A philosophy professor in New York discusses how Bollywood’s treatment of war movies over the years traces our country’s socio-political evolution
Chopra says that Uri: The Surgical Strike by Aditya Dhar rejects the ‘turn the other cheek’ paradigm that is supposed to underwrite Indian foreign policy, and that’s significant
Samir Chopra’s Bollywood Does Battle (HarperCollins) is an excellent guide to how Indians can understand themselves and their nation through Bollywood’s war movies. Chopra, a professor of philosophy at Brooklyn College, New York, is also the author of other books on cinema, military history, cricket, the politics of technology and the legal theory of AI. He says he chose to examine a nation in the making through Indian war movies because “they are the premier vehicle of cultural expression in India, showcasing music, dance, art, design, literary and dramatic expression; it’s where Indians go to find and make dreams about themselves and their nation”.
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Edited excerpts from the interview:
Have Indian war films in the new millennium defined prevalent ideas of nationalism, or been defined by them?
The influence goes in the direction of the various forms of Indian nationalism, as they grow and evolve, influencing the content of these movies. Indian war movies hadn’t been big enough hits or cultural presences, other than Border, to drive the construction of new nationalist images and paradigms. Right now, they tend to reflect the wishes, hopes, and fears generated and sustained by political and cultural developments; they reflect how the Indian film industry has conceptualised its nation and continues to do so.
You write: “The Indian war movie as an aggressive, polemical propaganda vehicle is a novel cultural production.” Could you explain the
reason for it?
Older Indian war movies are more diffident in their political assertions, less strident in their rhetorical style, though Haqeeqat does not match this template cleanly. In part, this is due to older movies being made under a Ministry of Information and Broadcasting regulation that stipulated “Indian enemies” could not be depicted “in a negative light”. JP Dutta was able to get this regulation relaxed for his 1997 Border. Newer Indian war movies like Lakshya and LOC: Kargil employ a markedly different visual and rhetorical grammar as does Uri—the ‘enemy’ is clearly identified and characterised, the political claims are more overt, the writing is more polemical.
Samir Chopra
Do you see the war films made after the BJP won the 2014 national elections, as different from those before it in any significant way? I ask particularly with reference to Uri: The Surgical Strike, which you have referred to.
The new Indian war movie appears more technically polished, more influenced by the visual grammar of the modern action movie and is certainly far more aggressive in its assertion of a newer, muscular, less diffident Indian identity. Uri... is especially overt in its claims that it aims to salute and recognise this new Indian nation. That it does so by offering a rejection of the ‘turn the other cheek’ paradigm that is supposed to underwrite Indian foreign policy is significant. It maps on, almost directly, to modern Indian nationalist claims that the time for “Mr Nice Guy”, domestically and internationally, is over.
While your book doesn’t offer a “comparative treatment” of Indian war movies with foreign ones, you do use parallels and analogies. Do any stark observations spring to mind when you think of Indian war movies alongside foreign, especially Hollywood, films?
A superficial one is that Hollywood films are more technical, more varied, explore a wider variety of themes, and are darker and more violent. There are many thematic similarities in that many Hollywood war films are also ‘masala’ or formulaic films, which generously employ war movie tropes. Most fundamentally, America has had a deeper, and more intimate relationship with war, one that is becoming more abstract, and this is reflected in the interest its cinematic artistes have shown in the depiction of war on the screen. The social dynamics of Hollywood war movies are also more complex, its critiques of military and foreign policy more pointed, and their treatment of war’s horrors more unflinching.
Among key absences you’ve noted in Indian war cinema are anti-war films, critical war movies and satire. For what reasons?
Several: the lack of extended wars that bring home the costs of military action to all citizens, a resurgent nationalism that casts a hallowed light over war and the military, and a general historical reluctance to engage with critical histories, especially at a time when a form of historical revisionism is underway and when new “sacred cows” are being found all the time. To make critical war movies or anti-war movies or satires will require having a less elevated view of both war and the military, something that must be a function of the surrounding culture’s understanding of it. Good military history would help.
JP Dutta’s Border, says Chopra, moves away from the earlier tendency of films to not show the Indian enemy in negative light as stipulated by the I&B Ministry
You’ve examined the Indian war movies’ emphasis on a soldier’s group as “a visible demonstration of ‘national integration’”. Could you explain, particularly in the context of the depiction of Indian Muslims in these films, as well as missing references to members of Dalit and Anglo-Indian communities?
The ‘soldier’s group,’ which is a prominent trope in war movies, has its own particular and peculiar form in Indian war movies. It is crucially concerned with transmitting images of cultural and religious syncretism—that Indians from all ethnicities and religions are united in defending the nation. In almost every movie under consideration, these notions are prominently placed on display. So, Indian Muslims are shown time and again as loyal, patriotic soldiers, a form of reassurance to the Indian polity that the nation fights together on the front. The absence of Dalit soldiers in soldiers’ groups reflects actual absences in the armed forces, while also reflecting a lack of national concern about their “integration in the mainstream”. The elision of Anglo-Indians is just plain historical ignorance.
You’ve linked the lack of historical battle detail in Indian war movies to the poor state of Indian military history. What reasons do you see for the latter?
Largely two-fold: one, Indian military history is not an area of academic concern or interest, and second, most Indian military history is written by veterans, who face their own peculiar constraints pertaining to the Indian Secrets Act, institutional loyalty, closeness to the subjects of their critique and analysis, and so on. Both of these factors are changing rapidly. And, because, in recent times, a kind of “devotion” or “homage” to the military has become a prominent aspect of India’s militarism, which has made it harder to carry out critical analysis of Indian military history. A genuine Indian military history would have operational, tactical, strategic, financial, social, political and cultural dimensions—this we simply do not produce at the moment.
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