The failure of “My Name is Khan”

Karan Johar’s over-hyped film My Name is Khan (MNIK) has dealt with a challenging subject – a subject that is extremely serious, pensive and political. The film has attempted to focus on a number of crucial socio-political issues and tried to make a humane statement concerning racial-religious discrimination and stereotyping. But the wide scope offered by the subject was purposely diminished by the director-producers of the film. The story of Rizwan Khan ended up being another feel-good film depicting Bollywood style heroism, romance and eye-wetting brash emotion – all embedded into a fairy tale arrangement. Based on a political subject, the film deliberately moves out of the political arena to engender flimsy humanism and fails terribly to emerge as a politically conscious film. A pseudo-real, fantasy like milieu and an escapist approach to life are the weakest aspects of the film. The self-styled “sensitive” performance by Shah Rukh Khan in the role of Rizwan, burdened with make believe mannerisms, have not only failed to cover-up these shortcomings but has actually become an integral part of it. By exaggerating on the “just a good man in love” side of the character, Shah Rukh’s celebrity presence has diluted the sternness of the subject as well as the film. A hoopla manufactured by the infamous idiots of the Thackeray clan surrounding MNIK’s release, the grand presence of Shah Rukh Khan and Kajol – super-hit duo of Indian mainstream cinema, the arty efforts of a bubbly director or the genuine technical excellence could not lift MNIK from its mediocre rank.

Good people, bad people

There is little doubt that the September 11 attacks were a huge turning point for millions of Muslims living in America. Impact of this catastrophic event had generated a significant amount of hostility towards the Muslims in general and had sharply polarized the American society down to street level. Islam and the Muslims turned into a subject of grave concern for the American state and became an important political issue. Though anti-Muslim bias and prejudices had existed before September 11, the attitude to connect the Muslim community to terrorism and perceiving the entire community as a threat, as a grave security risk, has intensified drastically following the incident. Post September 11, it became more difficult to be a Muslim in America. Non Muslim Americans became haunted by Islamophobia – a common parlance diversely applied today to define the discrimination faced by Muslims or to convey anti-Muslim sentiments. The response of common non-Muslim Americans towards Muslim minorities and their anti-Islamic hostile attitudes against them were also fuelled by certain sections of the mainstream media and political establishment, which had frequently used the term and popularised it among the scared masses. Muslims living in America including the women faced religiously motivated harassment; the Arabs were particularly singled out as objects of suspicion and became victims of official and societal discrimination, especially the younger Muslims who are more exposed to anti-Muslim bias than their parents. They were told to become “good citizens”, instructed to integrate into the multi-religious, multi-cultured American society, reprimanded for exhibiting hate and violence and were strictly warned to keep away from radical activities and extremist influences. The first targets of the American government’s anti-terrorism overdrive were obviously the softest ones – the immigrant Muslims who has arrived in the “land of freedom” virtually from all over the world.

The ambitious screenplay of MNIK had tried hard to depict this turbulent time and the condition of American Muslims. The film opens with the awful airport frisking scene where villain-like security men hounded the hero Rizwan Khan as a terror suspect because he was found to mutter verses from the Holy Koran while standing in a queue. Khan is portrayed in the film as a devoted and duty bound believer. In the backdrop of riot ridden Bombay he has learned from his mother that there are only two kinds of people in the world – good people and bad people. One holds a stick and the other holds a lollipop. In the entire film, Rizwan Khan actually tries to establish himself as the one who belongs to the lollipop holding “good people” class. In the film he is depicted as an extremely devoted Muslim, a loving husband, a caring papa, an innate humanist and ultimately a “good citizen” of America. The film has overstuffed a lot of issues and mishandling them badly. But at the end, it remained principally focused on establishing the “good citizen” aspect of the hero. The director was abetted by an oversimplifying attitude, twisting and fantasising the grim subject into a droopy romantic tale.

American Muslim, Bollywood Muslim

By law, the Census Bureau of America does not count adherents of a particular religious identification. Hence, the account of how many Muslims live in America differs widely in various estimates – from 1.3 to 7 million. This population with its vastly different ethnicity, culture, race and sectarian diversity have constituted a microcosm of the Muslim world. Immigration wave in America has increased rapidly after the American immigration law was reformed in 1965. Between 1989 and 2004, 15.5 million legal immigrants have entered the country. The number of Muslim immigrants is little less than one percent of America’s national population but constitutes the majority of the total Muslim population. Two-third of them is foreign-born, coming from South Asia, Iran, and the Arabic-speaking countries. The single largest group of Muslim immigrants among them are from the three South Asian countries of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Destitution, ethnic- religious discrimination, class repression, Islamism or anti-Islamism and war are some of the major reasons why Muslim immigrants seek refuge from their respective countries to “smell freedom” in the paradise of America.

All immigrants are not necessarily from the socio-economically marginalized class. A large number of them belong to the wealthy and middle class elite group. They are enticed by the candour of American life, the span of opportunities for a better livelihood, superior professional facilities, socio-political freedom and economic rewards. Immigrants in general are aggressive job seekers and hard-working due to their economical motivations. Likewise, immigrant Muslims are also inclined to resolutely focus on their professional and entrepreneurial careers and many of them possess good educational standards. As a result of these qualities they have achieved considerable economic success over time. Muslims in America today appears to be more educated and affluent than the country’s national average. This affluent economic situation could also be a vital reason behind the post September 11 anti-Muslim bias rather than their religious believe. After September 11, the employment-population ratio among Muslims had declined considerably. The arrogant anti-terrorism policy of the government under President Bush has caused enough humiliation and suffering to Muslim communities living across America. Race and ethnicity became deciding factors for opening an investigation against the Muslims. Mosques were raided to find out suspected terrorists. Surveillance and detention without warrant became a commonplace affair that had created an aura of endless fear within the community.

Where does Rizwan Khan fit here? He arrives in San Francisco after his mother’s death to live with his younger brother and his compassionate wife. Though Rizwan has a super ability to repair any broken machines from his early days, the jealous brother forced him to accept the job of an herbal cosmetics salesman. Rizwan is not economically motivated and dislikes his job. Instead, he gets more involved and occupied in winning the love of a Hindu hairstylist named Mandira. In fact, the director is not interested to focuses on the privations and struggles an immigrant usually comes across in a foreign country, particularly if the immigrant is a mentally challenged person. But privation does not sell! The film is thus packaged with lollipop emotion of love and longing, a utopia of its own kind, far away from the hard reality an immigrant might face in a foreign land. Rizwan Khan belongs to the moderate section of Muslims but at the same time he is also a dutiful practitioner of the laws of Islam – carrying a handful of pebbles to throw upon the devil, muttering scriptures and offering namaz wearing his prayer cap. If read in a different way, one might discover that Rizwan Khan’s religious behaviours are fairly deliberate, and at the same time exceedingly provocative.

One must not forget that Rizwan Khan is actually a Bollywood Muslim in America. Bollywood has its own unique way of characterising Muslims, even in the changed times. Syed Ali Mujtaba has observed in an article that, “Bollywood might be coming good in reaching out to the world but when it comes to creating Muslims on screen it’s closed to a dangerous time warp. Cinematic subtleties, community's sensitivity and societal realism are all thrown overboard. What quickly lapped up is, dirty stereotypes and reckless cliche while sketching Muslim characters.” In the same article he has further noted that, “no one likes to disturb the apple cart of set formulas that Bollywood mindlessly follow while making movies.” (Source)

Bush, Obama and Rizwan Khan

At least on one occasion George W Bush was absolutely sincere when he stated that, “the world has changed after September the 11th”. The twin tower attacks had significantly changed America’s relation and dealing with the world, particularly with the antagonistic Islamic nations. Just four weeks after the attacks, the “war president” and war hawks within his “war administration” had unleashed their infamous “war on terror” and successively destroyed the two sovereign countries Afghanistan and Iraq in cold blood. Although for eighteen long years, from 1980 to 1998, successive American governments were romancing the Taliban in Afghanistan. The attack on Iraq in particular, had nothing to do with the attack on the twin towers except oil interests of America’s business mafia. According to the book Plan of Attack by Bob Woodward, the CIA had already concluded that the hard-nut Saddam Hussein could not be removed from power except through a war. This CIA finding along with “pressure from advocates of war inside the administration” led to the secret planning for military action against Iraq. The September 11 incidence made it politically feasible for the coterie to stupefy public opinion and launch a “pre-emptive attacks against countries believed to be a serious threat to the United States”.

America’s war against Afghanistan has helped the film’s storyline to advance further. Rizwan and Mandira Khan’s American neighbour Mark, a journalist by profession, gets killed in Afghanistan while covering the war. The death of Mark changes the attitude of his grieving son Reese who develops racial hatred against his once dear friend Sam – Rizwan Khan’s sweet step-son. Sam gets involved in a brawl with him and dies of his injuries. A devastated Mandira holds Rizwan culpable for her son’s death. She indicts her husband that Sam was dead only because “his name was Khan”. The distressed and irate wife then tells her husband to depart from her life till he is able to ensure the people and the President of America that he is not a terrorist. Dumped by Mandira, Rizwan starts tracking after President Bush across the country to notify him: “My name is Khan, and I’m not a terrorist”.

Although the Afghanistan war is a vital resource to unfold MNIK's storyline, it is surprising that the name of Iraq was never mentioned in the film. When Rizwan Khan was travelling around the country to “fight against the disability that exists in the world”, American military was invading Iraq on phoney grounds “to free its people, and to defend the world from grave danger”, bombarding the country and its people into pieces. No “weapons of mass destruction” was ever unearthed from Iraq; no al-Qaeda–Saddam Hussein nexus could ever be proved. America’s Iraq misadventure is completely ignored in the film. Instead, the filmmakers were keen to concentrate on Rizwan Khan’s ultimate goal of fixing the broken relation with his beloved wife. They were less concerned about America’s corporate and military greed. The Iraq war was too insignificant an issue for them to be bothered about.

During his long journey across America, Rizwan Khan lands in a poor African-American neighbourhood in Georgia and finds refuge and console from an affectionate woman, Mama Jenny, who has lost her solider son in Afghanistan. Thus, in one stroke an African-American and an Indian immigrant’s grief becomes one and the same. Sharing the common grief, Rizwan joins the chorus in Mama Jenny’s community church to sing the civil rights anthem We Shall Overcome. From here the story rolls faster to its desired end. Rizwan Khan gets arrested while trying to meet Bush and is tortured in jail as a terror suspect, gets noticed by Indian-American journalists who put him on national news which Senator Obama watches with deep interest. In a mosque he confronts a jihadi doctor, vehemently opposes his devilish views by throwing pebbles at him and immediately informs the FBI. The film has to confirm that in spite of everything Rizwan is essentially a “good citizen” of America! He even performs a superman act to dramatically appear as a saviour at Mama Jenny’s hurricane devastated village to repair the lives of the devastated dwellers. The media follows and make a hero out of him. All of a sudden a disciple of the jihadi doctor stabs him in front of his repentant wife, accusing him for betrayal. But typically, he survives in style.

Rizwan Khan finally succeeds to deliver his message to the President of America. Not to Bush but to the newly elected Barak Hussein Obama who promptly assures him that “he is not a terrorist”. Here the director has clearly made a statement by projecting Obama as a responsive President against Bush. This is a loose statement and one should not read too much from it. The Obama effect or the colour of his skin might have also inspired the director and screenwriter to give prominence to the African-Americans and favorably linking Rizwan with them in the film.

This focal point seems to be essential for a film which is marketed and distributed by Fox STAR Entertainment, a joint venture between Twentieth Century Fox and STAR. Trade news has suggested that MNIK is selling extremely well across the globe through its lollipop message to “repair the world with love”. In America it has “turned out to be the largest weekend grosser Bollywood film ever”. (Source) The film has earned Rs 150 crore from its first week of release in India and abroad.

Everyone looks good against the pathological liar and hypocrite George W Bush. But what are those steps the populist Obama is taking that are significantly different from Bush policies? This is the pertinent question which doesn’t have an easy answer. And the problem with MNIK is that, it has not even attempted to raise any pertinent question. The world has gradually started to taste Barak Obama’s “audacity of hope”. “I think people are dazzled by Obama's rhetoric,” observed eminent historian Howard Zinn who has passed away recently, “and that people ought to begin to understand that Obama is going to be a mediocre president – which means, in our time, a dangerous president – unless there is some national movement to push him in a better direction.” (Source)

Rain Man syndrome

The makers of MNIK were definitely aware of the huge success of Barry Levinson’s 1988 Hollywood film Rain Man where Dustin Hoffman gave a fabulous performance as an autistic savant. To authentically portray the autistic-like traits of his character, Shah Rukh Khan spoke with an emotionless intoning voice, walked in mincing steps, always has his head tilting sideways and never makes eye contact with his addressee – not even in romantic scenes. All these mannerisms can’t help but remind us about Hoffman’s performance as Raymond Babbitt in Rain Man. A critic has objected about comparing Hoffman and Shah Rukh’s performance. The comparison, according to the critic, is “childish and naïve” because “Hoffman plays a highly gifted autistic savant while Khan is just a good man, in love, who happens to have Asperger’s Syndrome”. (Source) This point of view is certainly not of a film critic. It can only be a humble opinion by an ardent fan of Bollywood's “de facto super-star”.

Depicting the hero Rizwan Khan with Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism spectrum disorder, did not really help to carry any lofty message except for raising high-pitch sympathy and emotion for the character in the audience’s mind. The idea to portray the hero as an autistic is basically a discreet commercial formula applied by the makers of MNIK. People with Asperger’s have significant difficulties in social interaction and communication which includes “a failure to develop friendships or to seek shared enjoyments or achievements with others”. Throughout the film, Rizwan Khan acted quite the opposite. Just like a regular Bollywood hero, he had absolutely no problem to stalk and woo the single-mother heroine, to become close and friendly with her son and develop a deep affectionate relationship with an African-American family in up-country Georgia. Here, the director Karan Johar and his screenwriter Shibani Bhatija’s typical Bollywood mindset have prevailed. They have deliberately twisted the basic aspects of the disorder to fit them into a popular Bollywood schema. Asperger’s syndrome became a marketing tool to sell the film. Carried away by this fantasizing feint of MNIK, a mainstream critic has claimed that the film “uses familiar devices to create new meaning”. (Source)

The film has indeed created a “new meaning” of king-size profiteering by effectively exploiting many disabilities of the post-modern world to achieve record-breaking box office success.

NYT image courtesy: brothersjuddblog.com

MNIK poster courtesy: filmicafe.com

Reassessing 'Agantuk' - Satyajit Ray’s final statement as an artist

In the year 1991 Satyajit Ray made Agantuk (The Stranger), his last film before his death in April 1992. Here, Ray made a unique attempt to convey his annoyance about the materialistic quest of modern civilization through his characteristic storytelling style. The film depicts how the protagonist uncle Manomohan Mitra’s sudden landing into a conventional milieu of hosts made a panicky effect on them and exposed their priggish pride as a sham. The uncle was initially suspected as a fraud and later assumed to be a person with an insular objective to ‘fill his empty pockets’. In fact the depiction in the film turns into a near perfect surgical analysis of not only the benevolent protagonist but his mean-minded middle class hosts. It uncovered a terrible status of the modern urban middle class – acutely selfish and self centered, extremely money driven, always worried about security and hypocrite to the core. When at the end, taking account of his host’s ‘hospitality’, the altruistic uncle simply leaves the million dollar cheque of his inherited money as a small message ‘of little or no value’ for them, it falls like a slap on the face of the middle class smugness. The only member of the host family who was totally unsuspicious about Manomohan from the beginning was his grandnephew - the host’s little son. He was the first to convincingly declare that his grandfather is not a fake but genuine. The child has not yet been infected by the synthetic worldview of his parents and is yet to become a slave of conventional habits. His innocent and keen observations of his grandfather were the only one which was without any prejudices.

In many ways Agantuk is an inciting film. Though there is a genuine doubt if at all the grungy middle class can really think today in the way Ray wanted them to think. The basic theme is an intellectual soul searching for a re-discovery of the lost human values. It bluntly focuses on the vices of the post-modern world. The reckless immorality of the elite class, their greed for material possessions is harshly criticized. A ‘civilized’ person was defined as the person who can wipe out an entire population with lethal weapon by just pressing a button but has awfully forgotten how to embrace an alien stranger! The contradictions of high-rise and rickshaw pullers, NASA and ‘NESHA’ (drug addiction), technology and organized religion, the phenomenal decay of principles and values, the deep rooted systemic corruption and the death of curiosity are among some of the dark hidden corners of civilization that Ray has scornfully declared in Agantuk as ‘symbols of civilization’. How can the tangibility of a person's identity be proved through a passport in a fraudulent world? Who is civilized and who is savage? Class, caste and religion, values and prejudices, politics and power really have no place in the concrete humanity and morality that Ray has articulated throughout the film. Through his quest and vast experience of life Manomohan has recognized the brotherhood of Man which is beyond any country, language, cast or religion and free of any form of identity crisis. Ray’s own beliefs become clear when he speaks through Manomohan that, “I do not believe anything that divides Man – religion does it, and organized religion does it certainly. For the same reason I do not believe in caste…” According to him, caste and religion in the present form is only spreading hate and dividing Man. Technological achievements may well become counter-productive to provoke blatant greed. Modern civilization boasts on the achievements of science but forgets that it was the Neolithic age when Man had already made most of the indispensable inventions crucial for his survival.

Agantuk has two discern layers. The upper layer of the film deals with the problems of the urban middle class morals. This layer is relatively easy to recognize while viewing the film. In this layer Ray is mercilessly probing the harmful effects of money, the artificiality of values, the idiocy of war, the emptiness of an acquisitive worldview and the absurdity of identity. But there is also another deeper and subtle layer that exists side by side with the upper layer which apparently looks abstract. It deals with a much wider gamut of pertinent issues. This layer is inciting the viewer to position him/her in front of the history of human race to re-discover the natural Man in relation to his social state.

Honestly speaking, the anthropological aspects of the film were not Ray’s own. He had often spoken about how Agantuk was inspired by the thinking of the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. In his works Lévi-Strauss had firmly stressed that the mind and intelligence of the primitive savage people were certainly not inferior to civilized people. The universe of the primitives and of the civilized is different due to the approach in which primitive and civilized people conceptualized their world. The savage mind according to Lévi-Strauss is equally logical ‘in the same sense and the same fashion’ as the civilized minds and therefore no negative value could be attributed to it.

In his memoir Tristes Tropiques, Lévi-Strauss had revealed that in every part of the world and in every forms of society, whether savage or civilize, human beings has always followed its own styles and methods of thinking and has structured unlimited social systems for themselves. Every society is a product of the inescapable norms of these systems. The systems originate from the human thought process and then are applied in real life practices. The application of systems to reach the objectives of life might differ in time and space according to the cultural values of a specific society. This diversity is caused mainly by the different thought processes and its conclusion which evokes from the diverse reality of a particular time. The physical world is approached and conceptualized by the savage thought process in a supremely concrete way where the point of view originates from the sensible qualities of the savage mind. On the other end, civilized humans apply a supremely abstract method in their thought process which is derived from the formal properties of their civilized minds.

Whenever the strangeness of the primitive world is unintelligible to the people of the civilized world, the reality of the primitive people is viewed by them as ridiculous and disgusting. Frustrated by the inability to comprehend the culture and values remote from them, the primitive reality becomes insignificant, a ‘vanished reality’. This ignorance then becomes an excuse for the modern mechanistic civilization to gradually trap, overcome and finally destroy the radically different society of the primitives. As Lévi-Strauss has pointed out, human societies or individual human beings never create absolutely but “choose certain combinations from a repertory of ideas which it should be possible to reconstitute.” The values and social norms of the primitives are therefore important. To understand another system one needs to be tolerant, reflective and curious. Sadly, the mechanistic civilization by and large has lost these qualities.

Lévi-Strauss has asserted that, “Certain social groups must be adjudged superior to ourselves, if the comparison rests upon their success in reaching objectives comparable to our own…” The phenomenal evolution of human beings from anthropoid apes to modern man is the greatest evidence of this success. Certain civilizations of the past knew quite well how best to solve the same problems which the modern civilized society is still struggling to solve today. If one can diversify the field of investigation into different societies it will “eventually become plain that no human society is fundamentally good: but neither is any of them fundamentally bad; all offer their members certain advantages…” Cannibalism is considered to be the most horrible, disgusting and ‘uncivilized’ of all savage practices. But according to Lévi-Strauss, “…no society is proof, morally speaking, against the demands of hunger. In times of starvation men will eat literally anything, as we lately saw in the Nazi extermination camps.” By looking from outside one could be easily tempted to distinguish two opposing types of society. But once one had “lived as they live, and eaten as they eat, one well knew what hunger could be, and how the satisfaction of that hunger brought not merely repletion, but happiness itself.” Every form of society thus has its own impurity within itself that “finds outlet in elements of injustice, cruelty, and insensitivity.” Societies which seem to be brutal may turn out, to be reasonably humane and benevolent when examined from another point of view. By nature, no society is perfect. Claiming one form of society as superior in its relation to all the others is thus a shameful stupidity. In Agantuk, the representation of the Bison of Altamira convincingly explains this point.

In a most bizarre way, the honest provocation generated by Ray in the film has stirred his detractors. He is criticized as an ‘armchair liberal functioning as a simple humanist’ who is placing his ‘hopes and disillusionment on some grass-root cultural activity’ and on the innocence of children. Is he not oversimplifying social reality by viewing it as an ‘individual vs. society conflict’? Is he not an old fashioned, anti-progressive artist under a humanist cloak trying to spread pessimism? Do not forget that Ray was accused by similar criticism for romanticizing India’s poverty for foreign consumption in his seminal work Pather Panchali. These are stupid arguments essentially stimulated to achieve solace from envious intellectual melancholy of the present time and its flatulence from indigested modernity.

Ray did not profess for the primitive form of society which many of his critics thought he did. He has simply chosen a middle path where Shakespeare, Tagore, Marx and Freud can equally contribute along with the experience and values of primitive ancestors. While he has harshly criticized the war mentality of the civilized world, similarly he has disapproved the tribal custom of polygamy. His intention was to raise relevant issues from a certain perspective which can stir his audience to look differently. As a genuine artist, Ray did not intend to show the solution but tried to guide the audience to find one. Agantuk assists to shift the focus of the civilized world towards re-evaluating its root.

Similarly, Ray has definitely not spoken about any individual vs. society conflict in the film. He got the fundamental idea from Lévi-Strauss to put up incisive interrogations on society and culture as a whole. Is it possible to take an unbiased view of customs and ways of life distant from one’s own? Is it possible to doubt the rightness or naturalness of the customs of the civilized society instead of taking it for granted? Is it possible to find a middle way between the primitive and modern values? How to find elements from other societies and make use of them that will help the civilized world to reform its own customs? How to gather experiences from a remote culture and get enriched by them? Is it possible to unravel what in the present nature of Man is original, and what is artificial? Is it possible to re-discover the natural Man in his relation to the social state he belongs to? Even if we believe, how do we prove that other societies may not be better than our own?

The level of depth inscribed in the oeuvre of Satyajit Ray’s films is unique. In the age of the banality of Slumdog Millionaire and the hoopla surrounding an overcooked myth of Bollywood’s theory of culture, it is worth talking about Ray and his phenomenal artistic mastery.

Altamira Bison image: chenzhaofu.cn

Remembering Ritwik Ghatak: 32 years after his death

Ritwik Ghatak was once diagnosed as a patient suffering from duel personality. This was the time when he was frequently been admitted to hospitals as a result of his relentless drinking and eccentric lifestyle. An utterly shattered man, he passed away on 6 February 1976 at the age of 51. His admirers recall that he looked thirty years older than his actual age. They also speak about his strange nature to ‘allow mean and vicious people to hurt him repeatedly’ and ‘to hurt those who loved him the most and tried to help him’. In his swansong film Jukti Takko Aar Gappo made in 1974, Ritwik in a honest way tried to portrait himself through the protagonist Neelkantha Bagchi, the name suggesting the Hindu god Shiva, who according to Hindu legend had acquired the name ‘neelkantha’ or ‘blue throat’ after swallowed all the poisons of the world during the churning of the ocean. Similar to Ritwik, Neelkantha was also a middle class leftist intellectual but unorthodox, battered and isolated by the mainstream left and the society in general. His demeanor alienated him from his family and friends but by the sparkling insights, high optimism for life and honesty to the core, Neelkantha in many ways resembles Ritwik.