My first memory of Rajesh Khanna is the song, Accha Toh Hum Chalte Hain (Aan Milo Sajna, 1970). And then crying out aloud when my mother cut out his face from Filmfare to line a cake tin. And trying to watch Joru Ka Ghulam again and again for the scene where the monkeys enter his kitchen. The fact is that there was a time when you did not have to be a certain age or a film buff to know who Rajesh Khanna was. He just was. And you knew.
The story began when he won the 1965 All India Talent Contest organised by United Producers and Filmfare. In his first release, Chetan Anand’s Aakhri Khat (1966) , amid the heart-breaking tale of a lost baby, it was Khanna you remembered as he sang, Aur Kuch Der Thaher..Aur Kuch Der Na Ja. And then you suddenly understood why for a decade or more, he had become box-office gold. He is possibly the first male actor who brought into romance, a tantalising sub-text of sensuality.
This was not the loose-lipped passion of Shammi Kapoor, the unexpressed intensity of Guru Dutt,the stylised longing of Dev Anand, the muscled showmanship of Dharmendra, the gentle poetry of Dilip Kumar, the playfulness of Shashi Kapoor or the occasionally brutish fervour of Raj Kapoor. This was something else. Somewhere through Raaz (1967), Baharon Ke Sapne (1967) and Ittefaq, Rajesh Khanna discovered himself. He channelled something as elusive as a whiff of musky perfume escaping from a bottle. It was an overture, an unspoken, dangerously seductive. Since the actors in that era were not allowed to kiss on screen, Rajesh Khanna lowered his gaze and blinked or nodded as if to make up for it. And his smile was almost a weapon of mass seduction. It was a conspiratorial smile. Intimate and suggestive. Like a dialogue that only he and the woman before him could hear. And the world was never the same again.
No one in Hindi cinema has been lusted and longed for as much as Rajesh Khanna. In a repressed country where passion was considered unholy, he was a flesh-and-blood fantasy longing for itself. He was the dashing pilot of Aradhana, the first love of Andaaz, the playboy artist of Mere Jeevan Saathi ready to be reformed by a amber eyed, good woman. The eternally devoted lover of Amar Prem who looks at a sex worker as she sings a Krishna bhajan and tears up because he has glimpsed her soul and when she stops, he entreats, “Ruk Kyon Gayiin..Gayie Na.” He was the family rebel of Do Raaste who found time to serenade Mumtaz with, Yeh Reshmi Zulfein. The kurta clad young nawab of Mehboob Ki Mehndi who romanced a ‘chilman" behind which Leena Chandavarkar melted away like a sugar cube in summer. He had great comic timing, a delicious musicality which paired with the voice of Kishore Kumar and cinemasmiths like Shakti Samanta contributed to his rise.
His bungalow Aashirwad was a shrine and everyone knows the stories about the extent of his stardom. Women marrying his picture. Kissing his car. Writing letters in blood. And that story. That ironical story when a young, gawky Amitabh Bachchan could not get convincingly hysterical over the death scene in Anand and was told, “Imagine that RAJESH KHANNA has died!” And Bachchan broke down and the scene went down in history as a subtle game changer.
Khanna in retrospect was a summer romance..that India lived through over 15 golden jubilee hits. A time when Rajesh Khanna is supposed to have asked God for a flop because this extreme success was hard to sustain. Little did he know. It would be wrong to say that he never strayed beyond the golden haze of romance. He was Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s muse in sensitive films like Bawarchi, Anand and also worked with the stubbornly experimental Basu Bhattacharya in Aavishkar where he convincingly played an ad executive straining against a suffocating marriage. It would be cruel to outline what went wrong and why he became the poster boy of spent stardom. What changed? The signs were there for us to see in Namak Haram where rumour has it that he wanted the end changed to disallow Bachchan to walk away with all the sympathy.
But this alone could not have, should not have eroded what Khanna represented but success that had come like a fever, left suddenly without explanation..and then there was only a shadow animated by familiar though a tad overworked mannerisms.
The hits did not peter out totally. Despite the blurring of the angular lines of youth, there was the preachy yet moving Avtaar and Sauten that worked. Cameos and laboured love stories followed but the superstar had left the building, the world had moved on.
He passed away in July 2012 but his films continue to play in memory and while he lived, he appeared in many award shows and repeated the same poignant lines written by Sahir to perhaps to sum up his own life..
‘Izzaten,ulfaten,shauraten,chaahten sabhi ko milti nahi,
aaj main hu kal koi aur tha……
yeh bhi ek daur hai,
woh bhi ek daur tha’…
(Acclaim, loyalty, fame, love..are not destined for everyone..today I am here..tomorrow there will be another..This is a moment in time..And then there will be another.)