Shooting Terror by Meenakshi Bharat

Author:Meenakshi Bharat [Bharat, Meenakshi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Media Studies
ISBN: 9781000024937
Google: F73RDwAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 48931566
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2020-02-20T00:00:00+00:00

This self-reflexivity and freshly found enlightenment that ‘custodians of law and order,’ in ‘snatch[ing] away the basic rights of a human being’ and threatening his ‘life and honour,’ ‘open the doors to calamity and turmoil.’ The brunt of the film, however simplistic the distillation may be is now stated succinctly: ‘When intolerance becomes organized or institutionalized, it destroys the democratic principle and poses a threat to national peace.’ The filmic exhortation to those in charge of the safety of the country to introspect and weed out the hatred in their hearts through Zaid, ends with the practical direction of compensating those who have been wrongfully accused of being terrorists and of bringing those police officers ‘who kill innocent people in custody or in encounters’ to account. That, it would seem, is ‘true jihad.’

Carrying forward the concerns of Dhokha and combining the post-9/11 homophobic targeting of brown-skinned people around the world, especially Muslims, with the repeated attacks on Mumbai, Aamir (Raj Kumar Gupta, 2008) inserted terrorist attacks on Indian soil into the world ambit. Like A Wednesday and Mumbai Meri Jaan later, it highlights the fact that normalcy is utterly conditional, and that the menace of terror is always waiting around the corner. To the non-diegetic ironic beat of the 1946 Peggy Lee chartbuster ‘It’s a Good Day,’ the everyday life of Mumbai is pictured onscreen: the local trains and stations, the dhobi ghat, the flyovers, the skyscrapers, the vegetable markets, all peopled by ordinary Mumbaikars going about their day to day business, all utterly unaware of the calamity that is about to befall the city.

Representing the maturing use of cinematic and textual techniques in postterrorist Hindi cinema, and learning from his mentor Anurag Kashyap’s approach to the city of Mumbai, Gupta makes extended use of the immediacy of hand-held camera techniques to mirror the frantic urgency and terror of Aamir’s harrowing day-long journey through the unforgiving, uncaring Mumbai streets. The technique of irony is used to the hilt with an early introduction in the first frames of a happy Aamir on a flight home, smiling in anticipation of his homecoming, having no inkling that his ordeal is only minutes away. The camera, the audience, and Aamir share in the surprise and the horror of the events of the next few hours, which ends only with Aamir’s willing embrace of death in ironic martyrdom at the end of the film.

The inevitable postterrorist theme of the persecution of the Muslim is sounded right at the outset with his humiliating frisking at the immigration counter, despite his protestations that he is not a ‘thief or a terrorist’ and that he is a bonafide doctor. The prejudiced, homophobic man at the desk insinuatingly comments that ‘it is not written on anyone’s face that he is a terrorist … Till something actually happens, everyone seems innocent’ and he jibes that doctors and engineers bring ‘honour to the nation!’ referencing the fact that major terror attacks, chief among them the attacks of 9/11, have been perpetrated by highly educated, intelligent people.

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