By Yanis Iqbal

Spoilers Alert!

In the 2023 film Jawan, actor Shah Rukh Khan takes on the dual roles of Azad and Vikram Rathore. Azad serves as a women’s prison warden, while his father, Rathore, is a former commando, both burdened by their painful pasts. Rathore’s life takes a tragic turn as he opposes Kaalie Gaikwad, an arms dealer responsible for the deaths of Indian soldiers due to defective weapons. Unjustly labeled as “anti-national,” Rathore is forced into a life of obscurity. Meanwhile, his wife, Aishwarya (Deepika Padukone), is discovered to be pregnant just as she is about to face the gallows for resisting police personnel who sought to discredit Rathore. This grants her five years to spend with their son in jail.

However, when Azad reaches the age of five, he tragically witnesses the hanging of his own mother. Subsequently, he is adopted by Kaveri (Ridhi Dogra), an employee at the prison. Having learned about the systemic oppression experienced by female inmates, Azad’s return to the prison as a superintendent becomes a clever disguise for his true mission: rectifying social injustices. With the support of 6000 incarcerated women and a smaller team of six women, Azad orchestrates high-octane hijackings and heists designed to draw attention to a wide range of issues, including bad loans, farmer suicides, decrepit government hospitals, lax environmental policies, and election fraud. Eventually, he reunites with Rathore, who has successfully avenged the defamation he suffered at the hands of Kaalie.

Narrating Male Alienation

The movie is striking in its re-scripting of alienated masculinity: Azad and Rathore are not isolated emblems of armored masculinity. Rather, they are bumbling personalities whose psychic traumas generate new social relations. Gone is the “angry young man” figure so common in contemporary Indian cinema. An instance of this common trope is the film Deewar, in whichVijay Verma (Amitabh Bachchan) escapes the humiliation of poverty through the sheer forcefulness of his individual grit. This character is an example of the masculine focus on sovereignty and raw power.

This is emblematic of an ethic in which the feeling of wholeness is always threatened by others. In a patriarchal society, men who possess phallic power live with perpetual uncertainty regarding its permanence. Owning the phallus exposes one to an ongoing fear of losing it and an endless pursuit of permanent ownership. The phallus is retained only through enduring the looming threat of its loss, which radically constrains the male subject’s actions.

Ultimately, the game of phallic power leads Vijay to his disillusionment with the public sphere, pushing him into the private realm of womanhood as represented by the institution of childrearing, namely, a pregnant Anita (Parveen Babi). The risky adventurism of the criminal underworld, where a man constantly reaches beyond himself to become the Subject, contrasts with the reliability of the family, where the feminized characteristics of inertia and steadiness provide a private support system. When even this domestic crutch is stolen from Vijay with the murder of Anita, he dies in his mother’s lap in front of a temple – a fantasy of religious motherhood that masks the seeming futility of life without masculine power.  

Jawan avoids this type of crude ideological resolution by affirming this “futility.” That is, it elevates the lack of stable meaning in existence to ultimately feminist ends. Like Vijay, Azad has been dehumanized by an elite system. But this doesn’t strengthen his individual will to rise above his situation and earn respect in society. On the contrary, he remains in seemingly degraded conditions. There, he finds truth in the disrespected masses. Instead of embarking on the masculinist search for phallic identity, Azad realizes that no one has the phallus, and that any pretense of wholeness is undergirded by mythological hierarchies. Even the most powerful man needs others for the concrete functioning of his empire. It is the recognition of this lack of self-sufficiency that allows Jawan to find pleasure in what patriarchal narratives imagine to be the futility of life, a perpetual incompleteness.

Insofar as Jawan reveals the incomplete and open-ended nature of existence, it embraces relationality. Azad and Rathore’s losses do not lead to a sovereign, masculine anger. Rather, “loss” becomes a way to gain new bonds. And what better place for this outward-facing rage than a women’s prison. Why? Because women prisoners usually belong to socially and economically disadvantaged sectors whose criminal character is perceived as having violated the taboos set by religion and tradition. Azad’s core team consists of women who have either been wrongly accused or who have relied on vigilantism to upend oppressive rules. Here, the dispossessed woman prisoner excluded from phallic hierarchy is able to expand her relations with similarly placed subalterns.

Celebrating the Multitude

Jawan has been labeled as a “mass movie” that lacks a “connective tissue”. As one reviewer puts it: “It has no sense of scene, transition, rhythm, beauty, build-up. Catharsis is like a bucket upturned on our head, we feel it all at once; not the slow inhaling of sweet poison.” The alleged absence of coherence actually reflects the movie’s antagonism to masculinist discourses of alienation. Bourgeois-patriarchal theory is fascinated with a mythical “state of nature,” wherein an ungovernable multitude poses a threat to individual and property rights. The domestic sphere occupied by women is the paradigmatic instance of this “natural” state, since it is characterized by the networks of mutual dependency from which the male subject has to extricate itself in order to become part of a general, uniform will.

What Isabell Lorey calls the “alarming mutual relatedness” of a feminized multitude is dissolved through the establishment of a state that enables the practical construction of fully individuated, autonomous human beings. Temporally, this schema corresponds to the devaluation of the present, which is considered too emotional and superficial for the properly spiritual depth of male essence. In this view, women’s obsession with immediate concerns must be subordinated to the logic of the future, whose “harmony” ballasts a clear gender binary. Given the centrality of women in Jawan, the movie doesn’t follow the linear trajectory of male society; it instead dwells in a feminized, embodied sphere. Closed reflections on the dense interiority of male psyche are jettisoned in favor of fast-paced intensities and collectivity. Thus, the present appears as a dynamic of “movement and exchange,” an “expanded process of constituting” in which the singularity of the individual is expanded through the manifold bustle of life.

In typical narratives of alienated masculinity, women are positioned as sexual adjuncts to the male lead’s solitary heroism. Jawan’s repudiation of this solemnity allows it to focus on singularized bodies as productive sites. The narrowness of phallic discourses is breached through the continuous opening of bodies to the heterogeneity of incomplete histories. Narmada Rai (Nayanthara), an NSG officer tasked with negotiating with Azad, exudes charisma not due to her sexualized beauty but due to her wider erotic ensnarement in the unruly potentialities of the story, a vertiginous experience of unstable exposure that leads her to love those she initially considered to be terrorists. While this sprawling plot sometimes leaves the audience feeling overwhelmed and lost in a tangled mess of diverse themes, it also invites them to participate in the numerous horizons opened by such a narrative labyrinth.

Author Bio: Yanis Iqbal is studying at Aligarh Muslim University, India. He has published over 300 articles on social, political, economic, and cultural issues. His forthcoming book is entitled “Education in the Age of Neoliberal Dystopia”.