Tiger 3, starring Salman Khan and Katrina Kaif, is the latest Hindi film this year to navigate India’s relationship (or lack thereof) with Pakistan. Earlier this year, Shah Rukh Khan’s Pathaan and Sunny Deol’s Gadar 2, both massive box-office successes, had narratives that engaged with the Pakistan issue — and how the animosity between the two countries affects ordinary people on both sides of the border.
The previous two films in the ‘Tiger’ franchise, Ek Tha Tiger (2012) and Tiger Zinda Hai (2017), also dealt, in different ways, with the India-Pakistan question: is friendship or reconciliation possible?
Bollywood has a peculiar track record with depictions of Pakistan: for the longest time, Hindi films barely ever mentioned the country, and then, all of a sudden, from the 1990s onwards, it seemed like we couldn’t escape depictions of Pakistan in Bollywood. Why?
The Indian Express film critic Shubhra Gupta recalled that the first time Pakistan was explicitly named as the ‘enemy’ in a mainstream, non-war Hindi film was in John Matthew Matthan’s Sarfarosh (1999), starring Aamir Khan and Naseeruddin Shah.
“Before that, Pakistan only existed in euphemisms like ‘padosi mulk’ (neighbouring country), ‘videshi haath’ (foreign hand), etc,” Gupta said. “It was only specific films like Chetan Anand’s 1964 war drama Haqeeqat that named Pakistan as India’s enemy, but then, it had no choice but to do so.”
What explains the reluctance to specifically name Pakistan? One explanation is that the trauma of Partition was still too fresh in memory. Articulating the pain of the violence and displacement was still difficult in the collective imagination.
Hindi cinema instead preferred to look ahead to the Nehruvian ideals of secularism, socialism, anti-feudalism, and the uplift of the marginalised sections. It was an era of nation-building, and the prominent examples in Bollywood included Naya Daur (Dilip Kumar-Vyjayanthimala, 1957), Raj Kapoor’s Shree 420 (1955), and Bimal Roy’s Do Bigha Zameen (1953).
So when did things begin to change, and why?
By the 1990s, a generational change had taken place in Bollywood. The children of the survivors of Partition were now making films, and the event itself was far enough in memory to more comfortably enable multidimensional discussions around it.
Some of the literature on Partition that was being published made its way to the big screen: Deepa Mehta’s Earth (1999), which was adapted from Bapsi Sidhwa’s novel Cracking India (1991); Train to Pakistan (1998), adapted from Khushwant Singh’s novel of the same name; and Chandraprakash Dwivedi’s 2003 adaptation of Amrita Pritam’s Punjabi novel Pinjar, also titled Pinjar.
Filmmakers also began exploring Pakistani society, politics, and the military. In Gadar: Ek Prem Katha (2001), a Sikh truck driver from Indian Punjab ended up marrying a Muslim Pakistani girl. The film reiterated the trope of an oppressive society in Pakistan, but it still gave the message that “not all Pakistanis are bad”.
Yash Chopra’s Veer-Zaara (2004) was a love story between an Indian man and a Pakistani woman, in which the villain was the woman’s Pakistani fiancé, but the saviour was a Pakistani human rights lawyer played by Rani Mukerji. Both films showed that love is possible across borders.
The four wars with Pakistan in 1947, 1965, 1971, and 1999 were, of course, never far from the public imagination. While the post-liberalisation era brought prosperity and confidence to India, putting money into the hands of a generation of ‘new rich’, the 1990s saw Pakistan step up its efforts to promote separatism and violence in Jammu and Kashmir, and subsequently carry out or enable numerous terrorist attacks across India.
In 1999, Pakistan made an attempt to grab Indian territory in Kargil, and the generation of Indians who were too young to have a meaningful memory of 1971 for the first time saw war up close. This was also the time when Pakistan developed its international reputation for supporting and funding Islamist terrorism.
J P Dutta’s Border (1997) set a new standard in Indian war filmmaking, and was followed by films like Mission Kashmir (2000), LOC: Kargil (2003), and Lakshya (2004). The last decade, however, has witnessed a tonal shift in Bollywood’s portrayal of Pakistan.
The Narendra Modi government, and the Prime Minister personally, started out by extending a hand of friendship towards Pakistan in 2014. Salman Khan’s Bajrangi Bhaijaan, which was released in 2015, showed Pakistan in a positive light and was a huge commercial success.
The terrorist attacks on the Pathankot air base in January 2016, followed by the attacks on the Indian Army bases in Uri and Nagrota in September and November that year, led to a hardening of India’s position. From 2017 onward, Pakistan has been depicted unidimensionally as the evil enemy, with hardly any redeeming features. There was Raazi in 2018, and Uri: The Surgical Strike in 2019.
The unforgiving attitude towards Pakistan has both fed into and promoted the relentless othering of the country in India’s mainstream political discourse. Pakistan has fit neatly into the role of the external enemy in the nationalist Hindutva discourse.
To this extent, Tiger 3 remains an outlier, and its commercial success can be seen as bucking a trend.
Arushi BhaskarArushi works with the online desk at The Indian Express. She writes on… read more
Explained: Portrayal of Pakistan in Bollywood – The Indian Express
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