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Abstract
This dissertation charts the cinematic representation of historical trauma in the Indian experience. It connects the trauma of the Partition of India in 1947 as a result of an extreme mobilization of sectarian identities, with the vicious cycle of hatred, violence and catastrophe perpetuated by the forces of contemporary communal politics. The fictional and cinematic insistence on remembering is evidence of the return of trauma through “invasive memory” and displaced symptoms, and of the inability of a culture to “forget.” Cinema not only refracts history through the prism of representation, it also forms a collective memory of momentous events and mobilizes memory for an imagining of the community—both national and local. The dissertation is located, on the one hand, in trauma and memory debates, and on the other, within the debates around the Partition, militant Hindu imaginings and contemporary political discourses including those concerned with the crisis of secularism. It looks at the ambivalent nature of memory, at its healing and transformative role, as well as at the manichaean hold of the past over the present. It argues that if Hindu fundamentalism (Hindutva) “constructs” a memory of the Partition to radically distort history and the present, leading to disastrous consequences for contemporary cultural and political life in India, cinematic representations have not only indicated these dangerous consequences but have also called for an evocation of other memories of the past to counter the catastrophic “politics of memory” that Hindutva mobilizes. As “an alternative discourse for history telling,” cinema is deeply invested in visions, desires, the formations of subjectivity, and in the notions of community. All the films discussed here negate a monolithic conception of nationhood by challenging, critiquing and rejecting the idea that the “community in imagination” is the “communal imagination”. Using the affective power of the melodramatic mode, this cinema communicates history and political ideas as felt experience. If alternative independent cinema has been upheld as embodying an analytical impulse, the dissertation argues for and highlights the critical role of mainstream popular cinema, and underlines its negotiation of traumatic memory through “mourning work.”
