Despite the numerous excesses of Dil Se, its suggestion that terrorism is the last resort of those whose governments abandon them is not that far-fetched. Just recently, Colin Powell, on the October 18 edition of Meet the Press, invoked a similar rationale as an urgent reason to address world poverty. “We need to increase the amount of resources we put into our development programs to help the rest of the world,” he said. “Because when you help the poorest in the world, you start to move them up an economic and social ladder, and they’re not going to be moving toward violence or terrorism of the kind that we worry about.”
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?
India is the second most populous country in the world, with Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians and numerous others rubbing shoulders in teeming cities and poor villages. Most Indians get along, but there are pockets of unrest, and marginalized people of different religions sometimes air their grievances through violence. (Although America is diverse, it has not faced religious conflicts and problems of poverty on India’s scale.) Most Indians are not directly affected by the violence. I grew up knowing it was there, for instance, and a part of India’s history, but not much more.
The Indian film-censor board crouches in this explosive milieu, determined not to be responsible for any sectarian violence. “The censor board would not look favorably on films that portrayed minorities, especially Muslims, in poor light,” says Richard Delacy, an expert on Indian culture and languages who teaches a course on Bollywood at Harvard University. “There would be riots.”
Aha. So one reason the terrorist is humanized is purely pragmatic: filmmakers must get past a peace-loving censor board, and they want to reach as wide an audience as possible. Fair enough. But Delacy believes filmmakers want more than commercial success. “They are trying to have a positive impact,” he says. “It shows a critique of the state on the part of filmmakers, but not in a way that the state could object. That’s what humanizes the terrorist, as well — it shows the state as having contributed to circumstances that pushed people to terrorism. Filmmakers would make the argument that, in films, [showing] what makes a terrorist, and the nature of terrorism, could have a positive influence on society.”
