Pathaan and its politics

Abstract

Released on 25 January 2023, the Bollywood blockbuster film Pathaan, an action-spy thriller featuring India’s beloved superstar Shah Rukh Khan (SRK or King Khan to his fans), shattered box-office records. Pathaan’s spectacular success is the starting point for this Special Section. Scholars of Indian cinema offer their reflections on the larger political-cultural conversations within which the film is embedded and that it has ignited, not least the enmeshment between nation, religion and masculinity, and the film’s special place in SRK’s stardom and filmography. The six essays in this section extend the ways in which Pathaan has been read so far and offer interventions into thinking about star text and fandom, masculinity, nationalism, neoliberalism, and precarity in Bollywood.