Quarterly Review of Film and Video

Quarterly Review of Film and Video ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/gqrf20 Indian Screen Cultures and the Redefinition of Nationhood: The Evolution of Contemporary Productions and the Myth of ‘National Security’ Roshni Sengupta, Amaresh Jha, Devanjan Khuntia, Pavan Kumar & Kaustav Padmapati To cite this article: Roshni Sengupta, Amaresh Jha, Devanjan Khuntia, Pavan Kumar & Kaustav Padmapati (22 Sep 2023): Indian Screen Cultures and the Redefinition of Nationhood: The Evolution of Contemporary Productions and the Myth of ‘National Security’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, DOI: 10.1080/10509208.2023.2258743 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10509208.2023.2258743 Published online: 22 Sep 2023. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 170 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=gqrf20 QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO https://doi.org/10.1080/10509208.2023.2258743 Indian Screen Cultures and the Redefinition of Nationhood: The Evolution of Contemporary Productions and the Myth of ‘National Security’ Roshni Sengupta, Amaresh Jha, Devanjan Khuntia, Pavan Kumar, and Kaustav Padmapati Introduction In post-independence India, the policy of independent growth adopted by the state played a role in creating the conditions for the expansion and consolidation of a national audience, which was, in most parts of the coun­ try, either solely captive to the Bombay film industry or divided in its loyal­ ties between a regional product, and Bombay or Hollywood films.1 In her study of the cinematic imagination where she collates Hindi films and social history, Virdi (2003) states emphatically that at the heart of all Hindi films, mainstream or otherwise, lies the “fictional nation”. As such, serious tensions that threaten to fracture the nation are obsessively manifested in film as moral conflicts or ethical dilemmas. She also alludes to the homoge­ nizing mission of the nation state as a strain that runs through Hindi films. Doing so she refers to the fact that romantic love has transgressed divisions among all endogamous groups and communities except the Hindu and the Muslim communities. The primary objective of this paper is to provide a comprehensive out­ line for the imagination – and reimagination of nation and nationhood – in popular Hindi cinema, as it traces the roots of a volatile engagement with notions of nation-building, multiple nations subsumed in one, and the paradigm shifts taking place with respect to the changing forms of cine­ matic exhibition and consumption. In other words, this paper argues that one of the fundamental tropes that underlies the Hindi film – whether for the 70 mm screen or the more personalized digital OTT platforms – remains the preservation of the fictive nation, with the specter of national security emerging as a national priority toward which the simplistic, gamedimension (Cawelti) conclusions hurtle with breathtaking speed. Several Roshni Sengupta is Associate Professor, School of Modern Media, UPES, India. Amaresh Jha is Associate Professor, School of Modern Media, UPES, India. Devanjan Khuntia is an independent researcher. Pavan Kumar is Assistant Professor, Ambedkar University, New Delhi, India. Kaustav Padmapati is Assistant Professor, School of Modern Media, UPES, India. � 2023 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC 2 R. SENGUPTA ET AL. historical strands have converged to create the fictional nation of Hindi cinema, one of which was language. Post-Independence, as Hindi was institutionalized and promoted as the national language of India and the Bombay film industry came to be seen as the national film industry, the language of cinemas in the region came to be, rather inaccurately, termed as Hindi (Dwyer and Patel 2002). Primarily, this was an automatic reaction to the adoption of Urdu as the national language of Pakistan. Concurrently therefore, Urdu came to be regarded as the language of the Muslims and therefore marginalized. Before independence, however, Urdu was the lingua franca of both Punjabi Hindus and Muslims, which ensured the high proportion of members of these communities employed in the Bombay film industry, particularly as highly skilled writers of dialogues and screenplays. This, according to Dwyer and Patel, led to the development of Hindi cinema’s hybrid nature. Their work also dwells on the imagery of the predominant North Indian (read Punjabi), urban, upper caste Hindu hero in films of the 1940s, in an industry virtually taken over by migrant or refugee Punjabis from Lahore with an interest in film production (Dwyer and Patel 2002). Consequently then, characters from other religions, regions and castes were portrayed as “other”, and their style of speech, dressing, and so on became the subject of cinematic humor. The 1940s and 1950s were known as the golden period of Indian cinema, primarily because of the development of the new system of independent production, which allowed more flexibility than the studio system. In the 1950s the newly independent nation’s media debated the creation of a “national cinema” and the role of the government in its development.2 Hindi cinema could be seen to have chronicled the history of India but, like historical films produced elsewhere, they have often revealed as much about the time in which they were made as about history itself. Dwyer (2010) contends that since the Hindi film with its enormous audiences, is closely connected to other forms of culture such as theater, literature, and television, it helps to create a commensensical view of history. For instance, the Islamicate-cum-historical film reveals nostalgic affection for the figure of the Muslim as a cultured ruler who enjoyed good relations with Hindu subjects. These narratives are not about the history of Muslims in India but a particular way of promoting composite culture, which became one of the bulwarks of building the fictional nation on screen—considered a requirement after the fractious and violent act of partition that divided the imaginary nation. Therefore, as Dwyer explains, we have films on some Mughal rulers such as Humayun, Jehangir and Akbar but none on Aurangzeb who promoted a more Islamic and frag­ mentary vision of India. QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO 3 The early period also saw greater segmentation of film genres in the still fledgling industry in India. Madhava Prasad argues in terms of a wider change in ideology, as the fragmentation of the national consensus brought about political mobilization, challenging the esthetic conventions and mode of production of the film industry (Prasad 1998). As a result of this change in ideology, three major forms of Hindi cinema emerged—developmentalist state realism; identification-based realism of the middle-class arena; and the esthetic of mobilization. According to this model, during the 1980s, Hindi cinema produced films derived from the “aesthetic of mobilization”, where violence was employed as the major attraction. The spark essentially came from larger changes in the social composition, where with the growth in spending power, more and more of the middle classes began to acquire television sets and VCRs, watching soap operas and films in the comfort of their homes. Therefore, cinema halls, now neglected by the middle classes began attracting people, particularly men from the lower rungs of the soci­ ety. Thus, violence in popular Hindi films became a staple for the masses. In the 1990s, the middle classes returned to cinema halls owing primarily to the vastly improved facilities available in these halls and well-oiled mar­ keting machinery made use of by big film producers and distributors. Methodology The paper is primarily based on critical discourse analysis (CDA) of selected films, basis their thematic relevance to the nature of discussion being undertaken. Critical discourse analysis started in the mid–1980s as a new direction in the work of Fairclough, van Dijk, Wodak, and others. As a movement, it began in 1992, at a meeting in Amsterdam with presenta­ tions by van Dijk, Fairclough, Wodak, Kress, and van Leeuwen, later pub­ lished as a special issue of Discourse and Society (van Leeuwen 2006). Gradually CDA moved beyond linguistics, taking into account the fact that discourses are more often than not realized multimodally, therefore not just verbally or through text, but also through myriad other modes of com­ munication such as images, even moving images. Kress and van Leeuwen, in 1996, developed methods of visual analysis that were quite robustly and extensively inspired by Halliday’s systemic-functional linguistics and dem­ onstrated how these very methods could be used for purposes of critical discourse analysis. For example, van Leeuwen (2000) shows how ‘visual racism’ is affected not simply by bringing to bear the most obvious racist stereotypes, but through other more subtle and inconspicuous methods. As such, members of some social groups are mostly never depicted as individ­ uals with unique characteristics nor even personalized. Often represented in highly similar or identical poses, they are viewed and therefore portrayed 4 R. SENGUPTA ET AL. en groupe, as an undifferentiated mass. This then creates a ‘aren’t they all the same’ or ‘you can’t tell them apart’ effect. Cinematically, the members of some social groups are consistently depicted in ‘long shot’, which, liter­ ally and figuratively, ‘distances’ them from the viewer. In employing CDA to read contemporary Hindi films within the frame­ work of the depiction of the fictive nation and statist definitions of national security, this paper critically engages with the narratives of the following films − 1942: A Love Story, Gadar: Ek Prem Katha, Main Hoon Na, VeerZaara, Baby, Uri: The Surgical Strike, and the acclaimed OTT web series, The Family Man. Furthermore, it refers to several cinematic narratives that have depicted the conceptual categories of nation and nationalism in post­ colonial India, increasingly influenced by the state-driven discourse on national security. Theoretical Premise As is true for global cinema, there are – historically – two aspects in the context of nationalism that are important—the first category is that of films inherently aimed at glorifying nationalist sentiments, the second being films qualifying as contemporary discourses on national realities (Gellner 1983; Menes 1985; Tamir 1995). Hindi cinema has not been an exception and has inherently nurtured the politics of culture, characteristically hinged on the esthetic of nation building and national preservation. The cinematic “re-invention of nationhood” (Schulze 2002) has remained one of the prime motivations for Hindi cinema. Politics and popularity have often converged, charismatic politics and the representation of ideology finding space in global cinemas, scholars often deploying Freudian psychoanalysis to engage with what could be termed as the mass psychology of cinema viewing. Articulations of colonial experiences in India and resultant anticolonial sentiments have been consistent cinematic tropes in post-inde­ pendence Bombay films and such narratives have appealed to common sen­ sibilities thereby brining in commercial profits. Though these narratives may not be categorized simplistically as nationalistic, the plotlines have pre­ dominantly been instrumental in establishing the “Indian” identity in myr­ iad forms (Vasudevan 1993; Doraiswamy 2003). The changing identities of the protagonists in Hindi cinema as well as narrative transformation in the context of cinematic nationalism and the construction of the fictive nation appears evolutionary, in the sense that the storylines of more recent cinema texts adhere to the esthetic of realism compared to the cinemas of the 1970s and 1980s. Critics and commenta­ tors have viewed this transformation as the “predominant depiction of Hindu male power beyond nationalism” (Raghav 2022) through “mediating QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO 5 religion” and “performing terror”, critically assessed in the context of nationalism and belongingness by Thobani (2014), based on her study of the four films portraying the post-Godhra riots of 2002 – Dev (2004), Parzania (2007), Firaaq (2008), and Road to Sangam (2009). Though the plotlines and narratives of the films studied by Thobani differ significantly, the common thread that runs through them remains hinged on the silenc­ ing of the voice of a community and there comes the question of how reli­ gion mediates in dominating the narrative of national belonging. To understand Hindi cinema from the point of view of nationalist repre­ sentation, it is inevitable that the social and political aspects of cinema would be considered key as it has been observed that the tenuous link between nationalism and cinema is not only about a dominating contem­ porary political ideology but also about economy, development, and indus­ trialization (Gellner 1983). The partition of India, life stories of the heroes of India’s freedom struggle, post-colonial nation building, and the IndiaChina war of 1962 were the initial triggers that married nationalism and Hindi cinema in inextricable ways, even though a few film critics have argued that Hindi cinema is now part of a complex “post- nationalist” world convulsed by “social crisis” and “globalization”, articulating urban life in an entirely new form (Mazumdar 2007). For instance, a series of films have been produced on the lives of Bhagat Singh (Shaheed [1965]; The Legend of Bhagat Singh [2002]; Rang de Basanti [2006]) and Gandhi (Gandhi My Father [2007]; Hey Ram! [2000]; Lage Raho Munna Bhai [2006]; Maine Gandhi ko Nahi Maara [2005]). Studies on Hindi cinema and Islamicate histories (Bhaskar and Allen 2022) have provided evidence from Hindi cinematic universe about the cul­ tural and social intersections of Islam with the dominant cultures in India. Gabriel and Vijayan (2012) outline the concepts of “new-orientalism” and “terrorism” as cinematic tropes that have been brought to use in order to touch the nationalist nerve. The study further observed that “it was only after Mani Ratnam’s Roja (1992), addressing the question of militancy in Kashmir, that Indian cinema began to address “terrorism “and the issues around it more explicitly”, even though “terrorism and terrorists have been familiar to pre- and post-independence India for a much longer time”. As such “Islam”, “Muslims” (the Muslim “other”) and “terrorism” have been part of the discourse of Hindi cinema since colonial cinema characterized – or caricatured – the Muslim as inherently savage and violent (Sengupta 2020). Though it must be said that this is not a phenomenon limited to Hindi cinema only as the surfeit of post-9/11 Hollywood films have exem­ plified, discursive in the depiction of religion and terrorism. India’s geopolitical contiguity to Pakistan and terrorism-related incidents like the Bombay serial attacks of 26/11, the Pulwama bombing and serial blasts in 6 R. SENGUPTA ET AL. Bombay, Delhi and other parts of the country, having roots in terror groups operating out of the neighboring country has provided a natural reason for Bombay filmmakers to subsume terrorism and terrorist violence as a cinematic ingredient. The nature of aggression contained in these acts of terrorism and a culture of retributive action particularly because of the experiences of wars between the two postcolonial nations has provided Hindi cinema with an overabundance of emotional stories full of honor and valor. A definition of the term “terrorism” in the context of its usage and appli­ cation toward this research makes contextualization an imperative condi­ tion. Terrorism communicates a political message; its ends go beyond damaging an enemy’s material resources (Thornton 1964). The victims or objects of a terrorist attack have little intrinsic value to the terrorist group or outfit, but represent a larger human audience whose reaction the terro­ rists seek (Hutchinson 1978). It is interesting to note that scholars have recorded the highest number of terrorist campaigns having taken place in the United States between 1961 and 1970 and none of these campaigns owed allegiance to Islamic radicalism (Gurr 1979). Writing in the 1930s, Hardman (1962) categorizes terrorism as a method of combat in the strug­ gle between social groups and forces rather than individuals, and it may take place in any social order. Violence and death, he argues, are not intended to produce revenue or to terrorize the persons attacked, but to cause society or government to take notice of the imminence of large-scale struggles. Hardman outlines perhaps the first definition of non-state actors perpetrating terrorist violence by stating that resort to terrorism is not the exclusive monopoly of political organizations and parties.3 The “civilizational identity” of the subcontinent, the “secular identity” of post-independence India, and the majoritarian Hindu identity of being an Indian are three core concepts, which have underscored the discourse on Hindi cinema and its intersections with nationalism (Benegal 2005). Filmmaker Shyam Benegal, speaking at the P C Joshi memorial lecture at JNU in 2005, pointed out that when he looks at the concept of secularism from the filmmaker’s perspective, he perceives clearly the way in which Hindi cinema has “represented, managed and contained” religious differences. There were efforts by progressive Indian writers and film producers to change the percep­ tion about Muslims through films like Dhool ka Phool, which presented a secular outlook toward Indian Muslims. The bitter experience of the partition of India in 1947 had divided the social fabric to such an extent that Muslim characters in Hindi cinema were rarely portrayed as protagonists. The aspect of “frontality” has been employed to analyze the character of cinema and fits quite well with the analysis of Hindi cinema in the context of the construction of the fictive nation or nationalism. Shaheed, the film QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO 7 which was screened before its official release at the Congress Party’s annual meet in 1948, remains one of the foremost examples of reimagining – rather prompting – popular culture using a signifier (Vitali 2004). If demo­ cratic ideals and equality of rights are considered as the factors that would uphold a strong nation, then certain films made just after independence like Neecha Nagar (1946) and Rahi (1953) could be categorized as such because they are primarily based on the social identities of Indian citi­ zens—rich, poor, empowered, and disadvantaged. It remains imperative – in light of the discussion mentioned above – that “nation”, “nationalism” and “nationalist” be seen as separate, yet innately related, conceptual categories. While “nation” essentially refers to the fictive nation at the heart of most Hindi filmic productions, wherein the narrative focuses on preserving the essential and salient elements of the fictional Indian nation such as protagonists that could be identified as largely secular vying for supremacy against antagonists – who may or may not embody those particular features of the ideal Indian nation – the conflict finally resolving with the inevitable victory of the ‘good’ (hero) over ‘evil’ (villain), “nationalism” remains an ambivalent category that often gets cinematically conflated with “nationalist”. The ambivalence remains intact even though nationalism has been used to posit the rudiments of the anti-colonial discourse in cinema. Bollywood has strived to represent a native Indian model of nationalism on-screen almost since its inception which has been shaped and influenced by the atmosphere of national freedom struggle. During the colonial era, many films were restricted in portraying nationalist sentiments. Censorship was so strong that even the slightest reference to nationalist or anti-colonial ideas was not allowed in the films by the authority. Nevertheless, national­ istic discourse was presented in the early films in subtle form by dodging colonial censorship authority. Cinema not only appropriated the discourse of nationalism but became an extension of it (Ganti 2004). Since the latter category has acquired – over the years and more recently – negative and regressive overtones, while not always being realistically such, Hindi cinema has not undertaken the labor to unpack the theoretical underpinnings of either of the conceptual categories. That task has been left to cultural and film theorists and one that this paper seeks to under­ score while at the same time attempting to understand the underlying prej­ udices that remain at the forefront of most Hindi cinematic narratives. Double Consciousness, Ambivalence and Third Space in Context of Nationalism in Post-Colonial Visual Narratives As has been stated, the deployment of cinema to achieve the creation of a fictive nation state or the construction of “national cinema” is not limited 8 R. SENGUPTA ET AL. to Hindi cinema. The cinema medium has been instrumentalized in order to develop the identity of modern nation states or state nations throughout 20th century. The very first known instance of polities and cinema aligning for mutual interests dates back to the era of World War I. On 27 January 1916 in New York City, US President Wilson addressed an event hosted by the Motion Pictures Board of Trade. The audience included Hollywood stalwarts like Kodak’s George Eastman, Paramount’s Adolph Zukor and Samuel Goldfish (later Goldwyn) among the others. Vitagraph Studio’s Stuart Blackton supported US’ active participation in the war to safeguard “national” interest. He recited a pro-war poem the intent of which was vis­ ible on the silver screen later during the ongoing War, “So fire your forges and dam the bills/For the wings of peace must have iron quills.”4 The identity of the United States of America which was heavily focused on projecting it as a preferred “space” for global migrants in search of work which found a mention in Charlie Chaplin films, was fast appropriat­ ing the identity of a “nation” which preferred defending its economic inter­ est. For example, immediately after President Wilson declared war on Germany on 6 April 1917, Universal Studios founded Universal Preparedness Productions, whose creative content forms included serials, shorts and features with titles like Uncle Sam at Work, The War Waif, The Birth of Patriotism and Uncle Sam’s Gun Shops. Further Universal Preparedness Productions produced war related propaganda films like Rupert Julian’s The Kaiser, The Beast of Berlin (1918) and The Geezer of Berlin (1918). Such films were able to generate the support of the American public toward the War and subsequent “extremist” nationalism. Such constructed “nationalist extremism” could be understood with an example of an incident which took place in Davenport, Iowa, where during a public screening of The Beast of Berlin, a man – from among the audi­ ence – interrupted the show, yelled and rushed down the aisle of the the­ ater with a gun, firing two shots at the screen.5 Cinema’s role in constructing “new nationalism” during World Wars were not limited to the West. During the World Wars, Indian cinema was also aware of the international ramifications of the wars being fought. One of the well-known film magazines of the time, Picturepost (1945), during the peak of World War II, published a full page report entitled “Our War”, depicting Indian civilians belonging to both the sexes marching behind a soldier, and proclaimed that: “when the Nazi gangsters let loose their war machine against the world, India took a proud place in the fight against aggression”.6 Thus, support for extremist nationalism further homogenized the plural ethnic collection of princely states as one nation, i.e., India. Indian film producers and directors participated actively in the war through their films. For example, India’s support to China found a space in the QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO 9 film, Dr Kotnis Ki Amar Kahani, directed by industry stalwart V Shantaram. The film depicted the real-life experiences of five Indian doc­ tors who volunteered to go to China as part of the medical mission during the Japanese invasion. Shantaram also played the role of the central protag­ onist Dr. Dwarakanath Kotnis in the film, the poster of which was created by acclaimed artist S M Pandit who meticulously depicted the resilience of human beings in the midst of war by situating the Buddha standing in the burning war zone in order to symbolize hope. The instance illustrates the role of cinema in the nation-building project during and after the war, which coincided with the making and breaking of many nations as well as the weakening of colonial establishments in Asia in general and South Asia in particular wherein the national movement gained the required momen­ tum after the Second World War. What is worth noting, however, is that apart from the structural macro, socio-economic and political imagination of mainstream Indian cinema, which gave space to the War in its reels, its latent functions included the development of the Indian identity as a uni­ fied political state which needed to be freed from its colonial masters through a largely nonviolent but occasionally militant struggle. The social change or the political transformation was not linear and at the micro level people faced institutional difficulties in managing the all-pervasive national­ ism which included representation of different ethnicities in the new gov­ ernment in contrast to an existing political establishment of foreign origin. A number of films have been able to construct and represent these personal and individual dilemmas. Films like 1942-A Love Story, Gandhi My Father and Ambedkar are some monumental films depicting the concepts of dou­ ble consciousness, ambivalence and third space in the context of post-colo­ nial cinematic narratives. Such narratives were able to capture intersectional struggles between class, caste and family as a social institu­ tion and how political transformations demanded loyalties from the domin­ ant ideologies. The film 1942-A Love Story is based on the conceptual framework of double consciousness and ambivalence, which underlines the dilemma of everydayness of the subordinate citizens of the colonized soci­ ety. The protagonist Naren played by Anil Kapoor, Rajjo enacted by Manisha Koirala, Major Bisht played by Danny Dengzongpa methodically demonstrate the segmented realization of the ‘fluid’ self in the larger con­ struction of the idea of a new nation (India) based on the identification of the ‘other’ (British). The fictive nation is therefore held together by the process of othering, be it the Muslim or the British. Constructing the enemy remains an inex­ tricable part of the process where the representation of the post-Partition twin, Pakistan, has emerged as one of the central tropes around which the fictive nation is established, magnified and solidified. 10 R. SENGUPTA ET AL. The Portrayal of Pakistan in Hindi Cinema Pakistan’s portrayal in Hindi cinema – loosely referred to as Bollywood – has generally been stereotypical and negatively constructed, the Pakistani fictive nation represented as a cultural, social and religious monolith.7 Needless to say Pakistan and its citizens are more often than not portrayed as the enemies of India, influenced heavily by bitter political and continu­ ous border tensions between the two post-colonial states. Film narratives such as Border, Gadar, LOC Kargil, and Lakshya, to name a few, could be categorized as discursive highlights in this regard. These cinematic narra­ tives depict Pakistan as a state that harbors and nurtures terrorists, espe­ cially those inimical to the interests of India. Yet another category of Hindi films have tried to diminish the political tensions between the states, thereby signifying the futility and incongruity of war and as a corollary the inevitability of love, peace, and harmony. Film narratives such as Veer Zara and Main Hoon Na fall in the said category, where the portrayal of Pakistan has been nuanced in many ways, at the same time creating a false consciousness of love. If the first category is focused on hyper-nationalism and unadulterated jingoism, the other presupposes an idyllic scenario which might be perceived as utopian. Films like Pinjar (2003), 1947 -Earth (1998), Train to Pakistan (1998), Khamosh Pani (2003), Refugee (2000), Tamas (1988), Gadar (2001) and Garam Hawa (1973) are examples of film narratives that have portrayed Partition and consequently Pakistan as the enemy nation, thereby reimagining the Indian fictive nation. Roshni Sengupta has analyzed films lilke Khamosh Pani, 1947 -Earth and Pinjar to address the female abductions during the Partition and the memorialization of trauma through cinema.8 Gadar (2001) – a period drama based on the India-Pakistan partition – remains one of the key signifiers in a constellation of Hindi films that have been instrumental in driving the discourse. The film tells the story of a Sikh man, Tara Singh and a Pakistani Muslim girl, Sakina who fall in love and as Partition occurs and her parents move to Pakistan, she is left behind in India. Consequently, Tara Singh – the good Sikh – tries to bring Sakina to her family by risking his life. The discursive landscape in Gadar remains limited to the preemption and reimagination of the fictive Indian nation which can only be offset by a virulent, violent, unstable and fundamentalist Pakistan. In a significant sequence, the narrator states, “Aur is tarah lakhon Hindu Parivar dar dar ki thokaren khaane lage (And this is how millions of Hindu families were rendered homeless).” In yet another, the narrator further says, “Aur is tarah Pakistan ke hisson se Hindu or sikhon ki lashon se bhari gaadiyan Hindustan bheji jane lagi (And in this way trains filled with the dead bodies of Hindus and Sikhs started being sent to India).” As the train chugs into India, ’Hindustaniyon katana humse seekho’ (Indians, QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO 11 learn how to butcher from us) is seen scrawled on its facade. In response, Sikhs and Hindus are shown to have been inflamed and massacred Muslims. As is evident, the burden of guilt is placed firmly on Pakistan thereby proposing that whatever the Sikhs and Hindus did was in retali­ ation and therefore justified. According to Kavita Daiya, Gadar reinscribes the most dangerous, essentialized, and jingoistic representations of Pakistanis and Muslims as the evil and inferior “other” in the Indian public sphere.9 The Hindu described it as an “incendiary film about relations between the two countries”, one the likes of which has rarely been seen on celluloid in India.10 The reviewer of the movie further writes that a “more nauseating film that stokes contempt among Indians for all things Pakistani (and in very thinly veiled terms for all things Islamic as well) has probably never before been screened in India. And this is a huge success at the box office.”11 If Gadar portrayed a superior Hindu/Sikh culture compared to the evil and malicious Muslims in Pakistan and justified the violence perpetrated by Sikhs and Hindus as reactionary, Lakshya constructed the fictive Pakistani nation as a military state constantly at war with its neighbors. The film explores the journey of an upper-middle-class, urbane young man from a position of near obscurity and hopelessness to one of purpose and eventual triumph, all of which is realized through his induction into the Indian army and participation in the quasi-war fought with Pakistan at Kargil. The slickly mounted visual narrative hinges on the unmitigated glorification of the armed forces as signifiers of the fictive nation. In one of the poignant sequences, the character played by superstar Amitabh Bachchan instructs his men to follow proper procedure to perform the last rites of the dead Pakistani soldiers, despite the opposition from his men, thereby highlighting the “distinction” between us (India) and them (Pakistan), which presumably abets the cinematic imagination of the lawabiding, rule-following, empathetic, morally superior nation. On occasion, Lakshya could also be read as a utopian lament for peace, especially when Romi (Preity Zinta) asks: “why do we fight at all?” Needless to say, in response the Indian soldiers point out that they don’t want war, but what can they do if Pakistan starts one, thus placing the responsibility at Pakistan’s doorstep. In LOC: Kargil, Pakistanis have been compared to ver­ min, therefore comparable to the propaganda films produced by Nazi Germany which portrayed European Jews as nameless and faceless “subhuman” beings. A second category of films has imagined Pakistan as a significantly more humane “other”, not reducing it to merely an enemy state albeit often cri­ tiqued for simplifying the complex relations between the neighbors and fanta­ sizing about a South Asian idyl. Films like Main Hoon Na and Veer-Zaara 12 R. SENGUPTA ET AL. while managing to delink violence, terrorism and fundamentalism from Muslims and Pakistan perform the function of conveying the complicated, vacuous and multi-layered relationship between India and Pakistan. The Farah Khan-directed Main Hoon Na (2004) with Shahrukh Khan in the lead and playing a Hindu army officer was a box office hit. Interestingly, the nar­ rative portrays his eventual foiling of a plan by terrorists to carry out blasts in several Indian cities. The kingpin of the plot is a disgruntled Indian terrorist, thereby delinking terrorism from Pakistan and Muslims. As Kavita Daiya writes, “Main Hoon Na promotes an alternative discourse of nationalism as a positive sentiment and delinks terrorism from being associated ethnically with a Hindu or Muslim citizen”.12 If Main Hoon Na was an attempt to explore terrorism as a multi-layered problem, beyond cinematic narratives like Sarfarosh and Mission Kashmir, Yash Chopra’s Veer Zara (2004) chronicled the finer vestiges of cross-border love between a Indian-Hindu Air Force Officer, Veer Pratap Singh (Shah Rukh Khan) and a PakistaniMuslim woman, Zara Hayat Khan (Preity Zinta), the daughter of an influen­ tial feudal and political leader. In a first for Hindi cinema, Veer-Zara attempted the imagination of a syncretic, South Asian idyl where love and harmony transcends political and psychological borders. The film also suc­ ceeded in turning the dominant discourse on Hindu-Muslim sexual relations on its head wherein the narrative on sexual domination and subjugation of the Hindu woman is viewed as an assault on and a tactic by Muslim aggres­ sors to overpower and subjugate the Hindu body politic. Understandably then, Veer-Zara did not elicit the kind of response reserved for filmic narra­ tives like Jodha-Akbar and Padmaavat where the hint of sexual intercourse between the Muslim man and Hindu woman was perceived as the subjuga­ tion and occupation of the Indian nation. To protect the dignity of the woman he loves, Veer Pratap Singh exhibits extreme sacrifice as he spends more than half his life – and the entirety of his youth – in a Pakistani prison, and Zara – having given up her life of luxury in Pakistan - lives a life of rela­ tive anonymity in a village in Punjab, Veer’s hometown. The discourse of the film, whilst not transgressing significantly from the Hindi cinema archetype of the revengeful Pakistani (the character of Raza Shirazi played by Manoj Bajpai) places its emphasis on the transcendental quality of human relation­ ships that appear to be capable of disregarding man-made, political bounda­ ries and the exigencies of post-colonial statist positions. The film firmly focused on the similarities of culture, food, agricultural practices, even the changing weather patterns between the two nations in positing what one might categorize as an utopian view, nonetheless militating the largely onesided narratives on Pakistan that have been hitherto on offer. The song ‘Aisa Desh hai Mera’, which Veer sings for the most part, is transformed into an anthem for South Asian camaraderie as Zara adds, ‘Aisa hi Desh hai Mera’. QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO 13 According to Kavita Daiya, “This rhetoric—of asserting national likeness rather than national difference—permeates the ideological message of the film; however, it does not function to erase or undermine the idea of the nation-state as imagined community in favor of the transnational. Instead of subverting the hegemony of the nation-state, it calls for peace, dialogue, and mutual recognition between India and Pakistan based on shared humanity.”13 Representing the National Security Paradigm In the beginning of 2000s, the world witnessed the sudden rise in events that could be categorized as those motivated by international terrorism therefore eliciting a threat from radical Islam, which resulted in renewed interest among Indian film makers to produce cinematic narratives on themes like extreme or hyper-nationalism, war against terror, national security, and religious fundamentalism. ‘Terrorist’ films produced by the Hindi film industry after 11 September 2001 attempted to engage with the issue of global terrorism and the responsibility vested with the US for fomenting religious violence across the world. Not only did films like Kurbaan, New York, Fanaa, and Black and White demonstrate the willing­ ness of popular Bollywood production houses and big banners to experi­ ment with and address the issue of seamless and borderless terrorism, it necessarily initiated a new era of ‘terrorist’ films where the character of the terrorist does not metamorphose into a progenitor of violence under cir­ cumstances not under his control, but one in which the terrorist is smart, suave, technology savvy, and incriminatingly dangerous. The roots of this on-screen transformation of the terrorist image could also be traced to the upsurge of terrorist violence that has been perpetrated on Indian soil over the past decade. The post-9/11 phase also necessitates a discussion on and an exploration of the theoretical basis of political violence, more impor­ tantly, violence which takes the form of organized and planned terrorism. The response of the US toward the 9/11 attacks and as a corollary the man­ ner in which the rest of the world started to visualize “Muslims” as a homogenous whole (and therefore, dangerous) gave birth to the concept “Islamophobia.” By and large, the focus of most of the cultural content produced by the Hollywood industry remained the portrayal of Muslims in a negative light or as “others” in popular media, some films and TV series (Rules of Engagement, Body of Lies, Syriana, A Mighty Heart, Zero Dark Thirty, The Patriot, Homeland) even stereotyping them as a global villains. In addition, the global threat of radical Islam was successfully linked with the discourse on national security, which has found space through multiple narratives in the sphere of popular culture. The narrative wave hit 14 R. SENGUPTA ET AL. India a few years later especially in the aftermath of the terrorist attack on Mumbai on 26 November 2008. Since then, an inordinate amount of con­ tent revolving around “national security” and “nationalism” have emerged from the cinematic mills of Hindi cinema in the post- 26/11 scenario. The advent of majoritarian nationalism has resulted in a number of filmmakers focusing on themes such as patriotism and the supreme sacrifice, infused with the sentiment of nationalism. With the coming of the OTT (over-thetop) platforms in the Indian digital exhibition space, content on national security, anti-terror operations, espionage and allied themes, have been consumed with alacrity by the Indian audience. Web series and movies of such kind are fast paced, full of action and emotions, imbued with the sen­ timent of patriotism and usually dually stereotype (Sengupta 2020) the Muslims of India. Since the Indian audiences is perceived as emotional consumers of cultural content, patriotism or hyper nationalism are simplis­ tic popular narratives that have buoyed the political economy of not only celluloid productions but also OTT-specific content. In order to move forward with the discussion on the representation of the national security imperative in Hindi popular cultural productions, it becomes important to delineate the national security paradigm – albeit in brief – adopted by the Indian state. Undertaking a departure from both the realist and the neo-realist theories in the study of international relations, that do not count ideological traits as important variables in explaining international relations, the concept of postcolonial insecurity forwarded by Abraham (1998) and Krishna (1999) identify such traits as important variables in explaining the pursuit of power by states. Abraham’s concept of post-colonial “insecurities” echoes what Krishna calls postcolonial “anxiety.” Krishna (1999) analyzes how ideological and personality dynamics of post-colonial state leaders in an attempt to achieve successfully the “modern enterprise of nation-building” , try to make “ … .the recalcitrant clay of pluralist civilizations into lean, uniform, hypermasculine and disciplined nation states”. In his study of the TamilSinhala ethnic conflict, Krishna explicates how the postcolonial Sri Lankan state’s ideology seeking to maintain a “unified and modern nation- state” has led the state to “construct” the identity of the Tamil ethnic minorities vis-�a-vis itself, and thereby creating a “politics of identity formation” through a discur­ sive process of “Othering” (Das 2001). Along parallel lines, Abraham (1998) explicates a similar manifestation of post-colonial insecurity in the case of the post-colonial Indian state. He explains that the post-colonial Indian state “obsessed” with the goal of modernity but never really catching up” to the conditions of modernity of the advanced nations, seeks to express this “urge” by “constructing” or even “re-intensifying” certain postcolonial insecurity perceptions, that find manifestation through the personality and ideological traits of their state QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO 15 leaders. Rajagopalan (1998) explains how the personality traits of the lead­ ers of India and Pakistan find manifestation as “a military contention between two historic rivals” that explain much of the Indo-Pakistani nuclear arms contention. Traditionally, the concept of security and national interest has been identified in terms of the Westphalian concept of the nation state, which is essentially realist. Thereby, the definition of national interest was conceived in terms of military security (Dalby 1995). The militarized nation­ alist discourse guiding the security policies of India in the present times has acquired such “monolithic” proportions that it practically leaves little or no scope for the realist lobby in India to think in terms of evaluating the conse­ quences of this militarization and hyper-masculine nationalism. Neither does it enable them to analyze other possible alternatives than the ongoing pro­ cess of militarization to solve India’s security concerns. In the recent past, filmic narratives and content focused on “national security”, and “nationalism”, have become significantly popular in India, however, their role in the formation of the “imagined communities,” which are much more socially and politically influential than their counterparts, could not be denied (Chowdhury 2022). National security could be com­ monly defined as the nation‘s ability to preserve its national interest and internal values from external threats or safeguarding the country’s territor­ ial integrity. Over time, the concept has evolved into a much broader term and now countries must protect themselves from political unrest and wid­ ening economic inequalities, regional development disparities as well as cul­ tural, linguistic, and ethnic hatred. The cinematic narratives in Hindi cinema have normally equated national security with national defense or secret missions, which is a much narrower interpretation of the actual term. The vast plethora of Indian movies and web series produced around the theme of “national security” have focused exclusively on military secur­ ity and India’s military superiority particularly over that of Pakistan, which then appears on screen as a visible, quantifiable and justifiable aspect of national defense; the quintessential espionage drama emerges as a classic example. Some key Hindi films with a similar thrust, theme, narrative and storyline remain Agent Vinod (2012), D Day (2013), Ek tha Tiger (2012), Holiday (2014), Tiger Zinda Hai (2017), and so on. These Bollywood films have irreversibly focused on stories of either the Indian underdog who transforms into a hero or a super-agent or a former Army soldier who emerge triumphant after facing several adversarial situations or a threat or two from an “external enemy”, thereby foregrounding the victory of the charismatic, masculine “Hindu” hero who fulfills his national duties, res­ cues the nation from peril, and restores India’s lost glory. This section focuses on two films and one web series based predominantly on the theme of “national security” and “nationalism”. The first is Neeraj 16 R. SENGUPTA ET AL. Pandey’s Baby (2015), a high-action drama that plays to heightened patriotic sentiments and indulges to some superpower fantasy. According to popular film critic Anupama Chopra (2015), Baby is somehow like a love child between Zero Dark Thirty and Argo, two high-action dramas made in Hollywood. The title of the film refers to a top-secret counter-espionage team born after the events of 26/11, which does not maintain any official records and is led by the super-efficient Ajay Singh (Akshay Kumar). In a high-octane drama, this secret team encounters threats from multiple countries, including Pakistan and within India. Naturally, the members of the team are super-her­ oes without any profligacy for errors, led by an Indian Muslim whose loyalty to the nation is unquestionable, thereby titillating the viewer’s patriotic senti­ ments to the fullest whilst indulging in some superpower fantasy. With an extended yet choking climax, the narrative of Baby is heavily dominated by far-fetched set-pieces and high-pitched nationalism. As such, a number of filmmakers from the Hindi film industry have churned out film narratives showcasing and displaying perpetual hostility between India and its not-so-friendly neighbor, Pakistan. With “national security” as the key backdrop, these filmmakers have offered parochial con­ tent cutting across various genres of popular culture. Another film that fits into the popular narrative of “national security” and “nationalism” is Aditya Dhar’s Uri: The Surgical Strike (2019) – a potent mix of fictional and true events. The film is formally a dramatized version of the surgical strikes car­ ried out by special units of the Indian Army on 29 September 2016 as retali­ atory action against the terror attack on the Indian Army camp near the town of Uri in Jammu and Kashmir on 18 September 2016. The narrative depicts eight teams of Indian commandos successfully eliminating all Pakistani terro­ rists, including the masterminds of the Uri attack. From the Indian perspec­ tive, the narrative betrays intense glorification, liberal use of fictional elements to enhance the nationalism quotient of the storyline and the clear romanticization of the account of the Indian achievement against the enemy, bound to fill every Indian citizen with pride for India’s success (Chowdhury). The film brought to the foreground the narrative of “New India” which does not tolerate any bullying or transgression, instead it would infiltrate the enemy country and hit them where it hurts (Palat 2019). The big screen has now started to be replaced by the individualized, digital exhibition spaces or over-the-top (OTT) platforms that are fast emerging as the mainstay of people’s infotainment needs. In a dynamic scenario such as this, the content produced for, curated and exhibited on OTT platforms becomes justifiably influential as narrative-setters and as the new nerve cen­ ters of popular cultural content. Shows like The Family Man, created by Raj Nidimoru and Krishna DK, therefore, are seen to have played a significant role in the resurgence of the commercial fortunes of platforms such as Amazon QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO 17 Prime. The Family Man emerged as one of the most viewed shows in the action thriller genre across all the OTT platforms. The series is headlined by the char­ acter of Srikant Tiwari (Manoj Bajpayee), an undercover secret agent on a mis­ sion again Keralite ISIS recruits planning a terror strike in India, who is also a middle class family man. Needless to say, the main narrative of the series revolves around espionage and national security, portraying the constantly complicated life of the protagonist who straddles two worlds – that of a “family man” and an unappreciated, underpaid government agent. The series sends out a simplistic message that “The Family Man’s version of a ‘family man’ is someone who can juggle his work duties and familial duties (Ramakrishnan 2019). In the microcosmic representation of Srikant’s family values and respon­ sibilities lies a larger argument around the portrayal of a nation, its values and the straightjacketing of an individual citizen’s responsibilities toward the fictive nation. In the character of Srikant, one views a critical element that forms the backbone of the narrative of The Family Man – the protection and safeguard­ ing of the fictive home/nation through the motif of the societal unit of the fam­ ily. Herein lies the most critical argument of the series while the larger theme focuses on important geopolitical issues like global jihad, Kashmir, US hegem­ ony and terrorism afflicting countries such as India – perfect ingredients for a potent narrative predicated on hyper-nationalism. With the family drama as its backdrop, the series assiduously foregrounds “national security,” and “nationalism.” It must be, however, said that The Family Man posits crucial questions around Muslim marginalization, nationalist propaganda and the controversy around beef eating. Clearly, terrorism and the response of the state to acts of terror have emerged as a crucial point of reference for popular film­ makers attempting to portray politics through the moving image. The core of the nation remains simplistically defined and the “Muslim villains” are placed on the margins, outside the mainstream (Pandey 1999: 608). Muslim villains are made to assume an assiduously vicious role, especially those owing alle­ giance to Pakistan, which is identified as the fountainhead of most anti-India terrorist activities. Conclusions The implications of such nationalist hyperbole in popular cinema are three­ fold: first, the unabashed association of the Muslim with violence and ter­ ror; second, by implication of the first, the collective suggestion of the community as a willing accomplice in terror and anti-national activities, and third, as a result of the second, the recommendation of punishment for the offending Muslim. Discursively then, the Muslim terrorist remains the scourge of a passive state which must, taking a cue from post-26/11 film narratives, step away from its policy of restraint, and assume a 18 R. SENGUPTA ET AL. decisive, strong, even belligerent posture. The hyper-masculine national security paradigm adopted by the Indian state has made significant inroads into cinematic narratives, some of the most recent examples being Pathan (mentioned earlier in this article) and Gadar − 2, sequel to Gadar: Ek Prem Katha, released 22 years apart but inevitably reflecting the bellicose postur­ ing that made the latter a roaring success at the box office. Popular Hindi cinema, in most part to which this research provides evidence, appears to have uncritically adopted the shrill geopolitical nationalism of the milita­ rized security paradigm. Barring a few indiscriminate exceptions, film nar­ ratives have posited militarization, hyper-machismo, and aggressive ferociousness as signposts for commercially successful plotlines. Mass com­ mercial exhibition outlets including multiplexes as well as personalized exhibition platforms such as OTT have emerged as the financial bulwarks of cinematic narratives that reinforce and represent an imperceptive image of nationalism as well as national security. Notes 01. 02. 03. 04. 05. 06. 07. 08. 09. 10. 11. It is imperative to note here that when we speak of Indian films, we must take into account the fact that there is some amount of film production in every major Indian language and there are at least six important non-Hindi film industries: Bengali, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil, and Telugu. In 1960, the government set up the Film Finance Corporation, which merged with the Motion Picture Export Association in 1980 to form the National Film Development Corporation, for financing and exporting films, and in 1961established the Film Institute in Poona. In 1973, the government established the Directorate of Film Festivals, shoes brief was to organize the annual International Film Festival. Explicating the armed struggle in Iran, Jazani (1979) delineates the role of the “guerrilla” and exhorts the prospective guerrilla from falling prey to adventurism in the form of “too much emphasis on the role of the ‘fedaee’, resorting to constant invocations of ‘martyrdom’ to offset the absence of a mass movement, and the belief that the sacrifice of blood is sufficient for the start of the revolution”. The reference to “fedaee” or “fidayeen” is significant for observers of terrorist violence in the twentieth century, particularly in the post-September 11 scenario. Bush, W. Stephen, “Motion Picture Men Greet President,” Moving Picture World (12 February 1916), pps. 923þ. “First Board of Trade Banquet, Attended by President Wilson, Marks New Era in Industry,” Motion Picture News (12 February 1916), 817–18. Universal advertisement, Moving Picture World (5 May 1917), 706. Ibid, 810. Universal advertisement, ibid, 820. Moving Picture World (3 August 1918), 703. “Shot ‘Beast of Berlin,’” Variety (12 April 1918), 47. How Indian cinema helped fight fascism during World War II (newslaundry.com) For a detailed understanding of the categorization refer to Mamdani (2002) and Sengupta (2020). Sengupta (2019). Daiya (2008, 178). “‘Gadar’ at Agra,” The Hindu, Sunday July 15, 2001. “‘Gadar’ at Agra,” The Hindu, Sunday July 15, 2001 cited in Daiya (2008). QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO 12. 13. 19 Daiya. Daiya, 165. Work Cited Abraham, Itty. 1998. The Making of the Indian Atomic Bomb: Science, Secrecy and the PostColonial State. New York: Zed Books. Benegal, Shyam. 2005. “Secularism and Indian Cinema”, 11th P C Joshi Memorial Lecture, April 18. Archives of Contemporary History, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Bhaskar, Ira, and Richard Allen. 2022. 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