Indian Cinema In The Wake Of Partition Summary

Gary Tedman in his book Aesthetics&Alienation, offers a complete and novel theory of aesthetics based on the perspectives of Karl Marx and Althusser. The study encompasses areas like, aesthetic level of practice, aesthetic state apparatuses, aesthetic interpellation, and pseudo dialectics. These concepts enabled the researcher to understand the role of aesthetic experience and its place in everyday life. Furthermore, the author proposes that aesthetics can be defined in a concrete way to fill the gap between the perspectives of Marx and Freud. By looking into the Marxist concepts of base and superstructure, author is of opinion that the aesthetic level of practice is the area that has traditionally been ignored, and points out political reasons

He asserts that Partition remains a wound in the collective psyche of South Asia. Its representation on screen brings forth a history that remained largely opaque to standard historiography.Sarkar follows the initial silence to engage with the trauma of 1947 and the subsequent emergence of a strong Partition discourse. It reveals both the silence and the eventual “return of the repressed” as strands of one complex process. Sarkar develops an allegorical reading of the silence as a form of mourning by connecting the relative silence of the early decades after Partition to a project of postcolonial nation-building and to trauma’s disjunctive temporal structure. He relates the expansion of explicit Partition narratives in films made since the mid-1980s to disillusionment with post-independence achievements. He asserts how current cinematic memorializations of 1947 are influenced by economic liberalization and the rise of a Hindu-chauvinist nationalism. Sarkar provides a history of Indian cinema by traversing Hindi and Bengali commercial cinema, art cinema, and television (Sarkar,

The study explores how significant the role of media is for the bourgeois domination of a system in which democracy normally does not work for the socially oppressed and marginalized. The history of Indian cinema is depicted with many details in this book while at the same time it examines the histories of the Indian nation portrayed in this cinema. Deshpande also examines the intricacies of modern visual narratives becoming an instrument of bourgeois hegemony in colonial and post-colonial India. Moreover, deconstruction of the relationship between fact and fiction, history and imagination, nation and gender, nationalism and communalism, media and perception, history and war, cinema and social identities, have become the crux of the study ( Deshpande,