The Jingoism and Hollowness of Hindi War Films

What is war? The statistics of the dead? The duration it lasts for? The countries that fight it? The boundaries it is fought across? The headlines it makes? And how, over time, the headlines get relegated to corners of pages where they are forgotten, even normalised? It impacts lives—not just the ones that end during the war, but thousands more in multipleᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚ ways, before, during and after it.

Cinema often serves as a chronicler of the times it is cre🍬ated in. Sometimes, it goes back to contemporary history in the hope to recreate it with facts and some liberties to make 🐽it come alive. Many times, like in present-day India, it serves as a mouthpiece of the powers to peddle a narrative they furiously want citizens to believe. In such a context, war films offer an insight into the ideas of humanity, nationalism and patriotism. 

War films have been a part of Hindi cinema since the 1960s. In recent public memory, they have become more popular since Border (1997).  Since then, films like LOC (2003), Lakshya (2004), and until more recently War (2019), and Uri: The Surgical Strike (2019), have dominated public memory when it comes to such films. What is common in each of these, is that they have been touted as the pinnacles of patriotism. With political verbiage for every failure of the government — ‘Humare jawaan border par lad rahe hain aur tum itna nahin kar sakte’, the sacrifices and hardships faced by the soldiers have been reduced to mere political tools. The films themselves look at the act of war predominantly, laden with aggression, and the sacrifice of the soldiers as the ultimate exhibition of the fiercest patriot. The soldier becomes the righteous one, the subservient man that follows orders until death, ‘saving’ the proverbial ‘mother’ nation. Each of these tropes are laden with typical patriarchal and jingoistic stereotypes, amply peppered with ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’.  What this does is put emphasis on subservience, and not loyalty. The love for the nation and patriotism also comes from those who question its governments. However, by fusing the idea of the nওation with the idea of who controls it, the idea of patriotism is conflated, and the soldier becomes the perfect foil to ke♐ep that conflation alive.

Many of these films focus on the act of war itself— its strategies and its hardships. As side plots, there are love interests or waiting mothers, who stoically look at the fall of their sons (most representation has only male soldiers) as a part of their service to the nation. Or the soldier himself is on a path of self-discovery. The women are merely subplots to infuse emotion into the male character, and into that situation. However, for example at the end of Lakshya (2004), with the end of the mission, as Karan (Hrithik Roshan) looks to the next chapter of his life, it is crucial to remember that for anyone having been at war or direct🎃ly affected by it, the next chapter of life would not be as linear to get to. 

Almost always the enemy is the Muslim and/or Pakistan, barring films made on the Indo-China war well before Border (1997). It conveniently fits into the anti-Muslim narrative in the country at a civilian level. Whether the war is against a Pakistani army or a terrorist outfit, it is a relentless group that is apathetic and out to ‘claim’ what isn’t ‘rightfully’ theirs. It is in these set tropes that war films operate, becoming nothing more than hollow, jin꧂goistic, high-decibel glorification of aggression.

Where Hindi films woefully lack, are deep explorations of the preceding situations of wars and their aftermath—the impact wars have on people, space, time and history. They overlook the long-standing traumas of those who have been at war, and those affected by it—what loss of limbs does, what trauma of having watched death so closely does, what having lost friends does to people. There is a sequence in Lakshya that attempts to ask these questions during the Kargil War. Yet, there are more lives impacted, than the ones directly in the line of fire. And that is the view that is missing in most of these films.  What happens to children of soldiers, who live in fear as their fathers go to war? How do families live through that time? What happens to their lives, their financial decisions? What happens to disp🦄laced people, who are asked to vacate their homes so close to the lines of control and are forced to return to bullet-holed buildings? What happens to children growing up in war-torn areas? These questions, these practical chanಌges, spatial changes are seldom looked at in Hindi films. Hindi war films are reduced to mere jingoistic representations of the acts of war, glorifying the idea of ‘safeguarding’ the symbolic idea of a nation—an idea of a country drawn as a map on paper, but not a country that homes living, breathing families whose lives change. 

What happens when the war is over? Do people go back to living their lives as normally as before? Does trauma not travel with them as they go along, carry𓆉ing the smell of blood with them as they go home? There are no reflections on war, where there are no victors, no winners. Hindi films have not explored these aspects of war deftly or poignantly enough. 

Adding to these complexities is telling of history. No war or any socio-political incident in the world occurs in isolation. There are constant repercussions of these incidents. As indicated in the recent Netflix series IC814: The Kandahar Hijack (2024), the release of the three terrorists resulted in further attacks on India, and each of the terrorists had a past for which they had been imprisoned originally. Wi🌳thin this is the question of who tells whose history—a question that we must keep going back to, as we witness the holocaust in Palestine, watching history repeat itself. What then is the role cinema plays in chronicling the narratives that matter? Is it not crucial to preserve the gaze of the oppressed?

In the 1960s, Hindi films Like Hum Dono (1961), Haqeeqat (1964), Upkar (1967) and Hindustan ki Kasam (1973) amongst many others, did attempt to look at the human side of war. In Hum Dono, the ideas of changes in personality, ideas of loss—of families and hopes—and the human cost of war became cornerstones of the narrative. Upkar looked at a war hero forever damaged in war, as he returned to his village. Chetan Anand’s Haqeeqat cemen𓄧ted the visuals of militaristic nationalism post Nehru’s death by using the footage post the war—a war that India lost.  

What we must do, is look at war in Hindi films from a truly human lens—from the gaze of the oppressed and the sufferers, and those who truly lose. This empathy will help create cinema that brings alive the one single fact🉐 true about wars—that there is no one who takes ownership, and there is no one who wins. Everyone loses, when lives are lost.