The end of empire : a politics of transition in Britain and India

Abstract

We must abandon the rubric of national cinemas if we are to consider the multiple, conjunctural pressures applied by decolonization on the political entities of an imperial state and its colony. Declining British imperialism, in- creasing U.S. hegemony, and internal nationalist factions implicated Britain and India in each other’s affairs, shaping state policies, domestic markets, and emergent cinemas in both regions. A parallel narration of their inter- twined histories clarifies the global function of cinema during late colonial- ism by interrogating the consequences of a redistribution of political power in plural and linked cultural contexts. In 1931 Winston Churchill spoke to the Council of Conservative Associates in Britain, explaining his resistance to granting India dominion status. ‘‘To abandon India to the rule of Brahmins would be an act of cruel and wicked negligence. . . . These Brahmins who mouth and patter the principles of West- ern Liberalism . . . are the same Brahmins who deny the primary rights of existence to nearly sixty million of their own countrymen whom they call ‘un- touchable’ . . . and then in a moment they turn around and begin chopping logic with Mill or pledging the rights of man with Rousseau.’’