This paper argues that Chak De! India is an ideational assemblage for the nation in its 60th year. Deploying two foundational tropes that accompanied the coming into existence of the geo-political entity called India, Chak De! India provides a contemporary anthem to the contemporary nation. These two inaugural stages in the birth of the nation that haunt Hindi cinema are replayed intermittently through its postulated resolutions: (1) the idea of the Hindu-Muslim solidarity and (2) the idea of the 'states' of India. This paper will address the ways in which Chak De! India takes the assembling principle of a secular and plural Hindi cinema for granted and adapts it for Bollywood, particularly with regards to its principal character, Coach Kabir Khan. It will also assess how Shah Rukh Khan, the superstar who plays the role of the coach, (dis)assembles the character of the Muslim in Hindi cinema. In context of the global reach and influence of Bollywood, this paper asks how assemblages of this resolutely 'Indian' kind may or may not travel or translate across oceanic waters.
The obsession with “remains” in the wake of a devastated human century has been taken up in the work of European philosophers like Walter Benjamin, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Lévinas, and Jacqueline Rose and theorists like Marianne Hirsch and Kaja Silverman. That the Jewish Holocaust looms large over these theorizations and that the graphemic (both inscribed and visual) presides over these discourses on “remains” is undeniable, but these animadversions also open the door to other kinds of unmoorings and unravelings. This specter of spectacular death that haunts our historical moment is rendered suspect in Indo-American writer Jhumpa Lahiri's work; instead, in her death-ly preoccupation with the realm of the intimate and the domestic, she offers an unspeakably private contradistinction to public forms and forums of clamorous mourning. I understand Lahiri's work as first and foremost offering an ethics of mourning and a poetics of remembrance, where the death scene is made the literal representation of the in absentia remains of a model diaspora. The death scenes perform the function of witnessing the otherwise uncataloged lives of a specific migrant community she writes about, the Hindu Bengalis from the Indian subcontinent. In Lahiri's fiction, death in the adopted land becomes a site for fixing and rooting the migrant into his or her adopted country, a claim final and irrefutable. The deeply personal nature of her strokes brings our attention back to the domestic and quotidian aspects of “common” death scenes in a century embroiled in the spectacularity of death. Lahiri captures the ways in which death scenes necessitate a deeply involved and intricate processing of remains, a processing that calls on us to marshal all that is contextual in the human socius. This is not to suggest that the private and the personal are not the political; to the contrary, it is precisely in her refusal to proclaim publicity for her death scenes along with a relentless pursuit of that which remains (and not) that Lahiri critiques the politicized vulgarization of death in our times.
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