Terror, Nation and Violence in Hindi Cinema

Abstract

In the past two decades, the literature on Hindi Cinem has made a significant contribution to the understanding of cultural nationalism in the Indian context. In particular, it helped forge a renewed understanding of ‘systemic’ and ‘soft’ violence that breeds internal hierarchies within the nation across caste, gender and communal identities (Gabriel 2010; Chakravarthy 2005; Gabriel and Vijayan 2012). Yet, the films dealing with less tacit aspects of ‘terror’ and ‘violence’, such as the armed conflict of the Naxalites, have received little attention in secondary criticism. Pradip Basu’s essay collection Red on Silver: Naxalites in Cinema (2012), which maps a historical journey of both Hindi and vernacular cinema on Indian Maoism from the 1970s to the present, is perhaps the only exception to this. This essay responds to the existing discursive gaps in theorizing nationalism, violence and terrorism in three Hindi films on the Naxalite insurgency: A.N. Mahadevan’s Red Alert: The War Within (2010), Sudhir Mishra’s Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi (2003) and Prakash Jha’s Chakravyuh (2012).