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ABSTRACT
Critical scholars assert that the Bharatiya Janata Party is using commercial Hindi films, controlled by the censor board, to portray a ‘Hindu’ version of Indian nationality. Left-liberal intellectuals and activists further claim that Bollywood is also pandering to the diktats of the ruling party by making films which depict a right-wing version of Indian history. Films to a great extent define our social consciousness. This article attempts to show that the two films Bajirao Mastani and Panipat make a conscious attempt regarding the presentist use of medieval Indian history for furthering the process of national integration. Further, these two films partially challenge the patriarchal depiction of women in Indian society.
Acknowledgments
Credit is due to Dr Paul Rich for encouraging me to write on this topic and offering suggestions on my first draft. I am also grateful to my research scholars (Dr Moumita Chowdhury and Ms Priyanjana Gupta) for clarifying the convoluted relationship between Bollywood and military history. Thanks to the two referees whose comments have helped me to sharpen the arguments of this article. The usual disclaimers apply.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Devadoss and Cromley, ‘Intimacy in Non-western Discourses’, 2.
2. Bhowmik, ‘Film Censorship’, 297–307.
3. Fair, ‘Parmanu’.
4. Chaturvedi, Hindutva and Violence, 3–38, 319–23. For the quote see 324.
5. Chaturvedi, Hindutva and Violence, 207–10, 325–29.
6. For the Gandhian-Nehruvian concept of India as a nation in making see Chandra et al., India’s Struggle for Independence.
7. Devadoss and Cromley, ‘Intimacy in Non-western Discourses’, 3.
8. Quoted from Lichtner and Bandopadhyay, ‘Indian Cinema’, 442.
9. Chopra, Bollywood does Battle, xxii.
10. Raghavendra, Bollywood, 55.
11. Srinivasan, Baji Rao I, 72–9.
12. Raghavendra, Bollywood, 106–07.
13. Morcom, ‘Film Songs and Cultural Synergies’, 156–61.
14. Chopra, Bollywood does Battle, xviii-xix.
15. Quoted from Clausewitz, On War, 259.
16. Holmes, Acts of War, 7.
17. Kendrick, ‘“Man’s Greatest Catastrophe”’, 119–26.
18. Sarkar, Military History.
19. Gommans, Indian Frontier.
20. Keegan, Face of Battle.
21. For the war weariness of the Indian soldiers stationed in France during the Great War and their yearnings for home, see Indian Voices of the Great War.
22. For the career of Baji Rao, see Srinivasan, Baji Rao I.
23. Montgomery, History of Warfare, 405–06.
24. Sarkar, Military History, 139–45, 155–62.
25. Mehra, ‘The Arrangements of the two Armies’, 212.
26. Gommans, ‘Indian Warfare’, 157–82.
27. Dighe, ‘Baji Rao I’, 63–103.
28. Sarkar, Mughal Empire, vol. 2, 181–226.
29. John Keegan in Mask of Command elaborates heroic command as the commander giving an inspiring speech to his soldiers before the battle, showing himself to his subordinates, sharing the privations of the common soldiers, and displaying bravery in the danger filled forward edge of the battle area. Heroic command has the ingredients of inspirational leadership and leading from the front. However, heroic commander requires an efficient chief of staff who would provide bureaucratic support for managing the army engaged in battle. Sadashiv’s leadership is somewhat akin to fictious Jon Snow’s battlefield leadership in the battle of Winterfell as depicted in The Game of Thrones (2011). In this battle, Jon Snow was backed up by his lover Daenerys Targaryen who exhibited ‘bureaucratic command’. In contrast, the Maratha command structure was riven with internal dissensions (not shown in Panipat). Sadashiv, Ibrahim and Malhar had no coherent tactical plan. Sadashiv had no subordinate who had a flair for managing the battle as a whole. Panipat shows rightly that Abdali, Shah Pasand Khan, and Shah Wali Khan functioned both as frontline as well as bureaucratic commanders in response to the requirements of the changing battlefield situation.
30. For the metamorphosis of the Maratha Army between the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, see Sen, Military System.
31. Dighe, ‘Expansion of Maratha Power’, 90.
32. Sardesai, Main Currents, 146–47.
33. For the internecine political and military activities of the decentralised Maratha Confederacy after the Third Battle of Panipat, see Sarkar, Mughal Empire, vol. 3.
34. Deshpande, Class, Power and Consciousness, 128.
35. Srinivasan, Baji Rao I, 81.
36. Hannula, ‘Martial Woman/chaste woman’, 3–4.
37. Personal communication with Ms Priyanjana Gupta dated 19 June 2023.
38. Roy, ‘Visual Grandeur, Imagined Glory’, 24–5.
39. History of Afghanistan, 45.
40. Deshpande, Class, Power and Consciousness, 96–126.
41. Devadas, ‘Shifting Terrains’, 228.
42. Hannula, ‘Martial Woman/chaste woman’, 1.
43. Lichtner and Bandopadhyay, ‘Indian Cinema’, 431.
44. History of Afghanistan, 38.
45. Sardesai, Main Currents, 59–99.
46. Gordon, The Marathas, 76–7, 83, 85–6, 98, 100–01, 105, 110–11.
47. Quoted from Gabriel, ‘Manning the Border’, 828.
48. For the evolution of the concept of post-heroic tradition in Western fictional literature see Coker, Men at War.
49. Quoted from Banerjee, Muscular Nationalism, 2.
50. Gabriel, ‘Manning the Border’, 828.
51. Rich, ‘Introduction’, 883–95.
52. The view of the traditional right-wing scholars that medieval India under Muslim rule was a Dark Age is erroneous. The postmodernist liberal historians’ argument that there were no Muslim invasions in medieval India but what happened was a sort of Perso-Islamic cultural fusion is stretching imagination to the limit. One such example is Eaton, India 2020. One cannot deny that the Mughal Empire was run by Islamic Turkish and Iranian elites and Afghan immigrants who settled in India because they cannot go back to Central Asia, Iran, and Afghanistan. Mughal India offered them social status, political and economic power. Further, Persian language and Islamic ethos dominated the social and cultural realms. Unlike Persian, Sanskrit was not patronised by the Muslim rulers. The Hindus got the lower posts and to achieve high ranks had to convert. In addition, Muslim peasants got government loans.
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Kaushik Roy
Kaushik Roy is Guru Nanak Chair Professor in the Department of History, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. He was a Global Fellow at Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), Norway till January 2023. He has been attached with PRIO in different capacities for about a decade. At present, he is engaged in PRIO’s Warring with Machines project. Previously, he has taught at Visva Bharati University at Santiniketan, West Bengal, India, and also at Presidency College, Kolkata, India. He has done his PhD from Centre for Historical Studies, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He was also a Junior Fellow at the Centre for Contemporary Studies at Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi. He has received Charles Wallace Fellowship, and research grants from Indian National Science Academy, UGC, etc. He is a member of Indian National Science Academy’s Research Council. Roy specialises on the Eurasian military history. He has worked extensively on both conventional and unconventional wars of pre-modern, early modern and present eras. He has published many books and chapters in edited volumes published from Ashgate, Bloomsbury, Cambridge University Press, E.J. Brill, Oxford University Press, Pickering & Chatto, Routledge, etc. He has also published articles in various peer-reviewed journals like Economic and Political Weekly, First World War Studies, Indian Economic and Social History Review, Journal of Global History, Journal of Military Ethics, Journal of Military History, Modern Asian Studies, Small Wars & Insurgencies, Studies in History, War in History, etc. Roy is also one of the editors of War and Society in South Asia Series and Wars and Battles of the World Series of Routledge. He is the Chief Editor of Oxford online Military History Bibliographies. He is also one of the members of the editorial board of International Area Studies Review.