International terrorism? Indian popular cinema and the politics of terror

Abstract

The first decade of the twenty-first century has been marked by the decisive entry into our media landscape of the so-called global war on terror, with countless films and TV series from all over the world addressing the issue of international terrorism. Even Indian popular cinema, which has been addressing the issue of domestic terrorism since the late 1980s with films such as Roja (Ratnam, 1992), Drohkaal (Nihalani, 1994), Maachis (Gulzar, 1996), has, since the new millennium, begun to tackle the topic of international terrorism. In this article, I will analyse the shift in the construction of the terrorist discourse in Indian popular cinema from a domestic to an international perspective in order to highlight the close proximity between the two, as in fact, the “global war on terror” narrative seems to offer Indian filmmakers the possibility to simultaneously address international and domestic terrorism. In particular, I will refer to Karan Johar’s film My Name Is Khan as a text which, while discussing the consequences of the American war on terror on its minorities, problematises the official discourse on terrorism and its neo-Orientalist character. It also draws a parallel between the situation of minorities in the United States and India. In so doing, the film triggers a reflection on the state of the Indian nation and questions the state of the secularist values of newly independent India after decades of communal violence.

Keywords:

• Bombay cinema
• diaspora
• terrorism
• racism
• Orientalism
• counterterrorism
• state violence

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this article was presented at the following conference: “Diasporic Indian Cinemas and Bollywood on the Diaspora: Re-imaginings and Re-Possessions” – organised jointly by the Centre for Advanced Studies in India (CASII) and Osmania University Centre for International Programmes (OUICP), 22–24 January 2014, Hyderabad University. The author is grateful for the helpful comments from the conference delegates, and also thanks three referees, Louis Bayman, Claudia and Carlo Cini, for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.

Notes

1. On the similarities between 9/11 and previous Hollywood disaster and terrorist films, see Di Leo and Mehan (2012), Giroux (2007), Kellner (2004), Sánchez-Escalonilla (2010) and Riegler (2010).

2. For an analysis of the close relationship between Hollywood and the various agencies of national security state in the United States, see Kumar and Kundnati (2014), Semati (2002) and Riegler (2010). However, not all of Hollywood’s productions in the post-9/11 era have embraced the government’s official discourse on the “war on terror” (see Kellner 2010; Dodds 2010).

3. For a genealogy of the notion of “terrorism” see Rapin (2009, 165–168).

4. Employing Foucault’s notion of “subjugated knowledge”, Jackson makes a case for the recuperation of forms of knowledge on terrorism which have been silenced within the terrorism studies field (2012).

5. However, this does not mean that they antagonised one another (Kaviraj 1992, 20–33).

6. Which according to Appadurai is a consequence of the nationalist movement’s adoption of the communitarian system of representation introduced by the British rulers under colonialism (1996, 132).

7. The influence of the steady rise of the Hindu right on Indian public culture and popular cinema in the 1990s has been (rightly) criticised by several scholars, particularly in reference to the emergence of a new set of films which targeted the new middle classes and the Indian diaspora (Brosius and Yazgi 2007; Dwyer 2000; Deshpande 2005; Rajadhyaksha 2003). If this new genre has been undeniably influenced by the rise of Hindu nationalism, for what concerns terrorism-centred films, the link seems to be less straightforward (see Jain 2011).

8. If anything, we should now scrutinise the kind of films produced since 2014 – after the BJP victory at the general elections. One of the most notable changes taking place since then is certainly the revival of the love-Jihad myth, which very recently targeted Bollywood Muslim actors Shahrukh Khan and Amir Khan, both having Hindu wives (Ali 2015).

9. “Johar touted the film’s global box office grosses – about $39 million, including a little over $4 million in the United States – as concrete evidence of the film’s international appeal” (Ganti 2012, 360).

10. According to the Hindutva narrative, Muslim sexuality represents a threat to Hindus in India because “Islam is backward and regressive in its attitude towards reproduction […] and the Muslim proclivity for producing children is seen as a strategy for overwhelming the Hindus demographically” (Anand 2007, 260). Along the same lines, the Hindutva ideology argues that Muslims in India seduce Hindu girls to make them convert to Islam, and then of course breed Muslim children – a strategy which is popularly known as “love-jihad” (Anand 2007, 259; see also Sethi 2015).

11. Commenting on the restrictions of civil liberties, Gayatri Spivak observed that: “although civil liberties, including intellectual freedom, are curtailed, and military permissiveness exacerbated, although racial profiling deforms the polity and the entire culture redesigns itself for prevention, and although, starting on 28 September 2001, the UN Security Council adopts wide-ranging antiterrorism measures, we can still transfer the register to affect and say, ‘We are not terrorized, we have won’” (2004, 92).

12. On the broadcast of the TV series Ramayana, Dwyer writes: “The influential critic, Iqbal Masud, argues that the Sunday morning slot was given to religious television by the government as a conscious political act, setting up the view of the majority as that of the nation. If anyone – from a different religion or ideology, or caste – objected, it would be seen as treasonable. No one failed to notice the coincidence in the timing of the screening with the rise in popularity of the Hindu nationalist movement, one of whose central campaigns was for the building of a temple at Ayodhya” (2000, 25).

13. On the Gujarat riots of 2002, Ashis Nandy wrote: “Almost nothing reveals the decline and degeneration of Gujarati middle class culture more than its present Chief Minister, Narendra Modi. Not only has he shamelessly presided over the riots and acted as the chief patron of rioting gangs, the vulgarities of his utterances have been a slur on civilised public life” (2002; see also Kazmi and Kumar 2011, 183).

14. Earlier in the film, a news bulletin informed viewers of a Sikh man in Michigan shot by his employer who mistook him for an Afghani. Several scholars have commented on the vulnerability of Sikhs in post-9/11 America, as their turbans have led them being associated with Osama Bin Laden (Puar and Rai 2002, 136–138; Volpp 2002, 1590).

15. After 9/11, the Hindu right used the conflation of Islam and terrorism as a strategy to justify violence against Muslim in India: Kazmi and Kumar recollect how the then Chief Minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi, shortly before he legitimised and oversaw the pogrom in Gujarat 2002, summed up “All Muslims are not terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims” (2011, 177; see also Anand 2007, 263).

16. However, Dar rightly observes that Johar misses a point in excluding from the picture African American Muslims, considering the “iconic struggles for equal rights and social justice” conducted by people such as Malcom X or Mohammed Ali (2010, part V).

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Clelia Clini

Clelia Clini holds a PhD in cultural and postcolonial studies from the University Orientale of Naples (2011), where she conducted research on Bollywood cinema and its relationship with the Indian diaspora in Italy. She has published articles on Bollywood cinema and the Indian diaspora, and on the female representation of the diasporic experience in the Indian diasporic novel.