The Khan Mutiny

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 21 May 2017

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Bollywood, the world's biggest film industry had, until recently, largely avoided the inter-faith tensions that surface repeatedly elsewhere in India. Many leading men are Muslims - a fact that has been no apparent impediment to their success. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown explores the history of Muslims in Bollywood through the prism of the number of powerful leading male actors who share the same Muslim surname - Khan. The Khans have quite literally taken over Bollywood. Aamir, Salman, Shah Rukh, Aamer, Saif Ali and Irfan - to name but a few - currently dominate the industry. Almost all are Muslim or of Muslim descent, hugely successful and able to navigate two of the most powerful forces working against them - the puritanism of Islam and the ever-increasing grip of Hindu fundamentalism in India. They are some of the nation's best-loved and most successful actors, brand ambassadors of the official "Incredible India" tourism campaign - and Muslims in a majority-Hindu nation. And many of them are married to Hindus. Prominent actors, writers, directors, producers, composers, film historians, politicians and critics explain how the Khans have managed to successfully carve out their careers as Muslims in a Hindu world, about how they see the future unfolding under the growing Hindu fundamentalist culture of India, as well as against the national and international backdrop of Islamic fundamentalism.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Yasmin alibi Brown, and for the next hour I'll be telling you about how a group of male actors with the same Muslim surname of Khan came to dominate Bollywood.
0:14.0	So we're on the 17th floor, that's where my office is and what we're looking out is this huge
0:18.8	concrete jungle called Andhiri West in Mumbai, which is also in a certain way where
0:25.0	Bollywood is now centered.
0:27.0	Most of the studios are here, most of the people working in the industry are over here.
0:32.0	And if you can make out from the sounds of drills and
0:35.5	machines worrying about there's a lot of construction happening almost every second day
0:40.1	there's some plot where you see a new building coming up.
0:43.0	You know, as you can hear, there's this like what I call the symphony of Azar, what happens about,
0:48.0	there are about five mosques. We're on the 17th floor and we have these sounds floating up you know five times a day.
0:56.0	It has a very nice appealing quality to it. When we get about five of them together
1:00.8	there's like you know you can make out, there's one just ended, one has started.
1:05.0	There's a large Muslim population of Bombay,
1:08.0	which are all in a certain way around this place.
1:10.0	Gabir Khan, describing the stunning panorama from his office building in Mumbai in the heart of Bollywood.
1:18.0	He is a metaphor for the film industry in which the surname Khan seems to be a talisman, a passport to becoming part
1:26.9	of an elite brand for men of Muslim heritage. counterparts. and Sharuq Khan run the show. I went to Mumbai to find out more about these
1:56.4	remarkable leading men, Amir Salman and Sharu Khan, the kings of
2:01.6	Bollywood. I wanted to find out who they are, how they came to be,
2:07.0	and why the three top stars of Muslim heritage have become more cautious and more elusive the more famous they've become.
2:16.0	All three have turned 50 this year and all three have managed to stay at the top of their game for 25 years. India changes, the world changes,
2:29.2	but these stars shine on, worshipped by millions of fans from east to west, south to north.
	...

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