Dark Star: The Loneliness of Being Rajesh Khanna
By Gautam Chintamani
Rupa Publications, 272 pages, Rs 395

Rajesh Khanna’s thirteenth death anniversary falls on 18 July. Despite the passing of years, the Bollywood icon’s luminescence and remarkable legacy haven’t faded from public memory. Dark Star is a rare, honest portrait of the flawed and vulnerable man behind the celebrity. With incisive interviews with people who closely collaborated with Rajesh Khanna, the narrative offers unique behind-the scenes glimpses into a complex personality who experienced the giddy heights of success as well as the depths of failure and despair—all within the span of a few years. Well-researched and critically acclaimed, this book will appeal to cinema scholars, aspiring movie professionals, media students and the inquisitive readers. Dark Star is not a typical biography of a movie star, the narrative doesn’t shy away from revealing the actor’s insecurities, high-handedness and ego that eventually led to his isolation from the film fraternity.

If ever a life was meant to be a book, few could stake a stronger claim. Like a shooting star doomed to darkness after a glorious run, Rajesh Khanna spent the better half of his career in the shadow of his own stardom. Yet, five decades after his last monstrous hit, Khanna continues to be the yardstick by which every single Bollywood star is measured.

At a time when film stars were truly larger than life, Khanna towered above them all. He was the reason the word ‘superstar’ entered the Indian film lexicon.

With seventeen blockbuster hits in succession, starting with Aradhana (1969), and mass adulation rarely seen before or since, the world was at Khanna's feet. Everything he touched turned to gold. The hysteria he generated—women writing him letters in blood, marrying his photograph and donning white when he married Dimple Kapadia, people bringing sick children for his 'healing' touch after Haathi Mere Saathi (1971)—was unparalleled. Then, in a matter of months, it all changed. Khanna's career hit a downward spiral as spectacular as his meteoric rise, just three years after Aradhana, and from this he never really recovered.

‘Dark Star’, by historian and bestselling author Gautam Chintamani, looks at the phenomenon of an actor who redefined the term 'film star'. His engaging narrative tries to make sense of what it was that made Rajesh Khanna and what accounted for his extraordinary fall. 

Here is an excerpt from this defining work in the film biography genre:

Of Broken Dreams

Sapna Salona Tha, Khatm Toh Hona Tha

Rajiv Gandhi didn’t take too well to [Amitabh] Bachchan’s decision [to quit politics] and saw it as abandonment. It was also during this time that the Congress was ousted from power. Rajiv was looking for new friends and he saw Rajesh Khanna as not only a replacement for Bachchan, but also as someone whose proximity to him would spite Bachchan. Those close to Khanna, such as Johny Bakshi, saw this as a retirement plan for the star. But Khanna probably looked at it as an opportunity to prove that he was better than Bachchan. However, it is interesting that when Johny Bakshi asked Khanna about his decision to join politics, the star guffawed that politics was, in fact, truly the last resort for scoundrels. Like the time he let Bachchan loose on H.N. Bahuguna, Rajiv pitted Khanna against Lal Krishna Advani—the man who would take the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) from a two-seat entity to the main opposition party in the 543-seat Lok Sabha—for the New Delhi constituency. Having campaigned for the Congress in the past, Khanna wanted to fight from Thane or some place closer to Bombay, but Rajiv Gandhi believed that Khanna could spoil Advani’s chances in Delhi and picked him over Ambika Soni.

With Rajiv taking a keen interest in his political career, Khanna shifted base to Delhi and set off on the campaign trail. He was quick to don the standard neta attire of white kurta-pyjama and took to his new role like fish to water. Khanna might have been a star on the wane, but his popularity was intact and the public turnout for his speeches didn’t surprise anyone, least of all the Congress. He cajoled Dimple as well as Twinkle, his elder daughter, into canvassing for him and started courting journalists so that they would take him a little more seriously. The danger of being perceived as just a matinee idol who didn’t pose a serious threat to his seasoned adversary was very real. With each passing day, Khanna got more confident about not only doing well, but also beating L.K. Advani, who was still to become the political colossus that he turned into as the 1990s progressed.

[…]

Although the public mandate had been against the Congress in the 1989 general elections, it was a foregone conclusion that Rajiv Gandhi would make a comeback in the 1991 elections.

In spite of his inability to stop the atrocities against the Sikhs following Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984, his miscalculation during Operation Pawan that resulted in the death of over a 1,000 Indian troops in Sri Lanka, and his alleged involvement in the Bofors gun kickback scandal, Rajiv was convinced that the couple of years he had spent sitting in the opposition were penance enough. But unwilling to take a chance, he gave tickets to celebrities who could sway the crowds. His decision to field the likes of Rajesh Khanna and Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi, former captain of the Indian Test cricket side (from Bhopal), didn’t go down well with many people. Senior journalist Khushwant Singh even called Khanna, Congress’s official crowd puller, ‘some kind of a buffoon’, and also publicly boycotted the elections. On the day of the voting, Khanna was pleasantly surprised to see Rajiv Gandhi visit his constituency early in the morning along with his wife Sonia. The photograph of Khanna looking like a dedicated lieutenant keenly observing Sonia Gandhi as she cast her vote and Rajiv overseeing the proceedings became one of the defining images of the 1991 general elections. Khanna must have hoped that once he defeated Advani, Rajiv would reward him well. Everything was going according to plan and Rajiv, as seen in the photo that captured the moment, looked pleased as punch; but no one had an inkling of what was about to ensue.

The next day, Rajiv was scheduled to address a political rally for the Congress in Sriperumbudur, a small town close to Madras in Tamil Nadu. He reached the nondescript town a little later than expected, but the rapturous crowd didn’t seem to mind. The enthusiastic greeting was something Rajiv had become accustomed to during his public appearances in the elections, but a louder explosion in the form of a human bomb silenced Rajiv Gandhi forever.

A squad of three Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam (LTTE) soldiers, led by Sivarasan, avenged Rajiv’s actions in the island nation of Sri Lanka. Rajiv’s sudden death changed the game of the 1991 general elections, and the Congress rode home on a sympathy wave. The grand old party might have found a new lease of life in Rajiv’s death, but for Khanna it was nothing less than the end of the road. Ironically, the photo of Rajiv and Sonia casting their vote with Khanna and R.K. Dhawan, one of Rajiv’s closest confidants, which gave Khanna a political identity of sorts even before he took his first steps, ended up becoming his biggest political achievement once the picture entered the annals of history as the last of India’s sixth prime minister.

In spite of coming within a hair’s breadth of defeating L.K. Advani, Khanna’s utility for the Congress was over as soon as the ballots were counted. With Rajiv Gandhi dead and the Congress government led by P.V. Narasimha Rao, a far more discerning politician than Rajiv in every sense of the word, Khanna would end up being just another sitting MP. Although Advani had won the New Delhi seat, he, as expected, gave it up in order to retain Gandhinagar, the second seat that he had contested from. The by-election for the New Delhi seat saw another actor take on Rajesh Khanna. In Shatrughan Sinha, who fought on the BJP ticket, Khanna found an adversary who appeared to be impetuous and so, without any effort on his part, Khanna became the smarter choice. Following a less colourful campaign that was more of a formality, Khanna emerged victorious and made it to the Lok Sabha.

[The excerpt reproduced with the permission of the publishers.]