Questions Of Modernity

7. The Making of Modernity: Gender and Time in Indian Cinema

Seven The Making of Modernity: Gender and Time in Indian Cinema Veena Das In his essay on the painter of modern life, Charles Baudelaire stated that modernity is "the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable."1 This particular intuition about modernity, that it has to do with the fleeting , the transitory, the contingent, and that its privileged time is that of the eternal present, has led several scholars such as Charles Taylor and Alasdair Mclntyre to look at the stable and the immutableas the characteristic of tradition.2 Yet the past few decades, when the idea of multiple modernities was presented in the writings of scholars such as Eisenstadt, is also the period when the notion of stabilityof tradition was brought into question and the constructed character of tradition—the many ways in which it could be "invented"—was brought into sharp relief.3 It may be pertinent to ask here whether so-called traditional societies have their own ways of constructing modernity. May we then speak of alternative modernities or alternative histories of modernity when we come to regard non-Western sites as equally the sites of modernity?4 How does a tradition (or traditions ) make itself knowable to the world and to itself in the medium of the modern? As a way of addressing these questions I explore the imaginary institution of time and the construction of gender in Indian cinema, 166 The Making of Modernity 167 through which I claim that the notion of modernity is addressed. Since time is not the overt object of cinematic construction, I address the question of modernity through the construction (and de-construction) of masculinity and femininity. Simultaneously, there is also the constant address to the question of what kind of past the cinema as a modern medium in India can acquire. In one obvious sense one cannot speak about Indian cinema, any more than one can speak about Indian literature. An art form is, after all, not constrained or defined by politically defined territories. However , cinema in India makes the claim for itself as "Indian" through several cinematic devices. For instance, sometimes the device is used whereby the map of India appears onscreen and speaks to the people of India, as in Mughal e Azam (the Great Mughal), or the workers unite to form the outline of the map of India, as in the song sequence of Sathi Haath Badhana (Hold out Your Hand, Oh Friend) in Naya Daur (The New Dispensation). In an important sense, then, the cinema in India may claim that it has produced the disposition of an Indianness and not only represented it. But Indian cinema has not always been complicit with the aims of the state. Rather, in its enunciation of Indianness, we find such questions as the nature of the present, the production of the male subject, the desperate attempts by the female protagonist to make herself known, and a genealogy for cinema itself articulated.5 As Robert Smith has remarked, perhaps we can think of the media as a form through which the nation produces its autobiography.6 In the analysis that follows I take certain encounters between tradition and modernity as providing the context within which the institution of time and the transformation of the subject take place in the cinema. I find it useful to think of these encounters in the following way: (1) tradition as the pretension of an inner space that fortifies Indian society against the wounds of modernity—the seduction of tradition ; (2) tradition as it is claimed by the modern project of nation building and the claims of cinema as the monumental expression of that claim; (3) tradition as the "past present" that has become rotten, toward which the subject experiences a fierce nostalgia and a mountainous sense of loss, yet fidelity to the present requires its violent renunciation ; and (4) tradition as the natural, and modernity as a journey of the self into an unknown future. 168 VeenaDas Tradition as Inner Space In selecting the metropolis as the focal point for the analysis of modernity , the transitory character of the social relations struck Georg Simmel and the dominance of technological values (Simmel'sobjective culture) over personal values (his subjective culture) in the life of the metropolis.7 But just as Baudelaire conceived of eternity as the other half of the fugitive, fleeting...