The Washington Post
In India's New Consumerism, One Star Has the Most Currency
By Emily Wax Washington Post Foreign Service Sunday, August 12, 2007; Page N01
NEW DELHI -- Months before I moved here as a correspondent for this newspaper, Indian American friends started cooing about Shah Rukh Khan, the king of Bollywood -- King Khan, as he is known by dreamy-eyed Hindi movie fans from New Jersey to New Delhi, from Bangalore to Bethesda.
"He's the love of my life," one friend said. Khan, short and shaggy-haired, is sort of an Indian Tom Cruise. "He's got camel-shaped eyes and he's so sensitive," another giggled. Another friend put it simply. "He's hot."
I had seen my share of five-hour Bollywood song-and-dance epics -- part escapist fairy tales, part campy Broadway shows.
In the 1980s, I lived in Queens Village, N.Y., where my Indian American best friend and I would travel by subway from our elementary school to the Hindi movie theater in Jackson Heights.
We were mesmerized by the melodrama: elaborate extravaganzas that unabashedly mixed romance with science fiction and, say, a private detective theme -- all of which made Michael Jackson's then-pioneering "Thriller" video seem under-acted.
Later, as a correspondent in Nairobi, I would climb into Land Rovers with expatriate and Kenyan Indian friends and head to the Indian-owned drive-in theaters, which sat in the middle of the savannas ringing the capital.
But I had to admit that even after all those hours, I still wasn't totally clear on who the big stars of Bollywood really were. I think I once mixed up Khan, known as "SRK" and a young-looking 41, with Amitabh Bachchan, or "AB," who is equally handsome but way past 60. That was a really big mistake.
I knew I'd better learn as soon as I unpacked. Not knowing the difference between SRK and AB would be like landing in the United States and confusing Brad Pitt with Robert Redford. Clearly two different generations.
So the very weekend my husband and I arrived in New Delhi, I started paying attention, reading Page 3 -- the gossip and glitterati pages of the Indian newspapers -- and trying to get a glimpse of the VVIPs. It's not just VIP, which describes a fairly routine upper-class person; it's VVIP when it comes to Bollywood.
I asked some friends to draw me a chart of the heroes and heroines of Bollywood, the largest film industry in the world, producing hundreds of movies each year and selling 3.6 billion tickets, compared with Hollywood's 2.6 billion. But there are only a handful of Indian superstars, and day-to-day it was Shah Rukh Khan whose name and face kept appearing.
That's why I was intrigued and thankful when I heard King Khan now has his own unauthorized biography, "King of Bollywood: Shah Rukh Khan and the Seductive World of Indian Cinema," released by a major by Warner Books on earlier this month. It's a lyrical and fascinating portrait of Khan. But it's also a window on a changing and increasingly consumerist India that is leaving behind its socialist and isolationist leanings -- a shift Khan embodies.
I had noticed that Khan was not only in Bollywood films and the hundreds of spinoff song-and-dance videos. It seemed that the down-to-earth Khan was selling everything from banking to biscuits. His face beamed from rice ads, Tag Heuer watch billboards and Pepsi commercials.
On a random flip through India's many, many entertainment channels, he was on about half of them, showcasing products or appearing in tight leather pants and a tank top, crooning hit songs from his movies, with a stunning starlet dangling from his arm.
"Khan was the face of a completely new environment of post-liberalization and growing capitalism in India," said Anupama Chopra, the book's author and a longtime film journalist with India Today, a news weekly. "He was a promiscuous brand endorser, yet he was still respected and loved. It showed that India could be both materialistic and retain its history and Indian soul at the same time."
The book tells the stirring story of Khan's rise from childhood as a middle-class, secular Muslim boy to a megastar who played the vulnerable outsider and the antihero. He was the face of a younger, more cosmopolitan and, in many ways, more Westernized Bollywood.
"We suddenly saw that a 20-something kid could make a movie and generate massive revenues at the box office," Chopra said. "It wasn't just about AB anymore with his older and more traditional strong-and-silent-type mystique. There were new personalities now, just like India itself."
While AB was a working-class hero and seen as the non-emotional, nearly perfect, alpha-male archetype, Khan was self-deprecating, chatty and approachable. He married a Hindu woman, laughed off rumors that he was gay -- saying he was "metrosexual, and try-sexual" (he would try anything). Yet, he was still Indian enough to refuse raunchy sex scenes in his films.
Khan started in television playing roles as a commando and a circus performer before his breakthrough film in 1995: "Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge" ("The Brave-Hearted One Will Take the Bride").
The romance is called "DDLJ" in a country that never met an acronym it didn't love. The film was a massive hit because it was the first to show Indians living in England, while including scenes from India. It spawned dozens of Hindi movies about non-resident Indians, or "NRIs," living abroad.
The film has broken all records and is one of the longest running in the world, celebrating its 600th week showing to still-packed houses in Mumbai this spring.
"Earlier, Bollywood's appeal was limited to the inside of India, which would not experiment with characters abroad except to add color by shooting a song in a foreign location, preferably Switzerland," said Taran Adarsh, a Bollywood analyst. "This film really broke into a changing India that was both traveling now and living abroad and was sophisticated and worldly, too."
Chopra's book also does a wonderful job of charting the history of Bollywood as a symbol of the extravagant and dreamy fantasies that showed the ambitions of an economically rising India.
Chopra spent more than 30 hours interviewing Khan, who was, she said, very easy to talk to but "causes such intense hysteria among fans that they pick up his dirty cigarette butts as keepsakes."
After speaking with Chopra, I got Khan's agent's number and I nearly fantasized over the stories I could tell my Indian American friends if Khan called my cellphone for an interview I had requested.
But King Khan was apparently swamped with other requests, along with movie deadlines and advertising shoots.
So with the monsoon rains churning, I sat on my veranda and under a gray sky tucked into Chopra's instructive book.
"In a country mired in poverty, crowds and oppressive heat, each day some 15 million people troop into over 13,500 cinemas to watch a movie," she writes. "Khan's life reflects the fundamental paradoxes of a post-liberalization nation attempting to thrive in a globalized world. His story provides a ringside view into the forces shaping Indian culture today."
Or as she also puts it: "Shah Rukh Khan is bigger than Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt combined."
Now that I know that, I will never mix up King Khan and AB again. Luckily for me, Chopra's book even comes with a magnificent glossary explaining who is who in the world's largest and, undoubtedly, most wonderfully wacky movie industry.
-- My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of the same poverty. - Jorge Louis Borges