Khan do — until when?

Aamir, Salman and Shah Rukh have powered Bollywood for two decades. But their popularity is now conditional

“INDIAN CINEMA, MEANWHILE, is the most active on earth — in great part because the country has a population that still needs the communal movie experience we have lost.” This sentence, written in 2008 by wellknown film critic and historian, David Thompson, is appropriately sweeping — and in part, both true and fallacious. It puts a faintly patronising distance between the “we” in the West who have “lost the communal movie experience” and “they” who still, in 2017, need it.

Yes, “we” in India do need a “communal movie experience”. But it isn’t as if “they” in the West, and all those other parts of the globe which ravenously consume Western imports, do not. What else is a thousand-seater multiplex in the US and China, ringing to the rafters with Rogue One, the latest in the Star Wars space saga, a film expressly meant to milk a profitable franchise one more time?

And yet, there is a difference. The numbers in India are formidable. Our movie-goers constitute an entire world in and of themselves and there are enough films, filmmakers and stars of our own that provide us this experience. We do not need to borrow from the West. Our popular film stars create that community whose strength and stickiness is unique — that stardom is the glue that keeps the biggest film industry in the world intact, Bolly-knock-on-wood. And that is the reason our biggest stars have such a long shelflife; they have that ineffable, magical something that keeps us in perpetual thrall.

Recently, at work, I was asked, “Have you seen Shah Rukh Khan’s latest photo-shoot?” I had to confess I hadn’t. Two colleagues, both young women, sighed and said, “He looks soooo sexy.” Another chimed in with, “No, no, he looks very haggard, unlike Salman and Aamir who have such shiny faces.” A fourth said, “I don’t care — I’m still a fan.” And we launched into an animated conversation about these stars who have ruled Bollywood for over 20 years.