ABSTRACT
The vision of the nation presented in Bollywood war movies is key to the contemporary socio-political and historical moment, reifying powerful, “muscular” nationalism that is intertwined with the ascendancy of Hindutva forces in the 2010s. The circulation of discourses around impending cultural/national threats renders the figure of the soldier as particularly poignant. This chapter seeks to examine the ways in which the enterprise of war cinema in Bollywood has deployed the masculine/masculinised body of the soldier upon the silver screen in the last decade or so. It seeks to locate the contexts in which these war narratives reiterate the tenets foregrounded by right-wing Hinduism, disseminating a specific mode of being male/soldier/Indian; in tying hegemonic masculinity to ultra-nationalism, the cinematic representation of men-at-war circumscribes ideal maleness, masculine power, as well as the dominant, national imaginaries of manhood. In tandem, that which is non-masculine is produced and reproduced, marginalised as oppositional and/or ancillary to the hegemonic performances, practices, and meanings that re-present the capital masculine in Bollywood war narratives – the chapter seeks to deconstruct the strategies and filmic techniques through which this is affected.
