Duration: 00:19:05; Aspect Ratio: 1.250:1; Hue: 101.538; Saturation: 0.103; Lightness: 0.148; Volume: 0.204; Cuts per Minute: 17.342
Summary: Tango Charlie is a 2005 Indian film directed by Mani Shankar.
A singular viewpoint prevails as “good” versus “evil” discourse, flattening all the different, political movements within the nation state, (such as insurgents, naxalites, Kashmir discord) as the common enemy to be crushed by military intervention. No fleeting reference to the complexities of these problems is even hinted at. The fact that the film shows Bodo militants (who live in Assam) in the state of Manipur reflects how poorly the film was researched.
This film is important as it was banned in North East India on the ground that it defames communities living there. The Bodo community in particular had severe objections against the portrayal of their society in a negative light in the film. The film has references to Bodo militancy and refers to a Bodo militant cutting off the ears of a hostage and making a garland out of it for this lover. The militants are shown to severely injure an army soldier and then leave his body as bait, in order to kill anyone who comes to the rescue him. They are made out to be primitives and barbarians. Insensitive towards the multiplicities existing within the larger macrocosm of India’s ethnoscape, the film tries to popularize the idea of nationalism through isolating the struggles and insurgencies of the people. Ignorance of the other assumes an anthropological-ethnographic point of view in the film negotiating the identity and nationality of the ethnic other by reducing him to an unknown enemy. Difference and multiplicity which extends beyond identity towards aspirations for autonomy and self assertion is un-negotiated. The military intervention is appropriated through skillful justification of nationalism through suffering of soldier.
Mani Shankar, the director of the film served under the former Indian Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao as his personal media advisor.
The history of northeast india is really the history of their military intervention. Assam, one of seven states in India's northeast, has been home to a militant separatist movement since 1979, and unlike the conflicts in either Kashmir or even Punjab, the uprising in Assam has received little media attention both at home and abroad.
The only perspective on the Northeast that `mainland' Indians have got — that too sporadically — is New Delhi's project of `India', which the Northeast seems endlessly, inexplicably and violently to resist. Baruah's earlier book, India Against Itself: Assam and the Politics of Nationality (OUP, 2001) offered something new to scholars and policy-makers alike — a Northeastern vision of itself where the region was the focal point rather than a distant borderland to somebody else's idea of `India'.
Bodo community
Bollywood stereotype
India
Manipur
Northeast India
Paul Virilio
The story starts off with two Indian Air Force helicopter pilots (Sanjay Dutt and Sunil Shetty) discovering a mass pile of dead rebels and Indian trooper appearing to be dead. They later discover he's alive and find out who he is by reading his diary. The tale revolves around an Indian BSF trooper named Tarun Chauhan (Bobby Deol) in the 101st BSF Battalion arriving to the northeastern Indian province of Manipur with orders to report to his superior, Havaldar Mohammed Ali (Ajay Devgan).
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autonomy
ban
representation
war machine
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