Shah Rukh as metaphor

Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh 

By Shrayana Bhattacharya

This is an important book, one that documents the lives of a certain generation of Indian women, born in the early 80s, straddling a time period when society changed irrevocably with liberalization, “women who were on the cusp of adulthood when the world entered a new century.” A generation of women that has seen possibilities opening up for them personally, yet having to deal with families less enthusiastic about their enjoyment of them.

Bhattacharya tells the stories of these women, across social classes - a housewife in high society Delhi, a young cabin attendant from Jaisalmer, a single independent working woman in Delhi, an accountant in a government job, a young Muslim woman in UP doing piece work embroidery in Rampur. She peppers these stories with statistics. The labour force participation in our country is heavily skewed (77% of India’s workers are male). Nearly 71% of urban Indian women between the ages of 30 and 34 are engaged solely in unpaid housework. Among the wealthiest twenty percent of urban Indians aged 20-55, only 6% of married women are employed. 84% of marriages are arranged, nine out of ten are within the same caste.  In 2018, only 43% of women in India owned a mobile phone, compared to almost 80% of Indian men, the largest such gap in the world. The suicide rate of Indian women is twice the global rate. All of these to show that “there is no meaningful dimension of well-being on which men and women are equal in India. None…All the data on gender in India, despite progress since Independence, confirms that our country is profoundly unequal and that the gap between male and female achievement and access to resources continues to grow.” 

It is within this context that we read the stories of these women. Bhattacharya frames them through the fandom of Shah Rukh. The conceit is wonderfully worked. Through this shared fanhood, Bhattacharya draws out the desires and fantasies of these women, as they tell her why Shah Rukh is so important to them. They tell her he is self-made, that he is intelligent, that he understands women, that the love he portrays is the stuff of their dreams, that they have never seen a man peel carrots in the kitchen as he did in DDLJ. But, as one woman says, “No wonder our generation of women is so fucked when it comes to love. We saw this beautiful man dance on top of a train, romance women in the most beautiful settings and do it all with such conviction that we all bought the dream of love that he sold us.” But the men in their lives are far from the idea of Shah Rukh - “Every fan-woman I had met - from Lutyen’s Delhi to rural UP - would offer stories of how a man had compromised her selfhood, how her family would treat her like a ticking time bomb, how the marriage market made her feel worthless, how they were underpaid and how public spaces remain unfriendly.” 

But the women Bhattacharya writes about, all defy some convention, negotiate some form of space for themselves even while never openly breaking away from the patriarchy that holds them back. It could be taking a short break from a stifling marriage, or staying single and committing to a career, or seeking new guideposts to negotiate love. Bhattacharya distinguishes these ‘deeply private rebellions’ from the vociferous sloganeering on the internet about smashing the patriarchy. This is real, lived feminism, that ‘chips away at the social structures everyday’ - ‘feminism that won’t catch the eye but that can trigger change.’.Critics of DDLJ might see Raj’s refusal to run away with Simran and his attempt to stay and work to gain the support of her family as a concession to patriarchy. Yet, one of the women, Manju, the home-based textile worker in Rampur, sees it as a measure of Raj’s strength and maturity. Because in her lived world, she knows the dangers of being cut off from her family, the only source of support if, in fact, something does go wrong. And so we realize that “freedom is won through incremental negotiation, that dialogue amongst loved ones can be a path towards social change.”

Bhattacharya, through her research and reading, has come to believe that access to independent income is one of the most powerful tools of resistance women can have. And that as long as our institutions tax us for ‘seeking a self beyond beauty and duty’ and as long as the state does not recognize the unpaid labours women perform, it is difficult to keep women in the workforce. Which is why a mass female exodus from employment (women’s participation in the workforce has declined quite dramatically) can be so dangerous.  

It is a thought-provoking book, and a very interesting one, putting faces to the data points we read about. It uses Shah Rukh as a topic of mutual interest for women across social classes, in a country as diverse as India, women for whom it would otherwise be difficult to find common ground. As Bhattacharya says, she is “obliged that all talk of Shah Rukh liberated me from a researcher’s extractive gaze of ‘data collection’, that his films and songs freed me from having to look at the lives of women through the prism of deprivation and poverty alone.” It’s a Shah Rukh fan-girl’s take on a generation’s collective ideal of masculinity.

It’s a tough world out there, the change women seek is always too slow in coming, and the next generations still continue to have to negotiate their way through social change to try and achieve the autonomy they crave. As the author says, “Change involves regular people imposing censure and costs on friends and family members, on making personal acts of discrimination dishonourable and shameful. For the brave, change requires bearing the isolation and costs of resistance…Mindset isn’t enough, morality is embodied in how we demonstrate our liberal views in our daily encounters with people, places and our self. Without these intimate revolutions, the best laws and the strongest movements will fail.”