Paternal Metaphors and the City-Village Dynamic in Nehruvian and Emergency Eras vis-à-vis Naya Daur and Sholay

Abstract

The familial metaphors of the father, the mother, or the brother have been in use in Indian political rhetoric and discourse since independence serving both to forge an organic bond between the political establishment and the citizenry and to establish a continuity of political heritage and legitimacy. In the Nehruvian years, it served to level categorical differences in the Indian National Congress by appropriating the spirit of the Mahatma in order to grant legitimacy to Nehruvian policy and ideology, and in the Indira years, the appropriation of the paternal spirit meant to legitimize her rule amidst a thronging opposition. The city and the village as ideological signifiers also served to drive home this project of political consolidation negating basic differences such as the Nehru-Gandhi debate on the rural-urban roadmap of the nation. Where the city emerged as the Nehruvian public project- gone wrong in the Indira years because of the hostility of political Opposition in the cities, the village began to be projected as sites of welfare intervention thereby also serving to amend the failure of the paternal policy towards India's villages. Amidst these circumstances, the popular Hindi film serves to critique any such appropriative method thereby using the same political-familial signifiers to downplay their conservative assimilation. It therefore serves as a tool of ambivalence—granting legitimacy to the political project of figurative assimilation in the ‘totality' of the plot while denying such a legitimacy in the non-essential/ excessive/ surplus dimensions of the cinematic plot, thereby exposing the play of signifiers so characteristic of pre-liberalization regimes irrespective of the nature and/or degree of their authoritarian character. Using the commonplace Derridean projections, the spirit of the father will be shown to trace its own spectre haunting the political narratives of the age. This will be the crux of our analysis of two films—one from the Nehruvian years (Naya Daur, 1954) and another from the Emergency years (Sholay, 1975).