Rajesh Khanna, actor, died in Mumbai on 18 July 2012, aged 69. He was born in
Amritsar on 29 December 1942. He is survived by two daughters, Twinkle and
Rinke.
A rose, a candle, a couplet. Rajesh Khanna, Hindi cinema’s first
real superstar who passed away in Mumbai following a prolonged illness on
Wednesday, used these props freely and easily to capture for the first time in
Indian cinema a romance that was both adult and modern.
He was made less by the characters he played or the lines penned
by dialogue writers than his idiosyncratic mannerisms — the drawls, the pauses,
the sudden sparkle in his eyes, the fresh and easy smile, and the playful tilt
of the head. Even when stricken with cancer, or ‘lymphosarcoma of the intestine
— as Anand, a character he played in the film of the same name, was — that tilt
and smile barely faltered.
To understand what Rajesh Khanna was or how he altered the persona
of the film hero, it is important to stress what he was not. He was not a
loveable tramp like Raj Kapoor, nor a tragedy king like Dilip Kumar. He did not
trade on his masculinity like Dharmendra and rarely, if ever, played the hero
with shades of grey as Dev Anand liked to do. He was the stuff of soft romance,
his characters often earnest and virtuous, his performances enhanced by a face
that was a fortune and a style of acting that used eyes, lips, hands, and vocal
chords to great effect.
He got his break in cinema in Chetan Anand’s Aakhri Khat in 1966 as a
result of winning a talent competition.
