Wound, Injury, and Restoration : Bollywood’s Formations of Global Terror

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SAFM 5 (2) pp. 147–165 Intellect Limited 2013

Studies in South Asian Film & Media Volume 5 Number 2

© 2013 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/safm.5.2.147_1

Keywords

terrorMumbaifilmtraumapostcolonial restorationMuslimBollywood

Jigna desaiUniversity of Minnesota

rani neutillHarvard University

wound, injury, and

restoration: Bollywood’s

formations of global terror

aBstract

The discourse of exceptional crisis and unparalleled injury has made ‘9/11’ a globally recognized invocation and sanctioning of the security state’s violent impe-rial and domestic expansion and retaliation.1 Media representations themselves have come under scrutiny for their role in saturating our imaginaries with spectacles of American suffering with much less attention being paid to other more deadly occur-rences (e.g. conflict in Darfur). Both narrative and images attempt to establish 9/11 as the beginning of a new global history that stretches outward from the United States and incorporates other global cities2 – Bali, Mumbai, London and Madrid – into this history. National and international media located the 11/26 attacks on Mumbai as India’s own 9/11. The bombings, subsequent occupation of the city, and hostage crisis were figured as predicated by 9/11, demarcating a historical teleology of terror that originated in New York and lead to Mumbai. New York, the original site of attack in this narrative, is the centre of civilization, finance and democracy; and the various attacks on Mumbai demonstrate how the threat of Islamic terror is spreading to the free world and other democracies, a narrative that promulgates an Orientalist and imperial discourse of Islamic violence and terror. A recent subgenre in popular Hindi cinema has adapted and adopted a similar narrative of exceptional

1. Former President George W. Bush remarked during the fifth anniversary of the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security: ‘The events of September the 11th,

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2001 demonstrated the threats of a new era. I say “new” because we found that oceans which separate us from different continents no longer separate us from danger’. As many scholars have enumerated, the state has repeatedly identified 9/11 as a turning point that justified and required new policies and practices (including war, torture, occupation and surveillance) domestically and internationally through the reanimated tropes of exceptional injury.

2. Cities, perhaps, have long been the targets of state warfare as well as other forms of violence. While cities (e.g. Beirut, Oklahoma City, Baghdad) have been the target of bombing and violence, it was the ‘surprise targeting for destruction on live television of very tall and famous buildings in one of the world’s financial and publishing enters [that] had a way of focusing attention on a phenomenon until then associated with places peripheral to global power’ (Bishop et al. 2012: 1).

3. What counts as violence (most broadly understood as that which produces harm and suffering) is itself a site of contestation. While forms of physical and state violence are often explored, those embedded within institutions and everyday life linked to deprivation, exploitation, stigmatization or normalization often go unrecognized and marked as outside the domain of violence. In order to consider these forms of violence, we turn to a discussion of

injury. In a twist, recent Hindi films (2005–present) that deal with 9/11 and the Mumbai bombings have a different exigency, a shifted narrative that locates 9/11 within a larger frame of global Islamic violence, one where New York is not the origin, but where India precedes New York in injury. The affective and political shift we trace here is one where earlier cinematic narrative and images first concentrate on a history inscribed by loss – the 1947 Partition of India into India and Pakistan as a site of mourning, to films that deal with other conflicts and therefore other ways of politically and psychically understanding histories of inflicted and perpetrated violence as well as justification for the perpetration of violence. Most importantly, we suggest that films within the subgenre do not simply call for the expansion of the global security state, but can instead imagine other ethical responses. We identify one such response as postcolonial restoration.

‘Battles are not won by guns, Altaaf – they are won by cameras’.– Mission Kashmir

‘The best answer to the terrorists is to dream bigger, make even more money, and visit Mumbai more than ever’.

(Suketu Mehta, co-author of Mission Kashmir)

‘How should those of us whose hearts have been sickened by the knowledge of all of this view the Mumbai attacks, and what are we to do about them?’

– Arundhati Roy

Films on state-related violence3 span and constitute several subgenres of Indian cinemas. Within the last several decades, there have been films about Partition (e.g. Veer-Zaara (Chopra, 2004) and Ghadar: Ek Prem Katha (Sharma 2001)), communal violence4 (e.g. Bombay (Ratnam, 1995)), Kashmir (e.g. Mission Kashmir (Chopra, 2000) and Roja (Ratnam, 1992)), war with Pakistan (e.g. LOC Kargil (Dutta, 2003)), separatist movements (e.g. Dil Se (Ratnam, 1998) and The Terrorist (Sivan, 1999)), and a new subgenre about global terror that includes both Mumbai terror films (e.g. Kurbaan (D’Silva, 2009) and Aamir (Gupta, 2008)) and 9/11 films (e.g. My Name is Khan (Johar, 2012)).5 Not all films about violence are films about terror; within the context of Partition films, for example, violence is not a form of terror, but part of a national history of loss and trauma. ‘Terror’ is used to designate and de-legitimate ‘certain forms of violence committed by non-state-centered political entities at the same that it sanctions a violent response by established states’ (Butler 2004: 88).

In many Hindi films, violence and terror are configured through the figure of the Muslim. While numerous figures are identified as the sources of terror, such as the Sri Lankan Tamil or Naxalite-type insurgents, the Muslim subject and Islam itself are depicted as the primary threats against ‘Hindu India’. Associating terror and violence with Islam through a range of figures spanning from the internal Indian Muslim (the outsider-within), the nearby Muslim (the threat of Pakistan), and the networked Islamist (an insurgent member of a global network), many films forward Islam’s violent incompat-ibility with secular or tolerant Hindu India. Within these multiple subgenres, violence has been conceived as threats to the nation and state that are both internal (e.g. ‘insurgents’ and ‘bad’ Muslims) and external (e.g. Pakistan and Sri Lanka), with a porous boundary between the two.

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vulnerability later in the article.

4. Within India, the meaning of communalism is defined as the conflict between religious communities, in this case a conflict primarily between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs.

5. This is not an exhaustive list of the forms of violence that characterize Indian lives or Indian cinemas. Others can also be identified: poverty and exploitation, sexual and domestic violence, and anti-colonial nationalism.

6. Cities, perhaps, have long been the targets of state warfare as well as other forms of violence. According to while cities (e.g. Beirut, Oklahoma City, Baghdad) have been the target of bombing and violence, it was the ‘surprise targeting for destruction on live television of very tall and famous buildings in one of the world’s financial and publishing enters [that] had a way of focusing attention on a phenomenon until then associated with places peripheral to global power’ (Bishop et al. 2012: 1).

A new subgenre articulates violence as global terror within the space of the global city.6 These new films, we suggest, cite and subsume other narratives of violence in order to promulgate post-liberalization India as a unique target within the historical narrative of global Islamic terror and pose global Islamic terror as the culmination of previous modalities of violence. Furthermore, the new subgenre relies on simultaneous narratives of exceptionality (this is something new), similarity (this event is occurring globally and Mumbai is one node; references to Mumbai’s 9/11), and difference (the attacks in Mumbai are different because of India’s long-standing struggles with Muslims and Pakistan). This shifted narrative locates 9/11 within India’s long history of Islamic threat that has existed before any Islamic threat experienced by the United States. In order to tell this long history, this subgenre references, evokes and incorporates previous categories of violence and moments of trauma forwarding its central concern – post-liberalization India’s exception-ality as the target of global Islamic terror historically (even as the ‘original’ site of Islamic threat) and currently within the new global history demarcated by 9/11. In this article, we demonstrate how the evolution of representation of violence from Partition to Mumbai terror films moves from a narrative of national woundedness to a narrative of global injury. In looking at the recent spate of films about ‘global terror’ in Mumbai – such as A Wednesday (Pandey, 2008), Mumbai Meri Jaan (Jamath, 2008) and Aamir (Gupta, 2008) – we examine how violence becomes become collapsed with and cathected to globalized Islamic terror. Having established certain sites – such as New York, London and Mumbai – as global cities and its inhabitants as cosmopolitan global citizens, this subgenre links these cities together in a new and extensive Indo-centric urban topography of terror and war. Typically, claims to global injury are accompanied for demands for increased security achieved through war and the expansion of the security state we examine what other responses are generated by Bollywood’s newest subgenre when it does not necessarily produce, expand, or strengthen the ideology of the state.

Media and terror

While we focus on this cinematic subgenre, it is important to consider briefly how terror was framed more broadly within post-liberalized Indian media; other media forms – e.g., television, newspaper, and social media – more imme-diately presented depictions of terror in Mumbai. Since 1991, India has under-gone major social, political and economic transformations of liberalization and globalization, manifesting in new and diverse forms of consumerism, media practices, privatization of resources and services, and shifting mediations of the state. Over the last few decades, claims to the global have been accompanied by anxiety about protecting the citizen, the (Hindu) nation and state borders. During the 1990s, the global ‘Hindu nation’ (e.g. the modern ‘traditional’ Hindu family) was central to the national imaginary and growing dominance of the Bollywood culture industry; the expansion of Bollywood has been accompanied by a proliferation of discourses around the global in the new millennium as well (Desai and Neutill 2013). Since the 2006 train bombings, Mumbai has been thrust into the spotlight as representative of India’s vulnerability to global terror within televisual media. Arvind Rajagopal posits that the 2008 attacks were

the first terror attacks in India to occur under the full glare of media spotlights, and, after many years of state-controlled media, in an era in



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which private broadcasters dominate the airwaves. Dozens of 24-hour news channels vie for the Indian audience, many of them subsidiaries of transnational media corporations … In the past, when such violence occurred, the first response by the state controlled media would be a news blackout, followed by terse and occasional news bulletins aimed at the political management of the situation.

(Rajgopal 2009: 413)

In a post-liberalized India, mediatization, rather than media silence, char-acterizes the relationship between state, capital and elite consumer-citizens. Mediatization can be understood as the large scale processes by which every-day practices and social relations are produced and shaped by media technol-ogies and institutions that are located broadly in relation to capitalist markets and nation states (Livingstone 2009: x). Moreover, mediatization is essential to how subjects are located within relations of power and to the production and management of populations by markets and nation states. Mediatization has been a critical mode for claiming globality, in this case, the spectacle of violence has been essential to depicting certain bodies and subjects as vulner-able to the experience of violence itself, often represented as injury from global terror since 2006.

Within the last decade, the events that occurred on 11 September 2001 have frequently become packaged through televisual media into what we now ubiquitously call ‘9/11’. The incessant televisual and print representations of the collapse of the World Trade Center Towers in New York City have, in part, generated a global discourse for terror in which images of American injury provide the frames and grammar for claims to injury. ‘[T]he media (in harmony with state interests) promoted a certain version of endemic danger and insecurity, consistently mobilizing the deepest impulses of people’s vulnerability, while reinforcing the military, security and surveillance func-tions of the state’ (Giroux in Chatterjee 2009: 254). Consequently, violence in a post-liberalization India is nationalized and globalized via mediatization that is essential to defining events and establishing the spectacle of injury, the narrative of vulnerability, and the means for security through retaliation and asymmetric war.

The visual representations of terror within global cities have been key features of their shared global cartography. Television broadcasting of the attacks focused on specific locations that garnered cosmopolitan identification and recognition in a global arena; continuous incessant real-time coverage and the replaying of certain events of injury repeatedly are two strategies by which terror, risk and injury were mediatized. Attacks on cities may garner a specific and heightened response as emblems of civilization, capital, modernity and futurity. A recent Rand report indicates that the 2008 Mumbai attacks were planned to lend themselves to mediatization and to represent the violence as an attack on a very particular formation of Mumbai as a global city (Rabasa et al. 2009). The attacks may have been orchestrated to occur, as has often been remarked, in spaces and times that may have heightened their media coverage. The attacks began as rush hour traffic subsided, rendering public spaces more visible. Additionally, the choice of venues – railway station, hospital, Jewish cultural centre and luxury international hotels (such as the Taj) garnered very different coverage (Devji 2008). Together, these sites allowed for the visibility of a simultaneously local and global experience of everyday transnational India. While more people were killed at the Chhatrapati Shivaji



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7. One can consider this an adaptation of print capitalism within Benedict Anderson’s, Imagined Communities (1983).

Terminus railway station during the attacks, media attention was focused on the sites of the national and transnational elite, namely hotels. Luxury hotels are spaces that allow for the violence and its victims to be readily identifi-able and familiar transnationally; and the cosmopolitan elite were rendered as the common man or innocent bystander most affected by the violence. As Sushmita Chatterjee highlights,

The image of the burning Taj Mahal Hotel was likened to that of the Twin Towers and the ensuing fear and shock bound vibrant demo-cratic citizens into compliant subjects who were ordained to follow the dictates of the state in order to maintain their own security.

(2009: 255)

Less vulnerable to other forms of urban and state violence (e.g. debt, displace-ment or poverty), these urban cosmopolitans were cast in the role of targeted victim, as their class status garnered them global media attention. Their responses – candlelight vigils and flowers, mementos and messages that were posted in public spaces as memorials – followed post-9/11 paradigms and were also globally recognizable and telegenic. No doubt, the mediatiza-tion of 2008 attacks provided a mechanism and visualization for cosmopolitan elite citizen-subjects to be imagined and imagine themselves as the targeted victims and survivors of a global-scale tragedy within global modernity. Identification and recognition of attacks on global cities is facilitated by rapid global dissemination of events through media. Information about actions, communication between individuals and groups, representations of pain all facilitate the possibility of an immediate traumatic experience shared by many locally, nationally and internationally via television as well as a plethora of other platforms (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, text/SMS and blogs). These multiple media forms expand the geographical arena of and extend the population of those viewing, impacted by the violence both nationally and transnationally. Consequently, old and new media allow for the perception of immediate temporal dissemination and connectivity and thus enhance the transnational imagining of global communities and connectivity via media capitalism.7 In this case, media and media capitalism were critical to the experience of violence that established Mumbai as a global city and its affected inhabitants as global citizens within a national and international media-landscape.

In contrast to the ‘real-time’ media events available through television and new media, film offers a less immediate framing of terror. Televisual ‘real-time’ media form experience through supplying the images and information that serve as the semantics and grammar for the event; the new subgenre may present different imaginings of the nation and state in its claims to injury, ideologies of causality, and possible responses.

FroM trauMa and wound to inJury

In this article, interpreting the emergence of global terror in Bollywood involves a turn to the psychic experience of violence in relation to the nation state itself. The Greek word trauma, also meaning wound, originally referred to it as an injury inflicted on a body. In its later usage, trauma became something that would be associated with the mind, quite literally ‘a wound inflicted not on the body but on the mind’ (Caruth 1996: 3). As such, trauma and wound are synonyms and are the effects or the traces of the event that



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was not (and could not be) immediately registered. The wound haunts, the trauma repeats and these repetitions are psychically manifested. While bodily and psychic pains are mutually constitutive, we argue that there is a linguistic split whereby wound and injury are differentiated: whereas wound is both of body and mind, injury disregards the mind in favour of physicality. In fact, in differentiating between wound and injury we argue that the wound is the precise confluence of bodily and psychic agony whereas injury, by focusing solely on the bodily, often neglects the psychic implications and repercussions of the trauma that wounds the subject. The claim to injury (with its etymo-logical root in juris meaning right or law) concerns itself with the injustice of harm addressed to the state. Moreover, it is often a juridical and moral claim for redress wherein the redress is thought to address the injury and, more importantly, the oppression that bred the violence. Injury, because it is tied to the law and the state, is understood usually as a measurable and quantifi-able result of violence that can be eradicated or healed through redress. In order for the injury to be recognizable, the subject experiencing the violence and the modality of the violence must be legible. Wound, on the other hand, suggests to us an ongoing embodied and psychic phenomenon that cannot easily be remedied because it cannot be easily accessed through the law, language and representation. In recognizing the psychic and physical pain, attention is drawn to the non-rational, immeasurable and non-categorizable. Consequently, wound and injury can be profoundly different in their affective dimensions, political claims and ideological strategies.

We differentiate an affective and embodied wound from a physical injury through briefly examining the transformations in cinema about Partition and the conflict in Kashmir to the more recent popular Hindi films’ preoccupations with attacks on/in Mumbai. Partition narratives are often stories of suffering loss, not of being injured and terrorized. Terror is not associated with loss, but is the story of being attacked, injured and retaliating, a story about protec-tion and the reconstitution of the physical and national citizenry body. The difference between wound and injury lies in both political and psychoanalytic dimensions. Thus, while wound could be argued to be solely a psychic and embodied response to pain, trauma and loss within the nation, injury gener-ally registers in relation to the ideology of the state.

It is important to ask, to whom is the claim of harm (injury or woundedness) addressed? In the case of injury, we suggest that the subject is making an appeal as a citizen specifically to the state and more broadly, to all states for justice through law. Such evocations have been productive in securing tangi-ble changes and political access through an appeal to the state. For example, participating in discourses of rights, equality and democracy, GLBT activists, assert cases of injury to access political enfranchisement. Increasingly, such cases are made at the scale of the national and the global. Furthermore, what happens when various claims of harm are made simultaneously, as is often the case? Statements of being harmed may be dangerous as they are not in and of themselves transparent; they can be made by anyone and as such need to always be interpreted as texts within and of power. As we have seen, claims to injury by the privileged (Hindu nationalists, white heteromasculine citizens, etc.) often justify and further hierarchies of power as such claims are held to be legible and legitimate, this serves to reinforce and buttress citizenship, rights and privilege. How is a distinction sometimes made between injury and wound in order to validate and redress those whose speech acts are under-stood within the law? Injury is recognized a result of violence by the law, state,



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8. Partition narratives productively engage loss, trauma and suffering argues Rani Neutill.

9.

Increasingly the justificatory rhetoric has shifted in emphasis, from asserting the exemplary ideal of universal secularism and democratic representation vis a vis the other, to reacting to the security threat and the mystificatory political cultural alterity of the other. And with this xenophobic reaction has come the increasingly visible tendency to see the other within, and to use the threat of the internal other to write a script of paranoid mimesis... [and] embracing a refurbished Hindu religiosity as the authentic mean to re-enchant cultural and national identity.

(Dirks 2001: 179–80)

and citizenship. Hegemonic affective claims of injury, unlike their minoritar-ian counterparts, are validated and marked as recognizable speech within the domain of reason, civility, the law and the spectacle of the injured body. On the other hand, minoritarian statements about harm cannot always be heard as they are read simply as emotional and outside of reason and the political. When we speak of harm, it is necessary to consider how claims, concepts and tropes work to legitimate and devalue. Claims to harm have often been made by subordinated or minoritarian subjects in order to address vulnerabilities, oppression and injustices (Brown 1995) inflicted by the state; but, minori-ties are sometimes pathologized for these claims if they are not recognizable through identifiable and juridical terms. Certain kinds of harm and trauma are unrecognized or dismissed. When dominant groups claim injury, they do not face pathologization or dismissal, because their privileged speech and citi-zenship renders pain and violence as legible. They seek redress and justify further deployments and strategies of privilege in order to further consolidate and mobilize modes of power. The possibility of injury justifies violence as a necessary means for securing the safety of these legible and injured citizens. Hence, within the context of cinematic violence, Hindus are often imagined as the equal, if not, greater sufferers of pain and violence while Muslims, on the other hand, are made pathological by their wounds and that pathology leads them to inflict more injury on Hindus and themselves (e.g. suicide bombers).

Hegemonic Hindu nationalism demands state security and redress in order to heal and return to wholeness from injury. On the other hand, Muslims, ontologically, socially, psychically damaged are deemed beyond repair and dangerous. Suggesting that trauma extends beyond the domains of the rational, physical, and remedy and demands for justice are understood to be due to the lack of the of the subject who refuses to or cannot transcend of suffering to return to a normate status (Garland-Thomas 1996). ‘Holding on’ to wound-edness is perceived itself as a form of self-attentuation. We distinguish here between recognizing the continuation of pain, trauma, and loss, and creating a spectacle of the injury. Recognizing pain and trauma offers the opportu-nity to recognize the falsity of the narrative of wholeness and innocence as it also seeks insight from rather than remedy for the pain beyond the wound. It also narrates the psychic elements at play when wounds are inflicted. Psychic wounds as stated before are illegible in the ‘real’; they cannot be physically represented and are thus rendered unimportant compared to ‘real’ physical injury. In other words, following disability studies and trauma studies, we proffer that claiming and articulating pain and suffering from a minoritarian location can provide insight. Therefore, there might be something gained in neither dismissing trauma and suffering nor seeking vengeance, but rather acknowledging the possibility that the wound and pain continue to exist and may offer insight into how structures of power use the discourse of injury to justify state or even ‘the common man’s’ actions.8

In this article, we demonstrate how the evolution of representation of violence from Partition to Mumbai bombings moves from wound to injury. The shift from the language of loss and wound to injury transforms the discourse of power and subjugation and enables a staging of India’s presence on the global stage as well as justifies state violence as a necessary means. A new global media discourse of terror is centred on injury from violence to justify extraor-dinary or exceptional measures for the necropolitics of security state and war.9 While a new subgenre tells this story of global injury, the subgenre also conveys contestations over the meaning, causes, and outcomes of this injury.



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10. Then, of course, later Bangladesh.

Partition and KashMir

While violence is generally narrated through the tropes of suffering, pain and trauma, distinctions between different forms of pain and suffering give violence different meaning. In other words, violence itself is formed, framed and constructed by the way the harm is understood. We want to discuss how a shift from loss and mourning to injury can justify a retaliatory or ‘preventa-tive’ violence from the state in the name of security for those who are deemed to be citizens and what alternative responses are possible.

The foundational violence of Partition is constitutive of Pakistan and India, but is also India’s constitutive wound and loss. (Some argue that Pakistani national history narrates the opposite, Partition as a gain.) In most Indian Partition films, particularly the ones in the immediate aftermath, the woundedness of the nation is narrated in an effort to understand what may be considered the unassimilable nature of the trauma. It is narrated as loss. These films are about unresolved loss and unbearable grief in the face of violence that should not have happened and whose happening is inexplica-ble but nevertheless constitutive. Partition films tell us that the violence that occurred at the birth of the nation and to and by its ‘Midnight’s Children’ engendered a seismic shock. These films generally portray a formerly united people who have lived for centuries as brothers, friends, neighbours, who suddenly turn against each other in a flash of a moment. In this sense, we can see Partition films as centred on a woundedness that revolves around sadness and loss as opposed to Kashmir and Mumbai films that deal in many ways with revenge, protection and security, which demand that the state provide protection and retaliation. The loss within Indian Partition films is narrated not only the loss of lives and the presumed unity of India, but the loss of India’s successful birth and independence as Pakistan,10 embodies its failure, an immediate threat, and the justification for being a security state. Hence, Partition is not what engenders violence, nation-making is. Insofar as Partition films are about grief they are simultaneously ways in which the collective imagination of national trauma is projected onto the screen – the loss of the ‘fragment’ of the nation. Partition films attempt to mourn the loss of India’s innocence, hope and unity at its very formation. Loss entails a process of grieving, melancholy, a woundedness, a hope for healing, whether possible or not. In thinking about mourning and its possibility for post-Partition India, the films that narrate Kashmir or the multiple Mumbai bombings illustrate that this mourning has not yet been achieved.

Early Bengali and Punjabi Partition films from the late 1940s such as Garam Hava (Sathyu, 1973) and those by Ritwik Ghatak centre around tragedy, struggle, displacement, exile and a profound sense of loss and coping; the struggles within the films are not associated with injury to the nation state and its citizens, but injury as related to local subjects and communities. For example, Ghatak’s films are about sufferings of the refugee, loss of home, and consequential everyday struggles, rather than grand and epic depictions of large-scale violence. If early Partition films emphasize the loss of Partition, later films like Ghadar: Ek Prem Katha (2001) gesture towards the injury sustained by violence that is necessary to justify the security state and war. These films suggest that the loss is no longer relegated to the past and continues to pose threats today. While Partition is construed as a constitutive of India’s and Pakistan’s formations, it is also seen as a constitutive of the violence experi-enced by the nation and as justifying the retaliatory violence of the state, or



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vigilante citizen-subjects. This narrative shift becomes increasingly apparent when dealing with representations of the conflict in Kashmir.

The threat of Pakistan appears throughout Indian cinemas, especially through the evocation of Kashmir. The Kashmiri conflict is presented as a long-standing conventional interstate conflict based on a territorial border dispute. Violence is expressed in the forms of war and Pakistani-supported terrorism. Understood primarily as a regional conflict, even the charges of state-supported terrorist activity within Kashmir do not lead to many asser-tions of a global network of Islamic terror that we see in the new subgenre of terror. The many films about Kashmir (e.g. Roja, Mission Kashmir, Fanaa (Kohil, 2006) and LOC Kargil) justify the necessity of state action and war against Pakistan in the name of India’s endangered and injured citizens. Thus, the subgenre provides a critical component to a long history of being terrorized.

In the much written about Tamil film Roja, the ‘problem’ of Kashmir becomes a critical justification for the nation state as a national security state (against the threat of Pakistan). The English word ‘security’ has gained much ground and is peppered throughout the film, indicating the primary role of the state in relation to not only Pakistan’s claim to Kashmir, but clearly the heart of India – its villages. However, the state is seen as inadequate to the job of security as it fails to ‘control the political agenda’ and protect its citizens. The title inducing Roja calls out the state for not assisting her and rescuing her husband when he is captured by a Kashmiri separatist group sponsored by Pakistan; she proclaims that she is from the villages and though unimportant, is part of India’s peoples and therefore deserves to be listened to. Bowing to her heteropatriarchal devotion, the Minister though he originally says he will comply with the hostage-takers demands and release the militant, reneges on his promise. In the end, it is his humanism that converts the militant leader and his sister into releasing the husband to return to Roja. But Roja’s patriotic husband Rishi cannot allow for this compromise in the name of the nation, and insists that despite Roja’s attempts to free him ‘India will not be parti-tioned a second time’.

If Partition films signal a sense of loss and grief associated with the consti-tutive violence of the nation and independence, then Kashmir films suggest the necessity (and sometimes the failure) of the state to secure the nation – to protect villages, families and citizens – from the threat of Pakistan. Global terror films, in contrast, shift the attention from the village to the city, from territorial war to insurgency, and from national injury to a global one. This new subgenre’s key features rest on its political and affective claims. In the subgenre that includes 9/11 and Mumbai bombing films, the focus turns to terror and wounds transform into injury in a very literal and, at times, bodily form. In contrast to Kashmir films that feature territorial disputes between two states or the Indian state and state-supported insurgent groups, this new subgenre locates violence not only within the urban, but also within the global city, the arena of globally networked terror.

A new cartography of urban-based war and violence is understood to span cities from New York, London and Casablanca to Mumbai, Jakarta and Madrid. While each one of the attacks in these cities is independent, particu-lar and local, they, together, are considered to be the target of a new form of global-scale violence. That Mumbai claims to be a global city as a target like these others produces it as a node in a global network. ‘In this rebounding, spiralling violence between state and para-statal forces, the city of Mumbai



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11. That only certain cities matter and certain places become mediatized is abundantly clear. From the multitude of international examples, one can offer a ‘regional’ South Asian one, namely that of Sri Lanka. During the same year that the 11/26 bombings occurred in Mumbai killing 172, the abhorrent state violence against and internment of Tamils in Sri Lanka gathered little international media attention.

12. This framing of Mumbai as a global city as city besieged by global Islamic terror flattens the very complex relations of power that characterize Mumbai as a local, national and transnational city criss-crossed by geographies of power.

13. In the aftermath of 9/11, the US state posited that ‘weak’ or ‘failed’ states in the global South were responsible for the growth and spread of terrorism as they permitted terrorist networks to cross international boundaries and take root in multiple locations. Disregarding long histories of United States and other intervention, war and imperialism, this neo-liberal discourse of the ‘weak’ state blames postcolonial states themselves for their disempowerment and impoverishment.

14. For many reasons, the comparison and similarity to 9/11 can be deemed inappropriate. For example, within the United States, 9/11 led to the exponential growth and strength of the security state that waged war in multiple locations, suspended civil and human rights at home and abroad,

has been exposed not only as an obvious and iterable target, but also as a geo-territorial node in networks crossing domestic, national and institu-tional boundaries’ (Bishop and Roy 2009: 4). Global cities, understood to be unique and yet similar in the cosmopolitan lives of their inhabitants, incite identification and recognition in these moments of disruption and vulnerabil-ity. More than the sum of their inhabitants, cities appear to be, instead, stand-ing in for the global civic that is under threat, unprotected by an inattentive or weak postcolonial state.11 This subgenre urbanizes war and terror so that it is the city itself that is injured. The city is imagined as both as part of and larger than the nation. Framing Mumbai as a site of global terror is, therefore, a contemporary claim to injury by insurgent terrorist groups leading to crisis of security in step with those faced by other democracies in this age of modern war where the global ‘common man’ too is affected.12 The vulnerability of the global city to terror is perceived to an inherent characteristic of its global status and an outcome of the weak postcolonial state.13 The role of the state is understood to be fostering and supporting globalization in the form of capital, culture and technology, while protecting its elite citizens from the daily and territorial violence that befall those deemed expendable and marginal to these processes.

VulneraBle city, inJured citizens

The US posed 9/11 as a rupture and exceptional within the history of modern state governance. The discourse of exceptional crisis and unparalleled injury has made ‘9/11’ the globally recognized invocation for naming mediatized violence that sanctions the security state’s violent retaliation and expansion. The 11/26 attacks in Mumbai have been articulated within international media, however inappropriately,14 as India’s own 9/11, and therefore serve to mark India on the global map of terror and to demarcate a historical teleology of terror leading from New York to Madrid and Mumbai. Scholars have pointed out how these discourses incorporate and colonize attacks on Mumbai within Orientalist and neo-colonial narratives of global Islamic terror and moder-nity linked to 9/11. In refusing the neo-colonial frame of 9/11, Arundhati Roy urges that it is necessary to ‘reclaim and pick through the debris with our own brains and broken hearts so that we can arrive at our own conclusion’ (Roy 2008). In addition to decolonizing and vernacularizing the violence in India, it is important to also ask why claims to 9/11 are made in the first place. Comparisons of 9/11 may be derivative and colonizing, but how and why they are made and deployed in the name of making claims on the global stage is important to consider. We argue here that the frame of 9/11 tethers Indian tragedies to tragedies elsewhere, but does so by seeking to incorporate them into post-liberalized Indian narratives. The recent spate of Hindi films about terror inaugurate and fashion their own understandings and counter-narratives of violence in India under the rubric of ‘global Islamic terror’. The globalizing of the terror genre is primarily an expression of Indian nationalism and globalization and has occurred through several assertions: communalism is not an isolated and exceptional subcontinental issue, but a manifestation of global Islamic terror within India; these threats are long-standing and are constitutive of the Indian nation, state, and modernity; and this long history with global Islamic terror makes India a significant actor on the global stage.

Popular Hindi cinema both reifies and challenges American hegemony through its own narration of terror including 9/11. The subgenre of global



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and expanded imperial processes.

15. For example, the film Yun Hota Toh Kya Hota (Shah, 2006) weaves together the stories of four characters dwelling in Mumbai; the film culminates as all the characters travel or migrate to the United States during the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. The film casts those Indians affected or killed by 9/11 as Indians abroad.

Islamic terror deploys 9/11 as the paramount paradigm for framing war, security and violence on the global stage, while undermining the primacy and rupture represented by the western teleological narrative of 9/11 and American exceptionalism, replacing it with its own narrative that traces global Islamic networks of terror to a longer history of violence extending forth from Partition and communalism located in South Asia. It marks 9/11 not as a rupture, but as a continuation of this history. These films offer a different history of violence and injury within modernity with the subcontinent as an originary site of global Islamic terror arguing that: ‘terrorism, particularly the terror of Islam, happens on Indian soil, and happened long, long before it occurred within your territory’. The subgenre temporally locates 9/11 within Indian history, consequently rewriting the history of 9/11 as well. Popular Hindi films about 9/11 like Kurbaan and New York (Khan, 2009) explicitly begin the Islamic terrorist’s itinerary within South Asia. Hence, while these figures operate within New York and the contemporary context of American empire, the genealogy of violence is traced to the threat of Muslim violence within India. Spatially, New York is located not only within the Indian diaspora but as global India itself; the subgenre also expands to note Mumbai as an attacked city, an injured city, and a resilient city.15

One might suggest that Mumbai has long been the city of capital, celluloid and globalization, with its own subgenre of films focused on various forms of life in the city (the urbanization of villagers, underworld, global elite and Bollywood itself). Additionally, we have seen many forms of violence and consequently subgenres of film (e.g. gangster/underworld) make Mumbai their centre. Violence is not new within representations of Mumbai. While multiple forms of violence occur within Mumbai (e.g. the construction and mainte-nance of the Ambani residence, the lack of accessible water, and communal riots), it is a specific form of attack that gets designated as terrorism. Locating terror within the global city of Mumbai shifts the terrain and mode of terror and war. The bombings and attacks in Mumbai (1993, 2006, 2008, 2011) taken as a very precise rendering of the external threat, not of the border-ing nation state of Pakistan, but of a global network of terrorism, become a series of events in the history of terror in Mumbai. Moreover, these moments of violence, linked together as a succession of events, also become a history of Mumbai’s injury and vulnerability. Hindi films such as A Wednesday, Aamir and Mumbai Meri Jaan represent and link anti-Muslim communalism to global networks of Islamic terror that threaten not just Mumbai as a metropolis, but Mumbai as the space of India’s new global modernity. Each film offers a different response to this injury and the demand for expanding the global security state. Within the subgenre, we search for alternative ways to name, understand, and frame multiple forms of violence and for ethical responses to violence as terror that do not call for the expansion of the global security state in the name of injury.

Neeraj Pandey’s A Wednesday (2008), premised on the ideology that the weak state causes terrorism, calls forth citizens to intervene through vigilante violence. The film tells the story of Police Commissioner Prakash Rathod (Anupam Kher). He receives a phone call from an unnamed man (Naseeruddin Shah) who threatens to set off bombs he has planted throughout Mumbai unless Rathod releases four (Muslim) terrorist detainees who were active in the bombings of Mumbai in 1993 and 2006 and the attack on the Sabarmati Express train in Gujarat in 2002. Throughout the film Shah’s character dictates his demands from a rooftop overlooking the city. His position at the top of



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the roof and his power to control the fate of the city place him in a position to determine what is in the city’s ‘best interest’. Consequently, a bomb planted by Shah kills three of the detained men who are released. However, as he cannot be made the sole executioner and responsibility for action must be distributed more broadly, he demands that the participation of the state and that the police kill the fourth terrorist. The two policemen holding the fourth terrorist murder him outside of the law; to cover up their extra-legal actions as an act of self-defense, the Punjabi police officer shoots the other officer who is Muslim in the arm. Shah’s machinations have succeeded and he has forced the state to act outside of the binds of the law. He justifies his actions by call-ing himself an ‘ordinary man who is just cleaning house’.

Shah’s character descends from the rooftop carrying a bag filled with groceries. At the bottom, he encounters Rathod who knowingly states, ‘your bag seems quite heavy’. This heavy burden of the citizen, the ‘common man’, to protect the nation is the product of a weak or failed state; it is the burden of injured citizens who are forced to take extraordinary measures for their own security on behalf of the state. At the end of the film, Rathod asks Shah’s unnamed, ‘What’s your name?’ The film freezes and zooms in on Shah’s face, his mouth open at the moment of articulation – his religious and/or caste identity about to be revealed through his proper name. Although Shah tells Rathod his name, we are not privy to his identity and are left to wonder who is the ‘common man’. (Though if cinema has taught us anything, it is that the common man is Hindu.) Rathod further clarifies ‘one common man who had the guts … I don’t know if it was right or wrong, but personally speaking, whatever it was, it was good’. Since the weak state cannot protect Mumbai and its citizens from injury, the responsible (Hindu) vigilante must protect the already wounded nation from further injury. Replicating the post-9/11 US dogma that ‘failed states’ breed terrorism, the film perpetuates and expands this ideology, indicting the weak Indian state that ‘failed’ to protect Mumbai and its citizens. The film implies that the proper action by the security state would have been to resolve and remove the external threat of Pakistan (and Pakistan-state-supported insurgents) and internal threat of Muslims, instead it has become necessary to call forth citizen-subjects as vigilante state repre-sentatives to enact their own protection and righteous ‘war on terror’.

While the citizen’s religious identity is made supposedly ambiguous within A Wednesday, liberal and cosmopolitan – i.e., ‘modern’ Muslims are held responsible for (preventing) the violence of presumably globally networked modern Islamic terrorists. Within these narratives, it is not only the state’s weakness that is held accountable, but also modern Muslim subjects. This liberal position holds that cosmopolitan Muslims should demonstrate their lack of complicity and their support for democracies through self-sacrifice. While the citizen is called forth within A Wednesday, in Aamir, it is the modern Muslim who is held responsible for and must respond to terrorist actions. This modern Muslim (citizen and terrorist) has too been transformed within liberalization and globalization and is no longer configured as a holdout against modernity. ‘The Muslim terrorist is not backward anymore like his earlier incarnations ... He is all the more sophisticated and crafty because of his adoption of the accoutrements of various modernities – Indian, Western and even Arabian’ (Haider 2012: 61). In this configuration, modern Muslims are just as modern as the Indian state and now use advances in technology to wreak terror and havoc. All Muslims are held complicit with terror until proven otherwise.



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16. Positioning Indian and Pakistani Muslims as allied with violence, such blatant targeting is rationalized through explanations of Muslims need for retaliation after the massacres of Muslims following Ayodhya and in Gujarat.

17. Sunera Thobani posits that the popularity of Muslim actors and figures such as Shah Rukh Khan, Irfan Khan and A. R. Rahman relies on a particular political practice of silencing. She argues that these figures negotiate their identity as Muslims on a Hindu Indian Stage (and screen) by not being given and not asserting a political voice. In Aamir, the good Muslim has no political voice as sacrificing himself in the end.

Set in Mumbai, Aamir regards Indian and diasporic Muslims responsible for perpetuating violence and spreading terror. Within many ‘tolerant’ films, violence is understood, not as inherent, primordial or cultural, but as an Islamic and pathological response to injury – we are injured, so we injure others. (In films like Aamir and Kurbaan, the devastation of villages in Afghanistan, deaths of children in Pakistan, and the suffering in Mumbai slums leads to an instinctive, irrational and emotional retaliatory response to harm.) The weak state can neither protect nor provide for Muslims; consequently, it can do little to prevent the eruption of violence by Muslims, who must be held responsible for preventing and stopping terror themselves.16

Aamir (2008) locates terror within Muslim communities at large while suggesting that the ‘justification’ for violence is given through a demonstra-tion of the abjection of the Indian Muslim. The protagonist, an elite Muslim Non-Resident Indian doctor, is returning from London to Mumbai when he is told that his family is being held hostage until he follows directions to commit a bombing attack. As the NRI returns home to Mumbai to visit his family, he is drawn into a dangerous Islamic global network that is inherently violent. The terrorist master-mind who holds his family hostage communicates via telephone and pedagogically leads Aamir and the camera into the Muslim slums of Mumbai that are presumably rife with degradation, filth and danger. In these nooks and crannies, viewers are shown how terror is nurtured within each Muslim inhabitant. The film suggests that Indian Muslims retaliate for their abject position through the production of terror. The film’s protagonist Aamir and the viewer are unable to distinguish between the city inhabitants and those participating in this terror network; every Muslim is suspect. While the film recognizes the pain and suffering of Muslims in Mumbai, it does so only for the purpose of explaining why all Muslims are capable of, if not prone to, violence. Consequently, the film responds that it is modern Muslims who are responsible for preventing terror by their willingness to sacrifice their lives for the innocent Hindu nation in order to prove their worthiness.17

Evoking the ideology of the weak state, these two films call on either the vigilante citizen or the cosmopolitan (i.e. modern) Muslim to take responsi-bility for redressing injury of the nation and its citizens. The third film does not advocate for retaliation or redress to injury; instead Mumbai Meri Jaan emphasizes the vulnerability of its inhabitants to multiple forms and effects of violence. Mumbai Meri Jaan features the story of five people living in Mumbai who are affected by the 2006 train bombing and its aftermath: Suresh, a strug-gling IT Hindu who spends time at a local coffee shop disparaging Muslims; Sunil a low ranking policeman who is discouraged by the rampant corruption in the Mumbai police force; Rupali, a successful newspaper reporter who is happily engaged; Nikhil a financially wealthy executive contemplating emigration to the United States who is in the train during the bomb blast; and Thomas, a poor street vendor who is the daily target of everyday acts of violence. Within the film, an emphasis on vulnerabilities emphasizes the constructedness of disasters and the uneven distribution of their impacts. Identifying vulnerabilities to demonstrate historical and ongoing social, politi-cal and economic inequalities and their harm within the context of a bomb-ing attack can dismantle claims to the injury being singular and exceptional. Vulnerabilities hold in tension many frames of violence and harm. In doing so, it becomes possible to disrupt claims for exceptional injury and demands for the expansion and violence of the security state to retaliate through war or covert operations.



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Vulnerability is frequently a means for assessing the distribution of harm and risk faced by individuals, groups, and/or communities within their social, ecological and political environments (Pelling 2003; Bankoff et al. 2004); it is often accompanied by a consideration of resiliency to assess the abilities of these individuals, groups, and communities to withstand harm and its effects. Vulnerability assessments are often used to indicate the risk faced by individuals, groups and even regions in the face of disasters, violence, and oppression; clearly in this manner, social processes of inequality, past and present, produce vulnerabilities. In moving away from places such as elite cosmopolitan hotels to the crowded trains and stations, Mumbai Meri Jaan (2008) illuminates the distribution of vulnerability among the non-elite inhabitants that arises not just from terror, but also from the every-day and non-exceptional violence of institutions, systems and economies that are capitalist and/or state-sanctioned. The inhabitants are made vulner-able by a multitude of forces (e.g. environmental pollution and degradation, underemployment and poverty, police surveillance and violence, corruption, anti-Muslim communalism, abuse and violence of global capital) within the global city prior to the attacks. In this manner, Nishikanth Kamath’s Mumbai Meri Jaan makes visible vulnerabilities outside of the televised spectacle of attacks on elite hotels, focusing instead on the cosmopolitan and subaltern urban life occurring within the public spaces of the street, trains, malls and chai cafes. While all the characters are impacted by the bombings, it is clear that some are more vulnerable due to economic, political and social proc-esses that place them at greater risk of exposure to everyday and exceptional violence.

The physical, cognitive, psychic and affective dimensions of resiliency are used to identify and measure those factors that enable individualities and collectives to withstand and adjust to adversity. Resiliency points to how people manage harm and its impacts despite the suffering and death caused by various forms of violence and neglect, e.g. microaggressions, overcrowded trains, lack of necessities – health care, food, water, shelter and medicine, environmental degradation and destruction. While resiliency can be used to identify and recognize agency, strategies, and knowledge, it also can work as a demand. At the end of Mumbai Meri Jaan, the wounded people stand in silence to mourn for the victims of the train bombing. This unified stand is understood to be a sign of resiliency that is achieved through unity, a psychic and civic strength, in the face of injury. The resiliency of the people becomes the resiliency of the city itself. In the case of Mumbai, the resiliency of the city itself has been used to offer a non-violent alternative to the escalation of violence through vigilantism, asymmetrical war, or the expansion of the secu-rity state. As Saskia Sassen states, ‘It seems to me that the popular tendency in post-attack Mumbai to characterize the attacks more as a war on the city of Mumbai goes in this same direction, using the civic capabilities of the city to move away from a geopolitical two-state conflict’ (2010: 39, emphasis added). Mumbai Meri Jaan, in contrast to A Wednesday and Aamir, takes this further positing resiliency through unity as an alternative to the war, vigilante violence or retaliation associated with security, state and citizenship. The film identifies the civic capacities and collective strengths of the city as factors that contribute to its resiliency and ability to withstand this vulnerable status as a global city and target.

Right before the blast, Nikhil, who is consumed by the threat of envi-ronmental destruction, tells his friend that this threat will lead to the demise



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18. Community resiliency is now the focus of development discourses (Baliga 2012). While resiliency acknowledges and identifies the endurance of marginalized and subaltern subjects by recognizing the ability to sustain oneself and to cope with hardships and deprivation, it can also become reflective of neo-liberal rationalities that seek to identify metrics, behaviours and processes for assessing self-responsibility and self-governance within vulnerable, ‘at-risk’, and traumatized populations. While a critical term in development and psychological research, resiliency can also reflect neo-liberal discourses to indicate the ability to develop and deploy factors and strengths to overcome barriers, adapt to conditions and manage risk in the face of personal and structural harm without state support, capital or natural resources. Studies of resiliency often look to the individual’s and community’s abilities to cope with and overcome trauma in order to achieve ‘success’. But, in considering such factors, is it possible that resiliency becomes elided with neo-liberal self-governance wherein the vulnerable individual and community are lauded for their own self-sufficiency? Could ‘resiliency’ function within neo-liberal discourses to locate the mechanisms and responsibilities for survival back within the vulnerable individual and collective? Development and security discourses are beginning to deploy ‘resiliency’ within a

of Mumbai. His friend laughingly replies, ‘Mumbai won’t die. The people will’. Mumbai enlivened by human, financial and social capital is resilient and therefore capable of withstanding terror attacks, environmental disas-ters and the onslaught of modernity; but the resiliency of Mumbai raises the question of what does it mean when a global city, and not its inhabitants, survive? Whose psychic, cognitive, affective and physical capacities animate and provide life force for the city? While the city itself may continue to exist, it is clear that it may do so at the cost of its most vulnerable inhabitants. If unity brings resiliency in the face of terror, for whom or what?18 There is some sense of acceptance in the promise that Mumbai will continue to move forward regardless of the past and future losses entailed; previous losses and deaths continue to be wounds that do not heal. As the title itself suggests, Mumbai is my life (love). Here, resiliency does not imply that secu-rity is possible or life guaranteed; instead, it recognizes that exposure to harm is a constitutive process of existence for the individual and living systems and that resiliency also entails living with injury and the possibility of continuing loss.

What then is an ethical response to violence and harm that does not mask on-going distribution of vulnerabilities in a call for resiliency through unity? How does one respond beyond calls for exceptional injury, security, or unity? We note here that the very first words we hear in the film are Nehru’s midnight speech of 15 August 1947: ‘At the stroke of the midnight hour when the world sleeps, India will awake to the light of freedom’. This opening refer-ences independence and the violence, trauma, and loss that accompanied it. Nehru’s famous statement suggests that India is born and survives with hope amidst violence and trauma. The wound remains and trauma continues. Mumbai is a postcolonial global city – the site of repeated loss and trauma and the site of proliferating violence and vulnerability.

In Mumbai Mere Jaan, there is a moment of non-Islamic terrorism created by Thomas the street vendor who takes advantage of the heightened fear of violence by making empty and anonymous bomb threats against a shopping mall that evicted him from its premises. Thomas becomes witness to the harm engendered by his vengeful act when a well-to-do shopper suffers a heart attack and becomes ill, making clear to him the violence of his actions; he can do his best to make amends. Through Thomas, Mumbai Mere Jaan offers a different model of recognizing violence, vulnerabilities, complicity and trauma.

We want to borrow from ecological and justice models to imagine a different response – what we might call postcolonial restoration. Postcolonial restoration addresses harm and the distribution of vulnerabilities, but it also recognizes that loss and trauma are constitutive and continuing processes of postcolonial existence. Postcolonial restoration demands three ethical modes of response: 1) sitting with trauma, 2) implication, and 3) reparation. Neutill theorizes what it means to sit with trauma as an affective and ethical mode of being. Sitting with trauma reorients us towards an understanding of mourn-ing as an ethical mode of relationship to loss through what I term sitting with. Neither static nor terminal, sitting with is not melancholic, but rather an ongo-ing dynamic process that undoes conventional notions of mourning. We may walk away from the loss and trauma, but we also come back – an interminable mourning. In this case, there is no restoration to an original or pure form prior to the wound, but a continual process of recognition the constitutive and continuing aspects of trauma.



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paradigm in which the city and its inhabitants become recognized for their entrepreneurial self-reliance in which they find strategies to ensure their survivability and well-being outside of the state’s support. For a similar argument about biopolitics and the management of populations, see Michael Watts (2012) and Julian Reid (2012).

Second, in naming violence, there can be no singular claim to injury – harm is always located within distribution of vulnerabilities and harm. Moreover, in recognizing the distribution of vulnerabilities, one needs to focus on the harm that is inflicted as much as the harm that is suffered – Thomas suffers, but also must account for his own complicity in inflicting harm. In understanding the distribution of vulnerabilities across the living ecosystem, one must note how one is entangled and interdependent with modes of violence without claiming impunity. Arundhati Roy provocatively poses, ‘The only way to contain (it would be naive to say end) terrorism is to look at the monster in the mirror. We’re standing at a fork in the road. One sign says “Justice”, the other “Civil War”. There’s no third sign and there”s no going back. Choose’. Implication in this case means the necessity of acknowledging interdependency and recognizing distributions of vulner-ability that mark certain forms of violence, harm and death while abandoning others as disposable to slow deaths.

The third ethical response is reparation. Increased security from the state is not demanded as a salve to heal wounds as security cannot be achieved. But there must be an on-going attempt to salve the wound that cannot be healed. In this case, borrowing not from the more legalistic reparations (to pay), but from the ecological to repair (to rejuvenate and heal). The role of reparations is to restore not to an original unwounded state of being, but to engage in continual healing and recognition of loss and trauma in an ecologi-cal and systemic way. Reparation may never end as recognition of vulnerabil-ity and trauma continue within postcolonial restoration. As the loss continues and vulnerabilities are addressed but continue to proliferate, restoration is an on-going process.

It is not only possible, but also imperative that we imagine responses to terror that do not privilege exceptional violence, demand an increase in safety through a call for redress through the expansion war, global security, or vigi-lantism. Independence arrived with the violence of Partition, a wound accom-panied by reoccurring trauma. Post-liberalization, in turn, has engendered increasing harm masked under global claims to injury. This subgenre illumi-nates subsequent claims for vengeance, security and unity; consequently, we gesture towards an ethical response to claims of global scale injury that recog-nizes the distribution of vulnerabilities, recognizes our own monstrosities, and works towards restorative healing.

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suggested citation

Desai, J. and Neutill, R. (2013), ‘Wound, injury, and restoration: Bollywood’s formations of global terror’, Studies in South Asian Film & Media 5: 2, pp. 147–165, doi: 10.1386/safm.5.2.147_1

contriButor details

Rani Neutill is a lecturer in History and Literature and Women and Gender Studies at Harvard University after serving as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in English at Johns Hopkins University and as a Postdoctoral Associate in the Program in Ethnicity, Race and Migration and American Studies at Yale University. She has published articles on South Asian Diasporic film and liter-ature, Bollywood, and South Asian Queer and Feminist Studies.

E-mail: [email protected]

Jigna Desai is Professor in the Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies and a founding member and former director of the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Minnesota. Her research interests include Asian American, postcolonial, queer and diasporic cultural studies. Her book Beyond Bollywood: The Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film is the first book on Bollywood and the South Asian diaspora. It analyses the complex gender, sexual and racial politics of diasporas in the current moment of globalization (Routledge 2004). She has also co-edited several collec-tions – Bollywood: A Reader for Open University /McGraw Hill Press (2009), Transnational Feminism and Global Advocacy in South Asia for Routledge (2012) and Asian Americans in Dixie: Race and Migration in the South for University of Illinois Press (2013). She has published widely on issues of race, media, gender and sexuality in journals such as Social Text, Journal of Asian American Studies and Meridiens.


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http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?239277

mailto:[email protected]


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Wound, Injury, and Restoration : Bollywood’s Formations of Global Terror

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