Looking Beyond the State-Centric Discourse: Bollywood Movies and India Pakistan Relation
Vaishali
Raghuvanshi,
Research
Scholar,
Department
of International Relations,
South
Asian University.
India Pakistan relation holds
considerable significance for whole of South Asia. In brief, discussion on
South Asia remains incomplete in case we ignore these two neighbours. Considering their relevance for South Asian
region, there have always been myriad attempts to understand the India Pakistan
relationship. In this regard, it is notable fact that most of the popular works
on India Pakistan relations are grounded in traditional state centric
understanding of International Relations (IR). This draws our attention towards
the necessity to go beyond the statist and structuralist understanding of
traditional IR. In view of this, there is
a scope for analyzing the relationship between these two neighbours from a popular
perspective. This can be done by examining the nature of popular imagination in
both the countries towards each other. There are many ways for understanding how
people in these two countries perceive the other and one of the ways is through
the role of popular culture that shapes our perceptions. Popular Culture generally understood as
“people’s culture’s”, “Mass culture” or “common culture”. Popular sites of culture include music,
cinema, television serials, large circulations books, magazines etc. Narratives of popular culture includes diverse
beliefs, practices and objects that are part of everyday traditions, evoking
universal enjoyment among different cultural communities. In light of this,
there is a possibility of utilizing the medium of popular culture and observe
its suitability as data regarding dominant norms, ideas and identity in context
of imagining Pakistan and portrayal of national self-image.
In context of understanding
India- Pakistan relation, cinematic narratives act as a powerful instrument of
popular culture. This is because cinema captures and constructs popular
imagination. Particularly in this
regard, cinema plays crucial role by virtue of its pervasive mass appeal and
its ability to deeply push itself into the popular psyche and create a
penetrative impact upon people’s thinking and imagination. Bilateral relations
between India and Pakistan can be understood by probing the nature of
nationalism prevalent in these two countries.
Cinema also plays a vital role in creating a discourse on nationalism
and we have to investigate this part. This can be done specifically by looking
as how cinema creates an image of Pakistan in India and vice-versa. The
question that is crucial here to probe is whether the sense of nationalism is linked
to the national self-image and the imagination of the neighboring country as
the other. As a matter of fact the
construction of the image of the other state acts as one of the fundamental
drivers that evoke sense of nationalism.
The image of Pakistan has been a
prominent subject in the political discourse of Bollywood cinema and it is the
multifaceted and multilayered representation of this image that contributes to
the creation of popular consciousness and the making of nationalist identity in
the cinematic narratives of Hindi films. From films like Roja (1992), Border
(1997), Sarfarosh (1999), Refugee (2000), Pukar (2000), Gadar (2001), LOC (2003), Veer Zara (2004), Main
Hoon Naa (2004), Kya Dilli Kya Lahore (2014), Bajrangi Bhaijan (2015), Phantom
(2015) we can draw some important conclusions. In Indian Bollywood Hindi movies Pakistan has
been compared and contrasted in a dialectic mode ranging from it being a
warring and a terrorist state to celebrating of the glorious cultural legacies
and people to people contact that India shares with it. Moreover, beyond the statist imaginary the
very popularity of Pakistani artist like Rahat Fateh Ali Khan and Atif Aslam
etc. tend to challenge and critique the very foundations of the belief that
Pakistan is an adversary of India.
Interestingly, ranging from the
event of partition to the Kargil conflict, Hindi cinema has represented various
dimensions pertaining to the multifaceted imagery of Pakistan, as visualized
from the Indian perspective. Films depicting the general tension between the
two nations and the intermittent skirmishes around the Line of Control (LoC)
have also been produced. Bollywood cinema has thus played a very important role
in building the outline of the relationship between these two South Asian
neighbors in the minds of the masses. All these movies have been based on the
themes such as the heroism of the security forces, feelings of patriotism in
both the nations, the similarities and the dissimilarities between the two
countries and the hopes of reconciliation leading to a peaceful subcontinent.
In last we can safely conclude that Bollywood movies portrays different images
of India Pakistan relations and is also a medium for academic analysis. In
brief, it is time for us to expand our scope of engagement on the subject,
moving beyond the state centric approach and by including popular culture.
Comments
Post a Comment