The commercial success of some movies in India (and among the Indian diaspora) does not mean that these movies will be seen or felt the same way by foreign audiences whose impressions of India are already profoundly skewed in certain directions by a relentless, hostile global propaganda campaign.
Indian cinema has made ripples, although of different kinds, beyond our borders in the last few days. On the happier side, the Telugu blockbuster RRR won nominations for two Golden Globes. On a less pleasant note, the movie The Kashmir Files, despite its deeply emotional reception by survivors of the 1990s ethnic cleansing of Kashmiri Hindu Pandits, was rather harshly described as “vulgar propaganda” by an Israeli movie maker.
Since that time, there has been much controversy, reaching even diplomatic levels. While many people expressed dismay at Nadav Lapid’s indifference to the victims of violence, some filmmaker friends of mine also found his stand to be noble.
There was also a debate of sorts between the concerned two directors. Lapid professed his inability to tell if the events in the movie really took place and worried about how survivors would react to it, but did not reconsider his criticism. Propaganda could be artistic too, like Sergei Eisenstein and Leni Reifenstahl, he wrote, and no one calls that propaganda now. But The Kashmir Files was still, he insisted, just that.
Vivek Agnihotri, in turn, pointed out that “propaganda” is often what anyone calls an opposing point of view. He reminded us that there is no dispute about the veracity of the horrible events depicted in his movie, and that he had interviewed 700 victims for his story.
The debate appears to have paused there, with both camps perhaps settling down to feeling unheard by the other side, worrying exclusively about either Islamophobia, or Hinduphobia, respectively, even as public attention shifts again to RRR and tantalising claims about Indian soft power abroad (and of course, more polarising disputes about new Bollywood releases).
It is in this context that I would like to share some lessons from having screened and talked about Indian cinema with hundreds of non-Indian students over many years (my most recent talk, coincidentally enough, was a guest lecture in a Judaic Studies professor’s class on nationalism where we discussed RRR).
The basic reality that Indian movie-makers, critics, and “soft power” buffs should confront is that often what works for an Indian viewer doesn’t make sense to others at all. What we loved in a theatre in India, say, a Hum Aapke Hain Koun or Mr India, is rarely as engaging for students or viewers abroad, except if already deeply invested in the genre. There was indeed a bit of a speciality fascination around the world since the 1990s with “Bollywood,” a loose signifier for everything from Shah Rukh Khan to diasporic movie makers like Mira Nair and Gurinder Chadha, but this never meant that Indian movies were actually advancing a narrative from India.
With this reality check in mind, we might turn to some basic questions about taste, content and form.
Why is it that a movie like RRR (and before that Baahubali to an extent), managed to win the attention of both Indian and non-Indian viewers?
And why is it that a movie like The Kashmir Files, while evoking the heartbreaking sight of the survivors of the ethnic cleansing of the 1990s weeping in theatres after the screening, failed to win the sympathy of every artist who watched it?
Is the issue only one of rigid identity politics, with Hindus simply not counting as being worthy of having human rights in the eyes of the global human rights establishment? Or is there also a need to recognise limitations in our ability to tell stories that break across boundaries, in the best of times, let alone in these, our exceptionally polarised times?
I think there is a big risk that if we fail to consider these issues, we will find ourselves, despite RRR, with simply one more bungled renaissance.
Writers and movie-makers of a certain inclination have found commercial success in India in recent times partly because of their passion, but also partly because of the sheer representational starvation that Hindus, quite specifically, have felt in relation to cinema, publishing, and other cultural industries.
If it’s seen as pro-Hindu (or even pro-nationalist across the religious spectrum) or at least not gratuitously mean and mendacious towards Hindus in the name of some nobler political ideal, (aka “wokeness”), it will sell. Here. But only here.
As the Lapid unpleasantness shows us, if Indian storytellers (and their soft-power, foreign-policy, think-tank-type friends) don’t get the global landscape of tastes, sensibilities, and desires today, even the most seemingly important truths to Indian audiences will be callously dismissed by others. The dichotomy that has plagued us between those who seemingly “sell out” to crassly racist neo-orientalist cravings about India, and those who “settle in” complacently to the dull, insular, polarisation-dependent tastes of our own, has to be overcome.
Indian storytellers must urgently learn to neither sell-out nor settle in, but actually, “tell out.”
In conclusion, since accusations of propaganda and counter-propaganda only take us so far in learning to communicate better, perhaps India’s soft power heads could take a simple lesson from someone they might recognise better.
Carl Von Clausewitz wrote that in a war, propaganda had to be considered in relation to all three audiences: Supporters, enemies, and those who were neutral. The India story that we have witnessed for the past few years, unfortunately, has focused almost exclusively on the first category. If Indian cinema is to go global, and if the India story is to be really accepted by the world, we will have to learn to speak to all three audiences in the future, rather than merely label anyone who disagrees slightly as enemies or anti-nationals.
The real sign of narratives being changed will be when those who are neutral find themselves sympathetic to an experience or point of view.
Until then, it will just be “our propaganda, their propaganda,” and not a bridge in between.
The writer is professor of media studies at the University of San Francisco
