The disruptor

Irrfan: A Life in Movies

Author: Shubhra Gupta

Publisher: Pan Macmillan India

Pages:  397 (Hardbound)   
Price: Rs 899

When Bollywood actor Irrfan Khan succumbed to neuroendocrine cancer on April 29, 2020, the outpouring of grief on social media provided a hint to his enormous fan base. Such popularity is often the monopoly of leading mainstream stars and not of one such as Irrfan, whose career has mostly been in off-beat and small-budget cinema.
 

Irrfan’s breakout role was the smouldering Maqbool in Vishal Bharadwaj’s adaptation of Macbeth in 2004. He had done small parts before and had grabbed eyeballs as a negative character in Haasil (2003). His filmography would eventually include such well-acclaimed works as Life in a… Metro (2007), 7 Khoon Maaf  (2011), Paan Singh Tomar (2012), for which he won a National Award, The Lunchbox (2013), and Qissa (2013).
 

He also had a very successful career in British and American films, making a mark in 2006 with Mira Nair’s adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel The Namesake, then doing small but important parts in films like A Mighty Heart (2007), The Darjeeling Limited (2007), and The Amazing Spiderman (2012), and eventually bigger parts in Jurassic World (2015) and the Netflix miniseries Tokyo Trial (2016). And yet, it was only with Hindi Medium (2017) that Irrfan really tasted box office success in India.
 

Why did it take so long? Was it because he was not conventionally good-looking like, say, Hrithik Roshan? Or is it because he refused to do the kind of romantic comedies that his contemporaries, the other Khans — Shah Rukh, Salman, and Aamir — happily did? (Till 2012, he was credited as Irfan Khan, but he changed the spelling of his name to Irrfan thereafter.) Or was it because he was the quintessential outsider, a small-town boy trying to make it big in Mumbai, that took him so long to encounter mainstream success?
 

This is the central question in film critic Shubhra Gupta’s biography of Irrfan. Her question, however, is not only an appraisal of Irrfan’s life and career, but also an inquiry into the very nature of Bollywood, buffeted in recent years by accusations of endemic nepotism and mediocre filmmaking.
 

Gupta, who reviews films and writes columns for The Indian Express, brings to this book not only her in-depth knowledge of her

subject’s career and Hindi films, but also her deep access to the industry. She has won a Ramnath Goenka award for her writing on film and
 

has served as a member of the Central Board of Film Certification.
 

She has been able to interview for the book the who’s who of Bollywood — from Irrfan’s directors and producers such as Shyam Benegal, Tigmanshu Dhulia, Anurag Kashyap, Anurag Basu, Vishal Bhardwaj, and Pooja Bhatt to industry mogul Karan Johar, who never directed Irrfan but has some deeply insightful comments about his career.
 

What emerges from these interviews are some remarkable stories, some by people who knew him intimately and others who only worked with him. For instance, Irrfan’s wife Sutapa Sikdar, the screenwriter and producer, tells Gupta how her husband lied to get into the National School of Drama in the mid-1980s: “And I did not lie; unlike Irrfan, I did those ten plays! …Yes, he lied! He had done three to four and he said ten, because he was so desperate to get in.”
 

Naseeruddin Shah recalls Irrfan as a consummate actor by relating an incident from the shoot of Maqbool. “(I)nstead of Banquo’s ghost appearing, Irrfan kneels near the body and, the body opens its eyes. So they were doing that shot of Irrfan and I’m standing behind him. And he knelt over the body and, in a second or two, he fell backward. So I thought he’d toppled over. And he said, ‘Naseer bhai, please… what are you doing? …I was acting. Please don’t support me when I fall — I want to fall.’”

What also emerges is a composite picture of Irrfan. His producer and director Rajat Kapoor describes him as a mixture of “arrogance and humility”. On one hand, he was happy to take a pay cut or do a smaller role, on the other, he craved mainstream success. “It is on my agenda, absolutely,” Kapoor recalls him saying when someone asks about getting a fee of Rs 1 crore. “I am not getting it now but I am going to get it.” Mira Nair remembers Irrfan’s recognition of his self-worth: “I felt he thought he was good, that he was special, not to be frittered away.” And Shyam Benegal pays him the greatest compliment: “Who else could you look at when Irrfan was on screen?”
 

Another biography, Irrfan Khan: The Man, the Dreamer, the Star by festival curator Aseem Chhabra, was published in early 2020. Though Chhabra, too, conducted extensive interviews, he did not ask Gupta’s pertinent questions about how Bolly­wood essentially changed during the 1990s and 2000s. (Chhabra’s assistance with this book is acknowledged by Gupta.)  

The answer to her question is that Bollywood was not quite prepared for Irrfan when he burst onto the screen. “(W)e had access to the big movie stars then, we had the privilege to go to them with stories, but we didn’t have the ability — at that point of time — to think beyond that box,” says Karan Johar. Irrfan was essentially the disruptor, as Gupta discovered, the one who paved the way for those who came later, such as Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Rajkummar Rao, Pankaj Tripathi, and even Jaideep Ahlawat and Vijay Varma.
 

In a much-shared scene from The Namesake, Ashoke Ganguly, the first-generation Indian to settle in the US played by Irrfan, takes his young son Gogol to the beach. They walk down a narrow ridge jutting out into the sea to take a picture but forget their camera in the car. Ashoke tells Gogol to remember this moment. When Gogol asks how long he must remember, Ashoke tells him to remember it always, that he had come to a place where there was nowhere left to go.
 

Irrfan took Bollywood to such a place with his craft, his experiments, with his refusal to be boxed in. Now that he is not there anymore, it is for Bollywood to decide what it will do with his legacy.

The reviewer is a New Delhi-based writer and journalist. He teaches journalism at O P Jindal Global University, Sonipat