Indian cinema as a field of inquiry has been largely constituted by studies appearing from outside the geographical site, mainly in the geo-political imperial centres of US and Europe (peculiarly the UK). This establishes a contextualisation in the western privileged notions of film studies where the local cultural specificities are wedged into (western) existent schemas. This paper (and the overarching project of recirculating and redirecting film studies it contributes to) suggests to undo these tenets. Primarily, it seeks to dissolves the strict boundaries of the objects of identification and constructs alternative frames of reference to undo the western modes of scholarship where film and television or mainstream and art films are often expressed in the limited form of binaries. Moving beyond such fixations and challenging the orthodoxies, this work aims to provides us opportunities to build new forms of understanding and forge new contexts of a decolonial approach to elicit, understand, analyse and critique the glossaries, re-imaginations and aesthetic forms in Indian cinema that fostered resilience and were ripe with anti-colonial emancipatory thoughts. This project takes up on contemporary thinkers suggestions of deconstructing colonial discourses and the reconstructing alternative epistemologies and ontologies, and intervenes in order to escape the confines of these dichotomous frameworks and explore the grey areas of connections and intersections that lie outside the binaries. It proposes an alternative understanding of films guided by (indigenous or local) anti colonial revolutionaries and social scientists.

Authors:
Rajat Sharma, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong

About the Presenter(s)
Rajat Sharma is a PhD candidate at the School of Communication, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong.

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