‘Paltan’ Cast on Drawing the Line Between Nationalism and Jingoism

The ‘Paltan’, Jackie Shroff, Sonu Sood and Arjun Rampal talk about their experience of working in a war film.

Jackie Shroff, Sonu Sood and Arjun Rampal during the promotions of Paltan.

(Photo: The Quint)

JP Dutta’s Border and LOC Kargil featured combat stories of Indian and Pakistan forces. The war trilogy continues with Paltan but this time it will showcase an untold story of combat between the Indian and Chinese forces.

The most important question was, how does one draw the thin line between nationalism and jingoism while making a film like this. Arjun Rampal says it completely depends on the audience and what they think. “But you don't realise that when you are at war, you are shouting, you are going over the top a bit. People confuse that with jingoism,” he says.

Based on the Nathu La military clashes in 1967, JP Dutta wanted to shoot war sequences in the real-location but sadly Nathu La Pass has changed over 50 years. Hence, the makers decided to shoot in Ladakh so that the film looks as close to reality as is possible. Director JP Dutta went a step ahead to shoot at real locations and make it look more authentic and visually appealing. The director scouted and recreated locations in Ladakh to bore the same resemblance of the border area in East Sikkim. In that chilled weather of Ladakh, the whole shoot of war sequences lasted for 56 days before the team headed for Chandigarh.

Talking about the difficult working conditions, Jackie Shroff says that it was difficult to even breathe in that altitude but the “boys were very fit”.

“They would go running and do their daily exercise but that was the most difficult part,” said Jackie.

The national-award-winning director, JP Dutta had earlier treated the audience with war films like Border, LOC Kargil, and Refugee among others. The third film of the war trilogy will see an ensemble cast featuring Jackie Shroff, Arjun Rampal, Harshvardhan Rane, Gurmeet Choudhary, Abdul Qadir Amin, Sonu Sood, Sonal Chauhan, Esha Gupta, Monica Gill, Rohit Roy, Siddhant Kapoor, Luv Sinha, and Dipika Kakar.

Edit: Veeru Krishan Mohan
Camera: Sanjoy Deb