Professional Documents
Culture Documents
and Affect
sheetal majithia
INTRODUCTION
Melodrama thrives despite ongoing dismissals of its apparent excesses.
Critics have long objected to melodrama’s representation of overt emotion,
its arbitrary temporal organization, and its polarized morality. Nonetheless,
it persistently draws audiences across national borders. And, in the wake of
critical theory’s “affective turn” and of postcolonial and global studies’
focus on non-western texts, melodrama now also solicits the attention of
scholars with fresh approaches, whose interest in under-examined melo-
dramas, as objects of study, has made the form more popular than ever.
New methods and texts, however, confront scholars with melodrama’s mul-
tiple histories and uses, in national and transnational contexts,1 raising
questions about how to categorize and periodize concurrent, related, but
distinctive developments under the rubric of melodrama. Perhaps most
fundamentally, the introduction of new melodramatic texts prompts scho-
lars to re-imagine melodrama’s genealogies. By convention, scholars have
generally situated melodrama’s origins in relation to the development of
secular modernity, the universal condition from which it ostensibly
emerged, according to Peter Brooks. The present article argues that, due to
the coeval but uneven conditions that characterize postcolonial and global
conditions, melodramas emerging in these contexts contest received un-
derstandings regarding secularism and affect and force us to revisit the
melodramatic mode’s uses and value.2
With an eye to these concerns, the article adopts a transdisciplinary
approach, bringing together Indian cinema and postcolonial and affect stu-
dies to rethink melodrama’s functions and effects in Deepa Mehta’s Earth
(1998). In response to critics’ charges that Earth is a poor adaptation of
Bapsi Sidhwa’s novel on the partition of South Asia, Cracking India (1991;
published in the United Kingdom, in 1988, under the title Ice Candy Man), I
argue that the film’s seemingly failed aesthetic makes sense of affective his-
tories that have been elided by official accounts of nationalism. With a focus
on the body as a site of signification, postcolonial melodrama calls attention
to its own potential for generating knowledge and criticism through “affec-
tive reason,” a form of ethical knowledge, unexpectedly made available
through the work of affect, that realist accounts ignore. Moments of affective
reason emerge through the film’s use of interruptions, flashbacks, reversals,
and simultaneities. Contra conventional understandings of these features as
failures of realist representation, the various models of temporality they
offer serve as an alternative to the inevitably progressive and teleological lin-
earity underlying the homogenous and secular modernity of official state
narratives.
Earth opens in 1997, in Lahore, with the adult voice of the protagonist,
Lenny Sethna, recounting the historical events of 1947 from her then
eight-year-old perspective. The communal violence that accompanied
Indian and Pakistani independence in 1947 and the awarding of Lahore to
Pakistan shatters the previously tight and diverse community of Hindus,
Muslims, Sikhs, Parsis, and Christians – all of whom are drawn to Lenny’s
Hindu ayah Shanta. Bloodshed disrupts the nationalist rhetoric of found-
ing leaders Jawaharlal Nehru and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, which promoted
an official doctrine of rationality, tolerance, and secularism. As those in
Lenny’s vicinity, particularly Shanta’s two suitors – Hassan and Dil
Nawaz – turn upon each other, the ferocity of so abrupt a disintegration in
relations defies her rational understanding. Her efforts to make sense of
the transformations around her issue in disturbing nightmares that incor-
porate her affective responses to communal violence and others’ suffering.
Exacerbating the pain of polio, her body becomes the medium for making
sense of the violence: it is through affective means that she understands
her own subjectivities – secular, national, ethnic, and gendered – and
those of others, which have been excised from official accounts. When the
identitarian politics of modern nationalism reaches a crisis, at the time of
independence and Partition, emergent ethnic and religious allegiances
pull the diverse community members into their respective groups. Their
friendships splinter. Lenny is also pushed to define herself as a member of
the Parsi minority, despite her varied ties to others. Her understanding of
her own corporeal and affective subjectivity and attachments to others
proves unsustainable, particularly when she is tricked into betraying
Shanta, whom an angry crowd drags away to an uncertain future. Lenny is
left to embody Shanta’s absence for the rest of her life, provoking her to
question the triumphalism of nationalist narratives.
Earth was sold to twenty-two countries, won prizes at many interna-
tional film festivals, and received a standing ovation at its world premiere,
as a “special presentation” at the 1998 Toronto Film Festival. Yet, despite
the film’s global popularity and positive critical reception, it has detractors.
Critics describe the film as “mawkish,” “exploitative and nostalgic” (Winter,
“Across”), as “far too intimate” (Nesbit), and as characterized by “schmaltz
and wrenching emotion” (Klady). These reviews, in decrying melodrama’s
excess of emotion, themselves embody an excess of emotion, recalling
Linda Williams’s claim that “the designation ‘gratuitous’” to describe melo-
drama is itself gratuitous (3). Scholarly studies by Kavita Daiya and Rani
Neutill link melodrama to a seemingly nationalist and heteronormative
visual focus on the straight feminine body as a site of violence, while Robert
Budde argues that, standing in for the partitioned subcontinent, “the easy
central trope [Lenny’s callipered legs] . . . renders disability as a failed
trope” (47) because it neglects corporeality. For these scholars, melodrama
goes too far, one way or another, literally representing too much female suf-
fering, in bad faith, according to Daiya and Neutill, or allegorically repre-
senting too much, according to Budde. I suggest here, and elaborate later
in my reading of the film, that Mehta consciously complicates these pro-
blems of representation by situating Earth as a part of the Elements trilogy,
which roundly critiques heteronormative assumptions. She also challenges
the assumed dichotomy between literal and allegorical representation by
featuring Bapsi Sidhwa, the author, in the role of the adult Lenny, compli-
cating the reading of her actual performance of her semi-autobiographical
self as purely allegorical.
In contrast to Daiya, Neutill, and Budde, Jeanette Herman’s study of
spectator responses to the film reveals that audience response was uneasy
and ambivalent about the film’s refusal to sanitize the history of violence
and loss when commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of independence in
Pakistan and India. In other words, spectators felt the film denied them a
nationalist resolution. Despite the negative estimations of melodrama by
the scholars and of the film by the spectators, their responses, nevertheless,
hone in unintentionally on the heart of melodrama’s appeal, as seems to
be borne out by the responses of spectators who do not read the film as
nationalist. When melodrama’s apparent bad faith is recognized, instead,
as paradoxical potential, we see its power to make spectators feel memories
of a history that contradicts the standard realist versions propounded by
the state.
Since Mehta’s aesthetic choices emerge from and circulate within multi-
ple sites, her films deterritorialize the processes of national belonging and
interrupt official state narratives. Earth is officially Indian, but the cast and
crew came from India, Canada, France, and the United Kingdom, and the
writing, editing, and translation processes occurred among Canada, the
United Kingdom, and India with Sidhwa, a Pakistani American, collaborating
with Mehta on the screenplay and script. Mehta’s status as a transnational
filmmaker results from her Indian and Canadian backgrounds, affiliations,
and co-productions. She and her films move across geopolitical and aes-
thetic boundaries, at times willingly, and other times less so, as is the case
with much transnational cinema, according to Robert Stam and Ella Shohat.
While Mehta’s transnational circumstances give her access to certain re-
sources: funding, fans, circulation, and distribution, they deprive her of other
advantages, such as a national audience, whose aesthetics and habits she
shares (Levitin).
Melodrama in Mehta’s films emerges in song-and-dance sequences,
evoking the conventions of popular films, not necessarily as camp or kitsch,
but as diegesis forwarding the narrative. At the same time, the influence of
Indian New Wave’s interest in social issues emerges in Mehta’s focus on
postcolonial themes and her collaboration with New Wave film icons such
as Shabana Azmi, Nandita Das, and Seema Biswas. The Elements trilogy
focuses on responses to colonialism, Partition, independence, and women’s
marginalization through marriage, patriarchy, or widowhood. In Earth, fol-
lowing Fire (1996) and anticipating Water (2005), the characters Lenny and
Shanta refuse, or are perceived as failing to perform, the prescribed roles of
heteronormative womanhood often prized by the nation, an indication
that, far from pandering to global audiences, Mehta purposely makes aes-
thetic choices that are consonant with the film’s subject matter.
Thus, I argue that Earth is adapted into melodrama for good reason.
The focus on affect and temporality, expressed as interruption and simul-
taneity, reframes melodrama’s failures as potentially critical of linear, pro-
gressive time and productive of a secular understanding that opposes
conventionally championed identitarian politics. Through affective reason,
which often generates counter-intuitive and unexpected relations between
individuals or communities that do not need a reason to affiliate, Earth’s
model of the secular suggests an ethics of relationality, premised on open,
receptive, and intersubjective understandings. These derive from a postco-
lonial melodrama that counters official, prescribed, majoritarian under-
standings. Representations of excess, in fact, stand for the failures of realist
representation to account for affective history and experiences of secular-
ism as an ethics of openness. Relying on a cognitive sense of reason, pre-
mised on a neat separation between the mind and body, the linear cause-
and-effect logic underlying majoritarian realist accounts of the nation and
secularism are premised upon fixed, static, autonomous, often essentia-
lized subjects, whose patriotic and religious affiliations align with those of
the emerging nation state. Postcolonial melodrama, in Earth, suggests
instead a model of transnational, secular subjectivity as a discourse of
affect meant to protect the plurality of religious practices that define the
subcontinent. Lenny’s, Shanta’s, and Hassan’s understandings of their
own subjectivity as contingent on the subjectivity of others defy the
another Muslim man, cut into quarters by his Hindu neighbours. She asks
Adi to re-enact the scene on her doll, spilling its stuffing in the process.
That night, she kicks herself awake, jolted by nightmares into recalling what
she has witnessed. Soon after, she finds Hassan’s hacked body, in a gunny-
sack, left at the side of the road, ostensibly by Dil Nawaz, who has chillingly
replicated the violence enacted on his sisters – their dismembered body
parts were similarly discarded. The film portrays objects such as the plate,
doll, roses, needlework, and gunnysack with an affective intensity that med-
iates the circuits of action and reaction and complicates the conventional
sequence of cause and effect. The tropes of cutting, shattering, and dividing
materialize affective history, in melodramatic terms; namely, the somatic
and sensory incorporation of historical events.
The final scene returns to these tropes of failure, as ones that represent
the present of 1997: the adult Lenny, performed by Sidhwa, forlornly stares
at the headless statues of British monarchs, whose dismembered figures
guard the ruins of the park. Although the dissolution of the British Empire
has abolished their authority, and their sovereignty has lapsed into absence,
their ghost-like presence haunts Lenny’s waking hours, through memory
and a sense of nightmarish loss. Again, her disembodied adult voice asks,
Two hundred and fifty years of the British Empire ended in 1947, but what’s there
to show for it except a country divided? The massacres and kidnapping, vendettas
and more violence, was it all worth it? Fifty years have gone by since I betrayed my
Ayah . . . that day in 1947 when I lost Ayah, I lost a large part of myself.
She limps out slowly, in marked contrast with the lively child, Lenny, whose
walk showed confidence, despite the fact that she was subject to the gaze of
Queen Victoria, surveying her domain. This obvious contrast draws atten-
tion to the intertextual inclusion of Sidhwa as Lenny, but also to the embo-
died experience of Partition’s past, whose traces the film gestures toward,
while simultaneously forcing the spectator to mark its presence in the now
(a point Sidhwa herself notes [Sidhwa et al. 235–36]). In other words, the
film’s representation of fragmentation invokes the violence of Partition, just
as much as it presents contemporary communal violence.
Earth is officially an Indian film, and it is, therefore, significant that a
story ostensibly about Partition and national independence speaks from
the perspective of a transnational subject such as Sidhwa. The film’s focus
on failure and the intersubjective nature of secular identity undermines
chauvinistically nationalist narratives. Moreover, the flashback in which
Lenny recounts the events of the past and compares them with events in
1997 situates the film firmly in the present. Bhaskar Sarkar explains how
popular references to Partition, in India, cannot help but raise the spectre
of all the communal violence that preceded and has since followed.
Indeed, when Lenny asks, “Was it all worth it?” one cannot help but wonder
to whom her question is addressed. Is it to India, where the state celebrated
Earth, but where there was violent protest, in the name of communal poli-
tics, against Fire and subsequently Water? Is it to Pakistan, the film’s setting
and likely home of Lenny’s beloved ayah? Is it to England, to the empire
Lenny faces, in this scene, in the form of the Queen Victoria statue? Is it to
Canada, which partially funded the film, but whose history as part of the
Commonwealth accounts for the complicated and exclusionary experiences
suffered by its South Asian immigrant citizens also interests Mehta? The
question purports to address them all, forcing the spectator to understand
the historical relationships between these places, and global, rather than
national history, as the context for the transnational film.
Sidhwa’s Parsi perspective, and her citizenship in Pakistan, India, and
the United States, allow for a transnational position, unaligned with exclu-
sively Hindu, Muslim, or Sikh interests. She rejects the nostalgia of nation-
alist Indians, who still long for an undivided subcontinent, and the
blindness of Pakistanis who are indifferent to the fact that “India is home to
their kin, who have been sacrificed to their cause” (Sidhwa et al. 235–36).
Instead, Sidhwa advocates a kind of transnational understanding, absent at
the time of Partition, which she suggests is still necessary for pacifying com-
munal violence within and between the two nation states. Earth’s use of
melodrama to engage in the literal and figurative figuring of Lenny’s body
and its acts, reveals the tensions, conceptual and practical, between the
whole and the parts – the nation and its fragments – that existed during
Partition and continue to exist today. Demonstrating how the Radcliffe
Line’s seemingly reasoned inscription of Partition onto a map of the sub-
continent, concealed the divisions signified by the fragments of the
dropped plate, the scene reveals how melodramatic affect interrupts realist
renderings of “history” and the contemporary moment, which threaten to
erase the materiality of embodied experience.
lines inscribed on the map, the sequence of the Sethna’s dinner party that
follows, which occasions an elaborate table setting, extends the trope of
cracking. It dramatizes how, at the time of Partition, violent fragmentation
materialized and reversed ethical modes of understanding, in the body pol-
itic and in the national body – again, with an emphasis on failure as inter-
ruption or reversal. Through a representation of accord, premised on the
affective understanding of difference that once existed, the scene marks
redemptive possibilities by revealing the very failures that mark their
absence.
The scenes depict the making and unmaking of communities of affect,
by way of an intertextual reference to Jean Renoir’s 1937 Grand Illusion, a
celebrated French anti-war film (Mehta, “Literature”), associated with
Poetic Realism (Hayward). A visual quote from an early scene in Grand Illu-
sion, which also features marginalized characters, thwarted in love, sets up
a comparison between the related themes of the two films: division, vio-
lence, betrayal, lost love, and difference. Grand Illusion anticipates and cri-
tiques World War II and anti-Semitism, via a representation of a friendship
between Maréchal, a French lieutenant, whose Christianity remains un-
marked, and Rosenthal, a French, Jewish lieutenant.
Set during the Great War, the film depicts French prisoners of war, over-
coming the class, race, national, and gender boundaries that separate them
from other European prisoners and their German captors and collabora-
tors. The scene to which Earth refers unfolds in the dining area of an army
camp, where German soldiers prepare for a meal, and suddenly, French
prisoners of war enter. The Germans make polite conversation, in French,
to the surprise of the French officers whom they have recently attacked.
The German General Rauffenstein and French Captain Boeldieu converse
in English, acknowledging their shared class, while the French pilot, Maré-
chal, whose injury prevents him from eating, is touched when the German
officer to his side graciously becomes Maréchal’s hands, by cutting his
meat and feeding him, as they exchange their common experiences as
mechanics. Perhaps most intriguing is how affective translation, using lan-
guage and food, connects the individuals across class, smoothing over their
national differences, before the order comes to move the French officers to
the camps, and the dynamic is interrupted. Grand Illusion’s focus on how
shared affiliations of class, language, and desire, undercut national identity
seems to ask, “What makes for their commonality?”
National identity is an illusion, suggests Renoir’s film, the point that
Earth reiterates in the depiction of the Sethna’s dinner party, emphasizing
that difference rather than sameness relates people. The spectator is intro-
duced first to the servants in the kitchen, eating and preparing dinner, and
speaking in Hindi and Punjabi, bringing to mind a previous dialogue,
between Lenny and her mother, which slipped between English and
Lenny’s, below the table, by including only snatches of the adults’ dialogue.
In other words, we witness the scene as spectators but split our position:
we are aware that the movement of the camera and the voice-offs usually
do not correspond to the characters in the frame, and this allows us to per-
ceive the scene as Lenny does.
The denial of spectator identification – or the construction of autono-
mous subjects, if the film is read in realist terms – might be seen as evi-
dence of a lack of character development, psychological interiority, or
meaningful sequencing of performances. These are the typical criticisms of
Indian melodrama; however, in Mehta’s melodramatic terms, these strate-
gies represent the fleeting production and dissolution of community and
relationality. The discussion of colonial rule, independence, and Partition
quickly disrupts the circuit of relationality, premised on the pleasure of
shared humour. A markedly different cinematographic editing style rein-
forces the sudden, quiet authority assumed by the character of Mr. Sethna.
He concludes the joke by way of a pointed observation that interrupts the
smooth, cosmopolitan relationality depicted earlier. “You know, I learned
something the other day, Mr. Rogers, ke; there was no syphilis in India until
the British came,” he gently asserts.3 The suggestion is that the ostensible
progress equated with colonial modernity, in fact masked a variety of ills,
transforming progress to poison in the eyes of the colonized. Of course, the
urine cure, however toxic a home remedy, is, nonetheless, meant to put off
the meddling colonial officer the joke mocks; by analogy, self-rule, with all
its dangers, could cure the effects of colonial modernity, increasingly expe-
rienced as contagion.
With Mr. Sethna’s comment, talk turns to the imminent British depar-
ture and Partition, throwing the scene into a radically different editing pat-
tern, which reifies its subjects as stereotypes. The wandering camera settles
on an individual character, but only momentarily, before switching to the
point of view of another, in a rapid shot/counter-shot pattern. The unset-
tling and quick cuts increase the tension of the spectator; characters raise
their voices, and quick, close-up reaction shots very specifically identify
speakers and respondents, so that racial and religious differences now
dominate a scene that quickly becomes violent. Mr. Singh shouts at Mr.
Rodgers, “I’m up to ruling you and your empire. Why do you think we can-
not have self-rule?” Mr. Rodgers refers to Tara Singh and his Sikh followers,
including Mr. Singh, as “a bloody bunch of murdering fanatics.” Mr. Singh
melodramatically picks up a fork to stab the colonel. The act of engaging in
rough translation reifies the characters into stereotypes, along religious,
racial, and national lines, dramatically unravelling the civil intersubjective
relations established earlier.
The process of rough translation reveals a paradoxical relationship: what
might be construed as secular affect mirrors what is regarded as religious
affect. In both cases, the stakes are the same: Mr. Rogers’s ostensibly secu-
lar hate equals, in passion, Mr. Singh’s defence of the Sikhs, demonstrating
how affect is similarly mobilized, even if it is variously disposed. The fierce
rhetoric prompts another series of emotional reversals – the anger of the
colonial officer quickly turns to nostalgia: “This is the only home I’ve ever
known,” Mr. Rogers laments, anticipating his loss, while remaining indiffer-
ent to the losses of the Indians around the table, and, indeed, to the mil-
lions who would lose everything, including their lives, in the struggle.
The dialogue segues into the Sethnas’s attempts to redeem British colo-
nial rule by recounting its gifts: roads, an “exemplary postal service,” and
“English, beautiful language.” To this list, Mr. Singh adds “syphilis,” estab-
lishing his anti-colonial stance and highlighting the material losses of colo-
nialism. Earth’s adaptation of Grand Illusion’s scene calls for a comparison,
here, between two historical moments and repositions Partition’s history in
global terms. It reveals how rough translation, often expressed as stereotyp-
ing, interrupts the affective reasoning that makes it possible to relate across
difference and, in so doing, fosters untranslatability. Melodramatic ele-
ments of rhetoric, expression, and interest stage the heightened receptivity
that accompanies affective reasoning and show how affective relations
develop, while interruption renders the idea of inevitability impossible.
his gaze to look at us, and the camera shifts to an omniscient point of view
again. Although the camera captures a reaction shot of Lenny peering at Dil
Navaz, the film does not permit the shock of this surprising representation
to sink in, as the focus moves quickly to Shanta’s and Hassan’s perspec-
tives.
This abrupt and astounding reversal of our expectations, in terms of
point of view and camera angle, underscores Lenny’s desire for Shanta. Len-
ny’s perspective is matched with Dil Navaz’s, suggesting that what and how
they see corresponds; that is, as he desires Shanta, so might she. Just as the
dinner scene’s establishing shot prevents spectatorial identification with any
single point of view – and also splits the spectator’s point of view between
the guests and Lenny, forcing her to acknowledge the inter-subjectivity of
the characters – the establishing shot, here, shocks the spectator into recog-
nition. Lenny is Shanta’s ward, and her mischievous nature masks her mag-
netic attachment to Shanta as one seeking the maternal. Instead, her desire
is one of yearning and identification, which complicates the assumption
that the love-making scene simply capitalizes on representing Shanta and
Hassan’s gratuitous heterosexual coupling. Instead, a representation of tri-
angulated desire produces a subject position for Lenny other than the one
forced upon her as a Parsi, disabled, and asexual child.
Previously, her subjectivity had emerged from a sense of irredeemable
failure, predicated on the absence of visibility and desire. Lenny misinter-
preted her mother’s admonition that being a Parsi minority meant being
like sugar in milk, or like a chameleon: “invisible.” Later, she had to defend
herself against Papoo, the servant’s daughter’s, insult that “Langdi Lenny”
(lame Lenny) will never marry because of her limp. Though she is cast as a
marginalized and failed sexual subject, Lenny’s contact with Shanta and
her admirers transforms her own understanding of her disability. As her in-
teractions with Shanta heighten her own sense of embodiment, pain, and
sexuality, she intuits those qualities in others to produce an affirming and
alternative subjectivity that draws on her marginality and disability. More-
over, Lenny’s observation of Shanta and Hassan’s desire activates her
receptivity, also; that is, through her desire for Shanta, Lenny’s voyeuristic
act produces a new subjectivity. She sees from her own perspective,
through Dil Navaz’s, and, in identifying with her, perhaps through Shanta’s
as well. Theories about colonial discourse argue that there is a potential for
resistance in mimicry, as the colonized occupy, simultaneously, the posi-
tions of both original and copy (Bhabha 85–92). Mehta presents postcolo-
nial melodrama’s resistant potential as the ability of the subject to
simultaneously occupy multiple sites or points of view, thus subverting the
claims of progressive, linear time to define a unified subjectivity and a uni-
versal history. The multiple temporalities of melodrama destabilize the
sense of linear time – the time of realism and of universalist modernity.
The love-making scene depicts how Hassan and Shanta define them-
selves, on the eve of independence, producing a model of subjectivity not
unlike the one premised on the mobilization of untranslatability across lan-
guages that was implicit in the dinner scene. Hassan proposes, implying
that Shanta can convert to Islam and stay in Lahore, as she desires (she has
never expressed an interest in leaving for India, and the film suggests that
she would prefer to remain in Pakistan, but for the threat of violence posed
by Dil Nawaz, which frightens her). Sensing her fear, Hassan then suggests
that he could become a Hindu, in order to leave with her for Amritsar. It is
a scene where neither can be defined either as Muslim or as Hindu – but, at
the same time, neither Shanta nor Hassan disavows her or his religious
identity. At the same time, both fail to perform the expected and idealized
roles of nationalist, patriotic, and religious subjects; neither desires a partic-
ular national or religious identity. Shanta accepts the offer to go to Amrit-
sar, but not to assert a Hindu identity (indeed, she never expresses a belief
in Hinduism). Rather, in this particular performance of religious identity,
the two redefine religious identification as an ethical openness to the other.
The realist mode of identitarian politics and violence that has dominated
the development of secularism in South Asia does not incorporate the
model of affective relationality suggested by the dynamic that links Shanta
and Hassan. Thus, for instance, the film’s melodramatic focus on affective
transmission as generative of ethical and intersubjective relations runs
counter to the premise of Nehru’s famous independence speeches, fea-
tured in the previous scene, in which the concept of the primordially auton-
omous individual is the basis for the idea of the citizen-subject. Hassan’s
and Shanta’s approach to religious identity is untenable within the context
of the communalism that surrounds them and the national narrative that
holds sway in both India and Pakistan; by refusing to adhere to that narra-
tive or to the roles configured for them by communalism, the two redefine
the concept of secularism that the national narrative promotes, and affec-
tive reasoning, understood as the ethical component of secularism, comes
to ground their citizenship, irrespective of national belonging.
Hassan’s particularly complex resolution of ethnic and national identity,
through affective reasoning, answers Dil Nawaz’s earlier jeering question:
“What kind of a Muslim are you?” In comparing his own violence against
Hindus to Hassan’s pacifism, he intends to represent Hassan as non-
Muslim. Yet, Dil Nawaz’s previous impersonation of a Sufi holy man ironi-
cally undercuts his sanctimony here. Masquerading as a mendicant, Dil
Nawaz hoodwinked park-goers into believing that, for a small sum, he
could “telephone Allah” to request favours. In contrast, until this moment,
Hassan has seemed to express his Muslim identity by mediating between
the increasing aggression of Dil Nawaz and the marginalization of their
Sikh and Hindu friends. As their friend the butcher lashes out at Sher Singh,
Hassan reconciles them by reminding them that the Qur’an sits next to the
Guru Granth Sahib in Amritsar’s Golden Temple; the comparison between
the two scriptures suggests that Islam and Sikhism are exchangeable and
equally significant, to his mind. As hostility against Sikhs grows, Hassan, in
his capacity as a Muslim, hides Sher Singh’s family and then secures safe
passage for them to Amritsar, assuming responsibility for Sher Singh as a
brother.
Later, in a scene of heightened tension, Hassan happens upon throngs
of Muslim refugees from India, staggering into the city, and responds by
reaching for the ta’wiz around his neck, an amulet holding prayers for
safety or for warding off the evil eye. The gesture, which relates Hassan’s
gazing upon the mournful refugees to the hopes imaged by the amulet, sug-
gests an attempt both to extend to the refugees the protection that the
ta’wiz affords him and to draw reassurance from them, for his imminent
journey – a reflection, in the opposite direction, of their own – rendering
them equal and exchangeable. In either case, his empathetic act reveals
that what might conventionally be read as a sign of the moral occult, of the
sacred, is better understood as a circulation of affect, as receptivity in the
self feeds an orientation toward others. In these ways, Hassan’s practice of
religion serves as a conduit for care of others rather than as a marker of
faith, as such – or, perhaps, his faith manifests as a performance of ethical
care for the other. In other words, postcolonial melodrama recognizes reli-
gion as a marker of difference productive of relationality rather than as an
appeal to an otherworldly agency or transcendent power. We might, there-
fore, better understand postcolonial melodrama as a mode that poses ques-
tions or stages the reconciliation of difference and relationality; rather than
focusing on the moral, it focuses on the ethical.
CONCLUSION
I have argued that the postcolonial melodramatic mode expresses the
coeval, but uneven, conditions of postcolonial histories and modernities,
particularly the contest over defining the secular. If one extended this ana-
lysis to other postcolonial contexts, comparisons would yield the insight
that secularisms owe their origins to genealogies other than those assumed
by Brooks.
The argument of the present article is that the equation of melodrama
with modernity, and of modernity, in turn, with the post-sacred, dichoto-
mizes the sacred and secular, the irrational and rational, and non-west and
west, valuing the latter over the former. The moral occult, formerly the pur-
view of religion, is thereby displaced into melodrama, a secular mode in
which the sacred is a trace. This formulation marginalizes religion as a key
component of modernity. The claim is critical in many regards, as many of
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Many thanks to Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Matthew Buckley, Patricia Zimmer-
mann, Natalie Melas, Amy Villarejo, Aditya Behl, Suvir Kaul, Mary Poovey, Wolf-
gang Neuber, Mark Swislocki, Lauren Minsky, John O’Brien, Doreen Lee, and
Dale Hudson for comments on earlier drafts and presentations of this research.
NOTES
1 For books, see, e.g., on Asia, Dissanayake and Clark, Melodrama and Cinema;
Melodrama and Asian Cinema; on Egypt, Abu-Lughod; on Mexico, Dever; on
India, Vasudevan, Melodramatic. Articles include, on Latin America, Benavides;
on South Korea, McHugh; on Democratic Republic of Congo, Pype; on Japan,
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ABSTRACT: This article rethinks melodrama’s history, uses, and effects, through an analy-
sis of Deepa Mehta’s film Earth (1998), an adaptation of Bapsi Sidhwa’s novel on the parti-
tion of British India, Cracking India (1991). The film offers an encounter with postcolonial
and global melodrama that raises questions of comparison, categorization, and periodiza-
tion, as well as of the association of the melodramatic mode with “secular modernity” –
the universal condition to which Peter Brooks suggests melodrama owes its rise. In
Mehta’s film, the often disparaged aesthetic of melodrama makes sense of affective history
by signifying the body and generating potential ethical knowledge through “affective rea-
son,” which is often conveyed through Mehta’s use of interruptions, flashbacks, reversals,
and simultaneities. The film thereby suggests a temporality that stands as an alternative to
the progressive and teleological linearity underlying concepts of a homogenous and secu-
lar modernity and to official, realist accounts of nationalism.
KEYWORDS: melodrama, affect, secularism, postcolonial, Deepa Mehta, India
SHEETAL MAJITHIA is Assistant Professor of Literature at NYU Abu Dhabi. Her work
focuses on globalization, comparative postcolonial literature, film, theory, and South Asia,
and she is currently at work on a book manuscript entitled “Modernity and Melodrama.”