Thank God It's Friday!

Aamir Khan and Shahrukh Khan: Consummate Actors, Incredible Stars

Thank God It's Friday!

Recently, viewers were pleasantly surprised to see Bombay cinema megastars, Aamir Khan and Shahrukh Khan, appear together at a press conference. The event was to explain the film industry’s stand on profit-sharing with multiplex cinemas and its associated 'strike'. However, the meet was dominated by the presence of the two actors who share credit for some outstanding cinema and who are arguably the biggest contemporary stars on earth.

Aamir Khan and Shahrukh Khan enjoy the admiration of billions. Both are consummate actors with great charisma; their skill is best attested to by the fact that most viewers do not even realise the enormity of their undertakings as they laugh, cry and thrill before the characters the two portray. As many remarked watching the industry's ‘Fair Rights for Friday Nights’ meet, it would be wonderful to see the two stars together on-screen, in a casting coup reminiscent of Amitabh Bachchan’s appearances with Rajesh Khanna.

However, it would be considerably hard to house Aamir Khan and Shahrukh Khan on screen together. To understand why requires delving into the cine-mythic spaces of both stars and into the recent history of their nation.

Aamir Khan appeared on-screen in the late 1980s, a sensation overnight. He carved out an extraordinary filmic space, playing ‘everyday underdogs’ in schools, gullies and workshops, organising his work through path-breaking moves new to an entropic film industry. The nation responded with delight to his cinematic brilliance.

In 1993, however, the unthinkable happened. After two notable filmic beginnings (a Raj Kapoor-esque youth struggling between ideals and ambition, and a rebellious lover), suddenly Shahrukh Khan burst onto screen powered by the force of psychosis. His Baazigar’s’ demented thirst for revenge held a strange attraction to audiences. Against a larger social backdrop of violence and unrest brought about by changing religious, caste and class configurations, Shahrukh portrayed more screen villains, an insane stalker, a demented lover, ‘SRK’ adopting the mantle of Bombay cinema’s last great villain. With each successive psycho, Shahrukh endeared himself more to viewers who loved his stammering deliveries, his shaky laughter, his tightly controlled overacting.

Then, ‘DDLJ’ happened. SRK metamorphosed into a Shammi Kapoor-like lover-boy cavorting against Swiss hills, New York nightclubs and the Thames, leaving the Dal Lake and Marine Drive far behind. The timing could not have been more significant. Three years into India’s economic liberalisation and its epistemological swerve towards wealth and conservatism, mainstream popular culture was exemplified by films starring ‘SRK’ as ‘Raj’. Bombay cinema féted cosmopolitan mobility alongside ‘Hindu Punjabi roots’ while the significantly middle-class phenomenon, ‘SRK’, encouraged a new cult of filmic personality, exploiting bodily appeal, engineering film gimmickry and boasting a love of money that broke all notions of brashness.

The equations were clear. SRK played unabashedly to India’s newly moneyed middle class which frequented multiplexes and malls, holidayed abroad and indulged expensive new traditions. The gaze of this class was trained either on the private or the international; the nation and its ‘others’ were simply a matter of inconvenience if ever noticed.

Against this, Aamir Khan’s brand of cinema dug its heels deeper into Indian soil. At the turn of the century, Aamir’s most noteworthy screen character was Bhuvan, a peasant from eastern India who was not only not a rich Punjabi but also, placed in the nineteenth century, not a hip contemporary dude. Lagaan, nominated at the Academy Awards amongst the best foreign language films of 2002, brought Aamir to a new cosmopolitan viewership.

While Aamir followed the ‘earthy’ Bhuvan up with the delightfully ‘airy’ Akash, a rich Bombay playboy in Dil Chahta Hai’s ‘business class’ world, his range of characters predominantly dealt with the marginal, peasants, sportsmen, drop-outs, terrorists, who take on the system with varying results.

Interestingly, around the release of Aamir’s 2006 blockbuster Rang De Basanti, India’s honeymoon with liberalisation was beginning to wane. With farmers’ suicides (even in the cine-paradise of Punjab), soaring crime rates, distress migration, pressured urban infrastructure and gross commercialisation no longer easily swept under mall sales, Aamir’s ‘DJ’, advocating the vigilante killing of corrupt politicians, clicked. Shahrukh’s lover-boys remained entertaining but rang a tad hollow against reports of the ill-treatment of Indian brides wedded to NRI grooms, limits closing on Indian emigration and indeed, the quiet appearance of the global recession.

Recently, viewers have seen the two stars attempt switch-arounds, moving to new roles and meanings. Shahrukh’s portrayals of a marginalised Muslim hockey coach in Chak De India and later, a Punjabi bhai-sahab husband (not a wealthy, dashing lover) display his attempts to break out of his own glossy mould. Aamir’s literally ‘smash-hit’ portrayal of a millionaire seeking violent revenge in Ghajini displays his attempt to move away from earlier characters more grounded in the social, legal and mundanely sane.

Both stars’ recent portrayals are in fact another part of the twists and turns India itself is taking as its new history unfolds. Alongside, its popular culture faithfully mirrors its emotions and mischievously suggests its dreams, while the dynamics of its stars reflect changes in audiences, transformations in experience, landscapes, ideas and politics.

Casting Aamir Khan and Shahrukh Khan together would be an enormous filmic feat. It would also be a remarkable moment for the Indian nation and imagination. Two diametrically opposed meta-characters, rooted in deeply contradictory socio-cinematic terrain, might be reconciled. Perhaps some of the biggest divergences in recent Indian history might find common ground. Until then, we-the-viewers can only be grateful for ‘Friday nights’ and its promise.

(A version of this article appeared in the Hindustan Times under the title 'They Khan, They Must', May, 2009).