The political truncation of 1947 led to a social cataclysm in which about a million perished and some twelve million became homeless. Combining film studies, trauma theory and South Asian cultural history, Bhaskar Sarkar follows the shifting traces of this event in Indian cinema of the next six decades. He argues that Partition remains a wound in the collective psyche of South Asia, and its screen representations foster an affective historical consciousness that supplements standard history-writing.
Tracking cinema's reluctance to deal with the Partition in the 1950s and 1960s, and the eventual 'return of the repressed' from the mid-1980s, Sarkar draws attention to a gradual and complex process of cultural mourning. Even the initial 'silence' was never complete, not only because of atypical Partition films such as Lahore, Apna Desh and Ritwik Ghatak's trilogy, but also because the trauma frequently surfaced in indirect, allegorical forms. He points to the split families, mutilated bodies, amnesiac protagonists, and foundlings of Adalat, Waqt, and Deedar; the melancholic sensibility and style of Aag or Amar, and the obsessive search for happiness in the romantic films starring Uttam Kumar and Suchitra Sen. Sarkar relates the recent proliferation of films about Partition and its aftermath-including Tamas, Gadar, Border and Naseem-to a rising disillusionment with the postcolonial state, the anti-Sikh riots of 1984, economic liberalisation and the emergence of a Hindu-chauvinist nationalism.
Covering Hindi and Bengali commercial cinema, art cinema, and television, Mourning the Nation provides a striking history of Indian cinema that will be of interest not only to specialists of media, literature, and cultural history, but also to lay readers with an investment in the psychobiography of the nation.
BHASKAR SARKAR is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
With nationhood emerging as the modern form of collective political organization, the leaders of a nascent nationalism in the subcontinent had worked to splice together a secular national identity that could withstand the centrifugal challenges of a polity marked by dizzying differences of race, class, creed, caste, language, and regional life- styles. The slogan "unity in diversity" encapsulated the hope for a national imaginaire that would transcend all difference. The realization of the invidious two-nation theory in 1947-one country for Hindus, one for Muslims-rendered a crushing blow to this hope, undermining the belief that a united India could exist in the face of confounding diversity. The rancor and violence raised serious questions regarding the very possibility of continuing community life in South Asia. In spite of the widespread disavowal of 1947 and its reduction to a historical anomaly. Partition emerged as a national trauma-an experience whose memory cast its long, disquieting shadow on public consciousness, tinging subsequent national endeavors with an unspeakable sadness.
Mourning the Nation follows the shifting traces of this specific historical event in Indian cinema of roughly the following five decades. If that event occupies the status of a collective trauma in the psycho- biography of the nation, these cinematic traces are indexical of acts of cultural mourning. I track the initial reticence in engaging with this traumatic experience, widely construed as an ordinary wound, and the subsequent emergence of a strong, at times obsessive, Partition discourse. These shifts are situated in relation to an evolving project of nation building, from the early decades when official policy centered on a secular imagination of the nation and a proud insistence on achieving economic self-sufficiency through state-sponsored capitalist development, to the current conjuncture marked by the simultaneous and seemingly irreconcilable movements toward globalization and religious nationalism. The central objective of this book is to advance an understanding of both the silence and the eventual "return of the repressed" as strands of one complex process. Since Partition cannot be isolated from larger historical processes, the book also turns out to be a critical project of mourning, through the lens of cinema, the Indian experiences of modernity and nationhood. At stake is a theory of cinema as cultural mourning work.
Book's Contents and Sample Pages
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