Opinion Into the SRK multiverse
Here, desires and anxieties of a generation are addressed in an adored figure
There’s a difference between these actors playing two characters in a film and Shah Rukh’s tuning of doubleness — a repetition of dialogues, poses and music from his older films creates the sense of a different kind of double, someone we’ve met in his filmography already, who’s invisible in the film except as a continuation of the past, made manifest through a nod, a hint, a ‘mudra’, even a synecdoche. 
By now we know that there is not one but at least two Shah Rukh Khans. It’s the ethic of our times — the “buy one get one free” and hustle economy — that compels us to always be more than one, to be present in two places simultaneously, often even in different time zones and historical periods. Shah Rukh saw it before others — the need for a double, even a doppelganger, to emphasise one’s existence in the world. Saying something once isn’t enough, one must do it again — a life dependent on repetition; even America needs to be made great again.
“Continuity” is an expectation from actors, that they appear the same in a scene even if it is shot many months apart. Shah Rukh moved this from the character to the actor — he repeats a pose or a phrase from an older film in a new one, so that the utterance comes to have the character of a quote. The reasons might range from brand building to the purposive sketching of a lineage, both of which often derive from emphases provided by repetition. The arms thrown out in his signature gesture in film after film are meant to massage our memory, and, through it, calm us with an assurance of constancy. That is the difference between Leonardo DiCaprio’s outstretched arms on the bow of the most famous ship in maritime history — his need to declare that he was “the king of the world”, a pose that hasn’t been repeated in any film since Titanic (1997) — and Shah Rukh’s arms opened wide, for the first time in Deewana (1992), repeated gently for the next three years until its culmination in Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (1995), from when it began growing into the equivalent of an autograph.
Other actors have played more double roles than Shah Rukh — Kamal Haasan supposedly 20 times, Mithun Chakraborty 19, Jeetendra 16, Amitabh Bachchan 15. Shah Rukh has played a double role nine times. There’s a difference between these actors playing two characters in a film and Shah Rukh’s tuning of doubleness — a repetition of dialogues, poses and music from his older films creates the sense of a different kind of double, someone we’ve met in his filmography already, who’s invisible in the film except as a continuation of the past, made manifest through a nod, a hint, a mudra, even a synecdoche. What we take pleasure in is the creation of a “Shah Rukh, Again” multiverse where generational desire and anxiety can be condensed and addressed in the figure of a recognisable and dependable person. Shah Rukh becomes a candle placed between two parallel mirrors, past and present — the result is an infinite number of Shah Rukhs.
Shah Rukh Khan — or Shah Rukh Khans, to be precise — is a condition of 21st century life. Hugh Behm-Steinberg noticed this, not in SRK, but in Taylor Swift. In his short story ‘Taylor Swift’, Behm-Steinberg peoples it with Swift clones who do the narrator’s chores, sleep in different crates, and party, while waiting for “the real Taylor Swift” to send them a limo to take them to her “tower in New York City”. This need to clone oneself in endless instalments to stay alive commercially, as true of Swift as it is of Shah Rukh, is turned into an aesthetic choice — Swift’s new album The Life of a Showgirl has songs that seem to pay homage to her older albums like, say, Pathaan (2023) gathers Shah Rukh filmic memorabilia. It’s a version of the capitalist memory game: One must educate one’s audience and a largely amnesiac world about the different “Eras” (the title of Swift’s tour) in one’s career. It’s also part of the fame toolkit — that we praise ourselves so as to compel the world to praise us. “I’m the best, I’m the best, I am the best,” now the anthem of fake-it-till-you-make-it, declared with a kind of red-bullishness by Shah Rukh in the first year of this millennium, has become the marketing strategy of corporations, countries, communities and conmen.
We live in this world now — where there’s little to tell the film star from the fan: SRK plays both the worshipper and the worshipped in Fan (2016). We’ll have to survive as clones.
Roy, a poet and writer, is associate professor, Ashoka University. Views are personal
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