“Neither United Nor Separated” Negotiating Difference in Ashutosh Gowariker’S Lagaan and Ketan Mehta’S Mangal Pandey
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“Neither united nor separated” Negotiating Difference in Ashutosh Gowariker’s Lagaan and Ketan Mehta’s Mangal Pandey LUCIA KRÄMER HE PAST FIVE YEARS have seen an unprecedented rise of interest in popular Indian cinema among Western filmgoers and T film scholars. Not only has an increasing number of Indian films been released both for cinemas and home entertainment, there has also been a plethora of new books on what is generally known as ‘Bolly- wood’.1 The fact that most of these books are still conceived as introduc- tions to the history, conventions, and stars of popular Indian filmmaking 1 At the moment, the meaning of the word ‘Bollywood’ seems to be in flux. Originally coined by Indian film journalists as a playful and pejorative term referring to the Bombay film industry, ‘Bollywood’ is very often and somewhat incorrectly used to refer to popular Indian cinema as a whole (see, for example, Stadtler), and to con- trast it to New Indian Cinema and Indian parallel cinema. Wimal Dissanayake, by contrast, is one scholar who uses the term in a more restricted sense to designate films produced in Bombay in the wake of the liberalization of the Indian economy whose narratives and economics manifest particular effects of globalization and cultural nar- cissism. Although many Indian filmmakers reject the term because it implies that the films it denotes are derivative and defective when compared to Hollywood, according to Dissanayake “over the years it has come to assume more and more a neutral stance, appearing as a term of description rather than disapprobation.” See Florian Stadtler, “Cultural Connections: Lagaan and Its Audience Responses,” Third World Quarterly 26.3 (2005): 523, and Wimal Dissanayake, “Globalization and Cultural Narcissism: Note on Bollywood Cinema,” Asian Cinema 15.1 (2004): 143–44. See the titles by Dwyer, Ganti, Kabir, Manschot & deVos, Mishra, and Pendakur for recent introduc- tory books on ‘Bollywood’. 220 LUCIA KRÄMER º underlines the alien nature of this “cinema of interruptions”2 for Western spectators. Among the most unfamiliar yet typical features of the films are their average length of two and a half to three hours, convoluted plots with unexpected twists, and an episodic structure aimed at creating a fabric of thrills rather than a strictly coherent narrative. Moreover, popular Indian films often mix diverse genres, which can seem incompatible to Western eyes; this effect is exacerbated by the fact that the films usually also con- tain several song-and-dance sequences.3 In the genre mix, melodrama tends to be dominant – an impression supported by the unabashedly ver- bal nature of Indian cinema, where emotions are thus exteriorized to a de- gree rare in Western cinema today, and where the visual imagery is often doubled and/or elucidated by the dialogues. In this essay, I would like to investigate the negotiation of these cine- matic differences with regard to the Hindi films Lagaan (Tax, dir. Ashu- tosh Gowariker, 2001) and Mangal Pandey – The Rising (dir. Ketan Mehta, 2005), two historical films set in India at the time of British colonial rule. The main focus will lie on the analysis of the major verbal and visual imagery that is used in the films to represent difference between the Brit- ish colonizers and the Indian colonized. I will concentrate on the depiction of two British characters in the films who try to overcome racial, cultural, and national differences and whose attempts are doomed to failure owing to the historical situation in which the stories are set. However, beyond the film texts proper, Lagaan and Mangal Pandey are also representative ex- amples of recent developments within the Indian film industry and of the boom of Indian films in the West, and their reception illustrates the cur- rent negotiation of the differences between the Western and Indian cine- matic cultures in Western non-academic film criticism. At the end of the essay, I will therefore also have a look at the relation between the words of film criticism and the images and words of the films, and I will suggest 2 See Lalitha Gopalan, Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema (London: BFI, 2002): 16–22, on the aesthetics of interruption in popular Indian cinema caused by song-and-dance sequences, the interval and censorship. 3 From a Western point of view, the films therefore belong to the ailing genre of the musical. In the Indian genre system however, a musical would be a film containing more than eight musical numbers instead of the four to six that are the norm. .