That one time Shaktimaan Mukesh Khanna turned Aaryamaan to make Indian Star Wars
Mukesh Khanna made the childhood of many a 90s kid, thanks to his starring role in the superhero drama Shaktimaan. Sadly, Gen-Z might remember him more for his sexist views on women staying at home and not going to work.
As for Indian Star Wars fans (or “Wookies” as is the go-to term in the fandom), they might remember the Mahabharat actor as the man who brought Star Wars to India (and arguably massacred it).
With today being May the 4th AKA Star Wars Day, it only makes sense to revisit Khanna’s 2002 space opera for Doordarshan, a 91-episode saga dramatically titled Aaryamaan - Brahmaand Ka Yodha (Aaryamaan - The Warrior of the Universe).
Intending it as an Indian spin on Star Wars, Khanna produced the show himself under his Bheeshm International banner with a budget that was quite exorbitant for its time. Around Rs 15-20 lakh was the average budget for the initial episodes. It’s uncertain whether Khanna’s gamble paid off or not as Aryamaan is hardly cherished as his stints on Mahabharat and Shaktimaan are. But what’s certain is that for “shitpost memers”, Aryamaan is quite the gold mine.
And while Star Wars fans can trash it as much as they like, the Doordarshan series did carry the laughable passion of a Star Wars film. The effects are shoddy. The lightsaber duels are laughably bad. And Khanna thought his melodramatic performance as a space prince would come off as emotional (only to yield cringe-inducing results). And still, Aryamaan is an absurdly interesting time capsule of the early 2000s for the ones who are willing to sit through it.
The plot borrows many a page out of George Lucas’ original Star Wars (which in itself drew heavily from Akira Kurosawa’s samurai films like Hidden Fortress). But its plot also seems reminiscent of other classic “chosen prince” stories like the Hindu epic Ramayan and Frank Herbert’s sci-fi classic Dune. The title alludes to Khanna’s Prince Aaryamaan who lives in a galaxy far far away.
More specifically, he lives in a desert empire known as Thar Empire (yes, after the Thar Desert) in a galaxy called Aariyana Galaxy (yes, it’s pronounced like Ariana). But when his scheming stepmother Queen Nasa (yes, as in the American space agency) plans to kill him so that she can usurp the Thar throne for her half-human, half-beast son Mahasamant Naarak, Aaryamaan migrates to the planet Gurukshetra (as in a “land of gurus”) with his robot Tobo. Yes, Tobo looks like a cheap knock-off of the droid C-3PO but is still as annoying as his Star Wars counterpart.
Out here, he gains “Indian Jedi” knowledge and lightsaber fighting skills under the 750-year old master Hoshin. Remember Kiran Kumar, that one bearded man with a heavy voice who just shows up in any Hindi movie as a serious character? If you don’t remember his name, just take a look at his face.
Remember him?
Yes, so Mr Kumar plays Hoshin, India’s answer to the Jedi master Obi-Wan Kebobi. Hoshin trains Aaryamaan with fighting skills that should make an acrobatic lightsaber-wielder. But here’s the catch. Mukesh Khanna was aged 44 at the time of Aaryaman’s filming. And he was clearly not in good-enough shape to be a Jedi warrior, at least according to the conventional norms established by Star Wars so far.
So, when the 44-year-old (who by the way looked way older) played around like a young prince, that’s where the trouble started. Maybe Aaryamaan would have worked better if it had a more youthful lead. And Khanna, who literally debuted playing Bheeshm Pitamah (paternal grandfather) in Mahabharat, was hardly ever youthful.
Even as Shaktimaan, the man used to offer Baghban-level preachy monologues. So, it’s easy to argue that Khanna should have played the master instead of acting as the prince. And to put matters into context, the Hoshin actor was just 5 years older to Khanna.
Despite an aged hero living his dream of being Luke Skywalker, Aaryamaan has a lot to reinterpret from Star Wars (with expectedly hilarious results). Darth Vader’s globular ship Death Star is replaced with a skull-looking CGI render that looks like the cursed lovechild of the Star and He-Man’s skull cave.
When Aaryamaan gets his powers, he wears a dark armour resembling villains like Darth Vader. And you don’t have to be a Star Wars fan to know that Vader and his army of Stromtroopers were heavily influenced by Adolf Hitler and the German infantry soldiers known as Sturmtruppen (literally Stormtrooper in German). Maybe, Khanna got too inspired by the Nazi overtones as his Vader-like armour bears a symbol that almost looks like a circular Hakenkreuz! (or maybe he was just twisting the Hindu swastika to imply it had all gone wrong)
Such is the bizarreness of Aaryamaan that makes it a cult classic. After concluding on Doordarshan in 2003, the show even re-aired on the kids’ channel Jetix (where the writer of this retrospective discovered it in the first place along with other “so bad it’s good” gems like Hero: Bhakti Hi Shakti Hai). When Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens dropped its trailers, a YouTuber even ended up making a Star Wars edit of Aaryamaan.
If you wish to watch all the episodes of this forgotten sci-fi “classic”, you can find them all on YouTube. So, this Star Wars Day, if you wish to convert a friend into a Star Wars geek, let Aaryamaan be their introduction to George Lucas’ vision!