Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-vdxz6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T16:34:06.540Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Of ‘Metaphorical’ Politics: Bombay Films and Indian Society

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Ajanta Sircar
Ajanta Sircar
Affiliation:
The University of Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Having followed Modern Asian Studies for some time now as being among the major journals to have sustained a high degree of sophistication on debates relating to the historical and cultural developments of modern South Asia, one was greatly distressed to read Akbar S. Ahmed's article ‘Bombay Films: The Cinema as Metaphor for Indian Society and Politics’. Practices of representation always implicate positions of enunciation. In what follows, I wish to re-read Ahmed's article to show that his representations of Indian society derive their legitimacy not from their engagement with the many-layered sociocultural formation of the present-day Indian nation, but from a perspective which reinforces the continuing relations of dominance between metropolis and former colony. As an academician of and for present-day India, to challenge such a perspective is not merely an attempt to radicalize academic frameworks but, as I wish to show, expressive of a larger social need to create spaces where one is able to transform present reality. It is to identify marginality as much more than a site of deprivation. It is to identify marginality as a space of resistance, as a site of radical possibility.

Type
Articles
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 29 , Issue 2 , May 1995 , pp. 325 - 335
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Ahmed, Akbar S., ‘Bombay Films: The Cinema as Metaphor for Indian Society and Polities’, Modern Asian Studies, 26, 2 (1992), 289–320.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Subsequent references to this work have been indicated in the body of the essay.

2 Said, Edward, Orientalism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 7Google Scholar

3 See Frank, André Gunder, ‘The Development of Underdevelopment’, Imperialism and Underdevelopment: A Reader, ed. Rhodes, Robert I. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970), pp. 4–17.Google Scholar

4 See Chatterjee, Partha, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World—A Derivative Discourse? (Delhi: OUP, 1986).Google Scholar

5 For an excellent selection of essays which critique the culturally dominant notions of ‘Indian womanhood’, see Sangari, Kumkum and Vaid, Sudesh (eds), Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History (New Delhi: Kali, 1989).Google Scholar

6 Pande, Mrinal (Rev.), ‘Hitler Ki Asli Pasand: Beta’, Manushi: A Journal about Women and Society, 70 (05–06 1992), 39.Google Scholar

7 Mishra, Vijay, Jeffries, Peter and Shoesmith, Brian, ‘The Actor as Parallel Text in Bombay Cinema’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 11 (1989), 49–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 Bhabha, Homi K., ‘The Other Question…’, Screen,24, 6 (1983), 18–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 Ibid., p. 23.

10 Cited by Niranjana, Tejaswini, ‘“History Really Beginning”: Compulsions of Post-Colonial Pedagogy’, Economic and Political Weekly, 25,42–43 (1990), 2380.Google Scholar

11 Ibid.

12 Rajyadhyaksha, Ashish, ‘The Phalke Era: Conflict of Traditional Form and Modern Technology’, Journal of Arts and Ideas, 14, 15 (1985), 47–77.Google Scholar

13 Rajyadhyaksha, Ashish, ‘Neo Traditionalism: Film as Popular Art in India’, Framework, 32–33 (1986), 20–67.Google Scholar

14 Among others, see Binford, Mira Reym (ed.), Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 11 (1989);Google ScholarVasudevan, Ravi, ‘The Cultural Space of a Film Narrative: Interpreting Kismet (Bombay Talkies, 1943)’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 28, 2 (1991), 171–85;CrossRefGoogle ScholarVasudevan, Ravi, ‘The Melodramatic Mode and the Commercial Hindi Cinema: Notes on Film History, Narrative and Performance in the 1950s’, Screen, 30, 3 (1989), 29–50;CrossRefGoogle Scholarand Spivak, Gayatri, ‘Once Again a Leap into the Post-Colonial Banal’, Differences: A Journal of Feminism and Cultural Study, 3, 3 (1991), 139–70.Google Scholar

15 O'Hanlon, Rosalind and Washbrook, David, ‘Histories in Transition: Approaches to the Study of Colonialism and Culture in India’, History Workshop: A Journal of Socialist and Feminist Historians, 32 (Autumn 1991), 110–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 Rajyadhyaksha, Ashish, ‘Indian Film Industry and Television Boom’, Indian Cinema 1987, ed. Rajyadhyaksha, Ashish (New Delhi: Directorate of Film Festivals, 1987), p. 1.Google Scholar