Farewell, Irrfan. You made us see.
With Irrfan Khan’s passing, we mourn the loss of a great actor. He was one of those performers who dig deep into themselves to discover the truth, even when he played the flakiest of characters. He had that very unique, most paradoxical quality, something that all great actors possess: To make his audiences accept the falsity of film as an ineluctable truth, to make them believe.
He began, in 1988, in Shyam Benegal’s tele-serial Discovery of India. His latest film, Angrezi Medium released in mid-March, but couldn’t reach the theatres because of the lockdown. He was a cinephile’s delight. Critics loved him. But the constraints of finding good work in a film industry which coasted on formula-heavy flicks, and star-driven vehicles were also his constant companion. He began work with directors who broke into Hindi cinema, laterally, just like he had. The mid-’90s Bollywood was on the verge of a massive churn: The mainstream, under the steam of the three young Khans, Aamir-Salman-Shah Rukh, was creating demand and supply for family-friendly, mono-cultural, mono-theistic romances and sanitised social dramas. Pushback was arriving, in the shape of filmmakers who came from the Hindi-speaking heartlands of the North, from Vishal Bhardwaj, Anurag Kashyap, Tigmanshu Dhulia, who wanted to tell their stories, and needed actors who could do the job.
This Khan, who was happy to junk his surname, was finally right where he needed to be. He was capable of being as raw and visceral as the stories he was offered. And soon, he was outstanding. Big Bollywood took notice, and made a grab for him. Big Hollywood wasn’t far behind, and cast him in a few mega-budget entertainers. By then, Bollywood had turned new-agey enough for Irrfan to be able to make some of his most exciting work. But his best, combining maturity and “thehraav (gravitas)”, was yet to be. Farewell, Irrfan. You made us see.