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Bertrand Russell in Bollyworld: film, the Cold War, and a postmortem on peace
In 1967, British philosopher and social critic, Bertrand Russell, made a cameo appearance in a Hindi popular film, Aman (Peace, directed by Mohan Kumar). At the frail age of 94, such a remarkable performance was not to be repeated, and neither has it merited scholarly attention. The scene with Russell seems to run counter to the expectations of this kind of Indian cinema as it does to expectations of a renowned British thinker. Nevertheless, his appearance imbues a certain gravitas to the masala aesthetic that makes Russell both culturally and politically relevant to the film, and to an analysis of the larger Cold War context of the 1960s through the film. Including a real-life and scripted characters, the excerpt is not simply a documentary nor a drama, yet it is a document and drama of the era – a period in which India’s stance against the nuclear bomb epitomised by the views of its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, was beginning to show signs of change. Even though the statesman had died three years before the film’s release, Russell’s presence in the film was, as I demonstrate in this chapter, to keep the Nehruvian vision alive. Containing elements of historical document and (melo)drama, the excerpt is an interpenetrative assemblage of the real and fictional that I call ‘docu-drama-ment’ to distinguish it from its nearest cousins, docudrama or “true story” cinema.
History
Publication status
- Published
File Version
- Accepted version
Publisher
University of North Carolina PressPages
280.0Book title
India and the Cold WarPlace of publication
Chapel HillISBN
9781469651163Department affiliated with
- Anthropology Publications
Research groups affiliated with
- Sussex Centre for Cultural Studies Publications
Full text available
- No
Peer reviewed?
- Yes
Editors
Manu BhagavanLegacy Posted Date
2018-10-25First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date
2018-10-24Usage metrics
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