Cinema as a Discourse on Critical Geopolitics: The Imagery of India–Pakistan Borders in the Narratives of Bollywood Movies

Sanjeev Kumar and Vaishali Raghuvanshi

Journal of Borderlands Studies, 2023, vol. 38, issue 4, 623-636

Abstract: This paper attempts to map the modes by which cinematic narratives of select Hindi movies produced by Bollywood can be employed as a discourse on critical geopolitics. The focus is to understand how the representations of the India–Pakistan border in a select set of Hindi films tend to portray the psychology of cartographic fundamentalism. Situating the imagery of divided cartographies of the Indian Subcontinent in Hindi cinema, the paper looks at the ways in which the filmic narratives attempt to construct the psychology of border cleavages between India and Pakistan in the demotic consciousness of the viewers. Cinematic representations play a definitive role in constructing popular imagination regarding the issues of identity, refugee crisis and notions of cultural and psychic frontiers. The effects on collective imagination can be visualized by engaging with the narratives and powerful images that cinema is capable of presenting to the viewers. This in turn helps construct and deconstruct the popular notions by altering the dialectics of cognitive mapping.Placing our analysis in this conceptual framework, the paper examines how the psychology of divided cartographies gets inextricably linked to the nationalist construction of the image of India as the righteous self, and the portrait of Pakistan as the vicious other and country's primary enemy.The movies that have been analyzed in the paper are Border (1997), LoC (2003), Bajarangi Bhaijan (2015) and Filmistaan (2012). These movies have portrayed border as conflict-ridden non-porous zones. The paper employs discourse analysis as its methodology and discusses the cinematic reconstruction of the idea of the divided cartographies of the subcontinent on the foundations of the epistemic framework of critical geopolitics.

Date: 2023
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DOI: 10.1080/08865655.2022.2129425

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