Don't Call It Bollywood: An Introduction to the Hindi Film Universe by Margaret Redlich

Author:Margaret Redlich [Redlich, Margaret]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Annorlunda Books
Published: 2016-06-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

Why Do I Bake a Cake Every November 2nd?

I am a Shahrukh Khan fan. This is an integral part of my identity, right up there with my politics, ethnicity, and religion. I have self-identified as a Shahrukh fan for over ten years. I celebrate his birthday with a cake; I put his picture on my Christmas cards (of course, I only give these cards to fellow fans); I have six photos of him in my one room apartment, plus a framed quote. I light incense under his picture for good luck before any big event, and when my life gets hard, I turn to his films for comfort.

Being a Shahrukh fan isn’t just something I do, it is who I am. Not that my personality has changed thanks to being a fan, but that my choice of star reflects my personality. Shahrukh has a certain nasty sense of humor and quick-wittedness with a comeback. This occasionally gets him in trouble with friends and colleagues; unfortunately, I can relate to that. He is also extremely liberal in his politics. While his contemporaries may either avoid politics completely, tend towards the mainstream, or follow an intellectual liberalism, Shahrukh is closest to my own concept of practical liberalism and how I try to live my life. And his films tend to be romances more than anything else, or to put it another way, they tend to revolve around relationships more than actions. While I would not necessarily consider myself a romantic, I am someone who is more interested and focused on personal relationships than on bigger goals. I can be swept up in the drama of a son being rejected by his father much more easily than I can in a cop trying to track down a criminal or a reformer trying to change the system.

I am Shahrukh and he is me, and when things happen to him, or he cares about something, I care, too. In 2010, immediately prior to the release of his film My Name is Khan, a local Bombay politician started a campaign against him based on Shahrukh’s identity as a Muslim. This involved threats to Shahrukh’s life and the life of his family, public burnings of his images, vandalism of his posters, and speeches and articles calling for him to “Go back to Pakistan.” I cared about this deeply. Even if I had never been a fan of Shahrukh, this politician and the political theories he espoused and methods he used would still have been hateful and terrifying to me. But to feel the echo of my own emotions in the person whose face papered my walls, whose voice I knew as well as my own, whose life story I had memorized, magnified the reaction tenfold. Fandom doesn’t mean changing yourself, but it does mean connecting those parts of yourself to a larger whole that is beyond your control.

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