Shah Rukh Khan turns 60: When passion became a scandal: The story of Maya Memsaab’s boldest moment

An adaptation of Gustave Flaubert’s ‘Madame Bovary,’ it reimagined the 19th-century tale of longing and ruin within the folds of Indian domesticity.

When ‘Maya Memsaab’ premiered at the 24th International Film Festival of India in 1993, something remarkable happened. It was screened four times—an unprecedented feat driven by pure audience demand. The film itself, an Indo-British-French co-production directed by Ketan Mehta, promised a heady mix of art and allure.

An adaptation of Gustave Flaubert’s ‘Madame Bovary,’ it reimagined the 19th-century tale of longing and ruin within the folds of Indian domesticity. In a pre-Internet world, whispers spread that the film featured steamy scenes between Deepa Sahi, as Maya, and a young Shah Rukh Khan.

That curiosity—half literary, half voyeuristic—was enough to turn the festival screenings into an event. With a cast that bridged theatre and cinema greats like Farooq Sheikh and Raj Babbar, and music by Hridaynath Mangeshkar set to Gulzar’s lyrical melancholy, ‘Maya Memsaab’ entered the public eye as an audacious experiment rather than a routine release.

What has kept ‘Maya Memsaab’ alive in memory is its refusal to belong neatly to any genre. Mehta didn’t simply retell Flaubert; he relocated the French classic to Shimla’s quiet hills and transformed a bourgeois tragedy into an Indian fable of desire. His camera lingered on silences, on rooms too ornate for comfort, on snow that looked as cold as marriage.

The film drifted between theatrical stylisation and near-documentary realism, creating a rhythm of beauty and unease. Production tales mirror that same unpredictability—Mehta blocking Shimla’s Mall Road for night shoots, chasing the last snow to preserve continuity, even making emergency trips to London and Paris to patch the collapsing budget. That mix of literary ambition and guerrilla filmmaking gave the film its raw edge and lasting intrigue.

At the centre of the storm sat one sequence—a love-making scene between Maya and Lalit (Shah Rukh Khan). Conceived as a turning point in the story, it was meant to show Maya’s hunger and rebellion, not titillation. Deepa Sahi later admitted she “got giggly at first… but then you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do,” describing how professionalism replaced awkwardness once the camera rolled. She called Khan “a thorough gentleman” and credited Mehta for ensuring the moment served the story. Even the censors were unexpectedly gracious—one CBFC chief reportedly said that when a filmmaker “makes a piece of poetry,” it deserves respect, not cuts. But when the film left the screening room, the nuance evaporated. What was intended as art became fodder for gossip.

The real trouble began when a film magazine ran a fabricated story claiming that Mehta had asked Sahi to “spend a night” with Khan to prepare for the scene—an absurdity that infuriated the young actor. Shah Rukh stormed into the publication’s office; a confrontation followed, threats were exchanged, and a police complaint ensued.

One report even claimed he was briefly arrested. The incident exposed how easily gossip could wound careers in the absence of accountability. It also marked one of Shah Rukh’s earliest collisions with fame’s darker side—learning, almost overnight, how quickly perception can rewrite truth.

On set, however, his commitment had been absolute: Ketan Mehta later recalled that Khan’s mother was gravely ill during the Shimla schedule, yet he never missed a day’s work. That mixture of personal grief and creative intensity infused the performance with a rawness that few noticed then but is visible in hindsight.

Ironically, just months later, Shah Rukh’s image flipped from art-house curiosity to mainstream mania with ‘Baazigar’ and ‘Darr.’ The same industry that had treated him as an outsider now couldn’t look away. ‘Maya Memsaab,’ meanwhile, became the detour—the strange, misunderstood experiment in a filmography that soon overflowed with blockbusters.

Yet the choice to work with auteurs like Mehta and Mani Kaul (Idiot/Ahmak) remains a testament to his early instinct for creative risk. Before superstardom dictated his scripts, Khan seemed drawn to edges—to films that asked uncomfortable questions about desire, morality, and identity. ‘Maya Memsaab’ was one such edge, even if history buried it under misinterpretation.

For Mehta and Sahi, the backlash was bruising. Distributors and tabloids seized upon that one sequence and repackaged the film as soft porn, selling tickets on titillation rather than theme. Deepa Sahi later admitted she “brooded” over being misunderstood, while Shah Rukh Khan privately rued how a single frame could erase the intention behind an entire performance.

Critics and festival audiences saw bravery; gossip columns saw scandal. The nuance of female longing and social repression was reduced to a talking point about censorship. Soon, the film slipped into trivia—a curiosity item in SRK’s filmography, its serious craft forgotten beneath a cloud of sensationalism.

Commercially, ‘Maya Memsaab’ stumbled at the box office, but its afterlife has been stubborn. It surfaces in film school syllabi, in adaptation studies, and in cinephile lists tracing the evolution of Indian modernism.

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Gulzar’s verses, Hridaynath Mangeshkar’s music, and Mehta’s tonal daring continue to attract new viewers who stumble upon it decades later. More than a flop, it stands as an early document of ambition — of a director unafraid to test boundaries and an actor willing to risk discomfort for authenticity. The film’s enduring irony is that it was punished for the very honesty it sought to portray.

In the end, ‘Maya Memsaab’ survives because it dared. It treated female desire with empathy at a time when Hindi cinema mostly looked away. It embraced art when audiences expected romance, and turned sensuality into sadness rather than spectacle. That its message was distorted only adds to its myth. We still talk about ‘Maya Memsaab’ not for the scandal that consumed it, but for the quiet courage behind its making — a film that tried to whisper poetry and found itself trapped inside a scream.