By Kritvi Rana

Zed is a second-generation Pakistani immigrant. He raps in English about his Pakistani-British identity, the ‘truth he spits’ is accompanied by Hindustani beats, and the art form he employs, hip-hop, has direct socio-political and cultural roots within the African American Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. Although Mogul Mowgli (2020) demonstrates the plethora of identities that the protagonist, Zed or Zaheer (the name given to his by his parents) is stuck within, the film also indicates a camouflaged leitmotif of inter or transgenerational trauma which reinstates the trauma experience of the India-Pakistan partition through the protagonist and the autoimmune disease he is ridden with. The disease that renders him immobile is genetically inherited from his father, a man who was displaced from post-Partition India and was forced to relocate to Pakistan. Even though Zed did not personally experience the trauma event himself, the protagonist lives the same through his father’s exposure to the Partition. The historic humiliation associated with the trauma event and the trauma-inducing period, the colonial rule, has essentially been passed down through Zed’s father’s genes to him.

The writing of this article is dedicated to trace a particular aspect of this trauma-inducing event and period, the notion of demasculinisation. with the aid of which the colonial powers continuously Othered the colonised people. Through identifying and studying the narrative and the visual language of the film, and the rap that Zed recites, the aim of this article is to trace the demasculinised identity of the protagonist, Zed, in Mogul Mowgli (2020). Furthermore, this article will hope to contextualise this demasculinisation within the leitmotif of intergenerational trauma.

Colonial Demasculinisation

Colonial movements, while initiating and demonstrating political authority within a specific colonised jurisdiction, facilitate the extension and expansion of colonial rule through imposed notions of knowledge, culture, and other social institutions which characterise the identity of the colonised. A case in point is Thomas Babington Macaulay’s ‘Minute’ who argued for the promotion of a Western education system to essentially “civilise” the uncultured “Hindoo” in colonial Hindustan. In this view, the process of establishing political and jurisdictional authority of a land by a coloniser is accompanied by the cultural authority upon the colonised people, which is motivated by the viewing of the colonised people as the Other. The embodiment of this othering, in the context of this article, is identified from the perspective of gendered difference, which views the colonised man as one who lacks the masculinity that the European man possesses. As recognised by Fanon (1952), the gendered and sexual othered viewing of the social identity of the colonised is a psychological imposition of the colonial rule, which further imposes the viewing of the colonised man as demasculinised.

         Anti-colonial thinkers and scholars such as Ann Laura Stoler have commented upon the direct linkage between “sexual control and racial tensions”, elucidating upon the characterising features of Otherness that the two notions project. Firstly, there is a sense of dominance that hovers within the two domains, which reinforces a sense of superiority and authority within the said spaces. The two domains sustain hierarchical associations through the bodies of the said subjects. Secondly, the two domains are marked by physical differences which highlight modes of “seeing” (according to Historian Sander Gilman) in the two contexts. The fact that the two domains are inherently recognised by “anatomical signs of difference such as physiognomy and skin color” emphasise the direct correlation between the domains of sexuality and race, and even reinforce notions of the Other, which aid in the creation of hierarchies. One could argue that sexuality is what perpetuates this Otherness, playing an imperative role in domains of race. A dynamic is established between the demasculinisation of the colonised man, and the hypermasculinity of the European. The hierarchy that emerges between the coloniser and the colonised, in this case, the submission of an ‘inferior’ man to a ‘superior’ man, is characterised, and perhaps even emphasised by the overarching gendered and sexualised tones of association between the two. Through this article, the visual and narrative representation of this very demasculinisation will be studied through the Protagonist’s character, who as a second-generation immigrant with an autoimmune disease, is compelled to undergo a treatment which will result in infertility. 

Riz’s Autoimmune Disease and Intergenerational Trauma

An autoimmune disease occurs when the body’s immune system attacks its own healthy tissues. Although this article will not delve into the medical intricacies of the disease itself, it is imperative to study the allegorical symbols of the disease that the film attempts to reflect. Firstly, the disease is one that impacts people of particular ethnicities far greatly, in specific, people of colour. It is important to note that the ethnic roots of the disease have not yet extensively been explored, and all the studies that exist in this context refer to people of colour in the Global North. This perhaps is due to the disproportionate focus in the field of medicine on the socially, culturally, politically, and economically advantaged – Caucasians and people of the Global North. Further, the fact that the cause of the disease is unknown, and there is no known cure for it – a remark made in the film too – demonstrates the socially and culturally disadvantaged position of people who are ridden by the disease. Perhaps, the autoimmune disease is employed by the film to serve the protagonist as a reminder of the colonial positioning of people like him, a Brown man from the Global South.

The title too serves this allegorical purpose, a reference to Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, which many renowned literary theorists and thinkers have classified as a colonial tale. Scholar Jane Hotchkiss (2001) describes Mowgli as a “second generation colonizer, one whose childhood attachment to the place of nativity is complicated by a sense of exile as well as by cultural attitudes toward those indigenous to the colonial place”. In this sense, Mowgli represents the anxieties of identities that rid the Other. The Jungle in the The Jungle Book has essentially been understood as a hybridised space that encapsulates the colonial world and its culture. It is interesting to witness how Bassam Tariq, the director, expresses a similar, Othered colonial anxiety within the title, the colonial anxiety that Zed as a second generation immigrant is ridden with. The disease and the film’s title therefore, both refer to the colonial anxieties of the partition that the protagonist has inherited.

         It is imperative to note here that the notion of the disease, or in the anthropological terms of Mosse (1978), the “degeneration”, is one that is linked to the gendered associations within the colonial framework. This degeneration that is “transmitted through inheritance” – one that is passed on to Zed as a disease through his father – is comprehended as a threat to European interpretations of manliness. Moreover, the fact that the autoimmune disease requires a treatment that will result in the protagonist’s infertility, demonstrates its association with the colonial paradigm of masculinity. 

Jashn or Chaos?

After arguing with a man on the street about their Muslim identities and confronting him in a fist fight, the protagonist, Zed, imagines himself transported to a time when he was an adolescent, present in his father’s restaurant. We see him fussing to help his father in the eatery, and hiding in a closet space, listening to his Walkman. Here, when teenage Zed finally emerges from the closet space, he is now suddenly his grown self.

Through close-up shots of the customers, Zed’s father’s face, his own face, and the man in the sehra – a wedding gear common to both Hindus and Muslims – the scene depicts a sense of hurried chaos in a setting of jashn or a celebration of sorts. The loud conversations of the customers and their impatient orders, engulfs Zed’s father. However, the sound of the music and chatter soon begins to drown out as the protagonist walks towards the man with the sehra. Introducing himself as Toba Tek Singh, the man gives himself the name of a character from Hindustani writer Saadat Hasan Manto’s short story – a tale of a mental asylum patient who wishes to go back to his home that now lies on the border of Pakistan and India. Toba Tek Singh (1954) essentially symbolises a sense of displacement in the colonially anxious turbulence of the Partition. A scene that took place in the past, and is now being demonstrated to him as an adult, is initiated from the protagonist’s initial brush with degeneration – the fact that this scene was triggered by the early symptoms of the autoimmune disease.

When the music and the conversations around Zed begin to drown out, the man in the sehra, in a nazm recites that he was born out of a “rupture”, through the “sickness from this separation”, and of the distinction of an “us and them”. Then man finally introducing himself as Toba Tek Singh – perhaps a motif to enunciate Zed’s displaced identity as a second-generation immigrant – begins chanting the name he has just uttered, and with it, the music returns to the scene. However, this time around, the music possesses a madness that is replicated in the customers present in the restaurant. With shots of bodies in a train accompanying the scene, the customers begin creating chaos in the restaurant; breaking cutlery, dancing on the tables shirtless, while Zed’s father repeatedly shouts, “what are you all doing?”. The customers essentially embody a devilish disposition which is reinstated through the chaos they perpetuate.

The space of the restaurant is also a specific cultural juncture which is inhabited by South Asian people in a white country. While the space outside of the restaurant may be White, the space inside the restaurant is a cultural epicentre that allows all brown people - Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Indian immigrants who find a space of homogeneity in a White country. This also serves as a reminder of a pre-partition Hindustan which is soon disrupted by the chaos of the Partition, neighbours destroying each other’s homes and sources of income – as reinstated by the images of the customers destroying the restaurant.

The violence, contributing to the degeneration of a people, replicates a sickness within the community – as recited by Toba Tek Singh’s character – further sowing seeds of dependence and demasculinisation within the bodies of the trauma bearers. The Partition, imposing financial and physical restrictions on the bodies of the displaced, as replicated in the scene discussed, could be comprehended as efforts to demasculinise the trauma bearers. Further, it is also essential to state – even though not addressed in the film – the Partition’s violence possessed a deeply gendered complexity which was sustained through instances of female mutilation, in public and religious spaces. In an effort to impose one community’s masculinity over the other, these episodes of gendered violence during the Partition were intensified.

A Demasculinised Legacy of Trauma

Another such subconscious, but vivid, conceptualisation by Zed’s mind of his genetically imbibed trauma is represented in the scene after his failed attempt to cryopreserve his sperm – an effort which would have helped him produce children post his treatment induced infertility. Zed is now sitting on a hospital chair, receiving chemotherapy for his autoimmune disease, when his father walks into the scene wearing a pair of trousers and an olive-green shirt. He then dons a white shirt over the one he is already wearing, then a suit and a tie, then a yellow t-shirt which says, ‘Sheer African Beauty’, and then finally, a maroon-coloured apron with the words ‘Karachi Chilli’ inscribed on it – perhaps a reference to the multiple identities he too has had to dawn as a first-generation immigrant. While putting on another pair of trousers, he falls to the ground, immobile from waist down. Zed, with his pair of immobile legs as well, slides from the chair to the ground, attempting to help his father up. As Zed reaches him, his father begins smacking his own thigh, as though trying to generate mobility. The two begin shaking, mimicking the movement of people on a train, followed by a montage of scenes of visual turmoil – the shaking of shelves in a grocery store, the shaking of a child’s hands while praying, the shaking of Zed’s body on the hospital bed, and the shaking of the camera while Zed’s father is physically escorting customers out of his restaurant.

The visual representation of this turmoil, as stated in the above paragraph, relies on the movement of the train, a motif that draws inspiration from the reality of the violence during Partition, as read in Navdip Kaur’s study of the Partition of Punjab, “Overcrowded trains provide the most enduring images of Partition. No image of Partition, textual or in the mind's eye, photograph or film, escapes from the overloaded trains with men, women and children moving from one side of the border to the other. Due to their central role as a preferred means of urban evacuation, they have become symbolic of the last journey of the masses”. As the author states, the symbol of the train is a visual, cultural memory of the partition, surviving through generations. This memory, recognised through the violent movements of the train within the varied elements of the different scenes, essentially embodies, according to Campbell,  “the legacy of numerous traumatic events a community experiences over generations”. Furthermore, the desire to remember and reconcile with the past is a common visual tool to convey an intergenerational memory, an approach implemented by Mogul Mowgli as well. The fact that Zed’s father dons different clothes related to different identities of his life, is perhaps a reference to the reconciliation of the identity-trauma faced by both Zed and his father.

Taking place directly after the scene where Zed is supposed to collect his sperm, the mise-en-scene is perhaps a traumatic response to the demasculinisation caused by the treatment for the illness. He possesses the conflicting choice to either remain in a degenerated state or go ahead with the treatment, both of which will shred him off societal paradigms of masculinity. Eventually, he is compelled to undergo the treatment that threatens his masculinity, and this scene is evident of the genetically induced demasculinisation that has been imbibed by Zed, through the traumatic experiences of his father.

Mogul Mowgli, with its abundant allegorical references to the political, cultural, and social moment of the Partition, provides a comprehensive viewing of intergenerational trauma through the autoimmune disease Zed is ridden with. By embracing the revisited perspective of this trauma, and highlighting the notion of degeneration, the film comprehends the gendered disposition of the Partition through a camouflaged, second-generation experience of the event. The film is an imperative visual tool to interpret the historic event and has additionally charted a unique progression into postcolonial cinema – a narrative that does not focus on the traumatic event itself, but navigates through the contemporary socio-cultural, political, and economic repercussions of the same.