FILMS, LITERATURE & CULTURE: Deepa Mehta’s Elements Trilogy

Films, Literature and Culture is a collection of nineteen essays that focus on Deepa Mehta’s Elements Trilogy in order to explore the interconnections in the three categories and the manner in which they feed into each other. Films and literature are two mediums – one literary, the other performative – which use language and image, in order to capture the lived reality of cultural constructs.

But the processes of producing meaning and interpreting meaning are complex and multilayered. They get caught up in histories, locations and experiences. Neither film nor literature is a self-contained autonomous medium or artifact and even as they use and produce culture, they become its subverters.

The range of the interpretative strategies is amazing: social and political history, gender positions and feminist theory, cinematic frameworks and the theory of the gaze; landscape, space and exteriority; diasporic location and relationship to the culture of origin; religion and patriarchy; the city and its history, and the history of the making and reception of the three films Fire, 1947-Earth and Water.

The various interpretations provide a base for working out the psychodynamics of the relationship of the viewer with the text and invite the reader to participate in this multi-directional debate between reality and representation.

Jasbir Jain, UGC Fellow at the University of Rajasthan, is currently working on a project Indigenous Roots of Feminism. Series Editor of Writers of the Indian Diaspora, Jain has also worked on drama and films. Her recent publications include “Beyond Postcolonialism: Dreams and Realities of a Nation” “Reading Partition/Living Partition”.