The following section brings together mediatised perspectives on political issues plaguing the subcontinent since Partition, one of them being the continued impasse between India and Pakistan over Kashmir. In doing so, two key contributions to this book reflect on the trauma of a militarised zone and its cinematic representations. The chapters included in this section also provide an in-depth understanding of key strands of the mediascape as it developed in the subcontinent after the partitions.
In order to bridge a critical gap in scholarship regarding performance and media by going beyond the oft-cited framework of geopolitics culminating in a turf war over Kashmir even as two of the essays address the key question of Kashmir â from unique theoretical standpoints â this section encompasses critical new work. In her chapter âTrouble in Paradise â The Portrayal of the Kashmir Insurgency in Hindi Cinemaâ, Julia Szivak focuses on Bollywood films (1990sâ2000) based on the political context of Kashmir. The author contends that these films apply various narrative techniques and conventions to âportray the Kashmir conflict as a depoliticised, domestic affairâ projected in the backdrop of its harmonic landscape.
In his chapter âFinding Comfort in Silence? The absence of partition narratives from the contemporary Group Theatre in Kolkataâ, Arnab Banerji presents an overview of the socio-politically conscious Bengali group theatre scenario after Partition, which maintained a curious silence as a way of dealing with the trauma of the Partition of India in 1947. His chapter explores the reasons behind this silence and argues that the attitude of the Bengali bhadralok samaj (genteel society) led to an assumption that the partition of Bengal was beneficial for the sustenance of a âpureâ Hindu Bengali identity. Banerji bases his argument on two Ritwik Ghatak plays, Sanko and Dolil.
In âThe Rise of the Celebrity Anchor in Pakistanâs Private TV: The one voice that kills other voicesâ, Altaf Ullah Khan presents his bold structural castigation of the Pakistani television media. He proposes the restructuring of Pakistani television as a combination of âproductionâ and âdiscourse evolutionâ. He critiques the state narrative projected through Pakistan television under General Musharrafâs rule and regards the journalists working with private channels as disempowered individuals. Khan also launches a trenchant critique on talk shows which are a âmedium of promoting TV anchors as celebritiesâ and propagate a form of negative morality, necessitating the remodelling of national television in Pakistan.
Exploring present paradigms
Any engagement with the visual narrative of Partition remains incomplete without an examination of Bengali cinema director, author, and playwright, Ritwik Ghatak and his eponymous cinematic and theatrical works. Raychaudhuri examines the way Partition has featured in the work of Ghatak and the way he resists and rewrites this state-sanctioned version of his countryâs and his own past. The Bengal Partition provides the context within which all of Ghatakâs work is situated. Interestingly, however, the filmmaker never depicts the act of Partition itself, choosing instead as his subject the streams of refugees who left what was then East Pakistan and is now Bangladesh, and came to Kolkata in West Bengal. Ghatakâs most characteristic story, then, is the story of the educated, middle-to-upper-class East Bengali refugee, who has lost everything by having to move west. Ghatak has often cinematised the story of his own family and the families of thousands of others in the characters he brought to life on screen, which has become the predominant Bengali narrative of Partition. By focusing on Ghatakâs oeuvre, Raychaudhuri has shown how Ghatak uses it to resist the most pernicious, and also most permanent myth of the Indian Partition â that it was an act which led to two different, mutually exclusive, heterogeneous but unified nations (Raychaudhuri 2009).
While Ghatakâs films provide a longue durĂ©e view of the trauma of Partition, the body of work produced by the filmmaker and playwright has never been considered in contrast with the popular films produced during the period and their engagement with Partition. Chowdhury (2015) assembles a reading of two ârivalâ bodies of work for their potent engagement with the production of memory within the cinematic poetics of Partition. In relation to images of the city as a cinematic trope, his work offers fresh insights into the vivisection within the broader scopic regime of visual modernity. The whole schema of Partition-induced mobility and displacement seems to have produced a certain moving imagery and a cultural memory that cinematised the city space like never before. One also notes an overarching postcoloniality of form foregrounded in their spatial interrogation, a consciousness of space and city that was to be seen within the larger ontological field of interrogating the new nationhood, the new spatiality that the demise of empire had rendered visible.
Priya Jha and Amit S. Rai (2011) state that the dominance of Hindi-Urdu cinema in South Asian media studies has shaped popular culture criticism to the extent of occluding the varied strands of mediation that exist in the cultural landscape of the region. According to them, Hindi-Urdu cinema, popularly known as Bombay cinema or Bollywood cinema has been discussed for the most part in three ways: (1) as national cinema; (2) as a global phenomenon, and (3) as the âpurple pleasures of the momentâ or the postcolonial apotheosis of a certain melodramatic form. Yet, scant attention has been paid to the intensive processes of emergent filmic forms that take the critical gaze beyond cinema â from Hindi-Urdu cinemaâs âgoing globalâ to its intermedial forms of habituations, South Asian film in its various moments of media assemblage gives birth to new processes, new meanings, new perceptions, and new interfaces.
In their eponymous work on the Islamicate cultures of Bombay cinema, Ira Bhaskar and Richard Allen (2009) primarily present an elaborate discussion on the preponderance of Islamicate (not Islamic) motifs and mores since 1930s up to the new millennium. Focussing on Islamicate genres â Muslim historical, Muslim Courtesan Films, Classic Muslim Socials, and the new wave of Muslim Socials â and using âaesthetic idiomsâ, they explore âthe influence and impact of the forms of imagined history, social life and expressive idioms that are derived from and associated with Islamic culture, history, upon Bombay Cinemaâ. Despite being an important contribution with reference to Islamicate cultures in Bollywood industry through aesthetic debate and elaborate imagery, at one level, the work presents a perspective based on religion-inflicted cultural functions that in some ways celebrate the communal and religious differences that these films emphasised, precisely those that emerged out of Partition and deepened since 1947.
Rachel Dwyer observes Bollywood as a reflection of South Asian popular culture. She designates Bollywood cinema as reflecting the realities of Modern India and the problems, concerns, and lives of middle classes in India, arguing that Bollywood reflects peoplesâ histories can shape their views and attitudes towards politics. Moving a step ahead, Rajadhyaksha (2003) regards Bollywood as a global industry which attracts the middle class, including the diasporic South Asian middle-class groups. In her study of popular Hindi cinema and its narrative structures, Rao has examined how the Indian identity is shaped through Bollywood film industry and how lower middle class and rural India absorb, understand, and engage with these images. Nevertheless, unlike Dwyer, she argues that the non-elite audiences find themselves distanced from the images that Indian cinema has historically constructed.
Presenting a different perspective, Nadira Khatun argues that if âIndian nationalismâ is to be represented as âHindu nationalismâ and âIndian cultureâ as âHindu culture,â it logically follows that this majoritarian construction needs the minority âOtherâ to reinforce this notion of nationalism and culture. In order to make her point, she critically analyses the representation of Muslims in contemporary Bollywood films by deploying Edward Saidâs notion of representation and knowledge as imbricated in issues of power, class, and materiality. Using Saidâs theoretical framework of Orientalism, Khatunâs work elucidates how specific popular Bollywood films in the historical genre have dealt with the liminality of the Muslim âOtherâ in the nation-space by either representing Muslims in stereotypical ways or by vilifying their image.
Anjali Gera Roy has emphasised the relationship between Indiaâs âsoft powerâ (Nye 1990) and Bollywood. By âsoft powerâ she alludes to the power of the Hindi film industry to impact peoplesâ political views across the globe. The dynamic impact of Bollywood as an instrument to attract and influence audience is primarily felt in Pakistan and Bangladesh at times by conveying state policies through cinema. This is accomplished not only through Hindi cinema narratives but also through the regional film industries and several diasporic initiatives. Overall, according to Roy, âsoft powerâ constitutes the hybridisation of policy and aesthetics, through the charismatic personalities of Bollywood actors, the popularity of acknowledged directors, and the general acceptance of popular film narratives. Soft power works ânot through direct intervention but indirect persuasion, and the aesthetic becomes political through subversive acts rather than political military actionsâ (Nye 1990: 14), whereas, âsmart powerâ (Nye 1990: 15) â for Roy â is Bollywoodâs cinematisation of international relations and foreign policy. Moving beyond Royâs contemplation on the soft power of Bollywood, the contributors to this book have explored specific dimensions of cultural soft powerâ for instance, the responses to the political and humanitarian impasse in Kashmir or the dialogism of Ghatakâs work.
Much in the vein of Royâs studies on Bollywoodâs soft power, Rasul and Mukhtar â in their critical work on the impact of a nationâs foreign policy objectives on its popular culture â lay bare the intricacies of the manner in which the nexus between the film industry and state apparatus has grown critical and complex in the wake of the global war on terror. It attempts to understand the role of Bollywood as soft power in assisting governments to secure their interests at international level through the critical political economy of communication approach. Based on the analysis of popular films portraying tension and cooperation between the South Asian neighbours, the results indicate that Bollywood closely follows the foreign policy initiatives of the Indian government.
It is crucial to mention here the scholarly work of Zakir Hossain Raju who â through his extensive work on Bangladeshi cinema â has attempted to correct the considerable imbalance in scholarly engagement with the âotherâ cinemas of South Asia as he investigates the indigenisation of cinema, from production to reception, within the broader social, political, and cultural domain of early-to mid-twentieth-century Bangladesh. Not only does he reposition different events and processes by which film became localised as these represent initiatives of constructing various alternative but overlapping public spheres for different publics, he elaborates how the colonial rulers, non-Bengalis as well as Bengali Muslims of colonial East Bengal, appropriated cinema in different manners and how later in postcolonial East Pakistan both urban and rural Bengali Muslims indigenised film to construct their preferred identities.
Moving ahead, Smita G. Sabhlok examines the theoretical foundations of the relationship between nationalism and ethnicity in the South Asian countries of India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka and concludes that attempts to build this relationship through legitimacy of the state, self-determination, national and ethnic identities, symbolic form of coexistence or acceptance of the overall dominant identity has not worked in South Asia. Her work is vital in understanding the links between the multifarious strands of inter- and intra-ethnic negotiations in India and Pakistan â identifies a fundamental weakness â the absence of a viable theoretical model that could bring the diverse ethnic groups into one integrated whole. Sabhlok, therefore, recommends the necessity of a postmodernist discourse. This edited volume is a humble attempt at initiating such a dialogue.
To bring the focus on Pakistan, Manzoor posits internal issues (Manzoor 2019: 2), military involvement, and regional issues in Pakistan (5) as the reason behind the countryâs political complexity. He also considers the Kashmir conflict as a reason behind the grim relations between India and Pakistan (6â8). After the creation of Bangladesh, he designates post-1971 dealings in relation to Kashmir as becoming more complex due to UN invol...
