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Endarbeit
Soziologie

Delhi University

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Sophie C. ©

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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-


  1. 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.

  2. 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-


  1. 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.

  2. 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.

1 Dr Mandar, Sujata, (Accessed on 1 November 2014)

2 Anderson,B,, Imagined Communities,1983,P7

3 Chatterjee,P, Nation in Heterogeneous Times,P.4


4 Wright, Melanie.J, Religion and Film: An Introduction, P.154


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