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SRK@60: Why Shah Rukh Khan is Bollywood’s last, and only, superstar

A look at the Delhi boy who dreamed big and became the face of New India.

Shah Rukh Khan turns 60 on November 2. (Illustration: Suvajit Dey)

Boomers have their work ethic and thrift, Gen Z has its unshakeable sense of self and a healthy irreverence for authority. And millennials? What do the overworked, underpaid, emotionally overextended children of liberalisation have that the generations before and after us don’t? Bhaiyon aur behenon, we have Shah Rukh Khan — the dimple-cheeked, floppy-haired Delhi boy who conquered Mumbai, the striver who made yearning a national emotion, the lover whose kisses awakened a thousand unconscious desires and taught us to confess our hearts without irony. He could belong to no one but us. Does he know this? SRK, tum hamare ho.

There’s no doubt that Shah Rukh’s appeal is cross-generational. Everyone loves him, from the daadis and mummies who once worshipped at the altar of Dev Anand, Rajesh Khanna and Amitabh Bachchan to the toddlers of today who make reels about Vicky Kaushal. Yet, that moment when he burst on to our consciousness, zooming across Mumbai on a motorbike while singing about looking for love in Deewana (1992), was the moment he became, irrevocably and exclusively, a millennial icon. For the youth of a nation that was discovering its appetite for risk and invention, the idols of old — trapped in their own ideas of modesty — just wouldn’t have done.

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This is why, since Deewana, since Baazigar (1993) and Kabhi Haan Kabhi Na (1994) and Yes Boss (1997), we have projected our hopes and dreams, our fears and uncertainties onto SRK’s image. In film after film of that youthful decade, as he danced about in oversized suits and spoke the language of ambition — looking like a boy playacting at grown-up life by dressing in his father’s clothes — SRK represented a peculiar contradiction. He mirrored the unease of a generation that longed to grow up quickly and sample the delights of a bewildering new age, but still carried the ache of middle-class morality. That he combined these qualities with vulnerability, speaking often of the mother he lost before his big-screen debut, brought him closer to us, his wounds matching many of our own.

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In time, of course, it became clear that if Shah Rukh had no true predecessor, he has no true successor either. He is, to put it bluntly, the last — and the only — Bollywood superstar. Before him, the fan followings of even the most popular actors of the day were limited by their essential unknowability; audiences encountered them almost exclusively on the big screen while magazines could offer only tantalising glimpses into their private thoughts and lives. Their fans never really got anything close to the full picture. On the other hand, the actors of today suffer from a problem of over-exposure and over-curation, not just from their own personal Instagram reels and stories but also the punishing publicity tours, with non-stop digital coverage, of their latest films and endorsements.

There’s no doubt that Shah Rukh’s appeal is cross-generational.

Shah Rukh Khan greets fans who had gathered below his bungalow, Mannat, at Bandra in Mumbai. (File Photo/Prashant Nadkar)

Shah Rukh, however, benefited hugely from coming to us during that sweet spot in Indian entertainment history dominated by television. If we were the MTV generation of India, growing up amidst a deluge of private television channels with an ever-sharpening hunger for more than just news and films, SRK was the perfect star for the age.

From the start, his story was fatefully tied to that of television, beginning as he did on the small screen with shows like Fauji and Circus, before being noticed by Bollywood and invited to act in Mumbai. Could he have become what he did if not for TV, even when his films became hits? There is little doubt that TV was, in more than one way, the right medium for SRK: His intelligence and wicked wit — which the big screen could never possibly have allowed full play to — shone through in the many televised interviews of the era. They fed into and sharpened his image. When industry magazines reported on rumours about his arrogance on film sets, his insistence that he would work only a single shift or take on only 4-5 projects a year, he told us on Aap ki Adalat that his self-respect was misread as an overinflated ego, that he wanted to work and spend time with his wife at home and that he if he did only a few films in a year, it was so that he could give them his best. He came to us unfiltered, yet with enough of his mystique intact that we both related to and idolised him.

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Love is complicated, but SRK somehow has always made it less so. It has never really mattered that he is neither the best-looking nor the most skilled actor in Hindi cinema — not back then, and certainly not today. But that is what happens when an actor becomes the embodiment of a generation’s aspirations and anxieties. He is the mirror in which a generation sees its own reflection — restless, romantic, aspiring, bruised by the speed of our own becoming. In loving SRK, we learned to accept our contradictions and find poetry in striving.