Seeing like Shah Rukh
On Jawan, Pathaan, Dunki, and a theory of the Indian state
Significant spoilers ahead — I am writing assuming you have watched the movies. Also Substack tells me this post is too long for your email, so please click through to the website to read the full thing if you wish :) Thank you IB, EGF, KS, VP for helping make my stream of consciousness more comprehensible.
In September 2023, I started my masters program in ‘international development.’ I also watched Jawan. Twice.
I claim to be neither an extraordinary Shah Rukh fan nor an avid movie buff. And yet I’ve spent an inordinate number of my waking hours in 2023 thinking about SRK and his three releases—Jawan, Pathaan and Dunki. This year was his most prolific since 2004, which gave us Veer-Zaara, Swades, and Main Hoon Na. Quite like the 2004 trio, each of his movies reflect on the Indian state and identity at a turning point for our country and for Bollywood.
In 2015, SRK had been intensely trolled for condemning “religious intolerance” in the country after the grotesque, public lynching of Mohammed Akhlaq on allegations of eating beef. 2023 was the culmination of SRK’s five-year long hiatus from cinema and public life and a decade-long decline in civil discourse in India. Between the 2019 general elections, 2020 CAA-NRC protests and 2021 Covid crisis, a lot had happened and we hadn’t heard from Shah Rukh. In a October 2021 piece, Barkha Dutt wrote:
Khan’s middle-class roots, interfaith love marriage to a Hindu woman, full-throated embrace of multiculturalism and sardonic humour…made him a symbol of all that is bright, brilliant and possible about India and its pluralism. Now, his heartbreaking transition to a sad, apologetic and silent public figure captures all that is being corroded, debased and devalued in India today.1
In a Caravan profile, Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub, SRK’s co-star in 2017 film Raees, said about SRK’s philosophy: “He follows one ideology: ‘hamne field chuni hai films ki’”—this is the field we have chosen—“‘we will talk through our films.’”
2023 is the most he has tried to say in a while.
My own journey with SRK began when I was a child in Delhi, growing up with a brother who adulated SRK. My feelings at the time were ambiguous. Between the three Khans of Bollywood, I knew I disliked Salman and oscillated between respecting Aamir for his intellect and adoring Shah Rukh for his charm.2 After high school, I largely forgot about Shah Rukh.
This changed in 2022, when I read Shrayana Bhattacharya’s book ‘Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh.’ The book explores the lives of Indian women—their aspirations, agency, and independence—through their love for SRK. The kind, charming, and respectful characters he played enabled women to aspire to a kind of love that remains rare, both on-screen and in real life. Describing how one of her subjects related to SRK’s films, Bhattacharya wrote:
“For Zahira’s generation of women in Bapunagar, these films proved the existence of aliens who lived on another planet, where men sang love songs as a sign of affection rather than of streetside sexual harassment. A reprieve from the constant bargaining, incompatibility and violence in one’s own lived experiences of love, sex and marriage.”
(It’d be a crime to try to summarise the book in a few sentences and I recommend you read it. If you are reluctant to do so, I point you to an interview and my highlights instead.)
In the chapters set in South Delhi, the book described my own experiences to me. It made me understand why I still thought fondly of Mohan from Swades, Kabir from Chak De, and Aman from Kal Ho Na Ho. Rare is the movie star whose gaze makes you leave the theatre feeling better about yourself today and inspiring you to better yourself tomorrow. Over the last two years, SRK has helped me maintain faith in the idea of a country I have seen only from afar for the last seven.
SRK’s characters have continually explored their Indian identity and relation to the Indian state. Consider 2004: Veer-Zaara showed us an Indian Air Force officer falling in love with a Pakistani and both states’ failure in seeing beyond their borders, Swades examined an NRI returning to plug state failures, and Main Hoon Na portrayed an army officer placating tensions with Pakistan. In all 2004 and 2023 movies, SRK was a ward or agent of the state. The state has been his caretaker and guardian in much of his career, yet the relationship is rarely uncritical.
But why is it important to think about the state through SRK? “Because Hindi cinema reaches more people than theatre or literature, these images tell us something significant about what is permissible to depict and imagine at any given moment,” writes Bhattacharya. By learning to see the state like SRK, we might get a glimpse into what its subjects see, and what we can aspire to.
Pathaan: Subversion through representation
I was mildly stressed in the run-up to Pathaan’s release. There were widespread calls to boycott the movie, purportedly because Deepika wore a saffron bikini, but in reality because parts of my country can’t tolerate the idea of millions paying to watch a Muslim superstar. This was a particular stress I had become attuned to during my years abroad — a stress that isn’t personal (I had no immediate agency over the outcome) but also not a collective experience (most people I encountered in my diaspora life didn’t know SRK). I had felt it to varying degrees before: during the 2019 elections (moderately), the farmers protests (significantly), and the second Covid wave (debilitatingly). I was worried that the boycott might work. That an entire fandom would get so overtaken by hatred that we’d sacrifice three decades of joy and entertainment on the altar of Hindu nationalism.
On the face of it, Pathaan is a vanilla spy-action-thriller with a Bollywood aesthetic. There is much to ogle at and little to immediately think about. Divorced from context, Pathaan is little more than a visually pleasing one-time watch.
However, in the current state of Bollywood, Pathaan is subtly subversive. Pathaan’s backstory is ambiguous — he is an orphan who is raised by the state and subsequently ‘adopted’ by an Afghan village when he saves them from US missile strikes. His Indianness is not at odds with his cross-national Muslimness. John Abraham plays a former RAW agent whose family is killed after the Indian government refuses to pay out a ransom, causing him to turn on the state. He is commissioned by a Pakistani army man, General Qadir, to seek revenge on India while Pathaan, a RAW agent, allies with an ISI spy, Rubina, to fight them. The movie builds up to two Indo-Pakistani duos sparring against each other — for once ‘goodness’ is not tied up in one’s nationality.
Despite this complication, the movie reverts us to a pre-Hindutva but post-Independence idea of India, where Kashmir is still a prized bargaining chip. Qadir’s plot is triggered by India’s revocation of Article 370 and Kashmir is used as bait for Jim during the climax, yet we never actually see Kashmir or its people — it's reduced to a symbol, a pristine asset that is an instrument for provocation and revenge.
In February 2023 though, my stress gave way to a feeling of reassurance. My Instagram reels were littered with videos like this and Pathaan set every measurable box office record. Before Pathaan, the highest grossing Indian movies in the three prior years were Tanhaji (2020), Sooryavanshi (2021), and The Kashmir Files (2022).3 All these movies claim to be historical while engaging in disinformation and villanising Muslims and Pakistanis, where possible. I want to expect more from cinema than merely humanising a Pakistani, but in an age where Bollywood’s Overton window has reduced to a sliver and cemented itself firmly in majoritarianism, Pathaan is where I see glimmers of hope.
Jawan: Disruption through challenge
Of the three movies this year, Jawan was the most domestic. Unlike Pathaan there is no ‘foreign enemy’ and unlike Dunki there is no aspirational ‘abroad’. It’s entirely set in India. Most of us are stuck here and our problems are wholly our own.
Across his double role, SRK plays at least four distinct characters. Azad is at once an agent of the state as a warden of a women’s prison and a ‘criminal’ seeking justice he doesn’t trust the state to deliver. His father, Captain Vikram Rathore also assumes two roles: one as a patriotic army man who is betrayed by his country via crony capitalism and another as an amnesiac delinquent living in Ladakh.
Through vignettes, Jawan touches on farmer suicides, references the systemic indifference leading to the deaths of 72 children in Gorakhpur in 2017, and alludes to the political-military-industrial complex through the Bhopal gas tragedy and Bofors scandal. However, Jawan works within the confines of the state. Despite hijackings and kidnappings, it is not an anarchist movie — though the state is challenged, it is not actively dismissed. Vikram was an army man, Narmada is an intelligence officer, and Azad and his handler, played by Sanjay Dutt, are both IPS officers. The state is not beyond saving Jawan tells us, it just needs people invested in saving it.
Some of my classmates noted, correctly, that the movie grossly oversimplifies systemic issues. It does. But in the midst of the simplifications, the movie helps viewers rediscover our agency. Azad’s double life as a police officer and vigilante, reminds us that we can be good citizens while pointing out the state’s flaws. That not all dissent is ‘anti-national’. The health system vignette, where all hospitals are ‘overhauled’ in five hours, shows us that India is not a resource-scarce society, just a highly unequal one. Under the right pressure, incentives, and timelines, the flailing state can reliably get its act together.
The most common critiques I have heard of Jawan — that it is trashy, too fast paced, gory, unrealistic, and flashy — are actually critiques of the genre. One doesn’t walk into a Masala Bollywood movie expecting sophisticated depictions of reality. The genre was born out of a post-Partition, and then post-liberalization, India where we went to the theatres to escape the drudgery of existence for a few hours, not see it magnified on a bigger screen. However 76 years after Independence, Jawan does escape the genre by magnifying injustices we’d rather avoid.
Jawan also seeks to be a truly pan-India film, with a Tamil director and co-star, which introduces a South Indian aesthetic of drama that might be jarring to a Bollywood audience. However, the movie’s violence is is purely instrumental — it is a means to an end for justice in a structurally violent society.4 Precisely because Jawan isn’t a purely Hindi film, Rohitha Naraharisetty observes in The Swaddle, it can seek to hold power accountable in the tradition of Kollywood and Tollywood, one that is now completely absent from Bollywood.5
Did SRK actually ‘break his silence’ with Jawan? I don’t know for sure. But Jawan’s release was intriguingly timed with the G20 summit in Delhi, when the city was effectively shut down for ‘Bharat’s’ show of strength. The most iconic part of the movie is a monologue where SRK urges us to elect our leaders consciously, an allusion to the 2024 elections. Naraharisetty writes, “[the] rousing monologue…makes you forget Azad, the character who is speaking it. Anybody bearing witness to it knows it’s Shah Rukh who’s speaking. And he’s looking right at us.”
Rare is the movie star whose gaze makes you leave the theatre feeling better about yourself today and inspiring you to better yourself tomorrow.
Dunki: Desperation of escape
Dunki saw SRK returning to more of his tropes — he is a cheerful, charismatic leader-type who shows up from nowhere and rallies people together. The movie depicts a group of friends trying to migrate to the UK, illegally through the overland ‘donkey’ route when all their attempts at ‘legal’ channels fail. Again, SRK plays a former army man who is avowedly patriotic, to the extent that he reneges on his immigration attempt (and on staying with the love of his life) by refusing to denounce the Indian state.
However, the state itself is intriguingly absent from Dunki. For a movie centred on people going to lengths to escape their circumstances in India, it does little to explore how those circumstances came about in the first place and thus ignores the state’s failures. Instead, India is mythologized as a ‘home’ that will always be there, while the West is a site for opportunity but not belonging. The Indian state, quite like Indian parenting, is flawed and flailing, but always there for us.
So what does Shah Rukh see?
In James C Scott’s Seeing Like a State, he argues that in its bid to improve the human condition, the state seeks to systematise local knowledge to make its subjects ‘legible.’ In doing so, it often quashes the complexity of local conditions to create standardised and comparable units.6
Seeing like Shah Rukh is perhaps the inverse of seeing like the state. Through his movies, we can begin to understand how the subjects see the state, or at least aspire to. In all his avatars, SRK believes that the state is flawed, but ultimately fixable and worthy of our ‘loyalty’. His characters, especially the recurring army man, serve to bolster the state while undermining it when it fails to live by their values. He epitomises a Nehruvian idea of India founded on pluralism, secularism, and democracy.
In an a series on Doing Sociology which deep reads Pathaan, Gita Chadha writes:
“Whether he plays the Hindu patriot or the Muslim one, SRK’s feeling for the country, for a watan is visceral. For me, the SRK patriot plays out the syncretic identities, the jointness in what we call the ganga jamuna tehzeeb…When a Muslim character in a film performs nationalism, we must see it differently, it merits a different lens. We know that it is becoming harder and harder to express nationalism in India for the Indian Muslim. There is no easy language for it. In that context, the patriotism, and the performative nationalism of films like My Name is Khan, Raees, Veer Zara, Chak De India and Pathaan require a different compassion. They require critical empathy. It is in this sense that I, as an unapologetic fan of SRK, and as an intersectional sociologist, see the performative nationalism in Pathaan. And it is my fanship that has enabled me to stand by that, fully understanding the sentiment of patriotism for the watan, of being put outside and of having to find a place within the ‘nation’. Forever exiled, at home.”
However, SRK’s Nehruvian ideal is a savarna telling of India, which seems to consider the state as ultimately benevolent. In mythologising this idea of India, it repudiates majoritarianism but rarely acknowledges the state’s historical tendencies to occupation and casteism.7
My more progressive-minded friends often tell me that SRK won’t save us. That I should stop reading into him my fantasy of a national hero. And they’re probably right, SRK won’t save us.8 No one can. But he can help us imagine what to aspire to. In a 2019 interview with David Letterman, he said “I am an employee of the myth of Shah Rukh Khan.” By embodying my idea of a diverse, secular, flourishing India, both in his life and characters, his myth has reminded me that the idea hasn’t died. In a time where jingoism has overtaken mainstream Bollywood, which instead of turning a mirror to society has started moulding it in the image of powers that be, SRK reminds us that there is another idea of India within each of us and in doing so, hopefully discover it in us to make it better.
Also quoted by The Caravan’s profile on SRK before the release of Pathaan in January 2023
From Bhattacharya’s book:
“I’ve developed a simple test to detect misogyny in any Indian, Bangladeshi or Pakistani man. If a man likes Shah Rukh, he is usually progressive. If a man likes Salman, he is bad news. If a man likes Aamir, he’s often a bearded liberal who likes his own voice too much. My test rarely fails. —Fan interviewed in 2016”
Granted we are considering box office collections during outlying Covid years and these movies did much worse on average: 2016: Dangal - ₹2,024 crore; 2017: Secret Superstar - ₹966.86 crore; 2018: Sanju - ₹586.85 crore; 2019: War - ₹475 crore; 2020: Tanhaji: The Unsung Warrior - ₹366 crore; 2021: Sooryavanshi - ₹290 crore; 2022: The Kashmir Files - ₹340.92 crore; 2023: Jawan - ₹1,148.32 crore
Unlike other movies since which perpetuate violence for the sake of itself (and for misogyny)
Naraharisetty writes:
“Stories about fighting corruption, representing the small guy, sticking it to the man, and forcing the government to be accountable aren’t new to Kollywood or Tollywood. In the recent past, however, it is very new — and consequently, very unexpected — for Bollywood. In a cultural milieu saturated with The Kashmir Files, Kerala Story, Prime Minister Modi, Adipurush, and more, there’s never been a more bleak moment in time where Hindi cinema was so constrained by politics. Not even during the Emergency.
It makes sense, then, that Jawan isn’t just a Hindi film. It’s the only way a film today can tackle farmer suicides, privatization, money laundering by powerful businessmen, inadequate oxygen cylinders (and equipment) in hospitals, and patriotism in the same movie: join forces with the industries that have continued to do it, even if it’s now against the grain…It’s arguably a testament to the power of collaborating equally with Kollywood, an industry which hasn’t yet capitulated to Hindu nationalism, to show that dissent is patriotic, and accountability isn’t antinational.”
For example, in the Philippines under Spanish rule, the Claveria Decree of 1849 mandated the assignment of fixed, hereditary surnames to Filipinos to facilitate taxation, legal administration, and control. This decree standardised identity by imposing Spanish-origin surnames and significantly altering local naming practices for state legibility and bureaucratic ease.
Considering the latter in Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani, Eram Agha writes:
“Much like the nation it depicts, and the industry that produced it, Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani is a flawed film…There is a certain tone-deafness, and caste-blindness, about two Brahmin journalists helping another Brahmin evade consequences for a crime he admits to having committed…in a country where the jails are full of Bahujans who have not yet been convicted of a crime. However, the film aspires to a level of social commentary that has been extremely rare in mainstream cinema.”
Though I disagree with progressives who deem only the most radical acts worthy of being called progressive. On Indian women’s ability to rebel, Bhattacharya wrote:
“Critics often say that DDLJ, with its emphasis on patriarchal permission for young love, discourages dissent. This argument narrows the space for dissent by legitimising it only in its most blatant, combative form, demanding that dissent always be obvious and ‘out there’ in full view of TV cameras and Twitter. So, no act of protest short of elopement, short of the most radical rejection of family, would suffice. Demanding such all-or-nothing actions doesn’t account for the costs that eloping and actively abandoning their families would impose on women from any economic strata. The way we express resistance is subject to our own personal calculus of risk and reward.”