Cinema at the End of Empire: A Politics of Transition in Britain and India

About the Book

How did the imperial logic underlying British and Indian film policy change with the British Empire's loss of moral authority and political cohesion? Were British and Indian films of the 1930s and 1940s responsive to and responsible for such shifts? Cinema at the End of Empire illuminates this intertwined history of British and Indian cinema in the late colonial period. Challenging the rubric of national cinemas that dominates film studies, Priya Jaikumar contends that film aesthetics and film regulations were linked expressions of radical political transformations in a declining British empire and a nascent Indian nation. As she demonstrates, efforts to entice colonial film markets shaped Britain's national film policies, and Indian responses to these initiatives altered the limits of colonial power in India. Imperially themed British films and Indian films envisioning a new civil society emerged during political negotiations that redefined the role of the state in relation to both film industries.

In addition to close readings of British and Indian films of the late colonial era, Jaikumar draws on a wealth of historical and archival material, including parliamentary proceedings, state-sponsored investigations into colonial filmmaking, trade journals, and intra- and intergovernmental memos regarding cinema. Her wide-ranging interpretations of British film policies, British initiatives in colonial film markets, and genres such as the Indian mythological film and the British empire melodrama reveal how popular film styles and controversial film regulations in these politically linked territories reconfigured imperial relations. With its innovative examination of the colonial film archive, this richly illustrated book presents a new way to track historical change through cinema.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations xi
Acknowledgments xii
Introduction 1
1. Film Policy and Film Aesthetics as Cultural Archives 13
Part One. Imperial Governmentality
2. Acts of Transition: The British Cinematographic Films Acts of 1927 and 1938 41
3. Empire and Embarrassment: Colonial Forms of Knowledge about Cinema 65
Part Two. Imperial Redemption
4. Realism and Empire 107
5. Romance and Empire 135
6. Modernism and Empire 165
Part Three. Colonial Autonomy
7. Historical Romances and Modernist Myths in Indian Cinema 195
Notes 239
Bibliography 289
Index of Films 309
General Index 313

About the Author :

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

Review :
"Priya Jaikumar's Cinema at the End of Empire breaks out of the analytic framework of national cinemas that still dominates the disciplinary imagination of film studies, despite recent attempts to dismantle the rubric...The practice of considering the metropole and the colonies in conjunction has, of course, gained a prominent place on the research agenda of a new imperial history influenced by postcolonial theory but is relatively novel in the field of film studies, where scholarship on (post)colonial film cultures still remains segregated from work on European national cinemas; this monograph thus stages a significant critical intervention in that respect as well...her discussion of British and Indian films emphasizes their aesthetic hybridity, as well as the diversity of British responses to decolonization and the internal schisms of the Indian nationalist project...extremely insightful and thought provoking...the montage of tantalizing glimpses that Jaikumar offers into a complex and fascinating but underexplored domain of Indian cinema and the creative and significant connections that she makes (between, as well as within, national film cultures) will no doubt catalyze other important and much-needed work on the film cultures of colonial India and, more generally, in comparative film studies." Manashita Dass, Screen 2007, issue 48