Our wars, their wars

India is yet to make a great war film.

The country lacks a people’s experience of war, never having lived through an all-consuming, prolonged war with large-scale military and civilian casualties. To be sure, it has fought three wars, four if you count Kargil, but these battles were far removed from the mainland — fought either in the remotest parts of snowy Himalayas, as a new Netflix series on Kargil, Operation Safed Sagar, shows so spectacularly, or in a foreign country (erstwhile East Pakistan, now Bangladesh). The cities and their citizens remained safely cocooned.

There is an important caveat here. India may not have comparable experience, but Indians have the storied history of fighting in both the world wars, as the largest volunteer armies ever assembled, decorated and scarred in equal measure by massive casualties.

The only war with a big civilian toll that India has been involved in is the one that gave birth to Bangladesh. It is a war that has gone down in history for the genocide unleashed by the Pakistani Army against ordinary Bangladeshis.

Yet, there is no great Indian film on the 1971 war.

Think of the sheer drama: East Pakistan’s Awami League wins general elections which would mean Sheikh Mujibur Rahman becoming the leader of Pakistan. A reign of terror is unleashed by West Pakistan, Mujibur turns to India and two stellar leaders — Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw — step up. Gandhi mobilises the world. The then US President Richard Nixon despatches the US Navy’s nuclear-armed Seventh Fleet to the Bay of Bengal. The friendship treaty with the Soviet Union kicks in and the Seventh Fleet beats a hasty retreat. Pakistan surrenders.

What makes for a great war film? Listing features rather than documentaries, let’s first look at what does not qualify: The line is thin but it should not be a patriotic film; it should neither have a song (even sad ones) nor dance; there’s no need for a rousing happy ending and melodrama: It lowers the tone. Great war films tell a tale that resonates universally, often building on the notion of a “just war” with a clear moral victor. Increasingly, they have become nuanced in their treatment and less judgmental. Details of battles and the war machinery are minutely researched. Historically authentic, they are usually about wars between nations, although the 1969 film The Battle of Algiers stands out for its classic portrayal of the guerrilla war waged by Algerian nationalists against the French colonial army.

A great war film can be told from the point of view of the vanquished, too — Shohei Imamura’s Black Rain is a searing account of the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Ironically, then, a great war film can also be a great anti-war film. Like Black Rain, some of the greatest war films are about the turmoil of war, and few outclass the much-decorated Indian film, Distant Thunder, by Satyajit Ray. It is a film about a catastrophic war-impact — the Bengal famine of 1943, in which up to 3 million people perished after British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and his advisors “chose to use the resources of India to wage war against Germany and Japan, causing scarcity and inflation,” says historian Madhusree Mukerjee in her book Churchill’s Secret War. It remains among the biggest man-made famines in history.  It is hard to think of another great Indian war film. There is no great war film on the exploits of Subhash Chandra Bose and his Indian National Army, save for a forgettable biopic by the late Shyam Benegal, one of India’s finest filmmakers. There is no such film on the 1946 Indian naval mutiny, the last great act of resistance that brought the curtain down on the British Raj, or on the liberation of Goa in which the infant Indian Army overran an old European imperial power.

There is no film on the Battle of Monte Cassino, the doomed Allied attempt in 1944 to seize a hilltop Italian monastery from the Nazis in which the men of Rajputana Rifles and Gorkha Rifles suffered heavy casualties.

Renoir was right: You need to be singed by the horrors of war to make great war films.