THINKING ACTIVITY : POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES AND BOLLYWOOD MOVIES

Postcolonial theory and Bollywood movies. 

                             In this blog I'll discuss about two bollywood movies :

                              LAGAAN

                       RANG DE BASANTI

                          Here I'll mention about postcolonial theory in these two movies. 

                           LAGAAN

                                   

                         Lagaan is a 2001 Indian epic sports drama film written and directed by Ashutosh Gowariker. During the British Raj, a farmer named Bhuvan accepts the challenge of Captain Andrew Russell to beat his team in a game of cricket and enable his village to not pay taxes for the next three years. In this movie also various identity represents. How white man ruled over Indian people.

                                  

                              Lagaan (transl. Agricultural tax), released internationally as Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India, is a 2001 Indian Hindi-language epic musical sports film written and directed by Ashutosh Gowariker, and produced by and starring Aamir Khan, along with debutant Gracy Singh and British actors Rachel Shelley and Paul Blackthorne in supporting roles. Made on a then-unprecedented budget of ₹250 million (US$5.32 million), the movie was the maiden project from Aamir Khan Productions and was shot in villages near Bhuj.

                                    The film is set in 1893, during the late Victorian period of India's colonial British Raj. The story revolves around a small village in Central India, whose inhabitants, burdened by high taxes, and several years of drought, find themselves in an extraordinary situation as an arrogant British army officer challenges them to a game of cricket, as a wager to avoid paying the taxes they owe. The narrative spins around this situation as the villagers face the arduous task of learning a game that is alien to them and playing for a result that will change their village's destiny. It became the third Indian film to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film after Mother India (1957) and Salaam Bombay! (1988).

      POSTCOLONIAL STUDY IN MOVIE 

                                    In this film the colonizers are portrayed as the centre or the super power and the colonized portrayed as the other. It gives the colonized the perception that they are inferior to the colonizer. England was one of the super powers during colonization in India, and this is very evident in the film. For instance in the movie the antagonist, Captain Russell, is the decision maker and the villagers have no other choice but to follow them. There is a cultural transition that cuts through Gili-danda to cricket.

                                 Here is portrayed here when Elizabeth the sister of the antagonist teaches the Indians how to play the colonizers sport (cricket) and she intern learns the local language to talk to the localities nonetheless there are instances where in she tries on the Indian attire. This is the exchange of culture that takes place. The villagers find a way to turn the most British of customs into an Indian creation and this further introduces the concepts of  mimicry where in the villagers try to create the sports gear just like the Britishers, they try to learn the rules of the game and follow it. There are lingering effects that offer both the chance to beat the colonizers at his own game and the chance to join the colonizers game, playing by his rules. Likewise fervent, frantically almost religious attachment to the game is given by colonialism.

                                The rejection of white feminity is highly apprehensive here. The religious story is added perhaps as an attempt to make sense of relationships that’s about colonialism without use of colonialism. In other words it’s trying to disguise the facts that is about race and colonialism by using religion as an alternate framework. Elizabeth represents the goodness of colonialism and Russell on the other hand represents the evilness of colonialism. The winning of the match at the end, constructs an overall view of decolonization.

                      RANG DE BASANTI

                                   Rang De Basanti is a 2006 Indian Hindi-language drama film written, produced and directed by Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra, and co-written by Rensil D'Silva. When Sue selects a few students to portray various Indian freedom fighters in her film, she unwittingly awakens their patriotism. The emotional and mental process turns them into rebels for a cause. Rang De Basanti (transl. Paint it saffron) is a 2006 Indian Hindi-language drama film written, produced and directed by Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra, and co-written by Rensil D'Silva.

                               The film follows a British film student traveling to India to document the story of five freedom fighters of the Indian revolutionary movement. She befriends and casts five young men in the film, which inspires them to fight against the corruption of their own government. It features an ensemble cast consisting of Aamir Khan, Siddharth, Atul Kulkarni, Soha Ali Khan, Sharman Joshi, Kunal Kapoor and British actress Alice Patten. The film was shot primarily in New Delhi.

                                    It received critical acclaim, winning the National Film Award for Best Popular Film, and being nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2007 BAFTA Awards. Rang De Basanti was chosen as India's official entry for the Golden Globe Awards and the Academy Awards in the Best Foreign Language Film category, though it did not ultimately yield a nomination for either award. A. R. Rahman's soundtrack, which earned positive reviews, had two of its tracks considered for an Academy Award nomination. In India, Rang De Basanti won Best Movie at the Filmfare Awards.

        POSTCOLONIAL STUDY IN MOVIE 

                       The intersecting of time, history, narrative and subjectivity unfolds an intermeshed trajectory of notions about history's role in shaping views about nationalism and identity in Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra's popular film, Rang De Basanti (2006). History, taught via return, is experienced as otherness and eventually performed via a remediation of this otherness, thereby making it relevant to contemporary times. Offering diverse theoretical arguments about history and its narration, I also propose that history, although laden with mimetic impulses and desires for the male characters, excludes the women from mimetic agency.

                                  A Levinasian reading of the film's conclusion ultimately resolves the confines of historical determinism and reveals an aesthetic of mimeticism premised on ethical desire for transformative imperative that effectively displays history's otherness as well as its subjective performance.

 

                               The example of Rang de Basanti is only symptomatic of a greater problem in today's postcolonial world. Edward Said rebelled against the normative West in his seminal works questioning the power/knowledge to "constitute the Oriental other as a particular subject of discourse." At this critical juncture vis-à-vis the postcolonial theory, we must interrogate whether we have lived the theory that we profess so vigorously in our daily discourses. Aren't we through our popular culture and actions, reinforce the stereotypes thereby, making Macaulay's prediction, of colonizing the mind of the natives, coming true even so many years after independence? Does the new historiography effectively help us to readdress and revise our relationship with the colonized past along with its political, social and economic ramifications? Instead of creating an alternative normative world for ourselves, are we appropriating erstwhile colonial strategies to hegemonize and monopolise the tools of protracted control?