Israeli Ambassador to India Blasts Bollywood Film for ‘Trivialization’ of Holocaust
The Ambassador of Israel to India Naor Gilon and the Israeli Embassy in India have joined Jewish groups in criticizing...
The post Israeli Ambassador to India Blasts Bollywood Film for ‘Trivialization’ of Holocaust first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
A scene from the trailer for “Bawaal.” Photo: YouTube screenshot
The Ambassador of Israel to India Naor Gilon and the Israeli Embassy in India have joined Jewish groups in criticizing a new Bollywood film called Bawaal released on Prime Video India that they claim minimizes the atrocities of the Holocaust by comparing it to the strains of a new marriage.
Bawaal was released on Amazon Prime Video India on July 21 and revolves around a high school history teacher named Ajay, played by Varun Dhawan, and the strained relationship he has with his newlywed wife Nisha, played by Janhvi Kapoor.
During one scene in the film, the protagonists visit the Auschwitz concentration camp and are reimagined as prisoners of the Nazi death camp. In the movie’s trailer, Nisha is seen inside a gas chamber used to kill Jewish inmates at Auschwitz as what appears to be victims of the Holocaust suffocate around her. The trailer also uses the tagline “Every love story has its own war.”
The film was shot in location around Europe, including at the site of the former Auschwitz concentration camp.
“I did not and will not watch the film Bawaal but from what I’ve read, there was a poor choice of terminology and symbolism,” Gilon wrote Friday on X, formerly known as Twitter. “Trivialization of the Holocaust should disturb all. I urge those who don’t know enough about the horrors of the #Holocaust to educate themselves about it.”
The Israeli Embassy in India also issued a statement saying it is “disturbed by the“trivialization of the significance of the Holocaust in the movie,” directed and co-written by award-winning Indian filmmaker Nitesh Tiwari.
The Nazi leader Adolf Hitler is also used as a metaphor in Bawaal to teach viewers about human greed. Nisha tells her husband later on in the trailer, “We’re all a little like Hitler, aren’t we? We’re not happy with what we have and we want what others have.” In another scene, the Holocaust is compared to strife in their relationship and Nisha tells Ajay, “Every relationship goes through their Auschwitz,” according to the news outlet The Wire.
“Auschwitz is not a metaphor. It is the quintessential example of man’s capacity for evil,” said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC), in a released statement last week. SWC urged Amazon Prime to remove Bawaal from its website “due to its outlandish abuse of the Nazi Holocaust as a plot device.”
Tiwari defended his film against the backlash, telling the Indian entertainment website Pinkvilla that Bawaal has “so many good messages” viewers are overlooking because of “one or two odd incidents.”
“We’ve made Bawaal with a lot of love, a lot of care, and a lot of good intentions. And predominantly, it’s been understood the way I wanted people to understand it,” he explained, before saying he is “disappointed” in how the Auschwitz scenes have been interpreted by some people.
“That was never the intention. It would never be my intention to be insensitive in any which way. It was a context” he explained. “Don’t we see Ajay and Nisha getting completely troubled and moved by what they see in Auschwitz? They do. They see the prisoners, they see how they were stacked, they see how they were exterminated. Are they being insensitive about it? No. They are moved to tears.”
Bawaal‘s protagonists also came to its defense. Kapoor said an Israeli professor whose relatives were killed in the Holocaust told her he was moved by the film and not offended by any of its scenes.
“It’s important to understand the intention, always. And if you misunderstand the intention, that’s what I would call tone-deaf,” she added.
Dhawan meanwhile asked why the same criticism is not applied to non-Hindi language films that include controversial scenes deemed offensive, such as a scene in the new film Oppenheimer that has been condemned by many in India.
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