The end of empire : a politics of transition in Britain and India
Registro en:
978-0822337935
10.26530/oapen_625239
Autor
Jaikumar, Priya
Institución
Resumen
We must abandon the rubric of national cinemas if we are to consider the
multiple, conjunctural pressures applied by decolonization on the political
entities of an imperial state and its colony. Declining British imperialism, in-
creasing U.S. hegemony, and internal nationalist factions implicated Britain
and India in each other’s affairs, shaping state policies, domestic markets,
and emergent cinemas in both regions. A parallel narration of their inter-
twined histories clarifies the global function of cinema during late colonial-
ism by interrogating the consequences of a redistribution of political power
in plural and linked cultural contexts.
In 1931 Winston Churchill spoke to the Council of Conservative Associates
in Britain, explaining his resistance to granting India dominion status. ‘‘To
abandon India to the rule of Brahmins would be an act of cruel and wicked
negligence. . . . These Brahmins who mouth and patter the principles of West-
ern Liberalism . . . are the same Brahmins who deny the primary rights of
existence to nearly sixty million of their own countrymen whom they call ‘un-
touchable’ . . . and then in a moment they turn around and begin chopping
logic with Mill or pledging the rights of man with Rousseau.’’