Who was Irrfan Khan?

HOW DO YOU remember an artist whose legacy in death seems to have outgrown the prestige we associated with him in life? Irrfan Khan’s receding shadow has only enlarged the estimate of his impact on our cinema. It’s probably because the actor left us in the middle of a pandemic, at a time when his demise felt wrenchingly personal. As if, even in the process of letting go, the actor had been denied a stage, the kind of send-off his precocious but unrealised talent deserved. And thus, even in death like life, Khan remained untouched. Summarising what was probably the actor’s gift and, his burden; a talent so mercurially ahead of his time, it took Hindi cinema far too long to even scratch his surface. Which is why any attempt to evaluate Khan after death, also feels like an admission of collective guilt that we didn’t quite celebrate him in life.

Shubhra Gupta’s Irrfan: A Life in Movies, is one of several recent books to look at the actor’s life and journey in the rear-view mirror. Structured as a compendium of interviews with people from the industry— colleagues, critics, friends and observers—the veteran journalist’s sizeable volume to an extent both answers and prolongs that formative question—just who was Irrfan Khan?

Most people Gupta has interviewed represent the actor’s collaborators. Their opinion of work, thus, vary between heartfelt approbations to abstract opinions. It only re-establishes the fact that Khan’s talent wasn’t just unassailable, but maybe also indescribable. Even to those who tried to mould him into a recognisable shape. “There was this ajeeb thing about him,” says Vishal Bhardwaj, the man who gave Khan the platform he deserved with Maqbool. More than the recollections of his old work, however, it’s the trivial details that really help Gupta’s book rise above the journalistic marathon that the book often feels like.

For example, the curious fact that Khan chose to do Anup Singh’s Qissa, after the two connected over their mutual love for the music of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Or the fact that Khan pleaded with Shoojit Sircar to not make Shoebite (a film that remains unreleased) because it resembled something he was already doing. From his literary and musical inclinations, that seem to define him just as much as his work, to his willingness to seek stories Khan was probably as modest, as humane, as his talent may have been incomprehensible.

Interestingly, many of Gupta’s subjects mention the spoof videos the actor made with All India Bakhchod. The audacity, the prodigious effortlessness of it all echoed the variety that Khan could have offered. Instead, the actor was limited by intense roles, only to later emerge as one of the country’s finest comedic actors.

The actor’s wife, also his longest collaborator, Sutapa Sikdar talks at length about him. Strangely, this part of the book is the least affecting. There must have been obvious emotional deterrents that prevented this conversation from flowing—for one the interview did not happen one on one as Gupta mentions outright—but it leaves you wanting. Maybe it’s this fear, on the reader’s part, of coming close and yet remaining distant from an artist we can’t seem to frame with any sense of finality. Khan is the artist we could neither fully see and maybe won’t ever fully ‘get’.

Gupta’s book is structurally designed to fashion a collage of memories people have of working and living next to Khan, which occasionally does become repetitive. It is probably why, creative non-fiction ought to, perhaps, hide its questions, to better serve the answer. As a reader you can at times feel stuck in a loop of a news daily. It can feel like several sprints between the same two points of knowing and not knowing. Nonetheless this is another book attempting to fill a void that can possibly never be filled. For as Ritesh Batra says, “It’s a hole, where he [Irrfan Khan] was.”

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