The obituaries for the death of BJP leader Arun Jaitley by mainstream liberal writers and thinkers have truly been an illuminating exercise. They are a timely reminder of how the Hindu right-wing and the Hindu liberals understand each other — not as antagonists, ideological foes, or nemeses, but actually compatriots whose small differences can be overlooked in the spirit of national consciousness.
This vision of I’m-Indian-you’re-Indian, the Brahmin-savarna bhai-behen is instructive to understand how caste binds what nationalism seemingly divides. Ram Guha called Jaitley “a good man” who found himself “in bad company.” Rajdeep Sardesai termed him “a gentle democrat,” who had a “willingness to engage and contest the world of ideas with his opponents, without resorting to rancorous abuse.” Barkha Dutt amusingly referred to Jaitley as “an old world politician in a new-age BJP?” with a question mark tagged on the end, saying “the old BJP has died with them,” (i.e. him + Sushma Swaraj) and that Jaitley always engaged with those who thought differently. Karan Thapar meanwhile, called Jaitley a friend and recounted numerous points where Jaitley was “gentle,” “ironic,” and even “fair” unlike his other BJP counterparts.
The gradations of Hindutva as fleshed out by these liberal commentators can be nothing but a set of hilarious qualifiers. We already have a template of BJP=Hindutva, Congress=secularism with Hindu characteristics. But apparently, now there is also an old world Hindutva and a new-age Hindutva? Is there also an old world liberal i.e. Nehrutva vs. new-age liberal i.e. Guhatva? And these are all the 50 shades of Hinduism?
For an Ambedkarite/anti-caste politics, these verbal shenanigans reveal the blatant caste-class solidarities of the Congress-BJP leadership. The framing that soft-Congressi liberals have often preferred is one of “national character,” and that “Hindutva” is changing India’s national character to reflect a hypermasculine brutish Hinduism, whereas a softer Hinduism that is more plural, diverse, and accommodating is disappearing from the national imagination. This is, of course, hogwash if we are to consider who represents the brute, and who represents the gentler Hindu — always only the Brahmin and his upper-caste collaborators.
These representations are perhaps most vivid in Bollywood’s most patriotic moments, which offer a parallel history of how the upper-caste right-wing and the upper-caste left-liberal both engineer a Brahminical image of nationhood.
In this post, I want to flesh out how three hit films typified the cultural nationalism of their moment for Hindi film audiences — Border (1997), Rang De Basanti (2006) and Uri (2019). All three feature an upper-caste soldier somewhere (if not everywhere), a disabled ageing mother, aircraft metaphors, and martyrdom for the nation somehow. The films are also separated by around a decade or so, and they mark some important narrative shifts in the way Hindi cinema aestheticizes the nation and its nationalists Brahminically, but nonetheless, remain wedded to caste through and through.
The Humanist Soldier — ‘Border’ (1997)
J.P. Dutta’s Border (1997) was a cinematic retelling of the Battle of Longewala in the Indo-Pak war of 1971. Dutta’s brother in the Indian Air Force was involved in some of the fighting and first alerted him to the Battle of Longewala where 120 Indian troops apparently held the fort against 3,000 Pakistani troops. Border was a smash hit grossing second only to Dil Toh Pagal Hai that year in the box office, but its cult status lives on in the media far longer as staple watching for Independence Day and Republic Day on TV channels.
Border’s opening scene intriguingly begins at an air force base (not really the film’s focus), with the film’s most minor star, Jackie Shroff playing Wing Commander Andy Bajwa test-piloting fighter planes. Shots of planes landing and taking off are accompanied by a soundscape of heroic music overlaid with the harsh sounds of engines and jet noise. Andy is seen advising his fellow pilots to lose weight, be faster, and ominously says “The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war.” The overwhelming message is also India’s burgeoning military power in a society still feudal, illustrated in the shot below where the camera on the ground foregrounds village women working on the concrete runway under a boiling sun, as three jets swoop overhead in a cloudless sky.
Border is opening on a contradiction. Andy’s piloting sophistication will actually be stalled at a crucial time in the war and he will be relegated to a minor actor in a battle that is almost exclusively about ground forces stationed in a desert outpost near Jaisalmer at the Pakistan border. The man heading the regiment stationed there — Major Kuldip Singh Chandpuri played by Sunny Deol — is next shown training with the Punjab regiment, whose military prowess is exhibited through a loud live-fire exercise. Equally loud is his love for defending the nation’s borders, as he threatens to divorce his wife (Tabu) who wants him transferred by her well-connected father.
The outpost setting allows Dutta to compose an aesthetic entirely devoted to what he cares most about — the upper-caste soldier. The desert is a backdrop for upper-caste masculinity, rife with the mockery of soldiers who don’t want to fight as being womanly, wanting to hide behind their wife’s pallu and the enemy as being a coward that uses female tactics. Jat masculinity and Rajput masculinity are valorized through the logic of the martial race theory and the ethnic “suitability” of certain castes for war and warrior positions. The sardar Kuldip Singh and the Rajput Captain Bhairon Singh are twin embodiments of the martial “races” of Sikh Jats and Rajputs, and regularly mouth dialogues that involve annihilating Pakistani soldiers.
These visuals center The Man in the flat, open, emptiness of the desert. The camera maintains proximity to this warrior stomping through the wilderness. He is the heroic figure we are invested in, his masculinity is the redemptive force for the nation. The desert is surveilled and domesticated by this upper-caste male, most notably by Bhairon Singh’s ridiculous tendency to loll around in the sand dunes for naps, because apparently the dharti (earth) is the bosom of his mother.
The narrative juxtaposition of this mother is also the bride/widow. The upper-caste widow and the upper-caste mother are the twin female poles that nationalism spins around, their losses have to always be highlighted as exceptional sacrifices that caste-nationalism demands. Bhairon Singh’s bride Phool Kanwar, played by Sharbani Mukherjee (who in eerie moments looks like a younger Rakhee, or the mother figure), is allowed one night of marital bliss, the suhaag raat with the husband before he dons his military garb and disappears into the desert. Dutta devotes a whole song for this last sexual act of Bhairon Singh’s life, replete with the symbolism of hourglass, and his military doppelgänger determined to lure him to battle. Of course, one night of sex is also all it takes for his nubile bride to become pregnant continuing his virile Rajput lineage.
The symbolic topography of the desert is also matched by the spatial design of the outpost set. At its centre is a Hindu temple of Tanot Mata Devi, a Rajput goddess Bhairon Singh fiercely worships and who requests that the entire Punjab regiment worship while they are stationed there — a request Kuldip Singh promptly accedes to. The temple considered to be a good luck charm that cannot be bombed or destroyed will be a symbol egging the soldiers on in the crucial moments of the battle. Meanwhile, the only time the camera offers establishing long shots of the desert is to map out the positions of soldiers with respect to the design of the outpost. The dushman (enemy) post lies towards a ghostly horizon, one that Kuldip Singh at one point swaggers over to in a fit of braggadocio.
At the heart of the film’s narrative though, is not just the willing martyrdom of the Jat and the Rajput but also unwilling martyrdoms of younger soldiers. Lt. Dharamvir Singh Bhan, played by a painfully baby-faced Akshaye Khanna, is based on a real-life soldier. Bhan’s narrative arc offers a critique of what the army demands from the rural military recruit and the heavy human cost of war. Bhan’s surname is upper-caste (likely Brahmin), but in most other ways, I read him coded as a middle-caste, land-owning lower-middle-class soldier, meant to symbolize the presence of the rural Bahujan in the army’s internal caste system.
The son of a major martyred in the 1965 war, Bhan is scripted as being from a small village in what seems like Punjab, reluctant to join the army but forced by his father who extracted a promise from him that he would get conscripted, and is bitterly resentful at having to leave behind a blind, grieving mother to also go fight a war. At one point, Bhan is allowed to literally blame the Indian Army and its blind patriotism for his father’s death. His doubt is ruthlessly quashed by the Rajput Bhairon Singh, who sees enemy incursions into Indian territory as akin to someone lusting after his mother. And of course, the connections drawn from Mother Earth to the blind mother to Mother India bind land, family, and nation into one tight arc.
The army’s internal caste system is rounded off by two Subedars, the Sikh Ratan Singh (a very buff Puneet Issar of Duryodhan fame) and a timid and coded-as-effeminate Mathura Das, played by Sudesh Beri. Puneet Issar puffs up his chest and predictably throws around lines that he will roast Pakistanis in their tanks like it’s a tandoor. And Mathura Das in a famous scene is pilloried for getting a telegram sanctioning his leave as military tensions escalate, leading Kuldip Singh to yell at him in front of his regiment with the immortal line “Zindagi ka doosra naam problem hai” (Life’s second name is problem). No Sikh can ever be depicted doubting his moral code, hence Ratan Singh mirrors Kuldip Singh in his bravado, but Mathura Das, whose caste remains obscure, is the epitome of the weak-willed soldier whose heart isn’t in the war. Thus the internal caste hierarchy & flow of authority from brave soldier → meek soldier are neatly established with Major Kuldip Singh/Sunny Deol → Captain Bhairon Singh/Sunil Shetty → Lieutenant Dharamveer Singh Bhan/Akshaye Khanna → Subedar Mathura Das/Sudesh Beri.
Caste overtones abound in this order turning the Punjab regiment border outpost into a kind of caste society centred around a temple of a Rajput goddess. The outpost is superficially a fraternity in some sense because it is far from the political machinations of Delhi politicians; notably, no politician features in Border. But any doubt or hesitation to participate in the war is ruthlessly squashed as treason and insubordination, a kind of caste-disciplining that keeps this regiment synonymous with the nation, as established by Mathura Das feeling chastened enough to return later in the film. The camera then revels in its closeness to the brotherhood of soldiers, following them as they cook, eat, drink and dance in the outpost, while blind mothers and wives left behind just wait, pining for their men. Border could show these soldiers as human, vulnerable, loving agents of the nation, because it still subscribed to the caste-nation, which still stood hegemonically as the ideal. Capitalist advancement, technological developments were all still mere pipe dreams; the soldier was the main agent and the human cost of war.
I could go on and on about several scenes in Border because it really captures the caste-feudal nation becoming a neoliberal war machine in remarkable ways. Released in 1997, it came a year before the first NDA government came into place in India, which in 1998 promptly followed with nuclear missile tests in Pokhran, and a year later were caught up in a war with Pakistan in Kargil. Conservative and liberal Hindu Raj’s imaginative objectives are both rooted in Hindu militarism. But I will end by pointing to the humanist turn the film takes in its end with the song Mere dushman mere bhai, where the women, children, old people who also comprise the nation are depicted bearing the costs. Also shown, significantly, are Pakistani soldiers being given water in their dying moments by Indian soldiers, the common brotherhood of soldiers beyond nation and the two national flags between a setting sun.
A podcaster Pramod, in the Material Analysis podcast episode on nationalism actually points to this song in Border (34:33 onwards), and I agree in that it is an important moment in the film. The song signifies some of its politics, which is firmly on the side of the soldiers i.e. the willing upper-caste heroes and the reluctant lower-caste heroes, but the latter are all forgotten in the din of the nation. Border is a prototype for Bollywood nationalism and remains an enduring text to unpack.
The Everyday Soldier — ‘Rang de Basanti’ (2006)
Perhaps the most telling moment of Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s Rang de Basanti (2006) — hereby RDB — is that it opens with a passionate moment of postcolonial white guilt. Sue McKinley, the very blonde white granddaughter of James McKinley, a British jailor who witnessed the hanging of Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev, is so inspired by his diaries that she is desperate to make a documentary about Indian revolutionaries. She demonstrates this passion by flipping her boss a Hindi profanity, catching a flight alone to New Delhi which she falls instantly in love with, and starting a documentary on her own with her Indian friend Sonia (Soha Ali Khan). Auditioning for the roles leads to meeting Sonia’s rag-tag band of drunken friends including DJ/Daljit Singh (Aamir Khan), Sukhi Ram (Sharman Joshi), Aslam Khan(Kunal Kapoor), Karan Singhania (Siddharth Narayan), and their nemesis, a Bajrang Dal-esque saffron karyakarta/goon, Lakshman Pandey (Atul Kulkarni). Occasionally tagging along, is Sonia’s boyfriend/fiancé Flight Lt. Ajay Rathod (R. Madhavan).
Barring Pandey who is a Sanghi party worker, this drunken vella bunch loves getting drunk around public monuments, thinks nationalism is a joke, and is generally without aims in life. Aamir Khan’s DJ finished college 5 years before but still hangs around because he thinks he has an aukaat, a status in college (arguably positioned through caste). Karan is the spoiled son of a wealthy industrialist whose business dealings are implied to be shady military arms trading. Aslam, the soulful artist, lives stereotypically in old Delhi in an orthodox Muslim home that is filled with bitterness about how Muslims are treated in India, though Aslam himself couldn’t be cared to carry such bitterness. Sukhi is generally apathetic about most things beyond wanting to lose his virginity. In a telling scene, these friends drive around Delhi doing a drunk-salute at India Gate and the Amar Jawan Jyoti in the darkness of night. A low-angle shot paints the monuments out to be larger-than-life in comparison to these insignificant neoliberal millennials.
This is, of course, upper-caste masculinity’s “crisis,” with the fruits of feudal caste wealth lining their pockets, public service employment shrinking and no longer being a motivator for employment, college and classrooms are playgrounds, the city a site of adventure, and life a series of pleasurable moments. Mehra’s gaze keeps directing us to the half-naked torsos of these pleasure-loving young men on more than one occasion; the upper-caste male body engaged in fun and frolic embodies the youthful masculinity that is a constructed neoliberal ideal. These are the men our ads and films and TVs say represent our future, whose energy and drive signal India’s booming economy, whose surplus numbers offer new markets for consumption. And when those hopes aren’t fulfilled, the media expresses anxieties over their education, employment and prosperity. In two contrasting moments — one in a space of spirituality and other in a field with a machine of war overhead— these ripped and stripped young men, conservative and liberal but all Brahmin/upper-caste, signify hope (also, aircraft and air warfare interestingly remain a running theme in nationalist films).
Next, bringing together two seemingly differing representatives for “the idea of India,” Sue ropes in the janeu-wearing saffron goon Pandey to play the historical freedom fighter Ram Prasad Bismil, much to everyone’s disgust. Bismil was foundational to the Hindustan Republican Association (HRA)/Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA), organization(s) formed in the 1920s that the film covers. Bismil, a Brahmin, was brought up an Arya Samajist and not much is historically available about his life beyond Arya Samaji hagiographies and an autobiography hard to get ahold of. In a book review, historian Irfan Habib interestingly notes, however, that Bismil was enamoured of the Russian Revolution and his hope that “the youth would turn to Communism.” Bismil believed in people-led struggles — peppered with the Arya Samaji imaginings of a sanatani Indian nation — which arguably remained a crux of the HRA.
After Bismil and Ashfaqullah were executed by the colonial state for participating in the Kakori train robbery in 1927, it is the Sikh Jat socialist Bhagat Singh who continues the (now renamed) HSRA’s revolutionary surge in the 1920s by killing a British police officer to avenge Lala Lajpat Rai’s death. RDB reconstructs these events as heroism, but RDB’s Bhagat Singh is stripped of any socialist vision and is a creature of pure vengeance — much like a sanatani Pandava-esque hero. Bhagat Singh’s revenge on behalf of an Arya Samajist (i.e. Lala Lajpat Rai) using a socialist form of organizing brings together a peculiar confluence of Arya Samajist upper-caste values with socialism and this is the brand of revolutionary nationalism the offbeat band of upper-caste young men brought to the HRA/HSRA in the 1920s. It thus overlays much of RDB’s vision of youth, masculinity, and nationhood.
And it is here that gender becomes critical to the post-BJP brand of neoliberal nationalism RDB peddles to Hindi cinema audiences. Pilot Ajay Rathod, dies because of a faulty Mig-21 that crashes during an exercise. His mother, already a war widow, is now left without a son and his fiancé Sonia is distraught. Once again, it is a wife (to-be in this case) and a mother, whose combined grief becomes the catalyst galvanizing the six protagonists to turn into soldiers to avenge his death.
In a sense, this group of friends now becomes the renewed outpost from Border, an ever-ready group formed and (re-)assembled into a community of soldiers because of the martyr, his wife (the future mother of soldiers), and his widowed mother. If Border dealt with the human soldier, RDB is the becoming of soldiers by those most human in the caste society i.e. upper-caste men.
The Amar Jawan Jyothi is also symbolic here because Ajay could not be ‘amar’ (deathless), but he can ignite the fire of nationalism into new living soldiers who restore national pride. Yet it remains an upper-caste male soldier-body for an upper-caste nation-body. None of the historical revolutionaries from Bismil to Bhagat Singh represent the Bahujan working-class or the peasants who did fight the British. None of the contemporary revolutionaries can also thus be Bahujan, a continuing dismissal of the vast majority of the nations working castes whose national identity was forged in 1947, but who remain invisible in nationalist iconography (2006 is also when Mandal-2 is implemented, and the discourse around “merit” that is suspiciously also absent in the DU college of RDB is another layer of silence around caste).
A revolution now can, however, include an upper-caste woman and Sonia’s character becomes the spark to light the fire of this nationalism. Mehra imagines the historical Durga Devi articulate the need to kill Officer Scott, the police officer who had beaten Lala Lajpat Rai, and Sonia mirrors this articulation of murdering the corrupt defence minister. A 21st-century revolution has to reflect 21st-century gender dynamics.
This zeal then results in the hodge-podge group coming together to kill the corrupt Defence Minister Shastri. Sonia sparks the idea of murder, Pandey arranges for a gun, Karan the bike which he drives, and DJ becomes the killer. I watched this murder scene again today becoming suddenly with an awful sense of doom. The method of killing Shastri mirrors how rationalists-activists Govind Pansare, Narendra Dabholkar, MM Kalburgi and Gauri Lankesh were killed. In Dabholkar’s case, he was literally on a morning walk as he was shot dead by assailants escaping on a motor bike — identical to Minister Shastri in RDB. As an act of vigilante “justice,” RDB’s methodology mirrors what the Sanatan Sanstha would come to do from 2013 onwards, perfecting a Sanghi methodology of war against those it deemed “anti-nationals.”
In an earlier scene, Ajay Rathod, alive and sitting in a plush upscale bar with our vigilantes, asks them why none of them do anything to improve the nation they complain so much about. He concludes saying he knows why, “Kyunki ghar ki safai mein haath ganda kaun kare?” (Because who wants to dirty their hands cleaning their own house?) This is a remarkable line, considering some of the Whatsapp messages floating around after Lankesh’s murder calling her a “cockroach” or a pest, and referring to her murder and the others as a “house cleaning.” This language of sanitation, cleansing, disinfecting with respect to the nation have all been used in genocidal political rhetoric over the last century in harrowing ways. RDB’s filmic language replicates it.
Within this muddled representation of secular logic with Sanghi methods, reconciliation between Pandey and Aslam is then a key plot point that should seem counterintuitive, but it is not. Martyrdom should be a demonstration of “Hindu-Muslim” brotherhood in this secularized Arya Samaji imaginary. We can only speculate Aslam Khan’s fictional caste, but I have no hesitation in speculating it to be Ashraf/UC Muslim, meant to symbolize an upper-caste reconciliation of Sanghi+liberal in the face of death. There is, however, the likelihood that despite all of this, Aslam’s presence in this gang of six in 2006 is more likely to paint him out as a prototypical Muslim terrorist and bring much more state harassment to his family in the Nizamuddin neighbourhood . Not much thought is spared for Sonia either, who remains alive in the hospital with Ajay’s ailing mother as her compadres are murdered by Black Cat commandos. But retaining Mehra’s vision of caste-neutral secularism is more important and so the characters’ arcs end in their secular bromance-death rather than the possible consequences of Islamophobic realities.
Lastly, another little moment of symbolism is Karan’s murder of his father with Oedipal overtones. Karan’s patricide is blasphemous for caste logic where patrilineality provides all meaning to social existence, but within the logic of patriotism (whose etymology ironically harks back to mean “of the father”), this is the father who has betrayed the mother-of-all-mothers, i.e. Mother India, which gains spiritual overtones. In killing his father then, Karan symbolizes a good virtuous son of Mother India.
RDB remains curious for me as it is not just a story of Indian nationalism, but also a moment where Mehra imagines the British Empire is reckoning with its bloody past in the figure of Sue, who it is implied will likely document this bloody revolution much like her father is supposed to have documented the HSRA. I’m not quite sure why she was central to the story. We could have had an Indian millennial “discovering” the HSRA’s revolutionary struggles, a newly awakened liberal, a friend of our vigilantes symbolizing a millennial nationalism, but I think Sue is central to the story because the 2000s are when India operates consciously in the Western gaze in numerous ways, not least of which is the “booming economy” of globalization and neoliberalism. A white woman’s white guilt and white tears validate the heroism of upper-caste saviours of the “idea of India.” These ideological trajectories are all too evident in the plot of RDB.
The Mechanical Soldier — ‘Uri: The Surgical Strike’ (2019)
If Border and Rang de Basanti are in many ways about a Brahminical Congressi secular-liberal military nationalism, Uri is the saffron militarism of the Moditva era par excellence. Aditya Dhar’s Uri in my reading is really an extension of Border, or even better, perhaps a corrective response to the film Border. In both Border and RDB, the Indian military is shown to be a corrupt, inefficient, failed institution, letting down its soldiers in key moments. In Uri, that portrayal is fixed. Vicky Kaushal’s Vihaan Singh Shergill is nothing short of a machine. His aim is perfect, his planning is immaculate, his execution of military strategy is efficiency incarnate. The gun is not a weapon but literally an extension of his arm, a prosthetic, as in this poster. He is also quite literally an avenger, as he chases down and avenges the death of every Indian soldier (the killers are all automatically terrorists, there is no nuance through the nomenclature of “militant,” “rebel,” or “freedom fighter” nor do they ever seem to have a “cause”). Basically, he is a high-functioning gear in the Indian war machine as a Para (Special Forces) officer called to execute high-precision surgical strikes in enemy territory.
In an excellent paper on science fiction’s use of prosthetic warriors, Steffen Hantke writes:
… Eric Rabkin has pointed out that, through the centuries, the “zone of conflict” has become increasingly ill-defined. Having moved “closer to the interior of the defended territory and the interior of the defender’s psyche” (“Reimagining War” 19) — and, I would add, to the interior of the soldier’s body — the battlefield tends to become a metaphor for a state of mind more than a distinct geographical or topographical designation. Since technology can literally move the battlefield anywhere, without consideration of the specific conditions of territory, war is now a possibility wherever we happen to find ourselves on the map. As a constantly present, latent scenario of existence, we must internalize it and make it part of our thinking (pp. 496–497, emphasis mine).
Major Shergill embodies war as a state of mind. His Jatt-Hindu psyche, his sociality, his emotional spectrum is set to the wavelength of battle. In a key moment in the opening sequence, as Shergill is tracking down “terrorists” in the state of Assam to avenge an attack on a convoy, he is confronted with the man who killed several Indian soldiers. Shergill’s gun is tossed aside for brutally efficient hand-to-hand combat with this “terrorist.” No background music is required to heighten the tension as Shergill delivers kicks and punches with clinical accuracy.
As he has the man in a chokehold, music suddenly rises towards a crescendo, we see a glimpse of the human soldier, the effort he makes to strangle this man, a strained cry (Of rage? Of primal will?) before suddenly, Shergill’s expression hardens, the music is abruptly cut off and the man’s neck cracks. The mechanical soldier snaps into focus, suppressing all things human/animal. The soldier is perfected, all functioning parts, and no feelings.
Uri’s clear influence is Zero Dark Thirty in more ways than one, and its central agenda is to drive home evidence of India’s techno-military excellence. Torture, surveillance, espionage, reconnaissance missions, are all plot points meant to demonstrate the state’s sophisticated intelligence machinery. This is replicating Hollywood’s imperialist narratives and aesthetic in localized terms. It is no surprise then that we are made to see satellites mobilized in space spinning to capture detailed topographies, and the film camera often switches to a drone camera providing a god’s-eye POV over the landscape, tracking subjects along the terrain as if it were an HD version of the infamous Wikileaks video. Drone footage does not just flaunt superior military capabilities, but also serves to lay out the boundaries and the geographic scope of The Nation, imposing claims on contested regions and territories like the richly verdant Assam and Kashmir (quite unlike Border’s hostile desert). Of course, a literal drone named “Garud” is actualized in the film as the omnipresent gaze of the state, able to infiltrate what are painted to be terrorist holdings and suspected sites.
Reviews dubbed Uri a “war film” without clarifying if it was a film made about war or a film made in a time of war, but perhaps there is no difference when the savarna Hindu state of mind imagines itself in a state of permanent war against several Bahujan castes (across Hindu, Muslim and Christian faiths), Kashmiris, Adivasis, and other tribal and ethnic groups. The most remarkable omission in Uri is any reference to why a barrage of militant attacks occurred in Kashmir in 2016 — there is a deafening silence around Burhan Wani’s death and his status as a martyr in Kashmir’s freedom struggle. This is not accidental — the film is not interested in either the geopolitical history of Kashmir or any complexity around its autonomy. Its narrative is instead a stamping of Indian authority all across contested regions and territories. Hence, the framing of Naya India and the repeated dialogue of “Yeh ghar mein ghusega bhi, aur maarega bhi” (This [new India] will break into your house and will kill you too). The LOC (unlike in Border, where Sunny Deol stomps to its very edge but never crosses it) is not sacrosanct in Uri, because it is a Line of Control and in this film, the control is with the Indian Army, who decide if they can breach it or not.
The stage for an upper-caste cyborg breaking-entering and killing is set by the attack near the J & K town of Uri, where Shergill’s brother-in-law Major Karan Kashyap’s regiment is stationed. Kashyap is killed when their encampment is attacked by militants. The ensuing scenes reconstruct what occurred in the real-life cremation of the army Col. MN Rai (a Gorkha regiment officer killed in J & K in January 2015, more than a year and a half before the Uri attack of September 2016), where the media caught his daughter Alka raise the regiment’s war cry as she saluted her dead father. Uri fictionalizes Col. Rai’s death as Major Kashyap’s death, and reconstructs Rai’s daughter’s war cry of the Gorkha regiment (in the Nepali language) as Kashyap’s Dogra regiment’s war cry —but in Sanskrit. Alka Rai’s real-life Nepali Gorkha war cry: “Tiger 9 GR Ko! Ho Ki Hoina? Ho, ho, ho.” (Was he the Tiger of 9 Gorkha Rifles? Yes, yes, yes.) becomes the Sanskrit “शौर्यम् दक्षम् युद्धै: बलिदान परम धर्म:” (Courage and war skills in war, sacrifice is the first dharma/duty).
This is a deliberately Brahminical twist, where a Sanskrit war cry for a Dogra regiment rationalizes the subsequent upper-caste Hindu vengeance against Muslim “terrorists.” Uri makes no pretence of a secular-liberal vision of the soldier, the army or the nation — they are all bound by Brahminical Hinduism, and their redeemer is the upper-caste warrior. Punjabi Jatt masculinity is yet again a redemptive force, except in Uri, it is enhanced by all the technological gadgetry of the 21st-century. Shergill’s assembled team of commandos — Hindus, Muslims (slyly inserted performing namaaz in a song), Sikhs — are all committed to this revenge. And much like RDB, Uri also implicates the young fatherless girl as the next generation of (savarna female) Indians interpellated by nationalism’s murderous rage.
The rapaciously worded “ghar mein ghusenge” thus signifies agency, a critical element that past military films did not stress because the soldier was an agent of the state, taking orders from above. In RDB, as in Uri, the soldier-cyborg is the first person desirous of vengeance, before even the state. This agency is then materialized through images of ghusna, of infiltration. If the vocabulary of a surgical strike is medicalized, then the apt metaphor here for the soldiers would be one of pathogens, and Shergill’s nameless, faceless commandos worming their way through caves into Pakistani territory are heightened through the presence of night-vision goggles mimicking the compound eyes of insects/bugs. Upper-caste militarism is extended through technological forms that supplement its nationalistic visions.
It’s hard not to see the influence of Zero Dark Thirty in this entire sequence at the compound and the hunt for Osama Bin Laden being mirrored in the hunt for a terrorist Idris. However, the white American soldier’s efficiency is indistinguishable from the technology enhancing its capabilities — night vision goggles, drone intelligence, and stealth aircraft — so that when Osama is caught, his body is riddled with bullets from multiple guns, and then it is digitally photographed and transmitted to the Pentagon as evidence.
In contrast in Uri, the soldier’s body is augmented with technology that is meant to underscore his agency. Shergill can shoot endless rounds, but he can also drop his gun and enter fistfights and knife-fights and then pick his gun back up again to shoot. Similarly, when cornered by Pakistani weaponry, the Indian helicopter spitting bullets at the enemy while rescuing the Indian commandos is not just an efficient weapon of war, but meant to be a weapon exacting a widow’s vengeance for her husband’s death. Agential desires for revenge drive the murder of militants marked as terrorists, and technology is an enabler of that.
Shergill repeats the maxim of “New India” once again in hand-to-hand combat with Idris (where of course he tosses aside his gun again!), saying “Tere ghar mein ghuske tujhe aur tere bhaiyon ko maar raha hoon. Indian army kehte hain humein, Indian army” (I’ve broken into your house and killed your brothers, they call us the Indian army, the Indian army). Gutting Idris with a knife, Shergill’s killing is marked by a cry once again of rage and vengeance— except it is portrayed as orgasmic, or practically a spiritual experience. The only time this mechanical soldier demonstrates a human reaction — his josh — is when he kills. The josh, however high or low it may be, is a killing rage.
Finally, Uri makes space for multiple widows, multiple mothers and a daughter/niece. Shergill has a grief-stricken sister/widow and niece through whom the logic of revenge can be realized, but other upper-caste women are so able as to be recruited into the war machine. Pallavi Sharma (played by Yami Gautam) is an intelligence agent working behind the scenes with the security advisor Govind Bharadwaj, played by Paresh Rawal (and they are of course, both behind-the-scenes Brahmins) and Seerat Kaur (played Kirti Kulhari) is the air force pilot who destroys the Pakistani air force squadron firing at the Indian commandos. In fact, Sharma’s intelligence agent, undercover as a nurse for Shergill’s mother at one point, is allowed to be a bad nurse and caretaker of the ill mother but she’s a “damn good agent” of the state, in her own words.
And if the mother in Border was blind, the mother in RDB was hurt and in a coma, the mother in Uri has advanced Alzheimer’s. Wounded motherhood underlies the upper-caste soldiers’ concerns for both family and nation.
My final comment is about the prototype of the Amar Jawan. Uri has no symbols such as temples or India Gate in its iconography. The symbolism of the nation is unnecessary in a film that is literally about soldiers who cannot die. So unlike in Border or RDB where soldiers die and are reincarnated into new recruits, in Uri, the technologically augmented soldier-cyborg is un-killable — he is literally an Amar Jawan. The symbolic is rendered into the material.
This is the execution of propaganda, and Hindi cinema’s complicity in state apparatus has never been more wholehearted than in the months that followed Uri’s release when the Pulwama attack happened. Uri should be a text that Indian film scholars return to in order to document what BJP-2 will continue to unleash in the coming years in Indian politics.
***
In this extra-long essay, I’m really trying to draw out how upper-caste militarism — Congressi or Sanghi — drives romanticized visions of pride and patriotism, and cinematic language has really evidenced this in numerous ways. Uri despite its saffron badge of pride mirrors what more liberal cinematic mythologies of nation and patriotism have always done. India in Hindi cinema’s world is a meeting of the conservative and the liberal, the Hindu and Muslim, the male and the female, united in their upper caste-class interests. But where the solider could once sing “Sandese aatey hain, humein tadpaate hain…” (Messages come and torment us…), these vulnerabilities are now excised in cinema characters to present only the infallible Jat/Rajput soldier.
The reality, of course, is that jawans killed in the line of duty tend to be lower-caste. The stories of why these soldiers serve in appalling conditions are often glossed over as sheer love of nation. The fact that their service rarely translates to upward mobility or long-term benefits for their kith and kin is conveniently forgotten. The Indian armed forces reproduce caste, gender and class norms within their internal organization, and no amount of glossy Bollywood films reiterating the heroism of upper-caste majors and colonels makes up for the material deprivations maintained endured by the bulk of its marginalized jawans and officers. Caste remains the beating heart of the neoliberal Hindu nation.
