The three top-grossing Hindi movies this year have one thing in common, even if they might appear different on paper. While one is a glossy spy thriller featuring one of the biggest Indian stars in history, the second a scrappy mid-budget movie set against a geopolitical backdrop, and the latest a nostalgic throwback to the Bollywood of two decades ago, there is one thing that unites Pathaan, The Kerala Story and Gadar 2: religious identity.
In Pathaan, Shah Rukh Khan’s titular character makes it a point to separate himself from his religion, and enters into a romantic relationship with a woman from the neighbouring Pakistan. Like so many recent films, Pathaan had also been designed to tap into the patriotic fervour that can be felt among the masses, even if it subverted these ideas in unexpected ways on its way to a lifetime haul of over Rs 1,000 crore.
The Kerala Story, easily the most inflammatory of these three films, peddled falsehoods and stoked communal fires to generate more than Rs 250 crore worldwide. Its performance was similar to last year’s The Kashmir Files, whose trajectory filmmaker Sudipto Sen and producer Vipul Amrutlal Shah no doubt tried to emulate. A lot was written about both films, but they appealed to a section of the audience that doesn’t need much convincing that the Hindu majority in this country is under threat from the Muslim minority.
Gadar 2, in which an angry Sunny Deol crosses the border into Pakistan to save his son from the clutches of villainous army men, made a very overt attempt to attract the same crowd with its trailers and other promotional material. The bit where Sunny Deol screams at the top of his lungs about Pakistanis secretly wanting to live in India was designed for WhatsApp virality, as Bollywood once again took it upon itself to teach the public on how to correctly be an Indian.
But this Independence Day, it’s worth investigating why movies about patriotism — more precisely, patriotism conflated with religious identity — are so popular in India, even as the West moves away from incendiary filmmaking, and towards a more pacifist approach. Just last year, Netflix released a new adaptation of probably the most iconic anti-war novel ever written, All Quiet on the Western Front. The film received 14 nominations at the BAFTAs, winning seven; and nine nominations at the Oscars, winning four. In a year where we celebrated the success of RRR as a great moment for Indian cinema, a German movie was quietly sweeping the awards race.
In 2019, Sam Mendes released his technically immaculate anti-war movie 1917, in which a young soldier goes on an epic quest to deliver a message to the British high-command, and get them to literally call off an attack. Metaphors don’t get more blunt than that. Just two years before 1917, Christopher Nolan released Dunkirk, which attempted to depict the horrors of war through the eyes of a clueless young soldier caught in one of the most dangerous places on the planet. Towards the end of that movie, a blind man congratulated a character for safely making it back to home soil. “All we did was survive,” the character said in return, confused about why he was being applauded. “That’s enough,” said the old man. And then there was David Ayer’s Fury, which controversially also celebrated the idea of brotherhood, which muddied its morality.
While all pro-war movies are indistinguishable from propaganda, the best war movies are also actually staunchly anti-war, despite what Francois Truffaut once said: “Every film about war ends up being pro-war.” Nothing about Apocalypse Now, The Battle of Algiers, Hacksaw Ridge, Saving Private Ryan, The Thin Red Line, Platoon, or even American Sniper, actually celebrates the act of sending young men and women to war. Director Clint Eastwood defended some of the complaints about American Sniper, which, it’s worth remembering, ended with the main character dying after suffering grave trauma for his actions. “I think it’s nice for veterans, because it shows what they go through, and that life—and the wives and families of veterans. It has a great indication of the stresses they are under,” Eastwood told The Hollywood Reporter. “And I think that all adds up to kind of an anti-war [message].”
At a time when Nolan is being criticised in some quarters for neglecting to depict the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Oppenheimer — a flawed accusation, because the movie indicts Oppenheimer quite plainly — it’s almost unbelievable to consider that Eastwood was presenting the Japanese point of view in a major movie just a decade and a half ago. Imagine an Indian director — say, Shershaah’s Vishnu Vardhan — also releasing a movie about the Kargil War from Pakistan’s perspective. In the same year. It’s impossible to even comprehend.
And this thought experiment should be enough to remind you of where we are as a society, and how singularly backward some of our (most popular) movies are in their politics. If even Iron Man can admit the error of his warmongering ways, so can we.
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Independence Day 2023: Why does Bollywood keep weaponising patriotism, even as the West embraces an anti-war outlook? – The Indian Express
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