Organizational behaviuor

Submitted to:
Mr.Junaid Khalid

Submitted by:
Haroon Afzal 20
Asif Nawaz 17
M.Shabir 25
Maqsood Ahmad

Department of management
science
The islamia university of bahawal
pur

My Name is Khan(2010
Director: Karan Johar
Actors
In the film, the main role Rizwan Khan has
been played by Shah Rukh Khan and actress
is Kajol as Mandira.
Personalty+behavioural features
Rizwan Khan is suffering from Asperger
syndrome in the film. He exhibits different
symptoms like: no social interaction, hates
loud noise, hates yellow colour, keeps
repeating words i.e. Echolalia, less eye
contact and above average intelligence.
Social environment effect
Moreover, the movie brings out the out
casting or ill treatment of Muslims after the
9/11 incident and after the Iraq war. The
prejudices the American had towards the
Muslims has been portrayed in the film very
well.
Emtional attachments in personal life of
couple
Also in the film, Mandira marries Rizwan Khan
and the impact she has because he is a

Muslim. She loses a son. This brings

separation between the two.
If we compare the symptoms mentioned
above and the symptoms shown in the film,
most of them are similar. The symptoms
mainly include:
inappropriate or minimal social
interactions
conversations almost always revolving
around self rather than others
repetitive speech
lack of "common sense"
problems with reading, math, or writing
skills
obsession with complex topics such as
patterns or music
average to below-average nonverbal
cognitive abilities, though verbal cognitive
abilities are
usually average to aboveaverage
awkward movements
odd behaviors or mannerisms

 If we compare this to the film-My Name is

Khan
then we will find the character Rizwan
Khan having the following symptoms:
repetitive speech, awkward movements,
odd behaviour like in the film hes scared
of the yellow colour. He also hates loud
noise and is interested in jig saw puzzles.
Moreover, his eye contact is very less and
most importantly less or fewer social
contact.

This essay anchors its analysis in the experience of marginalized Americans

following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on New York City (9/11) as explored
in Karan Johars 2010 film, My Name Is Khan (MNIK). Amidst extreme politicization
over the events of 9/11 and the subsequent global war on terror, popular culture
offers multiple readings of post9/11 America from the standpoint of colored, Othered
bodies caught between the crosshairs of the national security apparatus. Though
Hollywood has produced a dizzying array of films taking up the issue of 9/11 and the
war on terror from both critical and mainstream points of view,[1] non-Western films
that subvert, contort, or re-position the point of view away from the dominant cultural
group have garnered critical acclaim (Soliman 183).
I explore the meeting points of race, class, and gender in Johars film, arguing that
MNIK opens crucial spaces for solidarity building amongst racialized Others at the
margins of American society. Class and race are shown to affect the degree to which

the South Asian body is discursively produced as a threat to national interest, and
also to emphasize how this nations interest ultimately excludes the interests of
lower-class black America. While opening this important entry point for building
solidarity, the film nevertheless repeats stereotypes about good/bad Muslims, and
defines South Asian women through the trope of real-life heroines, whose
subjectivities are subsumed by their duty/honor and whose choices are contoured
and constrained by the men in their lives.

My Name Is Khan tells the life story of Rizwan Khan,

a Muslim man with Asperger disorder who embarks on a mission to meet the
president of the United States (Johar 2010). As a young boy growing up in India
during the 1970s, Rizwan is different and no one knows why. After their mother dies,
Rizwans younger brother Zakir brings him to the United States, where he has been
living since leaving India at the age of eighteen. Zakirs psychologist wife Hasina
observes Rizwans behavioral patterns and quickly realizes Rizwan suffers from
Asperger disorder. She then works with him to develop strategies to ease his
integration into American society. While selling beauty products for his brothers
company, Rizwan meets a divorced Hindu hairstylist named Mandira and her son
Sam. The two begin an awkward and charming courtship and are soon married,
much to Zakirs chagrin, who rejects Mandira on the basis that she is not a Muslim.
Rizwan, Mandira, and Sam enjoy a middle-class suburban lifestyle until the Twin
Towers are destroyed. Over the course of the next five to six years, they begin to feel
the effects of racism and Islamaphobia in their personal and professional lives. One

day, a schoolyard confrontation results in a racialized assault that ultimately kills

Sam. Mandira, heartbroken, blames the surname Khan for the death of her child and
tells Rizwan she is leaving him; she cannot bear the sight of him because he
reminds her of Sams death. Rizwan tells her he will leave, as their house belongs to
her. He asks when he should come back, and in a fit of rage she sarcastically tells
him to return after he can tell the president that he is not a terrorist, despite his
Muslim name:
Tell everyone in America, Im not a terrorist . . . Can you do that? Can you? No, you
cant. Why dont you tell the president of the United States? Mr. President, my name
is Khan, and Im not a terrorist. Then he can tell all those people that my Sam was
not the terrorist son of a terrorist father. He was just a baby. My baby. When you do
that, come back. (Johar 2010, translation from subtitles)
Due to his Asperger disorder, Khan takes this instruction literally and embarks upon
a journey to convey his message to the president. During his quest, he encounters a
variety of ethnic Others including brown-skinned Muslims, Hindus, and African
Americans who experience the consequences of the war on terror within American
society in different ways.
Rizwan is mistaken for a terrorist at a rally and is falsely arrested; this story makes
headlines thanks to a team of journalists who seek to call attention to the effects of
rising Islamaphobia and racism within the United States. Upon release, he hears
about a hurricane that struck the small town of Wilhelmina, Georgia, where his
friends reside. Rizwan postpones his quest in order to travel to the stormy town to
help rescue and rebuilding efforts. By the time Rizwan finally meets the president to
deliver his message, the entire nation knows his story. When Mandira returns to him,
he has brought down an Islamic terrorist cell, helped rebuild a destroyed town, and
escaped death after being stabbed by an Islamic fanatic.
Building off Edward Saids Orientalism framework, Mounira Soliman argues that
Johars film resists the typical Orientalist trope of Muslims in Hollywood cinema.
Soliman argues that Eastern films have received more critical acclaim in the post

9/11 environment because they tend to subvert the point of view of the center to
focus on the perspective of the margin (1778). Though MNIK receives relatively
little attention in her paper, she identifies the importance of reversing the orientalist
gaze in the film through describing the moment Rizwan is released from jail. The
police officer stares at Rizwan, indicating with two fingers to his eyes that he will still
be keeping Khan under surveillance. Soliman suggests that Rizwans reciprocation
of this gesture indicates that he will also be keeping a watchful eye on the officer
(175).
In light of the recurring song We Shall Overcome in MNIK, Solimans challenge to
the power imbalance between margin and center is fitting. The films resolution
shows that Rizwan succeeds in proving the inaccuracy of the dominant gaze, though
the far-reaching consequences of this reversal are left open to interpretation. The
dominant gaze is one that homogenizes the Other as Muslim in this film. Several
brown-skinned characters representing a variety of religious denominations appear
the same under the dominant cultural gaze and are treated as if they are Muslims; by
extension, all brown-skinned people are seen as terrorists. The film opens the
potential for moving beyond this somewhat obvious foreground to consider the
importance of building solidarity among Others. A prime example is Jitesh, the Hindu
motel owner Rizwan encounters midway through the film. Vandals smash a window
in a racist attack as the two brown-skinned men are discussing a room, provoking
Jiteshs fierce anti-Muslim rant as he fires shotgun shells at the attackers. Rather
than channeling anger toward the mainstream American society that demonizes the
Muslim body, Jitesh instead internalizes this view and is outwardly angry at Muslims
for bringing about racial violence against brown people.
In The Karma of Brown Folk, Vijay Prashad argues that Asians in America are used
by the dominant culture to exemplify the ideal minority group based on their
economic success. By ignoring the fundamental differences underscoring how
African Americans and South Asian Americans came to America under radically
different classes, white supremacy encoded into the American state is blurred by the
manner in which South Asians allow themselves to be portrayed as the ideal
immigrants. This supports the fiction that American society is free and fair to

hardworking people (Prashad 160). Inspired by W.E.B. Du Boiss seminal 1903

text The Souls of Black Folk, in which Du Bois argues that being black is seen as a
problem in the United States, Prashad asks of South Asians, How does it feel to be
a solution? (viii). In other words, Prashad is problematizing the way in which South
Asian immigrants are used to legitimize the social status quo in America. Grounding
his analysis in history, Prashad urges the building of solidarity among blacks and
desis, recalling that the social construction of blackness and the terminology
nigger was not particular to people of African descent. Its origins are in the Greek
word anigros, which means unclean or impure. Under British rule, it was
commonplace for Indians to be referred to as nigs; they were understood to be of
the same essence as the African (Prashad 1589). Todays situation does not differ
in nature, argues Prashad. South Asians continue to eschew solidarity-building with
other marginalized groups because they are the solution rather than the problem in
terms of minorities: Attacking blacks by paying tribute to Asian intelligence makes
one immune from charges of racism, and the model minority thesis is thus a pillar of
inferential racism (Prashad 170).

MNIKs juxtaposition of
Muslim/white relations and Muslim/black relations after 9/11 offers a benign view of
what such solidarity could look like. Post9/11 Islamaphobia, enveloping all brownskinned people into one homogenizing dominant gaze, opens some room for mutual
recognition of Otherness at the margins of American society in MNIK. When Rizwan
first visits Wilhelmina, he meets funny-haired Joel and his Mama Jenny. He is
invited into their home in a scene composed of stereotypical images and music of
southern black America. Mama Jenny is an emotional, large, Aunt Jemimaesque
stereotype, and the scene is scored with blues slide guitar. The overt pandering to
existing stereotypes of the black Other exaggerates the marginality of the non-white
Others in America for reasons that I will explore in greater depth below.

Mama Jenny and Rizwan bond over the similar experience of losing their children as
a consequence of the war on terror; Mama Jennys son was killed as a US soldier
fighting in Iraq, and Rizwans son was killed in an anti-Muslim beating in America.
Set amidst the relative economic deprivation of Wilhelmina, Georgia, the film makes
an artistic suggestion that young blacks in the community are coerced into choosing
a career in the military. This is reinforced by the next scene, which shows the allblack community gathering at their church for a memorial service to honor those who
died in Iraq. Rizwan narrates that the town has a population of exactly 204. The fact
that a small black community of 204 dairy farmers could have enough sons and
daughters killed in the Iraq war so as to necessitate a memorial service reflects the
somewhat constricted choices available to poor black Americans.
Rather than harboring any contempt for Rizwan based on race or religious
essentializing, Mama Jenny adds Sams picture to her own sons picture in front of
the congregation, layering these two martyrs of the war on terror over one another in
a movingly visible performance of solidarity. Although she is a devoted Christian,
there is no suggestion here that she may confuse Sam for the terrorist son of a
terrorist father. Rizwan is invited to tell the congregation about Sam, and he does so
in Hindi, English, and Arabic.
[In Hindi] Sam had one more bad habit: he only told us good news. He always hid
the bad news from us. He would never tell us when my favorite team, Manchester
United, lost. [In English, smiling] Never. [In Hindi] Unless we had a bet. Then he
would tell me. Then I would have to give him his favorite mint chocolate ice cream.
[In English] Two scoops, always. [Laughter and restrained tears] Two scoops. [In
Hindi] 27 November 2007 he was killed. He was thirteen years, nine months, and
four days old. Sameer was not only my son, he was my dearest friend. Actually, my
only friend. [In English] My, my . . . only best friend. [In Arabic] Bismillahir Rahmanir
Rahim. [In Hindi] Im sure Allah is happy that Sam is in heaven with him . . . I . . . [In
English] Mama Jenny, I dont know what to say . . . I dont want to say anymore.
Amid the uncomfortable silence as Khan struggles in front of the congregation,
funny-haired Joel breaks into a verse of We Shall Overcome. As he sings, We

shall overcome one day! Rizwan slowly recognizes the song and joins in his own
language: Hum honge kamyaab, ek din! The congregation rises, singing and
dancing together in a reference to the Bollywood[2] dance sequences that normally
punctuate and accelerate plots. As the soundtrack splices the Hindi and English
songs, we see Mandiras parallel story. She is bravely walking onto the soccer field
where Sam was killed, interrupting a game in silent protest with a sign picturing Sam
and the text: 6 months without justice.
The Wilhelmina memorial service is important because it mirrors a very different
memorial service earlier in the film attended by Rizwan, Mandira, and Sam in their
mostly white suburban town following 9/11. At the 2001 service, there was visible
fear and discomfort associated with Rizwans ordinary Arabic prayer, Bismillahir
Rahmanir Rahim, even though he personally donated his annual zakat[3] to the
memorial fund for the victims of 9/11. Inside a Christian church in the black
community of Wilhelmina, a Muslim prayer does not so much as raise an eyebrow,
yet in an allegedly public, secular, and predominantly white American space, those
same words elicit fear and distrust. Wilhelmina, at the margins of the American
society, is a safe space for another marginalized person, even though religious
stereotypes suggest fear and distrust should prevail. Ironically, it is within a church
that solidarity among the Muslim and the black Others might begin in MNIK.
Language is not an obstacle; rather, Hindi, English, and Arabic intermingle in the
marginal space and ultimately result in an emancipatory song of great significance
across language, race, class, and religion.
Although MNIK opens up space for South Asian and black solidarity in America along
race lines, the film has been criticized for its complicity with the good/bad Muslim
divide (Balraj 934). The concepts of orientalism and the Self/Other distinction have
been widely applied in literature about representations of Muslims in Hindi-language
cinema and popular cinema more generally (see Balraj 91; Chanda and Kavoori
131145). Solimans adaptation of Saids theory in her article The (Un)Wanted
American: A Visual Reading of Arab and Muslim Americans is particularly insightful
with respect to MNIK. There is no simple race solidarity associated with black/brown
Americans in MNIK. One of the boys who participated in the killing of Sam was

black, and a Christian ticket seller who refuses Rizwan entry to a Christian-only
fundraiser for a drought in Africa is also black; neither of these characters is
presented as Other. Soliman argues that certain Americans are unwanted by a
mainstream society that nonetheless needs to address their presence in some shape
or form. Looking at wanted or unwanted enables a more flexible application of
Self and Other, one that is also amenable to the argument advanced by Prashad.
Prashad published his book the year before 9/11, and thinking of his argument
through the binary of wanted/unwanted, individuals like Rizwan and Mandira were
clearly wanted by their suburban society in the beginning. The representation of
9/11 as a critical juncture in American society is very pronounced in Johars film,
showing the dramatic transition of Prashads solution immigrants into the realm of
Solimans unwanted Americans. In representing pre9/11 society as a bastion of
liberal warmth and opportunity, the film hearkens to Prashads warning that the South
Asian gaze, lacking in class/race analysis, is complicit with the unfairness of
American society as exhibited through the condition of Wilhelmina.
The solidarities at play are not just between poor black Americans and Muslims,
however. After Rizwan is mistaken for a terrorist and arrested at a rally, two Indian
Hindu student journalists investigate Rizwans life, putting together a compelling
news story that mainstream stations refuse to air. They take their story to a Sikh
reporter named Bobby Ahuja, who rejects them as well. One of the students, Raj,
notices Ahuja is wearing a turban in a family picture resting on his desk, while he
does not wear one in the scene:
Raj: If you dont mind me asking, sir, was this photograph taken before 9/11?
Bobby Ahuja: Yes, why?
Raj: [Laughs while shaking his head]
Bobby Ahuja: Whats so funny?

Raj: No, its not funny at all, actually. They confused a Sikh for a Muslim, and you
changed your entire life. And here they are not even treating a Muslim like a human
being, and you cant even change your schedule.
Ahuja ends up carrying the story and broadcasts an interview with Rizwans brother
Zakir and sister-in-law Hasina. The message touches all the brown-skinned
characters shown in the storyline, who had been enduring indignities under the racist
dominant gaze. Ahujas interview with Zakir in particular strikes a chord with viewers:
I mean, we are told to report suspicious characters. Participate in protecting the
country from extremists, and then when we do that, were just put into the jail, like my
brother . . . The question over here is not why he wants to meet the president. The
question is whats wrong in an ordinary citizen wanting to meet the president of his
country? Or is it wrong for a Muslim man to even try?
Zakir is referring specifically to the fact that Rizwan called the FBI to report a bad
Muslim he encountered while at a mosque. It was this piece of evidence that led to
his release from prison, not any acknowledgement that he should not have been
imprisoned in the first place.
That Rizwans release was contingent on his reporting of suspicious behavior of
another Muslim reinforces the good/bad Muslim distinction that is not only vital in
post9/11 popular culture, but in Indian popular culture as well. As Shahnaz Khan
notes, Rizwan spends the entire film trying to show that he is in fact a good Muslim
(135). Belinda Balraj highlights that it takes a great pilgrimage and Asperger disorder
to be a good Muslim in MNIK (93). Balraj and Khan raise important points in the
broader context of Muslim-Othering in the canon of Hindi-language cinema. Chadha
and Kavoori show how Bollywood has portrayed Muslims along three main temporal
periods: exoticized Other, shown as separate from the real India but nonetheless a
part of the nation-building project (1950s1960s), marginalized characters of little
significance (1970s1980s), and demonized terrorist-Others (1990s2000s) (135).

Clearly, Muslims have never been absent

in Hindi-language cinema, though their roles in the modern period often play up the
good/bad Muslim distinction. The most recent demonized Other time period overlaps
with the war on terror but precedes 9/11, speaking to the currents of Indian politics
rather than American politics. In the 1990s2000s, Muslims have been portrayed as
power-hungry politicians, Pakistani aggressors, corrupt police officers, and smalltime crooks (Chadha and Kavoori 140; Khan 1335). The 1990s was a tumultuous
time in South Asian politics, with India electing the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata
Party after the Congress Party introduced sweeping and socially disrupting
neoliberal economic reforms in the early 1990s. Factional conflict fueled by a
resurgent sense of Hindu nationalism resulted in a 150,000-personstrong riot and
the destruction of the Babri-Masjid by Hindu nationalists in 1992. They claimed the
mosque was built on the birthplace of Lord Rama (Tully n.p.). This conflict in
particular brought to focus the simultaneity of Hindu and Muslim histories layered
over one another in India, each struggling to assert contested histories in the
postcolonial period (Deshpande 2649). In the framework of religious dynamics of
South Asian politics, coupled with the Al-Qaeda attack on New York and the
subsequent global war on terror, Hindi movies have been accused of being complicit,
even jumping on the Islamaphobia bandwagon rather than challenging it (Balraj 92).
With this context in mind, it is important that Rizwans salvation from prison ultimately
rests on his decrying the bad Muslim, rather than the American security apparatus
conceding there was little to no reason to believe he was a terrorist. This reinforces,
rather than challenges, racist representations of Muslims in popular culture. The
bad Muslim that Rizwan reports to the FBI clearly fits the role of the demonized
terrorist-Other that Chadha and Kavoori describe. Taken in this political context,
MNIK can be read as a problematic but important deviant case of Bollywood
addressing the serious issue of Islamaphobia, though admittedly, doing so in the

United States, far from having to weigh in on the currents of domestic politics in
India.
By way of offering a view from the marginal spaces of American society, MNIK is
sharply focused on race at the margins. Like a photograph, only the background or
foreground can be focused, and in this case, focusing on the margin comes at the
expense of a blurry view of the center. Consequently, the representation of
whiteness is one-dimensional. There are no white American characters of much
depth in the film, and most are essentialized as mere placeholders for racism.
Although the film can be commended for emphasizing a viewpoint of marginalized,
unwanted black and Muslim Americans, it also falls short in its representation of
women in the margins of the margins in Hindi-language cinema (Mishra, cited in
Jiwa, 129).
Women, whether gori[4] or desi, have been traditionally marginalized in Bollywood.
As Fazeela Jiwa argues, South Asian female characters in Bollywood usually
represent the stereotypes of vamp, heroine, or real-life heroine, the latter of which
takes the form of the virtuous (Hindu) mother (129). The principal division between
female characters is vamp/heroine, or good girl and bad girl, represented
differently in plots that unfold in India and plots that unfold in the diaspora (Jiwa 132).
Jiwa adds a fourth category to Bollywood stereotypes: the free Western woman
characterized by her independence (132). At first reading, Mandira can be seen as a
free diasporic Western woman. She is introduced as a successful hairstylist in high
demand on the cusp of opening her own hair salon. She was a victim of an arranged
marriage to a man who abandoned her soon after. Mandira learned to survive on her
own in the diaspora:
I was twenty-two when I was divorced. I had nothing. No money. No parental
support. I didnt even have a house. I had only Sam with me . . . I walked a lot and
stopped after reaching here. There was no way ahead . . . So I turned around, saw
the entire city in front of me. And for a minute, I felt it was waiting for me. I decided
then, [In English] No, Im going to make this work. And Im gonna win! [In Hindi] Hum
honge kamyaab.

In this scene, as Mandira turns around to face the city of San Francisco, she
pointedly switches to English to declare her intentions to realize the American dream
of succeeding through hard work and determination. She must overcome the
challenges of being a deserted, homeless, single Hindu mother and make a life for
herself and her son. She seems to do this seamlessly in the film. Her story, pre9/11,
is one of triumph over adversity. She happily falls in love and marries Rizwan, who
becomes a best friend and father to her son, Sam.
Mandira seems to fit the stereotype of the free Western woman, but a closer
consideration shows she more closely aligns with the stereotype of the real-life
heroine as a virtuous Hindu mother. She is shown performing puja for Sam regularly
throughout the first half of the film and very much embodies the idealized male
conception of the Hindu mother in Hindi-language cinema. MNIK breaks with
Chadha and Kavooris 1990s2000s tradition of demonizing the Muslim-Other and
reclaims an aspect of post-independence nation-building cinema that seeks to show
the compatibility of Hindu and Muslim. In one scene in the film, Mandira is shown
performing puja for murtis in the foreground while Rizwan is in the background,
prostrating to Allah. Several shots in the film show Hindu deities alongside the
Muslim Quran.
After Sam is killed and Rizwan leaves at her bequest, Mandira is shown talking to
her sister-in-law Hasina.
Hasina: Bhabhi, whatever you said then was said in anger. It was Sams grief that
made you say it. We all know you love him [Rizwan] a lot. Then why dont you
Mandira: There is no space for love in my life right now. Love will weaken me. Hate
will help me fight this battle. And I have to fight for Sam. I cant be Khans wife right
now. Im just a mother whose son has been killed.
In this scene, Mandira and Hasina are talking in a kitchen as Mandira clears and
washes dishes. The once happy and successful entrepreneurs life has crumbled
before her, not due to any actions of her own, but in direct relation to the two men in
her life: husband and son. Her business slowly went under after 9/11 because her

name was Khan. Her son was killed while engaging in a defiant anti-racist act
against a gang of bullies at school who consistently hurled slurs connecting him to
Islamic terrorism. Despite being presented as a free Western woman, Mandira
articulates her options within the dichotomy of wife and mother roles, and she
chooses the sacrificial mother, or real-life heroine, stereotype. Even with a view from
the margins in a race-based reading of the film, Mandira illustrates another layer of
marginalization.
Hasinas character also may have been presented at surface level to fit the
stereotype of the liberated Western woman. A university professor of psychology
who specializes in identity studies, she is intelligent, well spoken, and acts against
her husband Zakirs wishes when they contradict her own. For example, though
Zakir initially disowned Rizwan for marrying a Hindu, Hasina decided to attend
Rizwan and Mandiras wedding as the only person representing Rizwans family.
Hasina is the moderating peacekeeper and diplomatin the scene discussed above,
she is in the kitchen trying to coax Mandira into reconciling with Rizwan. Hasina
always selflessly puts the interests of her family ahead of her own. When she is
violently attacked in the hallway of her university shortly after 9/11, her hijab is ripped
from her head. The scene is shot from the point of view of the approaching attacker,
and a white male hand reaches out to tear her hijab away. As she falls to the ground
and inches away from her attacker, a mans voice growls, Get outta my country!
The next scene shows her in tears at home, retying her hijab. As Zakir approaches
and tries to comfort her, he tells Hasina, Dont wear this now. Allah will understand.
These people wont. Never. It is not Hasina who makes the decision to remove the
hijab in this scene; it is Zakir who physically removes and tells her not to wear it.
Yet it is through her assault that the Khan family is actually reunited; in this way,
Hasina too is a sacrificial character. That same evening, Mandira comes to visit
Hasina, and when Zakir answers the door, the audience realizes that they have
never met. It took an attack against Hasina for the crime of belonging to the wrong
religion for Zakir to realize that he rejected Mandira on the same charge. He
gestures her upstairs, welcoming her as bhabhi after she tells him Rizwan is
waiting outside because he will not enter his brothers home. Hasina and Mandiras

respective suffering reunite Zakir and Rizwan through their mutual experiences
under different expressions of the male gaze. From this vantage point, it is clear that
while on one level of analysis MNIK offers a view from the margin, that view is itself
hegemonic in that it subsumes the agency of women into predictable tropes.
This reading has sought to illustrate the analytical tensions grounded in race, gender,
and class represented in MNIK in the context of living under the dominant post9/11
security gaze in America. As Rizwans relationship with the black community of
Wilhelmina, Georgia demonstrates, at the margins of American society there exists
the possibility for solidarity building between Christians and diasporic Muslims. It is
the common experience of being unwanted that shrinks the significance of the
linguistic, religious, and perhaps class-based distinctions between Rizwan and
Mama Jenny. They are also united in the martyrdom of their respective children, and
their bond is reinforced by Rizwans great sacrifice to ensure the communitys safety
when even the American state would not come to their aid. It is perhaps the
sociopolitical violence of 9/11 that jolts Rizwan out of what Prashad might see as the
middle-class complacency associated with being the ethnic solution to American
society in his rapid transition to unwanted Other. Yet taken in the historical context of
Hindi-language cinema and Indian politics, the film remains wedded to the good/bad
Muslim trope that has characterized the last two decades of Bollywood films.
As the reading of Hasina and Mandira illustrates, these two characters speak to Vijay
Mishras observation that women in the diaspora tend to be the margins within the
margins (Mishra 2007: 145). While a first reading of Mandira might see a free
Western woman in control of her own life, this is violently taken away from her, and
she ultimately sees the limits of her life choices as being one of mother or wife. Both
Mandira and Hasinas gendered suffering is used to advance the plot in MNIK, but
otherwise the characters remain superficial. While the film opens space to imagine
the construction of solidarity among Muslim and black Americans in the marginal
space of Wilhelmina, it reinforces the popular cultural trend to essentialize the
Islamic terrorist-Other in both Bollywood and Hollywood. Although MNIK represents
a critical view from the margins of race and class, it falls short of challenging
dominant patriarchal views on the role of women in Bollywood.