Comment by Riaz Haq on January 30, 2018 at 3:53pm

How Hindu nationalists devoured India

Shikha Dalmia

http://theweek.com/articles/750971/how-hindu-nationalists-devoured-...

Loosely based on an epic poem by a 16th century Muslim Sufi poet, the movie's cinematic sophistication — it is shot in 3-D with absolutely breathtaking scenes of courtly pomp set in medieval India — contrasts sharply with its crude and cartoonish characters. The film isn't a clash between mere good and evil, but utmost perfection and complete depravity as embodied by Singh, the Hindu hero, and Khilji, the Muslim villain.

The Hindu Singh, with his buff bod and kohl-smeared eyes, is a paragon of Rajput virtue who treats women like queens (of which he has two), moves with grace, deals with matters of state with flawless judgment, conducts himself with decorum, and fights with valor and integrity. Twice he foregoes the opportunity to kill the unarmed Khilji because that would have meant violating the Rajput code of honor.

The Muslim Khilji, by contrast, is not just dastardly, but a savage lech. He is a sadist who gets a sexual high from humiliating his minions. On the day of his wedding, he is off jumping other women. He is cruel toward family and friends and happily turns on them for the slightest advantage. He doesn't dine from shining utensils sitting serenely in the traditional lotus position like the cultured Rajputs. He hunches over a table grabbing large pieces of meat with his bare hands, tearing the flesh with his teeth.

And he believes that for victory in war, no tactic is too ignoble. After killing Singh on the battlefield through treachery, he races to claim his prize. But Padmaavati, herself a paragon of virtue, calmly leads 800 women into a fiery cauldron in an act of mass self-immolation that Rajput widows were expected to perform to protect their — and their husbands' — honor. (This dénouement has rightly incensed Indian feminists struggling against traditional attitudes that measure a woman's worth by her devotion to her husband.)

It is not clear that Padmaavati ever existed, but Singh and Khilji were real historical figures and, unsurprisingly, much more nuanced than the movie's ridiculous caricatures. But literally every Hindu in the film, except the king's Brahmin tutor, is upright, humane, and decent — and every Muslim, but for Khilji's wife, is craven, randy, and slothful.

Such demeaning portrayals would be controversial under any circumstances. But today, when Muslims (and other religious minorities) are under siege in India, they are downright irresponsible.

Casual bigotry against Muslims has always existed in India. But since Modi assumed office, the situation has gotten considerably worse. Hindu nationalism's singular project is to restore Hindu pride and identity by avenging historic harms, real and imagined, inflicted on Hindus by "Muslim invaders" who ruled the country for centuries.

Lynching of Muslims suspected of consuming beef — which is taboo for Hindus — have become commonplace. And in recent years, paranoid Hindus have taken to accusing Muslim men of engaging in "love jihad" — or converting Hindu women by seducing them into marriage. (Christians face analogous allegations.) Hardly a day goes by when Hindu thugs don't beat up a Hindu-Muslim couple somewhere in the country. Last month, a court actually annulled a marriage between a Muslim man and a 25-year-old Hindu woman in med school. The court concluded that a woman of her station and background could not possibly in her right mind have consented to such a nuptial without being "brainwashed," her protestations that she was in love with her husband notwithstanding.

Given all of this, you would probably think that Muslims would be protesting this movie, directed by a Hindu with an all-Hindu cast, for feeding every single rabid anti-Muslim stereotype. Instead, it is Hindu extremists who have taken to the streets.

Comment by Riaz Haq on February 10, 2018 at 12:07pm

#India Should Be Grateful to Alauddin #Khilji for Thwarting the #Mongol Invasions. Mongol success would have completely destroyed #Hindu civilization. #Padmavati #PadmavatiControversy https://thewire.in/203518/india-grateful-alauddin-khilji-thwarting-... … via @thewire_in

At a time when most of the medieval world was laid waste by the brutality of the Mongol armies, Khilji kept India – and its culture and civilisation – safe.

What is not well-known, however, is that Khilji, for all his faults, saved India from a fate much worse than even his own oppressive rule – that of the murderous Mongols, who tried to invade the Indian subcontinent six times during his reign as the sultan of Delhi, and failed miserably, thanks to his brilliance as a general, the quality, discipline, and bravery of his army and its commanders, and their superior military tactics.

What the Mongol invaders inflicted on Persia, the Caliphate of Baghdad, Russia, and elsewhere is well documented – genocide, the destruction of infrastructure, and the destruction of native culture, literature, and religious institutions. Their habit of leaving conquered countries as wastelands that would not spring back for at least a hundred years, and their tendency to rule even the regions they settled in, such as Russia, in an exploitative and backward way, are well-known to historians and laypersons alike.

Against this backdrop, one can safely argue that Alauddin Khilji, for all his faults, actually saved the syncretic culture of the Indian subcontinent of that time – which included Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, and Jain subcultures – from enormous destruction, even if preserving the culture of India may not have been what motivated his resistance to the Mongols.

Indeed, Khilji is a classic study in the layered and complex nature of historical figures whom it is impossible to portray in the black-and-white terms that modern politics seems to demand. Khilji is rightly viewed negatively for his cruelty and brutality; but he should also, in fairness, be seen as the saviour of Hindustan that he unwittingly ended up being, by repelling the formidable and ruthless Mongol hordes.

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For the past month, Rajasthan has been convulsed by a controversy over the Bollywood movie, Padmavati, based on Padmavat – a prose-poem written by Malik Muhammad Jayasi in 1540 CE which uses Alauddin Khilji’s conquest of Chittor in 1303 CE and his supposed obsession with Rani Padmini of Chittor as a backdrop for its ficitional tale.

None of the politicians and activists accusing the film maker of denigrating the honour of the Rajput queen of Chittor, Padmini, and glorifying the “Muslim conqueror Khilji” has even seen the film yet.

Much of the controversy is fuelled by ill-feeling towards Khilji, based on the fact that he was an oppressive ruler to his subjects, who were mostly Hindu. So the possibility of romance – or even unrequited love – between a Muslim “villain” and a Hindu queen being depicted on screen, even as a fantasy, as has been rumoured, infuriates Hindu right-wing groups.

Comment by Riaz Haq on March 6, 2018 at 10:51am

By rewriting history, #Hindu nationalists lay claim to #India. #Modi has appointed committee of #Hindutva "scholars" to change #India's national identity to one based on #Hindu religion. #Islamophobia #Pakistan http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/india-modi-culture … via @SpecialReports

By RUPAM JAIN and TOM LASSETER Filed March 6, 2018, 11 a.m. GMT

NEW DELHI - During the first week of January last year, a group of Indian scholars gathered in a white bungalow on a leafy boulevard in central New Delhi. The focus of their discussion: how to rewrite the history of the nation.

The government of Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi had quietly appointed the committee of scholars about six months earlier. Details of its existence are reported here for the first time.

Minutes of the meeting, reviewed by Reuters, and interviews with committee members set out its aims: to use evidence such as archaeological finds and DNA to prove that today’s Hindus are directly descended from the land’s first inhabitants many thousands of years ago, and make the case that ancient Hindu scriptures are fact not myth.

Interviews with members of the 14-person committee and ministers in Modi’s government suggest the ambitions of Hindu nationalists extend beyond holding political power in this nation of 1.3 billion people - a kaleidoscope of religions. They want ultimately to shape the national identity to match their religious views, that India is a nation of and for Hindus.

In doing so, they are challenging a more multicultural narrative that has dominated since the time of British rule, that modern-day India is a tapestry born of migrations, invasions and conversions. That view is rooted in demographic fact. While the majority of Indians are Hindus, Muslims and people of other faiths account for some 240 million, or a fifth, of the populace.

The committee’s chairman, K.N. Dikshit, told Reuters, “I have been asked to present a report that will help the government rewrite certain aspects of ancient history.” The committee’s creator, Culture Minister Mahesh Sharma, confirmed in an interview that the group’s work was part of larger plans to revise India’s history.

For India’s Muslims, who have pointed to incidents of religious violence and discrimination since Modi took office in 2014, the development is ominous. The head of Muslim party All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen, Asaduddin Owaisi, said his people had “never felt so marginalised in the independent history of India.”

“The government,” he said, “wants Muslims to live in India as second-class citizens.”

Modi did not respond to a request for comment for this article.

INTO THE CLASSROOM

Helping to drive the debate over Indian history is an ideological, nationalist Hindu group called the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). It helped sweep Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party to power in 2014 and now counts among its members the ministers in charge of agriculture, highways and internal security.

The RSS asserts that ancestors of all people of Indian origin - including 172 million Muslims - were Hindu and that they must accept their common ancestry as part of Bharat Mata, or Mother India. Modi has been a member of the RSS since childhood. An official biography of Culture Minister Sharma says he too has been a “dedicated follower” of the RSS for many years.

Referring to the emblematic colour of the Hindu nationalist movement, RSS spokesman Manmohan Vaidya told Reuters that “the true colour of Indian history is saffron and to bring about cultural changes we have to rewrite history.”

Balmukund Pandey, the head of the historical research wing of the RSS, said he meets regularly with Culture Minister Sharma. “The time is now,” Pandey said, to restore India’s past glory by establishing that ancient Hindu texts are fact not myth.

Sharma told Reuters he expects the conclusions of the committee to find their way into school textbooks and academic research. The panel is referred to in government documents as the committee for “holistic study of origin and evolution of Indian culture since 12,000 years before present and its interface with other cultures of the world.”

Sharma said this “Hindu first” version of Indian history will be added to a school curriculum which has long taught that people from central Asia arrived in India much more recently, some 3,000 to 4,000 years ago, and transformed the population.

Hindu nationalists and senior figures in Modi’s party reject the idea that India was forged from a mass migration. They believe that today’s Hindu population is directly descended from the land’s first inhabitants. Historian Romila Thapar said the question of who first stood on the soil was important to nationalists because “if the Hindus are to have primacy as citizens in a Hindu Rashtra (kingdom), their foundational religion cannot be an imported one.” To assert that primacy, nationalists need to claim descent from ancestors and a religion that were indigenous, said Thapar, 86, who taught at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi for decades and has authored books on ancient Indian history.

The theory of an influx of people from central Asia 3,000 to 4,000 years ago was embraced during British rule.

RITUAL: A Hindu woman burns incense sticks as she prays inside her home in the old quarters of Delhi in Feb. REUTERS/Adnan Abidi

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India’s first post-independence leader, Jawaharlal Nehru, who promoted a secular state and tolerance of India’s Muslims, said it was “entirely misleading to refer to Indian culture as Hindu culture.” That outlook informed the way India was governed by Nehru and then by his Congress party for more than half a century. The rights of minorities - including the prohibition of discrimination based on religion - are enshrined in India’s constitution, of which Nehru was a signatory in 1950.

Shashi Tharoor, a prominent member of the Congress party, said right wing Hindus are “leading a political campaign over Indian history that seeks to reinvent the idea of India itself.”

“For seven decades after independence, Indianness rested on faith in the country’s pluralism,” Tharoor said, but the rise of Hindu nationalism had brought with it a “sense of cultural superiority.”

RISING TIDE: Shashi Tharoor, above, a parliamentary deputy from India's main opposition Congress party, said the rise of Hindu nationalism had brought with it a “sense of cultural superiority.” REUTERS/Anindito Mukherjee

A HISTORY FOUNDED ON HINDU TEXTS

The history committee met in the offices of the director general of the Archaeological Survey of India, a federal body that oversees archaeological research. Among the committee’s 14 members are bureaucrats and academics. The chairman, Dikshit, is a former senior official with the Archaeological Survey.

Culture Minister Sharma told Reuters he will present the committee’s final report to parliament and lobby the nation’s Ministry of Human Resource Development to write the findings into school textbooks. That ministry, which is responsible for education and literacy programmes, is also headed by an adherent of the RSS, Prakash Javadekar.

“We will take every recommendation made by the Culture Ministry seriously,” Javadekar said. “Our government is the first government to have the courage to even question the existing version of history that is being taught in schools and colleges.”

According to the minutes of the history committee’s first meeting, Dikshit, the chairman, said it was “essential to establish a correlation” between ancient Hindu scriptures and evidence that Indian civilization stretches back many thousands of years. Doing so would help bolster both conclusions the committee wants to reach: that events described in Hindu texts are real, and today’s Hindus are descendants of those times.

The minutes and interviews with committee members lay out a comprehensive campaign to achieve this, including the dating of archaeological sites and DNA testing of human remains.

FAITH AND POLITICS: India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been a member of the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) since childhood. Above, Modi is seen arriving in Sri Lanka in May, 2017. REUTERS/Dinuka Liyanawatte

“Our government is the first government to have the courage to even question the existing version of history that is being taught in schools and colleges.”

Prakash Javadekar, Minister of Human Resource Development

Culture Minister Sharma told Reuters he wants to establish that Hindu scriptures are factual accounts. Speaking of the Ramayana, the epic that follows the journey of a Hindu deity in human form, Sharma said: “I worship Ramayana and I think it is a historical document. People who think it is fiction are absolutely wrong.”  The epic tells how the god Rama rescues his wife from a demon king. It still informs many Indians’ sense of gender roles and duty.

Sharma said it was a priority to prove through archaeological research the existence of a mystical river, the Saraswati, that is mentioned in another ancient scripture, the Vedas. Other projects include examining artifacts from locations in scriptures, mapping the dates of astrological events mentioned in these texts and excavating the sites of battles in another epic, the Mahabharata, according to Sharma and minutes of the committee’s meeting.

In much the same way that some Christians point to evidence of an ancient flood substantiating the Biblical tale of Noah and his ark, if the settings and features of the ancient scriptures in India can be verified, the thinking goes, then the stories are true. “If the Koran and Bible are considered as part of history, then what is the problem in accepting our Hindu religious texts as the history of India?” said Sharma.

MUSLIM MINORITY: A Muslim boy learns to read the Koran at a madrassa, or religious school, during the holy month of Ramadan, on the outskirts of Agartala in May, 2017. There are 172 million Muslims in India. REUTERS/Jayanta Dey

Modi did not order the committee’s creation - it was instigated by Sharma, government documents show - but its mission is in keeping with his outlook. During the 2014 inauguration of a hospital in Mumbai, Modi pointed to the scientific achievements documented by ancient religious texts and spoke of Ganesha, a Hindu deity with an elephant’s head: “We worship Lord Ganesha, and maybe there was a plastic surgeon at that time who kept the head of an elephant on the torso of a human. There are many areas where our ancestors made large contributions.” Modi did not respond to a request from Reuters that he expand on this remark.

Nine of 12 history committee members interviewed by Reuters said they have been tasked with matching archaeological and other evidence with ancient Indian scriptures, or establishing that Indian civilization is much older than is widely known. The others confirmed their membership but declined to discuss the group’s activities. The committee includes a geologist, archaeologists, scholars of the ancient Sanskrit language and two bureaucrats.

One of the Sanskrit scholars, Santosh Kumar Shukla, a professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, told Reuters he believes India’s Hindu culture is millions of years old. Another committee member, Ramesh Chand Sharma, former head of the linguistics department at the University of Delhi, said he would take a strictly scientific approach. “I don’t subscribe to any ideology,” he said.

FOUNDING FATHER: A visitor stands next to a portrait of India's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru inside the Nehru memorial museum and library in New Delhi in Sept. 2015. Nehru promoted tolerance of India’s Muslims and said it was misleading to refer to Indian culture as Hindu culture. REUTERS/Anindito Mukherjee

With an annual budget of about $400 million - an important source of federal funding for historical research, archaeology and the arts - the Culture Ministry is an influential place to start a campaign of historical revision.

After he was named culture minister in 2014 following Modi’s victory, Sharma, a doctor and chairman of a chain of hospitals, said he received guidance from the RSS. Sharma, a genial man with a wide smile, has a portrait of Bharat Mata, or Mother India, hanging above the doorway of a meeting room in his bungalow in central Delhi. Below it are portraits of past RSS leaders.

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During the last three years, Sharma said, his ministry has organized hundreds of workshops and seminars across the country “to prove the supremacy of our glorious past.” The aim, he said, is to build a fresh narrative to balance the liberal and secular philosophy espoused by India’s first prime minister, Nehru, and furthered by successive governments for most of the nation’s post-independence history.

The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, now controlled by Sharma’s ministry, these days mixes in sessions about right wing Hindu leaders and causes. At one such event in 2016, the president of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, Amit Shah, took the opportunity to lambast Nehru as a man influenced by the western world. “We have always believed that our policies should have the smell of Indian soil,” Shah said. It was time for a history of India that concentrates on “facts about our great past.”

Comment by Riaz Haq on November 23, 2019 at 10:20pm

Hail the #Hindu Male! How #Bollywood Is Selling #Hindutva as #History. The makers of Tanhaji and Panipat are both following the template put in place by Sanjay Leela Bhansali in Padmavat (2018) and Bajirao Mastani (2015). #Islamophobia #Modi #India #BJP https://www.thequint.com/voices/opinion/tanhaji-panipat-ajay-devgn-...

Films often reflect the politics of their time. If the Nehruvian era witnessed films with a socialist bent like Do Bigha Zameen and Jis Desh Mein Ganga Behti Hai , Narendra Modi-led BJP’s reign has seen a series of Bollywood films projecting a sense of muscular nationalism.

Films focusing on counter-terrorism like Uri: The Surgical Strike and Baby are the most obvious examples of films glorifying the Indian State. More important are a series of period dramas, mostly set in medieval India, that push the narrative of Hindu nationalism.

This was evident in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Padmavat (2018) and Bajirao Mastani (2015) and the latest examples of this are upcoming films Panipat : The Great Betrayal and Tanhaji: The Unsung Hero.

Let’s begin with Tanhaji, whose trailer was released on Tuesday, 19 November.

How a Maratha Vs Rajput Battle Became Communal
When actor Ajay Devgn released the trailer, he labelled it as “The surgical strike that shook the Mughal Empire”. The same tagline featured in the trailer as well.


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The filmmakers’ use of the “surgical strike” analogy appears to be a deliberate ploy to equate the battle between Marathas and Mughals to India’s tensions with Pakistan. The underlying narrative, obviously, is ‘Hindu vs Muslim’.

But the Battle of Kondhana (now Sinhagad near Pune) of 1670, on which the film is based, was anything but a religious one.

The battle’s main protagonists were Tanaji Malusare, a Koli General of Chhatrapati Shivaji and Udaybhan Singh Rathod, the Rajput Commander fighting for the Mughal Empire. There was no Hindu-Muslim angle.
fbtw
This fascinating battle is a part of Marathi folklore and its most dramatic aspects are how the Marathas used a monitor lizard to scale the hill fort, the duel between Tanaji and Udaybhan, and Chhatrapati Shivaji’s remark after the victory: “Gadh aala pann sinh gela” (We won the fort but lost a lion [Tanaji])”.

But the filmmakers appear to have deliberately tried to present the battle as being one of ‘good vs evil’, ‘Hindu vs Muslim’ and also one between Indian nationalism and foreign occupation.

The poster itself shows Tanaji, played by Devgn, looking visibly Hindu with a tilak, while Udaybhan, played by Saif Ali Khan, is made to almost look like a Muslim, with a beard and no religious markers. This, despite the fact that the both of them were Hindu.

Official poster of Tanhaji: The Unsung Warrior.
Official poster of Tanhaji: The Unsung Warrior.
(Photo: Accessed by The Quint)
In the poster and throughout the trailer, the Maratha side is depicted with hues of yellow and saffron while the Mughal side is projected as dark and eerie. The Marathas are shown wearing white or saffron, while the Mughals are invariably in black or green, clearly in line with the “Good vs Evil” and “Hindu vs Muslim” theme.

Also Read : Top Entertainment News: Ajay & Saif-Starrer ‘Tanhaji’ Trailer Out


The obsession with Bhagwa (saffron) is stressed repeatedly throughout the trailer.

Tanaji’s mother is shown as saying, “Jab tak Kondhana me phir se bhagwa nahi lehrata, hum joote nahi pehnenge” (I won’t wear shoes until there’s a saffron flag atop Kondhana).

Then, a captured Tanaji tells Udaybhan, “Har Maratha paagal hai Swaraj ka, Shivaji Raje ka, bhagwe ka” (Every Maratha is mad about self-rule, Shivaji and saffron).

Comment by Riaz Haq 1 hour ago

India’s Hindu nationalist leader is shaping Bollywood to his own, divisive ends
By Imaan Irfan


https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/culture/72598/the-narendra-modi-...

In the darkness of the Indian cinema, reality falls away. Enter a world in which beautiful heroines sing in chiffon saris on alpine landscapes without getting cold. In which floppy-haired heroes perform physics-defying stunts and dance atop moving trains. And in which love, of course, always conquers all.

It is hard to overestimate the vastness of Bollywood—India’s Hindi-language film industry, based in the bustling heart of Mumbai. India churns out more films annually than both the US and China, serving a population of 1.45bn people and reaching global audiences from Nigeria to Russia.



But what, precisely, is now being served up? Something noticeably different since the election of Narendra Modi as prime minister in 2014 and the concurrent rise of his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). As India’s politics has shifted rightwards, the film industry has moved with it.

Unlike the relationship between Hollywood and Donald Trump, some of Modi’s most vocal supporters include high-profile actors and filmmakers. The prime minister frequently appears alongside Bollywood’s finest and makes cameos at celebrity weddings (including Priyanka Chopra and Nick Jonas’s big fat Indian wedding in 2018). A growing contingent of actors-turned-BJP politicians have even made their way to parliament, including action star Sunny Deol and actresses Kangana Ranaut and Kirron Kher.

The “saffronisation” of the country—named after BJP’s official colours—is taking place on screen, too. Bollywood has a history of sumptuous period films set in India’s Mughal era, from Humayun (1945) to Mughal-e-Azam (1960) to Jodhaa Akbar(2008). But since 2014, as it has become clear that films made in the same vein are now politically and economically straitjacketed, the old portrayals of cultured Mughal rulers have been replaced by new ones of bestial, flesh-eating brutes with thick beards and dark, kohl-rimmed eyes.

The 2025 historical epic Chhaava is a case in point. It portrayed a daring Hindu king with superhuman strength (and the ability to break a CGI lion’s jaw with his bare hands) facing off against a monstrous Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb (“Wherever you see saffron, stain it red with blood”). Following the film’s release, right-wing groups called to destroy the real-world Aurangzeb’s tomb, leading to riots in Nagpur last March. In 2022’s Samrat Prithviraj, meanwhile, another lionslaying Hindu king—whose consort Princess Sanyogita is played by former Miss World winner Manushi Chhillar—turns history on its head by killing his Muslim counterpart, Muhammad Ghori.



Cinema is perfect for broadcasting Hindutva narratives to unwitting audiences

Nor is this rewriting of history reserved for period films. For a leader who refuses to engage with critical journalists, cinema is perfect for broadcasting Hindutva narratives to unwitting audiences. And so there is a subgenre of hagiographical biopics of far-right figures—including Ajey (2025), about the extremist monk-turned-BJP leader Yogi Adityanath, and another about Modi himself, which drew criticism (and a temporary ban from the Election Commission of India) for its original planned release date on the day polls opened for the 2019 general election. Its opening transparently declared: “THE INTENT OF THIS FILM IS TO INSPIRE PATRIOTISM, NATIONALISM AND REVERENCE FOR OUR GREAT NATION ESPECIALLY AMONGST THE YOUTH AND ALSO PEOPLE AT LARGE.”

Comment by Riaz Haq 1 hour ago

India’s Hindu nationalist leader is shaping Bollywood to his own, divisive ends
By Imaan Irfan


https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/culture/72598/the-narendra-modi-...

Even more troubling—says Shakuntala Banaji, a professor of media, culture and social change at the London School of Economics who specialises in studying authoritarian uses of media—has been the “swing into very vicious forms of propaganda”. Take The Kerala Story (2022), which billed itself as a true account of 32,000 girls from Kerala who were groomed into joining Isis—and was premised on the idea of “love jihad”, a far-right conspiracy theory that is used to target interfaith couples in India. When journalists criticised the film for exaggerating the number of radicalised women, the figure on posters was reduced to just three. Still, the BJP leveraged the film in its campaign for the Karnataka assembly election, and it won the National Film Award (selected by a panel appointed by the government).

Or The Kashmir Files, released in the same year, which portrayed the exodus of Hindu Pandits from Kashmir and Muslim militant groups in the 1990s. This featured gratuitous (and fictionalised) episodes of violence—including a scene in which a widow is forced to eat rice soaked in her husband’s blood. Videos circulated on social media of moviegoers shouting, “Shoot the traitors!” BJP leaders organised special screenings and Modi personally met its creators.

Both films were endorsed by the prime minister and granted tax-free status in several exclusively BJP-ruled states.

In the moral universe of these films, argues Banaji, “the core theme is that violence and extreme violence are completely acceptable norms for individuals and groups who happen to be Hindu to use against [Muslims]… there’s always an excuse built in, in terms of the historical imagining of those films, about why one might need to use [violence] against insidious, vicious and usually completely inhuman or subhuman Muslim groups and characters.”

“If [filmmakers] push against an exclusionary idea of India’s Hindu nation,” she says, “you begin to see that you either have to be producing within the indie sector, or you are gradually pushed out, or you are the target of a lot of hate.”

The most striking example of this is the case of India’s Muslim actors. The “Khans of Bollywood”—Shah Rukh Khan, Aamir Khan and Salman Khan (no relation to each other)—are among the most wealthy and recognisable celebrities in the world, but they also occupy a precarious position.

Two years after Modi’s election, when Aamir Khan mentioned a “growing sense of disquiet” in the country and confessed that his Hindu wife had broached the prospect of having to move abroad, the subsequent backlash saw him being dropped from contracts, including as the face of the government’s “Incredible India” tourism campaign.

A few days later, the “king of Bollywood”, Shah Rukh Khan—worth £1.3bn and sometimes described as the biggest actor in the world—came under fire for suggesting India had become more religiously hostile (“I think we should be a little more tolerant”). BJP leaders compared his language to that of terrorists, and he was forced to retract. Separately, his son was detained without bail for a month by narcotics police, despite a lack of evidence. “If they could do this to the king,” observedSamanth Subramanian in the New Yorker, “imagine what they could do to us”.



Actors and filmmakers tread a fine line between self-preservation and complicity

Actors, like everyone else, have had to adapt to this new India. But they tread a fine line between self-preservation and complicity. Shah Rukh Khan visited a senior BJP figure to ensure the smooth release of Raees (2017), assuring him that his Pakistani costar, Mahira Khan, would not be promoting the film in India. Around the same time, Aamir Khan attended his first award ceremony in 16 years, to be honoured by Mohan Bhagwat, the head of the Hindu supremacist paramilitary group Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).

Comment by Riaz Haq 1 hour ago

India’s Hindu nationalist leader is shaping Bollywood to his own, divisive ends
By Imaan Irfan


https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/culture/72598/the-narendra-modi-...

It is impossible to understand Modi’s India without understanding the RSS, which was founded in 1925 as an echo of European fascist parties and now has some 6m active members. The group’s disciples have included Gandhi’s assassin and many BJP politicians—up to Modi himself. Its primary aim is to establish a Hindu Rashtra, a theocratic or semi-theocratic state, with minority faiths inevitably relegated to second-class status, or worse.

On 7th and 8th February this year, the group held centenary celebrations in Mumbai and rolled out the saffron carpet for Bollywood’s brightest stars. And it wasn’t just the usual suspects, Modi’s vocal allies in the film industry, who attended. Directors, actors and composers who had never attended an RSS event were present, too. Ten years ago, this would have been unthinkable.

Even Salman Khan made an appearance, permitting himself to smile at a line in Bhagwat’s speech acknowledging Khan’s influence: “What Salman Khan wears, college students do the same… Why do they do it? Because he is wearing it. Why is he wearing it? They don’t know.”

In those words was a clue to why all the actors were invited in the first place. After all, the country’s far-right leaders don’t just see themselves as the custodians of Indian culture—but also its shapers. And by merging the blind devotion of nationalist politics with the blind devotion of Bollywood fandom, what can stop them?

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