Tamil News - India's Cultural War in Bollywood - Dailythanthi.com

A politician from India’s ruling Hindu nationalist party shocked the country by offering a 100 million rupee ($1.6 million) bounty to anyone who beheads actor Deepika Padukone, star of the controversial new movie Padmavati, along with the film’s director, Sanjay Leela Bhansali. The threat to the Bollywood figures is just the latest evidence of an escalating culture war in India.Hindu nationalists have become obsessed by rumors that Padmavati features a romantic dream sequence between a 14th century Muslim sultan and the eponymous Hindu queen. Although Bhansali denies that a love scene exists, Suraj Pal Amu, an official with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, repeated a call for their beheadings on Nov. 19.

The film’s Dec. 1 release in India has now been put on hold, and an extremist group, Karni Sena, threatened to burn down British cinemas that screen the film. Amu resigned on Nov. 29, but critics say the scandal is an attempt by the party to play to its nationalist base and erode freedom of speech.

Under Modi, Hindu nationalists have stoked cultural conflicts. So-called cow vigilantism has surged as mobs target mainly Muslims in the name of protecting cattle, which are sacred to Hindus. In June, a chief minister of the BJP said the Taj Mahal, built by a Muslim emperor, did not "represent Indian culture." And on Nov. 24, a hanging in Jaipur was linked to the controversy over the movie–perhaps a grim harbinger of things to come in India’s new era of intolerance.No less an ardent secularist than India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, summed up the phenomenon seven decades ago: "Facts and fiction are so interwoven together as to be inseparable, and this amalgam becomes an imagined history, which may not tell us exactly what happened but does tell us something equally important—what people believed had taken place, what they thought their heroic ancestors were capable of, and what ideals inspired them." This "imagined history"—"a mixture of fact and fiction, or sometimes only fiction"—becomes "symbolically true."

This explains, in a nutshell, the opposition to "Padmavati." For some Hindus, the difference between historical fact and cultural myth does not matter; what is remembered and believed is as important as what is verifiable. And in today's climate, where "taking offense" is the name of the game and "hurting the sentiments of a community" is the name of the crime, that perspective is particularly relevant. The old Hindu boasts of expansive tolerance and acceptance of difference—the very tenets that underlie India's remarkable diversity—are wearing thin these days.

http://www.dailythanthi.com/News/Districts/2018/01/19115815/Indias-Cultural-War-in-Bollywood.vpf

For More Visit:-http://www.dailythanthi.com/

DailyThanthi is a leading No.1 Tamil News website which publishes Tamil News, Latest Tamilnadu News, cinema updates, Sports News, World News and all Tamil News updates.