Bollywood Films and Postcolonial Theory

Postcolonialism on the Silver Screen: Bollywood Films and the Legacy of Empire

Lagaan:

The 2001 Indian Hindi-language epic musical sports film Lagaan, also released internationally as Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India, was written and directed by Ashutosh Gowariker. It was produced by and starred Aamir Khan, as well as debutante Gracy Singh, British actors Rachel Shelley and Paul Blackthorne, and debutante Gracy Singh. The story takes place in 1893, towards the end of the British Raj's colonial rule over India. An arrogant British army officer challenges a small town in Central India to a game of cricket as a bet to avoid paying the taxes that they owe. The village's people, suffering from high taxes and several years of drought, find themselves in an unusual scenario. The story revolves around this circumstance as the villagers struggle to master a foreign game and compete for a prize that would alter the course of their community.

Subaltern Studies, Bollywood, and "Lagaan"

The paper makes the case that popular Bollywood films, by appealing to the masses of uprooted peasants, factory employees, the unemployed, the ignorant, and the destitute, can decolonize the Indian masses' imagination. It uses the film "Lagaan" as an example. It makes the point that "Lagaan's" attempts at indigenization and interrogation of prescribed discourses of modernity and history are to be credited for enabling the emergence of public debates in a culture where the majority of the population lacks literacy and is unable to participate in elite discussions of culture and modernity.

Reading cricket-related literature during the Hindu nationalist and farmer suicide movements

This essay will criticize the effort of postcolonial theory to read the cricket nationalism depicted in the Oscar-nominated Bollywood film Lagaan as one that undermines the civilizing goals of British colonialism while also reclaiming the agency of the lower classes. Instead, it would contend that Indian bourgeois nationalism, which has no room for the subaltern in its narrative, is replicated in this cricket nationalism. It will also argue that the postcolonial thesis of Lagaan's purported decolonization and indigenization of cricket is characterized by a culturalism that ignores structural elements like capital, class, and caste that control the institution of cricket in India. Finally, it will be argued that the only way to comprehend the cricket nationalism of the movie is to situate it in the current socio-historical context, where forces of capitalism and nationalism are hegemonic, in opposition to postcolonial theory's tendency to read a text in isolation from the context.

Once Upon A Time In India: Post-Colonialism And Political Resistance

The paper investigates the post-colonial and political struggle in the 19th century using the film Lagaan as a case study. The Bollywood film Lagaan, directed by Ashutosh Gowariker, came out in 2001. The fictional tale, which is set in an Indian village, examines the challenges that locals must overcome to obtain their rights. The study studies the sociopolitical environment of the nation while taking into consideration the film.

Rang De Basanti:

Paint it Saffron, also known as Rang De Basanti, is a 2006 Hindi-language drama film written, produced, and directed by Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra. Rensil D'Silva also contributed to the script.

The movie follows a British film student who goes to India to record the lives of five Indian revolutionary independence fighters. Five young men she befriends and includes in the movie spur them on to take up arms against the corruption in their government. The film's ensemble cast comprises Aamir Khan, Siddharth, Atul Kulkarni, Soha Ali Khan, Sharman Joshi, Kunal Kapoor, and British actress Alice Patten.

The likelihood of the Indian Army attacking students in a radio station was one of the film's main points of criticism. The Film Writers Association had a scriptwriter's conference that year, and when Rakeysh was asked about it, he responded: "So, in 2005, in Allahabad, a band of 4 kids took the TV station there, and they were shot dead. Everything I did, as I just said, was something borrowed. Naturally, I'm also discovering that how I tell stories isn't real; you might call it natural. Since the report was against the establishment, I decided it would be best to let the establishment handle it for maximum impact and get the point through. After all, Bhagat Singh was hanged by the institution. After all, in the Mandal Commission, the establishment did punish the defenceless pupils. After all, Tiananmen Square saw the destruction of the establishment. After all, when the American Flower Power movement first gained traction, the establishment fell. It is all there, then. Though perhaps not as realistically, it is unquestionably present in society. There are horrific stories about emergencies. The stories are horrifying if we have to go back to Kriplani and his movement in Bihar.

Information sources for Rang De Basanti

Consumption, Citizenship, and the Public Sphere in Rang De Basanti

The main goal of this thesis is to determine whether young audiences' consumption of RDB encouraged civic engagement and increased India's public sphere.

Rang De Basanti: Bollywood as National(ist) Cinema: Violence, Patriotism, and the National

This essay looks at the most recent Bollywood movie, Rang de Basanti (Paint It Saffron, 2006), directed by Indian filmmaker Rakeysh Mehra, to examine the relationship between violence, patriotism, and the national-popular within the medium of film. The movie fits into a corpus of work that creates and portrays violence as essential to creating a national identity or, more accurately, its recovery. Due to the enormous impact, it had on middle-class South Asian youth in India and abroad, Rang de Basanti is notable in terms of contemporary Indian film production. It rewrites, or more accurately restages, Indian nationalist history under the guise of martyrdom and armed struggle rather than the typical pacifist Gandhian vein. By portraying the tale of the Punjabi rebel Bhagat Singh as an Indian hero and an inspiration for the younger generation, it delivers a more "masculine" version of the nationalist narrative for its modern audiences. This study contends that the film's recovery of a bloody anti-colonial past is essential to its middle-class ethos, offering audiences a bourgeois nationalism with immediate and relevant appeal along with approachable (and politically acceptable) social activity. According to the sociologist Ranjini Majumdar, "the film successfully feeds the middle-class fantasy that corruption is the only issue facing the nation."

Resource: Oxford Bibliographies' list of films that employ postcolonial thought

In the discipline of film studies, postcolonial theory has barely been a defining paradigm. Despite the various intersections, postcolonial theory has not been overtly emphasised. The postcolonial theory first arose from comparative literature departments and film departments of film and media studies. Though it might not be immediately apparent, there are many parallels and points where the two domains naturally converge. For instance, with the growth of semiotic theory and poststructuralist thought at the end of the 1970s, both postcolonial theory and film studies evolved. Both fields actively participate in the study of representation, meaning how a language, whether it be spoken or written, can depict reality as "mediated" and "discursive," and as a result, as being shaped by power structures.

Vidhu Aggarwal, The Anti-Colonial Revolutionary in Modern Bollywood Film

In her article "The Anti-Colonial Revolutionary in Contemporary Bollywood Cinema," Vidhu Aggarwal explores several modern movies, particularly emphasising Rakesh Omprakash Mehra's Rang de Basanti. The Bollywood film is a cultural form that incorporates a variety of external and internal aesthetic trends. Mumbai Bollywood has long been fascinated with "arrival," or India's status as a modern nation-state, due to its formal heterogeneity and its origin in one of India's main cities. While some Bollywood films appear to celebrate idealised visions of India's entry onto the world stage, they also express anxiety about the affective possibilities within a new Bollywood with higher production values and a wider global audience, as well as an India with mobile borders and a diminished sense of historical context. Aggarwal connects Bollywood cinema to elements of the British film Slumdog Millionaire, which was directed by Danny Boyle, and examines how the contemporaneity of Bollywood-both in terms of acting style and aesthetics -is managed through reenactments of the colonial past.