Crossover Stars in the Hindi Film Industry: Globalizing Pakistani Identity 9780367266790, 9780367266806, 9780429294563

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CROSSOVER STARS IN THE HINDI FILM INDUSTRY

This book explores the cultural politics of Pakistani crossover stardom in the Hindi film industry as a process of both assimilation and “Otherness”. Analysing the career profiles of three crossover performers – Ali Zafar, Fawad Khan, and Mahira Khan – as a relevant case study, it unites critical globalization studies with soft power theory in exploring the potential of popular culture in conflict resolution. The book studies the representation and reception of these celebrities, while discussing themes such as the meaning of being a Pakistani star in India, and the consequent identity politics that come into play. As the first comprehensive study of Pakistani crossover stardom, it captures intersections between political economy, cultural representation, and nationalist discourse, at the same time reflecting on larger questions of identity and belonging in an age of globalization. Crossover Stars in the Hindi Film Industry will be indispensable to researchers of film studies, media and cultural studies, popular culture and performance, peace and area studies, and South Asian studies. It will also be of interest to enthusiasts of Indian cinematic history. Dina Khdair is an independent scholar. She has an MA in Media and Cinema Studies from DePaul University, Illinois, USA. Her research interests include globalization and Hindi cinema, narrative studies, and the convergence of commercial entertainment industries. She has presented original work at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and was a contributor for the online journal Antenna through the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. Her work has appeared in the peer-reviewed journals Studies in South Asian Film and Media and SAGAR. She intends to continue her research pursuits at the doctoral level.

CROSSOVER STARS IN THE HINDI FILM INDUSTRY Globalizing Pakistani Identity

Dina Khdair

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Dina Khdair The right of Dina Khdair to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-26679-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-26680-6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-29456-3 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Swales & Willis, Exeter, Devon, UK

CONTENTS

1 Introduction

1

2 A historical legacy

20

3 Globalization, new political economies, and cultural change

53

4 Aspirational affects and boundary crossing: Ali Zafar, the Pakistani “Prince of Pop”

78

5 A crossover romance: female fandom and Fawad Khan, Pakistan’s “reel” gentleman

105

6 I am not your feminist: Mahira Khan and the re-scripting of Pakistani womanhood, Islam, and globalization

133

7 A fragile union: moving forward, facing backward

155

Filmography Index

185 191

1 INTRODUCTION

In 2010, Pakistani musician and actor Ali Zafar noted how “films and music are one of the greatest tools of bringing in peace and harmony between India and Pakistan. As both countries share a common passion – films and music can bridge the difference between the two” (Press Trust of India, 2010). In a more recent interview from May 2016, Zafar reflects on the unprecedented success of his career in India, celebrating his work in cinema as groundbreaking and forecasting a bright future for Indo-Pak collaborations in entertainment and culture (Dawn.com, 2016). His optimism is signaled by a wish to reach an even larger global fan base, as he mentions his dream of working in Hollywood and joining other Indian émigré stars such as Priyanka Chopra. Fast-forward four months, and Zafar and other Pakistani stars working in India were given a 48-hour ultimatum to evacuate the country following a deadly attack by alleged Pakistani terrorists on an Indian military base in Kashmir (France Press Agency, 2016). Facing threats of violence from communalist groups and an industry ban suspending their current and future film projects, Pakistani stars were abruptly ousted from India’s entertainment scene. Acclaimed producer-director Karan Johar was pressured by key political groups to publicly apologize for employing Pakistani artists, even paying reparatory compensation to the military as a result of the controversy (Anand & Venkataraman, 2016). Meanwhile, the release of films featuring Pakistani actors was promptly stalled and a complete ban on media imports implemented on both sides of the border (Anand & Venkataraman, 2016). This study is both a response to and an attempt at exploring the complex politics of crossover stardom in India, focusing on the careers of Pakistani stars as a revealing case study. Richard Dyer (1986), in his discussion of African American star Paul Robeson, has previously defined a crossover star as a performer who appeals to multiple audiences; while the term was originally used in the music industry to describe

2

Introduction

artists who gained mainstream popularity beyond a particular genre or subculture, Dyer deploys the term to characterize Robeson’s movement across racial barriers in the 1920s and 30s. His interest lies in interrogating how America’s “first major black star” (p. 65) achieved unanimous success with both black and white audiences, albeit for different reasons and within a hierarchy of cultural discourses on blackness. Dyer asks “What was the fit between the parameters of what black images the society could tolerate and the particular qualities Robeson could be taken to embody? Where was the give in the ideological system?” (p. 65). A similar set of questions can readily be applied to Pakistani stars in India, who are “crossover” in any literal and figurative sense of the term. They not only cross a highly contested geographic/military border between India and Pakistan, a construct which figures powerfully in the national imaginary of both countries, but also media industries and platforms, having migrated primarily from Pakistani television screens to Hindi-language cinema, music, and ancillary entertainment products produced in India. Besides these more material passages between borders, Pakistani stars also cross religious, cultural, and linguistic boundaries. This is all the more remarkable considering India’s immense diversity, encompassing multiple faiths, languages, and regional and class identities. This fragmentary cultural landscape is evinced by the fact that India boasts at least seven significant regional entertainment industries, each possessing discrete audiences and aesthetic sensibilities. As a result, “crossing over” can imply a host of contradictory and parallel meanings. In the case of Pakistani stars, crossing over connotes a dynamic of assimilation and “Otherness” that is constantly in tension. Exploring the representation and reception of these crossover stars highlights key trends in the flow of global communication, culture, and power. Besides reflecting the increasingly global orientation of Hindi cinema in the past two decades – as indicated by a variety of co-productions with transnational media industries and an expanding audience base outside India – it also reinforces the Hindi film industry as India’s dominant locus of cultural production. Hindi cinema remains a pivotal medium for national and social consciousness and is the most visible representative of Indian soft power. The concept of soft power refers to the “intangible assets” (Nye, 2010, p. 333) of a nation that variably include its “culture, political values and institutions, and policies that are seen as legitimate or having moral authority” (Nye, 2010, p. 333). The objective of soft power is to achieve desired outcomes through co-optation rather than coercion (Nye, 2010). While remaining a highly debated concept, soft power is useful in apprehending the symbolic and political potency of culture in a globalized world. In the network society described by Manuel Castells (2010), culture occupies a central aspect of civil society, the global public sphere, and public diplomacy. These intersecting forces “convert” soft power into sociopolitical outcomes, from popular opinion to policy initiatives and governance (Hocking, 2005; Melissen, 2005). Thus, soft power and its political effects are progressively negotiated in a cultural terrain powerfully shaped by consumer media and entertainment (Hayden, 2012; Iwabuchi, 2007; Melissen, 2005; Thussu, 2010).

Introduction

3

If soft power is about projecting a global image, in which dominant media cultures are increasingly imbricated, then the necessity of reading such artifacts as political texts is overwhelmingly evident. For example, the crucial link between popular culture and nationalism in the Hindi film context is already well established (Banerjee, 2017; Chakravarty, 1993; Dwyer & Pinney, 2001; Mishra, 2002; Virdi, 2003). However, substantially fewer studies have explored the wider role of popular media in public diplomacy and conflict resolution. Iwabuchi (2007) points in this direction through her discussion of Japanese media as contraflow in East Asia, citing specifically how Japanese and Korean television act as a cultural bridge between societies formerly estranged by imperialism and war. Commenting on the cultural impact of the Korean drama Winter Sonata (2002, director Yoon Seok-ho) in Japan, she observes that many viewers, started to learn Korean, visit Korea and study the history of Japanese colonialism. In this process a significant number of audiences came to the realization that they harboured a prejudice against Korea as a backward country…This may make Japanese people realize that they now inhabit the same temporality and spatiality as people in other Asian regions and that the peoples of Asia, while being subject to common waves of modernization, urbanization and globalization, have experienced these phenomena in similar yet different ways in their own particular contexts. (p. 76) Iwabuchi’s insights are germane to the concerns of the present study. The recent emergence of Pakistani talent in India engages a historical legacy of national and religious conflict that has had significant cultural consequences – for example, the import of Indian films was banned in Pakistan for 43 years until the lifting of economic sanctions in 1998 (Safi, 2016). The two countries have fought three armed conflicts since World War II, share a tenuous geographical border marked by ongoing confrontation, and have national origins characterized by a violent partition founded on religious difference. As of this writing, both countries are at the brink of a renewed war over political control in the heavily disputed Kashmir region (Masih, 2019). The discursive outcomes of this conflict include long-term processes of religious and cultural “Othering” and static, homogenizing portrayals of each nation across both sides of the border in popular media. An escalating Hindu nationalist movement and rhetoric surrounding the global War on Terror has further exacerbated both real and ideological contention between the two nations. Simultaneously, both countries are also experiencing reciprocal social, political and economic pressures induced by global neoliberalism. In this context, examining the potential of cultural diplomacy in attenuating regional conflict could not be more exigent, making the recent phenomenon of Pakistani crossover stars especially salient and worthy of inquiry. Considering such historical and contemporary circumstances – and the theoretical questions they raise – how can Pakistani crossover stardom be interpreted?

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Introduction

This study approaches that question from several analytical angles; first by exploring the industrial, narrative, and cultural forces motivating Pakistani stardom in the Hindi film industry, and second by questioning what it means to be a Pakistani star in India. Which “identity” takes precedence in celebrity discourse on Pakistani stars – national or religious, if any such distinction is made? How does crossover stardom negotiate the representation of national and religious identities through popular media, and how has this representation changed over time? Finally, what do these changes indicate for the prospects and limitations of cultural diplomacy in a rhizomatic, conflict-ridden world? While in past decades crossover attempts by Pakistani actors have been brief and unsuccessful, the sustained popularity of stars Ali Zafar and Fawad Khan, and the continuing entry of debut talent like Mahira Khan, stand in notable contrast. These stars embody a new global imaginary for Pakistan that challenges its ghettoized depiction as a culturally impoverished “terrorist state” historically prevalent in popular discourse. Their work across media platforms blurs audiovisual boundaries between India, Pakistan, and the West that are mediated by globalization, problematizing questions of identity and belonging on multiple levels. However, the “soft power” embodied in such media flows increasingly confronts the “hard power” of state bureaucracies and national, as exemplified by the recent ban on crossover stars and cultural relations more widely in the wake of recent conflict. The impetus for crossover stardom in Hindi cinema can be attributed to increasing efforts at globalization, including shifting circumstances for cultural production and reception and new systems of financing, producing and distributing media products on a global scale. The reality of overseas markets as a primary source of profit (Ganti, 2004) and the role of convergence culture in shaping media integration and consumer engagement have been crucial factors in the crossover appeal of Pakistani stars in India. Each of the above stars had existing reputations in satellite industries before being launched in Hindi films, having already achieved commercial success in television and music, in addition to solid cross-border fan bases. This career trajectory points to an evolving model of media and talent franchising in the Hindi film industry that is linked to growing corporatization on the one hand, and a media convergence environment driven by consumer participation on the other. In terms of celebrity discourse, Pakistani crossover stars are positioned as figures of vicarious identification and fantasy that are tied to the aspirational lifestyle values intrinsic to consumer capitalism. However, rather than occurring in spite of these stars’ marked national and religious identities as Muslim/Pakistani, this process is an outcome of transnational shifts in the political economy of culture in India. The alleged “difference” of these stars is frequently framed as the source of their commercial appeal and is consciously inscribed through celebrity marketing techniques influenced by other global industries, including Hollywood. As a result, celebrity discourse evokes their national and religious backgrounds as much as emphasizing their integration into global standards of celebrity. This contradictory representation serves to preserve the brand “mystique” of crossover

Introduction

5

stars even as it exposes their celebrity personas to identity transcendence through their performance in popular media on the one hand, and operations of fantasy and desire via global commodity culture on the other. Finally, the diverse bodies of work these stars produce both directly and indirectly confront homogenizing stereotypes regarding Islamic and Pakistani identity and its association with terrorist violence, while positioning consumer capitalism as an alternative framework for accessing identity where religious, national and social boundaries are often fluid and ambiguous. While a film like Tere Bin Laden (2010, director Abhishek Sharma), starring Ali Zafar, boldly attacks Islamophobia with a satirical critique of the War on Terror, Khoobsurat (2014, director Shashanka Ghosh) is a romantic comedy that highlights the genteel charisma and sex appeal of its star, Fawad Khan, in a way that reframes the Pakistani/Muslim male body as an object of erotic desire rather than violence. These representations are reinforced by the off-screen personas of crossover stars as consumer brand and lifestyle icons. Popular media thereby becomes an important locus for consuming identity organized around shared values of hedonism, vicarious identification, and aspirational desire that can dispel bounded identity categories. Nonetheless, the elements of globalization that enable crossover stardom also constitute a struggle to redefine borders and identities in a de-territorialized cultural landscape. The transnational rise of Hindutva and the use of global discourses on terrorism by the Indian state and communalist organizations, adopted to justify the recent ban on Pakistani performers, highlight the paradoxical and contingent effects that globalization can produce. However, the ban’s conflicted reception in both India and Pakistan – not to mention globally – reveals that cultural artifacts engage critical subjectivities and resistance within networks of asymmetrical power, salvaging the possibility for a mediatized diplomacy. This process can be seen at work in the hybrid cultures, cosmopolitan imaginaries, and collaborative intelligence of networked communities inherent to contemporary media flows. While substantial research exists exploring Muslim subjectivities on screen and IndiaPakistan relations through cinema, (Agarwal, 2002; Ansari, 2010; Banerjee, 2017; Bharat & Kumar, 2008; Chadha and Kavoori, 2008; Hirji, 2008; Hussein & Hussein, 2015; Islam, 2007; Khan, 2009; Kumar, 2013; Richter, 2009) few analyses have considered how celebrity discourse shapes the on-screen representation and audience reception of Pakistani and Muslim stars. By using globalization as a guiding framework, this research interrogates how shifting political economies and sites of cultural reception generate opportunities for Pakistani crossover stars that were not available before. Globalization is thereby approached as a commercial agenda and an industrial and cultural practice that can have provisional and dissonant effects, offering a groundbreaking and comprehensive model in studying crossover celebrity as a wider media occurrence. In applying this theoretical lens, I explore an intensifying relationship between industrial infrastructures, audience imaginaries, and media convergence in shaping Pakistani crossover celebrity. The outcome includes new narrative and thematic iterations in Hindi cinema that challenge pre-existing ideas about Pakistani identity and its representation on screen. Such

6

Introduction

transitions accommodate the material and imaginative boundary-crossings encountered in the performances and creative authorship of crossover stars, even as they remain subject to the uneven effects of globalization. By exploring globalization as a mediating force, this research takes a different approach than the contemporary work of scholars who have examined identity politics and representation in popular Hindi cinema. Scholars like Fazia Hirji (2008), Claudia Richter (2009), and Shahnaz Khan (2009) argue that the construction of the Muslim “Other” remains an immutable fixture in Hindi cinema, but fail to consider how the industry’s globalizing imperatives over the past decade have opened new avenues for exploring national and religious identities on screen, a result of vast structural changes and efforts to access transnational markets (Ganti, 2012). Most importantly, scholars like Richter (2009) do not consider how popular film narrative is itself in dynamic flux, being transformed by genre-based storytelling aimed at global audiences that renders the style of melodramatic engagement she describes increasingly obsolescent. This suggests that processes of narrative identification for Hindi film viewers – and their role in subjectivity formation – are more heterogeneous than ever before. As a consequence, these discussions pay little attention to the reading practices of audiences. Rajinder Dudrah (2008) and Shakuntala Banaji (2008) demonstrate how spectators engage in complex meaning-making practices that can produce both dominant and personalized readings while recognizing that textual identification is scarcely unitary in the complicity or rejection of ideological messages. I draw on these theories of spectator engagement as multifarious and contingent, while applying Purnima Mankekar’s (2015) framework for transnational public cultures as a theoretical tool to interrogate how global media flows intervene in the formation of cultural identities. Mankekar explores how the circulation of transnational media products, including cinema and television but also material commodities, mediates notions of cultural identity and affective belonging/ unsettlement for Indians in both domestic and diasporic settings. She evaluates how transnational public cultures “constitute India as an archive of affect and temporality,” (p. 7) but rather than producing static notions of India – and thus totalizing frameworks for cultural identity – media cultures can elicit disjunctive relationships to national and cultural discourses. Most relevant to this study is Mankekar’s elaboration of the nexus between global commodity culture and the imbrication of what she calls “affective/sensorial ecologies” (p. 6). In showing how media products can embody regimes of feeling, for example, by locating Indian culture in the “hearts and bodies” of Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) rather than the territorial nation state, Mankekar contends that identity is constantly in flux, “inherently unsettled” (p. 57) and engaged by global processes. This research similarly reflects on the role of global media artifacts in “unfixing” national, religious and cultural identities. Mankekar’s deployment of affect as a theoretical apparatus is useful in excavating how the aspirational desires of consumer capitalism function as structures of feeling that can exceed identity signifiers – such as the stereotyped “sign” of the Pakistani Muslim male body and its

Introduction

7

co-implication with terrorist violence. This invocation of aspirational desire is articulated across the media texts and celebrity personas of Pakistani crossover stars. This work thereby builds on existing scholarship while aiming to illustrate how global conditions for the production and circulation of culture make possible complex material and subjective boundary crossings. This theoretical grounding is supported by Henry Jenkins’ (2006) insights on convergence culture. Jenkins defines convergence as both a technological and cultural process; it entails the integration of media outlets, technologies, and industries as well as the participatory behavior of media consumers in the digital age “who will go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they want” (p. 2). Jenkins’ observations are formative in demonstrating that Pakistani crossover stardom is driven by corporate and technological convergence on the one hand, and interactive consumer culture on the other. The fact that the Hindi film industry produces a multitude of content aimed at global audiences reveals how films are no longer destined primarily for the domestic box office; rather, it is expected that they will earn lucrative profits abroad and have an extended distribution cycle in a media convergence environment. In addition, corporate brand integration and the acquisition of multiple media franchises have catalyzed the exposure of Pakistani music and television in India, making the emergence of crossover stars and their transition to cinema a logical progression based on their prevailing commercial vitality in analogous formats. Combined with the accelerated movement of media products across linked venues – for example, the ability to download a star’s television serials and films on the same streaming service – these changes have created crucial conditions for the ascendance of Pakistani stars in India. This new convergence context relies on the sundry consumption habits and pop culture awareness of media consumers, whose interaction with multiple entertainment modes is a powerful stimulus in the cultivation of crossover celebrity brands. These forces are compounded by the convergence between a star’s various media texts and his or her celebrity identity in popular journalism, such that in consuming the media artifact the spectator also consumes the star as a celebrity text that is ongoing and multifaceted. In particular, Dyer’s (1986) notion of star images as complex, intertextual, and open to interpretation is a core theoretical praxis in excavating the contradictory discourses surrounding Pakistani crossover stars and their reception. On the one hand, this ideological “slippage” is a function of media convergence, part of the means by which star images are manipulated and branded by industry sources to satisfy diverse audiences; on the other, audiences play a crucial role in interpreting the relationship between a star’s media texts and celebrity persona, generating fan discourses while consolidating the social relevance of stars across spectrums of race, class, gender, as well as religious and national contexts. Approaching Dyer’s arguments from a convergence vantage are useful in understanding the political and cultural ambiguities of Pakistani crossover stardom. Dyer (1986, p. 7) argues that stars “articulate aspects of living in contemporary society.” As a result, they project social conflicts and act as objects of popular

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Introduction

identification/dis-identification. For Pakistani crossover stars – who transcend borders, industries, and identities – this positions them at the intersection of conflicting cultural, social, and political movements in a globalized world. In the first place, stars idealize the values and experience of transnational consumer capital; as lifestyle icons, they characterize ethics of entrepreneurship, individualism, and success, while also holding the potential to reveal the incongruities of capitalism and its commodification of bodies, labor, and social existence. In this sense they embody tensions regarding the nature of labor and individuality that Dyer has previously identified. However, by exploring what it means to be an individual in a global capitalist society, stars also symbolize reciprocal conflicts over social community and identity – ways of defining ourselves in relation to others through shared origins, beliefs, experiences, and locations. If Hindi cinema and its stars have historically played an iconic role in circumscribing and maintaining national identity, including discourses of cultural dominance and marginality, Pakistani crossover stars make the instability of these constructs visible through an ambiguous sense of place and belonging. By being in between borders and identities, as simultaneously familiar, desirable, yet markedly foreign and “Other,” their ambivalence highlights the disjunctive cultural effects of globalization, which destabilizes national and religious boundaries while throwing political conflicts over identity into stark relief. Arjun Appadurai (1996) has already posited the diminishing centrality of the nation state in fomenting social change; similar to Mankekar’s (2015) argument regarding global public cultures, he contends that electronic media and migration are the most potent forces shaping everyday life under globalization. By influencing both individual and collective acts of imagination, media enable a “community of sentiment” (Appadurai, 1996, p. 8) that can include, but frequently exceed, the confines of the nation state. This is certainly the case with Hindutva and discourses on global terrorism, for example, but it is also equally true of the shared competencies and emotional pleasures that consumer media cultures elicit. A core argument of this study is that media texts support new ways of imagining identity through common affects and epistemologies of consumer capitalism – a form of global citizenship that entails particular ways of knowing, experiencing, and acting in the world. Daniel Lerner’s (2010, p. 77) concept of “psychic mobility,” or the drive for self-transformation, in conjunction with Appadurai’s (2008, pp. 29–34) futureoriented concept of “aspiration,” embodies the capacity of capitalist imaginaries to fuel cultural change. The twin values of individual destiny and aspirational desire are thus the defining “thought-ways” and “life-ways” of global consumer society, to borrow Lerner’s phraseology (p. 81). As Appadurai (1996) acknowledges, this force is increasingly compelling in a de-territorialized and post-national society. This is not to suggest that consumer capitalism is liberating, homogenous, or democratizing as a global force, nor does this study directly address debates regarding consumer empowerment. What is of interest here is the imaginative potential of media artifacts, images, and systems (what Appadurai calls mediascapes) to produce cultural alliances and heterogeneous subjectivities beyond national or political identity constructs. The physical and textual boundary crossings of Pakistani crossover

Introduction

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stars reflect this imaginative agency while exposing the “fundamental disjuncture between economy, culture, and politics” (Appadurai, 1996, p. 33) that Appadurai (1996) identifies in his treatise on global cultural flows. This emphasis expands a pivotal trend in cultural globalization studies toward receptive media ecologies. Such an approach is central to understanding the intervention of media as soft power. As Castells (2010) and Kraidy (2010) demonstrate, the disproportionate role of culture in the network society indicates that analyses of soft power must shift away from paradigms situated strictly in the top-down, structural agency of nation states. The rise of non-state actors and the overall privatization of the public sphere suggest a shift in the center of cultural gravity – positioning the media consumer/spectator in a newly decisive role. Much of the existing scholarship on soft power in South Asia lands in the former theoretical trap. The seminal reference text on this subject – Daya Kishan Thussu’s Communicating India’s Soft Power: Buddha to Bollywood (2013) offers a relatively uncritical, expository survey of the “hard” economic and leadership potential of India’s soft power, defined broadly as “civilizational and cultural capital” (p. 7) that includes “India’s secular federal democracy, its pluralist values and institutions, and its civil society, as well as the media, Information Technology (IT) and communications industries” (p. 11). To fully capitalize on this potential the Indian government must leverage strategic “image” branding, engage publicprivate partnerships, and pursue multilateral policy agendas. The effect of this wide-ranging soft power on domestic and foreign publics, however – in both its “passive” and targeted guises – remains implicit yet undefined. Cultural diplomacy thereby continues to be framed as a hierarchical, top-down, and bureaucratic process that sidelines the emerging role of global consumer publics. As a result, the cultural influence of Indian media as soft power remains an intellectual gap that scholars have more recently attempted to address, and which this study attempts to enlarge (Athique, 2018; Schaefer & Karan, 2013; Wagner, 2010). The most productive studies have collected qualitative and quantitative feedback on how diversely situated audiences interpret cultural meaning through media texts (Athique, 2018). This bottom-up approach to the reception of soft power reveals how consumer-oriented participation intercepts targeted public diplomacy while opening a space for a civic sphere that is horizontally engaged and increasingly convergent. These studies reveal the imaginative processes that spectators engage within and between cultural proximities, and across spectrums of race, class, and gender. Adrian Athique’s (2018) pioneering study on the reception of Hindi films in Southeast Asia is a case in point, revealing how audiences in the Philippines and Thailand frame these texts within a “symbolic construction of modernity in everyday life” (p. 17) amidst competing local and global influences. Athique thereby discerns the realistic potential for Indian media artifacts to “engage with common aspirations to freedom and affluence or … to speak to common frustrations and complaints” (p. 17) in an interAsian dialogic framework. These findings contrast starkly with Wagner’s (2010) assertion that Hindi cinema is negligible as a soft power medium as it does “not promote a universal model for political or cultural development” (p. 336) like

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Introduction

Hollywood. Such arguments, as Devasundaram (2016) points out, belie the UScentric bias of soft power theory by endorsing a homogenizing, export-oriented template of cultural agenda setting. Devasundaram advocates for sites of resistance to this hegemonic narrative of soft power, which enfolds Indian cinema in a concentric hierarchy of what he terms “meta-hegemony” (p. 53). He alludes to ongoing trends in global media convergence as a prospective antidote to this ideological/cultural dominance, noting how the “New Wave of Indian Indies is increasingly de-stabilizing and de-centering Bollywood’s monopoly of Indian cinema” (p. 66) through “crowdfunding, independent film festivals, new media and the Internet” (p. 67). Such avenues of resistance and the imbrication of producer/consumer/citizen in a media convergence ecosystem reveal how soft power increasingly inheres outside the boundary of state apparatuses. I take this transition as a useful departure point to evaluate the utility of popular media as a tool for cultural diplomacy and conflict resolution in the ongoing crisis of IndiaPakistan relations, where traditional measures of public diplomacy have failed historically (Hall, 2012; Kugiel, 2012). The administrative reluctance to foster bi-lateral relationships on behalf of both states has given “grassroots” cultural diplomacy an exaggerated role (Akhter, 2016). Indeed, this soft power deficit is the proverbial elephant in the room when it comes to South Asian relations, obstructing India’s national brand as a benevolent superpower among its neighbors (Kugiel, 2012). The stakes and consequences of this “zero-sum game” (Moorthy, 2017, p. 302) are indisputably high. Besides intermittent military confrontation, the level of psychological mistrust and disapproval between both nuclear-armed powers is a barometer of the necessity for widespread cultural intervention. At least 79% of Pakistanis view India as “a serious threat to their nation,” (Kugiel, 2012, p. 371) a perception reinforced by ongoing government efforts to block diplomatic channels, implement “hard” barriers in education, travel, and development access, and insulate cross-border communication through censorship (Kugiel, 2012). This “hard power” blockade has led scholars like Akhter (2016) to prioritize culture as the salvaging domain for peace negotiation in the region. This view is even shared by more cautious advocates of soft power, with Kugiel (2012) noting, Interestingly, there is a huge discrepancy between societies and the ruling elites in their attitudes towards India. The more positive feeling of the public stands in stark contrast to the distrustful and difficult relations at the intergovernmental level. One can argue, however, that this gap should narrow in the future as India continues its soft power approach … As democracy takes root across the region, national authorities will find it harder to go against the wishes and preferences of their peoples and pursue confrontational policies towards India. This opens up even more space for Indian soft power to attract people in South Asia to the idea of shared prosperity and peace. (p. 374) Kugiel goes on to elucidate how India, as the region’s natural economic, military, and cultural leader, should advance this charm offensive through conventional outlets of public diplomacy with the objective of “reaching Pakistani civil

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society directly and promoting a positive image of India as a reliable partner and amicable neighbor” (p. 374). Nonetheless, there remains little practical or scholarly consensus on how this outcome might best be achieved – and to what extent such cultural transformation can and should reside within the purview of nation states. Following the lead of Devasundaram (2016) and Kolluri and Lee (2016), I adopt a modified understanding of soft power that acknowledges the burgeoning decentralization of culture within global flows of media, nationalism, and political discourse. While Akhter (2016) occupies the extreme end of this spectrum, arguing that “activism originating from the people’s level and a citizen inspired pursuit of peace, friendship, stability and progress” (p. 211) offer the greatest opportunity for arbitration, it is abundantly clear that “hard” and “soft” power coexist in the symbolic struggle over culture. The bottom-up resistance and optimism that Akhter (2016) outlines and which singer-actor Zafar valorizes at the outset of this chapter must be theorized within the limits of soft power, as the recent ban on Indo-Pak cultural accord suggests. Appadurai’s (1996) conceptual schema is again useful in theorizing this conflict over cultural hegemony, reflecting a collision between the technoscapes/ financescapes/mediascapes of global capitalism and the ideoscapes/ethnoscapes of local and global political communities. My approach thereby unites soft power/conflict resolution theory – currently skewed towards nation states, multilateral governance, and organizational agency – with parallel trends in media globalization studies. The receptive media ecologies and lateral agency of global consumers articulated above structure a compromise in discerning the evolving role of culture in globalized networks of power. This agency, I contend, is both material and symbolic; it occurs within the scaffolds of neoliberal capitalism and its polysemic arrangement of discourses, signs, and affects, the most prominent being aspirational desire (Appadurai, 2008). This cultural enfranchisement and its imaginative potency dovetail nicely with theoretical paradigms that interrogate the nature of hybridity and contraflow in a global media assemblage. In this regard the idea of “Third Space” (Bhabha, 1995, p. 208) helps justify the creative manipulation of culture by networked communities within and beyond state boundaries. Crossover media are an ideal manifestation of “third spaces,” which “actualize cultural borders and liminal regions where rules and resources are suspended, debated, contested and (re) produced” (Schaefer & Karan, 2013, p. 82). Without abandoning the caveat of “hybridity as hegemony” (Thussu, 2007, p. 27) through the relentless onslaught of neoliberalism, the idea of contraflow is relevant in apprehending the conflicting forces at play in global circulations of culture. As mentioned, significant work has been conducted on how diasporas deploy culture to deconstruct and negotiate identity (Georgiou & Silverstone, 2007; Karim, 2010). However, I argue that this process is not confined to diasporic communities, but rather characterizes the wider totality of cultural relationships in postmodern globalism. The idea of “third space” is relevant wherever authoritative narratives of social, political, and cultural identity are pushed to their discursive limits. The hybrid identities and media texts of crossover stars represent just such a challenge to these parochial frameworks.

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Retaining notions of hybridity as “third space” is key to assessing how consumer media can wield soft power beyond state patronage. This soft power is asymmetrical, operating through routes of cultural identification and (dis) identification within hegemonic media flows and the emotional/sensory topographies of consumer capitalism. Consumer capitalism as referent displaces the traditional dichotomy between “the country of origin and the country of residence” (Karim, 2010, p. 400) in a nation-based framing of “third space,” constituting its own cultural interstice where identities, desires, and attitudes of belonging are increasingly negotiated alongside formal communities. In this way, spatially bounded origins and destinations of selfhood are mitigated by the ahistorical, affective logics of global consumer capital. As Iwabuchi (2007) has already suggested, this can cause politically alienated societies to experience intellectual and emotional homologies that compel recognition of a shared “temporality and spatiality” (p. 76) – a sentient position rooted in the present rather than the historical past, and which anticipates an aspirational future. Govil (2007, p. 96) warns, If Bollywood remains committed to achieving global relevance through the nostalgic project of recovering primordial national sentiment, then it will be drowned out by the plodding, martial strains of majoritarian triumphalism. On the other hand, if Bollywood can move along the frictional trajectories inscribed in its name, well, that’s a beat more of us can dance to. This prescient statement captures the cultural conflict surrounding Pakistani crossover stars and the stakes of preserving hybridity between flow and contraflow. Hindi cinema’s aesthetic and cultural flexibility is indeed what makes it a credible soft power resource, possessing the potential to address subaltern locations within a global media system that remains primarily Western-dominated. As my analysis demonstrates, crossover stars and their media texts contribute to this hybrid sensibility in numerous ways – through peripatetic imaginaries that fuse local and global space, by inverting pervasive representations of the Muslim “Other,” and by invoking affective terrains of aspirational desire. Their voices of alterity speak to Beck’s (2008, p. 60) project of “realistic cosmopolitanism,” which seeks to address how “societies handle ‘otherness’ and ‘boundaries’ amid the global interdependency crisis.” Rather than eradicate difference, realistic cosmopolitanism recognizes otherness “both externally and internally; differences are neither ranged in a hierarchy nor dissolved into universality, but accepted” (p. 67). While cosmopolitanism remains colored by a utopian outlook and should not underestimate prevailing sentiments of national solidarity (Guibernau, 2008), the “third spaces” that global media enable provide crucial insight into how hybridization can intercede and destabilize conflict in a globalized world. In exploring the facets of crossover stardom articulated in the above discussion, this study takes a multidisciplinary theoretical and methodological approach. Chapter 2 provides a historical perspective on crossover stardom in

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the Hindi film industry, situating Pakistani stars within a broader economic and cultural legacy of India–Pakistan relations, and the role of ancillary formats like television and music in influencing trans-industry collaboration. I examine how the incorporation and signification of Muslim identity in Hindi film shifted over time, moving from strong assimilation – exemplified by the early Progressive movement – to qualified practices of religious containment, as Muslim identity became increasingly effaced by majoritarian nationalist politics. In this emerging context Muslim star personas were adapted to secular discourses of nationalism that disavowed Muslim subjectivity as a socially, politically, and culturally legitimate construct. This period, e.g. the “golden age” of Hindi cinema, witnessed the emergence of Islamicate genres that caricatured Muslim civil society as defunct and incompatible with the Indian state’s project of rational modernity. By the 1980s, crossover attempts by Pakistani actors were characterized in popular media through a process of stigmatization and “Othering,” corroborating preponderant nationalist rhetoric about Pakistani and Islamic identity. This analysis sets the stage for a discussion of how globalization is currently transforming the crossover horizon for Pakistani stars. This discussion is the focus of Chapter 3, which assesses how the political economy of culture in both nations has shifted in response to globalization, creating new commercial and cultural opportunities for crossover stardom. I include a detailed examination of infrastructural trends in the Hindi film industry, notably an ongoing movement towards media corporatization and its consequences for multi-platform convergence – conditions that have enabled Pakistani actors to transcend media genres and borders. An industrial approach also includes looking at new strategies of funding, producing, and distributing media products in the Hindi film industry, as multimedia conglomerates increasingly have the financing and diverse revenue streams necessary to tackle alternative subject matter, introduce new talent, and support “niche” products that are narratively and thematically innovative (Khdair, 2013). These conditions have allowed Pakistani television stars to gain a foothold in the Indian media landscape, circumstances that previously posed considerable fiscal and critical risk. Combined with the fact that intended audiences and markets for Hindi films are increasingly located overseas, including in the home entertainment market, the incentive to promote crossover stardom and reach new viewers in countries across Asia and the Middle East is ever expanding. This evaluation demonstrates that there is in fact room for ideological “slippage” and resistance within the confines of Hindi cinema’s “meta-hegemony” (Devasundaram, 2016), with hybridity serving to attract diverse audiences in the wider space of contraflows of both non-Western and diasporic media. These industrial and commercial transitions indicate that the way religious and national identities are represented on screen is likewise changing to meet new audience demands fueled by growing media exposure and industry collaboration. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 present a close textual reading of select films, music albums, and television serials for three of the most successful Pakistani crossover stars: Ali Zafar, Fawad Khan, and Mahira Khan. Zafar, the first genuinely

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successful crossover star, is both a musician and actor and continues to participate in multiple media formats and industries. By looking at his performance in films like Tere Bin Laden, Mere Brother Ki Dulhan (2012, director Ali Abbas Zafar), London, Paris, New York (2012, director Anu Menon) and Total Siyapaa (2014, director Eshvar Niwas), as well as two of his recent musical albums, Masty (2006, performer Ali Zafar) and Jhoom (2011, performer Ali Zafar), Chapter 4 investigates how Zafar’s projects consistently challenge stereotypes about Pakistani and Muslim identity while engaging the politics of “border crossing” – whether geographical, religious, or cultural. While two of the above films directly confront national and religious prejudice towards Pakistan in their narratives, each emphasizes the potential of transnational mobility, both economic and cultural, to overcome literal and figurative “borders.” By integrating Pakistani cultural references, imagery, and musical traditions within this larger globalized framework, Zafar’s work in cinema and music imagines India, Pakistan, and the West as a culturally continuous ontology. Zafar is deliberate about viewing his crossover work as a function of cultural diplomacy, utilizing ideals of cultural fusion and cosmopolitanism to promote this agenda. His rise to fame further glamorizes consumer capitalist ethics of hard work, talent, and aspirational desire that support alternative ways of imagining identity. Chapter 5 broadens this analysis with an in-depth exploration of Fawad Khan’s work in television and cinema, including his performance in the popular soap serials Humsafar (2011–2012, director Sarmad Sultan Khoosat) and Zindagi Gulzar Hai (2012–2013, director Sultana Siddiqi), both of which emerged as sleeper hits with television audiences in India, acting as precursors to the star’s debut in Hindi films. Fawad’s dramatic image in these texts as the consummate aristocratic “gentleman” position him as a fetishized object of romantic identification and fantasy that is heavily structured by female desire, an image that is evoked both on screen and off in his association with the Hindi film industry. Fawad’s genteel persona counteracts metonymical associations of Pakistani/ Muslim masculinity with physical and social violence. In addition to his role as a sophisticated prince in Khoobsurat, his performance as a closeted homosexual author in the family drama Kapoor and Sons (2016, director Shakun Batra) depicts a cosmopolitan maleness that is both tormented and gentrified. Unlike the regressive and threatening images of the Muslim male historically encountered in Hindi cinema, Fawad’s on screen demeanor is vulnerable, sexually restrained, and defined by a melodramatic sensibility of yearning, suffering, and loss. Unlike Zafar, Fawad’s stardom offers evidence of the influence that networked fan communities increasingly wield in a media convergence environment. His acclaimed reception in the above serials generated consumer demand among middle class viewers across the border that ultimately led to a nascent career in the Hindi film industry. Finally, Chapter 6 considers the on screen work of Mahira Khan, whose roles as a television host for MTV Pakistan and her co-starring performance with Fawad in the blockbuster serial Humsafar similarly paved the way for her debut in the Hindi film Raees (2017, director Rahul Dholakia). Mahira’s affiliation with global and local popular culture places Pakistani identity on a visibly

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transnational platform. In addition, her repertoire of honest and assertive female roles in the primarily women-centric serial genre contradicts stereotypes about Pakistani/Muslim womanhood as effaced, victimized, and exploited. Besides embodying shared ideals of femininity and star appeal in the Hindi film industry, Mahira holds global market potential due to her successful track record with audiences of Pakistani television, which is commercially successful throughout Asia and the Middle East. Her transnational bankability is indicated by the fact that Raees placed her opposite one of India’s biggest stars, Shah Rukh Khan, while the film’s extensive portrayal of Islamic cultural and religious themes (an overall rare occurrence in Hindi film) suggests an overture to audiences not only in Pakistan, but also in countries like the United Arab Emirates (UAE), where the film grossed nearly 25% of its global box office collections, coming in second only to the Unites States, and more than double its earnings in the United Kingdom.1 Such shifts reveal a growing incentive to target emerging overseas audiences and offer non-traditional content featuring stars with realistic crossover appeal and cultural accessibility. This factor reifies South Asian media cultures as an interlocking system of contraflow where alternate discourses of globalization, gender, and identity can be perpetuated globally. An analysis of the popular reception and celebrity identity of each crossover star is achieved throughout Chapters 4, 5, and 6 by examining press interviews and commentaries about each star in popular journalism, including their participation in brand sponsorship and public affairs, as well as by evaluating audience reception through fan websites and social media pages devoted to each star in India and Pakistan. This perspective is vital in determining what it means to be a Pakistani star in India, and in considering how celebrity discourse is constructed through commercial media outlets on the one hand, and consumer-driven activity on the other. Most importantly, it reveals how religious and national identities are negotiated through the crossover star text, and the consequences of this process for identity representation across media narratives. Finally, exploring the popular reception of these stars and their media texts underscores the contradictory forces shaping Pakistani crossover stardom. The recent banning of Pakistani artists in India for political reasons, and the resulting suspension of bilateral relations, reveals a conflict between national and global imperatives. The cessation of formal cooperation – due to an isolated act of aggression in a disputed territory outside of either country – illustrates nationalist and institutional resistance to a growing commercial and cultural engagement fueled by globalization. This engagement is top-down and bottom-up, motivated by neoliberal capitalism and industry agendas on the one hand, and the realities of labor migration, shared cultural landscapes, and technological convergence on the other. As a result, and in concluding this study, Chapter 7 investigates the various global flows underlying the ban while discussing how consumer capitalism both permits and disrupts the experience of nationalism in a global age, operating among multiple cultural regimes available to Indians in a transnational society. The unifying potential of aspirational desire and the shared pleasures and practices

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of consuming popular culture hold the potential to “unfix” national and religious discourses, as the work of Mankekar (2015), Appadurai (1996), and my extensive analysis of crossover stardom indicate. The disjuncture between capitalist consumer culture and discourses of national sovereignty and patriotism, propagated by the Indian state and right-wing religious groups, is best illustrated by the highly conflicted responses to the ban among industry professionals and the general public in both nations. As Held and Moore (2008, p. 3) remind us, culture today and its “private pleasures are very often matters of public concern, and the other way around.” The ban, its policies, and the various local and global responses to it reveal this new politics of culture, and how acts of consumption, cultural choice, and desire increasingly intercede the political sphere. In the process, the immediate and potential longterm consequences of Pakistani crossover stardom are considered, along with the wider implications of crossover media as cultural diplomacy in the region.

Note 1 Information retrieved July 3, 2017 from “Raees,” BoxOfficeMojo.com, www.boxoffice mojo.com/releasegroup/gr2804568581/.

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2 A HISTORICAL LEGACY

The emergence of Pakistani crossover stars must be situated within an ongoing historical legacy of political, economic, and cultural engagement between India and Pakistan, beginning with the watershed moment of both countries’ independence in 1947. The legacy of Partition has had a profound impact on national discourses, conflicts, and modes of cultural representation between both nations. Likewise, it is impossible to discuss the development of commercial entertainment in either country without examining the mutual origins and imbrication of their film industries during the early years of independence. This critical intersection between industries, along with the shared tapestry of North Indian culture and the linguistic dominance of Hindi-Urdu, have shaped the character of popular cinema on both sides of the border, leaving an indelible impression on these institutions and their consequences for national identity. These conditions both enabled and constrained the possibilities for crossover stars historically. The strong foundational ties and internal similarities between both industries created a compelling impetus to exchange talent; indeed, isolating and defining the first crossover stars is difficult considering that migration and resettlement was a formative phenomenon in the Hindi film industry following Partition. Where India ended and Pakistan began was a malleable idea physically, culturally, and psychologically in the transitional phases of nationhood. However, the gradual inurement of nationalist discourse and the consequent “Othering” of Muslim/Pakistani identity in Hindi cinema severely limited crossover migration, deterring the staying power of Pakistani stars on the rare occasions when they did grace Indian screens. This trend would be further exaggerated by political events after 1970, when both industries faced economic challenges and began to diverge structurally and culturally. The tide would not shift again until liberalization and globalization transformed the Indian and Pakistani economies in the 1990s through to the present. However, the reciprocal origins of both film industries

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remain an important factor in the historical migration and recent success of Pakistani crossover stars, just as the legacies of Partition and nationalist politics continue to impact their representation, popular reception and durability.

Partition: a backdrop The events surrounding the dissolution and Partition of British India in 1947 highlight, as Ian Talbot (2000) points out, the stark modernity of India and Pakistan as discrete political entities. The sudden and incongruous designation of geographic borders cut across vibrant coexisting communities, businesses, property, and integral heritage sites, rupturing the everyday social and historical experience of millions of people while leading to the largest documented migration in human history, with an estimated 12.5 million refugees crossing the border to join both newly independent states (Talbot, 2000). While the events leading to Partition are complex and multifaceted, its roots in British colonial administration and systems of electoral representation grounded in religious determinism are central to its legacy. These forces and their attendant rhetoric gained momentum during the independence struggle; however, it was not until Partition that notions of identity based solely on religious affiliation were normalized, obfuscating traditional and more nuanced perceptions of identity organized around caste, language, class, and region (Khan, 2007). The result was some of the most violent sectarian massacres in recent history, while Partition itself created an immediate sense of ambiguous place and belonging both for those residing in the affected border provinces as well as for those who would now be considered minorities in a “foreign” land because of their faith. Besides a number of forced migrations due to lost resources, family separation, or calculated ethnic cleansing campaigns, many of those who elected to migrate did so on a temporary basis, assuming they would return to their homelands and communities in the imminent future (Khan, 2007). The plight was especially difficult for women; at least 83,000 were raped, abducted, and forcibly converted, compelled into new lives and families against their will (Khan, 2007). It was in the painful and contradictory crucible of Partition that national ideas about India and Pakistan were formed, and the borders between each nation solidified. The irony and emotional dissonance characterizing the aftermath of Partition gave rise to selective and deeply partisan histories regarding its provenance in both countries. As Kavita Daiya (2008) notes in her seminal text on culture, violence, and the Partition legacy, this contradiction was embodied in the simultaneous achievement of national freedom and the permanent vivisection of the subcontinent. The paradoxes of this foundational logic were thrown into relief as the political establishment trumpeted India’s heroic destiny on the one hand, while friends and neighbors murdered one another ruthlessly on the other, converting faiths simply to ensure their own safety and often pledging allegiance to both nations or rejecting either (Khan, 2007). In addition, each nation had to absorb and justify hordes of refugees whose lives were uprooted for the sake of

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tenuous ideological ideals. As a result, national mythologies were built up around Partition; in India illegitimate Muslim claims to statehood were blamed for the loss of cherished territory and dreams of a united Hindustan, in addition to the primary cause of heinous atrocities committed against Hindus and Sikhs. In contrast, Pakistani discourse emphasized the sanctity and providence of the “Land of the Pure,” configuring refugees as sacrificial martyrs courageously fighting for a rightful Muslim state free from Hindu subjugation (Khan, 2007). In both official discourses, mutual culpability in Partition-related violence is elided. Each nation’s history was thereby forged in response to a religious and culturally polarized “Other” that echoed long-standing colonial definitions of identity and political sovereignty – even as this opposed very different indigenous histories and social realities. This credo was strengthened by the bitter memories and injuries inflicted during Partition, generating durable feelings of resentment and suspicion against the “Other.” As Yasmin Khan (2007, p. 185) persuasively argues, this “perceived aggression” on behalf of both states was the outcome of phobias exacerbated by the transitional phase of nation-building post-independence, in which “the vulnerability of both new nations was nakedly exposed by the dislocations of Partition.” (p. 183). Each assumed a defensive posture, borne by fears of re-annexation on the Pakistani side and of sabotage across the border in India, all before the first conflict over Kashmir had even erupted. These discourses have since become further fixed in national consciousness, drawing strength from three subsequent wars, multiple border skirmishes, and competition in areas of defense and foreign relations. The attitude of “perceived aggression” continues to inform contemporary bilateral relations and their cultural representation – particularly in popular cinema – despite an overall growing rapprochement in recent years. Notwithstanding its visible legacy in politics, education, and culture, Partition remains a contentious subject that is both evoked and repressed in popular memory. Daiya (2008) observes its symbolic erasure by the state, noting how Partition was popularly perceived as irreconcilable with India’s history of peaceful, nonviolent anti-colonial struggle that Gandhi led … Moreover, because responsibility for the violence lay with all the constituencies involved – British, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs – Partition has ultimately been disavowed historically as an aberration, a moment of “insanity” in an otherwise remarkable story of non-violently achieved freedom from British oppression. (p. 7) This stance was ideologically necessary “to maintain harmonious ethnic relations within the nation” (p. 7). Likewise, there is a corresponding lacuna around Partition in popular media that persists to this day. This cultural vacuum is likely due to the fact that in the context of the newly independent nation state popular media became a proponent of nationalism in both countries during the 1950s and 1960s, subsumed by the requisite imperatives of “harmonious” nation building.

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The shadowy underside of this national stimulus was a collective sublation of social trauma, which scholars like Bhaskar Sarkar (2009) and Meraj Ahmed Mubarki (2017) have explored in depth through their work on cinema and Partition. Sarkar’s study is seminal in this regard, particularly his attention to the role popular cinema and its modes of address have contributed to practices of cultural mourning. Both authors contend that early allusions to Partition violence on screen were oblique, a strategy that shifted diachronically to enable more explicit confrontations culminating in “New Wave” cinema and beyond. Mubarki (2017) takes this analysis a step further, notating how representations of the Partition legacy post-1990 have taken a decisively sectarian turn consonant with the political ascendance of Hindu nationalism. She identifies three consecutive trends in the cultural acknowledgment of Partition, “each progressively more aggressive than its predecessor” (p. 46); these being “denial,” “supra-communal trauma,” and “expropriation” respectively (pp. 46–47). The first renders Partition along allegorical terms already discussed by Sarkar (2009), incorporating a taxonomy of themes and plot devices frequently encountered in early post-independence cinema that indirectly exorcize the bloodshed and social agony of Partition. This category includes a coincidence of narratives involving doubles, natural calamities, deformity, amnesia, homelessness/vagrancy, cross-dressing, and filial displacement “akin to the breakup/disfiguration of the nascent nation” (Mubarki, 2017, p. 46). Central to Mubarki’s exposition is the notion of the “abject,” moments of an inbetween ontology characterized by “nothingness and absence,” (p. 48) of which Partition is a paramount example. Interestingly, neither author discusses the more overt references to social ambivalence and despair obvious in the postindependence popularity of gothic and noir genres – not to mention Dilip Kumar’s recurring masochism in a variety of dramatic roles. Besides problematizing the legitimacy of the state and its origins in Partition, these genres and their representational contours comment powerfully on the contradictions of belonging in an emergent national modernity – particularly for the Muslim star/citizen, which I discuss in more detail further on. According to Mubarki, the second phase involved denoting the reciprocity of Partition suffering among impacted communities, consistent with the pluralist outlook of Nehruvian socialism in the 1950s and 1960s, while the most contemporaneous development, in contrast, parochializes this trauma as the exclusive sanction of a Hindu majority. What is interesting about this insight is competing claims to the co-optation of victimhood, with Hindutva discourse ante-dating Partition to portray a historic legacy of cultural and religious subjugation beginning with medieval Muslim invasions of the subcontinent. Such “deified victimhood deflected attention away from the more contemporary narratives of power and violence” (Mubarki, 2017, p. 54) shaping Indian politics since the 1980s. Hindutva narratives of Partition are thus hazardous precisely because they justify past, present and proactive injunctions to minority apartheid in India which reverberates with larger structural forms of global oppression facing Muslim communities today. As Mubarki incisively expresses, this most recent iteration of Partition cinema relegates alternate

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experiences of the tragedy to non-diegetic spaces, while community anguish “becomes unique and even morally superior” (p. 58) in a way that concedes a disenfranchising religious nationalism. Despite its early formal disavowal and subsequent permutations onscreen, Partition nonetheless had a profound material and social impact on the emergence of distinctive film cultures in both countries. On the one hand, the porousness of borders, identities, and cultural affinities characterizing pre-Partition India were realized in the intellectual leftism of film personnel who contributed to Hindi cinema’s pluralist composition, establishing a common aesthetic and cultural basis that continues to exert influence. On the other hand, Partition challenged such continuities as cinema became aligned with a hegemonic nationalism that marginalized Muslim identity, including derogatory depictions of Pakistan as the enemy “Other” that reached exceptional heights during the 1999 Kargil dispute (Talbot, 2000). In Pakistan, Partition meant resurrecting a film industry from scratch whose cinema would become equally nationalist and jingoist in its views, only to collapse altogether under the weight of regional and linguistic tensions, censorship, and piracy (Ahmad, 2016). This chapter thereby surveys the historical development of the Indian and Pakistani film industries within the above cultural and political dynamics. However, this discussion also seeks to locate the Muslim star in the wider ideological landscape of popular Hindi cinema from pre-Partition to the current epoch of neoliberal globalization beginning in the 1990s. I contend that the accommodation of the “domestic” Muslim star in India throughout this period arbitrates many of the anxieties surrounding the originating moment of Partition, including its heritage of diffuse bodily/psychic violence, and the perceived threat of Muslim disloyalty and antagonism – the proverbial “third column” liability. These cultural discourses policed the boundaries for including and excluding the Muslim “Other” in the national imaginary by aligning the domestic Muslim star with the rational project of progressive Indian modernity. In fitting these parameters, Muslim identity became invisible – or at best secondary – to national identity, such that Muslim stars were (and continue to be) Indian first, and Muslim second. This differential hierarchy of integration is evidenced by the fact that Muslim stars in the post-independence period were repeatedly cast as Hindu characters within an overarching framework of secularism that was implicitly Hindu by default, while reverse instances of casting and role play became exceedingly rare. Islamic cultural life and institutions, when represented, were further deemed incompatible with normative Indian citizenship by an association with illiberalism, excess, and inscrutability. As a result, conditions of possibility for accepting the Muslim “Other” necessarily excluded anyone not invested territorially, emotionally, and physically in the Indian nation state. Thus, the importance of fixing national identity within borderlands – as marked by unwavering patriotism, hetero-normative coupling, and productive labor in service of the state – was the upper limit of Muslim belonging that inevitably precluded Pakistani nationals. As Daiya (2008) notes,

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the state’s utilization of “citizenship as technology of displacement” (p. 132) obstructed the capacity to reside between geographic and political borders, disenfranchising the migrant-cum-refugee of Partition and barring the possibility of return for those who had settled across the border, even under coercive circumstances. The effect of this, Daiya (2008, p. 133) reminds us, “consolidated the migrant’s displacement into permanent alienation from their original homes through their production as ‘nationals.’” This outcome was exacerbated by the state’s seizure of property in both territories that left returning migrants literally dispossessed. Daiya cites this practice as one of the variables that “enabled the deliberate if uneven state-initiated displacement of Muslims in India” (p. 138). Indeed, one of the reasons why today’s Pakistani crossover stars pose a uniquely political threat is that they unsettle established demarcations of citizenship, belonging, and material-cultural property in a rapidly globalizing landscape. Their ambivalence contrasts the reception of crossover actors in the 1980s, who were located fully at the gendered margins of a mainly exploitative cinema; a representation matched by narratives of social and sexual stigma that effectively delegitimated their belonging in the industry/nation. The liminality of these mostly female performers would only sharpen during the 1990s as the “saffronization” of Hindi film aesthetics, themes, and idioms advanced, leaving little room for ideological slippage (Viswanath, 2002).

Cosmopolitanism, fantasy, and mutability in pre-Partition cinema The process of ethnicizing nationality, citizenship, and property (both material and cultural) that gained momentum in and after 1947 contrasts noticeably with the pre-Independence period from roughly 1913 to 1946. Here, several factors contributed to a polyvalent cultural milieu anchored by a shared struggle for independence. This orientation was powerfully reflected in the nascent film industry, which was inter-ethnic, polyglot, and international in scope (Ganti, 2004; Thomas, 2014). Hybridity flourished through consolidation of the early studio system in a global political economy, the historical backdrop of North Indian culture, and coeval political movements like radical socialism (Bhattacharya, 2016; Ganti, 2004; Thomas, 2014). This now obscure phase of Indian cinema produced cosmopolitan imaginaries above and beyond incipient nationalism. Encompassing modes of production, distribution, storytelling, genre, and stardom, this period of cultural co-mingling generated a fluid terrain of signifiers for social and self-identification. The industry’s initial cosmopolitanism can be seen in the variety of its cultural stakeholders. A noteworthy proportion of films during the silent and early sound period were co-productions; salient examples include the Indo-German The Light of Asia (1924, director Himanshu Rai), which was released simultaneously for European distribution, and Achhut Kannya (1936, director Franz Osten), which led to the long-term association of German filmmaker Franz Osten with Bombay Talkies (Raj, 2010). The Union Cinematographical Italiana of Rome

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co-produced Madan Theatre’s Savitiri Satyavan (1923, director Georgio Mannini), while Raj Nartaki (1941, director Modhu Bose) was picked up for global distribution by Columbia Pictures, appearing in Hindi, Bengali, and English versions respectively (Raj, 2010). Like Hollywood, Indian studios also controlled financing, production, and distribution along a vertical axis, circulating their products in an emerging global media economy that included overseas markets and a thriving film festival circuit – even as this scenario would shift dramatically after World War II (Ganti, 2004). The industry’s hybrid political economy was equally registered at the level of narrative, genre, and star, as the swashbuckling action films of Anglo-Greek actor Fearless Nadia attest. Rosie Thomas (2014) has explored how the star’s racial ambiguity and the inflection of Hollywood genre in her work peddled a version of nationalism that incorporated decisively global characteristics, where the borders of modern “India” were open to flexibility, pastiche, and charade. This hybridity was negotiated through the star’s persona, whose exotic appeal (evident in the interplay between whiteness and ethnic contiguity) was juxtaposed with traditional models of Indian womanhood, particularly the virangana warrior (Thomas, 2014). The result was a heterogeneous vision of national and cultural modernity that resisted top-down strictures of ethnicity, race, religion, and gender – something embodied in the narrative miscegenation, playfulness, and identity transgressions of the swashbuckler. These inclusive features would eventually come to be overwritten by the more homogenizing, “nationalist” codes of social melodrama (Thomas, 2014). Hindi cinema’s labile assimilation of cultural material also included the vast topos of Islamic aesthetics prevalent in Persian, Arabic, and Urdu folk literature of North India. Besides mythologicals and socials – the two formative genres credited with solidifying the Indian box office – a substantial number of films drew on this rich trove of story content that invoked fantasies of cosmopolitan being and temporality. Thomas (2014) exhumes this “lost” historiography in her exploration of “the true balance between mythologicals, stunts, fantasies and other genres within that early history, as well as the dominance of American and European films in that era” (p. 3). She begins her inquiry by noting that, rather than Raja Harischandra (1913, director Dhundiraj Phalke), India’s first film may in fact have been Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (1903, director Hiralal Sen). As she rightly notes, the implications of this finding prompt a dramatic revision of film historiography that reveals the suturing effects of nationalist politics and culture post-Partition – one that strategically erases Hindi cinema’s (and the nation’s) pluralist origins. She comments, Rather than beginning with a forty-minute Hindu myth, Indian cinema history would kick off with a two-hour, confusingly culturally-hybrid tale from the Arabian Nights, set within an Islamic fantasy world and keying into global orientalist obsessions at the high point of cosmopolitan modernity. (p. 9)

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Her observation reverses the discursive trajectory that post-Partition nationalism would take, which sought to streamline and compartmentalize Indian identity within a timelessly Hindu mold. The collusive cultural impetus that Thomas identifies can be attributed in part to the sheer dominance of Urdu-speaking artists in the industry, a number reflected by the strong presence of early Muslim stars on screen. If we follow this revised perspective on history, it is perhaps no coincidence that the first truly prolific screen star, Khalil, was Muslim, whom Ashok Raj (2010, p. 40) describes as “the first macho hero, acting opposite all the top-notch heroines of the period.” Khalil’s first film, Gul-e-Bakavali (1924, director Kanjibhai Rathod) was a “popular Persian fable of love” (p. 40) that cast him opposite another Muslim star, Zubeida. As the sound period progressed, prominent Muslim names like Master Nissar, Naseem Banu, Gul Hamid, Najmal Hassan, Mazhar Khan, and Ghulam Mohammed graced the box office marquee alongside heavyweights like Prithviraj Kapoor, K.L. Saigal, and Ashok Kumar. Nearly all of these personalities – Hindu stars included – gained fame to some degree by portraying characters rooted in an Islamic cultural ambience that was both familiar and appealing to North Indian audiences. Besides historical figures from the Mughal era, the valence of popular folklores like Laila-Majnu or Shirin-Farhad were frequently used to cement and market a star’s image. Master Nissar’s career is a case in point; after appearing in both of the above romances, he went on to enact the consummate heroic figure in a variety of cognate genres (Raj, 2010). Banerjee (2017) and Chadha and Kavoori (2008) have charged that films made during this period, and indeed well into the 1980s, excluded Muslims from extant society by confining them to a remote historical past. What their analyses do not consider are the substantial shifts in representation that occurred over this vast period (roughly 1930 to 1980) and particularly after independence, when organizations like the All-India League of Censorship (Gill, 2015) and the right-wing bent of publications like Filmindia sought to purge the industry of overtly Muslim influence (Daiya, 2008). This transition led not only to the diminution of Muslim stories on screen, but also served to popularize the more “exotic” genres later affixed to Muslim identity, notably the Muslim social and tawaif film (Agarwal, 2002; Ansari, 2008; Chadha & Kavoori, 2008; Virdi, 2003). Interestingly, these two genres were a minority in the pre-Independence era, while the Muslim historical/biopic can be seen as part of a much wider trend that included an eclectic mix of historic legends from Vedic times to Alexander the Great, evident in films like Rooplekha (1934, director P.C. Barua), Chandidas (1934, director Nitin Bose), Sikander (1941, director Sohrab Modi), and Bhakta Surdas (1942, director Chaturbhuj Doshi), to highlight only a small sample. Muslim stars frequently essayed eminent Hindu subjects on screen, while Hindu characters (and actors) feature prominently in Muslim historicals that emphasize assimilation rather than difference. In addition, films like Padosi (1941, director V. Shantaram) counter the indictment that Muslims were historically present, but always presently absent. The film offers a portrait of Hindu–Muslim camaraderie

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against the backdrop of socio-economic hardship created by a village dam. By focusing on class – rather than essentialized notions of communal prejudice – as the source of tension between the two protagonists, the narrative reveals how Muslims and Hindus experienced shared economic, social, and political pressures. The denouement bears out this message when both men are defeated by their circumstances, clasping each other’s hands as dam waters sweep them to their death. To reinforce its intercommunal message, Muslim star Mazhar Khan portrays the Hindu thakur in the film while actor Gajanan Jagirdar enacts his Muslim equivalent. The most significant argument for the centrality of Islamicate civilization in early Hindi cinema – and in fact well into the classical period – can be found in Ira Bhaskar and Richard Allen’s comprehensive volume, Islamicate Cultures of Bombay Cinema (2009). One of the text’s most important contributions is recognizing the critical role the Muslim historical occupied in consolidating and legitimizing nationalist sentiment in the late colonial era. The authors trace the genesis of the form right back to the film industry’s origins in the 1920s, where it became a site of colonial resistance “that reaffirmed the value of indigenous culture and history” (p. 6). Here an obverse imagery of the nation was animated – one in which Muslim leadership, jurisprudence, and tolerance acted as the model for an ideal civic polity. This concept of justice was condensed in the figure of the Mughal emperor himself, who operated as a symbol of social virtue and dignity; an even-handed ruler “responsive to the sufferings of ordinary people” (p. 7). Such a depiction is a far cry from the demonizing accounts of Muslim conquest and profligacy familiar to contemporary Hindutva narratives, and their requisite cultural embodiments. Ultimately, this Islamicate vision of the premature nation would be displaced post-independence on two fronts – first by the socialist modernity of the Nehruvian state, and secondly by the ideals of Ramrajya in the 1980s, with Lord Rama assuming the archetype of righteous, benevolent leadership for the nation. Correspondingly, the Muslim historical witnessed a sharp decline in the 1960s and beyond, becoming a virtually moribund type. At its summit, the genre stood as an exemplar of religious and social equity, a theme obvious in its relentless focus on resolving internecine conflict and addressing larger questions of “power, political struggles, the moral legitimacy of the state, governance and questions of succession” (Bhaskar & Allen, 2009, p. 24). Integral to this arrangement was an exploration of Mughal–Rajput relations, in which filial ties, shared patriotism, and mutual affection framed Hindu–Muslim integration as both natural and consensual – the “original condition” of the nation and its anticipated future (Bhaskar & Allen, 2009). This representation was matched by the religio-cultural mutability of major stars of the genre like K.L. Saigal, whose onscreen sensitivity lent him credibility in roles like Tansen (1943, director Jayant Desai), Omar Khayyam (1946, director Mohan Sinha), and Shahjehan (1946, director Abdul Rashid Kardar), all of which portray the actor as artist immersed in Sufi ideals of devotion, longing, and renunciation. Hindu–Muslim synonymy is explored through the romantic, professional, and spiritual attachments of its protagonists during historic moments of intercultural flowering – e.g. the reign of Akbar and

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wider medieval period. The historic role of Sufism in mediating a common spiritual and cultural basis on the subcontinent is too large to be considered adequately here; nonetheless, its importance in shaping the sensibility of North Indian culture cannot be overemphasized (Abidi, 1992; Ernst, 1999; Faruqi, 1984). Sufism in India is cultural hybridity par excellence, and was consciously deployed by pre-Partition writers, musicians, and filmmakers to transcend religious lines and attract universal audiences. As the most apt metaphor for social, psychic, and metaphysical unity, Sufism helped modulate North India’s internal diversity at a time when ideas of national identity were inchoate and at best tenuous – being primarily the domain of political elites instructed in Euro-colonial epistemology. Sufi doctrine is itself a hybrid formulation, combining neo-Platonic philosophy with Arab and Christian mysticism in the framework of medieval Islam (Ernst, 2018). This preexisting synthesis acquired an added dimension of plurality in South Asia as Sufism became fertilized by Buddhist and Hindu traditions, most notably Vedanta and bhakti (Faruqi, 1984; Fatemi, Fatemi, & Fatemi, 1976). Guided by the Muslim concept of tawhid or unity in God, Sufism accentuates this principle to incorporate a pantheistic exegesis of being motivated by divine love (Fatemi, Fatemi, & Fatemi, 1976). Intrinsically heterodox in practice, its formative precepts differ from sect to sect and within the wider context of polemical Islam. While both widely celebrated and abjured, it has incontrovertibly played a vital role in the literary and performing arts of the Middle East, Turkey, Iran, and the whole of Central and South Asia (Ernst, 1999; Fatemi, Fatemi, & Fatemi, 1976). From the martyr-saint al-Hallaj to Persian laureates like Baqli, Rumi, and Hafiz, Sufism preaches love as the path to realizing deific essence. Mundane or passionate love (ishq) becomes a metaphor for divine love, a prerequisite to the ego-annihilation necessary for recognizing and reuniting with God (Ernst, 2018; Fatemi, Fatemi, & Fatemi, 1976). Likewise, many traditions – notably the Maulvis – prioritize music, dance, and poetry as vehicles for this mystical union (Ernst, 1999). Sufism’s foundational logic bears strong resemblance to Hindu ideas of atman/Brahman, as well as the bhakti premise of God obsession, including ecstatic prayer and the belief in multiple routes to attaining spiritual enlightenment (Faruqi, 1984). Sufism also has profound resonance with Hindu dramaturgical theory such as rasa, which similarly posits that compositional harmony, balance, and the strategic arrangement of expressions or “moods” can lead the artistic patron to divine epiphany (Ruckert, 2004). The popular facets of Sufi belief manifest themselves strongly in films like Shahjehan, which uses Sufism to monumentalize India’s convergent religious and artistic inheritance, as symbolized by the Taj Mahal. Sufism pervades multiple levels of the narrative; the first involves the ardent pining of the Emperor Shahjehan for his Queen Mumtaz, the inspiration behind the monument itself, while Saigal as the poet Suhail eulogizes the beauty of Ruhi, a Hindu Rajput heiress. The third level is the love of the Persian architect Shirazi for Ruhi, whose unrequited desire and separation from his beloved lead to a visionary revelation of the Taj Mahal’s design. Condensing multiple Sufi themes – beauty and art as meditative conduits of

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the spiritual, the sanctity of suffering, fanaa (self-annihilation) in love, and the rewards of divine knowledge for the “pure” lover – the film prefigures the Shahjahan–Mumtaz dyad as a model of esoteric union. This hierarchy of spiritual descent from king to poet/architect to the general public can be experienced in the Taj Mahal as shrine, making salvation available to the ordinary aspirant. Most importantly, by integrating the Suhail-Ruhi and Shirazi-Ruhi plotlines, the film consecrates Hindu–Muslim unity, inscribing the symbol of sacred oneness onto the Taj Mahal as timeless memorial. Sufism and its bhakti counterpart negotiated hybridity at the level of both text and star; for example, characterizing not only the majority of Saigal’s performances, but his off-screen persona as well. Raj’s (2010) tribute to the star is almost hagiographical, surmising that “he never attained inner solace from his own soul-filling music,” (p. 111) suggesting that the star renounced personal satisfaction for public edification. Likewise, the author positions Saigal as a living testament to spiritual–cultural hybridity, reputing how a Sufi Pir blessed the Hindu actor as a boy, who determined his ancestry from a prominent Sufi saint and instructed him in the sacred rituals of zikr and riaz “as an essential pathway for ensuring his entry into the mystical world” (p. 80). Raj continues the devotional analogy by noting how “Saigal’s singing evoked a deep sense of spirituality, as if one was in harmony with a mystic, deeply experiencing the feelings of eternal love despite suffering the agony of separation … in real life this remarkable artist was a true bairagi (ascetic) …” (p. 87). He goes on to quote an associate who frames Saigal as “somebody who stepped out of an icon [sic], so unaffected, totally oblivious of himself, like a line drawing” (p. 87). The parallels with Sufi ideals of self-effacement, an unflagging commitment to divine calling, and the intermediary role of the star as “saint” are unmistakable. Saigal is the quintessential poster child of pre-Partition culture in North India, where the frequency and flexibility with which religious identities overlapped can be witnessed in the popular cinema and star texts of the period. Saigal and other stars during this era maintained a vivid repertoire of Islamic performing arts, visible in the spate of “singing stars” that commanded the screen before the hegemony of playback singing during the post-independence period. A large contingent of these stars were Muslim women with credentials in classical Dhrupad, dance forms like Kathak, and the recitation of Persian and Urdu ghazals. Notable names like Jaddenbai, Kajjanbai, Khurshid, Noorjehan, and Suraiya represented the inclusion (quite literally) of Muslim voices and bodies in the aural/visual composite of Hindi cinema. Significantly, these stars and the heterogeneous, culturally mobile traditions they preserved would recede into oblivion following independence, eclipsed by the vocal monopoly of India’s most recognizable soloist, Lata Mangeshkar. Sanjay Srivistava (2006) notes how the singer became an “aesthetic marker of ‘modern’ Indian female identity” (p. 125) associated with the terrestrial nation state and its ideal citizen-subject. As I argue in the following section, this new cultural imaginary would likewise serve to contain and subdue Muslim identity in the national sphere.

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The partition moment: cleaving culture, converging nationalisms The immediate cultural environment post-independence was one of profound ambivalence and distress. People, goods, propaganda, and word-of-mouth rumors circulated freely across the newly established and still contested borders of both countries. Many people struggled to see themselves as “Indian” and “Pakistani;” as Khan (2007, p. 166) notes, there was no “blueprint” for identity available to these new national citizens. The refugee crisis also created a cultural and economic upheaval for each state, as people belonging to entire professional communities and industries relocated, leaving behind tremendous gaps in skill and labor economies (Khan, 2007). The film industry was no exception; in the months following Partition scores of technicians, writers, and entrepreneurs embarked on a reciprocal exodus from Lahore, now in Pakistan, and Bombay, India’s emerging cultural capital. The incentives and opportunities for employment were strong – as Urdu was the prevailing language of Bombay before Partition, there was a high demand for Urdu-speaking musicians, lyricists, and writers (Dwyer & Patel, 2002). As a result, the developing national industry was strongly molded by Punjabi artists, both Hindu and Muslim, originally hailing from urban centers now in Pakistan. Despite the subordination of Urdu and Islamic aesthetics that occurred once nationalism – and its official language, Hindi – was firmly entrenched in the cultural imaginary of popular cinema, the film industry remains notable for its history of religious integration and tolerance. This stance dovetailed with the secular outlook of India’s new socialist democracy under Nehru, who sought to assimilate India’s sizeable Muslim minority into the national fold (Talbot, 2000). The left-leaning perspective of many of its early contributors explains Hindi cinema’s continuing atmosphere of acceptance and was influential in maintaining an early cultural continuum between both nascent industries. The product of middle-class intellectual organizations like the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) and the Progressive Writers’ Movement (PWM), their participants embraced liberal social creeds, notably Communism (Manwani, 2013). Members of both groups were dedicated to social reform and political mobilization through art; advocates included prominent actors, film producers, and writers who would leave an indelible stamp on the industry. Key figures under the IPTA banner included Prithviraj Kapoor, Raj Kapoor, K.A. Abbas, Balraj Sahni, Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, and Dev Anand (Manwani, 2013). An example of the IPTA’s principles can be seen in the work of K.A. Abbas and Prithviraj Kapoor, who collaborated on multiple plays and films dealing with social oppression, imperialism, and communal accord. Some of these works, such as the theatre productions Deewar (1945) and Gaddar (1948), agitate explicitly against Partition and were eventually censored. The first symbolizes the social alienation of the India/Pakistan binary through the metaphor of two quarreling brothers and was intended to “break down the wall of misunderstandings between communities” (Jain, 2005, p. 33). Kapoor, a staunch opponent of

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the two-nation concept, was committed to the cultural unity of India, himself a Pathan migrant from the large frontier region of Peshawar currently located in northwest Pakistan (Jain, 2005). This region has remained central to the left-wing movement well into the present, where many of the industry’s post-Partition Muslims – including Dilip Kumar and Shah Rukh Khan – originate. As Dwyer (2015) notes, the Pathan community has been vital to India’s self-imagining as a secular republic, with Peshawar operating at the center of anti-communal resistance to the Muslim League and the Partition question prior to independence. This factor, and its association with the freedom fighter legacy, reflects a key condition for accepting the Pathan Muslim star along shared lines of national loyalty and ethnic/regional identity. Like the IPTA, the PWM had a chiefly Marxist outlook and championed social justice for the laboring and middle classes. Its writers, a combination of playwrights, prose novelists, poets, and lyricists, were equally vocal about the detriments of Partition and consistently argued for Hindu-Muslim amity; its enclave included illustrious and controversial authors of the period like founder Sajjad Zaheer, Sadat Hasan Manto, Kaifi Azmi, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, and Majrooh Sultanpuri, to name only a few (Talbot, 2000). Those who opted for cinema produced work that touched directly on social critique; an ideal illustration is the lyrical canon of Sahir Ludhianvi, whose reputation as a firebrand poet was subsumed in the popular social melodramas of the time (Manwani, 2013). In a memorable song from Dhool Ka Phool (1959, director Yash Chopra), Ludhianvi writes of the artificial divisions between Hindus and Muslims in a way that interrogates the legitimacy of Partition, while other cinematic compositions comment on subjects ranging from women’s rights to the hypocrisies of nationalism (Manwani, 2013). Beyond directly broaching issues of communalism, perhaps the most important contribution of progressive artists was their recognition of the psychological and affective homologies between Indians and Pakistanis in the wake of Partition, at a time when national segregation was becoming a concrete political reality. Their work affirmed the fluidity and shared pedigree of North Indian cultural traditions, engaging a spatial, temporal, and spiritual nexus between India and Pakistan in their use of colloquial Urdu, music and dance forms like the ghazal, qawwali and mujra, and iconographies of the beloved and divine common to literary and performance genres throughout India, from Hindu devotional plays to mystic Sufi poetry. Jyotika Virdi (2003) notes how Hindi cinema remains the last bastion for some of these traditions in India, particularly the Urdu lineage renowned for its florid, mellifluous prose which was well suited to the dramatic arts. Reaching a popular zenith in Parsee theater – a joint antecedent of Hindi and Urdu narrative film style – Urdu had an elite connotation, and its evocative potency has survived in Hindi cinema as a trace form in “film titles, screenplay, lyrics, and the language of love, war and martyrdom” (Virdi, 2003, p. 20). These developments are a reminder of the intricate alliances among film personnel, aesthetics, and creative values in the early expansion of both national industries, testament to the nebulous distinction between identities and borders

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in the formative years after Partition. Figures like Manto and Ludhianvi are claimed mutually as icons of national culture in both countries, with their work and those of other pivotal artists post-Partition expressing common sentiments of loss and nostalgia, if not outright resistance (Daiya, 2008). This post-Partition generation of Bombay filmmakers arguably produced the very first crossover stars, considering that they reached audiences in a culturally receptive and mainstream context in both countries during the first two decades after independence, before Indian film imports were finally restricted in Pakistan in 1965. This move was not so much political as a commercial strategy aimed at boosting the competitiveness of the local Urdu industry, revealing how strong the shared cultural appetite and demand for films was between countries, a reality still evinced today by the piracy and smuggling of Indian films across the border (Gazdar, 1997). Film personnel also shuttled across national boundaries on a regular basis; Ludhianvi migrated from Bombay to Lahore and back gain between 1948–1949, while actors like Nasir Khan and famed singing star Noorjehan dabbled in both industries, before eventually settling in Pakistan permanently. These early post-Partition film artists would not be the only connection between Indian and Pakistani media cultures. In the first two decades of independence, both industries followed a similar arc in narrative, economic, and ideological spheres. Besides mutual origins in Parsee theater and an infrastructure and vision influenced by refugees of Partition, both cinemas had a middle-class preoccupation as well as a modernizing agenda, reaching their “golden age” in the 1950s and 1960s under the political optimism of Prime Ministers Jawaharlal Nehru in India, and Ayub Khan in Pakistan. Both industries possessed political economies organized around a star system and independent financing, backed mainly by powerful producers. In addition, their cinema featured parallel narrative styles, aesthetics, and themes – not to mention audiences. Mushtaq Gazdar (1997) describes how Pakistani filmmakers struggled to find local talent in the early 1950s capable of competing with the box office appeal of Indian stars like Nargis, Dilip Kumar, and Raj Kapoor. This parity is reflected in the conventions of melodramatic storytelling that each industry adopted as a dominant commercial form. Scholars like Madhava Prasad (1998), Ravi Vasudevan (1993), and Ifthikar Dadi (2016) have previously discussed the unique narrative contract of melodrama in the South Asian context; its corpus includes representational tropes that are iconic, frontal, or in a static “tableaux” arrangement, while meaning is conveyed as preordained and symbolic, taking the form of direct address from a “God, King, or Star” (Prasad, 1998, p. 52). This address is complemented by a mode of viewing known as darshan in which the film’s symbolic subject reciprocates the spectator’s gaze (the subject is the film’s source of moral authority, typically the protagonist) (Dadi, 2016). Darshan occupies a key place in Hindu religious worship, which nonetheless has implications for the reception of public figures in India more generally (Eck, 1985). The influence of Hindu epistemology on film address and reception is deflected in Urdu cinema by the term dastan, though the symbolic dimensions remain strikingly similar. As Dadi (2016) notes, Pakistani cinema shares many of the frontal narrative characteristics

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integral to the darshanic mode, and he deploys the term dastan to refer both to Urdu genre historicals as well as to a form of storytelling that renders characters “with little inner psychological characterization, remaining as set types” (p. 83) while “there is a sense of stasis produced by the camera that remains largely inert and immobile” (p. 83). In the 1950s these narrative elements were combined with realist devices and point-of-view storytelling that suited the modernity and urban milieu of the “social” genre, an omnibus form that later included spectacle attractions like music, dance, and fight choreography (Dadi, 2016). The social was geared towards reform and explored moral, emotional, and relational conflicts against the metaphorical backdrop of the family-as-nation. In both India and Pakistan this genre would serve as a channel for nationalist ethics, while its similarities would forge a common narrative thread for audiences on both sides of the border.

From erasure to exoticism: post-Partition and the Muslim subject Popular cinema would come to exemplify the nation-building imperatives of both countries as the 1950s and 1960s progressed, aiming for a mass audience heavily fragmented by pre-existing regional, ethnic, and class differences. In India, the conundrum of accommodating a vast Muslim minority – a harsh reminder of Partition’s absurd consequences – was a pressing concern. Nehru’s ambitions for a secular, progressive state called for the inclusion of Muslims in the nationalist project; however, majoritarian politics nonetheless posited a Hindu identity for India, evident in campaigns to “purify” Hindi of its Urdu influences and associate Hindu symbolism with the nation, particularly by representing India as the goddess Bharat Mata (Mother India) (Talbot, 2000). In the film industry, parochialism would solidify discourses about the Muslim and Pakistani “Other” that gained currency both during and after Partition. Chadha and Kavoori (2008) identify three epochs in the representation of Muslims on-screen post-independence – exoticism in the 1950s and 1960s, marginalization in the 1970s and 1980s, and demonization in the 1990s and 2000s. However, what their schema does not account for is how the domestic Muslim star was negotiated and adapted along the lines of political nationalism in India throughout this tenure. If the film industry is indeed a “social microcosm” (Chadha & Kavoori, 2008, p. 134) of India, exploring the representational dynamic of its Muslim stars is relevant in evaluating the cultural politics of identity and belonging in the nation. This inquiry is all the more valid considering the symbolic potency of stars to the nationalist project of Hindi cinema, which served to galvanize an emerging public sphere. Contributing to this debate, I argue that Muslim identity – as embodied by the Muslim star – was erased and masked under a modern, secularized, and mutedly Hindu nationalism. In this way Muslim community was subordinated to national citizenship, while Muslim culture/civil society were framed as both extraneous and regressive to the nation. In line with Partition discourse, such forms of Muslim belonging were projected instead onto the Pakistani “Other,”

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whose nationalism was by contrast illegitimate, reprehensible, and dangerous. This projection served to distance the domestic Muslim star from the territorial and political reality of Pakistan while ghettoizing the mobilization of Muslim identity in India. The masking of the Muslim star strove to resolve the outstanding contradictions of Partition while inevitably revealing cracks in the national edifice, communicating disjuncture and alterity in its discourses. Such discourses, of course, operated along gendered lines, with male and female stars enacting “appropriate” roles within the nation that set definable boundaries for belonging in its borders. The same could not be said of Pakistani crossover actors, who remained “Other” and eventually faded from view. As Chapter 3 explores in detail, both domestic and crossover Muslim celebrity would shift substantially in the globalized Hindi film industry post-1990, continuing and complicating the above characterizations in interesting ways. The initial process of adapting the Muslim star after Partition was demonstrated in the continued transformation or erasure of Muslim names among actors and creative personnel; stars like Dilip Kumar (birth name Yusuf Khan), Nargis (Fatima Rashid), Madhubala (Mumtaz Jehan Begum Dehlavi), and Meena Kumari (Mahjabeen Bano) are the most famous examples. Considering the extent and durability of their celebrity in popular memory, I have chosen to focus on these stars in the proceeding discussion, though the list is by no means exhaustive. Despite the industry’s profile of religious integration, the renewed appellation of these stars served to obstruct a wider validation of Muslim identity in mainstream culture. The gesture was an effort to negotiate identity along the terms of post-Partition nationalism by distancing Muslim stars from territory now located in Pakistan, a figurative reassurance of their fidelity to the nation. The concept of loyalty was integral to Partition discourse, as identity was perceived unilaterally; if you had not chosen to be Indian or Pakistani, you were “Other” and thereby suspect (Khan, 2007). National allegiance was thereby the main prerequisite for social, cultural, and economic integration. In the 1950s and 1960s, re-suturing Muslim stars to the national fabric assured this integration. For male stars – of which Dilip Kumar is the most outstanding example – this meant conforming to the mold of the “Five Year Plan” hero, whom Srivistava (2006, p. 140) describes as “a particular type of masculinity which is attached to ‘scientific’ and ‘rational’ attributes.” This figure exemplified the economic ambitions of Nehru’s progressive socialism, enacted bureaucratic and social justice through dutiful service to the nation, and ensured successful reproduction of the state through conjugal coupling (Srivistava, 2006, p. 141). Modernity was indicated on the star’s body through dress (Western suits, shirts, and ties), physical mobility (cars, trains, roads) and spatiality (palatial homes with winding staircases, office buildings, factories), which marked the star/hero in the time and space of the developing nation. His “sober, frugal, rational” (Srivistava, 2006, p. 147) personality likewise legitimated state authority by dispelling superstition, reversing poverty, securing justice, and safeguarding individual choice.

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This productive labor for the nation was reflected in representative professions like lawyer, judge, bureaucrat, engineer, doctor, scientist, and soldier, with most narratives culminating symbolically in the courtroom or public sphere (Srivistava, 2006). However, unlike other stars such as Ashok Kumar, Raj Kapoor, Dev Anand, or Sunil Dutt, all of whom epitomize the Five Year Plan hero to a more or less high degree, Kumar’s relationship to this image was markedly discordant. His conflicted portrayal, I contend, evinced social disquiet about the legitimacy of the Muslim male in the Indian nation. If the normative citizen was the forwardlooking, Hindu male subject, the Muslim male was a reminder of the state’s untenable past – its failure at national integration via Partition, the bloody course of communal separation, a chequered agenda on protecting refugee/ migrant rights, and most of all, the now anachronous presence of the Muslim in the new nation. To this end, it is significant that many of Kumar’s roles feature him as an abortive modern subject incapable of realizing professional or romantic success, even as he portrayed predominantly Hindu characters; a paradox that reveals the fissured and incomplete “masking” of Muslim stars. His protagonists frequently convey unsanctioned, violent impulses, are haunted by guilt or regret, desire punishment/death, and are arrested temporally by the past. These “tragic” heroes embody a deep pathos and longing that conveyed the emotionally equivocal mood of the times amid lingering remorse over Partition. The above character traits likewise shadowed Kumar’s off-screen persona, which was exaggerated by rumors of romantic frustration, rejection and emotional despondence (Raj, 2010). Raj (2010) captures this observation nicely in his extensive analysis of Kumar, stating: The protagonist seemed to be interpreting the larger society’s suffering as a personal grief. This portrayal, in essence, represented an agonized, selfpitying and self-indulgent hero who helped the viewers in releasing their own trapped emotions of helplessness and despair. For the viewers, the inbuilt metaphor of the destruction of the self (often through alcohol) and a perpetual death wish (or the inevitability of overhanging death) had the same appeal as that of the sacrifice of a hero for an intimate or greater cause. All the situations in a film had the basic objective of creating a pensive and masochistic character who appeared to be enjoying his pain but, at the same time, seemed to be sinking deeper into it. (p. 148) Films like Jugnu (1947, director Shaukat Hussain Rizvi), Mela (1948, director S.U. Sunny), Arzoo (1950, director Shaheed Latif), Babul (1950, director S.U. Sunny), Jogan (1950, director Kidar Sharma), Sangdil (1952, director R.C. Talwar), Amar (1954, director Mehboob Khan), Devdas (1955, director Bimal Roy), Insaniyat (1955, director S.S. Vasan), and Madhumati (1958, director Bimal Roy) depict this dramatic oeuvre. While only one of these films, Madhumati, can be fully categorized as gothic, its elements pertain to a variety of the above screen portrayals,

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which feature characters burdened by subconscious repression and eventual eruption. This eruption is the dark “Other” of national memory, the Partition victim/refugee which the state has sought to banish from public visibility but who nonetheless demands absolution. Often symbolized as a crazed or possessed woman, she represents the otherwise intolerable reckoning of Partition’s systemic violence, rape, domestic loss, and bodily/psychic mutilation. This figure exposes the state’s impotence and culpability in enabling the Partition tragedy; a dynamic enacted in early postindependence films like Babul. Kumar as Ashok symbolizes the nation state “torn” between the India/Pakistan binary, cast here as two women. This unfeasible situation is resolved by the death of one of the women, Bela (Nargis), who has recurring premonitions of being carried off by a dark-veiled horseman – raising parallels with the abducted/lost woman of Partition who also signals the terrestrial body. Often the hero’s fractured ego operated as a metaphor for this national ambivalence. In Sangdil, a loose interpretation of Jane Eyre (1847, author Charlotte Bronte), the protagonist’s violent past (e.g. Partition) refuses to remain submerged. Despite being locked away, his insane, disheveled wife plagues their home, wailing ominously and terrifying Shankar’s new love interest. In classic gothic fashion, this alter ego is the inverted double of the heroine, bringing to light unspeakable horrors that disrupt conjugation and homeliness. The tradition is fulfilled when the mansion burns down in a gestural exculpation of the past. Throughout, the protagonist’s complicity, shame, and latent cruelty suggest the uneasy location of the Muslim subject in the figurative space of the nation. This potentially rupturing presence is perhaps best expressed in Amar, where the actor portrays an accomplished lawyer who inexplicably rapes a vulnerable, lower-class woman. The film communicates residual angst about the incomprehensibility of Partition violence, the untrustworthy and unpredictable neighbor, colleague, or communal “Other,” and the state’s neglected responsibility in the crisis. The narrative further points to the subaltern experience of gendered, classed bodies as the invisible casualties of Partition. Sarkar (2009, p. 73) reads the film as “the trauma of traditional rural societies ravaged by the experiences of modernity and nationalist centralization,” while acknowledging that the production, particularly the casting of Kumar, compels a critique of one-sided versions of Partition history in which the “other” community is always to blame. As a result, the narrative exhibits “a crisis of identity” (p. 77) already personified by the star himself. The eminently celebrated thespian was not insulated from communal apprehension and accusations of disloyalty (Sarkar, 2009) that reveal the double standards attached to domestic Muslim celebrity, including the faulty apparatus of religious and/or secular camouflage. The preceding examples refer to what Sarkar (2009, p. 27) also describes as the “temporality of trauma” in many cultural accounts of Partition. That which is suppressed shatters linear, conscious time to produce its own spectral echo, what he classifies “as the indirect trace of trauma: underlying the main diegesis, beyond the time of the narrative, we sense another ghostly subtext” (p. 30). Against the vigorous propulsion of Indian modernity in the 1950s is the

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stagnancy, delayed action, and expansive silence of many of Kumar’s most memorable protagonists. These solipsistic characters do seem to belong to “a parallel time” (Sarkar, 2009, p. 30) that is simultaneously present and absent. Deprived of articulation or movement, they force a confrontation with the abject – the point between life and death which Mubarki (2017) identifies. Daera (1953, director Kamal Amrohi) is a foremost instance of this phantom awareness, where the figurative castration of Kumar’s protagonist resounds with the national void of Partition. Moinak Biswas’ (2013) excellent analysis of the film points to its invocation of the Muslim social, an appraisal made significant by the film’s Muslim director and co-stars (Kumar and Meena Kumari), who are nonetheless “masked” as Hindu in the story. The apparent vitality of both characters contrasts the film’s interminable pace and oppressive silence which pinpoints the symbolic crippling of the Muslim subject and his/her lack of agency; a metaphor brought to life by Sheetal’s (Kumari’s) marriage to an ailing old man, while Kumar as Sharan observes her silently from afar, although his gaze is never returned. Besides entailing the India/Pakistan estrangement, what is notable is the film’s disjuncture of speech, time, and action that divests the Muslim body of meaningful expression, and which remains out of sync with the temporality of the new nation. As Biswas (p. 248) states, “the silence of others speaks in another language,” one inevitably consigned to non-materiality, where the body, voice, and consciousness fail to coincide but linger in a suspended state of potentiality and forbearance. Biswas suggests that these abject dimensions convey a Muslim subjectivity for which the narrative grammar of Hindu identity is inadequate; instead, Daera’s “language remains at the level of non-action, the body in recline, an atmosphere charged with muted desire and looming death” (p. 248). The film captures perfectly how the allegorical signposting of Partition, and its mapping of alternate sensory and chronological planes, extends to the iconography of the Muslim star more widely as both being and not quite belonging in the time-space of the nation, a representation eventually coded in the Muslim social and tawaif genres. The temporal conflicts of Kumar’s image coincided with, and were often deflected onto, the contradictions of postcolonial modernity. This dilemma characterized “the individual awaiting social change amidst the conflicting forces of pre-industrial paternalistic social relations … and the modernization being propelled by the state” (Raj, 2010, p. 228). In this way Kumar’s Muslim subtext and its destabilizing catharsis were harnessed, if imperfectly, to the dominant national project of mediating “tradition” and “modernity,” where the hero “finally came to symbolize the upholder of tradition … who is willing to accept change” (p. 229). This socially redemptive outlook enervated films like Anokha Pyar (1948, director M.I. Dharamsey), Ghar ki Izzat (1948, director Ram Daryani), Footpath (1953, director Zia Sarhadi), Azaad (1955, S. M. Sriramulu Naidu), Naya Daur (1957, director B.R. Chopra), and the remainder of Kumar’s corpus in the post-classical period. For female Muslim stars – numerically the majority – national suitability entailed performing prescribed norms of Indian womanhood centered on the roles of wife, mother, or modern professional woman (who nonetheless enters

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into marriage). However, “masking” produced its own form of slippage – this incongruity occurred both at the disjuncture of the film/star text (as with Nargis) and in the uncertain location of the Muslim woman in national society. If the Muslim male was a reminder of the state’s inaugural failures, the Muslim female body constituted an excess at odds with a gendered nationalism that fixes women’s bodies as repositories of chastity, tradition, and the physical landscape of the nation (Banerjee, 2017; Srivistava, 2006; Virdi, 2003). As a result, Muslim female bodies had to be coded to either hyper-signify the nation or remain “Other,” serving as outlets for censured desire and exploitability/victimhood (Agarwal, 2002). Stars like Nargis fit the former category, while her contemporaries Madhubala and Meena Kumari occupy the latter. This excess always strained the limits of the narrative text, as Thomas (1989) demonstrates in her discussion of the critically lauded film Mother India (1957, director Mehboob Khan) and its relationship to Nargis’ fame. She notes how the film text already betrays a variety of internal tensions “through its slippage between discourses of sexual and national identity” (p. 18), a conflict compounded by extra-diegetic accounts of Nargis’ celebrity as “scandal.” The notion of female chastity itself, she avers, conflates a number of not wholly compatible ideas and discourses … This slippage between woman and nation means, for example, that the film can construct woman as an ultimate authority and power, disavow this by relegating woman to metaphor for India or ideal morality, and simultaneously preserve a construction of woman as pawn of male desire. (p. 20) She goes on to argue that rumor surrounding the star’s lack of purported chastity “captured the prurient imagination of the nation” (p. 23) that counterpointed her depiction in the film, relating how the star’s virginity was “auctioned” as a teenager, followed closely by a long-term affair with already married star Raj Kapoor. The conflict evokes several formative questions regarding the problem of how to assimilate the Muslim woman into the national fold, even as Thomas does not frame the debate in these terms. She asks, “Can a daring, uninhibited seductress be a dutiful wife and mother? Can the daughter of a courtesan be a respected symbol of national propriety? … How is modern Indian woman’s sexuality negotiated?” (p. 25). Each of these questions points to the threatening, dissonant excess Muslim female bodies posed to the new nation after independence. The ideal models of chaste wife, mother, and goddess central to the national myth are, after all, Hindu prototypes that by default exclude Muslim signification. This observation is all the more pertinent considering the nation itself is imagined as the mother goddess archetype, the very soil comprising her munificent body. If this is the case, how can Muslim women signify the nation? Thomas notes how both the film and celebrity gossip text overlap to neutralize this irreconcilability through the protagonist/star’s figurative redemption in

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a crucial scene from the film, the moment of Radha/Nargis’ rescue from a burning haystack by her fictional son/real life husband. She observes, It is in fact a turning point in both texts: within the film, the point at which Radha’s devotion to her son is most acutely tested and recognition of the need to sacrifice him begins; within the gossip, the purging of the ‘unchaste’ woman, the point from which Nargis can achieve redemption and power by self-sacrificing devotion to husband, son and community. (p. 26) From this stage onward, Nargis gets discursively molded within the Mother India legend (Jha, 2011), a re-scripting that must be “continually asserted and tested” (Thomas, 1989, p. 27). Thomas’ (1989) analysis reveals a larger ideological struggle to contain the alluring but jarring presence of the Muslim female body in nationalism. Her treatise also points to several themes that emerge in the intra- and extra-diegetic representation of the Muslim female star: the role of gossip in complicating the star’s moral sincerity, the narrative arc of the defiled/debauched woman as “temptress” and object of lurid fantasy, the salvation of her honor and procreative vitality under the Hindu male’s benevolence. This representation characterized, for example, both Madhubala and Meena Kumari; however, unlike Nargis, redemption remains just out of reach and they continue to be “Other.” This “Otherness” was illustrated in the popular film roles of both stars, with Madhubala achieving success as a scopophilic gem in the more sexually titillating genres of gothic, noir, and historical drama, represented by films like Mahal (1949, director Kamal Amrohi), Sangdil, Howrah Bridge (1958, director Shakti Samantha), and Mughal-e-Azaam (1960, director K. Asif). In Mahal and Howrah Bridge she depicts an elusive, irresistible, and potentially deadly muse who baits the protagonist, often with dire consequences; while in Sangdil she plays a temple dancer outside the pale of acceptable society, a figure historically associated with sexual transgression. This image is repeated in Mughal-e-Azaam where the protagonist Anarkali’s aloof, fetishized beauty tantalizes Prince Salim (Dilip Kumar) against his better judgment, plunging the kingdom in turmoil. Here the aesthetic flamboyance of the Mughal period drama achieves maximum appeal with lushly decorated costumes, the sexual tease of veiling/unveiling the heroine under purdah, and of course the star’s mesmerizing mirror dance in the song Pyar Kiya To Darna Kya, which literally transforms the heroine into a reflection of the voyeuristic gaze while embedding her visually in the set’s sumptuous materiality. These representations alternate with an aggressively marked Western modernity evident in films like Mr. and Mrs. ‘55 (1955, director Guru Dutt), Chalti Ka Naam Gaadi (1958, director Satyen Bose), Kala Pani (1958, director Raj Khosla), and Half-Ticket (1962, director Kalidas). Popular legend served to reify the above representations, placing emphasis on the star’s exceptional beauty that drew parallels with Hollywood bombshell Marilyn Monroe, a comparison that solicited international attention (Akbar, 2011)

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while simultaneously marking Madhubala as a hyper-sexed, “Westernized” star. This impression was sustained by the balance of innocence/sensuality in the star’s dreamy, inimitable demeanor – including her breathy voice, languorous mannerisms, and expressive, often knowing glances. Consonant with this image, she was described in popular journalism as flirtatious and carefree, being infamous for a string of romances with co-workers and politicians that purportedly include Kamal Amrohi, Premnath, Bharat Bhushan, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Pradeep Kumar, Dilip Kumar, and eventual husband Kishore Kumar (Deep, 1996). Again, as Thomas (1989) underscores in her analysis of Nargis, the actual veracity of these rumors is less important than the popular construction of discourse surrounding these stars. Mohan Deep’s Mystery and Mystique of Madhubala (1996) takes speculation about the star’s private life to extremes, claiming that she was a “sex slave” for powerful industry leaders and was regularly shackled, whipped, and confined by her husband. These stories reveal the potency of the lascivious gaze on the Muslim female body that is perceived as erotically available and thus subject to exploitation and sensational caricature. Such connotations of “Otherness” were poetically justified in the popular imagination by the star’s untimely demise due to congenital heart failure in 1969, at only 36 years old. That she died unhappily wed, socially withdrawn, and desperately ill fed into narratives about Madhubala as both victim and dangerously sexualized woman whose end was warranted by moral delinquency. Unlike Nargis, marriage could not compensate her allegedly blemished chastity. A similar narrative can be identified in the star persona of Meena Kumari, who rivals Dilip Kumar in her reputation as on-screen tragedienne. The majority of her films terminate with spurned love, premature death, or recourse into social impropriety, visible in films such as Parineeta (1953, director Bimal Roy), Daera, Footpath, Chandni Chowk (1954, director B.R. Chopra), Sahara (1958, director Lekhaj Bhakri), Sahib, Bibi, aur Ghulam (1962, director Abrar Alvi), and Pakeezah (1972, director Kamal Amrohi). Her long-suffering image helped canonize the Muslim social and tawaif genres, both of which embalm Muslim identity in temporal stasis while foregrounding the Muslim woman as victim. Examples include Chandni Chowk (named after the famous Muslim quarter in New Delhi), where Kumari plays a young woman married off under false pretenses and subsequently abandoned at her new husband’s home, eventually believing him dead but unable to move forward socially due to the constraints of marital/family honor and widowhood. While not a Muslim social, Sahib, Bibi Aur Ghulam similarly explores moral deterioration among a fading feudal aristocracy that features the star as a desperate wife striving to endear her husband’s affections. Her futile efforts to prevent his copious drinking and brothel-going habits ultimately cause her to languish in self-destructive alcoholism. In her last major starring role, Pakezah, Kumari is memorable as the proverbial courtesan with a heart of gold who renounces happiness to protect her lover from social ostracism, although the film does end on an optimistic (if uncertain) note. Not unlike Nargis in Mother India, her roles in both Sahib, Bibi aur Ghulam

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and Pakeezah congeal with the star’s off-screen status. Her turbulent but everfaithful relationship to film director Kamal Amrohi is invoked in the latter film, while her struggle with alcohol addiction, physical and mental abuse, and romantic disappointment resound uncannily with her character Choti Bahu in the former, appearing to reinforce myths of the oppressive male/submissive female in Muslim matrimony. Her off-screen legend symbolized the retrograde locus of Muslim womanhood in the modern nation, doomed to wither under onerous and perverting circumstances – albeit within a highly sentimentalized aura of torment. This ethos was bolstered by the actor’s secondary reputation as a poet under the pseudonym “Naz,” where her verses convey the self-immolating tendencies of Urdu shayari and its Sufi inspiration. Madhuja Mukherjee (2017, p. 27) argues that Kumari’s poems “become the narrative drive” for some of her most important films, where “the relationship between her ideas, the film text, and directorial explorations may have been reciprocal” (p. 31). While Mukherjee’s intent is to uncover a feminist historiography of Indian cinema, the equivalence between Kumari’s self-perception and the socialcinematic disaffection of the Muslim subject are abundantly clear. This abject condition is outlined by the star’s own comments, where she states “I feel as if I am suspended in a vacuum, a dark void in which my whole being is so cold and desensitized that when thoughts and feelings come to me, they seem to come to someone else … ” (quoted in Mukherjee, p. 30). The disconnect of body/sensation and the reference to metaphorical death intersects with films like Daera, encapsulating the allegorical meaning of the post-Partition Muslim star as signifier of national trauma. For Kumari, this meaning was made poignant by the contrast between beauty and solitude, voluptuousness and death that fetishizes the Muslim woman as misfortune. Her actual death at the age of 38 due to cirrhosis suggests yet another teleology of self-fulfilling destiny for the desirable, yet irredeemable and pitiable, “Other.” The above analysis points to the imperfect assimilation of the Muslim star in national culture, where identities overlapped with a “normative” Hindu ideal while exposing an undercurrent of “Otherness” that signaled difference. The abject qualities of the star persona were heightened by a victim/temptress prototyping for female stars that was eventually deflected onto Pakistani crossover actors as the golden age waned. Their dubious sense of belonging counterpoints the inherent fidelity of the Hindu female actor, who both on screen and off rehearsed a familiar relationship to nation and womanhood. Stars like Nutan symbolized social progress against the conflicts of modernity, where sacrifice, devotion, and redemption mitigate the social/cultural liability of women in the public sphere. This tension justifies many of the actor’s unconventional roles that focus on social rejection and atonement; including Seema (1955, director Amiya Chakravarty), Paying Guest (1957, director Subodh Mukerjee), Sujata (1959, director Bimal Roy), Chhalia (1960, director Manmohan Desai), and Bandini (1963, director Bimal Roy). These performances position Nutan as a Sita-like figure who, despite desecration or transgression under the recent taint

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of colonialism, is ultimately salvaged within the modern nation. Often the protagonist’s wrongs were compensated as dharma due to the unjust or extenuating circumstances in which they occurred, such as Bandini, where Kalyani’s act of murder can be read as an allegory for the freedom movement – liberating the hero (e.g. the state) from a warped, debilitating marriage (e.g. colonial occupation). In Chhalia the Sita analogy is especially pronounced, with the eponymous character’s abduction, rape, and later rehabilitation restoring the purity of the Hindu woman/nation in the wake of Partition. If Nargis or Madhubala occasioned the hazardous excesses of an opulent, upwardly mobile lifestyle in their films, other stars like Vyjayanthimala commemorated traditional Indian culture and womanhood, evident in the star’s mastery and frequent performance of Bharatanatyam on screen that was complemented by a wide-eyed innocence shorn of sexual desire. Vyjayanthimala’s image fully abjured sexual modernity, her range of romantic expressions remaining firmly fixed in sringara rasa. The actor’s appearance – round face, pale skin, and curvaceous form – bears strong affiliation to the classic portraiture of Raja Ravi Verma, whose aesthetic positioned the superlative Indian woman as fecund yet elegantly poised (Dwyer & Patel, 2002). Vyjayanthimala’s sari-clad image suggests this delicate dynamic of Indian/Western ideals of beauty that simultaneously blends divinity, secularism, and nationalism (Dwyer & Patel, 2002), with her repeated casting as a village belle in films like Naya Daur, Madhumati, and Gunga Jumna (1961, director Nitin Bose) bearing out representations of an unsullied, “authentic” Indian femininity. Her narrative presence offset many of the social concerns accompanying rapid urbanization and industrial growth in the new nation, captured eloquently in films like New Delhi (1956, director Mohan Segal). Even when the star portrayed figures of questionable morality – most notably as courtesan – these roles mimic the integrity of conjugal marriage that depict the heroine’s quest for social honor. Chandramukhi’s singular commitment to Devdas in the titular film (1955, director Bimal Roy) and her masquerade as the ideal pativrata in Sadhna (1958, director B.R. Chopra) are demonstrable cases; while legitimacy is obfuscated in both, the latter narrative permits a double ocular in which the heroine convincingly occupies the role of virtuous wife from the hero’s (and by extension the state’s) dominant gaze. Off-screen, Vyjayanthimala’s devout faith and success in the established performing arts, along with her subsequent tenure as parliament minister in the Lok Sabha, testify to the seamless fit between nation and star that Hindu actors embodied. The new nationalist imaginary left little room for cross-border ambivalence, religious or otherwise. Meena Shorey’s stardom illustrates the shifting norms surrounding identity convergence that gained strength as the 1950s progressed, where a sharp increase in national-communalist rhetoric condemned the star’s religious, geographic, and sexual mutability. This elasticity was matched by the actor’s unique brand of corporal comedy in the screwball genre that allowed her to morph between emotions, stunts, and disguises with remarkable dexterity. Salma Siddique (2015) has shrewdly evaluated how Meena’s celebrity catalogues

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dramatic national and political change from pre-Partition to post-independence. Siddique’s (2015, p. 46) account reveals how the star’s “novel cosmopolitanism” and deployment of Punjabiyat as a resource of “cultural continuity amidst the territorial and temporal rupture” (p. 46) of Partition was eventually curbed by nationalist framings on both sides of the border. In India, the problematic of the Muslim woman’s body as excess was literalized in the star’s ample physique and use of slapstick comedy, where the “unfit” body operates as a site of both anxiety and catharsis in negotiating modernity. Meanwhile, the star’s versatility in religious and sexual terms – made obvious by her multiple marriages, conversion to Hinduism, and routine migration between India and Pakistan – is a precursor to the controversy surrounding today’s crossover stars. Her disconcerting excess and flexibility were predictably contained in popular discourse by her marriage to Hindu filmmaker Roop K. Shorey. In Pakistan, by contrast, Meena’s retroactive typing as morally degenerate echoes uncannily with debates around current stars like Mahira Khan; for both, their chastity becomes suspect through their choice to work in India, and the prospect of “contamination” via romantic-professional relationships with Hindu colleagues. The story of Meena’s career is thereby a story of emergent nationalisms, where the hybridity of pre-1947 becomes effaced by new definitions of citizenship and identity, a mutation made palpable by the increased hurdles Meena faced in sending remittances back to Lahore, legal and bureaucratic delays filming across the border, and most significantly, her labelling as “Pakistan-born” (Siddique, 2015, p. 52) in the Indian press. Ultimately, Meena’s decision to settle in Pakistan permanently, corresponding with her separation from Shorey, prefigures the conditions of belonging that Indian Muslim stars must accede, and which future crossover stars would tortuously grapple with – the necessity of national “choice” and an inability to reside precariously between borders. As Siddique (2015, p. 53) puts it: The so-called choice Meena had could only be an exercise in exclusion: either India or Pakistan, either Hindu or Muslim, marking her into the property of one nation and community over another. This was in complete contrast to her screwball persona in Shorey films, where she stood for no one but herself.

Marginalizing Muslims, consolidating nationalisms The marginalization of Muslim identity suggested by the domestic Muslim star, and so appositely demonstrated by the trajectory of Meena’s stardom, was narratively systematized by the splintering of the social into its sub-genres – the “Muslim” social and the tawaif or courtesan film. The first depicts a morally bankrupt and obsolete Muslim feudal class anathema to the rational modernity of Indian democracy (Dadi, 2016) while the other romanticizes a decadent Islamic court culture heavily imbued with Orientalist imagery. Both are placed

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in anachronistic settings and feature characters at the precipice of social decay; however, while the first advocates Muslim social reform in line with the modernizing goals of the nation state, the latter offers a timeless and essentialist view of Muslim identity. The transience of the kotha (brothel) and the courtesan’s inability to achieve social acceptance block the legitimacy of the Muslim subject by foreclosing a space within the nation. Since nationalist discourse positions women’s bodies as vestibules of cultural and national authenticity, it is clear that the tawaif’s body remains “Other” and can never be redeemed or harnessed to the reproduction of society. Bhaskar and Allen (2009) offer a tempered interpretation of these genres in their work, focusing on how the tawaif film privileges female perspective and agency, while the social offers progressive figures like the “enlightened” nawab and the educated woman as palliatives for a stultifying feudalism. However, there is little doubt that the nostalgia, obsession with tehzeeb, (polite manners), and the formality/aesthetics of Islamicate art, architecture, and poetry dominate these narratives in a way that foregrounds cultural exceptionalism. Both are also defined by a lack – the desolation of the courtesan and her rapacious commodification by a pleasure-loving culture in the former, and the backwardness of Muslim feudal patriarchy in the latter. In each Muslim society possesses irrational connotations, whether in the tragic irony of the tawaif’s imprisonment or the absurd commitment to honor, property, and title so often displayed in the social, where suicide is preferable to losing face in tradition (Bhaskar & Allen, 2009). Unlike the Muslim historical, both represent insular communities with little to no inter-faith engagement, emphasizing the separateness of a Muslim world that replaces the heterogenous vision of pre-Partition cinema. This representation was reinforced by the abnegation of Hindu-Muslim romance on screen that again has roots in Partition and nationalist renderings of the female body as a reservoir of cultural sanctity motivated by “the emphasis on female chastity and female honor” (Hirji, 2008, p. 60). Protecting women’s bodies from defilement became synonymous with guarding the Indian nation against the Muslim “Other” and Pakistan’s illicit claims to territory, including the embattled region of Kashmir. The politicizing of women’s sexuality reached an apogee post-Partition, when forced repatriation initiatives for women who had been abducted were conducted on both sides of the border in an attempt to restore national integrity (Hirji, 2008). Managing women’s sexuality entailed securing the nation’s prosperity, rightful cultural inheritance, and geographical borders. Inter-faith romance all but vanished during the 1950s and 1960s in the cultural ellipsis surrounding Partition and its attendant anxieties over sexual impurity. In the films where it does appear, the contaminated female body must be carefully re-circumscribed within the nation, as Daiya (2008) points out in her astute analysis of films like Lahore (1949, director M.L Anand). It is significant that interreligious relationships bear out these gendered nationalisms well into the present. The blockbuster film Veer-Zaara (2004, director Yash Chopra), for example, portrays a saga of romantic separation between a Hindu/Indian

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male – the ideal national citizen – and a Pakistani/Muslim woman, whose reunification at the end of the story can be read as an allegorical reclaiming of the “lost” territory of Pakistan by its rightful claimant, fulfilling nationalist fantasies of an undivided India that deny the validity of Pakistan. As Siddique (2015, p. 55) notes, “In this discursive regime, for a Hindu man to marry a Muslim is not wrong; it was seen as recovering Muslim women for something better by their conversion to Hinduism.” The strongly political implications of this arrangement are also suggested by the sense of triumph in Indian film journalism surrounding the star’s marriage to Roop K. Shorey, where the conquest/fertilization of the Muslim female body as “Pakistan” are inordinately clear (Siddique, 2015).

Crossing over in the 1980s: tentative first steps Despite persistent and trenchant representations of the Muslim and Pakistani “Other,” there have been multiple crossover attempts by Pakistani performers in the twenty odd years between the golden age of Hindi cinema and the current stage of globalization, beginning in the early 1980s. There are several reasons for this sudden transition; first and foremost is the fact that both industries were facing significant declines in production, quality and box office returns, fueled by political upheavals but also competition from commercial television, which lured middle class audiences away from cinema halls until well into the 1990s (Gazdar, 2017). Ironically, television would also become the primary vehicle for Pakistani crossover stars during this period, a trend that has remained constant. This scenario is due to the strong overlap between Pakistani and Indian broadcast signals, which, unlike cinema, easily bypass the import barriers and censorship constraining film distribution, while reaching audiences directly in the home (Gazdar, 2016). In addition, Pakistani television serials would maintain the character of the melodramatic social so familiar to Hindi film audiences, even as Pakistani cinema resembled its Hindi counterpart less and less, becoming fragmented by regional and linguistic divisions with little crossover appeal. As a result, the exposure of Pakistani talent across the border was facilitated by the new sociocultural and economic realities of television. The withdrawal of middle-class audiences and diminished film revenue during this period caused Hindi cinema to adopt a working-class aesthetic, featuring highly formulaic plots and an emphasis on sexuality and violence aimed predominantly at male spectators (Ganti, 2012). Consequently, there was an explosion in B-grade and low-budget productions that were not star-centered, and which privileged the entry of inexpensive, novice talent. In fact, the only authentic star of the period continued to be India’s original “Angry Young Man” Amitabh Bachchan, who ruled the roost above a range of medium caliber stars like Mithun Chakraborty and Anil Kapoor. This atmosphere was conducive to the small influx of Pakistani talent that emerged and was reinforced by the collapse of the Urdu film industry in Pakistan after 1975, which was replaced mainly by exploitative Punjabi and Pashto films (Gazdar, 1997). Compounded by a decreased national

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market for cinema after the recent Bangladesh war, crippling censorship codes, and aggressive restrictions on film production and exhibition under the regime of martial dictator Zia ul-Haq (Gazdar, 1997) there was clearly an increased motivation for Pakistani talent to migrate to India. However, it is difficult to categorize Pakistani actors working in India during this interim as “stars.” Their careers were ephemeral (spanning only a handful of projects) and they often received secondary or ensemble billing in films, possessing little to no clout with trade journals or film promotion circuits like contemporary crossover stars. They also did not engage in brand sponsorship, as there was no sophisticated system of talent franchising recognizable in the Hindi film industry today. Most importantly, their on-screen and off-screen personas mirrored the Muslim/Pakistani “Other” in predictable ways, through a limited availability of roles, dramatic typecasting, and scandalous publicity. Nearly 35 years after Partition, the first acknowledged Pakistani actor to accept a leading role in a Hindi film was Salma Agha in Nikaah (1982, director B.R. Chopra). A prototypical example of the Muslim social, the film explores the regressive aspects of Muslim feudal society, in this case the abuse of Islamic community law regarding divorce and remarriage. Unlike the representations of devotion, noble sacrifice, and gratification attached to the ideal Hindu wife in popular Hindi cinema, Agha’s role epitomizes the Muslim woman as victim in the social genre – an object of oppression, suffering, and pity. The socially defunct nature of traditional Islamic institutions is thereby highlighted and demands change, foregrounding an archaic, immutable portrait of Muslim womanhood that is likewise echoed in the courtesan film. In both genres, the downtrodden or corrupt condition of women serves to reflect the unsustainability of Muslim society as a whole. Agha’s dramatic repertoire and that of other Pakistani female actors from this period rehearse the stereotypical binary of Muslim woman as victim/temptress discussed earlier. In Hindi cinema overt sexuality and moral prurience was historically the preserve of the Westernized or foreign “Other,” and was projected onto a body marked by difference. In the Muslim social and courtesan genres, explicit markers of Muslim identity through character names, mise en scène, costumes, language, and music further operate as registers of difference that fetishize Muslim femininity, satisfying Orientalist fantasies of the exotic, inscrutable “Other” while enabling a heightened projection of desire, sensuality, and voyeurism onto the bodies of Muslim women. The courtesan in particular is defined by her ability to seduce and enchant male audiences through poetry, music, and dance; her entire being, from voice to body, is a decorative ornament aimed at provoking the senses It is revealing that Pakistani female actors were repeatedly cast as temptresses regardless of genre that pointed to their underlying “Otherness;” after Nikaah, for example, Agha appeared in a series of films where she either reprised the courtesan type or played exploitative roles, often as an item attraction in song sequences. Examples include Kasam Paida Karne Wale Ki (1984, director Babbar Subhash), Jungle Ki Beti (1988, director R. Thakkar), and Pati Patni aur Tawaif

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(1990, director Rajkumar Kohli). The only time Agha portrays a Hindu, culturally normative character in a leading role is in the film Oonche Log (1985, director Brij). Agha’s nominal place in the narrative is indicated by the film’s inordinate attention to the hero-villain dynamic within a larger multi-star cast, while her most striking scene in the film is little more than a glorified item number. The song O Sajna O Sajna follows the tradition of the “wet sari” sequence, and features Agha romping in a garden pool replete with sexually suggestive imagery that includes fountain jets, marble nudes, and protracted close-ups of the star’s legs, torso, and bosom. Dressed in a seductive shade of red, the contour-clinging fabric and diaphanous effect of the water suggest that Agha is primarily there for (male) spectatorial pleasure – an intention supported by the fact that the rightful holder of the gaze, in this case the protagonist Jagdev Singh (Rajesh Khanna), does not make an appearance until the song is nearly over. This element makes the song sequence stand out as an attraction fully detachable from the narrative that is odds with Agha’s putative normalization as chaste, Hindu woman. Marginalization also characterized the careers of other Pakistani performers who attempted to enter the Hindi film industry in Agha’s wake. Zeba Bakhtiar acted in a prominent Pakistani TV play before being launched in Raj Kapoor’s acclaimed release Henna (1991), emphasizing the critical role of television in mediating both early and current crossover stardom. Like Agha, Bakhtiar’s other roles were sparse and forgettable, fitting in with the hackneyed box-office fare of the period, while her only meaningful starring role in Henna capitalized on the “Otherness” of Muslim identity. A melodramatic romance about the relationship between a Pakistani woman and an Indian man, it premises the story on a hypothetical but illusory fantasy of cross-border unity, which becomes nullified at the end of the film with Henna’s (Bakhtiar’s) death, obviating the possibility of genuine consummation. In addition, it is only the hero’s amnesia at the beginning of the story – allowing him to temporarily forget his true identity as Hindu/ Indian – which permits him the imprudence of falling in love with Henna in the first place. As Hirji (2008, p. 62) notes, the film concludes with a reminder of the impossibility of cross-border, or crosscultural, love. The hero’s final call for peace between India and Pakistan comes as he stands over Henna’s body, and ultimately it is in India that the hero and his wife resume their lives. While nonetheless an important story for its direct confrontation of Partition and the India-Pakistan question, including a more sympathetic representation of Muslims and Pakistanis, these redeeming qualities are overshadowed by the irreducibility of the film’s final message. The off-screen personas of émigré actors supported this consistent “Othering” of Pakistani/Muslim identity. Agha is an illustrative example; despite being Pakistani by birth and residing there much of her life, she publicly dismisses her national origin as a Pakistani, stating in an interview, “I’m not from Pakistan.

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We’re Pathans from Amritsar settled in London where I grew up” (quoted in Farook, 2013). Again, her emphasis on being Pathan is an effort at establishing continuity with this community’s anti-separatist reputation, and its organizing role for conditionally accepting Muslims within the secular nation. This strategic distancing from Pakistan geographically and culturally stands in contrast with the celebrity discourse surrounding contemporary crossover stars and reflects the controversy and stigmatization characterizing early Pakistani actors, typical of the patriotic “burden of proof” that would continue to dog Muslim stars in India and that served to eviscerate any ideological, political, or cultural ties with Pakistan. This rejection was supported by the scandals that erupted when liaisons between Pakistani and Indian actors were exposed. Besides television, romantic, and professional relationships were a principal conduit for the introduction of Pakistani actors in India, and it is significant that the majority of crossover actors from this period were identified less by their careers or potential for stardom than as objects of sensational gossip and indiscretion. Their professional tenure typically lasted as long as the relationships that sustained them. The careers of Mohsin Khan and Somy Ali illustrate this persistent cycle. Khan achieved fame on two fronts; first for his existing reputation in cricket (another source of cultural contiguity between India and Pakistan) and second for his controversial marriage to Indian actor Reena Roy in 1983. His association with Roy motivated a brief stint in Hindi films, the most successful of which was a co-starring performance in Saathi (1991, director Mahesh Bhatt). However, Khan’s career never advanced and was expiring by the turn of the millennium, aggravated by his subsequent divorce form Roy and resettlement in Pakistan (Lalwani, 2012). Like Khan, Ali’s transient career in the 1990s was largely attributed to her long-term relationship with blockbuster star Salman Khan. The fact that she left home and moved to India at the age of 15 to pursue him – entering film projects primarily on the basis of sex appeal – attracted lurid speculation in another incarnation of the “temptress” image frequently attached to Muslim and Pakistani female actors. The unhappy ending of these relationships for both celebrities, including Mohsin Khan’s arduous custody battle over his daughter with Roy (TNN, 2011) dominate each star’s public image in a way that perpetuates cultural discourses about the impossibility or inevitable failure of inter-faith, cross-border relationships. This rhetoric has been used in celebrity journalism to embellish legends of doomed and unrequited romance as early as the 1950s, such as in the Dev Anand– Suraiya affair, where the star couple’s marriage was famously prevented as a result of religious differences (Ahujia, 2008). Khan’s case is especially significant as it defied the norms of gendered nationalism highlighted earlier, where Muslim male/Hindu female partnerships are viewed with suspicion, if not vilified outright (Banerjee, 2017; Siddique, 2015). These discourses overlap with wider cultural representations that abjure intimacy between religious and cross-border communities, affirming nationalist identity politics while delegitimizing the professional and social integration of Pakistani talent in the Hindi film industry.

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The legacy of these initial crossover actors is mainly one of subordination. The period in which they emerged provided few opportunities for genuine stardom, exacerbated by the fact that many were women who faced a paucity of roles in a patriarchal industry dominated by male star power. Their arrival occurred at a challenging time for women’s representation in Hindi film, with female characters frequently reduced to peripheral asides as either love interest or narrative distraction. This impetus made the Pakistani female “Other” an optimal solution for such a risqué treatment of women on screen, as Muslim women were perceived as being receptive to eroticization. This subtext of forbidden desire and moral impropriety was likewise expressed in censorious rumors surrounding the legitimacy of these early stars’ fame. Their status as Pakistani and “Other” firmly marked them as outsiders in religious, national, and cultural terms, limiting the range of available roles and representational possibilities. Their on-screen performances continued narrative traditions of marginalizing Muslim and Pakistani identity, while off-screen publicity emphasized a liminal and unstable location in the Hindi film industry, borne out by lackluster careers and an illicit notoriety generated by romantic or professional connections with Indian stars. Their fragile niche in the industry would all but vanish as tropes of the ideal Hindu wife/family would come to dominate screens, transforming these stars into a double negative as Muslim, Pakistani nationals. The taboo reception of these early pioneers contrasts the flexibility surrounding stardom and migration in the years immediately following Partition, when communal resistance and strong cultural affinities characterized both national industries. The transition reveals how nationalist discourse and political and industrial developments altered the landscape for crossover stars over time, much as globalization is doing today. Regardless, the shared origins of Indian and Pakistani media industries continue to provide an ongoing incentive for cultural exchange, while the political and ideological legacies of Partition remain visible in the shifting controversies surrounding present-day Pakistani stars and their careers in India. With this historical context in place, the representation and reception of these newer stars can be more fully explored.

References Abidi, S. (1992). Sufism in India. New Delhi: Wishwa Prakashan. Agarwal, S. (2002). Muslim women’s identity: On the margins of the nation. In J. Jain & S. Rai (Eds.), Films and feminism: Essays in Indian cinema (pp. 86–93). Jaipur and New Delhi: Rawat Publications. Ahmad, A. (2016). Cinema and society: Film and social change in Pakistan. In A. Khan & A. Ahmad (Eds.), Cinema and society: Film and social change in Pakistan (pp. 3–19). Karachi: Oxford University Press. Ahujia, H. (2008, March 9). An affair to remember. The Tribune, Retrieved January 2, 2018 from www.tribuneindia.com/2008/20080309/spectrum/main7.htm. Akbar, K. (2011). I want to live: The story of Madhubala. New Delhi: Hay House.

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Ansari, U. (2008). ‘There are thousands drunk by the passion of these eyes’. Bollywood’s Tawa’if: Narrating the nation and ‘The Muslim’. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 31.2, 290–316. Banerjee, S. (2017). Gender, nation and popular film in India: Globalizing muscular nationalism. London and New York, NY: Routledge. Bhaskar, I. & Allen, R. (2009). Islamicate cultures of Bombay cinema. New Delhi: Tulika Books. Bhattacharya, B. (2016). The left encounter: Progressive voices of nationalism and Indian cinema to the 1950s. In V. Kishore, A. Sarwal, & P. Patra (Eds.), Salaam Bollywood: Representations and interpretations (pp. 25–45). London and New York, NY: Routledge. Biswas, M. (2013). Bodies in syncopation. In M. Sen & A. Basu (Eds.), Figurations in Indian film (pp. 236–252). London and New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Chadha, K. & Kavoori, A. (2008). Exoticized, marginalized, demonized: The Muslim ‘other’ in Indian cinema. In A. Kavoori & A. Punathembekar (Eds.), Global Bollywood (pp. 131–145). New York: New York University Press. Dadi, I. (2016). Modernity and its vernacular reminders in Pakistani cinema. In A. Khan & A. Nobil (Eds.), Cinema and society: Film and social change in Pakistan (pp. 77–100). Karachi: Oxford University Press. Daiya, K. (2008). Violent belongings: Partition, gender, and national culture in postcolonial India. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Deep, M. (1996). The mystery and mystique of Madhubala. Bombay: Magna Books. Dwyer, R. (2015). Innocent abroad: SRK, Karan Johar, and the Indian diasporic romance. In R. Dudrah, E. Mader, & B. Fuchs (Eds.), SRK and global Bollywood (pp. 49–69). New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Dwyer, R. & Patel, D. (Eds.). (2002). Cinema India: The visual culture of Hindi film. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Eck, D. (1985). Darsan: Seeing the divine image in India. Chambersburg, PA: Anima Books. Ernst, C. (1999). Teachings of Sufism. Boston, MA and London: Shambhala. Ernst, C. (2018). It’s not just academic! Essays on Sufism and Islamic studies. New Delhi: Sage. Farook, F. (2013, March 15). Salma Agha: What’s the big deal if I married twice? iDiva, Retrieved August 27, 2017 from, http://idiva.com/news-entertainment/salma-aghawhats-the-big-deal-if-i-married-twice/20158. Faruqi, A. (1984). Sufism and bhakti: Mawlana Rum and Sri Ramakrishna. New Delhi: Abhinav Publications. Fatemi, N., Fatemi, F., & Fatemi, F. (1976). Sufism: Message of brotherhood, harmony and hope. Cranbury, NJ: A.S. Barnes and Company. Ganti, T. (2004). Bollywood: A guidebook to popular Hindi cinema. New York, NY: Routledge. Ganti, T. (2012). Producing Bollywood: Inside the contemporary Hindi film industry. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Gazdar, M. (1997). Pakistani cinema 1947–1997. Karachi: Oxford University Press. Gill, J. (2015). My Name is Khan: Reinventing the Muslim hero on the global stage. In R. Dudrah, E. Mader, & B. Fuchs (Eds.), SRK and global Bollywood (pp. 122–137). New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Hirji, F. (2008). Change of pace? Islam and tradition in popular Indian cinema. South Asian Popular Culture, 6.1, 57–69. Jain, M. (2005). The Kapoors: The first family of Indian cinema. New Delhi: Penguin Books. Jha, P. (2011). Remembering Nargis, retelling Mother India: Criticism, melodrama, and national mythmaking. South Asian Popular Culture, 9.3, 287–297. Khan, Y. (2007). The great partition: The making of India and Pakistan. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press.

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Lalwani, V. (2012, October 13). Sonakshi doesn’t look like me: Reena Roy. Times of India, Retrieved August 27, 2017 from http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/entertainment/ hindi/bollywood/news/Sonakshi-doesnt-look-like-me-Reena-Roy/articleshow/ 16793423.cms. Manwani, A. (2013). Sahir Ludhianvi: The people’s poet. Noida: Harper Collins. Mubarki, M. (2017). Violence, victimhood, and trauma: Partition narratives of Bombay cinema. Visual Anthropology, 30.1, 45–64. Mukherjee, M. (2017). Voices of the talking stars: Women of Indian cinema and beyond. New Delhi: Sage. Prasad, M. (1998). Ideology of the Hindi film: A historical construction. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Raj, A. (2010). Hero: The silent era to Dilip Kumar. New Delhi: Hay House. Ruckert, G. (2004). Music in North India: Experiencing music, expressing culture. New York, NY and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sarkar, B. (2009). Mourning the nation: Indian cinema in the wake of partition. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Siddique, S. (2015). Meena Shorey: The droll queen of partition. BioScope, 6.1, 44–66. Srivistava, S. (2006). The voice of the nation and the Five-Year-Plan hero: Speculations on gender, space, and popular culture. In V. Lal & A. Nandy (Eds.), Fingerprinting popular culture: The mythic and the iconic in Indian cinema (pp. 122–155). New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Talbot, I. (2000). India and Pakistan: Inventing the nation. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Thomas, R. (1989). Sanctity and scandal: The mythologization of Mother India. Quarterly Review of Film & Video, 11, 11–30. Thomas, R. (2014). Bombay before Bollywood. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan. TNN. (2011, August 3). Aishwarya Rai came between Salman and me: Somy Ali. Times of India, Retrieved August 27, 2017 from http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/entertain ment/hindi/bollywood/news/Aishwarya-Rai-came-between-Salman-me-Somy-Ali/ articleshow/9466777.cms. Vasudevan, R. (1993). Shifting codes, dissolving identities: The Hindi social film of the 1950s as popular culture. Journal of Arts and Ideas, 23.4, 60–75. Virdi, J. (2003). The cinematic imagination. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Viswanath, G. (2002). Saffronizing the silver screen: The right-winged nineties film. In J. Jain & S. Rai (Eds.), Films and feminism: Essays in Indian cinema (pp. 86–93). Jaipur and New Delhi: Rawat Publications.

3 GLOBALIZATION, NEW POLITICAL ECONOMIES, AND CULTURAL CHANGE

While the 1980s are remembered for the critical and commercial decline of Hindi cinema, new policies of economic liberalization and global growth radically transformed its character and appeal in the 1990s through the present, both on a domestic and transnational scale. The process began with the lifting of wider economic sanctions across India in 1991; but was dramatically increased once the government officially recognized the film industry as a GDPsupporting enterprise in 1999 (Ganti, 2004, p. 53). The granting of industry status meant that, for the first time, Indian films qualified for legitimate sources of commercial funding, including corporate loans, government sponsorship, and Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). This change has altered the production landscape for Hindi cinema and restored its cultural currency and dominance as a national industry, offering a more urbane reputation with audiences in India and abroad. As Tejaswini Ganti notes, Hindi cinema suddenly became “cool,” emerging as a fashionable preoccupation with middle class and youth consumers that was fully in sync with global cultural trends (Ganti, 2012, p. 17). The economic and cosmopolitan renaissance has inevitably impacted cultural exchange between India and Pakistan, a process supported by the intermittent thawing of bilateral relations that has steadily increased over the past decade, despite dramatic interruptions like the 1999 Kargil dispute and 26/11 bombings of Mumbai in 2008. Regardless, the primary lynchpin of India–Pakistan relations since 2000 has been growing opportunities for trade and collaboration on domestic and foreign policy issues. This outlook is discernible in the relaxing of visa and travel restrictions, the opening of new transport channels like the “Peace Bus” between Srinagar and Muzaffarabad, and record numbers in bilateral commerce, which broke the $500 million mark for the first time in 2005, auguring a new era of intertwined growth that has since escalated (Khan, 2007). These progressive steps have rendered material and cultural barriers between India and Pakistan less rigid,

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widening the scope for commercial and creative cooperation. The mutual experience of globalization, neoliberal capitalism and a flourishing consumer culture indicates that both societies resemble one another more closely than they have in the past 40 years. This equivalence is especially visible in consumer entertainment, as the demand for both Hindi and Pakistani media products has risen sharply and the number of Indian cultural exports and co-productions has increased, establishing Hindi cinema’s hegemony as an agent of economic, cultural and geopolitical influence. The fad for “Bollywood-style” weddings in Pakistan and the regular screening of Hindi (as well as international) films in posh multiplexes, once restricted to pirated prints smuggled across the border, is testimony to how much the climate has changed (Ahmad, 2016). It is in this new environment that today’s Pakistani crossover stars emerge as emblems of globalized capital and consumer culture, shifting perceptions of the historicized Pakistani and Muslim “Other.” This chapter looks at the role of globalization in setting the stage for Pakistani crossover stardom, the outcome of new industrial and cultural forces from corporatization and the growth of overseas markets to digital fandom and diasporic interaction. Nonetheless, these same forces of globalization have also served to strengthen identity politics and nationalism over the past decade, creating what has been called a “macabre marriage of consumerism and fundamentalism” in popular culture (Talbot, 2000, p. 189). As a result, this chapter further interrogates how the representation of Pakistanis and Muslims continues to fluctuate in a globalized age, shaped by social and political developments such as the rise of Hindutva and a preponderance of transnational discourses on Islam and terrorism. Pakistani stars emerge against this backdrop even as they exceed neat categorizations of national and religious identity in a global media convergence environment.

Post-liberalization and the Muslim “Other” in Hindi cinema As previously mentioned, Chadha and Kavoori (2008) note how the 1990s and 2000s are marked by the demonization of the Muslim “Other,” the period that has also witnessed the Hindi film industry’s globalization. These shifts in representation, as in previous decades, occur at the level of both narrative and star text within a larger sociohistorical context of economic, political, and cultural change. These forces have impacted not only the iconography of the Muslim in popular Hindi cinema, but also have induced adjacent shifts in how the “domestic” and “crossover” Muslim star can be reasonably assimilated within the nation. These processes of change can be traced through the rise of the Khan triumvirate post-1990 amid a burgeoning “saffronization” of cultural politics (Viswanath, 2002) in Hindi cinema, alongside the growth of global celebrity in the industry. Unlike their predecessors in the post-independence period through 1990, the new global Muslim star – best represented by the career of Shah Rukh Khan – reveals how political identities are simultaneously decoupled from and reinscribed within the cultural imaginary of the nation, emphasizing the permeability of borders, citizenships, and relationships of belonging. Such postmodern

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subjectivities within consumer capitalism help explain how the domestic Muslim star can simultaneously “represent” an increasingly majoritarian national sphere on the one hand, while being appropriated by Islamic constituencies on the other in places as distant as Dubai or Malaysia. These new criteria for configuring identity have shifted terrains for accommodating the Muslim in the globalized nation – a change that has opened new possibilities for the Pakistani crossover star. The liberalization of the 1990s not only encouraged an influx of foreign and corporate dollars, but also created a cinema that was outward-looking, expansionist, and fixated on consumer branding, with films proudly boasting product placement and a “designer” aesthetic. Watershed productions like Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995, director Aditya Chopra) and Karan Johar’s Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998) reflected this orientation while ushering in new narrative and thematic sensibilities. These films set the archetype for two critical trends in Hindi cinema: the NRI (Non-Resident Indian) film and the privileging of Hindu identity as a source of cultural and national authenticity (Malhotra & Alagh, 2004; Viswanath, 2002). Both appealed to a rapidly gentrifying Indian middle class and diaspora audiences predominantly located in the UK, North America, Australia, and Hong Kong. Centered on the upper class, North Indian Hindu family, the NRI film featured renowned foreign locales, opulent lifestyles, and an idealized sense of Indian identity located in the “hearts” of NRIs across the globe (Srinivas, 2010). A renewed emphasis on the extended family and traditional Hindu values likewise prevailed in these films, obviating other cultural, religious, and social means of constructing identity. The elaborate display of Hindu rituals, from engagement and marriage ceremonies to festival holidays like Navratri or Karva Chauth, dominate blockbuster films such as Hum Aapke Hain Kaun! (1994, director Sooraj Barjatya), Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam (1999, director Sanjay Leela Bhansali) and Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (2001, director Karan Johar). Invoking the idea of Ramrajya or benevolent rule, they depict the patriarchal Hindu family as the cornerstone of social unity and cultural habitus – even if the characters drive Ferraris and reside in places like New York City. In this way capitalism and Western modernity became seamlessly integrated with notions of Indian identity, which was increasingly defined according to a Hindu-centric moral universe characterized by filial piety, appropriate sexual and personal conduct, and the observance of Hindu belief. This symbolic adherence to traditional norms compensated the rapid incorporation of Western capitalist values and commodities in Indian society, in addition to legitimizing the growing economic and cultural importance of the NRI (Mohammad, 2007). For the first time in a decade Hindi cinema posed a realistic competition to television, drawing middle class audiences back to theatres while engaging relevant popular discourses – and anxieties – about national identity under the new cultural regime of globalization. This nationalism was reflected on screen as both “soft” and “hard” power – whether the protagonists were venture capitalists or soldiers battling for India’s sovereignty and prestige, they operated as metaphors for India’s competitive growth in the global arena (Banerjee, 2017). It is no coincidence,

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then, that the NRI film found its ideological counterpart in patriotic war and “terrorist” genres. Borrowing a lead from Hollywood’s depiction of the Arab and Muslim “Other,” Pakistani Muslims were officially cast as the adversaries of Indian prosperity and liberal democracy under the new guise of radical terrorism (Hirji, 2008). These genres mark a departure from the secularism and enshrined multiculturalism of the Nehruvian era towards a new era of hardline identity politics in mainstream culture. This development can be linked to multiple political and social movements that gained traction since the 1990s, notably a resurgence of Hindu nationalism, the 1999 Kargil conflict, and post-9/11 Western aggression in the Middle East and South Asia. The rise of Hindutva as a major political force has been a critical factor; beginning with the destruction of the Babri Masjid in 1992 (Wolpert, 2010) (a mosque allegedly built on the site of Lord Ram’s birthplace in Ayodhya), Hindu nationalist organizations like the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have commanded greater influence in the public sphere and ascended India’s governing bureaucracy (Talbot, 2000). Hindutva discourse projects “the breakdown of order and society under population pressures and globalization … onto a demonized Muslim ‘other’” (p. 175). This rhetoric recycles archaic Orientalist stereotypes about the Muslim invader/conqueror and of Muslim men in particular as repressive, violent, gluttonous, and sexually dissolute (Kumar, 2012; Talbot, 2000). According to this perspective, India’s Muslim minority is an undesirable relic of its past occupation under “illegitimate” Muslim rule, beginning with Mahmud of Ghazni’s pillage of Delhi in 1025 to the subsequent installation of Mughal power in 1526 (Talbot, 2000). The proclamation of a timeless Hindu nation and exhortations to devout Hindus to restore the glory of India’s “golden age” won the BJP its first electoral victory in 1998. This championing of the Hindu right was partly manifested in efforts to arm and defend the nation, leading to India’s first nuclear detonation that same year (Talbot, 2000). The show of aggression prompted a standoff with Pakistan over the enduring Kashmir issue, leading to the brief but acute Kargil encounter over the Line of Control (LOC) separating both nations. India demonstrated its military might during the conflict, narrowly declaring victory before Pakistan surrendered with an immediate ceasefire (Wolpert, 2010). Nonetheless, the skirmish inflamed passions on both sides of the border, engendering strong jingoist sentiment where “everything from light entertainment to advertising was linked to the events in the remote Tiger Hills” (Talbot, 2000, p. 187). As Talbot notes, patriotism had become profitable and popular culture from cricket to cinema was imbued with a nationalist fervor that sold tickets, product endorsements, and even video games, such as the “I Love India” program where players could bomb Lahore (Talbot, 2000). Around this time a number of Indo-Pak themed films surfaced, followed shortly by films like Fiza (2000, director Khalid Mohammad) and Mission Kashmir (2000, director Vidhu Vinod Chopra) that inaugurated the Muslim/Pakistani terrorist genre. Films like Border (1997, director J.P. Dutta), Gadar: Ek Prem Katha (2001, director Anil Sharma), and LOC: Kargil (2003, director J.P. Dutta)

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sensationalize military and political conflict with Pakistan, offering a historically polarized view of bilateral relations and associating the Pakistan state with espionage, insurgency, and destabilization. The ideological legacies of Partition are starkly visible in the sagas of betrayal, distrust, and sabotage these stories reiterate about the Pakistani “Other.” Likewise, Pakistani and Muslim civilians are routinely associated with terrorist infiltration, made all the more threatening by the fact that they cannot be distinguished from “true” Indian citizens. Examples like Sarfarosh (1999, director John Matthew Matthan), and Fanaa (2006, director Kunal Kohli) require the Muslim perpetrator to be socially eliminated; in the latter example, the Muslim female protagonist must assassinate her terrorist husband for the sake of national security. This trope has evolved into its own subgenre of the Muslim “burden of proof,” which portrays the “good” Muslim illustrating service and sacrifice to India while the “bad” Muslim devolves into counter-insurgent/terrorist. More recently this has shifted to a representation of Muslim bodies (both male and female) as “weaponized” tools of national defense, visible in the hard body films of Sultan (2016, director Ali Abbas Zafar) and Naam Shabana (2017, director Shivam Nair). This larger trend speaks to an ongoing anxiety about Indian Muslims furtively supporting an adversary Pakistan state that has its ideological ancestry in Partition and subsequent “McCarthyite” campaigns against “fifth columnists, spies and those who displayed a dubious commitment to the national interest” (Khan, 2007, p. 155). Again, performing loyalty to the nation is integral to Muslim subjectivity and belonging in the narrative imaginary of Hindi film (Hirji, 2008). These representations have been partly strengthened by post-9/11 global events, even as they are also increasingly contested in popular media. The BJP’s cooperation with US and European foreign policy, including a pledge to combat terrorism through increased defense expenditure and surveillance, has added fresh potency to Hindu nationalist dogma that co-opts the political, bureaucratic, and cultural apparatus of Islamophobia in countries like the US and Britain (Kumar, 2012). While certainly not identical in an Indian context – a culture that has dealt with religious diversity for thousands of years – this discourse nonetheless affirms an antagonist stance towards Pakistan and historical suspicions of its abetting and harboring terrorism, from Partition-related violence to the Kashmir dispute. Jigna Desai and Rani Neutill (2013) contend that Indian cultural responses to the global “War on Terror” connect Western imperialist discourse “to a longer history of violence extending forth from Partition and communalism in South Asia. It marks 9/11 not as a rupture, but as a continuation of this history … with the subcontinent as an originary site of global Islamic terror” (p. 157). This perspective was reinforced in the wake of the 26/11 terror attacks in Mumbai, allowing India to further leverage its geopolitical authority against Pakistan, whose civic corruption, reputed collusion with global terrorist networks and links to Kashmiri revolt are frequently contrasted with positive examples of a progressive and economically robust “India Shining,” contradictory as realities may be (Wolpert, 2010).

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The operations of Western punitive force in the Middle East and South Asia since 9/11, however, have also spawned resistance to Islamophobia and its political exploitation in India, a postcolonial nation with the second-largest population of Muslims in the world. The shift includes more palatable images of Muslims in Hindi cinema that directly counteract the “terrorist” prototype, although these allowances continue to rely primarily on the traditional depiction of Muslims as victims, or martyrs. Examples include films like New York (2009, director Kabir Khan) and My Name is Khan (2010, director Karan Johar), which show Muslims in a compassionate and/or heroic light as they encounter religious intolerance and terror-related violence in the globalized West. In a reworking of the NRI genre, these films deflect Islamophobia and administrative injustice away from the Indian state and its citizens onto the contradictions of Western capitalist society, evoking racial minority politics along the way. My Name is Khan goes so far as to link Muslim suffrage in the US with the historic civil rights movement, albeit with problematic representation. As Desai and Neutill (2013) note, the majority of these narratives end up confirming a neocolonial outlook on the “Islamic threat” by calling for an “expansion of the global security state” (p. 148) and other forms of citizen vigilantism. A common representational motif is that Muslims are responsible for identifying, policing, and recompensing justice against radical terrorism within their own communities, a key component of Islamophobic policy. Ultimately, such films continue to pass through terrorism as the principal lens for interpreting Muslim identity, offering a maladaptive and constrictive profile of Muslim agency and experience. These representations continue to manifest themselves along gendered lines. The Hindutva turn and its relationship to gender/sexuality have already been explored in depth by Sikata Banerjee (2017), who coins the term “muscular nationalism” (p. 9) to characterize a particular type of masculinity in the post-liberalization era which operates as “a signifier of India’s new self-confidence on the global stage” (p. 3). Unlike the hard bodies of the Reagan era in Hollywood that Susan Jeffords (2004) has previously considered, however, Banerjee (2017) acknowledges that even as muscular nationalism evokes “martial prowess, muscular strength, and toughness” (p. 9) it also permits an emotive, domestic masculinity in line with global consumer capitalism (Gehlawat, 2015). As for women’s bodies, they remain fixtures of national community and honor situated under the purview of Hindu men, although they likewise express conflicts over which types of femininity are culturally authentic/appropriate under globalization. Banerjee (2017) places the Muslim body is this new national imagescape, contending how “filmic depictions of these men and women have attempted to contain them within the binary ‘good’ Muslim/bad Muslim which is defined by rejections of an aggressive Islamic identity and steadfast explicit patriotism” (p. 80). She goes on to reiterate the gendered double standard regarding Muslim/Hindu desire, an insight I develop further in my discussion of the political controversy surrounding crossover stars and the nation in Chapter 7. In this framework Hindu male desire for the Muslim woman is avowed, while Hindu female desire for the Muslim male is fully proscribed, as “her very act

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would be seen as a violation of chastity which would dishonor the nation” (p. 78). Again, the conflating of Hindu male subjectivity with the rightful state and female bodies – including Muslim ones – with rightful territory are oblique to this argument. Muslim males, on the other hand, “are able to express national power, but because their religious background is marginalized in the moral economy of the nation, it is necessary to transcend this social anxiety by proving their unequivocal patriotism through redemptive action” (p. 88). In sustaining this vision of gendered nationalism, Banerjee points to recent films that redeem the Muslim “Other” through such contingencies, notably Fiza, Chakde India! (2007, director Shimit Amin), Mission Kashmir, and Veer-Zaara.

Nationalism, globalization, and the Indian Muslim star The above analysis, and Banerjee’s insight on gendered masculinities, elicits questions about what role the “domestic” Muslim star plays in signifying the nation during the post-liberalization period. I place “domestic” in quotes because, as demonstrated below, these stars have done much to globalize cultural identity away from the lived nation. As a result, I refer to this crop of global stars as “Indian” rather than “domestic.” If Muslim masculinity was a disarticulating reminder of the state’s dubious past following independence, while Muslim femininity was construed as excessive to the national body, what can be said about the Khan craze of the present? Furthermore, while Muslim female stars outnumbered their male counterparts up until the 1980s, it is equally revealing that the opposite trend now prevails in Hindi film celebrity. Banerjee points to the embodiment of muscular nationalism by Muslim stars on screen, but also does not acknowledge the slippage between and within the narrative/ star text of Muslim actors, which conceal fundamental contradictions. One of these contradictions is the notion of masculinity itself, which Banerjee alludes to but does not fully excavate. The ambivalent masculinities of stars SRK and Aamir Khan, and to a lesser degree Salman Khan, allow these performers to globalize a national identity that capacitates multiple heterogeneous, if often conflicting, subjectivities. In this way the global Muslim star deconstructs terrestrial nationalism while reframing it as a consumable affect or “brand” expressed through commodity culture, instituting new relationships to political identity that suit transnational NRI, diasporic, and crossover audiences. While a detailed exploration of these themes is beyond the scope of this work, significant strides have been made in this direction with the celebrity scholarship surrounding stars like SRK. Rajinder Dudrah, Elke Mader, and Bernard Fuchs (2015) refer to his star text as “globalized polysemy” (p. xi) that points to the open-endedness of the new global star text compared to the Five Year Plan hero, who was fully bounded by the physical and social space of the nation. The porousness of this new star image enables the projection of heterosexual and same-sex desire, androgyny, and the timespace compression of globalization itself (Dwyer, 2015; Ganesh & Mahadevan, 2015). Rachel Dwyer (2015, p. 63) notes

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how SRK “appears classless, ageless, international” in a way that opens his star text to cultural hybridity and appropriation. Extending these observations, Kamala Ganesh and Kanchana Mahadevan (2015) refer to his celebrity as third space that narrates multiple ways of belonging in a post-national world. They attribute this dynamic to the star’s soft masculinity that interrogates the rigid inflexibility of traditional nationalism, evident in films like Mohabbatein (2000, director Aditya Chopra), Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham and Kal Ho Naa Ho (2003, director Nikhil Advani). In these narratives the protagonists “affirm their relation to India through the domain of intimate relationships and cultural nostalgia” (p. 106) rather than patrilineal notions associated with conventional norms of belonging via citizenship, property, and inheritance, or what the authors call “patriarchal obsession with purity and authenticity of the bloodline” (p. 106). Here SRK is the returned NRI who, through his winsome charm and emotionality, resituates “manhood as an identity that is acquired through personal relationships rather than in the public domain” (p. 107), a radical departure from his post-independence antecedents. This new masculinity is affirmed by the affective vigor of the star’s image, best encapsulated in his oft-recycled quote “I am a feeling you cannot resist” (Gopinath, 2018). The quote collapses an abstract sense of identity/being with the rapid circulation of consumer commodities under global capitalism that mediates intangible modes of cultural participation. It is no small wonder, then, that scholars and fans position “emotion” as the core quotient in SRK’s transnational appeal, or what Gopinath (2018) calls the “feeling male body” (p. 308). That consumers “cannot resist” him refers to the ubiquity of the star’s compelling and relentless brand image, from advertising billboards to 24/7 Twitter feed updates that evoke the commodity affect of the star as lifestyle trademark. Identity is a function of attachment to the consumer artifact itself, in this case the star as brand within a trans-media empire that includes his films, film songs, commercial endorsements, concert tours, and ancillary merchandise from toys to video games. Nation thus becomes refigured as “culture,” whose engagement is a matter of sentiment that is elective and customizable according to the privileges of consumer choice. Such a relationship means that even non-Indians can access cultural identity, as Ganesh and Mahadevan (2015) point out in their description of German-speaking fans who resemble their Indian equivalents in terms of gender, class, and consumer taste. SRK thereby activates an insider/outsider duality that relates “the struggle to belong, through sensitivity, to the other” (p. 114), operating “at a transnational level to address displacement and create new public spaces” (p. 114). These hybrid aspects of SRK’s star persona make him a touchstone for diversely situated audiences while admitting the diasporic/Western/Muslim “Other” into the imaginative space of the nation. This multidimensionality is indicated in the star’s uneven expression of Muslim identity visible in films like Chakde India! and My Name is Khan. The first, as Banerjee (2017) incisively observes, repeats the “burden of proof” plot cycle, in which the Muslim citizen is only tentatively granted validity within the nation. From the outset the protagonist’s patriotism is questioned, while his

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belonging depends on subverting Muslim identity to national pride – here represented by the triumphant victory of the all-women’s soccer team as an allegory of the collective nation (Banerjee, 2017). The film can thereby be read as a majoritarian interpretation of nationalism that bears a genuine likeness to controversies surrounding the star’s own national loyalty, including the debate over accepting Pakistani players on his Kolkata Knight Riders team (Raj, Sreekumar, & Jermadi, 2016). The second film, however, offers a very different approach in its subaltern framing of Muslim identity. While the narrative continues to offer a victimized (and for SRK, consistently feminized) reading of Islam, it nonetheless creates opportunities for identification in its systematic disassociation of Muslim faith with extremism. The explicitly marked Muslim man, as Jaspreet Gill (2015) notes, becomes a model of empathetic suffrage that summons a global Muslim sensibility of disenfranchisement. That the film performed so well in Muslim-majority markets attests to this aspect of the story (and the star’s) global appeal (Gill, 2015). It is clear that SRK can channel the resurgently Hindu, “NRI” hero of the postliberal nation and icon of Muslim resistance with equal facility, a contradiction evident in his salutation as both a “national treasure” and representatively Muslim star. His extensive fan following with audiences in Malaysia is a case in point, for which “SRK acts as their true representative as a star entertainer, who carries an Islamic identity in name and in the upbringing” (Raj, Sreekumar, & Jermadi, 2016, p. 272). This fandom is the product of both state-sponsored and corporate efforts at globalizing the region, evident in efforts to brand the nation as “Halal Tourist Destination” for those who wish a religious experience … It was at this crucial and critical juncture the middle class Muslim or Islamic society were in search of an icon or star from their own religion (Raj, Sreekumar, & Jermadi, 2016, p. 271) for which SRK filled the void. He now acts as the nation’s brand ambassador and has been bestowed the prestigious “Datuk” (knighthood) title previously awarded only to indigenous civilians (Raj, Sreekumar, & Jermadi, 2016). This co-optation is an example of contraflow that reveals the complex intersections of culture as soft power in the global age; in this case reading the star text against its dominant ideological moorings only to be poached for another, oppositional sort of nationalism. It is worthwhile to note that these trends in global Muslim stardom also reverberate in the star texts of Aamir Khan and Salman Khan. The former is notorious for an artistic perfectionism that leads him to transform his personality from role to role, such that he can portray an innocent rustic in films like Raja Hindustani (1996, director Dharmesh Darshan) or Lagaan (2001, director Ashutosh Gowariker) to a hyper-muscular killing machine in Ghajini (2008, director A.R. Murugadoss) or an angst-ridden college student in 3 Idiots (2009, director Rajkumar Hirani). While less associated with the NRI image, Aamir’s shifting

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demeanor similarly refuses to stay fixed from text to text, while his commitment to “secular” nationalism is dramatically stated through the star’s off-screen involvement with socially progressive projects like the hit, multi-season show Satyamev Jayate (2012–2014, director Satyajit Bhatkal). In this way the star has managed to distance himself from an increasingly narrow definition of cultural nationalism that is evident in his decisively Gandhian outlook. This attitude is referenced throughout Satyamev Jayate with the notion of satyagraha (truth-seeking), while his particular iteration of masculinity incorporates compassion, patience, and justice that draws heavily on this legacy. Indeed, his ample demonstrations of emotional sympathy during the show were widely mocked, revealing how the star combines both masculine and feminine behaviors in his self-presentation (Dutt, 2015). Like his contemporaries, Salman Khan also portrays an ambiguous masculinity, albeit one tinged with subaltern frustration. It is perhaps for this reason that he attracts a wide following with Muslim male audiences in India, while he has traditionally been considered the most “Muslim” of all the Khans, affectionately tagged by his fans with the epithet “Bhai” or brother (Ashraf, 2014). His rebellious persona on screen and off, complemented by an image of toughness, emanates an “angry young man” vibe while many of his roles feature him as a slighted subject battling oppression, a position that insinuates the liminal status of Muslims (particularly men) in the nation. Even in films where the star plays an overtly Hindu character, there is a notable tendency for him to get “edged” out of the frame. This inclination can be seen in films like Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam – where the Hindu–Muslim romance again refuses consummation – and Baabul (2006, director Ravi Chopra), where the protagonist dies in a car crash but “blesses” his wife’s marriage to another man in spirit. Other films, meanwhile, portray a more mutinous image including Dabaang (2010, director Abhinav Kashyap), Veer (2010, director Anil Sharma), Ek Tha Tiger (2012, director Kabir Khan), Bajrangi Bhaijaan (2015, director Kabir Khan), and Sultan. Significantly, the last two directly concern Muslim themes and show the star/protagonist as emotionally and intellectually vulnerable, but physically strong. The protagonists in each film use this strength to either protect the socially weak (in the former case a mute Pakistani girl) or vindicate justice, while ultimately carrying the nation to glory. Both call for a reassessment of the Muslim in the nation, in the first instance by advocating a fragile Indo-Pak accord and in the second by deploying the Muslim male body for an aggressive display of national strength in the classic “sports patriotism” genre. Again, these films bear out hallmark traits of gendered nationalisms throughout their narratives even as they raise thorny questions of difference.

Towards the new crossover star: a shifting economy of culture The foregoing discussion reveals how the global, Indian Muslim star has paved the way for more flexible means of representing and including the Muslim “Other.” These changes have carved out a course for Pakistani crossover stars

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by decoupling identity from the palpable nation on the one hand, while opening discursive spaces for cultural hybridity on the other. However, opportunities for representing Pakistani and Muslim identity have also emerged that can be attributed to the industry’s continuing efforts at globalization. These pivotal transitions include 1) infrastructural reform, 2) the targeting of overseas markets, and 3) an accelerating trend towards corporate media convergence, including ancillary franchising and brand consolidation. It also incorporates what Henry Jenkins calls “grassroots” convergence through the emergence of digital media cultures that are consumer-oriented, permitting innovative means of distributing, appropriating, and generating media content (Jenkins, 2006). These factors have opened a genuine window of opportunity for Pakistani stars and the production of niche or alternative content supporting their crossover status, allowing greater flexibility in the cultural representation of Pakistanis and Muslims. These changes have also established Hindi cinema as the region’s prevailing cultural export and an important counterflow to Hollywood’s monopoly in major global markets. Changes in the political economy of Hindi film have provided the main stimulus for this large-scale global growth. Whereas the industry functioned as an independent, financier-driven enterprise post-World War II, the production scenario over the past 20 years has shifted towards a fully corporate studio model (Subramanian, 2012). This movement towards vertical integration has modified how contemporary films are financed, produced, designed, and distributed. The emergence of discrete genre categories, franchise sequels, and staggered blockbuster releases – known as the “100 Crore Club” film in industry parlance – have replaced incitements for a guaranteed and “universal” box office hit. This effect has been enhanced by the demise of single-screen theatres and the exponential growth of urban multiplexes, where big budget, foreign, and niche films can now be screened simultaneously (Ganti, 2012). In addition, the centrality of streaming and VOD (Video on Demand) services as part of a larger global distribution strategy for Indian media companies entails that dependence on first-run theatrical screenings has taken a back seat to lucrative satellite and licensing profits (Ganti, 2012). This corporate investment milieu has supported the emergence of a global media franchising approach in an industry once constrained by black money, profiteering, oral contracts, and an overall lack of transparency (Ganti, 2012). Such developments parallel similar trends across emerging media markets throughout Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. In addition to the entry of foreign conglomerates like Viacom, Disney, and DreamWorks, mainstay production houses like Yash Raj Films (YRF) and Eros International Ltd. have acted as industry leaders in this overall corporate restructuring. Eros was one of the first companies to sell overseas distribution rights for their films and foray into digital distribution, launching their own subscription service in 2012, while YRF (once a family run, “boutique” production business) was among the first to engage in media branding as an effort to market their films to diaspora audiences (Subramanian, 2012). The company now has a USbased division, a niche production banner, Y! Films for youth audiences, and

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ancillary merchandising for their most popular entertainment franchises (Bhushan, 2011; IANS, 2013). Unlike the speculative practices and “heterogeneous mode of manufacture” (Prasad, 1998) previously characterizing the Hindi film industry, in which film projects were assembled piecemeal, being dependent on multiple, and frequently disparate, sources of financing, these new entertainment conglomerates engage in a profitable “de-risking” agenda. This strategy includes debuting international stock, acquiring multiple media properties, and diversifying revenue outlets, enabling studios to work on multiple projects concurrently and invest in co-productions (Subramanian, 2012). This method has inevitably widened content choices for filmmakers and consumers by accommodating low budget or experimental cinema – a major conduit for launching both new and crossover talent. The corporate system has also made Hindi cinema more globally profitable than ever before, with an average annual growth rate of 11.6% (Price Waterhouse Cooper, 2014) and approximately 20–55% of total box office revenue deriving from overseas markets. Between 1998 and 2005 the Hindi film industry achieved peak growth post-liberalization, with revenues increasing nearly 360%, bolstering India’s global market share from less than 0.2% in 2004 to more than 2% in 2017 (Kramer, 2015). In 2018 the film industry is expected to grow at least 14.3% annually and reach earnings of over $33 billion by 2020 (PTI, 2017). This can be credited to higher ticket sales abroad and an increased profit margin in the distribution sector, which now accounts for around 60% of total film revenue, much of which is recouped before a film is even released (Ganti, 2012). This has impacted the hit-to-flop ratio of Hindi cinema, since films that otherwise perform poorly at the domestic box office can still be profitable in a limited overseas release – not to mention through pre-sold satellite, music, and related licensing rights. The new profit configuration has reoriented the content appeal, as well as intended audience, for Hindi cinema. In addition to NRI and global audiences in the West, the incentive to “tap” less penetrated markets – such as in Pakistan, the Gulf states, Turkey, and Southeast Asia – have created a strong export culture with targeted marketing and crossover interests. The Hindi film Raees (2017, director Rahul Dholakia), for example, earned 70% of total box office takings in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) during its opening weekend, collecting over $2,973,088 in that market alone (Box Office Mojo.com). Such expansion has positioned Pakistan in particular as an important locus for commercial investment, realigning its economic and cultural influence in the Hindi film industry. With only around a dozen domestic films released annually, Indian cinema imports occupy a large share of Pakistani box office receipts, with Pakistani distributors depending on the latest Hindi releases to fill theatre occupancies and reap profits, screening more than 50 films per year (Dubey, 2012). Even the most successful Pakistani blockbusters earn less overall than their Indian counterparts; for comparison, Pakistan’s highest-grossing film to date, Jawani Phir Nahin Ani (2015, director Nadeem Baig) earned Rs. 74.5 crore, or around $2 million, while the recent Hindi film release Sultan earned at least Rs.

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110 crore ($17 million) in one of the biggest box-office windfalls in Pakistan’s history (Aijaz, 2016). It also means that a substantial portion of the film’s total revenue – nearly 20% – was gained in Pakistan, considering the film grossed around Rs. 580 crore ($91 million) worldwide (Box Office India, 2016). Much of this disproportion in box office earnings has to do with Pakistan’s depressed exhibition market, which has a low screen density relative to the national population, amounting to approximately one screen per million (Ahmad, 2016). While India’s screen density is also among the lowest in the world – at about 10 per million – its shortcomings in the exhibition sector are compensated by a high rate of return in global distribution markets (PTI, 2017). The recent intermission in bilateral trade as a result of the 2016 Uri attack put a further dint in Pakistan’s exhibition sector, and the country quickly lifted its ban on Indian film imports after steep declines in revenue threatened to leave screens empty for 40–45 weeks, or 85% of the year (Safi, 2016). Regardless, selective import restrictions and newly imposed distribution fines for Hindi films indicate that Pakistani distributors stand to lose at least 30% of overall profits as a result (Koimoi.com Team, 2017). Considering the average box office earnings for Hindi films in Pakistan, this suggests that India is also losing one of its top five overseas markets, which has grown by 300% since the import freeze was completely lifted in 2006 (Dubey, 2012). This growing interdependence between the Pakistani and Indian media industries is further evident in what Ahmad (2016) describes as “The sheer level of professional and artistic interpenetration that makes modeling, acting, and singing for film, television drama and advertisements in Pakistan and India flow seamlessly into each other within individual career trajectories,” (p. 356) something that has escalated in the past decade, making it “increasingly difficult to draw clear borders between cultural forms and national mediascapes” (p. 356). The liminal status and cultural whitewashing of early Pakistani crossover aspirants has been more recently replaced by Indian patronage and corporate-backed initiatives in the local entertainment industry. Reliance is credited with opening the Pakistani exhibition market, particularly in Pakistan’s northern Punjab region, through its sophisticated distribution network (Dubey, 2012) while Indian financing and creative partnerships have helped resuscitate “New Urdu Cinema,” providing fresh incentives for mutual investment and growth. That Hindi cinema acts as a cultural and commercial paradigm for the Pakistani industry is a reflection of India’s soft equity in business and entertainment, part of the government’s impetus to situate the media sector as both national brand ambassador and fiscal engine for India’s globalizing capitalist economy. Members of the film industry belong to a global capitalist class fueling privatized growth and innovation through the export of corporate funding, technology, skilled talent, and material/intellectual resources. The effects are apparent through an increasing number of co-productions and the intervention of Indian dramatic talent and capital – along with aesthetics, narrative styles, and genre formats strongly motivated by Hindi cinema. While such influence has been

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long-standing, similar patterns of media globalization and direct cooperation in recent years has made access to shared markets both an objective and reality. An early precedent was Khamosh Pani (2003, director Sabiha Sumar), scripted by Indian filmmaker Paromita Vohra and starring Hindi film actors Kirron Kher and Shilpa Shukla, which earned cross-border and international acclaim (Ramnath, 2016) and involved “precious skill transfers from foreign crews and casts to inexperienced media workers on location” (Ahmad, 2016, p. 349). Such collaborations have translated into viable avenues of mutual profit and demand, supported by a burgeoning multiplex culture in both countries and a consumer-directed media environment. Notable Pakistani releases Khuda Ke Liye (2007, director Shoaib Mansoor), and Bol (2011, director Shoaib Mansoor) were distributed by Eros Entertainment in India, while dramatic talent in both productions reflect the freshly cosmopolitan ambience of new Urdu cinema. However, as Ahmad acknowledges, it is not only corporate sponsorship motivating this process; the role of individual agents in fostering cross-border cultural transactions remains critical, much as it has since the decades of the Progressive movement. Veteran actor Naseeruddin Shah, an abiding advocate of parallel and experimental cinema in India, has lent both credibility and expertise to a reviving filmmaking tradition in Pakistan. His roles in Khuda Ke Liye and Zinda Bhaag (2013, directors Meenu Gaur & Farjad Nabi) helped the films achieve global recognition while contributing top-caliber production values, professionalism, and digital formatting to these joint ventures, even hosting a weeklong acting workshop for Zinda Bhaag’s otherwise novice actors (Ahmad, 2016). The film also benefited from state-of-the-art color grading and sound synchronization in Mumbai “to produce a truly South Asian collaboration” (Ahmad, 2016, p. 349) that reflects the united global trajectory of both industries today. The impact of globalization has been far from unilateral. Khude Ke Liye and Bol served as critical exposure vehicles for Fawad and Mahira Khan in India, while new Urdu cinema more widely has attracted attention to a host of lesser known and supporting actors. Performers who have made their presence felt across the border include Adnan Sami, Javed Sheikh, Saba Qamar, Veena Malik, and Humaima Malick (Ramnath, 2016). However, unlike the three stars under discussion, these performers have mainly played supporting roles in intermittent, multi-cast productions. The only exception is Adnan Sami, who has worked behind the scenes as a long-term music producer and performer (like A.R. Rahman, he has helped bring South Asian music traditions to global audiences with considerable prestige). The ongoing convergence of corporate business strategy and talent resources evident in new Urdu cinema has thereby created circumstances conducive to more sustainable crossover stardom. By sponsoring novice talent and unconventional projects aimed at niche audiences, Eros’ distribution of the above films reflects a classic de-risking approach, which involves minimal cost expenditure while proliferating sources of revenue and potential markets. Multi-platform media franchising and a growing home entertainment market, including new spaces of digital consumption, have only enhanced this outcome.

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Likewise, corporatization presupposes higher brand integration than ever before, stemming from both foreign and local investment. For example, Disney first entered the Indian entertainment market with a 32% stake in the local company UTV Motion Pictures, a move that made all of its commercial properties and brands available in India (TNN, 2008). This is in addition to producing original content; nonetheless, the focus on family oriented films and youth entertainment supports Disney’s overall brand synthesis. UTV/Disney’s assured brand equity and global distribution has made their content accessible in a range of markets, including Pakistan, and it is relevant that their film Khoobsurat featured crossover star Fawad Khan in his first leading Hindi film role. This is an optimum example of how convergence supports the localization of transnational brand empires; in this case, fulfilling commercial objectives to expand the Pakistani sector along with a growing cultural appetite for crossover talent and media in India. Brand empires are also evident in entertainment affiliates with large parent industries, such as the Reliance Group’s multiple holdings not only in cinema but also in other major industries from manufacturing, energy, textiles, and financial services to telecommunications. This type of horizontal integration increases platforms for consumption and enables diffuse points of brand engagement; for example, using Reliance’s high-speed mobile service network to stream brand-owned content on their video app, BIGFLIX (Reliance Entertainment, 2017). Controlling a property’s development from production to exhibition also makes a unified brand experience easier and more cost effective than ever, considering again, for example, that Reliance runs its own 40-acre production studio, home entertainment franchise, and India’s largest theatre chain, Big Cinemas.1 Due to vertical integration and a prodigious investment strategy, Reliance is now a world-class brand presence from India and Pakistan to the UK, and like UTV/Disney, possesses its own unique brand capital that facilitates the mobility of crossover content across linked venues, products, and markets. The ramifications of corporate convergence are especially visible in the growing intersection of film, television, and music that further capitalizes on prestige brand attachments. Ancillary franchising has been a key component in the globalization of Pakistani media through shared circuits of promotion and distribution. It has also enabled individual performers to exploit a common industrial scaffold, permitting the interpenetration Ahmad has already alluded to, including a distributed labor and resource economy in which film technicians, facilities, and technology are used to produce a host of ancillary media content (Ahmad, 2016). As a result, convergence can be witnessed at levels of finance, text/narrative, and production, in which cinema is co-implicated with everything from advertisements to music videos and television programming (Ahmad, 2016). The shared ownership, sites of production and resemblance among these formats can again be ascribed to a reciprocal trend of media privatization in India and Pakistan, in which corporate consolidation and propagating outlets generate a globally interchangeable media landscape.

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As Ahmad (2016) observes, Pakistan’s satellite boom since the early 1990s catalyzed media franchising, with broadcast firms like Geo and ARY entering film production and distribution while in India global and domestic-origin film corporations dominate a fully integrated, televisual media spectrum. Global behemoth News Corp hosts the Star network that combines transnational programming with original television and film-based content, while franchises like MTV specialize in brand acculturation, customizing content for South Asian viewers (Butcher, 2003). Film corporations have also ventured into television production that depends in large part on the aggregate power of Hindi cinema as a cultural form (Ganti, 2012). The fluidity of media sensibilities in India and Pakistan, as Ahmad (2016, p. 354) argues, “can be comprehended through the spread of television, since it is equally traceable to the influence of Hollywood and Bollywood films and songs that screen daily on any number of satellite channels.” The role of television in supporting crossover stardom has been instrumental since the 1980’s; however, the exaggerated rate of contemporary brand and media integration has created altogether novel conditions – along with audience demand. An ideal example is Indian media network Zee Entertainment’s recent satellite venture Zindagi TV, a broadcast platform devoted to the syndication of Pakistani serials and content from the Middle East (Entertainment Desk, 2014). The channel’s groundbreaking success advanced the exposure of Pakistani media artifacts and talent in India, validating the crossover appeal of stars like Mahira and Fawad Khan, whose commended performances in Humsafar and Zindagi Gulzar Hai caused both serials to air in top-rated slots on Zindagi TV (Entertainment Desk, 2014). The unprecedented esteem of these shows presaged both stars’ entry into the Hindi film industry, pointing to an evolving system of talent development that depends heavily on a star’s projected capacity to transcend media franchises (and of course, markets). This includes music, with the role of outlets like MTV Pakistan and Coke Studio sustaining a pop culture continuum that blurs the division between talent categories and formats. The multifarious credentials of all three crossover stars under discussion is a case in point; from Zafar and Fawad Khan’s backgrounds in music, television and film to Mahira Khan’s sojourn from MTV personality to television and film actor. As a result, the convergence of ancillary media in creating a new route for the influx of crossover talent cannot be overlooked. Besides these facets of corporate convergence, consumer-driven convergence has also intervened in the emergence of crossover stars. The migratory habits of new media users in pursuing, selecting, and redistributing content, creating fanbased knowledge hierarchies and discourses, illustrates Jenkins’ (2006) notion of collective intelligence in the digital age. Operating within and beyond corporatesponsored platforms, products, and marketing, the pop cosmopolitanism of these consumers has influenced the exposure and reception of Pakistani crossover stars in India. The re-posting of original TV broadcasts, interviews, and related weblinks has promoted the rapid circulation of cross-border content that reflects the timespace compression of globalization, evading the border sensitive import

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restrictions of traditional media. These new settings for consumption assume greater agency and interactivity, allowing fans to engage in intensive consumption practices while contributing their own cultural narratives on identity. For example, fans streaming episodes of Humsafar or Zindagi Gular Hai on Netflix may be driven to seek additional content, biographies, and related media concerning their favorite star – and on Pakistani culture more widely. Commenting on Zindagi Gulzar Hai, one member of the media-streaming site shares: So glad to see this Pakistani drama/serial is available for all to discover and watch. I’ve seen a couple of Pakistani dramas before (Humsafar, half of Sadqay Tumhare, Bin Roye, part of Dil Banjara) but this one is my absolute favorite for a number of reasons … Sanam Saeed as Kashaf is the standout for me, but I also loved Ayesha Omer (Sara) and Manisha Pasha (Sidra) … The show covers weighty topics like access to higher education, husband-and-wife relationships, and the place of women in Pakistani society, and a lot of episodes have some serious discussions taking place … I live in America and am not Pakistani, but was still able to relate to the themes in the serial … All in all, I highly recommend this drama and I hope you enjoy watching it.2 This fan displays hallmark characteristics of the new digital consumer/pop cosmopolitan. While confessing that they are not Pakistani, this viewer had come across Pakistani serials before while browsing that eventually developed into a persistent curiosity about Pakistani media artifacts and culture, causing them to actively seek out the serial under discussion. Their interest prompted them to gather additional information on related serials featuring their favorite star, in this case Sanam Saeed, and to conduct research on supporting actors whose performances they liked. While it is unclear exactly how “intensive” this fan’s consumption of Pakistani media is, their familiarity and accuracy with specific drama titles and cast names reveals that they are at least receptive to a more exhaustive fan experience. Most importantly, their interest led them to consider aspects of Pakistani society and identity through the serial, satisfying and advancing an open-minded viewpoint towards global cultures. Rather than feeling alienated by the serial’s foreign context and locally specific themes, the fan found the series “relatable” and encouraged other viewers to have a similar interaction by engaging with Pakistani programs like this one. The fan is careful to avoid preconceived notions about Pakistan, while revealing how media exposure can provoke meaningful deliberation and greater cultural literacy; regarding the issues covered in the show, they state: I would not take these as representative of all of Pakistani society (just as any American TV show wouldn’t represent all of American society) but unlike most Pakistani dramas, it is at least willing to probe a bit below the surface and make its viewers question how things are.3

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As a result, consumers have more resources and opportunities for potential encounters that challenge dominant discourses – a process assisted by the topdown convergence of corporate media agents. Without Netflix’s extensive library of global media content, this fan might not have encountered Pakistani media in the first place. Both official and sub-official flows of content online also help close the gap between public and private culture, extending already existing forms of media sharing across the border, much of which has been historically illicit. Despite vested corporate interests in media franchising and the co-optation of consumer participation, active media use has enabled a more complete erosion of cultural, political, and geographic borders on the subcontinent. While these effects are constrained by factors of unequal access and distribution, which is heavily skewed towards the urban middle class in India and Pakistan (Ilvarasan, 2013), the reality of digital convergence in shaping consumer media ecologies is significant. Scholars like Adrian Athique (2008) have previously explored how media piracy, from traditional analog formats like VCR to DVD and digital filesharing, have played an integral role in the globalization of Hindi film, opening up crucial overseas distribution markets; as he argues, “it is doubtful if the Indian film would have anything like the global presence it now has without such operations” (p. 705). Digital media has escalated this global circulation of content to new levels; thanks to advertisement-based platforms like YouTube, many companies and media distributors load content for direct access on such key interface websites. Channels like ARY Digital (a subsidiary of the satellite broadcast network) have around 1,782,000 subscribers on YouTube, uploading hundreds of shows from classic and contemporary Pakistani television that are easily accessible to Urdu and Hindi-speaking viewers around the globe.4 This variegated consumer landscape allows users to experience disparate media content through both fan-produced outlets as well as commercial sources. Users who do not have access to Netflix, for example, can easily view content posted by their digital peers, such as Soho Khan’s eclectic channel that ranges from classic Hindi films and Star Wars fan videos to the entire episode cycle of Humsafar.5 The ability of ordinary consumers to select, archive, and manipulate media through grassroots production cannot be underestimated as a powerful force of lateral distribution, a reality aided by the new affordances of digital architecture. Search algorithms, for instance, make locating targeted content efficient and instantaneous regardless of when or how it is posted. Bottom-up convergence also allows fans to participate in a collective interpretation process on the relevance of individual stars and their careers, often providing contradictory accounts to industry-generated publicity. It likewise supports the formation of discrete fan communities or interest groups organized around the niche attractions of a particular star, or of specific media genres. This kind of activity has bestowed Pakistani crossover stars with a certain cult appeal in India, especially for female fans and television drama enthusiasts. The initial success of Humsafar and Zindagi Gulzar Hai had propelled Mahira and Fawad

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Khan to stardom in India, with Fawad in particular attracting a dedicated and predominantly female fan community online. Forums like “Fawad Khan Fever,” “FawadAK-Fanatic,” and “FawadKhanFan” indicate the ingenious peer-to-peer cooperation of media-savvy fans in establishing and disputing the star’s celebrity discourse, while their proactive curiosity, along with those of other Pakistani TV connoisseurs, have helped popularize everything from Pakistani comedy to food, fashion and colloquial Urdu (Verma, 2014). The overwhelming popularity of the drama-centric channel Zindagi TV is likewise evident in its ubiquitous social media presence and fan following, which as of 2014 had over 90,000 followers on Twitter and nearly three million Facebook fans in India (Verma, 2014). However, in the wake of the 2016 import ban and drastic adjustments to Zindagi’s programming, which now focuses on Korean TV serials and East Asian content, these numbers have dropped significantly. As of July 2017, the channel had only around 28,000 followers on Twitter, signaling a startling loss in community following and demand.6

Crossover stardom and the diasporic dividend If political economy is the main structural force driving new crossover stardom, then the role of a vast Indo-Pak diaspora must also be considered in creating a cultural environment amenable to sustained contact and exchange. As already noted, the Hindi film industry has refashioned itself in the global era to attract a millions strong Indian-origin population. Scholars like Thussu (2013) have also noted how this constituency exerts powerful social and economic pressure transnationally; however, rather than looking at the top-down influence of the diaspora as a political category, my interest here is in exploring the people to people engagement – i.e. the lived reality – of diasporic contact in transnational settings that has made the blurring of national borders a psychological reality. This theme is explored in films like Total Siyapaa, which is discussed in more detail in Chapter 4; however, I would like to provide an overview of these changes below to better apprehend the cultural forces at play in setting the stage for crossover media. The nature of diasporic migration has witnessed dramatic vacillations in the postcolonial period that overlap in interesting ways. The earliest migrants were indentured laborers under colonial empire who were dispatched to locations like Fiji, Guyana, Trinidad, and East as well as South Africa (Brown, 2006) following the demise of slavery. Many of these migrants journeyed a second time from these provinces in the vacuum of British decolonization, which saw the emergence of local governments that (like India and Pakistan) adopted ethnic-based nationalisms. This period also witnessed the first significant mass-scale, voluntary migration from the subcontinent to the UK, accounting for the large population that resides there today. This number has grown exponentially from 0.23% in 1961 to over 3% of the general population in the twenty-first century (Brown, 2006). These numbers have also swelled globally with a tertiary wave of skilled migration in the last half of the twentieth century which has witnessed

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movement to destinations like the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia (Brown, 2006). These patterns of migration in the postcolonial period reflect national disparities in class and socio-economic privilege that are also stratified along religious lines. Judith Brown (2006) notes how Pakistani migration has lagged significantly behind that of Indians in the UK, while Pakistani migrants tend to possess less material and cultural capital upon arrival than their Indian peers. This belatedness has generated significant differences in education, employment, social integration, and household size that are nonetheless evening out over succeeding generations (Brown, 2006). Such trends have also affected the geographic clustering of communities in areas of settlement, which overwhelmingly privilege urban locales and frequently coalesce in specific neighborhoods. In the UK, for example, Pakistanis have historically settled in Manchester and Oxford, while Indians transformed the borough of Queens in New York in the 1970s (Brown, 2006). In addition, some trajectories of migration impact national communities much more dramatically than others, as is the case with Pakistani migration to the Middle East. Here the nature and duration of migration (mainly laboring class and temporary) differs substantially from the predominantly white-collar migration of Indians to the US, currently the preferred destination for the majority of Indian nationals (Brown, 2006; Shukla, 2013). In addition, there is compelling evidence that diasporic communities reproduce sectarian nationalisms (Brown, 2006; Jaffrelot and Therwath, 2011; Mohammad-Arif, 2011). The growing presence of organizations with direct ties to political nationalist parties, such as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and Jama’at-i Islami (JI), has increased substantially over the past two decades among middle- and upper-class communities in the West (Mohammad-Arif, 2011). Such research demonstrates Appadurai’s (1996) contention that ethnoscapes rooted in the nation indeed crisscross other types of economic, social, and cultural flows in globalization. Regardless of these patterns, the potential for lived contact between Indians and Pakistanis in the diaspora remains very high, particularly in geographically favorable areas. The US continues to be the country with the highest level of integration both between communities and within the general population. As Brown (2006, p. 118) notes: a common national identity beyond ethnicity and rooted in shared political values was powerfully reinforced in schools … Moreover, South Asians who were admitted to America … shared many of the same qualities and aspirations as did white Americans: they were mainly urban and middle class in background, well-educated and cosmopolitan in outlook. This experience has been less universal in the UK, which still struggles with wider racial prejudice and uneven social conditions between Indians and Pakistanis. As Samad (2013) notes, the Pakistani community in particular is counted as a distinct demographic with social welfare dependency that has led both to

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more public representation as well as internal organization, unlike the community’s more diffuse, integrated profile in the US. Generational differences also play an important role, with second and third generation populations facing advanced rates of accommodation across the board. Overall, the shared experience of migrants in terms of language, material resources, job/educational prospects, and zones for mutual interaction do create opportunities for meaningful cooperation. For example, the role of grocery, clothing, and other ethnic merchandise vendors often bring Indians and Pakistanis in close proximity, a reality that has escalated with pan-diaspora recreational spaces like the multiplex theater (Cain, 2017). Many theaters, which include major and subsidiary franchises in the United States, screen both Hindi and Urdu films as well as regional content from across India that attract sub-groups throughout the diaspora (Cain, 2017). Often these theaters are connected to restaurants, shopping centers, and other socialized spaces. These formations connect what Myria Georgiou and Roger Silverstone (2007, p. 47) call “mobile foreign subjects,” who “challenge the purity of the nation and suburban privatized closure and instead participate in the construction of diverse, creative and sometimes anarchic urban cultures” (p. 41). The plurality inherent to diasporic identities and their modes of communication further contribute to a nebulous distinction between self and other in global spaces. The overlapping transnational, geo-cultural and dominant media flows that diaspora audiences relate with certainly help to destabilize community divisions within the third space dynamic of cultural production. A shared recognition of the migrant experience, conflicts, and similarities in adaptation, and the mediating role of host cultures all locate the diaspora at the crossroads of global hybridity that are likewise coded in the emerging, global imaginary of popular Hindi cinema. Rajinder Dudrah (2012) has explored the narrative and social ontology of diasporic politics in these new narratives. The border-crossing actualized by the Pakistani crossover star is staged by the political, sexual, and geographic boundary movement of “Bollywood” and the “haptic urban ethnoscapes” it facilitates (Dudrah, 2012, p. 63). His analysis of films like Jhoom Barabar Jhoom (2007, director Shaad Ali) position the diasporic urban locale as a site where South Asian identities meld and transcend. The two lead characters in the film – one Indian, the other Pakistani – first meet at a train station, where each attempt to outdo the other with outlandish, apocryphal tales of personal success. The resonance with a competing global thrust between both nations (symbolized by the train and a universally networked diaspora) are transparent, while the couple’s eventual union enacts a recognizable cycle of male Indian patronage over the Muslim woman. However, as Dudrah’s analysis highlights, the film energizes a postmodern subjectivity that cleverly overcomes national/religious barriers. Part of this sensibility stems from the use of fantasy and both characters’ ability to imagine themselves in alternate place and timescapes that refuse concrete political actualities. The use of Southall, West London in particular as a space of Indo-Pak kinship is brought to life with a visceral evocation of “South Asian ‘Punjabi-ness’” (p. 31) that emphasizes fusion and social correspondence rather than disparity. Dudrah (p. 41) describes Southall as “an intermix more of an emerging desi-Britain … rather than an

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easy exchange between the homeland and new place of settlement.” The film captures the eclecticism of these simultaneous displacements and conjunctions, where the diasporic space is “neither sanitized nor shied away from” (p. 41) in its layered, polysemic narrative. This cosmopolitan reframing of identity on screen is realistically engaged off screen by the imbrication of Hindi cinema in daily social contact, as Dudrah further considers in his metaphor of the haptic. Here the materiality of audiovisual experience functions as a type of skin “through which the bodies of audiences touch, feel, and rub up against a number of possible scripts (of nation, of gender and sexuality, communalism, diaspora, etc.) … and brought into intimate contact with other skins, with other bodies in the cultural geographies” (p. 76) of diasporic space. In other words, cinema infiltrates everyday sociality with the potential to radically reconfigure the psychological, social, and sexual coordinates of personal identity. In the process, “these sounds and images … help create a diasporic imaginary, one that enables diasporic subjects to imagine and represent themselves further against rigid configurations of race and nation and ensuing identities” (p. 66). In such a terrain, the “migrant” crossover star is a logical extension of the diasporic experience and its aspirations towards upward mobility, cultural acceptance, and the struggle to define identity in a multi-polar world. Collectively, the above industrial, narrative, and social changes have diversified available representations and discourses on Islam, Muslims, Pakistan, and crossborder relations. Globalization has elicited new industrial and cultural conditions for alternative media content, instigating the arrival of genuine crossover stars with transnational appeal. This new group of Pakistani stars play a crucial role, both on screen and off, in shifting the cultural dialogue around national and religious identity. How these stars – and their media texts and audiences – negotiate identity politics is the subject of the following three chapters.

Notes 1 Information retrieved December 15, 2017 from Reliance Big Entertainment website. www.rbe.co.in/index.html. 2 Information retrieved January 10, 2018 from “Zindagi Gulzar Hai: Member Reviews,” Netflix,www.netflix.com/search?q=zindagi%20gulzar%20hai&jbv=80087078&jbp=0&jbr=0. 3 Ibid. 4 Information retrieved January 11, 2018 from ARY Digital, “Home,” YouTube, www. youtube.com/channel/UC4JCksJF76g_MdzPVBJoC3Q/videos. 5 Information retrieved January 11, 2018 from Soho Khan, “Home,” YouTube, www. youtube.com/user/saawariyasns/featured. 6 Information retrieved July 25, 2017 from @Zindagi, “ZindagiTV,” Twitter, at https:// twitter.com/Zindagi.

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Ramnath, N. (2016, September 27). A brief history of Pakistan-India cultural ties. Dawn, Retrieved July 15, 2017 from https://images.dawn.com/news/1176320/a-brief-his tory-of-pakistan-india-cultural-ties. Reliance Entertainment. (2017, April 25). Reliance entertainment launches BIGFLIX, India’s first multi-language HD movie platform, globally. RelianceEntertainment.net. Retrieved December 15, 2017 from www.relianceentertainment.net/pdf/Media_Release_Bigflix.pdf. Safi, M. (2016, October 9). Indian films banned, Pakistani actors ejected – how the Kashmir crisis is hitting Bollywood. The Guardian, Retrieved September 15, 2017 from www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/09/indian-films-banned-pakistani-actorsejected-how-the-kashmir-crisis-is-hitting-bollywood. Samad, Y. (2013). The Pakistani diaspora: USA and UK. In J. Chatterji & D. Washbrook (Eds.), Routledge handbook of the South Asian diaspora (pp. 295–305). London and New York: Routledge. Shukla, S. (2013). South Asian migration in the United States: Diasporic and national formations. In J. Chatterji & D. Washbrook (Eds.), Routledge handbook of the South Asian diaspora (pp. 166–179). London and New York: Routledge. Srinivas, L. (2010). Nonsense as sense-making: Negotiating globalization in Bombay cinema. In M. Curtin & H. Shah (Eds.), Reinventing global communication: Indian and Chinese media beyond borders (pp. 17–35). Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Subramanian, A. (2012, April 04). Blockbuster Barons. In R. Saran (Ed.),Business Today (pp. 120–124). Noida: Living Media India Limited. Talbot, I. (2000). India and Pakistan: Inventing the nation. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Thussu, D. (2013). Communicating India’s soft power: Buddha to Bollywood. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. TNN. (2008, February 19). Walt Disney to more than double UTV stake to 32%. The Economic Times. Retrieved December 15, 2017 from http://economictimes.indiatimes. com/industry/media/entertainment/walt-disney-to-more-than-double-utv-stake-to32/articleshow/2793218.cms. Verma, S. (2014, November 23). The Pakistani invasion. The Telegraph India, Retrieved July 15, 2017 from www.telegraphindia.com/1141123/jsp/7days/19076201.jsp. Viswanath, G. (2002). Saffronizing the silver screen: The right-winged nineties film. In J. Jain & S. Rai (Eds.), Films and feminism: Essays in Indian cinema (pp. 86–93). Jaipur and New Delhi: Rawat Publications. Wolpert, S. (2010). India and Pakistan: Continued conflict or cooperation? Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

4 ASPIRATIONAL AFFECTS AND BOUNDARY CROSSING Ali Zafar, the Pakistani “Prince of Pop”

This chapter examines the various dynamic forces shaping the representation and reception of India’s first legitimate Pakistani crossover star, Ali Zafar. An independent musician, singer, and actor, Zafar embodies a new global imaginary for Pakistan that contradicts its heavily ghettoized depiction as a “terrorist state” in both Indian and international media. His parallel work in film and music, which blurs sonic and visual boundaries between India, Pakistan, and the West, creates an expanded cultural ontology grounded in consumer capitalism and mediated by processes of globalization. Collectively, his media texts, celebrity persona, and audience reception problematize questions of identity and belonging on multiple levels. Zafar’s ongoing corpus of Hindi films since his debut in 2010 with the political parody Tere Bin Laden is an optimal example of these processes at work. While Tere Bin Laden directly confronts homogenizing stereotypes regarding Islamic and Pakistani identity, and its association with terrorist violence, his roles in films like Mere Brother Ki Dulhan Total Siyapaa, and London, Paris, New York similarly evoke the politics of border crossing – whether geographical, religious, or cultural – by emphasizing transnational identity in overcoming individual difference. While Tere Bin Laden is a critically engaged satire that uses irony to position the viewer politically and historically in relation to the text in a way that inhibits identity boundaries, the other three films belong to romance and comedy genres that use the affective potency of love to negotiate narrative identification. The impact of globalization as a mediating force can be identified in the narrative ingenuity of all three films, which break melodramatic storytelling conventions in popular Hindi cinema. This departure reveals how a global political economy can open spaces to explore alternative subjectivities and modes of representation through experimental filmmaking. In addition, all three films frame Zafar as a globalized object of consumer desire; projecting consumer capitalism as an alternative framework for accessing identity in a de-territorialized cultural landscape,

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where religious, national, and social boundaries are often fluid and ambiguous. Popular cinema and music, therefore, become an important locus for consuming identity organized around shared values of hedonism and “love” that can dispel bounded identity categories. This is further evident in Zafar’s music, which not only combines Western, Indian, and Pakistani genre traditions, but also foregrounds individual desire and references to global popular culture in a way that defies singular notions of identity. Through a close textual reading of the above films and two of Zafar’s recent musical albums, Masty and Jhoom as well as his soundtrack compositions for cinema, I aim to decode the nuanced intersection between cultural politics and representational slippage that defines Zafar’s persona as a crossover celebrity in a wider transnational context. Although Zafar has participated in multiple film projects beyond the four already mentioned, these films have been chosen for analysis because they exemplify the boundary-crossing features previously outlined. In addition, Zafar’s on-screen and off-screen personas converge in these narratives in interesting ways. All three films feature Zafar in leading roles that draw reflexively on his off-screen persona as a “crossover” Pakistani star striving to gain legitimacy in the Hindi film industry. The overlap between Zafar’s persona in media texts and the articulation of his celebrity identity in popular journalism is further examined through press interviews and commentaries about the star. This primary source material both positions Zafar as a figure of vicarious identification and fantasy while extending his accessibility as an eroticized object of desire already prevalent in his films. Rather than occurring in spite of the star’s marked national and religious identity, however, I argue that this process is an outcome of transnational shifts in the political economy of culture in India and their consequent impact on celebrity. Unlike previous Pakistani crossover stars, Zafar’s alleged “difference” is frequently framed as the source of his commercial appeal and is consciously inscribed through celebrity marketing techniques heavily influenced by global industries, including Hollywood. As a result, Zafar’s celebrity discourse both evoke his national and religious origins as much as it emphasizes his integration into global standards of celebrity embodied by the Hindi film industry. This contradictory representation serves to preserve the star’s inimitable brand “mystique” even as it exposes his celebrity persona to identity transcendence through his artistic performance in cinema and music on the one hand, and operations of fantasy and desire through global commodity culture on the other.

Narrative novelty in the crossover text Zafar’s crossover stardom is already situated within a legacy of trans-industry collaboration between India and Pakistan through ancillary media products like television and music. However, the increasingly multi-platform and vertically integrated structure of the Hindi film industry as a global enterprise (Ganti, 2012) has enhanced the transition from television to cinema as an outcome of corporate franchising, exemplifying the various aspects of convergence culture (Jenkins, 2006). This culture can

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be seen at work in the use of Pakistani television serials and music to launch Zafar into the industry, and in the continuity between these various outlets in generating celebrity discourse that elicit shared points of cultural reception between audiences across borders. Convergence is thereby a powerful force in renegotiating religious and national identities through popular culture. Tere Bin Laden, Mere Brother Ki Dulhan (hereafter abbreviated as MBKD), Total Siyapaa, and London, Paris, New York (hereafter abbreviated as LPNY), epitomize the above-described processes at work. Each is a product of shifting economies of production and distribution characterizing the contemporary Hindi film industry that has significant consequences for narrative structure and thematic content. These infrastructural changes have had an impact on all aspects of political economy, as studios now host multiple production projects ranging from big-budget blockbusters to more modestly scaled films (Ganti, 2012) featuring socially nuanced stories, alternative subject matter, and narrative virtuosity. Compounded by the growth of multiplexes, which are rapidly overtaking the traditional single-screen theater in India, and the prevalence of global distribution networks, these shifts have opened new markets for niche cinema that fits an increasingly fragmented media audience (Ganti, 2012). They are also part of what Tejaswini Ganti (2012, p. 17) calls the “gentrification” of Hindi cinema into a globally recognizable brand driven by cultural capital and commercial sophistication. The production framework for each film illuminates these new domains of funding, generating, and distributing media products in the Hindi film industry. All were produced by multi-franchise corporations with assets in affiliate entertainment and consumer industries – Walkwater Media in the case of Tere Bin Laden, Yash Raj Films for MBKD, Reliance Entertainment for Total Siyapaa, and Fox Star Studios, a division of global film studio twentieth Century Fox, for LPNY. The company profiles of these vertically integrated studios demonstrate how public limited companies with diversified investment portfolios have become the norm in Indian entertainment. The material outcome of these industrial changes is a widening array of choices in media content and style for both filmmakers and consumers. As I have argued previously elsewhere, the impact of the industry’s globalizing imperatives can be witnessed in the newly cosmopolitan portrait of contemporary Hindi cinema that encompasses changes in narrative structure, thematic impetus and intended audience address (Khdair, 2013). Increasingly, the emergence of genre-based storytelling accommodates the cineliterate consumer by incorporating global storytelling trends with local influences in a bid to reach both regional and transnational audiences (Khdair, 2013). All four films reflect this movement towards genre-based storytelling that displaces the blockbuster “masala” film as the dominant narrative mode in popular Hindi cinema. In each case, the sophistication of genre categories and the targeting of discrete audiences – such as the young, urban middle class in LPNY or the diasporic family in Total Siyapaa – reveals how films are no longer destined primarily for the box office; rather, it is expected that they will have an extended distribution cycle in a global media convergence environment. More widely, these transitions

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reflect how Hindi cinema has become a cutting-edge medium sensitive to the diverse political, artistic, and social inclinations of a growing audience unfettered by geographic or temporal boundaries. The departure from conventional thematic and narrative choices is indicated by each text’s break with melodramatic narrative, which has remained an omnibus form of storytelling in Hindi cinema since the post-independence period (Dwyer & Patel, 2002). With an emphasis on collective modes of address and social moralism, melodrama was compatible with the nation-building imperatives of popular cinema while acting as a universalized narrative format accessible to a culturally, socially, and linguistically diffuse viewing public (Raghavendra, 2008). Due to its unique narrative contract and appeal to symbolic authority, melodrama conveys a transcendent, connotative message to the viewer that supports moral or emotional edification rather than critical reception (Prasad, 1998). Similarly, frontal devices of representation, such as iconic framing, invest the text with a one-way transmission of thematic content that refract interpretive agency from the spectator onto the act of signification itself (Prasad, 1998). Tere Bin Laden, Total Siyapaa, and MBKD each use ironic devices to interrupt symbolic framing, while LPNY employs classical linear, point-of-view narrative to restore the spectator’s evaluative control. The storytelling novelty of these films collectively serve to interrupt homogenizing portrayals of Muslim identity historically prevalent in popular cinema, and their discursive linking to the Pakistan state. Muslim masculinity has been historically marginalized in the narrative universe of Hindi film, either through the invisibility or failure of the Muslim male as a legitimate subject in the “modern” space of the Indian nation – as in the Muslim social – or through outright demonization in the more recent terrorist genre. If the Muslim social and courtesan genres represent Muslim womanhood through a victim/temptress binary, the Muslim male in these narratives is debauched and symbolically castrated by his inability to satisfy the social responsibilities of marriage, the result of either flagrant abuse or character debasement. In the courtesan film, Muslim men are directly represented as lascivious and pleasure seeking in a traditional Orientalist vein, part of a wider and contradictory portrait of Muslim men as simultaneously effete (hampered by an addiction to leisure, sumptuous wealth, and aesthetic indulgence) and hyper-masculine. Hindu nationalist discourse in particular associates Islam with sensual excess, believed to be the result of a carnivorous diet that exaggerates lust and mean temperedness (Talbot, 2000). In Chadha and Kavoori’s (2008) three consecutive phases of Muslim “Othering” on screen, demonization has been the most consistent in recent representations. This last phase coincides with depictions that systematically associate Muslims with terrorist violence and Pakistan-based insurgency against India. In this framework, Muslims are either condemned as morally polarized villains or required to demonstrate their patriotism to the nation through extraordinary acts of loyalty and sacrifice. Hirji (2008) notes that they are most frequently depicted as terrorists, sexual predators, or social pariahs, while Khan (2009) similarly contends that Muslims are posed as threats to the national and cultural fabric of

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India. Echoing the research of scholars like Saadia Toor (2011) and Junaid Rana (2011), she argues that the Muslim male body in particular is framed as hypersexualized, dangerous, and a peril to “the secular democratic goals of the Indian state” (Khan, 2009, p. 95). This idea coincides with discourses regarding the “violent” disposition of Muslim men that has its origins in early European culture, a concept that has been revived since colonial times through the present. This representation can be traced as early as the Crusades, when Islam was viewed as the principle threat to Christian Europe’s political sovereignty, and was later attributed to Ottoman rule (Kumar, 2012). The Muslim as ruthless conqueror and despot is a myth that has been perpetuated in Western imperial discourse and is further recycled in Hindutva ideology through its historical representation of Mughal reign as a vicious epoch of rape, pillage, and forced religious conversion (Talbot, 2000). Hindutva militancy, evident in martial arts camps, artillery and guerilla combat training, and body building cults for both men and women, responds powerfully to discourses of this violent, threatening Muslim “Other” (Talbot, 2000). The rigorous physical and morale-building instruction offered in these factions or shakas is an effort to fortify the Hindu nation against an imagined Muslim enemy – namely Muslim civic culture, the Pakistan state, and its political sympathizers. This regimen includes preparing women for self-defense against the perceived sexual aggression of Muslim men amid phantasmagoric fears of a renewed territorial, cultural, and spiritual invasion by Pakistan (Menon, 2010). As discussed previously, representations of the Muslim/Pakistani “Other” as a threat to India’s national and cultural integrity have been part of the foundational logic of the Indian state since Partition, while the representation of Muslims as terrorists has escalated in proportion to political radicalization in mainstream culture. These ideas have been reinforced by post-9/11 political discourse, which has systematically and administratively criminalized the Muslim male on a global scale. The punitive apparatuses of state surveillance, detention, and punishment are one facet of a larger structure of racial discrimination against the Muslim “Other” (Kumar, 2012; Bhattacharya, 2008). These policies and the rhetoric of national security have turned the Muslim male body into a ready-made signifier for Islam on the one hand, and terrorist violence on the other. As a result, the Muslim male body (accompanied in the West by racialized features like skin tone, facial hair, and ethnic dress) condenses ideas about Islam as a monolithic, irrational/regressive, and inherently violent construct (Kumar 2012). This epistemology has informed and legitimated US-led foreign policy in much of the world over the past decade, representing a continuation with both pre-colonial and colonial apprehensions of Islam (Kumar, 2012).

Tere Bin Laden A Hindi-language film produced within India featuring Pakistani actors, settings, and protagonists, Tere Bin Laden is an ideal example of the new material and

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narrative permutations of popular cinema deriving from global forces. Overtly addressing the topic of Islam and radical terrorism, the film offers a satirical treatment of global geopolitics that implicates US imperialism, neoliberal expansion, and state corruption in the construction of “terrorism,” as embodied in the film by a heavily caricatured Osama bin Laden. In the film’s plot, an aspiring Pakistani journalist named Ali, portrayed by Zafar, dreams of immigrating to the US in a post-9/11 world only to realize that his nationality, race, and religion cause him to be criminalized as a terrorist threat. Frustrated and cash-strapped after being forcibly deported from the US, he devises a lucrative scheme to produce and sell a bogus video of Osama bin Laden that inadvertently escalates the war in Afghanistan, launches a global financial crisis, and initiates a high-profile CIA manhunt. In the end, Ali single-handedly settles the War on Terror by producing a reconciliatory video of Osama bin Laden that changes the course of political history, while transforming him into a global celebrity and US media icon. Tere Bin Laden defies characteristic elements of melodrama, and their consequences for spectatorship, by adopting satire as its primary narrative mode. The use of satire and irony in the film has pivotal consequences; it challenges the expression of clearly defined subject positions by distancing the viewer critically from the text, precluding psychological investment in the story while opening the film’s content to reflexive critique. In mocking its own devices, the film operates as a deliberate farce that denies emotional or ideological closure for the spectator, exaggerating characters and plot events while obstructing processes of vicarious identification. Thus, Ali’s ambitions to live the “American dream” are portrayed with as much derision as the elusive Osama bin Laden (represented in the fictional video by a sexually naive chicken farmer) or the capriciousness and self-serving interests of US foreign policy embodied by the media and CIA in the film. This facetiousness is reinforced at the film’s conclusion when CIA agent Ted Wood makes a pact with Ali to conceal the counterfeit origins of the Osama video to justify US military aggression in the Middle East and South Asia, terminating US occupation while transforming Ali into a rich and respected journalist. This sense of irony and absurdity, present throughout the film, compels viewers to confront the text’s provocative engagement with historical and political themes rather than celebrate the protagonist’s achievement of his goals. These effects speak to the inherently political objectives of satire. Northrop Frye (1962) characterizes satire as analytic, by “breaking up the lumber of stereotypes, fossilized beliefs, superstitious terrors, crank theories, pedantic dogmatisms, oppressive fashions, and all other things that impede the free movement of society” (p. 20). This effect is apparent in Tere Bin Laden’s reflexive deconstruction of cultural politics, most notably discourses of “terrorism,” and the various stereotypes, myths, and institutional powers sustaining it. Its critical orientation to history and politics – the film even begins with a proximate reference to historical time and place, by locating the events on September 14, 2001 at the Jinnah Airport in Karachi – foregrounds conditional relationships between culture and power that invite viewers to acknowledge their

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own role as discerning spectators, leaving the text open-ended to multiple heterogeneous, and potentially dissonant, readings. To begin with, Tere Bin Laden eviscerates India from its narrative imaginary, circumventing a binary understanding of India–Pakistan relations revolving around conflict. More importantly, the film uses parody to mock the global Islamophobic sentiments of a post-9/11 cultural environment, deconstructing its discourses and modes of signification. By making a spectacle of the global security state and other founding axioms of the War on Terror, the narrative exposes otherwise normalized inequities surrounding the cultural representation of Muslims. In turning this act of signification onto itself, the text also links representation and discourse to the social realities of discrimination, abuse, and punishment that Muslims affected by Islamophobic policy confront. The narrative illustrates this insidious arc in a sequence immediately before the title credits, when Ali is aboard a commercial airliner bound for the US The only Pakistani passenger on the plane, he takes out a camcorder and practices in earnest his best impression of a news journalist, unwittingly repeating the words “Muslim,” “bomb,” and “hijack” too many times in the same sentence, making his fellow passengers uncomfortable. When Ali – well-groomed, wearing a Jimi Hendrix T-shirt, and sporting a handsome smile – later leaves his seat to return a butter knife to the flight attendant, she envisions him accosting her and begins to scream. This event serves as a transition into the film’s introductory song that shows Ali being questioned, imprisoned, beaten, and deported back from the US, all against a comic backdrop featuring Bollywoodized music and dance choreography. The sequence playfully lampoons stereotypical conflations of the Muslim male body with terrorist violence that is enhanced by Ali’s oblivion to the punitive apparatuses of power denying his social legitimacy. The juxtaposition of Ali’s cosmopolitan mien and blithe optimism with the animosity and hyperbolic social/physical violence he encounters illustrates what James MacDowell (2016) calls dramatic irony in film, where the spectator’s mordant awareness contradicts the fictional character’s own ignorance. Ali’s ambitions for professional success, romantic fulfillment, and transnational mobility, and their arbitrary negation due to prejudicial policies of the War on Terror, reveals the absurdity of these forces in violating the individual civic rights they purportedly aim to protect. The proceedings evoke Rana’s (2011, p. 52) idea of “racial panic” in the wake of 9/11, which criminalizes the Muslim male through associations with terrorism and illicit migration that justifies institutional regimes of “social control” (p. 54) and moral policing. Ali is incriminated in the above scene because he fits a broadly racialized portrait of Muslim identity that holds the potential for terrorist violence irrespective of geographical or ethnic variation. Thus, Ali holds a sign that says “South Asian” as his mug shot is processed and scrutinized by US agents that suggest the mutual interchangeability of Islam, regional origin, and terrorism. This absurdity is heightened by Ali’s equally outrageous attempts to re-enter the US under a variety of guises, even impersonating a cowboy, the most “American” of myths. Presented in tableaux, the film maintains a jocular tone that inscribes political commentary at the surface of the text. When Ali’s other

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humorous veneers fail, the shady immigration agent asks if he can fire an AK-47, suggesting that he pose as a mujahideen fighter so he can surrender at an American camp and become an instant “guest” of the US. The scene manages to connect historical veracities – notably the Reagan administration’s militarization of South Asia in the 1980s during its “proxy” war with the Soviet Union – with contemporary policy to lay bare a hilarious paradox; that the only way a Pakistani Muslim can achieve emigration to the West is by becoming its principal object of fear. The use of both communicative and situational irony (the visa agent’s sarcastic choice of the word “guest,” and the bizarre circumstances Ali finds himself in) (MacDowell, 2016) reveals how anti-terrorist discourse constitutes the very forces it denounces, while pointing to an officially blighted legacy of US military intervention in the bugbear of global Islamic extremism. Unfortunately, Ali’s education and legitimate qualifications as a journalist, along with his enthusiasm for American social values, are rendered meaningless by the discourses of racial threat he is unable to escape. The double standards of this ethnic burden are brought to life by Ali’s rejection even in Pakistan, where he attempts to find honest work as a native reporter. However, only American/European journalists are permitted at the political press conference which he tries in vain to cover, a maneuver that depicts the sycophancy of the Pakistan state in its cooperation with the US campaign on terror. Rather than producing serious news, Ali is obligated to cover a cock crower’s contest instead, where he first encounters the bin Laden doppelgänger who will become the star of his viral underground videos. However, Ali’s manipulation of the “racial and moral panic” (Rana, 2011, p. 52) of Islamic terrorism to his own benefit complicate distinctions between cause and effect, perpetrator and victim, and global and national identities promoted by a civilizational understanding of conflict in the War on Terror. This is powerfully demonstrated by the way Ali uses consumer technologies and entrepreneurship to create his own regime of cultural production that skews the geopolitical odds in his favor, supporting the film’s overall use of satire to unravel operations of cultural discourse, signification, and institutional practice. Nothing here is taken for granted; by the end of the film, the viewer is asked to question the legitimacy of every political fact, cultural belief, and administrative apparatus in the global War on Terror. The contrived nature of the Osama video – complete with makeshift props, slapstick bloopers, and sloppy Arabic translation – is corroborated by the action film aesthetics of “Operation Kickass,” the CIA’s $100 million plan to kill Osama that runs identical to a Hollywood trailer. In each the postmodern theatrics of power are highlighted, where media representation and consumption are simultaneously the means and objective of administrative policy. According to the film, Osama bin Laden is merely a chimeric pawn in an expensive imperial-capitalist game, albeit one with harmful consequences that even ordinary consumers like Ali can “play.” Herein lies the key to black humor’s ironic consciousness – a sense of futility and an underlying drive towards self-destruction symbolized by the comic backfiring of carefully coordinated authorities. Beneath the narrative’s comic implosion of political realism lurks the disturbing possibility that widely held “truths” and their

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enforcers may not, in fact, be what they appear at all (let alone serve our interests). Throughout the film’s 97-minute duration national loyalties, civil orthodoxies, and other hegemonic grand narratives are quite literally turned inside out.

MBKD Not unlike Tere Bin Laden, MBKD also uses parody and reflexivity to deconstruct ideas of national identity – here negotiated through the body of its female protagonist. It also features Zafar in a supporting rather than a starring role; however, its validation of cosmopolitanism and framing of consumerism as “culture” tap strongly into Zafar’s screen cultivation. We are introduced to his character, Luv, first, while London is immediately set up as a symbolic backdrop for negotiating hybrid cultural identities. The opening affirms the thrust of the narrative action – which, although located in India, apprises newly transnational and unfixed qualifiers of imaginative belonging. The film begins with overhead cityscape shots of London at night; its skyline of vivacity and sleek modernity juxtaposed with an old, wistful Hindi film tune, an aural cue that transitions to a television set playing the original source film in an upscale apartment. The camera pans to reveal a litter-strewn room and a young Desi couple caught in heated altercation. As the romantic film song continues to play, the woman hollers at her boyfriend, berating him for his perpetual tardiness and irresponsibility. She complains that she became a “proper Indian girl” for him, which the man, Luv (Zafar), disputes. Stating that he does not want a “traditional girl” but someone “charming and wild,” he accuses her of being what he calls a “BBCD,” or a “British Born Confused Desi.” The scene ends with the woman, Piyali (Tara D’Souza), storming out of the apartment after a mutual agreement to terminate their relationship. The scene instantly sets the tone of the film in several ways; firstly, through its reflexive use of media consumption as a conduit for cultural identification, and secondly through its overriding theme of cultural uncertainty. The nostalgia of the vintage text as “homeland,” tradition, and certitude is undercut by the couple’s disharmony that here serve to disrupt the nation and any assured sense of belonging. In addition, the opening situates Zafar/Luv as an evasively marked diasporic male that allows the projection of Indian or Pakistani identity in his primary signification as a global, London-residing migrant, activating a “third space” consciousness from the outset. How to negotiate cultural disconnect thus becomes the purpose of the film, but it is clear that culture is an open-ended appeal to a mutual experience of identity displacement, an intention that seems justified by Zafar’s casting as a crossover star. Through self-conscious references to both Hindi film and global popular culture, the narrative positions consumerism as the entry point for negotiating cultural aptitude in a de-territorialized world. For instance, we soon discover that Luv’s younger brother Kush (Imran Khan) is an assistant director in Bollywood, who happens to be attending a film premiere when his brother calls him suddenly with a special request – to find him a decent Indian girl to marry within a few weeks’ time. As part of the

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playful and deliberate parodying of Hindi film melodrama the film repeatedly elicits, it is appropriate that Luv turns to his brother as filmmaker to accomplish the whimsical task of conjuring up an ideal bride, one worthy of cinematic fabrication and fantasy. Thereby the film both cleverly satirizes – while ultimately reifying – the formative influence of Hindi cinema in negotiating common imaginaries and desires for the global diasporic community. On another plane, the absurdity of the request also reveals that Luv is just as confused about his cultural belonging as the girl he broke up with, moving from life as a single bachelor in London to coveting an arranged marriage with a “traditional” girl from India. The ambiguousness of how to characterize a “traditional” Indian girl becomes the focal point of the film, with much of the narrative’s comedy arising from Kush’s daunting task of sorting through the varieties of Indian womanhood he encounters during his search. However, an optimal prototype is communicated in the film’s stylized opening song sequence and credits. Beginning in an airport, it shows Kush waiting in the lobby for the perfect dulhan (bride) to suddenly appear from one of the many international airline gates, indicating on the one hand that an authentic “Indian” identity can potentially be located anywhere in the globe, while also confounding it on the other through the incongruous stream of attractive women he considers over the course of the sequence, including variably a stewardess, a demure-looking bride, a police officer, and a college student. Ironically, the only real condition, the song goes, is that she have “Delhi in her heart, and London in her head,” using a corporeal metaphor to reify the value of cultural amalgamation, while further legitimizing Indian identity on the basis of emotional and psychological attachment rather than geographical location. It is ultimately Katrina Kaif as Dimple Dixit, the protagonist of the film, who fits these over-determined qualifications. The implausibility of such standards for perfection is made excessively redundant as Kush initiates his nationwide search for the bride. Encountering women of different appearances and economic backgrounds, none of which fit the Cinderella-like criteria, his friend humorously informs him that “this is the real middle class, Mr. Bollywood.” Significantly, the prospective women are as comically distorted and unfeasible as the exalted model bride. This ordeal is followed by a telephone call from a distinguished Foreign Minister seeking a match for his daughter; as fate would have it, Dimple and Kush are already acquainted from previous experience. That the film aims to speak for a youth market is evident in references to typical college life and familiar “rite of passage” themes, albeit within parameters of avowed behavior that become re-coded on Dimple’s body. Kush first becomes aware of Dimple during a term break, when she “crashes” a segregated all-male bus, passes out a case of beer, and invites the eager boys to an impromptu rock concert at Agra Fort. She is shown smoking and playing guitar as she leads the concert, amassing an impressive horde of likeminded students that concludes with her arrest, to which she responds irreverently. Like the lyrics of her song, “oh my free spirited heart, my bohemian soul” the film portrays her rebellious nature as sensuous without being genuinely

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radical. Sexual indiscretion is out of the question, as becomes apparent when one of the boys in the group tries to molest her. Dimple punches the offender and gives him a thorough verbal lashing; emphatically insisting that “just because we’re friends, doesn’t mean I’ll sleep with you!” Considering her father’s important international political role, we soon learn that Dimple was born and raised in London. Her innocuous disconnect with patriarchal culture is directly alluded to in the film, where her sense of youthful fun is mistaken for sexual availability. However, limits of cultural infidelity are clearly demarcated, again centering on chastity as a warranty of cultural authenticity. With trademark boldness, she asks Kush bluntly if he thinks that she’s a “bitch, tart or slut,” and inquires whether or not she should change her emancipated outlook. In a discerning moment, Kush encourages her to stay as she is, noting that her extreme personality is part of her inimitable charm, and contains purity despite all the surrounding “filth.” This salient phrase represents a delicate attempt to reconcile Dimple’s Westernization, embodied by her fierce individuality, with prevailing notions of female sexual purity. However, this effort inadequately conceals the scene’s inherent contradictions, especially the fetishized framing of Dimple’s sexuality and the sources of desire and identification it elicits among young, urbanized Indian audiences, positioning the protagonist’s hybridity as a contentious intersection between opposing cultural inclinations. The sublimation of Dimple’s unbounded lifestyle is also pronounced in the MTV–inspired visuals of her rock music performance, the commodification of which speaks to the burgeoning role of media and consumer culture in shaping self-perception and expression among global youth. It is this discrepancy between feudal cultural traditions and participatory youth culture that ultimately challenges the text to achieve narrative compensation. Considering Dimple’s earlier behavior, it is much to Kush’s surprise that she actively seeks an arranged marriage when they meet again later in the film, claiming that while she was London-born, her heart is actually Indian, and she views this new opportunity as yet another “adventure.” With technology again serving as a mediating factor, she meets Luv via Skype, where she controls the terms of their interaction by prompting him with a series of straightforward questions that rely on popular media and consumer preference as a barometer of cultural aptitude in a globalized Indian society. She asks him to choose between Shakira or Beyoncé, Shah Rukh Khan or Aamir Khan, and whether he prefers pants to jeans, rice with beans, or pizza. This consumerist logic is acknowledged in the marriage process itself, where she confesses to wanting a man that is “rich, a so-called package” that can be easily located and downloaded from a website like Bharatmatrimony.com. A traditional family practice with pre-modern origins is thereby converted into an online shopping transaction. In this context, cultural identity itself becomes a consumable commodity, as do individuals and their bodies. Here the postmodern constitution of individual identities, enabled by global media exchange, becomes the instigating prerequisite for cultural participation and fluency. Predictably, it is Kush and Dimple who actually fall in love, and it is their surfeit scheming to reunite Luv with his former girlfriend that allows them to

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realize happiness without disrupting the honor of their respective families, who are objects of ridicule and fully out of touch with the “SMS generation,” as Kush’s father phrases it. As a result, the film deftly weaves the diaspora back into the national imaginary, with the Hindi film industry (represented by Kush) as intercessor. If Luv represents the fully globalized diasporic subject, while Kush is the link between this subject and the now (postmodern) nation, Dimple is both prize and compromise, signifying a newly cosmopolitan “India” that combines an ideal calibration of East/West synchronicity. Appropriately, it is Dimple who proposes running away; at one point even disguising and kidnapping Kush, only to be scolded by him for defying their family obligations. While there is a pronounced respect for family tradition, its narrative treatment is ultimately relegated to the background, as the couple’s sexual chemistry and psychological intimacy occupy center stage in the dramatic action. In addition, it is Dimple’s provocations that ultimately drive the narrative forward, exhorting Kush to challenge the ritual formalities that have kept them apart, although these obstacles are superficial and weakly developed to begin with. This diverted emphasis is supported by the film’s overall lack of narrative density, where foregrounded aesthetics and musical interludes command the majority of textual attention. There is an effort, however, at narrative compromise – the couple can only officially be united with parental consent, culminating in an opulent, grandiose wedding sequence as a final tribute to melodramatic signification.

Total Siyappa If Tere Bin Laden uses satire to critically destabilize national and religious stereotyping, while MBKD playfully deconstructs global consumer culture, Total Siyappa similarly experiments with narrative and thematic content to explore the complex social politics of cross-border romance between a Hindu/Indian woman and Muslim/Pakistani man. Grounded firmly in the comedy genre, the film sheds the sentimental disposition of melodrama in its representation of the North Indian extended family – or what Prasad has previously called the “feudal family romance” (Prasad, 1998, p. 30). While the family has traditionally been central to a melodramatic storytelling arrangement, operating as a metaphor for collective social moralism and by extension the nation state, Total Siyapaa disrupts these symbolizing processes by offering a satire of filial domestic space. Its story revolves around the romance of Asha (Yami Gautam) and Aman (portrayed by Zafar) and the couple’s efforts to achieve family approval of their forthcoming marriage, a plot with strong similarities to the iconic film Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (abbreviated as DDLJ). However, unlike DDLJ which acts as a narrative foil through direct references and thematic parallels, Total Siyapaa does not repatriate the diasporic Indian into the figurative space of the family-as-nation. Instead, it offers an uneasy displacement of national and religious boundaries throughout its plot, particularly at the story’s resolution, when the two lovers are united on London Bridge in a symbolic (and open-ended) gesture of territorial, religious,

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and cultural intersection. Most importantly, the approving gaze of the extended family is deflected by an exclusive focus on the couple’s private conjugality in the closing scenes of the film. This is enhanced by the film’s use of parody and comedy to reverse hallmark depictions of the idealized North Indian family that is evinced by the film’s comedy-of-errors structure. Aman becomes embroiled in an assortment of awkward confrontations and unintended accidents while meeting Asha’s family for the first time, creating circumstantial tensions that constitute the film’s humor. However, the source of this friction is not so much Aman’s Pakistani identity as the dysfunctional character of Asha’s family. The “chaos” suggested by the film’s title is evoked when Aman becomes witness to the family’s abundant problems – the mother suffers from depression, Asha’s married sister, separated from her husband, is an incorrigible flirt, and the grandfather is a war fanatic who carries loaded guns around the house, to enumerate only a few examples. This blatant parody of the traditional feudal family disrupts its association with cultural integrity and Indian nationhood, a representation strengthened by the “NRI” genre spanning the late 1990s and early 2000s, of which DDLJ is often cited as a defining example (Mankekar, 2015). By consciously subverting this representation, Total Siyapaa interrogates authoritative paradigms of nation and culture, one of many ways in which identity is “unsettled,” to use Mankekar’s (2015) meaning, throughout the film’s narrative. Total Siyapaa’s implementation of parody and comedy also collapses links between the Muslim male body and its association with terrorism, violence, and cultural pollution. The absurdity of these connotations is brought to light at the beginning of the film, when Aman is conversing on a cell phone with Asha on a busy London street, having just arrived from Pakistan to meet her family. In self-conscious recognition of his alleged guilt as a Muslim/Pakistani, Aman jokes about being a terrorist threat, stating that he has brought back a “small bomb” as a gift for Asha’s family. Unfortunately, a nearby police officer overhears these words and temporarily detains Aman in jail. Like Ali in Tere Bin Laden, forces Aman cannot control victimize and divest him of agency in the unfolding narrative. However, unlike the former, Aman’s plight is depicted sympathetically, and his subjective perspective dominates the film’s narrative vantage. Aman is a constant target rather than perpetrator of “threat” in the film, being exposed to indignity and personal violation on behalf of both the state and Asha’s family; he is frequently insulted by Asha’s mother and is nearly shot (albeit accidentally) by her grandfather. This is compounded by the family’s stubborn bigotry against Pakistan, particularly the violent hatred of Asha’s brother Manav, who repeatedly conspires to sabotage their Pakistani neighbors. Urbane and rational, Aman stands in sharp (and flattering) relief against the bewildering, neurotic milieu of Asha’s household. While intended to be farcical, this inverse process of “Othering” implicates the North Indian/Hindu family as socially destabilizing rather than the Muslim/Pakistani male in a surprising reversal of representational norms. That London was chosen as the backdrop here for inter-communal conflict is equally significant – as mentioned previously, the South Asian diaspora in the

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UK has historically been marked by notable divides in class, geographic spatialization, education, and other markers of cultural integration (Brown, 2006). These circumstances have placed the Muslim male in an especially precarious position, such that between 1990 and 2005 the number of Muslim prisoners had risen sixfold, bringing the total to more than 4,000: they are mostly of Pakistani background and make up 70 per cent of prisoners from ethnic minorities. By contrast, few people from India or Bangladesh are in prison in the UK. (Brown, 2006, p. 92) This factual reality makes the film’s representational politics especially radical, while speaking to the film’s deliberate attempts to reverse entrenched patterns of discrimination and inequality among the UK diaspora. The above statistics reveal not only the punitive weight of the global police state in the wake of 9/11, but also long-term processes of “ghettoizing” Muslim minority and migration historically. As a result, the material and cultural discrepancies among Indians and Pakistanis in the UK is a reflection of larger conditions defining bilateral relations, including the relative geopolitical advantage of India (in terms of wealth, military power, international prestige) versus Pakistan’s global status as an allegedly failed, insolvent state. This interlocking set of forces is carefully apprised in the film from the outset, by linking Aman as Pakistani migrant with criminality on the one hand, while pointing to the relative (if illusory) privilege of the extended Indian family on the other. Both representations, of course, get reversed throughout the course of the film, revealing the aspiring mobility of the Pakistani migrant as well as the internal pressures/contradictions of the diasporic joint family. Thus, resolving Indo-Pak conflict through the prism of a London-based diaspora points to both the enabling and constraining aspects of transnationality – in which legacies of disparity are still written but likewise offer the potential to be overcome. This conclusion is supported by the film’s evocation of generational differences that situate each character differentially to ideas of nation/diaspora. Asha’s grandfather remains tethered to a violent national past that raises the ghost of Partition and its consequent bilateral rancor; alluded to by his shell-shock mentality and involuntary reflex towards wary self-defense, as he insists there will be “more wars” with Pakistan. As a result, he remains – if only mentally – fully within the precincts of the traditional nation state and its hostile understanding of cross-border limits that can only be expressed in geographic terms. In contrast, Asha’s parents and even her older sister reflect the misgivings of patriarchal nationalism in a diasporic context, where migration, success, and the upholding of traditional culture are deflated by the family’s multiple failings. Manav, meanwhile, signals the inter-community tensions highlighted above, where the transnational is an extension of competing nationalisms and real material/social discrepancies between both diasporic groups, channeled humorously in a conflict over parking spaces that questions allegorically who has the right and privileges to “belong.” It is up to Asha (whose name means

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hope) and Aman (peace) to pave a new road through the emancipatory networks of a consciously post-national, globalized identity. Although national and religious differences clearly motivate the film’s dramatic conflict, romantic desire and love are posed as a unifying force capable of surpassing the couple’s adverse circumstances. After the two have a heated argument at the film’s climax, during which each stereotypes the other for being conventionally “Indian” and “Pakistani,” Asha’s mother encourages her to run after Aman, culminating in their final meeting on the London Bridge. In the intimate moments that follow the couple affirm their transcendent love for one another, privileging emotional reality over the superficial categories of identity that ostensibly separate them. “I’m Pakistani, you’re Indian, but nobody’s perfect,” Aman and Asha agree as the two embrace passionately against the London skyline, followed by the film’s closing song which reiterates the power of the couple’s affection: “I know that we cannot live apart, why fight over trivial things? You’re the one I want to die for.” Unlike comparable films like Jhoom Barabar Jhoom, the narrative permits a final audacious retreat from the stipulations of gendered nationalism by allowing a Pakistani male to possess the Hindu/Indian body through mutual passion and consent; fully unchaining sexual politics from the nation while validating the cosmopolitan individualism of Zafar’s celebrity image.

LPNY The film’s compelling message, and the theme of love’s universal power, also resonates with the representation of romance in LPNY. There is an implication in both films that transnational spaces neutralize conflicts over identity and belonging, where terrains of possibility, whether romantic or professional, can be played out. Like the above films, LPNY also takes a narrative detour from melodrama, using global storytelling codes to depict the romance saga of Nikhil (Zafar) and Lalitha (Aditi Rao Hydari), two middle class NRIs who meet and fall in love over the course of eight years in three different cities. With parallels to the classic drama An Affair to Remember (1957, director Leo McCary), the film situates itself within a genre legacy of Hollywood romance that is supported by the film’s formal design. Unlike the “masala” structure of many Hindi films, with peripheral narrative attractions ranging from comedy and action sequences to lavish musical numbers, LPNY features a linear plot arc and a singular thematic emphasis, focusing solely on the romantic vicissitudes of the couple over time. The psychological credibility of the protagonists enacts realist modes of narrative engagement that strip away the iconic and symbolic proportions normally encountered in the grandiose framing of melodramatic stories. As a result, the characters and their romance are wholly pedestrian, shaped by identifiable conflicts, choices, and emotions that are relatable and believable in scope. This realist orientation is most strongly registered in the narrative’s preoccupation with the formation of an individual “self” unmoored from family, nation

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and even culture, as the couples’ global peregrinations indicate. This coming-ofage momentum is communicated at the film’s outset, when Lalitha and Nikhil both experience independence from their families and homes for the first time in London. The exuberance of being in control of one’s own actions is conveyed in the characters’ sense of adventure and celebration of mobility. Nikhil makes this clear when he shouts “Freedom!” loudly and with exhilaration as the two cross London Bridge, encouraging Lalitha to embrace the spontaneous thrill of the moment. In the process, the characters experiment with their identities and sexuality, with the three cities representing consecutive phases in the evolution of their relationship. If both are apprehensive about their feelings when they meet in London, they boldly indulge their sexual attraction in Paris, engaging in a one-night stand, while finally arriving at a committed relationship during their rendezvous in New York. The narrative’s emphasis on individual choice, agency, and the self-fashioning of one’s destiny is brought to fruition when Lalitha advises Nikhil to “be true to yourself,” an adage which Nikhil adopts in his professional and personal life by pursuing goals which are meaningful to him rather than others. This message also comes full circle at the film’s conclusion, when both parties mutually agree that they are older, wiser, and self-assured. Having consolidated their own identities, they are now mature enough to spend the rest of their lives together. If the preceding films pass through national, religious and cultural conflicts surrounding subjectivity, the characters’ self-fulfilling arc in LPNY fully obliterates external or artificial constraints on identity, casting subjectivity as internally motivated. The characters’ unhampered movement through time and space, which is in sync with rhythms of global capital and the circulation of bodies, products, and labor across a transnational spectrum, enables this. The protagonists’ educational and career goals – Nikhil’s as a filmmaker, and Lalitha’s as a political scientist – place them on a shared trajectory towards aspirational desire that tap into a larger global imaginary contoured by the affects and logics of consumer capital. In this case, romantic desire and access to global circuits of capital eliminate all imaginable boundaries – geographical, national, cultural, or religious. It is no coincidence that the couple’s romance in LPNY becomes actualized in the world’s most acclaimed centers of global capital, or that the concept “be true to yourself” resonates so evocatively with the individualized ethics and maxims of self-made success intrinsic to consumer capitalism. The invocation of consumer capitalism as an affective terrain is mobilized in all three narratives. In Tere Bin Laden, Ali embodies values of neoliberal capitalism; not only is he a self-made media entrepreneur, but he is also saturated with global commercial brands and symbols, from Coca-Cola to Hollywood icon Marilyn Monroe. In addition, he is positioned as an object of consumer desire that unhinges the Muslim male body from terrorist violence. This is evident in the film’s final song sequence, I Love Amreeka; however, instead of Ali being victimized and expelled from the US like the outset of the story, the song uses erotic spectacle to frame Ali/Zafar as a global brand commodity through its slick visuals and

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MTV–inspired editing that signify his incorporation into global structures of consumer capitalism. That Ali has become a type of brand novelty is realized in the closing scenes of the film, as he is chased by a horde of US journalists reminiscent of media paparazzi. In a self-conscious moment of storytelling, Ali gazes directly into the camera at the viewer, smiles, and dons a pair of stylish sunglasses before breaking out into a run, a large crowd at his heels. In this instant the “reel” and “real” collapse, as the character Ali and Zafar’s actual celebrity persona seem to converge. The character’s route towards celebrity stardom has a metaphorical coincidence with Zafar’s own ambitions for global fame and cultural exposure made possible by his integration in the popular Hindi film industry. This transparent overlapping of Zafar’s real-life celebrity attributes is consistent across all four films. In each text he embodies charisma, sex appeal, creative intelligence, and self-determination, qualities that are inextricably linked to the affective potency of consumer capitalism and the goods associated with it. Mankekar (2015) notes how erotic desire is entwined with commodity desire, illuminating how transnational consumer capitalism can structure identification within the affects of pleasure and aspirational longing generated by consumer products. This collapse between consumption and erotic desire is always at the surface of Zafar’s representation in these films, as consuming the film text is interchangeable with consuming the star as a lifestyle emblem associated with brand endorsements on the one hand, and as an idealized object of identification/desire on the other. This process is illustrated in Total Siyapaa when Asha’s sister, a devoted fan of Aman and his music, makes flirtatious advances that leads to a scene in which the two of them dance in an abandoned cafeteria to one of his songs – which is of course written and sung by Zafar himself, thereby underscoring both Zafar/Aman’s erotic desirability. In a comparable scene from LPNY a bachelorette party demands that Nikhil show them some “Bollywood moves” in a full-scale song sequence that again reveals Zafar performing his own star image for the intra and extra-diegetic film audience, to the background score of his own-authored music. Ajay Gehlawat (2015) has previously conjectured that the shift in male representations on screen in Hindi cinema calibrates an orientation towards neoliberal agendas in the new millennium, where the Bollywood star now endorses consumer capitalist codes “of individual enterprise, sexual decadence and sculpted physiques” (p. 7). While his argument is certainly central to readings of the new masculine image, particularly his use of metrosexuality as metaphor, my interest lies in interrogating how the consumer spectacle of the male body – besides disassociating it with aggression – posits a cosmopolitan body readily detachable from the nation state. Rather than the “beefcake” image arduously cultivated by stars like Hrithik Roshan, Salman Khan, and John Abraham, and which remains linked to muscular nationalism (Banerjee, 2017), the distinct cosmopolitanism of stars like Zafar displays an erotic appeal that generates affects of global consumer capitalism (sounds, sensations, and emotions) rather than the one-dimensional flatness of the “manscaped” (Gehlawat, 2015, p. 90) body as object. Here the

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picturization of Ali’s songs – which balance the star’s attraction against other global referents – and the centrality of his voice as authorship disrupt the sublimation of the hyper-masculine body as nation, allowing him to inhabit multiple place and timescapes that suit his border-crossing persona. Zafar’s reputation as a maverick composer and songwriter notable for his “hybrid” sound supports this image of organic globalism, along with a striking individualism that casts the star as a self-made personality in the vein of traditional capitalist optimism. These twin features, discussed further below, help to disassociate the star from a rooted sense of national identity in the popular imagination.

Melodic miscegenation: hybridity and aspiration in Zafar’s music Through common imaginaries of aspirational desire, and united by shared conditions and outlets of global consumption, popular cinema and music increasingly operate as alternate sites of identity negotiation that have the potential to dispel religious, national, and cultural boundaries. This ambience manifests in the hybridity of Zafar’s music, which often combine classical South Asian genres, like ghazals and qawwali, with Arabic rhythms and R&B, hip hop, rock, and folk pop variations. Zafar’s distinctive fusion sound, and his adaptability as an artist, broaches larger transnational frames of reference that make his work accessible to a globally diffuse audience, while embodying intersecting cultural forces. In addition, rather than being the product of entrenched national industries, Zafar attributes his stardom to an enterprising spirit and creative independence as an artist. Responsible for writing, producing, and recording his music albums as well as helming his own film company, the star routinely presents his celebrity as self-motivated, ingenious, and off-the-beaten path, themes that are similarly engaged by his music. Zafar’s songs frequently alternate between Hindi, Urdu, and English lyrics, while assimilating a range of instruments and sound patterns. His recently produced independent album, Jhoom, which released in 2011, features several tracks that span musical genres. The title track, which is also the name of the album, has two versions. The primary version is heavily inspired by a classical Indian rag melody; it has a long introduction, a cyclical arrangement and uses traditional tabla beats, but combines elements of contemporary pop music by modifying the sitar sound with an electric guitar. The second is an R&B mix that clearly draws from this American genre legacy, privileging vocal harmony over melody and being scored only with keyboard and synthesizers, while also incorporating English lyrics. Other songs from Zafar’s previous albums, such as Aasman and Sajania from the 2006 compilation Masty, also use strong components of rock and light pop that have a distinctly hip, global sound. These qualities also characterize Zafar’s compositions for films like LPNY whose songs span diverse genres from the slow piano ballad Voh Dekhnay Mein to the upbeat, techno club melody of Ting Rang. By combining global and native sources of influence, Zafar’s music transcends boundaries and points of cultural, national, and religious reference. In this sense, the hybrid pop culture artifact becomes a formative arbiter of identity. Not

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unlike Mankekar’s discussion of transnational media and affect, Natalie Sarrazin (2008) has previously explored the role of Hindi film music as a mode of transnational identity, discussing how recognizable aural and visual codes conveyed in film songs position emotional sentiment as a mediating force in negotiating cultural attachment and identity for Indians on a global scale. Song performance plays an important role, Sarrazin claims, in reimagining cultural values for an increasingly dispersed NRI and diaspora audience. The idea of “love” and the importance of having dil (heart), essential themes in popular Indian performance and musical traditions, are present in both Zafar’s films and his songs, suggesting that feeling is an important indicator of identity that can surpass or even eclipse geographical, religious, or national windows of identification. Consuming popular culture, and the aspirations and pleasures it produces, thereby becomes a means of consuming identity. This is accentuated in Zafar’s music through an emphasis on individual desire, whether that desire is romantic, spiritual, professional, or even commercial. While a song like Mere Haathon from Masty is intimately romantic, Sajania is a song about gaining money at any cost that invokes the acquisitive rationale of competitive capitalism. Borrowing from the tropes of a Hollywood action film, the music video for the song features Zafar and an attractive young woman outwitting one another in a high-stakes bank heist that glamorizes aggressive individualism through a reflexive inscription of global pop culture. The aspirational lifestyle values that Zafar represents as a celebrity are part of the neutralizing and translatable effects of global consumer capitalism driven by shared sentiments of desire, wealth, and individual destiny, themes that have increasingly common cultural value and transnational resonance. This notion of individual destiny is discernible not only in the above-mentioned films, but also is something Zafar uses to characterize his own journey from a struggling artist in the entertainment business to an accomplished musician and actor. In his album cover dedication for Masty, Zafar alludes to his wish to inspire others through his own dreams of success: It was the fulfillment of that dream that made me realize that we only dream what is real. Nothing exists that can be imagined and not achieved one day…If my music helps one single soul to accomplish his/her dream, it will be worth it1 The statement and its meaning is not only universally relatable, but is also an open invitation addressed to any ambitious individual that exemplifies capitalist principles of personal tenacity. The right to “dream” and the possibility of achievement is purportedly available to everyone – irrespective of faith, nationality, or gender. These values demonstrate what Pramod Nayar (2009) calls “meritocratic capitalism,” (41) where the exceptionalism/ordinariness of the star text interact to justify the star’s attainment of fame. In the case of Zafar, his unusual good looks, talent, and work ethic are vindicated by the promise that everyday consumers/fans can likewise follow his example.

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The crossover star text as “third space” Zafar’s status as a global crossover celebrity, and the negotiation of his national and religious identity, must be situated within the Hindi film industry’s continuing efforts at globalization. As mentioned previously, the industry has a long and visible history of religious integration dating back to the pre-Partition era. However, while many of the industry’s most successful creative contributors and stars were Muslim, their origins and affiliations with territory now located in Pakistan had to be discursively erased and masked under the guise of Indian (and inevitably Hindu-centric) identity constructions. This practice eventually abated and the religious orientation of stars became clearly publicized, as evident in the phenomenal box office dominance of the three great Khans in the 1990s through the present. However, a conformity to status quo representations of Muslims on screen (including the portrayal of predominantly Hindu characters) and strong associations with nationalism and secularism have characterized their celebrity identities (Malhotra & Alagh, 2004). While not entirely without conflict, a marked disavowal of specifically Muslim subjectivities served to eviscerate any ideological, political, or cultural ties with the state of Pakistan, particularly in the wake of a swelling tide of public Hindu nationalist sentiment that has continued to escalate since the turn of the millennium (Talbot, 2000). Any contradictions that emerge – such as references to ancestral origins in Pakistan – are assuaged by outright declarations of national pride. Both Dilip Kumar’s and SRK’s Pathan roots, for example, are not only relegated to a romanticized past (tapping into utopian visions of a pre-divided India), but also emphasize the role of choice as an index of rightful place. By choosing India, domestic and Indian Muslim stars perform mandated frames of loyalty that ensure fidelity to the state. For crossover stars, the luxury of belonging is not only structurally absent; the animosity of Indo-Pak relations also makes the integration of these celebrities in the national-cultural landscape an apparent oxymoron. Unlike previous crossover stars, Zafar’s Muslim and Pakistani background is not concealed in his off-screen celebrity persona. Openly hailed as a “crossover” star, his national and religious identity is not so much a liability as an asset to be capitalized on in his potential for global market appeal, a maneuver that echoes Hollywood’s similar endorsement of transnational stars in a talent recruiting and marketing campaign that expanded aggressively in the 1990s (DeAngelis, 2001). In light of Hindi cinema’s bid to penetrate the global market, including not only Pakistan but also Asia and the Middle East, promoting Zafar as a crossover star is commercially and ideologically strategic. This contingent emphasis on Zafar’s national and religious identity is perceptible in early discourse on his celebrity at the outset of the star’s Hindi film career. Multiple interviews highlight (albeit incorrectly) that he is “the first Pakistani actor to debut as a lead in a Bollywood film” (Taneja, 2010), while comparisons are made with other Pakistani artists who had transient and unsuccessful careers in India. The strategic distancing from Pakistan geographically and culturally that characterized the

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public personas of early actors like Salma Agha is notably absent, and Zafar is unambiguously identified as a crossover star in popular journalism. Zafar’s choice to enter the industry with a controversial film centering on identity politics only fueled the press coverage. In fact, he comments that he chose to work on Tere Bin Laden because he wanted to challenge wider stereotypes about Islam, terrorism, and ethnic identity more generally, citing his unfavorable experience as a visitor to the US as an example of Western cultural hegemony and prejudice (Prokerala.com, 2010). Stressing the sense of victimization and intolerance that many Muslims and religious minorities continue to experience in a post-9/11 world, Zafar expresses awareness that his sentiments resonate with potential viewers in India, Pakistan, and throughout the globe. Zafar has also been consistently articulate about the political dimensions of his crossover potential, viewing his work in the production of popular media texts as a platform for cultural diplomacy. In his July 2010 interview he remarks how “films and music can bridge the difference between the two [India and Pakistan]” (Press Trust of India, 2010). The objective of blurring boundaries, both actual and perceptual, is thereby central to Zafar’s artistic agenda and choice of film projects. Boundary-crossing notwithstanding, Zafar’s celebrity persona is mediated by his positioning as both foreign yet culturally proximate to India. As one writer puts it, “Ali Zafar is a rare breed. He is the complete package. Apart from singing … Ali Zafar has the looks, the style and the histrionic abilities to work in Bollywood” (Kamal, 2010) something which preceding crossover aspirants apparently lacked – while their distinctiveness as Pakistani remained firmly and exclusively marked. In contrast, the fluidity of Zafar’s persona and his placement between industries and borders (straddling national, cultural, and religious realms) is repeatedly underscored, denying the star a singular or rooted sense of identity. Zafar’s depiction as perpetually migratory in popular journalism collapses easily with the locative boundary transgressions found in his work. When asked how he balances business commitments between industries, Zafar demonstrates a willingness to inhabit both equally and simultaneously, suggesting a continuum of space between India/Pakistan when he replies, “I can always have two homes, one in India and one in Pakistan, can’t I?” (Bhattacharya, 2010). This sense of being in both places at once is reinforced by Zafar’s pledge to continue his creative work in the Hindi film industry while insisting “I’ll never cut ties with my country,” (Bhattacharya, 2010) describing various endeavors from advancing Pakistan’s domestic entertainment industry to supporting social welfare causes (Press Trust of India, 2010). His characterization fits the “third space” purchase of the migrant/ refugee/diasporic body within globalization, where the signifier of the nation gets emptied and overwritten in the void of living between real and imagined borders. This alternating and occasionally contradictory discourse of cultural sameness and difference operates to ensure Zafar’s crossover brand integrity. Referred to variably

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as “Pakistan’s Prince of Pop” (Press Trust of India, 2010) and “The Pakistani Lion” (Kohli, 2010), he is also compared to both historical and contemporary Indian celebrity figures, ranging from classical playback singer Kishore Kumar to presentday blockbuster icon Shah Rukh Khan (Kohli, 2010). This reciprocal network of cultural references permits a dual identification for Zafar’s audiences in both India and Pakistan, while further casting the Hindi film industry as a place where dreams – and raw talent – can be usefully actualized. If this depiction is tokenistic, it is also consistent with the industry’s expansionist approach in marketing celebrities on a global scale, including among diaspora audiences where similar processes of identification and desire can be activated. At the same time, Zafar’s integration in the Hindi film industry – as a global system of cultural production – is also clearly inscribed in his “packaging” to consumers by media press outlets and industry sources. The star’s transnational equity is ensured by his attachment to global commodity brands like MTV and Coca-Cola, while his status as a transnational icon is indicated by his naming as “sexiest man” by the trans-regional publication Eastern Eye, which was allegedly based on poll responses from audiences throughout Asia (Times of India, 2013). Again blurring the boundaries between India, Pakistan, and the West, Zafar’s persona takes on a global character that offers possibilities for identity transcendence in his role as a global commodity brand. If his national/religious “difference” for Indian consumers is configured as novelty, and his “sameness” a teleology of destiny in the Hindi film industry where artistic fulfillment is enabled through its pluralist legacy, the multiple points of identification and access to the star image are consolidated in the global commercialism of Hindi cinema and its universalizing logic of consumer culture motivated by vicarious fantasy and desire – terrains of “feeling” that are consonant with Zafar’s performance in films like Tere Bin Laden, Total Siyapaa, and LPNY and throughout his musical corpus. Zafar’s stardom paved the way for the entry of other Pakistani celebrities into the Hindi film fraternity, most notably Fawad Khan, whose versatile career profile mirrors Zafar’s own sojourn to fame. While Zafar’s early performance in drama serials was overshadowed by the success of his musical career in generating media hype across the border, the importance of both corporate and digital media convergence in his crossover success is visible. This new convergence context relies on the wide-ranging consumption habits of new media users across interconnected platforms, supported by the ability to download and stream assorted content on the same outlets and devices in real time. The lateral interaction these consumers have with multiple entertainment formats, from television to music, is a driving force in the emergence of “crossover” celebrity brands. Zafar, Mahira, and Fawad Khan’s existing popularity have been major factors in the success of their films with domestic audiences in Pakistan (PTI Karachi, 2014) while their reputations in television and music remain important reference points in the publicity surrounding their films.

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Reception and the crossover text/star The above discussion has considered how Ali Zafar’s representation in cinema and his parallel work in music problematize concrete conceptions of religious and national identity through material and cultural boundary crossings that are powerfully shaped by processes of globalization. These global dynamics help justify how a Pakistani star like Zafar can attain crossover fame within India that is supported by the new ways in which cultural products mediate identity in an increasingly de-territorial society. Using Mankekar’s framework for transnational public cultures and their role in negotiating subjectivity through regimes of affect and temporality, this analysis illustrates how media products can fragment homogenizing discourses on national, cultural, and religious belonging. By rendering the boundaries between these identity categories ambivalent, and by using affective registers of romance and aspirational desire as alternate axes of subjective identification, Zafar’s media products participate in a larger globalized imaginary structured by the logics of consumer capitalism. This newly global character upsets metonymical associations of Pakistani/Muslim identity, and particularly the Muslim male body, with terrorist violence, a representation that continues to be disseminated in both India and the West. The relative critical success of the four films discussed indicates their viability as novel media products with groundbreaking narratives and themes. Reviews of Tere Bin Laden for example, responded to its political relevance and unconventional subject matter that also attracted global attention, with one reviewer from The Guardian describing the film as “a cautionary tale about the perception and unintended consequences of American policy in South Asia” (von Tunzelmann, 2010) suggesting that it should be required viewing for the US government. Comments like these reveal the effectiveness of the film’s satire in engaging critical spectatorship through its political and historical content, even if this is inevitably modified and reinterpreted to meet the demands of commercial entertainment. For a low-budget film with a total production cost of only 6 crores, or approximately $500,000, the film earned nearly $950,000 globally, gaining at least 8 crores or $700,000 in India alone.2 Considering the film’s limited release – including its ban in key markets like the US and Pakistan – these numbers are significant, revealing that the film doubled its expenditure among target audiences in urban multiplexes throughout India, the UK, and Europe. Its partial ban reveals that the film alienated nationalist politics in the US and Pakistan through its caricatured depiction of both governments’ actions in the War on Terror; however, positive responses like the one cited above bespeak the success of its subversive content within the film’s niche market. Most importantly, the 2010 embargo on Tere Bin Laden predicts many of the conflicts surrounding the Uri attack ban, particularly the disjuncture between the ideoscapes/ethnoscapes of political institutions and the mediascapes/financescapes of global corporate capitalism that are discussed in subsequent chapters.

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Likewise, MBKD received mixed reviews that nonetheless recognized its fresh, self-reflexive outlook. Sukanya Verma (2011) characterizes the film as a “feel-good, melodrama-free, candy-floss rom-com” that highlights a narrative disjuncture with melodrama. Verma also observes the film’s “fanboyism,” a nod to its self-obsession with popular culture that inscribes postmodern modes of cultural belonging. Calling it “a Hrishikesh Mukherjee in a Yash Raj set up,” the author suggests the film’s genre orientation as a tenuous attempt to marry formulaic commercial appeal with a more original, middle of the road cinema. The film’s earnings confirm an overall successful verdict, remaining in the top 200 all-time grossers and totaling over $3 million overseas.3 Like Tere Bin Laden, Total Siyapaa and LPNY also achieved notable reception as modestly budgeted films with experimental dimensions in story, thematic content, and talent. While Total Siyaapa was considered a critical and commercial failure in India, it performed well overseas, earning $261,484 during its opening weekend (Mehta, 2014b). In addition, most reviews acknowledged its exceptional storyline despite an allegedly weak script and poor direction. One writer referred to the film as having a “lush and interesting premise” (Mehta, 2014b), while prominent reviewer and filmmaker Subhash K. Jha praised the film for being “an audacious comedy that dares to poke fun at a border issue,” noting how “Zafar and his screen-other have an excellent Indo-Pak moment towards the end when they taunt one another’s country’s politics” (Mehta, 2014a). Comments like these suggest that the film’s tepid reception by Indian audiences was likely due to the text’s unconventional creative choices rather than its bold message on Indo-Pak relations. Jha describes the film as “stylized” and “attentively staged” with “a distinctly ‘European’ flavor and fervor” (Mehta, 2014a) whose narrative humor (more suitable to art house cinema) may have routed its potential as a commercial box office contender. The film’s low-star cast, offbeat tenor, and formal dissonance would account for its favorable reception among global audiences in the UAE, UK, Canada, and the US – its four top-performing markets (Mehta, 2014a). LPNY faced similar circumstances, earning mixed reviews that expressed overall approbation for the film’s forward-thinking plot on less explored subjects like individuality, sexual awakening, and transnational mobility. Reviews avowed the film’s genre specificity and under-30 content appeal, with one commentator noting that “the characters and dialogues are real and unpretentious enough to lure the youth, whether it’s the slight reference to sex positions or the bodily chemistry of a lip kiss” (TNN, 2016). The film’s investment in Hollywood-style storytelling and its politics of aspirational desire were rewarded by admirable takings at the global box office, with the film earning over $500,000 worldwide.4 Domestically the film also fared decently, grossing around 8 crores or $700,000 in total.5 The earnings roster for each film emphasize the diminishing centrality of the domestic box office for Hindi cinema, as in each case global yields approached or exceeded national ticket sales. This burgeoning trend justifies the edgy and even politically dissenting content of each film under discussion – with Tere Bin Laden turning a profit in spite of its controversial release.

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The portrait of these texts’ popular reception reveals critical and commercial appreciation for the boundary-crossing philosophy of Zafar’s films, which interrogate characteristic frameworks of religious, national, and cultural belonging. In a rapidly globalizing media environment, casting a crossover star like Zafar is now considered a creative risk worth taking in the Hindi film industry, amid growing overseas audiences and diversified corporate stock portfolios. In this way studios can spend little money on high-quality, niche films and achieve substantial returns in global revenue and prestige, as each of the above films prove. It remains to be seen, however, if Zafar and his media texts can continue to negotiate the complex, overlapping spheres of religious and national identity as a crossover phenomenon in the post-ban Hindi film industry.

Notes 1 This quote was obtained directly from the album cover of Masty (2006, Fire Records). 2 Information retrieved January 30, 2018 from BOTY, https://bestoftheyear.in/movie/ tere-bin-laden/. 3 Information retrieved January 30, 2018 from Box Office India, “Mere Brother ki Dulhan,” https://boxofficeindia.com/movie.php?movieid=32. 4 Information retrieved January 28, 2018 from Box Office India, “London Paris New York,” www.boxofficeindia.com/movie-story.php?movieid=17. 5 Ibid.

References Banerjee, S. (2017). Gender, nation and popular film in India: Globalizing muscular nationalism. London and New York, NY: Routledge. Bhattacharya, G. (2008). Dangerous brown men: Exploiting sex, violence and feminism in the war on terror. London and New York, NY: Zed Books. Bhattacharya, R. (2010, September 9). I am alive and raising funds in Pakistan. Hindustan Times, Retrieved July 5, 2017 from www.hindustantimes.com/entertainment/bolly wood/i-m-alive-and-raising-funds-in-pakistan/article1-598028.aspx. Brown, J. (2006). Global South Asians: Introducing the modern diaspora. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chadha, K. & Kavoori, A. (2008). Exoticized, marginalized, demonized: The Muslim ‘other’ in Indian cinema. In A. Kavoori & A. Punathembekar (Eds.), Global Bollywood (pp. 131–145). New York: New York University Press. DeAngelis, M. (2001). Gay fandom and crossover stardom. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Dwyer, R. & Patel, D. (Eds.) (2002). Cinema India: The visual culture of Hindi film. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Frye, N. (1962). The nature of satire. In C. Allen & G. Stephens (Eds.), Satire: Theory and practice (pp. 20–29). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing. Ganti, T. (2012). Producing Bollywood: Inside the contemporary Hindi film industry. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Gehlawat, A. (2015). Twenty-first century Bollywood. London and New York, NY: Routledge.

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Kamal, M. (2010, July 11). Ali Zafar goes border crossing … like it’s never been done before. Instep, Retrieved July 5, 2017 from http://jang.com.pk/the-news/jul2010weekly/nos-11-07-2010/instep/mainissue.htm. Karachi, P.T.I. (2014, September 24). Fawad Khan breaks records in Pakistan, Khoobsurat collects Rs 3 Crore. Hindustan Times, Retrieved July 3, 2017 from www.hindustan times.com/bollywood/fawad-khan-scores-big-in-pakistan-khoobsurat-collects-in-rs3-crore/article1-1267316.aspx. Khan, S. (2009). Nationalism and Hindi cinema: Narrative strategies in Fanaa. Studies in South Asian Film and Media, 1.1, 85–99. Khdair, D. (2013). Piecing together the puzzle: Kahaani, Talaash and the complex narrative in popular Hindi cinema. Studies in South Asian Film and Media, 5.2, 179–194. Kohli, H. (2010, August 17). Ali Zafar – The Pakistani Lion. PlanetRadiocity.com, Retrieved July 5, 2017 from www.alizafar.net/media. MacDowell, J. (2016). Irony in film. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Malhotra, S. & Alagh, T. (2004). Dreaming the nation: Domestic dramas in Hindi films post-1990. South Asian Popular Culture, 2.1, 19–37. Mankekar, P. (2015). Unsettling India: Affect, temporality, transnationality. London: Duke University Press. Mehta, A. (2014a, March 7). Total Siyaapa review round up: Avoid it! International Business Times, Retrieved January 28, 2018 from www.ibtimes.co.in/total-siyapaa-reviewroundup-avoid-it-542287. Mehta, A. (2014b, March 11). Box office collection: ‘Queen’ dominates over ‘Gulaab Gang,’ “Total Siyaapa’ worldwide. International Business Times, Retrieved January 28, 2018 from www.ibtimes.co.in/box-office-collection-queen-dominates-over-gulaabgang-total-siyapaa-worldwide-542781. Menon, K. (2010). Everyday nationalism: Women of the Hindu right in India. Philadelphia, PN: University of Pennsylvania Press. Nayar, P. (2009). Seeing stars: Spectacle, society and celebrity culture. New Delhi: SAGE. Prasad, M. (1998). Ideology of the Hindi film: A historical construction. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Press Trust of India. (2010, July 15). Films, music can bridge Indo-Pak gap. NDTV, Retrieved June 25, 2017 from http://movies.ndtv.com/movie_story.aspx?Section= Movies&ID=ENTEN20100146659&subcatg=MOVIESINDIA&keyword=bolly wood&cp. Prokerala.com. (2010, June 21). Ali Zafar hopes to change image with ‘Tere Bin Laden.’ Proker ala.com, Retrieved July 5, 2017 from www.prokerala.com/news/articles/a145089.html. Raghavendra, M. (2008). Seduced by the familiar: Narration and meaning in Indian popular cinema. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Rana, J. (2011). Terrifying Muslims: Race and labor in the South Asian diaspora. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sarrazin, N. (2008). Songs from the heart: Musical coding, emotional sentiment, and transnational sonic identity in India’s popular film music. In A. Kavoori & A. Punathembekar (Eds.), Global Bollywood (pp. 203–223). New York, NY: New York University Press. Talbot, I. (2000). India and Pakistan: Inventing the nation. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Taneja, N. (2010, May 30). Ali Zafar turns actor. Hindustan Times, Retrieved July 3, 2017 from www.hindustantimes.com/news-feed/entertainment/ali-zafar-turns-actor/art icle1-550676.aspx.

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Times of India. (2013, December 11). Ali Zafar crowned sexiest man on the planet. Times of India, Retrieved July 6, 2017 from http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/entertainment/ music/news-and-interviews/Ali-Zafar-crowned-sexiest-Asian-Man-on-the-Planet/article show/27218986.cms?referral=PM. TNN. (2016, February 9). London Paris New York movie review. Times of India, Retrieved January 28, 2018 from http://m.timesofindia.com/entertainment/hindi/moviereviews/London-Paris-New-York/amp_movie_review/12096528.cms. Toor, S. (2011). Gender, sexuality and Islam under the shadow of empire. The Scholar and Feminist Online, 9.3, 318–340. Verma, S. (2011, September 9). Review: Watch Mere Brother ki Dulhan for Katrina only. Rediff.com, Retrieved January 28, 2018 from www.rediff.com/movies/report/reviewmere-brother-ki-dulhan/20110909.htm. von Tunzelmann, A. (2010, July 22). ’Tere Bin Laden:’ Satire with a sting. The Guardian, Retrieved January 28, 2018 from www.theguardian.com/film/2010/jul/22/tere-binladen-review-tunzelmann.

5 A CROSSOVER ROMANCE Female fandom and Fawad Khan, Pakistan’s “reel” gentleman

Like Zafar, Fawad Khan had already attained recognition in parallel media industries before his emergence in Hindi cinema, having been both a musician and actor in television and film. However, while Zafar’s virtuosity as a musician defined his crossover potential and remains a reflexive point of reference across his media texts, including cinema, Fawad’s dramatic reputation as an actor in a niche genre with targeted audience appeal – namely the “soap” serial – would motivate his crossover stardom, shaping his celebrity identity. Unlike Zafar, whose transnational pop aesthetic, characterized by a deliberately hybrid musical sound anticipated his “branding” as a crossover star, Fawad’s trajectory to fame is a reflection of the bottom-up convergence that fan practices and lateral cultural contact can produce in an age of digital media. This type of globalization, from periphery to center, reveals how convergence culture operates across hierarchies of media production and consumption while transforming relationships between political economy, narrative, and audience reception. In the case of Fawad’s crossover fame, the fan-based discourses of predominantly female viewers of Pakistani television serials generated an authentic demand for his celebrity across the border that was compounded by top-down avenues of corporate convergence. The marked continuity between Fawad’s on-screen persona in Pakistani television and his subsequent representation in Hindi cinema reflects how audience reception and global political economies collide as a result of media convergence. The overwhelmingly enthusiastic response to Fawad’s existing work in Pakistani serials like Humsafar and Zindagi Gulzar Hai (hereafter abbreviated as ZGH), both of which achieved cult status across the border in India, was an outcome initially of trans-media franchising through Zee TV’s maiden syndication venture, Zindagi TV. However, the unprecedented success of both serials and fan-driven hype surrounding its main actors, including the formation of cross-border fan communities and active media sharing across consumer platforms, quickly accelerated each stars’

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transition to commercial Hindi cinema based on their existing vitality with audiences of Pakistani television and ancillary media. As a result, Fawad’s highly desirable image as the romanticized, “genteel” hero of Pakistani television drama translated into comparable roles – and box office success – in each of his subsequent Hindi films performances, from Disney’s Khoobsurat to his critically acclaimed role in the unconventional family saga Kapoor and Sons. Fawad’s on-screen persona, most notably his on-screen masculinity, has impacted the representation and reception of Pakistani identity in Hindi cinema as much as Zafar’s border-crossing, reflexive, and peripatetic image in music and film. Like Zafar, Fawad globalizes a Pakistani/Muslim masculinity that not only refutes but also deconstructs the aggressively patriarchal and violent masculinity inherent to colonial and contemporary discourses of the Muslim “Other” in India and much of the West. This pattern of deconstruction occurs throughout Fawad’s media texts as his masculinity is routinely asserted, undermined, and reinvented in a dramatic arc consistent with the conventions of the serial genre in which he attained fame. In particular, Fawad’s conflicted masculinity positions him as an object of melodramatic identification and desire, in which the fantasy of emotional or sexual union is idealized but consistently deferred (DeAngelis, 2001). This leaves Fawad’s persona open not only to multiple projections of desire, one that permits both heterosexual and homosexual imaginaries, but also to a subjective framing heavily contoured by the female gaze, including feminine structures of desire and identification. This depiction can be attributed to the women-centric orientation of the serial genre, which is written and produced primarily for female audiences. This chapter thereby looks at the intersection of Fawad’s screen persona with his off-screen celebrity discourse, paying close attention to the role of fans in constructing and disseminating media material, textual commentary, and “illicit” sources of news, gossip, and publicity contributing to his representation across media platforms. Just as the active consumer practices of early TV drama fans petitioned Fawad’s unique brand of genteel masculinity, their digital engagement on social media has played a critical role in shaping perceptions about his celebrity, and the relevance of being a Pakistani star in India. These discourses have been reciprocated not only in the star’s screen portrayals but also in industry-motivated publicity, endorsements, and journalism, which will be examined in conjunction with digital fan activity on social media websites, particularly forums such as “Die Heart Fans of Fawad Khan” on Facebook and “Fawad Khan Fever” on Twitter. These sources of fan discussion respond to Fawad’s romantic iconography in television and film, positioning him as an icon of utopian sexual desire, masculinity, and female companionship. The media artifacts considered for analysis here include Humsafar and Zindagi Gulzar Hai, the most prominent performances of Fawad’s television career and the most germane to this discussion considering their crossover success in India, and formative influence in cultivating Fawad’s dramatic persona across media projects. These texts consolidate his image as the iconic upper middle-class

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protagonist, whose masculinity and social context are interrogated to reveal emotional instability, repression, and a dynamic of longing, loss, and transformation. As will be discussed, much of these tropes derive from a genre that revolves around themes impacting women, most notably class, domesticity, social identity, and romance. As a result, these serials adopt a revisionist perspective on masculinity and patriarchy that is narrated in relation to (and often by) women, while appropriate behavior for both sexes is a central theme in each of the above texts, which focus on achieving social and psychological equity in heterosexual matrimony. Fawad’s Hindi-language launch vehicle, Khoobsurat, and his groundbreaking performance in Kapoor and Sons are further explored as a continuity of the dramatic precedent set in these serial performances. Like Zafar, shared forces of political economy have enabled a wider array of film portrayals that accommodate Fawad’s crossover stardom and unorthodox interpretation of masculinity on screen. This includes the general influence of Pakistani television serials as a format with distinctive narrative and thematic idioms. While Fawad’s Hindi film roles do not engage directly with Pakistani or Muslim identity, as is the case with much of Zafar’s repertoire, Fawad’s off-screen reputation as a crossover Pakistani star – and his fan following as a result – places this factor foremost in approaching his film texts and is a key component of their reception.

Fawad, masculinity, and Muslim identity: a prologue Fawad’s masculinity, as negotiated both on and off screen, contrasts the alienating depiction of the Muslim male commonly encountered in Indian and Western popular culture. Characterization in each of his crossover media texts challenge the stereotypical imaging of the Muslim male as terrifying, sexually threatening, and oppressive. In the first place his characters are consistently associated with gentility, middle class values, and cultural sophistication. Secondly, while multiple texts activate themes concerning patriarchal authority and a controlling or “vigilant” masculinity, these tenets are fully undermined and even reversed by the story’s denouement, and in the case of Humsafar and ZGH are accompanied by a whole-scale transition of the protagonist into an ideal husband and father. In fact, it is the protagonist’s masculinity that is questioned and problematized throughout both series, motivating the narrative’s dramatic crisis and ultimately demanding modification by its resolution. Rather than signifying threat, he is an object of fetishized infatuation within and beyond the diegetic story universe, serving as object of passionate aspiration for the text’s female protagonists – and by extension the viewer through subjective, point-of-view storytelling. During their brief stint on Zindagi TV prior to the ban, these and other serials played a critical role in offering a realistic portrayal of Pakistani social life to Indian audiences, with Bhattacharya and Nag (2016, p. 3) emphasizing how “they engendered a counter-discourse to the unremitting demonization of Pakistan in Indian popular culture.” They argue that these programs contradict the heavily decorated

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scenery of Indian tele-serials, which focus mainly on an inflated Hindu middle/ upper class with “The usual overdose of melodrama, loud costumes and makeup, artificially constructed ornate sets, and the never-ending plot around scheming mothers-in-law and other female members of a joint family,” (pp. 4–5) what the authors decry as “extremely glossy, over-the-top glamorous and far from reality” (p. 5). These serials bolster a fixation with an idealized Hindu culture that coincides with popular Hindi cinema in the new millennium by focusing on extravagant wealth, ritual, and religion. The ordinariness/realism of shows like Humsafar and ZGH by contrast, offer a change of pace that minimizes the stereotyped marking of Muslim identity as “the burqa-clad woman, the cap and the surma (Kohl for the eyes) wearing man, the ghetto next to a mosque and so on” (p. 7). Instead, issues of class and social struggle unfold in a quotidian backdrop and feature multifaceted characters whose religion is only one aspect of their identity (Bhattacharya & Nag, 2016). This sobriety and authenticity, the cited reasons for both serials’ success with audiences, would likewise come to characterize Fawad’s star persona, his crossover appeal with female fans, and ensuing representation in Hindi film projects. As a prelude to the star’s anomalous masculinity on screen, it is interesting to note that Fawad began his film career in Pakistan with Khuda Ke Liye, a film that taps into anxieties surrounding global, Muslim male identity post-9/11. In the film he portrays a singer, Sarmad, who becomes lured into radical Islam by a Pakistan-based activist, while his brother and musical partner Mansoor (Shaan) chases professional growth in the West, only to be incarcerated (and ultimately disabled) as a mistaken terror suspect. Fawad’s casting is telling here – if only for the fact that the star himself began his media career as a musician with the alternative rock band Entity Paradigm. The film pits liberal, democratizing youth culture (here symbolized by popular music, and Fawad as extra-diegetic star) against a rising wave of populist Islamism allegedly competing with these forces. The directorial project of acclaimed virtuoso Shoaib Mansoor, a figure recognized for his socially cognizant work, the film is a revealing portend to Fawad’s subsequent representation across media texts that is worth considering at length. The narrative inaugurates a familiar arc of character development defining his screen stardom; first spotlighting the hazards of militant patriarchy, symbolized by Sarmad’s indoctrination and later domestic abuse (including rape) against his wife, to a renouncement of these oppressive tendencies that is followed by complete behavioral reform. The film is a cautionary tale that depicts Sarmad as victim and victimizer, his masculinity defunct and subject to moral and legal probity. However, from the outset, the story is notable for its sensitive treatment of the Sarmad/Fawad plotline. Of the two brothers, it is clear that he is the shy and gentle one, responsive to the opinions of others. This gullibility makes Sarmad vulnerable to the machinations of the radical maulana, who responds to Sarmad’s innate desire to do the right thing by construing ascetism, particularly the eschewal of music and Westernized customs, as the decree of pure Islam. Sarmad’s growing susceptibility to the maulana’s ideology is indicated by the shadowy interiors and obstructed views of his face in the mosque he increasingly

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visits, while the film editing emphasizes an emerging distance from Mansoor and the pragmatic views he shares to counter the maulana’s toxic beliefs. The pontificating bent of the film, culminating in a courtroom sequence where extremist interpretations of Islam are literally put “on trial,” aims to categorically address formative schisms in Pakistani society – Islamism vs. secularism, arranged marriage vs. women’s choice, migration vs. domestic residency, along with a host of related conflicts. Sarmad’s guilelessness is indicated by the fact that, unlike Mansoor, he poses questions about such conflicts but offers little insight of his own, parroting instead the maulana’s words. The contrast between the star’s benign demeanor – tousled hair, soft-spoken voice, and mild mannerisms – and his growing intolerance towards his family and previous life are intended to convey tragedy rather than revulsion. This pathos only deepens as Sarmad sinks further into an oblivious endorsement of the maulana creed that leads him to the brink of self-annihilation and pervasive social/misogynist violence. This scenario takes shape as Sarmad is persuaded to marry his older cousin Maryam (Mary, Iman Ali) against her will, in a kidnapping scheme arranged by her own father across the border in Afghanistan. Sarmad acquiesces to his authoritative elders with little conviction or enthusiasm; his apprehension becomes clear in his pusillanimous and even tender interactions with Mary, as he tries feebly to engage her in conversation and make her comfortable in their now compulsory home. Approaching her with hesitation, he says that he has not consented to the marriage for his happiness, and even implores her understanding. His calm passivity contrasts Mary’s fighting spirit and volubility, who only moments before passionately upbraided her father for his crime, yelling “Don’t take the name of Allah – it doesn’t suit you!” The consistent feminizing of Sarmad and his foil in the aggressive, forwardlooking Mary is repeated in several other crucial scenes during the film. When Mary later attempts to escape Sarmad is at a loss for control, belatedly chasing after her and responding with indignation when his comrade threatens to shoot. Rather than being suspenseful the scene is surreal and melancholic, revealing the entrapment of both characters in circumstances they can no longer control. When the maulana finds out about the attempt he further chastises Sarmad’s masculinity, insisting that Mary must become pregnant to impede any future escapes. The thought had never occurred to Sarmad, who demurs by stating that she cannot stand him, and in any case he “didn’t marry her for physical relations.” Significantly, the innocence, sexual restraint, and placidity Sarmad/Fawad displays are attributes that would come to define his persona in the serial genre, along with the motivating crisis of masculine inadequacy. This problem becomes clear when the maulana laments how “God must be repenting to have made you a man,” compelling Sarmad to force himself on Mary. The film stages the rape off screen, while the eclipsing of Sarmad’s conscience is indicated by the shroud of blackness enveloping him as he approaches her bed. The inability to see Sarmad’s face both highlights Mary’s subjective vantage while figuratively disassociating Sarmad from his crime, transforming him into a faceless, depersonalized threat.

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Sarmad’s ultimate crisis of identity occurs when he is forced to fight in combat, emphasizing how war, like rape, is an exercise in destructive power. In the process he is forced to painfully confront the flawed logic of radical Islam and his own spiritual exploitation by the maulana for political gain, one that can only end in death. Estranged from home, family, and finally himself – being disarmed of any moral will or choice – Sarmad enters an anonymous battle where he is indistinguishable from the men he is asked to murder. Surrounded by gunfire and decaying corpses, the chasm between his obvious temerity and the aggressive patriarchy he is expected to display highlight the disputed masculinity of the Sarmad/Fawad image. Crouched in a corner, he weeps uncontrollably, explaining that he is unable to kill. His comrade, Sher Shah, scolds him like a child – “Sarmad, what’s wrong with you? Do I have to take care of you?” Quickly abandoned, Sarmad now fights for his life in an episode of total obliteration that skillfully illustrates the senseless bloodshed and self-defeatism of extremist jihad. After being pinned and almost strangled by another soldier, their positions are deftly swapped in a nearly continuous instance of reverse editing that emphasizes Sarmad’s interchangeability; staring down at his silent double, he realizes his dispensability as a “holy warrior” against fellow Muslims, powerfully invoked by the man’s final cry of “Allah Akbar” (God is Great) before dying. Horrified by his own act, Sarmad achieves both emotional and spiritual reckoning as he questions aloud “what kind of jihad is this?” By contrast Sher Shah proudly congratulates him, proclaiming that “now you’ve become a man.” The film’s reversal of militant discourse is pointed; rather than associating aggression with phallic dominance (and thus real manhood), violence begets a self-castrating lack, avowing Sarmad’s submission to conscience – one closer to Islamic ideals of compassion, brotherhood, and service to God. From this point forward he recants his views and pleads forgiveness to Mary, his family, and the wider public as jurors. If his masculinity is rehabilitated at the end of the film, Mansoor’s in comparison is stripped away by the punitive force of the global security state, yet another guise of untenable patriarchy. Overall, the Sarmad/Fawad character trajectory – from a hostile, incomplete masculinity to self-actualization – reaches an apogee in the star’s later work, transforming him into an object of sympathetic identification and strongly influencing his image with crossover audiences.

Television and melodrama in a Pakistani context Humsafar and ZGH are crucial texts in consolidating Fawad’s screen persona, picking up where Khuda Ke Liye leaves off. Both narrate relational sagas against a backdrop of class conflict, marital discord, and romantic desire, and in each poor communication and timing create a sequence of unfortunate misunderstandings that keep the protagonists apart, deferring romantic bliss until the end of the series. While this is a characteristic element of television drama, the twin themes of unattainability and failed masculinity are a defining feature of Fawad’s work that is visible in nearly all of his television and crossover productions. This

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portrayal can be situated within the melodramatic mode anchoring Pakistani drama narrative, in which the “fantasy of origin” (DeAngelis, 2001, p. 6) and tensions surrounding emergence/redemption for the protagonists is a defining feature. Michael DeAngelis (2001) has previously discussed the relationship between melodrama, masculinity, and star identities in his seminal work on gay fandom and crossover stardom. While his work focuses on how gay male audiences negotiate star personas, enabled by operations of melodramatic fantasy within and beyond media texts, these observations are also relevant to how melodrama structures desire in the narrative economy of Pakistani television drama and stardom. If DeAngelis’ study explores how “melodrama can help us to understand how such fantasies empower disenfranchised subcultures to ‘claim’ popular cultural icons,” (p. 5) the present analysis extends this theoretical basis to consider how melodramatic fantasy in the serial genre can empower both female and other subaltern audiences across axes of class in Pakistan. This is especially relevant to a society and media culture where the expression of female sexual desire and agency is largely disavowed, along with non-normative gender/social roles heavily constrained by class. As a result, the fantasy of “overcoming obstacles to fulfillment” (p. 5) inherent to melodrama helps negotiate desire and identification in relation to the star image. For female audiences this fantasy is achieved through narrative closure in which the object of desire is obtained, albeit within predictable boundaries – namely the socially sanctioned institutions of marriage and family. Martha Nochimson (1992) has done persuasive work on the role of narrative syntax and melodrama in American soap opera, a genre with strong similarities to the serial format under discussion, while scholars like Shuchi Kothari (2005) and Munira Cheema (2018) have done much to situate this research in a local cultural context. However, if Nochimson (1992) adopts a primarily textual approach, drawing little evidence from the viewing practices of audiences, both Kothari and Cheema rely almost exclusively on political economy and ethnography to deduce their conclusions. My orientation combines these approaches, paying attention to the narrative structures of desire in television and film melodrama on the one hand – and their relation to preferred, negotiated, and oppositional readings, to use Stuart Hall’s (1980) model – as well as evaluating the role audience reception plays in generating textual meaning on the other. In this case, the “texts” under question expand to include the crossover star text of Fawad Khan. Nochimson’s (1992) discussion of narrative framing in the soap opera is particularly relevant here. Nochimson posits a contrast between the closed, Oedipal structure of Hollywood cinema (which privileges the male gaze/agency) with the open-ended, episodic structure of the soap opera. This structure, she argues, opens spaces for female desire hitherto unavailable in other media arrangements. She makes this unambiguously clear at the opening of her treatise, stating, “soaps are about women and desire” (my emphasis, p. 13). This feminine gaze readily applies to the thematic and narrative setup of Urdu drama serials, which, as Kothari (2005) has observed, replicate the zenaana or women’s sphere once

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reserved exclusively for women in the home. The zenaana is a space marked by its own “familiar set of verbal and non-verbal codes” (p. 300) historically inaccessible to men; an alternate public characterized by liberal, often transgressive gossip and the psychological companionship of other women. This space has since widened to include both publicly segregated areas as well as the ambivalently public space of the domestic, to which television serials have contributed significantly. In Kothari’s (p. 290) words: since many television serials are about women’s lives, often written by women writers, and invariably viewed by a large female audience, they contribute to the development of women’s culture in both the private and public space. Serials open up discursive sites where women negotiate, resist and transgress their prescribed limits in an Islamist patriarchal society. According to Kothari, drama serials evoke the cultural politics of the zenaana in both their production and consumption by audiences – indicating that zenaana is coded both at the level of the text, and in the gossip, debate, and conjunctive discourse surrounding their viewing. By reading Urdu serials as zenaana, Kothari (p. 301) notes that “these television texts offer different subject positions, raise unanswered questions and open up gaps that women can ‘freely’ enter,” an observation that corroborates Nochimson’s (1992) insights on the “open-endedness” of the soap genre which defies resolution. Even when narratives do achieve closure – as they inevitably do at a series’ end – Kothari (2005) observes that this device rarely contains the text’s elements of transgression, such that “the many disruptions of the patriarchal world and the visualization of a woman making it by herself” retain emotional piquancy (p. 296). This factor has much to do with the way melodrama operates in these narratives, as “codes” made readable to a female audience in “a unique form for talking about the unspoken lives of women” (Nochimson, 1992, p. 15). For American soap operas, this is achieved by disrupting the “linear” narrative of Hollywood cinema that seeks to contain the dangerous (e.g. castrating) presence of the feminine. While narrative values of plot linearity and goal-motivated storytelling are inconsistent in a South Asian context, as already noted, the idea of subverting closure is nonetheless relevant to the shared poetics of melodrama common to both traditions. These parities can be seen in the adjacent plotlines, point-of-view storytelling, strategic use of silence/muteness, and deconstruction of patriarchy that Nochimson highlights, and which find affirmation in wider melodramatic theory (Gledhill, 1987). For example, it is telling that the failures of “abstract” (read masculinized) communication drive plot complications in both genres, while silence and the politics of the gaze/body are used to convey characters’ inner emotions, mainly from the point of view of the female protagonist. This is further achieved by reversing the libidinal direction of suspense away from the feminine “Other,” where “the anxiety is not fear of an onslaught by feminine desire, but instead a dread that feminine desire will be obstructed”

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(Nochimson, 1992, p. 126). Likewise, the role of the uncanny is also switched from masculine to feminine, such that terror lurks beneath the familiar, ordered world of patriarchy rather than the alienating, (but familiar) maternal (Nochimson, 1992). Since Freudian ideas about Oedipal conflict and castration anxiety undergirding Euro-American cinema are also relevant to the concept of fitna in Islam (Kothari, 2005), in which women’s sexuality is perceived as threatening and must be controlled within patriarchy, obtaining a parallel reading of Urdu television drama in the above manner is warranted, as my analysis below demonstrates.

Humsafar, Zindagi Gulzar Hai, and the melodramatic subject As Kothari (2005) notes, the thematic arc of drama serials in Pakistan have their origins in Persian dastaan and qissa folk literature, transmitted through early Urdu novel and radio drama into their present style of narrative. This form created its own unique derivative of domestic melodrama that traces the protagonist’s psychological journey in a way that, like Western melodramatic tradition, collapses the personal with the social (Kothari, 2005). The ambiguity of melodrama and its relationship to the private is one of the reasons drama serials thrive in a precarious media landscape, as they “challenge the restrictions of censorship in Pakistan within the trope of the family” (Kothari, 2005, p. 296). Humsafar is an ideal illustration of these processes of melodramatic engagement, and their complex negotiation of the personal (as) political. In the story Khirad, a lower middle-class woman, is married against her will to the upper class Ashar at her mother’s behest. During a familiar course of separation, romance, conflict, and eventual harmony, each protagonist adapts to unforeseeable circumstances, and for at least one of them – Ashar – a complete shift in behavior and attitude is enacted so that marital compromise can be realized, in the process reinventing patriarchy as a social construct. This reimaging includes establishing equity through a reduction in class and social barriers, as immediately both protagonists are introduced as belonging to different life-worlds. We first encounter Khirad doing laundry in a modest dwelling in Hyderabad, surrounded by extended family and neighbors. Natural, radiant lighting and a melodic background score signal her cultural rootedness and rustic simplicity, an idyllic setting that is accompanied by her framing as a humble and loving daughter. In contrast, we are first introduced to Ashar in a swanky Westernized cafe, chatting with an attractive woman over coffee. His more self-centered and isolated upper-class background is indicated by the austere, professional interiors he routinely inhabits. He is frequently shown at the office in business attire, speaking English, and is surrounded by consumer luxuries and affluence, including a spacious home complete with cable TV and swimming pool. The characters’ ostensible incompatibility is reiterated through editing, with Ashar and Khirad rarely occupying the same frame in the first quarter of the series. However, the characters gradually recognize a mutual attraction that blossoms into love, although it becomes clear that their relational parity is illusory, with Ashar remaining the dominant figure in what appears to be a traditional

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patriarchal arrangement. This position is confirmed when his dying father reminds him “that he’ll be in charge of things” once he’s gone, and that he must teach Khirad how to live in the world, comparing her to “unbaked clay you can mold how you’d like.” Ashar’s attempts to “mold” Khirad mutate into a struggle to contain her sexuality, while his anxieties about failure as a husband and father become a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is again communicated strategically through mise en scène and cinematography; Ashar’s patrolling gaze, reflecting a desire to keep Khirad in view at all times, constantly frames her, foreclosing the possibility of her own subjectivity or sexual awareness. In one critical scene Ashar blocks Khirad’s self-admiring gaze in the mirror, coming between her reflection and stating that all that matters is that she is “beautiful to him,” suggesting that any recognition of Khirad’s own desire or sexuality is threatening, as she exists for his eyes (and pleasure) only. The politics of the gaze assume a critical dimension here as close-ups are generally disavowed in the visual economy of the Urdu serial, which privileges establishing shots in medium close-up that emphasize the protagonist in her social environment (i.e. relationship to males and senior elders). Kothari (2005) refers to this phenomenon when she quotes a serial writer who notes, “close-ups are a luxury in a land where a woman is barely allowed to see her face” (p. 300). This panoptic male gaze is reinforced in a subsequent scene when Ashar claims that he could spend all day looking at Khirad – simultaneously an expression of romantic love and a paternalistic urge to monitor her sexuality. Even the viewer is not permitted to gaze at Khirad without Ashar’s consent; in one of the show’s more erotically charged scenes, Khirad is shown indulgently getting soaked in the rain. The sexual overtone of her actions and the pleasure she displays are mitigated by his authoritative presence, established through reverse shot editing and the fact that he explicitly describes her behavior as childlike, and thereby innocuous rather than sexual. Regardless, the hierarchy of desire in this scene prioritizes both his gaze and the viewer’s, while Khirad is deprived of seeing either herself or Ashar in the same light, as he lingers in the doorway to watch her. The fact that she is oblivious to the “spectacle” of her own sexuality is the motivating source of pleasure in this sequence, affirming Ashar’s subjective point of view – the patriarchal gaze which the audience is invited to share. However, this patriarchal authority that is avowed both visually and thematically is quickly destabilized as Ashar enacts a destructive cycle of doubt, envy, and misrecognition towards Khirad. As she finds greater independence through her studies and social engagements at college, Ashar becomes increasingly frustrated by his inability to police her actions. His insecurity is manifested by resentment towards her popularity and success, and his suspicion that she finds a handsome classmate, Khizir, more stimulating than him reflects an unstable masculinity, including repressed fears of his own inadequacy as a husband/lover. Blinded by male ego and pride, he punishes Khirad indiscriminately, misconstruing her true intentions and character. This crisis of masculinity culminates in devastating consequences when Ashar finally throws Khirad out of the house, refusing to believe she is innocent of having an affair with Khizir.

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The fact that conventional patriarchy is untenable achieves full realization in the second half of the series. As a woman now expecting a child, with no source of income or home, Khirad suffers the most emotionally, materially, and socially from the separation, while Ashar merely withdraws into a cloistered professional life. After begging for his acceptance and facing only rejection, Khirad eventually renounces all connections with Ashar and his family, refusing to depend on anyone but herself. In the meantime, as their child grows up, Khirad is forced financially to confront Ashar and demand paternal support. It is at this turning point that the show’s gender roles become reversed; Ashar’s vulnerability is revealed as he mourns the anguish he caused Khirad and their child, regretting his past mistakes and begging forgiveness. In contrast, Khirad is shown rebuffing his advances, and from the first meeting since their separation she dominates their interactions, imposing conditions and assuming a newfound authority in their relationship. The protagonists’ mutual opposition and eventual reunion fulfills melodramatic registers of a desire for wholeness, including a “return to origin” whereby the spectator desires “to witness the union of two protagonists separated through the course of fate” (DeAngelis, 2001, p. 5). While the emergence/redemption dynamic applies to both main characters, the melodramatic framing of Ashar’s character purposefully deconstructs traditional notions of masculinity, enabling a transfiguration which imputes the narrative with moral “truth.” Ashar’s journey is a path towards self-completion that is only possible once he fully embraces conventionally “feminine” spaces and attitudes, including the filial/ domestic sphere and traits like compassion and tenderness – qualities hitherto associated with Khirad. This movement is an extreme fulfillment of the fantasy of origin in that Ashar directly embodies aspects of the maternal feminine once he eclipses Khirad’s established role as caretaker for their daughter, Hareem. This transition is indicated by a shift from spaces of professional labor (e.g. the office or study) to the domestic, as Ashar is shown lavishing his affection on their daughter and prioritizing her interests before his own. The series’ finale brings this transformation to its climax. With Hareem suffering from a life-threatening heart condition, Ashar contends with the remorse and grief of potentially losing his daughter, having loved her too late. Experiencing emotional pain and forfeiture that parallels Khirad’s, Ashar finally understands the world from her perspective, and, confronting his fractured ego in the mirror, questions tearfully how he could have allowed her to endure the sacrifices she faced raising their daughter alone, regardless of the affair he erroneously believes she committed. Reciprocating Khirad’s actions earlier in the series, he pleads for her empathy, asking the same questions she once asked of him: “didn’t you ever think of my love for one moment?” If she is resolute and implacable, he assumes a position of deference, humility, and submission in persuading her of his worth – just as he had once compelled her to do as his wife. It is clear by the final scene of the series that the couple’s relational parity has legitimately been established, and the desiring gaze is now mutual, evident in the closing frames of the show when Ashar steps into the rain with Khirad and their daughter as a symbolic gesture of emotional and sexual fulfillment.

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If Humsafar lays bare fault lines within conventional patriarchy and middle-class masculinity, replacing it with an idealized husband/father figure shaped by female identification, this is a theme that is repeated in ZGH and throughout Fawad’s media projects. In the story, the protagonists are again positioned as belonging to different class and social spectrums. Kashaf (Sanam Saeed) comes from a middleclass background, while Fawad’s character, Zaroon, belongs to an affluent family. The story sets up a familiar axis of romantic desire and frustration that parallels Humsafar plot momentum. After meeting at university, the two characters develop an uneasy relationship; from the outset Zaroon is established as irreverent and conceited, while Kashaf is pragmatic, strong-willed and outspoken. We are first introduced to Zaroon typing a diary entry on his laptop, where he comments that life is a beautiful, “brilliant” package, but with one flaw: women. In his opinion, they represent “frailty, stupidity, selfishness, stubbornness, and hypocrisy.” Kashaf holds a similar opinion of men, viewing them with distrust and resentment, while she laments the burdens women face due to their subordinate social status. These mutual suspicions, exacerbated by class prejudice, lead to repeated misapprehensions that culminate in a major altercation at college. Again, Zaroon’s masculinity is portrayed as malicious and castigating in the first half of the series. His ego causes him to toy with Kashaf’s feelings, as he conspires to mislead her romantically in an effort to belittle her – in his words, “to break her arrogance.” This metaphor for male dominance as the act of penetrating the “resistant” feminine stems once more from an unstable masculinity; throughout the series, Kashaf is projected as Zaroon’s intellectual and moral superior, while her forceful nature is depicted as castrating. Not only does she place first in the college entrance exams, much to Zaroon’s disappointment, but also during their first meeting she mocks him publicly in front of the entire class, cutting him down to size when she says “you’re not wasting your time, just mine. I don’t give my time to guys like you … now will you go to your seat, or are you just going to stand here chewing my brains?” Their interactions quickly become competitive, with Zaroon struggling to outperform Kashaf academically and socially. Her acerbic wit and fierce independence are unrelenting; however, in true chauvinist fashion, Zaroon mistakes this defiant attitude merely as an attempt to gain his interest, and he believes he can easily sway/possess her. It is only during the second half of the series that Zaroon begins to respect Kashaf’s strength of character, and it is this quality that he comes to admire most. In an inverse of preceding events, Zaroon convinces Kashaf that he has changed his ways, apologizing for his callousness, self-absorption, and flirtatious behavior. Disobeying the wishes of his family, he pursues Kashaf against all odds, even though they are apparently mismatched – her steadfast dignity and sobriety at conflict with Zaroon’s florid romanticism and cavalier outlook. This lack of balance is strongly communicated on their wedding night when Zaroon fumbles to impress Kashaf, seemingly defenseless before her silent and imperious presence. Not sure how to proceed, he first tries complimenting her, an effort that is met only with skepticism. Becoming candid about his own inferiority

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before her, he eventually admits that “I’m truly sorry … I’ve hurt you,” to which Kashaf concedes mentally that “If he starts to think before he speaks, it can’t be bad … he’s not so much of an idiot as I thought him to be.” As in Humsafar, Zaroon assumes the deferred role in their relationship, yielding to Kashaf’s will and demonstrating tenderness and sympathy in the face of her resolve – again dismantling gender expectations. Similar to Humsafar, the show sets up Zaroon as a remote object of romantic fantasy, one that is always “just out of reach.” In both shows Ashar/Zaroon’s good looks, popularity, and class supremacy position him above the realm of attainment for the comparatively “humbler” female protagonists. His appeal is repeatedly exaggerated in each text; in Humsafar Ashar’s best friend Sara is patently obsessed with him, refusing to relinquish her romantic ambitions even after Ashar has settled down with Khirad. Once she finally realizes her desire cannot be reciprocated, she commits suicide. This unrequited passion is also witnessed in ZGH through Asmara, Zaroon’s classmate and closest friend, whose romantic delusions are likewise shattered. Throughout the show Zaroon is subjectively framed from a perspective of female desire; Kashaf (albeit reluctantly) and her friend Mahira constantly admire him from afar, while Mahira enthuses about his “dreamy” eyes and voice – “there isn’t a single girl who isn’t interested in him,” she claims. These comments within the text predict fan-based discourse about the star, which likewise focus on disembodied elements of the Fawad persona as a distinctly feminine rendering of experience and longing, which I address further in the next section. In a scene following this Kashaf muses about her ill fate, whereas girls like Asmara are “blessed” with everything – insinuating Kashaf’s envy of her perceived intimacy with Zaroon. His desirability is fully imparted to the audience during a reflexive scene where he performs at a school party, accompanied by a cheering crowd of female fans in a tongue-in-cheek reference to Fawad’s actual celebrity status as a musician/actor.

From television to Hindi cinema: crossing screens, connecting desires Khoobsurat Fawad’s on-screen projection in the above serials as an idealized but distant (if not outright impossible) object of love/desire is fully exploited in the Disney-produced film Khoobsurat. The fact that the film is a Disney product is significant for several reasons; first, it reflects powerful forces of corporate brand convergence within the Hindi film industry under shifting conditions of political economy. Again, the film’s transnational production context illuminates how top-down avenues of media convergence present new opportunities to integrate and globalize Pakistani talent. Secondly, that the film bears Disney’s hallmark brand ethos – as a romantic comedy with a “prince charming” plot twist – points to a wider continuity in Fawad’s image across media texts. Like the television drama serial, Disney-produced films

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are geared mainly towards youth and female viewers, and Khoobsurat optimizes this legacy with audiences, something visible, for example, in the film’s official release poster. The poster features lead actors Sonam Kapoor and Fawad Khan in a partial embrace, as Kapoor gazes up at Fawad with a dreamy, wide-eyed expression suggestive of Disney’s popular romance aesthetic. In addition, the DVD version of the film opens with a commentary by Kapoor, who states that she always wanted to feel like a Disney princess, something this role allowed her to do.1 Such brand elements sustain the film’s overture to female audiences, a factor reinforced by Fawad’s selection for the role of Prince Yuvraj that affirms his consummate image as a romantic icon branded and marketed by corporations like Hum TV, Zindagi TV, and Disney to a strategic, women-dominated fan base. As with Fawad’s other texts, the film depicts a familiar cycle of aloofness and restraint in middle class gentility, followed by the gradual undoing of social barriers and emotional/sexual catharsis encountered in each of the star’s protagonists. Again, the “return to origin” fantasy is played out through the influence and acceptance of feminine ideals and values, as his characters emerge from a conflicted, restrained, or deceptive masculinity. Like Humsafar and ZGH, Khoobsurat is also narrated primarily from a female perspective. In the story Mili (Sonam Kapoor), a physical therapist, is assigned to provide care to the ailing patriarch of an ancient royal estate, falling in love with his son, the prince, in the process. It is Mili we are introduced to first, and her characterization drives the story, while her dream of marrying “prince charming” is realized when she finally wins Yuvraj’s (Fawad’s) heart. Here again the couple’s union is complicated by differences in class, culture, and personality; in this case Mili’s middle class Punjabi background, and Yuvraj’s as an elite aristocrat from Rajasthan. From the outset the viewer shares Mili’s perspective as a tourist both removed from and bedazzled by Yuvraj’s world. When she first arrives Mili takes selfies with the palace, servants, and artifacts, and she is awed by the palace’s museumlike interior, posing immediately with a 400-year-old piece of armor. It becomes abundantly clear that she is out of place in this surreal and timeless setting, and her social distance is confirmed by the condescending reception she encounters as a “paid” employee of the household. Exacerbating these obstacles is Mili’s clumsy, brash, and socially awkward behavior, which, she bemoans, has caused romantic mishaps in the past. Her character is in stark contrast with Yuvraj, whose immaculate deportment and propriety make the distance between them both comical and seemingly insurmountable. That she could ever win a prince’s heart, the narrative indicates, is indeed the ultimate wish fulfillment. Yuvraj’s placement as an idealized object of fantasy and desire is enacted from the protagonists’ first meeting, when Mili accidentally mistakes Yuvraj’s bedroom for her own in the middle of the night and becomes caught in bed with him. As the lights go on, it is Yuvraj, not Mili, who is the object of the spectator’s erotic voyeurism. Impressed by his shirtless appearance, Mili cannot help but mock her absurd luck – “a good-looking thief,” she wonders aloud, no longer concerned for her safety. She rapidly gains control of the situation,

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breaching norms of intimacy – “so what do I call you, Yuvraj, Junior Majesty, Viku?” she asks. His privacy compromised, Yuvraj occupies a traditionally feminine role in this sequence as he struggles to defend his honor, insisting that Mili leave. This gender reversal – in which Yuvraj is sexualized for the viewer’s gaze and made to feel violated – forms the scene’s comic subtext while setting up the film’s distinctly feminine staging of desire. This framing is evident throughout the film, with Mili acting as romantic aggressor and agent of narrative change while Yuvraj is inhibited from expressing his feelings, constrained by his social position and the rules of decorum dictating the Rathore family. Again, fortuitous “accidents” present opportunities for Mili to enact her desire, and in a moment of drunken impulsiveness she kisses Yuvraj while they are alone at night in the middle of the road. This transgression of barriers, and the metaphor of sexual release, reflects the film’s primary dramatic impetus – namely Mili’s role in reviving the Rathore household. Emotionally stultified following the death of their other son in a car accident, the Rathores’ condition is symbolized by the king’s disability and the mansion itself as a symbol of the repressed feminine. Wheelchair bound and figuratively impotent, the patriarch refuses to acknowledge his inner distress, while his wife manages the household according to a draconian schedule. This rigidity and detachment likewise characterize Yuvraj, whose strict professionalism leaves little room for sentiment or benevolence. Mili quickly becomes a rejuvenating force, whose passion, openness, and bold encouragement shake the Rathores out of their psychological impasse, releasing them from temporal stasis into the present. Her positive influence rekindles the king’s willpower while inspiring Yuvraj to recognize his emotional instincts. His transformation is signaled by a new display of compassion; he embraces his sister’s dreams of leaving home to work in Mumbai and even adopts a more ethical approach to business. In addition, whereas Yuvraj’s emotions were previously accessible only through interior monologue, in which he contemplated desire for Mili but did not have the courage to execute it, by the film’s climax he externalizes these feelings in a manner consistent with melodramatic visibility. After it seems their differences are too great to overcome, Yuvraj travels to Delhi to propose, finding Mili in the middle of a paintball tournament. As a final erosion of his emotional and sexual restraint, she shoots Yuvraj with a paint gun, splattering his suit with color, after which he kneels and asks for her hand in marriage. In this way, Yuvraj’s transition is coded on the body that prioritizes literal rather than “abstract” categories of meaning consistent with his former, suppressively masculine demeanor. In addition, if the protagonists’ earlier interactions were mismatched, with little to no eye contact or engaging body language, here their desire is fully consummated, and any constraints of social position or culture between them are neutralized with both their parents’ consent to the marriage. The suspense has finally ended with the protagonist securing the object of “her” desire.

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Kapoor and Sons Fawad’s final starring Hindi film role before the ban on Pakistani artists was endorsed is the critically acclaimed Kapoor and Sons. If his persona in the above productions reinvents patriarchal masculinity, by Kapoor and Sons these themes are pushed to their limit as Fawad’s character experiences the ultimate dynamic of melodramatic redemption/emergence: the concealment, admission, and social acceptance of homosexual identity. Still a controversial subject in popular Hindi cinema, the film presents a masculinity open to multiple registers of desire and identification. This is consistent with the film’s parallel deconstruction of the traditional feudal family, whose symbolic meaning is similarly ruptured and amended by the end of the film. In the narrative Fawad portrays Rahul, a successful author and the favored son in a rapidly disintegrating middle-class family. Their dysfunctional nature is communicated immediately after the title credits, when the family’s octogenarian grandfather feigns a heart attack to gain the attention of his squabbling son and daughter in law. What they mistake as a prank, however, turns out to be a genuine health scare, causing the family to temporarily reunite. It becomes evident that Rahul possesses the most social, economic, and cultural capital of anyone in the family, especially compared to his brother Arjun (Sidharth Malhotra), who acts as a foil throughout the text. Again, Rahul is fetishized as an object of romantic and filial desire; his debonair lifestyle as a famous Londonbased author is our first entrance into the film’s narrative universe, where his literary agent describes him as “hot property” with thousands of fans awaiting his next work, after which she asks him to autograph a book for an infatuated friend. It is also clear that he is the “perfect” son; not only is he the first in the family to be notified about the grandfather’s illness, he also takes the initiative to arrange flights for him and his brother, chiding Arjun for being stubborn and not letting him purchase the ticket. Rahul’s depiction as the perfect son is further consolidated by the reception he receives at home. While Arjun’s childhood room has been converted, Rahul’s is left intact, complete with toys and furnishings. He is greeted first by the beloved family dog, and is instantly coddled by his mother, always being the object of his parents’ praise. Unlike Arjun, who is between jobs and hobbies, a habit his father angrily reprimands him for, it becomes clear that Rahul is quickly overshadowing his father as the family’s preferred patriarch. He is frequently shown taking control of the family affairs, making arrangements for his grandfather’s care and receiving instructions on his last wishes, while consistently demonstrating prudence, wisdom, and responsibility. That he serves as the family’s backbone is illustrated by his role as mediator, counseling and reassuring his parents as they face growing dissatisfaction in their marriage. Rahul’s allure is finalized when he attracts the romantic attentions of Arjun’s crush, Tia (Alia Bhatt). Echoing Fawad’s representation in Humsafar, ZGH, and Khoobsurat, Rahul is likewise presented as an emblem of female sexual desire and

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fantasy; during their first meeting, Tia spontaneously gushes to him “you’re hot,” embarrassing them both. Again, he is placed at the receiving end of Tia’s romantic advances; she asks him out to dinner and kisses him impulsively on what she mistakenly assumes is a first date. However, the uncertainty or impossibility of sexual fulfillment is unequivocally affirmed when we discover Rahul’s sexual orientation at the film’s climax, unlike the romantic closure achieved in each of the previous texts. It is at this point that Rahul’s masculinity is subverted, his internal torment and longing for self-expression revealed. His burdened conscience is conveyed when he confesses to Arjun “I’m tired of being perfect,” while his illusive authority as ideal patriarch/son is discredited when we discover that he has been plagiarizing his brother’s writing, with his mother’s assistance. Rahul’s identity crisis and subsequent redemption occur when his mother discovers his secret unexpectedly. Their estrangement, and Rahul’s struggle to regain her trust, is the emotional turning point of the film, reflected in the intense focus of their interactions. If redemption reflects a will to return “to the mother’s body,” (DeAngelis, 2001, p. 6) this is represented by Rahul’s acute desire for his mother’s acceptance, and he kneels in supplication before her in tears. His fragility and selfdoubt exposed, he confesses, “I hurt you and I apologize. But how do I apologize for who I really am? ... I’m tired of running from myself, from you … I am what I am, Ma – and I just want you to love me for who I am.” The transformative connotations of Fawad’s persona attain full resonance in the text, embodied by a movement from incomplete, flawed masculinity to wholeness. In addition, Rahul’s emergence in the story avows the sexual accessibility of Fawad’s filmic image, enabled by a melodramatic engagement that accommodates an economy of both heterosexual and same-sex desire. While the potential for same-sex desire is inherent in the dubious masculinity characterizing each of Fawad’s protagonists, including the unsatisfactory or deferred conjugation of the heterosexual couple in all of the media texts analyzed, this economy is less ambiguously activated in Kapoor and Sons This is made possible through Rahul’s framing as an object of female desire on the one hand, and by opening potential “scenes” of homoerotic desire on the other that exceed the narrative limits of the text. An optimal illustration is a scene where Rahul shares a bed with his brother Arjun; the tight closeups and relaxed intimacy in this scene lend themselves readily to a projection of same-sex fantasy, enhanced by Rahul’s thwarted impulse to betray his secret to Arjun (who falls asleep before the climactic moment). This scene permits viewers to imagine the possibility of desire beyond the boundaries of the text, even if such validation is narratively improbable. The film achieves a tentative resolution to these intersecting conflicts in the denouement; represented ironically by the proverbial “family photo” that is the grandfather’s final legacy wish. Regardless, the narrative leaves open-ended the question of how the family will resolve their differences in the future, while the structural containment of Rahul’s indiscretion is equally unsatisfactory – favoring subversive readings of the text that identify with him rather than the now “rightful” inheritor of the Oedipal dyad, Arjun. This open-endedness challenges Nochimson’s (1992)

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argument that television drama is the primary locus where subaltern desires play out and spill beyond the limits of the text. It is clear from the above analysis of Hindi film melodrama that cinema can achieve similar effects in its subjective address.

Melodrama, political economy, and reception The representation of Fawad’s masculinity in the above productions can be attributed to interlocking variables of political economy on the one hand, and audience reception on the other. The formative influence of Pakistani television drama is evident in the strong continuity of Fawad’s persona across media texts and formats. In the context of Pakistani television drama, its female-oriented themes and organization of desire are made possible by a production framework dominated by women and aimed at female audiences. For instance, Hum Network Limited – the first media company to be founded and managed by a woman in Pakistan – produced and aired both Humsafar and ZGH. Its founder Sultana Siddiqui can be credited with formalizing the serial genre in Pakistan, having over 14 directorial credits to her name, ZGH included. The company’s administration also has a large representation of female personnel, including mainstay scriptwriters like Umera Ahmed and senior producer Momina Duraid, the creative force behind Humsafar.2 It is further significant that both serials were based on romance novels by celebrated female authors, Farhat Ishtiaq for Humsafar’s and Umera Ahmed for ZGH, reflecting an integral connection between culture industries and genres developed by, and directed towards, women (Qamar, 2012). This gendered slant is likewise reflected in media consumption trends, with Gallup estimating that 67% of television entertainment viewers in Pakistan are female, representing a substantial majority (Gallup Pakistan, 2017). That Hum TV is a leader in television drama is also indicated by its placement among the top ten entertainment channels in Pakistan (Marilou Andrew, 2014). Along with ARY, it was one of two corporations responsible for resuscitating what was previously a flagging media format, and since 2009 has emerged as a trendsetter in the serial genre, a precedent that was confirmed with Humsafar’s release in 2011. Its success in consolidating the format can be witnessed in the sheer amount of content produced, with at least 90% of its programming consisting of serial dramas (Marilou Andrew, 2014). Along with greater organization and investment, the reselling of this content to foreign outlets – particularly in the Middle East and India – has doubled Pakistan’s overall growth in television entertainment. This has placed Pakistani television content on a globalizing trajectory that dovetails with India’s own growth in cable and satellite television programming, including an increasing overlap with film production. This development can be traced to the privatization of the Pakistan television industry in 2002 under General Musharraf, which inaugurated the exploration of gender-related issues on the small screen (Cheema, 2018). Part of this trend has to do with securing ratings in a newly competitive media assemblage that contrasts sharply with the state-dominated broadcasting scene in the pre-liberalization

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period. Like its cross-border incarnation Doordarshan in India, the Pakistan Television Corporation (PTV) promoted developmental socialism with an aim at education rather than entertainment; likewise, the channel was seen as a mouthpiece for the government with strong propagandist overtones (Cheema, 2018). However, the liberalization phase occurred much later in Pakistan, nearly 20 years after the television market was already evolving dramatically in India (Butcher, 2003). The change instigated a brief satellite “boom” that gave Pakistani audiences access to Indian content through legitimate avenues for the first time, and as Cheema (2018) acknowledges, formatting of the now commercial serial genre was widely based on existing Indian, Gulf, and Turkish templates. These changes occurred at a politically combustible moment defined by opposing trends towards liberalization and Islamic conservatism (Cheema, 2018; Naqvi, 2010), such that private television emerged as “a broker of cultural, economic and political freedoms linked to globalization” (Naqvi, 2010, p. 110). As Naqvi (2010) is careful to stress, however, this process is hardly democratic, not least because the industry itself was created via extra-juridical mandate under General Musharraf’s martial dictatorship. In addition, it remains subject to capricious political forces – embodied by the industry’s censorship body, the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (PEMRA) – and the influence of key pressure groups, particularly among the country’s religious ulama. These voices can effectively “silence” channels under charges of blasphemy, as Geo TV’s license suspension in 2014 demonstrates, while content perceived as critical of the government can similarly face retaliatory policing (Cheema, 2018). These realities are compounded by a functional monopoly system dividing the industry among five main stakeholders: Independent Media Corporation, Lakson Group, Pakistan Herald Publications Limited, Waqt Group, and ARY Group, among their various affiliates and franchises (Cheema, 2018, p. 5). The impact of liberalization on television representation has been both farreaching and ambivalent. Naqvi (2010) diagnoses the contradiction eloquently, noting how “the Musharraf regime’s deregulation strategy tacked a careful position between expanding consumer choice, promoting ‘open’ criticism of the government and envisioning media as technology of political pacification” (p. 113). The soft power potential of media was widely recognized by the Musharraf regime, accompanied by conscious efforts at national branding evident in administrative collusion in the post-9/11 War on Terror that was juxtaposed with a rising tide of Islamic sentiment. It is in these precipitating circumstances that television arrived at the intersection of the public and private sphere in Pakistan, one strongly contoured by religion under Shari’a law (Cheema, 2018). It is not surprising then that gender conflicts occupy this interstice, considering there is little official sanction in a public sphere that dictates an otherwise inconspicuous role for women. Hardly any change in the legal and public enfranchisement of women has transpired since the al-Haq era, while additional complications were introduced with the Hudood Ordinance and later the Women’s Emancipation Bill (Cheema, 2018). However, the centrality of television to national public discourse

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leads Cheema (2018, p. 9) to conclude that “access to a mediated public sphere can empower women who are otherwise living under the influence” of Islamic government and common law. As a result, television has emerged as an opportunity for women to enact “cultural citizenship” (p. 12) without breaching conventional Islamic norms around women’s mobility beyond the home. Cheema’s (2018) extensive audience research leads her to place drama serials at the forefront of this cultural engagement, observing how they offer a holistic view on gender-based realities in Pakistani society. Being emotionally invested in this genre, viewers develop an association with characters and can feel more for their ordeals. Moreover, I maintain that drama serials offer an ideal genre for developing silent consensus over controversial issues. (p. 88) Despite these observations, Cheema draws a distinction between intention and outcome in the production of drama serials, noting that generating social dialogue and contributing to a vibrant public sphere is rarely the object of creative personnel, who remain highly coerced by ratings. It is telling that Kothari (2005) paints a very different portrait in her research with pre-liberalization serial writers, each of whom engaged deliberately with a politicized depiction of gender to varying degrees within an upper-class orientation. Regardless, most of the producers and writers in Cheema’s (2018) study recognize the potential of drama content to elicit change, if only by reinforcing public awareness of gender-based discrimination as part of a larger media feedback loop. Without paying attention to narrative formalism, Cheema notes that there is realism in drama serials that is lacking in the more fantastic, utopian disposition of popular cinema. Interestingly, this discourse also emerges in fan rhetoric surrounding Fawad’s crossover appeal among Pakistani and Indian viewers, which I discuss in further detail below. Indeed, the perceived sense of veracity and authenticity associated with the star’s participation in the serial gene is a magnetic factor in his crossover status, which has likewise been translated into his Hindi film work.

Fandom and the star text The industrial variables outlined above, including strong brand monopolization of the television drama industry coupled with consistent and predominantly female authorship aimed primarily for women viewers, has ultimately permitted the exploration of revisionist masculinities on screen. Fawad’s star persona is thereby situated within the distinctive political and narrative economies of Pakistani television drama, while the circulation of Pakistani serials on a global scale has made their imprint visible in parallel industries, notably Hindi cinema. Besides corporate avenues of media exposure through licensing and franchise proliferation – like Zindagi TV – the role of audiences, and especially the

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development of fan communities, has accelerated the impact of Pakistani television dramas and their stars in global popular entertainment. This is certainly the case with Fawad’s genteel masculinity, whose cult reception among television drama fans in India and Pakistan have helped reimagine Muslim/Pakistani identity. Fawad’s commercial and critical potential as a crossover star was foreshadowed by the preliminary success of Humsafar and ZGH. Upon release in Pakistan each serial achieved exceptional ratings, with The Express Tribune Pakistan calling Humsafar a phenomenon “that cut across all divides to become a striking symbol of the times” (Zubair, 2012) while the show was widely praised for its novel casting and superior scriptwriting, cinematography, and characterization. Within weeks of its broadcast premiere the serial garnered an astonishing social media presence, with at least five fan pages on Facebook and over 100,000 followers (Tejani, 2011). It also rapidly achieved an international presence, with hundreds of fan uploads to YouTube in real time that attracted viewers in locations as far as Toronto, Canada – many of the uploads with English subtitles (Javed, 2012). In India, the serial was considered groundbreaking for its unanticipated popularity, despite the fact that it aired more than two years after its initial release in Pakistan. Critical reviews posited that it was “a breath of fresh air” (Ranjani, 2014) compared to Indian dramas and likewise developed an enthusiastic fan response on social media, including its own Indian fan page on Facebook and extensive Twitter feeds following each episode in detail, including the series’ emotional finale that left fans in tears on one popular thread (Web Desk, 2015). For its final episode on Zindagi TV, the channel even organized a competition on Twitter at hashtag #MadforMahira so that select fans could meet star Mahira Khan in Mumbai if they tweeted about the program throughout the finale on November 12, 2014 (Web Desk, 2015). ZGH experienced an equally rave reception on both sides of the border. Besides critical reviews that termed the series “a blockbuster hit,” (InPaper Magazine, 2013) it was widely recognized for its inspiring message and social commentary “on chauvinism, sexism and even everyday problems faced by women, especially single mothers” (India Opines, 2017). In India the show’s “relatable” plot and psychological realism were again highlighted, features secondary only to the overwhelming appeal of its lead actors (Mishra, 2014). However, equally important is the digital community it generated, reflected in blog posts by critics like Fatima Awan (2013) on Reviewit.pak. A fan-based site devoted to Pakistani television drama, Awan writes that the “best thing about this whole show was the discussions we all had here … a big thank you from the bottom of my heart, to all those who followed the reviews every week and took time out to comment.” Impressions like these reflect the unique pleasures of consuming drama serials for many fans, in which viewing the text is only part of its wider value in eliciting shared forums to articulate, criticize, and debate its cultural meaning. While this process is an extension of the traditional roles that gossip and word of mouth discussion have historically played in the reception of female-oriented genres, the emergence of extensive fan communities around key

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“organizer” texts is a powerful reflection of convergence culture. In this case, the online platform becomes an extension of the public-private zenaana, which is itself derived from the nature of consuming television drama in the home (Kothari, 2005). The reception of both serials is an ideal illustration of how convergence culture initiates opportunities for crossover stardom, occurring through a mutually reinforcing circuit of corporate brand integration on the one hand, and consumer-directed convergence on the other. An ideal example is Zindagi TV’s targeted programming and marketing approach, which leverages the female-oriented content and appeal of drama serials in India for “English speaking, smart-phone owning women between the ages of 15 and 44, who live in big metros, and cities like Bangalore, Pune and Indore” (Kaur, 2014). This target audience represents a “premium mass” of cable television viewers who have strong demographic similarities on both sides of the border, with Zindagi basing their Pakistani programming on its existing popularity with domestic audiences, namely middle-class urban women (Kaur, 2014). The channel’s tagline, Jodey Dilon Ko (“Bringing Hearts Closer”), references this continuity. As writer Karanjeet Kaur (2014) acknowledges, it alludes not only to the “romantic dramas it airs” but is also “a sentimental nod to the cultural links between the two countries,” a theme that is reinforced through the channel’s content promotion. The channel’s mission, therefore, is to sponsor texts and talent with commercial crossover appeal through strategic branding, evident in digital marketing campaigns like #MadforMahira and the network’s 2016 Fawad Khan festival for fans, in which popular Fawad-starring serials were re-aired along with his recent Hindi-language films during a month-long tribute. The event included the #FawadFestival contest, where the channel partnered with Twitter and WhatsApp so that fans could forward messages directly to the star (Images Staff, 2016). This type of brand integration co-opts “grassroots” convergence by encouraging and rewarding digital fan activity that supports the channel’s corporate agenda. In addition to similarities in genre and audience, the nature of television viewing itself, and the context of its reception, suggests why the long-format serial is ideally suited as a crossover “hook” for viewers. Kothari (2005) and Cheema (2018) have already pointed to the intimacy and long-term engagement with the television text that occurs in the private space of the home, where the performance of national identity and gender are not under public surveillance. In addition, their research suggests that drama serials are interpreted within deeply personal frames of reference as a reflection of domestic and social realities. As such, the drama serial offers the potential for critical reflection on sociopolitical issues on an intensive scale that are often seen to be part of the viewer’s reality. This unique viewing contract helps account for the powerful reactions audiences developed across the border to Humsafar and ZGH – and why television, rather than cinema, has been at the forefront of Pakistan’s media globalization. It is clear that both bottom-up and top-down forces of convergence interacted to establish Fawad’s crossover celebrity. His romantic screen persona and

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unorthodox masculinity, represented in both of the above serials, quickly became a cultural “bridge” for Pakistani and Indian drama fans, a crossover trajectory that was endorsed by corporate media outlets in an effort to tap this common niche market. Fawad’s cult appeal is manifested in the number of digital fan forums that emerged in the wake of both serials, affirming processes of identification and desire enacted in the melodramatic address of these texts. Besides dramatic realism and acting caliber, the sexual chemistry of both shows’ lead stars was widely cited as a main attraction for audiences on both sides of the border, with one Indian reviewer highlighting Fawad’s “charisma” as the key quotient to ZGH’s approbation with Indian audiences (Mishra, 2014). This, she claims, can be attributed to his “man of your dreams” image – “suave, great looking, and with an amazing voice! Pakistani actor Fawad Afzal Khan became a massive hit among girls since the first look hit the telly world” (Mishra, 2014). Also citing his persona as the formula for Humsafar’s success, another self-proclaimed “fan girl” describes his character in the series as “heartbreakingly lovable,” capturing “millions of hearts both within and beyond our borders” in her review of the show (Mehboob, 2015). Comments like these affirm the star’s textual representation as a fetishized object of melodramatic fantasy, recoding the Muslim/Pakistani male body as an emblem of sexual desire rather than threat. If the Muslim male has typically personified “terror” through his potential for sexual or social assault, Fawad’s body is associated here with sublime romance, his voice and demeanor alone enough to captivate; reflecting a fragmentation of the body more commonly associated with women than men that buttresses a feminized reading of the star. Additionally, rather than signifying myths of a brutal, oppressive, and archaic “Islam,” his masculinity is characterized as debonair and cosmopolitan, possessing an irresistible charm that echoes his genteel image in television and film. His vulnerability on screen is also recognized as a dimension of the star’s attraction, coinciding with the progressive masculinity explored throughout his media texts. One commentary, for instance, points to Ashar’s flawed masculinity as central to Humsafar’s script, acknowledging the show’s conscious deconstruction of gendered social norms: “Asher may be educated and modern, but he is also insecure … while Khirad is exceptionally affectionate, dignified and independent. Unlike other Hindi shows which glorify the protagonists, Humsafar does none of that” (Ranjani, 2014). Fawad’s exalted romantic image is likewise expressed in numerous fan forums devoted to the star. Launched in June 2014, “Die Heart Fans of Fawad Khan” on Facebook now has around 193,000 followers.3 Much of the fan commentary focuses on the star’s sex appeal and talent, again “fetishizing” his body as a target of passionate adulation; as one Indian fan posts: His voice is most attracting thing which made me go mad and his sense of humour in #zgh (Zindagi Gulzar Hai) serial. I liked his eyes which will make everyone to believe him even when he does wrong thing. And I totally believe that husband should be likeZaroon.4

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Posts like this not only underscore Fawad’s fan reception as a romantic icon, but also respond to his melodramatic image as the ideal husband/father in popular media representations. Revealingly, the repeated emphasis on communicative aspects of Fawad’s personality – particularly his eyes, voice, and smile – affirm theorizations of female desire as a need for expression that position the star/ideal man as one capable of empathizing with women. His genteel masculinity and sophisticated manner are also frequently referenced, reinforcing his characterization as the “ultimate” male fantasy figure; as another fan comments, “He is just so poised, calm, well spoken and well behaved plus he is ‘classy’ ... that’s why we all go gaga over Fawad Khan.”5 In addition to Facebook, the star also has over 272,000 followers on his official Twitter account, @_fawadakhan_,6 as well as several fan-based Twitter accounts, the largest of which are “Fawad Khan FC” and “Fawad Khan Fever.” The former has over 21,000 active followers worldwide, posting daily news and facts related to the star, while the second hosts primarily fan art and related tributes.7 The nature of his popular reception is perhaps summed up best in a witty opinion piece by celebrity journalist Shobhaa De (2014), who proclaims that “Fawad Fever” has taken hold in India precisely because of the star’s unique suitability to female fantasy: He’s as yummy as those irresistible Lahori kabobs, and desi ladies want him. Jaisey bhi! [Alas!] Afsos ki baat yeh hai ki [The regrettable thing is] he is married and a father to Ayaan … but, in our collective fantasy, we don’t bother about such faltu, real life details…fans have decided he is the yummiest, most sinful treat in town … forget calories. The potency of such fan-motivated discourse is evinced by the fact that fans themselves suggested Fawad for his first starring Hindi film role, mentioning his name to producer Rhea Kapoor during Khoobsurat’s pre-production (Sharma, 2015). Critical responses to the film accentuate its exploitation of female fantasy tied to Fawad’s “sex idol” image, with many headlines jokingly referencing him as the source of the film’s glamorous title. As Shobaa De (2014) humorously opines, “So, who is the real ‘khoobsurat’ (beauty) in the movie … Any guesses?” The majority of the film’s reviews invoke this “fan girl” perspective, drawing on existing discourses about the star and his popular reception among TV drama audiences (Bukhari, 2014). The scope of this reception is further recycled in popular publicity surrounding the star. Rather than focusing on artistic agency, which occupies much of the discussion surrounding Zafar as a versatile musician and actor, Fawad’s crossover stardom is depicted as a product of consumer demand, apparent in his frequent likening to a phenomenon, craze, or “fever.” This objectification is more than just sexual; he is most often discussed either in relation to audiences or through his effect on them, framing him within existing fan narratives. Like Zafar, Fawad’s “difference” as a crossover star is configured as novelty, the selling point for his commercial and

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critical potential. His intense fascination for female fans is accredited not only to “those eyes, that stare, that reluctant smile … and oof! – hair with a life of its own” (Bukhari, 2014) but also to his accessibility as a locus of women’s fantasy. Unlike prototypical Hindi film heroes “displaying their wretched, computer generated 6/8 pack bare bods in every second film,” (Bukhari, 2014) Fawad is set apart by his credibility both as an actor and object of sexual interest. Rachel Dwyer (2001) characterizes representations of Hindi film masculinity in a similar manner, describing how the average Bollywood male is framed “to emphasize the physique; his clothes may be torn, or he may be topless; covered in sweat with his hair slicked back … In other words, the presentation of the male star is as hypermasculine or active” (p. 272). Consistent with his on-screen characterization, Fawad is nearly always represented as passive rather than active. The star’s physique, height, or strength of his features – phallic indices of male beauty that commonly evoke virility and power – are scarcely raised in photo spreads or fan praises about the star. His appeal resides not in a blatantly “erect” male physique, as scholars like Gehlawat (2015) and Dwyer (2001) have noted, but in the star’s more introverted masculinity. That he fits practical expectations of female desire is indicated by his characterization as “strikingly real and beautifully normal,” (Singh, 2014) encapsulated by his expressive subtlety “to admire a woman secretly from the corner of his eye, in anger, to suggest a hint of a smile … and intensely enough to make you go weak in the knees” (Singh, 2014). His candor, sensitivity and emotional restraint/ depth are depicted as idiosyncratic qualities at odds with the vulgar commercialism of popular Hindi cinema, renowned for its larger-than-life bodies and personalities (Vohra, 2016). Fawad’s success at relaying emotion – that which is normally repressed/silent – rather than physical action is what sets him apart from more traditional figures of male desirability. These reactions again point to the efficacy of melodramatic “realism” in moderating attachment to an identifiable star image, one shaped by the distinctive visual and emotional registers of the Urdu serial. Such characteristics are easily rendered exotic. Unlike Zafar, whose celebrity discourse synthesizes both difference and sameness, Fawad is fully constructed as exceptional, his crossover status the source of his seductive appeal for fans. If Zafar’s identity emphasizes the possibility of achieving fame in the Hindi film industry based on hard work, talent, and creative risk-taking – evident in the politically controversial projects he chooses – Fawad’s identity is more eroticized, aligning with his tender “heartthrob” image on screen and in popular fan address. His positioning as the sensual “Other” finds expression throughout various media exclusives. Shobaa De (2014) compares him to “Sucre de Terre – a limited edition artisanal ice cream with an unusual, exotic flavor” while another commentator avers that Indian housewives now find “themselves wondering … where can I find a man/husband as hot as Fawad Khan? Answer: Across the border” (Singh, 2014). One interview in Filmfare deploys Orientalist language to exemplify his allure, calling him a “Cross Border Turk” and “enigmatic star … who’s giving our heroes sleepless nights” (Majumdar, 2015). Charu Gupta (2014) draws the political implications of the star’s image out into the open, noting how “Fawad

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Khan’s religious and national identity is not hidden or muted; it is explicit and out there. But Indian women, most of them Hindu, are totally disinterested or unconcerned with the fact,” going on to observe how female fandom for Fawad is an empowering form of resistance against the Hindutva specter of “love jihad,” a theme I explore more closely in relation to the star’s image in Chapter 7. Gupta’s words, particularly at the time of her writing, are a prescient insight into the subversive dimensions of “desiring” Fawad, salvaging not only the role of popular culture in Indo-Pak relations but feminist agency as well. By allowing women to “discursively bridge the conventional physical and psychological distance between Hindu/Muslim, Indian/Pakistani,” loving Fawad has unsettling consequences for patriarchal nationalism. Fawad’s outsider status reconfigures Muslim/Pakistani masculinity as not only desirable but also idealized, transforming appraisals of the Muslim male “Other” from an object of threat to one of consumer desire. His star identity is negotiated through fan-motivated discourse on the one hand and popular journalism on the other, reflecting the influence of multiple forces of convergence on crossover texts – from serials like Humsafar and ZGH to Fawad’s own star text. This analysis thereby reveals how consumer-directed convergence can interact with industrial political economies to motivate crossover stardom. This process is apparent in how the enthusiastic fan reception of Fawad’s early TV serials supported his wider branding as an icon of melodramatic romance both on screen and off. Such a representation is strengthened by the narrative and thematic continuity throughout his texts, in which the dynamic of melodramatic redemption/emergence offers a sentimental, progressive masculinity fully at odds with historical depictions of the Muslim male in Hindi film. Fawad’s hyper-signification as an emblem of female desire contradicts inverse tendencies to objectify the Muslim male body as a site of political, cultural, and social violence; however, his deconstruction of Muslim masculinity also makes him India’s most controversial crossover star. This subject will be outlined in more detail as the politics of the crossover ban are considered in Chapter 7.

Notes 1 This information was obtained directly from the DVD version of Khoobsurat (Reliance Home Video, 2014). 2 This information was obtained directly from the company’s website at Hum Network TV -“Board of Directors,” www.humnetwork.tv/Board_of_Directors.html 3 “Die Heart Fans of Fawad Khan,” Retrieved October 10, 2017, www.facebook.com/ Die.Heart.Fans.Of.FawadKhan/ 4 Ibid. Retrieved July 21, 2017. 5 Ibid. Retrieved June 26, 2016. 6 “Fawad Afzal Khan,” Retrieved October 10, 2017, https://twitter.com/_fawada khan_?lang=en 7 “Fawad Khan FC,” Retrieved October 10, 2017, https://twitter.com/TeamFawadA Khan?lang=en

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Mehboob, Z. (2015, September 20). Why people in Pakistan still can’t get over Humsafar. MangoBaaz.com, Retrieved September 29, 2017 from www.mangobaaz.com/10reasons-humsafar-is-still-the-best-pakistani-love-story/. Mishra, R. (2014, July 16). Zindagi Gulzar Hai: Top 7 reasons why this Pakistani serial is a big hit! India.com, Retrieved October 3, 2017 from www.india.com/buzz/zindagigulzar-hai-top-7-reasons-why-this-pakistani-serial-is-a-big-hit-96695/. Naqvi, T. (2010). Private satellite media and the geo-politics of moderation in Pakistan. In S. Banaji (Ed.), South Asian media cultures: audiences, representations, contexts (pp. 109–122). London and New York, NY: Anthem Press. Nochimson, M. (1992). No end to her: Soap opera and the female subject. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Qamar, S. (2012, September 24). Sultana Apa: The return of the director. The Express Tribune, Retrieved October 3, 2017 from https://tribune.com.pk/story/441687/sultana-apa-thereturn-of-the-director/. Ranjani, K. (2014, October 31). Humsafar: Not your regular romance. The Indian Express, Retrieved October 5, 2017 from http://indianexpress.com/article/entertainment/ screen/humsafarnot-your-regular-romance/. Sharma, I. (2015, July 12). 7 things Sonam Kapoor said about Fawad Khan which proves that she’s a bigger fan of him than us! India Times, Retrieved September 29, 2017 from www.indiatimes.com/entertainment/7-things-sonam-kapoor-said-about-fawad-khanwhich-proves-that-shes-a-bigger-fan-of-him-than-us-234668.html. Singh, S. (2014, October 13). Why the Fawad Khan fever refuses to die down. DailyO.in, Retrieved October 3, 2017 from www.dailyo.in/arts/fawad-fever-refuses-to-die-down/ story/1/358.html. Staff, I. (2016, July 5). Do you know? There’s a Fawad Khan festival happening in India! Dawn.com, Retrieved October 3, 2017 from https://images.dawn.com/news/1175753. Talbot, I. (2000). India and Pakistan: Inventing the nation. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Tejani, Q. (2011, December 24). Humsafar: Here’s what the noise is about. The Express Tribune Blogs, Retrieved October 5, 2017 from https://blogs.tribune.com.pk/story/ 9343/humsafar-heres-what-the-noise-is-about/. Vohra, P. (2016, March 18). Need a reason to watch Kapoor and Sons? This Fawad Khan fan from India lists so many. Dawn, Retrieved October 5, 2017 from https://images. dawn.com/news/1175013. Web Desk. (2015, January 24). Humsafar’s last episode left Indians crying. BrandSynario, Retrieved October 5, 2017 from www.brandsynario.com/humsafars-last-episode-leftindians-crying-twitter-reviews/. Zubair, Q. (2012, March 3). “Woh Humsafar Tha …” The Express Tribune, Retrieved October 5, 2017 from https://tribune.com.pk/story/344534/woh-humsafar-tha/.

6 I AM NOT YOUR FEMINIST Mahira Khan and the re-scripting of Pakistani womanhood, Islam, and globalization

Like Zafar and Fawad, Mahira’s crossover celebrity reflects a coalescence of global and local forces in a media convergence context. However, if conflicts surrounding Muslim masculinity define the relevance of Fawad’s crossover persona – and to a lesser extent, Zafar’s – then Muslim femininity indexes Mahira’s potential as a global star. Her dramatic identity on screen and public image off screen embodies a version of Muslim womanhood that contravenes colonial and Western-origin discourses, while appealing to shared cultural sentiments across regions like South Asia and the Middle East. Mahira’s “balanced” femininity is discernible in the strong, agencyoriented roles she portrays in the female-centric serial genre, albeit within culturally acceptable parameters; indeed, her crossover appeal is frequently ascribed to her chaste, modest, and socially rooted image. In India this persona is construed as a type of nostalgia for “traditional” femininity even as the star fits existing standards of glamour and talent in the popular Hindi film industry, credentials sustained by her previous work as a television host for MTV Pakistan. Her image diverges considerably from systematic figurations of the Muslim/Pakistani crossover star as morally and socially disqualified. Scholars like Appadurai (1996) have characterized globalization as multidirectional, uneven, and disjunctive, hosting competing cultural flows within a contiguous framework of neoliberal capitalism that is both geospatially and temporally compressed. Mahira’s crossover celebrity is an optimal example of these multiple ontologies, defying reductive theories about globalization as predominantly Westernizing, hegemonic, and imperialist. Her cultural intelligibility and appeal with audiences as distant as Saudi Arabia and Indonesia reveals how globalization permits subaltern flows along an axis of non-Western cultural influence, even as this process is driven by parallel factors of media convergence and transnational brand “localization.” This process can be witnessed in Mahira’s global exposure through corporate media franchising and integration into shared

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scaffolds of political economy, reflected in her brand engagements with MTV, Coke Studio, and Femina Magazine, to name only a few. In addition, her success with overseas audiences derives from the globalizing imperatives of Pakistani television. Apprehending globalization as a contingent process again helps us interpret the potential contradictions of Mahira’s media corpus, and their occasionally incongruous reception. Mahira’s celebrity has been simultaneously exalted and criticized for reinforcing conservative cultural and religious values, even as she symbolizes global capitalist brands and transcends media industries. That her crossover stardom in India, and her global appeal more widely, interacts with the ostensible propriety of her image reflects several conflicting discourses. Firstly, it exposes the paradox of global discourses surrounding Islam as “exceptionally” regressive and illiberal, a specious imaginary evident, for example, in the fact that Mahira’s persona differs little from nationalist paragons of the Hindu/Indian wife, mother, or daughter conventionally encountered in popular Indian media. Secondly, that her crossover celebrity possesses relevance for multinational audiences reveals that multiple versions of femininity can be globalized outside of the strictly liberal or secular feminist codes idealized in the West. Finally, her celebrity discourse reinforces how female stardom acts as a contested space to debate public morality, sociopolitical freedom, and national/religious identity – an onus doubly exaggerated for Muslim stars. In exploring the above dynamics this chapter considers Mahira’s roles as an actor in both television and cinema, focusing on the serial Humsafar and her only starring Hindi film role in the production Raees as demonstrative texts. While the star has done other work in Pakistani television and cinema, these texts laid the foundation for her crossover attention in India and on a global scale and remain integral to discourses about her celebrity identity. Again, the star’s popular reception is assessed through fan commentary in digital spaces, including forums on Facebook and Twitter as part of the #MadforMahira contest for fans that was hosted by Zindagi TV in India in 2014. The intersection of her screen persona with these digital fan narratives is analyzed alongside the star’s representation in press journalism and brand endorsements. Mahira’s work in television and film refutes neo-imperialist ideas about the “oppressed” and exploited Muslim woman, a discourse that has been used to justify American military and civic intervention in Islamic societies since 9/11 (Akbar & Oza, 2013). However, this construct also has a substantial legacy in colonial regimes of knowledge and governance, as Muslim women have been envisioned as the passive victims of Muslim male barbarism (Akbar & Oza, 2013). This notion takes recourse to Orientalist tropes of the “harem” that have origins in the discovery and travelogue reporting of early colonial historians, scholars, and artists. Besides contributing to the exotic, “temptress” image of the Muslim woman as “Other,” the veiled Muslim female body has become a symbol of subjugation that, like Muslim male corporality, collapses culturally distributed beliefs about Islam (Hirschkind & Mahmood, 2002).

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Mahira and Muslim womanhood: a prologue Mahira represents a globalized Muslim womanhood that disputes available examples in the West and India. Figures like Malala Yousafzai have been upheld as tokens of redemption and justice in the political rhetoric of what Deepa Kumar (2012, p. 193) calls “liberal imperialism,” a function of American empire in the global War on Terror. Yousafzai, a Nobel Prize laureate, women’s activist, and now celebrated author, has been lauded in the West for resisting misogynist violence under the Taliban regime in Pakistan. Surviving a near-fatal gunshot wound to the head after breaking the law to attend school, her provoking story seems to avow progressive feminist discourse in the West that Muslim women can and must be rescued from religious tyranny. As Charles Hirschkind and Saba Mahmood (2002) point out, little mention is made in such discourses of long-standing historical, political, and economic violence underpinning women’s suffering in countries like Afghanistan and Pakistan, of which colonial and postcolonial imperialism have played a major part. Rather than focusing on how ongoing “conditions of war, militarization, and starvation” (p. 345) disrupt women’s lives in these regions, they decry these deprivations as “less injurious to women than the lack of education, employment, and, most notably, in the media campaign … Western dress styles” (p. 345). Such discourses operate by “filtering” out dissonant facts and voices concerning the regions in question, which are, as Saadia Toor (2011, p. 1) notes, routinely “emptied of history, diversity, complexity, and dissent.” Instead, “Third World” Islam is continually pitted against the rational modernity, social mobility, and putative gender equality available through Western capitalism (Hirschkind & Mahmood, 2002). Scholars like Afiya Zia (2018) acknowledge that the history of feminism in Pakistan is complex, one that has been shaped by social movements, class, region, and politics. Although she disputes what she calls the “postfeminist” or “retro-Islamist” (p. 7) discourse of thinkers like Hirschkind and Mahmood, her work reveals a dense field of engagement with women’s rights in Pakistan that unsettles Western-origin notions of the absence of critical feminism on the one hand, and the Islamism vs. secularism paradigm on the other. However, she cautions against a reversion of the political into the cultural sphere, while salvaging a model of secularism that holds women’s universal civic rights apart from Islam. While a discussion of various feminisms and their benefits/retractions is far from the focus of this chapter, Zia’s analysis reveals how the project of feminism in Pakistan is ongoing, multifaceted, and responsive to legislative process. In fact, Zia identifies the turn to Islamism as a shrinking of the historically sanctioned role of secularism, revealing how the targeted political and cultural utilization of religion is more important in shaping women’s opportunities than an ostensibly “natural” inability to separate religion from governance in Pakistan. As a result, the alleged paucity of women’s rights in the Islamic world is concomitant with a belief that countries like Pakistan are accordingly bereft of democracy, culture, or economic opportunity, even if history tells a different story. Pakistan has been associated in popular Western and Indian media with military dictatorship and, more

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recently, as an instigator and oasis of terrorism, as the recent spectacle of Osama bin Laden’s assassination in 2012 testifies. This version of events obviates crucial historical precedents, including early US cooperation with Pakistan from Partition through the Cold War, in which American dollars and brands transformed Pakistan’s consumer economy. Ironically, this intercession has also enabled Pakistan’s political and social bankruptcy, as US foreign policy endorsed Islamist militancy and cultural radicalization in the global struggle against communism – an objective that justified martial rule and the funding, arming, and training of the mujahideen since the 1970s (Toor, 2011). Such discourses seem to posit that there is little to globalize about Pakistan beyond mediating its humanitarian crises and political instability, placing it on the receiving end of Western economic/military patronage. Again, women’s bodies are positioned as the terrain on which social conflicts and discursive scripts are negotiated, and stories like Yousafzai’s are treated as metonymical of Pakistani and Muslim society more generally, despite the fact that her experience is locally contingent – tied to existing rural and demographic volatilities in the Northwest Swat border she hails from. The crossover momentum of Pakistan’s current global media assemblage undermines these flattening and unilateral discourses, reminding us that globalization does not emanate exclusively from locations of Western cultural privilege. Mahira’s celebrity is a fitting case study of such processes at work, acting as a foil rather than corollary to existing Pakistani representations of womanhood and identity in transnational media. Rather than embodying the victimized “Other” divested of history, voice, and culture – which must be restored through Western political and cultural praxis – Mahira’s persona discredits the fallacy that Muslim womanhood is incompatible with globalization or the “private pleasures” (Hirschkind & Mahmood, 2002, p. 350) of consumer capitalism. This can be seen initially in her popular role as an MTV television personality on the show Most Wanted (2006–2008) and subsequently through her stardom in cinema and the drama serial genre that has, as I argue below, changed the game for representing female crossover stars. As analyzed in Chapter 2, the history of Pakistani crossover stardom has historically been female-gendered, an ancillary footnote in a nationalist and ideologically narrow cinema. These early stars fit easily into a pre-ordained victim-temptress mold; in fact, what makes Mahira’s crossover stardom revolutionary is how she globalizes an image of womanhood across the border that preserves discourses of cultural purity and duty rather than upending them. That this image offers a radical departure can be seen in her comparison with other recent (and miscarried) imports to Hindi cinema, most notably Meera, whose immodest status on screen strikes a chord with the legacy of early crossover antecedents. The actor, a consummate model-performer that befits much Pakistani stardom, is known in India mainly for her association with exploitative cinema in the lowerbudget (and softly pornographic) genres of thriller/horror. The star’s Hindi launch film, Nazar (2005, director Soni Razdan), is an instance of this category that serves more widely to navigate the moral, psychological and social jeopardies of

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a burgeoning neoliberalism. These themes are set in motion right from the film’s outset, where Meera portrays an actor with a preternatural vision for anticipating murder, a loose remake of The Eyes of Laura Mars (1978, director Irvin Kershner) with the crucial exception that a female cop, Sujata, is the mystery criminal. The opening frames introduce a duplicate gaze as it depicts a film shoot in progress that draws attention to the spectator’s own voyeuristic placement, while the song being picturized, Pyar Asth, is a veritable item number. Just prior to glimpsing her face, the camera loiters on Meera’s ample bust before trawling stock tableaux shots of her kneeling in the water, writhing sinuously in the sand, and rolling around on an open-air bed, appreciatively stroking her own body. The song is complemented by an Orientalist sensory-scape that features a sweat-drenched Meera in a skimpy belly dance costume, thrusting her body to an Arabesque soundtrack that signals “Otherness.” The film bears out this representation in the Divya/Meera character, whose professional success as an actor is predictably marred by loneliness and pathological instability. Her objectification, so aptly presented at the film’s opening, mirrors her liminal alter ego in the plot – the bar girls/prostitutes Sujata seeks to punish as retribution for her own HIV infection, with Meera her next victim. The patent parallels between film stardom and sex work make Meera’s protagonist more vamp than heroine, a figuration that plays out across her Hindi media projects. Ajay Gehlawat (2015) and others (Basu, 2013; Govindan & Dutta, 2008; Kasbekar, 2001) have noted a gradual blurring of boundaries in the vamp-heroine dichotomy in Hindi cinema since the 1970s. In truth, Meera’s opening song sequence, and her heavily sexualized image more generally, are not wholly distinct from those of other contemporaneous “item” stars like Bipasha Basu or Mallika Sherawat, or of the new age heroine at large. As Gehlawat (2015) notes, sexually assertive roles and the “item” song have in many ways become a staple for female actors, with the song vehicle becoming a substitute for sex on screen. The Pyar Asth sequence is a lucid outline of this process, which incorporates a number of pseudo-pornographic registers mimicking intercourse, self-stimulation, and orgasm. However, while Meera’s representation in some ways bestrides other female actors, her consistent association with highly sexed content continues traditions of peripheralizing Pakistani crossover stars. Significantly, her other notable Hindi film performances, namely Kasak (2005, director Rajiv Babbar) and Paanch Ghantey Mein Paanch Crore (2012, director Faisal Saif) visit similar themes in a B-grade cinema context. In the former Meera plays a cunning vamp who seduces her lovelorn hero out of his fortune, afterwards plotting his death; while in the latter she plays an ensemble role in a murder-sex heist thriller. The bold, adult connotations of this screen persona inevitably typecast the actor, who failed to take off with audiences and critics – leading to a short-term career in the industry. Unlike Meera, Mahira’s entry into Hindi cinema was conditioned by pre-existing crossover success in the socially engaged serial genre that continues to shape her “wholesome” reputation onscreen. Compared to the evolving sexual permissiveness of the Hindi film heroine, Mahira’s self-effacing decorum is a throwback to earlier

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incarnations of femininity in the medium. Much of this image stems from the conventions of the Urdu drama serial which prohibits explicit sexuality or desire, as referenced in Chapter 5. Again, the understated sensuality and dramatic verisimilitude of these serials, as Bhattacharya and Nag (2016) highlight, stand in contrast with the relative aggrandizement of commercial entertainment in India. The novelty of Mahira’s on-screen persona, then, reveals the influence of Pakistani cultural texts on audience expectations and content demand, which I discuss later in the chapter. Like Fawad, the star easily straddles both cinema and television platforms, with representations that are mutually reinforcing. She is also no stranger to challenging roles, being strongly associated with new Urdu cinema and its globalizing ambitions. Working with frontrunning director Shoaib Mansoor, she appeared in the filmmaker’s critical success Bol, a wide-ranging story that diversely traces issues of gender prejudice and equality, sexual rights, and infanticide. The film was a meditated effort at raising awareness about both gender and public health; it was even co-produced by the Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs, in conjunction with the Pakistan Initiative for Mothers and Newborns (PAIMAN) (Admin, 2012). The narrative offers a critique of both patriarchal codes and the state’s approach to family planning, while pushing a wider agenda for gender reform and tolerance. Mahira’s supporting role in this story was followed by other appearances that likewise interrogate the role of women in family and society at large, including the melodramatic Bin Roye (2015, director Shahzad Kashmiri) that evokes many of the same themes as Humsafar. In the story she portrays a young woman caught between individual desire and family obligations, a classic dramatic staging that is also widely explored in the serial drama. As Saba, Mahira codifies many of the motivating sentiments and traits surrounding her own star persona – personal sacrifice, the privileging of social values above self-interest, and of course modesty. In the case of Bin Roye the latter takes extreme proportions, as the protagonist unreasonably blames herself for her sister’s death due to jealousy, leading to total self-abnegation. Another notable appearance was in the multi-starrer Ho Mann Jahaan (2016, director Asim Raza), a narrative revolving around the theme of career choice and life destiny. Here the star is associated with the upwardly mobile ethos of consumer capitalism, signaled by her character’s pursuit of fame in the music industry that reverberates with the star’s previous incarnation as a VJ for MTV Pakistan. The film can be interpreted as a metaphor for Pakistan’s own bid for global advancement in the wake of neoliberal expansion against restraining political, economic, and social conditions (symbolized in the film by the traditional family). The variety of these roles and their conscious exploration of femininity attest to Mahira’s strategic placement in Pakistan’s national – and ultimately global – imaginary.

Humsafar and the desiring female subject The melodramatic engagement and globalizing impetus of the womandominated serial genre uphold this conflicted reality. As discussed previously, the themes and formal poetics of this genre support an economy of fantasy that enfranchises otherwise abstained desires and modes of identification for female

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audiences in Pakistan, along with a revisionist gender politics. While this empowerment is couched within socially prescribed norms and forms of narrative containment, it nonetheless opens imaginaries of romantic and social aspiration – if not outright transgression. Humsafar exemplifies this exploration of femininity and desire, demonstrating Mahira’s inimitable brand of strong yet culturally anchored womanhood typifying her crossover appeal. From the outset the show presents two contrasting paradigms of femininity that nonetheless offer multiple points of identification and/or rejection. As was mentioned in the previous chapter, Khirad (Mahira Khan)’s moral fidelity to her husband Ashar (Fawad Khan) opposes the self-absorption and libidinal excess of Sara (Naveen Waqar), Ashar’s best friend. While Khirad wears traditional attire and places filial duty before her own, Sara’s unsanctioned desire lead her to despair and eventual ruin, the epitome of fitna or catastrophic sexuality. This seemingly clichéd plot arc seems to allow little room for textual slippage; however, the nexus of emotions and desires activated by the narrative is far from unambiguous. Sara’s glamorous lifestyle and social independence serve as voyeuristic attractions for the viewer that invite aspirational desire, while her confidence, conspicuous wealth and mobility in spaces of professional labor invoke a cosmopolitan femininity. In addition, her psychological motivation easily becomes a source of empathetic identification for the viewer, as her intense yet frustrated yearning for Ashar elicits an angst the viewer can readily share, considering his position as idealized romantic object in the diegetic address of the narrative. The text often portrays events from Sara’s subjective perspective, with point of view editing highlighting Ashar’s desirability, on the one hand, and physical/social distance, on the other. This experience is doubled by the viewer’s own distance from text and star, wherein the desiring gaze is one way and cannot be returned, obstructed by the screen as barrier. Again, the viewer is summoned to occupy Sara’s psychic vantage as she fantasizes about Ashar, holding open possibilities for attainment and moral trespass that sustain the pleasure of “working through” obstacles to romantic or sexual union – much as spectators engage with the star image (in this case Ashar/Fawad). Even if the narrative ultimately authorizes female desire only within the confines of marriage, rewarding Khirad’s integrity and rejecting Sara’s extra-marital pursuit, her predicament inevitably mirrors the viewer’s, reflecting the malleability and open-endedness of desire in a melodramatic arrangement. The narrative likewise offers equal opportunity to identify with or reject Khirad’s subject position in the story. Her apparently traditional attitude and spiritual piety are represented as a source of dignity; this is relayed to the viewer almost immediately during the introductory frames of the series. From the beginning Khirad is associated with deference and righteous conduct, as she is shown covering her head with dupatta, engaging in namaaz (prayer), and observing predictable filial and community obligations, assisting neighborhood children with their homework and performing household chores for her elderly, ailing mother. However, this behavior is projected as a source of strength, independence, and

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honor rather than submission, and the story opens with a portrait of female selfreliance, as Khirad and her mother depend solely on themselves and other female kin. Khirad even chastises her mother for pandering to her brother Baseerat, insisting they do not need the financial or emotional support of a wealthier male relative. This offers the narrative’s first instantiation of patriarchal critique, as traditional feudal networks and institutions – including arranged marriage – are interrogated. Such trepidation occurs mutually for Khirad and Ashar, neither of whom wishes to marry under the given circumstances, as they each question how they are expected to wed partners they do not know. Conjugal romance and extended family commitments are thus placed in conflict through distinctly melodramatic binaries of individual vs. collective, self vs. other, and sacrifice vs. self-will. This representation fits the structural requisites of melodrama, with narrative tension deriving from the protagonists’ subjection to circumstances beyond their control, where the characters endure trials through which they must prove their innocence. This crucible applies to both male and female characters, whose lack of choice is vindicated by personal fortitude; however, such a subject location resonates especially with women’s concerns in patriarchal societies, as they bear the burden of maintaining national and cultural identity within class constraints – as negotiated through their bodies, sexuality, and conduct. In Humsafar Khirad is beholden, at least initially, to these gendered class and social demands; she confronts a dying mother, limited family resources, and imminent poverty that signify women’s social precariousness along class lines. Her mother’s anxieties, meanwhile, that she be “settled” with a good name and home reflect foundational tenets of patriarchal society in which women and marriage hold value in “consolidating class power” (Toor, 2011, p. 8) through kinship contracts and property rights. As Toor (2011, p. 8) notes, this makes marriage “something too important to be left to the men and women concerned,” while placing women in the contested position of preserving family/community/national honor. Nonetheless, this melodramatic subject position offers room for resistance and ideological disjuncture. Khirad rejects the situation she finds herself in, questioning her mother’s judgment and maintaining a sense of pride throughout her actions. Although she consents to the marriage at her mother’s deathbed, she refuses to relinquish her intellectual principles and class identity, explaining to her uncle that “she didn’t want a rich and mighty husband, just respect.” As a result, she makes little effort to ingratiate herself in her husband’s household, regarding her marriage as an “insulting” and demeaning form of “charity,” while she only responds to Ashar once he acknowledges her point of view and proud, determined personality. Khirad thereby vocalizes her unjust disadvantage as a lower-class woman forced into marriage, expressing a desire to achieve social mobility by returning to school for an advanced degree. “So what if I’m married? I’m still young and can make my dreams come true,” she declares to a friend. This independence would seem to be compromised by Ashar’s custodial patriarchy and Khirad’s diligence as loyal wife once they embrace their matrimony; however, this setup is again shown as misleading. The failures of traditional

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patriarchy, marked generationally through parental discretion and by Ashar’s authority, are made clear by the narrative’s driving crisis, while Khirad’s positioning as obsequious wife, daughter, and mother are problematized through her unwarranted suffering in these customary roles. Ashar misinterprets Khirad’s intentions with Khizir despite her selfless actions toward both husband and in-laws. His envy, suspicion, and accusatory outlook reflect a crucial double standard; while Ashar maintains his relationship with Sara, coming to her aid in moments of personal tragedy, Ashar sets limits on Khirad’s socialization, and her otherwise benign relationship with Khizir quickly becomes threatening – stemming again from patriarchy’s insistence on women’s incorruptibility as a reflection of izzat (honor). As a result, Khirad’s faultless embodiment of virtue is a source of ambivalence, available to both identification and dissent. Even as her wrongful treatment conjures up pathos, the irony of Khirad’s punishment contradicts the value of her traditionally “feminine” comportment. The hostility, belittlement, and repudiation she receives effect a dissonance that is affirmed by the complete social and material penury she encounters despite her faithfulness. Khirad makes this paradox explicit when she questions her own fate, proclaiming that “my husband abandoned me … forgot my love, loyalty and duty,” while the series’ complication of the ideal wife persona is fully realized in her empowering transfiguration by the climax of the series. Whereas Ashar had praised Khirad for being able “to speak well” and “think” while remaining “innocent,” demanding little if any material luxuries and serving him without question, her capitulating disposition is unequivocally reversed as the narrative progresses. Khirad epitomizes self-sufficiency by pledging to care for herself and her daughter, becoming a math instructor while resisting her aunt’s coaxing to make amends with Ashar, insisting that “she can survive anything now,” and without a husband’s beneficence. It is only due to her daughter’s grave illness that she is compelled to approach Ashar – and she does so with defiance. Her stamina is illustrated by a pivotal scene where Khirad and Ashar reunite after their prolonged separation. Storming into Ashar’s office without warning, she cuts him off immediately, asking him “Do I care what you have to say?” Stern, businesslike, and articulate, she scarcely grants Ashar an opportunity to speak as she argues her case to him, demanding her daughter’s “ethical and legal rights.” Ignoring his furious protests that she leave, Khirad calmly presents Hareem’s legal and medical documents, maintaining her composure as she edifies Ashar of his obligations under the law. Her forceful language and inflexible demeanor communicate her relative power, reinforced by the fact that she stands over Ashar, who remains seated and seemingly defenseless throughout their exchange. As discussed previously, this role reversal characterizes both protagonists during the remainder of the series, establishing a new equilibrium in the couples’ eventual reunion. Bhattacharya and Nag (2016, p. 6) confirm a similar reading of the serial, noting that “the dialogues written for Khirad speaks about female desire and also criticizes some basic assumptions of patriarchal and patrilineal family structures,” which they attribute to the literariness

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of the drama serial genre and its “attempt to ‘voice’ feminine desire and feminine agency through the course of the narrative and their closure” (p. 6).

Crossover stardom and cultural ambivalence: the case of Raees The centrality of Mahira’s interaction with conventional female roles is likewise invoked in Raees, her only other project with major crossover relevance. The film is notable for several reasons; first, for having a Pakistani co-lead, and secondly for its exploration of Muslim identity outside of the classic courtesan, Muslim social, or more recent terrorist genres in Hindi cinema. Although stretching the boundaries of Muslim representation, the film continues to associate the Muslim male with criminality through its delineation of the eponymous hero’s journey into underworld corruption and liquor racketeering. Regardless, the film openly addresses Muslim political and civic suffrage in India that points to the disenfranchised location of the Muslim citizen as minority. As a result, Raees (Shah Rukh Khan) as antihero performs a liminal subjectivity that educes identification and abhorrence, empathy, and remorse in conjoint measure throughout the narrative. Mahira, as Aasiya, actualizes these dualities through her supporting role as the protagonist’s wife. She symbolizes both Raees’ redemption and his tragic failure as husband, father, and community leader, as she watches him be apprehended for execution at the film’s conclusion. As with other filmic representations of Muslim womanhood, her portrayal as victim is cathartic. Regardless, like Raees himself, she mobilizes an equivocal representation of Muslim identity that bespeaks the film’s conflicted orientation to place, history, and ideology. Much of this has to do with the plot’s superficial resemblance to the actual life story of Abdul Latif, a notorious smuggler in Gujarat during the 1980s and 1990s who was implicated in the 1993 Bombay bombings, an outcome of resurgent communal violence across India. While the filmmakers deny any comparison (PTI, 2016) the text discreetly evokes this period and ambience, even using footage of the blasts in a telling scene from the film. This uneasy mooring of the film in a contentious moment of India’s political and social fabric justifies the narrative’s historical whitewashing on the one hand, and ambivalent depiction of the Muslim community on the other. Throughout the film there is ample opportunity to embrace, dispute, or catechize its vacillating placement of the Muslim as “Other.” From the outset the narrator, Majmudar (Nawazuddin Siddiqui), forecasts Raees’ demise, obliquely marking the film as an intra-psychic flashback of the police inspector and authority apparent in the story. However, although Majmudar is the voice of the film – allegorizing justice and the state – the narrative ultimately produces identification with Raees and Aasiya, both of whom emerge as martyr-like. However, this identification is uncomfortable as Raees is depicted as simultaneously murderous, benevolent, blasphemous, and secular, a contradiction that extends to the film’s use of religious symbols and themes. On the one hand Raees is associated with subaltern labor and its struggle for visibility, evident in the Muslim community’s illicit

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relationship to the economy and state. On the other hand, he and Aasiya participate in an unforgiving reign of organized crime characterized by avarice, hypocrisy, and gratuitous violence. He is positioned narratively as an “Angry Young Man” exacting justice for the underrepresented and exploited, a metaphor made real by his association with Amitabh Bachchan in this iconic role from the 1970s. This comparison is granted further depth by Shah Rukh Khan’s own status as a Muslim star with a historically ambivalent relationship to Muslim identity, having attained fame in overtly nationalist roles as a globalized, Hindu NRI. As discussed, the star has portrayed few Muslim roles on screen and remains characteristically neutral on issues of religious discord, maintaining a strongly secular stance in public. However, this has not occluded controversy from erupting around the star, from incidents of religious profiling at US airports (BBC News, 2016) to his early targeting by Mumbai-based gangs on religious grounds, where he was a victim of extortion and even death threats (Chopra, 2007). The star’s contradictory embodiment of Muslim experience, simultaneously repressed and underscored, is thereby interwoven in the film’s ambivalent portrayal of Islam. Negative elements are intermittently associated with Islam visually and narratively throughout the text. Raees’ aggression and “radicalism” are cued by his bloody selfflagellation during the Shia festival of Muharram, and later during numerous ironic scenes where he swindles, fights, and murders on this and other sacred religious holidays, against a blatantly Islamic mise en scéne of mosques, shrines, and Urdu script. One such scene occurs at a meat market during Eid, where animal slaughter denotes the protagonist’s visceral aptitude for violence in an apocryphal association of Islam and meat consumption with brutality. In addition, Raees is shown dominating Aasiya in a way that conflates Islam with “controlling” men and “submissive” women, while Aasiya is more looked at – rather than engaged – in the film. Her incidental status is indicated by an introduction 40 minutes into the narrative, when Raees watches her dance before her bedroom mirror in a voyeuristic imprint of desire as she “performs” an item song for his and the viewer’s gaze. Pulling her towards him, he declaims his authority by stating that he will take her to “Our World,” a place where “you will have a say, but my love will rule.” However, as with Humsafar, these interpretations are far from clear-cut. Aasiya’s representation differs little from conventional female roles in Hindi film, which are scopophilic, iconize the wife/mother persona, and hold a sanctimonious view of marriage within patriarchy. In addition, Aasiya displays moments of assertiveness that refute the text’s stereotypical message about Muslim femininity, such as when she leads a campaign to elect Raees and exonerate him from jail. She is shown delivering speeches, felicitating crowds, and directing campaign propaganda that emphasize her public esteem, representing both Raees’ aspirations and his competing drives for self-preservation and destruction. Their romance is a poignant contrast to his ruthless carnage and toxic masculinity, which obstructs him from realizing domestic contentment. Aasiya’s announcement of pregnancy and their celebratory mood, for example, are interrupted by an ominous phone call from a colleague that highlights Raees’ proximity to danger – and destined annihilation.

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That Raees cannot achieve social or political legitimacy is the film’s motivating pathos, made clear when he takes Aasiya to view the acres of land on which he plans to construct “Our World,” an idyllic community with equal access to education, healthcare, and wealth that references the state’s historical apartheid of Muslims. His assassination on this very spot at the end of the film again forbears the inclusion of the Muslim subject in the imaginative and material space of the nation. This nullification of the Muslim “Other,” however, is incompletely mitigated by Raees’ positioning as hero and the text’s facile allusion to secularism. Although the characters occupy Muslim spaces and are associated with religiosity through worship, custom, and appearance, Raees proclaims repeatedly that “my only faith is business” and he is shown enacting secular ideals of communal harmony that salvage the state’s official doctrine. He offers succor to both disadvantaged Muslims and Hindus in his community, waxing indignant when an associate suggests that he should stop giving free meals to Hindus during a relief effort; as he states, “no one should starve, Hindu or Muslim … they are our people.” This perspective is again reinforced when he kills Musa, a rival smuggler and orchestrator of the bomb riots who ensnares Raees in the scheme without the protagonist’s knowledge. Before stabbing Musa in vengeance, Raees reminds him that “I’m a businessman, but I don’t trade in religion.” Perhaps the greatest source of ambivalence in the text, however, is its portrayal of corrupt governance and complicity, in which politicians, cops, and ordinary citizens of both religions participate. In the end even Majmudar’s lofty goals are questioned as merely a reciprocal form of greed and narcissism, and in the final moments of the film he echoes the state’s dubious position when he expresses in voiceover that “I don’t know if I was right or wrong, but Raees’ words ring in my ears everyday … can you live with my blood on your hands?” The ending confirms Raees’ figuration as martyr, albeit an ironic one – in which he represents larger forms of marginalization and structural violence against Muslims, including the state’s obfuscation of provoked riots as a political strategy in Gujarat and elsewhere by Hindu nationalist parties. Raees’ contradictory representation of Islam and the resulting controversy surrounding the film condense overarching debates about Pakistani crossover stars and their interaction with Muslim identity. As mentioned previously, female stars are often positioned at the crossroads of such debates, with Mahira’s conflicted reception by both Pakistani and Indian audiences reflecting this tension. The polemic can be encountered in responses to both of the above texts and in fan discourse surrounding the star – which evokes both her crossover appeal and symbolization of Islam, femininity, and identity politics.

Mediating Muslim womanhood: Mahira, stardom, and post-nationality As summarized in Chapter 5, Humsafar revolutionized the serial genre in Pakistan, receiving positive reviews on both sides of the border and obtaining global viewership within weeks of its release. Like Fawad, Mahira was cited

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as a key constituent of the show’s success, with multiple reviews responding to her admirable performance. One review even placed her strong interpretation of womanhood as among the top five reasons for the show’s appeal, stating Firstly, it is great to see a woman standing on her own in defense of her honor, dignity and self-respect … It is about an issue of being accepted for who and how you are in your own right than what others want you to be. (Pakistan Ultimate Media, 2012) The same review also praised the show’s treatment of “class differences.” However, the program’s depiction of womanhood did not go unchallenged. In a live discussion with the series’ producer Momina Duraid, several comments questioned the show’s alleged conformity to patriarchal norms: The drama is a perfect example of patriarchal attitudes in our society. Till the very end the female lead spent time crying and asking for her husband’s largess. It would have been better if you showed a female lead with spine and character (and by character I don’t mean a ‘satti sawatri’ [perfect wife]). Do you think this affects how young women view themselves?. (Herald, 2016) In response, Duraid emphasizes that Khirad “finally stands up for her rights and is a powerful mother,” something that was not originally included in the novel (Herald, 2016). However, the same commentator extends their critique, asking “How is she a powerful mother? I am sure we have lots of powerful mothers like this who think its okay to be treated badly by their husbands and mother in laws” to which Duraid replies “Well I feel she was a powerful mother as she was not willing to apologize to her husband even when she got to know that he will accept her if she does” (Herald, 2016). This exchange is just one of many that emerged around the issue of women’s rights in the text. While Duraid is evasive in the above responses, avoiding her interlocutor’s incisive probing, other commentators explore the show’s gender politics in more depth. A caustic review in The Express Tribune Pakistan condemns Khirad’s “intelligence,” questioning her choices as a wife and mother in the series, asking rhetorically of Khirad “How stupid are you?” (Khalid, 2012). The writer goes on to rail against gender relations in the series more generally, pointing to “Khirad’s hypocrisy” for changing her mind at the conclusion while likewise disparaging Ashar for his “lack of a real apology to Khirad,” saying “If you call that contorted face, hitting your head against some random pole in the street an apology, I don’t buy that. Had I been Khirad, he could’ve bled to death and I’d still not take him back” (Khalid, 2012). That the series’ portrayal of gender stoked heated passions is evident in the political attention it gained. The Shiv Sena, a provocatively right-wing Hindu organization in India’s Maharashtra state, claims that the reason they banned

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Fawad and Mahira was due to Humsafar’s problematic orientation to women (Wali, 2015). A spokesperson comments that it’s about a man who sits by as his wife is thrown out, has his child, and returns to him for help with her health bills, only to find out that he’s a misogynist jerk who could care less. The woman then forgives him in the end … If Humsafar had shown Mahira giving him the boot and moving on to make something of her life instead of playing the damsel in distress our reaction would have been different. (Wali, 2015) While these comments deliberately oversimplify the series’ plot and themes, such criticisms shed light on how popular images of women reify larger debates around identity. The above commentaries record liberal/secular feminist discourses that cast women as barometers of social freedom and progress; that Khirad’s on-screen image is considered a reflection of the deficiencies of Pakistani society illustrates the pervasiveness of Western, neo-imperial epistemologies that nations like Pakistan are destined to be more patriarchal, less democratic, and incompatible with feminism. In their appraisals of Mahira/Khirad, each of the cited examples co-opts hallmark impressions of “Third World Women” (Hirschkind & Mahmood, 2002, p. 340) as captive, abused, and misguided, while ignoring Humsafar’s complex mode of address and exploration of female desire through melodrama. These comments seem to suggest that the only acceptable femininity is one that adheres to Western cultural, social, and political expectations. As Hirschkind and Mahmood (2002, p. 354) contend, such a discourse points to the degree to which the normative subject of feminism remains a liberatory one: one who contests social norms … but not one who finds purpose, value, and pride in the struggle to live in accord with certain traditional sanctioned virtues. Women’s voluntary adoption of what are considered to be patriarchal practices are often explained by feminists in terms of false consciousness, or an internalization of patriarchal social values by those who live within the asphyxiating confines of traditional societies. To be clear, the charges of pietist and “non-feminist docility” (p. 49) that Zia (2018) protests in her discussion of Islamic feminism, and which Hirschkind and Mahmood (2002) seem to endorse, do not do justice to the complex negotiations of desire and agency in Humsafar’s mode of address. As my foregoing analysis demonstrates, the melodramatic structure of the serial genre permits multiple and often conflicting subject orientations to the text that do not allow an easy reconciliation of ideology with representation. Indeed, there is little that can be interpreted as “docile” in Mahira/Khirad’s final trajectory in the serial, although the resistance she displays is not the same order as norms of political

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agitation, sexual freedom, and critical social rejection key to liberal feminism. Rather, her resistance remains situated in a feudal, class-sensitive context that cannot simply be wished away. Instead of bypassing realistic constraints of family, community, faith, and socio-economic status in their representation, shows like Humsafar highlight the palpable struggles women face confronting these forces, drawing attention to larger gender inequality and the internal contradictions of patriarchy in the process. Shifting hegemonic frames of reference helps illuminate how Pakistani drama serials like Humsafar can be authored by and embraced by women across the globe despite their apparently “objectionable” reprisals of Muslim femininity, which critics maintain should be amended to fit liberal feminist norms. Adopting this perspective justifies how Mahira’s inscription of strong yet traditional female roles, and religious and culturally devout values, possess realistic crossover appeal for fans – an image enhanced by her off-screen reputation as an actor who refuses to kiss on screen or accept sexually immodest projects (Vayani, 2015). Efforts to identify and procure this crossover fan base are visible in Zindagi TV’s strategic marketing across television, print, and social media platforms for the serial, including its 2014 #MadforMahira contest. The contest leveraged fan impressions on the channel’s Twitter feed to promote Humsafar contemporaneous telecast and the crossover image of the channel’s content more widely. Most relevant to this discussion is the channel’s depiction of Mahira as a crossover star whose brand of femininity has a distinctive appeal appropriate for its viewer segment; in the words of Priyanka Dutta, the Business Head for Zindagi TV: Our aim is to cater to the new age women with progressive mind-sets whose primary concern is to create a perfect work-life balance. Whether it is Kashaf of “Zindagi Gulzar Hai” … or Khirad of “Humsafar,” all of the leading ladies in our shows are the reflection of today’s women with progressive mind-sets. As a representative of Pakistani entertainment industry, Mahira sets the perfect example for Zindagi’s target audience. (Saud, 2014) Here Mahira’s “balanced” femininity in the serial – self-sufficient, yet morally circumspect – is considered an exportable model of womanhood to be consumed and emulated by Indian fans. That fans responded to Mahira’s articulation of femininity in the serial is echoed in commentary surrounding the star, with Humsafar immediately captivating the attention of its target female audience. As one Indian fan notes about the show, “Mahira was exceptional as a women who was betrayed … The way she handles herself so elegant even in times of distress … Mahira is really talented actress someone who can bring strength and vulnerability at once n [sic] a character” (Mg, 2016). This comment effaces any division between Mahira the actor and Khirad the protagonist, marking both star and character as combining traits of an idealized femininity; one that is reformist, demure, and conventionally

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feminine through Mahira/Khirad’s “vulnerability.” This theme is repeated throughout fan reactions to the star, with Mahira’s dramatic persona as humble, virtuous, and culturally faithful predominating fan insights regarding her attraction. Amruta, one of several Indian fans who won the #MadforMahira contest, posted on Twitter “Fr [sic] me she is only Khirad … Love n [sic] innocence personified. I am totally enchanted with her beauty n [sic] presence!”1 Another fan, Aashish, posts on the same thread: “A common girl who tell us every girl has its own fairy tale story & her voice makes me hear her again & her eyes are so pretty.”2 Significantly, the adjectives these fans choose recycle language used in the serial to characterize Khirad’s girl-next-door purity. Juvi notes “Just watched the interview of @TheMahiraKhan on @ZeeNews. This lady can actually kill with looks and her innocence!!!,”3 while Himani states “coz [sic] she is the prettiest lady who dance beautiful in rain. Her simplicity is her power … Luv her dressing style.”4 The above comments indicate how viewers identify with Mahira’s culturally bounded version of femininity in the serial that likewise resonates with traditional Indian values surrounding marriage, family, and socially sanctioned behavior. As another Indian fan remarks: The role played by you [Mahira] in humsafar was just amazing one should really watch this serial after getting married … it have the tendency to motivate the couples to love each other and how to compromise our little life for our parents who actually are the reason to brought up in this evil world [sic].5 This fan affirms the centrality of family and melodramatic ideals of sacrifice and personal compromise considered in the serial, upholding Khirad’s behavior as a practical template for navigating the challenges of marriage and filial obligations. That Mahira’s iteration of womanhood in popular media holds crossover appeal is seen in her global reception more widely. The star has multiple Facebook pages in Arabic, while Humsafar achieved phenomenal ratings and critical popularity in the Middle East when it was translated into Arabic as Rafeeq-AlRooh (Soulmate) and screened on MBC; fans responded widely to the serial on the channel’s Twitter page, describing it as “a successful series to the core” (Admin, 2014). The extent of Mahira’s transnational popularity is testified by other forms of official recognition, through awards like the “Unstoppable Emerging Talent from Pakistan” trophy at the Femina Middle East Women Awards in Dubai in 2016 (Entertainment Desk, 2016). The star also appeared at the 2017 Beirut International Awards Festival, where she won accolades in the “International Recognition” and “Best Dressed Category,” thanking her Arabic fans and expressing pride in representing Pakistani culture on a global stage (Web Desk, 2017). These mentions are significant in revoking Western-centric assumptions about Pakistani identity – and in particular, Muslim womanhood – as ghettoized and discordant with neoliberalism, while positioning Mahira as

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a visible representative of Pakistani/Muslim femininity within globalized benchmarks of glamour, talent, and brand synthesis across media industries. This transcultural finesse is further signaled by Mahira’s integration within the Hindi film industry as both a consequence of her crossover fame, and as a medium for the continued global exposure of Pakistani stars and media artifacts. As discussed previously, the Hindi film industry has a globalizing itinerary borne out by corporate brand convergence, media franchising, and transnational distribution that increasingly target overseas markets. Mahira’s celebrity prestige in Pakistan and international crossover success was one of several decisive factors in her selection for Raees along with the fact that she “looked” the part, fitting the film’s backdrop in a Gujarat Muslim ghetto during the 1980s (DNA Web Team, 2014). The film’s marketing indicates this perceived synergy between the lead stars’ images, the film’s thematic byline, and its overseas potential. Banking on both Shah Rukh Khan and Mahira’s existing fan following in Pakistan, the filmmakers anticipated an explosive premiere at the box office there – until the Uri attack forestalled the film’s release, leading to a rotating succession of bans and retractions. Further evidence of the film’s global orientation can be witnessed in its aggressive promotion in Dubai, featuring a gala reception during which an Arabic version of one of the film’s title tracks, Zaalima, was unveiled (Dani, 2017). This type of promotion illustrates attempts to cater commercially and culturally to regional sensibilities that are discernible in the film’s unorthodox creative profile – from subject matter and aesthetics to its conscious incorporation of religious themes. The film’s publicity, assisted in large part by Shah Rukh (who is also conveniently the ambassador for Dubai Tourism) was overwhelmingly successful, as the film garnered over 25% of its global box office earnings in the UAE market alone.6 Regardless, Mahira’s public image and the esteem of her media projects have not elapsed without debate. The star’s independent yet culturally tactful persona has been carefully cultivated in popular journalism, corroborating her on-screen inflection of femininity. The star affirms this compromise in her off-screen persona, acknowledging her anomaly as an influential media personality and divorced single mother in Pakistan on the one hand (Talwar, 2017), while prioritizing her children and accountability as role model on the other (Janmohamed, 2015). In an interview about Humsafar Mahira openly identifies with Khirad, appropriating her modest and culturally reserved attributes that concur with fan discourse about the star’s appeal. She acknowledges, “I identified with Khirad’s sharm (shyness) and jhijak (reserved nature) and her quiet resilience,” while pointing to the fact that she prefers to be “a hands-on mother … and I also don’t want to miss out on my son’s growing up years,” expressing a desire to not over-extend her career prospects (Singh, 2014). That the star epitomizes conventional feminine virtues, placing motherhood ahead of her career and extolling personal humility, is emphasized in another editorial piece that eclipses the actor’s filmography to focus on her reputation as

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a loving wife but also a sweet and caring mother of two children. Extremely close to her kids, she keeps writing journals for them in case something happens to her … now that is cute … the adorable actress maintains a low profile and wishes to have meaningful career graph and balance it well with her happy personal space. (Mishra, 2014) While such impressions are readily adjoined to female stardom in the Hindi film industry, Mahira is deliberate in circumscribing the social or political annotations of her public image. The rebellious and outspoken paradigms of female agency vaunted by liberal feminists, upheld by activists like Yousafzai and applauded in the West as emancipating for Muslim women, are foresworn by Mahira, who instead credits her fame to a subtle balancing act aimed at preserving cultural and religious attitudes. In one interview, Mahira defers calling herself a feminist “despite the strong women she has played,” what Zahir Janmohamed (2015) describes as “calculating the height of the tightrope she walks between pushing boundaries and retaining her popularity … especially since both conservatives and liberals in Pakistan try to claim her as one of their “own.” Such characterization marks the star as a global totem of Pakistani national pride – if for competing reasons. The conflict suggests in the first place that her crossover sojourn is motivated by nationalist concerns, a globalizing trend that both interacts with and undercuts hegemonic cultural flows originating in the West, of which liberal feminism is a part. In the second place, the star’s conflicted reception reveals the amount of public investment staked on women’s bodies and sexuality as standard bearers of national identity, stakes that are inexorably higher for Muslim stars in the global sphere. Mahira’s dually sacrosanct/ disdained status as a source of national, religious, and cultural identification lays bare debates around how Pakistani/Muslim identity should be represented and globalized, and for whom. This conflict echoes Naqvi’s (2010) insightful discussion about the geopolitics of Pakistani media in the post-liberalization era. As he notes, “It is not the discrepancy between democratic and consumer imaginaries of freedom that lends Pakistan’s private media industry its salience … but the uneasy entanglement of these imaginaries with geo-political and extraconstitutional forms of power” (p. 110). Part of this dynamic includes an “increasingly militarized division of the body politic into ‘moderate’ and ‘extremist’ Muslim camps” (p. 111), an embodiment of the state’s official position of Enlightened Moderation. Naqvi defines this position as an attempt to reconcile the diverging pressures of globalization with Islamic governance grounded in Shari’a, by striking a balance between the “possibility of creating a modern (rational, flexible, historical) interpretation of religious scripture that nurtures personal conviction and supports the individual and collective integration of Muslims into a global liberal political order” (p. 115). This frictional marriage of religion and consumerism is reflected in the privatization of public faith and its association with a modernist approach, what Naqvi characterizes as

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a “more user-driven form of ‘infotainment’” (p. 118) that reveals how religion is likewise subject to the forces of global convergence culture. Cheema (2018) also espouses this perspective, noting the importance many drama serial producers place on framing gendered empowerment and other socially progressive messages within an Islamic framework. The politicized, mediatized balancing act which both authors outline helps justify Mahira’s carefully crafted image of moderation both on screen and off, in which she disavows liberal secular feminism for a version firmly situated within available religious/cultural terms along the lines of Enlightened Moderation. This conflict is apparent in several controversies that are discussed further in the next chapter. Raees was temporarily banned in Pakistan for its censorious depiction of Muslims as “criminals, wanted persons, and terrorists” (IANS, 2017) – despite a majority Muslim cast and much crossover hype. This move, however, was more a politically reactionary display of nationalism against India in the wake of the Uri attack rather than a targeted abnegation of the film. Nonetheless, like the film itself, it sheds light on arguments over who has the right to “claim” Muslim identity and in what contexts. The second controversy involves a recent uproar over a photo in which Mahira is pictured wearing a short backless dress and sharing a cigarette with notable Hindi film star Ranbir Kapoor. Mahira was equally defended and rebuked in popular media (BBC Trending, 2017) reflecting a schism in debates over how Pakistani/Muslim womanhood should imbricate national pride – as a liberal-progressive victory or degradation of inviolable rights to female modesty, both of which utilize rhetoric about women’s prerogatives and are tied to the body. These jarring viewpoints reflect fissures in Mahira’s celebrity discourse of culturally “balanced” femininity, leaving it open to ideological usurpation. The incident reveals the politically volatile dimensions of globalizing Pakistani identity and “crossing over” for female stars, with the scandal being widely interpreted within nationalist politics of the ban on both sides of the border. Such controversies once again illuminate globalization’s multifarious character, which juxtaposes nationalism and identity politics within transnational consumer capitalism. Mahira’s celebrity is in dialogue with those of Zafar and Fawad, each of which appraises the role of national identity within the affective potencies and aspirational desires of global capital. Mahira’s celebrity averts Western-centric dogmas about Muslim womanhood, and by extension Pakistani identity, as anathema to the purported freedoms of neoliberal consumerism. Her attachment to global commodity brands and media circuits, and her participation in the melodramatic serial genre critically interrogate these conjectures. While not without debate, the denunciation of shows like Humsafar – and Mahira’s celebrity image more widely – fail to take into account their crossover identification for global audiences. Humsafar’s melodramatic format suits complex gendered experiences within feudal-patriarchal society that articulate realistic pressures, emotional conflicts, and competing commitments to family, self-fulfillment, and religious ideals. In this narrative arrangement there is room for heterogeneous subject positions,

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subversive desires, and coded social critiques, evident in the narrative’s sophisticated deconstruction of patriarchy. Rather than framing feminism as a singular conscription in the liberatory/rebellious mold, these shows adopt a revisionist gender politics within culturally familiar frameworks and modes of address that have mainstream legitimacy – effectively lending voice to women’s desires and needs in a public sphere where few such outlets exist. As Hirschkind and Mahmood (2002) remind us, those who view Islam and traditional cultural values as “important to their lives, their politics, and their forms of public expression … are not destined to live within authoritarian, intolerant, and misogynist societies” (p. 350) as popular Western ideology would have us believe. Mahira’s image marks a departure with hallmark representations of Muslim female celebrity in Hindi cinema, in which stars were historically shunted into a bifurcating route of either hyper-signifying the nation, as with stars like Nargis, or cast firmly within the victim-temptress pattern, becoming arcane figures of seduction, tragedy and mythical legend that were ultimately “Other.” That Mahira maintains her Pakistani/Muslim identity across media projects and within her self-representation – indeed, that this image is central to her crossover appeal – reveals the transformative agency of global media convergence. However, as the next chapter demonstrates, “crossing over” continues to incite political friction, bringing to light dialectical concerns over religious and national identity in a deterritorial cultural landscape.

Notes 1 Information retrieved November 6, 2017 from “#MadforMahira,” Twitter, https:// twitter.com/search?q=%23madformahira, 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 Retrieved November 6, 2017 from “#MadforMahira,” Twitter, https://twitter.com/ search?q=%23madformahira, 5 Retrieved November 5, 2017 from “Mahira Khan, Actress,” Facebook, www.facebook. com/Mahira.Khan.Actress/photos/a.356759141010922.81146.205809799439191/ 820565131296985/. 6 Information retrieved July 3, 2017 from BoxOfficeMojo.com, “Raees” www.boxoffi cemojo.com/releasegroup/gr2804568581/.

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Mg, D. (2016, March 16). What Indians think of recently aired Pakistani drama Humsafar. Quora.com, Retrieved November 8, 2017 from www.quora.com/What-Indians-thinkof-recently-aired-Pakistani-drama-Humsafar. Mishra, R. (2014, October 15). Mahira Khan: 7 things to know about Humsafar’s pretty Khirad Hussain. India.com, Retrieved November 8, 2017 from www.india.com/buzz/ mahira-khan-7-things-to-know-about-humsafars-pretty-khirad-hussain-172850/. Naqvi, T. (2010). Private satellite media and the geo-politics of moderation in Pakistan. In S. Banaji (Ed.), South Asian media cultures: Audiences, representations, contexts (pp. 109–122). London and New York, NY: Anthem Press. Pakistani Ultimate Media. (2012, January 27). 5 reasons that make Humsafar best Pakistani drama serial. Pakistani Ultimate Media, Retrieved November 5, 2017 from www. pakium.pk/2012/01/27/humsafar-best-pakistani-drama-serial. PTI. (2016, December 12). Raees work of fiction, not based on any person: Shah Rukh Khan. Indian Express, Retrieved November 8, 2017 from http://indianexpress.com/art icle/entertainment/bollywood/raees-work-of-fiction-not-based-on-any-person-shahrukh-khan-4423737/. Saud. (2014, November 12). India is #MadforMahira!!! Reviewit.pak, Retrieved November 5, 2017 from https://reviewit.pk/india-is-madformahira/. Singh, H. (2014, October 10). In conversation with “Humsafar” couple – Fawad Khan, Mahira Khan. The Indian Express, Retrieved November 3, 2017 from http://indianex press.com/article/entertainment/play/big-hit-2/. Talwar, P. (2017, February 10). Mahira Khan explains why Raees was like school. NDTV Movies, Retrieved November 3, 2017 from http://movies.ndtv.com/bollywood/ mahira-khan-explains-why-raees-was-like-school-almost-1658139. Toor, S. (2011). Gender, sexuality and Islam under the shadow of empire. The Scholar and Feminist Online, 9.3, 318–340. Vayani, R. (2015, July). Interview: Mahira Khan. Newsline, Retrieved November 5, 2017 from http://newslinemagazine.com/magazine/interview-mahira-khan/. Wali, H. (2015, October 22). We banned Fawad, Mahira because of Humsafar: Shiv Sena. Dawn, Retrieved November 8, 2017 from www.dawn.com/news/1214627. Web Desk. (2017, July 10). Mahira Khan dedicates international award to Pakistan. Geo TV, Retrieved November 3, 2017 from www.geo.tv/latest/148789-mahira-khan-dedi cates-international-award-to-pakistan. Zia, A. (2018). Faith and feminism in Pakistan: Religious agency or secular autonomy? Eastbourne: Sussex.

7 A FRAGILE UNION Moving forward, facing backward

The preceding chapters have situated Pakistani crossover stars within a historical context while examining their emergence within mutating frameworks of political economy, narrative, and culture – an outcome of global media convergence. Such transfigurations justify how Pakistani crossover stars can be accommodated in the industrial and imaginary apparatus of Hindi cinema. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 have also examined the star personas of three of the most eminent crossover artists, and how their celebrity texts interact with Pakistani and Muslim identity on a global scale. In each case the star images of Zafar, Mahira, and Fawad – as negotiated through their media artifacts and public representation – deconstruct prevalent apothegms about Pakistani culture as ghettoized, illiberal, and discordant with the aesthetic and consumer hedonisms of global capital, including its routine association with radical Islam and terror in Western-origin discourse. In addition, the crossover discourse surrounding these stars indicates that their “difference” as Pakistani is instrumental to their crossover appeal, whether as an inscription of consumer novelty or outlet for identification and aspirational desire within the vicarious pleasures of popular culture. Finally, the analysis of these star personas reveals how the representation of national and religious identities in commercial Hindi cinema has shifted over time to include subject positions outside of the strictly Hindu, secular, or heteronormative variations historically encountered, a transition supported by the globalizing imperatives of India and Pakistan-based media industries. In concluding this study, the present chapter examines how Pakistani crossover stars, while operating as totems of global capital, simultaneously problematize and render acute conflicts over national and religious belonging. These conflicts are patently visible in ongoing efforts to ban Pakistani media and performers, with the most recent exclusion serving as an optimal example of the politically and socially fractious implications of “crossing over.” What sets apart the 2016 ban from prior attempts is the totality of its precepts, level of political extremism, and amount of

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public deliberation it generated, reflecting the collision of multiple global forces. The ban exemplifies an intensifying conflict between the ideoscapes/ethnoscapes of political nationalism in India, embodied by the state, government, and ethnocivic institutional engagement, and the technoscapes/financescapes/mediascapes of neoliberal capital, visible in the industrial and consumer economies of media production, dissemination, and reception. The latter includes the effects of global media convergence as a top-down and bottom-up cultural phenomenon, ranging from corporate brand integration and media franchising to the active foraging, sharing, and collective intelligence of popular media enthusiasts. These forces, however, although in conflict are not mutually exclusive; as the below analysis demonstrates, political nationalism is inextricably bound with globalized pathways of consumer capital, evident in the transnational reverberation and consequences of the ban on the one hand, and the conflict between and within consumer mediascapes/technoscapes on the other. The formalization of the ban by the film industry incorporates hyper-nationalist discourse that reveals how ideoscapes/mediascapes can collaborate, evincing a contiguity between identity politics and globalization where ethnic/religious nationalisms become consumable “brand” entities infiltrating politics, news, entertainment, and commodity culture more widely. Mankekar explores this reality in her discussion of Hindu nationalism, politics, and commercial television in the 1980s, in which popular serials like The Mahabharata (1988–1990, director B.R. Chopra) and Ramayana (1987–1988, director Ramanand Sagar) corroborated a burgeoning movement towards identity radicalization in mainstream culture that reinforced political ideologies about Hindu supremacy, historical privilege, and majority enfranchisement in the national sphere (Mankekar, 1999). Talbot (2000) likewise points to this synthesis in his discussion of the Kargil War, in which nationalism incorporated popular cinema, television, and a range of consumer products. As alluded in Chapter 2, perhaps the most telling example of this collusion is the role of the NRI genre in 1990s and early 2000s Hindi cinema as an instrument of political and national branding, marketing a North Indian, Hindu identity to global diaspora audiences. This inclination reflected political attempts to endorse and validate the capitalist gentrification of “India Shining” under Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) political doctrine. The divergences revealed by the ban encourage reflection on the successes and limitations of cultural diplomacy in conflict resolution – both regional and global. As evident in the analysis below, many bureaucratic detractors of the “soft power” approach cited its failure as support for the ban, pointing to ongoing geopolitical tensions between the two neighbors as evidence that high-profile conflicts require administrative-military retaliation. In contrast, many figures within the industry and general public of both nations position popular culture as a democratic force that should be free of political intervention on the one hand, and which fosters cultural harmony on the other. These opposing subject positions reflect a struggle to direct cultural ownership in global contests over political identity and nationalism. Indeed, the altercation itself, and the discourses over consumer independence

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as “democracy,” reveal how ideas about national sovereignty and traditional modes of citizenship are increasingly fragile in a deterritorial world. In response to these emerging frictions, a soft power approach which takes into account the active role of mediated publics is necessary, as inspection of the ban illuminates core discrepancies between state objectives and popular sentiment within a wider struggle among the various “scapes” explicated above. This work has endeavored to take a median approach in conflict resolution theory and globalization scholarship, by demonstrating how crossover media texts – including the star text – exemplify processes of contraflow, cultural hybridity, and “third space.” A primary argument throughout is that Pakistani crossover stars “unfix” national, religious, and cultural boundaries. They accomplish this in several ways; firstly, by straddling territorial, political, religious, and industrial boundaries they interrogate enshrined benchmarks of identity that are reinforced by the cultural habitus of global consumer capital. The “in-between” status of crossover stars evokes the ambiguities of colonial and postcolonial discourse about national identity that can produce ideological dissonance. This effect is apparent in popular commentary around the ban in India, with multiple viewpoints claiming Pakistani stars as “natives” that resuscitate the porous cultural environment and ideological slant of the early Progressive movement by denying the integrity of political borders. Crossover stars and their media texts thereby highlight the transience of the migrant/refugee, the negative space which nationalism has historically sought to reject. In a convergence culture environment that is increasingly borderless this negative space is more visible than ever, where the locative agency of the new consumer-citizen is likewise migratory, bearing out new relationships to national identity that situate culture as the primary indicator of subjective belonging. This “belonging” can be configured within hegemonic frameworks of political identity, alongside them, or outside them completely. Reciprocal attempts to vindicate nationalist discourse by “fixing” crossover stars with intransigent definitions of religious and national identity may suit political exigencies, but also resist otherwise inconvenient cultural realities of globalization. Crossover stars disrupt hegemonic identities primarily through the imaginative agency of popular media consumption. The heterogeneous subject positions available to audiences through the narrative structures of popular cinema and television accommodate ideological transgression, whether through the subjective detachment of satire, as in Tere Bin Laden, or through the formal poetics of melodrama in serials like Humsafar, which induce a complex emotional engagement of identification, empathy or rejection – as well as desire. That desire has the potential to unbalance identity is visible in the controversies surrounding Fawad’s and Mahira’s reception in light of the ban, in which both stars’ desirability as global celebrities was attacked, provoking protectionist attitudes from loyal nationalists. As mentioned earlier, the fact that crossover stars also serve as lifestyle attractions comparably elicits affective pleasures and aspirational desires affiliated with consumer capitalism, positioning stars as arbiters of cultural identity that can exceed or disqualify other modes of identity. This places consumer capitalism as an alternate

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locus for apprehending identity on a global scale, something realized in the brand attachments and modes of commodification linked to the star image.

Theorizing the crossover text as soft power So what is the verdict, then, on the potentiality of crossover media as soft power in conflict resolution? Cheema (2018) provides a productive lead on this regard in her theorization of Pakistani publics as “cultural citizens.” Her work offers both convincing and practical evidence that culture in the global network society is an extension of the traditional public sphere, acting as the site where preliminary civic consciousness is negotiated. Her archive of viewer responses to popular television programs reveals how the media consumer engages the “outside” realm of the sociopolitical within the ambiguously private space of the home, often by translating active readings of the media text into prosocial behavior. This reality is both promising and problematic – for example, by portending the “hybridity as hegemony” (Thussu, 2007, p. 27) argument that scholars have already recognized, in which the media text perpetuates dominant ideological readings contoured by the imperatives of neoliberal capital. Cheema (2018) offers proof that some texts are indeed interpreted this way, for instance in the case of mothers not allowing their young daughters outside on their own in response to representations of child rape in serials like Khusi Ek Roag (2012, director Mohsin Mirza). In this case, the serial’s depiction of public life is taken as “reality,” while its otherwise socially conscious message becomes a pretext to reinforce existing gender inequities by further constraining women’s physical and civic mobility outside the home. Here the production company’s commercial agenda, achieved by “selling” controversial content in a globalized format, seems to normalize existing social structures while obfuscating aspirational empowerment for the consumer as citizen. However, Cheema’s (2018) work nonetheless demonstrates how popular culture can, in many respects, surpass the traditional routes of civic participation – particularly for conventionally marginalized publics like women, and within systems where there is little legitimate access to political representation under authoritarian governments (of which Pakistan is a moderate example, unlike places like North Korea). In her words, consumer media offers spaces for the intersection of the social, private and political. In modern times, popular culture and politics are intertwined … popular culture provides an arena where dominant ideologies and hegemonic agendas are simplified enough to make politics understandable, as well as pleasurable, to the audiences. (p. 78) This effect occurs not least, she claims, through popular media’s capacity to expose discursive contradictions while recycling political issues in popular consciousness

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through the intertextual (read convergent) production, narration, and reception of content. In supporting this argument, she notes how gaps in state law around gender are exposed in the many exploitations female protagonists face in the narrative arc of the drama serial, where “ongoing circulation and repetition of topics of social relevance on a weekly basis (episodes) allow citizens to return to an issue again and again” (p. 78). As a result, “Addressing the same issue of gender across different platforms (drama serials and interactive talk shows) serve as a reminder to the public that this subject needs urgent attention” (p. 78). One can clearly extrapolate from these observations how the crossover star text operates in the same way, by serving to repeatedly emphasize the unsettling hybridity of crossover stars and their media texts as “third space” that refuses to be contained by narrative or national borders. The dramatic corpus of stars like Zafar – where the myths of Muslim “Otherness” and community difference are continually debunked, or the signification of transgressive desire and fantasy embodied in the star text of Fawad, or the role of Mahira as Islamic feminist contraflow – can likewise serve, I contend, to preserve the contentious issue of Indo-Pak accord in the bilateral public sphere. The signification and message of cultural mobility these stars represent is part of a wider textual circuit where the symbols and affects of consumer aspiration get continually reinforced on screen and off. In this way, as demonstrated earlier, the star always signifies the “crossover” body/migrant that keeps the question of national borders open to critique and debate within mutually accessible frameworks of consumer capitalism. In addition, the adjacency of the peripatetic crossover star on screen with his/her off-screen persona serves to complement and contradict his/her representation across media forms that, like Cheema sustains, can provide multiple perspective on an undoubtedly dense political issue. The type of counter-discourse that consumers develop is an example of the cultural citizenship Cheema (2018) identifies in her sample of Urdu drama audiences. If citizenship means to discuss the sets of duties and obligations that states owe to the public and vice versa … cultural citizenship means opening the discourse on traditional citizenship to a discourse on identities, otherness, and tolerance … It is through unhindered and symbolic representation of identities in public fora that the right to be culturally different is registered. (my emphasis, p. 130) This effect is precisely the object of administrative cultural diplomacy; however, reluctance to leverage government-sponsored soft power initiatives has failed to support the necessary change. One of the reasons for this phenomenon is that acknowledging “Otherness” imperils the inviolability of nationhood enshrined in post-Partition discourse, which hardly suits aims for political sovereignty on both sides of the border. It is in this formative gap that popular culture can occupy a more central, non-partisan and democratic role through the model of

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cultural citizenship that Cheema outlines. Peace is, after all, in the best interests of the general populations in both countries, as economic and social arguments against the blanket ban on culture suggest in the ensuing discussion below. Most importantly, Cheema remind us that people who do not, or cannot, engage with the media are likewise unable to participate in political citizenship. As a result, cultural citizenship is a necessary pre-cursor to civic representation and its legal, juridical, and bureaucratic outcomes. There is a strong argument to be made, therefore, for the role of culture in conflict resolution by preparing citizens for civic engagement. This observation has not escaped other advocates of cultural diplomacy like Akhter (2016), who focuses on the potential of live theatre to neutralize conflict. Theatre’s direct mode of address, its sense of immediacy, and practices of communal viewing are framed as salvaging features in the genre’s capacity to foster people to people contacts. These capabilities are encapsulated in the Drama for Conflict Resolution (DCT) paradigm, which aims to unite dramatic content with beliefs in the value of conflict resolution, prerogatives which get enacted through participant’s personal relationships and the wider social field to bring about change. Her argument, and the tradition of “peace theatre” more widely, descends from the early Progressive movement as a liberal enterprise focused on civic debate and action. The limitations of such an approach however are obvious; theatre involves the commitment not only of a small subset of activists, but is further restricted in terms of access, class, and location. Like the early Progressive movement, it is an example of high culture that privileges upper and middle-class urban citizens who already have the financial resources and political willpower to engage. In addition, there is little longitudinal research to suggest that individual viewings of a theatre production can produce enduring prosocial effects, or that they differ in any consequential way from more scalable, popular formats like television and cinema. The latter can reach audiences directly in the home, often require long-term involvement with the text, and can be accessed across a variety of platforms and viewing contexts. This conclusion is buttressed by the work of Jisha Menon (2013), who uses mimesis as a theoretical praxis to investigate the role that performance plays in doubling the self, compelling a recognition “of similitude that does not dissolve into sameness,” (p. 17) unlike the dogmas of national/religious identity which sustain polarized myths of a unified self that by default supposes an excluded other. While recognizing theatre as a superb example of mimesis, Menon looks at how mimesis plays out as “a sense of shared witnessing” (p. 18) across daily life, from patriotic parades and public displays of ritual to cinema, theatre, and even somatic texts. Mimesis is therefore not categorically positive or negative, nor is it restricted to certain modes of reception – mass culture, like theatre, can likewise play a role in collective acts of witnessing. The only sticking point, as Akhter (2016) mentions and which Menon (2013) does not directly address, is the commercial objectives of mass entertainment versus the social justice model of formats like theatre. However, the post-performance discussions and critical stimulation Akhter

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(2016) outlines as vital to civic awareness in theatre are also affirmed by Cheema (2018) in her ethnography of commercial television viewers. In addition, both Cheema and Kothari (2005) have acknowledged that civic deliberation plays a role at the production and reception ends of the commercial media spectrum, even if this process is often inconsistent. The above summation overlaps with my own findings on audience reception. The convergent fan communities surrounding stars like Fawad and Mahira indicate that popular culture is capable of inciting prosocial reflection which can occasionally transform into resistance, as popular furor over the ban indicates. These facts bolster Iwabuchi’s (2007) earlier declaration that popular culture can indeed elicit a shift in cultural attitudes within politically entrenched situations of conflict. However, the limits of culture as diplomatic palliative cannot be overlooked. Cheema (2018) is cautious to point out that nationalism and faith remain important organizers of identity, sometimes even surpassing gender in order of priority during her interviews with participants. She observes at the outset of her treatise, for example, how “religion is by far the strongest of all factors that influence the context of production and reception” (p. 7) in the Urdu serial genre. This view is supported by a consideration of how content reception is highly sensitive to class and social variables, such that the perceived relationship between content and civic interpellation depends principally on the viewer’s personal realities and roles within society. While this avows the flexibility of popular culture to position diversely situated subjects, it also places political activism on a continuum of needs and wants, such that some issues are more relevant to viewers than others. Comprehensive explorations of the relationship between class and right-wing politics in India bears out this assertion, revealing how strong pro-nationalist sentiment among the politically mobilized middle class may mitigate the draw of bilateral cultural appeals, and thus prospects for a sustainable peace (Banerjee, 2017; Mohammad-Arif, 2011). In addition, as Cheema (2018) concurs, cultural change is a long-term process that intersects with, rather than eclipses, the role of government. It is clear that a compromise between cultural and legitimate measures of citizenship is necessary if a structured, long-term peace is to be achieved. Perhaps the greatest barrier to popular media as conciliation is the relationship between power, discourse, and mass entertainment that has been meaningfully assessed by scholars like Devasundaram (2016), Mecklai (2010), and Spencer (2005). There is substantial evidence that soft power depends in large part on the hard power of states – something that I explore in detail below in relation to the ban’s politics. To return to Govil’s (2007) warning quoted in the Introduction, so long as Hindi cinema remains the strong arm of nationalist propaganda, the prospects for cultural diplomacy are bleak. Regardless, there is ample evidence that cultural hybridity, cosmopolitanism, and the consumer affect of crossover stars are viable forces for global audiences in a newly post-national world, as the remainder of this chapter demonstrates.

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Broaching the ban: a historical context As summarized in Chapter 2, media censorship and import restrictions across the border have a complicated legacy. While the earliest bans were industry motivated – an effort to reduce competition and boost production in the nascent Urdu-language film industry – subsequent bans acquired a nationalist flavor in response to acrimonious India–Pakistan ties. These bans affected cinema more than television, which as the earliest Pakistani crossover artists demonstrate, continued to exert a more flexible influence. The cultural impasse escalated after the 1965 war over Kashmir and reached its height during Zia-ul-Haq’s dictatorship in Pakistan during the 1980s, including the widespread closure of cinema halls that rendered mainstream film production at a commercial standstill (Ahmad, 2016). These draconian measures only served to fuel piracy, and media smuggling was a mainstay for Pakistani audiences until an important breakthrough in India–Pakistan rapprochement occurred in 2005. For the first time, Indian films were allowed to release in Pakistan so long as they were shot in third-party locations, and not entirely in India. In 2008 this caveat was relaxed to include the release of up to 12 Hindi films per year in Pakistan, a boon for local exhibitors (Robinson, 2008). The step represented opportunities for both industries to globalize amidst expanding economic growth, bureaucratic partnership, and social exchange between the two countries, evident in a slate of executive agreements from joint military exercises to increased trade and commercial passenger flights across the border. The measures were a sustained effort to stimulate “people to people contact, business and trade activities” (Robinson, 2008). If cricket, cinema, and popular culture more widely were once potent symbols of nationalism and undeclared war across the border that must be carefully adjudicated to contain seditious effects, the objective of achieving a more lasting peace between both states was progressively conceived as occurring on the cultural front. Ironically, as suggested by the above comments, neoliberal capitalism and consumer culture were widely apprehended as an outlet for reducing bilateral tension and fostering mutual development. This orientation is embodied in official discourse and through organizations like Aman ki Asha (Hope for Peace), a joint cooperative of the Times of India Group and the Jang Group in Pakistan.1 The initiative aims to improve cross-border solidarity in commerce and culture through public relations campaigns, focused journalism, seminars, and fundraising. Other initiatives have likewise emphasized cultural exchange as a key peace-supporting device, evident in projects like ZEAL for Unity a project spearheaded by the Zee Entertainment Group in India. Announced in March 2016, the initiative brought together 12 filmmakers on both sides of the border to co-produce and direct a series of films about freedom and harmony (DNA Correspondent, 2016). The program’s stated objective bears strong resemblance to Zee’s other franchise subsidiary, Zindagi TV, which similarly aims to consolidate cross-border viewership through corporate convergence and the emotional poignancy of peace as a marketable concept. Ironically, Zindagi

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TV’s subsequent boycott of Pakistani content following the Uri attack points to how consumer culture can be deployed equally as a tool to reinforce ideological and geographic borders (Sharma, 2016). In this case, fluctuations in popular zeitgeist and consumer demand meant that selling peace was no longer profitable. That globalization can simultaneously fragment and reassemble “imagined communities,” to use Benedict Anderson’s (2006) term, is thereby evident in the patchwork implementation of these conciliatory initiatives, a peace process disposed to capricious political interruptions of which the 2016 ban is the latest incarnation. This prevaricating commitment is indicated by ongoing controversies that continue to punctuate an otherwise recent era of diplomatic optimism post-2008. Precedents to the Uri attack ban can be detected as early as 2013, when Indian and Pakistani governments flirted with another wholesale ban on cross-border media. This cat and mouse game, like its 2016 culmination, likewise activated frictions between commercial and political interests. In November 2013 the Lahore High Court (LHC) decreed that Indian films smuggled across the border and exhibited in Pakistani cinemas were illegal and could not be screened, condemning the Pakistan Censor Board for issuing false licenses to contraband media (Our Correspondent, 2013a). The petition for ruling was filed by the host of a private TV channel; however, official justification for the verdict hinged on vaunted nationalist discourse, citing the fact that “some Indian films promoted terrorism and lawlessness in Pakistan,” (Our Correspondent, 2013a) while the petitioner recommended that film smugglers be tried under the state’s Anti-Terrorism Act (Our Correspondent, 2013a). The proclamation raised backlash both from vested parties within the Pakistani entertainment industry as well as the Indian government. This preliminary ban stages multiple conflicts; on the one hand, rhetoric about the necessity of the ban appeals to state-based discourses around national defense and cultural protectionism, a vestige of Partition that revives mutual, time-honored concerns about “perceived aggression.” In this version of events, political nationalism is pitted against laissezfaire commerce as the sale and profit of Indian films is considered hostile to the national interest and state intervention. Here the ideoscapes of the political establishment confront the financescapes and mediascapes of globalized capital; indeed, this argument was widely presented by film distributors in protest to the ban. In filing an appeal against the edict, representatives of Pakistan’s exhibition guild contended that executing the ban would hinder Pakistan’s global advancement, claiming “the people of Pakistan were starved of entertainment and appreciated the revival of the ‘cinema culture’ which also presented a soft image of Pakistan to the rest of the world” (Our Correspondent, 2013a). The above quote assimilates the privileges of consumer demand with economic liberty, growth, and the global circulation of culture. In this case the freedom to screen Indian and foreign films is linked with incentives to gentrify and globalize Pakistan’s own domestic industry, which “had seen a resurgence of quality films” (Our Correspondent, 2013b). Likewise, India’s Information and Broadcast Minister Manish Tewari insisted that “films and serials were ideas that couldn’t be

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stopped” (Our Correspondent, 2013b) pointing rather ironically to the futility of the state’s legislation while highlighting the interconnectedness of a transnational media environment. On the other hand, the ban also reveals a conflict between financescapes/mediascapes. By appealing to national sensibilities, the ruling provided a convenient ideological cloak for commercial abrasions in Pakistan’s compact entertainment market. The fact that the banning of Indian films and serials was promulgated by a private television station reveals an embattled media terrain among industries, formats, and audience access; in this scenario protecting Pakistan’s more dominant television industry from the incursion of multiplex cinema, whether domestic or international, and competition from Indian programming content. The conflict makes it clear that globalized mediascapes collide not only with national borders and policies, but also each other. The controversy further points to globalization’s contingent effects by revealing how hegemonic ideologies can be co-opted to meet the agendas of neoliberal capitalism, in this case those of a privatized media actor – television.

Ban politics in an age of culture: the 2016 difference These same dynamics can be witnessed in the ban under discussion. As with previous bans, its ideological discourse continues colonial and postcolonial regimes of knowledge in the wake of Partition. The ban was more than popular outcry to a sobering event of national interest; rather, it was an extension of state authority in the name of internal security that reignited familiar rhetorical and political antagonisms. The specific circumstances leading up to the ban began on September 18, 2016 when four armed terrorists detonated multiple grenades along the Line of Control (LOC) between the two nations at Uri, in the Indian-controlled state of Jammu-Kashmir. At least 17 Indian army personnel were killed in the initial attack, with more casualties during the ensuing skirmish (TNN & Agencies, 2016). While the Kashmir conflict (over 50 years in the making) is profoundly nuanced, the attack was cited as an act of terrorism against India and was countered with a military response, including “pre-emptive” surgical strikes on Pakistan-controlled territory that killed soldiers on both sides (Safi, 2016). Within weeks of the attack, the Indian Motion Picture Producers’ Association (IMPPA) affirmed the state’s war response by announcing that Pakistani actors, technicians, and related artists were banned from working in India “until normalcy returns” (Safi, 2016). However, TP Aggarwal, the IMPPA president, beseeched the government to take immediate action against Pakistani entertainers, claiming that they would be banned “forever” (Safi, 2016). Immediately an alignment between the ideoscapes and ethnoscapes of nationalist identity politics could be detected in the reinforcement among political/military agendas, institutional industry policy, and Hindu nationalist ideals that served as the ban’s mouthpiece and most visible proponent. The coalescence between these levels of organizational agency is reflected by overlapping discourses and actions, with right-wing Hindu groups like the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, or MNS, issuing a 48-hour

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ultimatum for Pakistani artists to exit the country, or else be “pushed out,” using language identical to that of the IMPPA and affiliate media bodies (HT Correspondent, 2016). That the ban’s institutionalization was inextricably bound with, and a direct response to, the pressures of religious and ethnic nationalism can be seen in cooperation among the government, the Film and Television Producers Guild of India, and leaders of groups like the MNS in negotiating the ban, acting as intermediaries for the film industry. Both the MNS and Shiv Sena, a cognate Hindu nationalist party in Mumbai, had threatened to attack cinemas that consented to screen films with Pakistani artists, while Raj Thackeray, the MNS leader, insisted that all filmmakers who had worked with Pakistani actors in the past “pay a penance” to the Indian army as material and symbolic restitution (Safi, 2016). His statement contains several discursive resonances. By associating state-level public affairs and remote acts of war/terror with culture and commerce, Thackeray grafts ideological discourses about national security, loyalty, and service onto the everyday transactions of consumer capitalism, inscribing the production and consumption of popular media as an act of citizenship within a radicalized civic politics of identity and patriotism. This can be seen in Thackeray’s attribution of causality, suggesting that cultural exchange with Pakistani artists is itself an act of terror and disloyalty that has a direct bearing on national political events; in this case jeopardizing internal security, state operations, and the lives of Indian soldiers. His proclamation also reinforces Partition-origin discourses about identity as unilateral, homogenous and exclusionary – hence the requirement that impacted filmmakers and Pakistani crossover stars “prove” their loyalty to the nation, a theme that will be revisited later in the chapter. In this way the Hindi film industry becomes absorbed by the ideological and bureaucratic apparatuses of the state in an unequivocal association of popular culture with political nationalism. The state’s claim to cultural ownership was sealed when Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis “brokered” a pact with Thackeray, the Film and Television Producers Guild, and vested filmmakers to prohibit future engagements with Pakistani artists (Agence France-Presse, 2016). In the words of Mukesh Bhatt, the Guild’s president, “In the larger interest of the sentiments of the people and the soldiers and the entire country, we will not work with any Pakistani artist in the future” (Agence France-Presse, 2016). Phrased almost as an act of legislation, Bhatt’s announcement makes it nakedly transparent that the Hindi culture industry represents the national sphere – one heavily contoured by Hindutva discourse and local identity politics. In granting MNS concessions, the deal successfully compelled filmmaker Karan Johar, the producer of Kapoor and Sons and producer/director of Ae Dil Hai Mushkil (2016, director Karan Johar) to donate 50 million rupees ($747,220) to the Indian army and “run a tribute to the soldiers who were killed” (Agence-France Presse, 2016), avowing Thackeray’s philosophy on the interchangeability of national sovereignty and culture at the expense of democratic civil liberties. Although Johar had

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committed no crime, and no government regulations or travel advisories had been imposed on Pakistani nationals within India either before or after the ban (Jain, 2016) the industry’s compliance reveals the extrajudicial power of political interests to set limits on economic, cultural, and personal autonomy. As a government spokesperson notes: Notwithstanding the current debate on allowing Pakistani artistes to work in Indian films … the government of India has not revised its policy of issuing work visas to Pakistani artistes. Nor is there any proposal yet to revoke the work visas already issued to them. (Jain, 2016) The weight of these political forces produced tangible outcomes that forestalled the production, distribution, and consumption of Hindi films featuring Pakistani performers, leading to creative and fiscal losses for the industry that had a global chain effect – with film releases being delayed internationally while facing a complete embargo in Pakistan, as was the case with Dear Zindagi (2016, Gauri Shinde), Ae Dil Hai Mushkil, Raees, and virtually every major film release from India over the next several months (Al-Jazeera News, 2016). The consequences of this reciprocal ban for Pakistan’s exhibition sector, and for the Hindi film industry as a key target market, have already been discussed. The scenario is an ideal illustration of the contravening actions of political ideoscapes within global flows of media, commodities, and capital. It also illustrates intrinsic tensions within the mediascapes/financescapes of global Hindi cinema that are apparent in the topdown implementation of the ban by organizations like the IMPPA – which nonetheless provoked substantial backlash and generated concrete economic interruptions within the industry. So how was a ban of this scale possible, and why now? While nationalism and Hindi cinema have been co-implicated historically, espousing Partition-era frameworks of Pakistan as “Other” and reflecting a convergence between global ideoscapes/mediascapes as recently as the Kargil conflict, this particular ban reveals, perhaps more than any other, the incongruities of nationalist discourse. This is visible in the peculiarly vituperative nature of the ban’s rhetoric that exceeds incarnations of nationalism during situations of war or immanent peril. As one international relations pundit observes, the Kashmir conflict had ceased to be “the biggest internal security issue facing India” in recent decades, with challenges like the Maoist insurgency, communal violence, and other forms of civilian terror posing a greater threat to domestic safety (Robinson, 2008). While devastating, the events at Uri could not be more distant spatially or politically from the Mumbai-based film industry, its Pakistani crossover stars, or the majority of Indian citizens. The exceptional political tenor of the ban is highlighted by the fact that such polarized measures were not enacted even in the wake of the 2008 attacks in Mumbai – a similarly traumatic event of civilian terror that occurred on Indian soil in the heart of the nation’s economic and cultural capital. The incident

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exposed the fragility of urban spaces as soft targets for terrorism, resulting in the deaths of at least 170 Indian and foreign victims, while assaulting important icons of India’s globalized economy – such as the Taj Hotel (Friedman, 2009). Attributed to Pakistan-origin terrorists of the Lashkar-e-Taiba group, the 26/11 violence was widely compared to 9/11 politically and in the media, borrowing shared modes of representation regarding Islam, terror, and the global security state encountered in the West. Regardless of the attack’s extent, its high-profile target, and links to global circuits of capital – threatening ordinary citizens in the process – the incident failed to spark the same cultural ire as the Uri attack. While firebrand retaliation from groups like the Shiv Sena was predictable, there were no wholesale efforts to ban India–Pakistan cultural accord, which only increased over the next several years. Award-winning Pakistani musician Rahat Fateh Ali Khan, now banned, would record chart-topping hits for five Hindi films that year, while two years later Ali Zafar marked his industry debut with a politically trenchant satire about the War on Terror that was debarred in Pakistan but critically praised in India (Kazmi, 2016). The fact that the Hindi culture industry was specifically targeted following the Uri attack reveals that the ban controversy was more an ideological/discursive debate about identity rather than a strictly nationalist response to a political state of war. Pakistan denied involvement in the Uri attack, and although the Indian government escalated military aggression, neither country actively declared combat (Ahmad, 2016). That the incident was not considered a major threat to homeland security is also indicated by India’s reluctance to legalize the expulsion of Pakistani nationals more widely. Rather, the ban coincides with the ideoscapes/ethnoscapes of Hindu nationalism under ruling BJP doctrine, fitting imperatives to reinstate national and religious identity in a deterritorialized cultural landscape evocatively symbolized by popular media. The potency of crossover stars to sharpen these conflicts around identity and belonging made them convenient targets at a volatile, and politically conducive, moment.

Reification and resistance, or revisiting Partition That the ban was more a symbolic contest over culture and power rather than an expedient for national security is evident in numerous protests questioning its legitimacy. Members of the film industry pointed to its unwarranted and contradictory character; blockbuster heavyweight Salman Khan noted “his Pakistani colleagues had been cleared for entry by the Indian government, and in any case, were ‘artistes not terrorists’” (Safi, 2016). Veteran actor Rishi Kapoor likewise highlighted the ban’s absurdity, referring to the political establishment by stating, “Sometimes some skirmish happens in the border and your whole thinking goes wrong. Sometimes you shake hands and say go ahead. You’re confusing your country, people” (IANS, 2017). Johar expressed his regret over the attacks by stating, “his heart bleeds for the lost lives,” but reiterated that banning Pakistani stars “is not a solution” (Safi, 2016).

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The divided reactions to the ban again engage conflicts between the ideoscapes/ ethnoscapes of political nationalism and the mediascapes/technoscapes/financescapes represented by the global Hindi film industry. On one hand, arguments were presented supporting the usurpation of mediascapes for identity politics, relying on time-honored nationalist constructs hearkening back to Partition. On the other hand, claims about the unfair and detrimental effects of the ban pointed to its inconsistency with neoliberal ideals and the realities of cultural globalization. Besides public statements underscoring the ban’s unsubstantiated purpose, there was also overt support for the ban both within and outside the film industry that validated its precepts within the ideoscapes/ethnoscapes of hegemonic nationalism. Nana Patekar, another esteemed actor known for his conservative politics, urged his associates in the film industry not to interfere with the ban, as “Artistes are small insects in front of the nation, we are nothing compared to the country. I don’t want to know what Bollywood says” (Safi, 2016). This viewpoint was likewise echoed in popular commentary that exploded around the issue over the following weeks and months. Filmmaker and writer Vivek Agnihotri (2016) reprising assertions made by the MNS and IMPPA to justify the ban, conflates privatized culture with the government, nationalism and civic duty: Since the barbaric Uri attack … our government has been trying to isolate Pakistan in the world – politically, militarily, economically. When such efforts are on, then it is an undeclared state of war. In such a situation, how can the citizens of Pakistan be allowed to work in India?. (Agnihotri, 2016) He concludes his piece with a politicized call to action, writing somewhat ironically, “Terrorism isn’t a political point. It’s a moral issue. A human issue. It’s time we take a stand! Speak. Discuss. Act. It’s high time now!” (Agnihotri, 2016). His plea to fellow artists illuminates how the technoscapes/mediascapes of consumer culture can be redeployed to fulfill political objectives, privatizing the national public sphere and institutionalized definitions of identity. His surmises nonetheless convey some crucial contradictions – he argues that the media “attaches too much importance to what some of our artists and Pakistani artists are saying” (Agnihotri, 2016), yet he advocates the union of art with political education, while claiming that Pakistani artists are a threat precisely because they mobilize nationalist agendas, in this case state-sponsored terrorism. However, contrary perspectives were also offered presenting popular media as a “neutral” terrain exemplifying neoliberal capitalist principles of individualism, free speech, entrepreneurship, and the detachment of culture from religion and politics. Some opinions directly acknowledged the incommensurability of the ban with these goals; besides questioning the ban’s logic, Rishi Kapoor said it was “unfair to suddenly ban artists from Pakistan … Films are not planned in one or three days. It takes time. You can’t say that you’re going to ban a picture … These are unfair rulings and bullying tactics” (IANS, 2017). Here Kapoor endorses the

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independence of film commerce and industry more generally from political influence, a view strongly embraced by stars like Priyanka Chopra, who states: For an artist, their work is their religion … One cannot hold an artist responsible for their religion. Why are we not picking on someone who has actively done something wrong? ... This is entertainment. This is business. People buy a ticket, watch a movie for three hours and come away. Done. (The Hindu, 2016) Chopra’s comments reference consumer capitalism, including the right to free enterprise through “business,” a basic democratic priority for individuals, whether in producing marketable commodities like cinema or through ordinary acts of consumption (e.g. buying a movie ticket). According to her, everyone regardless of “religion” (an oblique jab at the ban’s anti-Muslim subtext) should have access to this individual right, holding politics aloof from capitalism and its connotations of equal opportunity, upward mobility, and success. The controversy over individual rights and the mutual imbrication of democracy, globalization, and neoliberal capital can be seen in arguments defending the entitlement of stars like Zafar, Fawad, and Mahira to remain politically unpartisan, rather than operate as symbols of national realpolitik. The fact that, for many industry insiders and the general public, conditions for their continued acceptance (specious as such claims might be considering the prompt application of the ban) centered on acknowledging and condemning the Uri attack reveals several key points. First, it surfaces the continued viability of Partition-origin discourses on nationalism, and the efforts of ban sympathizers to impose rigid constructions of identity and belonging along these lines. This perspective responds to the boundary-crossing momentum of crossover stars and the time– space compression of global cultural movements, symbolized by the fluidity of consumer brands, lifestyles, and shared capitalist values. Secondly, it points to how crossover stars destabilize nationalist discourses by rendering the “Other” familiar, if not outright desirable – as Fawad’s stardom, for example, reveals. Crossover stars are a reminder of historical continuities rather than the abrupt temporal rupture inflicted by Partition – whether in terms of geospatial memory linked to place or in realms like language, fashion, music, dance, and visual aesthetics. Such continuities can be seen in claims by left-leaning supporters that Pakistani stars hold an indigenous place in the Hindi film industry. Recycling discourse once exercised by their Progressive predecessors, these denouncers resist the designation of physical and ideological borders between India and Pakistan. Famed actor Saif Ali Khan says, “The world is open to our film industry and our film industry is open to the world especially cross border. We are artists who talk about love and peace” (Images Staff, 2016). His comment suggests that Pakistani stars have an especial cultural and creative claim of belonging in the Hindi film industry. Singer Lata Mangeshkar takes this attitude a step further by stating about Pakistan, “I know the people there are just like us. They want

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peace; only some elements don’t want peace” (Images Staff, 2016). Here Mangeshkar refuses to acknowledge artificial differences between both populations, which she envisions as sharing a united identity. Extending his reflections on the uproar, Johar says: I believe there are larger forces that need to come together to sort this situation out and it cannot involve banning talent or art … my intent was always to put out a creative product out of love and nothing else. Sometimes, you just want to fold your hands and say, “We are a creative industry. Please leave us alone. We make movies, we spread love”. (Kaushal, 2016) Besides another allusion to creative license and free speech as democracy, Johar’s concomitant belief that cinema and television can “spread love” refers to the affective power of commodities to incite desire, longing, and tolerance – in this case defusing sociopolitical boundaries and identity conflicts. Dissolving ideological differences through emotional agency is an ambition similarly voiced by singer Kailash Kher, who says “Banning or sending artistes back to Pakistan won’t serve any purpose, unless they are provoking any unpleasant emotions. Nobody belonging to the field of art is spreading hatred. People in Pakistan are equally kind, art-loving, and full of humanity” (Kaushal, 2016). Kher positions sentient reality against ideological and ethnographic hierarchies of identity, suggesting a united cultural-affective landscape between Indian and Pakistan through global mediascapes. Comments like this clash with divergent views alienating Pakistani stars culturally, psychologically, and emotionally from India. The ensuing tumult surrounding Fawad’s initial lack of response to the attacks is a prime example; the star issued an evasive response to the Uri attacks over a month after they occurred, reiterating his hope “that together we can build and live in a more peaceful world” (Ghosh, 2016). However, his preliminary reticence and failure to openly censure the attacks as an act of terror was perceived as tacit acknowledgment of Pakistan’s alleged culpability in the incident, revealing how Partition’s legacies continue to mediate nationalism. Legendary lyricist and actor Javed Akhtar announced that: Their silence is a kind of confession from Pakistani actors that Pakistan is responsible for it … If Pakistan says that “we are not responsible for it (the Uri attack), I don’t see any reason why Pakistani artistes or any Pakistani citizen should not condemn Uri and these kinds of terrorist attacks”. (Parande, 2016) Similarly, star Anupam Kher felt that “It is really important to say that ‘I condemn the unfortunate massacre of Indian soldiers.’ They (Pakistani actors) need to do that” (Images Staff, 2016).

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Such comments exhume enduring trepidations over national loyalty and choice, highlighting the awkward placement of crossover stars as between borders/nations. Their demands contain the implicit inquiry “whose side are you on?,” coercing Pakistani stars to operate within a binding nationalist dichotomy. By obliging them to take a stand on a politically contentious issue of mutual concern to both countries, they ask crossover stars to declare nationalist sensibilities in a fraught bilateral relationship of historical enmity. As Kher’s statement suggests, some ban supporters requested that Pakistani stars demonstrate loyalty by commiserating with India’s military presence in Kashmir – a challenging issue that is hardly accepted universally in India itself. The situation sheds light, again, on the fragile “tightrope” crossover stars tread; in this case, avoiding domestic dissent in Pakistan (and its potential repercussions) or staking conditional claims to Indian belonging within recognizable demarcations of identity. That most crossover artists did not adequately pledge allegiance according to this framework marked them immediately as “Other.” The above arguments also align with post-Partition and post-9/11 discourses about Pakistan’s metonymy with Islamic terror and violence by requiring Pakistani stars to hyper-signify the nation as a source of global liability. In a tit-for-tat, “open” letter to a virulent rejoinder from an Indian commentator, Pakistani blogger Asif Nawaz (2016) disputes the requirement that Pakistani/Muslim stars must repeatedly speak against terrorism. “You know how many Pakistanis have been killed due to terrorism? More than 50,000 … Our civil society, our community, our media, our children, and lately, even our establishment is trying extremely hard to get rid of the scourge of terrorism,” he states, pointing out that “Fawad Khan doesn’t have to carry the baggage of his nationality this way, just as you don’t hold your celebrities accountable for the actions of your state [referring to India]” (Nawaz, 2016). Nawaz points to the unusual burden that Pakistani/ Muslim citizens and stars bear in overstating fidelity to liberal democracy on one hand, and in apologizing for and thwarting terrorism on the other – framing Pakistani nationalism as illegitimate, hazardous, and therefore stigmatized. This one-to-one correlation of crossover stars with the Uri attack reiterates how Pakistani/Muslim bodies operate as transferrable, inert “signs” for global Islam and its reputed corroboration with terrorist violence, irrespective of location, history, or causality. The eviction of Pakistani crossover stars as a result of the ban is thus a reenactment of Partition’s originating geographic and ideological endowments, invoking familiar phobias of cross-border aggression, duplicity, and sabotage against Indian freedom and democracy. At the same time it validates political, military, and diplomatic coordination in the ongoing global War on Terror. This is evident in the ban’s reactionary logic that reprises state-level agendas on terrorism, including the forced migration, detention, or high-security vetting of “suspect” populations throughout global immigration policy. The ban is another auxiliary in this wider criminalization of Muslim identity, which proposes that Muslims are “ticking time bombs” for terrorist violence wherever they migrate.

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Fawad’s celebrity image makes the above concerns especially palpable, with his popularity facing the most public heat in the controversy. The debate is best encapsulated in an open letter to the star from Indian culture journalist Soumyadiptya Banerjee – the same letter protested by Asif Nawaz and referenced above. Matching point for point with the ban’s nationalist discourse, she connects stars like Fawad directly with Pakistan’s political administration, including proxy terrorism and insurrection against India through the state’s illicit designs on Kashmir, as she rallies for Fawad’s immediate deportation. Like other popular voices in the industry, she reproaches the star for not making the right “choice” with his nationalism: Let’s part as friends, Fawad. It doesn’t matter if you have failed to respond to the favours we have done to you and your colleagues from Pakistan … We wish that someday you will stand with us because you earned your bread on our soil. (Entertainment Desk, 2016) In her letter Banerjee explains that she is targeting Fawad because “he is the most famous Pakistani import to Bollywood;” (Entertainment Desk, 2016) however, her diatribe insinuates submerged disquiets about the transgressions of desiring the “Other” – made relevant by Fawad’s hyper-sexualized image as a symbol of romantic attraction. Banerjee suggests that, just as employing Pakistani stars is an act of terror, desiring them is equally a threat to national integrity, one which ultimately made India vulnerable to the Uri attack. Again, there is an unproblematic association between encouraging cultural intimacy, relaxing affective/psychological borders, and placing Indian territory at risk. The objections she vocalizes resurrect Partition-origin ideas about mistrust in cross-border ties, popularly interpreted through actual or metaphorical relationships. Her theatrical prose pretends Fawad’s seduction and consequent betrayal of the Indian public in much the same manner as a jilted lover confronts a deceptive trap. We have watched in pain how you have chosen to look away when your country is inflicting pain on us. We are letting you laugh all the way to your bank account in Karachi while our soldiers are bleeding in Uri, Kashmir … in the hands of your Mujahideen army. While we have given you only love, you have given us silence and that cute, dimpled smile of yours. (Entertainment Desk, 2016) Banerjee’s words rework predictable themes regarding the historical representation of Pakistanis/Muslims as “Other” – associating them with exploitation, treachery, and social vitiation, whose chameleon-like ability to integrate disguises ulterior political motives and capacities for violence. The hoodwinking quality of Fawad’s charm, and its “deadly” outcome, Banerjee seems to suggest, entail that the libidinal energies of Indian audiences are best directed elsewhere.

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Banerjee’s comments above surreptitiously reference Hindutva concepts of “lovejihad” that Gupta (2014) assesses superbly in her anecdote on Fawad. “Love-jihad” is “alleged to be a movement aimed at forcibly converting vulnerable Hindu women to Islam through trickery and marriage” (Gupta, 2016, p. 291). The metaphor is germane here not only through more generalized associations of India with the Hindu female body, but also the largely Hindu component of Fawad’s cross-border fan base that accounts for much of the cultural anxiety surrounding his covetous image (Gupta, 2014). As Siddique (2015) points out, the Hindi film industry was already an early target for such cultural suspicions, as she explores in her discussion of the Meena–Roop marriage in what magazines like Filmindia described as the “HinduMuslim bug” of romance (p. 55). The parallels with contamination/pandemic are clear, an anticipation of the “love-jihad” narrative that exacerbates phobias of lethal cultural and sexual adulteration akin to transmitted disease. Gupta (2016) contends that its fear-mongering rhetoric is a reactionary attempt aimed at thwarting “female free will, the subversive potential of love, pliable and ambiguous religious identities, and syncretic socio-religious practices, which continue to exist in different forms” (p. 292) – essentially, everything that crossover stars represent. Rather than reflecting existing cultural realities, however, “love-jihad” has strategic political functionality, as she points to its formative (if not wholly successful) role in organizing vote banks and influencing public opinion in the 2014 election of the BJP (Gupta, 2016). That its rhetoric would be similarly mobilized to support the ban, as a moment of political opportunism and calculated bilateral posturing, thereby comes as little surprise. The narrative operates as a conceptual buffer to massive social change in post-liberalization India, indexed by growing regional and secessionist movements, class/caste conflict, the breakdown of traditional feudal networks, and women’s mounting public independence (Gupta, 2016). By launching accusations of “love-jihad” against Fawad, Banerjee’s (Entertainment Desk, 2016) words support a wider majoritarian agenda of deflecting social threat onto a hallucinatory enemy “Other” in the public midst – even when the actual fighting is farther afield. Her rhetoric collapses actual/cultural warfare in a way that also reflects an updating of the Muslim male risk under “love-jihad” – his ability to pose as “beautiful, well-dressed” (Gupta, 2016, p. 295) and cosmopolitan, features integral to the star’s image. In this way, Muslim access to global consumer capital is itself viewed as a liability, something potently symbolized by the globalization of Pakistani stars that circles back to Indo-Pak rivalry for economic and geopolitical dominance. This angst is powerfully expressed by Hindutva conspiracy theories that “Muslim youth were receiving funds from abroad for the purchase of designer clothes, vehicles, mobile phones, and expensive gifts in order to woo Hindu women” (Gupta, 2016, p. 295), ideas that coincide with rhetoric about the illicit global financing of Islamic terrorism, the role of the Pakistan state, and Fawad’s fraudulent motives. As a result, Hindu– Muslim desire – coded by the star’s piquancy as a romantic icon – is framed as another guise of terrorism that simultaneously criminalizes the socio-economic enfranchisement of Muslims. As Gupta (2016) rightly observes, “love-jihad” is less

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about protecting Hindu/Indian women than it is about policing sexuality and re-erecting patriarchal boundaries – including state authority in an increasingly deterritorialized world. This impetus justifies its deployment in arguments like Banerjee’s (Entertainment Desk, 2016), which associate the ban with increased national security, a robust state, and intransigent national borders. Banerjee’s arguments highlight the potent agency of desire as a cultural force, in this case operating to disrupt hegemonic classifications of identity that she nonetheless endeavors to resurrect through her propagandist address. Likewise, Gupta (2014) reads popular culture as a form of resistance that vindicates its soft power potential, noting how the Fawad Khan craze has “dismantled the wild allegations” of Hindutva discourse, one “that reveals a religious and national liminality that can stump the hysteria over the constructed bogey of love-jihad.” The unsettling possibilities of the crossover persona are thereby imprinted by desire, one that also strengthens subaltern agency. As Gupta (2014) sums up, it “shows that the divisions have become muddier and more fluid, as a section of Indian women are discarding binary categories and fixed identities.” The relative lack of success for Banerjee’s (Entertainment Desk, 2016) own “love-jihad” crusade is indicated by the innumerable negative reactions to her post, with many respondents undermining her vitriolic attack on Fawad as irrational and baseless. One Indian Twitter user posts “This makes no sense. You are only spreading hate from #India and I do not agree with this” (Entertainment Desk, 2016). Another states, “how will it solve the problem? [banning Fawad]. Can’t blame people for their govt” (Entertainment Desk, 2016). Yet another commentator retorts sarcastically, “how does banning Fawad Khan solve anything? Will the terrorists go, ‘Oh they banned our actor.? Chal let’s not attack jawans [Come let’s not attack soldiers]’” (Entertainment Desk, 2016). In the end Banerjee conceded defeat, writing “Enough backlash for a day for the blog on Fawad Khan. Those who understood that it is a form of protest. Thank you” (Entertainment Desk, 2016). If Fawad signifies a problematic and potentially destabilizing cross-border desire, then female stars possess an exaggerated responsibility in arbitrating national identity. As discussed in Chapter 2, desiring the male “Other” versus the female “Other” unearths a crucial double standard – as women, and female stars in particular, have been historically recruited as icons of territorial nationalism and identity. In contrast, male stars have historically emblematized the “hard” bureaucratic and political functions of states, from justice to national defense. These gendered nationalisms have long been articulated in popular Hindi cinema and culture to characterize Indo-Pak relations, where the normative Indian/Hindu male’s possession of the Pakistani/Muslim female “Other” on screen reflected a figurative entitlement to territory now located in Pakistan. This inherited imaginary offers yet another explanation why Fawad’s stardom was more aggressively repudiated by staunch patriots in India than Mahira’s, as “desiring” Fawad holds stronger ideological valence within patriarchal nationalism. Loving Fawad connotes a proscribed recognition of Pakistan’s political legitimacy and threat as a contender for Indian land rights and cultural/spiritual

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influence. Gupta (2014) falls short of making this parallel explicit, although she underscores that “It is deeply discomforting for some Hindu men to share charismatic spaces with Muslim men, and that too one from Pakistan, making Fawad Khan’s charisma all the more threatening.” Banerjee’s (Entertainment Desk, 2016) unwavering indictment of Fawad’s “responsibility” for the Uri attack bears out this distress, as do her efforts to emasculate Fawad’s image under the beneficence of Indian cultural, economic, and political superiority. Within this imaginative domain the stakes for displaying and acting on desire are also much higher for female stars. Mahira’s photo controversy in September 2017 is a key case in point. The conflicted response to the series of images, which showed Mahira sharing a cigarette with Hindi film industry peer Ranbir Kapoor on a New York city street,2 ignited nationalist furor in Pakistan on par with the jingoist defamation over Fawad in India. As argued in Chapter 6, women’s bodies often become battlegrounds for identity, and while the photos would likely have courted debate regardless of when they released, popular reaction was widely situated in the politics of the recent industry ban. Part of the indignation stemmed from reciprocal anxieties over Pakistan’s cultural contamination, condensing larger debates over the “corrupting” influence of the globalized Hindi film industry and its liberal/Westernizing trajectory. The fact that ardent loyalists in Pakistan viewed the star’s actions as an indiscretion and national betrayal unveils barely coded concerns over crossborder miscegenation. “Is she even Muslim anymore?” one Twitter commentator asks, while another states “this is what u [sic] always say as ur [sic] high values … no more fan of u [sic]” (Shaikh, 2017). One journalist highlighted crucial hypocrisies of the post-ban cultural environment: This is a double standard. They go to cinemas, they watch her movies, they admire her and love to see her naked in movies but can’t stand to see a photo of her with a naked back and smoking with an Indian actor. (BBC Trending, 2017) Her comment points to the reality that much of the uproar centered on speculation about the star’s relationship with an Indian actor at an irascible cultural moment, evoking time-honored prejudices surrounding the forbidden consummation of Hindu–Muslim desire. Mahira’s intimacy in the photos with Kapoor was enough to attract licentious observation and outrage, again underscoring the powerful and transgressive pressures of desire in public consciousness. Another journalist blogs, “Apparently, Mahira’s izzat (honor) lies in her clothes?” (Shaikh, 2017), alluding to how Mahira’s sexuality is an equally contested platform for patriarchal nationalism in Pakistan. Tellingly, the photos stirred little anger with Indian fans, bearing out the role of gendered nationalisms in contests of culture and power between the two nations and their identity politics. Many writers sided with liberal feminist discourses that emphasize women’s rights to exercise independent lifestyles, focusing on how the star opted to present, use, and indulge her body as a badge of cultural and national progress. The

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situation points to the internal conflicts of global mediascapes – in this case, Mahira’s celebrity image as a source of identification/dis-identification for differing nationalist locations in Pakistan. On the side of progressive feminism, her agency was extolled as evidence that Pakistan was entering globalized, Western norms of feminist maturity. Others viewed Mahira’s impression in the photos as a “sellout” of Pakistan’s own claims to cultural globalization embodied in the wholesome, traditional values the star normally embodies. The conflict over Mahira’s sexual modesty thereby invoked concerns over how Pakistani/Muslim identity should best be represented and globalized. The same controversy became attached to her debut Hindi film Raees. The film’s ambivalent portrayal of Islam and Muslims, outlined in Chapter 6, likewise instigated rows over who has the right to “speak” for and claim Muslim identity, and was also heavily colored by the ban’s politics. The film was universally rejected in Pakistan despite Mahira’s co-starring presence and much pre-release fanfare. In addition, while censor board members acknowledged the text’s complex ideological address, allowing for diverse readings, the film was taken as detrimental to Pakistan’s national security in light of the ban and experienced a much delayed release in theatres (Mahmood, 2017). The irony of what was once touted as an outlet of national solidarity was quickly impugned as a product of cultural and national “Othering,” revealing how mediascapes can have dissonant effects within the technoscapes/ financescapes of global capital.

Crossover stardom: a way forward? Despite the seemingly regressive, and permanent, implications of the ban, crossover stars continue to open new ways of imagining identity that exceed the ideoscapes/ethnoscapes of political nationalism. The movement of Pakistani stars between transnational points of global consumer capital, from London to Dubai to New York, reveals how they transcend strictly nationalist spaces and borders. A corresponding lateral movement across consumer brands and products accompanies this sojourn, affording its own ideoscapes for cultural identity and communion. These ideoscapes include shared consumer capitalist regimes of knowledge, behavior, and values that incorporate discourses like self-sufficiency, individual destiny, enterprise, ingenuity, persistence, and upward mobility, to list only a few of the images and ideals marketed in consumer products across rapidly globalizing societies. While recognizing that capitalism is socially and historically contingent, the potential for commodities like cinema or cosmetics, fashion, and music to provide a shared imaginary for projecting aspirational desire and pleasure cannot be sidelined. Stars assist in this process by acting as lifestyle paradigms, conveying idealized traits like sex appeal, sophistication, intelligence, and talent that are points of comparison, offering templates for aspirational selves that can be purchased through goods and emulated, materializing otherwise abstract ways of living in the world. This dimension has been widely explored in celebrity scholarship and has been discussed by scholars like Dyer (1986), DeAngelis (2001), and Jackie Stacey (1994).

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Moreover, the “commodity affect” of popular consumer artifacts that Mankekar (2015) highlights produces united terrains of feeling that are linked to the emotional excesses of popular cinema, television, and advertising. Whether through the multifarious narrative contracts of popular entertainment, which present opportunities to enact desire through identification and fantasy in relation to character/star personas, to transgressive economies of erotic desire, the ideoscapes of consumer capitalism offer an alternate platform to organize identity around shared pleasures, motives, and competencies of consumer capital. These examples include the collective intelligence of intensive fan communities that concentrate expertise, resourcefulness, and agency in engaging the everyday relevance of popular media to personal goals and realities. The digital fan spaces for stars like Fawad and Mahira, previously considered, are optimal examples, as are user-directed websites like Reviewit.pak that provide news, gossip, media reviews, and group discussion forums from “amateur” writers. Pakistani crossover stars participate in these ideoscapes of global consumer capitalism through corporate brand assimilation. From Mahira’s roles on MTV to Zafar and Fawad’s numerous appearances on Coke Studio Pakistan, crossover stars evoke recognizable emotions and ethics attached to transnational brands. Coke Studio, for example, an international TV franchise now available from South America to Africa, is a popular live-performance music program with a consciously global ethos aimed at “bridging barriers by fueling optimism and ‘Opening Happiness’ – which is what Coca-Cola stands for” (Moye, 2013). On the soft drink company’s website Coke Studio is described as a “boundaryblending combination of traditional and modern” that “gives both well-known and up-and-coming artists a platform to share their music with national and international audiences” (Moye, 2013). Zafar has been integrally involved with the show since its first season, debuting multiple hit songs like “Rockstar,” while Fawad has made several notable appearances with his alternative rock band Entity Paradigm since the show’s third season. Describing the format’s success in Pakistan, the article notes how the show has become a cultural institution, “broadening Coke Studio’s appeal across age groups, geographic regions and socioeconomic groups … you hear Coke Studio music coming from restaurants, homes, cars … everywhere,” (Moye, 2013) pointing to how the show infuses collective consciousness and everyday life. The show and its artists profile global consumer capitalism through Coca-Cola’s evocative brand affect – which capitalizes on youth culture and feelings like social connectedness, drive, confidence, and of course, “happiness.” The effectiveness of the program in evoking these shared cultural sentiments and identities can be witnessed in fan comments on a YouTube upload from Coke Studio Pakistan Season 10, where one Indian fan writes “Pakistani coke studio is so good! Divided by borders united by coke studio:D;).”3 The above fan makes it clear Coke Studio and its music has given her a new way of imagining identity not restricted by conventional political categories – an imaginary process that is active, deliberate, and even rebellious.

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Stars also become “signs” for global consumer capital through their bodies, communicating brands and their affective meaning to consumers. Zafar, Fawad, and Mahira have each become attached to transnational products; Fawad, for example, was named Vogue magazine’s Most Beautiful Man of the Year at their 2014 Beauty Awards (Entertainment Desk, 2015), while he is the face of luxury Italian brand Giovani in Pakistan, in addition to representing Samsung and Pepsi. Mahira also has brand affiliations with the cosmetics firm Lux, L’Oréal, and Q Mobile, to name only a few. This commodification of the star image is an extension of the star’s persona across media texts as well as his or her off-screen reputation in “real” life. The convergence between these points of access means that stars always function as consumable “lifestyle” brands who sell movie tickets, songs, and material commodities that are taken to inscribe the star’s personality. This positions stars as outlets of identification, desire, and aspiration for audiences within standardized consumer ideoscapes that possess global currency and shape self-consciousness. Brand endorsements in particular exploit the desirability of stars by opening scenes of fantasy and “wish fulfillment,” inviting spectators to either “imagine” themselves as the star (via purchasing the product) or possessing him/her. Ads offer compelling imaginaries in this regard by selling images that fuel desire and condense multiple capitalist ideologies. An optimal example is Fawad’s Fall 2015 photo shoot for fashion retailer Giovani; in one image he is shown wearing a classic tuxedo and leaning against a grand piano, with a stately parlor as backdrop.4 The image conjures up several capitalist ideoscapes that are also foundational to the star’s persona, in this case wealth, glamour, cosmopolitanism, and success. The aristocratic gentility and sophistication of Fawad’s celebrity image is signaled by the tuxedo, piano, and luxury decor in the photo. Staring straight ahead with calm assurance in a relaxed but upright posture, Fawad represents the ideal self-actualized subject, an aspirational principle that has been universalized through the mediascapes, technoscapes, and financescapes of global consumer capitalism. The image also taps into constituent facets of the star’s inert masculinity, highlighting immanence rather than the kinesthetic motion or phallic suggestiveness of traditional masculine iconography. Instead of glorifying and centering the hardened male body – which normally appears in foreground – Fawad’s medium-shot framing incorporates the star’s setting and background, lending a contextual interpretation to the image, and by extension, his persona. There is no hint of musculature, his body fully clothed and tightly buttoned, while his relatively “closed” body language – hands folded over the crotch, one hand clasping his other wrist – further resists a transcendent masculinity that occupies and dominates space. Instead, the image reinforces the star’s trademark introspection and sexual restraint, the basis of his sympathetic appeal with female fans. The potential for fandom to exert tangible political pressure should not be overlooked, as Gupta’s (2014) discussion endorses but does not theorize. However, existing scholarship, bolstered by studies like Cheema’s (2018), support the role that consumer affect can play in “politicizing” fandom. Many activities of consumer culture are inherently political, working to both reproduce and undercut dominant

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modes of cultural production. In particular, John Fiske’s (1992) model of fan production can apply to processes of engaging culture more widely that is not necessarily restricted to the self-contained fan communities he is concerned with. Most relevant to this study are his concepts of semiotic and enunciative productivity; the former “consists of the making of meanings of social identity and of social experience” (p. 37) that resemble the way female fans of Fawad or the Coke Studio enthusiasts referenced above use media texts to define often transgressive identities. In contrast, enunciative productivity – and on another level textual productivity – speak more to the possibilities inherent to convergence culture, where semiotic constructions of identity increasingly take on a public dimension in a horizontal media environment driven by social media. The innumerable blogs, fan pages, and amateur websites that have sprung up around crossover stars, and which continue to flourish despite political censure, are optimal cases. As mentioned in Chapter 6, the unique pleasures of consuming the drama serial reflect dimensions of the “fan talk” that Fiske identifies as a motivating factor in fandom, where fans choose texts “at least as much by the oral community they wished to join as by any of its inherent characteristics” (p. 38). Fandom is thereby already constituted as a form of community with political implications, a process simplified by the new affordances of digital convergence culture. The mobilizing effect of fan communities, as Gupta (2014) notes, ties into real-life practices of enunciation that put agreed “meanings into social circulation” (Fiske, 1992, p. 38). She cites the corresponding increase in interreligious romance as an instantiation of cultural choice, where “our love for Fawad Khan and the increasing inter-religious marriages suggests that dominant investments of Hindutva … is under threat from within” (Gupta, 2014). Fiske’s (1992) ideas are reinforced by those of Lawrence Grossberg (1992), who likewise recognizes the profound connection of fans to texts within a framework of affect, what he defines as “the strength of our investment in particular experiences, practices, identities, meanings and pleasures” (p. 57). Again, his ideas can be extrapolated to explain our relationship to consumer culture more generally, where certain texts or stars may speak to or for us more powerfully than others, and at different points in our lives. As Grossberg’s, Mankekar’s (2015), and my own study illustrates, consumer culture is “determined by the cultural production of pleasures” (Grossberg, 1992, p. 55) that increasingly shapes our interaction with the political. While culture does not guarantee political engagement, it certainly primes it, as it “offers the resources which may or may not be mobilized into forms of popular struggle, resistance and opposition” (Grossberg, 1992, p. 65). Herein lies an optimistic note for the prospect of fandom and consumer culture to shift the terms of discursive debate on political identity.

Conclusion The 2016 ban on Pakistani crossover stars continues an emergent politicization of India’s cultural sphere that reflects the centralization of hardliner identity doctrines once relegated to the margins. Nandini Ramnath (2016) aptly summarizes the ban’s context:

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Over the years, Pakistani actors and singers have managed to escape the ultra-nationalist heat that has inevitably followed major terrorist strikes. They would lie low, ride out the calls for retribution and be back on the screen in a matter of weeks. That was before the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party government at the Centre, the proliferation of troll armies on social networking sites, the war-mongering on TV channels like Times Now and CNN News 18, and the polarisation of the movie industry into liberals, centrists, and proud ultra-rightwingers. Her statement reveals how political nationalism can co-implicate globalization and neoliberal capital, technology, and media in privatizing the civic sphere. This fragmentary cultural landscape permits conflict between global commodity flows and electoral identity battles, just as it permits disjuncture within transnational media currents. The Uri attack ban illustrates a struggle over who has the right to define and set limits on “identity” – and which identities are worth globalizing. The ban’s co-optation of state policy is one of multiple attempts to imagine Indian identity firmly within a Hindu nationalist mold, as an act of cultural “muscle flexing.” The Hindi culture industry was thereby targeted for its representative authority as an engine of economic and cultural soft power, making it an ideal agent for reimagining the globalized Indian nation. This can be seen in the ban’s ancillary consequences – as Hindi cinema redoubles its efforts to globalize, with stars like Priyanka Chopra and Deepika Padukone crossing over to Hollywood in 2017, Pakistani stars remain locked out of this hegemonic cultural confluence. Their expulsion is an ironic inverse to the growing approbation of Indian media, talent, and achievement in fields like fine art, science, and business. The ban reflects how Pakistani/Muslim identities remain ghettoized across transnational flows of labor, administrative justice, finance, and culture, possessing subordinate value within the gentrified imaginaries of advanced, “First World” capitalism. Regardless, the realities of convergence culture continue to globalize Pakistani identity through overlapping flows and counterflows of mediascapes, technoscapes, and financescapes, connecting global audiences within affective terrains of consumer capital. These new opportunities for convergence, as discussed above, hold the potential to transcend political debates around nation, religion, and culture, one of many ways in which identity can be imagined, and negotiated, in a globalized world.

Notes 1 Information retrieved August 11, 2017 from “About,” Aman ki Asha, http://amankia sha.com/?page_id=619. 2 To view the image, please reference the link below. Retrieved October 25, 2017 from “News/Movies/Celebrities/Mahira Khan” India Today, www.indiatoday.in/ movies/celebrities/story/mahira-khan-ranbir-kapoor-smoking-affair-trolled-ali-zafar1050336-2017-09-22.

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3 Comment retrieved August 11, 2017 from Coke Studio, “Danyal Zafar & Momina Mustehsan, Coke Studio Season 10, Episode 1,” YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch? v=cs9ORHI8o38. 4 To view the photoshoot please see the link below. Retrieved August 28, 2017 from HASNAmoon, “Making of Fawad Khan’s Photoshoot for Giovani,” YouTube, www. youtube.com/watch?v=cS0xbckTt3o. To view the image in isolation, please reference the following link. Retrieved August 28, 2017 from “Fawad Afzal Khan,” ModelsFashionPk.com, http://modelsfa shionpk.com/pakistani-Male-model/Fawad-Afzal-Khan/127.

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Filmography

187

Johar, Y. (Producer), & Johar, K. (Director). (1998). Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. [Motion Picture]. India. Johar, Y. (Producer), & Johar, K. (Director). (2001). Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham. [Motion Picture]. India. Johar, Y. & Johar, K. (Producers), & Advani, N. (Director). (2003). Kal Ho Naa Ho. [Motion Picture]. India. Kapoor, R. & Kapoor, A. & Kapoor, S.R. (Producers), & Ghosh, S. (Director). (2014). Khoobsurat. [Motion Picture]. India. Kapoor, R. & Kapoor, R. (Producers), & Kapoor R. (Director). (1991). Henna. [Motion Picture]. India. Kapoor, R.K. & Sadanah, S. & Sharma, R.P. (Producers), & Brij (Director). (1985). Oonche Log. [Motion Picture]. India. Kardar, A.R. (Producer), & Kardar, A.R. (Director). (1946). Shahjehan. [Motion Picture]. India. Khan, A. (Producer), & Gowariker, A. (Director). (2001). Lagaan. [Motion Picture]. India. Khan, A. (Producer) & Bhatkal, S. (Director). (2012–2014). Satyamev Jayate. [Talk Show, Episodes 1–25]. India. Khan, A. & Arora, M. & Mehta, D. (Producers), & Kahsyap, A. (Director). (2010). Dabaang. [Motion Picture]. India. Khan, M. (Producer), & Khan, M. (Director). (1954). Amar. [Motion Picture]. India. Khan, M. (Producer), & Khan, M. (Director). (1957). Mother India. [Motion Picture]. India. Khan, S. & Venkatesh, R., & Khan, K. (Producers), & Khan, K. (Director). (2015). Bajrangi Bhaijaan. [Motion Picture]. India. Kohinoor Film Company (Producer), & Rathod, K. (Director). (1924). Gul-e-Bakavali. [Motion Picture]. India. Kohli, R. (Producer), & Kohli, R. (Director). (1990). Pati Patni aur Tawaif. [Motion Picture]. India. Kumar, A. & Vacha, S. (Producers), & Amrohi, K. (Director). (1949). Mahal. [Motion Picture]. India. Kumar, A. (Producer), & Roy, B. (Director). (1953). Parineeta. [Motion Picture]. India. Kumar, D. (Producer), & Bose, N. (Director) (1961). Gunga Jumna. [Motion Picture]. India. Mansoor, S. (Producer), & Mansoor, S. (Director). (2007). Khuday Kay Liye. [Motion Picture]. Pakistan. Mansoor, S. (Producer), & Mansoor, S. (Director). (2011). Bol. [Motion Picture]. Pakistan. Matthan, J.M. (Producer), & Matthan, J.M. (Director). (1999). Sarfarosh. [Motion Picture]. India. Mehta, A. & Johar, H.Y., & Johar, K. (Producers), & Johar, K. (Director). (2016). Ae Dil Hai Mushkil. [Motion Picture]. India. Modi, S. (Producer), & Modi, S. (Director). (1941). Sikander. [Motion Picture]. India. Morani, A., Morani, K., & Soorma, B. (Producers), & Darshan, D. (Director). (1996). Raja Hindustani. [Motion Picture]. India. MTV (Producer), & Anonymous (Director). (2006–2008). Most Wanted. [Music Program]. Pakistan. Mukherjee, S. (Producer), & Mukherkee, S. (Director). (1957). Paying Guest. [Motion Picture]. India. Munawar, S. & Raza, A. (Producers), & Raza, A. (Director). (2016). Ho Mann Jahaan. [Motion Picture]. Pakistan. Mungrey, S.V. (Producer), & Dharamsey, M.I. (Director). (1948). Anokha Pyar. [Motion Picture]. India.

188

Filmography

Murari Pictures (Producer), & Sinha, M. (Director). (1946). Omar Khayyam. [Motion Picture]. India. Naushad (Producer), & Sunny, S.U. (Director). (1950). Babul. [Motion Picture]. India. New Theatres (Producer), & Barua, P.C. (Director). (1934). Rooplekha. [Motion Picture]. India. New Theatres (Producer), & Bose, N. (Director). (1934). Chandidas. [Motion Picture]. India. Padam, J.S. (Producer), & Saif, F. (Director). (2012). Paanch Ghantey Mein Paanh Crore. [Motion Picture]. India. Pallonji, S. (Producer), & Asif, K. (Director). (1960). Mughal-e-Azam. [Motion Picture]. India. Pandey, N. & Bhatia, S. (Producers), & Nivas, E. (Director). (2014). Total Siyapaa. [Motion Picture]. India. Pandey, N. & Bhatia, S. (Producers), & Nair, S. (Director). (2017). Naam Shabana. [Motion Picture]. India. Phalke, D. (Producer) & Phalke, D. (Director). (1913). Raja Harischandra. [Motion Picture]. India. Prabhat Film Company (Producer), & Shantaram, V. (Director). (1941). Padosi. [Motion Picture]. India. Rai, H. (Producer), & Osten, F. (Director). (1936). Acchut Kanya. [Motion Picture]. India. Ranjit Movietone (Producer), & Desai, J. (Director). (1943). Tansen. [Motion Picture]. India. Ranjit Movietone (Producer), & Sarhadi, Z. (Director). (1953). Footpath. [Motion Picture]. India. Roy, B. (Producer), & Roy, B. (Director). (1955). Devdas. [Motion Picture]. India. Roy, B. (Producer), & Roy, B. (Director). (1958). Madhumati. [Motion Picture]. India. Roy, B. (Producer), & Roy, B. (Director). (1959). Sujata. [Motion Picture]. India. Roy, B. (Producer), & Roy, B. (Director). (1963). Bandini. [Motion Picture]. India. Saeed, H., Iqbal, S., Nasib, S., & Seja, J (Producers), & Baig, N. (Director). (2015). Jawani Phir Nahin Ani. [Motion Picture]. Pakistan. Sagar, R., Sagar, A., & Sagar, M. (Producers), & Sagar, R. (Director). (19871988). Ramayana. (Drama Series, Episodes 1–78). Samanta, S. (Producer), & Samanta, S. (Director). (1958). Howrah Bridge. [Motion Picture]. India. Segal, M. (Producer), & Segal, M. (Director). (1956). New Delhi. [Motion Picture]. India. Sehgal, K. (Producer), & Bakhri, L. (Director). (1958). Sahara. [Motion Picture]. India. Shah, C. (Producer), & Doshi, C. (Director). (1942). Bhakta Surdas. [Motion Picture]. India. Shah, C. (Producer), & Sharma, K.N. (Director). (1950). Jogan. [Motion Picture]. India. Sharma, A. (Producer), & Bose, S. (Director). (1958). Chalti ka Naam Gaadi. [Motion Picture]. India. Shaukat Art Production (Producer), & Rizvi, S.H. (Director). (1947). Jugnu. [Motion Picture]. India. Sidhwani, R., Akhtar, F., & Khan, G. (Producers), & Dholakia, R. (Director). (2017). Raees. [Motion Picture]. India. Singh, A. (Producer), & Thakkar, R. (Director). (1988). Jungle ki Beti. [Motion Picture]. India. Sitamari, R.K. (Producer), & Sharma, A. (Director). (2001). Gadar: Ek Prem Katha. [Motion Picture]. India. Sriramulu Naidu, S.M. (Producer), & Sriramulu, S.M. (Director). (1955). Azaad. [Motion Picture]. India. Subhash, B. (Producer), & Subhash, B. (Director). (1984). Kasam Paida Karne Wale Ki. [Motion Picture]. India.

Filmography

189

Talwar Films Ltd. (Producer), & Talwar, R.C. (Director). (1952). Sangdil. [Motion Picture]. India. The Royal Bioscope Company (Producer), & Sen, H. (Director). (1903). Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. [Motion Picture]. India. Vasan, S.S. (Producer), & Vasan, S.S. (Director). (1955). Insaniyat. [Motion Picture]. India. Verma, S. & Talwar, S. (Producers), & Sharma, A. (Director). (2010). Veer. [Motion Picture]. India. Wadia Movietone (Producer), & Bose, M. (Director). (1941). Raj Nartaki. [Motion Picture]. India. Wadia Movietone (Producer), & Sunny, S.U. (Director). (1948). Mela. [Motion Picture]. India. Wald, J. & McCarey, L. (Producers), & McCarey, L. (Director). (1957). An Affair to Remember. [Motion Picture]. United States. Yash Raj Music, (Producer) & Zafar, A. (Singer). (2011). Jhoom. [Music Album]. Pakistan. Zaidi, M. (Producer) & Gaur, M. & Nabi. F. (Directors). (2013). Zinda Bhaag. [Motion Picture]. Pakistan. Ziskin, L., Peters, J., & Harris, J. (Producers), & Kershner, I. (Director). (1978). The Eyes of Laura Mars. [Motion Picture]. United States.

INDEX

Abbas, K.A. 31 abject, the 23, 38, 42 Agha, S. 47–48, 98 Agnihotri, V. 168 Akhter, Z. 11, 160 Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (1903) 26 Ali, S. 49 All-India Censorship League 27 Amar 36, 37 Anand, D. 31 Angry Young Man 46, 62, 143 Appadurai, A. 8, 9, 11, 16, 72, 133 Athique, A. 9, 70 audience reception: and crossover texts 68–71, 80, 111, 118, 125–129, 134; and film reviews 100–102, 125–126, 128, 144–145 Babul (1950) 36, 37 Bakhtiar, Z. 48 Bandini (1963) 43 Banerjee letter 172–174 Banerjee, S. 27, 58, 59, 60 bhakti 29, 30 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) 56, 57, 156, 167, 173 bilateral relations between India and Pakistan 15, 22, 53–54, 57, 91, 171 Biswas, M. 38 Bol (2011) 66, 138 Brown, J. 72 Chadha, K. 27, 34, 54, 81

Chakde India! (2007) 60 Chandni Chowk (1954) 41 Cheema, M. 123–126, 158, 159–160, 161, 178 Chhalia (1960) 42, 43 citizenship: and consumer capitalism 8, 124, 159–160; and crossover stars 165, 171; and the domestic Muslim star 34, 54; and Partition 24–25 Coke Studio 68, 134, 177, 179 Communicating India’s Soft Power: Buddha to Bollywood (2013) 9, 71 consumer capitalism: as affect 6, 8, 11–12, 59–60, 93–96, 177–178; and identity 4, 5, 8, 12, 15, 54–55; and nationalism 11, 15, 54–55, 94–95, 162–163, 167–168 convergence culture: as bottom-up 15, 68–7, 105, 126–127, 156; as corporate strategy 63–64, 66–67, 78–79; in cultural diplomacy 9–11 cosmopolitanism: in crossover texts 14, 68, 86, 94, 161; in music 94–95; in prePartition cinema 25–26; in theory 12 courtesan film 41, 43–45, 47, 81, 142 Daera (1953) 38 Daiya, K. 21, 22, 24, 25, 45 darshan 33–34 dastan 33–34 De, S. 128 Desai, J. 57, 58 Devasundaram, A. 10, 11, 161

192

Index

diaspora: cultural exchange 71–74, 96, 99; and media formats 11, 55, 63; and national politics 89–91; overview 71–73 Drama for Conflict Resolution (DCT) paradigm 160 Dubai 148, 149, 176 Dudrah, R. 6, 59, 73, 74 Duraid, M. 122, 145 Dyer, R. 1, 2, 7, 8, 176 early Muslim stars 27–28 economic liberalization 20, 53–55, 64 Enlightened Moderation 150, 151 Entity Paradigm 108, 177 ethnoscapes 11, 72, 100, 156, 164, 167 Facebook 71, 106, 125, 127, 134 fandom: and female viewers 124–129, 147–148; and political agency 178–179 Fawad photoshoot 178 Fearless Nadia 26 Film and Television Producers’ Guild of India 165 Filmfare 129 Filmindia 27, 173 financescapes 100, 156, 163, 164, 166, 176 Five Year Plan hero 35–36, 59 gendered nationalism 39, 45, 58–59, 92, 174–175 ghazal 30, 32, 95 Gehlawat, A. 94, 129, 137 Gupta, C. 129, 130, 173, 174, 175, 179 Henna (1991) 48 Hindu-Muslim romance 45–46, 48, 49, 62, 89–92 Hindu nationalism see Hindutva Hindutva: in discourse 23, 28, 54, 58; as political administration 5, 8, 56, 82, 130; and the 2016 ban 165, 173, 174, 179 Humsafar (2011–2012): in audience reception 69–70, 125, 144–148, 149, 151; in textual analysis 107–108, 113–115, 116–118, 138–142 Hum TV 118, 122 hybridity: in music 95–96; and prePartition cinema 25–26, 29–30; as third space 11–12, 13, 60, 73, 159, 97–100 Indian Motion Pictures Producers’ Association (IMPPA) 164, 165, 166, 168 Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) 31–32

infrastructural reform in Hindi cinema 63–64, 67, 80–81 intellectual leftism 31–33 irony in narrative 78, 83, 84–85 Islamicate Cultures of Bombay Cinema (2009) 28, 45 Islamophobia 5, 57, 58 Iwabuchi, K. 3, 12, 161 Jama’at-i Islami 72 Jenkins, H. 7, 63, 68 Jhoom (2011) 14, 79, 95 Jhoom Barabar Jhoom (2007) 73–74 Johar, K. 1, 55, 165, 167, 170 Kapoor and Sons (2016) 14, 106, 107, 120–122 Kapoor, P. 27, 31 Kapoor, R. 31, 33, 36, 39, 48 Kargil dispute 24, 53, 56, 156, 166 Kavoori, A. 27, 34, 54, 81 Khan, A. 49, 59, 62, 94, 167 Khan, M. 49 Khan, S. 49, 59, 62, 94, 167 Khan, S.R. (SRK): and Muslim stardom 54, 59–61, 149; and Pathan identity 32, 97; in textual analysis 142–143 Khoobsurat (2014) 14, 67, 106, 107, 117–120, 128 Khuda Ke Liye (2007) 66, 108–110 Kothari, S. 111, 112, 113, 114, 124, 126 Kugiel, P. 10 Kumar, A. 27, 36 Kumar, D.: crossover appeal 33; and Pathan identity 32, 97; on-screen representation 35–38 Kumari, M. 38, 39, 40, 41–42 London, Paris, New York (LPNY, 2012) 14, 78, 80, 92–93, 101 love-jihad 130, 173–174 Ludhianvi, S. 32, 33 Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) 164, 165, 168 Mahira photo controversy 151, 175–176 Malaysia 61 Mankekar, P. 6–8, 16, 90, 96, 100, 156 Manto, S.H. 32, 33 Masty (2006) 79, 95, 96 Meera 136–137 mediascapes 8, 156, 163, 164, 170, 176 melodrama: as cinematic address 32, 33–34, 78, 81–83, 119–120; and female

Index

audiences 123–124, 146–147, 148, 151; and masculinity 14, 106, 124–129; and the Urdu drama serial 110–113, 115, 122, 138, 139, 140 Menon, J. 160 Mere Brother ki Dulhan (MBKD, 2012) 14, 78, 80, 86–89, 101 Mother India (1957) 39, 41 Mubarki, M. 23, 38 Mughal-e-Azaam (1960) 40 multiplex growth 54, 63, 66, 73, 80, 100 Muslim femininity: association with feminism 135–136; as embodied by Mahira Khan 144–152; history of representation 134; in the wake of Partition 38–44 Muslim historical 27–28, 45 Muslim masculinity: association with terrorism 58, 81–82, 107–110; history of representation 81–82, 108; postliberalization 59, 62; in the wake of Partition 35–36 Muslim social 27, 38, 44–45, 47, 81, 142 My Name is Khan (2010) 58, 60–61 Nazar (2005) 136–137 Nargis 35, 39–40, 41, 43, 152 Nawaz, A. 171, 172 Nehru, J. 31, 33, 34, 35 Nehruvian socialism 23, 28, 56 Netflix 69, 70 Neutill, R. 57, 58 New Urdu Cinema 65–66, 68, 138, 161 Nikaah (1982) 47 Nochimson, M. 111, 112, 121 Non-Resident Indian (NRI) film 55–56, 60, 61, 90, 96, 156 North Indian culture 26–32 Nutan 42 Oonche Log (1985) 48 overseas markets: Middle East 13, 15, 63, 68, 122, 148; Pakistan 64–66 Padosi (1941) 27–28 Pakeezah (1972) 41, 42 Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (PEMRA) 123 Partition: and the abject 37–38, 42; and crossover stars 48–49; historical backdrop of 3, 20–22; and masking the Muslim star 35–37; on-screen representation 23–24; and the 2016 media ban 169, 171–172

193

Progressive Writer’s Movement (PWM) 31–32 qawwali 32, 95 Raees (2017) 64, 134, 142–144, 151, 166, 176 Raja Harischandra (1913) 26 Ramrajya 28, 55 refugees 21, 22, 31, 33 Sadhna (1958) 43 Sahib, Bibi, Aur Ghulam (1962) 41 Saigal, K.L. 27, 28, 29 Sangdil (1952) 36, 37 Sarkar, B. 23, 37 satire 83–86, 87, 89–90 Satyamev Jayate (2012–2014) 62 Shahjehan (1946) 28, 29–30 Shiv Sena 145, 165, 167 Shorey, M. 43, 44, 46 Shorey, R.K. 44, 46, 173 Siddique, S. 43–44, 46, 173 soft power: in conflict resolution 158–162; definition of 2; in India-Pakistan relations 10–11, 55, 156, 157; and nationalism 8–9 Sufism 29–30 Talbot, I. 21, 56, 156 tawaif see courtesan film technoscapes 156, 176 television: and contemporary crossover stars 7, 65, 67, 68, 70, 110–112; and early crossover stardom 46, 48, 49; and liberalization in Pakistan 122–123, 125, 126 Tere Bin Laden (TBL, 2010) 78, 80, 81, 82–86 Terror attacks: (9/11) 57, 58, 91, 134, 167; (26/11) 53, 57, 167 terrorist genre 56, 58, 78, 81, 90, 142 Thackeray, R. 165 Thomas, R. 26, 27, 39–40, 41 third space 11–12, 60, 73, 86, 97–100, 157 Total Siyapaa (2014) 80, 81, 89–92, 94, 99, 101 Twitter: and Fawad controversy 174, 175; and Fawad Khan 71, 106, 125, 126, 128; and Mahira Khan 134, 147, 148 victim/temptress binary 42, 47, 81, 136, 152 Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) 72

194

Index

Ul-Haq, Z. 147, 162 United Arab Emerates (UAE) 15, 64, 101, 149 Uri attack: description 164; effects of 65, 149, 151, 163; subsequent ban 164–167, 168, 169, 170, 172, 180 Vyjayanthimala 43

War on Terror 57, 83, 84–85, 100, 123, 171 YouTube 70, 125, 177 zenaana 111–112, 126 Zindagi Gulzar Hai (ZGH, 2012–2013) 116–117, 122, 125, 126 Zindagi TV 68, 71, 105, 107, 126, 147