Paper short abstract:

In contemporary India, where absence of direct political critique is seemingly apparent in cinema, the paper investigates how the nuanced political rhetoric, appearing in satirical terms, carves a newer form. It takes two films, Tere Bin Laden (2010) and Matru Ki Bijlee Ka Mandola (2013) as cases here.

Paper long abstract:

This paper attempts recognizing the vectors of political resistance in India, offered largely by the non-urban citizen subjects vis-à-vis the dissidence of the middle class intelligentsia against ideological imperatives of the discourse of development forwarded by the government-corporate coalition, while exploring the tinges of a few recent political satire films. It considers two Hindi films, Tere Bin Laden (Abhishek Sharma, 2010) and Matru Ki Bijlee Ka Mandola (Vishal Bhardwaj, 2013) as cases in point. Tere Bin produces a sheer criticism of the project of 'War on Terror' in the aftermath of 9/11 while mocking at the wholesome imagination of an 'American Dream', which the aspiring new middle class of India is an important part of. Its selection of the Pakistani city of Karachi as the physical space for narrative unfolding interestingly connects the issue of media manufacture of war, specifically in the South Asian context. On the other hand, Matru barges into the issue of land acquisition and brings in contemporary Maoist movement as a constituent of the spectrum of the resistance. The satire in Matru develops on the split-personality of an alcoholic billionaire who fluctuates between his dreams and delusions of whether to develop a modern township transforming his own village Mandola or to honour the rights of the farmers to keep their lands.

In contemporary India, where the absence of direct political criticism through cinematic terms is seemingly apparent, the paper investigates how the nuanced political rhetoric, appearing in satirical terms, carves a form of resistance in mainstream cinema.

Paper short abstract:

In Bollywood Kashmir has always been represented as a romantic Heaven. But the Kashmir insurgency of the 1990s created a new type of Kashmir film dealing with belonging and terrorism. I examine the changing narratives of these films and its implications for nationalism, patriotism and identity.

Paper long abstract:

Since the 1960s Kashmir has been represented in Bollywood films as romantic Heaven on Earth, the metaphor of love and lust. But what happened, when reality and imagination diverged to that extent that even filmmakers were not able to overlook the gap? The violent Kashmir insurgency of the 1990s created such a situation and a new type of Kashmir films was born: the genre dealing with belonging, terrorism and religion.

Hindi cinema has a following and impact unmatched by any other cinema, and it has a strong role in the building of a national identity. Bollywood films do not describe reality and do not thrive to do so, but are reflecting the way India is viewing its past, present and future, thus providing an invaluable insight into the nation's self-image. For this reason, it is very instructive to examine in Bollywood films the role of the Kashmir conflict, one of the most formative events with regards to India's relations to Pakistan and thus its own national identity.

Bollywood has dealt with the topic with extensively in the 1990s and 2000s, establishing a genre dealing with the Kashmir conflict. Films have been made from various angles and viewpoints with regards to the role of "the terrorist", the role of the Indian and Pakistani states in producing and sustenance of the conflict, the people of Kashmir and the role of religions. In my presentation I examine the changing narratives of this type of films and its implications for nationalism, patriotism and identity.

Paper short abstract:

Popular Hindi films have in the recent past witnessed a trend towards secularizing the Muslim in film narratives. The paper would endevour to explore these tendencies and their political implications.

Paper long abstract:

The unmistakable tendency of recent film narratives to posit the on-screen Muslim in secular spaces with non-religious motivations remains an intriguing trend in the development of popular Hindi cinema, commonly known as Bollywood cinema. This trend marks a break from earlier representations of Muslims as terrorists, communal propagandists and rioters. The New Wave, therefore, portrays Muslims as central protagonists with the narratives assigning them agendas and motives that are not religious or faith-driven. For example, in Gangs of Wasseypur the actions of the Muslim clans were motivated not by religion but by enmities arising out of turf battles between rivals gangs. The paper would like to explore these recent tendencies and their political implications.

Paper short abstract:

Less known German filmmaker Franz Osten’s Indian films, with strong political undertone, have contributed in developing cultural perspectives on India in pre-war German Cinema. He explores class, caste and community and merges local and global politics. I review how he represents politics on screen.

Paper long abstract:

The role of the less known German filmmaker Franz Osten, who directed seventeen Indian films (between 1925 and 1939) and contributed in the development of a cultural perspective on India in the pre-war German cinema, needs a reassessment. While we fail to acknowledge Osten's contribution in Indian Cinema, I argue that his significance can be best understood when his films are approached from a political point of view. Osten explores class, caste and community and explains the interplay between politics and culture in Indian society. I use David Bordwell's Historical Poetics of Cinema to outline the framework for my argument.

I study three silent films and three talkies of Franz Osten and analyze the political themes and cultural contexts these films try to address. Most of these cultural debates and political actions represented in the film stem not only from Osten and his team's creative innovations but also from social changes affected by politics during that time. I discuss how structurally and stylistically his films have a political flavour and also how he merges local and global politics. I briefly discuss some of the techniques used by Osten and the earlier filmmakers to represent politics on screen . I also explore how his films have influenced later developments in politics based films. In conclusion, by closely examining these six films, my paper sheds new light on the less recognized contribution of Franz Osten and his much neglected films.

Paper short abstract:

The paper will review the nature of political ideas expressed in mainstream Bollywood films and co called 'indie' films. The purpose is to look for the political ideology behind the camera.

Paper long abstract:

The non-main stream cinema in India has always looked for a way to express political ideas. It suffices to look at some of the Ritwik Ghosh's or Shyam Benegal's films. The contemporary so called 'indie' film industry is thus no different in its desire to film political ideas. The difference is perhaps in its reach to audience and its presence in main-stream cinema halls. On the other hand, the main stream Bollywood production has been often described as 'escapist' cinema, cinema of hallucinations and dreams. After year 2000 things have however started to change. Shah Rukh Khan's films like Swades, Main hoon na, etc. have smuggled into a romantic narrative political ideas of nationalism and patriotism that a general viewer in India will probably welcome as natural and satisfactory. Yet, there appears to be a limit to what can be shown and debated in mainstream cinema, as can be seen from the example of 'Slumdog Millionaire'. Although popular among mainstream goers, it had also started a complex debate among them, as they changed their opinions on the film, depending on the views expressed about the film by society's celebrities, politicians and influential people among their own communities. Thus the film screen becomes the place of public debate, asking difficult questions on gender, sexuality, corruption, white-collar crime, workers rights, etc. The offer of calm, everlasting happy nationalistic India, defended by heroic sacrifices of police, soldiers etc. appears not to appease all viewers.

Paper short abstract:

The presentation will discuss, in the context of contemporary socio-political debates on ecology in India and using a few contemporary texts from Hindi, Urdu and Bengali literature, how subaltern voices speak about the pressing environmental problems to and on behalf of their neighborhood.

Paper long abstract:

South Asia is often viewed as one of the regions that, having developed its environmentalism belatedly, is showing little or almost no commitment to the cause of ecologically sustainable future, at least on the level of central and local decision-makers. Yet, in India, the work of social activists, academics and local heroes fighting for better environment is known to many. The presentation will use the context of contemporary socio-political debates on ecology in order to discuss, basing on the examples from contemporary vernacular (Hindi, Urdu, Bengali) literature, the way many subaltern voices speak about the pressing environmental problems to and on behalf of the people from his own neighborhood. Environmentally-engaged literature often emerges from the peripheral regions - the tribal parts of Chhattisgarh and West Bengal, the hills of Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh. Some village- and small-town communities seem to be maintaining particularly strong connections to their land and nature. Collections of stories set in Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand by S.K.Phull, S.R.Harnot, Shekhar Joshi, collections of poetry by Mohan Sahil, Vinod Kumar Shukla, Uday Prakash, novels by Mahashweta Devi provide an insight into the present-day environmental philosophy and ecological concerns of India's ām ādmī and the local policy-makers.

Paper short abstract:

Addressing the concatenating forms of structural and‘slow’ violence that precipitate farmer suicides in Vidarbha, I examine how Sonora Jha’s Foreign strategically negotiates the representational challenge of new figures of subalternity through a performative aesthetics of ‘literary governmentality’.

Paper long abstract:

The advance of biogenetic capitalism presents not just a revisionary challenge to theories of biopolitical governmentalities, but constitutes as Gayatri Spivak, observes, an urgent imperative to rethink the 'new location of subalternity'. Specifically addressing the concatenating forms of 'structural' and 'slow' violence that precipitate farmer suicides in India's GMO cotton belt, I examine how Sonora Jha's novel Foreign strategically negotiates the representational challenge of these new figures of subalternity through a performative aesthetics of what John Marx terms, 'literary governmentality'.

Distancing itself from the conventional topos of the dissenting anti-state Indian English novel in India - particularly the polemical novel of postcolonial citizenship and the jaded bureaucratic imagination of 'babu fictions' -

I argue that Foreign's critique of 'governmentality from below' marks a strategic aesthetic maneuver in rejecting the neoliberal development narrative and its insidious appropriation of subaltern consciousness. Thus, I demonstrate that the novel marks a rare moment in the history of the Indian novel in English through the mimetic representation of the real time space of Indian political society post liberalisation, by simultaneously interrogating the privilege of dissent along with the transformative potential of the politics spawned by neoliberal governmentalities.

Finally, this paper argues that the novel's negotiation of transnational solidarity with the farmers of Vidarbha is hinged on a sociological reflexivity that recognizes its own limitations through a careful interrogation of the uneasy complicity of the muted 'unbound serialities' of global print capitalism with the creative fictionality of the 'bound serialities' of neoliberal governance.

Paper short abstract:

Dalit fiction from the 1990s offered a political and aesthetic challenge to high-caste Hindi literary texts. Udhar ke Log highlights the limits of this movement in an era of consumer culture. My paper focuses on the interpretive and aesthetic strategies deployed to achieve this purpose in the novel.

Paper long abstract:

The rise of Dalit fiction in Hindi in the 1990s has been described as a significant correction to high-caste, socially progressive literary prose that dominated this literary language from the age of Premchand onwards. Primarily expressed through autobiography and short stories, this form of fictional writing foregrounds Dalit literary subjects, not as sympathetic, passive objects of high-caste benevolence, but as morally wholesome agents of their own destiny, overcoming the stigma of untouchability, social ostracism and oppression. Such Dalit literary stories offered redemption as a valorized oppressed population. This literary movement was, however, restricted mostly to the genre of the short story. In 2008 Ajay Navaria published his first novel Udhar ke Log [The People Over There]. The most sustained and thoughtful response to the problem of a Dalit literary subjectivity in the age of liberalization, Navaria's novel marks the limits of such a subjectivity with the coming of a more intense form of consumer culture. Having entered the middle class, Navaria's unsympathetic protagonist cannot function as an unmediated, valorized representation of Dalit suffering and pain. As such, this novel challenges the very idea of a politically efficacious Dalit subject, and compels us to consider the deleterious and atomizing effects of late-capitalism. Offering a close reading of this Udhar ke Log in my paper, I reflect on its production in a genre (the literary novel in Hindi) that struggles in a marketplace now dominated by English-language novels aimed at an aspirational 'middle-class' determined to become fully-fledged consuming subjects of capital.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores a recent 2015 Hindi novel which deals with the politics of globalization and political violence in the tribal (Adivasi) region of Central India, analyzing its language of nature and violence in the depiction both of global shipping and Naxalite insurgency.

Paper long abstract:

My paper will examine intersecting issues of environmental degradation, Maoist insurgency, and tribal (Adivasi) identity, as expressed in Hindi literature of the previous two decades. Through an analysis that centers on Manoj Rupra's recent 2015 novel «Kāle Adhyāya» [Black Lessons], I will examine how the question of Adivasi identity emerges in Hindi literature from a field of political activism, concerns with the environment, and the new influence of globalization. The novel centers on a young man who leaves an Adivasi community in Chattisgarh in order to join the merchant marine, but returns to search for his sister, who has become the leader of a Naxalite cadre in the jungles of Bastar. These two worlds are joined together by a language of nature and violence in which the destruction of the natural environment, predation among animals, and the machinations of global capitalism are all presented in a unified imagery. I will historicize the narrative fabric of this work within recent Hindi literature dealing with political activism and identity, arguing that «Kāle Adhyāya», in depicting its central character's odyssey through both the globalized world of shipping and transport, as well as the world of an environment violently disrupted by the struggle between tribal groups and the Central government, argues for a unified, political interpretation of these worlds.

Paper short abstract:

The paper will focus on one of the many themes dealt with by Harnot in his short stories, that of the arrogance of power.

Paper long abstract:

In Harnot's writing a stern denunciation against every kind of power emerges, whether it is political power or money power. The distortions generated from abuse of power can be seen at every level, from the village accountant and the low-grade policeman up to a MLA (Member of Legislative Assembly) and a Chief Minister. To the extent that even a judge may find out a way to comply with the unexpressed request of a powerful politician. Where the main protagonist is the poor, a dalit - as it happens in most cases - his struggle is not rooted in any ideology, rather it is a pre-ideological struggle, the struggle for existence. However, when at least a "moral victory" is achieved, and the protagonist becomes aware of his strength, a future in which class consciousness may develop is envisaged.

Paper short abstract:

The Emergency of 1975-1977 without doubt constitutes one of the most tragic episodes in postcolonial India. In this contribution and through an analysis of Hindi fictions addressing this issue, I will look at the way these narratives have depicted the authoritarian rule and its repressive policy.

Paper long abstract:

The Emergency of 1975-1977 without doubt constitutes one of the most tragic episodes in the history of postcolonial India. Although it radically influenced the course of contemporary Indian politics, this event remains relatively little studied in the field of social sciences, let alone in the humanities and literary studies. If a few studies have been done on fictional works written in English, almost nothing (outside short chapters in monographs) has been published so far on the Hindi fictions addressing this issue. A critical inquiry into these works therefore seems both necessary and innovative.

After a brief reminder of the key steps and measures taken during the Emergency, my contribution will examine how Hindi fictions have dealt, explicitly or not, with crucial topics such as the "family planning" and the "slum clearances" programmes, and how their narrators have represented urban poverty (resettled people, beggars, marginalized people) as well as middle-class citizens and intellectuals in that context. Novels like Rāt kā reporter by Nirmal Verma, Kaṭrā bī ārzū by Rahi Masoom Raza, or Basantī by Bhisham Sahni will be analysed to see which picture of the nation and the society emerges from the fictions written in Hindi, and what does it tell us about the way these narratives have depicted the authoritarian rule and its repressive policy.

Paper short abstract:

Politically motivated violence has multiple forms in South Asia, as in the world. This paper explores the ways Hotel Arcadia constructs a literary response not only to instances of armed political violence but also to the entrenched structural, symbolic and psychosocial violence on multiple axes.

Paper long abstract:

The paper explores the notion of literary reactions to political violence from the author's standpoint. Although writing is often considered a private act, once published, literary texts are neither private nor intimate and are subject to complex public and personal reactions.

Building on readings from the novel, the paper explores the complex forms of entrenched structural, symbolic and psychosocial violence contribute to individual identities, lived experiences, and political actions and reactions. It will analyse how the novel confronts issues of ongoing structural violence experienced by its main characters beyond the ostensibly plot framing of a terrorist incident. In doing so, the paper builds towards questioning the forms of violence that are assigned cultural, narrative, symbolic and political value, as well as interrrogating the political violence that is denied, silenced and erased.

The paper lays the groundwork for a discussion on public and intimate literary reactions to political violence in contemporary India while also beginning to question how discreet and/or invisible exercises of power frames, controls and limits discourses on the topic.

Paper short abstract:

Politically inspired violence in South Asia affects literature in many ways. This paper juxtaposes the effects it has on the characters of Sunny Singh’s latest novel Hotel Arcadia and on public acts such as literary authors returning the Sahitya Akademi award.

Paper long abstract:

The paper departs from the theoretical notion implied in the panel brief that political action or creative activity in a political context derive from both conscious choices as well as to from subconscious impulses that come from social and cultural structures in which both art and the political are embedded. It will apply this to two different literary reactions on recent political violence in contemporary India.

On the one hand it goes to the heart of literary fiction, to the psychology of the fictional characters in Sunny Singh's 2014 novel Hotel Arcadia. Following on a reading from the novel by the author in the same panel, the paper will explore how experiences with extreme violence confronts the characters with an existential dilemma between art and life, living in the world or staying aloof, being involved or being an observer. It will analyse how these issues shape the psychology of the characters in the novel, but also how they reach out and take root in philosophical conundrums that resonate deeply in Indian culture.

As a counterpoint, the paper contrasts this intimate response to public acts of protest by Indian authors, such as the returning of the Sahitya Akademi award in October 2015 by a number of illustrious Indian authors, in protest of politically inspired killings of intellectuals. It will look at the shift in public attitudes towards writing and art since Independence and explore possible patterns or structures that inform both the inner and the public reactions to violence.