After two years, Bollywood made a comeback in 2023, riding on Shah Rukh Khan’s coattails

Bollywood-baiters had never had it so good. A young star’s tragic death was used to twist the knife: bad, bad Bollywood! These heartless stars and their stoner pals! The den of nepotism! Corrupting the morals of our impressionable youth! Those were the two years when the failure of a handful of bad Bollywood movies helmed by big-studios-and-stars — Shamshera, Ram Setu, Cirkus, among others—were posited against the mega success of three ‘South’ movies — just look at Pushpa, KGF, RRR, now those are real films — combined with the rise of unbridled, unchecked troll armies, had Bollywood on its knees. With audiences fearful of leaving their homes, forget about entering the theatres, producers refused to release the much-anticipated films which were ready. It was all doom and gloom.

2023 is the year that Bollywood came back. Wait, let me amend that. That’s a facile thing to say for those who do not know any better. The biggest film industry was just hunkering down, waiting in the wings, for the right time, the right vehicle.

On January 25, Shah Rukh Khan turned up in our movie halls as Pathaan.

If I were to say that the republic was waiting to embrace the movie, and by extension, the star who had been vilified round the clock, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration. My 7 am show at the nearby multiplex, almost deserted for the past two or three years, was full of the buzz that accompanies a film that’s destined to be a hit.

There was a reason why Pathaan became an instant success.

It was what we desperately needed at that time: a full-on starry vehicle, a fast-paced spy saga, shiny locations, songs and dances featuring the sensuous Deepika Padukone. And SRK coming at us with everything he had, the pain that he had been going through on personal and professional fronts, leaching into the movie— the guy who had been broken, who had gone through fire, turning his cracks into his secret weapons. He was kintsugied, his mended joints bared but oddly beautiful, laced with an awareness which flared and flamed, burnt and singed.

SRK was back. Those who had been quiet during the months he had been resolutely silent, biding his time with his son in prison on a trumped-up charge, voted with their cash. ‘Bete ko haath laagane se pehle baap se baat kar’was the line that would get the house down in his Jawan, but the audience was anticipating it, welcoming the star back where he belonged.

The thing is, SRK has never gone anywhere. For the last three decades, from the time he did a switcheroo from villain to hero, and spirited his dulhaniya away, this mid-sized dimpled guy with those eyebrows and that mop-top, has been busy cementing his brand of the ishq-wala love which connects seven- to seventy-year-olds. For a generation struggling with the sweeping changes of liberalisation, with all its confusion and exuberance, SRK’s films offered seductive hooks, segueing from such aspirational identifiers as GAP tees and DKNY sweats in teen romances, to exploring wide-spectrum themes in cross-border love stories, and pluralistic sports sagas, which have sadly disappeared into the black hole of narrow nationalism we see around us today. More than anything else, he’s been a poster boy for the post-modern Bollywood romance, which has moved from toplining the misplaced notion of brash stalking to a softer, more grown-up nurturing kind of love.

Sometimes it is not just about a release date. Movies sometimes come at a time when the anxieties besieging a nation have to be acknowledged, and the people need to be healed. Pathaan came at precisely that tipping point, righted the Hindi film industry, and gave us the kind of film we had been missing.

It was a silly, entertaining all-star vehicle, with Salman joining Shah Rukh to whoop it up. Even the most virulent Khan haters were steamrolled by the love that came pouring out while Pathaan was in theatres: it was a declaration from the silent viewers who were tired of being told what to watch, and whom to boycott. It was a call to arms to those who were willing to give themselves up all over again to the joys of kitschy bad Bollywood flicks, which know who we are, and what we stand for. The pushback was remarkable, all the more so because it came at a time when all rebellion seemed to have been tamped in response to an iron-fisted establishment whose motto— if you are not with us, you are against us— had succeeded in cowing swathes of us, or left us on the fence.

It proved all over again, if proof were indeed needed (and perhaps at this time, it was, given the kind of visceral hatred he had been up against) that SRK is beloved. I’ve lost count of the number of people who told me that they couldn’t stand him as an actor, but they loved what he represented, and that they were going to buy a ticket for Pathaan even if they didn’t go for the movie. He knows he is dubbed a ham, but that hasn’t stopped him from becoming a megastar who has grown from playing callow young men who chased reluctant maidens, to a self-aware adult who has not abjectly rolled over when asked to, and who has no difficulty in claiming his age (give me a grizzled SRK any day over the squirmy de-aging we are being promised in Rajkumar Hirani’s forthcoming Dunki), there really is no one quite like him.

In August came Jawan, which was basically SRK telling us, ok, done with Pathaan? Now watch this. ‘This’ was basically a blaring South masala film, which would have ordinarily starred the director Atlee’s muse, Thalapathy Vijay. It is elevated by the bits which SRK uses to raise his voice loud and clear, as a soldier, a citizen, a person who has the right to speak because he pays his taxes. These are as rousing as anything I’ve seen in the movies.

Films which masquerade as political megaphones do get stuck in rhetoric and bombast. Once we had accepted that fact, Jawan was always going to be about a hero climbing into the pulpit, and telling us what’s what. SRK is re-cast again as a patriot, unafraid to call out the injustices being meted out to the little people, the farmers who were being pushed beyond the brink and the evil corporates who were gobbling us up. Jawan has dreary stretches where you feel like throwing something at the screen, but as a text which digs into the crucial problems which impact us, it has a clarity and spine which has gone missing from our mainstream movies. It isn’t, thank you very much, about an animal who makes his mashooqa lick his boots to prove her love for him.

Pathaan rode in, in January. Dunki comes at the end of the year, in which SRK teams up with a director who has been wanting to work with him for a long time, and who has been very successful in making the kind of movies – universal, pan-Indian, which make you laugh and cry at the same time—that Bollywood has forgotten how to make.

Even as I write this, Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s Animal is roaring loudly, and Ranbir Kapoor has finally got a humongous hit that will take him all the way up the box office ladder, but it isn’t a film he will be able to show his daughter with any pride. He might even have to hide it from her. Sunny Deol has used his own brand of hand-pump patriotism to turn Gadar 2 into one of the biggest hits of the year. Ranveer Singh’s brash Rocky has Gucci-d his way into pert Rani’s heart, giving producer-director Karan Johar a genuine hit after a sizable gap. At the end of 2023, big starry Bollywood is buoyant, and raring to roll over into the new year.

Will Dunki be a triumphant hat-trick for SRK? We will see what we’ll see but no one can deny the fact that 2023 is SRK’s year. And no one can take away his mantle as Bollywood’s saviour and chief agent provocateur and spreader of those arms, a star who tells us that love is worth living for. And fighting for.