Contemporary Bollywood Cinema and Politics of Nationalism: A Critical Analysis of Aditya Dhar’s Uri: The Surgical Strike

Abstract

In the present-day context of political instability and growing fear of terrorism, renewed scholarly interest in aspects like nationalism, ethnic assertion, religious fundamentalism is clearly discernible. The rising xenophobia of West, especially after the terrorist attacks of September 11, is not restricted to the white culture now, but has enormously inspired the jingoistic tendencies across the world. The belligerent nationalism that follows has seized the popular mind finding manifold expressions in forms of popular culture. Movies, music, television series, web series catering to the chauvinist taste of the audience not only has greater prospect of commercial success, but their role in the formation of the ‘imagined communities’ render them much more socially and politically influential than their counterparts. So far as India is concerned, the perpetual hostility between India and its neighbouring country Pakistan has provided thematic content for many genres of popular culture, particularly Bollywood movies, since Partition. Aditya Dhar’s Uri: the Surgical Strike (2019) is such a movie, appealing to the nationalist sentiments of Indian audience of India and overseas, that has ranked fifth among the highest grossing Bollywood films of 2019 with its box office collection of over 49 million USD within seven weeks of its release. The fact that it is the dramatised version of a supposedly true event has evidently contributed to its immense popularity. This paper aims to critically analyze the movie as a cultural artefact and explore how contemporary Bollywood movies play a significant part in inculcating ‘nationalism’ in Indian audience by naturalizing the imagined commonalities among heterogeneous subjects through the projection of a common identifiable enemy. Reading the cinematic text as a cultural ISA, as Althusser has termed it, this paper is an attempt to decode this politics of nationalism in terms of contemporary Bollywood cinema.