NATION MISPLACED

Abstract

Histories and aesthetics of space intersected in South Asian decolonization. The contest for space has continued to be reflected in South Asian cinema from the 1950s to the present. Spatial politics and the aestheticization of spaces both reflect current politics and urban policies and also glance back at colonial and postcolonial histories of national fragmentation and nation-formation. In this essay the relationship of art and politics – of questions of artistic and political truth – is examined by comparing the cinemas of Ritwik Ghatak and Guru Dutt, prominent ‘art’ and ‘commercial’ filmmakers of the 1950s. In their films, I argue, cinematic representations of contested spaces provide the key to deciphering their aesthetic and political beliefs about decolonization and refugee experience. While Ghatak is generally seen as the testier, more radical oppositional chronicler of postcolonial South Asian national fragmentation and individual displacement, a lens such as Guru Dutt's commercial cinema offers an alternative reading of the exigencies of respatialization of a torn and decolonizing nation.

Keywords:

• decolonization
• Dutt
• Ghatak
• historic memory
• South Asia
• space

Notes

¹The Naxalite movement was a Marxist-Leninist Communist Party-led armed insurgency; see http://venus.unive.it/asiamed/eventi/schede/naxalbari.html (accessed 23 December 2008).

²Pheng Cheah (2003) outlines the organismic as an Enlightenment cultural metaphor for peoples and nationalities in Western Europe that appears as spectral in postcolonial nationalities.

³I borrow here Arjun Appadurai's exquisite phrase ‘public sleepers’ about spectral demotic identity in postcolonial Bombay (Breckenridge et al. 2002: 54–81).

⁴‘Cosmetic’ derives from the Greek kosmētikos or, skilled in adornment; and from kosmein, to arrange, adorn; and again from kosmos as order. Cosmetic artistry appeals to a deeper underlying need for order.