My Name is Khan

George Orwell, in his evaluation of Kipling, wrote of Kipling’s essential advantage over his liberal critics:

“Because he [Kipling] identifies himself with the official class, he does possess one thing which ‘enlightened’ people seldom or never possess, and that is a sense of responsibility. The middle-class Left hate him for this quite as much as for his cruelty and vulgarity. All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy. They have internationalist aims, and at the same time they struggle to keep up a standard of life with which those aims are incompatible. We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and those of us who are ‘enlightened’ all maintain that those coolies ought to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our ’enlightenment’, demands that the robbery shall continue. A humanitarian is always a hypocrite, and Kipling’s understanding of this is perhaps the central secret of his power to create telling phrases."

The American story draws its fundamental basis as well as its international appeal from the story of immigration to America. The “American Dream”, that kingmaker and illusionist of universal material prosperity, is indelibly marked with the story of millions of immigrants who have come to the United States pursuing fortune. The obvious is only so with repetition: America’s national pride is bound up in the proposition that this wealth is not unnatural or god-given. It is through effort and pain that one succeeds in America. And because pain and effort are open to all, success cannot be limited to the few.

America’s immigrants and their descendants are the avatars of America’s self-image. The sinusoidal ebbs and floes of their success in American society is tracked by Americans’ self-image. Although this often results in self-congratulation, it is also a cause for self-criticism: Give me your weak, your sick. I am not Europe. I am not a king, you are not my serf.

The treatment of Muslims and torture of detainees after the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11th is thus judged against a baseline of inherent American ‘goodness’, both within and outside America. Harassing Pakistani shopkeepers is not acceptable because it happens quite often abroad; Rather, it is unacceptable by very dint of its happening in America. (this is a functional definition of ‘American Exceptionalism’).

There is a scene in My Name is Khan where the main character Rizwan Khan (Played by Sharukh Khan), the autistic son of muslims from Bombay, begins to recite the hateful chant of a group of muslims he observes from his apartment window during the Riots of 1986. His mother chides him for reciting the chant, even though he doesn’t understand it. “Rizwan: there are no muslim people, no hindu people in the world. There are only good people and bad people.”

Besides becoming a leitmotif for later dramatic provocations and resolutions, Khan’s mother hints at the ultimate basis for American egalitarianism: there is no primacy of ideological beliefs, but only the rule of law and equality of opportunity. You will only be judged for your goodness or badness, not for your identity and associations. (I do not thereby discount the equally-plausible explanation that the belief in equality among men is not an American conceit but a muslim or christian one.)

My Name is Khan is not a Michael Moore-inspired morality play on American politics. Khan, because of his Asberger’s, is a gifted mechanic but remains unable to succeed. His brother emigrates to the United States to attend college and start his own business. After Khan’s mother dies, he moves in with his brother in San Francisco. There he meets the beautiful Mandira (Kajol Devgan). They fall in love and are married.

Khan’s brother disowns him for marrying Mandira, a hindu. But Khan ignores the stigma of miscegenation. His dysfunctional autism and Mandira’s two-bit job as a hairdresser aside, the couple move to a suburb of San Francisco, buy a house, send their child to public school and live life as the rest of the world perceives Americans to actually live it: as a nuclear family, in the suburbs, away from any kind of conflict, social or economic.

Although some critics say the film is less political than it is dramatic, I don’t accept that a Bollywood film can claim innocence for its ham-fisted political commentary in allegorical statementsof love, kindness and naiveté. Khan’s mental illness does not prevent him from selling cheap beauty products and traveling by plane. The ugly side of the American social contract is that the very mindset which advocates worldwide egalitarianism is the one most eagerly embraced by regimes of cheap oil and immigration protectionism. (Imagine how cheap a haircut would be if someone from Mexico could come to San Francisco and set up a barber shop on the corner. Mandira would find it a lot more difficult to buy her SUV and move to the suburbs, yaar?).

On its face, My Name is Khan is interesting to this American because it engages in the objectification which Americans and Europeans often utilize against the Orient. But when Khan arrives in the benighted town of Wilhelmina, Georgia, and is taken in by “Mamma Jenny”, a jolly, obese black woman who “fixes him up” some food and cries every twenty seconds, all the while dressed in a potato sack and ambling around her wooden cabin, Khan outs itself as little more than a pastiche of stereotypes, aimed at glorifying the greatest farce of all: that we are all American.