BOOK REVIEW: Shrayana Bhattacharya – Reluctantly Seeking SRK Fans
I visited North India (Himachal Pradesh & Chandigarh) this week. The last time I was there was in 2018, pulled abruptly out of an impending midlife crisis & looming health scares to cremate an unexpectedly deceased relative. I’ve never liked the mountains. My only associations with them have been under duress. Cold, weather I’ve always been thrust into, not once with my choice and always when I was struggling with something else that the people forcing me to travel couldn’t care less about. Mountain sickness brought on by the same dead relative forcing me to ascend faster than I was ready. And always, North India with its excruciating patriarchy, its vile aggression, its two-faced smarminess masquerading as lihaaz. North India has always been about duty without the faintest whiff of reprieve. And always the gaslighting about how great the food is, how wonderful the people are, how brilliant the weather is, how spectacular the mountains are. Everything is so much better than me, my city, my life. Shah Rukh Khan epitomised all of this to me, even if my city has been his home for decades now.
I began ‘Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh‘ by Shrayana Bhattacharya on the flight over. I’d never have given that title a second look. But I was recommended it by two different people who asked me to look beyond. Oddly enough, I’m not able to remember who these two were. The people I’ve reached out to, since picking up this book, assuming they were the ones doing the recommending, say they haven’t yet read it. How odd. Somehow this book, Shah Rukh Khan, where I am in my life and my experience of North India this time are inextricably entwined now.
More about the book once I finish it, in a review which I’m certain is going to be a good one. I am not normally given to nonfiction. It feels too ponderous & deliberately boring to me. I have also not enjoyed much feminist nonfiction, given they seem the same (labouring under the delusion that having something important to say means they don’t have to say it respectfully or well). I have never been a Shah Rukh Khan fan. Even after a quarter-century career & a home firmly entrenched facing Bandra seaface, there is an unmistakable whiff of Delhi in him. And Delhi is the epitome of all the worst things in North India, in my mind.
All those years ago, even as a teenager, I was horrified by Raj’s gleeful delight in tormenting Simran, a girl already burdened by a selfish patriarchal father & a helpless victim of a mother. What I thought, was there to look forward to in life, if a woman went from one set of people deliberately quashing her to a guy who shamed her (bra in face), callously disturbed her hardwon plan for one last trip, rape-joked her & only stopped when she was broken? And in what universe was that romantic?
This was followed by a nightmare fest of stories where a cad mauled, body-shamed & generally exploited a girl who was his friend, chased a more traditionally feminine girl and somehow still ended up getting both. And then there was the ‘che-din-ladki-in‘ where loving a girl meant the guy got to manipulate her & hook her up with someone else and you weren’t allowed to say anything because he was dying. No, I did not like Shah Rukh Khan films. And just as with all other things North India, I grew a wall of revulsion against the massive pressure to agree that he was wonderful.
This book isn’t changing my mind. I still think his filmography is largely awful & toxic. I have always also been cognisant of the fact that this is a highly intelligent and even self-aware man. There’s just no other way to achieve the kind of global fame that he has, especially considering he’s a Muslim man in rapidly fundamentalist India. These two facts can co-exist, one of those many dichotomies North India (or to be fair, my experiences of its culture & people) don’t seem able to comprehend.
What this book is showing me is just how miserable life as a North Indian woman must be, for them to pin their hopes on Shah Rukh Khan’s films. The stories in the book are primarily from women in the North and undeniably SRK’s influence extends far beyond. Life as a woman anywhere in the world is difficult. We’re second class citizens and (cishet) men are fifth class garbage masquerading as human beings. But I’ve been judgemental, even condescending in how I view ‘these women’, a defense mechanism against the wave of pressure to conform to this frankly horrible brand of femininity. It has been impossible for me to find empathy, let alone relating with these other women.
It has not been pleasant to discover insights in the stories of some of the people detailed in the book. It has been really, really hard to find that I relate to the conclusions that the author herself draws about patriarchy, womanhood, love & relating and life itself. I reluctantly like even the way she reaches these conclusions – through numbers, through deeply involved stories of actual people. That is exactly how I would do it. That is exactly how I have been doing it too.
One of the many things that really disturbed me, was the first story about a film reviewer & her frenemy (‘The Student’). It shook me enough to have to set the book aside for a time. But I came back, determined to just skip the chapter if it got too triggering and found, mercifully that it was almost over and the rest was easier to read. Why did this chapter bother me so? Because I have a person like that in my life. In my story, I am that hated/revered ‘Student’. Shrayana in the book, details the many successes of the protagonist & prods painfully at the disproportionate angst that she still has, especially her fanatical attachment to ‘The Student’ that she hates so much. The telling sentence was the revelation that ‘The Student’ likely didn’t even consider the protagonist important enough to think this much about her.
The person in my life that this reminds me of is an old classmate. We were friends as very young children and then briefly as teenagers, bonded on the agony of bad teeth & painful orthodonture. We both did also read and write but looking back, I’m not sure that’s what united us; it was solely a shared angst. In my case, it passed. I don’t self-identify as unattractive anymore. This is not for lack of trying on the world’s part. I daily survive the gaslighting about my skin colour, the predations of men and the projections of women dumping their own insecurities onto my not-flat stomach, my stretch marks & more. But ‘ugly’ is not a name I call myself now. That buck-toothed little girl was just a part of my childhood & her rehabilitation to wide grinner, only one of the steps to the confidence I built for myself. My former friend also went the braces way and she emerged as an ultra feminine babe. I had found a comfortable balance in having even teeth but continuing to dress ‘wild & tomboyish’.
Yet, something changed. I can’t tell how or when. The microagressions ranged from suggesting she had to apologise to people for being friends with a freak like me, to asking to try on my clothes & admiring herself in them, then crumpling them up while handing them back. She’d invite me to social gatherings and make it a point to single me out for subtle humiliation. At her boyfriend’s party, she cleared out all the spoons in the kitchen and then loudly asked me if I didn’t know how to use cutlery since I was eating biryani with my fingers. She pushed me to throw a birthday party and then told me the only reason she’d come was so she could make out with her boyfriend. For this same birthday, she gifted me a copy of Stephen King’s ‘Misery’, a book about a writer being tortured by a fan. She’d read me love letters she received, days after I was horribly dumped by my boyfriend during my board exams. She invited me to her bachelorette party and then had no food for me when I got there from work (after asking her if I should eat before coming). She flirted with my ex and he went along, making sure to announce to everyone in our social circle about how much fun they had. I think that was about the time I gave up trying to figure out why she was doing what she was doing and just cut them all out of my life. I did not miss any of them. As it turns out, a lot of other people wanted to be friends with me without having to tear down my dressing, my love life choices, my career or me.
Making that choice to cut her away let me breathe & find who I was outside this awful character sketch she was projecting of me. I don’t think about her except when she forces her way into my consciousness via a message. I’ve learnt to respond in polite banalities that don’t encourage any further engagement but don’t give her fodder for vitriol either. The harder part has been explaining to other people who know us both why. She is a more entrenched part of that social circle & the narrative is still that we were ‘such good friends’. It has just been easier for me to discard that whole circle. There are 7 billion people on this planet and most of the ones I meet, tend to like me. People are not disposable but when they are so toxic, they are certainly replaceable.
‘Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh’s first story is this one, seen through the eyes of that other woman, that inexplicably character so consumed by jealousy & self-loathing that she is willing to poison someone who doesn’t even notice her anymore. I’m not sure that is a shining endorsement for Shah Rukh’s filmography that this is the first fan story. But the book does get better which is why I’m still reading it. Another excruciating little detail for me is that neither the author nor the protagonist of this story are North India by origin, being respectively Bengali and Tamilian. But they both grew up in Delhi, which is a little factoid that I’ve filed away, that concurs with my impression of North Indian femininity.
The stories I’ve read since this difficult (for me) chapter have had me sighing in commiseration and even crying at the unfair truth of it all. There is a sisterhood out there, of urban Indian women, bravely soldiering on against the mighty patriarchy that is our country’s culture, trying very hard to hold on to love, romance, friendship and licking our bruises every single day that the world around us disappoints us. I just wish we’d known each other earlier. I thought I was the only one. Maybe my ex friend thought so too.
Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh: India’s Lonely Young Women and the Search for Intimacy and Independence by Shrayana BhattacharyaMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I’d never have picked up this book on my own given that title. I have never been a fan of Shah Rukh Khan and even as a teenager in the 90s, I found his films (including DDLJ, the highlight of his career) horrifying and problematic. But two people I trusted asked me to still consider it. I’m glad I did.
For starters, you may see some reviews calling the title clickbait; it’s not. There’s a touching sincerity about Shrayana’s affection for the star. There is also a backbone-of-steel honesty as she acknowledges why people may not share that affection, especially feminists of a certain kind. In the introductory chapter, she lays bare this question for herself – is it possible to be a feminist and also a Shah Rukh Khan fan? And because of the authenticity of her writing, she makes each of us question our answers to this as well.
What does it mean to be a feminist in India today, especially one navigating the cultural clash of post-independence Baby boomer parental values & those of the millennial internet-powered global economy? Every chapter, story and personal reflection examines this question over and over. Shrayana’s stories of SRK fans range from the obsessions of a hyperprivileged metro professional to the furtive grabs for agency by a lower-income Muslim single mother to a runaway rebel turned airline staff from Jaisalmer to a tribal woman navigating the church & dangerous Delhi. The book digs into Shrayana’s own life & work with economic policies, gender disparity & the wage gap – things that don’t find adequate coverage in their Indian context.
It’s a curious thing that such heavy questions hinge on the seemingly lightweight fandom of a masala Bollywood star. Yet, Shrayana also questions our assumptions that ‘important’ issues can only be thought about & spoken by elite, ivory tower intellectuals. Popular culture after all, is the language of the masses, the very people about who are struggling with these burdens. The women that Shrayana interviews & speaks about show their own ways of navigating the oppressive pressures surrounding them (moral policing, rape culture, domestic abuse, female feticide, slut-shaming, human trafficking, wage disparity). They are mothers, sisters, wives, girlfriends and more. They’re also enterpreneurs, albeit in ways that our systems of government & society do not recognise. In this sense, they are pioneers, finding their way to survival & joy amidst a system designed to erase their very identities. And what they have in common is a personal connection to the work & public persona of Shah Rukh Khan.
The book was a sobering look at my own elitism in thinking about feminism & about popular culture. Some of the women interviewed did not have the means to even watch a Shah Rukh Khan film on TV, let alone walk into a movie theatre. How then did they find a connection to this global icon? How did people that society tries very hard to enslave into kitchens & bedrooms with even controls on who they can talk to, what media they consume – how did they catch this pan-global narrative? Their stories tell you how and the significance of each of these roads struck out, how some of them have had to retreat back into the servitude of their lives, possibly condemned till death. And yet, that one time they managed to watch a full movie or that memory of learning the lyrics of ‘tujhe dekha to’ from replays of a battered tape recorder long after it has been shattered – these are such moving narratives.
This was still not an easy book to read. It took me over three weeks, between just stopping to catch my breath. Every insight of my own privilege, every chip broken off my condescension towards SRK fans, each one has been a punch to the gut. I’d say it was a much needed one for me.
If you’re a brown person, you would know Shah Rukh Khan (or you haven’t lived on this planet for the last 25 years). If you’re a feminist and can read English, please read this book. Power through the discomfort that comes up, because there are lessons in it. This is easily the best book I’ve read in 2021 and we’re only halfway through.
View all my reviews
