Subaltern reading of film: with special reference to Marathi New Wave

Abstract

The history of mainstream cinema in India is also a history of the growth of India as a nation. While in the initial years after the Independence India saw films that dealt with themes of subaltern struggles, the shift came post 70s when films began showing middle class angst. Post 90s the films kept their date with globalisation and liberalisation phenomena, the focus now being shifted to characters that were ‘global’ in nature. The subaltern had slowly begun disappearing from the film canvas. However, the New Wave cinema in Marathi is foraying into a terrain hitherto seldom inhabited by mainstream cinema, thereby making the medium mainstream subaltern sensibilities. With the non-stereotypical usage of characters of women and children and using folk medium like tamasha for the narrative, these New Wave films have been highly successful in ‘making the subaltern speak’. The present paper has done ‘reading’ into important issues that come up in some of these films through the broad canvas of subaltern sensibilities. With an objective of analysing treatment of subaltern themes, the paper employs comparative analysis to look into cinematic representation of the subaltern world from the point of view of subaltern studies