The Irresistible Badness of Salman Khan

EID CELEBRATIONS ARE INCOMPLETE without a Salman Khan release. After annual super hits like Wanted (2009), Dabangg (2010) and Bodyguard (2011), this year’s festive offering was Yash Raj Films’ Ek Tha Tiger. A romantic spy thriller, Ek Tha Tiger is a love story about a R&AW agent codenamed Tiger (Salman Khan) and ISI agent Zoya (Katrina Kaif) who fall in love during an international mission. Having decided to abandon their respective outfits to make a life together, they earn the wrath of their warring employers who end up with a common mission: to stalk and kill the renegades. Tiger brings together Salman Khan, whose super-stardom is well established, and Kabir Khan, whose short but significant filmography as a director has sought to explore new territories in relation to both themes and spectators. It is important, therefore, to consider the new narrative possibilities that Ek Tha Tiger inaugurates in the context of Salman Khan’s stardom and his particular appeal to certain viewing constituencies.

Salman Khan began his career as a romantic hero in Maine Pyar Kiya (1989) and followed up its super success with hits like Saajan (1991), Hum Aapke Hain Koun…! (1994) and Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam (1999). While romantic comedies like Andaz Apna Apna, Pyar Kiya to Darna Kya, Judwaa, Biwi No. 1, No Entry, Mujhse Shaadi Karogi and Partner consolidated his box-office success, his star persona was created through action films like Veergati, Baaghi, Auzaar, Karan Arjun, Jeet, Garv, Tum Ko Na Bhool Payenge, Tere Naam and Wanted. Straddling the borderlines of legality and criminality, the protagonists in these films confront a world of moral anarchy.

“Despite his unquestionable star appeal, box-office clout and exclusive membership of the Khan trinity, Salman has been largely sidelined as the B and C centre hero, the one loved by the masses and inconsequential for the classes,” wrote Namrata Joshi in Outlook in 2010. But the resounding success of Dabangg changed everything. An action-comedy set in the rural badlands, Dabangg was not only a sensational hit in Salman’s traditional fan-base, but also captured the imagination of the urban middle-classes, who were prone to deride Salman-starrers as lacking “class” and “taste”. Salman Khan described the film as a “sten-gun assault on the polite multiplex crowd” who he hoped would “whistle and dance on the chairs”. That is precisely what happened. Reeling under the shock of Dabangg’s success, magazines like Outlook, India Today, Tehelka and Brunch carried cover stories that tried to understand the star’s appeal. The stupendous success of Bodyguard the following year confirmed Salman Khan’s stature as a hero of both the ‘masses’ and the ‘classes’.

Even though Salman is a part of the ‘Khan Triumvirate’ with Aamir and Shahrukh, his stardom has always stood out. Salman possesses neither Aamir’s acting versatility nor Shahrukh’s on-screen charisma. Unlike the duo, he has seldom worked with top directors or big banners and has begun to be selective about his films only recently. Shahrukh started his career playing dark and unconventional roles in films like Baazigar, Darr and Anjaam but stopped experimenting after achieving stardom with big-budget entertainers like Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge and Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. His career now remains parked within the safe confines of corporate respectability and countless endorsements. An inventive professional and exceptional actor, Aamir Khan is the hero of urban multiplex audiences and, as testified by the success of Satyamev Jayate, the new poster-boy for corporate social responsibility. Both are admirable icons for an optimistic and upwardly-mobile, post-liberalisation generation spread across India and the diaspora. In contrast, a very large slice of Salman’s traditional fan-base is comprised of those for whom the changes unleashed by the forces of globalisation did not accrue any immediate benefits. Provincial towns, suburban areas, urban slums and mohallas are spaces where Salman reigns. This is also a constituency that matters little to the multiplex economy. This expansive cross-class appeal is what makes Salman Khan’s stardom distinct.

But despite his popularity, Salman Khan is a troubled ‘hero’. Print and electronic media as well as the annals of cyberspace are replete with stories of his violent fits, unstable personal life and criminal allegations over the hunting of protected blackbucks and driving rashly over a sleeping pavement dweller. These stories—of which many versions exist—cast a long shadow over his success. Equally popular are the stories about his generosity and philanthropic work, but even at the best of times, Salman Khan walks a risky tight-rope. There is no telling when he will slip and fall from the Olympian heights of superstardom into the dark crevasse of notoriety.

The entire decade of the 1990s and a large part of the next, witnessed a heightened communalisation of public spaces as Hindu Right forces consolidated political power following the demolition of Babri Masjid. Muslims were cast as unreliable citizens whose loyalties were perpetually in doubt. The anxiety suffered by the ordinary Muslim—who could be randomly targeted for interrogation, torture and incarceration merely on the basis of suspicion—found reflection, as it were, in the unpredictable vicissitudes that beset Salman Khan. Like Sanjay Dutt before him, Salman was sent to jail, brought to trial and hasn’t yet been declared innocent. Neither success not stardom served as protection. At such a juncture, Salman’s ability to survive the odds may explain why among his billion fans, under-privileged Muslims form a devoted constituency.

Film scholarship on stardom demonstrates how stars are able to embody anxieties and aspirations of the mainstream while also inviting ‘resistant readings’. During a period of escalating prejudice against Muslims, films like Tumko Na Bhool Payenge and Garv: Pride and Honour made room for the articulation of dissent. In Garv (2004), conscientious cop Arjun Ranawat (Salman Khan) believes that “traitors have no religion”. When Haider Ali (Arbaaz Khan), a trusted colleague, is transferred on grounds that Muslims cannot be trusted to fight Muslims, Arjun takes his protest to the highest echelons of power. In a scene that marshals all the dramatic conventions of Bombay cinema, Arjun condemns this “reprehensible communal mindset” as “unconstitutional” and responsible for alienating thousands of young Muslims. Delivered with rage and passion, the power of the dialogue is underscored by having the words “communal” and “unconstitutional” spoken in English.

A typical Salman Eid-release is expected to invoke certain cultural signifiers. To this end, Dabangg stitches a number of images onto its visual universe. One segment of the hit song ‘Tere mast mast do nain’ is staged in a Muslim mohalla while another, ‘Saachi saachi tere nazrein’, is shot in Dubai, where the visual markers of an Arab world are conjured through architecture, location and clothing. These cultural signifiers are recognised easily by Salman Khan’s huge following in South Asia and the Middle East.

If Salman Khan’s affiliation to a Muslim fan-base evolved through accidents of chance and intuition, then Kabir Khan’s attempts to intervene in the politics of representation are purposeful. Director of Kabul Express (2006) and New York (2009), Kabir has consistently sought to bend the tropes of popular cinema to subvert predictable representations of the Muslim. New York (2009) is a film about three friends, one of whom is arrested on suspicion of terrorism and upon his release turns to violence as a means of revenge. The film foregrounds a political identity rather than a religious one—a decision, Khan told reporters, that was inspired by a haunting line from Alex Gibney’s 2008 documentary film Taxi to the Dark Side. In the film a taxi driver who is detained as a suspected terrorist is told by a cop, “We don’t know whether you were a terrorist when you came in, we’ll make sure you are one when you leave.” New York did excellent commercial business in India while making profits in Pakistan, the Middle East, Egypt and Syria. The film continues to circulate enthusiastically through pirate networks. When the Syrian Ambassador to India ran into the editor of The Indian Express, Shekhar Gupta, at the airport, he said New York was a film that “us Arabs should have made but you have made it”.

Resisting the temptation to fall back on the tried-and tested devices of a typical Salman-starrer, Kabir Khan’s Ek ThaTiger, which was made on a budget of Rs800 million and shot in several international locations, manages to mobilise the actor’s established strengths while extending the cinematic range of his star persona. If there were initial worries that the urbanity and style of the film would alienate the star’s traditional fan-base, such fears have been put to rest. At the time of writing, the worldwide gross collection for Tiger was Rs3.3 billion with the India collection alone amounting to Rs1.98 billion. Having swept both Salman-strongholds and multiplex audiences in India and the diaspora, Tiger is Salman Khan’s most profitable film to date.

Cinematically, Tiger makes at least two critical narrative departures that bear contemplation. First, the heroine is not a passive counterfoil to male heroics but enjoys, perhaps for the first time in a Salman blockbuster, quite literally a substantive piece of the action. Second, the film’s climax breaks a convention that had for long determined the resolution of the cross-border romance—that is, the burden of having to choose one country over another. In the Pakistani film Tere Pyar Mein (2000) the lovers choose Pakistan after a violent disavowal of the ‘enemy country’. Gadar Ek Prem Katha (2001) replays the same idea with as much hostility. Even the protagonists of the non-belligerent Veer-Zara (2004) choose India. In a liberating turn, the lovers in Tiger reject both countries to make the world their home. As romantic love is privileged over patriotic love, the notion of betrayal also stands transformed. The lovers will be on the run till agencies like R&AW and ISI become redundant, says Avinash Kumar Rathod, also known as Tiger.