The "Nation" in War : A Study of Military Literature and Hindi War Cinema [1 ed.] 9781443859387, 9781443855310

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The “Nation” in War

The “Nation” in War: A Study of Military Literature and Hindi War Cinema

By

Gita Viswanath

The “Nation” in War: A Study of Military Literature and Hindi War Cinema by Gita Viswanath This book first published 2014 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2014 by Gita Viswanath All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-5531-6, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5531-0

In loving memory of My husband Lt Col G R Viswanath

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ................................................................................... ix Foreword ................................................................................................... xi Chapter One ................................................................................................. 1 Introduction Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 27 Nation and Nationalism: An Overview Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 53 The Uniform(ed) Self: A Study of Military Literature Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 91 Visualizing the Nation: A Study of War Films Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 135 By Way of Conclusion References and Bibliography .................................................................. 139 Filmography ........................................................................................... 149 Index ........................................................................................................ 153

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Writing is always a lonely enterprise. However, several people have walked alongside during this journey of mine and richly deserve my deep gratitude. Professor Sarla Palkar, my Ph.D. supervisor was generous with her sustained guidance and support through the years it took to complete this book. My sincere thanks are due to Professor P C Kar for his interest in my work. Dr Darius Cooper has been a great friend sending me books and other reading materials from San Diego. My debt to Professor Rajeswari Sunder Rajan is far too great to be adequately acknowledged. Her comments on a paper I had written way back in 1996 gave me the confidence to venture into the complex and tantalizing world of research. I thank her for reading this book and writing the blurb. Special thanks are due to my late principal Dr S C Srivastava who took the initiative to get me a Teacher Fellowship from the University Grants Commission, New Delhi. My colleagues P Joseph, Sonu Daryani and Aruna Rao at Tolani College of Arts and Science, Adipur, Kutch ungrudgingly took on the extra work load during my study leave. I must acknowledge the valuable inputs of Lt Gen N S I Narahari, PVSM, ADC (Retd) who spared time for discussions on military literature. Thanks are also due to Col S S Suhag who provided me with access to the library usually restricted to Army personnel of the Electrical and Mechanical Engineers School, Baroda. I am grateful to Col K P Singh for sharing with me material on the Kargil conflict. I am deeply indebted to Profs Indranil Bhattacharya and Bed Giri for writing the Foreword and the blurb respectively. A warm thanks to the editors, especially Amanda Millar, at Cambridge Scholars Publishing for their guidance. Some parts of the book have been published earlier as papers in edited volumes. I thank the editors, Profs Bed Giri, P C Kar and Jasbir Jain for permission to use them in this book. The reading for this book was done at several libraries such as the erstwhile American Studies Research Centre, Hyderabad, Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore, Centre for Contemporary Theory, Baroda, Hansa Mehta Library of The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda and Electrical and Mechanical Engineers School, Baroda. I extend my gratitude to the staff of all of these.

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Acknowledgements

I am deeply indebted to the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), New York for granting me the Writing Fellowship for a part of the chapter on military literature. I am thankful to the resource persons for their comments on my paper presented in the workshop held in Sri Lanka in 2005. Life wouldn’t have been half as beautiful as it has been without the laughter and endless conversations shared with dear friends such as Drs Nandini Manjrekar, Elizabeth Rohlman, Rajan Barrett, Bini B S, Bela Desai and Ms Mokshada Kar. Several other friends, all of whom cannot be named for obvious reasons, richly deserve my deepest gratefulness. Can one really thank one’s family enough? If yes, my parents, sister and her family deserve my deepest gratitude for always being there. My father taught me there is joy in reading and my mother ensured I cultivated the discipline it entails. My romance with books has been enriched by a combination of their lessons. My mother-in-law was an influential presence in my life. I know she would be proud of me wherever she is. My children Tushar and Sudhir taught me how to use a computer; were as enthused by my project as I was and have been what children generally are, our very raison d’être. Sudhir has spent long hours painstakingly formatting the book. Special thanks are due to my daughter-in-law Meha Sohni for the cheer and joy she brings into our lives. My husband Lt Col G R Viswanath who could not see the completion of this book due to his untimely demise was a reassuring figure in my life every time I felt overwhelmed by circumstances. To his memory, I dedicate this book. My pet Boogie Brilliant Starstreak taught me not to worry and be happy!

FOREWORD

The narratives of war and conflict are deeply connected with evolving discourses on the nature and manifestation of nationalism in India. Hindi films on war have been occasionally examined by scholars from film studies, along with those from other disciplines in humanities and social sciences. But looking at Hindi films, in conjunction with other forms of war narratives like military memoirs and conflict reportage is a new approach that needs to be applauded. Gita Viswanath has taken on the challenge of bringing in diverse narratives within a concrete theoretical framework. Apart from the dominant filmic narratives of post-colonial cultural nationalism, independent India has seen a surge of military literature spawned by three wars and a series of war-like conflict situations. While some of these have consciously towed the statist line, a few of them have subtly interrogated entrenched hierarchies and ideological structures. In the absence of an anti-war literary or philosophical tradition, as in the west, Indian war narratives have largely remained in the margins of postcolonial discourse. A substantive and theoretically grounded study of Indian war narratives has been a notable exclusion in post-colonial studies. This book attempts to fill that gap through a series of well-argued theoretical propositions and through interrogation of a wide range of texts from Indian cinema and military literature. The book is a serious intervention in the uncharted territory of ‘war studies,’ enriched with insights from her grounding in literature and film studies, from politics and culture studies. Her scholarship effortlessly straddles the elusive space between disciplines, connecting them through exhaustive research and a meticulously laid-down conceptual framework. The theorisations are self-referential, a quality largely missed in academic prose in the field of humanities and social sciences. I am happy that Gita has meticulously traced the evolution of the nationalist discourse from the nineteenth to the early 21st century. She takes her reader through the changing nature of the debates and discourse on nation-state and nationalism, almost in the manner of a critical historiography. I am sure young scholars researching Indian nationalism will find the second chapter of the book both useful and illuminating.

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Gita grounds her main argument on the idea of ‘discursivity of nationalism’ (nation being a discursive rather than a territorial entity) and follows the theoretical trajectory of the nationalist discourse. She traces it back to the works of Ernest Renan, Benedict Anderson, the subaltern historiography of Shahid Amin and Ranajit Guha, leading to the detailed explication of the nature of Indian nationalism by Partha Chatterjee and Dipesh Chakrabarty. To illustrate the ‘statist’ and gendered nature of war narratives, Gita invokes the feminist scholarship in the area, especially the well-known works of Judith Butler and insights derived from Lynne Hanley’s reading of women’s war memoirs. Postcolonial theory on nationalism finds echo in the works of military theorist Carl Von Clausewitz who had emphasized the dialectical interaction between various kinds of forces and ideas, precipitating into armed conflict. The various texts deployed by the author, create a layered, polyvalent discourse that aligns with Prasenjit Duara’s contention of history as a ‘series of multiple and often conflicting narratives produced simultaneously at national, local and transnational levels.’ Within this schema nation is more complex than a static entity constructed along the lines of the ‘material’ and the ‘spiritual’, but a domain where contesting representations of the nation create a complex polyphonic discourse. In the third chapter of the book, the author perhaps for the first time in scholarly history examines a fascinating array of war literature from both colonial and post-colonial period. She broadly divides them into two categories – insider and outsider literature. The former being written by men in uniform and thus perceived to have the insider’s knowledge and insight; the latter written by ‘witnesses’ who do not don the military uniform, but bring in the ‘outsiders’ perspective. It is interesting to encounter the memoirs of Captain Lakshmi Sahgal, a member of the women’s regiment of the Indian National Army, with the matter-offactness of her narration and the ironing out of personal details usually associated with military memoirs scripted by male officers. Filmic narratives, however, cannot be bound within the formal limits of ‘insider-outsider binary’. Popular cinema can successfully appropriate the ‘insider position’ by drawing on first-hand experience of former combatants and perpetuating ‘statist’ ideologies and as the author succinctly articulates – taking upon itself ‘the burden of narrating the nation’. The fourth chapter of the book, for me, is the piece de resistance. It brings together a series of known and lesser-known filmic texts like

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Haqeeqat and The Terrorist and connects them to the politics and aesthetics of the generic war narratives from Hollywood. In doing this the book takes an interesting conceptual leap by maintaining that war narratives both commodify and fetishize ‘land’, land being a metonymic extension of the concept of the nation. Gita has opened up the field of study of war and war narratives and given it a new lease of life. In the era of perpetual ‘low intensity conflicts’, matched by the simultaneous emergence of neo-nationalism and antinational separatist movements, narratives of war will also take new and unknown forms. I am sure the theoretical groundwork done in this book will be a pioneering effort in her chosen discipline. I congratulate the author and hopefully look forward to see the book in its published form. Indranil Bhattacharya Professor, Screen Studies and Research Film and Television Institute of India, Pune November, 2013

CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION

I This book seeks to explore the notions of nation and nationalism as they emerge in war narratives, specifically military literature and war films in popular Hindi cinema. Nation being a discursive entity as much as a geo-political one, it would be interesting to examine how the discourses of military literature and war films construct the subject, namely “nation”. The Indian nation faces a multi-pronged attack from neighbouring countries that seek territorial aggrandizement, the forces of liberalization (economic and cultural) and from secessionist forces within the nation. In the face of such an attack, a plethora of discourses engages seriously in constructing an idea of the Indian nation and reinforcing the notion of an Indian identity. The nation may have come into existence as a political entity in August 1947 but the nation as a cultural, social, and economic entity is constantly in the making. This gives the title of this study ‘The “Nation” in War’ a dual meaning, one the nation as a territorial unit under the perceived threat of an external enemy and two the nation as a discursive terrain, with multiple discourses attempting to gain hegemony. This study seeks to examine the notions of nation and nationalism in war narratives. However undesirable they may be, wars have been a part of human civilization. Aggression and conflict along with love and compassion form an integral part of interactions between human communities. War in one form or the other has been fought from the stone ages through the medieval and modern periods to the present postmodern era. Every nation has its moments of insecurity when it is attacked by an external force or questioned internally by historically marginalized groups that for one reason or another do not feel the sentiment of oneness, crucial for nation-formation. War calls for a total allegiance to the nation. Differences arising from caste, class, gender are seemingly overshadowed in war. Love for one’s birthplace or patriotism, as it is called is a dormant

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Chapter One

sentiment that surfaces during a war. This introductory chapter will outline in some detail the conceptual framework within which to locate the main issues to be dealt with in this study. Drawing upon the seminal work of Benedict Anderson and other scholars such as Ranajit Guha, Eric Hobsbawm, Partha Chatterjee, Kumari Jayawardena and Nira Yuval Davis, I proceed with the now established notion of nation as a contested category. The obsessive desire to grapple with the idea of an India has persisted in the national imagination despite the idea of a postnational or global world gaining currency. Nationalism generally associated with freedom struggles of colonized countries and hitherto restricted to textbooks has been exhumed and brought into focus in the globalized world. Precisely at a time when Third world countries have opened their borders, boundaries, and markets for the free flow of capital from First World countries, blurring to an extent the idea of nation as a distinct territorial and cultural space, the notion of nation wages a battle to survive. This chapter will also enunciate the similarities and differences between military literature and popular cinema and further provide a justification for the use of particular texts. The formation and consolidation of nation-states as one of the most advanced forms of human communities occurred in Europe and America from the mid-eighteenth century onwards. Since then, conflict over territory, overthrow of colonial powers, ethnic rivalry, and the like have been important causes of war. A socio-cultural and political institution such as the nation-state is at times believed to be the basic cause of war in the twentieth century. The desire for territorial aggrandizement, the megalomania of political leaders, and the goal of cultural hegemony are seen as some of the sources of conflict in this era. The Indian subcontinent has its own long history of war. The wars between Chandragupta Maurya and Alexander, Babar and Ibrahim Lodi, Tipu Sultan and the British are some examples. This study entails an understanding of how the idea of India as a nation emerges in the war narratives of the postcolonial period. The artifacts selected for examination are military literature and war films from popular Hindi cinema. This book would attempt an understanding of nation, nationalism, cinema, war and gender with the help of insights provided by cultural and postcolonial studies. It would then proceed to analyze the representation of war, the popularization of the military hero, the mobilization of sentiment, and the eclipse of the woman in war films and military literature. Through an exploration of the above

Introduction

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issues, I submit that it is possible to arrive at an understanding of the term, “nation.” Some of the issues that will be addressed and problematized in this book would be as follows: How do war films and military literature construct the category of nation? How is the family constructed in the texts under investigation? What narrative modes are deployed to create consensus for war? How do war narratives further the statist agenda? What is the link between the war waged by the national army and that by the insurgents?

II We may ask ourselves, “How is the nation represented in war discourse?” The search for an answer to the question posed would first require a thoroughgoing problematizing of the concept of nation. For this reason, the study purports to begin with the enterprise of understanding the complexity of nation as a conceptual entity. In recent political debates the category of nation has not only received unprecedented attention but is also being interrogated. This brings into focus related concepts such as nationalism, nationality, patriotism and so on. Politically, nationalism is a movement that demands statehood in order to grant legitimacy to a collectivity that imagines itself as a nation. Scores of books have been written on the subject of nation and nationalism. Benedict Anderson expanded the scope of the subject by treating nation as an imagined community, not as an objective entity. To him, nation was imagined through cultural forms. Since Anderson, studies on nation and nationalism have changed tracks from the political to the cultural arena. The idea of nationalism as a political/historical phenomenon has been enhanced by its formulation as a discursive phenomenon. Scholars today understand the nation as coming into existence in and through a range of discourses. The nation is characterized as a narrated rather than a cartographic entity. Nationalism then is a mode of narrating the nation. Homi Bhabha focuses on the textuality of the nation in all his writings. His contribution to the nationnationalism debate enables me to read films and military literature as texts that invoke the nation. Anderson stresses the role of print-capitalism in imagining a nation. According to him, the two main forms of imagining in eighteenth century Europe were the novel and the newspaper. We may contextualize Anderson’s thesis and ask, “How then may the large numbers of illiterate

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Chapter One

Indians imagine the nation? Through what modes of mediation does the nation get imagined for them? These are some fundamental issues that Partha Chatterjee takes up against Anderson in his works. His extensive oeuvre on the topic of nation and nationalism has greatly enhanced our understanding of the Indian nation as a cultural category. In his Preface to the Omnibus Edition comprising three of his best-known works (Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, The Nation and its Fragments, A Possible India), outlines the aim of his first book which is “to write the ‘ideological history’ of the Indian nation-state from its conception to its fruition (1999:v). This book provides theoretical frames to locate the concepts of nation and nationalism. Chatterjee detects a deep contradiction in nationalist discourse: While India borrowed the tools provided by modernity to fight colonialism, it rigidly guarded its tradition and cultural specificity. In The Nation and its Fragments, Chatterjee contests Anderson’s formulation of first world nationalisms as “modular” forms and third world nationalisms as imitative. Such a formulation elides the existence of indigenous modes of resistance to colonial rule, especially in the domain of the private/spiritual. For our purposes, Anderson’s view that print languages created “unified fields of exchange and communication” (1983:44) that helped foster a nationally imagined community may be applied quite effectively as we shall see later, to the role played by Hindi cinema. The fellow viewership allowed for the interplay between overt entertainment and a covert pan-Indian bonding. In the West, political nationalism is characterized by the rise of the anti-feudal bourgeoisie. Even in most postcolonial societies, the primarily elite nature of the nationalist classes gave it a sectarian character. However, when the modern Indian nation was taking shape, it was also being interrogated simultaneously for its exclusionary nature. Foremost among such anti-bourgeois thinkers was Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar, who saw the nation as a social brotherhood and democracy not merely as a form of government. Ambedkar’s vision combined the political aspects of a nation-state with the sociological aspects of the nation. The subsequent chapters will examine whether the nation constructed in the texts under scrutiny embodies an inclusive vision or remains entrenched in the elitist, bourgeois model. Aurobindo Ghosh claimed the right to freedom for India on religiospiritual grounds. He based his demand for independence on the inherent

Introduction

5

right of people to self rule and the inherent evil of foreign domination. His works are considered primary texts of early twentieth century Bengali religious nationalism (Heehs, 1998). Religious nationalists based their ideology on the belief that Indians had an intrinsic spiritual nature and hence the western secular model was not suitable for the nation. The historical perspective given to religious nationalism by Heehs helps us to understand the interface between religious movements and secessionist movements in contemporary India. Ghosh’s militancy even if motivated by the goal of freedom from colonial rule converges with movements such as the Khalistani or the Kashmir militant movement on the point of secularism. Both reject the western version of secularism and believe in the primacy of religion in politics. Secessionist movements in India have run parallel to the nationalist movement for independence from British rule disrupting the notion of nation as a single unit with a homogenous social and cultural life. These movements have also led to prolonged encounters with the national army in the country, resulting in low intensity conflict and a blurring of the identity of the enemy. Therefore the need is felt to expand the definition of war (more on this later) to include the dynamics of insurgency and consequently the shifting significance of the concept of nation. For the purposes of this study the term nation will be understood both as a cultural and a territorial space that both reflects as well as constructs an entity called “India.” A nation is constituted in the people’s imaginary through a series of cultural and representational strategies. The cultural practices of a nation actively engage in creating its particular image. Interestingly, there has been no major work on the link between nation and war in India. War is not a “normal” situation; its peculiarities call for perceptual mechanisms different from those employed during peace. The present study hopes to make up for this deficiency.

III War studies or polemology as a discipline is mainly restricted to military history and political science. The former is engaged in rigorous analyses of wars from the point of view of strategy. The latter studies war as a political phenomenon caused by differences in political ideologies and praxis. Military historians study war from the soldier’s perspective. Unlike the soldier who studies specific wars, battles and campaigns, the political scientists study war at the macro level. Political realists believe in the

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Chapter One

inevitability of war and the consequent need for nations to be prepared for it. Political idealists by contrast believe that peace is the natural state of the human being. Therefore the pursuit of peace and harmony among nations is a natural condition of nation states. The Marxists were of the opinion that the nation state was the cause of war. The bourgeois nation used war to subjugate not only its enemies but also the proletariat within its own territory. They believed that the end of war could be brought about by the triumph of socialism as it would facilitate the demise of the state. The political scientists study various factors that lead to war. For the soldierwriter, the inevitability of war is the starting point of his study. He does not question the political causes of war; rather he studies war in order to learn how to win wars. This marked difference in perception is crucial to our analysis of military literature. The present study attempts to integrate the two disciplines, i.e. political science and military studies, by employing the category of culture. Beginning with the premise that war to most of us is a narrated event the study proceeds to explore the “national question” in war discourse. Military literature in India may be loosely divided into autobiographies/memoirs (J N Chaudhuri, B M Kaul, S S P Thorat, S K Sinha for instance), monographs of battles/wars (P Bhullar, K P Candeth, J P Dalvi, Lachhman Singh, etc), and the evolution of the army as an institution (W J Wilson, S Cohen, P Mason for example). To the best of my knowledge no attempts have been made so far to study the representation of the soldier or the nation in Indian military literature. Also military literature has not received critical scrutiny except for journalistic attempts in the form of book reviews. Lastly, military literature has not been used as a tool to examine the ways in which India is constructed as a nation. My study is an effort to fill these gaps. Lt Gen S L Menezes’ Fidelity and Honour is an authoritative history of the Indian Army from its origins in the seventeenth century till the present. The book details the formation of the Presidency armies (Bengal, Madras and Bombay) under the East India Company up to 1857. Indian troops were recruited into independent companies, commanded by a British officer. Differences of caste and religion remained strong amongst the Indian troops and the British officers were ordered by their superiors not to interfere in such matters. The book analyzes the 1857 revolt, the Indian army’s role in the two world wars, the Indian national army, the partitioning of the Indian army that occurred with the creation of Pakistan, the Nehru and post-Nehru eras.

Introduction

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The studies conducted on war so far focus on strategy, history, analysis of causes and effects. Studies of war literature (John Onions for instance) treat it as “literary” texts and deploy the tools of literary criticism to interpret these texts. Jean Bethke Elshtain’s book Women and War is a major intervention in war studies in which war is treated as a cultural phenomenon. It offers a feminist perspective on war discourse. However, the “national question” is not satisfactorily addressed by Elshtain. In the third world context, women are drawn into war-like situations in anticolonial struggles as well as ethnic conflicts. This makes it imperative for us to address women’s militarism/militancy differently from first world contexts. Women’s agency in the third world context needs to be treated within more sophisticated theoretical matrices. My analysis of nation and war as gendered categories seeks to develop an understanding of the problematic relationship between women, militarism and the state. I invoke the ideas provided by Nira Yuval-Davis in her chapter, “Gendered Militaries, Gendered Wars” from her important book Gender and Nation. Military literature belongs to the category of niche writing. Unlike popular films made to cater to a large audience, military literature has a limited readership. It is therefore unmediated by the imperatives of commerce. Does this automatically make it a freewheeling narrative unconcerned with the market forces? If so would the writers be more free and honest? The search for straightforward answers to these questions is hampered by the nature of autobiographical writing. The temporal dislocation between the events described and the time of writing undermines the truth claims of this discourse. The representation of the self in autobiography or diary involves the processes of selection and erasure just as in fictional narratives. The sanctity of military literature is however diluted in this postmodern era by the intrusion of the media (print and electronic) into the hitherto insulated organization. War produces inexplicable situations. Even bitterly fighting enemies could suddenly develop empathy for each other as comrades-in-arms. Does the military experience narrated in literature produce the experience of individuals or nations? Classical European literature on war has an inexorable tragic sense as its dominant quality (Greek tragedies, for example). The literature of the American civil war dramatizes the conflict a soldier faces in the contradiction between private emotions and public duty. (For example, Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage.) This aspect which finds a prominent place in war films will be illustrated in the third chapter. Valorization of army discipline and behaviour went hand in hand with the professionalization of the army in the seventeenth and

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eighteenth century Europe. Both war films and military literature devote ample space to the description of training institutes. The professional soldier then was more and more isolated from the rest of society. War is only a small, even if the most momentous part of the military experience. The rest of the time is spent in making the organization work. For this reason, it may be noted that Lt Gen Sinha’s memoir analyzed in the second chapter has barely a few pages related to the author’s war experience. Any soldier more often than is imagined, is a corporate executive rather than a warrior. Comradeship is a dominant theme in the literature of war. The works of some English poets such as Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves exemplify this theme. In their works, the death of a comrade is more tragic than the horrors of war. The endurance of the brutalities of war is made possible in the light of collective suffering. The universality of the soldier’s situation increases endurance levels. The death of a comrade is like a rehearsal of one’s own death. The despair and senselessness of war increase with each comrade’s death. As can be seen, war is mostly explained in western literature as a universal phenomenon with philosophical implications for life, death, friendship, betrayal and so on. War does not occupy as much space in the collective imagination of the Indian people as it does in the western mind. While not ignoring entirely the existential dilemmas of war, the analysis provided foregrounds the immediacy of war, its representation in the cultural arenas of the national space and the gendered nature of wars.

IV The postmodernist age heralded the blurring of boundaries between binary oppositions, one of the most important being the distinction between “high” and “low” culture. An ideology that sees the surface as the real, appearance as reality has facilitated the examination of genres dismissed for long as unworthy of serious study. How may the popular be defined? What constitutes the popular? Can the popular be defined only in terms of its contrasting other, “The elite”? Stuart Hall has argued that the popular must necessarily be seen in a relationship of tension with its other, i.e. the elite (Hall, 1997). The historical shift from modernism to postmodernism in the eighties in the West may be seen as a shift from the classical to the popular. Such a shift is imbricated in the sociopolitical/economic forces of a particular time and place. The populist

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impulse in postmodernism has enabled the institutionalization of film studies as an academic discipline. This trend has established itself in metropolitan academic centers in India. The discipline of popular film studies is in its own way subversive in nature. That which is condemned as commercial or popular (appealing to masses) has attained status in academia. The trajectory of the Indian nation-state is best charted by examining popular cinema. Cinema, especially in Third World countries, is implicated in the economic, political, social and cultural processes of nation building. My argument focuses on how a text (whether a film or a memoir) produces a particular subject, in this case, the nation and how the process of production of the subject is inflected by ideology, commerce and historical imperatives. Cinema is a multi-dimensional art form. It combines literature, the pictorial, the plastic arts, dance, drama, music and even architecture. Architecture’s use of space to add to the drama is well exemplified in the films of Eisenstein or Antonioni (Corrigan, 1998). Film technology, production and distribution are commercial and economic enterprises. Films are not as much about subjects/themes as they are about presentation of subjects/themes. Any analysis of film must necessarily take into account this fundamental premise, what John Berger calls “way of seeing.” The ideological orientations of the film are manifested through inducing the audience to particular ways of seeing. The power of art, technology and commerce combine with ideology in the process of image production. In the past few years, several scholars have explored themes in cinema using the topos of nation and nationalism as a framework. One of the most influential studies is Sumita S Chakravarty’s National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema. It is an in-depth account of popular Hindi cinema over a period of forty years from Independence. The study is deeply entrenched in the poststructuralist framework that positions cinema at the intersection of the axes of culture and nation. Chakravarty employs the metaphor of impersonation to establish a relationship between Indian cinema and national identity. In a way, impersonation is reminiscent of the appearance versus reality theme, central to the readings of classical literature. Chakravarty analyzes very briefly the 1961 Dev Anand starrer Hum Dono, a film with a World War II background. Haqeeqat is mentioned in passing and its non-committal nature is too easily interpreted as the “apolitical stance of the Bombay film” (1996: 219). Hum Dono receives more attention as the double role played by Dev Anand gives Chakravarty an opportunity to locate the

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Chapter One

reading of this film within her framework of the impersonation theory. Such a tendentious reading of a war film obfuscates the possibilities of several other interpretations. My study has a strong feminist bias in which I explore the modes through which war narratives construct masculinity and feminity. The narratives use the metaphor of the earth mother to glorify the fecundity of the woman. The idealization of the nation as a mother, on the one hand, and the valorization of women’s subservience to national goals on the other, account for the paradoxical construction of womanhood in war discourse.

V A set of frameworks that informs my analysis of military literature and popular war film may be explained here. For military literature, I propound a framework that divides it into what I call “insider” and “outsider” literature. The former term designates the output of writers who belong to the armed forces and the latter indicates writers who write on military matters but are not from the armed forces. The two categories together resonate with the notion of secondary discourse as formulated by Ranajit Guha in his essay, “The Prose of Counter Insurgency (1983). Secondary discourse according to Guha consists of a body of retrospective writing like memoirs. It is written by the participant after a considerable lapse of time from the event. Unlike primary discourse (letters, dispatches, telegrams, and reports written by officials strictly for the information of the government), secondary discourse is meant for public consumption. This is not to assume that the compartmentalization of the two discourses is rigid. The two categories do overlap to the extent that both are written by a participant in the event. I use Antonio Gramsci’s and Louis Althusser’s formulations of ideology to understand how a war film upholds and propagates the statist agenda. According to French theorist Althusser, the function of ideology is to provide social unity and to sustain class domination as well. In “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus” (1971), Althusser explains the basis of his critical production. The key question he poses is: what is ideology and how does it permeate society and conscience? Using Marx, he sets out to explain his idea of a state. He enhances our understanding of the state by distinguishing the ways in which state power operates. He identifies two significant modes called “Repressive State Apparatus” viz.

Introduction

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army, police etc. and “Ideological State Apparatus” viz. religion, family, school, media etc. The hierarchies that operate in society are replicated in the values taught to individuals through ideological state apparatuses. Thus ideological state apparatuses ensure the continuation of existing relations of state power. Following this understanding of ideology I wish to see Hindi cinema as a cohesive force in that its ideology, as I shall show reflects as well as shapes national culture. Popular cinema is the arena of shared space (the cinema hall), shared aspirations/dreams/fantasies and shared national recreation. Such a sharing creates a community of national consumers that mediate in the formulation of discursive strategies of popular/public culture into which the hegemonic ideology seeps in at times in subtle ways, at others even overtly. According to Antonio Gramsci, a particular ideology flourishes in situations created by economic conditions. In order to understand the ways in which ideology penetrated and circulated in any given society, Gramscicoined the term “hegemony”. Hegemony involves the crystallization and entrenchment of the ideas of the elite classes. Hence we may say if ideology is the medium to transmit ideas, according to Gramsci, then popular film can also be read as a terrain on which ideological battles are fought. This makes cinematic characters bearers of dominant ideologies. Despite the onslaught of reception studies, Dwyer and Pinney’s for instance, that foreground the consumption of cinema, it is my contention that the scope for the study of cinema as an ideological site is not yet exhausted. To continue with Guha’s formulation, I suggest that the discourse of film, especially terrorist film be equated with what Guha calls “tertiary discourse” (1983: 71). This discourse belongs to the realm of the third person, non-official narratives. It is characterized by its radical content made clear through its sympathy for the insurgent. Some of the films in the third chapter will be analyzed in the light of this formulation.

VI In this section, I provide the layout of the book. The several strands in the title of the study (nation, war, military literature, Hindi cinema) need to be opened up and each strand necessitates detailed explication. In Chapter II, which follows this Introduction, I offer an elaborate overview of the concepts of nation and nationalism as they form the objects of study. Its main concern is to map out the history of the terms nation and nationalism as they have evolved in various contexts. The

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Chapter One

proliferation of studies of these terms from different disciplinary locations underlies their contestatory nature. In colonized countries, nationalism is predominantly understood as anti-colonialism. It conjures up images of an enslaved past out of which the nation extricated itself by the concerted and dedicated efforts of the people. These efforts written into the narrative of the nation as sacrifice, patriotism etc. bring to it a strong affective element forging “a community of sentiment”, to use Appadurai’s phrase. The creation of the Bharatmata as an emblematic figure of the nation encapsulates an entire regime of sentiment engendered and controlled by the state to a great extent through deployment of various strategies. The Bharatmata emblem also indicates that the nation is a gendered construct, an idea that is explored in the book.The mobilization of sentiment is crucial to the sustenance of the idea of a unified and unitary India. Sentiment is thus nurtured by authoring a progressivist narrative of the nation. It is in this sense then that nationalism may be studied as a narrative. Here the role of popular culture comes into play. Popular culture is a contested site that exists in a relationship of tension with high culture. Although nationalism is largely understood as an anti-colonial movement, for the purposes of this study, an understanding of nationalism as a discourse would be more productive. Nationalism is harnessed to the service of defining the nation. It involves the attempts to structure a coherent narrative of the nation. In this sense, India may be conceived as a discursive terrain over which different discourses of various ideological hues engage in a battle to gain hegemonic status in the task of lending meaning to an amorphous entity called an Indian nation. As the historical narrative of a nation is imbricated within its cultural articulations, the discourse of history is significant for the ways in which it shapes cultural discourses. The historical narrative enshrined in the institutionalized discipline of history is one of the chief sites that engages in defining the nation. Rajeev Bhargava distinguishes between four types of history writing on nationalism, viz. manipulated, strongly relativist, critical and objectivist. A glaring example of manipulated history is official history because such a history needs the power to be manipulated which rests with officials. Nationalist history writing takes on the responsibility of correcting colonial history. It attempts to restore the self-respect of the colonized people by creating the image of an idyllic past. Relativist histories are those that could not possibly be entirely objective. For instance, Indian historiography is divided between the communal and the secular, the

Introduction

13

former emphasizing communal difference and the latter the modern state with religion restricted to private realms (2000, 195-196). The discourse of history is significant for the ways in which it shapes cultural discourses. Nationalism in its various manifestations then may be seen as a dynamic and constant on-going process to gain power over the means to define, to give meaning to a well-bounded geographical space which we call nation. The study of nationalism in postcolonial societies must necessarily begin with the idea of nationalism as anti-colonial struggle. The territorial concept of nation shifts the locus of identity-formation from people to place. All nationalist movements claim the authority to speak for the whole nation. This gives a mass character to the movement. Such democratization is central to nationalism as anti-colonialism as it leads to mobilization of masses. In the Indian context, Gandhi is credited with bringing this mass character to the freedom movement. The sociology of nationalism concentrates on the being and becoming of nation. According to Aloysius, nationalism is best studied as “a specific form of social change.” (1997: 13) Anti-imperialist mobilizations of people are based on a common political purpose. This collectivization of people at the same time results in the formation of new social communities with the consequent focus on hitherto marginalized sections. Such a perspective of the nation shifts the focus from its conceptualization from above as a unified whole. The new formations foreground the conceptualization of the nation from below as a collectivity of heterogeneous fragments upon which unity is imposed. As we shall see later in this study, such a perspective becomes fundamental to the study of insurgent movements. As stated above, the nation is to be understood here as a cultural space in which culture is the locus of its self-definition. In the process of defining the nation, culture transforms into an ideology and becomes a contested/disjunctive site and forms part of the larger framework of the politics of nationalism. When a nation claims for itself a unique cultural distinctiveness, then the form of cultural nationalism arises. The idea of a unitary, absolute culture is utopian, especially in a plural society like India. Culture invariably is entwined with religion in multi-religious contexts. Therefore, cultural nationalism and religious nationalism become overlapping modes of constituting a nation. Writing about India’s attempts at forging a national identity, Richard Lannoy writes, “The difficulties in forming a contemporary national self-image may be more clearly appreciated when it is realized that while India is now building a modern,

14

Chapter One

secular state, its traditions are permeated by a sophisticated religious sensibility” (1998: 101-102). The cultural nationalists claim that religious differences can be ironed out by fostering the idea of a common cultural heritage. In a country like India, this is highly problematic as invariably culture is made synonymous with a Brahminical Hindu culture. Propagating this as Indian culture would be tantamount to homogenization and majoritarianism. In attempting to forge a national identity for a nation coping with new forces like free market and globalization, it is tempting to fall prey to the idea of a homogenized nation-state as the perfect solution for a conflict-ridden plural society. Critiques of Nehruvian socialism and secularism paved the ground for Hindu fundamentalism. The categories of caste and religion suppressed in Nehruvian discourse began to tumble out of the closet into the public arenas. In the articulations of intellectuals, caste and religion became “respectable” categories of analysis. These in turn emboldened the religious fundamentalist groups to mobilize at the political level. The analysis of the growth of Hindu fundamentalism is necessary for this study as it is inextricably linked to militarism. Of the many locations from which ‘the national’ may be defined the diasporic community is an increasingly significant one. The locus of a postnational global order lies within this community. The diaspora with its feet firmly planted on foreign soil and heart in the homeland emblematizes the simultaneity of lived experiences. The threat to the relevance of the conceptual nation in the wake of globalization has only increased efforts to perpetuate its significance. While first world discourses castigate the nation as a totalizing grand narrative, many third world scholars too, concede this point of view. However, their very attempt to move away from the meta-narrative by valorizing the fragment only helps to keep the former in the limelight. Diasporic writers (Rushdie, Seth, etc), scholars (Spivak, Bhabha for instance) and filmmakers (Deepa Mehta, Mira Nair and others) have added an entirely new dimension to the study of nation and nationalism, a dimension at times more valorized than that provided by the “real” Indians. This brings into question the instability of national identities which war narratives as we shall see contest in very definitive ways. Tagore was instrumental in prophesying the possible violent offshoots of nationalism in postcolonial nations. He notes, “Nationalism is a great menace. It is the particular thing which for years has been at the bottom of India’s troubles” (1985: 111). Nationalism implanted itself chiefly as antiimperialism resulting in freedom movements and finally independence. However, if nationalism was purely anti-imperialism, it should have

Introduction

15

extinguished itself with political independence. That it survives to this day in many forms (ethnic/cultural/linguistic, to name a few types) reveals its many-sidedness. Most of these movements have resulted in violent uprisings, leading to bloodshed and fragmentation of national and human communities. It is for this reason that this study considers nation not as a unified grand narrative but one that is contested by the fragments. This view propagated by the writers of the Subaltern Studies Series has gained canonical status in academia. Here I use it as a starting point in order to examine the extent to and rigour with which war narratives seek to dismantle such a view and resurrect the notion of a unitary India. Interestingly, this idea carefully constructed by the secular nationalists is revisited by the present day cultural nationalists. Only the former’s notion was inclusionary, the latter’s exclusionary. Chapter III analyzes some military memoirs (Capt Lakshmi Sahgal, Lt Gen S K Sinha) diaries (Amar Singh, Harinder Baweja), war accounts (Brig J P Dalvi, Maj Gen Lachhman Singh) and newspaper reportage to examine the truth claims of these narratives generally considered as the “authentic” or “official” sources for information on military matters. To reiterate, the selection of texts may be divided on the basis of the “insider” and “outsider” author. The literature produced by the men/women in uniform may be characterized as “insider” writing and literature produced on military matters by those not belonging to the armed forces may be characterized as “outsider” writing. The latter (A Soldier’s Diary and newspaper reportage) forms part of this chapter for the purpose of comparison and contrast. Interestingly, whatever criticism there is of the state emanates from “insider” literature. “Outsider” literature as we will see, indulges in romanticizing the soldier. Both however, uphold the sanctity of the notion of the nation. In this globalized world in which nations are conceptualized as abstracted “imagined communities” and nationalism condemned as archaic and disruptive of global unification, the Army persists with a notion of nation concretized in the form of borders, boundaries, maps and fences. The chapter will deal with the construct of nation in military literature. The focus here is quite clearly on the phenomenon of war and how it produces a particular idea of the nation. Carl Von Clausewitz, the theorist on war defined war as an extension of politics and the military as an instrument of political policy (1976). To the Nazi theorists of war there was no such thing as peace. Instead, peace was only the period of war preparation. For the socialists only the war of the oppressed classes could be considered the legitimate war. Kant believed that peace could be

16

Chapter One

attained if all states became republics and then formed a confederation of independent states (Efraim Karsh in Freedman, 1994). Legitimacy of war is granted in the epics as well as by socialists, however, for the latter only the war of the oppressed classes is the legitimate war. To MarxistsLeninists, the nation-state was the root cause of war. Liberal thinkers conceptualize the state as a war-like entity. Liberal and Marxist theories are inadequate to explain war, both being based on the idea of history as progress. War in the twentieth century, far from being the epic battle of good over evil has been self-serving, fought out of greed, territorial aggrandizement and ethnic/national/religious rivalries. Liberal theorists believe that chances of war decline in an industrialized society. But experience has proved that ethnic/religious differences perpetrate war even in industrialized societies. Consequently, war is not always necessarily fought for resources or territory. Even advanced societies can be drawn into the ethnic conflicts of third world countries, as is so well exemplified by the US attacks on Afghanistan, Iraq, etc. The neo-Machiavellian view is that war and the armed forces are a part of the human condition. War makes possible the unleashing of aggressive impulses. Glenn Gray in his The Warriors’ War (1967) makes visible a delight in destruction (in Elshtain, 1987). The romantic notion of war which may be seen in the work of Martin Van Creveld for instance, holds that war provides the opportunity for man to display heroism and all that is best in human nature, testing his worth against an equal or stronger opponent. To us, however, it is war as a narrated event that is central to an understanding of texts in this book. To the vast majority, war is narrated through stories, legends, history and films. The fascination for a war story is endemic to the human race. War stories are captivating as they deal with certain fundamental existential dilemmas of the human race. The transformative power of war with its classic stories of triumph and honour and as a rite of passage that shapes its veterans in profound ways makes for self-aggrandizement that translates into the aggrandizement of the nation itself. The children in the villages according to Fanon dream of identifying with ‘some rebel or another, the story of whose bravery still moves them to tears.” (1967: 91). There was a spate of books on war and terror after the attacks of September 11 on New York’s World Trade Centre. Justifying the spurt in sales a representative of a bookstore in New Delhi said, “Our job is to give the readers what they want. Tragedy and controversy sell like nothing else” (2 November 2001, Times of India, Ahmedabad). The tradition of war narratives does not exist in India unlike in Greek

Introduction

17

and Roman civilizations which produced writers like Herodotus, Thucydides, Polybius and Tacitus. Indian kings were great warriors but the tradition of maintaining war accounts did not exist. Only one Indian chronicle called Rajatranjini written during 1149-50 AD by Kalhana, a Kashmiri historian exists in Sanskrit verse. War accounts began to be written in India only during the Mughal period. Even these were not exclusively war accounts; instead they formed major parts of autobiographical writing as in Babarnama, Akbarnama and so on. War has been transformed in the present era by advanced technology. Today it becomes easier to be tempted to resolve problems by bombing as occurred in Iraq and Afghanistan.1 Access to advanced technology empowers a nation which may choose the route of armed conflicts more easily. Also due to advanced technology, military strategists underestimate the loss of civilian populations and installations which goes by the euphemism collateral damage. The new role of public opinion has a decisive part to play in changing the nature of war. Hobsbawm calls it the CNN effect (2001). The media is also an instrument at the disposal of the state for mobilising public opinion. It presents the war in such a way that people perceive it as legitimate and just. However, military intervention has also successfully halted crimes against humanity and expelled dictators. Two glaring examples are Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia to overthrow Pol Pot and the other example is Tanzania’s intervention in Uganda when it was ruled by Idi Amin. Such developments increase the scope of a war narrative and impinge upon the ways in which the nation is represented therein. That brings us to the specific texts to be examined in this chapter. I use a mix of memoirs, diaries and newspaper reportage. If I take all three services into consideration, my topic will become less manageable than it already is. My reading of military literature therefore has an army bias. The sheer output of autobiographical and other writing in the army is a fair enough reason for this choice. Besides, as most of the wars fought in India have been fought mainly by the land forces, the war accounts that exist share my bias. As military memoirs form a part of this chapter, it would be necessary to go into the evolution of the ways in which autobiographical writing have been theorized. Antonio Gramsci in his writings on culture gives one possible justification for the writing of autobiographies i.e. “to help others develop in certain ways and toward certain openings” (in Forgacs and Nowell-Smith, 1991). He inscribed autobiographical writing with a

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Chapter One

didactic purpose. Recent theories of autobiography have stressed the fictiveness of discourse that purports to describe the history of a self. According to Ranajit Guha in the first volume of the Subaltern Studies Series (1981), a memoir is a genre of retrospective writing. The event and its recall are separated by a considerable hiatus, yet it leaves a massive documentation. According to Guha, “The historical discourse is the world’s oldest thriller” (1981: 55). Event time and discourse time creates a gap in autobiographical writing. According to Linda Anderson, “autobiographies are not bare chronicles of fact, but the artful manipulation of details and events that acquire the status of facts during the construction of a particular persona as a self” (2001: 79). The writing about the self before the practice crystallized as the genre of autobiography consisted of confession (initially, a narrative of soul's progress towards God), apology (philosophical explanation and justification of one's beliefs) and memoir (recollections of a person involved in, or witness to, significant events). The term autobiography first emerges in English at the end of the eighteenth century. By the nineteenth century, it was applied to studies of the self-published in that era (ibid). The term seems to have emerged to accommodate a genre, which often fused elements of confession, apology, and memoir. In this study, I prefer to use the term, “memoir” as it implies the writings of people who are self conscious of their status in public and would rather not indulge in self reflection. The domestic or private lives occupy only limited space in the narrative. War discourse especially is based on an implicit understanding of the segregation of the man’s world and woman’s world. This has far reaching consequences for the ways in which the nation is constructed in military literature, an understanding of which I hope to gain through the following pages of this book. Chapter IV examines cinema as one of the many cultural representations from which it may be possible to extract ideas and constructs of nation and nationalism. Cinema, with its abundance of visual and linguistic signifiers, provides a terrain on which we may map out the intersection of the oppositional ideas of nationalism. Amidst the proliferation of discourses that seek to create and regenerate the idea of India, the discourse of Hindi cinema is quite clearly the most vibrant one. Its significance as a mode of narrating the nation may be gauged by its wide reach, broad mass base, and capacity to generate debates from the parliament to the street corners, its influence on

Introduction

19

sartorial choices and an entire range of ancillary entertainers (film glossies, pin-ups, videos, music CDs) that it produces. While on the one hand, Hindi cinema brings together a diverse set of people who cut across caste/class/gender/linguistic barriers into the common space of a cinema hall, simultaneously, it is all the while negotiating these very fissures in Indian society. This chapter also attempts to explain the construction of female subjectivity in war films. Patriarchal structures of Indian society have contributed vastly to the marginalization of women in most narratives. War films foreground the macho hero whose death confers martyrdom on him. The woman in the role of wife, mother, sister or daughter remains peripheral to the narrative, contributing only to the further romanticization of the hero at the cost of her own subjectivity. Thus, the Hindi film lends itself (not unproblematically) as a medium to analyze these constructs. Movies have always been popular as entertainment but they became subjects of serious study only in the nineties in India. The postmodernist dethroning of high culture facilitated the entry of low/popular/mass culture into the corridors of academia. The scope of the project would extend to some war films in popular Hindi cinema of the post-Independence period (Haqeeqat, Hindustan ki Kasam, Border). It would also include those films which depict the character of a soldier, even if the film is not a war film in the strict sense of the term (Major Saab, Pukar, Soldier). This chapter includes non-war, nationalist films to try to tease out the differences that exist in the idea of the nation between war and non-war films (1942 – A Love Story, Hey Ram, Rang de Basanti). Films based on the theme of insurgency and terrorism (Maachis, Dil Se, Fiza, The Terrorist, Mission Kashmir, My Name is Khan, Dhoka, A Wednesday!) demonstrate how they subvert notions of the nation which a war film constructs so painstakingly. In order that the study remains focused, it would be necessary to limit it to popular Hindi cinema, referring only tangentially to the Hollywood war film (Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July). Cinema is an affective medium that exploits the sentiments of the spectator for its own purposes. The trope of cinema as a vehicle for generating public sentiments/hysteria can be dated to 1901 when Save Dada made a newsreel on the return of R P Paranjpye who came from England with a Cambridge degree. There was mass hysteria when Paranjpye was escorted by a long procession of enthusiastic people. Even spectators who watched the newsreel experienced a surge of nationalist feeling (Kaul, 1999). As we shall see in this chapter, the mobilization of

20

Chapter One

sentiment is a vital part of a war film usually directed towards the creation of consensus for statist agendas. Indian cinema emerged during the colonial era. Hence, it indulges in a serious engagement with the construction of a national identity. Popular culture and film in particular are implicated in the power structures, ways and means of official discourse. Indian cinema’s imbrication with the nation-building process may be attributed to the historical fact of cinema’s arrival in India in 1896, around the time of the consolidation of the freedom movement. Indian cinema thus reflects the evolution of the idea of India as a nation. The tradition of political and historical films that engaged with the idea of nationhood goes back to the pre-independence era to D N Sampat who made India’s first political film Bhakt Vidur (1921). He made Hindi cinema a truly national venture by recruiting artists and technicians from all parts of India for his Kohinoor film company. Ramesh Saigal’s Shaheed (1948) and Samadhi (1950) recalled the moments of the national freedom struggle. Gautam Kaul locates the emergence of national cinema in the talkie. “As films began to be made in several of India’s own languages it now became possible to arouse people speaking these languages across the length and breadth of the country. The regional talkie harnessed the immense treasure of regional folklore and regional literature. It was like a message relayed through a dozen languages of the subcontinent. Thus emerged an all India body of national cinema, each projecting the unique share of its own regional ethos” (1998: 113). Today the “all-India body of national cinema” that Kaul speaks about extends beyond the territorial borders of the nation. The immense popularity of Hindi films among the growing non-resident Indian population in countries like USA, UK and the UAE has ensured a steady market. The popularity of Hindi blockbusters abroad shows the success of the nostalgic mode. For the exiled, return to motherland is more of a mythic than a real phenomenon. Thus the return to motherland is facilitated vicariously by films. However, the return to homeland need not have the kind of mythic value to a nineties immigrant to the USA for instance as it had perhaps for the indentured labourer in Trinidad. The class of the immigrant is now higher than it was in the sixties and seventies enabling him to visit home more frequently. For this reason the nostalgia evoked in films is for rural India, rather than the urban. For example, Bollywood hits like Aditya Chopra’s Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (1996) and Subhash Ghai’s Pardes (1997) locate the Indian scenes in the green fields of Punjab and the picturesque hills of Himachal Pradesh respectively. War films for somewhat different reasons deploy the

Introduction

21

nostalgic mode to transport the audiences to a heroic era in which the dilemmas were not merely of one nation against another but of the transcendental, existential ones of life and death itself, the conflict between eros and thanatos, or rather the question of the “ontic being” to use a phrase from Heidegger (1981). War is attractive as it has to do with that most enigmatic reality of life, i.e. its antonym death. Death is eroticized in the discourse of war as the dead are invariably young men who in the natural order of the universe should represent the life-affirming force of eros as begetters of the future generation. A brief synopsis of the kind of cinema produced in each decade since independence would be in order here. The fifties and sixties combined Nehruvian idealism and the decline of faith in socialist ideals which provided a framework for critiques of socialism as in the films mentioned below. Hindi cinema during this time consisted of social, neo-realistic films and espoused the cause of the oppressed. It negotiated a multitude of social concerns even within an apparently escapist narrative comprising song and dance, melodrama, action, fantasy and rhetoric. Raj Kapoor’s films like Anari (1959) romanticized the poor innocent hero lost in a corrupt world. Bimal Roy in a film like Sujata (1959) for instance engaged with a pertinent social theme like the caste-system. Filmmakers like Bimal Roy and Raj Kapoor are the prominent figures among others in this period. Roy’s Do Bigha Zameen (1953) explored in a moving and sensitive manner the trauma of displacement from the rural to the urban. A pertinent socio-economic problem of the times was translated into cinematic text. The seventies was the age of the “angry young man” dominated by the super star Amitabh Bachchan. This was a period of staunch antiestablishment sentiments following the failure of socialism to eradicate poverty, unemployment and social injustice. Bachchan epitomized the underdog of society in most of his early films. From the marginal position that his character occupied (gangster, petty thief, coolie etc.) he challenged the establishment values of the privileged classes. In Deewar (1975) unemployment makes him enter the world of crime until he rises to the position of a rich powerful gangster. His empowerment goes against the grain of empowerment of the individual as visualized by the socialist regime (through the route of education to employment to happiness). However the imperatives of commercial cinema make the film ultimately a proestablishment one. The hero, Vijay never attains happiness and dies at the hands of his own brother who as a police officer is a cog in the wheel of the establishment. Popular Hindi cinema seldom challenges the status quo and even if it does, it is only to restore and uphold it at the end of the film.

22

Chapter One

The films in the eighties and nineties have witnessed the reflection of the growth of cultural nationalism in the political arena of the nation. In the nineties, there have been two dominant genres in Hindi cinema, viz. action film and the family drama with the ubiquitous love story as its major component. These, I would suggest are only apparently antithetical. The ideological underpinnings of both remain the same. Both genres tackle an imagined enemy. Right wing ideology indulges in creating paranoia about threats to the nation, both territorial and cultural. The enemy in the action films is cross border terrorism with veiled references to Pakistan. The other genre tackles an insidious enemy which appears in the form of cultural invasion. This is a threat to the idea of an essential India. While tackling the first enemy is the job of the patriotic Indian male, the second enemy is reserved for the Indian woman. Here, I find useful Partha Chatterjee’s division of material domain and spiritual domain to stand in for the West and East. Further this suggests that this division is a gendered one, as it engages in the reification of rigid gender roles. The “material domain” with its engagement in the public world of economy, labour, political struggle and the like remains the male world. The “spiritual domain” is the private world of family, rituals, home and tradition inhabited by and the responsibility of women (Chatterjee, 1999). Conflict that occurs in each domain is split between the two genres of action films and family drama. The “back-to-roots” command of Hindutva simplifies conflict with its implicit belief that if only we are rooted in tradition, then there can be no conflict at all. In such a set up, the woman is assigned specific roles, which she is shown to accept willingly. A returnto-roots formula may be a counter strategy to the anarchic uncertainty, flux, ambivalence and in-betweeness of postmodernism. However, what is unsettling is that such a move leaves little option for women who are forced back into the straitjacketed roles of several decades ago. The “roots” in a so-called authentic past are themselves not unproblematic temporal and spatial zones to which one may return. Hence, such a strategy can at its best, be described as a form of romantic nativism. The eighties was a period of transition from socialism to capitalism, culminating in the nineties that was the era of globalization, privatization and the rise of Hindutva forces, emblematic of resistance to what has been described as cultural imperialism. The Hindutva debate foregrounds the categories of nation and culture both of which can be read as vigorously contested sites. As we have seen above, each decade (broadly and generally) provides an ideological framework for cinema that reflects the socio-political scene of the time. Each of the eras outlined above saw its cinema reflecting

Introduction

23

conflicting ideologies, making Hindi film a “cinematic discourse [which is] a symbolic force in post-independence India” (Chakravarty, 1996: 4). Popular films, in the process of constructing a national identity, turn into sites of ideological battles. In countries where there is a large population of illiterate people, popular film may be ‘‘seen as an alternative route into national imaginaries and cohesion” (Radcliffe and Westwood, 1996:18). Cinema has always responded to wars. The drama, pathos and emotion of war have provided fodder for its cinematic reproduction. In Hollywood, World Wars I and II, the Vietnam War and the American “war on terror”1 have inspired several productions. Scores of films have been made on Vietnam as well as several that are based on the heroes of American operations in Afghanistan. Many of these films speak on behalf of the common combatant against the military top brass and the politicians. The Indian nation’s pre-occupation with history both in the form of direct governmental intervention in revising school history text-books as well as the filmmakers interest in historical themes is closely related to the militarism of right wing politics alluded to earlier. Anil Sharma’s Gadar (2000) and Gowarikar’s Lagaan (2000) were patriotism laced period films. The focus on the nation’s past indicates cinema’s obsessive desire to grapple with questions of the nation and national identity. War films can be categorized on the basis of representing 1) war as an immediate threat 2) war as providing historical perspectives 3) war film as a medium to glorify heroism 4) impact of war. The films under consideration, viz. Haqeeqat, Hindustan ki Kasam, and Border would fall under the second and third categories. Certain stock features in war films are soldiers waiting for enemy attack, home coming of the hero, arrival of mail from home, brief loss of morale, love lives of soldiers, team work, character of a strong commander, tough training and mise-en-scene that includes battlefields, guns and a noisy soundtrack. War films serve as explanatory texts for the audiences. They play upon the emotions of the nation and make the emotive a constituent part of the mode of reception. Audiences are culturally active even if non-producing. War films set up a regime of loss as well as desire – loss of unity, security and nationalist sentiment and in lamenting the loss of these, there is simultaneously the desire for these as requisites for peace. This chapter also looks at terrorist films as putative subversions of war

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Chapter One

films. These films create space for the contestation of the State that the narrative of a war film assiduously glorifies. How do films depict militant violence? The terrorist films in showing violence as spontaneous and natural undermine the conscious and rational political choices made by the people. I shall draw upon Ranajit Guha’s formulations of insurgent violence from his seminal essay, “The Prose of Counter Insurgency”. Violence in militant movements is not merely material, it is psychological and symbolic as well. It aims at drawing attention to their cause, to threaten opponents to their cause and to destroy symbols of the State, which is their chief enemy. While expanding the definition of war to encompass insurgent movements, what I wish to do is to show the changing nature of war in accordance with the changes that occur in the perception of the nation and the state. Wars are defined conventionally as aggression between two or more nation-states as in World War I and II and closer home the Indo-Pak wars of 1965 and 1971. Wars may also be fought outside one’s own territory as for example the US forces in Vietnam, the Gulf and Afghanistan. Then there are the insurgent wars as in Kashmir, Nagaland etc. which are not called wars but are variously described as secessionist/irredentist/insurgent/separatist movements. For the purposes of this study, the last will also be called as wars. One of the ways of denying legitimacy to the movements is to deny them the conventional terminology itself. More importantly, describing them as wars may be enabling in the task of understanding the multiple connotations of the increasingly intractable term “nation.” My engagement with war films and military literature stems from a desire to also expose these texts as foregrounding male history, through valorizing male deeds of warfare and martyrdom. It would be illuminating to examine the category of gender as it is represented in war narratives, as they are essentially masculinist discourses. Wars have been fought conventionally to protect the women and children back home. The warrior/woman opposition is a cross-cultural fact. In Aztec society the worst insult to give a man is to treat him as a woman (Todorov in Elshtain, 1987: 196). Women in war narratives occupy liminal spaces as part of the family that glories in the exploits of their men, as victims in the form of widows/orphans. Women of the enemy ranks have usually been subjected to torture in the form of molestation/rape by conquering soldiers. By contrast, the armies of the insurgent movements recruit large numbers of women in their ranks. This changes the dynamics of gender construction in the narratives of terrorist films, making for an interesting study of women and war and their place in the nation.

Introduction

25

As war discourse foregrounds masculinism, the study of gender forms a significant part of this book. For instance, the narratives of the Vietnam War in which ten thousand women served continue to confine women to sexual and domestic spaces. Such a politics of erasure helps in the longterm investment of conventional ideologies. The presence of few women in the army mirrors the general prejudices that exist outside the military. By and large women are not taken as combat soldiers in the Indian Army. They are largely recruited as doctors, nurses and from the late nineteen eighties onwards in the services, i.e. non-combat formations such as Army Ordnance Corps, Corps of Electrical and Mechanical Engineers and Army Service Corps. They are not yet a part of combat formations like Infantry, Armoured Corps, and so on. Feminized images of women in the military are necessary complements to the discourse of machismo that permeate the military. War in classical studies is construed as a proving ground for masculinity. Although the advances in armament technology have rendered the fears of the risk factor in war outdated, women are still “protected” from it. As Yuval-Davis notes, “Technological innovations in modern warfare have deemed biologistic rationalizations of women’s exclusions mostly obsolete” (1997: 114). Chapters III and IV will look at the representation of women in military literature and war films respectively, in order to understand the ways in which a nation is imagined as a male fraternity. Several studies exist separately on nation, cinema and war. I propose to combine these categories in an attempt to fill in the gaps in the existing scholarship. The present work is a step towards understanding the cultural representations in visual and verbal forms of the undesirable, yet inevitable phenomenon of war through which emerges a particular notion of the nation.

Notes 1

The American President George Bush coined the phrase “war on terror” to describe the action taken against Afghanistan after the terrorist attacks on World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington DC on 11 September 2001.

CHAPTER TWO NATION AND NATIONALISM: AN OVERVIEW

The crimson glow of light on the horizon is not the light of thy dawn of peace, my motherland. It is the glimmer of the funeral pyre burning to ashes the vast flesh – the self-love of the Nation – dead under its own excess. —Rabindranath Tagore

I This chapter is devoted to a detailed study of some of the key concepts like nation, state, nationalism, patriotism and so on, which form the core objects of study in this book. I believe such an overview is important because each of the concepts enumerated above is invested with a rich minefield of intellectual thought. I propose to explain some of the ideas that have evolved over a period of time in this field. The polysemic term “nation” has been defined by several scholars in different periods in history. Still, it remains a problematic concept. It is defined by combining subjective elements like will and imagination and objective elements like language, territory, race, and so on. One thing however is certain and that is the fact that nation is a modern term. The fall of dynastic empires in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries gave rise to the forging of collective identities based on language, culture, ethnicity, etc. These collectivities crystallized over a period of time to form nation-states. The French and the Russian Revolutions along with the fall of European empires are the empirical causes of the formation of modern nation-states. The French Revolution ushered in democracy, which became the main political system of future nations. I offer here what is often called a survey of the field of nation and nationalism.

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II The intellectual tradition of studies on nation and nationalism has a long history. Ernest Renan’s essay “What is a nation?” is one of the earliest attempts at theorizing the idea of nation. Renan highlights the role of memory in the formation of a nation. Memory is a selective process that operates at the level of the individual as well as a collectivity. It is a complex mental process that includes remembering and forgetting. When Renan speaks of memory, he refers to remembering and forgetting, the two constituent components of memory. He says, “to be conscious of one’s own belonging to a nation, one must remember the past of one’s nation and must have the feeling of having shared its joys and sorrows together as ‘a people’” (in Bhabha, 1990: 19). Renan does not seem to take into consideration the fact that individual memory, or, for that matter, the collective memory is shaped by forces extraneous to one’s own free will. A powerful state can use several agencies, like the media for instance, in order to influence a nation’s memory through manipulation of images and information. Renan considers the subjective element of “will” to be central to the nation-formation process. He remarks: To have common glories in the past and to have a common will in the present, to have performed great deeds together, to wish to perform still more – these are the essential conditions for being a people (ibid: 19)

According to Renan, grief is more important than joy in national memories, as grief imposes duty. Besides a shared memory, a nation must also continuously assert a will to remain unified in future. In this sense, a nation is “a daily plebiscite” (ibid: 19). We will see in the fourth chapter how war films facilitate the assertion of the idea of a unified nation. The skillful use of images in war cinema helps to create the memory of a shared, heroic past. While dwelling on the element of memory in nation-formation, it would be fruitful to cite Shahid Amin’s essay on the Chauri Chaura episode. According to Amin, the nation invariably chooses to forget those events, images and metaphors that are associated with its subaltern classes, creating in the process an elite national memory. Therefore, recovering marginal histories should be an important part of the historiography of a nation. Amin uses the event of the peasant revolt of Chauri Chaura to put forth his argument. To Amin, national history-writing is like the writing of biography, where memory lapses, selectivity and erasures (at times, deliberate) form part of the strategy for constructing a past (2000: 179).

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Thus, in the process of creating the past of a nation, sometimes it may be necessary to recover the narratives of the subaltern groups. The spate of terrorist films in the nineties – some of them with a fair degree of sympathy for the terrorist – may be seen as an attempt to rewrite the history of the nation from the subaltern’s point of view. This issue will feature in detail in the fourth chapter. One of the most important contributions of poststructuralism towards the task of defining the complex term “nation” is to explain it in terms of its discursivity. The nation is no longer a unified, well-bounded territory of communities sharing a series of common features. Rather, the nation is constituted in and through the realm of narrative. The postmodernist dislodging of grand narratives from their place of pride facilitates the forging of marginal narratives. Hitherto suppressed residents of the margins begin to articulate their conceptualizations of the nation that interrupt and dismantle canonical discourses of the concept. One of the most influential scholars propagating such a notion of the nation is Homi Bhabha. In his seminal essay, “DissemiNation, Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” following Eric Hobsbawm, Bhabha foregrounds the experience of exile as crucial to the narrative of the nation. Further, it is not the nationalist movements per se that interest him, rather it is “traditions of writing that have attempted to construct narratives of the imaginary of the nation-people…” (Bhabha, 1990: 303). For the purposes of the present study, this formulation will prove to be productive as will be seen in the chapters that follow. The older meanings of nation stressed its ethnicity. The newer meanings associate nation with political unity and independence and increasingly with cultural sovereignty. To Hobsbawm, nations are “naturally heterogeneous” (ibid: 133) and national movements have been either for national unification or for expansion. He argues that even if nationalism is prominent today, it is historically less important in the sense that it is no longer “a global political programme” as it was in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. He predicts that the history of late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries can no longer be written in terms of narrow notions like nation and nation-state. The history of the world will be “supranational” or “infranational” with nations performing only cameo roles in the new world histories (ibid: 171-173). He hopes for the day when nation and nationalism need not be the only categories through which a person can constitute his or her identity. It may be difficult for us to go with this idea all the way. The nation is an entity, which in most Third World countries has come into being after a violent struggle against

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the colonizers. For this reason, it is as much an affective as a political, cultural category. Perhaps the most influential work on colonial aggression is Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. The memory of the colonizer’s violence is part of the collective consciousness of most African and other postcolonial nations. The native-settler encounter, according to Fanon, has always been violent. As a result, “the colonized finds his freedom in and through violence” (1967: 68). A nation that comes into existence after an encounter that involves such passion would necessarily be a strong, emotional category through which an individual derives his/her identity.

III The state is the political expression of the nation characterized by sovereignty over a territorial unit. It is universal in the sense that every person on earth belongs to one state or the other. Liberal political philosophers believed that the state should be in control of society and denigrated non-state institutions like churches or guilds for appropriating the power that should legitimately belong to the state. Much as it may seem the norm to talk of the state as a western concept, we cannot ignore the fact that a thorough conceptualization of the state exists in Kautilya’s Arthashastra as far back as 150 A.D. The state for Kautilya is responsible for the people’s well-being. Only a powerful, coercive state in charge of law and order can work for the welfare of its people. The state is conceptualized as a strong organ with the function of facilitating the expansionist aims of the king. Territory is thus central to the idea of a state. He envisions a paternalistic state that would be responsible for the people’s well-being. The state is the sole dispenser of justice. The prosperity of the state depends upon alliance, settlement on virgin lands, and conquest. The king, the councillors, the territory, the fortified towns, the treasury, the armed forces, and the allies are the constituents of the state (1987: 119). Now coming to the modern state we find that almost identical features have been ascribed to it. Territory, a political apparatus, legal system, and sole power in the use of force are some of the features that are common to Kautilya’s conception of a state. However, the continuity thus established is circumscribed by the fact that Kautilya’s state functioned within the framework of a feudal government. Therefore, we must turn to the more recent and larger narrative of colonialism to locate our conceptualization of

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the state in India. What the British rulers conceived as benefits given to the colony through their rule (railways, postal service, law courts, army, police, etc.) is now seen as part of a larger regime of power. The bureaucratization of the Indian state was an exercise in vesting power in an elite group. This elite group consisted of the educated classes of colonial times who are the precursors to the great Indian middle class. After Independence, therefore, there was no radical change in the administrative and functional aspects of the state. The Indian nation-state carried on the legacy left behind by their erstwhile colonial masters in the fields of law, education, military, etc. Statism is central to political nationalism. Thomas Hobbes considered as the founder of Statism said: I Authorise and give up my Right of governing Myselfe, to this Man, or to this Assembly of men, on this condition, that thou give up thy Right to him, and Authorise all his Actions in like manner (in Gilbert, 1998:77).

As we may see, Hobbes envisioned mutuality in the relationship between the state and the individual. State-formation is important for the survival and security of individuals. It is an artificial category but its contrary, i.e., a state of nature would bring humans into unnecessary conflicts with each other. Thus the function of the state is to play the role of an arbitrator and protector of the people. This could lead to a clash of interests with other states. Since it is the duty of each state to protect its people, one state can stand in relation to the other only in an attitude of conflict. Liberal philosophers believe that the state is a detached, enlightened, objective power through which a nation is kept together. For Hegel, the state is the domain of universal values that transcends the mundane concerns of civil society. The state’s power derives from its impartial and impersonal relationship with its members. The functioning of the state as it filters down through its various institutions is based upon uniformity, i.e., the creation of the citizen as an autonomous, free, unmarked individual. Discrepancies in the creation of a citizen have led to every national state having its share of what Hobsbawm calls “unredeemed minorities.” Hobsbawm notes that although the nationalisms of Asian countries were modelled on western nationalism, the states that were created after Independence were antithetical to Western states. States in Asian countries were multi-lingual, multi-ethnic and multicultural unlike their relatively homogeneous Western counterparts (1990: 169). Poststructuralists see the state as an agent of power. This understanding comes from Foucault who believed that in the twentieth

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century power is not centralized but distributed so thinly that it is not recognized as power. In the post-globalization era, it is important to examine the receding role of the state. The state in the global world withdraws itself from the social sector, giving place to the emergence of civil society. It is important to distinguish the nation from the nation-state. Much of the chagrin displayed by the critics of nation should more appropriately be directed at the nation-state. In the following elucidation, I wish to dispel the confusion that arises when the two categories are treated as synonymous. The nation-state is a politically constructed category, which holds within it the judicial, legislative, and constitutional domains. It is the nation-state that has proved to be inadequate in granting those who owe their allegiance to it, all that it set out to grant in terms of rights, equality, choices and space. The nation-state is responsible for the hiatus that creates the privileged and under-privileged, the metropolitan and the subaltern, the centre and the margin. The nation is mistakenly linked to territory because of its equation with the state and consequently of the state with the people. Thus in the subsequent pages of this study, the nation will be understood as an emotional site and the nation-state as a political site. With this we have a fair understanding of the difference between nation, state, and nation-state. To summarize, nation in this study will be understood as a culturally determined subjective, affective category, and state as its political expression. The nation-state would be an entity with which we interact as citizens. Nation-states are sovereign, independent units with properly demarcated territories. Recognition in the international arena is crucial for a nation to become a nation-state. For instance, Tamil Eelam may be a nation in the imagination of Tamilians in Sri Lanka. Still, it can be called a nation-state only after it gains recognition from the comity of nations in the world. Recognition is what helps a nation to come into existence as a nation-state.

IV It was believed that the overarching category of nation could include in non-conflictual ways diverse divisions based on caste, class, religion, gender. The reality as we know is far from the ideal. In this section, I attempt an analysis of gender politics as it is enacted within the space of the nation. Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis outline five different ways

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in which women are perceived by the nation-state. These are as: a) biological reproducers b) reproducers of national/ethnic/racial boundaries c) transmitters of culture d) signifiers of ethnic/national difference e) participants in national/political/military struggles (in Hutchinson and Smith 1994: 313). We shall see later in this section how the nation-woman-state relationship is cast in a complex mutuality. Women’s primary relationship with the nation-state is through citizenship. Gender and its relationship with the nation-state is a complex subject that is worthy of independent treatment. Several studies in the recent past have examined the state vis-à-vis gender relationship (Jayawardena and de Alwis, Yuval-Davis, Sunder Rajan, to name a few). Our purpose here is to examine the ways in which women are represented in war narratives, and how their representation impinges on the way the nation is imagined. Therefore, it would be necessary to understand the ways in which the nation becomes a gendered category, the mechanisms by which constructs of women are produced within the cultural arena of the nation-space, and how women are at times resistant national subjects. A formulation of this kind will have a bearing on our understanding of women in war narratives. The mythologizing of nation as earth mother is one of the most powerful strategies deployed in nationalist narratives. The nation as earth mother would have a deep resonance for a people whose main occupation is agriculture and whose sustenance comes from land. The image of the fecund earth provides a parallel to the image of woman as mother. This image is transferred on to the nation as a maternal figure iconized as Bharatmata, revealing the traditional nation and woman conflation. The etymology of the word nation (natio, Latin for “something born”) further consolidates the earth-mother configuration. This image of nation combines in a paradoxical way the dual implications of the mother as producer of brave sons, who in turn protect her from external enemies who desire her. There is an element of the Freudian oedipal complex at work here. As analyzed by Sumathi Ramaswamy in her essay on the erotics of Tamil nationalism, the patriotic love for the motherland is coloured by the erotic desire for the woman. Both the Tamiltaay (Tamil mother) and Bharatmata were imagined as compassionate and nurturing, yet desirable and virginal. The erotic is harnessed in the service of the patriotic through the manipulation of images within the discourse of nationalism. According to Ramaswamy, the virginal, hallowed Bharatmata, the desiring male citizen and the nationalist female citizen who must continue the line of descent through the propagation of the national collectivity are the three

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corners of “the triangular pattern of the nationalist love story” (in Sunder Rajan, 2000: 21). The domain of religion is a significant site for constructing womanhood. Scriptural sanctions for specific types of female “behaviour” are brought into force in the construction of an ideal Indian woman. Epic characters like Sita and others from Hindu mythology like Savitri are prototypes of Indian womanhood. In the colonial period, the influence of English education gave the Indian male and female colonial subject a new model to fashion a modern Indian woman, who was a judicious combination of the east and the west. The tradition-modernity dialectic was played out in the realm of gender. In the early nineteenth century, the woman’s question was framed within the discourse of social reform. According to Partha Chatterjee, nationalism in India posited the woman’s question as different from Western modernity (in Sangari and Vaid 1989: 243). It made the private domain the locus of the woman’s question. Using the status of women as a marker, the colonizer condemned an entire culture as barbaric. The female colonizer also became an ally in this discourse. The infamous work of Katherine Mayo, which Gandhi called “a gutter inspector’s report” upholds the idea that India did not deserve self-rule as it was not civilized enough to govern itself.1 One of the main criteria for arriving at this conclusion was the low status of women, which according to colonial discourse had the sanction of the scriptures. Women have always been exhorted to raise patriotic sons in folklore and nationalist myths. In Costa Rican nationalism, women were encouraged to raise patriotic sons like Santamaria. The Intifada did the same with Palestinian women and numerous folk songs amongst martial races in India, such as the Rajputs do likewise. In simultaneity with such images of home-bound, fecund women, India also has a tradition of militant warrior women in figures such as Razia Sultan, the thirteenth century queen of Delhi, Nur Jahan, wife of Emperor Jehangir and Laxmi Bai, the Queen of Jhansi who fought against the British in 1857. The last has been co-opted into the gallery of national heroes by official historiography. Despite this, women’s work for the motherland, whether it is in the freedom struggle or in various professions in postcolonial India, is always discursively constructed in a way that emphasizes their continued focus on home and family. Women’s work is seen as positive, worthy of appreciation only in tandem with their femininity, without the latter being jeopardized in any way by the former. As pointed out by Kumari Jayawardena:

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While Indian women were to participate in all stages of the movement for national independence, they did so in a way that was acceptable to, and was dictated by the male leaders and which conformed to the prevalent ideology on the position of women (1986: 108).

While the nation/earth-mother conflation conjures up a figurative, primordial relationship between women and nation, it is also important to address the corporeal, everyday negotiations of woman with the nationstate. The nation-woman relationship is entangled in a variety of discourses besides the obvious one of gender. Perhaps no other issue exemplifies this better than the Shahbano controversy of 1985. The legal case of a divorced woman petitioning for maintenance from her exhusband took on a national significance in which the discourses of law, media, academics, electoral politics and religion intersected making it an “event” in the history of the nation. The Shahbano case problematized the relationship of secular law vis-à-vis personal law. The hijacking of the issue by the more potent interest groups of politicians, religious fundamentalists and legal luminaries revealed that gender is necessarily enmeshed with various other categories. The case also opened up the important debate on minority identity. The insecurity of the Muslim community surfaced and this gave them “an opportunity to mount an attack on what they perceived as the Hindu’s homogenizing influence, an influence that would eventually lead to the assimilation and destruction of Muslim identity” (Pathak and Sunder Rajan 1989: 561). Partha Chatterjee’s “inner domain” in which he locates femaleness with its attendant qualities of morality, virtue, spirituality need not be as autonomous as he makes it out to be. Either the domain is invaded by the outer, public space or the recalcitrant inhabitants of the inner space elbow themselves out into the public domain, as was exemplified so evocatively in the Shahbano event. Either consciously or unconsciously, gender has been a crucial component of the nation-formation process. The colonial rulers drew attention to gender issues by pointing to the low status of women in India. Nationalists were quick to respond through interventions in social practices such as sati, widow remarriage, etc. Whether it was debates around sati or women’s participation in the freedom movement, questions of gender have always been imbricated within the discourses of nationalism. As Sunder Rajan and You-me Park point out, “Postcolonial feminists have necessarily to negotiate the relationship of their feminism not only with Western feminism, but also … with other contending ideologies such as nationalism … an endeavour that is both politically fraught and theoretically complex” (in Schwarz and Ray 2000: 65).

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V History and its writing is a crucial aspect of nation-formation. If, as we have noted earlier, Renan believed that the past of a nation is what constitutes its “spiritual principle” then a construction of that past for the benefit of the living present is important. However, a national history or more appropriately, historiography has always remained a problematic area. As war forms part of a nation’s history and war narratives a part of the project of history-writing, it is imperative that we examine the complex relationship of the nation with its history. A nation’s history comes to us through multiple narratives enshrined in the discourses of literature, film, sociology, etc. History as an academic discipline changed irrevocably with the publication of the first volume of The Subaltern Studies Series. The writers of this series stage a rigorous contestation of hegemonic historiography. It is their contention that the history of the Indian nation is elitist as it excludes marginal groups. The historiographer down the ages has kept the subaltern classes out of the narratives of the nation, denying them subjecthood of their history. Dipesh Chakrabarty points out that a phenomenon which came to be called “history from below” appeared in the 1970s to fill the gaps in official historiography (in Mongia 2000: 223). “History from below” referred to minority histories, that is, the history of those socio-cultural groups who did not feature in the mainstream narratives of official histories. These groups were invariably the oppressed, marginal classes like women, tribals, peasants, etc. “History from below” democratized the discipline of history by giving space to hitherto silent voices, which had been erased by mainstream history. Charging the Indian bourgeoisie for their failure to speak for the nation, the Subaltern Studies group’s foremost agenda is to rewrite the history of the nation from the margins, peopled by the subaltern classes who had to negotiate power at various levels. Their study had significant implications for the definition of a state. Some of these insights will be used in our study of insurgent movements and how they challenge the idea of a nation.

VI Nationalism has been variously described by a wide range of scholars. In the West, it received academic attention in the eighties. Nationalism

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may be studied as a) anti-colonial movement b) sentiment c) narrative and d) a response to the homogenizing tendencies of a global order. Firstly and most commonly, nationalism is studied as an organized movement against the existing state. Nationalism as anti-colonialism focuses upon its political and conflictual aspects. Nationalism is a movement that demands statehood in order to grant legitimacy to a collectivity that imagines itself as a nation, which is a “group of any kind that has a right to statehood” (Gilbert 1998: 1). What began as a movement in various parts of Europe in the mid-nineteenth century to establish nation-states spread to the colonies that used this ideology very effectively in their anti-colonial struggle. Thus in the Asian sub-continent nationalism is almost synonymous with anticolonialism. Nationalism calls for absolute allegiance and loyalty to the nation above all other groups that an individual is likely to identify with like family, caste, region, and linguistic community or religious groups. It is based on the firm belief that the nation is the supreme marker of identity for an individual, as is often manifested in statements such as “We are Indians first, then Punjabis, Tamilians and so on.” All leaders of anti-colonial movements use strong sentiments in order to mobilize colonized peoples against the colonizers. These sentiments offer a frame of reference that helps construct nationalism as a matter of consciousness of a particular culture. Here sentiments are mobilized by drawing symbols from the domain of culture. Such an endeavour is of course fraught with tensions, contestations and opposition. Scholars who subscribe to this way of understanding nationalism study cultural manifestations such as art, cinema, religion, language, etc. All cultural productions are seen as fields of signification, which produce particular notions of nation and nationalism. The primary idea of nation is the axis around which the discourse of nationalism revolves. In colonized countries, nationalism is largely associated with anti-colonial consciousness and revolt. The creation of ideas was needed for the mobilization of consciousness and the idea of the nation was one such. However, in the case of non-metropolitan nations, as Benedict Anderson details in Imagined Communities, it is believed that far from being original the idea of nation was shaped by metropolitan models of nationalism. Before Anderson, most studies on nation and nationalism focused on the givenness of a nation. Pre-existent, unitary groups were seen as potential nations. It was Anderson’s ground-breaking work that led scholars to think of the nation as a cultural construct mediated by the faculty of imagination. Anderson’s work revealed a fundamental paradigm shift in the conceptualization of nation and nationalism with its alignment

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of nationalism with cultural systems, rather than political ideologies. Print capitalism aided people in their pursuit for meaning in life. The temporal coincidence, (which Anderson calls, “homogeneous empty time” (1983: 69)) of an activity, like the reading of a newspaper at a particular time of the day, by a community of people within a particular space, gave rise to a national consciousness. The progress made in the field of communication further facilitated the awareness of commonality amongst people living within a particular territory. The nation is an outcome of a developed system of internal communication, which aids the construction of national identity. Anderson is of the opinion that the journeys undertaken by the functionaries also fostered a feeling of oneness, which was a prelude to nation-formation (ibid: 55). This indicates the importance he accorded to progress in the field of communication which makes nationalism a major component of modernity. A number of factors, notes Anderson, made nation-ness “the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time” (ibid: 3). Nations were imagined into existence by an increased level of national consciousness. Once nationalism developed in Europe and America, it became “modular” (ibid: 4). By this, Anderson meant that Asian and African nationalist elites imported these forms from the continents. Anderson’s calibanistic model of nationalism for colonial territories provoked Chatterjee to ask “Whose imagined community?” In a powerful critique of Anderson’s “modular forms,” Partha Chatterjee asks: If nationalisms in the rest of the world have to choose their imagined community from certain “modular” forms already made available to them by Europe and the Americas, what do they have left to imagine? (1992: 5)

It is in the context of contesting Anderson’s notion of modular forms that Chatterjee comes up with his (by now oft-cited) formulation of the material and spiritual domains. Nationalism had defined itself as anticolonialism in the spiritual domain of language, literature, arts, tradition, the family and culture long before it entered the public space as a political struggle (1992: 6-9). For this reason it would be inadequate to conceptualize it as imitative of western forms of nationalism. The politics of national identity is crucial to the process of forming a national consciousness. The creation of an identity is a politically loaded task that can very easily slide into the creation of a monolithic national identity. According to Amartya Sen, philosophical and historical issues converge in the making of an Indian identity.2 The historical construction

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of identity in India has traditionally conflated Hindu and Indian identities. But the makers of the Indian Constitution made a conscious choice while deciding upon a secular framework for a largely Hindu populated nation. It is necessary to dwell on the territoriality of the category in any discussion on the subject of national identity. Does a national identity, like “Indian”, for instance constitute only those dwelling in the territory called India? What does it mean to be an Indian outside India? What is the immigrant’s experience of India? Where does “Indian” fit into his/her identity which is transformed by the experience of immigration? Will India always remain only the past for him/her, a site of longing and belonging, a mythic place of origin and the desired location of death? The diasporic communities problematize the issue of national identity in complex ways. The in-betweenness of their location results in fractured identities, which radicalize the notion of nation. Nevertheless, a detailed study of this subject is beyond the scope of this book. Tom Nairn views nationalism from a Marxist perspective as a stepping stone to internationalism. All societies must necessarily pass through a nationalist phase that is a conjuncture of market economy and a national bourgeois class. Nairn likens nationalism to adolescence, which at times can be struck by “a deadly disease” (in Hutchinson and Smith 1994:71). This deadly disease turns nationalism into chauvinism. Nationalism to Nairn is “a fact of general developmental history” and people of a nation are forced into this historical development (ibid: 1994:72). Uneven development within and across nations is the cause of nationalism. Although Nairn is prepared to concede the role of ideas in the formation of nations and nationalism, to him, nationalism is still the political resistance of less developed societies towards more developed societies. The Marxist approach reads nationalism both as class struggle within a society and economic struggle across society. Class has now been proved to be an inadequate critical category for the analysis of as complex a concept as nationalism. Class is too universalistic and homogeneous and does not take into consideration divisions of caste, gender, religious affiliation, etc. Nationalism as anti-colonialism cannot be treated within Marxist discourse, as colonialism for Marx was a progressive event. The rationality of class interest and class alliances is too broad an understanding for analyzing the specificities of gender, caste etc., which rupture the collectivity called class. Mass politics is beyond pure rationality and masses are known to be mobilized on the basis of sentiment, identity and cultural associations. Marx’s call for the workers of

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the world to unite is a call for internationalism, for solidarity of working class people across national boundaries. Thus, at a fundamental level, Marxism cannot accommodate nationalism. At the most Marxist anticapitalism could provide some ammunition to fire at the bourgeois nature of anti-colonial nationalism. Since imperialism is also a form of economic exploitation, nationalism could be read as a resistance to it. Nevertheless, political freedom is no guarantee for economic independence. John Brueilly is of the opinion that a complex phenomenon as nationalism is best understood as “a form of political behaviour in the context of the modern state and the modern state system” (1985: 1). Other ways of understanding nationalism such as through categories of economy, class, ideology, culture, do not facilitate a “general” understanding because nationalism is about politics above all else, and politics is all about having control over the state. I would like to offer my resistance to Brueilly’s notion of a “general” understanding of nationalism. As we have already noted nationalism is a highly differentiated category that cannot be thought of in terms of a general understanding. Brueilly believes that the compulsion for political freedom is at the heart of nationalism. If that is so, then why does nationalism in one avatar or the other persist even after a nation attains political freedom? As we shall see shortly, there are many forms of nationalism: cultural, religious, linguistic, etc. Even after a nation comes into being as a nation-state, nationalism in one form or the other may still persist. Nations being heterogeneous collectivities, there could be groups who could organize themselves on the basis of region, ethnicity or religion. These groups could then mobilize masses with the ultimate aim of secession or irredentism, giving rise to forms of sub-nationalisms. The sovereignty of a nation is thus not absolute. Rather, it is always questioned by one form of nationalism or the other. For this reason, nationalism is a forceful, enduring process. Nationalism as a concept or as a praxis cannot be subjected to closure.

VII The Indian nation-state has witnessed a focal shift from political nationalism to cultural nationalism in the nineties. Political nationalism is characterized by processes of democratization of society and the emergence of the masses into the public domains. Broadly speaking, a form of nationalism that seeks to build a nation on the presumption of a unified, homogeneous culture would be called cultural nationalism. Cultural nationalism focuses on the community as it is considered the

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repository of “authentic” culture. Disillusionment with Enlightenment values of liberal individualism and structures of modernity that emphasize homogenization and centralization has led to a revival of interest in the collective entity called community. In recent political debates, a group of theorists (Ashis Nandy, T.N. Madan, for instance) pose community as an alternative to the secular nation-state. They believe that a community that is based on a set of commonalities contains certain internal mechanisms to deal with dissent and create solidarities for the common good of the people. Communitarian debates engaged in by social scientists contain certain underlying assumptions about community. Firstly, there is this romantic notion of community as a well-knit, unified group grounded in traditional moral values. Such an assumption undermines the possibilities of difference, dissent and division that may have existed even in premodern communities. Secondly, there seems to be an assumption on their part that communities are repositories of authentic culture. This may be true to the extent that the community in question was closed to external influences. Nevertheless, such influences did operate in the form of invasions, wars, and intrusions by nomadic tribes, and travel for trade purposes, which transpired even in pre-modern communities, bringing about changes in the culture of that time. Thus, so-called authentic cultures of communities, eulogized by communitarian theorists need not have been really authentic or indigenous. Lastly, community traditions invariably perpetuate patriarchal structures of repression and therefore, setting up the community as an alternative to the state, without contesting its internal repressive tendencies, could be dangerously elitist. Privileging the community could automatically mean resurrecting a patriarchal and hierarchical edifice, which would be deleterious to the interests of women, as we have seen in one of the preceding sections. Cultural nationalism is based on the belief of the distinctiveness of one’s culture over that of another. A particular culture is designated as the culture of a national collectivity. Vedic Brahminism, Bharat Rashtra (unified territory) and anti-modernity (anti-West) were the defining elements of cultural nationalism which took birth in late eighteenth century Bengal and later spread to different parts of India. Most scholars very easily essentialize western and eastern nationalisms as political and cultural respectively (Hans Kohn, for instance). Alternatively, they see nineteenth century nationalisms as political and twentieth century nationalism as cultural. Nineteenth century Indian nationalism had a fixed, immutable goal which was the attainment of political independence. Twentieth century nationalism by contrast, is a far more complex phenomenon. There is a double-pronged attack on the nation from within

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(secessionist movements and communalism) and without (globalization). This has led to the mobilization of certain essentialist notions of nation and national identity. Migration of people and the resultant cross-cultural interactions arising out of a postnational order become threats to notions of purity. As a result, the category of culture is redefined and mobilized to resurrect the nation’s exclusivity, for which the iconography and rhetoric of the audio-visual media is utilized. Even in nineteenth century India the engagement with culture coincided with the struggle for political independence. But the terms of cultural nationalism have changed at the end of the twentieth century. In the Indian context, cultural nationalism is closely linked to religious nationalism generally dismissed as a form of fanaticism. As opposed to secularists, religious nationalists do not conceive of religion as a purely personal matter. Religious nationalism thus becomes an encounter with the western tradition of secularism that demarcated religion and politics into the private and public domains respectively. However, at the structural level, one can discover similarities between the two forms of nationalism, viz. secular and religious. Both demand supreme loyalty, one to the nation, the other to religion; both sanction violence and both glorify martyrdom. For this reason, contemporary scholars of nationalism like Anderson have shown through their works that even secular nationalism, despite its claims to the contrary, cannot transcend cultural elements (1983: 4). The Indian concept of secularism has however valorized tolerance of all faiths rather than separation of religion and politics as the crucial aspect of secularism. Loss of faith in civil society, particularly amongst the middle-classes all over the world, has led to the resurgence of religion as a defining factor in global politics. The post-colonial nations adopted secular nationalism but became disillusioned with it. Therefore, the search for alternative political paradigms led them to religion (Juergensmeyer 1993: 23). Religion, an inescapable category in the project of nation-building in post-colonial societies, has always been a close binding factor in a community. Therefore the religious identity of the people cannot be ignored in the process of forging a national identity. However, in a multireligious, multi-ethnic nation like India, the different religious communities come into conflict with each other. Movements based on religious nationalism gain political power by their ability to sanction violence. This results in the notion of dharma yudh (just war) or jihad (holy war). Religious leaders justify violence and war by casting war as a fight between good and evil forces. By appropriating the state’s power to kill, they confer a legitimate power on themselves. According to Rene

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Girard, a religious scholar who has formulated a sophisticated theory of violence, religion’s aim is to transfer a community's immanent violence on to a victim. The victim becomes a scapegoat that prevents the members of a community from turning violent against each other (in Heehs 131). For this reason, religious nationalists create an inimical other on whom the immanent violence can be unleashed. Girard does not take into account the political and sociological changes that lead people to violence. Therefore, Girard’s theory in dealing with the pathology of violence has only a limited utility. Religious nationalism is usually seen as a reactionary and regressive phenomenon for women as most religions sanction and demand their subordination. Women are generally called upon to uphold religious values and traditions. Women in their turn easily succumb to such injunctions as they are socialized into being god-fearing and submissive. Chatterjee points out that in nineteenth century Bengal, women were called upon to maintain traditions and observe rituals as the men were preoccupied with the more pressing task of gaining independence for the country (1992: 147). Religion is part of the identity of a community. Therefore resisting religion would mean resisting the community. In societies like ours, women maintain close economic, emotional and social links with groups such as the extended family, the neighbourhood, the local community centres and the like. Therefore, women have much to lose in breaking ties with the community. The choice between the individual self and the communal self belies claims of female agency. However, increasingly women are themselves becoming part of militant, religious-nationalist groups. Women sometimes join the militant ranks as a result of being victimized during communal riots, pogroms, etc., as it happened in Punjab and Kashmir. For example, the militant group Dukhtran-e-Millat in Kashmir is an all-women outfit. The need arises then to conceptualize women and their agency differently. It is necessary at this stage for us to address the rise of Hindu nationalism because it forms the fulcrum of cultural and religious nationalism in India. A largely middle class phenomenon, Hindu nationalism gained prominence as a result of the demands of modernity, on the one hand, and adherence to tradition on the other. In the nineteenth century, Hinduism was threatened by the missionaries who undertook large-scale conversions among the tribal and other lower-caste communities. This gave the Hindu movement, which is generally dated to the mid-nineteenth century, an added impetus (Jaffrelot 1999: 11-14).

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Historically, Hindu nationalism has been associated with fascism. Belief in a centralized strong leadership, thriving on the creation of an enemy and spreading hatred, notions of social, racial, ethnic purity – these are some of the prominent features of fascism. In the 1930s, Hindu nationalism was influenced by European fascism and leaders like Hitler and Mussolini (ibid: 51). What attracted the Hindu nationalists of Maharashtra to fascism was the militarization and transformation of society through inculcation of discipline. Savarkar, Golwalkar and all subsequent Hindu nationalists argue that an Indian identity in one way or another must be derived from a Hindu identity. Hindu nationalist ideology defines a Hindu, not as a person who follows the religion of Hinduism, but one who is born and lives in the geographical territory called India. The conflation of religious affiliation and territory as the defining constituent in the formation of national identity leads to their assimilationist ideas that create a national homogeneity. Golwalkar’s idea of nation and nationalism, inspired by the works of a German lawyer, Johann Kaspar Bluntschli, contained the fascist hatred of the other. He believed: They [Muslims] may stay in the country wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment – not even citizen’s rights (ibid: 56).

Hindu nationalism enjoys a hegemonic status in present day India. Growing disillusionment with the inadequacies of the Nehruvian interventionist and tutelary state, technological advances and economic imperatives, which forced India to open its doors to Western market forces, and the resurgence of religion are some of the factors that helped foster the growth of Hindu nationalism. Its impact on the cultural productions will be dealt with in detail in the fourth chapter. Nationalism will be understood in this study as a historically and politically inflected cultural discourse that is still in the making.

VIII It is not completely true that India won independence through nonviolence alone. Recent research has shown the considerable role of “terrorist” groups. The patterns of revolutionary terrorism were established in Bengal between 1906 and 1910 with organized terrorism having begun in 1906. The agenda of the “extremists” was political economy, swadeshi and the establishment of national institutions in educational and judicial

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fields. Aurobindo Ghosh was a great inspiration for “extremist” groups. His idea was to stage an armed insurrection and general revolt in the Indian army. Early Bengali writers of the freedom movement consider Aurobindo Ghosh as an apostle of “militant nationalism” (Heehs 1998: 43). Nationalism to Ghosh was a religion that came from God. Ghosh believed that India was destined by God to be a spiritual leader of humanity. Thus, freedom was indispensable to accomplish this. In order to achieve freedom, Ghosh advocated a militant uprising as a mode of resistance to colonialism. So far, we have seen “terrorism” being used as a strategy for Indian independence. When we examine terrorism in post-Independence India, we find that the term is used for what is officially known as subversive movements. The goal of militant movements such as the ones in Nagaland or Jammu and Kashmir is secession from the existing state. The use of violence in insurgency is a contrast to peaceful forms of political protest like that of Gandhi’s in India, Khomeini’s in Iran, Solidarity in Poland and the Civil Rights movements in the USA. Using several resources like cadre recruitment, propaganda, infiltration and so on, insurgent movements function like the national armies. They have the sympathies of intellectuals, whose resources are used in the service of ideological manipulation of cadres as well as “the people.” The people are crucial to the success of insurgent movements. The insurgent elite represent the grievances of the people against the official state. Insurgency is primarily a political phenomenon. Military considerations are secondary to political, social and economic policies. We may say that the central object of study in the nationalist and the insurgent discourses is the nation-state. One upholds it, the other contests it, but neither can abandon it.

IX This section deals with nationalism in the time of war. Most of the European nations came into existence after a war or a series of wars. The process of parturition involves blood spilling. Similarly, nations are born after bloody revolutions as for example, France and America. Michael Howard notes, “In nation-building as in nationalism force was the midwife of the historical process” (in Hutchinson and Smith 1994: 225). The search for the origins of a nation invariably leads us to a history of conflict. Nationalism demands total allegiance to the large political structure called

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nation-state. Historical evidence reveals that a decline in feudal and religious hostilities is concomitant with the birth of nation-states. This has been the experience of sixteenth and seventeenth century European nations like England, France and Spain as well as several African and Asian nations. In this sense, nationalism reduces incidents of small-scale clashes. On the other hand, nationalism has been the cause of large scale wars in terms of destruction and violence. India’s historiography of the anti-colonial resistance, of course, is dominated by the non-violent struggle spearheaded by Gandhi. This hegemonic representation of the Indian freedom struggle has been to a certain extent displaced in academia by a foregrounding of violent struggles of the tribal people, peasants, etc., creating thus a rupture in the dominant discourse of the Indian independence movement. The precolonial history however is replete with accounts of wars between feuding kings of dynasties like Marathas, Moguls and so on. The idea of the bloodless birth of the nation is undercut in a powerful way by the bloodbath of Partition. Thus violence as a part and parcel of the parturition of the Indian nation is etched upon the consciousness of the people of the sub-continent. From time immemorial, the authorities have always used war against an external enemy as a cementing force in times of increased internal differences. The image of a martyr is emotionally charged and few can claim not to be overwhelmed by it. Nationalism in war degenerates into chauvinism in which an intense hatred of the other is created and disseminated through various agencies like media, educational institutions, etc. Patriotism in war becomes a contagious and almost mandatory sentiment for a loyal citizen. The soldier, usually in the shadows in peacetime, is deified in war. Bordering on jingoism, patriotism in the time of war is reactionary, regressive, and is forced by a desperate nation-state upon its people. What is patriotism? Is it love of one's birthplace or a space associated with early dreams and aspirations? Is it pure mystique? Patriotism is usually associated with something concrete like land, territory and place of birth. It is, to Gilbert “love of one’s country, whether one’s country is thought of in nationalist terms or not’ (1998: 5). The term, nationalism is used in relation to a more amorphous thing like the nation-state. According to Gilbert, it involves the “proper object of patriotism” (ibid: 5) i.e., the nation. It is the most enigmatic of human sentiments and difficult to theorize. Nationalism and patriotism are often used interchangeably.

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Therefore, it would be useful to examine the subtle difference between the two. Patriotism is a sentiment that one may claim to possess even without having faith in nationalism as an ideology. It is possible today to be an Indian born American citizen, taking an oath of allegiance to the American nation and still claim to be a patriotic Indian. (In fact, the non-resident Indian goes out of his way to prove his love for the land of his birth!) However, a nationalist must be rooted in his/her territory and owe supreme loyalty and attachment to the nation. His/her belief in the concept of the nation-state must be absolute. A nationalist puts the nation above all other categories like caste, tribe, religion, class, etc. If patriotism is a primordial feeling of attachment to one’s native land (watan, patrie) what happens in the case of displacement?3 Most of all, how does the nation make its people die for its sake? These are some of the questions that have vexed scholars who have tried to theorize nation and nationalism. According to Anderson the nation is constituted of “horizontal comradeship”, i.e., the sense of community which arises in contiguity with the territory it occupies (1983: 7). This solidarity makes people die for the nation. Propagators of the theory of postnationalism reject patriotism as an outdated and dangerous phenomenon. Since World War II and Hitler’s excesses, patriotism with its subsequent total allegiance to the nation-state has become suspect. In recent Indian history, the Pokhran nuclear blasts in May 1998, followed by the Kargil conflict of May 1999, brought to the surface a fresh wave of patriotism or more appropriately jingoism.4 Arundhati Roy, Booker prizewinner and activist, declared in an article in a leading fortnightly that she would secede rather than be part of a nuclear India.5 The question is, “does this statement make her unpatriotic?” Is the desire for a peaceful, safe world in the common interest of humanity of a lower order than subscribing to a nuclear nation? The sentiment of patriotism throws up several tricky questions to which there are no straightforward answers. Small groups like family, school, club, etc., demand the loyalty of an individual. Individuals are generally loyal to those groups from which they are likely to gain one thing or another. The nation is the single largest group that calls for the loyalty of its inhabitants. Generally, this loyalty remains intact, even if the inhabitants of one nation migrate to another. This is best exemplified in diasporic writing. The diasporic community continues to feel a sense of belonging to the nation of its birth even though it is located outside its geographical limits. The purely subjective category of nation belongs to the realm of individual feelings, thoughts and imagination. The nation, in such a formulation, crosses the barriers of

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geography and creates solidarities beyond categories such as region, language, and so on that would otherwise create fissures. Nation here transforms itself into an emotional, individualist entity evoking sentiments of longing and belonging, nostalgia and desire. Clifford Geertz notes that a nation is formed through a combination of primordial and civic ties (in Smith and Hutchinson 1994: 31). At one level, patriotism, tied up as it is with belonging and identity, is a manifestation of primordiality. At another level, it is related to the visual politics of performance. Patriotism involves a set of practices that display loyalty to the nation. These practices could emerge from within individual groups or could be imposed from above, i.e., from the state. Pinning a flag on one’s dress on 15 August or flagwaving during a cricket match are some instances of the performative aspect of patriotism. Then there is patriotism at the level of representation. Cinema, advertisements and other popular cultural productions within the nation-space effectively evoke sentiments of patriotism through manipulation of images. This need not detain us here, as it will feature in a major way in other parts of this study. The history of patriotism dates back to Greece and Rome in the West. Only selected inhabitants were given citizenship. The citizen, being the chosen one, had to owe his allegiance to the state above everything else. Patriotism thus had a moral flavour. Children were considered as belonging to the larger family of the nation before they belonged to their parents. Then the advent of the church put to test one’s loyalty to the nation. The church was a universal institution and Christians all over the world owed their loyalty first to it. In the Middle Ages small groups like the city demanded loyalty. Tudor and Elizabethan England are the prototypes of national loyalties. The American and French revolutions first brought to the fore what we now know as patriotism. With the invention of the hydrogen bomb, patriotism began to be condemned as parochialism and detrimental to universal brotherhood and peace. What is the place of patriotism in a post-globalization era? If khadi in pre-independence India was a symbol of patriotism, the flaunting of brand names like Tommy Hilfiger and Reebok is the order of the day in globalized India. What then is the object of patriotism today? Indian immigrants in different parts of the world continue to call themselves patriotic Indians. Patriotism is here directed at the land of origin and associated with soil, motherland, and birthplace and so on, evoking sentiments of nostalgia. Arjun Appadurai reminds us that thinking about the future of patriotism would automatically lead us to check out the relevance of the nation-state today (1997: 160). According to Appadurai,

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nationalism is “itself diasporic”, that is, it no longer invokes images of a bounded territory (ibid: 160-1). In the theories of nation, there is a definite conceptual shift from the natural to the cultural. That is, nations which were thought of as collectivities of a single race, language, and culture, are now increasingly seen as entities that are invoked through the processes of imagination triggered by cultural products such as literature, cinema, TV, newspaper, etc. If such fundamental changes have taken place in the notion of nation, then it would follow that patriotism too should be conceptualized differently. Appadurai suggests that patriotism should shift from challenges to die for the nation to challenges to die for ideas (1997:176). The objects of patriotism would change in the scenario of an emergent world order in which borders and boundaries are blurred, and territories are no longer peopled by homogenous groups. Thus, with pluralism being the inevitable feature of the postnational global arena, Appadurai suggests, “Patriotism itself could become plural, serial, contextual and mobile” (1997: 176). The American response to the attacks on the World Trade Centre quite clearly belies such hopes. Patriotism thrives on creating fictions of the other, such as a dangerously belligerent neighbour, culturally inferior other society, and so on. Such beliefs are so cleverly engineered that they give rise to feelings of superiority towards oneself and disdain for the other. The state deploys a series of symbols in the service of patriotism like flags, anthems, parades, fleet reviews, etc. Despite such attempts on the part of the state, sometimes the media creates a disjuncture in the discourse of patriotism. In a CNN report on the Desert Storm operation in Iraq, some soldiers were shown weeping when they admitted that they did not want to be in the war. Such media images rupture the myth of the patriotic soldier. War discourse channelizes the inherent feeling of love for the place of one’s origin towards the state’s expansionist purposes. More importantly, it uses the sentiment of patriotism to breed hatred for the other. After all, the borderline between patriotism and xenophobia is a thin one. The following chapters of this study will illustrate how war narratives achieve this purpose.

X The idea of nation as a distinct territorial and cultural space is threatened at a time when Third World countries have opened their markets for the free flow of capital from First World countries. Tagore’s

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romantic vision of a postnational world and his denigration of the category of nation in his long essay “Nationalism” is way ahead of his time coming as it did in 1917. The ethnological diversity of India is to Tagore, “her problem from the beginning of history” (1985: 4). This diversity has been negotiated through “social regulation of difference, on the one hand and the spiritual recognition of unity on the other” (ibid: 5). The nation is an imported category from the West into the East, which Tagore idealizes as “childlike in its manner” (ibid: 7). Tagore further distinguishes between power and human ideals. A nation organizes people into a group for the mechanical purpose of self-preservation. However, as power grows with the help of technology, then nations play upon the human’s inherent greed and begin to occupy more and more space until they become the ruling force. Tagore condemns nation as the least human and least spiritual collectivity. He has praise for the spirit of western civilization but denigrates the nation of the West. The former is manifested through philosophical thinking, literature, ideals of freedom and justice. The latter is the power-hungry imperialist government that seeks to invade, to colonize and to subjugate. He explains: The truth is that the spirit of conflict and conquest is at the origin and in the centre of western nationalism, its basis not social co-operation. (1985:21)

He sees an inherent paradox between the western spirit and the western nation. Nation breeds evil and the birth of every new nation is the harbinger of danger. Nationalist symbols like flags, anthems (an irony indeed that a song composed by Tagore is India’s national anthem) are dismissed as symbols of evil. Tagore homogenizes the West as an advanced, industrialist, materialist greed-driven society and therefore the concept of nation coming from the West could not be free of these drawbacks. Patriotism to Tagore is chauvinism. It creates demons of neighbours and spreads hatred, instead of love. Patriotism is cultivated through an insidious system that indulges in fabrication. Minds of young pupils are filled with hate through means such as display of war trophies, propagating pride in killing the enemy, and boasting about conquests. In a prophetic vein, Tagore pre-empts the notion of postnationalism when he says, “The whole world is becoming one country through scientific facility” (1985: 99). These are probably the earliest thoughts of a poet that envision a postnational world order. Tagore’s views on nationalism, however, do not equip us to deal with the concept as anti-colonial resistance. Nationalism at one point of time in all colonized nations was the political imperative of the day. As we have already noted, nationalism had epistemic value in pre-independent India.

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To sum up, it may be said that this chapter sufficiently problematizes our objects of study in this book. In the subsequent pages then, the term “nation” will be understood as a gendered, territorial and cultural construct with an emotional content. The state is a political entity which gives legitimacy to a nation. Nationalism is a process aimed at defining the “nation”, a means, we may say, to narrate the nation. The next chapter will examine how the Indian nation is narrated in military literature.

Notes 1 Mayo’s Mother India (1927) is a quintessential colonial text that justifies the colonizer’s civilizing mission in India. I have used Excerpts from Mother India edited by Mrinalini Sinha (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1997). 2 Second Dorab Tata Memorial Lecture, New Delhi, excerpts from Express Magazine, Vadodara, 4 March 2001. 3 I have in mind the Sindhi community who lost all of Sindh to Pakistan during Partition in August 1947. Sindhi literature is dominated by nostalgia for their lost land. If patriotism is only love of birthplace or native land, then the Sindhi’s love of Sindh would turn out to be anti-nationalist with Sindh in neighbouring Pakistan now. 4 The Indian army conducted an operation in the Kargil sector of Jammu and Kashmir in May 1999 to flush out militants who had intruded into Indian territory. The conflict received unprecedented media attention, resulting in what Nivedita Menon called “plastic patriotism” (6 July 1999, Times of India, Ahmedabad). 5 This is with reference to Arundhati Roy’s article entitled “The End of Imagination” in Frontline, 1 August 1998.

CHAPTER THREE THE UNIFORM(ED) SELF: A STUDY OF MILITARY LITERATURE

War is a quarrel between two thieves, too cowardly to fight their own battle; therefore they take boys from one village, and another village; stick them into uniforms, equip them with guns and let them loose like wild beasts against each other. —Thomas Carlyle

I This chapter examines the largely insular discourse of military literature and considers it as a body of texts that negotiates a space within which notions of nation and nationalism are defined and redefined. So far, military literature has been the subject of very little systematic study. In his introduction to the “Military Affairs Series,” Maroof Raza notes, “Today, India’s media, as well as a number of intellectuals and academic institutions have started to debate issues of national security, and this is the start of a healthy tradition” (2000: 5). My own subject position while making an intervention in this area is somewhat ambivalent. As a nonmilitary person, I do not qualify as an “insider”. Yet, having been the wife of an army officer, I am not entirely an “outsider”. It is in the interstitial spaces that are created by such overlapping identities that I take my position. The battlefront-homefront hiatus crucial to the gendered nature of military discourse would ensure my outsider status. As Jean Bethke Elshtain puts it, “Because women are exterior to war, men interior, men have long been the great war-story tellers, legitimated in the role because they have ‘been there’ or because they have greater entrée into what it ‘must be like’” (1987: 212, emphasis original). Firstly, the term military literature needs explication. Military literature or War Studies has a long tradition. War Studies as a discipline was established in 1918 to enable indoctrination of male college students (Carol Gruber in Hanley: 1991: 19). Concurrently, liberal arts departments in the universities were used to induce a notion of cultural superiority.

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Most war studies courses canonized American and British culture. The earliest to contest the canon mainly constituted by and of American males were women. Subsequently the canon constructed by women was destabilized by women of colour. Paul Fussell’s The Great Warand Modern Memory (1975) created a mythology of war literature by defining the “sources, the form, and the terrain of war literature” (ibid: 21). In Fussell, men in war by and large are victims of a system rather than perpetrators of violence (ibid: 22). Literature has proven abilities to mould our thinking of war. Most soldiers who are fed on a diet of highly romanticized accounts of war go to the front without the basic awareness of their need to kill once on the battlefield (ibid: 27). For this reason the first killing is usually a traumatic episode in the life of a soldier and is shown as a rite of passage moment in some films. (We will see this in our analysis of Border in the next chapter.) In Fussell, there is the strong idea put forward that the soldier is the biggest victim of war (ibid: 30-31). He is without agency. According to Fussell’s account the impression formed is that war is restricted to the battlefield and that there is no war outside of it. The clear demarcation of space limits our understanding of war and negates the possibility of designating belligerent postures between nations as war (ibid: 33). I mean by military literature all the literature that is written on war and military affairs by military officials; and non-military writers: journalists, defence analysts and newspaper reporters. Literature coming from within the establishment (military officials) will be called “insider” literature and that from outside the establishment (journalists, defence analysts) as “outsider” literature. This dichotomy, although specious, will in my opinion enhance our understanding of military literature generally designated as “official” literature and the other as “unofficial” literature. The former as representative of the state carries the weight of authority, authenticity and truth or rather more significantly the burden of a rigorous censorship. The latter, free from constraints of the “official”, enjoys relatively more freedom to analyse, critique and understand defence issues which are seen as crucial to the security and empowerment of a nation. The division is based on the location of the author. One would imagine that a soldier who fights a war would be the one with utmost authority to narrate it. But even within the army there is a hierarchy in which the infantry soldier is considered the one most fit to be a narrator of war. His proximity to the “enemy,” his direct involvement in action bestows him with the authority. The idea of the witness is crucial here. The process of

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seeing and consequently, the one who sees is valorized. The seer, then is one who sees and as in its other meaning, a thinker, a philosopher. Therefore the witness is one who sees and one who is able to philosophize about what he sees. Giorgio Agamben in his Remnants of Auschwitz (2002) writes about the witness in the context of the holocaust. One of the chief motives, he says that prevented people in the camps from committing suicide, was the desire to be a witness. This brings us to the genesis of a memoir, which is one of the genres I deal with. What the ‘eye’ sees in an event the ‘I’ of the first person account is desirous of reporting in written form. Thus a memoir is driven by the need to share significant, historically important public events of which one was fortunate or unfortunate to be a part of i.e. to bear witness to an era or an event. This explains the public nature of the narrative of a memoir. Eschewing personal details, the memorist tries to give a picture of him playing a significant role in the public domain. As against this there is the diary, which is another genre in my selection of texts. A diary is not written for public consumption. Sometimes it is made public posthumously. When it enters the public domain, once again it acquires the aura of authenticity akin to a memoir, notwithstanding the selective process even in diary writing. However, in the narrative of a diary there is no temporal dislocation between the event and its narration. Thus the witness is a kind of bearer of truth or authentic knowledge. Agamben through his etymological analysis of the term “witness” draws our attention to the paradoxes inherent in the process of witnessing. The word whose root lies in the Latin words, testis and superstes, which mean a third party in a trial and a person who has lived through and experienced a significant event respectively. The first implies neutrality and objectivity, the second by virtue of his participation cannot be neutral. As we can see, Agamben complicates the position of a witness by making it politically fraught and theoretically complex. This results in a discrepancy in the structure of a testimony. The idea of the witness as bearer of authentic knowledge forces us to examine the notion of authenticity, which has received considerable attention in contemporary debates. The most famous is Benjamin’s “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, which deals with authenticity in the context of art. Charles Taylor on the other hand understands authenticity as self-fulfilment and identifies it as the heart of modern malaise. I would like to extrapolate from these debates to try to understand what I call an anxiety for authenticity detected in the texts examined.

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For purposes of analysis and critique and most importantly as artefacts that provide valuable insights into the notion of nation and nationalism, I examine a selection of texts belonging to various genres. My methodology involves reading memoirs, diaries, war accounts and newspaper reportage as narratives that construct a particular idea of nation and nationalism. The period selected for this study is the nineties and the beginning of the new millennium. Contextually, the selected texts are not necessarily located in the nineties. Nevertheless, their publication in this period significantly reflects the political climate of the period under study. A growing interest in military matters is an outcome of the shift from centrist to rightist politics. This shift provokes new ways of constructing or imagining the nation. In an essay on the increasing role of the military from the eighties onward, Sumona Dasgupta argues, “While the military has not been politicized in India there has been significant expansion of the role of the military since the 1980s, which may be regarded as symptomatic of what can be called the ‘militarization of politics’” (in Raza 2001: 47). The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was the dominant party in the coalition that came to power in the nineties. Although three wars were fought during the earlier regime of the Congress party, the BJP is ideologically closer to militarism than the Congress. Its propagation of militarism dates back to its association with Fascism in Europe. As already seen in Chapter II, Hindu nationalists allied themselves ideologically with leaders like Hitler and Mussolini. The move away from the Nehruvian non-alignment policy to the nineties’ pro-active approach marks a clear paradigm shift in the way the nation imagined and projected itself in the global order. Also of importance is an increased visibility of the armed forces in the cultural landscape of the nation in this period. Whether it was in films, television serials, or advertisements with soldiers as protagonists or the use of guns and cut-outs of uniformed soldiers that formed the background to the Ganesh idols in the pandals of Ganesh Chaturthi festival or the camouflage dress as a fashion statement or the sight of army officers giving interviews on TV; the army during this time seemed to have surely come out of its barracks and entered the cultural arena of the nation-space. It is this popularisation of the military man as the national hero through cultural artefacts that makes the nineties an apt choice for the periodization of this study.

II I follow here a chronological classification of texts rather than a

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generic one. My aim is to study the historical evolution of the notion of nation and nationalism through military literature. I begin this section with a reading of a pre-Independence Army officer’s diary, published in 2000, with the idea of mapping out the historical origins of the idea of nation. More importantly, the purpose is to detect the origins of a national identity, if any. The volume Reversing the Gaze: Amar Singh’s Diary, A Colonial Subject’s Narrative of Imperial India records a selected portion of the eighty-nine volumes of eight hundred pages each of Amar Singh’s diary written between 1898 and 1942. The selections in this volume are from the year 1898 to 1905. Amar Singh was a Rajput from the royal family of Jodhpur. For this study, he is important so far as he was one of the first few King’s Commissioned Officers of the Indian Army.1 The selections I read from the book speak of his days in the pre-Independence army. It is a useful document for us as it reveals the genesis of the structures of dominance and subordination crucial to the organization of the armed forces. The editors call his position “liminal” as he was located between two societies, Rajput and British, “the first ‘black’, princely, and subordinate, the second ‘white’, colonial and dominant” (Rudolph et al 2000: 4). The British considered the royal personages as their allies and treated them differently from the common man. Although politically, the princely states did not come under British rule, there was much fraternization between the two groups. The royal family members sought to assimilate themselves into British society by adopting their manners and customs. The need to gain approval and be co-opted along with resentment at being treated as inferior is a central paradox in the British-princely state relations. Thus Amar Singh’s Rajput identity becomes crucial to his military identity. As the editors put it, “the military career becomes the site of his liminality, to adapt, to refashion or to resist – the choice is up to him” (ibid: 16). Amar Singh was part of one of the contingents that was sent to China to quell the Boxer Rebellion. He records the sight of corpses lying around in the town of Shai Hai Kwan in a journalistic style consciously eliminating feelings and sentiment. Amar Singh’s character reveals a thorough internalization of Rajput cultural stereotypes. He talks of death on the battlefields for a Rajput as an honourable, desirable death. In his account of the battle at Lijapoo, he notes with great acuity “Of the whole lot, these two acted like heroes” (ibid: 173, emphasis mine). So, war is about acting like heroes; it is about enacting a pre-written script that valorizes heroism. His description of the battle is comic, almost quixotic in

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nature. The confusion that occurs in war, the resultant unnecessary deaths and the excessive glorification of soldiers’ gallantry, which at times is plain foolhardiness, is something that cannot be ordinarily found in Indian war memoirs. The following description would illustrate my comment: Anyhow, it was a good day’s work and the retreat was quite light and full of talk. All were very excited and each said that he had killed some two, some three and some one. But they had only finished the wounded ones (ibid: 173).

We must also note that undeniably for us, reading a battle account of 1901, when Amar Singh went into battle on horseback with a spear in his hand, has a touch of the old, legendary mythic battles. It has the quality of a boy’s adventure story. Today we know even a street fight can be more lethal. Killing then had a romantic edge to it. Speaking about the enemies he injured, he remarks: They had an expression of great pain and horror or fear or whatever it may be called. It was also the same with the other two that were knocked with the revolver. I can safely say without exaggeration or boasting or selfpraise that my temper and nerve seemed to be quite calm. Of course I was a little excited (ibid: 174).

Amar Singh writes candidly about the racial discrimination prevalent in the army. “I would not like to be treated like a coolie”, he says (ibid: 183). At the same time, he is in awe of British culture. He is grateful to the British for inculcating in him the manners of a Victorian gentleman and is pleased that on many occasions the British did not find it difficult to accept him as one of them. The Imperial Cadet Corps was formed in India to train Indians as army officers. Its agenda was to create battalions of Indian officers who would rule at home and serve the empire abroad. The “refining” of the native aristocrats helped the British to further their collaborative enterprise with the princely states in order to secure their rule in the colony. Lord Curzon who was instrumental in setting up the Imperial Cadet Corps was very clear about the kind of soldier that was to be trained by the Corps. The Indian aristocrat was trained to have a career “suitable to his rank, congenial to his tastes, and free from danger to our own military and political system” (ibid: emphasis mine). The denial of King’s Commission to Indian princes trained for the army sprang from the terrifying thought of “a black man commanding a white man” (ibid: 236). Indian officers graduating from Sandhurst were posted to an all-Indian unit so that there was no chance of an Indian officer commanding British troops (Chaudhuri 1978: 178).

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Amar Singh’s King’s Commission did not automatically mean that he would be treated on par with British officers. Racism was far too deeply entrenched for that to happen. The liberal policies of the British government were curtailed through rigid bureaucratic procedures that made the King’s Commissioned Officers (KCOs) lose their pension and seniority. Even as the first Indian to command a regiment as an acting Major, Amar Singh had to face dissent from the British officers who were technically under his command. One would believe that being an Indian in the army during the preIndependence period would be fraught with moral dilemmas. The diary records such a contradiction while narrating the episode of the civil disobedience movement during which the army was sent out to maintain law and order. Amar Singh, his sympathies suspect, was not sent to lead the troops. He states, “… though I had no sympathy with the rioters, I certainly am against the passing of the Rowlatt Bill for which all these troubles had taken place” (2000: 243). The Rowlatt Bill was inherently unjust and oppressive the passing of which led to riots. The Army was called to maintain law and order. Amar Singh being an officer in the British Army, perceived the rioters as law breakers, not as nationalists. He was more worried about being penalized for manslaughter if he gave the orders for firing. As an Indian, he should have been concerned that the ones who would be fired upon would be his own countrymen. Clearly then, the feeling of oneness central to nationhood was yet to be fostered. The diary reflects a period in history during which notions of nation and nationalism were dormant. The focus was on the region of Jodhpur in present day Rajasthan. Feudalism was the dominant social structure, loyalty was sworn to individual princely states and nationalism manifested itself not as a strong group sentiment against colonial rule but as strong resentment against racial discrimination. The inclusion of the diary has helped us to get a historical perspective on the idea of nation. The diary’s unrelenting focus on the local indicates the nascent stage of the nationalistic spirit. The foregrounding of the community, in this case, the Rajput, develops as we progress in time into the larger community of the nation. According to Sudhir Chandra, the nineteenth century was witness to a staunch regional consciousness, which was “in many parts of the country, projected as nationalism in its own right” (1992: 116). The next section deals with a text which gives us an idea of the early formulations of the nationalistic spirit in the diasporic community. Thus, from the local, we move to the transnational perspective of the “national question.”

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III The characterization of the Indian independence movement as a peaceful one based on Gandhi’s principle of ahimsa is central to nationalist historiography as well as to the collective national consciousness. However, the postmodernist engagement with the fragment rather than with the totalizing grand narrative has resulted in the recovery and circulation of marginal narratives. The history of the Rani of Jhansi regiment of Subhash Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army (INA) is one such narrative resurrected with the publication of the memoir of Capt. Lakshmi Sahgal, titled A Revolutionary Life: Memoirs of a Political Activist. The book, Fidelity and Honour, by Menezes on the history of the Indian army has a whole chapter on the INA without a word on the Rani of Jhansi regiment (1999: 372-403). The publication of Sahgal’s memoir in 1997 as part of the publishers’ “Fifty Years of Freedom Specials” seeks to highlight such elisions in the histories written by male writers. The book is a combination of memoir, oral history and essay, with historical, political and feminist implications. According to the publisher Ritu Menon, the idea behind this book is “restoring women to history and restoring their history to women” (in Sahgal: 1997: vi). In the introduction, Geraldine Forbes says that the formation of the regiment was “one of the first conscious attempts in world history to integrate women into the military as a fighting force” (ibid: xiii). In his address to the domiciled Indians in Malaya, Subhash Chandra Bose used the legend of Rani of Jhansi to affirm the heroic nature of women. He eulogized women by stating, “Our brave sisters … have shown that when the need arises they could, like their brothers, shoot very well” (ibid: xix). Sahgal realized in the course of recruiting women in the INA that this unique venture would also have far reaching socio-economic consequences and lead to the empowerment of women. Bose too believed that the experience in the women’s regiment could, after it had served its purpose, be used to end women’s oppression by men. Displacement from the familiarity of one’s homes can be liberating or is sometimes a necessary condition for liberation. This is evident in Sahgal’s memoir when she talks about the Ranis joining the INA out of a desire to leave the oppressive confines of their homes. The nationalist indoctrinations came later. However, it is my submission that the formation of the women’s regiment had three functions. Capt. Mohun Singh of the INA had announced the dissolution of the regiment in December 1942 before Bose came from Germany and took charge of it. At that time, the strength of the

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INA had dwindled to 12,000 (Menezes 1999: 383). Sheer exigency made Bose start a women’s regiment even though women were not considered to be battle worthy. Two, the INA was accused of being a puppet army of the Japanese as it was formed by the officers and troops of the Indian army who had surrendered to the Japanese. The women’s regiment would give it a semblance of dignity as it could be used as an example of the voluntary nature of the recruitments into the INA. Three, it served a symbolic purpose. Bose’s government in exile worked towards producing a prototype of the Indian nation. Bose wanted to propagate the use of Roman Hindustani as he had done successfully with the recruits in INA. He wanted to spread the knowledge of English, which to him was the language of science and technology. He also had the rather impractical idea of evolving a uniform dress and eating habits in order to forge a national identity instead of plural regional identities. Thus the women’s regiment would serve the purpose of showing to the world, the kind of egalitarian society that he envisaged for a free India. Women are invariably the bearers of modernity or tradition as befits the ruling powers. The Taliban in Afghanistan perhaps is best known for using women as sites of tradition. The impositions of the burqa, the sanctions on schooling and careers for women, etc, are believed to be in keeping with religious doctrines. As we will see in the following chapter, popular Hindi cinema also endorses the Hindu nationalist idea of women as repositories of authentic Indian culture. In the same vein, the granting of voting rights to women in most postcolonial societies is a marker of modernity. The incorporation of women in the army thus carries a symbolic value. As Yuval-Davis notes, “Incorporating women into the military contains a double message: firstly, that women, at least, are equal members of the national collectivity; but secondly, and probably more importantly, that all members of the national collectivity are incorporated, at least symbolically, into the military” (1997: 98, emphasis original). Thus if Bose’s government in exile was conceived as a microcosm of a future Indian government, then Yuval-Davis’s observation would seem perfect. The INA being a revolutionary liberation army used women as symbols of modernity that promised equality between the sexes. Bose’s gesture of inducting women in his INA, motives notwithstanding, was far ahead of its time.2 By June 1943, the INA was retreating and it was clear that the Ranis would never fight. Quite expectedly, the women were taken seriously neither by the British who thought of them as harmless nor by the Japanese who found the whole idea a ridiculous one. Ultimately the Ranis for all their excitement of being in the fighting forces ended up in the

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traditional roles assigned to women in the army, i. e., as nurses. The frustration that resulted was vented out through a petition to Bose signed in blood that read: Why are we being treated thus? You gave us the name of the valiant Rani of Jhansi … you assured us that we could fight in the thick of the battle like the Rani, that our presence in the armed forces would demoralize our enemies and retrieve the Indian soldiers from the British army (Sahgal, 1997: xxii).

All the same, the women’s regiment even when ordered to retreat was exposed to the danger and horror of war. Marginalizing their role due to their retreat is in itself a male standard of evaluation by which only those who engage in battle are worthy of glory. Even if they did not actually take part in an offensive, they were still subjected to heavy air raids, trench life, capture and interrogation. They took part in several skirmishes with the enemy and even lost two of their members. After all how many male soldiers really fight in a war? According to a study, during World War II only 15 per cent of soldiers ever fired a gun (Yuval-Davis, 1997: 109). Women have traditionally been ascribed the role of the peacemaker. The essentialist construction of the female as mother gives rise to the image of woman as pacifist (Ruddick, ibid: 113). Her nurturing role, which is “natural” to her sex, undermines the attempts to represent her as a warrior woman in the cultural arena. The memoir contests such a construction of the woman. Instead, it belongs to the virangana tradition, a parallel tradition in Indian literary and visual arts that celebrates the exploits of the warrior woman. Rani of Jhansi and Razia Sultan, for instance, constitute the Indian collective imagination of the woman-aswarrior. Shikhandi, the eunuch in The Mahabharata was not killed by Bhisma as it was considered cowardly to kill anyone but a man. Yet, women have seldom been outside a war. In the same epic, Madri is brought to Hastinapur by King Pandu as a war trophy. In The Ramayana, Kaikeyi draws the chariot of her husband King Dashrath on the battlefield. The women who had served in the INA went back to their homes and the dream of social empowerment remained unfulfilled. A similar dystopia is articulated by Sahar Khalifa, a Palestinian writer, when she asks: What happened to Algerian women after independence? Women returned to the rule of the harem and to covering their heads. They struggled, carried arms and were tortured in French prisons … Then what? They went out into the light and the men left them in the dark. It was as though

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freedom was restricted to men alone. What about us? Where is our freedom and how can we get it? They shall not deceive us (in Cooke and Woollacot, 1993: 186). .

Like military memoirs of male officers, Sahgal’s work too eschews personal details. Except for the first chapter detailing Sahgal’s childhood days and influences, the rest of the memoir narrates only her experiences with the INA. It is also marked by a lack of emotion. While describing the condition of Malaya after the Japanese takeover, Sahgal relates with chilling objectivity about the Japanese who displayed the heads of a Malay and a Chinese. She says, “Needless to say this proved to be a most effective measure and prevented further looting” (1997: 29). Whether it is a conscious effort to react pragmatically “like a man” or whether it is the voice of a person who had seen the chaos and was relieved that the solution was found, even if inhuman, is difficult to say. The INA raises the pertinent issue of what it means to be a soldier serving in the colonial army. As Indian soldiers of the British army, did they owe allegiance to the Crown or to the Indian nation, which was still under colonial rule? The decision to court martial the officers who had joined the INA created a big controversy. Finally however, their sentence was remitted. The committee was sympathetic to the INA as it felt it was natural to be nationalistic and join the INA instead of being POWs to the Japanese forces. Sahgal glosses over these issues in her memoir as for her the patriotism of the INA forces was beyond question and the antagonism of some of her countrymen towards the INA was tragic. The memoir speaks glowingly of the patriotism of Indians abroad. It bears testimony to the notion of a nationalism that can cross physical boundaries. As the INA was formed outside India, the narrative contains perhaps one of the earliest accounts of the reactions of the diaspora to the freedom movement. Sahgal says, “The three years under Japanese occupation were years of regeneration for the entire Indian community of East Asia, numbering over three million” (1997: 35). The diaspora was largely constituted of poor migrant labourers and they were given a new identity as freedom fighters of their motherland with which they still had emotional links. Sahgal’s memoir bears testimony to the idea of a transnational nationalism. The nation therefore is invested with emotional content.

IV In this section of the chapter, we analyze Lt. Gen. S.K. Sinha’s memoir, A Soldier Recalls (1992), which seems to me more interesting

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than the rest (Gen. J.N. Chaudhuri, Lt. Gen. B.M. Kaul, etc.) because it raises a crucial question that has a bearing on the understanding of nation formation in India: can the military be completely apolitical? The memoir comes from a man who dared to question the superiority of the bureaucracy in a milieu in which quiescence is the norm for the soldier.3 The rebellious streak should not however lead us to believe that the memoir contests the category of nation in a radical manner. While it questions the relationship of the military vis-à-vis the state, the endorsement of the nation as a supreme entity remains intact. Sinha while relating an anecdote of his days in the British army mentions that he often entered into arguments with his British colleagues about the INA, which according to the latter consisted of a bunch of traitors. Later, the second in command gave an order that no discussion about the INA or any political matters be conducted in the Mess. The army top brass and their political masters have always been wary of officers who take a stand on political issues. President Venkataraman also had gently chided Sinha when he had expressed a desire to discuss the Akali issue in Punjab. General Chaudhuri describes Major General Negrib of Egypt in 1964 in the following words: He appeared to be very unsure of his position and made no comments politically, militarily, or otherwise and like a sensible soldier kept his mouth shut (1978: 185).

At the same time, he is of the opinion that “some form of political doctrination was necessary for a soldier to make sure he understood what he was fighting for” (ibid: 171). To Frantz Fanon, a soldier of an adult nation should be aware that he is in the service of the nation and not of his commanding officer. The national military must be used to detribalize and unify a nation (1967: 165). Sinha too saw a close relationship between politics and the military and realized that the military could not be entirely apolitical. The implausibility of a fully apolitical army is thus made quite clear from within the army establishment as well as from without. The memoir contains many anecdotes that highlight the perennial tension between the army and the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy constantly keeps a check on the powers of the military so as to assuage an inherent fear in any country about the unchecked power of the army. Although in India the sheer size of the country, combined with the army’s own disinterest in a take-over would make such fears unwarranted, they still persist. India’s strong democratic tradition has guaranteed the

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supremacy of civilian over military institutions. With the removal of the post of Commander-in chief and the appointment of the elected President as the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, the elected Union Government has full powers in policy decisions with regard to military matters. The military has a well-defined, limited role and is fully under the control of the bureaucracy. Although it enjoys complete operational freedom during war, it is strictly kept out of policy matters. In an essay on a comparative study of civil-military relations in India and Pakistan, Maroof Raza notes, “it [the Army] has often appeared to those contemplating social and political disorder in India, a staunch ‘nononsense’ defender of the legitimately elected government” (2001: 14). The Indian army’s tradition of unquestioning obedience of orders from superiors has led to loss of lives of troops and officers in wars. In spite of it, the Indian army believes in staying out of the business of politicking. J.P. Dalvi’s Himalayan Blunder (1969) illustrates the impact of noninterference in political affairs. An analysis of the book follows in the next section. We have noted earlier in our reading of Amar Singh’s diary that when they were part of the British army, Indian officers and troops found themselves in discomfiting situations at times. Sinha’s memoir too dwells on the contradictory pulls of nationalism and loyalty to the army one serves in. For instance, they were sent to Indonesia to fight the revolutionaries. It was strange that Indians, who were themselves under colonial rule, were suppressing the freedom movement of an Asian country. But they were led to believe that the Commander-in-Chief Field Marshal Auchinleck wanted the British officers to hand over a highly professional and disciplined army to the Indians. The Indian soldier through his participation in war in the South Asian theatres became aware of the declining supremacy of the British army. The mutinies in the army were also evidences of growing discontent. Sinha suggests: We had seen Asian nationalism rising from the ashes of European colonialism. I am convinced that the realisation by the British that they could not rely on the Indian army to uphold their imperial rule over India, was a major factor which influenced their decision to quit India (1992: 80).

The pre-Independence army began getting communalised around 1946 as a result of Jinnah’s influence and the Calcutta communal riots. Sinha recalls, “I remember Colonel Nasar Ali Khan who later joined the Pakistan Army, once telling me, ‘Every time I think that you come from Bihar, my blood begins to boil’” (ibid: 85). Indian Muslim officers had started

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visiting Jinnah and that according to the author was the genesis of the politicization of the Pakistan army. The memoir records the traumatic partitioning of the Indian Army after the creation of Pakistan. The Indian and Pakistani armies perhaps have faced the unique dilemma of fighting against their own brothers and colleagues. Officers and troops who had been in the same regiment barely a few months ago had to aim their guns at each other in the Kashmir operations of 1948. The late Field Marshall Cariappa was even supposed to have gone to Lahore upon the invitation of General Iftikar Ahmed for a horse show during the Kashmir operations. The desire to protect the organization and its personnel from disrepute results in a clever evasion of the issue of war crimes. War crimes in the Bangladesh operations are brushed aside in a single paragraph. Admitting that moral standards get eroded in war, Sinha reiterates the high standard of discipline in the Indian army and the war crimes committed are dismissed as exceptions that were dealt with in “an exemplary manner” (1992: 229). He also gives an account of his experience of dealing with POWs. Here he gives unstinted praise for the Indian army’s treatment of POWs in spite of a firing incident in which some of them were killed. For the first time foreign correspondents were allowed permission to visit the POWs’ camps. However, Sinha acknowledges that the visit was stagemanaged. The army showed the Meerut camp to the foreign Press in spite of the inconvenience caused and not the Agra one as that was where the firing episode had occurred. The result was an impressive report on the Indian army in The Washington Post. Later at the convention on “Application of Humanitarian Rights to Warfare”, organized by the UN and the International Red Cross Society in Italy, the writer uses this very report as proof of the exemplary treatment given to POWs by the Indians. In his report on the Indo-Pak war of 1971, Sinha indulges in the denigration of the enemy which is a crucial element in war discourse. Speaking about the moral laxity of Pakistani Generals, he remarks, “Yahya Khan with his girl friend ‘General Rani’ is reported to have stayed for some time in the Jaurian Inspection Bungalow” (1992: 261). The Hamoodur Rahman Report, instituted by President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto of Pakistan which probed the causes of the defeat of Pakistan in the Indo-Pak war of 1971 was published in a leading Indian weekly (Halarnkar 2001: 32-40). The elation at the victory in Kargil and the consistent campaign against “cross-border terrorism” created an interest in the previous wars fought between India and Pakistan. The report mentioned Gen Yahya Khan among others as morally degenerate and professionally incompetent (ibid: 37). It is equally interesting to note that the weekly chose to publish such a

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report at a time of increasing hostilities between the two nations. The report aspired to feed the jingoistic spirit of the time. Such practices are significant components of the politics of hate that precedes and follows a war. J P Dutta, as we shall see in the next chapter, uses strong anti-Muslim sentiments in his film Border. Sinha’s descriptions of war are like battle reports from a tactical point of view. War is not seen as a human tragedy that involves loss of life, displacement, hunger and so on. It comes across as an enactment of a sand model exercise. This may be attributed to Sinha’s extended tenures as a staff officer. Incidentally, during every war, he had held staff appointments. Sinha writes about his experience with insurgency in Nagaland. Instead of gaining insights on a sensitive issue like insurgency, we only get to know about the author’s self-interest. He says boastfully, “Of the six brigades in the Division, we managed to notch up the highest score in terms of clashes with hostiles, casualties inflicted on them and the weapons recovered from them” (1992: 209). There is a school boyish delight of getting more points for his team in these lines. Further he states: I had been emphasising on all my unit commanders that the real test of success in counter insurgency operations was the number of service weapons captured and the number of clashes with hostiles in which we got the better of them. I had been liberal in putting up officers and men who had done well, for gallantry awards (1992: 214).

However, he confesses later the disastrous consequences of instilling a competitive sense of such puerile nature. The result was that young officers greedy for awards began harassing even the innocent people of Nagaland through interrogation involving third degree methods. One’s domestic life and other matters are considered trivial, mundane and extraneous to a reflective, artistic study. Nonetheless, unlike most military memoirs, the family occupies more space in this narrative. Sinha’s grandfather and father served as police officers during the British days. He then talks of his marriage and birth of his four children and their marriages. A frequently elided part in military memoirs is the role of the wives of the officers in a cantonment. The women, always referred to as “ladies” or “lady-wives” (!) play a major role in the insular society of the army. With their identities derived purely on the basis of their husband’s ranks, they are all the time conscious of the social stratification. Officially, wives of military personnel are classified as dependents. Their status derives from that of their husbands. The segregation of officers and troops

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at the social level filters down to the level of the “ladies” too. Except in organised gatherings such as regimental functions, there is no interaction between the wives of officers and those of the troops. That further reduces the size of the social group within which the women in the army have to interact. The dynamics of this social group carries forward the rank structure of the officers. There are “senior ladies” and “junior ladies” in the social universe of the army. The former is entrusted with the task of caring for and shaping the latter into good army wives. This gives the former a responsibility and with it comes the inevitable power. As some critics have noted, “The military community provides a very clearly defined and highly structured role for women: ‘the military wife’” (Dobrofsky and Batterson, 1997: 677). Sinha recounts how his wife had rightly decided to stay back in the cantonment during the war with China in 1962. Very approvingly, he writes, “I am glad that my wife took this decision because it had a good effect on the soldiers’ families” (1992: 196). The women in the army have internalized their roles to such an extent that they are rarely contested. At the same time, it cannot be denied that a strong community feeling exists and the sense of bonding is crucial in times of war. If male camaraderie and bonding are essential for withstanding the horrors on the battlefield, then a corresponding female bonding is necessary on the home front. A war is a crisis that throws up leaders on the battlefront as well as the home front. If the commanding officer is to lead his troops from the front on the battlefield, his wife is expected to lead by example the women in her regiment whom she addresses with propriety as “my ladies”. While male camaraderie has been widely written about, female solidarity has seldom been mentioned. For an example of the former, let us take a look at Mussolini’s war diary which was published in installments in Il Popolo d’Italia from 1915-17. It exalted war as a fusion of classes, a “people’s war.” He remarks, “I have noted with pleasure, with joy, that the most cordial camaraderie resides between officers and soldiers. The life of continual risk binds souls together” (in Forgacs and Nowell-Smith 1991: 132). From the dormant nationalism of Amar Singh’s diary to the transnational nationalism of Lakshmi Sahgal’s memoir, we have with Sinha’s memoir, finally arrived at the notion of political nationalism. A Soldier Recalls endorses the idea of a strong, independent, sovereign nation-state with a clearly demarcated territory. The problematic issue however is the author’s plea for a closer relationship between the military and politics. This would be an undesirable development, harmful to the democratic tradition of the Indian nation. In fact, although Sinha makes such a plea, he disapproves, as we have noted, the politicization of the

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Pakistan army. The text fails to resolve this contradiction. The two contraries coexist in an irreconcilable, aporetic moment. Sinha describes war from the staff officer’s point of view and not from the field officer’s. But he does not fail to indulge in creating the image of the hateful other. Such an image-building exercise is absent in accounts of the Chinese war, an example of which we shall see in the following section.

V In this section, we take up two books for analysis. The selection of these memoirs does not adhere to the periodization of this study nor are they conventional memoirs. They are first person accounts of wars in which the writers were participants. They do not trace the writers’ life stories. Brigadier J P Dalvi’s Himalayan Blunder is a first person account of the Sino-Indian conflict. Dalvi had fought in the war and had been taken prisoner and held in captivity in Tibet by the Chinese for seven months. It is included in this study in order to have an “insider” point of view of the war. The Chinese war is the background to Chetan Anand’s Haqeeqat, which we will deal with in detail in the next chapter. Maj Gen Lachhman Singh’s The Indian Sword Strikes in East Pakistan is a participant’s account of the Indo-Pak war in 1971, which also forms the background to J. P. Dutta’s film, Border to be taken up for detailed analysis in the next chapter. A reading of the above war acounts therefore cannot be avoided. It would provide us with an opportunity to compare and contrast primary/secondary discourse and tertiary discourse, which frames the analysis of this study. Himalayan Blunder is a long account of the ineptitude of the political class and the arrogance and inefficiency of some of the senior army officials. The book is a retrospective report of the 1962 war. It is dedicated to all ranks of 7 Infantry Brigade who died in the Battle of the Namka Chu in October 1962. The Indian jawan is the unquestioned hero of the book. As Dalvi puts it, “the theme of the book is the steadfastness of the Indian soldier in the midst of political wavering and a military leadership which was influenced more by political than military consideration. The book records their valour, resolution and loyalty – qualities which are generally forgotten…” (1969: xvii). Dalvi is appreciative of his troops for their valour, adaptability and cheerfulness in the face of adversity. The Sikh

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troops of Punjab regiment, used to eating rotis lived on rice and salt for five days without complaining. Dalvi’s deep and genuine concern for his troops comes across in the book. The author laments the total lack of understanding of military affairs among the political class. Appointments to senior positions in the army were made arbitrarily. Favouritism rather than merit was the criterion. The appointment of Lt Gen B M Kaul to senior posts was made due to his closeness to Nehru. The author blames Kaul for the faulty policies (Forward Policy) on China which ultimately led to the debacle of 1962.4 He notes, “Kaul’s advancement was symptomatic of India’s half-hearted and limited preparations for war with China” (ibid: 94). The book details the political miscalculations that led to the SinoIndian conflict. An over-trusting Prime Minister with his coterie consisting of V. K. Krishna Menon and Lt Gen Kaul completely ignored the alarm bells that were sounded by formation commanders in the Northeast. Further, the description of war carries long explanations of the strategy used, the difficulties faced by the troops, the topography of the area and so on. Dalvi’s account of senior officers in the book is noteworthy for its candour. He does not hesitate to write about the weaknesses of officers whom he had observed closely in his career. He unleashes a diatribe against Lt Gen Kaul for his ignorance regarding the ground realities of war, his political clout, his unwarranted influence on the Prime Minister in policy decisions and so on. Similarly, Gens Thapar and Sen also come in for sharp criticism for their incompetence in handling the 1962 war. The dominant sentiment in the discourse of the 1962 war is that of humiliation. Betrayal by China, lack of political sagacity, the consequent poor performance of the army, and its impact on international relations – all contributed to a deep sense of shame in the army as well as in the entire nation. Most of the literature of the Chinese aggression carries this sentiment. The collective sense of shame establishes the fact that the nation is an affective category. Sentiments, whether of joy or sorrow, anger or frustration, heighten the sense of community feeling. The sentiment of anger and humiliation runs like an undercurrent throughout the narrative, even if the focus is on the logistics and strategy of the war. We shall see in the next chapter how films mobilize such sentiments through melodrama.

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Military memoirs and war accounts are also unwitting travelogues. The peripatetic lifestyle of a soldier gives him access to remote places and cultures. Dalvi’s description of the Monpas in Tawang in erstwhile NEFA (present Arunachal Pradesh) could easily qualify as ethnography. The geographical/cultural/linguistic diversity of the nation comes across in most military narratives. Anderson’s functionaries created a sense of community and nationhood during their journeys. Similarly, the Indian soldier has the unique privilege of experiencing people and places, not merely as a tourist, but by being a part of different milieu for extended periods of time. He experiences the diversity and oneness of the nation in the course of his travels. Thus Dalvi’s account encapsulates the territoriality, affectivity and cultural plurality of the Indian nation. In stark contrast to Dalvi’s narrative, Lachhman Singh’s account of the Indo-Pak war has the superior air of the victor. Such a difference in tone, interestingly, will be noted between the two films Haqeeqat and Border as well in the chapter that follows. Singh’s account reflects unequivocally the state’s agenda of political and military support for the erstwhile East Pakistan’s (present Bangladesh) upsurge of nationalism. From the point of view of Pakistan, the upsurge was a revolt against the state. The army participated in it through mutiny. Indian foreign policy legitimized the uprising as a manifestation of nationalistic spirit. Lachhman Singh’s vocabulary endorses Bangladeshi nationalism. Some examples are: daring and nationalist-minded, burning with the fire of patriotism, heroic deeds of patriotism and so on. He does not deal with the vexed issue of one nation’s freedom fighter being another nation’s terrorist. An engagement with this problem could have been enlightening but the issue is overshadowed by the total legitimacy granted to the Mukti Bahini, the guerrilla group raised with Indian support to fight West Pakistani hegemony. I am not here contesting the legitimacy of the revolt. I am merely submitting that an engagement with the issue would have resulted in a more nuanced war account. One of the imperatives of war discourse is to create an image of the enemy as evil. Lachhman Singh, who had commanded 20 Mountain Division, which is a fighting formation, had the opportunity to see and understand war from close quarters. He writes about corpses on the battlefield that indicate the extent of savagery of the enemy. Yet, he too exercises restraint in portraying the full fury of war. As he admits, “I have not described the frightful atmosphere of a battlefield while writing the battle accounts” (1979: x). He describes the moral laxity of the army

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officers in Pakistan. He gives evidences of their lack of discipline and cowardice. India as a nation in this war account is represented as “the big brother” who was able “to help millions of poor and oppressed men win their freedom …” (ibid: 177). The filial implications of “the big brother” image are manifested in an indulgent attitude for the weaknesses of the enemy, rather than a completely denigrative stance. By contrast the film Border as we shall see in the following chapter indulges in the politics of hate far more vigourously.

VI Let us now turn our attention to what I have described as “outsider” literature. The Kargil war prompted a number of journalists to write accounts of the war based on their experience as reporters. The BBC notes that Harinder Baweja’s book, A Soldier’s Diary, contains an “eye-witness account” and “extensive interviews with Indian soldiers” and is “based on confidential defence documents” (in Baweja, 2000: 3). As we can see, any literature on military matters is assessed by keeping in mind authenticity as the main criterion. As “eye-witness”, Baweja is the privileged “seer”. Such ocular-centrism valorizes the “eye” over other sense organs as a means to truth; seeing is believing. The centering of the viewer in war discourse is of course facilitated by technology. Covering a war “live” on TV, for instance, is a technological feat. This makes the war journalist a privileged “seer” of the war. The relationship between the “eye” and “I” is therefore not difficult to understand. Both bear the stamp of authority. A first person account of a life or an event is more believable and truthful than third person accounts usually dismissed as “hearsay” or fiction. Compared to the BBC review, the review in The Hindu is more cautious. It says, “To give a degree of credibility to her account, Baweja chooses the diary format to present her version of Operation Vijay. (ibid: 4, emphasis mine). The subtext is that Baweja presents only one version, her own, which could be one among several, accuracy notwithstanding. In her “Acknowledgements”, Baweja says, “For my generation of journalists, Kargil was the first taste of war. Covering it was exciting, full of adventure and very frightening. At all times, the adrenalin kept running” (ibid: 11). The connotation of war as exciting, adventurous, dramatic is made clear in the designation of a battlefield as “war theatre.” All war narratives have this double-sidedness to them. The horror of war is common knowledge to all. Yet, everyone loves a war. It unites a

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nation, brings to the fore buried feelings of patriotism, creates excitement in boring, monotonous lives, makes martyrs out of ordinary people and in today’s era of what Miriam Cooke calls “postmodern wars”, the journalist gets a good story to cover. What could be the possible reasons for Baweja’s choice of the diary form in which she adopts the persona of a soldier in the thick of action? The gendering of war narratives with their inherent dichotomy of battlefront/home front makes this female journalist take on a male persona. Also, as a journalist she is not an “insider” even if she is within the bounds of the space designated as the battlefield. The privilege of the “insider” status belongs solely to the man in uniform. Further, the category of soldier is not a homogenous one as it is thought out to be. A doctor in the army is also a soldier but when it comes to narrating a war, only the land forces can attain the “insider” status. Every officer who dons a uniform is a soldier but when it comes to narrating a war it is the infantry soldier who seems to be the authority. It is he who comes face to face or, to use military jargon, is in eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with the enemy. The enemy who is generally a fuzzy and blurred character to others is familiar to the infantry soldier. It is he who has actually waged an armed encounter with him on the ground, which at its simplest is the definition of war. Since he has fought the war by this definition it is his right to tell the story of the war. Therefore, Baweja assumes the persona of a male infantry soldier. She would be a “participant” in the Kargil war by Ranajit Guha’s definition of the term as one “involved in the event either in action or indirectly as an onlooker” (1983: 4). Baweja wishes to give credibility to her account of the Kargil war in this book by claiming special access to official reports. The underlying assumption here is the centrality of the truth-value of official documents considered by Ranajit Guha as “primary discourse.” He calls official literature as “primary discourse” which “is almost without exception official in character – official in a broad sense of the term. That is it originated not only with bureaucrats, soldiers, sleuths … but also with those in the non-official sector who were symbiotically related to the Raj, such as planters, missionaries, traders …” (ibid: 3). In the present context such a symbiotic relationship exists between the state and the media. The former needs the latter for ideological dissemination and the latter depends upon the former for its content and critique. At the same time, Baweja’s text also contains a critique of official reports. The misjudgement regarding the gravity and scale of intrusions in

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Kargil was evident in army documents like patrol reports. Thus the truth claims of primary discourse are circumscribed by the inadequacy of official documents. For example, “The official word, even two days after our arrival was that ‘some militants have crossed over’” (2000: 25). “We are all here because of a typical army-style briefing. In tones terse and cryptic, we were told: ‘Some rats have come in.’” (ibid: 21).5 The reliance thus on official reports combined with a critique of it is what makes this text particularly interesting for me. It also reflects how our access to truth is constrained by the ambiguities of primary discourse and our compulsion to rely on them. Examples of the inadequacy of official reporting abound in military literature. During the 1857 uprising, what British officers describe as Mutiny, there was the wife of a British sergeant known to all as “Mees Dolly” who was sympathetic with the “rebels”. She was killed for treason by the British. Most records of the uprising evade this episode, except for Field Marshall Henry Norman’s record which says, “’By the way, I must mention that a European woman was hung at Meerut, being implicated in the arrangements for the first outbreak on 10 May. The truth was she was hanged without trial for ‘egging on the mutineers’” (in Menezes, 1999: 162). Conflicting official histories render dubious any claims to truth. There is a whole semantic field within which the word “enemy” operates in Baweja’s diary. The word “enemy” in the official reports used in the diary evolves from “rats” (ibid: 21) to “militants” (ibid: 25) to “infiltrators” (ibid: 25) to “mercenaries” (ibid: 27) to “regular soldiers” (ibid: 27) to “mujahideen” (ibid: 27). The narrator calls them “fanatical soldiers” (ibid: 24). The almost naturalized link of the “enemy” with Islam and Islam with fanaticism is obviously at work here. The attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001 had spawned several hate sites on the Internet. For instance, the website www. makempay.com had pictures of the chief suspect, Osama bin Laden on a roll of toilet paper with the words, “you look flushed.” “We had to give the people something tangible, and some relief through humour,” said the web designer justifying these pictures (Times of India, 18 October 2001). Carrying on with the discussion on semantics, it is interesting to note that the army’s characterization of action as operations, skirmishes, wars, etc. can at times lead to gross underestimation of the situation on the ground. Baweja’s diary records an incident in which a General was inaugurating a golf championship in the midst of the Kargil war. In army officialese, the Kargil war was characterised as a conflict, a description that indicates that the operation was not as serious as a war. This could to

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some degree have had an impact on the General’s callous act that could have been devastating for the morale of troops and officers. The diary brings this out effectively. As the narrator reflects, “Pal apparently felt that life should go on as normal but what is so normal about being trapped in mountains, about being killed, this is war, isn’t it?” (2000: 66). Of the various ways of portraying the character of a soldier, one is to show the soldier as a victim of the politician’s ineptitude. Baweja uses this “soldier-as-victim” paradigm consistently in her narrative. In this case, the army brass is also under attack. The narrator complains, “Convoys are getting hit and Lt Gen Krishan Pal is still insisting it is a ‘localised affair. ’ Entire villages have emptied out and yet, even now, we hear on All India Radio that defence Minister George Fernandes has announced that the infiltrators will be thrown out in 48 hours. Is there no end to this madness?” (ibid: 38). Personal details intensify the pathos of war. The episode of Maj Adhikari’s wife’s letter lying unopened in his pocket is one such instance (ibid: 54). The technique of weaving personal aspects of a soldier’s life into war narratives is also used in war films as we will note in the next chapter. Baweja being a journalist herself and Kargil being the first war that received wide media coverage, the diary has frequent references to radio, newspapers and television. The technologizing of war through advanced equipment also encapsulates the penetration of the media into a highly guarded zone, normally marked as “out of bounds”. The limitations of the media however are equally glaring. It played a major role in whipping up an ultra nationalism. The report of the General inaugurating a golf championship was not highlighted in the press of a “country [that] has wrapped itself in a patriotic blanket” (ibid: 67). The soldier perceives the media as a morale booster. Uniformed soldiers cloistered in their cantonments who are invariably asked, “What do you do when there is no war?” were made household names by the media. Suddenly the nation had on its lips names of Sqd. Ldr. Ajay Ahuja, Lt. Saurabh Kalia, Lt. Col. R. Viswanathan and so on. “Overnight, we are no longer faceless men fighting a nameless war. Such reports lift our morale and ease some of the overbearing sense of futility that has engulfed us” (ibid: 73). The elisions in the media are made up for in the diary. The episode of the Major who refused to lead his company by feigning illness is a disjuncture in the narrative of the brave, compliant soldier. The reification of the soldier as brave is a process integral to war literature. Patriotism is a virtue thrust upon the soldier. In reality, the

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battalion is the object of loyalty. The narrator admits, “Our jawans perform acts of incredible heroism despite being grievously wounded. It has nothing to do with patriotism or nationalism” (ibid: 105). War brings out the best and the worst in human nature. What is constructed as “willingness to die for the nation,” in reality, may be a situation forced upon the one who chose the Armed Forces as a career. The attribute of “patriotic” for a soldier is axiomatic to say the least. However, the real picture is quite different. A soldier, more often than not, enrolls in the Army for pension, rather than out of patriotic feelings. After recruitment, he is trained with the assumption that nationalism is a sentiment which can be aroused and nurtured over a period of time. Nationalism is presumed to be, to use Hans Kohn’s words, “first and foremost a state of mind, an act of consciousness … the individual’s identification of himself with the ‘wegroup’ to which he gives supreme loyalty” (in Synder, 1990: 246). Loyalty is thus fostered for the immediate “we-group”, the battalion. The primordial sentiment of patriotism is then channelized towards loyalty to the nation. Patriotism, which may exist in the form of a special feeling for the land of one’s birth, is converted to nationalism, which demands unquestioned belief in the sanctity of the nation. It is an artificial process that involves indoctrination right from recruitment, through peacetime training, culminating in the maintenance of high motivation levels in war. War calls for a state of preparedness to face severe physical and mental stress and strain. The futility and meaninglessness of war, unarticulated for fear of punishment, manifests itself in the form of low morale. To overcome this, war is characterized as a noble task and soldiers as heroes who fulfill the grand task of restoring peace and justice. Such a justification becomes crucial to erase the contradictions immanent in war. Ancient Hindu scriptures, the Bhagvad Gita in particular, cast war as Dharmayudh, which meant that war was a duty to be performed in order to reaffirm the triumph of good over evil. Nationalism, coupled with the righteousness of war, endures as a powerful psychological force, not simply as love for the homeland and the urge to protect it, but rather as an ideology that legitimizes the essential brutality and immorality of war. Loyalty to the nation is combined with a deep feeling of vindictiveness towards the enemy. As the narrator in Baweja’s diary observes, “We have seen our comrades die. The thirst for revenge grows stronger…” (2000: 105). Intense feelings of camaraderie or male bonding are prime movers in the time of war. In his memoir, B. M.Kaul reflects, “What makes men to (sic) face dangerous situations willingly? Is it temptation for promotion, possibility for an award for gallantry, recognition of good work in some other way, tradition, discipline, vision of glory, personal loyalty and

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devotion between individuals, or just patriotism? Perhaps a little of everything” (1965: 431-432). Male camaraderie is a component of war discourse that cuts across cultural barriers. In his Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War, William Manchester explains: I understand … why I jumped hospital that Sunday thirty-five years ago and, in violation of orders, returned to the front and almost certain death. It was an act of love. Those men on the line were my family, my home. They were closer to me than I can say, closer than any friends had been or ever would be. They had never let me down, and I couldn’t do it to them (in Elshtain 1987: 206).

The brutality and inhumanity of one’s own soldiers is seldom alluded to in war accounts. Baweja’s diary is an exception to this rule; perhaps its fictional nature gives it the liberty. It records the act of a jawan of 18 Garhwal battalion who sliced the head of a Pakistani jawan, which was later sent to the brigade Headquarters and pinned onto a tree trunk. Visitors including the division commander treated this as a trophy. Some events described in Baweja’s diary were not reported by the media. This indicates the selective process at work in news reportage on television. The media highlighted the Pakistanis’ disregard for the dead and our soldiers’ humaneness in burying their dead with prayers recited by a maulvi. But what was evaded by the media, was the fact that “many of them [the enemy corpses] still lie on our peaks, flung into valleys and gorges by angry Indian troops. Even after killing all the enemy, our troops would go on a rampage knifing dead bodies” (2000: 146). A Soldier’s Diary can be seen as an addition to the corpus of “secondary discourse,” within which is imbricated the official point of view albeit with some critique, yet without radicalising it in any way. Baweja’s persona’s discourse is “unable to extricate itself from the code of counter insurgency” (Guha, 1983:26). There is no searching internal monologue about the relevance of war, no trace of sympathy for the soldier on the other side of the border, nor any concern for the impact of the war on the local population. The critique is restricted to the conduct of the politicians and senior army officers. That is to say, if they were efficient, the soldiers could have caused more destruction on the battlefield. A Soldier’s Diary, written soon after the Kargil war, contains the passions that are associated with war. It contributed to the jingoism of the time, which was a culmination of the growth and consolidation of a strong

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Hindu identity. Unlike most military narratives, Baweja’s book remained on the best-sellers list for several months. Two important issues arise from this long discussion of A Soldier’s Diary. one, the gendered nature of war literature and two, the privileged position accorded to the insider. Now we need to examine whether the two issues together provide a productive interpretive grid. The gendering of war discourse, which has been examined in some detail so far, is only a stepping stone to the idea of a gendered nation. War discourse and militarism in the national polity valorize the idea of male aggression and female pacifism. The consequent structures of representation shape the perspectives and attitudes in the material world. The privileging of the insider increases the insularity of war discourse. It denies entry to the outsider as s/he could threaten the inviolability of insider discourse. Such an alienation of the outsider rules out the possibility of a holistic understanding of the nation. The outsider in turn has to necessarily take recourse to insider perspectives to gain authority. Thus we see interdependency between insider and outsider discourses.

VII In this section, I wish to argue that newspaper reportage of war in India focuses on statist ideas of war which have little scope for critique. This is based on the model of war proposed by Clausewitz in which war is interpreted as a continuation of politics by other means. Through a close reading of different newspapers’ reportage of the Indo-Pak war of 1971; I explore newspaper reports as a narrative of war that is mobilized towards what Walter Lippman calls ‘manufacture of consent.’ Chomsky and Herman borrowing from Lippman posit the propaganda model in their Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Media (1988). The corporate-owned print and visual media like television are guided by the profit motive as they depend on advertising revenue for sustenance. Thus profit takes precedence over accuracy in reporting and concerns for truth and public interest are overridden. Further, I propose that a cultural reading of war would be more productive to an understanding of the phenomenon of war and its attendant concepts such as nation and nationalism. To buttress this argument, I use another theory of war provided by the British military historian, John Keegan which is a critique of the Clausewitzian model. The category of culture, needless to say, is politically fraught and hence any cultural

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reading would do well to be sensitive to this tension. Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831) was a Prussian soldier and thinker. His multifarious experiences beginning as a soldier with widespread combat experience against the armies of the Revolutionary France, as a staff officer with political/military duties at the very center of the Prussian state, and as a well-known military educator contribute to his theoretical exegesis of war in his magnum opus On War. Two of the most well known works in the Western canon that address the primary problems of war and strategy are Thucydides’s The Peloponnesian War (c. 400 B.C.) and Clausewitz’s On War (1832). There are several translations in major languages of On War and it remains on the compulsory reading list of military schools all over the world. Most critics of his famous line that “war is merely the continuation of policy by other means” argue quite correctly, for both ethical and practical reasons that war should not be seen as just another routine tool for politicians. That is, On War despite its details is a handbook of military tactics and strategy. It eschews larger philosophical conundrums of the inevitability of conflict in human relationships and whether human nature or politics drives man to war. Even as it defines war as a continuation of policy, On War does not address nor define such basic concepts as policy, politics, society, or the state. Clausewitz defines war strictly within the framework of the State. The submission of the enemy to our will is what constitutes the ultimate goal of war. Force, therefore to Clausewitz, is a means of war. War is not a sudden act; it is a culmination of the two main motives that result in war viz. hostile feelings and hostile intentions. Clausewitz makes a neat distinction between “savage peoples” and “civilized peoples”, giving the attribute of instinct to the former and rationale to the latter. This difference springs; however, he conceded not in immanent nature but “their attendant in circumstances, institutions and so forth” (1976: 76). This statement of Clausewitz provides us with the clue to read war culturally as his opponents have done. War is not impulsive; it is preceded by certain events. To Clausewitz, these events are restricted to the political world but we propose here that hostilities are played out in the cultural arena and that these are not time bound but are ongoing. Clausewitz says that “between two peoples and two states there can be such tensions, such a mass of inflammable material that the slightest quarrel can produce a wholly disproportionate effect – a real explosion” (ibid: 81). This mass of inflammable material comes from the cultural domains of the opposing states; something that Clausewitz does not even

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take into account. To him, the cause of war is always political. War is not autonomous but an instrument of policy. To him, primordial violence, hatred and enmity form the trinity of war (ibid: 89). It is at this point that we may take off on a cultural analysis of war. The hatred and enmity that Clausewitz accords such centrality to are nurtured in the realm of culture. This is where Keegan’s critique of Clausewitz becomes important to us. In A History of Warfare (1993), Keegan provides a historical overview of warfare from prehistory to the present era. Keegan noted that war, far from being political, arose and was conceptualized in the arena of culture. In this work, he scrupulously censures the Clausewitzian axiom of war as “a continuation of policy by other means”. Keegan believes that Clausewitz is more of a political realist who understands the need for defence and therefore the warrior class. Even if Clausewitz conceded that the warrior class is special because of the specialty of its activity, the warrior is still understood as only a state puppet. There is no acknowledgement the violence and savagery of war. To Keegan, when Clausewitz calls war a continuation of policy, he gave the soldier a convenient escape from “the older, darker and fundamental aspects of his profession” (ibid: 6). In A History of Warfare, the political compulsions and economic consequences of war are examined. There is also an attempt to study the psychology of a soldier along with the linkages of different types of conflict with society and culture. Into the Clausewitz-Keegan debate, I insert my close readings of war accounts through newspaper reports in order to propose that while manufacturing consent on the one hand, these narratives, on closer examination, also build up an ethos that contributes to a cultural reading of war. In the present era advanced technology has transformed war to the extent that the very notion of a battlefield has changed. The nature of conflict is such that it engulfs entire populations directly and indirectly. Access to arms militarizes even internal conflict (Davies, 2004: 4). Lynn Davies in her study on the impact of conflict on education notes that the very nature of conflict is shifting with wars no longer fought on demarcated battlefields but in towns, villages etc. of ordinary people resulting in almost 90% of causalities being civilian (ibid: 3). As a result, public opinion has a decisive role in changing the course of war. Hobsbawm calls it the CNN effect (2001). The media is also an instrument at the disposal of the state for mobilising public opinion. It presents the war in such a way that people perceive it as legitimate and just. Such

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developments increase the scope of a war narrative and impinge upon the ways in which the nation is represented therein. This section restricts itself to an examination of print media and its representation of the Indo-Pak war of 1971 and the Kargil skirmish. The quality of immediacy is the most important of all in print media. Topicality raises the market value of a newspaper. We will note below that newspapers reporting on the war of 1971 resonate with glorified constructions of the soldier during the war. This is done to boost the morale of the troops in the forward areas and their families back home. The Times of India (TOI) in its November issues of 1971 built up an image of Indira Gandhi as an iconic figure in the public imagination. On a single page of the November 22, 1971 issue, there is a photograph and report of Indira Gandhi inaugurating the Sabarmati irrigation project at Dabhoi, 95 kms from Ahmedabad. Then there is a report in which Gandhi’s reason for involvement in Bangladesh is quoted. There is on the same page a news item on a public opinion poll published in Belgrade, which rated Indira Gandhi as the most popular foreign politician. Thus we have on a single page Indira Gandhi in three different avatars: a) as a leader committed to technological progress b) as an astute politician and expert strategist in foreign policy matters and c) as an internationally recognized and admired leader. All put forth as verifiable facts, in the form of a photograph of her at the inauguration, her quote on Bangladesh and the public opinion poll. What constitutes the build up to her iconicity is the process of selection of news items, page layout and the timeliness of it all. It helps to produce and sustain a particular image of Indira Gandhi which became increasingly popular in the national imaginary. As Judith Butler in Frames of War has pointed out in the context of the Iraq war, “by regulating perspective in addition to content, the state authorities were clearly interested in regulating the visual modes of participation of war” (2009: 65). Barely two weeks within the TOI’s reports of Indira Gandhi, was India at war with Bangladesh. From end November onwards, TOI had been regularly publishing reports of Mukti Bahini activities along with maps of the region and even used the nomenclature “Bangladesh” for East Pakistan thus legitimizing the movement even before the official declaration of East Pakistan as Bangladesh. Alongside this, there were regular reports of Pakistan’s belligerence and denials of Pakistan’s claims. In the 23rd November paper in the midst of reports of action are also found reports of Prevention of Insults to National Honour Bill and the Home Minister’s

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appeals for use of Hindi. As we can see, there is a steady building up of a nationalist narrative which is crucial to the consensus on war. From 29th November pictures of villages and damage caused to them by West Pakistani troops begin appearing. Justification for war can only be sought on the plane of hatred for the enemy. The newspaper does this most effectively by using the visual power of the photograph, which besides standing testimony to the truth of a situation is also a successful medium to produce affect. The December 4 issue has the entire first page covered with news of Bangladesh, the special session of Parliament, announcement of state of emergency, bombing of airfields by Pakistani planes and order to the Indian forces to hit back. The newspaper unequivocally portrays Pakistan as aggressor and Bangladesh as victim. The font sizes of the headlines begin to get bigger by the day thus dramatizing the narrative. From sixth December onwards, the prominence of politicians is replaced by the figure of the jawan. The “jai jawan” of Lal Bahadur Shastri (coined in the war of 1965) is foregrounded. The first headline that appears about the jawan’s role, “Jawans clear road to Dacca” is in the paper of tenth December. Around the time also stories of bravado begin to appear which aid the mobilization of sentiment. The report of Second Lieutnenant Kishore Bhadbhade who died in Sind is one such instance. The mention of the fact that he was the son of Lt Col RG Bhadbhade and belonged to the same cavalry regiment as his father establishes the emotionally powerful paradigm of warrior families in the service of the nation. The fourteenth December paper carries public interest advertisements stating “Hoarding is anti-national,” and “Keep Prices down.” Smuggling, unemployment, inflation and hoarding were national ills in the 1970s. These ills are now begun to be seen as obstructing the path of success in war. The eighteenth December paper carries the famous picture of surrender, the headlines said, “Yahya yields to Indira, ends war.” War is seen as a personality clash. Such a personalization of a national conflict is further reinforced by the description of Indira Gandhi. TK Shanmugham, a Tamil Nadu legislative council member dramatically declares that Priyadarshini is Yahya Mardini – a reference to Goddess Chamundeshwari who had killed the demon Mahishasura and thus came to be called mahishasuramardini. This image is further perpetrated with the publication of a photo of Indira Gandhi in a white sari. The same page has jokes which contemplate possible names such as Ministan or Yahyastan for the truncated Pakistan. The Hindu begins focusing on the war only from sixth December onward when Pakistani saber jets began bombardment. This newspaper brings out the regional perspectives to a national event such as war. The

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sixth December paper has a report of Karunanidhi supporting war. This focus is important considering Tamil Nadu’s history of desire for secession, anti-Hindi movement, etc. Another Dravida Munnetra Kazhagham leader EVR Naicker posits that Pakistan could attack India only because of India’s social stratification on the basis of caste and creed. TOI on the other hand carried no such reports. Instead it featured the Home Minister’s talk about Hindi in the “interests of unity and integrity of the country.” However a shift in focus on India as mere defender to Yahya as India’s victim, very interestingly comes from the inimitable R K Lakshman. The 13/12 cartoon of R K Lakshman has Yahya on a hotline as he is falling off a cliff, saying, “Friends, look where India has pushed me.” The mobilization of sentiment is crucial to the sustenance of the idea of a unified and unitary India, especially during war when the nation is under the threat of an external enemy. A story of heroism, inevitable in all newspapers, in The Hindu features a South Indian soldier Armugam’s exploits. Page six of the December 17 Hindu is a pictorial representation of the war with the caption, “A Nation is born in blood and tears.” December 18 issue of the same paper carries the famous surrender picture, along with report of the heroism of a wounded major from the Jat regiment. The two reports are linked subliminally to show victory comes at the cost of death and injury. This is in keeping with the romantic notion of war which we have already noted exists in the work of Martin Van Creveld for instance. Newspapers use explicitly glowing terms while reporting about a soldier’s deeds. Print media describes a soldier’s deeds in war with as much drama as possible. It uses visual imagery to help the reader to see the action. For instance, reporting about the exploits of Sipahi Imliakum, the reporter writes, “At an altitude of 15,000 ft, he crawled alone ahead of his platoon to kill the two Pakistani sentries paving the way for a smooth attack” (Express News Service, 21 October 2000). Small, personal details are given to highlight the man behind the soldier. “Though Major Aima had been granted leave to attend his wedding anniversary on 2 August 1999, he stayed behind to lead an operation to nab terrorists in the dense forests of Poonch sector” (Express News Service, 21 October 2000). Such a description helps to create sympathy for the obvious absentee character in this report, viz. the wife, later, a widow. Even official accounts of war find it hard to stay away from the trope of war as adventure, excitement, an adrenalin-raising event. The Indian Navy’s attack on a well-defended Karachi harbour by a small flotilla of

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missile boats is described as “an exploit” (Kumar, TOI, 5 December 2000). It is interesting to note that newspapers carried official records of the 1971 Indo-Pak war in the year 2000. After Kargil, there was a tremendous interest shown by the media in military affairs and war. The Press narratives through allusions to veteran war writers establish a cross-cultural link in war narratives. A photograph of large numbers of civilian population driven out of their homes in Danchuk in Drass sector due to shelling is captioned “Fodder for Hemingway.” It is an obvious allusion to the American author whose war novels like A Farewell to Arms and For whom the Bell Tolls are now considered classics of war literature. One year after Kargil, the relatives are less celebratory of the sacrifices of their dear ones and more critical of the government for not nailing the culprits (Mishra Pandey, TOI, 26 July 2000). This shows the ephemeral quality of a martyr’s glory as well as the people’s ability to critique governments for their handling of the war. The image of the army too is less flamboyant. It is seen as an intruder into a pastoral setting. “Temporary army positions dotted the valleys, where shepherds once used to graze their cattle” (TOI, 2 December 2000). It is also represented as a disrupter of normal life. “Most journalists covering Operation Vijay were holed up in Hotel Siachen where not even running water was available. The hotel owner told us that the water problem began a few days ago when a water tank in the town was hit by a shell” (TOI, 2 December 2000). This anecdote captures perfectly the meaning of Hobsbawm’s words, “War is a disruption and destruction of the order of life and labour” (1990: 128, emphasis original). The print media has also to a small extent played its role in anti-war campaign. The paradox is that often military people speak the language of peace on the assumption that no one knows the bitter truth of the brutality of war better than them. Air Marshall Asghar Khan in the Pakistani paper, The Nation, says, “We realise that spending our meagre resources on the well being of our people and not on building a powerful war machine will bring strength and prosperity to Pakistan” (Reprinted in Times of India, 2 June 1999). Gen Musharraf in his press conference (extensively covered on TV and in print) after his visit to India for the Agra summit in May 2000 also emphasized that as a soldier, he knew the horror of war far better than anyone else. A hard-hitting article by Suhel Seth castigated the politicians and the bureaucrats who play with the lives of soldiers (TOI, 20 July 1999). The Intelligence failure leading to the Kargil conflict was highlighted by the Press but not pursued beyond a point as it was caught in

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the high-pitched patriotic fervour that the war had generated. The popular weekly India Today brought out a Kargil exclusive. The cover page had snow clad mountains with soldiers in snow gear trudging uphill. At the bottom of the cover page were the words, “On the Spot Report.” The magazine sent two reporters to Kargil one year after the war in winter, as “the great thrill of journalism is to be part of an experience, to taste the moment” (Vinayak, India Today, 21 February 2000, emphasis mine). But they returned after discovering that there was far less thrill and adventure than they had imagined. Sometimes, war can also be a lonely, monotonous affair. Standing sentry on remote peaks in inhospitable terrains, both the mind and the body are in a state of distress. “Its like solitary confinement with a few perks thrown in, says a Major at a forward post” (Vinayak, India Today, 21 February 2001). The quality of immediacy is the most important of all in print media. Topicality raises the market value of a newspaper. We have noted that newspapers reporting on the Kargil war resonated with stereotypical constructions of the soldier during the war. This was done to boost the morale of the troops in the forward areas and their families back home. The newspapers undertook the critique of the war only a year after it was fought. War also foregrounds the very vulnerability of human life. Judith Butler in Frames of War continues with the explication of the term precariousness which she began in her earlier work, Precarious Life. Precariousness is born out of the innate vulnerability of the human. As a human’s survivability is dependent on things outside of the self, human life is precarious. Precariousness implies living socially, that is, the fact that one’s life is always in some sense in the hands of the other (2004: 14). Newspaper reports of war are inscribed within the frames of heroism and patriotism. Butler uses the term “frame” to understand the ways in which our reading of texts is influenced by social, cultural and political conditions. Thus the frames through which we apprehend or fail to apprehend the lives of others, besides our own, as lost or injured are themselves politically saturated (Butler, 2009: 1). This makes only our lives grievable and that of others as not worthy of grievability. Therefore, a frame in seeking to contain, convey and determine what is seen, implicitly guides the interpretation (ibid: 8). By focusing on the domain of culture, it becomes possible for us to expand an understanding of war as an inevitable outcome of militarism

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and militarization. In order to marginalize the mere strategic, heroic and militaristic interpretation of war, the first step would be to realize war is an on-going hostility that creeps into the very culture of warring nations. Only when we do that, can we move towards eliminating propensity to war and moving towards peace by thinking through it as beyond strategy as Clausewitz does. In Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, as soon as the troops come ashore and look around to find their bearings, they first run into a TV news crew led by the director Coppola himself getting footage for the evening US news. They are shouted at: Don't look at the camera! Just go by like you're fighting. Like you're fighting. Don't look at the camera! This is for television. Just go through, go through.

Coppola’s film was based on the Vietnam War, the first to be brought live into American homes. The coverage helped to generate anti-war sentiment to the extent that it had an impact on policy decisions. Years after Vietnam, the US realised that one of the main reasons for losing the war was its inability to control the media (Sunday Herald, 10 September 2000). The end of the war came largely due to the lack of public support. In India, the telecast of the Kargil skirmish brought an altogether new dimension to a nation’s self-perception and its glorification of its soldiers. It comes closest to Baudrillard’s understanding of war as postmodern. According to Baudrillard, postmodern war is detached from the ‘real’ and reality of war is produced through the third order of simulation in which representation occurs without any reference to the real. In the introduction to The Gulf War did not take Place, Patton describes a weird situation in which a CNN newscaster turns to a reporter for live information on the war to be confronted with the reporter watching CNN for news of war. So much for live news! (Lane, 2007: 95). Thus news of war is generated not by war but by news of war. That is to say, news is not about some real event occurring in historical time and space. Baudrillard believes war in the conventional sense is not feasible, rather it is impossible in the era of media technologies. The enemy is either ill-defined or non-existent. For example, the Cold war to Baudrillard did not take place in the sense of actual combat; it was a war fought on the assumption of what might have happened. An elaborate machinery was mobilized to project and simulate the possibilities of the Soviet threat (ibid).

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The entry of Barkha Dutt, the STAR TV correspondent into a bunker in Kargil was a groundbreaking step towards spectacularizing war on Indian television. Farhan Akhtar’s film Lakshya also based on the Kargil conflict had a character (played by Preity Zinta) of a journalist inspired by Dutt’s reportage. The live yet represented nature of the telecast was brought home through carefully edited visuals. Most of the channels concentrated on manufacturing consent for the war. A profusion of visuals detailing the return of body bags from the icy mountains to weeping, yet proud family members and the military funerals provided by the regiments, formed part of the strategy for generating public approval. In the process, uncomfortable issues like intelligence failure, operational unpreparedness and the like were eclipsed. As Partha Chatterjee pointed out in a short, bold write-up in a daily, only “a diabolical mind” could imagine the human tragedy on the other side of the border as well. He dared to ask, “How then do we define our nationalism as ‘good’ and theirs as ‘bad’?” (TOI, 20 August 1999). The telecast created wide public support for the war. The Army Headquarters was flooded with letters from officers requesting to be posted in Kargil. Many saw it as a career advancement strategy, or as an opportunity to see action or further more self servingly as a means to attain instant glory. Extensive coverage of Kargil in the print media with pictures of weeping widows helped to mobilize nationalist sentiment. An otherwise insular organization like the army, physically separated through cantonments from civilians, was brought into the public domain. Investiture ceremonies telecast on TV and given front-page coverage in newspapers relived the gallant deeds of soldiers through citations. As Elshtain puts it, “War cemeteries and monuments meant the dead got to be actors in civic life, serving to integrate a sense of ‘peoplehood’” (105). We have noted, in this chapter, the evolution of the idea of nation. From Amar Singh’s focus on the local/regional, the idea of nation has evolved to India as a nation-state, as exemplified in the narratives of Sinha, Dalvi, Lachhman Singh and Baweja. In between, we have also noted one of the earliest narratives of transnationalism in Sahgal’s memoir. The phenomenon of war too has evolved from the medieval battles (Boxer Rebellion in Amar Singh’s diary) to limited war (SinoIndian and Indo-Pak conflicts in Dalvi and Lachhman Singh respectively) to postmodern war (Kargil conflict in Baweja). The link between the kind of war fought and the stage in the evolution of the nation can now be established. Medieval battles belong to the pre-national era when feudalism was the dominant social and political structure. Limited war

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may be equated with a mature sovereign nation-state. Postmodern wars inevitably relate to advances in technology, mediatisation of war and globalization. In conjunction with a study of the evolution of the nation, we also tried to examine the representation of the soldier, war and its dynamics, and the construction of the gendered nation and the role of women. To do so, we divided military literature into insider and outsider literature. We have noted that insider literature with the benefit of hindsight (Dalvi and Sinha, especially) contests certain state policies. Outsider literature, on the other hand, has proved to be almost entirely a statist vehicle in the time of war. This is contrary to our hypothesis outlined in the earlier pages according to which outsider literature was assumed to be freer of official pressures to maintain status quo. In the next chapter we move from verbal to visual artefacts in our examination of the representation of the nation in war films from popular Hindi cinema.

Notes 1

The British granted King’s Commission to Indians in the Army after a protracted debate between Lords Curzon and Kitchener. Before this, they were only given Viceroy’s Commission and these officers were called VCOs (Viceroy’s Commissioned Officers). 2 Women were inducted into the post-independence national army only as late as mid 1980s. As doctors and nurses, they have been in the army since independence. Gen. S.F. Rodrigues brought women into the army in the service branches. The army is divided into Arms and Services, i.e., combat and non-combat formations. For example, the infantry, artillery, armoured corps, etc. are arms and Ordnance Corps, Corps of Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, etc. are services. It is of interest to note that the entry of women in the army coincided with the sharp fall in men joining the army. Rather than being a progressive move, it was a clever ploy on the part of the army to make up for the shortfall of approximately 12,000 officers. This fact is corroborated by Sinha’s research. He says in his memoir, “Defence Services were very low down in their [the youth’s] choice for a career. I had also sent questionnaires to some of our senior serving and retired personnel, to enquire whether they would like their sons to follow them in the Defence Services … the bulk of them replied in the negative” (1992: 219). Women are inducted only in the officer cadre, not as troops unlike in some armies in other parts of the world. Women are still given only Short Service (SS) Commission (five years) and not Permanent Commission (PC) (fifteen years). The social construction of women as less committed than men to a career, unlikely to stand the rigours of army life, more inclined to marry and start a family and so on are the assumptions underlying these differences. The phenomenon of women in the army is too recent in India for any serious studies to have been conducted on the impact of women’s

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entry into the traditionally all-male world. Yuval-Davis observes that most women join the army “to empower themselves, both physically and emotionally” (1997: 102). Elizabetta Adis endorses this view by showing in her study of women in the army that women gain economically both individually and collectively by becoming soldiers (ibid: 102). 3 Lt. Gen. S.K. Sinha was superceded by Gen. A.K. Vaidya in 1983. He was seen as having political connections with Jayaprakash Narayan, who was responsible for spearheading a nation-wide opposition to the Emergency imposed by the Prime minister, Indira Gandhi. Sinha resigned as Vice Chief of Army Staff. This issue had caused a national controversy, which was debated in Parliament. In bar gossip, officers used to say Sinha was not a “yesman.” Parenthetically it may be added that there is a joke in the army that a good soldier is one who can say, “Yes Sir, Yes, Sir three bags full, Sir and all bags for you Sir” in an obvious parody of the nursery rhyme, “Baa Baa black sheep, have you any wool?” 4 “Forward Policy” entails the advancement of troops in order to evacuate enemy troops from territories they have wrongly occupied. This strategy can be employed in war only when there is a high level of operational preparedness. As this was lacking in 1962, Dalvi opposes the policy. 5 The Intelligence agencies had failed to provide vital information with regard to the intrusion of enemy ranks even in 1947 when Pakistan invaded Kashmir. Unknown numbers of armed tribesmen were believed to be advancing into Kashmir. Pakistan, even before Kargil, had denied the involvement of regulars in the aggression. In 1947, Indian troops had captured two Pakistani regulars of 6/13 Frontier Force Rifles.

CHAPTER FOUR VISUALIZING THE “NATION”: A STUDY OF WAR FILMS

If all the serious lyrical poets, composers, painters and sculptors were forced by law to stop their activities, a rather small fraction would seriously regret it. If the same thing were to happen with the movies, the social consequences would be catastrophic. —Erwin Panofsky

I Nationalism may be examined in and through the larger political, historical, literary discourses of a particular nation. As has been explained in the first chapter, our main concern is with the discursivity of nationalism. It involves the construction of narratives for the people of the nation-state. Narratives that provide links with the past create idyllic notions of a glorious, shared history whose values, it is believed, should filter down to the present. The genre of war film is one such narrative. This chapter will map out the notions of nation and nationalism as they emerge from the narrative and grammar of war films. I begin with conventional war films. Unlike Hollywood, where the history of the war film goes back to 1898 with Tearing down the Spanish Flag, in Hindi cinema except for the simple logic of a few swallows make a summer, we cannot detect a specific genre of war movies. To the best of my knowledge, Dr Kotnis ki Amar Kahani (1946), Hum Dono (1961) Haqeeqat (1964), Hindustan ki Kasam (1974), Border (1998) and LOCKargil (2003) are some of the war films in Hindi cinema. I would restrict detailed analysis only to Hindustan ki Kasam, Haqeeqat, Border and LOC-Kargil. Along with war films; I also examine Major Saab (1999) and Pukar (1999) as films in which the heroes are army officers. However their training, loyalty and discipline are channelized not in fighting conventional wars, but in protecting the nation from corrupting elements. The next section, which will examine nation and nationalism in non-war films, like 1942: A Love Story (1997), Rang de Basanti and Hey Ram

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(2000) will serve the purpose of comparison and contrast with war films. The final section of this chapter will deal with terrorist films: Maachis (1992) Dil Se (1999) Fiza (1999) The Terrorist (1996) Mission Kashmir (2000), and A Wednesday.1 The purpose is to posit these films as causing a rupture in the official discourse of the nation.2

II The nation in war films may be quite productively read as a fetish object. For long, history and by implication temporality have hegemonized scholarship in social sciences and theory. Edward Soja calls for “a reassertion of a critical spatial perspective in contemporary social theory and analysis” (1997: 1). I argue that Soja’s reassertion of a critical spatial perspective helps us to better understand the primacy of territoriality inherent to war narratives. At one level, it is easy to read war narratives as historical documents, located in time. However, when we inscribe such a natural tendency towards temporality with the new dimension of spatiality, then we can open up exciting possibilities of combining time and space, history and geography in more critical ways. To this effect, the films analyzed here will be read to demonstrate the engagement with the idea of nation that is territorially grounded. This will provide us with a handle to read war films as texts that fetishize the nation. A fetish is a concrete, material category. The insertion of space and territory into our analysis will enable us to read the articulations of the nation in these films as objectified by maps, borders, etc. in order to put forward the thesis that popular Hindi war cinema (re)presents the nation as a fetish object to be coveted, loved, and, therefore, worthy of sacrifice. The word “territory” connotes land, ownership, borders, boundaries, control, defense and so on. One cannot disguise the atavistic implications of territory despite the increasingly hegemonic discourses of globalization, which seek to undermine the reality of ascribed territories. In his fine study of India as a region in which land was produced as a conceptual category by British and European travelers in the early nineteenth century, David Arnold (2005) provides us an important clue as to how land can be studied as a category that may be culturally produced and not just as a material environment. Environment itself is seen in his book in a more subjective, socially constructed way. For instance India in colonial times was assessed as a land of scenic delight, practical opportunity, as well as death, disease, desolation and deficiency (2005: 30). Thus landscape was a vital constituent in the wider formation of colonial knowledge with

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ramifications for the postcolonial world (ibid: 5). These insights will be drawn upon later so that when we refer to land and territory, we understand these categories as ideological, political, and cultural in their connotations. Before I propose that the nation is fetishized in Hindi war cinema, we need to unpack the notion of a fetish; and how it can be related to that of the nation. In its earliest sense in anthropology, the fetish meant an object that contained magical, mystical or spiritual value. The value was seen as a property of the object itself and not something ascribed to it by a person. The concept was first elaborated upon by Charles de Brosses in 1757, while studying the relationship between West African religion and the magical content of Egyptian religion. Marx in the nineteenth century gave the term a secular dimension when he used it as “commodity fetishism” to speak about how goods with presumed magical qualities in capitalist societies control human lives. Freud later used the concept to refer to an inanimate object, or a part of the body, that may provide stimulus for attaining sexual satisfaction. As a form of paraphilia then, a fetish to Freud refers to an object that arouses sexual desire. In a more general but related sense it also stands for an irrational fixation, as in, “he makes a fetish of his car.” I would like to relate these implications of the term to Ernest Renan’s idea of the nation as explicated in his already referred to essay. Renan by calling the nation a spiritual principle imbues it with the same qualities anthropologists have attributed to a fetish as having inherently magical or spiritual powers. To this we may further add Freud’s view of the fetish, according to which the origins of a fetish lie in the male child’s horror of female castration. The child finds an object to substitute the missing penis of the mother, thus overcoming the apprehensions and reestablishing the erotic connection to the female. The act involves not only finding a substitute object but also the subsequent act of forgetting the act of substitution. Going back to Renan once again, the selective processes of memory and forgetting are crucial to his idea of nation formation. Just like the child who has to forget the act of substitution, communities need to sift through vast treasure houses of memories to chart out a history and geography that combines moments of collective joy and sorrow with grief being accorded a higher place in Renan. Similarly Marx’s version of commodity as a fetish object also resonates with the processes of remembering and forgetting. To Marx, the capitalist society’s reification of commodities as a source of pleasure disguises the exploitation of labour in the process of the production of

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goods. As Timothy Bewes puts it, “[c]ommodification after all bestows a power of abstraction from one’s immediate reality; commodity fetishism even offers a means of passage out of materialistic thingitude – physically, by way of the propensity of circulating goods to cross boundaries and frontiers, or imaginatively, by way of the transcendence which attaches to the object of fetishization, and which elevates the thing itself above both instrumentality and exchange value” (2002: 76). Similarly, Renan’s insistence on a community’s collective efforts at memorialization for purposes of nation formation indicates the workings of power groups, which necessarily conceal subaltern memories and histories. In our analysis of war films below, particularly Haqeeqat and Border, we will note that land is fetishized and gendered in the course of its representation.

III War with its inherent scope for action, conflict, pathos and heroism presents itself as an attractive subject-matter to the filmmaker. As stated earlier, Hindi cinema has not perfected the genre of war film, yet Chetan Anand’s Haqeeqat (Reality) and J.P. Dutta’s Border may be considered as war films. Haqeeqat is based on the Chinese aggression of 1962 (20 October to 21 November). This was a war fought exclusively for the reasons of territorial integrity and national sovereignty. The war began as a cartographic battle provoked by the China Pictorial Map, which included large parts of India in Chinese territory. Writing to Nehru about the MacMohan line, the Chinese premier Chou-en-Lai asked: Mr. Prime Minister, how could China agree to accept under coercion such an illegal line, would have it relinquish its rights and disgrace itself by selling out its territory and such a large piece of territory at that?

To this, Nehru replied: This is a claim which it is quite impossible for India or almost any Indian to admit whatever its consequences. It involves a fundamental change in the whole geography of it, the Himalayas being handed over as a gift to them – this is a thing, whether India exists or does not exist, cannot be agreed to.3

In the boundary dispute between India and China, Chou-en-Lai insisted that the boundaries were imposed upon the two countries by the imperialists. But India invariably takes refuge in mythology to vouch for

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its territorial integrity. It is claimed that the Vishnu Purana states, “The country that lies North of the ocean and South of the snowy mountains is called Bharata; for there dwell the descendants of Bharata” (Ganguli 2001: 3). The text of Haqeeqat foregrounds this emphasis on territorial rights. Geography, as just noted, is one of the most important elements in the formation of a nation. Nation, despite its many connotations, does constitute communities of people living in fairly well-marked territories. The idea of national sovereignty, crucial to the process of nationformation, is closely linked to the idea of territorial integrity. India’s Defence Ministry maintains that the country’s borders are inviolable, but continues to prepare for the defence of the borders from real or imagined enemies, thereby making the Armed Forces one of the most prominent national organizations in the country. An important marker of a nation’s strength and power is its military capability. The idea of nation as it emerges through the military has remained largely unexplored due to the insularity of the organization. In Haqeeqat, the Chinese soldier shouting into the bullhorn, “Yeh jagah hamara hai” (this land is ours), highlights the enemy’s expansionist ambitions and makes clear India’s compulsions. With this scene, the film justifies India’s defensive posture in the war of 1962. Maj. Iftekar (Balraj Sahani) explains to his troops, who are skeptical about the purpose of the war, the need to defend the motherland. To make his reasoning convincing, he invokes the image of a pacifist India, which has always attracted hordes of invaders. However, when pushed into a “do or die” situation, it is the duty of the Army to live up to the rich military tradition the nation has produced. The film thus makes nationhood an indisputable expression of territorial integrity because its “sovereignty is fully, flatly and evenly operative over each square centimeter of a legally demarcated territory” (Anderson 1983: 23). In Haqeeqat, the family embodies a synecdochic representation of the nation. The family is generally considered as belonging to the private space, which is used as a training ground for its members. It is in the family that one learns the values and behavioural patterns expected of people in public spaces. For this reason, Althusser lists the family as one of the Ideological State Apparatuses. There is one scene in the film which I consider important. The mise-en-scene consists of the house of a lower middle-class family (the class from which most of the troops hail). There is a young man in the family who insists on joining the army like his brother and father before him. The camera lingers over the garlanded picture of the father in uniform. In this case, patriotism or love for the

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nation is merely an extension of love for the family. The nation, to this young man, is an enlarged community of which the family is a microcosm. In Haqeeqat as in most films, women’s perceptions are often controlled by the narrative and formal techniques used by the filmmakers. The filmmakers’ discourse is part of the larger discourse of mainstream patriarchy. This is however one of the rare scenes in the film, which offers us a woman’s perspective. The sisters-in-law are not happy with the young man’s decision, not because they fear for his life and safety, but because they do not want another woman in the family to suffer, like they do, from long years of separation. The family matriarch who just like her son, believes in the idea of the male child as the torchbearer of family traditions, even if it means death for the son as it was for her husband, vetoes this opposition. Scenes such as these which represent the active male hero and the passive female collaborator reinforce the gendered nature of war narratives.4 To the mother, the family and by extension the nation is what Renan calls “a large-scale solidarity, constituted by the feeling of the sacrifices that one has made in the past and of those that one is prepared to make in the future” (in Bhabha 1990: 19). The portrayal of the mother as one who must perform her primary duty of producing brave sons for the battlefield belongs to the tradition of the “nationalist mother” image, which has a long history in literature and cinema. Sri Lankan war songs by Rana Gi valorize the mother who produces sons for the motherland. In her role as mother, she becomes “a central signifier of racial and cultural values, national pride and purity” (De Mel in Jayawardena and de Alvis 1996: 170). In her full-length study on women and war, Jean Bethke Elshtain writes of the combatant and non-combatant roles that women played during the Second World War and the American Civil War. Writing about the significance of the Spartan mother in the discourse of war, she quotes from Life magazine, which designated Mom as the real American heroine: “She said goodbye with a smile on her lips and a prayer in her heart” (1987: 191). The mother in Haqeeqat allows her son to join the Army in a similar way. Haqeeqat negotiates the family vs. nation dilemma through the characters of the father (Jayant) and the son (Dharmendra), who also share the official relationship that exists between a Brigadier and a Captain. The Brigadier-Captain relationship overshadows the nuances of the father-son relationship. The father’s public identity as a Brigadier clashes with his private identity as a father. In order to be a good soldier, he must be prepared to sacrifice his son. The Brigadier father orders his Captain son not to leave his post even in the face of imminent death. The father’s act enhances the image of a patriotic soldier.

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Violation of human rights becomes a crucial issue in the time of war. Women are the most vulnerable group in such a situation. The rape of Aangmo (Priya Rajwansh), a Ladakhi girl (with whom the hero Capt. Bahadur falls in love), by an enemy soldier symbolizes the violation of territory. Land and women are conventionally seen as possessions of men. The capture and rape of a woman symbolizes victory over the enemy.5 Thus both war and sexual exploitation are closely related in their violence against women. According to Dympna Callaghan: Rape has, then, both a physicality and a politics that in a patriarchal culture concerns relations between men in which women are property, and as such it cannot be separated from issues of class and ownership. That is, the discursive construction of the gendered body is implicated in the materiality of the non-discursive; and the latter is not simply raw materiality but also the social and cultural (in R.S. White 1996: 132, emphasis original).

Aangmo kills some enemy soldiers before she dies by the side of her lover. She avenges the violation of her body with this act. What began as a war film ends as a tragic love story. War is thus depicted as a destroyer of conjugal happiness. Aangmo attains the status of a martyr along with Bahadur. The Hindi film’s abiding interest in morality and sexual purity of the heroine makes Aangmo an unsuitable candidate for conjugal happiness. The narrative can offer her death as the next best option. The closing shot of the two lovers lying dead beside each other indicates the triumph of love. Such an ending helps to cover the shame and loss of face at the defeat in war. The 1962 Indo-China war is etched in the Indian collective unconscious as a national shame, as India had to concede parts of its territory to China just as Aangmo was forced to offer her body to the enemy. In combining the heroism of the soldiers fighting under severe odds with the heroism of the heroine, the film claims “a moral victory” for India (Chakravarty, 219).

IV The trope of the family is further explored in Hindustan ki Kasam (Swear by the name of India), another war film by Chetan Anand, set against the 1971 Indo-Pak war (2 December to 13 December). The film focuses on a family that has a long martial tradition. Most of the males in the family have been officers in the air force. Wing commander Rajiv Batra (Balraj Sahni) and Squadron Leader Rajesh Batra (Parikshit Sahni) are the sons of an army officer who died a martyr’s death in the Indo-Pak war of 1965. Their cousin, Usmaan separated during Partition, is now a

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pilot in Pakistan Air Force. Usmaan shoots down Rajiv’s plane in the war. When he visits the Batra family, he realizes that he has killed his own cousin. His remorse intensifies the futility of war, especially between two nations, such as India and Pakistan that were carved out of a single entity. The use of the metaphor of a split family for the partition of the subcontinent has a strong emotive appeal. The heroine of the film (played by Priya Rajwansh) is a spy on a mission to Pakistan. The female spy in war narratives is resonant of the sexualized and manipulative character associated with the Mata Hari image. Women are generally represented as victims in war films, not as agents. Women’s pacifism is privileged in most narratives and her militancy is acceptable only if it is in the interest of the nation. However, in this film, the heroine plays a crucial role in advancing the plot. She succeeds in sabotaging the enemy’s plans that are hatched in a TV station. In the end, she is rescued by her lover, Rajiv Shukla (Raaj Kumar), who has been sent on a bombing mission into the enemy territory. The woman, after she has served the nation, is ultimately restored to her traditional role as the beloved. In both his films, Haqeeqat and Hindustan ki Kasam, Anand portrays the heroine as playing a role in the war. In the former, she is a rape victim turned into an avenger. In the latter, she is a spy who uses her feminine charm to work her way through the enemy territory. The films end with the recuperation of the conventional image of the heroine as a sexualized being. In one, she is reunited with her lover in death, in the other, in marriage. In Hindustan ki Kasam, Chetan Anand uses a narrative strategy similar to the one he had used in his previous war film, Haqeeqat. The film is interspersed with shots of war scenes in the style of a documentary leading to what Roland Barthes called the “having-been-there” quality of the photographic image. The primacy of “having-been-there” or its narrative equivalent, i.e., the first person account in war discourse has already been discussed in the previous chapter and need not be reiterated here. It would suffice to mention that the tertiary discourse (film) retains the primacy of the first person narrative, central to primary/secondary discourse (military literature). The documentary footage authenticates the content of the film. Photographic images of the war assist in the ideological dissemination of India as a strong nation with valiant men. The courage and patriotism of the Indian woman is highlighted through the portrayal of the brave heroine. The figurative use of the family to emphasize the futility of war between India and Pakistan reveals the emotive content of this war film. Emotions are an important component of war films in Hindi cinema as well as in Hollywood.

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V From 1962 to 1971, militarily and politically there was a significant shift in the way in which the Indian nation was imagined. In 1962, India was a humiliated and defeated nation. In 1971, India was not a mere winner in the war, but was the midwife in the birth of a new nation.6 J.P. Dutta’s Border based on the Battle of Longewala in the 1971 Indo-Pak war stems from a triumphalist position. This gave the film an imperious quality, which was impossible for Chetan Anand to achieve in Haqeeqat. Dutta says, “I made Border because that was a story my brother had told me when he was part of a squadron which fought the 1971 war. So I went on to make that film and dedicate it to him because I lost him in 1987 in a flying accident” (Sunday Review, TOI, Ahmedabad, 25 June 2000). Dutta’s pride in the Indian Armed Forces and its accomplishments on the battlefield comes across in the film clearly. It is intriguing that even though Dutta’s brother belonged to the Indian Air Force, he chose to highlight the Army’s role in the battle which in 2008 was revealed by Tehelka magazine as completely inaccurate. In an article that used Army documents on the battle, Harinder Baweja nails the lie of Longewala. Interestingly, army documents admit that there was no land battle at all and the Pakistani armour was effectively decimated by a day-long air attack by the Jaisalmer squadron of the Indian Air Force. An Air Force miffed with its eclipse in the narratives of the battles even ordered an inquiry. Air Marshall M S Bawa who in 1971 was the base commander at Care and Maintenance unit of 122 Squadron, Jaislamer from where four Hunters were requisitioned for the assault on Pakistani armour said, “This is my challenge. There was no contact between the enemy and the army. When I landed at Longewala on December 5, Chandpuri was hiding in the trench. I called out to him and he was relieved to see a Sardar. He thought they were going to be captured. Let us not fake battles to earn medals” (2008: 31). The Army teaches the Battle in its courses as exemplary of the Indian soldier’s valour while the truth is contested by statements such as the just quoted one. The aphorism ‘truth is the first casualty of war’ is an old one and the tussle over the retellings of Longewala best exemplifies it. For our purposes, it only enhances the thesis of this book that war and nationalism are best comprehended as narrated categories. Having said this, we are not here dismissing the narratives of the Longewala battle such as the film Border. Even if writers of memoirs and filmmakers strive hard to achieve authenticity; the foregrounding of the

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truth value of war narratives is quite clearly not on the agenda of this book. On the contrary, there is great value in examining the ideological and commercial imperatives that drive the fictionalizing of historical wars. The highly sensationalized bravado and rhetoric of the characters in Border are a result of the triumphalist perspective of the winner. It is natural for the victorious nation to assume a condescending attitude towards the loser. One of the worst manifestations of such a narrow, abusive nationalism is the propagation of hatred for the other. Border highlights such a politics of hatred by vilifying the other. Sunny Deol plays the real life Major Chandpuri and is seen denouncing his Pakistani counterparts as “Lahore ke gandhe nale ke keeday” (worms of the filthy gutters of Lahore).7 We have just noted that the film establishes the supremacy of the Indian nation in the political and military arenas. The supremacy is further established through the category of religion – an issue that underlies any aspect of Indo-Pak relations, be it war or cricket. The film draws on real life characters from the war. In Border, it is deployed in a deliberate and self-conscious manner. For instance, there is a scene in which Capt. Bhairon Singh (Sunil Shetty) rescues the Koran from being burnt. As he hands it back to the surprised Muslim villager, Bhairon Singh claims, “We have always been like this,” meaning “we Hindus are tolerant and accommodative.” His statement also carries the inescapable underlying logic of “but you are not like this.” As Karen Gabriel in her detailed analysis of Border observes, “Bhairon Singh’s gesture, therefore, serves to ‘befriend’ the ‘alienated’ Muslim, even as it demonstrates, in that very ‘befriending’ the vaunted superiority of the Hindu” (831). The “befriending” is repeated in one of the final scenes of the film, in which Maj. Chandpuri gives in to the plea of a captured enemy soldier not to kill him, and offers him water instead. The Major even acknowledges the enemy soldier’s role in fighting for his country (i.e. Pakistan). This poignant moment in the film seeks to forge solidarity between soldiers on a larger humanitarian plane. The nationalism that war fosters places an exclusive emphasis on the value of the nation at the expense of moral and ethical values. Maj. Chandpuri resolves such a nation vs. morality conflict by his humanitarian gesture which at the same time endorses the ethical and moral superiority of the Indian nation. The film also uses obvious symbols of religion like the overdetermined image of the Mata temple, which survives the heavy artillery shelling. Bhairon Singh draws the attention of the survivors to the temple. This scene also draws the attention of the audience to the subtext of the film,

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which is a strong endorsement of Hindu nationalism. From times immemorial, Hinduism has been imagined as an accommodative and assimilative religion. The temple image is therefore a metaphor of Hinduism’s capacity to survive the onslaught of other religions. Border like Haqeeqat explores the inherent contradictions between duty to the family and duty to the nation. The nationalist discourse has a rich investment in masculinism. The fetishization of the nation as earth mother creates a gendered ideology of the nation. In Border, the primacy given to the masculinist discourse reaffirms the liminality of women in imagining/constructing the nation. Maj. Chandpuri’s wife’s (Tabu) action of using her father’s influence to get her husband posted out, in order to escape war, raises questions about woman’s ideas of loyalty. In the sanctified discourse of war, her concern for her husband’s safety and the future of her home, in case he dies or returns disabled, is seen as unpatriotic and subversive, calling for the forgiveness of the husband. Every soldier is expected to relegate the self to the background and it is assumed that his family should follow suit.8 Generally women construct their identities in terms of their families. However, in a war film, the woman too is expected to rise above the family in order to owe allegiance to the entity called nation. The film, with its focus on the action on the battlefront, raises these issues only tangentially. A deeper exploration of themes like the family vs. nation conflict would distract the audience from the single-mindedness and racy pace of a war film, which has its own formal compulsions. In war, the Army evacuates the border region and creates autonomous spaces for itself. Into such a space, the family can enter only as a nostalgic memory. One of the stock images in war films is the arrival of mail from home. The song Sandese Aate Hai (there’s a message) in Border reveals the private lives of the soldiers. In this song, Dutta portrays a series of images from the domestic lives of the soldiers. Such images help the audience to identify with the combat troops. By the end of the film, the narrative is steadily evacuated of the category of family. Instead, it is replaced by the regiment, which the cook calls a “family” – a homosocial universe – replete with instances of male bonding and camaraderie. The textual clinching of the family vs. nation contradiction occurs in the return of Mathura Das to the unit from half way home. Subedar Mathura Das (Sudesh Berry) who wishes to return to his ailing wife is reprimanded for expressing joy at being granted leave. The gendered ideology of the military is further buttressed by the wrath of his Company Commander and the ridicule of his companions when he shows concern for his cancer-

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stricken wife and children. Accusing a man of cowardice is generally taken seriously within the framework of masculinist discourse and its praxis. Mathura Das can only redeem himself by returning to his unit and dying a martyr’s death, leaving behind a widow and a pair of fatherless children. His joy at the prospect of returning home is shown to be childish as well as cowardly. His return to the unit therefore, restores the image of the soldier who must necessarily make familial duties subservient to national duties. In Border, one of the most gruesome scenes is the one that depicts gross violation of human rights. Suspected infiltrators posing as villagers are pumped with bullets, instead of being captured and tried. The informers’ death is celebrated as the young lieutenant Dharamveer’s (Akshaye Khanna) coming of age as a soldier. Bhairon Singh remarks in jest that the child, who began by playing with toys, is now a man. War facilitates the process of masculinization. Violence and masculinity are synonymous with each other. The cinematic representation of the transformation of S/Lt. Dharamveer from a greenhorn - afraid to kill - to a martyr is a powerful instance of the masculinist military discourse. According to Lynn A. Higgins, “the dominant Western cultural understanding of masculinity [is] defined as a flight from the feminine” (in Cooke and Woollacott 249). The young lieutenant has a vision of his blind mother just before he dies on the battlefield, and pleads with her to release him from her maternal bond, as the time has come for his end. His union with his father who also died in war ensures “the flight from the feminine”. His death becomes a ritualistic rite of passage from the oedipal stage to manhood. The text of Border stages a dramatic engagement with the notion of nation as earth mother. The temple image referred to above reinforces the reification of nation as mother. The trope of motherhood used for the nation is full of paradoxes. The mother both produces and devours her sons. On the one hand, the nation in the form of earth mother produces warrior sons, and on the other is incapable of protecting herself from the enemy, for which she needs to harness the services of her progeny. Capt. Bhairon Singh’s death is as much about a soldier going “beyond the call of duty” (a favourite army terminology for citations) as it is about Rajput valour. The very first scene that introduces him to the audience establishes his attachment to the earth. This scene is significant for portraying his character as well as for advancing the central metaphor of the film, viz. nation as earth mother. Both the characterization and the metaphor are captured by a long shot of the actor sprawled on the sand. The brown

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Border Security Force uniform camouflages with the vast expanse of the sandy Thar Desert (home to the Rajput community which Bhairon Singh belongs to) revealing a total harmony between the man and his environment. His death therefore, must necessarily be spectacularized in keeping with his first hyperbolic dialogue in the film, in which he explains to his jawan that the earth spreads a bed sheet over him to protect him from the scorching desert sun. According to Bhairon Singh, the war needs to be fought to protect his protector (i.e. earth mother). The paradoxical configuration of the nation as earth mother who produces valiant sons and as one who needs their protection explained earlier may be recalled here. His death reclaims the romance of a feudal era erased by the postcolonial nation-state. In the 1990s, the increased militant activities and a growing secessionist movement in Kashmir and other parts of India challenged people’s faith in the hegemonic discourse of a unitary nation-state. The film Border, in selecting for its subject a heroic moment in the history of the nation, went on to become a huge commercial success. The film created nostalgia for a moment in the past, when the nation transcended a host of differences and backed the Armed Forces with few voices of dissent. If we look at the post-Kargil euphoria9, then Border seems to have uncannily anticipated the nation’s capacity for overt display of patriotism. Through nostalgia films, according to Jameson, the past can be processed in an allegorical way. Nostalgia is an important mode of imageproduction. Nostalgia films always produce glossy images of the past. Border may, in this sense, be seen as a classic nostalgia film which “while evading its present altogether, register[s] its historicist deficiency by losing itself in mesmerized fascination in lavish images of specific generational pasts” (Jameson 296). Haqeeqat is a story of defeat, of despair with no regeneration. The heroine dies with the hero without leaving behind any progeny. The film ends with a mournful song that leaves a message to its viewers. The song Kar Chaley Hum Fida Jano Tan Saathiyon, Ab Tumhare Hawale Watan Saathiyon (We bid farewell O countrymen, we handover the homeland to you) reverberates with a powerful and emotionally charged nationalist fervour. Border, on the other hand, is a story of triumph. Capt. Bhairon Singh dies, but there is a Singh Jr. to carry forward the tradition of valour, courage, and masculine aggression. All the war films analyzed here retain the binarisms of war, viz. war/peace, public/private, battlefront/homefront and others, instead of demystifying them. The edifice of a patriotic Army created by the state, and ironically, even by the family remains unbroken.

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Though an attempt is made to contest the reification of the soldier as patriotic, the constraints of popular film restrict the attempt midway. The image of the patriotic soldier is retrieved each time there is a danger of its being dismantled. In 2003, J P Dutta made yet another war film LOC Kargil based on the Kargil skirmish of 1999 code named as Operation Vijay. The film joined the ranks of a series of cultural productions made in order to ride the jingoistic wave during and soon after India’s first war beamed live extensively on television by innumerable satellite channels. It was a paean to the heroism of the Indian soldier and with its duration of two hundred and twenty five minutes, the film was not half as successful as Border. Like Border the characters in LOC are based on real life soldiers such as Col. Lalit Rai (Sudesh Berry), Lt. Manoj Pandey (Ajay Devgan), Colonel Khushal Thakur (Raj Babbar), Lt. Col R Vishwanathan (Mohnish Behl), Major Rajesh Adhikari (Karan Nath), Lt. Balwan Singh (Akshaye Khanna), Captain Sachin Nimbalkar (Vineet Sharma), and Grenadiers Yadav (Ashutosh Rana) and Yogendra Singh (Manoj Bajpai). Dutta tries to be as authentic and as inclusive as possible in the telling of this tale. The film shot in an episodic style dramatizes the exploits of individual soldiers played by an ensemble cast on location in Kargil in an attempt at verisimilitude. According to trade analyst Komal Nahata, the film had “so much realism … because of which it seems like a documentary on war. It is too repetitive, too realistic and too lengthy” (in Bharat and Kumar, 2008: 15). The women in the film as in Border play marginal roles as love interests, fiancées, wives and mother. LOC Kargil plays upon the dominant post-Kargil national sentiments of euphoria and heightened jingoism. Dutta’s ideological leaning towards the right remains unchanged. The film clearly extols valour, heroism and supports militarism as a way of being. Nevertheless, the film failed to capture audience attention which four years from Kargil had quite clearly moved on.

VI Films like Raj Kumar Santoshi’s Pukar (The Call), Tinu Anand’s Major Saab, and Abbas-Mastan’s Soldier mark bold departures from conventional representations of the soldier in cinema. Pukar is a conspicuous exception as far as the representation of the hero as an unblemished soldier is concerned. Maj. Jaidev (Anil Kapoor) is stripped of his honour, shown to be a traitor and is finally reinstated as a loyal citizen,

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but wronged soldier. The two women (played by Madhuri Dixit and Namrata Shirodkar) in the film contesting for the love of the hero are made out to be the cause of the hero’s downfall. Sympathy is evoked for the hero; his fall from grace gives his character the tragic dimension of a classical hero. However, this hero’s honour is restored; poetic justice is granted to him through the repentance of the heroine and the death of the wicked terrorist Abroosh (Danny Denzongpa). The colonel who colluded with Abroosh is also punished. Anil Kapoor was awarded the Swarna Kamal (national award) for his role as Maj. Jaidev. The film is thus legitimated by the state, which has always, in one way or the other, monitored the modes in which its soldiers and the armed forces are represented. In Pukar the focus is not so much on the action, as it is on the interiority of the hero’s experience as a soldier. Except for a commandoaction early in the film, the rest of it unfolds the drama of alleged treason of the hero and his reinstatement. The film ends with the hero’s brave resistance to the army’s allegations and his heroic deeds even when he is not in the army. An interesting minor character Mrs. Mallapa (Rohini Hatangadi) is also an unconventional portrayal of an army wife. She openly talks about the difficulties faced by the women due to frequent postings. She ridicules her husband by saying that he served on the border for fifteen years and followed that up by talking about it for another fifteen years. Major Saab, like Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987) focuses on the training of a soldier. While Major Saab in keeping with the combat film formula endorses the training period as completely desirable, Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket shows the total disintegration of Private Pile, from a happy go lucky aspirant to the army into a homicidal maniac. Major Saab’s thematic is concerned with the process of masculinization. Veeru (Ajay Devgan), an insolent youth, joins the National Defence Academy (NDA) to fulfill his father’s wish expressed in his will that Veeru would inherit his wealth only if he would serve in the army. The film is replete with shots of the real NDA in Khadakvasla near Pune in Maharashtra. This lends the film a realistic air in so far as the setting is concerned. The training disciplines Veeru after his plans to escape from NDA are sabotaged. The instructor’s wife (Nafisa Ali), an army doctor, sees in him the son she lost during childbirth. Maj. Rana (Amitabh Bachchan) is an embodiment of a dual authority figure. As instructor, his word is the ultimate to his cadets. As the doctor’s husband, he becomes a father figure to Veeru. Veeru’s submission to the will of the father is

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portrayed through the point of view camera angle. Maj. Rana is shown standing on the top floor of the bungalow. He looks below to see Veeru collapsed on the ground after completing his punishment run. This shot with Rana in his balcony and Veeru prone on the ground effectively conveys the power equation extant in the hierarchically structured army. While the mother is a symbol of love, affection and leniency, the father is the exemplary disciplining figure. The action of Maj. Rana, Veeru and others is channelized towards exterminating the gangster (Ashish Vidyarthi) and to extricate the latter’s sister, with whom Veeru has fallen in love. The film emphasizes the relevance of masculinity for the nation. As army officers and cadets (future officers), they are the guardians of the nation protecting it from external enemies who threaten its territorial integrity as well as internal enemies who threaten its sovereignty. The film also shows that some army personnel are involved in the sale of weapons. Corruption in the army is thus hinted at, although not highlighted in the film. In Soldier, an army major is killed by the jawans who are caught redhanded in the act of stealing weapons. A Naib Subedar (Dalip Tahil) in the film complains of the low salary in the army and the increased risk of death. He turns into a rich arms dealer and is pursued by the son (Bobby Deol) of the major. Essentially a revenge drama, the film is noteworthy for its bold portrayal of corruption in the army. These three films are concerned with the enemy within – in the form of corruption, crime, and so on. The hero, whether with the Army or not, therefore remains a true soldier in spirit. He fights the forces of corruption like a typical Hindi film hero. Still, the films deviate from the norm as far as the representation of the soldier is concerned because they show some army characters as corrupt or anti-national. In a way, these films depart from the tradition of representation of soldiers as having an unquestionable integrity. The transgressions in the narrative construction of the soldier in the films make them differ from conventional war films.

VII War films uphold the sanctity of the nation. The films discussed above endorse the image of the nation as a supreme entity for the sake of which all other loyalties must be sacrificed. The narratives of popular film consolidate the idea of nation and nationalism constructed in military discourse and practice, as seen in the previous chapter. Most of the Hindi

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war films combine the genre of action film with that of romance films. Hindi cinema anticipates a postmodernist eclecticism wherein the serious, the comic, the spectacle, action – all overlap to form a sumptuous filmic text. The generic intermingling besides having an obvious commercial value also asserts a fundamental truth of life: love and war can and do coexist. Hollywood films like Casablanca, A Farewell to Arms and Pearl Harbour also stress this truth. Casablanca (1942) is a good example of how Hollywood gives a war background to the stock adventure story set in exotic places. Umberto Eco calls it “a great example of cinematic discourse” (in Lodge 446). Casablanca to him is a movie with an improvised plot in which there is a blend of many themes (love, romance, adventure, war) that have been universally popular. However, Eco fails to explain the appeal of the movie and its reification as a cult movie. The mysticism of his lines such as “extreme of banality allows us to catch a glimpse of the Sublime” (in Lodge 454) does not explain how such a process takes place. Pearl Harbour (2001) directed by Michael Bay, is a love story set in the background of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941. The splicing of black and white real video clippings with colour scenes of the filmic text is a common technique in war films used in order to lend authenticity. The love story brings out the finer aspects of the American character. The soldier hero is shown to be sentimental and emotional. This softens the image of a soldier usually depicted within the discourse of machoism. Hindi war films have failed to grapple with the horrors of war. For instance, except for the mourning by the women, Border has little to offer in terms of the impact of war, especially on women. Instead, we have scenes of jubilant celebrations at the victory in the war, with troops dancing the Bhangra on the top of a captured tank. The film refuses to confront the issue of the impact of war, except for the fleeting images of sobbing parents and wailing widows. In contrast, the Hollywood war films, especially the Vietnam films (Platoon, Saving Private Ryan, Apocalypse Now) are strong indictments of the business of war. Let us take Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) and Oliver Stone’s Vietnam trilogy as illustrations. Most Hindi war films, as we have seen, revel in the glory of war and propagate the notion of “just war”. The Vietnam War films on the other hand depict the terror and dreadfulness of war and its impact on the human psyche. Based on Joseph Conrad’s short novel Heart of Darkness, Apocalypse Now traces the literal and metaphorical journey of Col. Kurtz (Marlon Brando). The film shot in the

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Philippines recreated the jungles of Vietnam and aimed at realistic portrayal of the war setting as far as possible. Coppola said in a news conference at the Cannes Film Festival: "My film is not a movie. It is not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam” (http://www.ironmaidencommentary.com/, site visited on August 24, 2013). Baudrillard has a similar understanding of the film. The use of technology is central to postmodernism. Thus he describes the Vietnam War and film as hyperreal in his essay on Apocalypse Now. He believed that the world’s first televised war spectacularized war with its images of technological and psychedelic brilliance. Coppola too in his film uses special effects in order to create ‘realistic’ images of war. “In this sense,” he says, his [Coppola’s] film is really the extension of war through other means, the pinnacle of this failed war, and its apotheosis. The war became film, the film becomes war, the two are joined by their common hemorrhage into technology” (in Lane, 2007: 93). The conflation of the event of war and its representation as the film is therefore central to the readings of Apocalypse Now by Coppola, the filmmaker as well as by Baudrillard. The film focuses on the confusion, fear, and the madness of the Vietnam War. It uses a series of surrealistic sequences to highlight the futility of war. Although its excesses and a confusing ending may seem as flaws in the film, it still remains a brilliant evocation of the horror of war. Apocalypse Now plays around with visuals (napalm fires, helicopters in unison, etc.) to indicate a fence sitter’s stance towards the war: condemning at times and glorifying it at others. In a hard-hitting conclusion to his essay, “The Politics of Ambivalence: Apocalypse Now as Prowar and Antiwar film”, Tomasulo castigates Coppola’s apolitical and dehistoricized narrative. He says: Although much contemporary film theory valorizes the idea of the “open” text subject to polyvalent readings and interpretations, what is really needed – at least in terms of Vietnam War movies is a closed text, a film that takes an unambiguous stand on the imperialist involvement and illegal conduct of the Vietnam conflict (in Dittmar and Michaud 1990: 157, emphasis original)

Oliver Stone, the American filmmaker became most famous for his Vietnam films during the mid-1980s and the early 1990s. He himself had been a participant in the war which was the longest ever fought by the US and so may be called an “insider” if we extend our classification of military literature in the previous chapter to film as well. Platoon (1986) the first of his Vietnam films delineates the horrors of war through the

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eyes of a young Lieutenant. Written and directed by Stone, it is autobiographical in so far as it is based on his own experiences in the war. The concern with authenticity may be seen in the way Stone insisted that his cast go in for intensive training before the beginning of the shoot. The film was shot on Luzon Island in the Philippines. The cast dug foxholes and had to go on long marches and were even subjected to ambushes in the nights. In short, Stone wanted to not only create a battlefield setting but wanted the cast to realize the hardships of combat soldiers. He wanted them to have the tired, scruffy look and feel comfortable with the guns they had to handle. This gave the film a realism and grittiness that helped advance Stone’s ideological position about war as hell. Even if there are instances where the film demonstrates the heroism of war, by and large, what leaves a lasting impression on the viewer is war as full of despair, violence and even boredom. The film was honoured with an Academy award for Best Picture in 1986 ratifying, in a way, the hegemony of survivor discourse in war narratives. Continuing his insistence on authenticity Stone’s other two films from the Vietnam Trilogy, Born on the Fourth of July (1989) and Heaven & Earth (1993), were based on memoirs even if not his own. Born on the Fourth of July is based on the autobiography of US marine turned peace campaigner Ron Kovic. The film does not focus for long on the battlefield. Rather it is a post-combat narrative of a war veteran’s frustrations and his ultimate search for a meaning in life which he finds in his role as a peace activist. Heaven & Earth is based on the memoir When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, in which Le Ly Hayslip, recalls her life as a Vietnamese village girl drastically affected by the war, who finds another life in the USA. The film focuses on the life of a woman and the impact of war on her life and growth. In a buildungsroman narrative, the film traces the childhood and adulthood of Le Ly, a simple girl growing up amidst the rice fields of Vietnam. In a way then, Le Ly emblematizes Stone’s concern with the way in which war disrupts the normalcy of life especially for a woman. The conventional masculinity that overrides war discourses is here undermined by the centering of the female character.

VIII In this section, I deal with nationalism in non-war films. 1942, A Love Story directed by Vidhu Vinod Chopra, uses the Quit India Movement as the background for the film. It focuses entirely on the revolutionary struggle for independence without any references to the mainstream non-

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violent struggle led by Gandhi. The hero’s (Anil Kapoor) mother is cast in the image of the nationalist mother. She gives a gun to the hero and asks him to fight the colonial masters. An armed struggle against an oppressor calls for an overarching unity on the part of the oppressed. In this case, the creation of a national identity involved the subsuming of identities such as class, caste, gender, and the like. Many women during the freedom struggle were not averse to the use of arms as a means to end colonial rule. We have seen in the previous chapter that the Indian National Army had an exclusive women’s regiment. Women internalize the discourse of violence. While on the one hand, the woman is the nurturing mother; she can also be the aggressive one. Thus a revolutionary nationalist discourse achieves the “pernicious objective of defining women as an intrinsic part of military society” (Tennekoon, Serene, Lanka Guardian, 15 June 1986). Even marginal characters like Munna, the car driver and the bus driver become martyrs in the struggle. In the war films discussed above, we see a post-colonial nation fighting against “enemy nations” like China and Pakistan. It is a case of a nation protecting its territorial integrity and sovereignty through war. In 1942: A Love Story we see an incipient nation fighting a war against the colonizer. Hey Ram directed by Kamal Haasan is a Partition film, a genre peculiar to Hindi cinema.10 Set in Karachi, Calcutta and Madras of 1946-47, the story revolves around the character of a south Indian Brahmin called Saket Ram. He is drawn into the mindless communal violence after his beloved is gang raped and killed. The film (perhaps the first of its kind) is a strong indictment of Gandhian philosophy.11 Coming as it does in 2000 when rightwing forces had established themselves in the corridors of power; the film’s narrative seems to support the newly legitimated ideology. The character of Saket Ram is an allusion to Nathuram Godse, the assassinator of Gandhi. However, the film does not show Saket Ram killing Gandhi. On the contrary, he has a change of heart (highly unconvincing, considering the strident anti-Gandhi tone of the entire film) and refrains from killing Gandhi, although he goes fully prepared for it. The religious nationalism of the film offers a contrast to the secular nationalism of the war films discussed above. (Border, as already illustrated is an exception.) In Hey Ram, frenzied mobs indulge in communal violence with the instigation of partisan leaders. The film shows Muslims as the initiators of violence and the Hindus as reacting to it. The violence in war films is perpetrated by the armed forces that have the sanction of the state. As a result, it is justified, glorified and rewarded. In the case of communal violence, there is no overt state sanction. Both

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1942: A Love Story and Hey Ram like the war films weave the romantic theme into the text of nationalist films. Of late Aamir Khan’s oeuvre Lagaan, Mangal Pandey and Rang de Basanti have largely addressed notions of Indianans in very direct ways. The film draws a national/ist lineage of heroism, sacrifice and martyrdom through the use of historical figures like Bhagat Singh, Chandrasekhar Azad and Durga Bhabhi. Durga bhabhi was a member of the Hindustan Republican Association known for her painstaking plans which seldom failed (http://www.tribuneindia.com/1999/99nov14/sunday/head3.htm, site visited on July 30, 2013). The film juxtaposes colour for the present and black and white for the past. Present day characters morph into Bhagat Singh and Azad indicating a continuous national narrative. It draws a history of male martyrdom. Until the time Sue (granddaughter of police official James McKinley during the colonial era), takes them as actors in her film. DJ, Karan, Aslam Asfaqullah and Bismil are Delhi University students, aimless and passing time drinking and going on long drives. Such males in Hindi cinema are derided as lacking in ‘mardangi’ (maleness). An emasculated male is the butt of jokes and object of scorn in cinema as well as in real life. So when DJ rues the fact that five years after graduating he still hangs around on the campus as he has nothing to do outside, it is the angst of the emasculated male. They do show signs of derring-do however like drinking beer and driving backwards into a pond. Sue’s documentary gives a fillip to such adventurism. The unfolding of the rest of the plot is also an unfolding of the characters’ internal growth. They shed their angst and begin to get into the skin of the roles they are assigned to play. Female solidarity occurs on the plane of emotion and male solidarity in the domain of action. Male bonding is a theme resurrected in the 2000s dating back to Aamir Khan’s Dil Chahta Hai. Sue and Sonia are bereaved women having lost their lovers and this loss binds them. One of the last scenes of the film shows them sitting in the place which was witness to the fun and frolic of the group of friends. This moment in the film captures the transcendence of race. It is a moment of pure sisterhood, each woman mourning the loss of her beloved and contemplating a happier past. Conversely, male bonding and solidarity as I have said happens in the realm of action which forms the climax of the film. Quick-paced editing, a fast moving plot and a soundtrack filled with gunshots characterize the highly problematic climactic moment in which the ‘boys’ go out to the killing fields in a manner of speaking, to confess their crime of killing the

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Defence Minister. It ends like a formulaic Hindi film in which the forces of evil are pitted against the forces of good. With the friends opting to take the law into their hands, the narrative has to necessarily punish them with death. These scenes endorse a kind of nationalism that calls for action, heroism and machismo. The bar-trotting group emasculated due to a lack of direction in their lives gets charged with a higher goal – cleansing the system of the rot in it. Such a cinematic articulation of masculinity is central to the film and is in keeping with traditional depictions of the male especially in the genre of action cinema. The male actors are depicted in the film’s poster shirtless and having well formed musculature. The representation of the male body in action cinema foregrounds the toned and firm bodies of actors such as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone in Hollywood and Salman Khan, Aamir Khan and John Abraham in Bollywood. These bodies represent the collective desire of young men making action cinema heroes as youth icons. The focus on the male body is further evidenced by the circulation of images in advertisements, television series and consequently in the proliferation of gymnasiums and fitness centers in cities and small towns. It is interesting however that in RDB the desirable bodies of the heroes are problematized by showing the characters as in fact emasculated, purposeless and aimless young men. The presumed responsibility of white people to civilize native populations of colonized territories has been termed in post colonial studies as the ‘white man’s burden’ – a term borrowed from Rudyard Kipling. The imperialists saw this mission as ennobling. In RDB, it seems Sue is carrying this burden feminized by the fact that she is a woman. An expansion of public interest in Bhagat Singh was triggered by a series of films on the revolutionary hero who although a part of nationalist mythology was marginalized in the Gandhi-Nehru dominated construction of Indian historiography. Towards the end of the twentieth century memory became central to the cultural consciousness of people across the world. Commemoration became a business and the study of memoirs and personal narratives in academia gained ascendancy. The Imperial War Museum in London, for instance, curated an exhibition of World War II photographs, journals, letters, documents, uniforms etc. in an attempt to consolidate its memory. The film perpetuates the fact of the male as the universal subject of history. As masters of the public domain, it is the men who occupy public spheres and act in it to rectify the ills that emanate from it affecting the private sphere. In fact, what occurs in the private space (loss of

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friend/son/fiancé) is the trigger for the group’s actions in the public sphere. Sonia belongs to the traditional figure of the nationalist woman who believes in violence as a means to an end. As Durga Bhabhi in the film within the film and as Sonia in RDB, her response to injustice is, “Kill him.” Having said this what follows is her confinement to the private domain where she is the quintessential nurturer caring for her fiancé’s (the pilot) mother. Violence re-emerged as an important category in nationalist narratives. The film triggered the protests against the Jessica Lal murder case12 and actually influenced its judgment. The film gave rise to a tide of public activism and redefined citizenship for middle class youth which generated rational debate and political engagement. Thus we can see a reassertion of nationalism in the 2000s fuelled by inept governments, corrupt politicians and a frustrated middle class. Largely driven by middle class mobilizations as in the Anna Hazare movement against corruption, this emergent nationalism fails to understand the enormous complexities of differences in caste and diverse religions in the Indian nation.

IX In the final section of this chapter I analyze terrorist films as subversions of war films. Here, the terrorist film constructs its own version of a nation and a soldier, both of which are denied legitimacy in the official discourse of nationalism. The character of the terrorist in Hindi cinema is complex in the sense that it combines elements from the characterization of the hero and the villain. The terrorist, in fighting for what he or she assumes to be a good cause, is like the quintessential Hindi film hero. The ancestry of this character may be traced to the dacoit, a popular character in the films of the seventies and eighties. (Gabbar Singh in Sholay (1975), for example.) Through an analysis of Gulzar’s Maachis, Mani Ratnam’s Dil Se, Khalid Mohammed’s Fiza, Santosh Sivan’s The Terrorist and Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s Mission Kashmir, an attempt will be made to deconstruct the politics involved in the representation of the militant whose actions terrorize the everyday lives of the people and whose alternative discourse challenges the hegemonic discourse of the nation. The idea in analyzing these films is to map out certain ambivalent moments in the representation – moments in which the terrorist is located in the grey area between assimilation and expulsion from the discourse of the nation. To begin with,

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let us locate terrorist films in the overall film productions of the nineties. We find that they form a minority in the midst of a more popular and dominant genre, viz., the family drama. In the nineties, there have been two dominant genres in Hindi cinema, i.e., action film and the family drama with the ubiquitous love story as its major component. Action films may be further divided into war films, gangster films (Satya, Vaastav, Company, etc.) and terrorist films. Many of the nineties films are indictments of state institutions, especially the police and judiciary (Shool, Kohram). From such an anti-establishment stance, the secessionist stance of terrorist films seems to be a logical outcome. State institutions, which have betrayed the aspirations of the people, are made a site of contestation. The hero’s goal is no longer to fight or rectify but to break away from the state completely. In the films of the seventies and eighties, the heroes took action against the villains because they had lost faith in the state agencies like the police and the law. Ultimately the hero restored the glory of the state. In the terrorist films, however, the hero wishes to secede from the state and create another state instead of rectifying the wrongs of the existing state. Therefore the terrorist has to create a counter discourse and an alternative organization to fight the villain. Conventional political theory characterizes the militant as a disruption in the narrative of the nation. He is a Gaddaar (traitor) who breaks away from the norm of the loyal, patriotic national citizen. Instead, his loyalty shifts to his cause, which could be a nation of his imagining, which in turn becomes a threat to the hegemonic nationalism of the state. The nationstate guarantees citizenship rights to all its inhabitants. From the point of view of the nation-state then, the militant is an errant citizen, misusing his rights. Admittedly to most of us the nation is a “given”. Our nationality is a naturalized criterion for identification in a long list of other “givens” like religion, caste, mother tongue, etc. The militant, on the other hand, by becoming part of a group that challenges such a “givenness”, contests precisely the notion of the nation delineated by the nationalist elite. The image of the militant offered for popular consumption is a dynamic one subjected to a process that dramatizes the militant-in-themaking. Violence comes from two sources. One, from the state and the other, from the militant groups. The state is constituted by its exclusive power to unleash violence. According to sociologist Anthony Giddens, “Terrorists and guerillas appropriate to themselves a power that states seek to maintain as their monopoly – the right to use violent means to pursue political objectives”(1989: 368).

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In Fiza, the onus of making Amaan (Hrithik Roshan) a militant is on the police. Fiza is the story of a lower middle class Muslim family of mother (Jaya Bachchan), brother and sister. The film is based on the Mumbai riots of 1992-93. Amaan joins a militant group after being badly mauled in the street by lumpen elements of society who obviously had the sanction of the state. The sister, Fiza (Karisma Kapoor) unable to bear the suspense of her brother’s whereabouts for six years sets out in search of him. The quest results in her interactions with police officers, politicians and the media. Finally, she locates her brother in a border town of what appears to be Rajasthan. Determined and plucky that she is, she brings him back home. However, unable to get a job and following an identity crisis at home, he resolves to go back to the terrorist group. In the meantime, the mother (Jaya Bachchan) commits suicide. Amaan is assigned an important task of eliminating a Hindu and a Muslim politician. After successfully completing his mission, a weary Amaan unwilling to surrender to the police makes Fiza shoot him in a bizarre ending of the film. In Dil Se, once again the police and the security forces cause the violence. Dil Se is a love story involving a program executive of All India Radio, Amar Verma (Shah Rukh Khan) and a North Eastern insurgent, Meghna (Manisha Koirala). The insurgent is given the task of assassinating the Prime Minister in a Republic Day parade through a suicide bomb. Amar’s family arranges his marriage to a Keralite girl, Preeti (Preity Zinta). Amar however, becomes aware of Meghna’s mission a few days before his marriage and is determined to prevent her from committing the suicidal act. After a long sequence that makes excessive demands on the audience’s suspension of disbelief, Amar escapes from his captives and manages to stop Meghna from proceeding towards the parade grounds. His interest though lays not so much in preventing the assassination as in persuading her to reciprocate his feelings. She does so by embracing him. The bomb explodes and both are killed. The Terrorist is a short film based on the Tamil Liberation movement in Sri Lanka. The film focuses on how the female militant, Malli (Ayesha Dharker) as a suicide bomber prepares herself to assassinate the Prime Minister. This is an obvious allusion to the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi by a Tamil liberation suicide bomber in Sri Perambadur in Tamil Nadu. Malli is selected for this difficult and important assignment as she holds an impeccable record of thirty successful missions. Once she reaches Madras, however, life takes on a new meaning for her due to her pregnancy. She readies herself for the task but at the last moment is unable to carry it out.

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Maachis is the story of a rural Punjabi family consisting of mother, brother, sister and her fiancé, who is drawn into militancy when the brother is tortured by the police as a suspected murderer. Torture in police lock-up is revealed as the main cause for innocent people turning into militants in Maachis. The brother commits suicide when he is taken into custody a second time. The mother dies of grief and the sister joins her fiancé in the militant group. Rivalry and suspicion within the group destroys it. The sister and her fiancé commit suicide with cyanide. There are no violent scenes in Maachis. The audience is shown only the impact of police atrocities and not the actual torture. Whereas films like Govind Nihalani’s Ardh Satya, (1983) spectacularize violence. In Maachis what we see are the bruised and battered characters. Maachis attempts to be a strong indictment of state sponsored violence. Does it then logically follow that Gulzar sanctions militant violence as the natural response to state violence? Does he approve of Sanatan's (terrorist group leader, played by Om Puri) act of exploding a bus full of innocent passengers? Perhaps not. Because in the end the focus is on the dead couple engaged to be married. Clearly the aim is to show the annihilation of an ordinary family with simple aspirations. Violence therefore is not celebrated as the means to an end. It is at its worst self-destructive. How do the films under consideration represent militant violence? In their representation of violence as a spontaneous response, terrorist films undermine the conscious and rational political choices made by the people. Violence in militant movements is not merely material, it is psychological and symbolic as well. The terrorist aims to draw attention to his/her cause, to threaten the opponents and to destroy the symbols of the state, which is their chief enemy. In Dil Se, the plan to kill the Prime Minister in the Republic Day function is doubly satisfying for the militants because the parade is a visual signifier of the nation’s developmental and progressivist narrative, precisely the kind of narrative that is contested by militant movements. Political films that deal with the struggles of the people by their very nature call for regional, local moorings. The resort to ambivalence is a common strategy adopted by filmmakers dealing with politically sensitive themes. The filmmakers by narrating both sides of the story, so to speak, evade value judgements on the terrorist issue. This enables them to interpellate audiences with different sympathies towards a particular issue. When a specific historical event is seen in simplistic binary oppositions of terrorism/law and order, state/people, communalism/secularism, then the narrative is emptied of its historical and political possibilities. Resort to

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terrorism is made to appear a natural, spontaneous response to the atrocities inflicted by the state agencies like the police and armed forces. According to Ranajit Guha in his essay “The Prose of Counter Insurgency,” rebellion is made out to be “a sort of reflex action that is as an instinctive and almost mindless response to physical suffering of another kind (ex hunger, torture, forced labour etc.)” (1983: 47). The transition of Amaan, Kirpal, Veeran, Meghna and Altaf to militancy is naturalized. All of them are shown to be politically naïve until a particular episode of violence traumatizes them. The filmmakers mythify the characters by “abolishing the complexity of human acts” (Barthes 1973: 143). The focus on a single cause simplifies the multiplicity of the forces that motivate a terrorist. According to Barthes, the naturalization process “places them in a world which is without contradictions because it is without depth, a world wide open and wallowing in the evident, it establishes a blissful clarity: things appear to mean something by themselves” (ibid: 143). The actions of the terrorists following the police atrocities appear to spring from a desire for revenge. Such a simplistic causality results in the “blissful clarity” of myth. To understand more clearly the depoliticization of myth, Barthes formulated a distinction between what he called “strong myths” and “weak myths.” The myth of the militant is a strong myth because “in it the political quantum is immediate. The depoliticization is abrupt” (ibid: 144). The political load of the term “terrorist” is so obvious and visible that the filmmaker uses various techniques in order to convert the militant into a myth. Before we examine the techniques (narrative and cinematic) that filmmakers deploy to mythify the terrorist, let us ask ourselves what the filmmaker’s stakes could be in mythification. Mythification leads to depoliticization to a great extent. The terrorist film is implicated in the official discourse of the state. The state always deals with insurgency as a law and order problem. By deploying this strategy, the coercive state is even able to buy the consent of the people quite easily. In the process, the political and the social roots of insurgency are obscured and the real aspirations of the people remain unfulfilled. Terrorist films as popular cultural forms may be seen to represent the interests of dominant groups in a society. These groups recognize the threat to social harmony by the law and order problem posed by the militant activities. Since film production and distribution are dependent on peaceful conditions (obviously, a filmmaker cannot make his profit in curfew-ridden places, for instance) it is in the interest of the filmmaker to project terrorism as detrimental to peace, even if it is at the cost of a sensitive rendering of the genuine

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aspirations of the subordinate groups. In Maachis, the plot revolves around only a small group of militants. The village community is left out of the narrative except in one scene where some neighbours come out to see the badly bruised Jessie. One of the villagers spiritedly expresses his sympathy for Jessie by saying, “This is how militants are made. They don’t grow in the fields.” It is also a prophetic statement as Kirpal (Chandrachur Singh) and Veeran (Tabu) do join the militant ranks as a reaction to police brutality. In Dil Se, Meghna in the flashback scene calls the audience’s attention to her region’s history of deprivation and betrayal. The region of the North East is homogenized despite the fact that it consists of seven states, each with its distinct history, culture and politics. Such blatant disregard for India’s diversity betrays Mani Ratnam’s intention to produce a non-specific, historically and culturally uprooted narrative. The Terrorist alludes sharply to the separatist Tamil movement through location shooting. The jungles, the backwaters, the steamer ride across Palk Straits and the arrival in Madras to the strains of M S Subbalaksmi’s Suprabhatam – all point to the LTTE. Fiza is more specific in that the film announces its spatial and temporal setting by dating the episodes. The use of newspaper clippings showing the communal riots of 1992-93 in Mumbai authenticates the periodization. Despite such clear pointers, Khalid Mohammed disavows the film’s politics. He says, “Fiza is not a political film, though a lot of issues are touched upon. You have to read between the lines” (in Gahlot 2000). The films begin as well-meaning interventions in the progressivist narrative of the nation. The radical potential of such interventions however, is diluted along the way and what emerges finally is a cultural product that performs the function of an Ideological State Apparatus. How is the audience positioned? How is the spectator addressed? With most of the militant films ending with either the capture or the death of the militant, it may be said that these narratives set up a way of seeing, which positions the audience on the side of the State. “The People” are missing in all the above militant films.13 The militants are shown belonging to isolated groups with no contact with people who in reality are the main supporters of insurgency. A militant movement grows from the grass root level with the people’s support. This aspect is completely obscured in the films under discussion. As a result, a militant is portrayed as an anti-social character, or, a part of the lumpen elements of a society. Even an institution like the Law Commission in its working paper on terrorism while approving the anti-terrorist law describes terrorism as organized crime (K Balagopal 2005: 2115). The absence of people in militant films corresponds to the realities of contemporary politics. The state has seldom

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taken into account the people’s point of view in resolving politically the problems that foster militancy.14 Secession depends upon group sentiment. The filmmaker’s complicity with the official version of terrorism is obvious with the erasure of the group from the narrative. Another technique used in terrorist films to reiterate state discourse is to make some characters in the narrative supporters of the status quo. How do we explain Fiza’s killing of Amaan? In the absence of the father, Fiza arrogates to her self the disciplining powers of the male authority figure. She searches out her lost brother in order to bring him back to the family fold. She also represents the power and the authority of the patriarchal state. Her moderate political views and her categorical rejection of violence make her the raissoneur of the state. She tells the Muslim politician in the rhetorical style typical of the nationalist discourse that saffron and green are colours of the Indian national flag and that neither colour should seek to spread itself all over the flag. By this logic, Fiza must necessarily kill her brother in order to uphold the state’s sovereignty. She as a symbol of the state can kill her brother who has wrongly arrogated for himself its power. Such a narrative device helps to establish state hegemony through one of the most popular cultural forms of the era, viz., cinema. According to Gramsci, hegemony operates through coercion as embodied by the state, and ideologically through civil society with its network of social and cultural institutions. Thus popular culture and mass media are implicated in the processes of the production and transmission of hegemony. This idea was more fully developed by Althusser in his essay, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus,” in which hegemony is supposed to be manufactured by Repressive State Apparatuses (police, armed forces) and Ideological State Apparatuses (family, church, school, media). The only way an individual can become a subject is by succumbing to the established norms of a particular society. Drawing on the insights provided by Lacanian psychoanalysis, Althusser explains that the individual’s submission to the law of the father is effected by his/her submission to the law of the society.15 Fiza is however more problematic in its negotiation of the terrorist theme. The extremist group leader Murad Khan (Manoj Bajpai) describes his armed struggle as a fight against injustice and oppression of all kinds. Further, Amaan’s declaration, “I’m fighting a jihad,” is explained as war against all forms of oppression of the subordinate groups irrespective of religious/caste/creed affiliations. Such a belief is reinforced by his killing of both the politicians, one a Hindu, the other a Muslim. Both are seen as power hungry, self-serving people with no real concern for the oppressed

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classes. Amaan’s attempt to define jihad as a fight of the oppressed against the oppressor does not effectively cancel out its strong connotations as a religious war. His death at the hands of Fiza who upholds the constitutional version of the nation as a secular entity may be read as the denunciation of armed insurgency and the triumph of the state. Yet even in his death Amaan remains an unsullied hero and an “unrepentant jihadi” (Dasgupta, India Today, 9 Oct 2000). In The Terrorist, Malli and her compatriots as well as the child, Surya, whose code name is Lotus, all refer to the Leader who is an important absentee character in the film. The entire action in the film is propelled by this phantom Leader. Repeated references to him in glowing terms indicate his power, which comprises the power to kill, generally considered the sole prerogative of the state. The first scene of the film shows the horrifying death that awaits a traitor to the cause that is mainly articulated and mobilized by the Leader. The members of the Leader’s militant group appear to be completely robotized through indoctrination. Even their language suffers from a deficiency. All they can say is that their fight is for the sake of “apna desh” (our country) and “behtar kal ke liye” (for a better tomorrow). Here insurgency is characterized as a passive submission to the will of a powerful, charismatic leader who takes the initiative. Insurgents are projected as a “mindless ‘rabble’ devoid of a will of their own and easily manipulated by their chiefs” (Guha 1983: 79). There is not a single scene in the film, which focuses either on the oppression by the state or the conditions of the marginalized lives of an ethnic community, which forced them into an armed insurgent struggle in the first place. The film’s narrative fails to show the evolution of an insurgent consciousness. Women’s participation in insurgent movements has created new possibilities for an epistemology and politics from the periphery. That is to say, the mobilization of women (usually considered as immanently pacifist) in the militant movements provides us with a fresh perspective to rethink the politics of gender and insurgency. Challenging conventional constructs of women as pacifists and nurturers, the female insurgent is the recalcitrant subject of (counter)-nationalist discourse. What do we make of women’s participation in armed insurgent movements? How far is the decision to take to arms a matter of women’s agency? In the context of this section of the chapter, these are important issues as three of the five films analyzed here have women militants: Veeran in Maachis, Meghna in Dil Se and Malli in The Terrorist. Further, we need to examine whether these characters are invested with a revolutionary consciousness or whether their

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representations continue to show signs of biological essentialism, which the directors – all of them being male (Gulzar, Mani Ratnam, Santosh Sivan) – are most likely vulnerable to. None of the women really succeeds in advancing the political cause for which she was trained. Does this reify women’s putative feeblemindedness or does it posit women’s pacifism as the only hope for a non-violent, peaceful global order? Either way, the female subject of (counter)-nationalist discourse is positioned precariously. The end of The Terrorist is compromised as the female suicide bomber chooses not to press the button that will blow her victim to pieces. The film ends with a blank screen and the cry of a baby on the soundtrack. Are women essentially pacifist? Alternatively, to attempt a more emancipatory reading, is the end an exercise of choice on Malli’s part?16 Malli and her compatriots are shown throughout the film as subjects of an ideological apparatus. This is the first time that Malli can arrogate to herself an agentive power and that is what she puts to use. However, there is a problem with such a reading. The film begins with Malli killing a traitor on instructions from her leader. In all likelihood Malli will share a similar fate. Thus the film, at the connotative level, brings the narrative to a closure by making the audience recall the first scene while contemplating on the open-endedness of the narrative. The recalling of the first scene cancels out the emancipatory reading as in insurgent movements, women are important so long as they serve the revolution. Gender is subsumed by the larger categories of nation, community, etc. It would be appropriate at this point to recall the Ranis from the previous chapter who led a life of obscurity after Independence. Lakshmi Sahgal who had commanded the Regiment notes with regret in her autobiography, A Revolutionary Life, “… All they wanted when they came back to India was a little help… And no party was willing to help… (1997: 172). In her essay, “Unveiling Algeria,” Winifred Woodhull also makes a similar point when she describes the life of women after the Algerian war of Independence. She notes: The realignment of women with tradition and their consequent exclusion from public life was considered by feminists to be a betrayal both of the women who had fought for the nation’s freedom and of the revolution itself (1991: 113).

By contrast, Shoojit Sircar’s Madras Café (2013) attempts to depict the Sri Lanka-Tamil crisis in a historically realistic manner. The women are shown to be focused completely on their given assignment of killing the Indian Prime Minister which they accomplish with robotic efficacy. There is no fictionalizing of the historical event here as in The Terrorist. This

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marks a significant departure in the genre of terrorist cinema from the nineties to the two thousands. Similarly Ram Gopal Varma’s The Attacks of 26/11 based on the siege of the five star hotel The Taj Intercontinental in Colaba, Mumbai in 2008 uses a real life event in the manner of a documentary. Hardly any extraneous episodes are brought into the narrative. The script borrows heavily from newspapers and television news channels with the aim of achieving authenticity in the narrative. The latter day films arrogate to their story lines and treatment the power of the documentary. In Maachis, the female militant is trained and armed but her traditional role as nurturer of the family is not obliterated. Veeran is co-opted into the militant group as Bhabhi (sister-in-law). With this, she now has a Jeth (elder brother-in-law) and two Devars (younger brothers-in-law) to care for. Veeran enacts her feminine role to perfection by cooking and serving food for them. They in turn are happy with the “ghar ka khana” (homecooked food). This scene recalls “the happy family” scenes of the early part of the film. Such a bonding however does not prevent her from killing one of the “devars” who attacks her. Foucault identifies such an imperative to kill as “the principle underlying the tactics of battle – that one has to be capable of killing in order to go on living…” (1976: 137). In an unforgettable scene in the film, Veeran is tied to a pillar in their hideout, as Sanathan suspects her fiancé of disclosing their whereabouts to the police. He sends his assistant up a rickety staircase to the upper storey with instructions to kill Veeran. In the next scene, we hear a gun shot and see drops of blood on the floor, then the camera focuses on a pair of feet slowly descending the stairs, and next we see Veeran with a pistol in her hand. The Palestinian woman insurgent Leila Khaled who has the dubious distinction of hijacking two aircrafts reinforces women’s capacity to kill. In her autobiography, My People shall Live, she asserts, “I am not going to succumb to emotionalism and allow my feelings to blind my reason” (in Rajeswari Mohan 1998-99: 64). In The Terrorist, Sivan’s camera is a pervasive, voyeuristic camera that zooms in on the actress taking full advantage of the actor, Ayesha Dharker’s large expressive eyes, long thick hair, every strand of which is focused in extreme close up shots. The camera’s fragmentation of the woman’s body into eyes, hair, hands and feet puts her up on display. By setting up such a scopic regime, Sivan directs the gaze of the spectator towards the erotic identity of the heroine. The Terrorist plays upon all the so-called essential aspects of a woman’s psyche. However hard she tries to remain aloof and cold, Malli grows fond of her host Vasu and his wife.

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Finally, it is the child growing in her womb that prevents her from executing her task. Women’s sartorial features are often harnessed for the purposes of a revolution. The suicide bombers in both the films, The Terrorist and Dil Se are women. Women’s clothing provides ample scope for successful camouflaging of suicide bombs. Fanon in A Dying Colonialism (1965) also makes this point when he refers to the Algerian women who hid weapons in their clothes and transported them to the French quarters fearlessly without chances of being caught. In her essay on Leila Khaled’s autobiography, Rajeswari Mohan says, “Female militants are invariably seen as instances of gender anomaly --- the compulsion to sexualize these women into hyper-feminized objects of male desire and more significantly shepherd them into the patriarchal fold of marriage and heterosexual desire is one indicator of the threat they constitute” (1998-99: 68-9). In Dil Se, Meghna uses a putative feminine attribute of helplessness without a man in order to seek shelter in Amar’s house. She reasons, “We have nowhere to go, so we have come to you.” The female militant with a gun threatens the male order as it is tantamount to appropriating the power of the phallus. Hence, the urgent need to sexualize her as an object of desire. In a highly unconvincing scene, a militant impregnates Malli in The Terrorist. Malli protects the badly injured and dying militant from being captured by the security forces. He is surprised to know that his protector is a woman and proceeds to make love to her. Even after joining the militant ranks, Veeran is steadfast in her love for her fiancé. Meghna falls in love with Amar. Her initial continence is indicative of a monomaniacal focus on her mission. As the narrative unfolds her sexualization process is taken to its inevitable end in which she admits her love for Amar, for whom Meghna has been more a site of desire than an object of love. That moment of her sexualization in the narrative is also the moment of her failure to complete her mission. The female militant is successfully disarmed, castrated of the penis she had acquired by default and restored as the fully feminized subject of the conventional tragic love story in which she dies in the arms of her lover. In contrast to the sexualization of the female militant, the male body is projected as the necessary condition for the success of the mission. While the female body is given an erotic identity, the male body is given a militaristic identity. Unlike the female militants who fail to accomplish their assigned tasks as pointed out earlier, the males are successful. Sanatan explodes a bomb in a bus, Amaan kills the two politicians, Kirpal kills a police officer and is caught in the act of killing another. In The

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Wretched of the Earth, Fanon talks of the impact of the suppressed rage of the native on his body, which manifests itself in tense, contracted muscles (1967: 44). Khalid Mohammed exploits the muscular body of the superstar, Hrithik Roshan in a ten-minute exclusive sequence that documents Amaan’s training. The taut, stretched muscles combined with facial expressions indicating suppressed rage are reminiscent of Fanon’s natives. The marketing of masculinity is an important component of terrorist films. In Hindi cinema, conventionally the villain, like Danny Denzongpa in Boney Kapoor’s Pukar, would occupy the space of the terrorist. However, with heroes getting to be more experimental and doing what they call “negative roles,” it is not unusual now to see the hero as a terrorist. The action film has always been the unassailable citadel of masculinity. It thrives on conventional images of physically strong men who are the protectors of women and the world. Dil Se provides the audience with an excess of pleasure (unique dance sequence on a running train, beautiful scenes of exotic Ladakh, the romance of the lead pair) in a story with a grim subject like terrorism. The Terrorist is a short focused film, which hit the Film Festival circuit bagging awards. The film does not, unlike the other three, incorporate elements of commercial cinema like song and dance, exotic locales, glamorous stars, etc. According to Laura Mulvey, in her famous essay, “Narrative Cinema and Visual Pleasure,” “The song and dance sequences interrupt the flow of the diegeses in mainstream film [which] neatly combines spectacle and narration” (1989: 19). In Hindi cinema, song and dance sequences (a legacy of the Parsi theatre) are incorporated into the film even at the expense of interrupting the plot. The sequences are so integral a part of the total filmic experience that their absence affects the box office performance of the film. Video piracy in the late eighties and early nineties produced a deep anxiety among the film producers as audiences became increasingly prone to watching films at home. (By mid nineties, the advent of the multiplex brought back the audiences to theatres thus rejuvenating the older forms of film viewing.17) This anxiety coupled with the growing popularity of video albums contributed to a phenomenon that we may call MTVisation of cinema. Autonomous song and dance sequences were interpolated in the narrative in order to attract cinema audiences. The “Chaiya Chaiya” song in Dil Se picturized on a moving train with the svelte MTV VJ Malaika Aurora atop the train is a case in point. It proved to be a big draw for audiences.18 The song mobilizes the scopic drive of the male audience. The “look” needs to be solicited and the body of the actress is used for this purpose. In a similar vein, Fiza has a scintillating dance number, “Mehboob Mere” performed by former Miss

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Universe Sushmita Sen. To the vast majority of audiences for whom cinema is an exercise in voyeurism, the pleasure of seeing the seductively moving Sushmita Sen on a 70 mm screen with stereophonic sound far exceeds that of seeing her on a television screen at home. Although the interpolation of these sequences is driven by the profit motive, it nevertheless changes the contours of mainstream cinema as well as our ways of seeing. In a terrorist film in particular such dance numbers divert at least temporarily (perhaps even to a great extent) the attention of the audience from the violence, blood and gore, the pathos and politics of the main text. I take up Chopra’s Mission Kashmir separately for analysis as this film deals with the secularism vs. communalism debate. The film with screenplay by famous novelist Vikram Chandra is a nostalgia-ridden narrative about the loss of the peaceful paradise, Kashmir. Chopra says, “It’s really been one of the closest subjects to my heart. Kashmir was my childhood, it was my paradise. I have seen Kashmir when it was like heaven, when it was literally paradise on this earth. I have also seen how it’s been ravaged through the years and it’s torn my heart out. I had to do something small and significant to try and turn events around. My film, Mission Kashmir is therefore an attempt in that direction” (123india.com Movies). Unlike the terrorist films discussed until now, Mission Kashmir is unique in its engagement with the secularism vis-à-vis communalism debate. This debate has gained significance in contemporary political discourse in India. In Mission Kashmir the Muslim police officer Inayat Khan (Sanjay Dutt) is posited as the ideal Indian citizen. His secularism and modern outlook is shown by his marriage to a Hindu girl who retains her Hindu name, Neelima (Sonali Kulkarni) and visits both masjid and mandir. Chopra’s positioning of a Muslim police officer with a Hindu wife is typical of what Dhareshwar and Niranjana in their essay on the Tamil film Kaadalan describe as “the dominant politics of piety that has come to govern the discourse of secularism: namely, how secularism of love can engender love of secularism” (1996: 23). Inayat Khan is shown doing namaz in the private space of his home. This is a pointer to the idea of a desirable secular citizen who refrains from bringing religion into the public domain. The senior police officer suspects Inayat Khan’s loyalty when he has to assign him the task of the prime minister’s security. A visibly upset Khan proclaims himself as a patriotic Kashmiri Indian. The allusion made here by the officer to Indira Gandhi’s

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assassination by her Sikh bodyguards is revealing. Both Sikh and Muslims form part of the minority community in India who are usually perceived as secessionists and anti-nationals. Inayat Khan is projected as a model for the minority community to follow. Erasure of distinct religious signs is shown to be desirable in the course of constructing an “Indian” identity. By contrast, in Mani Ratnam’s Roja, the militant Liyaqat Khan is shown to be praying calmly, while the hero is putting out the fire to the Indian flag with his own body. The scene with its dense symbolism equates prayer with Islamic fundamentalism and Liyaqat Khan with antinationalism and religious fanaticism. Inayat Khan’s body in Mission Kashmir carries no signs of his religious affiliation. His is a secularised body erased of specific religious symbols. (Mani Ratnam’s Bombay by contrast uses the white filigree cap for all its Muslim characters.) In the course of performing his duty to the nation (storming into a militant hide-out), Inayat Khan kills the parents of a little child, Altaf. Inayat Khan and Neelima, who have just lost their child, Irfan in an accidental fall from the window, adopt Altaf. The Hindu wife of Inayat Khan gives him lessons in secularism (she takes him to Hazratbal and Shankaracharya to offer prayers) and takes care of him with great love and affection. The audience’s sympathy is created for Inayat Khan. He loses his son due to lack of medical care. As doctors are threatened by the militants they refuse to treat the child of the police officer. Later, his wife also dies when a bomb planted in his briefcase explodes in his house. When Altaf discovers that Inayat Khan is none other than the police officer who killed his parents and sister, he escapes from home and joins a militant group headed by an Afghani terrorist, Hilal Kohistani (loosely based on the real life Osama bin Laden). He is delegated the task of executing Kohistani’s most important mission which includes the blowing up of the famous shrines, Hazratbal and Shankaracharya. Here, the aim of the terrorist is to eliminate state symbols. (Both the shrines are managed by the state of Jammu and Kashmir.) The terrorists in Mission Kashmir are pan Islamic mercenaries, not part of autochthonous groups conscious of Kashmiriyat (Kashmiri cultural essence). The pan Islamists are unaware of the significance of the two shrines in the collective unconscious of the Kashmiris. In the end, Inayat Khan convinces Altaf to turn the missiles trained towards Hazratbal and Shankaracharya away from the shrines. For the first time after the traumatic events of his life, Altaf sleeps fearlessly and sees a dream in which he is enjoying a game of cricket with his foster parents. He has no memories left of his biological parents and sister. Altaf’s paradise is regained through the erasure of his biological parents

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and sister and his assimilation into the family of secular Muslims. Mission Kashmir, unlike Fiza, is rooted in a particular secessionist movement. The title of the film is the main indicator. Besides, the location shooting on the Dal Lake, shots of the Hazratbal and Shankaracharya indicate the rootedness of the film. The music adds local colour to the film through the use of lines (Rind Posh Maal) from a hundred year old folk song by Rasool Mir. The women are dressed in the traditional pherans. The specific historical rootedness of Mission Kashmir complements the characterization. The trajectory of Altaf’s character from the innocent, playful child to a terrorist is dramatized against the background of the politics of Kashmir. As the script writer Vikram Chandra puts it, “Our concentration is on individuals who move within the larger context of the historical background, the geo-political contradictions and the ambitions of various nation states and groups, caught up in that larger chakravyuha” (3). When we come to the examination of films based on the theme of terrorism in the 2000s, we note that it is not about specific political movements for separate states or nations. Rather, it is a more generalized phenomenon that affects completely unconcerned peoples in the most unexpected of places and times. We can relate A Wednesday! (2008) to RDB for its thematic similarity; namely, the frustration of the common man towards an impotent system. The film directed by Neeraj Pandey maintains tight unity of time like in classical drama. Set between 2 pm and 6 pm on a Wednesday, the film begins with the narration of a police commissioner (Anupam Kher) about an event that is strangely not maintained in the police records. A common man (Nasserudin Shah) completely exasperated by a ham-fisted police force sets up an effective signals system on the terrace of an abandoned building and fools the police into believing that he is about to commit a major terrorist act. In an edgeof-the-seat suspense drama, it turns out that he kills five hardened terrorists that the State has left unpunished. He goes unpunished for his act. Here it departs from RDB in which the boys are punished by death. It won the Indira Gandhi Award for Best First Film of a Director at the 56th National Film awards. Like Nishikant Kamat’s Mumbai Meri Jaan (2008) this film too was inspired by the train blasts in Mumbai. The problematic of Muslim identity is all the more fraught ever since the 9/11 episode. The expansion of global networks of jihadi terrorism has exacerbated the problematic of inter faith harmony. Media discourses are major epistemological tools even as they contribute to the perpetration of ethnic, racial and communal stereotypes. Thus, it becomes imperative that

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we study the various media forms in order to open up the question of the representation of Muslims because as Younds points out, “Studying media is not an ‘add on’ to the constitution of public discourse on security, terrorism and suspect communities, but is intrinsic to the constitution of that discursive reality” (Manchanda 2010: 44). Lamenting about the representation and misrepresentation of Islam and Muslims in his Covering Islam, Edward Said caustically remarks, “ … the media have therefore covered Islam: they have portrayed it, characterized it, analyzed it, given instant courses on it, and consequently they have made it ‘known’ (1997: li).” Cinema is one of the most potent producers of visual signifiers and as I have argued elsewhere, it is a powerful medium that constructs historical narratives.19 Karan Johar’s My Name is Khan (2010) establishes in the beginning of the narrative a notion of goodness, when the mother explains to her son distressed by the rioting outside his house that there are only good and bad people in this world, irrespective of religion, she is creating an ethical discourse that transcends the murky politics of religious divides. Having imbibed this, the hero in the rest of the film sets out on a journey that brings him face to face with crises. Each time he is the sole person out there being good by helping others – pumping out water in a flooded residential area or moving in waist deep water to bring aid to storm victims stranded in a hamlet which is a clear allusion to Hurricane Katrina. Bollywood appropriates American trauma in order to establish a notion of goodness that surpasses race, religion, ethnicity and all such divisions based on ascriptive identities. The irony of the demonstration of acts of kindness by a Muslim in a society that has vilified an entire community post 9/11 cannot be missed by the viewer. Rizwan’s ability to stay uncorrupted in the big bad world arises out of his mental condition, due to which he retains a child-like innocence and simplistic understanding of the world. In this sense, the film aligns itself with an older convention in Hindi cinema and that is the construction of the good Muslim – Rahim Chacha in Sholay (1975), Inayat Khan in Mission Kashmir and so on. In this movie Rizwan Khan is more poignant as he has to tell the world especially the powers that be that he is not a terrorist. Unlike Rahim Chaha just being good will not do; Rizwan has to scream his goodness from the rooftops, so to speak. The representation of Muslims has come full circle from the construction of the good Muslim to underworld criminals to Pakistani agents to terrorists back again to the good Muslim. In My Name is Khan an innocent

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child is victimized for having a surname like Khan. Rizwan Khan then sets out to undo the guilt of the gruesome act in a narrative that resembles the American road movie genre. Whenever Bollywood has attempted to give space to the Muslim outside of the terrorist, it ends up portraying them as victims. The representation of the Muslim then necessarily swings between victim and perpetrator especially in the post 9/11 scenario. Unlike most terrorist films of the 1990s, Pooja Bhatt’s Dhoka (2007) does not seek to overly dramatize terrorist activites. Rather it depicts poignantly the problematic negotiations of a minority community in the public sphere. The scene that shows the arbitrary police checking of vehicles driven by Muslims reveals both statist compulsions in the face of terror and the inescapable fact of the general perception of Muslims as terrorists. The lead actor’s (Muzammil Ibrahim) real life Kashmiri roots make his predicament and his dialogues that much more resonant. Dhoka does not show terrorism for secession. It shows it as a contemporary, all pervasive, urban phenomenon triggered by fundamentalist groups that has ramifications for ordinary Muslims too. The important category of identity may be inscribed here at this point. When Zayed says, “this is my country too,” he stakes a claim to a piece of land called India as a Muslim who has every right as a citizen to live a life of dignity. Like Chopra’s Mission Kashmir discussed earlier in this section, this film also inserts the Muslim hero within the state machinery. (Both heroes are police officers.) From this vantage point, Dhoka explores the complexities of identities of people in such locations. Early in the film Zayed says in jest to his friends who ask him to join him for a drink, “Paanch baar namaaz padne wale ko daru pilate ho?” (Are you going to offer a drink to one who reads his Namaaz five times a day?) This is a pointer to the fact that a devout Muslim is not necessarily a fundamentalist with loyalties to pan-Islamism rather than nation. Zayed can be devout and yet a secular, loyal and conscientious police officer. The film’s secularism does not negate religiosity. We are shown images of Hindu and Muslim characters in the film in the act of prayer within the confines of their homes. Ideologically, the film seems to adhere to the western notion of secularism as separation of church and state by which religion is restricted to the private domain out of bounds to the state.

X Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willemen in their Introduction to the Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema (1999) believe that the relation between

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cinema and state is sometimes complicit, sometimes confrontational and oppositional. Militant films may be viewed as oppositional or confrontational narratives. However, the confrontation is only a superficial gloss. Complicity with the state lies at the root of the narrative. Dil Se for instance, sanitizes the militant theme by foregrounding the theme of romance. The violence and brutality of militant acts forms a background to a song sequence. The focus throughout the film is on the hero’s search for the elusive heroine, who is a suicide bomber. The end of the film is also a paean to love in the tradition of tragic romances. Though Maachis shows sympathy for the militants, in the end, the state is overpowering. Kirpal is imprisoned and tortured beyond recognition for attempting to kill a police officer. The group decimates itself in a series of mindless killings arising out of inter-group rivalry and suspicions. We know the film is based on militancy in Punjab because of the location and names of the characters. There is however no reference to Khalistan (the name of the independent nation imagined by the militants) in the film. Militancy is understood as an unmitigated struggle against the oppressor which in the militant’s discourse is the state. Gulzar deflects the specificity of the Punjab problem, which was quite emphatically a separatist movement with elements of religious and regional nationalism. While stressing the need for filmmakers to treat traumas such as the Partition and militancy, Gulzar remarks: It lessens the hurt, otherwise the wound continues to fester. If there were more books written and films made on the partition, then we wouldn’t have such a major communal problem now. Europe has healed the wounds of two World Wars by bringing out all the hurt and resentment through art, books and films (in Gahlot, Express Magazine, 17 September 2000).

As shown above, militants are generally portrayed as frenzied, pathological characters. Terrorist films also ultimately become vehicles of pan-Indian nationalism e.g. Roja, Dil Se, etc. Rustom Bharucha in his essay on Mani Ratnam’s Roja observes that “nationalism is mediated and dispersed through layers of cultural expression which have been consolidated through the ‘manufacture of consent’ engineered by the agencies of the state in the market and the media” (1999: 115). Both Amaan and Kirpal Singh begin as reluctant militants. They are drawn into militancy to avenge personal loss and humiliation and not with any well defined political agenda. Such a displacement of intention diffuses the revolutionary content of militant movements. In all the above films, the impact of terrorism is shown on the private domain of family and romantic relationships. The idealized private space

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is dominated by the trope of the happy family picturized in tender domestic activities like the mother oiling children’s hair in Fiza, a large extended family making marriage preparations in Dil Se, two friends playing hockey in the courtyard in Maachis and a child enjoying a game of cricket with his parents in Mission Kashmir. Such a family becomes the site of the spectators’ desire. But the myth of the happy family is shattered and torn apart, when one of its members joins the militant ranks. Kirpal in Maachis, Amaan in Fiza, Altaf in Mission Kashmir and Amar Verma’s link with Meghna in Dil Se are ruptures in the narrative of the happy family. The focus on the private space certainly humanizes the militant issue but the erasure of the public domain depoliticizes it. The Hindi films discussed in this chapter have unequivocal political contents but are deeply embedded in the dominant ideology from which they are produced. Any resistance offered to the dominant ideology (we have examined several instances of resistance) is nullified at the end of the film, which upholds the state. The transformative language of the radical is decimated and the metalanguage of the oppressor is valorized. According to Moti Gokul Sing and Wimal Dissanayake the important shaping forces of Indian cinema are the two epics Ramayana and Mahabharata (1998: 41). They could be called the prototypes for any Indian war narrative. The wars in both epics are dharmayudhs (just wars) in which the forces of good triumph over the forces of evil. War is glorified; heroism is celebrated and masculinity made desirable. War films more often than not reflect the viewer’s fascination for terror, horror and adventure alongside the meticulous construction of their effects. All war narratives therefore are explanatory texts, at pains to justify war. Both war and terrorist films in my opinion focus on the emotive and humanist aspects and constitute these as the normative mode of reception, fudging largely the audience’s capacity for critical thinking. The films as forms of political address construct the idea of a unitary nation, whose strong centralized, patriarchal state may be critiqued or challenged up to a point beyond which its authority must necessarily be accepted. Cinema thus offers the citizen a nationalist utopia. The hero of a war film is posited as a model national subject fit for emulation. The film stars are assigned the burden of being the prototypes of the national ideals. Hindi war cinema would quite easily appeal to the urban middle class audiences who stand to gain the most by rooting for the nation. The middle classes are instrumental agents in the nation-building project. War films would equally appeal to the agrarian community whose sentimental

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attachment to the land is so effectively troped by the filmmaker. What, however, may be its appeal to the vast and ever-growing urban poor? Does war cinema incorporate the “slum’s eye-view of the world”, to use Nandy’s formulation (1998: 3). Are not the urban poor waging a war, in any case, on a daily basis against poverty, alienation, disease and unemployment? Are not their enemies within the nation rather than outside it? Questions such as these would involve a detailed analysis of the reception of war films which is outside the scope of this book. What I have tried to show in this chapter is the imbrication of Hindi war cinema (barring a few exceptions of representational anomalies) within a predominantly statist discourse which in the Indian context made a transition from secular to cultural nationalism in the nineteen nineties. War narratives are cast in the mould of popular cinematic conventions such as triumph of good over evil. An overarching thematic and narrative closure of such philosophical proportions leads to the inevitable fetishization of the large categories these films deal with, the nation being one. According to Bewes, reification happens, “in situations of modern warfare, when a complex of competing state interests is represented as a force for ‘good’ (more often, ‘justice’ or ‘stability’) in confrontation with a force of ‘evil’ – and so on” (2002: 4). Besides the primary aim of popular cinema being entertainment, the depiction of violence is also tuned to this purpose. This is what Jeffrey Goldstein notes: “Violent entertainment seems to be most attractive when it contains an engaging fantasy theme in which disliked characters are defeated by liked characters in the cause of justice” (1998: 4). War films as a genre demonstrate the binary of good and bad characters (even if only conjured as good and evil) and dramatize the conflict between the opposing forces. The characters, dialogues, cinematography and ideology are geared towards the unfolding of plots that thrive on action based on putatively authentic historical data.

Notes 1

I am aware of the semantic peregrinations of the word, “terrorist.” However, I retain the word for two reasons. One, for the lack of a suitable alternative. Two, the films usually portray them as “terrorists”: misled, anti-national and criminal, not as political revolutionaries. Having made this point, I will refrain from putting the word into quotes in order to maintain the visual appeal of the book. 2 The scope of nationalism extends beyond freedom from colonial rule. It manifests itself as an on-going process engaged in the task of defining a nation. The outnumbering of war films by terrorist films is a pointer to the changing nature of war. Today, wars are fought not exclusively against an external aggressor. The

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groups of people who are marginalized within a nation may seek to redress their grievances by waging a war against the state. In the Indian context, we have seen secessionist movements in Punjab, Nagaland, Mizoram and Jammu and Kashmir. 3 Notes, Memoranda and Letters exchanged between the Govt of India and China, Nov 1959 to Mar 1960, White Paper III, Ministry of External Affairs, Govt. of India, New Delhi, quoted in Ramesh Sanghvi, India's Northern Frontier and China, (Bombay: Contemporary Publishers, 1962). 4 Several interviews of mothers during Kargil war revealed them as saying that they would send their other sons too into the Army (Uma Chakravarti, Economic and Political Weekly, 29 April 2000, WS 12-17). 5 Japan admitted its role in coercing over 200,000 women to serve as prostitutes for the Japanese army during the war years of 1932 to 1945. The case of the military “comfort women” is indeed one of the most horrific of such violations. The prevalence of this practice is a pointer to the truth of the exploitation of women and the violation of their rights in the time of war. It is a gruesome reminder of the fact that institutionalized rape and prostitution constitute an important part of war crimes in the past as well as in our contemporary times as the cases of Shopian in Jammu and Kashmir and Manipur testify. In both these strife-torn places the security forces were allegedly responsible for the acts of rapes and molestations. 6 The reference here is to the formation of an independent Bangladesh (former East Pakistan) in 1971. 7 The attempts made by filmmakers to generate hate are not peculiar to Hindi cinema. Hollywood stereotyped all Germans as brutes in its World War II films. 8 The motto displayed prominently in Chetwode Hall of Indian Military Academy, Dehra Dun from where an officer passes out on completion of training, reads: The Safety, Honour and Welfare of your country comes first, always and everytime. The Honour, Welfare and Comfort of the men you command comes next. Your own ease, comfort and safety comes last, always and everytime. Field Marshal Sir Philip W Chetwode, Bt GCB, KCMG, GCSI, DSO. 9 India undertook Operation Vijay in Kargil to push back infiltrators who had occupied Indian posts in the Drass sector of Jammu & Kashmir in May 1999. The people of India lent whole-hearted support to the soldiers fighting under adverse conditions. Patriotism, or rather jingoism, became the zeitgeist of the Indian nation-state. 10 The pain and anguish caused by the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 have been the inspiration for several filmmakers: M S Sathyu’s Garm Hawa (Hot Winds) (1975), Govind Nihalani’s Tamas (Conflict) (1985), Anil Sharma’s Gadar (Confusion) (2002), Chandraprakash Dwivedi’s Pinjar (Cage) (2003). 11 The Marathi play “Mee Nathuram Godse Boltoy” is a precursor to antiGandhianism. 12 Jessica Lal was brutally murdered on 30 April 1999 while working in a bar when she refused a drink to a customer as it was closing time. The acquittal of the murderers led to large scale protests in Delhi followed by extensive media coverage. Finally on December 15, 2006, the main suspect Manu Sharma was sentenced to life imprisonment. A film based on her life called No One Killed

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Jessica directed by Rajkumar Gupta was released in 2011. 13 Simranjit Singh Mann in a Times of India interview laments the fact that the Government has never taken the people of Punjab and Kashmir into confidence in solving the militancy problem. For our purposes, Mann is an interesting figure. His trajectory from police officer (pro-State) to militant (anti-State) to politician (inbetween) makes him an emblematic figure in Punjab politics. 14 Abdul Ghani Lone, Hurriyat leader in a large gathering in Kashmir had appealed to the government to take into consideration the Kashmiri people’s views (Times of India, 9 Oct 2000) 15 For a detailed overview of the theories of cultural studies, see Dominic Strinati, An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 1995). 16 I am grateful to Rani Dharker for making me think in this direction. 17 See Gita Viswanath’s “The Multiplex: Crowd, Audience and the Genre Film.” Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 42, No. 32, 11-17 Aug 2007. 18 Rajashri Theatre in Ahmedabad replayed the number during the interval with special effects from a Dolby sound system. 19 See Gita Viswanath and Salma Malik’s “Revisiting 1947 through Popular Cinema: A Comparative Study of India and Pakistan.” Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 44 No. 36 Sept 05 - Sept 11, 2009.

CHAPTER FIVE BY WAY OF CONCLUSION

An attempt to arrive at an understanding of the meanings of nation and nationalism has only led us to believe in the multiplicity of their semantics. The focus, quite clearly, has been on the textuality of these concepts, in so far as film and military literature have been interpreted to de/construct notions of nation and nationalism in war. The conviction in textuality arises from the fact that war, to most of us, is a narrated event. A detailed analysis of film and military literature has led us to believe that the “national question” may be raised through the antithetical categories of popular culture and niche writing. While military literature addresses the idea of nation and nationalism in direct ways, popular film is somewhat more covert. The filmic text’s negotiations with the “nation” occur in the public space and this has an impact on its construction of nation and perception of nationalism. On the other hand writing and reading are completely private activities. The imperatives of commerce do not operate in the field of military literature to the extent that they do for popular film. The mass appeal of film makes it an inclusive medium. At every stage of film making from its production to distribution to reception, it involves the participation of diverse groups that represent the “people” of the nation. Men, women, children, rich, poor, urban, rural, upper caste/class, lower caste/class – all are part of the process of producing and consuming a film. By contrast, military literature is not representative of the nation’s demography. It is not a conscious disavowal of the totality of the nation, rather the specificities of the organization’s composition, task and needs determine the exclusionary nature of military literature. Even so, its marginalization of women, children and civilians is not entirely innocent. Military literature underlines the narrative of a belligerent, masculinist nation that is vigorously militaristic, fully acquiescent with the idea of war as a legitimate means to achieve peace. The most conspicuous metaphors of war in Hindi cinema as well as military literature are those of masculinism. As per the Freudian notion, violence and war are sublimations

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of aggressive urges of the phallus for uncultivated men who did not learn to control these urges at an early stage. The male too in war narratives is represented not as entirely free and privileged. War breaks down, to a great extent, the soldier’s individuality, agency and subjectivity through expectation of complete submission to the will of the State. Males in war are collective symbols of controlled virility with the tragedy intensified by stressing on the wastage of youth. Discourses of an endangered nation indulge in engendering the nation. That is, the nation in war popularizes through its cultural products the idea of a strong, brave, masculine, military hero as the saviour of the nation under threat. The self-abnegating female counterpart in her avatar of the fecund mother is the producer of war heroes. Although memoirs are written and published after the officer has hung his uniform, it continues to cling on like second skin. It would seem the authors are condemned never to peel this invisible second skin to reveal their naked selves. They fight shy of writing candidly about their personal lives the way autobiographers do. The soldier’s obliteration of the personal may be read as a form of transcendence required to be prepared to give up life on the battlefield. The self is usually depicted as an unfolding of manhood and death is characterized as a rite of passage from manhood to transcendence. The military experience is described as a ritual that makes a man out of the male. Self-reflexivity is largely absent in military memoirs. They have a sanitized, solipsistic, self-laudatory tone. Insurgent narratives are on the surface subversive in content more than in form. They create a space for the articulations of the insurgent, variously described as militant, terrorist and so on. The insurgent films in foregrounding the private domain with the major trope of the happy family systematically destroyed by the State derail the political and historical content of insurgent movements. This book argues that the narratives are emptied of their subversive contents and the State restored to its pristine position. The notion of the nation as redundant and obsolete can at best be fanciful for a decolonized country. In such cases, nation is a terrain won back from the colonizer after struggle (either violent or non-violent). It is a socio-economic-cultural-political space over which sovereignty can now be claimed. It becomes an emblem of that classic “lost and found” Hindi film formula, enormously boring yet hugely popular. Nation, although a demarcated entity, is constituted in and through a

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range of cultural categories like language, ethnicity and so on. The stability of a nation goes beyond mere political stability. Rather, a nation is contested by various groups which deploy different varieties of nationalism to do so. In India we have noted a clear shift from secular to cultural nationalism within a fairly short span of sixty years. The shift manifests itself in the arena of popular film in which the basic aim is entertainment. Yet, it is invested here with the heavy semantic burden of narrating the nation. The investment is justified because popular film, whether self-consciously or not, is inevitably rooted in the society from which it is produced. War films in Hindi cinema reflect this paradigm shift. The films from the nineteen nineties onwards analyzed here uphold a majoritarian, patriarchal and chauvinistic nation. The content of the hegemonic ideology of cultural/Hindu nationalism stands exposed. Some space for the contestation of such a nation is provided by the terrorist film. However, this genre also finally blends with the ultra nationalist war film genre, few exceptions notwithstanding. War discourse is celebratory of the overarching category of nation. Since war by nature is disruptive, narratives of war seek solace in the notion of a unified nation. A nation, despite claims to the contrary, is not a monolith. It is divided on the basis of caste/class/gender/religion and so on. War discourse irons out these divisions in order to foreground the national identity of the inhabitants of a nation. The narratives, whether visual or verbal, strive to mobilize sentiment towards consensus for a strong, centralized nation for which it is imperative to foster nationalistic and patriotic feelings. In the course of analyzing military literature and Hindi war cinema, I have used the poststructuralist idea of nation as a discursive space. This idea denounces the territoriality of the nation. Interestingly both military literature and Hindi war cinema (especially the former) foreground the territoriality of the nation. In the case of the latter, in conjunction with territoriality, cultural sovereignty is also emphasized. My study of popular film and military literature has led me to the conclusion that the two discourses complement each other. While the radical impulses of popular film are circumscribed by the state through censorship for instance, military literature plays out a well-defined role as a vehicle of statist discourse. A nation creates stories of heroism that may have a positive impact on the inhabitants. In the narratives examined here, we do not perceive a strong anti-war tradition unlike in some Western narratives. War continues to be cast in the mould of dharmayudh

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(righteous war) as propounded in the Hindu sacred text the Bhagvad Gita. Such a representation of war provides ample space for the glorification of a strong centralized nation, the mobilization of the sentiment of nationalism and the construction of gendered spaces.

REFERENCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

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FILMOGRAPHY

1942: A Love Story (1992) Dir: Vidhu Vinod Chopra Cast: Anil Kapoor, Jackie Shroff, Anupam Kher, Danny Denzongpa, Manisha Koirala A Wednesday! (2008) Dir: Neeraj Pandey Cast: Anupam Kher, Nasseruddin Shah, Jimmy Shergill, Deepal Shaw Apocalypse Now (1979) Dir: Francis Ford Coppola Cast: Marlon Brando, Harrison Ford, Robert Duvall, Martin Sheen Border (1997) Dir: J P Dutta Cast: Sunny Deol, Akshaye Khanna, Sunil Shetty, Tabu, Pooja Bhatt, Rakhee Born on the Fourth of July (1989) Dir: Oliver Stone Cast: Tom Cruise, Raymond J. Barry, Caroline Kava Casablanca (1942) Dir: Michael Curtiz Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid Deewar (1975) Dir: Yash Chopra Cast: Amitabh Bachchan, Shashi Kapoor, Nirupa Roy, Parveen Babi, Neetu Singh Dhoka (2007) Dir: Pooja Bhatt Cast: Muzammil Ibrahim, Tulip Joshi, Anupam Kher, Gulshan Grover

150

Filmography

Dil Se (1999) Dir: Mani Ratnam Cast: Mainsha Koirala, Shah Rukh Khan, Zohra Saigal, Preeti Zinta Fiza (1999) Dir: Khalid Mohammed Cast: Karishma Kapoor, Neha, Jaya Bachchan, Hrithik Roshan Haqeeqat (1964) Dir: Chetan Anand Cast: Balraj Sahni, Dharmendra, Jayant, Priya Rajwansh Hey Ram (2000) Dir: Kamal Haasan Cast: Kamal Haasan, Shah Rukh Khan, Om Puri, Rani Mukherjee, Vasundhara Das Hindustan ki Kasam (1973) Dir: Chetan Anand Cast: Raaj Kumar, Vijay Anand, Priya Rajwansh, Balraj Sahni, Amrish Puri, Amjad Khan LOC Kargil (2003) Dir: J P Dutta Cast: Sanjay Dutt, Abhishek Bachchan, Ajay Devgn, Sunil Shetty, Rani Mukherjee, Raveena Tandon, Kareena Kapoor Maachis (1992) Dir: Gulzar Cast: Tabu, Chandrachur Singh, Om Puri Madras Café (2013) Dir: Shoojit Sircar Cast: John Abraham, Nargis Fakhri, Siddharth Basu, Rashi Khanna Major Saab (1999) Dir: Tinu Anand Cast: Amitabh Bachchan, Ajay Devgn, Ashish Vidyarthi, Nafisa Ali, Sonali Bendre

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Mission Kashmir (2000) Dir; Vidhu Vinod Chopra Cast: Hrithik Roshan, Sanjay Dutt, Jackie Shroff, Preity Zinta, Sonali Kulkarni My Name is Khan (2010) Dir: Karan Johar Cast: Shah Rukh Khan, Kajol, Jimmy Shergill, Arjun Aujla, Zarina Wahab Pearl Harbour (2001) Dir: Michael Bay Cast: Ben Affleck, Josh Harnett, Kate Beckinsale Platoon (1986) Dir: Oliver Stone Cast: Charlie Sheen, Tom Berenger, Willem Dafoe, Keith David Pukar (1999) Dir: Raj Kumar Santoshi Cast: Anil Kapoor, Danny Denzongpa, Om Puri, Madhuri Dixit, Namrata Shirodkar, Rohini Hattangadi Rang de Basanti (2006) Dir: Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra Cast: Aamir Khan, Siddharth Narayan, Soha Ali Khan, Kunal Kapoor, Madhavan, Sharman Joshi, Atul Kulkarni, Alice Patten Roja (1992) Dir: Mani Ratnam Cast: Arvind Swamy, Madhu, Pankaj Kapoor Soldier (1999) Dir: Abbas Mastan Cast: Bobby Deol, Suresh Oberoi, Pankaj Dheer, Dalip Tahil, Preity Zinta, Rakhee The Terrorist (1996) Dir: Santosh Sivan Cast: Ayesha Dharker, Vishnu Vardhan, Bhanu Prakash

INDEX

1942: A Love Story, 19, 91, 109 111, 149 A Dying Colonialism, 123, 142 A Wednesday! 19, 92, 127, 149 Abbas Mastan 104, 151 Action films, 22, 114 Agamben, Giorgio, 55, 139 Aloysius, G, 13 Althusser, Louis, 10, 95, 119, 139 Ambedkar, Babasaheb, 4, 143 Amin, Shahid, xii, 28, 139 Anand, Chetan, 69, 94, 97 - 99, 150 Anderson, Benedict, xii, 2 - 4, 37, 38, 42, 47, 71, 95, 139 Anderson, Linda, 18, 139 Apocalypse Now, 19, 86, 107, 108, 147, 149 Appadurai, Arjun, 12, 48, 49, 139 Ardh Satya, 116 Azad, Chandrasekhar, 111 Barthes, Roland, 98, 117, 139 Baudrillard, Jean, 86, 108, 145 Baweja, Harinder, 15, 72 - 78, 87, 99, 139 Bay, Michael, 107, 151 Bhabha, Homi, 3, 14, 28, 29, 96, 139, 140, 146 Bharatiya Janata Party, 56 Bharatmata, 12, 33 Bhargava, Rajeev, 12, 140 Bhatt, Pooja, 129, 149 Border, 19, 23, 54, 67, 69, 71, 72, 91, 94, 99, 100 - 104, 107, 110, 142, 149 Bose, Subhash Chandra, 60 – 62 Butler, Judith, xii, 81, 85, 140 Casablanca, 107, 142, 149 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, xii, 36, 140

Chakravarty, Sumita S, 9, 23, 97, 140 Chatterjee, Partha, xii, 2, 4, 22, 34, 35, 38, 43, 87, 141 Chaudhuri, J. N. Gen., 6, 58, 64, 141 Chauri Chaura, 28, 139 Clausewitz, Carl Von, xii, 15, 78 80, 86, 141 Conrad, Joseph, 107 Coppola, Francis Ford, 86, 107, 108, 149 Curtiz, Michael, 149 Dalvi J. P., Brig., 6, 15, 65, 69 - 78, 87 - 89, 141 Deewar, 21, 149 Dhoka, 19, 129, 149 Diary, 7, 15, 17, 55 - 57, 59, 65, 68, 72 - 78, 87, 147 Dil Chahta Hai, 111 Dil Se 19, 92, 113, 115, 116, 118, 120, 123, 124, 130, 131, 150 Discourse colonial, 34 first world, 14 insider, 78 insurgent, 45 Marxist, 39 masculinist, 24, 25, 101, 102, 107 media, 127 nationalist, xi, xii, 4, 45, 101, 110, 119 Nehruvian, 14 of globalization, 92 of Hindi cinema, 18 of history, 12, 13, 18 of Indian independence movement, 46

154 of military literature, 1, 53 of nation, 92, 113, 136 of nationalism, 12, 33, 35, 37, 113 of patriotism, 49 of state, 117, 119, 132 of terrorist film, 11 of war, 3, 6, 7, 10, 18, 21, 25, 49, 63, 66, 70 - 72, 77, 78, 96, 98, 101, 109, 137 of war films, 1 outsider, 78 postcolonial, xi primary, 69, 73, 74, 98 secondary, 69, 77, 98 statist, 137 tertiary, 11, 69, 98 Dr Kotnis ki Amar Kahani, 91 Durga Bhabhi, 111, 113 Dutta, J. P., 67, 69, 94, 99, 101, 104, 145, 149, 150 Born on the Fourth of July, 19, 109, 149 Eco, Umberto, 107, 142 Elshtain, Jean Bethke, 7, 16, 24, 53, 77, 87, 96, 142 Ethnicity, 27, 29, 40, 128, 137 Fanon, Frantz, 16, 30, 64, 123, 124, 142 Female body, 123 Fetish – ize, ism, ization, xiii, 92 94, 101, 132 Fiza, 19, 92, 113, 115, 118 - 120, 124, 127, 131, 150 Freud, Sigmund, 33, 93, 135 Full Metal Jacket, 19, 105, 148 Gandhi, Indira, 81, 82, 89, 125, 127 Gandhi, M. K., 13, 34, 45, 46, 60, 110, 112 Gandhianism, 133, 143, 146 Gangster, 21, 106, 114 Ghosh, Aurobindo, 4, 5, 45, 143 Giddens, Anthony, 114, 143 Girard, Rene, 43

Index Globalization, 14, 22, 32, 42, 48, 88, 92, 139 Gramsci, Antonio, 10, 11, 17, 119, 142 Guha, Ranajit, xii, 2, 10, 11, 18, 24, 73, 77, 117, 120, 139, 143 Gulzar, 113, 116, 121, 130, 150 Haasan, Kamal, 110, 150 Hall, Stuart, 8 Haqeeqat, xiii, 9, 19, 23, 69, 71, 91, 94 - 96, 98, 99, 101, 103, 150 Heart of Darkness, 107 Heaven & Earth, 109 Heehs, Peter, 5, 43, 45, 144 Hey Ram, 19, 91, 110, 111, 150 Himalayan Blunder, 65, 69, 141 Hindi Cinema, 1, 2, 4, 9, 11, 18 22, 61, 88, 91, 94, 98, 107, 110, 111, 113, 114, 124, 128, 133, 135, 137 Hindu fundamentalism, 14 Hindustan ki Kasam, 19, 23, 91, 97, 98, 150 Hindutva, 22, 140 History, xii, 12, 13, 23, 28, 29, 36, 92, 93, 118, 140 - 147 from below, 36 male, 24 military, 5 national, 36 of conflict, 45 of Indian Army, 6, 60 of Indian nation state, 4, 36, 47 of nation, 29, 35, 36, 103 of patriotism, 48 of war films, 91 of war, 2 official, 12 Hobsbawm, Eric, 2, 17, 29, 31, 80, 84, 144 Hum Dono, 9, 91 INA, 60, 110 Indo-Pak War of 1965, 24 of 1971, 24, 97, 99

The “Nation” in War Insurgent movements, 13, 24, 36, 45, 136 Islamic fundamentalism, 126 Jayawardena, Kumari, 2, 33, 34, 96, 144 Johar, Karan, 128, 151 Kargil, 47, 51, 66, 72, 73, 74, 75, 77, 81, 84 - 87, 89, 91, 103, 104, 133, 139, 145 Kaul B.M. Lt. Gen., 6, 64, 70, 76, 145 Kaul, Gautam, 19, 20, 145 Kautilya, 30, 145 Keegan, John, 78, 80, 145 Khaled, Leila, 122, 123, 145 Kubrick, Stanley, 105, 148 Lacan, Jacques, 119, 148 Lagaan, 23, 111 Lal, Jessica, 113, 133 Lannoy, Richard, 13, 145 LOC Kargil, 91, 104, 150 Longewala, 99 Maachis, 19, 92, 113, 116, 118, 120, 122, 130, 131, 150 Madras Café, 121, 150 Major Saab, 19, 91, 104, 105, 150 Male body, 112, 123 Mangal Pandey, 111 Marx, Karl, 10, 39, 93 Marxist, 6, 16, 39, 40 Masculinity, 10, 25, 102, 106, 109, 112, 124, 131 Mayo, Katherine, 34, 51, 147 Memoir, xi, 6, 8 - 10, 15, 17, 18, 55, 56, 58, 60, 62 - 69, 71, 76, 77, 87, 88, 99, 109, 112, 136, 147 Menezes, S. L. Lt. Gen., 6, 60, 61, 74, 145 Militancy, 5, 7, 98, 116, 117, 119, 130, 134 Militarism, 7, 14, 23, 56, 78, 85, 104, 142 Military literature, xi, 1 - 3, 6 - 8, 10, 11, 15, 17, 18, 24, 25, 51, 53 - 55, 57, 74, 88, 98, 108, 135, 137

155

Mission Kashmir, 19, 92, 113, 125 129, 131, 151 Mohammed, Khalid, 113, 118, 124, 150 Mulvey, Laura, 124, 145 Muslim identity, 35, 127 My Name is Khan, 19, 128, 151 Nation as a cultural space, 13 as an emotional site, 32 as earth mother, 33, 101 - 103 as fetish, 92, 93, 101, 132 as territory, 27, 29, 32, 47, 49, 68, 92, 95 gendered ideology of, 101 narrative of, 12, 14, 21, 29, 114, 118, 135 territorial concept of, 13 textuality of, 3, 135 National identity, 9, 13, 14, 20, 23, 38, 39, 42, 44, 57, 61, 110, 137, 140 Nationalism, xi, 1, 3, 4, 11, 14, 15, 18 as a response to the homogenizing tendencies of a global order, 37 as anti-colonialism, 12, 13, 37, 39 as discourse, 12, 37 as narrative, 12, 13 as progress, 16 as sentiment, 37 cultural, xi, 13, 22, 40 - 42, 132, 137 discursivity of, 91 Marxist approach to, 39, 40 religious, 5, 13, 42, 43, 110, 144 secular, 42, 110, 132 transnational, 59, 63, 68, 87 Nationalist, 36 Nationality, 3, 114 Nation-state, 2, 4, 9, 14, 16, 24, 27, 29, 31 - 33, 37, 40, 41, 45, 46, 47, 48, 68, 87, 88, 91, 103, 114, 133, 139

156 Newspaper reportage, 15, 17, 56, 78, 80, 81, 85 Nihalani, Govind, 116, 133 Onions, John, 7, 146 Operation Vijay, 72, 84, 104, 133 Pandey, Neeraj, 127, 149 Partition, 46, 51, 97, 98, 110, 130, 133, 145 Patriotism, 1, 3, 12, 23, 27, 46 - 51, 63, 71, 73, 75 - 77, 85, 95, 98, 103, 133 Pearl Harbour, 107, 151 Platoon, 19, 107, 108, 151 Popular Culture, 12, 20, 119, 134, 135, 144, 147, 148 Postmodernism, 8, 9, 22, 108, 144 Postnationalism, 47, 50 Pukar, 19, 91, 104, 105, 124, 151 Radcliffe, Sarah, 23, 146 Rang de Basanti, 19, 91, 111, 112, 113, 127, 151 Ratnam, Mani, 113, 118, 121, 126, 130, 150, 151 Renan, Ernest, xii, 28, 36, 93, 94, 96, 146 Sahgal, Lakshmi, xii, 15, 60, 62, 63, 68, 87, 121, 147 Said, Edward, 144 Santoshi, Raj Kumar, 104, 151 Saving Private Ryan, 107 Secularism, 5, 14, 42, 116, 125, 126, 129 Shahbano, 35, 146 Sholay, 113, 128, 142 Singh, Amar, 15, 57, 58, 59, 65, 68, 87, 147 Singh, Bhagat, 111, 112 Singh, Lachhman, Maj. Gen., 6, 15, 69, 71, 87, 147 Sinha, S. K. Lt. Gen., 6, 8, 15, 63 69, 87 - 89, 147 Sino-Indian conflict, 69, 70, 94 Sircar, Shoojit, 121, 150 Sivan, Santosh, 113, 121, 122, 151 Soldier, 19, 106, 151 Statism, 31

Index Stone, Oliver, 107, 108, 109, 149, 151 Subaltern Studies Series, 15, 18, 36, 143 Sunder Rajan, Rajeswari, ix, 33 35, 143, 146, 147 Tagore, Rabindranath, 14, 27, 49, 50, 147 Terrorism, 19, 22, 44, 45, 66, 116 119, 124, 127 - 130, 139, 144, 145, 148 Terrorist Films, 23, 24, 29, 92, 113, 114, 116, 117, 119, 124, 125, 129, 130 - 132 The Attacks of 26/11, 122 The Mahabharata, 62, 131 The Ramayana, 62, 131 The State, 10 -13, 15 - 17, 27, 28, 33 - 37, 40, 42, 44, 45, 48, 49, 51, 54, 71, 79, 80, 81, 88, 103, 105, 114, 118, 120, 127, 129, 130, 131, 133, 134, 137, 139, 140, 141, 144 agencies, 114, 117 and the media, 73 as a western concept, 30 as an agent of power, 31 demise of, 6 for Hegel, 31 for Kautilya, 30 function of, 31 in the global world, 32 militarism and, 7 military and, 64 princely, 57 - 59 relationship between individual and, 31 sanction of, 110, 115 secular, 14 symbols of, 24, 116, 119, 126 will of, 136 The Terrorist, xiii, 19, 92, 113, 115, 118, 120 - 124, 151 The Wretched of the Earth, 30, 124 Thorat, S. P. P., Lt. Gen., 6 Tinu Anand, 104,150

The “Nation” in War Varma, Ram Gopal, 122 Vidhu Vinod Chopra, 109, 113, 149, 151 Vietnam War, 23, 25, 86, 107, 108, 142, 144 War and gender, 2 as a narrated event, 6, 16, 135 as an extension of politics, 15 films, 1 - 3, 7, 8, 19, 20, 23 - 25, 28, 75, 88, 91, 92, 94, 98, 101, 103, 106, 107, 110, 111, 113, 114, 131, 132, 137 legitimacy of, 16 male bonding in, 76, 101, 148 romantic notion of, 16, 83 studies, xi, 5, 7, 53, 54

157

War Narratives, xi, xiii, 1 - 3, 10, 14 - 16, 24, 36, 49, 72, 75, 84, 131, 132 as historical narratives, 92 female spy in, 98 gendering of, xii, 73, 78, 96 male in, 136 survivor discourse in, 109 territoriality in, 92 truth value of, 100 women in, 24, 33 Westwood, Sally, 23, 146 Woodhull, Winifred, 121 World War I, 23, 24, 130 World War II, 9, 24, 47, 62, 96, 112, 133, 130 Yuval-Davis, Nira, 2, 7, 25, 32, 33, 61, 62, 89, 139, 148