The Ground Beneath SRK’s Feet: The Flight of the Family in Pathaan (2023)

Shah Rukh Khan’s (henceforth SRK) 2016 film Fan marks the nadir of a certain cultural formation that confronts its debacle in the event of the film’s failure. The film’s makers confidently declared that the concept behind the film was all ‘about an emotional connect’ (Mehta, qtd. in Mehta, 2017). This film was predicated upon the assumption that the audience’s love for SRK was bottomless enough to turn the idea of a deranged fan into a conceit of unadulterated love. Yet the film evoked anything but happy emotions. Anticipation turned to surprise, and surprise to dismay – even a certain kind of horror. Audience appreciation – palpable in oohs, aahs, dialogue chiming, singing, dancing or whooping and clapping – gave way to a gloomy silence – or worse still, horror – when Meheli Sen and I watched it together in a New Jersey theatre in the fall of 2016 as we prepared for what would become a subsequent dossier on Fan.

Seven years later, Pathaan (2023) marks the apotheosis of SRK’s phoenix-like return. The star is resurrected as if from the ashes of a broken stardom. As SRK declared in a recent interview,

I have been working for the last 32 years and I never thought there will be a time when I will not work. But it happened. [Now] there was this strange hunger and newness to work. Enough of what I want. Bohot karli apne dil ki [Enough of what my heart wants]. (The Indian Express, 2022)

What does SRK mean by dil ki? Do the films that cluster around Fan as an experiment all coincide with a moment of rupture: Ra-One, Dilwale, Raees and Zero? Where and how would Pathaan fit within the universe of a so-called ‘malfunctioning’ star-body? Is Pathaan, as SRK claims, ‘not’ a film after his own heart? Or does its resounding success stage a magnificent obsession with revitalising aspects of SRK’s heart that he has always had to hide?

The conundrum of what SRK wants from cinema, and what cinema wants from SRK, is central to Pathaan. Pathaan positions SRK firmly within the cinema. In the Los Angeles theatre where I watched the film many times, audiences roared with delight when he spoke the line, ‘I was abandoned in the cinema’, taking it to mean: ‘I was born in (and for) the Cinema’ – coming full circle from the abject disappointment that Fan had evoked. Pathaan’s success is all about heart, not money. If I could draw a global map of the many viewers with whom I have watched an SRK film, in NYC or LA, in different universities and theatrical settings, it would include an astonishingly diverse array of admirers, across gender; age; religion; racial, ethnic, national or class/social affiliations; and/or sexual orientations. This extraordinary range of followers is almost oxymoronic: one fan base, for example, the Muslim minoritarian, could potentially cancel out another, for example, the Hindu majoritarian. It could be argued that, far from being divisive, SRK spoils his admirers by supplying an embarrassment of affective riches that can be tailored to a variety of cultural affiliations, preferred identities and locations across the planet.

As such, one key difference between Fan and Pathaan is Pathaan’s unfettered affirmation of SRK’s Muslim identity. Fan codes all emotion as ‘sentimental’ or Jabra – repressing aspects of the star’s Muslim roots as ‘un-Hindu’, to make them interchangeable with those of a deranged fan. Marking, attributing and even queering feelings as expressions of a hysterical lover or Majnu (Kapse, 2017), Pathaan makes no apology for everything that is Muslim – and cool about SRK – something that the LA audience I saw it with accepted without question as normal, far from deviant. What interests me most here is how elements of SRK’s Muslimness are recoded from being largely repressed emotions in order to be ‘retrofitted’ into SRK’s star persona. The elements that I analyse further are exuberantly assimilated into Pathaan’s narrative by mobilising a key axis of melodrama: the family. A focus on the family allows us to address a related set of questions: together, how do the star’s performative behaviour, action sequences, gestures and sexuality regulate, support or extend the integrity of the family as an economic, geopolitical and affective unit?

If we view Pathaan through the lens of an older example like Karan Arjun (1995), we can spot an entire grid of family resemblances concealed within its upscale technology of images. As Nandini Grewal, Dimple Kapadia plays the head of the comically titled, secret service unit Joint and Covert Operations and Research (JOCR). Her sharp black suit and quick repartee reprise Judy Dench’s elegant and acerbic M in the Daniel Craig James Bond series that culminated in No Time to Die (2021). If we look more carefully, however, Nandini’s love and care for JOCR resembles that of a fearful mother who neglects her own child’s birthday to serve the State – a cinematic archetype that can be traced back to Nargis’ Radha in Mother India (1957). If Nandini wears the pants in the family, then Jim (John Abraham) is a son who has gone rogue, abandoned by his ineffectual, punishing father, RAW joint secretary Colonel Luthra (Ashutosh Rana). Pathaan, far from being unquestioningly ‘pure’ (he is categorically not the Ramu of Mother India), must prove his innocence every step of the way. Unlike in the legendary Amar, Akbar and Anthony (1977), if Jim resembles the Christian-raised Anthony, as SRK jokingly claims in a post-release event, then Pathaan makes for a rather tongue-in-cheek version of the Hindu cop Amar, while Akbar seems to be altogether missing – or is he?

It would be useful to consider Pathaan as a retrofitted, colourful, poetic and loveable Muslim brother; Akbar is now split imaginatively between Deepika Padukone, as the Pakistan-born heroine Rubai; and Salman Khan, as yet another friendly Muslim Bhai/brother who extends Pathaan’s recalibration of a passionately inclusive Spyverse that covertly and jointly opens its arms to all Muslims, in and even outside the Indian border. I will turn to Salman Khan momentarily as another lost brother in the context of the family melodrama. Pathaan dramatises the pressures that the contemporary Indian Muslim male must endure as he tries to belong to a family that is either elusive, estranged or in perpetual crisis. ‘Hum saath kab hue?/When did we get together?’ asks a ‘bewildered’ Pathaan when Rubai simultaneously entraps and rescues him during their first face-off with Jim, a former RAW agent who now heads a terrorist unit called Outfit X. The film both playfully and painfully signals that things have changed irrevocably across the post-Independence, post-Emergency and post-Liberalisation decades of the 1950s, 1970s and 1990s, when it was still possible to imagine a syncretic religious family, through the device of the cinema. In Pathaan, the State represents a diseased body politic that is incapable of healing itself. Nandini’s withered and scarred body, which cannot endure the onslaught of a mutated smallpox virus, is a clear indication of the mother’s ties with, and inability to fully represent, the State. The imagery of biological warfare that Outfit X spawns is critical for staging the patriarchal tactics of an emotionally crippling and diseased State. Nandini’s weakness is further compromised by an authoritarian RAW that, like Colonel Luthra, is bloated and unavailable, with the baggy eyes of the watchdog of a saffronised Hindu majority (as the song Besharam Rang ironically emphasises). Indian law is depicted as weak and incapable of defending itself from the long arms of corporate surveillance: a key site of Pathaan’s double-edged provocations against a stepmotherly State (we rarely see SRK in army regalia). The corporate world is poorly tackled by a State that wants to but is unable to retain control. A syndicate of intelligence agencies that further extend to Europe, Africa, The Middle East and Central Asia issue an open challenge to the STATE, such that Jim and the Pakistani General operate less as villains and more as competing sites of political and affective power. The Syndicate is at loggerheads with the covert operations of both RAW and ISI, contradictory agencies brought together by Rubai and Pathaan. Rubai and Pathaan hover alluringly on the State’s border to embody its shifting terrain. Rather than tying its protagonists to the biological family as Amar, Akbar, Anthony does, in Pathaan, Rubai initiates a provisional alliance with the family by way of her sexual alliance with Pathaan. Padukone is positioned like a proverbial daughter-in-law whom Nandini is unable to accept, for Rubai is a Pakistani Muslim who, like Pathaan, must also repeatedly avow her virtue. The stunts that Padukone performs, including a fantastic ice-skating routine on Lake Bakai in Siberia, offer exciting opportunities for Rubai to partake in action normally reserved for men so that she can also be desexualised to be one of/with the boys, so to speak. ¹

Simultaneously, in Rubai, feminised villainy also takes a sexual form that triggers the melodramatic coup d’état that exposes the fraudulent equivalence between national and familial unity. Instead of playing a straightforward love interest, as she has in her previous pairings with SRK, Deepika Padukone plays a highly sexualised femme fatale for much of Pathaan. The sexual attraction between Pathaan and Rubai is shot through with betrayal at every step in an almost screwball fashion. Jim expresses a corresponding homoerotic glee as he walks past a gullible Pathaan – who has fallen prey to Rubai’s charms – in revealing white shorts, thereby triangulating sexual tension across male and female leads who belong at once to a family of globally allied secret agents who are also covert allies. As the blocking in this sequence shows, they are a global family but they are also not – nationally speaking. The film teases us with a motley alliance of beleaguered minorities: Jim, Pathaan and Rubai represent vicissitudes too real to be mere jokes. Salman Khan enters the picture just when things seem to go too far: he enhances Pathaan’s strength, solidity, loyalty, warmth and comic self-reflexivity in the face of go-for-broke scenarios riddled by two-faced behaviour that he too willingly participates in. Like Rubai, he forcefully liberates SRK’s Muslim roots that have remained hidden for too long, delivered in quick, short bursts of action.

The fragility, instability and appeal of a family whose paterfamilias can be imagined as Muslim – and SRK can claim that title only at the end, after repeated demonstrations of his integrity – are at the heart of Pathaan. Political crises are reimagined as conflicts that destabilise an extended secular family. Jim, a diehard patriot, rebels against Colonel Luthra when he refuses to pay for the release of his pregnant wife, held hostage by Somalian terrorists. Pathaan, abandoned in a movie theatre in India as a child, is nursed back to life after a deadly injury as an adult by an Afghan mother, played by Aamir Khan’s sister Nikhat Khan, forging a more reliable and lasting symbolic alliance with a mother who has the capacity to nurture Pathaan (see Ira Bhaskar in this dossier). However, this mother is located outside India in Afghanistan, underlining the Indian government’s revocation of Article 370 as discriminatory, divisive and structuring an alternative affective universe to expose the falsity and contingency of the State’s rhetorical stance of unity and clemency.

As Shrayana Bhattacharya observes in Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh Khan, SRK’s star persona has remained particularly endearing because he can very skilfully play ‘fragile men—the fragile lover, the fragile hero, the fragile husband, the fragile Muslim, and even the fragile villain’ (Bhattacharya, 2021, p. 19). Without making such characters look disempowered as victimised citizen-subjects, in Pathaan, SRK’s embrace of Muslim vulnerability does the work of affirming the health, vitality and essential goodness of his most fully rounded star persona to date. Any more aggressive, and any more sexual, and the persona would risk a fate similar to that of the protagonists of Fan and Zero (2018), who, despite SRK’s fine performances, could not accommodate the two characteristics that can be especially damaging as Islamic stereotypes: aggression like that of a global terrorist and/or uncontainable sexual desire a-la- Alauddin Khilji in Padmaavat (2018). To that end, as key leads in Pathaan: Jim, Rubai, Bhai and Nalini split and displace to emphasise and re-integrate all the disavowed Muslim aspects of SRK’s persona into Pathaan’s universe.

Eram Agha’s recently published Caravan essay underscores Khan’s nuanced re-calibration of the Muslim characters he chooses to play on screen. Here is a rakishly attractive Muslim (‘I am so sexy’, he says) who is also an honourable Pathaan, not a stereotypical miyan bhai (Agha, 2022, December 31). Additionally, the pleasures of repeat viewing an Indian film are closely tied to reading the star persona by using the tools of re-cognition, re-call and re-turn (Appadurai, 2019), particularly in an SRK film, where he plays a globalised Muslim who is ‘not a terrorist’, has no disability or physical impediment (My Name is Khan [2010]; Zero); can see clearly without eyeglasses (Raees) and is not under the nationalist duress that clouds him as an employee of the State (Chak De [2007]). Further, moments of intense economic and political upheaval can trigger the manifestation of an SRK persona that ‘can alternate … between the registers of heightened emotion and those of the playful tease’ (Vasudevan, 2010, p. 30). This enunciation is no longer split as it was in the early years of liberalisation, but is now forcefully aggregated, with the help of irony, into the star’s persona – traits necessary to accommodate SRK’s Muslim identity that is vital for reconstituting a fragmented body politic, even as it is overtly disavowed. Hence the irony that cuts through previous registers of performance and can juxtapose the artifice of deadpan humour with the truth of affective intensity.

To paraphrase a term from Jacques Rancière, there is speech here, but it is muted. ‘This level is not that of formal play upon [cinematic] language, but that of tropes’ (p. 145) which embody a ‘a detour of thought still enclosed with[in] the figure … caught between two nullifications’ (Rancière, 2011, p. 146): that of the Islamic terrorist and that of an ardent (Hindu) lover. Action offers a key ingredient for staging a double register that is itself placed in quotes: to stage a fragility that is also empowered. Pathaan introduces SRK as a broken, bloody and battered hostage. When we hear him for the first time – before we even see him, his dialogue delivery is low and measured, imbued with the hoarse cadence of past traumas that have left scars on his voice. Pathaan’s colour palette is also similarly muted: low light, blues, neutral yellows and browns predominate, so that John Abraham’s white shorts, Deepika Padukone’s saffron bikini, SRK’s black/green shirts (with pink roses), Bhai’s iconic black and white scarf, and Nikhat Khan’s richly embroidered firan can shine through as badges of Muslimness to ‘unmute’ their imminent desirability. These are aspects of the same star persona split across a displaced family and allowed to speak as one integrated voice to receptive viewers who can see and hear, for it is SRK’s dil that is doing the talking here, for and in the cinema.

Cinematic narratives tied to nationalisation have been forced to rewrite expressive forms to better embody a sense of family and belonging in the wake of the upheavals of globalisation. However, it would be remiss to produce a simple dichotomy that demarcates cinematic texts as either reactionary or subversive. As Carla Marcantonio argues, ‘what makes melodrama such a productive object of study is that, by and large, it dialogues with elements of both’ (Marcantonio 2015, p. 4). This is especially relevant to understanding Hindi cinema’s response to the corporatisation of its narrative forms and production design after the initial decades of globalisation. If, as Arjun Appadurai writes, globalisation has become the basis for increased cultural repression at home (Appadurai 2019, p. 151), then the current regime’s appropriation of the economic markers of wealth and modernity is strikingly at odds with Pathaan’s tongue-in-cheek remediation of blockbuster-style sequences modelled on the Bond and Marvel franchises. A logic of repetition and copying is common to both. However, as a cultural form, the repetitions of Hindi cinema invite fans to decode and participate in a pleasing economy of recognition, similar to the appreciation of an expert rendition of a familiar raga in a heightened new andaaz/style or sur/key that fans, as rasiks/fans, can savour according to their taste.

The jetpack is a terrific example of a sardonic sur/musical key as something that both affirms and ironises the pleasures of global consumption. First popularised by the Star Wars (1977) franchise, Jim and Pathaan chase each other across the skies of the planet in ways that are delightfully poor imitations of Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader: more like a carnivalesque Tom and Jerry scurrying about in a cat-and-mouse flight mode. Action sequences in Pathaan are almost always aerialised. They are aided by planes, helicopters, mountains, vehicles and train-top chases that set off figurative and spatial ‘star’ leaps. Such set pieces seize and amplify an intoxicating architecture of flight: global capital cannot be managed when it flies all over the place as it asserts the weakness of a dictatorial State. In films like Dhoom (2004) and Dhoom 2 (2006, a franchise inaugurated by YRF, expanded many times over by the Pathaan Spyverse), the choreography of action sequences disrupts a Hollywood economy of digital manipulation and seamless cuts. Instead, the injured SRK mouths a very throaty rendition of Zinda Hoon/I am alive to enhance the corporeality and presence of the star body from the outset, amidst an overload of digitised sensory stimulation. If sensory overload dulls the spectator’s conscious perception (see Vitali, 2008, pp. 241–242), the somatic pleasure of audible dialogue and traditional, Kung-Fu-style punches, somersaults and leaps guide our attention back to the solidity of the star body, hypostatised by SRK’s bloody ‘intake’ of a ticking time bomb to save a flight full of beleaguered passengers. Or take the sensation Salman Khan’s scarf caused even before his on-screen arrival – a sight that resulted in thunderous, haptic theatrical applause in cinemas across the world. Pathaan has indeed shifted the ground beneath SRK, as it reimagines and welcomes him back into the family fold.