The most famous line from the 1992 film A Few Good Men, “You can’t handle the truth,” is aimed at the average American who wants their country to be both secure and free but does not ever wonder about the inherent contradiction. In the climax, Colonel Nathan Jessup, played by a snarling Jack Nicholson, has been cornered in court over a cruel hazing practice that led to the death of a young marine. Defending this method of instilling discipline in marines, Jessup claims that the lawyer questioning him, played by Tom Cruise, cannot handle the reality that the young man’s death, “while tragic, probably saved lives.”
Jessup alleges that, deep down, the average American knows that the price of their freedom is a functional military, whose undemocratic character become necessary to maintain power, but they are incapable of accepting this about themselves. Jessup is eventually jailed, leaving viewers with the impression that army leaders like him—who commit or defend such excesses—are a few bad eggs, set right by a few good men. This, as critics pointed out and human-rights organisations reported, is a blatant lie. Jessups are more the norm than the exception.
In the Indian adaptation, Shaurya, Jessup’s counterpart, Brigadier Rudra Pratap Singh, played by Kay Kay Menon, also insists that the average Indian cannot handle the truth. Singh, whose unit is shown to have committed human-rights abuses in Kashmir, is revealed to be an Islamophobe who claims that “no Muslim can be trusted, because they are only faithful to their community, which is full of poison.” Therefore, someone—the brigadier himself—must take the responsibility of eliminating this threat to the country. The uncomfortable truth in one case is that an undemocratic military maintains American power. In comparison, the truth in India is that a bigoted military paints all Muslims as suspected anti-nationals in the name of national security. This bias has been borne out in Kashmir, despite every union government’s claim to the contrary. In Shaurya, Singh is punished for his excesses against Kashmiris, a fate that is yet to befall any senior officers of the real Indian Army.
As collective endeavours, films have been widely studied as repositories of national culture. The psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar calls Hindi cinema “a prism that reflects dominant psychological concerns … of the millions of men and women who constitute a faithful and devoted clientele.” It follows the rich and ancient tradition of myth-making, which provides solutions to real social problems through parables and stories. According to Kakar, Hindi films create “new myths” to offer “solutions for conflicts that are being generated by new political, economic and social forces.” Films, he adds, are a “collective fantasy” that allow the visualisation of the audience’s desires, which are often limited by reality. “The power of fantasy, then, comes to our rescue,” Kakar writes. The fantasy of Hindi cinema reflects ways in which Indians desire to change the world, “remaking the past and inventing a future” to make it more satisfying.