Numerous Bollywood films address the trauma of communal violence that has plagued India’s recent history. According to Rai, these films construct the Muslim terrorist as a monstrous “other” to be exorcised from a Hinduized national family. Rai, who analyzes the “cinepatriotism” evident in these films, offers telling insights into the rhetoric of counter-terrorism, also applicable to the US media.

Amit Rai is a faculty member in Literature and Cultural Studies at the New School in New York City. He has written on diverse topics including South Asian popular culture, the internet and identity, the actor Shammi Kapoor, the US War on Terrorism, and Gandhi and sexuality. In addition to numerous journal articles, Rai recently published his first book, Rule of Sympathy: Sentiment, Race and Power ( St. Martin 's Press-Palgrave, 2002). He is currently working on a study of Hindi cinema tentatively titled New Empire Cinema: Bollywood and the Cinematic Assemblage.

In Vidhu Vinod Chopra's Mission Kashmir (2000), we are witness to a scene beyond the borders of the nation, where a play of shadows mimes the secret negotiation of political-economic interests and religious sentiment. Hilal Kohistani (Jackie Shroff), an Afghan militant famed for his resistance to Russian colonialism, accepts a new mission from his Pakistani and Saudi backers; withdrawn in the shadows is the immobile silhouette of a turbaned man who commits $20 million for the entire operation.

Militant: They say that in Afghanistan the Russians used to flee their tanks at hearing your name.

Kohistani: Leave names. Talk of work.

M: Mission Kashmir. This work...

K: Will be done. Price?

M: Don't worry about money. Complete the mission and we'll pay you any price you want. Since 1947, all the attacks on India have been government-organized. We owe allegiance to no government. We are a free group, and we are soldiers for freedom. There are more Muslims in India than Pakistan. After our mission they too will join our jihad. And our unknown group will become the most illustrious. We will have the most illustrious name among all the world's mujahideen. In 1971, India changed the map of Asia. Now, we will change the shape of India. For every great goal, a great sacrifice is necessary. And the reward is also very great, God willing.

K: Ten million. Dollar.

Turbaned figure in shadows: Twenty million. To give money for jihad is as virtuous as giving alms. But even the name of this mission can't go beyond these walls.

K: Secrets buried in a Pathan's heart don't emerge even on Judgment Day. You take care of your own people.

M: We have organized the arms and ammunition aspect. TV camera, tapes and technical support will be provided as needed. If you need anything else...

K: A man who isn't afraid of death. Who so despises his own existence that I can fire him like a missile to destroy the target and himself.

M: A man like that... ?

K: I have such a man… Altaaf.

M: Where is your Altaaf now?

K: Crossing into Hindustan.

The film cuts to a scene of dense forests and picturesque mountains, across which moves inexorably a lone figure, Altaaf, making his way into Hindustan, like an infection moving through the body politic. The metaphor of an infection attacking the otherwise secure social body is of course quite common in the discourse on terrorism. 1   In India, these metaphors translate into concrete practices of purifying the nation of all anomalies or inconsistencies: the Indian citizen and the Muslim subject are locked in a violent embrace of normalization that seeks to suture the other (the Muslim) to the project of Indian nationalism. In Mission Kashmir, Altaaf is that element of infection; his character poses a challenge to fantasies of immunity, which animate contemporary discourses of Indian nationalism.

My paper traces the representation of the Islamic terrorist in three popular Hindi films: Sarfarosh (“Self-Sacrifice,” 1999; dir. John Mathew Matthan), Fiza (“Air,” 2000; dir. Khalid Mohamed), and Mission Kashmir (2000, Vidhu Vinod Chopra). These films are part of what one critic has recently called the renewed cinepatriotism” 2   of Bollywood: a set of films, indeed a genre now, that seeks to represent, visualize, and narrativize the sovereignty of the supposedly secular, but in practice upper-caste, Hindu Indian nation. As such, they have both critiqued and fueled the ongoing tensions between Hindus and Muslims that mark India 's postcoloniality. These tensions have been marked by an increasing regularity of murderous clashes between Hindu nationalist forces and Muslim communities, 3   which accompany the sometimes low-intensity, sometimes guerilla war between India and Pakistan over the northern state of Kashmir.

Set against this social and political backdrop, the new wave of cinepatriotism emerging from Bollywood is especially important because its narratives intervene in the debates around Muslim identity and Indian nationalism by rearticulating a kind of secular national subject. In this essay, I draw together a group of recent Hindi films that both activate and refuse Hindu nationalism in particular ways. First, I link the melodramatic form of Hindi cinema to the romance of the (Hinduized) national family. I then tie the representation of the Muslim terrorist to the construction of the abnormal monster in contemporary discourses of counter-terrorism both in the West and in India. This monstrous figure serves to legitimate strategies of normalization through the performance of the proper minority subject, and through the figuration of “nationalized” women. These films show the many strategies – complex and contradictory – at work in contemporary Hindi films aimed to manage that infection known today in Hindu India as the Muslim “other.”

Melodrama and the National Family

Contemporary representations of Muslims in Hindi films position specific cultural and religious identities as both necessary and intolerable to the security of the Indian nation. The figures of the radically alienated Muslim, juxtaposed with the patriotic Muslim and Christian citizen, and the dominant, often unmarked Hindu show how difference is crucial to the stability of the Indian nation – but not excessive difference: the militant Muslim is the figure of an intolerable difference.

Tying the question of community identity to broader economic processes, Arvind Rajgopal has recently argued that negotiating the tensions between national allegiance and other, more local forms of identity becomes increasingly important with the progress of globalization. 5   These tensions stem from the resiliency of community as a locus of affiliation, one that resists the homogenizing impetus of capital by acting as a site of historic memory and a resource for alternative futures. As Rajgopal states, “The kinds of rights asserted here are distinct from the chiefly individual character of the rights sought [after] and contested in western society. Classical liberal theory is unable to recognize communities as political actors... rendering it incapable of coming to terms with the kinds of developments witnessed in the contemporary world.” 6 It is in this at once communalized and globalizing context 7   that I would situate the construction of Muslim militant identity in Hindi films – an identity simultaneously inside and outside the Indian nation.

In Hindi films, hindutva takes the form of a post-secular nationalism, one that produces irreducible differences through melodramatic narratives of authentic belonging to the national family. As we shall see, the patriarchal family is still quite literally the model for the nation. 8   Moreover, the family provides a template for citizenship as well, through which minority subjectivity, once differentiated, normalized and marked off from the Muslim terrorist, is repatriated into the national family. 9   The heterosexual, usually extended Hindu family is the norm and telos of these narratives, in which a reconstituted family structure sutures the trauma of monstrosity, the trauma, that is, of a certain history. The suture here works in two ways. First, the traumatic history of partition is imaginarily resolved through a romanticized notion of the national family. And second, the anxiety caused by the political demands of India 's heterogeneous minorities (not only Muslims but also non-upper caste Hindus) is managed by this image of an organic national community.

Not surprisingly, this sense of belonging to a national family is also an occasion to position women as both supplementary to the violent struggle between opposed masculine forces, and central to their eventual normalization in domesticity. As Geeta Kapur suggests, national narratives have to engage with the anxious problematic of identity “wherein what is insecure is mapped on to the female body: the body posed for unabashed viewing outside the margins of history but inside a national pictorial schema.” 10   Extending and transforming an older nationalist imaginary around the figure of woman – for instance, in the classic film Mother India (1957) – these films position femininity ambiguously between the sacred space of the home and the contamination of the world, while heterosexualizing this zone of ambiguity through a fetishistic male gaze. 11 This space of ambiguity forms a kind of stage where Muslim women enact their patriotic duty: as “good” domesticated citizens, they are agents of normalization who draw the wayward Muslim male back into the national fold.

Moreover, the strategic combination of filmic and aesthetic forms that characterizes cinepatriotic films – somewhere between the commercial Bollywood melodrama and an older social realist art cinema – enables a peculiarly apt cultural form to chart such traumas of history. On the one hand, the melodramatic form of these films speaks to the violence of trauma, helping to minimize or redirect the force of that trauma. On the other hand, by engaging with the social realist tradition of Hindi films, these films lay claim to a pedagogical project of transforming history. The Hindi film aesthetic, as numerous critics have noted, is a strategic mixture of several factors: Hollywood continuity narrative, nineteenth-century gothic and sentimental fiction, Hindu darsan or the worshipful act of seeing the divine in an image, Parsi theater which often includes song and dance, and nineteenth-century tableau painting. As I argue below, this aesthetic is constructed through a set of ideologies that mediate between the home and the world, the sacred and the profane, and the sensual and the spiritual.

This particular combination has been transformed in the past ten years with the advent of economic liberalization and cultural globalization. More and more Hindi films attempt to present a spectacle that will sell in the diasporic markets of America and Europe. The hallmarks of this influence include shooting in foreign (i.e., Western or Western-looking) locations, the commodification of women's bodies, a defense of a narrow ideological nationalism, the spectacle of Western brand names on the screen, lavish lifestyles, and of course unimpeded mobility. By presenting viewers with an unabashedly cosmopolitan (no longer merely nationalist metropolitan) subject and lifestyle – one that is as at home in New York as in Bhopal – the worshipful act of darsan, for instance, has found a new god in globalization. This loosening of national ties reorients the traditionally and avowedly national aesthetics of Hindi cinema through the anxieties of not-belonging to the nation, and these anxieties, I would argue, are legible especially in the genre of cinepatriotism.

In the films I discuss below, this ideologically constructed aesthetic is manipulated in specific ways through the use of melodrama. We should keep in mind some recent work that has sought to tie melodrama to an analysis of trauma and history. For instance, E. Ann Kaplan in Screen has argued that as a Western genre “occupying the space between history and the unconscious, melodrama offers an imaginary focused on the private sphere of the family – where traumas are secret, hidden – yet an arena structured by male power in the public sphere.” 12 This necessary bridging of the private/public divide through melodrama can also usefully be thought of as a symptom of what Kaplan calls “cultural trauma.” In the Hindi films that I consider here, the “impact of an overwhelming event” (both psychic and historical), which cannot be absorbed and is therefore split off, becomes repeated and resolved through narratives that ensure “closure and cure at the film's end.” 13 Sometimes this trauma takes the form of a specific violence in the film, but always there is an oblique reference to the founding trauma of the Indian nation: the partition of 1947, where millions of people died in communal rioting.

It is in repetition that trauma is specifically activated and managed. According to Kaplan, “The repetition of certain stories may betray a traumatic cultural symptom, while the mode's adherence to realism, and thus to closure, seals over the traumatic ruptures and breaks that the culture endured. The style reassures the viewer, who leaves the cinema believing she is safe and that all is well in her world.” 14   Of course, the “certain story” that gets repeated in these Hindi films is a repetition in multiple forms of the partition narrative – a sudden loss, an end to speech, a death, a murder. In the three films that I consider here, a historical trauma tears apart a family. In Fiza, the loss of a son during the 1993 riots provokes his sister's search for the truth of those events. In Mission Kashmir, the death of a Hindu child and the murder of a Muslim family are unequally balanced on a scale of justice that is questioned again and again. In Sarfarosh, the murder of a brother and the maiming of the father by terrorists give force to the national sacrifice of the main character. The force of these traumas is then dispersed throughout the narrative in specific ways and with specific effects. Moreover, the specific events in the filmic narrative make oblique reference to and hence keep alive the memory of partition.

At the same time, this repetition disrupts the linear progression of these stories, problematizing the narrative structure. The experience of trauma is organized through paralysis, repetition, and circularity. As such, the “struggle to figure trauma's effects cinematically leads to means other than linearity or story: fragments, hallucinations, flashbacks are the modes trauma cinema characteristically adopts.” 15   There are, however, examples that test the limits of this theory of trauma and melodrama. Certainly all three films utilize memory, flashback and narration. They repeat again and again the loss that animates both the central characters and the story itself. Indeed, in keeping with the fragmentary nature of Hindi film aesthetics, this trauma serves to interrupt repeatedly the narrative flow. However, unlike the typical Bollywood use of flashbacks, the cinepatriotic film reactivates the trauma in order to forge a link with a socially real history that must be reimagined so that the future can be transformed.

Cinematic Depictions of Trauma

About the Mumbai riots, Amaan says to Fiza, “Everyone knew what was happening in that city, which everyone calls the most modern. How people were being massacred, how in the name of TADA [Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act] 20  women and old people were being molested and harassed.” It is as if the horror of the event expands each time, until finally we understand that although still living, Amaan is in some fundamental way already dead. As he says in his final speech, just before he asks his sister to shoot him, “I died a long time ago on the streets of Mumbai.” Amaan is a subject haunted by his own ghost.

Trauma sets up the central problem that will be resolved through narrative, a resolution that reconstitutes the nation in the figure of the individualized and domesticated protagonist. In the climax of Fiza, we can see this resolution and reconstitution taking shape through the charged dialogue between brother and sister, Amaan and Fiza. Murad Khan, the leader of the jihad, decides that two Hindu and Muslim political leaders (Singh and Syed) who try to suppress enquiry into the riots must be killed in order to prevent a Muslim-supported, Hindu-dominated coalition government. Khan chooses Amaan for the mission. Amaan trains his body and then kills the two leaders. But Murad Khan never intended that he survive: as chaos once again engulfs Mumbai, Khan orders his men to kill Amaan. Instead, Amaam kills them. In the last scene of the film, with the police chasing him, Fiza confronts her brother.

Fiza: Throw the rifle away, Amaan.

Amaan: What will happen then? Another will pick it up.

F: So much hatred, Amaan? Forget all this. There is still time.

A: This is not hatred. It is a voice raised against hatred. They call those who die fighting in jihad martyrs [shaheed]. 21 

F: Jihad means a fight for truth, and the truth is that we are of this country and will remain part of it. Where is it written in the Koran that to win your point you must spill blood? What kind of warrior [mujahid] are you that you can't accept this fact? Right yourself, Amaan. Accept it. Look, only what is right will prevail.

A: What is right, sis? What happened to me six years ago, was that right? Are these Singh and Syed people right? If they wanted to, they could fix all this. But they don't do that, sis. They have power, but with that power they pit us against each other. Separate us from each other so they can retain their own seats of power. If such people are right then I have done no wrong. I am pure [pak]. I didn't take up this rifle as a hobby. It just came to me through a line of fate in my hand.

As the police take their position against Amaan, he begs his sister to shoot him, saying, “I died a long time ago on the streets of Mumbai. Let me die with honor.” Fiza pulls the trigger. In this complex and heartrending climax, Fiza stands for the assimilated Muslim and Amaan for that trajectory beyond the pale of normality. In their dialogue, honor can be taken ironically to mean both living by the duties of the proper minority citizen and dying with the cry of those who will never be allowed into the nation.

Similarly, in Mission Kashmir, the drama centers on the possibility of Muslims being included in the nation. Inspector of Police Inayat Khan (Sanjay Dutt) seeks vengeance for the death of his son, who died due to circumstances arising from a fatwa issued by Islamic militants. Marshalling his police force, he dons the black mask of the militants and lets loose a hail of bullets that not only kills the militants, but an innocent Muslim family as well. This killing, reminiscent of so much police repression and outright assassination of innocent Muslim peoples, forms the trauma that will return and expand through the narrative. The only survivor of Khan's killing spree is a twelve-year-old boy, Altaaf, who before fainting from terror glimpses Khan's eyes behind the mask. Altaaf's nightmares keep the past present, as if Khan's eyes were keeping watch over a memory that can only be presented through fragments and repetition.

Trauma gives birth to a character who conflates the present with the past. In one nightmare, Altaaf (now the grown up Hrithik Roshan) blurs the object of his desire, his childhood sweetheart Sufi (Preety Zinta), with the memory of his foster mother, Neelima. In this scene, a dream sequence of the adult Altaaf, a certain struggle over Islam is at stake.

Altaaf: Why did you hang up on me, Sufi?

Sufi: I don't want to speak with you.

A: And so you put a picture of me on TV to get me killed?

S: What of all the people you've killed?

A: Sufi, why don't you understand? I'm doing all this for my religion.

S: I'm a Muslim, too. Islam doesn't permit the murder of innocent people. You're only taking revenge for your parents' death, Altaaf.

[As she walks away, he screams her name, demanding she stop; finally, he shoots her. When he turns her body over, he finds it is Neelima Khan.]

In this dream sequence, the loss of Altaaf's childhood love Sufi not only blurs with a subliminal desire for his foster-mother, but also foreshadows the moment when Altaaf accidentally kills Neelima. In a plot to avenge the murder of his family, Altaaf plants a bomb to destroy Inspector Khan, but it kills Neelima instead. Here, as in other cinepatriotic films, the memory of trauma functions to link the subject beyond the law of the nation to the sentimentalized ties of kinship, and then to rupture those very ties through the fragmentation of narrative.

Inspector Khan and his police force track down the Afghan mujahid, Hilal Kohistani, just in time to discover the real meaning of Mission Kashmir. The militants plan to blow up Hazratbul masjid 22 and the Shankaracharya temple, 23 and a pre-produced video tape will fix the blame on Hindu soldiers with the ultimate aim of inciting communal riots throughout India. In the climactic fight scene, Inspector Khan, the man who killed Altaaf's family, convinces Altaaf of the sinister plan. Altaaf remembers his foster mother's words of love. She had said, “In reality, this war is not between you and Khan-saab. On one side is love [mohabbat], on the other side hatred [nafrat]. On one side is compassion [insaniyat] on the other side brutality. Between innocence and guilt, good and evil, and humanity [insaniyat] and bestiality [haivaniat]. What will remain of Kashmir – this is what you, only you have to decide. So think very carefully before firing that gun, Alaaf.” As if suddenly humanized, Altaaf shoots Kohistani and foils the terrorist plot.

The movie ends with Altaaf, Inspector Khan (who now serves as his re-claimed foster parent) and Sufi reunited and at home. Thus, the trauma that haunted Altaaf is displaced and resolved through the elimination of Kohistani and the integration of a chastened, repatriated Altaaf into a new family structure. We must note the specific role of women, domesticity and humanization through memory and flashback that marks this genre of Hindi film. In a crucial sense, without the figure of Sufi and the memory of Neelima, Altaaf would be lost to the forces of evil.

In our third film, Sarfarosh, we find a similar problem and an analogous resolution. The narrative is launched through a trauma of familial violence. The patriarch of an extended Hindu family, on his way to give evidence against atankvadis or “terrorists” is abducted, and the older son is killed. Ajay, the younger son, witnesses it all. The father is tortured and then returned to the family, incapacitated for life. The complex narrative follows Ajay as he joins the Indian Police Service bureaucracy and goes on to become a feared officer who tortures suspected criminals. Finally, we see Ajay avenge the death of his brother and the maiming of his father by displacing the trauma onto the doomed terrorist Gulfam Hasan, a Pakistani agent posing as an entertainer, who smuggles arms into India trying to foment insurrection. The movie ends with Ajay promising his college sweetheart, Seema, that he'll be home for dinner as soon as he apprehends another insurgent criminal with his Muslim subaltern sidekick, Salim. I suggest that all these narratives resolve the individualized memory of collective trauma in terms of the success (Ajay and Salim in Sarfarosh, and Inspector Khan and Altaaf in Mission Kashmir ) or failure (Amaan in Fiza ) of reintegrating the liminal subject in the national family (where the family stands in for the nation).

Monstrosity and Terrorism

As if a breach or gap had opened in the national imaginary, trauma allows for the emergence of a monster, fully formed and “incorrigible,” one whose implacable cruelty will be pitted against all the forces of humanity and justice that the state represents. I should immediately state that monstrosity is not a category through which viewers I have talked with in India or in the diaspora experience Hindi films. The interviews I have conducted with viewers both in India and in America on the question of filmic representations of religious difference in Hindi films focused mostly on how specific films enabled the stars to showcase their talents, or how these narratives positioned difference and its relation to broader constructions of Indian citizenship. So I make no claim to any ethnographic verity. Rather, my interest in the question of monstrosity focuses on the experience of an event as a reversal or displacement of power relations. By this I mean two things. First, the appearance of the monster realigns all the relations of power in a given narrative such that inhumanity and brutality become his essential characteristics. Second, the figure of the monster renders transparent the relations of power between dominant (in this case Hindu and nationalist) groups and minorities (Muslims). In this section, I draw certain connections between monstrosity and the modern construction of the terrorist as an enemy of the state. This will allow me to show in the next section how the filmic text is bound up in certain strategies of normalizing power through narrative space and narrative fragmentation. Specifically here, I wish to understand monstrosity as a way in which historical trauma is remembered, repressed or even quarantined.

In what way has monstrosity come to organize the present discourse on terrorism? To answer this, we can merely glance at the language used by the dominant media in its depictions of Islamic militancy. As an article in the New York Times points out, “Osama bin Laden, according to Fox News Channel anchors, analysts and correspondents, is ‘a dirtbag,' ‘a monster' overseeing a ‘web of hate.' His followers in Al Qaeda are ‘terror goons.' Taliban fighters are ‘diabolical' and ‘henchmen.'” 24 In these invocations of the terrorist as monster, an absolute morality separates good from a “shadowy evil.” As if caught up in its own shadow dance with the anti-Western rhetoric of radical Islam, this discourse marks off a figure like Osama bin Laden, or a government like the Taliban, as the opposite of all that is just, human, and good. The terrorist monster is pure evil, and must be destroyed, according to this view.

Here we can begin to chart a complex genealogy of the modern terrorist in Indian and Western media. The figure of the abnormal 25 terrorist ties together the American government's ongoing War against Terrorism and the Indian government's attempts to neutralize Islamic fundamentalism. Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, 26   in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, national strategy planning in India and the US has converged on the dominant theme of “homeland security.” In India 's scramble to take up its “frontline role” in the war against terrorism, in its frank ambition to become a “global power,” much more is at stake than righteous posturing against Pakistan. The somehow always failed ambition of securing the nation from both internal and external threats has led to some signal innovations in India and the US. With a newly shared rhetoric constellated around such bogeys as “jihadi terrorism,” the internal Muslim “threat,” and cross-border infiltration, there has been an increasing cooperation of counter-insurgency military and intelligence resources.

To illustrate this rhetoric, consider the government response to the December 2001 attacks on the Indian Parliament. According to opinions ranging from the right to the left, “Revenge is the only compensation for this attack” (the title of a Web-based forum with leading Indian politicians regarding the attacks). 27   From the hindutva right, Shiv Sena's Bal Thakeray declared, “Does the government have the ability to take revenge? Whether it is Pakistan, Taliban or the ISI [Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence]: they shouldn't have the guts to attack us again.” Or, from the center, Congress MLA, Salman Khursheed argued for simply more restraint: “We have to tell the US that Afghanistan is no longer a priority. Now they've to tell us what they intend to do about cross-border terrorism… This is not like the US where an exclusively external threat affected their interests. Here, an external threat is trying to ride on the discontent of our own young people.” Or, from the right-centrist BJP Party, Arun Jaitley remarked, “It's clear that we need to dramatically strengthen our intelligence network. The time has also come for our security forces to send a chilling message to the terrorists and those who harbour them.” In these responses, the “terrorist” functions (1) to position India geo-politically with the West and the ongoing War on Terrorism; (2) to cohere India by isolating internal enemies (disaffected Muslims, especially youth) who are allegedly supported by external enemies (Pakistan); (3) to re-situate tactical knowledge or “intelligence” as key intellectual capital that must be accumulated and exploited; (4) to call for a “chilling” military response.

Implied in all these responses is a normative Hindu citizen, a subject that is at once the reason for the new security apparatuses, and the norm toward which all subjects will be made to conform. Today, in India, the figure of the terrorist is being constructed in a way that demands a certain identification by all citizens with a Hinduized nation. What I am suggesting is that the construction of the Islamic terrorist as monstrous “other” in fact enables the elaboration of a normative Hindu identity. In specific ways, the cinepatriotism of contemporary Hindi films portrays the terrorist monster through a normalizing narrative aesthetic involving the repeated spectacles of familial trauma. With varying degrees of psychological complexity, Hilal Kohistani in Mission Kashmir, Murad Khan in Fiza, and Gulfam Hasan in Sarfarosh 28 emerge as figures of violence, betrayal, inhumanity, bestiality, irrationality, deracination and irresponsibility.

However, what is also important about these Hindi films is that they show the forces of justice and humanity already blurring into the violence of injustice and inhumanity. Indeed, both Inayat Khan, the Muslim Inspector General of Police in Mission Kashmir, and Ajay Rathod, the Assistant Commissioner of Police in Sarfarosh, resort directly to tactics that would otherwise be called terrorist, while Inspector Shingle in Fiza could rightly be said to embody the stereotype of the corrupt and communal cop. The state thus matches its terrorist double in terms of brutal violence. In that sense we can see that violence is not what separates the state from its other: the means are the same, but the ends (national unity vs. fundamentalist fragmentation) differ. For instance, in Sarfarosh, we see the routine brutality and corruption that mark Ajay's ascent into police stardom. Moreover, in Mission Kashmir, two sequences show an enraged Inspector Khan who resorts to outright assassination after the loss of family members – first his son and then his wife.

In Fiza, however, the critique of the state and the critique of Islamic militancy are tied together in far more explicit ways. Thus, the opportunistic betrayals of elite leaders such as Singh and Syed only mirror the tactics of Murad Khan, the militant leader who draws Amaan into terrorism. Meanwhile corruption, communalism or simple incompetence implicates Inspector Shingle and the Mumbai police in a kind of self-interested passivity. In this example, we can see how even as the monster is severely marginalized, Shingle and Khan present equally moribund options for both Amaan and Fiza.

Performing Identity

Through the process of isolating and eliminating the terrorist monster from the national imaginary, the normalized Muslim citizen performs her identity-in-difference as her duty to the national family. In all three films, we see the emergence of something like the normalized minority subject who speaks her belonging to the nation. Historical trauma, then, not only gives birth to the monstrous terrorist, it also enables the narrative to repeatedly question who can legitimately represent the nation and the community. What is at stake for these narratives is to wrest the language of jihad (struggle, or war), shaheed (martyr, one who sacrifices life for community or nation), kaum (community), muhajid (soldier for Islam) away from militant Islam, thereby contesting the militant's claim of standing for the community. This strategy is coupled with the insistence that the Indian nation is a plural, necessarily heterogeneous space. By insisting on the pluralistic composition of India, contemporary cinema is in keeping with a long history of Muslim representation in Hindi films. However, the sign of a historical shift is precisely in the fraught and contested discourse around jihad.

The ideological work of cinepatriotic films is not merely to assert Muslims and Hindus are one family like the Congress party's tired claim of Hindu-Muslim bhai-bhai (brother-brother). These films also present pedagogical norms of citizenships that involve the performance of Muslim-ness with implications beyond religious identity. In Mission Kashmir, Inspector Khan is shown during namaaz or Islamic prayer ritual; the same is true for Salim, the Muslim sidekick to the hero in Sarfarosh. In Fiza, the heroine goes to Haji Ali Masjid to give thanks on her graduation. Simultaneously, all three of these characters forcefully resist religious discrimination by claiming and performing their belonging to the nation. In fact, all three give patriotic speeches asserting their devotion to the Indian Union – after Fiza's speech we are even treated to the 1930s patriotic song “Sare jahan se acha” (India is the best place in the world). 29  

Specifically in Sarfarosh, we find an example of the Muslim subject who must convince his peers of his allegiance to the nation. Salim is the Muslim officer who once trained Ajay Rathod at the Academy, but is now made to serve under him. Through an extensive information network, Salim is able to get tactical information that no one else on the force can. And yet the Police Commissioner takes Salim off a crucial case, claiming, “The whole department is saying that he let [a Muslim criminal] go because he himself is a Muslim.” In the confrontations that follow, Ajay and Salim together probe the nature of belonging to the nation. Repeatedly layering the questions of religious difference and class (Salim is poor and resents Ajay's middle-class wealth) and social inequality (as an Indian Police Services officer, Ajay is a member of India 's bureaucratic elite), the narrative exposes the complexities of social antagonisms. There are a series of confrontations between Salim and Ajay in which the very possibility of Muslim Indian citizenship and subjectivity is fought over and contested. It is resolved, finally, as both accept each other's role in fighting the enemies of the nation. Salim is able to gather crucial tactical information that leads to a breakthrough in the case. Having given his information, Salim walks away.

Ajay: Wait Salim. I need you.

Salim: What do you want now? …Go save your country, your home. What do you need me for?

A: I need you. To save this home I don't need one I need ten Salims.

S: Not ten, Sir. You'll find ten thousand if you trust in us. Don't ever tell another Muslim that this country is not his home [walks away crying].

A: [walks over to him as his men look on] I won't say it. Never again.

They embrace amidst a crescendo of sentimental music. Salim is reintegrated into the national family through this sequence, such that when the criminals try to get him on their side by appealing to his Muslim identity, he questions the genuineness of their faith and labels them traitors to the nation. We see here the complicity, if not paradox, that marks this representational strategy: a protest against discrimination translates into an assertion of inclusion in the national family.

Similarly, in a scene from Mission Kashmir, the Commissioner of Police, worried over the impending official visit of the Prime Minister of India to Kashmir, asks Inspector Khan to step down from his post because he is Muslim. Khan refuses.

Commissioner: Look, Khan-saab, one Indian PM [Prime Minister] was killed by her own security guards in the name of religion. Under the circumstances, I don't consider it appropriate to entrust the security of the PM to you.

Khan: Mr. Deshpande, this is not only the misfortune of Muslims, but rather of the whole country, that an officer who has dodged bullets for 21 years must repeatedly give proof of his loyalty [vafadari] because his name is not Deshpande but Inayat Khan. Look, Mr. Deshpande, my blood is in the Kashmiri soil. My nine-year old son is buried in it. My love for this country needs no IAS [Indian Civil Service] certificate. I am this state's IG [Inspector General of Police], and until you dismiss me, the responsibility for the PM's security will be mine.

We see through these scenes the construction of a mixed discourse where the struggle for equality and representation in the nation paradoxically produces normalized subjects, and narrows the space of dissent that such minority subjects can occupy. 30 In that sense, the liberalism of this filmic discourse belies a deeper monologic structure that is tied to the figuration of the essentially Hindu nation in hindutva discourses. This connection is oblique but, as I have been arguing, one can chart the relays between hindutva discourses and these films in both the structure of the narrative and the representations of the Muslim other.

The Female Subject

All three films discussed here tie the iconic 31 body of woman and the female subject to tradition, culture, and family, on the one hand, and education, social mobility, and the modernizing public on the other. As modern citizens of the nation, women serve as a foil for the Islamic terrorist. For instance, Sufi Pervez, Altaaf's childhood sweetheart in Mission Kashmir, grows up to be a newscaster on a local TV channel. She is the modern, liberal educated Kashmiri Muslim woman who functions as a foil for Altaaf's extremism. She provides him with a non-traumatic mooring to his past and, through their romance, to another future. 32 Thus, the normative woman appears to be that good Hindu or Muslim woman who offers to the wayward Muslim a secure mooring to the nation, family, romance, and idealized memory.

Fiza disrupts the normative representation of women in these Hindi films in many respects. 33 She refuses to be rescued by her lover, insists that her voice be heard, and displays resolve to work outside the family. As the familiar modern, college-educated subject, Fiza serves as the norm against which Amaan's transgressions are weighed. Through her search for her wayward brother in the deserts of Rajasthan, she moors Amaan to a family, a genealogy, and the affective ties of community and responsibility. Thus, oddly, the independent-minded Fiza is the one who says to Amaan, “Do you know what they call a man who leaves two helpless women? A coward.” This is the same Fiza who says publicly that, as women, “we are not helpless.” In other words, Fiza, depicted as both an independent and helpless   woman, 34 provides the narrative foil for Amaan while at the same time presenting masculinity with its traditional and also always anxious object of patronage and benevolence.

The representation of women also includes the typical objectification of women in romantic segments and dance sequences, constituting a temporary focal point for a normative male heterosexual gaze. In Sarfarosh, the good Hindu girl, Seema, sports mini-skirts and bathing suits, and lives the good life as one of India 's modernizing post-colonial elite. As a well-disciplined college graduate she can easily negotiate, translate and move between the different cultures of India. She can also provide Ajay (and the implicit male viewer) with both romantic diversion and heterosexual security. 35 Indeed, the heterosexual family finally provides the justification for national security and also functions to secure gender identity, and to stabilize (by idealizing) the memory of home and family in these narratives.

But, of course, these three heroines do not exhaust the role of women in these films, nor the commoditification of bodies. As I have suggested above, in keeping with the genre of Bollywood melodramas, it is specifically the iconic bodies of women that are used to manage the anxieties of the modernizing nation. In specific fantasy musical sequences, through the objectifying cabaret songs, women's bodies are frequently displayed. This produces an overall discursive regularity that ties women and heterosexuality to fantasy, humanity and the nation. On the face of it, of course, it might seem that humanity and objectifying fantasies might be in contradiction with each other and the construction of the nation. As I see it, this seeming contraction provides a discursive regularity. Women offer the heroes of these films with the possibility for sexual fulfillment, hence securing reproductive heterosexuality and, by extension the family – as with the example of Seema. This secure heterosexuality is what calls the liminal Muslim back from the edge of ruinous, monstrous violence into the folds of domesticity – as when Sufi foils Kohistani's plans for Altaaf. Finally, the modernizing Muslim woman, who serves as the object, target and instrument for the nation, becomes the idealized image through which a normalized minority is reintegrated into the folds of the nation – Fiza for Amaan. In this last case, we see a kind of failure of the suturing that structures the other two films. In the end it is Fiza who, having pulled the trigger on her brother Amaam, is left standing without family or support. Alone, she will carry on the struggle for and as an Indian Muslim.

The individual in any given nation has in this way a terrible opportunity to convince himself of what would occasionally strike him in peace-time – that the state has forbidden to the individual the practice of wrong-doing, not because it desired to abolish it, but because it desires to monopolize it like salt and tobacco. The warring state permits itself every such misdeed, every such act of violence, as would disgrace the individual man. It practices not only the accepted stratagems, but also deliberate lying and deception against the enemy; and this, too, in a measure which appears to surpass the usage of former wars. The state exacts the utmost degree of obedience and sacrifice from its citizens, but at the same time treats them as children by maintaining an excess of secrecy, and censorship of news and expressions of opinion that renders the spirits of those thus intellectually oppressed defenseless against every unfavourable turn of events and every sinister rumour. It absolves itself from the guarantees and contracts it had formed with other states, and makes unabashed confession of it rapacity and lust for power, which the private individual is then called upon to sanction in the name of patriotism. 38 

Endnotes

 1 As some terrorism experts based in America put it some years ago, “The open societies of the contemporary global arena are confronted by a form of warfare which, while not altogether new in itself, is unprecedented both in its dimensions and it its linkages, reflecting a common thread between episodes of violence that are threatening stability in areas as far apart as South Asia, the Middle East, South Africa, Western Europe, and the Western Hemisphere. To date, mysterious immunity to this epidemic appears to have been acquired by one type of regime only, and that prevails generally in the closed societies which follow the Leninist doctrine. Interestingly, however, at least in some of the regions infected, the immune regimes appear to be located in close proximity to the open societies which are under attack.” Uri Ra'anan, et al. (eds.), Hydra of Carnage: The International Linkages of Terrorism and Other Low-Intensity Operations - The Witnesses Speak (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1986), p. xiii.

 2 Manisha Sethi, “Cine-Patriotism,” in Samar : South Asian Magazine for Action and Reflection, Summer 2002, No. 15. pp. 31-33. Such films as Maa Tujhe Salaam, Indian, and The Hero have come to form a genre distinct from the Congress-aligned nationalist films of Manoj Kumar such as Purab aur Paschim or Roti, Kapada, aur Makaan.

 3 For instance, the Godhra carnage and communal pogroms in Gujarat in the spring of 2002 once again assured Indians and the world that Hindu chauvinism will forward its agenda of national purification by any means necessary. The background to this carnage was the Hindu right's declared intention of building a commemorative temple at the site of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, India (which was demolished by Hindu chauvinists in 1992). In the spring of 2002, returning from a pilgrimage to the site of the razed mosque, a trainload of Hindus from the state of Gujarat were killed (who killed them is still not certain). The Hindu right seized on that opportunity and fomented a brutal pogrom against the Muslim community in which thousands of people lost their lives and livelihood, and hundreds of women were brutally gang raped.

 4 Neera Chandhoke, Beyond Secluarism: The Rights of Religious Minorities (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 2. Glossing the ideology of Hindutva, Chandhoke argues: “Cast in the mould of cultural nationalism, majoritarianism calls for the erasure of all specific identities and demands the constitution of a culturally homogeneous nation. And this is cause for concern, for cultural or organic nationalism, as history shows us, is constructed on a ritualized and systematic suspicion of strangers (i.e. minority groups) upon the privileging of one ethnic, linguistic or religious community, and on calls to exterminate ‘impurities' in the organic nation. In India, the project of hindutva does all this. It appeals to the mythic unity of the Hindu people, invokes an ahistorical version of a glorious Hindu past, disparages minority identities, and demands conformity and homogeneity in order to accomplish two tasks” (p. 9). According to Chandhoke, the first project of hindutva is to establish the identity of the nation on the basis of a narrow definition of Hinduism; as Home Minister L. K. Advani put it, “ India is essentially a Hindu country. My party emphasizes that India is one nation and not a multinational state.” (Quoted in Chandhoke, ibid., p. 10). The second project of hindutva is the systematic and insistent denigration of minority communities. “In a tenacious, ordered, and subversive mode, the votaries of hindutva cast suspicion on the moods and motivation of the community against which hindutva is largely defining itself – the Muslims (and now Christians)” (p. 10).

 5 See N. S. Siddharthan, “Globalisation and the Budget,” EPW, March 17, 2001, pp. 889-892.

 6 Arvind Rajgopal, “Thinking Through Emerging Markets: Brand Logics and Cultural Forms of Political Society in India,” EPW, March 3, 2001, pp. 773 - 782.

 7 We can situate a bit more rigorously what such context entails. Globally, developing economies “had to implement a bundle of new policies and accommodate new conditions associated with globalisation: Structural Adjustment Programmes, the opening up of these economies to foreign firms, the elimination of multiple state subsidies, and, it would seem almost inevitably, financial crises and particular types of programmatic solutions.” (Sassen, pp. 101-2). This has, by and large, been the case in India since the implementation of the IMF liberalization plan in 1991. Recent trends are also not encouraging: “The year 2000-01 experienced a sharp decline in the growth of industrial production and growth of infrastructure, decline in the Indian share in world trade, decline in the savings and investment rates, and an absolute decline in the foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows.” See N. S. Siddharthan, “Globalisation and the Budget,” EPW, March 17, 2001, pp. 889-892.

 8 For the relationship between cinema as an institution shaped by society with roots in the national culture and the un-presentable differences that constitute that national culture, see Negar Mottahedeh, “Bahram Bayzai's Maybe... Some Other Time : The un-Present-able Iran,” Camera Obscura (2000) 43, 15:1, pp. 163-191.

 9 For an illuminating discussion on the recent resurgence of “family value” Hindi movies as technologies of disciplining the neo-liberal subject, see Patricia Uberoi, “The Diaspora Comes Home: Disciplining Desire in DDLJ,” Contributions to Indian Sociology, 32:2 (1998), pp. 305 – 335.

 10 Geeta Kapur, When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India ( New Delhi : Tulika, 2000), p. 174.

 11 See, for instance, Partha Chatterjee's “The Nationalist Resolution to the Woman's Question,” in Recasting Women ; see also Samir Dayal, “Constructing Nation as Family: Gandhi, Ambedkar, and Positionality,” Socialist Review, pp. 97-142 ; Amit S. Rai, “A Lying Virtue: Ruskin, Gandhi and the Simplicity of Use Value,” South Asia Research, vol. 13, no. 2, November 1993.

 12 E. Ann Kaplan, “Melodrama, Cinema and Trauma,” in Screen, 42:2 (Summer 2001), pp. 201-205.

 13 Kaplan, p. 202.

 1 4 Ibid, p. 203.

 1 5 Ibid, p. 204.

 1 6 Khan's masked face repeatedly flashes across the screen in moments when the camera seems to take in Altaaf's subjectivity.

 17 A word that is a popular name for both people and places, and that translates as “air,” “atmosphere” but more poetically as in the fizan of springtime. It connotes beauty, warmth, and a feeling of exhilaration commonly associated with springtime, and relates more to the beauty of nature.

 18 These riots were sparked off by a series of bomb blasts throughout Bombay, apparently in retaliation for the demolition of the Babri Masjid a year earlier by radical Hindu “kar sevaks” intent on building a temple for the god-king Ram. As Justice J. S. Verma of the Indian Supreme Court put it, “The city of Bombay was rocked by a series of bomb blasts on 12/3/1993 which killed 257 persons, maimed another more than 700 persons and destroyed property worth about Rs. 27 crores. These bomb blasts occurred in important government and public sector buildings of the stock exchange, Air India, Sahara International Airport, several five star hotels and busy commercial localities such as Zaveri Bazar, Katha Bazar and Century Bazar. Petrol pumps adjoining important locations were also the target[s] of these blasts. The bomb blasts were accompanied by explosion of hand grenades in sensitive areas intended to incite communal violence which caused riot[s] in certain areas. These incidents were a part of carefully planned strategy calculated to terrorise the governments in the State as well as at the Centre and to incite communal violence.” See http://www.supremecourtonline.com/cases/2141.html.

 19 Could one think of radical Islam as a specifically masculine “alternative circuit of survival”? Sassen writes, “It is against this context of what I would consider a systemic condition marked by high unemployment, poverty, bankruptcies of large numbers of firms, and shrinking resources in the state to meet social needs, that alternative circuits of survival emerge and can be seen as articulated with those conditions” (Sassen, p. 103). Of course, I do not mean to suggest that militant Islam is just one bad alternative out of a few, but rather that one pursues a course of action in life that is tied (but not reducible) to material and psychic conditions the histories of which are obscured and interrelated.

 20 An Amnesty International Report on new anti-terrorism legislation references the draconian 1987 Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act (TADA). “There are human consequences to this proposed legislation which cannot and must not be ignored. There are individuals whose lives have been irrevocably damaged by provisions of TADA and whose experiences could be repeated if identical provisions are re-enacted,” Amnesty International warned. One young man, who was detained under TADA in April 1993 after bomb blasts in Mumbai, was hung upside down, given electric shocks in his genitals, fingers, tongue and nose, and forced to eat human feces. Kashmir Singh of Punjab was told eight years after the “disappearance” of his son Harjit Singh that the TADA charges identifying his son as a “terrorist” were cooked up in order to justify a “stage-managed encounter” in which he was killed. Seva, along with several other women and men from Chamraj Nagar district of Karnataka, was detained, tortured, sexually abused and charged under TADA in 1993 in connection with smuggling activities and has been awaiting trial for seven years without the chance of bail” ( http://www.amnesty-usa.org/news/2000/32002600.htm ). Recently, the Hindu nationalist BJP coalition government at the Centre has sought to replace TADA by the equally problematic Prevention of Terrorism Ordinance (POTO). See http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow.asp?art_id =1027679721.

 21 The definition of shaheed is worth quoting in full: a martyr (religious or political: properly, one martyred in the name of Islam). With the verb hona : to be killed in battle against unbelievers; figurative: to become a patriotic hero; to fall desperately in love.

 22 Hazratbal Mosque is situated on the western banks of Dal Lake in Srinagar. The mosque is home to a holy strand of hair belonging to Prophet Mohammed which was sent to Kashmir by the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb and is exhibited to the public on certain days of the year. This shiny mosque is across the Dal from Shalimar. It is made of white marble with a dome and a miniature. ( http://www.1uptravel.com/worship/jk.html )

 23 It is located at 1100 ft. above surface level of the main city on the Shankaracharya hill. The Shiva temple, as Kalhana believes, was constructed by Raja Gopadatya in 371 B.C. and, as such, is the oldest shrine in Kashmir, though it is not certain if the temple exists in the same form as it had been built more than two thousands years ago. The first repair of the temple is believed to have been undertaken during the reign of Lalitaditya in the eighth century A.D. According to the historian Shrivara, Zain-ul-Abideen conducted second repairs of the temple after it had been damaged in an earthquake. The third repair was undertaken during the Governorship of Sheikh Mohi-ud-Din when the temple is believed to have been named as Shankaracharya. Dogra ruler, Maharaja Gulab Singh, constructed stone stairs up to the temple. ( http://www.1uptravel.com/worship/jk.html )

 24 Jim Rutenberg, “Fox Portrays a War of Good and Evil, and Many Applaud,” New York Times, December 3, 2001, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res= F30917F73A590C708CDDAB0994D9404482.

 25 Consider the racialized and sexualized group of monsters known as the abnormals. Michel Foucault ties the history of the monster to the overall discursive practice of abnormality in the West. According to Foucault, (1) the monster contravenes the law, disturbing “juridical regularities”; (2) the monster can be both half an animal as well as a hybrid gender and later in the text Foucault will go on to position the onanist as the third of the abnormals; (3) the monster is both impossible and forbidden; finally, (4) he is to be differentiated from the individual to be corrected on the basis of whether power operates on it or through it (in other words, the sovereign, repressive power that produced and quarantines the monster finds its dispersal in panopticism, or what I have referred to above as a normalizing form of power). See Michel Foucault, “The Abnormals,” Robert Hurley (translated), in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, Paul Rabinow (editor) (New York: New Press, 1997), pp. 51-58.

 26 See “Homeland Insecurity,” Samar 2002, No. 15, p. 2; and Amit S. Rai and Jasbir K. Puar, “Monster, Terrorist, Fag,” Social Text, Fall (72), Vol. 20, no. 3, 2002, pp. 117-148.

 27 “Revenge will be Our Only Compensation,” OutlookIndia.com, December 24, 2001. http://www.outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20011224&fname= Cover+Story&sid=10&pn=1

 28 In Sarfarosh, Gulfam Hasan is the Pakistani (or Indian?) refugee who publicly embraces the deep cultural bonds between India and Pakistan, asserting, “There are emotional ties that link Pakistan and India. Such ties are stronger than all others. In the Ghazal language, we call this bond, mohabbat [love]: ‘No consciousness is left, no attention is left. A person in love is no longer a person.'” These cultural bonds, however, mask political identities that are in fact rooted in the opposite of mohabbat : Gulfam Hasan, who, as a singer, is supposedly a cultural representative of the long-standing connections between Hindi-Urdu speaking peoples, turns out to be an agent of Pakistan 's proxy war against India. Pretending to further cultural bonds, Hasan uses the cover of singer-entertainer to oversee the smuggling of arms into India, and helps to encourage the armed insurrection of a disaffected tribal community in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh.

As Miriam Cooke reminds us, the Mohajir Quami Movement consisted of Muslims who left their homes in Muslim-minority states in India before and during the 1947 Partition to resettle in the northern Muslim-majority states that were to become Pakistan. The word “Mohajir,” which means “migrant,” comes, like “hijra,” from the Arabic root h-j-r, which means “to emigrate.” These Muslims named themselves Migrants, so as to describe the move as one from Dar-al-Harb, the Abode of War (a place where Muslims cannot practice their faith), to Dar-al-Islam, the Abode of Islam [“Women, Religion, and the Postcolonial Arab World,” Cultural Critique (45), Spring 2000, pp. 150-184, 158].

29 This is also the Quick March of the Indian Armed Forces. The words of this composition were written by the noted Urdu poet, Mohammad Iqbal. It was arranged for Military Band by Prof.A. Lobo.

 30 Not to mention that these narratives both invoke and then expel two figures who have come to represent the new developing economies of excess under global capital: the female sex worker and the migrant laborer. For a compelling discussion of this point, see Saskia Sassen, “The Excesses of Globalisation and the Feminisation of Survival,” Parallax (2001) 7:1, pp. 100-110. In the last scene of Sarfarosh, Salim's urchin-informant leaves for Dubai ; in Fiza, Amaan's Hindu assailants ask if he was in Dubai these past six years; in Sarfarosh and Fiza, the female sex worker is explicitly represented in relationship to “criminal gangs.”

 31 Geeta Kapur writes, “the iconic image is formatted to converge spiritual energies through inviting the devotee's gaze upon a condensed motif, thus establishing hypostasis. The tableau, a theater fragment of a larger whole, also invites the viewer's gaze, but by framing it. The image-tableau acquires an imminent (not manifest) narrative” [Geeta Kapur, When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India ( New Delhi : Tulika, 2000), p. 168]. Tying iconic in painting to Indian film, she argues that the “iconic in the language of cinema derives its characteristics from painting. Figurative images, especially portraits, rest not only on likenesses or resemblances but equally on an economy of representation, and with that an autonomous logic of positioning and structure. This inevitable distancing between the pictorial image and the real world acquires additional virtues in the transfer between painting and cinematography. The iconic sign, peculiar to cinema, denotes precisely this transfer (of icon-image-sign) and helps in breaking down a rigid assumption: that the cinema upholds ultimate verisimilitude” (ibid., pp. 237-39).

Indeed, melodrama is tied to the transference between the sacred and the secular on the terrain of the woman's body that characterizes Indian modernity. Drawing on Peter Brooks' theory of melodrama, Geeta Kapur has argued that “the melodrama... is predicated on the replacement of the sacred; it enshrines the beloved in the space evacuated by the sacred orders to the profane. We know that the invented genre of the Indian ‘mythological' massively mediates western romantic and melodramatic forms of narration and, coming full circle, alludes to the iconic. That is to say, if melodrama involves the transference from the iconic/sacred to the simultaneously familial and public registers of the image, the mythological takes that over but reinscribes the detached beloved back into a quasi-sacred space. It maintains, in lieu of the lost realms of the gods, this close register between the iconic, the familial and public” [see Geeta Kapur, When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India ( New Delhi : Tulika, 2000), p. 171]. Indeed, as we have seen, it is the bodies of women that will effect such a transference.

32 As one web review put it, “Preity looks a perfect Kasmiri beauty providing romantic relief in the otherwise action-packed militant affair.” See Tanuka Chakraverty, “‘Mission Kashmir': A Wrap Worth Looking Out For,” http://www.indiaexpress.com/choice/movies/action/action-19.html.

 33 Put in the broader context of Hindi films, the cinepatriotism of this genre plays on some of the recurring themes of gender, sexuality and femininity common to Indian cinema. Notably, in Hindi films, representations of women have supported and contested patriarchy in numerous and subtle ways. The variety of representations ranges from the “avenging women” to Mother India [dir. Mehboob Khan; 1957], from Helen, the Dancer of the Night [as in films such as Teesri Manzil (1966) and Jewel Thief (1967)], to Nadia the Fearless [in such films as Jungle Princess (1942) and Stunt Queen (1947)], and from actresses like Shabhana Azmi who take on feminist roles, to the cloying glamour doll roles of Aishwarya Rai. Cinepatriotic Hindi films narrow this representational range in some ways, and extend it in others. See Lalitha Gopalan, A Cinema of Interruptions ( London : BFI Publications, 2002).

 34 Fiza is in some ways represented as preternaturally strong and as completely weak: she single-handedly tracks down her brother, but cannot defend herself from the local Hindu thugs who harass her and her mother.

 35 In terms of the use of women's bodies, one web reviewer put it in this way: “Sonali Bendre is sizzling in ‘Sarfarosh.' She romances Amir Khan in the film. [The] Director has used her beauty to its full potential. She looks really stunning in sexy sarongs. [The] Waterfall songs are a treat for [the] eyes of front-benchers.” See Ajay Chaturvedi, “Patriotism's Battle with Terrorism,” http://www.indiaexpress.com/choice/movies/action/action-1.html.

 36 See my “The Promise of Monsters” in Cultural Studies (forthcoming).

 37 As I mentioned in an earlier note, these films form a kind of subgenre within the action film that has a spectrum of ideological range, from Fiza 's more liberal-left critique of state complicity with communalism, to the purely action-patriotic like the Sonny Deol vehicles. An excellent example of the latter is the recent semi-hit Hero (recalling Deol's earlier flop Champion ), where an Indian intelligence agent falls in love with a Muslim-who-turns-out-to-be-a-Hindu (a common trope), fights cross-border terrorism, and eventually saves not only India, but Canada as well!

 38 Sigmund Freud, “Thoughts on War and Death” [1915], E. Colburn Mayne (translated), in Collected Papers, 5 vols., Joan Riviere (editor) (New York: Basic Books, 1959), Vol. 4, pp. 293-94.