Gloomy Enigma of Stardom

The new millennium hardly brought much cheer for Rajesh Khanna. He had ceased to be relevant in the new scheme of things and had begun to come around to the fact that the world had moved on. He got used to the idea of insignificance that the last few years had bequeathed upon him; but for someone who had witnessed the zenith of popularity in the shortest time possible, the idea of obscurity remained a daunting notion. Right through the ups and downs of his career, Khanna had always remained convinced that everything would eventually fall into place. In the 1980s, when he delivered his first hit that looked to usher in a new Rajesh Khanna era, he had said in an interview: ‘Come September, and I will be back.’ Such was his optimism. He always believed that his charm would win over fate, but the debacle of Aa Ab Laut Chalen changed things for him. The film was Khanna’s comeback in the truest sense but unlike his bête noire Amitabh Bachchan, Khanna’s return to acting post-politics could not wring the same level of excitement amongst fans.

Along with Mohabbatein, the success of Kaun Banega Crorepati, the Indian version of the international television game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, resurrected Bachchan. Khanna’s most famous rival was enjoying the busiest phase of his acting career while the first superstar of Hindi cinema steadily slipped from public memory.

Even people around Khanna were undergoing changes. After 15 years of mostly playing the glamorous lead, Dimple Kapadia transitioned into becoming a full-time character actor with films like Dil Chahta Hai (2001) and Leela (2002). Khanna’s elder daughter Twinkle called it a day as far as acting was concerned once she had tied the knot with Akshay Kumar, a star in his own right. In 2002, the couple had their first son, Aarav, and becoming a grandfather for the first time brought some joy to Khanna.

Johny Bakshi recalls the cheer in Khanna’s voice the day his first grandson was born. A little over a decade ago, when Bakshi became a grandfather, he was directing Khanna in Khudai. Watching him beam with joy, Khanna couldn’t help but ask, ‘Aaj chhalang mar rayho, ki hoya?’ (You are jumping with joy, what’s the matter?) When Bakshi shared the good news, all he got from Khanna in the name of a reaction was a terse ‘So…?’ Bakshi told Khanna that he would know the feeling the day he became a nana. Bakshi was one of the first people Khanna called after he became a grandfather. Khanna found the joy divine and told Bakshi, ‘I want to go to the top of the roof and shout, I am a grandfather!’

Khanna’s first release in the new century was Pyar Zindagi Hai (2001), which failed to generate any interest. At a time when films were marketed on the basis of just the name of stars, the presence of Monish Behl, Vikas Kalantri and Ashima Bhalla could hardly change the destiny of Pyar Zindagi Hai. His next release, Kyaa Dil Ne Kahaa (2002), featured Tushhar Kapoor and Esha Deol, the children of two of his closest costars, Jeetendra and Hema Malini; and even though the film’s story held some promise, its soap-opera-like treatment failed with the audiences.

These successive failures saw Khanna join the club of his peers Dharmendra, Vinod Khanna, Jeetendra and Shatrughan Sinha, who found themselves discarded. These actors had not been able to make a Bachchan-like switch, and for them, the early years of the millennium sounded a death knell. The only roles they seemed to be attracting were in films that could be best defined as B-grade.

For Khanna, things were a shade tougher as he found himself at the lowest ebb on the personal front too. He would call close friends like Anand Bakshi or Shakti Samanta and pour his heart out. The hollowness of his existence echoed endlessly in the silences of Aashirwad, which was now just an address in the bustling metropolis. To the world that met him outside the confines of his bungalow, he was still Rajesh Khanna the superstar, and while interacting with people, he would never forget to pretend that they had caught him on a rare day off. He often unburdened his fears on Anand Bakshi and lamented how no one missed him enough to even call once in a while. Ashim Samanta recalls how Khanna habitually called his father on the telephone and got endlessly nostalgic about the glory days. Khanna would always make plans to drop by Samanta’s place for a drink and then not show up. A few days later, he would call again and continue ruminating about the past as if nothing had happened in the interim, before signing off on the promise of coming over, but the same thing would happen all over again and he never turned up. This irked Samanta enough to share the incident with the press when scribes pestered him endlessly to comment on the status of his relationship with Khanna.

In his entire working career, there were only a few people that Khanna formed a personal bond with; and like the deaths of Kishore Kumar and R.D. Burman, the passing away of Anand Bakshi in 2002 broke something within him. Shyam Keswani, who was a close friend of both Khanna and Bakshi in the early 1970s, hadn’t been in touch with Khanna since the mid 1980s but remembered the actor looking shattered during the lyricist’s last rites. He recalls Khanna as someone who never looked beyond himself on most occasions. But Bakshi was one of the very few people the actor respected immensely.

A sense of hopelessness started consuming Khanna and he sought something to look forward to. He even started spending more time in New Delhi and continued to offer his services to the Congress party; but, barring canvassing, nothing came his way. A staunch Congress loyalist, Khanna was one of the first members of the party to publicly support Sonia Gandhi during the opposition she faced on the grounds of being a foreigner. Khanna said that if Indians could treat Annie Besant and Mother Teresa as their own, there was nothing wrong with Sonia leading the Congress or—for that matter—even India. The Congress continued to utilize his services, but shifted focus when it came to things other than campaigning; but the hope of making a grand political comeback never left Khanna.

Besides bleak professional, personal and political prospects, Khanna was also reeling under some sort of financial strain. Rumi Jaffery’s interaction with the actor had increased in the years following Aa Ab Laut Chalen and he recalls Khanna trading his imported car for a basic Maruti 800 and replenishing his signature 555 cigarette packs with much cheaper Gold Flake sticks. Jaffery chided Khanna for not doing anything about his state: ‘I told him, “Kakaji, mara haathi bhi sava lakh ke barabar hota hai (even a dead elephant is worth lakhs), what’s the point in holding on to the bungalow when you are in a mess?”’

(Excerpted with permission from Gautam Chintamani’s Dark Star; published by HarperCollins)