The Burning Tiger

I

On Independence Day, I was on my way to a friend’s place on Prince Anwar Shah Road, in south Kolkata. As I approached his house, I was struck by a moving mass of people jostling on the road at a distance. I was taken aback. It seemed to me either a carnival or a terrible riot was underway. I headed towards the crowd, rather curiously with a beating heart, almost in half-a-mind to retrace my way to the Prince Anwar Shah crossing and take some other road. I inched towards the crowd and realized that it was particularly concentrated in front of Navina, an old stand-alone cinema hall on Anwar Shah Road. But why? Well, I did not have to wait long. Garlanded life-size cut-outs of Salman Khan were soon gazing at me with intently penetrating eyes of a majestic tiger, ready to pounce on its prey. And a swarm of cheering and jeering young men were engaged in a passionate ritual of hero-worship. 

Men, men, men! It seemed to me that the male desire for Khan had won hands down over the female desire for the brawn hero with soft romantic eyes. Where were the women? They have deliberately stayed away from the carnivalesque ruckus, thereby allowing an intense homoerotic male-bonding, cemented by the collective desire for the ‘roaring’ Khan!  Men had arrived in hoards, in wife-beaters or body-hugging T-shirts, tight jeans and a patta tied around their heads. The masculine energy that flowed was not only restricted to the glistening sweat on their faces and its patch-marks on their shirts, but also in their ribald alacrity to hail the greatness of their hero. I gathered that the ‘First Day First Show’ of Ek Tha Tiger, as all other opening shows of Salman Khan films must have been, was indeed a hypermasculine affair, much in tune with Salman Khan’s screen avatar. In their collective desire for self-identification with Khan’s epic stature, these men also unwittingly betrayed a homoerotic camaraderie: among many other attributes, the desire for Khan’s perfectly sculpted body is perhaps domineering. Salman Khan had originated the trend of using the body to the effect of spectacle since his Karan Arjun (1995) days. Since then, he has often gone shirtless on-screen as well as off-screen, thereby establishing the perfect body as the primary criterion not only for aspiring actors, but even those already doing well. Even the phenomenally successful Shah Rukh Khan had to submit to that demand (Om Shanti Om, 2007), after having reigned at the box-office for fifteen odd years. In any case, whether it’s Salman Khan or John Abraham, the camera loves their bodies and caresses their biceps, triceps, bulging pectoral muscles and perfectly chiseled torso. The gaze is double-edged; since mainstream Hindi has always assumed a preeminently male audience, the gaze cannot be simplistically interpreted as a heterosexual female gaze; it is a queer male gaze too, that simultaneously desires that spectacular body and also aspires to achieve its perfection. 

II

In his last few films in particular, Khan has been performing a certain kind of aggressive masculinity which, for a certain section of the audience, has, indeed, become a prototype of which all other forms of masculinities are but mere approximations: he parades his muscles turning them into a desirable consumer product to be had at the local gymnasium; he destabilizes the corrupt system single-handedly; he dances ‘like a man’, with pelvic thrusts and booty shakes, easily imitable by the roadside tapori in the Ganesh Chaturthi or Durga Puja processions; and he is disarmingly vulnerable, a vulnerability that is a manifestation of innocence. In fact, none of these characteristics have been invented by Salman Khan; Bollywood heroes have always been like that, with the exception of perhaps the sinewy show of which Khan was the originator. But, what is interesting is, just when we were thinking that the superhuman Bollywood hero was dead, Khan reincarnated him in his full glory. After a few debacles and average hits, Salman Khan returned, as it were, with Wanted in 2009 which was his first hit after the sleazy adult comedy No Entry in 2005, where he played a promiscuous middle class man, cheating on his wife without any qualms.  A few flops later Dabaang hit the screen in the middle of 2010, and broke box-office records. The runaway success of Dabaang brought in its wake a few other films on the same line: Ready and Bodyguard released back-to-back in 2011, and to some extent replicated the success of Dabaang. Although frowned upon by the critics as mindless and bawdy, by 15 August 2011, when Ek Tha Tiger released, a new hero was already born. The phrase “Ek tha…” (recalling the beginning of folk/fairy tales) in the title of the latest Yash Raj film attributes to him the status of a legendary figure and situates him in a timeless zone where all mythological heroes belong.  Naming him after the national animal, the title of the film cashes in on the cultural symbol of the tiger, as the King of the forest, the most stately, dignified and potent or perhaps the most dabaang (fearless) of all beasts. This new Salman Khan avatar, again, has its antecedent in the South Indian superhero whose salability in a pan-Indian market had been already ratified by his immense popularity on television. Tamil and Telegu films, dubbed in Hindi, have been earning noteworthy TRP since the day Sony Entertainment’s Set-Max started to run these films. At present, these films are often aired in prime-time slots. It is with the Salman Khan films (and more recently some of Akshay Kumar) that he has gained a national status.

The two blockbusters Hum Aapke Hain Kaun…! (1994) and Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jaayenge (1995) sounded the death knell of the action hero, and gave birth to the rich, sophisticated, foreign-educated, self-indulgent upper middle class hero whose most recognizable ambition in life was to soak himself in consumerist abundance. However, the action hero lived on in B/C grade Bollywood films. Several such films with the 80s superstar Mithun Chakraborty in the lead, made on an alarmingly paltry budget, did immensely good business in the interiors. In the cities too, in a few single-screen theatres catering mostly to the urban poor, these films ran to full houses. The action hero was still relevant to those who had not palpably felt the impact of the economic liberalization, despite their considerably easy access to mobile phones and satellite television. But in A-grade Bollywood flicks, he was sufficiently dislodged and replaced by the new middle class consumerist hero.  These were the “India Shining” years of the BJP reign, with the urban middle class tasting the fruits of the economic liberalization and salivating their way to compulsive consumerism, scarcely considering its fatal side effects. There was apparently nothing to be angry about; it was time to revel in the goodness of ‘good life’. The action hero barely had a cause to fight for.

Despite its brazenly extravagant attempt to sell the image of a shining India in the 2004 election campaign, the BJP lost out to Congress, by which time, the negative effects of economic liberalization had started to make visible impact on everyday life. Excessive price of essential goods that rose uncontrollably made life difficult for the masses. Besides, militant Hinduism had reached its crescendo, and communal riots between the Hindus and the Muslims achieved a new benchmark of unspeakable violence in the bloody Godhra riots in 2002. Saffron had already become the color of terror for many. The 2004 elections saw the UPA government, led by the Indian National Congress, coming to power. Although it was re-elected in 2009, under the UPA government things have barely improved. While demand for Gorkhaland continues to plague the beautiful hills of West Bengal, the demand for Telengana in Andhra Pradesh sporadically gathers fuel leading to terrible pogroms. On the other hand, Maoist rebellion against the State has more often than not proved devastating, and largely beyond control. The troubled water the country has slipped into has been further contaminated by a staggering number of scams that have taken place in the past three years. Corruption which was always there, acquired the status of evil personified as it were, when Anna Hazare launched a non-violent anti-corruption movement in the Gandhian mode amid much fanfare and media hoopla on 5 April 2011. The clarion call was answered by many, and Hazare became a hero overnight. There was, finally, a cause to fight for. Although the Anna Hazare movement lost wind within a few months, the movement has in any case, made the most unimpressionable and apathetic Indian, aware of a generally bad state of things.

 

Under such circumstances, it is quite natural for Bollywood to construct a messiah-like hero of superhuman dimensions. He is not as intense as the Angry Young Man of the seventies, born in the wake of the Emergency, or as volatile and brooding as the anti-hero of the early nineties, a product of the gory communal riots that tore the country asunder. Rather, he has affiliations with Superman or Batman, and demands of his audience unwarranted suspension of disbelief. His is a literally physical action that seeks to destabilize the system and purge it of its impurities almost magically. He is more brawn than brainy, and acts on his impulse. He caters to the desire of the modern Indian youth for whom physical action is more desirable than intellectual exercise; the Indian youth, in general, doesn’t want to put to use his rational faculty, and is easily seduced by surface gloss. Seriously lacking in historical knowledge, and more importantly, having no ideology to adhere to, the current breed of young people are much too frivolous and shallow. They neither have time nor the desired knowledge to get to the root of things. For instance, they know there is something called corruption that is ruining our nation, but very few takes interest in unraveling the causes behind it. The new action hero who barely cares for logic and acts impetuously incarnates the ethos with which the majority of the Indian youth identifies. Nonetheless, he alienates the multiplex audience to a certain extent as testified by the box-office collections; but, for a section of the urban audience too, he is an amusing ‘time-pass’, who does not demand of them painstaking attention and, therefore, offers a delightful break after a trying week. However, he is gaily celebrated by the urban poor, and in small towns and farther interiors. And this section of the audience is a numerical majority in India, and therefore, of tremendous consequence to the producers. The first day collections have of late become determinant of the film’s fate at the box-office; and none of these films have significantly disappointed their makers in this respect. No matter how infuriatingly illogical he might appear to some, the Tiger as he is aptly called, will continue to rule. That he still sustains his popularity is clearly attested by the carnivalesque celebrations on Prince Anwar Shah Road on his opening day.