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Overview
Sarkar tracks the initial reticence to engage with the trauma of 1947 and the subsequent emergence of a strong Partition discourse, revealing both the silence and the eventual “return of the repressed” as strands of one complex process. Connecting the relative silence of the early decades after Partition to a project of postcolonial nation-building and to trauma’s disjunctive temporal structure, Sarkar develops an allegorical reading of the silence as a form of mourning. He relates the proliferation of explicit Partition narratives in films made since the mid-1980s to disillusionment with post-independence achievements, and he discusses how current cinematic memorializations of 1947 are influenced by economic liberalization and the rise of a Hindu-chauvinist nationalism. Traversing Hindi and Bengali commercial cinema, art cinema, and television, Sarkar provides a history of Indian cinema that interrogates the national (a central category organizing cinema studies) and participates in a wider process of mourning the modernist promises of the nation form.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822392217 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/20/2009 |
| Series: | e-Duke books scholarly collection. |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 384 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
About the Author
Bhaskar Sarkar is an assistant professor of film studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Read an Excerpt
Mourning the Nation
Indian Cinema in the Wake of PartitionBy BHASKAR SARKAR
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2009 Duke University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4411-7
Chapter One
Cinema's Project of Nationhood
IN THE MONTHS I SPENT at the National Film Archives in Pune, scouring films for traces of the Partition, the image of a child on the back of a donkey captured my attention. I was certain that I had seen this image before, yet this was the first time I was viewing the particular film-the megahit Shabnam (1948), whose success at the box office helped consolidate Filmistan studio's reputation in the late 1940s as the producer of rollicking entertainment. Soon enough, I came across the same shot in an official documentary, The Agony of the Partition, produced by Films Division in 1985. This led me to think that I had also seen the image reproduced in print media, although I was not sure of it: after all, the representation echoed a familiar iconographic trope of capturing social suffering (famines and earthquakes, wars and genocides) through singular images of children. My punctum, a personal affinity, had penetrated a referential opacity to disclose an entire studium, a shared cultural field. More than the veracity of my memories, at issue was the existence and disjunctive circulation of photographic/filmic images of Partition.
This serendipitous detection of stock footage of Partition in a popular narrative film of the time marks an interesting juncture in my research. It is not surprising that footage of refugees from 1947 found its way into a commercial film made in the next couple of years; after all, such insertion is standard practice for genres like war films and biopics. This "discovery" is remarkable because it indexes the existence of film footage of Partition/independence and of surrounding events (for example, the 1946 riots in Calcutta; refugees on the road, on the roofs of trains, and in camps; Nehru's famous midnight speech in Parliament; and Gandhi's cremation in 1948). After all, there were armies of film crew-associated with the pre-independence government agency Information Films of India, private film-producing bodies like Wadia Movietone and Motwane Company, and international news agencies like Agence France-Presse and Reuters-ready to document the historic end of the British Raj and the birth of an independent nation-state. So the paucity of Partition documentaries turns out to be a beguiling paradox. Only in 1985 did the Films Division release The Agony of the Partition as part of a series on India's struggle for freedom. Even in that short piece, the focus shifts quickly to Gandhi's assassination: the trauma of Partition is deflected onto the shocking death of "the Father of the Nation."
The narrative of Shabnam has no apparent connection to 1947. The film is about Indian refugees fleeing Burma in the wake of the Japanese bombing of Rangoon in 1942. If we categorize the incorporation of footage of Partition refugees as just an instance of a standard cinematic convention, we overlook one significant fact: commercial cinema's representation of the plight of refugees in 1942, using images of refugees from 1947, constitutes a conscious, anachronistic displacement. In 1949, mainstream films would not take on the subject of Partition, yet they would tap into experiences and anxieties of the day by narrating a tale of refugees from 1942, emphasizing filmic traces from 1947 to establish verisimilitude.
Shabnam takes a tale of bewildering dislocation and privation on the road and turns it into an entertaining romantic caper, peppered with colorful characters (a fiendish feudal prince, a tribal ingenue, snake charmers) and engrossing, if highly improbable, situations. It is one of those Filmistan products in which we discern the gradual crystallization of genres in terms of themes, iconography, characters, and settings-cinematic codes whose influence continues to this day. It is also a text whose metaphoric displacements and allegorization-oblique narrative mechanisms that are important to the formation of genres and consolidation of audiences-reveal its fraught ideological labors. One realizes, for instance, that the iconic substitution of refugees allows the film to circumvent the immediate shock while engaging contemporary structures of feeling. The very iconicity of the shot of the child on a donkey ruptures the narrative about refugees from Burma and points indexically to Partition refugees: the traumatic event-an originary wound, as it were-persists in its photographic trace.
The esemplastic maneuvers from Shabnam draw our attention not only to the goals that were being pursued in commercial films in roughly the first decade in the career of the nation-state, but also to what was being left out to achieve these goals. I start by posing the following question: if contemporary films did not represent what was clearly the most momentous event in modern South Asian history, what were they doing instead? The objective of this circuitous approach is an understanding of both cinematic expressions and silences as intertwined figurations constituting an overarching discourse. The present chapter examines the specific expediencies that shaped cinema in spite of the general indirection and opacity of a traumatized cultural field; chapter two explores what the films, unable to depict directly, registered in implicit ways. The first two chapters, then, are of one piece: while this chapter delineates some modes in which popular films attempted to carve out a role for cinema in a project of nation building, chapter 2 undertakes an excavation of "hidden" narratives of Partition, revealing the ambivalences of Indian nationalism at its presumed pinnacle.
The balance of this chapter (1) situates popular cinema of the first decade in relation to a hegemonic nationalist project and an official national culture, (2) tracks cinema's agonistic relationship to the postcolonial state in the course of salient controversies (the bastardization of culture; the moral corruption of women, children and the masses; regulation and censorship), (3) documents industrial initiatives, including the formation of genres and the consolidation of audiences, and (4) explores popular cinema's dexterous and creative negotiation of the contingencies of that period by focusing on two key films.
Nationhood
In the years immediately following independence, Indian cinema was caught up in a collective endeavor of nation building, offering narratives that negotiated the challenges and choices facing its publics. In that sense, popular cinema participated in what the great Mexican writer Octavio Paz referred to as India's "project of nationhood." While such an undertaking is common to, and remains crucial for, all modern nationstates, it becomes particularly daunting in the case of India, given the diversity that characterizes its social field and the deep laceration that marks its birth. But as Paz points out, it is not just a matter of negotiating the plurality of languages (around eighteen official languages, hundreds of dialects), races, ethnicities, religions, castes, regional lifestyles: India is "a living museum, one in which the most modern modernity coexists with archaisms that have survived for millennia." Thus, for Paz, India-like Mexico, his homeland-constitutes "an enormous historical contradiction."
I take Paz's invocation of "historical contradictions" as shorthand for the multiple textures and fissured temporalities of postcolonial modernities, which trouble historicist assumptions about the gradual subsumption of all local difference by a teleological and unitary history. Recent critiques of historicism are directed not just at Western histories of "peripheral" nation-states, but also at hegemonic nationalist accounts that follow "universal" paradigms of modernization-an influential instance of which is to be found in the writings of Jawaharlal Nehru,8 India's first head of state. There is a fundamental tension in Nehru's evocation of the past and his articulation of a future for the nation: a tension between wanting to exalt national heritage as a source of collective pride and wanting to break with it, to move beyond traditional obstacles into a modern future.
The central contention of this chapter is that popular Hindi cinema of the late 1940s and the 1950s was involved in negotiating the contradictions of an incipient nation-state and was often able, both thematically and formally, to imagine and narrativize parallel, even immiscible, notions of time and being. In the course of such negotiations and imaginings, this body of films evinced an ambiguous relationship to official discourses: its frequent undermining of Nehruvian ideals of secular modernization and techno-rationalist development complicated its assimilation within a hegemonizing nationalist project. The chapter provides an admittedly selective sense of the cultural-ideological transactions, sketching a few of the debates that throw into sharp relief the epistemological and moral paradigms, rhetorical strategies and affective frames in terms of which popular cinema realized a nuanced, often equivocal, sense of nationality. In establishing these intricacies of popular cinema's narration of the nation, the chapter advances an understanding of "India" not as a prerealized and frozen entity, but as perennially in a state of becoming, in difference from and in contention with alternative sociopolitical formations. It also cues us in to what is elided: the subterranean impulses of national life, comprising what one might call a collective unconscious.
Hindi cinema is by no means exceptional in its dialogic participation in, and recalibration of, a project of nationhood: one can cite Italian neorealism's rearticulation of nationhood through a shift from the operatic bases of fascist cinema to the more quotidian world of the folk commedia dell'arte, or recent Hollywood cinema's multiculturalist renegotiations of American identity. However, what is striking is the extent to which Bombay films have been able to capture the dilemmas of the lived world of the masses, engage them at the level of their desires and fears, and generate a palpable realm of belonging that has emerged as the strongest realization of an imagined collectivity-more compelling than state-sponsored nationalism. Ashish Rajadhyaksha draws our attention to the ritualistic and performative realm of the "national" conjured up in Indian popular cinema in terms of a cinephile "insiderism" involving "a buddy-culture of speech and body-language" further elaborated in print media ("reviews, gossip columns and magazines, publicity materials, novelisations") and, one might add, on television and the Internet. He argues that "the dynamic of these idioms" does not readily coincide with "that of official, 'national' India in any predictable fashion": in this respect, the Indian industry remains distinct from Hollywood, whose projections of the national remain closer to official versions. While Rajadhyaksha does not theorize the differences between the Indian and American contexts, an explanation will probably have to start with the distinctive relations, real and imagined, between culture and the state in the two countries, and the underlying phenomenological and philosophical assumptions about the loaded question of representation. In Europe and North America, theories of the modern state and theories of culture evince a striking convergence, with modern "Culture" increasingly conceptualized as supplementary to the state: the overarching stress is on the pedagogical responsibility of culture in producing modern citizen-subjects. Nevertheless, culture's "civilizing" mission as an appendage of state governance remains sharply contested, a contestation palpable in the long history of proletarian resistance to the very idea of cultural education. This pedagogical role has a far more vexed history in postcolonies like India where class difference is compounded by factors such as difficulties in adopting the imported values and institutions of civil society, and the coexistence of irreconcilable lifeworlds.
Notwithstanding the differences, popular culture plays an important role in both India and the United States in establishing a space where desire and politics intersect. In her study of the libidinal politics of the American nation, Lauren Berlant observes that Americans are bound together because they "inhabit the 'political' space of the nation, which is not merely juridical, territorial (jus soli), genetic (jus sanguinis), linguistic, or experiential, but some tangled cluster of these." Berlant calls this space the National Symbolic. It not only provides the technical definitions of the citizen's rights, duties, and obligations, but also aims "to link regulation to desire" by infusing desire into political life. Thus the National Symbolic harnesses people's libidinal investments and channelizes them. Citizens' rights, duties, and responsibilities are made to matter in affective terms through the production of "national fantasy": national culture comes to be imbued with local, more personal desire, "through the images, narratives, monuments, and sites that circulate through personal/collective consciousness." Berlant asserts that "America" emerges as an amalgam of "ongoing collective practices," and its national subjects share "not just a history, or a political allegiance, but a set of forms and the affect that make these forms meaningful."
The concept of the National Symbolic is useful in understanding Indian popular cinema's promotion of a negotiated national subjectivity capable of projecting its Indian-ness, and being a citizen of a modern nation-state. The concept draws our attention to the two-fold necessity for both a set of cultural forms and the affect that makes these forms meaningful. In this respect, popular films of the period in question can be seen productively as cultural forms that sought to make transformations of national life (to a bourgeois, capitalist, democratic, secular polity) emotionally intelligible to the people. Debates surrounding these transactions, and efforts toward the consolidation of genres and their publics, are the focus of this chapter. In foregrounding collective fantasy, the concept also enables an analytic aperture onto the obscure, often subliminal, emotions and drives that course through the socializing rituals of cinema, producing unforeseen involutions in the nationalist script. That optic is the concern of chapter 2.
Cinema as National Culture: Art or Mass Communication?
To situate Indian popular cinema within a postcolonial national culture, we first need to map the ambiguous, at times contentious, truck between the film industry and official nationalism. What positions did the state and the cultural establishment adopt toward cinema as a mobilizer of national fantasy? How was it perceived in relation to time-honored cultural fields, such as literature and the fine arts? What kinds of assumptions about national spirit and creativity shaped such divergent attitudes about the place of various aesthetic domains in national life, producing, in effect, a hierarchy of the arts? In what ways did such predispositions influence public stance and official policy? I begin with a detour through the field of "national art" to identify the expectations that were brought to bear upon culture in the early years after independence.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ixIntroduction: National Cinema's Hermeneutic of Mourning 1
Part I. A Resonant Silence
1. Cinema's Project of Nationhood 47
2. Runes of Laceration 88
3. Bengali Cinema: A Spectral Subnationality 125
Part II. The Return of the Repressed
4. Dispersed Nodes of Articulation 169
5. Ghatak, Melodrama, and the Restitution of Experience 200
6. Tamas and the Limits of Representation 230
7. Mourning (Un)limited 259
Coda: The Critical Enchantment of Mourning 299
Notes 305
Bibliography 343
Index 365