Conflicts can abate, but the tensions that trigger them continue to boil just beneath the surface. These tensions can then suddenly resurface and erupt after decades. For example, the sudden eruptions of ‘communal violence’ in India and religious violence in Pakistan’s Punjab province, are largely the outcome of underlying and unresolved tensions that triggered communal riots in India in 1947 or on the eve of India’s partition. 

Thousands of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs lost their lives in the clashes. The memory of these riots instilled resentment in the Hindus, who lamented that the ‘secular’ establishment of India had allowed the Muslims to go scot-free. In Pakistani Punjab, on the other hand, Muslim resentment mutated and often erupts in the shape of violence against supposed ‘heretics’, non-Muslim minorities and non-Sunni Muslim sects. 

Factors that trigger underlying resentments are largely political and economic in nature. These then often manifest as ethnic, religious, sectarian or racial outrages. But sometimes, uncannily (or otherwise), certain art forms too have fed such resentments, especially film and TV serials.

In 1915, a film in the United States became a sensational hit. Directed by DW Griffith, The Birth of a Nation positioned itself as a ‘historical’ epic, based on two families impacted by the American Civil War in the mid-19th century. 

While it is usually political and economic faultlines that manifest as religious, ethnic and racial outrage, films and television can also exacerbate divides and trigger certain resentments

There was really nothing historical about the film, though. It was a product of the ‘Lost Cause Myth’. This myth was a yarn woven in the Southern slave-owning states in the US that had lost the civil war. The myth portrayed the Southerners as innocent, hardworking patriots who fought against the larger armies of the exploitative and corrupt Northern states, and won a ‘moral victory’. 

Griffith’s film presented the myth as a historical fact. The film unabashedly romanticised a once-obscure white racist outfit, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), by portraying it as a saviour of Southern dignity, sullied by brutish Black slaves freed by the triumphant North. 

The KKK was formed in the Southern states after the civil war. But by 1871, it was effectively neutralised by the federal government. However, the impact of The Birth of a Nation was such that the KKK not only re-emerged, it was joined by thousands of white people, both in the South as well as the North.

The new KKK also adopted the entirely fabricated costumes and rituals that the film attributed to the original KKK. These were things that the film (and the novel that it was based on) just made up. Violence against blacks witnessed a manifold increase after the film’s release. 

The resentment in the Southern states had continued to simmer after the civil war. It was then intensified when large waves of European immigrants (mostly Catholic) swept into various industrialised cities of the US. The Birth of a Nation glorified America’s white Protestant majority, so Catholic immigrants too became targets of the KKK, especially in the North. 

In 1966, a remarkable film, The Battle of Algiers was released. It was helmed by the Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo. It is a stark study of the vicious conflict between Algerian nationalists and French colonialists, which lasted from 1954 till France’s defeat in 1962. The film plays like an intense docudrama with sparse (French and Arabic) dialogue. 

It was released during the start of a turbulent period in numerous countries. In Asia and Africa, decolonisation was reawakening the violent memories of colonialism and, in the West, the suppressed memory of European fascism of the decades before had started to be scrutinised by young academics and students. 

The Battle of Algiers painstakingly re-enacted the rather ferocious tactics used by the French military and by the Algerian fighters. The film came to be seen as a ‘revolutionary guide’ by various urban guerrilla outfits. It was the go-to-film for left-wing militants across the late 1960s and 1970s. It was banned in France and heavily censored in the US and the UK. 

In 1971, Egyptian cinema saw the release of Fajr al Islam [Dawn of Islam]. It is a story of the persecution that early Muslims faced in Arabia. The film was a cinematic outcome of a gradual shift that had begun to take place in Egypt. The secular and modernist Arab nationalism that had been ruling the imagination of Egyptians till the country’s humiliating defeat at the hands of Israel in 1967, had begun to crumble. 

The Islamists, who had been completely sidelined, began to resurface and so did their resentment of being persecuted by the nationalists. They identified with the persecuted Muslims romanticised in the film. 

Four years later, when an English version of the film was released in Pakistan, it began playing to packed houses. The Islamists in Pakistan too had been sidelined till 1971. But in 1975, when the film was released in Pakistan, they had already made inroads into mainstream politics. Yet, they too identified with the characters of the persecuted Muslims in the film. 

According to the late film historian Mushtaq Gazdar, Dawn of Islam greatly contributed to the rising popularity of Islamism in the country, which eventually saw Z.A. Bhutto’s regime face calls for Shariah laws. Then, in 1977, an ‘Islamic coup’ toppled his regime. No wonder then that the film returned to the cinemas in 1978, when the dictator Gen Ziaul Haq declared that he would turn Pakistan into an Islamic state. Past rulers were accused of persecuting ‘pious Muslims’. 

In 1987, the Indian state TV broadcast a serial that adapted the epic Hindu poem the Ramayana. According to the Indian academic Rahul Verma, it became the most watched TV show in Indian history, with episodes watched by 80 million to 100 million people. 

According to Arvind Rajagopal, a professor at New York University, the TV serial Ramayana was the first major rupture of the secular consensus in India. Right-wing Hindu nationalist parties imagined it as something political. To Rajagopal, “[…] the serial irrevocably changed the complexion of Indian politics. The telecast of a religious epic to popular acclaim seemed to confirm the idea of Hindu awakening.”

Hindu nationalist resentments against the secular Indian establishment began to come to the surface and galvanised millions of Hindus to rally around the once tiny Hindu nationalist outfits. By the late 1980s, one such outfit, the BJP, had become a major party. In 2014, it became the country’s largest.

It now oversees acts of bigotry and historical erasure against Muslims and Christians as a way to avenge these two communities’ supposed centuries-long violence against the Hindus.

Published in Dawn, EOS, August 27th, 2023