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War Films Are Right Up
The Parivar's Street

By Saibal Chatterjee

The Hindustan Times
25 November, 2003

The steady rise of the rightwing on the Indian political stage over the past decade has impacted popular Hindi cinema in two crucial ways. One, it
has fuelled a plethora of feel-good "model Hindu" family dramas. The other is panning out before our eyes at this precise moment. The next 12 months or so will witness the release of a larger number of war films than the Mumbai movie machine has cranked out in its entire history.

It is no coincidence that all these films deal, in one way or another, with the perfidies of Pakistan while singing paeans to the courage and commitment of India's brave young soldiers. No wonder the current rulers of India simply adore Bollywood. An influential section of the film industry has willingly accepted the onus of furthering the one cause that is central to the
perpetuation of the might of the rightwing - kindling and sustaining the fire of patriotism in the hearts of the masses. Hasn't anybody around here heard the old adage about patriotism being the last resort of the scoundrel?

The grateful government is dying to hand over one of the last bastions of meaningful Indian cinema - the country's official international film
festival - to the mainstream Mumbai industry by shifting the annual event to its backyard, Goa. It is obviously a reward for a job well done. From Sooraj Barjatya's sugarcoated odes to the pure, selfless Hindu way of life, Maine Pyar Kiya and Hum Aapke Hain Koun, to the all-is-hale-and-hearty-in-good-old-India melodramas produced by the Yash Chopra school of escapist filmmaking to the brazen jingoism of Anil Sharma's Gadar - Ek Prem Katha to the upcoming spate of films designed to fan neo-nationalistic fervour, Bollywood has kept the saffron flag flying - overtly and covertly.

The leading lights of the mainstream film industry have clung to political patronage for dear life. A pliant mass media is exactly what purveyors of Hindutva - or any intolerant, exclusivist line of thinking - need to propagate
their worldview and keep hatred and distrust of Pakistan on the boil.

In all these years of its existence, the Hindi film industry had made only four major films that had war in the backdrop - Haqeeqat, Hindustan Ki Kasam, both helmed by Chetan Anand, Upkar, actor Manoj Kumar's directorial debut, and the defiantly kitschy Lalkar, produced by Ramanand Sagar, the man who went on to contribute television's Ramayan and Shri Krishna to the
increasing religiosity of the nation's popular culture.

Why have Hindi war films been so few and far between? The primary reason for the reluctance of Mumbai filmmakers to tackle the genre is the demand for realism that it necessarily makes on them. Bollywood has rarely been comfortable with anything other than escapist fare. That perhaps explains why even the few war films that have been made in Mumbai have allowed, with perhaps the exception of Haqeeqat, concessions to established narrative conventions and incorporated songs and comic interludes. Will we ever get to see a no-frills, gritty war film in Hindi? Highly unlikely unless a Ramgopal Varma rises above his obsession with the underworld and the twilight zone.

Significantly, the war movies that Mumbai has produced over the years have all followed a major military face-off. Haqeeqat was released in 1964, two years after the 1962 war with China. It pulled no punches when it came to its anti-China stance.

After the 1965 war with Pakistan, Manoj Kumar unleashed the ultra-nationalistic Upkar, about an upright farmer who gives up his land and joins the Indian Army. The box office success of the film emboldened the actor-producer-director enough for him to recycle the formula all through his career, often with great success.

Chetan Anand was back with another war film after the 1971 Indo-Pak military confrontation over Bangladesh, Hindustan Ki Kasam (1973), but this time around, he failed to make much headway at the box office. A year earlier, Ramanand Sagar had made Lalkar, a film that extolled the courage
of soldiers in the face of extreme adversity but had little to deliver by way of cinematic excellence. J.P. Dutta's LOC - Kargil promises to be a super-refined version of the Lalkar formula.

While the technical attributes of Hindi cinema may have improved beyond recognition in the intervening years, the avowed intention of the war films lined up for release in 2003-04 is no different from what it was when Ramanand Sagar made Lalkaar. It would be particularly interesting to see how Anil Sharma's under-production Ab Tumhare Hawale Watan Saathiyon shapes up. Will the bitter harvest he reaped with the Rs 55-crore Gadar sequel, Hero,
about a bellicose Indian spy who single-handedly thwarts a Pakistani bid to acquire an Islamic Bomb, force him to tone down the shrillness of
his pop patriotic rhetoric a touch or will he push for an even higher decibel level?

It won't be surprising if he opts for the latter course. The climate is just right for stepping up the Pakistan-bashing exercise a few notches. For the men in power, the situation is ideal - while one section of the industry churns out cinematic opium for the masses in the form of designer love stories, another reminds the people how crucial it is to be ready to lay down one's life for the motherland even as - this, of course, remains unsaid on the screen -- the politicians cynically and with impunity exploit the system to feather their own nests.

Until well into the 1990s, one important film censorship guideline barred the mention of the "enemy nation". Once that long-standing restriction was lifted - again, it wasn't just a stray administrative decision but a cold, calculated political chessboard move - Gadar struck. And now, there is no stopping the
you-have-to-hate-Pakistan-if-you-love-India juggernaut.

The suspicion with which the censors (and by extension the Information and Broadcasting Ministry) and the Sangh Parivar view independent documentaries and music videos is of a piece with the overall attitudinal shift that has occurred in the corridors of power since the early 1990s.
Anybody who nurtures fascistic tendencies has an innate impatience with truth and independent documentary filmmakers are an evil he can do
without. So he will clamp down on Anand Patwardhan's War and Peace, but merrily let Gadar slip through the sieve.

The incipient governmental drive against "raunchy" music videos - granted that some of them are indeed nakedly exploitative - is another manifestation of the growing intolerance for any form of counter-culture. Counter-cultures exist
beyond the pale of official control and that's a situation that a rightist government can never countenance.

The dramatic increase in the production of war films is a clear sign that the battle for creative freedom may have been lost. The war, however, remains to be fought.