Orientalism, terrorism and Bombay cinema

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Orientalism, terrorism and Bombay

cinema
a
Karen Gabriel & P.K. Vijayan
St Stephens College, Hindu College, Delhi University

Published online: 01 Jun 2012.
To cite this article: Karen Gabriel & P.K. Vijayan (2012): Orientalism, terrorism and Bombay
cinema, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 48:3, 299-310
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Vol. 48, No. 3, July 2012, 299310
Orientalism, terrorism and Bombay cinema

Karen Gabriel* and P.K. Vijayan
Downloaded by [Karen Gabriel] at 12:47 10 June 2013
St Stephens College, Hindu College, Delhi University

This paper critically assesses the usefulness of the new-Orientalism thesis in
understanding the discourses around the idea of terrorism and of the terrorist. It
observes that critiques of new Orientalism provide important insights into the ways
in 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 of
locality in understanding how these categories are formulated. The case of Bombay
cinema is particularly instructive here. The paper argues that Bombay cinema which
has engaged with these concerns in some form since its inception, and is going global in unprecedented ways exemplies both the play of these two distinct discursive 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 mechanics
and 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, which
erupted in various parts of the country, beginning with Kashmir and Nagaland. By the
1970s, there were insurgent movements in other northeastern states; Tamil militancy from
Sri Lanka; radical left Naxal militancy; and the Khalistan movement in Punjab. These
were well represented in the public imagination via mainstream print and electronic
media and as infested or controlled by terrorist organizations. Yet it was only after
Mani Ratnams Roja (1992), addressing the question of militancy in Kashmir, that Indian
cinema began to address terrorism and the issues around it more explicitly, despite the
fact that terrorism and terrorists have been familiar to pre- and post-independence
India for a much longer time. Both the Tamil and the Hindi versions of Roja did well
and triggered a host of lms on terrorism.1 However, very few of these subsequent lms
dealt 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 by
intensive police and paramilitary operations through the 1980s. Even the assassination of
Indira Gandhi and the anti-Sikh riots that followed in 1984 did not nd reference in
cinema, possibly because of censorship. The assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 by an
LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) suicide bomber was reected in cinema years
later in the 1998 Tamil lm Theeviravaathi: The Terrorist, although the LTTE belt
appeared as a charged signier of terrorism in lms like Dil Se (1998). Nevertheless, cinema did begin to show an increasing interest in the theme through the 1990s and into the
rst decade of this century.
*Corresponding author. Email: karengabriel@yahoo.com
ISSN 1744-9855 print/ISSN 1744-9863 online
2012 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2012.678744
http://www.tandfonline.com
300
K. Gabriel and P.K. Vijayan
In most of these representations, terrorism was identied as a Pakistani import into

India, especially in relation to Kashmir. While Hindi cinema was echoing a widely disseminated state political position on the matter, it also treated the issue as a fundamentally affective one, linking it melodramatically and crucially to belongingness, the
familial, consanguinity and kinship in the context of the nation. The issue of national
identity and Kashmir remained central in the cinematic treatment of terrorism, and even
on 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 and
imaginative peg for issues related to nation formation, self-determination, sovereignty,
heterogeneity, conict and reconciliation. Interestingly enough, given that the Kashmiri
landscape is not representative of the entire Indian topography, that secessionism has
been a ceaseless impulse there, and that location shooting in Kashmir was drastically
reduced and moved to lm cities following post-1970s escalations and intensications in
violence in the region, the very landscape of Kashmir continued to be seen to evoke
India. The ongoing need to claim Kashmir as Indian, while also acknowledging conict and the possibility of reconciliation, has led to a series of narrative experiments with
the idea of the nation state (e.g. Roja, Mission Kashmir, Fiza). This is one of the reasons
why, often, even though the terrorist was identiably Muslim, there was always a countervailing, patriotic and sacricial good Muslim. The predominantly melodramatic treatment 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 contained 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 stability. Its dual orientation towards the lyrical and the dramatic, its use of mise en scne and its
propensity for mythication become representational advantages in launching mainstream
narratives of and on society, permitting a psychologised narrative of troubling social events
and 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 had
already evolved an ambivalent moral space that was accommodative of acts like terrorism, through its celebration of vigilantism epitomized by the persona of the angry young
man. Ambivalence toward terrorism is inevitable in a postcolonial nation like India in
which violence and terror tactics were a part of the repertoire of the struggle for freedom
(Heehs 46982). The series of ve celebratory lms on the life of the nationalist freedom
ghter, Bhagat Singh, made between 2002 and 2006, exemplify this ambivalence even
while they articulate the now contested distinction between Hindu terror as for the
Motherland and Muslim terror as against the Motherland. In fact, the timing of the
Bhagat Singh lms post-9/11, and after the Hindutva upsurge advise us of the importance of factoring context into any understanding terrorism and terrorist acts. The appropriative revival of this legend in the strident Hindu nationalist environment of the 1990s
involved his cinematic celebration as a potent masculine emblem of Hindu identity. The
celebration itself was possible primarily because of the removed colonial setting and the
intense infusion of nationalism.
But 9/11 perceptibly transformed the ways in which cinema began to deal with and
represent 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 to
a representational world, the many contexts of cinematic production and modes of char-
301
acterization as well. The term terrorism changes register as a discursive play is initiated
between the national and newer international contexts of articulation, and the Indian position on terrorism in the South Asian context is consolidated by the post-9/11 US intervention into the debate. Representational changes were aided by the changed and
changing business models in the industry, and increasing corporate links with media
houses in the US in particular, signicantly inuenced the cinematic treatment of terrorism.2 This was assisted by the increased out-migration of Indian professionals to the
countries of the global north, and especially the US, resulting in an increase in the size
and wealth of the diaspora. All of these infused the cinematic representation of terrorism
with a greater global than regional particularity, with change of context leading to
changes in idiom, narratives and landscapes, and even to changes in cinematic form and
style. The moral ambivalence of the local, infused as it was with vigilantism and
nationalism, gives way to the global categorical equation of Islam with terrorism. In
what 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 before
the 1990s was the lm industrys careful negotiation of nationalism, national identity, and
the Indian state whether conceptually, institutionally (e.g. Central Board of Film Certication) or logistically (policies on tax, raw stock) (Gabriel, Melodrama). This complex of
relations 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, destitution, retribution and eventual reconciliation. Themes of nation-building, pre-eminent
from the 1950s onward, were consciously in line with the Indian states own avowed
agenda of national integration, which the lm industry notwithstanding the suspicion
with which the state regarded it saw itself partnering (Barnouw and Krishnaswamy).
The nation was celebrated as a triumphal entity that had embraced the challenging economic and social labour needed to achieve a Nehruvian vision. Nevertheless and inevitably, issues pertaining to the Indian nation and the bases of its formation exemplied by
Kashmir troubled the narrative and symbolic structure of the cinema with varying
degrees of urgency manifesting as a concern with border-breach, kinship, relative rights
and legitimacy. The discussions of these themes were structured by the interrupted melodramatic mode and discursively located along the gender-sexual axis. For instance, Manmohan Desais 1977 lm Amar Akbar Anthony addresses the issue explicitly
and inclusively despite the subtle hierarchy that is instituted by making the mother the
common point of origin Hindu. This attempt to unify in an originary kind of way what
is identied in the lm as distinctly diverse indexes a growing unease with heterogeneity
e.g. northeastern India. This intensies from the 1980s onwards, and becomes a central
concern in the 1990s. As signicantly, the rationale for the Indian nation state also came
to be articulated as a culturo-civilizational one in discourses of religious nationalism particularly after the 1980s rise of the Hindu Right and the 1990s programmatic endorsement 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
302
Hindu-ness and concomitant interrogations around the necessity and status of minorities
to and within the diverse nation state.
This eruptive right-wing nationalism was characterized not only by its strong Hindu
upper caste chauvinism, but by anti-minorityism, anti-Muslim rhetoric and practice that
resulted in, among other things, the demolition of the ancient Babri Mosque in 1992 by
Hindu nationalist fanatics, and the retaliatory Mumbai bomb blasts of 1993 by the
Muslim underworld. Signicantly, despite cinemas engagement with communal violence
and the role that Hindus play in it, like mainstream public discourse, it has baulked from
representing 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, following Sandlers (280) understanding of terrorism theres every reason to consider Hindu
attacks on Muslims and Christians as terrorist.4 None of the numerous and increasing
incidents of communal violence that mark this period and which were to culminate in
the genocidal violence against Muslims in Gujarat in 2002 (Gujarat Riots) were ever
sought to be represented as terrorist.
Fundamental to our understanding of how terrorism gets constructed in this period is
the coincidence of and inextricable link between religious right-wingism (Hindu nationalism) and economic right-wingism (LPG). Given that the economic elite in the country
has traditionally and dominantly been upper-caste Hindu, it was inevitable that economic
policies aimed at protecting their interests produced a commensurately protectionist ideological formulation, viz. Hindu nationalism. Resistance to these twin objectives was
actively discouraged and suppressed, as we see from the increasing number of repressive
Acts and Ordinances passed since independence in the name of national security, and
radically exclusive notions of nationalism were operationalized (for instance, the Maintenance 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 antinational and terrorist. In any case, Hindu nationalism has, from its very inception in the
19th century, dened itself consistently against Islam and the Muslim communities of
the subcontinent (Bhatt; Hansen; Hasan; Zavos). Furthermore, cinemas commitment to
the coincidence between political and cultural nationalism ensured that its notions of terrorism were in harmony with those of the Hindu nationalists, even while it continuously
strove 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 that
the 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 northeast
to Hindi cinemas imagination of the nation applies to Tamil militancy (Harriss 98) and
the northeastern problem. Furthermore, the exponential expansion of Hindi cinemas global and diasporic market over the last ve years, along with technological and institutional convergence that now characterizes all media industries, has led to radical
structural 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 consumption systems the economies, in other words of the global north/west (Gabriel, Melodrama; Kohli-Khandekar). These economies, the civilizations that house them, and the
way of life that they enable, are projected as continuously under threat from Islamic
terror a theme and a context for the construction of terrorism that Hindi cinema has
adopted in lms like My Name is Khan (2010). Even when the context changes from a
303
transnational to a domestic one (Enders, Sandler, and Gaibulloev), the treatment of

theme 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 cognitive, discursive and ideological errors, confusions and obfuscations. If the context were
to be thickened with the specicity of locality e.g. attention to the complexity of
HinduMuslim relations in India, the history of the IsraeliPalestinian conict or even
the 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 to
refer 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 are
in modern secular politics; it has no specic regional or cultural attachment; it is an instrument, one among several, for those aspiring to challenge states and, one day, to take power
themselves. (Halliday n. pag.)
Of particular signicance here is the construction of the phenomenon along the binary
lines 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 principle that all states (must) possess a monopoly on violence and a constant preparedness for
war (Halliday). The disturbing implication here is that the applicability of the term is
determined by whether or not the production of terror has the legitimacy of state power
and authority. This should be read alongside the conclusion by Enders, Sandler, and
Gaibulloev (335) that domestic terrorism tends to feed transnational terrorism and
that prime targets of transnational terrorism must help contain domestic terrorist campaigns abroad before they spill over into transnational terrorism, through foreign aid
or military intervention (335).5 This leads to important policy implications [ ] of
where to concentrate counter-terrorism resources in the war on terrorism (334).
These arguments suggest rstly that the prime targets of transnational terrorism
are 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 state
monopoly on violence (Weber 32), in the sense that the prime targets of transnational
terrorism are positioned and aligned in global terms as global meta-state possessing
the 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 the
role of subjects of this meta-state (economically through trade and/or foreign aid, administratively and politically through military intervention, or the threat thereof), leading to
an inevitable loss of sovereignty for the states that have to (or are forced to) assume subject status. In such an understanding, terrorism from below can come to characterize
the actions, not just of isolated groups, but of an entire country, in the appellation terrorist 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 of
the global north) would constitute the above of the implicit global meta-state, in rela-
304
tion to the below of the terrorist states. Such an alignment, in global political-economic
terms, carries a distinct endorsement of the need for imperialist Orientalism and action; it
forms the basis of what is referred to as the new Orientalism (to which we will return
shortly).
Secondly, the dichotomy of state versus non-state actors and actions does not take
into 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 majoritarian 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 precisely
the 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 majoritarian
group/community that controls that state. The point of signicance here is that, even
when violence is exercised by a majoritarian community, it can be understood as terrorism; 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 of
the concept terrorism; (b) in the fact that it is the perpetrators of those acts who control the discourses around those acts; and (c) the institutions, media, resources and sites
of the articulation of those discourses. Conversely, on a global scale, when a state exercises violence, even if that state represents its actions as morally and/or legally valid, it
can be considered a terrorist state, as long as those actions (a) are perceived as going
against the prevailing global power alignment; and (b) t what Charles Ruby calls the
behavioral denition of terrorism: terrorism is intended to create an extremely fearful
state of mind [ ] intended for an audience who may, in fact, have no relationship to
the victims (11). In the case of prime target states, Ruby scales down the responsibility for those actions to specic government agents (13), rather than to the entire
state, 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 case
of Anders Behrin Breivik). This discriminatory approach is part and parcel of how
racial subordination functions, to understand nonwhites as directed by group-based
determinism but whites as individuals (Volpp 1585) a logic which is essentially an
extension of the old Orientalist associational chain of western-individual-rational versus
non-western-communal-irrational.
Volpps critique targets the new Orientalist ways in which terrorism has become synonymous with Islamic terrorism, within certain primarily North American and European
mainstream media discourses on the topic, and is both welcome and appropriate.6 This
new Orientalist tendency seeks to consolidate a notion of the self that corresponds to
that of the meta-state that is its locus of origin, and denes itself against the other of
the 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 discursive tendency has been and remains powerfully inuential on public perceptions as
well as on policymaking (Cohen; Wilkinson). Nevertheless, it is neither universally true
of all instances of the equation of terrorism with Islamic terrorism nor a purely discursive
effect of new Orientalism.
Understanding terrorism as a neo-Orientalist term, therefore, while not without some
basis, 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 serve
and deliver, and to control and regulate) is the contested strategy by means of which
305
states engage with each other and with their populations, in the struggle to control
resources as well as to claim, retain or resist hegemonic power.7
The limits of the new Orientalism thesis
It is now clear that while the tendency to synonymize terrorism with Islamic terrorism is
common to a western perception and a local Hindu nationalist perception, the reasons for
doing so are different. The latter is the product of a complex history of Hindu-Muslim
relations in the subcontinent dating back to the 19th century, and is best understood
through the concept of religious communalism, generated and sustained by very different
politico-economic conditions and dynamics from those that have determined new Orientalism (Corbridge and Harriss). Illustratively, Big Oil, a key factor in the shaping of the
new Orientalism (Fueling Terror n. pag.) plays no role whatsoever in shaping communalism in India (Corbridge and Harriss; Vijayan). Conversely, caste contestation, central to religious communalism (Jaffrelot) has no parallel in shaping new Orientalism.
However, the new Orientalist motif of the white mans burden, especially regarding
Muslim women, who are represented as severely oppressed and in need of rescue from
their communities (Puar; Rai), has some correspondence in Hindu nationalist and communalist representations of Muslim women, the dominant perception and representation of
Muslim women in Hindu communalist discourses is as sexually fecund. However, in
almost all contexts, the Muslim male is the cause for anxiety and the gendered and sexualized face of terror. Fanaa, Shootout at Lokhandwala, New York, Black Friday, A
Wednesday! all document this anxiety as congealing around what is notated as a fundamentalist, implacable Islamic masculinity.
It is true that the principles of racial and ethnic distinction that underlie the old and
the new Orientalism are to be also found at work in, for instance, the perception of the
tribal communities in the jungles of eastern India, who are represented as primitive,
resisting developmental programs (Roy n. pag.). In order to rene an understanding of
terrorism, it is important to see this as (a) distinct from the anti-Islamism of terrorism,
aimed as it is simply at quelling dissent; and (b) serving to reinforce the hegemony of
the power elite, through the mechanisms of the state. As we have argued, terrorism is not
identied by an action, but rather by the nature of the states relation to it.
Cinema and terrorism
The cinematic take on these issues is inuenced both by the industrys early ideological
commitment to the idea of the nation and nation-building, and by the various structural,
nancial, organizational and technological changes that came with corporatization, globalization, convergence and the digital revolution. The distinctly urban phenomenon of the
multiplex cinema that resulted from the larger commercial development of shopping
complexes and malls, has effectively transformed both lm-viewing and lm-making.
The Slumdog effect notwithstanding, the cinema became even more narcissistically
focused on urban upper and middle class concerns and the treatment of these as momentous in themselves. However, the urbanity of contemporary cinema in particular owes as
much to the mainly urban location of the cinema halls as to the centrality of the city to
modern life. Consequently, the city provides a site, a location, a signier and a set of thematics that facilitates a complex relationship with reality that is especially productive for
cinema (Clark 2). In a terrorist lm, the city is deployed with particular effectiveness
to stand in for the nation and its angularities, a representational move that tellingly elides
306
the rural. In Mumbai Meri Jaan, Tukaram Patil reiterates an analogy between the city
and the federated (Indian) nation that is established imagically at the beginning of the
lm, when Nehrus tryst with destiny speech accompanies archival images of Mumbai
through time:
You know that this place of ours, that we call Mumbai was just seven disconnected pieces
of land, which someone joined together. That is what became Mumbai. That day after the
bomb explosion in the train, I could not help wondering whether Mumbai would again
become 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 counterpoised with an absent London (megapolis), but is also fractured and disaggregated into its
many component layers. It is thus simultaneously a highly metaphorised and a highly specic rendition of the city. Through the cinematographic spread offered, not just the optical
unconscious [ ] but the discursive underbelly of national identity is opened. Mise en
scne facilitates the (unwitting) exposure of what otherwise remains routinely buried: elitism,
orthodox normativity, homogeneity, religious majoritarianism and the hierarchies of caste are
explicitly 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, cleave
both 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 movement
of money, trafc and people, the city of the bourgeois, apparently secular but actually
upper-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 destitute
and the prostitute, all of whom service the rst city, and oil its wheels, just as Big Oil
from 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 the
changing socio-economic landscape of the metropolis, threatens to creep into the elite
mall spaces as claimant and not just as servant. These lms then stage a dramatic argument on the nation state and its inhabitants in which the fractured city is both protagonist
and antagonist. The various schisms thus symbolized disclose the politics of class, religion and social exclusion within the city-as-nation. So what makes the terrorist attack
spectacular is not its violence, but the fact that it spectacularizes the vulnerability of the
normally immunized, parasitic, rst-city elite to violence, even if it is momentarily compared to the systematized structural violence that they practice. The sentimentality that
infuses representations of a terrorized elite is born of the need to protect the class, caste
and religious afnities of both lm-maker and his/her audience/mall-goer. While cities
have been targeted for terrorist attacks because they are political hubs, centres of wealth
and media attention, and have a high population density, this sentimentality becomes visible 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 FBI
building that becomes the planned target of terrorists who emerge, like a pestilence, from
the very bowels the drains of the city.
The melodramatic rendition of one of the psychoses of urban modernity the explosion of the repressed in the form of terrorism becomes that which is bred by and
internal to urban modernity. In New York, Guantanamo Bay and New York and not the
al-Qaeda engender the terrorist, despite concerted efforts to transfer the blame to the
307
social and civilizational Other. The lm carries extended scenes of documented and
reported torture. During these, Sam, who is arrested by the FBI on suspicion of aiding
the 9/11 terrorists ten days after the attack, gradually involutes. He is forced by the methods of torture to adopt a fetal (subject) position, and is eventually delivered, nine
months later, into a full awareness that he is unequal and second-class in a world that
was once his oyster. He encounters the ethnic-racial bases of nation-states and of privileges and entitlements within the nation state. The normally abstracted idea of freedom is
forced into material relation with history, thereby made meaningful and shown to be
meaningless. Roshans remark that both he and Omar as Indian Muslims became free
only in the US implicates both India and Islam as un-free. But Samirs realization that
ethnicity and religion disenfranchise him interrogates the American dream and the myth
of America as the land of the free. His journey from the triumphant ag-bearing all
American Sam at the beginning of the lm to the criminalized hangdog Samir exiting
Guantanamo 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 citizen to Muslim. It is, then, not surprising that it is Samir who poses the central question
of the lm, how does an all-American dude became a terrorist?
In Aamir, we see how transnational terrorism shapes the perception and imagination
of domestic terrorism. The trouble Aamir faces at the airport a physical point of
interaction between the transnational and the domestic reveals the continuity between
global and local ways of seeing, and marks his (discarded) Muslim-ness as a seemingly
stable signier. The narrative of the lm then returns him to the meanings of this discarded identity (revealing, somewhat inadvertently, that Muslim-ness in India is not just a
religious condition, but a socio-economic one), and to the implications of quam (an Urdu
word that means nation or community, sometimes with an implicit synonymity
between the two). As an NRI doctor with a Hindu ance, he epitomizes upper-class
India, integrated into the secular metropolitan globalized economy; but this subject position is steadily interrogated, undone and overwritten by his forcible reintegration into the
Muslim quam. The quam is characterized/signied most conspicuously as a single,
organic, alien and monstrous body with compound and distributed eyes that function as
an extension of its hidden head the mastermind. In almost all terrorist lms the second city is shown harbouring the demonic, lunar, multitudinous compound and communal eye of the quam as opposed to the single solar, celestial Eye (de Certeau 92) of the
secular state and its legitimated communities. This classic gendering and racializing of
worlds, communities and spaces that characterizes Aamir, My Name is Khan, Black Friday and A Wednesday! is inverted in New York, where Guantanamo Bay, which was instituted by an epitome of legitimacy in the US the FBI becomes the site of the
subterranean and the orchestrated demoniacal. However, Guantanamo Bay, unlike another
sub-terrain the drain is geographically segregated, even while, like the drain, it crisscrosses the city, even feeding those drain pipes which we see are a part of the very architecture of the FBI building and, possibly, its nemesis. Ultimately, Samir emerges from
these very drains to properly service the FBI, but notably Samir, like the nameless protagonist 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, subterrain and surface till he is supplanted/trounced by the urban all-seeing eye of the surveillance 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 something 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
308
is closest to. The audience itself is allowed privileged access to all worlds the FBI
interrogation room, ofces, Samirs home, Guantanamo Bay, the sleeper cell and all psychological spaces. It is this scopic advantage that generates the pathos that accumulates
around Sam, serving as it does to elaborate what is usually schematized in narrations of
terror and terrorism. So while the mastermind of Aamir is literally left in the dark, an
unmistakable yet invisiblized presence, lmed with noirish lighting, disgured by starkly
low or high-angle shots, neither Samir, nor that which birthed him are concealed. In some
ways, Samirs death is spectacular simply by virtue of its location, providing the implicit
comment on the value that accrues to the death that happens in public view or is publicized (9/11) as opposed to deaths in the drains, or sub-terrain. Aamirs unmourned death
is turned into mere and meaningless spectacle by the shrill uncomprehending media
reportage of it. But, for all that, it is a necessary spectacle: like Samir, Aamir the Muslim
must die, as it were, on behalf of his treacherous Muslim brethren, so that Aamir the liberal 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 are
forced to become signiers of that which they have little relation to: the transnationalizing Orientalist discourse on Islam and Muslims which silently but clearly decrees that the
only good Muslim is a dead one.
Notes
1. Recent lms 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 their
objective is intimidation. Despite Hindu nationalist claims, Hindus do not constitute a
national group in India any more than Christians or Muslims, because, while Hindus
may constitute a majority in terms of overall aggregates, they are not a majority in many other
parts of the country. Vibhuti Narain Rai, former Indian Police Service ofcer, notes that since
the 1960s there has probably been no single [communal] riot in which less than 90% of those
killed have been Muslims (Rai).
5. While Enders, Sandler, and Gaibulloev provide strong statistical evidence to prove this, the
Gujarat genocide of 2002, the situation in Iraq or Afghanistan and now in Libya present somewhat 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 producing
countries Iraq, Iran, Libya as terrorist states, in the rst case; and the characterization of
tribal resistance to the illegal corporate plunder of mineral resources from constitutionally
protected tribal lands, as Maoism, or red terrorism.
Notes on contributors
Karen Gabriel is an Associate Professor in English at St Stephens College, Delhi University, and
a Marie Curie Incoming International Fellow at the Center for Gender Studies, TEMA, Linkoping
University. She has published numerous essays on the sexual economies of Bombay Cinema. Her
recent 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.
309
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Orientalism, terrorism and Bombay cinema

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Journal of Postcolonial Writing