Revolutionary Violence, Militant Women, and Indian History: Towards a Popular Memory

This paper analyzes the circulation of popular interpretations of the Indian past through cinematic representations. I analyze four Hindi language films The Legend of Bhagat Singh (2002), Rang De Basanti (2006), Khelein Hum Jee Jaan Sey (2010), and Chittagong (2012), all of which highlight revolutionary-terrorist groups and their contribution to the Indian freedom fight. I argue that though these films about the revolutionary movement serve as reparative history of violent nationalism, they ultimately confirm the dominant narrative of Gandhian ahimsa (nonviolence). The historical accounts of these films include representations of women terrorists, yet, they only highlight women who espouse the “ideals of Indian womanhood.” Even as the films challenge accepted narratives of Indian nationalism, in the end they all conform to the larger message of nationalist historiography — that the Indian independence struggle was a moral, heroic, predominantly male, struggle of non-violence. Reading the films against the archival sources I examined in my research, I raise questions about the relationship between popular and professional history. In my use of “popular”, I am not only indexing the difference between elite and non-elite. I understand popular to signify the larger common sense of history and events, people and places, the “notions about history and remembrances of things past,” that permeates everyday life in India. Thus, I attempt to use the films as a mass medium of significance to consider the politics of knowledge production in India, specifically to understand how the two domains of popular and academic history engage with each other.