He was and will always be India’s original heartthrob with classic elegance, rugged earthiness, warm brown eyes, a cleft chin and a heart-warming, naughty smile. Above all was a colossal onscreen carriage and a debonair charm that kept and will keep Vinod Khanna alive in our consciousness. So much so that fans and colleagues across the industry pleaded for the dignity of his fragmented self in the last days, a cry that became a collective angst against images that would rather not be seen. Seldom has today’s “put it out there” brigade been so respectful about a star’s cult appeal.
If the brooding Bachchan charisma was intimidating, Khanna, who was considered to be worthy of an equal appeal, was endearing, distant and immediate at the same time. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why Godrej signed him up as a brand messenger in the mid-80s to relaunch and upgrade Cinthol soap and create a Marlboro Man-type equivalent, a raw, too-good-to-be-true male who could get into your room with ease. “Vinod’s body confidence soap,” ran the tagline as the actor rode a horse on the beach and exuded confidence in a smart tux. That was Khanna, who rode his destiny. Perhaps even conquered it.
It was this innate confidence that gave us our first versatile star who transitioned from genres and characters with admirable ease. Much before Shah Rukh Khan made the anti-hero to hero switch seem like an achievement, Khanna began as a villain. Yet such was his stature that his negative characters left as much of an impression on us as his positive portrayals. Good-looking he was but when it came to his roles, that facet was incidental as the actor in him took charge. Through the first half of the 70s, he outshone himself in terms of variety, scale and range. As the disgruntled angry young ganglord in Gulzar’s Mere Apne (1972), he made the black sunglasses and sideburns a part of street cred with his fiery line, Baap ka beta hai toh saamne aa. If this defined him as an actor then, he stood out as a dacoit in Raj Khosla’s Mera Gaon Mera Desh, despite sharing screen space with such stalwarts like Sunil Dutt and Dharmendra. But it was his conflicted guilt and passion play in Achanak (1974) that made us go with his character of Major Ranjeet Khanna, who is shattered when he gets to know about his wife’s infidelity, is sent to the gallows for murdering her but still insists on immersing her ashes. By the time he played a criminal in Hath Ki Safai (1975), he had picked up the Filmfare Best Supporting Actor award. As Kishan, a character with shades of grey, in Parvarish (1978), Khanna was smartly able to get the audience to side with him. However, his kind of roles never got him mainstream awards back then.
Driven enough to choose his unique characters, he was an equally enthusiastic participant in the age of multi-starrers, repeatedly pairing up with Amitabh Bachchan no less. The two played con artists in Hera Pheri, were brothers in Amar Akbar Anthony — Khanna the mature and sober counterpart to Bachchan’s flamboyance — and the counterpoints in Muqaddar Ka Sikandar. The last was one of the biggest hits of 1978 with Bachchan as the lead but Khanna held his own and was given almost equal footage. So much so that gossip mills went into an overdrive about ego tussles, insecurities and how the two were not keen to work further anymore. Till date, Amar and Anthony’s brotherly confrontation outside a bar is remembered. As is Khanna’s thundering, “Izzat woh daulat hai, jo ek baar chali gayi toh phir kabhi haasil nahi ki ja sakti,” from Muqaddar Ka Sikandar. Nobody knows what actually transpired between the two or what would have happened had Khanna continued his uninhibited streak. For he was indeed emerging as a polarity.
But perhaps the foibles of an ego-driven, fragile world, where material excesses sucked everybody into isolation, got to him deep.
Soon after, he took up spirituality and devoted weekends to Osho ashram in Pune, turning a gardener. Saffron-clad and bead-wrapped, he philosophised on the sets. But was on call whenever the director was ready to roll. These were the heady days for he had just made death and sacrifice look like a great cinematic moment in Qurbaani (1980). Few know that Bachchan had passed over this role and himself died as an onscreen hero in the climax later in Shakti (1982). “Maine jab se hosh sambhala hai… khilono ki jagah maut se khelta aaya hoon” became an epic dialogue. Prophetic too.
Then he gave it up, just like that. Khanna returned signing amounts, held a press conference with his wife and two sons, and left for the Osho commune at Oregon, USA. Perhaps the twist in the tale was not sudden. For nobody had expected an alumni of St Xavier’s High School, Delhi Public School and later the Barnes School, Nashik or a graduate of Sydenham College to venture into Hindi films. But young Khanna decided to do films after watching the Dilip Kumar-Madhubala epic Mughal-E-Azam and the Dev Anand-Waheeda Rehman starrer Solva Saal.
As a spiritualist, he drifted away from his family too, separating from his first wife Gitanjali. But as fate would have it, the Osho commune in the US collapsed over charges of misappropriation of assets, corruption and cult cronyism. Khanna, though a changed man, returned a prodigal. His second innings was not quite a ski run but it had the peaks of Dayavan (1989), where he convincingly played underworld don Shakti Vellu who avenges the killing of his father by the local police, Mahesh Bhatt’s Jurm (1990) and Yash Chopra’s Chandni (1989). Be it as a cop who comes dangerously close to his protectee or the bereaved man looking for a second chance in love, Khanna did infuse the formulaic characters with his own individuality.
Though he was happy in the creative space, as evidenced by his slow but consistent run of character roles (the most remembered being as Salman Khan’s friendly step father, Prajapati Pandey, in the Dabangg series), he devoted himself to social service, taking care of riot victims following the 1993 Mumbai blasts. He simultaneously got into electoral politics. He re-married and had children again. In 1997, he joined the BJP and won from Punjab’s Gurdaspur constituency. In 1999 and 2004, he was re-elected to the lok Sabha from the same constituency. He was appointed the Minister of State for Culture and Tourism and later the Minister of State for External Affairs in the government of then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. He lost narrowly in 2009 to Pratap Singh Bajwa (Congress) but avenged his defeat in 2014 by winning from Gurdaspur for the fourth time. Khanna remained popular in the constituency despite accusations that he remained absent. But he was egoless in his approach, not minding to lunch in a corner at the Parliament canteen whenever the House was in session. Ups and downs did not matter to him, so long as he did it right and was ready to learn from his mistakes. He would free himself, much like the protagonist in lekin.
Khanna, then, was the perfect gentleman, one that comes as a sample study rather than assembly line.
His roller coaster ride through the film industry and politics never had any full stops. The song “ruk jana nahin tu kahin haar ke kaanton pe chalke milenge saaye bahaar ke” (from Imtihan in which he co-starred with Tanuja) seemed to embody the philosophy of his life.