They say that cinema must reflect its times. But such a definition barely scratches the surface. As a film does not simply depict the world around it; it dialogues with it, resists it, dreams beyond it. Perhaps it is more accurate, and more revealing, to say that cinema constitutes a kind of fantasmatic space: a realm where the unreal gains form and the unimaginable is momentarily granted plausibility. So, on celluloid, we do not simply witness what is, we flirt with what might be, what ought to be, or what we fear becoming. In this sense, film exceeds the notion of passive reflection. It becomes a living conversation with its times. Few films embody this tension, this elegant collision between the real and the imagined, as lucidly as Kabir Khan’s Bajrangi Bhaijaan. On the surface, it is a tale of simple moral clarity: a devout Hanuman bhakt, played with surprising earnestness by Salman Khan, embarks on a cross-border odyssey to reunite a lost, mute Muslim girl with her family in Pakistan. Now, a decade since its release, the film invites a different gaze. Watching it today is not merely an act of nostalgia, but an excavation. It reveals more about our current moment, than it perhaps ever could about the time in which it was made.
When Bajrangi Bhaijaan first arrived on the screen, it did far more than become one of Hindi cinema’s most resounding commercial triumphs, it ignited a rare, cross-sectional conversation. Cinephiles, scholars, and the wider public found themselves drawn not to its disarming, even radical, politics. Here was a mainstream film, fronted by a superstar, no less, that dared to reimagine the relationship between India and Pakistan not through the tired lens of enmity, but through a luminous humanitarian gaze. It stood in stark contrast to the dominant cinematic narratives of its time, which too often leaned into caricature, conflict, and jingoism. But time, as always, redraws the contours of what is permissible, sayable, and even imaginable. A decade on, it feels almost impossible to replicate the film’s proposition, that such a story unfolded through the body of a Muslim Bollywood superstar is, today, unthinkable. And perhaps, unsurprisingly so. The past ten years have not been kind to nuance, we have nurtured narratives of suspicion, fear, and aggressive nationalism, wearing them as cultural badges of honour.
But the real surprise lies not in what can no longer be done, but in what was already there, unnoticed, untheorized, almost taken for granted. For if one looks beyond the film’s luminous, tender second half, masterfully imagined and emotionally disarming, and revisits the more incidental beats of the first half, one finds a subtle but sobering clarity. At the time, these early narrative gestures may have seemed like minor storytelling conveniences, or perhaps they were simply eclipsed by the emotional crescendo that followed. But now, with the benefit of distance, they read differently. They speak not only of a story trying to mend what was broken, but also, inadvertently, of a society already on the verge of letting go of such stories altogether. What once felt like artistic license now feels like foreshadowing. The paths the film tiptoed in its first half, in the intervening years, become the highways of public discourse. And so, watching Bajrangi Bhaijaan today is not only to revisit what was, but to witness, with aching clarity, where we were always heading.
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So let’s look more closely at the narrative choices Kabir Khan makes in the film’s first half. The most noticeable among them is naming Salman Khan’s character as “Bajrangi.” At the time of the film’s release, the word was far from neutral, as it was inseparable in the public psyche from Babu Bajrangi, a man convicted for his role in the 2002 Gujarat carnage. But instead of avoiding it, Khan reclaims it. He detaches it from its violent connotations and anchors it in a character who is everything the name had come to signify against. And, in fact, by the time the film ends, “Bajrangi” has come together with “Bhaijaan.” It was a shift not just in title but in tone, politics, and possibility. However, Khan’s interrogation does not end with nomenclature. Within the folds of the film, there exists a critique of the very ideological apparatus that shaped Bajrangi’s world.
Kabir Khan crafted a character for Salman Khan that stood in defiance of the masculinity celebrated by the right.
Bajrangi and Rasika (Kareena Kapoor Khan) are both, in their own ways, disappointments to their fathers, each emblematic of Hindutva’s patriarchal conservatism. Rasika’s father is bigoted and suspicious; Bajrangi’s father is no less than the head of the local RSS shakha in Pratapgarh. These are not incidental details. They are signals. When Bajrangi confesses, with disarming modesty, “In all the subjects that were dear to my father, I had absolutely no interest,” it lands less as a punchline and more as an ideological break. As this is no accidental hero. Bajrangi, as conceived by Khan, is not the muscular, hyper-masculine saviour celebrated by the right-wing nationalist imagination. Similarly, there is Rasika, daughter of a man who proudly declares that he doesn’t rent to “Mohammedans.” He doesn’t like the smell of non-vegetarian food, which, he insists, pollutes his pure vegetarian air. But irony, that old trickster, arrives right on time. Because all these things he fears unfold in his very home. And when he objects, Rasika doesn’t flinch. She pushes back with utmost clarity.
But perhaps the most tender, and subversive, moment in this entire first half comes with the “Chicken Kuk-Doo-Koo” song. A strictly vegetarian Bajrangi sings a song about chicken to make a homesick Muslim girl smile. It’s a simple, almost throwaway moment. But it’s also profound. Here, food, often the site of division, becomes the language of care. Watching this now, a decade later, the moment lands differently. The country we inhabit today is one where food has become a site of violence. Where Muslim families are evicted for their diets, where homes are denied for surnames, where lynchings happen not in shadows but in broad daylight; all in the name of purity, of identity, of control. In retrospect, these fractures were always there. Bajrangi Bhaijaan saw them. But like the best of Manmohan Desai’s cinema, Khan wrapped it in a utopian second half, one that made us believe love could outrun politics, and kindness could defy borders. And maybe we needed that. Maybe we still do. Maybe we need Bajrangi, and Khan, more than ever. We need that noble foolishness, that wide-eyed idealism that insists a man can cross borders for a child he barely knows. That tenderness isn’t a weakness. That faith doesn’t have to harden into hate. But perhaps this time, the journey need not be across nations. Perhaps the expedition must remain within the borders. Because if Bajrangi once helped us imagine what was possible, maybe now he can help us remember what we’ve begun to forget.
