Why Shah Rukh Khan Is Under Siege

There’s a powerful scene in My Name Is Khan—the 2010 film that was Karan Johar and Shah Rukh Khan’s labour of love and the Hindi film industry’s strongest attempt at speaking up against Islamophobia after 9/11—that is guaranteed to make your hair stand in 2021.

Khan’s character Rizvan Khan is praying in the mosque when he overhears a doctor inciting a group of Muslims to act against the injustices faced by their community. The doctor advocates violence, citing the example of how Prophet Ibrahim (Abraham in the Bible) sacrificed his son Ishmael.

“You’re lying,” Khan pipes up, pointing out that faith is demonstrated by sticking to the path of love and mercy, and not by violence. “Ibraham had no doubt about god’s mercy. The story is about his undying faith. Despite a stranger trying to incite him repeatedly, he didn’t stop believing. He didn’t listen to the stranger because he knew that god wouldn’t let his son’s blood flow. And he was right.”

“God’s path is love’s path, not the path of terror and war,” Khan adds.

Three years after the film was released, Khan even named his youngest son AbRam, the Jewish name for Ibrahim, with the added bonus of Hindu god Ram contained in it, as he explained then.

As India’s most popular Muslim (with 3.5 billion global followers according to one estimate) battles to save his son Aryan in what increasingly seems like a vendetta, it’s clear why Khan’s ability to make Indians believe in the power of love might be perceived as a threat in present-day India.

Like most of Bollywood, you won’t see Khan attend a protest against the Citizenship Amendment Act or speak up about wrongful arrests. MNIK released one year after immigration officials in the United States pulled Khan out of the line and questioned him for over an hour.

Occasionally, Khan has been caught in the crossfire back home too. “I sometimes become the inadvertent object of political leaders who choose to make me a symbol of all that they think is wrong or unpatriotic in India,” Khan wrote in a rare, candid piece.

That was in 2013, when India was a different country.

Khan’s real and reel way of loving, for example, is under attack in a country that hunts down and murders young lovers for falling in love outside the tightly-drawn boundaries of their faith. For My Name is Khan, the superstar reunited with Kajol after a gap of nine years. Their sizzling on-screen interfaith chemistry has inspired scores of lovers for nearly three decades. Fifteen years after Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge’s Mehendi Laga Ke Rakhna, the fire is intact in MNIK’s Sajda.

In Chak De! India, moviegoers’ sympathies lie squarely in Khan’s corner when he plays the wronged hockey captain, accused of throwing the final of a World Cup match against Pakistan when he misses a crucial penalty shot. In MNIK, Khan gets an early lesson from his mother who draws stick figures fighting and asks him which one is Hindu and which Muslim. “Both look the same,” he replies, and she explains that the world is made up of people who do good things and those who do bad things. “That’s the only difference,” she says. Later, Khan’s reply to a Gujarati motel owner who abuses Muslims (“I’m going to put up a board saying no Muslims allowed”) leaves the man shamefaced.

It’s also become one of Hindi cinema’s best-known dialogues: “My name is Khan and I am not a terrorist.”

In a country determined to brew a toxic cocktail of distrust and hate between Indians of different faiths, only Khan can ensure that films about Islamophobia become blockbuster hits.

Two years ago, when Khan was interviewed by David Letterman, the superstar in his typical self-deprecating style said that halfway through his career he realised that he wasn’t that talented. “If I can’t do it with skill and talent I better get into the hearts of people,” Khan said explaining why so many Indians love him.

He also spoke about how he schemes to spend more time with his children. Like the time he learned to cook three of his kids’ favourite dishes so that every time his teenagers and their friends wanted a midnight snack, he was available for them. When asked what gives you hope, Khan said, “The birth of my children.”

Attacking Khan is just the next logical step in an industry that has been effectively Uri-ised in recent years. For a while now, films have been used to further ruling party propaganda and those who speak up are quickly raided by the tax department, prompting The Atlantic magazine to ask the question, ‘Can Bollywood Survive Modi?’.

A strike at the living, beating heart of the once syncretic Hindi film industry was inevitable, and what more effective way than to aim that attack at what every loving Indian parent holds dearest: their children.

Priya Ramani is a Bengaluru-based journalist and is on the editorial board of Article-14.com.

The views expressed here are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views of BloombergQuint or its editorial team.

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