ALLEGORY, NATIONALISM AND CULTURAL CHANGE IN INDIAN CINEMA: SANT TUKARAM1

Abstract

This paper examines the cultural crisis in Indian society generated by nationalist struggle for freedom from colonial rule and the ambivalent encounter with modernity. Allegory, as a mode that flourishs ‘at times of intense cultural disruption’, surfaces as the appropriate from that the representation of cultural crisis takes in an important film from the '3os—Sant Tukaram. I argue against both an idea of allegory as a mode specific to Western cultures, or as one that is a quintessential Third World form I demonstrate that the allegorical manifests itself through modes that are figural, typological and fabulistic. The question of national allegory, then, needs to be examined both in terms of these modes as well as the discourses of nationalism that may imbue a text. As a mode of language, particularly suited to negotiating cultural change or dealing with the ineffable or the inexplicable, allegory is available to any society for representation.

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