I am so happy to write this post. I’ve come close to it before but never really managed to have the kind of discussion I want to have. But I think now is the time! We have the right mix of people on the blog, and a good starting point.
In one of my graduate seminars on colonialism and orientalism and stuff, it talked about how among colonized writers and thinkers, the reaction to the Holocaust was very frustrating. Because similar events had been occurring for decades in colonized countries, situations where communities were rounded up and moved and eventually killed (through starvation, violence, all kinds of things). You can draw a direct line in terms of organizational structure from how the native people of many many colonized countries were treated to how the Nazis treated the Jews. So the reaction was this anger of “sure, now you are horrified, because it is happening in Europe to Europeans, but where were you for the past 100 years?”
To my mind, that is a justified anger and response. HOWEVER!!! It must go along with the basic “two wrongs don’t make a right” understanding. You can acknowledge that certain atrocities gain more attention than other atrocities and that is not fair. But you can also acknowledge that those are still atrocities and deserve the attention they got. America did terrible things to the people living here before America was settled, and continues to do terrible things to them. America also had slavery, which went on for hundreds of years and is an atrocity. I acknowledge all of those things. I also say that the Holocaust was a terrible thing that happened and Americans, as a whole, are right to treat it with deep reverence.
When I try to look at WWII from the Indian side, it is these absolutes and “two wrongs” arguments that I keep finding myself on. Yes, it was wrong for India to be colonized. Yes, the British did many terrible things large and small to India. But during WWII, that one moment in time, the Japanese and Germans were an immediate extreme Evil. I can acknowledge that the British were Evil in how they treated the people they controlled while still saying the British were on the right side in WWII. You can’t say “the British are wrong, so nothing else matters, might as well fight with this other side that is also wrong”. There are absolutes in this world. Germany and Japan during WWII were absolutely wrong.
Now here’s the other problem. I am saying this based on what I have learned living in America. All of the resources I have in America are biased in one way or the other, and obviously American history is going to support our position in WWII. If I say to you, person who is from a different cultural background, that the Nazis were the greatest evil the world has ever known and the Japanese of the 1930s and 40s weren’t far behind, you would be reasonable to doubt me, to think I am exaggerating because of misinformation and prejudice.
Ages ago on this blog I got into an argument about Taimur’s name. The argument was based on how deeply insulting and emotional it is to use the name of this monster. Timur, the historical figure, may well have been a monster. But he was around in the 1400s. It’s hard to see historical sins at the distance. WWII, historically speaking, JUST happened. We have photographs, audiotapes, and living humans even now who were there. When I say “Hitler was Evil”, this is not based on something I learned by rote in a textbook. It’s real lived experience.
Setting aside the reality of Evil, there is also the compassion for lived experience. This also, I think, came up with Taimur’s name. It’s triggering for people, it’s inconsiderate to remind them of this terrible thing that happened to their family. I do not find that a reasonable argument for something that happened 600 years ago. I do find that a reasonable argument for something that happened 2 generations ago. Even if I don’t convince you that Hitler was evil, I should be able to convince you that, for my family, where both my grandfathers suffered from PTSD from the war, where I have known multiple people through my life in America whose families were directly touched by the holocaust, that for me in particular it is not okay to minimize this person and these events.
Now, from the other side, there was a massive campaign of misinformation in India for hundreds of years, the remnants of which are still being cleared out. And of course now there is a new campaign of misinformation in India. So it is easy to assume anything you are told about history, read about history, anything at all is just a fiction. You can laugh about WWII the same way you can laugh about the British claiming they taught people how to bath. And there is the historical reality that part of the WWII story in India is arguments about whether it was a just war, from their side. Whether they should be either abstaining from fighting or supporting Japan. So from the India side, this is more British exaggeration and lies about someone who probably wasn’t that bad. And it’s sort of cool to just make fun of all that exaggeration and take the very basic parts of it, “Hitler means bossy”.
In the past, there have been lots of movies where “Hitler” is used as a joking nickname for someone who has a lot of rules. There have been a few serious movies dealing with Indian freedom fighters torn between the Allies and the Axis and which side is right. All of them make me feel uncomfortable. I can find a way to accept the “joking nickname” part in a movie, I understand where it is coming from, if someone used it in front of me in real life I would school them about why that is wrong. In a movie, there’s no one there for me to “school”, so I just close my ears and move on. The other part, the Serious Movies with Indian freedom fighters torn between the Allies and the Axis, I have a really hard time with those. I’ve only managed to see Indian and Rangoon. Part of what I really appreciated about Byomkesh Bakshy is that, in that moment in time, it showed the British as less of an evil than the Japanese. That’s a perspective that I have not seen much, and it is the only perspective I can really relate to for India in the WWII era.
And finally, I bring you to Bawaal! This is a very strange trailer. It starts with a silly married couple fights and stuff. And then they go on a Honeymoon which the husband jokingly calls a “World War”. And then suddenly we are in Germany, and there are black and white flashbacks to war, soldiers, and finally what is clearly a gas chamber.
There are two options for this movie. Either it uses WWII and “exotic” European history as a way to teach this young couple to be in love. In which case, this is one of the few times I believe in censorship. This movie should not be allowed to play outside of India, it is too painful for almost anyone to watch.
The other option is that, finally, someone in Indian pop culture is trying to address this big gap in knowledge within the country. Perhaps Varun is playing the “ignorant every man” and we will watch him go on a journey from “who is Hitler anyway?” to “oh whoa, this is bigger than anything ever and makes my life and my problems turn into nothing”. I am choosing to watch the trailer in that way. I still won’t see the movie, because Triggering, but I will be happy that it exists.
One final thing, just because I am curious if anyone else feels this way, there’s a lot of American pop culture content that treats WWII and WWI as “romantic”. That bothers me a lot. Ignore Hitler, ignore the Holocaust, this is still a terrible human tragedy. It’s a lot more than fun clothes and hair and music and passionate train station goodbyes. It pops up in the strangest places, sitcoms have a “very special episode” where they find old letters, or time travel, or something. If this movie is the second option, the “as an ignorant Indian, I came to Germany and finally grasped who Hitler really was”, I would actually find it less offensive than the “very special episode” where the teen lovers travel in time to WWII and the uniforms are so attractive and jitterbugging is fun.
dontcallitbollywood 
That is a horrible trailer and a horrible concept. I saw this podcast in which a moron was interviewing kajol and he said that during the pandemic Indians have started to look at a lot of dark content according to data. He said that Bollywood hasn’t caught up. Kajol said that the content we are seeing from Bollywood is from before the pandemic and that Bollywood operates on data and we will see new content as it is in development now.
This movie seems to me to be in that vain. I find it distasteful.
And i don’t necessarily even agree that atrocities other than WW2 were less…. It does not matter. Those images do not belong in that narrative that it is shown.
I do think there is WW2 commercialisation. I remember Kate Winslet talked about how she kept getting Oscar nominated and wouldn’t win and someone told her that when she does a Jewish Holocaust movie she will win and she won it for The Reader.
To use world war and Holocaust to show conflict in a love story is not done. IMO. I don’t have such an open mind. 🤷🏻♀️
In essence I feel all of India has intense + generational trauma and they do not even have the recognition, ability and capacity to pursue healing and using this kind of plot device is one way to show conflict to a desensitized / traumatized population. I’m not even curious enough to watch it. I am just glad i don’t live in that society anymore.
Sorry I lost it a bit as I was writing it after watching the video so I don’t even know if this send coherent.
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I also believe that if one has to use war as a plot device – one should use the history that belongs to one instead of misappropriating history that belongs to others. It is cheap.
Show Indo Pak war instead or indo china or even past atrocities in India. But “national pride” and “misinformation” gets in the way of embracing one’s own history. Maintain the delusion.
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YES! Or use the Indian history of WWII, the real history. I find it fascinating, how many colonial soldiers died, traveled the world, experienced atrocities themselves. If you want to tell a Holocaust story, if you absolutely MUST, how about the PTSD of a returning Indian soldier who helped free the camps? How about showing him trying to explain to his friends and family why “Hitler” isn’t a joke?
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Exactly!!!!!!
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That actually requires research and creativity. Which apparently this set of people can’t lean into. I’m so angry after seeing that trailer
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It feels like a trope to show European locale
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YES! Good point on the current trauma in the country. I think a film on the Kerala floods also just released. There’s a massive trauma that is local and recent. But also too scary and “real”, easier to use trauma from another country/era in order to process what you are feeling.
I should say, there’s a good way to do this too. There’s a lot of BBC period shows now that are dealing with issues of immigration and racism and hatred. They take the same words and feelings people have today. But that’s not this movie, this movie is just some sort of strange historical trauma tourism. Literally and metaphorical tourism.
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Yes the tone of this one just feels yuck.
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BTW I like Sam Wyndham books that put in context how Indians played a role in the British colonial existence in India. In the background while there’s a crime mystery in the foreground.
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I work in a town where they have a memorial to one of the early concentration camps. In the summer, they’re overrun by hordes of tourists from all around the world who are on a trip to Berlin and just thought to include one day at the concentration camp. This trailer feels a lot like I imagine those holidays: lots of fun with brief introspective moments.
They still continue to run these memorials that way, so I guess it’s better than nothing.
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I don’t understand that. I won’t even visit the local Holocaust memorial near me, which isn’t on a historical site it’s just something the local community put up in remembrance. If I ever visited your town, I would stay very far away.
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Well, those on-site memorials are probably the closest you can get to getting a feeling for the scale of the Nazi’s mass murder. We visited one of them with a class once. It’s certainly better than just having images of the war (like the trailer). Because that was after all “just” a war – something that’s always awful, but where one could understand an Indian soldier’s indecision which side to join.
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Also, I feel like we Germans may have the opposite problem to those colonized thinkers you mention in your second paragraph. It’s so ingrained in us that the holocaust was the very, very, very worst evil Man ever committed, that I think it contributes to our problems in acknowledging the evils of colonialism.
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Excellent point. It’s similar in America, the Holocaust is so shocking and vivid and Present, that it makes it hard to see other stories. Even something like the Armenian massacre, the few Armenians I have met still have that very much as part of their lived reality, but it’s not taught in schools or memoralized the same way as the Holocaust.
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I really appreciate this post because it didn’t occur to me how conflicted an Indian person might feel being colonized by the British but their oppressors being on the objective “right” side of the war. However, I rewatched the trailer after reading, and it wasn’t any easier for me to stomach. I’m probably one of the biggest Varun fans on the blog. But I’m also Jewish. Sure, I don’t have relatives who were directly affected by the Holocaust–if I did, they’re all distant. But any sort of romanticization of Hitler and this time, which is all I got from this trailer, puts the worst taste in my mouth. I am so scared for this movie, and so horrified because I love Varun and I don’t want him to be making these choices, and I don’t know if I’ll be able to survive this movie. And I sat through Coolie No. 1. And he’s a teacher in this movie too???? It’s like he hates me specifically, after all I’ve done for him. Blech.
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I’m choosing to give the makers the benefit of doubt until the film comes out. The director did Dangal, I think he’s a sensible person and there’s more to it than we’re seeing. Also I’m thinking would Amazon really release this worldwide if it’s indeed trivializing the Holocaust? Maybe I’m being naive!
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I hope so!
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This is such a hard topic to discuss. I know you and I have had a couple conversations about it before, especially regarding both of our grandfathers who fought in WW2.
My perspective comes from learning history partially in India and partially in the US and from my own grandparents.
To me, India’s reaction to the holocaust and WWII was less about “this has been happening for years in colonized nations and you are only now paying attention when it affects white Europeans,” although there might be some of that. I think it was more the timing of the War and what India was going through internally. WWII happened between late 1939 to 1945. India received its freedom from the Britain in 1947 – just 2 years later. This is important because by 1939, Indians had been living under British oppression for over 200 years. It was at the apex of their anger and rebellion. And when they were at their angriest, Britain decided to forcefully recruit Indian soldiers and ask them to fight a war that was not theirs and die for it, all while they were being subjugated to horrible treatment. I think so much of India’s reaction to WWII came from this state of mind.
I think when someone is so stuck in their own oppression and physically far from the actual conflict, it is hard to see the bigger world picture. You see only the atrocities propagated against you. Also, just as many Americans have some connection to WWII, most Indians have some connection to that time period, including being a part of the war and then shortly after that the partition. That time period holds many vivid and often dark memories for many Indians. This of course leads to a school curriculum in the future that very briefly focuses on the WWII and more on what was happening internally in India during that time period. This leads to generations of Indians not understanding the full gravity of WWII.
Having said that, I also learned about WWII in America and was horrified when I first saw the teaser and the trailer. But if the movies does what you hope it does, and educates an ignorant Indian man to the atrocities of WWII and stops someone from making casual Hitler references, maybe that’s not so bad.
I honestly don’t know what to think. On one hand, it is directed by Nitesh Tiwari and produced by Ashwini Iyer Tiwari. I have a ton of respect for both of these people based on their past movies. It is also going directly to a large American streaming platform, Amazon (not Zee or Jio). Here, I agree with Kainaat where, you would think, Amazon would have used its immense power of the purse to make sure this movie doesn’t justifiably infuriate more than half of the world. But I may be completely wrong. It is definitely a movie where I will read all the spoilers before I decide whether it is worth watching.
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In my post-colonialism classes, there was a lot of talk of the effect of WWII on all colonial societies in terms of invigorating movements that may have been stagnant or non-existent. In India, it was the end of a long journey. But in other countries, there was this burst of returning Vets going “wait a second, I just spent 4 years fighting and now I’m home and I’m not allowed to buy a house where I want to buy a house?” The same thing happened in America with the Civil Rights movement.
You are making me think about how actually there might be three categories. The Western countries who were horrified by the Holocaust but willfully blind to looking at the connection to their own decades long histories of racism, the colonies who were even more determined to fight for independence after seeing the news from Europe and having so many of their own people fighting in Europe, and India which had a history of anti-colonialism that wasn’t really affected that much by WWII.
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Just read the reviews for Bawaal and it’s a hard pass for me. Don’t think I can stomach it. If anyone from the DCIB community watches it, I’d be curious to hear what they have to say. But definitely an absolute no for me. I’ll just save up all my energy for Rock Aur Rani next weekend!
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I don’t believe that WWI is really romantacized other than being a part of the past. It was a messy war, gas and trenches, and even in hindsight Americans don’t really understand why people were fighting. BUT WWII is definitely romanticized, it is the only war in which our country can claim to be all good. We entered because we were attacked. Our support was vital to bringing about the Allies’ victory. We defeated a great evil, that was only fully exposed AFTER we had won. WWII gives Americans a sense of pride, it is our proof that we are the “good guys”. Even the Revolution wasn’t so clear cut.
The episodic revisiting of WWII where TV characters go back in time doesn’t bother me. Even without visiting the whole terror of the war those episodes very clearly convey of message of gratitude that we are NOT in a war now. I appreciate the “war is bad” message, even if the focus of the badness is on the separation of lovers. Bad is bad.
As for India in WWII, I am a product of the U.S. educational system, so I know nothing about it. And I don’t speak Hindi so I’m inclined not the judge the trailer and movie negatively because I just don’t know enough. Visually the idea that a couple sleeping apart in a bed is equivalent to soldiers getting shot is a tough sell.
As a product of the U.S. educational system I can’t think that colonialism is like the Holocost, because my perception is that extermination was rarely the goal of colonialism. I’m not saying it wasn’t the effect, especially in the U.S. with Native Americans and boarding schools and medical sterilizations, I understand that cultural as well as physical extermination of people existed. Growing up I thought that the governmental goal of of exterminating a people was a one off, too evil to be imagined, shocking the world. Wikipedia’s list of genocides proves that the world was not shocked.
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You are so right about how WWII is special in the American context for being so clearly black and white. Especially compared to the Civil War (fighting against ourselves) and Vietnam (messy in every way). WWII is this shining clear moment. Of course, the other part of that is even in America we want to ignore the “bad” parts of WWII. There were the internment camps, segregation in the armed forces, etc. etc.
The biggest example I can think of for WWI is Downton Abbey. I have a REALLY hard time with how that show handles WWI as this romantical moment. It was horrible! In so many ways! And then once it was over, the show just moves on and pretends it never happened, there’s no PTSD, there’s no lost generation, it’s all just uniforms and romance.
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I do appreciate this post as I have never thought about India’s persepectives of the World Wars before. I have had ponderings on different African perspectives as part of the war took place there, but outside of knowing that some Indians fought in the wars for the British, I hadn’t thought about India’s view of the world wars as a whole.
I watched a bit of Downton Abbey, but I don’t remember much of it discussing the war. Mostly I remember the main character’s miscarriage and the dead man in her daughters bed one morning.
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You just missed the War season! It was one season (which bothers me, because it doesn’t feel like 5 years if you do it in 10 weeks), and then it was never talked about again.
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So I guess while WWII was white for America and black for Germany, it would be a lot more grey for India, having been forced into it by their oppressors, and with some prominent figures sympathizing with the Nazis. Plus, partition was probably the more defining – and traumatizing – event for most Indians.
I feel like with everything that’s been said on here, I can sympathize with any Indian at the time who would have been undecided which side to join. As filmikudhi said, they were busy being angry at the British. And while anyone could see that Germany had started the war, sadly something like that happens all too often. The real extent of their atrocities was not something the Nazis broadcast abroad; like Genevieve said, even the Americans only knew afterwards.
I’m not trying to excuse any German who looked the other way. I think from the inside it was pretty clear that a genocide was happening. But the sheer scale, industrialization and bureaucracy that make the holocaust so horrible, that extent of it wasn’t necessarily something an Indian at the time could have been expected to know.
Of course I think that makes it all the more important that Indians nowadays learn about it. I’m just not sure that this film with its apparently large fun portion is the one to make those fine distinctions.
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Yes, I think that is it exactly. While it was happening, everything seemed like shades of grey. And then the mess of afterwards, when the camps were freed and the Nuremberg trials and the whole world learning the truth, India had bigger things to think about as they moved toward Independence and Partition.
The propaganda from the side of the Allies was over the top, they were lying about a lot of stuff done by the Axis. It just turned out that when the truth was known, it was worse than any of the lies we made up.
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