Women tend to fall for terminally-ill rakes — but not always with ill consequences. The right sort of heartbreak is what the romantic hero must keep inventing for his admirers. Rajesh Khanna did it to perfection. He could not keep it up for too long. But he stood for the birth of a new kind of hero at the end of the Sixties and the beginning of the Seventies. And this new hero was central to the birth of the new Bollywood that the world recognizes today for its vigorous and seemingly universal inventiveness. It is the irony of the tragicomic hero, whom Rajesh Khanna had fashioned for the silver screen, that he paved the way for quite another kind of hero and hero-worship. With their angry and action-prone machismo, the current ‘Bollygarchs’ enjoy a sovereignty that has resulted in a more aggressively global Bollywood than in the films of the early Seventies. Yet, Amitabh Bachchan, Hrithik Roshan and Shah Rukh Khan could not have created their own brands of super-stardom had Khanna not laid the foundations — in his gentler, though less enduring, way — for the glamour of the male actor in Bombay. But Anand had to die early in the Seventies for the lankier, and then virtually unknown, Babumoshai to come out of the shadows. The lyric hero, born to the manner of the unforgettable songs that he lips, must not only be skilful in his wooing, but he must also know how to die well.

Dying and coming back to life again in Aradhana, Rajesh Khanna had found the perfect counterpart to his own style of modernity in the urbane and pedigreed Sharmila Tagore. This was 1969, the year of Midnight Cowboy and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. But, more than Dustin Hoffman, Paul Newman and Robert Redford, Rajesh Khanna’s tender-hearted hedonism harked back to the Hollywood of Cary Grant, Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart. Yet, India in the Seventies quickly took on the guru-collared, kurta-trousered, slacks-and-sweatered look, which made charm with a hint of tragedy such an irresistible combination for the Dimples, Tinas and Anjus of middle India — respectable girls with an eye for stylish mischief. Rajesh Khanna’s presence had dwindled, physically and symbolically, in the course of Bombay’s transformation into Mumbai. But romance survives best as nostalgia, and Bollywood best remembers its romantic hero in his disappearance.