Research Title: Portrayal of War of Independence 1857 in Films: Comparative Analysis of British and Indian Movies
Hey Readers! I am Tanzeela Malik, currently a student of Media Studies in Riphah Institute of Media Sciences (RIMS). My previous degree was in Video Art and Film Making. So, I being someone who has always taken interest in films, have chosen a film oriented research topic for my thesis of MS. As the title explains, this research is a comparison between British and Indian movies that are specifically on 1857 Independence War. The War of Independence is an important landmark in the history of Sub-Continent. This War was fought in 1857 by Indians against the British in order to get rid of their domination. It is also given names as Indian Revolt, Indian Rebellion as well as Indian Mutiny. The main causes of the War were social, political, economic, military and religious. It was an extreme effort made by Indians, but they failed due to certain reasons including mutual jealousies, disunity, and lack of central leadership etc. Ever since the first War of Independence, various Indian and British war movies were released. Both US (Hollywood) movies, and Indian (Bollywood) movies are still the window to their respectable perspective, storyline and scripts. Both of the film industries portrayed their side of the story with a lot of variations.
When I reviewed previous literature, I found few similar researches on films regarding the portrayal but the interesting part is that 1857 Independence war films are still being ignored. Therefore, I found it quite interesting to compare the vivid representation style of both British and Indian movies by analyzing the scripts, as this war history is still fresh in the minds of Indians and the Britishers.
If I write a little bit about the challenges that I faced while preparing the proposal of this research, it wouldn’t be wrong to say that it took a lot of time, thoughts and revisions to finalize the proposal, as initially, I was not sure if I should be working on dialogues (as a sample) or visuals. However, once I finalized the research questions, the proposal led me towards the most suitable research method and hence I decided to work on dialogues (text). Another challenge that I faced was to find more and more British movies because the number of British films on 1857 war of independence are less than the number of Indian films. But been there, done that.
I also want to mention that, this is the first time I am conducting a research. Therefore, any suggestions and guidelines regarding this topic would be highly appreciated. So, feel free to comment below.
Thanking you all in advance and tighten your seat belts everybody, here I come…
