Demonization of Pakistan: Critical Discourse Analysis of Bollywood Anti-Pakistan Movies

Abstract

The current study aims at finding out how India uses cinema to demonize Pakistan. The study exposes the Bollywood’s propaganda against Pakistan and explores that in what ways Bollywood movies portray Pakistan as the land of evils and terrorists. By the use of Critical Discourse Analysis as a research tool, a corpus of 3 Bollywood movies is analyzed which are produced after 26/11 Mumbai attack, 2008, namely, Agent Vinod (2012), Phantom (2015), and Baby (2015). All of the movies belong to ‘spy’ genre in which the heroic actions of RAW agents against Pakistan are represented. Fairclough’s three dimensional model has been used to explore the linguistic features, and discourse structures. Furthermore, it is researched what kind of discourses are embedded in the texts and what are the ideological, and power structures behind the discourses which are represented in the selected movies. On the level of textual analysis, we observe that ‘mental processes’, ‘statements (both declarative and interrogative)’, and ‘epistemic modality’ are highest in frequency i.e. 35%, 69%, and 94%. On the level of discursive and social practices, it is found that different vocabulary items are used to demonize Pakistan. We find different discourses i.e. discourse of terrorism, discourse of conflicts, and discourse of religion etc. which have been used to demonize Pakistan. It is suggested that film industry should discourage the production of such movies which ignite the hatred between the people of both the countries as it would be helpful in stabilizing Pak-India relations.