Does the success of the three Khans (Shah Rukh, Salman and Aamir) in Bollywood suggest that Indians are inherently secular unless manipulated to act otherwise?”
This is a question a woman asked me for a weekly podcast that I have begun doing on a website. It is something that I have often thought about and, quite frankly, never been able to figure out conclusively. A variation of this is something that I am often asked when I am in Pakistan, where there is less exposure to Hindus, particularly in Punjab. The editor/cricket administrator/politician Najam Sethi once observed that in Bollywood romances, if there was a Hindu-Muslim angle to the story, for instance in Mani Ratnam’s film Bombay, it was inevitably the boy who was Hindu while the girl was Muslim. That indicated, Mr Sethi seemed to say that Indians would be reluctant to accept it the other way around (Muslim boy romancing Hindu girl).
Is this true? I would say not. While it may be absolutely true that some of Bollywood’s directors and writers might think so and, therefore, script their film accordingly, we need to look at reality. The fact is that the three Khans are either married to or are/were in relationships with Hindus. Four Khans actually, if we include the not-so-successful Saif Ali Khan, married to Kareena Kapoor. The Bollywood fans in general have no objections to this. We could extend this to the screen and assume that the audience may not get worked up in a romance between a Muslim male and Hindu female.
There is a second aspect to this and it comes from the nature of Bollywood’s content and our star system. In most Hindi movies the character of the male lead is not particularly fleshed out and is flat and two-dimensional. Salman Khan plays any character in the same manner, and that is assumed to be the real manner of Salman Khan the man. This tells us that the audience gravitates towards the man and not the character. It assumes that all the angularities and edges and dark places of the man as they have been introduced to him through the media over the decades are true. It also tells us that they admire him for what and who he is. They would really have no problem with him playing a Muslim on screen romancing a Hindu girl.
The point about Bollywood being cautious about such things goes back to the days in which Muslim actors like Dilip Kumar thought they had to give themselves Hindu names to be acceptable. Was their caution justified? We can say from our experience of the great Khans that this is not so and societies don’t change so much in a few decades in our part of the world.
Of course, I accept that Bollywood is only an indicator and that the history of relations between the two faiths in India is patchy. We have had incidents of extreme violence, even if they are episodic and over the decades they seem to have lessened. And we have the segregation of the communities in cities like Ahmedabad and Baroda, where it is encouraged by the state through laws like the Disturbed Areas Act.
But do these represent the broad thinking of the communities or are we, as that questioner suggests, inherently secular unless we are egged on to remember grievances from the past? My view is that Indians, of all faiths, are tolerant. Tolerance is something that is inherently sub-continental. One might argue that it comes from the way that Hinduism is practised and how this has also coloured other faiths here. I accept that is true.
But this brings us to an interesting point. The evidence suggests that we are not communities whose history is one of constant war interrupted by episodes of peace. It is the other way around, and even there the word war is inappropriate because violence tends to be contained within certain pockets. And so I agree with the questioner. Indians are tolerant unless instigated.
Aakar Patel is a writer and columnist
