Seeking stardust

My Mirror column:

An intriguing new documentary on actors who impersonate Bollywood stars offers insights into stardom and selfhood. 

Mahesh Waghela has built a career out of impersonating Rajesh Khanna. A still from the documentary 'Hubahu'.

Acting is usually understood as a successful imitation of life. But there are actors we watch less for their ability to play new fictional characters and more for a consistent, even predictable performance of themselves. We call them stars.

From Dilip Kumar’s perfect enunciation to Shah Rukh Khan’s romantic gestures, from Amitabh Bachchan’s baritone to Kareena Kapoor’s pout, our attachment to those we anoint as stars is usually based on particular elements of a screen persona. Every star worth the name is actually a constellation of signature vocal tics, repeated bodily gestures and stylistic choices: a particular haircut, a recognisable walk, an oft-repeated item of clothing.

And in our film-mad country, all of us have known someone who actually modelled themselves on a favourite star. It might be your father’s friend who, as a college student in the ’60s, took to flicking his hair and arching an eyebrow like Shammi Kapoor. Or your friend who adopted the tinkly Madhuri Dixit laugh along with the dance moves. Or the great-aunt who looked like Nimmi – and may have acquired something of her winsome air of naivete from that perceived connection.

Imitation, they say, is the highest form of flattery. Ramsha Alam’s documentary Hubahu, funded by the Public Service Broadcasting Trust (PSBT) and screened last Friday in Delhi as part of PSBT’s Open Frame Film Festival, zeroes in on three people who have taken this adage to its logical conclusion: for whom the imitation of their chosen star has become a lifelong, life-altering commitment.

Whether it’s Rais Khan, who works as ‘Junior Shashi Kapoor’, or Seema Motwani, who has played Hema Malini in countless advertisements and TV shows (MTV’s Fully Faltu employed her for seven years), or Mahesh Waghela, who has built a career out of impersonating Rajesh Khanna, Hubahu paints a fascinating portrait of the world of the Bollywood lookalike.

One of the things that Alam’s chosen subjects have in common is that the resemblance was first pointed out by someone else, and then gradually internalised. In Khan’s case, his mother first told him his teeth were like Shashi Kapoor’s. Khan, then young and impressionable, gradually began to see traits of Shashi in himself, and then worked extremely hard to improve on what he had. He spent years, for instance, training his straight hair into Shashi-like waves by tying it up in a handkerchief at night, using circular combs and so on, until it finally succumbed to his efforts. With sunglasses on, his now wavy hairstyle and slightly toothy grin makes him instantly ‘recognisable’ as Shashi. In Seema Motwani’s case, it was her co-actors, many of them already working as lookalikes, who told her that she could channel Hema Malini. For Waghela, it was a friend with a dance troupe who persuaded him to use the physical resemblance to his advantage.

Waghela’s story begins, like most lookalikes, with physical resemblance fanned by fandom. Just not his own. It was Waghela’s elder brother who was the Rajesh Khanna fan in the family, adopting the superstar’s look and hairstyle at the peak of his fame in the 1970s. The story suggests the endless loop into which mimesis can launch you: did the youthful Waghela start out copying Rajesh Khanna – or was he just a young man copying his elder brother, who happened to be copying a superstar?

“It takes a lot of effort to become a lookalike... though people just dismiss us as duplicates,” Waghela says ruefully. His brother had never performed. Stage fright drove Waghela off-stage, too, the first three times. But once he started performing Khanna’s famous songs and dialogues with the superstar’s signature moves in place, the audience roared its approval. There was no going back.

At the core of that feeling of gratification is the public adulation. The lookalike is perfectly aware that what the public is responding to is a performance (in fact, a performance of a performance), and yet something of the magic of the star rubs off on him or her. People’s unguarded, often emotional responses to a star-lookalike, especially in non-metropolitan areas, conjure up memories of public responses in the 1990s to actors Arun Govil and Deepika Chikhalia who played Ram and Sita in the televised Doordarshan Ramayana.

Bound already by the film industry's semi-feudal conventions in which artistes are classified as “senior” and “junior”, Khan, Motwani and Waghela have also come to identify deeply with their chosen star. Their investment in upholding the star’s image is total, lending them an air of gravitas – and dare I say, purpose. “I am careful never to wear revealing clothes, or do anything that would take away from Hema ji’s dignity,” says Motwani. Waghela regularly refuses comic routines centred on mocking Khanna. “When I’m earning because of him, why would I demean him?” After Khanna’s death in 2012 and Kapoor’s in 2017, there is a powerful sense that they are keeping a great man alive.

That process could be seen as subjugating their real selves. Waghela shaved off his moustache against his wife’s wishes, to look more like Rajesh Khanna. Motwani says she makes sure not to put on too much weight, so as to keep Hema Malini’s aura intact. But watching these actors talk to Alam – the barely suppressed teariness with which Motwani describes her own struggle, or listening to Khan’s eternally cheery manner, so reminiscent of Kapoor – it often feels like these are now part of their real selves.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 22 Sep 2019.