Pakistani Englishness and the Containment of the Muslim Subaltern in Ayub Khan-Din's Tragi-comedy Film East is East

Abstract

East is East, through carnivalising modes and techniques, reworks social histories and restrictive notions of individual, cultural, racial, and national identity. This essay examines the roles that rehistoricisation, spatial encodings and the carnivalesque elements of rude language, popular culture, and sexual imagery play in the film's satirical project. Yet, it also argues that the structural dimensions and motifs of the screenplay drive the film towards the containment not only of a father who indulges in domestic abuse against children and wife, but also the containment of certain kinds of Pakistani Muslim subject positions in Britain. The character George Khan is circumscribed to a subaltern position of troublesome and potentially volatile ‘alien’ in both family and nation. Ultimately, the film reinforces the notion that within the plural British nation, an essential polarity exists between ‘East and West’.