How Indian films are faring to depict what India was like under the British Raj
Earlier this year Gurinder Chadha’s Viceroy’s House, which follows the last British Viceroy of India, Lord Mountbatten, as he oversees British India’s transition to Independence, became the first major production since Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi (1982) to depict the period on the same scale. The presence of Chadha, a British-Indian director who felt that her lineage made it “a deeply personal story”, suggested that this could be the beginning of a new chapter in showcasing the Raj.
Chadha was more than aware that she did not want her Indian characters to be “marginalised” and wanted to undo not just the atrocious record of Western actors playing Indians but also portraying Indians with realism and dignity. But many critics felt that Chadha’s “bland inoffensiveness” turned Viceroy’s House into a sanitised period piece and some like Joseph Walsh felt that even after seven decades “Indian cinema (was) still struggling to depict the Raj, leaving its screen depictions — from Mahatma Gandhi to colonial racism — to be viewed almost solely through British eyes”.
India story
While Bollywood might be some distance from grasping India’s story when it comes to depicting the colonial past, intriguingly enough two new foreign productions slated to release later this year, Victoria & Abdul and The Black Prince, could give an indication of just how much has changed, if at all, in Raj cinema when it comes to telling the Indian side of the story.
A term commonly used to refer to the films and television shows about India, made in Britain in the early 1980s that illustrate nostalgia for the British Raj, Raj cinema can be prominently seen in Gandhi, Heat & Dust (1982), A Passage to India (1984), The Far Pavilions (1984) and The Jewel in the Crown (1984). In an essay titled Imperial Migrations: Reading the Raj cinema of 1980s, author T Muraleedharan argues that this 1980s’ resurgence of British interest in India almost 40 years after the loss of political domination is something much more than a coloniser’s continuing interest in a former colony.
He adds that in the 1960s and the 1970s, the deteriorating self-image of Britain with increased criticism of imperialism and neo-colonisation from the recently liberated colonies — besides growing inflation, unemployment and widespread immigration — led to the growth of neo-racism. This deployment of racism especially in the face of Asian immigration, according to Muraleedharan, adds interesting implications to films like Heat & Dust and A Passage to India.
These films attempted to rewrite history by reversing the oppressor/victim roles — in Heat & Dust, a nawab (Shashi Kapoor) is shown entertaining his guests, the colonisers, with stories of atrocities committed by his ancestors; he also impregnates Olivia (Greta Scacchi), the wife of a District Collector (Christopher Cazenove), and is shown as someone forever engaged in entertaining his guests while the British civil authorities are mostly working. What’s more, Heat & Dust also transfers the guilt of imperial luxury entirely to the Indian royalty “in spite of Britain’s imperial dominance over India”.
Now, a second wave of (re)discovering the Raj cinema is ready to hit the screens. Based on the book of the same name by Shrabani Basu, Victoria and Abdul explores the real-life relationship between Queen Victoria (Judy Dench) and her Indian servant Abdul Karim (Ali Fazal), who arrived from India to participate in her golden jubilee. The film is directed by Stephen Frears and would look at how the young clerk, Karim, finds favour with the old Queen and offers her new eyes to see a changing world and even helps reclaim her humanity.
Second wave
The other film, The Dark Prince, is a biopic of Maharaja Duleep Singh (played by singer Satinder Sartaaj), the last King of Punjab and the youngest son of Maharaja Ranjit Singh. It brings to life the contribution of the descendants of Maharaja Ranjit Singh in attaining independence from British in 1947. Duleep Singh became the king of Punjab at the age of five and at 15 he was taken away from his mother, Rani Jindan (Shabana Azmi), and sent to England.
Later Duleep Singh was indoctrinated into Christianity and kept away from Punjab lest his mere presence wopuld have revitalised Punjab to take on the British. Thirteen years later, when he briefly returned to India he reembraced Sikhism and hoped to regain all that was lost.
Reverse migration
It is intriguing that at the time of their release Heat & Dust and A Passage to India both portrayed a “reverse migration” and now in 2017, the Western interest in Asia is once again on the rise. The two upcoming films — Victoria and Abdul and The Dark Prince — would show the opposite, where an “Indian” heads West and, in some way, giving new insights on their actions that impact millions of people. India and Great Britain are at a crossroads much like nearly three decades ago: we are questioning our own leaders including Gandhi and their actions during our transition from a colony to a newly independent country, while the British are seeking new answers to the age-old question that grapples them — what was the degree of the Empire’s great wrongdoing?
Much of the present beliefs regarding our struggle for freedom or the way we interpret the Raj can be attributed to the Raj cinema. Perhaps this is what makes the timing of Victoria and Abdul and The Dark Prince fortuitous. Thankfully, with the central Indian characters in both being played by Indians, this could offer a better view of the past as opposed to a film like Gandhi which, as Salman Rushdie pointed out, were far too hagiographical to offer an accurate depiction of India’s most famous son. Or it may not. But in any case, it’s a long way from watching actors Bernard Bresslaw or Kenneth Williams “brown-up” in Carry On Up the Khyber (1968) or suffering Alec Guinness as an elderly Brahmin scholar, Narayan Godbole, in A Passage to India.
(Courtesy of Mail Today.)