The last of India’s mythic superstars
By Rhea Mogul and Ayushi Shah, CNN
Mumbai, India (CNN) — The ritual begins, as it always does, with a pilgrimage.
People pour in from the dense warrens of India’s financial capital and from dusty villages thousands of kilometers away, all flowing towards the fortified, sea-facing Mumbai home of actor Shah Rukh Khan.
The crowd is a mix of teenagers angling for a glimpse of the icon inside; middle-aged women for whom he was a first love; grown men who see their own aspirations mirrored in his trajectory.
Known as “SRK” by millions, and “King Khan” to his fans, he turned 60 last week, and the chaotic display of devotion outside his home is a testament to a level of stardom rarely seen elsewhere.
The air is thick with chants celebrating his milestone. Some have waited overnight. They don masks or T-shirts with his face on, or clutch posters of his movies. All are here for the same sacrament: to get a glimpse of the superstar and be included in the sweep of his signature open-armed embrace.
“I have loved him for a long time so I have come here to wish him happy birthday,” one fan told a local news agency. “Happy, happy birthday Shah Rukh brother. Happy birthday to you.”
Another said he comes here every year. “I’ve been a fan of him since I was born… I have watched all his films,” they said.
This bond was forged in a bygone era. As India opened its economy to the world in the 1990s, Khan opened its heart. He was an outsider who stormed the dynastic gates of Bollywood with little more than wit, ambition, and dimples that could disarm a subcontinent.
And while the adoring thousands gather outside his home to worship a film deity, they may also be witnessing the twilight of India’s cinematic gods.
“As stars become more relatable and fandom less devotional, the star-fan contract is less sacrosanct today,” said a recent IMDb report analyzing the last 25 years of Indian cinema.
In today’s fractured attention economy of streaming, the barbed wire of polarizing politics, and the cacophony of social media, winning adoration on this scale isn’t just difficult; it might be impossible.
As the IMDb report put it: “It’s time to stop searching for the next Shah Rukh Khan.”
The spectacle outside Khan’s home, Mannat, is an echo of a moment that began three decades ago, when India itself was being reborn. The name itself is a powerful metaphor: Mannat means a prayer answered, and the crowd gathered here treat Khan’s home like a shrine.
In 1991, the government dismantled the protectionist economic policies of its socialist past, cracking open the nation to the world. It was a policy shift that ignited a period of economic growth and industrial expansion that essentially reshaped the country. Satellite television brought a plethora of choice into the living room, Western brands began to appear in shops and, for a burgeoning middle class, the definition of success was suddenly rewritten.
An exhilarating mantra became mainstream: Anyone can make it.
Into this moment stepped Khan.
A Muslim boy from a middle-class Delhi neighborhood, Khan says he was shaped by a household rich in intellect but often short on cash.
His father, Meer Taj Mohammed Khan, was a lawyer and Indian independence activist from Peshawar, in modern-day Pakistan, who ran a series of failed businesses. His mother, Lateef Fatima, was the family’s anchor, according to the younger Khan.
“I come from a very normal lower-middle-class family. I saw a lot of failure,” he said during a 2012 speech at Yale University. “My father was a beautiful man and the most successful failure in the world… We were quite poor actually and let me tell you… poverty entails fear and stress and sometimes depression.”
He began acting in school plays. By the age of 23, he was already on television in the successful series “Fauji” (Soldier). But just as his career was taking flight, his personal world fell apart.
The death of his mother, years after he lost his father, prompted a move to Mumbai, the heart of India’s film industry.
“I was sad in Delhi,” Khan told CNN in a 2008 interview. “I said to myself: OK, come (to Mumbai) for a change of scene. Maybe I’ll enjoy myself for a year and get over my depression of my parents’ death. But I just I couldn’t go back… I was never trying to be a movie star, I became one by chance.”
Khan made his big-screen debut in the 1992 romantic drama “Deewana” (Obsessed) and soon became known for playing villainous, menacing characters in films like “Darr” (Fear) and “Baazigar” (Gambler). But it was his pivot to the romantic hero in the 1995 cult hit “Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge” (The Brave Hearted Will Take the Bride, widely known as DDLJ) that catapulted him to superstardom.
His character, Raj, presented a new model of masculinity that wasn’t the angry young man of the previous generation. He was the empathetic partner for the new one, offering a vision of modern love that felt safe and aspirational.
Bollywood certainly has other megastars, like Deepika Padukone, who is among India’s most celebrated women actors; Aamir Khan, known for his versatility; and Salman Khan. Yet, their followings are distinct from the quasi-religious fervor thar surrounds Khan.
It is a phenomenon of near-mythic proportions, engendering a devotion so profound as to lead to the scenes of mass pilgrimage outside Khan’s Mumbai home.
Sher Mohammed had traveled 2,200 kilometers from his village in the eastern state of Jharkhand and waited 95 days for a chance to meet Khan. When Khan learned of Mohammed’s determined vigil, he came out to the street to personally greet his fan.
“Everyone told me I won’t be able to meet him… I got even more motivated to meet him,” Mohammed said. “I felt so happy.”
Also present was Visharukh, Khan’s self-proclaimed “biggest fan,” whose home is plastered with posters of the actor, and whose children are named “Simran” and “Aryan” – after Khan’s love interest in “DDLJ” and his real-life son, respectively.
Visharukh’s shrine to Khan is just one thread in an intricate tapestry of fandom.
In her book, “Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh,” author Shrayana Bhattacharya explores what he means to women as someone who challenged masculinity in a newly liberalized economy.
“For 15 years, I thought I was talking to fans about Khan,” she said. “Eventually, he became a research device for hundreds of his female fans to use his icon to talk about their own frustrated attempts to assert economic and emotional independence in one of world’s most insidious patriarchies.”
For Bhattacharya, there is no single explanation for his appeal.
For a migrant tribal domestic worker, for instance, she found the appeal wasn’t rooted in grand romance. She most appreciated his characters’ willingness to participate in domestic life, Bhattacharya said, citing “simple gestures such as being in the kitchen in his films, helping with chores.”
For the nation’s elites, Bhattacharya found Khan symbolized something entirely different. He was a living embodiment of the dream that hard work could lead to limitless success. He represented, as she put it, “the myth of meritocracy at a time when India started its love affair with GDP growth and consumer spending.”
And for another crucial group – the first generation of women to ever work in their families – she found his films offered a vital refuge. Khan’s imagery became a “necessary entertainment and escape when their everyday rebellion of prioritizing a career over marriage caused heartbreak or exhaustion,” Bhattacharya said.
“He is one person, but each fan has projected their aspirations and fantasies onto him in their own unique and deeply diverse ways.”
Khan’s dominance is quantifiable: he appears in 20 of the top 130 Indian movies of the past 25 years, according to IMDb’s dataset.
But in today’s world of digital creators, those seeking fame face competition in a way Khan’s generation never could have imagined.
This new reality is the daily grind for Shivam Khatri, an aspiring actor in Mumbai. He, too, left his small town for the city of dreams, but his hustle operates in a different universe. For him, the formula has been inverted: where Khan became a star and then a brand, actors now must become a brand first.
“It’s not like someone gets picked up from the street,” Khatri said from the home he shares with several other people. “Social media, web shows, it’s changed everything.”
The influence of stardom in India is immense. Cultivated over years through a series of box-office hits, it can define eras, create cultural touchstones, and command a loyal fanbase that transcends generations.
But the very nature of the connection between stars and their audience is now evolving, according to the IMDb report.
“What was once a carefully mediated connection, built through iconic characters and controlled narratives, has become more porous,” it said. “The closing of the metaphorical gap between the big screen’s larger-than-life star and the one on the (Instagram) reel you can hold in your hand has changed the equation between the star and the fan.”
Khatri knows his follower count is as important as his headshot as he competes not just with actors but with food bloggers, comedians and dancers for screen time. “Everyone should have an online presence now,” he said, “and you have to constantly check it.”
His struggle illustrates how the singular path to box-office fame has been replaced by a thousand algorithm-driven streams on social media apps like Instagram and TikTok.
For Ibrahim Qadri, a Khan lookalike and social media influencer from Gujarat, it pays to trade on the existing fame of others, supplying a demand for connection that the real SRK could never sate.
His Instagram feed is a meticulous recreation of Khan’s world: the signature arm-spread pose in a mustard field, a lip-sync to a classic song, a frame-by-frame remake of a famous movie scene. He is, in many ways, more accessible than the real Khan, making a living through brand deals with local businesses and paid appearances at weddings.
“When I perform, I don’t think I’m imitating,” Qadri said. “I become him. I feel like I am him.”
This profound devotion, which has garnered him more than 2 million followers, comes with a paradox: He might be the only person in India who doesn’t want to meet Khan.
“I’ve said that many times,” Qadri explains. “Because if I meet him, I feel my passion will end… what will be left to do in life?”
As a Muslim icon embraced by a Hindu-majority nation, Khan has, for many, been the living embodiment of India’s post-liberalization promise. He attended a Christian school, married a Hindu woman, and consistently championed a vision of national identity that transcended religion.
“We don’t talk about Hindu-Muslim,” he once said in a 2020 interview in Hindi. “My wife is Hindu, I’m a Muslim, and our children are Hindustan (Indian).”
But in today’s era of political polarization, defined by a new wave of Hindu nationalism, that same identity has been weaponized, transforming him from a unifying symbol into a cultural battleground.
The 2023 release of his action film “Pathaan” (Warrior) served as a flashpoint. The brief appearance in a musical sequence of a female actor in a saffron bikini – a color associated with Hinduism – ignited a coordinated firestorm of outrage from far-right groups and politicians, who framed it as a deliberate insult to the religion.
Calls for a nationwide boycott trended for weeks, and effigies of the actor were burned, according to local media reports. But the film’s eventual record-breaking success was a deafening rebuttal from his loyal fanbase.
“I don’t know if there will be another SRK or not,” said the author Bhattacharya. “What I do know is that we will need icons who unite us in conversation, not divide us into spiritual silos.”
Back at the birthday congregation in Mumbai, a sea of fans surges outside Khan’s home. As the day wears on, the crowd swells to a formidable throng. Police struggle to maintain order, their wooden sticks cracking against the pavement in a futile attempt to control the sheer mass of people.
Afternoon bleeds into evening, and as the sun sets over the Arabian Sea, the collective hope that they’ll see their hero begins to fade. A message appears on X, confirming their disappointment. “Have been advised by authorities that I will not be able to step out and greet all you lovely people who have been waiting for me,” Khan writes, adding his “deepest apologies.”
For Khatri, the aspiring actor, there will never be another like Khan.
You have to almost be delusional to make it in the industry, he says. “It’s fun until the money runs out… It’s not going to happen in the next 10 days or months. But it will work out.”
Inspired by Khan, a vision board in the corner of his room reads: “India’s next superstar.”
The-CNN-Wire
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