War in Motion Picture

What did India's wars look like? We reimagine war films as war photographs to unearth the truth — if there is one — of what war really costs us all.

In 2011, Open magazine profiled India's war photojournalists, declaring there have been fewer than a dozen actively working at any given time from the country. Most, employed by international agencies, were assigned to cover wars abroad, losing limbs and lives in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. Only one was known for singlehandedly covering the Kargil War.

“The understanding of war among people who have not experienced war,” writes Susan Sontag in her essay “Regarding the Pain of Others,” “is chiefly a product of the impact of these images.” The wars that have unfolded, and continue to unfold, in India, however, are marked by a striking paucity of such images, unless one turns to another, more theatrical archive: the war film.

Susan Sontag writes that “... the photographic image… is always the image that someone chose; to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude,” and so one of the earliest films of the genre appeared just two years after the Sino-Indian War, which broke out in 1962. Haqeeqat, directed by Chetan Anand, was dedicated to Jawaharlal Nehru and to the Indian Army, and narrates the ordeal of a beleaguered platoon of Indian soldiers stranded in Ladakh, holding their ground against advancing Chinese forces in the face of certain death. In 2025, 120 Bahadur, directed by Razneesh Ghai, revisits much the same campaign, this time in colour. The visual archive of this war, then, subsists in the form of two fictionalised films. They are joined in the canon by several others, almost all underwritten by the army’s enthusiastic support and assistance. In turn, they assume the role of custodians of national memory, leaving scant room for disagreement with the acts carried out in the nation’s name.

Since independence, India has fought several wars, against Pakistan in 1947, 1965, 1971, and 1999, and against China in 1962. In Bollywood Does Battle, Samir Chopra observes that the country is marked by a striking paucity of visual records of these conflicts, with most citizens once reliant on radio broadcasts or newspaper dispatches to track the progress of war. The 1971 war, in particular, he argues, was “conducted in a partial visual vacuum,” with no “systematic effort… to record or represent battlefield realities by either documentary or feature film.” What comes to inhabit this vacuum, then, is cinema, and cinema, as it turns out, carries with it a distinctly curated account of what transpired.

This tradition, if one can call it that, began in 1997 with Border by J.P. Dutta. The film established the template for how war would thenceforth be “documented” in India – that is, through cinema, a medium ill-suited to the faithful recording of fact. To the general public, Border, a National Award-winning film for National Integration, became the most vivid visual record of what came to be known as the Battle of Longewala.

The movie “was like fighting a war,” confessed Dutta, and in the fog of war, all information is suspect. Even though the historical record notes only two Indian soldiers dying in the battle, the film depicts several, each framed as a heroic sacrifice. No wonder the film cemented itself in Republic Day and Independence Day broadcast traditions. Dutta went on to include Border within a trilogy of war films: Refugee and LOC Kargil. The success of the first film was soon accompanied by the rise of the BJP government at the centre. The film was banned in Pakistan. With so little documentary evidence to challenge it, the cinematic memory lodges itself as geopolitical fact.

The theorist Alison Landsberg calls this a “prosthetic memory.” As artificial as it sounds, it feels to the rememberer as personal and real as an actual memory. When traditional modes of historical transmission are disrupted or absent, prosthetic memories become particularly potent. This is the case with war movies in India. With archives sealed and the wars largely untelevised, cinema becomes the primary site of historical instruction.

If a generation of Indians learns what the Kargil War looked or felt like from Dutta’s LOC: Kargil or its most recent successor Shershaah, then Shershaah is, functionally, their history of the Kargil War. The movie, a biopic of Kargil War hero Captain Vikram Batra, literalizes the collaboration between filmmakers and the military establishment that began with Border. It was shot in Kargil itself – the only Bollywood production to have done so – on the army’s suggestion, with two serving majors on set throughout to "ensure [the production was] doing the right thing." At the trailer launch, then-Chief of Defence Staff Bipin Rawat publicly called the film “just the beginning” and expressed hope that more such films would be made. When the crew began production in 2019, it was in the immediate aftermath of the BJP government revoking Article 370 of the Constitution, which granted special status to Jammu and Kashmir. It might have been providential that the first movie filmed in Kargil during one of Jammu and Kashmir’s most fraught periods was also the one depicting India’s triumph over land that might otherwise have been lost to an enemy state. By reminding us of a version of the past, the film might have manufactured a version of the present destined to be remembered.

Across governments, India’s war movies stake their own claim on national memory. They build a version of the country’s military past that is more muscular, more glorious, and more useful to the present than the historical record, such as it is, would allow. The Official Secrets Act and the Ministry of Defence’s zealous guarding of archives prevent the writing of rigorous analytical military history. Consequently, war movies bear the involuntary burden of educating viewers about the nation’s past. Although filmmakers often use disclaimers that their work is “fictional,” they are frequently counting on the expressive impact of the “coincidences” between their fiction and historical reality to influence viewers.

The older films in this tradition carried a sensibility that mourned the losses of war. While the industry was once restricted from naming enemies to avoid straining “friendly relations,” it now “suffers no such compunctions,” allowing not only a more explicit “othering” of Pakistan and China to serve modern nationalist imperatives but also a clear hero and villain. So, in the newer films, the mourning of the older ones is traded for cheer, for that is how they draw recruits near. Aditya Dhar, who wrote and directed Uri, noted candidly that he hoped to inspire “the next generation of school students or college goers” to join the forces. This is perhaps why his movie opens with real television news footage before pivoting into dramatization so kinetic and immersive that the line between document and fiction is difficult to locate. With the Army’s approval and active support, Dhar spent two years recreating its covert cross-border operation, “getting the kind of action the special forces do, the right kind of guns, the exact gear and equipment.” The result is a film that looks like combat footage. From the actual operation, available images are limited to aerial satellite maps and topographic data. Uri fills that void so completely that it has become, in the public imagination, the archive of what really happened.

Every army trains as if war is imminent. They vault over obstacles. Sometimes they slither till their abdomen is breathlessly taut. Then, they fire, the gun an extension of their body. By the end, the body seems to shrug off fatigue entirely. Vicky Kaushal, preparing to play a Para (Special Forces) topper in Uri, trained much the same way, calling it his “most physically challenging film.”

Everything in Uri is “supposed to be real,” so fittingly, the “action scenes were tough,” Kaushal said in an interview. The movie, chronicling India’s 2016 surgical strikes in retaliation for the Uri attack, exploded at the box office in 2019, the same year India and Pakistan edged perilously close to nuclear war. For Kaushal and the production team, anything that “looks out of place” was an affront to their effort to capture “factual details” and construct a story about “everything that went on behind the news.” It had to feel like the real thing.

And so, when the Additional Directorate General of Public Information reportedly recommended cuts to his character’s storyline after he “okayed” the screenplay, Dhar went along. His actors began their days at 3:30 a.m., some even training under army officers as if heading into real combat. For Dhar, who knew he had to “represent the army in the best way possible,” it was equally important to use the opportunity to inspire students to consider careers in the forces. That his film might be jingoistic was of no special concern to him. “When [a soldier] has to [pull the trigger], he cannot be in doubt about whether shooting is the right or moral thing to do,” he notes, adding that mulling over politics would dilute his creativity. The result is a hyperrealistic, fictionalized motion picture “based on true events” that marked a decisive shift in the country’s war cinema. That Uri’s dark, visceral, and whirlwind visuals, framed with a soldier’s-eye perspective, could be mistaken for genuine footage of the Army’s 2016 covert mission is unsurprising, given the production’s scrupulous reconstruction under army guidance.

In the public imagination, Uri exists in the liminal space between memory and fantasy, with politicians parroting its dialogues and endorsing its realism. After its release, the filmmakers donated to army widows’ welfare. The same year, when India and Pakistan nearly entered a nuclear confrontation, fulfilling the logic of mutually assured destruction, Uri became a certified blockbuster. As the publicly available visuals from the Uri attack were limited to grainy topographic maps and aerial satellite imagery, Uri serves as the de facto archive of What Really Happened. As far as war media goes, it was the first time viewers could step into the hero’s shoes and vicariously experience the glory of winning a war – one that, as the main character emphatically points out, “we didn’t start,” but would “bloody well finish.”

Many celebrated films that memorialize war and valour have since been branded propaganda. But there is more to the story of our memory-making than just that. Prior to its release, 120 Bahadur found itself in legal trouble after members of the Ahir community demanded that their identity be acknowledged and honoured in the story of the Ahir battalion’s sacrifice during the Sino-Indian War. This is how it goes with the war film: one might dedicate itself to the Army; decades later, another falls short of recognizing the people in the Army. All representation – the good, the bad, the ugly – is ultimately a function of the capital and prerogative of the mighty production studios turning old wars into motion-picture memory.

“It seems that the appetite for pictures showing bodies in pain is as keen, almost, as the desire for ones that show bodies naked,” Sontag reminds us. “There is the satisfaction of being able to look at the image without flinching. There is the pleasure of flinching.”

Written by Diya Isha & Rohitha Naraharisetty

Designed by Neha Shekhawat