Bollywood’s Code Orange

The Bollywood movie powerhouse has gone from being celebrated to being used as a tool for propaganda, writes DEBASISH ROY CHOWDHURY

A fan of Muslim actor Shah Rukh Khan celebrates the release of Pathaan in Kolkata on 25 January, 2023. Pathaan sparked fury when critics claimed a song it featured insulted Hinduism

CREDIT: Sankhadeep Banerjee/NurPhoto/Shutterstock

ONCE UPON A time in India, the release of films with top-billed stars used to be joyous occasions. For days leading up to the release, die-hard fans would organise festive promotions with over-the-top celebrations, often involving ritualistic public worshipping of cardboard cutouts of their idols. On D-day, they would queue for hours outside cinemas to see the “first day first show” – the elementary test of fanhood – and, once in, wildly cheer their hero whenever he appeared on the screen.

Not much has changed – except the joy part, which has gone. Nobody knows when a new release will be hit by outrage, protests, litigation or worse. This is especially true when it comes to Bollywood films starring its three top male leads – all of them Muslims – who have dominated the industry for three decades. Their film releases have now come to be foreshadowed by ugly online hate-fests.

Foot soldiers of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), who resent the cultural influence of the formidable Khan triumvirate – Shah Rukh Khan, Aamir Khan and Salman Khan (not related) – routinely engineer fake outrages on social media against them. The anonymity of social media gives the ruling party plausible deniability in these well-orchestrated online campaigns, but this January, when an action thriller called Pathaan starring Shah Rukh Khan, the reigning king of Bollywood, was about to the hit the screens, the gloves came off.

The provocation was the pre-release launch of a song-and-dance sequence. In the song, with Khan cavorting with the female lead, he was clad in green and the (Hindu) heroine’s skimpy dress was orange. While green is associated with Islam, orange is a Hindu monastic colour (and also the mascot colour appropriated by the BJP and other allied Hindu supremacist organisations), and this was somehow extrapolated into a loaded insult to Hinduism.

Even as engineered outrages go, this seemed pretty silly in the beginning but gradually it began to gain steam. Khan’s effigy was burned, and cinemas planning to screen the movie were attacked. Leaders of the BJP and its allied organisations demanded a boycott, or at the least a thorough editing of the film to remove anything that might “hurt Hindu sentiments”. In no time, ministers jumped into the fray, with one declaring the movie might be banned because it had clearly been “shot with a dirty mindset”. The film certification board said it had asked the makers to make “changes” and to “submit the revised version” before theatrical release.

By the time it was released, Pathaan had become less a film and more a civilisational test of India’s multiculturalism. Those astir with fresh sentiments of Hindu pride under Modi declared watching it would amount to pandering to jihadi forces, while liberals urged one another on social media to go and watch it to prove India had not become the cesspool of hate that the Hindu supremacists made it out to be.

This wasn’t the kind of buzz Khan needed on his return to the big screen after four years, but much has changed in that time.

Modi’s government has become far more brazen in its project to remake India’s secular democracy as a majoritarian Hindu state. Brutalisation of Muslims through vigilante violence and discriminatory state action has become commonplace. The mass radicalisation programme spreading hate against Muslims has hit a high gear, and Bollywood has become a key theatre in this campaign for the poisoning of the hearts and minds of the country’s Hindu majority against its minorities.

With its universal tropes, cosmopolitan workforce and inclusive cultural representations, Bollywood is at odds with the Hindu supremacists’ project. The very deification of Bollywood stars and the visceral devotion of their fans, for example, cuts across language, religion and caste lines in hyper-diverse India. His fans see Shah Rukh Khan as a star, not a Muslim star.

Indian cine fandom breaks social boundaries just as Indian films often do, with their humanistic storylines. A dispensation that thrives on erecting new boundaries is naturally antagonistic towards such an inclusionary institution, whose cultural influence it both despises and envies, whose soft power it needs to both break and appropriate.

It understands that if India has to be remade, it is essential to remake Bollywood first.

Hindu supremacists appreciate the role of Bollywood in spreading Hindi, their chosen language as India’s lingua franca in a nation with 22 official languages and 19,569 mother tongues. But that’s no good if Bollywood doesn’t speak their language.

Bollywood has in recent years found itself in the cross-hairs of a co-ordinated attack by the regime, the governing institutions it controls, its social media lynch mob and the mainstream media it has captured. Contrived outrages, such as the one Pathaan encountered, have been deployed freely. Amazon was similarly forced to apologise and cut scenes from a television drama directed by a Muslim after BJP leaders alleged it was “deliberately mocking Hindu gods” in a scene in which a Muslim actor dressed as a Hindu god delivered lines they did not approve of.

A cornered industry, forever watching over its shoulder for the next unexpected offence, has responded with utmost caution and self-censorship. A midranking actor (let’s call him X – such is the climate of fear that none of the Bollywood insiders Index spoke to wanted to be named) calls it the “sanitisation process” which, he says, operates at every level, from script to editing.

“Legal teams are a key component of all production houses these days, picking up potential red flags,” he said. “And every new outrage is a learning point for these teams second-guessing the mob. Basically, the creative space is shrinking with every new production.”

Projects have been put on ice, scenes cut, scripts altered, plots picked depending on how “safe” they are, and actors changed. X, a Muslim, says he has never personally faced discrimination in the industry. “But who knows how many projects I have been blocked from because my identity could be a problem?” he asked.

Anurag Kashyap, one of Bollywood’s biggest directors, says Netflix pulled the plug on his enormously popular series Sacred Games – featuring a Hindu spiritual leader connected to terrorism and the drug trade – after the Amazon saga, and he believes that he wouldn’t have been able to make his earlier films today.

“I have written a lot of scripts but there are no takers. There are no takers for a lot of films which are remotely about politics or religion," he recently said in an interview with The Indian Express.

Airing views like that in public has got Kashyap in trouble, with taxmen knocking on his door several times. The government is as adept at unleashing the troll army as it is at sending taxmen to dig up the money trails of disagreeable films and their makers. Other law enforcement arms of the government are increasingly being used as ruthlessly.

The death of a Hindu actor, Sushant Singh Rajput, in 2020 snowballed, with the backing of Modi’s party, into a QAnon-style conspiracy theory movement against a supposedly drug-addled and underworld-funded Bollywood establishment.

Federal drugs and investigative agencies legitimised these concocted rumours of wrongdoing with dramatic raids and arrests of actors on trumped-up drug charges, cheered on by national TV channels. The spectre of drug busts returned the following year when Khan’s son, Aryan, was jailed for a month after a dubious drug bust at a rave party, even though nothing was found on him. The message was clear: “Fall in line.”

And in order to survive, Bollywood has done just that. The industry’s macho men, who once made their careers as action heroes on the silver screen, now openly grovel to BJP strongmen for protection. Groups of Bollywood personalities often meet Modi in highly-publicised “selfie-fests” to discuss nation-building, and industry insiders speak in hushed tones of shadowy figures encouraging Bollywood biggies to make films that better reflect Indian “culture”. Their efforts are showing. A whole new genre of movies has emerged that hew to the Hindu right’s worldview and promote Islamophobia in the garb of cultural pride.

Films rich in Hindu symbolism or drawing on Hindu mythology are a regime favourite. So are films villainising medieval Muslim rulers and emphasising their battles with righteous Hindu kings. Even though Muslim empires were thoroughly assimilated and indigenised in medieval India, Hindu supremacists view 800 years of Muslim dynasties – such as the Mughals – as colonialism, a period of shame and subjugation no different from the nearly 200 years of British rule. History is being rewritten accordingly in school and college text books, and a whole genre of films has emerged that aggressively pushes this idea that is central to establishing the Muslim as the outside “other”.

The children of these outsiders, in the language of Hindu fundamentalists, are not just unworthy of equal citizenship in the land of Hindus, they deserve retribution for the blood of Hindus their ancestors spilled. The apparently innocuous battle scenes in these movies, with beastly Muslim invaders chanting “Allahu Akbar” clashing with pious Hindu soldiers marching to religious war cries and waving orange flags, are designed to provoke a specific emotional response that feeds the BJP’s exclusionary politics.

There has also been a profusion of jingoistic films on security themes focusing on terrorism, highlighting the threat from resident Muslims and a hostile Pakistan. The latter works as a dog whistle for Indian Muslims, who Hindu fundamentalists charge with extra-territorial loyalties to Pakistan. Shah Rukh Khan has been called a Pakistani agent by BJP leaders and a “traitor” who “lives in India but his soul is in Pakistan”.

These films work to solidify the Modi government’s credentials of muscular nationalism – its calling card. In 2019, a Bollywood film called Uri: The Surgical Strike, which re-created a 2016 Indian army counter-attack on terrorist training camps in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, significantly contributed to Modi’s re-election campaign. The movie was released a month before the government carried out a new “surgical strike” – an air attack across the border in Pakistan – which whipped up hysteria and unleashed a wave of ultra-nationalism that Modi rode to return to power with a thumping majority.

Like Muslims, liberal intellectuals – a bugbear of the right-wing government – are also often portrayed in these films as internal enemies in cahoots with international forces out to harm India. All of these enemies of the nation are up against the unimpeachable patriotism of government leaders, who bear uncanny resemblance to the current office-holders. The dynamic national security adviser in Uri: The Surgical Strike who suggests attacking Pakistan looks exactly like Modi’s own national security adviser.

A Muslim man rides past a poster of Bollywood movie The Kashmir Files, Mumbai, March 2022. The film has been called a “vulgar propaganda movie”

CREDIT: Divyakant SolankI/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

Sometimes, there’s no need for accidental doppelgangers. Some movies are straight-up about the great helmsman himself. An avalanche of hagiographic and reverential Modi-themed films and web series made an appearance before the 2019 national elections. Conveniently, these films contrast the ham-fisted and bumbling past governments. Uri: The Surgical Strike hit the cinemas the same day as a docufilm titled The Accidental Prime Minister – a “shoddy propaganda film” (according to film critic Shubhra Gupta) on Modi’s predecessor Manmohan Singh, portraying the latter as a spineless puppet controlled by the Congress party’s dynastic Gandhi family (as opposed to the self-made and iron-willed Modi).

A new crop of propaganda films goes beyond merely showing the opposition parties and Modi’s predecessors in bad light or “othering” Muslims. The violent

subtext of films such as The Kashmir Files – a film that inflames hatred toward Muslims in the name of telling the supposedly untold story of a Hindu massacre in 1990s Kashmir by Islamist insurgents – puts them on a par with Nazi propaganda films such as Jew Suss and Die Rothschilds.

Hindutva rabble-rousers are using The Kashmir Files, which was promoted by Modi himself and given a tax break, to incite violence. Last November, Israeli director Nadav Lapid kicked up a storm when, as head of the jury of the International Film Festival of India, he trashed the film as a“vulgar propaganda movie”.

Later, in an interview with an Israeli news outlet, he said he was shocked by the “combination between propaganda and fascism and vulgarity” in a film pushed by the Indian government.

“It is crazy, what’s going on here?”