"The Company" and the Nation: Rhetorical Performativity in the Bollywood Film The Rising

Bed Prasad Poudyal, English

The 2005 Bollywood blockbuster, Ketan Mehta's The Rising: Ballad of Mangal Pandey is yet another in a series of Indian commercial films that exploit the nationalist themes for both indigenous and diasporic spectatorship. The film is an instance that exemplifies not only commodification of nationalism and of “local” culture for global consumption, but also rhetorical mechanism by which commercial cinema sells its representations by neutralizing its blatant commodification and by distorting unequal historical equations.

    The Rising pits the 1857 popular protest and Mangal Pandey, as its instigator as well as embodiment, against the East India Company, which the film constructs as the villain. The film sublates Mangal Pandey and the mutiny in the grand official, elite-nationalist historiography by reading the 1857 event as the beginning of Indian anti-colonial movement. My argument is that the figure of The Company which is announced vanquished by the end of the film, in fact, disrupts the nationalistic closure and situates the entire film in the present day version of the Company, the global capital. My analytic aim is to foreground how the rhetorical performativity of the film contains this disruption.

    In a combination of ideological and rhetorical critique, I will deploy narratology and post colonial theories to explicate the narrative performativity of The Rising, and thereby foreground the rhetorical subterfuge by which the nationalist closure masks the inscription of the film in the global capital.