Historicising the colonial past of India and Hindi cinema

Abstract

ABSTRACT The idea of India as a nation has its seeds rooted in the political leadership for the struggle of independence in the colonial history. The pathway of such struggles stemmed from the social-cultural sphere of the society that imagined India free from the shackles of debt and slavery from the colonial British. Visual imagination and representation of political struggles that made, unmade, and remade the notion of India have been documented in the Hindi Cinema. However, analysing Hindi cinema from perspective of imagination of a nation has received less attention and needs a serious critical engagement. This article investigates Lagaan (2001), a Hindi film, based on anti-colonial struggle to understand how the nation is imagined in the cinematic text. It explores the peasants' role in the struggle and the relationship of the peasants with the nation, in a larger debate on colonialism and anti-colonial movements by using dialectics as a method.