Being Salman

Bollywood is today ruled by a triumvirate of Khans. Each name summons an army of fans ready to debate the prowess of their particular hero. This essay is about Salman, the Khan who is different because he does not seek to be different.
Consider the other two first. Aamir Khan thinks he is decidedly intellectual, even political. His Rang De Basanti, Lagaan, 3 Idiots are all political statements. He is self-consciously intellectual and seeks a certain distance from Bollywood and its rituals, especially awards.

He sees himself as part of the folklore of inspiration that triggered the Anna Hazare movement.
Shah Rukh Khan is thoughtful in a different way. There is reflexivity about his films, whether it is Om Shanti Om or My Name Is Khan. He avoids politics but can engage with courage, as when he told the Thackerays off. He has a sense of humour, is more playful about his status, ready to join quirky Fair and Handsome advertisements, which Aamir is too correct to do.
Being correct is not a problem for the third Khan. Salman Khan just is, the others strive to be. About the only thing he can manipulate are his muscles. He is a muscular presence if not a muscular intelligence, a combination of boy next door and noble savage. The sense of being boy next door makes him familiar, almost domestic presence. His ability to get into trouble with black bucks and women endears him. His mistakes make him human. The audience almost makes him feel that to err is divine.
There is nothing intellectual about Salman but he exudes an animal vitality which substitutes violence for foreplay. He can be crude, boisterous, corrupt, obscene, gambol like an animal and the audience loves it all.
The other two Khans make a dramatic entrance but Salman explodes and drives the crowds to ecstasy. His relation to heroines is predictably simple; their conversation is brief and more in the form of signals. He speaks through his body, language almost becomes secondary. His sense of plot is simple. He reacts and a sequence of his reflexes constitutes the movie. Nuance eludes him.
If the plot is tricky he is the first casualty. In Bodyguard, he marries the wrong girl and still looks immovably the same. The other two Khans would not be caught in such a situation, except as a pretext for some comedy. The expectations are different. One expects high drama from the other two. With Salman, it is the lowest common denominator. He is low brow and loveable. When he enters the room the average IQ falls by a hundred, but the fun quotient increases a hundred-fold.
He is marked by two kinds of events. First is violence; he exudes it like breathing. Problem solving is not an intellectual act but a narrative involving guns and fists. For Salman, the shortest distance between two points is a bullet or a blow. Yet there is nothing wicked or sinister about him. He is simple and his simplicity is sheer joy. He flexes his muscles like a toy. It is him. Yet what mellows his violence is the sense of comedy, of playfulness. The jokes are simple, even crude, but he maintains values of duty and patriarchy.
Beyond violence, what marks him is his body. His body is his brand name. For Shah Rukh a six-pack body was a later addition, an add-on. For Salman, his body is him. There cannot be a movie of his where he does not discard his shirt to make a point. While others might delight in the sharp repartee or a rapier like wit, Salman displays his muscles with equal effect. His message is simple, almost endearing: love me, love my muscles. It is his being and his becoming.
Salman’s recent movies are an interesting bundle. Dabangg excited not merely for its cameo dances. It was Bollywood imitating a Bhojpuri film, tired of its own convolutions. It celebrates language at the lowest level. Ready is time pass, but what beautiful time pass. Bodyguard is even simpler, it has almost no pretensions of a plot until the last five minutes. It is a collage of dance and fights alternating at animal speed. There is Salman and nothing else. It is what I call the first “mass movie”.
Earlier, Bollywood was a part of popular culture but with a large amount of folk and myth in it. Bodyguard is the first mass movie. It needs no geneology. It does not have to refer back. It is utterly literal.
Salman is the first mass hero of the Hindi screen. He is his own mythology. He needs no other referent, no other presence. His machismo is self-explanatory. He is populist, he has to be the one with the maximum following. Hunger, love, hate, loyalty are not ideas but mere reflexes. One does not have to think, just react.
Often his personal life, his inability to retain girlfriends, his encounters with the law are cited as obstacles to his career. They appear to make him complex and add a sense of mystique and excitement. For the public, the myth of the man is adequate. He will always be the critics’ despair and the audiences’ delight. One guarantees the other when he enters. We admire a man without inhibitions. He has no inside. He cannot play Hamlet. The warm-hearted hulk is all he is and as far as the audience is concerned that is all he needs to be — Dhinka chika dhinka chika till the coffers keep filling.

Shiv Visvanathan is a social science nomad