Indian Cinema and the Presentist Use of History: Conceptions of “Nationhood” in Earth and Lagaan

Abstract

This article critically assesses Deepa Mehta's Earth (1998) and Ashutosh Gowariker's Lagaan (2001) as cultural outputs of recent political and historical debates over the nature of India's nationhood. The article argues that the films politicize history, constructing an innocent past with the aim of advocating a more inclusive Indian society.

Metonymies of Fear: Islamophobia and the Making of Muslim Identity in Hindi Cinema

“…To accomplish this, these movies have attempted at promoting discourses concerning the dominant culture, entirely relegating the minorities into a state of oblivion. In this regard, the role of these films in fabricating the past by creating disjunctive images of Muslims and misrepresenting their actions as anti-national forms a significant component of what has been called by Lichtner and Bandyopadhyay (2008: 435) as a history war. In pursuit of its divisive engagement in this history war, this section of Bollywood cinema has constantly perpetuated the cliché of the inherently arrogant Muslims and the supposedly tolerant Hindus 7…”

“…Kamal Haasan’s film Hey Ram (‘Oh God’, 2000, Kamal Haasan) is one such instance which ingenuously projects a bold narrative of Muslim bloodlust and Hindu trauma, juxtaposed with the notion of Mahatma Gandhi’s politics of Muslim appeasement (Vasudevan 2002: 2918). In the same way, another film, Pinjar (‘The Cage’, 2003, Chandra Prakash Dwivedi) also attempts at glorifying in a latent manner the dominant majoritarian notion in India that the Muslims are vindictive and barbaric (Lichtner and Bandyopadhyay 2008: 452).…”