Postcolonial Studies and Bollywood : Rang De Basanti

Hello Beautiful People...
I am Riddhi Bhatt. You know...what is today's blog ?This blog is Thinking Activity : Postcolonial Studies and Bollywood. This task is assigned by Prof. Dr. Dilip Barad sir, Head of the English Department of Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavsinhji Bhavnagar University (MKBU). As a part of the syllabus, students of English department are learning the paper The Postcolonial Studies(paper-203). So, let’s start making this wonderful blog task. But before we start I want to give short information about what kind of things we see here…
I am going to discuss postcolonial criticism in the popular Bollywood movie, ' Rang De Basanti'.So discuss some of the important aspects of the movie which reveal this theory.Before discussing postcolonial theory in this movie.  I would like to give you a brief indication about  what postcolonialism means.

Postcolonialism :

Postcolonialism is the critical academic study of the cultural legacy of colonialism and imperialism, focusing on the human consequences of the control and exploitation of colonized people and their lands. More specifically, it is a critical theory analysis of the history, culture, literature, and discourse of (usually European) imperial power.

At times, the term postcolonial studies may be preferred to postcolonialism, as the ambiguous term colonialism could refer either to a system of government, or to an ideology or world view underlying that system. However, postcolonialism (i.e., postcolonial studies) generally represents an ideological response to colonialist thought, rather than simply describing a system that comes after colonialism, as the prefix post- may suggest. As such, postcolonialism may be thought of as a reaction to or departure from colonialism in the same way postmodernism is a reaction to modernism; the term postcolonialism itself is modeled on postmodernism, with which it shares certain concepts and methods.

Rang De Basanti : 

Rang De Basanti (Color me Saffron) tells us the story of Caucasian and Hindi speaking, British filmmaker, Sue, who comes to India to make a documentary on India’s revolutionary and legendary freedom fighters, Bhagat Singh, Chandrashekar Azad, Sukhdev, Rajguru and Ashfaqullah Khan who were instrumental in India’s struggle against the British.He five Indian youngsters she chooses to play the revolutionaries are.. The group of friends is at first unable to relate the characters they portray.

Characters in movie :

1. Laxman Pandey (Atul Kulkarni), a Hindu fundamentalist with olitical aspirations; 

2. 
   Daljit Singh called DJ (Aamir Khan), a Punjabi guy who is also an ex-student of the university and uninterested in the life outside the universities’ gates; 

3. Aslam (Kunal Kapoor), a rational Muslim ; 

4. Sukhi (Sharman Joshi) , a fun loving guy primarily interested in women; 

5. Karan (Siddharth) a rich kid who dreams of settling abroad and shares an estranged relationship with his father; and 

6. Sonia (Soha Ali Khan) , a youth activist who is engaged to a patriotic pilot Ajay (Mad-havan).
   

Sue’s first meeting with the friends is disrupted when members of a Hindu polit-ical party (youth-wing) clad in ‘saffron’ clothes and led by Laxman Pandey object to the partying habits of college students. The attitude of the Hindu party workers in RDB has been compared to the actions of the ‘Shiv Sainiks’, a radical Hindu political group, whose members not only oppose western culture but also the presence of Muslims in India
Sue, who is impressed by the bonding between the friends, requests them to act in her film. However, Sue’s idea is rejected by the friends who find it hard to relate to the concept of nationalism. Even the patriotic Ajay is unable to change his friends’ opinions on this subject and accepts defeat. This scene gained immense popularity among audiences for capturing the disillusionment and angst of the urban, middle class in post independent India.Mehra by capturing the mood of the urban, middle class in India augments the socio-cultural realism experienced by the viewers in RDB. This aspect serves to enhance realism at the level of recognition in the above sequence.

The farewell party of Ajay where DJ, Aslam and Karan get into a dispute with Ajay over the futility of sacrificing one’s life for the country. While Ajay argues that one’s nation is worth dying for, the others in the group disagree with Ajay because they find India’s corruption and bureaucracy unworthy of their patriotic allegiance. Ajay who is disturbed by the perspective of his friends tries to reason with them by telling them that, “while it is easy to criticize the political system it is not so easy to take the responsibility to change practices in society”. Ajay advises his friends to stop critiquing the government and join politics or the army to make a difference in society or prove their allegiance to the nation.
Ajay’s death and the subsequent lathi charge by the police are the turning points in movie uses these incidents to comment on political corruption and the recent police atrocities on student protests in India.To highlight the same,  yet again re-creates the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in which we  observe the defence minister ordering the massacre on helpless people, one of whom is Ajay. The second Jallianwala Bagh sequence is also shot in black and white tones except for splashes of red to depict the spilling of human blood. Mehra uses the intellectual montage style of editing to draw parallels between the ruthless British soldiers of the past and the corrupt Indian politicians of the present.

Sue's encounters with the locals is liberated from historical colonial relationship, despite her wall of photos, maps, and writings with her grandfather's diary. However,rather than merely signifying a neo-colonial Orientalism, Sue's fascination with Indian history, lan-guage, and culture offers proof of the potential commercial viability of an "Indianness" that can be transmitted; her presence in the movie as a near Indian demonstrates the global reach of Bollywood through the inclusion of the Western subject as protagonist. This particular Bollywood iteration of mo- dernity, the colonial paradigm of "going native" transforms into the transnational paradigm of "going global." Here is an India seemingly liberated from history, a history that only Sue, an outsider, seems to covet.
Here I also want to talk about one article's some point that argue about postcolonialism in arnd De Basanti that.....
Jann Dark has argued that the white woman's association with capitalism and modernity in Rang de Basanti, Lagaan, and Indian advertisements, buttresses the dominance of the Indian male and affirms nationalist constructions of gender. Dark suggests that romance with the white woman offers a form of redemption for the various humiliations the Indian male suffered in the colonial dynamic and offers a fantasy of symbolic wholeness á la Frantz Fanon. Indeed, this introduction of the British woman in both Lagaan and Rang de Basanti harkens back to the imperialist romances popular in the 1980s, based on the novels of E.M. Forester and Paul Scott. Both David Lean's film Passage to India and the television series Jewel in the Crown highlight the British woman's consumption of Indian culture and the perils of such erotic consumption. In these films, the erotic gaze of the British woman is correlated directly to the punishment of the Westernized Indian man, who is jailed and beaten for his purported sexual aggression against her. The eroticism in these romances depends on the sadomasochistic degradation of the Indian male linked to the British woman's excessive, misplaced, and ultimately impossible desire. Renato Resaldo has perhaps the most blunt description of the "paradox" of "imperialist nostalgia" that plays out in these romances: ( "The Anti-Colonial Revolutionary in Contemporary Bollywood Cinema" )

THANK YOU........