ABSTRACT
Mani Ratnam’s much acclaimed and award winning film Roja, released in
1993, is a story about the personal ordeal of a newly-wed, innocent village
girl from the Southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Her husband Rishi is a
cryptologist working for the Indian Government. He is assigned a post in
an Army Communication Centre in Kashmir where he is abducted by a group of Kashmiri separatists who demand the release of their leader
Wassim Khan in exchange. Roja who doesn’t speak Hindi or English pleads
in Tamil and with hand signals to politicians and military officials to help
secure the release of her husband. But Rishi manages to escape in time
without any assistance from the Indian authorities. The movie ends with the
reunion of Roja and Rishi and the terrorist leader Wassim Khan still in
prison in India. The climax of the narrative thus not only secures the Indian
nation but more crucially reinforces the hegemony of a secular (Hindu) postcolonial Indian nation as constructed by the nation-state.1
