What makes Malaika the extreme Bollywood zest girl

Malaika Arora Khan not an actor, never mind the odd itsy-bitsy role in the odd forgettable film. Yet she has lasted in the film industry for over a decade. “I’m pretty much peripheral in terms of Bollywood, but yet in a way, because of the family I am married into, and my songs, I am in Bollywood ,” she says.

She is, rather, Bollywood’s Shakira of “item” numbers, the Item No. 1. A 35-year-old mother of a seven-year-old son, and still the stuff of male fantasy: when she teases a small town in Uttar Pradesh to distraction as Munni in Dabangg, the front-benchers and multiplex janta go wild. She is also, by the way, the producer of Dabangg Malaika will forgive you for letting that fact slip. “With me it’s always the songs... it’s for my “item” numbers that I’ll be part of this country’s cinema library.



It all started on top of a train. The year was 1998 and the film Mani Ratnam’s Dil Se. Malaika did the Chhaiyya chhaiyya Shah Rukh Khan and we all know how that turned out. Twelve years later, the “item number” is alive, though perhaps not flourishing, and she is still at the top, offered “a song a day toh pucca”. It’s a fact of the business: if an “item” song is the masala your film needs, Malaika is the go-to girl. In an industry where leading ladies turn into wallflowers in less than half a decade, what’s the secret of the dream run?



“She’s sexy, she’s beautiful and she’s a very good dancer,” says choreographer and director Farah Khan, “but then so are a lot of girls out there.” The difference, Farah says, is in the way she has planned her career. “Malaika has an edge because she has chosen her assignments wisely, maintained her exclusivity and is extremely professional. That’s the reason she has lasted so long,” she says. That, and the backing of one of Bollywood’s most powerful film families.

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