Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Query on Anti-Colonial Revolts

[Rakesh Bhandari <rakeshb@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

didn't get the dvd for lagaan yet (i think lagaan is expected to be
nominated for an oscar?), but this review in the latest on line
economic and political weekly
http://epw.org.in/showArticles.php?root=2001&leaf=12&filename=3798&filetype=html
may suggest why it has such appeal.
______
My aim in this section has been to show that 'Lagaan', by eliminating
any reference to the 'parasitic' role of the raja/taluqdar and other
indigenous dominant groups, ends up posing -even when dealing with
only subaltern agency without any overt linkages to questions of the
'nation'- the question in terms of a homogenised 'us' ('Indians')
versus 'them' (English colonisers) and thus becomes easy fodder for
nationalist mythologies. As Aijaz Ahmad argues in another context,
"if the motivating force of history...is neither class formation and
class struggle nor the multiplicities of intersecting conflicts based
upon class, gender, nation, race, region, and so on, but the unitary
'experience' of national oppression... then what else can we narrate
but that national oppression? [Ahmad 1992:102]. The result is not
only that the 'nation' becomes the legitimate community, but also
that the imagined 'nation' becomes
   the mask worn by the ruling classes to cover their face of
exploitation. Thus the nationalist  rhetoric here could be seen as a
strategy employed by the ruling coalition led by the  bourgeoisie to
overcome the crisis of legitimacy which it is facing in the present
[Lele 1995  and Desai 1999]. It also contributes to the myth of a
benign and benevolent traditional  order, which was only interrupted
by 'modernity' represented by the colonial state.22 That is
 why it is imperative to recover the silences of the 'fiction' that
'Lagaan' portrays.
 _________

rb