Introduction
We,
as citizens of largest democracy of the world are entitled to certain
rights and duties, which have been guaranteed to us by the
Constitution of India. But as the times are changing, we need to
understand how colonial encounters contributed to the shaping up of
democratic politics.
My
assignment will analyze the text The
Nation in Heterogeneous Times by
Parthia Chatterjee originally given as the Schoff Lectures at
Columbia University in 2001.
Furthermore
I have chosen four Bollywood movies in connection with this theory
which shall help me in analyzing the theory in a better way.
I
have selected two movies which are set in the time of colonialism in
India i.e. British Raj. These movies have a particular role to play
in my assignment. The movies are-
Sujata:
Director Bimal Roy had
a unique knack of presenting socially conscious themes through
eminently watchable, artistically stimulating and emotionally
satisfying films. His 1959- film Sujata is perhaps best example of
this quality. Sujata highlighted the burning issues of casteism
and untouchability in Indian society through a touching and humane
story.1
The movie has Dr. B. R. Ambedkar's fight against untouchability and
the myth of Chandalika in hinduism as its subtexts on the basis of
which it tries to criticize the practice of untouchability in India.
Lagaan:
This is the story about the resilience shown by the Indians when
they were under the British Rule. They are already taxed to the bone
by the British and their cronies, but when Jack Russell announces
that he will double the Lagaan (tax) from all villagers, they decide
to oppose it. Leading the villagers is a handsome young man named
Bhuvan, who challenges them to a game of cricket, a game that is to
be played by veteran British cricket players, versus villagers,
including Bhuvan himself, who have never played this game before,
and do not even know a bat from a piece of wood. As the challenge is
accepted, the interest grows and attracts Indians from all over the
region, as well as the British from all over the country - as
everyone gathers to see the 'fair play' that the British will
display against their counter-parts.
I
have then chosen two movies, which are set in the post colonial time
to explain the politics of the governed. They may also help in
understanding the effect of colonial encounters on democratic
politics. The two movies are-
Mary
Kom: The biopic is about MC Mary Kom (Priyanka Chopra), a five-time
boxing world champion and Olympic bronze medallist from India. This
movie tells about the the problems she has faced in her life because
of being a women, a north eastern and above all because of politics.
Chakde!
India: Chak De! India explores religious bigotry, the legacy of the
partition of India, ethnic and regional prejudice, and sexism in
contemporary India through field hockey.
My
assignment is divided into three chapters. In the first chapter I
will explain the Theory of Benedict Anderson which plays an important
role in the theory of Partha Chatterjee and would connect it with all
the movies mentioned above. In the second chapters I would explain
Chatterjee´s view on Anderson´s theory and how could I connect my
two post colonial movies with his view. In the end I narrate the
story of Dhorai and compare it with Sujata and Lagaan, which are set
in colonial time.
Chapter
1:Theory of Benedict Anderson
In
his work “Imagined Communities” Anderson defines that the nations
live in homogenous empty time. He follows a dominant strand in modern
historical thinking that imagines the social space of modernity as
distributed in homogenous empty time.
“ The
nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them,
encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if
elastic, boundaries, beyond which lies other nations. No nation
imagines itself coterminous with mankind…It is imaged as sovereign
because the concept was born in an age in which the Enlightenment and
Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely ordained,
hierarchical dynastic realm…Finally, it is imagined as a community
because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that
may occur in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep
horizontal comradeship”2
In
his recent book “The Spectre of Comparisons”, Anderson has
followed up his analysis in Imagined Communities by distinguishing
between nationalism and the politics of ethnicity. Ethnicity can be
defined as the fact or state of belonging to a social group that has
a common nationalism or a cultural tradition.
To
explain nationalism and political ethnicity Anderson uses the
distinction between bound serialities and unbound serialities.
Unbound seriality refers to the everyday universals of modern serial
thought that includes nations, citizens, workers, intellectuals and
so on. They are imagined and narrated through instruments of print
capitalism such as the newspaper, books etc. They offer the
individuals the opportunity to imagine themselves as a part of a
larger than face to face solidarities.
In
the movie “Sujata” one can notice unbound serialities like all
characters in the film are citizens of India. In the same movie “Rama
(Shashikala) is not only a pianist but also a singer and a stage
performer.
In
the movie “Chak de! India” the actresses in the movie are hockey
players. They also have their personal lives eg. Vidya Sharma(Vidya
Malvade) is a housewife. The men and the women depicted in the movie
belong to the Indian Hockey Federation.
In
the movie “Lagaan” the story is about the residents of the
village Champaner in India. They are also tax payers till now. The
characters not only learn to play cricket but also practice their
professions. Lakha (Yashpal Sharma) is a woodcutter, Bhura (Raghubir
Yadav) is a poultry farmer.
In
the movie “Mary Kom” Mary Kom(Priyanka Chopra) is the daughter of
a poor rice farmer in a small village in Manipur is fascinated with
boxing. She has a quick temper and gets into fights with the boys.
When she chances upon Coach Narjit Singh (Sunil Thapa), who runs a
boxing academy in a nearby town, she begs him to train her
professionally.
The
unbound serialities are potentially liberating. It doesn’t matter
how many number of heritages a person belongs to, he or she will
always be a part of unbound serialities unlike the bound serialities
which can operate only with integers. One can only be black or not
black, Muslim or not Muslim, tribal or not tribal.
In
the movie Sujata, Sujata(Nutan Behl) is a Harijan, a lower class in
India i.e. she is an untouchable whereas the family in which she is
brought up is Brahmin. Either she can belong to a lower class or
higher class. This is a bound seriality.
Similarly
in the movie “Chak de! Inda” one can notice a number of bound
serialities. Even though the women football players were Indians,
Komal Chautala (Chitrashi Rawat) is from Haryana, Preeti Sabarwal
(Sagarika Ghatge) from Chandigarh, Balbir Kaur (Tanya Abrol) from
Punjab, Rani Dispotta (Seema Azmi) and Soimoi Kerketa (Nisha Nair),
belonging to the remote villages in Jharkhand. Mary Ralte (Kimi
Laldawla) from Mizoram and Molly Zimik from Manipur (in North-East
India). If one is north eastern then one cannot be north western etc.
Coach Kabir Khan(Sharukh Khan) is a muslim. This can be also seen as
a bound seriality.
In
the move “Lagaan” Deva Singh Sodhi(Pradeep Singh Rawat) is a Sikh
which is also a bound serialtity. Kachra (Aditya Lakhia), plays the
role of an untouchable in the village. Mary Kom in the movie “Mary
Kom” is a north eastern i.e. from Manipur who if often disrespected
and humiliated.
Anderson
implies that it is bound serialities which produces the tools of
ethnic politics. Anderson sees the politics of universalism as
something that belongs to very character of time in which we live,
hence making it homogenous i.e our nation is homogenous. There is one
similarity between all of us and all the movies that we belong to
India and are fighting for it.
Chapter
2: Chatterjee`s View on Anderson`s Theory
However
Chatterjee dismisses this Theory of Anderson. His book The Politics
of the governed argues that the rise of the ethnic politics in the
Post colonial world is a consequence of new techniques of
governmental administration. Many of these operate outside the
traditional arena of civil society and legal institutions.
Chatterjees analysis explores the strategic as well as ethnical
dimensions of new democratic politics of rights, claims and
entitlements of population growth.
According
to him the Andersons empty homogenous time is utopian in nature.
Utopian is modelled on or aiming for a state in which everything is
perfect, idealistic. It is based on a utopian ideology but also
unreal. Empty homogenous time is not located anywhere in real space
since the modern life consist of heterotopia. Politics here does not
mean the same thing to all people. Time is therefore heterogeneous
which suggests the co presence of several times . These other times
have not just survived from a pre modern past but they are the
outcome of encounter of modernity itself. According to Chatterjee
there are new meanings to the key concepts of a society.
Civil
Society:
“the closed association of modern elite groups, sequestered from
the wider popular life of communities, walled up within enclaves of
civic freedom and rational law”3
Governance:
“The body of knowledge and set of techniques used by, or on behalf
of, those who govern”
Democracy is
no longer government of, by and for the people, but “should be seen
as the politics of the governed. Political theory today rejects
Aristotle’s criteria for the ideal constitution, where only certain
people were suitable to become part of the governing class because
they had the necessary practical wisdom or ethical virtue but
governmental practices are still based on the premise that not
everyone can govern. Yet people are devising new ways in which
they can choose how they should be governed (e.g., pastoralist
parliament).
Political
society is
a site of negotiation and contestation opened up by the activities of
governmental agencies aimed at population groups. To effectively make
its claim in political society, a population group produced by
governmentality a population group must be invested with the moral
content of community. Community here means the “conferred
legitimacy within the domain of the modern state only in the form of
the nation” This is central to what is meant by governmentality:
there are numerous possibilities for transforming an empirically
assembled population group into the morally constituted form of a
community.
We
can connect the concept of heterogeneity and other aspects of
Chatterjee´s theory with the movies Chakde! India and Mary Kom.
The
movie “Chak De! India` opens in Delhi during the final minutes of
a (fictional) Hockey World Cup match between Pakistan and India, with
Pakistan leading, 1–0. When the Indian team captain, Kabir Khan
(Shah Rukh Khan) is fouled, he elects to take the penalty stroke
himself. His strike, however, flies just above the goal and India
suffers a crushing defeat. Soon after the match ends, the media
begins to circulate a photograph of Khan accepting a handshake from
the captain of the Pakistan team. This action leads to a nation-wide
smear campaign which alleged that Khan (who is a Muslim) might have
"thrown" the game in an act of sympathy towards Pakistan.
The religious prejudice can tell us about the heterogeneity in India.
One can also notice in the same movie that all the women hockey
players belong to different states and have a tiff with each other.
Mary Ralte (Kimi Laldawla) from Mizoram and Molly Zimik from Manipur
(in North-East India) are both treated as "foreigners" by
virtually everyone they meet and face repeated sexual harassment.
This is a current problem is faced by people of North-East India. One
can notice the politics done by Mr. Tripathi (Anjan Srivastav), the
head of India's Hockey association, who argues
the team has no future since, the only long term role for women is to
"cook and clean." The newly united womens hockey team
is later challenged by Tripathi who suddenly decides that the women's
team will not go to Australia for "The World Championship."
He plans to give all the sponsorship and fund to the mens football
team. Khan, however, forces him to agree to a challenge match with
the men's team on condition that if the girls win, they will be
allowed to go to Australia. Here one can notice politics of the
governed. This practice can be defined as the
body of knowledge and set of techniques used by, or on behalf of,
those who govern.
We
can consider the movie Mary Kom for understanding more about politics
of the governed. The first few scenes of the film take cognizance of
the unrest that Manipur has been witness to for decades and which has
impacted the lives and livelihoods of the state’s youngsters caught
in the crossfire between rebels and the security forces. There are
various challenges faced by Mary Kom due to politics. Inspite of
getting fund from the government for refreshments and accommodation,
the national level boxing players are only provided with banana and
milk. They are forced to live in tents and rooms which are not in a
good condition whereas the association members of India stay in a
five star hotel. After her marriage, she gives birth to twins and
applies for a government job. However, when offered the position of a
constable she refuses, feeling that as a world-champion boxer, she is
above that position. It devastates her to learn that people no longer
recognize her. Her husband Onler encourages her to revive her boxing
training. She joins the gym again, leaving her husband to look after
the children at home. Her coach is still upset about her decision to
marry, but Kom makes a comeback in the National Boxing Championship.
Despite scoring better than her opponent, she looses the match due to
the apparent partiality of the judges. Kom throws a chair in anger
towards the judges, resulting in a ban. She later makes a written
apology, and the official accepts it while at the same time insulting
her. Politics of the governed can be easily seen in this movie.
It
would be impossible to state Chatterjee’s arguments without first
referring to our post colonial history. Chatterjee here takes up the
historical tension faced by Bhim Rao Ambedkar, the Chairperson of the
Drafting Committee and Mahatma Gandhi between civic nationalism and
politics of ethnicity. As we all are aware Ambedkar faught for
separate political representation of Dalits and legal protection of
modern virtues of equal citizenship and secularism. Chatterjee
focuses here on contradictions posed for a modern politics by the
demands of universal citizenship on one hand and protection of
particularist rights on the other.
Ambedkar
argued that there was in the beginning, a state of equality between
Brahmans , Shudhras and untouchables. The modern day struggle for
abolition of caste becomes then actually a struggle to return to that
original state of equality. The Utopian search for homogeneity is
made historical. Satinath Bhaduri, a modernist novelist of Bengali
language also supports Chatterjee views. This can be explained with
the example of one of his greatest work on Indian nationalism “
Dhorai Charitmanas (1949-1951).”
Chapter
3:The Story of Dhorai in comparison with the movies “Sujata and
Lagaan”
Dhorai,
a backward caste Tatma from Purnea district of Bihar is a fictional
character who is in search of answers after
being exiled by his own family. This act of exile is mentioned with
reference to the exile of Rama. Hence the name ‘Dhorai Charitmanas’
is much similar to ‘Ramcharitmanas’. His exile leads him to the
city where he perceives various urban objects such as district
courts, hospitals, etc. This perception of nation coming into shape
sets the protagonist into an epic journey towards his goal. This is
yet another example of two times coming together and signifying the
heterogeneity in the nation i.e. the urban and the rural space.
Similarly
the movie Sujata is a classic on the social issue of untouchability.
This film succeeds in making a social malaise which has been plaguing
Indian society for centuries. Sujata is an untouchable who is left
completely destitute and alone when all her parents and siblings die
in a plague. She is taken into the home of a wealthy family out of
kindness, but that act alone is not enough to overcome the family's
entrenched views on untouchables. Upendranath Choudhury (Tarun Bose)
and his wife Charu (Sulochana) - is a typical middle-class upper
caste couple i.e a Brahmin. Taking pity on an orphan infant girl,
they decide to give shelter to her in their family but the issue of
that girl’s lower caste keeps bothering their conservative minds.
The husband is more tolerant but the wife always remains skeptical
about correctness of their humanitarian action. Throughout her
childhood, Sujata is given a different treatment compared to
Choudhury’s own daughter Rama(Shashikala) and she never gets the
same privileges. She is not even given proper school education. At
every step, Sujata keeps realizing that even though her guardians
(whom she has always thought of as her actual parents) take good care
of her, they don’t really love her as their own.
As
the girls enter youth, this demarcation becomes even more apparent
and Sujata is forced to ask her ‘mother’ why she is being treated
so differently and unfairly. Charu then reveals the bitter truth to
Sujata. Suddenly Sujata’s whole world collapses beneath her feet.
Emotionally shattered, she even thinks of committing suicide but
better sense prevails. A young man Adheer (Sunil Dutt) then comes
into her life but once she comes to know that her foster-parents are
thinking of marrying Rama (Shashikala) to him, she decides to
sacrifice her own love. One day, Upen's wife falls down the stairs
and is rushed to the hospital. The doctors tell the family that in
order to save Charu, they need blood of a rare group. Only Sujata's
blood matches, and she willingly donates blood. When Upen's wife
knows that her life was saved by Sujata, she realizes her mistakes
and accepts her as her daughter. Sujata and Adheer are finally
married.
Nutan
essays the complex title role brilliantly. In the sequences where
Sujata realizes her plight of being an outcast in her own family, one
can literally visualize each and every scar on her mind in Nutan’s
eloquent eyes. The movie tells us how the family shifts from Bilaspur
to Dehradun which not only indicates heterogeneity but also how the
city reacts to the problem of untouchability.
The
movie “Lagaan” which is also is set in the Victorian period of
India's colonial British Raj. The story revolves around a small
village whose inhabitants, oppressed by high taxes, find themselves
in an extraordinary situation as an arrogant officer challenges them
to a game of cricket as a wager to avoid the taxes. The narrative
spins around this situation as the villagers face the arduous task of
learning the alien game and playing for a result that will change
their village's destiny.
Suddenly,
when Bhuvan’s (Amir Khan) team is training in Champaner, they spot
Kachra( Aditya Lakhia), the untouchable, standing on the mar-gins.
Bhuvan asks Kachra to throw the ball back. A petrified Kachra, with a
small broom in his right hand, his left hand handicapped, is
sweating. Hero Bhuvan goads him to throw the ball, and Kachra does it
with his disabled left hand. The ball spins wildly. Bhuvan is
terribly impressed and wants to rope Kachra in as the eleventh man
they have been looking for. Then the entire village from mukhiya
(chief) to vaid (doctor) to jyotish (astrologer) opposes the move to
induct an achchut (untouchable). They say: fight the British with a
silly game if you please, but don’t commit dharam-bhrasht
(sacrilege). When the British tread on your toes, you can justifiably
fight them, but practices like untouchability are legacies not to be
questioned.
But
in the figure of Kachra, Lagaan deploys the supreme icon of caste
oppression- the "untouchable". Kachra suffers social and
physical disability. He is first seen on the margins of community,
and since his right arm is partially paralysed, he embodies the
inequalities conferred by his caste status. In the movie he takes
crucial wickets and turns the fortune of the game on its final day.
His role within what is a proto-independence movement resonates with
much mainstream Indian rhetoric in which statehood has been posited
as a solution to caste linked problems.
Similarly
Lagaan critiques caste-based inequality, but never really moves to
depict Kachra as an autonomous agent. From a critical perspective,
the denial of Kachra's voice is especially striking given that today
Dalits provide the clearest example of a group that has become
acutely conscious of its history, and seeks to articulate a distinct
identity.4
Coming
back to Ambedkar who insisted that the untouchables were a minority
not just within Hindusism, as believed by Gandhi and many others from
the Congress, but a minority within the whole nation and thus needed
special representation, signed after much negotiations the Poona Pact
according to which the Dalits were given a substantial number of
reserved seats within the Hindu electorate. By this time, the country
had been divided into two sovereign nation states. Homogeniety broke
down on one plane, only to be reasserted on another. Heterogeniety,
unstoppable at one point, was forcibly suppressed at another. With
the Pakistan resolution in March 1940, Ambedkar was confronted with a
twofold demand- First, to continue the struggle for equal citizenship
within the nation and, second, to secure special representation in
backward caste in politics. But the most important issue for him was
whether or not the partition would benefit the untouchables of India.
He
concluded that it would be better for both Muslims and Hindus since
without the partition, India would be “an anaemic and sickly state”
with a weak central government but powerful provinces. An officially
supervised transfer of population was the only realistic solution.
The Hindustan that would thus be created would obviously not be
homogenous.
Once
again, Chatterjee negated Anderson’s views by saying that the bound
serialities are the main basis on which ethnic politics feeds
whereas, unbound serialities can imagine individuals as free members
of national community. Anderson, like many others, is keen to
preserve the utopian moment when classical nationalism merges with
modernity. For Chatterjee, it is morally illegitimate to uphold the
universalist ideal of nationalism without simultaneously demanding
that politics of the governed be recognized as an equally legitimate
power of the real time space of the modern political life of the
nation.
Conclusion
It
is clear to us that we live in a heterogeneous space of time. There
is no homogeneity. We can see this heterogeneity in all aspects of
our life. In the above mentioned movies for example ”Chakde! India”
Heterogeneity could be seen in the women´s hockey team. All the
players come from different states and begin their introduction as
Balbir Kaur, Punjab. One can also notice that Coach Kabir Khan is a
muslim and the majority teammates are Hindu.
The
rise of mass politics all over the world in the twentieth century has
led to the development of new techniques of governing different
population group. One hand the idea of popular sovereignty has gained
wide acceptance. On the other hand expansion of security and welfare
technologies has created modern government at bodies. The modern
governmental bodies which do not provide citizens with a space for
democratic deliberation. This can be clearly seen in the movies “Mary
Kom” and “Chakde! India”. In both of the movies The Boxing
Association and Indian Womens Hockey Association have an important
role to play. They are not free to react as they want to. Their
behaviors are influenced by such governmental bodies. They can act as
a hindrance to goal or can be supportive too. Under these conditions
democracy is no longer govt. of , for, by the people rather it has
become a world of tower whose starting dimension and unwritten rules
of engagement, Chatterjee provocatively lays bare with the
possibilities and limits of democracy of post colonial world.