The Mirror of Desire: Queerness, Fan, and the Riddles of Paheli

Doubling Down

The recent, and much publicized, release of Yashraj Films’ Fan (Maneesh Sharma, IN, 2016) offers an apposite occasion to reconsider the double role in popular Hindi cinema. While the double has been a staple feature of Indian popular cinemas for melodramatic as well as figurative reasons from its earliest years, it is important to note that only a certain scale of stardom lends itself to the notion of the doppelgänger, as evidenced by the actors who have played these roles: Dilip Kumar, Nargis, Hema Malini, Amitabh Bachchan, Sridevi, and more recently, of course, Shah Rukh Khan.² Additionally, the double or dual role is also subject to considerable variation in the popular film: for example, while certain films feature look-alikes who have no visible biological connection to each other, others deploy the double in quasi-metaphysical narratives of rebirth and reincarnation where a single “soul” passes through multiple lifetimes.³ Although in some films, the two characters remain separated by temporal or spatial imperatives—in other words, both characters are not present onscreen within the present-tense of the film, for example, SRK’s characters in Karan Arjun (Rakesh Roshan, IN, 1995),Don (Farhan Akhtar, IN, 2006), andOm Shanti Om (Farah Khan, IN, 2007)—the most enduring spectatorial pleasure of the double role is harnessed by witnessing the doubling of the star-body within single scenes and sequences. Thus, narratively and stylistically, the double offers certain unique opportunities and challenges, ranging from scenarios of lost-and-found siblings, mistaken identities, deception, and masquerade, to the mobilization of special effects that enable the doubled star to be manifest within the same frame. But fundamentally, the double role is an investment imperative: a multiplication of star-value onscreen indexes certain industrial calculations in terms of projected box-office returns.⁴ As “infallible” guarantees for financial returns, the commercial failures of double role films—such as Fan and Paheli (Amol Palekar, IN, 2005)—presents especially fascinating objects for analysis.

Indian cinema’s long romance with the double role makes the relative absence of scholarly explorations of the trope somewhat perplexing; what might account for this aporia, even as the field continues to expand at an impressive rate? I would wager that this oversight has something to do with the overwhelming dominance of melodrama as a theoretical optic. Since so much of the popular form’s proclivities have been categorized and understood as melodramatic, a figure like the double has simply failed to garner particular attention. The double role with its binary investments and dialectical propensities is particularly vulnerable to such an annexation, of course, but it is instructive to remember that the double as a figure has deep roots in epic, mythic, and folk traditions in South Asia, many of which predate melodrama as a mode. The figurative heft of the double ought to elicit critical reexamination of a kind that is beyond the scope of this essay; however, it is my contention that the manner in which the double functions in the SRK film troubles the contours of melodrama to a significant degree. The principle engine of this immiscibility is the question of “moral legibility” that Peter Brooks,⁵ and virtually all other scholars of melodrama, foreground as its foundational characteristic.⁶ Instead of providing clear coordinates for the distribution of melodramatic affects, the SRK double role introduces intensities and temporalities that stretch the mode to its limit. In what follows, I argue that the SRK double role queers the pitch for Hindi film melodrama in unique ways. This is not to suggest that the double role is beyond melodramatic reckoning in the commercial film—it is not—but here I wish to engage with the figure on its own terms, especially in relation to SRK’s stardom and filmography.

In one of the few sustained scholarly explorations of the double role in Hindi cinema, Neepa Majumdar has shown how the motif can fulfill important ideological tasks, as they pertain to managing troublesome aspects of certain star texts:

Using the melodramatic scenarios of the Bombay social film, the double...