British Cinema and the Raj Revival

The proliferation of films set in the past, or ‘heritage films’, in the decade of the 1980s in Britain is closely linked to the Thatcherite project, which combined forward-looking economic policies with a backward-looking ideology. In Kevin Robins’ view, the revival of interest in the past is not an exclusive feature of British society, but something which has to do with the nature of globalisation itself (2001: 29). Accordingly, Robins indicates how the globalising spread of ‘late capitalism’ and market societies is fast converting indigenous cultural products into standardised commodities that appeal to a world-wide consumer, on the one hand, while, on the other, the same economic trends are activating the exploitation of local differences and particularities as ways of breaking out of the homogenisation trend and fomenting cultural enterprise (2001: 31). This circumstance would explain the urge to recover and revive autochthonous traditions that could then be commodified on a global scale.