Vikram Johri: The box-office sultan

With Sultan, Salman Khan's latest starrer, on course to become the highest-grossing Hindi film of all time, the actor's position as the unrivalled king of Bollywood has been further cemented. Regardless of his questionable talent and boorish off-screen behaviour, Khan has that one thing that matters more than anything else: the ability to draw crowds to the theatre.

Khan is perhaps the only Bollywood star in recent memory who has gone from strength to strength in spite of his bad boy image. Another actor who has faced the wrath of the law is Sanjay Dutt, but the years seem to have mellowed him. Even before Dutt went to jail for the final leg of his term in connection to the Mumbai blasts case, he came across as a subdued man. Besides, his back story - of drug abuse and losing a parent at a young age - endears him to the audience in a way that Khan's cannot.

Yet, Khan must (obviously) have his backers. It is said that the small-town male is a solid constituency. He sees in Khan, or more accurately, the anodyne characters Khan plays, a version of himself - simple-hearted, if not too bright; respectful of tradition; doer of good. In all his recent films, Khan has played a variation of this theme. In Dabangg and Dabangg 2, he played Chulbul Pandey, a police officer who fights goons with as much cool detachment as he indulges in the wry turn of phrase. In last year's Bajrangi Bhaijaan, Khan played a Hanuman bhakt who journeys to Pakistan to help a mute girl find her home.

In these roles, Khan performs no intellectual acrobatics but displays an honesty that can melt the most hardened heart. His on-screen earthiness belies his status as the consummate Bollywood insider who gets away with killing blackbuck, mowing down people and dispensing sexism. In Bollywood circles, he is rumoured to be a great friend and an equally determined foe - he has ensured that the careers of those he believes have spited him are derailed.

In spite of belonging to a family firmly rooted in Bollywood, Khan attracts the sort of sympathy reserved for the outsider. Nothing sticks to him; no offence is too great to send him packing. When he made an inappropriate comparison between working hard for Sultan and rape, the outrage was like a background noise to be endured only till the film's release, when all the angry voices would be, as they were, quieted down. Contrast this with, say, Aamir Khan who felt the need to issue multiple clarifications after he made a comment last year on intolerance in society following the Dadri lynching. No one but Salman Khan can risk viewer anger - in his case, the viewer simply chooses not to get angry.

As is the case with other Bollywood A-listers, Khan's personal life has been the focus of much media speculation. At 50, he remains unmarried but his romances are the stuff of legend, including the often hazy circumstances in which they have ended. His fans call him "Bhai" and the largesse connoted by this epithet extends to his immediate family. He is believed to have tried brokering an (unsuccessful) rapprochement between brother Arbaaz Khan and his wife, Malaika. He lives in the same apartment complex in Bandra, Mumbai, as his parents. A less redemptive feature of this closeness is his father's serial public statements defending his son, including issuing apologies on his behalf.

India is perhaps the only country where Khan's onscreen success has enabled him to slip out of serial contretemps. Hollywood, for example, is famously intolerant of talent that refuses to behave. Mel Gibson may have earned multiple Oscars for Braveheart but his career never recovered from a 2006 drunken rant attacking Jews. Winona Ryder was a star in the 1990s, poised to become a leading light of her generation, when she was arrested for shoplifting in 2001. She continues to work in films and on TV but has never regained her status.

For all that though, even Hollywood winks at a Woody Allen, who has met allegations of sexual abuse with a studied silence. But then Allen is a giant of the cinema, having written, produced, directed and starred in films that brilliantly contest the space between fiction and autobiography. Khan's cachet comes not from his talent but his ability to single-handedly control an industry whose varying fortunes do not affect his films. To that extent, maybe the problem is not Khan but us, his viewers, who eagerly lap him up and place him on a pedestal of absolute commercial dominance.

Khan remains a study in contrasts. Is he a much-misunderstood gentle giant or a vindictive curmudgeon used to getting his way, or, more likely, a bit of both? We will never know. He has a famously sticky relationship with the media at whose hands, he believes, he has got a raw deal. He has often sparred with journalists enquiring about his personal life. The truth is Salman Khan is at a stage of unquestioned supremacy where he is answerable to no one but himself. What a delightful but also morally fraught place that must be!
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