waking up to a dream: contemporary bollywood, the yuppie shah rukh khan and the great urban indian...

journal of humanities and social sciences no. 6 (August 2009)

Copyright: Kaustav Bakshi and Samrat Sengupta, 2009.

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Waking up to a Dream: Contemporary Bollywood, the Yuppie Shah

Rukh Khan and the Great Urban Indian Middle Class

Kaustav Bakshi, English, Haldia Government College, Haldia.

and

Samrat Sengupta, Assistant Professor, English, Kharagpur College,

&

Doctoral Scholar, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences

_____________________________________________________________

In a dialogue with the Iranian philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo, Ashis Nandy observes:

The popular version of progress means nothing more than approximating the

American standard and style of living. The American way of life, the senior

George Bush once said, was not negotiable…But we have chosen to run after that

mirage and run away from the realization that we are chasing a mirage.1

The mirage Nandy speaks of is perhaps no longer quite illusory, for in recent years the

American Dream of the Good Life seems to have been appropriated and perhaps realized

by the great Indian middle class, at least to some extent. Indian popular films, particularly

the breed of feel-good romantic family dramas of the 1990s, have a historically

momentous role to play in concretizing that American Dream consisted in possessing a

big sprawling house, car, beauty, youth and talent. These films functioned much in the

same way as the Walt Disney comic strips which are widely reviewed as promulgating an

American way of life as the only way of life. But such interpretation is rather simplistic,

for as Dorfman and Mattelart point out in How to Read Donald Duck:

…such criticism misses the true impulse behind the manufacture of the Disney

characters, and the true danger they represent to dependent countries like

Chile…It is the manner in which the U.S. dreams and redeems itself, and then



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imposes the dream upon others for its own salvation, which poses the danger for

the dependent countries. It forces us Latin Americans to see us as they see us.2

These Bollywood flicks have repeatedly constructed a bountiful world of

glamour, glitz and an all-round goodness. This is, as evident, a borrowed dream, the

pursuit of which now seems the only reality available to the great Indian middle class. In

this way, the redemption of the United States through a successful imposition of its

dreams on us seems complete. Several Indianized versions of American reality shows

have spread their tempting tentacles to embrace an unthinkably large number of

youngsters who are unrepentantly sacrificing their board or university examinations to

join this roller-coaster ride to easy fame and money. Such pursuit of an overtly hedonistic

good life is essentially un-Indian and has its roots nowhere in Indian history but very

much in “the origins of American life, from the so-called American adventurers seeking

sudden fortunes on the plantations of Virginia to the spectaculars mining their prospects

in western cities like Las Vegas.”3 John Cullen adds:

But nowhere does this dream come more vividly into focus than in the culture of

Hollywood − a semi-mythic place where…fame and fortune were all the more

compelling if achieved without obvious effort. This is the most alluring and

insidious of American Dreams4

In academic discussions, even if we begrudge globalization and censoriously

name it neoimperialism, the common people are hardly critical of such a project. There’s

no denial of the fact that subsequent to the economic liberalization, the standards of

living have been raised. The common people, observes Gurcharan Das, “will any day put

up with Coca-Cola and KFC if it means two square meals, a decent home and a job.”5

Cinema and television serials have since then acted as powerful stimulus to act

accordingly, and have successfully created for Indians a new set of values, a new cultural

icon in the clean-shaven, metrosexual hero in branded clothes, riding expensive cars and

motorbikes, yet firmly rooted in traditions. Shah Rukh Khan or King Khan as he is

nowadays widely known has had a significant contribution to the construction of this new

image. Young India has extensively identified with or coveted to identify with this image,

the emergence and concretization of which seemed increasingly commensurate with the

changing nature of Indian economy and culture. An examination of some of Khan’s cult



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films, say from Darr to Rab Ne Banadi Jodi, would uncover a trajectory the dreams of

young India has taken over a decade and a half. In doing so, the paper would also trace

the gradual decline of this cultural icon perhaps best realized in the termination of his

contract with Pepsi a few months back, and his dire need at this flagging point of his

career, to simultaneously deconstruct (Rab Ne Banadi Jodi) and reconstruct (Billu) his

image in the popular imagination.

The journey of the post-liberalization psychotic/romantic hero: constructing and

deconstructing Shah Rukh Khan

Shah Rukh Khan shot into stardom almost overnight with his first feature film Deewana

(1992) which introduced to Bollywood a new character − the mad lover, who disrupts

more than he conforms. This loveable madness hardened into psychosis in three

consecutive films that took the box-office by storm − Darr (1993), Baazigar (1993) and

Anjaam (1994). The Hindi film industry unused to such grey shades in the main

protagonist, was awfully confused as to whether to categorise such a character as a hero

or a villain. This is best understood if one looks back on the Filmfare awards and its

nomination lists: for Darr and Anjaam, Shah Rukh was nominated in the category of the

Best Actor in a Negative Role (Villain), while for Baazigar he was nominated as the Best

Actor (Hero). By refusing to belong to any category, by his sheer slipperiness, he made

the conventional Bollywood hero appear in a poor, pitiable light. The very unfamiliarity

of such a character made him highly attractive to most viewers, yet their response to him

was not well-defined, for they did not know whether to admire him or to reject him. But

none could ignore him, and the energetic madness and the capacity of doing evil he

displayed was simply irresistible.

The appearance of Shah Rukh Khan’s psychotic hero/villain coincides with one of

the most significant historical events of all times, the demolition of the Babri Masjid and

the subsequent riots in Bombay that tore the city into pieces. No moral codes were

available to fall back on; the merciless butchering of innocent human beings in the name

of religion threw into question the very existence of a benevolent divine order. In this

appalling moment of a historical cataclysm, the broad social language of the angry young



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man would not work. The inward-looking psychotic hero, his vulnerability as well as his

killer-instincts, became a worthy representative of the times. Rajani Mazumdar writes:

…the violence of 1992 after the demolition of the Babri Masjid and the pogroms

in the city of Bombay.…the image of the psychotic allows us entry into forbidden

realms of desire, pain and subjectivity not accessible through the given narrative

structures.6

Such a reading of the psychotic hero/villain is not incorrect, for the formula-narrative of

Hindi cinema constructed along a series of binaries of the good/bad, moral/immoral, etc.

could no longer accommodate the desires, anxieties and fear of the people and the trope

of the happy ending seemed too Utopian to be believable.

Almost parallel to such films, came Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman (1992) in which

Shah Rukh migrates to Bombay, the dream-city to fulfil his ambition of becoming rich.

The fiercely upwardly mobile hero impresses by his talents, innovations, and skills,

instruments available to the middle class to climb up the social ladder. However, a

Bombay chawl remains an important site all through the film, occasionally reminding the

hero and his audience of the poverty that exists side by side the pomp and grandeur of

high society social gatherings, late night parties, etc. It is still an old-world Bombay

where the rich/poor binary is still uncomplicated; corruption, dishonesty and falsehood

are associated with the former while the latter represents virtue and morality.

1992 is an important year in the economic history of India. It was in 1991 that

Narsimha Rao quite aggressively carried forward a task left incomplete by Rajiv Gandhi:

the liberalization of the Indian economy. The impact of the liberalization was being thinly

felt by the middle class at that time, but the old world values were still unimpaired. The

great Indian middle class had not yet realized that the only ethos available to them in a

few years to come would be nothing but money, and the moral compunction of

embracing wealth and hedonism would be soon obliterated. Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman

captures this transition period, and Shah Rukh Khan who dreams to become a

‘gentleman’ becomes a worthy cultural icon of the Indian youth. Interestingly the film

celebrates hard work as the tool for self-realization, constructing for the young people the

hope of rising up the social pyramid depending only upon their education, talent and

skills. For a change, the rich fathers and corrupt ministers securing job vacancies for their



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worthless wards seem to have become less of a threat to the aspiring youth. A new

economic era was about to begin. The psychotic hero would soon die to be replaced by a

‘schizophrenic’ consumerist hero: the hero of Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman would now rise

and rise and spaces of poverty such as the Bombay slums and chawls would all of a

sudden retreat out of focus.

With the disappearance of poverty, the struggling hero also disappeared. The

unsettling and anguished memories of the Babri Masjid riots that brutally murdered the

dreams of a secular India were soon dissolved in the euphoria of the new money that

invaded and conquered the Indian market. The IT revolution engendered by the BJP

rather zealously provided the middle class youth a comparatively easy access to a decent

job and associated comfort. The Hindi film industry manufactured a new hero who acted

as an agent for carving out a dream world in hyperbolic terms for the new urban middle

class. Although another Shah Rukh Khan flick, Yes Boss (1997), reiterates the Raju Ban

Gaya Gentleman theme, most of the other Shah Rukh Khan characters are filthy rich, and

inhabit a world of plenitude, whether in India or abroad. For instance, Dilwale Dulhaniya

Le Jaayenge (1995) shows Raj Malhotra blissfully settled in London. Financially backed

by an incredibly rich father, he has nothing to worry about in terms of money or job. This

film is an interesting departure from Maine Pyaar Kiya (1989), where the father of the

heroine puts the hero through a severe test of earning two thousand rupees, on the

condition of which he would win his beloved. This test, in the late 80s, seemed essential,

for a hero backed by an affluent father was not desirable at all. It was an absolute

necessity for the hero to establish his self-sufficiency before he could ask for the

heroine’s hand officially. By 1995, such a hero was sufficiently outdated; the heroine’s

father hardly cared whether the hero earned his own livelihood. The old bourgeoisie

values had been shoved aside: an NRI chocolate-cream hero living in a plush mansion

and driving expensive cars or motorbikes is now highly sought-after. Neither the heroine

nor her father shows concern about the source of his money. As long as he has it, he is

fine by both.

Shah Rukh Khan was the first to popularize such a hero. Subsequent to Dilwale

Dulhaniya Le Jaayenge, many films came in which Shah Rukh repeated the same image,

almost elevating the image to a cult figure (In fact, repetition is the key word that



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dominates the global culture of ‘celebrityhood’). Interestingly, Pardes (1997), Dil to

Pagal Hai (1997), Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998), Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (2001), Kal

Ho Na Ho (2003), etc. which have Shah Rukh Khan in the lead, more or less project a

slight variation on the character of Raj, who in a way, had become the prototype of the

consumable hero, celebrated by the modern day youth. This financially secured hero is

always dressed in designer clothes, fastidious about his looks, and mostly seen in the

vicinity of or inside shopping malls and posh restaurants in the country or abroad. The

anguish of the poor and downtrodden has been wiped out of the map of the world he

inhabits. S. Deshpande observes that this consumable hero which Shah Rukh epitomizes

in its resplendent glory has no history, for he is a product of the liberalized market,

liberalization being a rather recent phenomenon.7 His father, however, has a history, a

past which he recalls rather fondly: for instance, Raj Malhotra’s father in Dilwale

Dulhaniya Le Jaayenge reminds his son that how he came to London without a penny,

but through sheer hard work established his huge business empire. But unlike the father

of the older generation hero, he does not urge his son to preserve the empire through

equal hard work and perseverance; rather he gives him free license to enjoy his life.

Enjoying life is here clearly equated with going on a long holiday in Europe, and

indulging in all available consumable luxuries. In Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, the college-going

hero grows up into a successful business-man who frequents London and attends Indian

Exporters’ Conference. But the film happily glosses over the course which leads to such a

successful career. It appears that it is the hero’s inherent right to be rich. The same is true

of Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham. The film unabashedly celebrates a world of mythic

affluence. . Here again, the hero is shown to be characteristically moneyed. Disowned by

a ‘fantastically’ rich father, the hero travels to London to set up his own mansion, but the

film is rather uncannily silent about how he manages to recoup, if not fully, but partially

the luxuries and comfort he leaves behind, and that too in a foreign city. The only

information the audience have is that the hero has an MBA degree from some eminent

university in London, and the rest is left to their imagination. It would be interesting to

quote Shah Rukh Khan himself, in this context. In an interview with Filmfare in August

2001, the actor says:



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If the 1970s hero was anti-establishment, as a yuppie I promised a better

world. The yuppie doesn’t bash a truckful of goondas. He’s smarter. He

doesn’t have to kill in a battlefield, he can make a killing in the share

market. The yuppie believes in capitalism, not communism. Actually he

believes in a new ‘ism’ everyday.8

The hyperreal hero, Shah Rukh constructs and makes a cultural icon in India,

represents a desire which the urban youth feels compelled to pursue. Pursuing this desire

involves aspiring for a big sprawling house, car, and talent, and above all enough money

to consume. The comparatively average-looking Shah Rukh adds to this image another

parameter: the much-talked about six-pack abs. One fine morning he flares up the

television screens with his macho Dard-e-disco act, leaving his fans dumbfounded. The

well-chiselled body was not new in Bollywood. Salman Khan, Hrithik Roshan, Akshay

Kumar and John Abraham had been alluring the young mass with their Greek God looks

to hit the gymnasium. While all these stars seemed to have been blessed with great genes,

the craze for a well-toned body was not as intense as it became, after the lean, not-so-

good-looking Shah Rukh Khan proved to the world that a well-guided work-out regime

could make the ugly look beautiful. Consequently, the desire for the ‘hot’ body gained a

new momentum post-Om Shanti Om. The voluptuous Pepsi (a brand which Shah Rukh

Khan endorsed for many years) slogan Yeh Dil Maange More (The Heart Wants More)

that took the nation by storm, almost became a syndrome in which the great Indian urban

middle class was caught, and almost incurably. While the Pepsi advertisements spread

such a sybaritic message, the big screen matinee idol spelt out in concrete terms what

exactly the heart should lust for.

Every time we use these terms ‘desire’, ‘craze’, ‘madness’, etc., we can’t help

thinking of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s thesis Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and

Schizophrenia. This consumable hero is schizophrenic in the sense that he is a producer

of desire and desiring-machines, who himself is one of the ‘productions of

consumptions’. This consumable hero is also the producer of schizophrenia in his

viewers, thereby situating them comfortably and unquestioningly within the repressive

structures of late capitalism. The grand parade of opulence, abundance and goodness this

consumable hero endorses, produces a desire amongst his viewers, who interpret this

desire as ‘need’. And, as Deleuze and Guattari observe,



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Desire is not bolstered by needs, but rather the contrary; needs are derived

from desire: they are counterproducts within the real that desire produces.

Lack is a countereffect of desire; it is deposited, distributed, vacuolized

within a real that is natural and social.9

Once the ‘need’ is produced, it is zealously chased, until it is fulfilled. The consumable

hero, as represented by Shah Rukh Khan, thereby grows from strength to strength

sucking up in the whirlpool of desire of which he is the product and the producer, the

great urban Indian middle class.

However, by the time we come to Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi (2008), Shah Rukh Khan

has grown old. In this film, we find King Khan throwing a frustrated gaze at his own

vibrant youthful image of Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jaayenge. Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi is the

story of a human being who endeavours to appropriate the qualities of that desirable

consumable hero constructed by Shah Rukh Khan himself to woo his wife who says that

she would never be able to love him, and ends up proving to himself and to his wife that

true love perhaps has no connection with an outwardly romantic “image” of the

consumable hero. It is tempting to point out that the release date of Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi

coincides with the climactic point of economic recession that rendered many people

jobless. For once, in many years, Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi goes back to the plain middle

class man, a government servant, leading a rather simple life rooted in a small North

Indian town. The steady growth of the middle class since 1992 reached a point of

precipitation with the severe financial slowdown last year. At this point Rab Ne Bana Di

Jodi, either coincidentally or deliberately, attempts to dismantle the world of dreams

which films such as Dil to Pagal Hai, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, or Kabhi Khushi Kabhie

Gham had created and made an object of desire for their viewers. Interestingly, the New

Year saw Shah Rukh Khan out of his Pepsi contract for the company targeting

‘Youngistan’ (or young Hindustan), found Khan too old to address the young generation

of consumers. In fact, the termination of the Pepsi contract acted as a tragic dénouement

of Khan’s steadily-rising career graph. As if to reassure himself of his magnetism, at this

sagging point of his career, Shah Rukh Khan produced Billu (2009) that rather

unashamedly celebrates the hero Shah Rukh Khan and his mass appeal. The film appears

to be a narcissistic venture of a hero who needs to prove to himself that his status as the

‘Bollywood ka Badshaah’ is still inviolate. Shah Rukh Khan the man and Shah Rukh



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Khan the hero get curiously mixed up in this last film. The next section of the paper,

closely examines in the light of the above discussion, Rab Ne Banadi Jodi and how the

film besides marking the death of the hyperreal hero, redefines the concept of Bollywood

romantic love, charting a movement beyond a syndrome produced and so far sustained by

several Shah Rukh Khan films.

Rab Ne(hi) 10

Bana Di Jodi: Bollywood or the Schizophrenic Indian Middle Class

The knight remembers everything, but precisely this remembrance is

pain,…Love for that princess became for him the expression for an eternal

love, assumed a religious character, was transfigured into a love for the

eternal being…Fools and young men prate about everything being

possible for a man. That, however, is a great error. Spiritually speaking,

everything is possible, but in the world of the finite there is much which is

not possible.11

The title of this section suggests that it’s God and only God who creates pairs in heaven

and also the impossibility of the same. It is God who can create pairs only in heaven

because both God and heaven are imaginary and conceptual just like the concept of a

‘pair’, a pair which is always there and does not need a coming into being. There are two

ways of looking at love as observed in diverse civilizations. Christopher Shackle

comments in an essay:

Within all known civilizations, the history of love may be defined in terms

of complex sequences of category shifts.…in the definition of love,

moving from an idealisation in terms of mystical spirituality (human as the

mirror of the divine) to idealisation in terms of perfect partners (human as

the mirror of the human).12

An apparition of the sacred haunts the institution of marriage which more often than not

is sanctioned by holy vows than a legal piece of paper. So if love is to be accommodated

or given a space in the scheme of marriage that is both sacred and secular at the same

time then the cause-effect relationship is to be turned upside down – marriage that

contains a sense of divine order (which might take the guise of a social order that

nonetheless like a divine principle is constant and universal) should not be presided by



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love, rather love is to be presided by some mystical divine principle. To put it simply –

the effect would prove the cause i.e., a happy and successful relationship would prove

that they were already made for each other – even if that follows a secular path of mutual

understanding and a process of working out. In the genre of Bollywood love stories we

can observe this interpenetration of the sacred and secular, the divine and the individual.

If we see the title of a film like Pyaar To Hona Hi Tha (Love was Ought to Happen) this

compulsory predeterminedness behind what is worked out at a personal level between

two persons can be clearly realized.

However this union cannot simply be thought of as a rational encounter between

two mature individuals which is just given a divine sanction for the sake of legitimacy if

it flouts some social principles like obedience to the parents’ wishes, protecting the

honour of the family etc. It is necessary to remember that there is a social-ideological

order through which our desire operates – which we would like to refer to as the economy

of desire. If divinity acts as an apparition behind the personal love between two adult

individuals there must be a general set of principles which would create a sense of

rightness in the audience and give him a realization of justice. These principles are

behind the creation of this economy of desire. The principles however might not follow

the logic of tradition and are liable to change but they are nonetheless principles in a

given space and time. Undoubtedly, as already pointed out, the archetype of a Bollywood

romance and Bollywood hero is a production of capitalist system and is changing

according to the changes in characteristics of capitalism from national to transnational

and beyond.

Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi marks a rupture in this discursive game of developing,

undercutting and reconstructing the image of hero repeatedly by recalling the entire

history of its construction in the song Hum He Rahi Pyaar Ke, Phir Milenge, Chalte

Chalte. It creates a parodic collage of previous generation Bollywood music and names

of the films, revoking the entire discourse of heterosexual love in Bollywood Hindi

movies with an ironic self-distancing. The reconciliation between the utopian romance

and socially demanded stability in relationship brought about in these films is unsettled in

by bringing back into existence a middle-class common man type protagonist. The

imaginary hero with all his gadgets, excess of wealth and prosperity, branded clothes and



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exotic location is at stake in this period of economic depression, where the

insubstantiality and voidness of a make-belief universe gets exposed. The film shows the

wish fulfilment of a middle-class man who finds himself absent in the mirror of

Bollywood movies engaged in a process of constant self-fashioning through its

experiments with the image of the hero. The wish of the middle-class man is now to be

himself and it is nonetheless Bollywood that can take up the charge of fulfilling such a

wish. In the song Haule Haule Ho Jayega Pyaar we see Shah Rukh Khan in the guise of

the character of a middle-class service-man dancing in the midst of everyday street and

happening – love makes the normal and mundane exotic and out of the world. The hero

need not take a flight to an exotic location to sing and dance but the familiar becomes

new to him.

The film becomes a demonstration of Derridean concept of iterability which

suggests a repetition of a structure with a difference each time it is repeated. The

Bollywoodish ideation of a hero who is larger than life and who is somebody people

would desire to be like is endlessly repeated inventing a new form every time. The genre

of Hindi popular cinema follows the postmodern logic of late capitalism where desire

becomes insatiable. It is worth remembering the Pepsi slogan Yeh Dil Maange More or

the Pepsi Oye Oye Bubbly ad where different objects are projected as having lips. The

unquenchable thirst of late capitalism can be better understood if we see Andy Warhol’s

artwork which shows a burger with its inside projected out – it is characterized by an

excess which cannot be contained. The fundamental form of desire is always the sexual

desire – the desire for a mate. Sexual desire can therefore by projecting itself can create

other manifold forms of desires. Once this desire is produced in the market according to

the capitalist logic it is to be repeated. Louis Althusser comments:

The ultimate condition of production is therefore the reproduction of the

conditions of production. This may be ‘simple’ (reproducing exactly the previous

conditions of production) or ‘on an extended scale’ (expanding them).13

The image of a Bollywood hero is such an ideological construction which is to be

infinitely reproduced. As in 70’s Hindi films boosted the dream of economically ailing

bourgeois to fight back the corruption and injustice which was accomplished on-screen,



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similarly in post 90’s cinema we see the hero being able to catch up the ever receding

horizon of middle-class dream of endless capacity to buy and consume. The eventual

result of this is the schizophrenic split of Indian middle class into smart, decked up,

wealthy, witty man which he wants to become and his ordinary, simple, soft-spoken, civil

everyday existence which he cannot shrug off. Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi elaborates this crisis

and split and provides us with an onscreen resolution. Here the hero Surindar or Suri,

played by Shah Rukh Khan is an ordinary looking shy government official working in

Punjab Power. The story unfolds when he accidentally gets married to Tania after a

mishap in which the would-be husband of Tania dies on the very day of wedding and

consequently, her father suffers a massive heart-attack. They get married to fulfil Tania

or Tani’s father’s (her father was a former teacher of Suri) last wish. Tani is not happy

with the marriage and stays with Suri only out of a sense of duty whereas Suri really falls

in love with her. The story is about how he wins the heart of the lady-love. The film

apparently shows the importance of relationship at an individual level which transcends

the authority of marriage that is only a social institution. However the possibility of

discovering love within marriage is reaffirmed in the end. So it reconciles the two ideas

of love – one that is pre-decided, divine or settled in heaven and the other that comes into

being through mutual individual interaction and understanding.

This happens presumably to ameliorate the deep-seated anxiety about the sanctity

and authority of the institution of marriage which forms the basis of a monogamous

family. The process through which the love between the already married couple is re-

affirmed or worked out in the film points towards this. Suri has to undergo a makeover

which transforms his looks almost beyond recognition and has to adopt the role of a

overtly loud, fun-loving and extrovert persona in order to join the dance competition in

which Tani takes part. Coincidentally (and Bollywood films are always full of such

exaggerated coincidences) Raj alias Suri becomes Tani’s dancing partner and she

considers him a different person because of his adopted looks and behaviour. The image

of outspoken and fun-loving Raj is overtly exaggerated and there is a deliberation in it.

The degree of exaggeration shows the impossibility of such a character in real life – it is

not only a parody of such a character but shows that such a character is a parody in itself.

Tani eventually falls in love with Raj with whom she even plans an elopement. Now a



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pseudo-tension permeates the film – whether Tani would elope with Raj or stay back with

Suri. We call it pseudo-tension because the audience is already aware that Raj and Suri

are the same and it is impossible for Tani to escape with Raj logically for Raj doesn’t

exist. The very fact that his character is an exaggerated one and he is only a role played

by another character points out not only the fact that he doesn’t exist but also that he can

never be. He is an idea that signifies a certain kind of ideology of heroism in post-

liberalized bourgeois society where the division of mind and matter collapses. The

dialectic of mind-matter is transformed and mind itself becomes material. It is not in the

Marxian sense of understanding mind as alienated matter but in a sense that materiality

itself becoming valuable and essential and invades our psyche. This materiality is a desire

for the material – the material which itself is however utopian just like Raj in the film.

The material in this sense is born out of the transformation of the desire for the material

into material-desire which is hyphenated, important in itself and might not refer to some

actual, physical and attainable matter. The mind itself is constituted by this materiality so

are the ideals which people are supposed to aspire for. Because of this reified relationship

between people a deep seated anxiety is developed which can be solved only by

integrating mind into matter which however is impossible to do without considering the

materiality of mind itself first. This is what happens in the film. If Suri represents a

‘mind-full’ hero then he has to transform himself into Raj – who is all about materiality –

catering to the impulse – who can dance, talk smooth and make people instantly happy.

The striking shot in the film is when Raj with sad eyes looks at a mannequin which

resembles Suri. It is the middle-class man’s desire to be himself as he knows that Raj is

not there and Suri is materialized into a mannequin in trying to become Raj. A

mannequin is an image of man, resembles the buyer but is also an image to be aspired for

by the buyer. So is Raj in the film. The presentation of the mannequin in Suri’s image is

suggestive of the fact that if the mannequin has taken up the guise of Suri, then Suri by

becoming Raj perhaps have made himself a mannequin.

With rapid globalization the capitalist aim of finding out new markets every time

has taken up new shapes. The market of male buyers has already got saturated on one

hand and the more and more entry of women in the professional world has made them

new potential customers on the other. The question of making choice that is central to



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liberalism is thrust upon women more and more as a marketing strategy which gives them

an apparent sense of autonomy and choice. However the overdetermined principles of

what is already there also has to be preserved for the aim of capitalism as it has already

been shown is not to bring radical changes but to repeat a certain structure which will

ensure the process of production and consumption. Moreover sense of autonomy comes

not only from ability to act individually but also from maintaining a certain sense of

continuity which capitalism exploits in its propagation. So on the one hand Tanis are free

to select between Raj and Suris on the other hand this freedom has to be ideologically

delimited and Tani cannot but get reconciled with her family. In the present multi-

national, globalized and neo-colonized world the question of choice becomes important

or ‘made’ important to women which is evident in the overt projection of male body in

advertisements and cinema. However as the film shows Tani finally discovers her

husband to be the only perfect match decided by divine power for her. If the order of

capitalism is the symbolic Other which we aspire for then it is the omnipresent but hidden

God whose instructions everyone must follow though it is important to remember that

this God is only a limited divinity and does not imply the messianic possibility of the

infinite. The same divinity which creates the image of Raj must reaffirm the importance

of Suri as all men must try to become Raj and end up accepting the impossibility of it

whereas each woman must desire a Raj to fall in love with but end up discovering that

Rajs are only hidden in Suris and nowhere else. In the process of coming to this

realization they have both transformed themselves, have become potential buyers – not

only of any particular commodity but of materiality itself. Relationships therefore

become im(material) i.e., immaterial because of its materiality and the pairs can only be

created by God on a conceptual level as they are not allowed by the same God to exist

actually on a purely individual level because our understanding and process of working

out a relationship is fraught by this materiality. It is thus Rab i.e. God who can only

create the jodi i.e. the pair. The capitalist order is only a imaginary one – an ideological

structure which people should follow and aspire for repeatedly and if we believe love and

relationship as always under creation and ‘to come’ (for which Derrida uses the French

word a venir) then the idea of a pair that capitalism defines as the epitome of happiness

makes the idea of a pair that is to come impossible. So the hidden God of capitalism can



15

never sanction the possibility of a pair that is ‘to come’ but can only affirm an already

existing existence without logically working it out. It gives us the morale and leaves it for

us to write the story. Every time Bollywood has tried to write a new story repeating the

same morals. Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi even after trying to deconstruct the binary of the

common man and the hero (as the slogan of the film demonstrates: ‘There is an

extraordinary love story in every ordinary jodi’) it ends up repeating the same structure in

a new way. The only difference in this modern day fairytale is that it ends up creating a

suyoraja and duyoraja (the archetypes of good but docile king and the bad but

charming/attractive king) instead of a suyorani and duyorani (the archetype of good but

docile queen and the bad but charming queen in fairytales) – the women being the new

potential buyers of this neo-colonized world of multinational capitalism.

Notes and References

1 Talking India: Ashis Nandy in Conversation with Ramin Jahanbegloo (New Delhi:

Oxford University Press, 2006), 133-134.

2 Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology

in the Disney Comic, translated and updated introduction by David Kunzle, (New York:

International General, 1991), 61.

3 Jim Cullen, The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation

(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 9.

4 Ibid.

5 Gurcharan Das, “Modern vs. Western”, in India Unbound: From Independence to the

Global Information Age (New Delhi: Penguin, 2000; revised and updated edition, 2002),

303.

6 Rajani Mazumdar, “From Subjectification to Schizophrenia: The ‘Angry Young Man’

and the ‘Psychotic Hero’ of Bombay Cinema”, in Making Meaning in Indian Cinema,

edited by Ravi S. Vasudevan (New Delhi: Oxford Univesrity Press, 2000), 251-252.

7 S. Deshpande, “The Consumable Hero of Globalised India”, in Bollyworld: Popular

Indian Cinema through a Transnational Lens, edited by Raminder Kaur and Ajay J.

Sinha (New Delhi, Thousand Oaks and London: Sage, 2005) 202.

8 Quoted in Deshpande, “The Consumable Hero of Globalised India”, 186.



16

9 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,

translated by R. Hurley, M. Seem and H. R. Lane, First South Asian Edition (London and

New York: Continuum, 2005), 28.

10

The Hindi word Nehi which means ‘not’ when put separately as ne hi means ‘only’. So

pun is intended in the title which is a variation of the name of the film Rab Ne Bana Di

Jodi which when translated means God has made the pair.

11

Soren Kierkegaard, “Fear and Trembling”, in The Worlds of Existentialism: A Critical

Reader, edited by Maurice Friedman (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago

Press, 1973), 175.

12

Christopher Shackle, “The Shifting Sands of Love”, in Love in South Asia: A Cultural

History, edited by Francesca Orsini (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007), 87.

13

Louis Althusser “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an

Investigation)”, in On Ideology (London & New York: Verso, 2008), 1.

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