Ibrahim Ali Khan Goes Full Throttle

The boy’s a force of nature. And you came expecting a nawabi colt. What were you thinking? 

Suite 208’s a mess. Iced coffees on the table and under it. Plates of food, too. Oh, a lot of them. Bedcovers in wild disarray.

Eight minutes pass. Four overdue knocks on the bathroom door.

“Iggy. Iggy?”

Yes. Iggy?

“Iggy?”

Then Iggy pops out. He hasn’t registered the unfamiliar presence in the room. He’s gonna need bigger pants, the consigliere advises. The presence withdraws their attention from the scene. The recorder’s on, the consigliere’s chair’s been drawn up. Iggy now towers above, extending a hand, the new reality of him wearing pants suddenly triggering a shift in his manner.

“Hi, brother. Ibrahim.”

This can’t be the same guy from this morning. In our previous meeting, as the Jaipur sun flooded the verandahs of stately Samode Palace, he stepped out in his bathrobe and greeted us with “Hello, f***ers.”

No offence taken—that is him. Manners are tiring. Iggy fraternises. He picks your phone recording this conversation kept too far away on the centre table, and helpfully places it on the couch.

He wiggles into the corner by the jharokha and grabs a cushion. The steam session from the morning seems to have worked. “It gets you the glow.” But self-consciousness eludes him. “Not big on complicated skincare routines. Face wash, moisturiser, body lotion here and there. You know the drill.”

Ibrahim Ali Khan is pleasant. And beautiful. An Andalusian foal, no nawabi colt. He punctures discretion with his cheekbones. Propriety can be taken care of with the jawline. But somehow, he doesn’t display any awareness of it.

This morning, he stood flanked by a couple of vintage convertibles, bemused by the photography and videography crews assembled around him. He turned around to face the curious guests at Samode Palace. They were beginning to herd around the main entrance. Somebody asked for the frame to be cleared. Somebody else started towards the façade gingerly.

“Just shout,” the first somebody commanded.

“Hey, get out of there. Hato wahan se,” yelled Iggy.

It was not a jokey yell meant to make everybody break into a laugh. But they did, after briefly turning the colour of Iggy’s flowy robe. It was an ebullient vermillion, the first of six outfit changes that the young Pataudi is going through this Monday morning.

After being a prince all his life, he’s a prince again today. And he laughs at all this prince business the media builds around new stars. “All these covers say modern-day prince, this prince, that prince… the real prince is here, buddy!”

Manners are tiring. He mocks the myths that are being made of men today, but is quick to self-deprecate.

“What does royalty even mean? Like, my friends laugh at me, when even as a joke I say, ‘I’m a prince, guys’. We live in such a modern age right now. All these princes, princesses, kings and all don’t matter anymore. But it’s quite cool to have that title.”

Ibrahim has been freshly acquainted with the dangerously fast churn of entertainment reception in our culture today. Titles and privilege are public enemy number one. Who could have had it worse than him when his debut, Nadaaniyan—which translates to ‘naïvetés’—tanked, and social media did its thing?

“Not too long ago, they were all waiting for my launch, and after Nadaaniyan, the hype has dropped real bad. They’ve trolled me nonstop. ‘He won’t be able to do it only’. It’s a massive low… and I constantly feel bad about it.”

His voice drops at “constantly”, and something flickers in his light eyes.

“I’m just gonna go on record and say that it was a really bad film.”

The cushion he’d been eyeing mid-conversation is clutched close to his chest now. Iggy is 24, as is his co-star in the film Khushi Kapoor. For someone that age, the comments on the film’s trailer on YouTube would need a TW.

“Kidney touching acting performances by the leads,” writes one. Another says, “I sanitized my eyes after watching this trailer.” One comment mocks Ibrahim by saying Arjun Kapoor—another star kid who’s a universal troll target—is a better actor.

“It was really bad. It became a sort of culture to, ‘Oh, let’s troll that film’. There were people who were trolling it just because they heard that some other person was trolling it. That’s uncalled for, but if I now give a blockbuster in the future, I want the same kind of response. They should go mad after me.”

As the standard star kid debut goes, Ibrahim isn’t ‘bad’ in Nadaaniyan. He’s playing a type in what’s designed as a frothy film in the same genre family as Student of the Year. Though a Karan Johar acolyte who continues to believe in the cultural cachet of the Dharma film—when he looks inward, he finds that he may have faltered. 

“I am not saying I took my chance for granted, but I stepped into the industry like, ‘Ho jaayega’. Of course, I was working very hard—like I’m still working hard on my speech issue. But in a way, I feel I must have rushed into that movie. I was 21 when I began shooting for it—others around me are doing it at 26, 27, 28—and I now think I could have been more mindful of the scale of what was going to happen.”

Ibrahim’s the grandson of Sharmila Tagore, a screen doyenne who ruled not only Bollywood but also Bengali cinema. The actress travelled to Cannes for the premiere of a restored print of Satyajit Ray’s Aranyer Din Ratri, earlier this year. Her maternal grandmother was the granddaughter of Dwijendranath Tagore, who was the brother of Rabindranath Tagore.

A lot of grandness there.

This morning, when Iggy greeted his staff member Jagan Dada with a good-natured fart-joke rhyme, who would have realised that he’s related—even if circuitously—to a Nobel-winning poet who towers above everybody else in the Indian literary canon?

“He’s my great-great-great-great-great-granduncle or great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather. These are great people we’re talking about.”

A lot of greatness there. But Iggy’s just conveying the sense of distance between Tagore and him that one might be erasing by casually putting the two in the same sentence together. But it might also be Iggy saying that he’s not performing legacy or lineage or blood or any of those things.

“Let’s face it, I’m not going to win a Nobel Prize no matter how good my films are. Nor am I well-behaved enough to win a Nobel Prize.”

And that’s it. Ibrahim just wants to act. When you’re older, it’s wise to latch on to legacy, but when you’re young, it’s wise to reject the burden of legacy. “I’ve taken a lot of inspiration from their greatness and grown up hearing stories about them. So, there is that awareness… But it’s not that I have to live up to that legacy.” 

He flicks away with the disdain of a Holden Caulfield, every irrelevant factoid flitting around him. He knows he can “look good, do magazine shoots, walk the ramp, score brand advertisements” but that’s not what keeps him restless.

“I know I have it in me. But I don’t know about asking for more chances—nobody is going to just… give it to me in this industry. You have to be good—you have to give good auditions. But I’m not here to lose.”

Despite a well-documented speech issue, he speaks with unfettered conviction when he really gets down to it. His words come in spurts of ejaculation rather than waves of articulation. All this could be that he is either passionate or really a damn good actor.

“I’m happy that Nadaaniyan came, and we got it over with, rather than we doing something else and this happening later on. Things happened for a reason.”

It’s hard to pinpoint why Iggy’s first-person pronoun in instances like these is ‘we’—but it’s an interesting reminder of his awareness of privilege. He knows an industry kid like him is set up to win. Both his parents are actors. He was 17 when sister Sara made her debut with Kedarnath (2018). He was eleven when Kareena Kapoor Khan became part of the family.

But, speaking of family, things like lineage, brilliance, the best of everything—his grandfather was Tiger Pataudi—the pressure of reputation could be part of one’s DNA. For Iggy, however, it’s about his place in the world, about the clouds of self-doubt. About, perhaps, having his own words to say.

“I usually always have self-doubt. Whenever I feel unsure, all this (lineage) is a reminder of who’s at home. ‘You’re Saif Ali Khan’s kid. Bebo’s in your family. You should be able to do it. You should be smashing it, man’.” 

That realisation usually flicks a switch. Surety and unsurety take their turns in Iggy’s head. He says something oddly profound for a 24-year-old and then makes fun of himself for having said it.

“Easier said than done. I tried getting launched in Nadaaniyan. It’s a rom-com. My dad has won a National Award for a rom-com (Hum Tum, 2004). So, I’ve to be careful, too. That does create pressure, you’re right. But mostly, one should remember to use them to drive you—what you’ve gone through, they have also gone through.”

For years, Iggy has been told he looks just like his father. Oh my god you’re just like him you’re just like him you’re just like him. Oh my god you’re just like Saif. “When you’re constantly fed something like that, that becomes a standard for you. You want to be more and more like him.”

And it’s easy, too, to imagine him all suited up in a crisp bandhgala like his dad, breaking into the smizing smirk we’re familiar with. He “loves” the Indian topcoat, with a designer rollcall befitting his patrician surname: “Manish Malhotra, Abu Jani Sandeep Khosla, Raghavendra Rathore,” he tells me, all while dressed in a Puma tee and wide-legged PJs.

“I dress based on how I’m feeling in a moment. According to my mood. I keep it cool and casual—breezy, comfortable, my baggy jeans with a t-shirt. White sneakers, jeans probably the same. Keep rotating the tees. That’s the hack, brother. That’s the hack.”

He was little when Saif delivered a performance that delivered him from harmless-soft-boy parts. Omkara (2006) was followed by Being Cyrus the same year, Love Aaj Kal, Kurbaan (both 2009), Aarakshan (2011), the Race franchise—with a career-defining part in Sacred Games. A long and well-reported period of self-education, including in the art of acting, alongside which he has accumulated credible cultural clout as an icon of sophistication and effortless elegance.

“I think my dad is an amazing actor. What I really like about him is that there were a lot of people that doubted him in the beginning. He took quite a few films to find his feet and become the versatile performer he is now.”

After a difficult opening hour at the crease, the generational grit is lapping inside Iggy. He has “something else” going on, too, that keeps him busy. But it’s mostly his own redemption arc. Guided by the internal compass that redirected his father. The same one that tided his grandfather Tiger Pataudi over the unfortunate accident that took away the former Indian cricket captain’s right eye at 20, before the late legend developed techniques that brought him his feared cut and hook shots.

Don’t know how much Iggy is thinking of that—all I’m saying is, these Pataudi boys know pluck. “I don’t think my speech issue is going to come in the way of my movie stardom… When I think about what my dad’s been through and how long he took to make his mark, I see that I, too, have to work harder and be better.”

On set, he’s a kid in a candy shop. A youthful, tangy filling in the dignified, self-serious crust of the palace. At any point, the atrium and hallways can ring with his adolescent voice. Clapping away in glee after nailing a quick video byte is Ibrahim. Pirouetting awkwardly for the right kind of motion shot is Ibrahim. Dangling out of his suite for something he forgot to tell you and so yelling it to you in raw delight from metres away, is Ibrahim.

“Happiness”, he says, is his “idea of luxury”. He’s quite a car guy, but Amrita and Sara don’t share his love for wheels. “But Mom and all hate them. I live with these two girls, not my dad, and I’m like, chalo, whatever, these girls won’t get it. My dad gets it, though.”

He wants to keep close the people he cares about. “People who are close to you, people who say the truth. I love taking chuttis, I love vacations and boys’ trips. Booking a nice villa, you and the boys—chill, pop some champagne on holiday. Something like that, man.”

Diler, Ibrahim’s theatrical debut (the title means ‘brave’), is directed by Kunal Deshmukh (Jannat, Tum Mile, Shiddat and others). After a sophomore effort (Kayoze Irani’s Sarzameen) that came and went, the feeling about his third film, a sports drama, is “good”.

“I’ve really sat on the script this time around. Kunal Deshmukh sir is a really experienced director. He’s very good and can present me well. I’m not taking shots at my previous directors, but the truth is that they are also first-time filmmakers. You have to think about that.”

At a time when naysayers are doubtful if Iggy can even give an okayish performance, he believes in his “range”, and since film is the director’s medium, vocally acknowledges the need of collaborators who know how to work with him. On his wish-list are Sandeep Reddy Vanga, Imtiaz Ali, Neeraj Ghaywan and Siddharth Anand. “Haha, as if they’re dying to work with me. But that’s the dream… to get to that point. Oh, and Abhishek Chaubey.”

“We’re on the backfoot right now, but I know how to act—it might be a cocky thing to say but some people have it, and some don’t. KD has really shown me the way. If I’m not comfortable with something, he would find a workaround. He always has an answer.”

The best thing about working in Diler, besides it being a Maddock film, is how he finds himself “presented”—a word that Ibrahim uses over and over. Deshmukh is a former collaborator of Mohit Suri, who Ibrahim met for Saiyaara, like several other young actors, before Ahaan Panday was cast in the role.

“Haha, after seeing Saiyaara, who wouldn’t name-drop Mohit Suri? Dharma, obviously, is my home. I just want to do well, and after I have done well, go back to Karan sir and say, ‘Okay, Karan sir, let’s do it again’. I want to do him proud.”

And to fans, critics, and those bringing him down, his kind request is… just wait and watch. “Give me one more chance, man. Let’s have at it.” 

Which is funny because his idea of success used to be validation from people. Now? Now, it’s about nailing it at your job. “And then reaping the benefits of having nailed it. Success is knowing you were good. Happiness is success. Hah, I sound like some cheesy, wannabe dude who read all this off the internet. Which I probably did, but who cares?”

Walking back from suite 208, I remember thinking, right, nobody cares. All they care about is what this prince has to say next, and you better make it worth their while, Iggy. 

Then I hear his loud voice behind me. 

“Bro, bro!” 

I turn around. He is dangling from the door.

“Did I say Abhishek Chaubey?”

***

Chairperson: Avarna Jain

COO: Jamal Shaikh

Editor: Rahul Gangwani
Styling and Creative Direction: Vijendra Bhardwaj
Photography: Tarun Vishwa

Editorial Mentor: Saira Menezes

Managing Editor: Sonal Nerurkar

Deputy Editor: Mayukh Majumdar

Hair: Laukik Jagtap

Grooming: Jagan Dash

Assistant Stylist: Komal Shetty

Booking and production: Varun Shah

Location: Samode Palace, Chomu

Artist PR: Spice PR
Esquire India Editorial: Saurav Bhanot, Nitin Sreedhar, Abhya Adlakha, Rudra Mulmule, Riti Ghai, Kashish Mishra

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