REPRESENTATION OF INDIANS IN INDIAN ENGLISH FILMS AND BRITISH INDIAN FILMS

Thesis

Submitted To

SREE SANKARACHARYA UNIVERSITY OF SANSKRIT in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the award of the Degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

IN

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

By

DIVYA U.

DEPARTMENT OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

SREE SANKARACHARYA UNIVERSITY OF SANSKRIT

KALADY

2017

Dr. Sudharma A K Associate Professor Telephone: 9447798039 Department of Hindi Email:[email protected] Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit

CERTIFICATE

Certified that the thesis entitled The Representation of Indians in Indian English films and British Indian films submitted by Divya U. for the award of Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature is a bonafide record of independent research work done by the candidate under my supervision during the period 2013-2017 and that it has not previously formed the basis for the award of any other degree or diploma or associateship or fellowship or other similar academic titles.

Kalady Dr. Sudharma A.K. 14.12.2017

DECLARATION

I hereby declare that the thesis entitled The Representation of Indians in Indian English films and British Indian films submitted to Sree

Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit, Kalady for the award of the

Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature is the original record of the studies and research carried out by me in the university during 2013-2017 under the guidance of Dr. Sudharma A.

K., and it has not formed the basis for the award of any degree, diploma, title or recognition.

Kalady Divya U.

14.12.2017

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This study would not have been possible without the support and

co-operation of many wonderful persons. First of all, I remember with

much gratitude and reverence the support and guidance provided by

my supervisor Dr. Sudharma A.K. I express my sincere gratitude to my

subject expert Dr. Ajayan C. for his guidance and support. I am also indebted to Dr. K. V. Ajith Kumar, Associate Professor and

Coordinator, Centre for Comparative Literature for his seamless support.

My special thanks to Dr. T Vasudevan and Dr. Soumya

Murukesh for their valuable support for the preparation of my thesis.

I express my gratitude to the authorities of University Library,

SSUS, Kalady Chalachitra Academy, Thiruvananthapuram, State

Central Library, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala University Library,

Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala Sahitya Academy Library and Public

Library Ernakulam.

Above all, I express my boundless sense of gratitude to the

Almighty and my beloved parents, Sister, Arun and Friends who

remained as beacon in my moments of confusion and steered me

towards my goal.

Divya U. CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION 1-7 CHAPTER ONE INTERROGATING FILM THEORY 8-55 CHAPTER TWO AN OVERVIEW OF INDIAN ENGLIGH AND BRITISH INDIAN FILMS 56-94 CHAPTER THREE REPRESENTATION OF INDIANS IN INDIAN ENGLISH FILMS (Bride and Prejudice, Fire, Mr and Mrs Iyer, Midnights 95-141 Children) CHAPTER FOUR REPRESENTATION OF INDIANS IN BRITISH INDIAN FILMS (Gandhi, City of Joy, Passage to India, Slumdog 142-189 Millionaire) CHAPTER FIVE CONCLUSION 190-214 FILMOGRAPHY 215 BIBLIOGRAPHY 216-235 APPENDIX i-vii

INTRODUCTION

1

Film is a visual art form; it has an extensive swaying power. The politics of film has buttressed the emergence of cultural studies in recent years. Its central proposition is that culture of all kinds produces, reproduces, and/or legitimizes forms of thought and feeling in society and that the well being of people in society is crucially affected and shaped by this. That is, who we think we are, how we feel about this, who we believe others to be, how we think society works. All of this is seen to be shaped decisively, perhaps exclusively, by culture and to have the most profound social, physical, and individual consequences. Cultural studies have focused on the particularities of cultures founded on social divisions of class, gender, race, nation, sexualities and so on. They also emphasise the importance of power, the different statuses of different kinds of social groups and cultural product and the significance of control over the means of cultural production. The aesthetic and cultural cannot stand in opposition. The aesthetic dimension of a film never exists apart from how it is conceptualized, how it is socially practised and how it is received; it never exists floating free of historical and cultural particularity. Equally, the cultural study of film must always understand that it is studying a film, which has its own specificity, its own pleasures, its own way of doing things that cannot be reduced to ideological formulations or what people

(producers, audiences) think and feel about it. (Dyer 9)

A film is seen as a ‘reflection’ of the dominant beliefs and values of its culture. It does not reflect or record reality but like any other medium of representation, it constructs and ‘re-presents’ its pictures of reality by way of the codes, conventions, myths, and ideologies of its culture as well as by way of the specific signifying practices of the medium. Just as a film works on the meaning systems of culture- to renew, reproduce, or review them- it is also produced by 2

those meaning systems. The filmmaker uses the representational conventions and

repertories available within the culture in order to make something fresh, but

familiar, new but generic, individual but representative. The result of cultural

approaches to ‘film as representation’ is ultimately to focus on the relations

between film’s representational languages and ideology. (Turner 131)

Representation is one of the key terms of cultural studies. Films go to

create the visual culture. Historical, cultural, social events, images etc are

represented in the film. But representations are not innocent reflections of the real,

but are cultural constructions. Here representation is intrinsically bound up with questions of power through the process of selection and organization that must inevitably be a part of the formations of representations. The power of representation lies in its enabling some kinds of knowledge to exist while excluding other ways of seeing. There are different kinds of representation as race, gender, nation and class. This thesis discusses how the race, gender, class and nation represented in the Indian English and British Indian films and how their politics are exhibited in these films. It has five chapters.

The first chapter discusses the theoretical perspective of representation, which concerns the cultural theories and practices in the films and analyses gender representation in Indian English and British Indian films. Usually gender inequalities have been discussed in the films. Most of the films represent stereotypical representations, especially of women, transgenders, third world people, blacks etc. The dominant group in the society designates them as ‘other’.

This ‘othering’ can also be seen in the films. Like gender representation, racial, nation and class representation are also discussed in this chapter. Race and class have a significant role in cultural studies. Racial discrimination is an important 3 theme not only in western films but in all other fields also. These racial and class discriminations are a serious issues even in the twenty first century and they are exhibited in their culture also. The racialized discourse is structured by a set of binary oppositions. There is a powerful opposition between ‘civilization’ (white) and ‘savagery’ (black) and an opposition between the biological or bodily characteristics of the ‘black’ and ‘white’ races, polarized into their extreme opposites.

There are sound distinctions between these binary oppositions, between the white races and intellectual development- refinement, learning and knowledge, belief in reason, the presence of developed institutions, formal government and law, and a ‘civilized restraint’ in their emotional, sexual and civil life, all of which are associated with ‘Culture’: but in the case of black races and whatever is instinctual- the open expression of emotion and feeling rather than intellect, a lack of civilized refinement’ in sexual and social life, a reliance on custom and ritual and the lack of developed civil institutions, all of which are linked to nature (Hall

243). Popular representations of racial difference during slavery tended to cluster around two main themes- first, the subordinate status and innate laziness of the blacks and second by their innate primitivism, simplicity and lack of culture.

In the same way, the culture difference between the east and the west is naturalised, that is, if the differences between the eastern and western people are cultural, they try to modify and change, but if they are natural, the ‘other’ people believed that they are beyond history, permanent and fixed. So ‘naturalization’ is a representational strategy designed to fix differences. It is an attempt to halt the inevitable slide of meaning, to secure discursive or ideological closure. But in the case of India race is based on religion. Minority groups are always marginalised 4

and suppressed by the dominant group. Their conflicts describe the racial

discrimination. Most of the Indian English directors have this as the pivotal

premise in their films. In the same way representation of nation is a significant one.

The concept of nation is not a naturally transpiring phenomena, which is

socially and culturally constructed. The idea of the nation can operate at the most

basic levels of meaning and discourse. It becomes an overriding set of priorities

which define what is acceptable and what is not, what is normal and what is not, all

through defining what is Indian or British or American and what is not. In wider

conceptions of politics—that is, not party politics but power relations generally—

the idea of the nation is enlisted in achieving and maintaining hegemony.

Hegemony is the process by which members of society are persuaded to acquiesce

to their own subordination, to abdicate cultural leadership in favour of sets of

interests which are represented as identical, but may actually be antithetical to their

own. The subordinated are persuaded by the ideologies on offer rather than the

particulars of their material conditions (which might be the practical result of such

ideologies). Hegemony’s aim is to resist social change and maintain the status quo

(Turner 158). Representations of the nation are themselves particularly important since they both produce and reproduce the dominant points of view. This does not mean that there is only one type of the nation—although ideally that is what hegemony could mean. What it does mean is that the various representations will

enjoy a different status and will have different meanings. In effect, they will

construct a different nation.

The multiplicity of representation will be controlled and regulated by the

cultural institutions, but the audience likes such forms of varieties. Representations

of the nation are not ‘fixed’; their political and cultural importance is such that they 5 are sites of considerable competition. To gain control of the representational agenda for the nation is to gain considerable power over individuals’ view of themselves and each other. The main problem of this kind of representation is the individual understands his/her own country through foreign media representations.

The second chapter gives a brief outline of Indian English films and British

Indian films. It examines the origin, its developing stage, women directors etc. of the Indian English and British Indian films. Both represent Indians in different ways. These differences are scrutinized in this chapter.

The third chapter examines the representation of Indians in Indian English films. Indian English films are the films which are directed by Indian directors in

English language. Many well known directors produce Indian English films. They consider some significant issues taking place in India as the central themes. They also give importance to the individual trauma of persons in the films. In this category four films such as Fire, Midnight’s Children, Mr and Mrs Iyer and Bride and Prejudice have been discussed. Fire and Midnight’s Children are directed by

Deepa Mehtha. Both films explain different themes; one is gender inequality and other is the construction of a nation (imagined communities) and postcolonial trauma. But the treatment of gender, race, nation and class are in the same pattern.

The film Fire concerns the serious issues of gender discrimination, alienation, lesbianism etc. Women are treated as subordinated and suppressed and as an object by the patriarchal society. Later, this suffocation explodes and leads to revolutionary actions against the traditional laws.

Midnight’s Children is a novel adaptation of Salman Rushdie’s novel with the same title. This film has been justified with the novel with no drastic changes in the film. This film criticises the existing social systems and government. And 6

the film travels through three periods, pre-independence, post-independence and

emergency, the most significant and crucial periods in Indian history. This study

explores how a nation is created and how race, gender and class are treated in that

nation. Mr and Mrs Iyer by Aparna Sen, explores the religious fundamentalism.

This film’s historical background is very important, that is just before Sen took this film, September 11 incident and the Gujarat riot happend. She takes this film on the basis of these incidents. The film depicts the after effects of these incidents and the cruel and brutal reality which occurred in India. Bride and Prejudice is another

Indian English film directed by Gurinder Chadha. It discusses the cultural difference between the east and the west. The protagonists of the film belong to different nations and their conflicts constitute the main theme of the film. But this film exhibits a dominant ideology and criticizes the Indian culture. Stereotypical representation leads to misunderstanding of Indians and Indian culture as is depicted in the film. These films are critically evaluated with the representational tools like gender, race, nation and class.

The fourth chapter discusses how the western film makers depict Indians in their films. Four films are analysed this chapter such as Passage to India, City of

Joy, Gandhi and Slumdog Millionaire. These four films are analysed on the concept of gender, race, class and nation. Gender discrimination is a serious issue in the world. In the patriarchal society women are considered passive, silent etc.

They are relegated into the background of society. These films depict the Indian and English women, but the treatment is the same and they are portrayed as passive. The dominant society makes them silent. Mrs. Moore, Adela Quested,

Kamala Pal, Joan, Kasthurba Gandhi, Lathika are the central female actors in these films. All are treated in the same way. If anybody violates the patriarchal law they 7

must be punished. Stereotypical representation is seen in these characters. They are

considered as commodity and pleasure making objects. These treatments are

critically analysed. Another issue is racialization. Racial issues are discussed in the

films. Indians and others are racially depicted in these films. A dominant ideology

informs these films which present stereotypical narration of third world countries

while criticizing their culture.

Different types of classes can be seen, namely bourgeoisie, professionals, working class people, gangsters, petty bourgeoise. Bourgeoisie rules the cities and they use their hegemonic power over the civil society. Most of the British Indian films show the whites as the hero and they are considered as gods. This stereotypical representation is used in most of the films. They teach their civilization and culture. They try to make the native people aware that, their culture and beliefs are negative, superstitious and problematic. Gradually this thought becomes naturalized and all keep and obey the whites’ knowledge. These things are examined in the fourth chapter.

The fifth chapter is the conclusion. All findings are summed up in this chapter.

CHAPTER ONE INTERROGATING FILM THEORY

8

Film is one of the genres of popular culture. Raymond Williams argues that the word ‘popular’ has at least four current meanings. First it can refer simply to those objects or practices that are well-linked by a lot of people. Or, it can be used to refer to objects or practices deemed inferior and unworthy. In this view popular culture is everything left over after identifying what constitutes elite or high culture namely the paintings and sculptures and symphonies typically associated with the wealthy and well educated. The term can also refer to “work deliberately setting out to win favour with the people”. In this usage, popular culture is explicitly commercial: it is a work that is produced to be consumed.

Finally the term can refer to the objects and practices “actually made by the people for themselves”(Williams 237). These different meanings are functional and precise depending on the context and particular cultural objects or practises in question.

According to Mukerji and Schudson We will sidestep a great many terminological disputes with the inclusive claim that popular culture refers to the beliefs and practices, and objects through which they are organized, that are widely shared among a population. The legitimation of popular culture can be taken only after the mid twentieth century. For getting the wide approval of people it has been a gradual process (3). The last decade has witnessed a steady growth of academic interest in popular culture as reflected in both increased scholarship and gradual transformations of formal curricula. Some disciplines have clearly been more receptive than others (Harrington and Bielby 3).

Sociologists conduct the pop culture research, but literary studies are much slower to accept pop culture as a serious focus of inquiry; critics charge that its lingering preoccupation with the idea of a canon led to an elitist dismissal of 9

“lesser” cultural texts. Today literary studies have fully embraced pop culture research, especially within the Cultural studies tradition (3). The gradual concoction of popular culture into the academic field has proven truly transformative. “The process of legitimating popular culture studies in recent years has been associated with major theoretical challenges to basic assumptions” of a number of different disciplines, including history, anthropology, sociology and literary studies. As a result “students of popular culture have simultaneously worked in the tradition of their disciplines and fought with their premises (Mukerji and Schudson 4-5). The growing field of Cultural Studies, the production of

Cultural perspective, and the popular Culture Studies tradition are the perspectives which share a belief in the legitimacy of pop culture but have different underlying assumptions about the nature and consequences of the process of cultural production and consumption.

Cultural studies develops from the complex set of social and economic process, including industrialization, modernisation, urbanization, mass communication and the global economy (Nelson,Treichler and Grossberg 5). It first emerged from Britain in the 1950s and was most closely associated with the

Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, which was founded in Birmingham,

England in 1964. It argues that culture cannot be understood apart from other aspects of social life: Continually engaging with the political, economic, eritical, social and ideological, cultural studies entail the study of all relations between all the elements in a whole way of life (14). Two main characteristics of cultural studies are its emphasis on subjectivity, rather than the supposedly objective positivism associated with most social inquiry, and its explicitly political or activist orientation. [A] Continuing preoccupation within cultural studies is the notion of 10

radical social and cultural transformation and how to study it. Its practitioners see

cultural studies not simply as a chronicle of social change but as an intervention in

it, and see themselves not simply as scholars providing an account but as politically engaged participants (5). The consumers of Cultural texts are not passive dupes but rather active participants in the creation of meaning.

During says that cultural studies have been most interested in how groups

with least power practically develop their own readings of, and uses for, cultural

products in fun, in resistance, or to articulate their own identity (7). But in this view popular culture is interpreted as a subordinate which disempowers the people:

“Popular culture is made by various factions of subordinated or disempowered

people out of the resources that are provided by the social system that

disempowers them (Fiske 1-2). Cultural studies explore the deep concern to

understand the values and strength of the sense making strategies used by ordinary

people in their everyday lives. So the new cultural studies' project is thus: [A]

project of thinking through the implications of extending the term “culture” to

include activities and meanings of ordinary people, precisely those constituencies

excluded from participation in culture when its elitist definition holds sway

(Barker and Beezer 5). The early theoretical precursor to this approach was the mid

1940s work of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer on what they termed

“cultural industries”. They argue that cultural objects are produced in much the

same way as other industries produce other objects. The standardization of

production creates standardised and interchangeable cultural objects, which lead

inevitably to standardization of consumption.

The contemporary production of culture approach moves beyond these

somewhat pessimistic beginnings in its efforts to use “analytical systems from the 11

sociology of occupations and of organizations to see how social resources are

mobilized by artists, filmmakers, and the like to make the cultural production

possible” (Negus 99). And he also says that we need to understand the meanings

that are given to both the ‘product’ and the practices through which the product is

made (101). By empirically examining group dynamics, the interactional order,

social networks, and organizational decision –making, this perspective attempts to

situate popular culture in concrete, identifiable social and economic processes and

institutions (Mukerji and Schudson 32). Popular culture is the everyday culture of

a group, large or small, of people. It is the way of life in which and by which most

people in any society live. It is the everyday world around us. It is what we do

while we are awake and how we do it. Popular culture studies are scholarly

examinations of those everyday cultures (Browne 22-25). The primary aim of

popular culture studies is to initiate and to legitimize the study of popular culture in

all fields of humanities and social sciences. Browne says that “popular culture

studies have pioneered the way and opened up the territory to a vast new field of

necessary understanding” (25). It suggests that popular culture studies perceives

itself as the roof, under which various theoretical, ideological, or disciplinary approaches to the study of popular culture, including Cultural studies and the production of Culture perspective, are situated.

Pierre Bourdieu concurs: Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier.

Social subjects, classified by their classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make, between the beautiful and the ugly, the distinguished and the vulgar. The most intolerable thing for those who regard themselves as the possessors of legitimate culture is the sacrilegious reuniting of tastes and which taste dictates shall be separated (Bourdieu 57). Culture is a dynamic process rather 12 than a static entity, and high/low distinctions can change over time, as can the social groups that engage them. For example, silent movies are treated as “art” films today but were originally created for mass audience.

Most scholars, particularly those in the cultural studies and production of culture traditions, believe that mass production was a necessary precursor to the emergence of a truly popular culture, and place its origins in the various transformations wrought by the industrial revolution in Western Europe and North

America in the late 1800s. But there is a tendency to equate it with everything western, especially everything American, and that obscures the ability to recognize its presence in other regions and cultures of the world.Cultural studies asserts that popular culture is neither totally imposed from above, nor something that emerges spontaneously from below, but rather is the outcome of an ongoing interplay between the process of production and consumption (Storey 13). Here one thing is confirmed that the cultural studies tend to concentrate on the consumers.

And Fiske points out that only consumer can popularize the objects or practices, and people possess the power.

“Popular texts are completed only when taken up by people and

inserted into their everyday culture. The people make popular culture

at the interface between everyday life and the consumption of the

products of the cultural industries. Relevance can be produced only by

the people; for only they can know which texts enable them to make

the meanings that will function in their everyday lives.” (Fiske 6)

Cultural evaluation is simply part of human nature. So making judgement about popular culture is thus preordained: And because it is inevitable, it is 13 unnecessary- unnecessary at least for the serious critic of popular culture, and unnecessary to the construction of a critical theory for popular culture. The only real authority concerning the “beauty” or “excellence” of a work of popular culture is the people in popular culture, the rule is “one person- one vote.” However regrettable this may appear it is a fact. Popular Art (thus) represents the triumph of a democratic aesthetics (Rollin 4- 5). He also says that the standards of aesthetic value can be transformed into moral imperatives which are then employed to celebrate some human beings and oppress others. The scholars should have to examine the aesthetic standards exactly, for they are entrenched in the relations of power and there is a difficult process of negotiations between producers and consumers about “goodness” and “badness” for making the cultural meaning.

According to du Gay and his colleagues, there are at least five

major cultural processes that should be emphasised in studying the

circuit of culture, including representation, identity, production,

consumption, and regulation. To study an object or text culturally, “one

should at least explore how it is represented, what social identities are

associated with it, how it is produced and consumed, and what

mechanisms regulate its distribution and use.” (10)

Representation is the production of meaning of the concepts in minds through language. It is the link between concepts and language which enables us to refer to either the ‘real’ world of objects, people or events, or indeed to imaginary worlds of fictional objects, people and events. Hall says that there are two processes, two systems of representation, involved. First is the system by which all sorts of objects, people and events are correlated with a set of concepts or mental representations which we carry around in our heads. Without them, we could not 14 interpret the world meaningfully at all (17). We form concepts of rather obscure and abstract things, which we can’t in any simple way see, feel or touch, for example, the concepts of love, war, friendship etc.. So we can make concepts about things we never have seen and possibly ever can’t see. But we can make up about people, places etc such as Malgudi (the fictional place in R K Narayan’s novel

Malgudi Days) or Radha or Sita (the heroines of Deepa Mehta’s film Fire). This is also a system of representation. It consists not of individual concepts, but of different ways of organizing, clustering, arranging and classifying concepts, and of establishing complex relations between them. The use of similarity and difference to establish relationships between concepts or to distinguish them is an example.

Hall explains the idea that in some respects birds is like planes in the sky, based on the fact that they are similar because they both fly, but they have also a difference that, one is part of nature while the other is man-made.

There are different ways to represent the images, people, places etc through the films. Visual images are easily comprehended by the audiences, so they have been widely accepted. Cinema reveals different life experiences, events etc by the realistic, fictional, imaginative modes. Representation includes the concepts of gender, race, nation and class, which are explained in this chapter.

Feminist theorists claim that gender is the cultural interpretation of sex or that gender is culturally constructed. The notion that gender is constructed suggests certain determinism of gender meanings inscribed on anatomically differentiated bodies, where those bodies are understood as passive recipients of an inexorable cultural law. When the relevant culture that constructs gender is understood in terms of such a law or a set of laws, then it seems that gender is as determined and fixed as it was under the biology-is-destiny formulation. In such a case, culture 15 becomes destiny, not biology (Butler 12). Simone de Beauvoir emphasises in her work The Second Sex that “one is not born a woman, but, rather, becomes one”

(301). Beauvoir suggests that gender is constructed and one becomes a woman, but always under a cultural coercion to become one. This coercion does not come from sex. Butler explains that Beauvoir doesn’t give any guarantees that ‘one’ who becomes a woman is necessarily female. If ‘the body is a situation’, she claims, there is no recourse to a body that has not always already been interpreted by cultural meanings; hence, sex could not qualify as a prediscursive anatomical factory (38). The difference between sex and gender serves the argument that whatever biological intractability sex appears to have, gender is culturally constructed: hence, gender is neither the casual result of a sex nor as seemingly fixed as sex. When the constructed status of gender is theorized as radically independent of sex, gender itself becomes a free floating artifice, with the consequence that man and masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a male one, and woman and feminine a male body as easily as female one.

Luce Irigaray argues that women constitute a paradox, if not a contradiction, within the discourse of identity itself. Women are the sex which is not one. Within a language pervasively masculinist, a phallogocentric language, women constitute the unrepresentable. In other words, women represent the sex that cannot be thought, a linguistic absence and opacity. Within a language that rests on univocal signification, the female sex constitutes the uncontrainable and undesignatable. In this sense, women are the sex which is not one, but multiple.

She opposes Beauvoir, for whom women are designated as the ‘Other’; Irigaray argues that both the subject and the ‘Other’ are masculine mainstays of a closed 16 phallogocentric signifying economy that achieves its totalizing goal through the exclusion of the feminine altogether.

For Beauvoir, women are the negative of men, the lack against which masculine identity differentiates itself; for Irigaray, that particular dialectic constitutes a system that excludes an entirely different economy of signification.

Women are not only represented falsely within the Sartrain frame of signifying- subject and signified-Other, but the falsity of the signification points out the entire structure of representation as inadequate. The sex which is not one, then, provides a point of departure for a criticism of hegemonic Western representation and of the metaphysics of substance that structures the very notion of the subject (Butler 14).

The universal conception of the person is displaced as a point of departure for a social theory of gender by those historical and anthropological positions that understand gender as a relation among socially constituted subjects in specifiable contexts. This relational or contextual point of view suggests that what the person is, and, indeed, what gender is, is always relative to the constructed relations in which it is determined (Scott 28-52) . Here, gender does not denote a substantive being, but relative point of convergence among culturally and historically specific sets of relations. Irigaray emphasises that the female sex is not a lack or an Other that immanently and negatively defines the subject in its masculinity. On the contrary, the female sex eludes the very requirements of representation, for she is neither Other nor the lack, those categories remaining relative to the Sartrain subject, immanent to that phallogocentric scheme (Butler 15). Gender is performatively produced and compelled by the regulatory practices of gender coherence. Nietzsche argues that “there is no being behind doing, effecting, 17

becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed, the deed is everything.”

(45)

Sexuality: “Intelligible” genders are those which in some sense institute

and maintain relations of coherence and continuity among sex, gender, sexual

practice, and desire (23). In other words, the spectres of discontinuity and incoherence, themselves thinkable only in relation to existing norms of continuity and coherence, are constantly prohibited and produced by the very laws that seek to establish casual or expressive lines of connection among biological sex,

culturally constituted genders, and the expression or effect of both in the

manifestation of sexual desire through sexual practice. The notion that there might

be a truth of sex, as Foucault ironically terms it, is produced precisely through the

regulatory practices that generate coherent identities through the matrix of coherent

gender norms.

The heterosexualisation of desire wants and institute the production of discrete and asymmetrical oppositions between feminine and masculine, where these are understood as expressive attributes of male and female. The cultural

matrix through which gender identity has become intelligible requires that certain

kind of identities cannot exist, that is, those in which gender does not follow from

sex and those in which the practices of desire do not follow from either sex or

gender. Follow in this context is a political relation of entailment instituted by the

cultural laws that establish and regulate the shape and the meaning of sexuality.

Within the spectrum of French feminism and poststructuralist theory, very

different regimes of power are understood to produce the identity concepts of sex.

Irigaray claims there is only one sex, the masculine, that elaborates itself in and 18

through the production of the Other, and those positions, Foucault assumes that the

category of sex, whether masculine or feminine, is a production of a diffuse

regulatory economy of sexuality. Wittig argues that the category of sex is, under

the conditions of compulsory heterosexuality, always feminine (the masculine

remaining unmarked and, hence, synonymous with the universal). Wittig concurs

with Foucault in claiming that the category of sex would itself disappear and,

indeed, dissipate through the disruption and displacement of heterosexual

hegemony (24-25). These various explanations of sex are understood depending on

the field of power is articulated. Irigaray’s theory of sexual difference suggests that

women can never be understood on the model of a subject within the conventional

representational systems of Western culture precisely because they constitute the

fetish of representation and, hence, the unrepresentable as much.

Women can never be according to this ontology of substances, precisely because

they are the relation of difference, the excluded, by which that domain marks itself

off. Women are also a difference that cannot be understood as a simple negation or

‘Other’ of the always-already-masculine subject. They are neither the subject nor its Other, but a difference from the economy of binary opposition, itself a ruse for a monologic elaboration of the masculine (25). The notion is that sex appears within hegemonic language as a substance.

Wittig explores that the binary restriction of sex serves the reproductive

aims of a system of compulsory heterosexuality; and she claims that the overthrow

of compulsory heterosexuality will inaugurate a true humanism of the person freed

from the shackles of sex. She suggests that the profusion and diffusion of a nonphallocentric erotic economy will dispel the illusions of sex, gender, and

identity. At yet other textual moments, it seems that the lesbian emerges as a third 19 gender that promises to transcend the binary restriction of sex imposed by the system of compulsory heterosexuality. In her defence of the cognitive subject, she appears to be the rehabilitation of the agent of existential choice under the name of lesbian: “the advent of individual subjects demands first destroying the categories of sex, the lesbian is the only concepts I know of which is beyond the categories of sex (Wittig 53). She does not criticize the subject as invariably masculine according to the rules of an inevitably patriarchal symbolic, but proposes in its place the equivalent of a lesbian subject as language user.

Teresa de Lauretis, a feminist film critic, has drawn on the work of

Althusser, and particularly Foucault, to describe what she calls a ‘technology of gender’. She makes four important points. First, gender is a representation, it is semiotic. It works through discourses, images and signs, which only function in relation to one another. Gender is not something, which exists in bodies but is, in

Foucault’s words, which she quotes, ‘the set of effects produced in bodies, behaviours, and social relations’ by the deployment of a ‘complex political technology’ (de Lauretis 3). She says that the construction of gender is produced through what Althusser called the ‘Ideological State Apparatus’, the media, school, the courts, the family and so on. The construction of gender is, “the product and the process of both representation and self representation. (9)

Lesbianism: the sexual behaviour of lesbians seems not to be an issue in a heterosexual order which defines sexuality in terms of male sexual performance. It may be the persecution of lesbians is more covert, that it is implicit in the culture of heterosexism. In her analysis of social science research about lesbians, Annabel

Faraday criticises the assumption that lesbians and gay men share certain characteristics because of their same sex relationships: “what is not recognised is 20 that while both lesbians and gay men are not heterosexual, heterosexuality itself is a power relationship of men over women; what gay men and lesbians are rejecting are essentially polar experiences (113). Here she argues for the specificity of lesbian experience; that it must be seen as an experience specific to women.

Adrienne Rich makes the same point that to equate lesbian existence with male homosexuality because each is stigmatized is to erase female reality once again

(Rich 239). She uses number of terms in the essay Compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence to describe lesbian or female reality, which has had a continuing influence on attempts to (re)conceptualize lesbian experience. She acknowledges that lesbian is term in a contemporary debate about female existence, for which she provides a historical trajectory not determined or limited by heterosexual assumptions. “Lesbian existence is used to describe both ‘the historical presence of lesbians and our continuing creation of the meaning of that existence. (239)

Rich influences the essay the woman identified woman by Radicalesbians, in which a group of lesbian feminists, argue that what identifies the lesbian is her rejection of the female role as constituted for her by her society. Subsequently, the term ‘woman identified the woman’ has been used to refer to a woman whose frame of reference was not that of the heterosexist feminine, but who may or may not be a lesbian (Radialesbians 240-245). That is, it describes the woman who refuses the stereotypical femininity assigned to women by compulsory heterosexuality-competitive (with other women), gossipy (about other women), nasty (to other women).

Phelan argues against fixed notions of lesbian identity, which tie lesbianism into heterosexuality as its defining opposite. She suggests that an individual becomes lesbian or not with the choices one makes (Phelan 52). These choices are 21

essentially about recognizing the socio cultural specificity of heterosexuality. She

also argues for a politics in place of an identity: ‘I do not need epistemology to

justify my desire, my life, my love. I need politics; I need to build a world that

doesn’t require such justifications.’ (55)

The lesbian feminists describe the experience of both lesbians and women

who do not identify as lesbians and indicate the social critique implicit in any

rejection of stereotypical femininity; both non-stereotypical heterosexual women and lesbians make a socially critical choice to behave as woman identified. The experience of heterosexual women and lesbians cannot be separated as clearly as heterosexist discourse claims. This interrelationship reinforces the notion that lesbianism is a specifically female experience, not just a female version of male homosexuality; however, it does not help to explain the specificity of lesbianism.

Defining lesbian raised a number of issues about the nature of identities based on sexuality, not least of which is the extent to which current conceptions are inevitably based on a rejection of heterosexist versions of identity, which move beyond sexuality to gender. Lesbianism demonstrates the extent to which the gendering of all women take place in relation to heterosexist norms, which assume

complaint femininity devoid of autonomous sexual desire.

Homosexual: it means having a sexual propensity for persons of one’s own sex. It came into general usage following the 1892 translation of Krafft-Ebbing’s

Psychopathia Sexualis. Swiss doctor Karoly Maria Benkert used the term

‘homosexual’ in a response to German anti-homosexual legislation in 1869 to describe an ‘inborn, and therefore irrepressible, drive’(Plummer 142). Foucault also records the use of the term in 1870, it describes ‘less a type of sexual relations than a certain quality of sexual sensibility, a certain way of inverting the masculine 22 and the feminine in oneself’ (43). The 19th century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology. (43)

Subjectivity: subjectivity and the subjects are the terms that have generally replaced the terms ‘selfhood’, ‘the self’ and the ‘individual’ when talking about who we are and how we get to be that way. The term ‘the self’ suggests rational, coherent, autonomous beings fully present to themselves and in control of their actions, thoughts, and meanings, but the term subjectivity and the subject suggest less powerful, more tentative beings who are subject to forces not entirely within their control or comprehension. The terms subjectivity and subjects remind us that each of us is born into a particular historical moment, a particular social class and culturally specific place with its own systems of meaning, coherence and value.

Many of the major male theorists of subjectivity suppress the issue of gender.

Theorists such as Teresa de Lauretis employ the same negotiative model of subject formation to explore gender as both representation and self representation and she asks one question, “if the deconstruction of gender inevitably effects its

(re)construction, the question is in which terms and in whose interest is the de-re- construction being effected?. (Lauretis 24)

The Question of Identity Politics: The feminist theorists, whose work constitutes the female liberation movements, speak to a universal sisterhood of women and for that universal sisterhood. They consistently failed to recognise that there were crucial differences between themselves and many of the women for whom they spoke; primarily between themselves and the women who had very different life experiences and backgrounds between them (Francis 55). Many of the 23

theorists belong to white and middleclass and come from privileged backgrounds:

most of the theories were based on the experience of their own. And another

problem is that of failure of recognition in that it constructed a universal woman

who was effectively disfranchised, silenced. Those women who did not fit her

description.

Barbara Omolade writes in 1985 about the failure of white feminists to

include the history and culture of women of colour in their writings. “We assert

simply that black women are not white women with colour but are women whose

colour has obscured, their historical and cultural experiences as Africans, as chattel

slaves and as more than half the population of the black community (248). She

explains the different experiences of black and white women. Most of the Western

European women’s books deal with non-European women, but only as victims and

preyers upon each other (Lorde 67). They are not writing any cultural heritage of

non-European. The assumption that her story and myth of white women is the

legitimate and her story and myth of all women to call upon for power and

background, and that non-white women and their stories are noteworthy only as decorations, or examples of victimization .(69)

Omolade says that in the middle ages, the social position and status of western European women were very poor (247). Many writers exclude feminism by emphasising that, apart from male-female difference, other differences such as those of colour, sexual identity, which are also used oppressively, are simultaneously glaring and invisible, and she also says that the taboo against

lesbianism is a reflection of the social constitution of femininity: ‘the dependency

of men upon women is a great secret of history (Tucker 267- 271). One of the

strategic politics of conservative society (patriarchal) is othering. Lorde says 24 institutionalised rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people (115). The distinction here is between the notion of ‘other’ and the difference.

She says that the institutional strategy of creating others, who are often to everything a society and its citizens represent. And here she draws on the

‘difference’. There are many differences between us- ‘race, age and sex, but that these differences are not what separate us. It is rather our refusal to recognize those differences and to examine the distortions which result from our misnaming them and their effects on human behaviour and expectations (115). Here she notes on class difference that, unacknowledged class differences rob women of each other’s energy and creative insight of race as white women ignore their built in privilege of whiteness and define women in terms of their own experiences and tradition which is too alien to comprehend.

Lorde’s concept of ‘difference’ works against the silencing impulse of

Othering and its results to accept the ‘Others’ as autonomous, but different. It gives recognition that universalism is a strategy of winners; the only people who can write as if their experience is shared by all are those who are in positions of social dominance. It deconstructs the binaristic thoughts. Contemporary gender theorists try to explain that difference provides a basis for simultaneous recognition of similarities and the acknowledgement of difference for sharing but not suppressing. It is an indispensible conceptual category of contemporary gender theorists. “Difference always implies the interdependency of these two sided feminist gestures: that of affirming ‘Iam like you’ while pointing insistently to the difference and that of reminding ‘Iam different’ while unsettling the very definition of otherness arrived at. (Trinh 152) 25

Helen Cixous revisites the list of binaries such as man/women and father/

mother are equated with others such as activity/passivity, culture/nature,

intelligible/sensitive, logos/pathos, and sun/moon. She continues to suggest a way in which they can be undone, not by reversing or revalorising them, but by an explicit acknowledgement of their hierarchal nature (90-91). Derrida writes about the privileging of the term in the oppositions- the equivalent of the Cixous hierarchy. He explains that not only is one term privileged above the other, but that the secondary term in the binary is central to the definition of the privileged term.

In man/woman, the term ‘man’ is privileged; it exists as the dominant term in the hierarchy, man/woman. Also the term ‘woman’ has no independent existence, no autonomy; it exists as the negative or opposite of the primary term

‘man’. Man is defined as what woman is not, activity, culture, father, head, intelligible, logos. Most of the theoreticians use the similar deconstructive practice; rather than reverse the opposition; instead they reveal how the hidden secondary term is pivotal for the meaning of the primary term and deconstruct its position as primarily. The other term is the binary which is recognized as a construction that defines, by opposition, the dominant term. So gender is seen to be one of the factors operating in the production of an event or an individual subjectivity.

Derrida’s notion of erasure is relevant here.

Martin Heideggar developed the term erasure, but it is extensively used by

Derrida. The word has been described as the typographical expression that seeks to identify sites within texts where key terms and concepts may be paradoxical or self determining, rendering their meaning undecidable (Belsey 116). It’s not just the particular signs that were placed under erasure, but the whole system of signification. To write a word and cross it out then print both word and deletion. 26

The word is inaccurate, but it is necessary, hence prints the word. Other wise

delete it. This concept is can be seen in the representation of women in the films. If

women is not necessary in the mainstream, she will be deleted the scene.

Difference and Power: power is usually described as a characteristic of

some group in society- men, the middle classes, whites etc. Marxist theorists

emphasise that the middle classes are in the position of self, the dominant position

and they maintain that position by a systematic repression of the working classes.

They emphasise that working class people are powerless and repressed. The view

of bourgeois society does explain some social behaviours and situations. It has

many passive after effects. First, it constitutes the working classes as victims and

makes it very difficult to imagine how they might ever improve their social

situation, except perhaps by the good will of the middle classes. Second, it doesn’t

provide a way of understanding how the working class people do exercise power,

both to resist bourgeois demand and in their social and personal relationships

(Francis 66).

In the same way is the position in relation to men and women, in that men have the power and maintain it by systematic repression of women. But women are constructed as victims, structurally incapable of improving their social positioning other than by the good will of individual men. Instead of power being seen as a repressive force that some people have access to and others don’t; powers can be thought of simply as enabling; power enables things to happen. Foucault describes power, ‘power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither it is a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to complex strategical situation in a particular society (93). For Foucault, power is not inherently in particular institutions or situation or individuals; rather, it is our 27

perception of the matrix of forces in operation that we recognize as power. Another

implication is that operations of power can be grasped at a local, not only global,

level; it is the moving substrate of force relations which, by virtue of their

inequality, constantly engender states of power, but the latter are always local and

unstable (93). This perspective is critical for the development of gender studies.

Immutability, universality and irresistibility are reconceived as strategies, that are

part of the operation of power, which becomes crucial to study the minute

operations of the matrices of power, in order that their strategies may be

understood and the power relations themselves disrupted.

Another relevant perspective of Foucault’s model of power is that power is seen as pervasive. Power is everywhere, not because it embraces everything but

because it comes from everywhere (93). It means that we are all implicated in the

operations of power. No particular group exists in isolation. Even within the most

isolated group, power will operate. He explains one of the the practises of power is

that of a confession. Through the confession people were incited to tell the truth

about their emotions, desires dispositions etc. Through it the identity that had to be

monitored, cultivated and often controlled. The power is productive as well as

constraining. It not only limits what the people can do, but also develop new ways

of acting and thinking about themselves.

Patriarchy: Patriarchy is used as shorthand to indicate a social system in

which maleness and masculinity confer a privileged position of power and

authority; where man is the self to which woman is other. It is generally used to

refer to the systematic structural differences in the cultural, economic and social

position of men in relation to women. Sylvia Walby says patriarchy is composed of

six structures: patriarchal mode of production, patriarchal relation in paid work, 28 patriarchal relations in the state, male violence, patriarchal relations in sexuality, and patriarchal relations of cultural institutions (20). To relate each of the structures, possible to identify that these patriarchal practices are less deeply sedimented. These structures are relatively autonomous.

Patriarchy is a social system in which structural differences in privilege, power and authority are invested in masculinity and the cultural, economic or social positions of men. Under a patriarchal system, women are excluded from positions of power and authority to support individual men or the social system as a whole. In Understanding Masculinities, Martin Max AnGhaill is concerned to build up a more complex model for understanding masculinity and male domination as cultural and social practices that are part of large scale social structures and processes. Connell points out that “the main axis of power in the contemporary European/American gender relations remains the overall subordination of women and dominance of men- the structure of women’s liberation named patriarchy (Cornnell 74). The phrases male hegemony or hegemonic masculinity are used by some instead of the term ‘patriarchy’ in reference to the widespread domination of men in the social, economic and cultural spheres. He says that the concept of hegemony refers to the cultural dynamic by which a group claims and sustains a leading position in social life and is borrowed from Antonio Gramsci’s analysis of class relations. (77)

Femininity and Masculinity as impersonate: Joan Riviere’s 1929 essay womanliness as masquerade suggests that genuine womanliness and masquerade are one and the same, that is, there is a performative masquerading aspect to the assumption of normal masculine and feminine subjectivity: patriarchal femininity and masculinity are masquerades in which both sexes adopt a role which covers 29

the ambivalence and anxiety of subjectivity and sexual identity. She points out that

“in everyday life one may observe the mask of femininity taking on curious forms

(Riviere 39). She states to an extremely competent woman of her acquaintance

who can attend to typically masculine matters, nevertheless, whenever a man is

present: ‘ she has a compulsion to hide all her technical knowledge from him and

show difference to the work man, making her suggestions in an innocent and

artless manner, as if they were lucky guesses. (39)

Stephan Heath cites Virginia Woolf’s mocking excoriation of masculine

uniforms in Three Guineas: ‘your cloths in the first place make us gape with

astonishment, every button; rosette and stripe seem to have some symbolical

meaning’. Indeed they do: “all the trappings of authority, hierarchy, order, position

make the man” (Heath 56). Riviere’s works concentrate on the sexual identity as

construction and representation. Another prominent theorist Judith Butler proposes

a radical critique of all categories of identity. In her book, Gender Trouble, she proposes an analysis of gender and sex in terms not of inner capacities, attributes and identities, but of a set of repeated performances that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being. (190)

According to Butler, gender only exists in the service of heterosexism; gender identities come about and are dependent upon what she calls ‘the heterosexual matrix. She argues that, it is precisely the butch lesbian and the drag queen, whose performance radically problematize sex, gender and sexuality in their parodic repetition of the heterosexual original. Since hetero sexuality itself is only produced through its connection to the repeated signifying practices of gender, gay is to straight not as copy is to an original but rather as copy is to copy.

In imagining gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself 30 as well as its contingency (191). Butler in her book Bodies that Matter emphasises that compulsory heterosexuality is not a natural category but rather a system built up by repeating over and over again a series of gestures.

Transvestism: it is the practice of dressing in the clothes of the opposite sex although clothes often include cosmetics and body language. Marjorie Garber writes on transvestism: ‘ if it is not a critique of gender roles, that may be because it is a critique of gender itself as a category (Garber 9). It is a radical, because visible, deconstruction of the performitivity of gender.

Transvestism intrigues people of all sexualities because of its concern with the borders or boundaries that maintain the sexes in a particular configuration. It is sometimes overtly and deliberately shocking because of the way it reveals one of the mechanisms by which the sexes are constructed in physical appearance and

(self) representation. Garber extends the interrogative function of transvestism beyond the boundaries of gender to include those between one class and another, one race and another, one religion and another and in fact, all the binaries which constitute social sphere - black/white, master/servant, workingclass/middleclass, and heterosexual/homosexual. In popular representations, transvestism marks the site of anxieties about class, race and religion as well as about gender:

‘transvestism is a space of possibility structuring and confounding culture: the disruptive element that intervenes, not just a category crisis of male and female, but the crisis of category itself. (Garber 17)

Filmic texts operate as technologies of gender. Teresa de Lauretis says that,

“the construction of gender is the product and the process of both representation 31

self-representation (9). So the construction of gender occurs both in representation

and self representation of individuals. She notes that

‘ the construction of gender goes on through the various technologies

of gender (cinema) and institution discourses (theory) with power to

control the field of social meaning and thus produce, promote and

implant representations of gender. But the terms of a different

construction of gender also exist, in the margins of hegemonic

discourses. Posed from outside the heterosexual contract, and inscribed

in micro political practices, these terms can also have a part in the

construction of gender, and their effects are at the local level of

resistance, in subjectivity and self representation’ (18).

Different ways of seeing by looking at stereotypes, their functions, their resistance etc can be seen. In John Berger’s book Ways of Seeing (1972), he writes,

“men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being

looked at. This determines not only most relation between men and women but

also the relation of women to themselves. The survey of woman herself is male:

the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object and most particularly an

object of vision: a sight. (47)

The narration of nation occurred by the powerful historical idea in the west.

They created nations, with their lose origins in the myths of time, but only it

happens through the mind’s eye. Homi K Bhaba says that narration of nation loses

their origins in the myths of time and only fully realizes their horizons in the

mind’s eye. Such an image of the nation- or narration- might seem impossibly

romantic and excessively metaphorical, but it is from those traditions of political 32

thought and literary language that the nation emerges as a powerful historical idea

in the west (1). The idea of western cultural coercion lies in the impossible unity of

the nation as a symbolic force. He emphasises that, large and liminal image of the

nation is a particular ambivalence that haunts the idea of the nation, the language of those who write of it and the lives of those who live it. It is an ambivalence that emerges from a growing awareness that, despite the certainty with which historians speak of the origins of nation as a sign of the modernity of the society, the cultural temporality of the nation inscribes a much more transitional social reality. In

Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson expresses the nation’s ambivalent emergence:

The century of the enlightenment, of rationalist secularism,

brought it darkness. [Few] things were (are) suited to this end better

than the idea of nation. If nation states are widely considered to be

‘new’ and ‘historical’, the nation states to which they give political

expression always loom out of an immemorial past and glide into a

limitless future. What I am proposing is that Nationalism has to be

understood, by aligning it not with self-consciously held political

ideologies, but with large cultural systems that preceded it, out of

which as well as against which it came into being (19).

The nation’s ‘coming into being’ as a system of cultural signification, as the representation of social life rather than the discipline of social polity, emphasizes this instability of knowledge. For example, the most interesting account of the national idea, if they come from different groups in the country, looks as if to assent on the ambivalent tension that defines the ‘society of the nation’. 33

Michel Oakeshott’s view of the national space is constituted

from competing dispositions of human association as societas (the

acknowle- dgement of moral rules and conventions of conduct) and

universitas (the acknowledgement of common purpose and substantive

end). In the absence of their merging into a new identity they have

survived as competing dogmas imposing a particular ambivalence upon

all the institutions of a modern state and a specific ambiguity upon its

vocabulary of discourse.” (201)

The scholars use referendum with different manner. Some one says that it is a safeguard of constitution, but some political theorists support it, for it will check on the excess of unrestricted party government. But others consider it might be used an elite streghtening device. He also explains the referendum is not a method by which ‘mass man’ imposes his choices upon his rulers; it is a method for generating a government with unlimited authority to make choices on his behalf. In the peblicite (referendum) the mass man achieved release from the burden of individuality he was told emphatically what to choose (380). And in

Hannah Arendt’s perspective, the society of the nation in the modern world is that

curiously hybrid realm where private interests assume public significance and the

two realms follow unceasingly and uncertainly into each other ‘like waves in the

never-ending stream of the life-process itself’. (33-35)

Tom Nairn calls nation as the ‘modern Janus’, that the uneven development

of capitalism inscribes progression and regression, political rationality and irrationality in the very genetic code of the nation. This is a structural fact to which there are no exceptions and in this sense, it is an exact (not a rhetorical) statement about nationalism to say that it is by nature ambivalent’ (Nairn 348). This is the 34

cultural representation of the ambivalence of modern society. If the ambivalent

figure of the nation is a problem of its transitional history, its conceptual

indeterminacy, its wavering between vocabularies, then what effect does this have

on narrative and discourses that signify a sense of nationness: the Heimlich

pleasures of the hearth, the unheimlich terror of the space or race of the Other; the

comfort of social belonging, the hidden injuries of class; the customs of taste; the

powers of political affiliation; the sense of social order, the sensibility of sexuality;

the blindness of bureaucracy, the straight insight of institutions; the quality of

justice, the common sense of injustice; the langue of the law and the parole of the

people. (Bhabha 2)

The emergence of the political rationality of the nation as a form of

narrative, textual strategies, metaphoric displacements, subtexts and figurative

stratagems has its own history. Benedict Anderson has also suggested these ideas

in his view of the space and time of the modern nation as embodied in the narrative

culture of the realist novel. To encounter the nation as it is written displays a

temporality of culture and social consciousness more in tune with the partial,

overdetermined process by which textual meaning is produced through the

articulation of difference in language. Such an approach contests the traditional authority of those national objects of knowledge- tradition, people, the reason of state, high culture, for instance, whose didactic value relies on their representation as holistic concepts located with an evolutionary narrative of historical continuity.

Traditional histories do not take the nation as its own word, but for the most part, they do assume that the problem lies with the interpretation of events that have a certain transparency or privileged visibility. 35

To study the nation through its narrative address does not merely draw

attention to its language and rhetoric; it also attempts to alter the conceptual object

itself. If the problematic closure of textuality questions the totalization of national

culture, then its positive value lies in displaying the wide dissemination through

which we construct the field of meanings and symbols associated with national

life. Despite the considerable advance this represents, there is a tendency to read

the nation rather restrictively; either, as the ideological apparatus of state power,

somewhat redefined by a hasty, functionalist reading of Foucault, or Bhakthin; or

in a more utopian inversion, as the incipient or emergent expression of the

national-popular sentiment preserved in a radical memory. These approaches are

valuable in drawing our attention to those easily obscured, but highly significant,

recesses of the national culture from which alternative constituencies of people and

oppositional analytic capacities may emerge- youth, the everyday, nostalgia, new

ethnicities, new social movements, the politics of difference. They assign new

meanings and different directions to the process of historical change. The most progressive development from such positions takes a discursive conception of

ideology- it is conceptualised in terms of the articulation of elements. As

Volosinov said, the ideological sign is always multi-accentual and Janus faced.

(Hall 9)

Edward Said prescribes a kind of analytic pluralism as the form of critical

attention appropriate to the cultural effects of the nation. For the nation, as a form

of cultural elaboration (in the Gramscian sense), is an agency of ambivalent

narration that holds culture as its most productive position, as a force for

‘subordination, fracturing, diffusing, reproducing, as much as producing, creating,

forcing, guiding’ (Said 171). Bhabha says that the nation is one of the major 36

structures of ideological ambivalence within the cultural representations of

modernity. It should be studied with the insight of poststructural theories of

narrative knowledge-textuality, discourse, enunciation, ecriture, ‘the unconscious as a language’ to name only a few strategies- in order to evoke this ambivalent margin of the nation-space. To reveal such a margin is, in the first instance, to contest claims to cultural supremacy, whether these are made from the old post imperialist metropolitan nations, or on behalf of the new independent nations of the periphery.

The marginal or minority is not the space of a celebratory, or utopian, self- marginalization. It is a much more substantial intervention into those justifications of modernity-progress, homogeneity, cultural organicism, the deep nation, the long past- that rationalise the authoritarian, normalizing tendencies within cultures in the name of the national interestor, the ethnic prerogative. In this sense, the ambivalent, belligerent perspective of nation as narration will establish the cultural boundaries of the nation so that they may be acknowledged as ‘containing’ thresholds of meaning that must be crossed, erased, and translated in the process of cultural production.

The locality of national culture is neither unified nor unitary in relation to itself, nor must it be seen simply as ‘other’ in relation to what is outside or beyond it. The boundary is Janus- faced and the problem of outside/inside must always itself be a process of hybridity, incorporating new ‘people’ in relation to the body politic, generating other sites of meaning and, inevitably, in the political process, producing unmanned sites of political antagonism and unpredictable forces for

political representation. The ‘other’ is never outside or beyond us; it emerges

forcefully, within cultural discourse, when we think we speak most intimately and 37 indigenously ‘between ourselves’ (Bhabha 4). The origins of national traditions turn out to be as much acts of affiliation and establishment as they are moments of disavowal, displacement, exclusion and cultural contestation. In this function of national history as Entstellung, the forces of social antagonism or contradiction cannot be transcended or dialectically surmounted. There is a suggestion that the constitutive contradictions of the national texts are discontinuous and ‘interruptive’

(Spivak 251). The directors produce panoramic views of the Indian history of the national idea and its visual forms and lead to a more articulate awareness of the postcolonial and neo-colonial conditions as authoritative positions from which to speak Janus- faced to east and west.

The modern nation is a historical result brought about by a series of convergent facts. Sometimes unity has been effected by a dynasty, sometimes it has been brought about by the direct will of provinces, sometimes it has been the work of general consciousness, belatedly victorious over the whims of feudalism.

Ernest Renan says that,

a nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things, which in

truth are but one, constitute this soul or spiritual principle. One lies in

the past, one in the present. One is the possession in common of a rich

legacy of memories; the other is present day consent, the desire to live

together, the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that has one as

received in an undivided form. The nation, like the individual, is the

culmination of a long past of endeavours, sacrifice and devotion. (19)

A nation is a large scale of solidarity, constituted by the feeling of the sacrifice that one has made in the past and of those that one is prepared to make in 38 the future. It presupposes a past; it is summarized, however, in the present by a tangible fact, namely, consent, the clearly expressed desire to continue a common life.

Some point to global developments that cast nationalism in the refractory light of heroic memory, where the invariable goals of creating an administrative economy, a repressive apparatus capable of waging war, and a sense of belonging that glosses over class conflicts, which are being passed over in favour of local affiliations and loyalties on the one hand, and on the other, are being rendered obsolete by the international realities of multinational corporations and the telecommunications industry. But Tom Nairn stresses what he calls nationalism’s

Janus-face – the fact that it is the communal and authoritarian, friendly and bellicose, all at the same time. He insists that the most vital thing about it is its chameleon content: its ability to rouse unlike peoples in dramatically unlike conditions in an impassioned chorus of voluntary co-operation and sacrifice, in which nationalism’s unviability is less an impersonal fact of neo colonialism-plus- technics than a political wish, since it is a reactionary throwback that impedes the solidarities of internationalism. (Brennan 45)

Belgian communications scholar Armand Mattlelart revises this view without ignoring the values of Independence movements. He recognizes that the utopian projections of Marx and Engels in the manifesto, which looked forward to the withering away of ‘national one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness’ and the transformations of ‘national and local literatures’ into single ‘world literature’ have grown, dialectically, into its opposite. The idea that it is necessary to smash the nation-state, the last obstacle to the new phase of the worldwide expansion of transnational capital, and transform it into a simple management state in an 39

‘independent’ world, is becoming naturalised. The transnationalization process creates an appeal for increasingly similar, ecumenical and universal values, or, to use the terms of Brzezinski, ‘a new planetary consciousness’, a new ‘harmony’, a

‘new world unity’ and a new ‘consensus’ (Mattelart 57). He clearly states here an important ideological tendency that is often only implicit that, on one level, nationalism is an obsolete school of thought is as unable to account for the positive necessity of defensive nationalism as imperial ideologues.

Paul Ricouer speaks of the characteristics of postwar period- between

‘universal civilisation’ and ‘national culture’, between the involuntary mutual awareness and dependency of every people and region made possible by civilization, as well as the dogged persistence of defensive movements helping subject peoples carve out a bit of space on the earth’s economic turf: “ everywhere throughout the world one finds the same bad movies, the same slot machines, the same plastic and aluminium atrocities, the same twisting of language by propaganda, etc” (Ricouer 276-277). On the one hand, [the developing world] has to root itself in the soil of its past, forge a national spirit, and unfurl this spiritual and cultural revindication before the colonialists’s personality. But in order to take part in modern civilization, it is necessary, at the same time, to take part in scientific, technical, and political rationality, something which very often requires the pure and simple abandonment of a whole cultural past (Ricoeur 276-277).

After the Second World War, Third World fictions’ usage of ‘nation’ and nationalism are most pronounced. The nation is precisely what Foucault has called a ‘discursive formation’- not simply an allegory or imaginative vision, but a gestative political structure which the Third World artist is consciously building or suffering the lack of. ‘Uses’ here should be understood both in a personal, 40 craftsman like sense, where nationalism is a trope for such things as ‘belonging’,

‘boardering’, and ‘commitment’. But it should also be understood as the institutional uses of fiction in nationalist movements themselves. At the present time, it is often impossible to separate these senses.

Most of the western writings and visual Medias are neglecting third world countries. If they discuss about the third world, it is only race and colonialism, but not the ‘nation’ as such. The period following the Second World War, English society was transformed by its earlier imperial encounters. The wave of post war immigration to the imperial centres –including England- the influx of large numbers of non-white people from Africa and the Caribbean, and America, from

Asia and Latin America – amounted to what Gorden Lewis calls ‘a colonialism reverse’ – a new sense of what it means to be ‘English’. To a lesser extent, the same has happened in France (304). The Indian English writer Salman Rushdie points out, in which English, ‘no longer an English language, now grows from many roots; and those whom it once colonized are carving out large territories within the language for themselves’(Rushdie 8). Ariel Dorfman, has written that

‘there may be no better way for a country to know itself than to examine the myths and popular symbols that it exports to its economic and military dominions (8).

And this would be even truer when the myths come home. One of the most durable myths has certainly been the ‘nation.

In cultural studies, the nation has often lurked behind terms like ‘tradition’, folklore, or ‘community’, obscuring their origins in what Benedict Anderson has called ‘the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time’(Anderson 12). Literature participates in the formation of nations through the creation of national print media, the newspaper and the novel. In tracing these ties 41 between literature and nation, some have evoked the fictive quality of the political concept itself. Eric Hobsbawm’s and Terence Ranger’s recent work on ‘the invention of tradition’, is really a synonym in their writing for the animus of any successful nation-state: It is clear that plenty of political institutions, ideological movements and groups- not least in nationalism – were so unprecedented that even historic continuity had to be invented, for example by creating an ancient past beyond effective historical continuity either by semi fiction or by forgery. It is also clear that entirely new symbols and devices came into existence, such as the national anthem, national flag, or the personification of the nation in symbol or image. (Hobsbawm 7)

Nationalism is enmeshed in the particular history of Europe and its ideology of ‘democracy’; it necessarily invokes the ‘people’, although this people become, increasingly after the late 19th century, inseparable from the modern working class, both in the Marxist sense, and in that hybrid of Marxism and Third

World populism made famous by figures like Fanon and many others. The folk, the plebeians, the people, the working class, are now important components for any inclusive treatment of the nation in fiction, as Bruce King has pointed out: nationalism is an urban movement which identifies with the rural areas as a source of authenticity, finding in the ‘folk’ the attitudes, beliefs, customs, and language to create a sense of national unity among people who have other loyalties.

Nationalism aims at rejection of cosmopolitan upper classes, intellectuals and others likely to be influenced by foreign ideas. (King 42)

In India, the idea of creating a united nation in a religiously, linguistically, culturally plural society came to be associated with the notion of secular 42

democracy and visions of creating a rapidly industrialising society. All in all,

nationalism was considered a positive virtue.

According to Aijaz Ahmad, there was Gandhian nationalism,

and there was Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s nationalism of the two nation

theory which undid the composite nation of Gandhi’s cherished dreams

and created one of the larger – nation states of its time. There is a

secular nationalism which eventually got written into the constitution

of the Indian Republic and was in any case dominant for almost half a

century. (41-42)

The leading core of the national movement always thought of secularism, conceived as multi-religious tolerance, as a necessary ingredient in the making of a modern nationhood for India, and that this core perceived the lack of secularism, in that sense, among its own ranks as a weakness and a deficit in the power and legitimacy of the movement as a whole (51).

Ernest Gellner defines nationalism as primarily a political principle, which holds that the political and national unit should be congruent. It is a sentiment, or as a movement, can best be defined in terms of this principle. Nationalist sentiment is the feeling of anger aroused by the violation of the principle, or the feeling of satisfaction aroused by its fulfilment. A nationalist movement is one actuated by sentiment of this kind (1). Another important theoretical perspective of nationalism is Benedict Anderson’s definition. He proposes the definition of nation: ‘it is an imagined political community, and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign (6). By ‘imagined’, he does not mean ‘imaginary’, but rather that people who define themselves as members of a nation ‘will never know most of their 43

fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives

the image of their communion (6). Unlike Gellner, who concentrates on the

political aspects of nationalism, Anderson is concerned about understanding the

force and persistence of national identification and sentiment. The fact that people

are willing to die for their nation indicates its extraordinary force.

Graeme Turner suggests that the identifications with ‘the nation’ can be

extremely arbitrary. Post war reconstructions of European national boundaries were clearly arbitrary and cannot have hoped to construct ‘national’ allegiances

easily with a line drawn across a map. Recent events have revealed how

unsatisfactory such strategies have been. The middle east is a further site of the

rejection of what are seen as arbitrary attempts to establish definitions of separate

nations. The idea of the nation can operate at the most basic levels of meaning and discourse. It becomes an overriding set of priorities which define what is acceptable and what is not, what is normal and what is not, all through defining, what is Australian or British or American and what is not (Turner 157). More recently, newspapers, television, and radio have played and still play a crucial part in standardising representations and language. These media also play an important

part in the reproduction and strengthening of nationalist sentiment.

The idea of nation is enlisted in achieving and maintaining hegemony.

Hegemony is the process by which members of society are persuaded to acquiesce

in their own subordination, to abdicate cultural leadership in favour of sets of

interests which are represented as identical, but may actually be antithetical, to

their own. The subordinated are persuaded by the ideologies offered rather than the

particulars of their material conditions. Turner says that Hegemony’s aim is to

resist social change and maintain the status quo (158). The rules, regulations and 44

controls of definitions of art, literature, and the national film industry are also

hegemonic in that vital is always to restrict and limit the propagation of

representations of the nation. This propagation of representation also produces

different meaning. Representations of nation are themselves particularly important,

because they both create and replicate the dominant point of view. The diverse

depictions will produce different status and will have different meanings. In fact,

they will construct a different nation. Like other ideological constructions,

representations of the nation are not fixed; their political and cultural importance is

such that they are sites of considerable competition. To gain control of the

representational agenda for the nation is to gain considerable power over

individuals’ view of themselves and each other.

The nationalization of film promotion through national marketing offices

reveals how closely indigenous film production is connected to the representation

and dissemination of images of the nation at home and overseas. When films act as

representatives of as well as representation, of the nation overseas they become

subject to a different regime of inspection. (160)

Racism has historically been both an ally and the partial product of

colonialism. The most obvious victims of racism are those whose identity was

forged within the colonial cauldron. Africans, Asians, and the indigenous peoples

of the Americans as well as those displaced by colonialism, such as Asians and

West Indians in Great Britain, Arabs in France. Jules Harmand says that “the basic legitimation of conquest over native peoples is the conviction of our superiority,

not merely our mechanical, economic, and military superiority, but our moral

superiority” (Curtain 194-195). Racist thinking is tautological and circular; we are

powerful because we are right, and we are right because we are powerful. It is also 45

essentializing, ahistorical, and metaphysical projecting difference across historical

time: “they are all that way, and they will always be that way (Shohat and Stam

19). Albert Memmi defines Racism, “the generalized and final assigning of values

to real or imaginary differences, to the accuser’s benefit and at his victim’s

expense, in order to justify the former’s own privilege or aggression (Memmi186).

Racial categories are not natural but constructs, not absolutes but relative, situational, even narrative categories, engendered by historical process of differentiation. The categorization of the same person can vary with me, location, and context ( Shohat and Stam19).

Race is associated with many emotionally laden issues, including racism, affirmative action, race-based quotas, and acts of personal prejudice, political

correctness, and sentiments against ethnic minorities. The experiences of most

racial and ethnic minorities are coloured by their status as minorities. Race has

been based on phenotypical differences in skin colour, facial features, and hair and

has been extended to include judgements on intelligence and other psychological

characteristics. These physical differences, however, were determined to be

inappropriate measures of separateness, so much so that the American

Anthropological Association (1998) issued a statement suggesting that race no

longer be used as a biological classification but instead be viewed as a product of

socio-political issues and economics (Schwarzbaum and Anita Jones Thomas 7).

Skin colour is probably more a historical adaptation to climate and environmental

conditions rather than a representation of genetic differences. Contrary to people’s beliefs, purity of the races is a myth (American Anthropological Association).

Race has socio-political connotations because race is a reason for political oppression. It was used for determining citizenship and land ownership and served 46 as a justification for oppressive acts.People are often socialized to pretend that race does not exist, encouraged and rewarded to see people as individuals without colour. Yet, for many, particularly ethnic minorities, race is primary identifier. It provides a sense of pride, a sense of connection and belonging; it becomes an all encompassing source of identity. One’s racial affiliation can determine life style choices and values, and it influences relationships and behaviours. But race can also lead to a sense of shame, discomfort, embarrassment, and fear as individuals encounter experiences of oppression and racism. Race can lead individuals to engage in stereotypical behaviour or behaviours that serve as attempts to fight against stereotypes.

Concepts of race can nevertheless be important to the extent that they inform people’s actions; at this level, race exists as a cultural construct, whether it has a ‘biological’ reality or not. Racism builds on the assumption that personality is somehow linked with hereditary characteristics which differ systematically between ‘races’, and in this way race may assume sociological importance even if it has no ‘objective’ existence. In Michael Banton’s view, race refers to the categorisation of people, and racism is more oriented to the categorisation of

‘them’. (106)

Genocide and the Plural Society: the plural society provides the structural base for genocide, the presence of the diversity of racial, ethnic and/or religious groups being the structural characteristics of the plural society, and genocide a crime committed against these groups. This is not to say that genocide is inevitable in the history of plural societies, but only that plural societies offer the necessary conditions for domestic genocide. Many genocidal conflicts in plural societies suggest an intimate relationship between the plural society and genocide. For 47

example, India’s partition, pogroms, Bangladesh’s partition etc. In the plural

society, racial or ethnic, or religious differentiation is elaborated in many different

spheres. There is generally inequality in the mode of political incorporation. The

political inequality is usually associated with economic discrimination, in the

opportunities for employment, in wages, in access to the means of production.

There is almost certain to be discrimination also in provision for education,

sometimes with quite startling differences in expenditure for dominant groups as

compared with subordinate. Segregation may be imposed in many spheres,

including prohibition against intermarriage, or an increasing segregation may develop in the course of conflicts protracted over many years. Differences in culture and social organization may add further to the division between the different sections.

The plural society is characterised by a superimposition of inequalities. The same sections are dominant or subordinate, favoured or discriminated against, in the political structure, in the economy, in opportunities for education, in human rights, in access to amenity. And issues of conflict tend also to be superimposed along the same lines of cleavage and inequality. These structural conditions are likely to be conducive to genocidal conflict. They aggregate the population into distinctive sections, thereby facilitating crimes against collectivities. The divisions being so pervasive, and relatively consistent in many spheres, issues of conflict may move rapidly from one sector to another, until almost the entire society is polarized. A quite local racial disturbance, for example, of seemingly minor significance, may set off a chain of reactions, rioting at distant geographical points, demonstrations, strike action, police reprisals, reciprocal terrorism and violent political confrontation at a national level. So too, by reason of the superimposition 48 of issues of conflict, particular issues, however specific in their origin, become generalized to a wide range of grievance. And if there is a long history of struggle, with its models, for the dominant group, of effective violent repression, and its memories, for the subordinate group, of past injustice and atrocity, it will give an emotional charge to the conflict, which may escalate to high levels of destructive violence. But this is by no means an inevitable development. A society which one might characterize as an extreme plural society on the basis of objective measures may remain quiescent for long periods, perhaps indefinitely, lacking the subjective reactions and opportunity to sustain a destructive conflict.

Leo Kuper says that, colonisation has been a major creator of plural societies, and many colonial and settler societies conformed to the extreme type of plural society. But colonies varied greatly in the manner of initial colonization, in the structure of the relationships established, in the mode of decolonization, and the violence attending these historical phases (264). Many variables are relevant to these differences in colonial societies, and in the incidence of violent confrontation. There is a familiar distinction between limited settlements, as for example Indians in the USA, Canada etc. Then there is the extent of intermarriage, with milder forms of racism prevailing where intermarriage was a predominant mode.

The period of colonisation, related to the forms of economic exploitation, is specially significant, as in the search for raw materials at the lowest possible cost in an earlier period, and for market outlets for finished goods at a later period

(264). The time factor is also relevant to the ideological justifications and the policies of the different colonial powers. So too, of particular significance for the introduction of new groups, with increasing pluralism of the society, is the failure 49 of attempts by the colonizers’to enslave, or to harness to production, indigenous groups, and the consequent resort to slaves or contract labourers from the outside; and the need in a certain situations to encourage the immigration of middlemen accustomed to a technological culture and a money economy. This has been a source of small hostage groups in former colonies, and also of substantial populations, strong enough to challenge the indigenous peoples in the struggles for power on decolonization.

There are two tiers of domination in the colonial structure; decolonization was particularly charged with genocidal potential. Plural societies preceded colonial imperialism, and in some cases, capitalist colonization of a plural society resulted in the superimposition of an additional layer of domination on an earlier domination. In a number of these societies, decolonization detonated explosive genocidal conflicts, as the earlier rulers and their one time subjects engaged in violent struggle under the impetus of electoral contests in a democratic idiom, introduced by the colonial powers in the movement to independence (266). In

India, the conflicts in the process of decolonization were aggravated by religious cleavages. The Hindus are in a great majority, some 300 million Hindus as against

100 million Muslims. They are separated from Muslims not only by their religion, but also by caste prohibitions to intermingling. They have been more ready than

Muslims to seize the opportunities for British education, and they were largely the administrators of India for the British. It was mainly from their ranks too that

India’s businessmen, financiers and professionals are recruited (Collins and

Lapierre 38-39). Kuper says that, the great majority of Hindus and Muslims must have been living in equal poverty and still, in an independent India, politically unified but communally divided, Hindus would have dominated the society. (268) 50

Partition transforms this situation, giving dominance to the majority,

Muslim or non-Muslim, in the partitioned sections. But the distribution of populations, with substantial religious minorities in areas dominated numerically by members of other religions, or with much intermingling of people of different religions, or with segregated enclaves, did not permit of an easy severance into a

Hindu India and a Muslim Pakistan. The structure gave the opportunity for the persecution of minorities and for retaliation in massacre, as reprisal provoked counter reprisal in areas of mixed living, and as atrocity against Hindus or Sikhs in

Muslim area of Hindu or Sikh dominance, set of counter massacres in a continuous spiral of escalating violence. Already massacres had started in some areas prior to partition, when communal sentiment became inflamed in the troubled course of constitutional negotiation. In Calcutta, following the proclamation by the Muslim

League of 16 August 1946 as direct action day, Muslim mobs howling in a quasi- religious fervour came bursting from their slums, waving clubs, iron bars, shovels, any instrument capable of smashing a human skull. They savagely beat to a pulp any Hindu in their path and left the bodies in the city’s open gutters. Later, the

Hindu mobs came storming out of their neighbourhoods, looking for defenceless

Muslims to slaughter. Never, in all its violent history, had Calcutta known twenty- four hours as savage, as packed with human viciousness. Like water-soaked logs, scores of bloated cadavers bobbed down the Hooghly river toward the sea. Other corpses, savagely mutilated, littered the city’s streets. Everywhere, the weak and helpless suffered most. By the time the slaughter was over, Calcutta belonged to the vultures. In filthy grey packs they scudded across the sky, tumbling down to gorge themselves on the bodies of the city’s six thousand dead (Collins and

Lapierre 41-42). 51

Many of the genocidal massacres were carried out by mobs in murderous frenzy. They were not a centrally organized government directed type of genocide.

Hindu and Muslim leaders gave assurance of protection to minority communities and before the partition both India and Pakistan solemnly guaranteed protection to all citizens. It‘implies that in no circumstances will violence be tolerated in any form in either territory. The two governments wish to emphasize that they are united in this determination (Moon 93-94). There is seemingly a remarkable faith in the effectiveness of the projected boundary force. But the leaders had greatly underestimated the extent and destructiveness of the communal passions unleashed by partition.

Stereotypes are one of the most recurrent strategies that the media represent the reality. It is often mentioned in connection with racism and discrimination. It tends to be more or less pejorative, although this is not necessarily the case. Used analytically in social anthropology, the concept of stereotyping refers to the creation and consistent application of standardised notions of the cultural distinctiveness of a group. Stereotypes are held by dominated groups as well as by dominating ones and they are widespread in societies with significant power differences as well as in societies where there is rough power equilibrium between ethnic groups. Stereotypes need not refer to a social reality, and they do not necessarily give accurate hints of what people actually do. It helps the individual to create order in an otherwise excruciatingly complicated social universe. They make it possible to divide the social world into kinds of people, and they provide simple criteria for such a classification. They give the individual the impression that he or she understands society. 52

Second, stereotypes can justify privileges and differences in access to a

society’s resources. Conversely, negative stereotypes directed towards a ruling

group may alleviate feelings of powerlessness and resignation: they can be seen as

the symbolic revenge of the downtrodden. Third, stereotypes are crucial in

defining the boundaries of one’s own group. They inform the individual of the

virtues of his or her own group and vices of the others. There are also minorities

who have largely negative stereotypes of themselves and positive ones of the

dominating group. ‘Doxic’ stereotyping (‘doxa’ is Bourdieu’s term for the

unquestionable, taken for granted aspects of culture) is very powerful in many

polyethnic societies and can often function as self-fulfilling prophecies: the

negative stereotype created by a dominant group may become part of a group’s

view of itself. Such stereotyping in turn usually feeds on differences in the

respective positions of ethnic groups in the economy and the political system. Peter

Worsely thus notes that ‘whole peoples are perceived as being naturally suited for

distinctive roles in the division of labour, and these “natural” differences often

include cultural as well as physical characteristics’ (236).

Stereotypes can sometimes function as self-fulfilling prophecies. A

dominating group can stunt the intellectual development of a dominated group by

systematically telling them that they are inferior. There are of course many

stereotypes which have little or no truth, such as the ideas traditionally held by

many African peoples and others to the effect that their neighbours are cannibals.

Stereotypes contribute to defining one’s own group in relation to others by

providing a tidy ‘map’ of the social world, and that they can be invoked in attempts

to justify systematic inequalities in access to resources (Erikson 31). 53

Another one is class representation. There are two definitions of classes.

One is derived from Karl Marx, the other from Max Weber. Many similarities can

be seen in these two definitions. The Marxist’s view of social classes emphasises

economic aspects. A social class is defined according to its relationship to the

productive process in society. In capitalist societies, according to Marx, there are

three main social classes. First, there is the capitalist class or bourgeoisie, whose members own the means of production (factories, tools and machinery and so on) and buy other people’s labour-power (employ them). Second, there is the petit- bourgeoisie, whose members own means of production but do not employ others.

The third and most numerous class is the proletariat or working class, whose members depending upon selling their labour-power to a capitalist for their livelihood. There are also other classes, notably the aristocracy, whose members live by land interest, and the lumpenproletariat, which consists of unemployed and underemployed people, vagrants, and petty thieves and so on. (Eriksen10)

Since Marx’s time in the mid-nineteenth century, the theory of classes has been refined in several directions, not least through studies of peasants in the third world and through Bourdieu’s and others analyses of cultural classes defined through symbolic power rather than property. Its adherents nevertheless still stress the relationship to property in their delineation of classes (11). A further central feature of this theory is the notion of class struggle. Marx and his followers held that oppressed classes would eventually rise against their oppressors, overthrow them through a revolution, and alter the political order and the social organisation of labour.

The Weberian view of social classes, which has partly developed into theories of social stratification, combines several criteria in delineating classes, 54

including income, education and political influence. Unlike Marx, Weber did not

regard classes as potential corporate groups; he did not believe that members of

social classes necessarily would have shared political interests. Weber preferred to

speak of ‘status groups’ rather than classes. Theories of social class always refer to

systems of social ranking and distribution of power.

The concept of representation has an important position in the study of

culture. In any culture, there is always a big assortment of meanings about any

topic, and more than one way of interpreting or representing it. The expression of one’s face says something about identity, emotions and attachment, which can be read and understood by other people. Cultural meanings are not only in the head;

they organize and regulate social practices, influence one’s conduct and

consequently have real, practical effects. The idea that all cultural representations

are political is one of the major themes of media and cultural theories.

The third world people, lesbian and gay and diverse oppositional

movements attacked the stereotypes and biased images of cultural representations.

These interpretations of racism, sexism, nationalism etc are not innocent or pure, in that they contain positive, negative, or ambiguous representations of diverse social

groups that they can serve pernicious interests of cultural oppression by

positioning certain groups as inferior, thus pointing to the superiority of dominant

social groups. Studies of representations of women, blacks, third world people in

films, for instance, would catalogue negative representations and how they produce

racism or classism, or would champion more positive representations. This chapter

discusses how the media (film) makes negative and positive construction of

people, culture etc through the visual Medias. The narrative of film culture is

scrutinized to discern how certain (usually social dominant) forces are represented 55 more affirmatively than subordinate groups, and there is a search for narratives and representations that more positively represent social types that have been excluded or negatively presented in mainstream culture. Culture is conceived as a field of representation, as a producer of meaning that provides negative and positive depictions of gender, class, race, sexuality, religion and further key constituents of identity.

CHAPTER TWO

AN OVERVIEW OF INDIAN ENGLISH AND BRITISH INDIAN FILMS

56

Films can provide powerful metaphors for audience which will help them

to address important anxieties in their lives and to redress them. Movies took root

in India in much the same way as they did in many European countries: from the

sensation caused by the Lumière brothers, whose actualities were shown in

Bombay on July 7, 1896, just six months after they premiered in Paris. Motion

picture cameras became available in India shortly thereafter, and they were used

exclusively for creating documentary footage until the early 1900s. In the next

decade, joint productions between India and the British saw the development of

fiction forms. Kristin Thompson and Davis Bordwell say that the last decades of

the 20th century, national cultures were transformed by globalization, the

emergence of networks of influence that tightened the ties among all countries and

their citizens (705). Indian English films and British Indian films represent Indians

in different manner. Indian English films are films, which are directed by Indians

in English language. British Indian films are the films, which are directed by the

British about Indians. The traditional texts represent India different from the western people’s construction of India. So these differences can be seen in the

Indian English and British Indian films. These films construct the imagined India

and Indian people. Western influences are evident in these films. This chapter

discusses the brief history of the Indian English and British Indian films from the

silent movies to recent movies that use new presentation of themes and characters.

The representation can be defined as a “process of presenting an image of

something in order to communicate ideas or tell the story” (Benshoff and Griffin

350). These films represent Indians in various manners. Representation of Indians

in silent movies and the recent movies are diverse. Indian English films emphasise

the diasporic alienation, identity crisis, casteism, gender inequality etc. of Indians. 57

In the same way British Indian films signify racial difference, cultural difference, class difference etc. Both representations of Indians are atypical.

The history of Indian English and British Indian films starts with the movie

The Light of Asia (Prem Sanyas ), which is a 1925 silent film, directed by Franz

Osten and Himansu Rai. It was adapted from the book, The Light of Asia (1879) in verse by Edwin Arnold, based on the life of Prince Siddhartha Gautama, who became the Buddha after enlightenment, or the "Enlightened one". This film starts the genres of Indian English and British Indian films. A tale from India about the origin of the Buddha, Prem Sanyas depicts the story of Prince Siddhartha

Gautama (portrayed by director Himansu Rai), the man who became the Buddha, as he journeys from privilege and seclusion to awareness of the inevitability of life's suffering, finally renouncing his kingdom to seek enlightenment.

The next film is A Throw of Dice, which is a 1929 silent film by Franz

Osten based on an episode from the Indian epic The Mahabharata.The movie is about two kings vying for the love of a hermit's daughter, the beautiful Sunita. The two kings, Ranjit and Sohan, share a passion for gambling and decide to play a game of crapsto determine who will marry her. Sunita wishes to marry Ranjit.

Ranjit loses the game to the nefarious Sohan and as a forfeit becomes his slave.

Sunita soon uncovers the truth about Sohan's evil deeds and to escape punishment he hurls himself off a cliff into the rapids below. Ranjit and Sunita are reunited and married.

A Throw of Dice has been in the British Film Institute (BFI)’s archives since 1945, though rarely seen. In 2006, in honour of the 60th anniversary of

Indian independence, the film was digitally restored, then re-released at the 58

Luminato Festival in Toronto, Canada on 13 June 2008, with a new orchestral score by British Indian composer Nitin Sawhney. The United States’ release occurred on 30 July 2008 during the Grant Park Music Festival at the Jay Pritzker

Pavilion in Chicago, Illinois. In the Guardian newspaper Peter Bradshaw writes a review about the film. Here is a rare and fascinating gem a lovingly restored version of an Indian silent movie from 1929, in honour of the 60th anniversary celebrations of Indian independence. It has a special free screening in London's

Trafalgar Square next Thursday with live accompaniment, before going on a national tour of cinemas. The movie was directed by the German Franz Osten, in collaboration with its Indian producer-star Himansu Rai. They created a lavish and spectacular story of rival Indian kings falling in love with the same woman, and both addicted to the thrill of gambling. It's extravagantly romantic, with a stirring score by Nitin Sawhney (https://www.the guardian.com).

Dave Kehr writes about this film in New York Times: there’s hardly a frame in the 1929 film A Throw of Dice that doesn’t provide a surge of visual pleasure, the movie itself seems poised between two cultures, pondering the highly developed technique of German silent filmmaking and the rich iconography of

Indian tradition. Jungles and palaces, elephants and tigers, princes in silk and servants in rags were photographed on location in Rajasthan and presented with the meticulous lighting, enveloping depth effects and rhythmic editing patterns of the

Weimar cinema at its height ( Kehr 2008).

Shiraz is a multilayered fairy tale that tells the story of the humble architect

Shiraz, who devotes his life to the adoration of Selima, a woman fated for royalty.

The central character, named after the city of Shiraz in Iran where many famous

Persian poets are buried, is a wholly fictitious creation. Several historical facts 59 pertaining to the origin of the Taj Mahal have been altered for the screen version, such as the name of the princess for whom it was built (known in the film as

Selima, her real name was Arjun and Banu). While Shah Jahan, the fifth Moghul emperor, did indeed build the Taj Mahal as an expression of his eternal devotion to his queen, the film depends on the fictional character of Shiraz to tell its story of unrequited love and ultimate transcendence.

Karma is the first talkie movie produced by Himanshu in 1933. It was a joint production between people from India, Germany and the United Kingdom.

Rai, who played the lead role and Devika Rani as the female lead, thus marking her acting debut. Karma is credited as having been the first English

Language talkie made by an Indian. The film was made in both English and Hindi, and premiered in London in May 1933. Alongside a special screening for the

Royal family at Windsor, the film was well received throughout Europe.

Karma (1933) completely bowled critics over in the U.K. The film was produced by Himansu Rai but Devika Rani stole the show: “Her beauty and charm are so obvious and her gift for putting across a lyric so rare she seems to me a potential star of the first magnitude.” Rai had made a bi-lingual film, shot both in Hindi and

English, but from all accounts, the English version, Karma was the bigger success, rather than Nagin Ki Ragini. But the triumph of opening the film abroad played well for the Indian audiences (Desai 1). In 2012, The Times of India described it as the "first Indian talkie with English dialogue which set all London talking"

(Dasgupta 1). The first period of these films can’t be separated as Indian English and British Indian films. But just after these years it can be categorised as such films. 60

The films are produced under the national and international productions.

One of the important productions is Merchant Ivory Productions. Merchant Ivory

Productions is a film company founded in 1961 by producer Ismail

Merchant and director James Ivory. Their films were for the most part produced by

Merchant, directed by Ivory, and 23 (of the 44 total films) were scripted by Ruth

Prawer Jhabvala in some capacity, all but two of those with solo credit. The films were often based upon novels or short stories; particularly the work of Henry

James, E. M. Forster, and two novels by Jhabvala herself. The initial goal of the company was "to make English-language films in India aimed at the international market." The company went on to make films in England and America. Most of their films include Indian themes, casts, locations, Indian stories etc. Many films in

Indian and British Indian directors were constructed under this banner. Most of the novels and stories are adapted into films. The Mystic Masseur is a 2001 Merchant

Ivory film based on the novel of the same nameby V. S. Naipaul. It is one of the relatively few films directed by Ismail Merchant who is better known as the producer in the Merchant Ivory partnership and addresses issues of Hindu subculture on the island of Trinidad.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. (abbreviated as MGM or M-G-M, also known as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer or Metro) is an

American media company, involved primarily in the production and distribution of feature films and television programs. Once the largest and most revered film studio, MGM was founded in 1924 when the entertainment entrepreneur Marcus

Loew gained control of Metro Pictures, Goldwyn Pictures and Louis B. Mayer

Pictures. In 1971, it was announced that MGM would merge with 20th Century

Fox, a plan which never came into fruition 61

After the silent era Indian English and British Indian films are started with the developing stage. Many films were produced under the national and international banners. The Householder is the first film of this production in 1963, with the screenplay by Ruth Prawer Jabwallah and James Ivory and directed by

James Ivory. The film starts with Prem Sagar (Shashi Kapoor), a teacher at a private college in Delhi, who is married to Indu (Leela Naidu) in an arranged marriage recently and is still learning ropes of relationships, when the arrival of

Prem's mother (Durga Khote) spells doom to their budding relationship. Indu, unable to handle her interference in the marriage, leaves Prem to return to her family. Prem searches for answers from a variety of people, including a Swami

(Pahari Sanyal), who reveals the secret of a successful marriage; as a result, he finally gains the maturity to love his wife.

Another film is Shakespeare Wallah in 1965, directed by James Ivory and with screenplay by Ruth Prawer Jabwallah. Gunga Din is a 1939 RKO adventure film directed by George Stevens and starring Cary Grant, Victor

McLaglen and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., loosely based on the poem of the same name by Rudyard Kipling combined with the elements of his short story collection Soldiers Three. The film is about three British sergeants and Gunga Din, their native bhisti (water bearer), who fights the Thuggee, a cult of murderous

Indians in colonial British India. The film portrays native people in India as cruel and indigenous, and a negative attitude can be produced through the characterisation of Thugs and native people.

Bombay Talkie is a 1970 film by Merchant Ivory Productions, with a screenplay by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and James Ivory. It is directed by James

Ivory. The plot is about Lucia Lane (Jennifer Kendal) a British author who is 62 researching the Bollywood film industry. She falls in love and has an affair with

Vikram (Shashi Kapoor), a famous Bollywood actor. The plot is complicated by the fact that Vikram is married, and his friend, Hari (Zia Mohyeddin), is in love with Lucia.

Bhowani Junction is a 1956 film adaptation of the 1954 novel Bhowani

Junction by John Masters made by MGM. The film was directed by George

Cukor and produced by Pandro S. Berman from a screenplay by Sonya

Levien and Ivan Moffat. The film starred Ava Gardner as Victoria Jones, an Anglo-Indian who had been serving in the Indian Army, and Stewart Granger as

Colonel Rodney Savage, a (British) Indian Army officer. It also featured Bill

Travers, Abraham Sofaer, Francis Matthews, and Lionel Jeffries and Neelo, who went on to become one of the leading ladies of the Pakistan film industry. The film, like the original novel, portrays the Anglo-Indian protagonist, Victoria Jones, as tugged in different directions by three suitors, Col. Rodney Savage, Ranjit Kasel and Patrick Taylor, each representing a different ethnic community: British, Indian

(Sikh) and Anglo-Indian, respectively. The film-makers, however, changed the novel's ending and Victoria's fate. Whereas in the novel Victoria finally seeks her future with her fellow Anglo-Indian Patrick, a railway worker, the film-makers instead matched her at the end with the more obviously dashing British officer

Rodney Savage, while consigning Patrick to a heroic death

(http://reportmysignalpm.blogspot.in).

The film depicts the last days of British rule in India and the two types of protests against British rule can be seen, that is non-violent protests by Gandhiji and revolutionary protests by communists. All the actors belong to the west. The heroine of the film wishes to marry an Indian, but later she fears the complete loss 63 of her identity, so she doesn’t marry Indians in the film. She goes to England. The film shows the heroic actions of whites and the coloured people becoming violent.

North West Frontier is a 1959 British Cinemascope adventure film, produced by Marcel Hellman and directed by J. Lee Thompson. It stars Kenneth

More, Lauren Bacall, Herbert Lom and also featured Wilfrid Hyde-White and I. S.

Johar. The film is set in the North West Frontier Province of British India, which now lies within modern Pakistan. The film explores tensions between Hindu and

Muslim Indians as Muslim rebels attack a fortress to kill a Hindu Maharajah. This film also portrays the white man as the hero who rescues the son of the King. The

Muslim rioters come and kill all Hindus without any hesitation. Here the director represents quarrels between Hindus and Muslims. There is a clear white agenda that Indians can’t live peacefully without the help of British rulers. The colonial reign is better than free India. These beliefs are instilled in the minds of the audience through the films.

The Stranglers of Bombay is a 1959 adventure/horror film directed by Terence Fisher for Hammer Films dealing with the British East India

Company's investigation of the cult of ‘Thuggee stranglers’ in the 1830s. The movie stars Guy Rolfe and Jan Holden. It premises in the 1830s, a cult whose members worship Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction, and who have abducted and killed tourists who come to Bombay in an effort to destroy the East Indian

Company and its influence in their native land. Capt. Christopher Connaught-

Smith (Allan Cuthbertson) is put in charge of neutralizing the murderers, but his cultural ignorance renders him ineffective. Capt. Harry Lewis (Guy Rolfe), who has worked in India for years, then takes over the case as it spirals out of control.

This British Indian film also represents India in a superstitious, barbarous, 64 dangerous manner. The native people want to exile the British people from India.

They do it, but actually the film has a dominant ideology, that is, the British people think that they only can help India, but the natives don’t want their help, they want freedom. For gaining that they are ready to do anything like murder, kidnapping etc. The film ends with a narrative display detailing that the Thugee cult was subsequently wiped out by the British

Tarzen Goes to India is a British Indian film, by John Guillermin and written by Robert Hardy Andrews. Like other films, this one also emphasises a white man who helps the elephants in calamities, which occurred when the dam is opened. Jock Mahoney plays the role of Tarzen in the film. A Private Enterprise is a British Indian film by Peter K Smith which was released in 1974. The story is about an ambitious Indian university graduate who has to struggle to live his entrepreneurial dreams against both the British social structure and his own family’s stubborn traditional values.

Conduct Unbecoming is a 1975 British drama film, an adaptation of the Barry England play Conduct Unbecoming. It was directed by Michael

Anderson and starred an ensemble cast of actors including Michael York, Richard

Attenborough and Trevor Howard. In some films English men play the leading characters. There are no Indians in a leading role, but the films are produced in

India. Grame Turner emphasises that film is seen as a ‘reflection’ of the dominant beliefs and values of its culture (130).

The late 1980s and 90s have seen an abundance of films about India in the

West. The tendency is an indication of the increasing presence of the people from

India who have moved to the West and are finding their new identities there (Mitra

66). The movies produced images of India and Indians by signifying these people 65 in specific ways and presenting them within the milieu of the West, thus transforming both the images of the people as well as the places they originally lived in and where they are now. These features can be seen in the films like

Bhaaji on the Beach and Buddha of Suburbia. Some films provide reassurance in a rapidly globalizing world that Indian values are portable and malleable (Chopra

72). In a pivotal move, the film shifts the diasporic Indian known as ‘non resident

Indian (NRI) to the centre of the narratives.

Indian English films have contributed to the problematization of socio- political life. 36Chowringhee Lane is a 1981 film written and directed by Aparna

Sen and produced by Shashi Kapoor. It marked the directorial debut of Aparna

Sen, who had until then been known as a leading actress of Bengali cinema. The film was very well received upon release. It stars Jennifer Kendal in a critically acclaimed role, along with Dhritiman Chatterjee and Debashree Roy. The film emphasises the loneliness of old age Violet Stoneham (Jennifer Kendal), but she gets friends Nandita( Debashree Roy) and Samaresh (Dhritiman Chatterjee). They request Violet to rent her house to have an income. And they become friends. But after their marriage, they avoid Violet. She comprehends their deception and she realises her loneliness. The final scene of the film shows Violet reciting aloud from King Lear with her only audience being a stray dog. Scholar Wimal

Dissanayake sees the film as a portrayal of the patriarchal social system: "The film portrays the plight of a lonely woman in a society that cares little for questions of female subjectivity and self-fulfillment" (Dissanayake 75 ). The title of the film has become symbolic of the city of Kolkata. The film signifies the hypocrisy of the people. 66

Salaam Bombay is another film produced in 1988, portraying the life of

Indian people. Bombay is the main plot in the film. It is directed by Mira Nair, and screenplay written by Sooni Taraporevala. The film chronicles the day-to-day life of children living on the streets of Bombay. It won the National Film Award for

Best Feature Film in Hindi, the National Board of Review Award for Top Foreign

Film, the Golden Camera and Audience Awards at the Cannes Film Festival, and three awards at the Montréal World Film Festival. The film was India's second film submission to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language

Film. The film explains the pathetic conditions of slum people. The film highlights the city’s notorious red-light area of Falkland Road, near the Grant Road Railway

Station. The dark side of India is depicted in the film. The film Salaam Bombay got international acclaim and awards.

In Which Annie Gives it Those Ones is a 1989 Indian TV film with screenplay by Arundhati Roy, direction by Pradip Krishen, and starring Arjun

Raina as the title character, along with Roshan Seth and Shahrukh Khan. This film was the recipient of two National Awards in 1989. This film acquired a cult status in the years after it was made. Set in the 1970s, In Which Annie Gives it Those

Ones is a funny film of architecture students in their final year of college. The film was part autobiographical with Roy recounting her own experiences of studying in the School of Planning and Architecture, Delhi, a leading architecture institute in India.

Numerouus British Indian films have won critical acclaim. The Buddha of

Suburbia is a 1993 British four-part television serial, directed by Roger Michell.

Based on the novel of the same name by Hanif Kureishi, the film starred Naveen

Andrews as the main character, Karim Amir. The film's music was written and 67 performed by David Bowie. The film emphasises the racial discrimination and identity crisis of the hero Karim Amir.

The Deceivers is a 1988 adventure film directed by Nicholas Meyer, starring Pierce Brosnan and Saeed Jaffrey. The film is based on the 1952 John

Masters novel of the same name. The film represents Indians as savage, superstitious, barbarous people. The Victorians try to teach their morality and culture to other countries. But the film also presents a negative picture of the country. The film also depicts ‘Sati’ in the film. The hero rescues the lady for practising it. Suttee, or sati, is the obsolete Hindu practice in which a widow burns herself upon her husband's funeral pyre (Sophie Gilmartin 141). Raja Ram Mohan

Roy even filed a petition for a law banning the practice of sati. He appealed to

William, the Governor of Bengal, to ban sati in British India and his persuasion bore fruit when sati was banned by law in Bengal Presidency in 1829. This law was later extended in 1830 to Madras and Bombay Presidency (Dodwel 140.).

Passage to India directed by David Lean and Gandhi by Richard Attenborough are other two films taken in 1982 and 1984. Passage to India is a novel adaptation with the same title. Gandhi is a biographical work on Mahatma Gandhi.

Indian cinema has reinvented itself for global audiences since the 1990s. In

India’s formerly closed, Soviet style economy (introduced by India’s first post independence Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru), foreign products came in the market years after they became available in the West. Government reforms introduced in 1991 dismantled strict quotas, deregulated local industries and permitted multinationals to enter India. The nation underwent accelerated globalization, flooded by foreign brands and satellite TV channels, bringing the west, with its glittering promises of glamorous, modern life styles, straight into 68 middleclass homes (Chopra 55). Some films provide reassurance in a rapidly globalised world that ‘Indian values are portable and acquiescent. In a pivotal move, film shifts the diasporic Indian known as ‘non resident Indian’ (NRI) to the centre of their narratives.

English August is the first feature film of the director Dev Benegal, which was released in1994. The screenplay was by Upamanyu Chatterji ( author of the novel English August) and Dev Benegal and was produced by Anuradha Parikh.

The film satirically criticises the people who follows complete colonial thought.

The hero of the film is Agastya Sen( Rahul Bose), who thinks, speaks, writes etc only in English. A lover of poetry, he listens to Bob Dylan, Miles

Davis, rock and jazz and reads Marcus Aurelius. Beyond that he is an Indian

Administrative Service officer. He is sent for a year's training to Madna, the hottest town in the country. Culture shock and a language barrier in his own country follows (August's mother tongue is Bengali). He feels like a foreigner, but he must survive. He faces the cultural difference and language barriers, which make him, feel as a foreigner. Moreover, August is surrounded by different characters:

Srivastava, the pompous head bureaucrat and his wife Malti, the fashion and cultural leader of the town; Sathe, a local pothead and cartoonist; Kumar, the

Police Superintendent and connoisseur of porn films; and Vasant, the world's worst cook. August negotiates this provincial creek with the only paddle he can find;

Fantasy, daydreams and "self-abuse" become his means of revolt and escape, as he escapes from the heat into the mystery and quiet of his secret world of erotic fantasy and contemplation. It won the Silver Montgolfier and the Gilberto

Martinez Solares prize for the Best First Film at the 1994 Festival, the National 69

Film Awards in 1995 for the best feature film in English, and Special Jury Prize at the 1994 Torino International Festival of Young Cinema.

The Making of the Mahatma is a 1996 joint Indian - South

African produced film, directed by Shyam Benegal, about the early life of

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi during his 21 years in South Africa. The film is based upon the book, The Apprenticeship of a Mahatma, by Fatima Meer, who also wrote the screenplay. The Making of the Mahatma was premiered in November at

New York's Guild Theater. The film intentionally lacks the panoramic proportions and epic scale of Attenborough's Gandhi. Benegal says, "This is a more intimate story. It is concerned with so much that had to change in Gandhi before he became the Mahatma."

The film documents Gandhi's 21 years in South Africa, from age 19, and the changes which came over this anglicized, London-trained barrister as he encountered the racial discrimination and bias of the colonials first hand. There are stirring scenes where Gandhi stands up for exploited indentured labourers and builds up their awareness of their rights. Rajit Kapur, a film and theatre actor from

Mumbai gives a strong performance as Gandhi, and Pallavi Joshi, who has 42 teleserials to her credit, wonderfully portrays his wife Kasturba. Viewers may be surprised to see Gandhi's quiet, subdued spouse played as a strong and vocal woman. Benegal explains, "People get the impression that she was a doormat, but she was very much her own person, and a strong-willed woman. She got him to change his views, and he became a strong supporter of independent women." The film is shot in the area where Gandhi actually lived one hundred years ago, including his old house on Loop Street. This film explores the changes which occur in the life of Gandhi to Mahatma. The film starts in South Africa. The shy 70 and silent English educated barrister becomes the Mahatha, the ‘great soul’.

Through many incidents this metamorphosis happened.

In the same year two other movies were released Bombay Boys and

Hyderabad Blues. Bombay Boys is a 1998 Indian comic film written and directed by the Indian director Kaizad Gustad. This film explores the adventures of three young men in Bombay. The boys are of Indian origin, but were all raised in the

West. Krishna Sahni (played by Naveen Andrews) is an aspiring actor from New

York who wants to make it big in Bollywood. Ricardo Fernandes (Rahul Bose) is from Sydney, Australia and is in Mumbai to search for his long-lost brother.

Alexander Gifford played the role of Xerxes Mistry, a confused young British

Asian of Parsi origin who comes to Bombay in search of his artistic and sexual identity.Writer-director Kaizad Gustad’s Bombay Boys (1998) is, not the first

Indian film to deal “seriously” with the politics of homosexuality. Riyad Wadia’s experimental short BomGay (1996) is far more angry, explicit and polemical than Bombay Boys, and Deepa Mehta’s Fire (1997) has received much more international exposure. But while Wadia’s film was a little-seen yet sensationally reported underground phenomenon, and Mehta’s Canadian-lensed art film was designed at least as much for the prestigious international fest scene as it was for

Indians back home, Gustad’s Bombay Boys may be India’s first gay indian film aimed at popular, domestic commercial audiences (Grossman 1).

Hyderabad Blues is a Nagesh Kukunoor’s film, which depicts a NRI coming to his native place from USA after a long period and who finds himself a foreigner in his own land. The movie revolves around his visit home after 12 years in the USA and his resulting culture shock. Bombay Boys and Hyderabad Blues take the same theme. It tries to portray the identity problems and cultural 71 difference. But the film Earth discusses the problems in India at the time of

Partition.

Another film of Nagesh Kukunoor is Rockford released in 1999. The plot revolves around thirteen-year-old Rajesh Naidu who arrives at Rockford Boy’s

High School. Having left home for the first time he is a bit sad. Rajesh's best friends are Selva, a good spirited boy, and David, an arrogant sports hero but with a good heart. The captain of the school, Raja, hates Rajesh. At school, Rajesh experiences the joy and agony of living in an all male boarding school, learning to fend for himself without the safety net of his parents. There he befriends PT

Instructor Johnny Matthew, who teaches Rajesh a lot of lessons of life.

One day the school arranges a fete in which the girls also participate every year, and all the boys are to propose at least one girl. Rajesh is least interested, but goes anyway on Selva's insistence. Unfortunately, David gets hurt and cannot go to the fete. Hence he tells Rajesh to give a card to Malathi, a student from the girls’ school. But Malathi becomes attracted to Rajesh which David takes in his stride easily. On Rajesh's birthday, Mr. Matthew pretending to be Malathi's uncle, brings her out of the school to meet Rajesh. This information is then passed on to the headmaster, Brother Lawrence. Shravya, Malathi's friend also accompanies them.

Malathi and Rajesh spend some time together, sharing their first kiss. Shravya and

Mr. Matthew go together for an Ice-Cream. She then accuses Johnny of having assaulted her when they were alone, which is in fact a lie fabricated by Raja.

Brother Lawrence, believing the lie to be true asks Mr. Matthew to resign from the school. Rajesh gets bewildered by this and fights Raja with the help of David, and makes him confess the truth in front of Brother Lawrence. Johnny Matthew then gets reinstated and everything ends well. This film unfolds itself from the 72 perspective of thirteen year old boy Rajesh Naidu. Another film is Hyderabad

Blues 2, which expresses the misunderstanding of husband and wife. These three films discuss different themes. Hyderabad Blues discusses the cultural differences and identity crisis of NRIs, but Rockford explores the life of 13 year old boy why the other film Hyderabad Blues 2 is a sequel to the film Hyderabad Blues. But the themes are different.

Split Wide Open is a 1999 Indian film and is Dev Benegal's second feature film after English, August. The film primarily deals with the Water conflicts in the slums of Bombay, and paedophilia (Pedophilia or paedophilia is a psychiatric disorder in which an adult or older adolescent experiences a primary or exclusive sexual attraction to prepubescent children), and also looks at the subversive sexuality in modern India and how the notions of morality are challenged when sex and poverty collide. Split Wide Open is a bold and strong statement on the filth and lawlessness that have wormed their way into the ``city of dreams,'' Mumbai. Using KP (Rahul Bose) and TV hostess Nandita (Laila Rouass) as mouthpieces, the film deals with consumerism and globalisation, child prostitution, goondaism and the sheer struggle for existence in Mumbai. KP sells water (tap water to the poor, Evian to the rich!) to earn his living. He is on the payroll of the local water mafia. He has special affection for 10-year old Didi

(played brilliantly by Farida Haider Mulla), who goes missing suddenly. Nandita, an expat Indian, hosts ``Split Wide Open,'' a daring show that provides a platform for people to discuss their secret sex lives, their fantasies and their unusual problems. Nandita is attracted to KP and helps him in his search for Didi.

Jabbar Patel directed the English-language movie (also dubbed in Hindi and other Indian languages) Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar, about the life of Ambedkar, 73 released in 2000, starring the Indian actor Mammootty as Ambedkar. Sponsored by

India’s National Film Development Corporation and the Ministry of Social Justice, the film was released after a long and controversial gestation period. Mammootty won the National Film Award for the Best Actor for the role of Ambedkar, which he portrayed in this film (https://drambedkarbooks.com). The film documents the period between 1901 and 1956. The movie covers the most important events in

Ambedkar's life. His stint at New York's Columbia University, his tryst in London, his return to Bombay and Baroda, his plunge into reform activities, his epic battle with the Mahatma over separate electorates, and his appointment as chairman of the Constitution drafting committee are all chronicled. The obstacles in his path and the conviction for his cause are well etched (http://www.Rediff.com).

In 2001, three Indian English films were released, Monsoon Wedding directed by Mira Nair, American Desi by Piyush Dinekar Pandya, and Everybody

Says I’m Fine by Rahul Bose.

Everybody Says I'm Fine! is an Indian film, released on 12 September 2001 at the Toronto Film Festival. It marks the directorial debut of Indian actor Rahul

Bose. The film revolves around a small group of elite Mumbaikars whose lives converge at a hairdresser's salon. The protagonist Xen (Rehaan Engineer) owns the salon and has a unique gift of connecting with the minds of his clients and reading their thoughts while at work. Most of his customers maintain a facade of normality in order to gain semblance and hide their tumultuous lives to some extent.

As backdrop to Xen's ability, it is revealed that as a young boy, he witnessed the death of his parents in a freak accident at a recording studio, where nobody could hear his cries for help through the sound-proof booth as he saw the 74 flames rising. Ever since, Xen's life plunged into some sort of forced silence. Xen uses his gift to help most of his clients, notably Tanya (Pooja Bhatt), whose private life is being indecently probed into by another one of his customers, Misha

(Anahita Oberoi). Xen manages to get the dirt on Misha, who is a secret cocaine addict, and more unsavory details surface where it comes to knowledge that Misha has even gotten some children at the orphanage she works at addicted to it. Xen slips the information to Tanya without her knowledge, who then confronts Misha with it when Misha becomes a little too inquisitive in Tanya's personal affairs.

Xen is, however, clueless in his own silence, and to add to it, he is unable to probe into the mind of one of his customers, Nikki/Nikita (Koel Purie) who arrives in his saloon one day and asks him to cut off all her long hair. He begins to develop feelings for her, sensing some form of distress in her being, unable to reach her but somehow wanting to help. Later, as Xen serves one of his regulars, a respectable businessman, Mr. Mittal (Boman Irani), it transpires that the married

Mr. Mittal is busy planning a liaison with another woman. More facts slowly unfold to reveal Mr Mittal is, in fact, Nikki's father, and Nikki has been subjected to an incestuous relationship. Enraged, on gradually learning the truth straight from the thoughts of his client, Xen strikes a heavy blow to Mr. Mittal's head, killing him, and later disposing of the body.

The death of her father triggers in Nikki a sudden response, and she crumbles to the ground in Xen's arms. He is now engulfed in her disconcerting train of thoughts, disjointed, and echoing her torment of many years. The final scene of the film shows Xen waking the next morning to find the silence in his life is now beyond him, and he can hear, as clearly and wholly as the next human 75 being. Nikki embraces him; the mutual catharsis has made them both more wholesome beings.

American Desi is a 2001 film directed and written by Piyush Dinkar

Pandya. An American-raised Indian, Krishnagopal Reddy (or "Kris" as he prefers to be called, to distance himself from his heritage) finds out to his dismay that his

University of Pennsylvania roommates are all Indians. He does not associate with the Indian culture that his parents and family have thrust upon him and prefers to be as American as possible. His roommates include Ajay (Kal Penn), an African-

American idolizing desi; Jagjit, who loves art but studies engineering to please his father; and Salim, who is very traditional and conservative, feeling that Indian-

American girls are too westernized to make good wives. Kris meets Nina, a girl he immediately falls for, and is surprised to find out that not only is she Indian, but she is also quite involved with Indian culture.

The movie revolves around him making mistakes and trying his best to win

Nina over, from joining the Indian Students Association to be near her, to learning how to perform a Dandiya Raas. Thus, Kris eventually begins to enjoy the company of his roommates, all of whom put together their knowledge and skill to help Kris impress Nina through various ways involving the Indian culture, which he eventually comes to love as well. This film represents the western influence of

Indian people who are being raised as westerners. But they are trying to come back to their native culture.

Out of these three films Monsoon Wedding, Everybody says I’m Fine and

American Desi represents Indians in different manner. The first one explores the cultural traditions and molestation of children but sometimes it reminds us of the after effect of partition in India. But in Everybody says I’m Fine, Rehaan 76

Engineer stars as Xen, a hairdresser whose parents died tragically when the sound board short-circuited in their recording studio. The trauma has left him with a psychic gift: When he cuts a person's hair, he can read the person's thoughts. He learns of adulteries, deceptions and hypocrisies, and keeps them all to himself, going upstairs after work to his lonely room, where the shades are never opened and the TV sound is muted. The film Everybody Says I'm Fine is a glimpse into the affluent culture of a country with economic extremes. In American Desi Krishna

Gopal Reddy is born in an Indian family in the US. Like most of the teens in the

US, he hates spicy Indian food, religious prayers, Bollywood movies, his parents, his birth names etc. which constitute the hackneyed narration of Indian English films.

Let's Talk is an Indian English language film, released on 13 December

2002. It is produced by Shift Focus and directed by Ram Madhvani. It is the first ever Indian feature film that was shot in the digital format. It was then reverse printed in 35mm film (reverse telecine) to be released in cinemas. Mango Soufflé is a 2002 Indian film written and directed by Mahesh Dattani. The film stars Atul

Kulnani and Rinkie Khanna. It was promoted as "first gay male film from India" and was adapted from Dattani's own successful English play On a Muggy Night in

Mumbai.

Leela is a 2002 drama film directed by Somnath Sen. The movie stars Dimple Kapadia and Deepti Naval. The film's story is loosely based on Summer of '42. The film was premiered at Reel World Film Festival, Toronto, in 2005. It also was featured in the 2002 edition of the IAAC Film

Festival, conducted by the Indian diaspora, which works to showcase the Indian films to the West. Leela is a film based on the South Asian-American experience. 77

By providing a dynamic expression of the struggles and celebrations of the expatriate life style, Leela is a true reflection of how the South Asian-American community is beginning to emerge, blend, and influence the mainstream American culture in its own exquisite ways. It is a story of Leela, an aware, liberal woman who struggles with the true meaning of independence. It is also the story of

Krishna, born of Indian parents in America but uncomfortable with his hyphenated existence. Leela then is a universal story of two paths that cross each other and pause a moment before moving on.

Provoked is a 2006 British biographical drama film, directed by Jag

Mundhra. It stars Aishwarya Rai, Naveen Andrews, Miranda Richardson, Robbie

Coltrane, Nandita Das and Steve McFadden. The film is loosely based on the true story of Kiranjit Ahluwalia who killed her abusive husband. The film starts with

Kiranjit Ahluwalia (Aishwarya Rai), a Punjabi woman who marries Deepak

Ahluwalia (Naveen Andrews) in an arranged marriage and moves to Southall, UK with him to be closer to his family. Initially he seems caring and affectionate towards her but soon enough the true colors of her husband begin to show as Deepak gradually reveals a darker, threatening, and even sociopathic side of himself. After enduring ten years of abuse and having two children with him,

Kiranjit, unable to bear any longer the brutality and repeated rapes at the hands of her husband, sets fire to his feet while he is sleeping, unintentionally killing him.

Charged with murder, her case comes to the notice of a group of South

Asian social workers running an underfunded organization called the Southall

Black Sisters.

Kiranjit is sentenced to life imprisonment with possibility of parole in 12 years. She befriends her cellmate, a White woman named Veronica Scott (Miranda 78

Richardson), who teaches her English. Veronica also friend with several girls in the prison and stands up for Kiranjit against the local prison bully, Doreen

(Lorraine Bruce). Veronica enlists her brother, Edward Foster (Robbie Coltrane), a highly respected Queen's Counsel, to aide in Kiranjit's appeal. Edward, in turn, realizes Kiranjit's importance to his sister and the importance of her case. His sister's request has additional meaning given that Veronica would not let him help her with her own appeal due to their relationship since childhood. Before Kiranjit's appeal hearing the Southall Black Sisters bring her plight to the attention of the media by organizing rallies to gather public support for her freedom. She is ultimately freed by the judicial system in a landmark case called R v Ahluwalia, redefining provocation in cases of battered women in the UK.

There are many Indian English movies released since 2000. They include

Bride and Prejudice, Morning Raga, Hyderabad Blues2, Being Cyrus, 15 Park

Avenue, Parzania, Water, Sins, Outsourced, Provoked, The Namesake, The Last

Lear, The Great Indian Butterfly, The President is Coming, The Japanese Wife,

Bend It Like Becham, English Vinglish, All I Want Is Everything etc.. Most of these films explore the diasporic feelings, cultural conflicts, the different perspectives of diasporic generations, stereotypical narratives, religious fundamentalism, different cultural background of East and West.

Many British Indian films were released in the same period. Metin

Husain’s film Anita and Me is a British comedy-drama film released in 2002 based on the book of the same name by Meera Syal. The story is of Meena Kumar, a 12- year-old Sikh girl, who lives with her family in the predominantly white,working- class, fictional mining village of Tollington in the Black Country in 1972. Meena meets Anita, a white, 14-year-old girl whom Meena comes to idolise. However, 79

Meena finds it harder and harder to fit in as her Indian heritage keeps on resurfacing, and Anita's new boyfriend proves to hold strong racist attitudes toward those he regards as "darkies". The film depicts the Indian girl’s wish to have a blonde look. The director describes the period of 1972 in the Black Country. But the director doesn’t discuss any economic problems of that time, but the racial difference, second generation diasporic people’s wishes and identity crisis are portrayed in the film.

Bollywood Queen is British Indian film directed by Jeremy Wooding. The actors are Preeya Kalidas and James McAvoy, and it was released in 2003. The plot is a cross cultural romance set in London about a young girl of Indian heritage.

The film represents Indians of various types including criminals and gays. The leading woman character lives in an illusory and imaginative world. These types of representations make an unconstructive impact on the audience.

Trishna is a 2011 British Indian drama film, written and directed by Michael Winterbottom, and starring Freida Pinto and Riz Ahmed. The story is a loose adaptation of Thomas Hardy's novel Tess of the d'Urbervilles. It is

Winterbottom's third Hardy adaptation, after Jude and The Claim. Trishna tells the story of a woman whose life is destroyed by the restrictions of social status, complications of love and life, and her development as an individual. Mixed receptions welcomed this film, but the Film critic Roger Ebert wrote

"Winterbottom is a director who never repeats himself, films all over the world, and in "Trishna," effortlessly embeds his story in modern India".

Sammy and Rosie Get Laid is a 1987 film directed by Stephen Frears, with a screenplay by Hanif Kureishi. Middle-class liberals Rosie (Frances Barber) and

Sammy (Ayub Khan Din) engage in an open adulterous marriage while living in a 80 lower-class neighbourhood in London. When they're not hiding their troubled marriage behind a series of "enlightened" affairs, the couple associates with a social circle that ranges from leftist to radical and includes enigmatic street philosopher Victoria (Roland Gift). Sammy's long-lost father, Rafi (Shashi

Kapoor), a South Asian politician, arrives for a visit just as rioting erupts in response to the killing of an innocent black woman by British police. Rafi decries not only the social upheaval that has transformed the country where he spent his halcyon university years, but also the lack of propriety on display in his son's marriage. Admitting that he's on the run for allegedly corrupt and violent political activities, the well-mannered yet manipulative Rafi uses his wealth to try to rein in what he sees as Sammy and Rosie's sexual and political excesses. Meanwhile, he tries to court Alice (Claire Bloom), the proper British lady he deserted decades earlier. The messy whirl of desire, resentment, and dogma that alternately throws these characters together and rips them apart ultimately reflects the confused and confusing society in which Sammy and Rosie live. Soon even the unassailable Rafi must question his beliefs about life after the empire. This film explores the violent conditions in England at the time.

Madame Sousatzka is a 1988 British drama film directed by John

Schlesinger, with a screenplay by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. It is based upon the novel of the same name by Bernice Rubens. An Indian boy comes every afternoon for piano lessons from Madame Sousatzka, who cannot disguise the love in her voice as she teaches him not only about music, but about how to sit, how to breathe, how to hold his elbows, and how to think about his talent. Behind her, in the shadows of her musty London apartment, are the photographs of earlier students who were taught the same lessons before they went out into the world - where some of them 81 became great pianists and others became just players of the piano. Manek is soon forced to choose between Madame Sousatzka and his mother who both compete for his attention. The film teaches the audience how to become disciplined in all areas of life and not just behind the piano. So the film asserts the western concept of morality, behaviour, attitude of the elite and how it must be kept for its success.

A mistaken consciousness is developed through the film. Slumdog Millionaire, directed by Danny Boyal, was released in 2008 and is discussed in a later chapter.

Women film makers have succeeded in carving a strong niche for themselves on the national as well as international film circuits. They are not only diasporic directors, but Indian directors also. They take their film themes from different literary works revolving around women. Well-known female directors are

Deepa Mehtha, Mira Nair, Gurinder Chada, Aparna Sen, Revathy, Shital Morjaria,

Shonali Bose etc. The central themes of their films are women oriented and their suffocation in the houses, societies etc are portrayed in the films.

Deepa Mehta is a well known Indian English film director, who is most known for her elements of trilogy, Fire (1996), Earth (1998) and Water(2005); among which Earth was sent by India as its official entry for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and Water was Canada's official entry for Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Many other films are directed by her like Midnight’s children, Bollywood/Hollywood etc. In 2003 three women directors and their movies were selected in the category of Indian English films, Deepa Mehta, Revathy and Aparna Sen. In their films different themes are discussed. Deepa Mehta’s film Bollywood Hollywood is completely different from her trilogy films such as Fire, Water and Earth. This film explores the traditional

Indian stereotypes especially those popularized by Bollywood. Not any serious 82 matter is discussed in this film. Like American Desi, complete stereotypical narration occurs in the film. The second generation diasporic people don’t keep up the traditional way of life. They question everything related to their native place.

This narration is seen in the film.

After one year another film by Deepa Mehta was released, Earth in1998.

Earth was released in India as 1947: Earth, a 1998 Indian period drama film . It is based upon Bapsi Sidhwa's novel, Cracking India. Earth is the second film of

Mehta's elements trilogy. It was preceded by Fire (1996) and followed by Water

(2005). It was India's entry for the Academy Award for the Best Foreign Language

Film. The film’s story is set in Lahore at the time before and during the partition of

India in1947. A young girl with polio, Lenny (Maia Sethna), narrates the story through the voice of her adult self (Shabana Azmi). She is from a wealthy Parsi family who hopes to remain neutral to the rising tensions between Hindus,Sikhs, and Muslims in the area. She is adored and protected by her parents, Bunty (Kitu Gidwani) and Rustom (Arif Zakaria) and is cared for by her Ayah, a beautiful Hindu woman, Shanta (Nandita Das). Both Dil Navaz, the

Ice-Candy Man (Aamir Khan) and Hassan, the Masseur (Rahul Khanna) are

Muslim and in love with Shanta. Shanta, Dil, and Hassan are part of a small group of friends from different faiths (some of whom work for Lenny's family) who spend their days together in the park. With partition, however, this once unified group of friends becomes divided and tragedy ensues. Roger Ebert gave the film three out of four stars and states that Earth, " is effective because it doesn't require much history from its viewers, explains what needs to be known, and has a universal message". (http://www.rogerebert.com) 83

The plot of the film Bollywood/Hollywood centres on the character of

Rahul Seth (Rahul Khanna), a young, rich, Indo-Canadian living in Toronto whose widowed mother (Moushumi Chatterjee) is eager to get him married after the freak-accidental death of his white pop singer girlfriend, Kimberly (Jessica Paré).

Furthermore, the mother proclaims that the impending wedding of her daughter

Twinky (Rishma Malik) and Bobby will not take place until Rahul has found himself a bride first. The pressure mounts on Rahul as he finds out that Twinky must get married to preserve the family's reputation because she is pregnant. Rahul goes to a bar and there meets Sue (Lisa Ray). Thinking she is a Spanish escort, he hires her to pose as his fiancée. Rahul eventually discovers that Sue is actually

Indian (her name is short for Sunita). Despite his initial anger at her lie, the two grow closer—due in no small part to a confidence boost Sue gave to Rahul's tormented younger brother, Govind, who incorrectly believes that no one cares about his welfare—and eventually considers one another a fit match. Pleased, Mrs.

Seth agrees to sanction Twinky's wedding. Rahul and Sue grow more intimate and later share stories about their pasts. It is revealed that Sue was once offered as a bride to the well-meaning but dim-witted prizefighter known as Killer Khalsa.

Offended that her parents would even consider such a match, she has been playing mischief in revenge. This mischief is not fully explained, but her liking for it is suggested by her audacity.

Sue is quite immune to social norms; she speaks bluntly to all, particularly to Rocky, Rahul's driver, who knows her as a famous drag queen. The blossoming romance is shaken, however, when Rahul is told by a drunken friend at Bobby's bachelor party that Sue was not only an escort, but a prostitute as well. Sue is so hurt that he would question her honesty and integrity that she leaves him. He is 84 forced to confess to his family that he never really courted Sue but merely bribed her to act the part of his fiancée. His mother is forced to withdraw her sponsorship of Twinky's wedding, due to her promise but she need not; Twinky's wedding has already taken place, well before the planned date. Prodded by this understanding, Shakespeare-quoting grandmother (Dina Pathak), Rahul goes after

Sue and professes his true opinion of her, and proposes marriage to her as well.

Sue initially turns him down, only to be found later in the driver seat of his limo to show her acceptance of his proposal.

Other films of Deepa Mehta are Sam & Me (1991), Camilla (1994), The

Republic of Love (2003), The Forgotten Women (2008), Heaven on Earth (2008),

Beeba Boys (2015). She tries to depict the serious issues which occur in the society.

Mitr,My Friend is a directorial debut film of Revathy, written by V.

Priya and with screenplay by Sudha Kongara Prasad. Set partly in India and the

US, the film was also noted for having an all-women crew. The movie won the Best English Film of the year award at the 49th National Film Awards. The movie also got Best Actress and Best Editor awards for Shobhana and Beena

Paul respectively. The film explores the cultural conflicts between the first generation and the second generation diasporic people. The next one is Aparna

Sen’s film Mr and Mrs Iyer, which discusses the socio-political conditions of

India, but what it does even better is to explore human nature and relationships under various circumstances. Sen succeeds in getting under the skin of different communities and people, showing their quirks and insecurities which are only too human. First, the Tamil Brahmin family from which Meenakshi comes, then the

Muslim couple, the Jewish man and the Bengali occupants of the bus, the young 85 and noisy group of boys and girls and the menacing, fanatical nature of the villagers who attack the bus. (http:// hinduism.about.com)

Mira Nair is an Indian English film director. Her production company,

Mirabai Films, specializes in films for international audiences on Indian society, whether in the economic, social or cultural spheres. Among her best known films are Mississippi Masala, The Namesake, Kamasutra: A Tale of Love ,the Golden

Lion-winning Monsoon Wedding and Salaam Bombay!,which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

Mississippi Masala is a 1991 romantic drama film directed by Mira Nair, based upon a screenplay by Sooni Taraporevala, starring Denzel

Washington, Sarita Choudhury, and Roshan Seth. Set primarily in rural Mississippi, the film explores interracial romance between African

Americans and Indian Americans in the United States.

Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love is a 1996 Indian English language historical fiction, romance film co-written, co-produced, and directed by Mira Nair. The film takes its title from the ancient Indian text, the Kama Sutra, and serves as a common link between the characters. The film stars Rekha, Indira Varma, and Naveen Andrews in pivotal roles. The film emphasises that, women are always considered as a commodity for having erotic pleasure.

Monsoon Wedding is a 2001 film directed by Mira Nair and written by Sabrina Dhawan, depicting romantic entanglements during a traditional Punjabi

Hindu wedding in Delhi. Although it is set entirely in New Delhi, the film was an international co-production between companies in India, the United States,

Italy, France, and Germany. The film won the Golden Lion award and received 86 a Golden Globe Award nomination. The film was premiered in the Cannes Film

Festival in 2001. The film's central story concerns a father, Lalit Verma

(Naseeruddin Shah), who is trying to organize an enormous, chaotic, and expensive wedding for his daughter, Aditi (Vasundhara Das), for whom he has arranged a marriage with a man, Hemant Rai (Parvin Dabas), she has known for only a few weeks. As so often happens in the Punjabi culture, such a wedding means that, for one of the few times in each generation, the extended family comes together from all corners of the globe, including India, Australia, Oman, and the

United States, bringing its emotional baggage along. The film also explores the sexual molestation of children through the character of Tej. Ria accuses him of molesting her in her childhood, but most of the women don’t believe the accusation and Tej’s wife protests "For such a small thing!”.

The Namesake is a 2006 Indian-English drama film which was released in the United States on 9 March 2007, following screenings at film festivals in Toronto and New York City. It is directed by Mira Nair and is based upon the novel of the same name by Jhumpa Lahiri. Sooni Taraporevala wrote the screenplay.

Gurinder Chadha is an English film director of Punjabi Sikh Kenyan

Asian origin. Most of her films explore the lives of Indians living in England. This common theme among her work showcases the trials of Indian women living in

England and how they must reconcile their converging traditional and modern cultures. Although many of her films seem like simple quirky comedies about

Indian women, they actually address many social and emotional issues, especially ones faced by immigrants caught between two worlds. Much of her work also consists of adaptations from books to films, but with a different flare. She is best 87 known for the hit films Bhaji on the Beach (1993), Bend It Like

Beckham (2002), Bride and Prejudice (2004) and Angus, Thongs and Perfect

Snogging (2008). Her most recent project is the comedy It's a Wonderful

Afterlife released on 21 April 2010.

Bhaji on the Beach explores a community group of British women (mostly

Punjabis of various faiths) of all generations from Great Britain, taking a group day out to the Blackpool Illuminations. The tensions of the generation gap torn between tradition and modernism as well as the personal upsets and issues of the women and girls come to boiling point as they spend the day out.

In 2004 Chadha adapted Jane Austen’s famous novel Pride and Prejudice

(1813) giving a Bollywood treatment by turning the early 19th century story about courtship and marriage into a modern day cultural class musical. Chadha’s adaptation as a reinvention of Austin’s work in a different historical and cultural setting which offers different social and cultural challenges (Torvik 6-7).

Bend It Like Beckham is a 2002 British romantic sports and Indian- themed comedy-drama and family film starring Parminder Nagra, Keira

Knightley, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Anupam Kher, Shaznay Lewis and Archie

Panjabi. The film was produced, written and directed by Gurinder Chadha. Its title refers to the football player David Beckham, and his skill at scoring from free kicks by curling the ball past a wall of defenders. The film is about the 18-year-old daughter of Punjabi Sikhs in London. She is infatuated with football but her parents have forbidden her to play because she is a girl. She joins a local women's team, which makes its way to the top of the league. 88

It's a Wonderful Afterlife is a 2010 British comic film directed by Gurinder

Chadha. The screenplay centres on an Indian mother whose obsession with marrying off her daughter leads her into the realm of serial murder. It was filmed primarily in English, with some Hindi and Punjabi dialogue.

Pamela Rooks is an Indian film director and screenwriter, most known for the film, Train to Pakistan (1998) set in the background of the Partition of

India and based on Khushwant Singh's novel. It was screened at several international film festivals. Apart from that accomplishment she also made award- winning films like, Miss Beatty's Children (1992) and Dance Like a Man (2003) and several documentaries.

Nina's Heavenly Delights is a 2006 British drama romance comedy, directed by Pratibha Parmar. When young Glaswegian cook Nina Shah (Shelley

Conn) returns home for her father's funeral after three estranged years in London,

England, she begins a romantic relationship with Lisa (Laura Fraser), an old childhood friend who now owns half her late father's Indian restaurant, The New

Taj. Together they seek to save the restaurant by winning the national "Best in the

West Curry Competition" for a third time. Nina's mother Suman (Veena Sood) and brother Kary (Atta Yaqub), however, want to sell the place to fellow restaurateur

Raj (Art Malik), whose chef son Sanjay (Raji James) had been left at the altar by

Nina. Lending the young woman moral support is Nina's flamboyant gay friend

Bobbi (Ronny Jhutti), and Nina's younger sister Priya (Zoe Henretty). The film discusses the lesbian relationship of Nina and her friend Lisa.

Gauri Shinde is an Indian ad-film and feature film director. Shinde made her directional debut with the highly acclaimed English Vinglish (2012), which marked the comeback of actress Sridevi. It is a 2012 Indian comic drama film, 89 written and directed by Gauri Shinde. The film's narrative revolves around a housewife who enrols in an English-speaking course to stop her husband and daughter mocking her lack of English skills, and gains self-respect in the process.

Shonali Bose is an Indian English filmmaker, screen writer and producer.

Her important films are Amu (2005) and Margarita with a Straw (2014). Amu explores the suppressed history of genocidal attack on Sikhs in Delhi in 1984 after the death of Indira Gandhi. Amu is a critically acclaimed 2005 film directed by Shonali Bose, based on her own novel by the same name. It stars Konkona Sen

Sharma, Brinda Karat, and Ankur Khanna. The film premiered at the Berlin Film

Festival and the Toronto Film Festival in 2005.

Amu is the journey of Kajori Roy ( Konkana Sen Sharma), a 21-year-old

Indian American woman who has lived in the US since the age of 3. After graduating, Kaju goes to India to visit her relatives. There she meets Kabir (Ankur

Khanna), a college student from an upper-class family who is disdainful of Kaju’s wide-eyed wonder at discovering the "real India". Undeterred, Kaju visits the slums, crowded markets and roadside cafes of Delhi. Soon after she starts having nightmares. Kabir gets drawn into the mystery of why this is happening, particularly when he discovers that she is adopted. Meanwhile, Kaju’s adoptive mother – Keya Roy, a single parent and civil rights activist, arrives unannounced in Delhi. She is shocked to discover that Kaju has been visiting the slums.

Although Kaju mistakes her mother’s response to a typical Indian over- protectiveness, Keya’s fears are more deeply rooted.

Slowly Kaju starts piecing together what happened to her birth parents and mother and daughter clash as Kaju discovers she has been lied to her whole life. As 90

Kaju and Kabir undertake this quest they both discover their families' involvement with the man-made tragedy of immense proportions which took place thirty years ago in the capital city of India: the massacre of thousands of Sikhs in 1984; after the assassination of Indira Gandhi, the Prime Minister of India (The violence in

Delhi was triggered by the assassination of Indira Gandhi, India's PrimeMinister, on 31 October 1984, by two of her Sikh bodyguards in response to her actions authorising the military operation). The Indian government reported 2,700 deaths in the ensuing chaos. In the aftermath of the riots, the Indian government reported

20,000 had fled the city, however the People's Union for Civil Liberties reported

"at least" 1,000 displaced persons( Mukhoty2010). The most affected regions were the Sikh neighbourhoods in Delhi. Human rights organisations and newspapers across India believe the massacre was organised (http://news.bbc.co.uk). The collusion of political officials in the massacres and the judiciary's failure to chastise the killers alienated normal Sikhs and increased support for the Khalistan movement. The Akal Takht, the governing religious body of Sikhism, considers the killings to be a genocide ("1984 riots were 'Sikh genocide': Akal Takht –

Hindustan Times".). Kabir learns that his father was instrumental in organizing the riots, as well as guilty of failing to stop Kaju's father from being killed. Kabir confronts his father who tries to justify his actions. Keya finally tells Kaju the truth; her birth name is Amu Singh and her Sikh father and younger brother were killed in the riots while her mother hanged herself in a refugee camp.

Margarita with a Straw is a 2014 Indian English film; it stars Kalki

Koechlin, who plays Laila, a teenager with cerebral palsy. Revathy, Sayani Gupta, and William Moseley play supporting roles. The movie depicts the struggles with the normal activities of Laila’s life. Laila (Kalki Koechelin) is a teenager with 91 cerebral palsy who uses a wheelchair. She is a student at Delhi University and an aspiring writer who writes lyrics and creates electronic sounds for an indie band at the university. Laila falls for the lead singer of the college band and is heartbroken when she is rejected.

She soon overcomes this phase, when she gets a scholarship for a semester at New York University and moves there with her mother (Revathy). Living in

Manhattan, she meets an attractive young man named Jared (William Moseley) in her creative writing class, who is assigned to help her in typing. She also meets the fiery young activist Khanum (Sayani Gupta), a blind girl of a Pakistani

Bangladeshi descent, whom she later falls in love with. As she embarks on a journey of sexual discovery, she figures out she is bisexual, as she feels attracted to men like Jared in spite of being with Khanum. She has sex with Jared and she doesn't tell Khanum. Laila's mother, believing the two are like best friends and oblivious to the fact that Khanum is her daughter's lover, invites her to Delhi to spend the winter break with the family. It is during that time that Laila finds the courage to tell her mother about her sexuality and her relationship with Khanum, which her mother initially disapproves. She also tells Khanum that she had sex with Jared and asks her to forgive her. Khanum thinks that she was being used by

Laila and leaves her.

After a short while Laila's mother falls sick and she learns that her mother had fourth stage colon cancer which has fallen into relapse after previous treatments. Later Laila and her mother patch up and come to terms with each other.

After her mother dies Laila plays a recorded speech at her mother's funeral telling how much she loved her and how she was the only one who ever understood her.

The story ends with Laila going on a date, with herself, signifying that she now has 92 taken control of her life and doesn't need anyone else to love and care for her. The movie revolves around very delicate aspects of this modern life, teaching society how it’s better to adhere to and accept the changing rituals. Films explore different themes, one is depicted in the severe attack against Sikhs and its after effects, another film emphasises the bisexuality and the self discovery of the protagonist.

All I Want Is Everything is an Indian English film directed by Shital

Morjaria and produced by Jhansi Laxmi & Rekha Pappu, which was released in

2013. The story of the film revolves around friendship of three urban South Indian girls. This was Morjaria's first film as a director. Sagari Venkata, who played one of the protagonists in the film, also made her acting debut with this film. Morjaria noticed that there were too many films made in Indian film industries on male friendship. Though (Indian) girls or women also make similar close friendship, it was almost never highlighted as the main topic in a film. That's why, she planned this film to measure the societal image of contemporary Indian women. The film also attempts to portray the dreams, fears, aspirations, joys of contemporary Indian women. Morjaria hinted in an interview that there were autobiographical elements in the film. When she was young, she was a sleepwalker like Trisha's character, or when she was younger, she was as angry as Nidhi (Nandini 2013).

Many male and female directors produced Indian English and British

Indian films. They represent Indians and India in different ways. British Indian films like Gandhi, Passage to India, City of Joy, Slumdog Millionaire and Indian

English films like Fire, Midnights children, Bride and Prejudice, Mr. And Mrs.

Iyer and Mitr, My Friend are closely analysed in the next chapters. Through these films we can understand how they comprehend and depict Indian culture and

Indian people. 93

In Indian English and British Indian films, the initial years gave importance

to the epic stories and fairy tales. But after the advent of talkie movies

mythological issues are portrayed in the films. Most of the films were directed and

acted by English men. The films came under international and national banners.

Just after independence, some films justified the colonial rulers for depicting the

revolutionary issues of Indian people and depicting Thuggees, a cult of murderous

Indians in colonial British India. Films portrayed the problems of partition and it’s

after effects and the coloniser became hero for helping the native people.

Till the 80s, Indian English films are very few. Most of the films are British

/American/German films representing Indians and India. Their films have a

politics that picture India and Indians in an unconventional and rude manner. They

only emphasise the negative facet of the Indian people and their beliefs. They think

that Indian culture is very mystic and barbarous. For rescuing the native people

from the revolutionary native people, the whites come and took it as a challenge

and conquered and destroyed the native revolutionary people without any

hesitation. But after 80s Indian English films are profusely made which explain the

problems of Indian people in India and abroad. Salaam Bombay is one of the

movies which explore the pathetic conditions of slum people. At the same time

British Indian films portray Indians as deceivers and the whites teach their culture

and customs to the native people.

Later, Indian English films investigate the cultural difference, alienation,

cultural conflicts etc., but some other films draw the consequences of partition,

slums in India, revolutions in India etc., and rest of them deal with serious themes like lesbianism, molestations of children, child labour etc.. There are many women filmmakers like Deepa Mehta, Mira Nair, Revathy, Aparna Sen, Shonali Bose 94 representing different kinds of mental traumas of women in the society, home, public sphere and significant social issues.

CHAPTER THREE

REPRESENTATION OF INDIANS IN INDIAN ENGLISH FILMS

(Bride and Prejudice, Fire, Mr and Mrs Iyer, Midnights Children)

95

Representation can take the place of an idea, which is populated and

expressed through imagination. Representation also automatically, by the fact of

selection, acquires a frame and frames are not all- inclusive. Art, in its own right,

requires focus-not diffusion. Even if diffusion or disorder is to be artistically represented, it needs framing, which is alike the demand of semiotics and form.

Multiplication of frames, repletion, and symbolic thrust can help expand meaning, but no piece of art is made upon only parallels or superfluities. In a way if there is an incident or shot or a sub- narrative that doesn’t add meaning to the whole, it

subtracts from the quality of art. Representation stands like a doorway between

writer/director and reader/ viewer and makes a demand on the imagination of both

(Jain 4). This chapter discusses the representations of Indians in Indian English

films with special reference to the films Bride and Prejudice, Fire, Mr and Mrs

Iyer, Midnights Children. Different issues and incidents are deliberated by the

films. In this Mr and Mrs Iyer, Midnights Children reflected the two important

issues in India. One is about Independence and other is Gujarat riot. Other two

films Bride and Prejudice, Fire reflect the issues of patriarchal society and east

west conflicts. The representation of gender, race/ethnic, class and nation are the

major concerns of this chapter.

Ideology is the discourse that invests a nation or society with meaning.

Scholars define ideology in different ways. Karl Max says that ideology is false

consciousness; Louis Althusser takes issue with Marx’s notion of false

consciousness. He suggests that in ideology, the subjects also represent to

themselves their relation to those conditions of existence which are represented to

them there (37). Ideology enters into everyday life and serves the ruling class, as

there is no resistance or opposition. While ideology is dominant, it is also 96 contradictory and therefore fragmented, inconsistent and incoherent. Moreover it is constantly being challenged by resistance from those it purports to govern. Cinema is an ideological apparatus by the very nature of its seamlessness. It produces meanings and renders it in society and naturalises it. Mainstream cinema or dominant cinema puts ideology upon the screen. The ideology of a film does not take the form of direct statements or reflections on the culture. It lies in the narrative structure and in the discourses employed by the images, myths, conventions, and visual styles (Turner 173). Indian English films produce an ideology, which mainly emphasises not only Indian people, but westerners also.

They produce a film for satisfying others. Bride and Prejudice, an Indian English film, provides a bollywood style English film, which shows conflicts between two cultures and its remedies.

Bride and Prejudice is a 2004 romantic musical film directed by Gurinder

Chadha. It is an adaptation of the novel Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. The characters are same as in the novel; their names have been changed as local names such as Lalita, Jaya etc. The film takes place in Amritsar, Punjab. The central characters are Lalita Bakshi, a young and bold woman who helps her father run the family farming enterprise and her mother determined to marry off her daughters to respectable and wealthy men. Will Darcy, a handsome and wealthy American working in his family’s hotel business, who arrives at Amritsar for attending a marriage with his friend the barrister Balraj, and Balraj’s sister Kiran. Events and scenes are parallel to those in the novel screened by the bollywood style. At first

Darcy neglects his attraction to Lalita, who considers him conceited, arrogant and intolerant towards Indians and Indian culture. 97

Gurinder Chadha depicts Mrs Bakshi’s talkative nature, Maya’s vulgur dancing; Lakhi’s mannerisms astonish Darcy and his friends, and this makes Lalita and her sister Jaya embarrassed. Jaya and Balraj fall in love very quickly, but others’ interference and misunderstandings make their relationship problematic.

And there is Lalita’s relation with Johnny Wickham, Darcy’s former friend, who utilizes the issues of Lalita and Darcy. Another character is Mr.Kholi, who is represented as a comic character and Chada portrays him as a rich, stupid, clumsy and an Americanized man, who proposes to Lalita. After she turns him down, her best friend Chandra agrees to marry him, but it creates in her confusion and consternation. While her younger sister Lakhi runs off with Wickham, Darcy and

Lalita find the couple and separate them before he can ruin her life. He already had done it to Darcy’s younger sister Georgie. The last part of the film elucidates a happy ending with marriage between Balraj and Jaya and Lalita and Darcy in

Indian style. In The Empire Write Back , Ashcroft uses the term postcolonial to refer to “all the culture affected by imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day” (2). Depiction of Indian and western images in the film is an evident example of this hybridization of culture.

The director makes a cross cultural film interpretation of the novel. The novel emphasises the issues of different classes, but the film concentrates on different cultural perspectives. This film elucidates the conflict between two cultures, western and eastern. The two main characters are Lalita and William

Darcy who represent the different ideological and political perspectives. So they try to overcome the issues of cultural clash, pride and class distinctions. The film explains the ideological and political differences between the two cultures. 98

Usually Indian English films portray foreigners as playing the key roles in the films, and others are only their supporters who praise them. Only a few are exceptions. But this film depicts western thoughts about India and Indian culture; they misunderstand Indian culture and see it only through the colonised eyes.

Orientalism is never far from what Denys Hay has called the idea of Europe, a collective notion identifying "us" Europeans as against all "those" non-Europeans, and indeed it can be argued that a major component in European culture is precisely what made that culture hegemonic both in and outside Europe: the idea of European identity as a superior one in comparison with all the non-European peoples and cultures. There is in addition the hegemony of European ideas about the Orient, themselves reiterating European superiority over Oriental backwardness, usually overriding the possibility that a more independent, or more sceptical, thinker might have had different views on the matter (Said 7). In this film Lalita represents the East and William Darcy represents the West. Here the director emphasises the cultural difference between them. Lalita is very bold, always proud to be an Indian, and it draws many scenes, especially the conversation with Darcy and his mother Mrs. Darcy, in the film. Mrs. Darcy begins the conversation by asking the Bakshis to tell her all about India. Lalita instantly responds saying “India is such a big country; I wouldn’t know where to begin. (Bride and Prejudice)

She thinks that to know about India is trivial and talks something about

India. The same scene follows in the film Passage to India directed by David

Lean. This film portrays Mrs. Moore who wants to see the real India, but at the end of the film she overcomes her colonial gaze and understands that Indian culture is more complex than she thought. But here Mrs Darcy is not ready to comprehend 99

other culture and its diversity. When Mrs. Darcy inquires about India, her

ignorance of the culture repulses Lalita. When Mrs. Darcy claims “what with yoga

and spices and Deepak Chopra and the wonderful eastern things here, I suppose

there’s no need in travelling there anymore” (Bride and Prejudice), Lalita is so

offended that she quickly retorts a comment that quiets Mrs. Darcy. Mrs. Darcy’s

statement portrays just how unaware of India she is. For Mrs. Darcy, Indian culture

consists only of that which has been brought into the Western culture. Her

colonialist image of India explains Darcy’s ignorance since it demonstrates the environment in which he was raised. She knows only yoga and Deepak Chopra about India. Differences in class are here overlaid with those in culture as a middle-class Indian family interacts with wealthy non-resident British Indians and

American owners of multinational enterprises, mingling the problems created by pride in social status with prejudices rooted in cultural insularity.

However, the underlying conflicts between social and individual identity, between relationships based on material expediency and romantic love, remain the same, clearly indicating India’s belated transition from tradition to modernity

(Mathur 4). William Darcy provides a colonial gaze towards India. Even in the first scene he shows he is disinterested towards other cultures. Darcy takes Balraj’s participation in the customs as entertaining instead of respecting him for engaging in the traditions. Just like Darcy appears to be observing the actions of his fellow party attendees through a Western gaze, the Bakshis are interpreting his actions through an Eastern ideology. Gurinder Chada uses the eastern and western gaze to represent the miscommunication with respect to overcome the cultural ideology and class structure. 100

Darcy’s ignorance, which can be taken to represent him as proud and unwilling to educate himself about other cultures, is exemplified throughout the scene. For instance when the dance that introduces the males to females begins,

Darcy is caught off guard and shocked at the action. When the music first starts,

Darcy asks “What’s happening now?” (Bride and Prejudice). The way that Darcy forms the question and his tone contain a semblance of derogation. When Balraj joins the group of dancing men, Darcy’s consequent grin indicates his opinion that the culture he is observing and what Balraj is engaging himself in is of a lesser calibration than his. Not only does Darcy place himself opposite Indian culture by way of his standpoint, but he also shows his ignorance of and lack of interest in learning culture. An example is when Darcy is struggling to fix his pants. At this moment, Darcy is at the centre of the screen fiddling with the string on his pants hopelessly and allows Balraj to take the string, and control of the situation. When

Balraj takes the strings to try and fix it, Darcy looks away and gives up. By looking away, Darcy is demonstrating his indifference towards a solution. His ignorance is further displayed when he is introduced to the Bakshis. In this interaction, Darcy stands to the side, unsure of what to do. At one moment, he gives a slight bow towards Lalita that is returned with a mixed look of confusion and displeasure by

Lalita. He then continues to upset Lalita and the family after he is given the opportunity to learn the dances and immerse himself in the traditions, but refuses, stating that he must return to his work. His refusal to join in is taken by the Bakshis to show his disinterest in their ways as well as his pride. Mrs.Bakshi responds to his refusal by stating “rich American, what does he think, we are not good enough for him?”(Bride and Prejudice). 101

Chadha elucidates the climax scene with a fight. It is an intertexual relation

with old bollywood movie. The climactic fight between Darcy and Wickham is

shot against a screening of Manoj Kumar’s Purab Aur Paschim (East and West)

(1970), establishing Darcy, unequivocally, as the Bollywood hero, the rescuer of the damsel in distress, who deserves, and gets, the audience’s full support, denoted by enthusiastic applause. Through such intertextuality, Bride and Prejudice enacts a postcolonial reversal whereby the usual hierarchy governing the relationship between the colony and the metropolis is inverted. By privileging through style and explicit reference the Indian Bollywood framework in Bride and Prejudice,

Chadha implicitly minimises the importance of Austen’s text, reducing it to just one among several intertextual invocations without any claim to primacy (Mathur

6-7). The movie has a happy ending with the marriage of Lalita and Darcy, Jaya and Balraj in Indian style.

Another film is Fire. This film explains how the women resist patriarchal beliefs and traditional suppression. The gender representation is the main concern of this film analysis.The Film Fire, written and directed by Deepa Mehta, Indian

English Film Director, was released in 1996 in 33 countries and won fourteen international awards. It looks at contemporary India of the eighties and nineties of the post-feminist and post-Babri Masjid period. Rooted in a post independent middle class urban household in Delhi, it criticizes the Hindu Patriarchy. Fire got warm welcome in the West and violent criticism in the east. In an interview, Mehta expresses her view, “Fire deals with politics of sexuality”. However, this chapter deals with how the Indians are represented in the film, throwing light on how

Deepa Mehta understands India, Indian culture, traditions etc. This work concentrates on portraying the Hindu tradition through the repeated reference to 102

The Ramayana, performing rituals etc. Fire depicts the country struggling between

tradition and modernity, and the suppression and desire of women.

The film starts with the scene of young Radha and her parents sitting on the

mustard field. Her mother talks to her about the folk tales and makes her to dream.

This scene is repeated thrice in the film. Just after this shot, Mehta takes the beauty

of Tajmahal through her lens. Newly wedded Jatin (Javed Jeffrey) and Sita

(Nandita Das) visit the Tajmahal during their honeymoon. Sita interestingly listens

to the tale of the Tajmahal told by the guide, but Jatin doesn’t like it and is

disturbed. On returning home Jatin leaves his wife and punctually joins his mistress. She has only one acquaintance, Radha (Shabana Azmi), who also feels

lonely in this home. Her husband, Ashok (Kulbhushan Kharbanda), passive male

power in the joint family, goes to a Swamiji every evening. He is an ardent

follower of religion and Swamiji. Through his worship of Swamiji, he completely

ignores his duty as a husband. For him, desire is the root of all evils; he has been

following celibacy for the last 13 years. Radha has a duty to take care of Biji, the

female power of this film and Ashok.

The family owns a food court and video rental store. In the video shop only

Jatin and Mundu have access, the two women are relegated into the kitchen. In the evenings, Ashok goes to Swamiji and Jatin to his mistress Julie. There is another character Mundu, the servant of the house. He is also a suppressed character. All his emotions are suppressed, but he does masturbate in front of Biji while watching

The Ramayana serial. Sita does not like to lead a traditional life, but her background makes her to live in a traditional manner. But Radha never expresses her dislike of tradition. Gradually between Radha and Sita a relationship develops.

Their repressed emotions, desire, aloofness, alienation etc make them lead a 103

different life. The patriarchal society never accepts their relationship and tries to

destroy them. But they escape from this attempt.

Gender representation occurs through the analysis of characters in the film.

There are two main protagonists in the film, Radha and Sita. Radha (Shabana

Azmi), a middle-aged woman, suppresses all her emotions and desires. In the

opening scene of the film young Radha is sitting on a mustard field with her

parents. Her mother teaches her to dream, but in her middle age Sita learns to

dream and to do things independently. She is very busy in her house. She has to

attend to Biji, work in the Kitchen and carry on her duty as a wife. Her husband

Ashok doesn’t think about her emotions and desires. He is an adherent of Swamiji

and obeys his words. That is why he keeps celibacy. They have lived for thirteen

years without any sexual relations. After the arrival of the new bride, she gets a

friend and they share all their emotions and needs. Here Mehta visualizes the

loneliness; repressed emotions and trespassing of tradition in life creating lesbian

characters.

In the religious epic, The Mahabharata, Markandeya tells Yudhishtir about

“wives restraining all their senses and keeping their hearts under complete control.

By serving their husbands only can they win heaven” (Roy 488). Here husbands

are considered as Gods. Kakar points out that, “this is the ideal, purveyed over and

over again, in numberless myths and legends, through which the Hindu community

has tried to mould the character and personality of its female members.” (67)

In the first scene, Radha reminds Sita about a saying, she had learned from

her mother, “the way to man’s heart is through his stomach” and Radha adds that, she likes plain boiled rice. Through this sentence Mehta emphasises there are close 104

association among men between sex and food. In the Indian consciousness, food

and sexuality are closely linked. As A K Ramanujan points out, “the words for

eating and sexual enjoyment have the same root, Bhuj, in Sanskrit” (91). In the last

scene of the film, like Sita in the epic, Radha undergoes a trial by fire when she

discloses to Ashok that she wants to leave him for Sita. She says” I desire her

warmth, her compassion, her body. I desire to live” (Fire). She changes into active

Radha. After hearing the shocking news, Ashok violently kisses her and fire catches her sari from the burning gas stove. Mehta visualizes Rene Girard’s notion of mimetic desire thus: “even within the ritualistic framework of marriage sexuality is accompanied by violence and as soon as one trespasses beyond the limits of matrimony to engage in illicit relationship. The violence and the impurity resulting from this violence grows more potent and extreme.” (Gairola 35)

While Radha’s sari catches fire and as she is struggling to overcome it,

Ashok carries away his mother without helping her. But she escapes from fire and it proves her chastity. At the end she finds comfort and solace in love. Gairola quoted “a patriarch is not the lowest common denominator of desire.” As her name signifies, Radha’s mind is in search of real love or passion, her life moving on unsatisfied and just because, she couldn’t be a mother, her life only demands servitude. She has to work tirelessly for the hotel run by the family and cater to her husband’s requirements whenever he would want her.

Sita’s entry can be seen in the second scene of the film. The newly wedded

Sita doesn’t find a good and lovable husband, for her husband Jatin is in love with a Chinese girl. When they visit the Tajmahal during their honeymoon, Sita spontaneously responds to the romantic tale of Tajmahal, but Jatin is irritated. She has been compelled to question her own attractiveness. Catherine Mckinnon 105

observes, what defines woman as such is what turns men on (Chakrabarthy 121).

Sita asks Jatin “Don’t you like me?”, but he gives a cold response, “we have been married only three days” (Fire) and on returning home, she has to tolerate the traditional ways of life. In a society, heterosexuality is a tradition and women are under the control of men. Sita has been indoctrinated by the ideal of romantic love.

Spivak in her essay “ can the subaltern speak?” says that “ the ideological construction of gender keeps the male dominant”, a process that Deepa Mehta contests in her film showing how indian women “ caught in the constrictive web of familial commitments, arranged marriages and notions of duty” are trying to maintain an equilibrium between all the three. An Indian girl, from her childhood, is deliberately trained how to be a good woman and hence through “conscious inculcation of culturally designated feminine roles”, she is taught docility and submissiveness (Chakrabarthy 121). Radha who has grown up from the little girl in the opening scene of the film, loved nature deeply, believed in her potential and dreamt of freedom, has by now become a typical indian woman who is expected to

perform her duties and conform to rules without questioning. Consciousness of the

sense of duty makes her a ‘good woman’.

Within the controls imposed on Sita’s cross dressing, her dance and music,

restricted to the close confines of the home and business like, yet curious,

examination of the violation of her virginity, a scene is inserted to make several

points, the most important of which being the sexual innocence of Sita as also the

cultural value attached to virginity, all focusing on Sita’s discomfort in her new

home. Sita cannot tolerate the traditional and patriarchal beliefs. In many scenes

we can see Sita doesn’t want Radha to respond to tradition like a trained monkey. 106

In the evenings, two sisters-in-law are left alone. Ashok, Radha’s husband devotes his evenings to his Swamiji, and Jatin, Sita’s husband, goes to his mistress

Julie. The two women go to the terrace to breathe fresh air. This depicts a space from the oppressive marital duty. Their relationship starts with Sita kissing Radha

when Radha comes to console the crying Sita. Then, they have transgressed male

space. It is the beginning of Radha’s and Sita’s relationship. Irina Negrea says their

relationship is marked by the contradiction between happiness and joy that the

wedding song expresses and the grim reality of their marriage (48). Mehta points

out that when marriages do not work, men always have choices, whereas women

have none. They can only suffer in silence. That is why Sita and Radha enter into a

lesbian relationship. Lesbianism that defines itself in radical exclusion from

heterosexuality deprives itself of the capacity to resignify the very heterosexual

constructs by which it is partially and inevitably constitued. As a result that lesbian

strategy would consolidate compulsory heterosexuality in its oppressive forms.

(Butler 163). Ashok never thinks about Radha’s desires and needs. He has refused

her all physical and emotional contact for the last thirteen years. Gradually the

women characters relationship grows. Adrienne Rich has described it as the

“breaking of a taboo and the rejection of a compulsory way of life. It is also a

direct or indirect attack on male right of access to women.” (192)

Sita and Radha make a bond between themselves and they are waiting for

their husbands to leave them. Sexuality as pointed out by Kakar is the creation of

two person’s universe, where the affirmations of the female body and the

recognition of her feminine soul take place simultaneously (144). In the picnic

scene, Radha and Sita exchange their loving looks and Sita massages Radha’s feet.

In fact, these actions take place in the presence of their husbands, but they do not 107

understand. Ironically, Ashok says that “I am lucky to have such a loving family”

(Fire). But soon, he comprehends their relationship. First he tries to make her

understand that it is not good, and then he is angry towards her. Radha is

experimented by fire (agnipareeksha). After surviving this experiment, she goes to

Sita.

Lilliyan Faderman in her book Surpassing the Love of Man: Romantic

Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present

observes that the word lesbian describes a relationship in which two women’s strongest emotions and affections are directed towards each other, sexual contact may be part of the relationship to a greater or lesser degree or it may be entirely

absent. By preference, the two women spend most of their time together and share

most aspects of their lives with each other (17- 18). The film establishes the point

that one is not born as lesbian, but becomes one. Radha and Sita are not born

lesbians, but later their circumstances make them lesbian. Sita makes Radha aware

of the limitations of her role as a wife and daughter- in- law and she makes her

active. As Ruth Vanita and Salim Kidwai have commented, “the film uses the

tropes of female intimacy such as oiling each other’s hair, tropes of marriage such

as exchanging bangles, feeding one another and pressing each other’s feet and

explores in a masterly fashion the eroticism of exchanged glances.” (214)

Fire shows how the Indian middle class family treats women in their home.

They are considered as a machine for procreation and have to do duty as a wife/slave. They have to suffer physical and mental torture. In the heterosexual society, women have no power and lead a passive life. But many women think and live, following a masculine imagination. Eventhough they suffer a lot, they are not ready to free themselves from all these problems. In one scene, the sexual relation 108

between Jatin and Sita is only mechanical. But Ashok doesn’t do sex with Radha.

These two male characters do not consider their wives. Women undergo

subordination not only for sex but throughout their life. Women just are their

bodies in a way that men are not, biologically destined to inferior status in all

spheres that privilege rationality.

At the same time, however, women are seen as more wholly embodied and

hence naturally disqualified from equality with the male, the boundaries of that

embodiment are never fixed or secure. As the devalued process of reproduction

makes clear, the body has a propensity to leak, to overflow the proper distinctions between self and other, to contaminate and engulf. Thus women themselves are, in the conventional musculinist imagination, not simply inferior beings whose civil and social subordination is both inevitable and justified, but objects of fear and repulsion, coincident with its marginalization, the devalued body is capable of

generating deep ontological anxiety. (Shildrick and Price 3)

Ashok, Jatin and Mundu are the main male characters in the film. Ashok is

the elder one and a passive power in the joint family. The family owns a food court

and video shop. He manages the money dealings and is an ardent devotee of

Swamiji and religion. For about thirteen years he has had no sexual relation with

his wife Radha. He completely ignores her. He needs her only for testing his desire

by having the object of his desire, Radha, lie near him until the temptation

subsides. When Radha asks him, “how does it help me?” he responds “by helping

me, you are doing your duty as my wife. For him, desire gives pain” (Fire) and in

many places he acts as the male power. He always thinks about Swamiji and his

traditions. So their marital relations are not fair. 109

Jatin, the younger brother of Ashok, acts as a loveless, affectionless

husband in the film. He has a Chinese girl friend and he loves her more than

anything else. Ashok and Biji, matriarchy of the film, forced him to marry Sita.

The second scene of the film shows Jatin as a careless and loveless husband, even

during their honeymoon Sita is very interested and loving, but Jatin has no interest

in her and she has to explain her love towards him and request him to love her, but

his cold response shows his indifference towards her. Jatin underestimates Sita and

says that she stands only for procreation. He makes it clear that he cannot love her

as he loves Julie. In one scene Sita calls him ‘a pompous fool’ and slaps him on his

face and he is taken aback. Sita’s arrogance rather than submissiveness kindles his

anger and he responds by kissing her violently. This act of sexual violence symbolizes the male power over her. After watching the doings of the lesbian

couple, his mind is filled with desire and shame. He even forgives Radha, while

she is ready to touch his feet. But Radha’s confident nature makes him violent and

he calls her “Whore” and kisses her violently. Her unresponsive nature creates in

him anger towards her and he goes out from there taking Biji, when the fire catches

her sari. This selfish attitude of the man in this critical situation renders him

inhuman.

The myth of Sita’s trial by fire is so internalized in him that he sadistically

cherishes Radha’s death by the accident and refuses to act. As Linda Singer and

Judith Butler point out “to the extent that women’s desires are addressed to other

women, men are displaced from their position of centrality, and heterosexist

hegemony, and all that follows from it, is subjected to challenge, critiques, and

ultimately denial (Butler and Linda Singer 146-162). Precisely, that is the effect of

Fire on the general Indian society which could not accept the abrogative stance of 110

that film on emphasizing the need for “flexibility” and diversity of power

deployments with respect to constructing sexuality as a site for intervention into

the lives of bodies and populations (146-162).

This film disturbs the gender relations and destabilizes the dominant

cultural realities for depicting the lesbian bodied subject. But lesbianism projected

here as a radical relationship between the two sisters- in- law in the same

household doesn’t arise from the biological need but rather from cultural

repression. Radha’s and Sita’s relationship is a relation of the unity of sex, gender and desire. The film reveals the non affectionate newly wedded Jatin and Sita. The

harsh realities of Radha and Ashok’s marriage explain the difference between

desire and reality. For Ashok, desire is closely bound up with procreation or else

desire is evil. Jatin however, reveals his sensuality with Julie and can demarcate

his roles. The sexuality that emerges within the matrix of power relations is not a

simple replication or copy of the law itself, but a uniform repetition of a

masculinist economy of identity. The productions swerve from their original

purposes and inadvertently mobilize possibilities of “subjects” that do not merely

exceed the bounds of cultural intelligibility, that effectively expand the boundaries

of what is, in fact, culturally intelligible (Butler 39). Ashok chooses strict

adherence to religion and worship of Swamiji. One received celibacy and, the other

a mistress. Jatin’s role as a husband of Sita is only functional and limited to the

consensual sexual act as a part of the marriage ritual. There is no affection and his

relationship with her is one of duty, but his relationship with Julie is that of

‘pleasure’. Actually, Jatin is trapped in a compulsive marriage like many other

Indian males, who don’t want to break away from the joint family system. He 111

would rather suffer double standards and distinguish between pleasure and

procreation, as he is unable to derive the same from one woman (Sengupta 105).

Mundu, the servant, has an important role in the film. He adheres to the stereotype of a servant who exploits in return for being exploited. Mundu’s conscious subversive imagination encourages him to masturbate before Biji in total

dismissal of her presence, while watching the porno film. Even when he is caught

at the time of masturbating, he can retort with a threat of exposing Radha’s secret

to the family. Further, it explains his outrageous conduct to Jatin by saying that

Jatin is his role model. He also finds his own space in the house. At the time of

Karva Chauth, to honour the husbands, when Radha narrates a story, Mundu

imaginatively plays the role of the king and chooses Radha as his queen, Sita and

Jatin become servants. He imagines Ashok as a holy man who introduces the

Karva Chauth ritual. Mundu’s reverie can be regarded as paradigmatic of the phantasmatic process, constituting a privileged moment where crude psychic materials are transferred from one system to the other (Hoogland 46). Lastly,

Mundu reveals to Ashok the secret relation of Sita and Radha.

Biji and Julie are the two power possessed women in the film. The role of

Biji in the house as a matriarch symbolizes the impasse in which all the characters find themselves. Biji’s expressive dumbness, her frustrations, her unwillingness to be fed by Mundu etc. demonstrate her power over the others in the household. She is a mute matriarch who sees and understands everything and holds on to the traditional codes steadfastly. Her sense of indignation and impotent rage against

Mundu and her disgust at Radha, at the close of the film, signify the potency of the mute traditionalism. Biji’s dumbness, her paralysis and yet her indignation, her control over the family, beautifully signify the baggage of traditional codes which 112 the Indian patriarchy continues to drag on even in the 20th and 21st century.

(Sengupta 106)

Julie, the Chinese mistress of Jatin, is a powerful character in the film. She rejects to marry Jatin and accepts him as a lover, for she can’t live in a joint family following traditional customs without any freedom. The Chinese label allows Julie the freedom to lead her own life which Jatin can’t (105). Usually the choices are only for men, but controversially Julie has a power to choose Jatin and she plays the masculine role even though, she may signify the female pleasure principle to

Jatin. Julie feminizes him. She has a power to lead her own life; nobody comes to her talking about rules and regulations.

Many religious and cultural images, explanations, scenes etc are also portrayed in the film. The film depicts the memorials and shrines- the Tajmahal, signifies of the immortality of love, and Hazart Nizammudin’s shrine signifying the immortality of the spirit. Nizammudin, a sufi saint, represents here the freedom from religious ritual (Shah 141). The Ramayana is a powerful subtext in the film.

Many scenes are drawn from the Ramayana on TV and drama and through

Swami’s discourses. There are recurring references to it and lastly the symbolization of agnipareeksha, trial by fire. Uma Parameswaran at one point objected to the names and suggested that Ashok’s wife should have been named

Sita and that allusions should have been more in a one to one relationship (267-

268). But deviating from such expectations, Mehta has simultaneously achieved three things. She has selected a subject that constructed the notion of womanhood in India, but has then gone on to disturb it by breaking away from its main narrative in order to serve the ideological function of the film’s narrative.

(Cartwright 129) 113

Religion exerts a great pressure on Indian women who are taught to adhere

to the ideal of womanhood as exemplified by Sita in the Ramayana epic. It shows

the control over women and their sexuality. Sita has been “transformed into a

cultural icon that has for centuries assisted in the validation of various ideological

forms of oppression [of women]” (Pandit 116). There is an image constructed that,

women should be pious and dutiful all the time. This notion of duty repeatedly

comes into the film through the shots of the Ramayana. Kakar is of the view, it is through recitation, reading, listening to or attending to dramatic performances of this revered text (Ramayana) that a Hindu re- asserts his or her cultural identity as a Hindu and obtains religious merit (63-64).

There is another recurrent scene where Rama asks Sita to walk through the fire to prove her purity and chastity. This scene comes up again and again as part of a film, as part of a TV serial and as part of an enactment at a local Ramleela, which is being witnessed by Ashok and his Swamiji. Like Sita in the epic, Radha undergoes a trial by fire when she discloses to Ashok that she is leaving him for

Sita. Ashok forces himself upon her and performs a consensual act of sati on

Radha. (Gairola 34).

The unaffectionate Jatin and Sita and the insipid realities of Radha and

Ashok’s marriage divide between desire and object of desire. For Ashok, desire is the root cause of all evils, but Jatin revels in his sensuality of Julie. In fact, both of these men neglect their wives and their emotions and passions. Biji, the passive power of the family, is a follower of traditional values. Mehta includes another ritual Karva Chauth, to respect husbands. It is a critique of traditionalism, which always dishonours and subjugates the female. Jatin doesn’t like this type of customs, but Ashok, true to his religious temperament, cherishes it as a necessary 114

ritual and Biji strictly adheres to the codes of the ritual. Radha follows this ritual

without expressing dissent, but Sita is ready to question it and openly expresses her

discomfort. Some feminist critics criticise that there is no reciprocal fasting of men

for the welfare of their wives. Karva chauth has been cited as a symbol of cultural

repression of women. Feminists such as Madhu Kishwar who has put it in the same class as "Khomeinivad" (i.e., pushing women into position of subservience to their husbands, similar to the family structure allegedly favoured by Ayatollah

Khomeini) (184). But husbands are not there. Ashok visits Guru and Jatin his mistress.

The taboo against incest and, implicitly, against homosexuality is a repressive injunction which presumes an original desire localized in the notion of

“dispositions”, which suffers a repression of an originally homosexual libidinal directionality and produces the displaced phenomenon of heterosexual desire

(Butler 83). Radha’s and Sita’s relationship develops through the repression and suppression of their emotions and desires by tradition and family. They trespass the conventional laws made by hegemonic institutions. Sita’s trial by fire runs through the film as a recurring motif to interrogate the very bases of codes and beliefs, which repress and subjugate the Indian women. On the first day of Sita in her husband’s house, she is changing into jeans and dancing to herself with the rhythm of the pop song, which reflects her drive to outwit the traditional codes followed by the others in the family.

Once she and Radha have found new meaning in their relationship, she tempts Radha into a ball dace with her, where they assume lover- like roles. Sita impersonates the male, clothed in trousers and with a stylish cap on her crown;

Radha acts as a feminine principle. In a way Sita is quite at par with Jatin, as he too 115

has little respect for the customs and codes followed in the house. Judith Butler and Singer’s observation on Foucault’s thesis on power and sexual discourse is relevant here. Butler said that the notion of an original or primary gender identity is often parodied within the cultural practices of drag, cross-dressing, and the sexual stylization of butch/femme identities. (174)

Costumes are one of the important elements in films. They help to identify the different natures and features of characters. Different characters have different costumes. They show their nature, behaviour, power, place, time etc. William H.

Philips says that costumes are often used to help to show a place and time, and sometimes show the character’s status and power. Appearances, including clothing, can be so expressive that a single image sometimes conveys the essence

of a story. Appearances reveal character and it can also create character (21). In

this film characters’ costumes are different. Radha and Sita, two main characters in

the film, are depicted in different costumes. A film has multiple main characters;

appearance can be used to individualize them. Clothing can be used to show or

reinforce an aspect of a character. (20)

In the first half of the film, Radha’s costumes are dull and they throw light

on her passive, unenthusiastic life. But after her relation with Sita, she has

completely changed. Costumes are different, colourful dresses are worn; a very

interesting, hopeful Radha can be seen. In the case of Sita, from the first scene to

the last scene, her costumes are the same; her costumes make her bold and ready to

question the traditional customs. Even in the first scene, Sita’s eagerness towards

modern dress can be seen. She wears Jatin’s pants and smokes and then dances to

an English song. Her thirst to be free from the traditional customs is obviously 116

portrayed here. In another scene she wears men’s costumes. The traditional and

patriarchal society pushed her to obey the rules created by the patriarchy.

In the same way Jatin’s and Ashok’s costumes emphasise their characters.

In Ashok’s case, his power and his attitude toward life can be seen through his costumes. Similarly Jatin’s attitude can be seen through his costumes. Like in most of the other films, servants’ costumes are the same. According to James Naremore

“costumes serve indicators of gender and social status, but they also shape bodies

and behavior”. He also quotes Charlie Chaplin’s words. “I had no idea of the

character. But the moment I was dressed, the clothes and make up made me feel

the person he was.” (88-89)

Deepa Mehta creates a new space in the film. That’s not so such familiar

for the Indian people.

According to Jasbir Jain, Fire is a foreign film more at home in

English. Most of the scenes are taken indoor, except, the Tajmahal visit

memory sequences of the girl with her parents which could be easily

lifted into any foreign setting. The scenes were slick, they moved

quickly into each other and were often cut short at the point of merging

into another, the double function fast-food joint and video parlour

almost solely managed by women (not a common sight in 1996 in

middle class India), were all a little distant and their apartment could

be an immigrant home abroad (Jasbir 56).

The film is thinly populated, there is no crowd, no relatives come there and

there are no neighbours, acquaintances, no community feeling, no festivals and

celebrations. The only outside persons are Swami and Julie. The Ramleela and 117

wedding function are only the additional sights. This film dominantly confined its

spaces both emotionally and physically. Biji’s bed is in the sitting room, where the

family TV occupies a place. The women move in and out of their rooms down to

the kitchen and back again. The two bedrooms are similar, double beds, dressing

table and a big window with bright lights, but nothing can be seen from the

outside. In Ashok’s room, Vivekanada’s photo is placed, but Jatin’s room is

decorated with the photos of Jackie Chan, Bruce Lee etc, Jatin and Sita sleep on a

single bed, but in Ashok and Radha‘s case the double bed has been separated into

two. Here the director tries to depict the different nature of the characters and their

relationship. There is no privacy and freedom. The old woman and her elder son

Ashok share the power of the family. She controls everything with the bell. And he

controls the money and the hierarchically structured roles.

Mehta takes most of the scenes about the home and exemptions are very few. Madhu Kishwar commented in her review of this film,

“an unrealistic element in her depiction is that the fire family seems to

live in complete isolation. This fire family strangely enough never gets

a visitor, even at the ritually important moment when the young couple

returns from their honeymoon. The post marriage period is usually

filled with guests and neighbours in Indian families. The total isolation

of the family is not only unrealistic but also claustrophobic. (1)

Deepa Mehta, Indian English director, makes significant editing and organizing the scenes in a proper manner. This film mainly interweaves three major themes, religion, life of the middle class and break down of the traditional concepts. These are depicted through the scene sequences. Firstly Radha asks 118

Mundu to take Biji upstairs and show her The Ramayana video. As Mundu does,

Radha and Sita talk about Radha not having children, when Sita says “Ashok

Bhaya is a saint”, Radha responds, “Yes he is” (Fire). Immediately in the

following scene we find Mundu’s masturbation in the presence of Biji. The word

saint is followed by Mundu’s masturbation. Similarly, the film mingles many

scenes related to The Ramayana. In another scene, Jatin is engaged in a prolonged

kiss with Julie and it is followed by an early morning shot with the sounds of

temple bells and prayer “ om jai jagadheesh hare” in the background and a

milkman chanting ‘sita ram radhe shyam’. At the time of Ramleela performance,

Ashok watches the swami more than the performance and he kills a fly in the

process. At the end of the scene, swamiji says ‘poor Ram’. Immediately the scene

changes into the terrace of the house where Radha licks blood from Sita’s leg. In another scene, Jatin is licking the toes of Julie followed by a shot of Ashok pressing the feet of swamiji.

The film shows the passive males and passionate women. The repressed women’s emotions explode and they try to find new meanings in their life. Radha and Sita, desired women, are chained with religion and tradition. But they have succeeded in breaking the iron chains and try to live in their own way. Actually, it is a revolt for freedom. The filmmaker gives vivid pictures about the middle class families in India torn between Ramayana and sex, between Swami and Julie, passive males and passionate women doomed into dead marriages by tradition without even the option of a divorce.

The film Fire has many threads like traditionalism, religion, patriarchy, gender differences, life of middle class etc. Here women are represented as passionate and desirable, but they are oppressed by the tradition, patriarchy and 119

systems of middle class family. In fact, Ramayana makes icons in the middle class

families and they are the ardent followers of it. As Sita in the Ramayana, Radha in

the film has to overcome agnipareeksha. Actually, people do not like to change

their traditions, customs, rituals etc. But here Mehta seriously points out that the tradition makes women as repressed and they don’t have any choice in their life.

Radha and Sita are two marginalized middle class Indian women. Beauvoir claims that one is not born, but rather becomes a woman. It follows that woman itself is a term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to originate or to end. (301)

The film discusses the gender discrimination in Indian patriarchal society, which includes both sexes. Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being (Butler 43-44). The director cunningly uses editing. Through the scenes, Mehta explains the connection between life and Indian beliefs (Ramayana tradition). Here she uses lesbianism, and points out that unsatisfied women follow lesbian characters. The way she portrays the structure of middle class Indian family is peculiar, there is no crowd, neighbours, relatives etc, and no men visit the terrace of the house. All the characters of the film have no other relation, except Swami and the Chinese mistress. Through this film we can understand, how Mehta understands India,

Indian Culture, tradition etc. There arises the question, “is it for an Indian middle class family?” If not, for whom did she make this film? It’s a partially Indian and partially English film. It portrays the arrival of lesbianism not only for the biological needs but also as a protest against the cultural repression 120

Another film is Midnight’s Children. This film analyses the historical facts about the pre and post independence period. How the nation is constructed and how it is represented in the film etc is closely examined. It is a first person narrative in which Saleem Sinai writes his private history, which is inextricably connected with the history of his country. The emergence of a nation is understood as the point of arrival for an “Imagined Community” (Anderson 6). Since his birth coincided with India’s independence and his destiny got handcuffed to history, the narrative and thematic progression in the film are characterized throughout by a continuous oscillation from the personal story of Saleem to the story of his country. He is a born grotesque. As a child, he uses his prophetic voice to communicate with other miraculous children on his country. After his nose is drained off its miraculous goo, it acquires an equally miraculous power of knowing. He sees through the games of love, sniffs truth and falsehood, smells what is in the air, and follows trails.

The historical space encompassed is enclosed by two momentous events, the first one marks the end of a long period of colonial rule and the beginning of free India; the second one puts an end to the short period of Mrs. Gandhi’s emergency rule in the country, during which hard-worn freedom of the country had been severely threatened . This leads Rushdie to an interpretation of India’s pre-

1947 past, which he intermittently invokes in the film to put the post-1947 past of

India in perspective.

The director ignores India’s past before 1947, because she thinks that it was mythical and imaginary; to counter this, he invents another India, which is also imaginary. However there is a difference between the two. The second one is a country of hope and promise, because in it “anything was possible”. Although her 121

view might sound like the well-covered thesis that the British really made us in to

a nation, it is much more than that. For her India is a wished for country. She

invests it with a new character, so that it could contrast with the old one, which

was unhealthy and undesirable.

Midnight’s Children is a 2013 film directed by Deepa Mehta; the

screenplay is written by Salman Rushdie, one of the eminent Indian- English

writers and is produced by David Hamilton. While it is adapted for the film, it

doesn’t have many changes from the source text. Through the adaptation of the

novel, the film justifies its original text. The main characters are Saleem Sinai

(Satya Baba), Shiva ( Sidharth), Parvathy ( Sreya Saran) etc.

As the novel, the film portrays the historical background of India in pre and post independence. The director makes history by using Saleem. According to

Lynn White “history does not exist; what exists is debris. Inchoate and amorphous

mass of events, incidents, and happenings. It is the historian who shapes them into

a picture of the past. (White 5)

The second shot of the film depicts pre independence India (1917 at

Kashmir). Saleem speaks of his grandfather Dr. Aziz and grandmother Nazim. His

peculiarity is a large and magnificent nose. Then the camera focuses on Agra 1942.

At that time the entire India discusses the partition of India and Pakistan. But one

character, Miya Abdulla, is against the partition and later he is shot by the fanatics.

Actually, the film doesn’t disclose who the killers are, but they want the birth of

Pakistan. His secretary Nadir Khan escaped to the underground of the house of Dr.

Aziz. His wife and daughters do not like this action, but Aziz doesn’t care about

what others say. Gradually he arranges the marriage between Nadir and his young 122

daughter, Mumtaz, without considering the indignation of her mother and two

elder daughters. But their marriage flounders. Through these incidents, the film

explains the power of men who try to keep women under their control. Nazim

can’t physically oppose her husband, but she protests against her husband’s action

and takes a vow of silence. Nadir is depicted here as a passive male character.

Representation of nation is explored in the film and through the explanation of image representation. Saleem Sinai is one of the main characters in the film, and is one of the thousand midnight’s children who possesses magical powers. In fact, he is a foster son of Amina (Mumtaz) and Ahmad Sinai. Among these children, he is the leader. He is born at the stroke of midnight on Independence Day. He himself says that he is mysteriously handcuffed to history and his destiny forever changes with his country’s. He says that he was born in the city of Bombay. Before he describes his story he narrates his grandfather’s and grandmother’s story.

Everything is narrated though his own eyes. He is one of the midnight’s children, and he has a power to unite the rest of the midnight’s children. His nose is very large.

In an interview, Rushdie explains the reason for Saleem’s big nose. “One day I was looking at the map of India, and all of a sudden from it resembled a large nose hanging into the sea, with a drip off an end of it, which was Sri Lanka. Then I thought if Saleem is going to be the twin of the country, he may as well be the identitical twin and so he sprouted this enormous nose (Rushdie 10). He knows there are two Indias, the actual India and his personized India, which he refers to as

‘my India’ or the India discovered within his mind. Certainly, he is not a historian nor a great character destined to play a special role in India’s destiny. One 123

controversial thing in Saleem’s life is that he becomes a sniffer (man) dog in the

Pakistan army.

Saleem’s birth and independent India’s birth occurred at the same time; at

midnight and people expected a peaceful and free life, but Saleem’s birth makes us

to expect that he will do something for the country by using his magical powers.

But he is depicted as a passive male protagonist. Though he has magical powers,

he doesn’t use the same for India. Saleem hears others sound through his nose.

Even if he knows about the crucial situation of the emergency period he can’t do

anything to protect the poor people. Through the enactment of the political act

(emergency in 1974) most of them have died. Here the director and the

scriptwriter unitedly show their indignation of the dictatorship of Mrs. Gandhi.

Saleem is castrated and deprived of all his powers. It also shows the destruction of

new ideas and young people. There is no hope, everything destroyed without any mercy. First Saleem has his beloved mother, father, Ayah, but gradually he is alone. Although, his childhood is in Pakistan, he likes to live in India.

In his childhood, he meets with an accident. His brutish English teacher attacked him by plucking his hair and he was seriously injured. In the hospital, the doctor tells his parents that his blood group is different from theirs. Because of this reason, his father Ahammed Sinai, tries to hate him. This incident forced him to exile from India to Pakistan. According to Saleem, there is a different atmosphere, even in his auntie’s house, which is full of military rule. Colonel Sulfikkar, his uncle and other army officers make a plan to attack the president of Pakistan, and bring a military rule. They use Saleem for sniffing. 124

Alternatively midnight’s children are gathered. Here Shiva and Saleem are

opposed to each other. Saleem loses his family in a bomblast in Pakistan and he

also loses his memory. He can’t narrate nine years history, even after recovering

from this accident East Pakistan separated and became an independent nation

Bangladesh. He can only escape from there through Parvati’s magic of

inivisibility. When he comes back to India, he feels peace and solace. But he

doesn’t have any sexual relation with Parvati because he can forsee the future

incidents. But she uses her magical power to bring Shiva and have sexual

relations. Later Saleem is ready to be married to the pregnant Parvati. In the

emergency period, all midnight’s children are castrated and lose their magical powers. Saleem can’t do anything for the country, but India gives a brutal experience to Saleem.

There are some emotional sequences. After his release from the jail, he comes to visit picture Singh and Saleem’s son. When they have food, he tastes green pickle. He finds the taste of the pickle is the same as his ayah’s pickle and goes to Bombay for finding the person, who makes the pickle. Lastly he meets his ayah and they all live hopefully in peace and solace.

Throughout the film Saleem wants to lead a peaceful life and he is not ready to do any work. Satya Babha acts as Saleem. His physique and long nose make him the right person to play the role of Saleem. Firstly Saleem is depicted as a high class and elite person, but later, he wears dhoti and lives in a slum. All his cultural background has changed. He is a potent and passive male character. He uses British accented language. 125

Shiva and Parvathy are the other two midnight’s children. In the film Shiva

has the power to make war and Parvati has magical powers (not blackmagic).

Actually Shiva is the son of Amina and Ahmmed Sinai, but at the midnight, sister

Mary changes the children for keeping her word to Joe. Even in childhood, he always opposed Saleem. He hates the rich and lives as the son of street singers. He possesses nothing. So from that time till his death he hates Saleem. In the middle of the film, Saleem loses everything, but Shiva gains something in his life. He became the chief military officer at the time of Mrs. Gandhi’s reign. Though he is one of the midnight’s children, he helps to implement the emergency declaration and destroys the street and all other midnight’s children for Mrs.Gandhi. Finally he meets with an accident and dies. The shot of Shiva’s death is immediately followed by the rising sun. It signifies that after removing the evil the country will be saved.

Parvati is a witch and she always supports Saleem and is not ready to accept Shiva’s arguments. In many cases she helps Saleem, like when they have to comeback from Bangladesh to India. She makes an invisible magic. When

Saleem possesses nothing, she helps him to find a better place. She makes Saleem acquainted with Picture Singh. When she is furious with Saleem, her magic powers bring Shiva into her home and they make sexual relation. But at the time of the emergency declaration, Parvati protects her child by sacrificing her life.

The film explains the pre Independence India through the characterisation

of other characters like Mumtaz, Alia, Emrald, Ahmmed Sinai, Major, Sulfikkar

etc. Mumtaz is considered as the typical woman in India. She is Saleem’s mother

and the younger daughter of Aziz and Nazim. Like her parents, she loves her

husband partly, that’s why their love doesn’t have long life. She is black when 126

compared to her sisters, but very loving. Aziz arranges her marriage very secretly

with Nadir Khan, but it fails and after sometime, she is married to Ahammed Sinai

and goes to Bombay. Even when she understands that Saleem is not their child,

she is not ready to neglect him but protects him. She is a very loving and

affectionate mother. She has an important role in the film. Emrald is a very pretty

girl who marries Lt. Sulfikar, chief in Pakistan army. She doesn’t like secret

marriage of Nadir and Mumtaz, she violently reacts against it, but always women

have no role in the public space. Her indignation brings police to nab Nadir in the

underground. In the film, she lives in Ravalpindi, Pakistan. Alia is the older one and wiser than others. Actually Ahmmed Sinai proposed to marry her, unfortunately, he married Mumtaz. Alia lives in Karachi, Pakistan.

These two personalities are the husbands of Amina/ Mumtaz and Emarald.

Ahamad Sinai is a successful businessman, who married Mumtaz, and he changes her name, Amina. First, he is a lovable husband and father, but after getting freedom to India, all Muslim transactions are freezing. After this incident his love towards others are decreasing. He hates his son Saleem, after discovering Saleem is not his blood.

Major Sulfikkar serves Pakistan army, who is efficient and strict. After getting freedom, he becomes a Pakistan major. The army, which has been led by

Major Sulfikkar, attacks the Pakistan president for bringing military reign. But after few years, east Pakistan is separated from Pakistan with the help of India, and gives rise to a new country, Bangladesh. In the film these two persons play important role that means Ahamad Sinai is the father of Saleem Sinai and make a link with the character Mathhold in to the film. Sulfikkar was Indian and gradually 127 became Pakistani. Most important wars between India and Pakistan were led by him.

Through the representation of Ahmmed Sinai and Major Sulfikkar, the stereotypical representation can be seen in this film. And all the Muslim characters are stereotypically represented in the film. Anti -muslim portrayal also takes place in the film. After Independence, most of the Muslim characters are removed from the mainstream scenario

Mary is another important character in the film. Seema Biswas acts as

Mary. This character has become the destiny of Saleem’s and Siva’s life. Mary exchanges children as rich to poor and poor to rich only for her Joe. This intended action makes her regretful and it haunted deeply. So that she leaves her job and becomes ayah of Saleem. Even if she feels regret in her mind, who is not ready to reveal the fact, but only on one condition she is forced to reveal the truth, while

Saleem misunderstands his mother Amina Sinai. Here one question arises why doesn’t she become Siva’s Ayah?, Actually Siva’s mother died at the time of delivery and while Mary reveals the truth she says that Siva is not good, that is why she always protects Saleem, not Siva. Mary looks after Saleem more than

Amina cares for her son, Saleem. In the film their emotional sequences are more affectionate than Amina and Saleem. Saleem was forced to say to his mother

Amina “amma, I hate you” (Midnight’s Children), but such type of discourse can’t be seen in any scenes between Amina and Saleem. Mary makes tasteful pickle,

Saleem likes it more than anything, because of that, he can find out her and he says to his son Mary is the mother towards the last scences in the film. 128

Mary stands here as Virgin Mary, for, she becomes the mother of Saleem

and his son. Saleem considers her as his mother and forgets Amina(Mumtaz) and the street singers.

Street singers are poor and for making money they crack jokes and sings. In

fact Saleem is the son of Vanita and Mathhold, who is an English man. But he is

exchanged with Siva. Vanita and her husband have a role to be the parents of Siva.

They are represented as oppressed class. They don’t have any right to oppose

others and live as they wish. The elite people exploit them as slaves.

Mathhold is represented as a symbol of evil and generates rather than fully

fleshed out characters. In the film we can comprehend that Mathhold is the first

officer in the East India Company and last European to rule India before India gets

freedom. His acts symbolize the entire colonial adventure of exploitation and

demoralization. His conversation with Ahmad Sinai is, “you will admit we weren’t

all bad; built your roads, schools, railway, parliamentary system, all worthwhile

things” (Midnight’s Children). It means his people as men who were the civilizing

influence on the Indian subcontinent and would like to remind the Indians of his

departure. The so called native elites try to identify themselves with the white

settlers. The white settlers take advantage of this situation in exploiting the

country. In the Preface to The Wretched of the Earth, Satre says,

the European elite undertook to manufacture a native elite. They

picked out promising adolescents; they branded them, as with a red-

hot iron, with the principles of western culture; they suffered their

mouth full with high- sounding phrases, grand glutinous word that 129

stuck to the teeth. After a short stay in the mother country they were

sent home, white washed (7).

Through this character the director exposes not only the myth of so called

superiority of the British, but also the colonial games that the British had played to

create Indians who were English in spirit and mental dependence on the British.

His too big price to buy a house to live in but as he shows it was the price that the

country paid forgetting it’s freedom.

In the history of India, Mrs. Gandhi is an indispensible personality. She

was an administrator par excellence. Socially, politically and historically many

developments were brought to India. She is called “Iron Lady”, she possess such

an energy, mental power intelligence etc. As a political leader, many stern

decisions were taken by her. But in the film, the director and script writer show

their ideas about her rule. Here Indira Gandhi is depicted in a negative role. They

take only one action of Mrs. Gandhi that is the black mark of her life, emergency period. The director gives us a vivid picture about the evilness of this period. The film says that emergency is her immediate decision and its consequences are very dangerous. Saleem, protagonist of the film, dreams her in his childhood, who is chewing something. Her close up shot expresses her evilness and cruelty. The film discusses that Mrs. Gandhi declares emergency only for destroying Midnight’s children. A scene in the film explains it in the conversation between astrologer and

Mrs. Gandhi,

Astrologer: India is Prime Minister, prime minister is India, Midnight’s Children threat to the nation and the Prime Minister. (Midnight’s Children) 130

She does not tell Siva directly to destroy midnight’s children, just make a gesture. The film expresses director’s deep indignation and despair through the characterization. Here Mrs. Gandhi stands as a murderous widow.

Historical and mythical construction of nation is occurred in the film.

While the role of memory and imagination in oral histories is known, we are not aware of the “imagined” nature of historical communities. The film takes us to a moment when the Indian nation was imagined. The use of words ‘myth’ and

‘dream’ underlines the imagined nature of the national community. In every historical event, Saleem writes himself into a central role. The film takes up the history of post independence India ending in the emergency as the main theme.

The history of India runs parallel to the life of the narrator Salem resulting in a unique coupling of the private with the public.

The film depicts pre independence India in a peaceful manner, especially

Kashmir, Agra etc. There does exist a custom, the Muslim women have no right to come into the public. When the film shows Bombay (pre and post Independence period) for the first time everyone is happy and all are energetic, but later the condition changes, only the issues have an importance. At first, the English men occupy the space in the film, only later the Indians make a presence in the screen

(Pakistan, Bangladesh are included in India at pre independence period).

There can be seen a clipping of declaration of India’s Independence on

August 15, 1947 which is one of the pleasurable moment for all Indians. Camera rolled on the celebration of independence and the hero of the film (new hope) born at the exact time at midnight. All historical incidents are mingled with the life of 131

Saleem. It is one of the cunning narrative techniques. Here the director expresses her own ideas about India through her characters.

The important historical events have been seen only after independence,

Pakistan and Bangladesh become separated from India and became a new nation,

India and Pakistan war and the film ends with the emergency declaration. Many serious issues arise questioning the independence of India. Through the partition, many people lost their family, wealth, life, living space etc. Some of the historical events and life of Saleem are connected that is, the day Saleem born his parents acquire the house of English man, Mr. Mathhold. His whole family members are killed by the bomb attack of Indian Airforce bombs in Rawalpindi on 23

September 1965. Siva, one of the midnight’s children and Saleem’s powerful and violent enemy, who make a sexual relation with Parvati, another midnight’s children in May 1974, on the very day that India explodes its first nuclear test bomb and finally their son Adam is born on 25 June 1975, the day emergency is declared for the first time in India.

The central myth holding the film together is the myth of Siva. Director evokes Siva in his destructive avatar, born to banish evil from the world. Here

Shiva gradually evolves into an evil force whose sole motive is to destroy the hero

Saleem for robbing himself of his real parents. Saleem’s children of midnight, the generation represented by Adam Sinai, symbolically born of the traditional gods,

Shiva and Parvati- the great figures of the past who are part of the cycle of

Destruction and Regeneration as expressed by the mother goddess. Mrs. Gandhi most closely resembles the goddess Kali, who represents “Death and Destroyer” 132

This film mainly concentrates on the issues that occur in India in post independence period. It completely explains the demerits of India. The film

Midnight’s Children depicts India, which is completely from the point of view of the director Deepa Mehta.She tries to connect Saleem, one of the midnight’s children and the protagonist of the film, and history of India. She uses history only for explaining post independence period till the emergency period. These children possess different magical powers, but their powers are destroyed by Mrs. Gandhi through the emergency declaration. Most of the westerners comprehend the negative side of India and also think that the reign of the British is far better than

Indian freedom. The two years of emergency is the black mark of Indian history.

The film mainly criticizes the situation after independence. Saleem’s family is destroyed through the Indian bomb attack and they help to make Bangladesh as a new country. Mainly the Europeans understand India through the Indian English films and Indian English literary works.

Next film is Mr. and Mrs Iyer, which is one of the Indian English films directed by Aparna Sen and produced by N. Venketesan and Rupali Mehta. This film analyses the imagined nation and construction of nation through violence and suppression. The performers are Konkana Sen Sharma, Rahul Bose etc. Zakir

Hussain, an Indian table maestro, composed the background score and music for the film and Goutam Ghosh, a film director himself, was the cinematographer. The film opened to Indian audiences on 19 july 2002.This film won many national and international awards, including the Golden Maile award at the Hawaii International

Film Festivel and the Nargis Dutt award for best feature film on National

Integration in India. This film potrays communal riot occurred in India through the story of married young South Indian woman and young wild life photographer who 133

meet on a bus journey. Meenakshi (Konkana) is a Hindu Tamilian, whose world

view and perceptions change as she witnesses communal strife during her journey.

When Hindu fundamentalists storm on to the bus to attack the Muslim passengers,

she protects her Muslim companion to hide out his identity by introducing him as

her husband, Mr. Iyer. They grow closer as they protect each other from the

turmoil around them. The movie brings out their relationship against the savagery

of the riots.

Nation is imagined and constructed by the people; Anderson says that a

nation is socially constructed community, imagined by the people who perceive

themselves as part of that group.(Anderson 224). Film is an art form, which is

closely connected with mass culture, so it can provide powerful metaphors for

audiences, which will help them to addresses important anxieties in their lives and

to redress them. India is represented in the films in a different manner. Meenakshi

Mukherji articulates that

this film is less about Hindu- Muslim relationship although does play a

part rather than about a journey external as well as internal. The

proximity of serenity and violence is immensely effective. Shot of the

incredible beauty of the group of deer in the moon light in the forest

juxtaposed immediately with a brutal killing of an innocent man. The

film uses the English language but the language of images take

priority. (Dayal 41)

It is remarkable how often the idea of an essential humanity of Indians surfaces in the various commentaries on Mr. and Mrs. Iyer. Consider for instance

the following excerpt from one review: Aparna Sen's story of an unlikely love 134 borne against a backdrop of communal violence makes for a deeply touching film.

Blending social comment with a moving tale of disparate people thrown together by circumstance, Mr. and Mrs. lyer is an evocative film that articulates the simple truth of the human condition and it's [sic] natural predisposition for humanity, as the central protagonist overcomes her own cultural and religious prejudices to embrace her fellow traveler. In Meenakshi's silent awakening, the director expresses her own hopes for a similar transformation of Indian society. The film tries to negate the stereotypical representation of characters. Branston and Stanford say stereotyping is a process of categorization that in most cases implies a negative evaluation of a thing that is being analyzed (142). But the representation of two characters Meenakshi and Raja negate the stereotypical behaviours.

The film mainly concentrated on the Hindu Muslim issues. Today, communal riots - shamefully common enough in the post-independence history of

India- seem to have turned in to open massacres of minority populations by majority Hindu, staged most recently in Gujarat, apparently with carnivalesque fanfare and 'a special savagery', with the active participation of 'educated' middle class Hindus, not to mention the support and help of state officials.. In report after reports, one reads about the 'chillingly unique' nature of the violence - especially sexual violence against women and even children, presumably “as a means of proving the masculinity" of Hindu men during the recent pogroms in Gujarat.

According to some, the 'intensity of torture' and "the sheer opulence and exuberance in forms of cruelty" on display in Gujarat exceeds the known horrors of the 20th century, including the subcontinent's own record of violence during the partition riots. The gruesome pictures emerging from the wreckage would seem to confirm this view. (Sarkar 77-78) 135

With these problems, the film shows how two different religious persons

love and protect each other and at the same time, the hooligans attack and kill the men in opposite religion. Actually people want to live peacefully, but some of the interruptions occur in the life. Aparna Sen elucidates the issues between different religious people and at the same time, their love and protective tendencies are portrayed.

Sumanta Banerjee has recently used the term the 'silent majority'. In

Banerjee's words, after every major communal riot, people like us

(both liberal and Leftists) who want to believe in the humane qualities

of Indians go on reiterating the old cliché- the majority of Indians are

secular-minded and all Hindus and Muslims believe in living together

in peaceful harmony! We describe them as the 'silent majority', and

pity them as mute observers of vicious riots (Refusing) to face up to

the fact that the silence of this 'silent majority' often amounts to

acquiescence in communal riots. (1183-1185)

Meenakshi Iyer can’t accept a Muslim at the first stage, but gradually she comprehends and accepts the Muslim community. Her narrow concerns are transformed and accept every one as a human being. In the journey, she can’t manage her child Santhanam, alone, so she prefers Raja for helping her without knowing his identity. While she knows his Muslim identity, she curse herself. But later the fanatic mob pushed in to the bus, she protects Raja for giving a fake identity to him, Mr. Iyer. Raja‘s real name is Jahangir Chowdhary, who is a young wild life photographer, belongs to a Muslim community. He is a silent and passive male character. In one situation, he is ready to reveal his identity to Meenakshi

Iyer, and he tries to escape from there, but the police pushed him to get on the bus. 136

When the rioters kill the old Muslim family, he exasperates, but Meenakshi forced

him to hold Santhanam. Since then he has been wearing the identity of Mr. Iyer,

Meenakshi’s husband.

Through these two characters, the director intensifies that, on one side the

communal riot occurs at the same time on the other side is portrayed the love,

affection and caring of two different believers. It emphasises the two sides of the life, the destruction and procreation of life. Two questions are raised here one is why the director has chosen the different religious people as the protagonists? The second one is, why Sen hides Raja’s real identity by giving a fake identity throughout the film. Aparna Sen here tries to depict humanity and its secular ideas.

There is no need for any caste and religion for loving each other. Another answer,

in one context, is necessary for hiding his identity, but another is as in the last

scene Mrs. Iyer is not ready to accept his own identity. The leading core of

national movements always thought of secularism, conceived as multi-religious

tolerance, as a necessary ingredient in the making of modern nationhood for India,

and that this core perceived the lack of secularism, among its own ranks as a

weakness and a deficit in the power and legitimacy of the movement as a whole.

(Ahmad 51)

The role of Meenakshi Iyer (Mrs.Iyer) is performed by Konkana Sen

Sharma, daughter of Aparna Sen. Mrs. Iyer belongs to Orthodox Tamil Iyer family

who acquires a master’s degree in physics. When she goes to her husband’s home,

she has to face intense religious issues during the journey. Through the film her

narrow concerns about caste and religion undergo a tremendous change and she

comes to accept all as human beings. In the journey she can’t manage Santhanam,

her son, alone and she prefers Raja (Rahul Bose) without knowing his identity, 137 when she comes to know his Muslim identity, she thinks she made a great sin and say in tamil, “Eswara Kapathen, Avan kuditha ……..”(Mr and Mrs Iyer), her language and gestures are just like the Tamil Iyer family woman.

After getting shelter in a forest bungalow, she is not ready to stay with him in one room. But gradually she comprehends Raja and covets his love and fondness. In the bungalow they directly experience homicide of a man without any dithering. She can’t tolerate this scene. But in the next morning, she is ready to face reality. While they are going to their destination, both of them can’t express their love. She introduced Raja with his real identity to her husband Mani Iyer.

Even after their departure she calls him Mr. Iyer.

Through the analysis of her character we see a vast change that occurs in her life. Firstly, she is not ready to accept other religious people, later she understands the feeling of humanity. The entire film moves on to the view of Mrs.

Iyer. She sees Raja as Mr. Iyer, not Jahangir Chowdhary, even in the last scene, she doesn’t want to refer to his real name. Here she listens to her mind that he is not a Muslim, who is Iyer. In some of the scenes she expresses her freedom, while

Raja speaks about their honeymoon when compelling the college students. Mrs

Iyer really likes the fake story and wants to go that places. In one context she speaks of her husband that he is a very busy man and always makes a journey for his official needs. These incidents emphasise that she doesn’t realize her dream successfully. Her dressing code suits actual Iyer woman, wearing sari, nose rings, tied hair and haunting a bindhi, who doesn’t have had the non vegetarian food. She speaks English with Tamil accent. 138

Raja’s(Rahul Bose) real name is Jahangir chowdhary, who is a young

wildlife photographer and belongs to a Muslim family and is another protagonist of

the film. He is a very silent and passive male character. When the rioters kill the

old Muslim family, he exasperates, but Meenakshi pushed him to hold Santhanam,

her one year old son. Throughout the film he has canceled his original identity

His ardent love of his job can be seen in many scenes. After the black day on the bus, he takes beautiful pictures, then at the forest he copies the beauty of forest and lastly he takes beautiful pictures of Meenakshi and Santhanam. While he

speaks with college girls, he explains many beautiful places like Wayanad,

Chidambaram etc. Through the depiction of these two people, the director

describes not only the love between man and woman but love of the human beings

and also different religions.

Santhanam is one year old boy of Mrs Iyer, whose name is the synonym of

God Muruka. His mother always calls him full name, no pet names used. It is very strange that a little child has no pet names. May be the director thinks that for intensifying the orthodox religious feelings of Mrs. Iyer family.

Bhisham Sahani and Surekha Sikri are portrayed as old man and his wife.

They are not interfering and talk with others and they create their own world in the bus. Old man was exasperated by the noises making youths and their dressing style also. They have beautiful nostalgia about their young age, when he first meets her

he just see only her fingers. It makes their traditional concepts and orthodox

manner. They are represented as the minority people in India.

Through the depiction of the characters the director makes the concept of

North Indians towards South Indian. In some scenes Sen portrays Hindus who 139

don’t accept other religions, it’s a very strange idea. India is not only for Hindus, but for all others. In India, the idea of creating a united nation in a religiously, linguistically, culturally plural society came to be associated with the notion of secular democracy and visions of creating a rapidly industrialising society. All in all nationalism was considered a positive virtue ( Ahmed 37).

The director creates a miniature of India through the depiction of a Bus.

Bus has a vital role in the film. It is considered as a miniature form of India. For, it comprises different people with various religions, different generations etc. Some of the stereotypes are teenage students, old husband and his wife, two Zikhs,

Meenakshi Iyer, Raja, a mother with her diseased son, some card players, newly wedded couples and three other people. Nobody cares about others and they are plunged in their own jobs. Here, the bus is depicted as a symbolic form of secular country. Inside the bus, there is no fantasy and no superhero power, while the hooligans enter into the bus and kill the old man and his wife, no one can oppose and protest against the pogrom. For the rioters are large in number with weapons, but the passengers are bare armed, only they can express their deep indignation towards the rioters. One teenage girl tries to oppose, but who is deeply slapped and fell down. At the same time a man betrays the old man and his wife, nobody interrogate him. Here the bus is represented as India, and the communal riot occurs, and kills the man is a symbolic representation of Gujarat riot. The rioters are taken in close up shots and low angle, because their gargantuan cruelty has to be shown in an effective manner.

In one interview Aparna Sen says that, on the basis of Gujarat riot in 2002 and 9/11 attacks, she takes the film. Before the Gujarat riot, another assailant comes about in Godra in February 27 and 59 were burnt alive. Following this 140

attack in jiffy Gujarat violence started. In this attack more than 1000 people were

killed including women, children etc.

This Hindu-Muslim attack seized several lives. Mashirul Hasan, noted

historian from Jamia Millia University, in his D.S Borker Memorial

lecture delivered on august 24, 2002, says: the Mahatma used the non

cooperation and civil disobedience methods to sap the moral

foundations of the Raj. Now 55 years down the line when the enemy

from our own ranks has surfaced wearing a different garb with the

intention to tear apart our pluralist fabric, can Satyagraha not be

deployed as an effective moral and political weapon? The Mahatma

had launched a campaign against a ‘satanic’ government. What makes

the Gujarat government less satanic? Today the British government

appears benign compared with the actions of our rulers in the land of

Gandhi. (Dayal 12)

The Hindu fundamentalists attack the minorities in India without any

vacillation. They don’t heed about the lives of others and kill them viciously.

There is transpiring murder in two ways, genocide and menticide. Two Sangh

Parivar ploys that need to be highlighted are genocide, the deliberate murder of

entire communities, and menticide, the killing of the mind or the technique of mass

brainwashing, the term coined by Merloo. The mobilization of dalits and backward

castes to participate in the activities of the genocide is the price these subaltern

groups have to pay for their acceptance in the Hindutuva fold. In reality it means to

be citizens of the Hindu Rashtra, the subaltern groups have to express antagonism

to Muslims as members of the religious minority and directly involve in the brutal massacre of the community termed as ‘the other’ on behalf of the upper castes, to 141 be included in the Hindu fold (32). Al-Qaeda claims the responsibility of the assault of 9/11 in America. This incident conceives the others in a feeling of anti

Muslim. This feeling formulates many pogroms against the Muslim people.

These four films are analysed through the different kind of representations.

Many incidents are taken and treated differently which are the main significance of the analysis. The directors portray the themes of the films with their own visions, which result in some distortions. Deepa Mehta’s two films are analysed here. Both films have different themes, but her treatment of these films concerns about the international audience also. So some compromises can be seen in these films.

Gurinder Chada’s film Bride and Prejudice explores the east west conflicts. West always considers they are elite and others are low class people. But many scenes depicts west thoughts are right. Aparna Sen’s Mr.and Mrs. Iyer deliberates the serious issues in India. This film is taken on the basis of Gujarat riot and World trade centre attack. Representation of nation, gender etc are analysed in the film.

CHAPTER FOUR

REPRESENTATION OF INDIANS IN BRITISH INDIAN FILMS (Gandhi, City of Joy, Passage to India, Slumdog Millionaire)

142

In this chapter an attempt has been made to analyse the portrayal of Indians in the British Indian films. In order to do this, it is necessary to focus our attention to how the directors of these films accomplish the visual images and characters appropriate to their films. It seems that, as it will be proven later, in these films no drastic change occurred in the way Indians are treated. These four films are released in different years, even though Europeans’ attitude has not changed. On close analysis a colonial outlook can be seen. Western (European) film makers write the history of third world countries and make films in a Eurocentric manner.

The native people and foreigners think that this is the true history of non European countries. Fanon says that colonialism is “not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it (210). Through the colonial discourses, they make their own version of history. Even the third world filmmakers try to depict their own countries, who have rewritten the history and use their own dialogues, images voice etc, but it’s not their own films, it substitutes an immaculate “truth” for European “lies.”

Fanon describes the imperial vision, “the settler makes history; his life is an epoch, and Odyssey,” while against him “torpid creatures, wasted by fevers, obsessed by ancestral customs, form an almost inorganic background for the innovating dynamism of colonial mercantilism. (51). Most of the British indian films depict Indians stricken with poverty, crookedness, violence, passive, powerless etc., but whites are depicted active, powerful, civilised, kind hearted etc.

“Dependency theory”( Latin America), “Underdevelopment theory” (Africa) and “

World systems theory” argue that a hierarchical global systems controlled by metropolitan capitalist countries and their multinational corporations 143

simultaneously generate both the wealth of the First world and the poverty of the

Third world as the opposite faces of the same coin.( Frank 33). Certainly the

difference can be seen very obviously. Taking all these insights, these four films

(Gandhi, City of Joy, Passage to India, Slumdog Millionaire) are analysed. These films are analysed through race, gender and class. Racial discrimination, the gender inequality and class difference suffered by Indians are studied in the chapter.

A Passage to India is a 1984 drama film written and directed by David

Lean. The screenplay is based on the 1924 novel of the same title by E. M

Foster and the 1960 play by Santha Rama Rao that was inspired by the novel. This

was the final film of Lean's career, and the first feature-film he had directed in

fourteen years, since Ryan’s Daughter in 1970. Receiving universal critical

acclaim upon its release with many praising as Lean's finest since Lawrence of

Arabia, A Passage to India received eleven nominations at the Academy Awards,

including Best Picture, Best Director for Lean, and Best Actress for Judy Davis for

her portrayal as Adela Quested. Peggy Ashcroft won the Academy Award for Best

Supporting Actress for her portrayal as Mrs Moore, making her, at 77, the oldest

actress to win the award, and Maurice Jarre won his third Academy Award

for Best Original Score.

The film is set in the 1920s during the period of growing influence of the

Indian independence movement in the British Raj. Adela Quested and Mrs Moore

sail from England to India,where Ronny Heaslop, Mrs Moore's son and Ms

Quested's fiancé, is the magistrate in the provincial town of Chandrapore.

Through Government College principal Richard Fielding (James Fox), the two

visitors meet an eccentric elderly Hindu Brahmin scholar Professor Narayan 144

Godbole (Alec Guinness), and they befriend Dr Aziz Ahmed (Victor Banerjee), an impoverished widower who initially meets Mrs Moore in a moonlit mosque overlooking the Ganges River. Their sensitivity and unprejudiced attitude toward native Indians endears them to him. When Mrs Moore and Adela express an interest in seeing the "real" India, as opposed to the Anglicised environment, Aziz offers to host an excursion to the remote Marabar Caves.

The outing goes reasonably well until the women begin exploring the caves with Aziz and his sizeable entourage. Mrs Moore experiences an overwhelming sense of claustrophobia that forces her to return to the open air. She encourages

Adela and Aziz to continue their exploration but suggests they take just one guide.

The three set off for caves far from the rest of the group, and before entering, Aziz steps away to smoke a cigarette. He returns to find Adela has disappeared; shortly after he sees her running headlong down the hill, bloody and dishevelled. Upon their return to town, Aziz is jailed to await trial for attempted rape; uproar ensues between the local Indians and the British colonial rulers.

The case becomes a cause celebre among the British. When Mrs Moore makes it clear that she firmly believes in Aziz's innocence and will not testify against him, it is decided she should return to England. She subsequently suffers a fatal heart attack during the voyage and is buried at sea.

To the consternation of her fiancé and friends, Adela has a change of heart and clears Aziz in court. The Colonials are forced into an ignominious retreat while the Indians carry the exonerated man from the courtroom on their shoulders, cheering wildly. Fielding looks after Adela since she has no one else to turn to. In the aftermath, Adela leaves India, while Dr Aziz, feeling betrayed by his friend

Fielding, abandons his Western attire, dons traditional dress, and withdraws from 145

expat society, opening a clinic in Kashmir near the Himalayas. Meanwhile,

through Adela, Fielding had married Stella Moore, Mrs. Moore's daughter from

second marriage and both expect their first born child. While he remains angry and

bitter for years, Aziz eventually reconciles with Fielding and writes to Adela to

convey his thanks and forgiveness.

The main objective of the study is to analyse the characters in the film and

three main concepts are used for this analysis are race, class and gender. Zinn and

Dill assert that “women and Men are differently embedded in locations created by

these cross cutting hierarchies. As a result, women and men throughout the social

order experience different forms of privilege and subordination, depending on their

race, class, gender and sexuality” (327). In other words, traversing modes of

domination produce both oppression and opportunity.

City of joy is a British Indian film directed by Roland Joffee. It’s a drama

film, based upon the novel of the same name by Dominique Lapierre. This film

portrays the poorest part of India (city of joy). The main characters are Patrick

Swayze as Max Lowe, Om Puri as Hazari Pal, Pauline Collins as Joan Bethel,

Shabana Azmi as Kamala H Pal. The film is produced by Jake Eberts and Roland

Joffe. It is written by Mark Medoff. City of Joy released in April 15, 1992.

City of Joy is synonymously called Calcutta. It’s a developing city in

Independent India. Outsiders of Calcutta think that Calcutta is a city providing more employability and better living condition, where people can live without hassles. But in the film, director depicts Calcutta as a crowded place full of vehicles, poor people and lepers; a polluted area. No one can see, where the joyness hideout. This film depicts an English man (Max) who comes to India for 146

peace. With all modern medical equipment, Max and other doctors try to rescue a

child, but it would be in vain, the child dies. Max resigns his job and comes to

Calcutta for peace. In the next scene, Hasari and his family are coming to Calcutta

for better living. The people in the world think that Calcutta is a city of joy and full

of peace. But after reaching there, both of them get repellent experience and also

understand the life of downtrodden.

The film also depicts haves as more luxurious than havenots. There does

exist the discrimination between the rich and poor. After Independence, rural

people lost their jobs and their lands which are consolidated by money lenders. So

they are forced to migrate to cities for better settlement. Since 1950, world

population has increased at a far greater rate than the total amount of arable land,

even as agriculture contributes a much smaller percentage of the total economy.

For example, in India, agriculture accounted for 52% of its GDP in 1954 and only

19% in 2004 (http://planning commission.nic.in). The same phenomenon happens

in the life of Hazari Pal and his family. But when the family came to the city, they

don’t get any type of warm welcome. But they are deceived by someone, who

promises to give them better settlement and takes all money from Hazari and after

sometime they know that they are swindled. Here the director tries to portray the

pathetic conditions of rural people. They are innocent and don’t know about the city life.

But this film depicts in the very first scene the pitiable conditions of the people in the city and outside the city. Poor always remain as poor, no one is ready

to make them rise from their conditions. Some rural migrants may not find jobs

immediately because of their lack of skills and the increasingly competitive job

markets, which lead to their financial shortage (Todaro 138–148.) Many cities, on 147 the other hand, do not provide enough low-cost housing for a large number of rural-urban migrant workers. Some rural-urban migrant workers cannot afford housing in cities and eventually settle down in only affordable slums (Craster 935–

940.). In this time, India gives more important to technological developments than farming. This makes the unemployed village people to leave their settlement and is forced to go to the urban areas. And they are ready to do any works for money.

Their individuality stands in between these two identities, so it makes them very confused and suppressed. Since the impact of industrial revolution, all changes in modes of existence and modes of life have taken place through brute coercion, that is to say through the dominion of one social group over all the productive forces of society (Hoare and Smith 298).

When Hazari and his family enter the city, they see many beggars, who are afflicted with leprosy. The director rolls camera on the dark side of the city. City of joy is the nickname of Calcutta. May be director calls it city of joy in a sarcastical manner, for Calcatta is a cultural capital of India, but its conditions are very meagre. The Indian’s most important cultural and educated city is depicted in a broke manner. Joffe’s camera captures the scenes from India which are full of misery, diseased, uncivilized. Even poor people don’t know that they are subordinated and ruled by landlords and elite people. The people understand this situation and organise against it. So they can resist the bourgeois attitude and live peacefully. With the appearance of new type of civilization, or in the course of their development, there has always been crisis. Not so much the working masses as the middle classes and a part even of the ruling class which had undergone the process of coercion which was necessarily being exercised over the whole area of society (298-299). Most of such films wants a saviour to help organise others. 148

According to Helen Carr, “in the language of colonialism, non-

Europeans occupy the same symbolic space as women. Both are seen

as part of nature not culture, and with the same ambivalence: either

they are ripe for government, passive, child-like, unsophisticated,

needing leadership and guidance, described always in terms of lack- no

initiative, no intellectual powers, no perseverance; or on the other

hand, they are outside society, dangerous, treacherous, emotional,

inconstant, wild, threatening, fickle, sexually aberrant, irrational, near

animal, lascivious, disruptive, evil, unpredictable”. (50)

These are the repetitive theme of British Indian films. There is one scene that is raining, when it comes first, all are very happy and enjoy it. Later it becomes more disastrous. At this stage a saviour appeared who is Marx. With him some of the colonised people come there and rescue the people from the flood. It symbolically interprets that the disastrous power of local godfather and his son

Ashok would be destroyed by the braveness of poor people. It also interprets that most of their problems are fled away in the flood and they become happier.

In City of Joy the rains not only destroy the dwellings, but also provide a cleansing and relief from the oppressive heat of Calcutta as people struggle for their everyday life in the Shanty town. In the lengthy rain sequence of City of Joy the American doctor is nearly drowned in the flood that sweeps the city. Yet the rain provides a turning point in the film narrative; after the rain and flood, the

American doctor is better accepted by the community in the Shanty town as if he has now been initiated into the living conditions of the city of joy. In this sequence, the film establishes the difficulties associated with living in Calcutta and perils of the local weather. (Mitra 102) 149

The film strongly conveys the idea that, without any saviour, the poor can’t

be lifted from the downtrodden condition and also shows that the native people

have no power to organize against the rulers and the only English one has a power

to organize everyone. This film misinterprets India and Indian people. Audience

get the false consciousness of the state and people. Everyone thinks that they are

suppressed and subordinate to all. These types of misrepresentations create in the

audience a negative impact of Indian people and Indian systems. Even in the court

scene the judge attributed the crime against Ashok, but at the same time Hasari is

also punished. Hasari pronounces all crimes of Ashok against him and common people and states all the unconditional treatment of landlords, but court declares the punishment against Hasari also. He has to clear out 50rs. Here film expounds the unreserved counter towards Hasari. It infers as a sardonic manner. Indian judiciary chastised an innocent man. Actually Indian judiciary states that no innocent man should be punished. These kinds of feigns and misjudgements can be seen in the film.

City of Joy articulates western politics. Joffe’s visual rendering only crop up about India and Indian people through slums, crooked, uncivilized manners etc.

Indians can’t recognize their positions and they are deceived by slum dwellers. But after the entry of hero, he acts like a god and save the poor souls. Here false believes or ideology are raised that without saviour, the poor can’t change their downtrodden conditions. Terry Lovell says that ideology as the production and dissemination of erroneous beliefs whose inadequacies are socially motivated

(Lovell 31). Here colonised people treat Max as a god and call him Max dada.

Gandhi is a biographical film directed by Richard Attenborough and screenplay by John Baily. BenKingsly, the English actor, acts as Gandhi, Rohini 150

Hathankadi as Kasthurbha. This is a historical and political drama film. The pre

independent India, the states of Indian people in India and South Africa are portrayed in the film. It dramatises the life of Gandhi, the leader of nonviolent independence movement against the British Empire. The film starts with Gandhi’s assassination and its funeral ceremony. The Film depicts Gandhi’s life from the journey to South Africa in 1893, as he is thrown off a South African train for being in whites’ only compartment and his assassination in 1948. His thoughts, spiritualism etc embraced not only as a Hindu, but of other faiths, particularly

Christian and Muslim. Gandhi released in 1982. It is nominated for Academy awards in 11 categories, won 8, including best picture, best director, best actor etc.

But early life of Gandhi has not been depicted in the film

Slumdog Millionaire is one of the British Indian films directed by Danny

Boyle and screen play by Simon Beaufoy, which is a loose adaptation of the novel

Q&A by the Indian author Vikas Swarup. It deals with the 18 year old Jamal Malik

from the Mumbai city. As a contestant on the Indian version of Who Wants to be

Millionaire? he is able to answer every stage correctly and later he is accused of

cheating. Jamal recounts his history, illustrating how he is able to answer each

question. It was screened at the Toronto International film festivals and London

film festivals. It was nominated for ten Academy Awards in 2009 and won eight—

the most for any 2008 film—including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best

Adapted Screenplay. It won seven BAFTA Awards including Best Film, five

Critics Choice Awards and four Golden Globes.

In 2006, eighteen-year-old Jamal Malik (Dev Patel) from the Juhu slum, is

a contestant on the Indian version of Who Wants to be Millionaire? , and is one

question away from the grand prize. However, before the last question, he is 151 incarcerated and agonized by the police, who suspect him of cheating because of the unfeasibility of a simple "slumdog" with very little education knowing all the answers. Jamal recounts, through flashbacks, the incidents in his life which provided him with each answer.

Jamal's flashbacks begin with his managing, at age five, to obtain the autograph of Bollywood star Amitabh Bachchan, which his brother Salim then sells, followed immediately by the death of his mother during the Bombay Riots.

As they flee the riot, they meet Latika, a girl from their slum. Salim is reluctant to take her in, but Jamal suggests that she could be the third musketeer, a character from the Alexander Dumas novel (which they had been studying though not very meticulously in school), whose name they do not know. The three are found by

Maman—a gangster who tricks and then trains streetchildren into becoming beggars. When Salim discovers Maman is blinding the children in order to make them more effective beggars, he flees with Jamal and Latika to a departing train. Latika fails to board the train as Salim purposefully lets go of her hand, thus resulting in her being recaptured by Maman.

Over the next few years, Salim and Jamal make a living travelling on top of trains, selling goods, picking pockets, working as dish washers, and pretending to be tour guides at the Taj Mahal, where they steal people's shoes. At Jamal's persistence, they return to Mumbai to find Latika, discovering that she is being raised by Maman to be a prostitute, to fetch him soon a high price and as a virgin.

The brothers rescue her, and while escaping Maman they shoot him to death. Salim then manages to get a job with Javed —Maman's rival crime lord. Back at their room, Salim orders Jamal to leave him and Latika alone. When Jamal refuses, 152

Salim draws a gun on him, whereas Latika persuades Jamal to obey his brother and go away.

Years later, now a tea-boy in an Indian call centre, Jamal searches the centre's database for Salim and Latika. He fails in finding Latika but succeeds in finding Salim, who is now a high-ranking lieutenant in Javed's crime organization.

Jamal reproaches Salim, who then pleads for forgiveness, and offers him to stay in his luxurious apartment. Jamal later bluffs his way into Javed's residence to reunite with Latika but as he professes his love for her, Latika asks him to forget about her. Jamal nevertheless promises to wait for her every day at five o'clock at the

VT station. Latika attempts to meet him there, but is recaptured by Javed's men, led by Salim, and once Javed moves to another house, outside Mumbai, the two again lose contact. Jamal becomes a contestant on Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, knowing that she watches the show regularly. Much to the consternation of Prem

Kumar, the show's host, Jamal becomes a wonder across India. He uses the 50/50 lifeline on the second last question and during the following break, whilst in the men's room, Kumar tries to fail Jamal, provide for him with a wrong answer, yet Jamal chose the other one, which turned out to be the correct answer.

Assuming Jamal is cheating, the police are involved. After an initial beating up, the police inspector listens to Jamal's explanation of how he reached each answer. Finding all of them "curiously reasonable", he allows him back to the show. At Javed's safehouse, Latika sees Jamal on the show and Salim, in an effort to make changes for his past behaviour, gives Latika his mobile phone and car keys, and asks her to forgive him and to go to Jamal. Latika is reluctant out of fear of Javed, but agrees and escapes. Salim fills a bathtub with money and sits in it, awaiting for Javed and his men as they realise that he let Latika free. Jamal's 153 final question is, by coincidence, the name of the third musketeer in The Three

Musketeers, which he never learned. Jamal uses his phone a friend lifeline to call

Salim's cell, as it is the only phone number he knows. Latika answers the phone, and, while she does not know the answer, tells Jamal that she is safe. Relieved,

Jamal randomly picks Aramis, the right answer, and wins the grand prize. Javed hears Latika on the show and realizes that Salim has betrayed him. He and his men break down the bathroom door but Salim kills Javed before he is shot, gasping,

"God is great." Jamal and Latika meet on the platform at the railway station.

These films are analysed through the representation of gender, race, class and nation. First the race representation of the films is analysed. Each nationality represents different race of people. Generally people use the term ethnicity or ethnic group rather than race to distinguish individuals with different national and cultural bequest.

Sociologists’ think of the concept of race is socially constructed. Race

is constructed differently in various nations. For example, United

States individuals of African descent with brown or black skin are all

seen as “black”. Brazil has distinct terms for such individuals; a brown

skinned individual is referred to by the term “Moreno”, whereas very

dark skinned persons are called “negro.” (Landry 4)

Race has functioned one of the most powerful and most brittle markers of human identity, hard to explain and identify and even harder to maintain. Today skin colour has become the privileged marker of races.

Miles points out that, either black or white but never big-eared

and small-eared. The fact that only certain physical characteristics are 154

signified to define races in specific circumstances indicates that we are

investigating not a given, natural division of the world’s population,

but the application of historically and culturally specific meanings to

the totality of human physiological variation. Races are socially

imagined rather than biological realities. (71)

While colour is taken as the prime signifier of racial identity, the latter formed by perceptions of religious, ethnic, linguistic, national, and sexual and class differences.

Racism has historically been both an ally and the partial product of colonialism. The most obvious victims of racism are those whose identity was forged within the colonial cauldron: Africans, Asians and the indigenous peoples of the Americans as well as those displaced by colonialism, such as Asians and

West Indians in Great Britain, Arabs in France (Shohat and Stam 18). Colonialist culture constructs a sense of European superiority. Jules Harmand says that “the basic legitimation of conquest over native peoples is the conviction of our superiority, not merely our mechanical, economic and military superiority, but our moral superiority” (Curtain 194-195). White Europeans considered third world countries as savages and beasts, for they are filching their land. Colonised peoples are derided as lacking in culture and history because of colonialism. In Slumdog

Millionaire, director potrays India and Indian people in a very negative manner.

Jamal Malik( Dev Patel) is the slumdog in the film. He belongs to a slum in

Bombay. He and his brither Salim Malik are called “Musketeers”. They do anything for what they want and they don’t have any interest to study. In Bombay riot they lost their mother and they escape from there. Here director doesn’t make any emotional scenes. They are children; they lost everything but no emotional 155 feelings. So the film gives a pessimistic attitude towards the slum people. Through this portrayal, director tries to conform that, Indians are savages and they don’t have moral superiority. Jamal and Salim have to face many problems in their childhood. They reached the hands of cruel people. They make children for begging and for the effectiveness they disabled the children.

Mainstream people used slum people for their own advantages. Aggressive behaviour can be seen through the portrayal of Salim who does everything in a belligerent manner. He wants money, for gaining that he does whatever in life. But

Jamal, hero of the film, shows a kind heart towards others especially Lalita, heroine of the film. But his character is depicted as passive. A stereotypical narration can be seen in the film. Colonised people as “all the same,” any negative behaviour by any member of the oppressed community is instantly generalized as typical, as pointing to a perpetual backsliding toward some presumed negative essence (Shohat and Stam 183). Elite people never allow the developments of poor people. Poor is gazed by dominant people as negative, violent, uncivilised etc.

Dr. Aziz: Victor Banerji acts as the character Dr. Aziz in the film Passage to India. He is young, handsome and professional. He represents the Muslim race.

He is an English educated man, whose thoughts about white people are very clean and tidy. “I always thought Englishmen kept their rooms so tidy. Everything arranged coldly on shelves is what I thought” (Passage to India). But this idea has been deconstructed in the film with his conversation with Fielding. In the film Dr.

Aziz abandons his Indian clothes and opts to wear the western garb. In representing the people the movies consistently use the outfits switching to signify the changes in the structural position of the people in the narrative (Mitra 110).

When he speaks with Mrs Moore, he says that “Please come and see. By a skilful 156 arrangement of our emperors, the same water comes and fills this tank. My ancestors loved water. We came out of the desert. We came over the Himalayas from Persia and Afghanistan, and wherever we went, we created fountains and gardens and...”(Passage to India), it shows that he is also one of the foreigners and inhabit India long years back. And also indicate that the Mughal Empire did not try to intervene in the local societies during most of its existence, but rather balanced and pacified them through new administrative practices (Asher and Talbot 115).

In another context “You cannot imagine how you honour me. I feel that I am journeying back into my past, and that I'm a Mogul emperor. Sometimes I shut my eyes and dream... I have splendid clothes again. And that I'm riding into battle behind ‘Alamgir’ (it is Aurangzeb’s imperial title, which means “world conqueror” or “universe conqueror”). He too rode an elephant” (Passage to India). It emphasises the nostalgic feeling of him. He also wants to live like the Mughal period. The Mugal Empire was abolished and replaced by the British Raj. Dr Aziz always bowed to English man, but lastly he says that “I am an Indian at last,

English always together” (Passage to India).

And he wears Indian dress instead of foreign dresses. His meeting with Mrs

Moore at the mosque is important to him because of the bond of sympathy that is instinctively established between them. Although he is happy that she feels for him in the way he has been snubbed by her compatriots, his chief delight derives simply from the fact that they feel for each other, irrespective of nationality: ‘ the flame that not even beauty can nourish was springing up, and though his words were querulous his heart began to glow secretly’. Again when Aziz is asked how he has planned an outing that cuts across the race-divide he insists that the picnic is an expedition of friends and has nothing to do with the racial origins of its 157 members. He can show his country off to those such as Mrs. Moore and Adela, who wish to see it for personal rather than official reasons.

David Lean points out that, which makes him (Aziz) happy. He is very interested to speak of about India. Some aspects of colonialism can be seen in Dr.

Aziz. He is introduced not simply as a doctor but as a very competent doctor who is better than his boss, Major Callender. In one scene he check up Begum

Hamidullah and begs to her that don’t drink water of the tap. And he also says that he has enough duties to do.

Begum Hamidullah : Doctor Sahib, when are we going to get you married?

Dr. Aziz : I have enough responsibilities, Auntie

Hamisullah : We ask the poor fellow to dinner, we avail ourselves of his

professional skills, and you always bring up this question.

Dr. Aziz : It is the least I can do. This should put a stop to the trouble.

And Begum Sahiba

Begum Hamidullah : Ha Ji?

Dr. Aziz : I beg you once more not to drink water out of a tap. Please

to boil it, boil it!

(Passage to India)

Dr. Aziz’s instinct to escape from the constraints of British rule after the

Marabar crisis is sound. It shows the degradation of the soul of the colonised under the impact of colonisation; it may be seen as radical. The hegemony of European ideas about the Orient, themselves reiterating European superiority over Oriental backwardness, usually overriding the possibility that a more independent, or more skeptical, thinker might have had different views on the matter (Said 7). The entire narrative of the Passage to India is based on the assumption that the passion of Dr. 158

Aziz caused the trauma to the young European woman when she entered the dark spaces of the Marabar cave with the man. The movie carries this issue to its logical conclusion where the brown man is accused of rape, and only acquitted when the woman herself doubts her reported assault.

The Indian male is often the one who would initiate a relationship between the white woman and the brown man, but that is not to say that the relationship is always one way. The representation of sexuality has changed with time, and the films tend to continue to present the ambivalent relationship between the races.

There is often a differential of social and cultural powers between the white and the brown. The white woman is often powerless before the lust of the brown man who is constantly vulnerable to punishment if he crosses the race barriers in relationships (Mitra 115). In the film, Dr. Aziz faces the legal prosecution. It also shows western superiority is maintained throughout the film. Said says that

Orientalism depends for its strategy on this flexible positional superiority, which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the relative upper hand. (Said 7). At last Dr.Aziz says that,

“I am an Indian at last”, before Marabar cave incident, he respects the English and wears dress like western style, but now he wears Indian dress and thinks very freely. Lastly he identifies his self.

Godbole: A professor of Philosophy at the government college in

Chandrapore, but in the novel he is introduced apparently as a funny figure. He wore a turban, who is dressed in shapeless flowing robes. The turban makes a repetitive appearance in a large set of movies, particularly the one that tell stories of pre-independence India. The representation of dress is used by the film to locate the people with their specific social, political and cultural positions. The 159

representation of clothes in the film is also connected with the social and cultural

hierarchies. Albert Memmi suggests, the sense of superiority was derived from

three major ideological components, the gulf between culture of the colonialist and

the colonized; the exploitation of these differences for the benefit of the colonialist;

and finally the use of these supposed differences as standards of absolute facts.

(Memmi 71)

In the film Fielding introduced him to Adela that, “We've an old Hindu

professor who'll tell you all about reincarnation and destiny. He might even be

persuaded to sing” (Passage to India), here Fielding thinks that real India lying on the reincarnation and destiny, but Dr. Aziz says that Godbole is, “the inscrutable

Brahmin”. Both of them think about Godbole as different, but Fielding thinks that through the Brahmin the two English ladies can know about the real India. But

David Lean depicts here that India is mysterious and muddle. He tries to show more of India’s philosophical background than historical background. Many of the earliest Oriental amateurs began by welcoming the Orient as a salutary derangement of their European habits of mind and spirit. The Orient was

overvalued for its pantheism, its spirituality, its stability, its longevity, its

primitivity, and so forth. (Said 150)

Godbole misses the Marabar picnic because he has miscalculated the

length of the prayer. Said suggests that Europe has traditionally constructed the

Orient as ‘other’ than itself, with the Orient as mysterious, irrational and therefore

vulnerable both politically and imaginatively to the organising, governing powers

of the West. In the one scene Dr. Aziz is trying (at Fielding’s tea) to get Godbole

to speak of the Marabar Caves and Godbole keeps fending off the discussion: The dialogue remained light and friendly, and Adela had no conception of it under 160

drift. There is a very strange cultural contrast being worked out. Foster takes the

notion of ‘Englishness’ as normative here. Adela is English but then since being

English is the norm, no mention of her nationality is made.

In the film, Dr. Aziz and Godbole are not described as Indians. Aziz is

described in terms not of race but of religion, as a Muslim and Godbole’s entire

complex identity as a human being is defined only by one term, his religion. In the

film Godbole’s characterisation works on two levels, the cosmic and the comic. To begin with there is the description of Godbole as the devotee who uses intense devotion as a means to reach the divine. Therefore he is treated instead as one who inhabits the same world of reality as everyone else in this section, a world that

combines social comedy and a cosmic quest.

Fielding: Fielding is introduced as a character that is suspected of being

unsound by his compatriots in India because he associates socially with Indians

and educates them. As long as race is something only applied to non-white

peoples, as long as white people are not racially seen and named, they function as

a human norm, other people are raced, we are just people (Dyer 1). The profession

of teaching in the context of any government based on force is itself revolutionary

to the extent that education implies the encouragement of ideas and free thought.

Fielding’s conduct both at the bridge party and at his tea suggests the

determination with which he tackles the race problem. Unlike Turton, Fielding

remains with the Indian guests at the bridge party and the Indians respond by

covering any minor social mistakes he makes. He invites Adela and Mrs. Moore to

tea with Dr. Aziz and Godbole only because he knows these English women will not discriminate against Indians. 161

Fielding believes that ‘the world is a globe of men who are trying to reach

one another and can best do so by the help of goodwill plus culture and

intelligence’. Lean attributed in the film to Fielding that to make up the doctrine of

liberal humanism. Its characteristics include first belief that people are important in

terms of their individualism and in terms of the personal relationships they form

with those who think like them. In other words, people are more important than

organisations and systems. Next such communities of like-minded individuals can be found throughout human history, cutting across all boundaries of cultures and classes. Then there is the sense that the creation of such relationships and communities is the best safeguard against brute force. Finally liberal humanism is closely related to love and this approach enables its proponents to feel they have access to the world of the heart.

He befriends Aziz wholly setting aside the racial divide. He remains on

Aziz’s side even when to do so means that Fielding is cut dead by the entire British community at Chandrpore. Again when he befriends Adela he does so because she has been a loser, not considering the fact that she belongs to the race which has cut him. However ignorant Fielding may be concerning any form of religion, he is

ready to recognize, although only dimly, the impulse of love in Hinduism that he

sees in Stella, Mrs. Moore’s daughter. It also explores the limitations of the

philosophy of liberal humanism and these come across in his characterisation as

well. First it is unrealistic and also potentially damaging for any philosophy to set

aside an existing political or social context and operate in a vacuum.

When Fielding attempts to make friends with Dr. Aziz he behaves as if the

racial divide simply does not exist, this is unrealistic. The accomplishment of race

consists of creating differences among members of different race categories, 162 differences that are neither natural nor biological (West and Zimmerman 137).

Once created these differences are used to maintain the essential distinctiveness of racial identities and the institutional arrangements that they support. On the personal level Fielding is disappointed that his Indian friends lack dignity either in the pre trial panic or the post trial- euphoria. He forgets that the colonial context itself denies the colonised by any semblance of human dignity and appeals to a value they have been denied.

Fielding always believes in Western European cultural values alone. For

Fielding ultimately ‘the Mediterranean is the human norm’ and every other culture is a departure from that norm.

bell hooks has emphasised that white liberals become when

attention is drawn to their whiteness, when they are seen by non-white

people as white. “often their rage erupts because they believe that all

ways of looking that highlight difference subvert the liberal belief in a

universal subjectivity (we are all just people) that they think will make

racism disappear. They have a deep emotional investment in the myth

of ‘sameness’, even as their actions reflect the primacy of whiteness as

a sign informing who they are and how they think. (167)

Liberal humanism is an ineffective instrument for social and political change because apart from love as a human value, it does not suggest any alternative programme for social action. At the beginning Dr. Aziz speaks of the way in which Indians respond to personal kindness when Fielding visits him. At the end, when it is clear that Fielding and the way of life he represents have nothing else to offer the India of the future, Aziz suggests Fielding and his 163 compatriots leave. There is no space in the colonial framework for personal relationships if they pretend the race-divide does not exist.

Max: Indian people call him Max Dada with respect and affection. Common people think that he is a saviour like a god. Max is an American born doctor. He can’t cure a girl on her operation. After this incident he is desperate and resigned his job and finally decides to go to India. Max is depicted as a stereotypical character, saviour of the poor people.

Homi Bhabha says that stereotype is not a simplification because it is a

false representation of a given reality. It is a simplification because it is

an arrested, fixed form of representation that, in denying the play of

difference (that the negation through the Other permits), constitutes a

problem for the representation of the subject in significations of

psychic and social relations. (45)

In the film about the doctor from Houston performs the saviour role in assisting in the birth of a leper child as well as combating the evil presence of the ruthless slumlords in the city of joy. Here the role of a doctor is akin to that of a messiah because he performs the saving of the souls as well as the body (Mitra

134). His superiority of whiteness can be seen in many sequences. When he reached hotel in Calcutta, the room boy set up a girl for him, but he neglects this act and pays least interest to it. Here the director tries to explain the moral side of the hero.

Richard Dyer says that the particular way in which the superiority is conceived and expressed, with its emphasis on purity, cleanliness, virginity. The superiority of whiteness has been felt in terms of beauty as well as morality (70). 164

He tries to teach civilisations and humanity to uncivilised peoples. He acts as a protector of poor people. The colony people think that Max is a super hero. He wants to civilize the people and is ready for helping the people from the Indian bourgeois. When Hasari has been wounded by Ashok, Max looks after him and there can be seen a photo, it is depicted a saviour rescuing the people from the flood. It symbolises Max’s role in the film. Only Max can help them from exploitation and poverty.

The film is a take on white politics. The director expresses a Eurocentric thought that is Europe /white people are the ultimate one. Only they can help the third world peoples. They pretend themselves as the creator, protector and destroyer of the people. Their ideology is injected on the people without knowing them. The dominant classes do not see themselves as exploiters or oppressors. And perhaps more importantly, the way in which ideology conceals the reality of subordination from those who are powerless: the subordinate classes do not see themselves as oppressed or exploited (Arthur 5). In one scene, Max asked Joan whether ‘there is any vacuum or anything, only the stethoscope, how can treat the ill persons’ (City of Joy). Here audience can understand that city of joy has no good hospitals, it makes a negative impact about India and India is depicted as an uncivilised and uneducated country. Through Max’s portrayal, western politics reflected in the film. The film depicts very few good people; others are negative and harmful to others. There a question is arisen, why always the English directors try to present the negative side of India. From the first to the last scene, English hero tries to liberate the downtrodden from the rich people.

Hasari Pal: Om puri acts as Hasari Pal in the film. He is the native of Bihar.

For better living and better job, he comes to Calcutta with his family. Like all 165

villagers, he thinks that Calcutta is a big city and everyone is living happily. But

after a few days he comprehends that city life is not so much easy and most of

them are crooked and cruel persons and getting job is a very risk factor. Most of

them have no good job, some are living in streets. Hasari got a job as rickshaw

puller. It is very difficult to pull the rickshaw, but he does it well. For finding

dowry for his daughter, he works hard. He keeps very traditional norms for his

living. Sometimes he acts as a typical husband and father. In the case of his

daughter, he accepts dowry system and gives do it to his daughter.

He becomes very conventional as a husband, when in between Max and

Kamala, a mutual respect is raised, but Hasari misunderstands them and can’t

tolerate it. In one scene Kamala, Hasari’s wife and Max do things together and

Max comments about her, leading to doubts. The result is he is not permitted to her

go with Max for treatment of leprosy affected people. He is not ready to stand

with Max for fighting against the landlord. Hasari is always loyal to local

godfather and doesn’t want to lose his job. Without any job, he can’t look after his family. Here the director depicts the unwillingness of Indians to free themselves from the exploitation and harassment. They attributed fate as the main cause of all problems. Later he is ready to fight against Ashok for, he molests Hasari’s daughter and tries to kill his sons. He can’t tolerate it and questions all bad doings.

So he has to go court and he gets a power to say whatever occurs against the poor and their bad conditions.

In the court scene, the judge and other lawyers are not ready to hear his arguments and they don’t have any interest. But he gets a positive result and he is also paid Rs 50 as penalty for disturbing Ashok. Max has always been with him in all the scenes of Hasari’s fight against the cruel people. The first part of the movie, 166

Hasari is very loyal and justifies the landlord and his son. But after the influence of

Max he becomes brave and disobeys and does things against the rule of the landlord. Except some unconventional thought, he is very loyal and responsible towards his family.

Blaming the victim and rebuff the compassion are the tactful approaches of western directors to represent the Indian characters. These are the weapons used by the colonizers for suppressing the colonised people. Withholding the empathy for people mired in the struggle for survival within the existing social order, the perpetuation of cool, skeptical distance in the face of claims of oppression (Shohat and Stam 23). The film emphasises the difference between other and mainstream people. Jamal is an ‘other’ in the society. When he reaches the final stage of “Who

Wants to be Millionaire” (Kaun Banega Crorepati), the anchor Prem (Anil Kapur) and police suspect him answering all the tough questions and they think that he is cheating. Actually his life experience makes him a winner, but the dominant society can’t accept the reality. Without any sympathy they are ready to punish him.

The dominant people’s main concern is that the downtrodden can’t reach the height of success. In one scene the police inspector says that “professors, lawyers, doctors, general knowledge wallahs never get beyond sixty thousand rupees. And he’s on half million? What the hell can a slumdog possibly know?” (Slumdog

Millionaire). Jamal is misunderstood by the police, Prem etc. They torture him without any reason. The dominant people call him slumdog without any hesitation.

He tries to become a winner in his life, but the dominant people don’t allow him to become a winner, they use the repressive power units against him like police. 167

The director makes a colonialist approach that is the efficacy of colonialism’s apparatus of social control in effecting strategies of dispowerment are totalised, and liable to be (mis)read as producing the colonised as a stable category fixed in a position of subjugation, hence foreclosing on the possibility of theorising resistance. Even if this is a crass misrepresentation of the project, the colonised’s refusals of assigned positions as subjected and disarticulated are not- and within its terms cannot be- accorded the centre stage( Parry 3-21). In some scenes Jamal try to transgress into the dominant role, but it cannot happen, instead of that the director presents his failure and calls him slumdog. Jamal is lovable and a firm decision maker. For gaining his dreams he does everything, when Amithab

Bachan comes near their slum, he takes a risk and gets his autograph. In thae same way he can’t save Lalita from the cruel person in his childhood, and at his teenage, he rescues her from the brothel. But fate plays on his life again and loses her because of his brother.

His strong desire makes him to participate in the TV show for getting

Lalitha. Throughout the story, he is passive and only by his strong desire he wins the game. The director portrays him as a passive hero, nothing possess him.

Through his colonizer’s gaze he draws an image of Jamal to his audience. The self reflection of the coloniser that produces the coloniser as subject (potent gaze, source of meaning, and action) and the native as his image, with all the pejorative meanings of ‘lack’ attached to the word ‘mage’ (Chow139). He has been making a stereotypical narration in the film. No paradigm shift occurs here.

Through the portrayal of Jamal and Salim, the director tries to reveal India.

Dirt, miseries, child labour, gangsters etc are depicted in the film. No positive face of India is depicted. Pathetic conditions of slum life are drawn, which have no 168 toilets, no bathrooms, polluted and waste water, canals and waste materials accumulated, full of crowd etc are seen in the film. The film gives another message that, slum people and children are musketeers and not lovable. The portrayal of their school also makes a negative impact on audience. The director satirises the existing political, social and economic conditions of India with reference to the slum life.

The film Gandhi explains the race discrimination through the life of

Gandhi, father of Indian nation. At the age of 24, he goes to South Africa to argue the case of Indian labours. Gandhi’s years in South Africa, especially from 1900 to1910, roughly spanning the fourth decade of his life, were crucial for the formation of his historical persona (Kakar 93). But he didn’t get warm welcome from there. When he travelled with first class ticket, Europeans didn’t allow him to sit there and scolded him without any manners. After this incident he comprehends the pathetic conditions of poor and coloured people. Gandhi belongs to a higher caste middle class family. He enrolled in Chancery high court and starts his work as a barrister in London, he says that “I am a barrister” (Gandhi). Through some of the dialogues Gandhi supports England and also emphasises that there is no such discrimination.

A postcolonial rewriting of past contestation, dependent as it is on a

notion of a multiple (dis)located native whose positions are

provisional, and therefore capable of annulment and transgression,

does not restore the foundational, fixed and autonomous individual;

what it does resort to is the discourse of the subject inscribed in

histories of insubordination produced by anti-colonial movements,

deciphered from cryptic cultural forms and redivised from vestiges 169

perpetuated through constant transmutation in popular memory and

oral traditions. (Parry 3-21)

Through the narration of this pattern the director tries to maintain their position and superiority. It also emphasises that this has not happened in Europe and Gandhiji’s dialogue is so powerful in the film. Many times Gandhiji’s softcorner towards the British can be seen in the film. He is very loyal to them. He thinks that all people live under the British Empire, so all are equal. In South

Africa, he collects labourers and organizes marches and stands for noncooperation and nonviolence. The first nonviolent political campaigns for the rights of Indians living in South Africa, which introduced and refined the instrument of Satyagraha

(literally, insistence of truth), took place during this period at the end of which he would become well known in many parts of the world (Kakar 93). He is a very diplomatic person that means, when the labourers are noncoperating to do their jobs in industries, it will be stopped and taking this noncooperation to other Indian people, all industries have to close and the South African government take necessary remedies for ending the marches. So all Indians get equal importance as the Europeans.

After the successful return from the South Africa, Gandhi becomes a national leader. But he doesn’t know the pathetic conditions of India. Here the director stresses another thing that, even if he is an Indian, he doesn’t know the wretched conditions of India. He lives like a British Indian. All other national leaders try to make him aware about the Indians. But after coming to India, he has seen congress leaders such as Patel, Nehru, Jinnah etc. Gokhale pushes him to do for Indians and leave the job as barrister. For knowing India, he travels all over

India in third class compartment. After this journey he can comprehend the state of 170

India and the injustice of British government which is intolerant to Gandhi and other congress leaders. So Gandhi creats a history of nonviolence, noncooperation in India and it makes him different from others. V.S Naipaul has pointed out

Gandhi’s intense self absorption, which made him oblivious to all the externals of his surroundings. (102-106)

The obsession for hierarchy means for ranking not only for people but for cultural and religious practices and placing Europeans above non Europeans. The film Gandhi portrays whites as a cruel and unjust to Indian people. But the film read as a text, there can be seen hidden white politics. In the first part of the film, the Indian political leaders also support the British Imperialism. The rich people in

India also discriminate against poor people which are portrayed in the film. The colonizers call Indians as coloured and they are depicted as passive, having no power to do anything. Gandhiji’s journey also shows the white discrimination against coloured people. In every scene these types of discriminations can be seen.

Europeans consider christianity as elite and others not. Peripherally the film criticises the whites’ actions, when deeply analysed the film shows sympathy and kindness towards British people.

Gandhiji’s friend is an English man, but he doesn’t do anything for the coloured people. In the same way, General Dyer’s actions are very brutal and unjustifiable. For threatening Indians, he ordered shooting Indians, including women and children without any kindness. After Jaliyanwallahbag Massacre, Dyer has to face court martial, but the film depicts his sympathetic face through the close up shot. So it explains his repentance to the brutal doings against the women and children, but the film justifies the doings of Dyer. The English men’s main agenda is to make Indians civilised and loyal to the government. If anyone is ready 171 to violate the rules and decisions of the white, they must be punishable without any hesitation. They always claim superiority over coloured people. Whites’ brutal actions are portrayed in the film, but Indians’ violence and separation are highlighted in the movie more than British imperialism. So the film follows a white ideology throughout the film, the viewers think that British imperialism is better than India’s violence and separation.

Another concept is gender representation. Gender is socially and culturally constructed. Simone de Beauvoir suggests in the Second Sex that “one is not born a woman, but, rather, becomes one” (301). Gender is obviously much more than a role or an individual characteristic: it is a mechanism whereby situated social action contributes to the reproduction of social structure. (West and Fenstermaker

158)

Dyer points out the representation of white women in different ways, both positive and negative. The positive side is the idea of white woman’s civilising mission and the negative side is the images of Memsahib as more snobbish and crueller to the natives, than the men, at once morally repressive and more liable to adultery and worse (184-185). Here Mrs. Moore and Adela Quested are represented in the positive side of the representation, but Mrs Turton is depicted as negative. She always uses her power over the natives and has no respect for the native culture. She says that ‘east is east, full of confusions’ (Passage to India), so she thinks that whites are elite and superior. Ella Shohat has noted that white women can be granted an ephemeral ‘post colonial superiority’ (63). In the absence of western male, white woman becomes a civilising centre. They express disapproval of British practice in India, though always at the level of how Indians are treated rather than whether they should be treated at all; they criticise the 172

conduct of empire, not the enterprise itself (Dyer 186). They did not question the presence of the British in the Empire, but did challenge the actual behaviour of the rulers toward the ruled, either in terms of Christian princilple

They provide an example of how people who belong in one sense to the

elite (in that they are both members of the ruling race) belong in another sense

among the subalterns (in that their roles are relatively marginal on account of their

gender). White women do not have the same relation to power as white men. Davy

argues that the archetypal role of white women has been to foster individualism in

white men while denying it to themselves, ‘reproducing a construction of white

womanhood that allows white women to signify and enact whiteness without

inhabiting the subject position reserved for the white men’ (197). This puts them in

unusual position. They are able to frame a critique of British rule from within since

their viewpoints are by definition personal rather than official. On the other hand,

precisely because they are women they are not to think to have a viewpoint other

than that of their official protector (Ronny). Both of them are unorthodox.

Mrs. Moore is convinced that the determining factor in personal

relationships is love and also that this Christian principle, God is love, should be

the basis of Empire. This vision that she projects is an alternative to the vision that

the Empire is based on force which British officialdom projects. Ronny dismisses

her critique by telling himself that her vision is only the delusion of a sick old

woman, inclined to foolish spirituality, and therefore need not be taken too

seriously. Yet Mrs. Moore’s alternative vision of India and the Indians cannot be

dismissed lightly. Her grasp of the essential life in Aziz is intuitive and enduring. It

is intuitive that she acquires it in one brief meeting and this leads Aziz to call her

an ‘Oriental’ or one who instinctively knows whether she likes a person or not. 173

Like other marginalised characters Mrs. Moore is silenced by the film. It is true she can do ‘no good at trail’ to use Ronny’s words as she has no evidence to give. Mrs.

Moore’s presence itself is an obvious reminder that there is a way of looking at Dr.

Aziz and at the Marabar which is personal and not official. To the British she becomes a tiresome ghost who never gives up haunting them with the sense that she must be taken into account. She is silenced on account of her gender.

Adela is characterised by her consciousness that’ she wants to see real

India. The collector throws a party for this purpose but India is presented to her only superficially ‘as a frieze and not as a spirit’. Aziz is a little suspicious of this attitude of Adela’s as he sees it only as a restatement of the British ambition to rule

India. Her dry rationalism does not win her any support either from the British or from the Indians. At the trial the remark that hurts her most is ‘the lady is so uglier than the gentleman’. It is a response to Macbride’s racist taunt and should not be taken out of context. Like Mrs. Moore, Adela is silenced.

Colonial frontiers offered Europeans the possibility of transgressing

their rigid sexual mores. Foreign lands and peoples certainly spelt the

possibility of new sexual experiences, which is why they became both

exciting and monstrous for the European imagination. Sexual relations

in non-European cultures were certainly different and sometimes less

repressive than in Christian Europe. (Loomba 158)

Adela tries to explore the areas in India, she accidently happens to see an old temple of graphic erotic carvings. The erotic sculptures of the temple and the activities of monkeys cause Adela to have some kind of nervous attack. Clearly the suggestion is that Indian eroticism at once threatens and excites Adela, who is a 174 product of Western sexual repression, and this conflict prefigures the more damaging fantasy of the caves. Such representations of the East as a place of sexual threat and liberation are a commonplace in Western culture. After this incident, her mind is disturbed and decides to marry Ronny. The construction of white female sexuality is different from that of the male. The white man has, as the bearer of agony, as universal subject, to have the dark drives against which to struggle. The white woman was not supposed to have such drives in the first place.

She might discover that she did and this is the stuff of great deal of western narrative, but this was a fall from whiteness, not constitutive of it, as in the case of the white man’s torment. The model of white women is the Virgin Mary, a pure vessel for reproduction who is unsullied by the dark drives that reproduction entails (Dyre 29). Adela’s desire and sex is repressed by the society.

Shabana Azmi acts as Kamala Pal, wife of Hazari Pal in the film City of

Joy. She is depicted as a dutiful wife and mother. After reaching Calcutta, they don’t get any shelter and job, she says to him ‘if I become a burden to you, I am ready to go to Bihar’. She is an adjustable and understandable wife. Most of the films Indian wives are rendered as very acquiescent and obeisance to her husband.

Without any change, Kamala Pal also renders in same pattern. In the traditional culture the good women is a Pativrata, subordinating her life to the husband’s welfare and needs. The Pativrata conduct is not a mere matter of sexual fidelity, an issue of great importance in all patriarchal societies (Kakar 66). Alternatively she has transgressed her role and public consciousness changed through her contravention.

In first half of the film she is represented in an objective position, but in the last half she contravenes her objective role and transgressed into subjective 175 position. She supports Max for the freedom of colonised people. Many times she disobeys her husband that is some male chauvinistic perception neglects and does what she likes. Kamala takes Meeta's hand and it's a moment before we realize

Kamala, with her fine hand, is holding Meeta's fingerless palm. When a man in leprosy affected colony comes to Joan for helping his wife, she is pregnant and comes bleeding. In this serious situation Joan pushed Max to save that pregnant woman from death, that time Kamala breaks her silence and become very brave and takes a role as a nurse. Her experience is delivering three children. That time her courageous character is shown. “I could help. I've had three babies” (City of

Joy). Hasari says to her that doesn’t touch that woman, she is a leper, but she defies his words and takes her hand without any hesitation. In the same way, she is only the supporter of Max for the freedom from rich and cruel people, but Hasari doesn’t support him. In the scene, Kamala’s individuality is highlighted.

The director emphasises that women have a power to do things correctly, but some social rules and patriarchal society suppress her and recede from the mainstream. In a patriarchal society, women are split subjects who watch themselves being watched by men. They turn themselves into objects because femininity itself is defined by being gazed upon by men (Berger 47). The film has also portrayed some social injustice, mainly the dowry system. The structure and kinship of marriage in parts of India contributes to dowry. In the north, marriage usually follows a patrilocal (lives with husband’s family) system, where the groom is a non-related member of the family. This system encourages dowry perhaps due to the exclusion of the bride's family after marriage as a form of premortem inheritance for the bride (Dalmia 71–93). The payment of dowry has long been prohibited under specific Indian laws including, the Dowry Prohibition Act, 1961 176

and subsequently by Sections 304B and 498A of the Indian Penal Code. Kamala

and all others accepted the dowry system, for giving that they are ready to do any

work and they think that it is their custom. Kamala and Hasari come to Calcutta for

collecting money for their daughter’s dowry. Their daughter is very young and she

is married to a young boy.

The director satirically depicts child marriage in the film. After

independence and adoption of Indian constitution in 1950, the child marriage act

has undergone several revisions. The minimum legal age for marriage, since 1978,

has been 18 for women and 21 for men. Poverty in India has been cited as a cause

of early marriages. Child marriages of girls are a way out of desperate economic

conditions, and way to reduce the expenses of a poor family. Kamala is a typical wife, but sometimes she expressed freedom from the unconventional systems. The director makes the audience think that women can come to the forefront of the society. Kamala is likes to do charity. But both women can’t do more things as men in the film. This negative ideology can be seen in the film. The patriarchal system doesn’t want to give equal role to woman, but here the director gives a feeling of subjectiveness of woman, but actually it doesn’t happen.

The film expresses the idea that women can change the society and do things against the patriarchal law, but nothing happens and they are relegated to the background of cinema. There can be seen a shift in the film that, in the case of

Joan, Max transgressed Joan’s roles and does things with his idea, but at the same time, Kamala transgresses Hasari’s role, but later we understand her transgression is just an illusion. This shifting can be seen in many films and it has been seen as a stereotypical narration and the male dominant society always portrays women as 177

objective and passive. Even when they try to transgress, they will be oppressed and

suppressed which speaks of her virginity, loyalty etc.

Kamala : Thank you for allowing me to go with you.

Max : You could make a helluva nurse. (City of Joy)

A little smile comes over her face; no one has ever paid her that kind of

compliment. She goes into Ram's hut, leaving Max and Hasari now.

Joan is another woman representation in the film City of Joy. Joan is a

British nurse, she comes to Calcutta for doing charity and acts as the doctor and look after all poor people. Her charitable deeds are emphasised and compared to

Mother Theresa’s works. Mother Teresa opened a home for those suffering from

Hansen’s disease, commonly known as leprosy, and called the hospice Shanti

Nagar (City of Peace). The Missionaries of Charity also established several leprosy

outreach clinics throughout Calcutta, providing medication, bandages and food

( Sebba 62–63). Like mother Theresa, she is not there to study medical studies, but

she does the charitable works, especially for lepers and poor people. She is symbolised here as mother Theresa.

The existence of British missionary woman in the film is an explicit representation of the presence of the Lord amongst the slum dwellers. In a historically authentic fashion that aspect of the story speaks about the various such missionaries who have spent their lives in such destitute areas spreading the word of Christ (Mitra 135). As a nurse, she is willing to care the patients with some

Indian doctors, but she is the superior one. The female volition, desire and agency

are literally pushed to the margins of the civilised world. But not all margins are

equally removed from the centre: skin colour and female behaviour come together

in establishing a cultural hierarchy with white Europe at the apex and black Africa 178 at the bottom (Loomba 154). With her dispensary she started a school for poor people. Nobody is ready to look after the poor and diseased people, but she is ready to care them and she pushed Max for helping her. She doesn’t do anything revolutionary and always loyal to the landlord. For doing charity she leaves her country.

Frida Pinto acts as the character Lathika in Slum Dog Millionire. Like other films, she is portrayed as a subordinate and suppressive woman. She is depicted in a stereotypical narration. She is considered as commodity, so any one can sell or buy her. In Slumdog Millionaire Jamal is the only one person loves her, others have no kindness to her. In Bombay riot, she lost her parents and joins Jamal and

Salim, but they are taken by child trafficking gangsters. But they have not tortured her, for when she become teen, they want to make her a whore. Her feelings, emotions etc have no significance in the film. But Jamal considers her as a woman, not a body, so he is ready to accept her. In the film Lalita has no voice, who is passive and fears everything. All consider her as mere body, not a human. The male characters and spectators gaze towards her and cannot tolerate her. She has been victimised many times in the film. Victimization is very different in each type of film and cannot be accounted for simply by pointing to the sadistic power and pleasure of masculine subject positions punishing or dominating feminine objects.

(Williams 29)

She is twice relegated from the mainstream. First she is a woman, second she is from slum, nobody gives any significance to her. The film presents the idea that street women become whores or prostitute, they don’t have any voice in the society. No shift and transgression occur in the film. The film has very negative impact on Indian women. Lalita is not only a character, but she represents the 179

whole women in India. This type of negative depiction comes from the

conventional idea about Indian people.

Rohini Hathangadhi acts as Kasthurbha, wife of Gandhiji in the film

Gandhi. The film portrays her as a good and loyal wife like a pathivratha. She

participates in the Indian Independence movement. Sometimes she is not supported by Gandhi. In South Africa, she has refused to clean common toilets, but after

Gandhi becomes a patriarchal husband she is ready to do it. In another scene she refuses to give tea to a black man. In that scene, her attitudes towards the poor people are revealed.

Gandhi: Ba- we will need another place set for Mr. Walker’s driver

Ba: I will tell Sora (She looks at Gandhi coldly (Gandhi).

Another example is:

Ba: Sora was sent to tell me I- I must rake and cover the latrine

Gandhi: Everyone takes his turn

Ba: It is the work of untouchables.

Gandhi: In this place there are no untouchables- and no work is beneath of us!

(Gandhi).

The film emphasises an understandable husband and wife and in many scenes she becomes a typical wife. She wears sari, which veils her head, puts

bindhi on her forehead etc. But Gandhi offers some justification for the ill

treatment of his wife that “I could not steal into my wife’s heart until I decided to

treat her differently than I used to do, and so I restored to her all her rights by

dispossessing myself of any so-called rights as her husband” (Gandhi 194). In

South Africa Gandhi has been shoved her to organize women for the meeting, she

does it only for her husband, actually who doesn’t like it. Gandhi’s wife, Ba, 180 standing at the front of the women. She possesses a surprising delicacy of feature, with large expressive eyes and a beautiful mouth- but at this moment she is ill at ease and uncertain, forcing herself to do that which she would rather not. (Gandhi).

Here the author describes a passive female role that means, she has no power to take her own decisions, who is very loyal to her husband. She is depicted as a stereotypical wife. Several times she has been imprisoned, even her last time she spends at the jail till her death.

There is a mistake made by director, for, Kasthurba has been portrayed as a loyal wife, but her motherhood and political career are not displayed in the film.

The role of a woman in a film usually revolves around her physical attraction and the mating games she plays with the male characters. On the other hand, a man is not shown purely in relation to the female characters, but in a wide variety of roles struggling against nature or against militarism, or proving his manhood on the range. Women provide trouble or sexual interludes for the male characters, or are present at all. Even when a woman is the central character she is generally shown as confused, or helpless and in danger, or passive, or as a purely sexual being

(Smith 14-15). First to last of the film she wears very conventional dresses, even her husband acts like an English man.

In the same way Meera / M S Slede is one of the important women characters in the film, who is an English lady. Geralden James acts as Meerabahan.

She is an ardent follower of Gandhiji and he has been given equal power to her as

Ba. After Ba’s death, he has to take all responsibilities in Ashram. Gandhi considers her as a daughter. When she comes to India, she wears very conventional dress like Sari and acts like an Indian lady. Sometimes she has acted as a British agent, for, when Gandhi is worried about the working class people in England, she 181

consoles him that “we are astonishing because of you; they know that it’s not for

their problem” (Scene 63 Gandhi). Here filmmaker presents the English working

class people as good and they can comprehend the issues of Indian people and they

don’t have any racial discrimination against Indian people etc. But in South Africa

a controversial issue is happening, that is, some working class people are teasing

Gandhi for walking with an English man. So why the director divulges the

conversation of Gandhi and Meera? This shows Meerabahan as a British agent.

Even she takes her own decisions, later she cannot do things freely.

Another kind of representation is class representation. Class position

determines one’s economic recourses, which in turn determine one’s living

standard. Class differences were not eliminated or even diminished in the later 20th

century. In an economy progressively dominated by large corporations, wealth

became increasingly concentrated in the hands of a relatively small number of

families in the upper class. The middle class continued to grow, fed by the demand

for accounts, lawyers, engineers, clerks, sales workers, and countless others needed

to run the growing corporations. (Landry 5)

The representation of unorganised people is one of the characteristics of

class representation. The unorganised people comprise those people in the film

who are without any bargaining power because they lack the education and the money to organise them into a collective or a group and gain influence. The subaltern classes are not unified and cannot unite until they are able to become a

“state”: their history, therefore, is intertwined with that of civil society, and thereby with the history of States and group of States (Gramsci 13). They are depicted by the director as very poor, who are outside the mainstream circle of social invasions and aspirations. These are the people who wear untidy dresses and humanity 182

grading and drifting beyond the educated vision, until no earthly invitation can

embrace it. This film suggests that, it engages with subcultures in India as well,

people who have been cut off from socio- economic realities. They are outside any

cultural, social or economic milieu.

The construction of racial difference had to do both with the nature of

societies which Europeans visited, the class of people who were being observed, as well as whether trade or settlement was the objective of the visitors. ‘Construction’ should not thus be understood as a process which totally excludes the responses and the reactions of those who were being represented. This does not mean that the vast populations that were stereotyped in colonial discourses were responsible for their own images; rather, the very process of misrepresentation worked upon certain specific features of the situation at hand. Thus misrepresentations or constructions need to be unravelled rather than simply attributed to some timeless, unchanging notion of racism or Orientalism. (Loomba 110)

There is one character, Hassan, who is the only person to speak, but not to express his own ideas and thoughts. All the people are depicted in a very poor state and have no right to speak to the elite persons. They have the only power to obey their masters’ orders. The director portrays them as only represented figures without a voice and without a thought of his own. Yet they defied as fate itself.

Indeed all those at the bottom of the classes are silenced and present them as objects of desire without any inhibitions because both on account of their race and their class, they are exotic and therefore fit subjects for political and imaginative rule. 183

Like Passage to India, many unorganised people can be seen in the film

City of Joy. They are relegated from the mainstream and they are subaltern, they

don’t have any power to do things. Ananda Mitra says that the film gazes at South

Asians as ‘others’ with strange practices that range from sacrifice and the violent

act of hooligans (47). Much discrimination is pictured in the film, in the colony

there is again division. The lepers live in another colony. Nobody cares and goes to

them. They are afraid to come to the mainstream, they only travell at night. In the

day light, nobody allowed them to come in front of the society. They always veiled

their face. They are beggars; nobody gives any job to them. Their pathetic

conditions are depicted in the film.

In the rainy seasons, they have no place to go and their houses are

destroyed by the heavy rain. They have no good schools for study. No Indians are

ready to care for these poor people. The rich people always try to exploit poor

ones. These types of portrayal make a negative impact on the viewers. India’s

pathetic conditions and cruel Indians are only depicted in the film. They don’t have

any good jobs, good shelter etc. The poor people don’t have any power to organize and oppose the social discrimination. But the western thoughts make them to

organize and think in the same way. The film shows the vulnerable conditions of

India.

The film Slumdog Millionaire depicts the Juhu slums in Mumbai, one of

the largest slums in the world. It has very crowded and dirty conditions. They have

no space. Their schools are depicted in wretched conditions. Students are sitting in

classroom which is very congested. These people have no right to rise and oppose

the beurocracy. If anyone is trying to do it, he/she must be killed by others. The

film depicts the Mumbai riots and in this riots; many Muslims are killed and lost 184

their shelters. Many people, especially children have lost their everything. The film

doesn’t make any resistance of slum peoples. Actually they are unorganised

peoples and they don’t have any freedom and can’t question the elite people. The

film develops only through the vision of Jamal, Salim and Lalita. The stereotypical

narration of India occurrs in the film. Slum people are treated as dirty dogs and

musketeers. However the police and bureaucracy respect the underworld people.

Just like other British Indian films, many unorganised peoples are

portrayed here. They are poor and common people and they don’t have any power

to organize and oppose inequality. In South Africa, there are many Indians of rich

and poor category, but no one can do anything against the white authority. For, whites think that they are coloured and barbarous people. And they are not accepted by other religions except Christianity. Whites racially, economically,

politically and socially discriminate against the Indian people. In one context Mr.

Khan and Gandhi’s conversation tries to make the Indians in South Africa are of

their condition.

Gandhi : But you’re a rich man-why do you put up

Khan (a shrug) : I’m rich – but I’m Indian. I therefore do not expect to travel First

Class.

Gandhi: In England, I was poor student but I-

Khan: That was England.

Gandhi: This part of “England’s” Empire! (Gandhi)

Khan is a rich man, but he can’t walk along with an English man.

Every one lives there experiencing suppression and subordination. In India poor/

common people can’t organise and oppose the English men, but after the advent of

Gandhi (hero), the people organise and fight against British authority under the 185 noncooperation and nonviolent movements. But actually there are many riots and other movements which are occur in India, but the film tactfully neglects it. Like other British Indian films, the hero makes the people aware about the cruelty of

English men. Certainly the people are feared to organize and fight against the imperial power, because they have no power. The British make the rules and regulations in India and people are forced to obey them, otherwise, they will be punished without any kindness. One of the most suitable examples is

Jaliyanwallahbagh Massacre, without any warning, General Dyer orders to shoot at the crowds. Not only men but women and children are brutally killed, without any mercy, whites have decided to kill one who disobeys their rules. They forcefully implement their power over the native people in India. This brutal power is discarded through the noncooperation and nonviolent movements by Gandhi. He has beaten the foreigners through these weapons. Here Gandhi transgressed the role of Hero (national) for helping native people which is a stereotypical narration in the film

Stereotypical depiction of Indian professionals is one of the characteristics of the films. This film discusses the professionals both in Britain and India. The

Indian professionals are Aziz and Panna Lal (Doctors), Hamidullah, Amrita Rao and Mahmoud Ali (Barristers), Das (Assistant Magistrate), Haq (Police Inspector) etc. In the film, the Indians are educated and trained for their respective professions. Gauri Viswanathan has shown that the emphasis on a literary education under British rule was a strategic ploy of almost effacing" the sordid history of colonialist expropriation, material exploitation, and class and race oppression". Not only that, for the colonised Indians the English literary text functioned as a "surrogate Englishman in his highest and most perfect state" 186

(98,103). They are creating a social network for themselves. The film shows one

such meeting at Hamidullah’s house, later, when Aziz falls ill, many of these

people come to visit him. Although Das officially presides over the trial of Aziz,

he goes to Aziz later on a personal level to ask for a prescription. The difficulties

that even professional Indians face when they try to come together are many.

While the film is sympathetic on the whole to this class towards a sense of national

identity, there are some areas of disappointment, that is Aziz professional decline

and Godbole is shown to change in a similar way.

Another one is the depiction of Bourgeois .Local godfather and his son are

the main villainous characters in the film. Local godfather uses his hegemonic power in a democratic way, but always controls them. Without his permission, no one can do anything. He gives jobs and rooms for rent, when they are against him, he can’t tolerate and give punishments to them. But people think that he is a good person, for he gives jobs for the colonised people. Even Joan also obeys his orders

and submissive to him. Without his gracefulness, they can’t do anything else. But

in the case of his son, who is mere aggressive than his father. He behaves to others

without any benevolence. Even he is very rich, he does burglary, pilfering etc..

Gramsci explains two types of bourgeois dictatorships, strong and weak. In

parliamentary system, if anybody violates or disobeys the rules and do popular

riots against bourgeois or state, the government uses repressive power units like police, army etc. and, an example for that is emergency period. The strong

dictatorship is just like fascism. The local godfather uses weak dictatorship

towards the people, but his son behaves others with fascist attitude. When others

oppress him or disobey him, he tries to kill them, Ashok brutally vulguring her

face with blade when Poomina supports Max. In the same way he tries to do it 187 again in Hasari’s daughter, but Max opposes it. When Hasari makes himself a rickshaw, he destroys it and molests his daughter like Poomina. Like his father he can’t control the people. With these two villainous characters, the director represents Indians in a very vulnerable manner.

The bourgeoisie think that poor people are their slaves and always loyal to them. Any one tries to violate it they must repress them for using repressive power units. Laws are made by the rich people; subalterns must obey the rules and laws.

Many national political leaders are depicted in the film like Gandhi, Nehru,

Patel, Azad, Jinnah etc. They are standing together for gaining Independence of

India. All belong to sound family background and stand in respected positions.

Their dresses have some peculiarities, which are different from the common man in India. They wear western attires, look like foreign men. After the advent of

Gandhi, a strong political interference occurred, opposing the British rules. But the film more concentrates on the depiction of quarrels of political leaders for the positions except Gandhi. Apart from Gandhi, no one consider the pathetic conditions of poor people in India and he gives more importance equality than social status. The other political leaders always try to maintain their positions safe.

Nehru and Patel don’t support Jinnah to become the Prime Minister of India, and vice versa. The film depicts the political leaders as western educated people who don’t know about the pathetic conditions of native Indian people and how to organize them. The film gives a message that all are leaders with western education, so they think like western men. But Gandhi is not like other political leaders and he is the real hero, rest of them are the supporters of him. 188

Underworld /Gangster film developed through the 1920s, creating a new

kind of anti-hero. Gangster films were popular with the public throughout the

1920s, peaking with Underworld. Stories of young ambitious lower-class men with

no respect for authority shooting their way to the top had a certain cachet in an era

of depression, poverty, and unemployment. Flouting the law and traditional values

of hard work and self-sacrifice, these gangster gun-toting heroes lived hard and

died young, enjoying money, fast cars and fancy clothes (Hallam 88). Slumdog

Millionaire is not a gangster film, but depicts the features of gangster films.

Slumdog Millionaire depicts the underworld/ gangster in the Mumbai city.

They rule the city and do not fear to kill and cheat others for money. Their main

occupations are in slums and reigned the slums. The film depicts three types of

gangsters, one is child traffickers, they convert the children to beggars, the next

one is sex mafias, and in the film the gangsters catch the girls for the sex markets.

They ruled the brothels. Salim gives his life to the gangsters’ for rescuing Lalita.

Usually the gangster and underworld people are depicted as coloured and third

world people.

Representations of Indians in these films are quite different ways. But their

treatments have been the same. In Passage to India, India and Indian people are depicted as mysterious and uncivilised. Dr. Aziz and Godbole have been portrayed as mystifying persons. In City of Joy, Roland Joffe tries to explore the pathetic conditions of urban slum people in India. The native people are cheated and suppressed by the Indian landlords. After the advent of the white hero, the issues of native people are carted off. But Slumdog Millionaire draws the pitiable circumstance of India and gives a negative impact about India. The film Gandhi probes into the life of Gandhi including his social and political carriers. These four 189 films depict Indians as very mysterious, superstitious, uncivilised, crooked, gangsters etc. A white supremacy is always presented in these films. The directors justify the colonisers’ vicious doings against native people in India and highlight their cultural peculiarities. They don’t accept the other cultures, people are fine and whites have maintained a supremacy towards third world people.

CHAPTER FIVE`

CONCLUSION

190

Culture has become an important and much used theoretical and substantive category of connection and relation. All those evoked domains of ‘culture’ are seen as containing a multiplicity of human forms and relations: from micro- interpersonal interactions to group norms processes and values to communicate forms, provided texts and images; wider out to institutional forms and constraints, to social representations and social imagery; wider out still to economic, political, ideological determinations. All can be traced back for their cultural effects and meanings, all traced for their mutual interactions from the point of view of how the meanings of a particular ‘culture’ are formed and held to operate. Stuart Hall says cultural studies is a discursive formation, that is, ‘a cluster(or formation) of ideas, images and practices, which provide ways of talking about, forms of knowledge and conduct associated with, a particular topic, social activity or institutional site in society’(6). It explorations are diverse and include gender, race, class, nation, colonialism, etc.. It seeks to explore the connections between these forms of power and to develop ways of thinking about culture and power that can be utilized by agents in the pursuit of change.

Adorno and Horkheimer argue that cultural products are

commodities produced by the culture industry. These commodities,

while purporting to be democratic, individualistic and diversified, are

in actuality authoritarian, conformist and diversified, and highly

standardised. Thus, ‘Culture impresses the sane stamp on everything.

Films, radio and magazines make up a system which is uniform as a

whole in every part’. (120)

The production of popular music, film, television and fashion is in the hands of transnational capitalist corporations. However, consumption oriented 191

cultural studies argues that meanings are produced, altered and managed at the

level of use by people who are active producers of meanings. Here Fiske argues

that popular culture is constituted by the meanings that the people make with it

rather than those identifiable within texts. He is clear that popular culture is largely

produced by capitalist corporations. However, he focuses rather upon the popular

tactics by which these forces are coped with, are evaded or are resisted (8). He

finds ‘popular vitality and creativity’ leading to ‘the possibility of social change

and the motivation to drive it.

Popular culture has been used in different ways; especially it may pertain to the mass-produced culture of the culture industries. In this case popular culture is regarded as inferior to its partner in the division. Some critics dislike commodity culture but refuse to decry the popular completely. Their strategy is to contrast mass culture with an authentic folk culture produced by the people. Fiske argues,

‘in capitalist societies there is no so called authentic folk culture against which to measure the “inauthenticity” of mass culture, so bemoaning the loss of the authentic is a fruitless exercise in romantic nostalgia’(27).

Contemporary popular culture is, primarily, a commercially produced one and there is no reason to think that this is likely to change in the foreseeable future.

However, it is argued that popular audiences make their own meanings with the texts of popular culture. They bring to bear their own cultural competencies and discursive resources to the consumption of commodities. Popular culture can be regarded as the meanings and practises produced by popular audiences at the moment of consumption. Thus the study of popular culture becomes centred on the uses to which commodities are put. Cultural studies works with a positive conception of popular culture by which it is both valued and critically analysed. It 192

rejects elitist notions of high-low culture or the critiques of mass culture. As

McGuigan has argued, cultural studies have a populist bent: ‘cultural populism is

the intellectual assumption, made by some students of popular culture, that the

symbolic experiences and practises of ordinary people are more important

analytically and politically than culture with a capital C.’ (4)

One of the key concepts of cultural studies is the representation. The

central strand of cultural studies can be understood as the study of culture as the

signifying practices of representation. Cultural representations and meanings have

a certain materiality. That is, they are embedded in sounds, inscriptions, objects,

images, books, magazines and television programmes. They are produced, enacted, used and understood in specific contexts. Actually the meaning does not inhere in

things, in the world. It is constructed and produced. It is the result of a signifying

practice- a practice that produces meaning, that makes things mean. There are

broadly speaking three approaches to explaining how representation of meaning

through language works. These are reflective, the intentional and the

constructionist or constructivist approaches. Through these approaches we can

understand that ‘where do meanings come from?’ and ‘how can we tell the true

meanings of a word or image?’. In the reflective approach, meaning is thought to

lie in the object, person, idea or event in the real world.

The theory which says that language works by simply reflecting or

imitating the truth that is already there and fixed in the world, is sometimes called

‘mimetic’. Visual signs do bear some relationship to the shape and texture of the

objects which they represent. There are many words, sounds and images which

fully understand but which are entirely fictional or fantasy and refer to worlds

which are wholly imaginary. The second approach is intentional approach. It holds 193 that it is the speaker, the author, who imposes his or her unique meaning on the world through language. Words mean what the author intends they should mean.

The third approach recognizes this public, social character of language. It acknowledges that neither things in themselves nor the individual users of language can fix the meaning in language. Things don’t mean: we construct meaning, using representational systems, concepts and signs. Hence it is called the constructionist approach to meaning in language. (Hall 24)

Representation is a practice, a kind of work, which uses material objects and effects. But the meaning depends, not on the material quality of the sign, but on its symbolic function. It is because a particular sound or words stands for, symbolizes or represents a concept that it can function, in language, as a sign and convey meaning or as the constructionist say, signify. The visual images are represented and produce different meanings are the main functions of visual

Medias, especially films. The meanings depend on the perspectives of the directors of films. Images are represented in different ways, especially through the descriptions of gender, nation, race, class etc.

The cultural studies perspective on race certainly acknowledges the importance of the intersections of race and class. It has tended to explore the shifting character of cultural understandings of race in terms of representation, the cultural politics of race as a politics of representation, the intersections between class, race and gender and the cultural legacy of colonialism. The idea of racialization or race formation is founded on the argument that race is a social construction and not a universal or essential category of biology (Barker 247).

Races are existed in the inside of representation. Rather, they are formed in and by 194

symbolization in a process of social and political power struggle. Thus, perceptible

features are transformed into signifiers of race.

As Gilroy argues that accepting that skin colour, however

meaningless we know it to be, has a strictly limited material basis in

biology, opens up the possibility of engaging with theories of

signification which can highlight the elasticity and emptiness of racial

signifiers as well as the ideological work which has to be done in order

to turn them into signifiers of race as an open political category, for it

is struggle that determines which definitions of race will prevail and

the conditions under which they will endure or wither away. (38-39)

In the discursive construction of meanings of race change and struggled

over. Thus, different groups are variously racialized and subject to different forms of racism. Goldberg says, ‘the presumption of single monolithic racism is being displaced by a mapping of multifarious historical formulations of racisms’ (20).

For example, British Asians have historically been subject to different forms of

stereotyping and have occupied a different place in the social and racial hierarchy

from British Afro Caribbeans. While British Asians may be second class citizens,

blacks are on the third rung of the ladder and they are stereotyped as doctors and

shopkeepers etc. Racism is a matter not simply of individual psychology or pathology, but of patterns of cultural representation deeply ingrained within the practices, discourses and subjectivities of western societies. (Barker 266)

Edward Said argues that cultural geographical entities such as the orient are not inert facts of nature. Rather, they are historically specific, discursive constructions that have a particular history and tradition. Thus the orient has been 195

constituted by an imagery and vocabulary that have given it a particular kind of

reality and presence in the west. Usually westerners depict oriental woman, who never spoke for herself, never showed her emotions and lacked agency or history, that is, the sexually beguiling dark maiden of male power fantasy. In contrast, the oriental male is seen as wily, fanatical, cruel and despotic.

Representation raises the question of inclusion and exclusion on the basis

of power. Stereotype is one of the representational modes, which can be

understood as vivid but simple representations that reduce persons to a set of

exaggerated, usually negative, characteristics. Richard Dyer suggests that ‘types

are instances which indicate those who live by the rules of society (social type) and

those whom the rules are designed to exclude (stereotypes)’ (29). Hall also says

that stereotypes concern those excluded from the normal order of things and simultaneously establish who is ‘us’ and who is ‘them’. Thus, stereotyping reduces, essentializes, naturalizes and fixes “difference”. (258)

The nation state, nationalism and national identity are not naturally occurring phenomena but contingent historical cultural formations. It is socially and culturally constructed as collective forms of organization and identification.

National identity is a form of imaginative identification with the symbols and discourses of the nation state. Nations are not simply political formations but systems of cultural representation by which national identity is continually reproduced through discursive action. The nation state is a political apparatus and a symbolic form also has a temporal dimension since political structures endure and change. The symbolic and discursive dimensions of national identity narrate and create the idea of origins, continuity and tradition. (252) 196

Cultures are constituted by changing practises and meanings that operate at different social levels and not a static entity. Various social groups are differently understood and acted upon the given national culture. Representations of national culture are snapshots of the symbols and practises that have been foregrounded at specific historical conjunctures. This has invariably been done for particular purposes by distinctive groups of people. National identity is a way of unifying cultural diversity so that, Hall argues ‘instead of thinking of national cultures as unified, we should think of them as a discursive device which represents difference as unity or identity. They are cross cut by deep internal divisions and differences and unified only through the exercise of different forms of cultural power’ (297).

National identity is a form of identification with representations of shared experiences and history. These are told through literature, popular culture and media.

Gender is socially and culturally constructed one. Gender has divided the human race into two categories, and it privileges the male over the female. Gender operates as a set of hierarchally arranged roles in modern society which make the masculine half of the equation positive and the feminine negative. Men are commonly held to be more ‘naturally’ domineering, hierarchally oriented and power hungry, while women are seen as nurturing, child rearing and domestically inclined. Gender is discussed in the first chapter based on the ideas of sexuality, lesbianism, homosexuality, subjectivity, patriarchy, transvestism etc.

Sex is an ideal construct which is forcibly materialized through time. It is not a simple fact or static condition of a body, but a process whereby regulatory norms materialize sex and achieve this materialization through a forecible reiteration of those norms (Butler 1-2). Sex is produced as a reiteration of 197

hegemonic norms understood as a performativity that is always derivative. Butler

conceives of gender and sex in terms of citational performativity, with the

performative being ‘that discursive practise which enacts or produces that which it

names’ (13). Here performativity is not a singular act for it is constituted by a

recurrence of a set of norms. The performance of sex is forced by a regulatory

apparatus of heterosexuality that repeats itself through the compelling production

of ‘sex’. Gender is performative in the sense that it constitutes as an effect that

very subject it appears to express (24). Masculinity and femininity are understood

to be the matters of representation. Actually women have played significant roles

in the culture and in literature, but they are omitted from the canon of good works

and this means the representations of women have been constructed. So the gender politics is central to the representation. In films the representations of women reflect male attitudes and constitute misrepresentations of ‘real women’. And this becomes known as the images of women perspective. But now certain changes have occurred and all representations are viewed as cultural constructions and not as reflections of a real world. So we think of how representations signify in the context of social power with what consequences for gender relations. This is called the politics of representation.

Films depict number and kinds of women representations with the interpretation of women roles and power (lessness) within those representations. In films, representation of ‘good’ women as submissive, sensitive and domesticated while ‘bad’ women are rebellious, independent and selfish. Barker quotes Meehan ten categories of women stereotypes presented in the media:

the imp: rebellious, asexual, tomboy; the good wife: domestic,

attractive, home centred; the harpy: aggressive, single; the bitch: sneak, 198

cheat, manipulative; the victim: passive, suffers violence or accidents;

the decoy: apparently helpless, actually strong; the siren: sexually lures

men to a bad end; the courtesan: inhabits saloon, cabaret, prostitution;

the witch: extra power, but subordinated to men; the matriarch:

authority of family role, older, desexed. (317)

The Indian films depict women in a traditional way, especially the characteristics of chastity, patience and selflessness. Images of women present the truth and falsity of representations. Cultural theorists have been interested not only in subject positions that seek to fix the character of sexuality but also in those that destabilize them. Kalplan explores the ambiguity of Madonna as a text that deconstructs gender norms. Her concern is with the politics of the signifier. That is, with the exploration of sex as an unstable but regulated performance (273).

Cultural studies have explored the representation of women in popular culture. It has argued that women across the globe are constituted as the second sex, subordinated to men. That is, women have subject positions constructed for them that place them in the patriarchal work of domesticity and being a mother and having a career and being able to explore one’s individuality.

Women in postcolonial societies carry the double burden of having been subordinated by colonialism and native men. Another type of gender representation is homosexuality. Homosexual characters can be seen in many films. Their presence has characteristically been coded while homosexual characters have been taunted, ridiculed, silenced, pathologized, and more often than not killed off in the last reel (Smelik 135). A simple call for positive images is not the solution as images of gays and lesbians cannot simply be seen as true or false. Rather, it is necessary to understand how stereotypes function in both 199 ideological and cinematic terms. Stereotyping works in society both to establish and to maintain the hegemony of the dominant group and to marginalize and exclude other social groups (homosexual, black, women, and the working class).

Stereotypes are normative. Stereotypes of gays and lesbians such as the queen and dyke produce norms of gendered heterosexuality because they indicate that the homosexual man or woman falls short of the heterosexual norm: that they can never be a ‘real’ man or woman (136). The stereotype of queen as the effeminate man and the dyke as the mannish woman are, therefore, informed by the structuring opposition of sexual difference. The stereotype of the homosexual character functions as a structure, a code or convention. The sign ‘homosexual’ represents the ideological meaning that the homosexual has for heterosexuality, as the negative or the failure of the heterosexual norm.

Another representational tool is class. The class, the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, consequently also controls the means of mental production, so that the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are on the whole subject to it. The individuals composing the ruling class possesesses among other things consciousness, and therefore think. Insofar, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an historical epoch, it is self evident that they do in its whole range, hence among other things rule also thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch. During the time aristocracy was dominant, the concepts honour, loyalty etc were dominant, during the dominance of the bourgeoisie the concepts freedom, equality etc. The ruling class itself on the whole imagines this to be so. The ideas which increasingly take 200

on the form of universality. For each new class which puts itself in the place of one

ruling before it is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to present its

interest as the common interest of all the members of society, that is expressed in

ideal form: it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and present them as the

only rational, universally valid ones.

The class making a revolution comes forward from the very start, if only

because it is opposed to a class, not as a class but as the representative of the whole

society, as the whole mass of the society confronting the one ruling class (Marx

and Engels 10). The historical unity of the ruling classes is realised in the state, and

their history is essentially the history of States and of groups of States. But the

subaltern classes are not unified and cannot unite until they are able to become a

“state”: their history is intertwined with that of civil society, and thereby with the

history of states and groups of states. The supremacy of social group manifests

itself in two ways, as ‘domination’ and as ‘intellectual and moral leadership’. A

social group dominates antagonistic groups, which it tends to “liquidate”, or to

subjugate perhaps even by armed force; it leads kindred and allied groups. A social group can, and indeed must, already exercise ‘leadership’ before winning governmental power; it subsequently becomes dominant when it exercises power, but even if it holds it firmly in its grasp, it must continue to ‘lead as well. (Gramsci

14)

But Bourdieu maintains the role for social class within the context of a mainstream and culturally focused on sociology. He is distinguishing himself from

Marxism. Power and dominance derive not only from possession of material resources but also from possession of cultural and social resources. Moreover, through the concept of symbolic capital, in addition to capturing the importance of 201

general signs of social recognition, he is drawing attention to the fact that the value

of any form of capital depends, in part, upon social recognition (Crossley 88).

Bourdieu’s distance from Marx reflects the historical situation of the two theorists.

Writing in the nineteenth century, Marx observed an early phase in the

development of capitalism, wherein two new classes (the bourgeoisie and the

proletariat), distinguished from, and simultaneously related to, one another by their

relations to the new industrial means of production, were forming themselves and

sparking conflicts that would dominate their societies for a century. Bourdieu was writing in the second half of the 20th century, when this dichotomous structure had

been obscured by, among other things: partial separation of ownership from

control of the means of production; the growth of public sector employment; and

the emergence of high salary occupations, elevated above manual labour by their

dependence upon scarce forms of technical or cultural knowledge. While enormous

discrepancies in economic wealth are apparent, social stratification had become

more complex than it was in the 19th century. Moreover, the expansion of education and increased significance of qualifications, which contributed to this change, rendered an exclusive focus upon economic capital problematic.

These types of representations in popular culture are very significant. The visual images are represented and differentiated through race, class, gender, nation etc.. Actually Indian English and British Indian films are represented and distinguished on the basis of different representation. The history of these films have been given an awareness of the stereotypical depiction of images, scenes etc.

During the colonial period, Indian English and British Indian films have been drawn a picture about India in negative manner. Most of the native Indians are 202 depicted passive, violent, revolutionary, mystic, superstitious, uncivilized and emotional.

In Indian English and British Indian films, the beginning years give important to the epic stories and fairy tales. But after the advent of talkie movies the mythological issues are portraying the films. Most of the films directed and acted the English men. The films are coming on the international and national banners. Just after independence some films are justifying the colonial rules for depicting the revolutionary issues of Indian people and depict Thuggees, a cult of murderous Indians in colonial British India. Films portrayed the problems of partition and its after effects and the coloniser becomes hero for the helping of native people.

Till the 80s Indian English films are very few. Most of the films are British

/American/German films representing Indians and India. Their films have a politics that to draw India and Indians in unconventional and rude manner. They only emphasise the negative facet of Indian people and their beliefs. They think that Indian culture is very mystic and barbarous. For escaping native people from the revolutionary native people, the whites come and take it as challenge and conquered and destroyed the native revolutionary people without any hesitation.

But after 80s Indian English films are profusely produced which explain the problems of Indian people in India and abroad.

Salaam Bombay is one of the movies which explore the pathetic conditions of slum people and the violence etc. At the same time British Indian films portraying Indians as deceivers and the whites teach their culture and customs to the native people. Later, Indian English films explore the cultural difference, 203

alienation, cultural conflicts but some other films draw the consequences of partition, slums in India, revolutions in India etc are the main themes, and rest of them examine the serious themes like lesbianism, molestations of children, child labour etc.There are many women filmmakers like Deepa Mehta, Mira Nair,

Revathy, Aparna Sen, Shonali Bose etc who represent different kinds of mental traumas of women in the society, home, public sphere and significant social issues have been taken as themes in their films.

These themes are closely analysed with the Indian English and British

Indian films. Indian English films and British Indian films are explored with race, class, gender, nation etc.. Racial discriminations have been occurred in films in various ways. Western racial discrimination is on the basis of colour can be seen in most of the British films. But in the case of India, racial discrimination mainly concentrates on caste and religion. Minorities are always discriminated in the mainstream society and it raises many issues among them and they are suppressed by dominant group. In the same way class discrimination occurred in the society on the basis of economic power. Different types of class can be seen in the society such as bourgeoisies, petty bourgeoisies, gangsters, working class, professionals etc.. These differentiations can be drawn in the Indian English and British Indian films. Gender representation is another significant characteristic of cultural studies.

How film makers portray gender in their films is one of the main concerns of the study. Gender discrimination is an important issue in the society. In the patriarchal society how woman has been treated and which position they have are also the main concerns of the analysis. In west and east, women’s treatment has same characteristics such as passive, emotional, silence etc. are the characteristics of good women. 204

Indian English films such as Fire, Mr and Mrs Iyer, Bride and Prejudice

and Midnight’s Children are closely examined with these themes. The film Bride and Prejudice is a novel adaptation of Jane Austin novel Pride and Prejudice. Film provides a political and ideological stand among the Indian and western viewers.

Director cleverly draws the two cultures in the world. Through the film, Gurindher

Chadha, director, intends to make an awareness of the different and diverse cultures. Lalita and Darcy represent two cultures, east and west. How the dominant ideology works among the people and their attitude towards others are explained in the film. This is an Indian version film of the novel and Gurindher Chadha recreates the incidents and events that occur in the novel in a bollywood style. The film starts with a wedding function which occurs in India; is a big celebration takes place, but another marriage occurrs in America without any celebrations, very few people attend the function. Here director draws the cultural difference between

Indians and westerners.

The film Bride and Prejudice describes the issues of different races and cultures more than different classes. Central characters are drawn in a multicultural identity, for Darcy and Lalita marry each other, accept and comprehend the other cultures. Its value, importance etc are accepted by them. Director draws some characters like Mrs Bakshi, her daughters Maya and Lucky etc in a negative way.

Mrs Bakshi is a talkative lady; she wants her daughters to marry with rich men.

Mr. Kholi marries Lalita’s friend Chandra and she feels sad. Her dressing style, body language etc emphasise her nature. Maya is not such a beautiful girl; she doesn’t like to live in a fashionable manner. But she does snake dance in a vulgar manner and is a traditional girl. Lucky is portrayed as a flirting girl, and she eloped with Wickham. 205

The film is a suitable medium for showing ideological powers in the society created by elite people. The film shows the misconception of westerners toward India and Indian culture, they only know about India in its spiritual power, other things they don’t try to understand. Like Mrs. Moore’s in the film Passage to

India, Darcy is ready to unmask colonial aura and accept other cultures. The film starts with cultural conflicts and ends with resolving all issues and misrecognition between two cultures.

The film Fire comprises many threads like traditionalism, religion, patriarchy, gender difference, life of middle class etc. Here women are represented as passionate and desirable one, but they are oppressed by the tradition, patriarchy and systems of middle class family. In fact, the Ramayana makes icons in the middle class families and they are the ardent followers of it. As Sita in the

Ramayana, Radha in the film has to overcome agnipareekha. Actually, people do not like to change their traditions, customs, rituals etc. But here Mehta seriously points out that the tradition makes women as repressed one and they don’t have any choice in their life. Radha and Sita are two marginalized middle class Indian women. Beauvoir claims that one is not born, but rather becomes a woman, it follows that woman itself is a term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to originate or to end. (301)

The film discusses the gender discrimination in Indian patriarchal society, which includes both sexes. Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts with in a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being (Butler 43-44).

Director cunningly uses editing. Through the scenes, Mehta explains the connection between life and Indian beliefs the Ramayana tradition. Here she uses 206

lesbianism, and pointed out that unsatisfied women follows lesbian characters. The

way she portrayed the structure of middle class Indian family is peculiar, there is

no crowd, neighbors, relatives etc, no men visit on the terrace of the house. All the

characters of the film have no other relation, except Swami and Chinese mistress.

Through this film we can understand, how Mehta understands India, Indian

Culture, tradition etc.. It’s a partially Indian and partially English film. And she portrays the arrival of lesbianism which indicates not only for the biological needs but also the cultural repression

The film Midnight’s Children mainly concentrates on the issues that occur

in India in post independence period. It completely explains the demerits of India.

The film Midnight’s Children depict India, which is completely on the point of

director Deepa Mehta. She tries to connect Saleem, one of the midnight’s children

and the protagonist of the film, and history of India. She uses history only for

explaining pre independence period till the emergency period. These children

possess different magical powers, but their powers are destroyed by Mrs. Gandhi

through the emergency declaration. Another question is why Rushdie, scriptwriter,

uses only the evilness of India and not its positive features? Most of the westerners

comprehend the negative side of India and also think that the reign of the British is

far better than Indian freedom. The two year of emergency is the black mark of

Indian history. The film mainly criticizes the situation after independence.

Saleem’s family is destroyed through the Indian bomb attack and they help to

make Bangladesh as a new country. Mainly the Europeans understand India

through the Indian English films and Indian English literary works.

Indian English films are made not only for Indians, but for foreigners also.

Foreign audiences want something about India especially negative side of the film. 207

The director describes the racial discrimination between Hindu and Muslim shows

as fanatics. It’s intensity is drawn through the incidents which occur occurred in

the film. Director creates the film through the eyes of Mrs Iyer. As the film title

emphasises the story happen in the life of Mr and Mrs. Iyer. In the film Raja and

Meenakshi represent the India. India is a secular country and everyone has an

equal right to believe in their own religion. This film elucidates how the nation is

created and imagined with using different characters and draws a mini India in the

form of bus. The film has been moved on the perception of the Meenakshi Iyer.

Mr. and Mrs Iyer is soundly influenced by the Gujarat riots and 9/11 issues. It also

has drawn the procreation and destruction of the nation. In one part of the movie

discusses the issues based on religion and it’s after effects and the unity and self

respect of these people are portrayed with parallel sequences. There is a message

that a man has to see others with his own eyes not in the eyes of religion. Man’s integral expression is humanity, so he must look on others with these feelings; otherwise issues such as communal riots will occurs in the society. India is a secular country, so everyone has a right to believe their own religion, respecting other religious beliefs also.

British Indian films expose India and Indians in a different manner. They always keep western dominant ideology and think India is an uncivilized country and only whites’ can change the pathetic conditions of native Indians. But in the case of British Indian films such as Passage to India, City of Joy, Gandhi and

Slumdog Millionaire, whose representation of Indians have so many resemblances,

but its treatments are different. In Passage to India, Indians are treated as

uncivilized and foolish man. Usually western film makers try to portray Indians as

Business men, doctor etc in positions. But the film mostly considers the spirituality 208

and mythical elements in India and its intolerance and negativity towards western people. Western audiences comprehend the uneasiness and complex practices of

India which are the main characteristics of the film. The racial discrimination has

been portrayed in the film.

During the time of colonialism, the British people try to keep distance with

native Indians. And they think that they have a superior culture. Even the director also draws a picture of India not fully positive sense. Actually India’s spirituality and mythical beliefs are part of their native culture. But this negative portrayal is only the concern of director. Gender discrimination is also represented here. Mrs

Moore and Miss Adela Quested are the two English ladies suppressed by their men

and law. Even they are English women who don’t have any freedom and if they try

to violate the patriarchal and racial laws, they must be punishable. Class

discrimination is also depicted there.

City of Joy investigates the class and racial discrimination. Joffe presents

Indian people with different class. The petty bourgeois rule the city and they

frighten poor people. They give job and if anyone violates their rules, they will be

punishable. Joffe picturises Calcutta as a ‘city of joy’, satirically he uses this name.

There are many poor people who live in very dismal conditions. But the rich

people don’t consider them as human beings. An English man comes there as a

god and helps the poor people which is the main theme of the film. In fact Max

comes there seeking mental peace, but he comprehends that the significant

problem is the wretched conditions of people in the city than his mental trauma.

It also depicts the gender discrimination. Kamala and Joan are the

suppressed women in the film. Kamala is very loyal to her husband Hasari, but her 209 disagreement and indignation are expressed towards her husband. But the traditional society makes her silent and passive. Actually she has a courage and ability to do things properly. Joan is free and does things properly, but sometimes she is presented as passive and dependable. In the first half she has been depicted as powerful lady, but later it is changed and dependable lady. The English lady and

Indian lady are depicted here in different ways, but the root problem is same, that is they are always relegated into the background of society.

In the film City of Joy, the title emphasises the city of Calcutta, one of

India’s developing cities at that time, even then culturally, politically Calcutta reached the highest position in India. But unlike the name, the film has depicted the city in a sarcastical manner. The director has drawn only the dark side of India, sometimes it is exaggerated. The film represents Indians as unorganised, brutal, crooked, uncivilized and untidy and emphasise that only white can treat these conditions. And the film makes the native people subordinate and weak. The poor people can’t comprehend their subordination and no power to criticize or oppose dominant people. There can be seen a clear politics, that is, Indian law, judiciary etc are sarcastically depicted in the film. Through these types of representations, the audience gets a negative or passive awareness of India.

Gandhi is another British Indian film which depicts the life of Mohandas

Karamchand Gandhi. It explores Gandhi’s qualities and firmness and his actions against the foreigners. Richard Attenborough uses the white politics throughout films. First part of the movie which concentrates on the brutality and racial discrimination of white people in South Africa, here black and third world people are treated as slaves and they don’t have any power among the whites. Some of the rich people in India are also treated as negative manner. Gandhiji can’t tolerate 210

these types of discriminations and he tries to organise the people and make a

success. In this part Indian and black peoples pathetic conditions are depicted, but

in the second half of the film presents pitiable situation in India. After Gandhi’s

advent to India, the Indian make him as their leader and do work for the independence of India. In the narration of independence, the director illustrates the conflicts between Hindu and Muslim religion. Here filmmaker describes that political leaders also want this separation and for that they create many riots and revolutionary actions. In the same way General Dyer’s brutal actions against the native Indians, especially women and children are justified the film through some scenes, in one scene he repents and defends his vicious actions against women and children. The seriousness of this issue becomes intense. Thus Jaliyanwallah Bagh massacre is slightly presented in the film. The film describes the racial issues, class struggle, gender problems, nationalism etc.

Slumdog Millionaire is a film accepted widely. It got eight academy awards including the best film. The central theme of the film is India’s misery and problems and no positive side is presented in the film. Only pathetic conditions are picturized in the film. Here director’s politics are explored, for, through the stereotypical narration of third world countries, the usual misrepresentations of them are strongly confirmed in the film. India is portrayed a slum and people have no power to raise or develop from their downtrodden situation. It also emphasises the native people who do not know their own values and even about their country.

In one scene, the Inspector asks Jamal “whose portrait is in Rs.1000 note?”, but he

(Jamal) doesn’t know about him, but he knows in whose portrait is in the dollar. It gives a negative message about the country. People don’t have time to know about the historical personages, even the father of the nation. 211

After colonialism, India falls into the pathetic conditions. , so people don’t know even Gandhiji, the freedom fighter. It also describes people’s ignorance of history of India and this freedom India has won is not for the poor, but only for the rich people, no substantial changes have occurred in the country since the freedom struggle. The film symbolically criticises India in a different way. Indian people cheat each other. In the show, the program anchor doesn’t tolerate the Indian who belongs to slum to become the winner. Several times he tries to tempt him to mistake, but he does not suceed and lastly he falsely informs the police about cheating, but the police take him to police station and question him. But they also suspect Jamal. It emphasises the irresponsible attitude of beaurocracy, police and power, which always stand with the elite people, the down- trodden and find no one to uplift them from their ruined conditions. Even India is the largest democratic country, poor always poor and no changes occur in their life. This film criticises the social systems in India. India is full of slums, musketeers, gangsters who are presented to the audience. No gender equality can be seen. The female hero Lathika is presented here as a mere body and a sexual object. Nobody cares for her feelings, emotions etc. She is passive and considered as only commodity.

Anyone can sell or buy the commodity, who hasn’t any emotions or hopes.

Indian English films depict the Indian people, their trauma, emotions, gender inequality etc, but British Indian films concentrate on the political and cultural drawback of India. Indian people don’t have any significance as the individual, but they emphasis the political issues and other matters.

This thesis has explored the connections between gender, race, class and nation, forms of power and to develop ways of thinking about culture and power that can be utilized by agents in the pursuit of change. The production of the film is 212

in the hands of transnational capitalist corporations, so the consumption oriented

cultural studies argues that meanings are produced, altered and managed at the

level of use by people who are active producers of meanings. Cultural studies work with a positive conception of popular culture by which it is both valued and critically analysed. The visual images are represented and produced different meanings are the main functions of visual medias, especially films. The meanings depend on the perspectives of the directors of the films. This thesis has explored the shifting characters of cultural understandings and cultural politics of race in terms of representation, the intersection between class, race, gender and cultural legacy of colonialism through the selected films.

Indian English and British Indian films are represented and distinguisged on the basis of different representations. During the colonial period, Indian English and British Indian films have been drawn a picture about India in a negative manner. Most of the native Indians are depicted passive, violent, revolutionary, mystic, superstitious, uncivilized and emotional. The advent of talkie movies the mythological issues are portrayed the films. After 80s Indian English films are profusely produced which explain the problems of Indian people in India and abroad. But British Indian films have drawn Indians as deceivers and foreigners

(whites) teach their culture and customs to the native people. Later, Indian English films explore the cultural difference, alienation, cultural conflict, but some other films draw the consequences of partition, slums in India, revolutions in India etc. and rest of them examine serious themes like lesbianism, molestations of children, child labour etc.

Indian English films such as Fire, Mr. and Mrs. Iyer, Bride and Prejudice and

Midnight’s Children are analysed. In Bride and Prejudice, the director tries to 213 depict the cultural conflicts between Indians and Westerners. It provides a political and ideological stand among the Indian and Western viewers. The film Fire comprises many threads like traditionalism, religion, patriarchy, gender difference, life of middle class etc. Here women are represented as passionate and desirable ones, but they are oppressed by the tradition, patriarchy and systems of middle class family. She portrays the arrival of lesbianism which indicates not only for the biological needs but also the cultural repression. The film Midnight’s Children mainly concentrates on the issues that occur in India in post independence period.

It completely explains the demerits of India. The film Midnight’s Children depict

India, which is completely from the point of director Deepa Mehta. She tries to connect Saleem, one of the midnight’s children and the protagonist of the film, and history of India. The film Mr. and Mrs Iyer elucidates how the nation is created and imagined with using different characters and draws a mini India in the form of bus. The film has been shown from the perception of the Meenakshi Iyer. It also has drawn the procreation and destruction of the nation.

British Indian films such as Passage to India, City of Joy, Gandhi and Slumdog

Millionaire, whose representation of Indians have so many resemblances, but their treatments are different. In Passage to India, Indians are treated as uncivilized and foolish man. Usually western film makers try to portray Indians as business men, doctor etc in positions. But the film mostly considers the spirituality and mythical elements in India and its intolerance and negativity towards western people.

Western audiences comprehend the uneasiness and complex practices of India which are the main characteristics of the film. The racial discrimination has been portrayed in the film. City of Joy investigates the class and racial discrimination.

Joffe presents Indian people belonging to different classes. It also depicts the 214 gender discrimination. Kamala and Joan are the suppressed women in the film.The film represents Indians as unorganised, brutal, crooked, uncivilized and untidy and emphasise that only white can treat these conditions. And the film makes the native people subordinate and weak. The poor people can’t comprehend their subordination and no power to criticize or oppose dominant people. There can be seen a clear politics, that is, Indian law, judiciary etc are sarcastically depicted in the film.

The film Gandhi explores Gandhi’s qualities and firmness and his actions against the foreigners. The film describes the racial issues, class struggle, gender problems, nationalism etc. The central theme of the film Slumdog Millionaire is

India’s misery and problems and no positive side is presented in the film. Only pathetic conditions are picturized in the film. It emphasises the irresponsible attitude of beaurocracy, police and power, which always stand with the elite people, the down- trodden find no one to uplift them from their ruined conditions.

Indian English films depict the Indian people, their trauma, emotions, gender inequality etc. British Indian films concentrate on the political and cultural drawback of India. Indian people don’t have any significance as the individual, but they emphasise the political issues and other matters.

FILMOGRAPHY

215

Being Cyrus. Dir.Homi Adjania Perf. Saif Ali Khan, Naseeruddin Shah. Time

Infotainment Media, 2006. Film.

Bride and Prejudice.Dir.Gurinder Chandha Perf. Aiswarya Rai, Martin

Henderson. Miramax Films, 2004. Film.

City of Joy. Dir. Roland Joffe. Perf. Patrick Swayze, Om Puri TriStar Pictures,

1992. Film.

Fire. Dir. Deepa Mehta. Perf. Sabana Asmi, Nandita Das.Zeitgeist Films,

1996. Film.

Gandhi. Dir. Richard Attenborough. Perf. Ben Kingsly, Candice Bergen,

Edward Fox. Columbia Pictures, 1982. Film.

Midnight Children. Dir. Deepa Mehtha. Perf. Satya Bhabha, Shriya Saran

Sidharth. Mongrel, 2012. Film.

Mitr, My Friend. Dir. Revathy. Perf. Sobhana, Nasser Abdulla. Tele Photo

Films, 2002. Film.

Mr. and Mrs. Iyer. Dir. Aparna Sen. Perf. Konkana Sen Sharma, Rahul Bose.

MG Distribution, 2002. Film.

Passage to India. Dir. David Lean. Perf. Judy Davis, Victor Banerjee. Thorn EMI

Screen Entertainment, 1984. Film.

Salaam Bombay. Dir. Mira Nair. Perf. Shafiq Sayed, Hansa Vithal.

Cinecom Pictures, 1988. Film.

Slumdog Millionaire. Danny Boyle. Perf. Dev Patel, Freida Pinto. Fox

Searchlight Pictures, 2008. Film.

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APPENDIX

i

Children Begging

People call Max Dada

ii

Max is Saviour

Marabar Cave

iii

Sita Solaces with Radha

Fire catches Radha’s sari (Agnipareeksha)

iv

General Dyer’s regret

Jalianwallah Bhag Massacre

v

Intolerance

vi

Slumdog Millionnaire

vii

The Rioters Attack