Patriotic Frames: Bollywood's Villains Through the Ages

Within the luminescent world of Bollywood, where dreams dance on celluloid, a parallel story of patriotism, heroism, and villainy has been etched over the decades. As India marks its 76th Independence Day, it's a fitting occasion to peer into the cinematic mirror that reflects the nation's fervour for freedom and its complex relationship with its past, its neighbours, and the world at large. Beyond the dazzling song-and-dance routines, Bollywood has woven narratives that resonate with the beating heart of a nation's aspirations, trials, and triumphs. Join us on a captivating journey through time, as we explore the evolution of patriotism's portrayal in Bollywood, from the era of colonial censorship to the modern age of global challenges and diverse villains.

A Few Patriotic Films of Bollywood. Image Credit: Gowri Suresh

This month, India celebrates its 76th Independence Day. On this occasion, let us look at how patriotism has been portrayed in Bollywood. Prior to 1947, the British could not be shown as villains in our films, obviously because the British censors would come down like a ton of bricks. But our intelligent filmmakers found ways of sneaking in patriotic messages in the dialogues, screenplay, or even the music.  There is, for example, the song ‘Charkha chalao bahno’ (‘spin the wheel, sisters’) in Aaj Ka Hindustan (1940), and the song ‘Chal chal re naujawan’ (‘march on, youth of the nation’) from Bandhan (1940). Brandy Ki Botal (1939) criticised liquor consumption, while Ghar Ki Rani (1940) highlighted the dire consequences of aping Western traditions.

Post independence, we have had a regular influx of films that have kicked up patriotic fervour — from  Shaheed (1965), which was about Bhagat Singh, and Kranti (1981) to 1942: A Love Story (1994). And, of course, the superhit Lagaan (2001), in which a group of villagers led by Bhuvan (Aamir Khan) beat the British at their own game — cricket. There was the classy Shatranj Ke Khiladi (1977), a period drama set in 1856, when the British were about to annex Awadh. The principal villains were Captain Weston (Tom Alter) and General Outram (Sir Richard Attenborough), who cooked up a premise to oust the weakling Nawab Wajid Ali Shah from Awadh. Outram’s incisive political strategy in spotting the nawab’s weaknesses and Weston’s shrewd execution were the first successful example in Hindi cinema of the British ‘divide-and-rule’ formula. Outram went beyond merely wielding the whip. In fact, there was not a trace of physical violence in him. His villainy lay in his strategy — he was the khiladi (chess player) and the nawab and his council of ministers were the shatranj (chess).

Apart from the British, Indians were called upon to fight for their motherland against other nations too. The 1962 Indo-China war spawned several films, perhaps the most well-known of them being the superhit Haqeeqat (1964). In the aftermath of the 1965 and the 1971 Indo-Pak wars came films like Prem Pujari (1970) and Hindustan Ki Kasam (1973). The stories of Indian soldiers continued to be portrayed in Border (1997), which was about the Battle of Longewala in the 1971 war with Pakistan. Unfortunately, we fought another tragic war with Pakistan in 1999 — the Kargil war. Based on this war came LoC Kargil (2003), which revolved around Pakistan’s intrusion into the Batalik and Dras sectors by crossing the LoC.  Lakshya (2003) was another film on the Kargil war, a fictionalised account of the reclamation of Peak 5179 at Kargil.  All of these were war films, portraying the nature of India’s hostile relationships with those nations.

Raazi (2018) and The Ghazi Attack (2017) too were war films, but these revolved around specific Pakistani characters shown up close rather than a war in an open battlefield with booming guns. In Raazi, an Indian spy penetrates the home of a Pakistani brigadier, while The Ghazi Attack was a mental game of war strategies between the Pakistani commander Razzaq Khan (Rahul Singh) of the Pakistani submarine PNS Ghazi and his enemy commanders of India’s submarine S21.

War is bad. But there was something worse — terrorism and terror-financing. Jamwal (Pankaj Kapur) in Dus (2005), was an international mercenary. Unlike the typical Bollywood villain who makes the earth rumble under his feet, Jamwal has no screen presence at all because, for the better part of the film, Jamwal hides in broad daylight as an impostor to fool the Indian Anti-Terrorist Cell.

The legacy of professional arms suppliers was carried on by villains like the suave and charming arms dealer Mikhail (Prithviraj Sukumaran) in Naam Shabana (2017), who was the one-stop shop for outlawed outfits like Jaish, Lashkar, and the Indian Mujahideen for all their arms requirements. People like Mikhail were professional terrorist outfits who got hired by the jihadis to carry out terror attacks on India. Mission Kashmir (2000) was another such instance, with Hilal Kohistani (Jackie Shroff), a professional assassin and terrorist, getting hired by a group of jihadis to carry out a major terrorist attack in Kashmir.

At the turn of the millennium, Pakistan’s secret agencies became the new villain in Bollywood films, especially in films centred around the two countries’ age-old grumble over Kashmir. Border Kashmir (2002), Lamhaa: The Untold Story of Kashmir (2010), Zameen (2003), The Hero: Love Story of a Spy (2003) were all about spying, insurgency, or assassination conspiracies by militant and terrorist groups harboured by Pakistan. Lamhaa showed seven- and eight-year-old boys being indoctrinated into anti-India sloganeering in a Lashkar Training Camp in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (POK). In this film, we also see Pakistan’s ISI headquarters funding and controlling local leaders like Haji Sayyed Shah (Anupam Kher), wielding jihad for an azaad Kashmir. In Zameen (2003), Pakistani outfit Al Tahir hijacks an Indian civilian plane with 107 passengers and crew to the POK, demanding the release of their leader, the dreaded terrorist Baba Zaheer Khan (Mukesh Tiwari). Pakistan’s direct involvement was so explicit that the Pakistan Army actually congratulated the hijackers and deployed troops to protect them. Even Pakistan’s ambassador to India (played by Arun Bali) refuses to help India. In The Hero (2003), ISI’s Additional Head Chief General Isaq Khan (Amrish Puri) was the principal villain who masterminded Operation Nishaan, which was about the ISI clearing the way for the jihadis to steal the Islamic nuclear bomb, while the Pakistan government would pretend that they had nothing to with the bomb being stolen. With the help of the bomb, the religious militant would win back Kashmir from India.

In the post-9/11 world, international terror took a turn for the worse with the likes of Lashkar-e-Taiba and the Mujahideen making daily front-page news. Baby (2015) was about the unofficial war between the Indian Intelligence and Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) on one side, and Pakistan’s ISI, LeT, Indian Mujahideen, and the lesser-heard-of Nanhe Mujahid on the other. A series of aerial strikes in various cities of India was being planned by Lashkar and Indian Mujahideen using Lashkar’s ‘Jumbo Jet Room’ based in Karachi. This operation was led by Pakistan-backed terrorist Bilal Khan (Kay Kay Menon), who was incarcerated in Mumbai. But the IM and ISI help Bilal Khan escape from Mumbai and flee to Saudi Al-Dera (perhaps a veiled name for Saudi Arabia) to plan and execute these aerial attacks.

One of the worst terrorist attacks that took place on Indian soil was at the Bombay Stock Exchange on 12 March 1993. Black Friday (2004) — based on crime reporter and writer Hussain Zaidi’s Black Friday: The True Story of the Bombay Bomb Blasts — brought to the fore, in an authentic way, Pakistan’s undeniable role in the Mumbai serial blasts of March 1993.

India has had to bear the brunt of foreign forces from another neighbour as well. Consistent with the trend of films inspired by real-life terror attacks, Sri Lanka’s Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), responsible for the assassination of the then Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, was fictionalised as the LTF (Liberation of Tamils Front) in Madras Café (2013). In the film, LTF supremo Anna Baskaran (played by Ajay Ratnam) was a thinly veiled portrayal of Velupillai Prabhakaran.

But what about the countries farther west? There hasn’t been a single prominent film in Bollywood that has had an American villain. Partly because the average Indian Americans, Frenchmen, and Englishmen all fall under a generic ‘angrez’. Secondly, we cannot realistically show a war with the Americans because we have never fought one with them. So, for the Indian, ‘Amreeka’ is a bad place, and the American villain is the all-corrupting culture of that country. In Pardes (1997) and Aa Ab Laut Chalen (1999), the villain was not a specific gum-chewing Texan or a mugger in downtown Bronx. The villain was the so-called American lifestyle itself — one that consisted of multiple sexual partners and the concomitant ills of drinking and gambling, and, therefore, the antithesis of what we understand to be bharatiya sanskar or Indian culture and values.

Director Abhishek Sharma, on the other hand, showed more nuance in his Parmanu: The Story of Pokhran (2018). In the film, the US was the villain for a specific reason — Bill Clinton and the CIA were trying to systematically thwart India’s nuclear testing programme. Or, take the example of NASA’s caustically cynical Indian-American scientist Rupert Desai (Dalip Tahil) in Mission Mangal (2019) who, after failed attempts to discourage ISRO’s mission, kept hoping, at every step, that the Mars mission would fail.

Have foreign villains exhausted their ideas? What novel villainy can they now conceive of? What about an invisible, man-made virus in a laboratory in China that is contagious enough to bring India’s social and economic machinery to a halt?

Yes, that could be the next big flavour of villainy.