The present paper sets out an explanatory framework for understanding Third World industrial relations systems. In the framework, distinct features of the Third World industrial relations systems are explained from a macro-based analysis of the past and present social, political and economic environment. It is also argued that the distinctive features of Third World industrial relations systems, compared with the west, are not expected to be eliminated in the foreseeable future. Thus, the explanatory framework for studying Third World industrial relations systems in this paper rejects the idea of 'convergence' between the industrial relations systems of the west and the Third World based on both the 'logic of industrialism' and the 'organizational-oriented late development' theses. Problems of the Third World industrial relations systemThe unique character of the Third World's industrial relations system has been emphasized by various writers in the past (Ross 1966; Dore 1974;Clegg 1976). The main features of the Third World industrial relations system that distinguish it from the developed countries of the west are a dualistic economic structure, where a pre-capitalist economic system mainly dominates the scene; a small industrial sector and the related small numerical size of the working class; a segmented labour market, where a sharp dualism both between modern and traditional manufacturing sectors and between small and large firms exists; the dominance of the state in the industrial sector; weak trade unions, and thus the absence of collective bargaining between employers and employees.Various explanations have been put forward for this very different character of the industrial relations system of the Third World. The explanations can be broadly divided into two main groups. First, there is the popular culturalbased explanation for the difference in the industrial relations system of the Third World. According to this explanation, such conditions as culture, tradition and custom are said to be primary influences on the industrial relations systems of the Third World. Moreover, it is often argued that these phenomena not only lead to a different industrial relations system for the Third World from that of the west, but also differentiate the industrial relations system of one Third World country or region from another. For example, the Indian traditional culture is widely held to be responsible for the development of a paternalistic industrial relations system there (Kennedy 1982, 259). In
This essay examines the missing national film archive of Pakistan against the politics of competing cultural memory. Sharing a common past yet existing in the shadows of the Indian film industry, cinema in Pakistan found itself in an unusual predicament after decolonization and Partition. While filmmaking was expected to carry the imprint of national difference, the intercultural context of colonial India bequeathed the industry its traditions and personnel. Yet when the British Film Institute repatriated colonial Indian films in the mid-1960s, the holdings went entirely to India. The lack of a public film repository denied Pakistan not only its colonial heritage but also the systematic preservation of its postcolonial film culture. In the absence of a state archive, what has emerged in the country is a democratic archive consisting of independent collectors, magazine proprietors, and avid users. Using a term extracted from one of the archives, filmaria (film fever), Siddique reads in the popular film archives the contagious circumstances of intercultural cinema. It alerts us to a film contagion widespread in the subcontinental publics that thrives on filmgoing, cinematic resemblance, and embodied cultural memory, a condition caused by the displacements of Partition and the creation of national difference.
This article is a star study of actress Meena Shorey, whose career navigated the tortuous itinerary of a divisive decolonization, travelling amongst cities and nations, identities and communities, and refugees and citizens. Becoming famous as the "droll queen," Meena appeared in a number of romantic comedies in post-Partition Bombay, which were directed by her husband and refugee filmmaker Roop K. Shorey, and loosely modeled on the Hollywood screwball. With unconventional gender dynamics and Meena as the ultimate star of these comedies, I argue that the Shorey films were sublime renderings of Partition social relations fissured along community and gender. Ek Thi Ladki (1949), in particular, is a Partition screwball that carries the historic imprint through a cynical humor, the nostalgia for Lahore and the reorientations of national perspectives. As the interfaith romance and marriage between a Muslim Meena and a Hindu Roop constituted a utopian alliance that informed the circulation of these films, it also served as a discursive site for communal and national tensions. Using archival sources accessed in both India and Pakistan, including Meena's memoir, the article recovers the productive cosmopolitanism that characterized the short-lived Meena-Roop collaboration, which ended with the actress's migration to Pakistan.
Identifying the earliest examples that document partition in Bombay cinema, this article delves into the relationship between a historic trauma and physical comedy through the star performance of Meena Shorey in a trilogy of romantic comedies, Ek Thi Larki (Once There Was a Girl, 1949), Dholak (Drumbeats, 1951), and Ek Do Teen (One Two Three, 1953). In these films, the female protagonist wrestles men, scales walls, drives tractors, and makes a spectacle of herself, demonstrating a complete disregard for received ideas of femininity. Informed by her multiple marriages, irreverent religious conversions, switches in national location, and a disavowal of the “partition serious,” Meena's image in these comedies served as visual innuendo for the abducted woman. Adapting the trope of a piteous partition figure to explore the possibility of feminine liberation, the Shorey comedies bring about a radical cinematic recovery through the laughter-inducing abandon of their star comedienne.
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