Every film finds its audience. But it is equally true that every audience finds its film. Forget the Tiranga Yatra. The cruel Gudiya reality show. And even the Left's persistent posturing. India is at a point in its history where it does not need to wear its patriotic heart on the sleeve of its teen-rang-ki-choli. India may not be shining, as the BJP learnt only too well-and too late-in the recent general elections, but it desires to.

PICTURE SPEAK

Our Sept 29, 2003 cover

Where could it be reflected more than in Bollywood movies, which I have never hesitated to take seriously. This is the reason I am intrigued by the commonality running through four big movies, made at a collective cost of over Rs 120 crore, and being released this winter. Unlike in the late 1970s and '80s, the country in these movies is not a corrupt nation state churning out a generation of angry young men out to avenge their fathers' killers. It is also not the romanticised Hindustan of the '90s, frozen in time and idealised by the NRI. It is instead a community, not all alike, not all perfect, certainly not ideal, but forever in the throes of experimentation and change.

This is an India as imagined by its citizens. It could be in the villages that Ashutosh Gowariker's Swades: We, the People seeks. It could be in love and succour across the border as in Yash Chopra's Veer-Zaara. It could be in the legacy of the British-of those who hanged Mangal Pandey in 1857: The Rising or left behind an India in flames at the time of Partition in Kisna. This is an India of four premier film directors: Chopra, who is making a movie after seven years; Gowariker, who is making his first movie after winning an Oscar nomination for Lagaan; Subhash Ghai, who has delivered 12 enormous hits; and Ketan Mehta, whose Mirch Masala remains a powerful allegory of feminine power. None of these movies portrays Pakistan as the enemy.

Bollywood's new nationalism needs no evil Other, neither the wicked West of Manoj Kumar's movies nor the aggressive Pakistanis of J.P. Dutta's Border and LoC. It is a nationalism which is content to give up a NASA career for a less-than-ideal village in Swades. It is a patriotism that thinks nothing of rescuing a British commissioner's daughter from a marauding mob in Kisna. It recalls the early Nehruvian innocence of Raj Kapoor in Jis Desh Mein Ganga Behti Hai-only the hero wears blue jeans, not a dhoti.

Bollywood is all-pervasive and sometimes even affects our relations with other countries. Nowhere was this more evident than when Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf told the India Today Conclave earlier this year that Indian movies were forever trying to "ridicule our forces" and sweetly requested actor Aishwarya Rai, who was present there, not to act in such movies.

The General should be happy to watch this new crop.

(Aroon Purie)

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