Abstract

This essay examines two high profile creative producers of Indian Muslim heritage: the actor Shah Rukh Khan and the writer Salman Rushdie. Even as each faced attacks (of different kinds) in 2022, early 2023 saw the triumphant resurgence of their creativity with the film Pathaan, starring Khan in the eponymous role, and Rushdie’s new novel Victory City. I argue that the film and the novel together offer a complementary manifesto for the Indian Muslim as a minority subject 75 years after Partition. To understand the stakes at play in this minoritization process, I conduct the analysis against two essays on minority subjectivities in India, particularly that which crystallizes through Indian Islam—one from the 1960s, by Humayun Kabir, and the other from the contemporary moment, by Aamir Mufti.

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