Description
The intimate connection between film production, history making and nation building is well established. This discursive struggle remains a particularly contested site especially when the contours of remembering, retelling and morphing of collective memory are considered. In the Indian case itself, this relationship between the mainstream Hindi film industry, morality, memory and propaganda has a rich history which is equal parts didactic and censorious and at times, critical, though never apolitical. However, since the advent of Modi on the political scene, the widening reach of the Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP) IT cell and the proliferation of streaming services in India, a whole genre of blatantly propagandist cinema has taken root with enormous reach to proliferate polarising narratives of collective memory of episodes in Indian history. When considered that popular media in India is far from free and the expansive reach of fake news, these exercises in myth making and morphed retellings of history function as an addendum to the Hindutva project of rebuilding the Indian state according to its purported narratives.
This paper analyses this morphing of memory, history and propaganda and the proliferation of Hindutva messaging in mainstream Hindi films. Intrinsically, the relevance of exploiting, modifying and constructing collective memory is at the heart of this analysis. There are many ways in which this relevance is visible present in film productions of recent times like the solidification of ongoing, recent struggles of power being consolidated into the public mindset for posterity with a clear bias towards the Hindutva state position as well as construction of state enemy like in the films Jehangir National University and Kerela Story; another is presenting a teleological, unitary narrative of contentious past Indian history with a simplifying narrative in line with the official Hindutva state position like Kashmir Files; finally, a third is the more categorical nature of propagandist films that consolidate all glory in the BJP like the films Toilet and Mission Mangal. It proposes three questions to delineate these processes: firstly, in what ways has film been used as a means of constructing history and how do these propagandist experiments eke legitimacy for their project; second, how is the Hindutva project building political agency via the medium of both the films being produced in support of its ideological and political project as well as the instrumentalisation and demonisation of agents of film making processes to solidify its project; thirdly, is there scope for protest in film as a site in India especially as a challenge to the production and solidification of collective memory making exercises by the Hindutva state.
