Earlier this year, in the now-famous post-end credits scene in Siddharth Anand’s Pathaan, we saw Shah Rukh Khan in a banter with another star, Salman ‘Tiger’ Khan, cracking a self-reflexive joke about the creaky bones of Bollywood’s aging Khans. He starts off by wondering if the trinity—all touching 58 this year—should think of retiring. He goes on to ask a seminal question: “Hamari jagah lega kaun (Who will replace us?)”, and eventually makes the thumping assertion that they are irreplaceable: “Humein hi karna padega. Bachchon par nahin chhod sakte (We will have to do it. We can’t leave it to the kids).”
It’s as though SRK had anticipated that some of the venerable veterans of Bollywood, like him, would be turning the industry’s fortunes around after a long dry spell through the pandemic and after. When you consider that their popularity has been on the decline and they have all been summarily dismissed as fading stars, this comeback itself becomes the stuff of mass cinema.
August and September have emerged as the biggest months for Bollywood box office this year. Ormax Media, the Mumbai-based media consulting firm, suggests that 2023 could well turn out to be the highest-grossing year of all time. All thanks to SRK’s Jawan, the 66-year-old Sunny Deol’s Gadar 2, the 56-year-old Akshay Kumar’s OMG2, and beyond Bollywood, the 72-year-old Rajinikanth’s Jailer. SRK, at the last count, had delivered Rs 1,050.30 crore gross with Pathaan (according to Bollywood Hungama) and Rs 695.67 crore with Jawan; Deol’s Gadar 2 had grossed Rs 679.69 crore.
Take away these ‘golden jubilee’ actors, including Ajay Devgn and the soon-to-be-50 Hrithik Roshan, and you would be left with almost no one else to wear the heavy crown of superstardom. A 40-year-old, unreliable Ranbir Kapoor? Or the callow younger bunch in their 30s—Kartik Aryan, Varun Dhawan and Tiger Shroff? Perhaps the 38-year-old Ranveer Singh, with the recent success of Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani (Rs 346.66 crore) behind him, could make the cut, but industry watchers think he can get too iconoclastic and unorthodox to have a sustained sway over the movie-watching masses.
There is another view to take in from the other side of the screen: the rapidly declining age of the Indian movie-going audience. According to a recent report titled Sizing the Cinema: 2023, the median age of India’s theatrical audience has dropped from 27.5 years before the pandemic to 24.1 years. So, more than the impressive crores their films have amassed, what’s astonishing is how the boomers and OGs are appealing to the millennials and Gen Z viewers. Many who are flocking to Gadar 2, for instance, weren’t born when Gadar: Ek Prem Katha released in 2001. They would not be driven by the nostalgia for the iconic handpump scene or the “Dhai kilo ka haath (Two-and-a-half-kilo hand)” dialogue. Moreover, main man Sunny Deol has hardly been active in recent years to have caught their eye. Yet, Gadar 2 is a Sunny Deol blockbuster, not the success of Utkarsh Sharma (who plays his son). Similarly, it’s the senior SRK, the cigar-smoking, rock-loving Captain Vikram Rathore, who trumps over the younger SRK, his son Azad, in Jawan. Even when one of his young compatriots in the film calls him “uncle”, his charming reaction sweeps the audience off the floor.
The title of Jawan doesn’t just invoke the Indian soldier but plays with the idea of youth, too. An awareness of the march of time and a simultaneous disregard for it informs the film. When Azad hijacks a Mumbai metro train and is called “buddha (old man)” by a cop, he takes off the bandages on his head, wraps them around the officer’s head and shouts as he age-shames him: “Buddha hoga tera baap (Your father must be an old man).”
The ‘Zinda Banda’ anthem is another of SRK’s ways of asserting his far-from-old stardom. As is his conscious attempt to pull out an ageing colleague—Salman in Pathaan and Sanjay Dutt in Jawan—to underscore the solidarity with them in their evergreen, never-say-die star appeal. SRK’s overt political statements aside, you can’t get away from his messaging on dotage and reinventing a supposedly fading stardom.
ALSO READ | 'Through The Night' review: Truth on trial
It’s the generational, father-son theme which stands out even more in the outings of Khan and Deol. “He (the son) is Simba, this (the father) is Mufasa,” goes a line in Jawan referring to The Lion King. The dialogue “Bete ko haath lagaane se pehle baap se baat kar (Before you touch the son, deal with his father)” could have been roared as effectively by Tara Singh when he returns to Pakistan to rescue Jeete, his imprisoned son, and single-handedly gets the better of the entire Pakistan army in Gadar 2.
It must be noted that in this remarkable success of senior superstars, women continue to have no place. We must notice that the year’s films are all built on the typical, massy formula of scale, spectacular action, and machismo. Even the women-friendly romantic persona of SRK has fallen in line and turned into an all-out action hero, with six-pack abs and rippling muscles. Tiger 3 and Dunki are up next. Will they stick to this successful recipe? For now, Bollywood is thriving again, even if not in all the ways we hope for.