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Rajesh Khanna, the hero who had many ‘wives’

Female fans would wait outside his Bandra home just to get a glimpse of their heartthrob. They chanted his name, left lipstick marks all over his car and even got ‘married’ to his photograph.

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With his crinkly eyes and lop-sided smile, superstar Rajesh Khanna wooed women on and off screen. His female fan following in the 1970s was legendary. “Women, irrespective of their marital status, would send him letters written in their blood,” recalls songstress Asha Bhosle.

Khanna, the first ever superstar of Hindi cinema, sparked a never-seen-before frenzy everywhere he went. Female fans would wait outside his Bandra home just to get a glimpse of their heartthrob. They chanted his name, left lipstick marks all over his car and even got ‘married’ to his photograph.

“I was so crazy about him that I cut my finger with a blade after watching Aradhana. As the blood oozed out, I stood near one of his many pin-ups in my room and applied sindoor in Rajesh Khanna’s name,” recalls Shyama Singh, a die-hard Rajesh Khanna fan and now a mother of two grown-up children.

Such was Khanna’s appeal in those days that an entire generation looked up to the hero who redefined romance with a careless tilt of his head and his piercing expressions. “When he was on screen we did not doubt for a minute that his jeep would not keep pace with the train in which his lady love was travelling or that two lovelorn people would not find shelter on a stormy night,” says retired school teacher Abha Shah, another big fan of Khanna and his films. Just like his movies, Khanna’s personal life too made headlines. The matinee idol broke innumerable hearts when he married a much younger Dimple Kapadia at the peak of his career in 1973. However, the frenzy surrounding him did not abate as he continued to make his female fans go weak in the knees.

Part of his appeal is attributed to the romantic melodies, including Roop tera mastana and O mere dil ke chain, that RD Burman and Kishore Kumar created for Khanna’s onscreen persona.

Even as women were swooning over him, male fans were busy emulating his clothes or hairstyle. “The dizzying heights that Rajesh reached as a superstar remain a landmark that no one star has been able to enjoy before since,” says scriptwriter Salim Khan, a good friend of Khanna, who has penned Haathi Mere Saathi and Andaaz.

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