Page 291 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

by the Pakistani army, the hero is willing to convert to Islam but risks his life
by refusing to praise Pakistan and curse India. 19

Mani Ratnam’s “Trilogy”
20
The Tamil separatist issue is not referred to directly in Hindi ¤lm, but
there are many indirect references in “human bomb” ¤lms, which included the
“art” ¤lm, Santosh Shivan’s Terrorist, (1999) and Mani Ratnam’s Dil se (From the
Heart, 1998). But it is striking that this ¤lm is part of Mani Ratnam’s “trilogy,”
21
the earlier two ¤lms being Roja (Rose, 1992) and Bombay (1995), which deal
with Kashmir terrorism and the riots in Bombay in 1992–93 after the destruc-
tion of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya by Hindutva supporters. Unlike Dil se,
Mani Ratnam’s only Hindi ¤lm, these two earlier movies were both made in
Tamil, although they became national successes in their Hindi-dubbed versions.
These are among the few ¤lms which have engaged with contemporary issues
22
about the Indian nation-state, and it is striking that they are made in the Tamil
cinema, which had earlier concerned itself more with local political issues of
Dravidianism and anti-Brahminism. These ¤lms were made after the assassi-
nation of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991, and so may represent a venting
of collective guilt by subsuming Tamil nationality into an Indian one (Niran-
jana 1994, 82). They all feature high-caste, if not Brahminical, ¤gures, who
travel throughout India, rehearsing a high-caste Hindu identity of nationalism.
The ¤rst two ¤lms have quite unjusti¤ably led to Mani Ratnam being attacked
as a supporter of Hindutva. 23
Much of Roja is set in Kashmir, which was formerly used as the major loca-
tion for romance in Hindi movies, drawing on its associations of an earthly
24
paradise, but which features rarely now because of political unrest. One of the
most memorable scenes from the ¤lm is when the hero, Rishi, is taunted by his
captors, Kashmiri separatists, who burn the Indian ®ag (described at length in
Dirks 2000). Rishi throws himself on it and catches ¤re, to the words of a song
by the nationalist Tamil poet Subramania Bharati: “India is dearer to me than
25
life.” The ¤lm cuts to his impassive Muslim captor at prayer, enforcing the
image feared by followers of Hindutva of the disciplined and self-controlled
Muslim linked to millions of other Muslims praying in a regimented manner. 26
Rustom Bharucha (1994) denounced the ¤lm as “fascist,” and Tejaswini
Niranjana (1994), in more moderate language, also noted how it portrays the
modern, secular (Hindu), Westernized, middle-class male as representative of
Indian nationalism while marginalizing the role of women to the nation and
depicting the Hindus as tolerant and the Muslims as fanatical. Ravi Vasudevan
(1994) complicates their argument by looking at the text as ¤lm, arguing that
they have privileged representation over narration, thus reducing its story to one
of ideology, while Nicholas Dirks (2000) reminds us of the complexity and
even ambivalence of the pleasures of popular ¤lm. While the ¤lm is retrogres-
sive in its association of Islam with “militants” or “terrorists” and in its gen-
der politics, it certainly cannot be read as a Hindutva text. Roja won the Na-

280 Rachel Dwyer