Most of us know little about the Indian subcontinent beyond watching Pakistan and India threaten to blow each other up every six months or so. For that reason alone, the Harvard Film Archive’s brief retrospective of the films of Anand Patwardhan, a left-leaning Indian documentarian who has survived censorship and controversy in his 30-year career of exposing his country’s injustices and pathologies, is worth a look. Far from being of mere parochial interest, the issues raised in these films involve the fate of the entire world. They also reflect trends that are sadly universal: though the names and places may be strange, the themes of oppression, intolerance, chauvinism, and greed are naggingly familiar.

War and Peace (2002; September 20, 26, and 28 at 7 p.m., with the director present on September 20) begins in 1998, when India and Pakistan hovered between the two title states. Both countries had run nuclear tests and were engaging in dangerous brinkmanship over control of the disputed Kashmir region. As you watch leaders on both sides whip up religious fundamentalism and jingoistic militarism, you wonder what happened to the nonviolence that won India its independence from British rule over 50 years ago.

That’s Patwardhan’s question, too, and he suggests that the United States is partly to blame, or at least India’s perceived image of us and its sense of inferiority before the American juggernaut. The current leadership believes that only by imitating America’s worst excesses of defense spending and international belligerence can India earn respect in the eyes of the world. But a more compelling reason for preferring military to spiritual strength might be simple ambition and greed: by fomenting national pride and sectarian hatred, politicians win votes, draw attention from the more pressing problems of poverty and class inequality, and, in at least one notorious case of corruption that Patwardhan documents, earn kickbacks from arms dealers.

Like its Tolstoyan namesake, the 146-minute War and Peace takes its time making its case, leapfrogging from scary Indian war rallies to radiation victims at uranium mines to the Hiroshima Peace Park and then to an A-bomb exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution. Although exhaustive, it could be more comprehensive — more on the historical background of the India-Pakistan partition of 1948 and the three subsequent wars fought by the two countries would have been helpful, at least for American viewers. Such lapses, however, do not diminish the conviction of the film’s conclusion: "Religion and patriotism are the greatest dangers the world has ever known."

Case in point: the Hindu fundamentalist crusade to demolish a 16th-century Muslim mosque in the city of Ayodhya and build in its place a temple to the god king Lord Ram. The mosque, argue the fanatics, occupies the exact site where Ram was born, though those questioned by Patwardhan in his chilling In the Name of God (1990; September 21 and 27 at 9:15 p.m.) can’t say whether that was a thousand or a million years ago. The faith and ignorance of the rabble can perhaps be excused, but Patwardhan has no sympathy for the cynical politicians who manipulated the situation to gain votes and entrench the haves at the expense of the have-nots — including the thousands who lost their lives or their homes in the violence the Ram crusade incited.

Patwardhan makes no bones about his own biases. One of the most illuminating and charming moments in War and Peace takes place in a Pakistani high-school class where teenage girls discuss whether their country should develop nuclear weapons; the filmmaker intrudes and takes up the discussion as well. Asked why she took the pro side, one student confesses that she thought the easiest way to score points would be to prey on the audience’s passions. That, points out Patwardhan, is exactly what politicians do.

And, of course, it’s what Patwardhan and filmmakers like himself do, though their goals are not so much self-aggrandizement and misinformation as clarity and change. He’s gotten much better at the job over the past three decades, as you can see from Prisoners of Conscience (1978; September 21 at 7 p.m.). Shot in grainy black and white, this 40-minute film comprises testimony from a number of dissidents imprisoned without trial and, in some cases, tortured. The tales horrify, but Patwardhan offers little historical or political context, and neither does he elaborate on the communist or socialist affiliation of his subjects. Compare that to the breadth, depth, and insight of War and Peace and you find a filmmaker who has learned to temper passion with wisdom.