Frames per Second: The billionaire as a common man in a world of ambition

Shah Rukh Khan is India's richest actor now, but one of his early films, 'Raju Ban Gaya Genteman', was a nuanced critique of ambition and the pursuit of wealth

In an early scene in the Hindi film ‘Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman’ (1992), the film’s protagonist Raj Mathur (Shah Rukh Khan), takes his girlfriend Renu Singh (Juhi Chawla), to a car showroom in Bombay (Mumbai). The showroom’s salesman (Vivek Vaswani) enthusiastically shows them the different models of imported automobiles. But his customers have a problem: They don’t have money to buy a car. Raju works at a small library and Renu is a typist at an engineering firm. Having received his first monthly salary of Rs 600 that day, Raju has taken Renu out for dinner. Confessing their economic status to the salesman, they are about to leave, when Raju returns. “I’ll come back one day and buy a car for her,” he confidently tells the salesman, “I promise you!”

 

 

Later in the film, directed by Aziz Mirza, Raju does turn up to buy the car, but not with Renu. This time, he is accompanied by Sapna Chhabria (Amrita Singh), the daughter of Raju’s employer and real estate mogul Lalkrishna Chhabria (Navin Nischol). By then, Renu has left him, repulsed by his swift descent into the world of corporate corruption. A young engineering graduate, Raju comes to Bombay (Mumbai) at the start of the film in search of employment. After some initial struggle, he is hired by Chhabria’s company. His hard work and honesty are noticed by his employers, particularly Sapna, who starts getting infatuated with him. Her support ensures that he is promoted quickly and put in charge of a major bridge construction project.

 

However, his success also depends on his participation in corruption — bribing government officials and propitiating them with sex workers. Though reluctant at first, Raju soon starts taking an active part in the process. When the bridge he is constructing collapses, sabotaged by business rivals, Chhabria and his partners try to divert blame. They claim that the workers who died when the bridge collapsed were terrorists. Fearful of losing his job, Raju also agrees with them. However, as he is well aware, the dead workers are residents of a working-class neighbourhood — similar to the one in the popular TV series ‘Nukkad’ (1986-87), co-directed by Mirza — where Raju had lived when he first arrived in the city. It is, in fact, Raju who got them work at the construction site. Witnessing the grief of their family during the funeral triggers a reckoning in Raju, leading him to abandon his corporate ambitions and revealing the truth to the world.

 

Raju’s character has cinematic predecessors in Raj Kapoor’s Ranbir Raj in ‘Shree 420’ (1955) or Somnath (Pradip Mukherjee) in ‘Jana Aranya’ (1976), directed by Satyajit Ray. But Raju is also a man of his times — an ambitious corporate employee in the years soon after India’s economic liberalisation and its turn towards neoliberalism. Facing a severe balance of payments crisis in 1991, the Indian government under former prime minister P.V. Narasimha Rao and his finance minister (later prime minister) Dr Manmohan Singh, introduced several structural reforms, supported by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Liberalisation delivered several benefits, such as the rapid expansion of the economy. At the same time, it has been blamed for the entrenched inequality in Indian society.

 

The role played by Bollywood in building consensus in favour of liberalisation has been researched extensively by film scholars and critics. In her 2020 book ‘Unruly Cinema: History, Politics and Bollywood’, film scholar Rini Bhattacharya Mehta writes that in the post-1991 era, Hindi cinema reinvented itself as “Bollywood”, a name that was “previously used sarcastically and always within quotes.”. This rebranding allowed the popular film industry to, in turn, reinvent the nation itself, “defined by a hegemonic Hindu nationalism on the one hand and the diaspora as an extended national family.” Films like ‘Hum Aapke Hain Koun…!’ (1994) and ‘Hum Saath-Saath Hain’ (1999), both directed by Sooraj Barjatya, provided models of an ideal Hindu family. Other films appealed to India’s large and growing diaspora — ‘Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge’ (1995), directed by Aditya Chopra; ‘Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham…’ (2001), directed by Karan Johar; and ‘Kal Ho Naa Ho’ (2003), directed by Nikkhil Advani, among others. All three of them starred Shah Rukh Khan.

 

The growth of India’s economy and the supporting role that Bollywood played helped the film industry significantly. While film budgets and profits rose exponentially, those in positions of power in the industry raked in the riches. ‘Hum Aapke Hain Koun…!’, starring Salman Khan and Madhuri Dixit in leading roles, had a budget of only Rs 6 crore, earning Rs 100 crore at the box office. In 2024, the Bollywood film with the highest budget — Rs 350 crore — was ‘Bade Miyan Chote Miyan’, starring Akshay Kumar and Tiger Shroff. In comparison, ‘Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman’ was made on a budget of Rs 0.6 crore. Shah Rukh Khan apparently wore the suits used as costumes at his wedding, during the making of the film; he now charges about Rs 150-200 crore per film.

 

Earlier this month, Khan entered the Hurun India Rich List 2025, an annual ranking of India’s wealthiest individuals. With a personal net worth of $1.4 billion (about Rs 124 billion), Khan is possibly one of the richest actor in the world. Juhi Chawla — his co-star in ‘Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman’ and several other films — is the second-richest Bollywood personality, with her family wealth pegged at $880 million (about Rs 780 crore). The number of billionaires in India has crossed 350, with Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani retaining the top two spots. The widespread reportage around India’s billionaires, however, failed to provide the essential context of stark inequality in the country. According to a 2024 study by the World Inequality Lab, the richest 1 per cent of Indians earned 22.6 per cent of the national income while owning 40 per cent of the national wealth. Describing this inequality as “billionaire raj”, the authors of the study claimed that the wealth and income inequality in India since 2013-14 was worse than during the concluding decades of the British colonial rule (1930-40).

 

In this era of billionaires, is it any surprise that working-class heroes like Raju have disappeared almost completely from our silver screens? Now, box-office success is driven by spectacle, global markets and aspirational fantasies, and the moral struggles of the ordinary worker have been replaced by the triumphs of tycoons, soldiers, and superheroes. Of course, this reflects the transformation of Bollywood itself — and even the country. To mourn the absence of the humble dreamer is to recognise what has changed irreversibly. Raju’s world cannot return, but its moral imagination remains a measure of what we have left behind.  Uttaran Das Gupta is an independent writer and journalist