Postcolonial studies & Bollywood

 Hello readers...

This activity is a part of my academic writing.Here I had explained the postcolonial features in the 2 iconic movies,

1.Lagan.

2.Rang De Basanati.

The postcolonial studies denotes a loosely defined inter-disciplinary field of perspectives, theories and methods that deal with the non-material dimensions of colonial rule and, at the same time, postulates the deconstruction of colonial discourses and thought patterns that continue to exert an influence up into the present. One of the reasons for the importance of this current for European history is that its adherents define colonialism as a cluster of reciprocal relationships that has shaped not only the colonised regions, but also the European metropole. In addition, the nuanced methodological and theoretical apparatus developed by "postcolonial studies" to describe and analyse asymmetrical power constellations and hierarchical modes of representation in colonial contexts can also be transferred to primarily internal European questions .

Postcolonial Literature Characteristics

• Appropriation of Colonial Languages. Postcolonialwriters have this thing they like to do. 
• Metanarrative. Colonizers liked to tell a certain story. 
• Colonialism. 
• Colonial Discourse. 
• Rewriting History. 
• Decolonization Struggles. 
• Nationhood and Nationalism. 
• Valorization of Cultural Identity.

1. Lagan

Lagaan is a blockbuster Bollywood film directed by Ashutosh Gavarikar. This movie is about a struggle faced by the people of Champaneer village during colonial rule. There can be various postcolonial aspects, few of them are:

In 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.

Hybridity 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.

Reverse 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.

2.Rang De Basanti

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). This article addresses a confluence of the pedagogic and the performative modes of history in relation to nationalism and modernity in the film. 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.

Notes

 1. I borrow the idea of the pedagogic mode and the performative mode from Homi Bhabha's essay, ‘Dissemination, Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation.’

 2. Her project does not get approved by the producers who believe that ‘Gandhi sells.’ Refusing to forego it, Sue decides to continue with this project on her own as she decides to go to India and make the film.

 3. When Sukhi is shot, DJ is genuinely surprised that they are being attacked with bullets. Earlier as they hug each other, they sincerely believe that they will only go to jail after having their voice heard by the nation. This plan echoes Bhagat Singh's plan when he discusses with Azad how they should cause an explosion in the parliament and have their voices against British imperialism heard; Bhagat Singh believed that they could have a huge impact with this strategy. Karan Singhania and DJ, likewise, believed that they would be able to bring the real story of the cause of Ajay's death.

 4. Bolter and Grusin's theoretical explanation of the distinction between immediacy and hypermediacy, although pertaining to new digital media, is meaningful in understanding the film-within-the film strategy in Rang De Basanti.

 5. In ‘The Storyteller,’ Benjamin articulates how the ‘Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom’ .

 6. A scene when she looks at the poster-chart with pictures of the revolutionaries (characters) and the pinned-up pictures of DJ and his friends (actors) suggests an iconographic superimposition of personalities and experiences. The roles of Bhagat Singh ascribed to Karan Singhania, Chandreshekhar Azad to DJ, Rajguru to Sukhi, Ramprasad Bismal to Laxman Pandey, and Ashfaqullah Khan to Aslam are designated by Sue based on her grandfather's views about the historical heroes and her emotional interactions with the modern day actors.

Thank you...

Shashi Tharoor and The Dark Era of Ingolrious Empire

This activity is a part of our academic writing.

 ⚫ Write on key arguments in shashi Tharoor's book "An Era of Darkness ".

 

Shashi Tharoor's , An Era of Darkness, is one breathless read. In it, he aggregates all the arguments required to establish that British colonial rule was an  awful experience for Indians and he does so with a consummate debater’s skill. His book is, in fact, an expanded take on British exploitation of India that famously carried the day for Tharoor in an Oxford debate not too long ago.

According to Tharoor, there was nothing redeeming in British rule of our country. What India had to endure under them was outrageous humiliation on a humongous scale and sustained violence of a kind it had never experienced before. In short, British rule was, according to Tharoor, an era of darkness for India, throughout which it suffered several manmade famines, wars, racism, maladministration, deportation of its people to distant lands and economic exploitation on an unprecedented scale. An indignant Tharoor even demands a token restitution and public apology from the British for all the harm they had caused India. This is something, as his debate established, wildly popular in India.impunity. Tharoor is right, of course. There are few Indians who would not have heard of the treachery that enabled Clive to triumph at Plassey or of the incredible amounts of ill-begotten wealth the East India Company officials hauled back with them to England. “One official,” Cyril Radcliff informs us, “was said to have pocketed 1,200,000 sterling in bribes from the Nawab of Carnatic: another pocketed 200,000 pounds.” Given the opportunities he had to enrich himself in India, Clive was “amazed at his own moderation”.

There was scant appreciation, Tharoor tells us, of India’s contributions in men, material and money, to the wars that the British fought within India and overseas, especially the two World Wars. The well-known historian and Nehru’s biographer, Judith Brown, acknowledges that “British taxpayers contributed not a penny to the Raj”. Even Niall Ferguson, not one of Tharoor’s favourites, accepts that Indians paid for the “privilege of being ruled by the British”.

That British rule in India was bad in parts has never been denied by anyone, least of all by the British. Their archives are full of accounts of British depredations, covering the entire period of their rule in India. Several of their historians have brought out the suffering the British inflicted on India and Indians throughout their rule of our country. What Tharoor, however, seeks to establish through his book, is that British rule was unremittingly rotten and indefensible by the standards of its time and ours. Tharoor admirably fills the gap by holding a mirror to the British, and the West, that they have a case to answer. And answer they must, as old imperialisms, with renewed vigour and with the same specious ‘civilising’ arguments, have never really ceased devastating the world, from faraway places like now well-forgotten Grenada and present-day West Asia and the Middle East.

⚫ Write critique on both the films with reference to postcolonial insights.

1.The Black Prince :

With the context of post colonial indight ,Maharaja Duleep Singh was a very complex and troubled man. In today's world, he would have a flock of psychiatrists and psychologists trying to help him overcome his troubles, and understand him. Maharaja Duleep Singh's battles were not fought on the battlefield. He didn't win any duels with the sword like his father, and the mighty warrior Hari Singh Nalwa, who helped shape the Sikh Kingdom of Punjab. His fight was more in terms of an internal battle to overcome his own demons and the manipulated reasoning imposed upon him by the British. He had to find himself first and reconnect to who he really was.Then [he could] raise his voice to denounce the English authority over him and demand freedom not only for the people of Punjab, but the entire sub-continent of India. He fought a lonely war amidst an atmosphere full of spies, traitors and manipulators. This was a story that needed to be told.

2.Victoria and Abdul :

Abdul Karim was 24 years old when he was dispatched from Agra to serve 68-year-old Queen Victoria as an attendant. The tall and handsome Indian Muslim didn't speak a word of English, nor the Empress of India any Urdu. What followed was a relationship of such intimacy and tenderness that the British establishment tried their hardest to destroy all evidence of it. In Victoria and Abdul: The True Story of the Queen's Closest Confidant historian Shrabani Basu unearths a story that shows a new side to Victoria and places a young Indian at the heart of the Empire as her greatest influence.

⚫ Summarise Ngugi Wa Thiongo's views in 'Introduction: Towards the Universal Language of Struggle' - from 'Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature'.  

Language and culture inDecolonising the Mind, Ngũgĩ sees language, rather than history orculture, as the enabling condition of human consciousness: "The choice of language and the use of language is central to a people's definition of themselves inrelation to the entire universe.Decolonising the Mind is a meld of autobiography, post-colonial theory, pedagogy, African history, and literary criticism. Ngũgĩ dedicated Decolonising the Mind "to all those who write in African languages, and to all those who over the years have maintained the dignity of the literature, culture, philosophy, and other treasures carried by African languages."

Thank you...

SR.Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

This activity is a part of our academic writing.

 1. Did the first talk help you in understanding of postcolonialism?

By understanding the nature of the question we should know about the postcolonialism. It is the historical period or state of affairs representing the aftermath of Westerncolonialism; the term can also be used to describe the concurrent project to reclaim and rethink the history and agency of people subordinated under various forms of imperialism.

Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice  and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.

2. Did the arguments in the talks are convincing ?

We Should All Be Feminists is a book-length essay by the Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. First published in 2014 by Fourth Estate, it talks about the definition of feminism for the 21st century. 

Yes,it convincing because it shows the So long  inequality and male supremacy persist, women and girls need feminism. Men and boys need it too because equality is better for everyone. Even though we're well into the 21st century, women are still under-represented in leadership positions and men are under-represented in caring roles.It also gives some postivive effects like Gender equitable societies which are healthier for everyone. As feminism challenges restrictive gender norms, improvements in women's access to health care, reproductive rights, and protection from violence have positive effects on everyone's life expectancy and well-being, especially children.

3. What did you like about the third talk? 

The wonderfully restrained sense of deep disappointment underlying Chimamanda's narrative reminded me of how similar the histories of many African countries are, how passionately people believed in ideas that would disappoint them, in people that would betray them, in futures that would elude them. 

4. Are these talks bringing any significant change in your way of looking literature and life?

OVERARCHING concepts which relates to our lives. Although every book is special in its own unique way, each of Adichie's novels circulate around two common themes: the concept that love isuniversal and humane there must be flaws , and that every perspective isdifferent therefore every perspective deserves a listen .Instead of sticking to just one or two perspectives, Adichie goes above and beyond by using  distinct characters' perspectives while keeping to a third person omnipotent narrator. In addition, certain plot devices are revealed in the very end, building lots of tension throughout the novel.

Thank you...