Retooling Trauma: Partition as Celebratory Nationalism in Neoliberal Metropolitan Cinema

Abstract

‘Retooling Trauma’ scrutinizes the deployment of the Partition trope in 21^st century Indian cinema. Using three films released between 2013 and 2017—Bhaag Milkha Bhaag, Rajkahini, and Begum Jaan—the paper elaborates on these films’ popular cultural maneuver of evoking historical trauma eventually to sideline it, for the sake of political-esthetic legitimacy. Far from the raw jingoism of the turn-of-the-millennium Partition films such as Gadar, Hé Ram, and Pinjar, these films adopt Partition trauma as backstory, coopting Partition violence as accelerant for otherwise weak plotlines. The advertisements and trailers of the films, however, highlight Partition as the driving force behind the narratives. How does this approach—of marketing a film around a political essence—compare with the earlier strategies of over-iteration and over-performance of Partition violence? The paper will answer this question through a contextual explication of these films’ style and content.

Keywords:

• Partition
• Bollywood
• Bengali cinema
• melodrama
• nationalism
• jingoism

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Amar Chitra Katha is a popular brand of comic books based on biographies of mythical, historical, and current-day figures.

2 Invalid source specified.

3 https://youtu.be/y-kQN4RorPU, accessed February 28, 2023.

4 https://youtu.be/5NIh2iUmTcc, accessed February 28, 2023.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rini Bhattacharya Mehta

Rini Bhattacharya Mehta is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and an affiliate of National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Her book on Indian Cinema, Unruly Cinema: History, Politics, and Bollywood was published by University of Illinois Press in June 2020.

She has published two co-edited anthologies: Bollywood and Globalization: Indian Popular Cinema, Nation, and Diaspora (Anthem Press, 2010) and Indian Partition in Literature and Films: History, Politics, Esthetics (Routledge, 2014). One of the recipients of University of Illinois’s first Presidential Initiative to Celebrate the Impact of the Arts and the Humanities, she is the creator of a Digital Humanities Project on Global Film History.