MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

The Partition of India (1947) along religious-ethnic lines was accompanied by genocidal violence between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs which led to two million deaths and displaced over twelve-sixteen million people. My paper is a part of a larger project which endeavors to understand the role of Partition film as cultural memory work in a context where trauma enables a limited access to the event via the distortions of repression. My talk will interrogate the ambivalent negotiations of the Partition in post-1947 cinema by focusing on two popular commercial (Bollywood) renditions, Manmohan Desai’s Chhalia (The Trickster, 1960), and Yash Chopra’s Dharmputra ( The moral man, 1961), products of a turbulent era which saw two wars between India and Pakistan (1965, 1971).
I will focus on the representations of women and the technologies of gender undergirding post-Partition Indian cinema which plays a powerful role in consolidating the imagined community of the nation. Women emerge as symbols of anxiety in both films, fluid signifiers who circulate “between men”, symbolic sites upon which intergenerational and interethnic affective bonds are forged. In Chhalia, women (abducted or otherwise) emerge as symbols of patriarchal exchange with the family and the national community ultimately held up as a woman’s “proper” refuge. In contrast, Dharmputra, one of the first films to address Hindu nationalism and majoritarian violence asserts and ruptures the normative discourse about the Partition. Problematizing the iconicity of the maternal as a symbol of the nation, Dharmaputra both corroborates and disrupts the gendered semiotic undergirding national cinema, subverting the resonant Bollywood trope of suffering maternity. Men are simultaneously depicted as victims and oppressors, while the cinematic narrative stages the traumatic implosion of identity, collapsing the binary between the self and the other.