India’s rich cinema has a history of highlighting social and cultural issues. But many of its actors have not come forward to condemn the Israeli war on Gaza.
A man stands next to a poster of the movie Article 370 displayed at a cinema hall in Guwahati, India, Thursday, March 21, 2024. The movie is one of several upcoming Bollywood releases based on polarizing issues, which either promote Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his government’s political agenda, or lambast his critics. / Photo: AP
The pro-Palestinian protest did not disrupt the sartorial event that had big names from the world of fashion and entertainment in attendance. They included Zendaya, Alexander Skarsgård, Janelle Monáe, Vera Wang, Jude Law, Raye, Sarah Pidgeon, and Bollywood’s Alia Bhatt amongst others. The campaign set off after former American model-turned-influencer Haley Kalil uploaded a video chiming to a TikTok video that included “let them eat cake”, a notorious, historical remark made by queen Marie-Antoinette of France during the French revolution at a time when hundreds of French peasants starved and died. Kalil who later apologised, and deleted her video, has a fan following of 9.9 million.
Bollywood by and large has maintained this status quo. Neither have the industry collectively or individually spoken about the growing anti-secular and anti-liberal climate in India or other social injustices that have rocked the nation in recent times. With exception of a few posts on X by actors such as Swara Bhaskar, Sonam Kapoor, and Kalki Koechlin during the initial days of this war, there has been no wider condemnation of the Israeli actions.
The debate, now seven years old, gained momentum after actor Sushant Singh Rajput’s untimely demise. Around the same time a hashtag called #BoycottBollywood popped up on social media. Bollywood, meanwhile, responded in different ways. On the one hand a section of producers, directors and actors like Amitabh Bacchan, Akshay Kumar, Anupam Kher sided with the right-wing cultural narrative by overtly supporting anti-Muslim, anti-minority, and violent discourse.
Although India has a history of diplomatically supporting the Palestinian resistance, the coziness between prime ministers Narendra Modi and Benjamin Netanyahu has led to whitewashing Israel’s occupation. In many of these films, successful at the box office starring mega celebrities like Shah Rukh Khan, Deepika Padukone, Ranbir Kapoor, and Ranveer Singh there were dollops of ‘othering’ Dalits, Muslims, and the indigenous people.
But why did it even take the Indian film industry six months and more than 35,000 dead Palestinians - many of them children - to respond to the gravest humanitarian disaster in recent history?
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