Link to the editorial note and the panel discussion can be found here.

Teaching the Social through Popular

What does it mean for the Sociology teacher to use Hindi film examples in class—to explain love, consent, conflict, courtroom, sexual violence, partition, and patriotism? Being a millennial teacher (starting my teaching in 2002), I have never shied away from using the Hindi film trope in teaching Sociology—either in law school or in the social sciences university. Being a feminist sociologist who engages with law, films have always been good examples to talk about rape/consent (The Accused, 1988 or Damini, 1993) or the difference between what an old-school social movement (Nishant, 1975) and media-induced citizens’ activism (Rang de Basanti, 2006). One senses the immediate connection with the film’s reality that many students make thereby generating sociological questions around it, when discussed in the classroom. One of the first films I remember formally screening and discussing with students in a Gender and Law course was Mirch Masala (1987), albeit in the ‘art-film’ genre. Generating ‘serious’ discussions with students had to be done with ‘serious’ films or the general belief in the ‘art film’ project of transformation, which was meant to serve a larger purpose in the social world.  While the law school space still hesitantly accommodated the use of films, the Sociology space was more conservative, with progressive male colleagues, ridiculing the ‘easy’ use of movie clips or songs in Sociology classes, as if to gain popularity or shrugging off the responsibility of serious sociological theorizing. I understood that using the popular is fun yet risky–unless contextualized in the broader social history of the popular and the sociological.

Shahrukh Khan, who I had a crush on since Fauji (1989) and Circus (1989) days, when still in school, entered a compulsory course that I designed in 2011 in Masters Sociology—‘Culture, Hierarchy and Difference’. Was it because I was a fan that he entered the curriculum or was it because sociologists could not deny the importance of the popular that SRK films were interpreted? So did Patricia Uberoi legitimize my use of Shahrukh in a Masters’s Sociology course? While I would answer this in the affirmative, at the same time also acknowledge my besharmi. I had already been besharam by using women’s autobiographies for a study of social history for a PhD degree from a Sociology department. At a time when sociologists either did ethnography or field surveys, reading autobiographies (that of women) was slaughtered in the department in which the synopsis was being defended. From what is sociological in autobiographies, to considering their fiction, to raise scepticism on whether reading twenty autobiographies was an adequate number in the sociological rigour, the more the resistance increased, the more the resolve sharpened. Twenty years down the line, the besharmi has been worthwhile to look at the discipline of Sociology with insight and rigour that following the norms would not have provided.

I knew while showing SRK movies could be sacrilegious, teaching Uberoi (The Diaspora Comes Home: Disciplining Desire in DDLJ’, 1998) will be legitimate. Thus, in the said course we watched portions of Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (DDLJ 1995), namely those scenes in which he is playfully convincing Kajol, having spent the night together with her in one room that ‘kuch nehi hua hai’ since “he is after all ‘Hindustani’, and is well aware of what an Indian girl’s honour (izzat) means to her (1998: 318)”.

The use of the popular was not beyond contestation and dilemmas. Uberoi said ‘sociologists and social anthropologists tend to be a little embarrassed, if not apologetic when using fiction or other products of the imagination as their primary source material…’. She further added, ‘writers on Indian popular cinema have proposed that these films tap into, play on, and ultimately resolve through a variety of narratival strategies the concerns, anxieties and moral dilemmas of the everyday life of Indian citizens’ (1998:306). Uberoi concluded that the consistently conservative agenda for the Indian family that DDLJ portrayed was a strong conservative construction of family values which also reflected the ‘anxieties regarding national identity that have been provoked by the Indian middle-class diaspora’ (1998:334). Through Uberoi’s essay questions of culture, identity, transnationalisation, and kinship could be discussed and the fan girl, popular and sociological co-existed.

If DDLJ formed one of the readings in this course on Culture, the other was Ratna Kapur’s (2000) ‘Too Hot to Handle: Cultural Politics of Fire’, an essay again on love—contested queer love between two (married) women and how they leave their kinship homes. There is queerness in DDLJ as well, the reading that comes from Paromita Vohra can be of that perspective—the film gave importance and space to its heroine’s desires, her dreams to see the world, her hope of finding love…This importance of the woman’s inner life has been true of most Shahrukh Khan films, subsequently. In a way, it offered us a newer, more open femaleness and a different, softer masculinity. That makes Shahrukh Khan, his many love explorations or explanations of the inevitable mistakes in love (in say Dear Zindagi’s Dr Jehangir Khan) make his oeuvre of love queer. As Sharanya Bhattacharya also says ‘but when measuring screen time and dialogue of his biggest hits relative to his contemporaries, Shah Rukh’s films are found to have more time and space for women’s words. Female characters tend to play a more equal part in his oeuvre, perhaps because establishing romantic love or familial harmony requires women to participate more than, say, in a testosterone-laden action drama or a gritty gangster story’.

Thus using examples of /from Shahrukh Khan enabled talking about the challenges that his movies made in a broader hypermasculine world of mainstream films. Given the range of films that Shahrukh Khan did, there was never a dearth of themes to refer to from them in Sociology courses—post 9/11 Islamophobia there was My Name is Khan (2010), to teach college love and subversion of (unreasonable) tradition there was Mohabbatein (2000), to discuss love outside marriage culminating in divorce and regaining love in Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna (2006). It has to be mentioned that there are very few, if any, popular Hindi movie actors, in the stature of SRK, who would risk portraying a character that is divorcing the wife and finally uniting with the other woman, with whom a love relationship had developed. While the divorce and the restart do not happen simultaneously or immediately, the fact remains that KANK is a rare film where Dev (Shahrukh Khan) and Maya (Rani Mukherjee) restart lives^[i], something which did not happen in the radical Arth (1982) or the controversial Silsila (1981) or the much loved and critically acclaimed Lunchbox (2013). Finally, there is a full set of movies to talk about his kind commitment to the motherland or desh through Swades (2004), Veer Zara (2004) Chak De (2007), Jab Tak Hai Jaan (2012) or Pathaan (2023).

Pathaan was released on January 25, 2023, after calls for boycotts and protests. Pathaan came under fire from a certain section of the public for visuals in the song “Besharam Rang” ahead of its release. They objected to the colour of Deepika’s costume in the song. When the film had crossed 600 crores in six days, in a media event, Shahrukh said Sabka maksad ek hi hota hai (Everyone has one motive). We should spread happiness, brotherhood, love, and kindness, even when I’m playing a bad guy like Darr. While this controversy was specific to the film, Shahrukh Khan himself had courted controversies throughout the last 20 years as well as immediately before Pathaan through alleged drug cases against his son.  It is equally important to remember that even before Pathaan, Raes (2017) had courted controversy around Pakistani actress Mahira Khan being part of the film as well as protests from the Shia community around the use of religious symbols in the film. The superstar had to meet Maharashtra Navnirman Sena supremo Raj Thackeray to assure him that Mahira Khan would not be part of the team’s promotion of the film in India.

Keeping controversies aside, Pathaan emerged to be one of the biggest hits in the post-pandemic world of movie theatres. While violence, technology, nation, and masculinity dominated the movie, there were more ‘softer’, queer aspects in the film as well, like Shahrukh Khan movies. I will look at two of them.

Firstly, Deepika Padukone’s Rubai, an ex-ISI, is a strong, combat-trained woman who looks good and can land the kicks and punches as fast and as hard as the two male leads. It is not the first time that we see strong women in professions with the hero in SRK movies. Anushka Sharma played a discovery channel filmmaker in Jab Tak Hai Jaan, Alia Bhat played an aspiring cinematographer in Dear Zindagi, and Anushka Sharma played a scientist in Zero (2018). Women characters being defined through their profession is rare even today in Hindi movies (OTT platforms are different). In that context, to not just share near similar screen time with women, but women in the profession, with purpose and goals in life, queer the entertainment pitch.

Second, is the reference to the ‘Pathaan family’ in the movie. Shahrukh Khan is an orphan, who has grown up in juvenile centres and remand homes. In the film, he is bestowed with the name Pathaan and a tabeeez around his arms by an old Afghan woman, after he saved many children in her war-torn village. Around the climax of the film, she also appeared as a part of Khan’s on-screen family. This absence of a heteronormative biological family to the hero is narrated in the movie in an intimate conversation with Rubai when he remembers the whole village that he saved during war, and in turn, was saved by receiving a social identity— the ‘Pathaan family’. This absence of a biological family and the creation of a family took me back to the ‘original Pathan’ of the movie world—Kabuliwalah (adapted from Rabindranath Tagore’s short story of the same name).

The Bengali film was released in 1957, and the Hindi version in 1961. The main theme of this story is that humans, no matter what their nationality or background, are all the same, as symbolised by filial affection—the deep love that fathers have for their children. Rehmat, the fruit seller from Kabul, Afghanistan comes to Kolkata and develops a familial relationship with a five-year-old girl, Mini, from a middle-class aristocratic family, who reminds him of his beloved daughter back home in Afghanistan. The physical separation from a daughter and the creation of a filial bond with another daughter in a distant land made Kabuliwalah a very humane story.

Interestingly the song Aye Mere Pyaare Watan in the Balraj Sahni starrer is a nostalgic remembrance of the land that is distant but dear—a tribute to the land that one feels a sense of belonging to, like the Pathaan family. The other famous Pathan character is Sher Khan (epitomized by Pran) in the Amitabh starrer Zanjeer (1973). He spoke the language of friendship through this immortal song Yaari hai imaan mera yaar meri zindagi (friendship is my faith and friends are my life) using the rubab, which is an Afghan string instrument. The Pathaan song also speaks of dosti, Jhoome jo Pathaan meri jaan, mehfil hi loot jaye, Dede jo zubaan, meri jaan, uspe mar mit jaye (Pathaan steals all the hearts when he dances, He keeps all the promises that he makes)–to the friend/the beloved/the desh.

If Balraj Sahni sang Tu hi meri aarzu, tu hi meri aabru, tu hi meri jaan (you are my longing, you are my pride, you are my life) in a different but connected way, for Pathaan saving his country is not just a professional duty but a need —since he seeks identity and meaning in his nation, having no religion, family or home to call his own. While this name-giving ‘family’ is the one that Pathaan remembered, a different mother-like figure for him throughout the movie was the character that Dimple Kapadia played, Nandini Grewal head of the Joint Operations and Covert Research (JOCR) department. Nandini is a boss and a mother. She asks Pathaan, ‘what should I have told them? That you are like my son, could they please torture you less?’ At the end of the film, Khan hands her a bravery medal and calls her ma’am throughout the movie but connects with the maternal spirit in her. This is what is called the virangana^[i] syndrome in Pathaan—the martial woman in Indian mythology. She is a valiant fighter who distinguishes herself in warfare. In a lot of ways even Rubai, even though not maternal yet her kindred and love towards her people makes her embrace patriotic, maternal-like qualities.

Thus by depicting besharam yet ‘committed to cause’ women in both Rubai and Nandini, chosen families in the Afghan village and belief in desh which homes him, the queering is continuous in the film’s narrative, drawing connections with a few other celebrated Pathaan films of the film industry.

SRK and the changing sociological discourse

Pathaan is a film that warrants a popular culture sociological moment, in a post-pandemic world where OTT streaming has become the norm, with of course myriad possibilities. While on the one hand, it re-establishes the masculine, technology-dependent action hero as the entertainment formula; it also constructs a vulnerable and fractured masculinity, who will become rather than someone already formed; a confident and mysterious womanhood in the care of chosen families. It is this (complex) popular that needs to find space in the understanding of the social. Pathaan not only queers the meanings around family and friendship, but it also does it with watan as well–the multiple ways of protecting and nurturing it, being appreciative of it with all its colours. A parallel nuanced watan narrative came through a song sequence in the Meghna Gulzar-directed film Raazi (2018) Ae watan, watan mere, aabad rahe tu, Mein jahan rahun, jahaan mein yaad rahe tu where very intelligently the Indian ‘spy’ (played by Alia Bhatt) is teaching the song to the Pakistani children, completely queering the idea of watan–whose watan–the one for which the woman is the spy? or the ‘enemy’ to whom she is married?–and all of this when there was still East and West Pakistan, and the seeds of Bangladesh Liberation from West Pakistan nurturant through the film. This Sunidhi Chauhan version, as opposed to the (arguably more popular) Arijit Singh version, has additional lines ‘lab pe aati dua tamanna banke’ by Allama Iqbal, the national poet of Pakistan (the writer of saare jahan se achcha), is used as an alaap in the song. The song–rendered as an anthem as well as a prayer, depicting the inherent duality of the Bhatt character tied the film beautifully and also established the shared history of the three nations of the sub-continent. Patriotism or patriotic songs are always a tricky terrain, more so when there is a dominant narrative of who is/can be a patriot. By juxtaposing Jim’s ‘love’ for watan with Pathaan’s buttressed with Rubai’s (an ex-ISI agent) commitment to save the planet, there is a clear message that there are multiple forms of patriotism. In a social world which is fast being painted with only one colour, the importance of queering both the popular canvas and the pedagogic classroom respectively on watan Sociology is immense.

As seen in this essay, Pathaan is not the first SRK film in which many of these complexities are shown, he has done it through his filmography. Moving away from the friendship-love-marriage formula in his Johar/Chopra brand of movies, he has experimented with intimacy, passion, and love in Jab Harry Met Sejal (2017) and Dear Zindagi.

Dear Zindagi experiments, very evocatively with singleness, break-up in love relationships, women friendships, love or experiences of loving as one other relationship and not the supreme one, trial and error in choosing a partner (questioning the puritanism around lifetime commitment). Most of this is discussed through therapy sessions, making mental well-being an everyday matter to converse on, while understanding how gendered its practices are. While I have not used it, I think this is a wonderful movie for another compulsory Sociology course that I teach–Relationships and Affinities. Interestingly, while I had proposed to title the course Relationships and Intimacies, senior liberal studies scholars of the university wanted to sanitize the besharmi of ‘intimacies’ and substituted it with affinities. In addition, senior sociologists in the city were alarmed that a compulsory course was discussing love, consent, queerness, companionship, adoption, and singlehood rather than blood and marriage-based kinship in Sociology. In a world where we are dealing with situationships or Facebook providing more than a dozen options on Relationship Status, the complexities of love, family and watan are real and sociologists need to acknowledge that.

When I started out teaching in 2002, SRK was already a decade in the Hindi film industry. The Sociology classroom has transformed in the last two decades, just like the SRK film arc. While I am not trying to draw a direct parallel between popular and pedagogy, I am tempted to admit that questions of love, intimacy, autonomy, queer, desire, and friendship have found more articulation in the Sociology classroom in the last decade than it has earlier. The students are hesitantly bringing it, sometimes indulged by the feminist Sociology teacher, or at other times very affirmatively articulating it, taking on the language of the queer movement or the popular, representational discourse around queering, not to mention the legal victories. The classroom has been an important site of sociological churning, especially when experiences related to gender started making space in the class (Chaudhuri 2002). It has also been a site that evokes and settles with creating ‘discomfort’ as a pedagogical need (Sen 2020)–where questions on the choice of partner or transgressions in an intimate sexual relationship do not always have settled answers. The changing student profile in the Sociology class makes it mandatory for us as teachers to queer, understand ambiguities, appreciate negotiations, be empathetic about different social and hierarchical locations that each student and teacher inhabit, learn as a teacher and articulate knowledge as a student, and have the final objective of instilling sociological consciousness.   

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Dr Gita Chadha for thinking of making me part of a team, jinke niyat mein Shahrukh Khan hai. As someone who has been very articulate in expressing fandom for Imran Khan or Martina Navratilova (as a school/college girl) Shahrukh while always present, the love and admiration have been more silent and more sociological. This piece enabled me to reflect on sociological pedagogy with/through SRK films. Thanks to the Doing Sociology team for creating a space such as this one.   

References:

Bhattacharya, Shrayana. (2021). Desperately Seeking Shahrukh Khan: India’s Lonely Young Women and the Search for Intimacy and Independence, Harper Collins.

Chaudhuri, Maitrayee. (2002). Learning through Teaching the ‘Sociology of Gender’, Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 9(2): 245–261.

Sen, Rukmini. (2020). Between Discomfort and Negotiation: Reflections on Teaching Law Through (Feminist) Sociology’ in Govinda, R. Mackay, F. Menon, K. and Sen, R. (ed.) Doing Feminisms in the Academy: Identity, Institutional Pedagogy and Critical Classrooms in India and the UK, pp. 252-279, New Delhi: Zubaan.

[i]There is a full personal journey of restarting life from 2008 which I do not want to discuss here, but the belief that lives can be restarted, that ‘love will find a way’ did also happen with me, definitely not because of KANK, but probably due to the belief that a popular film and its hero could instill in a ‘besharam’ relation. 

^[ii] One meaning attached to the term was the title awarded by the Government of Bangladesh to its war heroines–women who were raped in their liberation struggle. Feminists have contested the term, critiquing that it glorifies rape as sacrifice for the birth of nation.

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Rukmini Sen is a Professor at the School of Liberal Studies at Dr B R Ambedkar University Delhi.