Melodrama and Bollywood War Films

My paper makes use of melodrama and its theoretical framework as a broader aesthetic category to the study of Bollywood war films . In this paper I use 3 films namely Chetan Anand’s Hindustan Ki Kasam and J.P. Dutta’s Border and Farhaan Akhtar’s Lakshya1 to argue that use of melodramatic theory allows war films to create an emotional impact so that trauma is articulated and meanings is better explored in the Filmic text. In this paper, I will show how the Bollywood war film often relies on melodrama to create the emotional effects and how melodramatic mode is applied in the. In my paper the ideological implications of war films can be better understood more clearly from the melodramatic framework. In this paper , I would like to argue that war films are produced when there is a crisis like situation and there is resolution through these films. For my paper I mainly focus on some of the war Films post 1960s that became common in subsequent years as a result of significant shift in the way Indian nation was imagined militarily and politically post 1962.