Sardar

                                                Sardar : The Iron man of India

                           Sardar is a 1993 Indian biopic on Sardar Vallbhbhai Patel, one of India's greatest freedom fighters, directed by Ketan Mehta and written by noted playwright Vijay Tendulkar.
                          A film begins with a very young Sardar Patel playing cards with his friends and ridiculing Mahatma Gandhi and his policies to achieve Independence. His views change however when he is introduced to Gandhi by his brother and upon listening to a lecture delivered by Gandhi. He joins him in his struggle. Sardar then successfully organizes various satyagrahas throughout Gujrat.
                         The film then moved to the age of the Quit India Movement and India's freedom. Once the partition has been accepted, sardar then works to get all the princely states to join union of  India, the film accurately depicts his handling of the problems posed by the princely states of Kashmir, Junnagad and Hyderabad. The film also portrays his difference with Nehru and how they work together after the death of  Gandhiji. The film ends with Sardar resting in a village saying that today Kashmir to Kanyakumari, there is one independent nation.

                    "raghupati raghav raja ram, patitpavan sita-ram"

Writers of Indian Diaspora

  Book Review : Writers of Indian Diaspora
                        
           Series Editor: Jasbir Jain

  Launched in 1998, this series seek to provide Indian perspectives on the writings of the Indian diaspora. This study places Gita Mehta's works fiction and non - fiction in the framework of Diasporic studies and tries to ascertain how the author responds to the Indian realities vis -a- vis her Western experience.
      The book focuses on the fact that though she looks at her country with the bemused gaze of an outside, her strong urge to recover the lost essence and to return to the folds of her culture become explicitly obvious. Her works are set in India but they move in and out of the two cultures, blending subjective experience with recreate India that was and India that is.
       Gita Mehta's work offers and defines it's own problematics. It raises questions related to location: first of the writer, then the world of her fiction and then of the historical underpinnings of the fictional world. Karma - Coal evokes images of Hindu mysticism as well as the fizz of the western drink whose popularity haa travelled beyond the west.
        Karma - Coal, Raj, A River - Sutra each is different from the other but all respond to Western engejments with India and it's tradition of meditation, mysticism and naturelore. When it's come to diaspora, it also means post colonialism, and post colonialism in its turn impiles post modernism. One has sift and arrange the material carefully before one starts justifying it's applicability to the author. It means delving into theory and theory takes time.

             "It isn't where you're from;
              It is where you're at."