Reflections of the Pakistani Film Khuda Ke Liye

The 2007 film Khuda Ke Liye, Shoaib Mansoor’s directorial debut, is a poignantly tragic drama of injustice and suffering sustained by religious extremism, cultural prejudices, and post Sept 11 paranoia. Of all the films on terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism released internationally, Khuda Ke Liye is arguably the most riveting and engaging. When Mary, a British girl of Pakistani parents, becomes friends with Dave, a white Englishman, her father, Hussain Shah, disapproves of the romance and conspires to find her a Pakistani Muslim husband. Shah deceives his daughter into returning to Pakistan, where he recruits his Lahore-based Muslim family into a plan to keep her in his native homeland. His plan receives support from his mother, passive disapproval from his brother, and the ire of his nephew, Mansoor.

The chicanery results in Mary’s forced marriage to her cousin Samrad, who, along with village elders, keeps her hostage in a backwater village in war-stricken Afghanistan.  After her unsuccessful escape attempt, she succeeds in clandestinely contacting Dave, who marshals British legal and political forces to secure her release and return her to London; however, the entrenched religious and cultural forces in Pakistan baulk the Pakistani Government’s acquiescence to the British request. Ultimately, her fate rests on the persuasive powers of differing interpretations of Islam: one that can potentially free her and the other that is likely to keep her perpetually trapped in Pakistan.

Parallel to Mary’s ordeal is Mansoor’s tragedy. On migrating to the US to study music, he meets the Caucasian Janie and waivers over marrying her. Soon after conceding, he is severely tortured by American investigators, after his unjustifiable arrest from racial profiling following the September 11, 2000 terrorist attacks on the Trade Centers in New York.

Mansoor’s story does not only foreground the inescapable struggles of many diasporic Pakistani Muslims, it critiques the US security forces’ irrational demonizing of them after the incident and completes the tri-continental framing of the plot. Possibly a deeper reading of Mansoor’s fate may also reveal a subliminal critique of Westernized Muslims that feeds into notions of the inevitability of disaster and suffering accompanying their ‘misplaced’ loyalties and ‘corrupted’ values.  

The narrative spatialization is one of the most unique and attractive features of the film. In London, United Kingdom, we meet Mary and agonize over her father’s hypocritical and extreme reaction to her bi-racial relationship. In Lahore, Pakistan the narrative treats us to a philosophical and ideological debate on the conflation of religion and law in procuring justice; finally, in Chicago, United States, we empathize with Janie's pain and are horrified by the annihilation of Mansoor’s human rights.

I particularly love this film for its bold and balanced representation of popular anxieties of Muslim extremism, and the irrational responses generated by the associated fears. Although less renowned globally, the film reminds me of Salman Rushdie’s novel Satanic Verses in the way in which it attempts to upend many of the radical readings of Islam. It would come as no surprise to me were a fatwa to be declared on the producer or director…knock wood!

Khuda Ke Liye is refreshing in its humane and unexcitable portrayal of Islamic extremists, not that it celebrates them, but it offers a more complex and holistic foray into their ideological trappings. The representations of the temperamentally and ideologically contrasting Maulanas provide a rich context for understanding the role of Islam in both fueling and containing anti-Western sentiments in Pakistan. 

I found it ironic that while the film scores were arguable its most endearing aesthetic feature, music was also the discursive thread that tied together the ideological conflicts of the narrative.  Samrad and Mansoor were the most popular musicians in Lahore, suggesting that many Pakistani Muslims appreciate music, which according to radical Islam is antithetical to the sanctity of Islam. When the radical Maulana brainwashes Samrad into abandoning his music as a religious sacrifice, it leads him to a trail of extreme behavior that distances him from his family and even himself. Alternatively, the erudite Maulana loves music, elevating it as a cherished aspect of Islamic culture.  

Although much of the film settles on Islamic ideology, it also presents some powerful nationalistic discourses. The most powerful is the stereotypical portrayal of Mansoor’s and Janie’s first dyadic exchange. What appears on the surface as a corny and simplistic flirtation carries deep nationalistic and religious ideas. When Janie feigns ignorance of Pakistani Muslims, Mansoor responds “We built the Taj Mahal,” although the Taj Mahal is located in India. Despite being a historical fact, this claim by a Pakistani Muslim to India’s quintessential historic landmark has the potential to aggravate the historic religious and nationalistic conflicts between India and Pakistan. Indian Hindus are likely to be uneasy with it. 

Another example of the way in which the film subtly unearths religious tensions between Indians and Pakistanis is the scene where Mansoor’s Sikh neighbor in Chicago lambasts Muslims for the widespread abuses against Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs following the 9/11 attacks. This scene presents a critique of the perceived ignorance of the American system and highlights the intense marginalization of Muslims, not only by the West, but also by their Indian neighbors.

Reflections of the Hindi Film Kabul Express

Kabul Express (2006) is a Hindi film surrounding the experiences of two Indian journalists, Jai Kapoor, a Hindu, and Suhel Khan, a Muslim, who undertake a 48-hour journey into rural Afghanistan, at the heels of the US invasion of the country, to capture a career-changing interview with the Taliban. Their escapades to the remote and anarchic hinterlands en route to the Taliban’s enclaves lead them to an Afghan guide, Khyber; an American Reuters journalist, Jessica Beckham; and Pakistani soldier Major Imran Mohammed, an ex-Taliban, attempting to clandestinely return to his homeland. 

Major Imran Mohammed kidnaps the journalist entourage in a Toyota SUV labeled Kabul Express. Throughout much of the journey, they confront their own anxieties over each other, the American empire, the obscure trilateral conflict, and their evolving multicultural bond. Despite incessant interruptions from revengeful, anti-Taliban Northern Alliance Mujhaideens, the unscrupulous Hazara outlaws with their pastoral roadblocks, and the untamable rugged outback, they remain undaunted in their attempts to achieve their individual objectives, until they must decide whether their desired ends are worth more than human life.

Kabul Express attends to notions of Indian nationality through the distinctive differences in the interests and philosophies of Jai and Suhel, by playing on stereotypical discourses of religious and cultural variances in Indian patriotism. When Jai, the Hindu, is reluctant, even at gunpoint, to concede that the Pakistani Imran Khan was a better cricket all-rounder than Indian Kapel Dev, he embodies the essence of the Indian spirit; after-all, the game of cricket is a powerful mediator of Indian nationalism.

Conversely, the Muslim Suhel’s indifference to Jai’s and Major Imran Mohammed’s cricket polemic, rooted in Pakistan/Indian tensions, registers as profoundly unpatriotic, if not traitorous. Suhel’s unfolding empathy with or perhaps admiration of Imran Mohammed towards the end of the film also plays on the historical suspicion of the predominance of Muslim loyalty over nationalism. Suhel even tells the Pakistani soldier and fellow Muslim, “If you were not Talib, we could be friends.”

The film reframes the narratives of the Afghan tensions from the metannarative of religious extremism so dominant in Western media, to a more complex one, conflated by regional and territorial nuances, religious differences, Western capitalism and imperialism, and human vices.  The film upends the popular extremist reference to the conflict, by applying it to its framing of America as less of a victim and more as purveyor of capitalist greed and imperialism, so powerfully demonstrated in the scene in which Jai opens the back of a bombed truck that pours out coca-cola cans in an environment devoid of much else.

It also supports this theme with its characterization of the American journalist, Jessica Beckham, who seems more interested in reselling the tragedy in the media than she is about reporting on the human suffering. Khan could not help but tell her, “You almost seem to enjoy those wars,” to which she predictably responds, “I am hoping that publishers will line up for my book when I write all this.”

Kabul Express is also unique in the way it portrays the Taliban, through its multidimensional depiction of Major Imran Mohammed, as affective and complex human beings, loaded with their own emotional inconsistencies and internal conflicts. Through Mohammed, we see the Taliban not as one-dimensional heartless fanatics, but as passionate human beings, and even opportunists, whose religious dogma undermines their value of humanity. When he cries from the abandonment of his estranged daughter, who rejects his alliance with the Taliban, we recognize that his complicity in the conflict is not quite simplistic; in fact, he tells us, “You all belong to a different world. You will never understand.”  

The film’s production aesthetics is unique in many ways. Its cinematography offers a rare, but pleasant expose of Afghanistan’s landscapes that is both breathtaking and refreshing. It also celebrates rather than subverts the pastoral cultures that contextualize the scenes, a respectful distancing of Hollywood’s runaway formulae, although I had some misgivings of its narrative scripting that often mimicked American cinema.

The film does present a pro-Indian narrative, laced almost apologetically with fleeting anti-Western images of the triangulated conflict involving Afghanistan, Pakistan and the United States, with the bull’s eye centered on the Taliban. Some of its subtexts may embarrass the West, but perhaps more critically may serve to injure Pakistani sentiments. Arguably, if a Pakistani audience does not find the arbitrary and underdeveloped characterization of the their country's military involvement in the conflict offensive, they are likely to find the film's ending insensitive.

Reflections of the Hindi Film Mission Kashmir

Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s Mission Kashmir, produced in 2000, is a romantic drama that portrays the unrest, violence, suffering and religious tensions surrounding Muslim militant struggles for Kashimir’s independence from India. The story unfolds when the Muslim separatist leader Malik-ul-khan executes a doctor, and his family, for treating Inayat Khan, a high-ranking police officer injured by a rebel mine. Subsequently, Inayat Khan’s son is seriously injured and doctors refuse to care for him, fearing their lives.

The Muslim Separatist Struggle Demonized Through Malik-ul-khan

After his son dies, Inayat Khan leads a unit of masked officers in an invasion of a village home besieged by Malik-ul-khan and his men, shooting the guilty and innocent rampantly. The lone civilian survivor, eleven-year-old, Altaaf, suffers deep trauma from witnessing the brutal slaying of his family.

Khan Leads Police on Deadly Raid of Village Home

Overburden with guilt and contrite, the Muslim Khan and his Hindu wife Neelima adopt Altaaf who slowly accepts them as his new parents; however, on discovering Khan’s mask in the house, Altaaf attempts to kill his adopted parents, but only succeeds in jumping out the window. Vowing eternal revenge, he transforms into a skilled assassin as a member of the rebel Muslim group led by Hilal Koshistani.  He juggles his reunion with his childhood sweetheart Sufiya, his loyalty to his mentor Koshistani, his affection for Neelima, and his hatred of Khan in mediating his commitment to Mission Kashmir.



Altaaf Grows into a Terrorist



The film attempts to capture some of the salient tragedies of the Kashmiri conflict, the world’s longest running dispute, triggered by the British partitioning of India.  Yasmiin Khan, writes in The Great Partition, “The secret Indo-Pakistan League campaigned doggedly for the ‘original Pakistan’ right into the earliest days of Independence, claiming that the British had ignored cultural and social considerations in their division of the country, that the separation of the two wings of Pakistan was illogical and that remaining portions of the ‘original Pakistan’, such as Delhi, UP and Kashmir should be released immediately” (p.102).

Khan Rushes to Foil Altaaf's Terrorist Attack

The film carried some poignant narratives that caught my critical attention. Firstly, the perennial mother and son intimacy fostered through varied manifestations of the Freudian oedipal complex returns again in Mission Kashmir. From the moment Neelima adopts Altaaf as her son, the bond becomes sacrosanct, and only Neelima’s loyalty to the state can match it.  To Neelima’s , Inayat Khan’s role as the husband is subordinated to that of Altaaf as the errant son. As Inayat Khan tells her following her sequester with Altaaf, “Blood will be split now mine or Altaaf.”  He presents her dilemma even more lucidly by asking her, “Whose blood do you want it to be, you husband’s or your son’s?”

Khan and Neelima Troubled By Altaaf' Rebelious Preoccupation

Neelima also perpetuates the early Hindi cinema’s cliché of framing the mother as the conscience of the nation. Despite her intense love for her son, Altaaf, she reluctantly forsakes him in loyalty to the nation, beckoning him to abandon his subversive agenda. “On one side is love, on the other hatred. On one side is compassion on the other terror, good or evil, brutality of humanity” she tells him. Ironically, apart from serving as a plea to Altaaf, Neelima’s admonitions work to establish rigid and biased political agenda. By framing the Kashmir issue in such stark binary opposites, she over simplifies and nullifies many of the complex and deep seated and legitimate conflicts that drive such passionate jingoism.

Neelima Disobeys Khan and Meets Secretly with Altaaf

Alternatively, the film deviates from popular representation of Indian masculinity in Hindi films. Hindi films are generally not shy to show their male protagonists expressing emotion; in fact, many classic Hindi films present men sobbing or in full blown tears, but Mission Kashmir presents a hyper-masculine image of, Inayat Khan. When Altaaf reminds Khan of his deceased son, he runs to the room latches the door at his back and sobs privately. The underlying principle appears to be: if Inayat Khan is to be the protector of the nation then he must not be too emotional, for that is being weak. 

Khan Must Choose Between His Son and the State

Notwithstanding the deviation, the film does not challenge the patriarchal order or masculine stereotypes in any major way, if anything it often reinforces it. When Altaaf reflects on the impact that his terrorist actions would have on Sufiya, Koshistani tells him, “During Jihad, a warrior only has friendships with men, child.” On the surface this phallocentric framing of militancy highlights the subordination of women in Islamic culture; however when read against the agency given to  Mali in the film Terrorist, it works more as a critique of Altaaf’s ability to negotiate his feelings for Sufiya within his terrorist ethos.

Altaaf and Sufiya Childhood Romance Blossoms in Their Adulthood

The film also hypersensitizes audience to the extreme suffering and loss that continues to shape the Kashmiri conflict. Entire families are decimated and those that are left are disrupted or displaced; yet, within all this carnage there is also a semblance of normalcy, a quant order of everyday life. So many characters in the film have lost their family members, but they eventually work around containing their pain and trauma.  The loss mobilizes some victims to reactionary politics, while others appear to smother it in amnesia. For example, when Sufiya beckons Altaaf to tell her his troubles he responds, “I can’t feel anything. I can’t see beauty.” His impassivity points to the effects of trauma that Virdi refers to.

Sufiya's Love is Insufficient for Rehabilitating Altaaf

The film attends to religious conflict both insidiously and overtly in its plot. If Innayat Khan’s role as the nation’s IG, is extended allegorically to represent governmental authority, then Khan and Neelima’s interreligious marriage becomes an allegory for registering the Indian nation’s secular nationalistic policies and tolerance, if not encouragement, of religious integration. Their union registers as a promise of the future, which becomes poignant when Astaaf asks Innayat Khan, “How come you are Muslim and you married a Hindu girl?” Interestingly, religious differences are at the core of the conflicts, and the film does not deny that. Inadvertently, Mission Kashmir, as a Hindi film, frames the Muslim militants as a dishonorable and unscrupulous group of bandits. This was most profound when Koshistani executed one of his men for chastising Altaaf on his chilly manipulation of Sufiya’s love in service of the Jihad. After shooting the man in cold blood, Koshistani lies to his comrades that the man committed suicide in the service of the mission.

The Evil Eyes of Malik-ul-khan

At the heart of these narrative structures lies the foregrounding of the genuine distrust and anxieties among, Muslim, Sikhs, and Hindus, in constructing and nurturing the Indian nation. The film frequently points to casts differences and prejudices as fueling conflict. When the government bureaucrat, The Hindu, Mr. Despande, invokes the national tragedy of Indira Ghandi’s slaying, to question Khan’s loyalty to his country, threatening to remove the PM’s security from under his control, Kahn is outraged that his patriotism is being questioned. He indignantly rejects Mr. Despande’s orders, reminding him that as a Muslim police officer, he too has lost a son to the national unrests.

Who will pull the trigger?

This scene can be read closely with the scene of the two police officers, a Sikh and a Hindi, following the raid of the militant camp in search of Altaaf. When the Sikh police officer reprimands his Hindi colleague on his revengeful and bitter shooting of the militants, he responds by recounting the violence his family suffered at the hands of Muslims, noting “You do not understand because you are not a Kashmiri.” The Sikh responds by sharing stories of the massacre of his families by Hindus.  The resounding lesson from this exchange is that all Indians must negotiate their tragic past to allow for forgiveness that promotes service to the nation.

Altaaf Prepares to Launch Deadly Terrorist Missile

Finally, the film sustains common production techniques employed in Hindi films narrative structures. Flashbacks and the dream sequence operate to foreground visceral struggles and contextualize emotional and moral quagmires. In one of these episodes, Altaaf says,” I am doing all this for my religion,” to which Sufi responds, “Islam does not condone killing innocent people.”

Reflections on the Hindi film The Terrorist

The Terrorist (1999), directed by Santosh Sivan, features Malli, a Sri Lankan teenager, recruited and trained by separatist guerillas as an assassin. When the commander selects her for a suicide mission, she struggles to rationalize her destiny, gaining self-motivation from flashbacks of the gruesome murder of her brother, Ramu, by government soldiers. 

Malli in Combat with Rebel Forces

After meeting and bonding with her boyish comrade and forest guide, Lotus, learning of his anguish, and witnessing his death, Malli is forced to internalize the implications of her actions, but is still undaunted. She sojourns at the home of Manvan under false pretense in preparation for her suicidal mission, but soon learns that she is pregnant. When she discovers that Manvan’s immobile and speechless wife has inadvertently seen and heard her plans with Thyagu for carrying out the assassination, she wrestles with her conscience and doubts her commitment to completing her mission.

Manvan Treats Malli as His Own Daughter

The film contextualizes the close body contact of Malli and her injured comrade in a moment of empathy by framing their physical intimacy as rare and incidental. It registers this rarity clearly in the dialogue with the boy exclaiming,”You’re a girl” and Malli responding “You’ve never seen one before?” Fittingly, he answers, “Never this close before.” The scene is important because its ambiguity works to on one hand demystify and desexualize their heterosexual contact, but on the other hand register the implicit assumption of sexual energy between the two characters, which acquires deeper meaning through her repeated melancholic flashbacks of the scene and her eventual tracing of her pregnancy. Like Lotus she has nightmares, but hers is about the future, not the past.  In this sense, the film is a typical Hindi film by the way it uses flashbacks as a means of framing visceral struggles and anxieties, and activating memory.

Malli's Lover Dies in Her Arms

The film also works as a political critique of the separatist movement. By emphasizing the militarization of children, especially girls, through coercion and intimidation, it assigns a particular amoral character to the anti-nationalist movement.  Without providing any historical or political context of the separatists’ struggles, the film further serves to dehumanize and demonize their actions. The Terrorist centers the trauma of the garish violence, carnage, and disruption that marked these historical conflicts most vividly in the character of the emotionally fragile Lotus. His nightmares of the killing of his parents, his childish desire to be loved, his innocence of the magnitude of the struggle he represents, juxtapose against his precocious deftness with the wild and his chicanery to arouse deep sympathy.

Lotus Guiding Malli Through the Forest

The film deviates from the normative Hindi film in the way it portrays the mother figure, an allegory for the nation.  Here the nation is not the object of suffering or submission, but rather it is suspended in a state of vulnerability through the lifelessness of Manvan’s wife.  This framing hints at the helplessness of India in containing these violent tensions. Ironically, Manvan’s wife entered into her coma on learning of the death of her son. This tragic loss crippled her, not unsimilar to the way the virulent separatist movements destabilized and stagnated the Indian state. Her blank stare worked to unsettle Malli’s conscience, with Malli confessing their emotive affinity. In the end, Malli wanted and perhaps even needed her blessings, but with a squeeze of her hand she beckoned Malli, mother to mother, to abandon her mission. For me, this represented a powerful and desperate petition of the Indian state to its defectors and fractured groups to reinvigorate their duty and loyalty to the nation.

The Silence of Manvan's Wife Working on Malli's Conscience

Another moment of the film that I thought contained a fountain of embedded messages was the scene of Malli first entering Manvan son’s room. Photos of Hollywood celebrities plastered the walls of the room, which instantly captivate Malli’s attention on her entry. She began interrogating her own identity by mimicking their poses and appearances. In that moment of fantasy, she hints at a longing for a different life, a life that embraces modernity and the cosmopolitan culture of the new India.

Malli in Deep Introspection

If Manvan’s wife symbolizes the Indian nation, Manvan represents the traditional structures and lifestyles of rural India. Indeed, he treats the orphan Malli more as a daughter than a tenant. He even promises to grandfather her imminent child.  Despite his privileged status in the patriarchal order, he is not immune from sufferings of war. His ritual of keeping a vacant seat during meals for his son, who was killed seven years earlier, testifies to the difficulty and reluctance that many people had forgetting, shedding, or escaping the suffering and pain which these violent battles brought to their lives.

Reflections on the Hindi Film Train To Pakistan

The 1998 Hindi film Train to Pakistan, an adaptation of Khushwant’s Singh’s novel, is perhaps the most celebrated of director Pamela Rooks’ three major films. The film depicts the confusion, mayhem, and unrest that ensued in a Punjab village called Mano Majra during 1947, in anticipation of the partitioning of British India into two separate countries: Pakistan and India. The eve of the partition unearthed deep seated anxieties and tensions, otherwise relatively contained and managed among the Sikhs, Muslims, Hindus, and Christians, leading to the displacement of families, the massacre of ethnic groups, the pillage of villages, the rape of women, and the corruption of justice. 

Exodus of Muslims from India During Partition

Train to Pakistan highlights the extensive disruption of families caused by the violence and separation leading up to partition. There is loss in almost every major character’s life. The magistrate has lost his wife and daughter. Jagga has no father. Noora, the daughter of the village mullah, has no mother. Haseena only has her grandmother. These family disasters, placed against the background of the wider societal suffering and carnage, feed the film’s melancholy.

The Ethnic Violence from Partition

The film also foregrounds the fragility of justice and the arbitrariness with which the legal authorities administered law and order during partition. The most vivid portrayal of this came with scenes that showed the baseless arrest and imprisonment of Jagga and Iqbal for the murder of Ram Lal, a local businessman. The contrasting characters and backgrounds of the two accused are significant: they suggest that nobody was immune or insulated from these types of judicial indiscretions. When the police inspector ordered the cosmopolitan Iqbal to remove his pants to ascertain his identity, it mirrored the humiliation and ignominy that many innocent civilians suffered at the hands of paranoid, agitated, and, unscrupulous law enforcement personnel.   

Jagga Under Arrest

The local magistrate, Hukum Chand, represents the conscience of the law and reifies the mediation of the moral judgments of modernity and Eurocentrism on rural and traditional India. He is a dichotomy, symbolizing the nation’s epochal uncertainty, colonial trappings, contradictions, and anxieties. He quotes Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice and gives English commands; yet, he is in touch with the heartbeat of his district, sensitive to the implications of the unfolding catastrophe. Unfortunately, he is baneful and mechanical in his arbitrations, with little compunction for human sufferin. This is most evident in his distortion of the arrest of the social worker, Iqbal; however, when tensions between the police and military over jurisdiction and authority begin to transform the district into near anarchy, an overt commentary of the realities of the pending partition, Chand becomes self-reflective if not contrite.

Chand in a Deep Muse Over Rising Tensions

For me, the significance of the role of the blind Mullah, Noora’s father, inspires multiple readings. More literally, his blindness symbolizes the disfigured and dismembered body featured in many Hindi films portraying life of that period, which represent the extent of the corporal suffering endured during the partition. On a deeper level though, it speaks to the relative ignorance and naiveté of many Indian citizens of the toll that the partition took on their lives and their future generations. They may not have known much, but they knew that life was being disrupted; indeed, the Mullah seemed confused about much of what was going on around him, but he did notice the anomaly of the trains’ inconsistent and tardy schedule

Mass Murder on The Train to Pakistan

The frolicking in bed between Muslim Noora and the Sikh Jagga was the first time that I had seen early Hindi film present lovemaking through considerable physical contact. Even then the lovers’ touches are contained and smothered by their full attire and playful youthfulness, thus framing their actions as amoral, renegade, and out of sync with the village’s conventional values and mores.

Rear Love-Making Scene in Traditional Hindi Cinema

Unlike Raj Kapoor, Rooks struggles to create intimacy between her key characters, although she allows for more sexual touch between them. She establishes Jagga and Noora’s relationship on a foundation rooted in flirtatious and lustful encounters, but when Jagga is imprisoned their relationship unexplainably metamorphizes into an intense romantic affair, with Jagga shedding his established roguish character to perform a melodramatic emotional transformation, pinning uncontrollably for Noora, which, in the end, leads him to Romeo-like martyrdom.

Jagga and Noora on thier Romantic Rendezvous

Rook’s ineptitude at portraying intimacy on screen also comes across in the relationship between the district magistrate, Chand and Haseena, a teenage Muslim girl used by her grandmother as an escort or prostitute. If Rook intended their interaction to establish a complex relationship, inspired by the grieving of Chand for his deceased wife and daughter, and Haseena's corrupted innocence, she may have succeeded more at short-circuiting the development of their bond, for their exchanges are often clumsy, jolting, and bland.

Chand and Haseena in Emotive Exchange

Reflections of the Hindi film Sholay

Reflections of the Hindi film Sholay

Ramish Sippy’s (1975) film Sholay is a story about the tyranny of a rural community by Sikh bandits, the suffering and revenge of a police officer, and the bond and rehabilitation of two petty thieves. The plot unfolds when Thakur Baldev Singh recruits two of his legendary arrestees, the inseparable duo of Veeru and Jai, who only concedes to a coin toss to help him avenge his family’s slaying and his maiming, and to repel the vicious control of the city of Ramgarh by the infamous bandit Gabbar Singh, the bane of Thakur Baldev Singh’s existence.

Gabbar Bandits Terrorizing the City of Ramgarh

Attracted by the compensation package, Veeru and Jai, report for duty, but after discovering Thakur Singh’s real inspiration behind the mission, they eventually agree to offer their services pro bono.

Jai, Veeru, and Thakur Negotiating Deal

The outlaw buddies eventually become immersed in the life of Ramgarh, both developing romantic interests, Veeru in Basanti and Jai in Radha.

Basanti and Veeru Bonding

Their communal engagement also takes them through phases of attrition and reconciliation; however, the painful sacrifices of liberating themselves and the city take their toll on their body and spirit, registering the film’s tragic grand narrative.

Jai and the Village in Mourning over Murdered Boy

Melancholia and suffering dominate the thematic elements of this film. This is most vividly portrayed in Radha’s constant grieving over the massacre of her family and Thakur Baldev Singh’s obsession with revenge. Radha, speaks only one line in the film, and as an allegory, her dumbness possibly represents the protracted suppression by a generation of Indians of the trauma suffered from the violence and carnage surrounding partition.

The Grieving Widow, Radha

Another conspicuous element of Sholay is the extent of the male bonding between Veeru and Jai. Traditionally, Indian cinema tends to highlight gendered relationships, whether through oedipal complexes or heterosexual romance, but in Sholay these formulaic relationships are subordinated to the intimate friendship between Veeru and Jai. So when Jai is killed by Gabbar’s men, Veeru must abandon his promise to marry Basanti and mount a near suicidal counterattack to avenge his friend and ameliorate his own pain.

Jai Dying in Veeru Arms

The film also offers a normative commentary on the role of women in rural Indian society. Basanti’s agency in life relies on her ability to get married to a “worthy” man. Her guardian, Mausi, clearly emphasizes this ambition, when Jai represents Veeru in asking for her hand in marriage.

Jai Seeking Mausi's Approval for Veeru's and Basanti's Marriage

Therefore, when Gabbar Singh tortures her fiancé Veeru,  it comes as no surprise that she must share in the suffering, even to the point of dancing on glass, until overcome by fatigue, in her quest to save his life and ironically hers, for without Veeru, she losses a sense of worth or societal value.

Basanti Dancing, Hoping to Save Veeru's Life

These tropes point to the film’s narrative contestations between the traditional and modern. When Jai explores the possibility of marrying the widow, Radha, he must wrestle with the community’s traditions and its prescription of the widow’s role. Also, Veeru’s citified concept of dating, contrasts with Basanti’s adherence to the traditional processes of romantic bonding. Ultimately, he has to go to extreme means, feigning suicide, to circumvent one of the most deep-seated community values, that of parental consent to marriage.     

Veeru Threatening Mausi with Suicide

Sholay also highlights complex, race, cast, and religious anxieties and prejudices. Although the film is Hindi, Gabber, the unscrupulous bandit, is a Sikh and one of his most trusted followers the film’s lone black man.

Gabbar the Terrorist

This was the first time that I had seen a person of African descent in Hindi cinema, and disappointedly it replicated the Hollywood racial stereotypes of that period by demonizing him. Interestingly, there are no obvious Hindi villains, and those who engage in immoral behavior are eventually humanized.                                                

Thakur Releasing Jai and Veeru from His Custody

Additionally, the film also points to the limited presence and influence of the state in rural communities. The police is absent from the community of Ramgarh, forcing the impotent  and retired police officer Thakur Baldev Singh to rely on vigilantism to protect the community. Sholay also  endorses Virdi’s (2003) theory that many post-independence Hindi films present characters that are physically dismembered or disfigured. Imam Saheb is blind and Thakur Baldev Singh has lost his both arms to Gabbar’s cruelty.

Reference:

Virdi, J. (2003). The cinematic imagination: Indian popular films as social history. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.