Royalty in & as The Nation

Although prominent in Indian cinema since the silent era, the figure of the king—and the presence of royalty—has a temporally-specific social and political subtext in Hindi cinema in the decade after India acquired independence from the British Empire in 1947. Cinema revolving around dutiful kings and devoted princes afforded audiences vicarious pleasure in the form of lush visuals of luxurious palaces and men and women bedecked in finery, but also reinforced the importance of loyalty to a newly formed country.

In the Golden Era of Hindi cinema, dating roughly from the latter 1940s to early 1960s, stories of powerful kings, swashbuckling princes, and spunky princesses formed the mainstay of a range of films dubbed “costume dramas”.

Kings appear in Hindi films of several genres, including historicals like the visually sumptuous Jhansi ki Rani (1953) and Halaku (1955), fantasies like Shehzaada (1954) and Uran Khatola (1955), and period films like Anarkali (1953). These films engage in a robust play with fact and fiction. They switch off between fact and historical legend, adapt novels, plays and epics, and sometimes even season their narratives with a smattering of Hindu mythology to construct the figure of the king.

In Hindi cinema produced just after Indian independence, the king often appears as a stand-in for a newly constituted nation-state: a rallying point for audiences grappling with the idea of a linguistically and religiously diverse India.

As they draw from diverse sources, ranging from K. M. Munshi’s 1920 novel in Prithvi Vallabh (1943) to Agha Hashar Kashmiri’s classic play Yahudi ki Ladki in Yahudi (1958), the stories of kings in early post-independence cinema provide opportunities to trace both, the Hindu and the Perso-Arabic genealogies of Hindi cinema’s visuals and narrative.

In a manner analogous with other genres of Hindi films of their time, they include visual testaments to Hindi cinema’s penchant for the symbolic Hindu act of darshan, or seeing with reverence, as identified by film theorist Ravi Vasudevan. Meanwhile, they are also representative of the influence of Parsi theatre on Hindi cinema.

The impact of Parsi theatre on Hindi cinema is glaringly evident in cinema produced and directed by Sohrab Modi. He made several successful historical and fantasy Hindi films from mid 1930s to late 1950s under the banner of Minerva Movietone, setting the script for the aesthetic conventions of these genres. Strategically intermingling Hindi and Urdu, Modi’s films mostly centered the figure of a powerful king drawn from historical legend.

Modi had a history of allegorizing historical figures and mobilizing them as figures of nationalism in the pre-independence era. Prithvi Vallabh (1943) depicts a young couple devotedly singing praises of their great nation. The song ends with the couple joining their hands and bowing their head in reverence to the country. Sikandar (1941) was banned in some theatres by the British for its overt evocation of Indian nationalism. This ethical and philosophical rubric also seeped over into the films that he made after Independence.

However, the figure of the king cannot seamlessly function as a replacement for the authority of a nation-state in a young democracy. The conflict and slippages integral to this idea are hinted at in several films.

In Nausherwan-E-Adil (1957), a king decides to embrace statehood more meaningfully by writing down laws instead of arbitrarily pronouncing them as he sees fit. When his elder son prince Naushazad falls in love with Christian commoner Marcia, the king’s ideas of justice are brought into question by his own son.

Although it does not explicitly contest the idea of monarchism, Nausherwan-E-Adil points towards the ways in which a king, and by corollary, a singular idea of nationhood, can impede personal freedoms.

This idea is extended in Yahudi (1958), which is foregrounded on the Roman persecution of Jews, and grants poor Jewish subjects the agency to question the Roman king’s idea of justice.

Like Naushazad, several princes of popular Hindi cinema, such as Salim of Anarkali (1953), wage ideological, and in some cases, even literal wars against their fathers. In love with women whom their fathers consider inferior or unsuitable, they often disagree with the king’s conservatism and obstinate attachment to tradition.

As their love stories pull at the threads of class and religion’s ability to fray the fabric of the nation’s cultural unity, the conflicts princes have with kings resonate with newly liberated India’s gradually unfolding struggles with tradition and modernity.

The figure of the king also functioned as a vehicle for the traditional in the face of modernity. He is depicted as a patron of classical music and dance, and a preserver of the cultural heritage of India. The political agenda of the filmic king served Hindi cinema’s penchant for musical sequences, providing an opportunity to credibly inject song and dance sequences into the film.

Hindi films depicting royalty engage in intricate acrobatics with aesthetic conventions from a plethora of diverse sources, but like several films of their time, speak to a country that is in search of its identity after a struggle for independence. The figure of the king, while signifying the boundlessness of class aspirations, also represented the boundaries of the social and the political nation state.