Caramel connections

While the film Pathaan , at the time of its release in 2023, was read in terms of its overt political messaging and against the backdrop of a majoritarian political culture, this article sees Pathaan ’s political work as more subterranean. Pathaan functions as a kind of memory box connecting viewers through a web of sensed memories, which I call caramel connections , of cinema and their unspoken connections and implications of heterogeneity. The film’s self-aware engagement is with both the history and the memory of an older Bollywood cinema: its earnestness, its disinterest in aesthetics and politics of realism claims the space of popular culture as political outside the binaries of left and right. Shah Rukh Khan is a star who has functioned as an emotive vehicle for transitional moments in India. What kind of transitional moment do Pathaan and Khan see themselves as travelling through

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