Land, Nation and Post-Independent Hindi Cinema: A Case Study of Mother India and Do Bigha Zameen
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Date
2020-05
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Medical Council of India
Abstract
The idea of nation has been constructed, debated and reconstructed in socio-cultural representations throughout the world. In case of India, theidea of nation is deeply connected with the idea of land relations as a cultural policy. Hindi popular cinema after the Indian independenceembraced the subject of land as its narrative trope and tried to disseminate the idea of a self-sufficient independent nation. Mehboob's MotherIndia (1957) became an instrumental cinematic venture not only for the Bombay film industry, but for constructing an idea of an 'Indianness'based on the metaphor of land as the mother. If the role of the Indian state was shown triumphantly way in Mother India in dealing with theproblem of land in the post-independent nation, Do Bigha Zameen (1953) questioned the very validity of such statist interventions, especially atthe wake of Jawaharlal Nehru's Five Year Plans for industrial development. Mother India and Do Bigha Zameen became two most important filmtexts of national film culture when it comes to the question of land and peasant lives. Ironically, these two films can be considered as twodistorted mirror images of each other in their gaze on questions of land in early post-independence era.
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Keywords
Nation, Hindi popular cinema, land relations, Mother India, Do Bigha Zameen
Citation
Das Soumya Suvra. Land, Nation and Post-Independent Hindi Cinema: A Case Study of Mother India and Do Bigha Zameen. International Journal of Interdisciplinary and Multidisciplinary Studies. 2020 May; 7(2): 97-102