What. A. Dialog. Seetis & Taalis. [Throws coins at monitor.]

I would exclude the likes of Bhagat Singh from the “terrorist” movies, because there is never any sense in the movies that he is anything other than entirely virtuous; if he is a terrorist, then Attenborough’s Gandhi is part of the tradition of Hollywood representations of convicts. [Aside: the best Bhagat Singh movie from Bollywood is Raj Kumar Santoshi's The Legend of Bhagat Singh, written by Anjum Rajabali; it's the one that is the most honest about the fact that he was a communist, and is otherwise relatively solid historically]…

Aside, since Conrad brought up Fanaa: note that this film reflects the times & the Indo-Pak peace process by having a RAW agent mouth that India and Pakistan were both victims of (Kashmiri) terrorism. The terrorist outfit of which Aamir is a member (and in which his grandfather appears to be the only other member :-)) does not appear to be funded by anybody, have any connection to anybody, and operates from a forest (in reality, Poland) where there are no Kashmiris, or even animals. Gotta love it.

On the other side of border what is now called Lollywood, has its share of Terrosits/Freedom fighter movies. I have not seen any recently but in my tweens, there was a rush of movies like , NIZAM, JABROO and MALANGI etc. Here the hero is a tall, fair complexion, with nicely trimmed mustahce, Yusuf Khan or Akmal, with a black turban little different than present day Taliban Black turban, on a white horse. He is a hybrid of Robin Hood( robbing the rich local collaborators of the Farangies and giving to poors ,with usually a beautiful daughter), Bhagat Singh ( willing to die for his conviction)and Allama Iqbal (eloquent dialogues like ; DIN noo raj Farangi da, tey Raat noo raj malangi da etc; ).
I wonder if at present the hero of the movie may be a general Musharraf or Kiyani look alike, leaving a US war ship in a chopper with brief case full of dollars to eradicate poverty from the land or a Mullah Omar look alike issuing diktats from unknown place to keep the faith alive!

I should have included this in the above comment: the above the are the lines I was responding to.

I would also disagree that Naxalites and Tamil Tigers and NE insurgents were ever habitually represented on the Hindi film screen — in fact the only films that I can think of featuring Tamil Tigers and NE insurgents were directed by Mani Rathnam, a Tamil film director (the former was a tamil film; the latter, Dil Se) — Tango Charlie is an exception, but this film is a disneyland of Indian insurgencies, with the film lurching from one to the other. Sarfarosh did feature both Pakistani-backed terrorists (although Naseer’s character, offensively a ghazal-singer in the pay of the ISI, is animated not by religion but by a sense of historical injustice, as he lost everything during Partition) as well as Naxalites (who purchased arms from the Pakistan-backed terrorists as well as the money-minded Marwari seth). There has not been a trend IMO to replace a broader category of terrorists with Muslim ones; instead, it has been to replace the cartoonish, unmarked anti-nationals seen in Karma etc. in the 1980s, with the Muslim jihadi fanatics of the 1990s, and (perhaps more recently) also the upstanding Muslim youths led astray due to injustice perpetrated on them. Indeed, since the start of the Indo-Pak peace process 5-6 years ago, jihadi fanatics have mostly vanished relative to their heyday in the late 1990s.

Aside: I remember reading somewhere, but now cannot remember the book’s title, that in a handful of places audiences cheered Gabbar cutting off the hands of Thakur (while the film certainly ends by re-inscribing Thakur as the head of a virtuous economy, by 1975 it is too late for Hindi cinema’s thakurs: he has symbolically been rendered impotent by the loss of his hands, and must rely on two thieves (both far more outsiders to the milieu than Gabbar, two “unmarked” urbane guys) to get Gabbar (of course, the old colonial trope of the “metropolitan” having to save the rural from itself — this trope has continued unchecked over the years, most openly and noxiously in recent years in the well-meaning Swades, specifically SRK’s speech on caste etc.) But post-Sholay, most thakurs in Hindi cinema (when they still had thakurs, back when a film might actually be set in rural India, or even India) were villains, and typically ones who would incarnate the corruption of the status quo: cops would be in their pay, they would rape poor village girls, etc. (Amjad Khan himself played just such a thakur in Ganga ki Saugandh: in the film, the Brahmin Amitabh ultimately leads a coalition against him, one including Dalits (headed by Pran, the father of Bachchan’s love interest) and Muslims).

I always saw Karma as a more right-wing “re-do” of Sholay, and a more disturbing film (not in an interesting way), although it does have its moments. It is also one of only two films that I know of (the other is Mandi) where Hyderabadi Naseeruddin Shah plays a Hyderabadi. The “state” is very much a factor in this film, as it was in the Anil Sharma films starring Dharmendra from this period (Tehelka, Farishtay): in all these films, the villainous baddie is explicitly anti-India, is allied to foreigners, and has control of territory on or just outside India’s frontiers. By contrast, Gabbar’s mythic force in Sholay arises in part from the fact that he is no cartoon of the poisonous foreigner threatening “us”, but that he is very firmly rooted in the “domestic” ethos — he isn’t “of” the village of Ramgarh, but he is part of the landscape, and no outsider. [I might add that in Sholay’s original ending Ramesh Sippy had Sanjeev Kumar kill Gabbar at the end, but the sequence had to be re-shot as the Indira Gandhi government didn’t like the idea of people taking the law into their own hands at a time when memories of Jayaprakash Narayan’s movement were fresh, and in the year the Emergency was declared. A decade later, Karma “redeemed” this aspect of Sholay; by then, greater vigilantism and “corrective” violence had become more common in Hindi films (not to mention that such violence had become more and more legitimate even in mainstream politics), so much so that Amitabh Bachchan gunned down an entire state cabinet in Inquilab (1984; the year Amitabh was elected to the Lok Sabha).

You should check out Fanaa with Aamir Khan and Kajol; it is perhaps a little strange in having a Kashmiri terrorist as the main protagonist and love interest and doesn’t follow the simple jingoistic stereotype although it remains firmly within the Indian nationalist narrative.

In my mind Gabar Singh from the spectacular 1975 Sholay is a terrorist, albeit he has no interest in bringing down a State, or any cause beyond being evil.

IMO this is a totally wrong reading of Gabbar and the concept of a terrorist. Not everyone who uses terror is a terrorist. Gabbar is simply the end line of the figure of the rural bandit-villain who bases his rule on the coercion of the local rural populace. This has a long pedigree in Indian cinema going back to the 1950s, with films like Ram Ganga and Mother India; the only difference was that in the earlier films the bandits/villains were shown very much to come from rural society itself and had personal kinship bonds/relations with the local population which was the main source of dramtic tension and motor of conflict, usually translating into a conflict between brothers, parents and children etc. This bond meant that their use of violence was selective and targeted and terror was used rarely and against specific targets. Gabbar is merely an extreme manifestation of this figure but has no links personal or otherwise with the rural society he dominates; hence any restraint on the use of violence is removed and the instutionalisation of terror as a generic tool is prevalent. I don’t think this makes him a terrorist per se, just a new kind of villain; increasingly from this period on Bollywood villains exhibited many of these proclivities – you only need to think of Om Puri’s numerous villain roles for this, though few came close to rivalling Gabbar’s. Gabbar’s character clearly echoes the lawless and sadistic villains that were predominant from the late 60s onwards in the Spaghetti Westerns – I think some scenes such as the famous fly scene are almost identical.

More traditional terror genealogies (like those found here and here) would probably start with the 1986 Karma by Subhash Ghai, a crude amalgam of Sholay and 70s Hindi cops ‘n’ robbers films. Karma features a terrorist turned mercenary played by Naseeruddin Shah—an actor to remember as I run through the terror films today. However Karma, is about vigilante justice and personal vengeance, the State only begins to get involved in the nineties with films like Mehul Kumar’s Tirangaa (1992) or Droh Kaal (1994) made by Govind Nihilani, starring Om Puri and our man Naseeruddin Shah

I have to say, I disagree again here. Karma is an interesting film, I remember watching it several times as child since it was a relatively big hit when it came out; yet the figure of the State looms ominously throughout the film if rarely made explicit. It is also a film at least partially about personal redemption, since in the style of the Dirty Dozen, the group of heroes welded together to destroy the bad guys are former criminals, murderers or otherwise good-for-nothing types with one exception. And who whips them into shape? Dilip Kumar’s ex-police/jailor; who disgusted with the inability of the State to track down and destroy the villains, decides to raise, train and fund his own private mini-commando group to do so recruiting Shah and others on the way. The whole film is shot through with nationalist iconography that relies on Gandhian and Nehruvian concepts of culture and patriotism from the fantasy of the early scenes where prisoners are shown to be rehabilitating themselves through productive manual labour and singing uplifting patriotic songs and collective excercises in a typical Gandhian ideal of social harmony to the more explicit end scenes where Dilip Kumar’s character corners Dr. Dang and manages to machinegun an outline of India around his figure then extolling the tiranga. This scene was quite famous at the time, I enclose a cheesy link to it below!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Li1d_zy77jQ&feature=related

The ideological message and symbolism is pretty clear; from the exchange of taunts that occur in the film; whether it is DK’s police officer replying to Dang’s taunt that in Hindustan everything is for sale, by replying that him and by extension not all servants of the state are not; to the argument over what it means to be soldier DK has with Shah, who objects to the other younger recruits being separated from their love interests and embarking on what seems to be a suicide mission. The figure and role of the state becomes perhaps more explicit and differently configured but it incorrect to say it does not exist in these films.

Such a move will not occur again until Mani Shankar’s Tango Charlie in 2005 that deals with the situation in the Northeast of India. However, both are art-house films with limited distribution and impact.

I wouldn’t describe Tango Charlie as an art-house film; not sure why you say this. It isn’t a conventional Bollywood film but has pretty much a mainstream cast and doesn’t exactly stray outside the consensus that exists on a lot of the issues covered and the undercurrent patriotism is fairly explicit. The only reason it gets favourable mentions is because it doesn’t tend to glorify violence or war but its representation of the Indian security forces and those who fight them is quite stereotypical for the most part. It also isn’t really about the Northeast as such, only the first half of the film takes place there; the final third is located in the perennial favourite battlescape of Kashmir where the eponymous heroes go down fighting Pakistani soldiers and irregulars.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1241195/

There is a reason I avoid using “Bollywood” and it is because the Hindi film industry is different from Hollywood in a lot of key ways (though this is changing): Regional film continues to be a player in the India market (though less in the diaspora) and the Bombay industry mechanics work in a vastly different ways in Bombay, things like script writing, funding, stars, etc. So if 9/11 had happened in LA…who knows what would have happened? Maybe the films would be less huge disaster/ paranoid parables and more local? I do think it interesting that no major indie film from a New York director has worked on terror…except for the maudlin 11′09”01 – September 11.

I don’t know how Tamil films deal with terror, or Bengali but the point I was making about Bombay was perhaps a non sequitur….I wanted to ground the discussion in the particular history/ geography of Bombay a little and gesture to the fact that this unique perspective impacts the narratives. It did need more explanation, thanks for pushing!

This might have much to do with the orientation of the segment of the Indian audience that the films are increasingly targeted to — NRIs and upwardly mobile urban Indians — towards “the West”, economic liberalization, sense of “manifest destiny”, etc.

No doubt Hindi popular film turned to “global” markets (arguably with Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge in 1995) and has never looked back , so joining the axis of victims was even easier.

This might have much to do with the orientation of the segment of the Indian audience that the films are increasingly targeted to — NRIs and upwardly mobile urban Indians — towards “the West”, economic liberalization, sense of “manifest destiny”, etc.