Days before the release of Jawan, the new Hindi blockbuster starring Shah Rukh Khan, a trailer for the film was shared on social media. As the video showed the name of one of the film's producers, Gauri Khan, a voiceover by Shah Rukh, her superstar husband, drawled, "Bete ko haath lagaane se pehle baap se baat kar" (Before you touch the son, deal with his father). Simultaneously, the trailer cut to visuals of Shah Rukh himself.
This was as meta as cinema can get. Aryan Khan, Gauri and Shah Rukh's son, was arrested in Mumbai in 2021 on drug-related charges that the authorities ultimately failed to prove. That did not stop a media circus around the case, with Shah Rukh's name often at the centre of it. Critics of India's Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government expressed the belief that the arrest was meant as punishment for Shah Rukh, whose religious identity as a Muslim combined with his public image as a liberal have long riled BJP supporters. For viewers convinced of this reasoning, the trailer was Shah Rukh's message to those who had struck at his family.
This suggested that Jawan would be politically bold – a suggestion reinforced by the reputation of the film's director, Atlee, for taking strong stands on potentially controversial issues in his work in the Tamil film industry. A politically audacious film headlined by one of the biggest stars in the history of Hindi film could have been a game-changer for the industry at a time when most of his colleagues have ignored the ongoing rise in atrocities and discrimination against minorities and dissenters in India, while some have also simultaneously produced a spate of pro-government films pushing majoritarian and nationalist propaganda. But Jawan, it turns out, is a whimper rather than a shout when measured by these expectations. It is also a far cry from the small but steady stream of Hindi films that have risked making political statements under the BJP regime – even if these efforts have been upstaged in public perception by the industry's worst sycophants.
Mellow drama