Saif Ali Khan Pataudi: Chapters of a Life
Actor, titular prince, father of four, reader, connoisseur of fine wine... Saif Ali Khan Pataudi is all of that. But he is also a curious schoolboy who is eager to learn. Esquire India talks to him about self-education, mortality and his learnings on how to be a better man
Saif Ali Khan wants to learn how to tie a skinny scarf. No, not a cravat. A neckerchief. Like this guy he saw a photo of in a magazine. Wait, he should have the photo somewhere. How to find the photo on his phone now? He’s worried he sounds like his mother. But after some squinting and scrolling, he finds it. Triumph. Now he wants to learn how to tie a skinny scarf just like that—with a single, small knot. Will the Fashion Director show him how to tie it properly? Will he? After eliciting a promise, the actor goes back to recording short videos for the Esquire India team on his favourite recent reads—a wild list (Black River by Nilanjana Roy, Pandora’s Jar by Natalie Haynes…); his top restaurants—mostly classics (Trishna in Mumbai, Il Mulino in New York); and wines—“the trick is to get a great wine at a good price” (He loves a good red… bordeauxes, burgundies, anything carrying the Nuits-Saint-George appellation).
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We are at Soho House in Mumbai, at a room with a bar at one end and floor-to-ceiling windows along the length opening to a restless, grey sea at Juhu beach. The pallor of the monsoon sky, combined with the cabriole-legged furniture and pleated lampshades, create an appropriate context for the 55-year-old actor, whose English public school trappings haven’t left him despite him having spent more than half of his life in Mumbai. Khan has now got the side-swung single knot he wanted. The ends of the scarf gently sway in the breeze. “I look like a total fashion guy,” he says, making the room erupt in laughter. “I could be Yves Saif Laurent!”
Production has sourced delicious looking—and even more delicious smelling—vintage books for the shoot. Khan is drawn to that pile of hardbacks at every break. He’s picked up a book of aphorisms to read during make-up; he reads bits out to the crew and his adoring team. A collection of Japanese ghost stories catches his eye. Can he buy some of these for his collection at home? Please?
Khan’s home library has been written about—and it’s made appearances in festive family photos and on his wife, actor Kareena Kapoor Khan’s Instagram account. You know how to spot a real reader when the shelves are not neatly stacked, but have books bursting like ripe pomegranate arils from every nook. While Khan makes purchases online on occasion, he has a special affinity for bookstores, particularly Maggs Bros and Peter Harrington in London that stock first editions. He has built up a collection of books he intends to read, but he knows it’s a fantasy. He hasn’t read even a third of them yet. “You come to terms with the idea that you’re never going to live long enough to read everything you really wanted to,” he says, adding, “But I feel secure just having those books around.”
Comfort reading
Later, during the drive to his home in Bandra, we speak about how the interrupted education of his youth is possibly what has led to this concerted effort to read more midlife.
There are six broad categories he favours. History leads (“not too modern, finishing around World War II”), then mythology, psychology, horror (“there has to be a big fright… the English are the best at it”), humour (Wodehouse fan!) and fairytales. Khan believes there are deep psychological learnings in fairytales and prefers them rough and raw à la the Brothers Grimm. “Like Mirror, Mirror, on the wall… some beautiful mothers don’t want competition from their daughters and it could be the same for men,” he says. Because his reading time is fragmented, a novel is a rare event, though he did attempt a Tolstoy deep dive during the Covid lockdown.
Between the ages of 13-18, Khan attended Winchester College, one of the UK’s oldest and most revered schools, known for its fierce competition with Eton and with a tradition going back to the late 14th century. The plan after Winchester was to go to Oxford, like his father and grandfather before him. But instead, Khan wound up in Mumbai at the age of 20 to make his way as an actor. This was after a couple of years of living it up in Delhi (mostly partying at the iconic dance club Ghungroo) and a failed attempt by his father to interest him in the advertising industry. Acting, somehow, was the only thing that called out to him.
He didn’t arrive at this moment without the perks of a remarkable lineage. Saif Ali Khan doesn’t play down his privilege. It would be impossible to. His father, Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi, comes from a family of erstwhile Nawabs who ruled Pataudi, a small princely state on the outskirts of Delhi, and captained the Indian cricket team in the 1960s. His mother, Sharmila Tagore, is a celebrated actress who has starred in prominent Hindi and Bengali films. Not only was she introduced to the screen by the legendary Satyajit Ray, she traces her lineage to the literary and artistic Tagore family. But Khan’s journey in Bollywood, since his debut in 1993, and the long decade of second and third leads that followed, is very much his own.
“I probably did have it easy, but I mean of course I thought it was very hard for me,” says Khan, with a charming grin, now seated on the sofa in his living room, where we have arrived after evaluating whether the library room or one of the many terraces of the four-storeyed home he shares with his wife and two sons, Tim (8) and Jeh (4), are a better spot for tea and talk.
The struggle was being trained in a Western academic environment and then pivoting to Bollywood films, associating with an industry and culture that he was wholly unfamiliar with. While his mother was the highest-paid Indian actress in the seventies, and no stranger to commercial blockbusters, Khan says she never brought the work culture home. “We didn’t have the family background that empowered us to be a certain kind of movie star… our training was to be self-conscious, quiet, self-deprecating… not the larger-than-life persona that actors in the nineties were expected to have,” he says. “We were taught not to grab attention to ourselves.”
Learning in the jungle
Khan has had his share of public lessons. He was replaced in Bekhudi–where he was meant to make his debut with Kajol–allegedly because of his behaviour on set. The debacle born from his comments on eugenics-genetics-nepotism was less than a decade ago. And the internet is still divided about the veracity of the knife attack in his home earlier this year.
But Khan is not in defence mode. He’s been self-reflecting on the personal and work front. He quotes from the American psychiatrist M Scott Peck’s The People of the Lie, where Peck writes that love is a verb, it has to be practised. He made it a project to rewatch all the films he’s done chronologically. He’d watch one every night on YouTube—there are more than 50 movies in his first two decades, going by conservative IMDB records. “I’d done second lead, third lead... There were a couple of films that were decent, that kept one afloat. But then there came a time when, you know, one after another, they were very bad,” he admits. Khan married his first wife Amrita Singh at 21, and became a father at 25 (to Sara Ali Khan; Ibrahim Ali Khan was born six years later), so movies were not just a passion project, but a job as a family man. He recounts a time he was paid one thousand rupees a week by a producer who demanded he kiss her cheek ten times each time she handed him money.
He sees the ’90s as “net practice”, as learning on the job. “People would say, you’re lucky you’ve got so many chances. But it wasn’t that I was getting the best movies in town and being cast as the main lead,” he says. But then slowly—he sees the shift now—he got better. When the 2000s started, he started to take himself seriously as an actor. Love Ke Liye Kuch Bhi Karega and Dil Chahta Hai in 2001, and his role as an antagonist in Omkara in 2006, were turning points. He had been reprimanded by his mother around this time. He had told her that he was looking forward to filming in France, and she’d said: “When are you going to start talking like an actor? When are you going to tell me about a role you’re excited about?” Over time, he also realised that he works well in healthy competition, riffing off his co-stars. “That’s why working with wives and girlfriends is not a good idea,” he quips.
After he found some stability in his acting career, he entertained the idea of devoting more time to reading (and even writing, with a biography in the works). I ask if he regrets not studying after the age of eighteen. “The point is that I didn't even study enough in Winchester. It was an incredible privilege to be there… the opportunities it presented were tremendous,” says Khan. “I should have taken more advantage of my time there. I loved history and art history. I passed my exams all right. But my peers really made the most of it… they’re top editors at the Financial Times, they’re in law, public policy, governance. I always feel like I shortchanged myself.”
He’s making up for lost time. The Pataudi Palace had a good collection of books, but it was locked away in Godrej cupboards. “My grandfather’s books were stamped with a rubber stamp with the coat of arms and it said Pataudi Palace Library, but there was no room for display. There were books on everything from Roman sexual perversion to military history to hunting in Africa... It was as if someone had gone and bought books of a wide range,” he says. Khan has added to the collection and put together a library at the Pataudi Palace which he’s proud of. Growing up between their Bhopal and Pataudi homes, he has fond memories of his father reading to him at night—it was always Greek myths or a story from the Mahabharat. On occasion, Khan now reads to Tim from their shared favourite genre, which is horror.
School of Zen
At his home, Khan walks me through more of his shelves. He shows me a special edition of that book by Salman Rushdie that’s hard to get hold of, and shares that Rushdie had come over to offer him Midnight’s Children. I point out that they have more in common between them now. Khan laughs, but the story of a knife-armed intruder in his upscale neighbourhood had caused serious alarm among Mumbai residents. The actor and his staff shared that he had fought the intruder with his bare hands, leaving him with a major injury in his thoracic spine. He’d arrived at Lilavati Hospital with a 2.5-inch piece of blade lodged in his back, and reports said that had it been a little closer to the spine, it could have left him paralysed. But Khan is trying his best to continue to live life as before. He steers the conversation to Umberto Eco. He can talk in incredible detail about specific books he loves: The Island of the Day Before is about the historical search for the secret of longitudes. His hands gesture, his eyes widen as he speaks of oligodynamic effects and the “powder of sympathy” and now I really want to read more Eco. (Khan should do a books podcast!)
The family dog, a bossy Jack Russell called Elvis, comes to inspect us as we walk to the library upstairs. Around us, 35 years of collected art claim the walls: miniatures, modern and contemporary works, maps, photographs, even armour. Kareena is away in London for work. Both sons report back from their playdates to their father: Jeh has a mild sulk, but wants to say hello. Tim has a bit of a crisis. He has recently learnt that his best friend might be moving continents. He wants reassurance from his father. “Are you sad?” Khan asks. “He’s moving 50-50. Don’t know for sure yet,” says Tim. “So let’s be 50-50 sad for now,” advises his father.
Khan has been thinking of mortality. A few months ago, his ex brother-in-law Sunjay Kapur passed away from a heart attack at the age of 53. “How do you get old and die without having some kind of crisis about that process?
“There’s this crazy sense of how lucky one is because [the knife attack] was damn close. And to walk away relatively unscathed is nothing short of miraculous,” he says of his near-death experience. Lying on the floor of Jeh’s bedroom with stab wounds before he went to the hospital, he remembers thinking it’s been a great life. “It could have been the adrenaline but I remember thinking life has been colourful and I’ve been privileged to be in many places… not just in terms of money—so many people have much more money—but when I think of that rarefied atmosphere of Winchester, of all my travels with loved ones, the wine, my wife, my children…”
Khan’s analysis of the episode is that the intruder was there by mistake, that he didn’t know it was Saif and Kareena’s home. This narrative has helped give him normalcy. After the incident, his son Jeh told him he’s the bravest man he knows. As a father of three sons, I ask Khan what qualities he’d like them to have. He doesn’t highlight bravery. “Calmness, patience, discipline, balance,” he says. To stay calm when things are flying around, to stay loving when times are difficult, it’s not easy, he says. “You have to work quite hard for everything to be in its right place.”
Since he’s been self-aware in admitting he “wasn’t very good” earlier, I ask what he thinks of himself now. He used the money earned from films to reclaim possession of the ancestral Pataudi Palace from the Neemrana Hotels group, which makes him believe he fulfilled a duty to his family. “I'm happy. I think I've built something. There's a constant sense where you want to be better as a parent, a husband, a son. But I think I'm doing all right. And I’m much better than I was.”
Family life has brought him peace. He recounts a recent trip to Antiparos, a serene Cycladic island in Greece. After dinner, Tim and he found a beautiful cove and stood on a rock by the water’s edge. A full moon was low on the water. It was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. Tim challenged him to jump in, and he did. He remembers the embrace of the warm, saline sea, and floating with just his face above water, looking at the moon and stars. “So I've never been the kind to say, ok, let’s climb this mountain. This is what I want… floating in the water,” he says.
Tim and he both learn the guitar. Khan plays classic rock—Guns and Roses, Deep Purple. He’s not good enough to play Led Zeppelin yet. He’s stopped smoking. Drinking is limited, except special occasions. The week after we are speaking, Khan and his wife have a cooking date. Kareena is meant to bring “good wine” from London. They’ll make pasta, or maybe roast a chicken, there’ll be music playing and Elvis and the children running around. It’s been planned weeks in advance because it’s a small window before he leaves again for Ooty to resume shooting for Priyadarshan’s Khiladi of Hells, where he pairs up with Akshay Kumar after 17 years.
Accomplished actor, titular prince, son to famous parents, husband to famous wives, father of four—two of whom are already actors, reader, connoisseur of fine wine and neckerchief knots, amateur guitar player, Khan is all of that. But he is also a wide-eyed boy—the schoolboy from Winchester. He is eager to learn, eager to impress, he wants to do better, and he wants to speak about so many things that he frequently loses his train of thought.
Saif Ali Khan gives me Vernon Lee’s Prince Albiric and the Snake Lady to read with much enthusiasm. It’s a seventy-year-old Grove Press edition, wrapped in cellophane. It’s his favourite story of all time. The eponymous prince of the story is beautiful and virtuous; he is banished from his castle but finds himself living inside the world of the beautiful tapestry he used to admire in his childhood bedroom. In a way, he has everything he thought he wanted. He had a dream and now he is inside it. Perhaps, like a certain Chhote Nawab we know.
Anindita Ghose is the author of the novel The Illuminated. Her anthology The Only City is forthcoming from HarperCollins in October.
Credits:
Chairperson: Avarna Jain
COO: Jamal Shaikh
Editor: Rahul Gangwani
Creative Direction, Concept and Styling: Vijendra Bhardwaj
Photography: Nishanth Radhakrishnan
Styling Assistant: Komal Shetty
Editorial Mentor: Saira Menezes
Managing Editor: Sonal Nerurkar
Deputy Editor: Mayukh Majumdar
Words: Anindita Ghose
Make up: Dhananjay Prajapati
Hair: Sagar Rahurkar
Styling Intern: Vaishnavi Misra
Bookings & Production: Varun Shah
Production assistant: Ishani Bhojwani
Location: Soho House, Mumbai
Artist Manager: Urshita Kochar
Talent Agency: Exceed Entertainment
Artist Reputation Management: Communiqué Film PR
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