Satyajit Ray's 'The Chess Players': The discourse of British colonial enterprise and its representation of the other through the expanded cultural critique

In postcolonial Indian film and literature the normed subject of colonial labor discourse is the political-military-economic work of the indigenous elite male in the colony. This normative subject is represented through a set of binaries. The term enterprise indicates one side of the binary. In these fictions of colonialist enterprise the supra-valuation of Robinson Crusoe's labors is designed to establish his natural right to ownership of the island in Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe [1719], which is critically re-examined in Hollywood's Crusoe-inspired films. The binary half of capitalist-colonialist enterprise is the expanded cultural critique, a term that refers to the discursive devaluation of native labor. The discursive strategies by which the native's labor is devalued is to describe the native's labor practices through a critique of his cultural practices. This cultural critique is then expanded, consequently the industriousness of all classes in the colony is interpreted on the basis of indigenous elite males. Nationalism broadens the scope of the expanded cultural critique, and further inscribes the separation of the elite domain from the subaltern domain. How can there be resistance to the totalizing impulses of colonial-capitalist enterprise? The dissertation deploys a Subaltern Studies approach by focusing on two key moments of historical contestation in India's colonial past: Bengal in 1793, and Awadh in 1856. Nationalist fiction by the Hindi-language writer Premchand titled "The Chess-Players" [1924], and postcolonial films like Satyajit Ray's The Music Room [1958], Kanchenjungha [1962], and The Chess-Players [1977], elaborate a specifically nationalist construction of British-colonial discourses or in the case of Ray, critique both colonialist and nationalist constructions. In keeping with my theoretical emphasis on framing Ray's films with Hollywood cinema, I interrogate the liberal critique of American imperialist enterprise in Okinawa in Daniel Mann's Tea House of the August Moon [1956], and the celebration of working-class resilience in its confrontation with corporate enterprise in Penny Marshall's Big [1988]. The central argument of this dissertation are that post-Enlightenment colonialist and Indian-nationalist discourses construct the native's work-practices in terms of his incapacity to make the distinction between work and play, and productive work and unproductive cultural pursuits.