Grooving on at Seventy-Five: Shah Rukh Khan, Salman Rushdie, and the Indian Muslim’s Ecstatic Return

Abstract

This essay examines two high profile creative producers of Indian Muslim heritage: the actor Shah Rukh Khan and the writer Salman Rushdie. Even as each faced attacks (of different kinds) in 2022, early 2023 saw the triumphant resurgence of their creativity with the film Pathaan, starring Khan in the eponymous role, and Rushdie’s new novel Victory City. I argue that the film and the novel together offer a complementary manifesto for the Indian Muslim as a minority subject 75 years after Partition. To understand the stakes at play in this minoritization process, I conduct the analysis against two essays on minority subjectivities in India, particularly that which crystallizes through Indian Islam—one from the 1960s, by Humayun Kabir, and the other from the contemporary moment, by Aamir Mufti.

Keywords:

• Shah Rukh Khan
• Salman Rushdie
• Humayun Kabir
• Pathaan
• Victory City
• The Indian Muslim
• minority subjectivity

The partitioned (secular) Indian postcolonial state thus rested on this minoritization and ambiguity of the figure of the Muslim. This figure is now undergoing violent recoding.

Aamir Mufti, ‘The Grannies of Shaheen Baag: Hindutva Power and the Poetics of Dissent in Contemporary India’ (2023)

Jhhoome jo pathaan meri jaan mehfil hi lut jaye

De de jo zubaan meri jaan uspe mar mit jaye

(When Pathaan’s got his groove on, he’s devastating, my love

he’ll not let go of those he give his word to, my love)

‘Jhhoome jo pathaan’, Pathaan (2023)

From blood and fire, life and power will be born.

Salman Rushdie, Victory City (2023)

Every minority is a precious element in the totality of life in the community, and every minority has a role to play in national life.

Humayun Kabir, Minorities in a Democracy (1963)

The 75th anniversary of the birth of India and Pakistan is also the 75th anniversary of the category of “Indian Muslim.” It is not a status that sits lightly on its claimants. Carved out as the vulnerable remainder of Partition, sharpened into the touchstone of secular democracy, and now, as my first epigraph reminds us, “undergoing a violent recoding” through the relentless onrush of “Hindutva power” (Mufti 2023, 173–114): to be Indian Muslim today is to sustain a peculiar simultaneity of pain and pride while staring into the abyss with feet firmly planted on the edge. It is to know that the person identified as “Indian Muslim” will and can go nowhere. That the secular democratic credentials of the post-Partition nation was built on the statistics of our presence. That sharpened knives are out for our annihilation. That the briefest of slips can push us over the precipice, short-circuit the daily business of ordinary life to deliver us to lynchers, bring their homes under bulldozers, throw us behind bars. To know all this is to be—alongside ever-present divisions of language, class, and caste—unified by precarity.¹ It is also to have grown into an experiencing of Islam that is finely shaped, and therefore rendered distinct and specific, by the Indic sensorium.² (Whether it is rejected or accepted by individuals practising their faith is another matter; the assertion here is that it exists.) This desi or vernacular inheritance renders the Indian Muslim vulnerable to another source of precarity: opprobrium, or at the very least distancing, from Arabicized, juridical, and global strands of Sunni Islam (Kabir 2005).

But in its 75th year, Indian Muslimness, in all its battered precarity, has also seen an audaciously ecstatic return. This essay, which dares to utter “we” rather than opt for “they,” may be seen as joining forces with that audacity. On 25th January 2023, the film Pathaan (dir. Sidhharth Anand) with Indian Muslim film star Shah Rukh Khan in the eponymous lead role, was released; it immediately shot to unprecedented and unsurpassed box-office success. Barely two weeks later, 8th February 2023 saw the publication of Victory City: the latest novel by Salman Rushdie, whose Indian Muslim heritage has impacted his life and writing in ways also both unprecedented and unsurpassed. Now, between Rushdie the author and Khan the actor there is not just a divide of generation and genre; each has also dealt in a very specific way with their minority subjectivity over remarkably fecund careers (Kabir 2002, 2003). While Rushdie’s early novels spun magic realist and fantastic narratives around Indian Islam (Rushdie 1981; Rushdie 1988), Shah Rukh Khan’s early roles were, following long-established convention amongst Bollywood’s Muslim heroes, of generic (read upper-caste Hindu) protagonists. Yet even as Khan increasingly broke with that cinematic pact to take on roles of Muslim protagonists, the post-Fatwa Rushdie progressively distanced himself from Islam as subject matter. The mirrored evolution of their respective trajectories has led inexorably but also bizarrely to a point of convergence, foreshadowed in August 2022 by the near-fatal attack on Rushdie carried out by a fresh recruit to radical Islam, and, in December 2022, by the Hindu Right’s calls to boycott Pathaan even before its release. This convergence culminated in the stubbornly flamboyant resilience performed and proclaimed by the near-simultaneous appearance of book and film. It is this essay’s point of departure.³

In this essay I read Victory City and Pathaan as complementary commentaries on the Indian Muslim at 75 (which is also Rushdie’s age in 2023, as well as the age of the Indian nation). Rushdie and Khan use their creativity to assert the Indian Muslim’s continued salience in a highly hostile public sphere. Instead of relinquishing that category or behaving as deemed appropriate for it by majoritarian forces, both deliver a congruent manifesto of what I am calling “ecstatic return,” marked by charisma, braggadocio, and swag. The underlying message of both is: we are alive, we aren’t cowed down, we are grooving into the future. In the official English translation of the film’s closing song, “Jhhoome jo pathaan,” “grooving” stands in for the Hindi/Urdu verb jhhoomna; as the second epigraph shows, jhhoomna is worked into a grandiose declaration of grace and transcendence through a paraxodical devastation (lootna); it is equally apposite for Victory City’s frequent apocalyptic sentiments such as that cited in the third epigraph. Khan and Rushdie deliberately create this eschatological sense in response to the existential precarity of the Indian Muslim condition that they intimately know. My reading proffers five states: the Hindi/Urdu haal—that novel and film share as an elaboration of this response: zinda hona (being-alive), besharmi (chutzpah), vanvaas (exile), mohabbat (love), and, finally jhhoomna (grooving). These five states or haal cumulatively reveal the Indian Muslim’s ecstatic return as the meta-condition of an act of “world-building as performative repair” (Kondo 2018).

This analysis of Rushdie and Khan updates the conclusions of two articles where I first argued for their creative and political deployment of an Indian Muslim minority subjectivity (Kabir 2002, 2003). Written c. 20 years ago, they were catalyzed by the discussions around Partition prompted by the fiftieth anniversary of 1947, and the escalations in Indian public culture that were about to peak with the Godhra pogroms (Jaffrelot 2021). I revisit those arguments with the help of two political theoretical readings of the foundational minority status that interlocks Indian democracy with the category of the Indian Muslim. Aamir Mufti places recent popular protests that have occupied urban India’s public spaces in a genealogy of brutal assault on people of that minority status—which cannot, however, quell the ludic genius of an “arts ecology” (Mufti 2023, 180) surreptitiously irrigated by the creative and performative nodes of Islamicate South Asia, that continue to ramify underneath the edifice of Hindutva power (Kabir 2002, 259–260). His reading from the horizon of the present contrasts with the second one I engage with: a remnant of a naively optimistic past enshrined in a lecture published in 1963 (Kabir 1963), whose concluding statement furnishes my final epigraph. Coming from an voluntarily minoritized intellectual of newly-decolonized India, the nation-builder Humayun Kabir (Kabir 2013, 176–188), these views are a time capsule of a historical phase when the link between the vitality of a democracy and the security of its minorities could be openly and fearlessly declared, and the dangers of closed minds and systems unambiguously warned against. Sixty years on that link continues to be asserted, but drastically altered political circumstances necessitate the adoption of a more complexly (re)coded semiotic register.

To reveal and decode that register, I place into contrapuntal relationship four texts whose interrelations of contrasts and parallels are illuminated through argumentation that draws on the scholarship of radical Blackness as well as on esoteric and ecstatic Islamic traditions. Methodologically, then, this essay offers a radically lyrical response to a state of emergency, that upholds the ontological value of fragments and activates new epistemologies through their faceted rearrangement. It is an academic version of Shah Rukh Khan’s response to Deepika Padukone’s leading question in Pathaan: “Kya tum Musalman ho?” Pathaan’s answer, which will be discussed later in this essay, has an evasive clarity that Paromita Vohra (2023, n.p.) sees as emblematic of “all Hindi cinematic tradition … as one heterogenous, mythic text.” In her sensitive reading of the film from a declared position of fandom, Vohra interprets this question in the light of the same audacity I have identified, that she sees articulated in Varun Grover’s poem, “Hum kagaz nahi dikhlaenge” (We will not show our papers), made famous through its oral circulation during the equally memorable Shaheen Bagh protest of winter 2020 (Mufti 2023). For Vohra (2023, n.p.), this exchange encapsulates the film “as a potent aggregator of heterogenous memories” that return to its “amnesiac” audiences in “shards and fragments” activated by glimpses pertaining to what Mukul Kesavan (1994) memorably identified as Bollywood’s “Islamicate commitment”: in the case of Pathaan, a taveez or amulet worn by Khan, or his delicate gesture of salaam, elements that are moreover recycled from earlier, more allusive performances of Muslimness (Kabir 2003). Trafficking in these fragments, as does Vohra (2023, n.p.), I extend to the Indian Muslim condition as a whole the particular relationship to actuality as the “defence of memory of history” that she sees in Pathaan through its multi-faceted, dynamically “shape-shifting,” “bahurupiya” vagueness.⁴

Haal No. 1: Zinda Hai/is Alive

Seconds before we encounter Pathaan, the audience hears of him. The camera positions us as eavesdroppers on a conversation between RAW senior official Nandini Grewal and Joint Secretary Col Sunil Luthra. “We”ve heard that he’s been much tortured. It’s not clear whether Pathaan has died or…’ Cut to a close up of a bloodied eye, overhung by matted hair, framing a battered face. “Zinda hai” (“is alive”), declares an oracular voice seemingly issuing from his very guts. For those who have read Sadat Hasan Manto’s short story Khol do (“Open it,” Manṭo 1997, 11–14), this visceral introduction jolts us to Manto’s use of that exact phrase. In Khol do, a request to open the window of a hospital room is automatically processed by a young woman, the victim of gang rape, as the command to open the drawstring of her salwar. Her father’s macabre exultation at this sign of life takes the same form: “zinda hai!” (‘she’s alive!”). The reverberation of “zinda hai” functions as an insubordinate genealogy of what evades amnesia. The echo gathers the double sense of Alexander Wheheliye’s (2014, 2) coinage “habeas viscus—‘You shall have the flesh’ [that] on the one hand, … signal[s] how violent political domination activates a fleshly surplus that simultaneously sustains and disfigures said brutality, and, on the other hand, … reclaim[s] the atrocity of flesh as a pivotal arena for the politics emanating from different traditions of the oppressed.” Short-circuiting the present to the violence around Partition, the identical announcements of “fleshly surplus” nevertheless diverge in their deictic work. Manto’s “zinda hai” points to the victim of brutality; Khan’s declaration arrogates the grammatical third person to himself. While preserving the syntax of the sentence he seizes, he transforms its semantics from a doubt (“is he…”) to an assertion (“is alive”). This grammatical hijacking both retains and utterly changes the status quo.

The performative utterance of “being-alive” emulates Sylvia Wynter’s “being-human” (McKittrick 2015), where being is wrenched from nominal to verbal status in order to move toward doing. This work was also done by the photograph of Salman Rushdie published alongside an interview in The New Yorker on the eve of his new novel’s publication (Remnick 2023). Our first monochromatic glimpse of the author after the September 2022 attack zooms into the single black spectacle lens that, pirate-patch-like, covers the eye he has lost. His truncated but still-unflinching gaze pierces through the representational plane. Reduced yet fully present, he declares writing itself to be a death-defying act (Remnick 2023). The publication of the presciently-named Victory City continues the practice he had established on fleeing to New York in the fatwa’s wake: “With every public gesture, it appeared, Rushdie was determined to show that he would not merely survive but flourish, at his desk and on the town” (Remnick 2023). As the novel’s final line records, “words are the only victors” (Rushdie 2023, 338). But as the photo of the author as survivor insists, habeas viscus. Without the body, the victory of words on the cold page is merely pyrrhic. In Midnight’s Children, Rushdie’s protagonist possessed a cracking, disintegrating body that conveyed the trauma, bewilderment and loss of Partition by refusing readers the hermeneutic solution of metaphor. Yet Salim Sinai’s “poor body, singular, unlovely, buffeted by too much history, subjected to drainage above and drainage below, mutilated by doors, brained by spittoons” (Rushdie 1981, 1), is, as Rushdie’s prose style confirmed, also the source of a comedic plenitude (Kabir 2002). What he now declares of his latest protagonist, Pampa Kampana, uncannily ventriloquizes his resilience in the aftermath of an assassination attempt: “She would laugh at death and turn her face toward life” (Rushdie 2023, 7).

In Victory City, the forces of death are bigotry, patriarchy, and a relentless veering toward the pull of the singular idea. Although the fatwa’s ever-looming, finally realized threat foregrounds monotheistic Islam as its manifestation, it should not eclipse the fact that Hindutva power has also drawn from the same seductions of authoritarianism that Rushdie lampooned monotheism for in The Satanic Verses. The mounting consolidation of Hindu supremacy in India registers in Rushdie’s dogged embrace, as an Indic person, of the “polytheistic storytelling traditions in which the gods behave badly, weirdly, hilariously” in order to fashion stories that reject “the abuse of power and the curse of sectarianism—the twin curses of India under its current Prime Minister, the Hindu supremacist Narendra Modi” (Remnick 2023). Victory City and its author’s will to life function as much as “dissent, challenge and resistance to Hindutva power that have emerged in recent years” (Mufti 2023, 166) as does Pathaan’s bruised and bleeding body. In both cases, “Zinda hai” is the rallying call against the BJP’s “bulldozer politics” (Mufti 2023, 170–171)—a phrase that covers the material razing of Muslim homes, the systematic reduction of Indian history to a black and white battle between Hindu indigenes and Muslim invaders, as well as the semiotics of “Hindutva itself, ‘a flat, brute, massive, spectacular machine’ (Prakash 2022, in Mufti 2023, 171). whose only goal is to flatten everything in its path.” What Arundhati Roy calls a “scorched earth policy” (Al Jazeera English 2022, cited in Mufti 2023, 171), aimed squarely at the production and maintenance of fear, is in stark contrast to the pluralist vision offered by Humayun Kabir (1963) where he daringly argues that not only are minorities and democracies mutually constitutive, they are so precisely because “every minority is, in a sense, a Protestant group, a dissident group” (Kabir 1963, 15).

Haal No. 2: Vanvaas/Exile in Wilderness

In a sign of the radical openness of the early decolonial period in India, Humayun Kabir can insist both that “every minority is a heretical group when compared to the majority,” and that this innate characteristic of dissidence brings value to a democracy. His use of “dissident” in this context anticipates Mufti’s showcasing of the similar-sounding “dissent”; and indeed both words share an etymological connection with apartness. For Humayun Kabir, this ontology makes the minority a Derridean pharmakon (Johnson 2020, 56–82). Its apartness ensures the stability of a polycentric social system—the much-vaunted Nehruvian “unity in diversity,” but it can be contingently and unpredictably transformed into a threat to “the health of the body politic as a whole.” The tipping-point can come from both sides—either “the minority groups assert their individuality too much” or “the body politic as a whole tries to submerge or suppress the individuality of the separate groups.” The minority becomes a scapegoat figure that has to be ejected to restore equilibrium. It is to alert his audience to the long-term dangers of such expulsion that Kabir uses historically resonant terms such as “Protestant”—elsewhere in the lecture, he also speaks of Moors, Huguenots, and Jews as examples of groups whose violent removal from the body politic led to its overall impoverishment (Kabir 1963, 13–15): “Whenever minorities have been persecuted, it has hurt the entire community in two ways- firstly by driving out potentially creative and capable people, and secondly by creating friction and an attitude of intolerance and fanaticism amongst the majority” (15). Today, as Mufti’s essay demonstrates, Hindutva power persecutes the minority-as-dissenter with open intention to expel; but, as he also confirms, a poetics of dissent surges up through a “prosody of revolt” (Cola 2011, cited in Mufti 2023, 181), forged in the heat of improvised collective resistance.

One such arrow in prosody’s quiver is the concept of vanvaas—exile undertaken in a forest (usually voluntary, or, if imposed, accepted without protest). “Pathaan ka vanvaas ka time ab khatam hua” (the period of Pathaan’s exile has now ended).’ The film’s scriptwriter Abbas Tyrewala surely knew that the word vanvaas would render this line of dialogue an instant classic—particularly because, in the words of one reviewer, “of its conflation of a Muslim name with a term associated with the holiest epic of the Hindus” (Galatta.com 2023). In effecting this conflation, scriptwriter and star—Indian Muslims both—lay claim to a seam within the Indic imaginary that, not at all coincidentally, also appeals to Rushdie. Vanvaas occupies a prominent position within Rushdie’s Victory City, where “Exile” is the title of the second of four sections (Rushdie 2023, 119–192). As the start of this section reminds us, vanvaas is what Rama, Laxman, and Sita undertook for 14 years and the Pandavas, for twelve. Rushdie’s protagonist Pampa Kampana and her coterie will likewise enter into exile, “which is to say vanvaas … [in] the jungle that stands at the heart of the great ancient tales (121).” To thus enter the forest in exile is, as Romila Thapar (2001, 6) notes, a deeply symbolic act “with multiple meanings: there is a distancing from civilization; a seeking of knowledge through isolation and meditation; and a search for the meaning of life through experiencing the unknown.” In both Pathaan and Victory City, vanvaas activates a deeply Indic “dichotomy and complementarity” of the vana (forest), or “habitat of the ascetic and the renouncer,” and the kshetra (settlement), that “reflect[s] attempts at a regularly ordered social system” (Thapar 2001, 1). The wilderness lexically constitutive of vanvaas is affirmed as an “unknown, unpredictable space” where exile itself becomes “an experience in forging and testing human values” (Thapar 2001, 8).

“In the jungle,” writes Rushdie (2023, 121), “the past is swallowed up and only the present moment exists but sometimes the future arrives there ahead of its time before the outside world knows anything about it.” The supernormal clarity that vanvaas offers enables the exiled protagonist to gain self-awareness and knowledge, thereby justifying their return to rescue society. Pathaan and Victory City converge further in an audacious twist to their deployment of these associations. India needs Pathaan to return from exile because he must save it from the deadly virus raktbeej that will be deployed as biological weapon by the mercenary terrorist outfit operating at the behest of its enemies. It is not the expulsion but his reintegration that is urgently required to ensure the “health of the body politic” (Kabir 1963, 10), even as that which threatens it bears the name of a Hindu asura; the demons that normally haunt the vana will now multiply uncontrollably in the kshetra (Thapar 2001, 6). The boundary between kshetra and vana becomes porous in Victory City, too: Pampa Kampana meditating during vanvaas, realizes that the forest is a peaceful version of “arajakta” (literally, “kinglessness”) or “the state held by philosophers to be equivalent to a state of chaos or disorder” (Rushdie 2023, 137), which, in her absence, characterizes Bisnaga, the city she has created. This imploding of antinomies leads to an epiphany of sorts: “Could it be that the world would be better off without kings? … Could there be a way–- was it even possible—to let the people choose?” Yet, as Mufti points out, India under its democratically chosen leadership, is experiencing the same “constant state of ‘anarchy’ (arājikta [the word is the same as Rushdie’s, but in different transcription]),” which the BJP deliberately maintains as its authoritarian arrogation of sovereignty and consequent “degradation of the rights of the citizen” (Mufti 2023, 184, 169).

Haal No 3: besharmi/Chutzpah

What such degradation cannot eradicate is the Indian Muslim’s intimate access to Hinduism’s mythopoetic resources. To have mastery over these resources, and thereby confirm them as Indic, is, indeed, the Indian Muslim’s quintessence. It is also the source of Hindutvadi’s deepest disquiet and prurient fascination with the Muslim in his backyard, simultaneously too proximate and too alien. For Rushdie to write effortlessly about vanvaas, and for Tyrewala to mobilize it into a seeti (whistle-worthy, Mehrotra 2023) moment tailormade for SRK, is to revel in an agonistic stance characterized by a finely calibrated combination of arrogance, audacity, and a prideful love for what is claimed as one’s own. We share this cultural code and we will show you that it is we who are its most expressive users, is the underlying message. This attitude of chal dikha denge (go on, [we] will show you) can be summed up by the Urdu/Hindi word besharmi. Literally meaning “shamelessness,” I translate it as the Yiddish “chutzpah,” also a word that has caught on in the Indian street vernacular particularly after its showcasing in the film Haidar (Mookherjee 2016). In Pathaan, its adjectival form appears within the titular phrase for one of its two songs: “Besharam rang” (literally, “shameless color”). Used metaphorically in the lyrics, rang (‘color’) became literalized to highlight a saffron outfit worn by Deepika Padukone during the song’s closing ten seconds, which triggered the Hindu Right’s protests against the film’s brazenness in thus flaunting, shamelessly, their color. Typical of Hindutva power’s “bulldozer” cultural politics, this ideological constriction of the semantic complexity around saffron within Indic culture (Jha 2014) ironically confirms besharmi as an essential element within the Indian Muslim toolkit of dissent, even while helping us understand better how besharmi works.

“Nasha chada jo sharifi ka, utaar phenka hai/besharam rang kaha dekha duniya walon ne” (“even as I got drunk on decency, I threw it all away/what does the world know yet of my shameless true colours”). No translation can do justice to the extravagant wit of declaring a thirst for decency as drunkenness, and to the Sufi connotations of rang (Manuel 2008) that are unleashed by yoking it to besharmi. Reminding us of qawwalis for spring such as Amir Khusrau’s “Aji rang hai ri ma” (Losensky 2013) and of the Holi festival, rang crosses sectarian divides to conjure up the abandon of color play through which the self is revealed to the divine as lover (Manuel 2008). This scenario is essentially a performance of Sufi gnosis, which circles on the paradox of fulfillment through abjection triggered by the discarding of norms and mores (Schimmel 1975). By incorporating prominent booty movements—sanctioned within Africanist kinaesthetics (Pérez 2016), but provocative outside of them—Padukone’s choreography updates these centuries-old associations of Sufism with the thrill of heresy. These very associations were highlighted by Humayun Kabir’s understanding of the minority’s position within a democracy as intrinsically heretical; they surface too in Mufti’s analysis of why poetry in Urdu—for him, South Asia’s language of exile par excellence (2023, 194)—is such a popular vehicle for dissent against Hindutva power. But if Urdu “calls into question the cultural categories and cultural effects of the nation-state system in the subcontinent,” it does so best in concert with desi affects of longing, separation, and unrequited love (Kabir 2013, 22–25). From Dil Se onwards, that conjunction has furnished Khan with allegorical modes for staging his Muslimness (Kabir 2003). Now in Pathaan, the Muslim protagonist played by a Muslim star bamboozles us with a breath-taking implosion of the allegorical and the literal.

This besharam “stepping across the lines” (Rushdie 2010) that separate representational categories, including those between actor and role, author and character, and fiction and reality, draws together Pathaan and Victory City. As Victory City springs up from the dream-seeds that Pampa Kampana gifted its founding brothers Hukka and Bukka, the latter marveled, “this is what is must be to feel like a god—to perform the act of creation, a thing that only the Gods can do” (Rushdie 2023, 17). Such meta-commentary on fiction’s ontological power recurs through the novel to cock a snook at those attempting to monopolize meaning. “It was necessary, she said, to do something to cure the multitude of its unreality. Her solution was fiction” (Rushdie 2023, 31). The solution is not just Pampa Kampana’s, but Rushdie’s. Masquerading as “the humble author of the present (and wholly derivative) text” he is, above all, having fun with this blatant auto-referentiality. “It’s me doing it but it’s also her doing it,” The New Yorker quotes him saying, while admitting, “the pleasure is infectious” (Remnick 2023). The same contagious fun marks the sustained collapse of the fourth wall in Pathaan. “I am not sure if Shah Rukh was making Pathaan live and breathe or Pathaan was making Shah Rukh live and breathe,” recalls Tyrewala of its making, “They totally fed off each other, they were so interchangeable, it was great fun” (Mehrotra 2023). In making the dialogues “a lot more noticeable, quotable and in your face,” Tyrewala followed the director Siddharth Anand’s desire to have “every dialogue to be a bit larger than life, filmy” (Mehrotra 2023). Despite the risks in going, in Tyrewala’s phrasing, “as meta as you like” (Mehrotra 2023), the larger-than-life persona of Khan himself ensured the audience’s willing complicity and unstinted approval, sealed through record box office returns.

Haal No 4: Mohabbat/Radical Love

That still-unabated box office success performs—and confirms—a radical praxis of love and care that can forge communitas despite Hindutva power’s bulldozer politics. “Naacho gaao hanso kya pata kal ho na ho … . lekin sab karo thoda pyaar se” (Dance, sing, laugh, who knows what will happen tomorrow … but please do everything with a bit of love): that was Khan’s advice to his fanbase during an “ask me anything” session on his Twitter handle a day after Pathaan’s release (HT Entertainment Desk 2023). The prescriptive thoda (“bit”) actually signifies its opposite—an incremental aggregation of reciprocal love. “I am loving it that you are loving it,” Khan declares, and invites his fans “to share more of love if that’s possible” (HT Entertainment Desk 2023). This overturning of expectations, examined above in the frame of besharmi, continues through twitter-banter: to a question about his response to the record first day box office collection, Khan responds, “bhai numbers phone ke hote hain … hum toh khushi ginte hain” (“bro, let the phone deal with numbers; its only happiness that I count”; HT Entertainment Desk 2023) The paradox of counting the uncountable conducts the same rhetorical sleight of hand as the lyrics of “Besharam rang.” Despite the wit and wordplay, the key directive remains undiluted: “Look after each other when u [sic] are celebrating Pathaan please” (Khan quoted in HT Entertainment Desk 2023). Caring thus for the other, the stranger, and even the enemy, uncompromisingly to the extent of foolhardiness if necessary, is exactly the first verse of “Jhhoome jo pathaan” signals as the song begins closing the film: “tumne mohabbat karni hai, humne mohabbat ki hai, is dil ke alawa kisi se bhi na humne ijaazat li hai” (“you’ve still got to get to loving; I’ve already done that loving; I’ve not sought permission for it from anyone except from my own heart.”)

The lyrics reveal this mohabbat as an ethics of graciousness which insists on keeping one’s word, protecting the ill-intentioned at the drop of a hat, and, despite every inconvenience, betrayal, and disappointment imaginable, continuing to love the haters. Get so drunk on love, the song advises, that you embrace your very enemy as proof of your devotion. Echoing the trope of nasha chad jana (being mounted by intoxication) wielded in “Besharam rang,” the song augments it with an arsenal of Sufi tropes for complete surrender of the self to the beloved. This is the same vocabulary that had been deployed by the makers of Dil Se to create an anti-teleological plot with Khan as its love-crazed protagonist in the mold of the legendary Sufi madman-lover Majnun (Kabir 2003). Dil Se imposed on its heteronormative hero and heroine a radical, Sufism-inspired allegory of love that had no option but—literally—to detonate (Kabir 2003). Twenty years on, Pathaan shifts the paradigm again. The attraction between Pathaan and the Pakistani spy Rubai unabashedly literalizes the prescription of “love thy enemy” but without congealing into coupledom: rather, it is channeled into mohabbat that will generate a new community through mutual care. Gnosis is the song’s aim, which relentlessly challenges its audience to learn about love from Pathaan. This invitation is taken up on a corporeal level by all those viewers who have re-ignited the almost-defunct practice of dancing in the cinema pit and aisles as the song moves into its credits: first spontaneously, and then as the film’s success continues, as a ritual repeated worldwide. To paraphase Tyrewala’s words, the film’s audiences have understood that the ceremony may have ended, but the party had begun (Mehrotra 2023).

In Sylvia Wynter’s (1984) words, “the ceremony must be found.” Mohabbat reclaims the nation as an object of love through new rituals of inclusiveness rather than the chilling quest for exclusiveness exemplified by the BJP’s CAA-NRC policy. In Victory City, we read of the same longing for “a reign of love” that “will be established across the empire,” whereby “all divisions—of caste, of skin color, of religion—will be set aside, and premrajya or the kingdom of love, would be born” (Rushdie 2023, 223). Rushdie uses Pampa Kampana to voice both an intellectual skepticism toward such a simple recipe for social harmony, and an unfashionably sentimental hope for its efficacy. “The reign of love” is “just a phrase,” but, despite its “rhetorical emptiness” it allows her to imagine that, “if she were restored to her place of glory, she might whisper words of love” not just “into the king’s ear” but “every ear in the land” (223). However, Rushdie slams a lid on this prevarication: “But why didn’t she do that anyway?” (223). He answers via Pampa Kampana’s self-realization that the demand for love can arise from a desire for personal glory. Rushdie’s bitter experience of the consequences of the Ayatollah’s megalomania—that draws legitimacy from Shi’a investments in charisma (Asghari 2022), combines with the cerebral, prosaic domain of the novel to make it impossible for him to move this premrajya from the hypothetical to the realized through the charismatic individual who commands obedience through unstinted adoration from the masses. In contrast, Khan’s unqualified call for mohabbat operates in the performative arena of cinema; the principle of reciprocal love he enshrines means that viewers grant this Indian Muslim the right to transmit its message through his star persona. It is an anointment by the demos, a retrieval of democracy through the recognition and reward of charisma.

Haal No 5: Jhoomna/Grooving (in the Apocalyptic Now)

Those who protested against Pathaan before its release rightly feared Khan as a competitor capable of draining away charisma from the “cult of personality surrounding the prime minister” (Mufti 2023, 190), precisely because he deploys charisma to charm rather than “menace … nonbelievers and dissenters” (Mufti 2023, 190). Rushdie flies under their radar, because he resides outside India and creates in a less demotic register. The extreme allusiveness of his post-Fatwa engagements with authoritarianism escape their blunt instruments. Most crucially, he does not seek overtly to channel charisma from the created work to the creator, preferring to comment ironically on such channeling. Despite the contrasting attitude that Rushdie and the makers of Pathaan bring to charisma, both novel and film share an eschatological orientation and an investment in the concept of ecstatic return of a charismatic leader whose vehicle is an Indic convergence of Shi’a and Sufi beliefs (Werbner and Basu 1998; Bond 2022; Kabir 2005). Apocalyptic scenes flare from the pages of Victory City and the screen of Pathaan. This quickening sense of the end of things is accompanied by the apprehension of that which will return someday, in a blaze of glory, from beyond the frame of narrative closure. Yet we also sense this return as happening as the narrative rolls out. “Kursi ki peti bandh lo, mausam badalne wali hai” (“please fasten your seatbelts, the weather is about to change), announces another already-classic line from the start of Pathaan, that turns the standard inflight announcement of impending turbulence into an announcement that apocalypse has arrived. The present tense of the narration is infinitely distended: as Rushdie (2023, 188) makes Pampa Kampana declare, ‘Forever is a meager word. Now is my only concern.” This “now” ripples through linear time in the urgency emanating from Pathaan, who operates along the thin edge of catastrophe to bring back the nation from the brink of annihilation through biological warfare.

The camera endows Pathaan with the luminosity and potency surrounding Shi’a beliefs of the mahdi, the intensely charismatic messiah who is a sign of the authority to come; the fact that in some Shi'a sects, the messiah is already present in the mundane world helps us get our heads around these temporal convolutions (Asghari 2022). Even as Pathaan taps into these subterranean hopes for the mahdi’s charismatic return through apocalypse—which, to return to Humayun Kabir’s terminology, are of course heretical for Sunni Islam—we can see why those hopes, literalized in the figure and authority of the Ayatollah, wouldn’t be exactly those that Rushdie would reach out to. Nevertheless, an Abrahamic eschatology (Bond 2022) which is inherited by Islam permeates Victory City and Pathaan alike even as both draw on the Indic trope of vanvaas. It is the same eschatology operating within Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poem “Hum dekhenge” that made it such a popular rallying cry within the pre-Pandemic popular protests in India, as Mufti (2023, 197) perceptively demonstrates. We are in a zeitgeist of fervid churn of motifs, tropes, and hopes seized willy-nilly by a range of social actors intent on “cracking open” (Mignolo and Walsh 2018, 87) the brutalist massiveness (Mbembe 2023) of Hindutva power through unexpected, audacious rhetorical assemblages that generate an “alegropolitics” of mazaa (“collective fun”; Kabir 2020; Anjaria and Anjaria 2020)—but with mohabbat rather than menace. This irreverent and unstoppable calquing together of different mythopoetic resources (including inflight announcements) has an ontological rationale that the protestors of Shaheen Bagh, the author of Victory City and the makers of Pathaan all verbalize as the jettisoning of genealogical origin stories which feed the “concept of the indigenous” that fuel Hindutva politics through a “powerful cultural machinery for distinguishing the native from the alien” (Mufti 2023, 166).

Rushdie’s entire narrative mocks genealogy as the bulwark of autochthony, even suggesting that to crave roots is to aspire to a “simpler” vegetable status (2023, 20): “You have your roots so you know your place. You grow and you serve your purpose by propagating and being eaten. But we are rootless and we don’t want to be eaten.” Desires for authenticity are ontologically undermined by his very explication of Victory City’s name “Bisnaga” as the rendition of “Vijayanagara” by a stuttering Portuguese traveler (Rushdie 2023, 33). The liberating possibilities of creolization are frequently voiced by his characters: “The truth is, Bukka replied, I don’t really care. It’s probably a mixture, and so what” (19). The intense investment in a story of calqued, grafted, and creolized origins is also articulated in a much-quoted response to a query on his religiosity placed in Pathaan’s mouth: “I am an orphan and I was left outside a cinema hall as a baby.” An element in the backstory of the film even before the scriptwriter stepped in, the declaration draws on a powerful intertextuality with numerous films where Khan plays the role of adopted or orphaned son (Gopinath 2018). Along with this repudiation of bloodline as guarantee of belonging is Pathaan’s recourse to kintsugi, the Japanese art of gluing together ceramic fragments with gold lacquer, as a metaphor for the elite corps he wishes to assemble from all those special agents mutilated in the service of India—itself a metaphor for the mutilated body of the Indian Muslim who will nevertheless serve his patria with mohabbat and groovy jhoomna. These layers of referentiality, which recall Rushdie’s figuring of his minority subjectivity through the “Chinese boxes of the self” (Kabir 2002, 256) are a mechanism, simultaneously, of drawing attention to that status and disguising it.

Dar-ul-Takiyya/Realm of Dissimulation

“Our teaching is the truth, the truth of the truth; it is the exoteric and the esoteric, and the esoteric of the esoteric; it is the secret and the secret of a secret, a protected secret, hidden by a secret” (Virani 2011, 101). This is the explanation that Shi’a imam Jaafar al Sadiq reputedly offered regarding the necessity for Shi’as to keep hidden the esoteric message of the revelation from those unprepared to receive it, and also to protect themselves from persecution through precautionary dissimulation, or taqiyya. “Since the earliest days of Islam, the precarious existence of the minority Shi’a forced them to practice taqiyya as an almost innate and instinctive method of self-preservation and protection,” says Shafique Virani (2011, 11), adding that “The Shi’a even have a specific legal term for regions where taqiyya is obligatory: da’r al-taqiyya, the realm of dissimulation.” The Indian Muslim at 75, as analyzed in this essay, exemplifies “how the practice of dissimulation … was reworked in the Indic milieu in unprecedented ways” (Virani 2011, 100), which has indeed become for its Muslims, a veritable dar-al-taqiyya.

Taqiyya does not only imply going underground; wearing one’s dissimulation on one’s sleeve by mastery of the representational protocols of narrative and cinematic fiction, as Rushdie and Khan have done, is another route for survival—not merely with dignity but through flamboyance and fun, for living in a manner that performs, to return to Wynter (McKittrick 2015), a “doing-human.” This perspective also allows us to understand the reason for Pathaan starting with an invocation of the BJP government’s abrogation of Article 370 (Bhan, Duschinski, and Misri 2022, 1–16) which was the Indian Constitution’s guarantee of “special status” to Jammu and Kashmir: the film’s open reference to this flagship event for the BJP government disarms the vigilante into believing that the narrative is on the side of Hindutva power. From this topsy-turvy world of semiotic ferment and inversion we understand the full significance of Humayun Kabir’s assessment of the minority as the heretic of the world. Mufti too reminds us (2023, 199) of the defiant assertion of the most famous Sufi heretic of all, Al-Hallaj, “an al-haq” (“I am the truth”), for which he was hanged. Through Faiz’s ghazal Hum dekhenge, as Mufti points out, this assertion continues to ring through the desert of the Indian real: the heretic has no choice but to proclaim the truth, and the majority has no choice but to hear it even if choosing not to listen.

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Ananya Jahanara Kabir

Ananya Jahanara Kabir is Professor of English Literature at King's College London and Fellow of the British Academy (Culture, Media and Performance Section).

Notes

1 I speak—and write– from an Indian Muslim subject position. These statements represent a considered rejection of ‘scholarly neutrality’ as inapposite response to publicly visible minoritizing programmes against India’s Muslim-identified population. What is the value of an academic stance that prefers not to confront the implications of these escalations? An anonymous reviewer advised me to change the language here to ‘neutral’ grammatical forms as it was reading like a ‘manifesto’ that ‘didn’t work’ for them. I urge the readers to imagine what these statements would have read like with the pronouns ‘our’, ‘we’, and ‘us’ replaced by ‘them’, ‘they’, and ‘their’ and ask what may be gained– or lost—by such a substitution.

2 I use the term ‘Indic’ consciously, to denote a cultural continuum that encompasses peninsular India, stretches into the mountain zones cartographically occupied by the regions and nations of Pakistan, Kashmir, Nepal, the North-East of India, Bangladesh, and Myanmar; and spills out into the islands and archipelagos of the Bay of Bengal and Arabian Sea, including Sri Lanka. ‘South Asia’ for me is too enmeshed with very recent geopolitics, and ‘India’ is obviously hegemonic and exclusionary from a nation-statist perspective of other geopolitical entities in the region. I am aware that, in South-East Asia for example, ‘Indic’ in turn devolves into a hegemonic assertion. Nevertheless, I use the phrase as a hopeful bookmark for a cultural past that can betoken another future.

3 Because of wordcount constraints, l do not provide plot summaries of the works; these, together with reportage on the political events surrounding the pre-release boycott calls, are very easily available online. Translations from Hindi are mine.

4 The mythical Indic figure of the bahurupiya (Hindi: ‘the one with many forms’) thrives in popular culture as a form of vernacular cosmopolitanism (Jeffrey and McFarlane 2008).