Revisiting Fauji: A Portrait Of Early SRK

“In six-and-a-half hours I became the nation’s heartthrob,” Shah Rukh Khan declared in a 1992 India Today interview. Three years earlier, in 1989, his 13-episode Fauji (1989) premiered on Doordarshan, buoying his face into the dining rooms of houses across the nation, where every week, families would spend a half-hour with him. In a fashion typical of what we would come to expect in the coming decades, Khan would follow up that statement of bombast with a winking modesty, “With that kind of exposure, even a door knob can become a star.”

Khan’s screen debut as Lieutenant Abhimanyu Rai — a character who charms authority, never challenges it — alchemised his career, built on the weak-kneed foundation of his dimpled cheeks and honey brown eyes. The show follows the training of an Indian Army commando regiment, and its eventual deployment in a war against an unnamed “dushman” or enemy. The point of the show is not whom they are fighting or for what, but that they are fighting. The fighting itself is never valorized or fetishized. In a climactic reveal of the show’s ideology, a character quotes the poet Sahir Ludhianvi, “Jang toh khud ek masla hai, jang kya maslon ka hal degi? … Isliye shareef insanon, jang talti rahe toh behtar hai.” (War itself is a problem, with what will war solve problems? Decent people, if war is eternally postponed, that is best.)

The role of Abhimanyu Rai was initially meant to be played by the son of the show’s director, Colonel Raj Kapoor, but since he was also in charge of the cinematography, Kapoor opted for a new face. Kapoor’s son-in-law, who dealt in real estate, had come across Khan while showing the struggling actor’s mother some houses, and pushed his name and face forward. Such is how coincidence manifests as destiny. The audition for Fauji was an early morning 1.5 mile run followed by boxing. Most men withered; a chainsmoker, Khan floated up to the surface. As the show was getting made, many of the other actors on the multi-starrer began throwing starry tantrums and giving strange interviews that cast the show in a bad light. With all this noise, Kapoor decided to give Khan — a no-nonsense presence on set — the strongest storyline, the most screen-time.

The show has an air of staid romance — the way “Buddy” and “Chap” and “Darling” are thrown around the Hinglish dialogues with this forced ease, a starchy coolness in the way cigarettes dangle off lips, a world of dances and combat and open flirtation and marriage proposals. The only married character gets bumped off the show within a few episodes, because marriage is a sign of love’s collapsed pursuit, “pyaar ki aakhri manzil” as one character puts it. The show’s interest is love in motion — the women, all doctors and journalists and shopkeeping assistants, are yoked to the story as women to be loved, and once loved, pursued, and once pursued, married.

Thirty-six years after Fauji aired on Doordarshan the show is back on their airwaves. The re-run commenced on October 24th on DD National, part of Doordarshan Network.

Shah Rukh Khan in 'Fauji' on Doordarshan

To revisit the show is to see a world stuck between two generations. There is this veneer of forceful youth, discussions on sex and love, which are wobbled by melodramatic turns of phrase and a claustrophobically repetitive melancholic score. It is, in fact, a perfect manifestation of what it would take to make Shah Rukh Khan work as an icon — he was emblematic in cinema of an unsteady modernity, an unreliable relationship with tradition. As Anupama Chopra notes in her book King Of Bollywood, Khan provided a persuasive answer to the question “What does it mean to be Indian?” as the economy opened up and the very idea of Indianness got mixed up with and challenged by material desires. Through films like Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995), Dil To Pagal Hai (1997), Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998), Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (2001), and Kal Ho Naa Ho (2003) Khan charted a roadmap for a “hybrid” Indian, one “who easily enjoys the material comforts of the West and the spiritual comforts of the East. You didn’t have to choose between the two.” So Abhimanyu Rai, all suave in his denims with a Sylvester Stallone wall poster, won’t have cake; he loves nariyal barfi.

Even Khan’s acting brought together what Chopra describes as the “faux street grit of Bachchan … cultivated [with] the swagger of John Travolta in Grease (1978).” Early SRK used his lips more than his eyes, his mouth often open. As he aged into Major Samar Anand in Jab Tak Hai Jaan (2012), that youthful pout fled his face. He would take his dimples more seriously. What would remain is his flamboyant performance — one that, according to Chopra, had “spontaneity and physicality, not gravitas” — that made him a favorite with kids.

Abhimanyu Rai’s relationship with women is also worth pausing at — a relationship that jostles with them, without producing discomfort, even if it is an uncomfortable situation. In the first episode, Rai whistles at a woman but she remains unfazed. Like the scene in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai in which Khan’s character, Rahul, tries to intimidate Tina (Rani Mukerji) by bullying her, here too, he is the one who ends up embarrassed. The woman outsmarts him. She is a photographer. Walking up to him, she whistles at his face and flashes the camera at him. Stunned by the white flash, the cigarette dangling from his lips falls. Like in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, here, too, this interaction does not leave him resentful. His ego isn’t hurt. It is toyed with. The woman he eventually falls in love with is both his senior in age and position.

It was this performance as the brash but ultimately dependable Lieutenant Abhimanyu Rai that caught the eye of Iskra, a production company in Mumbai run by the directors Kundan Shah, Aziz Mirza, and Saeed Mirza — all three staunch Marxists. (Iskra, literally “the spark”, was the name of the newspaper started by Lenin) Khan was called to Mumbai and cast in shows they produced  — Umeed, Wagle Ki Duniya, and Circus. They even mentored him. Circus, in fact, would take forward the fragile modernity-tradition see-saw that Khan embodies in his characters. He plays Shekharan, the son of a circus owner, who returns from London and, initially, tries to convince his father to sell the loss-making circus, only to be seduced by that world and have a change of heart.

Mirza even nudged Khan towards Mani Kaul for a Doordarshan miniseries adapting Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, titled Ahamaq. In the India Today interview Khan notes, “Yaar, shooting for Mani was something else. I didn’t understand the movie but I loved the art film environment: you bite into a samosa and ask yourself—Who is God? What is life? Who am I?” The miniseries, after being screened on television, would never find the light of day. As an ode, it would be edited into a movie and shown at film festivals decades later, in 2016, fitting for an actor who also lunged from television to cinema. But by then, Khan’s leap would not only have landed, but also yielded far greater returns than imaginable — where a middle-class Muslim boy from Delhi had slowly, surely, become the most celebrated movie star in Hindi cinema, being remade by cinema, remaking cinema.