Given India’s long history as a British colony, and Britain’s authorship of a large part of Indian cultural and social history, we look back at this tenacious colonial period to find some of these answers. Thus, we look at the classical republican discourse of the “effiminatus” (Dowling 1994) that was used to define the “virile” man in nineteenth-century Britain. Imported to the colonies by colonial administrators and policy-makers, like Thomas Babington Macaulay, these prevalent ideas about imperial masculinity in turn molded the ruler/ruled paradigm (Bhattacharya 1998; Collingham 2001; Lowrie 2013; Rosselli 1980). As the educated native sought to become a subservient “mimic man” (Bhabha 2004), the only way in which he could be legible to his British master, the departure of this master, left these “mimic men” in a crisis. The subsequent reclamation of a distinctly Indian masculinity thus took root. We look at how this reclamation first started by redefining the Indian male body, hitherto “effete,” as the site of masculine identity. Apart from prevalent (corrosive) British influences, we also investigate alternative (redeeming) influences, like African-American jazz music, and how this was used by the colonized native man to imagine himself with/within the racial paradigm of colonialism (Shope 2016; Tamar Sharma 2010).
Our goal here is to bring together our particular research – in nineteenth-century Anglo-Indian literature, in film and film production, and in comics – to productively think about Indian masculinities. We look beyond the bounds of the current archives of this field, which focuses mostly on post-Independence fiction and film, to bring into conversation other textual and visual archives which expand its scope. If the British created the “effeminate” Indian, then how did they do this? Nineteenth-century Anglo-Indian literature, read and circulated within the “exile” community in India and the metropole, is where we look for answers. If comics were read across class and educational hierarchies after Independence, then what did the Indian man, hitherto “effete,” now look like in these texts? If Bollywood is where the Indian man goes to find himself, then what does its music have to do contribute to this search?
Meghna Sapui will begin by opening up the conversation with colonial ideas of masculine behavior, interaction, and presentation in George Francklin Atkinson’s 1858 book of sketches, Curry and Rice. Atkinson, a captain in the Imperial Army, illustrates and describes British expatriates in the fictional Indian cantonment town, Kabob. This paper argues that Atkinson’s men are portrayed and caricatured vis à vis the nineteenth-century stereotype of the “nabob.” It further investigates how Atkinson foregrounds questions of British representation in India, immediately following the Revolt of 1857. He does this by caricaturing the “nabob” as someone who is effeminized through his Indianization, not just in his outward appearance, but also in the “penetration” of his inviolable English body. In so far as this mockery of the “nabob” indicates its evolution from being the subject of ridicule to the subject of rejection, it also complicates the asymmetry of what Homi K. Bhabha calls “colonial mimicry” by making “mimic men” of the colonizer, who inadvertently also threaten the balance of colonial power.
Following the theme of the racialized construction of masculinities, Sourav Chatterjee, in his paper, investigates how native masculinity was reclaimed post-Independence. Chatterjee argues that Bengali comic strips of Narayan Debnath, and Mayukh Chowdhury, in the 1960s, radically reimagined the body of contemporary middle-class Bengali men to exorcise the pejorative label of the “effete” and restore masculinity. His paper also explores how these comics sought to negate the colonial assumption that Bengalis were collectively coward and “effete,” because firstly, this insult was a colonial construct; and secondly, this stereotype was internalized by Bengalis themselves. Chatterjee looks at how these comics, by graphically reimagining the Bengali male body, against the backdrop of the prevalent politics of West Bengal, forge a visually coherent Bengali comic tradition devoid of effete Bengalis.
The panel concludes with an examination of other racial models available in thinking about masculinity in popular Bollywood cinema. Tyler Klatt looks at the role of Western music as a means of masculine self-fashioning in Bollywood’s first hip-hop film, Zoya Akhtar’s Gully Boy (2019). In his paper, Klatt traces the instances across Indian cinema where black male subjectivity is deployed as a means of multifaceted resistance. In Akhtar’s film, 22-year-old Murad Ahmed or “Gully Boy” is a devout Muslim from the slums of Mumbai, India who aspires to be rapper. Similarly, for many Goan and other bi-racial (most of them Anglo-Indian) musicians, such as Chic Chocolate (1916-1967), who were marginalized by the British because of their mixed racial heritage, jazz music provided an appealing image of masculine authenticity. This paper outlines the role of African-American music in India during British rule and into the present moment, connecting Akhtar’s film to the “hybrid” music of the early Hindi film industry.
In providing a century-spanning overview of the many ways in which Indian masculinity was imagined and re-imagined, we hope to engage with the discourse of masculinity, manhood, and manliness as they have shaped the empire-building, and later, the postcolonial nation-building project in India. Even now as political, religious, and communal lines are drawn and redrawn based on masculine identity - the real Indian man as of 2019 is the chowkidaar, the nation’s watchman/guardsman – these papers seek to assess, in a timely fashion, why and how this identity (identities) continues to hold center-stage in the political and cultural life of the nation.