That someone from the increasingly vacuous world of Bollywood has emerged as a public activist-intellectual is itself rather creditable
— Rajdeep Sardesai, about Shabana Azmi in the Hindustan Times (September 4, 2008)
That the film industry is full of simple people, who create popular entertainment and make money, is a popular notion, especially in Delhi. This intellectual snobbery extends to rubbishing films without watching them, being patronising about someone who chooses acting for a profession, doubting his or her intellectual capacity because “they run around trees for a living”.
It is this attitude towards the film world which makes it susceptible to what you see happening to My Name is Khan. For those who came in late, in the recent bidding for the Indian Premier League (IPL), none of the team owners bid for any Pakistani player by tacit understanding. However, later, IPL team owner and actor Shah Rukh Khan said that he would have liked to have bought a Pakistani player. For saying this, his film is now being targeted by the Shiv Sena.
Much of this aggression stems from our generic attitude towards actors — how dare these dimwits have an opinion?
The fact is that the popular film industry has produced actors such as Balraj Sahni, Shobhana Samarth, Amitabh Bachchan, Naseeruddin Shah, Aamir Khan, Konkana Sen-Sharma, Anupam Kher among dozens of others. None of them can be called dimwitted. They have a mind and an opinion. Most usually face professional consequences for having one. Balraj Sahni, for instance, believed in socialism and was arrested for it. Aamir Khan has spoken for Medha Patkar’s Narmada Bachao Andolan. Now most of his films have trouble in Gujarat.
It is funny, but when a painter or a chef makes a lot of money from his craft, he is intelligent and creative. But actors have traditionally been lampooned for low IQ. The craft requires an intelligence, skill and patience that most of us don’t possess. Try standing in front of a hundred people, some of who are having tea or shouting instructions while you are doing an intense scene — maybe telling your (on screen) girlfriend how much you love her or, even worse, making love to her.
The film industry in India is what it is because it represents, in some ways, the idea of India. It is an inclusive, experimental, creative and liberal, potpourri. That is what makes for successful film (or creative) businesses. That is why the Indian film business is the only one perhaps that has survived Hollywood’s smothering presence that has killed almost all local film industries in the world. Many countries such as France and China have import quotas on films to protect local industries. India has none. Yet, unlike them, we have a thriving local film business.
India is perhaps one of a handful of countries where the big global studios — notorious for not investing in local content — have ventured into production. Disney, Fox, Warner, Sony et al have in the last three years either produced or are producing mainstream Indian language films. They may be able to give India a push into global markets. Indian firms have had patchy success there. They lack the distribution and marketing muscle required for a global release, a game the studios have mastered.
That is what Fox Star, a part of News Corporation, brings to the table for My Name is Khan. The company has picked up the worldwide distribution rights of the film. Its inability to find a decent release in India will be even more terrible given that it is one of the few really mass market films this year. 3 Idiots was the last one. In an industry struggling to find a hit, My Name is Khan was destined to make money. It is the first Shah Rukh film since the 2008-starrer Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi and his first one with Kajol in almost a decade. Khan and Kajol have delivered some of the biggest hits in Indian cinema. It was one of the “most looked forward to” films of 2010.
Now if only Shah Rukh Khan had stuck to the script and talked like the vacuous actor he is supposed to be, none of this would have happened.
