Moving pictures: The postcolonial state and visual representations of India

Abstract

The article examines visual representations of the nation produced by state and non-state actors in postcolonial India. Through an examination of how ‘moving pictures’ of Indianness have been produced and deployed over the past 50 years, I explore the formation and transformations of the postcolonial nationalist imagination. I focus on the genre of non-commercial film and video and compare the image-making efforts of the Nehruvian developmentalist state with those of the contemporary liberalised state, and also with images of Indian identity produced by non-state actors. The first section examines the state's vision through the documentary films produced by the state-owned Films Division of India and the audiovisual fillers and shorts produced by the Department of Audio-Visual Publicity. The state and the activities that it undertakes on behalf of the nation are foregrounded in these visual representations of Indianness, which is depicted as a relation between an enlightened, transcendent state and a diverse, infantile nation. The second section examines popular-patriotic visions of India through a discussion of the music videos produced for television in recent years by Bharatbala Productions, an independent media organisation based in Mumbai. Although these visual representations are significantly different in terms of form, they do not supplant or subvert the official nationalist imaginary in any significant way. Both state and non-state actors continue to illuminate—and obscure—Indianness in similar ways.