Rajesh Khanna
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India Today Gautam Chintamani
January 29, 2015
The story of Rajesh Khanna, pieced together from archival articles and an array of insiders, reveals how his personal life shorted his stardom
Rajesh Khanna looks out from his balcony.Being asked to review a book that shares that same subject as the one you wrote about a few months ago is at once an honour, a challenge and a daunting task as any. Although it was Rajesh Khanna's death that rekindled an interest in him and his work, the fact that two biographies on India's first true superstar would hit the stands within a matter of months increases the irony.
Intending to bring forth the untold story of India's first superstar, which also happens to be the book's subtitle, Yasser Usman's Rajesh Khanna strings the story from an array of sources that include archival film magazine and newspaper articles as well as interviews with people who knew the actor in a professional as well as personal capacity. The exhaustive list of sources includes issues of Star & Style, Super and Filmfare from the 1970s and writings of veteran journalists such as Bhawana Somaaya, Rauf Ahmed, Bunny Reuben, Bharathi S. Pradhan, Dinesh Raheja, Nina Arora, Uma Rao and, of course, the prima donna Devyani Chaubal, along with some who, according to the author, chose to remain anonymous. The death of Khanna might have robbed both the biographies of a direct source but Usman's sheer doggedness with the source material grants a sense of first-person account that an unofficial or posthumous biography would, by definition, lack.
”Rajesh Khanna: The Untold Story of India’s First Superstar”: Yasser Usman
The book starts with the superstar's sudden marriage to a then yet-to-be-discovered-star Dimple Kapadia where Khanna is more interested in proving a point to ex-flame Anju Mahendroo by rerouting his baraat to cross her home. The writer then travels back in time to understand a man who could "command nationwide devotion" and yet "never be able to nurture the same kind of adoration and love in his personal relationships. While addressing the milestones in a career that saw Khanna attain dizzying heights of stardom seldom witnessed by anyone before or since, the book chooses to focus more on how Khanna's personal life impacted his superstardom as opposed to how his stardom impacted his personal life. Usman concentrates on the actor's abject insecurities and his need to control those close to him and he thinks it is because of two reasons-the unbridled stardom that could corrupt anyone and the known but little highlighted fact of Khanna being adopted within his family. The book packs a punch while constructing the story of the biggest star of Hindi cinema and the best is reserved for the portions that describe his relationships with the women in his life-Mahendroo, Kapadia and Tina Munim. It seems Khanna constantly needed to dictate the terms of his interaction with the women in his life and simply moved on when those terms changed. The incidents, where he takes the nubile Dimple on a date and Mahendroo tracks him down only to find Khanna hurriedly hiding the evidence, or the one where after a long day he is chain-smoking cigarette after cigarette on the terrace, refusing to acknowledge wife Dimple's presence, stand out. Barring industry insiders such as Salim Khan, Sachin Pilgaonkar, J. Om Prakash, Sagar Sarhadi, or Dheeraj Kumar and the ones who met him during his days in politics such as Pankaj Vohra, most appear to speak about Khanna from the point of view of the women and their relationship with him. With quotes from the rare interviews that the three women gave to magazines over the years and interviews with people who worked for him and witnessed the Rajesh Khanna phenomenon firsthand, the book juxtaposes Khanna, the star, along with Khanna, the man.
A friend's son living with Khanna in the 2000s describes the star watching his old films on the projector and lauding himself in the third person. It shows how Khanna's popularity didn't spare him as well. Intriguingly towards the end of the book, it breaks away from the chronological order to jump back in time to explore the repercussion of the family dynamics-his being adopted by his uncle and aunt-on Khanna.
The book, however, doesn't deliberate much on his movies. It looks at the overall picture instead of highlighting particular films which may have missed the mark but show why Khanna is important beyond his box-office blitzkrieg. Therefore, Rajput (1982) and Amrit (1986) are erroneously clubbed together as having released in 1984-85 (p. 207) and the narrative jumps from Mehbooba (1976) to Souten (1983) while skimming over films such as Thodisi Bewafaii (1980) and Avtaar (1983) and overlooking films such as Red Rose (1980), in which Khanna pushed the envelope by playing a psychopath, and Kudrat (1981), his first multi-starrer that meant, for him, a coming-to-terms with the environment.
Actors who go on to become superstars are more often than not products of the environment. Ashok Kumar, the trio of Dilip Kumar-Raj Kapoor-Dev Anand, Rajendra Kumar, Amitabh Bachchan and the Khans-Aamir, Salman and Shah Rukh-took elements from the kind of cinema they were a part of and became the best of the lot. But Khanna could very well be the only superstar who changed the rules of the game to such a degree that when the environment changed, he couldn't adapt to it. The era of the late 1960s and early 1970s demanded a change and maybe that is why it embraced Khanna the way it did. Maybe that is the reason why Khanna ceased to be irrelevant in a new order and couldn't move with the times like Bachchan or, to some extent, Dilip Kumar did. Yasser Usman's Rajesh Khanna is not only an entertaining and lively account of the first superstar of Hindi cinema, but like any good journalistic work it offers a multitude of evidence for the reader to the questions it poses.
