Sanctity and scandal: The mythologization of mother India

Thomas, Rosie

doi:10.1080/10509208909361312

Cited by 73 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…56–57, 2006, p. 55). Mehboob Khan's 1957 film, Mother India , thus, becomes as a definitive post-colonial cinematic “nationalist rebuttal” to Mayo's imperialist text, affirming its essentialized, civilizational figuration (Sinha 2006, p. 25; see also Roy 1998; Schulze 2002; Thomas 1989). 7…”

Section: An Expanded Space Of Esthetic Circulationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

FromThe Good EarthtoMother India: esthetic circulations of peasant womanhood between India and China

Grewal

2022

International Journal of Asian Studies

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The mid-1920s to the 1950s witnessed the uneasy imbrication of the rural, the peasantry, and women as symbols and subjects of the nation in the era of anti colonial and socialist movements in both India and China. This essay examines this rural/peasant/woman nexus within conflicting representations of the peasant woman as embodiment of the nation's past, present and future, to map a range of connected global political-aesthetic imaginations of Indian and Chinese nationhood. A close analysis of the convergence of three texts – Pearl Buck's novel, The Good Earth (1931), Katherine Mayo's polemic, Mother India (1927), and Indian director Mehboob Khan's re-staging and transformation of both in his 1957 film, Mother India – opens up to a wider set of entangled Indian and Chinese co-texts within an expanded space of global aesthetic circulation. Together, these texts reveal a contested history of representations of the rural, the peasantry, and women in projections of Indian and Chinese national becoming that, in the end, cannot be easily recuperated or consolidated within singular nation-state narratives.

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Section: An Expanded Space Of Esthetic Circulationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

FromThe Good EarthtoMother India: esthetic circulations of peasant womanhood between India and China

Grewal

2022

International Journal of Asian Studies

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“…Following scholars such as Laura Mulvey (1977) and, in the South Asian context, Rosie Thomas (1989), Patricia White has argued, writing of Lebanese cinema, that, ‘In the time-honoured traditions of film melodrama, political and social conflicts are displaced onto such personal concerns and resolved (or not) emotionally rather than systemically’ (White, 2015, p. 104). In Pakistani dramas, depictions of family strife help reveal the growing collective valorisations of piety and the religious challenges shaping national identities since the 1980s.…”

Section: Family Dramas Kin Relations and Islamic Authoritymentioning

confidence: 99%

Mirāt ul-‘Urūson the Small Screen: Family TV Dramas and the Making of Pious Publics in Pakistan

Montpellier¹

2019

BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies

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This article analyses three Pakistani television adaptations of Nazir Ahmad’s novel Mirāt ul-‘Urūs to better understand the role of television dramas, an entertainment genre, in shaping pious publics. Scholarly attention to the novel, notably Shenila Khoja-Moolji’s work (2018) on the two most recent adaptations, primarily discuss feminine piety, women’s education and modes of instilling middle class values for women in these narratives. This article shifts focus to examine more broadly how dramas contend with family tensions, how they conceptualise familial duty, and how this widened focus on family provides new insights on religion in these adaptations. The article explores the concept of ‘religious-adjacent’ issues (‘ side-chizen’), a category that emerges from ethnographic fieldwork in the Pakistani television industry. This framing helps us understand not only the ways in which narratives are structured around private piety and tensions arising from familial duty, but also the changing forms of circulation and online audience engagement of these dramas, all of which play an important role in shaping religious publics in contemporary Pakistan.

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“…Theoretical precedents developed in relation to objects of study elsewhere and at earlier times-early cinema in the USA (Hansen, 1991;Singer, 2001), silent Shanghai cinema (Hansen, 2000), or popular 1950s Hindi cinema (Thomas, 1989;Vasudevan, 2000)-suggest that cinema has had the potential to constitute alternative spheres of intersubjective recognition and collective articulation of identity. The conjunctures in which such potential has arisen have tended to be characterized by specific combinations of mass-market expansion, rapid urbanization, migration, and particularly in India's case, profound political rupture and utopian nationalist energy.…”

Section: Rhyming Address and Recognitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mother Indiain Six Voices: Melodrama, Voice Performance, and Indian Films in Siam

Ingawanij

2012

BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies

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The most successful period of circulation of Indian movies in Siam (Thailand) was from the 1950s to the 1970s. Vernacularizing them meant, in this case, transforming them into melodramatic cinema experience through the "versioning" art of the film narrators or voice performers. This article traces the enmeshment of popular Indian films within a local, plebeian cinema dispositive, in which film exhibition was subsumed under the paradigm of the oral and improvisatory theatrical entertainment. What became "melodramatic" about Indian (largely Hindi) movies as a result of their metamorphosis within this particular arrangement of technology, voice, text and bodies is the first question to address. The second is what it means now to redeem an experience of affective intensity occasioned by the circulation of Indian movies in Siam during the Cold War.

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Sanctity and scandal: The mythologization of mother India

Cited by 73 publications

References 2 publications

FromThe Good EarthtoMother India: esthetic circulations of peasant womanhood between India and China

FromThe Good EarthtoMother India: esthetic circulations of peasant womanhood between India and China

Mirāt ul-‘Urūson the Small Screen: Family TV Dramas and the Making of Pious Publics in Pakistan

Mother Indiain Six Voices: Melodrama, Voice Performance, and Indian Films in Siam

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