pyaar Kiya where the boy challenges the family by showing his self-worth, in DDLJ the boy simply charms the girl’s stern, traditional and conservative father into letting him marry the girl. In the mid-nineties, this plot line enjoyed a wide appeal amongst the audience, so much so that it has become the longest running film in the history of the Indian film industry.
That SRK has kept a squeaky-clean reputation as a family man and has stayed away from any scandals has endeared him to female fans who see him as every mother’s son, every sister’s brother, and every college girl’s fantasy. They say that they love him, but don’t lust after him. They love his characters’ vulnerability, sensitivity and the ability to be silly in contrast to a macho man. He’s like a friend they can talk to and love that fact that he’s protective about his family in real life too.
Every time I have met SRK, the one thing he exudes besides his wit, is his warmth. For a superstar, that’s a rare quality.
For such a well-chronicled life and with the great access that the late Pradeep Bandekar had, the photographs chosen for this book could be better.
Mohar’s book is a thoroughly researched and well-organised collector’s edition of everything you’ve seen and heard about Shah Rukh Khan, perhaps, the last of the stars.
Check out the book on Amazon.
(The reviewer runs 91 Film Studios that produces and distributes feature films in Indian regional languages)
