Veteran actor Farida Jalal, who has worked with some of the finest actors and filmmakers of her time, recalled her not-so-pleasant experience with the superstar Rajesh Khanna on the film Aradhana. She described him as a ‘proud man’, whose popularity went through the roof after the film’s success. She also admitted that she didn’t think too highly of his female fans, and at times, wanted to knock some sense into them.
On The Ashoke Pandit Show, she said that all things aside, one can’t deny that Rajesh Khanna experienced unprecedented popularity, and that nobody has come close to matching that level of fame since. “You have to give that to him,” she admitted, but went on to say that they never got along while working on Aradhana. “We didn’t get along at all on the sets, because he was getting into that… He became a very, very, very big star after Aradhana. But we’d come up together. Once, I asked for another rehearsal, and he snapped, ‘How many rehearsals do you need?’ I was very put off.”
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She praised Sharmila Tagore for always standing up for her when things became too difficult. “She would say, ‘What nonsense, how can he talk to her like that?’ She was always on my side, she was a darling. Even Shakti da (director Shakti Samanta) would say that I would get however many rehearsals as I need. I was never happy with him. I felt he was very proud… He was that kind of person,” Farida recalled.
She said that she became friendly with Rajesh Khanna only after the movie had become a blockbuster, and they were touring around the country picking up accolades. But even then, she became put off by Rajesh’s increasing fame, which he would boast about. “How girls would fawn over him, I’ve seen it with my own eyes. They’d ask him to sign various body parts. There would be queues of girls, and I used to be appalled. Yeh ladkiyon ko main maarun (I wanted to beat them). I would feel that they had no self-respect, and he’d look at me and smirk. I used to be very angry. Yeh ladkiyan hain koi (What sort of girls were they)? Even Rinku di (Sharmila) would hold her head in embarrassment.”
Several of Rajesh Khanna’s contemporaries have spoken about his nature on set. But as successful as he was in the 1970s, his decline was just as rapid. He admitted in an interview that he took to the bottle after his career collapsed and that he was never quite able to come to terms with his fading stardom.
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