Shah Rukh Research Articles

Grooving on at Seventy-Five: Shah Rukh Khan, Salman Rushdie, and the Indian Muslim’s Ecstatic Return

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.

Book review: Shrayana Bhattacharya, Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh: India’s Lonely Young Women and the Search for Intimacy and Independence

Shrayana Bhattacharya, Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh: India’s Lonely Young Women and the Search for Intimacy and Independence (Harper Collins, 2021), 445 pp., ₹699 (Paperback). ISBN: 978-93- 5489-193-9.

A ‘New India’ for the Arab World

Abstract This article investigates the formations of ‘Brand Modi’ and ‘Brand Bollywood’ and their strategic and overlapping foray into the United Arab Emirates, considering it a pivotal moment in contemporary transregional media production. Two branding campaigns form the basis of my analysis: Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s highly mediatized 2015–2018 U.A.E. visits and Shah Rukh Khan’s 2016–2019 ‘#BeMyGuest’ campaign for Visit Dubai (the Emirate’s official tourism brand). Attending to questions of branding techniques, diasporic identity and historical imagination, I examine how these campaigns play on notions of the common man or aam aadmi and the upwardly-mobile and cosmopolitan ‘New Indian’ through the celebrity personas of Modi and Khan. I argue that this creation of a ‘New India’ for the Arab world seeks to efface down class connotations of India and Indians in Arab imaginaries by re-framing India as a key diplomatic and cultural-infrastructural partner of the Emirates.

Of Echoes and Utterances: A Brief Sketch of Arabic Hauntings in Hindi Cinema and Song

On a Saturday afternoon in January 2017, Shah Rukh Khan—Hindi cinema's reigning star of the last thirty years—arrived at Bollywood Parks Dubai to promote his latest film release, Raees (2017). To the crowd of adoring Arab and South Asian fans and journalists who had flocked to the theme park to catch a glimpse of the “Badshah of Bollywood” and brand ambassador of Dubai, SRK unveiled the much-anticipated Arabic version of “Zaalima” (Cruel One), the film's breakout hit song. Rendered in Darija by Moroccan pop artists Abdelfettah Grini and Jamila El Badaoui, this version of “Zaalima” proved an awkward copy of the original, its unwieldy Arabic lyrics molded to fit as tightly within the blueprint melody as possible. “ Dīrī fiya al-thiqa, al-gharām hā howa ” (Put your confidence in me, for love is here) did not have quite the same ring or seamlessness as the Hindi-Urdu “ Main sau martaba dīwāna hua ” (I fell in love a hundred times over), with the Arabic line painstakingly crafted to echo the “ hua ” ending of the Hindi-Urdu.

Desperately seeking answers to the future of stardom in the age of neoliberalism

Shrayana Bhattacharya’s book Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh: India’s Lonely Young Women and the Search for Intimacy and Independence is about women in contemporary India, how their gendered existence is shaped by patriarchal structures of exclusion and censure, and how women often use fandom (for Shah Rukh Khan) to build communities of solidarity and togetherness. This review article uses the book’s analysis to move the discussion of stardom beyond the star’s romantic appeal to women, to contextualize Shah Rukh Khan’s appeal in the broader milieu of precarity, alienation and heightened misogyny produced by neoliberalism. Ironically, the very culture that is responsible for the misery of women, has also created an unstable public that is putting real, violent limits to the phenomenon of stardom itself.

Can the Celebrity Speak? Controversies and the Eulogistic Fandom of Shah Rukh Khan

This article addresses the participation of celebrities and their fans in media controversies. As techno-social events, controversies are constitutive of discursive battles, between numerically conscious participatory communities, aimed at describing the meaning and significance of cultural symbols. Celebrities, in their capacity as cultural symbols, provide the ground for staging these discursive battles. Fan participation, as auxiliary of celebrity participation, is studied here specifically to discern its essential functions vis-a-vis controversies. For elaborating its argument, this article looks at Shah Rukh Khan (hereafter SRK) and his fandom in India. SRK, as a transcultural symbol of Liberal Islam, was embroiled in media controversies wherein the meaning and significance of his ‘Muslimness’ was debated and scrutinised. Marked by struggles between SRK fandom, on one side, and right-wing/reactionary groups on the other, these controversies testify SRK’s centrality in political debates surrounding the ‘Muslim Question’ in Indian Polity. This article argues that SRK Fandom’s primary discursive function is to create an ‘Eulogistic Buffer’ that insulates SRK from right-wing/reactionary islamophobia.

Interruptions and politeness in David Letterman show “my guest no need introduction” Shah Rukh Khan episode

This paper analyzed interruptions and politeness in the David Letterman Show. The data were collected from the show “My Guest No Need Introduction.” The study was qualitative research, and the data were analyzed and then classified into types of interruptions. Results showed 32 interruptions in the conversation uttered by two speakers in the show, more specifically 26 times of overlap interruptions, three times of simple interruptions, twice of silent interruptions, and once of butting-in interruption. It can be concluded that, first, the appropriate interruptions display positive strategies of politeness in the David Letterman Show. Interruptions could be done for a specific purpose to strengthen the bond between two speakers and to avoid misunderstanding. Second, the interruptions show politeness in conversation. Politeness appears to clarify statements to prevent misunderstandings between cultures.DOI: 10.26905/enjourme.v6i1.5962

Activating Bollywood buzz: Promoting Indian film superstars in supporting roles

This article shows how India’s popular Hindi cinema markets celebrity actors to promote films where they only appear in supporting roles. Focusing on promotional images of Shah Rukh Khan and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan from two 2016 Bollywood releases, we consider how ‘studio actions’ build on existing celebrity profiles to entice audiences to films. The combined promotion of these stars’ on- and off-screen personas and their ability to transcend Hindi cinema affords them a base of fans that increases their celebrity status across India, its diasporas and globally. As a marketing strategy, the ‘studio actions’ approach has its antecedents in Hollywood and is clearly aimed at increasing box office revenues. The highly visible inclusion of Khan and Rai on promotional materials creates a ‘buzz’ that reminds audiences of the star’s past successes and hints at the promise of seeing them again for an extended screen time.

Diglossic youth identity: The semiotic negotiations of fandom in North India

This article looks at the activities of a fan club dedicated to Shah Rukh Khan for the purpose of discerning how young men and women negotiate their identities vis-à-vis a mainstream culture that perpetuates negative stereotypes about fans. The members of the club are upper middle class from New Delhi. The study of fan culture in India is primarily organized around the assumptions that its membership comes from the urban poor youth (men) and that it is a phenomenon restricted to South India. In other words, there is a sense that fan cultures like youth subcultures develop in direct opposition to the mainstream. My contention is that youth culture in neoliberal India exhibits a more complex form of negotiation with the mainstream marked by notions of ‘timepass’ (leisure time as ‘wasteful’), compromise and ‘diglossia’ (language meant to negotiate opposed cultural perceptions and expectations to gain an entry into symbolic capital). This becomes necessary because mainstream culture maintains a consistent approach of being opposed to fan culture.

‘A feeling you cannot resist’: Shah Rukh Khan, affect, and the re-scripting of male stardom in Hindi cinema

ABSTRACT While Shah Rukh Khan is considered to be the cinematic representation of Indian neoliberalism and global capitalism, the gendered dimensions of his stardom and personae are still thin on the ground. This paper theorizes the particular role of affect, emotion, and feeling in the gendered construction of Shah Rukh Khan as star text. Though affective masculinity has been central to male stardom in Hindi cinema, SRK shifted the focus from anger (Amitabh Bachchan’s Angry Young Man) to vulnerability, sensitivity, and the ability to feel and endure pain. While these traits are still seen as constituent of the 'feminine,' SRK deployed them with great effect to craft a new style of middle-class masculinity that shifted the accepted terms of masculinity without losing its heteronormative privilege. The paper explores three intertwined ideas: SRK's self-confessed 'hammy' tearful performances; his onscreen physical vulnerability, and sexual availability; and consequential to the above, how SRK signaled shifts in the cinematic representation of Indian middle-class masculinity. While the plots of SRK’s films frequently reinforce heteronormative patriarchy, moments in his performance, along with the filmic representation of his body and face, contradict the linear inevitability of the triumph of patriarchal masculinity.

‘Chariot of Fire’: Genre slippages, iconographic agitation and ideological subversion in SRK’s Raees

Abstract Genres have often been a safe space for ideological containment, reworking popular conventions and fulfilling audience expectations. But many popular genres including science fiction, horror and the gangster film are also vehicles for subversion. This article will use Raees (Dholakia, 2017), a big budget Bollywood film starring Shah Rukh Khan (SRK), to demonstrate how the Indian gangster film acts as a rejoinder to Hindutva cultural politics, challenging the notion that popular Hindi cinema is merely in the bind of normalizing a nationalist agenda. Using the yatra (procession/journey) sequence as a focal point for textual analysis, I will cover three key areas. This includes the use of political iconography, the violent resistance that emerges to stop the yatra and that is instigated by Raees, a liminal figure of proletarian and secularist ideals, and finally, how the imagining of the Muslim harbours a punitive refrain.

Star Gazing via Documentary

Star Gazing via Documentary Priyadarshini Shanker (bio) This essay represents a preliminary attempt to explore a productive relationship between stardom (studies) and documentary (studies). To this effect, I analyze the first and second part of the documentary film The Inner/Outer World of Shah Rukh Khan1 (UK/IN, 2005) made by London based television producer, documentary filmmaker, and author Nasreen Munni Kabir and her longtime associate, the British cinematographer, Peter Chappell. The first part, The Inner World, was produced by Kabir’s London-based film production house, “Hyphen Films,” for BBC’s Channel 4. The second part, The Outer World, did not find financial backing with Channel 4 and was produced by Shah Rukh Khan’s (henceforth, SRK) Bombay-based media house “Red Chillies Entertainment.” Acquiring the DVD rights to both the films, “Eros International” decided to package and market them together. To film The Inner World, Kabir and Chappell, along with sound recordist Cherag Cama, followed SRK every single day, for three weeks, in Bombay and Delhi during October and November 2003. The 50-minute film explores SRK in an array of private and public spaces: physiotherapy sessions, Diwali celebrations, a visit to his parents’ grave, a meeting with Prince Charles, and his birthday celebrations on the sets of Main Hoon Na/Trust Me, I am Here (Farah Khan, IN, 2004). To film The Outer World, the filmmakers followed SRK on his twenty-seven country tour “Temptations 2004,” for five weeks, across twelve major cities in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada during August, September, and October 2004. While The Inner World maintains the traditional coding of “domestic” space as “private” and “professional” space as [End Page 100] “public,” The Outer World shifts the impetus to explore SRK within an onstage-offstage framework such that the film actively codes “onstage” as “public” and “offstage” as “private.” The Inner/Outer World of Shah Rukh Khan as Companion Pieces In this section, I explore the formal, stylistic, and thematic connections between the two films, through an analysis of specific documentary devices and an examination of the visuals, music, and editing, focusing on the intriguing contradiction between expository and observational modes. I try to assess how the rhetorical devices of documentary presentation, in particular the voice-over and the interview, mediate the star and produce him as a kind of document to which we have “unprecedented access.” I also introduce here the theme of the star body that is elaborated upon, more conclusively, in the following section. In spite of the distinct production histories and differing mise-en-scènes, The Inner/Outer World function well as companion pieces. The films do not attempt to provide a survey of SRK’s significant film and television career nor an analysis of his status as a contemporary public icon. The films only record his stardom as it unfolds in the present moment, preferring a fly-on-the-wall documentary approach. At a Press Conference organized by Eros in Bombay, to launch the DVD, Kabir emphasizes: “I think that actually Shah Rukh is too young to do that kind of sit-down look at the films, analyze your life for over 50 years . . . because it’s in the middle of a career . . . but this was a rare opportunity of actually filming the thinking and the psychology of a star as it is happening. And that was a very interesting thing for me in terms of a documentary subject. Here you are in the middle of this adoring storm, and who are you, how do you cope with people? . . . How do you balance all these worlds and how do you stay sane? . . . It seemed most appropriate to take this form of following him and letting things happen.”2 The first exception to the observational mode of “following . . . and letting things happen” comes through the use of the voice-over exposition. A baritone, British, male voice-over narration, by an unseen Jonathan Kydd, opens both films. The Inner World is introduced in the following words: “Tom Cruise, Jim Carrey, Brad Pitt: who is the biggest movie star on the planet? Not these Hollywood heroes! From Morocco to Malaysia, one man is worshipped by a...

Interview with Manu Anand, Director of Photography of Fan

Interview with Manu Anand, Director of Photography of Fan Priyadarshini Shanker (bio) New York City, January 5, 2017 Manu Anand graduated from the Mass Communication Research Center at Jamia Millia Islamia, in 2002, and since then has worked in the Bombay film, television, and music industry. He worked on documentary shorts, shorts, and video documentaries before shooting his first feature Shuddh Desi Romance (Maneesh Sharma, IN, 2013). Manu’s second feature project, the National Award winner, Dum Laga Ke Haisha (Sharat Katariya, IN, 2015) earned him the “Best Cinematography” award at the 61st Filmfare Awards. Fan (Maneesh Sharma, IN, 2016) is Manu’s third feature. Priyadarshini Shanker: There are two distinct protagonists in the film: the fan Gaurav Chandna and the star Aryan Khanna, but played by the same star-actor, Shah Rukh Khan. How conscious were you of this as you shot the film? Were there narrative, technical, or aesthetic reasons for lighting them differently or for preparing a distinct shot design for each character? How deliberate was this process? Manu Anand: The director, Maneesh Sharma, and I had many discussions about visual cues, subliminal cues, color palette, and several other visual aspects. These intense discussions helped us find the cinematic language of the film. A lot of these cues are very subliminal and not in-your-face. There are certain things that we did along with the production and the costume designer. There is a certain palette for the fan and his world, and there is a different palette for the star’s world. The fan’s palette is slightly warmer; the star’s palette is a little more monochromatic with [End Page 209] greys and browns. And we also tried to do some amount of mixed lighting in the film. So there is a lot of cool and warm light. . . PS: So warm light for Gaurav and cool light for Aryan? MA: Not always. There is a mix. For instance, in the famous pre-interval, face-off scene, when Aryan and Gaurav meet each other in the police station bathroom, there is a lot of warm and cool light mixed together. PS: To follow up on that particular sequence: The two characters sit across from each other, and there is a mirror in the background that multiplies their images infinitely and suggests doubling on several levels. Was that mirror a part of the screenplay or something that you stumbled upon during the location recce? MA: No, that was not a part of the screenplay. The screenplay indicates that a meeting will take place, in the jail cell, but it is not specified exactly where. During my pre-shoot research for the film, I looked at various images, and I was fascinated by the idea of using an infinity mirror. I shared some of these images with the director and he really liked the infinity mirror idea. So he requested the production designer to set the scene in a place where one can have a mirror. The production designer suggested that he could create a run-down toilet in order to justify the use of mirrors in a police station. We were keen to make this scene distinct. And this was also the first scene we shot during the actual filming process, after the first round of tests. For both the actor and the director, it was important to know how these characters are going to be pitched against each other, because it’s the same actor. For the director, it was important to witness the dynamic of how Shah Rukh is going to play Gaurav vis-à-vis Aryan. Hence, we incorporated the infinity mirror since we thought it will make the scene really special. The mirroring of images is, once again, a subliminal cue. But it was very tricky to shoot, extremely tricky. There were many concerns. Where do you place the camera? How do you hide it? The actor’s double role made it even more difficult. Yet, the scene is certainly the highlight of the film! PS: Another follow up about this sequence: When you are intercutting between the two characters, in a series of over-the-shoulder shots, or even during a straight two...

Fan and its Paratexts

Fan and its Paratexts Monika Mehta (bio) Introduction This essay examines the role of paratexts and their relationship with film, specifically, and cinema, more generally. My point of entry into this discussion is Fan (Maneesh Sharma, IN, 2016), a big-budget, Yash Raj Films (YRF) production whose promotion and publicity matched and, at times, rivaled its unconventional narrative. My investigation of these paratexts seeks to expand our understanding of stardom, fandom, authorship, as well as Bombay cinema’s industrial practices. I begin this task by offering my sample chronology of Fan’s paratexts that shows film is no longer the primary or privileged text via which a fan can interact with and track her favorite star. As with many blockbusters productions, film simply appears to be a source text, a hook to spin out other (para)texts. This account enables me to point to an industrial shift, namely, the proliferation of paratexts and the centrality of the Internet as a venue for circulating these paratexts. The portability of these paratexts enables their “spreadability.”1 I show that as YRF adopts “spreadability” as an industrial strategy, there is a palpable shift in authorship. In this scenario, fans and viewers are not only addressed as consumers. Rather, they are invited to become collaborators, distributors, and in some cases, producers of (para)texts. Many (para)texts generated by YRF, such as trailers, dialogue promos, teasers, the making of videos, and interviews with cast and crew, would be familiar to global audiences. My analysis focuses on two innovative (para)texts which are specific to Fan, namely, five short videos focusing on fandom, Tu Nahi Samjehga/You Won’t Understand, and eleven multilingual iterations of the song-sequence “Jabra.” I show how the videos [End Page 128] articulate a culturally specific mode of fandom by developing an argument on two looking practices, darsan (devotional looking) and nazar (excessive, harmful looking). In a related vein, I discuss how both para(texts) become captivating sites for reading the star image, and star-fan relationship. An Account of Fan’s Promotion and Publicity What I recount below is my experience of Fan’s promotion and publicity as opposed to a master narrative about how these events unfolded; I accessed all the paratexts mentioned, and others that I have not listed, via the Internet.2 As a Shah Rukh Khan fan, I devotedly followed a number of paratexts which began circulating three years prior to Fan’s (2016) release—the announcement of the film by YRF in 2013, the ensuing gossip about who would be the heroine opposite Khan in this project, potential delays on the project, information about the famous Hollywood make-up artist hired to re-do Khan’s face, one or two secret photos released of Khan’s look in the film, to name some. The full-on publicity for Fan began on July 8, 2015, nine months prior to its release; painted messages—“love you SRK,” “c u on 15th”—signed by “Gaurav” appeared outside Khan’s house. Initially, the messages were read as graffiti written by an overly besotted fan; later, it was revealed to be the work of YRF. This publicity stunt on July 8, 2015, was followed by a 63-second teaser, which highlighted Khan’s global stardom and his fans’ excessive, emotional responses. These early paratexts not only illustrate that this publicity was directed at fans but signal an expansion of fans’ roles, going beyond being mere consumers of star images. On July 29, 2015, YRF in collaboration with Yep, a fashion company, launched #iamfan contest. The contest announcement declared that Khan was looking for his “100 biggest fans” and invited contestants to submit their declarations of love. The potential rewards of fan participation included becoming immortalized in the film’s logo, meeting Khan, and later, being featured in the Shah Rukh Khan trivia videos. The economics of this deliberate blurring of fan and industry authorship is worth noting. Fans might earn recognition and could meet with their favorite star; however, unlike Khan, they would not be compensated financially for their declarations nor the use of their photographs in the film’s logo and in the trivia videos. Is this affective...

Double Trouble: SRK, Fandom, and Special Effects

Double Trouble: SRK, Fandom, and Special Effects1 Anupama Kapse (bio) Fan is a finely stylized site of technological and affective innovation that rewrites SRK as a star-text. A film whose theme is one of the most beloved in Bombay Cinema—the fan’s adoration of the star—Fan is premised on a casting coup that plays off an aging, narcissistic SRK against his much younger and far more resourceful look-alike. A highly mediated, fantastic reworking of Shah Rukh Khan’s previous double roles that crystallize with Karan Arjun (Rakesh Roshan, IN, 1995) and continue into Ra-One (Abhinav Gupta, IN, 2011), Fan departs visibly from the trope of family likeness. The family has been used to naturalize the double in Bombay cinema for years—a convention ably suited to express kinship as one of its most deeply held values.2 The star as a double has almost always appeared in the guise of a look-alike brother, father, or simply a twin. Fan ruptures this dynamic in startling and provocative ways. By playing up the differences between a star and a fan who (kind of) look like each other (but not really), it dramatizes a series of conflicts where subtle differences in face, gesture, body, set, tone, and backdrop—all enhanced by a variety of special effects—set up an intense drama that pits the humdrum against the glamorous, youth against age, anonymity against fame, and cinema, as an analog form, against the digital. In the process, the film atrophies domestic tropes that privilege the family as an engine of melodrama and locus for staging narrative (Figure 1). A central concern of this essay is how Fan fetishizes the fearful, disturbing, and uncanny elements of likeness to such an extent that resemblance becomes deviant and threatens to subsume the very object it fetishizes. Indeed, the double is vital for Fan’s many formal and affective innovations. Equally, special effects prove crucial [End Page 187] for upending stable conventions that untether doubling from dearly held values of love and belonging. Such a conjuncture sets into motion unsettling but passionate emotional effects: fresh incarnations of the SRK-image rub tantalizingly against existing versions of his star-body. As SRK notes in a recent TED talk, in Fan “humanity [appears] like an aging movie star—self-obsessed like me.”3 Given SRK’s killer charm—he introduces himself as the “best lover in the world: I am not, don’t tell anyone,” in Fan he plays Aryan, a character very much unlike his beloved, affable, and witty public persona. In Gaurav, Fan invents a double who is a nightmarish simulacrum of the star, someone who turns up like a digital “parrot” that echoes the star in infinitesimal, annoying detail. The double is by turns seductive, self-pleasuring, loyal, and fickle but always hypnotic. It represents a new interface for playing off mechanical media against the virtualized, offering critical reflections on how the digital can ape the indexicality of the analog. The abundance of motion-capture performance where live action is framed against a digitally variable background has changed the basic grammar of Bollywood cinema during the last decade. An emphasis on the mutability of the human form; the dominance of the vertical axis; the defiance of gravity; an interplay between slow/accelerated, delayed/rapid motion; and the bulking up of the male body have been defining characteristics of action in a virtualizing, digitized cinema. Editing patterns have changed to accommodate scenario changes imperceptibly. Shots can be coupled seamlessly along a vertical, horizontal or diagonal axis. Cuts and dissolves have given way to compositing technologies that allow space to be bent, molded, or extended instead of being chopped or “cut” according to an older shot vocabulary. Scenes of continuous stimulus based in immersive, relentless spectacle have found new ways to mobilize and extend the star-body and its performative capabilities. In turn, the ascendancy, power, and range of fan practices Fan considers converge viscerally on the body of the film star. Older incarnations of the star compete with a mediatized form of celebrity that wrestles with the fan as a monstrous creation of the star. The conjuncture of these varied and...

Doubling Offscreen and Onscreen: Queering the Star and the Fan in Fan

Doubling Offscreen and Onscreen: Queering the Star and the Fan in Fan Nilanjana Bhattacharjya (bio) At the climax of Maneesh Sharma’s film Fan (IN, 2016), an obsessive, deranged fan chases a Bollywood megastar onto a rooftop, and the megastar pleads, “Be a good son to your parents—a good friend, a good boyfriend. Stop being a fan!” But the fan refuses to let go of his obsession with the star, and in doing so, he rejects heteronormativity as he plummets to his death. The relationship between the star and the fan necessarily distances the idol from his admirer, a relationship that S.V. Srinivas has defined as the fans’ “surplus investment” in their stars’ performances.1 Fan portrays the collapse of that distance between the fan and star in multiple ways—as the obsessed fan pursues his star, the double casting of Shah Rukh Khan in the role of star and fan, and, with CGI modifications and makeup, the uncanny resemblance between the star and the fan. But the film also portrays what happens when the star pursues his fan and, in doing so, inverts the conventional relationship between the fan and his star—which is itself al ready non-normative. Furthermore, the consistent seepage and deliberate interweaving of the excessive narrative of actor Shah Rukh Khan’s established stardom onscreen and offscreen into his double roles in this film serves to undo the present narrative of Shah Rukh Khan’s stardom. Khan’s contemporary stardom has been most memorably established over the last two and a half decades in his repeated casting as the heterosexual, romantic hero onscreen and through the entertainment media’s frequent allusions to his offscreen relationships with his wife, Gauri, and their children in his actual life. At the start of the film, the audience familiar with Shah Rukh Khan’s stardom [End Page 161] offscreen recognizes Fan’s fictionalized star Aryan Khanna as a stand-in for Shah Rukh Khan himself and thus conflates those roles. Therefore, when the star in Fan pursues the fan as an object of his obsession, the star assumes the non-normative subject position previously occupied by the fan and, in doing so, queers his identity as the fictionalized star onscreen and, through the conflation of his real life and fictionalized identities, his real life offscreen identity as well. The fan’s pursuit of the star and, later, the star’s pursuit of the fan both recall Shah Rukh Khan’s memorable antihero roles in the early 1990s that preceded his rise as the romantic hero. In films such as Darr/Fear (Yash Chopra, IN, 1993), Baazigar/Gambler (Abbas-Mustan, IN, 1993), and Anjaam/Aftermath (Rahul Rawail, IN, 1994), Khan’s violent characters stalk their victims and either cannot or will not engage in conventional heterosexual romantic relationships. In this sense, Fan’s citation of these early roles undermines the narrative Khan’s stardom has constructed as a conventional romantic hero. The double casting and seep age of offscreen and onscreen stardom narratives generate these unexpected, queer relation ships, all of which converge into the suggestion of narcissism. The trope of the deranged, deviant fan unhealthily obsessed with his star is well rehearsed in stories about fans, especially on film, and as the film Fan starts, it seems as if it will tell this story too. As Joli Jenson describes it, in these stories a deranged fan fixates on the star as “a form of psychological compensation, an attempt to make up for all that [his] modern life lacks.” Unsuccessful in his own social relationships, the fan attempts to address this lack of social connection by trying to establish contact with the star.2 As he focuses on the star, the fan forgets his own inadequacies and becomes potentially dangerous as he loses the ability to distinguish between states of fantasy and reality. In the film Fan, the star Aryan Khanna is internationally famous, leads a transnational career, has a beautiful wife and two children, and, at several in stances throughout the film, self-consciously refers to how his hard work transported him from his humble, middle-class origins in Delhi to his present identity as a global...

A Revised History of Mongol, Kart, and Timurid Patronage of the Shrine of Shaykh Al-Islam Ahmad-I Jam

This article proposes revisions to scholarly perspectives on patronage of the shrine at Turbat-i Jam. Firstly, the chronology established by Lisa Golombek in Iran IX (1971) is materially amended. Secondly, it is argued that a gunbad attributed to a minor Ghurid ruler could have been funded by other parties. Thirdly, it demonstrates that patronage by the Kart kings (maliks) of Herat (r. 1245–1381) came primarily from Ghiyath al-Din Muhammad Kart (r 707–29/1307–29), and that patronage was virtually eliminated by his son, Mu˓izz al-Din Muhammad Kart (r. 732–71/1332–70), who was estranged from his affines at Turbat-i Jam, several of whom had participated in a failed coup against the malik. Fourthly, the paper shows that Shah Rukh patronised Ahmad's shrine through waqf endowments, thus weakening the argument that he had disallowed “minor semi-independent ‘amirates’” that could threaten Herat's authority.

Power of a Common Man

Don't underestimate the power of a common Man is a dialogue most Indians are familiar with, if not all, at least those who watched the recent movie Chennai Express. People heartily cheered when the versatile actor Shah Rukh Khan, an acclaimed actor in Bollywood delivered the aforesaid dialogue on screen.

An Iskandarnāma of Nizami Produced for Ibrahim Sultan

This paper introduces a copy of the Iskandarnāma of Nizami dated 1435 and dedicated to the Timurid prince Ibrahim Sultan, grandson of the eponymous founder of the Timurid dynasty. It discusses the various features of the manuscript together with comparable examples from the same period, and also focuses on Abu al-Fath Ibrahim Sultan ibn Shah Rukh and his role as both a military leader and a patron of the arts during his tenure as the governor of the provinces of Fars, Kirman, and Luristan (1414–35). Utilizing the visual data together with the historical context of the period, this essay interprets one of the illustrations of the Iskandarnāma, hoping to fulfill what David Summers called “the most basic task of art history,” which he says “is to explain why works of art look the way they look.” The addition of this Iskandarnāma manuscript to the surviving corpus of works that can be connected to Ibrahim Sultan will provide a further insight into the important patronage of this Timurid prince.

Nationalist transactions: Chak De! India and the down-and-out sports coach

This paper argues that Chak De! India is an ideational assemblage for the nation in its 60th year. Deploying two foundational tropes that accompanied the coming into existence of the geo-political entity called India, Chak De! India provides a contemporary anthem to the contemporary nation. These two inaugural stages in the birth of the nation that haunt Hindi cinema are replayed intermittently through its postulated resolutions: (1) the idea of the Hindu–Muslim solidarity and (2) the idea of the ‘states’ of India. This paper will address the ways in which Chak De! India takes the assembling principle of a secular and plural Hindi cinema for granted and adapts it for Bollywood, particularly with regards to its principal character, Coach Kabir Khan. It will also assess how Shah Rukh Khan, the superstar who plays the role of the coach, (dis)assembles the character of the Muslim in Hindi cinema. In context of the global reach and influence of Bollywood, this paper asks how assemblages of this resolutely ‘Indian’ kind may or may not travel or translate across oceanic waters.