A few years ago, this reviewer was on a panel discussion on the tenets of popular cinema and what made certain actors (read stars) more popular than their contemporaries. Among other things, a common motif emerged that the bigger a star, the more difficult it became to imagine a typical script for them. Yet, at the same time, no matter how different they tried to be, they often played themselves––the singular star. In this aspect, few can imagine coming close to the popularity that Salman Khan enjoys with his fans. If, on one hand, it’s almost impossible to intellectualise the Sultan actor’s popularity, on the other, he is just the kind of subject who deserves to be studied threadbare, beyond the realm of Hindi films.
Devapriya Sanyal’s Salman Khan: The Man, The Actor, The Legend attempts to chart the superstar’s career and make sense of the phenomenon, which, according to her, “exemplifies and highlights the definition of a celebrity in India today”.
One big question that Sanyal tries to answer––and succeeds to a significant degree––is why despite the mammoth hits or being in the news once too often, Salman rarely has takers to chart his stardom.
The landscape of Hindi cinema started to transform when the actor burst onto the scene in December 1989 with Sooraj Barjatya’s Maine Pyar Kiya. He had a lacklustre-debut in Biwi Ho Toh Aisi (1988), the year his contemporary, Aamir Khan, broke through with Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak, but he was a well-known face, thanks to his model assignments.
Salman soon delivered a bevy of hits before hitting a plateau, only to make a comeback in 1995 with Karan Arjun, in which he starred alongside Shah Rukh Khan, and the romantic drama, Hum Aapke Hain Koun..!, with Madhuri Dixit.
Sanyal employs an intriguing approach to decode what makes Salman tick, but focuses more on films such as Wanted (2009) and Dabangg (2010) than the ones that contributed to cementing his popularity with his core audience, such as Sanam Bewafa.
The author uses yardsticks that do not readily connect with the actor to measure how he went on to occupy a unique space with the fans, who have come to lovingly call him Bhai. Some of the film theorists or scholars she cites might not be the first observations that come to mind when thinking of Salman Khan, which makes the entire exercise worthwhile.
The relationship between the performance and its reception, in the case of Salman, transcends all logic. How much of Salman Khan is in the characters he plays, or how much of his brand and image results from a symbiotic relationship between the characters he plays and how he’d like people to perceive him are some questions that never really got answered until now. You might not get all the answers, but Salman Khan: The Man, The Actor, The Legend asks some engaging questions.
By: Devapriya Sanyal
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Pages: 234
Price: Rs 699