Shooting Terror

Terrorism in Hindi Films

Meenakshi Bharat

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781032174099
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000024937
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Shooting Terror highlights the disturbing immediacy of acts of terror and how cinema responds to them. It follows the changing representations of terrorism in Hindi cinema by fielding in-depth textual analyses of films such as Roja, Maachis, Black Friday, Tere Bin Laden, Uri: The Surgical Strike, among others.

It traces how terror and the terrorist have come to be viewed in the Indian cultural space and lays the grounds for a multivalent, perspectival reading of cinema and terrorism. Moving from the threat of terror condensed in the Mogambo-esque villain in Mr. India, to the showcasing of terror and the terrorist in their lived-in realities in Haider and Shahid, the book explores the fraught connections between terror and the themes of devastation and trauma; between terror and the urban cityscape. It also seeks to highlight the place of humour and satire in films on terrorism and the presence of the reactionary far right in these films.

One of the first books to present a composite picture of terrorism in contemporary Hindi cinema, this volume will be of interest to researchers and academics of cultural studies, media and film studies, and the study of sociopsychological violence in media and culture.

1
Filmic witness to terror

The ‘global profusion of terrorism’ recognized by Jean Baudrillard in his public announcement that ‘terrorism, like viruses is everywhere,’¹ is witness to our violent, factious times. Especially, in the perspective of an increasingly cosmopolitan world, the omnipresent and pervasive fear of terrorist insurgency and violent terror attacks, piggy-backing on the myriad globalizing squalls besetting nations, this cloud of terror, constantly hovering over our contemporary, becomes the defining cultural marker of our times. Tormented by vicious, divisive ideological politics, torn by recurrent, extensive terrorist outbreaks, India, specifically, has had a long unhappy history of being buffeted by terrorist violence over the years. In this scenario, ‘with the deepening confusions generated by the anarchic contemporary turmoil, locating creativity and identifying the potential for cultural resurgence becomes a challenging and deeply problematic task.’² The pervasive ideology of ‘terrorism’ has elicited reactions from all and sundry, from the common man who walks on the street, to the intellectual, each trying to make sense of it. Even creative sensibilities, artists, weighed down by the pall of terror, are drawn to the festering sore, to find themselves compelled to respond, to look for meaning in apparently meaning-less acts, to give shape to the recalcitrant subject-matter. In the core of the uneasy substructures of this crumbling, violence-ridden contemporary edifice, lie the problematic origins of significant creative output in multiple aesthetic spheres: literature, the visual, and aural arts.³ Cinema, significantly, has been a key artistic respondent to this ubiquitous terror globally.

In the Indian subcontinent, where acts of terror are as much a part of our days as cinema, cultural response has been swift and quite considerable. My endeavour here is to engage with this most frequent, popular, and visible cultural witness to assess what it means to the nation and its citizens; how it impacts on the relationship between the two. Especially noting the wrenching, widespread stranglehold of the distressing theme of terror on our collective psyches, creative reaction to, and understanding of this common exercising issue displayed by creative wielders of the camera, has turned up variegated, profound, and deep-rooted responses. Giving a lie to the adage, ‘laugh and the world laughs with you; weep and you weep alone,’ an amazing core of underlying interest and compassion, signalled by a spontaneous overflow of creative and intellectual engagement with the intransigent theme, marks these cinematic efforts. The artistic acumen of talented and committed filmmakers has propelled these Indian filmic responses—long, short, documentary, mainstream, and parallel—on a journey of discovery, where the ‘otherness’ of the ‘other,’ the terrorist, surprises even as it is wilfully addressed and negotiated.

This identification of cinema as the site for essaying some measure of comprehension of our terror-clouded world is not random or unsubstantiated. When asked by Alex Miller of VICE why cinema is a ‘useful tool … to analyze the world,’ one of the most vocal thinkers of our times, Slavoj Žižek says:

Mostly the way I talk about cinema is simply to use it to illustrate where we are today ideologically. How do we experience lives? What do we find worth fighting for? What’s the meaning of our life?⁴

Believing this to be a simply stated strong alibi for this cultural art form, I make films the basis for attempting to understand our present-day scenario which has so exercised the minds of leading contemporary thinkers. Further, agreeing with Terry Eagleton’s early comment that ‘culture has become part of the problem rather than the solution,’⁵ cinematic response to the contemporary cultural staple of terrorism, not only gives us a perspective to the relentless threat and assaults of terrorism but is also enigmatically poised in the problematic. Moreover if, as Ravi Vasudevan asserts, ‘cinema has been the central audio-visual medium of our times’ and as such, if ‘since independence, Indian cinema has provided powerful documentation of key passages in the imaginary world of our society, accessing issues of social justice and transformation, visions of community as well as of social fragmentation, despair, and violence,’ then the all-pervasive cloud of terror is bound to become the subject of films.⁶ Corroborated by Bhavani Iyer’s insistence that the ‘[e]vocation of any country’s collective consciousness is usually mirrored in its popular art forms,’ it becomes imperative that we access this ‘collective consciousness’ and its cultural perception to this most nettling problem of our times. Iyer, particularly, sites this mirroring in cinema which, according to her is the most apposite art form to deal with the lived culture of the nation because ‘cinema runs like the blood in our veins’ and because ‘the movies are made by people who feel and act like us’ and because ‘it reflects us.’⁷ Since the cinema that is ‘life’ to millions of Indians is mainstream Hindi cinema, it submits itself as the obvious, considered choice for extended, analytic study. Also, with both the filmmaker and the audience becoming more discerning and demanding, and with the line separating mainstream and the once pretentiously labelled art, niche or parallel cinema being well-nigh eroded, this zeroing in becomes inevitable.

Dogged filmic witness persistently intervenes to remind us that this element of the contemporary merits special attention both in India and the world at large. It does not take too much research to see the extent of the hold of the theme of terrorism over the imagination of a nation—indeed, of the world. At any given time, a quick scan of programmes on entertainment portals and television channels reveals a proliferation of Indian films based on terrorism. It is significant that these films are often slotted for repeat shows on TV. The attraction of the theme is further backed by the Hollywood choices available to Indian audiences—Paul Greengrass’s UA 93, Katherine Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty are among the many films on terrorism that are shown over and over again—and by the popularity of international TV serials like Homeland, Quantico and 24, along with their 2013 Hindi version. These multifarious visual narratives on offer to audiences throughout the country excite multi-perspectival, often conflicting responses, prompting the need to engage with them, however conflicting the interpretational exercise may be.

On the other hand, despite the special piquancy of the issue, terrorism has become so much a part of our everyday that quite often the terror event becomes a dismissible banality recorded by our daily newspaper: sometimes on the front page (if the number of casualties is high or if there is evidence of ‘the foreign hand’), but more often than not relegated to the third page, generally reserved for the more humdrum news items. Terry Eagleton too notes the insertion of violence into our ordinary, day to day existence when he spoke of the ‘Culture Conundrum’ in 2008 by harking back to his mentor, Raymond Williams’s key assertion that ‘Culture is Ordinary.’⁸

One of Williams’s key moves was to insist that culture meant not just eminent works of art but a whole way of life in common; and culture in this sense-language, inheritance, identity, religion—has become important enough to kill for. Dante and Mozart may be elitist, but they have never blown the limbs off small children.⁹

Following Williams’s perception of culture embracing both ‘a whole way of life,’ as synonymous with our day to day experience of life, and the forms of signification which include film and television, the pertinence of this study becomes evident. If terrorism has become so much a part of our ‘ordinary,’ then films which take on the theme become one of the most vocal and most visible cultural markers of our contemporary. How much the reference to terrorism has become a part of the everyday is clear from an exchange between two school-going teenagers in Secret Superstar (2017) as one helps the other to run away from home for a secret audition as a singer. Chintan, who is a friend of the ‘secret superstar,’ points to a getaway passage and jokingly remarks: ‘I thought that in case of a terrorist attack there ought to be an escape route.’¹⁰ In a film about the secret aspirations of Indian youth, in a film that has nothing to do with terrorism, this reference bears out the point of how banal the subject has become and how much a part of everyday conversation and experience. This is not a lone example. There are many other films, in which terror is not a central concern, but which touch upon this converging theme of terrorism in stray mentions, highlighting the dark undercurrent that constantly troubles the artist, especially the filmmaker.

The enigmatic and perplexing character of the issue of terrorism, as both ‘singular’ and ‘common,’ at the same time, makes heavy demands of the filmmaker. Despite the readiness of the theme for artistic treatment, filmmakers are caught in their own specific conundrum: how are they to tread the line between what needs to be highlighted and what they are expected to highlight. In their cinematic representations of terror, terrorism, and terrorists, they will unavoidably invite attention to deeper ethical questions about the limits and possibilities of the artistic endeavour: can/should filmmakers presume to enunciate opinions, or to direct sentiments, to weigh the scales one way or the other?¹¹

With the iterated emphasis on the ‘ordinariness’ of the terrorist act, and on the ‘ordinary’ being the contemporary culture, it becomes essential to weigh whether this ‘common’ event merits memorialization at all. The troubling thought that has assailed me over and over again is whether artistic endeavour with these concerns is, in some way, witnessing or writing history. And if they are witness to history, then is it significant history at all? With terror locators like the Kashmir-based terrorist assaults, the cross-border terrorist infiltration and activity, the Maoist terror in the heart of the country, the separatist terror movements in Punjab, Kashmir and the North East, the attacks on the major cities in the country and with specific terror events like the terror-inspired Mumbai Riots of 1993, the Mumbai blasts of 2003 and the Taj assault of 2008, all events memorialized in film, we realize that over and over again, as I have pointed out elsewhere, ‘the artist seems compelled by the urgent need to artistically commemorate these events which have little of the “grandeur” associated with great conflicts of past times. These are events that are politically, socially, and morally diminishing in impact; events that entail tremendous loss.’¹² How does the filmmaker convert this loss into a ‘making’ process through his craft? In this ‘age of terror’ how does cinema transcend the moment to give perspective, to inform?

Having thus established that by its very nature terrorism as an all-pervasive reality elicits a response which is both inevitable and necessary, it is still incumbent to actively consider the question of how this cinema transcends the limitations of the filmmaker’s prejudice. This analysis would thus occasion a thorough investigation of the embedded ideologies, beliefs lacing the particular social and political structures of the culture in which these filmmakers are located on the one hand, and, on the other, it would problematize the dynamic interpellation of these by the troubled contemporary scenario. Also, not only would it be necessary to sift the ‘design’ and ‘intent’ of the cinematic artist from the ‘impact,’ but my focus on terror-focused cinema from Mumbai, popularly called Bollywood, will also willy-nilly necessitate taking cognizance of both the responsibility of the artist in portraying terror, and that of the audience in responding to this portrayal. Certainly, it would be informative to see how far filmmakers can rise above their own prejudices even as they recognize and represent the significa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Filmic witness to terror
• 2 Early films on terrorism in Kashmir
• 3 Kashmir: paradise desecrated
• 4 Home-focused terrorism
• 5 Mumbai under attack: gnawing away at the innards
• 6 Beyond borders: the international reach of postterrorist Hindi films
• 7 Growing maturity: humour in the Hindi film on terror
• 8 Reckoning postterrorism in Hindi cinema
• Filmography
• Bibliography
• Index