Swades
After the international success (including an Academy Award nomination) of Lagaan (2001), writer-producer-director Ashutosh Gowariker’s follow-up is at first glance a very different film: whereas Lagaan gave new life to the Hindi “historical” film by being located entirely in 1893 and in Champaner, an imaginary Indian village, Swades opens with a shot of the globe that zooms down into contemporary Washington DC, where its hero, so unlike the earlier film’s simple villager Bhuvan, is a manager working on NASA’s Global Precipitation Measurement project. Whereas Bhuvan, lacking the ability to converse in English, nevertheless has to learn the wily ways of the British colonial rulers in order to literally beat them at their own game, Mohan Bhargava (Shah Rukh Khan), the hero of Swades, is apparently a fully assimilated, literally globalized scientist who skillfully handles a press conference in high-tech, jargon-laden English. And whereas Lagaan begins with the imposing voice-over of Amitabh Bachchan’s immaculate Hindi, that language won’t be heard in the “Hindi” film Swades for almost ten minutes, and then as hybrid “Hinglish” spoken by Mohan and his colleague Vinod.
But Swades soon draws Mohan back to his native India and to Charanpur, another imaginary village, in search of his beloved Kaveriamma (veteran actress Kishori Ballal, most notable in Kannada theatre, film, and television), the humble woman who raised him but who he has shamefully neglected following the death of his parents in a car crash when he was in college. Once the film adds a romance with Gita (Gayatri Joshi in her film debut), a village belle and schoolteacher of the feisty and independent sort, and begins to focus upon a goal (the generation o...
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..., auditions, and “Social Relevance Information.” The latter consists of a summary of India’s caste system “complied only for the purpose of the film and necessarily does not coincide with any other researched sources.” Truly interested viewers might nevertheless be encouraged to seek out “other researched sources.”
Works Cited
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Sunaina Marr Maira, Desis in the House: Indian American Youth Culture in New York City. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002.
Vijay Mishra, Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire. London: Routledge, 2002.
Arvind Rajagopal, Politics after Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in India. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001.
Lee, Robert G. 1999. Orientals: Asian American in Popular Culture. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
In this paper I will attempt to discover how cultural differences affect communication in two movies of differing cultures. I will keep the names of the characters formal for both movies and for the Indian movie I will translate their lines to English directly. The first movie is of the Indian culture entitled Quayamat Se Quayamat Tak, which roughly translates to “From Armageddon Till Armageddon.” This has a classic Romeo and Juliet theme. I will focus on what I consider are the three main relationships in this movie: 1) Raj, the main male character, and Reshmi, the main female character, 2) Raj and his family, and 3) Reshmi and her family. The second movie is of the African American culture entitled Boomerang. This is in essence about a lady’s man who is in search for a perfect woman. Along the way to finding Miss Right he romances other women and as soon as he finds who he believes is the right one, she romances him. I’ve chosen three main relationships from this movie as well: 1) Marcus, the main male character, and Angela, the women he ends up falling in love with, 2) Marcus and Jacqueline, the female he believes is the perfect women, and 3) Marcus and his friends Gerard and Tyler. This essay will discuss how the friends of each movie communicate with each other, what good and bad communication behaviors they have, compare and contrast the relationships depicted in the movies, talk about how the theories of friendship in the course text apply to the friendships in the movies, converse about how each film portrays the culture of the characters, and lastly discuss what each film says about the communication habits of their respective cultures.
Woodburne, A. S. "Can India's Caste System Survive in Modern Life?” The Journal of Religion, Vol. 2, No. 5. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. pgs. 525-537. Web
2. Feng, P. (Fall 1999). "The State of Asian American Cinema: In Search of Community". Cineaste, 24.
Mimura, Glen M. "What Is Asian American Cinema." Introduction. Ghostlife of Third Cinema: Asian American Film and Video. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2009. N. pag. Pdf.
It is not the daily news, newspapers, books or magazines, but the Indian cinema that has undoubtedly remained the ...
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King, Richard and Timothy J. Craig, ed. Global Goes Local: Popular Culture in Asia. Vancouver: UBC Press. 2002.
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Aparna, Bhargava. Theatres of Independence: Drama, Theory, and Urban Performance in India Since 1947. New York: University of Iowa Press, 2009.
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