Samir Chopra - Bollywood Does Battle: The War Movie and the Indian Popular Imagination

The best anti-war film has always been the war film.

JEANINE BASINGER

People advise us to be good and peaceful as if we are inclined to war We do not possess the warlike mentality.

JAWAHARLAL NEHRU

Dedicated to my father,

Squadron Leader Pramod Chandra Chopra, VrC,

a dedicated deglamourizer of war

Contents

Aakraman and Hindustan Ki Kasam:
The Juvenile War Movie

Border and LOC: Kargil:
J.P. Duttas Visions of War

Vijeta and Lakshya:
The War Movie as Bildungsroman

The Ghazi Attack:
The Submarine Movie

O n 15 August 1947, India attained independence from Great Britains colonial subjugation via a protracted struggle that included both revolutionary violence and non-violent protest. A few weeks later, it went to war with Pakistan, which, newly carved out from Britains Indian empire, had sent armed guerrillas into the Himalayan kingdom of Kashmir, seeking to settle by force the question of which of the two nascent post-colonial nations the former imperial possession owed allegiance to. That war ended in a stalemate one that persists to this day after a ceasefire brokered by the United Nations. Since then, the fledgling nation of India has gone to war four more times. In 1962, against China a war that ended in a humiliating loss of national territory and self-esteem, and which ended the then Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehrus political career; in 1965, against Pakistan in response to the provocations its neighbour had sponsored in the Rann of Kutch and Kashmir, en route to another ceasefire mandated by the UN; in 1971, against Pakistan again halting a genocide conducted by the West Pakistan Army in the erstwhile East Pakistan and creating the nation of Bangladesh in the process; finally, in 1999, after a brief but intense border conflict, India evicted intruding Pakistani troops from the occupied heights of Kargil in Kashmir.

War is part of the story of the Indian nation; its presence in Indias past continues to shape the Indian present and future. The 1962 China war, the 1971 Bangladesh war, and the 1999 Kargil war, all play outsized roles in the Indian popular imagination. The 1962 war with China left a scar on the Indian psyche a reminder of political, diplomatic, and military inadequacy yet to be effaced; the creation of Bangladesh, a dramatic disconfirmation of the two-nation theory that sundered the subcontinent via the disaster of the Great Partition of 1947, ensures that Indians cannot forget about the 1971 war; the 1999 war in Kargil, Indias first modern war in terms of its multimedia coverage, rode a new nationalist impulse present in the Indian turn of the century and engendered its aggressive contemporary variants. Even the relatively obscure 1965 war produced a new national archetype when, in its aftermath, the Indian Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri coined the slogan Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan, placing the gallant soldier who fought on the front and the humble rural farmer he protected together as aspirational ideals for an identity still in the making. The Indian film industry, the nations premier chronicler and myth maker, has attempted to both reflect and drive the attendant changes, in its own inimitable style, through the Indian war movie. In this book, I examine how it has gone about this task.

Why devote critical attention to war movies as a medium through which to examine a nation in the making? Most obviously, because war is a matter of perennial, morbid, and chastening fascination, a moral catastrophe that showcases the worst and the best of a nations politics. And war movies as their global commercial and cultural popularity confirms are unsurpassed vehicles for the dramatic visual representations of adventure and bravery; even those who disdain war and are horrified by its atrocities are enthralled by the bloody spectacle of men and women locked in mortal combat. Such vivid cultural representations of military history are necessary to understand nationalist politics, to understand what role war plays in determining national destiny, because the war movies political function is to reconcile a citizenry to war, placing war prominently in its imagination so its members can reckon themselves capable of the performances required on figurative or literal battlefields. The waging of war requires the assertion of national myths, many of which are found on reading a war movie because war movies embody and sustain a nationalist impulse that enumerates, vividly, the differences between us and them that justify the use of deadly force against them. War movies provide a national catharsis, an opportunity for a nation to understand collectively the particular way in which its politics have been enacted on a battlefield, to preserve or establish some national claim. They, most prominently, are propaganda vehicles which articulate a nationalist self-image and furnish answers to the question of why nations go to war the most important question a nation and its citizenry can face and answer. By viewing a war movie then, we may understand what a nations understanding of the wars it has waged is. Why has it fought these wars and how?

Every nation fights war for different reasons. The questions America a global superpower with an imperialist past and present that has continuously been at war in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and Americans, who once served in a military made by a compulsory draft, ask and answer about war are very different from the questions India a post-colonial nation, aspiring to be a superpower and Indians, who have only served in what was always a volunteer army, will ask and answer. We find a very particular form of these questions in the war movie. Such cinematic explanations of war might not agree with those provided by official national histories, which leads us to explore the gaps between popular understandings of a nations wars, which respond to nationalist rhetoric, and the more rigorous studies of academic military and political history, which respond to other political and cultural imperatives.

Besides these investigative functions, war movies have an important moral function, for their stark moral contrasts demonstrate how human beings, in making fraught choices between life and death, articulate their vision of a good life and a good person, and of what causes they are willing to die or kill for.

War movies are anti-war or pro-war depending on cultural demands; the glorification of war, while a moral outrage, does not violate technical and artistic norms of filmmaking. World War I films like Gallipoli, Paths of Glory, or All Quiet on the Western Front are almost always anti-war films, an appropriate accompaniment to the literature of national and personal trauma, and painful self-introspection, produced by those who fought in it. The Great War that Soviet Russia fought against Nazi Germany is still represented by Russian and German directors in movies like Come and See and Stalingrad through a blend of horror and heroism, the only way to do justice to the material and human carnage visible on Russias great expanses during World War II. The Vietnam movie, like Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, or Casualties of War, often offers a painful, critical examination of the confused impulses of the American polity that sustained the military and moral disaster of the Vietnam War.