Midnight's Children

Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie

1. Reading Resources
2. Video Resources
3. Online Test - Check your understanding
4. Presentations
   
   
   
   

1. Reading resources

• eText - Original Novel

• Introduction: About the Author- Salman Rushdie and 'Midnight's Children'

• 'English' in Midnight's Children

• Themes in Midnight's Children

  • History and the Individual

  • Colonialism and neo-colonialism in India

  • Fragmentation, Migrancy and Memory

• Technique in Midnight's Children

• Characterization in Midnight's Children

• Midnight's Children as Literary Event

  • Postcolonial Novel

  • Postmodern Novel

  • Historical Fiction

• Hybridity and Postcoloniality: Formal, Social, and Historical Innovations in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (Research Chapter)

2. Video Resources

• Characters in Midnight's Children
• Narrative Technique in Midnight's Children
• Reading Symbols
• Mr Rushdie and Mrs. Gandhi
• Postcolonial Reading - Nation & Hybridity in Midnight's Children

3. Check your understanding - appear in an online test

4. Presentations:

(i) Narrative Technique in 'Midnight's Children'

(ii) Postcolonialism in 'Midnight's Children'

(iii) Symbols in 'Midnight's Children'

(iv) Mr. Rushdie and Mrs. Gandhi

Narrative Technique in Midnight's Children from Dilip Barad

Postcolonialism and Midnight's Children from Dilip Barad

Symbols in Midnight's Children from Dilip Barad

Mr. Rushdie and Mrs. Gandhi - Midnight's Children from Dilip Barad

Postcolonial Studies: An Introduction

Postcolonial Studies and Criticism - An Introduction

1. Watch video resources

2. Read study material

3. Future of Postcolonial Studies

4. Check your progress - appear in 4 Online Test linked at the bottom of this blog

1. Watch Video Resources

1. Postcolonial Studies - Introduction 1
2. Postcolonial Studies - Introduction 2
3. Postcolonial Criticism - 1
4. Postcolonial Criticism - 2
5. Postcolonial Criticism - 3
6. Era of Darkness - Shashi Tharoor
7. Dangers of One Story - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
8. Discussion on Ashutosh Gowariker's Lagaan
9. Discussion on Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra's Rang De Basanti
10. Nation and Hybridity: Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children

2. Reading Resources

Click here to download reading resources

3. Future of Postcolonial Studies

(i) Globalization and Postcolonial Studies

    (a) Simplified version of the above article

    (b) Globalization and Fiction - Article with examples

(ii) Climate Change and Postcolonial Studies

    (a) Postcolonial Studies in the Anthropocene: Bridging Perspectives for a Sustainable Future

4. Online Tests

(i) Edward Said's Orientalism - Basic Introduction - 16 Questions - 24 Marks

(ii) Key Concepts: Postcolonial Studies - 23 Questions - 30 Marks

(iii) Introduction to Postcolonialism: Click here to appear in an online test to check your understanding of this topic - 16 Questions - 50 Marks

(iv) Future of Postcolonialism: Click here to appear in an online test to check your understanding of this topic - 27 Questions - 75 Marks

Postcolonial Studies and Bollywood

 Postcolonial Theory and Bollywood Films

Lagaan: Lagaan (transl. Agricultural tax), released internationally as Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India, is a 2001 Indian Hindi-language epic musical sports film written and directed by Ashutosh Gowariker, and produced by and starring Aamir Khan, along with debutant Gracy Singh and British actors Rachel Shelley and Paul Blackthorne in supporting roles. The film is set in 1893, during the late Victorian period of India's colonial British Raj. The story revolves around a small village in Central India, whose inhabitants, burdened by high taxes, and several years of drought, find themselves in an extraordinary situation as an arrogant British army officer challenges them to a game of cricket, as a wager to avoid paying the taxes they owe. The narrative spins around this situation as the villagers face the arduous task of learning a game that is alien to them and playing for a result that will change their village's destiny.

Reading resource on 'Lagaan'

1. Subaltern Studies, Bollywood and "Lagaan" 

Using 'Lagaan' as a case in point, this paper argues that popular Bollywood films with their appeal to the mass audience of uprooted peasants, factory workers, the unemployed, uneducated and poor can decolonise the imagination of the Indian masses. It points out that "Lagaan's" efforts at indigenisation and interrogation of prescribed discourses of modernity and history deserve credit for making possible the creation of public debates within a culture where the majority of the population is non-literate, and is unable to partake in elite discussions of culture and modernity.
Chandrima Chakraborty. “Subaltern Studies, Bollywood and ‘Lagaan.’” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 38, no. 19, 2003, pp. 1879–1884. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4413550. Accessed 2 July 2021. 

2. Reading cricket fiction in the times of Hindu nationalism and farmer suicides

This paper will critique postcolonial theory's attempt to read the cricket nationalism portrayed in the Oscar-nominated Bollywood film Lagaan as one that subverts the civilizing mission of British colonialism and also restores the agency of the subaltern classes. Instead, it will argue that this cricket nationalism replicates Indian bourgeois nationalism, which has no place for the subaltern in its imaginary. It will also argue that the postcolonial thesis of decolonization and indigenization of cricket supposedly achieved by Lagaan is marked by a culturalism that does not take into account structural factors such as capital, class and caste that dominate the institution of cricket in India. Finally, against postcolonial theory's tendency to read a text in isolation from the context, it will be contended that the cricket nationalism of the film can only be understood by locating it in relation to the present socio-historic conjuncture wherein forces of capital and nationalism are hegemonic.

Nissim Mannathukkaren (2007) Reading cricket fiction in the times of Hindu nationalism and farmer suicides: Fallacies of textual interpretation, The International Journal of the History of Sport, 24:9, 1200-1225, DOI: 10.1080/09523360701448349 

3. Post Colonialism And Political Resistance In Lagaan: Once Upon A Time In India

Using the movie Lagaan as a case in point, the paper examines the post-colonial and political resistance in the 19th century. Lagaan is a Bollywood movie released in 2001 and is directed by Ashutosh Gowariker. The fictional story is set in a village in India and it explores the struggles faced by the citizens to earn their rights. Taking in account of the movie, the paper analyses the socio-political scenario of the country.

4.  INDIAN CINEMA: Then and Now - PARTHA CHATTERJEE

https://www.jstor.org/stable/41804040  

5. Subaltern Studies, Bollywood and "Lagaan" - Chandrima Chakraborty

https://www.jstor.org/stable/4413550  

6. Real and Imagined Audiences: "Lagaan" and the Hindi Film after the 1990s - Rachel Dwyer

https://www.jstor.org/stable/25758031

7. What's so Great about Lagaan? - Sudhanva Deshpande

https://www.jstor.org/stable/23005829

https://www.jstor.org/stable/4413550  

8. Leadership Lessons from Lagaan

 https://www.slideshare.net/mohitsingla/lessons-from-lagaan-16096178 

Watch film 'Lagaan'

Rang De Basanti:

Rang De Basanti (transl. Paint it saffron) is a 2006 Indian Hindi-language drama film written, produced and directed by Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra, and co-written by Rensil D'Silva.

The film follows a British film student traveling to India to document the story of five freedom fighters of the Indian revolutionary movement. She befriends and casts five young men in the film, which inspires them to fight against the corruption of their own government. It features an ensemble cast consisting of Aamir Khan, Siddharth, Atul Kulkarni, Soha Ali Khan, Sharman Joshi, Kunal Kapoor and British actress Alice Patten.

A major point of criticism the film faced was regarding the possibility of the Indian Army attacking students in a radio station. When Rakeysh was questioned about the same in a scriptwriter's conference conducted by the Film Writers Association in the year 2008, he said the following, "So, in 2005, in Allahabad, a bunch of 4 students took the TV station there, and they were shot dead. Everything I did, it was kind of borrowed, as I said right here. Obviously, what I am also learning is the way I tell a story is not real; you can term it as a-real. For maximum impact, for the message to go through, I felt—since the story was against the establishment—let the establishment do it. After all, the establishment did hang Bhagat Singh. After all, the establishment did come down on the innocent, innocent students in Mandal Commission. After all the establishment did come down on Tiananmen Square. After all the establishment did come down when the whole concept of Flower Power emerged in America. So it's all there. It's borrowed, maybe not as realistically, but it is definitely there in the society. During emergency, there are horror stories. If we have to go back to Kriplani and his movement in Bihar, the stories are absolutely horrific."

Reading resources on Rang De Basanti

1. Rang De Basanti - Consumption, Citizenship and the Public Sphere

The central objective of this thesis is to explore whether the consumption of RDB stimulated citizenship among young audiences and caused an expansion of the public sphere in India.

2. Bollywood as National(ist) Cinema - Violence, Patriotism and the National - Popular in Rang De Basanti

This essay sets out to explore the relationship between violence, patriotism and the national-popular within the medium of film by examining the Indian film-maker Rakeysh Mehra’s recent Bollywood hit, Rang de Basanti (Paint It Saffron, 2006). The film can be seen to form part of a body of work that constructs and represents violence as integral to the emergence of a national identity, or rather, its recuperation. Rang de Basanti is significant in contemporary Indian film production for the enormous resonance it had among South Asian middle-class youth, both in India and in the diaspora. It rewrites, or rather restages, Indian nationalist history not in the customary pacifist Gandhian vein, but in the mode of martyrdom and armed struggle. It represents a more ‘masculine’ version of the nationalist narrative for its contemporary audiences, by retelling the story of the Punjabi revolutionary Bhagat Singh as an Indian hero and as an example for today’s generation. This essay argues that its recuperation of a violent anti-colonial history is, in fact, integral to the middle-class ethos of the film, presenting the viewers with a bourgeois nationalism of immediate and timely appeal, coupled with an accessible (and politically acceptable) social activism. As the sociologist Ranjini Majumdar noted, ‘the film successfully fuels the middle-class fantasy of corruption being the only problem of the country’.

 Watch film 'Rang de Basanti'

Reading Resource:

Postcolonial theory in films - Oxford Bibliographies

Postcolonial theory has hardly been a defining paradigm in the field of film studies. Postcolonial theory originally emerged from comparative literature departments and film from film and media studies departments, and despite the many intersections postcolonial theory has not been explicitly foregrounded. However, there are more similarities and natural points of intersections between the two areas than it would at first appear. For example, both postcolonial theory and film studies emerged at the end of the 1970s with the development of semiotic theory and poststructuralist thought. Both areas engage intensively with the field of representation, implying the ways in which a language, be it cinematic or otherwise, manages to convey reality as “mediated” and “discursive,” and therefore influenced by power relations.

The Anti-Colonial Revolutionary in Contemporary Bollywood Cinema - Vidhu Aggarwal 

In her article "The Anti-Colonial Revolutionary in Contemporary Bollywood Cinema" Vidhu Aggarwal discusses several contemporary films including Rakesh Omprakash Mehra's Rang de Basanti with focus on the figure of the revolutionary hero. The Bollywood film is a cultural form that combines several aesthetic styles, from within India and from the outside. With its formal heterogeneity and as a product of one of India's largest cities, Mumbai Bollywood has had an ongoing fascination with "arrival," that is, with India's status as a contemporary nation-state. While some Bollywood films seem to celebrate fantasy scenarios of India's arrival on the global scene, at the same time they express anxiety about affective possibilities within a new Bollywood of higher production values and larger global reach, an India of mobile borders and attenuated historical context. Aggarwal examines the way the contemporaneity of Bollywood — both in terms of acting style and aesthetics — is negotiated through reenactments of the colonial period and compares Bollywood cinema with aspects of the British film Slumdog Millionaire, directed by Danny Boyle.

Artist Floating World

 An Artist of the Floating World - Kazuo Ishiguro

An Artist of the Floating World (1986) is a novel by Nobel Prize- winning British author Kazuo Ishiguro. It is set in post-World War II Japan and is narrated by Masuji Ono, an ageing painter, who looks back on his life and how he has lived it. He notices how his once great reputation has faltered since the war and how attitudes towards him and his paintings have changed. The chief conflict deals with Ono's need to accept responsibility for his past actions, rendered politically suspect in the context of post-War Japan. The novel ends with the narrator expressing good will for the young white-collar workers on the streets at lunchbreak. The novel also deals with the role of people in a rapidly changing political environment and with

the assumption and denial of guilt.

The novel is considered as both historical fiction and global literature

(Weltliteratur). It is considered historical fiction on account of its basis in a past that predates the author's own experiences, and it draws from historical facts. It is also considered global literature on account of its broad international market and its thematicization of how the world today is interconnected. (Source)

Reading Resources

Online Test - Check your understanding

Video Resources

Video 1: Form | An Artist

Video 2: Key Themes | An Artist

Video 3: Plot Summary | An Artist

Video 4: Cruel History of Japanese Imperial Militaristic Campaigns

Video 5: An Introduction to the Novel

Video 6: Characters & Narrative Strategies | An Artist

Video 7: Title of the Novel: Explained | An Artist

Video 8: Reading Important Passages | An Artist

Video 9: Themes | An Artist of the Floating World

Video 10: Great Art: Explained | Ukiyo-e

Video 11: About the Author | Kazuo Ishiguro | 

Video 12: Introductory Presentation by Students (2023)

Worksheets:

1. Worksheet on the Author Kazuo Ishiguro & Title of the novel 'An Artist of the Floating World'

2. Worksheet on Characters, Theme, Narrative & Importance Passages from the novel 'An Artist of the Floating World'

1984

 Nineteen Eighty-four - George Orwell

Nineteen Eighty-four, also published as 1984, novel by English author George Orwell published in 1949 as a warning against totalitarianism. The chilling dystopia made a deep impression on readers, and his ideas entered mainstream culture in a way achieved by very few books. The book’s title and many of its concepts, such as Big Brother and the Thought Police, are instantly recognized and understood, often as bywords for modern social and political abuses.

Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-four as a warning after years of brooding on the twin menaces of Nazism and Stalinism. Its depiction of a state where daring to think differently is rewarded with torture, where people are monitored every second of the day, and where party propaganda trumps free speech and thought is a sobering reminder of the evils of unaccountable governments. Winston is the symbol of the values of civilized life, and his defeat is a poignant reminder of the vulnerability of such values in the midst of all-powerful states. (Source)

Genre Study:

Dystopian Literature & Orwellian

• Worksheet - 1: Understanding Dystopia and Orwellian

Movie Adaptations (Source)

• Worksheet - 2: Screening Film Adaptation of George Orwell's 1984

(1) 1984 (1956)

Director: Michael Anderson

Notable Cast: Edmond O’Brien, Jan Sterling, Michael Redgrave, Donald Pleasence

The first film adaptation of 1984 was a British production released in 1956, directed by Michael Anderson and starring Edmond O'Brien, Jan Sterling, Michael Redgrave, and Donald Pleasence. The 1956 film remained faithful to the themes and story of the novel, but made many changes to plot points and characters, combining, rearranging, and replacing elements of the novel in order to make a clearer storyline. Additionally, the characters of O’Brien and Goldstein are renamed O’Conner and Calidor. While well-received, this movie never became a hit.

(2) 1984 (1984)

Director: Michael Radford

Notable Cast: John Hurt, Richard Burton, Suzanna Hamilton

The second film adaptation was released in the actual year 1984, directed by Michael Radford and starring John Hurt, Richard Burton, and Suzanna Hamilton.

This adaptation remained more faithful to the plot of the novel, although it 

diverged significantly in its ending. In the film, Winston’s confession is broadcast 

publicly after he is released from the Ministry of Love. While the film—like the 

novel—ends with Winston encountering an image of Big Brother, the film seems to

indicate that the image instills shame, regret, or grief in Winston, while the image in

the novel instills love for Big Brother. Like its predecessor, this adaptation was 

well-received, but not a major hit.

Online Test - Check your understanding of the novel

Video Resources

 

Crash Course - 1

   

Crash Course - 2

   

Newspeak

   

Video Summary

   

Summary of the novel

   

1984 - BBC-Why it still matters?

   

How to recognize a Dystopia?

   

What is Orwellian?

   

Introduction by Students

   

Orwellian Explained

  

God is Power | 1984 | George Orwell

Critique of Religion | 1984 | George Orwell

Great Gatsby

 The Great Gatsby - by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby, third novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, published in 1925 by Charles Scribner’s Sons. Set in Jazz Age New York, the novel tells the tragic story of Jay Gatsby, a self-made millionaire, and his pursuit of Daisy Buchanan, a wealthy young woman whom he loved in his youth. Unsuccessful upon publication, the book is now considered a classic of American fiction and has often been called the Great American Novel. (Click here to read more)

Additional Reading Resources (Click to open)

Online Test

Video Resources

Introduction and Analysis of the novel 'The Great Gatsby':

Summary and Analysis of the novel 'The Great Gatsby'

Character Study - Nick Carraway, the Narrator

Understanding Jay Gatsby's character

Psychoanalytical Study of Jay Gatsby - Shame & Guilt

The study of the novel and the film adaptation - The Great Gatsby by Baz Luhrmann

The Great Gatsby | Novel and Film Adaptation from Dilip Barad