Tanuja was the spirited, spontaneous embodiment of raw talent. So is her elder daughter Kajol, who is to contemporary mainstream cinema what Jaya Bhaduri used to be in the 1970s: effortlessly natural and unheedful of what the mirror had to say. The glamorous avatar that we see now is a product of Manish Malhotra and Karan Johar’s influence. The two would incessantly remind Kajol that stars don’t dress and behave like… well, like Kajol.
She is one of her kind. Whenever Kajol is in the room, her voice is heard above all other sounds. She is the din diva and the djinn that comes out of the bottle every time she lights up the screen. Kajol loves to talk and she doesn’t filter her thoughts. They flow in a continuous stream of extreme consciousness of commonsensical pragmatism. Kajol likes to call a spade a spade. It started on the sets of Rahul Rawail’s Bekhudi and it continues to this day.
Kajol’s tongue spares none. When her pal Karan Johar offered her Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna, Kajol was unconvinced by the part. The role of a woman in an unhappy marriage with Shah Rukh Khan (“Which woman would be unhappy with SRK and who would accept us as an incompatible jodi?”) went to Kajol’s cousin Rani Mukerji, who was the natural choice of all directors whom Kajol said no to.
And Kajol says no to more offers than any actor in India. Sanjay Leela Bhansali recalls chasing Kajol all the way to the interiors of Gujarat for his first film Khamoshi: The Musical, where she called him for a narration and then completely forgot about the appointment, leaving the then-fledgling director waiting in the hotel lobby for six hours.
During the making of Indra Kumar’s Ishq, Aamir Khan told me Kajol was “badly behaved.”
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Says Kajol’s dear friend Karan Johar, “Kajol does nothing for effect. She is not badly behaved. She is what she is, and she is not willing to change for anyone. If Kajol doesn’t like you, trust me you would know.”
Her onscreen spontaneity is her USP. In the vast cast of Karan Johar’s Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham, Kajol stood out. I specially liked her in the sequence where she meets Amitabh Bachchan in her palatial home and clumsily topples over an expensive vase. Here is an actor who never gets intimidated no matter who is on screen with her. In her scenes with both Amitabh and Jaya Bachchan, Kajol more than stood her ground. No wonder Jaya told me she wants to remake her mother-daughter film Phagun, where Waheeda Rehman played the mother and Jaya the daughter, with Jaya as mother and Kajol as daughter.
Kajol’s best performance ever is in a Karan Johar film My Name Is Khan. But no one has seen it. The best sequence of this film, which is probably the best thing Kajol has done so far, was edited out due to the film’s length. It shows Kajol calling her relatives in India from the US after her son’s death to ask about the rituals to be conducted. The grief and confusion of a mother in an alien country is indescribable. Kajol nails it.
Lately, I am sorry to say, Kajol has become repetitive. Her bossy mother’s act in Helicopter Eela was embarrassingly screechy. Prior to that, she reunited with her buddy Shah Rukh Khan in the atrocious Dilwale, where she was miscast in a modern-day avatar of Madhubala from Chalti Ka Naam Gaadi.
What was Kajol thinking? Her recent performances are a disappointment. Kajol needs to expand her horizons. The tantrum-throwing screen queen in Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge needs to show us that there is more to her than meets the eye.
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