A Narrative Study On The Representation Of Cross Border Terrorism In Selected Bollywood Films
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Date
2015-05
Authors
KHAN, QAISAR
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Abstract
This study explains the multi-plot narratives of selected Bollywood films pertaining to the issues of cross border terrorism, with a focus on how ethnicity, religion and culture highlight ―national identities‖ between Hindus and Muslims in India, and between Hindu-India and Muslim-Pakistan. This narrative study encompasses social relationships between the rival countries based on the ―cartographic anxieties‖ which took place at the partition of the Asian subcontinent in 1947. Emerging in the 1990s, this melodramatic sub-genre of Bollywood cinema relates history to the contemporary development of authoritarian hostilities that create an ideological contestation of Hinduism and Islam. These films project Muslim-Pakistan as an external enemy while Indian-Muslims as enemies within. These films portray Hindu nationalism through articulating the cultural, economic technological hegemony and ―Orientalise‖ Muslims and Pakistan as ―Others‖, and creating the terms ―us‖ and ―them‖ as social constructs of binary relation by securing positive identity of self-affirmation through the stigmatization and denigration of ―Others‖ based on ethnic, religious, national, geographical and ideological differentiation. Terrorism is a hateful act of political violence premeditated against the society by antigovernment militants, subnational groups or clandestine agents, government themselves, group or individual psychotics and extortionists. This study aims to investigate issues of ―cross border terrorism‖, a social construct that links terrorism with illegal immigration through which a border crosser‘s violence and crime are directed against society. In this sense, the border is a civic imaginary and not a geographical entity. The study is divided into three themes, namely ethnicity,
religion and culture with metaphoric and symbolic significance of messages and meaning production. The theme ethnicity carries five sub- themes extracted from the scenes of seven films. The theme religion has five films and six sub-themes, while the theme culture contains six films and six sub-themes. The cultural hegemony, Muslims and Pakistan ―Othering,‖ Hindu majoritarian nationalism, authoritarianism, and identity formation are major concepts used in this study. It is concluded that the conflicts in these films caused cultural disturbances in the civil society and widened the gap of social interaction between the people of India and Pakistan through the cinematic language by using visuals known to be the ―socio-cultural-practice‖, with metaphoric and symbolic speeches or dialogues as indicators of cognitive process to represent reality. For relatively great cultural harmony, peace and good relationships, the study stresses that the approaches of cultural hegemony, post-partition and post-war elements must be avoided in Bollywood films representation.
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A Narrative Study On The Representation Of Cross Border Terrorism , In Selected Bollywood Films