Cinephilia

Reframing Irish ruins: Stanley Kubrick’s use of Kells Priory in Barry Lyndon

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Using Kells Priory, an Irish medieval site, as a case study, this essay examines how Stanley Kubrick transforms a specific historical and geographical place into cinematic space, drawing upon the priory’s architectural form, medieval history, and associations with conflict, power, and decline to create meanings that extend beyond landscape realism in Barry Lyndon.

This scene involving Redmond Barry confronting his childhood sweetheart Nora Brady and wealthy English Army Captain John Quin during their outdoor rendezvous was shot at Ballynatray Estate near Youghal situated on the border of County Cork and County Waterford. (Photo: Still from Barry Lyndon (Dir: Stanley Kubrick)

ATIKH RASHID

When Stanley Kubrick arrived in Waterford in July 1973 to scout for locations for Barry Lyndon, he was unknowingly or knowingly entering a landscape whose depictions on canvas or celluloid, in lyric and prose, are charged with layers of political, cultural, and emotional meaning.


The vision of Ireland as a pastoral utopia has evolved through various historical stages: from Oliver Cromwell’s displacement of native Catholic populations of Ireland to the less fertile western lands in 17th century, to Paul Henry’s renderings of rural life on canvas, to nationalist reappropriations of the countryside as the moral heart of the colonised nation. The postcolonial Irish state further instrumentalised this imagery to promote tourism, as did Hollywood with depictions of Ireland’s countryside – with films such as The Quiet Man (1952) – as rural utopia, for its own purposes. This story came full circle in the decade of 1970s with Irish filmmakers actively trying to deconstruct this image with films such as Caoineadh Áirt Úi Laoghaire (1975) and Poitin (1977).

The excitement that Kubrick’s plan to shoot ‘Barry Lyndon’ in Ireland is palpable in this article published by the Sunday Independent on July 7 . 1973 (Accessed on November 23 2026 through Irish Newspaper Archives)


Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, coming as it did in the middle of this decade, could be seen as another portrayal of Ireland of the older kind. Yet, the film was not – or hasn’t been – seen with the same derision that The Quiet Man and Ryan’s Daughter were for their stereotypical portrayal of Ireland and its people. In fact, Barry Lyndon was adjudged as the best Irish Film ever made by a jury at The Irish Times in 2020.


In the film, a young Irishman tries to climb the English aristocratic ladder through hook, crook and marriage only to lose everything as he is crushed by the rigid social order of 18th-century Britain. Looking for reasons for Barry Lyndon’s positive appraisal, film scholar Maria Pramaggiore argues that although the film “both indicts and participates in the colonial figuring of Ireland’s geographical and social landscape”, it sidesteps the Hollywood depiction by using melancholia and by framing the landscape through the 18th century debate about “the beautiful, the picturesque and the sublime”.

Later in this essay, I compare the cinematic space created by the filmmaker with the geographic place that Kells Priory is. (Graphic created by author; screengrabs taken from Barry Lyndon (Dir: Stanley Kubrick)


Last month, I visited the Kells Priory, County Kilkenny, one of the outdoor shooting locations of the movie in Ireland, to seek the answers to these questions for myself and to see how this site, which figures prominently in the film, was in real life. How was the cinematic place created from the geographic space? Has it changed since? How do the history of Kells Priory and its use in Barry Lyndon interact with each other?

Monastic-Military Complex

Founded in 1193 by Geoffrey FitzRobert, an Ango-Norman baron, Kells Priory was a monastic sanctuary with a defensive structure situated along the King’s River in Kilkenny County. Dedicated to ‘Blessed Virgin Mary’, the Priory was endowed with extensive lands and over the next two centuries came to comprise several buildings including a church, cloister, chapter house, dormitory, and refectory. These are parts of the monastic precinct at the priory.

The other part is the Burgess Court, which is mainly a defensive courtyard made of five defence towers linked to each other by a tall, stone-built compound wall. During its heyday, the priory served spiritual, economic and military functions that included worship, pastoral outreach, lodging for the canons, management of agricultural lands, mills and the defence of its occupants from outsiders in that turbulent era.

In March 1540, as per the policies of King Henry VII, the priory was surrendered and its lands were granted to other English nobles . Following this, the buildings gradually fell into disuse, some being adapted for secular uses. In recent times, the ruins became an important heritage site with archaeological excavations starting at the location beginning in 1972.

It’s plausible that filming and excavation took place parallely at Kells Priory. From 1972 to 1975, a large-scale programme of excavations was undertaken and it went on until 1980s. 7 The filming for Barry Lyndon took place in Kilkenny from October to December 1973.

‘The Dunleary camp’ : Barry at Kells Priory


In the movie, the scenes shot at the priory take place in the first half of the film before Barry leaves Ireland for Germany after he enlists in the Redcoats army. The priory has been used as a location to portray a fictional temporary training camp for the newly recruited Irish troops near the Dún Laoghaire harbour at the outskirts of the then Dublin city. This is a divergence (although not narratively important) from W M Thackeray’s novel, as in the latter Barry spends some time in Dublin with Fitzsimons’ family after leaving Barryville before enlisting for the English army and embarking on a ship to Prussian territories. In the novel, the episodes depicting the fistfight with Mr Toole and meeting with Captain Grogan (Fagan in novel) occur aboard the ship. In the film, these sequences are staged on land and specifically at the ‘Dunleary Training Camp’, which the novel has no mention of.

Interestingly, the first draft of the Barry Lyndon screenplay placed these sequences in Germany, unlike the finished film. Clearly, Kubrick decided to shoot more scenes in Ireland than initially planned, and the reasons for this could only be speculated. Notwithstanding the reason, it can be safely stated that this choice considerably expanded the Irish duration of the film and helped build a historical layer to the film’s depiction of a colonised Ireland.

Barry at the ‘Dunleary’ camp before he embarks on the ship to Prussia. (Screengrab: Barry Lyndon, Dir: Stanley Kubrick)

Interestingly, in an example of cinematic manipulation of space, the sequences shot at the Kells Priory are intermixed with scenes shot at Moorstown Castle, about 60 kms away, giving an illusion that these two spaces form a single place, a third, totally fictional, cinematic site of ‘Dunleary Camp’.

When I visited Kells Priory earlier this month, I found the site much the same as it appears in the film (minus the redcoats, their tents and paraphernalia) although 50 years have passed since the shooting of the film. The meadows inside and outside the walls, I saw, were populated by grazing sheep instead of redcoats having their humble lunch (as in the scene), which becomes the reason for Barry’s fistfight with Mr Toole.
Of the two parts of Kells Priory – monastic precinct and Burgess court – only the latter has been used in the film.

Redmond Barry’s entry at Dunleary training camp. (Screengrab Barry Lyndon, Dir: Stanley Kubrick)
The location today as photographed by the author from inside Burgess Court at Kells Priory. There is very little identifiable difference – apart from some dry patches seen in the movie visuals as compared to lush green grass at present, and sheep taking advantage of the greens. (Photo Credit:Atikh Rashid)

This space, characterized by its open, geometrically defined stone walls and towers, takes many a shapes in the mind of the visitors, becoming a place of multilayered meaning: as an ecclesiastical site with religious and colonial history, as an archival excavation site holding vast possibilities for anthropological and historical knowledge (some of the excavated material is stored inside the priory), and its ruined look harking back nostalgia and a sense of loss. By using the site in Barry Lyndon, Kubrick activates these layers of meaning and imbues it with additional ones by using it as a place where important incidents in the life of the protagonist occur.


It’s a space where Barry starts a new life as a Redcoats soldier, where a faux-aristocratic country-boy gets hardened by intermingling with ‘lower classes’. His fistfight with Mr Toole makes the green meadow an intimate Place of conflict and class tension thus imbuing the space with personal and meanings that transcend its existing associations.

The cinematic space of Dunleary training Camp soon after the protagonist’s induction into the British army.
Image 2. A photo taken by the author at Burgess Court of Kells Priory. The Burgess court, an enclosure that was built for defensive purposes, has seven such towers, the monument is also called ‘Seven Castles’.
There is some perspectival difference between the referenced shot and the image taken by the author is largely due to camera height and
Kubrick’s well-known use of a telephoto lens for this film . The film scene may have been shot by placing a camera at a height, capturing three towers in the background. The tree cover in the mid-ground has changed considerably, affecting the visibility of the wall compound as well as the towers in the background from this angle.

For an audience sensitive to Irish history, the sight of a foreign military occupying a historical Irish ruin (a stand-in for native institutions) is a powerful, active cultural stimulus that may recall the historical trauma of conquest and dissolution. The redcoats trampling the lush green terrain under their feet in the backdrop of ruins from Ireland’s past does tell a colonial story in itself and could possibly be read as the colonial fantasy of conquering a virgin land.


Perhaps, this is exactly what sets Barry Lyndon’s depiction of Irish life and landscape apart because the film does not idealise them but depicts them as sites of loss and domination. The lush green Irish terrain is not a cite of rural utopia but must be left behind to make a life thus symbolising displacement and colonial tension. The painterly aesthetic of the film inspired from 18th century art evokes a sense of loss and melancholia, the slow and restrained visual momentum helps the film – although a Hollywood product – stand apart from the melodramatic or picturesque clichés of Hollywood films mentioned earlier.


A mere location?


The question of whether the use of Kells Priory is merely locational in Barry Lyndon is a vexed one.

On one hand, the site is used as a location in the most functional sense as it stands for something fictional – the Dunleary training camp. On the other hand, it’s more than purely locational as basing the scenes at an identifiable Irish ruin, Kubrick imbues the scene with layers of historical and cultural meaning due the site’s documented history of loss and conquest and Barry’s own personal and ultimately unsuccessful struggles within British aristocracy.

Remains of the archaeological excavations that took place at Kells Priory can still be seen at the site. Photo Credit: Atikh Rashid


Kells Priory, although a national monument and an important medieval ecclesiastical site of great archaeological importance, is not a popular tourist destination. Barry Lyndon shoot there has not helped it (unlike the locations of The Quiet Man and Star Wars franchise), one would imagine, largely because the film itself doesn’t enjoy a broad popularity, claiming fanfare among a niche cinephile crowd. The tourism data published by Failte Ireland shows that within the Kilkenny county, the Priory is not a sought-after destination, with only 31,000 visitors in a year (although it’s a free-entry monument) as opposed to Kilkenny Castle which attracted 452, 383 visitors who had to buy a ticket.

Kells Priory, however, makes frequent appearances on online forums on platforms like Reddit in discussions involving shooting locations in Ireland. The film has gained in popularity with passage of time which shows in the online mentions of the film and its shooting locations but it’s still a niche to send crowds in the direction of the Kells. Also, in the crowded list of historic shooting locations in Ireland listed on portals such as Screen Ireland, Heritage Ireland or OPW, Kells Priory does not prefigure prominently

References/Further Reading:

Bradley, John, ‘Kells Priory, County Kilkenny: Archaeological Excavations 1972–1975’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 80C (1980), 345–420.

Harper, Graeme, and Jonathan Rayner, eds., Cinema and Landscape: Film, Nation and Cultural Geography (Bristol: Intellect, 2010).

McLoone, Martin, ‘Landscape and Irish Cinema’, in Cinema and Landscape: Film, Nation and Cultural Geography, ed. by Graeme Harper and Jonathan Rayner (Bristol: Intellect, 2010), pp. 131–46

Peckham, Robert Shannan, ‘Landscape in Film’, in A Companion to Cultural Geography, ed. by James S. Duncan, Nuala C. Johnson and Richard H. Schein (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), pp 420-429
Poitín, dir. by Bob Quinn (CineGael, 1977).

Pramaggiore, Maria. Making Time in Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon: Art, History, and Empire. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015

Thackeray, William Makepeace, The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq. by Himself (London, 1844).

Cinema and Landscape: Film, Nation and Cultural Geography, edited by Graeme Harper and Jonathan Rayner, Intellect, 2010, pp. 131–146.

Cinephilia

Shyam Benegal’s Trikal (1985) and the ghosts of Portuguese occupation of Goa

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Stills from Feitiço do Império (1940), Saat Hindustani (1969) and Trikal (1985)

The story of the liberation of Goa, a former Portuguese colony, and its aftermath on the politics and culture of this coastal region occupies only a small corner of Indian history, almost difficult to spot, and is barely recognised in the collective Indian memory.

I recently watched the Portuguese film Feitiço do Império (1940), a propaganda feature made during the Salazar dictatorship to promote the Estado Novo regime’s imperial agenda. While watching the film, I kept anticipating the appearance of Goa as Luís Morais, the film’s protagonist, travels through Portugal’s colonies, crossing African landscapes, encountering big-game wildlife, and observing exoticised portrayals of native populations. Yet he never visits Goa, Damão, or Diu. It seems that, for the Portuguese state at the time, the larger African colonies were considered far more important than the smaller eastern enclaves, such as Goa, and therefore more worthy of inclusion in this propaganda film.

News reports of Indian ‘invasion’ of Goa, Damao and Diu in December 1961.

To find how the Portuguese state saw Goa and its forced severance by Indian state in 1961, I turned to Cinemateca Digital, the Portuguese cinematheque portal, but didn’t find much that would meet my interest. There were only cursory mentions to Goa in news bulletins on evolving military situation during late 1950s and early 1960s but of very little depth.

Finally, I turned eastwards and wondered: How has the prolific Indian cinema looked at this event?
I was surprised to find that Indian cinema, especially the dominant Mumbai-based Hindi commercial film industry, which is infamous for sidestepping political issues and staying far removed from contentious social and political developments—has engaged with the Goan story quite directly. Quantitatively, however, the attention it has received is minuscule.

Two feature films deal directly with the history of the former Portuguese colony, the anti-colonial struggle in this coastal enclave, and its final ‘liberation’ by the Indian army in 1961. The first is ‘Saat Hindustani‘ (Seven Indians) made by Khwaja Ahmed Abbas in 1969 and the other is Trikal (titled in English as ‘Past, Present and Future’) made by celebrated director of ‘Indian new wave’ Shyam Benegal in 1985.

A still from Saat Hindustani (1969)


The first, although produced independently, takes the form of a propaganda film and, curiously or coincidently, employs narrative techniques that are not very different than those used by Antonio Ribeiro: seven Indians coming from different regions, religions and political ideologies join hands to wage a covert war against Portuguese oppression in Goa in the midst of the anti-colonial movement in late 1950s. The characters and the regions from which they come represent struggles and tensions within the Indian union over religion, language, and ethnicities. The film tries to emphasise the cohesiveness of Indian union and the fight against Portuguese as a higher call against an outside enemy despite local differences. Like Ribeiro, Abbas also mixes documentary and fiction formats in the film.

The second film – Benegal’s Trikal – is breathtaking in the historic depth, empathy, and nuance with which it deals with the complex subject and the ideas of change, loss, trauma of the past, and the past’s ability to influence the present and the future.  The fiction film is set in the tumultuous year 1961, just a few months before the Indian takeover of Goa in December 1961.

The film’s central plot revolves around a feudal Goan-Catholic family – Souza-Soares – and the family head, Dona Maria, who is in denial of her husband’s death as well as the imminent Indian takeover of Goa. The family is desperate to marry Maria’s granddaughter Anna to a young doctor who has settled in Lisbon, but the young girl is in awe of another relative, Leon, who has joined the Goan liberation movement against the family’s wishes. With Dona Maria attached to the past and unwilling to let go of the traditions, the younger generation seems eager to violate her wishes to find life away from the family house as they grapple with their loyalties—whether to Portugal, an independent Goa, or India.

In the film, the family home—the Souza-Soares mansion— and its deceased patriarch Ernesto Souza Soares, serve as metaphors for the Portuguese Colonial state in Goa. As the house and its occupants lose relevance for the local community – both Hindu and Catholic Goans – who are increasingly swept up in nationalist fervour, its residents grow anxious, even fractured, facing the impending takeover by the Indian army. The mansion also becomes a site where suppressed histories resurface, including Portuguese brutality against local revolutionaries during the native struggle, as well as those committed during the prolonged Catholic inquisition. The house’s eventual decay (shown when Pereira visits it 25 years later) seems to be telling the audience that Goa’s Portuguese past interests only historians and archaeologists.

Ernesto’s widow –  Dona Maria – seems unwilling to acknowledge the death of her husband even after going through all the rituals of the transference of the souls from this world to the hereafter. The husband’s death seems to have incapacitated her, and she suspends all her familiar affairs, announcing a moratorium.

She takes the help of shaman practices – seances held through the help of Milagrenia (an illegitimate child of her husband employed as a housemaid in the mansion) as a medium – to contact her dead husband, which never succeeds. What’s important is that her efforts to contact the husband are mirrored with hope expressed by some of the characters in the film that the Portuguese government will intervene and will never allow the Indian state to ‘invade’ Goa. As it turns out, both of these expectations turn out to be futile.

Salazar orders the Goan government and citizens of Goa to fight until the last breath. The governor general Manuel António Vassalo e Silva, seeing the futility of resisting 40,000 Indian soldiers with 3,500 at his disposal, disregards the ‘orders’ and surrenders to the Indian army on December 19 1961.

The seances held by Dona Maria, however, have a result contrary to her expectations.

Director Benegal uses the séance episodes to deal with the problematics of memory and history and how different sides of a conflict remember and mythologise different and contradictory narratives.

The seances conjure the ghosts of Vijay Singh Rane and Kushtoba Rane (instead of her husband’s), the latter an anti-colonial bandit who was captured by the Portuguese authorities with the help of Dona Maria’s grandfather — a Portuguese loyalist –  forcing her to confront her family’s – and by association Portuguese state’s violent past. This unintended encounter reveals how suppressed histories resurface, disrupting colonial nostalgia.

Rane, painfully, recalls the cultural erasure caused by centuries of Catholic inquisition that snatched away his community’s traditions and ‘even names’. Dona Maria, perturbed by these uneasy accusations, shouts: Why are you telling me this? I know nothing about this.” – highlighting the history bubble that surrounds her. She eventually abandons the seances, perhaps, with her coming to terms with the complex history of her family’s legacy.

Dr Pereira (left) rubbishes the possibility of an ‘independent Goa’ like Switzerland.

After Ernesto’s funeral, the family doctor – Mr Pereira – who has been portrayed as someone who has resigned to the ‘new reality’ of Goa ( or is he an opportunist who has shifted his loyalties?) – raises a toast “not with Scotch, but with our native pheni”. He refers to Ernesto’s death as the departure of “the Goa that they knew until now” and that a new regime will soon take over. At a dinner later, he insists to others at the table that one’s culture is the culture where one is born and that Salazar doesn’t care about Goa because he sent all his army to rescue the African colonies.

By the end of the film, Dona Maria seems to have undergone some change in her attitude. In the beginning, she seems incapable of dealing with Ernesto’s loss (and hence by association the Portuguese Goa). “I feel that if I forget Ernesto’s face, I will forget mine. If he is gone, what will be left for me?” she wonders at his funeral. By the end, she seems to have – even if passively – accepted the change as she expresses her approval of her granddaughter’s decision to leave and make a life elsewhere.

Film Heritage and History

Dilip Kumar’s Jugnu & the moral panic in newly independent india.

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While the masses loved it, the elite were riled up by Jugnu’s provocative framing of sexuality and depiction of college as a space for free intermingling of sexes. Several provincial governments banned the film, forcing the distributors to chop it drastically to rid it of ‘vulgarity’.

The singing star Noor Jehan’s depature for Pakistan with her husband Shaukat Hussein Rizvi, who was the producer-director of Jugnu, may have contributed to lack of sympathy for the film among decision makers in India.

ATIKH RASHID

Jugnu (Firefly, 1947) was an important film in many respects. It was the first box office success for Dilip Kumar, then a newbie in the industry, and the last film of singing star Noor Jehan before she permanently left Bombay for Karachi. Jugnu was peculiar in another regard. It was among a few films that were conceptualised and made in pre-independence India but were released in theatres after the dawn of Independence and the pain of Partition.

The response to Jugnu – the love it received from the masses, the ‘moral panic’ it evoked among the elite, and the punitive action it invited from the young government – was an outcome of the time of transition that the country was going through. It also set the tone for the censorship project that Independent India would embark on –aiming to protect the ‘fragile morality’ of the ‘gullible masses’ – and continues to obsess itself with even today.

The present-day audience would likely judge Jugnu as a run-of-the-mill romantic comedy (which like many latter films of Dilip Kumar ends in a tragedy) that ticks some boxes and misses a few. The film produced and directed by Shaukat Husain Rizvi, then-husband of Noor Jehan, has a simple story. Dilip Kumar’s Suraj and Noor Jehan’s Jugnu study in separate colleges located on the same campus and fall in love. Jugnu is an orphan and Suraj is the only son of an ostensibly rich raisaheb who has accumulated debt. The family has planned to marry Suraj to a girl from a wealthy family hoping to receive dowry that will end their financial troubles. The circumstances mean that the lovers can’t marry each other and must feign unfaithfulness. The mutual heartbreak, ultimately, leads the couple to their tragic ends.

Those against the film objected to, among other sequences, this scene in which Jugnu and Suraj indulge in a flirtatious chit chat hiding behind a sofa in the latter’s home.

Although a mixed bag in terms of performances, the film is salvaged by the comedic episodes in the first half and a couple of good songs in the latter.

While the newspaper advertisements from the time tell us that the film, branded as ‘The Song of the Youth’, was celebrating ‘Silver Jubilees’ in multiple cities, it was also evoking an adverse response from the elite for depicting ‘college’ as a place of the intermingling of the sexes, and its provocative framing of youthful sexuality. It portrayed Indian youngsters as carefree romantics for whom the only thing that mattered was the success and failure in love.

Another topic of contention, repeatedly raised by its critics, was its depiction of a romance between the ladies’ hostel matron, played by Ruby Myers, and a professor from the boys’ college. There were still others who blamed it for slandering India’s higher education institutions by not focussing at all on learning activities that, ideally, should go on in a college.

The song ‘Loot Jawani Phir Nahin Aani’ performed by Latika in the film as part of the college drama was a major point of criticism. Many objected to the lyrics as well as “vulgar”, “nude”, “courtesan-like” performance by Latika.

A peek into the archive tells us that popular periodicals like Filmindia were routinely receiving letters from its English speaking readers complaining about Jugnu. While some wondered how such a ‘vulgar film’ was cleared by the Censor Board. Others demanded that it should be re-examined. Readers would reproduce the lyrics of an entire song (Loot Jawani…) to prove their point of Jugnu’s indecency and its portrayal of college girls as ‘courtesans’. Even Indians residing in Singapore and Colombo wrote with angst that the film was spreading the “wrong impression about college life in India”.

“Believe me, Mr Patel. The whole audience was exasperated – barring a few perhaps – when they saw a college girl dancing with the full garb of vulgarity in a drama staged in the college… Patrons of Indian films here like good stories with melodious songs and not historical distortions and semi-nude dances,” wrote M T Piyaseela from Colombo, in a letter published in the October 1948 issue.

Shiv Das Singh, a student from Jodhpur, feared that Jugnu might affect his educational prospects. “What would be the effect on our parents’ minds seeing the film…Will our parents then be ready to allow us to continue our studies further?” he wondered.

After a successful north India run, Jugnu was released at Bombay’s Capitol Cinema on October 1, 1948 but was pulled off the theatre within four weeks “in the midst of its triumphant run” after Filmindia editor Baburao Patel wrote a scathing review headlined ‘Jugnu: A dirty, disgusting, vulgar picture!’.

“Jugnu…tells us that college life in India is nothing more than a long sex hunt in which boys chase girls, explore their hand bags, rob their tiffin boxes and sing suggestive love ditties while making vulgar gestures; while girls sigh about heavily, seduce boys to tea, pimp for their friends, puncture their cycle tyres and sing songs of frustrated love,” Patel wrote in the review, adding, “no decent exhibitor with any pride for his profession or any self-respect should exhibit it in his theatre.”

Interestingly, Patel was Noor Jehan’s neighbour in Oomer Park, Warden Road, Bombay.

In fact, Patel informs us in the review, that he had sent an ‘advanced copy’ of the write up to the then Bombay Home Minister Morarji Desai who watched the film on October 26 and issued a ban three days later under Section 21 of General Clauses Act of 1897. This led to a lot of protests from the film producers and distributors for the ‘arbitrary action’ by the Home Minister on a film already cleared by a ‘full board’ of the censors, but to no avail.

The romance between hostel matron played by Ruby Myers and a professor from boy’s college was a major cause of the films popularity among the youth. It, on the other hand, also added to Jugnu‘s trouble with the government.

After Bombay, several other provincial governments banned the film. The distributor – Bharat Pictures, Akola – was forced to re-submit the film for certification where it was chopped off significantly. Records show that when the film obtained its first Censor certificate from the Bombay Board of Film Certification on July 7, 1947, its total length was 14,093 feet. After revisions made following the ban, it was reduced to 11,559 feet. In terms of the run time, the film lost 28 minutes of its original duration of 156 minutes. The film returned to the screens after a few months in truncated form.

In many ways, the extent of criticism that Jugnu received seems disproportionate to the provocation contained in the film. This response can be understood in two contexts. Firstly, the elite discourse in the newly-Independent India was focused on ‘nation building’, a project that would require the energies and services of the youth. Jugnu’s celebration of youngsters as carefree lads inclined to shrug off responsibility in favour of romantic pursuits did not go well with the government and others with a say.

Secondly, the decision by the film’s female lead Noor Jehan and producer-director Rizvi to choose Pakistan over India left little sympathy for them and their product among the Indian elite. For example, in its review of Jugnu, Patel made a misplaced and far-fetched connection between director Shaukat Rizvi and Qasim Rizvi, the head of extremist, separatist Razakar movement in Hyderabad.

In the pages of Filmindia, which was the most powerful film magazine at the time, Muslim filmmakers who were travelling between India and Pakistan in the fog of the Partition (some of which decided to stay back in India) are repeatedly referred to as ‘fifth columnists’ who need to be watched to ensure that “they do not use the powerful medium of the films” for nefarious purposes.

“The censors must watch carefully such anti-social and anti-religious activities of these fanatic producers who live with us to stab us from day to day,” warns an editorial in the November 1948 issue of Filmindia.

Notwithstanding the legal and circumstantial impediments, Jugnu went on to become one of the biggest films of the time and launched Dilip Kumar’s career in the true sense. In fact, it was a large poster of Jugnu put up in Bandra that broke the news to Ghulam Sarwar ‘Agha’, the fruit seller from Peshawar, that his son Yusuf had entered the film business and had become a star.

(This story appeared on indianexpress.com as ‘How Dilip Kumar’s Jugnu lost 28 minutes to confused morality of a young India’ on July 17 2021)

Film Heritage and History, Long Reads

Why has the oldest film festival in Asia failed to make a name for itself?

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Although it has been around for 67 years, the International Film Festival of India (IFFI) lacks an identity of its own. In the late 1970s, efforts were made to distinguish IFFI on the world map by establishing it as a forum for the cinema of the developing world, but the plan was soon abandoned.

ATIKH RASHID

Every year about 2000 film festivals are held across the globe. Also, every year, scores of new ones come onto the scene and same number, or more, disappear into oblivion. Considering this, marking 67 years of existence and celebrating 50 editions is not a mean feat for any film festival. Therefore, it is a cause of pride for India that the state-funded International Film Festival of India (IFFI) successfully held its golden jubilee edition in Goa which concluded on Thursday.

But this shouldn’t be a cause of contentment. Is it not bothersome that IFFI, born in 1952 when it was the first such event anywhere in the East, doesn’t hold a place of prestige on the global film festival map? In fact, within Asia it is not counted among the most important festivals, despite being the eldest in the room, and much younger festivals – such as Busan International Film Festival which started in 1996 – acquiring greater importance in the international circuit.

In recent decades, state patronage has not been an issue. The Union Government and State Government of Goa (since it was moved there in 2004) have been putting in big money into the annual event. For the last 4-5 years, as much as Rs 20 crore is being spent on each edition by the two governments. The prize money given to winners at IFFI is also big – much higher than those given at several most prestigious film festivals in the world. Despite all this, IFFI is failing to click globally.

The reason for this failing, it appears, could be that IFFI has failed to create an identity for itself which will help it stand apart from the rest. In the highly competitive world of film festivals, IFFI doesn’t hold a promise to provide to the foreign filmmakers, international press and cinephiles, something that they will find nowhere else.

Perhaps, this is the reason that apart from invited (and paid for) foreign guests, the international community has turned its back on the event. In recent years, there have been no efforts to work on this identity lacuna. The focus, instead, has been on pomp and show that has started to put-off even the local film lovers.

Efforts to give IFFI a third world identity

It’s not the case that the organisers of IFFI were always blissfully unaware of its ‘identity’ lacuna. In fact, in the late 1970s when IFFI was still holding its early editions, the then festival director took steps to help IFFI develop a distinct personality. IFFI walked on that path for a couple of years but strayed soon with changes in priorities of the parent ministry.

Raghunath Raina, a bureaucrat belonging to Indian Information Service (IIS), became the Director of Film Festivals (DFF) in August 1978 and took upon himself to create a place of prominence for IFFI on the global festival map. His belief was that IFFI will gain importance on the world stage only if it offered something unavailable elsewhere.

Former Director of Film Festivals (DFF) Raghunath Raina (third from the right) receives for foreign guests at Delhi airport during 7th IFFI held in January 1979. Credit: National Film Archive of India.

To achieve this goal, he planned to turn IFFI into a prominent forum for ‘third world’ cinema which would attract films and filmmakers from developing nations from across the world. As per him, if IFFI could hold such a promise, it would attract international delegates and the press by providing an opportunity to them to “keep abreast with trends in the cinemas of the people constituting 2/3rd of the world population”. He did make the efforts in that direction during 7th, 8th and 9th editions of the festivals held between 1979 and 1981 when he headed the DFF.

National Film Archive of India. Former Director of Film Festivals (DFF) Raghunath Raina (third from the right) receives for foreign guests at Delhi airport during 7th IFFI held in January 1979. Credit: National Film Archive of India.
“My concern was not only to organise a successful and interesting festival but also to imbue it with a distinctive character of its own,” Raina wrote in an essay ‘IFFI-An Introspective Study’ included in the book ’70 Years of Indian Cinema’ published in 1984. “There had often been talk of a third world bias (between 1979-81) but this was largely an expression of intent. I clearly saw that if the festival became a forum for the third world cinema, it would acquire a personality and importance of its own. As such, it would also fit in with the country’s role as a founder-member of the non-aligned movement and as a leading protagonist, of the aspirations of the developing nations,” he wrote.

As part of his plan, in 7th edition of IFFI held in 1979, he invited Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene to head the international jury – a first for an African filmmaker at IFFI and a deliberate attempt was made to include a record number of third world films in both competitive and documentary film sections. Also, a symposium on ‘Cinema of the Developing Countries’ was held during the festival where African filmmakers criticised India’s policy of exporting films to fellow developing countries without importing any from them. India, they alleged, thus was following a policy of cultural imperialism much like the USA.

Raina continued his attempt in this direction in the 1980 festival (Filmotsav) held in Bangalore and 1981 when it returned to Delhi as a competitive festival. In fact, he had proposed that the international competition at IFFI should be reserved only for films from developing countries. The government’s hesitance to do this shelved this plan. Soon after the government at the centre changed, and the responsibility of organising the next edition of IFFI was handed over to National Film Development Corporation (NFDC).

In the essay mentioned above, Raina laments that his aim of giving a special identity to the IFFI remained unrealised and the festival has suffered subsequently due to this.

“Many elements of the Nehru dream have withered away; others remain only in form. The Indian (film) festival is one of them. It will continue to be so unless it is given an identity and is organised by people with a commitment to the film promotion and a passion for cinema,” wrote Raina.

IFFI is losing its patrons

Data obtained by The Indian Express from Entertainment Society of Goa (ESG), which looks after the logistical part of the festival organisation, shows that IFFI hasn’t only failed to attract international crowd, but it has been losing even its local patrons in recent years.

As per the data pertaining to delegate registrations for IFFI between 2007 and 2018, the number of delegates coming for IFFI went up from 2007 to 2014 but has since seen a sharp decline until the recent edition where, perhaps due to the hype of 50th edition, the numbers have somewhat improved.

International Film Festival of India Golden jubilee edition of International Film Festival of India concluded in Goa on Thursday. Credit: International Film Festival of India.
IFFI’s 2007 edition had attracted 3,713 delegates -including those from Goa and outside – which increased with every passing year and reached 10,054 in 2014, highest in recent past. However, in 2015 only 6196 delegates attended the event and the number came further down in 2016 to 5261 and slid further to 5020 in 2017. In 2018, the number improved marginally to 5214. Although officials number for the 2019 edition – which concluded on Thursday – are not yet available, the organisers said that around 6300 paid delegate passes and 1000 free student passes were distributed. The number is considerably lower than the 2014 count of 10,054.

Officials with Entertainment Society of Goa (ESG), the Goa Government unit responsible for organising the festival along with DFF, are hoping that this number would go up with their efforts to add more venues and experiments with online ticketing. “With more convenience, the delegate count will increase in future editions,” said Subhash Phal Dessai, Vice Chairman, ESG.

Can appointing a ‘Creative Director’ help IFFI?

Raina, a bureaucrat himself, had blamed the lack of a ‘sustained vision’ and IFFI’s bureaucratic setup or the festival’s failure to develop a personality.

“…The absence of a sustained vision on the part of the authorities and the vagaries of a system that grants hegemony to transient, generalist bureaucrats over people with a commitment to and expertise in film promotion, never gave the IFFI a chance to develop a distinctive personality of its own,” he wrote.

Rain’s comment remains true even after 35 years. In its present organisational setup, the Festival Director is a bureaucrat who occupies the post of Director of Film Festivals (DFF) for a maximum period of three years. He/She may or may not have any background in cinema before he occupies this post. And more often than not, even if he gains some expertise on the subject– in case he’s genuinely invested in the festival’s future – he’s out of there. The steering committee of the festival, which has a mix of bureaucrats, filmmakers and politicians, is appointed afresh every year and hence can’t think beyond the upcoming edition. A look at the names of filmmakers on the committee makes it apparent that, in a majority of cases, their political views seem to have played a key role in the appointment process rather than their potential to contribute to the event and its future.

There has been a long-standing demand that IFFI should get a ‘Creative Director’, someone who would have real expertise in film festival organising, cinema and who could provide a sustained vision to the festival by holding the position for a longer duration. However, there has been no progress on that front. In fact, the issue was discussed this year too at the first meeting of the steering committee held by Union Information and Broadcasting Minister Prakash Javadekar. The minutes of the meeting, obtained by Express using Right To Information, show that the suggestion was turned down after a member pointed out that “DFF is competent enough to look into creative aspects and the idea of a Creative Director may not be necessary.”

It appears that the beneficiaries of the present setup do not want it to change although it is costing the festival dearly.

Film Heritage and History

Arthouse True Crime: Films that look past the crime scene

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As true crime has evolved into one of streaming’s defining narrative forms, a quieter strain of arthouse cinema has approached the subject from an altogether different direction as portraits of loneliness, social decay, and the unsettling banality of violence. The crime itself frequently occupies surprisingly little screen time.

Still from The Girl with the Needle (Magnus von Horn, 2024)

ATIKH RASHID

The popularity of true crime is often explained through a deceptively simple contradiction: we seek proximity to what we fear. Psychologists have variously attributed the genre’s appeal to morbid curiosity, our evolved vigilance toward danger, and an impulse to rehearse threats from the safety of spectatorship. Cognitive film scholars similarly argue that narrative cinema functions as a laboratory for emotional simulation, allowing audiences to test moral intuitions and empathic responses without material risk.

True crime, in this formulation, satisfies an ancient desire to understand violence by transforming it into narrative. The murderer is apprehended, the motives are catalogued, and disorder eventually yields to explanation.

Yet contemporary true crime culture—particularly as shaped by streaming platforms—has gradually shifted from understanding violence to consuming it. The documentary series, with its episodic revelations, archival footage, police interviews, and dramatic cliffhangers, has become an endlessly renewable machine of suspense. Murder is reorganized into content. Victims become mysteries, perpetrators become puzzles, and investigation itself becomes spectacle. Even when ethically motivated, the genre often reproduces the procedural logic of law enforcement, asking not what violence feels like or what social worlds produce it, but merely who committed it and how they were caught.

There exists, however, another lineage of cinema that approaches true crime from almost the opposite direction. One that distrusts revelation, resists procedural satisfaction, and refuses the reassuring architecture of justice: the arthouse true crime. These are the films which have at their central plot a true crime – or even a serial killer – and are made by independent filmmakers and are mainly circulated through festival circuit, unlike the true crime documentary genre which gathered a startling momentum through digital screening platforms. It is a cinema scattered across countries and decades rather than united by movement or manifesto—a constellation of films that might be called arthouse true crime.

The Golden Glove (Fatah Akin, 2019)

I am talking here about films such as Angst (1983), Gerald Kargl’s suffocating immersion into the fractured consciousness of a serial killer; Sion Sono’s Cold Fish (2010), which transforms a notorious Japanese murder case into a corrosive study of patriarchal domination and capitalist excess; Vincent Le Port’s Bruno Reidal: Confession of a Murderer (2021), an austere adaptation of a real murderer’s written confession that privileges introspection over explanation; and Fatih Akin’s The Golden Glove (2019), an unflinching portrait of postwar social decay seen through the crimes of Fritz Honka. A notable addition to this constellation of movies is Magnus von Horn’s The Girl with the Needle (2024), which situates the horrors of the Danish serial baby killer Dagmar Overbye case within the brutal realities of poverty, motherhood, and postwar Europe.

These films are interested less in crime than in the ordinary conditions surrounding it: poverty, alienation, masculinity, social neglect, loneliness, labor, hunger, repression. Violence arrives not as an exceptional rupture but as something disturbingly embedded within everyday life.

A still from Japanese film Cold Fish (Sion Sono, 2010)

Watching these films often means abandoning the expectations cultivated by Netflix. There are no detectives, retired or serving, guiding us through evidence, no experts reconstructing timelines for the screen, no comforting narration promising that every question will eventually be answered. Instead, we inhabit spaces rather than stories. We remain with people long after conventional narratives would have moved on. The crime itself frequently occupies surprisingly little screen time.

What distinguishes arthouse true crime is not simply aesthetic sophistication but a radically different ethics of looking.

Social landscape of violence

One place to begin is with The Girl with the Needle (2024), the recent period drama by Magnus von Horn that hauntingly reimagines of the crimes of Dagmar Overbye, the Danish woman convicted of murdering infants in the uneasy years following the First World War.  Von Horn has little interest in reconstructing the case or in tracing the neat causal arc from crime to punishment that has become the default grammar of the contemporary documentary series. Instead, he drifts outward, away from the killer and toward the world that made her legible: a Copenhagen of soot-blackened factories, amputee veterans, unwanted pregnancies, and women for whom survival itself had become a daily negotiation.

Dagmar Overbye, as imagined by Magnus von Horn in The Girl with the Needle (2024)

The film’s emotional centre is not Overbye but Karoline, a young seamstress navigating a society that has already abandoned her long before she encounters the woman who promises refuge. The murders emerge gradually, almost imperceptibly, from this landscape of deprivation, as though they were another symptom of a social order that had already normalized quieter forms of violence.

That displacement—from the event to its atmosphere—is where the film locates its cinematic power. A conventional true-crime series would almost certainly organise the Overbye case around evidence, testimony, chronology: archival photographs, police files, expert commentary, the steady accumulation of facts leading toward judicial closure. Von Horn does something far more elusive. He empties the narrative of investigation almost entirely, replacing it with duration. The camera lingers on corridors and stairwells, on factory floors humming with mechanical repetition, on faces suspended in moments of waiting that seem to stretch beyond narrative time. Information is withheld not to manufacture suspense but to dissolve it. One is never encouraged to solve the crime so much as to inhabit the historical conditions from which it became thinkable.

Its monochrome imagery only deepens this sensation. Bodies emerge from darkness only to disappear back into it, while the city itself becomes less a setting than a material condition pressing against its inhabitants. Poverty acquires a tactile weight; interiors seem permanently deprived of air; faces bear the sediment of labour and hunger before they express emotion. Violence, when it arrives, scarcely disrupts the rhythm of these spaces because the world itself has already been organised around quieter forms of attrition.

What makes The Girl with the Needle stand away from the contemporary true crime is not that it humanises Dagmar Overbye but that she isn’t the privileged object of the gaze. She remains opaque, unsettling, resistant to diagnosis. Instead, the film asks us to attend to everything that ordinarily disappears in crime narratives: the economic structures that render certain lives disposable, the fragile solidarities among women, the institutional indifference that transforms desperation into opportunity. The crimes are never explained away, nor are they elevated into singular acts of monstrous evil. They remain embedded within the ordinary textures of social life, where history itself begins to resemble the unseen accomplice.

Akin’s grotesque examination

If The Girl with the Needle traces violence back to the invisible architectures of social abandonment, then Fatih Akin’s The Golden Glove (2019) descends into a world where abandonment has already become a way of life. When this film premiered in competition at the Berlin International Film Festival, it sharply divided critics. Many dismissed it as an exercise in calculated repulsion, accusing Akin of wallowing in degradation and reducing the suffering of Honka’s victims to grotesque spectacle.

The titular bar in The Golden Glove, where Honka picks most of his victims (Fatah Akin, 2019)

Based on the crimes of the West German serial killer Fritz Honka, who murdered at least four women in Hamburg during the early 1970s, the film unfolds almost entirely within a handful of oppressive interiors: the titular dive bar, cramped apartments stained by nicotine and neglect, and the claustrophobic attic where Honka’s victims disappear into the architecture itself. At first glance, Akin’s film seems to embrace the lurid iconography that arthouse cinema has traditionally held at arm’s length. There are decomposing bodies, bursts of startling brutality, prosthetic grotesquerie, and an almost overwhelming sensory assault. It is perhaps unsurprising that many critics dismissed the film as little more than exploitation masquerading as prestige.

The murders, shocking as they are, occupy surprisingly little narrative importance. What lingers instead are the rituals surrounding them: endless rounds of cheap schnapps, stale cigarette smoke hanging in the air, broken conversations between people too intoxicated to finish their sentences, and the melancholy choreography of regulars who return to the Golden Glove every evening because there is nowhere else left to go. Honka himself is almost incidental to this social landscape. He is neither criminal mastermind nor charismatic psychopath—the two dominant archetypes of contemporary true crime. He is physically deformed, emotionally stunted, sexually frustrated, and painfully ordinary. His monstrosity lies less in exceptional intelligence than in his utter banality. Akin refuses the perverse glamour that so often accompanies cinematic serial killers, presenting Honka instead as another discarded body among many.

In this regard, The Golden Glove is less interested in serial murder than in the slow violence of social invisibility. Its most devastating observation is that Honka’s victims are able to disappear because they had already, in many respects, disappeared from public life. Their absence scarcely registers beyond the confines of the neighbourhood because the film insists that neglect precedes murder. By the time violence erupts, society has already withdrawn its gaze.

Its aesthetic, too, is one of relentless materiality. Every surface appears damp with sweat, grease, alcohol, and decay. Wallpaper peels from nicotine-stained walls; food rots on kitchen counters; fluorescent lighting renders flesh sickly rather than expressive. One comes away remembering textures before events, smells before plot. In many ways, Akin replaces the evidentiary logic of true crime with what might be called an archaeology of environment.

The film doesn’t transform Honka into an unknowable monster whose evil reassures us of our own normality. Nor are his victims sanctified into abstract symbols of innocence. Instead, Akin insists on something far more unsettling: that everyone in this world has already been shaped, diminished, and forgotten by the same social conditions, even if only one of them becomes a murderer.

Not a procedural

If conventional true crime is organised around information, arthouse true crime is organised around duration. Its attention drifts toward the moments that procedural narratives routinely discard: a meal prepared in silence, an empty factory floor, a solitary drink, the slow rhythms of work and waiting. Violence is no longer an event to be reconstructed but a condition that gradually settles over everyday life.

Victims exist before they become victims; perpetrators remain morally accountable without being reduced to monsters. Explanation never hardens into exoneration. What these films ultimately deny is the comfort of distance. Murder appears neither exceptional nor spectacular, but banal, repetitive, woven into histories of loneliness, deprivation, and neglect. Their gaze shifts from the crime itself to the social worlds that make such violence imaginable—a refusal of easy causality that may be arthouse true crime’s most quietly radical gesture.

Cinephilia, Film Heritage and History

Drawn reality? Truth and subjectivity in animated documentary Just A Guy (2020)

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Animated documentaries (clockwise), Waltz with Bashir (2008), Flee (2021), Just a Guy (2020), and Tower (2016).

ATIKH RASHID

“…Animation can show things that lie outside the reach of photography… This mode of filmmaking can bear vibrant witness to things that cameras might not, or could not, or perhaps should not, record on the spot”: David Bordwell

Documentary filmmaking has traditionally been associated with live-action images that capture and depict ‘reality’. The animated documentary challenges this assumption by combining factual narratives with animated representation, expanding the possibilities of how reality can be documented and communicated.

As David Bordwell suggests, animation enables filmmakers to bear witness to subjects that cameras cannot reach, whether because they belong to the past, exist only in memory, or involve spaces and experiences that cannot be visually recorded.

This subject has generated significant debate about the relationship between documentary truth and artistic reconstruction. While critics have questioned whether animation compromises the documentary’s claim to reality, supporters argue that it offers unique ways of representing subjective experiences and hidden histories. Films dealing with trauma, memory, incarceration, war, and personal testimony have particularly benefited from the medium’s ability to visualize the unseen and the unrecorded.

One of the films from this genre that I found quite interesting was Just A Guy (2020) by Shoko Hara. It’s a 14-minutes animated documentary exploring the relationship three young women had with the Richard Remirez, the notorious American serial killer known as the ‘Night Stalker’, when he was lodged in a prison on death row. They corresponded with him through letters, with one of them paying him several visits in the prison and also receiving a proposal from Remirez to marry him.

It’s also a personal story for the director Shoko Hara as she is one of three women whose relationship with Remirez is depicted in the film, though she never met him in person. The film employs a mix of animation styles, including stop-motion, claymation, collage and also uses mixed-media to achieve a raw and immersive aesthetic

A screengrab from Just A Guy (2020)

Shoko said in an interview that she chose to animate the memories of these girls using dirty pink clay and other materials that are available in prison, like plastic, paper or garbage to convey the idea of exploitative, toxic love which was at play in the Ramirez affair. She said that she decided to use animation for the film as one of the two other women wanted to remain anonymous. She used their facial features, especially eyes while making their animations because she felt that audience would want to know how they look or looked.

In the film, Shoko Hara says that she was introduced to Ramirez by one of her female friends who was in a ‘correspondence relation’ with the murderer.

Talking about the young girls who were fascinated by Remirez – often called ‘groupies’ in the popular culture – Shoko says, “I realised that their relationship with Remirez wasn’t very different than other real relationships. It was about jealousy, toxic but also nice”.

For me, however, the film also raises the question that critics of ‘animated documentary format’ have been raising (mentioned in David Bordwells post ‘Showing what can’t be filmed’). The critics doubt animation’s ability – given that it involves great amount of human intervention involved like in other arts such as painting or architecture – to capture the flow of real time and space like photography does (in Andre Bazin’s words).

You see a lot of choices made by the filmmaker in the depiction of visuals that go with the testimonies of the Remirez’s female admirers. This adds a great degree of subjectivity to the film that would be undesirable for a documentary’s claims to factuality.

For instance, as Eve, one of the girls, describes her first meeting with Remirez in the prison, she remarks that he looked much bigger in reality than he seemed in photos or on television. The visuals, however, exaggerate this impression considerably making the images too subjective to the point of seeming unreal.

The animated documentary’s depiction of Eve’s first meeting with Ramirez

The animation makes him look like a giant, which may put in question the faith in factual presentation that the audience would take for granted in a documentary. The audience, from henceforth, may shift the comprehension strategy to accommodate the subjectivity, which may harm the claims to authenticity desired in a ‘conventional’ documentary.

The sequence (screengrabs from 1 to 4 taken by the author) shows the limbs, torso, and head of the drawn woman getting dismembered without making it clear if the drawing comes from Remirez or is an effect made by the filmmaker.


In another sequence in the beginning of the film, a drawing of a semi-naked woman from one of the letters by Remirez is dismembered in a sequence images. Did Remirez draw the dismemberment or was it the filmmaker who dismembered the drawing to symbolically convey his violent past?


Similarly, in another sequence, Eve shares that during some of her visits to Remirez he had flashed his sexual organ to her. This accompanies the visual of a giant, serpent like phallus trying to violate the woman. This, most likely, is a latter interpretation of the visit as during her visits she was a consensual participant in the affair and may not have felt the encounter as grotesque or violating as shown in the animated sequence. This adding another layer of subjectivity to the visual narration.

A screengrab of a scene where Shoko Hara’s subjectivity takes over

However, it’s more than clear that the film was an impossibility to make in live-action format as two of the three girls were not comfortable with showing their faces as they have moved on and there’s no recording of the prison visits by the girls. Shoko has cited the need for a partial or full anonymity requested by the young women as the primary reason to choose animated format for the film.

Long Reads

A short history of Delhi’s Muslim ghettos

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The story starts with the demarcation of ‘Muslim Zones’ in the capital to protect Muslims from violence in 1947 in the aftermath of Partition. During 1970s, these areas are seen as ‘unhygienic pockets’ requiring beautification and are subjected to demolition drives. In the post-9/11 world, they are pushed further to the margins as ‘terrorist hide-outs’ and are subjected to frequent police searches.

Muslim demography of Delhi. Map by Raphael Susewind

ATIKH RASHID

INDIA’S partition in 1947 and the resultant influx and efflux of communities caused a sea of change in the demography and character of the Delhi city.

Before partition, the city was home to a big and prosperous Muslim community which comprised of about one-third of the city’s population. However, the emigration of Muslims – some out of choice, others due to compulsion of violence – reduced the Muslim population of Delhi drastically. It is estimated that around 3.3 lakh Muslim residents of Delhi left for Pakistan and around 5 lakh Hindu and Sikh refugees from riot-torn West Punjab came to Delhi.

As per estimates, the Muslim population of Delhi came down from 33.33 per cent in 1941 to a mere 5.33 per cent in 1951.

Several localities which were predominantly Muslim, such as Chandani Chowk, Khari Baoli and Karol Bagh were emptied out to a great extent with the emigration of Muslims and were replaced with Punjabi Hindus and Sikhs.

Creation of ‘Muslim Zones’

In the aftermath of Partition, Delhi was thrown into grips of anti-Muslim violence, especially at the hands of Hindu, Sikh refugees coming from West Pakistan who had suffered the loss of life and property. Between August-October 1947, as many as 20,000 Muslims were killed within Delhi in communal riots and almost all the Muslim residents – especially from mixed localities – had shifted to temporary camps that had sprung up in Purana Qila, Nizamuddin and Humanyun’s Tomb.

Muslims from Delhi and nearby areas taking shelter in Purana Qila in September 1947.

When tempers calmed – with efforts by Mahatma Gandhi and Maulana Azad – the Muslims in the camps who had not migrated to Pakistan started returning to their homes. It was felt by the government that ‘mixed areas’ – where Muslims and Hindus previously stayed together – were no longer safe for Muslims to return to. The government decided to rehabilitate displaced Muslims in predominantly Muslim localities such as Pul Bangash, Phatak Habash Khan, Sadar Bazar and Pahari Imli areas which in government communications were being referred to as ‘Muslim Zones’. It can’t be ascertained to what degree the government succeeded in implementing this plan fully, but it was put in motion by the agencies surely.

“Certain largely Muslim mohallas were cordoned off, and abandoned houses there were to be kept empty by police intervention so that either Muslims could return to them or other Muslims could be moved there and provided safety,” says Vazira Zamindar her book The Long Partition and The Making of Modern South Asia.

Zamindar quotes Sardar Diwan Singh, the editor of Risalat, on how this shifting from ‘mixed localities’ to ‘Muslim zones’ happened.

“Muslims from mixed areas were asked to move to the Muslim zones. The constable stood at the street corner and they had five minutes to gather their belongings and go. Many thought this was only a matter of a few days and that they would return when the public had calmed down…”.

But, as per Singh, the Muslims did not or could not return to the houses.

Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru supported this policy saying if Hindus and Sikhs were accommodated in empty houses left behind by Muslims who departed for Pakistan, it would “push out” Muslims residents.

“There was a tendency on the part of the Muslim residents of the other houses, next door, to leave their houses because they felt they were being pushed out,” he said later in a parliamentary debate.

The Muslim Zones thus created soon were attached with a stigma of being “communally sensitive areas” and “zones of trouble”.

“For Muslims staying in these ilaqe (areas) was not a matter of choice; nor was these enclaves celebrated zones of culture. Instead, living in these areas became a compulsion for Muslims for safety. In a span of a few years these pockets were marked as ‘communally sensitive area(s)’- a stigma that transformed these areas in later decades from protected sites into alleged zones of trouble,” writes Nazma Parveen in her study on ‘Muslim localities of Delhi’.

Resettlements of Shahjahanabad

About three decades later, another round of creation of Muslim ghettos happened. It was due to the ‘urban beautification-inspired demolition drives’ that were held in the midst of Emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi. The drives, executed by Jagmohan Malhotra of Delhi Development Authority (DDA), were aimed at beautification of Jama Masjid, Turkman gate areas with a plan to revamp Shahjahanabad. Thousands of residents of these areas (mainly Muslims) were forcefully and violently evicted and ‘resettled’ in localities such as Seelampur and Welcome.

During the emergency imposed by then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi several demolition drives took place in Old Delhi in 1976 with an aim to beautify the congested areas.

As per author Ghazala Jamil, these areas continued to expand during 1980s as more Muslims from the Old Delhi areas who shifted out from Old Delhi houses due to various reason started settling in and around Seelampur and Welcome. Hindus moving out of Old Delhi would, on the other hand, shift to Shahadara, Geeta Colony and Uttam Nagar. Also, in localities where Muslim-population was greater, Hindus sold off their properties and moved out and these localities became largely Muslim.

“By the late 1980s, segregation in Delhi on religious identity lines became almost final and complete,” Jamil writes in Accumulation by Segregation: Muslim Localities in Delhi.

Migration of UP, Bihar and elsewhere

From the 1990s, Muslim migrants from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and other areas of north India started coming and settling in the localities north of Seelampur and formed the belt of largely Muslim localities in ‘trans-Yamuna’ areas ranging between Seelampur and Loni Border including Gautampuri, Chandbagh, Jafferabad, Gokulpuri and other areas where the recent Delhi riots were largely concentrated.

During the same period, Jamia Nagar saw unprecedented expansion with migration of aspirational migrants from north India and many new colonies came up. Some scholars have linked the migration of 1990s and 2000s of Muslims from UP and Bihar to Delhi’s Muslim ghettos to communal polarisation that happened during Ram Janmabhoomi Movement and 2002 riots of Gujarat.

“A very small portion of this population (residing in newer ghettos) can trace their earlier generation residing in Delhi before 1947, a vast majority being migrants from UP and Bihar. The pockets of Muslim population got consolidated (some even expanded) after each communal riot in the country especially the post-Babri Masjid demolition riots in 1992 and Gujarat pogrom in 2002,” writes Jamil.

The affluent class among Muslims who did not identify with the lot living in the ghettos formed gated enclaves either within these Muslim areas or on the borders in localities like Zakir Nagar Extension, Joga Bai Extension, Joharmi Farms or housing societies like the Taj Enclave.

“Still shunned from the affluent Hindu areas they resorted to using a new group membership as a source of positive self-esteem,” observes Jamil.

‘Terror Hide-Outs’ requiring combing operations

In one of his report (June 1 1948) about the plan of ‘Muslim Zones’, Delhi’s then Deputy Commissioner M S Randhawa refers to these zones as ‘Miniature Pakistans’ creation of which is being resented by Hindu and Sikh refugees of Delhi.

In over seven decades since, the Muslim ghettos of Delhi – as those elsewhere in India – have not been able to shake off the stigma, suspicion and derision associated with them.

The situation turned markedly volatie in 2008 when the controversial Batla House police encounter happened in which two university students alleged to be terrorists were killed by police. This was followed by a scores of arrests from the Muslim neighbourhoods often without police following proper legal procedure. The incident and what followed disgraced the neighbourhood in the public sphere as a ‘terrorist hideout’.

Prof Mohamad Sayeed writes in his essay about, how Batla House incident created an environment of fear among the local Muslim residents, a fear that was different that the fear of riot or violent attack life and property.

“First, it was not the fear of a known enemy—another group or community. It was fear of an unknowable source that could cause incomprehensible damage. Here, the police had emerged as the agency that could act without caring much about the mandatory procedures. Despite doubts about the veracity of the ‘encounter’, however, it was not just the police and wrongful arrest and detention that was feared, but also the possibility that there might be actual terrorists living among them. Thus, the likelihood that the encounter was not fake was as terrifying as its converse. The event had exposed the neighbourhood to its deepest vulnerability,” writes Sayeed in his essay ‘Fear, law and politics after the police encounter at Batla House, New Delhi’ published in the journal Contributions to Indian Sociology in January 2020.

January 2020 riots in Northeast Delhi left 53, most of them Muslims, dead. (Photo Courtsey: Praveen Khanna for The Indian Express)

Researcher Nazima Parveen summerises the journey of the Muslim Ghettos of Delhi, which are again in the news for prolonged sit-in protests against Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) 2019 and as the areas which suffered maximum damage during the communal riots that followed, in the following manner:

“These localities were looked at differently over the period. In the 1940s they were seen as ‘Muslim-dominated’ areas that were to be administered for the sake of communal peace, in the 1950s, as ‘Muslim zones’ that needed to be ‘protected’, in the 1960s, as ‘isolated’ unhygienic cultural pockets that were to be cleaned and Indianized, and in the 1970s as location of ‘internal threat’ – the Mini-Pakistans – that were to be dismantled and integrated. In altered political scenarios of 1990s and 2000s these pockets were looked at as ‘terrorist hide-outs,” writes Parveen.

Cinephilia, Film Heritage and History

Musings on ‘City symphony’ films

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Still from ‘Lisboa, Crónica Anedótica (1930), Dir: José Leitão de Barros

ATIKH RASHID

I like most city symphony films: Dziga Vertov’s eccentric, stylized, and self-aware The Man with the Movie Camera (1929), Walter Ruttman’s vibrant portrayal of the rhythm and energy of a single day in Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, and oris Ivens’s Rain (1929), a lyrical and atmospheric portrait of Amsterdam that transforms a passing rainstorm into a study of urban movement, texture, and light.


In this company, Leitão de Barros’s Lisbôa, Cronica Anedótica (1930), is a peculiar exception. It creates a poetic montage of the lives of various dwellers of Lisbon, like the other great city symphony films made elsewhere and before it. In addition, it incorporates staged visuals that set it apart from other symphony films.


I have often wondered what a city symphony film of an Indian city would look like. Each of the great cities of India in the second and third decades of the 20th century would have made great material for a symphony film: Bombay, Delhi, Calcutta, and Madras. Full of activity and brimming with political excitement, they were just a decade or two shy of freedom from colonial rule.

Screengrab from Panorama of Calcutta, India, from the River Ganges (1899) often credited to John “Mad Jack” Benett-Stanford.


India did have a filmmaking practice since the beginning of the 20th century, but it’s true that most of the films that were made during this period were made by westerners: British, French, or American filmmakers who headed to India with a camera to shoot it as an exotic land or as the “crown jewel of the British Empire.”


Numerous actualité and travel films were produced by companies such as Pathé and Gaumont which presented India less as a lived social reality and more as a spectacle to be consumed by audiences in Europe and North America. As film historians have noted, these early films often privileged scenes of religious ritual, bustling bazaars, royal processions, and picturesque landscapes, framing the subcontinent through a colonial gaze that emphasized difference, wonder, and imperial possession rather than everyday life.


Although there are no city symphony films for any of the Indian cities, if one looks through the archives, one may find that there’s some proto-city-symphony material that was shot in India by visiting filmmakers, and some of that material survives.

For instance, one of the earliest films shot in India, called Panorama of Calcutta (1899), does have the ethos, at least visually, of a symphony film. However, as has been pointed out by scholars, the visuals that one sees are not even from Calcutta but from a town (Benaras) almost 700 km to the west.

As Robin Baker wonders, “Maybe the cameraman got confused about his travels, or perhaps the company thought a more familiar name might be more tempting for audiences?”

The absence of an Indian symphony film is partially resolved when British-Indian filmmaker Sandhya Suri uses the ‘India on Film’ footage made available by the British Film Institute (BFI) in 2016 as part of the celebrations to mark the centenary of the Indian film industry to make Around India with a Movie Camera in 2018. She repurposes the visuals captured in India by British, French, and Indian cameramen to decolonise the gaze and create a symphony set to freshly composed Indian music of life in India before Independence.

Stills from Around India with a Movie Camera (2018) Dir: Sandhya Suri


A striking moments in Suri’s film is her use of footage from the Delhi Durbar of 1911, particularly the appearance of Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad III of Baroda. Historical accounts confirm that Gaekwad caused controversy by allegedly offering only a perfunctory bow to King George V and Queen Mary and turning away hastily, an act that was widely interpreted by colonial authorities and the British press as a breach of imperial protocol.


By incorporating this footage into her film, Suri invites viewers to look beyond the spectacle of imperial grandeur and attend instead to the tensions, ambiguities, and acts of dissent embedded within the colonial archive. In her hands, images originally produced to celebrate imperial rule are recontextualised to reveal the unseen tensions that prevailed at this historic moment and highlight the fragility of authority and the presence of Indian agency within spaces designed to display colonial dominance.

Film Heritage and History

National Film Archive of India seeks donations for digitisation, restoration of films

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Donors will get recognition in the form of credit in the opening slate of the restored and digitised film. 

ATIKH RASHID

National Film Archive of India, which is now a part of the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC), has sought funds in the form of sponsorships and donations for carrying out film digitisation and restoration projects.

Donors – who could be individuals, corporates, institutions or state governments – will be able to contribute towards digitisation of films which costs around Rs 2.55 lakh per film (120 minutes) as well as towards restoration which costs around Rs 27.40 lakh per film.

In return, donors will get recognition in the form of credit in the opening slate of the restored and digitised film. They will also get a memento for promoting the cause of film preservation and will also get their name in the ‘NFDC-NFAI platinum supporters’ list.

“The digitisation and restoration of films, that will happen through funds received through donations, will be in addition to the work being done under the National Film Heritage Mission (NFHM) which is currently under progress at the National Film Archive of India,” an NFDC official said.

Launched in January 2017, NFHM aims to carry out preventive conservation of 1.32 lakh film reels held by the film archive, undertake film condition assessment of the reels, digitisation of carefully prioritised 1,345 feature films and 2,768 short films as well as restoration of 1,145 feature and 1,108 short films.

Officials said that under the project, so far, 180 films are in the process of restoration while 3,700 films, including short films, are being digitised.

In March 2022, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (I&B) notified the merger of four media units — Films Division (FD), Directorate of Film Festivals (DFF), National Film Archives of India (NFAI) and Children’s Film Society, India (CFSI) with the NFDC.

The NFDC, a PSU working under the ministry, was given the mandate for the production of documentaries and short films, organisation of film festivals and preservation of celluloid heritage. The move, it was said, was undertaken to bring “convergence of activities and resources and better coordination, thereby ensuring synergy and efficiency in achieving the mandate of each media unit”.

Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana Coverage

Homing in

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This is a brief review of the ground-reporting done by me in 2020 to gauge the progress of Pradhan Mantri Awaas Yojana (Urban) in Maharashtra’s cities and towns.

I found that though the scheme, being implemented through the urban local bodies (ULB), was extremely popular, it’s execution was plagued with several issues which were further compounded by the challenges thrown in by the pandemic, with beneficiaries having to deal with bureaucratic red tape, loss of income as they struggled to build a new home.

ATIKH RASHID

Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (Urban) aims to change the urban residential landscape of Indian cities and towns by providing homes to the urban poor and by aiding others to buy their first home by subsidizing housing units.

The scheme is being implemented by the union government through urban civic bodies, namely Municipal Corporations, Municipal Councils, and Nagar Panchayats.

One of the flagship schemes of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, PMAY(U) started in 2016 with a stated aim to provide ‘housing to all’ by 2022.

It is one of the biggest welfare schemes ever undertaken by the Government of India, in terms of the amount of the grant, number of intended beneficiaries, overall financial allocation (also the political goodwill it can potentially generate for a political regime that undertakes such a welfare project), and the interest it generated among the intended beneficiaries, especially among the urban poor.

Under its most popular vertical – the beneficiary-led construction or BLC – the beneficiary family receives a total of Rs 2.5 lakh in government subsidy – Rs 1.5 lakh from the union government and Rs 1 lakh from the state government – to build the house on an owned plot. In the metro cities, civic bodies undertake housing projects in partnership with private builders and make the homes available to the urban poor at discounted rates (Rs 8 -10 lakh/house). In the latter case, Rs 1.5 lakh/DU PMAYU subsidy is transferred to the builder.

I reviewed the scheme at both these levels) at the level of the municipal corporation (Pune) where PMAY’s Affordable Housing in Partnership (AHP) component was the most popular vertical, and b) at the municipal council level (in Pathri, Hingoli and Jintur towns of Marathwada) where beneficiary-led construction (BLC) vertical of PMAYU was the most prominent.

Travelling across several districts of Marathwada, I visited cities and towns to speak to the beneficiaries who were allotted homes under the scheme and civic officials who were supervising the scheme.

I found that most homes sanctioned under PMAYU’s biggest and most popular vertical (Beneficiary Led Construction) in which beneficiaries are responsible for constructing the house on their own using the subsidy amounts, remained incomplete due to delays in the release of promised subsidy funds – especially the central government component.

In fact, in many cities and towns of the state, unfinished homes had become a common sight. The delay in completion of the construction and the financial hardships caused by staying in rented accommodations imposed a big emotional cost on the beneficiaries which the state or the media has no way of calculating. The ongoing pandemic made things worse for the affected:

Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana subsidy delayed, thousands of beneficiaries forced to live in shanties or half-finished houses

APART from the legwork that I did for ground reporting, I also filed several Right To Information petitions with the local civic bodies, the state government, and the Union Urban Development Ministry to obtain data as well as to bring to the fore how the bureaucratic apathy and red-tape was affecting the effective implementation of the scheme.

The documents obtained through RTI showed that the state government and central agencies were in communication with each other for months over the issue of release of funds and were engaged in a blame-match while the beneficiaries continued to suffer:

Maharashtra: As PMAY (U) beneficiaries wait for funds, state, central agencies in a war of words

SOON after the publication of these news stories, the Hingoli Municipal Council received a pending central subsidy of Rs 3.33 crore (thus bringing reprieve to about 250 beneficiaries), Pathri Municipal Council received Rs 5 crore ending the wait for over 400 beneficiaries.

After the reports, MHADA, the agency implementing PMAY(U) in the state, also changed its fund distribution norms so that subsidy funds are not diverted by the beneficiaries for other purposes:

Show construction progress to avail PMAY funds: Maharashtra civic bodies

The situation in big cities – for instance, Pune – was not any different. It was found that the beneficiaries of the Affordable Housing in Partnership (AHP) vertical were facing a different but equally pressing conundrum.

In Pune, houses built for the urban poor (lower-income and middle-income groups) by Pune Municipal Corporation were found to be too small (350 square feet carpet area) which led to many beneficiaries who were initially enthusiastic about the scheme forgoing the allotment. In this case, the civic authorities and the union urban development ministry failed to notice a mismatch between the aspiration of the urban poor and the facilities being offered to them under the scheme. In many cases, the loss of employment during the pandemic curtailed their ability to pay for the allotted homes or obtain bank loans.

Financial troubles, tiny houses: Why many PMAY allottees rejected the offer

Even after a second round of allotment as many as 63 per cent of flats on offer remained unclaimed.

Pune: 62% PMAY homes remain unbooked after second round of allotment

The civic body later decided to allot the about 850 unsold flats to the staffers of Pune Mahanagar Parivahan Mahamandal Limited (PMPML) which it partially controls.

Unable to sell flats to intended beneficiaries, PMC moves to allot PMAY(U) flats to PMPML staffers

Cinephilia

When Colour Queen of India said ‘Hullo’

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Telephone appeared in movies as an instrument that provided a multitude of narrative possibilities and also benefitted, in the initial days, from the portrayal in cinema as a desirable, aspirational commodity.

filmindia19373803unse_0092

ATIKH RASHID

Both cinema and the telephone are modern inventions – the former about 45 years younger than the latter. During the early decades of the 20th century, the two tools interacted with and complemented each other as symbols of modernity.

Telephone appears in movies as an instrument that provides a multitude of narrative possibilities – as a herald of a plot twist, a conduit of the feeling of love, or as a device whose incessant ringing leads to tension-building.

Hindi films have had numerous songs featuring the phone as a tool connecting two lovelorn beings, crooning at each end (Recall: “Jalte hai jiske liye” from Sujata). In many crime thrillers of the 1950s, telephone lines unravel the tangled plots and help the film reach a happy ending.

The telephone, on the other hand, also benefited from such a portrayal in cinema – a mass medium with great influence –  as a desirable, aspirational commodity providing a plethora of possibilities.

Hence, it is no surprise that telephone companies were among the most prominent advertisers in film magazines of the late 1930s and 1940s. The Bombay Telephone Company, which was established in 1925, issued regular advertisements to filmindia, the most prominent film magazine of the time, in its attempt to expand its subscriber base in Bombay, Karachi and Ahmedabad.

These advertisements had stars and starlets of Hindi film industry seductively holding the receiver to their ears, anticipating a conversation from the other end.

Image 3 December 1937
An ad issued by Bombay Telephone Company, Ltd in December 1937 edition of filmindia.

“Have you a telephone in your home?” asks this advertisement issued by the Bombay Telephone Company in the December 1938 issue of filmindia magazine. “If not you are denying the pleasure of communicating with your FRIENDS and running the risk of being unable to call the DOCTOR or FIRE BRIGADE in the time of need,” it says. The young model, lazily lying on the sofa, is holding the receiver in one hand and a glamour magazine in the other. The target audience here, clearly,  is English-speaking, educated, urban and affluent Indians.

The context to this marketing strategy adopted by Bombay Telephone Company to prominently highlight the social use – the pleasure of communicating with friends – of the telephone along with the more obvious logistical function, is provided by a letter sent by Lord Willingdon in September 1934 to London. In this communication, Willingdon laments that a lack of demand for telephone service in India was slowing down the expansion of the service in the country, largely owing to high cost and inability of a large section of the society to bear it. Indians are making comparatively little ‘social use’ of the technology, says he.

BUT WHO IS THE GIRL?

The full-page advertisement, it appears, not only worked for the advantage of the telephone firm but for the young model too.

“Who is the girl whose photo we find in the advertisement of the Bombay Telephone Co.? Is she a film star?” asks a curious reader of filmindia R S Mudaliar, a Madurai resident, in the ‘Editor’s Mail’ section of the magazine two months later.

The response to Mr Mudaliar by filmindia editor Baburao Patel informs us that the girl is the new Wadia Movietone starlet Pramilla who was previously attached with Imperial Studio. Elsewhere, the magazine fills in that Pramilla is busy shooting for Wadia’s Jungle King, co-starring John Cavas and Maheru – the monkey. Pramilla, born Esther Victoria Abraham in a Baghdadi -Jewish family of Kolkata, would go on to bag the Miss India title when the inaugural pageant was held in 1947.

COLOUR QUEEN OF INDIA SAYS ‘HULLO’

IMAGE 4

Before starlet Pramilla, the telephone was being marketed – in similar full-page ads in filmindia – by Padmadevi, the silent film star. She had appeared in JBH Wadia’s stunt films, most notably Dilruba Daku (The Amazon, 1933) fighting with goons as a masked daredevil. Later on, in 1937, she was the heroine of the first indigenously produced colour film Kisan Kanya directed by Moti Gidwani and briefly earned the moniker of ‘Colour Queen of India’.

One of the advertisements featuring Padmadevi has an interesting warning: Never tap or touch the receiver rest. You will get a wrong number.

In the garb of the warning, it’s a tip – and an allure – to the prospective owners of the telephone, that taking home the device will afford them a hitherto unavailable possibility of making an unexpected contact with an unknown stranger – who could be as pretty as Padmadevi – whom the device may ‘accidentally’ connect you with.

While reliable statistics are not available on the number of telephone subscribers in India, as per a US Department of Commerce report, by March 1945, British India had 1,25,400 telephone lines, most of these operated by Indian Posts and Telegraphs Department, Government of India. In 1933, an international line between Bombay and London was also inaugurated, which was later suspended between 1939 and 1945, owing to security concerns during World War II.

(This write-up appeared on the indianexpress.com on June 10. Find it here.)

Long Reads, Social Psychology

Why sportspersons from minority communities receive disproportionate blame in defeats?

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Theories of social psychology tell us that in groups – such as sport teams – members of minority communities assume salience by virtue of their looks, language, or identifiers in their names. In cases of defeat they are prone to be saddled with burden of blame because their salience makes them seem more causal, more responsible.

Atikh Rashid

Following India’s defeat to Pakistan in the Super 4 match of Asia Cup on Saturday, Indian pacer Arshdeep Singh became the target of social media trolling for dropping a seemingly easy catch of Asif Ali at short third man in the 18th over. Trolls attacked the 23-year-old bowler with political slurs and insinuated that he dropped the catch deliberately, out of his disloyalty to the Indian nation.

Last October, in another high stake India-Pakistan match in T20 international World Cup, Mohammad Shami’s poor bowling performance led to social media trolls questioning his loyalty to the country. For an expensive over in the last lap that hastened Indian teams debacle, Shami’s identity as an Indian was questioned and slurs linking his religion with the rival team were liberally used.

We are living in times of free floating social media hatred that attaches to individuals at the slightest provocations.  Targeted trolling is may also not be spontaneous and could often be part of ‘social media cold wars’ among competing political groups. Still, they do cause hurt to the individual or group at the receiving end.

Any reasonable cricket fan will tell you that it’s excessive and irrational to blame a single act by one player for a team’s defeat and then use that to put his ability and attitude in the dock. But a human mind doesn’t use reason all the time. Many a times, instincts kick in which cloud the appeals to reason.

Mohammad Shami’s poor bowling performance in high stake India-Pakistan match in T20 international World Cup led to social media trolls questioning his loyalty to the country.

Human mind, psychologists tell us, wants to attribute significant incidents – victories, defeats, and such – to causes. The mind starts making inferences about the causes and stops the search when a sufficient cause is found. ‘The Attribution Theory’ is one of the best known theories in social psychology that deals with how people interpret behavior and attribute causations for their own or other people’s behavior. It was first proposed by Fritz Heider in 1958 in his book ‘The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations.

The mind makes a ‘dispositional attribution’ when it explains a person’s action by pointing to something about the person. On the other hand, it makes a ‘situational attribution’ when the behavior or action is said to have been influenced by external factors or by the situation. Observers often tend to make what psychologists call ‘The Fundamental Attribution Error’ in which they overestimate the dispositional influences (‘the catch was dropped because the player is bad at the game, or he is disloyal to the team’) and underestimating the situational influences (the ball slipped off because of the dew, the light glare, or pressure of the game).

While observers are prone to making dispositional attribution, the individual involved in the in the action with negative result often makes situational attribution – blaming factors external to him or her.

The salience of the minority members

The human mind makes sense of the world with the aid of categories. In social life, the social categories help the mind make easy and fast judgements. By definition, minority groups are ‘uncommon’ and the human cognitive system is tuned to spotting their presence.

Individuals from minority groups are salient in perception, memory, and visual awareness, hence performance of players like Arshdeep Singh or Mohammad Shami comes under greater scrutiny, especially during high stake games.

Increasing social discord and thickening of community lines – something that India has been seeing a lot lately – makes people more aware and observant about the behavior of people perceived as others.

Research by Taylor and Fiske (1978) shows that women are seen as more causal when they is only one woman in the group.

Research done by Shelly Taylor and Susan Fiske shows that in a group setting a member of a minority community is seen as more influential and causal when there’s only one minority member in the group, thus making the presence salient. When there is only one woman in a group, she is seen as disproportionately responsible for the group decisions. This impression declines as more women are added to the group.

In their 1978 study ‘Salience, Attention, and Attribution: The Top of the Head Phenomenon’, Taylor and Fiske discuss the ‘Salience Hypothesis’ which states that the more salient an actor seems, the more an observer will ascribe a causality to him or her while making a snap judgment.

When things turn out well (a match is won, an enemy is crushed) the effects of salience turn out to be good. In times of adversity (a team is defeated by an arch rival, a pandemic threatens the wellbeing of the world and shuts economic activity), then people who are salient because they look different or sound different  are at the risk of becoming scapegoated, being blamed as their salience makes them seem more responsible. 

Further Readings:

1)      Salience, Attention, and Attribution: Top of the Head Phenomena (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S006526010860009X)

2)      Minority salience and the overestimation of individuals from minority groups in perception and memory (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2116884119#:~:text=In%20many%20contexts%2C%20minorities%20tend,creating%20an%20illusion%20of%20diversity)

3)      The process of causal attribution (https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1973-24800-001)

4)      Salience https://thedecisionlab.com/reference-guide/psychology/salience

5)      Attribution Theories (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3Or-jq3G1g8