Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsRoshni SenguptaRoshni Sengupta is Senior Assistant Professor at the School of Modern Media, University of Petroleum and Energy Studies, India. She previously held Assistant Professor positions at Leiden University, The Netherlands and Jagiellonian University, Poland.Notes1 And this kind of further category is Disclaimer, Euphemism, Evidentiality, Generalization, Hyperbole, Implication, Irony, Polarization, Presupposition, Vagueness, Victimization (Van Dijk, 1997 van Dijk, T. A. (Ed.). 1997. Discourse as Social Interaction: Discourse Studies: A Multidisciplinary Introduction, Vol. 2. Thousand Oaks: Sage. [Google Scholar])2 Naxalism is the ideological moniker of a peasant uprising which began in 1967 in Naxalbari in West Bengal. The origins of the uprising can be traced to the split in 1967 of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), leading to the formation of the Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist). Initially the movement had its centre in West Bengal. In later years, it spread into less developed areas of rural southern and eastern India, such as Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana through the activities of underground groups like the Communist Party of India (Maoist). The response of the state has been replete with counter-insurgent violence which peaked with the raising of an anti-Naxalite armed militia and the numerous instances of violation of basic human rights of the tribal communities that not only populate this region but also sustain the Naxalite forces.3 Directed by Alexander Korda.4 The film depicted the establishment of British influence in a fictional independent state of Tokot in the tribal belt of the NWFP. It featured the good British Captain and the loyal yet treacherous governor of the province who is ultimately convinced by the British of a Russian plan to invade the region. Following the treaty between the tribes and the British, the old ruler and his heir apparent are given a very generous subsidy for life. The calm is marred by a deceitful relative who attempts to murder the British captain and his wife along with the ruler and young prince. The young prince prevents the murder and with the aid of British troops overcome native bloodlust. The resultant portrayal showed India in imminent danger of a Muslim take-over and the British as the only hope of maintaining peace.5 Further, the film condemned the emasculate, impotent and boy-loving natives, the Pathans, while glorifying the overtly heterosexual and masculine qualities of the colonizers. The Frontier male was portrayed in The Drum as a degenerate, prone to debauchery, torture and rape, on the one hand and homosexuality on the other. Parallels could be drawn between such depiction of the Asian male and that of the Persian in the 2007 Hollywood blockbuster 300 (based on the graphic novel created by Frank Miller and directed by Zack Snyder). Curiously, the film disregards the inherent historical flaw in its narrative by presenting the “Asian hordes” as predominantly Muslim, led by a God-king, the Persian monarch Xerxes. Modern Iran is conflated with ancient Persia to create an imagery where the Persians and described as “soulless immortals”, their king being the overlord of a land that thrived on unabashed sexual relations, between both men and women and men and men, personified in the imagery of Xerxes, an effeminate, wimp-like individual with a particular fondness for males. The analogy seeks to validate the claim that the depiction of the Muslim remains intact in Western cinema—overtly religious, bloodthirsty hordes of convoluted souls, plunged to the depths of human depravity.6 It also investigates the notion of nationalism as identity movements continue to rage across the world, the most recent examples coming from North African states such as Tunisia and Egypt where largely youth-driven movements succeeded in deposing dictatorial and brutal presidential regimes. Even though the contexts are different, the arguments for freedom and recognition of identities and freedoms remains the same.7 The hermeneutics of mourning thus takes on the Freudian principle of delayed consequences of trauma, reflected in five decades of Indian films. In Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1995), the author finds a Western parallel for the unfolding of the effects of collective trauma as time passes. He differentiates between the various forms that the act of mourning can take—explicit or subterranean, direct or displaced. The process of mourning moves from understanding, memorializing and finally, overcoming loss.8 While Shabnam articulated the trauma of the Partition through the rhetorical image of a child on the back of a donkey even though the film per se had little to do with the Partition9 Khan also made Muslim socials such as Najma (1943) in which the bride’s parents refuse to accept a bourgeois son-in-law and Elaan (1947) where the heroine is forced to marry the bad rich brother. Following his death, the good poor brother wants to marry her but she commits her life to education and social reform. Mehboob Khan’s films could be construed as cinematic ventures which were created to delineate and make a clear statement to the viewers and audience—that of the urgent need for the emancipation of the Muslims of India.10 Whereas Naushad Ali evoked the aura of the Muslim courts through his path-breaking compositions for films such as Baiju Bawra, Mughal-e-Azam and Mother India, mostly inspired by Hindustani classical music and the rhythms of UP folk music, Ustad Nusrat brought the purity of Sufi tunes from Punjab and Sindh (through the poems and songs of sufi mystic Bulleh Shah) into popular Hindi film music.
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Mar 18, 2024
Chibundu Onyemachi Onyesoh 
