Recognising and Misrecognising Shahrukh Khan in Pathaan

I went with a group of friends to see Pathaan on opening night in the US on January 31, 2023, partly as a fan and partly to be able to write screening questions for my students, whom I would be taking to see the film the following week. The theatre was almost full by the time the movie began, which is unusual in my experience in Pittsburgh, but it was clear that we were all afficionados and perhaps even fans. Five minutes in, the movie sets up a moment of recognition that is meant simultaneously for the diegesis and for the audience. The silhouetted prisoner says to his torturer and to the audience, “You’ll take five seconds to be surprised. Then five seconds to wonder where you’ve heard this voice before,” and as the torturer slowly responds, “Pathaan? You?” the audience similarly responds in recognition. Then, exactly at the five-and-a-half-minute point, as the prisoner raises his head into the light to reveal the bloodied face of Shahrukh Khan, the hall erupted into loud cheers, the loudest from the group of young women in the row behind us. No whooping or cheering in the diegesis, of course, but then, even as the background score intensifies and Shahrukh Khan (henceforth SRK) rises from his chair, the cheering in the hall increased and we all experienced a moment of collective euphoria that many of us knew we were sharing with others around the world and especially in India. I never expected to experience something like this in Pittsburgh, but this was an unusual screening and, for my own teaching purposes, also an unlikely class field trip, interrupting the fourth week of the semester before students had had time to even know who SRK is. Across the world, we all experienced the Pathaan screening as unusual; many have written about the politics of this moment, the public’s embrace of SRK’s re-emergence as being about more than the star himself. And yet it was also the star himself who ended up embodying the public’s hunger for a more inclusive idea of India, as the film itself seemed to throw caution to the winds and chose to complexify religion, identities, and allegiances in its narrative in ways that finally stood up to the climate of daily violence, trolling, and harassment that have become normalized in the era of BJP and Hindutva power.

How was I to set up this complicated context for my students, who may not know SRK at all, let alone the geopolitics or even the location of Pakistan and Afghanistan in relation to India? With the previous weeks’ films, we had already discussed some of this, but I also wanted to see how the film would do with an audience completely unfamiliar with SRK. The following week, on February 1, when I took my students to see Pathaan, this time it was my class of 30 students who filled the theatre, so I knew not to expect the same cheer of recognition at the five-minute point in the movie. This time with my class in the movie theatre, the audience was a mix of fans, those who vaguely knew SRK, and those who were completely new to Indian cinema, so the moment of recognition at the film’s five-minute point passed by with a quieter ripple of sound across some of the seats. This was an opportunity to see how the same film activates itself differently among different audiences. In the case of my students, I had an unusually vocal group this time. By this, I don’t mean class participation alone. I mean vocal “hootin’ and hollerin’” as I put it to students in the second week of the semester. In the first week of the semester, when we watched Bajirao Mastani (Sanjay Leela Bhansali, 2015) in class, I was pleasantly surprised by the enthusiastically vocal response of some of the students in the class, a response so infectious that it gave permission to others unfamiliar with Indian cinema to also join in. Bajirao Mastani served the dual purpose of introducing students to the pleasures of Bollywood narrative and spectacle, while also beginning what became a semester-long conversation about contemporary Hindutva politics, both in its narrative and its production and reception contests (Gehlawat, 2017). The next week we talked about why it’s okay to not sit in serious silence, even in an academic setting, when it comes to Indian cinema of a certain type. So, I had an already primed audience when I set up Pathaan in advance of our class visit to the theatre. They understood what it meant when their assignment on Pathaan included video and still images of enthusiastic audiences across India dancing in front of the screen to the “Jhoome Jo Pathaan” song that accompanies the final credit sequence of the film. And despite feeling awkward about it, two or three brave students did go up to the front of the screen to dance with the final credits at the AMC Waterfront Cinema in Pittsburgh.

Just as Om Shanti Om (Farah Khan, 2007) and Fan (Maneesh Sharma, 2016) afforded different forms of recognition and engagement for different audiences, Pathaan, in its own way, did the same. As anyone who teaches Indian cinema outside India knows, Om Shanti Om works just as well, but differently, if shown in the first week of the semester versus the last week. In the first week, there’s enough for audiences to recognize, even when they don’t get all the references. In the last week, they have the thrill of insider knowledge and a greater degree of recognition, though the level of engagement with the film isn’t necessarily better than when shown in the first week of the semester. In the case of Pathaan being watched in the fourth week of the semester, interrupting the course’s chronology, and before students had even been introduced to SRK or any of the other stars, there was an unfolding of recognition and misrecognition pertaining to the global action genre, the film’s gender politics, the film’s set-up for the first appearance of more than one mega star, and the anticipatory moment of the two songs. When we discussed the film in class the following week, students had already written on the questions I had asked them to think about as they watched the film: Keeping in mind that there are five recognizable stars in the film, even if you don’t recognize them, how did the narrative build in anticipation of star appearances into its structure? In this context, how can you understand the post-credit scene on top of the train car (which now appears before the credits in the Amazon Prime version)? How could you tell that the film incorporated references to other films, even if you didn’t get the references? What can you say about the film’s gender politics – this should include attention to all the female characters in the film, including the minor ones. How does the film represent the identity of the character Pathaan, played by SRK – where does he get his name from, and what is his parentage? Please consider this in the context of the recent years of harassment faced by SRK at the hands of the current Hindu nationalist government and its supporters, who insinuate that, as a Muslim, he isn’t capable of being sufficiently patriotic towards India. Think of this and Pathaan’s box office success in terms of the tension between politics and fandom. How does the film complicate what could otherwise have been a straightforward representation of the nuclear tensions between the neighboring countries of India (Hindu majority) and Pakistan (Muslim majority)? How does the film work as a global action movie but also as a local Indian action movie? What can you say about audience engagement practices in the Indian context, including the impact of pre-releasing the film’s songs?

Among these questions, the ones that got the most traction were the ones on action and stunts, stardom, gender, and the politics of the film’s box office success. We were evenly divided as fans and haters of action movies, I myself belonging to the latter category and representing a conflict between fandom and genre preference. The questions helped us get past our preferences, especially as action afficionados had a lot to say, including the equivalences they drew between the imaginative stunts in Pathaan and Top Gun: Maverick (Joseph Kosinski, 2022), not knowing in advance that the films shared Casey O’Neill as action director. As the discussion proceeded on why both Pathaan and Top Gun might seem to follow global action norms of testosterone-filled jingoism and the conversation turned to the unreal nature of SRK’s abs for his age, from the back of the room, a student pleaded, “don’t judge SRK from this movie alone, please!” This student was concerned that newbies to SRK fandom were misrecognizing the fuller range of his star persona and would wonder why their classmates made such a big deal about him. And indeed, the SRK of Pathaan was in many ways unrecognizable for those students who had not kept up with him after his romance movies. But the student’s plea to withhold judgement before seeing his other films was, of course, the very first lesson in star studies and, in the case of Pathaan, one that invites us to think of the layered resonances of SRK’s appearance in the film. Those in the know understood that the student who reminded my class of the full range of SRK’s star persona was more interested in some of these earlier contexts that we would be encountering later in the semester through films like Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (Karan Johar, 1998) and Om Shanti Om. These discussions and responses, especially coalescing around SRK’s vulnerable and invulnerable bodies across his career, and their visceral imprint on viewers, bring us to the question of Pathaan’s place in the intertextual layering of narrative scenarios and star bodies.

There are two intersecting ways in which Pathaan represented a rejoinder to the Hindutva troll army seeking to control the box office fate of films and stars under the current regime. The first was a resounding wave of fan support for SRK, something that went beyond fandom alone and became a message from even non-fans that the public had become sick of the bullying he had been subjected to. In fact, fandom as a rejoinder was nothing less than a form of love expressed even by moviegoers like myself who hate the action genre. Despite being a fan, I would not have taken my class to see this film (because of my own genre tastes) if SRK hadn’t been subjected to the harassment he endured in full view of the public. The second form of the rejoinder was, of course, the way in which the film flew a relatively subversive narrative under the radar of a “silly” global blockbuster genre whose tropes include testosterone-laden militaristic techno-fetishism and overt forms of patriotism. In fact, students who didn’t like action movies were put off by this aspect of the film. Only a closer look at the film’s narrative and some knowledge of geopolitics would draw their attention to the fact that we have a hero here who is a patriotic Muslim Indian spy, one whose name was earned in a village in Afghanistan, whose parentage is unknown because he was an orphan, and whose allegiance to India isn’t in question in the narrative (though it certainly is in its political impact); a villain who is an Indian spy gone rogue, again a detail that is unremarked in the narrative but surely has political valence; and a Pakistani spy who, while seeming to be a femme fatale, is actually on the side of India. Under the masquerade of the basic tropes of the global action genre, especially its hypermasculine and conservative patriotism, the film offers us the very figure as hero (both the character and star) that the Hindutva trolls have been trying to convince us has no real allegiance to India because of his religion.

With each iteration of a star’s public circulation in a film or elsewhere, the palimpsestic text of that star gets further layered. That moment of recognition at the five-minute point of the film points back to the many scenes in SRK’s filmography that show him inching towards an action role. We have seen that bloodied face many times before, though the narrative and genre contexts were significantly different, such as romance (Pardes), terrorism (Dil Se), and fandom (Om Shanti Om), to name just a few, and SRK mostly played roles where he got the worst of it in the earlier decades of his career, moving eventually towards roles where he gave more than he got in films such as Fan and Raees (Rahul Dholakia, 2017), in which the focus shifted from his bloodied face to his athletic leaps across buildings and roofs. The key marker in this trajectory has been his star persona’s comic embrace of masculine vulnerability. Even in Pathaan, we have the same comic gesture towards these earlier iterations of SRK’s vulnerable battered face, such as in Dil Se, where he lies to the goons who are thrashing him that they should be careful because he has friends in high places. In the train fight scene in Russia about halfway through Pathaan, after several minutes of SRK single-handedly fighting off a Wagner-group-like militia, he falls back against the train wall in a bloodied-face close-up, and begs them for a “time out.” It is appropriate that this is the moment in which the movie sets up the grand entrance of its fifth major star after SRK, Dimple Kapadia, John Abraham, and Deepika Padukone. The double recognition of the star/role of Salman Khan/Tiger in this scene when he descends from the roof of the train to rescue SRK was another carefully set up moment of recognition for the cheering audience at my first viewing of Pathaan. In connecting this moment of SRK vulnerability not only to the YRF spy universe, but also to the films they starred in together, starting as brothers in Karan Arjun (Rakesh Roshan, 1995) and most famously as friendly rivals in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, the film made a new patriotic space for two Khans. While my students did not recognize Tiger or Salman, they certainly recognized the film’s comic jab at the hyperbolic masculinity of such action scenes when SRK responds to Tiger’s offer of some pain medicines with “men don’t feel pain,” even as he winces and gratefully takes the pills. This is a different instance of what Mukul Kesavan (2023) noted about SRK in relation to John Abraham, who he claims is “without question the handsomest villain the world has ever seen”: “Shah Rukh Khan’s willingness to act alongside taller, conspicuously better-looking men — Arjun Rampal in Om Shanti Om and Abraham in Pathaan — says something about his confidence and generosity;” in this case, SRK is willing to be rescued by another star and to let him have his own action scene. Yet, Pathaan is no multi-starrer of the 1970s, despite its ideological affiliation with Amar Akbar Anthony (Manmohan Desai, 1977) that SRK himself pointed out. As a phenomenon more than a film, Pathaan is very much an SRK film, and these self-deprecating moves are elements in his multilayered star text that the film invites us to recognize.

Let us now pause on the multivalent politics of SRK’s diegetic name, Pathaan. There’s more to it than the notable detail that he is, in fact, nameless and orphaned, and that his identity is one he has earned or lived through, “raised by India” and renamed Pathaan by grateful villagers in Afghanistan after he prevents one of the US’s many casual collateral damages of women and children massacred in drone attacks. The politics of this back story had to be unpacked and explained to my students, though Shahrukh Khan’s own reference to Amar Akbar Anthony as a kind of intertext was helpful since students had already watched it before Pathaan. To recognize SRK in one of the relatively few Muslim roles he has played in his career, from Chak De India (Shimit Amin, 2007) to Raees, is to see Pathaan layered alongside not only his earlier Muslim roles, but also the intertextual history of the Pathan figure in Bombay films, from Kabuliwala (Hemen Gupta, 1961) to Zanjeer (Prakash Mehra, 1973) to Khuda Gawah (Mukul Anand, 1992) to Hey Ram (Kamal Haasan, 2000). Sher Khan, the Pathan figure in Zanjeer, was similar to many such older, wiser Muslim roles in films across the art cinema/commercial cinema divide, including characters in Deewaar (Yash Chopra, 1975), Sholay (Ramesh Sippy, 1975), and Mirch Masala (Ketan Mehta, 1986)), playing a loyal secondary role to the heroes of these films. But it’s notable that this Pathan figure went from a secondary to a primary and starring position in Amitabh Bachchan’s role as the Afghan hero, Badshah Khan, in Khuda Gawah, with its many intertextual references to Amitabh’s career up to that point. For SRK, the Pathaan role reprises not only this history of the character, but also his own lesser-known role as Amjad Khan in Hey Ram, a film that my students watched later in the semester. Given that Amjad in Hey Ram has to speak up for his right to be considered an Indian, the role in Pathaan may be considered to be very much a continuation of a cinematic trajectory that embraces this figure as worthy of both star performance and unquestioning Indian citizenship. That one should even have to speak of Indian citizenship, and that this topic was brought up in Hey Ram in 2000, shows one of many ways in which the long arm of Hindutva extremism has been with us. One could similarly trace the multivalent intertextual meanings of the narrative detail that Pathaan was an orphan who was found in a movie theatre, since foundling narratives played a major role in films that were overtly about India’s secular ideals. In fact, I referred my students to the song “na Hindu banega na Musalman Banega” from another foundling film, Dhool ka Phool (Yash Chopra, 1959), but Amar Akbar Anthony’s foundlings were also on our minds.

Later in the semester, I screened Hey Ram after students had seen Kuch Kuch Hota Hai and Om Shanti Om. Being unfamiliar with the film, they were not expecting to see SRK, and cheered when he appeared. But the biggest gasp was reserved for the final section of the film, where SRK’s Amjad Khan reconnects with his former friend, who over the course of the film has been radicalized into a Hindu extremist, and now refers to him as “Pathan” and tells him to go home to Pakistan (conflating Pakistan and Afghanistan as undifferentiated Muslim spaces). With Pathaan, SRK did not have to answer such questions about his allegiances either in the diegesis or from his fans. The times we live in require us to temper the luxury of the ideological critique we aimed at films like Amar, Akbar, Anthony, Hey Ram, and by a similar logic, Pathaan. While acknowledging the secularist impulses in Amar, Akbar, Anthony and Hey Ram, we also taught our students to read the majoritarian Hindu tendencies in both films. We can still do that, but given the current context of Hindutva power, we can also ask students to consider how these two films activate a different set of meanings for today’s audiences about an idea of India that the country is losing. Similarly, what some have seen as the fascistic veneer of Pathaan has to be read as a kind of Trojan horse carrying these older films and ideals. In referring to the film as a kind of Amar, Akbar, Anthony once it was clear it had succeeded in the box office, Shahrukh Khan outed the Trojan horse.