Once upon a time there was a Hollywood film director named John Ford who wisecracked, "Whenever in doubt, I make a Western." Since Ford directed a phenomenal 150 pictures, both silent and talkie, it is no surprise that the horse opera became the staple diet of the American film audience. And once the film industry migrated from cloudy New York to sunny California, its horses could easily gallop through cacti-speckled photogenic deserts, its guns could roar along the Mesa Valley, and its baddies could bite the colourful red dust. Then the Americans fought the first and second world wars on foreign soil, on the winning side, so horse operas were soon and easily enough supplemented by the other obvious addition to the Hollywood stable – the war movie. It was the same stew, only the garnishing was different. And Ford's wisecrack holds good even today, when we see a celebrated cult director like Terence Malik return to filmmaking after 18 years, with the war movie The Thin Red Line.
War movies and horse operas, cowboys and Red Indians, soldier against soldier, man against man. This is the right stuff for drama, because drama is conflict, and what better conflict than war, always so readily available? Heroes are created easily, myth built simplistically, life shown to be larger than life. Though they had witnessed the horrors of war at their own doorstep, the Europeans took a lesson from the American film industry in their own productions. The Soviet and East bloc countries produced war movies using almost the same recipe as Hollywood's. War movies became an important product in the worldwide film market.
Interestingly, the copycat Indian film industry could not, did not duplicate the war movie for a long time. The horse opera they successfully copied, though, with a plethora of films about dacoits, or bhagis, that earned the dubious sobriquet "dal-roti western", akin to the Italian spaghetti western. But war movies eluded their grasp for two reasons. One, the Indian audience had no experience of war, and therefore the filmmakers had no great nationalist hype to profit from. Second, Hindi film directors, unlike their American and European colleagues had no direct personal acquaintance with war, since they had never been conscripted. The Punjabis and Bengalis among them may have had some experience of the civil war that came with Partition, but that was hardly the stuff to make heroes out of – only villains all around. With both Hindus and Muslims in the audience, Partition could not deliver the right cowboys and injuns. Nationalist fervour is difficult to rouse when the story is about your own burning house, especially when the fire is always smouldering.
And so, Hindi war movies never really took off, neither did civil war movies on Hindu-Muslim clashes, the events of Partition, and the matter of refugees and mass migrations along paths defined by blood. It was also true that Partition was not a lived experience and meant almost nothing to Indians other than the Bengalis and Punjabis. There was no significant Punjabi film industry in the 1950s and Punjabi directors and writers working in the Hindi film world gave conflict a wide berth. Barring exceptions like Nemai Ghosh's Chinnamool and the films of Ritwick Ghatak, the Bengali film industry also avoided conflict as a theme to be explored. Even with Ghatak, the experience of Partition remained imprisoned in nostalgia, never a noble emotion, however painful its portrayal may be.