Rajanish Kakade/AP

People pass a poster for "Swatantra Veer Savarkar" outside a cinema in Mumbai, India, March 21, 2024. The movie is one of several recent Bollywood releases promoting Prime Minister Narendra Modi's political agenda.

A burqa-clad woman walks through a bleak version of Srinagar in India-administered Kashmir. She’s an undercover agent hot on the trail of a young separatist militant.

Over the next 2 1/2 hours of the recent Bollywood production, titled “Article 370,” the audience follows her action-packed journey against the backdrop of the troubled Himalayan region. 

The movie’s climax? The Indian government’s real-life decision to revoke Kashmir’s special autonomy in 2019. That shocking move and a subsequent media blackout were broadly criticized by human rights organizations and the international media, but “Article 370” celebrates it unequivocally.

The movie ends with a montage of positive headlines about Kashmir, set to uplifting music, and a shot of Prime Minister Narendra Modi – played by actor Arun Govil – smiling as he reads a newspaper article extolling his decision. 

“Article 370,” named after the constitutional article that formerly granted Kashmir some autonomy, is one of several films with striking pro-government narratives released just ahead of the country’s massive general election, which begins this month.

Another is a biopic of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, a radical leader who opposed Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent resistance and founded the Hindu nationalist ideology embraced by Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). And “JNU” – a film that appears to cast Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, long considered a leftist bastion, as working against the nation – is set to reach theaters later this month. 

The new releases reflect a broader shift in Indian cinema over the past decade, one that some critics say has transformed Bollywood into an extension of the prime minister’s PR machine. Films that support the BJP’s stance are often given tax breaks at the box office and get shoutouts from government ministers. Films that don’t face swift and intense backlash. 

“Mainstream Hindi cinema [or Bollywood] has always been pro-establishment,” says Sreya Mitra, associate professor of media studies at the American University of Sharjah. “But you’ve never witnessed so much explicit alignment with the establishment to the extent that it is parroting the same lines.”

Bollywood under Mr. Modi

Media experts say Bollywood movies have always reflected the collective anxieties of the nation. Villains in the past were mysterious foreign entities or rich industrialists profiteering by duping the masses. These days, the bad guy is often a liberal, an opposition figure, or a Muslim.

“The Kerala Story” (2023) depicts Muslim men luring Hindu women and recruiting them into the Islamic State, mirroring a widespread Hindu right-wing conspiracy theory called “love jihad.”

The latest films feature cameos of the prime minister’s character – flanked by the Indian tricolor and delivering punchy dialogues with a steely gaze – and “explicit rewriting of historical narratives,” says Dr. Mitra. “It is very much in alignment with the populist sort of deification of Modi himself,” she says.

Anupam Nath/AP

A woman stands in front of a poster for "Article 370," displayed at a cinema in Guwahati, India, March 21, 2024. The film celebrates the government's 2019 decision to revoke Kashmir's special status.

What is shown on the screen can have real-world consequences. “The Kashmir Files” (2022) showed graphic and hyperbolic depictions of violence against Kashmiri Hindus by Kashmiri Muslims. After watching the film, some Hindus made rousing speeches and Islamophobic comments in movie halls.

Implicit censorship

When a film veers from these formulas, Hindu hard-liners have quickly mobilized in protest.

In 2017, right-wing Hindu nationalist groups threatened violence against the actor of a period drama when rumors spread that it contained scenes depicting a romance between a Hindu queen and a Muslim ruler. And in 2021, makers of a political drama series streaming on Amazon apologized for scenes that allegedly disrespected Hindu gods and the office of the prime minister, and made changes to their show.

In this environment, nuanced portrayals of religious and sociopolitical issues are rare, says Dr. Mitra. 

The implicit censorship extends to the press, too. Kunal Majumder, India representative at the Committee to Protect Journalists, lists several disturbing trends over the past decade: an uptick in police complaints against reporters, the unprecedented use of anti-terror laws against journalists, and foreign journalists’ visas being revoked, among others.

Several news outlets, including Hindi-language newspaper Dainik Bhaskar and the BBC, have also faced tax raids after they published stories critical of the government.

“When something like this happens, it sends a chilling effect,” says Mr. Majumder. 

The government is a major source of advertising revenue for big media companies, he adds, which makes news outlets wary of running stories that could upset those in power. Plus, many of India’s top news organizations are now controlled by billionaires close to Mr. Modi, including India’s second-richest man, Gautam Adani. In 2022 he acquired NDTV, one of the last remaining networks that pursued hard-hitting coverage. 

“India’s vast media landscape has been captured by the BJP,” says Zoya Hasan, professor emerita at Jawaharlal Nehru University. Fawning coverage of the Modi administration’s policies or the echoing of sensationalist anti-Muslim narratives have earned a large section of Indian media the moniker godi or “lap dog” media.

To be sure, Mr. Modi and the BJP are extremely popular throughout the country. A Pew Research Center survey showed 79% of Indians hold a favorable view of Mr. Modi, who is expected to easily win a third term in the upcoming elections, which begin April 19. But observers say the pro-government bias in entertainment and news media can warp viewers’ perception of Indian politics and exacerbate fault lines in Indian society. 

Propaganda or point of view?

“Article 370,” like many new releases, has been labeled “propaganda” by critics. Anjali Sharma, who caught a recent showing in the Delhi suburb of Gurugram, agrees such films can be one-sided. “What is shown to us and what is happening [in Kashmir], there is a lot of difference,” she says. 

But Siddharth Bodke, who plays a leading role as a right-wing Hindu nationalist student leader in the upcoming “JNU,” says these films merely present audiences with a certain point of view. He insists that his film is “balanced,” adding that if he had the opportunity to do a more anti-establishment film – and the script was good – he would take it. 

Either way, audiences are buying in.

At the Gurugram screening of “Article 370,” the theater was three-quarters full even a month after the movie’s release. “The Kerala Story” and “The Kashmir Files” also had successful runs at the box office, though not all pro-government movies do well.

Filmmakers today feel they can milk the country’s current sociopolitical climate, says Dr. Mitra, but if more movies flop, they will stop.

Could these movies shape voter opinions? Maybe over a long period, says moviegoer Dinesh Bansal. But not him, he adds. “I always look at the entertainment quotient,” he says. “I don’t think too much about the messaging.”

“I can’t wait for it to go dark,” says Sylvester. He wiggles in his camp chair, and I look over at my son. His dark hair flops over a pair of protective eclipse glasses as he angles his head toward the waning afternoon sun. 

We’re minutes away from a total solar eclipse, and I’m scribbling in my green notebook, trying to record my impressions of a family trip in search of wonder, a once-in-a-generation celestial event. So rare and special that Sylvester is missing a day of fifth grade. 

I tell myself that he’s being schooled in the science of the cosmos, the movement of planets. You can’t learn that in a classroom. Actually, you can, and he did already. (We have the artwork.) But here we are, sprawled out on a town common in Waterbury, Vermont, along with dozens of other eclipse-watchers, counting down to the magic moment. And we’re not the only ones skipping school. Friends have gone even further north to St. Johnsbury, which is smack-dab in the path of totality. And we unexpectedly run into another family we know from Cambridge, Massachusetts, on the common. 

Sylvester peers into my lap. “Will you be able to write in the dark?” he asks. 

Sure, I tell him. But when the eclipse happens, I can’t. Words fail me. Or I fail them. Only afterward do I pick up my pen. But nothing will measure up to the majesty of the light that we see and the vertiginous sensation of day becoming not-night, not-day. It lasts less than three minutes. Three head-spinning, heart-stopping minutes. 

As the crowd whoops and wows its appreciation at the spectacle, Sylvester turns to me again, his brown eyes no longer hidden by dark plastic panes. “The moon is covering the sun! Take a photo of it, Dad.” 

But I leave my phone in my bag. I want to listen and watch, to share the moment with Sylvester and Jenn, my wife. You can’t put a price on memories. At least, that’s how we justified our last-minute decision to book the last hotel room in town at peak eclipse price. 

Later, Jenn showed me her photos, including images of the sun she took as the moon began its hourlong occultation. We had watched its passage across the sun through the eclipse glasses we packed that morning in Cambridge, leaving home at 7 a.m. to beat the northbound traffic.

Riley Robinson/Staff

Andrew Martell takes a selfie with his son, Theo, age 5, as they wait for the total solar eclipse April 8, 2024, in Burlington, Vermont. Their family traveled from Brooklyn, New York, to experience totality.

“It looks like a croissant,” I told Sylvester. 

He studied it again. “Dad, the colors are changing. It’s more orange now.” 

“OK, then an orange segment.” 

On our way over to the common, I’d told him about what the Aztecs saw in eclipses of the sun, the movements of which they tracked closely, both for practical reasons – as a farmer’s almanac – and to buttress their cosmic mythology. A total eclipse was a moment of peril: A monster threatened to consume the sun god Tonatiuh, plunging humanity into chaos and perpetual darkness. Only the proper rituals could stave off calamity; human sacrifices were involved. (I didn’t dwell on this point.)   

An Aztec-themed eclipse explanation seemed appropriate. In February, we had taken a vacation in Mexico City. We spent a sunbaked day at Teotihuacan, the colossal pyramid ruins that predated the Aztecs, where we walked the Avenue of the Dead. A vendor of tourist trinkets showed us a smooth patty of obsidian, a black volcanic rock, that fit in Sylvester’s palm. 

“Look at the sun,” he told us, and held the black disc to his eye. We did, and a red disc appeared. Before eclipse glasses, there was obsidian, which was traded widely across Mesoamerica and crafted into tools and blades.

Sylvester liked the pyramid tour, but Mexico City felt overwhelming at times, and he was glad to get home. And when I tell him in Vermont about the Aztec conception of eclipses, he doesn’t respond. Later, though, as we sit on the common, taking in the fading daylight as the moon slides into place, I try again. “The monster is taking bigger bites of the sun,” I say. 

He laughs. I suggest we need to offer a sacrifice to save the sun god. Mom has a bag of jalapeño chips. Maybe a chip? He agrees. A chip is a fair offer. 

Then Sylvester tells me about a book in the “Warriors” series, of which he has a passel of dog-eared paperbacks. The series features epic wars among clans of feral cats who inhabit a Hobbesian world. In this book, he explains, the four clans are battling for supremacy. “They’re fighting; then suddenly everything goes dark,” he says. “They all went running, wailing, and screaming home. But actually, it was an eclipse, because it went light again.” 

The warring cats thought that their ancestors had killed the sun “because they were angry with their fighting,” he continues. I nod. So they stop fighting? Yes, in that book, he says. 

After the sun reappears, spreading its warmth again, the crowd on the town common starts to disperse. The streets fill with cars as eclipse-chasers head off. Sylvester is also ready to move on. I’d rather sit longer to watch the moon’s onward passage and try to hold onto the feeling of wonder. But it’s time to go. 

The next total solar eclipse in August 2026 won’t be visible from North America. It will, however, pass over Iceland. We know a family who is already scoping out accommodation there. Maybe we should join them. Sylvester won’t even need to miss school. 

The roads leading to Ekinci Atatürk Middle School are dusty, and the surrounding fields strewn with rubble – the remnants of apartment buildings, restaurants, and grocery stores razed by a series of earthquakes in February 2023.

But in the schoolyard, the sun is shining. The air smells like pine and cypress from the trees that hem the property. Children laugh as they throw a worn-out soccer ball across the basketball court, or chat excitedly about the art exhibition they planned for later that week. Principal Umut Beyazgul cuts a hulking figure as he crosses the yard and banters easily with the middle schoolers.

In Antakya, still reeling more than a year after the quakes that struck southeastern Turkey, the school’s concrete structure painted in bright orange and white stands as a rare example of stability. According to official figures, 53,537 people were killed in the quakes, half in the Hatay region where Antakya sits. Millions of others were displaced.

Mr. Beyazgul, whose first name means “hope” in Turkish, is determined to return normalcy to his 480 students – preparing them for recent annual exams despite the education gap they face and reconnecting them to the love of sport, art, and play that defined their childhoods before they lost so much. 

“We have to put their focus elsewhere,” says Mr. Beyazgul, fiddling with a tesbih, a small string of prayer beads, around his wrist while he talks. “After all, children have a future. They are in a position to improve themselves.”

Courtesy of Umut Beyazgul

Ekinci Atatürk Middle School Principal Umut Beyazgul is determined to bring normalcy to students traumatized in the earthquake recovery zone in Antakya, Turkey.

“We’re trying to do whatever it takes to get them out of the psychology of the earthquake,” he adds.

Caring for children in the quake recovery zone is among the most pressing challenges for the region. More than 6 million children were affected by the earthquakes, according to Save the Children. “It was just a traumatic event in general,” says Makayla Palazzo, director for advocacy and communications for Save the Children’s country office in Turkey. “We’re still seeing things like nightmares, children not being able to sleep.”

Schools play an important role in recovery, but education is out of reach for many. More than 70% of schools in Antakya were destroyed, according to the teachers union, and most students still attend classes in makeshift shelters or crowd into remaining school buildings. Classroom hours have been severely shortened, compounding learning loss that began with the coronavirus pandemic. Some students – especially Syrian refugees – do not go to school at all.

Özgür Tıraş, head of the teachers union for Hatay, warns of a “lost generation” and implores the federal government for more help: “The children and teachers need clean water; they need to be fed; they need housing; they need to solve their economic problems.”

Erin O'Brien

Students play in the courtyard of Ekinci Ataturk Middle School in Antakya, March 4, 2024.

Many in Hatay say support has been scant because of politics. In February, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan seemed to warn that if his party didn’t win upcoming elections, Antakya would continue to struggle. “If the central government and the local government do not join hands and are not in solidarity, [no aid] will come to that city,” he said. His party won back control of Hatay in March 31 elections.

An oasis amid grief

Mr. Beyazgul, a teacher for five years before the earthquakes, is trying to make his middle school an oasis amid the vast needs.

The night of the quakes, he was asleep with his wife when they felt strong tremors and ran to their young son’s room. They heard walls coming down above them in the apartment building and feared the structure would crumble atop them. When the tremors finally stopped, they fled to the safer port city of Mersin for a month. But Mr. Beyazgul says he couldn’t stay away, so the family returned to a village on the outskirts of Antakya. He began teaching in the informal tent schools set up in displacement camps until being named principal of Ekinci Atatürk Middle School last September.

Nearly a quarter of his students still live in temporary housing, and many classes are held outside in containers that leak when it rains. Two teachers died in the quakes – both were close friends of Mr. Beyazgul – and others left the city and haven’t returned. So the school recruited staff from cities such as Ankara and Istanbul. Because these teachers weren’t themselves traumatized by the quakes, they can focus on children’s well-being, Mr. Beyazgul says.

This stability is an exception in the region, says Uğur, a former in-school psychologist who now travels among 300 schools providing mental health support to students affected by the quakes. He asked to be identified by his first name only, fearing professional reprisal for speaking candidly. He says he sees widespread effects of trauma in students, teachers, and parents.

Erin O'Brien

A temporary container school inside the container city built by the Konya municipality on the outskirts of Antakya is typical of where students in the recovery zone are studying a year after the devastating quakes.

Ms. Palazzo says that creating a safe space for children, as Mr. Beyazgul is doing at Ekinci Atatürk Middle School, is critical to helping them move on. “Just having that space and having somewhere for children to go does so much,” she says. “Children are very comforted by routine, and having the school day as the rhythm of their life is important in helping them ... regain a sense of expected everyday life without surprises and with some structure to it.”

A lesson in trust

On a recent day, children with oversize Spider-Man and Superman backpacks scramble over bits of building material to get to the school. They stop at a small pop-up market by the front gate that sells ice cream and other treats, and laugh as they eat purple-and-white ice pops.

In the schoolyard, children talk about the activities Mr. Beyazgul and his staff have planned, including an International Women’s Day event, sports tournaments, and a festival where kids could perform halay – a traditional dance from the region.

It’s not about ignoring the pain; the students’ artwork and these activities are an outlet for their grief. It’s also an effort to foster trust in the future.

“Yes, they need to experience this sadness,” Mr. Beyazgul says. “But this sadness shouldn’t take over the rest of their lives.”

Jill Norton

Natasha Trethewey, former U.S. poet laureate, is the author of "The House of Being," part of the series "Why I Write" from Yale University Press.

Natasha Trethewey, who served as poet laureate of the United States from 2012 to 2014, deepens her exploration of the memories and landscapes that have shaped her writing in “The House of Being.” The book is a slim yet stunning collection of essays published as part of the Yale University “Why I Write” series.

Fans will recognize the broad thematic strokes in “The House of Being,” as illustrated by her parents’ interracial marriage, which was illegal in Mississippi in the year of Ms. Trethewey’s birth. Her mother, Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, a Black woman, and her father, Eric, a white poet who had emigrated from Canada, met when they were in college in Kentucky. They married in Ohio and returned to the South. Natasha was born in Gulfport, Mississippi. Her grandmother, a seamstress, cared for young Tasha while Gwendolyn and Eric were at work.

Natasha was 6 years old when her parents divorced. Her mother later married a Vietnam vet who was deeply troubled and abusive. For 10 years, he was physically violent with Gwendolyn and emotionally tormented Natasha. After they divorced, he continued to stalk Gwendolyn. When Natasha was 19, he shot and killed her mother.

“The House of Being” addresses those and other defining experiences, as well as the racial inequities in the South, through the lens of memory and metaphor. The book opens with vivid details about the baby gift Natasha’s grandmother purchased for her: a 20-volume set of World Book encyclopedias. Those books, like the fabric murals her grandmother created, sparked a sense of wonder. They also reminded the future poet of the stark differences between the love and acceptance she experienced within the walls of her grandmother’s house and the bigotry outside them.

"The House of Being" by Natasha Trethewey, Yale University Press, 96 pp.

Ms. Trethewey has addressed some of those issues in “Native Guard,” a collection of poems, which won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize, and in her memoir “Memorial Drive,” published in 2020.

In a recent interview by video call, the poet discussed how her childhood memories, which include her father teaching her the importance of metaphorical language, have shaped “The House of Being” and her desire to write. 

“I think he was trying to teach me that all of language influences how we see,” she says. “Language can be used to contain and define us. That understanding was such a gift and so necessary for someone like me, growing up in the Deep South.” 

The importance of metaphor runs throughout the book, as does the impulse to transform one’s surroundings into something more beautiful. Ms. Trethewey learned the latter from her grandmother, who used fabric and oil paint to create window-sized nature scenes of owls and mountains. 

“I think everyone has that desire to make something beautiful and to surround yourself with it,” Ms. Trethewey remarks. “People try to curate their worlds and their lives.” 

Those fabric pictures decorated a long, windowless hallway and reminded the family of the pasture that once existed behind the house. The art was also a subtle reminder that Black people in Mississippi could only dream of many freedoms. That fact became frighteningly real the night the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross in front of her grandmother’s house, perhaps because they thought it was part of the church across the street, which was holding a voter registration drive, or because of the interracial family inside. “We never knew which,” Ms. Trethewey says. 

Yale University Press

A family photo shows Natasha Trethewey as a child with her parents, Gwendolyn and Eric, in the living room of her grandmother’s house in Mississippi in 1969.

More lasting markers were visible throughout the South, most noticeably Stone Mountain – a Confederate Mount Rushmore – which could be seen from the front gate of the apartment where Ms. Trethewey’s mother lived and died.

The metaphor of monuments is relevant, she says, because “we’re living in a moment in which the contests over what is remembered, contests over statues and memorialization, and what they inscribe onto the physical landscape and into the landscape of our cultural imagination, are more fraught than ever.” 

“I think some people thought of monuments as things that ... no one paid attention to, that they weren’t somehow still speaking to us, some of us at least, about what our place in the culture at large was supposed to be,” she explains. “In the aftermath of the death of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter protests that were centered around a lot of these monuments, people began to rethink what their place is now, which is why some of them are being removed and put in their proper places.”

In “The House of Being,” Ms. Trethewey revisits themes, including the idea of constellations – both stars and circumstances. 

“When you look at the night sky, so many of the stars are, to our view, brighter than others, and there are countless tiny ones that are perhaps harder to see,” she says. “I think of that as a metaphor for how we tell stories about our lives. Which of the stars do you pick out, and how do you draw lines between them to make connections? When I wrote ‘Memorial Drive,’ and when I wrote ‘The House of Being,’ there were countless other details I could have chosen to tell, but you choose the ones that are creating the constellation of story that ... is the one that you can exist inside of, and thrive within.”

AP

German soldiers arrive at an airport in Vilnius, Lithuania, April 8.

On April 8, or just shy of 79 years after Nazi forces surrendered in World War II, Germany began its first permanent stationing of combat troops outside its borders. The first of 4,800 German soldiers arrived in Lithuania – which borders Russia – to set up a military base. They were warmly welcomed by the Baltic nation as part of NATO’s new Forward Presence strategy against further Russian aggression in Europe.

The deployment is a historic “lighthouse project” for Germany after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, said Defense Minister Boris Pistorius. It is part of a “turning point” for Germany in improving its military and becoming a protector of European security, according to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

“Given Germany’s complex historical legacy and the state of its armed forces, the German commitment is astounding,” Māris Andžāns, a professor at Rīga Stradiņš University in Latvia, wrote for the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.

The German forces in Lithuania will complement American troops in Poland, British soldiers in Estonia, and Canadian soldiers in Latvia. Those Eastern Europe countries are considered among the most vulnerable if Russian President Vladimir Putin makes good on a promise to re-create the Soviet empire that fell in 1991. Russia has lately begun to increase its arms production by more than 60%.

Germany’s first temporary deployment of troops – in defense of Bosnia-Herzegovina – came in 1996, or more than a half-century after World War II. But such milestones did little to sway German opinion from a deep postwar pacifism. In 2011, as Russia began to flex its military might, a Polish foreign minister declared that he feared “German power less than German inaction.”

Now the Russian invasion has forced many Germans to “recognise that it may sometimes be necessary to defend territory, values and principles,” wrote Katja Hoyer, a German British historian, in the Financial Times.

Germany’s longtime reluctance to be a military leader has actually earned it a measure of trust within the 32-member NATO. “To some people, we now seem like a sometimes slow, but ultimately always helpful and, above all, reliable friend,” wrote commentator Matthias Koch in the German daily newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau. From the welcome given to German soldiers by Lithuanians on Monday, he may be right.