King of Victimhood: Shah Rukh Khan bites the hand that fed him

An archive opinion column, first published January 2013.

Of Punjabi bhangra-pop artist Daler Mehndi, it was famously said that he built an entire entertainment career on the strength of just five nifty dance moves.

Much the same can be said of actor Shah Rukh Khan. A man of at best middling histrionic capabilities, he has fashioned a far more phenomenally successful career on the strength of far less discernible talent. More importantly, he was embraced by a generation of Indians who were evidently so swayed by his looks (or whatever else they saw in him) that they readily overlooked his vacuous performances, blessed him with fame and fortune, and asked only one thing in return: that he keep them entertained.

And then, in January 2013, he wrote Being a Khan.

In the piece — published in Outlook magazine's anniversary issue — Khan wrote about being asked, ever more often after 9/11, to prove his Indianness; about being detained at American airports; about being reduced, in his own telling, to his religion. The essay was read around the world as the anguished confession of a Muslim star in a Hindu-majority nation.

Here is the problem with that reading. India did not make Shah Rukh Khan a star despite his name. It made him a star with it. In no other country on earth could a man named Khan — an outsider with no film family, no godfather, no surname that opened doors — have become the single biggest box-office draw of his generation, the face on a billion lunchboxes, the man whose arms-outstretched pose schoolchildren imitated in playgrounds from Kerala to Kashmir. That is not the biography of a victim. That is the biography of a country that, whatever its faults, handed him everything.

Victimhood is a strange garment for this particular king to wear. It fit poorly then, and it fits poorly now. The same public that queued around the block for his films was the public he implicitly indicted. You cannot dine at the table for twenty years and then write a column complaining about the seating arrangement.

None of this denies that Khan faced real prejudice — the airport detentions were real, and ugly. But there is a difference between naming a wrong and building an identity on it. One is courage. The other is ingratitude dressed up as confession.

India gave Shah Rukh Khan the world. The least he could do was not bite the hand that fed him.