In memory of the 'Roohdar' – Irrfan Khan

Swakkhyar Deka

And he went away just like that. Just like Roohdar, which Irrfan Khan played to perfection, in 'Haider'. Roohdar appeared and disappeared at will, giving a sense of omnipresence and in control of the narrative.

It is one thing to represent a person, solidified out of the pages of a text, quite another to play an essence of a story. As Roohdar himself so aptly puts it "Jhelum bhi main, Chinar bhi, Shia bhi main, Sunni bhi main, aur Pandit bhi" (I am Jhelum, I am Chinar, I am Shia, I am Sunni, and I am the Pandit.)

Haider's 'Roohdar' (literally 'rooh' means soul/ spirit) narrates a story to 'Haider', the story that he claims to have the advantage of knowing from spending tortured nights and days in the dungeon-darkness of the jail where he was kept with Hilal Meer (Haider's father), a story of the days they spent together as 'rooh' and 'sharir' (soul and body), 'daria' and 'pani' (river and water), inseparable in anguish until the latter's death by gunshot.

Like the ghost in Hamlet (on which Haider is based), it is Roohdar who plants the seeds of revenge in Haider's mind voicing-over his father's last wish in taking 'intekaam' (revenge) on his uncle for lending hand to such a heinous conspiracy. However, the hypotextual enigma re-echoes here in the disparity between Roohdar's version of portraying Hilaal as a tormented figure seeking revenge of his prescribed destiny and Hilaal's portraiture in the initial scenes of being an excessively concerned doctor for whom saving a patient's life matters more than his own.

Haider, not having any other choice, had to put his faith in Roohdar's version of the story as do the audience but the rupture is suggestive. So therefore, it is the persona of Roohdar, that becomes a tool for Haider's director Vishal Bhardwaj to trace the sub-current of the terrorized reign in the valley and explore different subtexts.

Irrfan lived his characters and made them his own, emoting immaculately the finer nuances. You can hand him a sliver of a role, a ghost of a man, and he will haunt the space he performs in.

Irrfan's role in Haasil (2003) too, which was his big breakthrough, stood out in many ways. There was this scene that kind of stays with the viewer, as it also underlines the importance of his magic eyes as acting tools. Sitting by the lake, student leader Ranvijay (Irrfan) asks Jimmy Shergill's more polished student why women are scared of him – a rare contemplative moment for this violent, crude character. "I have a clean heart too, but it's all about appearances. What can I do, god has given me these eyes". Irrfan lightly slaps one eye as he says this – a funny, revealing gesture.

Those eyes took him far – whether he was projecting the loneliness of his character Saajan Fernandes in 'The Lunchbox' (2013), as he rides a local Mumbai train; or earlier in his greatest performance as Ashoke Ganguli in Mira Nair's 'The Namesake' (2006), when he accepts his failure to reach out to his son Gogol (Kal Penn) or when he delivered a superlative performance in Paan Singh Tomar in 2012.

But after all the success he achieved, Irrfan was impatient for more challenges. And he eventually set out to redefine his Bollywood image, by acting as a romantic, comic character in films such as Piku (2015) and Qarib Qarib Single (2017).

When Hollywood came knocking on his door he jumped at the opportunity. Surely the money was good, but he could not resist the chance to act with names like Ang Lee (Life of Pi, 2012) and earlier with Michael Winterbottom (A Mighty Heart, 2007) and Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire, 2008). And while he worked on some of Hollywood's biggest franchise projects – The Amazing Spider Man (2012) and Jurrasic World (2015), he even accepted a small indie film Puzzle (2018), where he played an eccentric rich man, and the puzzle partner of the character played by Kelly Macdonald. Since his debut, Khan had always played characters that were fringe elements, stirring only in the dark and behind shadows. While they were exciting – Haasil, Maqbool and The Warrior will forever be master-classes in acting – it was in 2007 that Khan acquired a quality that every mainstream actor craves for – likeability. It is easy to understand why Khan had been dealt such a hand till then. Bollywood has always been very clear about the appearance of its leading men. And Irrfan did not conform to those norms. Quite honestly, supremely-talented-regular-looking-actors will always be exceptions, like Nawazuddin Siddiqui, for example. We might now accept Rajkummar Rao and Ayushmann Khurrana as leading men, but even then, they are the faces of "slice-of-life", "content-driven" cinema – the celluloid world is still reserved for Greek gods.

Over the years as Irrfan's career took off in India and later in the west, many directors made use of the actor's deep, somewhat tragic eyes. Irrfan might have just started to get his due as an actor as the whole world woke up to the exquisite range he brought to the table. Now, one can only wonder, where his penchant for choosing content driven roles would have taken him - a BAFTA or an Oscar, perhaps?

But no matter what, Irrfan would always stay relevant in the cinematic universe and his humble journey from Jaipur to world stage would keep inspiring others like him. 

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