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The other life of a king

Shah Rukh Khan talks about the need to strike a balance to survive stardom

  • By Joe Leahy, Financial Times
  • Published: 00:00 March 5, 2010
  • Weekend Review

  • Image Credit: Ramachandra Babu, Gulf News
  • The 44-year-old star has ruled India's film industry for nearly two decades and Khan's image is everywhere in India. He is on billboards and on television, advertising products from Pepsi Cola to skin-whitening cream.

Shah Rukh Khan is the baadshah, or "king", of Bollywood. The 44-year-old star has ruled India's film industry for nearly two decades and Khan's image is everywhere in India. He is on billboards and on television, advertising products from Pepsi Cola to skin-whitening cream.

He also owns an Indian Premier League cricket team, the Kolkata Knight Riders. Shrines are dedicated to him. Fans send him letters written in blood. His ancestral home in Peshawar, now in Pakistan, is a tourist attraction. And after Khan was questioned by United States immigration last August because of his Muslim name, some fans burnt the American flag.

The star is in London to promote his new film My Name is Khan. In the film, Khan plays an autistic Muslim man living in the US during the volatile period after 9/11. While the film, an emotionally charged love story, is classic Khan, the subject matter is unusually sensitive. Khan, a Muslim married to a Hindu in predominantly Hindu India, has rarely touched on issues of religious and ethnic tensions in his films. Is this film a sign of a trend in Bollywood towards tackling weightier themes?

"I've never thought about film being society-changing. I'm not being flippant but I believe the prime objective of any cinema that I do and what I perform is to entertain as many people as possible," he says. "But maybe when you reach a level of stardom or universal appeal that perhaps I have ... you get a little more ambitious and say maybe I can just throw in a bit more of a point of view and garb it in entertainment."

Born in 1965, Khan and his older sister grew up in a middle-class family in New Delhi, where he attended St Columba's, a school run by the Christian Brothers. His father, Meer Taj Mohammad, a former freedom fighter against British rule, was born in 1928 in Peshawar, then in British-ruled India, and ran a struggling transport business. In 1980, when Khan was just 14, Meer died from cancer. Khan's mother brought the children up on her income as a magistrate and from running a restaurant and trading business. She died in 1991.

After university — a degree in economics at Hans Raj College and an unfinished masters in mass communications — Khan began winning parts in television serials in the late 1980s. I ask him whether he considers himself a serious actor. "I'm a fantastic actor, Joe," he responds jokingly, before addressing the question more seriously.

"There's no point in me trying to explain the seriousness behind my acting," he says. "I think artistes should not say: ‘I'm very serious about my work'. My job should be that when you see my work, you should feel that this could be you."

I ask him how a superstar manages his home life. He and Gauri have been married since 1991 and have two children, 13-year-old son Aryan and 10-year-old daughter Suhana. He says he has invented an elaborate mental construct to manage stardom. He believes his appeal as a superstar stems from his persona as an "ordinary guy". But if fame begins to swell the ego of the regular guy, the appeal will vanish. So he decided to think of himself, Shah Rukh Khan, the husband and father, as the employee of Shah Rukh Khan, the multimillion dollar superstar brand.

"I think my connectivity to my audience is my being a middle-class guy. My being very simple and straightforward, not being enigmatic, not getting sold on the idea of stardom, is very important to this. But the temptation is there, how do I avoid it? So I thought: ‘You know what? I should think of myself as a servant to this master. I should be an employee and an employee who is doing a very good job.'" And what would a good job be? "Keep myself simple and straightforward and work like I did when I started 20 years ago, acting in every film as if it's my first and maybe my last one."

Khan recently caused controversy in Mumbai by suggesting that more Pakistani cricketers should have been included in this year's season of the Indian Premier League. His off-the-cuff remarks ignited violent passions among Hindu nationalists, who threatened to destroy cinemas if Khan screened his new film. It was a row that united all three of India's national obsessions — cricket, Bollywood and politics.

We return to the subject of Mumbai. The city is a cosmopolitan mix of all Indian ethnic groups but local politicians have become increasingly hostile to outsiders. Khan refuses to let these prejudices pigeonhole him. "I'm an actor, I'm an Indian. My father fought for the freedom of the country. And I truly believe when I say something about a nation or people that you cannot categorise people."

Warming to the theme, he mentions recent attacks on Indian students in my home city, Melbourne. "Someone has told me very vehemently that there've been racial attacks against Indians in Australia. So should I say you're racist? The world is full of good and bad people, not good Australians or bad Australians, or good Christians and bad Muslims."

We wrap up the lunch. I stand up to say goodbye and I wonder which man I have had lunch with today — the servant of the superstar or his master? As I leave the warm Bollywood bubble and the cold of the London winter hits me outside, I think I may have met them both.

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