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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.