For our Indian Cinema and Society Class, we’re watching what could be called an Indian epic in a cinematic form, Mehboob Khan’s Mother India (1957) – also one of India’s first movies in color! Set in an apocryphal northern Indian village during the late colonial period, the film featured the struggles of the single mother Radha against rural poverty and the seductions of the local moneylender Sukhi-lala. The three-hour film was such a phenomenal success such that, between 1957 and the early 1990s, the film was in continuous circulation in movie theatres throughout the country as well as in Africa, the former Soviet Union, and parts of the Middle East.
Gayatri, our instructor, has written a Penguin-published book on the movie, and the lectures on the movie has understandably spanned from Aristotelian narrative theories to Indian politics in the 1950s!
The non-linearity and multiplicity of its narrative as well as its reference to numerous Indian mythologies renders the movie a complexity that can only be justifiably treated by treating it as an allegory of the nation. Perhaps it’s not surprising that two of the main stars of the movie, Nargis and Sunil Dutt, were still beloved by the Indian people during their short but vibrant political careers.
What I am seeing in this movie too, however, is that it’s also an excellent parable of not only India in its early years of independence, but also of many other post-colonial nations in their formative years. Radha, in her early years of marriage, was not only brought into the financial difficulties of her husband’s mortgaged farmland, but also into the village’s entire system of moral economy that is evaluated through collective female honor. In a similar sense, India in its early years faced not only the turbulence of trying to achieve self-sufficiency, which has been slowed down before by the relentless pressure of producing agricultural commodities demanded by the British, but also the challenge of “honor” in asserting its national identity over a diverse matrix of autonomous cultures.
Ben Anderson’s idea of the nation as an “imagined community” is extremely relevant here, since the film itself is a way of reimagining the land as a feeding and caring mother who had gone through monumental difficulties to raise her children. In fact, there is a panoramic high-angle shot in which the farmers of Radha’s village stacked hay in the shape of an unpartitioned Indian subcontinent.
I haven’t seen this level of national re-imagination in Hollywood or even European movies, probably since the nation-state as a coterminous manifestation of a single ethnolinguistic identity is much more prevalent in the First World. Even mainstream Hollywood productions tend to portray either the “dominant” Anglophone society or the experience of immigrants and minorities, but rarely the interface of both, albeit with some notable exceptions.
On the other hand, plural communities such as India and Indonesia (and, much, much more discreetly, countries like China and Israel) have a much more obvious challenge of trying to accommodate their mosaic of divergent identities into a nation-state.
Mother India, therefore ,is a justifiably an epic of not only India in its entire complexity, but of many other post-colonial worlds as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment