It’s a widely held belief that every true blue Bollywood enthusiast has a favorite among The Holy Trimurti. Mine has always been Aamir Khan. I never cared for either Salman or Shah Rukh. Never cared for their films or for them as people – Shah Rukh appeared in commercials that mocked and belittled people with darker complexions and Salman deserves a prison sentence. As for Shah Rukh as a thespian, I only enjoyed a handful of his films (namely the gorgeous, baroque fantasy Dil Se), and if truth be told, his unremarkable performances in it had nothing to do with me liking the film.
Still, when Shah Rukh Khan’s film career descended just as the current ruling administration ascended– and yes, I do see a correlation between the two– I suddenly felt something I’ve never felt for Shah Rukh Khan before, sympathy. During the past eight years, we have witnessed the unprecedented downfall of someone who, despite my personal reservations of him, had largely been a global force for good for his one billion plus countrymen.
The entertainer, icon, statesman that is Shah Rukh Khan commands a legion of fans across the world like no other Indian star. Mention his name in a crowd in Europe, Asia, Africa or the Americas and you will quickly garner a sea of smiles.
The once colorful, joyful, phantasmagoric world of Bollywood has now become a septic tank full of proletariat anger and hatred.
To see someone be attacked so relentlessly and undeservedly is a cruel thing to witness. Especially since the main reason why is because he’s a highly successful Muslim. Let’s just lay that flat out.
But it’s not just SRK whose stardom is diminishing; it’s Bollywood as a whole that’s in major trouble. Hordes of haters, primarily in North India, are hell-bent on destroying the Hindi film industry with their incessant boycott hashtags and worse, death threats to Bollywood stars for having a contrarian opinion or for just wearing an orange dress.
It’s fucking sad.
The once colorful, joyful, phantasmagoric world of Bollywood has now become a septic tank full of proletariat anger and hatred. As filmmaker, Anurag Kashyap, once astutely said in an interview “social media has empowered the public. Before, the public could not reach Bollywood stars. They used to just see them on screen. Now, the public can shit on them whenever they want on social media. They feel that by trolling them that they feel equal to them. The gap between stars and the public no longer exists.”
And the bigger the star, the harder the public will want them to fall. Shah Rukh’s last four blockbusters all underperformed at the Indian box office while lesser stars like Ayushmann Khurrana and Vicky Kaushal have replaced him in Bollywood’s upper echelons.
A prudent PR team would advise the flailing film star to reinvent himself, to perhaps make the move to digital, which resurrected his peer Saif Ali Khan’s career, or to switch gears completely and make an intimate, small town drama – India’s flavor du jour.
But with Pathaan, it’s clear that Shah Rukh is standing his ground, choosing not to be a gamechanger but to hold on for dear life to the now antiquated larger-than-life masala experience that made him the megastar he is.
And surprisingly enough, it’s working thus far. Despite the film’s first single, Besharam Rang, a sensual summer banger, dropping in the dead of winter, it arguably became the biggest Bollywood hit of the year. Its equally catchy follow-up, Jhoome Jo Pathaan, quickly followed suit instigating a TikTok craze which saw thousands of Bollywood fans across the world imitating the music video’s now iconic dance moves on the platform.
If Pathaan is able to sustain this mammoth momentum and prove to be as successful as its filmmaker, Siddharth Anand‘s last film, War, then it will be an emphatic victory not only for Shah Rukh Khan, but also for Bollywood and more pressingly, India’s Muslims, many of whom no longer feel safe in their own country…and a nail-biting loss for Hindutvas.
