ABSTRACT
During the Golden Globe Awards show in 2009, Indian Muslim megastar Shah Rukh Khan was introduced to the North American audience as the ‘King of Bollywood’. Invited to present the nomination of the film Slumdog Millionaire, Khan warmly greeted the slightly bewildered audience with an offer to do a ‘pelvic Indian dance’. In this setting, Shah Rukh Khan’s brown (Muslim) male body could be recognized as a form of Orientalized Bollywood, rather than as a terrorist with the prompts and validation of Danny Boyle’s presence and within the larger terrain of global cinema. Directly addressing the expectation of his staging and performing re-Orientalism, this offer was followed by a tongue-in-cheek comment that could be read to reflect Khan’s awareness of Hollywood’s ethnocentrism and ignorance about him and the broader Bollywood culture industry rather than any form of selfdeprecation: ‘[but if I were to do such a thing,] they would shoo me off the stage’. Addressing the audience, he added cordially: ‘Thank you for your graciousness to the Indian film fraternity and thank you Danny [Boyle] for shooting your film in Mumbai. Way to go.’ Expressing gratitude for what might be considered cinematic tourism may be an ironic statement, and at the very least a statement that highlights the Orientalism of the film, Hollywood and his invitation to enact a re-Orientalism on this stage. While aware of Bollywood’s presence, few of the American celebrities seemed actually familiar with or able to recognize Khan himself. Hence, while Bollywood might be one of the largest global culture industries and Khan an unparalleled celebrity within it, to an ethnocentric Hollywood both were only vaguely identifiable through Orientalist lenses. Nevertheless, it is tempting to see Khan’s frictional and teasing offer to gyrate as a recognition of and a rejection of a performative Bollywood re-Orientalism in which he plays the role of the submissive and appreciative little brother who wants to join the celebrity fraternity. ‘Lack’ of recognition showed a different face a few months later when
Khan’s name surfaced on an alert list and he was detained and interrogated at Newark’s Liberty International Airport. On his way to celebrate India’s Independence Day and to promote a new film, he was held by US Customs and Border Protection authorities for questioning for a short period of time until he was permitted to contact the Indian Embassy for assistance. Khan
was ironically en route to promote My Name is Khan, a story of a Muslim American with Asperger Syndrome who is racially profiled as a terrorist in a post-9/11 United States. Outrage and protest flooded the print media and electronic forums across the subcontinent and parts of the diaspora as the ‘King of Bollywood’ was ‘mistaken’ for a potential terrorist. In the heavily surveillanced space of the airport, this mis-recognition overwhelmed and breached the buffer of Orientalism and Bollywood re-Orientalism staged at the Golden Globes, rendering Khan Muslim and dangerous, a potential terrorist. Danny Boyle’s film Slumdog Millionaire, which Khan introduced at the Golden Globe Awards, was much more likely to be familiar to the American audience than Shah Rukh Khan, My Name is Khan or Bollywood. Slumdog Millionaire’s achievement of numerous nominations and awards in the United States has much to do with the fact that it is not an Indian film, but a film about an India. More interested in depictions of slums and poverty (think of the recent popularity of Born into Brothels by Ross Kauffman and Zana Briski), elements of Slumdog Millionaire, nevertheless, resonated with audiences eager to consume certain Orientalist visions of India. This chapter examines the politics of and around Slumdog Millionaire, demonstrating different enactments and levels of (Orientalism and) re-Orientalism, within the film as well as in terms of its reception, in India and in the West. With its transnational production, it may in fact to be said not only to perpetrate Orientalism and re-Orientalism, but also to simultaneously create and feed a desire for or consumption of the same. The crossing trajectories of Shah Rukh Khan and Slumdog Millionaire
indicate the multiple and simultaneous globalizations occurring through varied and stratified flows, some of which reify and reinvigorate Orientalisms. One might argue that the cinematic world in which Shah Rukh Khan is adored by millions of fans, if not recognized by over a billion people, encounters the world of Hollywood and Homeland Security in moments of high friction. In contrast to scholars who see globalization as a set of processes that are characterized by smooth flows of people, commodities and capital, anthropologist Anna Tsing poses globalization as characterized by moments of friction that are the ‘awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnection across difference’ (Tsing 2004: 4). While awkward and unequal may be understatements in this case, nevertheless these encounters reveal the complex social, economic, cultural and political processes that are indicative not of a single global culture or the transcendence of the national into the universal, but rather of frictional networks of power, and, importantly in this case, ones in which Orientalisms significantly shape the terrain. Thinking through and beyond frameworks of globalization here, the competing frictions include multiple forms of Orientalisms, ones that frame Shah Rukh Khan as exotic spectacle and state threat. In the spaces of the Golden Globe stage and Liberty International Airport, different flows of power coincided creating and making visible frictions of exotic spectacle, state power, Muslim racial formations and pulp globalizations embedded in
Orientalism and re-Orientalism. To understand Slumdog Millionaire, then, requires an engagement with the text, but also an understanding of what epistemes make it so recognizable and appealing to western audiences at the same time that its references, stars and performances remain frictionally unfamiliar, unsettling or misread. Orientalisms, here, are reconstituted as exotic spectacle (Bollywood) and as racialized empire (Muslim as terror) within the context of neoliberalism and globalization. As these Orientalisms compete and collide, they produce congruence or discordance, as well as frictions. I argue that re-Orientalism is critical to making distinct a ‘benign’ Orientalism of exoticism from one associated with the threat of terror. The performance of re-Orientalism satisfies the desire to recognize the Orient in the image of the West as ‘little neoliberal brother’ (or globalized game show winner as I discuss later).
