The Bollywood Beyond Song and Dance

Bollywood is known for its supremely choreographed song and dance routines, sickeningly sappy romances, and improbable plot twists. Recently, however, many directors and actors have added a new element: an address to social problems plaguing Indian society and political life. In a particularly un-Bollywood style, many movies frequently confront a theme previously rare in India and its pop culture: terrorism.

Persistent acts of terror force people to adjust to the abnormal. Terrorism is sudden, unpredictable, and unnatural. It changes how we interact with the world, yet forces us to adapt to the new reality. September 11^th redefined how Americans understand and relate to terrorism, but even the US reaction is inherently global. We have come to fear other peoples and nations and to question our own hegemony. This kind of fear is destabilizing, and is one India regularly struggles with, having experienced a number of significant terrorist attacks. The 2008 Mumbai bombings targeted prominent hotels, while many smaller attacks have been carried out in Northern and Northwest India (bordering Bangladesh), Northwest India (bordering Pakistan), and in Tamil Nadu, the location of the terrorist group the Tamil Tigers.

Bollywood has become a tool in both confronting and assisting this phenomenon. Movies are cinematic voyeurism, and in Bollywood especially, viewers are able to experience the intimate lives of the characters hashed out on screen. Movies have connected Indian audiences with the one true love who turned out to be a terrorist, the brother no longer recognizable for his terrorist ties, or the anguish of a victimized family member.  Films affect the real-life understanding of terrorists and terrorism in a human way not always apparent from newscasts and articles extolling body counts: Bollywood specializes in pulling on one’s heartstrings. Spending three hours in a film requires empathy with the characters, and Bollywood holds nothing back in terrorist themed movies. Subsequently, we cringe when the characters injure or kill, or are injured or killed, even while we disagree with their motives.

After the 2008 Mumbai bombings, Indian writer Dilip d’Souza noted that downtown Mumbai became a tourist attraction, with “ice cream and snack and drink vendors, people taking photographs in every direction.” The mass desire to view the carnage firsthand demonstrates how easy many find it to dissociate from the very act of terrorism. Bollywood acts as the bridge that acclimates viewers to such realities in a more personal manner, by showing them the process and people behind terrorism.

India is a particularly interesting setting for exploring discussion of terrorism, and the production of terrorist themed movies in India reflects the societal tensions of the subcontinent. Since the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan, strain between Hindus and Muslims has remained strong. General and targeted violence ebbs and flows. Extremists exist on both sides, with the Hindutva (Hindu nationalists) desiring a “return to” a Muslim-free India and Muslim groups fighting for Kashmiri independence. Additional cross-border violence has perpetuated Hindu-Muslim conflict. For many Indians, the “hostile relationship with Pakistan translates into suspicion of Indian Muslims,” which has been reflected and promoted on screen by Bollywood movies such as Kunal Kohli’s Fanaa and Rensil Silva’s Kurbaan, featuring the popular actors Shahrukh Khan and Saif Ali Khan, respectively.

India is majority Hindu (80.5%), a partial cause for biased depictions of Muslims on screen. In Bollywood, the noticeable trend is for terrorists to wear traditional Muslim dress (shalwar kameez) and have Muslim names. A number of the top terrorist themed movies feature Muslim terrorists (Fiza, Dil Se…, Kurbaan, Fanaa, Sarfarosh, Mission Kashmir, Bombay, etc.) illustrating the prevalence of Muslim terrorists in Bollywood and society’s preference for Muslim versus Hindu terrorist characters. Researchers Muhammed Ashraf Khan and Syeda Zuria Bokhari note “from the very beginning and particularly since 9/11 incident, the Indian film industry very often portrays the Muslim with [a] stereotype image (which is negative). After the 9/11 incident, Muslims are being looked [at] as suspicious people and portrayed as terrorists. Indian film industry adds fuel to the fire by making a lot of movies on Muslims and presenting them as terrorists and negative ones.”

The wide reach of Indian cinema, (1,288 films in 2009, and 3.6 billion tickets worldwide) implicitly propagates the connection between Muslims and terrorism. Just as terrorism in America is not caused solely by Middle-Eastern Muslims, the same is true in India. Take the destruction of the Babri Mosque in the holy city of Ayodhya in 1992, for example, which was stormed and taken apart by Hindu extremists who claimed it was the site of a Hindu temple. The Hindutva, mentioned above, often engage in terrorism against ethnic minorities, specifically against Muslims.

Indian cinema, then, depicts a stereotype not fully encompassing of what Indian terrorism looks like. The cultural identity of Indian cinema is, luckily, amorphous. The tenor of violence in Indian cinema has shifted towards international terrorist violence and away from small town personal violence. The hope is that current standard depictions of Muslims can become less violent and less often associated with terrorist groups, yet decades of Indian cinema continue to depict Muslims as unsavory characters.

Though many terrorist themed movies feature Muslim terrorists or favorite India over Pakistan, this movie genre has simultaneously pushed the boundaries of viewers’ compassion and empathy with the characters. Indian cinema tends to glorify villains and create thrill in their evilness. In two popular films featuring a Muslim terrorist, Aamir Khan’s Fanaa and Saif Ali Khan’s Kurbaan, the actor’s loyalty to terrorist organizations is not apparent until after intermission – a staple of Bollywood filmmaking serving to break up the three hours of footage – when their secret ties are revealed to the women who love them. At the beginning, the characters are not depicted as evil, allowing the viewer to develop empathy and compassion towards them.

Similarly, Shahrukh Khan in Dil Se… and Hrithik Roshan in Fiza, appear as main characters with terrorist associations who are nonetheless loved (although Dil Se…  is a bit of an anomaly for featuring a woman terrorist). Fiza, sister to Roshan’s character Aman, demonstrates her love through continual attempts to bring Aman back into the family fold and away from terrorist ties, eventually killing him herself to avoid a dishonorable death as a terrorist. In Dil Se… Khan’s character Amar pursues the girl Meghna despite her resistance, knowing her only as a love interest, not as a terrorist, and thus the audience sees her in multiple contexts. The social connection and family bonds make these relationships Bollywood material: Roshan’s Aman winds up tearing his family apart with his loyalty to a terrorist organization, while Khan’s love for Meghna the terrorist in Dil Se… contributes to their mutual demise.

An actor in many “blockbuster” Hindi films, Khan, perhaps more than any other actor, has left the comfort of big, famously cast Indian films to star in and produce smaller, hard-hitting films. Even the New York Times reported that he has “done what many others had failed to do — reach the Indian mainstream by using Bollywood tropes in the service of larger causes.” In Kunal Kohli’s Fanaa (translated as Destroyed in Love) his Kashmiri terrorist character is foiled by his love for an Indian girl, playing on the movie’s theme that “what defines life is the decision between the greater of two goods or the lesser of two evils.” The inner struggles of Khan’s character between his love for Zooni and his loyalty to the Kashmiri state lead to a self-destructive yet morally redeeming choice, and this presents him as a whole, dynamic character.

In the past fifteen years, the prevalence of terrorist themed movies has risen. Some especially popular ones have worked their way into American pop culture – such as Shahrukh Khan’s My Name is Khan. A movie about racial stereotyping with the conceit “My name is Khan and I am not a terrorist,” the movie attempts to break the associations between Muslims and terrorism. The United States’ TSA procedures are a prime example of the impact of stereotyping. When Mr. Khan was travelling to the USA to promote the movie My Names is Khan in 2009 TSA officials detained him because his name was supposedly on a watch list. Arguably the most famous man in India due his massive popularity as an actor, it is speculated that he has been detained due to his last name (Khan), which alludes to his religion (Muslim), despite being supremely recognizable anywhere that Bollywood movies are shown.

There are no heroes in Indian movies. You will not find a Jessica Chastain or Jeremy Renner equivalent. In Bollywood, hero worship occurs whether or not a character is admirable. Villains still experience moments of happiness, have people to love, and are more complex than their actions.  The extension of Bollywood motifs in terrorist-themed movies means even terrorists are not shown as one-dimensional beings, but have families, love lives, and traces of humanity. Intentionally or otherwise, Bollywood is slowly affecting understandings of cultures that stereotypically produce terrorism.

After terrorism occurs in India, Muslims must constantly demonstrate and re-demonstrate their loyalty to the Indian state, a side effect of political and social distrust of Muslims. The New York Times quotes one young man after the Mumbai attacks in 2008 saying “it’s a pity we have to prove ourselves as Indians.” While Bollywood has a strong showing of famous Muslim actors – Shahrukh Khan, Saif Ali Khan, Aamir Khan, Salman Khan, and Ifran Khan (to name some unrelated Khans) – the baseline depiction of them in movies, especially in terrorist-themed films, are as bad guys. Yet, implicit in social and political realities, Bollywood is demonstrating that the bad guys are human; more like the rest of us than we readily acknowledge.