NMML Public Lecture on 'Dr. Kotnis ki amar kahani and after:Images of China in Bombay cinema'

[rohit...@aol.in]

                            The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library

cordially invites you to a Public Lecture

at 3.00 pm on Wednesday, 10 April, 2013

in the Seminar Room, First Floor, Library Building

on

'Dr. Kotnis ki amar kahani and after:

Images of China in Bombay cinema'

by

Prof. Patricia Uberoi,

Institute of Chinese Studies, Delhi.

Abstract:

China is India’s largest neighbour, yet this country has had minimal representation in the Indian cinematic imagination. This presentation focuses on V. Shantaram’s Dr Kotnis ki Amar Kahani (The Immortal Story of Dr Kotnis, 1946), a much-cited and probably little watched Hindi movie that extols an iconic moment in the twentieth century history of Sino-Indian relations: the participation of the Indian Medical Mission to China in China’s liberation struggle against Japanese occupation, and the tragic death in the field of one of the Mission’s members, the eponymous Dr D.S. Kotnis. In the ultimate analysis, the film appears to authorize the symbolic appropriation of the Chinese ‘Other’ to the paternalistic order of the Indian family just as, in the early years after Independence, India was to patronize the assimilation of China to the world order of modern nation-states. This, as we know, proved to be an unsustainable partnership, setting the stage for the motif of betrayal that permeates Chetan Anand’s Haqeeqat (1964), the next major cinematic rendering of India–China relations. Some five decades on from the border war which forms Haqeeqat’s subject matter, Indian public sentiment continues to be dominated by this deep sense of betrayal and mistrust.

Speaker:

Prof. Patricia Uberoi has taught Sociology at the University of Delhi and Jawaharlal Nehru University, and retired as Professor of Sociology at the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi, where she was also editor of the well-known sociology journal, Contributions to Indian Sociology.  She is currently Honorary Fellow and Vice-Chairperson of the Institute of Chinese Studies, Delhi, where she has been actively involved with the Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar (BCIM) Track Two regional dialogue. She has published widely on aspects of family, kinship, gender and popular culture, including cinema, in respect to both India and China.

All are welcome.