This book is not an ode to Bollywood’s anti-Pakistan blockbusters.  In fact it tells you quite the opposite when it says there is a sexual insult involved in getting girls from the other side of the border to fall in love with Hindu men.

Anil Sharma’s Gadar (‘Revolution’, 2001) was the crudest and most emphatic assertion of this phenomenon, according to the authors. “Here, male Indian protagonist plays the macho lover-rescuer to the beleaguered Pakistani female protagonist. The working assumption is that the predominant Indian-Hindu audience in India would not be able to accept a story where the Pakistani-Muslim man sexually annexes an Indian woman. Since Hindi films are made primarily for an Indian audience, they can ill-afford to reverse this chauvinistic storyline and male-female equation”. (p.131).
The opening article by Kishore Budha makes an interesting observation thus: “Right wing politics have always seen mass media as propagating conservative ideas of nationalism and patriotism. Their arguments stem from the belief in media effects as well as the soft power of Hindi cinema in creating and sustaining imagery, myths and legends about the nation”. (p.6)

While LOC Kargil (2003) was all about Indian victory and Pakistan’s defeat in the Kargil war,   in Main Hoon Na (2004) the good Indian warrior (Shahrukh Khan) was all for releasing Pakistani prisoners while the bad guys were trying to thwart him.  Veer Zaara (2004) was friendly too but contained the insult that no Pakistani could have missed: the irreducible condition of having a Hindu hero (Shahrukh Khan) ensnare a Muslim beauty (Preity Zinta).  

War themes are no guarantors of box office hit. Several biggies have burnt their fingers. Director Farhan took pains to clarify that Lakshya (The Objective, 2004) merely used the war as a backdrop to explore struggles of individuality. The failure of Maa Tujhe Salaam (2006) led Sunny Deol to distance himself from patriotism and stick to straightforward dramas” (p11) But ‘multi-starrers’ like Border and Refugee had made record big money.

Interesting book by all means to the student of cinema and the intellectual keen to know the mind of Bollywood.