Caramel connections: A memory box, the box office and Pathaan.

While the film Pathaan, at the time of its release in 2023, was read in terms of its overt political messaging and against the backdrop of a majoritarian political culture, this article sees Pathaan's political work as more subterranean. Pathaan functions as a kind of memory box connecting viewers through a web of sensed memories, which I call caramel connections, of cinema and their unspoken connections and implications of heterogeneity. The film's self-aware engagement is with both the history and the memory of an older Bollywood cinema: its earnestness, its disinterest in aesthetics and politics of realism claims the space of popular culture as political outside the binaries of left and right. Shah Rukh Khan is a star who has functioned as an emotive vehicle for transitional moments in India. What kind of transitional moment do Pathaan and Khan see themselves as travelling through? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]