Hello Readers!
Greetings, this blog is based on an Assignment writing of Paper No. 205 22410 – A : Cultural Studies And I have chose topic is,
Reclaiming the Margins: Cultural Materialism and New Historicism in Rewriting History through Popular Indian Adaptations - Ram-Leela and Veer
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🔷 Details of Assignment:
Paper: Paper No. 205 – 22410 A : Cultural Studies
🔷 Table of Contents :
Abstract
Keywords
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Introduction
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Theoretical Framework: Cultural Materialism and New Historicism
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Rewriting History through Indian Popular Adaptations
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Case Study I: Ram-Leela – Cultural Syncretism and Gendered Power
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Case Study II: Veer – Nationalism and Historical Mythmaking
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Contemporary Analysis: Relevance of Cultural Materialism in 21st Century Bollywood
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Critical Evaluation: The Politics of Representation and Reception
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Conclusion
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References
Abstract :
Adaptation and historicizing in popular cinema reconfigure cultural memory and social power. This paper applies Cultural Materialism and New Historicism to examine how Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Goliyon Ki Raasleela Ram-Leela (2013) and Anil Sharma’s Veer (2010) rework historical narratives, local identities, and political affect. While Ram-Leela localizes Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to interrogate caste, honour, and community rivalry, Veer constructs an epic masculinity and nationalist past through star persona and spectacle. The analysis demonstrates how adaptations perform ideological negotiation—sometimes recuperating marginalized voices, sometimes reproducing hegemonic imaginaries—revealing the ambivalent politics of popular historiography.
Keywords :
Cultural Materialism; New Historicism; Film Adaptation; Bollywood; Ram-Leela; Veer; cultural memory; ideology; popular history; reception.
Introduction :
Literary and film adaptations perform historical work: they do not merely retell stories but recontextualize cultural pasts for contemporary publics. In postcolonial India, such re-writings are especially charged because cinematic narratives operate as sites where collective histories, identity politics, and ideological conflicts are dramatized for mass audiences. Cultural Materialism (CM) foregrounds the socio-economic conditions that shape cultural artifacts; New Historicism (NH) reads texts as negotiated sites where power circulates through cultural practices. Combining CM and NH enables a dual reading: we can examine the institutional, market, and class forces shaping a film (CM), while also attending to the play of representation, power, and micro-histories within the film’s textual strategies (NH).
This paper examines two popular Hindi films—Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Goliyon Ki Raasleela Ram-Leela (referred to as Ram-Leela) and Anil Sharma’s Veer—as case studies in cultural rewriting. Ram-Leela remodels Romeo and Juliet within the socio-political terrain of contemporary Gujarat, turning Shakespearean romance into a commentary on clan rivalry, gendered violence, and cultural performance. Veer constructs a stylized historical epic that melds star-driven masculinity with a nostalgic, militarized past. Reading these films through CM and NH reveals how popular cinema participates in the politics of memory: sometimes recuperative and subaltern-sensitive, sometimes complicit with hegemonic narratives.
Theoretical Framework: Cultural Materialism and New Historicism
Cultural Materialism, as articulated by Raymond Williams and later practitioners, insists cultural texts be read in relation to the material and institutional conditions of their production and reception. CM asks: who funds, distributes, and consumes this cultural product? What class formations and ideological investments underpin its form? Williams’ attention to the “structure of feeling” and the relations between culture and ideology helps explain cinema as both commodity and social practice (see McGuigan on Williams). CM thus makes visible the power structures that regulate the production and circulation of meaning.
New Historicism, associated with Stephen Greenblatt, treats literary and cultural texts as dynamic participants in historical circulations of power and desire. NH reframes texts as cultural artifacts embedded in networks of social practices: texts both shape and are shaped by other discourses, institutions, and practices. NH emphasizes contingency, contradiction, and the often subversive slippages whereby marginalized voices surface within hegemonic discourse. This approach is useful for identifying how filmic representation negotiates authority and resistance.
Pairing CM and NH provides two complementary perspectives: CM grounds the text within economic, institutional and material contexts (industry structures, censorship, star systems), while NH inspects the text’s rhetorical strategies, intertexts, and moments of subversion.
Methodology:
This study uses close reading of the two films, contextualized by production histories, publicity, reception, and secondary criticism. Filmic elements (mise-en-scène, music, casting, dialogue, and visual symbolism) are analyzed alongside industry factors (star persona, marketing) and socio-political contexts (regional politics, cultural debates). Primary sources include the films themselves; secondary sources include scholarly articles, reviews, and theoretical texts (provided in the resources list). The comparative method highlights convergences and divergences in how each film negotiates history, identity, and ideology.
Case Study I: Ram-Leela — Localizing Shakespeare, Rewriting Community
Textual and Cultural Background
Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Ram-Leela adapts Romeo and Juliet but transposes the action into a Gujarati milieu of warring clans. The film’s aesthetic—lush, folkloric, and violently romantic—frames interpersonal passion against collective feuds. Bhansali’s cinema is noted for its opulent mise-en-scène and melodramatic romanticism (see Qureshi on Bhansali’s historical aesthetics).
Cultural Materialist Reading
CM draws attention to the film’s production context: mainstream Bollywood industry dynamics, star positioning (Ranveer Singh and Deepika Padukone), and market strategies that exploit spectacle as commodity. The film’s release in 2013 coincided with heightened debates on regional identity and communal politics in Gujarat and nationally; thus commercial interests intersect with cultural politics—spectacle sells, but it also circulates particular affective narratives about tradition, honour, and community.
From a CM view, Ram-Leela commodifies folk culture—music, dance, religious imagery—packaging it for national and transnational consumption. The film’s marketing foregrounded visceral local color: costumes, fairs, and ritual. Yet the industry’s appropriation of local forms raises questions of voice and authenticity—who profits from the representation of local histories and how are those histories stylized for cinematic drama?
New Historicist Reading
NH spotlights intertextuality and the film’s rhetorical negotiation of history. Ram-Leela inserts Shakespeare into Indian civic memory, producing resonance between early modern notions of family feud and present-day clan conflict. The film’s scenes of public ritual and violent enactment become micro-histories where larger social anxieties (honour killings, patriarchy, caste/communal rivalry) surface. Significantly, moments of subversion appear: while the central romance is tragic, Bhansali’s camera frequently lingers on women’s agency—gestures, sartorial power, and vocal resistance—opening space for marginal perspectives even within a melodramatic form.
The NH lens notices the film’s slippages: its celebration of masculine valor often coexists with poignant critique of male honor code. This contradiction allows for ambivalent readings: audiences may derive nationalist or communityist pride, or conversely feel incensed at the film’s exposure of violent custom. NH thus shows how the film participates in circulating social energy—both reinforcing and problematizing prevailing norms.
Reception and Memory Work
Reception studies (audience responses, reviews, controversies) illuminate how Ram-Leela reconfigured local memory. In Gujarat and among diasporic communities, the film prompted discussions about cultural representation, honour, and the aestheticization of violence. Critical essays (Periago; García-Periago; Chakraborty) document how the adaptation situates Shakespeare within Indian social idioms and how it mediates between global textual heritage and local political realities. Thus Ram-Leela acts as a site where collective memory is reshaped—Shakespearean tragedy remade as an Indian moral and political commentary.
Case Study II: Veer — Epic Masculinity and Manufactured Past
Textual and Cultural Background
Anil Sharma’s Veer (2010) is a star vehicle for Salman Khan that fashions a pseudo-historical epic drawing on folklore, martial heroism, and cinematic spectacle. The film’s representational strategy constructs a mythic past, foregrounding male heroism, martial identity, and the rhetorical recuperation of a heroic past.
Cultural Materialist Reading
CM asks: what industrial exigencies shape Veer? The film’s creation as a Salman Khan spectacle reflects star system economics: Khan’s persona as a symbol of virility and nationalist masculinity is centrally implicated. The film’s production choices—lavish battle sequences, star-centric marketing, and patriotic mobilization—suggest commodification of a manufactured historical ethos appealing to broad demographics (fan bases, rural viewership, male audiences).
From a CM perspective, Veer functions as cultural work that reproduces hegemonic narratives of masculinity and national pride. The film’s address to mass audiences operates within market incentives that reward simple narratives of honor and martial selfhood. The economic imperatives thus shape ideological outcomes: profitable myths of past glory are valorized.
New Historicist Reading
NH investigates how Veer choreographs historical affect: rather than represent actual pasts, the film manufactures a stylized past that secures emotional identification. Its rhetorical techniques—grand tableaux, melodramatic music, and archaic diction—perform a historicality that compensates for social anxieties (modern dislocation, loss of status). NH attends to how such textual devices naturalize nationalist myths: the past becomes a resource for present legitimation.
However, NH also locates moments where the film inadvertently exposes the constructedness of its own history. Overblown spectacle, caricatured villains, and anachronistic elements reveal the film’s fictive foundation. In these slippages, critical viewers can discern the film’s ideological claims as contestable rather than seamless truth.
Reception and Memory Work
Veer’s mixed critical reception indicates divergent public responses: aficionados valorize the film’s masculine myth; critics deride its ahistorical glamorization. The film thus participates in the politics of cultural memory by offering a palimpsest of heroic pasts that some audiences embrace as identity anchors, while others critique as instrumentalized nostalgia.
Comparative Analysis: Margins, Agency and Ideological Ambivalence
In the contemporary cultural landscape, the reinterpretation of historical and mythological narratives through popular Indian adaptations like Ram-Leela and Veer exemplifies the ongoing dialogue between power, ideology, and artistic representation. Both Cultural Materialism and New Historicism provide critical frameworks to analyze how such films reconstruct the past to reflect present political, social, and gendered realities. Cultural materialists, following Raymond Williams, argue that cultural production is inseparable from material conditions—these films function not merely as entertainment but as sites of ideological negotiation, reflecting and contesting dominant discourses of nationalism, religion, and gender.
New Historicism, as theorized by Stephen Greenblatt, reads these texts as cultural artifacts that circulate within networks of power and meaning. Ram-Leela’s reimagining of the Ramayana in a violent, sensual, and hyper-modern aesthetic foregrounds how myths are commodified within capitalist frameworks while simultaneously questioning patriarchal and religious orthodoxy. Similarly, Veer reconfigures the colonial resistance narrative, intertwining heroism with imperial nostalgia, thereby revealing the contradictions within postcolonial identity formation.
In today’s digital media ecosystem, these cultural retellings gain renewed political significance. They not only reinterpret national identity for the globalized viewer but also highlight how power continues to operate through representation. By merging theory and practice, such contemporary readings of Indian cinema reveal how art becomes a battleground for reclaiming marginalized voices, destabilizing hegemonic histories, and democratizing cultural memory. Thus, these adaptations function as modern palimpsests—rewriting the nation’s past to negotiate its plural and contested present.
Conclusion :
Applying Cultural Materialism and New Historicism to Ram-Leela and Veer shows that popular cinema is a crucial site of historical negotiation. Films perform memory work—recasting the past for contemporary publics—while industry forces shape which pasts are profitable and therefore visible. Ram-Leela negotiates margins by placing local rituals and subaltern experiences at the centre of melodrama; Veer manufactures a heroic past that consolidates dominant masculine and nationalist narratives. Together, they demonstrate the ambivalence of adaptation: it can both recover and reinscribe marginal voices within the logic of spectacle and capital. For scholars and critics, the task is to remain attentive to both the emancipatory gestures and the commodifying frames that shape popular historicization.
References :
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Garcia Periago, R. M. (2020). Localizing Romeo and Juliet: Ram-Leela, female agency and Indian politics. In Adaption: The Journal of Literature on Screen Studies. Retrieved November 5, 2025, from https://doi.org/10.1093/adaptation/apaa017
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