Shah Rukh's Khan

I saw ‘My Name Is Khan’ on the second day of its release in Leicester, where I now reside. I wasn’t alone, but with my wife and daughter. It was the 1130pm show and the cinema hall was nearly full. I noticed lots of Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Indian Muslims. The Leicester brigade of Ugandan Gujaratis and Singh Sahebs from both sides of the Punjab made up the rest.

The same evening, much of the Asian diaspora was watching the film in several cities in the UK, including Bristol, Manchester, London, Birmingham, Liverpool, Bardford, etc. Unlike ever in the past, this film was released in each and every, repeat, each and every cinema house of the small and big towns in the UK. Same story in the US and a host of other countries, I gathered later.

My wife told me Shah Rukh Khan had acted very well. The best, she gushed. I generally don’t disagree with my wife, knowing well how much she adores him. But I said to myself, perhaps SRK himself was diffident about his acting, given the kind of publicity stunts he devised at least two months before the film’s release. My views of the devalued Indian broadcast media are well-known among my friends, but I must say these channels do rise to occasions, such as this, to delve into greater depths of pitiable marketing. The channels breathed, lived, ate, what not, SRK. And all of them were exclusive coverage. NDTV repeated the telecast of Barkha Dutt’s exclusive with SRK almost every hour on the eve of the film’s release. I pitied Raj Kapoor and Nargis and Dilip Kumar, even Keshto Mukherji, for never having lived in the age of global live communications. Who knows, Sri 420 would have been the national film of Burkina Faso or Mother India would have been translated into Swahili.

Lest my dislike for SRK become apparent, here are some random thoughts about the film which manufactured controversy (Chomsky listening?) and made a certain cartoonist-turned-petty-politician see red. It is my belief that all the unintended comments of SRK always had an intended target.

The credit goes to him for raking up the Hindu-Muslim controversy that preceded the film’s release. What the stupid chiefs of the various Senas did was to merely react, along predictable lines. But SRK is clever. He was not bothered about a pre-reaction in India alone. He wanted it wherever the Asian diaspora lives, particularly abroad. Remember, the first time anyone heard of the film was when there was a news report that SRK had been subjected to a body search at an airport in the US because his name was…well….Khan!

The first thought that came to my mind was about the war for superiority among religions. Religions cannot co-exist, because their differences are the very basis for their existence. By the same logic, followers of religions cannot co-exist either. But then we human beings are said to be different from animals because we can reason. And this reasoning has left us with certain rules that allow religionists co-exist if they follow certain rules. That’s when politics enters the fray. The father of the Indian Constitution, Dr. Ambedkar – who laid down some of these rules -- may have had his reasons to embrace Buddhism, but that very act was a political one, making it clear that Hinduism practised untouchability and, therefore, Buddhism was superior. This was less than a century ago. The Hinduism-Islam feud goes back centuries. So the case with Islam and Christianity, and so on.

In this backdrop, when the preamble of the Indian Constitution says that India is a ‘secular’ republic, it is only attesting the fact that people of this country practice several religions, and not necessarily that people of this country practice several religions peacefully. There is no peace in conflict. And if there were no conflict, there wouldn’t be so many religions in the first place.

Religious co-existence, to my mind, is a political act, crafted carefully to nurture certain assumptions that characterise a nation or a state. It is not a social tool. Just like poverty. Will you give away part of your wealth to a beggar of your own volition? No. You need to be taxed to take that money away from you to redistribute. Like female infanticide. You need laws to stop you from killing your girl child. Like caste. You need laws to make you co-exist with a person of another caste.

So is the case with religion. Ambedkar was one example. Yesudas is another. Shouldn’t the high priests of Guruvayoor be hanged in public because they have committed the same crime as those who bought the Babri Masjid down? Or, at the very least, shouldn’t they be banned from hearing songs in praise of Lord Krishna sung by Yesudas? Why was Yesudas, a Christian, allowed to sing Hindu songs in the first place? How dare Valmeeki, a lower caste, write the Ramayana? How could we tolerate an Austrian nun in Calcutta? Would there have been four battles of Panipat in all if Akbar had not married Jodha?

See, how complicated this damn talk about religion is? Luckily we have politics which saves us from ourselves and religions, which touts secularism in the face of fundamentalism, nation-building in the face of a violent, religious migration, reservation in the face of caste conflict. Politics is omni-potent. It gives birth to a conflict, it nurtures it, it destroys it. Politics itself is no constant, evolving over time. Like in the present, ‘My Name Is Khan’.

Two things go in his favour, clearly. Bollywood has now reached a stage where a Muslim character in a film need not be a lackey of a Hindu hero and keep proving his loyalty to his community and his country, in that order. Mr. Khan, to that extent, now shares the celluloid pedestal with Mr. Bharat insofar as cinematic reflection of Indian politics is concerned. To that extent, Mr. Khan is the ideal cenotaph for Tamas and Garam Hawa.

Secondly, Mr. Khan introspects about the ills of the misguided among his fellow religionists – perhaps the first of its kind in Indian cinema on Muslim identity – and that give him a place in the hall of flame inhabited by the Meerabais and Munnabhais.

I want to ask SRK why he made the film, other than to make more money. Did he have a political message to convey other than that has been conveying through television and Twitter throughout the pre-release period? Did he think the Indian Muslims would react to the film in the same manner as Muslims in other parts of the world? Perhaps the 9/11 backdrop was created to make the film contemporaneous to Muslims across the globe? I don’t know if SRK had a message to convey, because he has not said so other than mouthing secularist phrases as explanations.

Given the political campaign that preceded the film’s release, it has to have a message. But what? I tried watching the film seriously for clues. For instance, Khan’s failure to meet President Bush, Khan’s natural affinity for Afro-Americans, his (un)intentional travels through the southern states like Arizona and Georgia, his insistence on being called Khan even by his wife instead of by his first name, Rizvan, the absence of the ubiquitous mark on the forehead of every practising Muslim (as shown without fail in Indian films!). But most important of all, the character of Khan and his message, ‘I am Khan, but I am not a terrorist’, preferring to hide himself inside the body of an autistic person who with his mannerisms disarms any overt criticism of what Khan has to say.

In the end, is it a film to educate people about Asperger’s Syndrome (because the titles carry an explanation about it), or how religion can disharmonise relations between inter-religious couples, or about the western mistrust of the followers of Islam, or of the true Islam that preaches peace as much as any other religion? I know one thing. There’s nothing apolitical about it.

SRK should know. He owes the Indian television audiences at least that much for overwhelming us with his presence all these months. As the film ended, I didn’t know who stood tall. SRK or Khan?

Otherwise, it’s just another Bollywood film.