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Gender, nation, and popular film in a globalizing India
On January 26th, 2006, Rang De Basanti (Color Me Saffron, hereafter RDB) directed by Rakyesh Omprakash Mehra premiered in select Indian cities. RDB was one of the major hits of that year, a reputable film critic declared it to be among the ten best films made in the decade spanning 2000 and 2010, and it won a slew of international and national honours (Kamath, 2009).1 But most interestingly, it struck a chord with middle-class youth, who have spent most of their lives in an India flooded with global goods, images, and cultural icons. Blogs discussed the RDB phenomenon, contextualizing it within a debate wherein nationalism was defined as a resurgence of patriotism and a willingness to fight for a more just India (Dilip, 2008). Indeed a few protest movements adopted some of the activist strategies valorized in this film (Chakravorty, 2006; Chaudhury, 2006). The popular current affairs magazine, Tehelka placed an iconic image from the film in the first page of its online issue dated February 11, 2006; the caption above read “What’s Right about India,” while underneath were the following words: “vibrant, resilient, resurgent, ancient, rooted, inclusive, plural, singular, country unputdownable.” These words framed the bare muscular torsos of four young men as they leaped up and reached towards an Indian air force jet flying above.
This image draws together masculinity, youth, militarism, and a self-confident nationalism against the context of globalization in a manner that is quite provocative and can be located in a contemporary discourse of masculinized nationalism circulating in India. Eight years before the release of this film, on May 11, 1998, India detonated three nuclear devices. These were followed closely by two more on May 13. Newspaper editorials and public celebrations indicated that these nuclear tests were clearly seen by citizens as a “performance of militant strength and restored national virility” (Oza, 2006, p. 124). The resonance of this view of national manliness did not fade away, and almost ten years later, in 2007, India’s preeminent English language paper, the Times of India, initiated the patriotic India Poised campaign. This campaign was inaugurated by a two-minute video, featuring an aging but fit film superstar Amitabh Bachchan, which emphasized a new Indian strength and claimed that the world is looking at a “pulsating, dynamic new India” which “no longer boycotts foreign-made goods but buys out the companies that makes them instead …”2
In 1991, the government of India opened the economy to foreign investment, ending the Five-Year Plan based semi-socialist approach to economic policy that had existed since independence and ushering in an open, neo-liberal market economy. Not only did this change increase consumerism and the presence of global goods in the market, but simultaneously created a self-confident middle-class economically benefitting from these changes, which had global ambitions and was eager to see India as a key player in the world. As Leela Fernandes (2000) has argued, this assertive self-confidence differs from the post-independence Nehruvian years, which focussed on rational developmentalism and emphasized the need to be modest in one’s patriotism. These changes occurred in a political context where the forces of Hindutva or Hindu nationalism were ascendant and circulating a discourse of patriotic fervour infused with a belief in the cultural dominance of Hinduism and Hindus in India. Indeed, it was the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party or BJP government which exploded the nuclear devices in 1998. These economic and political changes worked in tandem to create a social landscape wherein patriotism was celebrated.
Several popular films expressed these cultural changes – 1942: A Love Story (1994, director Vidhu Vinod Chopra); Border (1997, director J. P. Dutta); Solider (1998, director Abbas-Mustan); Sarfarosh (1999, director John Mathew Mattan); Mission Kashmir (2000, director Vidhu Vinod Chopra); Gadar: Ek Prem Katha (2001, director Anil Sharma); Lagaan (2001, director Ashutosh Gowarikar); Indian (2001, director N. Maharajan); Maa Tujhhe Salaam (2002, director Tinu Verma); Mangal Pandey (2005, director Ketan Mehta); and Rang De Basanti (2006, director Rakyesh Omprakash Mehra) to name but a few – centring an adult male muscular body ready to sacrifice for the nation. The soldiers, freedom fighters, and police personnel who are central to these films celebrate martial prowess and a steadfast, strong manhood. Even the 2001 Lagaan which pitted Bhuvan and his friends against a British team in a cricket match hinted at this interpretation of masculinity. The emphasis on sports – which the British saw as a training ground for armed masculinity as reflected by the Duke of Wellington’s famous phrase, “The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton” – centred a muscular physical body poised to take on the risky goal of resisting imperial presence and creating a strong nation. Indeed scholarship (Majumdar, 2006) has revealed the important location of sports and athleticism in the construction of a certain masculinist view of the Indian nation in the nineteenth century. Although, I would hesitate to draw an unbroken historical continuity, nevertheless, it is indeed interesting to note that in contemporary Indian film, the muscular male body seems to be chosen as an expression of the self-confidence of a nation poised to become a global player, “As India begins to imagine itself as a rising economic and cultural giant, an ‘India Shining’, many of the recent films have begun to focus on recovering an Indian masculine to help define and symbolize the nation” (Khan, 2011, p. 99).
This book focuses on this masculinization by unpacking gender in select Indian popular films produced between 1995 and 2010. By adopting a perspective shaped by feminist theorizing on masculinity and nationalism, I argue that ascendant Hindu nationalism and a triumphalism linked to globalization created by the 1991 economic reforms have constructed a context that is conducive to configuring the male body as a signifier of India’s new self-confidence on the global stage. Certain material aspects of this context such as the emergence of a transnational middle class as well as structural changes in the film industry have also enabled this masculinization. Culturally, this masculinized nationalism is eloquently represented in Hindi popular films, which I read as political texts. Important themes shaping my political readings of these films include the imagining of history to provide a proper lineage for a globally vigorous and muscular India, the uneasy relationship of the Muslim body (both male and female) to this (usually Hindu) nationally virile “self,” and an invented diaspora which provides a site for social anxieties associated with globalization to be expressed.
Popular film is a contested term in the Indian context. Usually Indian popular film is conflated with the term “Bollywood” referring to a Hindi language industry located in Mumbai India. However, films are produced in several regional centres and languages. For example, Kolkata based Bengali cinema and Tamil language films produced in Chennai are integral to the cultural mosaic that is Indian cinema. Indeed, the Film Finance Corporation (FFC) established in 1960 on the recommendation of the S. K. Patil Film Enquiry Committee report of 1951, in a span of almost a decade, funded over fifty films, including three by internationally renowned director Satyajit Ray. These films were purported to be serious of intent, providing a socially realistic representation of issues facing the new republic and delineating the complexity of rural and urban India. However, by 1968, the FFC had run out of money. It was reconfigured as the National Film Development Corporation, which had a mandate to finance low-budget films, preferably in black and white, to sponsor new talented film makers trained by the Pune Film Institute, and draw on the works of eminent Indian writers in the various national languages. Mrinal Sen’s 1969 film Bhuvan Shome launched this “new wave” of Indian cinema (Bhaskar, 2013). However, because of erratic financing and the eccentric distribution network underlying the Indian film industry, these productions were not commercially successful. At the same time, directors like Basu Chatterji and Hrishikesh Mukherjee were pioneers in what became known as “middle” cinema, commercial popular cinema aiming for realism by focussing on the role of the middle class around issues peculiar to their evolving identity: changing gender roles, marital tensions, problems of urban space, and the scarcity of privacy for young couples (Prasad, 1998; Poduval, 2012).
Despite this diversity, a bulk of the scholarship (Chakravarty, 1993; Dwyer and Patel, 2002; Dwyer and Pinney, 2001; Gabriel, 2010; Gopal, 2011; Gopalan, 2002; Mazumdar, 2007; Mishra, 2002; Prasad, 1998; Vasudevan, 1995; Virdi, 2003) on Indian film has focussed on Hindi language commercial films associated with producers, directors, and writers located in the Mumbai-based industry. One important reason for this focus is the market reach of these films. Mumbai produced only 16 percent of the films in 2004, but accounted for more than 40 percent of Indian box office revenue (Lorenzen and Taeube, 2007). Twenty-three million people in India go to the cinema everyday. And figures show that almost half are watching commercial Hindi films (Lorenzen and Taeube, 2007). Of all the Mumbai Hindi films made between 2000 and 2009, Gadar grossed the most at the box office pulling in Rs. 650 million, while Indra (2002, director B. Gopal) a Telegu language film, topped regional box office performance with Rs. 300 million.3
The patriotic India Poised Campaign relied on a Hindi film star to lend credibility to its nationalist message as “Bombay cinema has not only reflected the politics of India, it is also often in the forefront of their making” (Desai, 2007, p. 52). Thus, recent images of nation and manhood reflected in these films become an important signifier of a reconfigured nationalism. The muscular bodies represented in popular films do not exist in isolation; young well-built male bodies as dominant images of masculinity are being circulated in film as well as television and print advertising as depicted by the muscular bodies displayed in Indian versions of Vogue, Cosmopolitan, and Elle. These images are noteworthy because they demonstrate a move away from earlier dominant public images of the Indian male which tended to be unmuscled, soft, and non-martial (Jain, 2001; Kapur, 1993). When India’s new national self-confidence is coupled with these changing images of the male body, it appears that the role of masculinity in nationalism becomes quite provocative. It is worth mentioning that I am not arguing that the intersection of masculinity and nationalism is new in the post-1991 period. Indeed scholarship (Alter, 1994; Banerjee, 2005) has indicated that masculinity was an important component of nineteenth-century nationalism, but my focus is on the manner in which both manhood and nation is specifically reconfigured after the 1991 reforms and the continuities and discontinuities of this construct with earlier periods.
My study is located at the intersection of two theoretical strands: one, studies centring the gendered expressions of nationalism, and two, scholarship on social constructions of masculinities. The first strand (Aretxaga, 1997; Enloe, 2000, 2007, 2010; Hooper, 2001; Mayer, 2000; McClintock, 1993, 1995; Nagel, 2003; Sjoberg and Gentry, 2007; Tickner, 1992 to name but a few) builds on and extends the pioneering work of Cynthia Enloe (1990) that unpacks the multiple ways in which gender has expressed and represented various nationalisms.
This particular strand of theorizing on the nation is also informed by Anderson’s (1991) foundational work on nations as imagined communities. Acknowledging the value of the concept of “imagined communities,” these studies go on to critique Anderson for failing to attend to gender and sexualities in his work. Thus, this body of scholarship nuances Anderson’s work by introducing gendered analysis into the study of nationalism. As Anne McClintock (1993) reveals, Anderson, in common with other famous theorists of nationalism such as Ernest Gellner and Eric Hobsbawm, paid little attention to gender. Further, they viewed nationalism at worst as neutral and at best, a progressive force that based on reason, would further economic and political development (McClintock, 1993). This belief in the rational progressive force of nationalism has a historical legacy in British justifications for their imperial presence in India,
But India is wanting in the one qualification essential to independence, inasmuch as she possesses no sentiment of nationality…. India is neither a nation like France nor a collection of nations like Europe…. If the strong hand of England were withdrawn, the different races and creeds would never agree to a common line of action … they would not consent for long to subordinate their racial and religious jealousies to the common good.
(Morison, 1899, pp. 2–3)
Although, Anderson would not agree with these explicitly imperialist words, Partha Chatterjee (1993) has argued that his notion of modular nationalism implicitly sets up England and the United States as the original nations, while postcolonial nations are merely imitating these forms.
Anderson claims that once certain ideas of nations were created and spread through print capitalism, “they became ‘modular’, capable of being transplanted with varying degrees of self-consciousness to a great variety of social terrains” (Goswami, 2002, p. 777). Chatterjee (1993), the most powerful of Anderson’s critics, argues against this idea of the modular nation by positing that not only does such an idea erase the originality/diversity of postcolonial nationalisms, but creates a hierarchy between the original nations and the imitators. McClintock implicitly supports Chatterjee’s position – which does not see nationalism as neutral or progressive – as she argues the danger of nationalisms. This danger, according to her, is nested in a patriarchal gender hierarchy implicit in most nationalisms and the violence it can evoke against groups who fall outside the gendered national hierarchy. The power/danger of nationalisms resides in the concept of “difference” and its link to power embedded in these ideologies. Difference circulates through ideas of the proper manhood and womanhood creating a moral economy of the nation (Nagel, 2003).
According to McClintock, the trope of nation as patriarchal family clearly illustrates this perspective,
The metaphoric depiction of social hierarchy as natural and familial – the ‘national family’, the global ‘family of nation’, the colony as a ‘family of black children ruled by a white father’ – this depended on the prior naturalizing of the social subordination of women and children within the domestic sphere.
(p. 64)
She uses the cons...
