Shahrukh Khan expressed regret that no players from Pakistan would play in the Indian Premier League cricket tournament.

MUMBAI: Armed police and burning effigies marked the release of the latest Bollywood blockbuster yesterday after Hindu radicals threatened to attack cinemas in Mumbai because of its star’s pro-Pakistan stance.

Many cinemas cancelled screenings of My Name Is Khan after the Shiv Sena, an ultra-nationalist political party with a history of violence, called for the film to be boycotted.

Police chiefs deployed 21,000 officers to maintain order on the streets of India’s film capital. About 2,000 Shiv Sena activists were detained.

The unrest came after Shah Rukh Khan — Bollywood’s Brad Pitt — lamented that no cricket players from Pakistan were to play in the Indian Premier League (IPL), cricket’s wealthiest tournament, when it begins next month.

The Shiv Sena, which is based in Mumbai and has long been a fount of anti-Pakistan rhetoric, demanded that Khan, who is Muslim and co-owns an IPL side, should apologise for his “treacherous” remarks or emigrate.

Plain-clothes police mingled with cinemagoers in case violence broke out inside the few screenings of the film that went ahead. Protests were also reported in Delhi, Calcutta and Ahmadabad — although at least some of the anger on show was directed at the Shiv Sena.

“It’s important to make a stand against [the Shiv Sena]” said Rakash Durani, a 21-year-old student who was queueing to watch the film at a Mumbai multiplex. “Don’t, and these guys become a Hindu Taleban.”

The disturbance made for an unconventional opening of a film that hopes to break the Bollywood mould. My Name Is Khan tells the story of a Muslim man with Asperger’s syndrome and his fight against racial profiling in America as a result of 9/11.

There are no dance sequences and no lip-synched songs. The distributor, Fox Star Studios, has said that it wants the film, described by one critic as “one of the most meaningful and moving” Bollywood films in recent years, to replicate the global success of the Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire.

However, yesterday’s unrest may dent the film’s financial fortunes. Mumbai typically accounts for about a quarter of a Hindi-language movie’s box-office takings.

But it has been suggested that Khan, who was in Berlin for the city’s film festival yesterday, has courted controversy, betting that there is no such thing as bad publicity.

This week he claimed that workers at Heathrow had printed out and circulated pictures of him that had been produced by a security scanner showing his naked body beneath his clothes. The story was scotched by the airport authorities, who said that the scanner in question did not have a printer.

The Shiv Sena is also masterful in garnering attention. It has espoused an anti-migrant ideology in Mumbai for nearly 50 years — often by attacking film stars and cricketers from other regions of India who have settled in the city, as well as poor taxi drivers from the northern states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. It recently criticised Sachin Tendulkar, after the batsman said that Mumbai belonged to all Indians.

The faction’s leader is the octogenarian Bal Thackeray, a political cartoonist turned firebrand who expressed an admiration for Hitler and struck up a friendship with Michael Jackson when the King of Pop accepted his invitation to visit Mumbai in 1996.

In 2008, a wave of violence was unleashed across Mumbai when Amitabh Bachchan, the Bollywood star, was criticised by a splinter party linked to the Shiv Sena. The actor had expressed fondness for his home state of Uttar Pradesh, but lives and works in Mumbai.

Mumbai police officers arrest a woman as she protests against the movie ‘My Name Is Khan’ outside the Fun Cinema multiplex during its release in Mumbai on Friday