Screening Precarity: Pathaan and the Muslim Question in Neoliberal India
Anwer explores how Hindi films released post-2010 mediate precarity in contemporary India, and what that mediation reveals about both India polity and the social life of the movies. She argues that these films are contentious cinematic terrains that record India’s transition from the glee and gusto of liberalization in the 1990s, to a nation contending with the failures and inadequacies of neoliberalism’s promises, and ascendency of the material-affective redressals offered by Hindu nationalism. Her talk will conclude with a close textual engagement with Shah Rukh Khan’s blockbuster Pathaan (2023), to delineate the possibilities and limits of how marginal identities are shaped, scripted, and screened when neoliberalism and authoritarianism enmesh.