The chief minister instructs Shroff to send his team to Jaisalmer immediately and “arrest the bastard.” Without a moment’s hesitation, Shroff responds: “I’m sorry, Sir, but we couldn’t wait to get permission.” The minister had been unreachable while in a three-hour flight, and Shroff went ahead and took the unilateral decision to send his team to hunt down Hafeez. Once again, Shroff receives no objections, no questions.  Clearly, then, the cop’s actions, even without official approval, are in line with what the state already wants. The cop is the mechanism for preemptive promptness—not a vehicle for over-compensatory amendments against the state. He only hastens state operation. And, because of his ability to anticipate the state’s actions, even before the state knows that it needs to act, the state always emerges as efficient and successful at combating its enemies. The implicit subtext is that this is a new phenomenon: in 1993 they might not have been able to preempt the twelve bomb blasts in Bombay. But today, with Article 370 in place, and the free rein given to the police, the state will not only rectify its past mistakes (like letting terrorists like Bilal Ahmad escape to Pakistan), but it will also halt new terroristic possibilities.

And this is because the state is willing to go that extra mile. They’ll do whatever it takes—physical torture, psychological warfare, intimidation, humiliation of suspects. In each instance, state machinery encourages the police to both act before consent (by assuming its eventual arrival) and, where necessary, act without consent. So, when Soorya tells his boss, Shroff, that the only way to get Kadar Osmani (another terrorist in India) to start talking is to “humiliate” him using an “unofficial” strategy, because beating and torturing him are not doing the trick to “break” him, Soorya gets exactly what he needs from his boss: a confirmation to go ahead. This authorization, however, is given without ever saying the word “yes.” Instead, it comes in the form of a refusal to say “no.” In response to Soorya’s request for the license to violate the law, his boss Shroff, mock-chides him: “Oh yes, like you’ve never done anything till now without my permission.” Without a categorical “yes,” Shroff lets Soorya know that the field of possibilities for dealing with terrorists is wide open, and that the state’s endorsement to break rules can be tacitly assumed.

Even more, such disregard for protocols protecting human rights becomes an open-secret and a matter of mirth—all the subordinates witnessing Shroff and Soorya’s interaction snicker at this exchange between the two senior police officers. The shared joke operates at multiple levels: it testifies to collective humor at Soorya’s pretense of seeking permission; at Shroff’s fake-irritation about Soorya’s not following rules; at the delicate balance performed in the routine of seeking and granting (un)official clearance; and, at how in-step the two cops are even in the moment when they’re discussing stepping out of line. They each know the role they need to play to side-step the law together. There is no rift; only the smoothest continuum between the state, top-ranking police officers, their underlings, and the audience who are in on the joke.

But such a successful moment of humor rests upon excluding someone’s body and subjecthood; the joke is predicated on someone’s rejection from insider-status and their consequent response of non-laughter. Muslims do not laugh in Sooryavanshi. They are, instead, angry, taciturn, vengeful, and petulantly committed to watching “India burn.” The film enacts a very different approach to the Muslim question than a film like Gully Boy. In the latter, the current “condition of Muslims” in India is tackled as a single throw-away sentence. Otherwise, the film steers clear of commenting on national politics and the ascendency of Hindutva ideologies. Sooryavanshi, however, takes on the challenge of explicitly spelling out “Musalmaano ka haal” (the situation Muslims are in).

It does so, first and foremost, by having Muslims tell their own story of trauma. Anti-Muslim riots do not make it into the national narrative. In this case, the historical background relevant to the film begins with the violence endured by the country in 1993, with the Bombay bomb blasts; not with the post-Ayodhya riots in 1992, in which more than two thousand Muslims died in Bombay alone. The film enforces a jarring severing of two intimately connected moments of violence and insists on starting history where the political culpability of Islamic terrorists (and their sympathizers) begins. The film’s historiography is fully aligned with a Hindutva timeline. What happened to Muslims during the riots is something that the Muslim-terrorists are left to recount. The film, and the nation it depicts, have no interest in anything else.

In some ways, the film is rare for how unequivocally it lays bare the politics of associating terrorists and Muslims—a key political tactic used by the Hindu Right to justify its Islamophobia, and to intimidate and delegitimate Indian Muslims as political agents. When Soorya reaches the Muslim mohalla to arrest Kadar Osmani, a Lashkar and ISIS-supporting politico-religious leader, a Muslim crowd gathers to protest his arrest.  Addressing a maulvi (Muslim priest), Soorya offers a litany of Osmani’s crimes—misleading young boys in the name of religion and sending them off to Syria to fight for ISIS etc.—as evidence for why he must be arrested. But the “dialogue” with the Muslim community, the willingness to address and engage them, and offer a detailed explanation for the police’s actions is not an exercise in assuaging people’s unrest or their suspicion of the police. It is, rather, the segue to a threat:

“If, after knowing all this [about Osmani], you still continue to support him, then the whole community can be blamed.”

Soorya categorically warns Muslims that they are themselves responsible for being labeled unpatriotic, anti-national, and untrustworthy, because of who they ally with. But that’s not where the threat ends: if they don’t comply, then “another 1993-type of situation/atmosphere can occur,” and “neither you nor we want that,” Soorya reminds them.

At the start of the film, Devgn’s disembodied voice-over had left out any mention of the anti-Muslim riots of 1992 to cleave the country’s suffering (because of the blasts) from the suffering Muslims underwent in the 1992 riots. In this instance, Soorya’s evasion (of leaving out any mention of the riots) achieves a different end. The warning about history repeating itself (“1993-jaisa mahaul”) cloaks an unspoken threat to the public of anti-Muslim riots. No Muslim can remember the Bombay blasts without remembering the riots that preceded them. When Soorya mentions the blasts, the riots linger just under the surface of his words and return as phantasmagoric reminders of what Muslims should fear. Orchestrated riots: always denied, always deployed. Soorya’s warning, however, goes yet a step further. He pleads with the maulvi, “as one Indian to another” to “let him do his job”, otherwise the cop will have to bring in the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF)—India’s paramilitary force to manage internal national security. Tipping his hat to Muslims as compatriots just masks the final thread of the warning—that the federal state’s coercive apparatus is at the cop’s beck and call. Needless to say, the maulvi instructs the crowd to back down. Whether it’s from fear of being branded a terrorist, attacked in a riot, or taken out by special armed forces is hard to say. But the subtle intensification of the pressure to relent is decidedly hard to miss or ignore in this cinematic threat.

The script leaves the depiction of Muslim precarity to the meager and unreliable narrative capabilities of the “bad” Muslim, and, predictably, they come up short at convincing the audience (or the characters in the film) of the authenticity of Muslim vulnerability. Instead, the script works hard to present political grievances by Muslim as malicious distortions and exaggerations of the truth. In this way, Osmani’s words, “You know what the condition of Muslims in this country is?” are negated when a retired Muslim policeman, Naeem Khan (who just happens to be visiting the police station) reminds Osmani of Osmani’s grubby origins: he was a petty thief before he donned the garb of a pious man. Osmani is, of course, shamed into silence by the “tewar” (temper) of real “Hindustani Musalmaan.”

Another tactic for disqualifying the validity of protest from Muslims is to suggest that their civil rights were never really violated. This “unofficial” technique of humiliation Soorya uses to get Osmani to talk about his terroristic affiliations. Soorya brings the latter’s wife and daughter into the police station and pretends to torture them. They are taken into a room adjoining the one where Osmani is strung from the ceiling, their mouths covered so that they can’t make a sound. Then two female police-officers fake-scream in response to the sound of pseudo-belt-lashes, so as to make Osmani believe that the women in his family are being tormented. With no physical damage, any objections to police brutality against religious minorities would be unwarranted.

In this scene, too, the film takes recourse to humor to dislodge attention from the horrific nature of what is transpiring on screen. Instead, we are led to laugh at the absurdity of the erotic-sexualized screams that the female cops produce. To make that connotation explicit, Soorya reprimands his women colleagues for confusing torture for “Kamasutra,” and for not faking Muslimness convincingly enough: one of the female cops uses the Sanskritized word “pitaji,” instead of the Urdu word “abbu” for father as she calls out to the “father,” Osmani, to save her.

There is much to unpack here: The film’s gender politics are obvious in its use of women to create sexual humor. And its gendered ethnonationalism is on display because it reinforces the normalcy of patriarchal protectionism: even a terrorist will succumb to the horror of his women relatives being violated. Or, perhaps, it suggests that Muslim men are especially susceptible to the pressures of wanting to protect their women’s honor. The scene also articulates a subtle castigation of Urdu as a language associated with terrorists, and with the griminess of fake torture and bad porn. Most critically, the scene of simulated torture is used to make us un-see real torture on screen: Osmani hanging by his arms from the ceiling of a prison cell; and his wife and daughter being gagged into silence. And it does the trick to falsify our memory of real-world ideologies and incidents, where the Hindu Right cruelly advocates and deploys the use of sexual and physical violence against Muslims.[41] [open endnotes in new window]

There is one exception, where the film grants an iota of sympathy for the distress that Muslims have endured. When the police catch up with Bilal Ahmad, who has returned from Pakistan to set in motion the next terrorist attack in India, he threatens to take his own life rather than be hanged like a “spectacle.” With his gun to the temple, he describes his motivation for turning to terrorism. He tells Soorya that his house was scorched and his wife, children, and father burned alive during the 1992 riots:

“I still hear their screams twenty-seven years later.”

The film allows the viewer to feel a momentary possibility of empathy for Ahmad: we see flashback sequences, which ostensibly stand in for glimpses of Ahmad’s memory, of a mansion engulfed in flames. This visual assemblage, however, is distinctly minimalist compared to the long newsreel, archival footage we’re shown every time the film refers to bomb blasts by Islamic terrorists. Then, we see a sequential collage of photographs: collapsed buildings, chaos and catastrophe in public spaces, dead and injured bodies strewn everywhere. In contrast, the images of a burning house do not produce the same affective tenor. So, even when there is a basic visual repertoire offered to produce sympathy for the victims of communal violence, it is no match for the hyperbolic cinematic arsenal through which the film depicts the impact of terroristic violence.

During the conversation, Soorya does acknowledge that “what happened” to Ahmad “was wrong.” He even urges Ahmad to remember that India “tumhara bhi hai” (India is yours too). But these words of commiseration are sandwiched between strategies of dismissal, which once again invalidate Ahmad’s grief and anger. “What about the blasts you organized out of revenge?” is the first comeback that Ahmad receives from Soorya. “What happened with you was wrong, but you also took thousands of innocent lives.” This rejoinder is particularly poignant because, as a young man, Soorya had lost both his parents in the blasts. “If I wanted,” he continues, “I could take out all my anger [bhadaas] on you right now.” And then comes the clincher: “But that time has passed” and, Ahmad needs to forget, to move on: “aage badhna hoga.”

Herein lies the film’s ultimate treatise on the management of political discontent and psychological trauma that result from sectarian state politics. The answer to terrorism lies in one’s capacity to “move on,” to repurpose trauma, as Soorya has done, toward the higher end of protecting the nation. Ahmad’s, and by extension the Muslim community’s failure lies in their inability to be entrepreneurial with their pain, in their incapacity to convert pain into productivity. This is the neoliberal spin on ethnonationalism. Such a motif occurs at the end of the film, when Simmba arrives on the scene (to give Soorya support in taking down the terrorists. With his classic earthy humor Simmba reminds the terrorists that their activities hurt the economy, affect tourism, impact the entertainment, sports, and art industries.

If terrorism jeopardizes the smooth flow of capital, then the terrorist is the equivalent of a bad venture capitalist who misrecognizes the sagacity of the avenues of his investment. Instead of devoting his energies in and to the nation, he detracts from the nation. He is unable to get over structural traumas and deal with them as individual familial loss. Rather than nationalizing his trauma, he insists on traumatizing the nation. The Muslim-terrorist is thus the psychologically stunted, mentally unwell melancholic, brooding over the communal past, when the security state has opened up an exciting neoliberal future. The Ahmads, Osmanis, and Hafeezes refuse to enter the techno-financial global order that would free them from the oppressiveness of their Muslimness and allow them to be, as Basu puts it, “subsumed and extinguished into an overall civic religiosity of neoliberal market structures.”[42]

What this narrative does is to invent the Indian Muslim as “an entity that is at once pathological and infantile,”[43] and therefore, after all is said and done, pathetically ineffectual. In the same breath that the film collapses Muslim with terrorist, it also disallows terrorists the possibility of success. The Indian state and police, we learn, will always forestall political antagonism that may arise from religious minorities. The film reinforces the idea that any politics misaligned with ethnonationalism is doomed to self-combustion. This is seen in the following script development: Ahmad unwittingly self-sabotages the terrorist plan by insisting on going to visit his mother’s grave in Bombay, even though he is repeatedly warned against this kind of sentimental foolishness. Predictably, he is recognized at the graveyard, caught, and must take his own life. Thus, despite decades of Indian history with its “progressive underdevelopment, and disenfranchisement of entire Muslim communities,”[44] Muslims are deemed incapable of even proper, or properly terrifying militant political expression. As terrorists, they are not only devoid of good politics, they are devoid of politics altogether, or of a political future that is not entirely subsumed within a majoritarian-nationalist paradigm. Without threatening nudges, reminders, and rejoinders from the Hindu cop, outdated traumas, foiled plans, and familial-fixations are all they’re capable of.

Ajay Gudavarthy argues that this narrative structure, in which the malfunction of Muslim unrest is always a given, always scripted into the story from its very inception, offers audiences “many comforts,” especially when neoliberal reforms have expanded the realm of uncertainty and insecurity in everyday life.[45] The predictability of these narratives is premised on the knowledge that Muslims are the “safest enemies to have in India.” In this view, they are a numerical minority (only 15% of the nation’s population, while Hindus constitute 80% of India), socially backward, and economically marginalized. And yet this recurring narrative has a usefulness for the state. That is, positing Muslims as the stable, unified enemy allows an authoritarian populist state, and its cultural texts, to generate a unified Hindu identity that can forever exist in a quasi-panicked, quasi-celebratory state—fearful of Muslims but rejoicing in their guaranteed vanquishment. In the end, what this kind of screenplay produces is a cinematic universe in which all erstwhile idealism of communal harmony, even if it only once existed in the discursive-cultural-cinematic realm, is permanently laid to rest. What is normalized in lieu of it is a popular politics of pragmatism:

“From an imagination of overcoming conflict, we are reconciled to the fact that conflict is an everyday reality and that we will live with these conflicts for a long time to come…. The state that was forced to speak a social democratic language, now, under populist regimes has given voice to the views that we used to hold all through only in the private realm. The state has also accepted that conflicts are going to stay unsolved to become our lived reality.”[46]

In this scenario, the cop as a state functionary, becomes the vehicle of pragmatism. He brings a middle-class, Hindutva, drawing-room version of politics out into the open as he embodies and encourages a rampant disregard for a politics of justice or equity. Such a characterization moves to evacuate a politics born out of disenfranchisement and suffering to kneel at the altar of an impervious state, or worse, a state that is proactively vindictive.

Simmba, Singham, and Sooryavanshi take down the terrorists.