Pathaan's Huge Success: This Is How the Hindu Right Failed in Its Racist Campaign Against Bollywood Muslim Actors

Bollywood films with Muslim actors such as Shah Rukh Khan have been subjected in recent months to campaigns and calls to boycott them, launched by activists from the Hindu nationalist right on social networks.

Actors Aamir Khan and Ranbir Kapoor, in turn, faced calls to boycott the works in which they participated.

Groups of extremist Hindus are calling for the ban of Pathaan movie, denouncing a song in which actress Deepika Padukone appears in a saffron-colored bathing suit, a color that carries symbolic meanings in the Hindu religion.

 

Pathaan’s Success

The new Indian film Pathaan, starring Shah Rukh Khan in the lead role, broke records at the Indian box office after its release last week, reviving a Bollywood industry that has recently suffered poor results.

Pathaan, directed by Siddharth Anand, achieved the highest-grossing ever for an Indian film in the first two days of its showing in India. Analyst Taran Adarsh reported on Twitter that the film grossed 2.5 billion rupees ($30 million) in its first five days in cinemas.

Worldwide ticket sales exceeded 1 billion rupees ($13.7 million) in three days, according to the production company Yash Raj Films. Audiences were anticipating the release of Pathaan, the first film starring Shah Rukh Khan in four years.

The Guardian reported, “Just a week after its release, Pathaan has already broken almost every Bollywood record.”

Hindi-language Bollywood films have struggled since cinemas reopened after the pandemic. “The unprecedented celebratory success of Pathaan I think speaks volumes about where we are headed as the Hindi movie industry,” movie theatre chain owner Akshaye Rathi told AFP.

He noted that there is a return to the old school, which is based on cinema in theaters as a societal experience, noting that cinemas rely on Indian films.

Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan, 57, returns to the screen after a four-year absence from the movie business, with the blockbuster action film Pathaan, which has angered the Hindu right-wing.

Khan belongs to the Muslim minority in India. He is one of the most important stars of Indian cinema and has millions of fans in India and abroad. His name has been prominent in Bollywood for more than 30 years, and he is known by the nicknames “King Khan” and “Baadshah of Bollywood.”

However, his return to cinemas comes after a series of personal and professional setbacks. The last film in which he participated in 2018, Zero, suffered a commercial failure, and his son was arrested last year in a drug case that was later dropped.

Film critic and analyst Taran Adarsh praised the movie Pathaan, and wrote on Twitter that in this movie, all the ingredients for success: Strength, style, songs, spirituality, substance, surprises, and above all, Shah Rukh Khan’s return for revenge. The film will be the first huge work of 2023.

 

Protests and Anger

Pathaan, which was shown in cinemas on January 25, on the eve of the Republic Day celebrations in India, sparked controversy among extremist Hindu groups who protested against one of the film’s songs.

Local media reported that activists belonging to a Hindu extremist group demonstrated on Wednesday in Bangalore. They burned pictures of the film’s advertisement, chanted slogans against it. The state of Bihar in the east of the country witnessed similar protests, while demonstrations were recorded in the state of Assam as well.

On the other hand, a group of people, wearing T-shirts with the image of the film and playing drums, gathered in front of cinemas in Bombay.

Voices were raised to ban the movie if the song was not removed from it. The boycott of Pathaan hashtag (#BoycottPathaan) spread on Twitter as part of campaigns that were recently repeated on social media targeting some films.

Shahrukh Khan, who plays a spy role in the new work, notes that 25 cinemas with one screen reopened their doors on Wednesday in various parts of the country thanks to the film.

In recent years, Bollywood has faced difficulties in producing blockbusters, a genre that has achieved great success in India and abroad.

Bollywood productions in the Hindi language face a major challenge in front of films produced in other languages, such as RRR (2022), which won the Golden Globe award this month and appeared on January 24 in the list of Oscar nominations in the Best Song category.

 

Bollywood in Modi’s Era

The London-based Indian journalist and writer Samanth Subramanian said in his report entitled When the Hindu Right Came for Bollywood that the film industry is thriving in many other cities in India, but Bollywood has become shorthand for all of Indian cinema and for the thousands of films the country releases annually.

For nearly a century, Bollywood has also been touted with the warm glamor and complacency of being a passion that unites a country of divisions. Filmmakers will say that not only is its audience as mixed as India itself, but Bollywood is a place where religion and caste don’t matter. The most religious proof of this is the fact that in a Hindu-majority country, a Muslim man named Shah Rukh Khan has been the most popular box-office star for decades.

The journalist explained that even if Bollywood had this liberal streak, the right-wing swing in Indian politics has killed it. In Mumbai, people divide modern history into pre-Tandav and post-Tandav periods and ponder the series and its bitter legal battles over banning its second season as a lesson in what can and cannot be said in Modi’s India.

For example, Amazon Prime now discourages not only figures who share their names with Hindu deities, but also decides to put bold film and TV projects into cold storage.

Meanwhile, other filmmakers are embracing productions to suit the tastes of the BJP, such as dubious historical epics glorifying erstwhile Hindu kings or action films about the Indian army, political dramas, and biopics. All of these products derive from the BJP’s list of corrupt: medieval Muslim rulers, Pakistan, Islamic terrorists, leftists, and opposition parties like the Indian National Congress.

Through Bollywood, India tells the world stories about itself. And many of those stories are now very different, consistent only with right-wing bigotry.

Governments have attempted to control Indian cinema in the past, often through the Central Board of Film Certification, but the BJP’s disdain for Bollywood registers as something deeper.