Irrfan Khan remembers Rajasthan

Malashri Lal

The legendary actor Irrfaan Khan was born on January 7, 1967 and died on April 29, 2020. Jaipur now holds a theatre festival in his name every January. With the passage of time, the legend acquires heroic proportions, and Irrfaan the candid speaker, the marvellous recontour and the unpretentious son of Rajasthan may be forgotten. I write this memoir of my encounter with the actor at the Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) in 2014, to recall aspects of his personality and his charm that stay indelible in my mind.

Jaipur is my home-ground, or my ‘soul-ground’, I should say, as I live in New Delhi and taught at the University of Delhi for about forty-five years. As JLF comes by every year, I am happily swimming into the various array of sessions organised immaculately by Namita Gokhale, William Dalrymple and Sanjoy Roy. That year, 2014, I was given the responsibility of moderating a session on Vijay Dan Detha, the Rajasthani folklorist who had compiled fourteen volumes of local tales under the title Batan ri Phulwari (a garden of words). Detha, better known as ‘Bijji’ among his admirers, had passed away a year earlier and this session was planned as a tribute to his extraordinary service to oral traditions. JLF had invited a panel comprising of Irrfan Khan, C P Deval, Mahmood Farooqui, Arjun Deo Charan, and Prahlad Shekhawat.

JLF panel with Irrfan Khan (January, 2014)

On this cool afternoon, the crowd awaited the arrival of the glamorous film star Irrfan. He showed up a trifle late, just after the others were seated, a perfect entrance with his characteristic stride and his dark glasses. While a thunderous applause greeted him, he sat modestly on the empty chair at edge of the stage and demurred about being the first speaker. Irrfaan Khan was here as a “Jaipur boy” if one may put it that way, for he was born in the Subhash Chowk area, studied at Saint Paul’s School and Rajasthan College, and then left for a course in acting at the National School of Drama, New Delhi. This visit to Jaipur was a recap of his closeness to Bijji’s work-- after all Irrfan’s mother was from Jodhpur and he knew the ethos closely. It was also time to express his attraction for storytelling in the folk medium in Rajasthani and Hindi, and to speak of the link between literature and cinema.

Irrfan Khan reading

Irrfan looked dreamily into the past, to a shooting schedule in Jodhpur and his sudden wish to meet Bijji in Borunda village. During the journey he watched the undulating landscape with that tall tree and that deep well where ghosts and mysteries may lurk as in the folktales. On meeting Bijji, Irrfan wondered about the trauma this writer would have suffered as a child of four seeing his father dead in a brutal feud, but that moment having passed, Irrfan spoke of being impressed by Bijji’s “abhivyakti” (determined expression) that he chose to write in Rajasthani at a time when there were neither publishers nor readers. And the “lok katha” or folk idiom is forever young and old said Irrfan lyrically, “old like seed, new like fruit; old like sunset, new like sunrise.” It seemed to me that the poetry inherent in the creative mind of this fine actor was pouring through the language he was using when praising the art of traditional storytelling, a meandering narrative filled with life wisdom.

What philosophy did Irrfan learn from Bijji, I asked, and again, with a straightforwardness that was the actor’s hallmark the reply came “Kudrat ki kadar jo samajhta hai (one who understands the true value of Nature). By way of illustration Irrfan read a snippet from a folk tale, a conversation between a goatherd and a king; one knows the freedom of the birds and the sky, the other knows only a gilded confinement.

All of us were aware of the adaptations of Bijji’s tales into Bombay cinema: Mani Kaul's Duvidha, Habib Tanvir and Shyam Benegal's Charandas Chor, Amol Palekar's Paheli, among others. Irrfan Khan had no hesitation in saying that film producers needed Bijji more than he needed them. “Bijji paraspathar ban gaye thei” (Bijji had become a touchstone that transformed the substance). Did the film industry promote social good asked someone in the

audience and promptly came Irrfan’s honest answer that commercial goals have to be met in Bollywood; the “combination of Saraswati and Lakshmi” would be ideal but one can just wish for that.

On Irrfan Khan’s birth anniversary, my reminiscence is a reminder that fame need not obliterate the link with the maati/soil of one’s ancestral culture. The sands of Rajasthan stood alongside the arc lights of Bollywood—no contrast, no comparison. The crowd had expected glamour—and what was delivered by Irrfan was the truth that eternity resides in those timeless tales of the spirit world in which cinema as well as folktales offer their own kind of interpretation. Though Bijji and Irrfan Khan are no longer with us, their work and their words continue to inspire.

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Bio: Malashri Lal, author of 22 books including academic and creative writing, anthologies and edited volumes, retired as Professor in the Department of English, University of Delhi.

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Setu, January 2025