Manning the Border of gender, by weaving the minor narratives
of the individual protagonists ofthefilmin a socio-polity differentiated along the aces Gender and War in 'Border' of public/private, material/spirittual, inner/ outer, visibility/invisibility, masculine/ Karen Gabriel feminine' - national borders/national interiors. This geographical investment is undertaken toward consolidating a very Even white the discursive registers of the film open and engage with specific agenda: through these different a series of questions ostensibly regarding the legitimacy or narratives, the 'nation' comes t o be located, justifiabilitSy of war, at no point does 'Border' ever visually deviate in all its ideological significations, at its geographical borders - so that the male, from the representation of the battle as a 'dharmyudh', a war of military community that mans them comes righteousness. Consequently, when the heroic Indians/Hindus die, they to be constructed as its most authentic must be seen to do so spectacularly, yet without disintegration, and r e p r e s e n t a t i v e s , because they stake their with dignity, concealing both vulnerability and indignity. lives on their 'national' identity. W a r is t h e catalyst that distillates not just this identity J P DUTTA 'S' Border' (1997), a film osten- title. Appropriately enough, the film is also but conversely also the gender of the nation sibly about the incident of December 5, at a study in liminalities; the fractious and that 'confers' that identity as masculine. The Longewal during the 1971 Indo-Pak war, performative liminalities of nationality, the conferring of this identity however remains directly negotiates the genre of the Hollywood nation-state and gender. In the initial an uneasy and unresolved process; as is war film as one which can be domesticated documentary-style announcement (that the repeatedly projected in the film, the into bearing some of the concerns of much film is about the mentioned incident in the masculinity of this community derives contemporary Hindi commercial cinema- 1971 Indo-Pak war), there is a clear (partly) from its relentless feminization of While 'Border' is not the first Hindi film to recognition of the historicity of the nation- the nation as 'Mother' - a process perfectly deal with war, it is the enormous commercial state as a political entity that seeks or requires commensurate with the relegation of its success of the film that draws speculation territorial definition of itself, through hostile women to the interiors', away from the about the nature and implications of this and violent conflict if necessary. This border. Yet, precisely because the 'nation 1 particular indigenisation of the Hollywood recognition of a political liminality, brought in question is now no more than its military genre. The genre of the war film has into locus by the fact of conflict itself, representatives, it is also a hyper-masculine traditionally dealt with the critical experiences however, does not extend to its diagnosis in entity, defined by its heroisms, its powers of war itself - the imminence of death, fear, terms of the real politic stakes in the war of of violence and its invulnerability. The body failing courage, pain, loss, etc (besides, of the regimes of Indira Gandhi or Zulfikar Ali of the nation is thus feminine, while - in the course, the obligatory and spectacular Bhutto. Instead the conflict is transformed best traditions of patriarchy - its identity is representations of heroism, death and by the film into becoming the site of the claimed as masculine. This ambiguity of violence). What is extraordinary about cultural liminality of nationality - genders however, and the tensions in socio- 'Border' is that none of its protagonists is the matically introduced in an early sequence political g e n d e r roles it implies, is represented as ever e x p e r i e n c i n g the of the film when Pakistani insurgents are symptomatic of the resistance to its thematic over whelming fear of death or of inadequate almost mistaken for compatriots, and programmes of identities at the level of the performance during war.' Rather than seeing betrayed by no more than blades of grass. affective micro-economies of,everyday this as an accidental or careless occurrence, This scene (one of the most explicitly violent practices. They therefore demand ceaseless it will be argued that, within the discourses and loaded scenes in the film) broaches ideological address to resolve and remain of identity - national and gender-that frame several issues that the film subsequently problematic to the very end of the film: the the film, only suchanabstracted and idealised addresses and resolves. The most immediate real sites of contention remain within, the depiction of war is a d m i s s i b l e . This of these is that question of the identification interiorities as much psychical as abstraction serves to displace war as the - the mark - of the enemy: language, skin geographical. central concern of the film, and effects it colour, physical features, dress and numerous The affective import of these themes is instead as a suitable situational backdrop cultural codes - none of these serves to most penetratively posed, in the sequence within and on which a very specific ideology distinguish friend from foe, Pakistani from earlier noted and in subsequent ones, by the of masculinity and the nation find articulation. Indian. The border here is clearly identified character of Second U Dharamvir(Akshaye Through an analysis of the film, this paper as no more than an imaginary1 one, in the Khanna), both verbally and gesturally in will attempt a preliminary explication of sense that it serves to exclude people several ways. First, by his refusal to kill one some of the discursive and scoliotic strategies who are indistinguish-able but for their of the critically wounded (unmasked) employed to connect these ideologies as imagination of the identities they possess. 3 insurgents offered to him: then through his they come to be articulated. This sequence thus sets the agenda for the nausea at the sight of their violent kitting 'Border' is not merely about the geo- film as primarily p e d a g o g i c a l - the by his senior officer - thereby reiterating the graphical limits that the f i l m s title alludes identification, construction and inculcation common humanity of both killer and killed to but equally about the definition. use of a doctrine of who the Ideal Indian' is and - and finally, by initiating a dissenting, transience, transgression, surveillance, and how 'he' exists - within a thematic of nation personal counter-narrative in his extended the need for the constant construction and and gender. meditation of the propriety, of the notions reiteration of borders. This, however, though The masculinity of that identity is not of war. During this, the tooted absoluteness in itself an intimidatingly large agenda, fortuitous. 'Border' locates the problem of of heroic discourses and their priorities are does not exhaust the implications of the identity as not just of nationality but also compelled into a constant referentiality with
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some of their silenced significations: the imperative in the public, masculine world This issue is deliberately posed as an routine betrayal of other attachments and they inhabit. Through this, while both worlds opposition between Bhairav S i n g h ' s duties the displaced and bereaved this are drawn into conjunction, their separateness archetypal, metaphoric conception of heroism leaves behind, the incomprehensible is simultaneously underwritten, as the maternality and Dharamvir's deeply personal absurdity of killing absolute strangers.affective world in realigned (within terms links with his very real mother Dharamvir's Sacrificial military courage comes to be of utility), toward articulating a new strain initial failure to conform to the code of revealed terms of the oppositional of masculinity formulated independently of conduct expected of him - in refusing to kill significations inherent in its otherwise traditional heterosexual sexual assertion. an insurgent - though treated as a failure to singular and absolute value, now becoming Precisely for this reason, the heterosexual carry out his official and patriotic duty, is comprehensibleaseither heroism or betrayal spaces' of the private and the domestic are crucially represented as rooted in insufficient or both. The double valency that he attributes repeatedly imaged and argued as being gendering, in the other soldiers' mocking to heroism haunts its the matisations in the disruptive or debilitating, as is the masculinity him as a boy. a lesser man. His own personal film, resisting all attempts at easy resolution. that yields to its demands. This is why when narrative of loss and filial duty - Dharamvir's These early sequences thus set out the central the jawan, Mathura Das expresses his father too is reported to have been an heroic problematics of the film; liminality and the jubilation at his request for leave being army officer, martyred in battle through rashy need to reconcile the political 'necessity' of granted (to return to his ailing pregnant courageous actions - is one that affirms this war with its devastation and moral wife), Major Chandpuri (Sunny Deol) is reading of his actions, Dharamvir understands unjustifiability, specially a war in which infuriated, Mathura Das' eagerness to return his father's actions as his mother does: as friend and foe are so anonymously alike. To home constitutes the remembrance and the failure and betrayal of personal duties cope, the film then effects a split between affirmation of hitherto acceptable modes of towards him and his mother, and politics and morality through the paradox of masculinity - those that acknowledge subsequently only joins the army to honour condemning the logic of the war - 'their' domestic duties and kinship allegiance as a commitment to his dead father (keeping politics - even as it urges heroism -'our' well - an affirmation that, to the Major, a promise he makes to him before his death). morality. It goes on to resolve this untenable fundamentally weakens the affective tics Dharamvir's unease with Bhairav Singh's dichotomy through an ideological polemic that bind the troops to a (militarised) insistent reification arises from the persistence that is finally an indefinite uncomfortable masculinity, characterised by its relationship of the equal validity of the dual but deferral - of the ideological to the pragmatic to life only through an inextricable in equalised significations of military courage - a n d not a resolution. The strategy of deferral relationship with death and that more abstract - its valour and the betrayals that demands is begun through another character, Bhairav entity, the nation. He is exculpated from a - and is indicated by a relentless, nightmare S i n g h ' s (Sunil Shetty), r e s p o n s e to masculinity that is constructed as a form of intrusion from his personal history - the Dharamvir's cutting interrogation, while its cowardice amounting to treachery only by private narrative Of his mother as itself i e , nature and some of its implications are spelt his independently voiced and proven decision the relentless contextualisation and rooting out in the circularity of Bhairav Singh's final (ultimately through his death) to realign his of abstracted a f f e c t s . T h i s personal emphatic pragmatism - if you don't kill him, priorities toward affirming the masculinity endorsement of his mother's narrative and he will kill you. All the politics and moralities that valorises the abstraction of the maternal- its logic accounts for the fact that, once at of war finally devolve to this blindly circular national entity: by returning on the eve of the border, Dharamvir is haunted by logic of anonymity; kill or be killed - a logic battle to his unit, without going home. Hence, nightmares of his blind mother holding a that further complicates the differential by employing these a f f e c t i v e spaces 'sehera' 7 (rather than a shroud) stumbling identificatory lines being sketched. In fact, repeatedly to root what are stressed as through a war-torn field of corpses, seeking the issues and paradoxes that Dharamvir antithetical public discourses, the private him. The nightmare is equally the Sense of raises are never resolved through direct and the domestic are systematically harnessed betrayal implicit in his impending rejection discursivity, but haunt the film to its end, into a productivity that eventually depletes of an utterly different mode of relationally The film's agenda is undertaken in two them of disruptiveness. The hit song,Sandese viable masculinity and his realisation of the registers; one, the discursive register of aate hain, is again an instance of this incompatibility of the two modes. The film ideological polemic, involving appeals to conversion to productivity of the domestic: seems to indicate that the nightmare in all patriotism and religious identity; and the the song's lyrics draw on the tradition of the its nuances comes true in the end, as other, the affective register of narratives of lament of the rural family for news of their Dharamvir lies in the battlefield with this personal lives. Although these registers - kin, away as migrant labour in the big cities. identical but hallucinatory vision of his like the gender spaces they come to signify Ironically, it thus harnesses the affects mother in his dying eyes. - o v e r l a p , they are c o m p e l l e d into associated with a d o m e s t i c , socio- H o w e v e r , it is through his final distinctiveness in terms of an opposition economically effected estrangement, into the hallucinatory transformation of his mother between "national' military and 'personal' service of affirming the personal and into a simulacrum - both a denigration of civil duties, specifically to celebrate the ideological conditions of estrangement mutual dependency and a reinsertion of his military. This, however, gets increasingly necessary to fight an anonymous enemy at mother into the traditional sexual economies tenuous because of the regular and systematic the border through the definitive, of exchange that she has been released from appropriation of the affective privatised unproblmatic integration or rejection of in widowhood - that the unsatisfactory spaces and their vocabularies to sustain the self-division. resolution of what are stated to be agonistic ideologies of public polemic. Thus, for claims is eventully e f f e c t e d . In the This strategy best explains the ways in instance, Bhairav S i n g h ' s vociferous hallucination, Dharamvir responds to his which the notion of maternality, frequently proclamations of the nation as a mother - bereaved, deranged mother's appeal for his drawn on by the film, is reified so completely Earth-Mother-conceptualises an essentially life with the demand that she relinquish him into Bhairav Singh's archetype of the Earth- political entity in metaphors that are primarily to his father's 'absolute' heroism of death. Mother, that the sole real maternal figure familial and emotive. Similarly, the cook's Only this release will allow him to make the (Dharamvir's mother) appears as mere reference to the all-male unit as being a semantic leap that will translate his death as simulacrum of maternality in comparison, family is turned into a programme for valour alone. It is only when he thus in a and indeed, is almost turned into one by affective conduct and an ideological single gesture is displayed conjuncting Dharamvir himself by the end of the film.
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the two neatly - i e , effecting an abstraction then a considered action - proving a - point thus negotiate the problematic discharging of his mother that is commensurate .with the - in which he kills and then deliberately and of personality - male and female - and are archetypal maternality of the mother-nation carefully empties his gun into the corpse of the facilities by which Dharamvir's father invoked by Bhairav Singh - that he finally the enemy informer. It is the self-conscious, retains a dominant discursivity while seems to resolve for himself his early and we later realise, bitterly parodic remaining completely absent visually. misgivings about the war. In thus abstracting superfluity of this emphatic action - Therefore, the loci of the specific emotional her, paradoxically, he de-maternalises her in overdoing the role of militarised maleness effects that each individual figure of favour of the maternality of the mother- through the disgust he feels at it - that speaks masculinity generates are together displaced nation - returning her to his father and the his persisting unease with it. While he thus from the personal-individual-feminine onto significations that the latter had bestowed on comes to conform to the official ideal at this the national-abstract-'masculine'. her, thereby replicating his father in erasing point, his agency and the legitimacy of While Dharamvir's narrative thus clearly the minor, personal narrative of his mother q u e s t i o n s he raises get highlighted. bears the burden of bringing about an So, the point at which Dharamvir rises Irresolvable by mere heroism of action, it ideological resolution, there are other (less uneasily from son to father - to 'manhood' requires the final resolution, at the level of directly narrative) semiotic and discursive - his mother must slide from mother to wife personalising the ideological (however strategies that are employed to carry it - to silence and impotence. It therefore uneasily), for the questions to be laid to rest through. Partially through Bhairav Singh's appears discursively insufficient to simply It is necessary to point out that several ideas, but also through intensive visual displace the importance of the live maternal discursive sleights are performed before an bombardment, the film presses a series of in celebrating instead the claim of the effective ideological and emotive resolution gendered conflations: the Earth-Mother- archetypal - the once condemnable choice become possible. 9 First, while the semiotic Nation, for instance, translates without that his father had made in his heroism. burden of the affective is borne primarily by warning into the Earth-MotherGoddess, in Instead, Dharamvir's validation of the figures of femininity, the discourses they a sequence in the film where all that remains significations of his father's masculinity, generate congeal around figures of defiantly erect in a village demolished by once of which is his mother's lonely masculinity. Figures of femininity are thus enemy bombing is the Mata-temple. By derangement, requires him to review his emptied into vehicular signs that record a calling attention to it, Bhairav Singh mother's demands as his father viewed them, history of masculinities, their construction highlights a subterranean discursive tack on i e, situating her in a disempowered and and significance. Second, this tactic, in the the question of marks of identification, of sexual relation to his father - as wife. This film's central agenda of delineating a a morality sufficiently justificatory of the also immediately permits him to exonerate consolidated and singular masculinity, also politics of war, of the comparative powers himself from the filial duties he owes her, results in an equally hollowed, lowest- of different religious beliefs. The war is Won affirming further that the only inflexible common-denominator, 'pure' masculinity - then not merely by the fortuitous arrival of filial duties are finally toward the father. His one that is drained of its complex resonances the Air Force, but because of the good fortune final reconciliation to the 'legitimacy' of the to retain discursive vitality. This reduction of a particular religious affiliation. The war is thus also the film's signal that the is clear not j u s t in the qualitative signifiance of this scene is that it directly anxieties he opens at the beginning are indistinguishability of one act of heroism unravels the knotty problem of 'who the resolved at the level of the personal and the from the next and their performers' cloned enemy is'. It is also the moment when the sexual, and indicates the nexus between relation to death, or in the uniform non- slippage between morality and religion is recognition of bereavement - the most explicit. Bhairav Singh's hitherto s e x , gender and power. Within the insignificance of those they leave behind - circular arguments on the rationale of war disempowerment that wifehood signifies in at the moment of their death, but also in the abruptly dovetail into a revealing the cultural frame offered by the film, it absence of a sustained sense of division that fundamentalism - through a definition of therefore remains unremarkable that he is characterises all the heroes except Second acceptable identity and unquestionable the only protagonist of all the married or Lt Dharamvir. This exception, it has been morality: the superior prerogative and power betrothed ones, who cares to seek that (albeit argued, is retained only to deplete it of its of being 'Hindu', 'Border' is thus clearly no ritual) affirmation of his death from his critical vision, employing it to underwrite innocent rendition of a forgotten historical mother not his betrothed, indicating the the sexual politics of the filmic text. Third, event. Rather, it is, as Bhaskar Sarkar has continued endurance of his m o t h e r ' s this most crucial index of a heroically remarked about the televised epics: maternality and of the cultural significance successful militarisation therefore entails an ...a rewriting of history: it is not just going bestowed on it. exclusive inscription and affirmation of a back but invoking a certain interpretation Dharamvir's initiation into ritualised of the past to manipulate the present...[that] killing is no sudden transformation. The s p e c i f i c understanding of agency as conformity, of what it means to be human attempts to forge a 'Hindu' version of the sequence in which he is shown (heroically) nation's history that will help achieve a accomplishing his first kill is entirely imagic, as man and the peculiar modes of relations required by that. Fourth, there is a progressive coherent 'Hindu' nation-ness." without any of the articulated discursivity This agenda is taken up at length in the of the scenes in which he expresses his decrease in the presence of women in scenes immediately following the bombing repugnance for war. Briefly, he tracks down narrative emphases, so that, by the second of the village, in which Bhairav Singh rescues and kills an enemy informer who is caught half of the film only the male characters a copy of the Koran for a Muslim inhabitant transmitting information from within Indian remain as elements of the story. The of the village from his burning house. When territory. No explanation is provided for his increasing annulment of depicted feminine the man expresses amazement at the profound decision to go alone; the imagic implication subjectivities and disruptive masculine ones veneration that Bhairav Singh-despite being is that he too (overwhelmed by outrage at feeds a corresponding increase in the Hindu - displays toward the holy text, the treachery) is naturally capable of the kind consolidation of the power of an abstract latter responds by proudly announcing that of masculinity expected and demanded of masculinity. Thus, even high emotive respect for other religions has always a soldier Even so, his eventual harnessing moments like death get discharged of any characterised Hinduism: 'We have always tragic content, as death ceases to signify loss into this militarised masculinity is represented been this way'! 11 He thus unqualifiedly as first a gut reaction - firing only reflexively, but functions merely as a reiterative device endorses two favourite hindutva themes - in response to the enemy opening fire - and to an abstracted masculinity. These sleights the enduring homogeneity and the tolerance
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of Hindus and Hinduism. In Bhairav Singh's in defence of the (feminine) realm.15The war like commercial cinema anywhere - sells discourse therefore there is the conflation of itself is of little import: the immense costs, visually powerful effects; the realities it nation and femininity, religion and power, in human and material terms, that accompany invests in are designed for sale, usually so that the defence of national borders any war are so phenomenally spectacularised colourfully packaged and slickly produced, amounts to the defence of both the 'national' - casual destruction often is the bearing few traces of cither their conditions goddess and her body, indicating how deeply spectacularisation - in 'Border' that, rather of production or the seams of their these ideologies are personalised and than signify loss, they come to denote an manufacture and assemblage. All themes inflected by morality and gender. In fact, the immense power: the power of sacrificial and issues, historically accurate or otherwise, force of much of these ideologies derives masculine valour and of a national moral are consequently filtered through the lenses from these inflections. 12 This episode serves superiority. Further, vividness of violence of what is judged to be commercially viable. another linked purpose it neatly pre-empts can threaten to signify the vulnerability of A stereotypical investment (commercial and the danger of any reading of its representation the body - spurting blood, broken limbs, ideological) in a particular mode of of the conflict as a communal or religious twisted torsos - and in that 'realism 1 , the masculinity and heroism marks 'Border', so one. Identifying Pakistan as the enemy is indignity that violence forces on the subject that, even as it proposes to offer 'serious' fraught with the history of Pakistan's identity of it.16 Consequently, when the heroic Indians/ fare, it remains determined by the imperatives as an Islamic state - an identity that is subtly Hindus die, they must be seen to do so of the industry that produces it. That is, even reiterated in the communally sensitive spectacularly yet without disintegration and when it seems to be departing from offering historical environment that the episode clearly with dignity, concealing both vulnerability the pleasure-patterns of recognising the alludes to. Given the 'kill or be killed' logic and indignity. However, the hour-long established formulae that characterise the already touted by Bhairav Singh as the only spectacular battle celebrating the triumph of investments and productions of the industry, definitive rationale for and in war, the politics an inculcated masculinity which constitutes it remains fundamentally committed to its of hyper-masculinity necessarily entail an the climax of the film is followed by a programme of entertainment values. The implicit acknowledgement of an equally collaged spectacle of bereavement and an war it seeks to problematise is of necessity powerful Pakistani (read Muslim) hyper- accompanying lament sung as much for the transformed into a visually powerful, almost masculinity - a threat and a provocation13 bereaved as for the dead. The result of both appealing spectacle. The end effect is that demand complex resolutions without spectacles - separately and contrastively - therefore a peculiar, confusing overlap of compromise to Indian (read Hindu) hyper- is a serious depletion of prior textual images that results from incompatible agenda; masculinity, While victory in the war serves performance, as none of the depicted heroisms the strategic de-intensification of the facts in itself as an endorsement of the superiority in any way defend or balance the spectacle of immense d a m a g e or brutality or of the latter, it remains a 'border' resolution, of bereavement that follows. This generates bereavement that would deplete the film's marginalised from - though impinging a terminal problem of exculpating the overarching heroisms as well as the sense seriously on - the complexions of internal ideology of casually sacrificial masculine of irremediable loss. To diminish this contest, communal disease. This calls for the ideo- valour of the earlier sequences within the emphasis comes to rest on sheer and total logical affirmation of that superiority, but morality of newly and expediently legitimised visibility - the wealth of the visible that the within the terms of a constitutionally estab- terms of relationality, The irreconcilability camera brings to the spectator, converting lished secularism that would illegitimise any of a 'naturally' violent/valorous masculinity into visibility and clarity the most shrouded, such affirmation. Bhairav Singh's gesture (there is a serious slippage between the two) darkened, private - even invisible or therefore serves to 'befriend' the 'alienated' and the pitiable condition of bereavement, inaccessible - and troubled of spaces (from Muslim, even as it demonstrates, in that very abruptly becomes an incompatibility between Dharamvir's hallucinations to the spectacle 'befriending', the vaunted superiority of the masculinity and morality. That is, the film's of Bhairav Singh's death in the thick of Hindu. Thus, even while 'national concious- spectacular celebratory demonstration and battle). The seamless production of this ness has nothing to do with the sovereignty steady valorisation of a fundamentally wealth erases any indication that it is not of the nation-state, 14 the two are rendered explosive and exclusive masculinity is now so simply or openly 'available' - visible as coterminous in and by the film, explain- problematic and must be blurred to to the unenhanced eye - but is constructed ing the routine deprecatory othering charac- accommodate morality. The reason for into availability. Further, this investment teristic of the politics of chauvinism. The retaining the final curious collage then is an in the simulation of an uncomplicated and logical implication of this is, of course, that affective ploy to recuperate local masculine easy visibility is toward a unique kind of the mark of the enemy then may be just as violence as 'responsive', not aggressive - power, a power akin to omniscience; the easily found in the compatriot - an ideation by depicting our men as the dead victims power that constantly attempts to reproduce that further demands that entire histories of e x p e r i e n c e s as total experiences; - not the perpetrators of violence, alternate nationalisms, self-determination unproblematically comprehensible and synonymising them with the bereaved, and movements and minority programmes be consummable without demanding (perhaps thus exculpating them. This strategy, a elided, subsumed in the hegemonic dis- even disapproving of?) the participatory particularly obvious one in the light of the courses of martial Hindu nationalism. The experience of the viewing s u b j e c t s early sequences that extol and recommend textual clinching of this issue of course is subjectivity itself - without the subjective natural masculine violence, is one that in the final victory of the Indian forces: 'our prices that are paid in acquiring experience. therefore seeks to swerve the moral onus of morality', as espoused by the closing song, That is, it is the power to erase from death and loss away from the home-side onto is accompanied by a reverent and repeated imagination the subjectivity of imagination the enemy, precisely by dwelling on its chanting of 'Hindustan, Hindustan...' - to supply imagination as experience immoralities. itself. Thus, the wealth of images that Thus, even while the discursive registers The underlying politico-religious agenda project the war constitute the sites of the of the film open and engage with a series within which this peculiar twist of conjunction of two not entirely disparate of questions ostensibly regarding the significations can occur is, of course, largely forces: the power of film production legitimacy or justifiability of war, at no point responsible for this; the other unaccounted technology and of f i n a n c e capital to does 'Border' ever visually deviate from the factor though is the power of the construct and simulate imaginary realms as representation of the battle as a dharmyudh, commercially produced and motivated image experientially proximate; and that of political a war of righteousness, fought legitimately itself. Hindi commercial cinema - perhaps
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ideologies that are programmed toward re- 1989. Chatterjee's formulations are derived them with the 'tolerance' of Bhairav Singh primarily from the 19th century Bengal against the Muslim. The politics of such imagining the nation in the idioms of a newly juxtopositioning is evident. context and have since been substantially conceived masculinity, War, in 'Border', is critiqued; but his model remains a useful 12 For discussions on the overlap between no more than a visual grammar for this new albeit qualified ideological trope to read the the discourse o f religion, gender and speech. manufacture of gender-types undertaken in nationality see for instance Tanika Sarkar the film. and Urvashi Bhutalia (eds), Women and Notes 5 It will be indicated later how this is no more the Hindu R i g h t ( K a l i , Delhi, 1995); Kumkum than a discursive sleight as masculinity is Sangari and Sudesh Vaid teds). Recasting 1 As the original Major Chandpuri remarked never conceptualised or represented except Women: Essays in Colonial History, op on the film, "..[W]e always have to remember in antithetical sexualised and traditional cit; and Kumari Jayawardene, Feminism and that these ore two separate things - film is gender terms. Nationalism in the Third World, Zed Press, fiction, the war was for real." New Woman, 6 While no overtly homosexual signals are London, 1986. vol 1, issue V, 1997, p 61. released in this film, there is a strong celebrat- 13 This provocation is explicitly elaborated 2 During a routine patrol some members of ion of homo-erotic male bonds; this in turn in a sequence which occurs immediately the Indian BSF come upon a group of men can be seen as feeding into the constructions prior to the final battle, when the Pakistani who, on being interrogated, claim that they of masculinity that are the film's concern. forces amass at the border. Major Chandpuri w e pilgrims on their way to Mata Mandir. 7 The psychoanalytic implications of this are at this point engages in a heated and vitriolic Satisfied with the explanation, the team in themselves worth speculating on: they verbal exchange of provocations with his leaves and on the way back to their jeep clearly indicate an awareness of the mother's Pakistani counterpart in Punjabi and without discovers that the visitors' camels are dependence on Dharamvir's domestic duty to supplementary subtitles in either Hindi or eating fresh leaves that are found only on her in approximately the same sense in which English. This e x p l i c i t l y i n d e x e s the the other side of the border in Pakistan. she had depended on her husband - the demographic field of address of the film's Realising the deception, they immediately transformation of Dharamvir by his mother nationalism as being essentially northern rush back and without either further into a bridegroom. Indian, masculine and Hindu, invoking the interrogation or warning, open fire killing 8 The other women as brides are denied the trauma of the partition of Punjab as a powerful all of them in a scene w h o s e bloody valid right to interrogate; they mainly accept. affective base for its consolidation. v i v i d n e s s is unmatched in the entire This is the status that Dharamvir returns his 14 R Radhakrishnan, 'Nationalism, Gender and depiction of war that follows. mother to in order to neutralise her. the Narrative of Identity', Nationalisms and 3 This conception is owed to some of the now 9 It has been argued that the one cannot happen Sexualities Anthony Parker et al (eds), controversial formulations in Benedict without the other. (Routledge, New York and London, 1992). Anderson's, Imagined Communities: 10 Bhaskar Sarkar, Epic (Mis) takes; Nation, 15 Although a ceaseless battle is waged against Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Religion and Gender on Television', Quarterly 'femininities'. Nationalism, Verso, London, 1983, Review of Film and Video, vol I6( l), p 68. 16 Reacting to the charges that the film was 4 Partha Chatterjee, T h e Nationalist Resolution 11 It is notable that the other fleeing Hindu overly violent, the original Chandpuri of the Women's Question', Kumkum Sangari villagers display no such dangerously remarked that, 'There is no violence depicted, and Sudesh Vaid teds), Recasting Women: 'fanatical' (the blazing house is collapsing) it is rather a tribute to our Armed Forces". Essays in Colonial History, Kali, New Delhi, concern for their religious texts, aligning New Woman op cit.