Jodhaa Akbar and the Question of Film Studies

There are, so to say, at least two conventional ways through which one can study films. One would be to say that films like novels or poems reflect society and by studying films one would be studying society. Another conventional way to look at it is to say that films do not reflect society but is the product of imagination, perverted or otherwise, and is not worthy of being studied, at least by good scholars. Another addition to the second argument would be that since films, like literature or painting, do not reflect society one should restrict one’s study, if at all, to the de-contextualized formal aspects of films. This would include looking at the theme, music, narrative etc. of the films taken up for studying to judge whether these aspects are either ‘good’ or ’bad’. This is a version of the old formalist school of thinking.

To ponder over some of these aspects, the study of art in general and films in particular, I would like to look back to the debate regarding the ban imposed on Jodhaa Akbar, directed and produced by Ashutosh Gowariker and released on February 15, 2008. The distributor of the movie, UTV Software Communication, approached the Supreme Court to lift the ban imposed on the film by the states of Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Uttaranchal and Rajasthan on account of the controversies generated by it. The controversy erupted when some sections of the Rajput caste alleged that the film is not an ‘accurate’ depiction of historical facts. Karni Sena, a Rajput organisation which spear heads the protest, says that Gowariker’s depiction of Jodhabai as Mughal Emperor Jalaluddin Akbar’s wife is factually incorrect. According to them, Jodhabai married Akbar’s son Jehangir and Shahjahan was their son. This theory has its obvious implications if one looks at the recent claims made on Taj Mahal by different power groups across India. However, the Rajputs themselves are not united in their stance against the film with the Mewar Rajputs allegedly accusing the Jaipur Rajputs of ‘selling off’ their daughters to the Mughals. UTV, invoking article 32 of the constitution in the court, argued that the ban was a violation of the fundamental right of freedom of speech and expression and the story reached a kind of climax when the Supreme Court provisionally lifted the ban on the film.

It is not difficult to see that the discourses created around the film were attempts to establish a proper way to depict history. The furor was created because the history depicted, as in the case of any history, has stakes in making and unmaking the contours of the present. The stake holders, as we can see, involve the feuding Rajputs who cannot digest the fact that a Muslim man can marry a Hindu woman, although the other way is deemed as welcome and secular as seen in many recent Hindi films; the producers and the intellectuals who argue for a liberal state which should grant free speech as a fundamental right; and the Indian state which needs to somehow shore up the fast receding national unity, by imposing a ban, due to rising identity politics and sub-nationalisms.

Some of the recent theories of society have surrounded around this word called discourse which I have used above. According to these theories we cannot have an immediate access to society other than through discourses. Our idea of society in effect is mediated by these discourses which shape and define the society. For example, Benedict Anderson, when talking about the evolution of nationalisms argues that nations as we understand them were created with the emergence of print capitalism. With print capitalism an anonymous imagined community was created who would wakeup to read the same news paper or book across a vast distance. Although, Anderson’s theory would not be very useful to understand the erosion of nationalism in spite of the explosion of media, it offers interesting perspectives to understand the constitution of society.

To make it clear let me put things crudely. For example, how do we know that we exist in a certain society? Our senses are not simply good enough to scan the entire geography of a city or a town and even if it were, it would be a futile exercise, as we know that the geography of the same would not ‘make sense’ without the mediation of a map. It is through discursive devices like these—maps, censuses, museums, newspapers, magazines, postal codes, films, television broadcasts, mobile phones etc.—that we realize that all of us are part of and share a social space. Therefore, obviously, if there are different power groups, like the Rajputs, UTV or the state, there ought to be constant power struggles to determine the contours of this social space. The winner of this struggle would eventually subsume all others to establish its own, temporary, notion of the social. This temporary victory is described by different theorists as hegemony (Gramsci), suture, point de capiton (Lacan) etc. The victory is temporary because another power group is bound to over throw the previous one to eventually establish their own notions of the social. It is this desire to change the social space that makes these struggles political.

In the light of the above theories it would not be difficult to understand why Jodhaa Akbar created so much controversy. The controversies were created not because the film reflected our society or was the figment of some quirky imagination. For example, the ‘reflection’ theory assumes that there is a society a priori available to be tangibly seen or analyzed. The theory which deems films as fictional imaginations makes the same assumption when it assumes a ‘real’ society as opposed to the ‘fictional’ landscape of a film. In that way, the proponents of these theories do not realize that even the study of the form of films can actually yield rich results in understanding the form of the social space in which we inhabit. Therefore, it would be safe to assume that the controversies over the film were created precisely because the masses who created the controversy knew better than the ‘reflection’ and the ‘fictional’ theorists of film. They know that the film in question itself is the social space in which they live and is the place where that space is made and unmade. This insight makes a popular medium like film or any art for that matter a fertile area of study.

As an afterword I would like to add that in answering the question of film studies I have clubbed film studies with studying television, literature, art, political science etc. It is certainly true that such a chain of equivalence can be established between these. But to study films one needs to also understand its specificity as against the specificities of internet, literature, television, painting etc. This is because each of these would be entrenched in its own institutional, technological and historical matrixes which one need to take into account. Being careful about such specifics gives film studies its individual characteristics and makes it an area of specialist study.