Yes, Diljit Dosanjh can do what Shah Rukh Khan can't

But the reasons are complicated.

Twitter has been abuzz with discussions of Punjabi actor, singer and general superstar Diljit Dosanjh’s epic takedown of general Bollywood rabble-rouser and right wing icon Kangana Ranaut. Dosanjh, who combines charm, courage, humour and some Punjabi plain speaking refused to back down to Ranaut’s usual ranting and emerged (quite deservedly) as the hero of the day.

But the spat also sparked off a slightly more painful side debate: Why don’t more successful stars like Shahrukh Khan and Salman Khan quite manage to stand up for their own community in the manner in which Dosanjh has?

It is a question that has been asked before, notably during the CAA-NRC protests that engulfed the country last year, and the answer is still both painful and complicated.

The cultural erasure of the Indian Muslim

My parents grew up in a different India. They watched Waheeda Rehman and Guru Dutt in the 1960 hit Chaudhavi ka Chand (a movie in which the entire plot centres around an instant in which the heroine lifts the veil of her burka in the market, and is seen by the Nawab), they idolised Mansur Ali Khan “Tiger” Pataudi, and hummed “pyaar kiya toh darna kya” from the other 1960 super-hit Mughal-e-Azam as they flouted their own social restraints to meet each other.

For them, Indian Muslim culture was not something alien. It was familiar, it was even aspirational. It was as stylish as a Tiger Pataudi doing adaab to a bowler after one of his genius field placements yeilded a wicket.

By the 1990s, this was no longer the case. Muslim characters in Bollywood were few and far between, and any characters on screen were portrayed with nothing that would identify them as Muslim apart from their name (unless of course they were the villains/terrorists in which case the entire cap and beard paraphernalia would be employed).

Urdu, once the lingua franca of Bollywood was also disappearing. Arslan Jafri explains this shift as being due to a decline in the popularity of the language itself, and an association in Indian minds of the language with Pakistan. In 1999, the Amir Khan starrer Sarfarosh hit the screens and cemented this association in people’s minds. Released in April (just before the 1999 Kargil conflict) it drew an unfortunate connection between the much loved subcontinental tradition of Urdu ghazals and cross-border terrorism. Despite some beautiful Urdu songs, the timing of the film, together with the Kargil conflict, was a blow for any aspirational depiction of subcontinental Muslim culture in Bollywood.

By the 2000s, the only route left for an Indian Muslim character to shine onscreen was to subsume his or her identity completely to a larger “patriotic Indian” identity. Shahrukh Khan’s character in Chak de! India (2008) is the perfect example. Never overtly Muslim, perfectly willing to accept an aarti and a tika for good luck, and yet perpetually questioned. For a movie about the unfair criticism faced by a Muslim sportsperson in India, there is little overt representation of any Muslim culture. The title is Punjabi and the dialogues are predominantly Punjabi, Haryanvi and a sort of cosmopolitan Hindi.

In a way, movies like Chak de! show us how complete the erasure the Indian Muslim identity from mainstream Bollywood has been. This same erasure, ironically, created the space for the ascendancy of Punjabi culture.

Enter, Punjabi

Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (1994) reacquainted the rest of India with Punjab. Punjab became a technicolour Yash Raj dream in which fields of mustard beckoned a homesick diaspora. The worst that could happen in this Punjab was that a very pan-Indian looking Shah Rukh Khan would fight the very Punjabi Kuljeet for a parentally sanctioned happy ending (“Ja, Simran, Ja. Ji Le Apni Zindagi”). It was as far as possible from any legacy of the 1980s, the riots, Blue Star or the insurgency.

By 1996, it was even possible for Gulzar to make a movie like Maachis about the insurgency — a fairly balanced take, that strongly critiqued police and state excesses committed during the counter-insurgency. Maachis was also fascinating in that the dialogue was largely in Punjabi, and one of the hit songs from the movie was almost entirely in Punjabi. (Though perhaps in a nod to the rest of India, none of the militants wore a turban.)

By the 2000s, the mainstreaming of Punjabi culture in Bollywood was complete. Candy floss romances like Jab We Met (2007) that were set almost entirely in Punjab did extraordinarily well at the box office. By 2009, mainstream Bollywood films audiences were lapping up Saif Ali Khan in Love Aaj Kal playing a good-looking Sikh hero who would traverse the country in search of his love, and Bollywood commentators were debating the “Punjabification of Bollywood”.

The popular music scene cemented Punjab’s role as a creator of mainstream trends. “What Punjab hears today, the rest of India hears tomorrow”, a commentator once remarked, and this is probably true. Hirdesh Singh and Aditya Prateek Singh Sisodia, (perhaps better known as Yo Yo Honey Singh and Badshah) have transcended cultural barriers to national and international popularity. Dosanjh himself is an extremely well known (and well liked) figure with over 4.2 million followers on Twitter. Most Indians now know far more Punjabi than they did 30 years ago — words like “chak de” and “soni kudi” are in popular use and weddings through the country have (much to some South Indian horror) adopted Punjabi customs like a sangeet with dancing. (When I got married in 2014, a tailor even did her best to convince my mother that all brides, even South Indian ones, now wore lehengas — she failed)

The “othering” project; failure and success

While this mainstreaming of Punjabi culture, or Punjabification of mainstream culture if you prefer, has come in for its fair share of grumbling, it has made it impossible for the Indian government today to alienate the rest of India from the struggles of the ordinary Punjabi, in the way in which it manages to alienate the rest of India from the struggles of the Indian Muslim or the Kashmiri.

When the #Dillichalo leg of the farmer protests began last week, Indian right wing handles and their liberal enablers did try very hard to revive the “Khalistani” tag. Government friendly news channels like Zee did their best to paint pictures of a global “khalistani” conspiracy. But it failed. And a large part of the reason it failed was the familiarity most Indians now have with Punjabi culture (and the consequent affection in which it is held).

Dosanjh, a couple of days before his epic Twitter fight posted pictures of farmer protestors on Twitter, asking the media to be more responsible in their coverage. He said “Eh Terrorists Lagde Ne Tuanu?” (Do these look like terrorists to you?)

Source: Twitter

He can ask that question safe in the knowledge that the answer from a majority of the Indian mainstream will be a resounding “no”. That was not the case in the 1980s. For many watching the farmer protests, seeing the scars of the 1980s being picked over afresh by the Delhi media has been traumatic. And watching the resoundingly positive mainstream Indian response to Dosanjh’s spat with Kangana (including South Indian handles happily tweeting “Sat Sri Akal" this morning) has provided some much-needed relief. To “other” the Punjabi again will not be as easy as imagined.

But this is not the case for the Indian Muslim community today. No Indian Muslim (superstar or not) can ask the question Dosanjh asked, and be sure of the answer. And it’s unfair to take their unwillingness to ask that question as a reflection of their courage. The erasure of Indian Muslim culture from the mainstream and the consequent “othering” of the Indian Muslim is a project that has gone on for generations now.

I’ve written elsewhere of the grotesque adoption by Indian liberal circles of a framing that is for all practical purposes a corollary to the two-nation theory — any overt expression of Muslim identity is immediately treated as “anti-national”, and the only “good Indian Muslim” is one who completely subsumes his religious identity to a national identity.

And this framing has only become progressively worse in the decades since partition, to the extent that today, a university with staunchly nationalist roots like Jamia Milia (whose first principal Dr. Zakir Hussain went on to be President of India and whose first Trustee was Jamnalal Bajaj) can be termed “anti-national” without raising eyebrows.

It is this framing that most Muslim Bollywood starts are forced to operate within. Instead of pointing fingers at privileged Muslims for not speaking out, we need to ask ourselves how we got here. How did close to 15 percent of our population become so invisible in mainstream culture that the right wing finds it so easy to “other” them?

The lesson that Diljit Dosanjh and his whole generation of rising Punjabi stars have taught us is that such othering and alienation doesn’t have to be permanent. But for that, the cultural erasure of Indian Muslims has to end. And that can’t be done just by Indian Muslims. It must be done by all of us.

Edit: An earlier version of the article stated that there were no Muslim players in the girls hockey team in Chak De! India. There is one. The article has been edited to reflect that.