Rajesh Khanna: Won Through Subtlety, Lost To Context

Rajesh Khanna: Won Through Subtlety, Lost To Context
He got attached to the results of a context he had not created,
and unlike Amitabh, failed to recreate and reinvent himself.

Handsome looks, his mannerisms , an infectious smile and a subtle dialogue delivery style are what defined Rajesh Khanna. His phenomenon has come alive in the past few days since his death. Life is a great leveler and holds its cards close to its chest. While life takes back what you want the most in life, it returns it on death, when you were expecting none of it. Rajesh Khanna got it all when he least expected them, lost it all even as he desired to hold on to them, and regained them just for a brief period when his eyes had shut forever.

Cinema offers a very interesting paradigm of life. It imitates life, and then creates an illusion which life – seemingly almost deliberately -- struggles to keep up with, forgetting that it was the creator of the illusion in the first place, and so has the power to recreate rather than hold on to an ephemeral passage of time. Personalities in the form of stars and superstars mirror this play of the real and the illusory, resulting in a roller coaster ride for them. Much before the information revolution made the previous day's success irrelevant in the morning, cinema had already provided a deep perspective on the success-failure equation. It had made actors realise that you were just a hit away from being a phenomenon and perhaps just a flop away from being discarded.

Rajesh Khanna and Amitabh Bachchan, who replaced the eternal romantic as an `angry` superstar, in that sense are not just personalities, but case studies in their own right. While one rose to superstardom on the back of charm and subtlety, the other rose to superstardom on the back of intensity. Both actually were simply pawns in the script of life, which wove a context and placed its two best protagonists on centre stage, for they, with their immense talent for expression, were the two most suitable boys of Bollywood to enact the role life had envisioned. The terms `pawns` and `suitable boys` should not be seen as being disrespectful to Rajesh Khanna and Amitabh Bachchan, for when you see it from the perspective of life being a master, both Khanna and Bachchan were the chosen ones, and it is a tribute to their immense talent and charisma that they found themselves in a period of Bollywood history which is one of the most discussed. They both exuded just the right kind of talent and `reel behaviours` for the prevailing context.

If Rajesh Khanna brought alive like no one else the undercurrent of romance of a young India in the late '60s and early '70s, Amitabh Bachchan became the demolition man of systemic ills once it became clear the country could no longer afford to live in romantic solitude and had to find ways to resolve its real time issues. Thus, context was the backdrop in which both succeeded, and change in context was the backdrop in which Rajesh Khanna found his personal decline.

The reason Amitabh has managed to come back from decline and stay on as an enigma for so long is because he found ways to reinvent and express himself beyond a limited context. He managed to operate beyond the `master social script of life`. He found a script which was not necessarily linked to the social milieu and revolved more around his own limited contexts as a human being and a professional.

Rajesh Khanna perhaps lost this perspective when the context had changed course. He got attached to the results of a context he had not created, and unlike Amitabh, failed to recreate and reinvent himself. But there is no taking away from the fact that he shaped a critical period in the evolution of Hindi films and laid the foundation for the emergence of `The Superstar` designation in Bollywood.

Rajesh Khanna is gone, but his phenomenon will live on, kyun ki `Anand Mara Nahi, Anand Marte Nahi` .