Representing Hindutva: Nation, Religion and Masculinity in Indian Popular Cinema, 1990 to 2003

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

Working with the assumption that visual culture, specifically film, draws on wider hegemonic discourses circulating within the public space to construct its own narrative, and that hegemonic definitions of the nation emerge and take shape within “public culture,” of which film is a part, this article reads six Indian films from the 1990s and the early 2000s — Roja (Mani Ratnam, 1992), Bombay (Mani Ratnam, 1995), Sarfarosh/The Patriot (John Matthew Mathan, 1999), Mission Kashmir (Vidhu Vinod Chopra, 2000), Gadar/Revolution (Anil Sharma, 2001), and Pinjar/The Cage (Chandra Prakash Dwivedi, 2003). At a time when the Hindu nationalist movement had gained momentum, this article identifies discourses that surrounded “maleness,” the nation and religion through its reading of popular cinema. The three themes that emerged from the reading of these films point to the manner in which discourses of nationalism, masculinity and religion intersected during this particular historical conjuncture in the Indian subcontinent to form hegemonic patterns that represented and reinforced Hindu nationalism. All six films mobilize ways of seeing that reproduce and represent social differences as they construct the Muslim male as the “other.” Although some of these films ostensibly attempt to grapple with real and contemporary social and political concerns with some sensitivity, they continue to represent hegemonic discourses that accord primacy to the Hindu male over the Muslim male by defining Islam as an ideology and the nation as demanding a suppression of difference.