It is strange to write about a book that you have been part of, one that has been one of the glittering successes of your career as an editor/publisher. It seems only the other day that Gautam Chintamani walked into the HarperCollins office with a proposal for a book on Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak. By the time we finished, QSQT had been put to the back burner, and a new book idea was born. Dark Star: The Loneliness of Being Rajesh Khanna, a compelling, sometimes melancholic, always honest portrait of Hindi cinema’s first true superstar, a man who rose like a meteor in the late 1960s, became a nationwide obsession, only to spiral into oblivion, consumed by ego, insecurity, and the very machinery that built him. With a new edition being published by Rupa, this important book gets a much-needed fresh lease of life.
Gautam’s biography is not a gossipy tell-all nor a hagiography meant to deify its subject. Instead, it is a nuanced, layered study of a man trapped in his myth, of the burden of stardom, and of how fragile the edifice of fame can be. Gautam captures the atmosphere of that time with journalistic rigour, bringing alive that ineffable ‘X-factor’ that made him magnetic. The book offers revealing insights into how Khanna’s superstardom was also a product of its time: an India recovering from a barrage of misfortunes – from the wars against China and Pakistan, the food shortages, the language conflicts—and finding in Kaka, a romantic hero, someone who could offer a balm to the nation’s weariness.
Khanna’s tilted smile, his dreamy eyes, the famous dialogue delivery became the vocabulary of Hindi cinema. He was not just acting in films; he was scripting a new idiom of stardom. But as the title suggests, this is not merely a celebration. The brilliance of Dark Star lies in how it juxtaposes Khanna’s dazzling public persona with his increasingly fractured private life. Stardom, Gautam implies, came at a cost Khanna never fully understood.
The cracks began to show with the emergence of Amitabh Bachchan, who represented a shifting socio-political landscape. Khanna’s romantic, soft-spoken persona soon appeared out of sync with the times. Audiences who once swooned at his lover-boy image now wanted grit, rebellion, and antiheroes. Ironically, a couple of Khanna’s early successes, as Gautam perceptively observes, cast him in the ‘angry’ mould.
Khanna’s response to his declining popularity was not resilience or reinvention but petulance and paranoia. He alienated directors, turned increasingly insecure about co-stars, and began to surround himself with sycophants. In Gautam’s telling, Khanna comes across as a man who never grew up. Chintamani does not sensationalise but lets such moments speak for themselves. The superstar’s loneliness becomes palpable.
Where the book shines is in its re-evaluation of Rajesh Khanna, the actor. Gautam is a fan, but he’s not blind to Khanna’s limitations. Unlike actors who grew with time, Khanna largely stagnated, repeating mannerisms. While duly highlighting some of his finest performances in which Khanna brought a delicate emotional intelligence that few actors of his generation could match, Gautam also brings a wonderful understanding of some of Rajesh Khanna’s largely unheralded films, particularly Red Rose and Dhanwan. This accounts for some of the most fascinating passages in the book.
Gautam writes with a journalist’s eye for detail and a cinephile’s passion. The prose is accessible, the tone sympathetic but never indulgent.
In the end, Dark Star reads like a cautionary tale – not just of a man undone by fame but of the machinery of Bollywood itself. Rajesh Khanna was the template for a kind of stardom that India had never seen. He was mobbed, deified, and ultimately left behind. The industry moved on, as it always does. The book closes not on a triumphant note, but a wistful one. Even in his final years, Khanna craved the adulation he once commanded. His final ad films and appearances were not of a star gracefully ageing, but of someone trying to reverse time.
This is a portrait of stardom in all its glory and wreckage, essential reading for anyone interested in Hindi cinema, not only for its subject but for what it says about fame, fragility, and the cost of being worshipped. It’s a book that lingers, much like the memory of the star it chronicles. Like Rajesh Khanna himself, it is a dazzling, haunting, and ultimately tragic story.