PERSPECTIVES

Manning the Border of gender, by weaving the minor narratives

of the individual protagonists ofthefilmin
a socio-polity differentiated along the aces
Gender and War in 'Border' of public/private, material/spirittual, inner/
outer, visibility/invisibility, masculine/
Karen Gabriel feminine' - national borders/national
interiors. This geographical investment is
undertaken toward consolidating a very
Even white the discursive registers of the film open and engage with specific agenda: through these different
a series of questions ostensibly regarding the legitimacy or narratives, the 'nation' comes t o be located,
justifiabilitSy of war, at no point does 'Border' ever visually deviate in all its ideological significations, at its
geographical borders - so that the male,
from the representation of the battle as a 'dharmyudh', a war of
military community that mans them comes
righteousness. Consequently, when the heroic Indians/Hindus die, they to be constructed as its most authentic
must be seen to do so spectacularly, yet without disintegration, and r e p r e s e n t a t i v e s , because they stake their
with dignity, concealing both vulnerability and indignity. lives on their 'national' identity. W a r is t h e
catalyst that distillates not just this identity
J P DUTTA 'S' Border' (1997), a film osten- title. Appropriately enough, the film is also but conversely also the gender of the nation
sibly about the incident of December 5, at a study in liminalities; the fractious and that 'confers' that identity as masculine. The
Longewal during the 1971 Indo-Pak war, performative liminalities of nationality, the conferring of this identity however remains
directly negotiates the genre of the Hollywood nation-state and gender. In the initial an uneasy and unresolved process; as is
war film as one which can be domesticated documentary-style announcement (that the repeatedly projected in the film, the
into bearing some of the concerns of much film is about the mentioned incident in the masculinity of this community derives
contemporary Hindi commercial cinema- 1971 Indo-Pak war), there is a clear (partly) from its relentless feminization of
While 'Border' is not the first Hindi film to recognition of the historicity of the nation- the nation as 'Mother' - a process perfectly
deal with war, it is the enormous commercial state as a political entity that seeks or requires commensurate with the relegation of its
success of the film that draws speculation territorial definition of itself, through hostile women to the interiors', away from the
about the nature and implications of this and violent conflict if necessary. This border. Yet, precisely because the 'nation 1
particular indigenisation of the Hollywood recognition of a political liminality, brought in question is now no more than its military
genre. The genre of the war film has into locus by the fact of conflict itself, representatives, it is also a hyper-masculine
traditionally dealt with the critical experiences however, does not extend to its diagnosis in entity, defined by its heroisms, its powers
of war itself - the imminence of death, fear, terms of the real politic stakes in the war of of violence and its invulnerability. The body
failing courage, pain, loss, etc (besides, of the regimes of Indira Gandhi or Zulfikar Ali of the nation is thus feminine, while - in the
course, the obligatory and spectacular Bhutto. Instead the conflict is transformed best traditions of patriarchy - its identity is
representations of heroism, death and by the film into becoming the site of the claimed as masculine. This ambiguity of
violence). What is extraordinary about cultural liminality of nationality - genders however, and the tensions in socio-
'Border' is that none of its protagonists is the matically introduced in an early sequence political g e n d e r roles it implies, is
represented as ever e x p e r i e n c i n g the of the film when Pakistani insurgents are symptomatic of the resistance to its thematic
over whelming fear of death or of inadequate almost mistaken for compatriots, and programmes of identities at the level of the
performance during war.' Rather than seeing betrayed by no more than blades of grass. affective micro-economies of,everyday
this as an accidental or careless occurrence, This scene (one of the most explicitly violent practices. They therefore demand ceaseless
it will be argued that, within the discourses and loaded scenes in the film) broaches ideological address to resolve and remain
of identity - national and gender-that frame several issues that the film subsequently problematic to the very end of the film: the
the film, only suchanabstracted and idealised addresses and resolves. The most immediate real sites of contention remain within, the
depiction of war is a d m i s s i b l e . This of these is that question of the identification interiorities as much psychical as
abstraction serves to displace war as the - the mark - of the enemy: language, skin geographical.
central concern of the film, and effects it colour, physical features, dress and numerous The affective import of these themes is
instead as a suitable situational backdrop cultural codes - none of these serves to most penetratively posed, in the sequence
within and on which a very specific ideology distinguish friend from foe, Pakistani from earlier noted and in subsequent ones, by the
of masculinity and the nation find articulation. Indian. The border here is clearly identified character of Second U Dharamvir(Akshaye
Through an analysis of the film, this paper as no more than an imaginary1 one, in the Khanna), both verbally and gesturally in
will attempt a preliminary explication of sense that it serves to exclude people several ways. First, by his refusal to kill one
some of the discursive and scoliotic strategies who are indistinguish-able but for their of the critically wounded (unmasked)
employed to connect these ideologies as imagination of the identities they possess. 3 insurgents offered to him: then through his
they come to be articulated. This sequence thus sets the agenda for the nausea at the sight of their violent kitting
'Border' is not merely about the geo- film as primarily p e d a g o g i c a l - the by his senior officer - thereby reiterating the
graphical limits that the f i l m s title alludes identification, construction and inculcation common humanity of both killer and killed
to but equally about the definition. use of a doctrine of who the Ideal Indian' is and - and finally, by initiating a dissenting,
transience, transgression, surveillance, and how 'he' exists - within a thematic of nation personal counter-narrative in his extended
the need for the constant construction and and gender. meditation of the propriety, of the notions
reiteration of borders. This, however, though The masculinity of that identity is not of war. During this, the tooted absoluteness
in itself an intimidatingly large agenda, fortuitous. 'Border' locates the problem of of heroic discourses and their priorities are
does not exhaust the implications of the identity as not just of nationality but also compelled into a constant referentiality with

828 Economic and Political Weekly April 11, 1998

 some of their silenced significations: the imperative in the public, masculine world This issue is deliberately posed as an
routine betrayal of other attachments and they inhabit. Through this, while both worlds opposition between Bhairav S i n g h ' s
duties the displaced and bereaved this are drawn into conjunction, their separateness archetypal, metaphoric conception of
heroism leaves behind, the incomprehensible
is simultaneously underwritten, as the maternality and Dharamvir's deeply personal
absurdity of killing absolute strangers.affective world in realigned (within terms links with his very real mother Dharamvir's
Sacrificial military courage comes to be of utility), toward articulating a new strain initial failure to conform to the code of
revealed terms of the oppositional of masculinity formulated independently of conduct expected of him - in refusing to kill
significations inherent in its otherwise traditional heterosexual sexual assertion. an insurgent - though treated as a failure to
singular and absolute value, now becoming Precisely for this reason, the heterosexual carry out his official and patriotic duty, is
comprehensibleaseither heroism or betrayal spaces' of the private and the domestic are crucially represented as rooted in insufficient
or both. The double valency that he attributes repeatedly imaged and argued as being gendering, in the other soldiers' mocking
to heroism haunts its the matisations in the disruptive or debilitating, as is the masculinity him as a boy. a lesser man. His own personal
film, resisting all attempts at easy resolution. that yields to its demands. This is why when narrative of loss and filial duty - Dharamvir's
These early sequences thus set out the central the jawan, Mathura Das expresses his father too is reported to have been an heroic
problematics of the film; liminality and the jubilation at his request for leave being army officer, martyred in battle through rashy
need to reconcile the political 'necessity' of granted (to return to his ailing pregnant courageous actions - is one that affirms this
war with its devastation and moral wife), Major Chandpuri (Sunny Deol) is reading of his actions, Dharamvir understands
unjustifiability, specially a war in which infuriated, Mathura Das' eagerness to return his father's actions as his mother does: as
friend and foe are so anonymously alike. To home constitutes the remembrance and the failure and betrayal of personal duties
cope, the film then effects a split between affirmation of hitherto acceptable modes of towards him and his mother, and
politics and morality through the paradox of masculinity - those that acknowledge subsequently only joins the army to honour
condemning the logic of the war - 'their' domestic duties and kinship allegiance as a commitment to his dead father (keeping
politics - even as it urges heroism -'our' well - an affirmation that, to the Major, a promise he makes to him before his death).
morality. It goes on to resolve this untenable fundamentally weakens the affective tics Dharamvir's unease with Bhairav Singh's
dichotomy through an ideological polemic that bind the troops to a (militarised) insistent reification arises from the persistence
that is finally an indefinite uncomfortable masculinity, characterised by its relationship of the equal validity of the dual but
deferral - of the ideological to the pragmatic to life only through an inextricable in equalised significations of military courage
- a n d not a resolution. The strategy of deferral relationship with death and that more abstract - its valour and the betrayals that demands
is begun through another character, Bhairav entity, the nation. He is exculpated from a - and is indicated by a relentless, nightmare
S i n g h ' s (Sunil Shetty), r e s p o n s e to masculinity that is constructed as a form of intrusion from his personal history - the
Dharamvir's cutting interrogation, while its cowardice amounting to treachery only by private narrative Of his mother as itself i e ,
nature and some of its implications are spelt his independently voiced and proven decision the relentless contextualisation and rooting
out in the circularity of Bhairav Singh's final (ultimately through his death) to realign his of abstracted a f f e c t s . T h i s personal
emphatic pragmatism - if you don't kill him, priorities toward affirming the masculinity endorsement of his mother's narrative and
he will kill you. All the politics and moralities that valorises the abstraction of the maternal- its logic accounts for the fact that, once at
of war finally devolve to this blindly circular national entity: by returning on the eve of the border, Dharamvir is haunted by
logic of anonymity; kill or be killed - a logic battle to his unit, without going home. Hence, nightmares of his blind mother holding a
that further complicates the differential by employing these a f f e c t i v e spaces 'sehera' 7 (rather than a shroud) stumbling
identificatory lines being sketched. In fact, repeatedly to root what are stressed as through a war-torn field of corpses, seeking
the issues and paradoxes that Dharamvir antithetical public discourses, the private him. The nightmare is equally the Sense of
raises are never resolved through direct and the domestic are systematically harnessed betrayal implicit in his impending rejection
discursivity, but haunt the film to its end, into a productivity that eventually depletes of an utterly different mode of relationally
The film's agenda is undertaken in two them of disruptiveness. The hit song,Sandese viable masculinity and his realisation of the
registers; one, the discursive register of aate hain, is again an instance of this incompatibility of the two modes. The film
ideological polemic, involving appeals to conversion to productivity of the domestic: seems to indicate that the nightmare in all
patriotism and religious identity; and the the song's lyrics draw on the tradition of the its nuances comes true in the end, as
other, the affective register of narratives of lament of the rural family for news of their Dharamvir lies in the battlefield with this
personal lives. Although these registers - kin, away as migrant labour in the big cities. identical but hallucinatory vision of his
like the gender spaces they come to signify Ironically, it thus harnesses the affects mother in his dying eyes.
- o v e r l a p , they are c o m p e l l e d into associated with a d o m e s t i c , socio- H o w e v e r , it is through his final
distinctiveness in terms of an opposition economically effected estrangement, into the hallucinatory transformation of his mother
between "national' military and 'personal' service of affirming the personal and into a simulacrum - both a denigration of
civil duties, specifically to celebrate the ideological conditions of estrangement mutual dependency and a reinsertion of his
military. This, however, gets increasingly necessary to fight an anonymous enemy at mother into the traditional sexual economies
tenuous because of the regular and systematic the border through the definitive, of exchange that she has been released from
appropriation of the affective privatised unproblmatic integration or rejection of in widowhood - that the unsatisfactory
spaces and their vocabularies to sustain the self-division. resolution of what are stated to be agonistic
ideologies of public polemic. Thus, for claims is eventully e f f e c t e d . In the
This strategy best explains the ways in
instance, Bhairav S i n g h ' s vociferous hallucination, Dharamvir responds to his
which the notion of maternality, frequently
proclamations of the nation as a mother - bereaved, deranged mother's appeal for his
drawn on by the film, is reified so completely
Earth-Mother-conceptualises an essentially life with the demand that she relinquish him
into Bhairav Singh's archetype of the Earth-
political entity in metaphors that are primarily to his father's 'absolute' heroism of death.
Mother, that the sole real maternal figure
familial and emotive. Similarly, the cook's Only this release will allow him to make the
(Dharamvir's mother) appears as mere
reference to the all-male unit as being a semantic leap that will translate his death as
simulacrum of maternality in comparison,
family is turned into a programme for valour alone. It is only when he thus in a
and indeed, is almost turned into one by
affective conduct and an ideological single gesture is displayed conjuncting
Dharamvir himself by the end of the film.

Economic and Political Weekly April 11, 1998 829

the two neatly - i e , effecting an abstraction
of his mother that is commensurate .with the
archetypal maternality of the mother-nation
invoked by Bhairav Singh - that he finally
seems to resolve for himself his early
misgivings about the war. In thus abstracting
her, paradoxically, he de-maternalises her in
favour of the maternality of the mother-
nation - returning her to his father and the
significations that the latter had bestowed on
her, thereby replicating his father in erasing
the minor, personal narrative of his mother
So, the point at which Dharamvir rises
uneasily from son to father - to 'manhood'
- his mother must slide from mother to wife
- to silence and impotence. It therefore
appears discursively insufficient to simply
displace the importance of the live maternal
in celebrating instead the claim of the
archetypal - the once condemnable choice
that his father had made in his heroism.
Instead, Dharamvir's validation of the
significations of his father's masculinity,
once of which is his mother's lonely
derangement, requires him to review his
mother's demands as his father viewed them,
i e, situating her in a disempowered and
sexual relation to his father - as wife. This
also immediately permits him to exonerate
himself from the filial duties he owes her,
affirming further that the only inflexible
filial duties are finally toward the father. His
final reconciliation to the 'legitimacy' of the
war is thus also the film's signal that the
anxieties he opens at the beginning are
resolved at the level of the personal and the
sexual, and indicates the nexus between
s e x , gender and power. Within the
disempowerment that wifehood signifies in
the cultural frame offered by the film, it
therefore remains unremarkable that he is
the only protagonist of all the married or
betrothed ones, who cares to seek that (albeit
ritual) affirmation of his death from his
mother not his betrothed, indicating the
continued endurance of his m o t h e r ' s
maternality and of the cultural significance
bestowed on it.
Dharamvir's initiation into ritualised
killing is no sudden transformation. The
sequence in which he is shown (heroically)
accomplishing his first kill is entirely imagic,
without any of the articulated discursivity
of the scenes in which he expresses his
repugnance for war. Briefly, he tracks down
and kills an enemy informer who is caught
transmitting information from within Indian
territory. No explanation is provided for his
decision to go alone; the imagic implication
is that he too (overwhelmed by outrage at
treachery) is naturally capable of the kind
of masculinity expected and demanded of
a soldier Even so, his eventual harnessing
into this militarised masculinity is represented
as first a gut reaction - firing only reflexively,
in response to the enemy opening fire - and
830
then a considered action - proving a - point
- in which he kills and then deliberately and
carefully empties his gun into the corpse of
the enemy informer. It is the self-conscious,
and we later realise, bitterly parodic
superfluity of this emphatic action -
overdoing the role of militarised maleness
through the disgust he feels at it - that speaks
his persisting unease with it. While he thus
comes to conform to the official ideal at this
point, his agency and the legitimacy of
q u e s t i o n s he raises get highlighted.
Irresolvable by mere heroism of action, it
requires the final resolution, at the level of
personalising the ideological (however
uneasily), for the questions to be laid to rest
It is necessary to point out that several
discursive sleights are performed before an
effective ideological and emotive resolution
become possible. 9 First, while the semiotic
burden of the affective is borne primarily by
figures of femininity, the discourses they
generate congeal around figures of
masculinity. Figures of femininity are thus
emptied into vehicular signs that record a
history of masculinities, their construction
and significance. Second, this tactic, in the
film's central agenda of delineating a
consolidated and singular masculinity, also
results in an equally hollowed, lowest-
common-denominator, 'pure' masculinity -
one that is drained of its complex resonances
to retain discursive vitality. This reduction
is clear not j u s t in the qualitative
indistinguishability of one act of heroism
from the next and their performers' cloned
relation to death, or in the uniform non-
recognition of bereavement - the
insignificance of those they leave behind -
at the moment of their death, but also in the
absence of a sustained sense of division that
characterises all the heroes except Second
Lt Dharamvir. This exception, it has been
argued, is retained only to deplete it of its
critical vision, employing it to underwrite
the sexual politics of the filmic text. Third,
this most crucial index of a heroically
successful militarisation therefore entails an
exclusive inscription and affirmation of a
s p e c i f i c understanding of agency as
conformity, of what it means to be human
as man and the peculiar modes of relations
required by that. Fourth, there is a progressive
decrease in the presence of women in
narrative emphases, so that, by the second
half of the film only the male characters
remain as elements of the story. The
increasing annulment of depicted feminine
subjectivities and disruptive masculine ones
feeds a corresponding increase in the
consolidation of the power of an abstract
masculinity. Thus, even high emotive
moments like death get discharged of any
tragic content, as death ceases to signify loss
but functions merely as a reiterative device
to an abstracted masculinity. These sleights
Economic and Political Weekly
thus negotiate the problematic discharging
of personality - male and female - and are
the facilities by which Dharamvir's father
retains a dominant discursivity while
remaining completely absent visually.
Therefore, the loci of the specific emotional
effects that each individual figure of
masculinity generates are together displaced
from the personal-individual-feminine onto
the national-abstract-'masculine'.
While Dharamvir's narrative thus clearly
bears the burden of bringing about an
ideological resolution, there are other (less
directly narrative) semiotic and discursive
strategies that are employed to carry it
through. Partially through Bhairav Singh's
ideas, but also through intensive visual
bombardment, the film presses a series of
gendered conflations: the Earth-Mother-
Nation, for instance, translates without
warning into the Earth-MotherGoddess, in
a sequence in the film where all that remains
defiantly erect in a village demolished by
enemy bombing is the Mata-temple. By
calling attention to it, Bhairav Singh
highlights a subterranean discursive tack on
the question of marks of identification, of
a morality sufficiently justificatory of the
politics of war, of the comparative powers
of different religious beliefs. The war is Won
then not merely by the fortuitous arrival of
the Air Force, but because of the good fortune
of a particular religious affiliation. The
signifiance of this scene is that it directly
unravels the knotty problem of 'who the
enemy is'. It is also the moment when the
slippage between morality and religion is
most explicit. Bhairav Singh's hitherto
circular arguments on the rationale of war
abruptly dovetail into a revealing
fundamentalism - through a definition of
acceptable identity and unquestionable
morality: the superior prerogative and power
of being 'Hindu', 'Border' is thus clearly no
innocent rendition of a forgotten historical
event. Rather, it is, as Bhaskar Sarkar has
remarked about the televised epics:
...a rewriting of history: it is not just going
back but invoking a certain interpretation
of the past to manipulate the present...[that]
attempts to forge a 'Hindu' version of the
nation's history that will help achieve a
coherent 'Hindu' nation-ness."
This agenda is taken up at length in the
scenes immediately following the bombing
of the village, in which Bhairav Singh rescues
a copy of the Koran for a Muslim inhabitant
of the village from his burning house. When
the man expresses amazement at the profound
veneration that Bhairav Singh-despite being
Hindu - displays toward the holy text, the
latter responds by proudly announcing that
respect for other religions has always
characterised Hinduism: 'We have always
been this way'! 11 He thus unqualifiedly
endorses two favourite hindutva themes -
the enduring homogeneity and the tolerance
April 11, 1998
 of Hindus and Hinduism. In Bhairav Singh's
discourse therefore there is the conflation of
nation and femininity, religion and power,
so that the defence of national borders
amounts to the defence of both the 'national'
goddess and her body, indicating how deeply
these ideologies are personalised and
inflected by morality and gender. In fact, the
force of much of these ideologies derives
from these inflections. 12 This episode serves
another linked purpose it neatly pre-empts
the danger of any reading of its representation
of the conflict as a communal or religious
one. Identifying Pakistan as the enemy is
fraught with the history of Pakistan's identity
as an Islamic state - an identity that is subtly
reiterated in the communally sensitive
historical environment that the episode clearly
alludes to. Given the 'kill or be killed' logic
already touted by Bhairav Singh as the only
definitive rationale for and in war, the politics
of hyper-masculinity necessarily entail an
implicit acknowledgement of an equally
powerful Pakistani (read Muslim) hyper-
masculinity - a threat and a provocation13
that demand complex resolutions without
compromise to Indian (read Hindu) hyper-
masculinity, While victory in the war serves
in itself as an endorsement of the superiority
of the latter, it remains a 'border' resolution,
marginalised from - though impinging
seriously on - the complexions of internal
communal disease. This calls for the ideo-
logical affirmation of that superiority, but
within the terms of a constitutionally estab-
lished secularism that would illegitimise any
such affirmation. Bhairav Singh's gesture
therefore serves to 'befriend' the 'alienated'
Muslim, even as it demonstrates, in that very
'befriending', the vaunted superiority of the
Hindu. Thus, even while 'national concious-
ness has nothing to do with the sovereignty
of the nation-state, 14 the two are rendered
as coterminous in and by the film, explain-
ing the routine deprecatory othering charac-
teristic of the politics of chauvinism. The
logical implication of this is, of course, that
the mark of the enemy then may be just as
easily found in the compatriot - an ideation
that further demands that entire histories of
alternate nationalisms, self-determination
movements and minority programmes be
elided, subsumed in the hegemonic dis-
courses of martial Hindu nationalism. The
textual clinching of this issue of course is
in the final victory of the Indian forces: 'our
morality', as espoused by the closing song,
is accompanied by a reverent and repeated
chanting of 'Hindustan, Hindustan...'
Thus, even while the discursive registers
of the film open and engage with a series
of questions ostensibly regarding the
legitimacy or justifiability of war, at no point
does 'Border' ever visually deviate from the
representation of the battle as a dharmyudh,
a war of righteousness, fought legitimately
Economic and Political Weekly April 11, 1998
in defence of the (feminine) realm.15The war
itself is of little import: the immense costs,
in human and material terms, that accompany
any war are so phenomenally spectacularised
- casual destruction often is the
spectacularisation - in 'Border' that, rather
than signify loss, they come to denote an
immense power: the power of sacrificial
masculine valour and of a national moral
superiority. Further, vividness of violence
can threaten to signify the vulnerability of
the body - spurting blood, broken limbs,
twisted torsos - and in that 'realism 1 , the
indignity that violence forces on the subject
of it.16 Consequently, when the heroic Indians/
Hindus die, they must be seen to do so
spectacularly yet without disintegration and
with dignity, concealing both vulnerability
and indignity. However, the hour-long
spectacular battle celebrating the triumph of
an inculcated masculinity which constitutes
the climax of the film is followed by a
collaged spectacle of bereavement and an
accompanying lament sung as much for the
bereaved as for the dead. The result of both
spectacles - separately and contrastively -
is a serious depletion of prior textual
performance, as none of the depicted heroisms
in any way defend or balance the spectacle
of bereavement that follows. This generates
a terminal problem of exculpating the
ideology of casually sacrificial masculine
valour of the earlier sequences within the
morality of newly and expediently legitimised
terms of relationality, The irreconcilability
of a 'naturally' violent/valorous masculinity
(there is a serious slippage between the two)
and the pitiable condition of bereavement,
abruptly becomes an incompatibility between
masculinity and morality. That is, the film's
spectacular celebratory demonstration and
steady valorisation of a fundamentally
explosive and exclusive masculinity is now
problematic and must be blurred to
accommodate morality. The reason for
retaining the final curious collage then is an
affective ploy to recuperate local masculine
violence as 'responsive', not aggressive -
by depicting our men as the dead victims
- not the perpetrators of violence,
synonymising them with the bereaved, and
thus exculpating them. This strategy, a
particularly obvious one in the light of the
early sequences that extol and recommend
natural masculine violence, is one that
therefore seeks to swerve the moral onus of
death and loss away from the home-side onto
the enemy, precisely by dwelling on its
immoralities.
The underlying politico-religious agenda
within which this peculiar twist of
significations can occur is, of course, largely
responsible for this; the other unaccounted
factor though is the power of the
commercially produced and motivated image
itself. Hindi commercial cinema - perhaps
like commercial cinema anywhere - sells
visually powerful effects; the realities it
invests in are designed for sale, usually
colourfully packaged and slickly produced,
bearing few traces of cither their conditions
of production or the seams of their
manufacture and assemblage. All themes
and issues, historically accurate or otherwise,
are consequently filtered through the lenses
of what is judged to be commercially viable.
A stereotypical investment (commercial and
ideological) in a particular mode of
masculinity and heroism marks 'Border', so
that, even as it proposes to offer 'serious'
fare, it remains determined by the imperatives
of the industry that produces it. That is, even
when it seems to be departing from offering
the pleasure-patterns of recognising the
established formulae that characterise the
investments and productions of the industry,
it remains fundamentally committed to its
programme of entertainment values. The
war it seeks to problematise is of necessity
transformed into a visually powerful, almost
appealing spectacle. The end effect is
therefore a peculiar, confusing overlap of
images that results from incompatible agenda;
the strategic de-intensification of the facts
of immense d a m a g e or brutality or
bereavement that would deplete the film's
overarching heroisms as well as the sense
of irremediable loss. To diminish this contest,
emphasis comes to rest on sheer and total
visibility - the wealth of the visible that the
camera brings to the spectator, converting
into visibility and clarity the most shrouded,
darkened, private - even invisible or
inaccessible - and troubled of spaces (from
Dharamvir's hallucinations to the spectacle
of Bhairav Singh's death in the thick of
battle). The seamless production of this
wealth erases any indication that it is not
so simply or openly 'available' - visible
to the unenhanced eye - but is constructed
into availability. Further, this investment
in the simulation of an uncomplicated and
easy visibility is toward a unique kind of
power, a power akin to omniscience; the
power that constantly attempts to reproduce
e x p e r i e n c e s as total experiences;
unproblematically comprehensible and
consummable without demanding (perhaps
even disapproving of?) the participatory
experience of the viewing s u b j e c t s
subjectivity itself - without the subjective
prices that are paid in acquiring experience.
That is, it is the power to erase from
imagination the subjectivity of imagination
- to supply imagination as experience
itself. Thus, the wealth of images that
project the war constitute the sites of the
conjunction of two not entirely disparate
forces: the power of film production
technology and of f i n a n c e capital to
construct and simulate imaginary realms as
experientially proximate; and that of political
831
ideologies that are programmed toward re-
imagining the nation in the idioms of a newly
conceived masculinity, War, in 'Border', is
no more than a visual grammar for this new
speech.
Notes
1 As the original Major Chandpuri remarked
on the film, "..[W]e always have to remember
that these ore two separate things - film is
fiction, the war was for real." New Woman,
vol 1, issue V, 1997, p 61.
2 During a routine patrol some members of
the Indian BSF come upon a group of men
who, on being interrogated, claim that they
w e pilgrims on their way to Mata Mandir.
Satisfied with the explanation, the team
leaves and on the way back to their jeep
discovers that the visitors' camels are
eating fresh leaves that are found only on
the other side of the border in Pakistan.
Realising the deception, they immediately
rush back and without either further
interrogation or warning, open fire killing
all of them in a scene w h o s e bloody
v i v i d n e s s is unmatched in the entire
depiction of war that follows.
3 This conception is owed to some of the now
controversial formulations in Benedict
Anderson's, Imagined Communities:
Reflections on the Origins and Spread of
Nationalism, Verso, London, 1983,
4 Partha Chatterjee, T h e Nationalist Resolution
of the Women's Question', Kumkum Sangari
and Sudesh Vaid teds), Recasting Women:
Essays in Colonial History, Kali, New Delhi,
832
1989. Chatterjee's formulations are derived
primarily from the 19th century Bengal
context and have since been substantially
critiqued; but his model remains a useful
albeit qualified ideological trope to read the
manufacture of gender-types undertaken in
the film.
5 It will be indicated later how this is no more
than a discursive sleight as masculinity is
never conceptualised or represented except
in antithetical sexualised and traditional
gender terms.
6 While no overtly homosexual signals are
released in this film, there is a strong celebrat-
ion of homo-erotic male bonds; this in turn
can be seen as feeding into the constructions
of masculinity that are the film's concern.
7 The psychoanalytic implications of this are
in themselves worth speculating on: they
clearly indicate an awareness of the mother's
dependence on Dharamvir's domestic duty to
her in approximately the same sense in which
she had depended on her husband - the
transformation of Dharamvir by his mother
into a bridegroom.
8 The other women as brides are denied the
valid right to interrogate; they mainly accept.
This is the status that Dharamvir returns his
mother to in order to neutralise her.
9 It has been argued that the one cannot happen
without the other.
10 Bhaskar Sarkar, Epic (Mis) takes; Nation,
Religion and Gender on Television', Quarterly
Review of Film and Video, vol I6( l), p 68.
11 It is notable that the other fleeing Hindu
villagers display no such dangerously
'fanatical' (the blazing house is collapsing)
concern for their religious texts, aligning
Economic and Political Weekly
them with the 'tolerance' of Bhairav Singh
against the Muslim. The politics of such
juxtopositioning is evident.
12 For discussions on the overlap between
the discourse o f religion, gender and
nationality see for instance Tanika Sarkar
and Urvashi Bhutalia (eds), Women and
the Hindu R i g h t ( K a l i , Delhi, 1995); Kumkum
Sangari and Sudesh Vaid teds). Recasting
Women: Essays in Colonial History, op
cit; and Kumari Jayawardene, Feminism and
Nationalism in the Third World, Zed Press,
London, 1986.
13 This provocation is explicitly elaborated
in a sequence which occurs immediately
prior to the final battle, when the Pakistani
forces amass at the border. Major Chandpuri
at this point engages in a heated and vitriolic
verbal exchange of provocations with his
Pakistani counterpart in Punjabi and without
supplementary subtitles in either Hindi or
English. This e x p l i c i t l y i n d e x e s the
demographic field of address of the film's
nationalism as being essentially northern
Indian, masculine and Hindu, invoking the
trauma of the partition of Punjab as a powerful
affective base for its consolidation.
14 R Radhakrishnan, 'Nationalism, Gender and
the Narrative of Identity', Nationalisms and
Sexualities Anthony Parker et al (eds),
(Routledge, New York and London, 1992).
15 Although a ceaseless battle is waged against
'femininities'.
16 Reacting to the charges that the film was
overly violent, the original Chandpuri
remarked that, 'There is no violence depicted,
it is rather a tribute to our Armed Forces".
New Woman op cit.
April 11, 1998