Abstract This is a short study of media’s role in creating national and gender identities in contemporary global times. Taking the medium of cinema as a visual narrative form in the particular case of India – a postcolonial nation that is witnessing a rising force of religious nationalism, I explore various ideas and theories of narrative, nation, state, gender, identity, film, feminism and psychoanalysis. This is also a personal exploration of self, identity, nation, gender, politics and history in the context of present media environments. The research lays insights on the works of both Western and Indian scholars and comes up with unique and interesting conclusions about what it means to belong in the modern world. Introduction Rise of nationalism at the beginning of the 21st century may seem absurd and politically motivated when space-time compression (Harvey 1989) has allowed free flow of people, goods, ideas, and cultures to move across borders (Castells 2009). While this process has aimed for a utopian cosmopolitan project (Smith 1995), it is also interesting to note that the rise of nation states went hand in hand with transnational economic and cultural exchange, creating a contrast between the ideas of nationalism and globalization (Mann 1997). Access and use of media and communication technology affects how we experience events, create networks that help in creating new identities, providing us new ways of organizing and understanding ourselves. In such a scenario, even if nation states as building blocks are flourishing more than ever, conflicts of identities are coming more into attention – of self, nation, gender and culture, leading to mass civil unrests, protests, wars and clashes (Kaldor 2004, Mann 2005). The central research questions that I will explore are – “How is media responsible for building narratives around the ‘nation’ and how are they gendered?” and “How are these gendered national identities represented through the medium of film? I’ve chosen film as the preferred medium to explore these questions because in the last few years, Indian Cinema has seen a rise in the themes of national and gender politics. With a population of over a billion people and multiple spoken and written languages, cinema being a visual medium, becomes the most popular storytelling medium to build and maintain national consciousness in India (Chakravarty 1993). It is the primary cultural product to narrativize the nation and its history into the popular imagination of not just the nation’s primary citizens but its diaspora spread across the world. Despite the deep divisions in the society – of language, religion, caste and class, popular cinema manages to engage in the narratives of past, present and future of Indian civilization. An overwhelmingly huge film industry centered in Bombay that produces over 800 films on average a year in all major Indian languages, makes it certain that cinema is the defining mass communication tool to elicit what the nation is for the common people (Virdi 2003). For this project, I’m choosing to critically analyze the narratives of two very different Indian films made in the last 5 years – Haider (2012) and Tasher Desh (2014) to observe how gendered bodies perform in the narratives of the nation in filmic representation. To support my analysis, I will use a lot of ideas, concepts and theories of both western and Indian scholars, combing ideas and forming my own interpretation of them. The literature is divided into the following sub-headings – Media, myths and narratives: Here I will explore why we humans need stories and narratives to survive, how myths help in understanding our actions and behaviors, and how in the modern day, these myths are told through media. And since media is based on physical infrastructure, it is directly to the idea of the nation and its representation. Mediatization (Krotz 2008, Hjavard 2011) and postmodernism (Lyotard 1979) are the two main theories I talk about in this section. Nations, nationalism and the media: Here I will talk about how nation is understood differently by Primordialists (Smith 1983, Anderson 1983, Brubaker) and Modernists (Gellner 1983, Hobswan 1990, Rokkan 1975). What the different theories of modernization are (Bergmann 1992, Moore 1966, Sztompka 1994) and how different scholars comment on media playing the channel for these processes. Lastly, I will explore the ideas of Gellner (1983) and Renan (1996) on nationalism and how it’s related to violence and pride (Weber 1968, Stein 1996) Gender and Nationalism: In this section, I will explore how we understand masculine and feminine and we attach meanings and values in their constitution (Peterson 1992, Tickner 1992) How gender, sexuality and family is related to the nation (Mayer 2000, Enloe 2989, Gatens 1996, Banerjee 2005) and how male domination and patriarchy perpetuates itself in the society (Malsevic 2010, Goldstein 2001, Brownmiller 1975) I will also discuss Hofetede’s (2002) theorizing of nations and cultures as masculine and feminine. Hindu nationalism and gender Briefly exploring the history of India, I will go over how the nation has been imagined and defined by various leaders and scholars (Nehru 1946, Spivak 2007, Kaviraj 1991) what its current political situation is (Flaten 2017, Virdi 2003, Brosius 2004) and how gender identities have been represented in nationalist movements from independence movements to the present (Van der Veer 1994, Banerjee 2005, Jayawerdena 1986) and how the idea of woman is represented in some Hindu myths and symbols (Mankekar 1995, Sinha 1995). Film theories and the nation I will first establish the link between cinema and nation especially in India (Chakravarty 1993, Nandy 1983, Virdi 2003) and then discuss how that helps in dispensing myths and ideologies ( Nichols 1981, Berger 2016) Finally, I will focus on feminist theories of film – especially gaze, spectatorship, and psychoanalysis (Mary ann Doane 1987, Mulvey 1975, Irigaray 1993, Kaplan 1983, Kakkar 1989). I will then use these concepts and theories to do a visual narrative analysis engaging in some questions I pose for myself, using qualitative research methods suggested by Berger (2016) and Hansen, Cottle, Negrine, Newbold (1998) This project will help me not only to understand my position as a maker of media and film from a certain ethnic background, gender and nationality in the global context but also help me create gendered perspectives on narratives coming out in the media at large. MEDIA, MYTHS AND NARRATIVES Unlike other species that mostly survive on instincts alone, human beings need stories to survive, to give answers to our basic questions of birth, growth, development, aging, love, marriage and death, to understand ourselves and give meaning to our lives and of fellow humans. The time we live on this planet is limited and this experience of time which develops both memory and the unconscious, both of the individual and the collective plays an important role in the formation of identities, represented and reflected in these stories that are told, retold and passed on from generations to generations. An individual’s relationship to his/her family, society, civilization, nature, universe and the forces and principles that affect and govern this relationship like science, technology, politics, economics, religion, history are explored in the form of oral, written, visual and aural cultural expressions like art, myth, legends etc. According to Paul Ricouer (1964), a foundational narrative or creation myth is the story through which a community of people understand how they came to be. And because of this desire to transcend their lifetimes, this community of people who come together to form a nation tell stories to fulfill “the need for infinite” as Peruvian writer Jose Carlos Mariateguie calls it and go to wars if need be with other groups of people who have their own myths. However, the line between myth and history is blurred in pre-modern people where countless interpretations are made of the past. For a long time, religious myths and traditions were used to understand sufferings, joys and modes of behavior, but in the modern world this role of ‘meaning –making’ is being played by the media due to proliferation of structures of communication technology in every aspect of human life (Drotner 2008). This process called ‘mediatisation’ happens when media becomes so deeply entrenched that it starts defining social relations and what we call ‘truth’ or ‘reality’ (Krotz 2008, Hjavard 2011, Lillekar and Scullion 2008, Mazzoleni and Schulz 1999). For eg, language, religion and politics have now become all about performance in the media environments (Meyer, 2003, Stromback 2007). A narrative is defined as ‘a chain of events in cause-effect relationship occurring in time and space in which characters take action (Bordwell and Thompson 1990: 55). Media as a whole – global, national and local that by its virtue deals with power, ideology and representation (Hall 1993) controls and alters these narratives. They not only create aspirations and appropriate behaviors and morals but also provide blueprints to understand our relationships, memories, fantasies and desires. The metaphor of TV/internet as the modern fireplace around which people from geographically distant places come together to share stories is pertinent. Cinema as a visual narrative medium is one of the most powerful to represent mythical communal dreams in which primary archetypes of our times are expressed (Jung 1969). Opposed to news or print media, cinema creates a narrative of scenes/sequences that explore basic tenets like truth, salvation, goodness, peace, happiness and ideals of masculinity and femininity in a less intellectually demanding manner under the guise of entertainment. It is important to note that media is a product of ‘modernity’ that with all its variants, runs along the metanarrative of nationhood, a ‘self-fulfilling and self-justifying’ ideology (Appadurai 1995: 1) While every nation has its own trajectory of modernity, all share a common conception of time, which involves a reflexive attitude to the past and the present and a general orientation towards ‘the future’ (Therborn 2003). In “The postmodern Condition”, French postructuralist philosopher Jean Francois Lyotard (1979) argues that all forms of discourse can be understood as forms of narrative which are related to power structures in any given society. He introduced the concept of meta-narrative i.e. a big idea or story that organizes experience and knowledge and the tendency of postmodern narratives to question it. In the ‘postcolonial postmodern’ moment, narratives like globalization, capitalism, consumerism, feminism, space travel are narrated daily through ‘imaginary’ and ‘symbolic’ images in the mass media like TV news, radio, newspapers, films and now the internet. In the present world order, Thussu (2006) claims that media generally flows from the global north to the global south so that powerful images and stories that are of a certain race, gender and class coming from the western dominated capitalized nations are capable of setting identities for the rest of the world. “The question is therefore not whether the media are manipulated, but who manipulates them. A revolutionary plan should not require the manipulators to disappear; on the contrary, it must make everyone a manipulator” (Hans Magnus Enzenberger in Constituents of theory of Media, New Left Review, No. 64) With democratization, economic liberalization and technological changes (Price 2002), media models have changed and the power is more fluid and dispersed than before allowing the previously unrepresented peoples and places and nations to have a voice and represent themselves. This brings us to the question of what makes a nation and how its myth of existence, development and progress is represented in the media. NATIONS, NATIONALISM AND MEDIA A ‘nation’ as an idea has many meanings. Although it is often imagined in spatial terms as a geographical territory with a unique name, a lot of different scholars have tried to define it in their own ways. There are two main concepts to understand – ‘nation’ as a cultural entity with a certain emotional value attached to it and the sovereign ‘state’ as a political entity or ‘power container’ as Giddens (1985) calls it. The concept of ‘nation-state’ then fuses both the ideas to making it a political, cultural and emotional territory. There are two major traditions in which a nation is understood – by primordialists and modernists. Primordialists like Anthony Smith (1983, 1991) give precedence to ethnic and cultural roots of people who share myths, memories and loss, symbols, religions, ancestry that go back to historical origins before modernization. Consisting of people sharing similar language, descent, history, ethnicity, customs, and traditions with borders separating them from the “others”, a nation then attains statehood when it gains the right for ‘self-governance’. Therefore, an identification of a group as “the other” becomes important for the definition of ‘the self’ of a nation. Benedict Anderson (1983) talks about nations as “imagined communities” and highlights the role of human imagination and signification to associate “profound emotional legitimacy” with the natural environment (mountains, rivers, seas) and to give a name and history to a nation. Brubaker (2002) adds that these imaginary constructs help individuals and groups to create self-awareness and self-image and a sense of belonging and security in their identities. These identities are then reinforced among people through per formative and pedagogic strategies using symbols like flags, anthems, songs, monuments, shrines, festivals, holidays, costumes and colors. In building this identity, cultural and spiritual signifiers are preserved and the notion of ‘homeland’ is created. To maintain this over time, writing one’s own history becomes a necessary basis for national narrative (Ersoy 2010). Modernists like Gellner (1983) and Hobsbawm (1990) however had different ideas about the nation. According to him the emotion, romantic and mythological aspects of the nation created a psychological superstructure that in the long run gave way to the objective requirements of modernity (Roshwald 2015). He believed that because people of different ethno-cultural reside in the close proximities, it was very easy for each one to ask for a separate nation and self-determination. But this doesn’t happen because their relationship depends upon economy and hence the modern nation should be constructed on something else like civic duties and market economy. Therefore, the idea of modern nation state as its exists today originated in Europe as a result of industrialization and spread of modernity when processes like capitalism, revolution, bureaucracy and secularization started taking place. Originating during the French Revolution in the 18th century along with Enlightenment, rise of individualism and formation of state subjects, the idea then spread to the colonies as they achieved independence in the 20th century. This included formation of constitution which gave people certain democratic legal rights, and divided labor in a system of production that allowed mobility across the territory. In this process, a direct relation between the individual and the state was formed mediated through organization of families, schools, markets, armies and especially uniform language and education that allowed the state to have direct political control on the diversity of cultures and temporalities (Rokkan 1975). The modern nations thrive on the ideas of ‘advancement’, ‘growth’, ‘progress’ depending on different temporal orientations of the societies (past, present and future oriented) (Bergmann 1992). Moore (1966) mentions how societies have seen three models of modernization – liberal democracy, fascism and communism depending upon the balance of power between market and state. Religious fundamentalism is a special type of modern political movement, elected democratically not unlike fascism which promotes essentialized notions of cultural traditions by creating a third wheel called ‘community’ in the market-state power axis (Eisenstadt 1999). Western liberalism’s ideas of uniform and unilinear industrial progress based on opposition between ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ essentially puts the nation state at its focal point and is then adapted or sometimes forced on other nations, especially the weaker ones (Sztompka 1994). This type of modernity is based on the myth of scientific development and thrives on radical break from the past, promising betterment in the quality of lives of people and apparent understanding of their place in the universe. Feminist scholar Haraway (2003) notes that byproducts of this include militarism, capitalism, colonialism and male supremacy. Huntington (1996), an American political scientist proposes that in this century, clashes between and within nations will be about culture rather than ideologies unlike last century and which Smith (1995:4) claims are unlikely to disappear until all areas of the globe have made the painful transition to an affluent and stable modernity, on the western model. Today, while one may not have the means to go to a country, he or she always has the opportunity to consume narratives instantly and form perceptions about it through media both corporate and state sponsored. Various scholars have studied the role of media in this process of nation building (Jarvie 1992, Price 1995, Maxwell 1995) and how language (Yuval Davis 1997) and cultural representation acts as a form of nationalist discourse (Hayes 2000, Hjort and Mackenzie 2000, Askew 2002, Ryan 2002, Wilmer 2002). Some media-anthropologists have even investigated how nationhood is mediated through the textures of everyday life-worlds (Gillespie 1995, Mankekar 1999, Abu – Lughod 2005, Madinou 2005, Postill 2006). New media technologies like social media (Facebook, Whatsapp etc.) also serve as platforms for preserving national identities and circulation of national myths (Eriksen 2007). Representation of nationhood in the modern world has become so commonplace and ‘banal’ as Billig (1995) calls it, it is not surprising anymore to see people sporting nation flags on their every possession. Cheah (2003: 10) mentions that this uniformity in representation can be attributed to a universal grammar of nationhood that we are witnessing in the face of transnational communication and hybridization (Giorgiou 2006). This is very visible in the formation of standardized international unions, institutions and blocks based on trade and agreement like United Nations (UN), World Bank, International Monetary Fund and multi-national corporations (Holton 1998). Nationalism may then be understood as a state of mind, form of discourse or cultural representation – a way of seeing and interpreting the world (Ozkimli 2005) or as a political movement and ideology (Gellner 1983), but any of these require formation and mobilization of groups of people and hence, hence it would be right to say that nationalism lies in the purview of power of institutions and their relations. Renan (1996) describes it as will to live together and perpetuate inherited knowledge and experience and extending the ‘soul’ and ‘spiritual’ principle to the next generations. This sentiment can be so strong that Gellner (1983) even goes on to say that it is nationalism that constructs nations and not the other way around. Because this view of the world fundamentally divided on the basis of national borders needs legitimation, it often involves violence which becomes inherent and naturalized in the formation and stability of the nation not only to preserve borders but also to maintain ‘national unity’. German sociologist, Max Weber (1968) puts it directly and flawlessly – “State is a body that enjoys a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Nation’s identity and metal was forged through power politics and war. Because it is rooted in rituals surrounding sacrifice and death (Steans 1996: 51), it doesn’t make nationalism as sentiment very far from religion (Juergensmeyer 1993, Smith 2003) – the two ideas which often combine to form religious nationalism which involves pathos, a ‘pathetic pride in the power of one’s own community and identity’”. The question of identity and its definition brings me to the question of gender and how it is imagined in the context of nationalism. GENDER AND NATIONALISM In Ego and the Id, Freud (1962) describes the existence of three parts in the human psyche: Id, Ego and Superego. While ‘Id’ is that part that calls for desire, passion, lust and chaos, ‘Superego’ is the one that represents restraint and conscience, and Ego is the one that mediates between them to provide balance and help make decisions. It is also the one by which one recognizes oneself as “I” and becomes aware of one’s subjectivity and identity. This ego is first constructed as a bodily form through the surface of an imagined human morphology, ‘the image’ which can be self-generated with the help of a mirror (Lacan 1949) and also searched for outside in the media. Since images in the media help in forming identity, and since media is connected to the nationalist discourse as shown before, national identity is formed as a human enters into the symbolic order of the world around him (Mayer 1999). Kinwall (2004) also mentions how the combination of nation and religion can be a particularly strong ‘identity-signifier’ in these times when mass movement of people, and uncertain futures have left people ontologically insecure and existentially uncertain. Two of the other main signifiers of identity are ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality’ which as we’ll see now may also depend on nation, culture and religion. Sexuality as described by Freud comes from a force he calls ‘libido’ or the sexual instinct and is dependent on the sex or gender of an individual. While Fausto-Sterling (2000) associates ‘sex’ with the biological binaries of male and female as forms of embodiment in nature, ‘gender’ as a concept has different associations in different cultures. For eg., contemporary western gender theories like Butler’s (1996) performativity, Braidotti’s nomadic becoming (2002) propose a post-identity politics suggesting that gender is a fluid category and always in transformation. Although these ideas are valid and open up the concept of gender from more than just the binary, they ignore the ground reality of oppression and social inequality suffered by lack of agency, subjectivity and recognition by subjects in the other parts of the world (McQueen 2016). Therefore for this project, I will assume male and female bodies as subjects irrespective of the gender identities they assume, in complete awareness of the fact that patriarchal socialization discourages and marginalizes androgyny, fluidity, homosexuality and variations other than the heteronormative male-female coupling. This normative imagination is probably because of the observation that the nation is represented generally to serve the aspirations of the elites (Anderson 1991, Hobswam 1990) ignoring those at the margins. In nationalist discourses, certain assumptions are made about what constitutes as masculine and feminine and this is then enforced in all practical areas (Banerjee 2005). Recent feminist work (Blom, Holl and Hageman 2000, Enloe 1989, Mayer 2000, McClintock 1995) has shown that the neutral body, assumed by the liberal state, is implicitly a masculine body. Gatens (1996: 24) goes on to say legal and political arrangements have made man as the model, the centerpiece, with the occasional surrounding insets concerning abortion, rape, maternity allowance. Peterson (1992) says that in the international context, the female body because of its reproductive ability, menstrual cycle and other natural processes has been linked to creation, peace, the ‘good’, the ‘light’, the ‘whole’, in touch with the divine and therefore, in most of the world’s religions and societies, women are both elevated and subjugated, put up high on the pedestal of purity, and at the same time represented as weak, vulnerable and in need of protection. “The feminine” associated with ‘nature’, with all its beauty and allure is also unpredictable, chaotic and irrational which must be dominated and objectified by masculine reason, machine and order (Steans 2013). Banerjee (2005) adds that in most nationalist narratives, the land is equated with the female body which must be protected from the dark and penetrating forces of masculine violence. This myth of ‘protection’ (Ehlstain 1995:4, Young 2003) requires masculinized qualities of toughness and strength (Barrett 2002, Hockey 1986). Hence, the need arises the need for militarization of the state to secure the land (Der Derian 1995). This dichotomy of male-female also present in language is then applied to that of ‘hard-soft, public-private, culture-nature, subject-object, strong-weak, reason-emotion, creation-destruction etc (Tickner 1992). I believe that even though such binaries have been constructed and followed for centuries, in the modern world when human activities are less dependent on physical ability than mental, these categories should be revised. Some philosophers (Carlassare 2000; Plumwood 1993) have also argued that the categories ‘woman’/‘man’/‘nature’/‘culture’ have been socially constructed in ways that devalue both women and nature and therefore should be reevaluated. Hofstede (2002), a famous social psychologist suggests that depending upon culture, certain societies can be considered masculine or feminine. This is also related to our ideas of national development and progress that are based on the competitive, rational and linear masculine Western model of scientific and technological advancement rather than an alternative feminine model of restoration and recovery. Traditionally, women have been associated with the role of motherhood which in many cultures represents the spirit of collectivity. In a patriarchal culture, Yuval – Davis and Anthias (1989) says that women’s national importance and symbolic status (associated with ‘purity’) is based on their reproductive roles, which include biological and ideological reproduction, reproduction of ethnic or national boundaries and transmission of culture to the next generation. Supporting her, Mayer (1999) makes a very strong assertion when she says that even though women now have equal rights in terms of land, labour and voting, most nations still remain the property of men, represented, governed and run by men. This is probably because nationalists have a general tendency to compare the nation to a family (McClintock 1991; Skurski 1994) where state becomes the father and guide, the nation is seen as mother and citizens as children, functioning according to the familial morality of honor and shame which depends on the integrity, modesty and submissiveness of the women (Van der Veer 1994). Sexual behavior of women becomes tied with honor in patriarchal households with the father as the head that in turn act as miniature polities responsible to the state (Hartmann 1979, Eisenstein 1979). In this setup, hierarchical authority structure, male domination of decision-making positions makes the nation state essentially a masculine institution (Franzway, Court and Connell 1989; Grant and Tancred 1992; Connell 1995). Malsevic (2010) and Goldstein (2001) give the example of war and conflicts, where we see men ready to kill and die for the nation based on ‘passionplay of martyrdom’ for the motherland. This is usually accompanied by discussions of rape, sexual enslavement of women by groups of soldiers and even at the higher levels in the armies that are mostly composed of men (Brownmiller 1975; Enloe 1990, 1993; Sturdevant and Stoltzfus 1992). In popular myths, the soil, blood, language and mother conjoin to represent mother earth, cultivated by the sweat of the male peasant and protected by the male soldier willing to sacrifice his life for the motherland. Here, feminine land becomes the object of desire for both the peasant and the soldier whose sacrifices becomes a sacred act honored by the state and its citizens (Virdi 2003: 38). If military and technological strength, considered as signs of masculinity is what nations derive political power from, then national development can be seen as a sort of competition to be more masculine. Making a comment on history, Edward Said (1993) says that European colonization of the rest of the world could be seen as a form of emasculation of cowardly, weak, docile, incapable men by the rational, strong, martial European (Inden 1990: 17). On this note, I will focus on the case of India, a nation that has experienced colonization from European powers. </br> HINDU NATIONALISM AND GENDER The modern Indian nation-state was formed in 1947 alongside Pakistan after a long and hard struggle for independence from British colonial rule that lasted around 200 years. Before that the territory constituted over 500 princely states that agreed to join the nation after freedom. An ancient civilization going back to 5000 years with a rich history of being host to a lot of migrants, traders and invaders over centuries who arrived and got absorbed with the locals to create a healthy breed of different religions, it serves as home for these races settled in different regions forming their own regional culture. The first major migrations include the Aryan race from Central Asia, then came Islam as a religion from West Asia and both of them made it their home with the local Dravidian race. Lastly, Europeans who first came as traders made the land their colony. After they left, the Hindu-Muslim rivalry increased which led to the splitting of the nation based on religion to form two states. Jawaharlal Nehru, one of India’s great nationalist leaders, in his book “Discovery of India” makes the distinction between ‘Hindu’ as people with a certain ‘culture’ and ‘Hinduism’ as a religion. The major task of nationalists was therefore to unify all these different ethnicities and races (both modern and pre-modern) under one nation called ‘India.’ Contradicting Nehru, some postmodern scholars like Udipta Kaviraj (1991) and Gayatri Spivak (2007) argue that the imaginary concept of India was imposed as an ideological construct for political purposes and did not exist before the 19th century. Spivak goes onto say that the name ‘India’ was given by an ancient Greek king Alexander, ‘Hindustan’ by Muslim conquerors, and ‘Bharat’ was given by Hindus to commemorate a mythic king. Therefore, the Indian nation has always had a fluid sense of identity having seen so many transformations historically. In its present form, as a 70 years old modern-nation state, it is seeing a form of politically charged cultural nationalism (Greenfeld 1992, Ignatieff 1994) where it is being defined as a “Hindu state” using markers of religion, language and ethnicity. The ‘Hindu’ upper caste people are assumed to be the original Aryan race belonging to this imagined Hindu nation and anybody else who deviates from this normative identity is seen as ‘the other’. This includes Muslims, Dalits and other tribes who are facing violence and discrimination on a daily basis. This is a narrative created by the extreme right wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) who won the General election in 2014 as the majority ruling party (Ginrich and Banks 2006). Founded in 1980 along with its allies RSS (1925), the VHP (1964), the Shiv Sena (1966) they constitute the four major voices of Hindu nationalism in India (Flaten 2017). Advocating a fundamentalist ideology called ‘Hindutva’ that proposes ‘Hindu’ as ‘a way of life’ and a ‘culture’ claims that all Indians regardless of their present religion are Hindus by the virtue of belonging to the nation giving them an identity opposed to that of the Western subjects (Sarkar 2002). The narrative of development India has changed since independence when Nehruvian socialism functioned. In 1991, by opening the economy to capitalist markets, the nation welcomed neoliberal capitalism as the ruling ideology (Virdi 2003: 4) which goes very well with the nationalist ideology as it appropriates traditional Indian values of family to propagate the new consumerist ethic (Van der Veer 2004). Ironically, while the party invokes ancient scriptures as ‘culture’ and bemoans materialism of the West, it takes pride in the modern technological progress following the model of the US (Smith 2003). According to Moore (1996), this is a particular type of modernizing project not different from Italian Fascism or German Nazism where both political and economic forces are subordinated to the interests of a particular community of culture, and are put at its service. The main narrative of Hindu nationalism is thus ownership of history, culture and religion compared to that of the West which is based on the protectionist view due to globalization and immigration (Banerjee 2006). This fundamentalist nationalism uses media as a propaganda tool to spread nationalism through mobile texts, emails, posters, videos, banners and posters physically and digitally, not just to the citizens but also to the diaspora in western countries like USA, UK and Canada. This media contains sentimentalist kitsch made of images, symbols, scripts and plots that include familiar iconography and aesthetics. For example, in one the popular prints ‘motherland’ is shown as a woman in despair, humiliated by invading forces, in need of protection by her male warrior-sons who are urged to join the battle against diverse anti-national threats like Christianity, Islam and capitalism (Brosius 2004, Flaten 2017). This brings me to question if Hindu nationalism historically has a gendered nature, if yes then how it is reflected in the national myths and stories. Notions of masculinity and femininity have been created in nationalist movements in India since pre- independence times. In Gandhi’s (called the ‘Father of the nation’) non-violent nationalist project, only the devout male body with the ability to retain his semen could achieve detachment and spiritual power to confront the violence of the British, thereby surrendering the notions of masculinity (Van der Veer 1994:96-97). On the other hand, Hindu elites like B.C. Chatterjee, Swami Vivekananda, and V.D. Savarkar called upon Indians to be “men” and wrest their ‘motherland’ from the British with force if necessary (Banerjee 2005). Here masculinity is associated with attributes like decisiveness, aggression, muscular strength, and a willingness to engage in battle and femininity is associated with weakness, non-violence, compassion, and a willingness to compromise (J Ann Tickner 1992). Today, this desire to be more assertive, unified, politicized and stronger as a modern state is about moving away from Hinduism’s varied thought, fatalism, otherworldly view, localism and effeminacy and this desire is satiated brilliantly by Hindutva ideology (Banerjee 2006: 237). This assertion of strength comes with owning and solidifying the culture of ‘Indianness’ in two spheres: material and the spiritual. While the women are expected to secure the spiritual essence of the national culture (Mankekar 1999: 108), men are given the responsibility of material progress. Mankekar also mentions how from freedom movements to present day, the status of women has always been the marker for social struggles in India. As a barometer for ‘civilization’, they’re always victims to be protected, objects of development or heroines to be glorified who battled against all odds. Jayawardena (1986: 99-100) adds how their political participation is seen as secondary to their roles as mothers and wives. These “feminine” roles are also prevalent in the symbols and myths of Hindus. Symbols The ideal of ‘Bharatiya Naari’ (Indian Woman) – an indigenous symbolic construct is centered on the image of the mother representing motherland ‘Bharat Mata’ – Mother India which itself is based on the Hindu concept of mother goddess (Mani 1989). This contrast between idealizations of womanhood as goddesses and reality of women’s lives is something to be noted. A goddess is only benevolent as long as she is married and “a satisfied mother” (Sinha 1995). The national song “Vande mataram” also eulogizes the land as mother. Banerjee (2005) bravely adds that it’s not uncommon to see India depicted as a beautiful woman in the offices of nationalist parties like BJP and RSS. This means that all national symbols of the country show India as a beautiful mother. Myths India has often been called the land of myths, and rightly so, because so many of the beliefs, morals and traditions of people come from the two major foundational mythological epics – Ramayana and Mahabharata in which gendered subjects are very strongly implicated (Rajagopal 1998). I will take the example of Mahabharata in which a quote from the Bhagwad Gita (considered sacred) makes a direct link between the nature of evil, society’s morality and women’s sexuality: “Out of the corruption of women proceeds the confusion of castes; out of the confusion of castes proceeds the loss of memory, out of the loss of memory proceeds the loss of understanding, and out of this all evil.”[Bhagavad Gita,1:41] In the same myth, the female figure of Draupadi who gets disrobed and humiliated in a king’s palace by men is seen as a reflection of women’s struggles to negotiate a masculine environment that is hostile to their dignity. Mankekar (1999) talks about how nationalists appropriated her angry image (her anger is directed at the helplessness of her men) and her desire for revenge to symbolize first the subjugated nation and in the post-colonial conjuncture, the fledgling nation state. Banerjee (2005) adds on a positive note that this passive-angry image of the woman is also contrasted with some Hindu iconography that associates violence, militarism and anger with the divine feminine in the form of goddesses like Kali and Durga. I will now reflect on some theories of film and how they represent gendered bodies in the context of the nation. FILM THEORIES AND THE NATION I will make a distinction between film and cinema in the beginning itself. While individual film corresponds to the distinctive textual feature of the medium which can be viewed on different screens (big and small), it belongs to the bigger industry and apparatus of cinema that produce and circulate it (Branston 2000: 131). Chakravarty (1993:13) mentions two ways in which cinema is linked to the nation. One, because of its use of photographic mode of representation (of people, landscape, lifestyle, maps, dress, language) and cultural signifiers like body movements, behavior and gestures, cinema situates itself in a particular national or regional context evoking a feeling of identification. The other, because it is a cultural product that requires financial investment and technological infrastructure and more so because it deals with import, export etc., it is linked directly to the economy and hence to the state. This relationship is made even stronger in the cinema of the third world and postcolonial countries where the social imaginary, because of the strong need to define one’s own identity, is bound with the idea of the nation (Virdi 2003:5). Indian scholar Ashish Nandy (1983) makes the point even crisper – “cinema has become the microcosm of social, political, cultural and economic life of India where notions of citizenship, civic duty and the dynamics of mainstream and marginal identities are articulated.” In a country like India, where technology is both desired and feared (Chakravarty 2003), movie – making as an industry has become a money-making business mostly set for the middle class urban audiences. Controlled by the state through film corporations, script boards, training institutes, censorship panels, it is in direct relation to the government. Since the growth of the right-wing in the 1980s, cinema as a public discourse has also become an object of contention with hard censorship and controversies (Virdi 2003: 22) Rituals like mandatory attention for the National Anthem and the national flag hoisted on the screen before every film make the cinema experience an especially patriotic one. The medium of cinema deals primarily with the visual representation of human forms, their relationship with each other and emotions that play out between them. It is the perfect medium to explore embodied ideas of self and the other, individuation and kinship affiliation, eroticism, sublimation, desires, pleasures and degrees of freedom of movement of bodies across space and time (Chakravarty 2011). The human body, each unique and distinct is a carrier of ‘power’ or ‘force’ whose actions while dependent on its inherent ability and will, also depends on the structures and systems of the society and culture that it lives in, which in turn exists within a nation (Foucault 1983). Access to basic needs and requirements like food, water, shelter, care, protection from other animals and nature, while essential for everyone depends on the axis of gender, class, race, caste and other societal factors. In the heavily mediated modern society, representation and consumption of media takes place in certain power relations that according to Foucault “normalizes” the images and narratives. Film scholar Nichols (1981) says that because of its narrative form that seeks to resolve contradictions providing models to take action, cinema is very close to myths which in turn relates it to ideology and social change. Berger (2016) adds that because of the ability of films to represent a world consisting of signs and symbols opposed to the ‘real’ world of the audience, they also become an ideological product. Ideology in Althusser’s terms is a system of representation (images, myths, symbols, ideas or concepts) tied to a particular way of thinking endowed with a historical existence and role within a given society (Gledhill 1998). Hence, the commercial films coming out of industry (like Bollywood) could be seen as a product of bourgeois ideology. For this project, I’m interested in exploring the representation of gendered bodies in film, especially that of women and so in the next part, I will discuss some feminist film theories including psychoanalysis which will help me analyze film narratives later. Feminism, film and psychoanalysis “Women are somehow more biological, more corporeal, and more natural than men” (Grosz 1994:14) This quote by feminist writer Elizabeth Grosz brings me to the subject of the female body and its visual representation that has always been problematic for artists, filmmakers and writers throughout history – the female form, whether adored or idealized as beautiful, or considered inferior, weak and therefore as an object to be sexualized and lusted after, is always at the behest of definition especially by men who still control and own the means for cultural production. I will discuss this in the context of film, the base of which is formed by the ‘apparatus’ and ‘the gaze’ (look) and how they relate to each other. Cinematic apparatus, because of its cumbersome and heavy machinery like big cameras and crews make its access to women difficult, if not impossible, especially in countries like India where patriarchy is so prevalent and gender roles are strictly defined. This makes most films coming from the masculine perspective. Mary ann Doane (1987) says that as soon as a woman gets behind the camera, she maintains a different relationship to it as compared to man simply because of the different way in which she experiences the world and herself. Her perspective and how it relates to the magnified and affective image of bodies is very different from that of man. Feminist film scholars like Laura Mulvey (1975) and Judith Mayne (1993) have theorized about how the “male gaze” functions in the patriarchal order and how the audience views the characters on the screen. I will discuss this from the point of view of the maker and the spectator. Gaze: The ‘Male gaze’ is created when a male is positioned behind the camera and the narrative of the film is controlled by the action of the male characters and the female characters act only as inspiration or motivation for them to act, therefore becoming a projection of male desire. In a typical filmmaking scenario, the female actor then becomes an object of visual pleasure from all sides – a) the actor, b) the director/ crew c) the audience. Spectatorship: Because of this imbalance in looking and receiving the look, the identification of the female spectator oscillates between the male and female position invoking the metaphor of a transvestite (Doane 1982). Repeated so often in media and daily life, she starts internalizing the objectifying gaze by looking at herself like a man would. According to Luce Irigaray (1993), the difference for both the sexes in viewing a cinematic or photographic image lies in the anatomy and different erogenous zones for the sexes. While males take voyeuristic and fetishistic pleasure (scopophilia) in viewing images of women’s bodies, females get more pleasure from touching than watching and hence male bodies become less of an erotic but a power spectacle. This difference in experiencing pleasure (visual vs tactile) for men and women makes it harder for women to represent their pleasure in cinema. Irigaray also mentions that while sexuality of women is more often limited to themselves and their bodies, men tend to project their sexuality onto the idea of a woman, their sexuality is something external to themselves. This, of course is a rather generalizing thought, but it is worth considering as a plausible reason for the bias in representation. I will now shift to the unconscious (the hidden parts of the human psyche that is not realized consciously). This is studied by the theories of psychoanalysis that study the unconscious urges and desires of an individual and how they manifest in their actions in life. Since these theories assume a gap between the body and psyche and takes the image of the body or symbolization of the body to construct its discourse, it is particularly interesting for visual analysis. Especially for feminist critics because developed by Freud, and then Lacan (both male), they’re still a primary framework to understand family relations giving an insight into the narrative structure of films. Mulvey (1975) mentions how the patriarchal unconscious has a structured film form and hence psychoanalytic theory becomes a political weapon to understand how cinema works, particularly how sexual difference is constructed in it. Although there are many theories of psychoanalysis that have come in waves, I will focus briefly on the classical one “The Oedipal Complex” developed by Freud and the postmodern one proposed by Deleuze and Guattari (1972) in their book “Anti-Oedipus” because they are relevant to the films I’m analyzing. Oedipal Complex In conceptualizing the ideas of Oedipus complex, Freud (1999) mentions the two main forces driving human actions – Desire (Eros) and Death (Thanatos) – sex and death instinct are the two intertwined human yearnings for stimulation and stasis, movement and rest. These yearnings manifest themselves in the adult unconscious which might contain neurotic conflict and infantile reality if oedipal complexes are not resolved. He proposes that the image of the mother plays an important role in the development process of a child into an adult, especially for the male for whom the mother becomes the connection to the “prehistorical”. From the time the child parts from the mother and goes out into the world, the mother remains a powerful force in guiding his behavior, acting simultaneously as a nurturing love object and a strong controlling agent. The desire of male child for union with the mother is threatened by phallic desire of the father which in turn gets suppressed and causes castration threat in the child. This sexual repression is fulfilled by phallic symbols and objects like guns, knives, swords, cannons, bats, rockets and other objects of destruction that the young boy becomes obsessed with in the phallic stage of the four stages of psychosexual development – Oral, anal, phallic, genital (Indick 2004). He also mentions how because the woman feels a sense of ‘lack’ (Lacan 1960) from the patriarchal symbolic order, she desires to have a male child to make up for her castration which in the man’s case is fulfilled by the love interest/wife (in replacement of his mother). Here, the relationship of mother with the child is considered narcissistic, for example the way the woman looks at her child. This of course, is contested by feminist critics like Luce Irigaray who says that in this entire theory, man and his desires are taken as base and women as mothers or objects of desire only function as reproductive agents or sexual objects which is a patriarchal way of looking at desire and sexuality. In a phallocentric world, the woman then exists in two ways: as the image of the sexualized woman acting as a castration threat (for her lack of penis) or as image of the mother who enters her child into the symbolic order (to compensate for her lack of penis), therefore creating a duality in her image representation. Her image is at the same time glorified and dreaded. When applied to cinema, Kaplan (1983) explains the domination of women by the male gaze then becomes part of men’s strategy to contain the threat that their mother embodies, and to control the positive and negative impulses that memory traces of being mothered have left in the male unconscious. Women, in turn have learned to associate their sexuality with domination by the male gaze, a position that involves a degree of masochism in finding their objectification erotic. In Indian cinema, a lot of narratives revolve around the trope of “Family romance” (mother, father, son) where caste/class/ gender divisions are negotiated, providing the background for the hero to take action usually in order to protect or progress the nation. In such narratives, the female character acts either as the “Madonna” (good motherly figure) or “the vamp” (evil sexualized figure) (Virdi 2003:7). Sudhir Kakkar (1989) and Dr. Girindrashekhar Bose, Indian psychoanalysts argue that in the Indian scenario, the Indian male experiences a different trajectory than that of the Western male subject. Because of the lack of complete separation from the mother, and a strong mother-son bond that goes on till late in his life, the son gets stagnated in the pre-oedipal stage unable to arrive at the oedipal stage. Because of the father’s envy of the mother-son relationship and the son’s persecution anxiety that create father-son rivalry at a later stage, the son doesn’t experience castration threat but a desire to be female. And since the Oedipus figure represents a combined parental image, much of the motivation of the maternal deity is traceable to this behavior. Therefore, the mother becomes a divine object of worship disavowed of her sexuality. In this sense, India’s hegemonic narrative resembles that of ‘devi’, the mother goddess not Oedipus or Adam and Eve (Virdi 2003: 89-91). Even through psychoanalysis, it is revealed the importance of the figure of the mother in adult male psyche. Anti – Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari (1972) come from a radical French school of psychoanalysis where they try to explain desire in a modern capitalist society. Although there are multiple dense ideas in their books, I will pick only those that are pertinent to the films I’ve chosen and think will help interpret them. They rejected the nuclear familial order of Oedipal complex by saying that the family becomes a psychologically oppressive agent in the capitalist society where, desires of the children are repressed and controlled by the parents because it is seen as a way of ‘acquisition’ as it seeks to fulfill something it lacks. They suggest that instead, desire can be seen as a positive force in a socio-political context as a way of producing order and bureaucratic systems. According to them, sexuality is everywhere in the military-industrial complex of society – “Flags, nations, armies, banks get a lot of people aroused”. Therefore, in the political context, while this desire can act as a way for “self-oppression” leading to fascist tendencies, it can also be used as a revolutionary act to break the normative heterosexual order and hierarchical structures of exploitation and servitude. Methodology Films as a medium of representation are inherently political because every representation is used from a myriad of possible representations depending upon the filmmaker’s interest. The point of view that we get can be entertaining fictions or reflections of reality or cultural artifacts. Since camera is associated with the act of looking, it does not exist without power dynamics (Mulvey 1989). Reading and understanding a film requires reflecting on politics of representation – of not only what is seen but also what is hidden or indirectly decoded in the text in the form of metaphor and other codes. While every reading is subjective and dependent on cultural understandings and subject position of the viewer, I will interpret the films as a female viewer and try to answer the questions I’ve posed for myself. There are various methods suggested by Arthur Asa Berger (2016) and Hansen, Cottle, Negrine, Newbold (1998) to analyze media and especially film – Semiotic analysis, Rhetorical Analysis, Ideological Criticism, Psychoanalytic Criticism, Discourse analysis. Because my aim is to extract and understand the meaning, myth and ideologies in these films, I will use theories and ideas I’ve explored in the literature review – of nation, nationalism, gender, film and psychoanalysis to analyze the narratives. This qualitative narrative analysis can be done in the following ways – Syntagmatic approach – Developed by the formalist work of Vladimir Propp (1968), this way analyzes sequential development of narrative plot describing chronological order of linear events and each film is analyzed individually, not compared to other works of its genre, culture or author. Paradigmatic approach – Developed by structuralist work of Levi Strauss (1964: 312), this way recognizes the patterns of opposition and themes that exist within the narrative and how they contribute to the development of the story and the films are analyzed in the context of other films to look for universal structures and signs. I will do a formalist visual narrative analysis with some bits of paradigmatic oppositions by dividing it under the following subheadings – Context: History and background of the film giving the context in which it was made and distributed. Characters and actors: Defined using Carl Jung’s (1969) archetypes that are present in the ‘collective unconscious’ of all human civilizations and come into conscious understanding through works of art, religion, myths and in this case, films. Content and representation: Overall description of underlying meanings, ideologies, internal structures and devices in the text and how movement is achieved. Narration and dramaturgy: In-depth analysis of ‘Roles’ and ‘Functions’ in specifically selected scenes and sequences, compositions, camera angles and aesthetics. Conclusion After reading a lot of books, papers, articles, journals and closely analyzing two major feature films to explore the questions I had posed for myself in the beginning, I’ve realized that my country “India” that I imagined as a piece of land with a particular shape on the political map of the world, is more than just that. It’s an idea that has been imagined so well by the people and the media, that it engages with a strong sense of belonging, culture or a way of living that when comes in conflict with other imaginary ideas of the nation, create violent events that are etched down in history. Exploring my own national identity after coming here, I’ve realized that nationality as an identity is not in my genes or my race or the color of my skin, but in the structure of the modern world – the experience of which so far has led me to search for some spiritual essence that connect me back to my nation. For me, it’s not the culture, but nature, climate and land that makes that connection. Therefore, according to me, political and cultural imaginations of the nation that are made using complex apparatus of metaphors, discourses and modes of address in the media (especially cinema) are all fictions, myths and ideologies propagated for power and control. With media as a platform for mythical representation, these wars between nation-states are now being played by politicians with the objective of selfish development and progress. I also conclude that gender is at the heart of nationalist discourse, and women’s bodies are appropriated in order to serve the idea of the imagined masculine nation. The rise of right wing populism in so many nations in the world today means that what we are witnessing is a politics of fear and masculine assertion basing itself on the difference of ‘the other’. If Indian men see colonial encounter with the white Europeans as some sort of an emasculation, Hindu nationalism is a project for reclamation of that lost masculinity. Proposed as a path to modernity, it bases itself on religion, family, heterosexuality, militarism, community and the economy of neoliberal capitalist development generating ‘intolerance’ for any alternate views, ideas or models which in turn affects state education and the ability of the citizens to think beyond. These signs show a tenure of pre-fascism and has started a new discourse of ‘antinational’ in India where people are rejecting their national identity theoretically only because they still carry passports to travel outside. By 2020, India’s population is expected to exceed China making it the most popular nation in the world and if this nationalism project that worships and idealizes motherhood as divine stays, along with a lot other problems the country is facing today (poverty, inequality, climate change and crimes are just some) we could see violence, conflict and instability in the coming years. India’s uniqueness is in its multiplicity and if we try to create a single unified ‘national identity’ by considering the minority and the women as ‘the other’, it’s going to lead to conflicts. But I would like to end with a positive note. In this moment when our consciousness and activities are global in nature and nations depend more than ever on each other for survival and economic exchange, there is a need being felt to create new myths and new narratives that question the old man-made ideas of gender and nation. I would like to read and watch these new narratives from a female perspective – a new way of representing meaning through media politically, a new way to represent nation and its subjects taking it beyond the market-state axis. For example, could the feminine preserve the soul and the spirit in the idea of the nation? I would like to see more films made by women, entering the symbolic order, whether from India or any nation that provide counter-narratives for the hegemonic representation of men and women and deflect the ‘male gaze’. There is a possibility to develop an alternative model of modernity made of myths so powerful that they transcend time, borders and power structures. For example, an idea of modernity where citizens can have a global identity while still retaining their national essence, with less border conflicts and involvement of governments. I would also like the next researchers to develop narratives where gender oppositions of male/female, dominant/submissive, active/passive, nature/civilization, order/chaos, east/west, matriarchal/ patriarchal are absolved and instead of creating a split between them, picking the good things from the other, hence transcending the polarities that bring fear and pain, opening up the way we see the world.