Visual culture and violence: inventing intimacy and citizenship in recent South Asian cinema

Abstract

The 1947 Partition of India has recently re-emerged as a thematic concern of many South Asian films about nationalism in popular and parallel cinema. These films invoke the 1947 Partition in both productive and troubling ways: they connect it to the contemplation of the role of religion in the contemporary nation-state, and of the impact of religious ethnicity, terrorism and gender on the experience of citizenship in both India and Pakistan. Recent popular Bollywood cinema uses the Partition to invent new narratives of secularism and secular nationality for minority citizens; however, these narratives rely on the capture of intimacy and inter-ethnic coupledom for nationalist discourses about citizenship. In contrast, exilic or third cinema offers a postcolonial feminist critique of the terror of ethno-nationalisms in South Asia by representing their violent effects on intimacy in the minority female citizen's everyday life.

Keywords:

• India
• Pakistan
• Bollywood cinema
• gender
• secularism
• religion
• nationalism

Notes

1. Hall, ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’, 402.

2. Chakrabarty, ‘Modernity and Ethnicity in India’. I use the terms ‘religious identity’ and ‘ethnic identity’ interchangeably, as I find it productive, following Dipesh Chakarbarty's suggestion, to see contemporary communal conflict in South Asia as a modern conflict of ethnicity akin to racism, rather than an ahistorical conflict between primordial, essentialized ‘religious’ communities.

3. Mishra, Bollywood Cinema, 32.

4. Naficy, An Accented Cinema, 4.

5. Daiya, Violent Belongings.

6. Kipnis, ‘Adultery’, 323.

7. Berlant, ‘Intimacy’, 288.

8. Nandy, ‘Introduction’, 12–13.

9. Mishra, Bollywood Cinema, 33.

10. Dwyer, Filming the Gods, 133.

11. http://www.telegraphindia.com/1010621/national.htm, http://www.gujaratplus.com/00–01archive/arc477.html.

12. Spivak, ‘Subaltern Studies’, 231.

13. Singh, I ACCUSE … — The Anti-Sikh Violence of 1984.

14. Dwyer, Filming the Gods, 166.

15. Chatterjee, Nation and Its Fragments; Ray, Engendering India.

16. Khan, ‘Nationalism and Hindi Cinema’, 92.

17. Biswas, ‘Couple and Their Spaces’, 130.

18. Prasad, ‘Signs of Ideological Re-Form’, 166.

19. Khan, ‘Nationalism and Hindi Cinema’, 95.

20. Rajan, Scandal of the State, 168.

21. Thoraval, Cinemas of India, 128.

22. Berlant, Queen of America Goes to Washington City.

23. Butler, Precarious Life, 144.

24. Sumar, ‘Interview with Sabiha Sumar’.

25. Naficy, An Accented Cinema, 6.

26. Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, 308.

27. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 86.

28. Williams, Alchemy of Race and Rights, 73.

29. Berlant and Warner, ‘Sex in Public’, 318.