Cinematic regimes of otherness: India and its Northeast

Abstract

As a cultural text, films are recognized to have powerful influence in the construction of national identities. While debates regarding the scarce representation of Northeast India in the national media continue to become a constant source of deliberation, the paper seeks to look into the dominant Hindi film’s representation of the region and how this positions the Northeast in the national imagination of the audience. It discusses the idea of nationhood with the return to the popular concepts of self and the other. The findings are based on the reading of four popular films made on the region post 1990, specifically on Manipur and Assam, viz. Dil Se (1998), Tango Charlie (2005), Bumm Bumm Bole (2010) and Mary Kom (2014), selected purposively from the very few films depicting the region. These films facilitate the understanding of various scales of representation of Northeast India and its changing representations over more than a decade.

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