PK was a Rajkumar Hirani, directed (2014) movie. The plot follows an innocent alien (Aamir Khan) who lands on Earth but loses his communication device. He meets Jaggu (Anushka Sharma), a heartbroken reporter, and tries to find his device. As PK makes sense of this Earth he also raises many thought-provoking questions. It can also be read as a film that explicates the doing of ethnography- long, fieldwork in ‘another culture’.

PK opens with a  female voice describing that there are many planets in the galaxy. On one such planet, one planet may be having people like us. From their planet, they send PK for research on human social life. To continue this sequence, the hero of the film, PK, is an alien who came to Earth on a spaceship. The spaceship landed in a desert area somewhere in Rajasthan, India. When he came out he was completely naked. But, he was wearing a remote control like a necklace on his neck. Flowed by, he saw far away a man was going. He runs near the person. After reaching he was observing the person for the first time in his life and he saw a human first time in his life. He was observing the dress, the instrument that the person was holding, and the fashion of that person. Unfortunately, the human had stolen the spaceship remote, necessary needed to be called back to the spaceship. Without the remote he cannot go back to his planet. PK does not know the language, or culture and does not have a single friend. He is alone and helpless.

PK starts to make sense of the ‘strange’ world. In anthropological terms, he uses ethnographic methods to study the human cultural variations in their naturally occurring setting. That is “the ethnographer who is study the people’s lives in naturally occurring settings to understand the detailed description of a particular culture”. He appears to follow the Malinowskian (1884-1942) style of fieldwork. Bronislaw Kasper Malinowski is one of the most important anthropologists of the 20th century who is widely recognized as a founder of social anthropology and principally associated with field studies of the peoples of Oceania Before, Malinowski, the explorers, travellers, medical doctors, colonial officers, and missionaries did the ethnographic fieldwork. They used interpreters to communicate with the native people, (it was called notes and questions) and highly narrative. Malinowski has often been associated with long stretches in the field,  participant observation, learning the native language, and key informant interviewer. This indeed is how PK ‘understands’ the human world and its human cultural variations. 

However, the question is what the steps are in this movie and how it helps us to understand the Malinowskian style of fieldwork. A simple narrative, a beautiful, funny story of a fieldworker who observes dress variations between men and women, different age groups and the working classes. PK first notices that people’s skin colour seems to be widely varied. Some have shining bright skin, others black skin, yet others have other colours and shapes.  He learns that the story is not of skin alone when he sees a ‘dancing car’ and an undressed couple with their clothes kept aside. This is his encounter with the fact that people’s bodies are the same as the people of his world. This encounter is also his moment of ‘making sense’ of ‘other culture’ and the idea of ‘clothes’ or material culture draped on human bodies.

One day, he was wearing a woman’s gown and a man’s shirt. People laughed at him. He understood that men’s clothes are different and women’s clothes are different. People wear different clothes at night to sleep, for work and play.  PK also learned the different meanings, emotions and the feel of the language. He learnt that the same word can have different meanings, and that tones convey meanings.

The moment he learned the native language, he decided to find out his remote. He gets to know from his friend that the thief had sold his remote in the Delhi market. He goes to Delhi and starts to search for a remote. He keeps asking questions about how he will get back his remote from everyone including the policeman. And he gets the same answer from everyone ‘Policeman is a human, not a God’, ‘Only God can help you’, ‘You hold God’s legs, he is the only one who can able to help you’, ‘Only God knows, how can we know, God knows how to get out, have faith in the God son’. As a result, he understood that God is the source of everything. God knows everything and solves all the problems on this planet. Thousands of people go to God to solve their problems and God has solved all the problems but with a high amount of fees.

For this reason, PK goes to different places of worship. He learns that members of different religions dress differently during marriage, after marriage and after the death of the spouse with lifelong celibacy. After a lot of experience, observation and participation he understands that this world does not have a single God. There are many Gods. Each of these Gods has managers, different rules and regulations. In this world, everyone has religious beliefs, which means that they belong to one company. If that is so which company does PK belong to? Which God should he pray to? If he wants to get back his remote control. Knowing this is very crucial. In this process, PK figures out that by birth different people follow different religious beliefs and have different symbols and identities. PK the ethnographer gets confused and wonders how religion is to be verified at birth.

He goes to the hospital and keeps checking whether there is any symbol of God on the back of a child at birth. He does not find it and understands that no one is born with a symbol of religion. After that, he decided to participate in all the religious festivals and activities of different religions. So, that God will be happy to return his remote control. He practices all religious beliefs and distributed the missing poster of God and put on a yellow helmet to get focused on God. But it does not work. Finally, he understands that human beings are created the God. There is a middleman (manager) between God and humans who creates all problems. This middleman is intermediating between God and humans who are misleading the people. The people are toys in the hand of this middleman.

However, PK builds a rapport with a news reporter. She helps him get back his remote. PK and the news reporter convey to the people through the digital (TV) media that the voice of the manager does not reach God. It is the wrong number. Many people raise their voices about the wrong number. Donation boxes are flooded with letters asking questions about God. The middleman’s business stalls.  Similarly, on social media such as Facebook, and Twitter also millions of negative comments are posted. Then, the middle man called the news reporter and told them that he wants to talk with PK on a TV show. Fortunately, the thief is caught by his friend (Dheeru Singh) and he calls PK so that he catches him. The thief sold the remote for 40000 rupees to Tapaswi (middleman). Then PK got to know that Tapaswi is a liar. PK also understands that the wrong number duplicates God is Tapaswi who got it firsthand. However, Dheeru Singh is coming to Mumbai with the thief. Unfortunately, during the bomb blast, PK lost his friend and thief. The day of the TV show has come.

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Kinkar Mandal is a PhD Research Scholar at the Institute for Social and Economic Change (ISEC), Bengaluru.