Indians of my generation can pinpoint the precise moment that Aamir Khan became a movie star. It's the scene in the 1988 blockbuster hit Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak (From Resurrection to Resurrection) when Khan's character, Raj, in a bouffant hairdo, skinny black tie and open waistcoat, straps on an electric guitar and launches into his first song: "Papa kehte hain bada naam karegaa" (Dad says I'm going to make a name for myself, but nobody knows where I'm going). The lyrics, the look and the attitude captured both the aplomb and anxiety of youth, and the fun-loving, fresh-faced actor who embodied those qualities became an instant favorite of millions.

The Aamir Khan sitting across from me in the office of his elegant, art-filled apartment in Mumbai's tony Pali Hill is nothing at all like Raj: he's all grown up and very, very serious. His legs are folded in the lotus position on his favorite perch, a faded green armchair. His palms are joined as if in prayer, with both forefingers grazing his lower lip. His back is perfectly straight. It is the ideal posture to meditate on the question he has himself raised: "What is the role of the entertainer?" After waiting just long enough to make me think I'm required to respond, he supplies his own answer: "It's to bring grace to society, to affect the way people think, to make the social fabric stronger."

That would be grandiose coming from almost any movie star, but 47-year-old Khan, one of India's most successful actors, is trying very hard to live up to his ideal. Over the past decade he has acted in, directed and produced a string of movies that artfully straddle the demands of popular cinema and that desire for grace. Now, with his groundbreaking TV show Satyamev Jayate (Truth Alone Prevails), he has dispensed with commercial considerations to indulge his conscience. With it, Khan has taken on the mantle of the country's first superstar-activist.

The show, in equal parts chat and journalism, casts an unblinking spotlight on some of India's ugliest social problems. Khan is its creator, producer and host, and he has invested it with his star power — and his credibility. It's a ballsy move, and potentially jeopardizes his status as the beloved idol of millions. After all, the subjects his show tackles — whether female feticide and the sexual abuse of children or honor killings and the terrible inequities of the caste system — are precisely the sorts of harsh realities from which many of Khan's fans seek escape in his movies. "He's betting that people who come to him for entertainment will also follow him on more serious issues," says Rajkumar Hirani, who directed Khan in the 2009 blockbuster hit, 3 Idiots, the highest-grossing Indian movie ever. "That's a risk few actors will take."

It might just pay off — for India as much as for Khan. By the time the 13th and final episode of the show's first season aired on July 29, it had notched up an aggregate TV audience in excess of 500 million. (A special 14th episode was broadcast on Aug. 15, the anniversary of India's independence.) Many more millions followed the series on radio, watched episodes online or picked up threads of the discussion in their newspapers. It may be impossible to calculate how much total benefit Khan has brought to Indian society, but there's plenty of anecdotal evidence that the actor long typecast as a singing-and-dancing romantic lead is enabling some real change.

Only days after an episode on the sexual abuse of children, the lower house of India's Parliament passed a long-overdue bill to protect kids from such molestation. Another segment, on the exploitation of "low caste" Indians, led to a meeting and discussion with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. A show about crooked doctors brought an invitation to testify before a parliamentary committee, a first for an actor. It's not only the high and mighty who are reacting to Khan's high-wattage advocacy. After the episode on female feticide, the chief of Budania, a small village in Rajasthan state, vowed to set the police on families that sought gender-determination tests and abortions.

Not all the response has been positive. A doctors' association demanded that Khan apologize for the episode on medical malpractice, saying it unfairly portrays all doctors as greedy and crooked. (Khan denied that all doctors were so portrayed and refused to apologize.) Some commentators have carped that the star's prescriptions for the social ills he identifies are too woolly minded and impractical. (Sounding frequently like a self-help guru, Khan indicates that India's problems could be solved if all Indians resolved to solve them.) Others suggest that the actor fakes the emotions he displays during the show's more dramatic moments. Aveek Sen wrote in Kolkata's Telegraph newspaper: "[Khan's] empathy is endless and humility endless — and both instantly, endlessly, enacted."

Nobody questions, however, that Khan has forced his audience to confront unpalatable truths about Indian society. Even journalists with a long track record of covering social problems acknowledge that Khan's star power has helped make people sit up and listen. "We've been covering these issues for years," says Richa Anirudh, the anchor of Zindagi (Life) Live, a Hindi-language news show that tackles themes almost identical to Satyamev Jayate's. "But when [Khan] brings them up, they naturally get more attention."

Can a movie star affect the mores of a nation of 1.2 billion? It might just be possible in India, where a national obsession with cinema, unparalleled in the world, gives popular actors an influence beyond the imagination of Hollywood scriptwriters. Indians are voracious movie watchers: collectively, they buy over 4 billion cinema tickets every year and watch over 1,200 films in a dozen languages. (In comparison, the average annual output of Hollywood's major studios and subsidiaries in the past decade is barely 180, with Americans buying 1.28 billion tickets a year.) Scores of Indian TV channels deliver an unending supply of reruns, and pirated DVDs of current releases as well as classics sell in the millions.

But you don't have to be in front of a screen, large or small, to come under the thrall of Bollywood. (The term, originally attached to Hindi-language movies made in Bombay, or Mumbai, is often used to describe all of Indian cinema.) Giant billboards advertise the latest releases or feature movie stars endorsing everything from automobiles to mouth fresheners. Every day of the year, readers of major Indian newspapers receive an eight- to 16-page supplement of cinema-heavy celebrity coverage.

All of this adds up to a national culture of fanatical star worship: only Brazil's adoration for its top soccer players comes close. "If you're a movie star in India, you're both a god and a favorite child," says Anil Kapoor, who had enjoyed that status long before international audiences saw him as the swaggering quizmaster in Slumdog Millionaire. "People give you incredible reverence, but when they talk about you, they use your first name, like you're a member of the family."

Yet, for all their outsize influence, Bollywood's biggest stars rarely embrace causes, even uncontroversial ones. There is no Indian equivalent, for instance, of Jerry Lewis' telethons for muscular dystrophy. Bollywood's brightest can be relied on to bring glamour to fundraising parades or galas after a natural disaster. Still, no one has attempted a deep engagement along the lines of Angelina Jolie's humanitarian efforts in Africa, much less George Clooney's aggressive activism on Darfur. "Many [Indian actors] are good-hearted, but they haven't been smart or focused when it comes to causes," says iconic actress Shabana Azmi, who has spotlighted the plight of Mumbai's slum dwellers and done public-interest messages about AIDS. "Some of them do things quietly, but they say they don't want to openly attach themselves to a cause because it might be seen as going beyond their responsibility as entertainers."

"You worry that people will say, 'Your job is to give us three hours of escape from our lives, not to lecture us on how we should live,' " says Rishi Kapoor, romantic hero of the 1970s and '80s, and son of Raj Kapoor, the actor-director who made a string of films with powerful social themes in the black-and-white era. "It takes a genius like my father to find the balance between what people want to see and what you want to show them."

With Satyamev Jayate, Khan has torn up the unwritten compact between a star and his fans. The show makes no effort whatsoever to sugarcoat the message, and there's no concession to the audience's desires. You see what Khan wants you to see, and much of it is very, very unpleasant.

Each 90-minute episode tackles a single issue — honor killings, say, or discrimination against the disabled — with a brutal candor that has viewers squirming on their sofas. On a sparse stage before a small studio audience, the victims of India's social ills pour their heart out to Khan, who encourages them to relive their horrors. Their tales are interspersed with short field reports and discussions with experts on the scale of the problem. Khan supplies his audience with statistics compiled by a team of researchers. There's also usually an exploration of the laws pertaining to the issue and a can-do segment in which those who have overcome the predicament offer guidance to those still enduring it.

The format borrows from U.S. confessional shows, leading inevitably to comparisons to Oprah. But the similarity is superficial, at best. Unlike Oprah Winfrey, the queen of American chat, Khan doesn't give his audience a break with digressions into health advice, cooking tips or celebrity interviews. The world of Satyamev Jayate is too full of serious troubles to allow for the respite of a low-fat cookie recipe. For the most part, too, Khan is careful to avoid easy scapegoating. When a woman shows pictures of her husband who, she alleges, bit off portions of her face because she "failed" to give him a son, the man's own face is pixelated out to hide his identity. Khan says this is not merely a precaution against legal action. "I'm not interested in individual villains," he says. "This is not a movie, so I don't need to show that so-and-so is a monster who gets his just desserts in the end. I'm interested in the larger issue: What is it about our society that makes a man think that a son is more important than a daughter?"

Collective responsibility is Khan's mantra. At some point in most episodes, the star looks straight at the camera, squares his jaws and delivers some variation of the theme that all Indians are at least culpable for the inequities in their society. He fixes me with that same look — stern but sincere — from his perch on the faded green armchair and launches into a soliloquy about responsibility: "The solution has to start with me, with every individual. After all, if these terrible things are happening in my society, then I have a share of the blame, because I've done nothing to stop them. A solution can only begin to appear once I accept it's partly my fault, and then you accept that it's partly your fault, and a third person [does that], and a fourth person." I come to understand why his critics say Khan's prescriptions are no more substantive than a fatherly lecture on morals.

While Satyamev Jayate is Khan's first foray into television, he dips into the Bollywood bag of tricks to keep his audience's attention. Each episode comes with large dollops of melodrama, the host employing the purple prose favored by Indian scriptwriters. Speaking of a whistle-blower allegedly murdered for exposing corruption in government road-building contracts, he intones in Hindi: "The torch of truth that he lit should never be allowed to wane in our hearts." When guests recount their personal tragedy, Khan's expressive face registers shock, horror and pain; he chokes up, and the camera repeatedly catches him wiping away tears. Every episode ends with a rousing call to action, usually in the form of song. "He has to use the language of Bollywood," says Anurag Kashyap, one of the hottest young directors in Hindi cinema. "If it were cut-and-dried, it would not be effective." Khan says his responses on the show are genuine, that he is not acting. But he admits to manipulating the emotions of his audience. "I'm not a journalist, I'm a storyteller," he says. "I can make you angry, sad, happy ... That's my skill set."

The episode on domestic violence, for instance, features an all-male audience kept in the dark about the show's subject. Khan announces that they will discuss "the security of women in our society," and makes a maudlin appeal to the men as "protectors and defenders" of women. Khan then asks, "Where are women most unsafe?" It's a cue to a field report from a Mumbai hospital, where a doctor says six out of 10 women brought in for care are victims of violence at home. Now Khan unleashes a shocking statistic: 50% of Indian women have at some point been victims of domestic violence. The audience is on the ropes. "Here I had them preening as protectors of women," Khan tells me, his eyes lighting up as he recollects the men's reactions of shock and embarrassment. "Now they're suddenly confronted with the realization that, statistically, there's a chance that many of them sitting there have [been violent to women]. There's no getting away from it."

Khan's first ambitions in activism were humble: years ago, he toyed with the idea of making some public-service documentaries on road safety and etiquette. He dropped the idea as unworkable (a pity, most Indians would agree) but felt "like there was something I had to offer, somewhere down the line." That instinct is the product of nurture as much as nature. Khan's father Tahir Hussain, a moderately successful producer in the 1970s and '80s, made movies with social messages, including the 1982 Dulha Bikta Hai (Bridegrooms for Sale), an indictment of the ancient dowry system in which the parents seeking a husband for their daughter must offer inducements in cash, jewelry and other valuables. (Three decades on, the practice is still prevalent in India and is covered in an episode of Khan's show.)

But Khan's early career gave little inkling of a socially conscious streak. After his breakthrough role as Raj in Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak, he was quickly typecast as a romantic lead and delivered a string of hits through the 1990s. He began to vary his roles with Lagaan in 2001, about a cricket match between British colonialists and impoverished Indian villagers. Nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, Lagaan was a spur for higher-quality work, including his 2007 directorial debut Taare Zameen Par (Stars on Earth), a critically acclaimed exploration of dyslexia, a condition the Indian school system barely recognizes. While 3 Idiots is principally a comedy, it too is a commentary on India's education system, taking aim at the tradition of rote learning, especially in universities.

Khan was finally ready with an idea for a TV show, but it would take him two years to develop Satyamev Jayate. From the beginning, says director Hirani, "he was determined that it would be completely different from anything anybody had tried on TV." Though the show was bankrolled by Star India, the country's biggest cable network, owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., Khan agreed to do it only if it was simultaneously broadcast by the state-owned terrestrial station. His star power ensured that Star went along with other conditions too: the program, shot in Hindi, would have to be dubbed or subtitled in several Indian languages; there would also be tie-ins with radio shows and a weekly column in major newspapers. Khan says the full-court press is designed to "force you to pay attention to the issues we were covering, wherever you were in India."

He insisted the show air on Sunday mornings, at 11, traditionally a "dead" time for popular television. "I didn't want prime time," Khan says. "I wanted people to make an investment: you have to decide you want to watch." He calculated that as viewers sat to Sunday lunch with their families after the show, they would discuss what they had just seen. "It's not enough to shock and shake," he says. "It's important to start conversations." Khan also had conditions for the show's sponsors. Airtel, a cell-phone company, and Axis Bank agreed to be the conduits for any donations the audience would make to the causes being examined, and a major Indian charity agreed to match all the contributions.

The themes for the 13 episodes were chosen after weeks of brainstorming with a team of scouts, reporters and producers. Once shooting began, bringing Khan into contact with the victims of social problems the team had identified, it began to get very real. Listening to their stories was more emotionally exhausting than he had expected. "It left me very brittle," he says. "I'm not trained for this, to be sitting two feet from someone, having them pour their heart to you."

Even allowing for Khan's marketability, the show was not a sure thing. It was impossible to know if Indians would tune in on a Sunday morning to be hectored for 90 minutes on subjects they had previously preferred to sweep under the carpet. The decision to open the series on the subject of female feticide was risky too: the stories of women forced by their families to get rid of their unborn daughters were gut-wrenching. "We knew we had strong material, but we couldn't be sure how long people would watch before deciding they'd had enough of the horror and turn to a comedy or a cooking show," Khan says. Yet the first episode was watched by 90 million people.

The program's success has led, inevitably, to questions about a second season. Khan says he's interested, but wants first to take some time to assess the impact of the first series. It will be hard to top. There are tough subjects left to tackle, and they will likely offend more than a doctors' association. "How far does [Khan] want to go?" asks Kashyap, the director. "Will he tackle the taboos even Bollywood doesn't dare touch?" These, Kashyap says, include direct criticism of politicians or parties, discussion of sexuality and questioning the tenets of religion. Khan says he won't think about new themes just yet, but rules one out outright: "My interest is in the corruption in each of us, not just in politicians." Whatever Khan chooses to do next in his quest for grace, there's a good chance it will lift India a little closer to what he — and fellow Indians — would wish their country and society to be.

By Bobby Ghosh / Mumbai Monday, Sept. 10, 2012