My Mumbai Mirror column today:
A recent biography of Hindi cinema's first superstar retraces the outlines of what could not be a more dramatically filmi life story. And yet things are never as meteoric as they seem.
In one of the marvellous set pieces in Naseeruddin Shah's recent memoir, he describes how sometime in his final year in school in Ajmer, he was reading the fortnightly Screen in a barbershop when he came across "an ad for something called the Filmfare-United Producers Talent Contest". He promptly cut out the attached application form, though it wasn't at all clear where he would find the money for 'three cabinet size photographs; one front face, one profile and one full figure'. His ten-rupees-a-week pocket money certainly wasn't enough, and he never gathered up the courage to ask the couple of adults who might have helped. "[T]hat application stayed in my pocket, and the dreams in my head, as long as I was in school," writes Shah.
Then, just after his school final exams, sitting in the same shop, he came across the results of the contest. Shah remembers comparing his teenaged reflection in the barbershop mirror with the winner's face in the magazine. "The man in the photograph already looked like a star: square-jawed with coiffed hair, perfect teeth, clear eyes and the confidence of having the world at his feet... I had to consciously check another strong attack of resentment at nature for not having given me a face like his. He was twenty-one years old and went by the name of Rajesh Khanna. And so that, as they say, was that."
Shah's telling is true to his angular relationship with the popular Hindi film world: occasional fascination leavened with a long-lasting disdain for its self-referentiality and lack of respect for anything outside itself. Gautam Chintamani's just-published biography of Rajesh Khanna offers us another viewpoint on that Filmfare contest. This time we are situated not in some small-town schoolboy fantasy, but at the centre of the action. The who's who of the commercial Hindi cinema world -- including BR Chopra, Bimal Roy, GP Sippy, HS Rawail, Nasir Husain, J. Om Prakash, Mohan Saigal, Shakti Samanta and Subodh Mukherji -- had come together to form the United Producers' Combine, and the winner of the Talent Contest would be cast in the lead role in one film made by each of them.
Jatin Khanna, pampered favourite son of a family of successful railway contractors who had moved from Lahore to Bombay in 1935, was then biding his time at the city's KC College while he did small-time theatre and waited for his big break. As the scion of a well-to-do family that was willing to support him financially, he was the sort of 'struggler' who drove a sports car to auditions and had a monthly allowance of a thousand rupees. He filled the form for a lark, and was shocked to reach the final round. Producer J. Om Prakash remembers that he asked so many questions about the scene he was given that GP Sippy told him, "Kucch bhi kar do." Khanna chose a monologue from a play he had done, and (though it sounds pretty damned awful), apparently managed to impress the pants off the judges, thus beating some 10,000 participants to the prize (including his closest contender Vinod Mehra, who lost by a single point).
Chintamani does not say so, but competition seems to me to drive everything in Rajesh Khanna's life. Vinod Mehra does not appear again in the book, barring one brief mention -- one can only wonder whether two extra points might have changed the fate of this appealingly gentle actor, whose persona had none of the bombast or mannerisms that Khanna cultivated. (But then again, the film industry's big daddies picked the kind of actor they thought would be a star. And they were right.) But many other actors were competition for Khanna. Ravi Kapoor, his schoolmate in Girgaum and later at KC College, got his break before Khanna did, in V. Shantaram's Geet Gaya Pattharon Ne (1964), taking away the screen name Khanna wanted: Jeetendra. Another contemporary was Hari Jariwala, whom Khanna seems to have seen as a rival right from their theatre days till years later, when Jariwala had achieved acclaim as Sanjeev Kumar. Screenwriter Salim Khan remembers Khanna actually coming around to Mehboob Studios with a magazine in which Khan had named Sanjeev Kumar as among the brightest actors around, and demanding to know if he thought Kumar was better than Khanna.
In his personal life, too, one-upmanship was crucial. Coming home after an angry break-up with long-time girlfriend Anju Mahendru, he told a visitor that he was looking to get married. The visitor suggested his teenaged daughter, then about to debut as an actress. Dimple married Rajesh soon after. The wedding was so much on the rebound that Khanna is said to have re-routed the wedding procession to go past Mahendru's house.
The most legendary competitiveness, of course, was with Amitabh Bachchan. The biography repeats the well-known tale of Khanna, then at his height, mocking Bachchan as "manhoos" (unlucky) on the sets of Bawarchi, making Jaya Bhaduri angry enough to announce that only time would tell who was going to be the lucky one. We all know which way that went. The lanky newcomer Khanna took for granted in Anand (1971) had all but eclipsed him by Namak Haraam(1973). But it is not true that Bachchan's rise wiped out Khanna and his kind of cinema: Khanna began in 1966 with Chetan Anand's Aakhri Khat, and delivered hits like Souten and Avtaar till the mid-1980s. His career lasted much longer than the meteoric three years before Bachchan. As always with Rajesh Khanna, the legend was larger than the man.
An older column on Rajesh Khanna's appeal to women, here: 'Rajesh Khanna and the women who loved him'.
A recent biography of Hindi cinema's first superstar retraces the outlines of what could not be a more dramatically filmi life story. And yet things are never as meteoric as they seem.
 |
| A Stardust cover that asked 'Is Rajesh Khanna married?' |
Then, just after his school final exams, sitting in the same shop, he came across the results of the contest. Shah remembers comparing his teenaged reflection in the barbershop mirror with the winner's face in the magazine. "The man in the photograph already looked like a star: square-jawed with coiffed hair, perfect teeth, clear eyes and the confidence of having the world at his feet... I had to consciously check another strong attack of resentment at nature for not having given me a face like his. He was twenty-one years old and went by the name of Rajesh Khanna. And so that, as they say, was that."
Shah's telling is true to his angular relationship with the popular Hindi film world: occasional fascination leavened with a long-lasting disdain for its self-referentiality and lack of respect for anything outside itself. Gautam Chintamani's just-published biography of Rajesh Khanna offers us another viewpoint on that Filmfare contest. This time we are situated not in some small-town schoolboy fantasy, but at the centre of the action. The who's who of the commercial Hindi cinema world -- including BR Chopra, Bimal Roy, GP Sippy, HS Rawail, Nasir Husain, J. Om Prakash, Mohan Saigal, Shakti Samanta and Subodh Mukherji -- had come together to form the United Producers' Combine, and the winner of the Talent Contest would be cast in the lead role in one film made by each of them.
Jatin Khanna, pampered favourite son of a family of successful railway contractors who had moved from Lahore to Bombay in 1935, was then biding his time at the city's KC College while he did small-time theatre and waited for his big break. As the scion of a well-to-do family that was willing to support him financially, he was the sort of 'struggler' who drove a sports car to auditions and had a monthly allowance of a thousand rupees. He filled the form for a lark, and was shocked to reach the final round. Producer J. Om Prakash remembers that he asked so many questions about the scene he was given that GP Sippy told him, "Kucch bhi kar do." Khanna chose a monologue from a play he had done, and (though it sounds pretty damned awful), apparently managed to impress the pants off the judges, thus beating some 10,000 participants to the prize (including his closest contender Vinod Mehra, who lost by a single point).
Chintamani does not say so, but competition seems to me to drive everything in Rajesh Khanna's life. Vinod Mehra does not appear again in the book, barring one brief mention -- one can only wonder whether two extra points might have changed the fate of this appealingly gentle actor, whose persona had none of the bombast or mannerisms that Khanna cultivated. (But then again, the film industry's big daddies picked the kind of actor they thought would be a star. And they were right.) But many other actors were competition for Khanna. Ravi Kapoor, his schoolmate in Girgaum and later at KC College, got his break before Khanna did, in V. Shantaram's Geet Gaya Pattharon Ne (1964), taking away the screen name Khanna wanted: Jeetendra. Another contemporary was Hari Jariwala, whom Khanna seems to have seen as a rival right from their theatre days till years later, when Jariwala had achieved acclaim as Sanjeev Kumar. Screenwriter Salim Khan remembers Khanna actually coming around to Mehboob Studios with a magazine in which Khan had named Sanjeev Kumar as among the brightest actors around, and demanding to know if he thought Kumar was better than Khanna.
In his personal life, too, one-upmanship was crucial. Coming home after an angry break-up with long-time girlfriend Anju Mahendru, he told a visitor that he was looking to get married. The visitor suggested his teenaged daughter, then about to debut as an actress. Dimple married Rajesh soon after. The wedding was so much on the rebound that Khanna is said to have re-routed the wedding procession to go past Mahendru's house.
The most legendary competitiveness, of course, was with Amitabh Bachchan. The biography repeats the well-known tale of Khanna, then at his height, mocking Bachchan as "manhoos" (unlucky) on the sets of Bawarchi, making Jaya Bhaduri angry enough to announce that only time would tell who was going to be the lucky one. We all know which way that went. The lanky newcomer Khanna took for granted in Anand (1971) had all but eclipsed him by Namak Haraam(1973). But it is not true that Bachchan's rise wiped out Khanna and his kind of cinema: Khanna began in 1966 with Chetan Anand's Aakhri Khat, and delivered hits like Souten and Avtaar till the mid-1980s. His career lasted much longer than the meteoric three years before Bachchan. As always with Rajesh Khanna, the legend was larger than the man.
An older column on Rajesh Khanna's appeal to women, here: 'Rajesh Khanna and the women who loved him'.
No comments:
Post a Comment