Powell’s statement might reflect a softening of America’s black-and-white attitude to the war on terror, or it might reflect the re-emergence of realists who were drowned out by W.’s thundering righteousness. Either way, the statement suggests a more conducive climate for movies like Dil Se in America.
In the next life
In Kabul Express, more than any of the other movies, the Talibani, Imran Khan (Salman Shahid), looks truly frightening. But he, too, turns out to be human, as we see when he argues with journalists Suhel (John Abraham) and Jai (Arshad Warsi) about cricket, sings old familiar Bollywood songs with them, and makes a stop at his daughter’s village, where he gets his heart’s desire of one last glimpse of her. “Imran, sir, you’re not a bad man,” Suhel remarks later. “Had you not been Talib, we could even have been friends.” “As we say,” responds Khan, who describes himself as a soldier following orders, “in the next life.”
In Fanaa, too, the unrepentant terrorist sees himself as a soldier on a mission. His orders come from a grandfather who raised him to believe that Kashmir’s freedom is a just cause. When he meets the pure Zooni, he is tired, wounded, and wants to be done with his duties. The idea that terrorists might see themselves as soldiers, and that the only difference between freedom fighters and (some kinds of) terrorists might be eventual success, makes it easier to see the terrorist as human.
Terrorists are not uniformly presented with sympathy in Bollywood. The mullah in Dhokha and the grandfather in Fanaa manipulate their impressionable young charges into blow themselves up, to further their own agendas. That thread is clearest in the 2007 film Khuda Kay Liye (For the Sake of God), a product of “Lollywood,” Bollywood’s close cousin operating out of Lahore, Pakistan. The movie depicts two young Pakistani brothers from a liberal family in Karachi, one of whom comes under the thrall of a charismatic orthodox mullah who leads him in the ways of restrictive Islam. It’s a compelling portrait of how an open-minded young man may be indoctrinated into violence by a wise-seeming leader. The “terrorist” here is depicted as someone who gets caught up in a brief madness, but then recovers.
Bollywood films’ various depictions of terrorism are hardly naive, and their well-intentioned hyperbole is the very thing that makes them palatable. They wear their hearts on their sleeves and present a world of physical exuberance, family bonds, fights, love, anger, tears, and speechifying. The terrorist, emerging in a sea of such strong emotional currents, is not a particularly scary bogeyman.
Glamorizing terror?
It’s all very well to humanize the terrorist, but why does Bollywood do it, and is it a good idea?
