In Narratives of Gendered Dissent in South Asian Cinemas, Alka Kurian appraises dissent in cinema narratives and takes received categories of art/parallel and commercial/popular films as given, rather than worthy of further investigation. Conventional ideas about high/low or alternative/commercial cinema have been destabilised in cinema scholarship since at least the last two decades of the 20th century. For instance, art films could be critiqued for affirming the status quo just as much dissent could be found in what might for long have been considered an unlikely place: popular cinema. Dissent in popular films might point to the politics of the everyday, symbolic of deeper fault lines, and often somewhat incredibly, battles fought and won by individual heroes. Much of these developments in reading strategies have to do with revisions about redistributing the power and locus of making meaning in films. A reader might therefore take issue with focusing on art, parallel, and a few crossover-film narratives as the exclusive provenance of dissent. Kurian, however, takes up narratives in cultural work deemed art cinema, rooted exclusively and explicitly in Southasian radical political mobilisation and social movements that erupted in the second half of the 20thcentury.
Dissent and outright rebellion in film narratives about leftwing mobilisation in the 1950s and 60s, rightwing mobilisation in the 1990s, ethnic liberation movements, and migration to Britain are creatively selected in thematically aggregated chapters. Kurian's close analysis turns a spotlight on women's figuration in mainly feature films and two documentaries tied to key postcolonial struggles since the mid-twentieth century. The films she selects are marked by local-global dynamics affecting Southasian politics and culture: anti-feudal organisation and insurrection, flashpoints in the Indian left movement, the Naxalite uprising, state actors trucking with religious fundamentalists in Gujarat's anti-Muslim pogrom, Pakistan decreeing itself an Islamic state, the Sri Lankan secessionist liberation movement's guerrilla tactics, and the Southasian diaspora's experience in Britain. Kurian picks these political skeins to stage her analysis of select film narratives – no mean task – providing an exemplary model for interdisciplinary scholarship that draws on contemporary literary, historical, cultural, subaltern, and diasporic studies under the rubric of postcolonial academic discourse on Southasia.
Class struggle
Kurian begins by analysing political mobilisation, represented in films using Althusser's theoretical framework of "class instinct" and "class position". The former is a subjective response to objective class conditions, and the latter a rational, educated understanding leading to organised action. Faith in Althusser's theories of class as a blueprint for mobilising insurrection might have the archaic ring of Marxist vanguard shibboleths, but Kurian applies it unselfconsciously to the analysis of films about organising rebellion and state development. Nishaant (Night's End, Shyam Benegal 1975), Kurian argues, exemplifies the protagonist schoolteacher and the priest mobilising the oppressed, peasants and Dalits, transforming class instinct into class position through "meticulous planning". She valourises the climactic insurrection, but also questions it for spinning out of control, the "senseless loss of lives". Similar efforts towards educating and mobilising villagers to form an economic cooperative by Dr. Rao in Manthan (The Churning, Shyam Benegal 1976), however, are held suspect. Rao, Kurian argues, is a bureaucrat, represents the state arm, imposes an alien political ethos of social democracy, and is blind to the skewed cultural power imbalance of caste practices prevalent in the village.