The spate of ‘nationalistic’ films that are setting the cash registers ringing at the box-office isn’t an entirely new phenomenon. The Indian film industry, always a majoritarian entity, has seen its share of chest-thumping patriotism from the earliest of times, but the complexion of its fervour has certainly changed.
The non-sectarian clarion call ‘Dur Hato Aye Duniya Walo’ of Kismet (1943) feels very different from the ultra-nationalistic josh of this year’s Uri: The Surgical Strike . The Sunny Deol brand of jingoism, unleashed with Border (1997), was a sea-change from the idealistic moralising of Manoj Kumar in films like Upkar (1967) or Purab Aur Paschim (1970), with the latter kind of desh bhakti perhaps having more in common with Akshay Kumar’s recent output.
Nationalism has become a byword for a unified sentiment of tribal outrage directed at the ‘other’. Even for balance, a film that might dissect the flipside of such intense flag-waving is rare on the ground. There is, of course, Satyajit Ray’s Ghare Baire (1984), that is based on the eponymous novel by Rabindranath Tagore, who wrote a famous essay on the subject in 1917. In the film, Soumitra Chatterjee’s self-avowed Swadeshi nationalism in underpinned by a political agenda that is much more partisan than he might care to admit — in fact, his stated politics is an eyewash. In the name of national pride, he bears no qualms about setting off inter-community conflagrations. Today’s political climate continues to be dominated by such demagogues.
Perils of nationalism
For a more nuanced take on the perils of nationalism, we must look elsewhere. For instance, take Kevin Macdonald’s The Last King of Scotland (2006), a film based on a novel (by Giles Foden) that is ostensibly a take-off on Macbeth . The two figures at its centre are the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin (Forest Whitaker), almost permanently in army fatigues, who was responsible for the large-scale expulsion of Indians from Africa in 1972, and his personal physician and confidant Nicholas Garrigan (James McAvoy) — a fictional composite of real-life individuals. Amin’s interest in the young Scottish man (Garrigan) presupposes an admiration for the Scotland of yore that bravely resisted the British, and it’s a coup d’etat that establishes his rule. McAvoy’s graph is an indictment of the white man’s conscience vis-a-vis Africa, whether it is as colonisers reluctantly handing in the baton or as those embracing the lap of Africa coiffed in a humanitarian bubble. In the searing climactic scene, he’s drawn with talons to the ceiling like an animal. His crime is complicity — rather than someone truly diabolical, he is an accidental if spineless bystander caught up in a political maelstrom that he misjudged as a chance for adventure. It is Whitaker’s Oscar-winning turn that gives us a measure of ethnocentric pride gone rogue. The different facets of nationalism exhibited by myriad characters in the film, the allegiances that shift from frame to frame, gives the film the feel of a thriller, but it is ultimately a cautionary tale with universal implications. The black nationalism it espouses is as exclusionary as an imperialist’s designs.
For a much more affirmative brand of African nationalism, one need not look any further than Black Panther (2018), in which Wakanda is the self-sufficient Promised Land whose people are masters of their own destiny. Its legacy remains unsullied by the forces of encroachment that have pillaged Africa through history.
Yet, the film also calls the lie on its notions of extreme loyalty to the state, ultimately allowing the dialogue and introspection that are perhaps as important as unstinting national pride.
Even as a child, the writer sought out cinema that came at least two generations before him.
