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Jaikumar argues that the challenge in conducting a cultural analysis of the later period of the Empire lies in “observing the internal heterogeneties as well as significant ruptures of its (imperial) practices” — such as the formation of liberal democratic institutions — “and in building a conceptual framework sensitive to imperialism’s historical multivalence.” The modernisation of British India had begun as early as 1836, particularly through Lord Macaulay’s reforms in education, which led to the creation of a class that was purportedly Indian in colour but British in taste and intellect, and could aid in the Empire’s governance.

But the domestic backlash in England in the aftermath of the Boer wars, waged around the turn of the 20th century — and which contributed to the defeat of the Conservative government in 1906 — forced the disavowal of economic imperialism as an explicit goal. Increasingly, the Empire was becoming an international embarrassment. Morality-heavy reasons then had to be proposed to justify Britain’s continued political presence in dominion states.

Around this time, the United States began to emerge as an economic and cultural powerhouse; British cinema’s inability to compete with Hollywood was symptomatic of the Empire’s vulnerable state. The British film industry perceived itself as subjugated by Hollywood. As World Film News, a British publication, commented ruefully in 1937, “The Americans, with impressive supply of Hollywood pictures, have the necessary tank power to put native (British) exhibitors to their mercy. They are using it remorselessly... So far as films go, we are now a colonial people.” “Liberalism’s impulse towards self-governance,” Jaikumar writes, “put pressure on imperialism’s essential unilateralism to define the internal form and formal contradictions of British film policy and commercial film style.” The idea of India as a readymade market had to be tempered: British films were thus projected as a positive moral influence on impressionable minds. But even if colonies had acquired a new relevance during the 1920s and 1930s as hitherto-unexplored markets for British trade, the surge of nationalism meant that these could not be taken for granted.

The British film industry’s fear of being marginalised by Hollywood was reflected in the official film policy, which attempted to create a free trade zone for the benefit of the Empire. The state introduced a quota, guaranteeing Empire-made films an audience, in turn hoping for a wide audience among the Indian educated class for British films. Hollywood did exploit a legal loophole and infiltrated the colony markets to an extent, by producing films made in Canada (another British dominion), thus deriving some benefits.

But statistics suggest that Hollywood films didn’t make much headway in the Indian market during this period. The real problem for British cinema was their films weren’t hugely successful either; the audience wished to engage with made-in-India cinema, which invented a nationalistic identity by the visual reclamation of a homeland. This was achieved notably through historical allegory employed in movies such as “Sikander”, which was first certified then subsequently censored, on grounds of promoting seditious material in the guise of historical discussion.

Through illustration, Jaikumar has made a comprehensive (and valuable) study of trends within the genres of realism, romance and the historical epic in British Empire cinema, and mapped the transition of British attitude towards their own Empire — from Kipling to Orwell in literature; from “Sanders of the River” to “Black Narcissus” in cinema.

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