The spectral Irrfan Khan
What is the measure of a character who is not a father, not a ghost, not a person, not a place, not quite the length of a feature story, not precisely its quarter. Yet, its all. "Jhelum bhi main, Chinar bhi, Shia bhi main, Sunni bhi main, aur Pandit bhi" (I am Jhelum, I am Chinar, I am Shia, I am Sunni, and I am the Pandit.), as Roohdar, Irrfan Khan's sliver of a character in Haider, puts it. It is one thing to represent a person, solidified out of the pages of a text, quite another to play an essence of a story. We are seated at a long wooden table in the courtyard of Lai Bhaari director Nishikant Kamat's Aaram Nagar bungalow-office. On the walls are art works by architect friend Kunal Naik, making the space devoid of filmi self-aggrandisation which is such a leit-motif to the film world. There is a zen calm here. Irrfan, barely a week past Haider's release, is clad in a white shirt, his face flushed with the many more ghosts he is in the throes of taking on. He switches off the fans, rolls himself a cigarette, and, over a cup of Kamat's special chai, unfurls...
In discussing the scene where he is strung up next to Haider's father in a prison cell, Khan, who turned down the role of Hamlet's father originally, told his old friend and director Vishal Bharadwaj, to let him stand for all of Kashmir. "I found it a very important film" Khan says. It moved him beyond claiming Kashmir as an Indian, to seeking what goes on within in. Taking the straightjacket as it were, off the perspective. "Your heart cries" he says, tenderly. He found little literature, nobody writes, no reporting, no television is telling you the inside stories. When we went there, they told me "yahaan, har ghar mein ek Nirbhaya hai (we have a Nirbhaya in every home)." The more Khan read about and visited Kashmir in the process of his research, the more numb he became till he reached a point where he could not speak of what he was experiencing. This is the subtext to his role. "Because the pain of Kashmir is not only of the Muslims, and the Pandits, it is also of Partition. The pain of Kashmir must carry all the pains of its past. And that role is carrying all the pain," he says. How you present that, is your measure.
When you say there was a mystery to a role, how will you pinpoint that, Khan asks. As it varies from actor to actor, five actors with the same research material channel that pain very differently; it will vary from ghost to ghost, too. His role in the forthcoming Qissa, is a different sort of a Why. In Qissa he is careful to be deader. What does it mean to be a ghost, what makes him linger, he ponders this to play it. Some actors like to channel life, they will say, but to Khan, life can get boring too. It is the story that must offer, and hold, promise. That's what you go after. Sometimes, he says, you get cheated. It's part of the process.
Length, he says, is highly overrated. If there is length, then there has to be a back story, and if there is a back story, it has to connect with the audience and with the plot in a myriad different ways. You can go deeper when you are abrupt. Not that he is here to be a short role specialist, he laughs, but there is an instinct to the role that pushes him to say "I want to do this" more than it merely being a standard lead.
Perhaps this draw for depth over length is a survival instinct gleaned from when he found himself a letter writer turned negative on the cutting floor of Mira Nair's Salaam Bombay to the all too short villainy of Dr Rajit Ratha in The Amazing Spider-Man 3. From the actor who found himself largely sidelined till, as long-haired and sword wielding Lafcadia, Asif Kapadia's Warrior took him to the BAFTAs. His struggle is well documented, and long past. Behind him is Life of Pi, and round the corner is Jurassic World, Nishikant Kamat's Madhari (formerly Dangal), and Sujoy Ghosh's Durga Rani Singh. The past is not something he takes pleasure in dwelling on. Even so, Khan has never made a living off peddling exotic India. It is a choice he says he must constantly make. "Because in the mainstream what is constantly being flung at you is the regular. It is a constant choice. To make a living, earn some money, or find what moves you. What feeds you, fuels you, is not always money." And who is to say what moves you? We don't have a Ritwik Ghatak or a Satyajit Ray anymore, consumerism pushes us to be one dimensional, a constant stream from all manner of media leaves you with no time to assimilate, but in all that, what becomes possible is to push those boundaries to find a language that works.
Whether it is a Jasbaa in which he plays the romantic lead cast with Aishwarya Rai, the unlikely lover to Kangna Ranaut in Divine Lovers, or Sunderkand in which he must romance typically Bollywood glamour girl Tapasee Pannu, (all of which he is reluctant to bring up until they are sealed and signed), it is said you never really arrive in Bollywood till you have played the romantic lead. How does it matter to he who cannot define himself, even by the portfolio of films done in a single year, as a Bollywood or a Hollywood actor? "Oh, but it does. It matters immensely. I became an actor to do love stories. I am obsessed with love stories, if somebody gave me a love story to do at 90, if alive, I would do it," Khan says.
He learnt love from watching Raj Kapoor's films. The way Dilip Kumar used to interact with women. Who do you stand for, as a lover, consumes him? He is an actor unable to bide by definitions. Destiny denied him the role of a lover in his early days. Maybe, he thinks, it has been left for him to redefine who a lover is. Guide, with Dev Anand, is the greatest love story ever told, says Khan. "The filmmaker is discussing the limitations and boundaries of life. Then you are trying to find love to be free. But then you find the ultimate freedom ultimately when you are rejected in life. When conventional love doesn't give you space, then in desperation you find the ultimate freedom."
The sparrows chirp, the whirr of the fan starts up again, and it doesn't seem as though it is film he is talking of.