Badshah of Bollywood Shah Rukh Khan as Raees proves that he is not only a superstar but that he has the dimaag of a baniya and the daring of a miyanbhai.
The Bollywood media, obsessed with box office stats, has keenly followed, blow by blow, the battle between Shahrukh Khan’s Raees and Hrithik Roshan’s Kaabil. The two highly anticipated films arrived in the multiplexes on January 25 (a Wednesday, not a Friday, the shift of date aimed at cashing in on the R-Day weekend) and sparked a fierce clash between the two Bollywood superstars. The repercussions, a lot of which bordered on the distasteful, were felt well beyond the cash registers.
Raees, keeping its nose consistently ahead in the race, inched steadily towards the Rs 200-crore mark. Just as importantly, the retro-styled crime drama was also talked about for the way its lead actor, a romantic hero with a phenomenal fan following, went where he had never gone before.
Raees has the Badshah of Bollywood in the garb of a larger-than-life 1980s MuslimGujarati crime lord who not only wears his religious faith on his sleeves but also famously talks up the virtues of the “daring” of a “miyanbhai”. To rub it in, the film includes a spectacular Muharram sequence in which the superstar bloodies his torso in ritualistic self-flagellation.
That was a red rag to the Hindu supremacists avowedly ill at ease with the long, unbroken reign that Bollywood’s Khan triumvirate has had over the Hindi film industry. Such is the threesome’s clout that they have neatly sliced up the three major festival ‘windows’ on the release calendar among themselves. Salman has Eid, SRK Diwali and Aamir Christmas. All the other A-list stars, Akshay Kumar and Ajay Devgn included, have to work their release strategies keeping those dates out of their plans.
Any talk of communal polarisation in the context of Mumbai moviedom sounds utterly incongruous because the Indian film business has stayed largely uninfected by the poison of religious sectarianism. But of late, in a climate of bigotry and prejudice, the Muslim megastars of Mumbai have sadly found themselves repeatedly having to prove that they are Indians first.
Not that SRK has never played a Khan on the screen before. He was women’s hockey coach Kabir Khan in Chak De India and the specially-abled Rizwan Khan in My Name is Khan. More recently, he was the shrink/life coach Jehangir Khan in Dear Zindagi and Tahir Khan in Ae Dil Hai Mushkil. Raees is, in fact, SRK’s third successive release in which he plays a Muslim character.
But Raees is different from all the other times that SRK has opted to don the fictional guise of a Muslim man. In Dear Zindagi and ADHM, his religious identity had no narrative centrality. Certainly not in the way it does in Raees.
Not only has the film come at a time when the political environment in the country is defined by vitriol and distrust, but it is also clearly a telling and assertive political statement from a powerful Hindi movie star – a far cry from the days when Yusuf Khan had to become Dilip Kumar to make a career in the industry.
It is not insignificant that the communal polarisation pot in a traditionally secular film industry was first sought to be stirred when Hrithik’s first film, Kaho Naa… Pyaar Hai was released more than a decade and a half ago. Politically motivated elements in and outside Bollywood projected him as “a Hindu superstar”.
That odious campaign died a quick death because the rightwing dispensation in Delhi at the time did not bear the sort of RSS imprint that the present central government does. But those that had orchestrated the Chinese whispers at the turn of the millennium are still around. They have resurfaced, emboldened manifold and, therefore, infinitely more brazen.
BJP general secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya does not feel the need anymore to couch his language in social niceties. He uses his Twitter handle to blatantly exhort people to boycott a Raees “who is not of his country” and support “a Kaabil patriot”. On cue, an army of Muslim-baiters unleashed many a conspiracy theory about Raees, via snide social media posts, angry tweets and vile WhatsApp messages.
This campaign of calumny would have us believe that Raees is anti-national because its cast is led by three Muslim actors – Shahrukh, Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Mahira Khan – and the film is designed to glorify a criminal (1980s Gujarat bootlegger Abdul Latif) who had links with one of India’s biggest enemies, Dawood Ibrahim. It has mattered not a whit that director Rahul Dholakia has gone blue in the face insisting that Raees tells a fictional tale.
Not very long ago, a sadhvi of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) had appealed to her supporters to deface posters of films featuring the three Khans. So, SRK is by no means the only one at the receiving end of the ire of hate-mongers. They are Khans and they are soft targets.
SRK has never shied away from publicly and eloquently discussing his identity as a Muslim Indian, but he has always exercised restraint and civility in articulating his thoughts on what rampant majoritarian tendencies do to the psyche of members of minority communities.
He is a movie star and what better method could he have employed to assert himself in this fractious Hindu-Muslim dynamics. His character in Raees, an underworld figure who toys with the law with impunity until he runs into an upright (Hindu) cop who vows to bring him to book, upholds the basic principles of humanity even when the chips are down.
Apart from intoning that “ammijaan kehti thhi koi dhanda chhota nahi hota aur dhande se bada koi dharm nahi hota,” Raees dreams of using his power and affluence to construct a colony – aptly called Apni Duniya – where he hopes hatred, poverty and hunger would be non-existent.
Late in the film, Raees declares: “Main dharm ka dhanda nahi karta”. He clinches it with a firm ‘no’ when an associate suggests that, in order to stabilise his finances, he should close down a riot relief camp in a Hindu-dominated locality. He shoots back: Did we worry about who is Muslim and who is Hindu when we began our business? Why should we do so now?”
Aamir Khan, too, has a history of bitter run-ins with haters going back to the time he played Kashmiri insurgent Rehaan Khan in Fanaa (2006).
In the lead-up to the release of that film, the star had spoken out against the Gujarat government, which was then headed by today’s Prime Minister. The state instantly was placed out of bounds for Fanaa. Not that it made any dent in the film’s fortunes. It raked in big bucks in the rest of the world.
More recently, Aamir stuck his neck out and said he and his wife felt unsafe in the current climate of intolerance that obtains in India. The rightwing social media stormtroopers came out in full force and trolled the actor. They called him names and advised him to migrate to Pakistan.
He obviously didn’t. Instead, in 2014, he delivered PK, a lively anti-superstition satire that his detractors saw as an attack on Hindu shibboleths. Again, a shrill call went out for a mass boycott of the film. In one incident, the VHP and Bajrang Dal demonstrated against its screening in Hyderabad, forcing the cinema hall owner to stop a show until the law enforcers stepped in and restored ordered.
When Dangal arrived, it was clear that the lunatic fringe does not forget and forgive easily. They again sought to make Aamir pay for his ‘intransigence’. A ‘boycott Dangal’ hashtag trended for a while, but it only helped the cause of the film, giving it a lot of free publicity. Incidentally, Dangal and PK are currently the two most commercially successful films in the history of Hindi cinema.
The title that comes in third on Bollywood’s all-time list of biggest moneyspinners, Bajrangi Bhaijaan, has had its own slew of troubles with Hindutva warriors running amok these days. This, despite the fact that leading man Salman Khan portrays a Lord Hanuman bhakt in the film.
Audiotapes were put in circulation to warn people that Bajrangi Bhaijaan promotes ‘love jihad’. It was argued that the film has a Muslim actor ‘marrying’ a Hindu actress (Kareena Kapoor, who plays a Brahmin girl). In real life, Kareena is married to Saif Ali Khan and the name they chose for their firstborn (Taimur) whipped up a recent Twitter storm. But that is another story.
The anti-Bajrangi Bhaijaan tapes went to the extent of alleging that the film’s director Kabir Khan had received funds from Arab countries to push the agenda of the Indian votaries of love jihad.
These ridiculous charges would have been dismissed as a sick joke had the impact of the utter madness not been so serious and deleterious. The recent assault on Sanjay Leela Bhansali in Rajasthan during the filming of Padmavati is the latest in the line of desperate acts by fringe groups driven to despair by the continuing success of the Khans.
It is rather rich of the Khan-bashers to think that Raees is going to be the last film that will seek to set the cat among the pigeons and watch the latter fly helter-skelter. For this is not only about fighting on the side of sanity, but also to save the soul of Bollywood; one of the glues that hold India together.