Pathaan, precarity and the Muslim question in neoliberal India

In India’s current censorial political climate, Pathaan ’s subtle jabs against authoritarianism, jingoistic nationalism and communal ideologies make it an unusual and innovative cinematic-political intervention despite its clichéd genre-elements. Yet we argue that the film’s diagnosis of what needs intervention is inadequate and its interventionist apparatus is counterproductive. The film uses all the accoutrements of a neo-liberal image-economy (globe-trotting mobility, jet-setting lifestyles, glitzy hotels, sexy bodies, monster automobiles) and the neocolonial ‘big brother’ rationality of a hyper-militarized, surveillance-driven, paranoid security-state to make an argument about religious tolerance and a nationalism grounded in compassion. We invite an analysis of the film that is not caught between a wide-eyed celebration of the film or an angry dismissal of its betrayals, though perhaps Pathaan deserves both. Instead, in reading the film as an example of ‘cinema of precarity’, we identify its structures of resistance and explore why they amount to so little. The film thus also allows us to register the limits of neo-liberal stardom as an adequate foil to religious authoritarianism

Political science · Precarity · Sociology · Gender Studies · Indian Economic and Social Development · Social and Economic Development in India

• Imagining Indian Muslims

  Open Access•Maidul Islam•Indian Journal of Human Development•2007

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