Big screen battles

Book review of Bollywood Does Battle: The War Movie and the Indian Popular Imagination

Prime Minister Narendra Modi began his speech at the inauguration of the National Museum of Indian Cinema in Mumbai in January 2019 by quoting the blockbuster Uri: The Surgical Strike. Addressing filmmakers, actors and producers, he said: “How’s the josh?” — a popular dialogue from the film. On cue, the audience replied: “High, sir!” The film depicted the Indian army’s “surgical strike” on terrorist camps in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir in 2016, in response to a terror attack on an army post in the town of Uri. The film was the biggest box office success of 2019.

The success of Uri and other war movies — The Ghazi Attack (2017), Raazi (2018), Paltan (2018) — reveals, to borrow psychologist Ashis Nandy’s definition of popular Hindi cinema, “the secret politics of our desires”. Bolstered by its economic growth, India has in recent years reimagined itself to be a strong military power as well. In Uri Govind Bharadwaj (Paresh Rawal), the character of the National Security Advisor based on his real-life counterpart Ajit Doval, says, “This is a new India — it knows how to hit back”. He is probably echoing what many Indians feel. Border conflicts like the one with Pakistan in early 2019 and another with China in 2020 have also provoked these desires and their onscreen representations.   

Samir Chopra’s book is an interesting and essential intervention in this cultural cauldron. In the introduction, he poses several questions: “What does the Indian war movie say about the nationalist and moral impulses that sustain India’s wars?... What kind of nation does India think it is? What does it think its enemies fight for, and why is opposing this a matter of life and death?” Later, he adds: “Through these war movies, we may obtain a finer understanding of the film industry’s construction of the idea of India.” This idea, as scholars such as Sunil Khilnani and Ram Guha have shown us, has always been amorphous.

Studying the genealogy and chronology of this idea through popular Hindi cinema is not a novel enterprise. Film studies scholars such as Ashish Rajadhyaksha and M Madhava Prasad, and sociologists and political scientists like Dr Nandy and Partha Chatterjee have done the same. Using one genre or aspect of Indian cinema to comment on society or politics has also been done. Dr Chopra, who teaches philosophy at the City University of New York and has a previous book on the 1971 war, brings his expertise on strategic affairs to enrich his analysis of cinema.

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

Editors: Samir Chopra

Publisher: HarperCollins 

Pages: 229; Price: Rs 399

The films he chooses are Haqeeqat (1964) on the India-China conflict in 1962, Hindustan Ki Kasam (1973), Aakraman (1975), Vijeta (1982), Border (1997), and The Ghazi Attack (2017) on the 1971 war, and LOC: Kargil (2003) and Lakshya (2004) on the 1999 Kargil War. He does not look at the 1965 war, which has been infrequently represented in cinema. “In general, in the Indian war movie, the 1965 war functions as a prop to indicate veterans’ histories or bitter lessons,” he writes, “it has become… one of the three wars India and Pakistan have fought over Kashmir.” He also steers clear of “terrorist films” such as Roja (1992), Dil Se (1998), Mission Kashmir (2000), or Madras Café (2013). By limiting the number of texts he manages to focus on his chosen themes.    

The structure of the book is not chronological, but thematic. There is one chapter on Border and LOC: Kargil, analyses how filmmaker J P Dutta, the greatest on-screen chronicler of India’s wars, imagines Indian wars. Another one on Vijeta and Lakshya treats the war film as Bildungsroman, making the disciplined life of army officers more desirable than civilian life. Dr Chopra acknowledges the influence of historians and writers on strategic affairs on his analysis of the wars and his research allows him to point out anachronisms such as the Indian Air Force flying MiG21s in the Battle of Longewala instead Hawker Hunters, as they actually did, in Vijeta.

Dr Chopra refers to Ramayana and Mahabharata and the centrality of war to these epics to account for the fascination of Indian audiences for war films. In 1965, British historian Hugh Tinker predicted that the newly independent nations of South Asia would frequently experience military intervention and authoritarian regimes. This has proven true for Pakistan and Bangladesh. India has managed to avoid this, though in recent years, “the Indian soldier has become an object of reverence, and the military a sacred icon,” Dr Chopra writes, quoting film scholar Satadru Sen.

“War will come again to India,” claims Dr Chopra, and it will be bigger and bloodier. The war movie can play an important role in making Indians aware of how and why their nation goes to war, or it could become a propaganda vessel, making the army an imagined repository of virtue that it is not. This could, in turn, make way for military intervention in India’s democratic affairs. While these developments remain to be seen, Dr Chopra’s book is an essential read not only for cinephiles and film studies scholars, but also anyone interested in contemporary Indian history.      

The writer’s novel, Ritual, was published in 2020