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Priya Jaikumar is Assistant Professor in the School of Cinema-Television at the University of Southern California.

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""Cinema at the End of Empire" offers a sparkling account of the intertwined histories of British imperial and Indian colonial films. Challenging the frame of national cinema, it situates the cinematic representations of both empire and the nation in the conjuncture of late colonialism, and shows how films dealt with the pressures, anxieties, and challenges of decolonization. At once attentive to films and history, this is a truly remarkable book."--Gyan Prakash, author of "Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India"

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CINEMA AT THE END OF EMPIRE

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

List of Illustrations............................................................................xiAcknowledgments..................................................................................xiiiIntroduction.....................................................................................11. Film Policy and Film Aesthetics as Cultural Archives..........................................132. Acts of Transition: The British Cinematograph Films Acts of 1927 and 1938.....................413. Empire and Embarrassment: Colonial Forms of Knowledge about Cinema............................654. Realism and Empire............................................................................1075. Romance and Empire............................................................................1356. Modernism and Empire..........................................................................1657. Historical Romances and Modernist Myths in Indian Cinema......................................195Notes............................................................................................239Bibliography.....................................................................................289Index of Films...................................................................................309General Index....................................................................................313

Chapter One

AS CULTURAL ARCHIVES

In the 1930s British film journals worried about Hollywood's exploitation of Britain's film market, and Indian film journals complained of the lack of affordable equipment, of exploitative middlemen, and of a need for better stories. Although colonialism was not a preoccupying theme, it was the pervasive condition, as changes in imperial state politics and colonial relations defined the alternatives available to British and Indian film industries confronting obstacles to their development. Everything in British India was under renegotiation: the colony's right to sovereignty, the imperial state's entitlement to colonial resources, the jurisdiction of imperial administrators, and the future of empire. These contests were etched into commercial film-policy debates and film form in both territories. With this opening chapter I look ahead to the rest of the book, and write about how the angels of culture, history, and politics danced upon a pin's head of film-policy semantics and film style.

State Form

In 1932 the British Commission on Educational and Cultural Films, funded by grants from private trusts and local authorities, published the report The Film in National Life. The commission had been established at a 1929 conference of "some hundred Educational and Scientific organizations" to examine sound and silent films, and to evaluate cinema as a medium of education, art, and entertainment in Britain. The report is best known for its recommendations to create a national film institute, which became the template for the British Film Institute, established in 1933. Less known is the fact that the report also contained an assessment of commercial British films in the colonies. Based on its study, The Film in National Life concluded that the "responsibility of Great Britain is limited to what, by the production and interchange of its films, she can do in this country. The Colonies are under varying forms of control; and their Governments cannot be expected to take constructive action without a clear and firm lead from the Home [British] Government. There the responsibility of Great Britain is double, for what is done at home and for what is done overseas."

The report highlights, in condensed version, three related aspects of the British State's attitude toward commercial cinema during late empire. In the 1920sand1930sstate-fundedcommitteesinBritain,thecolonies,andthedominions assessed local film production, transforming a new cultural industry into manageable, organizable data. The desire to influence colonial film industries underwrote these official collations and productions of knowledge about film, which in turn guided the rationalization and regulation of British cinema within the domestic British market. At the same time, colonial and dominion film industries reacted to Britain's regulatory initiatives with varying degrees of reservation as they asserted their boundaries of cultural sovereignty. In the first part of this book I deal with the parallel operation of such domestic and imperial negotiations, which began in 1927-28 when the British State assessed both the British film industry and the Indian film market, rendering them cognate territories for potential state intervention. Subsequent to its evaluation of Britain's industry, the state resolved that British film production was a necessary industrial sector for Britain and worthy of measured domestic protection, as provided by the Quota Act (chapter 2). At the same time, the state accepted an evaluation of Indian film as a luxury industry that was best left to its own devices (chapter 3). Here was a linked state apparatus-with the government of India answerable to the British parliament and the Crown-arriving at opposing definitions of two film industries in relation to their respective domestic markets.

A series of questions become interesting in this context. What kinds of arguments and lobby groups did British film producers utilize to acquire state assistance? Why and on what terms was the Indian film market assessed? Who conducted the investigation in India, and why did the state withdraw from active intervention there? Answers to these questions demonstrate that the state's adjudication of the British film industry as essential and of the Indian film industry as inessential altered the authorized boundaries of state power with regard to cinema in both countries. A liberal state's authority derives in part from its jurisdiction over differentiating between "public" and "private" spheres, "essential" and "tertiary" industries. Liberal-state rationality or "governmentality" operates through the codification of social and cultural information to generate a legitimate agenda for state intervention or restraint in relation to its populace and their governing institutions. This Foucauldian conceptualization of the state as a collective of practices operationalized through multiple points of attempted and actual regulations frames government and society in mutually constitutive terms. However, for Foucault the correlative of the state's suasive power is the free (rather than the colonial) subject. Foucault's theory of the liberal state necessarily brushes up against the West's simultaneous application of nonconsensual state power in the colonies to convey the contradictory operations of Western political modernity.

The British State, constitutionally liberal at home but not in its colonies, was an agent of modernization in both domains through the twinned enactment of liberal and imperial policies. Scholarship on the colonial state in anthropology, ethnography, literary studies, and history has long offered evidence of such circuitous historical mappings by studying "the metropole and the colony as a unitary field of analysis." The virtue of this analysis is that, by shifting attention to the role played by colonies in the definition of a modern British state, it moves...