India has finally made Shah Rukh Khan a Muslim

Yesterday, a veteran editor asked on Twitter what was more disappointing, the “Corleone-fication of our financial/entertainment capital, or a megastar slavishly accepting it”. He was, of course, referring to the much-reported Shah Rukh Khan-Raj Thackeray meet, in which the Bollywood superstar “assured” the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena chief that neither would the former have his Pakistani co-star Mahira Khan promote his upcoming film Raees, nor would he feature Pakistani artists in his movies in future.

There were “open letters” aimed at SRK yesterday. Letters of disappointment, mostly. The solidarities, if any, were kept bubbling underneath the thick crust of moral odiousness at the no-longer-hidden nexus between the political thugs that the Thackeray-led MNS really are, and the liberal elite of Bollywood, particularly Karan Johar and Shah Rukh Khan.

This transformation of SRK – from the brash, egotistical male and the symbol of India’s post-liberalisation libidinal energies, the nebulously Indian consumer as the romantic hero, slightly rootless but contextualised in the post-1991 opening up of the sexual economy, whose moral universe started and ended with “love”, a peculiarly bourgeoisie obsession at that, to the Bollywood entrepreneur whose 1980s throwback of a movie about a Gujarati Muslim bootlegger, smuggler and terrorist, Raees Khan, is imperilled because of its stereotypically controversial subject, portrayal and star cast – is something that is one of the defining tensions of our times.

It is the story of how India and its pungent polarisation of a vast and diverse citizenry finally catch up with its most beautiful and heady creation – the cosmopolitan desi, the irreverent performer, the effortless anti-hero and the star of stars, Shah Rukh Khan.

The mythmaker that is Shah Rukh Khan, once the upstart, the parvenu of the protectionist guild that was the Hindi film industry till the late 80s, hardly ever wore his religion on his sleeve. Sure, he’d say Inshallah to his dreams and hopes, or that “Yes, we Khan”, but there was a firm lightness of touch which came from a supreme confidence in India’s ever delicate but constitutionally enshrined secularism.

Not for Shah Rukh Khan, before he became SRK, the overbearing burden of Nehru/Indira-era socialism, as Paromita Vohra has explained in a mesmerising piece about King Khan. Neither did he think much of nation-building, as some of the Amitabh Bachchan movies did, such as in Amar Akbar Anthony, that would envision India as a huge family of brothers belonging to different religions, but all drawing the blood and bond from the same mother, the country.

Nor did he pay attention to the intricacies of being a Muslim in a post-Babri Masjid demolition era, when Bombay was split wide open by blasts killing hundreds, and the word Muslim came to be associated with inherent criminality and violence, drugs and bootlegging, and many more organisational vices that constitute the visible slice of the black berg.

No.

Shah Rukh Khan was more concerned with playing Rahul, the DKNY-sporting lover boy, the good-hearted NRI who gets the girl, the one with the swag, oh yes. His flirtation with Indianised Dostoevsky versions of Raskolnikov, the lurid outcast of a prosperous but highly repressed sexual economy, though immensely successful, was over.

Somehow SRK – the middle-class Delhi boy who was in love with Gauri Chibber and married her shortly, lived in barsatis and lost his parents early, an orphaned Oliver Twist of Delhi and Bombay, the sprawling mega cities that were both his home and his antagonist – found that the foothold he needed to set himself apart from the pantheon of industry actors, old and new, and from the terrible snobbery of the Bollywood blue blood, that very foothold, was now too small to hold his exponentially growing feet.

His feet were wings.

Since 1995 and Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge, through the spate of dance move movies like Kuchh Kuchh Hota Hai, Dil to Pagal Hai, Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham, Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna – the Aditya Chopra/Karan Johar-SRK complex blossomed, along with the multiplex-going crossover cinema-loving globalised Indian, not only the NRI but the “neo-middle class” India, enabled by the newfound freedom that a liberalised economy and a technological revolution bring in their heels.

SRK’s paeans to love were therefore the love songs of the comfortable new Indian, not the ABCD, or the America Born Confused Desi, but the India-born complex citizen, for whom borders, for a while, became redundant, and being apolitical, far removed from the newspaper headlines about India-Pakistan Kargil conflict of 1999, the Gujarat riots of 2002, and other historical-political milestones became hiccups he could cure with deep breathing. And some forgetting.

Because Brand SRK was much, much bigger than Shah Rukh Khan the individual, who had a Muslim name and said Inshallah, who received overnight stardom bang in the beginning of his career and retained, nay, expanded the dominion of that kingdom like no other, becoming the second richest actor in the world – attending to that minor detail that he was born into Islam was absolutely redundant.

And like most in his Bollywood cohort, paying obeisance to the “Tiger” of Bombay, Bal Thackeray, had less to do with Shah Rukh being a Muslim, and much more to do with his being a superstar, who must acknowledge the omerta and ensure “there is no trouble”.

His forays into playing the “Good Muslim”, as evident in Chak de India! and My Name Is Khan, gained him a doting audience abroad, in Europe and America. An entire conference was held in Vienna in 2012 titled “Shah Rukh Khan and Global Bollywood”, in which over 40 academicians discussed how the superstar was a symbol of “religious unity”, a case study and an inspiration for these fraught, communally charged times.

The milder Muslim, the practising Islamic character who either sells cosmetics or is a hockey coach for the underdog women’s team, saw SRK bring in a long lost tenderness in those roles, liberating the Muslim from the terrible, terrifying straitjacket enshrined in Nehruvian India.

Always consigned to character roles, or playing the lead in ghettoised “Muslim socials”, the eroticised, Orientalised Muslim was synonymous with endless shayari, kebabs, the best friend who dies, the good uncle who prays at the dargah for the hero’s life, the mausi who brings up the orphan hero who thinks he’s Muslim, but is miraculously saved as it’s discovered in the end that he’s Hindu after all.

Shah Rukh Khan normalised the Muslim in the handful of characters that he played. Of course, even they were played with a certain irreverence, hall mark of Brand SRK, with that grizzly stubble and the tiny pony-tail jutting out just a little as a nod to the king of swag, the brash Badshah, the Bad Shah, of Bollywood.

The carefully controlled real life of SRK – with just the right amount of spontaneity, as in the Wankhede stadium outburst, or fabled face-offs with Salman, now the Bajrangi – was in perfect balance with the Nita Ambani-photo ops during IPL matches, his casual brushing of shoulders with the richest Indian, and being the dimpled, elegant cowboy of cool.

His Muslimness wasn’t even an afterthought, for he never parted from it. It was a deeply private aspect of his luxuriously secular life, ruling Bombay from his Mannat, which has a temple for his wife. A bit like Akbar in his empire of romantic dominance, Shah Rukh Khan, the poster boy of India’s aspirational classes, the guilty pleasure of the intellectual and desiring girl who is now a woman, had worn his Muslimness, like a liberal class Brahmin wears his/her privilege – casually, without reflection, without torment, without rebellion.

How things change!

Shah Rukh Khan’s Raees is not only a film about a Gujarati Muslim bootlegger, smuggler and terrorist, with loose similarities with dreaded 1980’s black marketer Abdul Latif, who was killed in a police encounter, it is a film about being aggressively, violently, polemically and criminally Muslim in an era when being good and clean is defined in deeply communal terms, as in a “yagna”.

SRK’s Raees Khan is a surma-sporting, no-holds-barred gangster warlord, AK-47 toting terrorist – the ultimate Other in Indian imaginary. This Shah Rukh offers to us, the meekly complying, nationalism-loving, cow vigilantism-witnessing good citizens of India, as “Mian Bhai ki Daring” as well as “baniye ka dimag”.

It is as if the latent promiscuity of Shah Rukh Khan’s inimitable, hitherto benign Islamic heart, has suddenly exploded on our screens. We are not used to seeing SRK like this – his Don was an uber-cool world-trotting glamour crime lord, not a local terrorist who would sell bootlegged alcohol in a prohibition state that is Gujarat.

It’s as if the initial Shah Rukh, of his early twenties – the stalker, the killer, the unaccommodated loser and the outcast – has returned in a highly politicised, aestheticised, Islamicised version of himself. This is not even the SRK contemplating on his star persona and the phenomenon, as in Fan. This is the Shah Rukh that SRK has repressed all his life, because he simply he didn’t know or care or even wonder about.

Raees Khan, as is evident in the trailer, and through the staunchly denied parallels with Abdul Latif, is Shah Rukh’s revenge on Brand SRK and the India that now so betrays the promise of a liberal capitalist utopia. Under the present dispensation, in which even a Shah Rukh Khan is forced to acquiesce to the imitation Corleones of Mumbai, facilitated by none other than the chief minister of Maharashtra, the auction of Shah Rukh Khan is now complete.

A publicly Faustian deal with Raj Thackeray is therefore Shah Rukh’s “evil laughter”, a holding up of the cracked mirror that is India, to itself. Yes, he wants to ensure that there is no trouble, and he’s only certain that trouble there will be, because MNS is only one among the countless custodians of covertly and overtly institutionalised thuggery in the name of the very country Shah Rukh represented with all his heart and might and intellect and charm, for over two and half decades now.

Today, Shah Rukh Khan is not only becoming a Muslim, he’s embracing a celluloid self, an experimentation with the “id” of the Indian superego – the Muslim terrorist in a Hindu supremacist India. Shah Rukh Khan is finally becoming a rebel, by giving vent to that very repressed current in the mighty river that is the story of life – part mythology, part inspiration, part envy, part glamour – that he had thought didn’t even exist. Or, at least that his immense success could eclipse completely.

That eclipse is over. Shah Rukh Khan, meet Shah Rukh Khan, the Muslim. The Indian Muslim. Branded with the hot iron of nationalism – the congenital criminal.

Also read: My fan moment after watching SRK's Fan