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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
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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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