stanford: apr 13th lawlessness and the cinematic popular in 1970s india: sholay

apr 11th, 2011 CE

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From: Sangeeta Mediratta

Sudipta Sen: Lawlessness and the Cinematic Popular in 1970s India: Meditations on Sholay

April 13: Encina Hall West, Room 208, 4 pm

Abstract:

In this paper I address vignettes of lawlessness and travesties of the legislative state in post-colonial India through a study of arguably the most popular movie made in India, Sholay. This is a sprawling melodrama based on a story of outlaw vigilantism that encrypts a fable of the unlawful subject dispossessed of the means of rightful justice. The phenomenal appeal of this film, and its exalted place in Indian popular cinema as the exemplar of a time-honored genre devoted to retribution outside the purview of formal law, indicates an abiding fascination of the Indian cultural mainstream with the enforcement of the law and its violation. Not only the central theme of the movie, but also the history of its production, including its initial struggles with the central board of censors in India, taken together provide a valuable instance for a study of popular cinematic representations of the state and the fears and uncertainties surrounding the rule of law in India during the 1970s.

Bio: 

Sudipta Sen is Professor of History and Director, Middle East/South Asia Studies Program at the University of California, Davis. A historian of late medieval and early modern India and the British Empire, his work has focused on the early colonial history of British India. He is the author of two books, Empire of Free Trade: The English East India Company and the Making of the Colonial Marketplace, Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998, and Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India, London: Routledge, 2002. He is currently working on two book length manuscripts. The first, Ganga: Many Pasts of an Indian River, New Haven: Yale University Press (forthcoming) is an exploration of the idea of a cosmic, universal river at the interstices of myth, historical geography and ecology, and the other is a longer term project entitled Imperial Justice: British Rule and Criminal Law in Early Colonial India, 1770-1830.

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