Satyajit Ray’s The Chess Players and Postcolonial Theory Culture, Labour and the Value of Alterity Reena Dube Language, Discourse, Society General Editors: Stephen Heath, Colin MacCabe and Denise Riley Selected published titles: Elizabeth Cowie REPRESENTING THE WOMAN Cinema and Psychoanalysis Mary Ann Doane THE DESIRE TO DESIRE The Woman’s Film of the 1940s Reena Dube SATYAJIT RAY’S THE CHESS PLAYERS AND POSTCOLONIAL THEORY Culture, Labour and the Value of Alterity Jane Gallop FEMINISM AND PSYCHOANALYSIS The Daughter’s Seduction Peter Gidal UNDERSTANDING BECKETT A Study of Monologue and Gesture in the Works of Samuel Beckett Geoff Gilbert BEFORE MODERNISM WAS Modern History and the Constituency of Writing Piers Gray, edited by Colin MacCabe and Victoria Rothschild STALIN ON LINGUISTICS AND OTHER ESSAYS Stephen Heath, Colin MacCabe and Denise Riley (editors) THE LANGUAGE, DISCOURSE, SOCIETY READER Ian Hunter CULTURE ON GOVERNMENT The Emergence of Literary Education Jean-Jacques Lecercle DELEUZE ON LANGUAGE Jean-Jacques Lecercle and Denise Riley THE FORCE OF LANGUAGE Patrizia Lombardo CITIES, WORDS AND IMAGES Colin MacCabe JAMES JOYCE AND THE REVOLUTION OF THE WORD Second edition Laura Mulvey VISUAL AND OTHER PLEASURES Michael O’Pray FILM, FORM AND PHANTASY Adrian Stokes and Film Aesthetics Denise Riley ‘AM I THAT NAME?’ Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History Moustapha Safouan SPEECH OR DEATH? Language as Social Order: A Psychoanalytic Study Moustapha Safouan JACQUES LACAN AND THE QUESTION OF PSYCHOANALYTIC TRAINING (Translated and introduced by Jacqueline Rose) Erica Sheen and Lorna Hutson LITERATURE, POLITICS AND LAW IN RENAISSANCE ENGLAND Stanley Shostak THE DEATH OF LIFE The Legacy of Molecular Biology James A. Snead, edited by Kara Keeling, Colin MacCabe and Cornel West RACIST TRACES AND OTHER WRITINGS European Pedigrees/African Contagions Raymond Tallis NOT SAUSSURE A Critique of Post-Saussurean Literary Theory John Anthony Tercier THE CONTEMPORARY DEATHBED The Ultimate Rush Geoffrey Ward STATUTES OF LIBERTY The New York School of Poets Language, Discourse, Society Series Standing Order ISBN 0–333–71482–2 (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England Satyajit Ray’s The Chess Players and Postcolonial Theory Culture, Labour and the Value of Alterity Reena Dube © Reena Dube 2005 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–4629–9 hardback ISBN-10: 1–4039–4629–9 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dube, Reena, 1961– Satyajit Ray’s The chess players and postcolonial theory:culture, labour and the value of alterity/Reena Dube. p. cm. — (Language, discourse, society) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–4629–9 (cloth) 1. âátaraäja ke khilåòå (Motion picture) 2. Ray, Satyajit, 1921–1992— Criticism and interpretation. 3. India—Social conditions—1947– I. Title. II. Language, discourse, society (Palgrave Macmillan (Firm)) PN1997.S1784D83 2005 791.4302′33′092—dc22 2004058340 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne For My Parents Jagdish Prasad Dube and Saroj Rani Dube This page intentionally left blank Contents Foreword viii Preface xi 1 The Discourse of Colonial Enterprise and Its Representation of the Other Through the Expanded Cultural Critique 1 2 Childhood: Work, Play, and Shame Friendship in the Discourse of Enterprise 41 3 Towards a Theory of Subaltern and Nationalist Genres: The Post-1857 Lakhnavi Tall Tales and Their Nationalist Appropriation in Premchand’s “The Chess Players” (1924) 85 4 Comic Representations of Indigenous Enterprise in Daniel Mann’s The Teahouse of the August Moon (1956) and Satyajit Ray’s The Chess Players (1977) 130 5 Refuting the Expanded Cultural Critique: The Construction of Wajid Ali Shah’s Alterity 169 Notes 199 Bibliography 236 Filmography 243 Index 246 vii Foreword One of the greatest problems facing the development of human knowledge today is the problem of specialisation. Specialisation is always necessary in order to attain a detailed understanding of the cultural object under examination but that necessary specialization becomes an obstacle when it prevents the placing of that object in the wider social contexts, which allow of real illumination. This general problem is particularly acute in the case of film studies. Film studies constituted itself as a discipline around a detailed under- standing of the formal structure of film, the specific articulation of sound and image, which differentiates each film. This study became areproducible pedagogy when the technological advance of videotape allowed every student and teacher to enjoy a relation to the image, which in earlier decades had been the preserve of the editor and the director. In many institutions the birth of film studies saw this study of film bureaucratically separated from both the humanities and the social sciences. Such separation could find some justification in the specific formal articulation of film. However, it ignored the centrality of film to twentieth-century history, a centrality often commented in the intensely political role of film in both Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany but just as central to the history of the United States where both the Hays Code and the use of blacklisting in Hollywood after the war are best understood as deliberate attempts to limit the social force of the image. As important, this separation ignored how the wider culture surfaced within the film text, as adaptation, as music, as performance. Reena Dube’s brilliant analysis of Satyajit Ray’s The Chess Players ignores the separations which impoverish much film analysis. Dube is determined to situate this film both within the social forces of its moment of production (1977) and also in the complex presence in The Chess Players of a whole variety of textual and cultural histories. Dube locates the film as part of the thinking which produced the collective of Subaltern Studies historians and their influential analyses. The subalternists argued that the movement of national liberation which had produced the independent India of l947 had been fatally flawed in that it had copied the colonial oppressor both in the form of the state it adopted and in the notion of citizenship it espoused – both ignored the reality and complexity of Indian history and experience. In class terms the native bourgeoisie had conceived viii Foreword ix the national liberation struggle in terms of their own production of citizen subjects worthy of participation in a modern nation. But these new citizen subjects, modelled on British politics, ruled the subaltern classes with as little attention to their experience as the former masters of the days of the Raj. The subalternist’s analysis grew out of the disillusion with the society of post-Independence India and particularly the catastrophe of Indira Gandhi’s declaration of a state of emergency in l975. Although the film-maker Satyajit Ray had no direct, documented contact with the subalternists, he worked and lived in the same Bengal society as did the majority of the radical historians. Dube argues that his film The Chess Players should be read from the same perspective. Ray’s film, however, has resources not available, to the historians, the resources of cinema. A theoretical weakness of the subalternists was that their analysis of the inadequacy of the national bourgeoisie’s model of both subject and state and its erasure of subaltern experience could not produce an alternative model – that had to come from the subaltern classes themselves. The mistake which had been made once could not be made twice. In many ways this mistake was the mistake of a Marxism which was then under- stood as fatally linked to the particular developments of capitalism in Western Europe. Marx’s announcement in the Communist Manifesto that capitalism’s great gift to humanity had been its release from “the idiocy of the village” increasingly seemed a simple repetition of bourgeois norms of modernity which were as dangerous in their environmental as in their cultural consequences. But the risk of refusing to speak for the subaltern, of refusing to offer an inadequate discourse to represent an experience which was not directly understood, was that the subaltern might not speak at all. The subalternist intellectual was left attending a potentially evermore radical voice in an evermore actually vacuous political position. Dube shows how Ray avoids this fate by anchoring his film in the one medium where the subaltern does speak – in the form of popular jokes. Ray doesn’t choose just any popular jokes; he chooses the tall tales of the city of Lucknow and in particular a joke which tells of the fall of the city and its kingdom of Awadh. The joke attributes the fall of the kingdom to an indolent ruling class too busy playing chess to notice what the British were up to. Ray comes to this story through the nationalist fiction of Premchand but Ray does not accept the typical nationalist tale that Premchand tells, which castigates the decadent aristocracy for not being earnestly bourgeois enough to fight the English and be worthy of statehood. Rather Ray goes back to the ambivalent subaltern version