William Pinch

William Pinch is Professor of History at Wesleyan University and Associate Editor of the journal History and Theory. His principal areas of research and teaching are South Asian history, historiography, theory and methodology, and postcolonial and global history. His book Peasants and Monks in British India (Berkeley 1996) examined the social and historiographical dimensions of religious movements, especially among peasant communities in north India. In Warrior Ascetics and Indian Empires (Cambridge 2006), Pinch explored the intersections of religious asceticism, soldiering, violence, and history from the sixteenth to twenty-first century. Pinch is currently completing two projects: a book on mid- nineteenth-century military culture history, expanding out of a close reading of the uprising at Meerut in 1857; and a joint translation of two long Hindi ballads from the eighteenth century celebrating the life of the Saiva ascetic warlord Anupgiri Gosain (a.k.a “Himmat Bahadur”).

History and Hindi Film

Pinch’s chapter is structured around his experience as a historian teaching with and reflecting on historical films in Hindi.  The discussion begins with the “parallel” or art house cinema of the 1970s-‘90s before turning to the rise of a “new wave” of big-budget, mass-appeal period dramas from the mid-1990s to the present.  This new wave, of which the film Lagaan (2001) is especially emblematic, coincided with the political consolidation of Hindu nationalism in India, manifest most visibly in the expanding electoral footprint of the Bharatiya Janata Party—and indeed almost all the blockbuster period dramas made after 2001 examined or developed the question of religious identity as a central problem for the nation-in-the-making.  Pinch gives particular attention in this section to the presentation of religious boundaries in films about early modern India—especially through a comparison of the classic Mughal-e-Azam (1960) with Jodhaa Akbar (2008).  He then turns to two films from 2006—Rang de Basanti and Lage Raho Munna Bhai—that engage in a kind of makeshift metahistorical reflection on the relation between the nationalist past and postcolonial present in Indian society.  Pinch’s chapter concludes with an unusual small-budget period drama from 2019, “Laal Kaptaan,” which departs from the “religion/nation” formula of the “new wave” blockbusters, and offers as well a complex and nuanced understanding of the past and of history via its central character, an Afghan turned warrior yogi who haunts the frontier badlands of Bundelkhand amidst the decline of the Marathas and the rise of the British in the chaotic eighteenth century.