Cinema as a Discourse on Critical Geopolitics: The Imagery of India–Pakistan Borders in the Narratives of Bollywood Movies

ABSTRACT

This paper attempts to map the modes by which cinematic narratives of select Hindi movies produced by Bollywood can be employed as a discourse on critical geopolitics. The focus is to understand how the representations of the India–Pakistan border in a select set of Hindi films tend to portray the psychology of cartographic fundamentalism. Situating the imagery of divided cartographies of the Indian Subcontinent in Hindi cinema, the paper looks at the ways in which the filmic narratives attempt to construct the psychology of border cleavages between India and Pakistan in the demotic consciousness of the viewers. Cinematic representations play a definitive role in constructing popular imagination regarding the issues of identity, refugee crisis and notions of cultural and psychic frontiers. The effects on collective imagination can be visualized by engaging with the narratives and powerful images that cinema is capable of presenting to the viewers. This in turn helps construct and deconstruct the popular notions by altering the dialectics of cognitive mapping.

Placing our analysis in this conceptual framework, the paper examines how the psychology of divided cartographies gets inextricably linked to the nationalist construction of the image of India as the righteous self, and the portrait of Pakistan as the vicious other and country's primary enemy.

The movies that have been analyzed in the paper are Border (1997), LoC (2003), Bajarangi Bhaijan (2015) and Filmistaan (2012). These movies have portrayed border as conflict-ridden non-porous zones. The paper employs discourse analysis as its methodology and discusses the cinematic reconstruction of the idea of the divided cartographies of the subcontinent on the foundations of the epistemic framework of critical geopolitics.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical geopolitics
• divided cartographies
• psychology of cartographic fundamentalism
• nationalist self-image
• enemy image-making
• Bollywood

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Newman 2003, 13–25.

2 Discourse analysis is a form of qualitative research method which seeks to explore how social realities are produced (Phillips and Hardy 2002, p. 6). It studies the ways in which particular kinds of language, mediated through different forms of oral, visual and written texts, tend to construct social realities (Sawyer 2002, 434). Overall, discourse analysis is concerned with the modes by which texts are made meaningful through the processes of their production and as to how, they contribute to the constitution of social reality by making meaning (Phillips and Hardy 2002, 4). See Phillips and Hardy (2002); Sawyer (2002)

3 Anderson, M.,1996; 2.

4 Foucher 1991; 36–37.

5 Colard 1999; 5.

6 Braillard 1999; 31–32.

7 Moraczewska 2010, 329–340

8 ibid:331; Anderson, M.,1996

9 Banerjee 1998; 180–91

10 Krishna 1994; 507–21.

11 Chaturvedi 2002; 149–59.

12 Tripathi and Chaturvedi 2020; 173–181

13 Tripathi 2019, 186–200.

14 Ibid

15 Ibid

16 Ibid

17 Moze and Spiegel 2022.

18 Wang 2013; 21–33.

19 Adorno 1954, 213–235.

20 Ibid:21

21 Kumar HM 2013; 458–469.

22 Migdal 2004.

23 Deshpande 2007; 95–101

24 Larouche, Valérie St-Jean and Johanne Brunet.2015; 64–74

25 Gokulsing and Dissanayake 2013.

26 The paper has selected four movies that fall under two distinct categories. Such a categorization is less driven by genre and more by the way in which the narrative on Pakistan has been weaved within a particular cosmological formation. If Border and LoC tend to construct the enemy image of Pakistan, in the cosmological context of the frictions and tensions of an ongoing war. The movies Bajarangi Bhaijaan (2015) and Filmistaan attempt to capture the popular imaginary regarding the idea of Pakistan that prevails in the demotic consciousness that emanates out of the everyday socio-cultural experience. The ontic intertextuality that connects both these categories of movies is the ways in which both security forces and the civilians tend to epistemologically construct the idea of Pakistan as an enemy and Pakistanis as brothers and sisters. In terms of institutional psychology, the cognitive conscience of both civil society and the security forces seem to intersect with each other in a kind of a complex circuitous trajectory. In this sense, the contested discourse pertaining to Pakistan as an enemy and the Pakistanis as brothers and sisters leads to the construction of the idea of Pakistan as a hybrid subject.

27 Shimko 1992; 281–301

28 Waltz 1959

29 Sridharan 2007.

30 Ibid

31 LoC Kargil, 2003.

32 Budha 2008; 3–20.

33 Border 1997.

34 Jackson 1975.

35 Wendt 1992, 391–425.

36 Bajarangi Bhaijan 2015.

37 Filmistaan 2012.

38 Dawn 2014.

39 The Indian Express 2015.