Zamana bade shauq se sun raha tha, hum hi so gaye dastaan kehte kehte. (The world kept listening spellbound, it was I who fell asleep narrating my stories) — Saqib Lakhnavi

The year was 2012 and I was a student at JNU. There were at least 400 or 500 of us students gathered in the open-air theatre. Irrfan walked in, wearing an unassuming black shirt with an olive-green muffler carelessly thrown around his neck. Looking quite like a regular JNUite, a tall and handsome man.

The instant connection he established with the crowd with his four-minute-long speech intensified over the two hours of discussions afterwards, which ranged from cinema to various passions in life and the beauty of ordinariness. He was also asked who his first love was, and no surprises here, it was cinema itself. He had said that his wife Sutapa was his last love! Back then, coming to JNU was not akin to professional suicide for artists, as it has become now.

Irrfan passed away this week, at the young age of 53, battling a colon infection. To a world already reeling under the shadow of a global pandemic, the news of his death was a cruel shock. And it triggered a massive wave of mourning on social media. People spoke of the void he had left behind, but also of his legacy of giving us so many more ‘everyday heroes’. They spoke of how they felt his death was a personal loss and how his personality and cinema had been an inspiring presence.

Irrfan played the role of everyday heroes in his movies, his brilliant skills spilling out of the frame each time, and he grew to become a giant in Indian cinema, even crossing over rather easily into Hollywood. He made us believe that a common person, facing everyday challenges, can also be a real hero. Outside the big screen, Irrfan was a man of few words, who led a discreet and downplayed life. From the outside, it seemed as if his days revolved only around cinema, but he was in fact much more than an actor.

Taking a stand

Irrfan was one of those rare people from Bollywood who not only had strong socio-political awareness but who wasn’t wary of voicing his opinions or taking a stand. In the 2009 general elections, in fact, he even campaigned for Mallika Sarabhai when she stood for elections in the Ahmedabad constituency against prime ministerial candidate L.K. Advani. He had strong views about candidates with criminal charges and said they should be debarred from politics.

Scrolling through his Facebook page, tucked away amidst the film promotions, you come across posts of Gram Seva Sangh (GSS), an organisation that fosters synthesis between rural and urban India and promotes handmade products. In 2018, while inaugurating a GSS symposium, Irrfan said his art was also like that of the artisans — both use the same tools, the human body. This was his peculiar ability, to form a bond with every person he met, to empathise. Among the last posts that Irrfan wrote before he passed away, he expressed support for the Karonakuch campaign of GSS, which demanded prioritisation of welfare for poor artisans and the protection of natural resources. He expressed solidarity with the organisation’s tax denial satyagraha, which demanded a GST exemption for handmade goods, and he called out the exploitation of artisans. These are not easy stands for a star to take, but Irrfan clearly did not care about how the cinema ecosystem might react.

In quite a radical move, given the massive popularity of ‘Khans’ in the industry, Irrfan Khan dropped his surname, saying he wanted to carve a niche for himself through his work, not his lineage, caste or religion. In 2016, he publicly questioned the concepts of fasting, qurbaani, and tajiya processions, which didn’t go down well with Islamic clerics. He later clarified that he did not intend to create a controversy, but maintained that a discussion must begin around these rituals. All religions must introspect and change to stay relevant, he said.

At other times, he invoked his Muslim identity to make the point that, unlike him, most Indian Muslims were poor, and any communal divide was unsustainable for this country. When he died, he was mourned across religious identities, even though for one set he was just a Muslim ‘jihadi’ and for another, he was not Muslim enough. There was something about the man that allowed him to be embraced by many despite being disowned by a few.

Freethinking iconoclast

Irrfan was a freethinker, environmentalist, socialist and heretic. His portrayal of the Marxist Urdu poet, Makhdum Mohiuddin, the man who led the Telangana movement, in Kahkashan, made an indelible mark in the hearts of socialists. His recitation of the poem ‘Thakur Ka Kuan’, a critique of the caste system, at the Jaipur Literature Festival in 2014, has been shared several times over. As has his own composition, ‘Idhar Aao’, which alludes to the alienation of labour, kaam zarurat nahi, zarurat kaam nahi. Junoon aur sukoon mein koi farq nahi (Work can’t be necessity, nor necessity work. What difference then between passion and mere comfort.)

After his death, the iconic lines he spoke in Pan Singh Tomar: “Bihad mein toh baghi hote hain, dakait milte hain parliament mein,” (The badlands have rebels, it’s Parliament that has the dacoits) have become the status message of thousands of social media accounts. Quietly, smilingly, Irrfan was a dissenter and a comrade. And that is why his death feels like a personal loss to so many people who didn’t even know him. He really did make his audience believe in what he said in JNU that day, “Aam aadmi hi hero hota hai” (It’s the common man who is the hero.)

Irrfan is no more and hope, like many other things, is in short supply these days. But before we lose what little we have, let’s remember that this man fought cancer to give us the joy of one last film, to tell us one more story before he slept.

The writer has a Ph.D. from the School of International Studies, JNU, on migration and identity issues.