This has been a challenge. One of the toughest I’ve faced while writing about someone. Curating a list of essential Shah Rukh Khan films for the British Film Institute, Omar Ahmed wrote, “There’s no consensus in Indian cinema except about the abiding virtuosity of Shah Rukh Khan.” This is very true and indeed is one of the rarest of rare narratives that has found its root deep in contemporary Indian pop culture and lacks any popular or unpopular counter-narrative, as three decades later, Shah Rukh remains the brightest of the stars in the sky of Indian cinema and culture.
However, being argumentative and an obstinate critic, I might love Shah Rukh – since his presence itself is an entity of magical energy that bewitches most of us – but I have never stepped back from criticizing what should be criticized. There could be a dozen films that I’d never revisit again, but what outplays, for me at least, his unworthy performances is a handful of films that make you revisit them time and again, if not for the sake of mere cinephilia then for political or social circumstances.
Shah Rukh Khan is charming. He is adorable. But that’s not the point. What makes him relevant is his participation in certain films that appeared at a juncture when society was metamorphosing into something new and unknown. Shah Rukh was a prominent figure in the mid-to-late 90s when the implementation of the neoliberal economy had started leaving an impression on films, and arguably, he was the only actor who became the torchbearer of a new kind of urban middle-class dream.
He remained relevant throughout the first decade of this century, partaking in certain films that would soon become timeless classics and give shape to a nationalism that is essentially very much Indian. In this decade, when the perception of nationalism has turned into chest-thumping jingoism and shallow chauvinism, SRK emerges with counter-narratives to resettle the idea of nationalism in the mainstream discourse. So, it is a shallow analysis to reduce his efforts to his charm and dimples while forgetting the fact that his political choice of films is the de facto reason behind his appearance as a mythical figure and the very fact that makes us (perhaps unconsciously) fall in love with his screen presence.
Shah Rukh has been the mythical figure that we’ve looked up to while growing up. For this reason, one struggles to write about him. You think there’s so much to write, and the next moment you struggle to articulate. However, I have practiced channelizing my love for him not through fanaticism but through the recognition of his socio-political importance in contemporary popular culture, and I have been mindful of the fact, while curating the list, that I’d pick only those films of SRK that themselves were an event or phenomenon when they appeared. Fortunately, Shah Rukh Khan has more than a dozen performances like that to his name, which makes him one of the most important figures in the history of Indian cinema.
15. Fan (2016)
All I’ve heard to date about Maneesh Sharma’s 2016 film “Fan” is a pile of mixed reviews. However, the only commonality that tied the negative reviews with the positive ones is their unanimous acceptance of the fact that the film was an experiment in itself and had the potential of opening vistas of more similar films to come, which unfortunately hasn’t happened till now.
It’s a story of a simple boy – “Gaurav Chandna” (played by Shah Rukh Khan) – who runs a cybercafé in Delhi and speaks Hindi in a typical Delhi accent, albeit that doesn’t constitute his identity. What makes him who he is is his fanaticism for a Mumbai-based Hindi cinema superstar, “Aryan Khanna” (also played by Shah Rukh), or rather, it could be argued inversely, also by saying Aryan Khanna is the source of Gaurav’s existence, or more comprehensively, I should say Aryan’s existence gives validation to Gaurav’s very existence.
Gaurav is a lookalike of Aryan, and that resemblance convinces him that the two share some mysterious spiritual bond. The illusion collapses when Gaurav intrudes into Aryan’s personal space and the star—whose life he worships—refuses to acknowledge any connection between them. This single instance makes Aryan Gaurav’s arch-rival, and for the rest of the film, the narrative argues to delineate the power of a fan.
While it could’ve been the easiest choice to cast SRK in the character of Aryan, as according to his own words he is the last of the stars, what really astounds us is the decision to cast SRK himself as the fan – which should by now have revolutionized the potential of using graphics and computer-generated imagery in films that don’t seek to recreate any long-forgotten historical event but normalize the use of graphic technologies in everyday circumstances. “Fan” indeed was a phenomenon and should have received more critical attention as one of the rarest films where SRK experimented with his demeanour, accent, and everything in a very distinct way after “My Name is Khan.”
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14. Dear Zindagi (2016)
If an actor doesn’t create either a spectacle to simply entertain us or delve deep into doing something intellectual to make us rethink socio-politico-economic structures and patterns, his/her performances are not count-worthy. That’s simply the case with Gauri Shinde’s coming-of-age film “Dear Zindagi,” where Shah Rukh Khan as Dr. Jehangir Khan sits calmly on a couch against the backdrop of a bookshelf crammed with books and gently helps Kaira (Alia Bhatt) find the missing pieces of her life puzzle to complete it.
Kaira has been messy with her relationships because she had a traumatic past that blackmails her present and ultimately ruins her could-have-been beautiful future. With constant pressure from a typical upper-middle-class family to settle down and find a decent job, she finds her world getting topsy-turvy and accidentally chanced upon a seminar where Jehangir (who wouldn’t mind if you call him ‘Jug’) delivers a lecture in torn jeans and simple words amid the serious and academic-looking psychologists.
A few sessions down with Jug, we find Kaira changing. The beauty of this film is its tendency not to go too fast but to keep making steady progress in the character. By the time you finish watching it, you will find a Kaira who is completely different from the one you watched in the beginning. Gauri Shinde should be remembered for making “Dear Zindagi” because she presented the concept so simply and beautifully that, if presented in a different discourse, in a non-mainstream context, it would have been much more complex, with difficult names and hard-to-pronounce theories.
Finally, I must admit I need a special session to decode my love for the game that Dr. Jehangir Khan introduced in the film, where he plays “Kabaddi” with the waves. I keep coming back to that scene again and again—maybe if decoded, the result could say it is simply because of the gentleness and serenity that emanate from Shah Rukh in this film.
13. Ahamaq (1991)
Mani Kaul’s 1991 “Ahamaq”/ “Idiot” is one of those jinxed cinematic enterprises that set out into voyage knowing that it would eventually be lost. In 2017, the mini-series, divided into four episodes, was played as a continuous three-hour-long film at Jio MAMI in a newly introduced segment called “The New Medium,” which was curated by Shahina Anand. “Ahamaq” is Mani Kaul’s attempt to adapt Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1869 novel “The Idiot” and fit it into an Indian context for Doordarshan. The mini-series carries an undercurrent of Indian politics as well as a flavor of Indianness but I refrain from calling it a loose adaptation not because it retains most of the original Russian names of its characters but because it has a certain terseness that runs the risk of making sense to only those literati among the audiences who are well-acquainted with Dostoevsky’s text and style of writing.
I do not critique Mani Kaul for being culturally irrelevant by making something that automatically alienates the layman. The reality is that the series was mercilessly compressed to fit into Doordarshan’s episodic format. Thus, what should have been at least an eight-hour-long affair was reduced to a 232-minute-long adaptation of such a novel that carries its own complexities to be visually translated.
“Ahamaq” won the critics’ award for Best Movie in the 1993 Filmfare and travelled to the New York Film Festival in October of 1992, where Stephen Holden, a critic at NY Times, remarked about the film that “it turns a literary masterpiece into a numbing soap opera as incoherent as it is technically crude.” Holden did not understand, perhaps, the technical grievances Kaul had to face. Apart from these two contradictory critical responses, I couldn’t come across anything else. However, I like the mini-series for its poetic lyricism. Kaul visually interprets the apparently complex story in a slow-paced, poetic manner, and sometimes the poetic effect is amplified by the non-diegetic dialogues.
The polaroid-like soft imagery veils the neatly crafted and powerfully orchestrated mise-en-scènes. Shah Rukh Khan, a then young turk who was yet to make his debut in 1992, plays “Pawan Raghujan” and finds himself in an intricately enigmatic space convoluted by love interests – maybe a prelude to the characters he was yet to embody in the future (though, of course, in a popular discourse)?
Shah Rukh, to be honest, still had his thespian leanings in “Ahamaq,” but he contextualized them well with the character as the series had so many mise-en-scènes that often demanded a stage-like performance from the actors. More time should be spent on exploring the setbacks of such a potential cinematic endeavour, but first, the mini-series needs attention, and what could be a better reason for paying it a watch than witnessing a lesser-known classical performance by our favourite Shah?
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12. Hey Ram (2000)
Lately, there has been so much activism, exhibition, and demonstrations to uphold the secular, democratic, and socialist values of India to counter the streak of onslaughts unleashed by the power center on the constitutional values of this country, but nowhere did I see anyone talking about Kamal Haasan’s “Hey Ram.” This could be a simple case of an exception, but this exception needs to be fixed politically.
I personally felt it should be our duty to talk about films that contain the particular ingredients that make this nation what it is, and “Hey Ram” is certainly one of those worthy films to mention in this context, and fortunately, it stars Shah Rukh Khan, also. However, by no means am I advocating for the film’s political significance to include it in the list; the film itself is a great work of art and deserves attention.
It is about the journey of a man named “Saket Ram” (Kamal Haasan) who loses his moral conscience after losing his wife in a religious riot on Direct Action Day. Later, he chooses the path of religious extremism only to realize the erasure of ethics from his body and soul, and goes through a catharsis.
Saket choosing the path of bloodthirsty undeniably has a political connotation in the contemporary scenario, while his repentance and catharsis could be seen as a utopian space to cope with the religious extremism to which people from the margins of society are falling prey. Apart from this, the film documents the harrowing accounts of Direct Action Day in an unparalleled way and in the rawest possible sense in terms of image construction.
Shah Rukh doesn’t get the central stage, just like Saurabh Shukla. Both of them play the characters of Saket’s friends and disappear after the first few minutes of the film, only to return later. Shah Rukh plays “Amjad Ali Khan,” who returns in the penultimate sequences at the cusp of religious violence and helps Saket realize his mistakes, or it could be argued that Amjad pushes Saket towards the final culmination of his bloodthirst, which is catharsis.
Very few actors have dared to engage with issues as sensitive as partition because the issue has left a scar on the collective memory of the people of this subcontinent, and major discrepancies in our ethical values have roots in partition. So, this sometimes becomes a political act to rinse the rusty sedimentation of oblivion from the tin cans that contain films like “Hey Ram” and push them towards an accessible space for audiences coming from all strata, and also it is needless to say that when Shah Rukh Khan partakes in such a film, it itself becomes a reason to give it a watch.
11. Baazigar (1993)
“Baazigar” was made a couple of years after the initiation of neoliberal economic policies in India. It has been argued by scholars that the implementation of this economic policy massively affected the culture industry, which, like any other art, was reflected—perhaps most powerfully—in films and especially in the commercial discourse. “Baazigar” was made in the pre-transition phase, and an evident tug-of-war between the old typical Hindi cinema and the nascent glossy glamour industry called Bollywood could be seen in the film. If not entirely visually, then of course in terms of story and its narrativization, this Abbas-Mustan catch-me-if-you-can thriller sticks to the popular topos of the 70s.
This thriller casts Shah Rukh Khan as an anti-hero named Ajay Sharma & Vicky Malhotra (this is actually the name of one of his friends whom he impersonates), who lost his sister and father (Ananth Narayan Mahadevan) at an early age and has a traumatized mother (Rakhee Gulzar) at home—all of this being an aftermath of the shock when Ajay’s father found himself deceived by “Madan Chopra” (Dalip Tahil). Ajay describes himself as a “baazigar” (a tricky magician) because he knows how to win something even after losing initially. He practically becomes an illusionist when he lures two of the Chopra sisters and ultimately turns the tables by deceiving Madan Chopra in the same way Chopra himself did years ago with Ajay’s father.
With Anu Malik’s typical music playing in the background, a sick mother at home, and occasional angry-young-man-ish dialogues, Baazigar reminds us of all those Bachchan-era films where the protagonist takes the road of crime to fulfill his retribution. “Baazigar” only differs largely from those films if we see it through the lens of morality. The character of Ajay metamorphoses into a cold-blooded killer to achieve what he desires and finally dies. “Baazigar” was one of those handful of films that departed from 70s crime drama in terms of morals and ideals because the protagonist of the film doesn’t only take the road of crime but the road of evil, selling his soul to the devil. Watch it, if you haven’t already, to witness the evil laughter of Shah Rukh Khan that would send a shiver down your spine.
10. Paheli (2005)
“Paheli” came at a time when Shah Rukh was going through a phase of experimentation. Although he was very much active in the commercial discourse, he revived his earlier tryst with offbeat cinema with “Dil Se”, “Hey Ram”, and “Swades.” “Paheli” emerged as the continuance of that streak, running parallel with the popular projects that kept enlarging his stardom.
Set in Rajasthan and based on Vijayadan Detha’s story “Duvidha,” which had already been adapted for the big screen by Mani Kaul in 1973, “Paheli” is a fantasy. The reappearance of the adaptation of the same story within the span of three decades is an interesting phenomenon that perhaps needs to be looked at more closely in a different piece. What marks the difference between the two adaptations is the approach towards the subject.
While Mani Kaul, as a student and activist of parallel cinema, tried to explore the subject in a much more aesthetic manner, Amol Palekar represented it in a magical narration with a cohort of mainstream actors. This latter adaptation explicitly refuses to entrench its feet in realism but puts forth a coterie of rich imagery that, if dissected, helps us read and locate the position of women in the socio-economic grid of Rajasthan at a particular time.
SRK plays the dual character of “Kishanlal” and an apparition who doesn’t shy away from declaring that he is a ghost, a maya. Rarely has a ghost ever been so straightforward! Jokes apart, in “Paheli,” when the ‘baniya’ (businessman) Kishanlal leaves his newlywed wife “Lachchi” (Rani Mukerji) alone to trade in a foreign land, a ghost – or, perhaps, it is best to describe it as an entity of maya – decides to impersonate him because he has fallen in love with Lachchi. The lonely wife accepts his companionship, and their love grows deep with time, to the extent that Lachchi bears the impersonator’s child.
It becomes Kafkaesque when the real Kishan returns, and amid the commotion of the villagers, a shepherd (Amitabh Bachchan) takes on the ordeal of Kishan and his doppelganger. Punctuated by the voices of two puppets (Naseeruddin Shah & Ratna Pathak Shah), “Paheli” becomes a fantasy worth watching. Although it functions in the mainstream discourse, it provides enough space to view it critically and, arguably, with time, has become one of the milestones in SRK’s career – one he perhaps often looks back on when musing over his journey alone.
9. Darr (1993)
“Jo taar se nikli hain, wo dhun sabne suni hain / Jo saans pe guzri hain wo kis dil ko pata hain?”
“Everybody has heard the melody which comes out of the instrument / which heart knows what has passed through the breath?”
“Rahul” (Shah Rukh Khan) is involved in a clandestine love affair. He fears taking the name of the girl and serenades her secretly, and at times recites Ghalib too after gulping a couple of pegs. All this might sound cool until you notice the other side of Rahul. In the darkness, you will chance upon him musing endlessly about “Kiran” (Juhi Chawla) – whose beauty bewitched him in his college days – and often talking to his dead mother, whom he lost eighteen years ago in a car accident. Rahul is a loner; he doesn’t have many friends, and there’s also a hint that he might consider his father responsible for the death of his mother. Losing her perhaps traumatized him so deeply that his desperation to attain Kiran surpasses ethical boundaries, and his love embeds itself deeper in devilry.
This romance-cum-psycho-thriller casts Shah Rukh as an out-and-out antagonist in the love story of Sunil (Sunny Deol) and Kiran. All his previous anti-hero performances culminate in “Darr,” as he embodies the psychotic character of Rahul with a necessary evilness that has rarely been witnessed in Hindi cinema.
This Yash Chopra thriller still remains one of the most celebrated performances of SRK, and there’s no reason to counter its popularity even after 33 years. With all that madness – be it walking on the edge of a skyscraper, playing “she loves me, she loves me not!” or firing a bullet at Sunil in a congested street – you’ll perhaps never forget that evil smile that your very own charming lover once laughed.
8. Maya Memsaab (1993)
It might be an unpopular opinion, but the reason I consider “Maya Memsaab” as one of the best, or perhaps the best, Ketan Mehta film is because of its unparalleled quality to transform a dull, realistic setting into something enchanting by bestowing the visual palettes with vibrant colors, yet being careful enough not to reduce the essential melancholy. Although based on Gustave Flaubert’s novel “Madame Bovary” (1856), the film finds an Indian expression through its typical Indian small-town setting, intense romantic urges manifesting in eloquent, soothing melodies, and most importantly, through the prism of the Indian moral value system.
Provincializing a European literary work always runs the risk of losing something in its cross-cultural transaction through translation and incorporation into another language and cultural fabric, but “Maya Memsaab” manages to succeed, perhaps for its decision to liberate itself from the taut structure of the original novel and infuse the imagery with such exuberantly dynamic richness that a selection of images can be referred to anytime working like nothing less than a moving painting.
“Maya” (played by Deepa Sahi) is the epitome of a modern woman trapped inside a dated patriarchal society. She decides to marry “Dr. Charu Das” (Farooq Shaikh), expecting a life filled with love, but when love becomes a habit and the lamp of passion extinguishes, Maya finds herself in a state of loneliness punctuated by her mother-in-law’s taunts and a beggar (Raghuvir Yadav)’s occasional ballad-like, heart-wrenching cries of “Sonchiriya” (“O bird of gold!”). To cope with her loneliness, Maya subjugates herself to the burning temptation of extra-marital affairs. Of the men other than her husband to whom she had sought refuge, “Lalit” (played by Shah Rukh Khan) was the youngest and the most lovable, for his appearance was marked by an enamored smile.
Their dalliance, however, dwindles just like the other affairs of Maya’s, but Lalit’s character goes through a transformation and loses the charm, as can be seen in the brief sequences where he is interrogated by two nosy detectives. Lalit offers a space to Shah Rukh, early in his foray into cinema, that he later exploited to become a champion, but it would not be legitimate to say that the inclusion of “Maya Memsaab” into this list is grounded solely on the actor’s embodiment of Lalit. Rather, it is the calibre of the film that paves the way for Shah Rukh to excel in enacting romantic characters later in his career.
7. Veer-Zaara (2004)
The Persian word ‘Sarhad’ means border or frontier. To find the etymological origin of this word can be deceptive, as the actual meaning has nothing to do with the practical meaning it conveys in the modern nation-state. Through innumerable bloodshed to enhance or encroach upon a territory, the word’s actual meaning has been redefined as simple violence. Yash Chopra’s 2004 romance drama “Veer-Zaara,” made in the post-Kargil political ambience, is a redressal of the modern connotation of Sarhad.
“Veer-Zaara” is a would-have-been complex romantic film told in a simple narrative, although the narrative unfolds in a combination of analepsis and prolepsis: opening, after a nightmarish sequence, in a Lahore jail and slowly taking us back with a major flashback to the rendezvous, and very slowly towards the bleakest possible suffering a lover could endure. The lion’s share of the narrative is devoted to the sanctimonious love between Veer (Shah Rukh Khan) and Zaara (Preity Zinta) – divided, like a classic, between union and separation.
Veer meets Zaara in a rescue operation and realizes that she has come from Pakistan only to perform the funeral rites of her grandmother. Initially bewitched by the eyes of Zaara, Veer decides to establish and strengthen a familial bond between them when Zaara asks him to be a part of her prayer because, without him, she wouldn’t have fulfilled her grandmother’s dream to complete her funeral in India.
Veer’s love for Zaara rapidly grows, and his silent yearnings unfold more in silence than in dialogue, but his devotion to Zaara suffers a blow when Veer discovers Zaara is getting engaged to Raza (Manoj Bajpayee), which is nothing but a marriage set up for political understandings. When Veer visits Pakistan, Raza takes his revenge too when he realizes the celestial bond between Veer and Zaara and dictates that Veer incarcerate himself till his last breath by signing an affidavit that recognizes him as “Rajesh Rathore” – an Indian spy.
Being imprisoned for so long, Veer has learned to live with his memories and imagination of Zaara. Saamiya Siddiqui (Rani Mukerji) enters his life. A lawyer of human rights, initially, Saamiya is interested in abolishing the gender inequality existing in her country by winning the case, but slowly she gets entrapped in Veer’s narration of his story and attaches herself personally to the case, arranging a meet-up of Veer-Zaara inside the courtroom that plays out as a perfect denouement and leads us towards a happy ending. The reason we return to this film, and again to the beautiful melodies of its album, lies in the mythical tale of Veer and Zaara—a story that has come to live in our hearts more like a legend than a mere work of cinema.
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6. Om Shanti Om (2007)
Two decades down, and we are heading towards the third of this century, and still, many consider Farah Khan’s 2007 blockbuster “Om Shanti Om” as one of the best films to come from Bollywood in the popular discourse. We were not entirely surprised that the film came from Farah Khan, whose career has largely been built on flamboyant potboilers. Yet the prophetic wit embedded in the screenplay makes one pause and marvel at how the film seemed to anticipate today’s memes about nepotism and the endless motivational stories of outsiders trying to carve a place in an industry dominated by Kapoors and Khans—narratives that now flood our social media feeds.
The film has stood the test of time in such a manner that even Aryan Khan’s 2025 debut series, The “Ba**ds of Bollywood, “ only feels like a spin-off or a spiritual successor to “Om Shanti Om.” “Om Prakash Makhija” (played by Shah Rukh Khan) from works as an archetype for Aryan’s protagonist “Aasman Singh” (played by Lakshya Lalwani). This happens only when a film creates a legacy so great that other films en route to the same genre end up in its shadow, and the latter becomes a sort of mirror image of the former, as they cannot be seen in isolation without referring to the former.
SRK’s screen presence in “Om Shanti Om” is split into two characters, separated by death and thirty years. As Om Prakash Makhija, a junior artiste, he is less concerned with craft than with bagging a Filmfare, owning a bungalow, and above all, winning the heart of Shanti (Deepika Padukone), the era’s most sensational actress. None of these desires is fulfilled, and Makhija meets a tragic end. He is then reincarnated as Om Kapoor, a star whose very existence embodies a process of metempsychosis.
Kapoor’s realization that he is merely living the afterlife of Makhija sets the film’s ultimate tone, which gradually shifts from the enchanting world of pastiche and dreams [Rishi Kapoor, Sunil Dutt, and Rajesh Khanna dancing in cherished song numers (superbly recreated through Red Chillies VFX)], the gala dance where an entire industry could be found merrily dancing to celebrate a typical Bollywood success party, to a denouement of revenge punctuated by jump scares.
What makes “Om Shanti Om” so cherished is the way it transforms: no one at the outset could have guessed that such a magical, dreamlike spectacle would slowly wrap itself in a tense, sad drama, culminating in a climax of moral justice — all without derailing from the popular tropes that keep audiences glued to their seats.
5. Dil Se (1998)
To love. To be loved. To perish in love. Twenty-eight years later, Mani Ratnam’s timeless classic “Dil Se” still whispers in every lover’s ear: “Mad heart, be brave.” Bravery is the word that comes to mind whenever I think about this spectacular film. Amid a torrential downpour, on a desolate platform, Amarkanth Varma (Shah Rukh Khan) bumps into a stranger—who will later be called “Meghna” in the film (Manisha Koirala)—and, bewitched by love, keeps following her to know her … to understand her … and to unlock all those secrets that she has locked within her soul, until he perishes with her.
Amar is the son of a veteran army officer and works at All India Radio. He is charming, enthusiastic about his job, and above all, he is brave. His bravery transgresses all limits … be it in the case of walking into the base area of separatist militants in order to interview them or in the case of love—whatever it is, shying away from the target is contrary to his habit.
While his bravery as a journalist comes to us as a counter-narrative to all those mainstream media outlets that keep bantering about their fixed propaganda, Amar’s grit and courage in the course of love initially come as a subtext to the main plot, but slowly intermingle with the primary narrative. This intersection of courage and vulnerability in Amar’s character—both as a journalist and a lover—asks us to understand his madness, in which he perishes in the end.
“Dil Se” is not a simple film that portrays a simple love story against a political backdrop; rather, it is a complex narrative that restlessly documents a particular kind of political unrest and explores marginal spaces that we do not often get to see. What if I tell you, “Dil Se” is Shah Rukh Khan’s most political yet beautiful romantic film?
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4. Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa (1994)
“Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa” is one of those sweet-simple films that you love affectionately and unconditionally for what it is. It’s a film about a love triangle between a wealthy, talented boy, the daughter of a confectionery shop owner, and a clumsy chap who is talented only when he gets his trumpet in his hands. This chap – “Sunil” (Shah Rukh Khan) – has already failed three times in his exams and is forced by his father (Aanjjan Srivastav) to help in his motor-repairing garage, but Sunil dreams of winning “Ana’s” (Suchitra Krishnamoorthi) heart by any means possible.
He struggles to make ends meet and repeatedly runs into disappointment. Yet the most endearing thing about Sunil is that he rarely lets it weigh him down. Whatever he does, he does with such innocence that you laugh when he wants you to laugh and feel sorry for him when he wants you to. In short, he possesses that rare charm that makes you instantly fall in love with him.
However, the reason you’d love Sunil is perhaps not for his appearance but for what makes him who he is. In a scene, Sunil’s sister “Nikki” (Sadiya Siddiqui) says that Sunil has a special charm that melts people’s hearts wherever he goes, and I guess it is probably not his charm but his heart that makes people love him.
Shah Rukh, early in his career, probably had a dilemma in deciding the direction of his itinerary as an actor, as can be argued from his selection of earlier films that often contradicted each other in terms of the target audience and, of course, the aesthetics. His engagement with what can be called parallel cinema, adaptations of classical literary works, and his earlier roles as antagonists show that his maturity and growth have not been linear but always dialectical, making Shah Rukh what he is today.
However, with “Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa,” Shah Rukh Khan’s brief engagement with alternative cinema and character-driven experimentation came to a temporary pause—though “Anjaam” (1994) remains a partial exception. The film quietly set the direction of his career and his emerging public image. In retrospect, it can be seen as the precursor to the string of endearing “chocolate-boy” lovers he would go on to play throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s.
3. Chak De! India (2007)
In the 21st century, to date, Indian sports have very little room for games other than cricket. Organizing a Hockey World Cup, a U-17 Football World Cup, or efforts to popularize the national sport Kabaddi didn’t even manage to generate a handsome TRP, let alone sow the seeds of the games among audiences to garner a set of passionate viewers. From a sports perspective, India’s approach is extremely parochial. In such a society, making a film with the intention to pump up nationalism, about a heroic saga of a women’s national hockey team, is deeply political.
The Indian men’s cricket team winning the inaugural T20 World Cup and Shimit Amin’s “Chak De! India” releasing in the same year (2007) are among the rarest instances of serendipity our generation will remember. It is also perhaps the last popular event in which nationalism in India was cherished without jingoism. However, with such an unprecedented coincidence, there comes cultural damage when you see the titular song of the film hijacked by cricket fanatics. Cricket stadiums till date remain pumped up with Sukhwinder Singh’s brilliantly sung “Chak De! India” while the maker’s political and intellectual foray into the margins of sports and gender subsists in collective oblivion.
“Chak De! India” is about two struggles conjoined together: girls coming from different parts of India and struggling to put a collective effort while representing their country, and a veteran hockey player-turned-coach, “Kabir Khan” (played by Shah Rukh Khan), who was doomed to oblivion after losing a World Cup final to Pakistan and was accused of match-fixing. A rendezvous of their destiny culminates in bagging the first-ever international women’s hockey World Cup for India that the world, till then, was not prepared to witness.
The character of Kabir Khan finds his expression not so much in physical kinetic mannerisms but in a meditative angst channelized through potent dialogues and an indomitable mindset. The character, written by Jaideep Sahni, carves out the tough guy from Shah Rukh, who was typecast for featuring in regular romantic dramas. A distinct feature that makes Kabir a character worth remembering is the depiction of his journey that percolates a tenacity to regain a lost paradise and is less material, more spiritual in nature, which is a rare feat in the legacy of Bollywood sports dramas as well as in Shah Rukh Khan’s career.
Similar to Shah Rukh Khan Movies – Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh Khan on The Big Screen
2. My Name is Khan (2010)
The shift that followed pushed Shah Rukh Khan to move beyond the familiar Rahuls and Rajs, a trajectory that arguably culminated in Karan Johar’s “My Name Is Khan.” “My Name is Khan” predates all the unusual characters [“Gaurav” from “Fan” or “Bauaa” from Zero, etc.] that Shah Rukh was yet to engage with, and while the latter experimentations neither brought any fruits, in terms of either box office or critical acclamation, “My Name is Khan” remains one of the most political films made in this century to date.
The actor’s recent engagement with films bearing political relevance has been one of the major USPs that helped him regain the lost paradise – his box-office relevance – but using a mere political backdrop or a handful of statements carrying popular dissent are only temporal phenomena, while “My Name is Khan” stands the test of time for critically intermingling multiple narratives rooted in such grave concerns that still haunt humanity as a spectre, to say the least.
“Rizvan” (played by Shah Rukh) Khan (pronounced from the epiglottis) hates yellow and yelling. Asperger’s syndrome makes him appear different from those we call ‘normal,’ but Khan has an unparalleled intelligentsia that helps him, on one hand, to solve word games within a few seconds and, on the other, damaged his ties with “Zakir” (Jimmy Shergill) – his brother – years ago due to an envy that Zakir felt in his infancy. Rizvan, on his quest for happiness, finally finds it in “Mandira” (Kajol), whom he marries and with whom he adopts “Sam” (Arjan Aujla). Not long after, Rizvan finds his world shattered when “Sam” falls victim to a religious violence – a post-9/11 affair – that costs him his life.
Disparity that percolated through society in the 9/11 aftermath finds expression in Rizvan and Mandira’s breaking apart, and “My Name is Khan” becomes a testament that dares to document the crisis from the POV of a Muslim man who doesn’t refrain from clearly stating, “My name is Khan, and I’m not a terrorist.”
By the time “My Name is Khan” came, the Karan Johar–SRK partnership was believed to have exhausted itself. Carving out something like “My Name is Khan” from an actor-director partnership known only for box-office successes has rarely been this beautiful. Also, the film carves out reality from fantasy, and often one has to derive the arguments from the dialectical contestation of fantasy and reality – at times soothingly wrapped in Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy’s composition.
However, leaving aside the aesthetic implications, “My Name is Khan” remains one of the politically pertinent films that Shah Rukh Khan was a part of, and the beauty of the film lies in its honesty in placing a character suffering for his identity within a damaged fabric of democracy, which doesn’t reduce him to a Muslim only but rather offers a lens to critically analyse all sorts of identity crises to which humankind is still subordinated.
1. Swades (2004)
Ashutosh Gowariker harvested his best fruits in the span of only seven years (2001–2008). Of the three films he made in the mentioned period – “Lagaan” (2001), “Swades” (2004), and “Jodhaa Akbar” (2008) – “Swades” is deeply rooted in a Gandhian-Ambedkarite philosophy that helps it deliver a stern critique of the caste status quo in India. The film has stood the test of time, even after massive shifts in politico-cultural hegemonies, and still offers a critical lens to analyze and criticize an ecosystem that is haunted by the specter of untouchability.
An astronaut at NASA, currently working on a project called “Global Precipitation Measurement,” Mohan Bhargav (played by Shah Rukh Khan) returns to India after ages. Initially, his intention was to find his foster mother (Kishori Ballal) – who lives in a remote village named “Charanpur” – and take her back with him to the United States, where, according to Mohan, life is very easy and comfortable. But what was meant to be a short visit kept expanding as Mohan encountered an India that he had only probably heard about but never had a first-hand experience of. The beauty of “Swades” unfolds when the village engulfs Mohan and bewitches him on one hand, and on the other, he explores the disparities and lack of basic amenities that loom like a dark cloud over Charanpur.
Mohan’s growing affection for the village’s bucolic simplicity finds expression in his love for Gita (Gayatri Joshi) and in the quiet resolve he develops to bring light to the community. Yet this resolve emerges only after his interactions with the villagers, who initially welcome him warmly but gradually grow suspicious of the quasi-Yankee outsider, fearing that he might disrupt their cultural beliefs by imposing ideas imported from a distant and unfamiliar world.
The caste discrimination against Mela Ram (Daya Shankar Pandey) – with whom Mohan develops a kinship – the precarity of a farmer, a little kid selling water at some desolate station, and a Brahmin-dominated patriarchal milieu transform a man out of an American-accustomed astronaut who dedicates the rest of his life to the service of Charanpur.
The most powerful symbol Gowariker used in “Swades” appears when Mohan dances with the kids in a song (“Yeh Tara Woh Tara”) during a power cut, and the curtain that separates different castes drops silently and leads us to an image of assembled children cheering together in joy – an image Babasaheb would be proud of! The character of Mohan has the rare quality of becoming an idea rather than a mere character, by transcending the flesh and blood of an imagined human being, and works as a beacon of hope for us in the darkest of times.
