Salman Khan, who completes 35 years in the Hindi film industry on Tuesday, has definitively redefined the meaning of muscular fandom, becoming one of those rare stars whose successes and failures have little or no impact on their popularity.
There’s a sequence in ‘Biwi Ho Toh Aisi’, which came out 35 years today, giving Salman Khan his first role in Hindi cinema, in which he is dancing. Or something like that. He’s on a bed, throwing his arms and legs about, a Michael Jackson poster on the wall overlooking his antics. He’s wearing a vest and tight jeans. His hair is shoulder-length shaggy, his biceps buff, the muscles not as rock-hard as they would be, but clearly visible
Nothing in that clunky first appearance, where he comes off as just another Bollywood hopeful, suggested that he was going to be one of the biggest stars in Hindi cinema.
The Farooq Shaikh-Rekha-Bindu starrer was one of those high-pitched melodramas that Bollywood used to churn out at alarmingly frequent intervals, featuring the kind of screechy saas-bahu clashes that Ekta Kapoor resurrected much later to great success, changing the face of Indian TV.
It’s really quite a coincidence– the kind movie gods love– that from that mess also emerged Salman, who followed up his wholly embarrassing debut with Sooraj Barjatya’s mammoth hit ‘Maine Pyar Kiya’ ( 1989), which redefined youthful romance in Bollywood. ‘Dosti ka ek usool hai, madam, no sorry, no thank you’, says Salman’s smiley Prem to Bhagyashree’s simpering Suman, and that single line effectively sealed the fate, forever and anon, of those who liked to mind their ps and qs.
The high-on-family-values Rajshri production contained early warning signs of a couple of things: that Prem would become a much-used screen name of Loverboy Salman, and that that bare chest, which we kept getting flashes of through the film, was going to be such a strong signature that entire climaxes would be created around the moment Salman would go shirtless.
‘Maine Pyar Kiya’ slung Salman to such a dizzying height of stardom, the kind people dream of and only a select few ever achieve, that he’s never really come off it, give or take a black buck or two, or a court case or few. There was only one other star at the time who could give Salman serious competition: Aamir, who also came from an established film family, had just had a huge hit in the 1988 ‘Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak’; the duo would have to wait a few more years for Shah Rukh to join them, with the 1993 ‘Deewana’, to create the enduring Khandom which has shaped mainstream Bollywood, and held us in thrall since then.
After MPK, Salman found himself in several similar knock-offs, one worse than the other. He would have sunk into oblivion, if Barjatya hadn’t rescued him with ‘Hum Aapke Hain Koun!’. There are those that gleefully called it a long ‘shaadi’ video, but that 1994 film turned out to be a landmark: it changed Bollywood in fundamental ways, whose impact we are still experiencing.
The film cemented Salman’s youthful appeal, created the super-hit pair of Salman-Madhuri Dixit, launched a purple sweetheart sari blouse which took over the bridal market, and, with its popular song “Waah waah Ramji, jodi kya banayi,” established a clear social-religious hierarchy, in which the ‘moonhboley’ Muslim ‘chaacha’ and ‘chaachi’ are firmly relegated to the sidelines, leaving the centre-stage to be filled with a series of functions like ‘moonh-dikhai, sagaai, joota-chhupaai, vidaai, god bharai’ interspersed with songs. We didn’t know it then, but HAHK would foreground the coming dominant cultural space: thirty-five years on, minority-religion characters have been excised from our movies, even as minor characters, unless they are villainous or superfluous.
That a Muslim superstar managed to kickstart this change speaks to both an India that used to be, and the country that it was in the process of becoming. Not that Salman, son of Salim Khan, who himself once creatively partnered Javed Akhtar in writing such classics as ‘Sholay’, and ‘Deewar’, made much of his religious identity. Like the other two Khans, he just happened to be Muslim, and his legions of fans didn’t care: as far as they were concerned, Bhai (by now, there was no need to spell out Salman because there was only one Bhai; the other bad boy of Bollywood, Sanjay Dutt, was Baba), was the god of all things. He just had to appear on screen, his trademark blue bracelet to the fore, and all would well
Source-The Indian Express
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