The title of Anupama Chopra’s book, King of Bollywood , refers to Shah Rukh Khan, who is among the most recognizable faces in the popular genre referred to as Bollywood cinema. Khan, Chopra claims, “is bigger than Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt combined” in India. Though few of his films have reached the same level of success in North America as they have in India, Khan’s fame is international. Even as a Canadian who has never seen his films, I was vaguely familiar with him, and friends who saw me reading the book immediately recognized him. I read this book hoping to learn a bit about Indian cinema, and though Chopra’s book will give readers a general introduction, it is a fairly typical sample of the pop biography genre, where the subject is well-known but not necessarily worthy of a book-length life study.
Like many celebrity film actors, Khan had relatively humble beginnings. He was born in New Delhi, and grew up in a household that encouraged his talents in spite of financial instability. Chopra runs through his personal tragedies (the death of his parents) and the trajectory of his acting career (theatre productions, initial low budget film efforts, and eventually huge box office hits and lucrative advertising gigs) while weaving in a bit of history on India & its film culture to provide context. Chopra describes India as a place where huge differences in economic prosperity and technological progress exist side by side, and where there is a tension between the Muslim and Hindu faiths. In this context, Chopra studies Khan as “a Muslim superstar in a Hindu-majority country” and as “as star who blended, in perfect proportions, Indian and Western culture.”
Bollywood films are flamboyant productions, and according to Chopra, scripts were sometimes hastily written during production. With its mixture of genres and musical interludes, Bollywood would seem to be quite different from the popular cinema of North America, but there are points of contact. The tension between film as an art and film as a business exists in India as well, with Chopra at one point mentioning that Indian cinema also cycles into periods where it appeals to the lowest common denominator. For example, when writing about the “dark ages” of 1980s Hindi film, Chopra says ‘theatre audiences now largely consisted of lumpen young men, or what the Bollywood trade calls the “front benchers.” They seemed to prefer basic action and loud emotion. A slew of directors…catered to the front benchers.’ Sound familiar?
While Chopra doesn’t equate Khan with low-brow cinema, she does describe some of his earlier work as “mediocre movies that did mediocre business.” Though Shah Rukh Khan is a huge star, his life and work don’t necessarily make for a fascinating book. Having not seen a Khan film, I couldn’t comment on his acting; yet some of Chopra’s comments imply that Khan is not really notable for any artistic contribution. When a film is described as a “success,” it is usually always in economic terms. As such, the reader becomes curious about a film like Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge because it was a huge hit (it was screened for over a decade in Mumbai), and not because it is identified as a great film with great acting by Kahn. When discussing Khan’s acting abilities, Chopra says, “Shah Rukh was a flamboyant actor. His performances were gymnastic, forceful, and extravagent. He had spontaneity and physicality, not gravitas.” Chopra later interviews one of Khan’s early mentors during his student theatre days, Barry John, and Khan’s ‘star quality’ is emphasized more than any great acting talent:
‘Shah Rukh spent five hears with TAG [Theatre Action Group]. In this time he did not, in Barry’s words, do a “serious or strong role.” His persona was exuberant, comical, and, invariably, lightweight…But Shah Rukh, as Barry said, “never did a Hamlet.” His signature performances relied less on internalization and more on what Barry called “advertising,” or outward display. Barry’s suggestion that Shah Rukh do Hindi films was a backhanded compliment.’
Over the course of the book, there is not a sense that Khan grew beyond this and developed his craft to any great extent. Chopra often describes the formulaic nature of some of his biggest roles, with the tendency towards stereotypes being part of why they resonated so strongly with large audiences. When Khan attempted to break away from this, such as with the film he produced called Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani, the result was a critical and financial bomb.
Many contemporary pop biographies are meant to have an immediate financial impact. There are some examples where these kinds of biographies can go beyond making a quick buck at the peak of a person’s fame. Years ago I read an Alanis Morissette biography by Paul Cantin; though a biography of the singer was certainly premature, at the very least it sketched her artistic development from her teenage juvenilia to the beginnings of her more mature songwriting. Chopra cannot trace any comparable artistic evolution in Khan’s career, and since his life is relatively ordinary, the book isn’t memorable. Instead of wanting to see a film starring Khan, I found myself wanting to read more about Indian cinema in general, as well as the involvement of the Indian mafia in the film business (which Chopra writes about towards the end of the book).
Chopra’s writing is thankfully free of the jargon one can find in much academic writing on film; this is clearly a book intended for a popular audience. Though her prose is clear, Choprah simply hasn’t chosen a subject with enough substance to make King of Bollywood worth recommending. The basic material for this book, pared down, could have made an interesting magazine article. In the course of the biography, Chopra mentions many Indian film directors, and at the very least readers new to Indian cinema can jot down these names and investigate their films, regardless of whether Shah Rukh Khan is in them or not.
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