Lunch with the FT: Shah Rukh Khan

Shah Rukh Khan is the“Baadshah” or “king” of Bollywood. The 44-year-old star has ruled India’s film industry for nearly two decades, and Khan’s image is everywhere in India. He is on billboards and on television, advertising products from Pepsi Cola to skin-whitening cream.

He also owns an Indian Premier League cricket team, the Kolkata Knight Riders. Shrines are dedicated to him. Fans send him letters written in blood. His ancestral home in Peshawar, now in Pakistan, is a tourist attraction. And after Khan was questioned by US immigration last August because of his Muslim name, some fans burned the American flag.

I wait to meet Khan in the coffee shop at the Courthouse Hotel, off Regent Street in central London. A former magistrates’ court, its grey façade and quiet lobby feel too restrained for a Bollywood superstar.

I had been warned earlier in the day that the star was feeling unwell and that lunch would be delayed. Eventually, after a three-hour wait, I am ushered up to the star’s suite on an upper floor, where Khan, looking tired, greets me warmly.

He is wearing a slim-fitting black suit, a sky-blue shirt with open-necked white collar and shiny black shoes. He plays with his glasses as we talk.

We go into the sitting room of Khan’s suite, a wood-floored, wood-panelled room with armchairs grouped around a coffee table and windows overlooking the street below. The hotel has set up a small buffet table, and a waiter puts rice and chicken curry on a plate for Khan, who normally spurns carbs to maintain his six-pack. He has made an exception for this lunch.

I ask the waiter for chicken and rice with extra lentils and salad on the side. We eat with our plates in our laps, until Khan breaks off to light a cigarette.

The star is in London to promote his new film My Name is Khan (which has gone on to break US and UK box-office records for a Bollywood film, taking nearly £1m in the UK in its first weekend on release).

In the film, Khan plays an autistic Muslim man living in the US during the volatile period after 9/11. I remark on the fact that it might seem odd for him to have started naming his films after himself. He leans forward, flicking ash into an ashtray, and fixes me with his trademark charismatic smile. “As it is, people think I’m very arrogant, which I’m not. I was telling Karan [Johar – the film’s director and a great friend of Khan] when we were naming it that people will say now we’re suddenly naming films after me.”

I assume they chose the name Khan because it is recognisably Muslim. But he sidesteps further probing, saying only that the name worked for the character. “He [the film’s protagonist] has an issue that most people, even his wife, can’t pronounce his name because Khan should be said from the epiglottis,” he says, demonstrating the sound from the back of his throat.

While the movie, an emotionally charged love story, is classic Khan, the subject matter is unusually sensitive. Khan, a Muslim married to a Hindu in predominantly Hindu India, has rarely touched on issues of religious and ethnic tensions in his films. Is this film a sign of a trend in Bollywood towards tackling weightier themes?

“I’ve never thought about film being society changing ... I’m not being flippant but I do believe the prime objective of any cinema that I do and what I perform is to entertain as many people as possible,” he pauses, leaning over to stub out his cigarette. “But maybe when you reach a level of stardom or universal appeal that perhaps I have ... you get a little more ambitious and say maybe I can just throw in a bit more of a point of view and garb it in entertainment.”

Over the years Khan has portrayed a wide range of characters, from a slick mafia boss to a drunk lover and a reincarnated actor. He took over from fellow Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan as host of India’s version of the hugely successful quiz show Who Wants to be a Millionaire? But he remains best known for his roles in “masala” films – cheerful song-and-dance confections, filled with romance. “See, I like masala. I enjoy masala. I think it’s very important if you want to reach out to everybody. The country has a lot of real problems and you need someone to take you away for a few hours.”

I remark on how Khan’s own life has been anything but a “masala”. Born in 1965, Khan and his older sister grew up in a middle-class family in New Delhi, where he attended St Columba’s, a school run by the Christian Brothers. His father, Meer Taj Mohammad, a former freedom fighter against British rule, was born in 1928 in Peshawar, then in British-ruled India, and ran a struggling transport business. In 1980, when Khan was just 14, Meer died from cancer. Khan’s mother brought the children up on her income as a magistrate and from running a restaurant and trading business. She died in 1991.

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