Exploring Shah Rukh Khan's film trajectory, from his anti-hero edge to pandering to the male gaze, questioning the ethical lines blurred in Bollywood’s storytelling evolution. Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri writes…

Shah Rukh Khan’s journey in Bollywood is one that toes a fine ethical line, shifting from morally complex characters to roles shaped by the male gaze. His early films, like Baazigar and Darr, broke ground by introducing an anti-hero who transgresses traditional ethics, setting new standards for a Bollywood protagonist. Yet, as he transitioned into romantic lead roles, Khan's work often reflected a pandering to audience expectations, sometimes reinforcing regressive tropes and conventional gender roles. The shift invites reflection on Bollywood’s prioritization of spectacle over consciousness, where ethical storytelling becomes secondary to box-office appeal. SRK’s roles thus mirror not just an evolving actor but a cinematic landscape caught between artistry and commercial allure.

November 1993 to April 1994. Those months are enshrined in my memory even thirty years later. As I was increasingly beginning to tire of my career in finance, films had opened up a world I could escape to. I had also begun to write on cinema. And over that ‘golden’ period of six months, four articles/reviews I wrote found a place in Filmfare, winning the Rs 500 prize for best review and/or article thrice. It was liberating. That prize money seemed so much more than the very respectable salary I drew as a finance professional.

The unique thing about my ‘hot streak’ was that it coincided with that of the new star on the block: Shah Rukh Khan. Each of those articles was for an SRK film – Baazigar (November 1993), Darr (December 1993), Kabhi Haan Kabhi Na (February 1994) and Anjaam (April 1994). My friends who knew of my obsession with Amitabh Bachchan for close to a decade looked at me quizzically. I fancy, some of them smirked. Though I had not abandoned the Big B yet – despite the horrors of Shahenshah, Gangaa Jamunaa Saraswati, Toofaan, Jadugar, Hum, Khuda Gawah – there was no doubt that for the first time I was wavering in my allegiance to Bachchan.  

A New Star for a New Era

Looking back, it is possible to see in my admiration for Shah Rukh Khan a continuum with what Amitabh Bachchan had meant for me. If you consider the basic tenet of each of these four films in the first leg of his career – the ‘hero’ who operated with a set of rules he himself puts in place – there is little wonder that I loved him. I did not take to him in Deewana – I remember India Today doing a story on him and how his hand gestures were driving fans wild, and wondering, what’s the big deal. I thought he was rather insufferable in Chamatkar. However, Baazigar, Darr, Kabhi Haan Kabhi Na and Anjaam briefly promised to take the Hindi film hero on a new tangent.

Shammi Kapoor had upended the family dynamics as the first rebel of Hindi cinema in the 1960s, replacing the often weepy, self-sacrificing and prone-to-self-pity hero of the era. Amitabh Bachchan took the rebellion outside the home and into society, creating the first antihero of Hindi cinema who raved and ranted about injustice and vengeance. Shah Rukh Khan carried that the distance – creating the first hero/protagonist who operated in a moral grey zone.

Yes, he was driven by the need to avenge himself in Baazigar, but unlike Bachchan’s Vijay, SRK’s Ajay/Vicky was not averse to killing innocent people to achieve his ends. For him, even the act of love was not hallowed. As an actor, he made you believe that it was okay to entrap your fiancée’s sister and throw her off a terrace if that helped you reach your goal. I remember watching this sequence – and the one in which he kills the police officer – with open-mouthed awe in a hall in Lajpat Nagar, turning to my brother to mutter, ‘My god, what is he doing?’

Transgressing Ethical Boundaries

A couple of characters he had essayed before this had shown flashes of this willingness to transgress ethical boundaries, for example, in Raju Bann Gaya Gentleman and Maya Memsaab – both rather underrated SRK performances that are much better than his more heralded ones. Then there is Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa, probably his finest film, ‘Chak De! India’, notwithstanding. But Baazigar was an eye-opener for the way it demonstrated the lengths to which the new hero was willing to go. And, given the film’s box-office success, being allowed to go by the audience looking for a new hero.  

He carried it a step further in Darr – terrorizing the woman he is obsessed with, killing, maiming, wreaking havoc on anyone who came in the way, all the time speaking to his dead mother to ‘justify’ his actions. Anjaam was scarier, boasting the one sequence of his career I thought he seldom bettered – the one in which he sets his car on fire after losing a race to the object of his desire. The audience erupted in a frenzy.  

It was frightening what these two characters and their motivations denoted. But it was seductive too. In many ways a better film than Darr – I took Anjaam seriously enough to record it for my parents on the VCR, cutting out parts I felt were superfluous, so that they watched a different, ‘better’ version of the film that did justice to Shah Rukh’s performance – the film bombed, probably because the second half went nowhere.  

However, the star almost made being ‘bad’ worth emulating. Before he zoomed into the stratosphere in various iterations of Mr Goody Two Shoes ‘Raj/Rahul’ a year later, this was Shah Rukh Khan at his wicked best. It would be two decades before the star ventured into such darker terrain again, with Fan (2016) – a film in which he was brave enough to critique both himself (the star and his narcissism) and his fans (of the toxic variety; it was strange to experience the stalker ‘hero’ of Darr being stalked so mercilessly). No wonder the film bombed too.

Disillusionment Sets In

It was not long before I had had enough of him. Two strands put paid to any hope of my SRK infatuation going beyond that. One: his total lack of control as an actor. Three films over the next three years epitomized this – Ram Jaane (1995), Chahat (1996) and Duplicate (1997). In the first of these, a ‘remake’ of Michael Curtiz’s classic Angels with Dirty Faces, SRK, reprising the role immortalized by James Cagney, was at his most insufferable. Coming on the heels of the reasonable amount of restraint he had demonstrated in Anjaam and Kabhi Haan Kabhi Na, the actor left me flabbergasted.

In fact, I still remember a small news report attributing to renowned acting coach Barry John (also SRK’s mentor and coach in Delhi) the following comment, rather unflattering of the star: ‘I am embarrassed by some of the things he is doing as an actor.’ Chahat and Duplicate marked the lowest points of Mahesh Bhatt’s career as a filmmaker, and Shah Rukh simply did not have it in him as an actor to salvage the box-office and critical turkeys.  

The second strand that put me off SRK is ironically what made him the mega star he is. His string of good-boy roles starting with Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge in 1995. I am still not sure why this for-all-practical-purposes cultural phenomenon never quite appealed to me. For all the hosannas that the public and the critics have heaped on DDLJ, it left me cold the first time I watched it and every time after. Even his much mimicked ‘Palat’ sequence was a rip-off of one in ‘In the Line of Fire’, and as I kept telling anyone who would listen (not that there were many), he wasn’t a patch on how Clint Eastwood put that scene across even at the age of sixty-three.  

Maybe I could never take to a ‘hero’ making ‘love’ dependent on parental sanction. Particularly, after his mean streak in the first phase of films where he brooked no reason, no opposition. I could never reconcile to this namby-pamby leading man glorifying honour killing in mainstream cinema, which was conveniently packaged as the approval of a feudal lord, father of the heroine, right at the end after all the melodrama and violence had been delivered as storytelling. Of course I was in a hopeless minority as the star, with the help of directors Aditya Chopra and Karan Johar made ‘loving your parents’ fashionable, not to mention other regressive content pertaining to gender roles. Nowhere more apparent than in films like Mohabbatein and Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi.

As an actor, he continued to be subpar, demonstrated by two films that still make me shudder: Devdas and My Name Is Khan (MNIK). If the first had me laughing mirthlessly at the lowbrow jatra-like aesthetics of the film and the performances, the second left me wishing that there was a better actor to put across its important message. I am all for creative interpretation of books but Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Devdas is an affront to the senses made worse by cringe-worthy performances by the superstar and Kirron Kher, as also the unpalatable and questionable ostentation. MNIK actually felt like a performance with little organic about it, and with classics like Rain Main and Awakenings, and even Sparsh in my memory, the actor appeared woefully out of his depth.   

The Goofy Hero

The popularity of DDLJ, Dil Toh Pagal Hai, Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham, Kal Ho Na Ho, Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna, and other films of the ilk sounded the death knell not only for the edgy brand of characters in the star’s first phase but also for the kooky character he was so good at in Baadshah (1999). This is one SRK performance I absolutely dig, and probably the one where he was just right with his comic timing. His ‘visually impaired’ act (although I will allow the physically disadvantaged rights activists to decide if it was moral to do or not) with Twinkle Khanna holds up remarkably well even after twenty-five years and he is a hoot right through the film. Though he was ‘Raj’ in this film too, audiences were rooting for the other Raj-s and Rahul-s in the string of acronym-popularizing films of the era: DTPH, KKKG, KHNH and KANK, among others.

Baadshah failed at the box office, as did his later experiment with Paheli (2005, an uncharacteristically subtle comic performance). However, the one failure that must have stung most was that of Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani (2000), his maiden production. At the time, before the advent of the Navikas and Arnabs, the film looked like a bizarre take on news media. It’s strange how prescient it has turned out to be. Given the horrors that the media has unleashed in the last couple of decades, the film appears almost tame in the way it lampoons the world of breaking news. In the aftermath of these failures, the star more or less relinquished the goofiness that he brought to these two films. These roles were reminiscent of one of his earlier successes, and for those who loved the unaffected and beguiling charm of Sunil in Kabhi Haan Kabhi Na, it is a matter of immense regret that the star never gave free rein to this side of the actor in him.

With of course the exception of Om Shanti Om (one of the few big SRK films that I love) and Chennai Express (where he was good though overshadowed by Deepika Padukone). In Om Shanti Om, the star actually pays a homage to his own stardom and it’s a measure of his charisma that he pulls of this playful ode to the spectacle of Hindi cinema with aplomb. It’s impossible not to love this film with every Hindi film fan’s dream-come-true and potpourri of ingredients – a reincarnation drama, a love story, a revenge saga spanning lifetimes, and one of SRK’s most mimicked monologues.   

The Actor over the Star

It is perhaps a measure of what stardom means that in a career spanning over thirty years and close to a hundred films, barely a handful stand up to scrutiny for the actor in SRK. Of these Chak De! India occupies pride of place with probably the most nuanced of the star’s performances. Shimit Amin’s sports drama has SRK essay the role of a disgraced coach who is given the seemingly impossible task of mentoring the Indian women’s hockey team. Even as he shapes the hopelessly divided and out-of-its-depth bunch of players into a winning combination that punches above its weight, he finds in the exercise a road to personal redemption. Over the last decade or so, the increasing religious polarization in India and the star’s Muslim identity have lent a lot of meta-contexts to the film. But even independent of that, it contains some of the finest moments of the star’s career as an actor.  

The other film that boasts a terrific SRK performance is of course Swades, Ashutosh Gowriker’s follow-up to Lagaan. As the NRI Mohan Bhargava, who returns to India and reconnects with his roots, the star reined in all the mannerisms one expected of him in the wake of his Dharma and Yashraj films to come up with a finely nuanced, rich performance. Despite what the film offers to us in terms of the actor in SRK, and the cathartic narrative, the 2004 film came unstuck at the box office, putting paid to all hopes of the star ever emerging out of his comfort zone.

The Return of the Star

Despite Chak De and Swades, Om Shanti Om and Kabhi Haan Kabhi Na, it would take me another thirty years to go back to the kind of passion I felt for the star when I first became enamoured of him in 1993. I am of course talking of Pathaan. The audience response to the film harked back to the single screens of my youth. This was the first time I was actually witness to such frenzy in a multiplex. You could not for your life hear a single word above the cacophony, not a single action sequence went without appreciative howls from the crowd. It was magical – the way films are meant to be seen. I watched Pathaan three times in the span of a month and even the third show was houseful.  

The jaw-dropping success of Pathaan probably requires a fuller and more empirical study. Some films (and film stars) probably go beyond reviews and critiques, and the criteria of good or bad, logic or lack thereof. It is nobody’s case that Pathaan is a no-brainer. The film has a heavy hangover of the MI films, James Bond and even the Marvel Universe, but it is honest about telling you that that is what it is doing. It has no pretensions. Pathaan is in your face about telling you – ‘Here I am, the way I am, take it or leave it.’ That is remarkable candour and chutzpah for a film to possess.

It helps that the film has a certain sheen to it. Though every sequence, every pun, every cut, seems calculated to elicit an audience response, there is something organic in the way all of it comes together without feeling contrived. The background score is a smasher, the cinematography (globetrotting all the way across the continent and beyond a la James Bond) is eye-catching, and the dialogues are seeti-maar.