Why Is Shah Rukh Khan Dancing at a Billionaire's Wedding?
The billionaire Bollywood star now represents nothing more than tacky deference to power and money.
Why, you might be asking, has a video of Indian Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan dancing at the wedding of a billionaire’s child gone viral? Which billionaire’s wedding, is probably your follow-up question. Is this the same multi-mega-loaded person’s wedding that a Trump son danced at? Who can tell? It’s hard to keep up with the vulgar festivities of India’s ultra-rich.
In one clip, a bride in all her sparkling finery asks Khan to repeat the lines from one of his well-known advertisements. Khan declined the insistent bride in his typically self-effacing way; when you do a ghutka (chewing tobacco) ad, they never let you forget it, he demurred. In another viral video, he appears to invite a bride to dance, and she appears to shyly refuse (the groom, however, does try to match his steps). Is it the same bride? I honestly can’t tell. Either way, Khan performing at a billionaire’s wedding is nothing new. Remember him coaxing that rhythmless dud of a dancer, Hillary Clinton, to shake a leg at the wedding of one of the Ambani children (India’s richest family)? Who can forget?
The actor, who recently became a billionaire himself, commands massive fees for his appearances. One Indian website estimated that eight crore rupees – nearly $900,000 – is Khan’s standard payment for dancing with a giggling bride and her luxury guests. Khan has said at different moments that he takes these gigs to bring happiness to people (which people, he did not specify) and to fund his films, which are hardly short of funding. But Khan’s latest viral moments raise a larger, more depressing question. As the world burns and images of human suffering from Gaza to Sudan are broadcast in an endless loop of carnage, what sort of politics does Khan – uniquely positioned to speak to hundreds of millions of people – represent?
The answer is simple: none whatsoever. Khan’s brand identity, so to speak, is one designed to evoke diversity and an idea of India that is increasingly a fantasy – one of openness, inclusion, and harmony. Yet simultaneously, his public posture is so carefully constructed to say absolutely nothing at all, polite but ultimately deferent to power.
This past fall, he made a happy birthday video for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s 75th – Bollywood actors from the top of the heap, like Khan, all the way down to Z-listers fawn over Modi in a decidedly North Korean fashion, rushing to felicitate their dear leader for all the world to see. “Your journey from a small city to the global stage is very inspiring,” Khan gushed this past birthday. “In this story, I can see your discipline, your hard work and your dedication towards your country.” If Modi’s birthday were made a public holiday, I don’t think anyone would be surprised at this point.
The birthday greeting was hardly Khan’s first public rhapsodizing of the extreme right-wing BJP leader, whose party has actively fostered a political agenda and climate intended to downgrade Muslims like Khan, whom the ruling dispensation openly views as second-class citizens if not outright interlopers. The actor congratulated Modi on India’s G20 presidency, made a music video appeal for people to vote at the PM’s request, and spoke at a state event on Mahatma Gandhi, where he called for a “Gandhiji 2.0” as Modi smiled next to him. Indeed, Khan’s shapeshifting persona mirrors India’s changing moods. In the early days of the Modi era, when it was still worthy to trade in ‘we are all one, Hindu-Muslim same same’ discourse, Khan made anodyne statements about tolerance: “There is intolerance, there is extreme intolerance… there is, I think… there is growing intolerance.”
During Congress rule, when a history of fighting the British was semi-fashionable, and public spaces displayed M.K. Gandhi’s portrait rather than those of the RSS ideologues who inspired his killer, Khan reminded us that his father, who was from Peshawar in what later became Pakistan, was a freedom fighter. In an interview, he recalled his father saying, “You should never take your freedom for granted. We have given it to you, so always maintain this freedom. At that point of time, I really used to think that by the freedom he meant from a foreign rule or something, but now I understand after having grown up that this freedom he was talking about was in terms of poverty maybe, freedom from misery.”
Today, as India remains one of Israel’s staunchest allies two years into the holocaust of Gaza, Khan – the biggest Muslim star in India and perhaps even the world – has not publicly uttered one word about Palestine. Not a single peep. That Khan represents ‘secular India,’ as his fans are fond of claiming, tells you everything about the sorry state of Indian secularism as it stands currently. It is, like the wedding dances, rich in performance but increasingly empty in substance, a toothless, cowed ideology subservient to fascism and capitalism.
Fatima Bhutto is an award-winning author and journalist. ‘Gaza: The Story of a Genocide,’ a collection of essays she co-edited, is now available. Her memoir, ‘The Hour of the Wolf,’ will be published in January.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Zeteo.
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SRK has always been this way, a hired gun with impeccable manners. The vast majority of Bollywood, and certainly all the Khans, remain spectators at best, complicit at worst, in their own community's oppression in India.
As they say every one has a price! Sadly SRK has sold his soul to the Almighty Dollar (Rupees). I have no idea what he is going to do with it. He will not be able to spend it in his lifetime. As a suggestion perhaps he should help those that sleep on the street not far from his gated home.