The Pathaan Effect

Cinema’s powerful presence in everyday life has always been linked to its ability to both represent and inscribe details that may miss the eye, using the expressive language of bodies, gestures, space and narrative. When these qualities become amplified in popular blockbuster films, their power is frequently dismissed and the potential of this genre’s role in diverse social contexts is routinely undermined. Pathaan, Shah Rukh Khan’s (SRK) comeback vehicle after a hiatus of four years, is a film that made a splash with its dramatic release and massive run at the box office. Like the aesthetics of blockbuster cinema (Acland, 2013), Pathaan became associated with spectacular special effects, a sense of tonnage articulated in the ongoing generation of information linked to the film’s ability to draw noisy and cheering crowds to the theatres, its large budget and even larger returns. At the core of this blockbuster, however, was SRK’s altered identity as an action hero, a new look that was the main highlight unveiled in stages through photographs, teasers and trailers prior to the film’s release.

The significance of Pathaan lies in its ability to source the recent past and congeal into a major media event. There are periods in history when films have become immersed in the circumstances in which they were created, drawing fuel from a sense of topicality while also becoming triggers for media debates in public life. In 1994, Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz identified media events as distinct from the routine production of news; these are enormous events, largely state-centred and televised in real time to have a transfixed audience. The authors argued that electronic media like television could command attention through their ability to portray stories about contemporary events. The events could be political or sporting battles, charismatic missions or rites of passage associated with well-known figures. Media events, they said, are also performative since they are not always tied down by notions of balance, neutrality or objectivity. They are, in fact, interventions, not narrative accounts, that actively build new worlds. While the framework of the media event for Dyan and Katz was largely linked to television and the nation, globalisation and digital technologies have created a larger sense of a transnational universe that goes beyond television to move across a new platform economy.

Pathaan is a contemporary film of immense significance, not because it is exceptional but because the context of its creation and circulation, its geographical imagination and its personification of SRK’s stardom cannot be isolated from an examination of the way the film’s blockbuster aesthetics and presence through widespread circulation became a sensational media event. As an espionage spy film with its assortment of villains, heroes, femme fatales, explosions and constant movement and action, the film set a different kind of stage for SRK to perform against the tide of attacks he has faced as a Muslim star in the last few years. Eight months after Pathaan, Jawaan (Atlee, 2023) was released to become an even bigger hit. While it is important to place these two films together as part of a continuum, in this dossier, seven of us focus entirely on Pathaan to reflect on that overwhelming moment of surprise, exhilaration, and ecstasy that reinstated Shahrukh Khan back in the saddle.

Ira Bhaskar describes the film as an intervention against Hindutva propaganda regarding Muslims and their lack of loyalty to the nation. She claims that the generic structure of the action spy thriller necessitates a commitment to patriotism, which Pathaan investigates through a play with themes of belonging and abandonment, played out through two tropes from popular Bombay film history: the figure of the orphan/foundling and the figure of the Pathaan. To consolidate these ideas, the film, according to Bhaskar, uses SRK’s global popularity to remodel the parameters of nationalism, internationalism and commitment.

Pathaan, according to Anupama Kapse, incorporates hidden layers of the star’s Muslim background in a new language of melodrama with powerful female characters. This is exemplified in the star’s move from a romantic to an action hero. As a result, spectacular action becomes the vehicle through which shards of Hindi cinema’s melodramatic universe are routed through the hero to reinstate the Muslim figure back into the fold of the family/nation. This is structured through the positioning of SRK within recognisable melodramatic tropes of Bombay cinema’s past to stage his dramatic return to the screen.

Meheli Sen focuses on SRK’s body, which in the film is often the site of constant battery in virtually all the set-piece action sequences. While strength and agility are key for action sequences, SRK’s wounded and vulnerable body invites audiences into a masochistic identification with the body in pain. The concept of kintsugi – the Japanese art of using gold to repair broken objects – is presented metaphorically in the film, says Sen, drawing attention to SRK’s ageing star body to both produce him as an object of desire and comment on the schisms that have become part of an ongoing political crisis in India today.

Shohini Ghosh situates Pathaan within a wider body of new millennium action thrillers whose affective sensorium is related to the constant playing out of what she calls the ‘spectral Muslim’. The kinetic rush generated on screen is important to how these films connect with their audiences and necessitates careful attention to the choreography of the action set pieces – the use of international locales, frequent movement, speed and sensation. Attention to the mounting of the action sequences allows Ghosh to reflect on the spatial imagination of the spectral Muslim as a new mode of political communication.

Neepa Majumdar demonstrates how Pathaan works to activate various audience groups in different ways in an American teaching context. The complex world of the film’s spectatorial address and use of SRK’s stardom is set within a larger history of popular Hindi cinema’s tropes, such as the use of the name Pathaan, the figuration of SRK’s bloodied face when he is first introduced, and the character’s orphan identity. She shows how fandom and insider knowledge complicate the viewing experience and pedagogical strategies in the current environment, where an inclusive notion of India is constantly under attack in the era of BJP and Hindutva politics.

Monika Mehta examines the attack on paratexts such as songs released prior to the premiere of films, delving into the performative Hindu nationalist posturing that occurred in the aftermath of the attacks on Pathaan’s popular song ‘Besharam Rang’. She demonstrates how the rabble-rousing technique was intended to portray the Hindu majority as victims and to show the rescue of the colour saffron as an act of faith. The significance of social media infrastructure in mobilising this discourse was essential, as it normally permits right-wing groups to press for anti-minority measures. Pathaan’s use of SRK’s stardom, however, provided a backdrop for fans to challenge such a discourse.

In my essay, I focus on charged viral moments involving SRK’s off-screen persona since the arrest of his son, Aryan Khan. I show how these performative images were critical to affectively influencing the making and reception of the film. I connect these fragments to the networked experience of fans/spectators who demonstrated a sense of viral agency through their dancing and hollering, reawakening the embodied experience of single-screen audiences to intervene in online space where their performance could draw special attention and become part of a repetitive aural and visual force to resuscitate SRK’s beleaguered stardom.