When does cinema stop being entertainment and become propaganda? Hindi film has long romanticised the nation, but what’s happening now is something else entirely. In the latest Himal Footnotes, associate editor Nayantara Narayanan sits down with film critic Anna MM Vetticad and journalist Raza Rumi to talk about how Bollywood has become a vehicle for Hindutva ideology by manufacturing mythic pasts, normalising anti-Muslim violence and lending cinematic glamour to the BJP’s political project. Using the Dhurandhar franchise as a case study, they ask harder questions about the industry: How does propaganda disguise itself as entertainment? What happens when the line between fiction and political fact-making is deliberately blurred? And what has been lost from the Hindi cinema that once held space for a more plural, secular India?
Disclosure: I know Raza Rumi and have worked with him when he was at “The Friday Times”. I was mostly doing editorial work during what was essentially a summer internship. He has written a book about his experiences traveling in Delhi (where I believe his family was from). The book is called Delhi By Heart: Impressions of a Pakistani Traveller.
By Umair Javed
At this admittedly early stage of a changing world order, multipolarity is cementing domestic tendencies that already prevail. The status quo, along with the economic interests aligned with it, will continue to navigate geopolitics in ways that serve regime consolidation rather than broad-based development. For that calculus to change, the three issues/ contradictions identified above would need to become the organising basis of a political challenge capable of compelling a renegotiation of state-society relations. That is a high bar. But it is the only honest answer to the question of what multipolarity can offer a country like Pakistan. The world can change its architecture without changing who benefits inside Pakistan’s borders. That part remains entirely a domestic problem and a domestic responsibility.
3) Nothing can stop the breakup of Britain. Even Farage is powerless.
By Aris Roussinos