FATIMA BHUTTO: NUOVI RE DEL MONDO

Dal 7 aprile 2023 è in distribuzione nelle librerie italiane il saggio Nuovi re del mondo. Corrispondenze da Bollywood, dal Dizi e dal K-pop, di Fatima Bhutto, pubblicato da Minimum Fax. Fatima Bhutto, scrittrice pachistana, è imparentata con nomi noti della politica del suo Paese. Benazir Bhutto, ad esempio, è sua zia. 

Nel comunicato ufficiale si legge:

'Immaginari inediti si stanno affiancando a quello occidentale sulla scena globale. Un vasto movimento culturale pone una sfida importante ai grandi brand della cultura pop americana, da Hollywood a McDonald’s. Nuovi re del mondo è il racconto degli sviluppi recenti della cultura di massa: i film indiani di Bollywood, le soap opera turche (dizi) e la musica pop della Corea del Sud, nota come K-pop. Mixando con cura modernità e valori tradizionali, in contesti urbanizzati sempre più ampi, queste fabbriche dei sogni stanno creando un pop differente, in grado di superare i confini locali e diffondersi in luoghi e culture molto diversi.

Negli ultimi anni la band di maggiore successo al mondo, i BTS, è coreana, i blockbuster indiani hanno una popolarità che va oltre le frontiere nazionali, e le telenovele turche riscontrano un successo che unisce il Medioriente all’Italia, alla Spagna, all’America Latina. In un ampio reportage, l’autrice traccia il profilo di Shah Rukh Khan, per molti versi la star più popolare al mondo; va dietro le quinte di Magnificent Century, il più importante tra i dizi, seguito da oltre duecento milioni di persone in 43 paesi; e scopre come è iniziato il K-pop in Corea del Sud. Un’importante testimonianza dei tanti poli di una cultura pop che prende forma davanti ai nostri occhi'.

Nella prefazione al saggio si legge:

'Se le storie della produzione turca e di quella coreana sono tutto sommato recenti, con mercati interni di dimensioni limitate da superare con una studiata politica di esportazioni sostenuta attivamente dal governo, l’India ha una tradizione molto più articolata e un mercato interno decisamente più grande e autosufficiente. Fatima Bhutto dedica buona parte del suo Nuovi re del mondo a ricostruirne le fasi principali mettendole in relazione ai cambiamenti politici interni e, soprattutto, alla svolta neoliberista degli anni Novanta, incarnata cinematograficamente da alcuni eclatanti casi di divismo attoriale, e in particolar modo dalla figura complessa di Shah Rukh Khan, incontrata da Bhutto a Dubai alternando al suo profilo squarci di dialogo che rivelano la dimensione quotidiana del mito. Un mito che vive non solo nel vicino Medio Oriente ma in Paesi lontani che nulla hanno a che fare con l’India, come il Perù, che consuma il cinema di Bollywood fin dagli anni Cinquanta, dove Khan, tra gli altri, incarna un modello vincente per le popolazioni andine, strappate dalla loro terra e gettate nei meandri della capitale a condurre vite spesso miserabili'.

Video promozionale di New Kings of the World. Dispatches from Bollywood, Dizi, and K-pop (2019)

Aggiornamento del 3 luglio 2023 - Vi segnalo l'intervista concessa da Fatima Bhutto a Federico Chiara, pubblicata oggi da Vogue Italia:

'Cosa ti ha spinto a scrivere questo libro?

Volevo esplorare la politica della cultura, più specificamente il modo in cui la cultura viene usata come forma di potere. L’hard power è fatto di carri armati, pistole e guerra, il soft power è Elvis e la Coca-Cola e il rock and roll. Trasporta le idee in modo gentile ma non innocente.

Perché siamo sempre più attratti da culture pop non occidentali? E perché pensi che queste ultime stiano perdendo colpi?

Il processo di globalizzazione è cambiato tanto ma ha anche tradito molte promesse: è stato detto che avrebbe portato ricchezza e opportunità per tutti, che ci avrebbe collegato attraverso gli oceani e avrebbe trasformato in meglio le nostre esistenza. È successo, ma solo per alcuni. A milioni di persone è stata venduta la stessa promessa, col risultato che hanno lasciato le loro case nei villaggi per trasferirsi nelle grandi città aspettandosi di essere trattate come capitani d’industria, ma lì si sono trovate alienate, isolate, abbandonate. (...)

Parli di migranti che affrontano spostamenti a breve e a lungo raggio, dunque.

La maggior parte delle migrazioni nel mondo di oggi non riguarda tanto le persone che abbandonano l’Africa o l’Asia per trasferirsi in Europa, ma chi si sposta all’interno dei propri Paesi, muovendosi dai villaggi alle città. E la cultura pop occidentale non descrive questa difficoltà, questa sofferenza che stanno vivendo centinaia di milioni di migranti. Ma gli spettacoli turchi sì, gli spettacoli nigeriani sì, Bollywood sì, parlano di quella solitudine e umiliazione e di quanto sia difficile vivere una vita dignitosa nel mondo moderno. I film o le serie occidentali parlano di supereroi, sesso, miliardari. Non parlano più di ciò che il mondo sta affrontando.

Bollywood ha un’industria dell’intrattenimento molto ben avviata: quali sono gli ingredienti del suo duraturo successo?

Quando nel 2019 ho scritto Nuovi re del mondo, Bollywood era un’industria diversa. Se dovessi riscriverlo oggi non la includerei, e ti spiego la ragione. Fino al 2010 Bollywood è stato uno specchio dell’India riflettendo, di volta in volta, l’ottimismo per l’indipendenza nei film degli anni 40-60, le lotte contro la corruzione e il potere negli anni 70, lo shock del neoliberismo negli anni 90. Oggi è ancora uno specchio dell’India, ma l’India è cambiata: al governo c’è un partito indù che ha una storia di violenza contro le minoranze - si pensi ai massacri del Gujarat contro i musulmani nei primi anni 2000 o alla violenza contro i cristiani in Assam oggi. I film mainstream ora riflettono questo: sono solo noiosa propaganda, non arte'.

SFILATA DIOR AUTUNNO 2023 A MUMBAI

La collezione Autunno 2023 di Christian Dior, disegnata dalla direttrice creativa Maria Grazia Chiuri, è stata presentata lo scorso 30 marzo a Mumbai, sotto l'imponente Portale dell'India. Oltre cinquanta indossatrici/indossatori erano di origine indiana. Numerose le celebrità presenti, fra cui Anushka Sharma con il marito Virat Kohli, Sonam Kapoor e Rekha.

Dior a Mumbai, la sfilata in India spiegata in 5 punti chiave, Federica Caiazzo, Vanity Fair, 31 marzo 2023:

'John Galliano, che ha guidato Dior per quindici anni dal 1996 al 2011, si era già lasciato ispirare per la Primavera-Estate 1998 da lussuosi gioielli in stile Raj. Ma fu il suo predecessore Gianfranco Ferré, direttore creativo di Dior dal 1989 al 1996, a dedicare all’India un’intera collezione. La collezione Dior Haute Couture Autunno-Inverno 1996/1997 da lui disegnata fu chiamata Passione Indiana. (...) Gianfranco Ferré, che in India aveva trascorso una parte della sua vita, raccontò in seguito: «In India ho vissuto e lavorato per anni, i primi della mia attività: dovendo riassumere in un concetto il senso più vero di questa mia esperienza fondamentale non potrei che ricorrere ad una definizione duplice e apparentemente contraddittoria: semplicità opulenta, elementarità sfarzosa». (...) La collezione Dior Autunno 2023 è stata realizzata con il supporto della Chanakya School Of Craft di Mumbai, che la direttrice creativa ha più volte visitato in prima persona per conoscerne le ricamatrici e scoprire come l’antico know-how viene loro trasmesso'.

Video ufficiale: la sfilata

Video ufficiale: Sonam Kapoor visita la Chanakya School of Craft

Rekha e Maria Grazia Chiuri

Sonam Kapoor e Maisie Williams

Gianfranco Ferré: sfilata Dior Autunno-Inverno 1996-1997

Gianfranco Ferré: sfilata Dior Autunno-Inverno 1996-1997

Gianfranco Ferré: collezione Dior Autunno-Inverno 1996-1997

Gianfranco Ferré: sfilata Dior Autunno-Inverno 1996-1997

Gianfranco Ferré: collezione Dior Autunno-Inverno 1996-1997

RAJ & DK: MAXIMUM GUYS

Vi segnalo un lungo articolo di Uday Bhatia dedicato al mitico duo di registi Raj Nidimoru e Krishna DK: Raj & DK: Maximum guys, Mint, 11 marzo 2023. Di seguito un estratto:

'Theirs is a comedy rooted in the everyday, born of miscalculations, coincidences and overreaches, but it’s also practical, a consequence of navigating the obstacle course of daily life in India. (...) Their new Amazon Prime series Farzi (...) [is] a ridiculously entertaining series. (...) Farzi had been rattling about in Raj & DK’s heads since the early 2010s. They had planned it as a film, even pitched it to Shahid Kapoor. Had it happened then, it would have been seen as the directors of 99 taking another shot at a caper film, this time with a star. But it never panned out, so they moved on to other projects. “We write a lot, a lot of ideas drop off,” Nidimoru says. “Farzi never dropped off.” (...) The show pulls together strands from across Raj & DK’s career: the madcap underdog energy of 99; the gritty but lovingly realised Mumbai of Shor In The City; the surreal slapstick of Go Goa Gone (2013); the procedural momentum of their wildly popular Amazon Prime series The Family Man. It also marks 20 years of the duo as film-makers; their first feature, the no-budget Flavors, which screened back in 2003. (...)

When I visited their office in Andheri, Mumbai, the walls were covered with post-its: a season broken down, episode-wise, into key scenes. This was for the Indian offshoot of Citadel, an upcoming Amazon franchise produced by the Russo brothers, which will have a US flagship series followed by spin-offs in India, Italy and Mexico. There’s the prospect of further seasons of The Family Man and Farzi, to say nothing of sequels to the other shows they are debuting. Right now, they are, to flip a phrase from The Family Man, Indian streaming’s maximum guys.

Raj & DK’s career was always building up to this moment. They have never been typical Bollywood directors. They are a bit too self-aware. They don’t do masala. They waited till their fourth Hindi feature before including a lip-synced musical number in the main body of the film. All their films have had music (Sachin-Jigar have been a constant) but you never get the sense (...) that the bottom would fall out if you removed the songs. No wonder they have taken so well to streaming. (...)

Their screenplays are written first in English, dialogue and all. Longtime writing partner Sita Menon then does a Hindi version. Then, because neither Raj, DK nor Menon have a writer’s command over Hindi, they bring in someone to punch up the lines. It has been this way since 99 and they still work like this. “For a long time, we were ribbed - these people who write in English and make Hindi films,” Menon says. But just because they don’t supply all the words themselves doesn’t mean they can’t tell when they have the goods. Since they already have dialogue in English, they don’t need top Bollywood writers, just someone with a quick mind who isn’t opposed to doing translations (this might explain why their work sounds unlike most mainstream Hindi film writing). (...)

On the low-budget Shor In The City, they skipped dialogue writers and took a cheaper, if more chaotic, route. “We were calling cousins and friends and asking them, how would you say this line?” Nidimoru recalls. (...)

Unlike, say, Vishal Bhardwaj or Anurag Kashyap, who draw as much from older Indian films as they do from foreign cinema, Raj & DK’s reference points skew towards Hollywood. (...) The tributes in Go Goa Gone are to foreign zombie films, not the Ramsays. (...)

They started out watching homegrown films, though, DK in Chittoor, Nidimoru in Tirupati - both in Andhra Pradesh. They met in Tirupati’s Sri Venkateswara University as engineering students and continued their film-going, “tripling” on Nidimoru’s bike (an image reproduced in Shor In The City) to go see Telugu and Tamil releases and the occasional Hindi or English film. They also started teaming up for quizzes and charades. “By third year, we were a famous team,” DK says. “We could read each other’s minds.” Both moved to the US after college. They kept in touch, and fell in love with American film.

Over the next few years, without much of a plan, they started fooling around with cinema. They had no formal training, so they would “reverse-engineer” films, breaking down the ones they liked until they understood why they worked. The timing was fortuitous, the tail of the indie boom in the US coinciding with the rise of digital shooting. “You could buy a camera, buy a computer, and shoot a film, edit a film, all on your own,” DK says. “And we were watching all these independent directors making films with no money. That was the boost we needed.” They lived in different states, so they would drive down on the weekends to prep and shoot. After a couple of shorts, they embarked on their first full-length feature. Flavors, an English-language film, was a loosely connected series of vignettes featuring a range of Indian-American characters. (...) In an interview around the time of Flavors’ release, they said they were planning “a new kind of Bollywood movie”.

Full of hope, Raj & DK quit their software jobs in the US and moved to Mumbai, where they wrote a version of what would become their first Hindi film, 99. They tried, unsuccessfully, to get it to Aamir Khan. No doors opened. They went back to the US, where they refined 99 and another script, a gritty urban drama with intersecting stories. It was the latter that yielded their first representative work: a short film called Shor (2008). (...) It was their first work written with Sita Menon. She would go on to co-write all their projects apart from Stree [sceneggiatura di Raj & DK, regia di Amar Kaushik] and The Family Man.

“Flavors was our film school,” DK says. “With Shor, it was like, okay, we know how to make this.” The short became a calling card. Actors Kunal Khemu and Soha Ali Khan loved it, which led to them signing up for 99. (...)

These were some of the Hindi releases in 2009: Dev. D, Rocket Singh: Salesman Of The Year, Gulaal, Luck By Chance, Sankat City, Wake Up Sid, Kaminey. Clearly, there were anarchic spirits coursing through the industry then, a lot of them comic. It was the perfect time for Raj & DK to drop their first Hindi film. Almost immediately, they turned their attention to the original vision from which Shor had emerged - what they were now calling Shor In The City. (...)

With their reputation growing, Raj & DK could have chosen to go full Bollywood. Instead, they opted to make a stoner zombie action comedy. (...) This was largely uncharted territory: Zombies didn’t feature in Hindi cinema outside cheesy Ramsay brothers productions. (...) One of the executives they pitched the film to told them later : “We thought you were mental.” Go Goa Gone was mental-funny and hyperviolent. (...) As with 99, it wasn’t so much that the jokes were brilliant (...) but that there were so many of them that it didn’t matter if a few flopped. (...)

Just when everything was going so well, the wheels came off. First there was Happy Ending. (...) Raj, DK and Menon described it variously as an “anti-romcom”, “very meta”, and a comedy about romantic tropes. But the film, set in an impersonal Los Angeles and California, was neither sufficiently satirical nor subversive in the way it was envisioned. A Gentleman, set largely in Miami, followed: their first all-out action film. For once, the actors felt out of sync with Raj & DK’s style. (...) “It was a big studio film,” Menon says. “Many people had their points of view on it. We tried to cater to all of those and the film suffered.” The action sequences held the promise of things to come but mostly it seemed that in upscaling, Raj & DK had misplaced what made them special.

“That control we had was being lost as we got into a bigger circle,” Nidimoru says. “So we decided, on Stree, we will go back to producing ourselves. Let’s make it out of our pockets and release it. It was back to the Shor In The City model.” They were planning to direct it but Amazon came calling. Once The Family Man became a reality, they knew they had to pass the reins on Stree. Amar Kaushik, first assistant director on Go Goa Gone, took over; Raj & DK stayed on as writer-producers. This unequivocally feminist horror-comedy about an avenging female ghost was a sleeper hit in 2018; made on a budget of about ₹24 crore, it grossed over ₹170 crore. Its success kicked off the modern Hindi horror-comedy cycle - though one could argue that started with Go Goa Gone. (...)

I ask if they reverse-engineered for TV too, the way they had done for film. “Yeah, new beast,” DK says. “In a tiny one-room office, every wall was covered with these notes because we had to figure out how to write a frickin’ series,” Nidimoru adds, pointing to post-its on the wall. They are not sure how they arrived at it but they came up with a five-act structure for each episode and a three-act structure for the series. Here was a chance to write, write, write, create a tapestry of characters and plots in a manner that a film just wouldn’t allow. The initial feedback was positive but a little confused. Why was their gritty spy series also a comedy and a family drama? They fretted over suggestions to trim the family stuff, but eventually decided to leave it as it was. (...)

One of the exciting things about The Family Man’s first season was discovering, episode by episode, just how capable Raj & DK were as action directors. They settled on a complicated but rewarding signature: extended sequences shot in one take. The 13-minute hospital breakout in the sixth episode is the most celebrated, but there’s a dynamic single-take shootout in the first episode itself. (...)

For Raj & DK, the show was the start of something new, and not only because it was long-form storytelling. It was the first time they were directing something not written by Menon (Suman Kumar was co-writer). It was also their first brush with politically charged material. Most spy narratives skew towards order and conservatism, and, on balance, The Family Man does too. (...) Yet, there is also doubt and complexity seeded along the way. (...)

Though “pan-India cinema” has been touted as a silver bullet for the theatrical experience, streaming offers a more genuine - and achievable - vision of pan-India film-making. Its viewers are more likely to watch something with subtitles. And they are more likely to have watched films or series in languages they don’t speak. Raj & DK, Telugu-speakers both, have been particularly committed to pan-India casting. (...) The Family Man is full of actors who work across the southern film industries. (...) Samantha Ruth Prabhu as rebel soldier Raji in season 2 wasn’t just a casting coup but a signal that streaming TV was no longer something mainstream actors in the prime of the career wouldn’t consider.

The second season of The Family Man also allowed actors to speak their own language; a lot of the dialogue is in Tamil. The makers even weave the cultural divide into the story. (...)

Da destra: Krishna DK, Suman Kumar, Raj Nidimoru e Sita R. Menon

Other borders beckon. If Citadel is a success, Hollywood could be on the cards. But there’s also a genuine concern of being stretched thin. Whether they can juggle two ongoing shows, three forthcoming ones, their production work, and whatever plans they have for the future remains to be seen. Perhaps they will build a B-team of co-directors like they have done with writers. (...)

In all this, they can count on the partnership of Menon, and each other. Though DK is more technical and Nidimoru more involved with the actors, they are, by all accounts, uncannily in sync. (...) DK jokes that sometimes Nidimoru would walk onto set and say, “What have you done, you have changed the entire shot!” But though they often split production duties, they always shoot together. They seem to seek out, and encourage, actors with a bent for improvisation. (...)

Twenty years on, Raj & DK have built a neat little filmography. Six features directed, three others produced, two series. Comedies all, yet spanning city films, stoner films, capers, family dramas, procedurals, action, horror, romance. All distinctly, visibly theirs, even the clunkers. Watching them in one go, I could see more clearly the motifs and cross-currents: double lives, fraying marriages, cursed phones, frantic runs, fancy parties that regular folks can’t get into. The considerable visual appeal of their work notwithstanding, theirs is a writer’s filmography. “We are really, really happy to be writers,” Nidimoru says. “Writing for us is half the directing”.'

SALAAR: LE RIPRESE IN ITALIA

Nel comunicato ufficiale del Comune di Matera, diffuso nella giornata di ieri, si legge:

'Il titolo del film è “Salaar”, di genere thriller/azione diviso in due parti, la versione originale sarà in lingua telugu, scritta e diretta da Prashanth Neel e prodotta da (...) “Hombale Films” (il produttore esecutivo italiano è Ivano Fucci). (...) Ha come protagonista il noto attore indiano Prabhas in un doppio ruolo, (...) insieme a Prithviraj, (...) Shruti Haasan. (...) La società di produzione ha già interloquito, nei giorni scorsi, con il sindaco Domenico Bennardi e l’assessore al Cinema, Tiziana D’Oppido, che hanno aperto le porte al nuovo progetto, prestigiosa vetrina di Matera anche nel grande Paese asiatico. (...) Sono già in corso sopralluoghi e riprese nei Sassi per la prima parte del film, a cui seguiranno altre settimane di riprese nell’inverno prossimo per la seconda, quasi tutta incentrata su Matera. Per il resto la pellicola sarà ambientata ai tempi nostri in diversi luoghi d’Europa, con riprese effettuate anche a Budapest, Napoli e Roma'.

In rete si incrociano notizie contrastanti. A fine 2022 sembrava che la produzione progettasse di realizzare Salaar in due parti. Voci ricorrenti sostenevano un coinvolgimento di Yash, nel secondo capitolo, per un cross over con la saga di K.G.F (sempre diretta da Neel e finanziata da Hombale Films) - o addirittura una trasformazione di Salaar 2 in K.G.F - Chapter 3. Circa un mese fa, alcuni media indiani smentirono la possibilità di un secondo capitolo per Salaar. 

Il comunicato del Comune di Matera potrebbe quindi confermare l'ipotesi iniziale in modo autorevole. Ad oggi, la distribuzione di Salaar (primo capitolo o capitolo unico) è prevista per il prossimo settembre.

Aggiornamento del 3 aprile 2023: secondo quanto dichiarato dai media indiani, anche Prabhas era a Matera lo scorso marzo. La troupe si è poi trasferita a Napoli. 

Servizio di Rai Radio 2.

NAATU NAATU E THE ELEPHANT WHISPERERS VINCONO L'OSCAR

Ieri sera, alla cerimonia di conferimento dei premi Oscar, l'industria cinematografica indiana si è aggiudicata ben due statuette:

- la trascinante Naatu Naatu, di M.M. Keeravani, tratta dalla colonna sonora del film telugu RRR, ha vinto l'Oscar per la miglior canzone originale, soffiandolo ai brani di superstar del calibro di Rihanna (Lift me up) e Lady Gaga (Hold my hand). La statuetta è stata ritirata da Keeravani e dal paroliere Chandrabose. Naatu Naatu, in precedenza premiata con il Golden Globe, è stata rappresentata da danzatori professionisti nel corso dell'evento; Kaala Bhairava e Rahul Sipligunj hanno cantato dal vivo. L'esibizione è stata annunciata da Deepika Padukone. Presenti in sala S.S. Rajamouli, Ram Charan e Jr NTR. Recensione di RRR.

- il cortometraggio documentario tamil The Elephant Whisperers, diretto dalla regista Kartiki Gonsalves e prodotto da Guneet Monga, ha vinto l'Oscar nella sua categoria.

Video Variety: Ram Charan 

Video Variety: Jr NTR

Video ABC: Deepika Padukone e rappresentazione di Naatu Naatu

Video ABC: proclamazione della miglior canzone originale

Video Hotstar: proclamazione del miglior cortometraggio documentario

Video: dichiarazioni di Guneet Monga

Vedi anche Naatu Naatu, All That Breathes e The Elephant Whisperers in corsa per gli Oscar

Da destra: M.M. Keeravani e Chandrabose

Da sinistra: Kartiki Gonsalves e Guneet Monga

Kartiki Gonsalves: Vanity Fair Oscar Party

Vanity Fair Oscar Party

Mumbai, 13 marzo 2023

BREAKING DOWN PATHAAN, THE MOST POPULAR MOVIE IN THE WORLD

Per fortuna i miei timori si sono rivelati infondati: Pathaan sta letteralmente incendiando il botteghino, e non solo in India, frantumando tutti i precedenti record di incassi con la rapidità e la precisione chirurgica e spietata di un raggio laser. Persino nel nostro Paese, grazie alla lungimiranza del circuito UCI, si è guadagnato numerose proiezioni, molte delle quali aggiunte all'ultimo minuto, a testimonianza di un successo non previsto ma reale. 

Purtroppo non ho ancora potuto gustarmi il film, magari è una schifezza, ma inutile precisare che sono in primo luogo superiperfelice per il Re: dopo le batoste familiari e personali subite negli ultimi tempi, una rivincita di proporzioni planetarie era proprio quello che la suprema legge della compensazione multiversale doveva avere in serbo per lui. In secondo luogo, sono felice per l'industria cinematografica hindi, ingiustamente, volgarmente, sproporzionatamente attaccata. In terzo luogo, sono felice perché si è forse accesa una luce in fondo al tunnel: di politica me ne frego, ma chiunque - di destra, di sinistra, di centro, di sopra, di sotto, di lato - osi toccare il cinema indiano, non merita la mia stima. E chiunque osi toccare il Re, sul piano personale, non condivide il mio patrimonio biologico e genetico.

Vi riporto di seguito il magnifico articolo Breaking down Pathaan, the most popular movie in the world, di Swati Sharma, pubblicato ieri da Vox. Il pezzo include una conversazione con il talentuoso critico cinematografico Rahul Desai.

'One of the biggest movie stars in the world is at one of the most tenuous moments in his career. Bollywood titan Shah Rukh Khan hasn’t made a movie in almost five years, his two most recent films failed to captivate audiences, he’s at odds with India’s ruling government, and his industry has been plagued by pandemic disruptions, boycotts from right-wing activists, and anger over nepotism. His latest film, which was released on January 25, is perhaps the biggest test of his star power in his 30-year career.

But the stakes of Khan’s movie Pathaan go far beyond the actor’s relevance. A Muslim man from a middle-class family, Khan hasn’t succumbed to the growing trend of Hindu nationalism that has dominated Bollywood for the last several years. He’s in fact been a target of the right-wing Hindutva government that has been in power since 2014, due to the charismatic star’s singular influence in India and many other parts of the world.

When the sleek high-budget action film Pathaan came out on the eve of India’s Republic Day, it became the biggest film in the world, knocking down Avatar The Way of Water, which had held the top spot for weeks. (...) The film has broken all sorts of records. It is one of the highest-grossing Hindi films of all time. (...)

Though Bollywood is facing myriad issues, one thing is apparent: The Indian government’s mission of promoting Hindu nationalism above all else has wounded Hindi cinema’s freedom of expression, influence, and even profits. It seemed possible that these attempts would sink India’s biggest icon as well. But it didn’t. To unpack the significance of this film and the present and future of Bollywood, I spoke to Rahul Desai. (...)

Q. Like Hollywood, Bollywood - the Hindi film industry - was all but shut down during the pandemic. What was the state of the industry leading up to the release of Pathaan?

Before the pandemic, Hindi cinema was already struggling. There was a big nepotism scandal after a famous actor who was an outsider, Sushant Singh Rajput, died by suicide. There was a narrative that mainstream blockbusters from the South had an edge on the Hindi film industry, which is in northern India. The public caught a feeling that, to put it bluntly, Bollywood was the villain in Indian cinema. Covid only made things worse.

To be honest, since 2015 or 2016, I’ve struggled to make annual best movie lists because there have not been enough contenders. So unpopularity wasn’t completely unwarranted, but things got very toxic in the last few years, and Bollywood movies have been underperforming. The Marvel films that release in India and Telugu blockbusters like RRR outperform Hindi movies even in Mumbai, which is the center of the Hindi film industry.

Q. India has also changed a lot politically. The country, though a Hindu-majority nation, was founded on secular principles. But since 2014, the right-wing government has been promoting Hindu fundamentalism. It seems like the government is influencing Bollywood more than ever.

There has been a relationship between Bollywood and the government, but that relationship stopped at freedom of expression. Many film stars may have had their own political opinions, but that did not stop them from making movies that were expressive, and that were brave, and that were secular in many ways. Communalism and religious prejudice have always plagued this country. It’s just that this current particular establishment has weaponized that compared to the previous ones. Why? Because Bollywood has maximum influence over the masses, and they realized very quickly that this medium is how they will get their ideas across.

Because of that, the government has broken many of the powerful people in the industry into some kind of submission. Stars won’t speak up when one of their contemporaries is being harassed or when one of their own is being bullied. I can’t fault them for that, because their livelihoods and careers are at stake. It’s a very precarious situation for a lot of the celebrities to be in.

This has a knock-on effect on the kinds of films that are being made. The government’s hands are in the kind of stories being told and the kind of actors that are propped up, especially if they openly showcase their Hinduism. You see a rise of patriotic films that pretend to be patriotic, but they are obviously preaching a very different kind of nationalism as compared to, say, the films of the past that represented secular ideology and gentle patriotism, saying, We are proud of the country we are in, but it doesn’t have to cross the line. Now a lot of lines are being crossed.

Q. This brings us to the topic at hand: Pathaan has been one of the most anticipated releases in Bollywood over the last few years. There are many reasons why, but one of the biggest is Shah Rukh Khan, or SRK. Give us a sense of who he is.

Khan has been the biggest superstar of the modern era in Hindi cinema, since the early 1990s. He has been the name that a lot of people associate with India. If you go to the most obscure foreign country, the one name people will know is Shah Rukh Khan. They’ll name one of his movies from the ’90s or hum one of his famous songs. He’s been an icebreaker for Indian travelers all over the world. He’s been that icon for three decades.

Q. And, of course, Bollywood has many, many stars! In fact, there are two other Khans - Salman and Aamir. Along with SRK, these three Muslim actors were dominant in the 1990s and 2000s, and are still relevant today. But SRK, who is from a middle-class family and the only non-nepo baby of the group, speaks about secularism, has a father who was a freedom fighter for India’s independence, and transcends other stars in India.

Khan has the ultimate underdog story: He is the most famous outsider in the industry, and it’s always his story that wins cinema. People don’t just go to watch him so much as celebrate his story. He represents what can be accomplished if you just leave everything and travel to Mumbai with your bags, no matter how promising you were in other fields - and you become a superstar. To this day, people still come to Mumbai with him as the example to strive for. That very idea of the India that he and the three Khans represent is an inherently secular idea of India.

The three Khans have been mostly dominant for the last three decades. But for SRK, the last decade or so, as he entered his late 40s and now his late 50s, has been a struggle. His last films stopped working for a bunch of reasons, mostly because they were not very good. They were terrible. And he was not very good in them either, because he was at that awkward age where he didn’t know whether to be Shah Rukh Khan, or to be an actor, or to be a character actor.

It happens to many stars - he was trying to get a box office success, especially as the two other Khans, Aamir and Salman, continued to shine. If you look at the biggest hits in Bollywood, the top five spots before Pathaan were taken by Aamir and Salman Khan. I felt like at some point, SRK got insecure that he never broke records, though he was a safe bet. He was always everyone’s sort of ideal lover, ideal son, and a cultural icon. But he was not the biggest box office draw anymore. I think that got him into the race for box office success, and that’s when he started doing films that were pretty bad. For the first time in his 30-year career, he didn’t have a film release for almost five years, so it’s all built up to a story within a story, and that’s the prelude to Pathaan.

Q. So SRK is a huge star in India, but three decades in, he’s trying to find his way through a changing industry. That part of his story is pretty typical. (...) The thing that’s different with Khan is his relationship with India’s current government.

Funnily enough, a lot of my generation growing up in the 1990s didn’t think of the Khans as Muslim or Hindu superstars; we just looked at them as superstars in Bollywood, and we considered “Khan” the most stylish surname. When I was watching films in Mumbai many years later and focused on the myth of Shah Rukh Khan, I started to get more and more connected with how the narrative of religion is being used by this current establishment. If the new Hindu nationalist ruling party had to really take down the idea of secularity, they had to take down the ultimate symbol of it as well. It’s no coincidence Khan has been indirectly targeted in the last four or five years.

SRK himself is a Muslim actor, and even if he’s playing Hindu characters in these films - which was mostly the case - there’s always a sense in the back of your head that this is a superstar who’s very open about his religion, who’s not ashamed of his religion, who doesn’t hide his religion. The current government has wanted stars to cozy up to its Hindu nationalist narrative. Shah Rukh Khan, though, has resisted and kept his silence, which has become a statement. He hasn’t spoken up for the government as much as a lot of the other celebrities in this country, so you always feel like he hasn’t conformed and he is not broken. 

All this reached a head last year when the saga with SRK’s son unfolded. Aryan Khan [then 23] was arrested and jailed on trumped-up drug charges. As ironic as it may sound, that’s when the tides turned against the right-wing government and toward SRK. People felt the government went too far. It was too blatant. They went after a Muslim superstar and everyone’s favorite hero. That’s part of Pathaan’s success as well.

The movie was a fun one, but let’s be honest: It’s an action movie that we’ve seen a hundred times before. It’s not a masterpiece. I can name three other better Hindi action films in the last 10 years, but the context cannot be divorced from the movie. It’s so important to take it into consideration, because that’s why a lot of us are rooting for the success of Pathaan. When you push your country’s favorite superstar into a corner, people feel obligated to root for that star after a while. I don’t think he still was the biggest star in the country until all the things with his son happened last year. That’s when he was brought back into the limelight.

Once I became a professional film critic, I never really liked to get into this discourse, to talk him up as “the India we need, and not the India we have.” But as it turns out in the last year or so, there’s no escaping that discourse.

Q. As you say, there are a few things happening before Pathaan: Bollywood desperately needs a hit, Shah Rukh Khan’s popularity is being tested. And then - I don’t want to exaggerate this, but it seems like it’s the question - can an actor at odds with the government be successful or not?

I’ll be honest, I didn’t see it coming. I actually was preparing for the worst. Seeing what has been happening in this country in the last 10 years, I thought, we are going to see SRK almost begging people to go watch the film, which is not a good look for anyone. To my absolute shock, the film was a huge success.

The patriotism we see in Pathaan - I won’t say it’s brave, I won’t say it’s rebellious in any way. But it’s sort of subversive, because SRK is playing a character called Pathaan, which is the name of the Pashto-speaking group in Afghanistan and Pakistan who are mostly Muslim. He’s not saying he is an Indian Muslim; he says he feels connected to a village in Afghanistan. That has nothing to do with India. You’re not exactly going straight on or hitting the heart of Hindu nationalism here. What you are doing is being Shah Rukh Khan and starring in a film called Pathaan and then releasing it in this atmosphere we are in. After all of Bollywood’s struggles and the state of the nation, it’s a breather. All the stars aligned.

Q. Tell me more about the significance of the title of the movie, and Pathaan the character.

The significance of the title is that patriotism isn’t a Hindu birthright anymore. It’s not tied to a certain kind of religion. I see a lot of people criticizing the fact that SRK’s character doesn’t say he’s an Indian Muslim. We don’t know his real name - Pathaan was given to him by a family he met in Afghanistan. But it’s not about what kind of Muslim you are or where you come from. It’s the fact that your love for your country, your love for film, your love for people, your love for art in general, should not be hijacked by one particular community.

That’s what the film does so smartly. They don’t take potshots at Hinduism, the way a lot of Hindu nationalist films have been taking potshots at Islam for the last 10 years. Instead, what it does is put forward a very different idea of Islam. That’s the more human and more dignified way to make a statement, rather than running down one community to glorify another.

Q. One thing that’s fascinating is the movie had to be a very fun, popcorn action film. If it was a beautiful indie masterpiece and didn’t have mass appeal, it wouldn’t have this kind of impact.

There is no question about the fact that Pathaan was written with Shah Rukh Khan’s particular situation in mind. The director and the writers all but admitted in interviews that of course it was made and designed around Shah Rukh Khan’s comeback. They won’t go so far to say whatever political commentary they wanted to deliver through him, but there is no doubt that all of it was taken into consideration for this to work and for this film to infiltrate the top five Bollywood hits ever. In terms of box office successes, it’s as good as it gets and as timely as it gets.

Q. The movie doesn’t have overt Hindu nationalist themes, but many believe (...) it has a problematic Pakistani narrative. Do you agree?

When I started watching the film, two scenes in the beginning scared me. The first scene shows a Pakistani general vowing to destroy India, and the second is SRK’s introduction, where he tells someone to only speak in Hindi, a metric that this current government has been really pushing down our throats in the last 10 years. I was quite wary.

But then if you read deeper into a silly film like this - and it is silly on its surface - I don’t think the vilification of Pakistan exists as people think it does. The main female actor, Deepika Padukone, plays an ISI [Pakistan’s CIA] agent who rebels against her own government, who does not agree with what the ISI is doing, and says that her people would never agree to biological warfare against India. That Pakistan is the Pakistan that we don’t see in Hindi movies enough.

SRK’s character is more of a rogue agent, because he’s not really working for the Indian government - he’s been brought out of exile. He doesn’t agree with his boss’s, the colonel’s, methods and criticizes him. You see a sense of dissent in the Pathaan character toward his own government and the establishment. He’s more of an individual. That’s why I felt like this sort of patriotism that you see here was the language of rebellion that we’ve all but lost in a lot of Indian movies in the last decade. This kind of nuance may not be for the masses. For them, it’s like any other patriotic film, except Shah Rukh Khan is in it. I’m glad that people are consuming it without really realizing that it’s not the kind of film they think it is.

Q. Let’s revisit what’s at stake. Shah Rukh Khan is thriving - he even spoke about how the movie celebrates unity in India because it stars a Muslim, a Hindu, and a Christian. Is this going to slow down any of these Hindu nationalist plots in Indian films? Is this really a win for secularism in India?

It’s too early to say right now. For now I’d say the one thing it’s done is signal that there is still a place for a very old kind of patriotism and secularism that our country and Bollywood specifically grew up showcasing. Hindu nationalist films that we’ve been seeing over the last decade or so are already losing audiences, even before Pathaan. A lot of that is also because people are out again after the pandemic. Cabin fever has receded, and people have become a little more sane compared to two or three years ago, when everything was supposed to be a war against something else.

What Pathaan’s success has done is given some kind of hope to an entire generation of producers and superstars and actors and technicians, who still want to make the kind of films they want to. I’m not saying they’re good films or bad films, but they make films that are more liberal in their worldview. We had seen a lot of those films recede into the background in the last 10 years, so I’d like to hope that this is a turning point. I’d like to hope that the year of Pathaan is the year that things start to change. At the same time, I’m going to be a little cautious about that, because things don’t change overnight.

I don’t think a lot of the mainstream Hindi film industry has a political ideology. Most powerful people do not subscribe to one kind of political identity. They go where the money goes. Right now, what Pathaan has done is shown that the money is going in a certain direction.

A lot of people say that it’s cruel to talk about box office numbers. I used to look down on these figures for the longest time, but every morning I check them. For better or worse, it’s a measuring stick for the conscience of the nation right now'.

Vedi anche:

- How Bollywood is rewriting history

- Shah Rukh Khan: two decades of pure feeling