Now in his fifties, Khan has appeared in nearly a hundred films, was awarded an honorary doctorate from Edinburgh University and a Yale Chubb Fellowship (whose previous recipients include Chinua Achebe and Maya Angelou), and won countless Filmfare Awards.* He has an international fan club with over ninety unpaid but adoring administrators in countries from Peru to Germany, and has received numerous international honors, including a title of Malaysian Knighthood.† At the $100 million wedding of India’s richest man’s daughter, Khan joined Hillary Clinton onstage as the former secretary of state did her best to wiggle along to “Abhi toh Party Shuru Hui Hai” (“The Party’s Just Begun”) while another former secretary of state, John Kerry, boogied alongside them. More importantly, Khan is the icon of a brash but troubled culture of neo-liberal capitalism in the Global South.
By the time Khan moved to Mumbai to become a Bollywood star, he had already appeared in a local television series and played the small role of a gay college student in Booker Prize–winning novelist Arundhati Roy’s cult film, In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, which she called “lunatic fringe cinema.” No TV actor before or since has successfully transitioned to the pinnacle of Bollywood stardom, but fate seems to have looked upon Khan with exception from the start. Standing on the city’s famous Marine Drive, the young actor, who used Camlin Glue and water to style his hair when he was too broke to buy hair gel, swore that one day he would run Mumbai. “Shut up,” one of his friends is said to have replied. “Don’t talk shit.”
Mani Kaul, who hired Khan for his second TV role in a 1991 adaptation of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, was initially unsure that the “babyface” actor had what it took to play Rogozhin, but eventually admitted that he was won over by Khan’s voice—“an unstated whimper”—and his “strange mix of someone beautiful and slimy.” Convincing directors to hire him was a tough sell, and Khan initially found himself considered as a runner-up for roles, never the first choice. One director didn’t think he could be a romantic hero because his face “wasn’t chocolatey enough.” So Khan decided on an unconventional route into the business: bad guy roles. That he was so rapturously accepted in his portrayal of murderous lunatics speaks to the dark tide approaching India at the time.
As poverty became an unpleasant memory, easily erased from Bollywood’s storyboards, stars began to play a revolving rota of NRIs living in palatial mansions in New York, London, and Paris. Khan went from stalker to softie without missing a beat, playing a slew of NRI characters kitted out in Gap sweatshirts and Nike caps, reveling in the consumer paradises of European capitals in the late ’90s and early 2000s. These characters were uniformly upper-class Hindus, named Rahul or Raj, whose spirits had not been polluted by migration. Rather, these NRI characters perfectly embodied the religious piety and conservatism of their forefathers while enjoying lifestyles of the rich and famous.
“The problems are romantic with romantic solutions,” Nasreen Munni Kabir, an author and filmmaker who directed a two-part documentary on Khan, told me. “They are not social problems with social solutions—Shah Rukh is not looking for a job in his movies. The setting is not realistic, it’s a lot of fantasy.” For Indians, Khan quickly became “the poster boy of a new kind of aspiration,” explained Nandini Ramnath, the film editor of the English news website Scroll India. “He seemed at home in the version of India created by the movies, as well as a global citizen who could comfortably inhabit American and English cities without losing his bearings. The stereotypical Shah Rukh Khan gesture—the arms thrown wide open—typifies this aspect of his persona. He is inclusive as well as expansive.”
Alongside the globalized economic outlook ushered in by India’s neo-liberal restructuring was a conservative, inward-looking set of traditional values. In one of his most popular films, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (The Big Hearted Takes the Bride), Khan plays Raj, a rich flunky living in England with a fast car, a mansion, and disposable income, who falls in love with Simran, an NRI from a simpler background. She is engaged to someone else, and he follows her back home to Punjab in order to win her over. When Simran suggests they elope, Raj refuses. “I might have been born in England,” he declares. “But I am Hindustani. I’ve come to make you my bride. I’ll take you only when your father gives me your hand in marriage.” Khan’s early rise to romantic idol was orchestrated without him kissing a single love interest. Bollywood films are generally kiss-free in order to avoid conflicts with the Indian censor board and the movies have historically relied on heavily suggestive, even vulgar, nuance, coupled with outwardly chaste conduct. Khan’s first screen kiss did not come until 2012’s Jab Tak Hai Jaan (As Long as I Live) in which he plays a bomb defuser who gets retrograde amnesia.
Khan was the navigator through which rising India negotiated the riches, tensions, and violence of globalization. Onscreen, he was proof that you could be a wealthy New York football player but still be spiritually and emotionally guided by traditional Indian values. Off-screen, he was stopped by American immigration at U.S. airports in 2009, 2012, and 2016. Such is Khan’s celebrity that the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State apologized the last time he was detained, assuring the world it was random checks, not profiling. “Whenever I start feeling too arrogant about myself, I take a trip to America, the immigration guys kick the star out of stardom,” Khan said of the experience. “But I have my small victories. They always ask how tall I am and I lie and get away with five feet ten inches. Next time I’m gonna be more adventurous. What color are you? I’m gonna say white.”
Bollywood’s flair, fantasy, and spectacle have always been situated within the boundaries of conservative, traditional values and as such have long reached global audiences. In the 1950s, Raj Kapoor’s film Awara (Vagabond) was such a success that he was known in the Soviet Union as “comrade Awara.” Even Joseph Stalin was a fan. Throughout the Cold War, it was Bollywood that provided the Soviet Union with ideologically safe entertainment. In the 1970s, Kapoor directed his son Rishi in Bobby, which readers of the popular film magazine Sovetskii Ekran (The Soviet Screen) voted one of their top five films of 1975, as it “taught them how to love.”
Bollywood films were imported into Nigeria by Lebanese businessmen in the 1950s. Young Hausa men and women have long been devoted fans of Bollywood because it allowed them to be entertained “without engaging with the heavy ideological load of ‘becoming Western.’” Switzerland erected a statue of the director Yash Chopra in Interlaken in gratitude for his “opening up a legacy of South Asian tourists.” Rajinikanth, a Tamil-language star who rarely makes appearances in Bollywood but is so popular in Tamil language films known as Tollywood that audiences threaten to set cinemas on fire if his character dies in a film, saw his 150th movie, Muthu, run for twenty-three weeks in one Tokyo cinema alone.* Italy advertised summer screenings of Bollywood films, dubbed into Italian with the songs cut, as Amori con Turbanti, or “love with turbans.”
Hyperconnectivity, global branding, and migration, however, have placed Khan in another category altogether. DDLJ, as The Big Hearted Takes the Bride is known in shorthand, is the longest continually running Indian film of all time; Maratha Mandir Theatre in Mumbai has been screening it every single day since its release in 1995. Cineplexes in London sold out shows of Dil Se, in which Khan plays a radio journalist covering the insurgency in North India, five times a day, making it the first Bollywood film in the United Kingdom to be screened at regular hours, and the first ever to reach the top 10 of a British film list. Khan’s dance on the roof of a moving train in Dil Se, involving eighty separate cuts, was so outlandish no other Bollywood star has ever dared top it. Devdas, another SRK classic, was the first Bollywood film accepted to the Cannes Film Festival in 2002.
Khan is also India’s most pervasive celebrity endorser. Within the first decade of his film career, he had already done 281 print ads and another 200 commercials. Khan has been the face of Pepsi, Frooti mango juice, Dubai tourism, Hyundai, and Fair and Handsome (a male whitening cream, for which he was roundly criticized). In 2005, he was the first male model of LUX soap in India. In that year alone, Khan was the face of 34 different products. An Indian research firm’s 2002 advertising survey found that Brand SRK was so ubiquitous that respondents even associated Khan with brands he had nothing to do with.
He has also been adept in forging advertising tie-ins with his films. For 2010’s My Name Is Khan, a film about a Muslim who walks across America to tell everyone in the country that he is not a terrorist, Reebok launched a special sneaker. For Ra One, a passion project of Khan’s (a superhero action film whose title is a play on the Hindu god Ravan’s name), the actor signed deals with 25 different brands bringing in nearly 6 million euros toward the film’s expensive budget. For Don 2, a crime caper, TAG Heuer, the Swiss watchmakers, released a limited-edition Don watch, and the actors all wore different TAG Heuer watches during the film itself.
In the spring of 2016, Brad Pitt traveled to India to promote his Netflix original film War Machine alongside Khan, who wasn’t in the movie. Pitt said he could never be in Bollywood because he couldn’t sing or dance, to which Khan joked, “Singing and dancing has to stay so that we can keep Brad Pitt away from Bollywood.” But was it conceivable, a moderator asked, that Brad could be in an Indian film and Shah Rukh in a Chinese film? “I hate using this word,” Khan responded, “but this globalization would happen, most definitely.”
Since India’s neo-liberal reforms came into place, Khan hasn’t played destitute characters, starring instead in a solid stack of global-professional roles made famous by his partnership with Karan Johar, the director who solidified Khan’s role as ambassador-at-large of how to not survive, but thrive, in “shining” India. “If the 1970s hero was anti-establishment, as a yuppie, I promised a better world,” Shah Rukh Khan said in 2001. “The yuppie doesn’t bash a truckful of goondas [goons]. He’s smarter. He doesn’t have to kill in the battlefield, he can make a killing in the stock market. The yuppie believes in capitalism, not communism. Actually, he believes in a new ‘ism’ every day.”
In 1998, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (Something Something Happens), the first of the Khan-Johar NRI films—which, presumably in homage to Johar himself, have an abundance of “K” words in all their titles—became the number-one foreign language film in the UK. KKHH, as the film is popularly known, begins in an Indian school straight out of an American comic book—all bright colors and bubblegum aesthetics. Tina, played by Rani Mukherjee, is a repatriated NRI who Rahul, played by Khan, taunts with an English accent and goads into singing a Hindi song as some sort of schoolyard initiation.* Tina accepts the challenge and sings a Hindu bhajan, causing Rahul’s jaw to drop in respect. He is instantly smitten. “Just because I’ve grown up in London, I haven’t forgotten my culture—don’t forget that,” she scolds him before stomping off. KKHH was sold out in South African cinemas for six months straight; in Durban it ran longer than Titanic and was seen by more people. During the 1999 South African elections, Ela Gandhi, a Member of Parliament for the African National Congress party, or the ANC, and granddaughter of the Mahatma, recorded the title track of KKHH as her campaign song, calling it Kuch Kuch ANC. “The movie did so well,” Gandhi explained. “People identify with it and it conveys important themes of sacrifice, love, and non-violence.”
In 2001’s Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (Sometimes There’s Happiness, Sometimes There’s Sorrow), or K3G, Johar doubled down on the notion of the NRI as a bastion of national integrity and honor who is duly rewarded by obscene capitalist success. While Khan’s NRI family live in an English manor, his brother attends school in Blenheim Palace of all places—a UNESCO heritage site and the birthplace of Sir Winston Churchill—and their main mode of transportation is a helicopter.† His wife insists on speaking Hindi to her English neighbors. His brother, played by Hritik Roshan, dances Bharat Natyam in Leicester Square, wearing an outfit of all leather, while his backup dancers, all white women, are clad in shalwar kameez.* Khan’s son sings “Jana Gana Mana,” the Indian national anthem, at his private school concert, supported by a chorus of English children. As his entire family immediately rise to their feet, the concert’s audience of British patricians are so moved that they, too, stand—some brought to tears while others place their hands across their hearts. Even a little girl in a wheelchair is so roused by the Hindi lyrics that she painfully raises the only body part she can, her arm. K3G was subtitled into more languages spoken outside the subcontinent than inside it, including, but not limited to, Arabic, Dutch, Spanish, and Hebrew. In Peru, where it’s a cult classic, its title was changed to La Familia Hindu (The Hindu Family).
Khan was not the auteur of these films, but he participated in the strange marriage between the Indian neo-liberal fantasy of money, power, and—as it was beamed out across the nation’s screens—a distinctly cultural assertiveness. The consequences of these heavily nationalistic films still reverberate today. In 2016, Indian cinemagoers were obliged to stand for the national anthem, which is played before all films. The Supreme Court ruling that required not only the anthem to be played but also audiences to stand in solemnity came as a direct result of K3G. Having gone to watch K3G in a darkened Bhopal cinema in 2002, a Mr. Shyam Chouksey was so stirred by the scene of Khan’s son singing “Jana Gana Mana” at his English school concert that he stood up from his seat. His fellow audience members were not amused and complained that he was blocking their view. Chouksey was so insulted at his compatriots’ lack of respect for the national anthem that he began a protest outside the Bhopal cinema. When that yielded no results, he filed a case in Madhya Pradesh’s high court, banging on until his cause reached the highest bench in the land.
By the end of the first decade of the 2000s, Khan had moved away from playing the moneyed migrant. My Name Is Khan is notable in this period as one of Khan’s rare political films, where he plays a Muslim man with Asperger syndrome who immigrates to America only to see his stepson killed by bullies after 9/11. MNIK was a belated, post-9/11 realization that, though NRIs may want to be a part of the American Dream, Americans didn’t want much to do with them. Their son only died, Khan’s wife in the film says, because “his name was Khan.” Khan walks across America in a quest to tell the president, and everyone else in the process, that his name is Khan, and that he is not a terrorist. The film was an international success and was distributed to sixty-six countries, including nontraditional Bollywood markets like Syria, Puerto Rico, and Taiwan. Khan played several other serious roles around this time, including in Chak De! India (Go for It! India) where he was a Muslim hockey captain who is declared a traitor for losing a match to Pakistan, and Veer-Zaara where Khan plays an Indian Air Force pilot who pays the ultimate price for falling in love with a Pakistani and crossing the border to be with her—jail. Veer-Zaara was the highest-grossing film of the year.
In international markets, excluding India, out of the top twenty-five Bollywood grossers of all time, by 2015, Khan featured in eleven. The previous year, Khan was second on Forbes’s list of the wealthiest actors in the world—after Jerry Seinfeld and before Tom Cruise—had countless endorsement contracts, production ventures, and in 2016 had licensed his catalogue of films to Netflix in the first deal of its kind.
Though in 2018 the Supreme Court modified its ruling, making the national anthem optional at cinemas and not compulsory, Bollywood, Pankaj Mishra told me, created the mood music for Narendra Modi. Recent films push a jingoistic, cultural nationalism in step with the governing political chorus. Today, films increasingly tout government propaganda. Akshay Kumar, for example, who has starred in six hyper-nationalistic films in the past three years, regularly screens his films for Modi, including Toilet Ek Prem Katha (Toilet, A Love Story), which was based on the PM’s sanitation drive, Swachh Bharat (“Clean India”), which—besides its disquieting and ominous focus on purity—largely seems to involve inviting the media to watch Bollywood actors sweeping some dirt around with a broom. The film also made positive references to Modi’s demonetization in 2016, a move that wiped 86 percent of Indian currency out of circulation, slashed India’s GDP by 2 percent in the subsequent financial quarter, and reportedly caused a hundred deaths. Amartya Sen, the economist and Nobel Laureate, called demonetization a disaster, but the makers of Toilet, in their political wisdom, disagreed and included a scene of a chief minister praising the prime minister for his note ban. Kumar’s latest film, Kesari (which means saffron, the very color of Hindu nationalists), depicts a battle between Sikh soldiers, fighting on behalf of the British Raj, and Pashtun tribesmen resisting colonial oppression and occupation. Yet in the Kesari version of history, the Pashtuns are the enemy, Muslims and ravenous barbarians who recite prayers before beheading girls, while Kumar is a saffron-clad hero.
He is not the only actor to have made a career out of aligning entertainment with the politics of the day, however. Sui Dhaga (Needle and Thread) took another Modi initiative, Make in India, and used it as its subtitle. Commando 2, an action film that critics said “could well have been written by a low-level Finance Ministry official looking for a pat on the head and a promotion,” detailed the state’s fictional fight against black money.
Modi himself reached out to Bollywood stars twice to discuss what role Bollywood could play in “nation building,” the first time in October 2018 when he met Aamir Khan, and again in December when he took selfies and analyzed Indian soft power with luminaries such as Karan Johar and Ranveer Singh.* Akshay Kumar, however, blurs the lines of Bollywood’s political project more than most. In the middle of the 2019 polls he was granted a one-hour interview with Modi, who is the only prime minister in India’s seventy-two-year-old history to have never held a press conference during his first term. Kumar studiously avoided any of the hard-hitting issues of the day, making zero mention of corruption, communal violence, or India’s swift economic downturn. On his Twitter, Kumar teased the interview by advertising it as “COMPLETELY NON POLITICAL” and proudly lived up to his promise. “Does our Prime Minister eat mangoes?” was the first question Kumar asked Modi. Is your sense of humor intact after becoming Prime Minister? You sleep only three and a half hours a night, the actor probed. Don’t you get sleepy?
The actor, who is a poster boy for the Modi government, starring in films based on the prime minister’s projects, meeting RSS leaders, and peddling state propaganda on TV and social media, also happens to be a Canadian citizen who cannot vote in Indian elections. After his embarrassing interview with the prime minister, Kumar landed in a puddle of trouble when he was visibly absent on voting day. After being roundly criticized and questioned, Kumar was forced to admit he could not vote in the elections. “About the Canadian thing, I am an honorary citizen,” he waffled. “I’ve been given an honorary thing. I think it’s a thing that people should be proud about. I have an honorary doctorate also but I am not a doctor. So this is what people have to understand.” However, Canada has only ever bestowed six honorary citizenships: The recipients include Malala Yousafzai, Aung San Suu Kyi, the Aga Khan, Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, and Raoul Wallenberg. Kumar, a good, old-fashioned naturalized Canadian, is not on the list.
Regional allies may dither and disappoint, but Modi’s government could reliably count on Bollywood for its rapturous support. After a suicide bomber hit a convoy of paramilitary forces in Pulwama in February 2019, and Jaish-e-Muhammad, a militant group based in Pakistan, claimed credit for the attack, India and Pakistan stood at the precipice of war. India flew fighter planes across Pakistani territory, and the two countries’ air forces engaged in dogfights for the first time since 1971. As tensions between the two nuclear nations magnified, Bollywood cheered enthusiastically for war.
“Mess with the best, die like the rest,” Ajay Devgn tweeted, salivating over news that India had struck Balakot, a forested region in Pakistan. Raveena Tandon—it bears noting that neither she nor Devgn have been big draws at any box office in recent years—was equally gleeful: “What an explosive morning!” Priyanka Chopra, a UN Goodwill ambassador, faced petitions to have her position withdrawn after she, too, cheered support for India’s Balakot strike, and Kangana Ranaut, who in recent years has styled herself as judge, jury, and executioner when it comes to her colleagues’ nationalist credentials, opined that barring Pakistani artists from Bollywood “is not the focus, Pakistan destruction is.”
Heading into an election year, Bollywood’s Modi mood music reached fever pitch. On January 11, 2019, two films were released on the same day in what can only be described as a propaganda overkill. The first, The Accidental Prime Minister, was a whiny smear job of Modi’s predecessor, Dr. Manmohan Singh (the BJP tweeted its trailer from their official party account), and the second, Uri: The Surgical Strike, was an action thriller based on India’s claimed retaliation against militants who killed eighteen of its soldiers on a military base in Uri. The two-minute trailer features shooting, rocket launching, torture, and a government official reportedly based on Modi’s National Security Advisor, Ajit Doval, boasting, “Ye naya Hindustan hai, ye ghar me ghusega bhi aur marega bhi.” (“This is the new India, we will enter that house and kill them too.”)
The coup de grace was undoubtedly a film based on Modi himself, which the Supreme Court stopped from being released the very week before 900 million Indians went to the polls. The trailer for Modi: Story of a Billion People has been described as “a hagiography for dummies” and depicts Modi leading soldiers through Kashmir, waving an enormous Indian flag in the middle of a gunfight, promising to cut Pakistan’s hands off, and carrying a child away from a bloody riot. The film’s trailer was launched by its lead actor, Vivek Oberoi, who turned up dressed as Modi: white hair, prosthetic nose, and all. “I am a balanced person,” Oberoi announced to the press at the launch, not looking or sounding very balanced at all. His father, a BJP member for fifteen years, had produced the film. Omung Kumar, the director, was also present. “I am a very neutral person,” he chipped in.
This is the face of Bollywood today. There are no epics devoted to the struggles of Dalits, the lowest, “untouchable” castes of India, who constitute nearly 20 percent of the population. If you include cameos, in his ninety-plus films, Shah Rukh Khan has played only six Muslim characters. Three of those have been since 2016, though Khan has pointed out that that’s a matter of coincidence rather than targeted political posturing. Bollywood’s cinematic citizen is one of a moneyed majority. And though Khan is an innocent, a man standing at the crossroads of myriad ideas, ideologies, and histories, as he grows as a global icon, interviewed by David Letterman as one of the selected few for his Netflix series and more, at home he is increasingly besieged by the same forces that once carried his career to its pinnacle. With his rivals snapping at his heels, today Khan seems marginalized, or at least viewed with suspicion by India’s increasingly muscular right wing.
Bollywood is a pleasant diversion in the subcontinent, but cricket—South Asia’s only positive legacy from an otherwise humiliating and larcenous experience with British colonialism—is a matter of life and death. Khan is the co-owner of three Twenty20 cricket teams, most importantly the Kolkata Knight Riders, an Indian Premier League cricket team that has twice won the IPL cup. Though one would imagine an association with India’s beloved game would only increase SRK’s megawatt status, it has been a source of friction.
In 2010, the actor was pilloried by the Shiv Sena, a right-wing Marathi party, after he questioned why Pakistani players were included in IPL auctions if they were not allowed to play in the league. Pakistan, widely considered the world’s best at T20 cricket,* a fast-paced form of the normally languid sport on which the IPL is based, is the only country not invited to play in the franchise. Even Bangladeshi players are traded in the league, though they are fairly recent entrants to the game.† The Shiv Sena demanded Khan apologize for his statements, and when he refused, bayed for his blood.
While Bollywood bends over backward to participate in the weird nexus between India’s entertainment industry, TV news, and Hindu nationalists, in the past Khan has been quiet, if not elliptically critical. “I’m often asked nowadays—probably you are asked the same thing—What is your opinion on terrorism?” he said after the 11/26 terror attacks in Mumbai in 2008. “I find this a very strange question, because no one can have a difference of opinion on terrorism.” More recently, after noting that “religious intolerance and not being secular … is [sic] the worst crimes that you can do as a patriot,” Khan was publicly rebuked by a general secretary of the BJP. While he had enjoyed Baazigar and DDLJ, the BJP spokesperson said, selecting an interesting choice of films, Khan’s soul seemed to have vacated to Pakistan.*
Aamir, hailed by his fans as a politically minded artiste, came out in support of Modi’s disastrous demonetization policy, calling it “a good initiative,” and asked his fellow Indians to support their prime minister’s long-term vision. (In the final analysis, it cost India 3.5 million jobs and India hit a forty-five-year unemployment high.) Aamir confessed that the currency ban hadn’t affected him personally, as “I make use of card, be it debit or credit card, when we buy something.”
A few days before the seventy-first anniversary of India’s independence, Salman Khan tweeted a sepia photo of himself, looking especially beefy, as part of the Indian Sports Ministry’s #humfittohIndiafit (“if we’re fit, then India is fit”) campaign. “Swachh bharat toh hum fit … hum fit toh India fit….” (“Clean India so we’re fit … if we’re fit then India is fit….”); he captioned the photo of himself gazing dreamily into the distance into what one can only presume is a mirror, with a plug for not one but two of the BJP’s government initiatives, adding: “then u can do whatever u want to do man … but don’t trouble your motherland.”
Karan Johar, his frequent collaborator who directed Khan in KKHH, K3G, and several other K-titled blockbusters, released a video resembling a hostage statement to apologize for casting a popular Pakistani actor in his 2016 film Ae Dil Hai Mushkil (This Heart Is Complicated). In his Stockholm Syndrome video, Johar bizarrely referred to Pakistan as if it were the Voldemort of nations, mysteriously never mentioning its name, only calling it “the neighboring country,” and promising “not to engage with talent from the neighboring country.” Johar saluted and affirmed his respect for the Indian army, listed how many Indians had worked on the production of his film, condemned terrorism, and swore his love for his country.*
The month before India went to the polls in 2019, every two minutes for a full hour Modi tweeted to Bollywood celebrities asking stars to use their voices to call people out to vote. He tweeted to Khan, Amitabh Bachchan, and Johar in one tweet, amending the tagline from K3G: “Urging @SRBachchan, @iamSRK and @karanjohar to creatively ensure high voter awareness and participation in the coming elections. Because … its [sic] all about loving your democracy (and strengthening it). :)”†
The Press Information Bureau, an official government body, used screen grabs of DDLJ with new dialogue to push the vote out:
“Kya Kaha, Raj har baar vote deta hai!!” (“What did you say? Raj votes every time!!”)
“Han Bauji,” Simran’s character confirms to her father—in the film, Khan’s character, Raj, has to be beaten nearly to death in the last twenty minutes of the film before Simran’s father approves of him. But in the government’s ads, all it takes is that he is a voter. “Jaa Simran jaa,” the father says, “he is a responsible citizen.”
In his reply and retweet, Johar squeezed as much enthusiasm as humanly possibly into 280 characters, and Bachchan responded with his now trademark Twitter verbiage. The prime minister also tweeted Aamir and Salman together, both of whom responded happily, Salman so much so that he was forced to clarify the next day that he wasn’t joining the BJP. Khan also responded to the prime minister’s call and, curiously, with more gusto than all the other Bollywood stars. “PM Sir asked for creativity,” Khan tweeted in Hindi. “I’m a little late because I was making a video.” He then uploaded a minute-long music video—an extra effort no one else took the time to include—calling for Indians to vote. At the end of Khan’s anodyne rap on the joys of voting, a disclaimer flashes on the screen: “This video has been issued in public interest to encourage people to vote. This video does not endorse any political candidate or political party, or any views or positions held by any type of political candidate or party.” The prime minister’s response was immediate. “Fantastic effort!” he praised Khan in a retweet of the rap video.
After Narendra Modi won the 2019 elections, securing a second term in power, Salman was the first to extend his Twitter congratulations, and Khan followed next. Though he had seemed less enthusiastic than his peers about India’s descent into rabid right-wingism, he, too, offered Modi his unsolicited, rambling congratulations: “We—as proud Indians—have chosen an establishment with great clarity and now we need to get behind it and work with it to have our hopes and dreams fulfilled. The Electoral Mandate and Democracy is a winner. Big congratulations to PM @narendramodi ji and @BJP4India and its leaders.” Aamir said nothing.
Mahesh Bhatt, the Bollywood director, who believes that the only reason “Pakistan will never go to war with India is because Shah Rukh lives there,” and who described himself to me as the “only person in Bollywood who has made two flop films with Shah Rukh Khan,” is the father of two actresses who have both worked with Khan. “The world and reality are burning,” the director fumed to me on the phone from Mumbai. “You need to insulate yourself with fairy tales. This is what Shah Rukh panders to. He wants to be that; he wants to keep the fairy-tale yarn going. He wants to keep you on that frequency of life. He doesn’t want you to gravitate into the abyss of what is called the truth. What is so marvelous about the truth?”
*Bollywood’s Oscars; when there wasn’t a category suited to Khan’s latest oeuvre, Filmfare simply created one for him, such as the “Power Award” or the “Filmfare Special Award Swiss Consulate Trophy.”
†According to local newspapers, Khan responded in thanks by declaring that Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad “is my favorite person in the world.”
*On New Year’s Eve 2017, Rajinikanth announced he was joining politics, setting up a new political party and contesting all 234 seats in Tamil Nadu.
*This was Khan’s fifth Rahul.
†His seventh Rahul. Raj Kapoor in his heyday played thirteen characters named Raj (five more characters had Raj variants as names, such as Raju). Amitabh Bachchan played at least eighteen roles named Vijay. Khan’s career isn’t as long as either Kapoor’s or Bachchan’s, yet he’s still managed to rack up eight Rahuls.
*In K3G, Roshan has the worst line I’ve ever heard in a Bollywood film. “I’m going to Haridwar to meet my two favorite girlfriends!” he trills. “Who are your girlfriends in Haridwar?” asks his skeptical friend. “My two grandmothers!” Roshan laughs cheekily.
*It was Ranveer Singh’s wife, Deepika Padukone, who had been threatened with beheading for her role in Padmaavat. A BJP leader offered a $1.5 million bounty for her head and promised to look after the families of anyone willing to kill the actress. [“BJP politician puts bounty on Deepika Padukone’s head.” Al-Jazeera, November 22, 2017.] Though Padukone was not present for the Modi photo op, her husband, who also starred in the film, was. “Jaadoo ki Jhappi! [Magic Hug!] Joy to meet the Honourable Prime Minister of our great nation,” Singh tweeted afterward. [“Bollywood ‘squad’ meets Modi to discuss ‘nation building.’” Business Standard, January 10, 2019.]
*By other people, not just me.
†I.e., they’re not very good. Sorry.
*The BJP will put the Pakistan Tourism Board out of business, at this rate.
*I wrote to Karan Johar to interview him for this book, but he did not reply to my requests. Presumably because he didn’t want to be forced to make another video.
†K3G’s tagline is, “It’s all about loving your parents.”