On Fandom

Despite growing up in the nineties, I never managed to understand the brouhaha over the phenomenon called Shah Rukh Khan. For me, he was one of those Bollywood superstars, acting in over-the-top melodramatic movies and never really showcasing real talent that would make you sit up and take notice. All this changed during the pandemic.

With nothing much to do during the lockdown, my daughters aged 7 and 4 began watching SRK’s movies. Suddenly, he became the center of their lives. Watching them captivated by him, somehow altered my own perception of his influence. When his son was falsely implicated by the Narcotics Control Bureau, the part of me rooting for him, was the father in me rooting for his daughters’ favorite matinee idol.

The philosopher Rene Girard has a theory to explain this phenomenon. According to Girard, all desire is mimetic – it is acquired through imitation and mimicking what we see others desiring. We are thus born with no innate desires. Everything we desire in life (apart from our needs like shelter, safety and sex) is driven by the model of mimetic desire. I’ll probably do a separate post on Girard’s model someday soon.

Coming back to the phenomenon of hero-worship, Sheena Patel, in her highly readable novel, ‘I’m a Fan’ had this take:

Fans take their heroes and make them a part of their identity and so it becomes unbearable to ever really take in rumours of bad behaviour. We want them to remain perfect in order that we can telegraph or offload certain archetypes on to them: the truth teller, the champion, the maverick, the trickster. If we turn people into symbols and then create a fandom around them, we don’t have to take on those responsibilities ourselves, they become our spokesperson nominated to do this for us so we can carry on living our lives unperturbed. These people are only human and when they commit acts of harm, we hold knowing and not knowing together, it is called an ‘open secret’. Silence is tacitly demanded from gatekeepers and fevered fans. The small voices oblige. We demand this suppression. We see the small voices’ sacrifice as a justified one, serving a greater cause which is the ability to love our idol. Every single person is implicated when a small voice is hurt by a person we pedestalled and totemised. Every single fan.