Shooting Terror
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 socio-psychological violence in media and culture.
Meenakshi Bharat teaches in the University of Delhi and is a writer, translator, reviewer, and critic. Her special interests include childrens literature, womens fiction, film studies, postcolonial, English, and cultural studies. Her most recent publications are Troubled Testimonies: Terrorism and the Indian Novel in English (2015) and an anthology of Indo-Australian short fiction, Glass Walls: Stories on Tolerance and Intolerance (2019).
First published 2020
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2020 Meenakshi Bharat
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ISBN: 978-1-138-35117-2 (hbk)
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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 responseslong, short, documentary, mainstream, and parallelon 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 iek 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? Whats 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 Eagletons 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 Iyers insistence that the [e]vocation of any countrys 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.
