Read an exclusive excerpt from Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh

For the Shah Rukh fangirl, Hindi movie romance between 2013 and 2015 had become stale... Seated in a cinema hall, watching our hero in action films with fast cars and few women, the anatomy of many Shah Rukh fangirls became frail. Our icon had abandoned us... Anupama Chopra, recalling how Shah Rukh characters were once invariably a lovesick Raj or Rahul, closed her review of his 2013 Chennai Express with the plea, ‘Now come back, Rahul. All is forgiven.’

After his detour into high machismo, our hero would return to us in 2016 with a female director at the helm. He would play a sexy shrink to a young woman. From then on, he would persist in talking to women on-screen and acting in films where women had more than half the share of dialogue. It was a radical departure from most commercial Hindi cinema in which the loud, overbearing presence of a male superstar inevitably drowned out the voices of women.

In the late 2010s, audiences had their pick of niche multiplex films and web series in which women were given room to speak. However, ‘mass’ films with equal female dialogue would no longer rule box-office records. A DDLJ, with tons of women’s voices, was the biggest hit of 1995 and one of the biggest all-time box-office successes. But in 2020, we were back to a box office dominated by loud and proud men. Films on women’s menstrual health would be made with barely any female dialogue. Men would constantly speak for and in place of women. While Hindi film scripts were changing to feature vocal and exciting women, male characters continued to receive a much larger share of humanity and subjectivity while the ladies remained hideously objectified. The films in which women spoke freely and frequently were often those without male superstars. When women’s words were central to the storyline, their characters were usually concepts or causes, rarely complex, fully formed people. They were what Paromita Vohra called ‘a new catalogue of [female] types—badass, ditzy, heroic, victims’. A woman on celluloid is always the Beauty, the Bitch or the Bechari, never even our own muddled desi Bridget Jones.

At the same time, sophisticated multiplex films have relaxed the need for men in the movies to be as charismatic as Shah Rukh or as muscled as Salman. Their plots help an audience appreciate male characters beyond the metric of sexual attractiveness, masculine strength or wealth. They accord a rich interiority to capitalism’s male losers with sympathetic stories about corporate burnouts, elderly men, balding men, unemployed-youth-turned-sperm-donors, coal mafias, gangsters and psychopaths. The new heroes of the multiplex are hardly matinee idols, they’re terrific scripts about the men-next-door. Women, though, are still objects, their sex lives seemingly the only arc of interest. They remain physically present, whether they are wrestling, dancing, performing jauhar, or looking painfully glamorous, but are nearly always silent. At the close of this book amidst a pandemic, I measured how many lines of dialogue women spoke in some of Hindi cinema’s biggest hits. The results were depressing. At the movies, most women remain gorgeous and mute.

Before the pandemic closed down cinema theatres, the highest-grossing Hindi film in 2019 was War, starring Hrithik Roshan and Tiger Shroff. Its contribution to Hindi cinema is surely the mainstreaming of homoerotica. The camera pays lingering tribute to these men, their muscles, their moves and their beauty. Women are incidental to this worshipful tribute to the male physique, which pretends to be a stylish action film with a fleeting interest in the Indian Muslim identity. One woman does appear for a brief post-interval bikini-clad scene and song, dying soon after. Another plays a crucial role in the plot but says almost nothing. Compare this with Shah Rukh’s final release before the pandemic, Zero, which boasted two powerhouse female performances—Katrina Kaif playing a fiercely charismatic, troubled actress and Anushka Sharma playing a scientist. The film has no interest in male heroics and is full of scenes in which these strong women ridicule Shah Rukh’s character for not being able to match up to them. The contrast is made literal by the fact that Shah Rukh’s character is a dwarf. Of course, Khan will always keep us guessing, never allowing me or anyone else to cage him with clichés. His post-pandemic release is being made by the same team that created War.

Shah Rukh isn’t a feminist icon. The overwhelming power of men to dictate the commercial fate of a film will never allow that... But when measuring screen time and dialogue of his biggest hits relative to his contemporaries, Shah Rukh’s films are found to have more time and space for women’s words. Female characters tend to play a more equal part in his oeuvre, perhaps because establishing romantic love or familial harmony requires women to participate more than, say, in a testosterone-laden action drama or a gritty gangster story. Although even in films where he plays criminals or robots, women’s words are central to the plot. And women have much to say about Shah Rukh, from Mumbai to Morocco. He isn’t a feminist icon, but certainly a female one.

(Excerpted with permission from Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh: India’s Lonely Young Women and the Search for Intimacy and Independence, by Shrayana Bhattacharya; published by HarperCollins; 2021)