Summer School 2013 "Situating Media" - Participants
Marie-Eve Lefebvre (Montréal)
Once There Was a Sardar: Representing the Sikh Community in Bollywood Movies
A vast majority of films produced in North India do not deal directly with religion, nor do they have an “official” discourse regarding religion. Still, through themes, narrative, and characters, Bollywood offers a representation of what Rachel Dwyer (Filming the Gods, Religion and Indian Cinema, 2006) called Indian-ness. Representing Indianness this way consists in associating the religion of the Hindu majority (which represents 82% of the population) with the whole of Indian society. In other words, within Bollywood movies, to be Indian is to be Hindu, and vice versa.
In the last decade, a growing number of films presented a Sikh hero – which was never the case before 2001. However, an important misunderstanding persists in North Indian society: on one hand, the Hindu majority believes that Bollywood offers a rosy picture of Sikh characters; on the other hand, the Sikh community seems to find these depictions of themselves simplistic and often offensive.
Drawing upon the work of Stuart Hall and other Cultural Studies intellectuals, we will explore the materialization of the power dynamics between the Hindu majority and the Sikh minority. Starting with the identification of the Sikh community’s discontent, this essay will seek to explain how these representations take form and how they become visible and identifiable.
Marie-Eve Lefebvre earned her BA from Université de Montréal in Anthropology and Theology. She then completed her MA in Religious Studies (specialization in Hinduism) at Université du Québec à Montréal, where she wrote her thesis on the influence of Hindu values on the depiction of Ideal and Otherness in Bollywood movies. She is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Communication Studies at Concordia University (Montréal) and intends to study the cinematic representation of the Sikh community and how it is received by Sikhs in Punjab and thorough North India.