When Sharmila Tagore was relieved to stop working with Rajesh Khanna, said he ‘didn’t reinvent himself’: ‘People began to mock him’

Sharmila Tagore and late actor Rajesh Khanna first worked together in the 1969 film Aradhana and it changed their careers forever. Soon, they were the ‘it couple’ of the movies and started working in many films, but for Sharmila, the association was very stressful and she chose to walk away from it. The duo had appeared in many hit films like Amar Prem, Safar, Daag among many more but Sharmila was not very keen on working with him.
In the book Dark Star: The Loneliness of Being Rajesh Khanna, Sharmila wrote in the foreword that what affected her “personally was his habit of coming late to work.” She wrote, “I went to the studios at 8 am and wanted to be back with my family 8 pm. But this was impossible since Kaka never arrived before 12 for a 9 am shift. And we could never finish on time. As a result, the entire unit would pressurise me to work overtime and complete the schedule. This became the norm and since I had many films with Kaka, I found myself in a quandary.”
Because of this, Sharmila made the decision of working with other actors “despite the fact that our pairing had been so successful.” Calling this separation a “huge relief”, she wrote, “Probably even Kaka felt it was not such a good idea to have so many films with one actress – one runs the risk of becoming stale. Whatever it was, we found ourselves working together in less and less films. And I must confess it was a huge relief.”

Rajesh Khanna appeared in 15 consecutive hits between 1969 and 1971 but his films in the later years were not as successful. Like many of his contemporaries, he too was a hit-or-miss actor now and the pedestal he was once placed on was pulled down.
Sharmila also wrote that the “craze” for Kaka, as he was fondly called, ended as abruptly as it had begun. The Kashmir Ki Kali actor wrote that “it left a scarred Kaka in its wake.” She mentioned that the Bawarchi star “didn’t nurture his stardom and allowed it to slip from his grasp.” Talking about how he was stuck in his ways, she wrote, “He failed to notice that the audience was changing, and that the roles he had been doing were becoming less and less relevant. Kaka either couldn’t or didn’t reinvent himself to remain contemporary, so much so that he became almost a caricature of himself and people began to mock him.”
Rajesh Khanna passed away in 2012 at the age of 69.