ABSTRACT
Strategically selected discourses of history are routinely mobilised within the arena of popular culture as instruments that can mitigate the slipperiness of the present and volatility of its politics. On the other hand, films such as Uri: The Surgical Strike (2019), Batla House (2019), Mission Mangal (2019), Pad Man (2018), and Toilet: Ek Prem Katha (2017), which are based on relatively recent historical events, reconfigure the present moment in order to engineer a specific understanding of it in public memory and legitimise their versions as the historical discourses in the future. As they render complex politics of historical reality manageable by transmuting them into myths that can be easily circulated within the economy of political discourse, these films offer an occasion to trace the movement of history into myth. This chapter will examine this process and probe the myths being peddled by these films to extrapolate contemporary political anxieties.
