Through the lens of cinema, this paper examines the construction and contestation of colonial and post-colonial narratives in Indian public memory through a comparative analysis of Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi (1982) and Randeep Hooda’s Swatantrya Veer Savarkar (2024). These biographical films portray two contrasting ideologies of the Indian freedom struggle: Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violence and moral resistance versus Savarkar’s vision of armed revolution and Hindu nationalism. Grounded in post-colonial theory and film studies, the analysis explores how each film contributes to historical memory, mediates national identity and reflects dominant ideological currents of their production contexts. Drawing on Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Ashis Nandy, Benedict Anderson and Sumita S. Chakravarty, this study also engages with visual culture, masculinity, nationhood and myth-making in cinema. Through the usage of scene-level analysis, this paper argues that while Gandhi globalizes India’s colonial experience through liberal humanist tropes, Swatantrya Veer Savarkar reclaims history through a filter of militant nationalism and post-colonial revisionism thus showing that cinema serves as an active agent in reframing political imaginaries within contemporary India’s polarized cultural landscape.

Authors:
Bristi Gogoi, The Assam Royal Global University, India
Abhilash Boruah, Dibrugarh University , India

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Posted by James Alexander Gordon

Last updated: 2023-02-23 23:45:00

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