Shyam Benegal's Zubeidaa: memory as 'voice'

The demolition of the Babri Masjid in December 1992 and the Mumbai riots that followed in its wake in January 1993 motivated Shyam Benegal to respond to his feelings for the minority community. His empathy for the minority was triggered mainly by the violence he was personally witness to at the crowded streets of Tardeo where his office stands. He saw a Muslim bakery being set on fire by an angry mob. His response brought in its wake three films in quick succession – Mammo, Sardari Begum and Zubeidaa, a family trilogy relating to the stories and journeys of three women from Muslim families. All three films defined Benegal’s concern with marginalized women. The three central women characters in these films were marginalized thrice over – one because being Muslim, they were part of a minority group in India; two, as Muslim women, they were a minority-within-minority within their own communal group; and three, because they were women, per se. Within the first area of marginalization, they were targets of oppression that is the fate of Muslim women by virtue of the ideologies and philosophies of Muslim faith. Though these three areas of the oppression of Muslim women come across lucidly, subtly yet strongly in all three films, it is not the victimization that interested Benegal but rather, the strength and the power that lay hidden within these women, waiting to be tapped, drawn out and executed across the span of their respective lives. The aim of this paper on Shyam Benegal’s Zubeida is to show how the filmmaker has made imaginative, aesthetic and emotional use of ‘memory’ reconstructed from erased history as ‘voice.’ Memory reconstructed from archives like a family album, a forgotten/hidden roll of film containing a song-dance sequence, diaries written by the woman whose strident and vocal ‘voice’ has been reconstructed from the past. Oral accounts offered by the woman’s mother Faiyyazi to her grandson Riyaz, reveals Zubeidaa’s ‘voice-as-it-was’ in the present. It tries to discover how cinema as language, medium and agency, makes it possible to reconstruct erased memory of the past through the memories of people in the present and agencies of the past

Shyam Benegal's Zubeidaa: memory as 'voice'

The demolition of the Babri Masjid in December 1992 and the Mumbai riots that followed in its wake in January 1993 motivated Shyam Benegal to respond to his feelings for the minority community. His empathy for the minority was triggered mainly by the violence he was personally witness to at the crowded streets of Tardeo where his office stands. He saw a Muslim bakery being set on fire by an angry mob. His response brought in its wake three films in quick succession – Mammo, Sardari Begum and Zubeidaa, a family trilogy relating to the stories and journeys of three women from Muslim families. All three films defined Benegal’s concern with marginalized women. The three central women characters in these films were marginalized thrice over – one because being Muslim, they were part of a minority group in India; two, as Muslim women, they were a minority-within-minority within their own communal group; and three, because they were women, per se. Within the first area of marginalization, they were targets of oppression that is the fate of Muslim women by virtue of the ideologies and philosophies of Muslim faith. Though these three areas of the oppression of Muslim women come across lucidly, subtly yet strongly in all three films, it is not the victimization that interested Benegal but rather, the strength and the power that lay hidden within these women, waiting to be tapped, drawn out and executed across the span of their respective lives. The aim of this paper on Shyam Benegal’s Zubeida is to show how the filmmaker has made imaginative, aesthetic and emotional use of ‘memory’ reconstructed from erased history as ‘voice.’ Memory reconstructed from archives like a family album, a forgotten/hidden roll of film containing a song-dance sequence, diaries written by the woman whose strident and vocal ‘voice’ has been reconstructed from the past. Oral accounts offered by the woman’s mother Faiyyazi to her grandson Riyaz, reveals Zubeidaa’s ‘voice-as-it-was’ in the present. It tries to discover how cinema as language, medium and agency, makes it possible to reconstruct erased memory of the past through the memories of people in the present and agencies of the past

Bollywood's Global Reach: Consuming the Diasporic Consciousness

Using the British Sikh community as its research context, this article explores the influence of the Bollywood film genre on what Vertovic refers to as the “diasporic consciousness” in relation to this community. Bollywood attempts to speak to the diaspora by conveying a new sense of “Indian-ness,” one that is less about citizenship and more about imagined identity and community. The authors investigate what they have termed the “Indian imaginary” and how the values embedded therein impact on the lives of young British Sikhs. The findings discuss three emergent core themes: (1) reaffirming pride in Indian heritage; (2) evoking romance and longing; and (3) reinforcing family values and a sense of kinship within the British Sikh diaspora. The overall contribution of the article is twofold. First, it illustrates how the globalization of Bollywood affects the Indian diaspora at a local level. Second, it shows how Bollywood provides an important space for negotiating and reconciling various tensions between family-based and more individualistic value systems. Ultimately, then, Bollywood offers young British Sikhs a particular, hybridized representation of courtship and marriage that is both romantic and familial, and that serves to reconcile Eastern and Western marital relationship ideals and oppositional cultural discourses