Postcolonial study in bollywood

Postcolonial Theory and Bollywood Films

Postcolonial theory has hardly been a defining paradigm in the field of film studies. Postcolonial theory originally emerged from comparative literature departments and film from film and media studies departments, and despite the many intersections postcolonial theory has not been explicitly foregrounded. However, there are more similarities and natural points of intersections between the two areas than it would at first appear. For example, both postcolonial theory and film studies emerged at the end of the 1970s with the development of semiotic theory and poststructuralist thought. Both areas engage intensively with the field of representation, implying the ways in which a language, be it cinematic or otherwise, manages to convey reality as “mediated” and “discursive,” and therefore influenced by power relations. An example could be the notion of the gendered gaze by Laura Mulvey and her concept of looked-at-ness and how it also applies to the screening and representation of black and colonized bodies in films, which bell hooks later theorized as black looks, to which she proposed the response of an oppositional gaze. Despite their different genealogies, it is therefore not only very natural but also necessary to combine postcolonial theory and film in order to unearth how the visual field is inherently hegemonizing and hierarchical and therefore in need of critical appraisal and a deconstructive take, such as postcolonial theory. Postcolonial theory has critically contributed to revisiting the representation of the Other, addressing long-standing tropes and stereotypes about cultural difference and racial otherness. This implies new interventions on how visual representations are implicated in the policing of boundaries between East and West, between Europe and the Rest, the self and the other, undoing or rethinking the ways in which the visual field conveys operation of a mastery that needs to be undone and decoded.

Rang De Basanti :-

Rang De Basanti (Color me Saffron) tells us the story of Caucasian and Hindi speaking, British filmmaker, Sue, who comes to India to make a documentary on India’s revolutionary and legendary freedom fighters, Bhagat Singh, Chandrashekar Azad, Sukhdev, Rajguru and Ashfaqullah Khan who were instrumental in India’s struggle against the British. The five Indian youngsters she chooses to play the revolutionaries are Laxman Pandey (Atul Kulkarni), a Hindu fundamentalist with political aspirations; Daljit Singh called DJ (Aamir Khan), a Punjabi guy who is also an ex-student of the university and uninterested in the life outside the universities’ gates; Aslam (Kunal Kapoor), a rational Muslim ; Sukhi (Sharman Joshi) , a fun loving guy primarily interested in women; Karan (Siddharth) a rich kid who dreams of settling abroad and shares an estranged relationship with his father; and Sonia (Soha Ali Khan) , a youth activist who is engaged to a patriotic pilot Ajay (Mad havan). The group of friends is at first unable to relate the characters they portray on screen. The film-within-a-film format allows Mehra to compare yesteryear’s ideal ism (represented through the freedom fighters) with today’s skepticism (represented through the portrayal of the friends) and as Sue continues to make the documentary, the idealism of India’s revolutionary heroes’ seeps into the protagonists. Somewhere during the making of the movie, the friends find themselves moved by the passion of the characters they play. They gradually begin to realize that their own lives are not very different from the actors they portray on the screen and that the same state of affairs that once plagued the revolutionaries continues to torment the present generation. 

While, previously it was the British Empire who played the villain, today this role is being essayed by contemporary politicians. Soon the barrier of time between the two generations begins to dissolve as the characters become one in spirit. The death of their close friend, Ajay, who dies like a hero, having averted a greater tragedy by crashing his MiG plane (inspired from a real life incident in India) into an empty field instead of trying to save his own life pushes their tolerance over their brink, as instead of honoring his martyrdom, the Indian government labels him as a careless novice so as to deflect media attention away from the details of the purchase of faulty Russian MiGs. The friends are devastated by Ajay’s death and shocked by the corruption they encounter from the bureaucracy when they try to clear his name. This forces them to take action against the State. In the process of trying to cleanse the system, they take the law into their own hands and meet a tragic end. In the film, the docudrama shot by Sue of British India in the 1930s runs along with the main story and intersects it at decisive moments in the narration. The climax of the film sees the blurring of the past and the present, reiterating the idea that nationalism is not yet dead and that people need to wake up and be the change they talk about. 

As Hindi film critic Dr. Chakravorty describes it, RDB is more than another patriotic film: it is a moral, social and political allegory. “By blending history along with the nationalist struggle, idealism and humanitarianism along with contemporary politics, religious fundamentalism, and the lack of social responsibility, Mehra pro vides us with a mirror to look inwards and think about the way we live and the choices we make.”13 It was for this reason that audiences, especially youngsters, for whom daily life in India was on the lines depicted in RDB, found this film to be a slice of their own lives. RDB also ends with a strong message that it is not patriotic or right to be indifferent to what is going on in the country, and even more so in public life. Moreover, nor is it correct to sit on the fence and point fingers at all the things going wrong in a democracy like India. It stresses the idea that is very important for people to actively participate in the public sphere to bring about change in their country. “No country is perfect, it needs to be made perfect”14 and this is the message that Mehra’s film leaves the audience with. Interestingly enough, film critics even when discussing the movie in their reviews felt that RDB could lead to reflection, discussion and possibly even action among youngsters in India. It was for this reason that RDB enjoyed much publicity before and after its release. It also helped that this film had an interesting ensemble of novice and established actors starring in it and that the popular press declared the film to be one of the biggest releases of 2006. 

While there is always the danger of popular cinema like RDB being labeled es capist, mere entertainment, and fantasy-oriented, it is very essential to understand the role it plays in motivating audiences to act in certain ways. For despite all its inanities and irrelevancies this cinema is ideology-filled and its raw material is the society of today. RDB, by focusing on the concerns of youngsters, operating from their perspective and speaking their language, conveyed the mindset of urban and educated youngsters in post-independent India. It therefore serves as a fertile ground to study issues of changing culture, identities, media consumption and audience effects among others. It is in this context that I study the consumption of RDB and the implications of the same on young audiences. RDB, as this thesis showcases, is an example of a distinctive case in which the consumption of a super commodified cinematic product revitalized citizenship among the youth in India.

Lagaan :-

 Lagaan films with their appeal to the mass audience of uprooted peasants, factory workers, the unemployed, uneducated and poor can decolonise the imagination of the Indian masses. It points out that "Lagaan's" efforts at indigenisation and interrogation of prescribed discourses of modernity and history deserve credit for making possible the creation of public debates within a culture where the majority of the population is non-literate, and is unable to partake in elite discussions of culture and modernity.

 conclusion :-

 The white woman's association with capitalism and modernity in Rang de Basanti, Lagaan, and Indian advertisements, buttresses the dominance of the Indian male and affirms nationalist constructions of gender. Dark suggests that romance with the white woman offers a form of redemption for the various humiliations the Indian male suffered in the colonial dynamic and offers a fantasy of symbolic wholeness á la Frantz Fanon. Indeed, this introduction of the British woman in both Lagaan and Rang de Basanti harkens back to the imperialist romances popular in the 1980s, based on the novels of E.M. Forester and Paul Scott. Both David Lean's film Passage to India and the television series Jewel in the Crown highlight the British woman's consumption of Indian culture and the perils of such erotic consumption. In these films, the erotic gaze of the British woman is correlated directly to the punishment of the Westernized Indian man, who is jailed and beaten for his purported sexual aggression against her. The eroticism in these romances depends on the sadomasochistic degradation of the Indian male linked to the British woman's excessive, misplaced, and ultimately impossible desire. Renato Resaldo has perhaps the most blunt description of the "paradox"of "imperialist nostalgia" that plays out in these romances: "A person kills somebody, and then mourns the victim" . According to Resaldo, this nostalgia disguises any complicity of the mourner in this loss, in effect erasing the traumatic history. In relationship to imperialist nostalgia, Jennifer Wen-zel describes "anti-imperialist nostalgia" as a phenomenon in a formerly colonized nation, in which the pre-independence period becomes an idealized ur-moment of potential, not necessarily fulfilled in the present day nation-state. In both forms of nostalgia, the pre-independence period acts as a fetish or an object that compensates for the trauma of Britain's loss of empire and India's occupation under colonial rule. If for Anne McClintock, the fetish, as both commodity and psychoanalytic "perversion," work off the "failure of a single narrative of origins" whether cultural or sexual, Rang de Basanti offers a type of doubling of India's narrative of origins as a nation-state. In Rang de Basanti two types of fantasies imperial and anti-imperial — overlap. Although Sue is the supposed director of a documentary film, she also acts symbolically as the fantasy audience, both a witness to India's successful transformation into a global force and the Western subject who provides recognition for the historical trauma behind India's birth into modernity through sentimental affiliation with heroic individuals.