Is Farah Khan an accidental Marxist? What her end credits reveal about Bollywood's hidden labour

Indian Express

a day ago

I love the ending of Main Hoon Na (2004). What's not to love? It's a 'happily ever after' of epic proportions. Ram is reunited with Laxman. Raghvan's own hubris destroyed him. All the romance comes to fruition, and perhaps most surreal of all, India and Pakistan are seen extending olive branches to each other (a true fairytale moment).
But as heartwarming as all of this is, my most rewatched three minutes of the film come after it ends. When, instead of fading into the usual scrolling crawl of white text over black, it cuts to a song. There is singing and dancing and sheer joy in the air as every member of the cast and crew gets their moment in the sun. It's not just Shah Rukh Khan and Sushmita Sen grinning into the lens, but the spot boys, the assistant choreographers, the sound engineers, the drivers — an entire army of people who, until this moment in the film, have been invisible.
In Om Shanti Om (2007), filmmaker Farah Khan does it again. The film ends, but instead of a curtain call, there's somewhat of a curtain lift, and she extends a backstage pass to her audience. Every crew member is pulled out of anonymity for just a few seconds so they can dance down the red carpet. Since it's a film about the constructedness of cinema, it is even more fitting to celebrate the people who did the said 'constructing'. (It does take a village!)
Considering Khan's long history of work as a choreographer and technician before she ever became a household name, this gesture seems genuine and logical. Its silliness is infectious and you can't help but smile as you leave the theatre (or shut your laptop, to be accurate).
But these end credits also serve a different, bigger purpose: They accidentally interrogate the way films — and capitalism itself — are structured.
One of my favourite lectures on Marxism in college explored the idea of commodity fetishism.
Commodity fetishism, in Marxist theory, describes how, under capitalism, we treat commodities as if they have intrinsic value and power, obscuring the messy human labour that produced them. The social relationships (who made it? under what conditions? for what pay?) get buried under the somewhat magical, mystical aura of the object itself. We see the diamond ring, not the miner; the handbag, not the seamstress; the new iPhone, not the assembly-line worker in Shenzhen.
In short, under capitalism, we alienate the product from the means of its production. Take, for instance, a bag stitched by a human being. In its material form, it's just a bag. Then Louis Vuitton or Prada slaps their label on it and suddenly, the bag is worth a thousand times more. The brand gives it a status symbol — a means of gaining power or social standing. The craftsperson remains anonymous and their skill unrecognised in proportion to the bag's price. The label accrues the glamour.
Films work the same way. The end product — the movie — is marketed and consumed as a singular, almost magical thing, its value disproportionately tied to the 'brand' most visible on the poster: usually a star, sometimes a director or the producer.
But cinema is inherently collective. Actors, directors and even DOPs do not work in a vacuum, and their talent does not function in isolation. Every scene is the result of hundreds of invisible contributions — gaffers, focus pullers, location scouts, dressmen, and post-production assistants. And yet, to most of us, these people are as abstract as the hands that built our phones or stitched our H&M clothes.
Bollywood, if anything, amplifies this hierarchy. Star culture has been its organising principle for decades. There are 'above the line' names and 'below the line' names, and the effort-to-reward disparity is disgusting to behold. That is why meta-narratives are slightly rarer — because Bollywood thrives on preserving glamour, not dismantling it.
Khan's end-credit sequences join a tradition of films that examine the machinery of cinema itself.
In Hollywood, Singin' in the Rain (1952) remains a cherished early example, chronicling the birth of the talkies while revelling in the messy, sweaty labour behind them. More recently, films like Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood (2019) and David Leitch's The Fall Guy (2024) both weave stories around stunt performers, centring their experiences as a lens to examine Hollywood's labour politics among other themes. Hugo (2011), La La Land (2016), and even The Studio (2025) may be love letters to films, but they also serve to demystify and deconstruct the business of movie-making by giving us alternate perspectives and unexpected truths.
Closer to home, Guru Dutt's Kaagaz Ke Phool (1959) is a bittersweet eulogy to the film world, drawn from Dutt's own heartbreak, while Zoya Akhtar's Luck by Chance (2009) is a sharp insider's look at the bit players, assistants, and fixers who keep the illusion alive. Hardik Mehta's Kaamyaab (2020) — a tender, meta story about a character actor chasing one last memorable role after a lifetime in the background — carries forward this tradition. And of course, one can't forget Om Shanti Om, the mother of all self-referential Bollywood spectacles, turning the film industry into both a playground and a parody.
These end-credit sequences are, in a minuscule way, doing what unions and strikes try to do on a structural level: assert that there is no movie without the people who make it.
But it's still only just a crumb.
Visibility for the people behind the scenes remains the exception, not the rule. As the recent Salim–Javed documentary, Angry Young Men, reminds us, Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar were the first screenwriters in Hindi cinema to acquire a star-like persona — something unheard of for writers. The same could be said of figures like A R Rahman or Gulzar in music. But such names are rare; most of the labour that sustains the industry remains anonymous.
The Film Employees' Federation of South India (FEFSI) and the Federation of Western India Cine Employees (FWICE) have, for decades, fought to establish minimum wages, enforce working-hour limits, and secure accident compensation for crew members. The FWICE represents 32 different craft associations, from lightmen to sound technicians. In 2008, a major strike by FWICE brought Mumbai's film and television industry to a halt for weeks, forcing producers to negotiate better pay structures and break schedules.
But these victories have been partial and fragile. Unorganised and freelance labour still makes up a huge portion of the workforce, leaving many without benefits, job security, or bargaining power. Stars still command astronomical fees while everyone else earns barely enough to survive Mumbai rents.
The fetishism is structural, and no amount of singing and dancing can obscure the exploitation behind it.
To move from symbolism to substance would require larger conversations about profit-sharing structures, pay parity, enforceable caps on working hours that actually get upheld and accountability mechanisms strong enough to protect workers from the industry's entrenched hierarchies. That sounds utopian — and in the current climate, it probably is. But things usually begin with shifts in perception. For me, the trigger was stepping onto a set for the first time and finding out there are 'A caterers' and 'B caterers' that serve vastly different food to different segments of people on the set. For you, it could be reading this article.
Khan's end credits (and films) don't answer the big questions, but they do make it fun to notice and recognise that the film we just watched wasn't conjured into being by SRK alone, but by a network of human beings whose names you now know, and whose faces you might just remember. And maybe next time, when the credits roll, you will keep watching.