Framing Pakistan in Hindi Cinema

Cinema, as a site of historical and cultural memories functions as a space of negotiation where competing narratives and deeply political stakes shape the national imaginary. Drawing upon the psychoanalytic film theory, one might argue that mass culture acts symptomatically— functioning as a massive screen onto which collective traumas, fantasies, disquiet, and their after-effect can be imagined and projected. As Laura Mulvey (1993) points out, cinema reveals ‘the blind spots of a culture and finds forms that make manifest socially traumatic material through distortion, defence, and disguise’ (p. 6). After
Independence, Hindi cinema evolved into more than a popular form of entertainment; it became a vital cultural form mobilized for the task of nation-building—creating national and proto-nationalist identities that could bind viewers and citizens across class, caste, ethnic and regional borders into a shared vision of the Indian nation. However, as Ravi Vasudevan (2011) has noted, this cohesive vision is constructed through a majoritarian Hindu lens (p. 102). In this framework, the cinematic figure of Pakistan or the Pakistani is rarely represented as a neutral entity. Instead, it often serves as a symbolic stand-in for the Muslim ‘Other’, conflating the vectors of regional and geopolitical differences into a singular religious identity.