Cinematic regimes of otherness: India and its Northeast (original) (raw)
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On Cinema and History: Reading the Representations of Northeast India in Bollywood
Proceedings of North East India History Association (37th Session, Gangtok), 2016
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Arab World English Journal For Translation and Literary Studies, 2024
Ever since Friedrich Meinecke proposed the distinction between the terms “cultural nation” (Kulturnation) as expressed in fine art and “Statsnation” (political nation), the cultural sphere of nationalism or nationalist idealogy/culture has been quoted either out of context or misquoted/misinterpreted to demean other cultures and reinforced ostensibly to carve out a false or “imagined” national identity in the Indian context and more so in the Indian popular culture. Does it reflect the culture of the majority populace in India? Why does it hegemonize other cultures? With the mainstream narratives and myths that underlie the Indian media, popular culture galvanizes around terms like nationalism, national identity and others. The main aim of this article is to unravel and deconstruct the notion of national culture and all the accompanying terms associated with it. It becomes significant in the present socio-cultural-politico-Indian context with its approach towards feudalism and postcolonial imperatives. The main question is how these terms are appropriated and subverted to form a new meaning, perhaps a historical revision. Randomly, nine Indian films were chosen for observation. The analysis reveals that a microscopic minority invokes the metanarrative of hypernationalism and cultural homogenization to placate the democratic forces and achieve their hidden agenda. Since it is value-based, its recommendations too primarily belong to the moral turpitude of those who are in power. Keywords: Cultural nationalism, Indian Feudalism, National Identity, Nationalist Ideology, Nationalism, Popular culture, Postcolonialism
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This article seeks to identify coordinates for Indian cinema beyond the territorial nation, from so-called `empire films' of the 1920s and regional film circuits which went beyond the territorial nation, and also considers how the formation of nation-states constrained the terms of film culture in the subcontinet. It is pitted against nationalist assumptions and the framework of national cinema studies.
Mantras of the Metropole: Geo-televisuality and Contemporary Indian Cinema
2005
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BHOJPURI CINEMA: Regional resonances in the Hindi heartland
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Metropolis and peripheral life: Digital cinema dialects in 'Northeast' India
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The Creative Launcher
Edward Said, in his seminal work Orientalism, opined that the colonialist thought process (the notion that the West is superior to the East) did not come to an end when the colonial rule ended, but continued in varied forms. The vision of the Northeast within the borderlines of India reiterates this idea when one envisions the area through the lenses of mainstream ‘Indo-Aryan' and ‘Dravidian' cultural practices. Often termed as a ‘conflict zone', the Northeast has always had a tense relationship with ‘mainland' India, due to the differences in opinion regarding societal and cultural practices, food habits, territorial squabbles, and religion. When it came to the representation part of the Northeast in various art forms, it almost always got moulded by the mainstream imagination, which had nothing to do with real life practices related to the Northeast, and Bollywood movies act as the perfect canvas for this. This paper would attempt to contextualize the (mis)represen...