Sands of time - Part III: When Shah Rukh Khan Met Fyodor Dostoevsky

“I always felt that Godard is making films that are faster than the time experienced in normal life. And I needed to go slower than that. I just needed to go slower. Supposed (there is) a static guava on a static table, and the camera is static - then the only thing that is functioning there is time. The moment there is a movement, the idea of time is alienated.” - Mani Kaul

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Shah Rukh Khan’s father hailed from the same neighbourhood- now in Pakistan - as Dilip Kumar and Raj Kapoor. It literally meant “a market for stories”. These three men were destined to shape modern storytelling in the subcontinent like nobody’s business. It boggles the mind.

Many years later, Meer Taj Mohammad gifted his son, little Shah Rukh, a book by a Russian author called Fyodor Dostoevsky. The book was called The Idiot.

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It was the 80s, a crazy period when India was gradually shrugging off the shackles of its past and taking baby-steps towards a global future. In a south Delhi suburb, a coterie of chattery, effervescent youth got together to do theatre. Among them was a wide-eyed youngster called Manoj Bajpai. Tired of being turned down by National School of Drama three times in a row, Manoj had turned to Barry John’s theatre group TAG to sharpen his tools.

Many years later in an interview, Manoj spoke warmly about a co-actor who used to drive around in a Maruti van (which, in 80sspeak, is the fanciest ride a middle-class kid could ever have). He took him to the discotheque at The Taj - they also shared a cigarette or two, and when the coffers dried up, even beedis. This young co-actor of Manoj, barely 4 years older to him, who studied acting with him at the feet of the venerable Barry John, probably hasn’t tasted a beedi for more than a quarter century or more. His name is Shah Rukh Khan.

Barry John, who came to India in the heydays of flower-power and hippie heaven, set up Theatre Action Group (TAG) in the early 70s. He put together a ragtag group of youngsters, did workshops with them and staged plays wherever possible: in school, colleges, dorm rooms, youth festivals, wherever they could manage a makeshift stage and go at it. TAG was about a decade old when Barry and Shah Rukh crossed paths. Shah Rukh Khan had been on and off stage even during his school days. This continued when he was in college.

Theatre was also a great place to meet girls, at a time when there wasn’t a dating scene to speak of, and Tinder was still 30 years away. Now, whether a young Mr. Khan was staging the musical Annie Get Your Gun with the students of Lady Shri Ram College to score brownie points with the ladies or to indulge his passion for acting, is still not known...but one could venture a guess. At any rate, it was during the staging of this musical that TAG was called upon to help, and Shah Rukh ended up being a part of the group.

His friends Benny Thomas and Divya Sheth accompanied him. Barry didn’t believe in schooling his proteges. His job was to let them do their thing, only stepping later to reign them in, or push them ever so slightly. This was a great opportunity for Shah Rukh, with the surging electricity living inside of him struggling to burst out. He pounced about the stage in sheer abandon, playing lead roles in plays like Old King Cole and The Incredible Vanishing.

A lot of these roles required slapstick comedy, which involved falling hard on the stage, slapping, kicking and pushing your co-actors to draw laughs from audiences, which quite often included school children. But there was also more serious fare like Brian Clark’s Whose Life Is It Anyway, an intense plea for euthanasia. And even in those early days, Shah Rukh Khan was quite the star. In staid platforms like a theatre stage, he found ways of being flamboyant, flashy and loud. But it was rarely superficial or frivolous. Like most south Delhi boys, Shah Rukh was well spoken, well read and had a penchant for the arts.

The TAG team was called upon to participate in a film called In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, directed by Pradip Kishen, who knew the group and its mentor. Despite being hired, no principal role in the film was suited to contain Shah Rukh Khan’s maverick, and he settled for a walk-in cameo of a gay senior. Not much later, television came calling and Khan found the first glimmer of stardom in a tv show called Fauji. And this was when the crazy genius called Mani Kaul took notice. Mani saw in Shah Rukh - in his own words - “a strange mix of someone beautiful and slimy”. He found in Khan’s voice “an unstated whimper”. He was in the process of conceiving a Hindi/ Urdu adaptation of Dostoevsky’s seminal novel, The Idiot.

Mani Kaul was an institution unlike any other in Indian cinema. A disciple of the original enfant terrible, Ritwik Ghatak, Kaul was probably one of the most uncompromising filmmakers this country has ever produced. His work encompassed cinema in its truest, undiluted form. Unflinching in its study of human self, stillness, silences and the general music of the universe, Mani Kaul’s cinema harked back to the Upanishads and its multifarious layers. And it was this sensibility he fused with Dostoevsky’s when he conceived Ahmaq out of The Idiot.

Nobody in their right minds would call Shah Rukh Khan an intellectual - and neither would he be entirely accepting of the accepting of the epithet. But he never lacked in intelligence and sensitivity. He was finding some success on television and popular Hindi cinema of the day was too lowbrow and puerile for him to get into. He had begun to foresee a TV career for himself. The platform was flourishing and Doordarshan, the national broadcaster, was more forthcoming than ever before (or since) in encouraging raw talent. Plus, his then-girlfriend was not too keen on seeing his suitor scamper around trees in garish costumes. So, Hindi films were a no-no - at least till that point in his life. But Mani Kaul was no typical Hindi filmmaker, and the role he was offered was fascinating. Also, Shah Rukh had a history with the book Ahmaq was based on.

Shah Rukh was playing Raghujan, a version of Rogózhin, one of the iconic villains of world literature. It was his first “negative role”, so to speak, containing snatches of some of the other bad guys he was destined to play. Raghujan was an obsessive lover, a friend-turned-foe, and eventually a cold-blooded killer who remarks why a knife sunk so deep into someone’s skin would draw so little blood. Though their sensibilities and worldview were like chalk and cheese, Shah Rukh Khan and Mani Kaul, both adhering to their own styles, found a way of working together. The film never saw wide release, but was eventually shown on Doordarshan in the early 90s.

Shah Rukh would never return to Dostoevsky, Mani Kaul or their ilk anymore, and nor did he see Hindi cinema as beneath him. In fact, he would go on to be Bollywood’s most abiding symbol, its brightest beacon.