SHAH RUKH KHAN: A GLOBAL ICON
Anupama Chopra
Bollywood has found a major market abroad over the last two decades, and superstar Shah Rukh Khan has become Bollywood’s most recognized and bankable face for global audiences. This excerpt tells the story of the three friends who were principally responsible for making Hindi films globally marketable in the 1990s: Shah Rukh, Aditya Chopra and Karan Johar. Chopra’s Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge and Johar’s Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, both starring Shah Rukh, are among the most successful Hindi films ever made.
Karan Johar was a key player in the construction of Shah Rukh Khan as a global icon. For Bollywood, the West had largely functioned as a philosophical conundrum (and, occasionally, a flashy backdrop for songs), but, after DDLJ and Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, it evolved into a market and plot. The UK and the USA became a fount for both full-blown narratives and millions of viewers who paid handsomely in dollars and pounds to watch them. By the turn of the millennium, Hindi films were as likely to be based in New York as in New Delhi.
As the market share became larger, canny directors started to design ‘overseas-friendly films’. These were big-star cast movies with extravagant songs, lavish production, romantic plots, and minimal action. Violence and gore were sidelined by family values. The non-resident Indian wanted, as Karan put it, ‘one big Indian joyride with good-looking faces, in good-looking clothes, saying beautiful things and preaching the right morals for their children’. Shah Rukh’s films fit the bill perfectly. Dil Se (From the Heart: 1998), ironically an unqualified flop in India, became the first Bollywood film to break into the UK top-ten charts. In 2003, a Nielsen EDI survey reported that seven of the top ten Hindi films in the UK from 1989 onward starred Shah Rukh.
For the twenty million-odd Indians scattered overseas, Hindi films have always been more than entertainment. They were a way to bind the community, maintain an emotional chord with a distant motherland, and buy, inexpensively, a dose of Indian culture for second-generation children who were growing up as hyphenated hybrids. In 1970s London, a Bollywood film was a social event, a chance for the ladies to flash their silk saris and twenty-four-carat gold jewellery. The samosas and chai served during interval were as critical as the film itself. Through the 1980s, video and cable decimated the theatrical business both locally and overseas. Non-resident Indians now lapped up the latest Hindi films at home or at the corner Indian grocery store, which doubled as a video parlour. But even though they passionately consumed Bollywood product, non-resident Indians very rarely saw themselves in it.
Hindi films traditionally portrayed the West as kala pani (black water), a spiritual and cultural exile. Its corrosive effects could be seen on the non-resident Indian, who was, more often than not, scripted as an irreparable debaucher who had made a Faustian bargain, exchanging his morally superior Indian soul for material comforts. This disapproving tone was set by a 1970 blockbuster called Purab Aur Pachhim (East and West), in which a decadent Indian family in London—the son is a hippie and the daughter a night-clubbing tart—is set right by a staunchly upright Son of the Soil, who, in case the audience missed the point, is named Bharat (the Hindi name for India).
Eight years later, another film, Des Pardes (Home, Abroad), summed up London in a flurry of images of people kissing in the streets and pornographic posters. This blatant wickedness causes the film’s heroine, a virginal village belle from India, to rush home in panic and sing a devotional song: ‘Kaise yeh nagaria, kaise hain yeh log, haaye sab ko laga prabhu besharmi ka rog’ (What is this city, what people are these? O Lord, everyone seems to be without shame). These films offered local viewers the small solace that their foreign brethren might enjoy living in the comfortable, clean West, but it was they, struggling with heat and grime and flies, who actually had unpolluted souls.
The Chopras—Yash and Aditya—and their protégé Karan turned these stereotypes on their head and resuscitated the business. In 1997, at the insistence of Aditya, Yash opened a distribution office in the UK. Their first release, Dil To Pagal Hai, netted £1 million. No Indian film had done even a quarter of this business before, at least not officially. A year later, they opened an office in the US with Karan’s debut film, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. It broke even DDLJ’s record, grossing over $7 million worldwide. Karan’s film hit the UK top-ten charts at number nine. In South Africa, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai raked in more money than Titanic.
Kuch Kuch Hota Hai is the story of Rahul, a young widower, whose eight-year-old daughter takes it upon herself to reunite her father with his long-lost best friend Anjali. The first half of the film is an extended flashback to their college days, in which Anjali is an unkempt tomboy who beats Rahul at basketball and teases him about his several bimbo girlfriends. But this strictly backslapping-buddy relationship changes with the arrival of Pooja, a gorgeous miniskirt-clad vision with permanently windswept hair. Rahul is instantly smitten. Only when Pooja and Rahul begin to fall in love does Anjali realize that she too loves Rahul. Anjali abruptly leaves college. Rahul and Pooja get married. Pooja dies soon after childbirth, but leaves behind letters for her daughter urging her to find her father’s true love, Anjali.
Karan set this gossamer-thin confection in a Neverland that was quite disconnected from Indian realities. With its lockers, cheerleaders and uber-cool skateboarding students, the college is a Grease-meets-Archie-Comics fantasy that doesn’t faintly resemble any existing educational institution in India. The candy-floss American ambience only grows thicker in the second half of the film, which is mostly set in a children’s summer camp.
Shah Rukh is once again Rahul, the college’s coolest student. He’s so cool, in fact, that he actually wears a necklace that spells out C-O-O-L. In this airbrushed world, accessories and clothes are a key element. Karan was a consummate fashionista. He had designed Shah Rukh’s look in Dil To Pagal Hai, but the Rahul in that film hadn’t discovered labels yet. In Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, Karan aspired to set a new style standard in Hindi cinema.
Before shooting started, Karan and his designer friend, Manish Malhotra, made special trips to London for appropriate costumes. (When Karan first suggested this shopping spree to his father, who was producing the film, Yash Johar thought his son had ‘lost it’, but he finally agreed to a budget of £5,000, which was later raised to £8,000.) To make sure that the audience recognized the effort and money involved, Karan and Manish deliberately chose clothes that prominently displayed their foreign-designer origins. Several had labels emblazoned across the chest. Anjali’s first shot has her playing basketball in a DKNY tracksuit. Rahul, more sartorially evolved than his earlier screen avatars, is partial to Polo Sport and Gap.
But these weightless fantasy landscapes of the film are rooted in oversized Indian emotions. Karan wept copiously in movies and he wanted his audience to do the same, so scenes are pitched to wring out every last drop of melodrama. Though the film is set in India, the characters, echoing DDLJ, are hybrids. They are modern, articulate people who, underneath the trendy Western labels, proudly preserve their Indian identity. Rahul goes to the temple every week (wearing Polo Sport, of course). Pooja, who has been raised in London and educated at Oxford, dresses like a fashion model, but when Rahul and his friends force her to sing in public, she breaks into a Hindu hymn. The boisterous crowd is stunned into silence. She says, ‘Living in London and studying and growing up there has not made me forget my roots, and don’t you forget that.’
In DDLJ, Simran’s father compares second-generation nonresident Indians to the proverbial washerman’s dog, who belong neither to the ghar (house) nor the ghat (riverbank). But these films assured non-resident Indians that in fact the opposite was true. They did belong. Living in the West had not robbed them of their roots. Indian values were portable and malleable. They could straddle both worlds, just as the characters in DDLJ and Kuch Kuch Hota Hai did. Both films offered non-resident Indians a palatable India. The poverty, corruption, injustice—all reasons for leaving home, perhaps—were carefully edited out. Instead these films fed a nostalgia for an imagined homeland in which beautiful homes were filled with large, loving families, rituals and traditions remained intact, and children, despite their cool posturing, were happily subservient to their parents.
Shah Rukh was a star who blended, in perfect proportions, Indian and Western culture. So while the local Indians aspired to be articulate, designer-clad yuppies like him, the Indians abroad saw him as one of them. First-generation immigrants hoped that their Westernized sons and daughters would find the elusive cultural equilibrium that DDLJ’s Raj had. Second-generation children adored Rahul’s suave negotiation of traditions in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. He was someone they could relate to—he looked like them and spoke their language (after Kuch Kuch Hota Hai was released, the orange sweatshirts, which Rahul wears in the film, were sold out at the Oxford Street Gap store in London).
Unlike Bollywood heroes of the past, Shah Rukh wasn’t verni, a derogatory term for somebody who had studied in one of those ‘vernacular’ schools where an Indian language, not English, is the medium of instruction. He made everything look exceptionally cool, from wooing girls in Switzerland to nestling his head in his mother’s lap. Kuch Kuch Hota Hai helped to make Hindi films au courant. For several generations of Indians, Bollywood became a style guide and a way home.
In Karan, Shah Rukh found a film-maker who instinctively understood that what was being marketed was not an actor but a personality. Karan further advanced the high-gloss, high-emotion style originated by Yash Chopra. But this evolution was also a sanitization. Despite their ostensible glamour many of Yash’s films had dark undertones, but Karan and Aditya, both second-generation Bollywood kids, shared a more rose-tinted take on life. They had, as Yash’s biographer, Dr Rachel Dwyer, put it, ‘a less complicated view of human beings’. Together they took the sting out of love and created comfortable, fluffy fairy tales for adults with Shah Rukh as Prince Charming.
Karan’s success was especially spectacular because it was wholly unexpected. Unlike Aditya, Karan grew up without any film ambitions. His father, Yash Johar (who died in 2004), was a Bollywood veteran who had started in 1952 as a production controller and eventually, after working his way up the ranks, launched his own production company in 1976. But Karan treated Hindi movies with an aesthete’s disdain. He was an unapologetic south Mumbai snob. Even as a child, he had a keen sense of style (he was pudgy and this made him so self-conscious that he sometimes refused to attend birthday parties). Karan knew Aditya and his younger brother Uday. They met at previews and birthday parties, but Karan told his mother that he couldn’t befriend them because they spoke in Hindi about Hindi movies, which was just ‘too tacky’.
But this upturned nose was only a front, cultivated perhaps to match the attitudes of his fashionable friends. Actually, Karan was a closet Bollywood buff. He grew up devouring Hindi movies and reading the trades, but he could never articulate his passion for his father’s world. After finishing college, he worked in an export business the family owned, learned French, and made half-baked plans about moving to Paris for further studies.
Aditya laid those plans to rest. Sometime in 1994, a common friend re-introduced the two men. Their personalities were polar opposites. Aditya was an introvert, very guarded in his relationships. He was stubborn, intensely focused, and highly competitive—even losing at a board game would put him in a foul mood. Karan was giddily gregarious. He was hardworking but more relaxed. (The contrast would be underlined in their respective responses to success—after his blockbuster debut, Aditya remained an anonymous recluse. He blocked out the media so effectively that the audience had little idea what he looked like. But Karan, after his debut, determinedly dropped several pounds and became a glamorous Page Three personality, even hosting a successful chat show called Koffee with Karan.) Aditya noticed in Karan what no one had before: a distinctly Hindi movie sensibility.
Aditya started bouncing script ideas off Karan. Eventually he convinced Karan to forget Paris and assist him on DDLJ. Karan was the all-purpose handyman on the film. Besides consulting on the script, he also had a small role. His chief responsibility was costumes. Aditya had a more prosaic sense of style, but Karan was obsessive about a film’s ‘look’. He was as skilled at ferreting out fashions as he was at tweaking scenes. He spent hours trudging through the congested, grungy streets of Goregaon, a far-flung suburb of Mumbai, searching for perfectly matching bangles and bindis. He agonized over how to make the heroine, Kajol, look slimmer. Sometimes, between takes on the streets of Switzerland, Karan combed her hair himself.
Through the making of DDLJ, Shah Rukh connected with Karan in the same way he had connected with Aditya during Darr. Aditya was now at the helm of affairs. Harrowed by the myriad details of making a film, he was overworked and so wired that he barely ate. Karan became Shah Rukh’s confidant. They thrashed out script details and improvisations. On the outdoor shoot in Switzerland, Shah Rukh, who had never felt the need to cure his insomnia, made Karan sit up with him on long nights, talking movies. Karan’s baby face and fey mannerisms belied his sharp scripting instincts and arcane Bollywood knowledge. They shared a similar wacky sense of humor. Shah Rukh saw in Karan the same wide-eyed earnestness he had seen in Aditya. One day, over coffee in Gstaad, Shah Rukh suggested to Karan that he make a film and said that he would be willing to act in it.
Six months later, Karan went to Rajasthan, where Shah Rukh was shooting, and, sitting on the steps of the Amber Palace, he narrated an underwritten romance about a widower who goes in search of his first love. God, played by some suitably heavyweight senior actor, would have a walk-on part. Karan was petrified that Shah Rukh wouldn’t like it, but Shah Rukh didn’t discourage the nervous, fumbling boy. ‘I figured,’ he said, ‘if Aditya could be so fantastic, even his assistant director would be good. I was very confident about the way Karan described some scenes. We would have the same team, Yash Johar, Kajol, and we would figure something out.’
On October 21, 1997, Karan started filming Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. The night before, his mother came into his room and hesitantly asked if he knew how to look through a camera lens and frame a shot. She couldn’t believe that her pallu ke peeche (painfully shy) son was going to direct a movie. Her question was valid. The first day of the shoot didn’t go well. The crew was young and raw. Karan and his assistants barely knew which lens to use or how the scenes would finally cut together. Shah Rukh was explaining the technicalities, such as camera right and camera left, on the set. He said, ‘Karan makes no bones about the fact that his technical knowledge of film-making wasn’t at its peak when he made the biggest hit of the decade.’ It hardly mattered. Six months after the film’s release, Karan was inundated by Best Director awards. He told the press that Shah Rukh would be featured in every film he made henceforth.
This enduring professional and personal proximity led to rumours that Shah Rukh and Karan were lovers, to which Shah Rukh replied with his typical wit, ‘So how did I have two children? Heavy petting?’ In fact, Karan was closer to Gauri. Karan treated Shah Rukh with a near-fanatical reverence, but Gauri was his mate. Karan helped her navigate the treacherously shifting loyalties in Bollywood and adjust to her newfound status of superstar wife. ‘It was easy for me because Karan was there,’ she said. ‘I didn’t miss Shah Rukh at all. With Karan, time just passed.’
The roller coaster of stardom did not shake Shah Rukh and Gauri’s relationship apart. After the first few years, Gauri stopped giving interviews. She was a fashionable presence at the city’s Alist parties. Occasionally she lent her name to boost a favoured designer or friend, but mostly she basked in her husband’s glory. Their son, Aryan, was born on November 12, 1997. Three years later, on May 22, they had a daughter named Suhana. Unlike many Bollywood stars, Shah Rukh wasn’t dogged by romantic scandal. Gossip magazines occasionally linked him to his heroines and industry grapevine mostly linked him to Karan, but there were no sustained stories of extra-marital dalliances. ‘There are some promises in my heart about our relationship,’ Shah Rukh said, ‘and those I think I have maintained.’
On 8 October 1995, Shah Rukh gave Gauri a spectacular birthday present: a sea-facing heritage bungalow built in 1896, sitting on a 26,300-square-foot plot of land. In a city where a cramped 500-square-foot apartment is considered eminently livable, a stand-alone bungalow speaks of serious wealth and power. The property had often been used for film shoots and was hideously run down. But over 4½ years architects and interior designers turned it into a Mumbai landmark.
Mumbai law forbids restructuring of heritage properties so the exteriors and elevation were left untouched, but the interiors were converted into a sleek, awe-inspiring star home. M.F. Husain, India’s most famous living artist, created a painting to match the white-and-cobalt-blue living room. The den had a bar, pool table, juke box and, like so many of Shah Rukh’s films, a cola-vending machine. The family moved into the house in 2000. Five years later, a six-floor building with a movie theater and a swimming pool was built in the open space behind the house. Shah Rukh and Gauri called their home Mannat (Wish).
Within Mannat, Shah Rukh and Gauri endeavoured to maintain a semblance of normalcy. But it was difficult to disconnect the man from the pedestal entirely. The media reported on the minutiae of their lives, from how often Shah Rukh dropped his children off at their school to the salon where Gauri preferred to get her hair styled. Shah Rukh’s opinion now carried so much weight that he usually had two. Gauri called him Shah Rukh One and Shah Rukh Two, which she explained as ‘two sides; one is saying one thing, the other is saying the complete opposite, and both in the space of a minute’. Which once prompted writer Javed Akhtar to ask Gauri casually, ‘How are they?’
This split personality was essentially Shah Rukh’s way of dealing with his canonization. He said, ‘There are two Shah Rukh Khans. Gauri’s relationship with the superstar Shah Rukh is strange. She doesn’t know him. I don’t think she even likes him too much. I don’t bring him home and she is very clear that she doesn’t want to know him either. But her relationship with her husband Shah Rukh is fantastic. I think superstar Shah Rukh is the only competition she has accepted and settled with. That is a big sacrifice. That is how she’s dealt with it. It is a good way. I like the joke in it.
‘I have also made sure that superstar Shah Rukh doesn’t do anything which disturbs the other Shah Rukh’s life. I have never disregarded my personal life. I do believe that Shah Rukh is more important than superstar Shah Rukh and because of that belief the superstar keeps prospering. Because I think my heart is in the right place and that is what you require as an actor. I am just an employee of the Shah Rukh Khan myth.’
Extracted from King of Bollywood: Shah Rukh Khan and the Seductive World of Indian Cinema.