Before Shah Rukh Khan became Bollywood’s “King Khan”, he was just another young actor trying to find his place in showbiz. Long before his debut ‘Deewana’, he shared screen space in a quirky, little-seen English-language short film from 1989 ‘In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones’. The film’s heroine was played by none other than a future literary star, making this one of the most unusual pairings in Indian cinema. Interestingly, SRK’s first co-actress was the woman who would later win the Booker Prize.
Before the Booker
What makes this early outing even more remarkable is who Khan shared the screen with. Playing Radha, the film’s free-spirited, sharp-tongued heroine, was a then-unknown Arundhati Roy. Long before she penned The God of Small Things and won the Booker Prize, Roy was dabbling in cinema as both actor and writer. In fact, she was the screenwriter behind ‘In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones’, a film that went on to win two National Awards.
Roy’s Radha was memorable, irreverent, bohemian and unapologetically nonconformist, a character who mirrored her own later reputation as a fearless public intellectual. In hindsight, the pairing of a young SRK and Roy in one film feels almost surreal – two cultural icons at the very start of their very different journeys.
From Page to Screen: Roy’s Early Film Career
Between her literary success and activism, many tend to forget that Roy also had a career as a screenwriter. She wrote two films, the strangely-titled In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones (1989) and Electric Moon (1992), both directed by her then-husband, filmmaker and environmentalist Pradip Kishen. The first film won two National Film Awards, including one for its screenplay, which went to Roy, and another for ‘Best Feature Film in English,’ awarded to Kishen.
A Glimpse of ‘70s Delhi College Life
In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones is more than a Shah Rukh Khan debut. The film captures youthful rebellion, college camaraderie, and life in ’70s Delhi. Featuring trilingual dialogues in English, Hindi, and Punjabi, it portrays the carefree spirit of students, a disregard for authority, and a rock-and-roll soundtrack that sets the tone.
Though the film was only briefly shown on television years ago, interest resurged after Roy’s literary fame. Penguin later published the screenplay, and parts of the film found a new life on YouTube. Today, it stands as a notable example of successful Indian English-language cinema and a glimpse into one of Shah Rukh Khan’s earliest cinematic ventures.
Shah Rukh Khan Before Stardom
Shah Rukh Khan started his acting career on television with the popular TV serial Fauji in 1988. He then appeared in minor roles in Umeed (1989) and Wagle Ki Duniya (1988-90) before landing the lead in Aziz Mirza’s Circus (1989-90). It was in 1989 that Khan acted in In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, written by and starring Arundhati Roy.
The film, set a year before the Emergency, revolved around the idealistic student Anand Grover/Annie (Arjun Raina), who would rather dream up utopian solutions to India’s problems than study. His girlfriend, the bohemian Radha, was played by Arundhati Roy, while actors like Roshan Seth, Rituraj Singh, and Manoj Bajpayee played supporting roles. Shah Rukh Khan essayed the role of a student simply called Senior. “Senior is a bit over-refined and ineffectual, the kind of person people would angrily shake fists at and call ‘armchair intellectual’ today. It is strange to see Shah Rukh Khan play this part because the character is subdued and talks from the mind rather than the heart,” the film’s analysis notes.
