Shah Rukh Khan’s Pathan

Bollywood is obsessed with Pakistan. We’d be flattered if it weren’t so nasty

by FATIMA BHUTTO

If recent Bollywood films are any indication, it is fair to say that India’s film industry is obsessed with Pakistan. Obsessed. Like standing outside your apartment and trying to peek through your windows at night with binoculars obsessed.

If the films were smarter or more daring, Pakistan might be flattered. Instead, we are beginning to be mildly confused by all the attention.

Even though our common neighbour China has taken – without too much of a struggle and aided by a helpful press blackout in India – 38,000 sq km of Indian land in Ladakh, on which they are building homes and bridges, you won’t find any Bollywood films with Chinese villains or bad guys.

No, all the nasties in Indian cinema are Pakistanis, usually wearing military uniforms, and always Muslim.

Bollywood has always reflected Indian political trends; the films of the 1950s mirrored the optimism and romance of the newly independent country, the 1970s hero was a proud but disenfranchised man fighting against the powerful and corrupt. In the 1990s, there were endless films about neo-liberal yuppies who worked in Dubai, danced in London discos and drove shiny Mercedes. Since Narendra Modi and his rightwing party, the Bharatiya Janata Party or BJP, came to power nearly nine years ago, Bollywood has readily embraced his menacing politics.

In 2018, the starlet Alia Bhatt headlined Raazi, a film about a woman who marries a Pakistani army officer in order to spy on the country during the 1971 war with India. In 2019, Bollywood released Uri, a military flick about Indian special forces launching a “surgical strike” on Pakistan after a supposed terror attack. Though Uri was based on a real incident that nearly brought two nuclear-armed states to war, it played fast and loose with the facts.

All this is especially unpleasant as Pakistanis have traditionally been enthusiastic audiences for Bollywood – the industry brought us songs and fun and the profound knowledge that our neighbours look and live just like us, demonstrating the incredible power of culture done right.

It is well-known that Bollywood’s three biggest stars, the three Khans – Shah Rukh, Aamir and Salman – all happen to be Muslim, as were many of Bollywood’s earliest stars, including Dilip Kumar and Meena Kumari. Raj Kapoor, the original heartthrob of Indian cinema, was born in Peshawar and at its founding, Bollywood enthusiastically celebrated India’s many religions, histories and fables. Muslims not only acted and made music for the industry but their legends were beautifully translated on screen. One of Bollywood’s most beloved and lavish epics, Mughal-e-Azam, was set in the Mughal court of Emperor Jahangir. But those days are far behind us now. Today, it is clear that India’s fascination and anxiety over its neighbour points to darker political imaginings.

This month, Shah Rukh Khan returned to the big screen in his first film in years, Pathaan, an action film that’s smashing box office records. The film opens in Lahore, where a Pakistani general with just three years to live hears the news in his oncologist’s office that Narendra Modi’s government has revoked article 370 of the Indian constitution, which guaranteed Kashmir, India’s only Muslim majority state, autonomy and special status. The general decides to use his remaining years of life to “bring India to its knees” and immediately calls a deranged terrorist to get all this organised.

Pathaan’s plot is nonsensical, and no one wears many clothes as they dance in bikinis and shorts trying to save India and therefore the world. It is naturally unconcerned with facts – article 370 was the instrument that allowed Kashmir’s ascension into the Indian union; if it is declared null and void, then so too is Kashmir’s ascension to India, but why bother with facts or what any actual Kashmiris think or feel? There aren’t any in this insipid film anyway.

I interviewed Khan, or SRK, as he is known to his hundreds of million fans around the world, for a book five years ago and noticed even then that he straddles an uncomfortable role as the ever grateful Muslim who is really, really, really Indian. As India embraces the Hindu majoritarian politics of its ruling BJP party, high-profile Muslim figures like Khan are increasingly seen as fifth columnists. Trolls and angry protesters often beseech Muslim stars to “go back to Pakistan”, though they have no roots there. Today in India, anyone who questions the government or dissents from popular discourse is slandered as “anti-national” and told to go live in Pakistan.

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Breaking down Pathaan, the most popular movie in the world

by SWATI SHARMA

An Indian film expert explains Shah Rukh Khan’s latest Bollywood hit, the biggest film of 2023, and its subversive political message.

Talk about a comeback.

One of the biggest movie stars in the world is at one of the most tenuous moments in his career. Bollywood titan Shah Rukh Khan hasn’t made a movie in almost five years, his two most recent films failed to captivate audiences, he’s at odds with India’s ruling government, and his industry has been plagued by pandemic disruptions, boycotts from right-wing activists, and anger over nepotism. His latest film, which was released on January 25, is perhaps the biggest test of his star power in his 30-year career.

But the stakes of Khan’s movie Pathaan go far beyond the actor’s relevance. A Muslim man from a middle-class family, Khan hasn’t succumbed to the growing trend of Hindu nationalism that has dominated Bollywood for the last several years. He’s in fact been a target of the right-wing Hindutva government that has been in power since 2014, due to the charismatic star’s singular influence in India and many other parts of the world.

When the sleek high-budget action film Pathaan came out on the eve of India’s Republic Day, it became the biggest film in the world, knocking down Avatar: The Way of Water, which had held the top spot for weeks. Few predicted this level of success for the movie, but many are celebrating the beloved star’s return to the spotlight. The film has broken all sorts of records. It is one of the highest-grossing Hindi films of all time and, according to Deadline, the first Bollywood movie to earn $100 million without a release in China. It’s one thing to have huge box office numbers; it’s another to reach these kinds of milestones.

Though Bollywood is facing myriad issues, one thing is apparent: The Indian government’s mission of promoting Hindu nationalism above all else has wounded Hindi cinema’s freedom of expression, influence, and even profits. It seemed possible that these attempts would sink India’s biggest icon as well. But it didn’t. To unpack the significance of this film and the present and future of Bollywood, I spoke to Rahul Desai, a film critic at the Indian entertainment news site Film Companion. He walked me through why Pathaan’s success is attributed to much more than the substance of the movie and, after a decade of divisive Hindu nationalist sentiment in India, what happens next.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Like Hollywood, Bollywood — the Hindi film industry — was all but shut down during the pandemic. What was the state of the industry leading up to the release of Pathaan?

Before the pandemic, Hindi cinema was already struggling. There was a big nepotism scandal after a famous actor who was an outsider, Sushant Singh Rajput, died by suicide. There was a narrative that mainstream blockbusters from the South had an edge on the Hindi film industry, which is in northern India. The public caught a feeling that, to put it bluntly, Bollywood was the villain in Indian cinema. Covid only made things worse.

To be honest, since 2015 or 2016, I’ve struggled to make annual best movie lists because there have not been enough contenders. So unpopularity wasn’t completely unwarranted, but things got very toxic in the last few years, and Bollywood movies have been underperforming. The Marvel films that release in India and Telugu blockbusters like RRR outperform Hindi movies even in Mumbai, which is the center of the Hindi film industry.

India has also changed a lot politically. The country, though a Hindu-majority nation, was founded on secular principles. But since 2014, the right-wing government has been promoting Hindu fundamentalism. It seems like the government is influencing Bollywood more than ever.

There has been a relationship between Bollywood and the government, but that relationship stopped at freedom of expression. Many film stars may have had their own political opinions, but that did not stop them from making movies that were expressive, and that were brave, and that were secular in many ways. Communalism and religious prejudice have always plagued this country. It’s just that this current particular establishment has weaponized that compared to the previous ones. Why? Because Bollywood has maximum influence over the masses, and they realized very quickly that this medium is how they will get their ideas across.

Because of that, the government has broken many of the powerful people in the industry into some kind of submission. Stars won’t speak up when one of their contemporaries is being harassed or when one of their own is being bullied. I can’t fault them for that, because their livelihoods and careers are at stake. It’s a very precarious situation for a lot of the celebrities to be in.

This has a knock-on effect on the kinds of films that are being made. The government’s hands are in the kind of stories being told and the kind of actors that are propped up, especially if they openly showcase their Hinduism. You see a rise of patriotic films that pretend to be patriotic, but they are obviously preaching a very different kind of nationalism as compared to, say, the films of the past that represented secular ideology and gentle patriotism, saying, We are proud of the country we are in, but it doesn’t have to cross the line. Now a lot of lines are being crossed.

This brings us to the topic at hand: Pathaan has been one of the most anticipated releases in Bollywood over the last few years. There are many reasons why, but one of the biggest is Shah Rukh Khan, or SRK. Give us a sense of who he is.

Khan has been the biggest superstar of the modern era in Hindi cinema, since the early 1990s. He has been the name that a lot of people associate with India. If you go to the most obscure foreign country, the one name people will know is Shah Rukh Khan. They’ll name one of his movies from the ’90s or hum one of his famous songs. He’s been an icebreaker for Indian travelers all over the world. He’s been that icon for three decades.

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