Shashi Kapoor: The Householder, the Star

A pretty pedestrian puff piece. About ten years ago, I went through a fervent Hindi film phase - and Shashi Kapoor was one of the brightest stars in that firmament. I just loved him, and - according to my movie review blog statistics - I've seen ~50 of his movies (gee!). He's always held a very special place in my affections, but also a kinda fraught place too. There was something about him and his celebrity that I felt - weirdly guilty about? Like, and I say this unironically, but I always felt like he was super objectified (dude was suuuper handsome), and there was a troubling darkness under that charm?

In January of this year (2018), he passed away. It was very sad, and it reminded me of his peak days during the 1970s: beautiful and snaggle-toothed. I was a bit leery about reading a celeb bio of him, figuring it'd be indulgent, vapid or both, but decided to give it a shot anyway. Unfortunately, this bio is not great.

I was, naturally, very curious about the stuff I knew about: how his older brother, Raj (ultra-famous in his own right), once called Shashi a “taxi” who would take any film offered (and, boy, did that lead to some stinkers!); how he married an Englishwoman, Jennifer Kendal, who died tragically young at 51; how he essentially disappeared from films after her death, gaining weight and fading from view while his extensive family (the Kapoors) went on to keep dominating Bollywood up to this day (his grand-nephew, Ranbir Kapoor, is the current generation's star). All of this is really interesting.

It would have even been really charming to just read a biography that richly contextualized Hindi films from the 1950s to 1980s - that period must have been magical, and a history of Bollywood - passionately researched and written - would be great!

INSTEAD. This book. Unfortunately, this book is just a puff piece; it intersperses bland flattery taken from interviews with his co-stars and collaborators (“Shashi was so generous”, “he treated the crew with so much respect!”) combined with brief, uninspired synopses of his best-known films (Junoon is about blah blah, etc.) Not much investigative journalism went into this, since most of the content summarizes existing (magazine) interviews, etc. I was also irked by the tone in some moments: for example, Neetu Singh - one of the interviewees - is mentioned as someone who, oh yeah, also acted a bit. DUDE, Neetu was HUGE in the 70s! And her disappearing after she married Rishi Kapoor (Shashi's nephew) was a tragedy and one of the things I hate about Bollywood (married actresses were/are rare...). Jennifer Kendall's death is also mentioned in a weirdly off-hand way, which felt terrible. The whole book just felt superficial, at times sycophantic. Which is a shame!