Orientalism, Terrorism, Bombay Cinema

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Orientalism, terrorism and Bombay

cinemaKaren Gabriel

a& P.K. Vijayan

a

aSt Stephens College, Hindu College, Delhi University

Published online: 01 Jun 2012.

To cite this article:Karen Gabriel & P.K. Vijayan (2012): Orientalism, terrorism and Bombaycinema, Journalof Postcolonial Writing, 48:3, 299-310

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Orientalism, terrorism and Bombay cinema

Karen Gabriel* and P.K. Vijayan

St Stephens College, Hindu College, Delhi University

This paper critically assesses the usefulness of the new-Orientalism thesis inunderstanding the discourses around the idea of terrorism and of the terrorist. Itobserves that critiques of new Orientalism provide important insights into the waysin which Islam, the Muslim and terrorist have come to be constructed. However,it also argues for the importance of the density of historical context and specicity oflocality in understanding how these categories are formulated. The case of Bombaycinema is particularly instructive here. The paper argues that Bombay cinema whichhas engaged with these concerns in some form since its inception, and is going glo-bal in unprecedented ways exemplies both the play of these two distinct discur-sive tendencies and also the tensions that arise because they are not identical. Post-9/11 lms like Aamir (2008) and New York (2009) manifest these discursive mechanicsand the tensions that result from the play between new Orientalism and the local.

Keywords:Indian cinema; Hindutva; terrorism; Indian Muslims; Orientalism

Post-independence India has witnessed considerable unrest and political violence, whicherupted in various parts of the country, beginning with Kashmir and Nagaland. By the

1970s, there were insurgent movements in other northeastern states; Tamil militancy fromSri Lanka; radical left Naxal militancy; and the Khalistan movement in Punjab. Thesewere well represented in the public imagination via mainstream print and electronicmedia and as infested or controlled by terrorist organizations. Yet it was only afterMani Ratnams Roja (1992), addressing the question of militancy in Kashmir, that Indiancinema began to address terrorism and the issues around it more explicitly, despite thefact that terrorism and terrorists have been familiar to pre- and post-independenceIndia for a much longer time. Both the Tamil and the Hindi versions of Roja did welland triggered a host of lms on terrorism.1 However, very few of these subsequent lmsdealt with the Khalistan or Naxal movements, or the Tamil question in Sri Lanka, or with

the violence in the northeastern states. One of the few

lms on the Punjab problem,Gulzars Maachis (1996), came long after militancy in the state had been decimated byintensive police and paramilitary operations through the 1980s. Even the assassination ofIndira Gandhi and the anti-Sikh riots that followed in 1984 did not nd reference incinema, possibly because of censorship. The assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 by anLTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) suicide bomber was reected in cinema yearslater in the 1998 Tamil lm Theeviravaathi: The Terrorist, although the LTTE beltappeared as a charged signier of terrorism in lms like Dil Se (1998). Nevertheless, cin-ema did begin to show an increasing interest in the theme through the 1990s and into therst decade of this century.

*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]

Journal of Postcolonial Writing

Vol. 48, No. 3, July 2012, 299310

ISSN 1744-9855 print/ISSN 1744-9863 online

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In most of these representations, terrorism was identied as a Pakistani import intoIndia, especially in relation to Kashmir. While Hindi cinema was echoing a widely dis-seminated state political position on the matter, it also treated the issue as a fundamen-tally affective one, linking it melodramatically and crucially to belongingness, thefamilial, consanguinity and kinship in the context of the nation. The issue of nationalidentity and Kashmir remained central in the cinematic treatment of terrorism, and evenon the occasions when terrorism did not directly allude to Kashmir (Dil Se, Drohkaal,Prahaar), it was seen to provide the most immediately powerful affective charge andimaginative peg for issues related to nation formation, self-determination, sovereignty,heterogeneity, conict and reconciliation. Interestingly enough, given that the Kashmirilandscape is not representative of the entire Indian topography, that secessionism has

been a ceaseless impulse there, and that location shooting in Kashmir was drasticallyreduced and moved to lm cities following post-1970s escalations and intensications inviolence in the region, the very landscape of Kashmir continued to be seen to evokeIndia. The ongoing need to claim Kashmir as Indian, while also acknowledging con-

ict and the possibility of reconciliation, has led to a series of narrative experiments withthe idea of the nation state (e.g. Roja, Mission Kashmir, Fiza). This is one of the reasonswhy, often, even though the terrorist was identiably Muslim, there was always a coun-tervailing, patriotic and sacricial good Muslim. The predominantly melodramatic treat-ment of the difcult issues of national identity and national integration ensured that the

problems inherent to national self-denition were aired and exposed and only then con-tained and resolved, if somewhat clumsily:

The hospitality of the melodramatic mode to both the representation of contradiction [ ]and its normalization makes it especially suited to the representation of transition and stabil-ity. Its dual orientation towards the lyrical and the dramatic, its use ofmise en scne and itspropensity for mythication become representational advantages in launching mainstreamnarratives of and on society, permitting a psychologised narrative of troubling social eventsand relations on the one hand and their resolution on the other. (Gabriel, Melodrama 7576)

But even apart from the uses of the melodramatic mode, prior to 9/11, cinema hadalready evolved an ambivalent moral space that was accommodative of acts like terror-ism, through its celebration of vigilantism epitomized by the persona of the angry youngman. Ambivalence toward terrorism is inevitable in a postcolonial nation like India inwhich violence and terror tactics were a part of the repertoire of the struggle for freedom(Heehs 46982). The series ofve celebratory lms on the life of the nationalist freedom

ghter, Bhagat Singh, made between 2002 and 2006, exemplify this ambivalence evenwhile they articulate the now contested distinction between Hindu terror as for theMotherland and Muslim terror as against the Motherland. In fact, the timing of theBhagat Singh lms post-9/11, and after the Hindutva upsurge advise us of the impor-tance of factoring context into any understanding terrorism and terrorist acts. The appro-

priative revival of this legend in the strident Hindu nationalist environment of the 1990sinvolved his cinematic celebration as a potent masculine emblem of Hindu identity. Thecelebration itself was possible primarily because of the removed colonial setting and theintense infusion of nationalism.

But 9/11 perceptibly transformed the ways in which cinema began to deal with andrepresent terrorism. The remark of the protagonist Samir of the Film New York (2009),that 9/11 changed the entire world, so how could I, Samir, remain untouched? refers toa representational world, the many contexts of cinematic production and modes of char-

300 K. Gabriel and P.K. Vijayan


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acterization as well. The term terrorism changes register as a discursive play is initiatedbetween the national and newer international contexts of articulation, and the Indian posi-tion on terrorism in the South Asian context is consolidated by the post-9/11 US inter-vention into the debate. Representational changes were aided by the changed andchanging business models in the industry, and increasing corporate links with mediahouses in the US in particular, signicantly inuenced the cinematic treatment of terror-ism.2 This was assisted by the increased out-migration of Indian professionals to thecountries of the global north, and especially the US, resulting in an increase in the sizeand wealth of the diaspora. All of these infused the cinematic representation of terrorismwith a greater global than regional particularity, with change of context leading tochanges in idiom, narratives and landscapes, and even to changes in cinematic form andstyle. The moral ambivalence of the local, infused as it was with vigilantism andnationalism, gives way to the global categorical equation of Islam with terrorism. Inwhat follows, we will attempt to account for these changes by examining the interplay

between (representations of) terrorism, new Orientalism and the imperatives that drive

cinematic production, especially in the period following 9/11.3

Terrorism: the Indian context

A primary reason for the cinemas relative lack of engagement with these issues beforethe 1990s was the lm industrys careful negotiation of nationalism, national identity, andthe Indian state whether conceptually, institutionally (e.g. Central Board of Film Certi-cation) or logistically (policies on tax, raw stock) (Gabriel, Melodrama). This complex ofrelations was shaped by a number of factors which included the intensely communalized

but repressed Partition theme that manifested narratively, idiomatically and symbolically

in motifs of sundered families, separated siblings, absent fathers, besieged mothers, desti-tution, retribution and eventual reconciliation. Themes of nation-building, pre-eminentfrom the 1950s onward, were consciously in line with the Indian states own avowedagenda of national integration, which the lm industry notwithstanding the suspicionwith which the state regarded it saw itself partnering (Barnouw and Krishnaswamy).The nation was celebrated as a triumphal entity that had embraced the challenging eco-nomic and social labour needed to achieve a Nehruvian vision. Nevertheless and inevita-

bly, issues pertaining to the Indian nation and the bases of its formation exemplied byKashmir troubled the narrative and symbolic structure of the cinema with varyingdegrees of urgency manifesting as a concern with border-breach, kinship, relative rightsand legitimacy. The discussions of these themes were structured by the interrupted melo-

dramatic mode and discursively located along the gender-sexual axis. For instance, Man-mohan Desais 1977 lm Amar Akbar Anthony addresses the issue explicitlyand inclusively despite the subtle hierarchy that is instituted by making the mother thecommon point of origin Hindu. This attempt to unify in an originary kind of way whatis identied in the lm as distinctly diverse indexes a growing unease with heterogeneitye.g. northeastern India. This intensies from the 1980s onwards, and becomes a centralconcern in the 1990s. As signicantly, the rationale for the Indian nation state also cameto be articulated as a culturo-civilizational one in discourses of religious nationalism par-ticularly after the 1980s rise of the Hindu Right and the 1990s programmatic endorse-ment of liberalization-privatization-globalization (LPG). The usual narrative, political and

ideological use of melodrama in lm to stabilize the problematic nation state was then,expectedly enough, accompanied by a celebration and normativization of upper-caste

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Hindu-ness and concomitant interrogations around the necessity and status of minoritiesto and within the diverse nation state.

This eruptive right-wing nationalism was characterized not only by its strong Hinduupper caste chauvinism, but by anti-minorityism, anti-Muslim rhetoric and practice thatresulted in, among other things, the demolition of the ancient Babri Mosque in 1992 byHindu nationalist fanatics, and the retaliatory Mumbai bomb blasts of 1993 by theMuslim underworld. Signicantly, despite cinemas engagement with communal violenceand the role that Hindus play in it, like mainstream public discourse, it has baulked fromrepresenting these attacks as terrorist, because the ideological orientations of the term,as we will argue shortly, prevent its being deployed in this context, even though, follow-ing Sandlers (280) understanding of terrorism theres every reason to consider Hinduattacks on Muslims and Christians as terrorist.4 None of the numerous and increasingincidents of communal violence that mark this period and which were to culminate inthe genocidal violence against Muslims in Gujarat in 2002 (Gujarat Riots) were eversought to be represented as terrorist.

Fundamental to our understanding of how terrorism gets constructed in this period isthe coincidence of and inextricable link between religious right-wingism (Hindu national-ism) and economic right-wingism (LPG). Given that the economic elite in the countryhas traditionally and dominantly been upper-caste Hindu, it was inevitable that economic

policies aimed at protecting their interests produced a commensurately protectionist ideo-logical formulation, viz. Hindu nationalism. Resistance to these twin objectives wasactively discouraged and suppressed, as we see from the increasing number of repressiveActs and Ordinances passed since independence in the name of national security, andradically exclusive notions of nationalism were operationalized (for instance, the Mainte-nance of Internal Security Act 1971, the Terrorist & Disruptive Activities [Preventive]

Act 1985, the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2002).Taken together with a communalized situation, this suppression of dissent inevitably

also became a suppression of minorities, especially Muslims, by deeming them anti-national and terrorist. In any case, Hindu nationalism has, from its very inception in the19th century, dened itself consistently against Islam and the Muslim communities ofthe subcontinent (Bhatt; Hansen; Hasan; Zavos). Furthermore, cinemas commitment tothe coincidence between political and cultural nationalism ensured that its notions of ter-rorism were in harmony with those of the Hindu nationalists, even while it continuouslystrove to reconcile these to an integrationist model of the nation. The Hindu nationalist

position that Sikhs are the sword-arm of Hinduism (Elst) is one possible reason thatthe Punjab problem of Sikh militancy hardly featured in Hindi cinema as terrorism.The same elision of alterity modied by the peripherality of the south and the northeastto Hindi cinemas imagination of the nation applies to Tamil militancy (Harriss 98) andthe northeastern problem. Furthermore, the exponential expansion of Hindi cinemas glo-

bal and diasporic market over the last ve years, along with technological and institu-tional convergence that now characterizes all media industries, has led to radicalstructural changes within the industry, changes in lm nance, and in the organization of

production-distribution chains and delivery platforms.This has intensied the integration of this industry into the production and consump-

tion systems the economies, in other words of the global north/west (Gabriel, Melo-drama; Kohli-Khandekar). These economies, the civilizations that house them, and the

way of life that they enable, are projected as continuously under threat from Islamicterror a theme and a context for the construction of terrorism that Hindi cinema hasadopted in lms like My Name is Khan (2010). Even when the context changes from a



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transnational to a domestic one (Enders, Sandler, and Gaibulloev), the treatment oftheme remains more or less similar, with the exception of lms like Mumbai Meri Jaan(2008) and New York. These themes resonate with, and get sutured into, the wider more

powerful discursive eld, thereby eliding the context itself, resulting in quite serious cog-nitive, discursive and ideological errors, confusions and obfuscations. If the context wereto be thickened with the specicity of locality e.g. attention to the complexity ofHinduMuslim relations in India, the history of the IsraeliPalestinian conict or eventhe relations between Muslims and the west the analytical framework would change.

Terrorism: the global context

Though terrorism originally used to refer to state violence against a people, it came torefer primarily to the actions of non-state actors during anti-colonial movements(Halliday). In that sense, terrorism, as ideology and instrument of struggle, is a modern

phenomenon, a product of the conict between contemporary states and their restive

societies:

It has developed [ ] as part of a transnational model of political engagement. Its roots arein modern secular politics; it has no specic regional or cultural attachment; it is an instru-ment, one among several, for those aspiring to challenge states and, one day, to take powerthemselves. (Halliday n. pag.)

Of particular signicance here is the construction of the phenomenon along the binarylines of state versus non-state. Underlying such a dichotomy is an implicit distinction

between legitimate and illegitimate forms of violence an appeal to the Weberian princi-ple that all states (must) possess a monopoly on violence and a constant preparedness forwar (Halliday). The disturbing implication here is that the applicability of the term isdetermined by whether or not the production of terror has the legitimacy of state powerand authority. This should be read alongside the conclusion by Enders, Sandler, andGaibulloev (335) that domestic terrorism tends to feed transnational terrorism andthat prime targets of transnational terrorism must help contain domestic terrorist cam-

paigns abroad before they spill over into transnational terrorism, through foreign aidor military intervention (335).5 This leads to important policy implications [ ] ofwhere to concentrate counter-terrorism resources in the war on terrorism (334).

These arguments suggest rstly that the prime targets of transnational terrorismare morally and legally justied in framing policies to concentrate counter-terrorism

resources in the war on terrorism. This is analogous to the Weberian principle of statemonopoly on violence (Weber 32), in the sense that the prime targets of transnationalterrorism are positioned and aligned in global terms as global meta-state possessingthe rights and the resources to carry out a war on terrorism anywhere in the world.Correspondingly, the states that are infected by domestic terrorism are relegated to therole of subjects of this meta-state (economically through trade and/or foreign aid, admin-istratively and politically through military intervention, or the threat thereof), leading toan inevitable loss of sovereignty for the states that have to (or are forced to) assume sub-

ject status. In such an understanding, terrorism from below can come to characterizethe actions, not just of isolated groups, but of an entire country, in the appellation terror-

ist state (used variously and at different times for Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and Iran).In terms of global power alignments, the prime target states (presumably the countries ofthe global north) would constitute the above of the implicit global meta-state, in rela-



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tion to the below of the terrorist states. Such an alignment, in global political-economicterms, carries a distinct endorsement of the need for imperialist Orientalism and action; itforms the basis of what is referred to as the new Orientalism (to which we will returnshortly).

Secondly, the dichotomy of state versus non-state actors and actions does not takeinto account forms of violence undertaken by non-state actors with the complicity of or even on behalf of governments. This is especially true of countries with majoritar-ian communities, as in the case of the Hindus in India, in which violence perpetrated

by such a majority is rarely denoted as terrorism, despite the fact that it has preciselythe effect that all terrorist actions have. Nevertheless, it remains largely immune to

being labeled terrorist because the state that monopolizes the right to violence which is almost all states implicitly and tacitly extends that right to the majoritariangroup/community that controls that state. The point of signicance here is that, evenwhen violence is exercised by a majoritarian community, it can be understood as terror-ism; if it is not, then the difference does not lie in the actions perpetrated or the agents

of those actions, but (a) in the semantic and consequently the ideological orientations ofthe concept terrorism; (b) in the fact that it is the perpetrators of those acts who con-trol the discourses around those acts; and (c) the institutions, media, resources and sitesof the articulation of those discourses. Conversely, on a global scale, when a state exer-cises violence, even if that state represents its actions as morally and/or legally valid, itcan be considered a terrorist state, as long as those actions (a) are perceived as goingagainst the prevailing global power alignment; and (b) t what Charles Ruby calls thebehavioral denition of terrorism: terrorism is intended to create an extremely fearfulstate of mind [ ] intended for an audience who may, in fact, have no relationship tothe victims (11). In the case of prime target states, Ruby scales down the responsi-

bility for those actions to specic government agents (13), rather than to the entirestate, while in other cases the state itself and often the entire country or community is held accountable for individual actions that amount to terrorist behavior (the caseof Anders Behrin Breivik). This discriminatory approach is part and parcel of howracial subordination functions, to understand nonwhites as directed by group-baseddeterminism but whites as individuals (Volpp 1585) a logic which is essentially anextension of the old Orientalist associational chain of western-individual-rational versusnon-western-communal-irrational.

Volpps critique targets the new Orientalist ways in which terrorism has become syn-onymous with Islamic terrorism, within certain primarily North American and Europeanmainstream media discourses on the topic, and is both welcome and appropriate.6 Thisnew Orientalist tendency seeks to consolidate a notion of the self that corresponds tothat of the meta-state that is its locus of origin, and denes itself against the other ofthe new Orient. It is therefore not merely a textual strategy or a dominant narrative trope,

but a cognitive and imaginative principle of organizing the world (Said 123). Such a dis-cursive tendency has been and remains powerfully inuential on public perceptions aswell as on policymaking (Cohen; Wilkinson). Nevertheless, it is neither universally trueof all instances of the equation of terrorism with Islamic terrorism nor a purely discursiveeffect of new Orientalism.

Understanding terrorism as a neo-Orientalist term, therefore, while not without somebasis, can gloss over and even overlook the complex dynamics of that new global order,

in which the right to administer terror (in both senses of the word administer: to serveand deliver, and to control and regulate) is the contested strategy by means of which



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the rural. In Mumbai Meri Jaan, Tukaram Patil reiterates an analogy between the cityand the federated (Indian) nation that is established imagically at the beginning of thelm, when Nehrus tryst with destiny speech accompanies archival images of Mumbaithrough time:

You know that this place of ours, that we call Mumbai was just seven disconnected piecesof land, which someone joined together. That is what became Mumbai. That day after thebomb explosion in the train, I could not help wondering whether Mumbai would againbecome seven disconnected pieces of land. (authors translation)

Aamir introduces an additional internal aspect of this multiplicity:

set as it is within the context of globalisation, Mumbai (city and countried local) is counter-poised with an absent London (megapolis), but is also fractured and disaggregated into itsmany component layers. It is thus simultaneously a highly metaphorised and a highly spe-cic rendition of the city. Through the cinematographic spread offered, not just the opticalunconscious [ ] but the discursive underbelly of national identity is opened. Mise enscne facilitates the (unwitting) exposure of what otherwise remains routinely buried: elitism,orthodox normativity, homogeneity, religious majoritarianism and the hierarchies of caste areexplicitly shown to be the underpinnings of mainstream nationalism and national identity.(Gabriel, The Country 55; emphasis added)

New York, A Wednesday! and Black Friday retain this impulse and, like Aamir, cleaveboth city and nation into two. The rst city is the groomed cosmopolis of the urban elite,the city of airports, yovers, high-rises, a space characterized by the ceaseless movementof money, trafc and people, the city of the bourgeois, apparently secular but actuallyupper-caste-upper-middle-class individual (Gabriel, Melodrama 58). The second city

houses the refuse of the

rst city: the slum, the mohalla, the poor migrant, the destituteand the prostitute, all of whom service the rst city, and oil its wheels, just as Big Oilfrom the cradle of terror fuels the global economy. In Mumbai Meri Jaan, Thomas is

beaten and thrown out of a mall because he is poor and a sign of the mohalla that, in thechanging socio-economic landscape of the metropolis, threatens to creep into the elitemall spaces as claimant and not just as servant. These lms then stage a dramatic argu-ment on the nation state and its inhabitants in which the fractured city is both protagonistand antagonist. The various schisms thus symbolized disclose the politics of class, reli-gion and social exclusion within the city-as-nation. So what makes the terrorist attackspectacular is not its violence, but the fact that it spectacularizes the vulnerability of thenormally immunized, parasitic, rst-city elite to violence, even if it is momentarily com-

pared to the systematized structural violence that they practice. The sentimentality thatinfuses representations of a terrorized elite is born of the need to protect the class, casteand religious afnities of both lm-maker and his/her audience/mall-goer. While citieshave been targeted for terrorist attacks because they are political hubs, centres of wealthand media attention, and have a high population density, this sentimentality becomes visi-

ble in the represented vulnerability of the gleaming rst city to contamination, delement,pollution and violence from the rot within it: the second city. In New York, it is the FBIbuilding that becomes the planned target of terrorists who emerge, like a pestilence, fromthe very bowels the drains of the city.

The melodramatic rendition of one of the psychoses of urban modernity the explo-

sion of the repressed in the form of terrorism becomes that which is bred by andinternal to urban modernity. In New York, Guantanamo Bay and New York and not theal-Qaeda engender the terrorist, despite concerted efforts to transfer the blame to the



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social and civilizational Other. The lm carries extended scenes of documented andreported torture. During these, Sam, who is arrested by the FBI on suspicion of aidingthe 9/11 terrorists ten days after the attack, gradually involutes. He is forced by the meth-ods of torture to adopt a fetal (subject) position, and is eventually delivered, ninemonths later, into a full awareness that he is unequal and second-class in a world thatwas once his oyster. He encounters the ethnic-racial bases of nation-states and of privi-leges and entitlements within the nation state. The normally abstracted idea of freedom isforced into material relation with history, thereby made meaningful and shown to bemeaningless. Roshans remark that both he and Omar as Indian Muslims became freeonly in the US implicates both India and Islam as un-free. But Samirs realization thatethnicity and religion disenfranchise him interrogates the American dream and the mythof America as the land of the free. His journey from the triumphant ag-bearing allAmerican Sam at the beginning of the lm to the criminalized hangdog Samir exitingGuantanamo Bay, records the implications of 9/11 and the difference a syllable Sam(ir)or a phonic (Aamir or Amar) can make. Bafingly for him, Samir goes from being citi-

zen to Muslim. It is, then, not surprising that it is Samir who poses the central questionof the lm, how does an all-American dude became a terrorist?

In Aamir, we see how transnational terrorism shapes the perception and imaginationof domestic terrorism. The trouble Aamir faces at the airport a physical point ofinteraction between the transnational and the domestic reveals the continuity betweenglobal and local ways of seeing, and marks his (discarded) Muslim-ness as a seeminglystable signier. The narrative of the lm then returns him to the meanings of this dis-carded identity (revealing, somewhat inadvertently, that Muslim-ness in India is not just areligious condition, but a socio-economic one), and to the implications ofquam (an Urduword that means nation or community, sometimes with an implicit synonymity

between the two). As an NRI doctor with a Hindu ance, he epitomizes upper-classIndia, integrated into the secular metropolitan globalized economy; but this subject posi-tion is steadily interrogated, undone and overwritten by his forcible reintegration into theMuslim quam. The quam is characterized/signied most conspicuously as a single,organic, alien and monstrous body with compound and distributed eyes that function asan extension of its hidden head the mastermind. In almost all terrorist lms the sec-ond city is shown harbouring the demonic, lunar, multitudinous compound and commu-nal eye of the quam as opposed to the single solar, celestial Eye (de Certeau 92) of thesecular state and its legitimated communities. This classic gendering and racializing ofworlds, communities and spaces that characterizes Aamir, My Name is Khan, Black Fri-day and A Wednesday! is inverted in New York, where Guantanamo Bay, which was insti-tuted by an epitome of legitimacy in the US the FBI becomes the site of thesubterranean and the orchestrated demoniacal. However, Guantanamo Bay, unlike anothersub-terrain the drain is geographically segregated, even while, like the drain, it criss-crosses the city, even feeding those drain pipes which we see are a part of the very archi-tecture of the FBI building and, possibly, its nemesis. Ultimately, Samir emerges fromthese very drains to properly service the FBI, but notably Samir, like the nameless pro-tagonist in A Wednesday!, is elevated to the top of the building, becoming potentially

positioned as the celestial all-seeing eye one who has seen both drain and rooftop, sub-terrain and surface till he is supplanted/trounced by the urban all-seeing eye of the sur-veillance state. The lm works out this remarkable play on vision and the lack of it, as

Samir sees, is made to see, or cannot see, as he is taken to various sites that reveal some-thing crucial about a post-9/11 city, nation, world, community, self, situation. He remains

blind and uncomprehending only of the betrayals afoot under his very nose by those he



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is closest to. The audience itself is allowed privileged access to all worlds the FBIinterrogation room, ofces, Samirs home, Guantanamo Bay, the sleeper cell and all psy-chological spaces. It is this scopic advantage that generates the pathos that accumulatesaround Sam, serving as it does to elaborate what is usually schematized in narrations ofterror and terrorism. So while the mastermind of Aamir is literally left in the dark, anunmistakable yet invisiblized presence, lmed with noirish lighting, disgured by starklylow or high-angle shots, neither Samir, nor that which birthed him are concealed. In someways, Samirs death is spectacular simply by virtue of its location, providing the implicitcomment on the value that accrues to the death that happens in public view or is publi-cized (9/11) as opposed to deaths in the drains, or sub-terrain. Aamirs unmourned deathis turned into mere and meaningless spectacle by the shrill uncomprehending mediareportage of it. But, for all that, it is a necessary spectacle: like Samir, Aamir the Muslimmust die, as it were, on behalf of his treacherous Muslim brethren, so that Aamir the lib-eral can save the cosmopolis and uphold the values of urban, upper/middle class India,which, through the very narrative requirement of his death, is shown to be communal.

Eventually both Aamir and Samir one of whom is a partially lapsed Muslim areforced to become signiers of that which they have little relation to: the transnationaliz-ing Orientalist discourse on Islam and Muslims which silently but clearly decrees that theonly good Muslim is a dead one.

Notes

1. Recentlms on terrorism include Fanaa, Sarfarosh, Zameen, Mumbai Meri Jaan.2. In 2008, Anil Ambanis Reliance Big Pictures and Hollywood icon Steven Spielberg signed a

$825 million deal to make lms for global audiences (Media n. pag.).3. Even though the long-standing demand for the corporatization of the industry was initiated in

2000, 9/11 signicantly boosted LPG and its implications for the organization of the media.

4. They are premeditated, carried out by individuals belonging to a subnational group and theirobjective is intimidation. Despite Hindu nationalist claims, Hindus do not constitute anational group in India any more than Christians or Muslims, because, while Hindusmay constitute a majority in terms of overall aggregates, they are not a majority in many otherparts of the country. Vibhuti Narain Rai, former Indian Police Service ofcer, notes that sincethe 1960s there has probably been no single [communal] riot in which less than 90% of thosekilled have been Muslims (Rai).

5. While Enders, Sandler, and Gaibulloev provide strong statistical evidence to prove this, theGujarat genocide of 2002, the situation in Iraq or Afghanistan and now in Libya present some-what counter-intuitive, counter-factual cases to this argument.

6. Bernard Lewis is a typical new Orientalist. See Lewis and Alam.7. Both the global imperial struggle for oil and local struggles for resources: land, forests, water,

minerals, etc. These are exemplied vividly by the pronouncing of recalcitrant oil producingcountries Iraq, Iran, Libya as terrorist states, in the rst case; and the characterization oftribal resistance to the illegal corporate plunder of mineral resources from constitutionallyprotected tribal lands, as Maoism, or red terrorism.

Notes on contributors

Karen Gabriel is an Associate Professor in English at St Stephens College, Delhi University, anda Marie Curie Incoming International Fellow at the Center for Gender Studies, TEMA, LinkopingUniversity. She has published numerous essays on the sexual economies of Bombay Cinema. Herrecent book, Melodrama and the Nation (2011), was published by Women Unlimited, Delhi.

P.K. Vijayan is an Associate Professor of English at Hindu College, Delhi University. He has

published extensively on Hindu state and Hindutva ideology in India.



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Orientalism, Terrorism, Bombay Cinema