Nationalism is bad enough, since most people love their country, and it makes little or no sense to claim "our nation is the best." But when it is paired with religious dogmatism, the result is doubly dangerous.
The October 17, 2022 issue of The New Yorker has a really interesting story, "When the Hindu Right Came for Bollywood." Here's a PDF file if you have trouble with that link. (I'm a subscriber.)
Download When the Hindu Right Came for Bollywood | The New Yorker
It's unfortunate that India has become so polarized -- the fate of many nations, including the United States. But in this country, at least Christian nationalists don't get to tell Hollywood how to make movies. The story describes how in India, Hindu nationalists are trying to do just that.
Here's some excerpts from the story.
In the summer of 2019, the actor Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub won a role on “Tandav,” an Indian political drama being produced by Amazon Prime. The title was clever. In Hindu lore, the tandav is the dance of life and death performed by Shiva, the god whose terrible powers can end the universe—a neat metaphor for the dark, intricate maneuvers of national politics.
When Ayyub read the show’s script, he spied a handful of allusions to the India around him. In one episode, policemen barge onto a university campus to arrest a Muslim student leader. The scene recalled the government’s persecution of popular student politicians and, more broadly, the hostility toward Muslims that marks the Hindu nationalism of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (B.J.P.).
...Drawing inspiration from bleak headlines—the religious lynchings, the cronyism, the autocratic acts of the state—had become a fraught enterprise. The B.J.P. and its supporters were growing intolerant of contrary views and criticism, and they were liable to react badly—through social-media attacks, targeted harassment by government agencies, or endless litigation. Outright violence was rarer, although its threat was never distant. “In the year or so before ‘Tandav,’ ” the lawyer said, “people were objecting to anything.”
...When “Tandav” premièred, in January, 2021, Ayyub was on location, shooting a film. On Twitter, he noticed that he was being tagged frequently—sometimes by people praising him, but mostly amid heaps of abuse. In cities and towns far from Mumbai, people filed police complaints, claiming that the portrayal of a foulmouthed Shiva was an insult to Hinduism. (A B.J.P. official told me that, in the large family of Hindu-nationalist organizations, “an enthusiastic worker can always be found who will file these complaints to keep his bosses happy.”)
Such cases usually go nowhere, but in the B.J.P.’s India, where the police and the courts are pliant, it’s hard to be sanguine. Recently, a Muslim journalist was imprisoned for three weeks because someone complained that a four-year-old tweet derided Hinduism. The account that reported him was anonymous, had one tweet and one follower on the day of the arrest, and went offline thereafter.
...Filmmaking thrives in plenty of other cities in India, but “Bollywood” has become shorthand for Indian cinema as a whole, and for the thousand or so movies that the country releases annually. For nearly a century, Bollywood has also worn the warm, self-satisfied gloss of being a passion that unifies a country of divisions. Not only are its audiences as mixed as India itself, filmmakers will say, but Bollywood is a place where caste and religion don’t matter. The most piously presented proof of this is the fact that, in a Hindu-majority country, a Muslim man named Shah Rukh Khan has been the supreme box-office star for decades.
Even if Bollywood possesses this liberal fibre, the rightward swing in Indian politics has gnawed away at it. In Mumbai, people divide recent history into pre-“Tandav” and post-“Tandav” periods, reading the show’s fate—its bitter legal battles, its suspended second season—as a lesson in what can and cannot be said in Modi’s India.
...The B.J.P. often ascribes these events to fringe elements or faceless Hindu “patriots.” But the number of such incidents makes filmmakers assume that they’re seeing a bigger transformation, in which the average member of their audience now truly likes everything the B.J.P. likes, and abhors everything it abhors. For anyone with hundreds of millions of rupees riding on a movie, a director of lavish blockbusters said, these are tectonic confusions. “When someone thinks of a movie idea—not just me but other people who think of themselves as liberals—they think, Is it O.K. if my hero is a Muslim?” he told me. “But the darker question is: Is there even an audience out there for this kind of movie?”
...One morning, a man with a polite mustache joined me at my hotel for breakfast. Once a consummate outsider, he is now trying to become a new kind of insider. I’ll call him Ramesh, because although he belongs to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the mother ship of the B.J.P. and other Hindu-nationalist groups, he was keen to stress that he was meeting me in a personal capacity. The R.S.S., a volunteer organization that’s nearly a hundred years old, isn’t a political party. It’s the custodian of a belief that India is, first and foremost, a land for Hindus; it aspires so much to a literally muscular Hinduism that its members often receive paramilitary training.
...Happy endings are relative, though. If a film conforms to the R.S.S.’s vision of India, Ramesh excuses any manipulations of fact; if it departs from that vision, Ramesh believes that its creators seek to “tarnish” India’s image. He cited “The Empire,” a show on Disney’s Indian platform, about Babur, the Muslim warrior who founded the Mughal dynasty in India, in 1526. Why make a show that humanizes Babur, Ramesh wondered. He doesn’t consider Muslim rulers to be Indian, even if they were born in the country. “They were invaders,” he said.
...“It’s only in the late nineteen-eighties, and really with greater and greater frequency in the nineteen-nineties, that mainstream films start showing Muslims as gangsters, smugglers, and then terrorists,” Bhaskar said. Not by coincidence, she pointed out, these were also the decades when the B.J.P. grew as an electoral force. In 1992, after calling for the destruction of a mosque in the temple town of Ayodhya, B.J.P. and R.S.S. leaders watched as their followers tore the building down in a matter of hours.
The demolition ignited riots, ushering India toward its present condition of chronic, quivering polarization. In 2010, Bhaskar met the director Yash Chopra, who had made many staunchly secular movies between the sixties and the eighties. “We couldn’t make those kinds of films today,” he told her. The plural ideal had withered too much. “Back then, we had faith in it.”
...Earlier this year, Banerjee sent me a Vimeo link to his finished film, which confronts the bigotry infecting India. Banerjee approaches his theme slowly and sideways, through the story of one Muslim family. The family’s first generation, living in Kashmir during the unrest in 1990, finds itself sundered from its Hindu friends. In the second generation, a young woman wants to buy an apartment in present-day Mumbai, but no one will sell to her. (Muslims in Indian cities commonly struggle to find places to live, a form of discrimination practiced by Hindu homeowners and residents’ societies.)
...Banerjee’s film joins a growing trove of content that studios and filmmakers are reluctant to air. One director told me that he’d shot a love story about a couple who run away from home to be together. No one wants to release the film, he said, because “it just so happens that the boy is Muslim and the girl is Hindu.”
Religion and nationalism seem to be bed-fellows, bed-fellows in that they both stem from the basic needs to feel secure, not only physical security but psychological security in the sense that to 'belong' to a religion or a country is to be part of something to be attached to that helps to boost one sense of identity.
Perhaps the reason for so much discord and violence is that one becomes so identified with a particular belief that to threaten it in any way is to threaten the very identity or self structure that is a prominent part of the ego aspect of the mind.
Nationalism has some positive attributes in that in can help build the infrastructure of a nation: bring endless job opportunities: gives strength to a nation etc. Conversely, it can lead to isolation: it can lead to war: develops prejudice and so on. I would reckon that all the alleged positive points of nationalism (and religion) could be achieved through a more universal manner based on the mutual understanding that we all have to live on this planet. After all, self interest (national, economic – and religion) has helped bring the planet to the point where its naturally evolved eco-system is collapsing.
India with its hate (or fear) filled climate is a mess – but so is Russia, the USA, much or Europe, the Far East etc. Sadly, I don't see a way out of our self-imposed mire, mostly because we don't really want to change, we don't want to give up our particularly long-standing standards of living and/or our particular psychological investments in our various belief systems.
Ending on a lighter note, when Monty Python's Life of Brian came out, a town in Wales (UK) recommended a ban in 1979 saying the movie made fun of Christianity and was blasphemous by a committee made up of church leaders. The 30-year ban on Monty Python's Life of Brian, was finally repealed with two members of the legendary comedy troupe attending the movie's first screening in the town in three decades. Perhaps there's hope for us yet!
Posted by: Ron E. | October 27, 2022 at 03:02 AM
That was very interesting, Ron, the 30-year Monty Python ban thing at that righteous and blessed little town.
But I'm afraid you're far too cavalier about blasphemy. The commandment about blasphemy is up there among the top three for a reason. No one should take blasphemy lightly.
Here's a troubling documentary that presents a grim picture about what happens when a degenerate irreligeous populace starts taking blasphemy lightly. Our Lord JC, no less --- well, okay, an earlier generation’s Lord, not quite ours, but still --- laughed at and ridiculed by oblique and completely sacrilegious references to some two-by-four ignorant peasant of a lunatic tradesman! That outrage is the kind of thing that happens when people take as loose a view on blasphemy as you.
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asUyK6JWt9U
Posted by: Appreciative Reader | October 28, 2022 at 11:07 AM
Pity, the complete mess over at India. Not just the Bollywood thing, but in general I mean to say.
I mean, it’s always a pity when this sort of thing happens, always. But more so because this is India. I mean, this is the land that, centuries and millennia ago, gave to the entire world the priceless treasure that are the Upanishads. The land that gave us so many deep insights in philosophy and spirituality --- true spirituality, the true search for who and what one is. And this is also the land that, not very long ago, produced stalwarts of the likes of Mahatma Gandhi, who not just helped deliver that unfortunate land from centuries of abject slavery and colonial exploitation, but did it in a way that was truly unique the world over, and presented to the entire world, and for all time, a lesson in how to wed spirituality on the one hand, and harsh reality and hard-nosed politics on the other hand; and showed how this can be done not just in the best of times when all that troubles one are mild irritants, but the worst as well.
For this land to be overrun by this bunch of vulgar semi-literate yahoos, for this sublime intellectual heritage of that land of giants to be overrun by the ignorant self-serving hypocritical chattering of this bunch of Bandar Log types --- to use that uniquely Indian, if colonial, metaphor --- that is nothing short of completely tragic.
Posted by: Appreciative Reader | October 28, 2022 at 11:17 AM
@Appreciative "Pity, the complete mess over at India. Not just the Bollywood thing, but in general I mean to say..."
Very well said. I appreciate the comments.
Posted by: Di | October 28, 2022 at 11:49 AM
Dont forget Gurinder singh dhillon does not condone bullies and thugs. He regularly gives the green lights behind the scenes for his RSSB sevadar to beat up innocent farmers. These farmers have every right to protest about how the bully dhillon and his family and his cronies steal farm land and their very livelihoods. His brainwashed sangat only see is dhillon as love and light and a saviour figure, how completely opposite are his character and morals standings. Dirty dhillon, your days are totally numbered, you are an evil, vile, man and all your family happily live off the spoils of laundered , siphoned money from your own blood nephews. How shameful of a human being you are.
Posted by: Ranvir | October 28, 2022 at 01:44 PM
About 4 weeks ago, Beas sevadars and a sikh sect called Nihangs got into it pretty bad. Both sides were injured in fighting as well as police officers. Beas sevadars were forcibly stopping the Nihangs from grazing their cattle on Beas property. Things got out of hand really fast. I guess the sevadars didn't want cattle to be eating on Beas property. Shots were fired into the air from both sides and stones and sticks were used by both sides also. I guess sevadars are allowed to commit assault now.
https://www.hindustantimes.com/cities/chandigarh-news/10-injured-as-nihangs-clash-with-radha-soami-sect-followers-over-cattle-grazing-101662319164699.html
Posted by: Reporter | October 28, 2022 at 04:06 PM
A.R. Blasphemy!! Can't ever remember being blasphemous – just enjoyed the film, particularly the sending up and exposing some of the ridiculousness of various political militants, unquestioning crowds of believers, denying 'what did the Romans ever done for us' etc., along with the many examples of human gullibility – all done with humour.
I'm surprised that their other film, (much more risqué) 'The Meaning of Life' got away so easily and not resulting in bans or boycotts – and it didn’t do anywhere near as well at the box office.
Many religious countries play the blasphemy card so harshly it shows the inhumanity and lack of compassion that can often go hand-in-hand with putting beliefs before people.
Posted by: Ron E. | October 29, 2022 at 02:40 AM
Convicted murderer and rapist head of Dera Sacha Sauda serving life ,given parole by BJP Government to assist with their forthcoming state elections, BJP organising and attending his satsangs which he performs as messenger of God. Even Mr Modi calls him messenger GOD.https://www.ptcnews.tv/hc-lawyer-blames-haryana-govt-of-pampering-ram-rahim-sends-legal-notice
Posted by: Baba Land Grab. | October 29, 2022 at 03:58 AM
A well established Indian nutter Baba Gurinder Singh Dhilion is a well known corrupt criminal. Who has every intention of becoming the worlds number one Shameless Baba.
Which he has finally achieved.
He will go at any lengths to see his mafia style organisation called Radha Soami to become a global well known Cult which is based on a foundation of well told lies.
He has jailed and coned many out of pocket, locked his own nephews up after stealing millions from them. Bullied farmers out of they're land, stole millions from bollywood directors and the whole world knows about him but as Gurinder is a Shameless character he still carrys on.
His 2 Sons still live off his dirty money in London in luxurious mansions in Mayfair and have no Shame too as from where they're so called Baba of a father all of a sudden made a fortune all from a waiters job in Spain.
Talk about promotion or shall we say dirty money dhillon pays the way
The world sees all, even if you still think they don't . EXPOSED!!
Posted by: Trez | October 29, 2022 at 01:24 PM
Bollywood is fuly sponsored by terrorists Grow up Brian.
Posted by: Deepak | November 07, 2022 at 02:09 AM