Brand SRK is a much bandied about term. But what are its coordinates? More importantly, how does it connect with the 24x7 news cycle, obsessed with Shah Rukh Khan’s son Aryan’s arrest following a dubious drug-bust?
It is important to first map the brand’s textual trajectory through Khan’s cinematic oeuvre. SRK as a brand emerges in the late 1990s, fuelled by the overwhelming success of Aditya Chopra’s Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995) and Karan Johar’s Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998). Characters essayed by SRK—lover boy Raj Malhotra and yuppie Rahul Khanna—rewrite the psychotic anti-hero image that come in films that preceeded them: Baazigar (1993), Darr (1993) and Anjaam (1994). The sheen of the later, romantic-domestic dramas, speaking to a rapidly liberalising economy and the attendant rise of the Hindutva movement, stamps out the grim residue of the angry young man, traces of which appear via mobilisation of the revenge genre—in...
A Fanboy’s Bollywood: Before And After The Khans 
