Last Updated on May 5, 2015, by eNotes Editorial. Word Count: 1373
The adoption of postcolonial literature in the English curriculum of British and American schools in the last few decades has coincided with changes in how and why literature is studied. These changes include ideas about what texts should be included in class syllabi, issues of literary taste, and the purpose(s) of studying literature. The writing studied in literature classrooms in the United States and Great Britain is often referred to as belonging to the canon. The term derives from the Greek word “kanon” and originally denoted the list of books in the New Testament and Hebrew Bible that came to comprise the Holy Scriptures. More recently, the phrase “literary canon” has been used to denote the “major authors,” critics, and historians considered to be the most important for students to read. Surveys of the great works of Western civilization, for example, traditionally would include works by Plato, Aristotle, John Milton, William Shakespeare, and so forth, in short, works by men of European descent. However, in the second half of the twentieth century, a number of events has challenged the assumptions embodied in the literary canon. These events include the Civil Rights movement in the United States, the Women’s Liberation movement, and the accelerated unraveling of the British Empire in the wake of World War II. As more and different people began to assert their own rights to explore their heritage and express their identities, critics began to expose the ideological underpinnings of the literary canon and how those underpinnings served one group of people while excluding another. Since the 1960s, a number of critics have argued for the revision, or even the abolition, of the literary canons.
In The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures, Bill Ashcroft, Careth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin point to “the development of English as a privileged academic subject in the nineteenth century,” arguing that its study “has always been a densely political and cultural phenomenon . . . called into the service of a profound and embracing nationalism.” Nationalism refers to a favoring of the traditions, practices, language, myths, and rituals of a group of people who believe their way of life superior to that of others. By instituting its own school system into its colonies, the British used education as a primary means of controlling colonized people. Walcott, for example, a writer of African, Dutch, and English descent, grew up in St. Lucia of the West Indies reading Milton, Spenser, Shakespeare, and other British writers. He was taught to think like a British person and to develop British tastes. His notion of what made “good” literature, then, was in large part defined by his British education. Indigenous people were “other,” defined by and through their difference from the colonizers. The idea of “otherness” has helped to foster the notion that Third World countries are backward, inferior, and uncivilized. The editors of The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism summarize the insidiousness of colonial literary education as follows:
As it inculcates Western Eurocentric values, literary education supports a kind of “cultural colonization,” creating a class of colonial subjects often burdened by a double consciousness and by divided loyalties. It helps Western colonizers rule by consent rather than violence.
In many cases, however, colonized countries had no national literature of their own, no literary tradition, no concept of literature itself, and so there was no basis of comparison for colonized people, many of whom could neither read nor write. Some of these colonies had strictly oral storytelling traditions and no history of written language. The British, in their attempts to “educate” the inhabitants of their colonies, used their own language and literature as models of civilized and superior thinking and behavior.
During the independence movements of British colonies and after colonies declared their independence, natives of former colonies attempted to establish their own literary traditions. The writing produced by postcolonial natives is often a literature of resistance that integrates Western modes of writing and narrative with local traditions and ways of knowing. Walcott’s plays such as The Sea at Dauphin (1954), for example, mixes West Indian language and customs with elements of Greek drama. And Walcott’s establishment of the Little Carib Theatre Workshop, later renamed the Trinidad Theatre Workshop, was an attempt to provide native West Indian writers with a place to develop and produce plays about their own history and culture.
However, writing about one’s own history and culture after centuries of colonization, for Walcott as well as for other postcolonialists, has proved a difficult, virtually impossible task. Representing the relationships between precolonial cultures and imperial cultures necessarily includes the acknowledgement of culture’s hybrid nature and the futility of ever recovering a “pure” past. The idea that all cultures are representations and the result of political forces at work shows up in the postmodern forms and styles that postcolonial writers such as Walcott, Coetzee, Rushdie, and so forth have chosen to “depict” the postcolonial condition. Although the meaning of the term “postmodern” is as hotly debated as the term “postcolonial,” in reference to postcolonial writing it denotes writing that mixes genres and, often, languages, integrates traditional Western forms with indigenous materials, and foregrounds how identities are social constructions rather than essential features of people, countries, or cultures.
As style, the postmodern is most often embodied in the novels of postcolonial writers rather than, say, poetry or drama, and it is the novel to which postcolonial critics pay most attention. The novel, as a kind of writing that attempts to create and people its own world with elaborate characterizations, plots, and detailed setting, is apropos for writers motivated to reshape public as well as personal history. Coetzee’s novels, for example, especially Waiting for the Barbarians (1982), which is set in an imaginary empire not unlike South Africa, employs postmodern strategies and devices to foreground their status as works of fiction, while at the same time suggesting a political stance towards a real place and policy, that is, South African apartheid. Postcolonial literature that overtly uses postmodern compositional strategies is not without its detractors; however, critics often claim that it can send the message that oppression and colonialism are a part of the human condition and will always be here. In his review of Coetzee’s novel, Irving Howe comments on Coetzee’s universalizing approach towards describing South Africa’s predicament:
That ‘a heart of darkness’ is present in all societies and a beast ‘lurks within each one of us’ may well be true. But such invocations of universal evil can deflect attention from the particular and at least partly remediable social wrongs Mr. Coetzee portrays. Not only deflect attention, but encourage readers, as they search for their inner beasts, to a mood of conservative acquiescence and social passivity.
The inclusion of postcolonial literature in English departments in the United States, Great Britain, and Australia in the last few decades has also been part of the move away from the study of literature per se and towards the study of culture broadly conceived. Some colleges and universities are even abandoning literature departments altogether and replacing them with cultural studies departments, whose courses include literature, heavy doses of theory of various stripes—literary and other—historical documents, movies, and texts not traditionally studied in literature classrooms. Some of the questions raised by the study of postcolonial literature include the following: Which writers speak best for the postcolonial nation? How does postcolonial literature ask readers to reexamine their own notions of history and “otherness?” In what language should the postcolonial writer write? Is America itself a postcolonial country, and if so, what does that say about Americans’ authority to theorize about the postcolonial condition?
The shift in focus in Western schools away from the study of English and American literature and towards curricula that embrace an international worldview using a variety of texts has been for the good. Such curricula allow people whose voices have previously been stifled to speak out and allow artifacts previously ignored to be studied. This inclusion of new texts and writers can (potentially) make English departments agents of social change, rather than simply arbiters of literary taste.
Source: Chris Semansky, Critical Essay on Postcolonialism, in Literary Movements for Students, The Gale Group, 2003.
Last Updated on May 5, 2015, by eNotes Editorial. Word Count: 3383
In the current climate of literary studies, it is tempting to think of contemporary Native American literatures as among the postcolonial literatures of the world. Certainly they share with other postcolonial texts the fact of having, in the words of A statue of Daniel O’Connell who symbolized the fight for Irish independence in the nineteenth century the authors of The Empire Writes Back, “emerged in their present form out of the experience of colonization and asserted themselves by foregrounding the tension with the imperial power, and by emphasizing their differences from the assumptions of the imperial Centre.” Yet contemporary Native American literatures cannot quite be classed among the postcolonial literatures of the world for the simple reason that there is not yet a “post-” to the colonial status of Native Americans. Call it domestic imperialism or internal colonialism; in either case, a considerable number of Native people exist in conditions of politically sustained subalternity. I have remarked on the academic effects of this condition in the first chapter; here I note the more worldly effects of this condition: Indians experience twelve times the U.S. national rate of malnutrition, nine times the rate of alcoholism, and seven times the rate of infant mortality; as of the early 1990s, the life expectancy of reservation-based men was just over forty-four years, with reservation- based women enjoying, on average, a lifeexpectancy of just under forty-seven years. “Sovereignty,” whatever its ultimate meaning in the complex sociopolitical situation of Native nations in the United States, remains to be both adequately theorized and practically achieved, and “independence,” the great desideratum of colonized nations, is not, here, a particularly useful concept.
Arif Dirlik lists three current meanings of the term postcolonial. Postcolonial may intend “a literal description of conditions in formerly colonial societies,” it may claim to offer “a description of a global condition after the period of colonialism”— what Dirlik refers to as “global capitalism,” marked by the “transnationalization of production”— and it may, most commonly in the academy, claim to provide “a description of a discourse on the above-named conditions that is informed by the epistemological and psychic orientations that are products of those conditions.” Is any one of these meanings useful to describe contemporary Native American literature? Dirlik’s first sense of the postcolonial will not work because, as already noted, the material condition of contemporary Native “societies” is not a postcolonial one. His second sense might perhaps come a bit nearer, inasmuch as Native societies, although still in a colonial situation, nonetheless participate in the global economy of a world “after the period of colonialism.” To give a fairly undramatic anecdote, in Santa Fe, Native Americans sell traditional ceramic work and jewelry (including “traditional” golf tees) across the street from where non-Native people offer the “same” wares made in Hong Kong. In something of a parallel fashion, Lakota people travel to Germany and Switzerland to promote tourism at Pine Ridge. As for the last of Dirlik’s definitions, little discourse surrounding Native American literature, to the best of my knowledge, has been selfconsciously aware of having been formed “by the epistemological and psychic orientations that are products” of the postcolonial. (And the “nationalist” Native critic seeks to reject any formation whatever according to these “orientations.”) Perhaps, then, it may not be particularly useful to conceptualize contemporary Native American literature as postcolonial.
But even though contemporary Native American fiction is produced in a condition of ongoing colonialism, some of that fiction not only has the look of postcolonial fiction but also, as I will try to show in the second part of this chapter, performs ideological work that parallels that of postcolonial fiction elsewhere. Here, however, I want to suggest a category—the category of anti-imperial translation— for conceptualizing the tensions and differences between contemporary Native American fiction and “the imperial center.” Because historically specifiable acts of translative violence marked the European colonization of the Americas from Columbus to the present, it seems to me particularly important to reappropriate the concept of translation for contemporary Native American literature.
To do so is not to deny the relationship of this literature to the postcolonial literatures of the Sign in South Africa before the end of apartheid world but, rather, to attempt to specify a particular modality for that relationship. To say that the people indigenous to the Americas entered European consciousness only by means of a variety of complex acts of translation is to think of such things as Columbus’s giving the name of San Salvador to an island he knows is called Guanahani by the natives—and then giving to each further island he encounters, as he wrote in his journals, “a new name.” Columbus also materially “translated” (trans-latio, “to carry across”) some of the Natives he encountered, taking “six of them from here,” as he remarked in another wellknown passage, “in order that they may learn to speak.” Columbus gave the one who was best at learning his own surname and the first name of his firstborn son, translating this otherwise anonymous person into Don Diego Colon.
Now, any people who are perceived as somehow unable to speak when they speak their own languages, are not very likely to be perceived as having a literature—especially when they do not write, a point to which we shall return. Thus, initially, the very “idea of a [Native American] literature was inherently ludicrous,” as Brian Swann has noted, because Indian “languages themselves were primitive.” If Indians spoke at all, they spoke very badly (and, again, they did not write). In 1851, John De Forest, in his History of the Indians of Connecticut, observed, “It is evident from the enormous length of many of the words, sometimes occupying a whole line, that there was something about the structure of these languages which made them cumbersome and difficult to manage.”
Difficult for whom, one might ask, especially in view of the fact that De Forest himself had not achieved even minimal competence in any Native language. Further, inasmuch as these were spoken languages, not alphabetically written languages, any estimate that single words occupied the length of “a whole line” could only depend on De Forest’s decision to write them that way. De Forest’s sense of the “cumbersome and difficult” nature of Indian languages, as I have noted, implies that any literature the Natives might produce in these languages would also be “cumbersome and difficult.” Perhaps the Natives would do better to translate themselves or be translated, to “learn to speak”— in this case, to speak English—in order to have a literature. De Forest was wrong, of course, although what most people know as Native American literature today consists of texts originally written in English.
Almost half a century after DeForest, as late as 1894, Daniel Brinton—a man who actually did a great deal to make what he called the “production” of “aboriginal authors” visible to the dominant culture— nonetheless declared, “Those peoples who are born to the modes of thought and expression enforced by some languages can never forge to the front in the struggle for supremacy; they are fatally handicapped in the race for the highest life.” The winners in the “race for the highest life,” therefore, would be the race with the “highest” language; and it was not the Indians but rather, as Brinton wrote, “our Aryan forefathers” who were the ones fortunate enough to be endowed “with a richly inflected speech.” As Kwame Anthony Appiah explained in reference to Johann Gottfried von Herder, the Sprachgeist, “the ‘spirit’ of the language, is not merely the medium through which speakers communicate but the sacred essence of a nationality. [And] Herder himself identified the highest point of the nation’s language in its poetry,” in its literature. “Whoever writes about the literature of a country,” as Appiah elsewhere cited Herder, “must not neglect its language.” For those like the Indians with “primitive” languages, there would seem to be little hope, short of translation, for the prospects of literary achievement. Thus, by the end of the nineteenth century, the linguistic determinism expressed by Brinton— and, of course, by many others—worked against the possibility of seeing Native Americans as having an estimable literature at exactly the moment when the texts for that literature were, for the first time, being more or less accurately translated and published.
But here one must return to the other dimension of the translation issue as it affects Native American literatures. For the problem in recognizing the existence of Native literatures was not only that Natives could not speak or, when they did speak, that their languages were judged deficient or “primitive” but also that they did not write.
Here I will only quickly review what I and others have discussed elsewhere. Because littera-ture in its earliest uses meant the cultivation of letters (from Latin littera, “letter”), just as agriculture meant the cultivation of fields, peoples who did not inscribe alphabetic characters on the page could not, by definition, produce a literature. (They were also thought to be only minimally capable of agriculture in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, but that is another story.) It was the alteration in European consciousness generally referred to as “romanticism” that changed the emphasis in constituting the category of literature from the medium of expression, writing—literature as culture preserved in letters—to the kind of expression preserved, literature as imaginative and affective utterance, spoken or written. It is only at this point that an oral literature can be conceived as other than a contradiction in terms and the unlettered Indians recognized as people capable of producing a “literature.”
For all of this, it remains the case that an oral literature, in order to become the subject of analysis, must indeed first become an object. It must, that is, be textualized; and here we encounter a translation dilemma of another kind, one in which the “source language” itself has to be carried across—trans-latio—from one medium to another, involving something more than just a change of names. This translative project requires that temporal speech acts addressed to the ear be turned into visual objects in space, black marks on the page, addressed to the eye. Words that had once existed only for the tongue to pronounce now were to be entrusted to the apprehension of the eye. Mythography, in a term of Anthony Mattina’s, or ethnopoetics has been devoted for many years to the problems and possibilities involved in this particular form of media translation.
Translation as a change of names—as a more or less exclusively linguistic shift from “source” to “target” language—may, historically, be traced in relation to the poles of identity and difference, as these are articulated within the disciplinary boundaries of what the West distinguishes as the domains of art and social science. Translators with attachments to the arts or humanities have rendered Native verbal expression in such a way as to make it appear attractively literary by Western standards of literariness, thereby obscuring the very different standards pertaining in various Native American cultures. Conversely, translators with attachments to the social sciences have rendered Native verbal expression in as literal a manner as possible, illuminating the differences between that expression and our own but thereby obscuring its claims to literary status. I have elaborated on these matters elsewhere, and so I will here turn from considerations of the formal implications of translation practices to their ideological implications. I want to explain what I mean by anti-imperial translation and why it seems to me that a great many texts by Native American writers, though written in English, may nonetheless be taken as types of anti-imperial translation.
I base my sense of anti-imperial translation on a well-known, indeed classic text, one that I have myself quoted on a prior occasion. The text is from Rudolph Pannwitz, who is cited in Walter Benjamin’s important essay “The Task of the Translator.” Pannwitz wrote, “Our translations, even the best ones, proceed from a wrong premise. They want to turn Hindi, Greek, English into German instead of turning German into Hindi, Greek, English. Our translators have far greater reverence for the usage of their own language than for the spirit of the foreign works . . . The basic error of the translator is that he preserves the state in which his own language happens to be instead of allowing his language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue.” My use of Pannwitz was influenced by Talal Asad’s paper, “The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology,” originally presented at the School for American Research in 1984 and published in James Clifford and George Marcus’s important collection Writing Culture in 1986. As will be apparent, I am much indebted to Asad’s work.
Asad’s subject, like mine, is not translation in the narrow sense but rather translation as cultural translation. The “good translator,” Asad wrote, “does not immediately assume that unusual difficulty in conveying the sense of an alien discourse denotes a fault in the latter, but instead critically examines the normal state of his or her own language.” Asad notes the fact that languages, if expressively equal, are nonetheless politically “unequal,” those of the Third World that are typically studied by anthropologists being “weaker” in relation to Western languages (and today especially in relation to English). Asad remarks that the weaker, or colonized, languages “are more likely to submit to forcible transformation in the translation process than the other way around.” Asad cites with approval Godfrey Lienhardt’s essay “Modes of Thought” and quotes Lienhardt’s exemplary explanation of anthropological translation: “We mediate between their habits of thought, which we have acquired with them, and those of our own society; in doing so, it is not finally some mysterious ‘primitive philosophy’ that we are exploring, but the further potentialities of our thought and language.” This sort of translation, Asad affirms, should alter the usual relationship between the anthropological audience and the anthropological text, in that it seeks to disrupt the habitual desire of that audience to use the text as an occasion to know about the Other, a matter of “different writings and readings (meanings)” in order to instantiate the possibility that translation, as a matter “of different uses (practices),” can be a force moving us toward “learning to live another form of life.”
My claim is that Native American writers today are engaged in some version of the translation project along the broad lines sketched by Asad. Even though contemporary Native writers write in English and configure their texts in apparent consonance with Western or Euramerican literary forms—that is, they give us texts that look like novels, short stories, poems, and autobiographies— they do so in ways that present an “English” nonetheless “powerfully affected by the foreign tongue,” not by Hindi, Greek, or German, of course, and not actually by a “foreign” language, inasmuch as the “tongue” and “tongues” in question are indigenous to America. The language they offer, in Asad’s terms, derives at least in part from other forms of practice, and to comprehend it might just require, however briefly, that we attempt to imagine living other forms of life.
This is true of contemporary Native American writers in both literal and figurative ways. In the case of those for whom English is a second language (Luci Tapahonso, Ray Young Bear, Michael Kabotie, Ofelia Zepeda, and Simon Ortiz are some of the writers who come immediately to mind), it is altogether likely that their English will show traces of the structure and idioms of their “native” language, as well as a variety of linguistic habits and narrative and performative practices of traditional expressive forms in Navajo, Mesquakie, Hopi, Tohono O’odham, and Acoma. Their English, then, is indeed an English, in Pannwitz’s words, “powerfully affected by the foreign tongue,” a tongue (to repeat) not “foreign” at all to the Americas. Here the Native author quite literally tests “the tolerance of [English) for assuming unaccustomed forms,” and an adequate commentary on the work of these writers will require of the critic if not bilingualism then at least what Dell Hymes has called some “control” of the Native language.
Most Native writers today are not, however, fluent speakers of one or another of the indigenous languages of the Americas, although their experiences with these languages are so different that it would be impossible to generalize. (E.g., Leslie Marmon Silko certainly heard a good deal of Laguna as she was growing up, just as N. Scott Momaday heard a good deal of Jemez, whereas many of the Native American writers raised in the cities did not hear indigenous languages on a very regular basis.) Yet all of them have indicated their strong sense of indebtedness or allegiance to the oral tradition. Even the mixed-blood Anishinaabe—Chippewa— writer Gerald Vizenor, someone who uses quotations from a whole range of comtemporary European theorists and whose own texts are full of ironic effects possible only to a text-based literature, has insisted on the centrality of “tribal stories” and storytelling to his writing. This is the position of every other contemporary Native American writer I can think of—all of them insist on the storytelling of the oral tradition as providing a context, as bearing on and influencing the writing of their novels, poems, stories, or autobiographies.
In view of this fact, it needs to be said that “the oral tradition,” as it is invoked by these writers, is an “invented tradition.” It can be seen, as John Tomlinson has remarked, “as a phenomenon of modernity. There is a sense in which simply recognizing a practice as ‘traditional’ marks it off from the routine practices of proper [sic] traditional societies.” This is not, of course, to deny that there were and continue to be a number of oral traditions that “really” existed and continue to exist among the indigenous cultures of the Americas. Nor is it to deny that some contemporary Native American writers have considerable experience of “real” forms of oral performance. I am simply noting that “the oral tradition” as usually invoked in these contexts is a kind of catchall phrase whose function is broadly to name the source of the difference between the English of Native writers and that of Euramerican writers. This “tradition” is not based on historically and culturally specific instances.
A quick glance at some of the blurbs on the covers or book jackets of work by contemporary Indian writers makes this readily apparent. When these blurbs are written by non-Indians (and most are, for obvious reasons, written by non-Indians), reference to “the oral tradition” usually represents a loose and vague way of expressing nostalgia for some aboriginal authenticity or wisdom, a golden age of wholeness and harmony. When these blurbs are written by Native Americans—this generalization I venture more tentatively—they are (to recall the discussion I offered in the first chapter of this book) a rhetorical device, a strategic invocation of what David Murray has called the discourse of Indianness, a discourse that has currency in both the economic and the political sense in the United States. Once more, to say this is in no way to deny that the narrative modalities and practices of a range of Native oral literatures, as well as the worldviews of various Native cultures, are important to many of the texts constituting a contemporary Native American literature, and not merely honorifically, sentimentally, or rhetorically.
Anyone who would make the claim that a particular Native text in English should be read as an instance of cultural translation must offer a specific demonstration of how that text incorporates alternate strategies, indigenous perspectives, or language usages that, literally or figuratively, make its “English” on the page a translation in which traces of the “foreign tongue,” the “Indian,” can be discerned. If one then wants to claim that this translation is indeed an anti-imperial translation, it becomes necessary to show how those traces operate in tension with or in a manner resistant to an English in the interest of colonialism.
Source: Arnold Krupat, “Postcolonialism, Ideology, and Native American Literature,” in Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Literature, edited by Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt, University of Mississippi Press, 2000, pp. 73–94.


Close Reading Guide for Moving Image Texts
We all learn to look at screen texts from an early age, just as we learn to listen to the stories that our parents read to us. However, just as we need to be taught to read and write in order to become literate in the traditional sense, so we also need to be taught to 'read and write' audiovisual texts in order to become literate citizens of a 21st century democratic world.
In this section you will find two check-lists that are designed to help teachers and students learn how to analyse and discuss the meaning of audio-visual texts whether factual or fictional. Together with the punctuation and grammar guides presented on other areas of this site they should help demonstrate to any doubters that screenworks are not just 'illustrated' written texts, but complex interwoven time-based narratives that deploy a highly evolved language of their own - and are therefore worthy of detailed study.Glasgow Today and Tomorrow
The key thing to remember when analysing any audio-visual text is that like all texts it is a deliberate act of creation. The film may be a documentary that seeks to depict reality or use a realistic style, but there are still many choices made by the filmmakers relating to editing, shot length, types of shot, use of imagery and music that effect how we relate emotionally and intellectually to the texts. The act of close-reading audio-visual texts involves becoming aware of – and being able to compare and analyse – these choices or systems of working, just as one judges the style, technique, imagery (and bias) of a journalist or author.
A good place to start with any film is to ask: What type of text is it?What does the title suggest it is about? Who was it made for? How was it funded or commissioned? And how was it filmed?
Looking into the following areas will help you begin:
Type of audiovisual text - Factual films come in a variety of different forms: news, documentary, corporate film, advert (often closer to fiction than reality), 'reality' TV show (often closer to fiction than reality), public information film, propaganda film, local topical film (see feature resource), wedding video, home movie, etc.
Documentaries come in many sub-forms too that are often referred to as genres by academics. However, for the most part these terms reflect more the production processes than the underlying narrative genres such as horror, investigative thriller, domestic drama, communal drama, epic, etc. Some of the most popular forms of documentary at the moment are:
1.'Voice of God' documentaries where a trusted voice narrates the truth of what is being seen, presenter-led documentaries where the narrator appears within the film often as an investigator, 2. Observational or fly-on-the-wall documentaries where we are invited to view events and largely reach our own conclusions about what is going on without the interpolation of a narrator (nb. these are often less truthful than they first appear when asks the questions about the production), 3. Investigatory presenter-led documentaries often current affairs but can equally be biographical or documentaries looking into the arts 4. 'List' documentaries where TV makes programmes about other forms of seductive media as a way of filling the schedules 5. 'Dirty' documenataries that often use news style footage shot by normal people to create a view of an event (here dirty refers to the quality of the footage which may simply be shot on mobile phones, 6. Drama documentaries (often historical documentaries or horror 'what if' speculative documentaries) - here the events are dramatised to fill in the gaps in the available footage or to make the narratives more emotionally compelling, 7. Sponsored documentaries where the filmmakers employ the 'truthful' style of documentary to promote a company, product or organisation (i.e. really a hybrid form between documentary and corporate video)
Production - Identify how the film was funded, by whom, the reason it was made, how it was produced, and for which audience. There is a great deal of information you should be able to discern from the titles and credit sequences at the beginning and the end of the film, but you may also find out more with some basic internet research. When it comes to factual film it helps to discuss issues relating to how the filmmakers gained access to the settings being filmed? To what degree they needed to gain the co-operation of the participants in making or coordinating the film? How well funded the production looks to be? How many cameras they are likely to have used (this is very important as documentary or news footage can be edited together to make it appear to be happening at the same time when it is not)? And how open and upfront the film-makers are (or are not) about their methods and techniques?
Narrative structure - Fictional films (and observational documentaries) usually focus on the desires, actions, challenges and obstacles facing one character (occasionally several) as they struggle to achieve a goal. Factual and documentary films are often organised around simple rhetorical questions that often will reveal its true narrative genre. If the question is a investigation the structure of the narrative is likely to be detective (e.g. news and current affairs docs), if it is historical it may employ the structure of a thriller or an epic, if it is a future doc it will often follow a horror format e.g. documentaries about how the country might respond to a pandemic. It is vital you identify how the film is structure and what the concerns of the film and its genre are likely to be.
Active Questions - What rhetorical or narrative questions does the audience want answered by the film? If there is more than one question, how are these ordered, e.g. in a whodunnit we first need to find out who has been killed, then who did it, then whether they will be caught and finally why they did it. In a documentary the film will usually set a main rhetorical question at the beginning and several other sub-questions as the narrative unfolds. It may also raise narrative questions connected to specific characters shown in the film.
Genre – The genre to the film gives us our biggest clues as to what the narrative will be about – sometimes known as the theme. Specific genres have specific general themes, for instance a romance is about love, a horror film is about survival and a rites of passage or communal drama are about the desire for validation. This goes for factual films as well as fictional ones. For instance , investigative documentaries are by definition investigative thrillers and therefore always about justice and/or morality. That said you will need to look closer than the general theme that the genre gives you to work out what the narrative is truly about, e.g. 'Titanic' shows that true love triumphs even over death.Clearance 68
Documentary is supposed to be truthful as well as informative. It is the reader’s job to ensure that s/he can distinguish between fact and opinion, detect any bias in a film, and examine how the filming may have had an impact on what was filmed. That said factual films are rarely simply documents in themselves as where the early topical films or YouTube style single shot videos. Most of them use editing techniques to create meaning from a series of images, scenes and narration.
Subject Matter – Where is it set and what is it about? This is particularly when looking at archival film where the world have changed considerably since the film was made. In this case what is most interesting about the film may not be what it was meant to show, but elements of the scene that the filmmakers may take for granted or have gained or decreased in significance to the audience through time.
Rhetorical questions - Look at the different questions raised by the film, examine their order and use this to analyse how the filmmakers build and expand upon their initial arguments. Many arguments proceed along dialectical lines. This means the filmmakers present a thesis, then show conflicting views and then try to resolve the differences between these two or more points of view. Narrative sequences - Identify the different sequences and the different documentary techniques they employ, e.g. ‘Voice of God’ narration, observational sections (either using continuity style cuts and/or long-tracking or panning shots that reveal the presence of the cameraman) or not presenter led discussion, interviews, talking head interviewees with illustrative cutaways or GVs (general views that are often used to underscore or reinforce the theme or context of the narrative).
Surprise - Identify the main surprises and turning points in the narrative, how are these used to influence the argument and engage the audience emotionally and intellectually.
Authority and trust - Examine how the filmmakers encourage the audience to trust in their ability to examine the argument fully. This may be achieved by having a well-known voice narrate a ‘voice of God’ narration or having a well-known presenter appear in the film to lend credibility. Likewise the film may interview a range of experts whose names and titles appear on screen. Or it may be produced by a particular broadcaster, producer or director who has a reputation to preserve.
Truth - Look closely to see whether the filmmakers are even-handed and fair. Are there times when their shooting or editing techniques favour one side or the other? In some cases the film may be deliberately one-sided and polemical, but if this is the case the filmmakers should be upfront about their intentions. Drama documentary, staging and historical re-enactments - Where films use these devices you will need to examine closely the issue of accuracy. The dramatic reconstructions may have been written or approved by historians but where this is not clear you may need to look closely at the historical record to see how much really is known about what exactly happened and where the filmmakers have ‘filled in the gaps’.
Statistics - If the film uses statistics, examine whether they explain their method or whether they expect you to take their statistical gathering and analytical techniques at face value. Remember the quote attributed to former British PM Benjamin Disraeli and popularised by the novelist Mark Twain, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." If people don’t explain their statistics, you will need to discuss how far they can be trusted, based upon your knowledge about who made the film.
The presence of the camera - Examine whether the presence of the camera or the technical requirements of filming would have changed the nature of the events being filmed and ether this might compromise the integrity of the film.McNab's Visit to London
Amateur and early filmmaking
It is important to know a bit about film history in order to analyse archive film texts. In the early days of filmmaking which began in around 1895, films were made by professional companies and distributed to be screened as part of an entertainment or novelty programme at the travelling shows or music halls. The equipment was often supplied by a company, for example, Edison’s cinematograph – the conditions of which meant that a showman could only show films made by the Edison company. Film from 1895 – 1910 was very much something that was brought to the masses and which they could have no influence or impact on or in. Viewers of early films were very much consumers of this latest entertainment product or invention.
From 1910 the first purpose built cinemas emerged and cinema going developed. Films were still supplied by professional organisations and companies for entertainment and news.
It was not until the mid-1920s that the first ‘home movie’ cameras became available for people to make their own films. These early ‘home movie’ cameras and film stock were incredibly expensive and therefore purchased by the wealthy who had both the money for the new equipment, but also the leisure time to use it. Developments in technology in the 1930s meant that several home movie cameras and film stock were available for the amateur filmmaker. However, it was not until after the war that amateur filmmaking became less expensive and available to a wider section of society. Since the 1950s new formats have been introduced with technology becoming cheaper and more easily accessible over the last 50 years, so that today everyone has access to some kind of filmmaking equipment, whether it is a digital camera, Flip Video camera or mobile phone. Today, everyone and anyone can make their own film.
Important points to consider when anaylsing early and amateur archive films:
- When was it made?
- Who made it and why?
- Where was it screened and who saw it?
Professional film or home movie? Establish this by looking at the credits. If there are no credits – try and establish the date of the film by what you see on screen. Is it an event or occasion? Where was it, try to find out when that occasion or event took place by researching in the local library or online.
Amateur Filmmaking Timeline
- 1895 - mid 1920s – If the film was made before around 1923 it is highly likely that it will have been have been made by a professional company. Amateur filmmaking equipment was not available before 1923.
- 1923 – 1940s – Developments in technology meant that various types of film camera were developed for use by amateur filmmakers.
- 1923 Standard 8mm film cameras and stock were introduced by Eastman Kodak. Kodak also introduced 16mm film for the amateur filmmaker. Also dating from this time was Pathe’s 9.5mm film cameras and projectors, which were also used widely for both making films and screening studio films. All these formats used black and white film.
- In 1936 Kodak brought out the first successful colour film for the amateur filmmaker – Kodachrome – it was very expensive in the lead up to the war and only those with money had access to it.
- During this time, many cine clubs and film societies made their own dramas and films largely using 16mm black and white film stock.
- 1940s – 1950s – Film stocks during the war were rationed and ‘home movies’, especially colour films were rarely made. Following the war, both 8mm and 16mm film was relatively cheap for the amateur and many ‘home movies’ or amateur films were made during this time.
- 1965 – Super 8mm film came onto the market and quickly replaced Standard 8mm as the quality was better.
- 1980s – Today The development of video cameras and now digital video has made amateur filmmaking accessible to all.
Fictional screen narratives feature large in culture. While there are few fictional films in this collection, there are frequent dramtised sections of documentary or sponsored films in this collection. There may also be sections of a film where the filmmaker is suggesting that a narrative exists by editing together disparate shots to create the illusion of continuous and connected action.
Fictional texts tend to come in four main forms (with numerous sub-forms):
- Filmed drama (and all its sub forms from sitcom to soap, and short animated comedy sketch to Hollywood blockbuster),
- music video,
- Arts video (often interactive) that are usually show in galleries or art spaces,
- and video games.
Characters - Who are the main characters and how are they introduced to us? How do we discover what they want and what they fear (NB. Here you should look out closely for the use of POV shots in establishing desire)? If there are no characters, what is the subject?
Genre - Does the narrative have a defined genre? What are the key elements that allow you to point to a specific genre?
Tone - Is it a comedy and if so, what type of comedy, and how do you know what type it is? e.g. slapstick, farce, comic romance, romantic comedy, thriller comedy, satire, black comedy, tragicomedy, etc. NB. If it is not a comedy, the narrative may still have comic moments or comic interludes and it will be worth noting how these are used and whether the tone is consistent throughout. Initiating events - What are the initiating events in the character's story? NB. These may not be the same as the initiating events in the story world. e.g. the reasons a soldier joins a war are often not the same reasons that his country goes to war since they may or may not be connected.
Suspense / dramatic irony - Who do we with sympathise with and why? Why do we pity them and fear for them? On deeper level you might also want to think about historical ironies, cinematic and genre ironies as well as these dramatic ironies.
Task - What do the characters have to do to get what they want? What would happen if they failed?
Opposition - Who stands in their way? Why do they oppose the main character? NB. In a disaster movie this is not necessarily a living creature.
Strengths and weaknesses - What are the main characters strengths and weakness (physical, mental and sociological)? How are these tested during the story? How do opponent(s) attack their weaknesses?
Stages of conflict - What are the main stages of the conflict? How does each stage challenge a different aspect of the character?
Reversals and revelations - What are the main reversals of fortune (from good to bad and vice versa) and revelations during the narrative? How do these help propel the narrative forward?
Recognition - What are the key moments when the audience realises the character will need to make greater efforts to achieve their goals?
Self recognition - Does the main character realise that he or she will need to change in order to defeat their opponent and achieve their goal? If so when does this happen? NB. There may be more than one step to full realisation (if it happens)
Climax - What is the climactic moment of the film and how does this satisfy the big questions the audience has been asking about the characters?
Resolution - Is the conflict resolved in a surprising, interesting and emotionally engaging fashion?
Aftermath - How has the world been changed by the action and conflict we have witnessed?
Narrative techniques that apply to both factual and fictional narratives:
Shots - are any types of shot used more frequently than others? How are they used? How often are they used? Are there any used in judicious moments for special effect? What is that effect?
Angles - Is there any system to the use of lenses and angles?
Cuts - Are any types of cut (on any of the layers) used more frequently than others? What effect does this help produce? Are any used?
Camera Movements - Are there any specific cinematographical camera movements employed? Where and how are they used to reveal new information and create specific effects or moods? e.g. Dolly, Crane Shot, Crash Zoom, Pan, Titles
Composition, colour, etc. - Are there any specific compositional techniques, colour schemes, lighting systems or references to art-history that are being used to influence the audience?
Setting - What is the setting for the film both in terms of the general setting and specific use of locations (or choice not to use them)? You may also want to think about the time in which something is set or how different times or how different eras are established (in period films), compared or contrasted e.g. in epics or documentaries.
Imagery, colour and symbolism - Do the filmmakers choose to use any images, symbols, colours situations that are particularly distinctive on their own or which repeat and create a pattern of meaning? What affect do these uses have? How do these uses relate to external sets of symbols?
Soundscape - Is there anything special about the soundscape? Could be more background or foreground noise? Could be added non-diegetic sounds or special FX? Play the clip without sound, then with sound. How does the sound affect your perception of the action, your understanding of the narrative and your emotional involvement in it? Consider:
- the apparent pace of the action
- the mood of the scene
- motivation for character's actions
- narrative tension and suspense
- any other points.
Music – Is there any particular style or pattern to the music? Is it generally diegetic or non-diegetic? Is there anything significant in the choice or timbre of the chosen instruments or use orchestration? Is the music's use appropriate to the subject matter or used for contrast or juxtaposition? In a factual film you may ask whether use of music is appropriate or whether it carries too much bias? Is it themed in any way to event, character, setting, etc.? How is it used to support the other narrative layers of the film?


These notes were compiled for a Day School earlier this year that looked at extracts from various Indian films/films about India in an attempt to understand how the issues surrounding the Partition of India in 1947 have been represented on screens.
The ‘partition’ of India was the final act by the British colonial administration working through the India Office and the Viceroy (i.e. the King’s representative) in August 1947. The Viceroy then became the Governor-General of India still representing the King as the Head of State in the independent ‘Dominion’ of India. In Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah became Governor-General.
The Labour government in London faced many severe problems in the immediate aftermath of war. The winter of 1946-47 was one of the worst on record in the UK and the heavy snowfalls in January severely disrupted industry and agriculture. As much as 10% of industrial output was lost, energy supplies were severely restricted. Public spending with the foundation of the National Health Service and the expense of military activity abroad (15% of GDP) created pressure on sterling and subsequent devaluation from $4.00 to $2.80 as the dollar exchange rate. Historians see this as the first stage in the UK’s decline as a superpower. Despite the enormity of the Partition of India as an event, it was only one of the problems facing Prime Minister Attlee’s cabinet (withdrawal from Palestine was also a priority). Mountbatten was given considerable powers and the government was prepared to accept a swift retreat from India. Communal conflict has been a feature of life in India at various times throughout recent history (much of it caused directly by British policies) and in August 1946 around 4,000 people lost their lives in Calcutta during clashes between Hindus and Muslims. The lack of action by the colonial authorities at this point is inexcusable, but the British state was increasingly running out of resources to police India effectively. Mountbatten was appointed Viceroy in February 1947, charged with achieving a British withdrawal by June 1948 at the latest. He accelerated the process of withdrawal in an attempt to avoid further violence – but instead probably exacerbated the conflicts.
The leaders of the Indian Independence movement, including Nehru, Jinnah and Gandhi, had been pressing for independence since the 1920s and earlier. (The Congress Party and the Muslim League had origins in the late 19th century and early decades of the 20th century.) The emergence of a ‘two state’ solution is generally accepted to have happened because of the position that Jinnah and the Muslim League adopted in the early 1940s. Jinnah argued for a division according to religious affiliation because of fear that an independent India would be dominated by Hindus. Ironically, Jinnah himself was not a ’religious Muslim’ and the British had encouraged separate political constituencies for Muslims and Hindus and other religious groups as early as 1932 with ‘The Communal Award’. Congress could reasonably argue that Jinnah did not have the support of the majority of Muslims across India as shown in local elections, but he convinced the British that he was the Muslim leader they should negotiate with.
Once partition appeared inevitable (i.e. when Jinnah and Gandhi /Nehru could not agree on how to negotiate with the Viceroy), the fundamental problem became how to divide the three provinces of British India in which there were roughly equal numbers of Muslims and Hindus. Punjab was further complicated by the presence of the home base of Sikhism in Amritsar. Bengal had already experienced a very unpopular earlier partition by the British along religious lines in 1905 (rescinded in 1911). Jammu and Kashmir was actually a ‘princely state’ – not under direct British control. India and Pakistan had to negotiate a partition arrangement after independence and this proved extremely difficult – leading to future military confrontations.
Punjab, Bengal and Kashmir will be the focus of our study of how Partition has been represented on film.
Who was actually responsible for creating this inevitability of Partition in 1947 is the most contentious issue in the history of the period. The most recent British film focusing on Partition, Gurinder Chadha’s Viceroy’s House (2017) lays much of the blame on the wartime British leader Winston Churchill and his attempts in 1944-5 to prepare for the threat of Soviet influence over an independent India. Nehru was seen as most likely to adopt a non-aligned but friendly position vis-a-vis Moscow and Churchill saw the possibility of an independent Pakistan as a Western ally, allowing British bases to remain in place. In a documentary screened on British TV in August 2017, Chadha explored this evidence further (referring to wartime documents held in the British Library). This programme suggested that Jinnah had met privately with Churchill and that the idea of Pakistan as a future ally against the Russians was widely shared by what Chadha termed as “the British establishment” – including the Royal Family and the military. The suggestion is, therefore, that the Attlee government was faced with a fait accompli policy that they were unable to alter. Indian historians and Indian filmmakers have tended to blame Jinnah and the British – either separately or together.
‘British India’ referred to what were in effect British colonies, locally administered by colonial civil servants and the India Office in London. In 1947 there were seven major provinces administered in this way and developed from the original ‘presidencies’ of Bengal, Bombay and Madras.
The British Crown also had ‘suzerainty’ over some 500 plus ‘princely states’, ranging from large states such as Hyderabad and Mysore to tiny states of a few thousand. Each local ruler had to make a separate arrangement with the newly established dominions of India and Pakistan.
The directly ruled colonies and the princely states together comprised the ‘British Raj’ established after the 1857 Indian Mutiny. It also became known as ‘the Indian Empire’.
Languages and local cultures
Religion was just one of the potentially divisive factors in India in 1947 and its impact was felt most strongly in the North. In much of Southern India, language differences and ethnic differences (i.e. the Dravidian South’s mistrust of the Aryan North) were more important. During the 1950s and 1960s, Indian government was re-organised to produce states based on linguistic groups. In the states of West Pakistan and East Pakistan after partition, the fact that the mass of the population in the East spoke Bengali and not Urdu was a major issue for any sense of ‘national identity’.
Indian film industries
We are concerned with representations of the events of Partition and its aftermath on film. One of the important issues for us is to identify which film industry has produced a film and who the ‘creatives’ (writer and director in particular) might be. There are many films about Partition issues as well as many filmmakers from diverse backgrounds. For this reason, I’ve tried to include something from each of the following categories (they are overlapping categories, so some films and filmmakers appear in more than one category). There is no ‘ranking’ in this list.
- Popular (mainstream) Hindi cinema – often now retrospectively termed ‘Bollywood’.
- Popular international or Hollywood ‘studio’ films.
- Indian art films and ‘parallel cinema’ films
- International art films
- Films by Indian diaspora directors
- Indian ‘regional films’ – films in languages other than Hindi (or English)
(Because of difficulties of availability of films, I have not included Pakistani or Bangladeshi films that might address Partition issues)
From the list above, it would be useful to distinguish between a film like Gandhi (1982), Richard Attenborough’s biopic, as an ‘international’ Hollywood studio film and Gurinder Chadha’s Viceroy’s House as an independent British film (with some Hollywood support) directed by a diaspora director – someone whose grandparents left Rawalpindi in 1947 and who now lives in the UK.
The so-called ‘parallel’ or ‘middle cinema’ of India is difficult to define but it is clearly distinguished from the popular Indian cinema of multi-genre narratives and choreographed song and dance sequences. Parallel cinema was/is more ‘serious’ in its social concerns and character development. It is more difficult to distinguish between parallel and ‘art’ or ‘avant-garde’ cinema, the latter being in formal and narrative terms more experimental.
What follows is an attempt to select extracts from films which represent Partition and in some cases its aftermath in Pakistan, West Bengal, Kashmir and Punjab. In some cases, longer posts are available discussing the films in more detail and I have included links where appropriate.
Jinnah (1998, UK-Pakistan, (English) dir Jamil Dehlavi)
This unusual biopic of the Muslim leader stars Christopher Lee in the title role. Director Dehlavi is a diaspora figure based in Europe and he used mostly British-based actors alongside Indian star actor Shashi Kapoor in this co-production with Pakistan that was controversial at the time of its release but has since been accepted in Pakistan.
Subarnarekha (Golden Line, 1962, Bengali, dir Ritwik Ghatak)
Despite being one of the most important filmmakers of his generation, Ritwik Ghatak’s films were not widely appreciated when first released. But when he went on to become one of the first tutors at the Indian Film Institute in Pune, he soon became an influential figure for younger directors. He was very much affected by partition, being forced to move from East to West Bengal. His trilogy of films in the early 1960s uses music and politics to explore the heartbreak of partition. (The other two films in the trilogy are Cloud-Capped Star (1960) and Komal Gandhar (1961).
In Subarnarekha, Ishwar, a man in his late twenties and his younger sister Sita find themselves in a refugee camp in Calcutta where they acquire a stepbrother – a young refugee boy Abhiram who has lost his mother. This trio then find themselves in the western part of Bengal by the Subarnarekha River. The children grow up and fall in love, but the older brother can’t cope with events and breaks down, unable to escape from his past. In the clip above, the landscape is expressive of the despair and sense of exile and loss experienced by Ishwar.
Roja (1992, Tamil, dir Mani Ratnam)
An important film for Indian cinema, Roja is an example of Tamil language popular cinema. Unlike Bollywood, which in the early 1990s preferred stylised fantasy films, Tamil cinema, and Mani Ratnam in particular, created romances set in ‘real’ situations. Roja (‘Rose’ – a symbol for Kashmir) sees a Tamil cryptologist working for Indian intelligence being sent to Kashmir with his young wife. Visiting an area close to the ‘line of control’, he is captured by a Muslim guerrilla group who want to exchange him for one of their own members imprisoned by Indian forces. The film won many awards and was hailed as a ‘patriotic film’, being dubbed into Hindi, Telugu, Marathi and Malayalam. It encouraged Bollywood to think of more serious issues as the basis for entertainment features.
In this clip the cryptologist tries to talk to his captors.
Lakshya (2004, Hindi, dir Farhan Aktar)
This mainstream Bollywood blockbuster was written by the director’s father, Javed Akhtar, one of the most acclaimed writers in Indian cinema. A young man (Hrithik Roshan) from a wealthy Delhi family attempts to give up his aimless life and eventually passes out of the Indian Military Academy. He is posted to Kashmir and given the opportunity to prove himself in action against Pakistani insurgents. The various conflicts on the Kashmir border/line of control feature in several Indian films, often associated with the ‘Kargil War‘ of 1999.
The film shows Hindi cinema attempting to merge a romance (Pretty Zinta is the hero’s ‘lost girlfriend’, a TV reporter) with a story about young India’s indifference towards guarding its border. Ironically, the Colonel of the regiment is played by the supreme Bollywood hero Amitabh Bachchan. At the time Roshan was one of the young hopefuls attempting to replace Bachchan.
The clip below is a ‘music video’ featuring the title song with scenes from the film. We see the hero in training and the role of the Army officer is shown as both heroic and glamorous. It’s worth noting that both the Indian and Pakistani Armies were created out of the British Indian Army in 1947, a situation which initially created the possibility of a civil war situation in which officers and men who had trained together might find themselves on opposite sides in a conflict. The Bollywood presentation suggests that today there is an American influence on how the image of the Indian military is constructed.
Garam Hava (1973, dir M.S. Sathyu)
This film, in Urdu, is one of the first examples of the ‘parallel cinema’ of the 1970s and 1980s. The title translates as ‘Scorching Winds’. They are mentioned in the first few lines of dialogue as threatening the flowering trees of the city of Agra (the city which is the home of the Red Fort and the Taj Mahal, two major symbols of the Muslim Mughal Empire in India). If not uprooted, the trees will wither in the heat. ‘Scorching Winds’ is also metaphorical and refers to the violence of communalism sweeping through India in 1947-8. The film deals with a Muslim owner of a small shoe factory. He decides to stay in Agra, but his brother moves to Karachi and gradually life becomes very difficult for the brother left behind. Garam Hava proved controversial even after more than 20 years since the events depicted. It had a delayed release because of fears of communalist violence. It was supported by the government agency, the NFDC and submitted as India’s entry for Best Foreign Language Oscar.
In the interview above the director and scriptwriter discuss the film and its legacy in some detail. The interview in 2014 was conducted at the time of the film’s re-release. (You need to click on the link and watch the interview directly on YouTube).
Earth (1998, dir. Deepa Mehta)
Earth is an adaptation of an autobiographical novel Cracking India by Bapsi Sidhwa, first published as ‘Ice Candy Man’ in the UK in 1988. The director Deepa Mehta was born in Amritsar in Punjab in 1950. She moved to Delhi as a child and graduated from the University of Delhi. In 1973 she migrated to Canada and started a film career as a writer and documentarist. She directed her first feature in 1991 and as well as English language features in Canada she has returned to India to make four features. Earth was the second film in her ‘Elements’ trilogy after Fire (1996) and preceding Water in 2005. All three films were controversial (Fire addresses lesbianism and Water, the treatment of widows in traditional Hindu culture). They were also highly praised and won prizes. Her 2012 adaptation of Midnight’s Children was less successful (but still well worth watching).
Although this is a film from a diaspora director with photography by Giles Nuttgens from the UK, it is also a film deeply rooted in Indian cinemas. The music is by A. R. Rahman and the actors include the current Bollywood superstar Aamir Khan in an early role. Nandita Das is a star of Indian parallel cinema and other cast members are well-known in India.
The film is part of the group of films, like Garam Hava that deal with the personal tragedies of Partition rather than directly with the political machinations. Like Train to Pakistan its focus on Punjab means that the complexity of religious, social and cultural relationships are explored in some detail.
The film is set in 1947 in Lahore in Northern Punjab. The city has a Muslim majority but the household at the centre of the narrative is Parsee and the little girl who in effect ‘narrates’ the story has a Hindu nanny/maid (Nandita Das) who has a circle of friends that includes Muslims and Sikhs. The clip below shows the girl and the maid during the kite-flying festival and the maid is being wooed by the Aamir Khan character, the Muslim known as the ‘Ice-Candy Man’, one of his several identities. The kite-flying is a joyful competition which ironically underlines how the community will later be divided by the violence of the communal violence in the lead up to Partition.
Train to Pakistan (1998, dir. Pamela Rooks)
This is another film that received backing from NFDC as a later example of a parallel film. Pamela Rooks was a filmmaker born in Calcutta to an Army family, but the film (in Hindi) is set in Punjab. It’s an adaptation of a 1956 novel by Kushwant Singh, himself a major cultural figure in India post 1947.
The trailer above does not have English subtitles but a subtitled DVD is available in the UK. The story is set in an Indian village in 1947 close to the new border with Pakistan. Despite the conflict all around them, the villagers, mostly Sikh landowners and a minority of Muslim labourers, live a peaceful life. The film explores, through various characters, how the peaceful village is drawn into the conflict. The village money-lender is killed when he refuses to open his safe for a band of Sikh dacoits. The local magistrate, befuddled by whisky and a young prostitute, sanctions the arrest of two men – one is a Communist Party member just arrived from Delhi and the other a local dacoit who never robs in his own village and who was sleeping with his Muslim girlfriend when the murder was committed. The magistrate and police attempt to frame both men, meanwhile a train filled with dead Sikhs arrives in the village and a little later, Muslim refugees on foot from India.
Other Partition narratives
The films discussed here are by no means the only examples of film narratives exploring Partition. Here are two other examples not discussed on the day:
Partition (Canada-UK-South Africa 2007)
Another diaspora director, Vic Sarin, made this film in English starring Jimi Mistry, Irrfan Khan and Neve Campbell in Canada. It takes the Sikh perspective on partition in Punjab.
Qissa – The Tale of a Lonely Ghost (India-Germany-France-Netherlands 2013)
I didn’t see this fine film by Anup Singh until after the Partition Event. Please follow the link on the title above for more details. The film again stars Irrfan Khan as a Sikh in the Punjab at the time of partition. Anup Singh is also a diaspora director with a similar but also slightly different background to Gurinder Chadha.
I used the following two books alongside web searches in preparation for the event:
Akbar, M. J. (1985) India: The Siege Within, Harmondsworth: Penguin
Tunzelmann, Alex von (2007) Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire, London: Simon and Schuster
The films from which extracts have been taken have all been available in the UK on DVD except Garam Hava (which is available on YouTube or from India/US as a Region 0 DVD).