The Curse of Gandhism: A Review of Prakash Jha's "Aarakshan"

I've just returned from seeing Prakash Jha's already-controversial film Aarakshan (Reservation) at the Regal Cinema in Connaught Place, New Delhi. Built by the British in the early 1930s, it is a magnificent, cavernous space complete with a wide balcony, round arches on the side walls, and pictures of old film stars in the lobby. Surprisingly, it's also fairly clean and well kept. All in all, it reminds me once again of how fake, gaudy and soulless the multiplex "experience" can be, especially in India, and how little of the old culture of film-going remains with us.

But I digress. As far as the content of the film goes, this was also a surprise. The pre-release controversy had made it seem like Aarakshan was a bold, reactionary attempt to criticise reservations - hence why it was banned in UP by Mayawati's government. In fact, as the Times of India review notes, very little of the film even references or discusses the issue of reservations in any sustained or serious way. It's more of an incidental device to move the plot forward to the real confrontation: between Amitabh Bachchan's heroic, inspirational ex-principal of a private college who offers free classes to the community and villain Manoj Bajpai's commercial education scheme. True, Bachchan's character does resign from his post at the college over his support for reservations, and there is a fierce conflict in the first half involving Saif Ali Khan's Dalit professor and a high-caste student played by Prateek Babbar. But they come together in the end to help Bachchan defeat the for-profit coaching classes, backed by corrupt politicians and the police. The film's climactic scene is a showdown, as bulldozers approach the gate of Bachchan's compound, between the good guys (students and volunteers of all castes) and lathi-wielding policemen.

By pure coincidence, I caught a bit of Richard Attenborough's Gandhi on TV last night, a film I have not seen in years and certainly not since I began doing a PhD. in Indian history. The moving scene depicting the Dharasana Satyagraha, in which row after row of peaceful marchers are mercilessly clubbed by police, shows just how ideologically and cinematically powerful the imagery of Gandhism continues to be. In effect, Prakash Jha has resolved his plot by using the classic set-up of Gandhian struggle: non-cooperating, non-violent do-gooders versus the mighty apparatus of the state. It comes as no surprise, though it still manages to be an emotional moment drawing cheers from the audience, when the bulldozers' drivers are convinced by Bachchan's appeal and cross over to join the students in solidarity. What does this say about Jha's view of politics, and its appeal?

This has been a hot topic for discussion since last summer's hit Raajneeti, which depicted the political process and very nearly all its participants as fundamentally violent and corrupt. A perceptive essay in the current issue of The Caravan about Jha's career basically makes the point that his characters have become "bereft of a moral core". They do not ask themselves questions about the "ethical consequences" of their actions. In some cases, as in Gangajaal (2003), the film "dangerously leaves the task of public accountability to the individual conscience of one man". It should become apparent from my description that, with Aarakshan, Jha can be absolved of the charge of not creating idealistic or ethically concerned characters anymore. Bachchan's principal is a model of uprightness, honesty and fairness; when the fight over reservations erupts on the grounds of his college, he steps in to reprimand both sides and dutifully carries on the fight to improve children's lives and test scores through tireless work and self-sacrifice. Here, however, Jha's tendency to offer solutions in the form of the virtuous actions of one individual reveals itself. Though an entire community comes together to help with the free classes, and a mass protest including both upper and lower castes ends up facing the villains at the end, in the end the success of the enterprise rests on one man's shoulders. The method of grassroots voluntarism being idealised here is also extra-institutional, and leaves no room for contemplating the reform of existing institutions like the private college. Only after Bachchan is on the outside can he score his great moral victory and then be appointed back to his old post. The crooked politicians are not voted out or held judicially accountable but publicly shamed.

The appeal of this worldview is not only nostalgic but deeply connected to the ongoing debate about corruption. The self-anointed Gandhian activist Anna Hazare has been mobilising the middle classes by fasting in support of the passage of the sweeping anti-corruption Lokpal Bill. Critics of Hazare's approach have pointed to the absolutist nature of the demands, which move beyond and even seek to de-legitimise the political process. A remarkable and profound interview in Tehelka with civil society activist Aruna Roy makes the point that any attempt to change the mechanism or culture of governance in a democracy must go through the painful but necessary process of soliciting opinions from stakeholders, debating drafts of bills, compromising, and, at the end, living with the end result even if it may not be ideal: "Democracy is a dialectic and you can’t afford to lose it. And no matter how imperfect it is and how much we struggle to refine it, unless we want to opt for a dictatorship, even a benign one, it is the only viable political system we have." She tells this story to illustrate the dangers of Hazare's bottom-line approach: "Let me give you a very small example from a meeting in Tilonia in Rajasthan. Every 15 August and 26 January the gram panchayat there has meetings and invites me to speak. Once there was this big talk in the air that “Constitution koh badalna hain”. I asked the 3,000-strong crowd, how many of you have seen the Constitution? About six hands went up. Then I asked, how many of you have touched it, about four went up. Then I asked, how many of you have read it and two went up. So then I said, if a political party is telling you the Constitution of India is anti the people of India and we must amend it, and all of you are saying, yes, yes, it’s bad, change it, are you acting out of reason or ignorance?"

The "curse of Gandhism" I am referring to is not so much the substantive nature of Gandhian political thought, but the enduring appeal of the form. In Hazare's case, as it has become very clear by now, the high-profile fasting and the other theatrical aspects of his movement conceal a contestable political programme (pushing for oversight by building a new bureaucracy) while claiming to be outside and indeed even hostile to politics. Prakash Jha's recent films, along with Rang de Basanti (2006), invoke the social-patriotic conscience of mainstream Hindi cinema (largely absent since the 1950s, the decade of Guru Dutt, Raj Kapoor and Bimal Roy). These are films about big issues, daring to ask about how to save the country (Aarakshan's tagline: "India v. India"). The answers they provide, however, are troubling in different ways. Rang de Basanti was an extreme case; its protagonists, apathetic students inspired to love their country by making a documentary about Bhagat Singh, take action by assassinating a corrupt politician. In Aarakshan, the solution is mild and basically unobjectionable by comparison. But by not saying anything about the political process, or offering any hope about building institutions other than the Bachchan character's selfless volunteerism, the film offers a bleak assessment of the prospects of Indian democracy. We never get to hear a full argument about the politics of reservations, or understand what place they have in India's democratic system. All we know by the end is that we must "be the change we wish to see in the world", so to speak. In 2011, that's no longer enough.

Textures of Print II: Hitler in India and the Street Book Market

The other day, I was standing in front of the haphazardly organised shelves of a respectable bookstore in Hazratganj, Lucknow's main shopping area. I spotted, cozily standing upright side by side, William Darlymple's White Mughals and Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf. Now, apart from a snide remark one could make about Darlymple in this situation, it's still an astonishing reminder of how deeply into the mainstream Hitler's book has burrowed in this country. In the West, Mein Kampf is not only politically anathema, but also widely regarded as a pedantic and uninteresting text that has little historical or contextual value (unlike, say, the writings of other designated evil people like Lenin). In India, we are intermittently reminded by outraged newspaper articles, Mein Kampf is a self-help book and Hitler is a kind of management guru for the neo-liberal age. Explanations in these articles in the English Indian and foreign press revolve around the supposed need for stability and order amidst the chaos of India's changing economic landscape, and a bizarre but culturally innate fascination with a tale of a self-made man rising by the bootstraps to conquer the world. All of this, of course, is ultimately caused by India's continued isolation from the outside world's respectable opinion, which will in time dissipate and Hitler will be taken off the shelves. This is, for instance, what our old friend Sadanand Dhume writes in the Wall Street Journal. India, as a whole, is a country "too busy having a conversation with itself to pay much attention to what others think," and Indians have an "infinite capacity to compartmentalise" that can be extended to the "murder of six million people."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704853404575322290608186082.html

The issue has been brought into the public eye recently by the announcement of Bollywood director Rajeev Ranjan Kumar that a film entitled Dear Friend Hitler was in the works, starring none other than perennial lovable dad (DDLJ, Wake Up Sid) Anupam Kher as Hitler. Kumar's main reason for admiring Hitler relies upon a reservoir of historical memory that Dhume far too easily dismisses: Subhas Chandra Bose's and the INA's strategic alliance with the Axis against the British Raj during World War II. It is this relationship that forms an important piece of the puzzle. Bose continues to be a national hero in India, and the INA's path of violent resistance is widely credited, and not just by crypto-fascists, with providing the real muscle for decolonisation. Perhaps this should call for a re-thinking of historiographical positions on political violence, as I argued in a post last year. But it certainly is no easy issue that will go away once the average Indian learns from the pious politically correct Westerner that Hitler was evil, as Dhume thinks.

The other piece of the puzzle is the admiration of Hitler by the contemporary Hindu Right, which is also supposed to have faded as today's RSS is a great friend of Israel against the Muslims. Alarmingly, this should lead us to the exact opposite question than the one Dhume & co. ask. Why is it that admirers of fascists can today also be admirers of the state of Israel? I am not saying that Hindutva ideology is somehow behind Hitler's presence on the bookstalls. But today's Hindu Right would never call for its removal simply because they are friends of Israel. The "fetish" for fascism in India, which is of course not culturally innate but historically produced, can extend to celebrating Israel's iron boot in Palestine without shame or contradiction -- so it is, if anything, a marker of how far and fast Israel's credibility on the world stage has pummeled.

But to return to the Indian street. The most fascinating and acrimonious exchange involving Mein Kampf actually took place a few years back between Sanjay Subrahmanyam, who had unenthusiastically reviewed Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger in the LRB, and Pankaj Mishra. Mishra attacked Subrahmanyam's claim that the "subaltern" Balram Halwai, not being able to read English, could have mentioned Hitler as reading material. In doing so, though his critique is unnecessarily acidic, Mishra does successfully isolate the "mofussil bookstall" where cheap editions, in both English and Hindi, of Hitler and Kahlil Gibran or Paulo Coelho are sold side by side, as an important area of study.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n21/sanjay-subrahmanyam/diary

Perhaps Hitler's text is not so different from the others in this specific context. The extension of cheap reading material, especially of the self-help/management kind, is an abiding feature of India's "opening up" to neo-liberal capitalism, and not a holdover of primitive beliefs. I'd wager that under Nehruvian socialism Mein Kampf was not so widely available. Furthermore, these are not locally produced or variable texts. The mass publishing industry, now extending itself throughout the country via these astounding and impressive networks disseminating the printed word, does not know the difference between Hitler and Chetan Bhagat. It is also not clear that some curious feature of consumption practices is driving this trend, as all commentators seem to think. I was in another bookstore and saw a different copy of Mein Kampf, this time featuring an advertisement for a book "countering" Hitler on the inside flap, and a bonus DVD of a critical documentary on Hitler. The text, in other words, is frequently contested within itself and we should not assume its mere presence indicates acceptance of its ideas. After all, in the United States Mein Kampf is available at Border's with a black cover and preface by Abraham Foxman.
But, in the end, Hitler's presence on the bookstalls does say something about our present, where confusion and the failure of discernment in matters of paperback consumption and more are compounded by the day by what is available and possible under "India Shining."

Provincializing America? My Name Is Khan and Modernity

Seeing My Name Is Khan with a group of sophisticated movie-goers guaranteed the usual bouts of exasperated sighing that accompany the credits of a Karan Johar film. In fact, this one is so over-the-top that the top is no longer even in view; it makes Kuch Kuch Hota Hai look like Scenes from a Marriage by comparison. As with all masala epics, suspension of disbelief is a given...nobody in any audience would think it realistic. But in some ways MNIK reaches much farther than the usual Hindi film. For one thing, in this as in other recent dramas (I'm thinking of Paa, which I just saw), set musical pieces are gone entirely, replaced by a more "Western" soundtrack-montage overlay. For another, and much more importantly, the film turns a sociological lens -both broadly and minutely- upon another country, the United States, in ways that suggest a new form of "globalisation" for the Hindi film. Instead of, as many scholars have pointed out, merely transporting the action to foreign shores or focusing on the culturally cosmopolitan wealthy middle classes in India, the post-1990s Hindi film is also making its first attempts at representational authority.

What do I mean by this? It's not only that a non-Western film takes America as its subject. Plenty of such films exist. MNIK does so, however, without any pretence of subtlety or objectivity, yet from a universalist standpoint. It revels in its own partiality and stereotypes with confidence. Previously, Hollywood filmmakers would throw up a hasty sketch of a foreign country where the workings of that society, including timelines, would be hopelessly blurry. And of course it would all be defensible on the grounds of artistic licence! If a serious foreign film ever looked back, it would be from a verite or underground perspective. But here, we have a Hindi blockbuster taking the same kind of sloppy liberties, and the result is oddly exhilarating. Thus, most average Americans are shrill caricatures, racist and suspicious and decidedly unfriendly (contra the usual view of typical American openness and friendliness; see the scene where the cable car passengers crowding around Shah Rukh in the middle of the street are all abusing him, except for the good-hearted Indian Kajol). George Bush in 2008 is greeted by hundreds of happy supporters waving signs and flags at a speaking appearance. Politics don't exist (conversely, do Slumdog or City of Joy ever discuss the intricacies of party politics and opinion polls?). Along the same lines, teachers in San Francisco Bay Area (!) schools tell children that Muslims are evil. Scrappy college journalists can break a national story regarding torture by passing it on to the local television station...on this count Johar is far too naive and optimistic about America! And so on.

The most head-scratchingly bizarre choice of stereotype is the pre-Civil War Deep South village milieu Johar constructs (on a set in Bombay), with Big Mama Jenny and her little boy living in a shack and praying at the local church with all the other black folk. Prima facie this is all immensely racist, condescending, and ham-handed. There is a wish for some kind of alliance between the oppressed here (singing "We Shall Overcome" together, the convoy of good-hearted Muslims delivering supplies through the waist-deep water when no government aid arrives), but having no understanding of the experiences of minorities in post-industrial society (Katrina affected the poor urban population, not some idyllic hamlet where cows outnumber people 3 to 1) and pulling out the worst from the "yes'm massa" bag of tricks is no way to go about it. Then again, Karan Johar has always been a very conservative kind of filmmaker: witness the considerable abuse heaped upon the Anglo-Indian caricature in KKHH as disloyal and foppish (forget English! Sing Vande Mataram...and this in a film that supposedly celebrated the Anglicised youth).

Yet there is something very telling about this crude attempt to "provincialize America," as Dipesh C. would say. Johar does not merely see America from another (outsider) angle and thus renders it unexceptional, he in fact robs it of the modern and the universal. The loudest howls of protest from my friends were to the effect of, "Where is the government aid? How come Shah Rukh - and Kajol, and the film crews, and the helpful volunteers - can get to this village by taking the bus, while no state or federal authorities are to be found?" In taking the experience of Katrina to its logical extreme, Johar asks: what if America really was a Third-World country, as so many Americans who watched helplessly in 2005 feared it would resemble (yet, of course, not literally ever become)? This isn't an obscure or philosophical point. When a natural disaster happens in India, Pakistan, or even Romania (seasonal floods are always in the news), there is often no government aid for a while, if ever. Many of the places affected are isolated agricultural villages that really exist, unlike the absurd Wilhelmina, GA. The United States and fellow Western democracies are commonly understood as societies where the state has reached hegemony along with dominance (cf. Ranajit Guha), where its apparatus of ameliorative bureaucracy and impartial law extends, imperfectly but expectedly, across every inch of its geographical space. Furthermore, this theme runs throughout the film. The interrogator who tortures Shah Rukh is the mirror of the policewalas in Slumdog, the perfect Western metonym for Indian corruption and arbitrary use of power. Whereas a Western filmmaker would undoubtedly present similar critiques of government inaction or illegality from the realistic, gritty and ultimately liberal point of view that produces "social pressure" for reform, Johar is after the sentimental generalisation that is not so easily resolved. His vision of America is of the many tendencies believed by American reformist progressives to be flaws in an incompletely generalised system needing to be fixed as constitutive elements of a pre-modern, archaic society. This is why, and not because he's stupid or insensitive, he must rely on a vision of rural America from the 1850s.
So, while MNIK is ultimately a silly film, it delights in a cheeky right to represent that it would be a pity for Hindi film to lose. Backed by global capitalism and increasingly entering into international circuits of exchange, such exercises can inject some needed vitality in the rather staid debates about meanings and aspects of modernity.

The Curious Indian Life of Archie

From an outsider's perspective, it is odd to observe what appears to be a national obsession with Archie comics in India. This summer, when he proposed to brunette vixen Veronica over wholesome blonde Betty, newspapers ran story after story of analysis. The Times of India conducted a poll asking its readers, "Should Archie Marry Veronica?" 78% said No and emphatically argued the point on the comments page. Another earnest headline in DNA proclaimed, "Betty fans protest as Archie proposes to Veronica." What makes Archie so popular in India that mainstream culture so actively concerns itself with its fictional universe?

A few years ago, there were plans to "Indianise" Archie, perhaps even going to extent of clothing Veronica and Betty in saris. It was noted that the books had been selling well in India for over forty years, and had the largest circulation of any comic in English. In the Indian context, Archie takes on a range of meanings and references, which tenuously reconcile the all-American world of Riverdale High with a very different cultural milieu.

On one level, there is a certain colonial genealogy to Archie. In Aparna Sen's 36 Chowringhee Lane, elderly Anglo-Indian teacher Violet Stoneham visits her brother Eddie in a Calcutta nursing home to bring him tins of biscuits and Archie comics. Here the book itself becomes a symbol of a colonial past, pleasantly quaint yet fundamentally anachronistic. It is also a marginal relic, separated from the surrounding post-colonial cultural world of Calcutta and circulated in an intimate ceremony that memorialises the shared past of Violet and Eddie.

However, despite this highly specific use of the Archie book to suggest a vanishing past, its story is actually deeply implicated in India's post-colonial modernity. In Amit Chaudhuri's essay on America in Granta, which appeared in 2002, he recalls from his childhood "the much thumbed and perused copy, in the 'circulating library', of the Archie Comics Digest; the thin line that separated us from Riverdale." This remarkable statement asserts a connection to America in a non-official space, nurtured by the English language and a particular imagination. Chaudhuri writes that American comic books taught him how to read and "somehow entered our lives in Bombay and became indistinguishable from them." In other words, the universe of the comic book becomes a constituent part of the Indian cultural milieu into which it has been transported.The "thin line" that separates Bombay and Riverdale is finally crossed in Karan Johar's now-classic 1998 melodrama Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. This film has been acknowledged as a sort of turning point in recent Hindi cinema, marking the full bloom of the romantic comedy aimed at young, cosmopolitan audiences. The first half of the film takes place in St. Xavier's College, an ambiguously Americanised space that is part India, part Riverdale. The love triangle between Shah Rukh, Rani and Kajol has even been described as an outright Archie adaptation. What is important here is that Karan Johar deliberately chooses to reference Archie and its universe as a way to express a new modernity for India. His characters live on a stage that is only partly constructed by observing how young Indians actually behave with each other; it also uses comforting allusions and symbols of a "foreign" world that has, for the better part of the last half-century, in fact been India's own.

Hindi Film and the World: An Alternative Globalisation

Once again, Amitav Ghosh has written an essay so thoughtful, rich and beautiful I feel compelled to react at length with my own comparatively disjointed yet (I hope) somewhat constructive thoughts. In "Confessions of a Xenophile," which appeared last year in Outlook, he puts forth something approaching a condensed vision of his entire personal and professional life, anchored in the formative experience of living in an Egyptian village in the 1980s. He begins with a revelation about Hindi films:

"My hosts and I discovered one medium of communication where we were on equal terms: this was the language of aflaam al-Hindeyya – that is to say, Hindi film songs. When all other efforts at communication broke down, we would burst into song – this was no small accomplishment on my part as I am a terrible singer. But many of the younger people in the village sang very well and knew innumerable Hindi songs. Indian filmi music thus became a shared language and opened many barriers and earned me many invitations to meals. The Hindi films that were best known in Lataifa were of the fifties vintage – films that featured such stars as Raj Kapoor, Nargis, Padmini, Manoj Kumar and Babita..."

Here we have a classic case of cross-cultural exchange of the kind extensively facilitated by such products as Hindi films in many parts of the world during the 1950s and 60s- not just in Africa and the Middle East, but also in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Indeed, so popular were Raj Kapoor films in my native country, Romania, that the name is still readily recognised and frequently used; for instance, reviews of Slumdog Millionaire in the newspapers referenced its hero as an archetypal "vagabond" successor of Kapoor. Of course, much was lost in translation since virtually no Hindi was spoken or understood in the many parts of the world these films reached. Thus, the 1950s Romanian crooner Luigi Ionescu recorded a version of the song "Awaara hoon" (I am a tramp) that came out through misunderstanding as "Avaramu" (it can still be widely found on the internet today under this title, and it's a safe bet almost all Eastern Europeans wouldn't know it as anything else). It's quite an amazing thing that Romanians, Russians and Egyptians were singing in Hindi words they did not know, much in the same way so many of the world's teenagers today ape American pop songs without speaking English. The phenomenal worldwide success of Hindi films at this time was a different kind of globalisation, deeply tied to a specific set of political changes in the postwar era. Ghosh explains,

"Broadly speaking, those circumstances could be described as the spirit of decolonization that held sway over much of the world in the decades after the Second World War; this was the political ethos that found its institutional representation in the Non-Aligned Movement. We are at a very different moment in history now, when the words Non-Aligned seem somehow empty and discredited; today the movement is often dismissed not just as a political failure, but as a minor footnote to the great power rivalries of the Cold War. It is true, of course, that the movement had many shortcomings and met with many failures. Yet it is also worth remembering that the Non-Aligned Movement as such was merely the institutional aspect of something that was much broader, wider and more powerful: this, as I said before, was the post-war ethos of decolonization, which was a political impulse that had deep historical roots and powerful cultural resonances. In the field of culture, among other things, it represented an attempt to restore and recommence the exchanges and conversations that had been interrupted by the long centuries of European imperial dominance. It was, in this sense, the necessary and vital counterpart of the nationalist idiom of anti-colonial resistance. In the West, Third World nationalism is often presented as an ideology of xenophobia and parochialism. But the truth is that many of these movements of resistance tried very hard, within their limited means, to create an universalism of their own. Those of us who grew up in that period will recall how powerfully we were animated by an emotion that is rarely named: this is xenophilia, the love of the other, the affinity for strangers - a feeling that lives very deep in the human heart, but whose very existence is rarely acknowledged. People of my generation will recall the pride we once took in the trans-national friendships of such figures as Nehru, Nasser, Sukarno, Chou En Lai and others. Nor were friendships of this kind anything new. I have referred above to the cross-cultural conversations that were interrupted by imperialism. These interruptions were precisely that – temporary breakages – the conversations never really ceased."

There is much to discuss here. First, as a point of historiography we can see the organising principles behind Ghosh's tendency in both his fiction and non-fiction to explore the connections between people and places in a pan-Asian or Indian Ocean-centred arc. Thus, he has written movingly and with equal sensitivity about Egypt, the Gulf states, India, Burma, and Cambodia. Historians are nowadays setting their sights on these kinds of "comparative" and "regional" histories, but for clarity of purpose and beauty of prose none can match Ghosh. Secondly, he provides the key institutional context for understanding the spread of a cultural product. Hindi films with Raj Kapoor were not popular in Egypt or Romania because they were socialist (though the affinity of the Nehruvian ethic with the political aspirations of these other nation-states was certainly a factor). Their populism was, if not subversive of the state, certainly not dependent upon it. As Ravi Vasudevan notes, popular Hindi cinema appealed to a "mass public which lies beyond the borders of institutions legitimated by the state," and thus could "provide a distinctive route for the social imaginary." The manner of its translation abroad should not be read as a mere extension of relations between states but as a true globalisation: the spread of words, ideas, images and ways of seeing the world across vast numbers of people in many places at the same time.
Naturally, this included political ideas, and once again we are not speaking exclusively of state structures. The transnational popularity of leaders like Nehru and Nasser alluded to by Ghosh was widespread, and the sentiment is not entirely dead even today. Earlier this year, I was in an electronics store run by an older Egyptian fellow in Berkeley, just off of Telegraph Avenue. I was buying a converter to use with my laptop in England, where I was going to do research for my thesis at the British Library. The man asked me what I was studying, and I said imperialism. His eyes lit up and he exclaimed, "Do you know who the leader of Egypt was after the British left?" "Yes, Nasser." He continued with glee, "Do you remember what he did to the British? He stuck their nose in the mud!" That the Suez incident of 1956 should evoke such a passionate reaction in 2009 from someone who could barely have been a boy at the time is, if anything, a powerful reminder of the persistence with which the non-aligned moment lives on in people's minds.

Today's globalisation is of a fundamentally different kind; Ghosh refers to the alliance of "capital + empire," with fundamentalism thrown in as the third pillar of the new world order. The changes can be easily tracked in Hindi cinema. Rochona Majumdar writes, "In the six decades since the country’s independence, inaugural prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s nationalist, populist government, rooted in socialist ideals, has given way to neoliberalism and globalisation. On the screen, this evolution meant the end of the category known as 'the people'" exemplified by Raj Kapoor films. Thus,

"To Bollywood songwriters in the 1950s and ’60s, city streets were playful and teeming with possibilities. Albeit idealized, their depictions animated a then-true national identity: in 'innumerable' songs, Majumdar says, 'you see the dream of socialist India come to life.' As the global economy arrived at India’s shores in the 1980s, however, the collective people disappeared from Bollywood screens. The iconic city street darkened, becoming a 'contested space,' she says, where people from different religions, castes, and professions—criminal or otherwise—strove for dominance. Bollywood itself splintered, producing different films for distinct audiences. India’s wealthy diaspora saw movies in which characters from large, affluent families fall in love and get married, their weddings setting the stage for grand musical sequences. Often these films, which emphasize individual—rather than universal—experiences, are set abroad in places like Switzerland, Egypt, or New Zealand. These are the films foreigners consider typical Bollywood fare, and their popularity has inspired Hollywood and other film industries to use Bollywood conventions, directors, and stars for movies like Monsoon Wedding, Bend It Like Beckham, and Bride and Prejudice."

While Majumdar makes some great observations about the use of space (the changing meanings of the street and the choice of filming locations), what is most important here is the particular kind of globalisation processes Hindi films participate in. In the 1950s, a self-consciously nationalist Indian cultural form resonated with foreign audiences. Today, the mainstream Hindi film is a fragmented product that is slowly being woven into a truly global tapestry of interchangeable symbols. Dancing in the Alps or under the pyramids, surfing on the beach in Australia, partying in nightclubs and so on are the common aspirations of the moneyed "good life" driven by notions once viewed as typically American and Western European. It is not a question of recovering the "Indianness" of films in danger of being "Westernised," but of recognising that such categories are themselves rapidly becoming obsolete.

In parallel, the rise of the Hindu right in the 1990s and the prospect of communal violence has provoked the most sustained attempt by the Hindi film industry to address the relationship between religion and nationalism since the first few decades after the independence. Noted filmmaker Shyam Benegal speaks of a revival in recent years of "hugely successful films like Lagaan which equate an inclusive secular unity with nationalism." Other films that have appeared since then that explore urban life in contemporary India, including Rang de Basanti and Mumbai Meri Jaan, feature explicit plot lines revolving around the suspicion and hostility between Hindu and Muslim characters that is happily resolved in the end. Unlike the old days, however, when censor boards would not allow any impression of communal tension to make it to the screen, the new crop of films are didactic without being unrealistic, as they often begin by openly acknowledging mistrust and conflict. Many of these films perhaps owe more to their Nehruvian predecessors than to the homogenising tendencies of our globalisation. And Hindi films remain popular abroad, though offering a much different kind of entertainment than they once did.