Hindi Cinema: Repeating the Subject 2012016462, 9780415698672, 9780203084175

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Hindi Cinema

Hindi cinema is full of instances of repetition in its themes, narratives, plots, and characters. This book focuses on the phenomenon as a crucial thematic and formal code, which grows problematic when representing the national and cinematic subject. It reflects on the cinema as motivated by an ongoing crisis of selfformation in modern India, taking into account 60 years of films. The book looks at how cinema presents liminal and countermodern identities emerging within repeated modern attempts to re-enact traumatic national events, so as to redeem the past and restore a normative structure to happenings. Establishing structure and event as paradigmatic poles of a historical and anthropological spectrum for the individual in society, the book goes on to discuss cinematic portrayals of violence, gender embodiment, religion, economic transformations, and new globalised Indianness as events and sites of liminality disrupting structural aspirations. After revealing the impossibility of accurate representation of incommensurable and liminal subjects within the historiography of the nation-state, the book highlights how Hindi cinema draws attention to the problematic nature of the thematic of nation, through an ongoing engagement with the nation-state as a site of eventfulness. It is a useful study for academics of Film Studies and of South Asian Culture. Nandini Bhattacharya is Professor of English and affiliate of Film, Women’s Studies, and Africana Studies programs at Texas A&M University, USA. Her interests include South Asia, postcoloniality, cinema, gender, and transnationalism.

Intersections: colonial and postcolonial histories Edited by Gyanendra Pandey, Emory University, USA

Editorial Advisory Board: Partha Chatterjee, Columbia University and Calcutta; Michael Fisher, Oberlin College; Steven Hahn, University of Pennsylvania; David Hardiman, University of Warwick; Ruby Lal, Emory University, and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, New York University and Bangalore. This series is concerned with three kinds of intersections (or conversations): first, across cultures and regions, an interaction that postcolonial studies have emphasized in their foregrounding of the multiple sites and multi-directional traffic involved in the making of the modern; second, across time, the conversation between a mutually constitutive past and present that occurs in different times and places; and third, between colonial and postcolonial histories, as theoretical positions have very different perspectives on the first two ‘intersections’ and the questions of intellectual enquiry and expression implied in them. These three kinds of conversations are critical to the making of any present and any history. Thus the new series provides a forum for extending our understanding of core issues of human society and its self-representation over the centuries. While focusing on Asia, the series is open to studies of other parts of the world that are sensitive to cross-cultural, cross-chronological, and cross-colonial perspectives. The series invites submissions for single-authored and edited books by young, as well as established, scholars that challenge the limitations of inherited disciplinary, chronological, and geographical boundaries, even when they focus on a single, well-bounded territory or period.

1

Subaltern Citizens and their Histories Investigations from India and the USA Edited by Gyanendra Pandey

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Subalternity and Religion The prehistory of Dalit empowerment in South Asia Milind Wakankar

3

Communalism and Globalization in South Asia and its Diaspora Edited by Deana Heath and Chandana Mathur

4

Subalternity and Difference Investigations from the north and the south Edited by Gyanendra Pandey

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Mixed-Race and Modernity in Colonial India Changing concepts of hybridity across empires Adrian Carton

6

Medical Marginality in South Asia Situating subaltern therapeutics Edited by David Hardiman and Projit Bihari Mukharji

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Hindi Cinema Repeating the subject Nandini Bhattacharya

Hindi Cinema Repeating the subject

Nandini Bhattacharya

First published 2013 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2013 Nandini Bhattacharya The right of Nandini Bhattacharya to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Bhattacharya, Nandini. Hindi cinema : repeating the subject / Nandini Bhattacharya.   p. cm. -- (Intersections : colonial and postcolonial histories ; 7)   Includes bibliographical references and index.   1. Motion pictures, Hindi--History--20th century. I. Title.   PN1993.5.I8B424 2012     791.430954--dc23   2012016462 ISBN: 978-0-415-69867-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-08417-5 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Bookcraft Ltd, Stroud, Gloucestershire

Contents

List of figures viii Acknowledgments ix

Introduction

1

1 Structure, event, and liminal practices in recent Hindi films

33

2 Imagining the past in the present: violence, gender, and citizenship in Hindi films

69

3 The man formerly known as the actor: when Shah Rukh Khan reappeared as himself

110

4 Romancing religion: Bollywood’s painless globalization

126

5 Love triangles at home and abroad: male embodiment as queer enactment

153

Notes Bibliography Index

183 194 211

Figures

2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 4.1 5.1

Lahore “Retired Hurt,” FilmIndia “Hindu Code Debate?” FilmIndia Print advertisement for New Delhi, FilmIndia Amina and her mother, a still from Garm Hawa Gadar film poster Ram in the 1990s Kaante, offset lobby card

85 91 91 96 100 103 143 162

Acknowledgments

This book owes its origin to those reckless youths, my parents, who doughtily and un-censoriously hauled me off to “see cinema”—as Bengalis say—in the sweet and sour sixties and seventies of commercial Hindi filmmaking in India. I went happily, and the cinephile that I am today is most likely due to this childhood experience. This book owes its completion to two very different cinema-lovers, my Bombay friends Irene Dhar Malik and Ashwini Malik and their daughter and my godchild Trisha, whose disapprobation of the sort of films I saw in my innocent youth is boundless, if not downright volatile. Irene and Ashwini not only introduced me to various Hindi cinema personalities and artists, but put up gallantly with my extended stays in their apartment in Bombay, and my endless stream of queries about whom to meet next and how to get there. Ashwini sat down with me patiently and shared with me a treasure trove of knowledge about how the industry works, how films get made and, of course, scripts, scripts, scripts. Such are the varied ingredients and tensions—like the classic masala Hindi film—of which my cinephilia (first) and my scholarship (second) are compounded. As long as it has taken me to finish this book, I finally dedicate it to this group of family and friends. They made this happen, whether or not they want to own up. I owe deep debts of gratitude to my Bombay friends: Onir, maker of exquisite and adventurous Hindi films today; Anjum Rajabali, doyen of contemporary Bombay scriptwriters; and Paromita Vohra, feisty and prolific writer and filmmaker. Onir, aka Tutul, was my ever gracious mediator and one-man social network, giving me access to his numerous contacts in the industry as well as sharing with me his insights about making films and making them mean something, as the world knows from his own films. Anjum was an invaluable resource, host, and cheerful receiver of free-floating interlocutions and -- in the earlier stages of my work -- vague and tentative questions and reflections upon what I was facing and what I saw as my project. To these people, my first and foremost thanks and admiration. Deepest thanks also to all those who gave me precious time, insights and opportunities: Saif Ali Khan, Kundan Shah, Rahul Dholakia, Sanjar Suri, Paresh Rawal, Homi Adajania, Urmi Juvekar, Anjum Rizvi, Vinay Shukla, Arun Joshi, Rohit Banawlikar and Nadi Palsikar. At the National Film Archives of India, Pune, likewise, my debts to the following persons are immeasurable: Dr. Sasidharan, Mrs. Karkhanis, Mrs.

x  Acknowledgments Lakshmi Rao, Mrs. Shanta Joshi, Mr. Diwar, and all of the other staff who made my visits there pleasant and memorable. My chief editor at Routledge, Dorothea Schaefter, is a boon to all who, like myself, want to write about South Asia for a large and varied audience: to her I extend my warmest thanks. I thank also Jillian Morrison and Leanne Hinves at Routledge, and Richenda Milton-Daws and Thursa Swindall for their copyediting and production efforts. Colleagues and friends to whom I feel deep obligation for their generous and enthusiastic support are too numerous to name individually for each instance of inidivual kindness, but I would be remiss not to make special mention of Kamran Ali, Srinivas Aravamudan, Margaret Ezell, Sangita Gopal, Renu Juneja, Ketu Katrak, Jimmie Killingsworth, Lawrence Liang, David Morgan, Marietta Morrissey, Claudia Nelson, Mary Ann O’Farrell, Sue Ott Rowlands, Paul Parrish, Amit Rai, Srividya Ramasubramaniam, Sumathi Ramaswamy, Vanita Reddy, David Stern, Shankar Subramanian, Jyotsna Vaid and Neha Vora. Heartfelt thanks to my Spring 2012 English 658: Indian Cinema graduate seminar folks for a fun semester or conversations and learning, especially to Catalina Bartlett, Victor Del Hierro, Dhrubaa Mukherjee and Alma Villanueva. I benefited vastly from the wealth of knowledge of fellow members of the South Asia Working Group at Texas A&M University, and from the South Asian Cinema Online folks. This book was made possible by generous research support and grants from the Glasscock Center for the Humanities at Texas A&M University, the Texas A&M College of Liberal Arts, and the Texas A&M English Department. Finally, this book owes its sustenance to Bob and to Khoka, and all its flaws to me.

Introduction

Academic criticism of Indian popular cinema displays a particular penchant for reductive typologies and stern agendas of improvement, based on a standard that no actual filmmaker ever seems to achieve—only the scholar-critic, it appears, possesses the knowledge to imagine the ideologically perfect film … Lutegndorf, “Is There An Indian Way of Filmmaking?” International Journal of Hindu Studies, 10:3, 2006: 240

This book concerns 60 years of Hindi cinema, from 1948 to 2009. I invite its reader to consider the idea that Hindi cinema has a “repetitive subject,” that is, that one very important thematic and formal code, at least during those 60 years, has been repetition. An instance of the development of this tendency would be the mainstream Hindi cinema in India of the early 1990s, which began to depict an unusual number of unstable characters and generically mixed plots. Heroes became indistinguishable from villains or comedians, and classic, formulaic narratives gave way to hybrid genres. Unpredictable storylines and unreadable, psychotic, or schizophrenic characters emerged, primarily on the back of rising star Shah Rukh Khan’s vehicles. By the later nineties, it was clear that these ambiguous styles of character and plot development had come to stay. This book shows why this phenomenon within Hindi films matters, and why it is not new. While the apparently stable formulas and anodyne look of Hindi cinema were visibly disturbed in the nineties, it was not the first time that such ambiguities failed to represent cinema’s particular revisionist apotheosis of subjectivation, whether anti-foundational or hegemonic; rather, they echoed diverse prior formal and thematic stutters in subjectivating cinematic and national protagonists. This matters because, as I will show, the nineties and earlier decades of Hindi film-making broadly represented (and repeated) the co-implicated formation of a particular model of history as a structure of repetitions and repeatability on the one hand, and a cinematic model of conjunctural, as well as disjunctural, repeat performances of significant political and social trauma unsettling crucial salvific discourses of national subjecthood on the other. “The new is not found in what is said, but in the event of its return,” writes Foucault (1981: 28). What repetition or return does is come back to the constitutive lag, gap, or caesura that marks the moment of the event returning. The moment or event’s re-articulations thereby continue to wash up at the point at which the

2  Introduction future broke away from the present and its past in the original articulation, so as to make nothing more concrete—certainly not that moment—than the break or the disarticulation itself. The future potentials become more prominent than the oneness and plenitude of the event with and within itself (Foucault 1977: 133–5). Tracing the formal and thematic codes of repetition in India’s Hindi cinema bears out this thesis in relation to enactment or performance: every performance is an unsecured and uncontrollable re-enactment or re-activation, and this dynamic mechanism of reactivation (rather than inert duplication) defers the possibility of realized and secured subjectivation in Hindi cinema. Performance, as a term, exceeds theatricality, spectacle, action, and representation; it is a thicker term that grounds itself beyond object and practice, but rather in a theory of both. In this sense, performance is in itself a kind of “exaggeration” (Taylor 2003: 13–5) that meshes well with practices of repetition and indeed requires them for its utmost plenipotentiary outcome. The performance aesthetic of Hindi cinema, with its heavy reliance on sometimes unmotivated “excess”1 is thereby also a more intensely presentational mode of ontologically unsecured “exaggeration,” whose effect is multiplied with each repetition. I trace the co-formation of the cinematic mechanism of repetition with a historical discourse of repetition of structures and events as Indian nation-building, and demonstrate that, in cinema, both diegetic history and plot use tropes of repetition to effect the de-centering of subjectivation. I argue that the notion of repetition underlying the theory of performativity generates multiple versions of the subject, and stokes the un-extinguished debate over whether subjectivity is a public or a private ontology and genealogy—two constitutive characteristics of Hindi cinema’s agonistic production. While cinema in general has been theorized vis-à-vis performance (Metz et al.), and Indian cinema in particular has been theorized in terms of Indian performance genres (Lutgendorf; Dissanayake and Gokulsing; Ganti), the temporality of performance as repetition in the cinema itself has been very rarely explored by scholars. Deleuze, of course, concerned himself with difference, repetition, time, and the cinema, and separately analyzed cinema as a temporal allegory and repetition as generative of difference (2001, 1994). In his reflections on repetition and difference, Deleuze wrote incisively about the power of repetition in different contexts, including the theatre, to overcome the trauma of representation. While performance as representation succeeds in merely reinstating the regime of being as “the same,” repetition is that which institutes the dynamic movement of becoming, because difference is at the heart, and is indeed constitutive, of such repetition. Repetition is, for Deleuze, that which conveys the real and the material in the “eternal return,” which is not the return of identity, equivalence, or commensurability, but rather that of difference, singularity, and becoming: “identity, produced by difference, is determined as ‘repetition.’ Repetition in the [Nietzschean] eternal return, therefore, consists in conceiving the same on the basis of the different” (Deleuze 1994: 41). However, beyond placing repetition and difference squarely in the realm of theatre or performance (1994: 23), Deleuze did not extensively explore temporality as repetition in his discussions of cinema as time-image (2001), as I believe is

Introduction  3 crucial to do in the case of Hindi cinema. I consider the apparently novel emergence of “uncharactertistic” characters and plots in the cinema of the nineties, looking back across approximately 50 years of cinematic history and showing that this sort of instability is by no means new. It is instead a long-standing constitutive characteristic of an anti-essentialist Hindi cinema that relies primarily on thematic treatment of the polymorphous relationship between historic event and social structure, which actively and necessarily generates subjunctive or liminal being. I see such subjunctivity or liminality less as incompleteness, more as a certain metaphysics and art of “becoming” through the repetition and eternal return of the excessive and incommensurable, as Deleuze writes: “Only the extreme, the excessive, returns” (1994: 41). Further on, I will demonstrate how Deleuze’s sense of the excessive and extreme, that which I call the liminal and the subjunctive, also finds support in Badiou and Derrida’s anti-essentialist theories of being. In the chapters of this book I demonstrate the metaphysical art of such generations of liminality and subjunctivity, in different eras of films that refract history as a debate of structure and event, problematizing the repetition said to be intrinsic to history as positive heuristic, while offering cinematic performativity as sometimes quizzical, and sometimes critical, re-enactments of embodiment, generating not subjects but liminality in the process. In an article detailing the oft-discussed subject of Hindi or Indian cinema’s perplexingly (to outsiders of the cinematic culture and reception circles) generic and repetitive qualities and impact, Philip Lutgendorf takes up the question of the generic evolution of Hindi cinema’s particular style. He references the cinema’s characteristic of repetition, contesting a classic Marxist analysis of form, such as Prasad’s account of “heterogenous conditions of manufacture” in the Hindi film industry (Lutgendorf 2006: 240–1), and privileging instead a cultural-historical telos whereby those familiar players—Sanskrit drama, folk tales, Parsi and Hindi theatre, but especially the classic epics—maintain key roles in shaping the fundamental structure of films. This structure is the repetition of plots, themes, and characters from oft-told and well-loved epics. He shifts the explanation for “typical” Hindi cinematic form from Prasad’s Marxist structural model to “the structure of the epics (and … of a much larger body of popular narrative) rather than their specific content that presents a parallel to the way in which film stories unfold” (242). This account of Hindi cinema as product of a layering of formal elements primarily derived from a determinant, indeed over-determining, structure of mythic and epic provenance (Lutgendorf 2006: 250) seems problematic to me for several reasons. First, this analysis does not explain why, within a short decade in the current century, Hindi and other regional film styles, and indeed even stories, have taken a turn toward the almost “postmodern” exploration of liminal subjectivation, such as I explore here. Have audiences forgotten the ur epics and their “structural” imperative for all mandates of storytelling? This seems unlikely in the era of Hindutva nationalism and its recent televangelical successes with the stories of the Mahbharata and the Ramayana. Second, this hermeneutic of all cinematic form as a cyclical repetition and reproduction of a primary atavistic narrative structure—largely that of the moralizing epics—is somewhat ethnocentric, as Lutegndorf would himself admit. It partly privileges “a” Hindu

4  Introduction mythology as synonymous with “the” national mythos, though Lutgendorf also provides a summary of Islamicate narrative traditions that “structured” future popular cinematic storytelling and forms. Third, and here I must resort to the subjective with all its attendant risks, it does not take into account the experience of a secular middle-class viewer, as I myself was as a teen Hindi cinephile, who does not necessarily have a total and familiar grasp of classic and traditional mythic and epic narratives, nor reads the films instantly as duplicating or evoking such narrative frameworks, but despite being a product of a secular and postcolonial educational system, nevertheless appreciates Hindi films for a variety of ludic, psychic, social, and sensory pleasures. In other words, the link between cinephilia and cultural insiderness or context-sensitivity may be less adamantine than Lutgendorf suggests (2006: 249–50), and the phenomenon of repetition in Hindi cinema may be more wideranging, multivalent, and less purely contextual than the rehearsing of familiar traditional epics. Fourth, and most importantly, though far more rationalized and corporatized today, new Hindi cinema is still made as a result of a vast team effort, involving numerous functionaries and sub-functionaries and immense collaborative yet discrete organization. There is a distinct return to the “studio” model of production, as exemplified by the Dharma, Yash Raj, Ram Gopal Varma and Company, and Mukta Arts production houses. Indeed, the end product of such continuing artisanal efforts—not entirely dissimilar from Hollywood methods, as Lutgendorf himself acknowledges—is a cinema coming to represent very different kinds of repetitions of background, generic formations and constituents (song lyrics, star texts, box office histories), context, conscious and unconscious depth, allegory, inter-textuality, and metadiscursivity; themselves surfacing as much more contemporary, intra-textual, and self-referential phenomena. The cinema mines itself and its generic formations and constituents explicitly and thoroughly for successive and successful allusions, citations, and quotations, many of which I explore in the subsequent chapters. Lutgendorf’s cultural historical hermeneutic lays bare, I believe, the armature of an organic enterprise in Hindi cinematic historiography and cinema scholarship, which is to see the cinematic narrative as a structurally influenced story, wherein every re-enactment or story is a replica, copy, or duplication of an extant and privileged ur (often “national”) structure, rather than a re-activation, re-envisioning, or dramatic reiteration, whereby the present and the past are prised apart as not temporally punctuated recalibrations of the same story. In using Ramanujan’s rubrics of “context-sensitive” and “context-free” (Lutgendorf 2006: 247–9), Lugendorf treats the “contexts”—backgrounds and genesis—as the stabilized cultural history of Hindi cinema, whereas I will look at “context” or event, and its diegetic treatments as the critical “text”—trope and language— of the cinema. With the aid of important scholarly work such as Lutgendorf’s, this book’s formal analyses will be tied to a more probing reading of the hermeneutic of structure and event (the latter not always a structural subset), and of universality versus singularity, as an essential heuristic and problematic of the story of the cinema itself, not as its totalizing explanatory schema.

Introduction  5 Against the grain of “events” as an imagistic for society, “structure” sets up an indicative mode subtended by a metalanguage of order, as well as inversion. In effect, however, structure’s indicative mode is always already permeated, suffused by the event’s performative, apperceptive, subjunctive mode—one that I will henceforth call liminality, or the liminal. My term “liminal” is drawn from anthropology, political history, and performance studies, and refers to performances of identity that generate multiple iterations and ongoing flux across cultural and social boundaries that are elusive or at risk, and that signify a process rather than an end. Liminality is the subjunctive category, a sub-set of what anthropologists like Turner call structure.2 For me, the most useful account of the cultural liminal as a performative zone is still that of the anthropologists; Turner writes, “for every major social formation there is a dominant mode of public liminality, the subjunctive space/time that is the counterstroke to its pragmatic indicative texture. Thus, the simpler societies have ritual or sacred corroborees as their main metasocial performances; proto-feudal and feudal societies have carnival or festival; early modern societies have carnival and theater; and electronically advanced societies, film” (1977: 34–5, 1984). The liminal is the “what if,” the “collective reflexive,” the publicly ritualistic mode of structure. It is also the “what if” zone of power relations; while Turner sees freedom in the performance situation, Visweswaran has rightly returned this symbolic anthropology to a consideration of the reality of power relations in performance, and by extension, in my view, in liminality (Visweswaran 1994: 76). It will become evident later on that the liminal is the space of play and performance that leavens the ordering of social structure: Hindi cinema has staged, repetitively, this performance of the liminal within the structural framework of Indian nation-building and state-formation—within relations of power and governance and their ability to hail subjects—for decades. Moreover, as repetition, Hindi films unearth the obsessively liminal quality of re-enactments of identity that always straddle, and sometimes transcend, the strict dichotomy of public and private existence. This is something that I discuss further below, as a phenomenon of “countermodernity,” which stands, as per Foucault, for a certain pre-modern relationship of subject to time and space that exceeds a present and modern ratio of spatio-temporal vectors of self-formation (Foucault in Drolet 2004: 45). This idea is also figured in Chakrabarty’s critique of “Historicism,” as the West’s stagist theory of history according to which nonWestern countries were “not yet” ready for political modernity, as expounded eloquently and elegantly in the introduction to his Provincializing Europe: The achievement of political modernity in the third world could only take place through a contradictory relationship to European social and political thought … The political sphere in which the peasant and his masters participated was modern—for what else could nationalism be but a modern political movement for self-government?—and yet it did not follow the logic of secular-rational calculations inherent in the modern conception of the political. (2000: 9–12)

6  Introduction Hindi cinema’s repetitive re-enactments might be transgressive and destabilizing of the strict dualities of public history and private memory, because all repetition may destabilize such dualities, especially repetition that is a performance as opposed to a pedagogy, as Chakrabarty points out following Bhabha (Bhabha 1994: 208–29, Chakrabarty 2000: 10). Perhaps the most generative schematic about “repetition” for my purposes is Freud’s enshrinement as a “complex” (Freud 1959: vols. 9, 10, 12, and 17). He wrote: “it is possible to recognize the dominance in the unconscious mind of a ‘compulsion to repeat’ proceeding from the instinctual impulses and probably inherent in the very nature of the instincts—a compulsion powerful enough to overrule the pleasure principle, lending to certain aspects of the mind their daemonic character” (Freud 1959: 17: 238). Though I will travel considerably before and beyond Freud in my own “countermodern” move, in discussion of critical and geographical traditions concerning the trope of repetition, he is a force to be reckoned with. Synthesizing Freud’s many essayistic elaborations upon repetition, Robert Smith writes, “Even the most esoteric form becomes, qua form, a repeatable event and, in this regard, potentially public … Obsessive actions are no doubt personal—they even serve to ratify the alleged particularity of a given psyche—but their repeatability lends them a formal element which simultaneously takes them beyond that psyche’s exclusive ownership” (2002: 215). Repetition is thereby the critical and indispensable axis whereupon the quiddity of pre-national, pre-colonial jouissances—the “countermodern” in Foucault’s terms—become “publicised,” tried out, ritualistically and obsessively, in a collective framework. Might this not be the reason for the prevalence of this code of repetition in a “popular” cinema that has remained obsessed with the “popular” as that which exceeds, perhaps explodes, the boundaries of representation into the void of incommensurable difference, i.e. the countermodern? To repeat obsessively in popular cinema—and this is what the liminal subjectivations of Hindi cinema appear to be doing, as most cinephiliac charges of stubbornly “formulaic” Hindi film-making assert—is not only to ritualize an obsession with the problem of liminality, but also to make it shamelessly public, thereby defying the confinement of obsessive, “non-modern,” but potentially pleasurable, scandalous, incommensurable, or liberatory practices and subjects to a hidden realm, be it the private sphere or the psyche. Moreover, if one follows Freud further in his thinking of “repetition” as a psychic and analytic process, he states that “the greater the resistance, the more extensively will acting out (repetition) replace remembering” (emphases mine; Freud 1959: vols. 12 and 151)—aka “representing.” To transpose this then, from the private analysis situation to one of public or collective subject-recoveries: the more inevitable and irreducible obstacles there are to such subject-recoveries, to persisting in such recovery operations or what might be called “getting the story right”—either in the form of repression, liminalities, fragmentations, segmentations, state or state-sponsored action, non-state and pre-modern, countermodern, or liminal constituents, etc.— the more repetition or “acting out” presents without representing. It repeats without re-membering (re-membering defined here as conscious retrieval, not

Introduction  7 involuntary repossession) those core and incommensurable countermodern liminalities (Freud 1959: 12: 150–1). Here, as Chakrabarty has written, “historical time is not integral … it is out of joint with itself” (2000: 16). Popular cinema is a natural site for such “acting out,” or repeating to bypass the pursuit of remembering or representing a “right” mythic and ontological self and story, in favor of enacting or performing a collective but dispersed epic of teleological differentiation. Repetition is the crucial screen and mirror for enacting difference, not capturing and taming it. One might say that cinema repeats “not as a memory but as an action” (Freud 1959: 12: 150), while letting it be thought (sometimes) that it is acting out a fully recovered memory, an onto-mythology, of the subject. In this public re-enactment of pre-public ritual, such as cinema, the pre-public countermodern “repeatedly” perforates the containment of public nation-statist modernity (Smith 2002: 217). There are four chapters in this book that look at the repetitive and recursive historic discourses of structure and event in the Hindi film public performatic: Partition and gender embodiments, the enactment of Muslim embodiment, the new enactments of masculine embodiment in the neoliberal era, and the queer masquerade of heternormativity in the crossing from Bollywood to diaspora. National history’s discourse of repetition flows into Hindi cinema’s ongoing discourse of subjectivation as scenarios of re-enactment of embodiment, and of identifications as discrete iterations, involving both avowals and repudiations. The historical model of repetition—of events folding in upon themselves as they unfold, with multiple outcomes—is the concomitant referential matrix for a story-level, generic, and citational model of repetition, as performances and trials of embodiment that lead to liminalities. From 1948 to the present, I argue, Hindi cinema has represented liminal identities of one sort or another as ambiguities that put the coherent nation-state and subjectivation under scrutiny. I stress that, though structures and patterns of repetition as critical tropes of cinematic historic accounts of subjectivation materialize in more intense liminal messages and performances in the nineties, they are actually a long-standing and constitutive characteristic of Hindi cinema. The liminal emerges when a new subjectivation is attempted, usually as response to a current critical event; but with a history of that event, its becoming, haunting its present iteration. It might be possible to model this mathematically by saying “liminality = embodiment = enactment,” though given the nature of the latter two terms, their order might easily be reversed. According to Badiou’s influential elaboration of the event and being, the “evental site is an entirely abnormal multiple; that is, a multiple such that none of its elements are presented in the situation” (2005: 175). Such a “multiple” Badiou describes as being the historic subject is adumbrated in what he calls the “singular” in the same work, that which belongs but is not included. Badiou writes, “all situations are structured twice … there is always both presentation and representation. To think this point is to think … the danger that being-qua-being represents, haunting presentation” (2005: 94). What contains or “frames” this danger to presentation, or to an appearance of order or structure is, for Badiou, the “state of the situation … by means of which the structure of a situation—of any structured presentation

8  Introduction whatsoever—is counted as one, which is to say the one of the one-effect itself” (95). This “state of the situation” emerges as the state in historical society, or what Badiou calls “metastructure,” that which keeps in check the abnormal multiple or void appearing within the count, the liminal threatening to shade into the singular: metastructure guarantees that the one holds for inclusion, just as the initial structure holds for belonging … there is always a metastructure—the state of the situation … It is by means of the state that structured presentation is furnished with a fictional being; the latter banishes, or so it appears, the peril of the void, and establishes the reign … of the universal security of the one … (2005: 97–8, 103) I will contend in this book that this state is not only “fictional”, as Badiou says, but also “theatrical.” Badiou’s metastructural state has, for Derrida, the power of the “absolute performative” (2009: 214). What is clear from that phrase is, of course, that while holding the other players in place in a sort of ontological cordon, the state nevertheless is not immune to the lures of performativity itself, and is, however much a constitutive lawgiver or matrix, also a player. That the state is a player or a performer, even as it is an absolute right- and law-giver (thus an ‘absolute performative’)—even in Badiou’s sense it “makes up” or holds things together like a gel, base, or foundation (easily thinkable stagey, cosmetic words for a concept of the cosmos)—can also be adduced from Derrida, associating the state with the ultimate mark of power, i.e. “ipseity,” or the power to name itself as “self” among others.3 As this ‘ipseity’ marks the state’s absolute sovereignty—its formidable authoritative essence which, ironically, is also the metastructure for its equally quintessential internal fissuring, as both sovereign and beast according to Derrida (2009)—this ipseity also marks its complicity with theatre and performance, for to play roles means to assume, or to have the power to assume or arrogate, a name, a role, a self, an “ipse.” The theatricality of the state or metastructure is a concept that we shall return to again and again in this book, but especially in the first chapter. Crucially for my analysis of cinematic historiography or representation, Badiou continues to say: Once counted as one in a situation, a multiple finds itself presented therein. If it is also counted as one by the metastructure, or state of the situation [translatable as “state” within the context of my analysis], then it is appropriate to say that it is represented. This means that it belongs to the situation (presentation) and that it is equally included in the situation (representation) … (2005: 99) The difference between presentation and representation, in terms of the subject of being, is the subject that belongs versus the subject that is included, i.e. those that are “present” versus those that “count” for the state. Badiou calls the subject that both belongs and is included, that is both presented and represented (the

Introduction  9 former by the structure, the latter by the state), “normal,” and that which is presented but not represented, belonging but not included or counted (the latter by the state), “singular.” The singular is thus already on shaky ground, as presented in the site/situation/ structure, but not counted by the metastructural state. Its exile from the normal and its overlap with the liminal is completed in the instance of the “evental site,” defined earlier as “an entirely abnormal multiple; that is, a multiple such that none of its elements are presented in the situation,” a close affine therefore of “Singular terms … [that] are composed, as multiples, of elements which are [also] not accepted by the count [of the state]” (emphasis mine; 99), though they may be presented within the situation. The singular as the “uncounted”—“this [singular] term exists—it is presented—but its existence is not directly verified by the state” (99)—is therefore marked by the contagion and the contiguity of the liminal, which is neither present nor inside of the count, i.e. neither presented by the society nor represented by the state. Liminality is also the irreducible remainder, which Adorno has suggested thwarts any totalizing conceptualization, however (well) intended, of the object’s aporias. Singularity and normality, or (structural) belonging and (state) inclusion, also align on another axis of the formalist cinematic paradigms usually termed “presentation” and “representation.” It is typically said of Indian cinema that it is “presentational,” unlike Hollywood cinema that is considered “representational”. Built on a very broad distinction between non-Western film as more cathected with non-cinematic forms such as theatre, performance, and spectacle, whereas Western (especially Hollywood) cinema is more “realist”, this characterization of Indian cinema as “presentational” would suggest that its roots include “proletarian” identifications and pleasures, whereas the “representational” classic Hollywood film aligns itself with narrative “modes of the bourgeoisie, realistic theater and fiction.”4 To read the cinematic formalist paradigms, in terms of the paradigms of Badiou’s theory of being and event, would reconfirm the alignment of the presentational with the unruly proletariat or populace, who elude the count of the official state and whose stories are not always amenable to “classic realist” telling, and the affinity of the representational with the aspirational “stable” bourgeoisie, whom the state includes and “represents”. Of course, it is the perennial drift toward the hyper-real presentational—and one might argue the “populist” or populous—that bourgeois criticism of the Indian cinema has long regretted, expressing instead its preference for something more truly representational, i.e. a so-called “normal” reality. The new celebration, or at least resurgence, of the liminal in contemporary Hindi cinema further alienates this longing of the intelligentsia and the cultural elite for a more “intelligent” cinema, whereby such putative elites demonstrate their willingness to devitalize the “singular.” The state that “represents” this group, to return to Badiou again, is the state of the historico-social situation … the essence of the State is that of not being obliged to recognize individuals … the role of the State is to qualify, one by one, each of the compositions of multiples whose general consistency,

10  Introduction in respect of terms, is secured by the situation, that is, by a historical presentation which is ‘already’ structured … (2005: 105) This is also the metastructure that ensures the maintenance of the distinction between the mass presented (belonging) and the citizens represented (included): “the State always re-presents what has already been presented” (Badiou 2005: 106). The bourgeoisie and the citizenry are both presented and represented: “the State … is always consecrated to re-presenting presentation: the State is thus the structure of the historico-social structure, the guarantee that the one results in everything” (106). The singular is presented, and the liminal not even that; neither is represented in the “one” that the state counts and re-secures. Some nineties films present liminality arguably as a shock effect of massive cultural technological and economic change: new media, digitalization, satellite and communications technology explosions, financialization and virtualization of life, for instance. As new globalized subjects were being forged under the hammerings of a virtual or virtuous postmodernity or neoliberalism, the countermodern and subaltern as original, counter-rational, archaic wounds repeatedly appeared as contrary iterations skeptical of a script of transformative transcendence, either cultural or socio-economic.5 The films I will discuss, however, grapple with even more palpable, tangible, and unassimilated shocks of political and historical events and processes, whose catastrophic impact calls forth rituals, indeed orgies, of performative self-fashioning. It is these proliferations of selffashioning that the official state is called in to contain, because The State is fundamentally indifferent to belonging yet it is constantly concerned with inclusion … It is not for nothing that governments, when an emblem of their void wanders about—generally, an inconsistent or rioting crowd—prohibit ‘gatherings of more than three people’ … thus proclaiming that the function of the State is to number inclusions such that consistent belongings be preserved … (Badiou 2005: 107–9) And yet, such unbinding appears to constantly threaten the question of representation in Hindi cinema, earlier mostly politically and thematically, and now also aesthetically and formally. For Badiou’s analysis, the site of this unbinding is the political event, that which “does not suit the philosophical clarity of the political … which makes politics into such a strange domain—in which the pathological … regularly prevails over the normal” and which is the inescapable haunting of structured being by the startling synthesis of an excess and a void.6 The political activist is “a patient watchman of the void instructed by the event, for it is only when grappling with the event … that the State blinds itself to its own mastery” (2005: 111). However tense the Indian public aesthetic debate about the relative worth of the presentational versus the representational might be, the very existence of such a tension suggests that presentation—the singular that belongs but is

Introduction  11 uncounted—is still a possibility within the socio-historical structure, despite it perhaps not being included by the state. Indeed, Hindi cinema has always dealt with issues of sex, gender, sexuality, religion, ethnicity, class, and other “populist” issues, even if it has not ultimately set their status as normative or “normal”, and even it if has instead always tended to privilege the “normal,” either in the sense of the “feudal family romance” or the “bourgeois social romance.” The presented as singular still belongs in the visual text of the cinema. However, the problem of representation is compounded when it is given the task of presenting the “unpresentable,” as Badiou calls it (111), which I translate as the violent transformative event that flies beneath the radar of both the presented and the represented, the singular and the normal. This is the realm of the liminal, whose overlap with the category of the singular presents the ultimate challenge, as well as a tantalizing possibility to representation in addition to presentation. When the masses are violent or turbulent, how does a cinema already juggling the gap between the presented and represented—it does this of course by naturalizing and mythologizing history (Badiou 2005: 176; Barthes 1957: 129, 141)— depict that? Political violence, struggles over national space, and socio-cultural changes are the ur evental sites, “the site of the unpresentable” (Badiou 111), which produce the scenarios and screens for iterations of liminality, and are in turn shaped by them. Public violence is the radically “other” event—in the radically othered and not repeated context—that seems to lead forth structure only to derail it because it “is not a part of the situation … it is on the edge of the void” (Badiou 2005: 175). The event that is unmoored from its obligation to be a part of either mythic structure or statist metastructure is the radically contextually other, for which there is not presentation, which is historical in Badiou’s sense in that historicity is absolutely “relative” and “non-natural” (176). Hence, again, whilst the definition of natural situations is global, the definition of evental sites is local (ibid.). Textual or hyper-textual subjects of modernity and postmodernity require contextualization in material, however; reticulated and displaced durations and locations, or histories and events. While in his recent book on Indian cinema, Rai (2009) saw identities and bodies in the cinematic experience as purely “pre-individual,” nonlinear, non-representational, pre-conscious, and nonhuman, even as a pure human-media interface, I argue that to move away from a conception of identities, bodies, and affect as spatially, sensorially, individualistically and politically “grounded,” and cinematically “represented” is a mistake. Liminalities exceed and frustrate subjectivation, but they are not without social ground and political realities—the physical substrata of performativity—that generate visible effect. Unlike Rai, who follows closely Brian Massumi’s lead in replacing both the “regulating codifications of the Static” (Massumi quoted in Rai 2009: 52; read as “the state” in my formulation), and the “regularizing codings of the ‘social’ or ‘cultural’” (ibid.; read as the “national cultural” in my formulation and the “socio-historical situation” in Badiou’s) with what he calls “the transitive mode of power”—read as the connectivities of human-media interface (Rai 2009: 52). I refuse to relinquish the claim that the liminal emerges out of grounded historical contexts and texts of repetition found in statist and national-cultural iterations, and articulate events and embodiments of subjectivation.7

12  Introduction Had Hindi cinema’s liminal subjects been purely postmodern, their enactment of selfhood might have disavowed space-time coordinates of historicity altogether. This, however, as I hope to show throughout this book, is not the case; instead, the liminal subjects in Indian cinema experiment with a number of possible and desired lived relationships with the present and other temporalities. As Foucault has argued in “What is Enlightenment?”, if modernity is an alignment of temporal consciousness, an attitude of engagement with lived time in the present moment (Drolet 2004: 45), and if engaging with the modern as a temporal present point allows a full inhabiting of space in the present, by contrast, a countermodern attitude necessitates defocusing from the present as a stable, habitable space. The countermodern gestures toward the pre- or the post- , to an elsewhere and another time. Thus the primary form a (post-)modern aesthetic that takes in Hindi cinema, in representing and invoking the liminal national subject found in violent times and places, is a play with the inherent repetitive or mimetic ability of cinema harnessed to explore the possibilities of history as a narrative structure of repetition or iteration of countermodernities. Hindi cinema has a quintessentially countermodern aesthetic that mobilizes plural, alternate temporalities and settings through evoking a subject that enacts itself as a potentially palimpsestic iteration, and thereby as liminal. This cinema concerns itself with multiple, iterated, recursive, and successive relationships of human, space, and time. It manifests, however, a strong quest for habitable locations that permit inhabiting the present without forgetting a past difficult to remember. It experiments with the idea of historic memory—my term for an entente between contending views of history and memory as viable modes for living through the experience of difficult temporality—which allows one to live in the present without necessarily forgetting the past, and also allows a potentially open vision of the future. Location in such a present enables the management of a troubling history as neither dead nor overwhelming, but as permitting the drive toward a future of plural possibilities. Such a futuristic or possibilitarian orientation is not a conscious urge or project of the cinema; it is, however, an aggregate of many narrative resolutions of portrayals of homelessness or dispossession. Structures form upon ideological frameworks as much as upon the apparent temporal and spatial ordering and location of events. As Ray writes of the classic Hollywood cinema, evoking Althusser’s concept of “ideological apparatuses”: the … Cinema never simply reflected contemporary events … the movies responded to what Althusser calls the mass audience’s ‘relationship’ to those events—a perception of them determined to a large extent by the movies themselves and the historic weight of the tradition the cinema had adopted … (1985: 68) Hindi cinematic repetition, a significant ideological, formal, and thematic apparatus or “tradition” in this sense—that mediates historical events not as representations of some tangible reality, but of an ongoing imaginary relationship with that reality—combines with a historical discourse, perhaps a dream, of repetition of structures and events as Indian nation-building. Both history and cinema

Introduction  13 use the trope of repetition to effect the de-centering of the subject as countermodern. The event is, therefore, the object whose ideological re-enactment also re-activates in each instance the hope and desire for a changing historical and cinematic subjective moment. Just as national and unofficial publics have long been engaged in contestations of the “location” of the nation in historic “time,” thereby deploying certain well-worn binaries—tradition versus modernity, indigeneity versus globalization, the material and the hyper-real, the pre-colonial and the colonial, the modern and the postmodern—so Hindi cinema today gestures at the contestations of the pre- , the post-, and the “neo-” colonial in the “reel” reflection of the real. In the process of rereading the event through the apparatus of repetition, the specter of countermodernity is revived. Thus, when we have, as Shohat has argued, not only a “postcolonial” moment in decolonized “third world” countries, but also a simultaneous “neocoloniality” in those same countries, when nominally decolonized countries still operate under the power of “gringostroikas” (Shohat 2000: 132–3), cinema spectatorship, as in India, may well be a segmented pre-/anti-/de-/post-/neocolonial citizenry, differentiated by differential spatio-temporal experiences as much as by shadings of gender and sexual politics, class, ethnicitiy, urbanization, Westernization, etc. For this spectator or citizen, nothing in the “present” particularly integrates the dissociative reality of spatio-temporal crosshatchings and differential affect. The “repetitive” dynamic of cinema and cinematic history mirrors post-independence South Asian differentials of political power and civic rights, and local, regional, or communal disarticulations of power and rights among “authentic” and “inauthentic” subjects of decolonization and globalization; those who experience national space and time on quite distinct topographical registers and asymmetrical developmental clocks. Hindi cinema is consumed by different time, space, and affective registers within the putative present moment in India. A mélange of personality cults, star followings, generic foci and obsessions, stylistic and technological innovations in film-making, and plot and theme staples and “remakes” have reflected this wide range of spectatorial differences within the “postcolony.” Perhaps the most critical basal fault-line, in this regard, is the awkward contemporaneity of the neocolonial and the postcolonial in India today, which suggests a paradoxical conflation of past and present, collapsing the radical discreteness of separate events in time and turning a discourse upon history into a neoliberal presentist static, instead of a modulated and sequential narrative about time. In other words, within the so-called “post”-colonial world of India, neocolonialism’s crosscurrent disaggregates citizen-formations as articulated by different fortunes of decolonization. This radical and disaggregative plurality is one of the social “realities” that support the persistent discourse of repetition in Hindi cinema, perhaps in addition the cultural need for that discourse. As per Foucault’s cartography of history, “It is the historian’s task to uncover discursive and nondiscursive practices in their plurality and contingency, in order to reveal the fields that render intelligible an otherwise heterogeneous collection of events” (Flynn 1994: 39). My work here on Indian cinematic history’s spaces and times of subject-making as a history of discursive practices of repetition engages precisely with this task.

14  Introduction In the co-implication and co-existence of neo- and postcoloniality (Shohat 2000: 133), in these displacements and transformations of space and time, neocolonialism reappears and repeats, yet rephrases and dislocates postcolonial aspirations, producing an ironic phatic aporia of the subject in the process. Discourses of national integrity, development, security, and terror express the imbrication of two displaced temporalities of the future of colonialism—“post-” and “neo-”—in the liminal modality of repetition. If in the nation the colonial is “pre-”, “post-”, and “neo-colonial” simultaneously, the cinema is potentially the allochronic, as well as synchronic flickering of the “pre-” postcolonial upon the screen of a “postcolonial” postmodernity that has appeared as the cultural cargo of a primarily neocolonial vessel. Cinematic stylistic and thematic divergences, which can perhaps be called aesthetic pluralism—real versus hyper-real modes, modernist versus postmodern aesthetics—capture and cover the resurgent countermodernities of the colonial and the anti-colonial within the post/neo/colonial. In this way, different eras, configurations, and grounds of the social, the material, and the psychic intersect in cinematic text and image. The crosshatching of style and message is a temporal dialogue between the colony and its aftermath (but not its end), as much as a distance between the ex-colony and its “postcolonial” spaces (i.e. between West and East). Therefore, it is crucial to map this particular temporality and spatiality of the “postcolonial”—its co-extension with the pre-colonial, colonial and neocolonial—upon other co-extant binaries of real and hyper-real, modern and postmodern, in cinematic narrative and styles redolent of countermodern forces. I have identified historical discourses of durable structures and mutable events—frequently found in cinema as particularities of statist nestings of events within the circuit of national-cultural structural codes with either repetitive or differential outcomes—as constitutive grounds for the discourses of iterability and performativity that “embody” the liminal in the various films I discuss. Events that are the staging spaces for reenactments of the subject are very much still to be found coded through available indices and icons of the national and the statist, and throughout this book, therefore, national and statist space and time will remain key players. Critical discussion of Hindi cinema used to be dominated by variations on the concept of the nation (Chakravarty, Vasudevan, Rajadhyaksha, Prasad, Sarkar, etc.). Even in a retrospect of his own work on cinematic melodrama and that of the prevailing discourse on Indian film, Vasudevan wrote in 2010: In the Indian context, the political frame has inevitably meant an engagement with questions of colonial, anti-colonial, and post-colonial history, and has tended to be dominated by discussions about the place of cinema in the discourses, policies, and practices relating to questions of nationhood and citizenship. This hermeneutic has more recently been supplemented by analytics of transnationalism, space, urbanity, audiences, ethnicity, sexuality, new media, and cinema’s metadiscursivity and postmodernity (Roy, Mazumdar, Jaikumar, Virdi,

Introduction  15 Gopalan, Rai, Gehlawat, etc.). Most of this latter body of scholarship defines identity as plural but coherent categories within the nation, such as gender, religion, ethnicity, sexuality, and so on. In navigating these two bodies of scholarship toward a yet-unexplored discussion of the formal juxtapositions of “iterability” in cinematic story and cinematic historiography, I further take into account work by scholars of film, postcolonialism, feminism, anthropology, performance studies, subaltern studies, and area studies to effect my own substantive shift in reading a cinema that has hitherto been seen primarily as the image gallery of a fractured nation-state. I depart from other bodies of scholarship by calling for an investigation into the concept of identity itself, as a fluid and liminal formation. Consequently, I put the theories of the “event” proposed by Badiou, Derrida, Turner, Sahlins, and others in dialogue with the theories of pre-national and precolonial, colonial and postcolonial subjectivity as proposed by Chakrabarty, Ramanujan, Pandey, Amin, Das, and more to show how the re-mapping of the South Asian event—in terms of its historic potential for expressing liminality and subjunctive identities—brings out the operations of the countermodern as key to India’s cinematic modernity, as well as to postmodernity. Unearthing repetition as a Hindi cinematic and historical master tool of handling the sensitive topic of subjectivation (becoming subjects) is not merely another way of pointing out the uniqueness or distinctness of Indian cinema, or of the interpretation thereof. Instead, it is a crucial underscoring of cinema’s handling of the “real” in a social and political setting, which presents the liminal subject within evolving aesthetic and representational frames that resonate with the insights of poststructuralist and postmodern queries into the subject, and might have fruitful implications for the disciplinary study of cinema in general. The first chapter of this book, “Structure, Event, and Liminal Practices in Recent Hindi Films,” discusses historical discourses of repetition in their codifications as durable structure or mutable event. I cover three different political attitudes to the liminal by way of various implicit historiographies in three recent Hindi films that dramatize citizenship. Through comparing the theories of Sahlins, Ramanujan, Massumi, and Derrida about the nature and significance of the temporal event, and applying them to Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi (“A Thousand Such Desires,” 2003), Rang de Basanti (“Paint It Saffron,” 2006), and Mumbai Meri Jaan (“Mumbai My Life,” 2008), I demonstrate how the films exemplify different styles of historic narration, either privileging larger structures and historic fables of the national-cultural, or invoking a statist view of history as reiteration of events that produces indeterminacy as to whether they are repetitive and identical or successive and dissimilar. The latter indeterminacy inevitably raises the vexed question of development or progress and their ethics, in addition to logic. Thus, the implicit historiography of Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi—a directorial voice-over synthesizing disparate political and private experiences of heterogeneous subjects in postcolonial times—reflects Sahlins’ conception of modern national history as reiteration of mythic, pre-colonial, and anti-colonial structures. Rang De Basanti, on the other hand, reflects Ramanujan’s view of event-based histories of the modern state, representing as it does the critical historical “event” as a privileged statist utterance, which ends up

16  Introduction flattening out the heterogeneity, affective specificity, and radical diffuseness of events and their actors. Lastly, Mumbai Meri Jaan departs from the notion of any event’s stasis, instead recalling Derrida’s view that repetition implies alteration: no event, context, or identity is coeval or reducible to another or to a particular form. Moreover, in this view, every identity or event is potentially unreadable. Mumbai Meri Jaan rearticulates altogether the nation-state, structure-event binary in foregrounding as its subject the unclassifiable resistance of the dispossessed and the hopeless, the politically uncounted public. Since the nineties the liminal has emerged as the strongest constituent of the public, as Hindi cinema breaks with its past forms. In the second chapter, “Imagining the Past in the Present: Violence, Gender, and Citizenship in Hindi Films,” I consider how depictions of South Asian postPartition tropes of violence, abduction, and rescue of women—representing liminal sexual identity-formations and porous national borders between India and Pakistan—return in the enactments of persecuted or marginalized women in Hindi films of the forties, fifties, and notably, after the nineties. Films like Mother India (1957), Garm Hawa (“Hot Winds,” 1973) and Veer-Zaara (“Veer and Zaara,” 2004) re-tell the story of the disenfranchised woman, whose romantic or sexual misfortune hints at the continuing trauma of the gender violence of the 1947 Partition, putting into question the cohesion of the nation-state itself. These films address women’s experiences in India’s modernity as important “events”— defining Indian citizenship as part of a long history, with many iterations of these events—but indicate how the female citizen is repeatedly an elusive subject at risk, regardless of the eras of setting and filming. The third chapter, “The Man Previously Known as the Actor: When Shah Rukh Khan Reappeared as Himself,” shows how manipulations of ethnic liminality and star text ambiguities—similar to racial “passing”—previously made it possible for Muslims to become superstars in Hindi cinema. Rarely, however, did a Muslim star play a Muslim character on-screen. This chapter’s focus is on Muslim contemporary male super-star Shah Rukh Khan and his first performance of Muslimness as on-screen liminality, in a recent film titled Chak de India (“Three Cheers India,” 2007), which seemingly abjures the star’s “passing” only to re-inscribe the character’s “passing” as the film’s primary story. Shah Rukh Khan plays Kabir Khan, the Muslim captain of the Indian men’s hockey team and, after dismissal as a result of anti-Muslim prejudice, the successful coach of the marginalized Indian women’s hockey team. Despite the ill treatment that Kabir Khan receives, his relentless syncretic evocation of “playing for India” against the grain of communal rivalries and gender boundaries displays the statist mode of national integration: an enactment of ethnic liminality as salvific and a simultaneous avowal and erasure of ethnic liminalities. Shah Rukh/ Kabir Khan’s Muslimness is set in motion by this film’s statist mode precisely to rewrite the event of anti-Muslim communalism as the potential starting point of communal integration. In the fourth chapter, “Romancing Religion: Bollywood’s Painless Globalization,” I contrast the unruly liminal body of super-star Amitabh Bachchan, in his socially conscious “angry young man” films of the seventies

Introduction  17 and eighties, with the docile male bodies servicing the state and official economy in later popular family romances built around consumerist lifestyles, notably the trend-setting Hum Aapke Hain Koun! (“Who Are We to You?”, Sooraj Barjatiya, 1994). In the 1990s, the Indian economy was officially liberalized. Critics have argued that this represents arrest of a singular narrative of nation-formation in favor of one aligned with world capitalist dominance, and that the ethos of liberalization flattened political dissent under neocolonial imperatives that have now been successfully privatized. In Bollywood, too, the male body underwent a transformation from spectacular resistance to painless corporatization; masculinity was recast as a new liminality, slickly traversing separate gendered spheres and palliating potential class struggle. By foregrounding conjugal melodramas of the rich as the stuff of social history, such films dissolved social crisis, class conflict, and the critical event into neoliberalism’s triumph over popular dissent. In the fifth and final chapter, “Love Triangles at Home and Abroad: Male Embodiment as Queer Enactment,” queerness emerges in the twenty-first century as a new articulated liminal category in South Asian diasporic identity narratives. Ostensibly heteronormative films depict love between men in transnational spaces, reincarnating South Asian liminalities as viable diasporic masculinities. In box office favorites Kal Ho Na Ho (“Tomorrow May Never Come,” 2003) and Jaane Mann (“Beloved,” 2006), two straight men bond over their love for the same woman so much as to “act” queer before diegetic and exegetic spectators. However, queer masquerade paradoxically re-stabilizes heterosexual object choices in these two films; comically performed homosocial relations end up subtending and surrogating “serious” heterosexual romance. Homosocial affect is, moreover, protean: these films show heteronormative nationalism and queer performance serving interchangeably as vehicles for primordial nationalism (language, religion, culture) in transnational contexts. The geopolitical sites and transnational trajectory of “global South Asian” homosociality are as unexpectedly sutured as the odd re-inscribing of primordia and heterosexuality through performing queerness. The characters in the films effortlessly traverse a world strung between Bombay and New York, and in their transnational repertoires of male embodiment, queerness as a flexible scenario accommodates both so-called Eastern and Western values within the frame of nationalist brotherhood. As an allegory of masculinist nationalism, but as its split double, queer performance estranges the viewer from any possible critique of a patriarchal and heteronormative nationalism in the diaspora. Beginning with a review of the films of the “tall” hyper-male Amitabh Bachchan hero of the seventies, I trace a “rhizomatic” embodiment of masculinity in Bollywood’s new transnational heroes. While an extended discussion of form in Hindi cinema is largely beyond this book’s scope, I do wish to make two observations extending the forms and conventions of the subject to another “vernacular” art form that circulates in India, i.e. calendar art. In tracing the complex ebbs, flows, and crosscurrents of demand and supply in the popular Indian calendar art industry and its consumer base, Jain has recently alerted us to the flow and play of transactional and material relations in the conception, production, circulation, and consumption of the popular calendar (Jain 2007). Stylistically, vernacular art in India, such as the

18  Introduction bazaar calendar works, athwart aspirations of colonial and postcolonial European Enlightenment-inflected rational bourgeois modernities, by offering visual aesthetics and affects as non-representational (the visual or performative frame does not lay self-legitimating claim to a pure or “realist” capture and representation of the object or the scenario, effecting instead a dynamic return of visual art to the singular thing out there in the world, the “real”). Jain also re-categorizes the power of the image, often sacred or divine, to intercede in entirely secular transactions, as well as public and private exchanges of affect, faith, and profit in Indian marketplaces and other economies. Being presentational and participating in a performative ethico-politics, rather than in a juridical representation of the subject, like calendar art, Hindi cinema tends to favor “not a just image” but “just an image”8 (though the films themselves often iconize and valorize their performative presentation of change as reform). Moreover, Hindi cinema captures the transactional religio-secular hybridity of vernacular art; by unmooring from representationality and re-anchoring in performative politics, Hindi cinema, like Indian calendar art, retains a political voice, a seat in the popular parliament of critical perspectives on institutions, power relations, and disciplinary regimes of the nation-state, thereby maintaining diverse and often discrete claims to the ethico-political. Moreover, both of these formal characteristics confirm my assertion that Hindi cinema is a quintessentially liminal form in the anthropological sense discussed above, because it does its cultural work and has its cultural effect within the realm of the popular subconscious, both eluding and exceeding the agitprop earnestness of postcolonial modernist aesthetics (Jain 2007: 7–18). Popular cinematic and journalistic discourses upon Hindi cinema after independence appear to have had very little problem with the “naïve reflection” school of filmic analysis, and cinematic form was held by such discourses to be subservient to the project of “reflecting” the “nation” accurately and widely. An editorial in Filmfare (6:17, 16 August 1957) titled “After Ten Years of Independence” declares (italics mine): in some vitally important departments the majority of our films today, if they are not actually worse than those of 1947, are certainly no better … The inspiration then was drawn mainly from the life of the people, past and current, and the films reflected the culture, customs and way of life of the country, which is what films should do … Today it is the exception rather than the rule for the average film to serve that first principle of motion picture production … The remedy lies in the filmgoers themselves, their developing taste and judgment and in the conscience of the average producer—both elements of dubious efficacy for some time to come … On the credit side it must be said that the proportion of good pictures in the annual output has risen steadily … there is no doubting the progressive achievement in respect of quality and content as well as in the production vales of our pictures … Among the best features of progress is the keen and growing interest taken by the Government in the industry, manifest in a policy which is designed to foster and encourage it without undue interference and control … Several

Introduction  19 of our pictures have won distinguished awards at various international film festivals in competition with the world’s best product, the names of our stars are getting to be known and the doors of the world market are opening slowly to our industry with vast populations avid for knowledge of us and our country … In unhesitatingly declaring the accurate reflection of national life as the summum bonum of Indian cinema, this editorial and others like it in contemporary film journals would appear at first to be promoting a theory of film as a naïve representation of national life, merely a sort of ethnographic product and export. However, it is productive to re-read this lengthy quotation as evidence of the interrelated presentational and transactional quality of Hindi cinema discussed above (Jain 2007). Primarily, the relationship between cinema and nation-state posited and advocated by the 1957 Filmfare editorial is one of cinematic performance (characterization, mise en scène, theme, or narrative) as presentation of the emergent nation-state and its multitudes. Only secondarily and disapprovingly does the editorial see film-making in India as the business of telling “realist” narratives that might result in “shoddy imitations which have nothing of our national life in them beyond the language, the costumes and the names of the characters”—a clear dig at Hollywood influences. Also during this period, debate on the future of film in India was well afoot; the S. K. Patil Film Inquiry Committee had been appointed by Prime Minister Nehru himself in 1951, in response to major agitations by film producers, exhibitors, and distributors since at least 1949 to institute needed reform in taxation and revenue structures, as well as by film appreciation societies and cinephiles demanding state intervention in improvement of cinematic taste and audience awareness. Though nothing came for a long while of the economic subsidies, infrastructural support, and tax restructuring proposed by the Patil Committee, its recommendations did result in the establishment of the Film and Television Institute, the National Film Archives, the Film Finance Corporation, the Indian Motion Picture Export Corporation, Hindustan Photo Films, and the Indian International Film Festival. These were all successfully transacted concessions to the surging demands of the film industry for government recognition and support. My book is also concerned with spaces, cinematic and socio-politico-historical. I reflect upon what might be seen as a national longing for liminality, or for a space to be national, i.e. placed. My thinking about this topic is indebted to a thought-provoking essay by Niranjana, “Nationalism Refigured,” wherein she explained the emergence of the new “‘post-national-modern’ (not the postmodern, and not the postnational) to describe this situation (in post-independence India) in which old terms are acquiring new significations” (2000). Though I am struck by the prescience of her finding of “new identities” in popular cinema that has taken “new directions” since the 1990s—as will be seen below, this is exactly my contention in chapter two of this book—there are three foundational points where, in my view, her analysis does not go far enough. First, I would disagree with her axial claim that “Unlike gender, however, caste and community (or religious identity) are not privileged sites for the representation or staging of

20  Introduction modernity and nationhood” (2000: 139). On the contrary, I feel that it is an undue sidelining of these “other” new identities in favor of working out the strategic deployment of the “female modern” that leads several feminist critics of Indian cinema into a too narrow visual aperture upon the complexities of Hindi and Indian cinema’s refraction of the identity question. Indeed, when I discuss the refracting of the question of modern identities through the figure of the woman in Indian films of the forties and nineties in the second chapter, I suggest precisely how gender or sexual identities are not precipitated prior to other identity narratives and performances, but are located squarely in the latter’s midst in ways that are mutually constitutive of the entire complex of gender and sexuality, ethnic, religious, and communal identities. Second, I find it more profitable to engage with the question of identities in Indian cinema as a long-term and historically embroiled process, not merely an inevitable outgrowth of post-Nehruvian modernity re-morphing miraculously in nineties cinema (Niranjana 2000: 139, 141). Again, this forms part of my argument in chapter two. Critical to my project is the contention that Hindi cinema has been grappling (at least since 1948) with the fundamental indeterminacy of identity within an evolving historical discourse of nationhood that predates cinema. I hope to show this mostly in the second chapter, but also in the first chapter’s analyses of reiterative and recursive cinematic ideologies and praxes of historiography, as opposed to so-called “modern” breaks from the past, which result in fatefully and faithfully revealing supposedly fresh and unique events to be commensurate repetitions of prior conjunctures in the mythic structures of national history. The third point of my dissent from Niranjana is in shifting the emphasis away from her (and other scholars’) key term, “nation.” My book will engage energetically, but not quiescently, with this rubric of a putative “national” cinema. Of course, many eminent industry figures—including D. G. Phalke, V. Shantaram, Raj Kapoor, Mehboob Khan, Yash Chopra, and Aamir Khan—have made films with the figure of the nation as the ground of their cinema. Much troubles this claim of the Hindi cinema in India as a “national” cinema, however. My contention is that the idea of the nation in this cinema is just a contention, a ground that is ultimately a figure for absence. Nationalism is, therefore, a top-level simulacrum in this cinema. It is the figuration of the ground of absence as itself the figure that in part makes this cinematic discourse of nationalism a modernist mirage and a postmodern simulacrum. When I interviewed Hindi cinema industry personnel, many indeed ridiculed my use of the world “nationalism.” What “ism,” they asked, was signified by the industry’s unswervingly commercial nature—capital-“ism”, perhaps, they asked archly.9 Sarkar argues in his strategic reading of Indian cinema as an allegory of the South Asian Partition that the overt disavowal of it by Hindi cinema auteurs like Yash Chopra is a sign of their “oblique depictions of the experience,” an obliqueness and dissociation, which Sarkar reads throughout the corpus of 1950s Hindi cinema as calling for an allegorical reading to uncover the foundational stratum of Partition trauma (Sarkar 2009: 121). I agree with Sarkar’s call to read the allegorical or disavowal mode of major film-makers since the

Introduction  21 Partition—whereby the fiction metastasizes its own distance from the “real” event, making the referential linkage oblique and only partially decipherable— as a “meta-allegory” (2009: 124) constitutive of the form of Hindi cinema set upon precipitating the nation as a “sublime object of ideology” trumping the trauma of Partition. I argue, however, a need to take further the disavowal mode itself as a primary constitutive rhetoric of the Hindi cinematic apparatus, and as a meta-allegory of the cinema’s frisky disavowal of over-determined critical concepts such as nationalism and nationhood. Indeed, in many senses, what makes Lutgendorf’s “ideologically perfect” film (Lutgendorf 2006: 240) is the restructuring of the discourses on film diegesis and modes of production and their relationship to a “real” by ideology’s overdetermining and transformative power (Ray 1985). The overdetermination of ideological restructuring is most apparent in the “distinguishing characteristic of the sign—but the one that is least apparent at first sight—[which] is that in some way it always eludes the individual or social will” (Saussure 1965: 17). If film-makers have disavowed an explicit concern with Partition, a ruse that can be unveiled only via acutely allegorical strategies of viewing their films, I might suggest that other disavowals—such as that of the iconic concept of “national-ism” that I encountered—might point to a constitutive structure of disclaimers in Hindi cinema, extending beyond the thematic and historical node of the Partition. This structural pattern of disclaiming, if specious, should still be taken seriously as an ideological form of genre consolidation in Hindi cinema. Film-makers’ habits of disavowing specific theme or content should, critically, be de-linked from specific ascriptions of false consciousness and productively re-linked to a habitual abjuration of icons, like nationalism, in favor of flexible liminalities, such as commercial, cinematic, civic, and spectatorial identities that are always in flux. In other words, it is through the habits of disavowing—discursively and technically—fixed cathexes to discrete and immutable unitary themes, ideologies, purposes, and frames of subjectivation that the generic and generative form of Hindi cinema might be understood. A short reprise of recent Hindi films like Mumbai Meri Jaan (Nishikant Kamat, 2008), Don I (Farhan Akhtar, 2006), Rang de Basanti (Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra, 2006), and Raajneeti (Prakash Jha, 2010) reveal that a new era of experimentation with characterizations, themes, and visual and narrative techniques in Hindi cinema has merely distillated a core quality since its inception: its ability to simulate the blank space of the nation, or the nation as a quintessentially blank and writable space. The question of space or place is highly important here. Space or place are recurrent and productive topics for a project on the “national” or its simulations; the space where the figure of the cinematic nation ought to cohere is, and has, been the ground of national cinema. And yet, this space is revealed in historical and personal musings as permanently unfixed, and frequently perambulatory or dislocated. In this space the nation itself is cinematic, or a representation of experimental manifestations of spatialized subjects. This is a point to which I will return in chapter two. A new turn to hyperreality, simulacra, intertexutality, and metadiscursivity is now prominent in this cinema, as viewers of the current crop of films, such as Ram Gopal Varma’s ouvre, Dev D (Anurag Kashyap, 2009), Fashion (Madhur

22  Introduction Bhandarkar, 2008), Ek Chalis ki Last Local (Sanjay M. Khanduri, 2007), Oye Lucky Lucky Oye (Dibakar Banerjee, 2008) etc., might concede. This hyperreality and metadiscursivity extend to identity politics. Identities are now overtly geo-televisual, globalized, pluralized, decentered, hyphenated, and disjunctive, as well as simulated in many new Hindi films (in Don I, for instance). Indeed, in this post-subjective moment, identities in Hindi cinema are crystallizations of liminality that together, at best, constitute a simulation of the “nation” or the national. This post-subjective moment forcefully precipitates recognition that, instead of being a mirror of reality, of a juxtastructure10 of identity and its symbolizations, Bombay cinema has always been hyperreal. The history of this cinema might be written as the progression of representational work from the material to the hyperreal.11 A good instance of this occurs in a recent kitschy juxtastructure of the material and the symbolic in Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire (2008) in a scene of the signing of Amitabh Bachchan’s photo—recently shit-spattered—for the hero Jamal by a disembodied Bachchan himself.12 From the kinesthetically dizzying mixing of the suturing eye-line match of Boyle’s spectator rushing horizontally along at the diegetic fan’s breathless pace and the vertiginous descent of the camera onto a photograph being held out by an invisible hand to an invisible but very tall man, we can tell that the Big B autographs Jamal’s copy of his image. However, the intersecting camera and eye movements that provide a duplicated suture—with implied fan and implied star at first—disrupt suture in favor of the image itself within the image on screen. The star’s photograph standing in absentia signifies the dual spectrality of the star, these two spectralizations also occurring in the pro-filmic metadiscourse on Amitabh Bachchan the superstar, and the extra-filmic metadiscourse of Slumdog Millionaire upon stardom. This image becomes the thing itself rather than its sign, and replaces the body of Bachchan, or at least makes his image the desired object of his own gaze as ours, and it also vanishes the character in favor the spectatorial position within and outside the shot, the film. Put another way, this image is the node of convergence of star and spectator, both spectralized yet living only in the spectatorial function itself and in possibilities of suture with the star/image per se. The exegetic spectator knows that the image collapsing the relational polarity of the cinematic gaze has circulated from a communal “body”—the public toilet with the waste-pit underneath—and has the potential to transmit infection from live public bodies to the iconic but invisible hero, to whom the entire film is in any case a partial homage. The image and the star or spectator do not, however, know this. They are impervious to this infection of knowledge. The effacement of the characters, spectators, and stars from the screen itself—leaving nothing thereon but an image that mirrors the star, whose eye is, however, also that of camera and exegetic spectator and a copy of their desires, staunches the flow, the transmission of the real, the body of the public, with a simulacrum of presence multiply mediated and thereby distanced. The flow of organism is stopped by the inscription of a magisterially and mechanically delivered signature—the autograph—arresting the tremulous and messy body of the fan and the public.

Introduction  23 This signature itelf is a replacement, a hyperrealization, moreover, of material and affective context and content.13 The real meets the hyperreal; Big B’s absent body—forever sought and never gained—replaced by his signature, transforms mirror into simulacrum, Bachchan’s sign for his flesh and blood. The cinematic production of the hyper-real is itself a copy of the larger cinematic tendency to dismantle mirroring with suturing that destabilizes and rips up ontologically distinct subjectivities, proclaiming that the image is both the star, the spectator, and no one at all, as well as everyone, i.e. the public that defecates. Fecal matter and sign are contrastive, as well as mutually illustrative. The public’s bodily waste, public materiality, in the form of excrement on the photograph, is neither redeemed nor recognized by the sign, the star signature, which itself does not inhabit its own embedding and imprinting, its clearly mechanically repetitive gesture building not momentousness, but sheer self-duplicating momentum. Hence, Bachchan’s bodily absence combined with the spectrality of his image and the mechanical-ness of his signature—foregrounding absence in signature of “signification,” of collaborative meaning-making—serves to “re-inscribe” that which the shot pretends to disavow: the absence of meaningful difference, of meaningful subject positions and affect, in favor of the production of simulacra. Even when star texts were holistic and iconic, they simultaneously coded an absence and a hyperbolic presence, as Majumdar has shown (2003). Majumdar has argued that the classic Hindi cinema encrypted the melodramatic text and the star text in its multiple roles, in order to reinforce the power of a cinema where meaning remained in excess of its modes of representation: meaning remained incoherent and sometimes anxious (2003: 90). According to Majumdar, the proliferation of the Hindi cinema star text in double or multiple cinematic roles was an “attempt to grasp at and establish the ‘truth’ of the actual ‘being’ of the star,” because otherwise the phantom “otherness” of the star remained forever elusive and inaccessible (91). It follows that the question of the other, of the liminal presence of others, spectralized even the very iconicity of individual “heroes” of Hindi cinema and sought multiple avenues of expression in the “double” or “multiple” role. Today, because of media, advertising, and multi-platform communication technologies in India, the actor’s star text is greater yet than the sum of the parts of their film roles (Shah Rukh Khan is the best example of this). The star’s image as a product endorser is prolific, extra-cinematic, and ubiquitous. Hence, the “expressive incoherence,” with its attendant “liminal” possiblities of otherness that melodrama and multiple-role casting were said to allow yesteryear’s actors’ star texts to exhibit (Majumdar 2003: 90), now continues in the market-driven pluralization and de-centering of the actor’s commercial appearances outside of the film frame, i.e. outside of the cinematic appearance of stardom. These new proliferations of the star text are driven by an extremely coherent and focused logic of the marketplace. Anupama Chopra writes that past star icons had been wary of plugging products; this use of their star text seemed to endanger their stardom. Dilip Kumar apparently declined proposals to endorse products, saying, “Hum ishtihaaron ke liye nahin bane hain” (“I was not made for advertisements,” Chopra 2007: 158). Whether or not stars did endorse products, this much

24  Introduction is clear: it appeared critical that they not appear to do so. To appear to do so would be to squander their star text in the service of popular consumer culture. Not to be “consumed” casually and publicly, the star text was meant to be a hoarded commodity, to be multiplied only in order to enhance or mystify star appeal and alienation, and to hint at the idea of otherness personified by actorly polyphormousness. In the newer eras of Hindi cinema we see the classic melodramatic mode and the idea of an iconic star with a hoarded and secret liminality giving way to what might only be called a speed rush of hyper-real simulations, ambiguous characterization and casting, remakes, and remixes (in the music industry). This new stylistic signature is indeed the mark of a recurrent and singular postmodernity in Indian cinema. The entry of vast amounts of “new talent” into contemporary Hindi cinema is also further evidence of this de-centering of the older star text with the newer postmodern text: more is less, copy is as alluring and charismatic as original. What might the present postmodern and consumer-conscious mode of Hindi cinema have to do with the absence or obsolescence of the past melodramatic mode of that cinema? How does the proliferation of the hyper-realized star text on extra-cinematic media—including national advertising space—affect the creation of a postmodern symbolic of Hindi cinema today? And regarding the question of liminality, has untapped and uncommodified “otherness” been entirely lost in the flood of marketed demystification of the star text as a coherent extra-filmic site of consumption (product endorsements), or located itself elsewhere even though star power must still encompass some of this spectral quality for the film to work at all, according to the schema of visual consumption suggested by Majumdar (2003: 90–1)? If the residue of otherness, of elusive star essence is whittled away by the ubiquity and overproduction of the star text in advertising and marketing, what happens to the cinema’s actual ability to suggest a non-consumerist, non-materialist (but embodied) liminality? Given the absence of a “photo” effect (Ellis 1982), whereby the filmed object is felt to be simultaneously absent and present in this postmodern moment of star hyper-realization and hyper-representation, and as the power of the star image to suggest multiple embodied liminal identities is now replaced by higher speed cameras delivering pastiche, parody, fragment, disjuncture, and deconstructive narratives of identity, I would argue that the cinema now finds liminality not so much in the shadowy otherness of the star text, as in fractured representations of character through new casting choices, and in fractured ideas of subjectivity inherent in the new film-making style itself. Such choices and representations show up in the hyperrealities popularized by the globalized technologies and look of post-nineties Hindi cinema, wherein simulacra and metatextuality are themselves cinematic themes, narratives, and languages of cinema. I devote considerable discussion to the hyperrealities, simulacra, metatextualities, postmodern surface, and globalized technologies of Rang de Basanti, Mumbai Meri Jaan, and Billu Barber in the next chapter of this book. I argue, therefore, that identities in Indian cinema have always been figured liminally, and they continue to appear that way despite the alterations to star text in a hyper-mediated consumer culture. This is because identities are discursive

Introduction  25 constructs, as postmodern understandings would suggest, and both unitary and liminal identities are indices within that discourse. If one asks what an Indian is, one must also ask how that identity is produced. What is an Indian? In a sense this book extends to a study of Indian cinema some critical questions that Amin has asked on the meaning of citizenry and nationhood: “The story of Indian nationalism … is written up as a massive undoing of Colonial Wrongs by a non-violent and disciplined people” (1994: 2; see also Anderson 1991). Following Amin, I want not only to refute a unitary assumption about the citizen’s body and identity in the cinematic nation, but also to anatomize and graph it into its constitutive liminalities. What if Indians became “Indians” because or when the British colonized them? Or when the pressure of neoliberal economics pushed against and extended the idea of authentic “Indianness”? Or when the diaspora inserted themselves into the national fabric as de-territorialized votaries of the nation? I will therefore distance myself somewhat from the use of the term “postcolonial” with reference to Indian cinema in the rest of this book, usually only including the term within quotation marks; “postcolonial” suggests to me a strong bias toward assuming that the cinema and its “material” had an achieved identity that film-makers were consciously or unconsciously realizing. I would have much preferred consistently to the use of the term “post-independence” throughout, whatever the limitations of this latter term, as it rids analysis of these teleological or ontological assumptions about Indian cinema. However, as a practical matter, the term “postcolonial” cannot be entirely avoided since it serves, at the very least, a shorthand and near-patois function in the matter I am discussing; still, I am eschewing the temporal and teleological assumptions implied by the notion of the “postcolonial,” as the postcolonial assumes an inevitable cathexis of cinema and the nation with a particular relation to temporality and historical periodization as expressed in the progression of modern or postmodern, colonial or postcolonial, etc. I instead argue for a reassessment of Indian cinematic content and form as a recursive folding and looping back through the cinema’s own textual and contextual history; I propose that cinema in India has always been postmodern in a singular and non-eurocentric way. The preference for the term “post-independence” in this book is guided by that understanding of Indian cinema’s specific postmodernity. As Barthes proclaimed, myth is that which transforms history into nature (1957: 129). Indian cinema might thus be seen as a mythology whereby a political history of disjunctures is naturalized into a unitary ideology of the nation: “the reality of the world into an image of the world” (141). The chaotic material order that resembles Lacan’s real, the politically and socially ambiguous identities that crisscross it, and the incredulous gaze on the rift between the two, are conjoined into a mythic narrative concerning that very rift, ambiguity, and chaotic material.14 Following Barthes’ analysis, cinema is the myth that literally stretches the sign or form of the national/liminal/historical into a form of the fecund/regenerative national/natural. However, the principle of inchoateness in the shape of unruly liminal subjects keeps obtruding upon the perfect coherence of so-called national form. To elaborate, after an era in the late nineties of excessive essentialist constructions of pure “Indian” identities in Hindi cinema—Subhash Ghai,

26  Introduction YashRaj films, and, indeed, Aamir Khan led the way here—Indian cinema is now transparently engaged in the projection of “national” identity as in itself a liminal, indeterminate concept: terms that are potentially useful are pan-national, pan-regional, post-national, etc. The post-subjective turn in the Indian film is still predicated on the intersections of spaces and bodies, on habitable loci, however. Lived space is a mutual configuration of the material and of the psychic. Its materiality allies it to Lacan’s real, where materiality is a traumatic reminder of that which one seeks to transcend by crossing over into realms of desire, i.e. into the symbolic realm of language, representation, and the psyche. Hence, retaining a focus on embodied identities, on laboring, and on political life that operate within (overlapping) spheres of legitimacy and violence, remains crucial even within this neoliberal postmodernity. Violence embodies and also confuses bodies and identities; as I said earlier, it would be a mistake to see such South Asian postmodern cultural formations detaching completely from a politics of national particularism, from embodiment, and to think that a ground that is ultimately a figure for absence is not itself figurative. This is particularly evident in the cinematic discourse of political terror and state sovereignty, wherein, no matter how disembodied and “imagined” representations of state-ism and terrorism are, the palpable human body is undeniably present in both the anti-state and the statist perpetrators of violence and vengeance. The iconic and darsanic embodiment of the “fighting machines,” who also gyrate in contemporary MTV-dominated styles to the pulsating beats of physical sexuality in the song and dance sequences of films like Main Hoon Na (Farah Khan, 2004), Mission Kashmir (Vidhu Vinod Chopra, 2000), and Fiza (Khalid Mohamed, 2000), express the impossibility of the evacuation of laboring and political bodies.15 Foucauldian analyses of bio-power only reinforce the reality that ethical geographies expressing nationalisms of “spirit” imply that, no matter how liminalized and even de-territorialized identities are in the contemporary transnational moment, identity is not unmoored from territories or bodies. Here a concept from the Lacanian left on the postmodern human might be usefully imported. As Stavrakakis writes about the potential of radical democracy, “If democracy is to be relevant, it will have to be thought of as an invitation to invent the body anew … And to invent space anew” (2007: 143). Only this recognition and acceptance of a radical dissonance—of the jouissance of unruly bodies opening up the heart of the abyss, and yet keeping the abyss within mainstream cultural discourse, within symbolic representation, rupturing and yet shaping the social symbolic—can explain the play of identities within the postmodern selfreflection of Hindi cinema. In this cinema, “H”-istory may be understood as a site of incomplete and chaotic “event-ness” in Badiou’s sense of the term, wherein: [the] fidelity to event-ness, to what ultimately permits the emergence of the new and makes possible the assumption of an act, presupposes a betrayal, not of the act itself, but of a certain rendering of the act as an absolute and divine positivity. In that sense, fidelity to an event can flourish and avoid

Introduction  27 absolutisation only as an infidel fidelity, only within the framework of another fidelity—fidelity to the openness of the political space and to the awareness of the constitutive impossibility of a final suture of the social—within the framework of a commitment to the continuous political re-inscription of the irreducible lack in the Other … (Stavrakakis 2007: 127) This keeps the national space of theatre and the sociopolitical space that human bodies inhabit in a relationship of traffic and transfusion with each other, making it impossible to separate the interpenetration of the representable and the un-representable. Derridean deconstruction and the Lacanian left merge here— Hindi cinematic representation of the historic or political event can be understood as a site of “event-ness,” not of mere “eventfulness,” in which democracy itself is staged and restaged as an “act,” as well as “re-acting”—and the theatre of cinema is an enactment of democratic experiment that does not rest in a single, finite event, but continues to explore the potential of “event-ness” and of “theatrocracy” in national symbolic life (Stavrakakis 2007: 128), something especially remarkable in the 2008 film Mumbai Meri Jaan. Chatterjee and others have argued persuasively that, in India, the space of the material is external public space. They have suggested lived social space was bifurcated into the material public realm versus the spiritual (and feminized) private realm (Chatterjee 1997) within anticolonial nationalism. Private feminized space was evacuated of any trace of materiality, even of the sexed, laboring, or reproductive bodies of women. This legacy of binary spatial spheres in Indian socio-historical discourse is transmuted in Hindi cinema, which problematizes the separation of the material and the psychic by commensurating the trauma of the material (or the outside), through the psyche’s circuits of desire (the interiority of protagonists). The shock of encountering a public space jarred and riven by a traumatic material modernity marks the emergence of the colonial and the “postcolonial” real. In it, one sees an earlier Indian spatial commensuration of the material and of the psychic, wherein the world outside and the world at home were not strictly separable (Appadurai, “Street Culture”; Chakrabarty 1991), a commensuration still finding form in Indian cinema primarily through the ongoing travels and travails of the liminal subject. In a sense, the crashing of the material onto the languages of representation that are available—the cinema, the media, citizenship and national belonging, and law enforcement—makes a film like Mumbai Meri Jaan a timely and historicized reflection on the dilemmas and styles of liminal representation in contemporary Indian cinema. The quest for lived space by liminal subjects subsequently creates disjunctures in cinema’s temporal consciousness. On one hand, there is a residual pre-colonial social tradition of the psychic viability of public and material space, as not yet the post-independence real; in it, the material need not necessarily be traumatic, nor completely exteriorized, though poverty and exploitation have been endemic features of South Asian public space throughout pre-colonial, colonial, and post-independence times. On the other, there is the post-independence experience, in which public materiality

28  Introduction seems undeniably to evoke the Lacanian real: a space of loss, disenfranchisement, and political negativity. The importance of this space lies in its conductivity, nevertheless, of a pre-colonial legacy of commensurable public and private, and material and psychic realms. Spatial dispositions thus offer a possibilitarian outlook in Hindi cinema; films of several genres and decades attempt to inhabit and organize available space. While this trend started early after independence—Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa (1957) comes to mind—in the contemporary neo- or “post-” postcolonial cinema, like MMJ, this possibilitarian recuperation of the material public continues to occur amidst various experiments with the citizen liminalized by varietals of the real, as we shall see in the first chapter. In some ways the cinema and its public spatial apparatuses—billboards, signs, posters, advertisements, star sightings, product endorsements, phone ringtones, etc—are a superimposed hyperreal that de-materalize the real, to the extent to which this is possible (since the real cannot at some level even be apprehended). It is the hyperreality of an image-drenched postmodern aesthetic that makes available a certain new configuration of lived space, where the psychic and the real can attempt to co-exist. The shock of the material is progressively more muted or resorbed in cinema by the countershock of the hyperreal—of flaneuristic virtual mobility—and this is a factor of speed, in many ways. Indian cinema, if now the hyperreal, was, according to some, always already the first and sole space of flaneuristic motility in India. Mazumdar, for example, has discussed how, due to marketing practices in pre-colonial and colonial times, India did not develop the “shop window” marketing phenomena of the early capitalist West (2008: 95). The urban flaneur of the West lacked social identity as well as space in India. It was the cinema that provided this flaneuristic space and subjective identity for the urban subject. Cinema became the hyperreal in the sense of the ultimate combinatory space for virtuality and mobility (Mazumdar 2008: 92–3); in a limited sense, the ultimate “shopping experience”. This became truer following the late eighties: “The presence of programming from different parts of the world introduced a notion of simultaneous time, which promoted a hyperreal viewing experience in India” (Mazumdar 2008: 93). However, critically for the purposes of my argument, this hyperreality of the cinema, with its sequential speeding up of time, leads to a muzzling of the shock of the material existence of the national real. The speeding up of time, something that cinema has become better and better at doing, as much through camera work as through new editing techniques (Yash Chopra’s Dhoom series is pertinent here), is the imprimatur of the hyperreality that re-organizes space to animate a historic memory, functioning positively towards the generation of a future of possibilities beyond a traumatic materiality. Alternatively, an apperceptive historical consciousness, one that sees itself seeing itself and seeing history through itself, acutely aware of its own location and situation (that is, one’s “s/p(l)ace”), such as can also be found in MMJ, approaches an apprehension of the real within the discourses of the symbolic and the imaginary in ways suggesting the embeddednes of liminality in representation. In this not value-free, non-neutral second style, that of an apperceptive

Introduction  29 historical consciousness—something usually perceived as the sentimental utopianism of the Hindi cinema—the singularity of a South Asian postmodernity expresses itself as a hyperreal cross-woven with a proxemics that allows a post-independence commensuration of private and public, psychic and material realms. I will demonstrate in the following chapters of this book how, in major nodal points, Hindi cinema concerns itself with the proxemic politics of bodies—of inhabited spaces, of placed headcounts (Badiou 2005)—in its decades of aporetic subjectivation as contested inclusion. However, I also have a personal proxemic experience and aporetic apperception to recount here. On my last visit to the national film archives in Pune, in connection with this particular project, an “event” highlighted for me the fruitful synthesis of postmodern and pre-modern material and symbolic aporias in the late capitalist era of post-independence India. It highlighted the emergent, possibly “uncounted,” futures of “postcoloniality” amid the fluid, disjunctural temporalities possible in nation space and in cinema, which makes the newer cinematic assemblage familiar to a dispersant, migratory global audience. It certainly focalized my inquiry upon the role of the countermodern local or locale in deciding upon the futurity or possibility of cinema other than the space-time of the modern developmentalist nationstate. The account that follows will partly bring to mind Mazumdar, Gopalan, or Gopinath’s theoretical moves toward a non-narrative but mobile imaginary of Indian cinema, i.e. an experience of space as a chronotope of memory formation that is future-oriented, while located in apparently anachronistic or current spatial practices, including practices one must remind oneself to keep forgetting. Mine was a countermodern experience of a temporally populous space that points at its own ongoing metamorphosis into a future memory of the past, as Deleuze would say (2001), as well as of other pasts. It reanimated my understanding of cinema as an apperceptive historic medium that bypasses the time of the nation-state and the “pre-/postcolonial” dyad, and seeks alternative, countermodern, disjunctural locations and temporalities of memory. Though this synthesis is mainly played out in the cinema, its other stage is “nation place,” a place that is a space brimming with what Appadurai calls “the enchantment of multiplicity” (2006: 17). I almost did not get out of Pune, Maharashtra, that day in June 2009: as I was leaving the National Film Archives late that day in order to meet the driver of my car to the airport, my hotel’s rental car lady called to inform me that, due to a public march and attendant road closings, I had best make arrangements for an “auto,” a nearly sci-fi like fantasy of transportation cannibalized out of the antiquation of the modern—a tottering three-wheeler passenger conveyance transmogrified out of the two-wheeler “scooter,” both ubiquitous and renowned for its frequent upsets—generally avoided by “foreigners” like myself, whose dollars will rent the latest air-conditioned four-wheelers. Listening to her voice in the hallway of the archives, itself a counterintuitive hybrid of the technological and the antiquated/dilapidated (an institutional analogue of Indian megacities like Bombay, Bangalore, Hyderabad), my information-retriever identity experienced both dismay and a setback. I despaired both of finding an auto that would take me as far as the airport, and of being safely transported with my luggage in one of

30  Introduction those relics of transportation engineering. I was pulled back into the contradictions at street level, which inform what Zakaria has called this “illiberal democracy.” A religious procession of thousands in honor of Sant Tukaram—a patron saint of Mahrashtra, on whose life the film Sant Tukaram (Prabhat Film Company, 1936), which won the Venice International Film Festival award in 1937, was based—had set off from Pandharpur in Maharashtra, and was snaking its way through Pune, also a cantonment town and a new information technology metropolis, a silicon valley wannabe. The city was paralyzed; traffic was frozen, the Bombay–Pune road and other major arteries of rush-hour traffic were closed. I left the archives early, my researcher’s timetable out the window in response to this local event, and found myself an auto. I explained to the driver the urgent nature of my need to reach the airport. He did get me there, albeit for a fare that was no doubt a windfall for him but a relative pittance for myself; I was only too glad not to miss my flight. On the way, I saw the many pilgrims patiently, and sometimes noisily, dominating the city’s thoroughfares, normally chock-full of autos, public transportation, two-wheelers of various size and volume, and luxurious air-conditioned road-hoggers such as the one I had forfeited to Sant Tukaram. The pilgrim men were dressed in kurtas, dhotis, and turbans, and carried saffron pennants; the women in colorful saris carried festive tasseled mini-cushions on their heads and brought up the rear with the children. The time could be now, or a hundred years earlier. A spatio-temporal vortex, in which countermodernity had checked my project and an inquiry into postmodernity had suddenly opened up. As Majeed has eloquently laid out in his discussion of nationalist autobiography and travel, a primary criterion for anticolonial self-determination used to be that subject’s ability to mobilize the technologically unfettered body within national space.16 Indeed, if a nation cannot lay claim to its own spaces, and if national subjects cannot determine their own modes of travel within that space, national subjectivity remains unrealized, as Gandhi repeatedly demonstrated with his anti-colonial marches, wherein the walking body was a form of protest against usurpation and displacement. This vortex of stoppage was, in a sense, reminiscent of, and indeed evoked for me, the quandary that the Gandhian-Nehruvian mindset is said to have faced in reclaiming and claiming national space and styles of mobility as hallmarks of nationhood. I just happened to be on the losing side of it this time, but hadn’t my side already lost once before? A fate well deserved, perhaps, for underestimating the walkers. National space, always at a premium, had been reclaimed by the saint and his followers, mementos of a pre-modern cosmopolis still wrapped in chains of faith around the feet of God and prophet. The material and the symbolic, the countermodern and the postmodern, had comfortably coiled around each other to expel nothing more than an undue sense of their incompatibility, such as mine was in that moment. As Joseph writes of the impure space of the early post-independence nation-state: the bourgeois nationalisms that fueled optimistic economic policies in many postcolonial states also provoked intense debates on the meaning

Introduction  31 of citizenship … for many citizens in these postcolonial states, mobility became a key to psychic survival in a volatile and rapidly changing world … The translocal and regional disruptions highlighted a neglected arena of social movement theory: the impure space of the early nation-state and its importance as a link between colonial, imperial, and contemporary transnational processes (1999: 6) I would differ, however, that this impurity obviously and naturally persists beyond early post-independence modernity into a late neocolonial postmodernity. My proxemic account of urban space as it collided with myself and my “research agenda” in the summer of 2009 demonstrates that “nation space” is still at a premium and critical in the contest between political actors, and religious identities and entities; legitimate citizenry, “illegitimates”, and migrants; feminist discourses and heterosexist or sexist fantasies; nationalist and globalization discourses; vertical aspirations and sprawling ground-level miseries; developmental and exceptional neoliberalisms, and primordial discourses (Ong 2006); and, above all, countermodernities and (post-)modernities. There is no declared winner. Visibility itself is affected, enhanced, refracted, or reduced by all of these contests and antagonisms on the ground of the nation. In the era of modernity, these contests were depicted in Hindi cinema as realist or naturalist narratives of epic or social melodrama, often predicated on countermodern “values.” Those slick city flicks of the fifties, a belated and displaced black and white noir dominated by the star texts of Guru Dutt, Dev Anand, Geeta Bali, Waheeda Rehman, etc. are replicated 50-odd years later by other archival gestures, in which postmodernity is already archived in the popular imagination as a reality lived on the ground and yet as a visual repertoire for self-fashioning of old and new liminalities. “Rather than history containing space, different spaces … contain history,” as Susan Stanford Friedman has argued of postcolonial Indian fiction,17 except that as spatial optics and logics transmogrify in late capital, so does the temporal dimension, whether it is intrinsic or external to ideas of historical time. Temporality becomes a-historical and “aspirational,” time becoming the ticking chroneme of a bright “future,” of a coming revolution of lifestyles, aspirations, and mobilities. Benjamin’s angel of history must still gaze with terror and pity, but look forward this time. In recent films like New York (Kabir Khan 2009) and Kambakht Ishq (Sabir Khan 2009), we see a globalization of space and bodies that has been afoot since the late-twentieth century, in films like Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (Aditya Chopra, 1995), Company (Ram Gopal Varma 2002), Being Cyrus (Homi Adajania 2005), and Dhoom 1 and 2 (Sanjay Gadhvi 2004 and 2006). The cinematography, as well as narrative, of such films is a quest for global panoramas of postmodernity, of hyperreality, where new relations between spaces and bodies may be configured, albeit via a language of economic exceptionalism inspired by neoliberal economic experience. The mobility of the hypermodern or postmodern globalized Indian body is coeval, however, with the saturation of nation space by different liminal bodies: the poor and itinerant, the disabled, the mendicant, the

32  Introduction unidentified, the unclassified. Moreover, even the global or globalized body is usually the traveling foot of the compass of extraterritorial nationality, whose fixed foot, conversely, is nation space, both material and discursive. This book will look at the post-independent state’s image archive of a hyperreal class-consolidated civil society being produced at the post-statist conjuncture, even as religious nationalism and ethnic conflict seem to drive the transformation of this postmodern capitalist state in an indeterminate (and to some retrogressive) direction. The de-centering of in-name-only “postcolonial” developmentalist optics and texts by postmodern hyperrealities and simulational styles will be analyzed through a wide-ranging historical survey of Hindi films, ranging from 1949 to 2009, as well as through focused readings of particular film and star texts. Some of the cinematic themes that particularly reflect this de-centering of “national” subjecthood—diffusely present as chapters of this book—are the nation-state duality, or what I will call the “double role” performance or appearance of state and nation; gender violence and citizenship claims; private and public religion and power in India and in the diaspora; and fixing and dismantling embodied ethnicity and gender and sexuality on screen. This book has no predictive, let alone oracular, aims. It does not find or propose that the Hindi cinema industry is “poised” in certain ways, aesthetically or politically. Predictability is highly rare in the industry, its regulations, financing and products, and consequently so is intentionality. Most film personnel I speak to tell me that they see no particular “trends,” “directions,” or “intentions.” Things have come and gone, and they always will. Other than the aesthetics and pacing of camera imposed by a globalized televisualism in an “illiberal democracy,” perhaps the only other influential mode and aesthetic impulse derives from resurgent, and never quite absent, competing countermodernities. But these tendencies do not quite a philosophy or theory make. Film industry folk who deny intentionality and a consensual logic must be given some right to articulate what they do and make. Again, in terms of representational techniques and codifications within the cinema, the return of the West in recent cinema is systematized as an “event,” even a major historical mega-moment comparable to that other armed rebellion during anti-colonial struggle. In terms of further techniques and codes, this book does not attempt to navigate the fruitful terrains of song and dance and other aesthetic grammars of the Hindi cinematic code that have recently become significant renewed areas of inquiry within the field of Indian cinema studies (Gopal and Moorti et al). While these aesthetic grammars would no doubt yield insights regarding questions of temporality and space that will be addressed through the anthropological and historical dialogues in this book, such a study remains beyond the immediate purview of the questions sought to be answered within the framework of this project. I welcome and look forward to such engagements in the future.

1 Structure, event, and liminal practices in recent Hindi films

In this chapter I concentrate on Hindi cinema’s constitutive syntagm of history as repetition. Recent Hindi films have self-consciously and conspicuously foregrounded their diegeses—as much mode as content, as Metz reminded us (1982: 119, 144–5)—as the voice of history deliberating on the problems and strategies of historic representation as historic repetition, and more indirectly, addressing the problem of the socio-historical presentable, the representable and the unpresentable (when absolutely inevitable). I have framed and outlined these problems in the introduction to this book. Three such films—Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi (Sudhir Mishra, 2003), Rang de Basanti (Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra, 2006), and Mumbai Meri Jaan (Nishikant Kamat, 2008)—show history’s exegetic repeating structure as the governing allegorical frame of diegetic re-enactments of colonial and neocolonial trauma by “national” actors, who hope to redeem history by re-enacting its plot or structure within critical social scenarios, but generate rather unexpected outcomes. Their attempts to pin down and stabilize the apparent imperatives of national history within the post-independence state frequently produce incoherence and indeterminacy instead. A fourth film, Billu Barber (Priyadarshan, 2009), mimes historically patterned representation as situationally contingent repetition in the staging of diegetic subjects or characters as mobile and mutable signifiers of cinematic signification itself, subjects who incessantly and fluidly re-enact and repeat one another, thus forcefully staging and reframing one of Hindi cinema’s most alluring scenarios, its fetish—subjective identification or duplication between diegetic and exegetic star and fan—as its very mode and content. Billu Barber is one of the strongest instances yet of Hindi cinema speaking to and of itself of the codes of repetition it deploys to make meaning and subjects in the cinema experience. Its metadiscursivity is the secondary modality for the primary cinematic idea of recycling and repetition of subject-forming events, both social and cinematic. All these films illustrate the turn toward a singular poststructuralism incipient in Indian cinema since its early days, which differs from a general Euro-American construct of poststructuralism in being concerned with the human in an older political sense of being socially and temporally grounded, yet segmented. This turn uncovers processes of identity formation and marginalization that still assert the allure, but not fixity, of the term “subjectivity” within the fluid parameters of “subjectivation.” This humanist political residue is expressed in this cinema by

34  Structure, event, and liminal practices presenting liminal actors playing at being fully embodied political subjects; their very innovations and failures are symptomatic of an underlying aspiration toward a realizable embodiment. Throughout this chapter and this book, my evocation of difference in re-enactments of extended and extensive structural motifs will draw upon formal techniques and strategies of film-making. In this chapter I will concentrate on depictions of the violent event in later Hindi cinema as a paradigm for the emergence of difference and liminality: that of the escalating violation of the 180-degree rule in scenes of rapid action and violence, which automatically confuses the audience about their relationship with the actors on screen with whom they might identify. All four films I discuss in this chapter are paradigmatic of the latest co-implication of cinematic and historic discourses of representation as repetition in the age of postmodernity, as well as neocolonialism, but such repetition is not immune to fissures where the irrepressibly embodied and subjective human shows itself. Badiou argues the importance of the idea of the multiple in a definition of the one, or of being. He outlines the ways in which a “situation” or “set” and its constitutive multiples inevitably evoke the specter of the void and of inconsistent multiples, of that which is outside of the name of the one, or the “count-as-one” of the multiple. Badiou’s attention to the problem of number or the multiple in ontology—that which leads him to pronounce that ontology is, after all, mathematics—lends ballast to my thesis on subject formation in Hindi cinema as the dialectic of structure and event, or of what Badiou might call the meta-structure or “state” of the situation (both an ontological meta-structure and the historicopolitical state) and the situation itself with its consistent multiplicities. Put in socio-historical terms, such as Badiou himself does, I am tracing the development of an idea of a unified subject as a product of the attempt to integrate, arrange, and contain multiplicities within the figure of being or oneness (what Badiou calls the “normal”), a project of subject formation that is overseen by the “state,” which stands outside of the count itself, but provides the constitutive outside which enables such a count and such a situation (of the normal). While this relationship of state, situation, and subject might seem coherent and stable enough, I explore the murky space or the gap between the situation and its state, wherein ruptures and inconsistencies of evental heterogeneity, of inconsistent “multiples” or the “void,” “excess,” or “un-presentable” in Badiou’s text—liminality in mine—overturn the apparently stable equation between a situation (the structured event), the subjects who form the constituents of the socio-historical situation (consistent multiples of the structured event), and the meta-structural state that is necessary to monitor and re-insure the stability of the entire structure, the count-as-one (Badiou 2005: 93–111).

The countermodern While different representations of various liminal identities will be examined in films spanning over 60 years (1948–2009) in the following chapters, in this first chapter I use the aforementioned four films to explicate a theory of history and of the historical event—especially the violent event—that grounds this cinema’s

Structure, event, and liminal practices  35 discourse of history. I think of the violent event and its aesthetic of the citizensubject as a countermodern element within the discourse of Hindi cinematic history in Foucault’s sense,1 and perhaps in a Nietzschean sense. The countermodern allows history to be understood as differential weighting of structure or event, whole or part, and a radical questioning of their connection that rewrites the subject’s status in each iteration and foregrounds the liminality of identity. Foucault’s scattered yet ubiquitous articulations of the countermodern privilege the polythetic substrata of experience, space, and time over the monistic locus of subjectivity or selfhood, which he calls “catastrophic,” as in his comparison of Christianity’s “appropriation of morality by the theory of the subject” versus the Greek “search for styles of existence as different from each other as possible” (1990: 253–4). In a related context, within Nietzsche’s genealogy of morality, violence has an underlying public pietistic function, a performance of sublime conviviality that undergirds history.2 Historical discourse in the Indian cinematic context is markedly pervaded both by a sense of disjointedness—of time out of sequence—and a sense of the sheer public performative potential of violence. The disjointed spatio-temporal figurations and ideations that mark the post-independence nation-state’s “postmodernity” as countermodern has been prefigured by other scholars who have engaged with questions of modernity in the anti-colonial setting. In these accounts, modernity, nationalism, and the state were not necessarily polarized, co-extensive, or successive. For instance, Chakrabarty’s account of the “pre-nationalist” colonial Bengali comprador class shows their polythetic affiliations of identity characterized by an evasion of fixed and regulated contexts and temporalities that concepts of statehood, nationhood, tradition, and modernity suppose and impose. Chakrabarty describes the comprador Bengali upper-caste male’s organic and “pragmatic” tactics of negotiating new foreign rule by creating an apolitical, non-secular private realm of “mytho-religious” practice (2000: 222) that was differentiated from, and privileged over, the public spaces of Mandarin work for the British. This mytho-religious realm, remarkably Nietzschean in many senses, where gods, ancestors, and daily rites formed the core of identity complete with household pieties, including animal sacrifices, challenged, or rather ignored, the hegemony of the public space of labor for the “state,” without, however, invoking the oppositional political figure of the “nation.” If anything, any idea of the nation may instead have been a spectral constituent of the public space of the state and official economy to this pre-national comprador class (Chakrabarty 2000: 222). Hence, the anti-colonial idea of the “nation” as a political rival of the state would have been irrelevant to this pre-national “pragmatism.” The crucial psychic and subjectivating distinction of it would have been that which exists between an apolitical private as well as public (ibid.: 218–24). This pre-national distinction does not map neatly onto a colonial or postcolonial vocabulary of liberatory (domestic) nationalism versus repressive (foreign) state-ism. Its spatialities and temporalities are not so much antithetical as dis-“junctural,” de-centered, dis-“placed,” and un-“timely.” The indirection, the indifference that the comprador pre-nationalist subject presents to the colonial state and its apparatuses is not revolutionary or counterrevolutionary; it is seemingly aphasic and catachrestic.

36  Structure, event, and liminal practices In later anticolonial “nationalist” thought and practice, however, Chakrabarty argues that such indifference and evasion of the category of the “nation” morphed into an emergent political consciousness of nationalism, wherein locus and chronology—or a determinate chronotope—acquired a new urgency and constitutive significance.3 The amorphous and oblique idea of the pre-national, spectral, as well as mytho-religious, gave way to the morally triumphal antithesis of the now fully “foreign” colonial state and its repressive public apparatus regulating anticolonial “nationalism.” Therefore, public and private now seemed to be more precisely and claustrophobically charted onto state and nation, while simultaneously, colonial rule threatened to penetrate deeper into the psychic, as well as civic, structures of emergent nationalist consciousness. No pre-national, primal, pre-political private could remain, just as the official state and economy could no longer be a non-constitutive outside, a purely pragmatic exteriority. As the nation consciously diverged from the official state, it also paradoxically became more fixed in a psychic and physical space dependent upon its antithetical status, becoming the displaced reversal of the state, like a spectral trace. This colonized nation then, in fact, transformed the private, which it appropriated, to impose a more regulatory framework upon it. Private space became partly feminized and the male nationalists’ laboratory for the newly gendered discourses of “public” nationalism (Chakrabarty 2000: 224; see also Chatterjee 1993, 1986). Indeed, in a further series of syntagmatic reconsolidations, binarizations, and realignments, the public and the private were prised apart and yet counterpoised to be each other’s refracted images. If the state and the nation were exteriorized categories equally subordinated to male mytho-religious interiority in pre-nationalist times, a new public-oriented anti-colonialist nationalism both disavowed and yet reinstated the regulatory regimen of the colonial state within a non-secular mythos, and only partially recovered the mytho-religious within a private sphere. This was now reconceived as a feminized heteroglossia constituted by its separation from the publicness of colonial officialdom, as well as male nationalism. A prime instance of such deployment of the distinctly mythoreligious as the new feminized private is the concept of the nation as mother goddess: both god and ancestor—two concepts that Chakrabarty claims were influential in demarcating and separating the pre-nationalist’s “mytho-religious” space—became domesticated in the figure of the goddess of anticolonial imagination, whose paean is the nationalist hymn “Vande Mataram.” 4 Since colonial times, the Indian state and nation have been neither identical nor antithetical, despite efforts to shape and characterize them in that way; they have been, rather, a shifting collage or confluence of multiple spatial and temporal consciousnesses or assemblages. Within the post-independence chronotope, state and nation continue as each other’s ideological and spatial other, as well as double, and thus engage in a pedagogical dialectic (Bhabha 1994) with each other. For instance, when the nation made its home in the private sphere sanctified by the relocated mytho-religious, it also partially dragged the state in with it in the form of new disciplinary and disciplined practices and functions of anti-colonial nationalism. It is this ongoing co-implication of the state and the nation that Indian cinema engages in its conversation with history, as a double

Structure, event, and liminal practices  37 movement of event and structure with multiple spatial and temporal points of origin and iteration. This unfixed plural assemblage of space and time is still the hallmark of Indian modernity, postmodernity, or countermodernity. While the state and the nation are not fully polar, neither are the public and the private, despite anti-colonial nationalist pressures to articulate them as such; instead, private and public are often co-articulated. Referring back to Chakrabarty once more, just as the nationalists’ deployment of the private as a laboratory for keeping alive a banned nationalism brought into the public understanding of nationalism plural private mythologies of identity, so similar plural privates now inform the mythic repertoire of twenty-first-century public nationalism, images of which we see in Hindi cinema. These later privates are partly derived from the “mytho-religious” effects of pre-nationalism, as well as from the plural privates of the high anti-colonial nationalists. But they do not, tout court, correspond to some totalizing private ethos of nationalism in the sense of being purely oppositional to bureaucratic apparatuses of statecraft. Instead, they are intrinsically plural, anti-totalizing (not to be confused necessarily with anti-totalitarian), and both pre- and post-hegemonic. In all, then, the spatial and temporal hinterlands of anticolonial subject formation—past and present—invoke the category of the countermodern, and dismantle concepts of fixity and linearity. Here, regional or communal disarticulations of power and rights are noticeable in their catalyzing of differentials between the “haves” and the “have-nots”, between “authentic” and “inauthentic” subjects of decolonization and globalization, among those who experience national space and time on quite different topographical registers and asymmetrical developmental clocks. Uncertain or indeterminate subjects play or try many roles state-saturated societies impose on them, in order to negotiate identities and identifications regarding that state, and multiple migrations, scenarios, enactments, and trans-border identifications and nomadic identities are common.

Structure and event: cinematic histories In a similar vein, I wish to think of the “event” as a keenly contextualized countermodern experience of national history, as opposed to the abstracted universal experience that might better be described as a structural phenomenon. Here I would invoke for the event LaCapra’s term “structural absence” (1999). I begin by considering three further perspectives on the “event”—a stud in the wheel of history that concerns all four films I discuss in this essay—which place different emphases on the status of the “event” in structural discourses of history, and yet continuously evoke a root sense of spatial and temporal disjunctures and pluralities as constitutive of both structure and event. First, according to Sahlins’ structuralist account of the discourse of history, the “event”—so preponderant in national historical accounts—is a crossing, or a conjuncture as he calls it, between the “happening” and the “structure” of collective mythemes of cultural memory. The structural frame of history, according to Sahlins, is studded with “events” that are its constitutive stops and notations, but also vehicles of the basic theme or burden of that history, a history marked by a collective (or plural)

38  Structure, event, and liminal practices consciousness or voice, as well as a longue duree temporality. In discussing the “vexed problem of the relation between structure and event” (1985: xiii), and in calling “‘structure’—the symbolic relations of cultural order … an historical object” (1985, vii), Sahlins reminds us of the essential structural nature, whether performative or prescriptive (1985: xii), of this sort of historiography of “events,” in which: an event is not simply a phenomenal happening, even though as a phenomenon it has reasons and forces of its own, apart from any given symbolic scheme. An event becomes such as it is interpreted. Only as it is appropriated in and through the cultural scheme does it acquire an historical significance … The event is a relation between a happening and a structure (or structures) … (1985: xiv) However, for Sahlins, beyond the duality of the prescriptive and the performative, there is not a necessary or sufficient difference between how an event is experienced or recounted differently by collective versus individual subjects of history, or at different moments of collective or individual recounting. Sahlins only briefly acknowledges contextual variation. While privileging the longue duree temporality of what he calls the “structure of the conjuncture”—that is, event as the conjuncture of happening and structure—Sahlins shortchanges the question of the contextual specificity and plurality of those serialized but not equivalent conjunctures (as Benedict Anderson theorizes them, which I cover below). A second conception of the event, with regard to the idea of contextual specificity, and its fate in the Indian “modern”, derives from Ramanujan; he writes: One might see ‘modernization’ in India as a movement from the contextsensitive to the context-free in all realms; an erosion of contexts, at least in principle. Gandhi’s watch (with its uniform autonomous time, governing his punctuality) replaced the almanac … In music, the ragas can now be heard at all hours and seasons. Once the Venkatesasuprebhatam, the wake-up chant for the Lord of Tirupati, could be heard only in Tirupati at a certain hour in the morning. Since M.S. Subbulakshmi in her devotion cut a record of the chants, it wakes up not only the Lord, but anyone who tunes in to All India Radio in faraway places … (2001: 436) Ramanujan sees the dense and knotty discourse of pre-modern nationalisms indifferent to the state giving way to the standardized fluid temporalities of official nationalism within its “count-as-one” as both structure (consistent multiplicity) and event (consistent multiple). In the modern event’s flattening out and loss of specificity may be seen the continuation of anticolonial nationalism’s reframing of the pre-colonial noncontiguity of secular state and non-secular mytho-religious nation as syntagmatic,

Structure, event, and liminal practices  39 culminating in a constitution of identity as national-statist. It is in this reading of history as an aggregation of commensurable events that the state and the nation become truly entwined—inseparable—a process that, by Chakrabarty’s account, began with anticolonial nationalism’s need to define itself quintessentially vis-à-vis a state, even if oppositionally. Anderson, in his account of the function of time in national consciousness, describes “history”—i.e. national history—as a thought experiment for the flow of undifferentiated time through unmarked space, calling it the “idea of a sociological organism moving calendrically through homogenous, empty time [which] is a precise analogue of the idea of the nation, which is also conceived as a solitary community moving steadily down (or up) history” (1991: 26). Upon this empty homogenous time, the modern state, which is the tribunal presiding over the antagonisms of civil society, as Marx said, introduces the concept of non-simultaneity by virtue of its necessary role as the arbiter of the particular and colliding interests of its subjects. It stamps icons of temporality that may be singular but are also always commensurate; these it calls “events.” To re-read this in Badiou’s terms, the state suppresses an account of the “event” as “evental site” or “abnormal multiple,” a “multiple such that none of its elements are presented in the situation … it is on the edge of the void … Just ‘beneath’ this multiple … there is nothing, because none of its terms are themselves counted-as-one” (Badiou 2005: 175). The evental site’s closeness to the void and to incommensurability is precisely what the state covers up with an insistent “count”—each event is a succession or repetition of what has already been counted as consistent within the national socio-historical situation. This situation is often deemed the social “natural” or organic, since nature denies history’s inconvenient unruly singularities (Badiou 2005: 176). Barthes recaptures this hegemony of the “natural” in deeming myth as “naturalization” of history. That the state is invested in this hegemonic naturalization of historic heterogeneity and incommensurability is suggested by the term “naturalization,” which defines citizenship as the process of being counted as one element and set within a natural and non-singularizable multiple. The state engages the event as the crucible for endlessly reproducing a repertoire of national consciousness that can faithfully reiterate a stable and monolithic structure, untroubled by internal fissures and fault-lines, as well as remain defined primarily via its ambivalent co-implication with the state. By such an account, the event is both context- and surprise-free; none of its constituents are “in-consistent” in Badiou’s sense (2005: 175). It connects the state and the nation, and Anderson has therefore described not the nation, but the nation or modern state. Modern events thus become two-dimensional notations in time of the interwoven rhythm of unconscious structures of memory and agonistic incommensurabilities that is pre-national history. Anderson’s concept of flow is derived from Benjamin’s “empty homogenous time” of modernity, the very thing that Ramanujan laments. Anderson’s diachronic conceptualization of national subject formation is conscious of temporal and spatial duration, but is less conscious of diachronic and synchronic incommensurabilities—those mytho-religious chronotopes of the pre-colonial comprador indifferent or hostile to the official state and

40  Structure, event, and liminal practices economy, and to the homogenous time of nationalist modernity. Ramanujan’s lament on modernity is an important re-reading of the relationship between fixed events and fluid structures of histories within the homogenizing matrix of empty national-statist time. Ramanujan’s idea of an “Indian” context awareness can be understood as antithetical to Anderson’s “serialities” of the dispersed but coterminous experience comprising the national. The idea of seriality evades or erases the incommensurable differentiations built into unofficial and uncounted experience of incommensurate others—those “abnormal multiples” bordering on the void, which Anderson does evoke in his memorable phrase “remembering to forget [difference]”—whose othering creates the same and the state. A full history of heterogeneous affect is missing here. Ramanujan mourns the inability to reclaim, indeed liberate, the event from the state as the doppelganger or mouthpiece for the nation. He argues that the contextualized, unique event is auratic, and that standardized eventfulness is static (or statist), that modernity and its standardization or serialization of the contextual specificity of the pre-national cultural artifact or event is a loss of the particular, the heterogeneous, the animated: the Venkatesasuprebhatam is not the unique song sung idiosyncratically and irreproducibly in the temple, but merely duplicated with each rendition when sung irreproachably by the disembodied Subbulakshmi over the airwaves, enacting what I have called the erasure of the countermodern. The pre-modern “event” for Ramanujan is singular experience counter to the “modern” experience in that it does not betoken sameness, stasis, or succession.5 For him, history is studded with events that are recognizable as pinpoints marking contextual experiences and situated knowledges, and do not present themselves merely as commensurable variations on a collective and consolidated historical set of elements, the set that Sahlins and Badiou refer to as “structure” in different senses. Further, Ramanujan sees the event not as a conjuncture—in Sahlins’ sense of the conjuncture of structure and happening (see Sahlins, above)—but perhaps as what Shahid Amin has called the historical “contingent” (1995). Ramanujan’s viewpoint enables a new perspective on Hindi cinema’s historic linkage with radical counter-discourses and contingent liminalities, which have always peopled that cinema and have generally gone unglossed. My purpose in comparing and contrasting the logic and dynamic of the universal versus the particular in Sahlins, Ramanujan, Badiou, and Taylor is to reroute them through the doubt posited by Jacques Derrida concerning the efficacy of the “event” as final arbiter of the anxiety of subjectivity, detailed in his canonical essay, “Signature, Event, Context.” Derrida argues that the event is both iterable and other: the same and different in each context. Iteration is both repeating and othering. In his reading, the event is always already marked by the imprimatur of context (1988), or rather by the particular contextuality necessitated by a particularized identity, experience, or act. In this regard, Ramanujan’s position is markedly close to Derrida’s; it also foreshadows the countermodern echolalia that Indian cinema’s singular postmodernity—that we see in Rang de Basanti, Mumbai Meri Jaan, and Billu Barber—has begun to offer on the infinite polymorphousness and liminal status of the historic event.6

Structure, event, and liminal practices  41 Sahlins, Ramanujan, and Derrida thus offer three theoretical perspectives on “eventfulness,” (the fullness of time, so to speak) that locate varied cinematic discourses on the (sometimes) violent event in national history on different points of the spectrum, linking the particular event with collective structural myths. While all three critics agree on the link between event and structure, I read Sahlins as offering a more tenacious view that somehow the structural mode is more determinative of the singular event than not; Ramanujan would stand behind a radical contextualization of the particular event as the only available means of mooring particularity to an even notional structural consciousness or unconscious; Derrida offers radical doubt about context itself, with its attendant binary framework of structure and event. It is the Ramanujan-Derrida complex of thinking of the event in relation to structural history that is most helpful in decoding the ongoing Hindi cinematic trajectory of the Foucauldian or Nietzschean countermodern performative modality, though the Sahlinsian train is not unknown in film-making, as we shall see next.

“A Thousand Such Desires”: Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi (hereafter HKA) seems to bear out a Sahlinsian model of historiography; a re-securing of narrative voice that underpins a structural mode of historiography is omnipresent. The narrative takes the form of the “re-telling of history” in an omniscient, structuring directorial voice-over, conjoining the eventful lives of a set of Indian college students who act with or against the postcolonial nation-state during the traumatic events of the National Emergency (1975–7), when Indian politics and civic life underwent tremendous challenges as a result of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s crackdown on civil liberties and political and fundamental rights. The directorial narrative voiceover is occasionally striated by the voice of the film’s “revolutionary” protagonist, who frequently juxtaposes these modern political subjects against an immutable national past and tropicalities of anti-modernity and pre-colonial life. The story opens in 1970s New Delhi, with the college friendship of Siddharth Tyabji and Vikram Malhotra, who both love the same cosmopolitan young woman, Geeta Rao. Siddharth, the son of a minor politician, eschews a guaranteed bureaucratic career and comfortable upper-class life to become an anti-government Naxalite rebel, joining his lot with the ultimate anti-state countermodern ideology of the Indian seventies. It is his “revolutionary” voice that crosscuts the director’s voice-over in the narrative. Geeta loves Siddharth, but upon his disappearance from their circle, marries a successful IAS officer, a potentate of the postcolonial nation-state, while Vikram, the son of a former freedom-fighter, joins the state’s corrupt politico-economic junta and becomes a political and business wheeler-dealer. Geeta eventually leaves her husband to join Siddharth. When they are brutalized by the provincial police (Geeta is raped while Sidhharth watches), Geeta’s ex-husband rescues her but will do nothing for Siddharth. Vikram agrees to rescue Siddharth, but is hospitalized due to a minor accident in the same hospital where Siddharth lies fearful of discovery and recapture by the police. He is,

42  Structure, event, and liminal practices however, spirited away by his Naxalite followers, and Vikram is grabbed instead by the brutal policemen and nearly beaten to death. As he is beaten by the police, he cries out repeatedly asking if they know who he is, invoking his status and influence, in vain, of course, as the provincial police feel that Delhi’s long arm is not long enough to reach them. At the very last moment, Vikram is rescued; he survives with permanent mental and physical disability. The irony of this is obvious: accidentally changing places with his political and romantic adversary, Vikram becomes the victim of a pre-national political that he thought he had mastered. Geeta and Vikram are the primary victims of political violence in HKA. These violent events are meant to reinforce an ironic view of a corrupt democracy’s “leveling” effects, citizens’ political affiliations and social status notwithstanding. The three characters who experience violence choose different paths, yet experience highly unforeseeable consequences: it is Geeta, the cosmopolitan city girl, who returns to the village with Vikram, now disabled, and Siddharth who abandons revolution and goes abroad to study medicine, which he hopes will be less confusing. The film’s apparent lack of comment on the betrayal of the revolutionary cause by Siddharth, and its undifferentiated representation of the inchoate modern and countermodern experiences of citizens torn between elite postcolonial backgrounds and shocking subalternizing experiences overlaid by gender difference, represent the film’s refusal to probe the singularity of each event. Instead, the characters’ experiences are seen as fitting into a homogenizing “national” history of structural statist violence, a sense also reinforced by the precedence given to the voice of the Naxalite and “intellectual” ideologues and dialecticians in the narration. This narrative clearly has structural ambitions and academic intonations in its historiography and textual citationality: its very title and epigraph are drawn from verse by Mirza Ghalib—a survivor of another uprising against the colonial state, the failed 1857 anti-colonial mutiny— mourning another kind of shredding of the national illusion of consistent multiplicity. The twists and turns in the protagonists’ divergent lives are indicated less by the rebel articulations of diverse subaltern publics—the police or villagers are never individualized—and more by a “historical” postcolonial national elite commentary on resistance to an oppressive state. “History” in HKA emerges as already always emplotted within readerly subjectivities, both with the film audience as exegetic readers of the cinematic text and with the characters as diegetic internal readers of “history.” As we will see below, Rang De Basanti is unselfconscious about the function of reportage embedded in its own representation; HKA, however, is acutely self-conscious about reportage and the “literary” and the “mythic.” In another way, HKA is concerned with political events as well as with their “literariness.” HKA does not represent history as emplottable merely in the abstract and faceless genealogy of structure, but populates it with characters and narrators who are “readers” of a historical narrative, of sentimental genealogies and mythologies of nationalism and revolution re-enacted within frames of historical and traumatic events—such as the Emergency and the brutal suppression of the Naxalite movement in rural India—that continue to scar the national body and memory. The most important

Structure, event, and liminal practices  43 of these events is the student-led Maoist revolution of the 1970s, but the film’s literary and political allegory harks back to a much earlier past of nationalist anticolonial struggle, the 1857 mutiny. Furthermore, the cynical Vikram’s father is a former congress activist and anti-colonial freedom fighter, jailed many times by the British, yet jailed again during the Emergency for so-called seditious activities. History repeats itself indeed. This embodiment of the plot of revolution in telling the story of history is a continuing homage to a structural history or historical structure of eventful being. The nation is narrated here through a chronicle of violence that engages and embodies multiple but classified subjects who people a seemingly epic history of decolonization. If there is liminality here, it is suggested as a threat to nationalist historiography and allied with a corrupt state: a pervasive modernity that longs for moorings in historic structure shrugs off liminal polymorphousness in the nation. Violence is seen as a pitched battle between bad state—chiasmically co-opting liminality as illegitimate law enforcement, employing countermodern agents negatively—and this good nation, preserving the convenient dialectic of their encounter. Still, while purportedly telling the story of a collective national structural consciousness stamped with postcolonial congress party modernity, HKA cannot help registering this polyglossia of countermodernity culminating in chaotic violence, as in the revolutionary Siddharth’s (incredulous but reconciled) voiceover that locates the 1,000-year-old countermodern in the “backward” indigeneity of Bhojpur, simultaneously an indigenous ur-subaltern structure where statist modernity has failed to register (though this view is later seen as oversimplified), and the crucible of brutal encounter between rogue police, Maoist revolutionaries, as well as sleek (and incredulous and unreconciled) Delhi-based tycoons. Here the brutal police are a particular instance of the chaotic hybridization of pre-colonial and postcolonial, pre-modern and modern, past and present, and countermodern and post-enlightenment. In that sense, as an entity that is never actualized, they are Badiou’s “excrescence,” the category of being within the socio-historical situation that is included but does not belong, that is represented but not presented, agential without embodiment (Badiou 2005), which is the situation of the police who are brutal without being actualized or embodied in any other sense; they do not count as citizenry, but they do count as the muscle of the state. Their absence in the film’s final frames, which show Gita and Vikram back in the village serving the revolution, reinforces the salutary image of a revolutionary nationalism that is singular but presented or embodied, that trumps the counter-revolutionary state and its just barely managed primordial excrescence, the local police. Thus, in using for his title the phrase “Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi,” or “A Thousand Such Desires,” from the melancholy Urdu poetry of Ghalib—an influential identitarian voice for Indian Muslims ravaged by the despair of the failed 1857 anti-British mutiny (or the first war of independence)—to gloss the 1975 Indian Emergency, when constitutional rights were suspended by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s ruling congress party, director Sudhir Mishra invites comparison

44  Structure, event, and liminal practices as well as identification with an established historical discourse (one might call it a tone, mood, or affect, but those certainly come framed in the syllables of political subjectivation), which proposes an enduring “integrationist” urge of a collective unconscious for a reassembling of frictive and fissiparous forces in the postcolonial body politic, indeed, for the mythical nation.

“Paint It Saffron”: Rang de Basanti Rang De Basanti: A Generation Awakens (henceforth RDB) engages the notion of a structural mode of historiography but in so doing reifies a statist discourse of the “event,” which is enacted diegetically minus any sense of the radical disjunctures, discontinuities, or contingencies attending discrete events, contexts, and happenings. Events in RDB appear hailed as a collective consciousness only in the sense of an inevitable response to a hegemonic state: the colonial stateinduced resistance; the neocolonial state induces resistance; resistance is always similar in mode and appearance, because it is not about the particular subject or context. It is, rather, the state hailing its citizen savior through its crisis and reinventing itself. Erasing distance and difference between iterations and successions of events erases their singular specificity, as well as the discontinuity scuttling the structural frameworks of history. Radical colonial youth resisted oppression, and so radical neocolonial youth mimics the same resistance in diegetic layers of mimetic reconstruction that gesture toward the extra-diegetic, i.e. the reified character of nationalist awakening. When RDB was released, and as its subtitle indicates, it was hailed as an example of “neo-patriotism,” this becoming a label also conveniently attached to the revival of lead actor Aamir Khan’s—until recently—flagging career and fortunes. In Fredric Jameson’s terms, this would be the ideal instance of the third world text that can only exist as political allegory, without any of the literariness that attached so self-consciously to HKA, as mentioned previously. RDB suggests the bad clone of Ramanujan’s notion of the singularity of an event: a too-perfect re-enactment of a past event in the present completely reconciles the event with a static perspective of history, free from disjunctive temporalities and incommensurable alterities. RDB diegetically tackles the containment of differences, including those of gender and citizenship, in the echo chamber of history as an extended reverie traveling back to a British colonial past and agency. A British colonial jailor’s granddaughter, Sue McKinley comes to India as a film-maker, and mobilizes a group of disillusioned and disunited young Indians. The politically apathetic Indian college students whom Sue meets and mobilizes find new inspiration within the diegetic aesthetic register: “consumed by the characters they portray … They realize that there’s not much difference between 1930s’ British India and today’s free India, inasmuch as the country is currently ruled by corrupt politicians.”7 The students “audition” before the director Sue to establish their credentials as duplications of “patriotic” freedom fighters, their dormant nationalism only emerging as a result of their performative experience. The aesthetic of performance provides the portal into the political in the conceit of film-making itself as a historico-political narration, the diegetic director’s voice-over. The

Structure, event, and liminal practices  45 performative matrix also projects the national past as the ur-story of the statist present, by structuring the representation of diegetic film-making as a trope of serial re-enactments: superimposed images of anticolonial revolutionaries and the boisterous contemporary youth, and visual bytes splicing historical event and filmic or film-making event, past and present (such as actors preparing for historic cinema in Technicolor, intercut and superimposed with filmic enactment by them of historic events and actors in sepia tones). Comments in the review by trade journal Film Information cannily glance at the film’s immobilization in an aesthetic and teleology of “eventfulness” that would not necessarily mobilize the masses: not much has been shown (except some laudatory words on TV channels) by way of the fight against corruption being continued after the group members are gunned down under government orders. A better and far more universal ending would have been to show lakhs of people coming out on the streets to protest against the government’s orders to kill the six friends … (Film Information 2006: 2) In other words, the event does not stand outside of a certain inevitability of plot, of theme, or heavy “representation.” It does not become the trigger: completely freeing the theatre from the weight of the ‘illusory imitativeness’ and ‘representationality’ … through a transition to montage of ‘workable artifices’ … any aggressive aspect of the theatre … that subjects the spectator to a sensual or psychological impact, experimentally regulated and mathematically calculated to produce in him [sic] certain emotional shocks which … become the only means that enable the spectator to perceive the ideological side of what is being demonstrated—the ultimate ideological conclusion … (Eisenstein 2002; formatting original) The event as montage or attraction would not so much iterate a certain historical grand narrative as constitute a new spectator, who “himself [sic] constitutes the basic material of the theatre,” guided “in the desired direction (frame of mind)” (Eisenstein 2002: 303–4). I will return later in this chapter to the importance of the reconstitution of the spectator in the following discussion of the later film Billu Barber, whose “a-historicity” enables, I suggest, a stronger thrust toward animating spectatorship, rather than re-animating grand structural historical narratives of subject formation. Instead, in RDB, history becomes inseparable from aesthetic event or framing, a mediated re-enactment. Violent rebellion as “event” becomes the hinge metaphor for anti-colonial struggle, but only as mediated within Sue’s reverie about postcolonial citizenship as India’s love-fest with a new West, inaugurated by the awakening of romance between herself and the leader of the Indian students, a “modern” Sikh named Daljeet or DJ. Event cannot, therefore, escape grand cinematic and historical metanarrative (Eisenstein 2002: 304–5), nor “blow up”

46  Structure, event, and liminal practices the minds of spectators, politically speaking, so that they can break free from the repetitive historical structures that bind them to the same dead-at-the-sceneof-action outcomes that reduce repetition to sameness, not difference (Deleuze 1994), all claims to neo-patriotism notwithstanding. One character affectionately refers to his friends as “nautanki saale,” or “public vaudeville types”;8 true enough, if one considers that their very revolt is recorded and choreographed on a “cinematic” register complete with alternating “historical footage” in sepia overtones, and their apologia is publicly “mediated” via All India Radio. They are eulogized on national television by youth and students nationwide as model revolutionaries, whose statement of violence is thereby already mediated by national-statist “tolerance” for apparently intolerable crimes against the state, and ploughed into a national-statist enunciatory stream. The state and the nation are then, once again, realigned. What exactly are the possibilities for embodied liminality in such supposedly transparent postcolonial allegories of politics as history, and history as a political narrative, mediated by memory resurrected as and by the aesthetic? One sees in RDB not a shift in the representability of nationalism, but in the representability of a neo-imperialist West’s commerce with a decolonized nation-state, presented through the ever-useful mythos of an interracial romance. Aamir Khan, the star and DJ of RDB, now scolds the national public in commercials for not making the nation more tourist-friendly. Managing the topos of nationalism in an era wherein liberalized economies have made “soft power” imperialism the dominant force in decolonized state formations, RDB cannot but operate within the liminality of the representational dilemma of crisis-ridden (neo-)nationalism, hailed anew as the white (wo)man’s burden of neocolonial reform. This hailing of a neoliberal nation-state is the actual aesthetic project of RDB, which paradoxically suppresses liminal countermodernities. No national subject exists who is not preemptively gathered up in the British director Sue’s representational apparatus of the anti-colonial and decolonized nation-state. And while fatuous or infatuated Western female figures sympathetic to natives are not unusual in the literature and film of empire as well as within nationalist historiography,9 Sue’s novelty lies in her occupying the three roles of character, historian/narrator and diegetic director of her film, whereby there is a complete containment of all resistive and anti-dominance discourses and actions within her own pet aesthetic project. In this schema, only the metropolitan gets to represent or present the peripheral. The actors exemplify the “universal” modernity and consumerist affect of global “youth culture,” erasing differences and specificities of time and place. Thus, RDB’s “event” repeats itself to produce not alterity, but a neoliberal state-driven identity, a hegemonically anti-hegemonic approach to history. It is this specific mandate that necessitates its collapse of event and structure, misreading the violent event’s repetition as a solitary stand-in for the more complex story and changeful narrative of systematic exploitation that marks both colonial and postcolonial histories, and sweeping up all genuinely countermodern liminalities, such as the unreconstructed Hindu fundamentalist subject, into the magic web of timeless nationalism. Anti-state violent

Structure, event, and liminal practices  47 events thus appear as the only history in town, but that history is not read as intrinsically mutable, as a generator of ruin, even though some of the scenes of the film are set among architectural ruins. Instead of suggesting the singularity of the decolonized present for those who inhabit and embody it, every “present” image is literally “hyperlinked” to a virtual “past” image. In one notable scene, the young Muslim college student Aslam Khan barges through a door bristling against his family’s “communalism” to emerge on the other side in his past “historical” incarnation as a Hindu revolutionary, whose struggle against empire must also break through into a recognition and rejection of divisive communalist thinking. Alternating between spectatorship and performance—the youth are initially avid and passive television watchers, and only reluctantly become actors in Sue’s docudrama—the Indian characters nevertheless uphold the integrity of the line separating appearance and reality as two intact realms of “happening” that evince the structurally iterative relationship of past and present. The present is a repetition of the past, and re-enactment is duplication. In each historical re-enactment that the film within the film presents, the event is a self-contained temporality, with no difference between past and present times, past and present alterities, and the liminalities generated not just by politics but also by historical duration. The anti-colonial armed robbery of the train at Kakori in Sue’s film is cinematically dissolved into the attack upon neocolonial arteries of power and knowledge in RDB, i.e. the youth’s brief takeover of All India Radio followed by a gun-battle with anti-terrorism forces. The youth mobilized in the colonial past are merely sepia originals of angry youth today. No gap opens up—either in Sahlins’ sense of what needs to be understood as not an identification but as a conjuncture, nor in Ramanujan’s sense of a disjuncture—between a collective or universal experience, then or now, and a singular experience now or then. Refusing to allow a gap between temporalities of the event leads to an absence of liminal identities. Limialities must be submerged, subjugated into iterations of the universal nationalist subject, whether secular or fundamentalist. Violent subversiveness also operates lyrically as narrative montage and disjointed imagery such as multiple optical printing superimposing past upon present, rather than recognizing the difference between past and present. The event is almost infinitely repeatable, in contexts that are almost entirely semblable. For it is not an uneven trajectory of history within a nationalist telos that RDB is detailing, despite its assertions to that effect; instead, it is documenting the struggle of neo-imperialism’s visual matrix to imprint itself upon the visual matrix of neo-nationalism. Indeed, given its abjuration of irreducible liminal, countermodern, and singular embodiments subtending an “eventful” history, RDB visibly performs the contradictions inherent in Hindi cinematic and historical subject formation, at least from the fifties to the nineties. Its narrative of subject formation is mediated by mystifications such as Indian national history, as the post-globalization West’s “passion” for hailing the seamless re-enactment of the anti-colonial past in the neocolonial present. Its attempt in so doing would appear to be the innate urge of “mockumentary,” or:

48  Structure, event, and liminal practices the fiction film’s intersections with documentary—and its quite common arousal (purposeful or not) of what we might call the viewer’s ‘documentary consciousness’: a particular mode of embodied and ethical spectatorship that informs and transforms the space of the irreal into the space of the real (Sobchak 2004: 261) The consequences for ethical spectatorship, however truly intended, of disavowing the radical alterity produced by temporality itself is a disappearance of radically other singularities: a coherent though virtual narrative of national integration can be produced consequently, as in the film’s story of bringing both the Hindu fundamentalist and the Muslim atheist into the fold of a “modern” secular and cultural nationalism, blessed by Western mediation. Even if the point of simplistically enacting or duplicating past as present and vice versa were merely to point up the epistemological status of ontological phenomena, of positing the cinematic object as really the experience of the “knowing” national cinematic subject10 —an epistemology of spectatorship that Sobchak describes as “distinctive subjective relations to a variety of cinematic objects, whatever their textual features” or: an experienced difference in our mode of consciousness, our attention toward and our valuation of the cinematic objects we engage … to blur … the line between two ontologically different modes of existence while, in fact, constructing hermeneutic play between two different sets of epistemological criteria” (2004: 261–2) The viewer, whose historical and cultural competence alone produces the spectatorial ethical affect of “neo-patriotism” that the film aims for, the kind of patriotic spectator hailed by such epistemes of filmic ontology, is in fact frozen in an epistemologically stagnant situation, which equates colonial and neocolonial political traumas. The historiography of public violence in RDB, which strings along all historic events with the same chain of unvarying temporality, produces subjects who are the “forever-changing-nothing-new” that Walter Benjamin saw as characteristic of modernity (Gilloch 1996), and that Ramanujan lambasts as modernity’s malaise. In RDB, as I have said before, literariness and textuality are foregone in the race for eventfulness. The film is immersed in the “event,” in some senses as discussed by Tarlo in her book on the 1975 Emergency in India under the Congress leadership of Indira Gandhi (2003: 6). Tarlo explains that anthropological method has often disdained a focus on “event” and preferred study and analysis of “structure” in societies. In her own work on the Emergency, Tarlo advocates and actualizes a departure from an anthropological veneration of structure, because while structures are undeniable, influential, and real, “events” are not only obviously “real” and palpable (and documentable, dateable, locatable, and so on), but in fact often determine structures and embed and “emplot” structure in historical writing and representation. The Indian Emergency (1975–7) was such an event, which picked

Structure, event, and liminal practices  49 up extant threads of political debate, dialogue, and dissension, and catalyzed their distillation into narratives of history—narratives that “report” but also induce revolution—and whose literariness and monumentality are subsequently memorialized in official records, archives and buildings (Tarlo 2003: 21–61). The Emergency’s narrativization of Indian political history is indeed a potent trace and subtext, arguably, in RDB’s chronicle of youth frustration and mobilization against political corruption. However, departing from Tarlo’s idea of the event as an “emplotment” and not a series of identical repetitions in history, RDB is so invested in the latter concept of the “event” as to refuse or fail to acknowledge the literariness, the evolving constructedness, of the history the events purportedly repeat. The film indeed misses “narrativity” and remains “mimetic” in a sense that is temporally and ideologically foreclosed.

“Mumbai My Life”: Mumbai Meri Jaan While in HKA and RDB the status of the “event” is differentially weighted as contestations of powerful nationalist-statist discourses of history, Mumbai Meri Jaan (hereafter MMJ) begins to displace the nation-state, structure-event binary altogether, in order to privilege the lowest common denominator of the polity, foreground bare life, and expose the radical liminality or void at the heart of iteration, re-enactment, and re-presentation. MMJ shows the event as the site of explosion—the evental site, wherein the constituent subsets of the represented are un-representable, inconsistent, in Badiou’s sense—of the unitary subject of national-statist history, and the implosion of that subject’s relation to the collectivist narrative of a structural consciousness of national history, or the metastructural securitization of the state. It proliferates the liminal subject by showing bare life’s denied access to either legitimate emplacement in census or passport schemas—the national or global context(s)—or serialization in structuralist accounts of national history and belonging. We see in MMJ an instance of “bare life” in Mumbai (erstwhile Bombay), a much denigrated and humiliated Tamil street vendor and slum-dweller, who makes a precarious living selling country liquor, while being assaulted at every turn by evidence of the local inequalities and contestatory differentials of global money and power in neoliberal India. Here, besides Badiou’s account of the also excessive void, Derrida’s definition of the event as a re-recording of a radical trace comes to our aid. Derrida’s radical questioning of the space-time of the violent “event,” his retention of the constitutive suture of the event as both other and the same—erstwhile and present— generates a horde of post-globalization liminalities both “literally” invested in the national or global context, as well as bare of context, such as those in MMJ. In the globalized India of MMJ, liminality directly flags postmodern discourses as countermodern discourses,11 as, for instance, when the outsider or terrorist figures as a prominent syntagm or paradigm of a new aspirational Indian homo economicus. Notably, in the state response to violent terror, one marks the emergence of a dynamic new formation of liminality, as the terrorist becomes the latest in a series of liminal identities that approach postmodern simulations of “bare life” (Agamben 1998) as hyperreality.

50  Structure, event, and liminal practices Hindi cinema’s representation of the terrorist assemblage—by which I mean the quadruplet of the perpetrator, violence, the afflicted state, and the citizen—is a culmination of its expertise in offering liminality and liminal exceptionality as the ground of the elusive nation. While in recent years, the terrorist has been depicted in Hindi cinema as more and more virtual, as an embodied weapon, as a projectile body simulating a mediated attack on the fabric of the nation-state in films like Dil Se and Mission Kashmir, as a liminal but embodied identity the terrorist—like the homeless or the undocumented dispossessed—fits the category of the “political exception,” which Carl Schmitt defines thus: a political decision that is made outside the juridical order and general rule … The condition of exception is thus a political liminality, an extraordinary decision to depart from a generalized political normativity [Badiou’s ‘normal’], to intervene in the logics of ruling and of being ruled … (quoted in Ong 2006: 5; emphasis mine)12 The terrorist is a liminal entity or phenomenon, who throws into radical doubt the constitution, coherence, or consistency of the modern developmental nationstate and its borders. The apparent immutability of “frontier” thinking must today be transmuted into a border performativity, in which the very iteration of multiple differences, in different voices and tongues, will lead to an identity map that is not about equivalences and translations but about simultaneous disidentifications (Chow 1991: 98; Balibar and Wallerstein 1991: 26). This is exactly the condition of the citizen recently re-contextualized as the border-crossing, deterritorialized terrorist in Hindi cinema. Since the 1990s, depictions of violence have accelerated in Hindi cinema, recalling acerbic points of view, for example “Violence is not an event but a worldview and way of life” (Taylor 2003: 209). Hindi cinema’s discourse of violence reaches the apogee of its investigation into the question of “be-longing,” of the status of the citizen, incipient since the fifties,13 with the border as the new prophylactic, splitting—condensing as well as displacing—state legitimacy into the twin tropes of terrorist violence and citizenship, rather than maintaining terror as a purely externalized threat to the integrity of the body politic, sometimes metonymized as the “foreign hand” (Bose 2009). The tropes of violence and citizenship are twinned in the sense of Derrida’s iterative signifying contexts: contextually varied repetition signifies sameness as well as difference, re-enactment rather than duplication (Derrida 1988). The threat to security has spun beyond the discovery of violence in the alien terrorist (predictable difference, as in Black Friday, Anurag Kashyap, 2004) to the terrorist masquerading as citizen and the citizen masquerading as terrorist within the body politic (unpredictable sameness, as in MMJ). This postcolonial process of subject formation, whose unconscious is saturated by the experience of violence, can be discerned in a formulation from Homi Bhabha: the Unconscious speaks of the form of otherness, the tethered shadow of deferral and displacement [citizen=citizen; but citizen=terrorist; therefore

Structure, event, and liminal practices  51 terrorist=citizen?]. It is … the disturbing distance in-between that constitutes the figure of … otherness … It is in relation to this impossible object that the liminal problem of … identity and its vicissitudes emerges … (1994: 64; emphasis mine) The terrorist embodies and generates the subsumption of particularities by the universalizing logic of global capital accumulations, as well as the resistance that then follows (Balibar). It is an identity split along the axis of sameness as constituted by difference, and to paraphrase Giorgio Agamben, an identity that is, precisely, not identity (Agamben 1990). Such is the elusive “signature,” the indeterminate identity, of the unknowable terrorist nesting among citizens, of his or her unpredictable sameness, rather than predictable difference. Beyond an empirical socio-historical function, MMJ’s focus on violence indicates a full circle of the film’s engagement with citizenship, by way of throwing in doubt the licit “citizen,” who seems reasonably to demand perfect accountability from the nation-state. A foundational and originary post-independence crisis of citizenship, one we are to see in the following chapters, is re-enacted with a vengeance and a difference in a policeman’s derisive enuncation “the citizen has come!” when mocked by the “common man” about failing to solve the crisis of terrorism in Mumbai. Moreover, in public discourse in India today, the Muslim citizen is usually conflated, without differential, with the Pakistani terrorist, the new “foreign hand” in the body politic; this theme will be discussed at length in chapter three, with reference to Shah Rukh Khan’s appearance in Chak de India (2007). The image of the rational citizen is being contested or replaced by an image of the citizen as also hopelessly hierarchized, corrupt, compromised, anonymous, shadowy, and terrorized, as well as—potentially—terrifying. Echoing its “docu-dramatic” predecessor Black Friday, which attempted a historic retelling and witness-bearing of the panicked narrative of the 1993 Mumbai blasts, but, with the 2008 Bombay train blasts as its context, MMJ’s title still echoes the lyrics of a fifties song from a police thriller (CID, 1956), “Yeh Hai Bombay Meri Jaan,” nostalgically evoking a Bombay that once allowed a comfortable nestling of urban realism within a romantic narrative of the city (Aguiar 2011: 151). The continuity between lyric and title inheres in a persistent realist romance of Bombay’s zest and chutzpah as it triumphs over phenomenological challenges, because popular virtue in the fifties still seemed to triumph over the narrative of urban noir, of shadowy lives lived amidst violence—“insaan ka nahin yahan naam-o-nishaan (“a being here has neither name nor address”).14 This romantic urban noir narrative is overwritten when the vendor Thomas takes his family to a hyper-modern neo-global mall—trying out the role of the newly entitled national homo economicus—where he is insulted and evicted for handling exorbitantly expensive perfumes. His evident poverty and lack of buying power adds to his crime, because it proves that poor people reproduce and that poverty spreads into the global mall (Rai 2009: 166). In a city reeling from the shock of back-to-back terror attacks—widely blamed on the city’s Muslims, the other reviled foreigners besides “Madrassis” or Tamils in Bombay—the vendor (who

52  Structure, event, and liminal practices is without “nam-o-nishan,” a full name or address) falls between the cracks of this biopolitical conundrum and finds himself out on the street with his family. Mutely suffering his humiliation and rejection, he then overhears the spoilt college-shirking daughter of a rich household where his wife works as maid say that one way to subdue the state that forces education on its paying citizens is by calling in a bomb threat. He is then shown inserting a coin into a payphone— remembering the young woman’s casual joke, “You don’t know what one rupee can do”—and reporting fictitious bombs. His ability to spread rumors brings multiplexed globalization to its knees , endowing him with a new sense of power. He has the satisfaction of seeing rich Bombayites fleeing malls and buildings upon the false bomb alarms he has called in, and the mall from which he was thrown out is raided by police. The perfume store owner is “thrown out” by the police, as once he himself had been. Since the film Achhut Kanya (Franz Osten, 1936), forms of bare life, such as untouchability, have been rarely covered by Hindi cinema, despite emergent articulations of Dalit identity in Indian political and social life. Not only does the cinema not present, let alone represent, untouchability, it never articulates a reason for its lack or for its absence. To ask, as Rao has, “If caste and especially Untouchability, is the deep structure of secular and religious configurations of community and nation, can we address India’s political modernity without an account of the subject who inaugurates that modernity—the Dalit?” (2007: 153) is not merely to ask whether there is a conspiracy of silence, a disarticulate political discomfort, or simply an attitude of indifference. It is, rather, to ask, what happens when bare life, and thereby liminality, begins to figure as the constitutive trope of Hindi film-making, as it seems to be in the process of becoming. As Balibar and Wallerstein have shown us, tropes of nation and state are inevitably subtended by racialized categories of labor, which in turn replicate and reactivate core-periphery relations existing on the global scale between core-peripheral nation-states and their differential but symbiotic pasts and “destinies”: Core and periphery strictly speaking are relational concepts that have to do with differential cost structures of production … the concentration of core processes in states different from those in which peripheral processes are concentrated tends to create differing internal political structures in each, a difference which in turn becomes a major sustaining bulwark of the inegalitarian interstate system that manages and maintains the axial division of labour … (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991: 78–9) The Dalit, untouchable, or, in this case, unspeakable and un-nominated, is the pivotal node of the management of labor (class and race conjoined in “caste”) by the nation-state system (nation) via the regulatory regime of ethnic “class”ification (ethnic/caste hierarchy). The tributary structure that feeds this coreperiphery interstate system, according to Balibar and Wallerstein, is the domestic economy. There, in the process of capital accumulation, ethnicity and race can be manufactured (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991: 79), amidst other processes, via

Structure, event, and liminal practices  53 domestic relations of labor. The history of nationalism is actually the history of racism, or that of materially determined, as well as state-generated, labor racism and ethnicity-generated caste racism.15 In India, this state-generated or statesubtended racism often takes the form of discrimination linked to ghettoized work: unpaid or low paid and unstructured labor producing and reproducing domestic and global core-periphery relations. In this sense, the vendor is “bare life” as unstructured labor—he sells street liquor, does odd household jobs, or acts as a rag-picker—to be created and identified as a different “race,” an internal other—insaan (“human”) with no nam-o-nishan (“name or address”). His “non”identity is constituted by his un-“class”-ifiable laboring place in core-peripheral structures of serfdom straddling the neoliberal states’ zones of exception (Ong 2006), and its logic of internal “race”-ing of its captive labor force, an articulation of ethnicity and race via modalities of class and labor (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991). In this film, history, as we understand the term in the age of “nationstates,” is a product of racialized thinking, where the subject is enacted through various mise-en-scènes of dehumanized labor. At last, Hindi cinema appears poised to re-present the liminal in the hollowed out individual instance, without representing her or him through morally grand political or ethical rhetoric, or even through the classificatory discourses of citizenship and census taking. Indeed, since the vendor hardly ever speaks and is never spoken of—barely noticed—by any of the film’s characters, the bar on “representation” is maintained throughout the film though he is undeniably “present.” His only self-identifying act is that of “acting” as the aspirational citizen attempting poise within global capitalist praxes and spaces of consumerism. However, while he attempts to perform “citizen” and cross securitizations that exclude a deracinated and de-classed workforce, he is instead produced and enacted as an example of bare life who is an undeniable but inarticulate entity, without representation, given only within a “re-presentation,” a hollow duplication that gestures unmistakably to his liminality as farcical and absurd performance of citizenship (another sort of nautanki). However, the disjunctive iterations, the proliferating enunciatory possibilities of his very performance also re-articulate citizenship itself as liminality. The vendor’s staging of his own social death—a race and class apart—is not a hall of mirrors, nor an echo chamber; it is repetition with a difference. Terror and trauma now invade classificatory structures of licit citizenship; the anonymous, un-identified terrorist can be a citizen, and the citizen can and does now inhabit the terrorist’s alienation. In this film, therefore, we find the quest for the one who “belongs” within the count, the true citizen—a critical South Asian fable of decolonization—loop back and re-emerge as terrorist act and aporia. The vendor, the man without a ”name,” switches to enacting terrorist rather than citizen when his bare, meager entitlement from globalized capital—handling a bottle of perfume that costs 10,500 rupees, a sum beyond his wildest imagination—is brutally challenged. A failed assertion against capital backfires into a failed prophylaxis against terror, both failures threatening the prime assemblage of neoliberal consumerism, the global mall realizing and hyperrealizing external and internal core-periphery relations.

54  Structure, event, and liminal practices The policeman’s enunciation of “Citizen!” that I mentioned earlier reminds the film’s viewers that, in the communal discursive proliferations of the instance of so-called citizenship, the so-called citizen may be the terrorist, another ironic reflection upon the quandaries of global security agencies. The meaning and nature of citizenship is ambiguated. Moreover, as MMJ shows, the so-called patriotic Hindu-identified citizen may also be a person who imagines a state of personal vigilantism—another sort of anti-establishment monadic terrorism— replacing the police force, thereby adding another challenging dimension to the state’s security crisis. Finally, the police in MMJ are not only stereotypically brutal, but perhaps also brutalized by the postcolonial national elite. When they do try to intervene in the crimes of powerful citizens, elite hegemonic interests intercede with their superiors to defang them. In MMJ one sees a moment of hesitation, of slippage between ethical and penal, visible in the resistance of the police to elite hegemonic interests. This becomes evident in the police’s eventual reluctance to participate in the hegemonic and othering discourse of the state and the so-called national subject, the licit citizen. In contrast to the hardly actualized policemen of HKA, in MMJ the police have feelings and cry; their sympathies with the citizens they watch and protect ebb and flow as visibly as their loyalties to the state they serve. They are, in the final analysis, nearly as liminal as the terrorist or the citizen, because they strain to be realized beyond the function of “excrescences” of the national state, agential representatives who may not exactly belong, or blend in, with the citizenry.16 In MMJ, as we have already seen, the state certainly has feelings, just as the police do. The state interrogates its subjects within the paradigm of its own affect, thereby channeling the relationship between state and citizen into an “evental site” where the state is on one hand teetering upon the verge of being another affective participant in the drama of the nation, and on the other acting as the security implement of a normative and totalizing situation. If the state can be humanized, ethicized—with brothers who cry as they perform their law-enforcement duties against their brothers in Deewar, and policemen who cry, reflect, and philosophize in MMJ—then the state is partly reconfigured as another liminal, disjointed, fragmented participant in the national discourse along with other liminalities. In MMJ, the embodiment of the state’s affect, as well as the liminalization of the state in the evental site, is clearly glimpsed. Citizens are being put on stage, as spectators and as actors: [they perform within the available] notions of citizenship [that] are infused with public images, official definitions, informal customary practice, nostalgic longings, accrued historical memory and material culture, comforting mythologies of reinvention, and lessons learned from past rejections … the anxious enactments of citizens as actors (Joseph 1999: 5) It is in the praxes of self-enactments—such as education, religion, lawfulness, consumerism, etc.—that the curtain parts and the drama of national identification unfolds. Praxes of the “live body” are themselves the vectors, the molds,

Structure, event, and liminal practices  55 for theories and methodologies of subject formation in cinema and globalized nationhood (Joseph 1999: 8). In MMJ, bare life must assert itself by non-juridical means, through stratagems of rumor, indeterminate threats and petty persecutions (see Joseph, above) to intervene in a deadly neoliberal state-stamped reality of “public images, official definitions.” Thereby, the citizen is both the actor and spectator of violent terror. The idea of a spectatorial matrix overwhelms all other modes of identity. In his retirement speech the veteran policeman Tukaram Patil17—who was seen earlier as skeptical of the modern citizen’s demand for accountability—refers to stealing his schoolmaster’s spectacles in childhood, an act that got him expelled from school. Spectacles, he confesses, always fascinated him, for he thought he would see further with them. Upon this, Tukaram ruminates, his father told him that he had better join the police, or he would surely enter the criminal world. Becoming a policeman, however, frustrated his expectation of someday being vouched clarity of vision. The modern Tukaram’s speech is redolent of longing for lost vision, for a lost faith that just as his name iterates that of the nineteenthcentury saint, so contemporary post-independence events would repeat structural myths of pre-independence nationalist historiography. Tukaram confesses to having misunderstood things he has seen, of being a confused spectator who did not know how “to act,” so absorbed was he by the national drama unfolding before him. His speech reveals the complex interweaving of actor and spectator positions in national and cinematic discourses of citizenship. Liminality of the viewing subject or position affects visibility. Violence is the ultimate “limning” or marking of the link between citizenship and liminality, a border that both contours and liminalizes citizenship. Whereas the cinema’s visual heft might consist of classic realist techniques of shot-reverseshot, flat camera, depth of field shots, tableaux, close-ups, high to medium key lighting, point-of view shots, eye-line matches, etc., these have been replaced by a distracted and fast shot-duration camera, low key lighting, disjunctive visual compositions, tilted camera, pastiche and collage rather than montage, wideangle cinematography, long tracks, pans and zooms, crane shots, rack focus, multiple optical printings, etc. These aesthetic modifications—primarily used to narrate fast-paced political, suspense, horror, and thriller dramas involving rapid and violent movement and action, or to convey the hip distractedness of “postmodern” rhythms in the global south—connote political liminality, suturing proliferating and heteroglossic points of view and vantage as the core of national subjecthood, as well filmic narrative. In this cinematic “limning” of violence we have the final answer as to why the citizen’s identity is nothing if not liminal, as is that of the terrorist; the citizen and terrorist are sutured entities, as are actor and spectator, cinematic diegesis and exegetic reality. Thus, in MMJ, national life or cinema and national subject or spectator are indeterminate and liminal in four separate evental sites of violence: the critique of the media’s coverage of communal violence; the citizens’ visual misreadings as they witness communal violence and suspect and attack each other; the sense of helpless, disjointed, and compromised policemen watching a black and white film (an older cinematic register) as though it were in color (as Tukaram Patil

56  Structure, event, and liminal practices opines in his farewell speech); and in the citation of a different era of urban violence as in the older Bombay noir CID (1956) in the film’s title and title-track. The film, however, swivels back to optimism in the end, this turn suggesting a lingering belief in the salvific idealization of performance as the exorcism of “bad conscience” (Levinas 1998: 143). When the vendor’s false threats lead to the cardiac arrest of an elderly nouveau riche man visiting the mall, the vendor repents, atones, and takes responsibility, as though he and his “victim” were indeed equals and mutually responsible and responsive beings. Doing so, he refashions resentment toward the other whom he has so far burdened by his very existence into an acknowledgment of responsibility that was never extended to him by that other. The vendor’s repentance, therefore, alchemizes Nietzschean bad conscience into a Levinasian version thereof, but one that bare life must bear. This alchemy or re-enactment that turns bare life into the guilty party with a “conscience” works to further the logic whereby to be the citizen is no longer to be, but to act.18 Liminality thus implies performativity in the borders, between fields and spaces of “doing.” If violence and civic performance are both “doing,” the liminal in representation appears in cracks along the suture of civic and bare identities, or between citizens and terrorists. Liminality as a performative, political and ethnographic category and limit case thus acts as the ground for social identities in the modern and postmodern Hindi cinematic universe, with violence as the poignant stylus for their delineation. What could be more spectacular to do with or against the state, but to show violence, re-enacted as endogenous or exogenous, sometimes sexual, sometimes communal, sometimes nationalistic, sometimes terrorist? In MMJ, such liminal subjects—the vendor, the Muslim, the terrorist—populate the context of the violent event in spectral ways. They are neither us, nor them, yet both.

“Billu Barber” Another less cataclysmic trend that might be associated with this new radical indeterminacy of identity is that of the incorporation of the spectator within the cinematic frame itself, what I will call a “reverse direct address” mode, as seen thematically throughout and quite dramatically in one shot of the film Billu Barber (Priyadarshan, 2009), hereafter BB. By “reverse direct address,” I refer to a dialectic of the exegetic spectatorial gaze becoming absorbed into the diegetic, wherein the exegetic spectator is literally resorbed into the texture of the film as onscreen image, asserting affinity as well as iteration, or the audience’s actorliness. The urge fully articulated or “signaled” in BB, to apply Deleuze’s insight on repetition and theatricality, is to replace the concept of filmic “representation” (an actor socially, politically, and affectively representing or speaking for his fans) as false abstraction, with the idea of material and psychological repetition (the actor and fan as interchangeable signs onscreen) as real signification (Deleuze 1994). In BB, this is achieved by patiently experimenting with and fine-tuning the spatial and psychological “distance” that separates actor and audience, star and fan, so that the actor and audience step in and out of each other’s “visual” frames, in what Sobchak has called “cinema’s visible inscription of the dual, reversible,

Structure, event, and liminal practices  57 and animated visual structure of embodied and mobile vision.” She describes this as looking “at,” as well as “through,” vision (2004: 150, 149). BB serves as recent Hindi cinema’s perfect “sign” of the “correct distance” in theatrical spectatorship, which makes the difference between actor and spectator into a doubling or repetition that demonstrates that “which in eternal return makes him [actor or spectator] ill into a liberatory and redemptive repetition” (Deleuze 1994: 23). This might also be read as the re-spatializing and distancereducing mechanism whereby repetition works toward the attainment of a kind of psychic stasis via instinctual drives that exceeds the pleasure principle, aka Freud. If the compulsion to repeat is to work towards restoring “an earlier state of things,”19 and if this work involves a spatial mechanism of relocation to a psychic “ante-riority,” i.e. to an ante-psychological psychic “home” defined by instincts and not by psychoanalytic ideals of conscious self-retrieval (i.e. representation), then spectatorial maneuvers to become one with stardom (as per the Metzian formulation of screen viewing as streaming self-projection or mirroring, as imaginary signification) is a similar spatial maneuver “through the individual psyche” and “into a phylogenetic past” (Smith 2002: 220). For this, melodramatic form is naturally found to be the best medium of articulation, because melodrama bypasses representation in favor of re-enactment or repetition (Brooks 1994: 19). Such a required embodiment appearing as the symbolic consubstantiality or “phylogenesis” of spectator and screen image is also effected by other identifications or duplications in classic melodrama, often bodily marks or signs upon the body, such as the proverbial locket—“La croix de ma mere” (Brooks 1994: 18)—that effects recognition and (con-)substantiation of lineage claims,20 like the twin beeping lockets we find exhorted in high melodramatic registers in BB’s film within the film. BB is the story of a Bollywood star and his long-lost childhood friend, Billu, the village barber, being reunited by a series of fantastic twists of plot during location shooting for a film that would appear to be a Hindi remake of Star Wars. The relationship of the Bollywood star and his fandom is at the thematic core of the film. To consider the individual psychic formation, spectatorship is concerned with achieving the proper distance needed for “repetitions [of selfhood], particularly of the aesthetic variety … [to work as] sallies from a repressed wish that has been condensed and displaced [what I would call a wish not only to have the star but to be the star]” (Smith 2002: 220). The illness of cinematic spectatorship, the trauma of the unfulfilled promise of representation of spectator by actor, then has a built-in healing system achieved by manipulating spatial possibilities, as BB suggests. Since desiring spectatorial identification, as proposed by Freud, Metz, and Deleuze, is quintessentially an act of perversely reaching a psychic stasis beyond pleasure by refilling an absent auratic image with a compulsive spectatorial selfpresence, or of going beyond the pleasure of desiring as identification to reach a far more anterior psychic interior of desiring as identity, an ante-psychological, and pre-psychoanalytic realm of instincts, then such spectatorship is essentially a spacing and distancing trick, skill, or pedagogy. The more the star’s absence is recognized, the more the spectator repeats or enacts the star instead of despairing

58  Structure, event, and liminal practices or lashing out—as an exteriorization of principles of the imaginary signifier or of interiority as anteriority—and the less the absence of the star “signifies” as disrupting or disabling viewing pleasure. Eschewing the conventional pleasures of representation for the absorption and repetition of actor and spectator in each other by determining the “correct distance” between actor and spectator—whereby the psychic distance needed for viewing pleasure morphs into the psychic distance covered in condensation and displacement of the imaginary into the signifier—BB invokes and activates a foundational yet liminal principle of spectatorship and repetition as an emergent preoccupation of Hindi cinema. To consider the “phylogenetic past” of this spectatorial self-formation, spectatorship in BB is a fundamentally collective and communal act of repetition and of re-traditionalizing of modernity. The privileged access ultimately granted to the humble barber Billu by the star Sahir Khan works out as a type of celestial visit to the village as a whole. When Sahir chooses the little village of Budbuda for the shooting location of his new “sci-fi” mythological, the “star”-struck villagers, including Billu, experience the God-like Sahir Khan in their midst, in their village, upon their soil; erstwhile they had been engaged in single-minded abortive attempts to enter Sahir Khan’s space from afar. Along with a collective merging of star and fan, therefore, Sahir Khan’s “appearance” validates a “past” mythopoesis, whereby traditional communities and publics expected Gods and saints to be demotically immanent as well as transcendent. In the film, “material” absorption and iteration do not, however, equate to a physical mirroring or reflection, a production of identity or sameness in the sense of equivalence (Deleuze 1994: 1–3, 19, 22); rather, they instantiate what Metz has described as “identifying only with something seeing” (1982: 97), i.e. a selfconsciousness of dual location within the spectatorial continuum, what Deleuze describes as the signification of difference in repetition produced only within the spectatorial relationship, and only when viewer and image are set at the correct distance in relation to each other within the trajectory of the gaze (1994: 23). Productive difference, itself intrinsic to repetition (Deleuze 1994), depends in theatre and in other signifying systems of repetition upon the spacing and positioning of the signifiers, which “testify to the spiritual and natural powers which act beneath the words, gestures, characters and objects represented … [such signs or signifiers] signify repetition as real movement, in opposition to representation which is a false movement of the abstract” (ibid.: 23). In BB, one particular shot exactly bears out the status of material repetition as the true producer of the authentic movement and animating spirit of this cinema, that of the indeterminate and canny splitting and rematerializing of the transcendent subject, when it insistently adjusts the spatio-temporal lag between the differential subject positions of spectator and image famously proposed in Metz’s idea of the “missed encounter” and “unauthorized scopophilia” of the cinematic viewer.21 The protagonist Billu looks in wistfully upon a scene of film shooting where the star is Sahir Khan—played by actual megastar Shah Rukh Khan—his long-lost childhood friend. Contrary to the expectations, even demands, of his family and community, Billu has thus far refused to “cash in” on his link with his childhood friend. He has refused to enter the world of the cinema and the iconic

Structure, event, and liminal practices  59 star, no matter what the pressures of communal status, financial need, or even personal longing. He is now separated from the star by the diegetic mythos of celebrity-hood, the technical armature of the shooting of a diegetic film, and the necessary cinematic separation of spectator and actor redoubled (since already in the filmic “missed encounter” the spectator and the actor are never in the same spatio-temporal frame). In one single frame, Billu is almost “seen” by Sahir Khan, but this, too, ends in failure. Goaded by his family and community’s pleas and demands to get personal audiences with Sahir Khan, Billu reluctantly joins other villagers in soliciting the idolized Sahir Khan’s attention or notice. Intrigued by a hauntingly familiar voice—that of Billu joining the villagers’ choral hailing of his name—Sahir looks intently for a few seconds at his fans perched on a tree branch in an effort to get closer to him and to be hailed by him as successful spectators and adorers. For a deftly triangulated instance, in which the fans are the common object of the gaze of diegetic star (Sahir), the camera eye, and exegetic viewer (ourself), all within the depth of field internal to the screen, we see a serried rank of spectators including Billu himself, a fan like us, waving back at the camera, at Sahir, at us. In a moment of pure illusion, the spectator seems to have finally reached the goal of being imported, transported, spirited, and absorbed within the frame of the film, of having crossed the line between screen and spectator, thereby defying the convention of the impossible contiguity of spectator and image. As Sobchak writes insightfully: all the bodies in the film experience—those onscreen and offscreen (and possibly the screen itself)—are potentially subversive bodies. They have the capacity to function both figurally and literally. They are pervasive and diffusely situated in the film experience. Yet these bodies are also materially circumscribed and can be specifically located, each arguably becoming both the “grounding body” of sense and meaning since each exists in dynamic figure-ground relation of reversibility with the others … (2004: 67) In her evocation of the “literal and the figural,” the transcendent materiality of cinematic subjectivity is once again cited or sighted. The visual object of the exegetic spectator—the diegetic spectator and fan, who doubles the exegetic spectator’s desire and position—becomes a potential re-embodiment or re-enactment of the spectator as both spectator and image onscreen (also in Metz’s sense of the “imaginary signifier,” as both a perceptually undeniable presence and an empirically unquestionable absence), by literally recombining the spectator as actor and image.22 This may at first appear to be recalling something of the visual economy of darsanic encounter in Hindi cinema—something that Prasad has, for instance, seen as typical of the Indian cinematic phenomenon whereby the Metzian “missed encounter” gives way to a plenary communal phenomenon of the godhead showing themselves to a rapt and absorbed spectator—but what it actually demonstrates is the dismantling of the presence-absence binary, not

60  Structure, event, and liminal practices its affirmation or dissolution. This scene comprises both an imaginary and a symbolic mode, because the actors in this scene of address are themselves spectators of the shooting, like Billu, involved in processes of identificatory merging, as well as discrete transactionality, with the star of the film and of the film within the film. The spatiotemporal separation of image or actor and spectator has been bridged by the incarnation of spectator(s) within the frame as actor(s), closing the gap, waving back at those outside—like us or like Billu at other times—viewing the frame and ruing their separation from the actor as endless and inevitable. Like the terrorist, the spectator is neither insider nor outsider, yet both. However, Billu’s act of faith here ends in the metaphorical reaffirmation of the line separating screen and spectator in the form of the tree branch that falls under the burden of spectatorial liminality, taking down the other villagers but landing squarely on Billu’s back in particular. The rude awakening of the painful accident and the reiteration thereby of the line separating actor and fan ruptures the moment of potential recognition and attention, or dissolution of their difference and distance, in obliterating Sahir Khan’s fleeting pro-prioception of his friend. Another longer durational moment of the potential doubling of spectator and actor occurs when Billu is seen bringing a shattered and stained mirror back into his barber shop from the garbage dump. A band of local goons had thrown all his tools into the dump as revenge for their disappointed expectations that Billu could get them closer to the star Sahir Khan. Stripped of his own temporary stardom in his village—whose name Budbuda means “bubble” according to the MonierWilliams Sanskrit–English dictionary—when he seems to either not want or be unable to relay contiguity with stardom, Billu re-enters his life as a poor barber by pausing the cinematic freight-train, so to speak, to look into the broken mirror as he props it up against the wall. Whereas his blurred and discolored image in the badly damaged mirror immediately pertains to the damage done to his local “image,” this frame is also a meta-discursive allusion to “image,” because it is an existing visual signature of the idea of the “performer” in Hindi cinema. Two notable examples are the actress Rekha as Umrao Jaan in Muzaffar Ali’s film Umrao Jaan (1981) and Smita Patil as Urvashi in Shyam Benegal’s Bhumikaa (“The Role”, 1977). As the title of Benegal’s film especially suggests, this moment of the actor’s gaze upon her own image in the mirror is a momentous suturing of the actor as spectator, performer, shadow, and image. It highlights the reliance of the actor’s image upon the spectatorial presence, without which the cinema especially resonates only with the actor’s absence. The “insupportable” distinction of actor and viewer is marked by “mirroring,” which undeniably signifies separation (absence), as well as the mutual construction and constructedness (presence) of both identities.23 The two spectatorial points finally merge with this substitution of mirror for screen. In other words, when finally the spectators physically enter the space of the object of cinema—the image that used to be another but is now the spectator—and are yet also watching themselves watching their imaginary signification, the difference between screen and mirror is no longer sustainable, and representation increasingly becomes “copying,” re-presentation, reactivation. Indeed, even at the level of the cinematic apparatus, Metz points out

Structure, event, and liminal practices  61 how the cinema involves not just one reduplication but many, “a series of mirroreffects organized in a chain” (1982: 51). Shattering, mirroring, etc., have homoerotic connotations within Perso-Arabic literature; how these homoerotic connotations permeate subjectivation as well as spectatorship will be more extensively addressed in chapter five of this book, in which male embodiment and the star-spectator relationship will be considered again, but a brief reflection on homoerotic connotations in Sahir Khan and Billu’s story of mutual subjectivation and spectatorial formations is also worth considering. Within Perso-Arabic discourse, the image of a shattered mirror has figured at two levels. According to Kugle, “The broken mirror that in [pre-colonial] Sufi rhetoric represented the heart shattered in passionate love now [that is, post-1857] refers to the ego made subservient to pious prayer that unites a community of patriotic believers” (2002: 38–42). The suppression of “Persian” culture as “effete, slothful and corrupt” by colonial-era Islamic reformers such as Altaf Husayn Hali (1837–1914) in favor of “an imagined earlier, ‘purer’ Arabic poetry that had the manly virtues of vigor, fortitude, directness, and ‘naturalness’” (Kugle 2002: 38–9) can be seen as reversed in BB, signifying the return of the countermodern and the liminal in homoeroticism. Here, I invite consideration of the other level of spectatorial subjectivation signifying hidden countermodern formations of passionate male-male affect—the shattered mirror as the image of the self-ruptured in love for the impossible love object—which can also be considered to be determining Billu’s gaze into the mirror. As the invocation of Sahir and Billu’s “dosti” suggests, the suffering of Billu as the disenfranchised, proprietary bourgeois male seeking status and access as a member of the “public” to the “star” could also “screen” this other “private” subjectivation of homoerotic identification with an unattainable auratic object. Indeed, Brett Farmer has argued that certain relations to seeing, or certain kinds of spectatorship, have long functioned in cinema as indexical of certain kinds of homosexual subjectivity. Using as his example for discussion Hector Babenco’s film adaptation of Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman, Farmer writes: Cinema has long functioned as a vital forum for the production of gay male meanings and identifications to the point that a certain type of film spectatorship has become a veritable shorthand for male homosexuality in various cultural discourses … extraordinarily intense [male] spectatorship functions in Kiss of the Spider Woman as one of the more spectacular and readily legible signs of that character’s homosexuality … (2000: 23) Billu not only refuses to “be seen” but also to “see” Sahir for much of the film. My suggestion here is that BB’s emergent enunciation of new political and spectatorial desiring subjectivations in Hindi cinema remains most frequently articulated through the figure of homosocial desiring subjectivation between men. As Billu “sees himself” in the mirror, the recursive and chiasmic image of him seeing himself seeing himself as image mirrors the potential subjectivation of male star and spectator, image and viewer, actor and fan, as twin entities,

62  Structure, event, and liminal practices and one vector of this chiasmic subjectivation is the passionate intensity of the repressed homosocial identificatory and desiring gaze. The history and relationship of Sahir Khan and Billu figures serially and interchangeably as the story of the empowerment of the common “man,” the fan in the cinematic universe, as well as the ethnic and sexual “minority” in the body politic, homoerotic intensity as a “minority” alterity coming into sharper focus upon the canvas of “normal” visibility. When the prohibition upon seeing is finally overcome by Billu, the star and the fan can finally be reunited as long lost friends, or “dosts,” without homoerotic passion having to be declared. In keeping with concurrent new tendencies of radical subjectivation in ethnic and sexual politics, as well as new spectatorial subjectivations in contemporary Hindi cinema, reverse direct address signals, taking the viewer into the frame, or through successive layers of apparatus–technical, imaginary, symbolic, identificatory, fantasmatic, secondary, theoretical, etc.—into a new future for the cinematic mise en scène and medium, implying a positioning of spectator, subject, and actor as fluidities on a visual and spatiotemporal spectrum, a fluidity that seems to be occurring around the same time as other experimental “subjectivations” also become visible. For instance, at the same time as “bare life” is embodied in MMJ and BB—each time in the expressive, deadpan close-up views of actor Irrfan Khan’s now-trademark face for such roles—new direct visual subjectivations of the Muslim as embodied by Shah Rukh Khan (in BB and since Chak de India, 2007; see chapter three) are in progress. These parallel experiments in subjectivation of bare life and the Muslim (aka “terrorist,” “homosexual,” “disenfranchised”)—both identities performed within cinematic history as examples of “non-identities,” or nomadic citizenship articulated disjuncturally concerning the state that delimits them within certain zones of exception (and sometimes exemption)—may not stand in a purely coincidental or accidental relationship with each other. These may instead be linked interpellations, whose symptomatic expression may be the relatively new reverse direct address mode of the (frequently homosocial) visual, suturing the male spectator or subject and the image or actor within a time-space flow hitherto monitored and syntactically jointed, as discussed previously. This new cinematic spectatorial fluidity reflects and shapes the ambiguation of identity, of liminalization, of identity, unfolding as non-identity and incommensurability, omnipresent in exegetic life. Robert Ray has identified a similar repetition and re-enactment trend in seventies Hollywood in the form of camp, re-issues, and sequels, which sometimes deployed well-known characters and actors migrating from film to film, especially in sequels and camp versions (Ray 1985: 261–3). He identifies it as “fostering the kind of ironic relationship to the movies that results from an increased awareness of an art’s intertextuality” (263), and also relates it to a wider socio-political crisis of American national identity at the time. The explosion of such an intertextual reactivation strategy as one of the modalities of repetition or copying in Hindi cinema does imply a more ironic and stylistically self-conscious spectator of that cinema as moviegoer; seeing stars and character types “migrate from film to film, the audience inevitably became aware of these characters’ artificiality … this new widespread sense of films’

Structure, event, and liminal practices  63 ‘made’ quality represented a major departure in the direction of self-consciousness” (ibid.: 263). However, like Ray, I also see Hindi cinema’s employment of this intertextual repetitive strategy in the form of “reverse direct address” as a heightened self-consciousness of the manipulated and surreal nature of civic identification and political subjectivation, beyond cinematic spectatorship, in the sense of an uneasy political recognition of liminality in historic events and mythic narrative structures themselves.24 Repetition as reverse direct address is an attempt at enacting non-representational heterogeneity: the signifier repeats both the putative signified and signification itself. The image repeats the imaginary and the symbolic, the spectators and the spectatorial gaze upon its object. In a sense, as Metz has indicated, all cinema performs the illusion of duplication: it drums up the absence of its signified in the excessive presences of its signifier on screen (Metz 1982: 45). However, in RDB, MMJ, BB, and other films, the appearance of a performative excessive presence in the screen space of absence opens up the very possibility of radical uncertainty, of liminality, in Metz’s words in “all the really perceived detail … [of] unaccustomed perceptual wealth, but at the same time stamped with unreality to an unusual degree” (1982: 45). What the pert trope of direct repetition in BB evokes particularly powerfully is the palpable excess of a signified that forces open, literally, the screen, as a membrane holding reality and reflection, signified and signifier, presence and absence apart, so much so that the mirror is forced to become a “true space” (ibid.: 43), wherein the embodied spectator can literally inhabit the ghostly space and body of the star within this mutual dissolving of representation and reality, of absence and presence, in endless re-enactment. A review of the abundance of tropes of repetition in BB will be helpful here: the film within the film is the excessively presented and excessively improbable Hindi filmic narrative staple of twin brothers lost at birth, a familiar Hindi cinematic ur-fiction that its specific audience robustly and raucously endorses and enlivens. The twins are separated at birth but are “technologically” linked through twin electronic keepsakes worn around their necks, which beep upon physical proximity, because this particular instance of filmic fiction is also a copy of Star Wars, involving that other excessive Oedipal fiction of dual and indeterminate identities, of the heroic son who must kill that evil father who was once very much like himself. These nested “identifications” and “identities” are presented as futuristic and techno-tropic: East meets and copies West. Additionally, the hero Sahir Khan is a Muslim, like the actor Shah Rukh himself, but in the film is also a version of bare life that his fans and lost “twin” Billu embody, because he actually came from the same masses as his audience. Sahir Khan carries his fans, therefore, into his image onscreen and thus ends up “copying” them in his very embodiment. If this were not enough repetition, in the “shooting” narrative, the diegetic actor who has forced himself on to the cast by persisting in petitioning Sahir Khan, and who is meant to identify the twins as the type-cast “police inspector,” keeps forgetting his lines, so much so that the diegetic audience, now glimpsed as corralled off the shooting space, again facing and mirroring the “real” film’s “real” viewer, is heard chanting his forgotten lines:25 at birth the twins’ mother declared them “twin stars” in the firmament,

64  Structure, event, and liminal practices pushing us back upon the pregnant possibilities of Star Wars as exegetic mother lode of the futuristic signified of Hindi cinema. The star is twinned and duplicated in the fan/spectator/friend. They are, in fact, the two lost “brothers” of the film within the film, but the pathway to “re-cognition” in their case is rerouted from the technological—no beeping keepsakes as they approach each other across the multiple separations and boundaries between them—onto the affective; Billu hears at the last possible moment, upon the last possible twist of his track as he does his best to distance himself from his now famous “brother” or “dost,” how much his friend, once so like him, still loves and misses him. And thus the “twins” are rejoined as each other’s soul mates and reflections. Iteration upon a single “starry” axis conjoins everyone in the cinematic spectrum: the exegetic fans, the diegetic fans, the unglamorous protagonist Billu, the star and the image, the cinematic apparatus, cast, and crew, until the image of the star turns out to be quite literally a reflection of the fan or audience via Billu and his peers, but never consolidated, absolute, or determinate. By rewriting the dominant paradigm of darsan according to Indian cinema criticism as a viewing mode26 —whereby the public frontal encounter with the star or icon is said to trigger absorption in order to create devout passivity and resist or efface audience subjectivation as an activating, individualizing process— without bypassing the theory altogether, as Gehlawat advocates (2010: 21–3), the scene of audience “absorption” in BB revises, I propose, the very meaning of the star to audience darsanic or viewing relationship, by empowering the audience actively to modify iconicity as mode of publicity, to appropriate the icon to reflect felt social, public needs, and to create transactional identities. As Jain (2009) has argued with regard to Indian religious art, bazaars, and transactional publics, and as Srinivas (2009) has argued in relation to active fan culture in South Indian cinema, audiences in Hindi cinema continue to emerge as active in their negotiations of images, and actively position themselves on a continuum, like the “police inspector” wangling a special appearance deal with a star who remains a star but also a brother. Identification in the Metzian sense does not foreclose the possibilities of symbolic reenactments of the darsanic or iconic, of transactional activities of self-formation as differential and Dionysian public formations, and of the re-channeling of public identities into private interests. Indeed, we see the co-existence of the darsanic and the imaginary clearly in BB, for the star’s alignment with, and reproduction in, the fan is unmistakably posited precisely upon the notion of the star’s “stardom.” There is no reproduction here without the invocation of aura, however reactivated the latter might be. It is, therefore, critical to understand the centrality of the twinned historical and cinematic tropes of repetition in Hindi cinema that belie an actual reliance on the countermodern, as Hindi cinema appears to pursue its so-called postmodern apperceptions of national life. BB (2009) actualizes, or at least gestures, at a wider set of possibilities of subjectivations and futures than were imagined possible even in MMJ (2008), by tweaking the trope of repetition of cinematic event and subject. This accelerated trajectory suggests the hold that the motif of repetition has on the cinematic imagination, as well as the ways in which new technologically radical compressions of time and space might indirectly aid in

Structure, event, and liminal practices  65 the generation of other radicalities of subjectivation. We see here an ongoing interweaving of South Asian modernity’s publics and visual apparatuses, what Joseph calls “Emergent Publicness as Visual Modernity” in the formation of nomadic concepts of citizenship (1999: 29), engaged through cinema and other media, as well as through political agitation and mobilization in past and present anti-colonial, pre-national public formations.

The state, the nation, and liminality as techne The films I have discussed stage the contest between the idea of the state and the idea of the nation in a liminal performative space, inviting and evoking public reflexivity and re-enactments. Both the state and the nation have discourses of history; but whose history, and how remembered? This is where the continuing imprint of the countermodern can be most clearly seen. State and nation mandate significantly different discourses, but they stand not necessarily for a clear binary division of such discourses, but for multiple fractured and overlapping (dis-)articulations. The statist static always threatens to dominate, to drown out, individual or liminal cries and whispers, and this triumph of the normative over the singular and the liminal seems paramount in the half a century of cinema since India’s independence. However, during certain periods in post-independence India, the state came to be perceived as powerless and limp, promoting a cinematic and social quest for alternative and subaltern leadership (Kazmi 1998: 145). On the heels of critics as diverse as Agamben (1993), Pandey (2006: 46, 53, 64), and Spivak and Butler (2007), I also bear in mind that the state is crisscrossed by vectors of emotion and randomness, a concept Butler evokes when she writes: If we pause for a moment on the meaning of ‘states’ as the ‘conditions in which we find ourselves,’ then it seems we reference the moment of writing itself or perhaps even a certain condition of being upset, out of sorts: what kind of state are we in when we start to think about the state? (2007: 2–3) Any discussion of the state and the nation in the Hindi cinematic context must also keep in mind the affect that can and does subtend the theory and concept of the state, the sort of affect that pushes the “excrescent” police outward, closer to the edge beyond which lies the void, excess, and liminal countermodernities that the state tries to contain. Their affect is, in part, the state’s affect; the state is hegemonic but can also be reactive, emotive, or sentimental, and of course “nationalist.” It can oppress the Muslim, but can also look for ideological and visual matrices within which to accommodate the Muslim’s “otherness,” sometimes in direct response to engaged public pressure. As Shah Rukh Khan’s recent performances nest deeper into the potentialities of embodying enactments of Muslimness27—cultural and countercultural liminal subjectivations never completely disengage themselves from vectors of spatio-temporal engagements, from physical substrata of performativity, from contextual embodiments—other

66  Structure, event, and liminal practices political and cinematic subjectivations also proliferate their articulations for differential recognition by the state. The enfolding of idioms of state, nation, countermodernity, and liminality generate some of the representational dystopy of the films I discuss. The nation and the state seem to come freighted with what I would call specific “chrono-tropes” in cinema. When the focus of cinema is an “event-based” past or present, wherein the “event” is flattened out as both overwhelmingly atemporal and overwhelmingly duplicative, as in RDB, the state seems resurgent as the dominant political unconscious; when the focus of cinema is on a longitudinal history with “structures” that inform “happenings” or events, as in HKA, an idea of a plural and trans-historical but normative “nation” seems on the rise. However, the seemingly liberatory and oppositional construct of the nation as more authentic is largely a by-product of cinematic formal experiment and innovations in narrative voice and “chrono-tropes”—we have seen this in HKA and RDB—which both essentialize and liminalize the ideological contestation between state and nation. This conundrum—wherein the longitudinal concept of nation versus the presentist model of state are repeated in the cinematic meta-conscious as representational stand-ins for the past (history or myth) and the present (modernity or postmodernity); those latter are in turn seen as notations along an unbroken hymn of sustainable nation-statehood—is also manifested in other repetitions of liminal identity that attempt to “get it right” in the modern Indian nation-state and in Hindi cinema: sexuality, ethnicity, religion, and gender. The formal experiments choreographing the dialectics of past versus present, nation versus state, and structure versus event, produce the cinematic texture. Nothing expresses this relationship of liminality and cinematic texture better than the following statement by Victor Turner: for every major social formation there is a dominant mode of public liminality, the subjunctive space/time that is the counterstroke to its pragmatic indicative texture. Thus, the simpler societies have ritual or sacred corroborees as their main metasocial performances; proto-feudal and feudal societies have carnival or festival; early modern societies have carnival and theatre; and electronically advanced societies, film … (1977: 34–5) Thus, this cinema is not only a liminal space of public reflexivity, of social subjunctives one might say, in its function; it also uses presentational strategies invoking liminality to mediate and visualize the “structural” and the “eventful” in the national political narrative. Films not only adopt structure and event as teleologies and modalities on socio-political questions, but also deploy cinematic narrative conventions—presentational texture and aesthetics, non-realist and non-continuity editing, (non)linear plots, presentational speeding and slowing of time, and a jouissant embodiment with the propensity for jumbling and blurring realist frameworks of time and space, especially in the popular musical mise en scène—to foreground liminality as the counterweave in historical narrative as

Structure, event, and liminal practices  67 “structure” or “events.” Maintaining a secular historical telos, a normative and consistent structure, in the face of distressing gashes in the fabric of pluralist democracy—inflicted by ethnic particularisms, aggressive global capitalism, religious nationalisms, patriarchal revivalisms, and a notable speeding up of visuality—are the critical challenges of this national statist historiography. Liminality serves as the crucial link between pliant diurnal events and durable static history as a techne and aesthetic for a national mythopoesis, already straining to accommodate the singular within the structural and normative, to naturalize, history. The aforementioned category of the speed of vision in the Indian context of the global media-text is the emergent style of etching liminality as a subjunctive mode within a cinematic mythos, as exemplified in RDB, MMJ, and BB. Paul Virilio has drawn our attention to the mechanization and instrumentalization of vision as a historical process: starting around the Renaissance, slower spiritual and material collocations of the human subject withered in favor of atrophying distance and materiality in human engagement with art. As Renaissance optical technologies began to strain toward greater instantaneity and reduction of the distance that used to make the aesthetic experience spatial as well as material—a “movement in time,” a slower unfolding and making of representation forming both spectators and their visual experiences and objects (Virilio 1994)—they set a new clock ticking, culminating in the instantaneity of contemporary visual technologies and their transmissions.28 It might appear that thus begins also the atrophying of the countermodern as a collocation of spatial and temporally discontinuous, non-contiguous frames. However, Hindi cinema has an oblique relationship to this history of temporal and aesthetic subjectivities: here speed and a countermodern aesthetic are not necessarily incompatible. While Hindi cinema poses important counterevidence to Virilio’s thesis—in the past it compressed space and dismissed “real” temporality in concocting a psychic tonic only in the “exotic location” song and dance sequence, without exalting instantaneity as an otherwise significant narrative or visual technique—it has shown an inexorable movement toward instantaneity in representational techniques of cutting, editing, tracking, etc. in approximately the last 15 years. Generally these techniques are read as instances of a global aesthetic of communicational instantaneity and simultaneity: satellite transmissions, MTV-ized visual styles, and other contemporary entertainment and information technologies and their disseminatory practices. However, I would argue that Hindi cinema’s “new” speed is an ongoing articulation of a longstanding tendentious relationship of national space and liminal subject negotiated within the contestation between (post-)modernity and countermodernity. South Asia has seen many urgent contestations of space, such as the Partition and refugee migration cycles, as well as massive urban slum formations. The history of space in modern South Asia is spectacularly traumatic and chaotic (Sarkar 2009: 2ff.). I would agree with this in the sense that liminality of political and aesthetic representation does indeed form the core of Hindi cinema’s articulation of nationalism. This core is a fractured and fracturing one that destabilizes “state”ly contours. The traumatic political struggle of centripetal liminality against an engulfing statist frame of nationhood in South Asia has manifested itself most in

68  Structure, event, and liminal practices the politics of spatial rights and belonging. The story I told in the introduction to this book about the spatial contest in Pune that slowed down national “modern” times—the story of many strikes, processions, marches, and other public protests in India—and in which I, the secular scholar of cinema, found myself involuntarily stuck in so-called non-secular time, is a case in point. If “cinema, as the modern medium of representation, reveals from the very outset a preoccupation with the problematic of depicting trauma” (Sarkar 2009: 21), then one index of growing trauma in Hindi cinema is an aggressively accelerated visual rhetoric of space and movement responsive to traumatic violence and displacement. Hindi cinema’s protagonist is traumatized most often by a challenge to their spatial belonging, and the liminal subject’s accelerating struggle for spatial rights with regard to the nation-state manifests itself in a speeding up of trauma. Hindi cinema’s gradual speeding up is the visual index of the liminal subject’s frenetic adaptation to a chaotic decolonization and the crisis of geographic space in South Asia, particularly evident in the four films discussed above (Rogoff 2002). While Asian consumerist modernity has more recently heated up and accelerated national temporality as a specific modality of global aesthetics, the South Asian subject has had a far longer history of traumatic dislocating violence, and is habitually and reflexively positioned in relation to multiple violences. Violence, as we know, accelerates movement: the subject rushes away from perceived threats, hurtles towards perceived prey, refuses to linger physically and visually (in Virilio’s sense, abjures slow temporality) over scenes of horror and landscapes soaked in blood. In the process of reacting kinetically to trauma by enacting a differential of movement speed, the liminal South Asian subject and spectator are therefore co-constituted by spatialized experiences of national time, and temporal experiences of spatial violence. Herein, as in other modes, the countermodern still prevails, despite donning the look of postmodernity. The liminal object of violence in Hindi films might experience a merging with the medium, an instantaneous death recalling Bazin’s idea of cinema itself as mourning for loss and death, yet a repeatable mummification of life (1967, 2002). In representations of deadly violence upon the subject, speed reaches a negative climax in the absolute elimination of duration, i.e. total instantaneity. The gun flashes and the bomb blasts in a moment that unites the visual and the diegetic experiences of perfect instantaneity as the flipside of immobilizing mobility. In these new representations of violence in Hindi cinema—those where the camera focuses on carnage and death squarely and head on—the protagonist and the spectator share a mise en scène in which the body and the eye both crash into the stillness of death. Maximum speed results in total immobility. The subject collapses into its opposite, the annihilation of subjecthood, a near-perfect approximation of the liminal. Speed, the apogee of a postmodern form, turns out to re-enact the eventful and contingent matter and temporalities of the countermodern subject. Liminality as a product of a sometimes violent spatio-temporal instability remains the content, the critique, and the strategy of Indian cinema: its telos, its techne, and its articulation of the shifts in the presentability of subject and violence. It is these shifts that I trace in the rest of this book, albeit discontinuously and non-teleologically, in their formal and meta-discursive aesthetics.

2 Imagining the past in the present Violence, gender, and citizenship in Hindi films

Kalikattaiya gori, Baby-austin-e chori Dhakuriar lake-e Piya ko saath leke Chole she enke benke Moderrrn [sic] shaaje Purush tare dekhe palai chhati dheke Bole, “O Baba e ke? Moderrn Bama je! Bama Bheema je! Moderrrn Bama je! Bama Bheema je!” The Calcutta lady Riding a Baby Austin In Dhakuria Lake park With boyfriend by side She struts and weaves In moderrrn [sic] garb Men see her and run under their umbrellas They say, “O lord, who is this? The modern woman! The modern superwoman! O Modern Woman! O Modern Superwoman!” Hindi/Bengali folk lampoon ridiculing “modern” Indian woman, early twentieth century; my translation

My grandmother taught me this limerick. I remember wondering vaguely about it, thinking, why was this so funny? Why did my grandmother, mother of six surviving children, derided by her husband as an illiterate fool, sing this song with such relish, when she might herself have aspired to the constitution of a new womanhood, apparently terrifying to late colonial Bengali masculinities? Given her own experience of shaming control, why did she acquiesce in the lampooning of the modern independent woman of late colonial India? This query brings me to the subject of this chapter: the dialectic of a structural consciousness of cultural nationalism that romanticizes national womanhood and the living record of widespread violence against women in twentieth-century South Asia, as they converge in the liminal performances of gender that are

70  Violence, gender, and citizenship staged throughout this time. I hereby ask, what are the implications of imagining national history in the national gendered present tense? How do messy structures of feeling, belief, and conflict affect experiments of graphing history within the events of gender violence that puncture the fabric of majoritarian cultural nationalist glorifications of nation as woman and goddess? Do historical discourse and religious discourse form each other’s “supplements” in shoring up the frontiers of nationalist thought, “making nationalism and patriotism out to be a religion—if not indeed the religion—of modern times”? (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991: 95). Then, returning to consider the temporality implicit in this structuralist historic narrative, what are the consequences herein of treating gender as a “structure of the conjuncture” in tracing “history” through “events” in the Hindi cinematic imagination (Sahlins 1985)? If cinema is a liminal space of public reflexivity (Turner 1977; Rajadhyaksha 2003: 34), what sort of historiography of gender has been developing over the years in Hindi cinema, and what does it mean to represent something “happening” within the historical structures of gender in that cinema? What is the status of the legal, civic, or violent gender “event” in Hindi films about national identity? In 1952, Baburao Patel, the irascible and inimitable editor of the popular film journal Film India wrote: our power-crazy Gandhian Politicians ushered our freedom by dividing our land, by allowing the rape of thousands of women, by killing thousands of men, by uprooting millions of people, by making millions homeless orphans and finally by appointing our enemies as trustees over our nation’s granaries … (Film India, May 1952: 9) Conjoined cinematic and political commentary from the redoubtable Patel—a vocal and irrepressible critic of cinema and national politics in mid-century India— lends exact support to Turner’s claim that “Quite often … public ritual dramatizes secular, political, and legal status relationships” (1977: 36). In Indian nationalist discourse, the performative and gendered and the political and religious cannot be meaningfully separated: law, politics, and violence have been inseparably etched on the canvas of religious identity in India. When the liminal is reflexively restructured in public, however, as in cinematic performances, gendered events as sites of excess, as well as void, over-determine religious, visual, and political structures. Gender and sexuality are axial to the discourse of historical thinking in this context of framing the national secular. Twentieth-century Hindi cinema’s representational topoi and imagistic of the “secular national” question—the framed space demarcated from cultural, graphic, and political liminality—have repeatedly touched upon the nation-state’s paired crises of political and sexual terror. Gender, like citizenship, hovers between inclusion, belonging, and liminality, or between official representation, pure presentation as embodiment, and sheer unpresentability. History often comes to be a question of imagining the structured and structuring past tense of the present, while memory comes to be a mode of managing the liminal in its multiple non-present iterations.

Violence, gender, and citizenship  71 In remembering history, questions about the gender of citizens, even as an after-effect of the crisis of representing the besieged nation, have appeared vividly in 50 years of Hindi cinema. Here I will focus on films such as Lahore (M. L. Anand, 1949),1 New Delhi (Mohan Segal, 1956), Mother India (Mehboob Khan, 1957), Mughal-e-Azam (K. Asif, 1960), Garm Hawa (M. S. Sathyu, 1973), Gadar (Anil Sharma, 2001), and Veer-Zaara (Yash Chopra, 2004). Even a preindependence film, Mehboob Khan’s Watan (1938)—allegorizing the Indian freedom struggle as a story about Tartar independence from Cossacks in central Asia in some nebulous past and place—pours the historical present and an imagined nationalist future into a purely fictive historical past, so that the past becomes a living guide for the present national struggle. An associative technique of memory replenishes stark gaps in subjectivation in the present with the romantic mists of temporal distance or pastness. The amplitude and “eventfulness” of the cinematic mise en scène of the pre-Partition Watan—a nomadic tribe of pastoralists resisting an elaborate and despotic imperial power, what Film India called “one more story of the Tartars”2—becomes inconsequential, if not a deliberate ruse to induce reflection upon the meaning of historical narrative as itself a structural discourse and not a narration of particular or real events (Jaikumar 2006: 22). After the Partition, “social” and familial dramas with a nationalistic impetus— such as New Delhi (1956), Mr and Mrs 55 (Guru Dut 1955) , Dekh Kabira Roya (Amiya Chakraborty, 1957), and Kathputli (Amiya Chakraborty, 1957)—foreground the impossibility of communicating the “unique” signature of violence in these “events.” They denaturalize and make unavailable—constitutively, according to Derrida’s notion of the impossibility of communication (1988)—the “iteration” of the singular event, the event that felled the individual man, woman, child, or citizen. Thus the Derridean impossible “iteration,” whose etymology traces back both to repetition and alterity as concepts—to the repeated experience that one is “lost” linguistically and ontologically in the transfer to the “other’s” context and experience—conveys that the signified is never transcendent, and cannot capture the unique, unitary embodiment underlying the voice or idea of a referent. But “iteration” also suggests that, while singularity is not transmissible, neither is syntagmatization without metaphoric or paradigmatic possibilities. While communication foregrounds absence, it is also constituted by the absence between extant terms. The referent, if one allows that term any positivist existence, is always already split into specular self and other, but splitting here suggests both displacement and condensation. To recapitulate Derrida in his essay “Signature, Event, Context,” no “singular,” specific “iteration” of the violent “event” contextualizing and situating the female body in South Asia is adequate to capture the “experience” of that particular event, except within the “performative” medium itself, as of cinema or of literature, wherein an “iteration” of the inherently undescribable situation occurs as a mediation whereby the violated national body is re-imagined—though not authenticated—not only as a frequently performed gendered role (from Aag [Raj Kapoor, 1948] and New Delhi, to Gadar and Veer-Zaara), but actually as an imperso-“nation” (to use Roy’s term) that constantly skips back and forth

72  Violence, gender, and citizenship between national identities. Yet, as this would suggest, the violent event shares a core of universality, as the enemy “other” often suffered as one did oneself. The specularity of the female body (to remember Irigaray’s famous speculum of the other), its hollowing out to catch the image of the specularizing state, appears in a number of cinematic frameworks where the organizational logic—if logic it is—closely follows a ritual of resurrecting structure in the very eventful moment itself. In this eventful or critical moment (as Veena Das describes it) that is the structure of a conjuncture—to recall Sahlins—a violent bodily action or reaction is caged, gauged, or presaged in critical discourses lamenting the unrecoverable erasure of the event in terms of pure memoir or historical discourse (for instance, in work by Butalia, Menon, Bhasin). I argue that such un-recoverability is inevitable not only in a Derridean sense of the case of language in general, but in the specific South Asian “event” of Partition, wherein gendered genocide was reciprocal and cross-border, re-enacted repeatedly on both sides of the putative border. This repetition explains the impossibility or difficulty of “communication” of singular experience—if not its entire “silencing”—in discourse on gendered violence at Partition.3 The other suffered, in the moment, something like that which the self did, and vice versa, and self and other thus mirrored each other in that brief moment at least. Duplication was never possible, but neither was complete alterity. The iteration, rethinking the matter of communication of violent experience through Derrida again, simultaneously foregrounds both the sameness and difference mechanisms inherent in communication, in this case made more poignant by the fact that the violence of Partition was experienced by a self and an other that had historically been irreducible to an absence versus a presence (Hindu and Muslim communities had for generations lived amicably side by side, as far as religious identity was concerned) (Hasan 2000: 9). Besides, both Hindu and Muslim (not to mention Sikh, etc.), Indian, and Pakistani women had identical experiences of violation and loss. Some women themselves perpetrated violence (Butalia in Hasan 2000: 188). The discourse of the survivor in the context of the “event” of Partition violence comes shorn of any “personal” signature, because so many repeated stagings and re-activations mobilize both difference and similarity, alteration and repetition, such simultaneous mobilizations undoing any possibility of concrete or singular “signification,” hence of “communication.” The singular was impossible due to the repetition of the same experience among both sides in Partition’s gender violence, even if identification was equally impossible because of the recognition of the other’s ultimate agential alterity. The impossibility of the singular is therefore established upon the double axes of iteration’s capacity to “other” as well as to “mirror.” On one hand, the struggle to “other,” facing the inevitable mirroring of mutual violence and violation as iterated and re-activated experience—because the different were also the same in both suffering and persecuting—caused an aphasic retrenchment of subjectivity as singularity. There is no clearly denotable alterity if the other mirrors the self across contexts. On the other, the discursive event of personal and political violence is inherently im-“personal” or non-singular precisely because the impossibility of iteration, as particularized

Violence, gender, and citizenship  73 identification is also the very constitution of hatred and fear of the other as a structural or collective entity; there is no communication across discrete and concrete singular contexts with a murderous horde that inflicts collective trauma. It might appear that I am arguing that the iterative mode generates not liminalities of gender, but only structural universality regarding the experience of gender violence. However, this is not entirely so. Just as iteration as individual and structural experiences of violence has two conjoint axes of repetition and alterity— from the two together, liminality issued forth, like the ambiguous zone of the boundary line drawn between peoples and nations, eloquently captured in Saadat Hasan Manto’s “Toba Tek Singh”—so iteration as past and present violence also has diachronic and synchronic axes, and liminality continues to emerge in the crosshatching of the two axes. By a diachronic axis I mean a temporal history of the subject; by a synchronic one, primarily spatial. South Asian events of gender violence have occurred across chronological periods, as well as across political spaces. Within the diachronic axis, iteration functions more to generate alterity, within the synchronic mode iteration’s cognition of alterity is given pause by the uncanny recognition of self “acting like” the other. While women of India and Pakistan, or Hindu and Muslim female citizens of both countries, suffered similar experiences despite their differences during the traumatic time of Partition and its aftermath of “recovery”—that is, in synchronic or spatial mode—women at different points of time within nationalist historiography—that is, in diachronic or temporal mode—had contingent experiences that were seen as marked by polar and unvarying ethnic, communal, and religious heterogeneity: singular differences. If the spatial, synchronic mechanism of repetition produces the “selving” of the other (repetition as sameness or universality), the diachronic, temporal mechanism of repetition acerbates the “othering” of the self (repetition as difference or singularity), though of course such dichotomies are always fragile. After all, the boundary between India and Pakistan, Hindu and Muslim, once indeterminate, remained porous (as we shall see in discussion of Gadar and Veer-Zaara). This crosshatched selving and othering, a coeval yet contrapuntal mechanism of iteration—given the indeterminacy both of a new spatial axis differentiating the two people who once were counted as one, and of a temporal axis of historical structural differentiation between people who frequently saw themselves as at least two—generated a specific kind of liminality as a consequence of attempts to identify sameness and difference as spatial and historical phenomena respectively. Liminality was further generated by the fact that such spatial and temporal phenomena actually produce each other: memory is an associative mode filling gaps in the present context from texts and chains of recollection, and history is a mode of filling gaps in the text of recollection with objects and subjects from the present context. In the crosshatching of the two contrapuntal yet simultaneous axes of iteration—temporal and spatial, diachronic and synchronic—liminality emerges in the discourse of gender violence at the moment of Partition, and in future decades, every time the discourse of an iterability within the past crisscrosses the discourse of iteration within the present, without sufficient actual demarcation of the two as I have already suggested: the past is always a substitute

74  Violence, gender, and citizenship or tonic for gaps in the present, and history is the past tense of the present and vice versa. The gendered subject simultaneously suspended in the two is neither fully avenged nor forgiven, neither fully here nor there, and neither fully us nor them.

Citizenship, secularism, and the nation-state Cinematic discourse in independent India of the fifties was ineluctably concerned with questions of civic identity, religion, and law, all of which make up multiple strands in the discourse on secularism in India. In the late fifties, the epic genre—Mother India (1957) and Mughal-e-Azam (1960), for example—made a significant if temporary comeback, and myth reigned supreme as a gesture of transforming history to an illusory coherence and consensus that had eluded bureaucratic, taxonomical counts. In the seventies, the “Muslim” drama Garm Hava provided a path not taken in the later Gadar and Veer-Zaara: its stark and uncompromising look at gender as the national incommensurable is indicated in the murderous fate of the woman unable to cross national and ethnic borders. A brief recapitulation of the “secular” in the Indian context is relevant here. In the representative collection of essays edited by Robert D. Baird, Religion and Law in Independent India (1993), Bhagwati reminds us that the term “secular” was deliberately left out of the draft of the Constitution by Dr. Ambedkar, the principal architect and himself an “untouchable.” The term “secular” was initially excluded in order to allay fears (in the fifties) that its inclusion “might give the impression of establishing a state structure inconsistent with the cultural ethos of the Indian people” (Bhagwati in Baird 1993: 9). However, the initial decision to exclude the term “secular” was not meant to “allow freedom of religion to become an instrument for thwarting the progress of the nation to a new secular social order” (ibid.: 15). The term was inserted in 1976 to mitigate developing “communal strains” (ibid.: 9). As all of this makes evident that the post-independence nation-state started life with the problem of reconciling the diarchy of universalist secular values and indigenous and plural traditions within the body politic staring it hard in the face.4 This was particularly true between 1944 and ’56, the years of drafting of the constitution as well as the controversial Hindu Code Bill, and of the operations of the Abducted Persons (Recovery and Restoration) Act, intended to rescue women and children who experienced communal violence at Partition. In 1951, the Hindu Code Bill was introduced in Parliament by the Congress government;5 this bill sought radical changes in customary Hindu personal law regarding marriage, succession, adoption, guardianship, and maintenance in an attempt to “modernize” colonial law codified by the British on the basis of pundit- and patriarch-derived interpretations of religious texts (Dhagamwar in Baird 1993: 215; Virdi 2003: 67–9). Finally, the Hindu Code Bill was passed and divided into five separate acts relating to marriage, succession, adoption, and maintenance (Virdi 2003: 70; Basu in Agnes 2004; Lateef 1990; Sethi 1974). This bill met with vociferous opposition from Hindus, who felt that, despite the secular guarantee of the Constitution, they were being unfairly singled out for destruction of their “traditions,” while minorities (meaning mostly Muslims) were

Violence, gender, and citizenship  75 not facing interference in their equally “traditional” personal laws (Dhagamwar 1993: 235, 241; Virdi 2003: 68). This discontent falsely memorialized colonial authority as having maintained the policy of minimal intervention in indigenous personal customs and law—or customary law—since the time of Warren Hastings (Virdi 2003: 67–8). Since Muslim law was left untouched, the Hindu Code Bill was seen as evidence of minoritization of the numerical majority, the Hindus. Hindus protested vigorously against what they claimed was “unfair” victimization of their identitarian rights and equally “unfair” privileging of Muslim personal law during the Hindu Code Bill debates of the fifties; here was one originary point for the recursive pattern of protest in later decades about Hindu “minoritization” (Khory in Baird 1993: 128; Srinivas 1986: 4, 23). Muslims, in contrast, opposed the establishment of a Uniform Civil Code—a universal code of private law for all Indian citizens regardless of ethnic identification—enjoined upon future legislators by the original drafters of the Constitution (Virdi 2003: 70), arguing that this would assault their rights as minorities. Apparently, all communities sacrificed gender justice at the altar of national integration as well as communal cohesion (Virdi 2003: 70–3; see also Sangari 2003: 181–213). According to some views, legislation such as the Hindu Code Bill granting women rights regarding marriage, divorce, adoption, succession, etc. cut juridico-politically against the grain of the very religio-philosophical discourse that underpinned a “traditionalist,” pre-modern, “dharmik” model of prenational identity (Coward in Baird 1993: 36; Larson in Baird 1993: 59–61, 65–74; Mansfield in Baird 1993: 142–3; Rekhi in Baird 1993: 183, 198, 200–1, 205, 214). These interpretations remind us that pre-national and countermodern notions of the person, deriving from essentially religio-philosophical discourse upon the individual in community, suffused and penetrated every level of secular juridicopolitical discourse in independent India. Upon that canvas of the indeterminacy of emergent citizenship and sexual and political terror during the Partition of India and accompanying gendered violence, the fifties saw the superimposition of self-recovery via a law known as the Abducted Persons Act (1949) passed by both the governments of India and Pakistan after Partition (Menon 1997: 15–32; Aiyar 1947; Butalia 2000; Menon and Bhasin 1993, 1996, 1998). On the Indian side, the act was meant to recuperate the female Indian citizen and also, more controversially, such minor children as had been born to her during the period of her being “lost,” to their state of origin. Needless to say, this act was problematic in conception and in execution; it was state activism for enumerating and identifying the female citizen. Among other scandals associated with the act was its endowing of minor police personnel with authority to search, arrest, and forcibly “rescue” and repatriate women deemed to have been abducted, even against their will (Menon 1997: 19, 23). Menon describes it as “remarkable for the impunity with which it violated every principle of citizenship [as the POTA, or Prevention of Terrorism Act, and the TADA, or Terrorist Activities Disruption Act, would do later in the terror-hazed nineties]—fundamental rights and access to justice” (1997: 31). Women’s (sexual) chastity masquerading as their political legitimacy dominated the political graphing of violation, and representations of abducted and abductor proliferated trauma (Menon 1997: 22, 27–9).

76  Violence, gender, and citizenship In the disputes and excesses of the Abducted Persons Act the gendered and the Muslim subject of post-independence South Asia emerged as instances of liminaility, produced by the normalizing drive of post-independence civic identity haunted both by structural myths of blood, kinship, purity, and legitimacy, as well as by conflicts between inconsistent yet constituent subjects—those who were presented but not yet represented, whose belonging was a physical fact but whose inclusion would be a political act—whom the state struggled to make consistent with its normative count of political inclusion. This threat of the simultaneous void and excess also mirrored the constellated contradictions between social liminalities and national-statist dicta characterizing the Hindu Code Bill debates (Menon 1997: 21, 29). The frame of almost identical repeated violence enacted against women of both communities and nations—themselves only just barely separable, distinguishable—evoked, as I have already discussed, the paralyzing liminality of the porosity of self and other. If a particular violent act against the women of one’s community had to be condemned and indemnified, it had to be done by suppressing knowledge of identical acts by members of one’s community against the women of the other community. This tension of identifying and distinguishing self and other, insider and outsider, created a particular impossibility of particularizing the event of violence in the moment as either familiar or new, same or different, leaving open only the possibility of performing it repetitively, whether as masked spectacle or as identity. The fact of brutal gender violence strained against the rhetoric of its situational legitimation, as in all violence and war, of course, but particularly in this case of civil war where subject, object, and action were re-activations and re-enactments, mimicry as retaliation. The topos of fractured and contested political representation by the state of its inconvenient subjects resurfaced—along with renewed demand for a Uniform Civil Code in diverse sectors of national opinion, including Muslims—in the late eighties with the Shah Bano case, wherein a Muslim woman’s right to maintenance after divorce was first granted under the provisions of the Indian Criminal Procedure Code and then withdrawn and reassessed in terms of Islamic Shariat law as a result of severe resistance and pressure from Muslim patriarchs as unconcerned with women’s rights as their Hindu counterparts (Virdi 2003: 71–2; Agnes 2004; Lateef 1990). Cinema, which had been associated with nationalism since its earliest inception in India, has mirrored these fractured and contested topoi of political representation and identification since the fifties at least (Khory in Baird 1993: 134–5).

Past, present, Hindus, and Muslims: “epics” and “socials” of the fifties I begin with a survey of a relatively unknown film, wherein gendered citizenship was mediated and filtered through the narrative of the refractory family romance, wherein rapture and rupture were intertwined for apparently wholesome social purposes, but with traces of interrogation of the frameworks of both citizenship and gender. Amiya Chakrabarty’s Kathputli (“The Puppet”, 1957), like its contemporary Mehboob Khan epic Mother India, was released soon after

Violence, gender, and citizenship  77 the passage of the Hindu Code Bill that allowed so-called greater freedoms for Hindu women, including the right to divorce, which is relevant to Kathputli’s story of a street waif rescued from obscurity and an abusive marriage to a disabled and dishonest man by a theatrical impresario. The theme song “Bol re kathputli dori kaun sang bandhi/ sach batla tu nachey kiske liye” (“Tell, O puppet, to whom you’ve tied your fate/ Tell truly for whom you dance”) ties the fate of the professional actress to the fate of the devoted Hindu wife and woman, for whom marriage and motherhood seem ontological, prescriptive destinies and yet are actually, the song suggests, roles to be played. The fate of woman as wife and mother ruptures the career and success of the female performer, who finds that escape from domesticity and maternity is elusive, even when social liberation seems tantalizingly possible. It is noteworthy that a sharp line usually has divided the career of a successful young actress or performer in Hindi cinema from any subsequent life as a wife or mother; she is usually considered past her professional prime when it seems time for her to marry and settle down. As Kathputli’s heroine’s theatrical career takes off, her husband feels slighted and her marriage falls apart; the jealous husband decamps with their child, whose “recovery” forms part of the story. The graphing of the rupture in domestic felicity through the debatable rapture of female empowerment as an actress, and via newly acquired conjugal and gender rights as a female citizen of modern India is troped in the film—through the repeated use of the song, for instance—as a life of performances; however, this trope-ing occasions scrutiny of the entire national and governmental “performance” of new rites of secular and modern citizenship for and by women. Moreover, in the moment of fixing her femininity, the emphasis falls heavily upon the regulation of her sexual and reproductive history via her child, who must be “restored” to the mother’s “proper” sphere by the spousal surrogate of nation-state governmentality, like many other children at Partition. The woman’s emergent identity remained regressively bound up with her belonging in her “proper state,” which signified both “marriage” and “country of origin.” What is troped as public performance in Kathputli is transformed into the private penance of the new female citizen in Kathputli’s more famous contemporary, Mother India. Mother India demonstrates the concatenation of the major themes of the Nehruvian era: development and modernity, fertility and femininity, and—once again—the incommensurability of women’s sexuality. A very brief plot synopsis would be as follows: Radha is married to Shamu in a prototypical village in the timeless Indian landscape, and realizes that her mother-in-law has mortgaged their land to the extortionist village moneylender Sukhilala, who is known for doctoring accounts and incommensurate usury. The viewer is introduced to a close-up of Radha’s face as she hears this as a new bride—her head turning to the right to hear her mother-in-law’s muttering—and registering this information with sorrow and inarticulate foreboding while beginning to remove her bridal jewelry, symbols of both her personal fortune and her bridal status.6 From this the camera cuts abruptly to a spinning mortar at which Radha is shown grinding wheat, her labor as the family’s woman and mother beginning immediately. The connection between land, woman, and family well-being thus firmly

78  Violence, gender, and citizenship established, the story moves through Radha’s happy marriage and hard work with her husband, the birth of children, a disastrous drought, the husband’s farm accident and loss of his arms, his abandonment of the family, Radha’s struggles against poverty and impending concubinage to Sukhilala, her surviving sons’ development into radically polar personalities, the delinquencies of her younger and best-loved son Birju, and her eventual sacrifice for the village community in shooting Birju to death when he turns lawless, kills Sukhilala, and abducts his daughter in revenge. Filmfare reviewed the film in the same issue as that of Kathputli, and is noteworthy for its deft paring of the film’s strengths and weaknesses: The accent is on melodrama throughout the film, except in the early passages … One melodramatic sequence is piled upon another and the story is relentless in its exposure of the evil in men. But one cannot commend the writer for the brutality and violence with which he makes the characters achieve their objects. However noble the end may be, it does not justify the means [i.e. violence] … (22 November 1957: 23) In noting the departure from a certain kind of classic or socialist realism or stark neo-realism, wherein the hardships of village life would be unsentimentally unveiled, the reviewer of course draws attention to the fact that the caesura at the film’s mid-point links as much as it separates: melodramatic quality is traceable to the desires and expectations of the lumpen, who supposedly crave melodrama over brutally ethical resolution. This reviewer leaves unresolved the status of the melodramatic in film except to write that “Mehboob displays a rare understanding of the hopes and aspirations of the simple villagers … But in the second half, in which drama takes firm root, Mehboob shows a tendency to lay undue stress by melodrama” (23). The reviewer’s note of the caesura serves to remind us that the secular modernity of the film’s establishing and concluding shots are utterly dispelled by the cyclical melodramatic ordeals of the mythic mother, whose heroic struggle is precisely that of restoring the sacred to the familial within traditional authority— in the form of parents, elders, or husbands—has failed. Here I draw upon Ravi Vasudevan’s influential analyses—in turn drawing upon Peter Brooks’ theories of melodrama—upon the trope-ing of melodrama in the Indian cinematic context as also the recovery of the sacred in the familial context, and the evisceration or disembodiment of this sacred in social crises (2000: 115; also Thomas 1989: 14, 15, 19, 27; Rajadhyaksha 2003; Mishra 2002). Comments on the reprise of the real and the realization of the sacred as parents or household gods make melodrama seem culturally essential: “melodrama … penetrates to repressed features of the psychic life and into … family dramas” (Vasudevan 2000: 115). Thus, it has been said, when the older Radha shoots her own son Birju, she is doing so for a greater good than her own love and family; she is saving the honor of the village, which inheres indiscriminately in its women. While melodrama typically relies on the mythologization of femininity and the obscuring of sexual politics, in Mother India the mythos of motherhood is doubly

Violence, gender, and citizenship  79 enshrined in nationalist associations of the righteous woman with the goddess and the mother land. The woman as mother therefore has to replace failed traditional patriarchal authority in crucial cinematic moments of crisis that figure the larger crisis of women at risk. Radha goes to beg food for her children from Sukhilala, who only too eagerly lets her in through his massive, studded doors, an early image of both incarceration and securitization of the subject. Facing rape by Sukhilala, the almost vanquished Radha, or “Mother India”, played by the legendary star of the era, Nargis—significantly caked in mud from the recent flood, and therefore actually quintessentially “Mother Earth”—turns from her molester to the household deities, before whom he dares intend her violation, and questions their power or existence. The sequence that ensues is a reverse shot of dialogue between Radha and Sukhilala’s household goddess Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of wealth, with Lala hovering somewhere off-center. Lakshmi appears to be a silent witnesses of sacrilege at first: Radha flings her mangalsutra (symbol of her married status) upon the shrine, upon which Sukhilala puts a gold chain around her and calls her his “Lakshmi”; the imbrication of sex and money in these catachrestic displacements will be obvious. As Sukhilala begins to lead her away, a nearly hopeless Radha laughs bitterly and addresses the deity and spectator, saying “Devi, did you not feel shame in coming in my shape? If you’ve come as me, then you should feel no shame in my dishonor” (my translation). Radha seems to be saying that she intends to implicate the goddess in the loss of her virtue should the rape occur. Addressing the sacred construction of womanhood in the profane world of women’s devaluation, is the hunted and haunted Radha turning rebel against a gender-violent society? As ominous as this might be, the mood darkens further. The reverse shot shows Lakshmi resplendent and still, a mere doll in Sukhilala’s house. Suddenly the camera switches from medium to extreme close-up. Radha’s mud-caked face with the huge rolling whites of her eyes—the face of the indigene, the subaltern—glowers in bitter anguish at the camera and makes the following address through clenched teeth, “Don’t laugh. Don’t laugh. You may bear the world’s weight, goddess, but you would not have been able to shoulder the burdens of maternal love” (my translation). Obviously sutured with the goddess as witness in this reverse-shot sequence, the spectator hears the maternal manifesto as a parallel discourse of the fallen woman’s selfvindication. What should have been abjection momentarily turns into defiant confrontation between two images of female godhead. The reverse shot shows the same silent goddess. Radha continues in extreme close-up, saying, “Once you are a mother, your feet will stray too.” An odd statement within patriarchal morality, to say the least—unless read as a stunning critique of patriarchal hypocrisy—this moment of defiance cathected through human encounter with indifferent or powerless divinity is cut short by Sukhilala stepping in to remove the goddess. However, Radha suddenly draws secret strength and wrestles the little shrine from Sukhiklala’s hands. The 180-degree line is now crossed so that Radha and the goddess are on one side of it and Sukhilala on the other side, where Radha previously stood. Radha says, “The goddess will not go anywhere. The goddess has given you wealth and brought me before you as the indigent/indigene. I will tell the goddess that it is easy to point the way but hard

80  Violence, gender, and citizenship to tread it; to watch the public farce is easy, but to become the public farce is very, very hard.” The bitter story of inequality is being told as the story of exploitation of famished rural women, but not without an echo of the story of the violated female citizen or of the woman performing roles as a dancer and actress. There are several roles that Nargis the actress plays in this scene: the victimized woman, the defiant subaltern, the legal defendant, the goddess, the fallen woman, etc. The challenge of this scene is to transfer Radha across the line separating moral decline and moral triumph both physically and thematically, and the camera work achieves this axial swiveling and crossing remarkably self-consciously, the editing cuts palpable and clumsy to make the journey unmistakable, laborious technique drawing attention to itself and to spatial possibilities and situational contingencies that unfold to marginalize Sukhilala, and foreground Radha and the goddess as at first interlocutory and then identificatory. The goddess is re-activated in Radha as familial virtue (ghar ki laaj, or honor of the household) when Radha crosses the 180-degree line to join the goddess physically, instead of standing addressing her/us as either supplicant, defendant, or subaltern. The dialogue and the visual metaphors are at odds now, for, in contrast with her recent defiance, Radha is now in an identificatory mode, clutching the shrine to herself, tears streaming down her face, pathos replacing rage, and Sukhilala cordoned off to the other side of the central axis of vision. In mythology, Radha is the consort of Krishna, an incarnation of Vishnu, the god of the Hindu trinity who is known as the preserver and also the husband of Lakshmi. In the classic Indian epic the Mahabharata, Krishna preserves the threatened honor of his friend and protégé Queen Draupadi, who is also known as Krishnaa. The film consciously deploys these parallels as a duplicating device that hails the Hindu woman as goddess but also as beloved of the gods and protected by them. Now the exegetic viewer, the film’s audience, is no longer on the goddess’s side of the 180-degree line, but standing somewhat sheepishly off to the side of the dramatic scene, spectators of the divine melodrama, whereby Sukhilala is now faced with Lakshmi and Radha confronting him. Radha’s merging with the goddess returns the familial to the sacred and the spectator to the less charged space of gazers, not addressees. The dharmik is seemingly restored after the tyrannies of the conjoined economic, (pseudo-)legal and sexual are obliterated: the sexual predator is struck down, the mother is restored to her children. Thus, Radha/Nargis recovers her faith just in time to reclaim the goddess; the moment of discordant liminal disidentification, of the singularizing emergence of the rebel in Radha, passes. However, as she drops in apparently devout submission and helpless tears to the ground, a physical movement ensues, one seen during the opening sequence when the elderly Radha’s face is in close-up, and one seen later in Radha as the new bride. In the scuffle with Sukhilala over the shrine, Radha’s Mangalsutra is returned to her miraculously, and the familiar shot of Radha turning her face to her right and examining this miracle of marital symbolism is repeated. Every re-framing of this apparently motivated shot has thus far signaled a deception and a deprivation, rather than its diegetically presumed opposite, and this instance of the shot is no exception. Faith is apparently restored via the familial and the conjugal, through an imagined covenant, in which the goddess seems to

Violence, gender, and citizenship  81 contract to return Radha’s suhaag (her marital bliss or husband), as well as her children’s lives. But the fact that Radha’s husband never returns, and her beloved younger son dies at her own hands, proves that this promise of restitution was also illusory. Radha then persuades the villagers not to abandon the earth that is their mother. A scene of reconstructive dredging of the flooded fields follows, and the village population returns and reconstitutes as the pre-Partition territorial map of India (Mishra 2002: 65). In this scene, as previously in the motivated close-up of Radha with the Mangalsutra, however, the melodramatic graphing of a plenary topos of restitution—as the restitution of sacred and traditional authority—is utterly catachrestic, because once faith is lost, the loss must return as remainder, as it does in the future crisis of the heroic mother’s favorite son turning dacoit, abducting the village moneylender’s daughter, and being shot by the mother to save the village’s honor (as elder and mother, for her the abducted girl’s honor is the honor of the village). Mishra and others have argued that the film’s resolution clearly privileges the “non-violent,” law-abiding Dharmik tradition in Radha’s heroic elimination of the rebel agitator Birju (Mishra 2002: 65, 81–7); this is to overlook the catachrestic function of the scene of the mother’s rape (a national preoccupation at Partition), and its return in the abduction of the moneylender’s daughter (which pits members of the community against each other on the identical issue of women’s honor, as at Partition), which signifies the irreducibility of memories of betrayal and abandonment. Indeed, if as Mishra reminds us, one of the ur-texts of “Mother India” in India is the story in the Ramayana of Sita and her abduction by the demon king Ravan, that great ethnic and ontological other of Hindu normativity; that story of epic violation is never quite resolved, remaining an overdetermined gender and racial black hole in Hindu mythology (ibid.: 69), a perennial catachresis of the performance of female virtue or normativity. Radha’s original moment of alienation, that the gods are about to fail her and her honor, returns via Birju’s irreversible rebellion to haunt the bright future of Nehruvian village India with its dams, cranes, tractors, jeeps, trucks, farm machinery, and pylons. The old Radha is shown in the opening credits as grasping a clod of the earth on which she sits, while as the frame opens the heavy machinery operates at a visually higher angle than her prostrate body and almost threatens her; while grasping the clod, her head turns right in the motivated shot I have already mentioned, in seeming incomprehension of what is happening behind, around, and above her. Her seemingly complete and certainly abrupt recuperation and self-recovery from trauma and outrage in the near-rape scene, I have suggested, is an enactment of the forced recovery and so-called re-naturalization of the abducted woman. However, given its duplication of the motivated shot of Radha’s face turned to her right in close-up, the proleptic first scene of the film is also thick with memory as “undying” loss of faith, which quickly leaches into visual notations skeptical of the “developmental” logic of normative modernity. The excessive melodramatic stutter of the scenes where Radha dissociates from her female embodiment and empowerment—the old woman’s unmeaning handling of ancient earth broken by new machines, the young bride’s removal of her bridal ornaments, and the cathexis of the female protagonist with the divine

82  Violence, gender, and citizenship sign on the scene of attempted rape—is the undoing of the static of developmental synergy. Yet, these scenes are precisely where technique comes alive with titanic energy: “Photographed in Gevacolour with prints by Technicolor, ‘Mother India’ presents beautiful, though at times dramatically meaningless, vignettes of the countryside. But it is in the filming of the dramatic passages that cameraman Faredoon Irani shows his craftsmanship” (Filmfare, 22 November 1957: 23). The averted rapes of the soil and the woman are equally dramatic and equally doomed, because nothing determinate or “progressive” in terms of women’s experience of violence and modernity emerges from such successive framings of mother, woman, native, victim, rebel, or other. The Filmfare reviewer’s apparently casual waffling on the stuttering excess and hyperactivity of formal control over melodramatic content and intent is more significant than it appears. If, as Rajadhyaksha reminds us, Metz identified spectatorship as a form of self-identification, as the “imaginary signifier,” and if spectatorship and citizenship are also both concerned with forms of “self-identification,” the Indian state was undoubtedly engaged in both in the 1950s.7 Thus Rajadhyaksha’s motif of “identification” of the spectator (Mishra 2002: 65, 77) encompassing and exceeding the sense of self-identification to enclose a sense of “social” identification (Vasudevan 2000) leads to a third political and historically weighted space of “identifying” citizens, which is the plural political narrative of re-adjudicating women’s “lost and found” identity or citizenship claims in the Abducted Persons Act (1949–51), as well as women’s legal rights as envisioned by the state after Partition in the Hindu Code Bill (1951–6) (Virdi 2003: 67–73). These three manifestations of the uneasy pursuit of the ideal citizen or spectator— the individual, the collective, and the gendered—are aestheticized precisely in the melodramatic technical “excess” of the supposedly dramatic realist Mother India, that “representative” document about India’s female citizen: mother, sexual victim, lumpen, and figurehead of lost communal integrity and vanished authenticity, that must be forever reprised through reimagining the sacred and the restoration or destruction of the gendered body of the nation, within the static or statist discourse of modernity and law, and in the Nehruvian visual frame of factories and dams superimposing on the body of a torn and crushed mother earth. In this sense, the film is a vehicle for the burning question of the 1950s in cinema: who was the citizen-spectator for whom films were to be made in the new nation? What was the relationship of the filmic event to historical memory or structure? Identifying the film’s “cultural syncretism” (Mishra 2002: 63) is the beginning of a response. Identifying its cultural unraveling is a further necessary heuristic. The presumably unconscious grafting of the anthropological episteme upon the historical one—structural myths dominating an analytic of “eventfulness”—in the film’s body was best realized in one of those “technical” and “excessive” melodramatic moments, when the invocation of the almost denuded earth mother Radha restores the sacred community; the villagers return to fall back into a formation that spectacularizes and spectralizes the map of (pre-Partition) India. Yet, though the villagers’ graphing of “India” in the aftermath of the critical event of assault on Radha and her renewed enfranchisement answers questions about spectatorship, citizenship, and national integration in

Violence, gender, and citizenship  83 one perfectly contrived moment and move of history as structure, this image cannot obliterate the trace realization of the iterated troubling of the sacred in the context of rape (read as rape of the mother, whose inarticulate incestuous overtones—the moneylender is, after all, also of the village, whose emblematic mother he attempts to rape—are to be repeated, in a sense, in the future rape of his daughter by the mother’s son, which she will read as the rape of her “own,” i.e. village honor).8 The chain, once broken, keeps unraveling, and the sacred or the communal cannot eventually be restored familially, even though this is a part of the film’s melodramatic desire and address to the spectator. In Vasudevan’s sense, Mother India’s uneasy mix of dramatic realism and melodramatic extravaganza, as also its perhaps accidental allegory of the unraveling of the narrative of the sacral, the national, and the woman/native/other, as in Partition and its aftermath, is the very source of its fantastic and national phantasmagoric power. Its direct address of a predominantly, indeed overwhelmingly, Hindu nation appears to transcend the communal problem, but in fact its extravagant awkward suturing of chaste and rebel femininity and other sexual scandals reveals its persistent haunting by the specter of rape as harm to the “Hindu” female/maternal/divine/national body. In this regard, it is noteworthy that cinematic and popular discourse of the “Muslim” threat peaked in 1956. I am referring especially to FilmIndia and its cantankerous and conservative editor, Baburao Patel, an institution in his own right in the film industry. Patel’s 1956 editorial “Is Nehru Trembling?” hails Indian and Pakistani Muslims as untameable religious bigots, genocidal and fanatical proselytizers and sexual predators, as well as US-backed terrorists and rioters. To those familiar with contemporary Indian politics, none of this will seem unfamiliar. The anti-Muslim charge sheet of the fifties is, almost word for word, unmistakably a foreshadowing of anti-Muslim complaints of the communalist future. Nehru was castigated by FilmIndia as a delusional internationalist and an appeaser of bloodthirsty Muslims in the following terms: “His appeasement of Muslims in the pursuit of an ideal secular state has created a colony of sulking traitors right in the midst of millions of his worshippers” (May 1956: 7; see also FilmIndia, April 1956: 10). The Muslim as terrorist and rapist of Hindu women is India’s post-Partition ghost in the mirror (Devji 1992; Mufti 1995; Pandey 1997; Khory in Baird 1993: 121–2). It is no surprise then that the same Baburao Patel was said to have co-written a special brochure published for Mother India’s publicity in 1957, which: begins and ends with the assertion that the film is about Indian women’s chastity and its sanctity … ‘The woman is an altar in India … Indian women have thrown themselves into the sacrificial fire to escape even the defiling shadow of a foreign invader … This India of the olden days still lives in the 700,000 villages of India’ … (Thomas, “Sanctity and Scandal,” 1989: 20) Patel’s authorship of this brochure is at least plausible given his journalistic imprimatur; both deploy the subtext and text of the abduction of Indian women by

84  Violence, gender, and citizenship unscrupulous and inhuman “others” nurtured by ex-colonials and their “internationalist” successors.9 Here, once more, is the “foreign hand” (see also chapter one). If Partition and abduction are partially hailed “events” in the historical imagination of Mother India—one that traces event to latent historical structure, but hints at the failed restoration of pattern and universality in re-mapping pre-Partition India as the village community, bringing back instead the chaotic instance in complex visual notations, such as the almost-rape scene and the shots of Radha dissociating from her femininity—the little known Lahore (1949), directed by M. L. Anand, tackles a story of a woman victim of Partition and abduction.10 It is important to note the train of continuities and discontinuities here in the films’ themes, Nargis’ star text, and her present versus her past. Nargis had by this time acted already for Mehboob Khan, her director in the future Mother India, in the film Taqdeer (1944), and her Muslim antecedents, as well as illegitimacy as the daughter of a Muslim courtesan and a Hindu father, were also well known. In Lahore, Nargis plays the abducted Punjabi-Hindu girl Leelo, whom her lover Chaman (played by Karan Dewan, son of the producer Jaimini Dewan) rescues from their home city of Lahore when border crossing is dangerous and illegal. The film begins with studio shots of Lahore streets and storefronts, and evidently signals the cosmopolitanism of pre-Partition Lahore, a fact also abundantly documented in other literature and film (FilmIndia, July 1949: 47). The camera then pans to domestic interiors, where Chaman’s family is shown as troubled by a feckless father and an equally feckless brother, while Chaman, his mother, and his disabled youngest brother live in daily fear of poverty and eviction. Leelo’s home is relatively stable, but she is waiting to be married off, hopefully to Chaman, her childhood sweetheart. Chaman leaves Lahore for his studies, and the Partition causes Leelo to be left behind in Lahore, where she is abducted and immured by a Muslim man and his mother. Lahore’s startling conjuncturality is the way it forms the sub-text of Radha, the story of the abducted woman Leelo, as well as the star text of Nargis that Rosie Thomas and Parama Roy have so carefully detailed. Yet these concatenations find no mention at all in extant filmographies of Nargis, Mother India, etc.11 Indeed, I would suggest that the scene of attempted rape in Mother India is an over-determined transformation of Leelo’s story in Lahore, and Nargis’ life up until that point, in ways that transform a reading of that scene. The thematization of gendered citizenship as an unresolved melodrama revolving upon questions of female chastity and political identification of the citizen is discussed in Thomas’ careful and brilliant essay on Mother India, “Sanctity and Scandal”, despite her rather un-rigorous location of the law in the realm of the colonial (Thomas 1989: 18), but she, too, makes no mention of the direct address of Mother India to the spectator of the post-Partition “Hindu” and anti-Muslim nation. Mother India read as the post-figuration of Lahore makes explicit the importance of reading the Muslim actress Nargis’ masked star text as beginning in 1949 with Lahore, its exposition of the abduction and rescue problems re-emerging unmistakably in Mother India’s unqualified direct address of a Hindu nation. When Chaman and his brother come to Leelo’s rescue from the implicit sexual slavery of the Muslim usurper, she says dolorously: “I have been

Figure 2.1 Lahore (1949). Courtesy of National Film Archive of India, Pune.

86  Violence, gender, and citizenship out of the house [a euphemism for rape] … I am darkness, your world will not be able to lighten me” (my translation).12 Darkness has descended upon the land, and its face, on- and off-screen, is that of a Muslim and a woman. The spectator of Lahore reads a tale of gender and chastity through the “contaminated” body of the Indian Muslim actress embodying a story of border-crossing, even though the film could not cross the border, since it had been banned in Pakistan ( FilmIndia, July 1949: 47). By this time, Nargis’ star text was becoming inflected with many layers of stories of abduction and betrayal: her mother had allegedly not only made her available to act in films for her friend Mehboob Khan, but had “sold” her to a wealthy Muslim prince, as courtesans sometimes were (Thomas 1989: 23). This story might be apocryphal, but it no doubt contributed to the creation of Nargis’ star text as the Muslim woman of dubious sexuality who later came to embody the chaste Mother India. Nargis plays the abducted Leelo with a despair and deathliness that cannot but evoke something of her own life as we know it from Thomas and Roy’s accounts. “Shattered” by her mother’s “abduction” of her from a respectable life (ibid.: 30)—she had wanted to be a doctor—and experiencing the circumscription of her career and romantic hopes in her public affair with the very married and very controlling Raj Kapoor, her Leelo is an “impersonation” (Roy 1998) of womanly disenfranchisement, refracting the pathos of the character as the pathos of Nargis’ own star text. To this pre-Mother India phase of the formation of her star persona critics have paid no attention, but it recuperates the story of abduction and recovered citizenship in crucial ways that can be added onto the texts of Mother India. One such text that has gone missing, I would argue, is Nargis’ “abduction” into the persona of Mother India. As audiences in the fifties might have known, K. Asif, the maker of Mughale-Azam, another great epic of “modern” India that looked back to a glorious Mughal past as a time of the “cultural syncretism” (Mishra), had in fact decided to cast Nargis as Anarkali, the heroine of that film.13 However, after he began the project in 1944, he ran into various difficulties, such as the Partition, the loss of film personnel to Pakistan, and communal riots (Kabir, 2005: x). Finally resuming work on the film again in 1949, Asif now found Nargis unavailable, as she had meanwhile become committed to other projects and to her married onand off-screen lover, Raj Kapoor, and his R.K. Studios. She turned down Asif’s renewed offer of the part in Mughal-e-Azam. Instead of playing the Muslim heroine Anarkali as she might have, Nargis acted out, first, her mother’s wishes in appearances for Mehboob Khan and entering the publicity of films; second, the honorary “ideal Hindu woman” vis-à-vis her paramour Raj Kapoor, who would never convert to Islam so she might become his second wife (Thomas 1989: 23); and third, the “devoted” wife of her Hindu husband Sunil Dutt, who also never converted, though she was Bombay cinema’s top female star and he a relative newcomer when they married. Lahore is the cinematic text where this abduction text peeps through and starts a chain of connections between star text and character throughout Nargis’ career, revealing her repeated experience of transacting autonomy for acceptance and familialization. It is also unquestionably a moment when cinematic and political repertoire intertextually conjoin to interrogate and fix the identity of the female subject. Mother India is the film text where this

Violence, gender, and citizenship  87 abduction has become codified and absorbed into the national narrative of sacred womanhood, though not, I submit, without the seams showing. Rajadhyaksha’s potent allegorization of the identificatory energy of the newly nationalized state towards its gendered and raced citizens and minorities, and the suturing of this identificatory process with cinematic hailing of the citizen spectator, is instructive, but it, too, makes no mention of this specific juridiopolitical process afoot in the fifties, and a cinematic narrative popular in the nineties, that of describing and enumerating the “lost,” “violated,” or abducted” citizen, usually a woman. It is this process of gendered and raced “identification” in cinema’s mediating and liminal space between civil society and state that I am looking to explore.14 In Nargis’ fairly short active career, a good bit of time (1949–57) was spent working out the image of her Indian Muslimness, as well as her Indian womanliness. It is in the context of the state’s crisis—fiscal and otherwise—in identifying its “proper” citizens and its “proper” cinema, that such “ascriptive” identities become critical, as evident in the fortunes of the Hindu Code Bill, women abducted during Partition, and, last but not least, the cinematic mediation of such phenomena of citizenship in the fifties through the figure of the sexually at risk woman. Mishra, for instance, writes: Among the many issues canvassed by the nationalists, two of the most significant dealt with the secular ethos of the nation and sectarianism … the larger nationalist program … was always predicated upon a visionary egalitarianism dramatically at odds with the real social divisions in the country … (2002: 66; see also Coward in Baird 1993: 32–3) Rajadhyaksha usefully contrasts “Bollywood” and “Indian Cinema” precisely in terms of the latter’s lack of access to the markets and commodity nexuses of the former (Rajadhyaksha 2003: 26, 29, 30). However, as I have been suggesting, after noting the “Indian cinema’s”—as opposed to “Bollywood’s”—historical lack of finesse and dysfunctional access regarding market, financing, and commercial networks, Rajadhyaksha finds that “cultural self-definitions” thus resist “economic … resolution,” because of “a crucial set of conflicts bred into Indian nationalism … a situation in the late 1940s” (2003: 31, 32). This is the situation, previously examined, of the post-independence Indian cinema “spectator” also being the new “citizen,” the constitutive mechanisms of both identities— citizen and spectator—being “identification.”15 With this coeval, kindred and constituted citizen-spectator of the post-independence era Rajadhyaksha associates a melodramatic nationalist Indian cinema narrative mode, which apparently arose out of a cinematic re-visioning and reconstruction of non-Bollywood Indian cinema as “representative,” “something that more authentically [but not unambiguously, as he argues] represented the modernist aspirations of India’s newly enfranchised civil society” (2003: 33). The market failures of Indian cinema (as opposed to its supplemental and smarter progeny, Bollywood), its fiscal indigence, and “strange” neglect by postcolonial Indian governmentality, then reflect its troubling of representations of “national culture,” commensurable unicity, and familialization, and its

88  Violence, gender, and citizenship privileging of public descriptions and enumerations of the citizen over untroubled “private” scenarios of domesticated citizenship—what would later appear as “family values” in nineties Bollywood (Rajadhyaksha 2003: 34–5; see chapter four). Indeed, socially conformist films about “family” and “family values” were welcomed in the chaotic fifties and fluffy sixties of Hindi cinema, while troubling “socials” did less well in the new state of the nation. The edgy social was precisely the kind of cinema that the state did not want to support in the fifties (or in later decades), writes Rajadhyaksha (35). This is because in the edgy and progressive “social” of the fifties, seemingly private existences, identities, and cultural behavior became ambiguated as singularities within a wider normative secular modernity.16 The fifties cinema mediated this suturing of the singular and the normative, but not perfectly, not unlike the state itself, as we have seen in the botched demographic project of the Abducted Persons Act. The familial was never completely sutured without sexuality (especially female) as a remainder, just as a simultaneous political commitment to normative communities and to singular citizenship—separate and equal, both included and belonging, in Badiou’s terms—has never quite been achieved in Indian secularism (Larson in Baird 1993: 66). Manmohan Desai’s Chhalia (1960) is a good example of this trouble of reconciling normativity and singularity. The “realistic” story of a Hindu Partition victim who is deserted by her husband and his family in Lahore during the riots, it evokes gender trauma uncharacteristically overtly for a film made at this time. However, Chhalia is remarkable for its refusal to categorize polarities, though these polarities are tantalizingly encountered at every turn in the plot and dialogue. What makes Chhalia possible is the diegetic impossibility of the forensic and diagnostic. The narrative does not unearth a redemptive, immutable truth beneath the layers of ethnic and sexual trauma. Liminalities, while abundant, are never diagnosed into definite sameness or difference. Since, as we have seen, articulation of historic violence and trauma seem possible only when retelling involves alterity—privileging difference in repetition—this film’s systematic structure of iterations, that stubbornly resist differentiation or assimilation and produce liminality and not identity, can narrate trauma: since nothing is quite what it seems, neither the same nor different, neither triumphal nor catastrophic results of the tumultuous socio-historical crisis are expected or offered. An example of the uncategorizable nature of polarities in the film may be found in a classic scenario of failed “recovery.” After being renounced by her own parents, the “recovered” abductee is about to be reunited with her husband at a “women’s camp,” but he rejects her when she introduces to him “their” child, who identifies himself as a Muslim son of a Muslim father. This mystery is later explained as the agency of a Muslim man who had rescued and sheltered the abandoned and already pregnant wife, but the explanation remains as unverifiable in the film as it might in life. Dressed in “Muslim” clothes, the child proudly proclaims his Muslim father’s name to his (real?) father. Even as a bedtime story, the heroic tale he wants to hear is that of his “father’s” rescue of his mother (made more problematic for patriarchy by the fact that the husband, the “proper” rescuer and protector, was absent from the scene). These juxtapositions keep alive the

Violence, gender, and citizenship  89 miscibility of real and fake, or self and other. The Muslim surrogate acted as the real rescuer, and indeed as the real father. The real father was absent when rescue was needed. This makes the enemy who we would be—like us—and yet unlike us in our ignoble failure to act when needed; who are we, therefore? The child is thus the primary embodiment of liminality resulting from an unverifiable iteration: he seems and sees himself as Muslim, yet is said to be Hindu, his paternity being thus split and doubled. The film thus reiterates that it is impossible to determine which polarities are sustainable, and that some polarities that are also hybrid re-activations cannot be disentangled. Some other unresolved iterations the film employs are as follows: the couple first meet during arrangements for their marriage mutually castigating “Lahore boys” versus “Lahore girls”; people during riots are humans or devils; the abductee is either a liar or innocent, victim, or volunteer; she is the counterpart of a similarly unidentifiable Pakistani Muslim woman left behind in Delhi; the woman’s natal family disavow her as not their daughter; crooks are godly, etc. Polarity reveals itself as singularity, and bypasses altogether the logic of commensuration. Therefore, cohering around the vulnerable or violated gendered body, the familial keeps unraveling as the politico-legal conundrum, as well as the cinematic mise en scène. Rajadhyaksha cites as films snubbed by the state “socials from the Bombay Talkies studios, reformist musicals such as some of Raj Kapoor’s work or some of Dev Anand’s Navketan production house … and realist-internationalist films” (2003, 36)—that is, the cinema wherein non-normative and public identities emerged as liminal in heteroglossic cinematic discourse—“a domain of something in between, something that enabled the protagonists of national culture … to negotiate with, the State” (2003: 34). Chhalia, I suggest, was able to engage the scandals of Partition, abduction, and national reproduction only by avowing this liminal and the indecipherably singular at every thematic and formal opportunity, and thereby avowing itself as a cinematic liminal mise en abyme. Indeed, except as a metatextual theatricalization of a national mise en abyme of identity, its staging of embodiment as enactment would not have been possible in its historic moment. The chasm between traditionalism and “modern” citizenship, un-forded by post-independence cinema, is also instantiated in the rift in the state’s unsuccessful mediation of family-centric traditional structures, a modern, secular consciousness of gender rights, and the reality of endemic and epidemic gender violence, as evident in Hindu code and Partition-related legislation, as well as in films like Chhalia. Another apparently “normative” social film that might be usefully contrasted with polythetic political epics like Mother India or Mughal-e-Azam, or with edgy heteroglossic socials like Chhalia, is Mr. And Mrs. 55 (Guru Dutt, 1956), which seems to be a hymeneal romance engaged in the reinvestment of tradition as true modernity by the proper dispensation of the bodies of marriageable young women. It is a “marriage comedy,” depicting the difficult choice of an ideal life partner in a modern social context of fluid, indeterminate identities. It is, however, crucially different in its representation of female identity choices, both civic and spectatorial. The heroine Anita faces the double dilemma of a paternal injunction to marry before she is 21 or forfeit her deceased father’s fortune,

90  Violence, gender, and citizenship and a matriarchal injunction from her feminist aunt to divorce her husband of convenience so she can maintain her independent “feminist” identity. Divorce for a Hindu woman is conceivable only by the provisions of the new Hindu Code Law, and the film’s intent, as Virdi has eloquently shown, is to undercut this legal genesis of gender modernity (2003, 75–6). Charming and lyrical, Guru Dutt’s romantic comedy recuperates “feminine tradition” via a pleasant detour through the modern and its pleasures and discontents (for Indian husbands-to-be in this instance; recall the lampoon at the beginning of this chapter). Anita is unable to follow the “modern” script. She divorces the bachelor hustled up by her aunt (Preetam, aptly named “the loved one”) after marriage, but returns to the path of tradition led by the example of other modest Indian women and wives, defying her aunt’s “feminist modernity” to reunite with Preetam (Virdi 2003: 77). In a formal and visual contrast to the narrative message, however, this story of stability and stasis is undercut by the film’s black and white camerawork and tilted camera angles (Cooper 2006: 162, 164), which instead capture the starkness of carnivalesque inversions gripping the nation through “modernity,” and index the indeterminacy of new civic identities, including male ones. Preetam is unemployed but talented, self-respecting but on the verge of despair, virile but forced to perform (feminizing) neurasthenia, verging on homelessness, a good man but a reckless employee, and so on. The marriage choice in 1955 is additionally complicated for Anita by the undeniable indeterminacy of this new male citizen, the denizen of India’s new modernity, in turns rogue and nobility; he matches with his personal and social slipperiness her own, sliding between the scales of the modern normativity of gender rights (the right to divorce, primarily, which is seen as a Western plague) and traditional narratives of feminine normativity (wifeliness, meekness, devotion, dependence, etc.; Virdi 2003, 80–4). The film achieves a “traditionalist” and gender conservative resolution, however, and thus acts as a moderating and moderate cinematic mediation of urgent questions about gendered citizenship agitating pubic discourses of law, religion, and national belonging. The Hindu Code Bill was meant to be a hallmark of the secular principle in the Indian constitutional imagination of gender. As Coward writes, the ‘thisworldly” secular values of Nehru, Ambedkar, and Gajendragadkar, the chief drafters of the bill, determined the crafting of the Hindu Code Bill from 1944 to ’56 (in Baird 1993: 31–3). What did the interpenetration of constitutional and private discourses among the nation’s architects in the crucial years of 1944–56 spell for the cultural imaginary of the nation, i.e. Indian cinema and its metadiscourses? Mr. And Mrs. 55, as we have seen, was viewed in its time as a potent reflection on the distortion of historical tradition by this incommensurable legal event. The anonymous Filmfare reviewer wrote in 1955: “the film unfolds a page from life itself, throwing the spotlight on evils of today which strike at the roots of our civilization and culture” (Filmfare, 27 May 1955: 21). As the Hindu Code Bill’s effort to craft a revolutionary code for reforming and modernizing the personal laws of Hindus proceeded, cinematic meta-discourse rubbed its hands at the opportunity for lampooning, as two cartoons in FilmIndia’s November 1951 issue would suggest (see figures 3 and 4).

Figure 2.2 “Retired Hurt,” FilmIndia, November 1951: 15. Courtesy of National Film Archive of India, Pune.

Figure 2.3 “Hindu Code Debate?” FilmIndia, November 1951: 33. Courtesy of National Film Archive of India, Pune.

92  Violence, gender, and citizenship “Retired Hurt” suggests a battering of the principal architect of the bill, the eminent jurist Dr Ambedkar—an untouchable by birth—by the dominant forces in Congress who remained prejudiced against untouchables. The tattered Hindu Code Bill is held up in the centre of the boxing arena by a pugilist, while a Muslim Congress member says, “Envious of Muslims, eh?”17 Nehru, the co-architect of the bill, holding aloft the weapon that appears to have wounded Ambedkar, says, “I am sorry you are going this way, Ambedkar!” The cartoon “Hindu Code Debate?” depicts various Congress members shamelessly exposing their anatomies and proclaiming their virile masculinity in different ways to prove themselves to be high caste men, even if they supported the bill. Such cartoons document the cinematic meta-discourse tacitly supporting opposition to the Hindu Code Bill as unduly empowering minorities, women and, incidentally, performers, especially embodied by the last figure to the right of the cartoon (Dhagamwar in Baird 1993: 236–4; Virdi 2003: 69–71, 79–81). FilmIndia’s cartoons suggest the shaping of public, secular national identity by the ambiguities of a Hindu-centric consciousness experimenting unhappily with modifying its theistic foundations, the urgent demands of “modern” gender politics replacing traditional consensus on a hierarchical structure of society (Coward in Baird 1993: 24–32). This discourse has the ring of the “structure of the conjuncture,” in Sahlins’ words (1985: xiv). In discussing the “vexed problem of the relation between structure and event” (ibid.: xiii), and in calling “‘structure’—the symbolic relations of cultural order … an historical object” (vii), anthropologist Sahlins suggests a structurally implicated nature—whether performative or prescriptive (xii)—of historical “events,” wherein: an event is not simply a phenomenal happening, even though as a phenomenon it has reasons and forces of its own, apart from any given symbolic scheme. An event becomes such as it is interpreted. Only as it is appropriated in and through the cultural scheme does it acquire an historical significance … The event is a relation between a happening and a structure (or structures) … (Ibid.: xiv) The legislative imbroglio bears the marks of an emergent prescriptive, as well as performative, unfolding of structural impulses that shifts attention away from enduring and longstanding tradition to “events” functioning as structures of conjuncture—legal, political, or violent—that are meant to be reinterpretations of that past structure, yet bear the marks of the latter’s constraints, not unlike Ambedkar’s marked body in the cartoon. The discourse on tradition is incompletely retired in the quest for secular modernity, and keeps interrupting the latter discourse. The cartoons and their grumbling certainly lend credence to that postulate: Hindus … had all their laws shuffled and reshuffled till Hindus started looking like Christians in marriage and Muslims in succession. All the itch for making laws was spent on detraditionalizing Hindu men while leaving the 40 million Muslims of the country severely alone out of sheer fear of the

Violence, gender, and citizenship  93 usual Islamic repercussions … The Hindu to whom this land belongs can be sent to jail if he marries a second wife but the Muslim can simultaneously throw four women into his bed as wives and four more as his mistresses and then shake hands with Pandit Nehru as one more Maulana of Delhi … (FilmIndia, June 1956: 4; italics mine)18 Patel’s “minority” anxiety on behalf of the majority Hindus in India is particularly resonant given that, while Hinduism was specifically undefined in the Constitution, anyone who professed no other religion was therefore automatically counted as Hindu (Coward in Baird 1993: 37; Baird, 1993: 41–58). As we have seen in Mr. and Mrs. 55, this rupture in the discourse of tradition and the ontology of the traditional man cinematically metamorphosed into the discourse of romance and marriage in the “family values” social. My third example of a “social” film, New Delhi (Mohan Segal, 1956), provides a double prospect on the theme of ontic instability and indeterminacy being tied to new nationhood and emergent citizenship. New Delhi stars Vyjayantimala and Kishore Kumar, the dancing and singing star, and may be called the romance of linguistic performance, providing resolution to rupture in an aesthetic confluence. Vyjayantimala and Kishore Kumar play Janki and Anand, a south Indian Tamil “girl” and a north Indian Punjabi “boy.” Though they both live in New Delhi, they speak different vernacular languages, a significant interstate problem of national cohesion in post-independence India. Anand masquerades as a Tamil speaker in a predominantly Hindi-speaking city, where linguistic and regional prejudice have become intense enough that rental lodging is conditional upon being a co-regionalist or a co-linguist. In a wider sense, New Delhi reflects a crisis faced by Hindi cinema itself since its earliest days: the problem of linguistic plurality and the attempt to create a cinema with a national audience. This problem manifested itself from the days of the Indian Cinematograph Committee report (1928) and its discovery that films had distinctly regional affinities based on language that impeded the notion of a nation-wide cinema; the Madras Presidency (comprising Tamil Nadu, parts of Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh) had fought off an effort by the interim Congress party in 1937 to make Hindi the region’s official language.19 It is no coincidence that finding a “Lingua Indica” is the film’s actual dilemma. The nation as home is invoked here, strongly crosscut by ethnographic or heritage tourism shots of the city in the film’s opening sequences, with architectural and historic sites dominating the camera in an attempt to establish the modernity, urbanity, yet worldly historical stature of independent India’s capital city. The “tourism” angle never disappears as the romances in the film (Anand and Janki’s, and Anand’s sister Nikki and a young Bengali-speaking painter’s) occur in heritage settings such as the Red Fort and other architectural registers of historic and contemporary national importance. The domestic spaces seem claustrophobic, even panoptical (as in the first song sequence set in the tavern, in which multiple rental units sternly look in upon the central courtyard where the landlord resides and decides who is to stay) by contrast, except when livened by Anand’s “anti-communal” performance demanding national and linguistic pluralism. The indexicality of

94  Violence, gender, and citizenship historic sites—sites serving as signs of heritage from which the new modern state can take its aspirational cues, abiding structures within which new self-defining events of modernity, such as inter-communal marriages, can occur—is repeatedly alternated with cuts to sequences and tableaux of performance venues (Anand is an aspiring show artist and Janki an accomplished dancer) to signal a nation of performers—RDB’s “nautanki saale.” On another performative plane, “heritage” sequences also induce a theme of ontological instability of the “common citizen” once again, because the sites’ very publicness introduces questions about the verifiability, enumerability versus “performativity,” of those one meets there when on a sight-seeing tour. In an extended comic sequence, Anand struggles to maintain his “Tamil” identity when caught by his sister and her admirer while romancing Janki at a heritage site. A wider national identity as a performative jouissance potentially transcends the film’s more private conflicts of linguistic regionalism. An editorial in FilmIndia (February 1956) acidly satirized the central government’s proposed linguistic redistribution of state territories in Bombay, Maharashtra, and Gujarat, a proposal based on linguistic regionalist demands of precisely the sort seen as obstreperous and divisive in the film.20 The film’s achievement, according to FilmIndia’s caustic review, is “to expose and emphasize the crass and inherent stupidity of that widely prevalent attitude in India which is called provincialism and which makes the people of one linguistic region deride and distrust those of others” (ibid.: 73–4). Evoking the ubiquitous spectre of murderous communalism, this review addresses the film’s conveyance of an explicit national event through the metaphor of social romance. In a “tragic” false climax, New Delhi figures death by drowning of Janki, discovered by her Tamil father in her linguistically inappropriate romance with Anand (Kishore Kumar), whose autocratic and bossy father21 also vetoes both his son Anand and his daughter Nikki’s inter-linguistic romances. After a tumultuous scene with her distraught father, who wishes her dead rather than married to a Punjabi speaker, Janki is thought to have committed suicide by jumping into the river; only her shawl is found by the riverside. The scandal of the fictitious “death” or “suicide” of Janki as a result of her romantic transgression is, implicitly, the scandal of abduction; her turning to a Punjabi for a romantic partner is diegetically treated with the horror usually reserved until this point in Indian cinema for the woman who has transgressed caste, untouchability, virtue, and, of course, ascriptive ethnicity. Janki “dies”—figurally and fictively—the death of a “victim” of communal conflict. Her carefully contrived resurrection (she of course only “played” dead, or rather, missing) is a rapturous ending to the story of abduction that would have been mostly unavailable to the recently partitioned nation. Rescue comes, as in Dekh Kabira Roya, through a socially lower-class surrogate father figure who is “linguistically” neutral. While Janki comes out of hiding from the shelter of this shopkeeper friend of her father, who is of no particular stated affiliation to any language or regional community, the film’s second false climax depicts Anand’s sister Nikki’s rejection by the Punjabi suitor chosen by her father for insufficient dowry. The Punjabi father now feels the shameful pangs of the father whose

Violence, gender, and citizenship  95 daughter is “dishonored” as the Tamil father previously did—not coincidentally, in the Indian context this position is only habitable by the fathers of daughters, not of sons. Desperately, he runs from friend to friend in his so-called “community” or “Biradari”—literally “brotherhood”—to be told by each in turn that there are limits, particularly monetary ones, to “community.” The previously spurned Bengali painter now steps in and nobly offers to make up Nikki’s dowry with his own family jewels. Tearfully, the father, re-humanized into modern pluralism, welcomes the spurned Bengali suitor and launches into a speech redefining “community”: community’s fictive and unstable contours are realigned and reinforced in the image of a hymeneal rapture that transcends regionalism and communalism. New Delhi’s linguisitic eclecticism thus leads to communal integration and the rescue of “lost” women. Janki’s “death” is thus doubly obliterated, by the refiguration of community and by her re-absorption into the family where earlier she was an absolute outsider, as well as a “victim,” of transgressive sexuality. The advertisement for New Delhi (see Figure 2.4) declares that it is “A Film on the Emotional Integration of India,” and in smaller type, “A Story of Babels [sic] about Labels.” Indeed, the tacking of “Emotional” before “Integration” in the slogan is symptomatic: it suggests that other integration that was not possible, that of the two countries that used to be undivided India and that fought literally to the death at Partition and sacrificed many women in the process.

The seventies and the Muslim present: Garm Hava Then, in the seventies, one gets an isolated film like Garm Hava (“Hot Winds”, M.S. Sathyu, 1973), an intricate weaving of the “Muslim social” with an anticommunalist message, the one “Islamicate” film wherein Muslim social life is realized and contextualized in wider Indian society. The film is articulated in the realist didactic mode rather than the romance didactic. Director M.S. Sathyu described the nexus of communal, cultural, and national identity in Bombay cinema of the late twentieth century as woven of recursive looping of experience, memory, and representation regarding national trauma: There are a lot of film-makers who had earlier suffered due to the Partition when they migrated from Pakistan to India and became part of it. Though they had suffered because of Partition, they never made films on Partition at that time … They didn’t want to remind themselves of those times. But today suddenly there is a spurt of nationalism which has become synonymous with being anti-Pakistan … (Interview with M.S. Sathyu; Joshi 2004: 65) Besides rightly indicating belatedness among directors who personally survived Partition,22 which might suggest a necessarily lengthy gestational heuristic and telos for Indian films on the topic of gender as an incommensurate liminality, Sathyu revives charges familiar from Patel about the “national” film-makers’ opportunism and exploitation.

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Figure 2.4 Print advertisement for New Delhi, FilmIndia, April 1956. Courtesy of National Film Archive of India, Pune.

I suggest that the lag in cinematic representation of traumatic events is a function of national representation as repetition, as recursivity, and not merely one of opportunistic exploitation. Govind Nihalani, the maker of Tamas (1988), an acclaimed made-for-television film on the Partition and communal riots, explains

Violence, gender, and citizenship  97 that survivors and witnesses needed distance from the immediacy of the event (Joshi 2004: 9–10, 81, 83). It is repetition that this cinema relies on to get it right, even though it activates unexpected outcomes each time it rephrases the liminal, the singular, the excessive, etc. in order to get them right. Shyam Benegal, director of another Partition-related film, Mammo (1994), points at the lengthy filtering process of conscious-raising films: “It won’t happen with one film. It is a process” (Joshi 2004: 101). P. K. Nair lists both “family dramas” and more radical films, such as Chhinamool (“Uprooted”; Nimai Ghosh: 1951) and Ritwik Ghatak’s Subarnarekha (“The Golden Line”, 1962), as prominent and excellent, but early post-Partition films wherein the trauma of separation showed up fairly quickly as embedded in family dramas of displacement (Joshi 2004: 11–4; Sarkar 2009). Such films, however, barely made it commercially, or, indeed, not at all, however highly they were adulated as auteuristic and anti-communal masterpieces. Chinnamool and Subarnarekha were quickly laid aside in their own time (though they have made major critical comebacks); demotic memory seems to have been overwhelmed and paralyzed by the direct tackling of Partition in cinema so soon after the event; we have already observed the relatively total oblivion of Lahore in the depths of popular and critical memory. The films themselves constituted a liminal zone of cinema, and joined other liminal zones and narratives, such as the story of gender and sexuality as told cinematically. By 1973, however, the displacement of the twinned topoi of communalized rape and abduction and the birth of the new nation in India onto familial tales of ruptured rapture found a somewhat more transparent narration. Garm Hava tells the story of Salim Mirza and his family, Muslims of Agra, who stay behind in India after Partition, though their relatives leave one by one for the promised land across the border. Salim loses his shoemaking business because no one will give him loans after his factory is burned down; his house becomes evacuee property because it was in the name of his brother, now in Pakistan. The greatest blow falls when his daughter Amina, after losing two suitors to Pakistan and migration, and after being sexually involved with the last one in expectation of marriage, commits suicide. Salim, now a broken man, arranges to leave for Pakistan, too, but, at the last minute, he chooses to join the mobilizing masses of India out protesting in the streets, and to remain in the only country he has ever known as home, along with his younger son, Sikander. Garm Hava found representational techniques that have been seen as strategic: Sathyu very wisely, [sic] stuck close to the story of the disintegration of a single Muslim family of Agra in Uttar Pradesh. Their trials and tribulations helped in an intimate way, to depict the senselessness that lay behind the enforced division of a nation on religious grounds. The fragility of human existence amidst unbridled political chaos, was the central thrust of the narrative … (Chatterjee in Joshi 2004: 66; italics mine) Chatterjee finds this technique of familializing and privatizing the political trauma “full of the gnarled poetry of everyday life” (68), as indeed it is. However,

98  Violence, gender, and citizenship this focus on the family might yet be a matter of the slim repertoire of available representational techniques for citizenship and spectatorship that Rajadhyaksha has alerted us to, which returns us to the question of communal political identity finally only gesturally presented in the film. The question of the lag in cinematic representations of Partition might now need to be further linked to this privatization of trauma, as well as to the question of the near-impossibility of the Muslim in cinematic and political representation. Ultimately, how to represent the Muslim and the woman again refocuses, as with Mother India, on the question of who the normative citizen or spectator of modern India might be. The question of representability, even within the schema of repetition as subjectivation, finds a peculiar challenge in the case of the Muslim and the woman—racial and sexual incommensurables—films about whom might be made only after a certain lapse of time, and then with certain necessary pessimism against presupposing a viable, cohesive community of such singularities as part of a stable familial structure or narrative. Contrary to Chatterjee’s reading of this film as realizing the poetry of individual and family identities despite political chaos and crisis, such technique appears not to have worked. The film could not finally rest on a depiction of individual and family destinies, its protagonists being non-normatively raced and gendered. Since identification as woman or Muslim is traumatic in Garm Hava—witness the violence on Amina—the citizen-to-be is then forced to make the choice of participating in a troubling political narrative of national identity, a mass mobilization that reflects inconsistent sub-elements of the nation-state: the film concludes with Salim and Sikander joining a procession of civic protesters. The identity of the citizen or spectator might well be partially limned only through the dual indirections of temporal lags and repressed liminality of such incommensurables in cinematic representation. As has been noted: the [film] industry functioned then (as it still does) under the constraints of censorship protocols which proscribed the representation of subjects that might tend to inflame ‘communal passions,’ a proscription that ensured that … Muslim religiopolitical identities except of an oppressively benevolent variety renamed unnamed and unexaminable … (Roy 1998: 165) Garm Hava was actually banned for possibly fanning “communal passions” before it went on, in a wonderful twist of fate, to win the President’s Silver Medal for promoting national integration.23 Star & Style wrote in 1974: The biggest weakness, obviously brought to it by the writers is the subjective self-pity for the minority community … the film’s sympathy is for those suffering indirect or direct opposition in North India, in the wake of Partition and with several of their own kith and kin flying by night to the new land of communally based opportunity. In that sense ‘Garm Hava’ is not exactly a film to promote harmony, integration and all that … The film would have

Violence, gender, and citizenship  99 been a marvel, if made in 1949 or so. But in 1974, it looks out of place, in the sense of opening up old, healed wounds (21; emphasis mine) This reviewer’s objection reminds one, once again, of the significance of temporal distancing in performing an identity. There appears to be a right time, and a right way to do so. An “un-historically” staged (unlike Mughal-e-Azam) film about Muslim identity runs the risk of being interpreted, in spite of the precautionary restriction to psychological realism only, and despite the so-called focus on the family, as being precisely communalist. It is repeatedly remarked that the film tackles the event of Partition at a temporal distance, but the historical structures that are sniffed out are still those of Partition and thereby much too close for comfort. Something is needed here to explain the crisis of representing the Muslim as citizen against the backdrop of temporal double consciousness—always too early and always too late, an indeterminate embodiment, spectral but carnal—that surrounds the question of the Muslim’s subjectivation in national memory. As has been asked of women, so it might be asked if the only good Muslim is a dead Muslim? If as Chakravarty has suggested, “The historical film has been the privileged site of elaboration of the Muslim sensibility,”24 a Muslim-centered film that, however family-focused, deals with questions of modernity and identity in the present, doubly defied the taboo against representing the Muslim as neither past nor dead, and as both embodied and carnal. What is entirely lacking in Chatterjee’s analysis aforementioned (Joshi 2004: 66)—the corpse of Amina, the sexualized and violated daughter—returns to haunt us now as the Muslim and woman dead out of necessity. Once again, we see violence against the minority as being gendered when the context is live, not mythic or foreclosed. The film, it has been noted, closes with the “progressive,” probably “socialist” motif of the “return” of the Muslim Salim his son Sikander, joining millions of dispossessed Indians, rather than “lost” others, across the border. As much as that return should function as closure, the central trauma of the film forms around the romantic and sexual tragedy of Amina, whose death prevents total closure of the filmic and the political narrative of Muslim experience in post-Partition India, a narrative of the state’s betrayal of its citizens, in some ways not unlike the foundational betrayal of women at the core of Mother India. In the case of the Muslim citizen, cinema’s relationship with historiography is incompatible with a notion of conjuncture that is not murderous—yet. The fate of Janki in New Delhi partly prefigures Amina’s fate in Garm Hawa, but averts Garm Hava’s tragic closure for women by the intervention of an aesthetic of the aesthetic privileged over the linguistic politics in the “heart” of the nation, the capital New Delhi, to reinstate the hymeneal romance. Garm Hava, on the other hand, did not mince matters, though it was said to. The body of Amina at her suicide is dressed in bridal garb, and the ever-dignified Salim (her father played by the powerful actor Balraj Sahni, in his last screen appearance) watches the body wash away among the last of his memories of pre-Partition life. One can see why a film such as this, 25 years after the Partition, garnered criticism for being both separatist and belated; it falls into the fissure between the structures

100  Violence, gender, and citizenship

Figure 2.5 Amina and her mother, a still from Garm Hawa. Courtesy of National Film Archive of India, Pune.

of history and the metastructure of the state, and thus into a visual liminality. At the heart of the film is the drive to redefine the “Muslim” as an Indian citizen, and as someone who has no desire to “cross” the border, as this land is her land, while simultaneously laying such hopes out on the bier of violated femininity. This is a predicament, an impasse according to critics, making it a cinematic record of belated and/or missed opportunities; “Ajab,” reviewing the film in 1973, brings up the question of “The kind of Muslims” that Garm Hava departs from norm in depicting: “characters drawn from the Middle-class family,” the average Muslim who is also a citizen—in other words, not a political problem or a threat. Other reviews of the times are more guarded in their containment of the damage: “A major triumph of Sathyu is that he has made Hindus play Muslim character and vice versa” (Movieworld, 28 May 1974). Garm Hava seems to have been a cinematic crossroads of sorts, one wherein the subjunctivity of enfranchisement and citizenship are re-enacted.

The nineties: Gadar and Veer-Zaara The border rather than the crossroads returned as the dominant concern in Gadar: Ek Prem Katha (“Revolution: A Love Story”, Anil Sharma, 2001). It was a big-budget film marked by “catchpenny sloganeering and noisy melodrama” (Gahlot in Joshi, 2004: 110–1).25 As Gahlot writes:

Violence, gender, and citizenship  101 It can’t be denied that it was the blatant jingoism of Gadar that made it one of the biggest grossers of all time—though its anti-Pakistan rhetoric, excessive violence and communal incendiarism made a lot of discerning viewers uncomfortable. The ‘masses,’ however, loved the film. In India it was a bigger hit than Lagaan which was released during the same week … They [presumably the masses again] enjoyed the Pakistan-bashing on the basis of a more contemporary issue of terrorism … the fact that Sunny Deol beat the Pakistanis on their home turf, fuelled an armchair patriotism in Indian viewers … (2004: 111) Needless to say, the analogy with antagonisms in cricket—in Lagaan against the British and in Gadar against Pakistan—might play a small role in the associations of “home turf.” Visually lurid recreations of the tense traumas of flight and survival during the Partition and its massacres, train stations in the earlier scenes and trains in the later scenes where Deol “beat the Pakistanies on their home turf,” rewrite the entire political narrative of the Partition in Gadar, re-consigning the Muslim to the category of national traitor, elevating the Indian Punjabi Sikh to the role of national hero and saviour, and fixing the de-naturalized woman as the porous embodiment of communal conflict and contestation (Menon 2004; Aiyar 1995). The film’s acknowledgments are preceded by the following “historical” statement: The Producers dedicate this film to those Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs who in spite of suffering irreparable losses and facing enormous tragedies at the time of Partition in 1947, painstakingly rebuilt their lives and brought up their families with extraordinary determination, hard work and sacrifice contributing to the noble task of Nation building. This is followed by filmic re-enactments of violence during Partition: a Sikh family leaves Pakistan, providing poison as a safeguard against abduction to the daughters, their refugee train is attacked by armed Muslims, the daughters are raped and murdered. The train, by now established as a symbol of human suffering, chugs into Amritsar station in India, where an incredulous Indian crowd watches the blood-streaked compartments rolling in. The camera pans to disbelief in the extreme close-up shot of the eyes of the hero, who reads the Urdu words written in blood on the compartment: “Hindustanis, learn from us how to cut [i.e. divide or cut in half].” This montage of ostensibly “historic” events is meant to establish the film’s truth claims, which are enmeshed with the film’s anti-Pakistan rhetoric and imagery thereafter. The Sikh hero’s disbelief transforms into rage, and a rampage of killing Muslims in India begins. It is at this time that the hero meets the heroine, Sakina, daughter of a fleeing Muslim aristocrat in Amritsar station. Despite the small replica of the Taj Mahal—a monument of Indian Islamicate architecture and a memorial to the enduring love of a Mughal emperor—that Sakina clutches

102  Violence, gender, and citizenship as she flees, Tara Singh, the hero, is unable to bring his sword down upon the Muslim Sakina as his compatriots urge him. She is then left behind in another chaotic scene of trains and pell-mell refugees, and found by Tara Singh trampled and bleeding on the station platform. The camera closes up on Tara Singh’s face and eyes to show him as a humane figure after all, though a vigilante. He first finds the bloodstained glass Taj Mahal replica and is shown clutching it sorrowfully: the highly obtrusive background music here switches from Hindustani classical raga to a sufi-esque lament. Meanwhile, Sakina recovers from her faint and finds herself pursued by a gang of Hindu would-be rapists and murderers. As she flees, she finds herself on the tracks of the departed train where Tara Singh now stands, and as she faces him, the story flashes back their less turbulent past. As Tara Singh fends off the maddened mob, flashback reveals that he and Sakina had felt attracted to each other, unsanctioned by class and ethnicity, during pre-Partition days. He now saves her after more bloodshed, despite his co-religionists’ taunts than she is a “Muslamani,” a hated other. Singh, whose eyes never stop glaring and tearing in turns, declares Sakina a “Sikh” woman by anointing her head with his blood (as the mark of the vermilion that Hindu and Sikh wives wear). Sakina thus becomes Tara’s “wife” and the next shot shows Tara and Sakina on the same side of the 180-degree line, as opposed to facing each other; they now face the ravenous mob, who are soon dispatched by Tara Singh. Sakina opts to remain in India, even though Tara wants to return her. She declares her desire to be to him the wife he wants—which as the well-bred, educated, and elite Muslim woman she is not—one who cooks, cleans, and even occasionally gets slapped by her husband. The lines between assault, recovery, abduction, rupture, and rapture are thus summarily blurred. Sakina takes to the life of the Punjabi woman and wife with gusto, with much cultural tourism by way of Punjabi folk rituals and dancing and singing, and a child is born. She then discovers in a newspaper that her parents are alive and well in Pakistan. Drawn by ties of kinship and family to Pakistan for a “visit,” she gets trapped by her own family, that is, by Muslims; her father refuses to acknowledge her marriage or child. The indomitable Tara Singh now forces his way into Pakistan. Just in the nick of time, too, for Sakina is about to be remarried to a Muslim man, and is just engaging a Qazi—a Muslim priest—in heated theological debate about women’s rights and exogamy in Sharia law. By this time, her family are urging poison on her, a not-too-subtle flashback to the opening scene and the Punjabi girls fleeing Pakistan. In language reminiscent of Mother India’s Radha, Sakina refuses death because she is certain her husband will come to take her back to India. Tara Singh meanwhile rages through Pakistan, blowing up bridges, trucks, and people, and finally boards a burning train and drives himself and his wife and child across the border into India. The camera repeats shots of Pakistani armored vehicles blowing up, as if the intended audience could not possibly get enough of the carnage of the enemy other. The entire military might of Pakistan is unable in the end to prevent Sakina’s re-abduction to India (see Figure 2.6). While the similiarities with Lahore will be obvious, this is a repetition with a difference. The difference, clearly, is that of the substitution of the Muslim female body as the fractious locus for identification of citizenry, as opposed

Violence, gender, and citizenship  103 to Leelo’s Hindu body. The alteration that this difference makes, however, is realized in the deafening diegetic audio-visual track that fills the deep silence, the impossibility of singularity and therefore of communication, that women’s Partition experience engendered. As I argued at the beginning of this chapter, singularity was forced into a false universality when South Asian Hindus and Muslims recognized in the other side their own mirror image, despite attempts to differentiate the other from the self as radically dissimilar. Re-enactments of identical communal events and acts by both sides enforced and reinforced, however tacitly, an acknowledgment of identity, which repressed enunciation. Only by displacing the context or site of the event onto a doubled difference, an initial incomplete otherness written over by performances of incomplete “naturalization” (Sakina’s near perfect mimicry of Hindu-ness nonetheless leaves her vulnerable to re-absorption by whatever patriarchal context she enters), can the film revive the inalienable difference and singularity that warrants brutality and massacre. This doubling or looping of sameness and difference in the female other’s body is intensified by that gender embodiment in both a spatial and temporal register. As I mentioned before, the synchronic spatial register of experience invokes a similarity—Sakina’s predicament unmistakably parallels that of the Hindu women massacred in the film’s opening sequence—but the film adroitly crosscuts that register with that of a diachrony, which insists upon insuperable difference, by evoking in the scenes of Muslim family life in Pakistan a sense of archaic primordiality, achieved primarily through the representation of Sakina’s father’s household as absurdly countermodern but also “behind the times” within the chronometry of Muslim history itself. As mentioned before,

Figure 2.6 Gadar film poster. Courtesy of National Film Arcive of India, Pune.

104  Violence, gender, and citizenship Sakina is depicted debating with a Muslim cleric about interpretation of women’s rights in the Sharia, a discourse that hints unmistakably at the debates raging within twentieth-century Islam about the weighting of pre-modern, countermodern, and modern forces in Islam concerning gender ideology. Beyond even this, the entire nation-state of modern Pakistan is also tarred with the same brush as being irredeemably corrupt, chaotic, derelict, and, in the end, risibly incompatible with enlightened modernity. By contrast, enlightened modernity is apparently resurrected on the Indian side in Yash Chopra’s Veer-Zaara (2004), where we see another scenario of repetition with difference, or a re-activation, of the core doubt of Lahore, Mr. and Mrs. 55, Mother India, Garm Hava, and Gadar—namely, the identity of the normative citizen. The resolution here is in the partially feminized embodiment of the title character Veer Pratap Singh, the brave “rescue” pilot of the Indian army who languishes in a Pakistani jail for his devotion to Zaara Hayat Khan, daughter of a Pakistani politician whom he fails to “recover,” unlike the frenzied Tara Singh: the train station here is a scene of re-abduction by Zaara’s compatriot and fiancé, Razaa Shirazi (played by the Hindu actor Manoj Bajpai) clearly gesturing at invasion by the Pakistani. Veer Singh is played by Shah Rukh Khan, who begins with this film a clear sentimental shift into embodied gender ambiguity—men are meant to be captors, not captives—though not yet into an ambiguation of ethnic embodiment such as we see in Chak de India (2007; see chapter three) and Billu Barber (2009; see chapter one). Gender embodiment continues to be the site for articulation of difference, when the film’s ideological structure demands a recuperation thereof, as in Gadar. However, unlike Gadar, rather than resort to a historical or diachronic register of iteration to re-discover the Muslim as archaic, countermodern, and thus singular, Veer-Zaara allows a modern singularity to emerge via the appearance of the liminal in gender embodiment and enactment. What enables difference to emerge here as the dominant outcome of the cinematic syntax of synchronic repetition is the displacement of crisis onto the male body, which simultaneously enables the importation of a discourse of difference rather than identity from the singularizing diachronic to the universalizing synchronic register. Given the insistent “modernity” of Veer and Zaara themselves, at least—the setting is most definitely a contemporary India—the film only sparingly evokes Muslimness as archaic and passé, and neither is it a “period” film. Without the availability of ethnic otherness, however, representations of singularity cannot become commonplace within cinematic and socio-historical synchronic structures without transforming the normative in some other way. In this case, this transformation resulting from the recurrence of diachronic representations of singular difference within the synchronic frame is replaced by the liminalization of gender embodiment—especially male embodiment—as gender re-enactment. Veer-Zaara begins with Zaara traveling to India, without her family’s knowledge, to bring her Punjabi Sikh nanny’s ashes to India as per her nanny’s wishes. The nanny’s story is never detailed; we just know that she was exiled to the Pakistani side of the border and wished to be “returned” to the land of her birth after her death. Thus, Zaara’s story is palimpsestic in its encoding by the prior

Violence, gender, and citizenship  105 history of another, older woman, who somehow crossed into the wrong country during Partition, and wishes to be reunited with her beloved homeland. Later in the film we see Zaara herself as an older woman who has chosen India as her own homeland, since it is that of her beloved Veer, replicating the nanny’s choice in some senses, especially since she is also shown as tending to young children in a school. Yet Zaara’s story diverges from her nanny’s in that her nanny has remained relatively unassimilated—she did not see her belonging as inclusion, whereas Zaara insists upon inclusion. Never knowing the personal and affective circumstances of the nanny’s life in Pakistan, the viewer, too, hesitates to surmise true identity between them. While Zaara’s romantic choice of the Hindu Indian Veer is entirely disruptive of paterfamilias, her movement into India had been non-conformist but legal. While Zaara’s passage to India is politically and legally unmarked and unremarkable, the nanny’s much earlier and possibly cataclysmic passage remains even more unmarked. It is not unlikely that the nanny’s earlier story is entirely unmarked and silenced primarily to enable the representation of her difference from Zaara and, crucially, of modern India from modern Pakistan. A complete re-enactment of the nanny’s story in Zaara’s is eschewed, therefore, by the temporal separation of the nanny’s story as belonging to a less enlightened past time in a less modern country, and Zaara’s—as we shall see—to an apparently more modern present in a more enlightened country. The nanny’s apparently unwed status and sexual neutrality also contrasts clearly with Zaara’s romantic assimilation with “Punjabi” India, which begins when she meets Veer’s family after being “rescued” by him from a hillside accident on her first cross-border trip to dispose of the nanny’s ashes. Veer’s foster father—a very “Punjabi” Amitabh Bachchan—blesses her as a proxy Hindu wife. Zaara can be reabsorbed, clearly, into the “lost” Indian side of her Punjabi Pakistani self, via Veer Singh and his Punjabi relations, who immediately identify her as a returning bride, a sort of returned object of abduction (though this is suppressed in the ethos of Punjabi joviality and bon vivre). The nanny’s nearlifelong existence and exile in Pakistan is therefore merely a story of rupture, in suturing which Zaara’s life enters simultaneously into rapture and the rupture of hostile state relations. On her way back to Pakistan, as Zaara and Veer ascend a bridge between railway platforms, Veer says in an uncanny echo of Partition discourse on trains, “Actually, there is a cutthroat race for seats.” Zaara’s face is shown as freezing just as Veer speaks, and we encounter her Pakistani fiancé Razaa striding toward them, dressed in traditional garb that marks him instantly as “Islamic” and thus archaic, though Veer and Zaara are clearly contemporary and modern, and dressed accordingly. Just as the lovers are crossing a bridge separating and joining two platforms, they are met by the ominous Razaa. Subject positions are re-shuffled here to re-enact Gadar’s crucial scene of successful rescue as a scene of successful re-abduction. As Zaara is “transferred” from Veer to Razaa at the train station, the camera cuts to a limp and unfeeling handshake coming undone between Razaa and Veer, superimposed over the figure of Zaara standing between the two men representing Muslim Pakistan and Hindu India. However, rather than the clear separation between winners and losers achieved

106  Violence, gender, and citizenship by Gadar’s transfer of Tara Singh from the pursuers’ side to Sakina’s side across the 180-degree axis, Veer and Zaara remain trapped on the further side of the 180-degree axis, where they both seem to be equally in Razaa’s power. The almost sociable encounter at the train station, in a thematic, social, and aesthetic re-enactment of the traumatic station scene in Gadar, is the beginning of Zaara’s abduction, but will also be the beginning of Veer’s later “abduction” in a movement that joins men’s, rather than women’s, destinies to the “female other.” The story of abduction is then a story of triple abduction: it was the nanny, unidentified and unidentifiable, who begins the chain of events, whereby Zaara crosses the border and is recaptured, and Veer crosses the border and is unable to return, like the dead nanny. Even though he is a true hero and a lover, his enlightened attitude, as opposed to that of his Pakistani enemies, leads him to meekly suffer the fate of a captive, an abducted person, “like a woman,” silently and without protest. He agrees to be arrested and detained in a Pakistani jail when told by Razaa that Zaara’s future happiness will depend upon it. A silenced difference that is a willed mark of enlightened modernity is a far cry from a silenced difference that is an involuntary reaction to primal and primordial aggression. Veer Singh stops speaking while in the Pakistani jail, but this is a choice, not a fate. This displaced embodiment of womanliness is axial for difference as a trope of national historical diachrony to cross into difference as a critical marker of synchronic national history. The movement of identity as difference from the diachronic to the synchronic register of national history depends upon the displacement of gender embodiment from the female to the male body in cinema, because since men actually experiencing the fate of women—in however many different ways that might be interpreted—was unlikely or, at least, unrepresented, this fictional identification and its accompanying silence became a strategic moral tool, a choice, and not the end of representation. As films of the twenty-first century—such as those discussed in detail in chapter one—demonstrate, more and more recent Hindi cinema is experimenting with a magnification of the national public discourse upon the indubitable reality of difference or liminality within the nation, by paradoxically resorting to a less is more approach. Besides the liminality of identity that results from the crisscrossing of temporal and spatial codes of repetition, as discussed at the beginning of this chapter, the other primary vehicle for this approach is a new kind of re-enactment of gender embodiment—men who take women’s place in suffering, but can never be mistaken as actually feminine, thus recalling Partition’s subjective iterability encompassing both sameness and difference, which both mirrored and othered—which have liminalized both gender identity and gender behavior. Actor Shah Rukh Khan is himself the most prominent vehicle for this. As he proceeds along his career path of many fascinating liminal ambiguations—schizophrenic to superstar (Darr to Dilwaale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge), homosocial to supervillain (One 2 Ka 4 to Don 2), carnal to spectral (Dil Se to Kal Ho Naa Ho), Hindu to Muslim (Veer-Zaara to Chak De India), etc.—he begins in Veer-Zaara in particular to embody a sentimental masculinity that hints at feminization, without eschewing heroic masculine codes of gender, a signature terrain of liminality. Unlike the hyper-male star of Gadar, Sunny Deol, Shah Rukh Khan was

Violence, gender, and citizenship  107 already recognizable as a somewhat more androgynous and ambiguous figure (a professed Muslim superstar frequently playing Hindu males in Indian movies, after all, must be an ambiguous figure), and such an inversion of gender roles in the captivity narrative is therefore not very problematic within the more “sophisticated” Yash Chopra oeuvre. Since Veer-Zaara, masculinities in Hindi cinema have continued emerging as more and more polythetic; instead of the violent aggression characterizing national masculinity, such as that found in Gadar, the new heroes of the new cinema act in ways that link them closely with femininity and bare life, but do not de-naturalize them. The ambiguation of gender experience and the sentimentalized masculinity of Veer Singh in Veer-Zaara inscribes this difference from the engorged masculinity of Tara Singh in Gadar as a positive enlightened modernity, thereby marking a critical shift in national-statist enactments of responses to violence in modernity through re-enactments of embodied gender. Instead of relegating difference to a countermodernity characteristic of the past, newer films liminalize the countermodern within the present “security” crisis of the nation-state in stories of border crossing that re-enact inter-communal abduction as romantic rescue, militant vigilantes as law-abiding and self-sacrificing citizens, and gender identities and behaviors as radically contingent, in accordance with the liminalizing logic of representation as repetition. As a last note, however, the liminalization of gender embodiment in performative settings does not entirely replace the liminality of ethnicity, in Khan’s case especially. Khan stands for, and possibly embodies, a clear new trend in Hindi cinema of multiple ambiguating re-enactments of the citizen subject, as we have already seen in chapter one, and as we shall see further in the next chapter. While his gender liminality functions actively in Veer Zaara’s re-articulation of singularity as the primary condition of synchronic representation (as discourse, as story)—however much the mythic condition for synchronic representability (as civic inclusion, as naturalization) might rely on the fiction of similar and equal presentation, and however much the socio-historical fact of synchronic presentation might in fact be one of indistinguishable self and other—in one scene near the film’s end, Khan’s Muslim identity is redeployed as the inevitable liminal torque, in addition to gender ambiguation, upon which the film’s layered reflections on citizenship and subjectivity turn. While being acquitted by a Pakistani court though a prisoner-exchange program with India after a long incarceration, Khan reads a poem referring to himself as “prisoner number 786” about the fact that his belonging, as well as that of his Pakistani lover, to either nation-state always remained a plural, indeterminate, empty as well as excessive sign. He refers to the soil of the two countries as being interchangeable at a primal level of apperception, referring simultaneously to the once unified status of India and Pakistan as well as to his own fungibility as an incommensurate sign in both countries, since he is a Muslim citizen of India descended from Pakistani Muslim migrants here playing an Indian Hindu imprisoned in Muslim Pakistan. Often used in South Asian Islam, “786” happens to be the numeral equivalent referring to the first verse of the 113 suras of the Quran: “Bismillahi r-rahmani r-rahim” (“In the name of God, most Gracious, most Merciful”).

108  Violence, gender, and citizenship Not only is Khan’s ontological Muslimess hereby re-enacted in this performance of his liberation from Pakistani Muslims, who are thematized as his own people, but this re-activation of “786” is also an iteration with a difference that is forced through as being commensurable with national unicity: in Yash Chopra’s Deewar (1975), “786” is the number of a badge given to the hero Vijay (played by Amitabh Bachchan) by a Muslim co-worker. It saves his life, in fact, and this catachrestic transfer or gift has since been recognized as an op-sign of communal harmony and national integration in Hindi cinema. Its re-cognition or re-activation in Veer-Zaara iterates the text of unicity in singularity that is doubly instrumental in the context of Shah Rukh Khan’s dual sub-textuality, first in being the Indian Muslim who represents the Indian citizen abducted by the Pakistani state, and second in re-inscribing onto his body the states of liminality experienced by women during Partition. This plural inscription of singularity as unicity—the charismatic and iconic number 786 fragmenting, and yet substituting, the star text of Khan in this instance—becomes an enunciatory possibility that the nation-state so desperately needs and seeks in modern times. While the logic of representation requires differentiation, without which there can be no communication, only silence, as we have seen earlier in this chapter’s discussion of the silence on Partition, the modern state is reluctant to produce difference through the construction of singularities such as non-parallel identity for self and other on a diachronic or temporal register, or to officially characterize its minority citizens as un-presentable as well as un-represented (neither counted nor spoken of), or to resort to a total non-response as a mark of difference from the barbaric other as that would be both politically and discursively suicidal. The solution is in indirection, therefore, or in re-directing the cognition of liminality and singularity as incommensurable into a so-called “re-cognition” of the potential for the national-statist self or citizen to survive by mutation and fragmentation, by re-membering, re-presenting the presented minority by invoking gender and ethnic liminality, and by making, along the way, an affectively wrenching courtroom drama of the whole thing. The grand legerdemain of Gadar and Veer-Zaara is their re-membering of the nation-state as a gendered and embodied scenario for romantic rapture, and their manipulation of a critique of the state as an agent of rupture and differentiation. Scholarship of the nineties has highlighted the atrocity of some recoveries: ‘abduction’ as defined by the act of 1949 assumed that any and every woman located in the home or under the control of a family or individual of the other community, was eligible for recovery, regardless of any indications to the contrary … (Menon 1998: 24) Gadar, as we learn from Gahlot, was supposedly based on the real story of Boota Singh, a Punjabi Indian who married a Muslim woman during the violence, subsequently lost her to the recovery efforts mandated by the Abducted Persons Act, made his way to Pakistan, failed to recover his wife, and died there a “shaheed,” or martyr, according to an Indian romance of Partition. Romantic melodrama

Violence, gender, and citizenship  109 obscures the progressive recognition of the excesses of national citizen identification. Gadar makes a calculated bid for exploiting the excesses of spectatorial identification with characters of ruptured romance who are seen as victims of bad, diachronic readings of regional history. Gadar’s story of redone recovery— or recovery done twice—is a jingoistic re-appropriation of nation vis-à-vis the foreign woman’s body (if the women of Pakistan want to return to their Indian lovers, should not Pakistan itself regret its rash rupture from India?). It produces a freakish hyper-masculine superhero as the liminality generated by tackling synchronic singularities that are supposed to populate only the archaic other, but in fact characterize the contemporary self that cheers on as Tara Singh tears through the Pakistani landscape with his burning train and his loot of Pakistani bodies, proving that the anxieties of identification and differentiation require repeated re-staging, blurring diachronic and synchronic registers, and merging the normative with the very murderous excess that is a sign of radical alterity. Veer-Zaara’s more “contemporary” treatment of a very similar double recovery adopts equally duplicitous modes of writing structural political disequilibrium as fortunes of individual naturalizations, whose triumph over the politics of nationstates completely drives aground any redemptive plot of neighborly understanding: the “progressive” transnational romance and its “softening” of masculinity re-energizes distorting representations of ethnic others, because retaliatory violence cannot be accommodated within the synchronic register without foreclosing representation. Could Hindi cinema’s turns and twists, subterfuges, prevarications, and allegories of Partition experiences have arisen from what in the introduction to this book I call a covert acknowledgment of the temporalities and spatialities of the countermodern that challenge and dismantle a progressive national-statist structural discourse of “natural” progression, or progressive “naturalization” of the citizen? Hindi cinema’s mythic naturalization of the structures of violence informing South Asian early modernity as the romantic, solitary, solipsistic, individual, or familial “event” of abduction and appropriation would suggest so, as does the repetition of this “event” as evidence of both the stress and the success of recording the irreducible heterogeneity of countermodern and “in-consistent” (in Badiou’s sense) elements within the discourse of the nation-state and the myth of its historic nature. One isolated comment does not a manifesto make, but Yash Chopra, the director of Veer-Zaara, declares his solipsistic stance as follows: ‘I was in Jalandhar during Partition … I have seen riots in great detail from close quarters. I have seen people dying, looting and burning. From that time to the present, I have not been involved in any political party … In the world every tragedy is caused by politicians … (Joshi 2004: 113) Representing the structural violence of political discord as redemptive myths of individual naturalizing events is one way in which Hindi cinema deals with inevitable incommensurabilities that establish the excess, the void, the liminal, the exception—the woman, the Muslim, the feminized male—as the rule of the state.

3 The man formerly known as the actor When Shah Rukh Khan reappeared as himself

Shah Rukh Khan, hereafter SRK in this chapter, has been seen by some as not only articulating the new zeitgeist of a post-globalization billion-strong India, but also as a star text for legitimating a new hybridity for an erstwhile liminality, aka the Indian Muslim (Singh 2008), one that can “subvert and complicate … a linear and narrow interpretation” of Hindi cinematic output since the 1990s as bearing the mark of a hegemonic Hindutva (ibid.: 1–2). According to Sunny Singh, SRK’s is a star text that gave a face to a new generation undergoing monumental social and economic challenge and change, and managed to produce the stable category of the “middle-class aspiring Indian,” a category that “may appear to occupy a hotly contested liminal space” (ibid.: 3, 2; emphasis mine) due to myriad fractal articulations of national identity. Singh’s article is intriguing and at times compelling in proposing the Ramayana as the grande syntagmatique (à la Metz) of Hindi cinema, which SRK has helped to embody as a manifestation of Rama, the virtuous hero. Taking its cue from Mishra’s work (2002), which argued for the Mahabharata as the grand syntagmatic of Hindi films and Amitabh Bachchan in his “angry young man” roles as its embodiment of Karna, the troubled hero, Singh analyzes several of SRK’s films, including Chak De India, as instances of the new materialization of the hero in keeping with the new national mood of optimistic aspiration. He argues, moreover, that SRK’s successful representation as the virtuous Hindu god Ram in the epic Ramayana successfully complicates, indeed scuttles, any dogmatic argument about a takeover of the Hindi cinema industry by antiMuslim Hindutva-centric forces. While it is true that SRK has long and successfully played Hindu characters on screen in Hindi films, presenting the most successfully secular face of Indian demographic diversity despite being known as a Muslim (Shiekh 2006: 136), the fact remains that Chak de India is SRK’s first significant appearance as a Muslim protagonist in a Hindi film. It is also true that very few other prominent Muslim actors in the history of Hindi films have ever merged their off-screen lives and on-screen star texts in this way, by appearing as a Muslim in a film (a rare exception being Dilip Kumar). Actors have travelled in the opposite direction, of course, playing Muslims while being real-life Hindus; the reverse has generally not happened.

When Shah Rukh Khan reappeared as himself  111 On a point further along the trenchant critique of nation-statist ideology than Singh’s argument travels, Shahnaz Khan has elaborated Hindi cinematic schemas for representing Muslims as depoliticized or good versus fanatical or bad (Khan 2009: 88). Between Singh and Khan the range of options span from Muslims as facilitating an integrationist view of a new liberalized and ascendant global India, versus Muslims as an element of the national multiplicity who must be re-politicized. Singh’s reading of the Muslim as embodied by SRK eschews the question of Muslim particularity, and certainly of Muslim embodiment, as irrelevant to the new national repertoire that successfully includes hybridity. To be “Indian,” in this sense, is to bypass altogether the question of any “particular” embodiment. Khan’s reading of the Muslim in the film Fanaa (“Storm of Love”, Kunal Kohli, 2006) insists upon the Muslim as embodied and incommensurate within the story of the modern nation unless reconfigured as patriotic; in Fanaa, a terrorist Muslim has to be physically destroyed despite being the male protagonist of the film’s romance narrative. To be “Muslim,” in this reading, is to be nothing but a “particular” problematic body that demands address. These two readings, it might be argued, relate ethnicity to the pan-national narrative as structural (Singh) versus eventful (Khan). The axial difference between the structural accommodation of ethnicity and its “eventalization” as excess—in Badiou’s sense (2005)—is the presence or absence of Muslim singularity as embodiment. If one sees the Muslim male in the Hindi cinematic repertoire as successfully amalgamated hybrid, the singularity of Muslim male embodiment gives way to the Muslim’s commensurability as structural and archival (Taylor 2003). If, however, one sees him as perennially threatening an alienated incommensurability, a liminaility exceeding the norms and bounds of the hegemonic nation-state complex, his embodiment needs to be re-enacted, re-performed repeatedly to assure his “belonging” to the hegemonic script and to salvage his “evental” act of non-belonging from the nothingness and excess of incommensurable liminality. Khan outlines, in her discussion of Fanaa, the work that the filmic narrative must do to recuperate the Muslim by destroying the Muslim male body as violent, excessive, and liminal. However, a third option for representing the Muslim has not been considered thus far. I will call this option that of re-embodiment; it neither avows the physicality of the Muslim as ethnic-ized, nor is it in-“different” to its potential for masquerade and performance. From this I would argue that, despite SRK retaining his Muslim name throughout his career, the fact that he departs from norm in personating a Muslim man as a Muslim actor in Chak de India (2007) is of great significance, but not necessarily because this signifies a liberatory pinnacle of the triumph of post-communal harmony. Indeed, in this essay, I would contend that SRK’s first major filmic appearance as a Muslim character in 2007 is a familiar Hindi cinematic exercise of inert repetition, meant to normalize the liminality of the Muslim by re-embodying Muslim masculinity as feminized. The Muslim character played by the Muslim actor is, in this sense, a doubled embodiment that generates sameness in the form of displacement of ethnicity and its re-coding as femininity as the condition for and of representation. Doubling SRK’s real-life persona in this new formation in his star text does not generate “identity” as

112  When Shah Rukh Khan reappeared as himself heterogeneity and “difference.” Instead, it paradoxically ensures that his “difference,” i.e. Muslimness, remains bound within the rigid and foreclosed logic of representation that is premised upon the homogenous essence of the nation-state. In what follows, I hope to show how invocations of difference in the film are invariably diffused by foreclosing race and gender identities as interwoven and commensurable. In Chak De India, SRK’s character, Kabir Khan, coaches the much belittled Indian Women’s Hockey team to an unprecedented and unanticipated landslide victory at the Women’s Hockey World Cup, thereby apparently demolishing sexist biases and discrimination against Indian women. The film depicts the derisive, sexist and non-egalitarian treatment of the women’s team from the very outset by the Hockey Association itself, particularly by its highest officers, who run it as a male fiefdom. Kabir Khan, the erstwhile Indian men’s hockey team captain had been expelled from the team seven years before, upon the accusation of betraying his team into defeat against Pakistan in the Men’s World Hockey championship match.1 Having disappeared thereafter, he reappears and volunteers to coach the women’s team amidst showers of ridicule and insult. His coaching results in besting and overturning all the accumulated misogyny and contempt for women commonplace in Indian society, however, and the restoration of the women’s pride in themselves as athletes and as women. The film repeatedly codes this pride as a form of honor, previously “lost” and now regained thanks to their coach. Besides the progressive representation of women’s rights and abilities, there are other salutary vectors in the representation of identity politics within the Indian national-statist official ideology of secularism in Chak de India. Thus, for instance, in showing the sport of hockey—India’s official national sport—as the equal domain of official discourses of equal rights and privileges creating rational and enlightenment discourses of gender politics, and that of entirely primordial and unreconstructed hetero-patriarchal and ascriptive identity networking and clannishness, the film dismantles handily what Thomas Blom Hansen characterizes as an artificial secularist polarity of “dirty” politics and “pure” cultures in India within the specific arena of official sports, a realm one might call both intensely political and cultural (Hansen 2000: 255). Deftly, Chak de India shows that the actual discourse of Indian secularism, which seems to be its primary import and, indeed, export, is enacted not merely within the so-called “modern” rationalist, dispassionate, progressive, and Westernized enunciations of public and civic citizenship, but is also a part of the passionate cultural articulations of pre- and countermodern communities, civil societies, and communalities attached to “national” sports in the pre- as well as post-independence eras.2 In fact, in the film’s opening shot, which is that of the momentous hockey match between India and Pakistan where Kabir Khan fails, the commentator says that the “game” has always been a matter that goes beyond sports, hinting unmistakably at historic rivalries and tensions between the two uneasy neighbors, (Hindu) India and (Muslim) Pakistan. The problem of being secular, it suggests, it not merely political but also a longstanding cultural nationalist issue. However, all such discourses of representation of female gender and ethnic politics assume a kind of “straightness” of the discourse, whereby the protagonist,

When Shah Rukh Khan reappeared as himself  113 the player, straightforwardly represents—either restoring or foregrounding—the essence of an identity that has been lost, displaced, misconstrued, or simply repressed. In other words, there is no doubt in such interpretations of “representational” discourse of the possibility and the probability of a full “capture,” a metaphoric fulfilment, of a plenary empirical entity, a being that is whole, recuperable, and unchanged by translation or transition, by interpretation and semiotic re-ordering or transmission. Semiotics and semantics are seen as congruent and paradigmatic in such discourses of representation. If one shifts attention, however, from the “representational” emphasis in Chak De India as being that of Kabir Khan, aka SRK, successfully “representing” Muslims and women as beings endowed with rights equal to Hindu men, it begins to emerge that such portrayals of full subjectivation in the film are based on a legerdemain of partial equations and incomplete transferences, whose origins lie in a principle of representation or portrayal as “camp” in the sense of enactments that transform stable ontological essences. As Farmer writes on this, “camp prioritizes gender as the ultimate style of stylistic performativity,” and, drawing upon a range of theories of camp, continues, “camp shifts the emphasis from seeing gender as an essentialized ontology, a fixed expression of an inner truth, to seeing it as a performative production” (2000: 114). The most influential such theory in contemporary discourses of sexed and gender identity is that of Butler, who has argued most eloquently and forcefully proposing gender as a form of performative masquerade, as in camp enactments in which “all sorts of resignifying and parodic repetitions become possible” (1991: 23; 1990: 31, 137–8). I invoke the category of camp with regard to Chak de India not to suggest its deployment as a conscious attitude, but rather as a residue or sediment of what appear to be, on the surface, entirely serious aspirational enactments of the gendering and ethnic composition of the inclusive and tolerant democratic nation. Camp style and masquerade are activated by the film in three senses at least. First, the treatment of oppression as a matter inviting a camp subterfuge is evident in the film in SRK’s very hyperbolic acting style, especially his emotional close-ups, which always incorporate an element of self-distancing and self-consciousness from the role and moment; it is always apparent to the viewer that SRK is conscious of himself as the actor acting. In certain roles, this has made for a very interesting and protean range of simulacra of expressivity when SRK embodies strong emotion. This style of performance is camp because it quite clearly, though subtly, enunciates the thin invisible line between performed affect and the intentionality of performance. SRK’s style of camp acting might on the one hand seem simply to be an instance of over-acting or “hamming,” of inflated melodramatic thespian extravaganza; on the other, it might easily be understood as what Farmer has called “subjective masquerade,” which derives logically from the privileges as well as pressures of the star system (2000: 124). A certain reflexive style of performance is meant by “subjective masquerade,” whereby the actor in acting gestures at his “acting,” and also gestures subtly (or perhaps not, in SRK’s case) at a shared awareness between themselves and the audience that “this is me acting.” It is a style that deploys and foregrounds the shared theatrical awareness of everyone—that the actor is not

114  When Shah Rukh Khan reappeared as himself the character they are playing—as the heightened parallel text that simulation is the very meaning of simulation. As Kuhn has written: An actor’s role is assumed like a mask, the mask concealing the performer’s ‘true self’ … In effecting a distance between assumed persona and real self, the practice of performance constructs a subject which is both fixed in the distinction between role and self and at the same time, paradoxically, called into question in the very act of performance. (Kuhn 1985: 52, cited in Farmer 2000: 124) While, in the case of other actors this mutability, this fluidity of impersonation is often suppressed, such is the aura of SRK’s star text that, in his case, this fluidity of assuming a “role” is in fact played up and foregrounded as a parallel meaning of the cinematic text and its histrionic imprimatur. Chak de India is not self-conscious, unique, or intentional about this dimension of SRK’s performance style; in part, this style is a given, a matter of his star text peeping through in a certain default tongue-in-cheek, almost pantomimic metaperformance that seems to hover between solipsism and narcissism.3 In this regard, therefore, the auratic authority of SRK’s star image or text succeeds in the sort of “recuperation” and consolidation of artifactual enactments of that image text that Dyer has called highly unstable and difficult to achieve (1979: 16). This self-conscious reflexivity of histrionic style—this ironic “knowingness”—has all the marks of camp as a parodistic unsettling of fixed notions and constructs of gender and (self-)representation. The second way in which camp emerges as a dominant vector of gendered performance is in the treatment of the athlete characters as a troupe of performers to be retrained to give their best performance yet. The women are re-educated into identifying themselves as “team India” from their proclivity to identify themselves parochially and regionally as state champions; they are redeemed in the eyes of the callous Hockey Association and a derisive public as genuinely great players given the right coaching and circumstances; finally, they demolish any perceived contradiction between being great athletes and perfectly normal Indian “women.” Indeed, the women are re-educated to see themselves in a different “role,” to “play” a new part, not as third-rate athletes expected to lose, but as champions and victorious Indians. The gender of the female athletes is, in this sense, not achieved until the climax, when they emerge as women who win the Hockey World Cup. Until that point they are perennially in training, at first as mutually antagonistic and competitive solo players, and finally as female champions and champions of femaleness, actualizing their optimal gender identity and role. Finally, and most obviously, camp as unfixed performance of gendering or gendering as performance is activated in the “feminization” of Kabir Khan— who has no apparent heterosexual family or companion—who joins the Indian women’s hockey team as coach on his own initiative, to restore his own “honor,” and to raise the status of women in India. While on the one hand this characterization resembles the disguise of Arjuna as the female dance teacher Brihannala

When Shah Rukh Khan reappeared as himself  115 in the palace of King Virata during the 14-year exile of the Pandava brothers in the Mahabharata, it differs in the fact that this masquerade of re-embodiment as a gender double involves no fatuous or comic disguise, transformation, or masking in Kabir Khan’s case. He coaches the Indian women’s hockey team as a Muslim man without wife or family. That this diegetically implies no perceived sexual threat from him is equally obvious and startling, given that Muslim men in India have traditionally been stereotyped as sexually profligate, voracious, and especially threatening to the Hindu female “other.” The most ready explanation for this would also be the most persuasive one, i.e. Kabir Khan is not a threat to the women because he is emasculated or feminized, and his performance as a “man” living and traveling with a whole group of young and physically vigorous women causes no anxiety because he is not seen first and foremost as “virile.” The logic and aesthetic of gender as a camp outcome in the film is completed with this placing of a man “in the place of” women. What, then, might the conflation of Kabir Khan as Indian Muslim, and the female hockey players as Indian women, as finally successful and accepted nomenclatures of identity and citizenship mean? After all, Kabir Khan, who is consistently compared to discredited women at the beginning of the film, achieves his own re-subjectivation, his own re-naturalization as Indian by elevating a team of non-Muslim Indian women as “natural” athletes, as well as women. After being slandered as a “traitor” while the captain of the Indian men’s hockey team, and exiled from sports and public view for seven long years, the only way he can reinvent himself and re-enter the world of hockey is by volunteering for the supremely un-coveted job of coach of the Indian women’s team, a team that sexist Indians consider born losers. Coach Khan’s re-subjectivation as Indian (though Muslim) is, thereby, conditional upon the recuperation of Indian women as successfully Indian, athletic, and feminine. To go further, his re-subjectivation is, in fact, equivalent to the full subjectivation of Indian women. As a mistrusted ethnic minority, in order to re-enter the nation and to represent it as well as be represented within it, Kabir Khan must re-perform the category of gender, not ethnicity, to break stereotypes and transform fixed perceptions. While seeming to maintain the idea of political and aesthetic representation as stable, unproblematic, and “straight”-forward, Chak de India actually deploys the strategy of camp, which plays with the fluidity of gender performances, of gender as fluid performance rather than stable essence, thus destabilizing representation in the very act of so-called representation. Women and Muslims may gain “representation” in this film, but it is gained by the stratagem of repeatedly subverting the notion of identity itself by forcing it through the gender-bending of camp stratagems that destabilize gender and other representations altogether. However, the film’s almost maniacal invocations of “Indianness” and “India” ensure that, in the end, ludic and heterogenizing possibilities of camp are checked. By rearticulating Muslim rights in the rubric of women’s rights in postcolonial Indian democracy, the film makes way for the particularity of Muslim male embodiment—including its potential implication in a vigorous debate within Indian Muslim communities about the rights of Muslim women—to be evacuated. “Difference” intersectionally tripled and compounded—the Muslim

116  When Shah Rukh Khan reappeared as himself star appearing as the Muslim character who is a proto-feminist supporter of oppressed women—adds up to a sublimation and erasure of “difference” as the ground of identity.

The “ins” and “outs” of Chak de India The opening gambit of Chak de India is one of mise en abyme, of the self-loss of India’s Muslim hockey team captain, Kabir Khan.4 The “conflict” posed at the outset is one of the casting “out” of an undesirable element—the treacherous Muslim who betrays India—from the Indian body politic. At the white-knuckled close of a critical hockey match between Indian and Pakistan, Kabir Khan misses a penalty shot, losing India the cup of victory. As the Pakistani team captain helps up a rueful Kabir Khan from the ground, the gesture of goodwill turning into the customary sportsman’s handshake, a photojournalist catches their gesture and disseminates it with an accompanying question about Khan’s true loyalty, interpreting the act of a “good sport” as a stereotype of Muslim perfidy against India, a betrayal of the nation to which he belongs. The slander spreads like wildfire, accompanied by “mockumentary” footage of street rioting and incendiary mobs reminiscent of many mediations of communal violence in twentieth-century India that will be familiar to a national audience. Diegetic journalistic interviews portray public response as overwhelmingly antagonistic to the erstwhile darling of the public, the animus focusing squarely on his Muslim identity; one interviewee explicitly remarks that “these people” should have been expelled from the country (India) at the time of Partition (1947) itself. While effigies burn in the streets, the scene fades into a key turning in a lock, zooming out to show Kabir Khan and his mother locking up their ancestral home and leaving their “mohalla” or neighborhood. As the weeping mother expresses faith in the “mohalla,” Kabir’s gaze scans the assembled crowd of hostile neighbors; the camera then cuts to a man writing “Gaddaar” or “traitor” in Devnagari script upon the wall bordering Kabir’s home. As they leave, the screen fades into a blackout; the intertitle “7 years later” appears within a few seconds, but suggests the intervening time as a lost time, a blank space, a dark tabula rasa of oblivion and disappearance—complete mise en abyme or self-loss. The rest of the film is about the restoration of this man from the state of expulsion from his “country,” “in” which he must be included again as a loyal “citizen.” As a parallel textual theme, the weak and ill-trained Indian women’s hockey team, which he will return to coach seven years later, faces a similar predicament until the film’s close of being counted, of being “included” or not, and of being “in” or “out” of the running as India’s representative team in the World Hockey Championship contest. The next narrative segment opens onto a board meeting of the Indian Hockey Association, where members openly express contempt for women players. The association chair states, “These are Indian women who are used to serving men at home; what will they do running around wearing knickers-wickers?” The sole woman member sitting next to him looks coyly reproving at this, but does not challenge him, while the other male members leer and smirk. The quintessential corrupt bureaucrat and petty tyrant,

When Shah Rukh Khan reappeared as himself  117 the chair also derides ethnic minority players from economically less-developed states, thus sealing his chauvinism as both misogynistic and majoritarian. Finally, when Kabir Khan meets the association asking to coach the women’s team, the chair bluntly asks him “You’ve already lost your own honor (izzat), and now you want to regain it through this dishonored women’s team, this team that in this country is a national team only in name, not in fact?”5 The alliance of women and minorities as emergent identities, as those who “count” in modern India, is clearly risible to this officialdom. As persona non grata for the nationstate, as non-normative citizens who are not to be trusted to represent the state, the two categories are definitely “out”; yet, ironically, as we shall see, the salvation of the state lies in their hands. This salvific position is contingent upon their singularity being erased, however; neither as self-realizing women nor as selfidentified Muslims, but as generic others, the two categories of outsiders to power and privilege are allowed back into the body politic so that the body might be healed, restored, dragged back from its own peculiar mise en abyme. Kabir Khan and the women hockey players are established, at the very outset, as homologous lumpen, “impure” heterogeneity (Bataille 1985), and therefore “compatriots.” Kabir Khan himself has a special aversion to partial identifications sensitive to singular inflections, such as identifying with one’s state rather than with the Indian nation in its wholeness. Prior to the players’ arrival, he protests his Hindu ex-teammate and friend’s remark that the players shall soon be arriving from their “own” states, pulling the latter up short on his conceptualization of the team as a heterogenous body assembled from various state units rather than “Team India,” exclaiming “Nothing has changed!” Framed in medium-close silhouette against the India Gate Memorial in Delhi in the distant background, this juxtaposition of the Hindu and the Muslim debating contested belonging in the postcolonial nation gains added significance from the initial dedication of the monument to the memory of Indian soldiers who died fighting for the British empire’s various wars (1931), and from a cenotaph within, dedicated to the memory of Indian casualties in the Indo-Pak war (1971). Like the conversation it arches over, the memorial testifies to the vexed national discourse marked by the metonymy and partiality of all symbols of colonial and postcolonial integration and assimilation. In this scene, however, Kabir Khan is both “in” the frame where “India” is paramount, on the inside of the imagined community marked spatially by heritage architecture, and emotionally “inside,” by his refusal to recognize “differences.” Resuming the thread of his earlier remark that nothing had changed (uttered in a positive sense at that time, however), he continues, “There were (only) states then and there are (only) states now; nothing has changed.” It is clear that this is what he must change. Yet in that project, difference, including his own, must not be allowed to “matter.” Following this we cut immediately to several shots of the players’ arrival, a set of dynamic cameos accompanied by customized soundtracks that do nothing but assert the “regional” identities of these players in ways that individualize them concretely for viewers, though perhaps this is a proleptic device meant to trigger viewer recognition of their own parochialism. In the sequence of shots showing players sign up for the Indian team, there are clear signposts of provincialism,

118  When Shah Rukh Khan reappeared as himself contemptuous indigenization, aggressive marginalization, and entrenched regionalist hierarchies dominating the hockey scene: players are shown as being treated differentially and discriminatorily according to class, appearance, ethnicity, linguistic cosmopolitanism, and, above all, regional affiliation. Players from “backward” or border states are ridiculed and misunderstood, treated effectively as “outsiders,” much like Kabir Khan himself. Kabir Khan changes all this when he imposes upon the team equal parts of disciplinary toughness and team solidarity. When a star player arrives late for registration, she almost gets thrown off the team for her presumption; Kabir Khan counters her arrogance as “captain of the Chandigarh team” by saying, “I can neither hear nor see the names of states, just the name of a nation (‘mulk’): I-N-D-I-A.” His assault upon players’ personal, singular, and regional identities in the name of I-N-D-I-A continues throughout the training. The team hits back with active marginalization of the new coach as a traitorous and crazy Muslim. The leader of the resistance against him, a seasoned player named Bindiya Naik, calls him “Tughlak” after the infamous fourteenthcentury Turkic sultan of Delhi, Muhammad bin Tughluq, notorious for his eccentric and absolutist, but inspired (according to some), reformism and innovation.6 She also baldly states that “Kabir Khan was actually captain of the Pakistan team in Indian uniform.” Having previously “sold” the country at the men’s World Cup, she fears aloud that he might sell “the women” this time. Bindiya’s slander campaign is successful; one by one the players revolt against Kabir Khan’s “barbaric” regime, shocked and angered by his draconian discipline and training, and petition for his dismissal as team coach. The diegetic reason works overtime to show the athletes failing to understand their true condition and interests; downgraded since inception, the team has internalized the false consciousness of wider society that women are not worth taking seriously. Despite their love for the game, they have been used to this judgment and are resigned to their lesser status and privileges, and bicker to secure crumbs of power and status for their particular identities. It becomes the fellow sufferer Kabir Khan’s mission to re-educate them; to restore their self-esteem, he has to retrain them not to see themselves as either “regional” players or as “women.” When the team revolts, Bindiya revives the charge of treachery, calling Kabir a “traitor” to the country to his face. An enraged Kabir lifts his arm to strike Bindiya but controls himself just in time. The camera movements here are worth noting: in one frame the players are on the right of the frame, deeper in space as a group, while the female assistant coach Krishna-ji and Kabir Khan face them standing to the left of frame, with their backs to the camera. The camera crosses the 180-degree line back and forth during the ensuing exchange, zooming in upon the figures in medium to close-up shots as the bitterness and tension escalate between the coaches and the team. When the team captain reluctantly hands Kabir Khan the petition for his dismissal, the camera takes a close frontal shot of Krishna-ji—standing behind Kabir Khan—who exclaims to the players, “I’ll give each one of you a slap.” The undaunted Bindiya is now shown in reversefrontal shot, saying to Krishna-ji, over whose shoulder the camera now looks, “Why Krishna-ji?” The camera rapidly crosses the line again to reveal Krishna-ji

When Shah Rukh Khan reappeared as himself  119 and Kabir Khan facing the players, as Bindiya (facing them) continues to say, “Why would you hit us?” Cut again to Bindiya facing Krishna-ji, saying, as her gaze lifts to Kabir Khan to the left and out of frame, “We have not sold our country.” In two rapid successive shots, Kabir Khan shouts, “Quiet!” as the camera switches over Bindiya’s shoulder, and swivels back to behind Krishnaji’s. As he lifts his arm to strike Bindiya, Bindiya’s face shown as partly averted anticipating the slap. In this shot, the camera’s view when facing the players always includes Krishna-ji shown as standing squarely behind Kabir Khan, on his side, in his space, back to the camera. However, when he raises his arm, Krishna-ji is heard to say, “Sir,” and moves slightly forward, nearing both Khan and Bindiya, as if about to step over the 180-degree line. Though she does not, the camera keeps cutting back and forth, as if trying to take the decision for her, first showing Kabir Khan’s upraised arm from Krishna-ji’s perspective, then back again from Bindiya and the players’ perspective, again from over Krishna-ji’s shoulder as it begins to descend, the players watching facing camera from right of frame, then over the players’ shoulders in a close-up of Krishna-ji’s face registering shock (and her gasp on the soundtrack) as she stares in dismay at Kabir Khan’s hand, straddling the 180-degree line and back to the players’ gaze as Khan lowers his hand in frustration and turns away from the players. When he turns back to them, we see him from a slight high angle over the team’s heads, to cut again to the view from behind Krishna-ji’s shoulder with Bindiya and Khan, the two prime combatants, in profile. Again facing the camera and the players, Kabir Khan speaks for a while on his reason for returning to hockey, which was to defeat that which had defeated him. While Krishna-ji, now apparently restored to her faith in Khan, watches from her place slightly behind and to left of him, Khan declares that the team opposes not him but his efforts to unite them as Team India. As the camera resumes crossing back and forth from Khan to the players, we see Krishna-ji’s face once more aligned with his rhetorical and physical position when the camera faces him, and when he finally declares that he resigns as the coach of the team, the camera zooms into rack focus of Krishna-ji’s incredulous and stunned expression. This entire sequence of camera positions and the accompanying soundtrack offer the exegetic viewer faces, looks, bodies, and hands reacting to threatened violence. As the female assistant coach, Krishna-ji occupies the most liminal position in the filmic and pro-filmic world. As a non-elite (Hindu) woman who has very little power in a male-dominated world of Indian sports, and as someone unable to speak so as to be heard, she still attempts to temper the excesses of the players, as well as the coach. Not only does she take Khan’s side when the players submit their petition, but she is included in Khan’s space within the frame whenever the players are shown rebelling and insulting him, suggesting a united point of view with Khan himself. However, in her liminality, she is also potentially unstable and volatile. She mirrors all the conflicting emotions the exchange generates: while Bindiya’s insolence elicits a shocked disciplinary response from her, Kabir’s upraised arm elicits equally horrified disbelief that he is about to hit Bindiya, as his restraint and resignation subsequently trigger

120  When Shah Rukh Khan reappeared as himself grief and dismay. Being the shifting emotional register of the conflict between men, women, Muslims and non-Muslims in this scene, Krishna-ji’s face is both screen and mirror here, in this shot of crucial and tortured configurations of the gendering of power and the empowering of minorities like Khan himself in the film, but in such a way as to preserve the line between gendered affects: men attack and shout, women recoil and gasp. What does her gendered affect, registered twice—once as Kabir Khan’s hand rises, and once as he announces his resignation—signify about gender and power in this narrative? Along with this, what do her loss of faith and her recovery thereof, and her slight movement toward the team and then fixity in place by Khan’s side, tell us about the most “traditional” figure of womanhood in the film—nurturing, responsible, reconciliatory, supplicatory, passive, and therefore powerless? Having been the initiator of the threat of violence against these women—“I’ll give each one of you a slap”—she reacts sharply to Khan’s near-actualization of that threat. However, in the end, she returns her loyalty to him. This tells us that, while Krishna-ji’s face and look might be motile, shifting, her body must not move too far from Khan’s space, as indeed it does not. Once her look is activated, she is quickly positioned to be within his space and facing the hostile team with him, and subsequent camera angles (shots including her in Khan’s space) identify hers as a primary and originating—indeed controlling—point of view, for which her bodily situation adjusts. The circuit between her body and look, and Kabir Khan’s hand, is thus activated to check the scandal of violence against women that would necessarily sink a Muslim man’s reputation once and for all, by showing that violence as originating from a gesture of maternal reproof and held in check by the womanly look and voice. The registering of Khan’s potential for violence in her face and her look serves as a repetition of her outrage at the players’ insubordinate action. Whenever the tension and the potential violence in the shot exceed allowable limits, the focus on her face, voice, and body dissipates them. The slight movement of her body towards Khan’s raised arm deters and diffuses his motion and levels the conflict, as though upon a pro-prioceptively sensed hinge. Above all else, her refusal to move past the line separating Khan and the players onto the latter’s side is critical in underscoring Khan’s authority and ethicality. Krishna-ji’s body and look are positioned, therefore, upon a boundary that marks the normativity of her gender, of typical femininity in the diegetic context, and marks also the function of that femininity as conciliatory of “differences.” Her loyalty and reliability make her the companion that the active and energetic male needs, but she also acts as surrogate mother and interceder for the players, the womanly presence restraining the enraged patriarch. She is the still-traditional wife and mother of this team, where traditional gender norms and marginalized identities are being otherwise modernized, reconstituted, or resorbed. It is therefore crucial that she be “in” Kabir Khan’s space and aligned with his point of view; in her absence from the frame, his hand and his gesture could be completely misconstrued as affirming every stereotypical bias against the treacherous Muslim male, who literally has a gaggle of non-Muslim women7 in his power. Every physically energetic gesture by him is framed and monitored by

When Shah Rukh Khan reappeared as himself  121 the look of Krishna-ji, which wraps around and controls him, but persuasively, indirectly, and non-coercively. The team’s attitude changes miraculously when they rescue themselves by fighting for one another, as a “team,” against public sexual harassment at a local McDonald’s, where Khan takes them for a farewell lunch. Violence is reintroduced here, as in the previous conflict, as a mise en scène whereby gender identities are modernized and resorbed, a salutary means of harmonizing “differences” and not as a mise en abyme. The harassment begins, tellingly, with insults to the two “border state” players from Mizoram and Manipur, who had made their debut appearance in the film as victims of sexual harassment by loafers at a street corner during the players’ registration. These two players, ethnically distinguishable by a markedly more Westernized style, lighter skin, and east Asiatic phenotype, are singled out each time as easy “sexy” prey by “roadside Romeos,” and it is to “save” them that the entire team now forgets its despondence to unite against the common enemy, oppressive masculinity. Again, a discourse of “in” and “out” is forcibly activated in this representation of gender oppression as homologous to ethnic oppression. To save the “marginal” members of their nation, the team unites and defeats male oppression; they beat the harassing men into leaving them alone. Once they do this, however, the potential for other kinds of unity dawn upon them, and they now accept Kabir Khan as the coach they need for their proper training, letting him back “in” as well. The integration of the incommensurable minority thus follows the logic of women’s liberatory movements, while public rioting and violence are reconfigured as salvific acts of liberation. Tellingly, in this assimilation of difference into an attitude of unity, it is the women who resort to violence; Kabir Khan does not join the fight as the heroic male savior, despite diegetic and exegetic expectations that the male coach or SRK the star will do so. The postcolonial nation’s promise of equal justice for all is extended here to its race-d and gender-ed constituents without differentiation, and violence is reconfigured as physical prowess or strength. While Khan’s masculinity is surprisingly not staged during the fight scene, a deeper reason for this is revealed in Khan’s shaping of this incident into a logic of self-reliance and integration, one that serves both women and minorities in the disturbingly hierarchical postcolonial nation-state. The look by Krishna-ji that had disabled the potential for violence between Khan and Bindiya from exploding into destruction is now ours, the look of the exegetic spectator, also looking on from Khan’s side and only intervening in the scene of impending violence with a silent prayer for reconciliation initiated by a violent prelude. The team has to give another test of their mettle by playing a deciding match against the men’s hockey team that leads to them being sent abroad for the World Cup in Australia, which they win after many more reversals and many more lessons in unity and dedication to the national cause. While they lose their first match against the Aussies, another post-colony, they tellingly defeat England, the ex-colonizers, and go on to victory after victory. A great deal is made of the Indian flag and other insignia of national pride along the way, especially by way of throwaway comments about forcing “whites” to pay tribute to the flag,

122  When Shah Rukh Khan reappeared as himself recalling the scene of Khan’s conversation with his friend against the backdrop of the historically palimpsestic India Gate in Delhi. Finally, when the victorious team returns to India, the players, as well as the coach, are greeted with frenzied jubilation. Several diegetic “commentaries” superimposed on the image track declare that Kabir Khan is the epitome of the true “Indian.” Khan and his mother are shown returning to their ancestral home, their erstwhile hostile neighbors gathering before their house, looking in wonder and awe. The re-assembling of the neighbors suggests the re-absorption of the Muslim into the community or mohalla, the breach hereby closing, the “outsider” suspected of violence against the national body being “in”-cluded, and the inside/outside dichotomy being reordered. When Kabir Khan notices a young Sikh boy industriously scratching out the word “Gaddar” or traitor carved into the boundary wall of the Khan home, he offers the boy his own hockey stick, holding it up first as though flourishing a sword of victory (still an ambivalent image, of course), before handing it over to the boy, who holds it high and shouts “Chak de!” while the neighborhood bursts into spontaneous applause, signaling the Muslim Khans’ absolution and re-integration. In the end, getting the girls back into sports, into the game, gets Khan back into India. However, this still does not bear out Vinay Lal’s thesis that there is no true outsider in Indian cinema (1998). This film, as we have seen, works extremely hard to make Khan an insider. Still, the very last shot of the film involving Khan shows him re-entering his ancestral home, in black silhouette cut-out, and shutting the door behind him so that we the viewers are plunged into absolute darkness, a darkness recalling the one that followed his departure from home seven years earlier, but that also reminds us that, in the end, we will not have access to his privacy or to his interiority, that he will remain inaccessible in his particularity, in his private, intimate context, besides and beyond the fact that he has been seemingly re-assimilated into the fabric of national political life. In contrast, after this we see individual players returning to friends, families, and other private contexts that individualize, particularize, and embody them as celebrated “women of India” in their singularity and specificity, both reconfiguring and re-establishing women as national “ players.” Who’s in, and who’s out, one asks.

Fact, fiction, and postmodern histories The viewer might not remember this, but the question of Kabir Khan’s guilt in betraying his national team to the adversarial Muslim nation Pakistan’s hockey team is never resolved in the film. We see Khan resent the allegations, and of course we, as viewers, implicitly align ourselves with him, but we do not see the allegations investigated, dismissed, or revoked. In other words, the film does not provide a final answer to the question, “Did Kabir Khan betray the Indian hockey team on the basis of primordial religious affiliation with an inimical foreign state?” When Kabir is re-incorporated into the Indian body politic, it is because he rescues and revives the women’s team, not because he is absolved of guilt for the previous event.

When Shah Rukh Khan reappeared as himself  123 What is the status, then, of that event, the initial charge of betrayal? In many senses the status of this event would appear to fit the Freudian description of “nachtraglichkeit,” or the deferred action or retrospectivity that traces a secondary event to a primary, original one, without making the secondary one ephemeral or unreal, but tying its interpretation, its “meaning” decidedly to the indeterminacy, the ambiguity of the first primal experience, the first event; this is the foundation of trauma and analysis. Neither event can ever be fully explained or understood, but neither can be waved away, or understood in isolation from the other. In the historian’s parlance, this relationship of events within the framework of “nachtraglichkeit” structures the contemporary meanings of historical “events” that hold at a distance, in abeyance, the distinct, foundational difference between fact and fiction, or experience and narration or interpretation. Chak de India’s metafiction of a contemporary Muslim re-experiencing, undergoing the fate of Indian Muslims at Partition all over again, attacked and cast out of the national body politic, ends with a redemptive “a-historical” conclusion—Khan is accepted back into the nation as a re-embodied entity, a “camp” version of masculinity and Muslimness—but this avoidance of the “real,” of the “fact” question, underpins the possibility of such a resolution. The avoidance of “fact” works redemptively in the other direction as well: if India can forego exact accounting of Kabir Khan’s transgression, Khan can also forego an exact accounting of India’s offence against him; he never holds the nation to account for what was done to him, but patiently awaits his re-incorporation as a result of his service to the nation. In this sense, then, the question of the original accusation of betrayal as an evental site that leads to the explosion of doubt, accusation, trauma, and rejection of a citizen of India from the national scene and public is entirely subsumed, bypassed, and foregone for a version of history that is “postmodern” in its treatment of a quasi-historical metafiction— the story of Muslim plight in modern India—as one where fact and fiction do not need to be thoroughly assessed and demarcated, but in fact inform each other’s content and structure.8 I categorize Chak de India as such a “historical metafiction” or a “fictional history,” because its entirely made-up story hinges upon the linked enactment of two historical events: Partition ethnocide in the forties and communal ethnocide in the nineties (with a long history of similar events strung between these two chronological points). It is a fictional account of history that then demands a re-reading of history’s “original” trauma in the syntax of future generations remembering, re-narrativizing and re-enacting that trauma both antagonistically and empathetically in order to exorcise it. The point of such fictional histories and historical metafictions, as Hayden White has demonstrated in a reading of Oliver Stone’s film, JFK, is not to establish the facticity or fictionality of historical events, but to trace the evolving narrativization and memorializing of such events as history, or to follow the narrative’s process of determining what the very distinction between fact and fiction means and whether it holds. The primacy of fact over narration or interpretation—on which so-called “authentic” history was thought to be based in previous definitions of the

124  When Shah Rukh Khan reappeared as himself “historical”—is superfluous in this “fictional history” of the event of Muslim trouncing and denunciation that is an endemic, embedded feature now of the national historical oeuvre, and must be repeatedly re-engaged and exorcised in order for a coherent self-narrative of the socio-historical situation to exist. However, this kind of “postmodern” public historiography, wherein the distinction between fact and fiction matters neither in terms of structure nor content of narrative, is conditional upon the homogeneity of the constituent public that receives such histories. Any heterogeneity within such constituent publics would mean a greater focus on the “truth” question. This is analogous to the way that Janet Staiger, in response to White, has argued for a shift in emphasis from analysis of representational modes to analysis of audiences and their heterogeneity (Staiger 1996). As Staiger argues, postmodernism notwithstanding, people do still want to get at the “truth” or the “facts,” and if the people or the audience are differentiated, heterogeneous, segmented, etc., the truth question and conflict over it become more palpable. Hence, the abjuration of the demand for “facticity” is only enabled by the fact that Kabir Khan is not reincorporated as a (heterogeneous) Muslim, but homogenized as an Indian, and a feminized one at that. Had his Muslimness, and particularly his Muslim maleness, actually been “in play,” the issue of “[just] the facts” of the first communal incident surrounding him would have also been rather more in play, ambiguating his seeming assimilation with threats of terror, violence, or even simply lingering resentment. Had he been more overtly “Islamicized” as an Indian Muslim facing a tribunal of those not like him, it would have been more important to get at the “whodunit” question of the “fact” of his culpability or innocence. However, since his “difference” from another Indian is remembered only in order to be forgotten—evoked only to be completely suppressed—the facticity of the charge against him is allowed to become irrelevant in this sort of fictional historiography. As chapter five will make clearer, Kabir Khan, aka SRK’s “embodiment” in Chak de India, is a “representation” rather than “presentation,” in that his “story” as well as his “history” are given to the viewer as fully transmissible, abstracted, coherent, and viewable in entirety—in the sense that representation claims full power of hermeneutic and narrativization of its object, whereas presentation gives us, again, “just the facts,” and is silent about their meaning. In White’s terms, this “treatment of the event is a representation (Vorstellung) of a thought about it, rather than a ‘presentation’ (Darstellung) of the event itself” (1996: 27). This kind of “embodiment” or characterization recalls the insight offered by White that: Modernist literary practice effectively explodes the notion of those ‘characters’ who had formerly served as the subjects of stories or at least as representatives of possible perspectives on the events of the story; and it resists the temptation to ‘emplot’ events and the ‘actions’ of the ‘characters’ so as to produce the meaning-effect derived by demonstrating how one’s end may be contained in one’s beginning … (1996: 24; emphasis mine)

When Shah Rukh Khan reappeared as himself  125 In other words, an insider never can be an outsider, and vice versa; a hermetic seal separates the two positions that would be breached only at the cost of a complete demolition of the category of identity itself.9 Thus Kabir Khan, despite the layers of Muslimness that shore him up, is shown as a perfectly secular Indian and also, of course, politically re-naturalized only through gender camp. Throughout the film, we never see him enact (an alienating) Muslimness in any way, such as by acts of worship, affiliation with a community or kin circle, a family, Muslim friends, etc. His existence is completely monadic, circumscribed entirely by the exigency of winning a trophy for a “dishonored” team, and thereby regaining his own honor and that of his female protégés-cum-alter-egos. Gyan Pandey has argued that, in the context of ethnic and gender violence at Partition, violated communities took refuge in the notion of the absolute outsider, the perpetrator of unspeakable violence who could not have at any time and in any way have been an insider. As Pandey has argued, the distinction between spatial insiders and outsiders in postcolonial narratives about violence and community has to be tenacious precisely because it is tenuous. The space of community was fragile; the constitutive outside had to be reinforced in order to demarcate communal space. Boundaries are porous and dangerously indeterminate. To shore itself up, the threatened community had to conjure up an outsider who was solely responsible for the violence done to the community, despite the “fact” that at times of communal turbulence neighbors became killers, and the crucial outside/inside spatial distinction impossible to sustain (Pandey 1990). Nevertheless, and indeed because of this, the “fiction” prevailed that one is either an outsider or an insider, a violent perpetrator or a refugee victim, never both and neither. Khan’s fictional history cannot be told, for this reason, as the story of an Indian “Muslim,” but has to be told as the story of a mis-recognized Muslim “Indian.” The blurring of the categories of fact and fiction, literal and literary, event and historiography—necessary for a “modern” or “postmodern” telling of the story of national identity—is conditional upon the petrifaction of normative and liminal categories, of those who are counted and those who are not, insiders and outsiders, secular patriots and unreconstructed minorities, Indians and Muslims.

4 Romancing religion Bollywood’s painless globalization

Market places here carried the invisible imprimatur of ruling Authorities … Further, markets were aligned to a landscape dotted with sacred sites, often sharing the same space with established religious edifices: the mosque, the temple, and the saintly tomb. (Sen 1998: 8–9)

I first began work on this essay in the fall of 2003, when the Bharatiya Janata Party government was still in power in India. I had been pondering the relationship between the latest Hindi films and politics in India for a while, making a note of the cinema’s recent refashioning of gender politics, images, and roles in an era of “militant Hindutva [which] seeks to homogenize India’s multi-religious society into its neo-fascist image.”1 Hindutva, in brief, is best described as “Hindu-ness”; a presentist, ethnophobic, reactionary socio-political ideology in India and abroad, it is at least equal parts piety and civilizationalism. Hinduism may or may not be a civilizational way of life; Hindutva is. Its major political arm in India is the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which is the political instrument of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). The cultural arm of the RSS is the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (“World Hindu Forum,” VHP), which has many outreach outfits in the Indian diaspora (Narula 2003: 2, 11, 53; Van der Veer 1994: 108, 117, 119, 130–1, 134, 122–6; Malik 2003: 29; Mukta 2000: 443). If caste is a bio-moral category, Hindutva nationalism is a bio-civilizational category. It is based and steeped in notions of pure blood, though not on concepts of race as such: This conception of ‘race’ is very slippery indeed and can use the epistemic resources of culture and civilization or spirituality and religion or ‘blood’ and nation without necessarily having any epistemic responsibility for the use of any of these ideas … (Bhatt and Mukta 2000: 413) Hindutva is political Hinduism or religious nationalism; its ideologue Savarkar defined a Hindu as “a person who regards this land … from the Indus to the Seas as his fatherland (pitribhumi) as well as his Holyland (punyabhumi)” (Varshney

Bollywood’s painless globalization  127 2002: 65; Chakraborty 2003; Van der Veer 1994: 106). By focusing on gender ideology as an axial modality, in which ethnic and religious nationalisms and violence were becoming lived within the rash of recent Hindi films—which I will henceforth call “Bollywood” (Rajadhyaksha 2003)—I began to probe the neoliberal refashioning of these new films in neoliberal yet Hindutva-saturated India (Hovden and Keene 2002: 1–6, 59, 76–7, 183). As Van der Veer and others have suggested, the local, regional, and market-oriented affiliations fundamental to religious nationalism have been too easily missed in delineations and analyses of the postcolonial nation-state, and I began to suspect that a related and contingent elision of the polythetic gendering inseparable from such communal affiliations required reversing. At its inception, my research seemed to suggest a specific and unilateral connection between Bollywood’s redistilled scenarios of communalized and gendered violence and its complement—gendered religious nationalisms—as singularly BJP/Hindutva-specific phenomena. After October 2004, with the toppling of the BJP government from central power, I feared I was an author in search of an argument. Sadly however, in real terms, this state of rhetorical homelessness was short-lived. The party was ousted, but the films kept coming, and they retained the liminalities of gender identities and performances that characterized BJP-era communalist and neo-nationalist yet neoliberal developmentalism. A set of connections had long existed between Indian politicoreligious and economic nationalisms and Indian film-making—possibly since the late 1980s—as linked structures within a national imaginary of contests over hegemony, whose very basis was the performance of gender and debates over embodiment, including changing representations of the male heroic body (Jayawardena and de Alwis 1996: ix, xi, xxi; Sangari and Vaid in Jayawardena and de Alwis 1996: 260–6, 283). Falk writes of global neoliberalism: our future is being primarily shaped by numerous interactions among the many varieties of technocratic globalist, social reactionary and mean-spirited traditionalists, a strange interplay between advanced sectors of electronic capital (for example, Bill Gates’ Microsoft) and various backlash phenomena associated with a variety of nationalist, ethnic and religious extremisms … (Falk in Hovden and Keene 2002: 93) Observers of Hindu nationalism have drawn out the several interwoven strands that constitute its seeming cultural politics and economic policy (SearleChatterjee 2000: 498; Bhatt and Mukta 2000: 408, 409; Malik 2003: 26–9; Van der Veer 1994: 132). Bollywood, too, leads the critic beyond an exclusive focus on a single political party as a state apparatus of calculated violence to a wider framework, on the intimate meaning of violence twice mediated in national culture: both as a political iconography and choreography of civic life and conflict, and as representational matrix or classic scenario of a pantheistic film industry. The paired logic of globalization and neoliberalism as new economic policies provides a material frame for the paired imagistic of a national culture

128  Bollywood’s painless globalization of representation and the representation of cultural nationalism. In Bollywood cinema, national identity is frequently a flourishing Hindutva. There are two primary geo-bytes for the staging of triumphant NRI-friendly neoliberalism in Bollywood. One is, and has always been, Bombay—gritty, sexy and cosmopolitan; the other, more shifting site is, currently, the bucolic Punjab.2 In DDLJ, Yaadein, and Pardes, the green fields and waving crops of the Punjab served as an imagistic location for the NRI’s reabsorption—never plenary, but calculated to tantalize, energize, mobilize—into “Indian” life, as in the famous opening montage of DDLJ showing women dancing through the fertile landscape. A relatively similar terrain and imagistic appears in the opening sequence of Pardes, a film that articulates something that I call “bridal nationalism”, its theme being the re-Indianization of an NRI tycoon, who chooses for his debauched Americanized son a Punjabi girl who exposes the son’s false Indianness and finds herself a more truly Indian/NRI husband, played by Shah Rukh Khan. However, even this exceptional young woman is entirely framed and captured within paternalistic homosociality: her father and the tycoon ultimately jointly endorse her rebellion and legitimate her revolt against their initial choice. She is also the mouthpiece of triumphalist NRI re-nationalization, as when she regales the tycoon’s party of select San Franciscans with a folksy blend of nationalist crooning. Why the Punjab? The choice of Bombay as a locus for renegotiating late capitalist modernities is rather obvious; Bombay, the gateway to India, has always been a consciously metropolitan chronotope.3 More frictively, however, the Punjab’s resurgence in the imagistic can be explained by a polythetic analysis. First, the Punjab of the green revolution signifies prosperity mythologized as neoliberal and entrepreneurial, when really it is a result of environmentally degrading structural subsidies (Ramakrishnan in Hovden and Keene 2002: 246–51). Second, Punjab is the birthplace of bhangra, an eastern cultural form of music proven capable of ideal syncretic fusion with Western beats. Finally, though, a political rationale underpins and subtends these cultural ideoscapes. Until the nineties, secessionist Sikh nationalism had made the Punjab threatening and unavailable to the national imaginary (Varshney 2002: 79–80). After the subsidence of Sikh nationalism in 1990, Punjab was reopened, and not accidentally, Bollywood’s mythopoesis and fetishizing of Punjab—the other paradisial location Kashmir, alas, had been lost—corresponds with the recovery, one might say, of an entrepreneurial part of the Hindu extended family feared lost. This Punjabi revivalism is again, actually, politically, and economically motivated—not an accident. The wildly popular formulaic fusion of Punjabi locales and the story of neoliberal manifest destiny for a new nation is similarly not accidental, but a fusion of this new nation form and late capital in the renationalization of the diasporic Indian. If “a takeover of Indian politics by the Hindu nationalist ideology is highly improbable” (Varshney 2002: 86), a takeover of Bollywood imagistic—bolstered by NRI goodwill—has been achieved. Thus, in Ek Rishtaa, megastar Amitabh Bachchan appears as an industrialist whose foreign-educated “techy” son takes on the factory’s labor boss in a bloody fight sequence, proving that capitalists are

Bollywood’s painless globalization  129 right and have the better social plan after all. Citations of the West and the NRI— though the latter term was not coined until recently—are not new in Bollywood. The genre and industry are indeed committedly metadiscursive, keenly aware of their teleological transnationality and indeed of their proto-diasporic fixations, relentlessly evoking a proto-globalized world since the early twentieth century. However, the refiguring of global “Indianness” as ultra-capitalist, paternalist, and predominantly “Hindu” reinforces emerging scholarly findings that religious nationalisms are fundamentally economic and political, not religious or cultural phenomena. The neoliberal ideal and its potential for determinist social and economic hegemony masked as regeneration found a spectacular frame in neoliberal Bollywood’s adoption of the tenets of economic and political nationalisms, and its recasting of them in terms friendly to religious and cultural nationalisms. This is especially evident in the NRI-conscious and NRI-oriented films of the nineties and thereafter, films like Hum Aapke Hain Kaun! (hereafter HAHK!, “Who Are We to You!” 1994, Sooraj Barjatiya), Yaadein (“Memories,” 2001, Subhash Ghai), and Pardes. Moreover, this recasting of secular national politics as a play of fissiparous anti-secularism is especially clear by contrast with Hindi cinema of the 1970s and ’80s, where piety took a quite different form. Instead of serving as a representational matrix for docile male bodies servicing the state and official economy as in popular nineties family romances built around consumerist lifestyles, notably the trend-setting HAHK!, 1970s and ’80s Hindi film was dominated by the unruly liminal body of super-star Amitabh Bachchan, in his socially conscious angry young man films, presenting the male body and its passionate piety as ultimate resistance to the corrupt and non-egalitarian state. Having thus far described the twinned reproduction of identity in the neoliberal crucibles of territorial and deterritorialized subject formations, and the new civilizational and familial hegemonies of Hindutva identified cultural nationalism in Bollywood, I wish to contrast them with an earlier Hindi film’s scene of pious sadomasochism in one of those notorious and bathetic song-and-dance sequences in “formula” Bollywood films. Of the many possible choices, I have picked a scene from an Amitabh Bachchan film, Mard (1985, Manmohan Desai), which offers the old look of subaltern negotiations of hegemony in a pooja or worship context typical of pre-liberalization Hindi cinema. To understand the construction of a suitable viewership for this scene one must recognize Bachchan’s iconic status. Dwyer and Patel write of him: Regarded as the most successful Indian actor of all time, Bachchan developed his persona of the ‘angry young man-hero’ in the 1970s … Consequently over a period of time he was presented as a strong independent figure, ready to fight for justice, physically powerful but also introverted and in some cases ultimately tragic … promotional material projected the ‘material phenomenon’ of Bachchan, his ‘physical body, physiognomy, gestural repertoire, physical agility, and costume’ (2002: 184–5)4

130  Bollywood’s painless globalization Mard depicts the struggles of Raju/Mard, the child tragically separated at birth from his patriot father, who carved the name “Mard” on the infant’s chest at birth. Marked by the sign of anti-colonial paternal hopes and crisis, both physically and symbolically, Raju/Mard becomes an iconic text of traumatized hypermasculinity.5 Mard grows up into a world of neocolonial nativist hegemony still dominated by “foreign” influences, whose freakish occidentality expose them to relentless popular caricature as anti-national remnants and mutants of the colonial encounter, reviled puppets and stooges of the neocolonial West’s continuing market hegemony in pre-liberalization India and in Hindi films. Named Raju as an adult, he extends his father’s nativist legacy of a categorically phallic resistance to neocolonial native elites portrayed as effeminate, as well as female. Lutgendorf puts it best: These madcap action adventures, aimed primarily at proletarian audiences, update the beloved ‘stunt films’ of earlier decades with tales of avenging superheroes (generally played by Amitabh Bachchan) who are often the lost sons of princes or magnates, happily relocated among the People. Working on a limited budget (much of which necessarily goes for tanks, explosives, and Bacchan’s salary) and making marvelously inventive use of everyday Indian objects (such as cycle stands, tongas, whips, and Karnataka State), Desai here crafts a non-stop action fable … in kickass dishoom-dishoom form.6 The film’s pooja or darshan scene, however, serves up a pathos whose influence softens, even destabilizes, the masculine affect of the hero. Darshan is the direct encounter with deity that characterizes Hindu spiritual subjectivity. Dwyer and Patel summarize the phenomenon of darshan in Bollywood: a two-way look, the beholder takes darshan (darshan lena) and the object gives darshan (darshan dena), in which the image rather than the person looking has power … darshan can have enabling as well as authoritative functions … The star frequently appears in tableau scenes that seem to invite darshan, thus hierarchizing the look and giving the star associations with the traditional granters of darshan, notably kings and gods … (Dwyer and Patel 2002: 33) Darshan has also been seen as the basis for the aesthetic norms of frontality and the gaze in painting and calendar art in nineteenth- and twentieth-century art, both precursors of the cinema (Mishra 2002: 1; De 2005). Darshan also has connotations of the full frontal encounter with the male “megastar” in films (Dwyer and Patel 2002: 44), a relationship I explore in chapters one and five in full contrastive detail for its gendered implications. In Mard’s pooja scene, where darshan is doubly mediated—once for the hero and then for the exegetic spectator—Raju/ Mard waits for his long-lost mother, found toiling in the native neocolonialists’ labor camp, in the temple of

Bollywood’s painless globalization  131 Sherewaali Ma (Tiger Goddess or Vaishno Devi, a popular North Indian incarnation of the female mother deity). His father—played by Hindi cinema’s then most famous action-star and he-man, Dara Singh—toils in a separate part of the prison. The narrative bypasses the father, however, to focus on the mother’s incredible escape, synchronically intercut with a temple devotional that Raju/ Mard dominates physically and psychologically. Raju/Mard’s mother escapes the prison guards through the kind offices of the goddess’ sacred animal, the tiger or sher, and stumbles into the temple, miraculously regaining her power of speech in the same instant. While Raju’s mother is undergoing her fortuitous and miraculous escape, the camera cuts to Raju/Mard’s passionate but challenging invocation of female subaltern power. The goddess Sherewaali and Raju/Mard/Bachchan lock gazes in a visual dynamic, wherein Raju is abjectly sado-masochistic as well as demandingly confrontational, repeating his demands of the goddess with synchronically self-inflicted wounds. The populist and idealized mise en scène of the temple and its congregated worshippers provides a grassroots community backdrop for the primarily solitary struggle of Raju/Mard against the greedy and corrupt neocolonialist Indian capitalists. The song rolls on; its lyrics include “The rich have everything, but the poor only have mother and father; don’t take their one wealth away from them” (my translation). As the song reaches its climax, Raju/ Mard/Bachchan’s frontal gaze is rapidly and repeatedly reversed with that of the goddess, thereby positing a taut continuum of identification and disidentification of goddess and devotee, which fully exploits Bachchan’s own iconicity. From this point, strengthened by renegotiation of agency in its maternal Shakti form, Raju/Mard/Bachchan inexorably triumphs over the thugs and villains. I shall attempt interpretation(s) of this reunion and its ideological yield. First, renegotiation of subalternity as heroic, but virtuous, masculinity cathected through the mother—imagistics for a nineteenth-century version of male Indian nationalism imagined as a mother-son bond—enables a spectacular expression of subaltern masochistic affect as popular, anti-hegemonic discontent. As Jigna Desai writes, “the gendered subaltern signifies the space of the conceptual failure of the nation” (Desai 2004: 11). Second, critical decolonization is crudely represented here as self-mutilating pain; its resolution occurs in reunification with the maternal, against the backdrop of an empathic but non-familial, anonymous collective, perhaps a kind of hybrid between a political mass and civil society. This recuperates affect for a compassionate masculinity and a feminized nationalism, both radically “weak” for contemporary Hindu nationalism. The traumatized mother-son pair indexes the inevitability of pain as the lot of the socially disempowered, but their reunion also endorses the liminal publics of a morally resurgent anti-hegemonic nation, including various gendered subaltern countermodernities. Re-site-ing and re-citing anticolonial struggle within a decolonized context as an individual and liminal legacy and performance—the son repeats the father’s traumatic anticolonial resistance to immoral authority, as the protagonist repeats the inscription and performance of heroic post-independence trauma by a filmic and pro-filmic prototype in Deewar—the hero’s masculinity gingerly balances several contested representations of the slippery

132  Bollywood’s painless globalization genders of nationalism and nativist neocolonialism. The anonymous communal tableau in this scene emphasizes not the power of the unambiguously united familial collective—as tableaux will do later, shown below—but the family and nation cohering only in publics who share and witness trauma, abjection and triumph, as serialized challenges to multiple and cynically gendered sources of social authority. The nineties’ neoliberal Bollywood film has, by contrast, regenerated piety as social deterministic reorganization: the domestic male Hindu icon and the flash of global money. Also, in the very repertoire of mobilized gendered identities within the religious nationalist paradigm, the neoliberal Bollywood film has suppressed three other related social categories that used to play culturally authoritative, if incidental or secondary, roles in earlier Hindi cinema: women, religious minorities, and the urban poor. This new Indian self-fashioning underscores the scholarly consensus that these fundamentalisms are finally about a particular shape of modernity: a neoliberal one that shirks the challenges of a more nuanced role for civil society (Falk in Hovden and Keene 2002: 93–4; Chatterjee 1986, 1993). That such modernities are frequently genocidal as well as gender violent is evident in the dilemma posed to Indian feminists by the BJP’s embrace of a demand for a Uniform Civil Code as its gesture of support for Muslim “women.” To review briefly, the the BJP and its precursors, Hindutva-centric political clusters in India, have long been vocally claiming that Muslims enjoy rights unavailable to the dominant majority as a form of minority “appeasement.” Any event that has allowed Muslim personal law to be a primary determinant of issues relating to marriage, death, birth, inheritance, or adoption—as mandated by the constitution for all ethnic communities, and certainly as frequently exploited by Hindus as any other group—has raised reactionary anti-minority outcries of Muslim appeasement (Agnes 2004: xxxiii, xlii-xliv; Varshney 2002: 64; Hasan in Jeffrey and Basu 1998: 76–8, 80–2; Sarkar in Jeffrey and Basu 1998: 92–9). The BJP’s apparent and paradoxical championship of Muslim “women’s” rights is not only a snake in the basket for Indian feminists—for its true objects and concerns are not women—it fortuitously (for the BJP) also embodies the political statement of the BJP that “‘Muslim appeasement,’ … is the cause of communal conflicts in India” (Varshney 2002: 8; Basu in Jeffery and Basu 1998: 4, 11; Hasan 1998: 71–3, 86–7). The BJP joined the outcry against so-called Muslim appeasement to argue that personal law is anti-woman; it used the 1986 Shah Bano divorce case to argue for the repeal of Personal Law for Muslims in India. On the basis of this case’s final decision upon appeal, which is widely held to portend further appeasement of Muslims, “Parliament passed the Muslim Women (protection of Rights on Divorce) Bill, which prevented Muslim women from claiming maintenance under the C(riminal) P(rocedure) C(ode)” (Hasan 1998: 74). This particular indirect form of paternalist mobilization of women proceeds hand in hand with other forms of “Hindu” mobilization, including fanning antiminority, even genocidal, sentiment among Hindu women themselves, within and without the female enclave of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh7—the BJP’s

Bollywood’s painless globalization  133 ideological fount—the Rashtra Sevika Samiti (Bacchetta in Jayawardena and de Alwis 1996; Basu in Jeffrey and Basu 1998: 3, 10, 11; Sarkar 1998: 98–102). Although the BJP is no longer the ruling party, its alignment with the zeitgeist of neoliberalism also persists in the successful and seemingly irreversible cultural nationalist mobilization of a transnational and diasporic Indian modernity. This mobilization makes an evocation of an Aryanized and firmly patriarchal Hindu pantheon at a crisis in the filmic story a condition of representing “Indianness.” It is also essential that women be mobilized yet subordinate non-agents in the films (Bagchi in Jayawardena and de Alwis 1996: 115, 124). Bollywood’s patriarchal and paternalistic reorganization of the nation and the family serves as an iconology of state- and official economy-regulated gendered and structural violence. The neoliberal mobilization of a transnational and diasporic Indian modernity engineers the political transformation of foreign/NRI investments into an emotional and cultural nationalism, mediated by neoliberal Bollywood as the event of diasporic return to rebuild a transnational “family” as a supernationalist act based on paternalist mobilizations and manipulations of women (Bachchetta and Bagchi in Jayawardena and de Alwis 1996). In the nineties, therefore, an entirely more chilling new globally powered wind started blowing through Bollywood, engendering a distinctive re-mediation of the iconography, choreography, and gendering of primordial piety onscreen. Piety in Hindi films used to be enacted by the solitary believer, sometimes a woman, pleading with a particular familial deity. The alternative scenario of piety and prayer would depict an emotional male worshipper who would usually be found making his case to the gods in a public setting, such as a communal temple, as in Mard and other Bachchan vehicles featuring young men seeking social justice. In both cases, the patriarchal familial as a backdrop for the individual’s personal interaction with deity was conspicuously absent. In Bachchan vehicles, in particular, the male challenger played by him usually demanded and received darshan (frontal encounter and audience with deity) within a context of homelessness, social disenfranchisement, or even illegitimacy or virtual orphanhood. Piety and pathos were both enacted as solitary or oppositional, as well as the last resort and purview of various unrepresented publics living precarious lives. These were sometimes rebellious or desperate acts of negotiation with a personal god, but the entire exchange usually occurred outside the paterfamilial organization of social life, and, indeed, often as a communally witnessed and framed appeal against the excesses of familial, patriarchal, and state hegemony. In the nineties, changes occurred in that mise en scène of piety. The first critical feature of this altered mise en scène is a revival of the (sometimes transnational) familial tableaux, reminiscent of earlier films such as Mehboob Khan’s Andaz (1949)8—or a representation of patriarchal and (Hindu) primordial hegemony— as a central imagistic of the representation of piety. Within this representational logic, the family displaced other publics to acquire publicity; it became a public and promoted space for negotiations and transactions relating to gender, class, and ethnic hierarchies. The family, as headed by a powerful patriarch, usually played by a greatly refashioned Bachchan or a reinvented bellowing and chilling

134  Bollywood’s painless globalization Amrish Puri, explicitly presented itself as the matrix for intensive crosswebs of economic and interpersonal drives, sanctioned by the majoritarian regime. The second critical feature of the altered scene of religious activity was the attenuation or absence of pain or trauma in the individual’s negotiations of gendered identity and politics. These two representational changes in Bollywood’s pooja mise en scenes—reauthorizing an authoritative and flourishing paterfamilial structure as arbiter of social power and as publicized identity, and erasing individual trauma—are concurrent with the institutionalization of neoliberalism in India since the 1990s (Varshney 2002: 72), the diasporization and new look of Bollywood film (Dwyer and Patel 2002: 30, 173–82), and, most especially, with the reconfiguration of transnational “Indianness” as rabidly Hindu-centric and patriarchal in India, and culturalist or proselytically multiculturalist9 in the diaspora (Rajagopal 2000: 467, 489). Of the US Indian diaspora, Arvind Rajagopal writes: Indians in the US tend to seek a religio-cultural definition of their identity, partly because of a desire to side-step this issue of their racial marginality, and partly because of a well-established pattern of reformulating cultural difference through religious affiliation … the social practices associated with Hindu religion become progressively less important in relation to their utility as a marker of their cultural or civilizational distinction, and as a set of privately-held beliefs (Rajagopal 2000: 489–90; emphasis mine; see also Raj 2000; Ong 1999: 1–3, 5–6) Of course, forms of Hindu patriarchal resurgence are not identical—to say that would be making the “Bosnian fallacy” (Rajagopal 2000: 467)—but uncanny, or perhaps canny, linkages are to be found in transnational sociocultural and cinematic representations and ideologies of the pious Indian family, Indian gender relations, and Indian identity. This argument runs parallel to Aihwa Ong’s problematization of “the popular view that globalization has weakened state power” (1999: 6). I believe, like her, that “Globalization in Asia … has induced both national and transnational forms of nationalism that not only reject Western hegemony but seek, in panreligious civilizational discourses, to promote the sanctity of the East” (ibid.: 18; emphasis mine). The complex linking of national and diasporic transnational identities and exchanges—cultural and financial—generating both concord and discord has been analyzed by Jigna Desai (2003: 45–61). What these links join together might be called, in Gill’s useful term, the mythic structures of “market civilization” (Gill in Hovden and Keene 2002: 123–51). New pooja scenes in Bollywood project calm plenitude depicting familial tableaux, wherein hegemonic familialism and civilizationalism, if diegetically challenged at all, are never overturned, especially not for the claims of the rebellious or incommensurate individual. These new worship scenes do not contest a socio-political hegemony clearly associated with territorial or deterritorialized Hindu nationalist success stories. The RSS itself operates within a familial framework. Smita Narula writes of RSS Hindutva’s genocidal activities:

Bollywood’s painless globalization  135 The RSS was founded in the city of Nagpur in 1925 by Keshav Baliram Hegdewar with the mission of creating a Hindu state. Since its founding, it has promulgated a militant form of Hindu nationalism as the sole basis for national identity in India … the RSS ideologue, M. S. Golwalkar, based much of his teachings on the race theories of Nazi Germany … (2003: 41–68; also Malik 2003: 28–9) To understand the directives upon familialism and civilizationism emanating from the RSS, it is instructive to examine the familial organizational framework within which the RSS and its offshoots operate. Narula writes: The RSS also reportedly runs upwards of 300,000 shakhas—local cells organized on the principle that only a militant and powerful Hindu movement can counter threats from so-called outsiders. Shakhas recruit young boys and men, fifty to one hundred for each cell, providing them with extensive physical training and indoctrinating them with the Hindutva ideology.10 (2003: 5) Again, in the transnational diasporic context, the VHP forges a “politicized Hindutva community … [whose] ‘familiar-familial’ space occupied by religious preachers draws large numbers of believers into the Hindutva fold” (Mukta 2000: 442; also Rajagopal 2000: 473). Another aspect of the reframing of the Hindu nation as the RSS family is the story of what uses are found for women in this ideology. Amrita Basu writes, “The forces that are most committed to politicizing gender have treated women as the repositories of religious beliefs and the keepers of the purity and integrity of the community” (1998: 3). In this matter, as Sarkar has shown, RSS women do not lag behind: Krishna Sharma, the leader of the Delhi Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) Mahila Mandal, has justified the tearing open of wombs of pregnant Muslim women by Hindu rioters and the gang rapes of Muslim women that are said to have been videotaped … (Sarkar 1998,:102; Basu in Jeffrey and Basu 1998: 167–84; Jayawardena and de Alwis 1996: viii; Kumar 2005) The protection of tradition then requires the demonization of “other” women and other men’s “women” (Kannabiran in Jayawardena and de Alwis 1996: 33). Entirely suppressing the reality of violence underlying neoliberal cultural nationalisms, Bollywood’s neoliberalized imagistic reflects a practiced and common sleight of hand, thus enshrining gender violent ideologies as tradition (Desai 2003; Radhakrishnan 2003: 119, 123, 127). The diaspora constitutes a critical deterritorial space for this reconstitution of Bollywood cinema since at least India’s economic liberalization policies in the early 1990s (Hopkins 2002: 17–44). This reconstitution of Bollywood as neoliberalized accompanies a new cinematic aesthetic, plot, and ideology, reflecting and refracting new diaspora-inspired

136  Bollywood’s painless globalization consumerist ideologies, and a certain notion of “modernity,” of which gender, as we have already seen, forms one strategic vector. This phenomenon of a territorially, ideologically, and materially cross-cathected national modernity is now well recognized, especially through ethnographic concepts, such as Ong’s notion of “flexible citizenship” and the “new modalities of translocal governmentality and the cultural logics of subject making” (Alessandrini 2003; Desai 2003: 48; Dwyer and Patel 2002: 215–218; Ong 1999: 15; Spivak 1997, 2008; Stokes 2004). Kamat et al. stress that the translocal Indian diaspora are a belated product of the purely local in India, the results of twinned local phenomena nationally and in the US (Kamat, Mir, and Mathew 2004: 8, 11–4). In this way, Indian diaspora cultural identities are often amalgams of (caste-based) national or primordial and (technological) transnational or modern aspirations. Since the flip side of a violently gendered Hindutva in the era of economic liberalization, technocracy and cosmocracy is the genesis of a transnational Hindu modernity, whose common matrix is capital-conscious consumerism (Malik 2003: 28; see also Rajagopal 2000: 470; Rao and Sarkar 1998: 102–3), it then makes entire sense that conspicuous consumerism and mobile transnational capital emerge overwhelmingly as major aesthetic hinterlands of neoliberal Bollywood (Desai 2003: 47). Even the antecedents of this Hindutva are firmly grounded in commercial interests translated into cultural nationalist communalism (Bhatt and Mukta 2000: 411). The Arya Samaj itself was a precursor of the VHP and the RSS (Menon and Bhasin 1996: 28; Menon in Jeffery and Basu 1998: 30). Women are traditionally considered consumers par excellence in most societies; a culture’s economic preoccupation is often justified by shifting consumerist roles on to these conspicuous consumables who are maintained as conspicuous consumers. If women are the embodiment and symbol of conspicuous and innovative consumerisms, if women are supposed to drive the consumerist apparatus, their supporting roles in scenarios of capitalist cultural nationalisms are crucial. Neoliberal Bollywood’s gendering practices and repertoires show that screen women’s simultaneous mobilizations as conservative, traditionalist, consumerist, and modern is analogous to Hindutva religious identitarianism itself, gender rhetoric and ideologies inserting a notable margin of acquiescence masquerading as agency. The capital-conscious, consumerism-struck, upwardly mobile populations who largely undergird Hindutva in India have their counterparts in the diaspora populations abroad who have steadily grown in numbers, influence and visibility in their host countries.11 These diaspora groups, some now cosmocrats and high-power financiers, form the apex of a substantial population graph that consumes Bollywood films abroad (Mukta 2000: 448, 458). Indeed, these upwardly mobile groups now find a self-representational imagistic in neoliberal Bollywood’s peripatetic plots and lavish “international” lifestyles. Women adorn themselves and the home in this imagistic. “Family” films like Yaadein, Taal, and HAHK! blatantly cited product ads as backdrop, as well as plot engine. In Taal, the hero and heroine simulate a first kiss by sipping coyly out of the same coke bottle; later, when the heroine is trying to decide between her two equally cosmopolitan lovers during an MTV contest in Canada, another shared bottle of coke stirs up romantic melancholy as well as nationalistic nostalgia. “It’s

Bollywood’s painless globalization  137 good for love,” her new suitor says, while actress Aishwarya Rai’s dreamy eyes conjure up the old one.12 In Yaadein, coke ads are blazoned in the film itself, as several commentators on the Internet Movie Database disgustedly observe.13 In HAHK! glittering candy bar wraps and home PCs also play supporting roles as romance as well as suspense apparatuses (Desai 2003: 47–8). In a converse pattern of multinational product placement, as Dwyer and Patel have written, “In recent years the overseas market [for Bollywood films] has become more important than any of the domestic territories, with the UK being the most profitable, followed by the US” (2002: 24). These claims are easily upheld by quantifying the divide between pre- and post-globalization Bollywood films by comparing data about the films’ gross collections in India and overseas. The films I will compare are the already discussed Mard (1985), the superhit Hum Aapke Hain Koun! (hereafter HAHK!, 1994, Sooraj Barjatiya), and the less successful Yaadein. Data collected from the International Business Overview Standard website shows that Mard (1985) had no overseas figures listed and gross domestic collections of Rs. 478,648,665; HAHK! (1994) grossed 2,500,000 US dollars and 1,500,000 British pounds, in addition to a domestic total of Rs. 1,110,576,940. Yaadein (2001) grossed 1,100,000 US dollars and 437,021 British pounds.14 Clearly, Mard is a pre-globalization film, at least in terms of overseas viewership; HAHK! and Yaadein are definitely post-globalization in terms of the same viewership. Primordial civilizationalism as religiosity plays a significant role in this post-globalization, neoliberalized Bollywood, either in an interpellatory capacity toward the cosmocrat or cosmocratic family, or in a guest appearance in Bollywood films as a naturalizer or mediator of modernity primarily imagined as romance and technology, or the technology of romance, or the romance of technology—as, for instance, in Yaadein. In a brief pooja scene in this film that succeeds the title credits, we are shown an incredibly wealthy diaspora family gathered around their household shrine worshipping Laxmi, the goddess of wealth. The pooja is mediated and dominated by male priests and patriarchs. The paterfamilias, played by Amrish Puri, a ubiquitous “villain” in Bollywood, dominates not only by his arrogance but by the fact that he is the business head of the family. His sister-in-law is as superficial as she is superfluous. She is brusquely reprimanded by Puri when she chatters. During the worship, we rarely see the goddess herself; our frame allows us to see mainly the assembled patriarchal family and the priests, the politics of prayer. This family’s entrepreneurial success is also crudely publicized. In the middle of the pooja a cellphone rings and the paterfamilias’ secretary hands over the phone to the paterfamilias, who instantly engages in a chat about shares and stocks with someone in New York. The family’s transnational business acumen is thus plentifully invoked. Despite the look of glazed devotion on the faces of the family members, the visual absence of the deity denies them and the spectator the darshan—or the direct vision of the deity—that one would expect from a truly pious locked gaze encounter with deity characteristic of Mard. Darshan is never granted to the viewer in this scene, except when it is also granted to the young male challenger to the dominant paterfamilias: the young

138  Bollywood’s painless globalization tech-savvy nephew played by Hrithik Roshan, a rising young star and, again, Bollywood scion. The viewer’s perspective must be aligned with the male youth. Presumably, darshan is delayed in this scene in Yaadein in order to recover the pious gaze as the dynastic dynamic of the screen/mirror male/deity cathexis. The techno-media-savvy nephew speculates aloud that this year the shrine is a hot spot because the family’s business shares fell the year before. The priests remonstrate, the paterfamilias looks daggers. However, the young hero is unrepentant. Later we discover that his main gripe at this point is the absence of a family friend with three nubile daughters, who have returned to India because the youngest had become a too keen on Western vices like smoking, drinking, and partying (Rajagopal 2000: 474). The hero engages in a verbal duel with his uncle, then steps forth and says, “Hi, Mata. We are well here. Perhaps more than we need to be. You should be in India where people need you more” (my translation). Before the goddess can respond, the youth is whisked away by his ineffectual but humane father, and upon prodding reveals his true frustration that the diasporic have abandoned the mainlanders. In her discussion of the history of publicized image production in late-colonial and contemporary India, Jain emphasizes, among other things, the separation retained between public and private uses of religious icons in multiple media and product brands as “reterritorialization” and “deterritorialization” of religiosity— “ongoing negotiations within the sacral era”—which allow competing postcolonial interests to appropriate the sacral for competing presentations of identity (2007: 191). In her classification, Jain aligns publicity primarily with the forces of the Indian “bazaar”—a largely pre-colonial and postcolonial formation that has extended into contemporary formations of Hindutva-inflected but commercially acute “modernity,” such as I describe in this chapter. Private sacrality, deterritorialized as she sees it, remains aesthetically more subtle, subdued, or even aspiring to Westernized “realism” in her account, which mostly concerns calendar art in India. In the switch from the calendar art form to newer cinematic mediations of sacrality, however, I would argue that neoliberalized Hindi cinema presents a transposition of a “bazaar” aesthetic onto the private realm, perhaps previously more subtle in accord with the tastes of a Europeanized indigenous bourgeoisie, but now interiorizing the aesthetics and ideologies of the complex cast that the bazaar embodies in India today, including Hindutva and its unlikely bedfellows, such as corporate capital and neoliberalism. In other words, films like Yaadein show Jain’s “bazaar” internalized, specifically as an aesthetic, but also frequently as an ideology (as we will also see later in HAHK!). These new representations of pooja and piety must now be mapped against contemporary presentist defenses of Hindutva-guided atrocities against territorial minorities such as Muslims, Christians, Eastern missionaries, and other foreigners, as retaliation for the supposed sexual runs of such communities upon Hindu women. One especially striking instance of Hindutva-style patriarchal protection is offered by Mukta, who writes that in the London Swaminarayan temple—“the much advertised ‘Europe’s first traditional mandir’” (2000: 460)—visitors are instructed that the practice of female infanticide in the state of Gujarat originates in the attempt to save Hindu girl children from abduction

Bollywood’s painless globalization  139 by Muslim invaders (ibid.: 462). These gender fundamentalist doctrines can be matched with Hindutva youth organizations’ forcible re-abduction of women who were “raped” into love-marriages with Muslims, with the rape of Christian nuns, and the resurgence of the practice of sati in Rajasthan (officially abolished since the 1820s), or with propaganda at Hindutva meetings in the US, where the prevention of exogamy is the focus (Patwardhan 1994; Mukta 2000: 449, 451; Kumar 2005: 50–3; Rajagopal 2000: 476). The defense and protection of Hindu women has now become the recognized propagandistic logic of Hindutva’s ethnophobia. In Yaadein, the entire Hindu pooja scene is based upon visual and material cathexes of paterfamilial players. Their cathexes make them unresponsive to superfluous mothers standing in the circle of piety, dominated and chastised by overbearing men. In pre-liberalization Bollywood, a woman of the house—the domestic subaltern—might have been the focal point of the piety on display. She might have been mediator of divine messages, conveyor of pathetic petitions, and the family’s moral arbiter, straddling the hero’s unjust politicized world and that of divinity. In contrast, neoliberal Bollywood film usually depicts pooja or religious worship as spearheaded by male performance, with sumptuously dressed women acting often in instrumental capacities within a circuit of familial surveillance.15 Women’s transactional fetishization has become unmistakable in their frequent suppression and exchange. This is evident from the parade of large numbers of consensually organized men—often several generations of men—in these new scenes of pooja. A significant change is thus observable in filmi16 scenes of worship from the 1980s to the ’90s, and the early twenty-first century is precisely the replacement of the female or the solitary male by the paterfamilial tableau gathered around the icon. Women are relegated to a heightened consumerism or commodification, to helpless or passive remonstrances toward their male kin at best. The logic of gendered entrepreneurial piety is diegetic in Yaadein; in other popular films like HAHK!, the filmic meta-parole features it prominently, as in the website that features a “family” photo of the entrepreneurial men (only) of the Barjatiya family who produced the film. The tableau mise en scène is particularly striking because in it, not only does the family rather than the solitary and often female individual worshipper dominate, but men bearing the imprimatur of successful enterprise and patriarchal authority assume the dominant role. In Yaadein, we are introduced to the wealthy diasporic family in the household worship or pooja scene, which also stages diasporic oedipality. I would argue that this staging reinforces that the pooja scene is the locus of concentrated paterfamilial power; any challenge to the paterfamilias is most spectacular when made here. Actual women as mediators or actors in scenes of social negotiations are subsumed by the patriarchal plots of the neoliberal diasporic and Hindu nation. Women singularly perform pooja in one recent blockbuster, Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham (2001). A mother- and a daughterin-law, one in India and the other in London, are shown beseeching household gods for their respective families’ wellbeing. However, the mother-in-law’s pooja is clearly circled by her husband’s wealth and power as the sumptuous shrine

140  Bollywood’s painless globalization indicates, all traces of female subjectivity unconnected to patriarchal power erased; similarly, the daughter-in-law’s preservation of tradition in her domestic pooja is as much an assertion of Hindutva-affiliated consumerist nationalism as it is of her subjective spirituality. Her pooja is also framed within her husband’s success and their prosperous diasporic status. The devotees of this transnational family, moreover, clearly experience pathos but not traumatic pain as a consequence of their devotion. There are no tears or crises in the prayer scenes. This new configuration of pooja in the new Bollywood silences or overwhelms women by engulfing them within patriarchal tableaux. And the profits of such patriarchal familialization of devotion are clear from the imagistic constellations of pleasure and prosperity that provide the mise en scène of this new piety. Not only are women’s roles in neoliberal Bollywood attenuated to that of the “consort,” but gender and consumerism are, indeed, the twin mirrors within which Hindu religious nationalism redoubles and replicates itself. Sarkar writes, for instance: an immense stimulation of purchasing and the promotion of commodity distribution through aggressive advertising campaigns and media techniques … relates … to … a specifically feminine consumerism [that] increased dramatically after India was launched on the new career of liberalizing its economy under World Bank and IMF guidelines … Older forms of gender ideology are merged with new offers of self-fashioning and a relative political equality in the field of anti-Muslim and antisecular violence. Patriarchal discipline is reinforced by anticipating and accommodating [women’s] consumerist aspirations … (1998: 103–4; see also Feldman in Jeffrey and Basu 1998: 35; Menon and Bhasin 1996; Kannabiran in Jayawardena and de Alwis 1996: 32–41) As Basu has written, “Behind the semblance of ‘fundamentalists’ traditionalism’ there lurks a modern political project” (1998: 13, 177–82; Feldman in Jeffery and Basu 1998: 34; Hasan 1998: 73). My own argument in this essay is that Hindutva cultural politics as imagined by Bollywood fixes upon the threat of women’s changing agency as “all that is wrong” (Feldman 1998: 37, 46; Rouse in Jefferey and Basu 1998: 54–65, 69). Hence women cannot but become, indeed must become, spectral non-agents, non-subjects except in the consumerist sense within the core economic processes of identity-loss or affirmation. Sangari and Vaid make this very explicit indeed in their exploration of women’s spectralization in the social resurgence of sati in India, which entrenches the practice ideologically by: the suppression of the materiality of the event and of the processes that inform the immolation … the concept of Sati submerges the material and social bases of the event and gives a sense of religious euphoria to the mass witnessing of the immolation … (Sangari and Vaid in Jayawardena and de Alwis 1996: 240–92, particularly 243, 251–3, 258; emphases mine)

Bollywood’s painless globalization  141 In the collusion between religious nationalism and economic neoliberalism, the fundamental axis of negotiation is the alternating familialization and violation of women in transactional nodes between rival ethnic communities: women consuming and consumed at different points along the axis (ibid.: 40). As recent influential scholarship has suggested, modernity is no longer to be understood as a Western phenomenon; instead, we must conceptualize several overlapping and disjunctive configurations of alternative and adaptive modernities (Appadurai 1996; Van der Veer 1994: 132–4, 136–7; Ong 1999: 35; Varshney 2002: 76–84, 106–11; Raj 2000: 538; Kumar 2005: 182–3). The agency and power of the diaspora to manipulate, collate, and reconfigure pieces of religion (read Hinduism here), gender, culture, ethnicity, and family values in the larger picture of transnational, adaptive modernities are considerable. Modernity is being configured in the diaspora as “religious,” while both modernity and religion are being digitalized. Take, for instance, how the cinematic image has been visibly indebted to new technology since the 1990s: the computer-aided technique that allowed for the diffusion of images and the subtle transition of image to image differentiates this … [image] from the clumsy montage effect of the 1970s and ’80s … [this] reflect[s] an important shift in film theme, from a decade defined by the masala [spice or formula film] and its depiction of violence to films defined by themes of family, love and romance … (Dwyer and Patel 2002: 177; emphasis mine; see also Rao, “Globalisation of Bollywood”) The “modernization” of the real and the representational easily accord with the regressive spectralization of women. This modernization and postmodernization of cinematic form are, moreover, indebted to an extant Hindi cinematic tradition, whereby: the kind of cinematic specularity that gets endorsed is not spectatorial identification with the modern as such but the modern inscribed within dharmik registers that have a time-immemorial force: the modern hero doubles up as the premodern hero from the nation’s epic past … (Mishra 2002: 16) Slick montage can easily be matched with the ability of the VHP “to forge a sense of Hinduness world-wide, linking up Hindus throughout the globe as one family with one collective will” (Mukta 2000: 445; see also Sangari and Vaid in Jayawardena and de Alwis 1996: 283). Derrida says of televangelism and “globalatinization” of religions (by which he means the papal spectacle in Western nation-states): through this virtualization that in truth ‘actualizes’ the process of spiritualization-spectralization, the essence of the religious reproduces itself … these mediatic manifestations of religion, Christian or other, are always tied,

142  Bollywood’s painless globalization in their production and their organization, to national phenomena. They are always national … we are heir to religions that are designed precisely to cooperate with science and technology … (2001: 61–2) Moreover, modernity as ethnicity-driven civilizationalism is also a kind of performativity, hence its clear affinity with the cinema. What or who one is—the diaspora would argue in the UK or the US—is a matter of not only a religious essence, but of cultural performativity heavily inflected, indeed masterminded, by a religion that is also, once again, heavily and spectacularly performative (Rajagopal 2000: 468; Raj 2000: 538, 542). To this, also add the perception that, in the case of the diaspora, the so-called “pure” religious identity is a response not only to perceived fluxes of economic identity and experience, but to perceived racism from the postcolonial metropolitan state. In that latter case, the Hindu nationalist covertly acknowledges the centrality of official economy and state, the metropolitan racists, as major players in the genesis of diaspora primordial Hindu identity. The diasporic Hindu nationalist is interpellated into being by this non-religious identity, in response to non-religious threats to personhood, livelihood, security, etc. Hence diaspora performativity is crucial to the concept of diaspora nationalism, and gendered religious performativity in filmic representations and in transnational communities alike create and reify these high patriarchal and “familiar-familial” images of identity-in-community, as reflected particularly in the Virat Hindu Sammelan (Great Hindu Gathering) held in Milton Keynes in 1989 (Mukta 2000: 453–5; Kumar 2005: 184–5; Rajagopal 2000: 471, 474–6, 480–4). Religion especially interpellates diaspora identity in ways that encompass disturbing affective responses and behaviors, such as “Hindu hurt” and “Hindu denigration” (Mukta 2000: 447; see also Rajagopal 2000: 468). These are terms used to mobilize diaspora Hindutva nationalism in the face of what is seen as the racisms and imperialisms of adoptive Western homelands, such as Britain and the US (Mukta 2000: 444, 446, 450). Hindutva’s own practiced culturalism—as defined and masterminded by the VHP—also makes its connections with globalized Bollywood’s imagistic of the nation profitable and intuitive, as the VHP’s own articulation “does not arise simply out of the field of religiosity” (ibid.: 446). Unspoken but dominant patriarchal mandates now stage and run poojas (ibid.: 463). Indeed, the telltale sign of the collectivist masculinization of the familial religious moment has been the prominent resurgence of the cult of the god Ram, the mythical Aryan ruler of Ayodhya, India, who defeated the indigenous demon-king Ravana and rescued his abducted wife, Sita, from Ravana’s kingdom, Lanka.17 The Aryan god Ram’s imagistic hegemony is symbolic of paternalistic Hindutva’s power to dominate lower-caste, non-Hindu groups. Equally disturbingly, the militarization of Ram’s potential is captured in images from the 1990s (see Figure 4.1).18 Ram in the 1970s was a milder, more pacific deity, but since the ’80s he has become a glorified Hindutva warrior. The protection and rescue of the family’s women from unclean and ethnically impure outsiders, a central interpretation of the Ram story (the Ramayana) since its inception, lends additional fillip to the story that Bollywood tells of the patriarchal familialization of Hindutva worship

Bollywood’s painless globalization  143 Figure 4.1 Ram in the 1990s (http://www.patwardhan.com/ films). Courtesy of Anand Patwardhan.

reflected in the neoliberal scenario of pooja. Not only that, but Ram’s imagistic of male domination masquerading as benevolent paternalism (the Ramayana is a complex, many-stranded story of race, class, and gender domination, of which the Ram-Sita marriage forms only one strand), has largely replaced goddesses as images of shakti (female power) in the Bollywood pantheon (Bhatt and Mukta 2000: 416). In Mard, we had seen such a goddess, the Maa Sherewali, or the Tiger Goddess. Her autonomous female energy, however, gives way in neoliberal filmic and societal contexts to the familial tableau of Ram-Sita, or to other male gods of the Hindu pantheon. This other crucial component of filmic reconfiguration— mirroring national and transnational re-masculinizations of Hindutva identity (ibid.: 414; Kumar 2005: 239–40)—matches the dominance of male authority and power within the familial tableau of neoliberal Bollywood. A deft and well-wrought anti-racist, anti-imperialist discourse is used by followers of Ram in India and abroad to justify the resurgence of anti-minority nationalism as a response to perceived and putative attacks upon Hinduism. Here, “the dominant religious community [Hindu, both in the east and the west], given a political voice by the Bharatiya Janata Party, is said to be under siege” (Mukta 2000: 443). The syncretic, polythetic religious traditions that flourished for hundreds of years in India (Searle-Chatterjee 2000: 505–6; Varshney 2002) have vanished, particularly in the diaspora, and also in India’s more riotprone cities more than in its less riot-prone villages (Searle-Chatterjee 2000:

144  Bollywood’s painless globalization 506; Varshney 2002; Raj 2000: 540). Hindutva has successfully used “multicultural” initiatives in the West by appropriating both victim status and liberatory rhetoric (Mukta 2000: 444–5; Rajagopal 2000: 472; Van der Veer 1994: 117; Radhakrishnan 2003: 122, 127). Varshney, who argues for a “way of life” civil society that is inter-communal and associational, critiques the stranglehold of Hindutva’s cultural determinism that re-materializes culture’s performances in the fields of the economic, social and associational, where religious identities are revealed to be largely based on economic interests and experiences, and religious fundamentalism is revealed to be fundamentally more economic than religious.19 Hence, Sen’s statement—cited in the epigraph for this chapter—starts to become emblematically relevant to this analysis: markets and shrines were interwoven in Indian social life since pre-colonial times. Varshney has itemized five characteristics of civil society—Habermas’ public sphere reconceived (Varshney 2002: 41)—that Varshney also partially questions (42–6). These five characteristics are, first, space between state and family levels; second, interconnections between individuals and families; third, independence from the State; fourth, formal association, intra- and inter-ethnic; and fifth, voluntaristic not ascriptive associations, or what I would call the performative possibilities of identity construction (ibid.: 39–40). Though Varshney himself takes issue with and modifies the category requiring voluntary, non-ascriptive motives for harmonious civic associations, I find some utility in retaining that category as a component of civil society and in re-training its perspectival vantage point on the Bollywood imagistic. As Butler has written, a life that is not acknowledged as life cannot be grieved, and a life cannot be acknowledged as one unless a set of social relations exist that make it tenable or performable as a recognized life (2009). An ascriptive framework of identity does not accommodate or validate those “other” lives that do not fall within certain rubrics and frameworks of cognizability and sustainability come forth with only a specific set of onto-juridical formulations of identity, such as immutable, immiscible ethnicity. This is why victims of communal riots are dispensable and destroyable; it is because within the purely ascriptive intra-ethnic set of affiliations that instigate communal violence, certain lives are not sustainable, cognizable, or, therefore, grievable. If we allow that ascriptive models of individual and associational identities in tandem with state-sponsored cultural warfare do disrupt societies and civil life, we have an analytic for the pre- and post-neoliberal Hindi film imagistics. In Mard, and in the Bachchan-dominated pre-globalized era as a whole, it was clear that the state, ideally and necessarily a non-player in Varshney’s list of conventional civil society attributes, was indeed absent or, at most, a challenged hegemon in Hindi cinema’s political imagination. Moreover, in that cinema, identity was available for experimental and voluntaristic performance, for contextual re-significations and re-shaping of the relationship between the particular and the collective, for iterations of difference. It challenged the “way of life” stance of Hindutva ideologues that Hinduism is an eternal cultural standard, rather than a rich and heterogeneous trove of cultural imagery and symbols, from which people pick and choose their particular religious ideoscape and identity (Searle-Chatterjee 2000: 511). Civilizationalism is hardly distinguishable from

Bollywood’s painless globalization  145 fundamentalism if it takes an essentialist and determinist trajectory on identity, and if it denies the syncretic malleabilities and mutabilities of complex traditions (Radhakrishnan 2003: 128). Mard and Amar Akbar Anthony (1977, Manmohan Desai)—two feisty Bachchan multi-starrers of the eighties—presented ethnic identities as constructed and incidental, not primordial and essential; identities were even depicted as institutionally derived (the police force and the law) and mobilized by non-state actors (criminal cartels and foster parents). In Amar Akbar Anthony, three brothers born to parents (who are by default Hindu) are separated in childhood and brought up in Hindu, Muslim, and Christian environments respectively (Bachchan plays a hilarious Christian, Anthony). While the film does deal in ethnic stereotypes—Amar is an upstanding policeman, Akbar is a flamboyant Muslim entertainer, and Anthony is a tapori bootlegger with a heart of gold—in the end the brothers unite to defeat their parents’ oppressors who are, again, neocolonial thugs, and reunite beyond boundaries of blood and race to rejuvenate the nation: in a symbol of communal unification the brothers simultaneously give blood to a traumatized woman who turns out to be their real mother. The possibilities of intra- and inter-communal peace seem real, not chimerical. Because the state was a non-agent, if not a non-player, the films of the eighties and the early nineties interpellated civil and communal life, responsibility and justice, through the male protagonist’s solitary dispossession and masochistic disempowerment, and subsequent communally witnessed recompensation (however tenuous). Mard could attain social justice for marginalized men; Amar Akbar Anthony could gesture at a voluntaristic familial politics of minority empowerment and communal amity. The heroes’ very masochistic piety, rebellion and violence were based not on an ascriptive, state-sponsored identity, but on a logic of civic engagement, at least potentially pluralistic in its particular form of multicultural nationalism. With Bombay (1995, Mani Ratnam), the emergence of state-sponsored interethnic violence was vividly, spectacularly cinematized, albeit antipathetically. Bombay’s watershed moment is significant because of its foregrounding of intraethnic ascriptive identifications as the cause of ethnic violence, and of voluntary inter-ethnic associations—like the film’s Hindu-Muslim marriage and family— as the engine of ethnic peace. The city of Bombay has been the location of the greatest number of riot-related deaths between 1950 and ’95—1,137 in total— and is thus one of India’s most riot-prone cities, according to Varshney (2002: 7, 106). Though Varshney cautions against a radical disjointing of ascriptive or traditional and voluntary or modern identities as a more theoretical than empirical move, since Bombay ascriptive identification and state involvement are civilsociety disrupting factors both avowed and disavowed in Bollywood (Niranjana 2000: 138–66). As per the classic definition of ideology, Bollywood’s fascination with identity as ascriptive versus voluntary has solidified the conundrum into an empirical reality that many now observe as a given. Since Bombay, films have obsessively focused on untangling and exploring the political and human nightmare of ethnic violence in the era of neoliberal global fundamentalism. The associational power of Hindi cinema—indeed, its claim to be a civil association

146  Bollywood’s painless globalization or civil society building institution in postcolonial India—has capitulated to two civil society disrupting forces: state sponsorship of anti-minority feelings, and the reinforcement of ascriptive ethnic identities. Varshney has demonstrated that civil life with interethnic associations—many of them business-related—discourage ethnic violence and segregation of ethnic groups. The absence of associational transactions among them—the lack of civil societal structures, in other words—are one of the causes of ethnic violence: [There is]an integral link between the structure of civil society on one hand and ethnic, or communal, violence on the other … the focus is on the intercommunal, not intracommunal, networks of civic life … their absence or weakness opens up space for communal violence … the associational forms [of intercommunal civic engagement] turn out to be sturdier than everyday engagement, especially when people are confronted with the attempts by politicians to polarize ethnic communities … (Varshney 2002: 3–4, 8–9, 11–2, 23, 46; see also Long in Hovden and Keene 2002: 43–5, 52) The separation of the political and the economic and the manifestations of both in the forms named as “ethnic” or “religious”—within the national context—may indeed be a necessary result of what Gill calls the “new constitutionalism” of the global order, which “mandates a separation of politics and economics in ways that may narrow political representation and constrain democratic social choice in many parts of the world” (2002: 139). The economic and the political, when denied linkage in the forms of inter-ethnic associations, find new mediation in the category of “ethnic” or “religious” nationalism, and this forcing of a much larger set of (generally) secular problems, regulations, institutions, and mechanisms through the narrow bottleneck of the ethnic and religious produces neoliberal fundamentalisms in the guise of nationalisms. Thus political nationalisms that are economically governed must travel the course of passionate intra-ethnic identifications and associations and pick up passional traits. Speaking in defense of neoliberalism, Robert Keohane writes: the liberal stress on [economic] institution building is not based on naiveté about harmony among people, but rather on agreement with realists about what a world without rules or institutions would look like: a jungle in which governments seek to weaken one another economically and militarily, leading to continual strife and frequent warfare … (Hovden and Keene 2002: 25) The problem is not with Keohane’s mapping of political phenomena onto economic bases per se; the problem arises from the limited conceptualizing of political and economic phenomena as asocial and non-communal (Long in Hovden and Keene 2002: 42). The isolationism of intra-ethnic associations actually diminishes possibilities of Keohane’s “harmony among people,” and economic and political interests can thereby easily appear further sundered, making the inroad of other

Bollywood’s painless globalization  147 non-voluntaristic identity narratives likelier. Fundamentally, such neoliberal arguments about the validity of (economic) institutionalism need to be modified by rethreading the woof of social formations such as intra-ethnic and paterfamilial organization and ideology through the politico-economic and institutional fabric. In direct crosshatching with neoliberal international social theory, as articulated by Keohane, Bollywood incubated a distinct paradox of the theory of associationalism. Keohane writes: liberalism focuses on … privately organized social groups and firms … [whose] transnational as well as domestic activities are important for liberal analysis … liberalism … seeks to discover ways in which separate actors, with distinct interests, can organize themselves to promote economic efficiency and avoid destructive physical conflict … (Hovden and Keene 2002: 16) In contrast, Varshney has demonstrated that civil life with inter-ethnic associations—many of them business-related—discourages ethnic violence and segregation of ethnic groups. The absence of associational transactions among groups—the lack of civil societal structures, in other words—are the causes of ethnic violence. Keohane’s neoliberal vision provides an important theoretical backdrop and reasoning for why insular intra-ethnic identity— ascriptive in Varshney’s sense, and also gendered—functions to bring about rational, calculated violence that does not disrupt regulatory neoliberal logic. The neoliberal social organization in India accommodates actors and associations that co-exist to promote economic efficiency and destructive physical conflict. What they are missing, of course, are voluntaristic identities and an economic organizational logic that stands outside of regulatory neoliberalism. Bollywood mimics this phenomenon in depicting, in film after film, the family saga as the battle between good and evil rewritten as the battle between ascriptive insiders and outsiders in a strongly ethnicized and Hinduized (by default, often) theatre of identities. Keohane’s optimistic and positivistic interpretation of neoliberal institutionalism misses the crucial lack in an unreflexive theory of associations that does not comb deeper for the cultural stances and social reconfigurations generated by calculative rationalities of intra-ethnic and, indeed, intra-familial economic phenomena (Keohane in Hovden and Keene 2002: 23; Long in Hovden and Keene 2002: 38; Ramakrishnan in Hovden and Keene 2002: 242, 245). The resurgence of state-sponsored ascriptive ethnic identification has taken commodified, well-packaged shape in “diaspora delight” films like Dilwaale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge, Yaadein, Pardes, etc. As Mankekar, Desai, and others have argued, these new NRI-dominated imagistics refamiliarize patriarchal and paternal gender ideologies in the guise of rehumanizing them. The meteoric emergence of the neoliberal diaspora aids the global dispersal of this neoliberal Bollywood by supplying the critical market, as well as imagistic for this cultural nationalist artifact. Indeed, as Kamat et al. have argued, the nation-state not only

148  Bollywood’s painless globalization supplies the political imagination of a national media monolith like Bollywood, but also creates economic migrants (and non-migrants) and their mental and physical spaces as cultural subjects of an apolitical globalization (2004: 6, 19). This gendered citizen is generated, as they have argued, as a result of twinned territorial and, indeed, micro-level policies: education policies of the Indian state, and immigration policies of the US government.20 Increasingly, as we have seen, this state-sponsored deterriorialized audience has become the grande syntagmatique and the mirror or screen—in Metz’s sense of spectatorial identity (1999: 803–5)—of the cinema. In films like Yaadein, Pardes, or Ek Rishtaa, individual and familial business groups are set within intra-ethnic ascriptive identity frameworks, generally Hindu. In these films, Hindus associate or do business with other Hindus and retain intact—despite occasional failed experimentations with alternatives— paternalistic and capitalistic structures. Bollywood characters’ associational transactions—as, indeed, those of real NRIs and prominent Indian entrepreneurs—also retain collusive links with neoliberalized, structurally readjusted states. The secular is not that secular, just as the religious is not that religious: “What has … erroneously been construed as a straightforward struggle between secular (modernist) and religious (often labelled ‘obscurantist’) forces, is in fact better understood as a struggle between democratic and anti-democratic tendencies” (Rouse 1996: 60; Varshney 2002: 76–7). The “I love my India” slogan is rarely owned or challenged by women and minorities, who remain frozen in the framed hierarchies of this cinema. In conclusion, I wish to consider the success of the post-globalization Bollywood film par excellence, HAHK! (1994), a mega-blockbuster in Indian cinema history.21 The film inaugurated “modern” industrial trends, not only in film marketing (Dwyer and Patel 2002: 25), but also in ushering in other heterogeneous modernities as dominant referents of prosperous everyday “Indian” life in the film’s visual collage. Its website describes it as “India’s cultural ambassador in the world market” (note the [un]canny juxtaposition of “culture” and “market”), and as “A Celebration of Indian Traditions.” This film was not only hailed as a romance of family life, bringing new vigour to a Bollywood that had tired its audiences with the blood-and-thunder genre of the superheroic angry young man as represented by Mard, but was also discreetly recognized as a “brand-name” film, replete with signs of consumerist fantasies. Its characters drink cokes, eat expensive candy bars, rollerblade, and wear costly though garish designer clothes; they live in a Hinduized version of Western affluence, use computers, and drive fast cars, wedding “wholesome tradition and consumerist modernity” (http://www.uiowa.edu/~incinema/humaapke. html). One writer called it “a three-hour wedding video about a family with a house the size of a cricket stadium” (http://www.uiowa.edu/~incinema/ humaapke.html). The patriarchal family romance plot is upheld by “Hindu” values and by a media-friendly religiosity. One of the scenes depicts the families of the loving young couples and their friends relaxing in the young men’s sumptuous home. The evening’s entertainment turns out to be a “musical chair” of highly performative

Bollywood’s painless globalization  149 mimesis of Bollywood song by these Bollywood actors. This bears out the insights I have referenced earlier about transnational Indianness performing its identities with the aid of a careful selection of artifacts and props, and adopting the framework of performance itself as a self-consolidating and self-assuring action. The specific songs, dances and dialogues that the actors—scenarios within the scenario—mimic serve as the affective interactions between various characters, repetitions without too much difference, an archive effortlessly mimicked. One way that HAHK! succeeds is by skillfully meta-allegorizing Hindi cinema in choosing cinematic performance as an imagistic for its accomplishment of a Bollywood narrative function. A central architectural presence in this film is the idealized Hindu temple, near and around which the heroine’s family seems to have designed its identity and habitus. This temple and its highly idealized reconstruction of a specifically Hindu antiquity—pious and splendid—replicates many Hindu temples in North America, particularly the newer ones. The characters also engage in a virtualization of faith superior to any feats of electronic communication technology; this is especially apparent in the wedding sequences. In this film, the older daughter of a loving Hindu family is first married to the elder nephew of her father’s best friend. When her natal family come to visit her after the marriage, a romance rapidly develops between her sister and her husband’s younger brother, thus preparing the ideal conditions for intra-ethnic endogamy. After the birth of a son, the older daughter dies in a highly improbable staircase accident, just as her sister and brother-in-law are preparing to tell the two families of their love. Her younger sister, played by the charismatic and popular Indian actress, Madhuri Dixit, now finds herself cast by both families as her sister’s replacement and her brother-in-law’s intended second bride. Despite the film’s consumerist and technological modernity, at this point the younger sister and brother of the two households become curiously inept at the most basic modes of communicating, such as phone calls, email, letters, or even conversations with their families. A mid-night phone conversation between the hapless star-crossed youth only results in a romantic song of loss and farewell. The younger brother, the male star of the film, is denied any desire, right, or agency whatever except the power of sweetly acquiescing in all that his elders and the “family” wish. It is understood that the patriarchal family—still portrayed as utterly benevolent—has the natural and ultimate say, and the young couple are bound by their families’ consensual mandate. The day is saved in the end by a faithful retainer whom the younger sister had been teaching English, and by the family dog, Tuffy, who clearly has powers of extra-sensory communication with the household deity. The only remaining non-paternalistic or subaltern agency in this film is re-imagined via family retainers or pets as primary worshippers. These subalterns intercede with the deity, however, only on behalf of the powerful families that retain them. Gone is the subaltern’s interrogation of the waywardness of the powerful. The feudal family retainer is instrumental in bringing about the film’s denouement and its avoidance of a tragically gothic conclusion. He attends the second wedding cognizant of the sundered couple’s pain, but as a feudal

150  Bollywood’s painless globalization subaltern has no authority to speak of his knowledge. He does, however, have a devout identity and the power of channeling a mute appeal to the household deity. This leads him to appeal through a direct frontal gaze to the deity. The parallels with the piety of the suffering but rebellious male in Bachchan vehicles of earlier eras is undeniable here, but only in the contrast. In this moment of tearful frontality and direct appeal, like Raju/Mard’s in its pathos but unlike Raju/Mard’s in its distinct embeddedness in feudal familial hierarchy, the pleasures of piety are meted out to converge in the not too distant future in the hymeneal consumerist romance. As a result of the servant’s direct frontal gaze and whispered appeal, the deity responds in a moment of darshan, of direct and unmediated connection with the worshipper (darshan dena), and relays a command to the also extra-perceptive dog, Tuffy, who rushes to the heroine, writing her secret final missive to her lover, the younger brother. The interception of this letter by her intended husband and brother-in-law leads to the discovery of the prior romance and the happy ending. The elder brother graciously steps aside upon discovery of the pre-existing passion between the younger brother and younger sister, and all ends happily in nuptial glee. In this staging of the miraculous, feudal familial power is redirected by a moment of apparent subjectification of subalterns, yet, in actuality, this subjectification is a further instrumentalization. It is presented as a reactivation of communication, of transmissibility, of the romance of a theology that transcends technology. It is mediation in its purest form. From the direct and conspiratorial gaze of the servant upon the audience, the camera cuts to an equally direct gaze between the viewer and the household deity, an Aryanized image of Lord Krishna, and from thence to Tuffy, whom the camera then follows. The powerlessness of subalternity is glorified, romanticized, and deified into the triumph of feudal Hindutva and its fixed ascriptive chain of intimate and social hierarchies. The power of patriarchy is emphasized by the synchronous silencing and serial re-envoicing of youth and other subordinates according to a quasi-gothic narrative logic, as also seen in DDLJ and in Pardes. The gothic anxiety and terror induced by the uncertain line between authority and tyranny keeps viewers on edge only long enough to double the relief when the traumatic ambiguity of patriarchal authority dissolves back into the luminous shimmer of familial prosperity. The power of idols in starting chains of communication is not merely a “filmi” thing, but was actually a notable media event in 1995, the year after HAHK!’s release. As Julius Lipner writes: Toward the end of September 1995 a classic media event involving the image of Hinduism created a sensation … Images … were said to be sucking in substantial quantities of milk. Some said it was a ‘miracle’ that was a ‘a sign that the coming century would be a Hindu one,’ or that ‘a great soul [had] arrived into the world.’ … What is interesting is the way Hindus both manipulated various forms of the media and were manipulated by them. Such agents of communication as computers, the press, television, and the telephone ensured that within a day or two the same phenomenon was being reported and repeated in Hindu homes and temples

Bollywood’s painless globalization  151 around the world in a context of Hindu solidarity that cuts across political, religious, and social divides … (2001: 321–2) As happened in this case of global virtualization of Hindutva triggered by a deity’s improbable active interventions in reviving everyday faith, HAHK!’s deity is instrumental in restoring the flow of communication and in reuniting the family in the paterfamilial pleasures of piety and pathos. Sentimental consumerism blends seamlessly with a new sentimentalized masculinity to simulate traditional romance. Even though the pooja scene of Mard shows a direct interlocking of the devotee’s gaze with the deity, Mard’s scene differs from that in HAHK! on two crucial counts: first, the intensity of Mard’s scene is not in faith alone but in a challenging defiance expressed as a lonely sadomasochism, and second, because the unification anticipated is individual yet framed within community values, not yet defined by brand-name publicity offered as ideal domesticity. In comparing and contrasting the scene from Mard with neoliberal Bollywood’s staging of the “sacred” and the object-cathected familial tableaux structuring them, my object has been to propose a genealogy of the new diasporic and Hindutva-identified family, constructed through the pleasures of piety as a painless political, pietistic, consumerist, and gendered experience (Gill 2002: 144). The narcotic piling of transnational consumerist effects was conspicuously absent in Hindi cinema of the 1970s and ’80s. Citations of Western modernity were crude and stereotypical, drawing imagery primarily from an anti-colonialist past and consciousness. No cokes or computers in Mard, only wonderdogs and carthorses. The deus ex machina is a traditional community goddess, no slick, well-groomed Aryanized family altarpiece. The lading on of pain as an affect in the worship scene from Mard signals the pre-liberalization Hindi cinema’s low-budget negotiations and notations of social and political power, as well as the constitutive value of trauma in its filmic and social production of gender and subalternity. The contrastive absence of pain in neoliberal Bollywood’s mise en scène of the “religious” and its attendant cathexes of familial and political power is notable. Also remarkable is the absence of violence and the political as modes of negotiation in the neoliberal diasporic Bollywood imagistic. In contrast, the real Hindutva movement’s political engagement is significantly characterized by its recourse to violence and bodily pain, real or ritualized.22 How intriguing then is the comment of an IMDB user from London, that “this was the turning point for the Indian Cinema, not Sholay, since this movie is for the family where as [sic] Sholay was for the Community” (IMDB, 18 March 2004, user comments for HAHK!). The realization that filmic mise en scène of the “religious”—a moment of renegotiation or wresting of social and political power as cathected through kin and familial ideologies represented by tableaux or by strategic discursive placement of gendered individuals—differs notably in pre- and post-liberalizaton Hindi films; that the lone individual’s crisis is portrayed in the former and a familial crisis of gendered authority is portrayed in the latter reconfirms that the two eras of film-making and their attendant reproductions of gender and family

152  Bollywood’s painless globalization mirror a spatial, as well as temporal, lag. The formula film Mard was made at a time when the “globalized” diaspora or non-resident entity did not significantly figure in the Indian national imaginary. Box office returns being predicted to be modest, film financing did not count on NRI funding or ethnocentric business empires that Bollywood sometimes does. Mard’s sadomasochistic construction of masculinity within the religious mise en scène of sundered family and renegotiated social power therefore reflects an earlier and more territorialized national construct of civic crisis and political action. Here, the actor and the character— and perhaps the film industry—are essentially alone, pitted and framed against a non-dominant choral backdrop that does not intervene in the reconstitution of the family as a patriarchal institution.23 In HAHK! and in Yaadein, however, the negotiation of power and the constitution of gendered identity emphasizes the familial tableau, the kinship ties that bind even in absence, which has been the mantra of transnational Hindutva-based Indian nationalism. The presence or absence of on-screen sadomasochistic pain in mise en scènes of piety mark the differential aesthetics and politics of sacrality and liminality in pre-liberal and neoliberal Hindi films. Male trauma as signifier of liminal publics and their negotiations of neoliberal system worlds—the state and the official economy—disappears from the repertoire of Bollywood after economic liberalization. This is probably related to the VHP’s curing of male “weakness” (Van der Veer 1994: 134). In the neoliberal imagistic of Bollywood, nation and family constellate around a religious moment and modality, whose aspirations and gestures are civilizational, painless, as well as ethnocidal. The cathartic and radicalizing mobilizations of pain and pathos in earlier Hindi films are re-imagined as pleasure and mobility in neoliberal Bollywood. The gender and religious politics of the evolving images and models are, however, deeply disturbing in plotting the future of nationalism. Gender is the borderland, and borders are gendered. The structure of repetitions, deeply loved and ardently enshrined in the Bollywood formula, has ceased to yield the political potential outlined by Walter Benjamin’s mass art or the postcolonial aesthetic suggested by Fredric Jameson; I believe it once did so (Benjamin 1999: 731–51; Jameson 1986). Bollywood has lost the polysemic, polythetic character of a piety diversely, inter-ethnically lived, and offers instead consumerist extravaganza as genealogical multiplicity, hierarchical diktat as common ground, and liminal gender and subaltern identity as the mediated globalized consumer of the happy diaspora family, ruled by the law of the patriarch (Desai 2004: 47).

5 Love triangles at home and abroad Male embodiment as queer enactment

Heights of stardom In Bachchanalia, the monumental collection of Amitabh Bachchan images and stories, author Bhavna Somayya writes of Bachchan: “His growing stature from an actor to a superstar is evident from his altering body language reflected in the film posters over the decades” (2009: 11; emphases mine). Superstar Amitabh Bachchan’s body, I suggest, tropes a vertical notion of the hero, frequently captured in epithets applied to him, such as “towering” or “lambuji” (“the tall guy”). In sharp contrast to the lateralization or the horizontal montage of the hero’s body in a succeeding generation of “shorter” actors, best embodied by Shah Rukh Khan, Bachchan’s “verticality”—not to be confused with a transparent and literal stand-in for the phallic—is in fact metonymic of the way new audience relationships to the actor’s body formed and shifted along with the novel attention given to Bachchan’s height as he rose to stardom (Joshi 2001: 56). As metonym or syntagm usually function, a syntagmatic relationship is one of limitations in which the contiguity and displacement of metonym take the place of the condensations and resemblances of metaphor (Metz 1982: 202–5). The relationship of Bachchan’s spectators with Bachhan’s “height,” as this evolved over time and throughout his career, is a metonymic or syntagmatic one that does not complete any given set of relations, transactions, identifications, and aspirations between, say, the very high and the very low. Instead, it iterates distance and unattainability; it makes the very high or tall-standing figure a pure presentation of its viewers, a pure singularity (that which belongs in a set but is not included, is presented but not represented, in Badiou’s sense, and thus in my sense here “presents” itself but does not represent its mass spectatorial constituency). Without offering the possibility of representation of the viewers, such a relationship is therefore metomynic or syntagmatic, predicating desire upon the guarantee of its non-fulfillment and incommensurablity, upon its incompleteness. Madhava Prasad has described the effect of the “star”—after the Film Finance Committee funding regulation reforms (1969) that led to state sponsorship of a “realist” cinema, and the resultant reorganization of commercial mainstream cinematic production—as the new “mobilizer” of the masses

154  Love triangles at home and abroad The star became a mobilizer, demonstrating superhuman qualities and assuming a power that transformed the others who occupied the same terrain into spectators. As the auratic power of the represented social order diminished, there was a compensating increase in the aura of the star as public persona … (Prasad 1998: 134) In this way, Amitabh Bachchan “stood (tall) for” his mass following without ever being “one of” them; he effected his role as star or popular icon without ever being “at the level,” so to speak, of the masses. He remained aspirational, not rooted or grounded, or what might be termed in the language of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, “rhizomatic” (2004). The visual text, the coding of the actor’s body, allowed only a partial fulfillment of the narrative coding of Bachchan as “man of the people.” How did this work? How can the man of the people simultaneously be repeatedly and often successfully cast only as the man for the people? How can the star belong and yet not be included, present yet not represent? The way to understand this syntagm, metonym or conundrum of absent presence is to realize that Hindi cinema in the Bachchan era did not want a too-close identification of star and fan, however incomplete and complicated that alchemy still remains in the postBachchan era. Arguably, the fascination and obsession with his height reflects a pre-conscious deliberation, even a collective proprioceptive instinct. To retain iconic, talismanic charisma, the star and the fan must not become undifferentiated, indistinguishable, etc. The star, in representing fans, must not lose his defining otherness, and become fully present without absence, or fully representative and inclusive. Indeed, his presence must rather always gesture toward a return from that utter abyss of the liminal and the void, which the incommensurable hoi polloi represent with their cargo of excess and difference; the invocation of that eternal return as also an eternal separation must never be done away with. According to Valentina Vitali, Bachchan vehicles of the 1970s began to be made very much with this intent, demarcating Bachchan’s difference from the masses whom he seemed to represent (2010: 203). Bachchan vehicles actually strained away, therefore, from their putative intended audience. However, since the masses are themselves “singular,” in the sense of themselves belonging to the state but not being included, of being presented without being represented, the discrete yet concomitant singularities of the fan and the star were in fact the common grounds of syntagmatic (non-paradigmatic) identification of star and fan. Consequently, in the 1980s, Bachchan’s aura gets not just doubled, but tripled, for example in a film called Mahaan (1982, S. Ramanathan), where he is cast in a triple role, as a father and two sons. This is also the beginning of a cresting of his presentation, what I would call the ultimate “high-rise” mode. After this crescendo of the celebration of the vertical hero’s potential to present a “larger-than-life” figure of the common man that morphed further the higher it rose into the segmented transcendence of the hero, high priest, and avenger, Bachchan frequently repeated these “larger-than-life” roles in a range of films in the late eighties and the early nineties. The commonest epithet used

Love triangles at home and abroad  155 to describe Amitabh Bachchan during the mid- to late 1970s was “towering.” The commonest shot used to photograph him is a full frontal, medium closeup or low-angle shot, in which he appears indubitably monumental. However, a parallel trend was already underway; the “chocolate boy” hero embodied by Salman Khan (Maine Pyar Kiya, 1989, Sooraj Barjatiya) was also emerging. Another such hero emerging at this time was Aamir Khan, as the vulnerable teenage lover boy in Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak (1988, Mansoor Khan). It was the body and image of Shah Rukh Khan (hereafter SRK), however, that instated a new template for the Hindi film star body in the early nineties—a new sense of community built upon the actor’s body, one might say—that came from SRK being the recognizable boy next door. This new hero was rhizomatic and lateral, embedded in the context of representation, rooted in a supposed public reality, and evoking the phantasm of the hero as identified man “of” the people.1 Both his physique and his performance were also distinguishable from a not very muscular, highly lanky, and non-terpsichorean Bachchan, in the form of serious brawny extension and professional dancing skills (Deshpande 2005: 196–7). SRK, unike Bachchan, was the actor who seemed like the “ordinary man.” The films where he “towers,” even symbolically like an Olympian above the masses, are considerably less memorable or remembered; in some instances they are remakes of Bachchan films, such as Don, and do not define his oeuvre. This familiarization and demystification of the star body brought audiences closer to the screen personality, coinciding with a certain democratization of the image in the age of liberalized media in India, and inaugurated the birth of new audience sectors whose relationship with the star became less hierarchical, less “darsanic,” and more identificatory. The actor’s “commonness”—a new signature of the actor in the cinematic context—enabled a new style of film-making, whereby the actor and their audience were less impossibly distant from each other (something we have seen as the engine of narrative structure in BB in chapter one of this book). Superheroes and heroes like Bachchan, Dharmendra, or even Sunil Dutt were replaced by the boy next door, the actor with whom audiences could easily identify. Yet, this new incarnation of the star also made the uncanny more enactable: after all, the actors might be known to be Bombay denizens, or the boys and girls next door from the provinces, yet they undeniably had an aura that was an insuperable divider. Identification would remain uncanny because of the irreducible remainder of the separation unbridged by representational mediation. Repeated passages across the boundary between the known and the unknown, the familiar, and the auratic—instead of smoothing access—in some sense intensify the liminal, and heighten the experience of cinema itself as a liminality. Perhaps this is one reason why, along with this new embodiment of the hero as rhizomatically grounded, as the “man of the streets,” as opposed to phantasmagorically elevated, a parallel trend surfaced of noir “underworld” films, populated by seemingly verisimilar, commensurable, and representational characters moving within an uncanny and liminal nexus—both familiar and unfamiliar—of crime, shadowy deeds, anti-heroes, and frequently tragic denouements. Parinda (“Birds”, 1989, Vidhu Vinod Chopra) is a good early example of these, to be followed by an entire slough of such films both depicting and sensationalizing

156  Love triangles at home and abroad underworld lives and myths.2 Perhaps it is not entirely coincidental that several lateral heroes, regardless of their appearance in noir or underworld films, have been reputed to have connections with the real Bombay underworld and, equally significantly, their Muslimness has been cited as a voluntary, as well as ascriptive, identification with the denizens of that underworld of whom some are also, notably, Muslims and declared enemies of the Indian state.3 Though a new Muslim hero rarely appeared in these films, they have become stamped as a new brand of noir associated with the shadowy underworld, which made news concomitantly with the newsworthy rise of the new hero and the renewed fear of the Muslim canker at the nation’s heart. While a larger analysis of the connections perceived between some of the new actors’ Muslimness, parallel noir lives and connections, and “commonness” may not be undertaken here, I think this triadic concatenation is quite meaningful in terms of potential readings of rhizomatic actor bodies and their coincidence or co-implication—within discourses of securitization, terror, civil and uncivil disobediences, and colonial and postcolonial demotic uprisings—with the “ground” and the “underground” of film-going publics. As these new trends took off, however, Bachchan’s strange new liminal appearances in Jaadugar (“The Magician,” 1989, Prakash Mehra), Toofan (“The Storm,” 1989, Manmohan Desai), and Akayla (“Alone,” 1991, Ramesh Sippy) suggest his inflationary embodiment of the vertical hero adjusting to these eruptions of the lifelike, “believable,” lateral hero right under his feet, so to speak. By the 1990s, these eruptions would become runaway hits, and Salman Khan (Hum Aapke Hain Kaun? 1994, Sooraj Barjatya), SRK (Dilwaale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge, 1995, Aditya Chopra), and Aamir Khan (Rangeela, 1995, Ram Gopal Varma; Ghulam, 1998, Vikram Bhatt) would make significant strides toward a different kind of spectatorial subjectivation concomitant with a narrowing of the gap between presentation and representation in the actor-spectator relationship, via chocolate hero, bubblegum teenage loverboy, or tapori/boy next door/ desperado personas. Indeed, in the process of this narrowing of the gap between presentation and representation, this “demotic”-ization of the hero, the new heroic body absorbed some of the noir characteristics of the parallel genre of crime flicks, as evident in the psychotic and violent registers of some “new hero” films like SRK’s Darr (“Fear,” 1993, Yash Chopra) and Baazigar (“Gambler,” 1993, Abbas Mastan), and Aamir Khan’s Qayamat se Qayamat Tak (“From One Success to Another,” 1988, Mansoor Khan) and Ghulam. To return to Bachchan’s heydays, however, his laying on thick and fast of the height and presence factors generative of the visual frisson of the spectatorial relationship as that of god and devotee was dependent on deploying the syntagmatic, metonymic, presentational visual dynamic as what the moment demanded of the star persona. Whereas even as a towering figure Bachchan also tended to be tottering and vulnerable—as in his emotional or dead drunk scenes—and whereas this combination of strength and vulnerability partly explained his cultic popularity (as I have said already, neither the identification nor dis-identification of actor and fan could be total), his image as cult demanded a less than perfect fusion or satiety. A less than full identificatory submersion was needed

Love triangles at home and abroad  157 to generate the pleasure of repeat visits to the Bachchan shrine to survive the assaults of demotic iconoclasm that were bringing down political denizens of the world around him, and among whom he was known to move. He was close to the Gandhi family, who ruled the country at that time with an iron fist. The Gandhis were beginning to experience the fate of gods with clay feet: Indira Gandhi was highly unpopular after the 1975 emergency; Sanjay Gandhi, Indira’s younger and rather scandalous son, died mysteriously in 1980; she herself was assassinated in 1984. Bachchan was implicated, possibly falsely, in a number of scandals associated with the Gandhi family. Ironically, Bachchan himself briefly joined politics the eighties, and his most “over the top” messianic film, Shahenshah (1988), depicts him as a savior who is also “shahenshah” (“king of kings”).4 In cinema of the eighties, he served the function, in a sense, of resuscitating the tarnished image of those who should have been the people’s idols, as Gandhian politicians, but were not. He could not, however, be all of any one thing or only one thing. Desh Premee (“Patriot,” 1982, Manmohan Desai) quite fantastically offered him as both a lovable buffoon and as an Indian Christ; the patriot’s unmistakably crucified look inaugurates an era (c. 1980–9) of accommodating the conflicting yet conjoined aesthetics of fallibility, singularity, and power, be the latter religious or political. As the ingredients of cult, godhead, power, and stardom began to move ever closer together, the national prayer vigils undertaken by devoted fans when Bachchan met with a near-fatal accident on the sets of Coolie (Manmohan Desai) in 1983 served again to cement the link between hero and god. Godhead would remain an inalienable vector of star popularity, even when the heroic icon “presented” the ambiguous negotiations of actor, king, spectator, and god. When the icon explicitly set about dismantling iconicity, as Bachchan would do in Nastik (“Atheist,” 1983, Pramod Chakravorty) by playing an atheist, the result was a dismal failure (Somayya 2009: 172). More work would need to be done on this thesis, but it may not be out of the question to suggest that Nastik failed because it foregrounded too starkly the failure of the ethical principle within the materiality of power, mirroring thereby the mistake the nation’s political leadership had made. Godhead, in fact mediates and arbitrates the inconsistencies and incommensurabilities of power and its subjects; for the actor to negate godhead is to lose the power of metonymy to link partial truths. Clearly, therefore, the tripartite equation of godhead, political leader and actor had to be skillfully handled to achieve the right outcome of presentational exaltation without the pitfalls of representational leveling vis-à-vis the spectator. The spectator asserted his or her fantastic power to insist upon a certain cultural and ethico-political ordering of rights and responsibilities that even the most “highly presented” star ignored at his peril. The spectator demanded the invincibility of the god as much as the glamour of the star; in this one instance, the popular ascendancy of stardom was not unquestionable or unassailable. In contrast, SRK has attained the honorific of “King Khan,” but has never come close to approximating godhead in any of his roles: no aspiration there to mediating religious and political authority and cinema. I suggest that considerations of minority identity aside, this is a factor of the persistent dismantling of

158  Love triangles at home and abroad the syntagmatic and presentational non-representative “verticality” of the iconic Hindi film hero in the later generation of stars. Embodiment of heroic nature by the new male stars of Bollywood Hindi cinema is remarkably differently enacted, at least on the surface. Unlike in Bachchan’s case, these actors have managed to stay away from a psycho-political multiple investment in the star’s towering figure as a transcendent (dis-)location—a location not quite occupiable by either star or spectator as conveyors of euphoric being—of spectatorial desire for embodied and piled spiritual, political, and visual ecstasies. Lately SRK also rather explicitly emphasizes his “secularity” (Chak de India, 2007) as well as “apolitical” being (BB, 2009), and appears to aspire tirelessly to a more and more perfect indexicality or representation of the common man, regardless of star status, by portraying the star as also the common man (see chapter one). Notably, one articulation of Bachchan’s singularity, a staging of Bachchan’s “height” and his incommensurability with the “ordinary” person, occurred most explicitly within heterosexual scenarios, as, for instance, where his much shorter screen ladies are shown standing on stools or beds to attend to his sartorial needs. In Benaam (“Nameless,” 1973, Narendra Bedi), Bachchan’s heroine Moushumi Chatterjee is shown sewing a button on to Bachchan’s shirt while standing on a bed; in the much later Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (“Happiness and Sadness,” 2001, Karan Johar) Bachchan’s screen and real-life wife Jaya Bachchan is shown knotting his tie standing on a stool (Chute 2005). Such frames explicitly gendered the polarity or incommensurability of Bachchan, and necessarily so, since heteronormative gender roles and relations used to be some of the most characteristic enactments in Hindi cinema of presentation, of representational incommensurability. Men and women tended to belong to different worlds, and, when found present in each other’s worlds, were definitely not represented as included therein but at best as complementary singularities. Bachchan’s was a singularity that presented itself as an icon of plebian difference, but did not or could not in fact be indexical of the plebians he presented; Bachchan’s “stature” thus precluded him from “inclusion” in the worlds of fans, and also of gender others in the form of female co-stars. Heterosexual romance predominated in most Bachchan films as the only available dialectic of gendered relations, foreclosing other dialectics of gendered being, transactionality, and engagement between men and women characters. In contrast, in newer films by the new generation of lateral heroes, male and female characters evince at least the possibility of representing themselves to each other as commensurable, readable, and engaged in a dialectic of cohabitation, with social, familial, and sexual conjugations and contacts. The shift from presentational to representational dynamics thus characterizes the shift in male embodiment, as well as gender dynamics, in new Hindi cinema versus Bachchan’s oeuvre; heteronormative gender relations have been another crucial site besides the male hero’s body for the shift from a purely syntagmatic and metonymic possibility in the articulation of the relationship between star and spectator. Yet, one must not lose sight of the fact that, in critical respects, such a shift is still merely cosmetic in the case of gender relations. As we shall see later, the full articulation of a radically representative equation of the gender or sex complexes continues to be deferred. While new male embodiments have

Love triangles at home and abroad  159 in some respects appeared in tandem with changing gender dialectics, femininity has continued to serve as the quilting point in the ideological free-fall of masculinity, assuring the retrenchment of a seemingly protean and liberalized ideology of masculinity in the cause of heteronormativity and heteropatriarchy, metro-sexual and new age representational ethos and aesthetics notwithstanding. Traditional heterosexual femininity has especially served to fix and prescribe heteronormative and heteropatriarchal values as “family” values, insuring the happiness of all genders and generations, regardless of the newer cinematic narrative’s compulsive forays into the pleasures of metrosexuality and queer camp and masquerade.5 This point will become significant in the further elaborations of re-enactments of male sexualities in cinema later in this essay.

Lateral moves I now turn to elaborating the new male embodiments of the Hindi cinema hero post-Bachchan, with whom a more leveled identification of men and women characters, as well as star and fan, became more probable if not yet entirely possible or plausible. The new hero not only looked more like the audience he represented in terms of body shape and language—showing far more rhizomatic fluidity and energetic deportment as opposed to the laconic stiffness that characterized Bachchan’s tall form—but anatomically he even bulged out laterally with muscular enhancement dictated by the demands of a new MTV-ized song and dance performance kinesthetic (Deshpande 2005: 196–7). Spatially, he also began to travel further and further from the epicenter of the Hindi film mise en scène and its traditional (hetero-)normative plots. Nitin Govil has described this in the context of the morphing manipulations of the “singularity” of Bombay/ Mumbai as the point of spatial reference for Hindi films (2008: 209). They also represent the projection of male bodies into a global imagistic of masculinity as mobile, malleable, plebian-ized, serialized, and standardized, a fantasy of attainability for aspirational narratives of the body, as well as the political economy of globalization, an embodied “commons.” Indeed, these films adumbrate a development that Vitali describes as continuing: in the long term the opening up of Indian exhibition may also enable smaller, commercially more adventurous, producers to claim a share of the market. In the 1920s, the 1930s, and the 1960s, films produced in a shoestring [sic] sought to gain a position on the centre ground of the industry by exploiting precisely a visual ‘excess’ that more centrally located films did not dare to touch, and then radically scooped up contexts of living and aspects of social experience that had, until then, been bracketed from representation … (2010: 243) One such category of representation is, needless to say, male sexualized embodiment.6 Heroes now represented increasingly more peregrinatory or diasporic characters, as well as characters more at ease with the “new” woman, who is often a

160  Love triangles at home and abroad social and economic equal and well able to hold her own. I will return to this last point further on; suffice it to say, these heroes also represent men more openly playful and experimental in their behavior and relations with other men—more focused on plural male “friendships,” on buddy culture—and only partly as a result of the pressures of negotiating and transacting femininity as a value cum obligation of heterosexual identity within hetero-patriarchy. While this movement began in the late eighties with Salman Khan and Aamir Khan vehicles jostling with a parallel “underworld” noir, as well as Bachchan’s tiring epics of magnified heroism, revenge, salvation, and—as Mazumdar says—subjectivation,7 once again SRK was the prime vehicle of this lateral transversal of the Hindi male actor, re-inventing the motif of the “son of India” as diasporic and sometimes polymorphously or ambiguously gendered and embodied, sojourner or man of the people (far more than Bachchan, who himself played such roles very rarely and not at all in his earlier films). After SRK’s DDLJ (Dilwaale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge, 1995, Aditya Chopra), others followed suit. Bachchan did not fall by the wayside with this new lateralization of the hero; he adapted and fitted himself into the lateral schema of stardom. Story has it that after a streak of playing his old self in increasingly failing productions such as Mrityudaata (“Executioner,” 1997, Mehul Kumar) and Sooryavansham (“Sun Dynasty,” 1999, Satyanarayn Rao), he walked across to director Yash Chopra’s house and asked him for work, saying he needed a job. Chopra offered him Mohabbatein (2000, Aditya Chopra) which launched his transition into the world of rhizomatic heroes as the intransigent and uncompromising towering patriarch who eventually bends to measure his success by the happiness of these little folk in the films. The latter’s bubblegum romances were rescued from tragedy by his characters’ re-humanization from patriarch to generation-jumper, who learns to adapt to the lives and loves of contemporary youth, as he has in fact also been jumping generations by acting for film-makers with whose fathers he started his own career (Somayya 2009: 208–9). In fact, the publicity materials of the films since Mohabbatein, along with their overall shot compositions, marked a transition to a differential spatial embodiment of the Bachchan hero (Mohabbatein; Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham, 2001, Karan Johar). Rather than the older vertical composition built along the towering liminality of Bachchan’s body itself as their axial orientation, posters of his newer films began to cast him more as a point on a lateral spectrum of family and kin, still taller than the rest but visibly more assimilated, integrated, and conceding a lateral mode of identity and identification. This is not to argue that Bachchan does not retain and carry with him a “high” aura as a nostalgic tribute or even a commodifiable “signature” of what contextualized his identity in Hindi films. Here we can recall the jagged eye-line matches and points of view in the tumultuous scene of the invisible but tall star signing his excrement-spattered photo for slum-dweller Jamal in Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire (2008). The photo, retrieved from a communal pit by the boy, is held up to the unseen star for signing; Boyle’s diegetic fans and exegetic spectator accompany this unseen figure who is so tall he must look down from a seemingly great height upon the photo being held out. Besides the exegetic spectator’s prior

Love triangles at home and abroad  161 knowledge that this is Bachchan’s image, simply by the catachrestic evocation of star as height we can tell that it is the Big B himself who autographs Jamal’s copy of his image. The joke is, as always, about height and elevation, about towering above a pell-mell and undifferentiated crowd of fans, and relative eye-line asymmetry metonymizes the actor’s body itself, as well as the actor’s impossible— carrying the traces of excrement from a public outhouse, the photo connecting star and fan comes with connotations of extreme contagion but is converted into extreme fetish—connection to the fan, his signature instantly transforming the unspeakable into the auratic. Along with the lateralization of the hero, however, gender identities and roles in Hindi cinema level out, become more interactive, rhizomatic, and co-implicated performances or co-constitutive representations. By “co-implicated” and “co-constitutive” I mean that screen men and women and off-screen fans more frequently inhabit the same worlds and same spaces, for example via modern romance that is “naturalistic” in scenarios and settings, such as “realistic” song-dance sequences set in nightclubs, parties or North Indian wedding celebrations—locations where their spectators might more conveniently imagine themselves romancing—rather than upon a Swiss mountainside. Heroes since Salman Khan and SRK have also become performatively and kinesthetically “leveled,” with on-screen female bodies that previously used to be primarily charged with dancing, dressing up or down, and simpering. Even Bachchan now occupies an evocative, iconic, and sometimes citational hotspot in largely lateral publicity images and diegetic collective song-dance sequences, which depict family as a linked chain of people waltzing away at festivities and gatherings; his transformation from verticality is particularly evident nowhere in such musical sequences where he is, quite literally, “down with the people.” Even in “negative” anti-hero roles such as the back-to-back films Aankhen (“Eyes,” 2001, Vipul Shah) and Kaante (“Thorns,” 2002, Sanjay Gupta) that rework the Sholay plot8 of ex-con heroes, the principle of portraiture is what one might call “con lateral”; Kante’s publicity (see Figure 5.1) depicts six tall men, Bachchan in the middle, striding into the heart of danger a la Ocean’s Eleven (2001, Stephen Soderbergh). This lateralization, “shortening,” and apparent emasculation of the actor’s body and gestures becomes indexical of the potential to locate the unheroic hero finally in the masses, to “normalize” him, so to speak, as finally representational and not a purely stylized presentation of the presented. This has culminated in what is today as seen as a wave of films about the not-extraordinary ordinary man—exemplified mostly by actors such as Irrfan Khan (BB, Mumbai Meri Jaan), Saif Ali Khan (Omkara, 2006, Vishal Bhardwaj), Shahid Kapoor (Kaminey, “The Scoundrels,” 2009, Vishal Bhardwaj), etc.—and not about his non-representative, syntagmatic relationship with the towering figure of the singular star. A lowering and lateralization of star movements and bodies now enables fantasies of a paradigmatic, metaphoric relationship between star and fan as inhabitants of the same “commons,” i.e. of representation, a representation that promises not singular outcomes of repetition, but sameness and identification, and returns the funhouse of simulacra as the doorway to a new aspirational identity.

162  Love triangles at home and abroad

Figure 5.1 Kaante, offset lobby card. Image courtesy of Pritish Nandy Communications (www.pritishnandycom.com).

Dispersal: a new Hindi cinematic romance As opposed to what might have been called Bachchan’s “mobilization” of the masses in his seventies and eighties films—a mobilization whose momentum remained confined within the territorial borders of the Indian nation-state—a new “mobility” appears in Hindi cinema of the late nineties and the early twentyfirst century. I will now look at two of these films—Kal Ho Naa Ho (2003) and Jaan-E-Mann (2006)—to trace the arc between an earlier Hindi cinema of “mobilization” and the later cinema of South Asian diasporic “mobility.” I will read this arc as evidence of a continuing discursive and imagistic formation of space and national subjecthood as co-constitutive of the Hindi cinematic geo-body. I have argued elsewhere that a politics and poetics of space and spatial containment of the aspirational Indian body are central to the imagination of a national chronotope, as well as the narrative logic of Indian cinema. In a sense, migratory and displaced characters are nothing new in Hindi cinema, as a slew of films about migrations between country and city will suggest.9 However, the fraught idea of the migrant Indian, of the Indian geo-body suspended between nation and diaspora, occurs in films much earlier than the nineties; migration to the West becomes articulated from the sixties onward, usually in terms of desperation and mourning as a path of no return. In Ritwik Ghatak’s 1961 film Komal Gandhar (“A Soft Note On a Sharp Scale”), already displaced refugee lovers discuss the emerging reality of migration to the West, which affects the woman especially because she is engaged to be married to a man who is abroad while trying to decide between that and her commitment to theatre and indigeneity. The stage and the state are set here in a mutually antagonistic relationship, with the absent diaspora forming a beckoning temptation threatening to depopulate the nation of its promising young talent. As we have seen, in M. S. Sathyu’s 1975 film Garm Hava, a younger son of a struggling Indian Muslim family faces the

Love triangles at home and abroad  163 possibility of migration to the West because of the dire conditions and prospects for its Muslim minority citizens (Sarkar 2009: 196, 223). In neither film are these threats to rooted citizen-subjecthood realized. The matrix of such discussions in both films is, however, a prior South Asian experience of displacement—that of the traumatic South Asian Partition of 1947. The two films cited above present migration abroad as a self-liminalizing, spectralizing gesture that triggers a demand for extra-cinematic, as well as cinematic, justification. If one migrates abroad, one becomes a refugee, dead to the nation, counted as among its lost members. If this earlier cinematic discourse on transnational migration had to do with intolerable conditions created by catastrophic genocide or tragic decolonization, and the inevitable and desired cinematic and extra-cinematic response to it was that of mourning and melancholy, in films of the nineties the “loss” of members of the national body is refigured as a second birth or a joyous doubling of the national geo-body. A body appearing in the diaspora is an extension of the body back home; indeed, diasporic proliferation, instead of being mourned as a hemorrhaging of the national body politic becomes a national doubling, flexible accumulation, a second life of the nation. This new staging of the nation’s geophysical health and fecundity rejuvenates the moribund postcolonial nation-state, an argument that has become commonplace in the national economic arena. Whatever the real dynamic of the nation-diaspora dialectic, the diaspora has come to be culturally represented within certain Indian cinematic and official national discourses as a repeat performance of national greatness (the non-resident Indian is sometimes hailed as more nationalistic than the non-mobile Indian who stays home). The lateral and rhizomatic tendencies of the new Hindi cinematic heroic male body rather conveniently serve this new configuration of the national geo-body as spatially extended and proliferated by the diaspora. Now, when the Indian travels or lives abroad, it is a corner of a foreign field that is forever India. NRI re-embodiment, like new male heroic embodiment, is merely globalizing, updating, and lateralizing the nation itself, not diminishing it. Repetition of the nation in this sense is, however, extending it as foreclosed, as previously mentioned in Deleuze’s sense. The lateralized repetition of national essence within diasporic re-enactment in these new Hindi films and their outstretched heroic bodies aspires to the production of sameness and not difference. Such production of sameness in repetition is what Deleuze characterizes as “representation,” a foreclosed narrative without the possibility of transformation, shock, or rupture (1994). This is nowhere more evident than in the treatment of sexualities in diasporic romance plots of new Hindi films. The diaspora is penetrated and interpellated by hetero-normative sexual politics and discourses; cinematic narratives playing with presenting diasporic young men as homosocial or homosexual beings soon capitulate to a narrato-logic pressure to restore hetero-normativity as the representational norm. Geo-political extension cannot transform the sexual epistemes of geo-bodies in the end, and true difference remains webbed in the nexus of heteronormative representation with its ossifying foreclosure of the sinthomic real. In contrast, the presentational mode of Bachchan’s pre-globalization narratives was always productive of some kind

164  Love triangles at home and abroad of difference, because repetition in that case did not produce representation of the star as the “same as” the fan; representation always fell short of completion as I have discussed, leaving the question of the persistence of the irreducible real as both liminal and excessive perennially open. National doubling in an abstracted transnational space for global geo-bodies occurs through a reaffirmation of male-male love as deep friendship, or of a more traditionally licensed homosociality (as in ambiguously homoerotic relationships in Kal Ho Naa Ho and Jaan-E-Mann). A pervasive and persistent South Asian problematic of civic liminalities is referenced but not “mobilized” through spatial “mobility,” demonstrating the continuing purchase of representation and sameness over presentation/difference in seamless diasporic repetitions/doubling of the nation. This reverses the scenarios of mainstream Hindi films of the 1970s and ’80s critical of Western modernity, wherein nationalistic South Asian characters—especially those exposing corrupt “Western” values and mongrel national subjects—were a staple. Here one thinks of Manoj “Bharat” Kumar’s Purab Aur Pachhim (“East and West,” 1970), or Dev Anand’s Hare Raam Hare Krishna (1971), deriding Westernized Indians and their dissolute and profligate “hippie” children, or the representations of corruption and immorality as “Westernized” in the angry young man films of Amitabh Bachchan: ganglords, corrupt dons, and co-opted politicians who manifest their moral rot via iconic references to occidentality and colonial pasts. These iconic references included unnatural dyed or “done” hair, affected “foreign” speech patterns, wobbly vernacular usage, drinking, smoking, and sexual promiscuity. I bypass this spate of films antagonistic to Western and/or diasporic values and lives, however, because the return to India or true Indian values was not merely a possibility, but frequently inevitable. Indianness is locationally specific; it can be realized on Indian soil alone. In the nineties and afterwards though, Hindi films eschew this territorial juridicality of national belonging, and present national belonging morphing into a spatial laterality, whereby Indianness not only travels, but travels well (Punathambekar 2005: 162). Whereas the nation-bound diasporic simulacra represented by the re-“naturalizable” “unnatural” Indians and hippie wannabes of the seventies and the eighties were also undergirded by heteronormative and heteropatriarchal resolutions erupting under psycho-sexual crisis, recent diaspora films no longer require territorial naturalization for such resolutions. The sexualities they represent are, indeed, still critical to presenting Indian-ness, but transnational spatial amorphousness dovetails with sexual polymorphousness, and accommodates a wide spectrum of sexual behaviors: heteronormative, anti-patriarchal romantic, diasporic filial with intergenerational familial values, homeland filial with intergenerational familial values, homosocial, homoerotic, and homosocial servicing heteronormative.

Fathers and sons Critics have of course already drawn attention to “the last decade’s ferment within the sexual and gender discourses of Indian cinemas, and the shifting sexual alignments within the framework of masculinity that this ferment reflects”

Love triangles at home and abroad  165 (Waugh 2001: 281). I want to examine something more, though, than just the fact that new representations of diaspora in Hindi cinema depicting liminalities of sexuality are now (accurately or not) articulated within national discourse as new manifestations of “Western-ness.” I would stress that this emergence of strong homosocial affect is indicative of a discursive shift from ethno-political identity to not-so-new gay and other non-normative sexual identities, performances and practices—including gender masquerading, cross-dressing, and drag—and calls attention to their performativity both as plot devices and as on-screen shock values. After all, sightings of male-male affect, if not desire, are not entirely novel phenomena in South Asian social spaces or in popular representations including cinema. I would add, moreover, that this “new” transcendent and phatic perfomance and affect of male-male love, mostly occurring in diasporic spaces, is also another imaginarium and overlapping space for the longstanding affective history of South Asian nationalism, whereby the nineteenth-century anticolonial nationalist man imagined himself as member of a brotherhood constellated around preserving (actually bringing into being) an iconic figuration of the Indian woman undergirding the formation of an ideal patriarchy (Chatterjee 1993, 1997; Sinha 1995; Sangari and Vaid 1996). Whatever the constellations of sexuality in that nineteenth-century anticolonial discourse, in films today it has become common to see a spectral male-male affect mediating and ventriloquising a heterosexual romance, before disbanding into the constituent elements of the heterosexual family and its constitutive outside. Thus we see homosociality still being formulated in the guise of plots that appear to be about constituting ideal heteropatriarchy and its idealized female love object. It is important, therefore, to understand that this supposedly “new” ferment of representation and politics of same-sex love in Hindi cinema is not merely a manner and matter of repeating the West or reproducing Western homosexual political discourse; rather, even in the age of new masculinities bound Westward and stylistically fashioned upon liberal Western lifestyles and expressive attitudes, these masculinities serve to reinforce an autochthonous indigeneity in so far as the very wide repertoire of homoerotic affect is concerned. Some film scholars contend that very few films about this sort of distillation of heterosexual romantic effect as residual or displaced affect from homosocial to heterosexual relationships have been “situated” in India. It is true that a vast majority of the recent ones are set in Western diasporic locations. Yet, ironically, such homosocial affects, behaviors, and identities are indeed examples of a South Asian pre-colonial (or at least pre-1857) “countermodern” and polymorphous sexual spectrum, wherein, as Vanita and others have pointed out, male-male affect was regulated less by gender than by social status criteria (free/slave; agent/object; active/passive; etc.) and allowed greater exercise and expression (Vanita 2002: 7). The necessity for spatial displacement when it comes to ambiguous and liminal South Asian sexualities and national discourses suggests that diasporic location facilitates the re-enactment of queer acts and identities, harking back to polymorphous countermodern historical articulations of national(-ist) manhood familiar from South Asian pre-, anti-colonial,

166  Love triangles at home and abroad and even postcolonial contexts. Indeed, not only have second-tier films like Dosti, Tamanna, and Main Khiladi Tu Anari signaled the existence of homosocial sexualities and gender identities in earlier decades of pre-global Hindi cinema (Vanita 2002; Waugh 2001), but blockbuster Bachchan hits themselves have been remarkable for elaborate tracings of the power and pleasure of malemale intimacies and relationships. A few examples must suffice out of a wide range of instances. Sholay (1975) famously depicts the loyalty and love of two hired guns, Jai (Bachchan) and Veeru (Dharmendra), casting into decided shadow their heterosexual attachments to women. Indeed, the famous “Yeh Dosti” (“This Friendship”) song sequence in the film, depicting the two men riding a motorcycle while celebrating their friendship in song, is fraught with contact, intimate gestures, and one shot in which Veeru rides on Jai’s shoulders as Jai rides the motorcycle, an image of phallic camaraderie that matches the lyrical accompaniment proclaiming the bodily fusion of the two “partners” in life and in death. In Yaarana (“Friendship,” 1981, Rakesh Kumar) the friendship of Bishan (Amjad Khan) and Kishan (Bachchan), childhood friends, is coded visually and narratively as easily displacing heteronormative conjugal bonds. Not only do Bishan and Kishan frequently invoke their love and their inability to live without one another, but they perform these affects in a narrative of Bishan mortgaging his family fortune to support Kishan’s singing career and exciting his wife’s jealous rage upon the discovery. Gesturally, the film deepens its portrayal of the primacy of male-male affect in scenes such as Kishan singing before a Shiva lingam (phallic image) of his desire to regain his friend’s love after Bishan threatens to leave the village unless Kishan accompanies him to the city to begin a singing career. Jovial as the scene is, such appeals to Shiva the phallic god are traditional for Hindu women praying for good husbands, and the comic presence of Johnny the driver (Kader Khan), as the long-suffering mediator of the subtextual affect between Bishan and Kishan, “normalizes” such affect by creating the “third space” that serves as true “difference” embodied as class and status and not sexuality or gender.10 The repetition of the coded text of homoerotic sociality is far from coincidental or accidental in Bachchan’s era of verticality, yet it remains strictly distinguishable from the new breed of homosocially embodied masculinities in Jaan-E-Mann, Kal Ho Naa Ho, etc. by a clear visual and structural coding of masculinity (primarily Bachchan’s) as heteropatriarchal and hierarchical. Thus, while both Bachchan and the newer heroes’ vehicles share the hetero-normative cure of the prototypical female love object who displaces and reverses the germinal sinthome of homosexuality, both Bachchan’s towering embodiment of masculinity and the conspicuous textual logic of powerful fathers standing in the way of the realization of homoerotic desires are significant elements of his films, toying with homosociality and conspicuously missing elements in SRK, Aamir Khan, and Salman Khan vehicles. Nowhere is this filial entanglement and jeopardy of a homosocial impulse more evident than in the little-discussed film, Hera-Pheri (“Crooks,” 1976, Prakash Mehra), starring Amitabh Bachchan and his then-frequent co-star, Vinod Khanna.

Love triangles at home and abroad  167 In Hera-Pheri, Bachchan and Khanna pair as the familiar multi- and ambivalent male friends who hold their friendship dearer than all other ties, certainly at first above heterosexual love interests. Vijay (Bachchan) has saved Ajay’s (Khanna) life and the two vow to live and die for each other while making a living as small-time crooks through heists involving many masquerades and disguises. One scene of attachment and intimacy shows Vijay careening into their shared apartment dead drunk and insulting a praying Ajay for his devotion to the household god, Hanuman (or Bajrangbali, as is the film’s preferred moniker), saying that instead of being rescued Ajay will be “bamboo-ed,” a popular slang for anal penetration. Ajay’s “piety” in this scene is secularized by his remarkable attire: he wears a tight and high pair of blue shorts, and a red print shirt knotted at the waist that reveals much beefcake chest, torso, and arm. Vijay’s eye-line as he stands behind Ajay insulting his piety to Hanuman—who is often seen as the subordinate of the mythic Lord Ram, as well as his partner in action—matches both the deity’s placement and the posterior half of Ajay’s body. As Vijay rumbles, “You’ll be bamboo-ed,” a smile appears on his face that might either be cynical or leering. After Ajay puts Vijay to bed for the night, he prays again to Hanuman to transfer all of Vijay’s secret sorrows to him, a distinctly consort-like gesture. We next see Vijay being woken from drunken sleep by Ajay bringing Vijay a cup of hot tea, seemingly a ritual between friends, but strongly suggestive of an enactment of the role of the wife or woman, who so wakes up a husband or partner in the morning. Still clad in blue shorts and red shirt, Ajay nudges Vijay with a bare knee, rolls him over with his leg upon the bed in a posture of easy intimacy, and then slides into bed beside him while deftly holding the tea-cup with practiced ease. They banter about the previous night while Ajay returns to standing over Vijay in bed, legs apart, pelvic area level with Vijay’s face, and his back reflected in a mirror on the adjoining wall as he moves and gesticulates. We learn eventually that Vijay’s father was killed by the latter’s best friend, who is actually a criminal and was threatened with exposure by Vijay’s father. Vijay has concealed his maddened mother and is engaged in a relentless search for his father’s killer, though the man remains under his very nose, still disguised as his father’s best friend and an honorable businessman. When Ajay discovers this, he reproaches Vijay with keeping secrets from him and asks if he would be accepted by Vijay’s family. Ajay, on the other hand, mourns the loss of his parents: his father “sold” him in childhood to save his dying mother, but Ajay still reveres his parents and seeks them. Meanwhile, the killer is informed that Ajay is his son, and has Ajay and Vijay’s setup infiltrated in order to separate the two men, by employing a female gangster Kiran (Saira Banu), who does the crime boss’s bidding until she falls in love with Vijay herself. Vijay spurns Ajay’s friendship after realizing that, even though Ajay’s father would appear to be his father’s killer, a disbelieving Ajay is not willing to disavow father and patrilineage. After they clash in a bar over patrilineage versus loyalty, a very drunk Vijay, followed by a concerned Kiran, totters along a road lined with posters of contemporary Indian and Western films. This scene begins with Vijay meandering, bottle in hand, onto the brightly neon-lit and rain-slicked night

168  Love triangles at home and abroad street from frame right. To his right and frame left are posters of movies on a tall wall and on lamp post billboards. After taking a few faltering steps he stumbles, turning to the wall on his right for support. While singing of broken vows and drowned hope, he looks up at the wall to face two posters at eye level. The one to his right is for the film Dost (“Friend,” 1974, Dulal Guha), showing the male actors Dharmendra and Shatrughan Sinha clasping hands. This poster is also reproduced in a lamp post billboard above Vijay’s head and to his further right, but facing the exegetic spectator. The camera has switched angle, meanwhile, from mediumdistance crane shot to medium-distance low angle shot on Vijay, capturing his visible anguish. The second poster, nearest the left frame border and to Vijay’s further right, advertises the film Dushmun (“Enemy,” 1971, Dulal Guha), showing actor Rajesh Khanna and actress Mumtaz in a romantic embrace. Dost is about the friendship of two men, one of whom has a criminal past, while Dushmun is a traditional heterosexual romance about a reformed criminal. As he looks up at the poster of Dost, Vijay turns around and back to gaze up at another copy the same poster on the lamppost billboard, then in a gesture of despair he swivels back onto the road while his right hand tears off the title from the bottom of the wall poster of Dost. We see it floating away in rain water, mimicking the lyrics then being sung about flotsam drifting away in water. The camera cuts back to Vijay walking away from the wall, but placing his hand to support himself on another poster of Dost pasted to the left of the poster of Dushmun. The posters, we now see, are repeated in a series as well as palimpsestically. While they are located both within a spatial and a temporal series (on a wall horizontally, as well as within the same decade of the seventies), they are also in asymmetrical and temporal conjuncture with posters of other films about triangulated friendship and hetero-normative romance from previous decades. The next sequence of shots reveals Vijay slowly detaching from the wall with the two sets of paired posters of Dost and Dushmun on it, but also with two overlapped posters of Aah (“The Cry,” 1953, Raja Nawathe) and Sangam (“The Confluence,” 1964, Raj Kapoor) at the top right corner of the frame, and partly out of it. Aah and Sangam are both films about hetero-normative romances interrupted by and recuperated from same sex attachments. The wall is a cinematic palimpsest of the coding of same-sex attachments and their conflicts with dominant hetero-normative plots in at least three decades of Hindi cinema (the fifties, sixties, and seventies). Bachchan’s tall form is seen ambivalently engaging and detaching with it symptomatically and allegorically, as he part leans on and part propels himself away from this historical cinematic repertoire. At the end of the take, Bachchan moves closer up to the camera to loom up to near eye-level with the spectator and exits out of left frame, while the camera moves right to capture Kiran (Saira Banu), now in medium distance and watching him, then zooms in on her shocked and concerned face. The next take returns us to a looming and tilted Bachchan left of frame, cuts back to Kiran in frame center, then back again to a still tilted and swaying Bachchan, inviting the viewer to follow his gaze, with an eye-line match following, which frames a large billboard poster in half darkness and out of frame but with its title Dushmun frame center and illuminated.

Love triangles at home and abroad  169 The suture of enemy and woman is thus well under way and the camera cuts back again to Kiran in medium close-up slowly approaching. It cuts again to a wide angle zoom out from a billboard poster of Dost with one half missing, showing one actor gone, to Bachchan re-entering frame left, swaying as he looks back at this other torn poster of Dost, and turning and staggering on while glancing at the wall with more posters horizontally arranged, swigging from his bottle and singing of his loss. Finally, after he exits the frame at left again, we cut to a deep space sequence showing him walking out on to a large illuminated square with two more pairs of Dost and Dushman posters on billboards, framing him within the frame so that the alignment of posters, neon street lamps, and Bachchan’s moving body are angled diagonally and upward across the frame in a line of exit toward the left of frame and the palimpsestic wall. At this point, as Bachchan continues to remain the center of this configuration and walks toward the viewer, Kiran emerges after him from right of frame and walks after him, beginning to join Bachchan’s centered figure, though keeping a distance, until Bachchan finally begins veering to his left and to the right of our frame. The camera zooms back and dollies up, a leafy tree branch begins to protrude on our view of the square, erases the posters, and offers a new highangle shot of Kiran and Vijay as two small figures now together and alone, without the posters and their homosocial coding of gender relations, occupying the center of the square and the frame. The next cut shows Vijay and Kiran in medium close-up, she bending over him seated at street- and eye-level, touching him with her left hand. As he looks up, he asks, “Who (is it)?” She replies, “ A friend, whom you probably consider to be your foe.” In this take, however, two posters of Dushmun and Dost, the first closer up and the second much deeper in space, has reappeared behind the two on two lamppost billboards, in case one missed them before. The suture of woman and foe is now both completed and questioned. Unquestionably, by the film’s end, the hetero-normative scenario is recuperated: Vijay and Ajay are matched up with female love interests, the powerful and independent Kiran noticeably domesticated by her longing to become Vijay’s wife. The friends are reconciled upon conclusive proof that Ajay was not the son of the murderous crime boss after all, as Vijay had all along supposed, and that his shocking seeming-identification with his putative father had been purely strategic and meant to expose the latter. However, the sexual camp in Hera-Pheri outstrips most other mise en scènes of (mis-)recognition of queer scenarios in later Bollywood. The film plays daringly with men’s bodies being intimately compromised, as in a scene that can only be called a comic striptease effect, wherein Ajay and Vijay elude a series of goons and cops, chasing them by emerging from under their pursuers’ posteriors and between their legs, and by stripping down to their underwear, which they display conspicuously in their fugitive antics. After the seventies, Bachchan still demonstrates vigorous camp in the occasional scene in almost every film, but the queer is gone from it (Farmer 2000: 111–2). The supple flexibility of his physical clowning is also gradually replaced by a more erect and rigid bearing in later films, where he predominantly plays

170  Love triangles at home and abroad darker and darker tortured protagonists whose primary identification, cathexion, as well as antagonism, is with the Oedipal heteropatriarch, who was easily surmountable in the fraternal queer camp romance of Hera-Pheri and a few other Bachchan films. Before and after Hera-Pheri, his films predominantly portray Oedipal triangulations and struggles, as in Zanjeer (“Chains,” 1973, Prakash Mehra), Deewar (“The Wall,” 1975, Yash Chopra), Sholay (1975), Don (1978, Chandra Barot), Trishul (“The Trident,” 1978, Yash Chopra), and Muqaddar ka Sikandar (“King of Destiny,” 1978, Prakash Mehra); Yaarana (discussed above) is a stark and sole exception to this norm. The passionate fraternizing of HeraPheri morphs in other films into the dyad of brothers at odds with each other, sometimes fatally for Bachchan.

Brothers and lovers Jaan-E-Mann and Kal Ho Naa Ho promise an energetic return to the story of homosocial frisson jostling the hetero-linear norm as the very crux of the plot, as well as the engine of the heroes’ styles of embodiment. The male characters in these films have no fathers, nor do they need or miss them. Indeed, the conspicuous abjuration of the father’s presence and power mark these films just as much as their complicated ambiguity regarding the heterosexist norm, which the films rather insufficiently and incompletely resolve, and that largely only by routing homosociality through the iconic repertoires of metrosexuality rather than hegemonic heterosexuality. A clear visual and structural coding of masculinity (primarily Bachchan’s) as heteropatriarchal and hierarchical is missing from the later films, however avidly both eras of films deploy the technique of hetero-normative romance to avert catastrophic queer endings. Still, the later films’ mise en abyme of the queer (mis-)recognition scene is far more guarded and coded than that in earlier Hindi films like Hera-Pheri, despite their diasporic metrosexual affiliations and affect. I suggest that this is because the sleight of hand of geographic translocation serves as a dislocation of the hetero-linear norm by queer masquerade only up to a point. Indeed, the translocation and displacement create not so much a “reversal” of the hetero-normal as an “in-version,” by which punning term I mean both a greater closing of ranks and homogenization of diasporic identity as adamantly hetero-normative, and a more coded and guarded masquerade of homosexuality as “inversion/perversion” that is the inside story, which troubles the very assumptions of fraternal bonding upon which the nation or diaspora dyad hinges. The lateralization of emergent heroic masculinities in Hindi cinema rides parallel axes that I will show as convergent in actuality: they are the axes of spatial and narrative displacement or repetition of the heteronormative familial structure, premised upon a lateralization and leveling of film settings, plots, and heroic embodiment as diasporic, familial, and rhizomatic; and that of heteronormalization and strenuous citation of femininity as permitted presentational and representational sites articulating homosociality, whereby the countermodern pre-national can continue to belong in the teleological narrative of the transnational nation-state. By the “strenuous citation of femininity” I mean primarily the

Love triangles at home and abroad  171 habit women have—however old this observation now appears in critical feminist theory—of ending up as the “speculum,” vehicle, or currency transforming suspect male bonding into transactional prowess, into “good trades.” Ontological women and hetero-normal family are props for hetero-masculinity, but such hetero-masculinity is not the norm or necessity for countermodern gender identities predating the age of the sovereign territorial nation-state. After the time of Bachchan, when such countermodern and liminal identities were glimpsed but not fully expressed, presented but not really represented, a rhizomatic era of diasporic migration, as well as lateralized heroes, produced the right incubating conditions for these liminal and countermodern teleologies of gender and confraternal homoeroticism to re-emerge (Chatterjee in Vanita 2002: 73). I will look first at their partial articulation, bringing us to the year 2003, which saw the release of two films: Bachchan’s Baghban (“The Gardener,” Ravi Chopra) and the SRK-starrer Kal Ho Naa Ho (“Tomorrow May Never Come,” Nikhil Advani; hereafter KHNH). On the surface, the two films have nothing in common. Baghban was another venture in the new Bachchan experimental series of billeting the superman hero of yesteryears as an old-timer in contemporary youth culture and cross-generational family sagas; in Bachchan’s words, it was a film that “proved that the audience is ready for subjects on senior citizens” (Somayya 2009: 220). It depicted a devoted husband and father clinging to his hetero-normative identity as “family man” in defiance of the role of peregrinatory post-retirement bachelor, imposed on him by the new order of the dispersed family, by sons who want their elderly parents to separate and spread themselves geographically thin in order not to be a double burden on any one son. The hetero-normative family is thus threatened with rupture and dissolution by the leveling and lateralizing tendencies of the new family order, but redeemed by Bachchan the father’s renewed consolidation of traditional family values—his tending of the home garden—over nuclearization and virtual exile as a new ethos of family induced by new aspirational economies. On the other hand, in KHNH, SRK as Aman unites two Indian “desis” in marriage on his visit to New York to be treated for an incurable heart condition. Though Aman loves the young woman Naina, who yearns for a “normal” family, lost due to her father’s suicide, his failing health and his “friendship” with the other man leave him with a graceful and stylish demise as the only viable means for reinforcing the familial narrative. KHNH, however, is best known for the scene where Aman and Naina’s eventual husband, Rohit (played by Saif Ali Khan), are mistaken as gay lovers by the traditional Indian maid of the diasporic Indian man (Gehlawat 2010). According to Somayya, this film “started the recent trend in Bollywood to litter its film with gay culture innuendos” (2009: 220). Indeed, as Hu tells us, the film was opened up to the possibilities of camp and queer spectatorship and contexts throughout its runs in the USA, especially in New York City and San Francisco (Hu 2006: 97, 99). This particular scene’s comic possibility is exploited to the extent that its homoerotic suggestion starts operating as the film’s subtext, only to be totally suppressed in the film’s irreproachably aseptic heteronormative denouement— the marriage of Naina and Rohit following Aman’s untimely but inevitable death.

172  Love triangles at home and abroad However, the possibilities launched by the film’s public discotheque song-dance sequences of reading against the grain of coherent ethnic and national identities (Hu 2006) parallel the possibilities opened up of queer readings of the film’s precariously hetero-normative text by scenarios of private homosocial intimacies. As Hu argues persuasively, if from a diasporic desi spectator’s perspective the disco number (“It’s the Time to Disco”), where a very drunk Naina abruptly displaces a white crowd from the floor and takes it over to be joined by Aman and Rohit in a spectacle of ethnic triumphalism, bolstered by anti-racist premises, is hollow; from the same desi perspective the queer suggestion that emerges the next day when Aman and Rohit wake up in the same bed to the horror and consternation of Rohit’s maid (with Naina out of the picture) is telling. The true energies of the film reside in the risqué play with camp and queer that pervades the film’s narrative and performative codes, and defies disavowal, at least in terms of the film’s reception by diasporic spectators (Hu 2006; Gehlawat 2010). While these plot synopses may proffer no comparison between Baghban and KHNH, the link between them begins to emerge once their treatments of spatial extension, agonistic embodiment, and gender normativities are all considered together. To take space first, while KHNH narrates the “angelic” resolution by an Indian man of high dramas of diasporic middle-class Indians in New York city (with liberal sprinklings of mundane “desi” references), Baghban’s Bachchan is reunited with his beloved wife (the familial narrative thereby restored) through the “angelic” offices of an adopted son who lives abroad (played by an ever bemused-yet-with-it Salman Khan) and returns home to find his adoptive parents immiserated and proceeds to “re-marry” them. Diasporic traversals, in both cases, resolve hetero-familial crises both in the nation and beyond it. Upon the surface, the adopted son is the inverse of Aman: he is the diasporic returnee, whereas Aman is the Indian abroad. However, the two characters do in fact mirror each other, reinforcing the symbiotic function of NRI and traveling Indian as two ends of the scale upholding “family” as the ultimate value in the national imaginarium extended across and between nation and diaspora. Spatial extensions and mobility are, therefore, crucial to the denouement of the plots of both Baghban and KHNH. The issue of agonistic embodiment surfaces in the reliance both Baghban and KHNH place upon tropes of displacement that favor a rhizomatic, lateralized conception of the heroic male who loves and loses his woman only to regain respect and love in the end, but without resorting to the towering fury or high jinks of the Big B. The heroic male in these films is insistently, if unconvincingly, an “ordinary” man. The draw of such heroes, their rhetorical last resort and flourish, is upon reserves of hetero-normative familial discourse and ideologies, upon “real life.” There is little or no rescuing of maidens in distress, gang fights, or other kinds of muscle flexing, though there is plenty of well-toned muscle.11 The body, instead of towering over its vanquished foes, is extended out into the world conceived as family, community, nation, and diaspora. The third and final issue of gender normativity subtends those of spatial extension and male embodiment; the plots of both films resort to restoring women within heterosexual marriage to discipline and domesticate “illicit” libidinous

Love triangles at home and abroad  173 drives that encroach upon the traditional hetero-normative structure of the Indian family both in India and abroad. Bachchan’s wife in Baghban arrests the possibility of his dissent into a late-in-life rakishness and bachelor sexuality barely contained in their sons’ nuclear families, the sons’ nuclear sexualities being the ironic engine of the parents being denied a right to a traditional emotional and sexual life as a couple. The attempted exiling and displacement of the elderly couple’s “family” values leads to a redistribution and replacement of such values within an “extended” rubric of family by an extended set of community and diasporic actants. Attempts to break up the family lead to its rejuvenation and reinvigoration. However, when spatial remembering and spatial extension threaten to result in new configurations of affect and affiliation, as in a redesigning of male embodiment as queer or libidinous, such embodiment is also disciplined back into the confines of heteronormative “family” values through marriage and biological reproduction of patrilineage. The implication of such undergirding of space and masculinity by women’s role in heterosexual romance is that women can obviously both make and break families, but women’s entire disappearance from the sexual romance would end narrativity itself. While homosexuality is not explicitly referenced in KHNH, its heroine is such a crucial prop in the sense that the camp “faux” queer scenes in the film inevitably accelerate the heterosexual “marriage” plot. While the “marriage” plot does not supplant the “romance” plot, it mobilizes discovery of another hitherto undisclosed marriage, namely that of the cardiologist friend of Aman, whom the lovelorn Naina had imagined to be Aman’s love interest; all sexual mysteries therefore end in straight marriage. The heterosexual marriage plot works in repeat mode and overtime to diffuse the ambiguity of gay romance subtext, though the cultic charm and spectatorial synergy of KHNH inheres in its “mistaken for gay” elements. I have argued thus far that the lateral and rhizomatic hero, the diasporic male protagonist, the gay or proto-gay hailer of hetero-normativity and the tirelessly normative feminine antidote thereto are critically interlinked variables contributing to both star and fan subjectivation and/or cross-sectional audience identification in Hindi cinema post Bachchan’s era of the megalithic vertical hero. I now turn to an elaboration, indeed a perfecting, of such variables constitutive of new cinematic masculinities, subjectivities, and spectatorships in JaanE-Mann (2006), starring Salman Khan, perhaps the most “man of the streets” hero among the new generation of rhizomatic star embodiments. Jaan-E-Mann is a slightly less tongue-in-cheek precursor to the slapstick farce Partner (David Dhawan) released only a year after Jaan-E-Mann, where Salman Khan’s man of the people identity is perfected in the persona of “big brother” or “love guru,” who advises men in matters of heterosexual love, i.e. in matters relating to women. Jaan-E-Mann is a campier warm-up to this subject, set in Bombay and New York, with Salman Khan as Suhaan Kapoor, mentoring a young Indian astronaut, Agasyta Rai (played by Akshay Kumar), who has returned to Bombay from working at NASA, seeking his lost love who happens to be Salman Khan’s own ex-wife, Piya Goel (played by Preity Zinta, also Naina Kapoor in KHNH). Agastya appears at Suhaan’s door in search of Piya, whom he had hopelessly

174  Love triangles at home and abroad adored during his extreme-nerd college days, while she was happily dating the college “bad boy,” rockstar Suhaan Kapoor, hoping to make it big as a “superstar” in films. Flashback tells the tale of Piya the dizzy young fan, exploiting Agastya unscrupulously to further her forbidden romance with Suhaan. Suhaan and Piya eventually married, but Suhaan temporarily separated from a pregnant Piya when his film producer told him told that marriage was a problem for his lover-boy film star image. Due to a series of misunderstandings, Piya thought herself abandoned by the temporarily absent Suhaan and migrated to be with her family in the United States. Suhaan’s acting career, however, tanked soon after. Agastya is the “nice boy” and true romantic lover who, despite his rough experience, hears of Piya’s misfortunes and comes back years later to rescue her from the terrible fate of her marriage to the “bad boy.” He meets Suhaan without recognizing him as his past rival. Suhaan hides the fact that he is himself that “bad boy,” and, in order to avoid paying the divorce settlement that Piya is now demanding of him, decides to broker Agastya’s marriage to Piya, since, once remarried, Piya will no longer be entitled to his support. Tellingly, Jann-E-Mann also reprises the “angelic” incarnation of the sacrificing lover Aman in KHNH as a fantasy spectacle. If one were to seek evidence of intertextual referentiality between KHNH (2003) and Jaan-E-Mann (2006), one could not do better than to consider two parallel scenes of “prayer” in the films. In an almost identical mise en scène, in KHNH and in Jaan-E-Mann there are two scenes of praying for miracles or supplication of angelic powers. In KHNH, we see Naina’s mother and siblings kneeling before a window in prayer to a hoped-for angel to improve their dire financial and familial circumstances as US Indian diaspora, caught between the American dream and rude economic reality; in Jaan-E-Mann, we see an identical framing of Suhaan and his sidekick lawyer and friend, Chachu (meaning “father’s brother,” played by Anupam Kher digitally manipulated into a dwarf embodiment), praying for deliverance from Piya’s demand for a one-time settlement of unpaid alimony. The mise en scène of the two shots make it hard not to surmise an intentional duplication in Jaan-E-Mann of the trope of prayer for a miracle in KHNH. In both films, moreover, the answer to the prayer is an embodied angel who will eventually return to a spectrality (in Aman’s case) and an astrality (in Agastya’s case). In KHNH, the family’s prayer scene cuts to a newly landed Aman marveling at snow falling on Brooklyn across the street from where Naina and her praying family live. In Jaan-E-Mann, Suhaan and Chachu’s prayer leads to the advent of Agastya at Suhaan’s doorstep in answer to the former’s prayer for deliverance. Jaan-E-Mann, in its inimitable spirit of camp frolic and reactivation, literalizes the angelic trope, however, by digitally adding a halo over Agastya’s head as he faces Suhaan and Chachu at the door. The theme of homosocial bonding charges Jaan-E-Mann as it does KHNH, and an early instance of this occurs when Chachu calls Suhaan into the kitchen to plot foisting Piya off onto the miraculously materialized Agastya. The scene unfolds as Chachu reads to Suhaan out of a manual for divorce and marriage that, according to the Hindu Marriage Act (1956), a man is only responsible for financially supporting his ex-wife until she remarries. After this pronouncement,

Love triangles at home and abroad  175 a physically proximate Suhaan and Chachu enact a scene of paterfamilial intimacy: Suhaan enacts a traditional Indian wife coyly suggesting to a husband, here instantiated by Chachu, that perhaps one should ascertain the “daughter’s” (here Piya’s) feelings in the matter as well, pretending to pull a sari over his face and subsequently bursting into laughter with Chachu. The scene, however, seems to establish Chachu as a paterfamilial authority over the plot progression and stratagems that follow.12 Indeed, Chachu slides back and forth between portraying a legalistic, conjugal, and paterfamilial entity, the last especially when he offers Suhaan his “life’s savings” in order to go abroad, a portrayal with which many middle-class Indian parents might identify and one which further fixes Chachu in the space of paterfamilial facilitation of the conjugal “family” plot. Moroever, Chachu and his paterfamilial faciliation of heteronormativity hatched from a homosocial plot is re-enacted in New York, when Suhaan and Agastya arrive there later, in the figure of a restaurateur who advises Suhaan to direct Agastya in his courtship of Piya by communicating to him via a nearly-invisible earphone walkietalkie, a device that ensures Agastya doubling Suhaan in channeling Suhaan’s essence as his script with Piya.13 Also played by Anupam Kher, but in his normal embodiment, this character is promptly christened “Mamu” (mother’s brother) by Suhaan. But Chachu is most of all a “little man,” a man embodied as “little” or a dwarf, at the most palpable level of apprehension. The “mock conjugal” kitchen scene is followed by an unexpected “mob” of “short men,” here dwarves, bursting out of a closet in Suhaan’s apartment and performing a ditty that “enables” the stratagem to draw Agastya into Suhaan and Chachu’s plot to disencumber Suhaan of his obligations to Piya. Though this may be entirely coincidental, persons exhibiting symptoms of dwarfism sometimes prefer to be called “little people,” and one of the disorders that causes dwarfism is termed “rhizomelia.” Rhizomelic little people merging out of closets, needless to say, suggest some entanglement of the trope of dwarfism with the stereotype of the “different/hybrid” man who may be coming out of the closet. The import of these identificatory tropes or stereotypes is deepened when one considers that this scene of the frolicking song-dance of the dwarves who emerge out of a closet is determinant of “getting” Piya. First, Chachu joins in with the group of singing “little men,” his hair done like the college girl Piya’s, wearing a t-shirt with a “princess” logo; then, a cardboard cutout of Piya wearing the same t-shirt emerges from the same closet supported by singing and dancing dwarves who literally hand this image over to Agastya. Indeed, in the end, after much handling by the dwarf troupe of Piya’s cardboard cutout—which in this process is reduced entirely to the status of a simulacrum and to a transactional entity—this scene overpopulated with dwarves spilling out of closets succeeds in “encouraging” Agastya to believe in his “destiny” with Piya. Little people who fall out of closets, aka Chachu as a rhizomatic contender for the hero’s affections as well as paterfamilias, however unlikely this concatenation might be, thus call the shot in establishing the trajectory of hetero-normative romance and transactions in women in Jaan-E-Mann. In the spirit of camp frolic that is characteristic of the Salman Khan oeuvre, the transactional redistribution

176  Love triangles at home and abroad that had to be enacted in KHNH by a conjugal transfer of the female love object is effected in Jaan-E-Mann by simulation first, and then by replication (not duplication) of the woman in question, which is achieved by Piya’s later “re-incarnation” as a female Russian astronaut with whom Agastya will successfully replace his first hopeless love. This startling repetition of the female body in racial drag according to the demands of a male desiring economy directed by confraternal pacts is another re-embodiment parallel to Chachu’s sexual drag as “little man,” who is also a co-conspirator in male designs to share women. I will return later to this parallel logic and technique. Meanwhile, Agastya and Suhaan travel to New York together; the first to find Piya, the second to solve his financial problems. Still a complete greenhorn in matters of love despite years of living abroad and professional success, Agastya is awed by Suhaan’s ability to charm women and appoints him the guide in his own desperate romancing of Piya. The two begin life in New York sharing an apartment that happens to be right across the street from Piya’s. Though Suhaan is ostensibly in the apartment to coach Agastya in the art of successfully courting Piya, we see the two men intimately sharing living space, including a bed. Indeed, at one point, Agastya explains his gender politics to Piya by declaring himself to be a homosexual (prompted by Suhaan’s walkie-talkie coaching), quickly correcting himself to say, “I mean metrosexual,” upon seeing the confused look on Piya’s face. The Cyrano de Bergerac scenario is poised precariously with the queer diasporic enactment of male-male intimacies in ways that the film finally resolves via Suhaan’s eventual discovery that Piya is the mother of his own child and his subsequent recovery of her affections (she, of course, never stopped loving Suhaan, and considered marrying Agastya mainly because of convenience), as well as of her person and the child. Even in the crucial scene of discovery of paternity and recovery, one might say of hetero-normativity, there are many returns to the closet. After realizing that Piya lives across the street with their daughter, Suhaan manages to get into Piya’s apartment while she is away by locking out the nanny, and bonds with his daughter. To hide from Piya when she returns home while he is still in her bedroom with their daughter, Suhaan is shown first moving away from the shadowy bottom right corner of the frame of a large reproduction of Diego Velazquez’s (1599–1660) “Feast of Bacchus” (1629), an eroticized scene of allmale revelry into which he had blended in as though balancing a figure in the bottom left corner of the painting, and then entering the closet in her bedroom. We next see him leaning against Piya’s closed bedroom door from within, listening as she tells Agastya of her marriage and divorce in the living room. When she comes back into the bedroom with the child, he retreats to the closet wherein he is found seated in a corner, photographed from the interior of the closet, waiting until Piya falls asleep. Thereupon, he re-emerges from the closet and tells the child in the crib that he will reunite with her as well as with her mother, who he says is “not so bad after all.” The plot’s twists and turns are, clearly, inseparable from stepping in and out of closets in Bombay as well as in New York. Later, upon learning that Suhaan is in fact Piya’s true love and ex-husband, Agastya tearfully but gracefully steps aside, but at the film’s end is rewarded for

Love triangles at home and abroad  177 his “angelic” behavior with a place among the stars in a literal sense, as well as with the Russian female astronaut as mentioned. However, until this doubling of the singular woman is actually literalized by the cloning of the heroine, the two men share her in a sexual conquest plot that completely excludes and disenfranchises her, but also, more literally, through a pornographic voyeurism: Agastya sets up a high-power telescope that allows him and Suhaan to snoop on Piya throughout her apartment at will, a version of “star-gazing” that passes as an extreme version of the Hindi cinematic and exegetic male’s unquestioned right to “look,” to be the ultimate spectator and consumer of the female body and image. Like the cinema itself, audio-visual technology such as telescopes and two-way transmitters stand in for male needs to share and see women in this film. Yet, so powerful is this spectatorial action as a companionate masculine consensus and compact that it threatens to tip over into a relocation of desire: while watching a large-screen projection of Piya in her apartment watching television, the two men settle down comfortably on their bed with popcorn, apparently absorbed in their mutual heterosexual scopophilia. However, the next frame shows the two sleeping next to each other on the same bed in satin sheets, the popcorn sprinkled on the bed resembling white rose petals. This scene is fairly obviously a borrowing from the similar and famous scene in the earlier KHNH, where Aman and Rohit wake up in bed with each other after a night of drunken revelry with Naina at the disco. However, should the two men’s intimate proximities at times threaten to overshadow the main sexual conquest drive, leading the audience to question that latter text, Jaan-E-Mann’s plot supplies a third man to receive and bear the aggression that would have been conventionally expected between the roommates, but that mysteriously fails to materialize. Instead, this aggression manifests itself in scenarios of serial distractions, involving physical chastisement upon a third comic contender for Piya’s affections, a clearly hopeless desi who is working on Piya’s dissolute brother’s weaknesses in order to marry Piya. Some of the rough physical comedy of the film derives from the besting of this urban lout, whom Suhaan and Agastya conspire to discredit and torment repeatedly, flexing muscle in this joint enmity toward the male outsider who is also clearly a negative portrayal of the American desi or “ABCD.” The routing and shaming of this hapless suitor cements the foundation for Agastya and Suhaan’s bond, and provides a common outlet for aggression and hostility typical of men competing for the same woman, their scapegoat-in-common protecting their own camaraderie from this outcome. In this pre-incarnation as an unofficial “love guru,” Salman Khan plays with unmatched sangfroid the man of many disguises, strategems, moods, and skills— including his drag appearance as Piya’s savior when Agasyta fails to protect her from sexual harassment at a nightclub—yet patrilineage proves too potent to allow what appeared to be a prospect of vicarious self-fulfillment in the buddy’s romantic happiness, an attitude necessary when two men cannot literally both have the same woman, one that Aman in KHNH experienced and resolved by dying. Knowing Agastya and Piya are engaged, Suhaan tries to steal his child and take her back to India, but is caught. When he is discovered, however, Piya and her diasporic kin quickly come around to recognizing and conceding the

178  Love triangles at home and abroad prior claims of “family”—a unit that Piya, Suhaan, and their daughter clearly and singularly represent—and the narrative not so subtly veers towards a displacement (albeit voluntary) of “nice boy” Agastya beyond the familial pale, and his eventual dispatch to outer space, an “astral” stratum not unlike Aman’s “spectral” stratum. Agastya remains deeply attached to Suhaan and Piya, but re-embodied for an astronautical realm, the film’s opening and final shots have him phoning them from his spaceship and introducing them to his Russian counterpart and girlfriend, Piya re-embodied.

Representation and presentation redivivus Having thus far discussed the repetitions in representations of masculinity Bachchan- and post-Bachchan-era films generate, contrasting vertical and rhizomatic representations of masculinity, it is now time to return to social, cultural, and political formations and discourses generating the repetitions whose divergences demonstrate the process whereby the hero assumes representational rather than presentational functions and obligations. The critical divide between the two eras of cinematic masculinity that re-enact embodiments linking them to the same mass audience to come up with very different subject formations—with the perennial exception of immutable recursions to hetero-normativity when femaleness obtrudes—reflect the emergence of non-heteronormative cultural representations of masculinity and accompanying social transformations. Indeed, intellectual critical debate in India on normative and non-normative sexualities has itself shifted from a scenario of non-availability of syntax or vocabulary— i.e. a representation—for configuring alternative, parallel, and non-normative masculinities to one of far greater “representability” of such linguistic, social, and embodied entities and identities. As Vanita writes in discussion of Deepa Mehta’s Fire, there was once “no word in our language,” according to Mehta’s lesbian characters, to describe what they felt for each other (2002: 1). As Vanita proceeds to demonstrate with historicist acumen, a sense of being that might once have been mired in such an inability to find words for what one felt as a nonheterosexual is now largely more “self-representing,” because of queer activism and consciousness-raising in India and in the diaspora. This might also be the condition of a new Hindi cinematic engagement, however catachrestic or allegorical, with hitherto repressed words and images for non-heteronormativity. Vanita’s focus on the rubric of “representation” is highly relevant for my argument in this essay about successive cinematic figurations of heroic masculinity as towering versus rhizomatic, and presentational versus representational (Vanita 2005: 4). As homosexuality becomes representable in popular and political discourse, its representation refuels and triggers the rhizomaticity of the popular cinematic hero, who vividly represents many such demotic and “multivocal” masculinities, including deep male friendship and male bonding, and the hero’s resemblance to the common denominator (the “little” people, the man on the street). One might say Hindi cinema has now found the syntax and vocabulary needed to talk about the potential “other” masculinities that the hero can embody. While Vanita focuses on the validity of the

Love triangles at home and abroad  179 charges of “ahistoricism” leveled at the newly found representational language in India for othered sexualities (2005: 4–5), my emphasis is on the fact such a language has now been found as would allow cinematic recovery of embodiment as (superman) effect tempered by (rhizomatic) affect, of alternative and countermodern male subject formations, crosscutting the hitherto presentational screen to throw up the very figure of representation, of the hero’s inclusion, however fantasmatic, among those to whom he belongs, to the “common man.” Again, however, these “sexual commons” prefigured in the new heroes’ negotiations of embodiments and space are nothing new, nor are they past: they are yet another ideal node of convergence for the wide-ranging spatial and temporal phenomena known as the countermodern, which take their life not from differentiation from tradition, but from indifference to tradition’s essential logic. It follows from this intrinsic heterogeneity of the countermodern that, in arguing this view of how to take the changing embodiment and sexualization of the male hero in the last 40-odd years of Hindi cinema, I am not proposing an essentialist ontology of identity as embodiment. Far from that, I am reading embodiment—height/ verticality/presentationality versus height/laterality/representationality—as a symbolic and constructed category, manifested as much in what the hero looks like as in what the look means. Bachchan’s somewhat freakish height apart, of course not all of the popular male stars of later Bollywood have been of a certain uniform “average” height and build, but that is beside the point. What is crucial is the uses “average” and “non-average” embodiment have been put to. As Chute writes, “no one in the current crop of younger actors has anything like Amitabh Bachchan’s moral authority, which is the grown-up distillation of his youthful anger” (2005: 56). Indeed, Chute suggests a vertical axis for Bachchan’s image crystallizing into a metaphor for time itself, as in playing the cruel patriarchs that in his earlier films he defied and resisted for directors with whose fathers he started his career, the older Bachchan seems to sweep transgenerational rebellious angst upward into the solitary anguish of the dark lord, who towers over challenges from his own cinematic offspring, new copies of his own earlier prototype (ibid.: 55); ontogeny repeats phylogeny as Bachchan’s transmogrification crystallizes the passage of cine-historical and personal-historical time into a teleology of masculinity, which morphs to repeat difference on principle to produce a new kind of his/-hysterical new man (ibid.: 55). The younger actors’ embodiment as emblematic and not empirical anatomy has been used here to frame a wider exegetic transformation of cinematic and spectatorial consciousness about the “average” man, the regular guy. This guy cries more often, feels more flamboyantly, acts more roguishly, has more buddies, girlfriends, girl friends, and “girlie” friends, forms part of ensembles and performance troupes more often, is more often a part of multiple plots and parallel and overlapping affective realms, travels and moves around outside of the heartland of the Hindi film industrial mise en scène more easily, and is perhaps, in the end, more like his putative new Indian spectator or the latter’s aspirational selfimage. However, this newness is, in a sense, only a repetition of differences; while certainly “new” in terms of difference from the earlier vertical hero, this language of the male body resuscitates the difference of older, pre-colonial, and

180  Love triangles at home and abroad pre-national practices and rhetorics of sexuality (Vanita 2005: 2–3). To quote Waugh again, this hero is “not so much the new man (since Indian male stars have always had permission to weep and recite poetry) as the revival of more traditional romantic conceptions of gender roles” (2001: 286; emphasis mine). Along with this, following the logic of such heterogenizing representational possibilities, he also sometimes acts gay, looks gay, plays gay, and even is a little gay.14 In other words, he is an icon of the countermodern appearing as the ultra-modern. In this present incarnation, both such embodiments and such representations are symbolic constructs gesturing at the liminal and the countermodern, and their coeval formation (that at first appears to be yet another Hindi cinematic episode of repeating first a popular/heroic subject and second a popular joke) is actually very likely co-constitutive, topical, and not accidental. The formal and thematic code of repetition in Hindi cinema thus generates subjunctive and liminal countermodern male-sexed subjects in a few ways. As far as repetition is concerned, we have seen the reincarnation of male heroic embodiment in an altered and rhizomatic manner, in order to create what might be considered an affinity with the countermodern and almost non-cinematic spectator, a spectator who exceeds and replaces the high theoretical filmic paradigm of spectatorship as imaginary signification with spectatorship as physical co-embodiment. Such identification is, of course, in most ways, highly fantasmatic. In Jaan-E-Mann, the two heroes retain astral stature—Suhaan as an actor in Bhojpuri film, and Agastya as an astronaut—neither position easily within the reach of the average cine-going fan. In KHNH, SRK’s character remains “angelic” and spectral until the very end, making it impossible for any spectator to truly catch up; we see a materialist version of this in BB. Still, however fantasmatic or illusory such identification and affinity might be, a suspicion that BB wryly suggests, while appearing to disprove it, is that this repeating as difference shifts the grounds of identification with the hero or star to representation rather than presentation; it carries a powerful surge of spectatorial and cinephilic identificatory charge. This is repetition in the service of cementing or hardwiring a new relationship of cinematic and cinephilic spectation, whose concurrent result might be a new subjectivity-effect as a new spectatorial-effect, the very theme, in a sense, of BB, a crucial film within this oeuvre of the reconfigured and re-embodied rhizomatic man-of-the-people hero. Besides this repetition as differential embodiment producing new liminal and countermodern subjects, a second kind of repetition is also generated in the coalescing and commensuration of heroic verticality and rhizomatic non-linear sexuality upon the figure of traditional femininity in hetero-romantic plots; the two figurations of masculinity here iterate each other to produce femininity as the (only) real difference. As has been noted above, both figurations of vertical and lateral heroes converge upon the ground of sexuality to distillate traditional “woman” as remainder of experiments with both models of maleness. Third, the objectification of women within sexual subjectivation stories, as well as the maleness of the spectator in fables of spectatorial subjectification via identification, cannot but alert one to the enduring maleness of the spectator. Even in the era of renewed affirmations of the liminal and the countermodern

Love triangles at home and abroad  181 in sexuality and gender discourses, and in the age of national “(post)modernity,” female identity remains the one with no adequate “representation,” neither as star nor as spectator; it remains an inert repeating difference. In fact, as we have seen, women are actually “repeated” to meet the needs of the new love triangle stories, wherein the lack of a fourth person threatens the dissolution or erasure of the third person in the love triangle. To take just one version of such erasure, in earlier Hindi films such as Andaz (1949, Mehbood Khan), Sangam (1964, Raj Kapoor), or Muqaddar Ka Sikandar (1978, Prakash Mehra), as Deshpande reminds us, the problem of the love triangle was the paucity of women: two men loved a woman while also, in certain cases, “loving” one another as best friends or “partners” (2005: 199). In such a case, “the love triangle is premised on the assumption that one of the three has to lose out in the end” (ibid.: 200). In the new movies, however, this problem of triangulation has tended to be solved by the “doubling” of women between two men in ways that do not involve contradictions in the attainment of desire, which would seriously jeopardize filial or confraternal bonds. Indeed, Deshpande characterizes this tongue-incheek as a “bigamous” solution, but, in any case, the solution seems to be one of cloning more women for consumption where needed: “The consumerism of the new globalised hero, then, extends as much to the sexual realm as it does to the economic” (Deshpande 2005: 201). When not enough women are available to go around among the men, the woman is essentially split or doubled to make do without breaking men’s hearts. Men’s feelings are thus never permanently hurt, and men do not die of lost love. And when women are not “cloned” into enough versions to satisfy all competing male desires, sometimes men console themselves with each other’s companionship, as in Dostana (2009), offering another happy permutation of the imbrication of the male queer subtext in the heteronormative text. Spectatorship and stardom remain bound up within vectors of confraternity and relations of homosociality. In this cinema, the spectator as the subject desiring the image on screen, as Mulvey had suggested in her early, muchdiscussed and much-challenged work, usually has been, and remains, male. So does the image, however, contrary to Mulvey’s position, and, in this sense, the only subject position available in Hindi cinema’s spectatorial and scopic complex is that of the male.

The variable and the constant: or repetition redivivus We have seen the changing face of cinematic subjectivation in the last few decades of reconstitutions of the Hindi film hero, from the heights of stardom to lateral moves into fan territory. What remains constant in this field of changing susceptibilities, sensibilities, and perceptions? The answer must come back as follows: what remains constant is the role that performance and embodiment of traditional gender ideology plays. It is a repeat performance that, no matter how much other things change—spatial extension, star bodies, sexual risky business—re-enacts the subservience of all realignments of people, affects, places, and intimacies to the imperial discourse of “traditional family values,” and the “great Indian tradition.” Women’s traditional role in the gender ideologies in which Hindi cinema

182  Love triangles at home and abroad has invested remains, in a sense, the end of the road for producing the liminal or indeed the countermodern. The greater transactional flexibility and finesse of the newer films, KHNH, Jaan-E-Mann, and Dostana, yields the same role and the same value for women in re-stabilizing the teleological narrative of the transnational hetero-patriarchal romance, as it did when the heroines were raising themselves up on stools and beds to serve the hero. If men in the past individualized women for private emotional and familial needs, snatched them away from other predatory men, or robbed the gene pools of rich and recalcitrant fathers, now men gift each other the gift of the girlfriend, and new homosocial sanctimonies are forged in acts of renouncing female lovers for buddies. The hetero-normative gender relationship remains both axial and transactional. It is finally evident that queer enactment in Hindi cinema, like other re-enactments, is nothing new. There have been many enactments, many versions of queer performance and queer masquerade in different times and at different places. Comparing two high points in such queer masquerades with their axial gendered transactions, as I have done above, leads one to surmise that queer performance is not about queerness, but about the embodiment of masculinity. Just as the spectator is finally male, the queer is ultimately only a man.

Notes

Introduction 1 On “excess”, see Thompson 1986 and Barthes 2006. 2 Turner states: “This term, literally ‘being-on-a-threshold,’ means a state or process which is betwixt and between the normal, day-to-day cultural and social states and processes of getting and spending, preserving law and order, and registering structural status” (“Frame, Flow, and Reflection: Ritual and Drama as Public Liminality”, Performance in Postmodern Culture, 1977: 33). 3 Pursuing the rhetoric and analysis suggested by Badiou’s term “fictional” and his own term “absolute performative”, Derrida writes of “the theatrical space of the politics of our time”, wherein “the essence of political force and power, where that power makes the law, where it gives itself right … passes via the fable, i.e. speech that is both fictional and performative” (2009: 290–1). 4 I derive this formulation of the presentational and the representational as “proletarian” versus “bourgeois” from Ray 1985: 35. 5 See also Govil 2008: 203. 6 Badiou writes, “politics stakes it existence on its capacity to establish a relation to both the void and excess which is essentially different from that of the State; it is this difference alone that subtracts politics from the one of statist re-insurance” (2005: 110). 7 See Levinas on the “presence of the face” (1998: 33). Levinas views the image or the “face” as a primary category in a different theory of language, because, for him, language is not signification but invocation: “Invocation is prior to commonality. It is a relation with a being who, in a certain sense, is not in relation to me—or, if you like, who is in relation with me only inasmuch as he is entirely in relation to himself [sic] … It is this presence for me of a being identical to itself that I call the presence of the face. The face is the very identity of a being … neither a sign allowing us to approach a signified, nor a mask hiding it” (1998: 33; italics mine). This theory of immediate presence, a theory of being as invocation, is a contravention of Sausseurean or Derridean meaning systems, whereby signification, or its de-centering, remains at the center of any system of meaning. The belatedness or alterity of presence as signaled by a structuralist or poststructuralist theory of signs, either as signifier or as signified, is tethered to a politics of absence, of mediation, of deferral and de-centering. Levinas replaces those with a politics of identity that is based on a theory of presence, of immediacy, “of personal identity, irreducible to the concept” (37). Incidentally, such a theory of presence, of invocation, and of the “face” also underlies the Indian onto-visual paradigm of “Darshan”, which has been glossed by several interpreters as the unmediated showing of the deity’s face to the devotee, providing a special, channeled, communicative access of the devotee to the deity, wherein the (ineffable) image, rather than the desiring gaze predicated upon lack (according to critical interpretations of the “male” spectator of classic realist cinema) holds power and primacy. On Darshan, see Babb 1981 and Eck 1981: 5.

184  Notes   8 Jain 2007: 7–20. Her quotation of Godard’s credo for neorealism is on p. 9.   9 Conversations with Paresh Rawal (actor), Rahul Dholakia (director), and Anjum Rajabali (scriptwriter) in July 2007. 10 I use this term as Metz defines it for cinema’s symbolic aspect, as joining some of the features of a “base” or infrastructural context of signification for cinema, as well as cinema’s historical and social contexts and aesthetic practices—its “enonce” or statement, in addition to its enunciation. 11 Other useful accounts are Olalquiaga 1992 and Soja 2000: 331. 12 Bachchan is signified by dematerialized or disembodied contexts in this film in at least three ways. First, the plot of Slumdog Millionaire—poor orphaned boy from the slums bests corrupt hegemony and gets the girl he loves over social obstacles to their union, in the process re-establishing faith and a system of justice—is the happier version of the plot of several Bachchan hits, such as Amar Akbar Anthony, Deewar, Shakti, Don, Trishul, Muqqaddar ka Sikandar, etc. In this sense, Bachchan’s cinematic text is clearly Slumdog Millionaire’s urtext, an original that continues to generate numerous re-enactments. Second, Bachchan in this film is the acknowledged reigning superstar of Hindi cinema, whose arrival near one of Bombay’s slums for a shoot causes a public stampede of fans running to see him, to be near him, or to get his autograph. Third, Slumdog Millionaire’s plot engine is the hero’s recovery of his lost love through his appearance as a guest on the very popular diegetic quiz show, whose exegetic counterpart is the highly popular Indian version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire”, reflecting the rags-to-riches dream of many an Indian, hosted by none other than Bachchan himself. I recognize that Slumdog Millionaire is not a “Hindi” film; nevertheless, I find it an apt choice to exemplify a Hindi cinematic phenomenon, because the film’s symbolic, as well as imaginary, elements are suffused with Hindi cinematic motifs and myths. 13 Here I refer the reader to Derrida’s highly charged reading of the allusive aporia of writing: “Are there signatures? Yes, of course, every day. Effects of signatures are the most common thing in the world. But the condition of possibility of those effects is simultaneously, once again, the condition of their impossibility, of the impossibiity of their rigorous purity” (1998: 20). 14 This process of mythologization subtends a second order of signification according to Barthes’ model of myth, which consists of a second order of signification, taking the “sign/signified” of language as its “signifier” and creating a new or second order of signification or sign therefrom. The end result of language—its ultimate sign and also its meaning—becomes the beginner signifier of the schema of myth and ends in a second order sign that is basically a form, not a meaning or concept (Barthes 1957: 115). 15 Ong 2006: 22, paraphrasing Arendt 1998 (1958): 7–9. 16 The technologically fettered body would be the one guided in its movements by colonial apparatuses of mobility and self-realization, such as the railways, prisons, bureaucracy, or schools. See Javed Majeed, Autobiography, Travel and Postnational Identity: Gandhi, Nehru and Iqbal. Houndmills, Basingstoke, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2007: 76–100. 17 Susan Stanford Friedman, “Feminism, State Fictions and Violence: Gender, Geopolitics and Transnationalism”, Communal/Plural. 9:1 2001: 119.

1 Structure, event, and liminal practices in recent Hindi films   1 See the introduction.   2 Nietzsche wrote: “the eyes of the gods still looked down on moral struggles, on the heroism and self-inflicted torture of the virtuous … unwitnessed virtue was something inconceivable for this nation of actors” (1997: 45; emphasis mine).   3 In what Lata Mani called “an effect of a colonial discourse” in her well-known work on the British abolition of sati in nineteenth-century India (1987), the abolition

Notes  185

4

5 6

7 8 9

of sati by the British was an event that influenced modern discourses on women’s rights in India, and marked the beginning of internalization of British official insistence upon “reform” by emerging “nationalists” like Ram Mohun Roy, who began importing statist rhetoric and demands into the hitherto non-official private and “mytho-religious” sphere of Indian/Bengali indigenous elites. Chakrabarty describes these as having previously been oblique to, and oblivious of, a consciousness of “nation-state” formations (Mani 1987: 122–3). Gender and women’s rights became the normative fulcrum of this new constitution of the “nationalist” private in this moment of nationalism. The fact that this gendered normativization was not immutable as either a gender rights phenomenon or as proof of “modernity” is testified by the resurgence of mytho-religious non-official support for, and re-enactments of, sati by countermodern publics in twentieth-century independent India, as well as by Partition gender violence over women’s citizenship and patriarchal disgruntlement over their personal law reform in the forties and the fifties, as discussed in the second chapter. Charles Heimsath has made the case that Indian nationalism and Indian cultural nationalisms were two separate, though related, movements in the late nineteenth century. Cultural nationalisms, especially as emerging out of nineteenth-century social reform movements, did indeed demarcate a special, separate sphere of the national private. Political nationalism, on the other hand, had undertaken the deployment of political rationalist ideas of liberalism and democracy in the service of national liberation from colonization. The agendas of these two nationalisms did not always overlap. This view extends to Chakrabarty’s articulation of plural national publics and privates that were neither co-existent, polar, nor constituted by relationship with the official state. However, Heimsath reinscribes Chakrabarty’s trajectory of the later constitutive compartmentalization and inter-dependence of nation and state in his example of gender-related social reform controversies and their impact on interpellating and articulating the nineteenth-century political leadership’s negotiation of autonomous identity vis-à-vis colonial rule: the Age of Consent (for Marriage) Bill (1891) controversy precipitated the alignment of pro- or anti-reform nationalist ideologies as pro- or anti-Western, i.e. responsive in one way or another to the official state. Clearly, the necessary feminization of the private in this instance is an act of mutual translation of the public and private spheres as both possible and necessary, making the spheres equally continuous and contiguous, the “other other” of each with respect to the official colonial state. As Chakrabarty argues, the conversion of pre-national private space into a nationalist political laboratory for ideas of public rationality propels gender into the foreground of nationalist thought, pressuring the private and the national to assemble, thereby generating countermodernity, which thrives on spatial (and temporal) disjunctural, disarticulating assemblages. On Ramanujan’s views on repetition in Indian social and narrative contexts, one would do well to consult Corey Creekmur’s insightful essay (2007) discussing the uses and nature of repetition in the so-called “Devdas phenomenon.” Another understanding of event and context can be found in Diana Taylor’s distinction between a “narrative” or textual structure of historic re-enactment (she calls this performatics) and a structure of “scenarios” (2003: 28). Substituting the performed “scenario” for the social script or standardized historical text, Taylor’s analysis of social dramas of everyday life sees “scenarios as meaning-making paradigms that structure social environments, behaviors … allows [sic] for many possible ‘endings’ … resuscitates and reactivates [sic] old dramas … [that] have localized meanings … But are ultimately flexible and open to change” (28–9). “Rang de Basanti,” Film Information 28 January 2006: 1. This is a far cry from agitprop, of course. Some obvious examples would be E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924), Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet (1966–75), Aamir Khan’s earlier Lagaan (Ashutosh Gowariker, 2001), as well as historic figures such as Margaret Noble (sister Nivedita, 1867–1911)

186  Notes 10 11

12 13 14

15

16

17

18 19 20 21

22

and Annie Besant (1847–1933), who dedicated their lives to causes led by charismatic Indian men. Vivian Sobchak defines this as a spectatorship that “looks less to the cinema as a phenomenal object than as a phenomenological experience” (2004: 260) of the historically and culturally competent and “knowing” viewer. Fiza (2000; about an Indian Muslim turned Pakistani terrorist); Dil Se (1998; about a hill woman turned anti-national terrorist); Dil Chahta Hai (2001; about sophisticated metrosexuals pushing the boundaries of traditional love and marriage); Kal Ho Naa Ho (2003; about diasporic Indians reinventing India in the city of New York); Ek Chalis ki Last Local (2007; about contemporary urban crises and “aspirational” identities, new middle-class angst as evacuation of middle class ethics and turn to “criminality”), and Dostana (2008; about two men enacting queerness as a means of getting close to a woman who desires neither) are all examples of such diverse new cinema. Carl Schmitt 1987 is quoted in Ong 2006: 4–5. Rajadhyaskha and Prasad et al. The song goes, “Ay dil, hai mushkil, jeena yehan; zara hathke, zara bachke, yeh hai Bombay meri jaan” (“Dear heart, it is hard living here; be careful, be fearful, this is Bombay, my life). The address of “meri jaan” is both the listener and the city itself, but the mood of the song is one of light-hearted joshing. For instance, Wallerstein claims “in almost every case statehood preceded nationhood,” which means that ideas about race necessitated by the necessary division of labor in interstate systems underlie much of the ideology of nationalism, a point also made by Balibar (Wallerstein, Race, Class, Nation, 80–1; Balibar, Race, Class, Nation, 53, 59). See also Anurag Kashyap’s Black Friday (2003) and the crime and police dramas starring Amitabh Bachchan in the seventies and eighties—Sholay (“Embers”, Ramesh Sippy, 1975), Deewar (“The Wall”, Yash Chopra, 1975), and Shakti (“The Power”, Ramesh Sippy, 1982)—for earlier representations of the police as familiar foes in this sense. The state is further embodied and endowed with affect in Deewar in the figure of the policeman, who is the brother of the criminal Amitabh and who weeps as he hunts down his brother. Tukaram’s name is an obvious echo of Sant Tukaram, patron saint of Maharashtra, the state in which Bombay is located, and cause celebre of my traffic-related proxemic experience in Pune, June 2009 (see introduction), on whose life an acclaimed Marathi film was made in 1936. This was also shown in the forties and fifties, when the citizen was not the one who was found in place, but the one who was either found or rescued, that is, performed or witnessed a dramatic act, to become a citizen (see chapter two). Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920), in Complete Psychological Works (18: 57). Brooks calls them “the deepest relations of life, as in the celebrated voix du sang” (1994: 19). Metz 1982: 63–4. Metz’s scenario helps substitute the poetics and metaphysics of theatre criticism that for so long dominated Indian cinema theory for one of metaphysical absence or indeterminacy and postmodern play that is more properly the domain of film criticism, as Ajay Gehlawat has pointed out (Gehlawat 2010: xvii– xvii). In my argument, I am not finding or advocating a re-emergence of a theatrical suppression of absence, but a mechanism of iteration as a subjectival device that ambiguates the very binary of absence versus presence, the very metaphysics of embodiment, in favor of a metaphysics of presentation of the represented. While Sobchak herself differentiates her theory of the “cinesthetic subjet” (68) as embodied and literal and experiencing cinema cross-sensorially from “anorexic theories of identification that have no flesh on them” (71), by which she means Metzian and psycho-linguistic theories of spectatorship, I choose to abjure this strict separation

Notes  187

23

24

25

26 27 28

and to synthesize instead these two theories of cinematic subjectivation as in many ways parallel and organically related, promising a richer debate on spectatorship together rather than separately. The original Metzian model of spectatorship and the signifying apparatus is by some counts outdated and modified, including by Metz himself (Sandro 1985), but according to other accounts it still serves to anchor the antecedents of much contemporary film theory to primarily psycho-linguistic models of spectatorship and cinematic signification where Metz’s early work on the “imaginary signifier” and the screen as mirror is still foundational (Altman 1985: 523). I am, of course, tracing the textual and meta-textual modeling of just such a narrative in recent Hindi films via BB, where “mirroring,” which Altman identifies as the definitive metaphor of both the signifying apparatus and of spectatorial identification, is significant both as an intra-textual gloss upon cinematic signification per se, and as a trope of spectatorial or “fan” subjectivation. BB therefore is the paradigmatic new Hindi cinematic “reflexive text, which derives its identity from a portrayed disparity between reality and its representation” (Altman 1985: 523–4). Here I diverge from critics like Vijay Mishra (2002), and to a lesser extent, Sunny Singh (2008; see chapter three), who draw upon Indian myths such as the Mahabharata and the Ramayana as the “grand syntagmatiques” of Hindi cinema, explaining plot, theme, and above all, characterization. In contrast, I suggest that the continuous breakdown and assault of these mythic syntagms and structures are what mark Hindi cinema as liminal, especially when its implicit but dominant technique and theme of repetition is systematically examined in the contexts of spectatorship, political subjectivation, ideology, plot, visual style, and so forth. Much as the “real” viewer themselves might be doing in what Boris Eikhenbaum called “inner speech” (cited in Ray 2001: 23), much as fans in the auditorium might be repeating favorite or notorious lines of dialogue, thrusting themselves thereby deep and far into the “cinematic” mise en scène. The literature on filmic darsan is extensive; I will refer here to some of the most wellknown examples such as Prasad 1998, Vasudevan 2000, Rajadhyaksha 2000, Mishra 2002, Dwyer and Patel 2002, Pinney 2004, Eck 1981, Lutgendorf 2006: 227–256, etc. This will be covered in more depth in chapter three. Descartes’ separation of the spirit and the body—“Cogito, ergo sum”—is a parallel epistemology of the dissociated subject, consisting of a dematerialized consciousness and a collapse of time-space categories and limits of identity.

2 Imagining the past in the present: violence, gender, and citizenship in Hindi films   1 Cited in index, but not discussed in Rajadhyaksha and Willemen 1994.   2 Watan review in FilmIndia, February 1938: 40–2.   3 I thank Charu Gupta, Ketu Katrak, Pritika Chowdhury and others present at the feminist pre-conference panel of the Annual South Asia conference at Wisconsin, Madison, 2008, for first raising the issue of “silence” surrounding Partition’s gendered violence. I argue that, while these discourses are not always “silent” on Partition violence, what they register is the difficulty or the impossibility of the “communication” of the particular or singular experience as singular or particular. These discourses resort instead to a collective narrative or a collective silence about these experiences. My debt here to Butler’s work on gender performance as “iteration” is obvious.   4 See Khory’s “The Shah Bano Case: Some Political Implications,” Baird 1993: 134–5. Khory details how, under Nehru and his grandson Rajiv Gandhi, prime ministers respectively in the fifties and the nineties, the state faced and defaulted on this identical question: “how does the state reconcile group interests with the demands of common citizenship” (135). On religion in the Indian context see Bhagwati in

188  Notes   5   6   7

  8

  9 10

11 12 13

14

15 16

17

Baird 1993: 17; Van der Veer 1996; Hansen 2001; Cohn 1988; Lloyd and Lloyd 1987; Varshney 2002. An earlier draft was proposed in 1944, but was shelved temporarily (Virdi 2003: 68–9). Also see Mishra 2002: 63. Rajadhyaksha 2003: 35. Identifying the film’s address constitutes filmic spectatorship for Metz; identifying the state’s address constitutes political citizenship for Rajadhyaksha, Menon, and the constitutionalists and critics represented in Baird 1993. The link between citizen and spectator was discussed in chapter one as an ongoing dynamic of subjectivation in the cinematic universe. A salacious scandal arose from the “incestuous” mating of the “mother-son” pair in real life: the Muslim actress Nargis (Radha, or “Mother India”) and the Hindu actor Sunil Dutt (her intransigent son Birju) married after Mother India was filmed, and their engagement was apparently suppressed before the film’s release for fear that it would muddy the film’s reception (Movie August 1984: 90). I draw upon this when I discuss the film Lahore (1949) below, to elaborate on the shadowy issues of legitimacy, sexuality, female chastity, and contamination. While the villain of the brochure is the Muslim, the villain in Mother India was a Hindu moneylender; yet both were protégés and pawns of the British according to nationalist discourse. The other film where Nargis plays a very similar role is Aag (1948), but the story of the gendered victim of Partition is there alluded to only covertly, while in Lahore this forms the very overt theme of the film, the very narrative of the gender discourse of Partition. See Mishra 2002: 68–71, 79, 84–7; Thomas 1989: 16–8, 20, 25, 27. Tamas or “darkness” is the sanskritized title of Indian parallel film-maker Govind Nihalani’s well-known eighties television serial on the Partition. Nargis uses the vernacular word “andhera.” See Kabir, “Introduction,” x. I do not discuss Mughal-e-Azam in detail in this essay, as it strictly evades, to some extent, the question of defining the new citizen altogether. However, it is not free from the impulse to draw the terrain of India, and to appeal for the “cultural syncretism” remarked upon by Mishra. Thus, in its very opening scenes, the spectator is hailed by the film speaking as “India” itself: “I am India.” Later in this essay I will discuss its crucial re-emergence in the wake of late twentieth-century films (discussed below) as the ambassador of Indian goodwill to Pakistan. The migrations of films are sometimes as politically fraught as that of bodies in twentieth-century South Asia. See also Roy 1998: 152–3; the nineties saw a renewed spate of legal battles on various issues of sexual minority rights, actors’ rights, industry regulations, and self-regulation, as well as anxious industry responses to the increasingly threatening interventions of the Shiv Sena in Bombay, claiming to fish out terrorist and pro-Pakistan elements in the industry supporting those who perpetrated the 1993 Mumbai bomb blasts (“Thackeray Softens Stand,” 1993; “Film producers clash over star rules,” 1995; “Film bodies deny Pak star ban,” 1993; Mohamed and Sardesai 1993; and “No guidelines on films: Pharande,” 1993). Re-enactments and reactivations of the liminal and the subjunctive, as well as the countermodern, in the nineties are no surprise. As he writes, Metz’s apparatus theory “developed a distinctly political meaning in the India of the 1940s and early 1950s” (35); see also 2003: 34–5; Vasudevan 2000: 113. Vasudevan 2000: 105, 109. Vasudevan, however, keeps the family in focus as one level or layer of that wider “social” space. To him, it is characters’ movements between extra-familial and familial spaces that constitute their publicly melodramatic history, a perception significant for my analysis of post-independence films and their ambivalent suture of national and familial subjects. My translation. As we know, Muslim personal law was left untouched by the Hindu Code bill reformers, particularly the Congress for fear of further alienating the

Notes  189 18

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23 24 25

Muslim minorities, to the chagrin of Hindus who opposed reform of their traditional family law (itself a residue of colonial legal interventions). Patel’s editorial piece, “Is Nehru Trembling?” in the May 1956 issue of FilmIndia quite surpasses his other rants in the fictional minoritization of Hindus (a numerical majority in India) and the fear of Muslim sexual battery on Hindus (3–7). With regard to the notion of the land belonging to Hindus, one must examine the early twentiethcentury Hindu fundamentalist or Hindutva theories of Savarkar and Golwalkar incarnated in the contemporary political approaches of the RSS, the BJP, and the VHP, today’s cultural and political Hindu fundamentalists in India. See Chakraborty 2000; Jaffrelot 1996; Gupta 2001; Hansen 2001; Van der Veer 1997; Brass 1974; Varshney 2002; among others. For this and for information about the ICC report’s findings on the issue of interregional linguistic divides and their consequences for Indian cinema see Jaikumar 2006: 98–100, 266. FilmIndia, February 1956: 4. See also editorial April 1956: 11. Literally, the Punjabi father is the Tamil father’s boss at work. Director Yash Chopra tries his hand at a spuriously “documentary” turn in fictional histories of borders, partitions, and abductions past and present, refracted through the lens of romantic ruptures, only in Veer-Zaara (2004). See Sarkar (2009) on the allegorization of trauma in Chopra’s films. Chopra made Dharmputra (Godson) as early as 1961, but its overt themes were intra-state Hindu-Muslim antagonism and violence in India, and did not explicitly relate those to the Partition. Indian Express review, 19 January 1991. Chakravarty 1993: 165. The story derives from a brief episode in Lapierre and Collins’ Freedom at Midnight (Gahlot 2004: 110).

3 The man formerly known as the actor: when Shah Rukh Khan reappeared as himself   1 Raised by Muslim adoptive parents, the original saint Kabir was a Muslim weaver whose name meant one of the 99 names of God in Islam, but he had followers among Hindus and Sikhs, as well as Muslims.   2 Madan and Nandy suggest the “non-nativeness” and “non-naturalness” of secularism as a Western ideal transplanted to unsuitable Indian grounds. These critics argue that secularism in India is not a political phenomenon at all, as the grounds of tolerance and mutual respect have long been communal and cultural, rather than official and state-sponsored; they point particularly to secularism’s vexed status once categorized as a Western “political” import (Hansen 2000).   3 Ashwini Malik, a film-maker and scriptwriter in Mumbai, says, “No one can direct Shah Rukh Khan. Shah Rukh Khan directs himself as actor.”   4 SRK was himself a champion hockey player in high school, according to his testimony in Shiekh 2006: 62.   5 The echoing parallels with minority citizenship as citizenship in name only, and not in fact, will be hard to miss here.   6 Called the “wisest fool,” one of his poorly executed reforms was the “forced” token currency, or the replacement of gold and silver coins with copper coinage in order to strengthen the exchequer with bullion, an abysmally failed measure that Naik explicitly recalls in the context of criticizing Kabir Khan’s reformist zeal, the metaphor pinning Kabir Khan to his Muslimness.   7 One member of the team, Gul, is Muslim, but she gets the least exposure as an individual player.   8 Here I am drawing upon Hayden White’s reflections on the changed nature of “historiography” in modern and post-modern formations, which draws in turn upon Frederic Jameson’s work on modern and postmodern style: “literary (and for that

190  Notes matter filmic) ‘modernism’ (whatever else it may be) marks the end of storytelling … Modernism thereby effects what Fredric Jameson calls the ‘de-realization’ of the event itself” (White 1996: 24–5).   9 Lal (1998) comes to mind here, though his essay does not account for the reconstitutions, impersonations, and re-embodiments we see in Chak de India in Kabir Khan’s portrayal as a Muslim played by a Muslim actor, who is not in the end permitted to be “counted” as a Muslim.

4 Romancing religion: Bollywood’s painless globalization   1 Rao, “Globalisation and Bollywood”, http://imagineasia.bfi.org.uk/guide/surveys/ globalization/index.html. See also Van der Veer 1994: 107; Hansen 2000, 2001. Commentators on South Asia no longer exclaim at the co-constitutive or simultaneous relationship of fissiparous neo-nativism and hegemonic economic developmentalism or globalization.   2 A fan on sulekha.com writes about the film Ek Rishtaa (“The Bond of Love”, 2001, Sunil Darshan): “Amitabh’s deep voiced dialog [sic] delivery remains as impressive as ever and would be a reason alone to watch any Bollywood movie twice. Many people don’t know he is half a Sardarji, his mother was a Sikh. Another great thing in Bollywood movies is the increasing use of Punjabi as a deference to the biggest NRI group outside India and whenever it is said the Punjabis always laugh in appreciation for eg [sic] when the policeman says to Monish ‘Yaar tu aadmi hai ki pajama?’” (http://www.sulekha.com/movies/moviereview.aspx?cid=119629&rvid=132072&p ageno=22). Indeed, the Big B—the once-angry young man of Hindi cinema—has begun to pontificate and posture extensively since the nineties, as though he were a covert cultural ambassador of Punjabi nationalism: “Mahiya o Mahiya,” “Ek Punjabun, Kudi Punjabun,” etc.   3 An excellent purview of Bombay and the film industry is to be found in Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City.   4 Once the breakaway icon of radical popular dissent and mass political disaffection, he changed with the times and now continues to cast his long shadow over neoliberal Bollywood in such mega-starrers as Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (K3G or “Sometimes Happiness, Sometimes Sorrow” [my translation], 2001, Karan Johar). This film’s now (in)famous motto, incidentally, is “It’s all about the family.”   5 Doubtless this textuality of the Bachchan child’s body is a motif redeployed from Yash Chopra’s Deewar (1975), where the inscription—“My father is a thief”—is, however, a matter for filial shame, not pride.   6 Lutgendorf’s review in http://www.uiowa.edu/~incinema/Mard.html is irrepressibly entertaining; a must-read.   7 See Bhatt and Mukta 2000: 412 and Chakraborty 2003 on Savarkar and the RSS; see Varshney 2002: 55–68 on the BJP.   8 On the crucial function of the tableau form as a site for rearticulation of tradition and modernity in fifties Hindi films see Vasudevan 1989 and 2000b.   9 For instance, as Arvind Rajagopal has written: “In India, the invocation of religion summons up the unresolved debates between nationalism and social reform, and presents Hinduism as an implicitly conservative force. By contrast, in the US, Hindu religion is more self-consciously a medium of cultural reproduction” (Rajagopal 2000: 467). He also writes, “The mainly cultural emphasis exhibited by Hindutva in the US represents, perhaps, the fruition of Hindu nationalists’ ecumenical assertions, in many ways difficult to achieve in the context of highly politicized divisions of caste and community in India” (ibid.: 489). 10 See also Sengupta 2002; Thapar 2004. 11 In a similar vein, Ong has written of the Chinese that their “[seemingly] parallel [East-West] narratives … disguise common civilizational references in a world where the market is absolutely transcendental” (1999: 7).

Notes  191 12 One reviewer on the diaspora website sulekha.com responded to this with “Basically one big coke commercial … I’ve never seen such blatant product placement!” (http:// sulekha.com/movies/moviereview.aspx?cid=77696&rvid=307524&pageno=3). 13 Pranil, Singapore, 16 August 2001, writes, “the blatant product placements is very insulting, imagine [sic] watching a commercial for Coke … in the movie itself!” Manfrommatunga, Mumbai, 11 August 2001, writes, “the use of brand placement for advertising is a joke. Coke as cokemohabbat.com and Pass-Pass (a mouth-freshener) are blatantly thrust upon the audience … Subhash Ghai has gone on record saying that his target market is the foreign market where people pay $7–10 for a ticket and he does not really care for the guy paying 10 rupees in a small town in Bihar.” Gussifinknottle of Sydney writes, “The movie can be described as one big advertising arena—for products ranging from Coke to Hero bicycles.” Skfazil in Yorba Linda and Kamran–3 in Toronto protest “product placements” (IMBD, Yaadein user comments, 2001). 14 All of the film-specific data are taken from the International Business Overview Standard (http://ibosnetwork.com). 15 Dwyer and Patel describe these films as follows: “These films revive a form of the feudal family romance in a new, stylish, yet unmistakably Hindu, patriarchal structure, which is connected to the (largely indirect) part they play in the resurgence of Hindutva politics in the 1980s and ’90s” (2002: 22). 16 The common slang term for things related to film across India is “filmi,” as in “filmi bol (speech),” “filmi chaal (fashion),” “filmi ishtyle (style)” (Dwyer and Patel 2002: 8). 17 See Mukta 2000: 460 on the Aryanist cult of Ram in the diaspora. 18 See also Bhatt and Mukta 2000: 428, 429; Kumar 2005: 236–8. 19 Varshney writes that “ethnic groups often fight over economic resources … ethnic conflicts are not always about identities … Essentialism makes it hard to explain why, if animosities are so historically deep and so rooted in cultural differences, tensions and violence between groups tend to ebb and flow at different times, or why the same groups live peacefully in some places but fight violently in others” (2002: 26–8). 20 Kamat et al. 2004: 7, 13–7. The colonial doctrine of “we want your labour, not your bodies” (ibid.: 17) has reached hyperreal fulfillment in the phenomenon of outsourced services in global production, telecommunications, and finance, and has maximized the neoliberal separation of economies (labor) from politics (bodies). 21 The International Business Overview Standard records in its trade note section that the film did “2,341 shows in 847 days of its run at Mumbai’s Liberty cinema. It ran 105 weeks in regular shows and 16 weeks in noon shows” (http://ibosnetwork.com/ filmbodetaisl.asp?id=Hum+Aapke+Hain+Kaun). 22 The Ramjanambhoomi movement in Ayodhya, a case of intense anti-Muslim violence in recent Indian history has been well described in Gupta and Sharma 1996. Anand Patwardhan’s documentary, Father Son and Holy War (1994), recent nuclear testing in India, the Godhra anti-Muslim massacre case (2002), and Rajagopal’s summer camp experiences are all accounts of the coded or unmasked violence of this political engagement in India and abroad. In response, sadly, the Indian state has amassed a retaliatory level of unrestrained violence against “perpetrators” (Narain 2005). The cycle of violence continues unabated between state, individuals, and law enforcement, without sufficient or real attempts to draw on existing inter-ethnic or communal structures for upholding peace and accountability. 23 See Rajagopal 2000: 475.

5 Love triangles at home and abroad: male embodiment as queer enactment   1 I use the term “representation” in this sentence as a somewhat less than fortuitous phenomenon, as an abstraction rather than a reality of being, in the sense that Deleuze discusses the difference between representation and repetition in his influential book,

192  Notes

  2

  3

  4   5

  6

  7

  8   9 10 11

Difference and Repetition (1994). Deleuze argues that repetition actually produces difference, whereas representation produces foreclosed sameness. The term representation, as used by Deleueze, in this context can also be paradigmatically mapped onto Badiou’s use of the same term to suggest the “normative” or “normal,” and onto Freudian psychoanalytic theory, which predicts the interminable nature of analysis. The duo of repetition-representation informs and troubles poststructuralist and postmodern theory in ways that I have suggested throughout this book; my foundational formulations of these concepts are laid out particularly in the introduction and chapter one. In some ways, it was an Amitabh vehicle that began this trend; in Deewar (1975, Yash Chopra) he is said to have portrayed Haji Mastan, a then-famed and feared Muslim gangster. However, film aesthetic and ideology were both updated, transformed, and re-interpreted in the series of noir films of the digitally enhanced nineties and later, including Ram Gopal Varma’s Satya (1998) and Company (2002), Mahesh Manjrekar’s Vaastav (“The Reality,” 1999), Anurag Kashyap’s Black Friday (2004), Ek Chalis ki Last Local (“Last Local at 1:40,” 2007, Sanjay Khanduri), and Shootout at Lokhandwala (2007, Apoorva Lakhia), all of which depict a rather more subterranean and rhizomatic world in a much more surreal and fast-paced visual idiom. Muslim heroes of the Hindi film industry have been much written about and questioned regarding their connections with the (significantly Muslim) underworld. Beginning with actor Sanjay Dutt’s well-known troubles with the state on account of his so-called terrorist and Muslim sympathies (his mother, Nargis, was a Muslim), press outpourings regarding the “dubious” characters of the Muslim stars SRK, Aamir Khan, and especially “bad boy” Salman Khan have been numerous. See “Shakeel May be My Fan, says Salman,” 2003; Mohamed and Sardesai 1993. This interlude of political ambition was, however, brief and stormy. Bachchan himself reportedly said of his political career: “it’s a closed chapter now. I have no regrets” (Bhardwaj 1989: 14). The queer camp that I will elaborate upon in this essay is, especially in the content of popular Hindi films, rather more in the nature of David Miller’s “open secret” than an acutely actualized socio-psychological representation (Miller 1991: 125). As opposed to an explicit text or context of cinematic depiction, these portrayals of queerness are the sort of “twilight” visions that are “something known but unspoken” (Farmer 2000: 7, 249; Miller 1991: 125; Russo 1987; Rose 1986; Hanson 1999). While I think Vitali’s emphatic assertion that “It is the task of film historians to identify as accurately as possible which socio-economic pressures work themselves out in any given film, and to show how they do so” (2011: 241) is salutary in reminding one of the embeddedness of cultural commodities within commodity cultures, her analytic is somewhat astygmatic and rubs out altogether the importance of creative synergies and immaterial ideological forces at work in the making of films. Parallel subjectivations were also occurring not only in the noir underworld films already mentioned, but also in the emergence of powerful documentaries by Anand Patwardhan (Raam ke Naam, “In the Name of Ram,” 1991), who chronicles grassroots activisms, both fundamentalist and secularist. Sholay (“Embers,” 1975, Ramesh Sippy) depicted Bachchan and Dharmendra as two petty convicts hired by an ex-police inspector to avenge his family’s decimation by the feared bandit Gabbar Singh (played by Amjad Khan). Early examples of such films are Do Bigha Zamin (“Two Acres of Land,” 1953, Bimal Roy) and Jagte Raho (“Be Awake!” 1965, Amit and Sambhu Mitra), as well as Shree 420 (“Mr 420,” 1955, Raj Kapoor) and Pyaasa (“Thirst,” 1957, Guru Dutt). Readers are referred to the discussion of status and not gender as the determinant logic of pre-colonial and indigenous same-sex relations in South Asia according to Chatterjee and others in Vanita and Kidwai 2002. There is a single fight scene in Jaane-E-Mann where Salman Khan takes on American thugs (black and white) who are harassing heroine Preity Zinta at a New

Notes  193 York nightclub, but the scene is conceived as both racial and gender drag, with Khan appearing as a Western transvestite in the scene 12 In keeping with later Hindi films’ disavowal of fathers, as I have argued above, Chachu is eventually discredited—acknowledging his failure to guide Suhaan ethically and responsibly—and finally disappears completely from the finale where Suhaan and Piya are found reunited. 13 This syntagm appears clearly derived from KHNH (2003), but with significant “assimilation” even as relating to the transmission of homosexual tropes from homeland to diaspora; in a similar scene in the earlier film, Aman gives Rohit a transmitter device enabling him to guide Rohit in courtship with Naina. He tells Rohit, “Put this in your kaan [Hindi for ‘ear’].” Rohit asks him, seeming perplexed, “Put it where?” The joke apparent to the knowing viewer of this will be the homophony of “kaan” and “gaand,” the latter the north Indian gay slang moniker for “asshole.” However, this deployment of the slang moniker is more pervasive in the subcontinent than in America, thereby increasing the present exegetic shock value of its blurry iteration, as well as the urgency of the pendant demand for its future normalization and diurnalized mythopoesis as the romance of technology and the technology of heteronormative romance in similar diasporic diegetic contexts, as in Jaane-E-Mann (2006). Once the onomatopoeia sinks in, Aman and Rohit laugh about this as Aman inconclusively returns, “I see what you mean.” Jaane-E-Mann’s repetition of this technical device and its reiterative possibilities is an instance of the idiomatization and mainstreaming of the trope of homosexuality in Jaane-E-Mann compared to KHNH, the former a “cooked” avatar compared to KHNH’s very much more “raw” deployment of homosocial “deviance” or “device.” 14 Repercussions of this for female sexualities—alternative, parallel, performative, camp—are critical, burgeoning, and thought-provoking, but that will have to await another inquiry as the parameters of this chapter do not permit that study.

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Index

Aag (1948) 188 Aah (“The Cry,” 1953) 168 Aankhen (“Eyes,” 2001) 161 Abducted Persons (Recovery and Restoration) Act, 1949 74, 75–76, 108 abduction Chhalia (1960) 88–89 failed recovery 88, 104, 108–109 Gadar: Ek Prem Katha (“Revolution: A Love Story,” 2001) 101–102, 105–106, 108–109 Garm Hava (“Hot Winds,” 1973) 97 Lahore (1949) 84, 86–87 ‘lost and found’ 82 Mother India (1957) 78, 81, 83 New Delhi (1965) 94 prevention of through infanticide 138–139 Veer-Zaara (“Veer and Zaara,” 2004) 108 Achhut Kanya (1936) 52 Adajania, Homi 31 adoption, laws relating to 74, 75, 132 Advani, Nikhil 171 advertisements in films 137 Agamben, Giorgio 49, 51, 65 Agnes, Flavia 76, 132 Aiyar, Swarna 75, 101 Akayla (“Alone,” 1991) 156 Alessandrini, A. C. 136 Ali, Muzaffar 60 Amar Akbar Anthony (1977) 145, 184 Ambedkar, Dr. 74, 92 ambiguity in characters and plot 1, 7, 24 of gender 104, 107, 160 of identity 62 sexual 165, 170, 173 social 25, 107 Amin, Shahid 25, 40

Anand, Dev 31, 89, 164 Anand, M. L. 71, 84 Andaaz (1949) 181 Andaz (1949) 133 Anderson, Benedict 25, 39–40 anti-communal performances 93, 97 anti-essentialist theories 3 anticolonial nationalism 27, 36–37, 38–39, 131, 165 Appadurai, Arjun 29, 141 Arendt Hannah 184 Arya Samaj 136 Asif, K. 71, 86 Baazigar (“Gambler,” 1993) 156 Babenco, Hector 61 Bacchetta, Paola 133 Bachchan, Amitabh 16–17, 22–23, 108, 110, 128, 129, 133, 145, 153–154, 155, 156–157, 158, 160–161, 164, 166–167, 168, 169–170, 179, 184, 190, 192 Bachchan, Jaya 158 Bachchanalia 153 Badiou, Alain 7–8, 9–10, 11, 34, 39, 40, 49, 88, 183, 192 Bagchi, J 133 Baghban (“The Gardener,” 2003) 171–173 Bainu, Saira 167 Baird, R 74, 75, 76, 83, 87, 88, 90, 92, 93, 187–188, 196 Bajpai, Manoj 104 Bali, Geeta 31 Balibar and Wallerstein 52, 53 Balibar, Etienne 51 Banerjee, Dibakar 22 Bano, Shah 132, 187–188 Banu, Saira 168, 169 bare life 49, 52, 53, 55, 56, 62, 63, 107 Barjatiya, Sooraj 17, 139, 155 Barthes, Roland 25, 39, 183, 184

212  Index Basu, Monmoyee 74, 133, 135 Bed, Narendra 158 Being Cyrus (2005) 31 Benaam (“Nameless,” 1973) 158 Benegal, Shyam 60, 97 Benjamin, Walter 39, 48, 152 Besant, Annie 186 Bhabha, Homi 50–51 Bhagwati, P. N. 74, 187 Bhandarkar, Madhur 21–22 Bharatiya Janata Party see BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) Bhardwaj, Vishal 161, 192 Bhasin, Kamla 72 Bhatt and Mukta (2000) 126, 127, 136, 190, 191 Bhatt, Vikram 156 Bhumikaa (“The Role,” 1977) 60 Big B see Bachchan, Amitabh Billu Barber (2009) 24, 33, 40, 56–65, 104, 161 Birju 188 BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) 126, 132 Black Friday (2004) 50, 51, 186, 192 body language of stars 153 Bollywood consumerism 136, 140, 141 darshan 130–131 definition 127 family values 133, 147 gender ideology 127–128, 135, 136, 140 globalization of 127–128, 132, 137 iconicity 132, 158 market access 87–88 and masculinity 17 national identity 127–128 piety 132, 133–134, 138, 139, 152 pooja 134, 137, 138, 139–140 and sexuality 171 suppression of social categories 132 Bombay (1995) 145 Bose, Derek 50 Boyle, Danny 22, 160 brand-name films 148 Brass, Paul 189 Brooks, Peter 78, 186 buddy culture 160 Butalia, Urvashi 72, 75 Butler, Judith 65, 113–114, 144, 187 Calcutta Lady, The 69 calendar art 17–18 camp enactment 62, 113–115, 169–170, 173

caste 19–20, 52 censorship 98 Chak de India (“Three Cheers India,” 2007) 16, 51, 104, 106, 111–115, 116–125, 190 Chakrabarty, Amiya 71, 76–78 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 5–6, 27, 35 Chakraborty, Bidyut 127, 189, 190 Chakravarty, Sumita S. 99, 189 Chakravorty, Pramod 157 Chatterjee, Gayatri 171, 192 Chatterjee, Moushumi 158 Chatterjee, Partha 27, 97–98, 132, 165 Chhalia (1960) 88–89 Chhinamool (“Uprooted,” 1951) 97 Chopra, Aditya 31, 156, 160 Chopra, Anupama 23 Chopra, Ravi 171 Chopra, Vidhu Vinod 26, 155 Chopra, Yash 20, 28, 71, 104, 109, 160, 170, 189 Chowdhury, Pritika 187 Chute, David 158, 179 CID (1956) 51, 56 citizenship flexible 136 gendered 76, 83, 84, 86, 88, 90, 107, 185 liminality of 55 minority 189 naturalization 32 nomadic 62, 65 postcolonial 31, 44 and secularism 74–76 and spectatorship/actors 54–55 and violence/terrorism 50–51, 55 class identity 53 Cohn (1988) 188 comedies 90 Company (2002) 31, 192 consumerist culture 17, 24, 46, 68, 129, 136, 139–141, 148 Coolie (1983) 157 Cooper, Darius 90 Coward, Harold G. 75, 87, 90, 92, 93 CPC (Criminal Procedure Code) 132 Creekmur, Corey 185 Criminal Procedure Code (CPC) 132 cultural nationalisms 185 Dalit (untouchability) 52, 74, 92 dance performances, and body shape 159 Darr (“Fear,” 1993) 106, 156 darshan 130–131, 133, 137–138, 150, 183 Darshan, Sunil 190

Index  213 Das, Veena 72 DDLJ see Dilwaale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge Deewar (“The Wall,” 1975) 108, 131, 170, 184, 186, 190, 192 Dekh Kabira Roya (1957) 71, 94 Deleuze and Guattari (2004) 153 Deleuze, Gilles 2, 3, 56, 163, 191 Delhi VHP (Vishwa Hindu Parishad) Mahila Mandal 135 demystification, of stars 154 Derrida, Jacques 16, 40–41, 49, 50, 71, 72, 141–142, 183, 184 Desai, Manmohan 88, 129, 131, 134, 135, 136, 137, 145, 147, 152, 156, 157 Descarte, René 187 Desh Premee (“Patriot,” 1982) 157 Deshpande, Sudhanva 154, 159, 181 Dev D (2009) 21 Devji, Faisal Fatehali 83 Dewan, Karan 84, 85 Dhagamwar, Vasudha 74, 75, 92 Dharma 4 Dharmendra 155, 168, 192 Dharmputra (“Godson,” 1961) 189 Dholakia, Rahul 184 Dhoom series 28, 31 Difference and Repetition (Deleuze, 1994) 192 Dil Chahta Hai (2001) 186 Dil Se (1998) 106, 186 Dilwaale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (1995) 31, 106, 147, 150, 156, 160 displacement dramas 97 divorce, laws relating to 75, 77, 132 Dixit, Madhuri 149 Do Bigha Zamin (“Two Acres of Land,” 1953) 192 Don I (2006) 21, 154, 184 Don 2 (2011) 106 Dost (“Friend,” 1974) 168, 169 Dostana (2009) 181, 182, 186 Dosti 166 dramatic realism 83 Dushmun (“Enemy,” 1971) 168, 169 Dutt, Guru 28, 31, 90, 192 Dutt, Sanjay 188, 192 Dutt, Sunil 86, 155 dwarfism, symbolism of 175 Dwyer and Patel 129, 130–131, 134, 136, 137, 187, 191 2002 141, 148 Dyer, Richard 114 Eck, Diana 187 Eikhenbaum, Boris 187

Eisenstein, Sergei 45 Ek Chalis ki Last Local (2007) 22, 186, 192 Ek Rishtaa (“The Bond of Love,” 2001) 128, 148, 190 embodiment agonistic 172 gender 81, 103–104, 106, 107, 115 heroic 170, 179–180 and liminality 7 masculine 17, 61, 127, 153–159, 163, 166, 173, 178 Muslim 65, 89, 111–112, 115 and spectatorship 57, 59 of state 54 empowerment 62, 77, 81 enactment, and liminality 7 epic narratives 3–4, 31, 43, 74, 80, 86, 110 ethnicity-driven civilizationalism 142 event-ness 26–27 evental sites 7–9, 11, 39, 49, 54, 55, 123 exaggeration 2 exoctic locations 67 exogamy 139 face, presence of 183 Falk, Richard 127, 132 family dramas 78, 97 romances 11, 17, 129, 150 values 93, 133, 148–149, 171–173, 190 Fanaa (“Storm of Love,” 2006) 111 Farmer, Brett 61, 113–114 Fashion (2008) 21–22 Father Son and Holy War (1994) 191 Feast of Bacchus (Velazquez, 1629) 176 female empowerment 77 identity 139–141, 180–181, 182 infanticide 138–139 fidelity 27 Film and Television Institute 19 Film Finance Committee, 1969 reforms 153 Film Finance Corporation 19 Film Information 45, 185 film posters, and body language 153, 154 Filmfare 18–19, 78, 82, 90 FilmIndia 70, 71, 83, 91, 92, 94, 187, 189 Fiza (2000) 26, 186 foreign hand, concept of 50, 51, 84 Forster, E. M. 185 Foucault, Michel 1–2, 5, 12 Freedom at Midnight (Lapierre and Collins) 189

214  Index Freud, Sigmund 6, 7, 186 Gadar: Ek Prem Katha (“Revolution: A Love Story,” 2001) 71, 74, 100–104, 105–106, 108–109 Gadhvi, Sanjay 31 Gahlot, Deepa 100–101, 189 Garm Hava (“Hot Winds,” 1973) 16, 71, 74, 95–100, 104, 162–163 gay cultural inuendos 167, 170, 171 Gehlawat, Ajay 64, 171, 172, 186 gender Abducted Persons Act (1949) 74, 75–76, 108 ambiguity of 104, 106–107, 160 embodiment 81, 103–104, 106, 107, 115 fundamentalist doctrines 138 iconicity 132, 165 religious nationalisms 127 violence 16, 70, 71–74, 76, 127, 135 genocide, gendered 72–74, 76, 135 Ghai, Subhash 25, 129 Ghandi family 157 Ghatak, Ritwik 97, 162 Ghosh, Nimai 97 Ghulam (1998) 156 Gill (2002) 134, 146, 151 Gilloch, Graeme 48 godhead figures 59, 79, 157 Golwalkar, M. S. 135, 189 Gopal and Moorti et al 32 Govil, Nitin 159, 183 Gowariker, Ashutosh 185 Guha, Dulal 168 Gupta and Sharma (1996) 191 Gupta, Charu 187, 189 Gupta, Sanjay 161 HAHK! see Hum Aapke Hain Koun! (“Who Are We to You?” 1994) Hali, Altaf Husayn 61 Hansen, Thomas Blom 188, 189, 190 Hanson, Ellis 192 Hare Raam Hare Krishna (1971) 164 Hasan (1998) 140 Hastings, Warren 75 Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi (“A Thousand Such Desires,” 2003) 15, 33, 41–44 Hegdewar, Keshav Baliram 135 Heimsath, Charles 185 Hera-Pheri (“Crooks,” 1976) 166–168, 170 heroes 153–155, 160, 178, 179–180 hetero-normative gender relationships 163, 168, 170–172, 178, 182

heterosexuality 17, 158–159, 160, 165–166, 168, 172–173 Hindu Code Bill 74, 75, 76, 90–91, 188–189 Hindustan Photo Films 19 Hindutva 126–129, 135–144, 150–152 Hollywood cinema 4, 9, 12, 19, 62 homo economicus, identity 49, 51 homoerotic interpretations 61–62, 164, 166–167, 171 see also homosociality homosexuality 61, 66, 170, 178, 180, 193 homosociality 17, 128, 164, 165, 166, 170 see also homoerotic interpretations Hovden and Keene (2002) 127, 132, 134, 146–147 Hu, Brian 172 Hum Aapke Hain Koun! (“Who Are We to You?” 1994) 17, 129, 136, 137, 138, 139, 148–152, 156 hyperreality 21, 28, 49 iconicity 21, 23–24, 26, 64, 127–128, 129, 154, 157–158, 165 IMDB (Internet Movie Database) 137, 151 Indian cinema, market access 87–88 Indian Cinematograph Committee, 1928 report 93 Indian communities, gender violence 73 Indian Criminal Procedure Code 76 Indian cultural nationalism 185 Indian Express 189 Indian International Film Festival 19 Indian Motion Pictures Export Corporation 19 Indian Muslim identity 110 Indian nationalism 185 indigenous personal customs 74–75 infidel fidelity 27 instability, of plot and character 1, 3 intelligent cinema 9 International Business Overview Standard 137, 191 Internet Movie Database see IMDB (Internet Movie Database) Irani, Faredoon 82 Islamic Shariat laws 76 Jaadugar (“The Magician,” 1989) 156 Jaan-E-Mann (“Beloved,” 2006) 17, 162, 163–164, 166, 170, 173–178, 182, 193 Jaffrelot, Christophe 189 Jagte Raho (“Be Awake,” 1965) 192 Jaikumar, Priya 189

Index  215 Jain, Kajri 17, 64, 138, 184 Jameson, Fredric 44, 152, 189 Jayawardena and de Alwis (1996) 127, 133, 135, 140, 141 Jeffrey and Basu (1998) 132, 133, 135, 136, 140 JFK 123 Johar, Karan 158, 190 Joseph, May 30–31, 54, 65 Joshi, Pratik 97, 109 juridico-political discourse 75

Komal Gandhar (“A Soft Note On a Sharp Scale,” 1961) 162 Kugle, Scott 61 Kuhn, Annette 114 Kumar, Akshay 173 Kumar, Amitava 135, 141, 142, 191 Kumar, Dilip 23, 110 Kumar, Kishore 93 Kumar, Manoj “Bharat” 164 Kumar, Mehul 160 Kumar, Rakesh 166

Kaante (“Thorns,” 2002) 161, 162 Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham (“Happiness and Sadness,” 2001) 139, 158, 160, 190 Kabir, Nasreen Munni 86 Kabir, Saint 189 Kal Ho Na Ho (“Tomorrow May Never Come,” 2003) 17, 106, 162, 163–164, 166, 170, 171–173, 174, 177, 182, 186 Kamat et al. 136, 147, 191 Kamat, Mir and Mathew (2004) 136 Kambakht Ishq (2009) 31 Kaminey (“The Scoundrels,” 2009) 161 Kannabiran, Kalpana 135, 140 Kapoor, Raj 20, 86, 89, 168, 181, 192 Kapoor, Shahid 161 Kashyap, Anurag 50, 186, 192 Kathputli (“The Puppet,” 1957) 71, 76–78 Katrak, Ketu 187 Kazmi, Nikhat 65 Keohane, Robert 146–147 Khan, Aamir 20, 26, 44, 46, 154, 156, 160, 185, 192 Khan, Amjad 166, 192 Khan, Farah 26 Khan, Irrfan 62, 161 Khan, Kabir 31, 189, 190 Khan, Kader 166 Khan, Mansoor 154, 156 Khan, Mehboob 20, 71, 76, 84, 133, 181 Khan, Sabir 31 Khan, Saif Ali 161, 171 Khan, Salman 154, 156, 160, 161, 172, 173, 192 Khan, Shahnaz 111 Khan, Shak Rukh 1, 16, 23, 51, 62, 65, 104, 106–108, 110–125, 128, 153, 154, 156, 157–158, 160, 161, 171, 189, 192 Khanduri, Sanjay M. 22, 192 Khanna, Vinod 166–167 Kher, Anupam 175 Khory, Kavita R. 75, 76, 83, 187 Kiss of the Spider Woman 61 Kohli, Kunal 111

labor identity 53 LaCapra, Dominic 37 Lagaan (2001) 101, 185 Lahore (1949) 71, 84, 85, 97, 102, 104, 188 Lakhia, Apoorva 192 Lal (1998) 190 Lateef, Shahida 74, 76 layering 3 Levinas, Emmanuel 56, 183 liminality, definition 5, 7 linguistic plurality 93–95 Lipner (2001) 150 Lloyd and Lloyd (1987) 188 lost identities 87 love triangles 181 Lutgendorf, Philip 1, 3–4, 130, 187, 190 Madan, T. N. 189 Madhubala 93 Mahaan (1982) 153 Mahbharata 3 Main Hoon Na (2004) 26 Main Khiladi Tu Anar 166 Maine Pyar Kiya (1989) 154 maintenance, laws relating to 74 Majeed, Javed 184 Majumdar, Neepa 23, 24 male sexualized embodiment 159–160 males, iconicity 132 Malik, Ashok 126, 127, 135, 136 Malik, Ashwini 189 Mammo (1994) 97 Mani, Lata 184–185 Manjrekar, Mahesh 192 Mankekar, Purnima 147 Manto, Saadat Hasan 73 Mard (1985) 129–132, 133, 137, 143, 145, 151–152 market access 87–88 marriage, laws relating to 74, 75, 77 masculinity camp 123

216  Index feminization of 106–107, 111, 151, 159 heroic 170, 178–180 hetero 170–171 homosocial 166, 170 hyper 130 Muslim 111, 123 national 17, 107 Mastan, Abbas 156 Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (Mehta, 2005) 190 Mazumdar, Ranjani 28 Mehra, Prakash 156, 166, 170, 181 Mehta, Suketu 190 melodrama 83 Menon and Bhasin (1996) 75, 136, 140 Menon, Ritu 72, 75, 101, 108, 136, 188 metastructures 8 Metz, Christian 57, 58, 59–61, 63, 110, 148, 153, 186, 187, 188 Miller, D. A. 192 minority citizenship 188, 189 mirroring 57, 58, 59–61 Mishra, Vijay 78, 81, 82, 110, 141, 187, 188 Mission Kashmir (2000) 26 Mitra, Amit and Sambhu 192 MMJ see Mumbai Meri Jaan (“Mumbai My Life,” 2008) Mohabbatein (2000) 160 Mohamed and Sardesai (1993) 192 moralizing, through epics 3 Mother India (1957) 16, 71, 74, 76, 77–79, 86–87, 98, 102, 104 mother, role of 77 Mr and Mrs 55 (1955) 71, 89–90, 104 Mrityudaata (“Executioner,” 1997) 160 Mufti, Aamir 83 Mughal-e-Azam (1960) 71, 74, 86, 188 Mukta Arts 4 Mukta, Parita 126, 135, 136, 138, 141, 142, 191 2000 143 Mulvey, Laura 181 Mumbai Meri Jaan (“Mumbai My Life,” 2008) 15, 21, 24, 27, 33, 40, 49–56, 161 Muqaddar ka Sikandar (“King of Destiny,” 1978) 170, 181, 184 Muslim identities embodiment 62, 65, 87, 89, 111–112, 115, 123 laws relating to 74–75, 76, 132, 188–189 liminality of 88–89, 107–108 perceived threat from 51, 83, 111

representability of 98 violence towards 72, 73, 99, 135 Muslim Women (protection of Rights on Divorce) Bill 132 mythic approach 74, 78 mytho-religious practices 35, 36, 37 Nandy, Ashis 189 Narain, Siddharth 191 Nargis 79, 80, 84, 85, 87, 188, 192 Narula, S. 126, 134–135 Nastik (“Atheist,” 1983) 157 National Film Archives 19, 29 national womanhood 69–70 “Nationalism Refigured” (Niranjana) 19 nationalist hymns 36 naturalization of history 39 Nawathe, Raja 168 Nehruvian era 77 neo-patriotism 44 neocoloniality 13, 44 New Delhi (1965) 71, 93–94, 95, 96 New York (2009) 31 Nietzsche, Friedrich 35, 184 Nihalani, Govind 96–97, 188 Niranjana, Tejaswini 19–20 Nirnajana (2000) 145 Nivedita, Sister (Margaret Noble) 185 Noble, Margaret (Sister Nivedita) 185 Ocean’s Eleven (2001) 161 Olalquiaga, Celeste 184 Omkara (2006) 161 One 2 Ka 4 106 Ong, Aihwa 31, 134, 136, 184, 190–191 Osten, Franz 52 Oye Lucky Lucky Oye (2008) 22 Pakistani communities 51, 72, 73, 101 Pandey, Gyan 65, 83, 125 Pardes 128, 129, 147, 148, 150 Parinda (“Birds,” 1989) 155 partition 16, 20–21, 67, 72–74, 84, 95–97, 188 Passage to India, A (Forster, 1924) 185 Patel, Baburao 70, 83–84, 93 paterfamilial structure 134, 139, 174–175 Patil, Smita 60 Patwardhan, Anand 139, 191, 192 penance 77–79 performance, and representation 2 Persian culture 61 Perso-Arabic literature 61 Phalke, D. G. 20 piety 132, 133, 138, 152, 167

Index  217 Pinney, Christopher 187 place 21 plot development 1, 7, 24 polarity in cinema 88–89 political Hinduism 126–127 political nationalisms 185 political traumas, and plot 1 pooja 134, 137, 138, 139–140 post-globalization viewing 137 post-independence 25, 36–37, 74, 76 post-partiion era 97 postcoloniality 13, 25 see also post-independence poststructuralism 33 POTA see Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) Prabhat Film Compay 30 Prasad, Madhava 153–154, 187 pre-globalization viewing 137 pre-individual identities 11 pre-modern nationalism 38–39 pre-nationalism 35–36 presentation 8–9 President’s Silver Medal 98 Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) 75 private space 27, 36, 37 Priyadarshan 33 product endorsement 23–24, 136–137, 148, 191 production models 4 public nationalism 37 public space 27, 35, 36, 37 Puig, Manuel 61 Punathambekar, Aswin 164 Punjabi nationalism 190 Purab aur Pachhim (“East and West,” 1970) 164 Puri, Amrish 134, 137 Pyaasa (“Thirst,” 1957) 28, 192 Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak (“From One Success to Another,” 1988) 154, 156 queer enactment 17, 159, 169–173, 182, 192 Quran, Suras 113 107–108 Raajneeti (2010) 21 Raam ke Naam (“In the Name of Ram,” 1991) 192 race 53, 126 Radhakrishnan, R. 135, 143, 144 Rai, Aishwarya 137 Rai, Amit S. 11 Raj (2000) 141, 142, 143 Raj, Dhooleka Sarhadi 134

Raj Quartet (Scott, 1966-75) 185 Rajabli, Anjum 184 Rajadhyaksha and Willemen (1994) 187 Rajadhyaksha, Radha 78, 87, 89, 98, 187, 188 Bollywood 127 Rajadhyaskha and Prasad et al. 186 Rajagopal, Arvind 134, 135, 136, 138, 190, 191 2000 142, 143 Ram, cinematic depiction of 142–143 Ram Gopal Varma and Company 4 Ramakrishnan, A. K. 128, 147 Ramanathan, S. 153 Ramanujan, A, K. 15, 38–39, 40–41, 48 Ramayana 3, 110 Ramjanambhoomi movement 191 Rang de Basanti (“Paint It Saffron,” 2006) 15, 21, 24, 33, 40, 44–49 Rangeela (1995) 156 Rao and Sarkar (1998) 136 Rao, Satyanarayn 160, 190 rape 79, 81–82, 83, 84, 135, 139 Rashtra Sevika Samiti 133 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) 126, 132–133 Ratnam, Mani 145 Rawal, Paresh 184 Ray, Robert 12, 21, 62–63, 183, 187 RDB see Rang de Basanti (“Paint It Saffron,” 2006) realism 95 recovery failed 88, 104 of faith 78, 80 of persons 74, 75, 77, 81, 102, 107–109, 176 self 75, 81 Rehman, Waheeda 31 Rekha 60 religio-philosophical discourse 75 Religion and Law in Independent India (Baird, 1993) 74 religious identity 32, 72 repatriation, of abducted women 75 repetition 1–2, 5, 6, 7, 57, 97, 185 representation 8–9, 10 rescue, and gender 16 rhizomatic embodiments of masculinity 17, 154, 155, 156, 172, 175 romance, family 11, 17, 129, 150 romantic melodramas 108–109 Rose, Jacqueline 192 Roshan, Hrithik 138 Rouse (1996) 148

218  Index Roy, Bimal 192 Roy, Parama 98, 188 Roy, Ram Mohun 185 RSS 134–135, 136 Russo, Vito 192 S. K. Patil Film Inquiry Committee 19 Sahlins, Marshall 15, 37–38, 40–41 Sahni, Balraj 99 Saint Kabir 189 Sangam (“The Confluence,” 1964) 168, 181 Sangari and Vaid (1996) 165 Sant Tukaram (1936) 30, 186 Sarkar, Bhaskar 20–21, 67, 133, 135, 140, 163, 189 Sathyu, M. S. 71, 95, 100, 162 sati, practice of 139, 140 Satya (1998) 192 Savarkar 126, 189, 190 Schmitt, Carl 50, 186 Searle-Chatterjee (2000) 127, 143, 144 secular modernity 78 secularism 74–76, 78, 189 Segal, Mohan 71, 93 Sen, Sudipta 126 Sengupta, Somini 190 Sethi, R. P. 74 sexual ambiguity 165, 170, 173 sexuality 70–71, 88, 165, 170, 180–181 see also homosexuality Shah, Vipul 161 Shak Rukh Khan see Khan, Shak Rukh shakti (female power) 143 Shakti (“The Power,” 1982) 184, 186 Shanenshah (1988) 157 Shantaram, V. 20 Sharma, Anil 71, 100 Sharma, Krishna 135 Shiekh, Mushtaq 189 Shohat, Ella 13, 14 Sholay (“Embers,” 1975) 151, 161, 166, 186, 192 Shootout at Lokhandwala (2007) 192 Shree 420 (“Mr 420,” 1955) 192 Sikh communities, gender violence 72 Singh, Boota 108 Singh, Dara 131 Singh, Sunny 110, 187 Sinha, Mrinalini 165 Sinha, Shatrughan 168 Sippy, Ramesh 156, 186 Sister Nivedita (Margaret Noble) 185 slang terms, in film 191 Slumdog Millionaire (2008) 22–23,

160–161, 184 Smith, Robert 6, 7, 57 Sobchak, Vivien 48, 57, 59, 186–187 social ambiguity 25, 107 social films 88, 89, 93 Soderbergh, Stephen 161 Soja, Edward 184 Somayya, Bhawana 153, 157, 160, 171 Sooryavansham (“Sun Dynasty,” 1999) 160 space 21, 36–37, 67 spatio-temporal instability 30, 35, 68 spectatorship 47–48, 54, 57–58, 61, 82, 98, 171, 181 speed, of reaction 68 Spivak and Butler 65 Spivak, Gayatri 136 Srinivas, M. N. 64, 75 SRK see Khan, Shak Rukh Staiger, Janet 124 Stanford Friedman, Susan 31, 184 Star & Style 98–99 Star Wars 57, 63, 64 Stavrakakis, Yannis 26–27 Stokes, Geoffrey 136 Stone, Oliver 123 street culture 27 structural absence 37 structural narratives 42 studio production model 4 Subarnarekha (“The Golden Line,” 1962) 97 subject formation 37, 39, 45, 47, 50–51 succession, laws relating to 74, 75 superheroes, character development 155 Taal 136–137 TADA see Terrorist Activities Disruption Act (TADA) Tamanna 166 Tamas (1988) 96–97, 188 Taqdeer (1944) 84 Tarlo, Emma 48–49 Taylor, Diana 2, 50, 111, 185 televangelism 141 temples 149 terrorism, identity of 50, 51 Terrorist Activities Disruption Act (TADA) 75 Thapar, Romila 190 theatrical spectatorship 57 thematic codes 1 Thomas, Rosie 78, 83, 84, 188 Thompson, Kristin 183 Thorns (2002) 161

Index  219 Toba Tek Singh (Manto) 73 Toofan (“The Storm,” 1989) 156 trauma, and perceived speed 68 triangulation in relationships 59, 168, 181 Trishul 184 Turner, Victor 5, 66, 70, 183 Umrao Jaan (1981) 60 Uniform Civil Code 75, 76, 132 untouchability (Dalit) 52, 74, 92 ur-stories 3, 4, 11, 43, 45, 63, 81 Vaastav (“The Reality,” 1999) 192 Van de Veer, Peter 126, 127, 141, 143, 152, 188, 189, 190 “Vande Mataram” 36 Vanita and Kidwai (2002) 192 Vanita, Ruth 165, 171, 178–179 Varma, Ram Gopal 21, 31, 156, 192 Varshney, Ashutosh 126–127, 128, 132, 134, 141, 144, 188, 189, 190, 191 2002 143, 145, 146, 148 Vasudevan, Ravi 14, 78, 187, 188, 190 Veer-Zaara (“Veer and Zaara,” 2004) 16, 71, 74, 104–109, 189 Venice International Film Festival, 1937 30 verticality, of heroes 153, 154–155, 160, 178 VHP (Vishwa Hindu Parishad) 135, 136 villains 1, 188

violence depictions of 50 and gender 16, 70, 71–74, 76, 127, 135 liminality of 43, 55–56, 68 repetition of 46–47, 72 Virat Hindu Sammelan (Great Hindu Gathering), Milton Keynes, 1989 142 Virdi, Jyotika 74, 75, 76, 92, 188 Virilio, Paul 67 Vishwa Hindu Parishad (“World Hindu Forum,” VHP) 126 vision, as a historical process 67 visual modernity 65 visual structure 56–57 Vitali, Valentina 153, 159, 192 Wallerstein, Immanuel 186 Watan (1938) 71, 187 Waugh, Thomas 164–165, 166, 180 White (1996) 123–124, 189–190 wife, role of 77 womanhood 69–70, 77, 78, 86, 98 women’s rights 75, 82 Yaadein (“Memories,” 2001) 128, 129, 136, 137, 138, 139, 147, 148 Yaarana (“Friendship,” 1981) 166, 170 Yash Raj 4, 26 Zanjeer (“Chains,” 1973) 170 Zinta, Preity 173, 193