King's Rites

Devesh Sharma Profiles the Journey of the Outsider Who Became King – Shah Rukh Khan

- Devesh Sharma

There is a scene in his film Fan where Shah Rukh Khan’s obsessive fanboy Gaurav travels without ticket in the Rajdhani train because his icon had done it in real life. The scene was supposedly based on truth. Shah Rukh Khan supposedly hitched a ride in the Rajdhani when he first travelled to Mumbai from Delhi. He certainly had the money to buy the ticket. Maybe he did it for a lark. The point is that you’re never sure where myth meets reality when it comes to Shah Rukh Khan. People see this larger-than-life image of him and kind of forget his struggle. He represents the industry so much today that people forget that he wasn’t to the manor born. Rather as an outsider he had to go through several harsh rites of passage before he was anointed King.

It was his affinity for taking risks that paid off at first. If he was doing populist serials like Fauji and Circus, he also tried his hand at absurd cinema by playing the lead in the Mani Kaul film based on Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. He began as a second lead under Rishi Kapoor in Deewana (1992). Rishi’s star was decidedly on the wane. SRK’s gamble that the crowd would like his rebel avatar and fresh pairing with Divya Bharti paid off in trumps. He also accepted Hema Malini’s offer of acting in her directorial debut Dil Aashna Hai (1992). It had established stars like Mithun Chakraborty, Dimple Kapadia, Amrita Singh et al and he didn’t have much of a role but still got noticed.