Mr Salman Khan has done something interesting over the past fortnight. He has switched the burden of responsibility of making someone enjoy a film, from the performer to the audience.

DaMann

Mr Salman Khan has done something interesting over the past fortnight. He has switched the burden of responsibility of making someone enjoy a film, from the performer to the audience. In a nation of many hierarchies, where power is position often defined by not what's around you but who's below you, he has levelled the playing field ufffd he has starred in a movie that's being enjoyed nationwide by everyone ufffd from penniless farmers (with glee) to Harvard Business School graduates (with guilt).

Gandhi wanted to do this because he thought the main lesson a nation of caste and status could learn was equality. Hence, the sacrifices, the marches, the starvation, the martyrdom. It is a bit odd to think that Salman and Arbaaz Khan, two men often more associated with cut-off jeans and muscle flexing than Gandhian principles, stepped in to pick up where the teachings of the Mahatma left off. Yet, if the box office numbers of their latest massive blockbuster Dabangg are true, rich and poor India, elite and slum India, city and village India, sat next to each other to enjoy this. Gandhi had once said that if ever all of India could share a common experience, the idea of this nation would make sense. However odd it is saying this, Dabangg is the closest we've gotten to that experience in a while.u00a0

In an increasingly earnest (and urban) cinematic culture, exploring dyslexia or educational reform or rock music dreams or autistic people walking across Arizona to improve US-Islamic relations (all valid), there is very little place for stories that don't necessarily show the makers as enlightened, and saying something meaningful. Like the rest of the culture, the aim is to leave the past behind us, no more heroes being heroic, villains with dens being villainous, no more very strong man VS unjust system. No more power failures and waiting for a home phone connection.

In a nation of capitalism and possibility, everyone wants to be better ufffd real estate developers want glass and steel high-rises to get us out of the cagey 70s architecture, the bureaucracy wants to be efficient, the middle class wants to improve their mind through new ideas and their lifestyle with new things. It's only fair thus that film critics want to hold cinema to western standards ufffd to their urban, and often refined, tastes.u00a0

New India, and the people creating it, are city people. Our economic revolution has often been suggested to be one of city ambitions. Economists and financiers talk of a service economy replacing an agricultural economy, as if the latter is something backward and unnecessary (except that little thing of feeding all of us). In this increasingly English-speaking, westernising milieu, thus, in cinema, that great vehicle of a nation's value systems, there's little place for anything that isn't about the new, the fashionable, the posh ufffd whether ideas, locations or things.

In the middle of this optimistic aspiration India, Mr Khan has dropped a film (directed by Abhinav Kashyap) that doesn't care. And in a lovely touch, nor does he. The film creates a character that's part Clint Eastwood, part Chuck Norris, part Charles Bronson, part Rajnikanth. All hero. Cleaning up a small UP town like Clint did as a lonely cowboy Sheriff in any western (plus special effects).

This is not scripted after some deep analysis of rural India to understand what the other side might enjoy, nor after some massive studio market research to understand consumer habits. This is not trying to be some urban ironic satire on 80s cinema a la Tarantino tributes (though urban India has read it that way, laughed and enjoyed the ironies). This is a movie star saying 'my India begins with me ufffd and it's for all of you ufffd a billion ufffd not city VS village, not NRI VS B towns, not wine party crowds VS tea stall crowds, not Prada VS dhoti, not driver VS BMW owner ufffd everyone.

It's hard to argue with that philosophy ufffd that mass entertainment should be enjoyed by, well, a mass ufffd regardless of upbringing, money or stature. And cinema that can do that, in a nation divided by stature, truly transcends.

The reason the burden of responsibility lies with elite India, is that somehow they have to justify, in their heads, how they could, at their core, be thoroughly enjoying Salman Khan just like their maid or their driver. Especially, after the Ivy league education, the multinational job, the world travelling, the Kindle novels, the art buying and martini drinking. Surely, that means they should be more evolved to scoff at him. But that's their problem, not his. He's just saying, this is it ufffd everyone's welcome.

Anuvab Pal is a Mumbai-based playwright and screenwriter. His plays in Mumbai include Chaos Theory and screenplays for Loins of Punjab Presents (co-written) and The President is Coming. He is currently working on a book on the Bollywood film Disco Dancer for Harper Collins, out later this year.

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