FROM THE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Somewhere in its opening scenes, as he’s thrashing a tied-up captive, a villainous henchman realises with a shock who the object of his exertions is and breaks into an incredulous whisper, “Pathaan!! .... ” And Shah Rukh Khan, bleeding like a boxer in the last rounds, fills in the blanks with “…Zinda hai”. The spy he’s playing had been presumed dead and is simply affirming: “No, I’m still alive.” But no one could miss how that applies to SRK himself. From that point on, Pathaan runs along two tracks. One is intrinsic to the film, and the other reaches outside and becomes an extended ode to the star actor himself. Pathaan zinda hai. Those words turned out to have quite a prophetic ring. The film has been an astounding comeback vehicle for Shah Rukh Khan—in the public eye, a real-life Pathan playing an extended alter ego on screen, and carrying extra resonance for that. Pathaan’s overall collections worldwide are inching towards Rs 1,000 crore, and it’s threatening to become the first Hindi film proper to touch the Rs 500 crore mark within India. It has set new lifeblood coursing through the veins of Bollywood after multiple events cast a shadow on it—the arrival of at-home OTT entertainment, the profusion of digital media, and the South invasion, not to speak of a pandemic that kept audiences away from public spaces. A comeback story is always a compelling one because we see a star struggling to keep up with the myth of eternal recurrence. And here, SRK is coming off an unusually lean patch. His last blockbuster was Chennai Express, in 2013—a decade ago, another era, in fact. In between, while the two other Khans logged five of Bollywood’s 10 biggest hits, SRK’s record only shows a handful of forgettable duds. This is not counting personal trauma, the most acute episode coming with the unfair targeting of his son Aryan Khan in a drug case. The film thus breaches the embankments imposed by its script. Its charm resides not in the sumptuously global merry-go-round it takes us on. We are given to feast on the stunning, icy Lake Baikal in Siberia, the spires of St Petersburg, the beaches of Cadiz in Spain, the streets of Paris, Turkey, and what have you. And, if you are so inclined, to feast on two sets of immaculate eight-pack abs as its hero and villain put on ludicrous turbo-powered eagle’s wings and fly off vertiginous cliffs in Afghanistan. Many such spy capers come and go without making a lasting impression. Purely as a film, Pathaan cannot even be said to rank anywhere close to the best. It often seems like a video game. Its plot is fairly juvenile, its action sequences strain credulity, and the many gorgeous parts hang together messily. But sometimes a film is about so much more than itself. Much more than its own silly plotline, songs or cartoonish action. You may or may not have liked “Besharam Rang” or “Jhoome Jo Pathan” as songs. Mainstream Indian entertainers can generate a warm and joyous buzz with their festive sounds and colour. But among them, certain films establish a connection with the audience, at certain junctures in history, because of reasons much greater. This film is one of those, and one reason is SRK. Yes, Pathaan is SRK. This goes beyond the idea of the star actor who’s larger than the film. We are familiar with how a film’s hero can be much more than what’s essayed within the frame of its story. In popular cinema, the star never gets totally subsumed by the character. Raj Kapoor stays Raj Kapoor. Dilip Kumar is Dilip Kumar, despite his intense engagement with roles. Rajesh Khanna, Amitabh Bachchan, or any of the latter-day stars. There is a whole galaxy of them. And with Pathaan, the SRK we know is intact with his demeanour and mannerisms—ruggedly handsome now with a scraggly beard-’n-ponytail and sleek musculature, but still invested with that old tinge of vulnerability, the wit, the nervous energy. SRK here is SRK. No question about that.
But the peculiar quality of Pathaan is how it speaks to audiences at different levels. That’s why it has struck a chord everywhere. Yes, it’s about soaking in the sheer lustre of its visuals—the stunning locales, the drop-dead gorgeous actors. But it’s also that rare film that talks, in funnily self-deprecatory ways, about its star. About SRK, as a person and a star caught at a curious crossroads in Indian history. And thus, it’s also about the times we are living through socially—the vociferous protests and the ludicrous cuts that preceded the film’s release only accentuated that. In a way, as entertainment changes around us faster than a witty SRK repartee, it’s also about the institution of Bollywood. Deputy Editor Suhani Singh takes us through these fascinating layers of subtext crackling under the top layer of the film. On the surface, there’s that wonderful mutability. “At 57, Khan has reinvented himself as a mass action hero with eight-pack abs,” she writes, “a quantum leap from the romantic, emotive, bubbly hero” of the nineties and noughties. He does it in a way that’s “consciously wired to the changing tastes of the new generation”, but without ever “making his masculinity toxic”. He is vulnerable. “Pathaan is not an invincible oneman army. He needs rescuing—he’s saved both by Deepika Padukone and by Salman Khan’s Tiger character—as well as painkillers”. That last bit actually gets very personal. Like the broken spy whose body is held together by “biodegradable screws”, SRK himself has had back, shoulder and knee surgeries. Hence, the “reference to kintsugi, the traditional Japanese pottery repair technique where cracks are filled and missing pieces replaced”, gestures well beyond the meaning it has in the film. Indeed, among the very last words of Pathaan, coming in a remarkable post-credits banter between SRK and Salman Khan, is “lower back pain”. Abbas Tyrewala’s witty dialogue track has plenty of this extra-filmic juice. In that scarcely disguised self-referential sequence, the two ageing stars ponder retirement, then pull back. “Humein hi karna padega, bhai. Desh ka sawaal hai, bachchon pe nahin chhod sakte (We need to hang on. Can’t leave the nation in the hands of kids).” There’s also the sheer pluck and honesty with which Pathaan invokes an older Bollywood ethos. SRK put his finger on it by christening the troika of Deepika, himself and John Abraham as “Amar, Akbar, Anthony”. That undercurrent of political messaging, standing aloof from the jingoism that had seemed to swallow Bollywood of late, is also the film’s essence. And that spirit, embodied in SRK, has been validated by audiences like never before. Perhaps that’s why his co-star John Abraham says, “Shah Rukh is not an actor anymore. He is an emotion.”