A Grand Unified Theory of Aamir Khan
Despite being a flawed film, Aamir Khan’s Laal Singh Chaddha further extends the thesis of the superstar’s life’s work: a pan-India aspiration to live in a better country.
In hindsight, perhaps Forrest Gump—the 1994 Oscar-winning Hollywood blockbuster—was always made for Bollywood.
Over-the-top melodrama? Check. A barrage of serendipitous coincidences? Check. Hearts broken and hearts mended? Check. The ‘Maa’ factor? Absolutely. What about an unrelenting display of patriotism? Never in doubt.
Perhaps then, it’s no surprise that an official Indian adaptation of the cult-favourite dramedy finally appeared 28 years later in Laal Singh Chaddha, a flawed-yet-memorable film directed by Advait Chandan which sticks painfully close to its source material. Despite transplanting Gump’s (played by Tom Hanks) adventurous tale to the context of recent Indian history, LSC fails to truly shine out of the box and sniff the ambitious cultural impact of its predecessor. And yet, for lead star and cinema legend Aamir Khan, his most recent film was but a natural extension to his decades-long cinematic treatise, another ambitious chapter in a slew of movies which have attempted to see India more for its similarities than its differences.
It is an optimistic-nationalistic perspective, one which has contributed to some of the highest-grossing films ever made.
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Now 57, Khan—an actor, director, producer, writer—has been a defining feature for Indian cinema since the 80s. Often, his legacy is expressed not just as an individual but as part of the great triumvirate of mainstream Bollywood superstars who share a common last name and a penchant for box office dominance. Shah Rukh Khan, Aamir Khan, and Salman Khan, three Muslim men born in the same year (1965), all heartthrobs of the silver screen, all grasping success and power beyond one’s wildest imaginations, winning awards, accolades, international fame, earning a feverish fan following, and scripting their legend in many of India’s most memorable films.
Yet, the Khans each took a different path to success, with rarely an overlap in their on-screen personas once they truly hit their strides in the 90s. Together, the three made for pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that defined Indian cinemagoers.
For lead star and cinema legend Aamir Khan, his most recent film was but a natural extension to his decades-long cinematic treatise, another ambitious chapter in a slew of movies which have attempted to see India more for its similarities than its differences.
Shah Rukh has long been the poster boy of romance, the ideal lead of some of the most successful (and culturally significant) rom-coms ever made. He was the sensitive hero, a listener, a friend, a lover, not a fighter. Meanwhile, Salman’s most popular work has usually been as the lead action hero, one who mixed brawn with some comedic charm to dismantle opponents and win the ladies. This is an extremely broad generalization, but women wanted to be with Shah Rukh, while men wanted to be Salman.
Where did that leave Aamir?
For the past twenty years or so, Aamir Khan’s on-screen profile has been a rebellion against the idea of a set profile itself. There has been no prototypical Aamir character to define him by. Of course, he has flirted with roles of a lover (like Shah Rukh’s romances) or a fighter (like Salman’s action heroes). But more than anything, it has been his out-of-the-box characters—many that actively sought risk, with physical and mental transformations—that have set him apart. And, even when he has settled for the role of a ‘traditional hero’, he has placed this heroic ideal in settings that were highly uncommon for the big screen, telling stories that challenged the norm of predictable Bollywood blockbusters.
If there is a thread connecting Aamir’s direction as a performer and storyteller, it has come not as much as in the individual, but through a grander vision of what a character can mean for the country. Since the turn of the century, Khan’s characters have often been stand-ins for ideal men at the macro, national scale, of the type of men who seek to instruct, educate, and transform the nation—as much as they hope to entertain it.
The list is long; Khan has appeared in over 50 movies, and has taken risks in character and content from the very beginning, including in memorable films like Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikander, Andaz Apna Apna, Rangeela, and more. But the transformation towards his true pan-Indian obsessions began with Lagaan, the classic 2001 drama set in 19th century colonial times, and the first release under Khan’s own production house. Khan’s character, Bhuvan, leads a team of ragtag young Indians in a cricket match against a team of colonizing British officers, where the stakes are as high as the livelihood of the villagers. The match serves as a perfect allegory of rebellion, of burdened Indians rising up against their colonizers and beating them at their own game. Marrying India’s two great national pastimes—cricket and film—was a match made in heaven, as Lagaan went on to win a number of domestic and international accolades, and set the then 36-year-old Khan towards an ambitious new trajectory for his career.
However, Khan immediately subverted all expectations with the release of Dil Chahta Hai, which hit the screens just a few months later. A smaller story of friendship and youth, Dil Chahta Hai became a beacon for the India’s young, where a new generation were finding their voice, their motivations and ambitions. “Hum hain naye, andaaz kyon ho purana?” asked one of the film’s most popular songs. We’re new, why should our perspective be old?
And the character subversions continued. To be an Aamir Khan fan meant not be a fan of a personality, but a fan of the content that this personality represented. If Shah Rukh and Salman filled theatre seats with fans who expected to see their heroes in reliably-similar avatars, Aamir was able to pack theatres with a trust he’d earned over the message in his movies—aided, of course, with some of his superstar charm and ingenious marketing strategies.
Even as the character differed from film to film, an Aamir Khan-starrer usually meant that the audience was in for a lesson for ideas of transformational social changes to their country. There was a return to Lagaan-like rebellion against the Raj in Mangal Pandey: The Rising. A double role in Rang De Basanti presented Khan both as a pre-Independence freedom fighter and a present-day college student standing up against corruption. There was the arts teacher in his directorial debut Taare Zameen Par, who hoped to teach Indian parents about accepting all children despite any neurological or social differences. There was the bright college student in 3 Idiots who represented the value of creative thinking and joy amidst the dreary and dangerous competition in India’s academic institutions. There was an alien in PK, who arrived to India to criticize religious differences between communities. There was the true-life representation of a father in Dangal, who looked beyond gender stereotypes to help his daughters become national wrestling legends. And most recently, there was the titular character in Laal Singh Chaddha—India’s very own Forrest Gump—who overcomes his personal limitations to discover the beauty of a diverse country.
In between these larger expressions of Indianness, Khan also produced and hosted the chat show Satyamev Jayate. Airing from 2012-2014, the show was an idea both simple and revolutionary, where the star actor sat among common citizens to discuss India’s many social issues, including caste untouchability, domestic violence, mental health, LGBT communities, corruption, ecological concerns, and more. Khan’s off-screen persona mirrored many of his characters on screen: an emphatic teacher, listener, and entertainer.
From time to time, Aamir enjoyed some dalliances of on-screen characters into Shah Rukh-Salman territories, such as the romantic drama Fanaa or the action-thriller Ghajini (a remake of a Tamil film of the same name). But Aamir Khan’s name by then had become synonymous with risk and experimentation. Between the roles he portrayed and the films that he produced under his banner, he had achieved something rare in the Indian film industry: the ability to provide relatively ‘alternative’ content to a mainstream audience.
Lucrative success followed. Whenever Khan released a film, it undoubtedly became one of the highest grossers of its year. Five of his films—Ghajini, 3 Idiots, Dhoom 3, PK, and Dangal— have held records for being the highest-grossing Indian film of all time. Four of the highest-grossing Hindi films ever made star Khan or were produced by him.
Before Laal Singh Chaddha, Khan had figured out his own formula for ‘hat-ke’ cinema, one that chased unconventional content, while still exploring themes that catered to the country’s most conventional urges of nationalistic pride or grand social unifiers.
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After spending years trying to rehabilitate the social fabric of his country, the mood of the nation slipped further away from Khan. A right-wing, majoritarian government came into power, pushing India far from the liberal and social ideals that he eschewed in his films and chat show.
Some of the turmoil began with the well-intentioned (if clumsily-executed) 2014 film PK, where Aamir played the titular character: a Bhojpuri-speaking alien who lands on Earth to find an India shockingly poisoned and divided by religious dogma and fundamentalism. PK searches for the presence of god among the corruption of religion—all religions, for that is the pan-India, Aamir Khan way—and uses disarming innocence to show some of the hypocrisies of Indian society.
PK was a sensational hit, becoming the highest-grossing Indian film in both domestic and international markets. But controversy was right around the corner. Pro-Hindu organizations complained about the depiction and what they deemed to be a criticism of their gods. It was perhaps the first time that Khan’s own religious agency was brought into question on a large scale. His ‘misdeed’ was that that he was a Muslim satirizing Hinduism—even if PK satirizes Islam, too.
PK was released the same year that the BJP and its alliance won the general election, thrusting Narendra Modi to the seat of prime minister. The result further accelerated the rise of intolerance towards Indian minorities; the following year, Khan, in a moment of candidness, spoke about his personal insecurities as a Muslim in India, even confessing that his wife suggested that they leave the country.
This is the India as envisioned by Khan’s cinematic utopias: diverse, tolerant, quirky, vulnerable, intelligent… and kind.
But by now, Khan was swimming against the rapid tides of division.
The outcry about intolerance only generated more intolerant outcries. Khan never left the country, of course; instead, he continued to chug along more stories that seemed to be written from the same thematic perspective of social improvement that he had explored in Satyamev Jayate. Two of these films, Dangal and Secret Superstar—exploring a conservative father’s support of female equality and a Muslim teenager’s dream of stardom against cultural roadblocks, respectively—became some of the biggest hits of All Time.
Now in his 50s, Khan was hardly the ‘leading man’ anymore, but the evolution to more mature characters was handled with grace. Even with the whiff of controversy, he continued to make films that both related to and instructed to a large swathe of Indian and global audiences—all while retaining his Midas touch for box office success.
If age couldn’t stop him, perhaps the mood of our times finally did. First, the pandemic and subsequent lockdown delayed all productions. Then, came the audiences shift towards at-home (or on-mobile) options for entertainment, as streaming services quickly threatened to turn the theatrical experience into an anachronism. And finally, as the release of Khan’s latest project—Laal Singh Chaddha—approached, Bollywood was in the midst of fierce rejection from right-leaning audiences waging a culture war against the industry’s alleged propagation of our constitutional secular values. PK and Khan’s 2015 comments came back to haunt him. There were fervent calls for LSC’s boycott. And this time, deep into Modi’s second term as prime minister, the country’s divisions had become wider than ever.
Despite the ₹180 crore budget, LSC underwhelmed at the box office. It’s relative failure—set against Khan’s past high expectations—could be attributed to any of the reasons above. But truthfully, it just isn’t a great film. The close imitation of Forrest Gump is frustrating, and LSC fails to capture the emotional weight of the most affecting moments borrowed from Gump’s life: The first run (“Bhaag Laal Bhaag”), Laal’s mother’s death, his many separations of Rupa, the horror of war, Aman’s reveal, etc.
Negative word of mouth spread fast. In the past, Khan’s star-power and promotional hype was enough to drive audiences to the theatre. Now, most people chose rather to save their time, money, and effort for the OTT release—if they even watched it at all.
But for those who did watch LSC, the film arrived as a natural extension of Khan’s grand unified India project. It became clear quite early that Forrest Gump—which itself was adapted from a Winston Groom novel—wasn’t just a Bollywood film in American disguise, but a film that was almost destined to be tackled by someone with Khan’s ambitions, one that projects the innocence of a ‘simple’ everyman over the complexities of a whole nation.
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Chaddha, like Gump, is a traditional underdog who overcomes his obstacles to achieve the opposite of his expectations. Burdened with a disability that requires him to wear leg braces as a child, he nevertheless becomes a champion runner—eventually running across the length of the country. Seemingly lacking in intelligence, he is able to use courage and goodness of character to become a war hero and a successful businessman. Both Chaddha and Gump represent the aspirations of their respective democracies, where the lesson is that this ‘goodness of character’ can help achieve the improbable, where even an underdog fighting against the odds can find heroism, prosperity, and love.
Wisely, the makers of LSC begin the film at a railway station platform and on a train. The station could be anywhere in the country, but its motifs are truly pan-India, and there is hardly a setting that unites a diverse array of Indian citizens like the Indian Railways. It is here that Chaddha—with a box of dry golgappas on his lap—reveals his unprompted life story to co-travelling strangers, a story that is as much about the last fifty years of India as it is about Chaddha himself.
Our hero hits the road, from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, Punjab to Kerala, Varanasi to the Northeast, and much more of Mainland India in between. Even if the run begins as one man’s personal sorrow, it becomes a healing balm for a wounded nation, presented as an allegory of a country united.
If you know about Gump’s life, then you know Chaddha’s too. There are hardly any deviations. A doting mother, the desi Jenny (Kareena Kapoor), the miracle of the leg braces, the years at war, the years in industry, the long run, and on and on.
It’s the story of India, however, lurking bright in the background, which provides LSC with its own, unique colour palette. The history lesson in Chaddha’s lifetime begins with the end of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency in the mid-70s, followed by Operation Blue Star, Gandhi’s assassination, the 1984 Delhi riots, Bal Thackerey’s Rath Yatra, the Mandal Commission, the demolition of Babri Masjid, the riots in Mumbai, the war in Kargil, the rise of India’s private sector, the 26/11 terror attacks, the 2011 anti-corruption movement, and more.
Adding to this large breadth of history are the film’s central characters, who represent some of the country’s diversity. Chaddha and his mother are Sikh, who suffer the brunt of violence and vilification in the first 10-15 years of Chaddha’s life. Kapoor’s ‘Jenny’, Rupa D’Souza, is half Christian. Naga Chaitanya’s character Balaraju (a stand-in for Gump’s Bubba) hails from Andhra Pradesh and is the South Indian representative in the film. Mohammad (played by Manav Vij) is a Muslim Pakistani soldier—a twist on the Lieutenant Dan character—who despite being the enemy in combat is saved and befriended by Chaddha.
This is the India as envisioned by Khan’s cinematic utopias: diverse, tolerant, quirky, vulnerable, intelligent… and kind.
But by now, Khan was swimming against the rapid tides of division.
Fear of those tides must have struck Khan, too: in a movie that began with Indira Gandhi’s tyrannical turn, there is hardly a mention in LSC of the alarming crises faced by present-day India, a country veneering towards authoritarian rule, struck by the tainted hands of the press and the judiciary. There is not a whisper of the 2002 Gujarat Riots in LSC, and all history seems to stop about a decade ago.
The only major nod to the present is prime minister Modi’s face and the lotus symbol of his political party appearing on a mural at the ghats, while Chaddha runs through Varanasi (the PM constituency). The film offers no further comment to this moment and to what has followed in the country over the past ten years.
This is the only reminder of the toxic mood dividing India and edging it towards collapse. For a movie that essentially began history with one dangerous leader—Indira Gandhi—it conveniently ignores delving deeper into the perils of the one in power today. Perhaps, fifty years from now, someone will be brave enough to show a public criticism of the 2020s, too
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Despite this grave blind spot, Chaddha’s ‘big run’ in LSC is the film’s crowning moment. Our hero hits the road, from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, Punjab to Kerala, Varanasi to the Northeast, and much more of Mainland India in between.
Even if the run begins as one man’s personal sorrow, it becomes a healing balm for a wounded nation, presented as an allegory of a country united.
Near the end of the film, Chaddha recalls a number of exquisite memories of India: Himalayan peaks shimmering in the moonlight, vast ocean views, the desert at night, lakes in Ladakh, and more. The memories help him get a better understanding of his own self.
The ‘big run’ takes about nine minutes of actual screentime, but through this stretch, and in Chaddha’s reflections of his experiences, Khan presents his utopian vision again: an appreciation of the country for its beauty and goodness. Thus, these nine minutes become the ultimate thesis of Aamir Khan’s life’s work.
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Karan Madhok is a writer, journalist, and editor of The Chakkar. His debut novel A Beautiful Decay (Aleph Book Company) was published in October 2022. His creative work has appeared in Epiphany, Gargoyle, The Literary Review, The Bombay Review, The Lantern Review, and the anthology A Case of Indian Marvels. He is the founder of the Indian basketball blog Hoopistani and has contributed to NBA India, SLAM Magazine, Fifty Two, FirstPost, and more. You can find him on Twitter: @karanmadhok1 and Instagram: @karanmadhok.
