Industrial Networks and Cinemas of India: Shooting Stars, Shifting Geographies and Multiplying Media [1° ed.] 0367210584, 9780367210588

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INDUSTRIAL NETWORKS AND CINEMAS OF INDIA

This volume points to the limits of models such as regional, national, and transnational and develops ‘network’ as a conceptual category to study cinemas of India. Through grounded and interdisciplinary research, it shows how film industries located in disparate territories have not functioned as isolated units and draws attention to the industrial traffic  – of filmic material, actors, performers, authors, technicians, genres, styles, sounds, expertise, languages, and capital, across trans-regional contexts – since the inception of cinema. It excavates histories of film production, distribution, and exhibition and their connections beyond regional and national boundaries and between places, industrial practices, and multiple media. The chapters in this volume address a range of themes such as transgressive female figures; networks of authors and technicians; trans-regional production links and changing technologies, and new media geographies. By tracking manifold changes in the contexts of transforming media and inter-connections between diverse industrial nodal points, this book expands the critical vocabulary in media and production studies and foregrounds new methods for examining cinema. A generative account of industrial networks, this volume will be useful for scholars and researchers of film studies, cinema studies, media studies, production studies, media sociology, gender studies, South Asian studies, and cultural studies. Monika Mehta is Associate Professor of English at State University of New York, Binghamton, USA. She is the author of Censorship and Sexuality in Bombay Cinema (2011/2012) and has also co-edited Pop Empires: Transnational and Diasporic Flows of Korea and India (2019). Madhuja Mukherjee is involved with art-practice, curatorial projects, and filmmaking. She is Professor of Film Studies at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. Her research papers have been published in academic journals; she is the author of New Theatres Ltd.: The Emblem of Art, The Picture of Success (Pune: 2009), editor of Aural Films, Oral Cultures: Essays on Cinema from the Early Sound Era (Kolkata: 2012), Voices of the Talking Stars: The Women of Indian Cinema and Beyond (Kolkata/ Delhi: 2017), and Popular Cinema in Bengal: Genre, Stars, Public Cultures (London/ New York: 2020).

INDUSTRIAL NETWORKS AND CINEMAS OF INDIA Shooting Stars, Shifting Geographies and Multiplying Media

Edited by Monika Mehta and Madhuja Mukherjee

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Monika Mehta and Madhuja Mukherjee; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Monika Mehta and Madhuja Mukherjee to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted 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 A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-21058-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-34471-9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-32602-8 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

To our parents

CONTENTS

List of figures x List of contributors xi Acknowledgementsxv

Introduction: detouring networks Madhuja Mukherjee and Monika Mehta

PART I

1

The female star, traveling figures and transgressions

19

  1 Fatma Begum, South Asia’s first female director: resurrections from media and legal archives Rashmi Sawhney

21

  2 The ‘problem of respectable ladies joining films’: industrial traffic, female stardom and the first talkies in Bombay and Tehran Claire Cooley

35

  3 Sabita’s journey from Calcutta to Bombay: gender and modernity in the circuits of cinemas in India Sarah Rahman Niazi

48

  4 Travels of the female star in the Indian cinemas of the 1940s and 50s: the career of Bhanumathi Uma Maheswari Bhrugubanda

61

viii Contents

 5 Bringing bharatanatyam to Bombay cinema: mapping Tamil-Hindi film industry traffic through Vyjayanthimala’s dancing body Usha Iyer PART II

77

Networks of circulation, production, and imaginings

93

  6 Film exhibition in Hyderabad in the 1930s: the case of Moti Mahal cinema and film circulation C. Yamini Krishna

95

  7 Arriving at Bombay: Bimal Roy, transits, transitions, and cinema of intersection Madhuja Mukherjee

108

  8 Circumambient geographies of cinema: the Shaw Brothers’ Malay film production studios in mid-century Singapore124 Peter J. Bloom  9 Filmfare, the Bombay industry, and internationalism (1952–1962)137 Anustup Basu 10 Traversing The Evil Within (1970): transnational aspirations, stardom, and infrastructure in a cold-war Asia Pujita Guha PART III

Media geographies, agencies, and technologies 11 Habits and worlds: Malayalam cinema’s travels with the gulf Ratheesh Radhakrishnan 12 Celluloid visions in a video frame: Bhojpuri cinema between insurrections and catharsis Akshaya Kumar

151

165 167

181

13 Mixing industrial elements, generating sexual agency in Aiyyaa194 Nilanjana Bhattacharjya and Monika Mehta

Contents  ix

14 Blurring the boundaries between Hollywood and Bollywood: the production of dubbed films in Mumbai Tejaswini Ganti

208

15 Making-of videos: of placeless studios and pioneering music directors Pavitra Sundar

222

16 Locating Mollywood: video industries, inter-regional media networks and the “located mobility” of Malegaon films Ramna Walia

238

Index253

FIGURES

1.1 Mother-daughter/Fatma-Sultana 22 3.1 Art plate of Sabita Devi, Filmland, Vol II, No 83, Puja Special, October 193149 4.1 Bhanumathi as village dancer Subbi in Swargaseema63 4.2 Bhanumathi as glamorous stage actor Sujatha in Swargaseema63 4.3 Rita Hayworth 66 4.4 Bhanumathi in Vauhini Sankranthi Fancy Dress Event in 1952 67 4.5 Bhanumathi with Dilip Kumar and NTR on the sets of Chandirani70 5.1 Vyjayanthimala dances before a map of undivided India in Penn (M. V. Raman 1954) 80 5.2 Vyjayanthimala in her debut film, Vazhkai (A. V. Meiyappan and M. V. Raman 1949) 82 5.3 Mapping corporeal nodes of industrial traffic through Vyjayanthimala’s dancing body 88 7.1 Udayer Pathe and shadow of famine 113 7.2 Intersecting landscapes 113 16.1 A shooting still (L) and River Mausam that divides Hindu merchants on the left and Muslim weavers on the right (R) 240 16.2 A street wall, Camp area, Malegaon (L), and poster outside single-screen theatre, Upkar (R) 246

CONTRIBUTORS

Anustup Basu is Associate Professor in English, Media and Cinema Studies, and

Criticism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. He is the author of Hindutva as Political Monotheism (2020), Bollywood in the Age of New Media: The Geo-televisual Aesthetic (Edinburgh, 2010), and the co-editor of the volumes InterMedia in South Asia: The Fourth Screen (Routledge, 2012) and Figurations in Indian Film (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2013). His essays on film, media, culture, philosophy, and politics have appeared in journals like boundary 2, Semiotic Inquiry, Journal of Human Rights, Postscript, South Asian History and Culture, PostModern Culture, and Critical Quarterly. As a film producer, he made the Bengali feature Herbert (2005), which won the Indian National Award for the Best Regional Film. Nilanjana Bhattacharjya writes on South Asian popular music and films within

South Asia and in South Asian diasporic communities. She teaches interdisciplinary humanities as Senior Lecturer and Honors Faculty Fellow at Barrett, the Honors College at Arizona State University in Tempe, USA. Her work has been published in Asian Music, South Asian History and Culture, Framework, and South Asian Popular Culture as well as in Writing about Screen Media and with Monika Mehta in Global Bollywood: Global Travels Song and Dance. Uma Maheswari Bhrugubanda teaches in the Department of Cultural Studies

at the EFL University, Hyderabad, India. She is the author of Deities and Devotees: Cinema, Religion and Politics in South India (2018). She has co-edited a translation work, Vegetarians Only: Stories of Telugu Muslims (2016) and is a co-author of Towards a World of Equals: A Bilingual Textbook on Gender (2015). Her scholarly articles and reviews have appeared in Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies, Critical Quarterly, and Contributions to Indian Sociology. She is currently working on two research projects on Indian cinema – one on early South Indian female stars and the second on contemporary Telugu cinema.

xii Contributors

Peter J. Bloom is Associate Professor and Vice Chair in the Department of Film

and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara, USA. He has published extensively on British, French, and Belgian colonial media including French Colonial Documentary (2007), Frenchness and the African Diaspora (co-editor, 2009), and Modernization as Spectacle in Africa (co-editor, 2014), among other publications. His recent work has focused on film and radio in late colonial Ghana and Malaya. Claire Cooley teaches Arabic, Persian, and media studies at the University of Texas at Austin, USA, where she received her PhD in 2019. Her research interests center on Arabic pedagogy, sound studies, and overlapping Middle East and South Asia film histories. In her current book project, Claire traces sonic connections among Egyptian, Iranian, and Indian cinemas from the turn of the twentieth century to the 1960s. Using both Arabic and Persian sources, Claire focuses on “sonic infrastructures” to capture the dynamics of cinematic circulations across this contiguous region. Tejaswini Ganti is Associate Professor of Anthropology and core faculty in the Pro-

gram in Culture & Media at New York University, USA. She has been conducting research about the social world and filmmaking practices of the Hindi film industry since 1996 and is the author of Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry (2012) and Bollywood: A Guidebook to Popular Hindi Cinema (Routledge 2004; 2nd edition 2013). Her current research examines the politics of language and translation within the Bombay media world, ranging from screenwriting practices to the dubbing of Hollywood films into Hindi and Netflix series into English. Pujita Guha is a film and media PhD student at the University of California, Santa

Barbara, USA. Her doctoral research probes the entanglement of environmental media, forest histories, and Southeast and South Asian cinema and culture. With Abhijan Toto she runs a curatorial project called the Forest Curriculum that looks at the entanglement among south and southeast Asian cultures, indigenous epistemologies, forested environments, and film/media. Alongside her environmental interests, she works of popular cinemas and cultures of South and Southeast Asia, having published in Popular Cinema in Bengal, Stardom in Southeast Asia, and NANG, among others. Usha Iyer is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Department of

Art and Art History at Stanford University, USA. Her book, Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Popular Hindi Cinema (2020), examines the role of dance in the construction of female stardom in Hindi cinema from the 1930s to the 1990s. Her essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Camera Obscura, South Asian Popular Culture, The Oxford Handbook of Film Theory, The Oxford Handbook of Indian Dance, and the Women Film Pioneers Project, among others. C. Yamini Krishna is a PhD scholar from the Department of Film Studies, The

English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad (EFLU), India. Her work is

Contributors  xiii

on the history of cinema in Hyderabad, she studies the history of cinema as a part of the socio-cultural history of the city. Her other areas of interest are urban studies, princely states, cultural history and digital cultures. She has received the Centre for Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) fellowship in 2015–16 and Charles Wallace Trust Fellowship in 2017. Her work has been published in South Asian Popular Culture, Widescreen and other venues. Akshaya Kumar is Assistant Professor at the School of Humanities and Social Sci-

ences, Indian Institute of Technology, Indore, India. He finished his PhD at the University of Glasgow, UK and has published articles in Media Industries, Postmodern Culture, Social Text, and Television and New Media, among other journals. His academic monograph, Provincializing Bollywood: Bhojpuri Cinema in the Comparative Media Crucible, will be published in 2020. Monika Mehta is Associate Professor of English at State University of New York,

Binghamton, USA. She is the author of Censorship and Sexuality in Bombay Cinema (2011/2012). Her articles and chapters examining trans/national film regulation; globalization and cultural production in India; DVD compilations; music awards; cinephilia; streaming and media distribution; and authorship have appeared in journals such as Cultural Dynamics, The Velvet Light Trap, Studies in South Asian Film and Media, South Asian Popular Culture, as well as edited collections such as Global Bollywood, Music in Contemporary Indian Film, Behind the Scenes, and Postcolonial Studies Meets Media Studies. She has co-edited Pop Empires: Transnational and Diasporic Flows of Korea and India (2019). Madhuja Mukherjee is involved with art-practice, curatorial projects, and filmmaking. She is Professor of Film Studies at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. Her research areas include the film industry, regional cinemas, sound cultures, gender, labor, city, and new media. Her research papers have been published in academic journals; she is the author of New Theatres Ltd.: The Emblem of Art, The Picture of Success (Pune: 2009), editor of Aural Films, Oral Cultures: Essays on Cinema from the Early Sound Era (Kolkata: 2012), and of the award-winning anthology Voices of the Talking Stars: The Women of Indian Cinema and Beyond (Kolkata/Delhi: 2017). She is the co-editor of Popular Cinema in Bengal: Genre, Stars, Public Cultures (London/ NY: Routledge, 2020); she also adapted and illustrated Kangal Malsat (2013, Bengali), graphic novel. Mukherjee is the writer of the films Ekti Tarar Khonje (2010, Bengali) and co-writer of Qissa (2013, Punjabi), and Carnival (2012, no-dialogues, English inter-titles), written and directed by her, premiered at the 41st International Film Festival Rotterdam. Her present documentary work explores Women at Work/ Film industry under construction. Sarah Rahman Niazi is Doctoral Researcher with the Centre for Research and

Education in Arts and Media (CREAM) at the Westminster School of Arts, University of Westminster in London, UK. Her work explores the entangled history of cinema’s relationship with the Urdu public sphere in India (1930–50). In 2011,

xiv Contributors

she finished her MPhil from the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her thesis Cinema and the Reinvention of the Self: Women performers in the Bombay film industry (1925–47) is an attempt to understand the role of cinema in the transformation of lives of women performers in India. Ratheesh Radhakrishnan teaches at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences of the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT-B), Mumbai, India. His research focuses on Malayalam language cinema, stardom, and film festivals. He is currently working on a manuscript based on a biographical study of the Malayalam star Sathyan, supported by the New India Foundation. As a film festival programmer, he has worked with MAMI Mumbai Film Festival, IFFK, and NFDC Film Bazaar. Rashmi Sawhney is a full-time academic and part-time curator, currently based

at Christ University, Bangalore, India, as Associate Professor of Film and Cultural Studies. Recent publications include a special issue of The Moving Image Review and Arts Journal on “South Asian Artists’ Film and Video” (co-edited with Lucia King) and a special issue of Studies in South Asian Film and Media on “Science Fiction and Fantasy.” She has curated Future Orbits and Video Vortex XI as collaterals of the 2017 Kochi Muzeris biennial and SET.RESET on “Cinema and Labour” in collaboration with Production Designer Aradhana Seth’s House of Enquiries. Her two-channel video Drift City was shown at KHOJ, New Delhi, as part of a 2018 show titled “Could be Urbanism.” Pavitra Sundar is Associate Professor of Literature at Hamilton College, where she

teaches courses on transnational film and literature. Her scholarly interests span cinema studies, sound studies, postcolonial literary and cultural studies, and gendersexuality studies. Her book manuscript, Listening to Bollywood, brings a feminist ear to mainstream Hindi cinema. She has contributed to journals such as Meridians, Jump Cut, South Asian Popular Culture, and Communication, Culture, and Critique; the sound studies blog Sounding Out!; and other anthologies on the cinematic voice and South Asian media. Also in the works are collaborative projects on South Asian masculinities and accent. Ramna Walia has a Ph.D. from the Department of Radio-Television-Film at The

University of Texas at Austin, USA where she worked on the spatialized material history of inter-regional mobility networks of video and digital productions in India. She has published her work in Bioscope, Synoptique, and Studies in South Asian Film and Media. Her research interests include South Asia, video cultures, informal media, low genres, creative labor, technology, and film recycling and remakes.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to first and foremost thank all our contributors and those who joined us at the ACLA Conference 2017, held at Utrecht, Netherlands, for keeping the conversations alive. While we had addressed and proposed the theme “Industrial Networks of Cinemas of India” and began thinking through the possible networks and its varied function, it would have been practically impossible for us to conduct any such in-depth research, across geographies, multiple timeframes, and media. We are truly grateful for their amazingly rich, well-argued, and enjoyable essays, which enabled fruitful discussions and encouraged us to push the idea of “networks” as a method. We are particularly grateful to Shoma Choudhury, Brinda Sen, and other members of the Routledge staff for shepherding us through this process and encouraging and supporting us at every step. Many thanks to Swarnavel Eswaran Pillai for helping us acquire stills and permissions for Chapter 5. I (Monika Mehta) would like to thank Madhuja for our many generative conversations made possible by telecommunications networks. I learnt so much from our conversations, and it was a pleasure to collaborate with such a passionate, attentive, and rigorous scholar. Last, my deep gratitude and love to my parents, Rajesh and Sahana, who sustain and nourish me, enabling me to work. And I (Madhuja Mukherjee) would like to express my deepest love and gratitude to Monika, for supporting me at every stage, as we tackled certain personal situations and were located in different parts of the world. It is hard to express in words how much we owe to telecommunications and how much I  learnt from Monika as we sailed through this enriching process without any complications. I am indebted in every way to my parents and Avik – for being there unconditionally – and to Shoma, who had not given up the hope of doing books together.

INTRODUCTION Detouring networks Madhuja Mukherjee and Monika Mehta

Our project was activated on the steps of Harvard University in 2016 where we animatedly discussed a question that had emerged in an American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) conference session, principally, how to rethink methods of doing histories of cinema(s) of India. Both of us had been trained in trans/national frameworks that foregrounded the social and political history of cinema. Our research on early studios, censorship, and sound cultures were indebted to these approaches (Mukherjee 2009; Mehta 2011; Mukherjee 2012). The emergence of lively conversations on industrial labour, portable and digital media, distribution, and the fluid nature of industries in media studies jostled above mentioned modes of analyzing cinema. Similarly, our new lines of inquiry on regional cinemas, industrial drifts, female stars, paratexts, and transnational flows (Mukherjee 2016, 2017, 2019; Mehta 2017; Lee et al. 2019) along with a careful re-reading of the obvious – the cinematic text, inclusive of credit sequences, its visual scope, the soundtrack, star performances, and narrative address  – pointed to the limits of concepts of nation, national, and transnational. These terms were unable to capture the diverse linguistic and industrial milieus as well as the pulsating traffic – of actors, performers, authors, technicians, technologies, genres, styles – as well as the complex web of industrial interconnections that have shaped cinemas in India since its inception. Thus, this edited collection reconsiders the trajectories of cinemas of India and the histories of their making. It shows how film industries in India, located in disparate territories, have not functioned as isolated units, cordoned by geo-political labels and thereby, points towards a new direction of cinema studies that may be approached via a “networked” framework. By studying cinema’s manifold movement over the years in the contexts of transforming media (celluloid, video, digital, for instance), we aspire to expand the critical vocabulary and indicate newer methods and approaches for studying cinema.

2  Madhuja Mukherjee and Monika Mehta

India produces films in many languages and has robust “mainstream” and “art house” cinemas, along with subsidiary productions. Historically, film personnel have worked in multiple industries within India and abroad, and the major studios in Madras, Bombay, or Calcutta produced films in multiple languages since the early period. For instance, in the 1920s, films did not only include intertitles in multiple languages but were released across British India territories (which included Burma, Ceylon, and Northwest provinces), many silent period actors/ actresses (namely Jaddan Bai, Miss  Padma, Patience Cooper, Sabita Devi, et  al.) travelled between Bombay and Calcutta and worked in disparate industrial setups and transited from the so-called silent era to the “talkies.” Likewise, many singing stars and prolific dancers based in Calcutta, Madras, Poona, and in other places worked in Bombay during the “Talkie” period. The famed 1930s film studio, New Theatres Ltd., produced films in Tamil, Hindi, Bengali, and Telugu, while Debaki Bose directed films in Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, and Tamil. Moreover, directors like Bimal Roy, Nitin Bose (of New Theatres), V. Shantaram (of Prabhat Film Co.), and several well-known performers and writers based in West-Punjab (now in Pakistan) shifted to Bombay in the context of war and partition. The popularity of landmark Hindi films like Awara (Raj Kapoor 1951) and Mother India (Mehboob Khan 1957), in Turkey, Greece, and Nigeria is now part of cinema histories (see Larkin 1997; Abadzi 2008). Such a list is long and enduring: prolific playback singers like Lata Mangeshkar and Kishore Kumar along with others have sung in numerous languages; producers and directors from industries located in states such as Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh have made Hindi films with major stars (like Rajesh Khanna, Amitabh Bachchan, Mithun Chakraborty and others) initiating newer popular modes; and music directors such as R. D. Burman, A. R. Rahman, and others composed for films produced in Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Hindi, Malayalam languages, and in Hollywood. Recently, Bollywood productions such as Gangs of Wasseypur I & II (Anurag Kashyap 2012), Chennai Express (Rohit Shetty 2013), and Kahaani (Sujoy Ghosh 2012) shifted the locus of imagination from lush international tourist spots to gritty and familiar locations within India. Both the representations of spaces in these films and the use of local cast and crew re-imagined sub-urban and rural landscapes of the post-liberalization period. Furthermore, the intermediacy of cinema, TV, and digital platforms such as the dubbing of Hollywood as well as Tamil and Telugu popular films for Hindi TV channels and a larger market, along with the rapid growth of localized video industries across the hills and in marginalized places (e.g. the growing popularity of Manipuri videos, Santhali videos, and Malegaon videos), initiate newer points of departure. These passages and detours of plots, sounds, machines, technical crew, writers, performers, objects, and experiences, we argue, produced the heavily mutated formal structures of popular cinema (also see Mazumdar 2007; Basu 2010; Dwyer and Pinto 2011). Considering intra-national and inter-national linkages between production and distribution within the British India map were dynamic (Ravi Vasudevan 2010; Madhuja Mukherjee 2008, 2009; Ranita Chatterjee 2014; Nitin Govil

Introduction  3

2015), popular films of the period and, in the subsequent years, were a mélange of disparate generic tropes and expressions (see Thomas 2013; Vitali 2008). We re-visit studies of post-independence Indian films, which, by and large, continue to be addressed through a binary that posit national cinema logics vis-à-vis transnational circuits and/or focus on close readings of regional industries, despite the fact that such conditions alter constantly. These transformation are visible in varied film production-exhibition coordinates (see Srinivas 2003, 2013; Neves and Sarkar 2017), mergers and re-organizations of local/national/global productions (Ganti 2012; Punathambekar 2013), collapse of industrial boundaries and formation of newer ones, changes of industrial economy, and expanding new-media practices (Sundaram 2015). In addition, the meteoric move towards Bollywood and trans-national cinema studies, following global flows of peoples, capital, cultures, and media in the context of economic liberalization in India, is staggering. In the light of this scholarship, we inquire about the function of categories such as national, transnational, and regional along with classifications of periods, media forms, industries, genre, styles, and publics. Building on contemporary research that highlights existing and multiplying networks, we move beyond any fixed categorizations and explore newer tactics of twigging the manifold structure of Indian cinemas. Our edited collection builds on and advances the work in the burgeoning field of production studies. Scholarship within this field has generated valuable and “grounded analyses of media makers, experiences, observations and interactions” (Banks et al. 2015). In doing so, it has both expanded debates on creative labour and authorship as well as alerted us to the diversity of media practices and styles (Banks; Caldwell 2008; Ganti; Mayer et al. 2014; Punathambekar). Our collection contributes to this field in manifold and critical ways. First, current scholarship in production studies focuses on contemporary media. Our project problematizes and widens this temporal lens by including investigations of production cultures in the early twentieth century to the present. This historical range enables us to see the transformations and overlaps in the context of shifting cultural terrains. Second, for the most part, production studies scholarship focuses on documenting a single-production culture and its localized practices. In contrast, the chapters in this collection study traffic and transactions among industries, thereby jostling media geographies and links between place, language, cultural practices, and multiple media. Last, our conversations during and since ACLA 2017 as well as our readings in production studies pushed us to think how these diverse micro-analyses of media production were connected. In our discussions, network(s) emerged as a key linking mechanism and concept. We argue that network is not merely a condition pertaining to media that encourages us to study how, why, and to what extent such interconnections are possible; rather “network” is a method that compels us to reconsider the existing courses of studying (Indian) cinema. Thus, we are rethinking “network” as network “studies,” which is not restricted to any one field or framework. Rather, it enables interdisciplinary research and facilitates newer approaches and methods.

4  Madhuja Mukherjee and Monika Mehta

In current parlance, networks are associated with digital technologies. However, Lars Bang Larsen reminds us that network was – and we would argue still is – “a social concept” (2014, 13). Thus, we propose that networks as method involves pursuing long-existing and multiple trajectories with respect to media. This includes but is not limited to: tracing movements of objects, technologies, styles and/or people; following the diverse as well as precise routes of this traffic; examining how industrial relations might intersect with kinship, social, political, and professional affiliations; studying how networks are created, activated, propelled, and sustained; and investigating why and how networks might elapse or transform. Analyses focused on networks reveal that film industries are porous. They intersect with other professions, industries, and economic structures – legal, banking, paper, textile, timber, and food, to name some. Thus, stories about cinema might be found in law or accounting firms (Sawhney), on textile routes (Walia), within legal configurations (Liang 2011), across video circuits, or in Gulf remittances (Radhakrishnan). Accounts of networks demonstrate that while film scholarship might separate and police film styles (documentary vs fiction; realism vs. melodrama), filmmakers regularly mix and match different forms (Mukherjee). Thus, networks blur boundaries, “undermine root narratives,” “doubt genealogies,” and question constricted archaeological mining, revealing a “rhizomatic view” of media histories and forms. This vision, as Larsen notes, “accepts cross-pollinations and irregular developments and all levels of life and culture . . . because meetings and events occur in many empowered places” (Larsen 2014, 14). Moreover, networks move away from models of centre-periphery, which cast some industries as media capitals and others as alternative or marginal (Walia). They avoid scalar analyses that centre, decenter, and re-center places. Instead, they seize upon relays and connections that show that localities and media are always already heterogeneous. Within the context of India, the formation of linguistic states and film industries sought to tie place, culture, language, industrial conditions, and film. Studies of production cultures in linguistic states (Mukherjee 2009, 2016; Radhakrishnan; Walia) as well as distribution of films across states (Mukherjee 2016; Kumar) show that multiple and multilingual production, distribution, and consumption thrive in different states. Recent scholarship, especially in BioScope, South Asian Screen Studies shows regions as well as film and media forms have porous boundaries; thus, inter-connections across media and socio-cultural contexts of production–distribution–exhibition remain fluid (see 2014 5(2); 2015 6(2); (see 2018 9(2) issues). For instance, the category ‘Bengali cinema’ presupposes that only Bengali language cinema is made in Bengal (see Mukherjee and Bakshi 2020). Such an assumption overlooks the multi-lingual and multi-cultural contexts of (Bengali) cinemas, which also comprise of cinemas of so-called Others – like Bangladesh – and includes both art-house and low-brow (Indo-Bangladesh) productions. In a similar vein, the landmark social-realist film Jago Hua Savera (1959) produced from Pakistan, directed by A.J. Kardar, and shot by the Academy award winning cinematographer Walter Lassally in Bangladesh (then East-Pakistan) with local, Pakistani, and Indian cast, is an outstanding example of the manner in which the classic Manik Bandyopadhyay text (in Bengali) was transformed via Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s writing (in Urdu). Thus, (intermedial) investigations of regional, national,

Introduction  5

and transnational traffic uncover manifold industrial imprints and thereby demonstrate the difficulty of naming and locating media. Relatedly, in this edited collection, Claire Cooley examines the production of Iranian films in the early sound era in Bombay and unravels multi-part histories of making of national cinemas and regional stardom. Meanwhile, Peter Bloom tracks Phani Majumdar’s Singaporean ventures, which suggest that Singaporean film industry might have had an “Indian father.” While following the dubbing of a Hollywood film into Hindi, Tejaswini Ganti inquires, if Bombay-based infrastructure, including the voice actors, scriptwriters, and other personnel rework and reinvent dialogues of English (as well as Tamil and Telugu) films, can the dubbed projects still be labelled as Hollywood films? Bhattacharjya and Mehta’s close reading of Aiyyaa shows the intense linkages between disparate industrial setups (Hindi, Tamil, Marathi) and (feminine) fantasies. Therefore, we wish to work beyond templates and review the imagined boundaries of media landscapes. We underscore that transnational and transregional networks persist since the early phase of cinema and beyond; and networks between peoples, geographies, languages, tools, capital, labour, and film forms are preconditions of cinema. These conditions, as illustrated in Mukherjee as well as Bhattacharjya and Mehta’s chapters, compel us to problematize any linear periodization, region, genre, and media-specific research and drive us to re-examine a range of inflexible compartmentalizations. Moreover, the fuzziness of the industrial setups (Mukherjee 2009), its persisting cosmopolitanism (Mazumdar 2007; Kaushik Bhaumik 2001; Mukherjee 2017), and problems of ambiguous archives (Vasudevan 2010; Menon 2011; Debashree Mukherjee 2013; Mukherjee 2014), especially of the formative years, raise fundamental questions with regard to a concise and comprehensive model of history. For example, a “brief history of Indian cinema” often includes works of major male directors and producers, considers influential films, and thereafter mentions productions outside Bombay as “regional.” In contrast, “speculative” studies of early film practices question such historical models and the paternal narrative they generate (Sawhney 2013; also see Madhushree Dutta et al. 2013). In a similar vein, conversations around contemporary methods, approaches, and research, highlighting the variable materiality and forms of cinema, drove discussions during the “Cinema Century: Film, Technology and the Contemporary” conference organized by the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, 2013. The conference reviewed cinema history by presenting research on sound cultures, local histories in relation to transnational circuits, stardom vis-à-vis alternative cinemas, as well as through old/new media forms and formation of new archives. Likewise, the “Many Lives of Indian Cinema: 1913–2013 and beyond” conference organized by Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, 2014, not only reconsidered subjects of national, regional, place, and locations via the framework of South Asia; it emphasized alternative and experimental film production, especially documentation and documentaries, alongside questions of intermediality and new media archives and, therefore, exhibited a range of curatorial projects and installations (also see the Art Connect 2013 7 (1) and Widescreen Journal 2014 5 (1), Special Issue on “An Unseen Century: Indian Cinema 1913–2013”).

6  Madhuja Mukherjee and Monika Mehta

In the light of such approaches, we focus on women and work in this volume, not simply because women’s labour in filmmaking demands particular attention but because their narratives of travel and action underline the conditions of networks, interconnections, and intermediality we hope to accentuate. Film scholarship, shaped by a national bent, has situated female film personnel within a moral framework, debating problems of respectability and scandal that dogged female stars (Majumdar 2010). What has been left largely unexplored is the issue of women’s labour, the precarious working conditions, and their impact on industries and film craft. For example, Ratan Bai’s “open letters” (Mukherjee 2017) reveal multiple networks, her presence/absence in the industry, as well as traffic of many such professionals. While Ratan Bai vanished from the Calcutta scene in 1935, following her scuffles with the renowned New Theatres Ltd., she resurfaced in Bombay during 1936 via other productions. By 1944, she was already a producer involved with newer legal battles. Her story underscores the conflicting nature of the industrial setups, the precarious and parallel routes authors, artists, and technicians, traversed to survive and achieve stardom. Stories such as Ratan Bai’s compel us to ask, how is access to networks regulated? In other words, who can access which networks? Thus, networks, old and new, reveal cinemas’ paternal genealogies as constructs and draw attention to “outsiders” who played a decisive role in the making of films. Such networks also underscore the function of transgressive desire, sexuality, gender, culture, practice, and the shifting configurations of media types (Bhattacharjya and Mehta; Sundar; Kumar), which are manifest both through the making of the films and in their narratives. Networks reimagine media geographies as they make visible under-studied or overlooked routes (e.g. Iran and India; Malegaon and Mumbai’s Grant and Lamington Road circuits; Bhojpuri films in Tamil Nadu). At the same time, they reveal that film production and circulation follows other industrial routes (Walia; e.g. textile routes in the case of Malegaon films); diasporic routes in the case of the Malayalam and Persian films (Radhakrishnan; Cooley); perhaps colonial and indentured routes in the case of Phani Majumdar (Bloom); or arrive at a specific location via intermittent routes (Krishna; Mukherjee). The building of networks is a difficult task and, thus, failures also provide an important entry point into this conversation as shown in the chapters by Anustup Basu and Pujita Guha. Moreover, even as networks direct our attention to flows, it is important to remember that networks depend on reliability and are activated to complete projects, transactions, tasks, and requests. Thus, stability is also a key characteristic of networks. As the connective tissue of this collection, networks shape and propel our contributors’ inquiries.

Part I: the female star, traveling figures and transgressions The first section of this volume, “The Female Star, Traveling Figures and Transgressions,” focuses on such alternative itineraries and networks of work and kinship and highlights the pulsating movement within the field. The Women’s Film Pioneer Project ushered in new directions in doing, recording, and archiving women’s

Introduction  7

film history and accentuated the missing link  – women’s dynamic role in filmmaking. Similarly, Lant and Periz’s (2006) mammoth work, as well as Vicki Callahan’s (2010) volume, interrogate film history in an attempt to produce a feminist historiography, which is based on empirical research. In addition, biographies of (female) actors and their recent translations have brought to light the densities with regard to creative labour in the film industry. In this section we emphasize traffic and transgressions and explore the courses via which women, precariously located within industrial hierarchies, journeyed multiple industrial setups. This section opens with Rashmi Sawhney’s chapter, which develops a feminist historiography that departs from a desire to “complete” or “correct” historical narratives and to bring “history” into the present. In doing so, she points to how possible and fluid archives can re-write film historiography. In a way, Fatma Begum’s life story – and its fragmentary nature – alongside rumours and scandals that lace it, raises questions regarding method. Sawhney evokes Deleuze and Guattari to highlight in what ways “ ‘becoming’ is a process of change, flight, or movement within an assemblage” and compels us to ask “what is film history” and “how to approach it?” This chapter also traces the flights of certain motivated women from various cities to Bombay – which form some of the key concerns of this anthology. In a similar vein, Claire Cooley writes about the “Persian star from Calcutta” and addresses the experiences of Ruhangiz Saminezad and the ways in which the pioneering Iranian film The Lor Girl was shot. The study brings within the discourse of industrial traffic the shared stories between Iran and India as well as of Saminezad and other female stars of the period. Spotlighting the specific industrial turn with the arrival of the Talkies, she elaborates on how sound film constructed female stardom and underlines the problem of labour with regard to female actresses. Cooley particularly mentions how cinema of the period was connected to the formation of Iranian state, and the Nushki Extension Railway, which facilitated the British military services, and demonstrate the interconnected contexts in which the “Talkies” emerged in Middle East and South Asia. Therefore, highlighting the limitations of national cinema frameworks, Cooley underlines how this transnational industrial traffic shaped female stardom, sound, and labour. Thus, the story of the making of the first Persian-language sync-sound film turns up the volume on the dynamics of gender, technology, and stardom, vibrant at this historical conjuncture. Considering that with the arrival of sync-sound, and the “Talkies”, the circuits of film production, distribution, and consumption expanded during the 1930s and, thereby, accelerated and reinforced the (existing) industrial networks, the crucial links between the big cities – such as Bombay, Calcutta, Lahore, and Madras – were reorganized during this period. This intensification of the circuits of cinema and other socio-cultural movements transformed Bombay into a major site of transregional films, as films from other sectors, such as Calcutta and Poona, flooded the map of British India. The itineraries of many performers, artists, and authors thus overlapped and created a convergence of media circuits. Sarah Rahman Niazi explores the journey of Miss Iris Maud Gasper aka Sabita Devi from Calcutta to Bombay. In the absence of biographical details (as in the case of other actors), as

8  Madhuja Mukherjee and Monika Mehta

well as film texts, Niazi gleans information from popular magazines (like Filmland) and addresses the intersections between gender and modernity, enabled by the industrial networks of cinema. She attempts “to recuperate her body of work from the debris of archival amnesia” (Niazi). The multifarious and shifting narratives of the female stars and their eventual emergence as filmmakers (writers/ directors/producers, see Debashree Mukherjee 2013) demonstrate specific contours of cinemas of India – women’s role in the making of cinema and its history. Uma Bhrugubanda’s chapter on Bhanumati, by reflecting on her biography and the films, further illustrates how some women enjoyed substantial power owing to their stardom (particularly across Tamil and Telugu film industries). This chapter reconnoitres the works of Bhanumathi, whose extraordinary career as an actress, singer, writer, director, and studio owner point out the multiple roles many artists, authors, and technicians essayed. Bhrugubanda unpacks the circuits between Tamil, Telugu and Bombay film industries. She shows how Bhanumati’s individual career and her autobiography as well as biographies and memoirs of her contemporaries reveal how gendered subjectivities were reworked through multilingual cinematic texts and extra-cinematic narratives. Usha Iyer’s persuasive work shows not only how Tamil films were consistently remade in Hindi during the 1950s – featuring the dancing star, Vyjayanthimala, which were produced by the Madras-based studio, AVM Productions – but the ways in which such films brought a so-called South Indian dancer-actor and the dance form (such as “Bharatanatyam”) to Bombay cinema. Such transactions and transference brought new gestural repertoire in Bombay cinema, which, as argued by Iyer, affected costume, mise en scène, and narratives of popular cinemas. The star body and the dance form(s), therefore, enable us to trace the idioms and spectacular imaginations that Tamil cinema brought to Hindi cinema, as well as the developing hierarchies between film industries and their claims as national cultural products. Iyer illustrates the manner in which an “intermedial star like Vyjayanthimala,” whose career involved both stage and film performances, carries a range of “movement vocabularies across media and alters representational regimes when she moves between film industries” and in the process underscores a complicated subnational politics  – a critical point which is dealt with in other chapters of this volume. In this regard it might be useful to flag films such as Kalpana (Uday Shankar 1948), which was made in Hindi, and Chandralekha (S.S. Vasan 1948), originally made in Tamil and later made into Hindi, both of which were shot during the same period at the Gemini Studios, Madras. While Kaplana may be studied as personal and political imagery of the nation, Vasan and Shankar’s exceptional work, in terms of setting, lighting, movement, action, gestures, and articulation left impressive imprints across the body of popular cinema. Moreover, the question of Waheeda Rehman’s dancing body (discussed by Iyer) that consolidated new representational repertoire with the film Guide (Vijay Anand, 1965) is also examined via the problem of its production by Pujita Guha (in Chapter 10). Such productions, we propose, were carriers of multiple cultural practices and imaginings and accelerated the traffic of mediums, forms, and creative labour. “Gender”

Introduction  9

and “networks” thus become analytical categories, which facilitate further study and remapping.

Part II: networks of circulation, production, and imaginings The section titled “Networks of Circulation, Production, and Imaginings” does not merely signpost flows of objects, peoples, and practices; it also highlights how things arrived at certain places and the in-flow and out-flow of material and labour via inter-routes. C. Yamini Krishna studies the location of Hyderabad within the larger map of cinema and circulation of films. Hyderabad was a princely city under the rule of Nizam whereas Secunderabad (its twin) was a cantonment city under the British. Although cinema in both these cities was a colonial import, the cultures of cinema were remarkably different. For instance, in Hyderabad, cinema functioned as a part of the feudal economy under the patronage of the ruler whereas in Secunderabad, it operated as a centre for entertainment for the colonial army. Krishna draws attention to the position of Hyderabad and Secunderabad within film histories through tracing and rethinking the archives of cinema and city and through an in-depth reading of film exhibition and viewership of Motimahal theatre in Hyderabad. Situating cinema histories of these cities in a broader map, this chapter narrates a complicated account of cinema vis-à-vis the city, architecture, planning, public sphere, demography, class, and gender, all of which come to the forefront during a fire in the theatre in 1936. In the process, Krishna unpacks the entanglement of disparate industrial networks that interconnect multiple sites of film production. This micro-history, therefore, links up with the larger macro history of cinemas of India. For instance, the Indian Cinematograph Committee Report (also see Priya Jaikumar 2006) shows how cities and towns like Peshwar, Karachi, Rawalpindi, Jullundur, Ranikhet, Simla, Dalhousie, Ahmedabad, Nasik, Allahabad, Jhansi, Lucknow, Nagpur, Jamshedpur, Asansol, Darjeeling, Kurseong, Shillong, Trichinopoly, Vellore, as well as Godhra and Malegaon and many more (in present day Sri Lanka and Myanmar), were connected through a compelling traffic of cinema and cinematic paraphernalia. Likewise, the Bengal-born filmmaker D.N. Ganguly formed at least three film companies, collaborated with disparate companies and personnel, and also launched the Lotus Film Co. at Hyderabad, which was set up with the support of Nizam. Krishna’s chapter, which presents the story of Motimahal theatre, mentions how it was owned by Motilal Chambaria of Calcutta and thus, in the process, gestures towards newer historical readings pertaining to place and the mobile filmic object. For instance, on one hand, Moti Mahal was connected to the networks of colonial railways as films and peoples arrived to this place; on the other, it was part of an elaborate film production and distribution network, which extended across Madras, Calcutta, Kolhapur, and other centres. Additionally, cinema also mobilized a wide network of technical crew as film operators and projectionists trained in cities like Bombay and Calcutta found employment in Hyderabad.

10  Madhuja Mukherjee and Monika Mehta

Madhuja Mukherjee’s chapter titled “Arriving at Bombay” traces the works of Bimal Roy and the meandering nature of such networks and draws attention to the layered cinematic style, which she describes as “cinema of intersection.” Drawing from the debates around “transitional” form, she argues that this is not a cinema about transition per se, which is waiting to evolve. Rather, it’s a form and a style that retains traces of continuity and change. For instance, Bimal Roy began his career in Calcutta and later shifted to Bombay in the context of the Second World War due to the weakening of the studios in Calcutta. Prior to becoming an influential filmmaker Roy was associated with the making of “newsreels” for the (British) state. Mukherjee draws attention to such to-ing and fro-ing between fiction/ non-fiction as well melodrama/realism to produce a complex historical reading of stylistic ambivalence, which she reads as “cinema of intersection.” Furthermore, Roy did not shift to Bombay alone. Besides his team, the Bengali speaking actordirector-technicians were not the only group to have landed at Bombay during this period. As a matter of fact, by the mid-1940s, there was an influential group of Left-wing thinkers who contributed to the socio-cultural life of Hindi cinema. There was also a considerable flow between undivided Punjab, Bombay, Bengal, as well as Madras provinces, which increased following the Second World War and Partition. Such journeys, as Mukherjee illustrates, were often bumpy, long drawn, meandering, or byzantine. Peter Bloom follows the extended networks through the works of Phani Majumdar, who also began his career in Calcutta, with the same production company as Bimal Roy. His analysis shows how a regional economy for film production, melodramatic forms, and playback songs emerged during the 1950s and 1960s in cinema of Malaysia (in Singapore) and foregrounds an elaborate South and Southeast Asian entertainment network. Thus, Malaya cinema was understood as part of an extensive transnational Indian/regional cinemas, as evident from the films of Majumdar (who also directed films in multiple Indian languages), made during a ten-year period under a contract with the Shaw Brothers. Bloom’s reading of the landmark film Hang Tuah (Phani Majumdar 1956) unravels an immensely complex field of production and narrative collaborations. Anustup Basu’s chapter chalks out a multi-planar map of such transactions. Studying Filmfare magazine and other print media, he traces a particular vein of Indian cinema discourses during the 1950s, which were marked by an international imagination (in the era of the new republic, five-year plans and Bandung). This aspiration, as discussed by Basu, was consolidated after the first Indian Film Festival in 1951 and gathered further impetus following Awara’s (Raj Kapoor 1951) remarkable success in the USSR and West Asia, as well as by the Pather Panchali (Satyajit Ray 1955) “phenomenon.” This aspirational condition produced a plethora of projects, which were often announced or rumoured and even abandoned. This chapter explains the ways in which such projects and projections fizzled out in the next decade and the Bombay industry adopted popular Technicolor-Gevacolor romances. Such accounts of imagined projects – and even (mega) failures – we contend are as much a part of historical narratives and networks as

Introduction  11

the landmark texts and contexts. Furthermore, Basu’s section on K.A. Abbas, the renowned writer and (later) filmmaker, and subjects of internationalism, reminds us of Abbas’ pivotal role in imagining a certain kind of Indian cinema during the pre-independence era (Mukherjee 2008). Like Basu, Pujita Guha tracks an unsuccessful project. Drawing upon media archaeology, she pursues “failed projects, wayward shards of experimentation, or even non-linear historical writing that chaotically slides between the past and present” (Guha) by narrating how the popular actor-producer Dev Anand, who was initially associated with Nav Ketan, endured an international failure. Yet, the lackluster performance of the English version of his magnum opus Guide (1966) did not deter Dev Anand. A few years later, he teamed up with film producer-director Rolf Bayer in an attempt to re-launch his international career via Hollywood. Titled The Evil Within (1970), the film was to be distributed by 20th Century Fox across 42 countries. Based on a drug network that is busted by the Interpol agent Dev (Dev Anand), this project was shot on location in India, Vietnam, Hong Kong, and Philippines. Its cast included Rod Perry, Filipino star Tita Munoz, the Indian star Zeenat Aman, and involved Yash Johar (later producer) as production controller. Its post-production was completed in the Far East Studios in Japan, and sound was processed in the Aoi studios of Japan. Although the film wasn’t released in India or in the USA, a dubbed version was released in Philippines, and an English version found its way to the Fox Movie Channel. This chapter draws out a detailed career graph of the film, and in the process elucidates the interlacing of Dev Anand’s career trajectories on one hand, and the complex web of media networks and imaginaries in post Second World War/Cold War Asia on the other. Although the project did not eventually model Bandung’s internationalist utopia, Guha’s narrative account reveals a vast network across postcolonial worlds in the context of “cold-war Asia,” which, nonetheless, was imagined by the American studios. Such imaginings, we propose, perhaps attained newer forms via Bruce Lee’s cult films such as The Big Boss (1971) and Enter The Dragon (1973), which were produced by Hollywood studios and by means of Dev Anand’s own Hare Rama Hare Krishna (1971), which dealt with international trafficking and doping. Interestingly, Dev Anand’s failed international projects have resurfaced via the internet; their continued circulation suggests the possibilities of new encounters. Guha and Bloom uncover varied circuits, idioms, infrastructures, and narratives of film production, shifting our understanding of national and transnational cinemas. By exploring aborted alliances and projects, Basu and Guha pressure us to reconsider potential archives of Indian cinemas and narratives of film history that are based on success. While studies of contemporary Bollywood chalk out the movement of Indian diaspora across territories of Global North and South, such renewed focus on South and South Asia and on colonial/post-colonial narratives, which shift the focus from studies in language-specific films and populace to a decisively networked history, expands the scope of study from regional/national/international to a dizzying map of transnational and the transregional circuits.

12  Madhuja Mukherjee and Monika Mehta

Part III: media geographies, agencies, and technologies The chapters in the section on “Media Geographies, Agencies, and Technologies” examine the intermingling of media, geographies and technologies and highlight the significant role played by media in (re)imagining identities, desires, and communities. Ratheesh Radhakrishnan looks at Malayalam film from the 1980s to the present focusing on cinema’s role as an object of transaction and a domain for configuring subject experience in the contexts of migration. Mobilizing the affective and geographical valences of Sara Ahmed’s concept, orientation, he argues that novel props and sets that populate Malayalam cinema reorient the horizon of desire and, thereby, reconstitute the experience of the Malayali subject. He provides a wonderful example of a man who watches an ABBA video, which is followed by shots of his wife appearing in her new nightie, both freshly brought from the Gulf by her husband, enabling her to articulate her sexual desire (also see Mehta and Bhattacharjya). In these films, video and VHS not only mark aspirational desires; they signal cinema’s rebirth and new avatar in elsewhere. Thus, the Gulf becomes the site for video’s emergence and its re-circulation in Kerala as well as a financial source for cinema in Kerala as remittance monies find their way to film productions and construction of cinema halls. Thus, both these objects represented in cinema, and cinema itself, Radhakrishnan shows, is constituted by an elsewhere, gesturing to the difficulty of imagining a pure regional subject or cinema. While Radhakrishnan analyses interregional networks, Akshaya Kumar turns our attention to intra-regional networks through his investigation of Bhojpuri cinema. With the entry of digital/video film, Kumar argues, the Hindi media landscape opens to new players and configurations. This development takes place at a juncture when Bollywood is abandoning its domestic audiences as well as its preferred form, melodrama, in favour of multiplex and global audiences and slick, muted films. Bhojpuri cinema takes up this discarded genre and thereby restarts conversation with domestic audiences that were no longer of interest to Bollywood. Bhojpuri cinema, Kumar notes, does not align with the linguistic state and cinema models that have defined vernacular cinemas and their audiences in India. Indeed, the Bhojpuri community does not live in a single place (Hardy 2015). Rather, the community is spread out across Eastern Uttar Pradesh, Western Bihar, Jharkhand, and Nepal (also in Mauritius, Fiji, the Caribbean, and elsewhere) and the search for jobs takes working class male migrants to new places. The advent of portable and mobile technologies advances the already unmoored nature of Bhojpuri cinema. Viewers are able to watch these films on VCDs, video parlours, and phones, displacing the theatre as a privileged site for viewing film. Mobile devices, which are able to house both Hindi and vernacular films, reduce the distance between them, diminishing both the size and stature of Bombay cinema. Interestingly, melodrama, a form that appears to require the “scale of projection and enclosing visuals,” thrives on these small screens and increases the viewership of Bhojpuri cinema. Melodrama’s ability to flourish, Kumar notes, depends on its promise of social mobility, of scaling up. This promise is primarily offered to the male subaltern subject. Thus,

Introduction  13

along with melodrama, what re-surface are patriarchal stories and arrangements in new media and beyond. Nilanjana Bhattacharjya and Monika Mehta’s chapter track how gender and ethnicity impact the formation of interregional networks in their analysis of Aiyyaa (2012). The intermingling of desire technology and elsewhere that shapes Radhakrishnan’s argument re-emerges in their chapter. Aiyyaa’s female protagonist, Meenaxi, is an ardent fan of Bombay cinema, and her pursuit of her romantic aspirations, fuelled by this cinema, leads her to learn Tamil via television. In the film, cable television allows Meenaxi, a Maharashtrian Brahmin, to access content from elsewhere – the riveting Midnight Masala – and thereby fuels her desire for Surya, a Tamil art student. Aiyyaa’s lavishly mounted song sequences combine elements from Bombay, Tamil, Telugu, and Marathi cinemas to stage Meenaxi’s abundant and voluptuous fantasies. If heterogeneity is a key component of the film’s diegetic world, it also shapes its production. In making Aiyyaa, the Marathi filmmaker, Sachin Kundkalkar extended one of the stories of his film, Gandha (2009), Lagnaachya Vayachi Mulgi. Aiyyaa’s cast was put together from Urdu/Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, and Malayalam film industries, and several actors had worked in television and theatre. Both in and off screen, Aiyyaa is saturated with places and signatures, revealing stamps of various cinemas, de-centring Bollywood’s authority. This vision is tempered by the chapter’s credit sequence analysis, which reveals that masculine citational practices as well as industrial size and rank continue to persist, even in hatke cinema. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a dubbing studio in Mumbai observing Hollywood films being dubbed into Hindi, Tejaswini Ganti’s chapter complicates nation-bound understandings of Bollywood and Hollywood. Dubbed Hollywood films, she argues, are often characterized as threats to local film industries. Such an understanding rests on dubbing as simply overwriting one voice with another, a feat made possible by technology. However, Ganti’s fieldwork reveals that not only do Hollywood majors rely on local companies in India for translation and dubbing, but for their Hindi versions they are eager to dub with Bollywood stars and employ established Bombay screenwriters to write the dub scripts. This scenario not only challenges the cultural imperialism thesis but also, along with Ganti, compels us to inquire: to what extent are these films then “Hollywood films?” Could we not also call them Hindi films? Her study shows not only the blurring of boundaries between Hollywood and Bollywood but also between the realms of production and distribution. Dubbing is located in the realm of distribution; however, Ganti’s analysis shows that dubbing not only involves elements associated with production, but it generates a new text. Her meticulous fieldwork reveals that the local is not simply a space of consumption and new markets but also a space of production and distribution. Furthermore, her interactions with Hindi dubbing professionals who view English, Tamil, and Telugu as foreign demonstrates that the local is always already a space of difference.

14  Madhuja Mukherjee and Monika Mehta

Pavitra Sundar’s chapter examines the local hierarchies gestured to in Ganti’s work through her analysis of the making-of genre. She considers the visual tropes of the making-of genre: the figure of the music director, the space of the recording studio, and the technologies of musical production. She argues that this genre renders the studio, technology, and the artist as critical nodes in the traffic of sounds and music across India. The studio, Sundar notes, is constructed as a “placeless” venue. There are no windows, dialogues, or shots through which one might decipher its whereabouts. Her conception of the studio pressures Edward Relph’s (1976) theorization of “placeless” venues such as airports or malls as sites that signal the consolidation of capitalism and consumption. The studio, while a transit and transitional site like shopping malls and airports, is a site of labour and sociality. This “placeless” spot is filled with technologies that enable the production of music, allowing professionals who are separated by both time and space to work together. It also becomes a space for cross-regional flow where informal translations occur regularly, revealing that multilingualism and, therefore, translation, have been key attributes of film production in India. In the making of genres, A. R. Rahman is cast as a much sought-after music composer, spiritual genius, and tech wiz from Chennai (earlier Madras), who is indelibly associated with the studio and its technologies. The studio thus becomes a place that unsettles Bombay’s hegemonic status even as it becomes yet another important venue for building and consolidating male homosocial networks. In contrast, Sundar’s chapter shows how the making-of genre featuring Sneha Khanwalkar destabilizes structures of power that shape the film industries (see Shikha Jhingan 2015). Khanwalkar’s search for novel sounds once more take us away from Bombay to different sites of production such as Chandigarh or Patna, generating new industrial networks. While Sundar’s work is attentive to the gender politics both in and outside the studio, it also invites one to think about how caste and class enable Khanwalkar to travel. Ramna Walia’s chapter foregrounds the complex cultural geography of cinema in India by looking at the overlapping economy of cultural production in the Malegaon film industry and Bombay. Two key discourses shape and dominate the construction of the Malegaon industry. The first imagines Malegaon as preliberalized Bollywood where there are oral promises rather than contracts, handwritten scripts, unregulated markets, and unlicensed exhibition. This discourse shores up Bombay cinema’s current corporate veneer. Alongside this vision of Malegaon as spoof and doppelganger of Bombay cinema, there is a romanticized view of Malegaon as an alternate industrial economy, thriving on piracy, informal networks, and cheap digital technologies. In this discourse, the Malegaon’s granular aesthetic is fetishized and read as a sign of participatory or download cultures. The first discourse constructs Malegaon as backward, and the second one assigns it to a peripheral realm. Puncturing these discourses, Walia uses Malegaon as a lens to jostle and rethink key tenets of media studies. The difficulty in locating Malegaon’s industry (is it local or regional? is it a film industry or video industry that lies outside of global-national-regional identities?) brings to surface a “crisis of scale” that structures media industries and scholarship. She shows that Malegaon

Introduction  15

film industry relies on older trade routes, river systems, performance cultures, and household economy of operations; a network of small entrepreneurs, video circuits sustains and nurtures both trade and performance. Malegaon viewers routinely watch pirated Hollywood and Bollywood films, dubbed versions of Tamil and Telugu films, Marathi films, Bhojpuri films, and low-grade Lamington Road and Grant Road films. While Malegaon is located in Maharashtra, it comprises of working-class Muslim immigrants who migrated from Northern Uttar Pradesh. Thus, Urdu is its language of literacy; local interactions occur in Khandeshi; Marathi is the language of state; it has trading links and communal ties with Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh. The multilingual film cultures in Malegaon, its video circuits, which are indebted to new technologies and older river routes and communal ties, pressure our critical vocabulary with respect to geography, media, and technologies. This study of Malegaon compels us to revisit fundamental questions: Where and how are films made? What ties and links do they rely upon? What are the itineraries of these films? What kind of audiences do they encounter, either imagined or unimagined? Therefore, if Arjun Appadurai (1991) proposed the idea of “parallel modernities” in the context of globalizing worlds and Partha Chatterjee (1997) argued about the uncertain trajectories of “our modernity,” through this volume we use the entanglements of film industries and its networks, particularly across South, Southeast, and West Asia, as a lens to examine the shifting geo-politics, as evident via the expansive interlinking of production-distribution-exhibition coordinates, varying media forms, disparate film styles, work cultures, planning, labour, gender, language, and social relations. We propose that networks as a method helps us theorize multiple trajectories with respect to media – from print to video files, celluloid to digital, cinema to TV, cassettes to sound bytes – and industrial boundaries (marked by local/national/global maps) and enables us to rethink media “archaeologies” as an intersection of multivalent conditions and forms that overlap with other contexts and are in a state of flux. This collection contributes to and invites further debates and discussions on networks.

References Abadzi, Helen. 2008. “Hindi Films of the 50s in Greece: The Latest Chapter of a Long Dialogue”. www.academia.edu/3805022/Hindi_Films_of_the_50s_in_Greece_Memory_ of_interactions_in_a_bygone_era [Accessed August 17, 2019]. Appadurai, Arjun. 1991. “Global Ethnoscapes: Notes and Queries for a Transitional Anthropology”. In Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, edited by Richard Fox, 191–210. Santa Fe, CA: SAR Press. Banks, Miranda J., Bridget Conor, and Vicki Mayer. 2015. Production Studies, the Sequel! Cultural Studies of Global Media Industries. New York: Routledge. Basu, Anustup. 2010. Bollywood in the Age of New Media: The Geo-televisual Aesthetic. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Caldwell, John Thornton. 2008. Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

16  Madhuja Mukherjee and Monika Mehta

Callahan, Vicki. 2010. Reclaiming the Archive: Feminism and Film History. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University. Chatterjee, Ranita 2014. “Film History Through Fragments: The Aurora Archive and the Transnational Travels of Early Indian Cinema”. BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 5 (1): 29–47. DOI: 10.1177/0974927614531358. Dutta, Madhusree, Kaushik Bhaumik, and Rohan Shivkumar, eds. 2013. Project Cinema City. New Delhi: Tulika Books. Dwyer, Rachel, and Jerry Pinto. 2011. Beyond the Boundaries of Bollywood: The Many Forms of Hindi Cinema. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Ganti, Tejaswini. 2012. Producing Bollywood Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan. Govil, Nitin. 2015. Orienting Hollywood: A Century of Film Culture Between Los Angeles and Bombay. New York/London: New York University Press. Hardy, Kathryn C. 2015. “Constituting a Diffuse Region: Cartographies of Massmediated Bhojpuri Belonging”. BioScope: South Asia Screen Studies 6 (2): 145–164. DOI: 10.1177/0974927615600623. Jaikumar, Priya. 2006. Cinema at the End of Empire, A Politics of Transition in Britain and India. Kolkata: Seagull Books. Jhingan, Shikha. 2015. “Backpacking Sounds: Sneha Khanwalkar and the “New” Soundtrack of Bombay Cinema”. Feminist Media Histories 1 (4): 71–88. Lant, Antonia, and Ingrid Periz, eds. 2006. Red Velvet Seat: Women’s Writings on the First Fifty Years of Cinema. London: Verso. Larkin, Brian. 1997. “Indian Films and Nigerian Lovers: Media and the Creation of Parallel Modernities”. Africa 67 (3): 406–440. Larsen, Lars Bang. 2014. Networks. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Lee, S. Heijin, Monika Mehta, and Robert Ji-Song Ku. 2019. Pop Empires: Transnational and Diasporic Flows of India and Korea. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Liang, Lawrence. 2011. “Media’s Law: From Representation to Affect”. BioScope: South Asia Screen Studies 2 (1): 23–40. DOI: 10.1177/097492761000200104 Majumdar, Neepa. 2010. Wanted Cultured Ladies Only!, Female Stardom and Cinema in India, 1930s–1950s. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Mayer, Vicki, Miranda J. Banks, and John Thornton Caldwell. 2014. Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries. New York: Routledge. Mazumdar, Ranjani. 2007. Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mehta, Monika. 2011. Censorship and Sexuality in Bombay Cinema. Austin: University of Texas Press. ———. 2017. “Fan and Its Paratexts”. Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 58 (1–2): 128. DOI: 10.13110/framework.58.1-2.0128. Menon, Bindu. 2011. “Sketches for a Film Which Never Happened: Appan Thampuran’s Bhootarayar”. BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 2 (2): 181–188. Mukherjee, Debashree. 2013. “Notes on a Scandal: Writing Women’s Film History Against an Absent Archive”. BioScope: South Asia Screen Studies 4 (1): 9–30. Mukherjee, Madhuja. 2008. “The New Theatres Ltd.: ‘The Cathedral of Culture’ and the House of the Popular.” Unpublished PhD thesis, Jadavpur University. ———. 2009. New Theatres Ltd: The Emblem of Art, the Picture of Success. Pune: National Film Archive of India. ———, ed. 2012. Aural Films, Oral Cultures, Essays on Cinema from the Early Sound Era. Kolkata: Jadavpur University Press.

Introduction  17

———. 2014. “Material, History, Arguments: Unidentified Publicity Images and Art Installations”. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 15 (1): 113–127. ———. 2016. “Toward a New Frame for Regional Films: Manbhum Videos and the Other Side of (Indian) Cinema”. BioScope: South Asia Screen Studies 7 (1): 58–79. DOI: 10.1177/0974927616635939. ———, ed. 2017. Voices of the Talking Stars, the Women of Indian Cinema and Beyond. New Delhi/Kolkata: Sage Publications/Stree. ———. 2019. “When Was the ‘Studio Era’ in Bengal: Transition, Transformations and Configurations During 1930s”. Widescreen Journal 8 (1). http://widescreenjournal.org/ index.php/journal/issue/view/10. Mukherjee, Madhuja, and Kaustav Bakshi, eds. 2020. Popular Cinema in Bengal: Genres, Stars and Public Cultures. Oxon/New York: Routledge. Neves, Joshua, and Bhaskar Sarkar, eds. 2017. Asian Video Cultures: In the Penumbra of the Global. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Punathambekar, Aswin. 2013. From Bombay to Bollywood: The Making of a Global Media Industry. New York: New York University Press. Relph, Edward. 1976. Place and Placelessness. London: Pion. Sawhney, Rashmi. 2013. “Writing History in the Dark: Fatma Begum in Conversation with Ms. Kitty”. ArtConnect 7 (1): 20–41. Srinivas, S.V. 2003. “Hong Kong Action Film in the Indian B Circuit”. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 4 (1): 40–62. ———. 2013. “Rajnikant in Japan: Indian ‘Superstardom’ and Low Value Markets”. InterAsia Cultural Studies 14 (4): 615–634. Sundaram, Ravi, ed. 2015. No Limits: Media Studies from India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Thomas, Rosie. 2013. Bombay Before Bollywood: Film City Fantasies. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Vasudevan, Ravi. 2010. “Geographies of the Cinematic Public: Notes on Regional National and Global Histories of Indian Cinema”. Journal of the Moving Image 9: 94–117. Vitali, Valentina. 2008. Hindi Action Cinema: Industries, Narratives, Bodies. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

PART I

The female star, traveling figures and transgressions

1 FATMA BEGUM, SOUTH ASIA’S FIRST FEMALE DIRECTOR Resurrections from media and legal archives Rashmi Sawhney

Like many women pioneers in cinema, Fatma Begum, British India’s first female director and producer who ran a production house in Bombay from 1926–29, has by and large been a spectral presence in film history. This chapter attempts to address this gap by bringing her into representation, trafficking her, so to speak, from a past historical time into a contemporary present. The account presented here is a result of several years of persistent probing, and while I have written about her elsewhere (Sawhney 2013), in this chapter, Fatma Begum functions as a point of departure to raise methodological questions for film historiography.1 Given her absence in film archives, my account necessitates a turn to media and legal archives, indicating that mobility – or agility – is a fundamental requirement within cinema studies as well. The larger question at play that underwrites this work is how fluid and impermanent archives influence postcolonial and feminist historiographical approaches to history and its present.2 Fatma Begum wrote, directed, acted in and produced films in Bombay in the 1920s and 1930s, enacting multiple kinds of labour, a common practice during the early decades of cinema that continues to mark independent and women’s film work. She was no exception to the culture of innovation and enterprise embodied by better-known pioneers like Georges Melies, Auguste and Louis Lumiere or Dhundiraj Govind Phalke. Although Fatma was literate enough to write film scripts, unlike D.G. Phalke, the famous ‘father of Indian cinema’, neither she nor others seem to have found significance in preserving her scripts and papers. Colonial policies had forced the predominately oral cultures of the region to transition to the British idea of ‘literacy’ solely as ‘the ability to read and write’, and Fatma would have belonged to the 2.9% of female population listed as being literate in the 1921 Census of India. One notes that the devaluing of female work, including by women themselves, has had a long and persistent history, extending into present times.

22  Rashmi Sawhney

To add to this, the indifference and hostility towards cinema in the early 20th C, seen by ‘respectable society’ as a wasteful and morally corrupting form, extended towards a general apathy towards film preservation. A large number of film prints and negatives were lost due to negligence, celluloid was often sold for extracting silver, and sometimes production houses were deliberately set on fire to claim insurance money (Kumar 2016). Prints of Fatma’s films too were a casualty of this neglect, and the impossibility of now viewing the cinematic object, the film print,

FIGURE 1.1 Mother-daughter/Fatma-Sultana

Source: Digital art by Mishta Roy 2013

Fatma Begum  23

gives rise to the need to not only find relevant archives but to construct our own archives.3 The methodological manoeuvres implied by these challenges to film historians have been debated at length, and therefore I  will not dwell upon the pedagogic aspect here.4 However, it is worth pointing out that dispersed and fluid archives open up to us the possibility of seeing history as narratives in formation, rather than as fixed and stable accounts. Such archives, which I suggest might be call ‘improper archives’, are always in the process of being built and rebuilt, always self-reflectively incomplete, edging us to think of historical narratives as pulsating projections into present times, rather than as stable entities belonging to a distant and cut-off past.5

From princely state to Bombay cinema Fatma’s story is remarkable but not entirely unusual within the film industry. She was ‘married’ to Ibrahim Mohammed Yakut Khan III Bahadur, the Prince of Sachin (part of what is now Surat, in Gujarat), in 1906 at the age of 14 and bore him three daughters: Zubeida, Sultana and Shehazadi, in that order. Fatma was an Urdu and Gujarati stage actor, who migrated to Bombay with her daughters to join the film industry. However, there isn’t much clarity about this narrative and not sufficient archival material to ratify claims about her stage career although Kaushik Bhaumik’s unpublished (as of 2020) PhD dissertation on early cinema upholds this claim. Historical records reveal that the first wife of Ibrahim Mohammed Yakut Khan III Bahadur was indeed called Fatima Sultan Jahan Begum Sahiba. She was the daughter of his paternal uncle and the first of his three wives. However, the family records state that Fatima Begum died in 1913, at which time she would have been about 21 years of age. It is entirely imaginable that it may have been more convenient for Fatma to have been declared dead rather than for the Nawab’s family to face the public shame of having one of their clan join the film industry. There is not much clarity on the nature of the marriage contract either, and a couple of sources indicate that it may have been a morganatic marriage, which would have absolved Mohammed Yakut Khan from passing on his title or privileges to Fatma or their children. However, this cannot be established conclusively, as one of their daughters, Zubeida (famously the lead actress of the first Hindustani talkie film, Alam Ara, released in 1931, directed by Ardeshir Irani), went on to marry Raja Dhanraj Giri Narsinghji Gyan Bahadur of Hyderabad. His ancestors had migrated in the 15th C from Gandhar in present-day Afghanistan to settle initially in Pune, and then moved to Hyderabad in the 19th C, where they established a flourishing trade and rose to prominence as the bankers in the Nizam’s court. Possibly, Zubeida’s star status in the Bombay film industry secured her this social ‘elevation’. In the absence of any conclusive evidence about the nature of Fatma’s ‘married’ life in Sachin and the sudden declaration of her death, I would like to suggest that 1913 – coincidentally the year that Dadasaheb Phalke made Raja Harishchandra – is also the year Fatma Begum might have migrated to Bombay along with her three

24  Rashmi Sawhney

daughters. On the linear scale of Indian film history, 1913 thus marks the year that the ‘father’ and the ‘mother’ of Indian cinema both made their own different forays and departures into the world of cinema. Therefore, Fatma’s entry into the film industry would necessarily have to be seen as an event that is relational to the rhythms and milieus of early cinema, including in relation to Phalke’s legacy and the start-up culture of the 1920s Bombay film industry.6 Interestingly, Phalke and Fatma both exit the world of cinema in 1937–38, cleaving out a 25-year period that marks something of an epoch in Indian film history, a point I return to later in this chapter. There is a fair amount of literature available describing the difficulties and challenges Phalke had to face in order to materialize his dream of ‘images Indian in form and content’. Unfortunately, though, almost nothing is known about the early years of Fatma’s experiments in cinema. The first we hear of her is with reference to her film debut in Manilal Joshi’s Veer Abhimanyu in 1922, in which she played the role of Subhadra at the age of 30. However, what the story is for nine years, between 1913–22, will as of now, remain a mystery. Nonetheless, we know that somehow Fatma managed to get a foothold into the film industry and, from the beginning of her career as an actor, went on to become a writer, director and producer as well. Veer Abhimanyu was produced by Ardheshir Irani before he set up Imperial and involved over 5,000 persons in the production. Fatma’s daughter, Sultana, made her debut in the same film. Two years later, the eldest daughter Zubeida started her acting career at the age of 14 playing the lead role of the fairy-princess, Bakavali, in the iconic film Gul-e-Bakavali (dir. Kanjibhai Rathod), also featuring Sultana. Zubeida became a leading star of the 1930s and an iconic star of the ‘talkies’ after her role in Alam Ara (1931). Fatma Begum’s career thus sits at the cusp of the transition from silent cinema to the talkies, represented by her daughters Sultana (a leading star of the 1920s) and Zubeida (who is reported to have had an impressively high income of Rs 2,000 per month in the 1930s). Fatma’s first film as a director, Bulbul-e-Parastan (1926), was produced under her own banner. The Fatma Film Corporation went on to produce all the other films she directed, which included: The Goddess of Love (1927), Heer Ranjha (1928a), Chandravali (1928b), Kanaktara (1929a), Milan Dinar (1929b), Naseeb ni Devi (1929c) and Shakuntala (1929d). Ironically, 1929, the year of highest productivity for the studio, was also its last year; Fatma got embroiled in a number of legal cases and stopped directing or producing films, taking up only some acting roles in the 1930s, with the last one being in Duniya Kya Hai (1937). The last years of the 1920s were tumultuous for many in the film business as the arrival of the ‘talkies’ was imminent. In addition to the general confusion about what this new form of cinema would entail, the industry functioned in a greatly unorganized manner. It would be reasonable to assume that the pressure felt by the industry at large was experienced by its only female director and producer in a much more intense way. Such an assumption can be sustained on the basis of the many accounts provided even today by female actors, producers and directors who continue to struggle to

Fatma Begum  25

raise finances or find distribution for their films (“Why are there so few female filmmakers?” 2010; “Hard for women filmmakers” 2018).

Legal twists and turns in film history I look at the period between 1929–32, drawing upon newspaper reportage of the numerous court cases that Fatma was embroiled in, as indicative of the borderlines that she kept shifting across and in-between (The Times of India 1929–1934). While the absence of archival material appears to be an obstacle for historicism, it prompts one to look more carefully into the dispersed sites of ‘a possible history’, as I do in this chapter, by looking into archives of media and law. This indicates another kind of traffic: a trail ending, forcing a turn in another direction, in turn opening up the possibility of looking at the relationship between the film industry and law, beyond censorship (Bhowmik 2009; Mehta 2011; Mazzarella 2012). Fatma’s narrative may be considered symbolic of the desperate situation of several small-scale filmmakers in the transition from silent cinema to the talkies but is particularly indicative of the tremendous instinct for survival that women entrepreneurs in the film industry had to summon. The multiple legal cases are symptomatic of the struggles of a woman with no history of making films attempting to build a career in the industry at perhaps the most precarious phase in the history of Indian cinema. This transition, as we know, led to the closing down of several studios (and the emergence of new studios based on the logic of curtailing risk), bringing to an end – or into substantial revision – many careers in the film industry (Mukherjee 2007; Dharamsey 2010).7 By 1929, The Victoria Fatma Film Company was in serious financial trouble. Fatma had been advanced a sum of Rs 25,000 by Reliance Film Distributors to make three films, namely, The Goddess of Love, Shakuntala and Romeo and Juliet, for which the company was to acquire distribution and booking rights. Reliance Film Distributors claimed that instead of giving the films to them, The Goddess of Love was given to a Mr. Rangwalla, and Reliance had to pay Rs 3,000 to acquire the film from him. In the meantime, G.N. Bhat, proprietor of Saraswati Film Labs (formerly a partner with D.K. Desai in Atmanand Film Lab until May 1929) claimed that The Victoria Fatma Film Company had passed promissory notes to the tune of Rs 3,100 for the film developing and processing work done by the Atmanand Film Lab for the studio. A High Court decree was obtained against Fatma, and the proceedings that began in September 1929 ordered her to complete and deposit the film Shakuntala as security within ten days of the ruling. The film could not be completed, and the entire claim was paid up by Mr. Razak, a proprietor of Reliance Film Distributors, on behalf of Fatma. Subsequently, Mr. Babubhai Maneklal, Manager of Reliance, filed a case against Fatma in February 1930 and, eventually, a settlement between Fatma and Reliance appears to have been arrived at on 7 March 1930, whereby it was agreed that the matter should be referred to arbitration. Pending arbitration, by common consent, the films were to be deposited with a Mr. A. Hussein (although Romeo and Juliet

26  Rashmi Sawhney

still seemed to have been incomplete and was eventually never finished), and a film printing machine Fatma had acquired from Krishna Film Co. was to be kept under a trust receipt at her Bandra studio. It was later discovered in May 1931 that the film printing machine was in the possession of Sultana Jilani, Fatma’s daughter, who, according to some accounts, was also a partner in the Fatma Film Production Company. A further complaint was filed, and when the machine was removed to the police station, it was discovered that parts of the machine were missing. These narratives emerged through the statements of witnesses during another suit Fatma was facing through 1931–32 on charges of forgery that became a major point of interest for the Bombay press, which followed it closely over its long-drawn 22-month court trial, revealing the underbelly of industrial traffic. Messrs. Samant and Co, a law firm that litigated for Fatma during the late 1920s, had accrued a substantial bill as a consequence of the various legal broils she was involved in and filed a Regular Darkhast to recover costs. Property belonging to and lying in Fatma’s Bandra studio was attached to the Darkhast by the court on 26 March 1930, ordering Fatma to execute a legal possessory mortgage in favour of the law firm within four days. Around the same time, a milkman named Ramkhilavan Sampat Pandye had filed a Regular Darkhast for the sum of Rs. 460 against Fatma for failure to pay him, to which the court issued a similar possessory mortgage decree, which Fatma repudiated. It turned out later (in the duration of the trial) that a Mr. N.A. Sherwani, Fatma’s husband for a brief duration until the end of May 1929 and allegedly Manager of Victoria Fatma Film Company, had helped in the filing of both these Darkhasts. If one takes at face value the coverage of the legal proceedings extensively reported by The Times of India, Sherwani had turned against Fatma after she resisted his attempts to take control of the Victoria Fatma Film Company, and he had more or less been removed from the production house even before they separated. In a fairly dramatic twist, following the possessory mortgage order, Sultana Jilani’s attorney sent a letter to The Victoria Fatma Film Company stating that on 17 May  1929, Fatma had pledged the Bandra studio to their client Ms. Sultana Jilani. And on 3 April 1930, Sultana proceeded to file a case against her mother in the Bombay High Court, to recover the amount due under the alleged mortgage deed of 17 May, which was to be handed over to her on the 17th of April 1930. Not surprisingly, on 4 April  1930, Mr. Nilkanth Pandurang Samant, partner in Messrs. Samant and Co, filed a complaint claiming his firm was dishonestly induced to agree to a fraud settlement. The 22-month-long case involved testimonies from about 65 witnesses and media reportage of details of the court hearings like: ‘Fatma Begum and Sultana Jilani appeared in court wearing a thin veil, but the latter removed hers as she took a seat before the jury’; ‘after paying the bail amount of Rs 500, the two ladies drove off in a Rolls Royce, which had been bringing them to court for the last two months’ and so on. Part of the evidence considered was the physical condition of the allegedly forged mortgage deed; The Times of India reports state that the jury considered the aged appearance of the paper and that its folds did not align with the rest of the

Fatma Begum  27

pages of the document, making a distinction between the use of a forged document and being guilty of forgery. The final judgment (considered perverse, by some media reports) stated that while there was no doubt that the mortgage deed in question was fabricated, it was not possible to prove that it had been forged by the four accused, namely: Fatma Begum, Sultana Jilani, K.V. Acharya (formerly Secretary of Mysore Pictures Corp. Ltd.) and Syed Zaimul Abedin Syed Vaheuddin. As if this was not enough, new charges were levelled on 25 October 1932 against Sultana, K.V. Acharya and Sorabji Ardheshir Talati, by Mr. Allabux Hydrally, a jewellery merchant in Santa Cruz, on grounds of cheating, criminal breach of trust and abetment of jewellery worth Rs 3,500. Hydrally had been told by Acharya and Talati that a Begum wished to buy some jewellery and was taken to Sultana’s Carter road residence, where she chose two pairs of diamond earrings and a diamond ring, signing a note of receipt and asking Hydrally to leave them with her to consult a Begum friend. By the time Hydrally returned to collect his payment the next day, the Begum and her friend had left for Hyderabad. It is doubtless that in the absence of adequate material on Fatma Begum in film archives in India the media reports of legal proceedings provide an invaluable insight into her life and work, as well as the functioning of the Bombay film industry in the 1920s and 30s. We are told by these reports that Fatma could read, write and speak English, although it is also reported that she denied this during the court proceedings. These legal cases chart out for us ‘thick descriptions’ (Geertz 1973) of what has come to be accepted as the reign of ‘fly by night’ producers in the 1920s and 30s, revealing that filmmaking involved a sustained struggle and not merely an opportunity to make quick money, as is indicated by the allusion to the pop-up culture of production houses in this period. Moreover, they reveal the lengths to which a female director and producer had to go in order to survive in the industry. More than anything though, these reports, along with the absence of any material on Fatma Begum in film archives – or indeed in Indian film historiography – expose the devaluing of women’s contribution to the history of Indian cinema. It is nothing but astonishing that the National Film Archive of India (NFAI), which regularly commissions monographs on film directors, has not considered it of any importance to bring out even a slim publication on Fatma Begum, the first female director (and producer and writer) in South Asia. Could it be because she was a feisty Muslim woman, who did not fit into the nationalistic account of Indian film history, which has been very much centred upon the noble endeavours of upper caste Hindu men like D.G. Phalke and V. Shantaram? Or is it because women’s work in the film industry is not considered a labour of any consequence? Whatever the reason might be, the history of early cinema in India/South Asia remains woefully inadequate without considering Fatma Begum’s adventures and misadventures in the film industry. I must add as a caveat that any narrative account of Fatma’s life and work (and by extension that of the thousands of workers in the various film industries of the time) is necessarily temporary and contingent upon constant revision, as new pieces of information and evidence reveal themselves, sometimes in the form of unforeseen and unpredictable digital data, which, nonetheless, must

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be considered as ‘documents-in-flux’ by scholars engaging with film history in the 21st century.

Film history as an assemblage in motion The conceptual category of industrial ‘traffic’ provides us with an opportunity to think through the implication of this inherent mobility within the cinema industry and film history. The etymology of the word ‘traffic’ can be traced back to Middle French ‘trafique’ in the 15th C which meant ‘trade’ or ‘commerce’ and the Italian word ‘trafficare’, which meant ‘to carry on trade’ as well as ‘to touch repeatedly/ handle’ from the Vulgar Latin term ‘transfricare’ (trans = across + fricare = to rub). Canadian linguist Ernst Klein (1966) suggests that the ultimate derivation of this Italian word comes from the Arabic term ‘tafriq’, which means ‘distribution’. Its meaning as ‘the movement of people and vehicles’ emerges in the 19th C, and the negative connotation of traffic as the ‘illegal trade of goods or people’ is a later 20th-C turn. The idea of ‘movement’ that is inherently embedded in the word ‘traffic’ is a useful way of engaging with what has by and large been theorized through the framework of multiplicity in Cinema Studies, for example, as in the case of transnational cinema. The root term ‘trans’ denotes spreading across more than one entity, and transnational cinema has been understood as cinema that belongs to more than one region or nation. Hamid Naficy (2001) notes that films made by diasporic filmmakers, who belong to more than one nation/culture, are marked by an accent, belonging neither fully to one place nor the other but devising a third space/aesthetic altogether, which, in a different context, preceding Naficy, Homi Bhabha (1994) refers to as ‘liminal space’. Liminality and mobility are intertwined, i.e. liminality arises and becomes possible because of some kind of border-crossing, migration or movement, and, conversely, the liminal states of subjects over time transform their immediate milieu or context. This mobility need not only be restricted to transgressing national or cultural identity and could equally be applicable to the crossing over or spreading across multiple kinds of work practices and contexts. But at the same time, it enlists a particular type of crossing-over, which might involve possibilities for a fundamentally different way of being and being located. For example, the capacity of filmmakers to migrate from silent cinema to the talkies or from celluloid to VHS and digital or professional multiplicities such as being a singer as well as an actor and a director (and so on) imply re-distributions that need to be understood in a durational manner as narratives of what Deleuze and Guattari (2004 [1980]), following Bergson, call ‘becoming’. According to Deleuze and Guattari, ‘becoming’ is a process of change, flight or movement within an assemblage. Rather than conceive of the pieces of an assemblage as an organic whole, within which the specific elements are held in place by the organization of a unity, the process of ‘becoming’ serves to account for relationships between the discrete elements of the assemblage. One piece of the assemblage

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is drawn into the territory of another piece, changing its value as an element and bringing about a new unity. Deleuze and Guattari term this process as ‘deterritorialization and re-territorialisation’, where the properties of the constituent element disappear and are replaced by the new properties of the assemblage. The concept of an assemblage and of things and people moving around, being de-territorialized or re-territorialized, is especially helpful in understanding Fatma’s presence and entry into the film industry not only as a historical narrative but also as an episode that is relational and transformative for the filmmaker, the film industry and film history. Fatma retired from an active life in cinema after acting in G.P. Pawar’s Duniya Kya Hai (1937), an independent production by Lalita Pawar, under the banner of Diamond Films, in which Lalita Pawar played the lead role of Lalita, a mistreated orphan girl. One notes with some irony that the film is an adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s Resurrection, and the story, with which some would be familiar, is that the girl (who in Tolstoy’s account is a housemaid) gets pregnant with the child of Madhav Kale, a student of law and son of the family who has adopted Lalita. Lalita is forced to take to prostitution in order to raise her child and, post multiple melodramatic turns, is accused of a murder that takes place in the brothel. By this time, Madhav has returned from Bombay, married and a practising lawyer, and he finds himself confronting Lalita again, as the prosecutor. As is widely known, Resurrection suffered severe censorship for almost four decades. Although the book was first translated into English by Louise Maude in 1900, a year after Tolstoy wrote it in Russian, a ‘definitive’ version was only published in 1938. Tolstoy’s open criticism of state-sponsored violence and organized religion were inconvenient to the Tsarist government, which kept up its efforts to silence him. Subsequent to his turn to spiritualism and a few years before he wrote Resurrection, Tolstoy had announced that he was giving up copyright over all his future work. However, in what has been considered as a major coup in the publishing industry, he decided to hold on to his rights for Resurrection, donating all his revenues to a sectarian peasant community called Dukhobors, whose religious beliefs forbade them to take up arms and who had therefore been persecuted over their refusal to participate in any form of military activity. The money raised from the publication of the book was given to the Dukhobars to migrate to Canada en masse. The internationalist impetus of this entire episode of adapting a Russian novel into a Hindi film in the late 1930s cannot be lost on those familiar with Indian film history, and Duniya Kya Hai needs to be seen in the context of the work being done by ‘progressive’ filmmakers like V. Shantaram, whose Prabhat Film Company had earned a substantial reputation for dealing with social issues in the 1930s. It is also remarkable that a translation of Tolstoy’s work would find its way into popular Hindi cinema a decade or more before Russia set up dedicated publishing houses to generate books for the Indian market in the 1950s. The larger emphasis of the self-reflective account of the Bombay film industry (as published in various film magazines) as being ‘inferior’ to films being made in Calcutta makes this film even more remarkable. While the film remains lost to us as yet, the song booklet

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prominently displaying Tolstoy’s picture and published in Hindi, English, Gujarati and Urdu, along with newspaper reviews, indicate that it did not go unnoticed. One could argue that if the history of Indian cinema were to be rewritten centred upon its female directors, producers, technicians and actors, it would differ greatly from the male-centric and nation-oriented versions currently at hand. A year before Duniya Kya Hai was released, Phalke produced his last film, Gangavataram (1937), a mythological about the descent of the river Ganga to earth. This was Phalke’s first and only talkie, and as has been extensively reported, he was by then an established failure in the Bombay film industry. Many years earlier in the 1920s, Phalke had decided to take sanyas (‘retire’) from cinema and had moved to Benares to write a play called Rangabhoomi (Swaroop 2013b).8 Jaya Dadkar in her Marathi book Kaal ani Kartutva (2010) writes about Fatma Begum going to Benaras to persuade Phalke to return to the world of filmmaking, which he does subsequently. Fatma’s role in helping resurrect Phalke’s flailing film career is intermeshed with her unsuccessful efforts at salvaging her own, which ended with her swansong, ironically in a film titled Resurrection. One final point needs to be made in recontextualizing this early period in Indian film history with respect to Fatma’s presence in that milieu. Much has already been said about the eclectic ethnicities of film actors – especially female actors – in the early 20th C, and it is by now widely recognized that Anglo Indian, Muslim and Jewish women played a crucial role in the film industry, until, as the popular narrative goes, questions of respectability and education were qualified through the entry into cinema of upper caste Hindu women (Ben-Moshe 2018; Majumdar 2009; Niazi 2018; Mubarki 2016). The question of diversity in Bombay cinema has largely remained tied to the yoke of ‘respectability’ (as a measure of education, class and caste) with respect to women, and much of the focus of the discussion on ‘male directors’ has had to do with their quest for an indigenous aesthetic, their interest in social reform, and their experiments with studio production systems, almost as if questions of caste or class did not apply to them. The diversity among directors (and indeed, within other forms of skill and labour, other than acting) has by and large eluded the interest of film theorists and historians, as if ethnicity or religion did not matter in any of these other kinds of work. It is in this context that Fatma’s work becomes even more significant, as not only was she a Muslim woman trying to compete within a brutal and unstable industry dominated by men, but she was also ancestrally probably of East African origin, belonging to the community of Siddis, also known as Habshis, of the Bantu tribe in Ethiopia. The Siddis were brought to India initially by the Arabs from the 8th C onwards and later by the Portuguese in the 15th C, largely as slaves, but they were also recruited as soldiers, and some came as traders. They are considered to have risen in political rank and economic influence, and Siddis like Malik Ambar, Barbak Shahazada and Jamal-ud-din-Yakut are among those better known in the context of Indian history. Sachin was one of two states that was under Siddi rule from the 18th C onwards, having its own model of governance and cultural practices. The state of Sachin was established in 1791 by Nawab Siddi Hyder Khan, great-great

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grandfather of Fatma’s one-time husband. The Schomburg Centre for Research in Black Culture held a show on ‘Africans in India’ at the New York Public Library in 2014, curated by Sylviane Douf and Kennith Robins, which included, among other interesting works of art, a portrait of Nawab Siddi Hyder Khan. Thus, the first female director and producer, and also perhaps the first female film writer in Indian cinema history, was of East African descent. What does this imply for us beyond functioning as a ‘historical account’? Partha Chatterjee and Anjan Ghosh (2002, 12) state that ‘ways of writing are inextricably entangled in the ideologies of the historian’s present’ and suggest therefore, that to ‘do’ history is also to ‘make’ it. If the film histories we construct also in some way begin to constitute and belong to the improper archives of cinema, how might one think of bringing these out from the dusty shelves of the past into our own present? My ongoing work with uncovering early film cultures through Fatma Begum attempts to address the possibility of constellating across time periods, in the mode of a timetraveller journeying through the labyrinth networks of cinema and history.

Inconclusive speculations The following long excerpt from an interview with independent scholar and historian of early cinema Virchand Dharamsey about the film Gul-e-Bakavali (1924) is indicative of the speculations one might put forward about the form that Indian cinema (and consequently Indian film historiography) might have taken if the focus had rested not on questions of ‘indigenous aesthetics’ (the work of D.G. Phalke and V. Shantaram, for example, as well as scholarly work about them) but on questions of ‘hybrid aesthetics’ as exemplified by films like Gul-e-Bakavali and others like Fatma Begum’s own directorial venture Bulbul-e-Parastan (1926), located within a similar tradition of the kissa-dastan. Gul-e-Bakavali was the first all-India hit for the Bombay film industry. By 1926, it had run for over 20 weeks in Bombay  .  .  . it was probably the biggest hit of the silent film era. It definitely established the Arabian Nights fantasy film as a commercially viable genre in the Bombay industry. The film itself seems to have been inspired by a popular theme, maybe themes and even earlier versions in the Parsi Theater. Also, there were imported Orientalist films being shown in Bombay through the 1910s and 1920s. That too might have inspired the look of the film. But for me, what is important is that the film seems to have been the first ‘secular’ film made in Bombay film history. In Gul-e-Bakavali, we find the employment of all kinds of costumes for the actors – tribal, Arabian Nights Orientalist, classical ‘Hindu’ style or nomadic dresses. Yakshas, gandharvas mix with rakshasis, and performers dance in burqas traditionally connected with Islam. One character is called Jalad Singh (a Rajput) and his son Taj-ul-Mulk (a Muslim name). This might be one of the main reasons why it appealed to audiences all over India – it belonged to no single culture (Bhaumik et al. 2012, 179–180). At a point in our own political history, when plurality and diversity are themselves at threat, returning to these early histories of Indian cinema becomes a way

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of returning to the possibilities for an inclusive social imagination that precedes the idea of the nation. The improper archives of cinema then, might assist us in articulating alternative ‘what ifs’, as history’s questions to futures only fleetingly visualized.

Notes 1 I’m inspired in my methodological approach by Monica Dall’Asta and Jane Gaines’ (2015) idea of ‘constellating’ with women workers from earlier periods as a durational investment in film history and historiography. 2 I have written and spoken about these elsewhere; for example, see ‘Revising the Colonial Past, Undoing National Histories: Women Filmmakers in Kannada, Marathi and Bengali Cinema’ (2015, 151–165). See also ‘Spilling-Over: Archives and the Present-Tenses of History’, in Erdogan and Kayaalp, eds. (2020) Forgetting the Archive: Film History in the Digital Age. Amsterdam University Press. 3 In this context, see Pad.ma (2010) 10 Theses on the Archive. https://pad.ma/documents/OH. [Accessed September 8, 2020]. Also see Sudhir Mahadevan’s chapter “The Ephemeral Archive: The Protocols of Film Historiography in India” in his 2015 book A Very Old Machine: The Many Origins of the Cinema in India. 4 For some of these methodological debates and departures see the 2010 issue of the Journal of the Moving Image, which includes articles by S. Theodore Bhaskaran (2010), Stephen Putnam Hughes (2010), Gayatri Chatterjee (2010) and Ashish Rajadhyaksha (2010). A  significant contribution to these debates has been made by scholarship on women in early cinema by Madhuja Mukherjee (2015), Neepa Majumdar (2009) and Rosie Thomas (2013) (among others), who look at oral histories, film magazines, media reports and so on in constructing their accounts of film history. 5 I draw inspiration from the work of the visual artist Nalini Malani in thinking about archival materials and their relationship to the present, as well as by Mieke Bal’s response to Malani’s video shadow plays, exhibited at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, in 2014. See Sawhney (2018) ‘Shadowing the Image Archive: In Medias Res: Inside Nalani Malani’s Shadow Plays’ MIRAJ, 7 (2): 324–334. 6 This is where Deleuze and Guattari’s (2004 [1980]) ideas urge us to consider history (and history writing) not as a stable, fixed narrative but one that is at all times an enactment of relations or transactions between various people, ideas, events and so on. 7 Some, like the Madan Theatre Company, managed not only to safely tide over the transition to sound technology but to build a very successful film business making talkie films. See Mukherjee (2009) on Madan Theatres. 8 The filmmaker Kamal Swaroop has been researching the life and work of Phalke for several decades now and as part of these explorations has published the book Tracing Phalke (2013a), along with a website Phalke Factory, which contains some material from a series of workshops he conducted in the various cities Phalke lived in, for a speculative reconstruction of this history. Swaroop has also directed a film, Rangabhoomi (2013b), shot in Benaras, the title of which is taken from Phalke’s play.

References Baskaran, Theodore. 2010. “Problems Faced by Film Historians in India”. The Journal of the Moving Image 10 (December): 61–72. Begum, Fatma, dir. 1926. Bulbul-e-Parastan. Bombay: Fatma Film Production. ———, dir. 1927. The Goddess of Love. Bombay: Fatma Film Production. ———, dir. 1928a. Heer Ranjha. Bombay: Fatma Film Production.

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———, dir. 1928b. Chandravali. Bombay: Fatma Film Production. ———, dir. 1929a. Kanaktara. Bombay: Fatma Film Production. ———, dir. 1929b. Milan Dinar. Bombay: Fatma Film Production. ———, dir. 1929c. Naseeb ni Devi. Bombay: Fatma Film Production. ———, dir. 1929d. Shakuntala. Bombay: Fatma Film Production. Ben-Moshe, Danny. 2018. Shalom Bollywood: The Untold Story of Indian Cinema. Australia: Identity Films. https://austinjff.org/shalom-bollywood/. Bhabha, Homi. 1994. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge. Bhaumik, Kaushik. 2020. “The Emergence of the Bombay Film Industry: 1913–1936”. PhD diss., Oxford University Press, Oxford. Bhaumik, Kaushik, Virchand Dharamsey, and Ananya Parikh. 2012. “The Script of Gule-Bakavali (Kohinoor, 1924)”. BioScope: South Asia Screen Studies 3 (2): 175–207. DOI: 10.1177/097492761200300206. Bhowmik, Someshwar. 2009. Cinema and Censorship: The Politics of Control in India. Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan. “Bombay Film Star Faces Trial,” The Times of India. 1929–1934. Chatterjee, Gayatri. 2010. “Writing History for Cinema: Archives, Archeological Sites and Homes”. The Journal of the Moving Image 10 (December): 47–60. Chatterjee, Partha, and Anjan Ghosh, eds. 2002. History and the Present. New Delhi: Permanent Black. Dadkar, Jaya. 2010. Kaal ani Kartutva. Pune: Mouj Prakashan. Dall’Asta, Monica, and Jane Gaines. 2015. “Prologue. Constellations: Past Meets Present in Feminist Film History”. In Doing Women’s Film History: Reframing Cinemas, Past and Future, edited by Christine Gledhill and Julia Knight, 13–25. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 2004 [1980]. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Masumi. London/New York: Continuum. Dharamsey, Virchand. 2010. “The Advent of Sound in Indian Cinema: Theatre, Orientalism, Action, Magic”. Journal of the Moving Image 9: 22–50. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. “Hard for Women Filmmakers to Make Films Without Male Backing in Bollywood”. 2018. Business Standard, November  1. www.business-standard.com/article/pti-stories/hardfor-women-filmmakers-to-make-films-without-male-backing-in-bollywood-ruchinarain-118110100760_1.html. Hughes, Stephen Putnam. 2010. “The Lost Decade of Film History in India”. The Journal of the Moving Image 10 (December): 72–92. Irani, Ardeshir. 1931. Alam Ara. Bombay: Imperial Movietone. Klein, Ernest. 1966. A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. Amsterdam: Elsevier Publishing. Kumar, Ramesh. 2016. “Alas, Nitrate didn’t Wait, but Does It Really Matter?: Fiery Losses, Bureaucratic Cover-ups, and the Writing of Indian Film Histories from the Relics of Cinema at the National Film Archive of India”. Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies 7 (1): 96–115. DOI: 10.1177/0974927616635946. Mahadevan, Sudhir. 2015. A Very Old Machine: The Many Origins of Cinema in India. Albany: SUNY Press. Majumdar, Neepa. 2009. Wanted Cultured Ladies Only! Female Stardom and Cinema in India 1930s–50s. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Mazzarella, William. 2012. Censorium: Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass Publicity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Mehta, Monika. 2011. Censorship and Sexuality in Bombay Cinema. Austin: University of Texas Press. Mubarki, Meraj Ahmed. 2016. “Brown Gaze and White Flesh: Exploring ‘Moments’ of the Single White Woman in Hindi Cinema”. Contemporary South Asia 24 (2): 164–183. DOI: 10.1080/09584935.2016.1195337. Mukherjee, Madhuja. 2007. “Early Indian Talkies: Voice, Performance and Aura”. Journal of the Moving Image 6: 1–28. ———. 2009. New Theatres: The Emblem of Art, the Picture of Success. Pune: NFAI. ———. 2015. “Gender as Method: Early Indian Cinema and a (few) Marginal Actor(s)”. Estudos Feministas, July–December. www.labrys.net.br/labrys28/india/madhuja.htm [Accessed February 2, 2020]. Naficy, Hamid. 2001. An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Niazi, Sarah. 2018. “White Skin Brown Masks: The Case of ‘White’ Actresses from Silent to Early Sound Period in Bombay”. Culture Unbound 10 (3): 332–352. DOI: 10.3384/ cu.2000.1525.2018103332. Pad.ma. 2010. 10 Theses on the Archive. https://pad.ma/documents/OH. [Accessed September 8, 2020]. Pawar, G. P., dir. 1937. Duniya Kya Hai. Bombay: Diamond Pictures. Phalke, D. G., dir. 1937. Gangavataram. Kolhapur: Kolhapur Movietone. Rajadhyaksha, Ashish. 2010. “Reconstructing the Indian Filmography”. The Journal of the Moving Image 9: 13–21. Rathod, Kanjibhai, dir. 1924. Gul-e-Bakavali. Bombay: Kohinoor Film. Sawhney, Rashmi. 2013. “Writing History in the Dark: Fatma Begum in Conversation with Ms. Kitty”. ArtConnect 7 (1) (January–June): 20–41. ———. 2015. “Revising the Colonial Past, Undoing ‘National’ Histories: Women Filmmakers in Kannada, Marathi and Bengali Cinema”. In Doing Women’s Film History: Reframing Cinemas, Past and Future, edited by Christine Gledhill and Julia Knigh, 151– 165. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. ———. 2018. “Shadowing the Image Archive: In Medias Res: Inside Nalani Malani’s Shadow Plays”. The Moving Image Review and Arts Journal 7 (2): 324–334. ———. 2020 (forthcoming). “Spilling-Over: Archives and the Present-Tenses of History”. In Forgetting the Archive: Film History in the Digital Age, edited by Nezih Erdogan and Ebru Kayaalp. Amsterdam University Press. Swaroop, Kamal. 2013a. Tracing Phalke. Bombay: NFDC. ———. 2013b. Rangbhoomi. Bombay: PSBT. Thomas, Rosie. 2013. Bombay Before Bollywood: Film City Fantasies. Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan. “Why Are There So Few Female Filmmakers?” 2010. The Guardian, January 31. www.the guardian.com/film/2010/jan31/female-film-makers.

2 THE ‘PROBLEM OF RESPECTABLE LADIES JOINING FILMS’ Industrial traffic, female stardom and the first talkies in Bombay and Tehran Claire Cooley

In a filmed interview in the early 1970s, Ruhangiz Saminezhad recounted her experiences making the first Persian-language talkie, Dokhtar-e Lor (“The Lor Girl” 1933). When the Bombay-based Imperial Film Company cast her in the film’s sole female role, Saminezhad was an Iranian expatriate living in India with her husband. The choice of Saminezhad was happenstance; Saminezhad did not have acting experience, but she spoke Persian and her husband worked as a driver for the Imperial Film Company. Saminezhad’s comments in the interview forty years after the production of The Lor Girl signal the former actress’s then-bewilderment at her position within the larger industry. “The Imperial Film Company was planning to film me,” she remembered, but “I didn’t even know they were filming, I thought it was a toy” (Naficy 2011, 273). The Lor Girl, produced in collaboration between an Iranian expatriate Abdolhossein Sepanta and Parsi community member and film producer Ardeshir Irani, was popular among Iranian and Indian/Parsi audiences. By the twentieth century, the Parsis were among the first film exhibitors and producers in India. The production of The Lor Girl was representative of the longer history of cultural and economic traffic between Iran and India. Working with Imperial Films in Bombay and later the East India Film Company in Calcutta, Sepanta produced films based on epic tales shared across the Middle East and South Asia. Sepanta’s focus on these tales was the continuation of a trend followed by silent film directors that challenges later national borders. For example, the first silent film hit for the Bombay film industry Gul-e-Bakavali was an adaptation of a narrative shared across Arabic, Persian, and Hindustani traditions (Bhaumik 2012, 176). Yet Ruhangiz Saminezhad’s experience filming The Lor Girl elicits questions about industrial traffic that notions of exchange and shared stories between Iran and India do not adequately address. Saminezhad and the other female stars of the early talkies, their characters, and the first Persian-language sound films turn up

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the volume on the dynamics of gender, technology, and stardom in the particular historical conjuncture and transnational context in which the films were produced. In the wake of the film’s release, Saminezhad and her high-pitched voice became the object of ridicule among audiences – a contributing factor to her exit from the industry. So-called professional actress, Fakhrozzaman Jabbar Vaziri, then traveled to Bombay and then Calcutta to star in subsequent Persian-language films. In calling attention to her education and family background, newspapers constructed a persona of Jabbar Vaziri that would make the presence of her voice and body on screen and in production more acceptable in a transnational context. The case of the Persian talkies produced in India gives network-focused insights into technology’s role in helping to shape the gendering of certain roles in the entertainment industry, both on and off-screen (Weintraub and Barendregt 2017, 24). Despite the trans-regional character of the first Persian talkies, Iranian studies scholars have largely considered them – and The Lor Girl in particular – according to the borders of the Iranian nation-state. In addition, questions that scholars ask of The Lor Girl and the other Persian talkies that pertain to gender remain limited to questions of representation. Drawing on the contemporaneous sonic contexts of colonial India and a modernizing Iran, this chapter situates early Persian sound films both within regional and transnational networks. The demands of industry played a pivotal role in the sound film’s construction of female stardom and the labor that female actresses performed. In addition to highlighting the limitations of national cinema frameworks, this transnational industrial traffic informs how female stardom, sound, and labor were constructed. On the level of industry, actresses were implicated in filmmakers’ efforts to establish the cinema as a respectable medium. (Majumdar 2009, 9). In order to frame cinema as acceptable, it was necessary to position it as integral to nationalist aspirations and worthy of state-support and investment. The entanglement of female voices and the trajectory of the film industry in India are evident in the Indian Cinematograph Committee Report (1927–1928) (Madhuja Mukherjee 2017, 138–185), which was part of an official effort to gather information on Indian film audiences and production (Jaikumar 2006, 69). The committee interviewed hundreds of people connected to cinema in some way, including female actors. Questions that the committee asked actresses in these conversations indicate a desire to attract more trained and ‘respectable’ ladies to the profession. Although sound was an initially a cause for anxiety with regard to women in cinema, it ultimately became an index of an actress’s professionalism. In studies of stardom, ‘image’ and other visual metaphors have been primary concepts through which scholars have synthesized the amalgamation of texts, images, films, and other media that make up a star’s public persona (Dyer 2007, 85). In this chapter, I develop a concept of sonic stardom to demonstrate how, on the one hand, certain stars complicated or surpassed the gender norms and class roles deemed ideal in Iran and framed by industrial aspirations for the cinema in colonial India. On the other, sonic stardom marked an actress’s professional background. In developing sonic stardom, I draw on Neepa Majumdar’s work on aural stardom but relocate

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stardom beyond nation and national frameworks. I reveal the different degrees to which actresses had access to transnational networks. Sonic stardom was a means with which an ‘outsider’ actresses could impart respectability to the controversial arena of female public performance, with which the cinema was associated.

‘Bombay films for Persia’: the Indian film industry brings sound to Iran In 1927, for the first time people traveling to and from India and ‘Persia’ on the Nushki Extension Railway would be required to present national passports. The railway, which stretched across what is now Pakistan, had been built by the British to facilitate their military objectives in the region (‘Travelers to Persia: Passports Required’ 1927, 11). The passport requirement is a signal of the way that the establishment of the modern Iranian state complicated travel between the two places. This kind of travel, theretofore much less restricted, would become even more difficult in following decades. The Nushki Extension Railway and other aspects of colonial infrastructure demonstrate the interconnected context in which sound film industries emerged in The Middle East and South Asia. The Lor Girl was produced at a time when national cinema was not yet firmly articulated with a specific language and when transnational elements played a key role in film production. The early years of sound cinema and media in Iran coincided with developments that renewed focus among elites on Iran’s historic relationship with India. In the 1920s and 1930s, the newly established Pahlavi regime and its allied elites in Iran promoted Iran’s Indo-Iranian-Aryan heritage as the modern nation’s official identity. It was in the context of a renewed interest among Iranian intellectuals in studying and reviving an Indo-Iranian and Zoroastrian identity that Iranian scholar Abdolhossein Sepanta traveled to India to study Persian texts with the Parsi community in Bombay (Marashi 2013, 187). While living in Bombay, Sepanta met Ardeshir Irani, a prominent member of the Parsi community and owner of The Imperial Film Company. Irani, who is known as the father of the Indian talkie through his production of the Urdulanguage film Alam Ara, made a number of the first talkie films in other languages, such as Hindustani, Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Burmese, Malay, and Pushtu (Burra and Chandran 1981, 17). With companies like The Imperial Film Company, India was establishing itself as a major Asian film power. In their aspirations to reach a variety of domestic and international markets, Irani and other filmmakers were undoubtedly concerned with the ability of their films to travel. Due to their focus on national and international audiences, the “Hollywood-style costume and spectacle film” became a trademark of The Imperial Film Company (Mahmood 1985, 64). With its burgeoning sound film industry and cinema culture, India in the 1930s was alluring to potential filmmakers like Sepanta who did not have access to the same resources in Iran. India had up-to-date equipment and trained technicians, and the industry was much more developed in terms of capital investments. For

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instance, the Iranian silent film that was released at the same time as The Lor Girl, Ovanes Ohanians’s Mr. Haji, the Movie Actor (Haji Aqa, Aktor-e Sinema 1933), was shot with a twenty-year-old, hand-crank camera, which was made more efficient when one of Ohanians’s students attached a “handcranked sewing machine to the camera to obtain a smoother and more even filming speed” (Naficy 2011, 212). The Imperial Film Company, meanwhile, was one of the largest film producers in India and known for “its polished productions, which [were] the delight of Indian film fans all over the country” (‘Imperial Film Company’s Bright Future’ 1935, 19). By 1935, the company had produced fifty-five silent films and thirty talkies. During his time in Bombay, Sepanta became convinced that talkies were an effective way to promote a ‘modern’ Iranian identity and culture. Sepanta and Irani made plans to collaborate on a Persian-language film for audiences in Bombay and for distribution in Iran. While he was enthusiastic about investing in a Persianlanguage sound film, Irani first needed assurance from Sepanta that the film would do well in Iran. Sepanta wrote to several friends to inquire into the reception of cinema among audiences in Tehran and to ask about ticket sales and the number of movie theaters in Iran. The information that Sepanta received from his contacts made Irani confident that a Persian-language sound film would be successful. Irani subsequently gave Sepanta a series of books on film theory and screenwriting that he had purchased in England (Omid 1984, 19). Under Irani’s direction, Sepanta wrote the film’s script and lyrics. Because The Lor Girl would be released in both countries, Sepanta and Irani worked to ensure that the film would resonate across contexts. The way in which The Lor Girl was discursively constructed in advertisements, newspapers, and posters demonstrates how The Imperial Film Company used the Persian and Iranian identity of the film’s producers and actors to establish the imported film as a local product and its story as familiar and relevant to Iranian audiences. Several months before The Lor Girl arrived in Iran, advertisements in newspapers in Tehran kept potential filmgoers updated on the imminent arrival of the first Persian-language talkie film from Bombay. While it was acknowledged that the studio was located in Bombay, advertisements in these Iranian newspapers and film posters represented it as a local company producing a film for Iranians and by Iranians. In 1933, a promotion for the film appeared in the Iran newspaper: The first Persian talkie film will arrive in Tehran in the near future. The first Persian talkie and musical, made by Persian services company in India under the direction of Ardeshir Irani with the participation of Iranian artists for Iranians, is being prepared and will soon arrive and be exhibited in Tehran. Stay tuned for a second announcement about the name and topic of the film. Persian Services Company, Bombay Imperial Film Studios (Omid 1984, 39) Even though The Lor Girl was a product of Bombay, filmmakers presented The Lor Girl as a national film. An article about the production of The Lor Girl in The Times of India applauds The Imperial Film Company’s move toward making films for

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export, describing it as “one of the greatest aims of the cinema producer” (‘Bombay Films for Persia’ 1934, 3). When The Lor Girl and the other first Persian talkies arrived in Iran, domestically produced silent cinema did not tell stories similar to the spectacular romances for which The Imperial Film Company was famous. The plot of Ohanian’s Mr. Haji, the Movie Actor is significantly different from The Lor Girl and Sepanta’s subsequent films. Mr. Haji, the Movie Actor is a self-reflexive film that follows the narrative of a conservative man who does not like cinema and does not want his daughter to become an actress – a story that engages contemporaneous attitudes toward cinema in Iran at the time. By the end of the film, Mr. Haji becomes convinced of the cinema’s worth, and he gives his daughter permission to act in a film. Despite its engagement with a familiar conversation about the place of cinema in Iran at the time, Mr. Haji, the Movie Actor performed abysmally at box offices. The screening of The Lor Girl in Iran essentially put an end to the demand for domestically produced silent films (Naficy 2011). The case of The Lor Girl and Sepanta’s subsequent films demonstrate how narrative strategies and cinematic codes are exchanged and/or reinforced through coproduction. Hamid Naficy notes that the opening scene of The Lor Girl hints at the cabaret and café sequences, which later emerged in Indian and Iranian commercial cinemas (Naficy 2011, 236). These sequences are also connected to cinema’s presence in the bazaar (Bhaumik 2012, 7). Early cinema’s roots in the bazaar and Parsi theater and its connection to the ‘lower’ classes that participated in these traditions contributed to connotations of the cinema as a disreputable institution (Bhaumik 2012, 7). Yet in the mid-1930s in India, control of the industry shifted from the bazaar to the bourgeoisie, a change that impacted studios’ production strategies (Bhaumik 2012, 126). The shift in control over the industry is reflected in Sepanta’s aim to produce high-quality spectacle films to encourage official interest in cinema in Iran. As demonstrated through examples such as the first Persian talkies, the emergence of sound films altered the cultural connotations of cinema in Iran and India. Despite their many differences, The Lor Girl’s engagement with questions of gender and cinema were similar to those posed in Mr. Haji, the Movie Actor. The overlaps between The Lor Girl and Mr. Haji, the Movie Actor in Iran provide examples of how conversations about gender and industry at site of the film’s production were influenced and possibly reinforced conversations about the production of similar concepts in Iran. As Timothy Havens reminds, racial formations and other constructed categories of identity such as gender travel through film and media (Havens 2013, 9). Through industrial traffic, the objectives of a particular film industry and their gendered contours could circulate through the talkies. The Lor Girl and Sepanta and Irani’s other sound films were successful in Iran in the absence of Persian-language talkies. Despite his efforts to please the Iranian state through films based on Persian epics, Sepanta was unable to convince the Iranian state to invest in a domestic film industry when he returned to Iran from India in the late 1930s. Officials in Tehran ignored him, and the minister of finance

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criticized Sepanta for spending his time on something useless like cinema. Sepanta approached the Ministry of Education and Endowment with plans to establish a sound film studio, but he was ultimately unsuccessful (Naficy 2011, 244). Without a domestic sound film industry in Iran until the 1950s, Indian cinema continued to have a significant presence in Iranian theaters. Until 1965 with the production of Siamak Yasemi’s blockbuster Qarun’s Treasure (Ganj-e Qarun), films from India consistently outperformed Iranian sound films at the box office. As demonstrated by co-productions Tapi Chanakya’s Subah-O-Shaam (1972) and Ghorban Mohamadpour’s Salaam Mumbai (2016), industrial traffic has continued between Iran and India in the post-colonial period. Subah-O-Shaam tells the story of a man named Aarun (Mohammed Ali Fardin) who falls in love with a beautiful dancer named Shirin (Waheeda Rehman). Yet due to Shirin’s ‘questionable’ profession, Aarun lies to his mother about Shirin’s background. In several ways, the narrative of Subah-O-Shaam resembles conversations about female performance and the talkies from the 1930s. The narrative of Subah-O-Shaam echoes that of The Lor Girl and discussions about female actresses’ morality in Bombay.

Golnar becomes a respectable lady in The Lor Girl In the context of industry-wide efforts to popularize the talkies among the intelligentsia, sound was deployed strategically to gender actors and actresses in particular ways. With sound a crucial component to a film’s diegesis, filmmakers adjusted how they aurally and visually presented characters as male or female. Christine Ehrick reminds us how gender is “represented, contested, and reinforced through the aural” (Ehrick 2015). What did the addition of sound to cinema mean for presenting female and male bodies and voices? The Lor Girl tells the tale of Golnar (Ruhangiz Saminezhad) and Jafar (Abdolhossein Sepanta) in the twilight years of the corrupt Qajar Dynasty Iran. With the Qajar’s waning power, provinces far away from the central government were susceptible to chaos. It is in this context that Jafar, a government soldier, is sent to the Lor and Khuzestan provinces to subdue bandits led by Qoli Khan who have been wreaking havoc. Golnar comes from Lorestan and, captured as a child by these bandits, has the job of dancer for the male patrons of a café owned by the evil Ramazan. Jafar and Golnar initially meet when Jafar comes to Golnar’s rescue when an Arab sheikh, who has paid Ramazan to be with Golnar, tries to rape her. Ultimately, Golnar and Jafar escape the chaos of Lorestan and flee to Bombay. The film’s first scene opens with a tight shot of Golnar’s swaying hips and the sounds of a reed flute, oud, tabla, and male singing voices. The camera tracks and we see that Golnar is playing a tambourine and performing for an audience comprising male patrons in the café. The audience members – as indicated by their clothing  – include local men of Lor and Arab origins, which remind us of the café’s location near Iran’s border with modern day Iraq. The men, as well as an ensemble of male musicians, sit in large circle around Golnar. As Golnar dances and the ensemble plays, we hear the audience clapping and yelling “very good, very

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good!” to encourage her. Through their jeers and taunts, the film sonically casts the men in the audience as vulgar, and its visual construction of Arabs dovetail with Orientalist aesthetics that Rosie Thomas argues were found in contemporaneous Hollywood, European, and Bombay cinemas (Rosie Thomas 2015). The sonic characteristics of these men that we hear throughout the film also reinforce the one-dimensional Orientalist, racist visual codes; the Arab sheikh’s high-pitched, cackling voice sounds simultaneously evil and weak, while the bandits’ voices cast them as brutish and uneducated. Now that cinema included both sound and images, filmmakers drew on elements of music, dancing, and other aspects of existing local performance traditions, such as Parsi theater. Representations of gender in Parsi theater were characterized by flexibility; Kathryn Hansen notes that due to concerns about female actors performing for male audiences and in public in general, female characters were often played by men (Hansen 1999, 128). In addition to Parsi theater, various local forms of performance traditions across India had similar gender-bending performances. The acceptance of cross-dressing in these traditions – not only in terms of body but also voice – allowed for fluidity in terms of how femininity and masculinity were aurally represented. Yet sound cinema did not allow the same flexibility in terms of gender performance due to sound cinema’s intersection with national and modernist discourses. Voice and its rendering were marked by increasingly rigid notions of femininity and masculinity. The trajectory of Golnar and Jafar’s characters encapsulates this tension between gender identities and modernity. Jafar wears a military uniform and mustache associated with the ‘pre-modern’ Qajars. Throughout most of the film while in Iran, Golnar wears long braids and a long dress, clothing that indicates that Golnar hails from the ‘chaotic’ Lorestan province and that marks her as traditional and backward in the context of colonial modernity. In Hindi films, meanwhile, clothes like Golnar’s were worn by gypsy and nomadic characters. Although Jafar rescues Golnar initially, the film ultimately casts Golnar as more capable of outsmarting the bandits. Golnar saves Jafar from the bandits several times throughout the film, moments that cast her as strong and brave similar to the virangana (warrior woman) trope that was widely circulated and popular in early 20th-century Indian popular culture, which Rosie Thomas notes “implied gender ambivalence and multiple modes of femininity” (Thomas 2015, 111). In the Iranian context, Farzaneh Milani discusses a similar trope of the female nomad or gypsy that was familiar in Iranian literature. Through her mobility and desegregated lifestyle, the nomad challenges binaries associated with modernity; she is not domestic, and her narrative does not culminate in an inevitable tale of male domination and female subordination (Milani 2011, 15). Yet Golnar and Jafar experience significant transformations by the end of the film and upon their arrival in Bombay. Musical notes played on the piano suggest a happy state as the film shows us buildings and monuments of modern Bombay. Afterward, intertitles inform us of the spectacular changes that have taken place in Iran while Jafar and Golnar have been in Bombay now that a new shah has come to

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power. In the next scene, we are in the couple’s grand living room of their house in Bombay; a servant cleans their grand staircase while we hear and see Golnar at the piano. Jafar enters the room and notes how well she has learned to play. While initially positioned similar to the virangana, Golnar now wears a European-style dress and short haircut. Ranjani Mazumdar discusses how in emerging Indian nationalism “Victorian ideology entered into a comfortable alliance with Indian myths to reinvent the ‘virtues’ and ‘purity’ of the Indian woman,” casting her as associated with the bourgeois domestic space of the home and interested in Europeanassociated pursuits such as the piano (Mazumdar 2007, 82). As Madhuja Mukherjee notes, moreover, the piano in Hindi films “has a tremendous visual meaning, suggesting modernity, youth, romance, grandeur elitism and thus is a crucial thing to be seen” (2012, 23). In The Lor Girl, the piano is presented prominently both visually and aurally. The Lor Girl was met with great enthusiasm in India and among audiences in Iran, and its sounds reverberated in and beyond theaters. Due to its memorable sounds and dialogue, The Lor Girl was able to circulate widely beyond the spaces it was screened. Those who had seen the film enough times would repeat its dialogue, especially the intimate conversations between Golnar and Jafar. The film’s success inspired Sepanta to make more Persian-language movies for distribution in Iran and India, in Bombay and then in Calcutta. Sepanta chose stories shared across Iranian and Indian literary traditions for these films such as Layla and Majnun and Shirin and Farhad. Just as he appeared as Jafar in The Lor Girl, Sepanta would also act as the debonair, male lead in these films. Yet instead of starring Ruhangiz Saminezhad, Sepanta’s following films featured a new female star.

“Persian star for Calcutta”: sonic stardom and respectable ladies Despite her sonic and visual transformation onscreen from gypsy to modern woman and therefore the ‘respectable’ role she assumed in the film, Ruhangiz Saminezhad’s experiences off-screen in India and Iran were fraught. Saminezhad encountered negative reactions from the beginning of filmmaking to long after the film was released. Saminezhad was recruited for the role of Golnar primarily due to her native Persian-speaking abilities. The seemingly arbitrary nature in which Saminezhad was chosen for the role is also reflected in her own knowledge of cinema; apparently she did not know she was acting in a film throughout the course of its production (Naficy 2011, 273). Conditions also proved difficult beyond the film’s production. On an almost daily basis when leaving the film studio after work, Saminezhad and others had to be accompanied by two bodyguards in addition to their driver and sometimes had to cover their heads so as not to be recognized. Saminezhad and others were afraid that other immigrants from Iran would damage their car – ostensibly due to their involvement in making a film and the negative connotations that cinema had among the community.

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After the release of The Lor Girl and its overwhelming success, Saminezhad continued to encounter severe criticism for her role as Golnar in the film. Although some fans would admiringly mimic Saminezhad’s ‘cute’ Kermani accent and repeat her lines after leaving the theater space, she was otherwise made fun of for how she spoke onscreen. Some family members even accused her of ruining their lives due to her appearance in the film (Naficy 2011, 273). In later interviews, she admitted that she had thought of acting again in films – apparently she had had opportunities again to do so in both India and Iran. Yet, due to the difficulties she faced after The Lor Girl, Saminezhad was forced to withdraw from public for years (Naficy 2011, 274). As has been widely documented, many of Indian and Iranian cinema’s early actresses came from minority or what were framed as questionable backgrounds. Framing female actresses as unprofessional, as coming from poor families, and taking advantage of wide understandings of film studios as inappropriate atmospheres for women gave predominately male producers the upper hand in industry dynamics (Debashree Mukherjee 2013, 9). In terms of film historiography, this would contribute to paternal genealogies of cinema and silences in material evidence of female experiences. In her autobiography, Kanan Bala writes about the difficulties she faced as a female actor in the early sound era. With the coming of sound to cinema, Kanan Bala became one of the first singing stars of Indian cinema with her prominent roles in films and the wide circulation of her film songs on records. Kanan Bala’s recollections demonstrate the pivotal role played by actresses in the industry and their significance to its functioning (Madhuja Mukherjee 2017, 61). But as she recalled, “it was not a heroine-dominated industry. . . . The heroines did not have the discretion either to select or reject roles according to their choice” (Madhuja Mukherjee 2017, 78). Actress Ratan Bai’s experiences dealing with film producers were similar. In one instance, Bai’s scenes and songs were removed from New Theaters Ltd.’s film 1934 Karwan-e-Hayat in which she was supposed to have starred as the heroine. Only learning about her deletion from the film when she saw it in theaters, Bai sent an open letter to the studio demanding that they explain what had happened as she feared it would ruin her career. In his reply to Bai, the publicity officer of New Theaters Ltd disregarded Bai’s request for an explanation and cited her background in the red-light districts of Calcutta as a reason for not owing her anything (114). In addition to other local elements, the tawa’if or courtesan tradition was also an element that factored into the reputation of female singers and actresses in the Indian film industry. The Urdu word tawa’if describes a group of women singers and dancers who performed for the elite in private gatherings in northern India starting in the late 18th century (Jha 2009, 271). Tawa’if institutions changed into the 19th and 20th centuries with shifts in patronage, British colonialism, and commercial sound media technologies. The career of one of India’s first recording artists Gauhar Jaan demonstrates these changes. Daughter of a tawa’if, Gauhar Jan became immensely famous through the medium of the gramophone and later

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starred in silent films in which she lip-synched to her own songs (Farrell 1993, 35). Although Gauhar Jan “represented a different and emerging stratum of professional urban musicians”, at the turn of the 20th century in India, the profession of singer and dancer still held negative connotations (38). The association between cinema and ‘questionable’ local traditions continued to be a barrier for aspiring actresses. Parsi women in India who sought careers in the film industry struggled with the reactions of disapproving community members. Even though Parsi women affirmed their social status in a visible manner through their dress and conspicuous consumption, the acceptability of this visibility did not translate to the screen (“Big Crowd Outside Bombay Cinema” 1935, 10). The example of the Persian language talkies helps us understand a dimension of sound’s role in star culture and the ways in which sound proved integral to framing the medium as respectable. Here, Fakhrozzaman Jabbar Vaziri’s experiences in subsequent Persian-language films are important examples. Through the way she spoke, Jabbar Vaziri affirmed that she came from an educated and “upper” class background. Without opportunities to pursue a career in acting in Tehran, Bombay proved appealing to aspiring filmmakers and actors like Jabbar Varizi. Jabbar Varizi’s training indicates the growing professionalization of cinema in Iran. Before joining Sepanta in India, Jabbar Vaziri was the head of women’s classes at a film studio in Tehran and had studied acting in Paris (Naficy 2011, 274–275). In contrast to Saminezhad, who was apparently unaware that she was even acting a film during filmmaking, Jabbar Varizi was more prepared for the world of cinema and stardom. Similar to Saminezhad, Jabbar Vaziri starred opposite Sepanta in his subsequent movies, Shirin and Farhad (1934), Firdusi (1934), Black Eyes (1936), and Layli and Majnun (1937). Saminezhad’s regional Kermani accent sonically placed her in a particular socioeconomic class. Jabbar Vaziri and her background were similarly identifiable by her voice. The preoccupation with Jabbar Vaziri’s voice is communicated in various news articles in Bombay and Calcutta announcing upcoming Persian-language films. In these articles, Jabbar Vaziri is framed as an educated actor from an elite family of Iran. In one article, Jabbar Vaziri’s voice and language skills are emphasized in indicating her suitability for the role in the upcoming film: “In order to assist, the Persian Government have specially sent Miss Waziri, a Persian actress, to Bombay. It was found that, although there are many Persians in the city, the form of Persian they speak is not in conformity with that used among educated people in Persia.” The article continues: Miss Waziri [sic] is regarded as an extremely lucky find for Persian films. She is a beautiful Iranian type but has never before appeared on the screen professionally. She has been trained in France, speaks French and English, as well as Persian and her family is closely connected with the Persian court. (‘Bombay Films for Persia’ 1934, 3) Announcing that she would star in an upcoming film produced by a studio in Calcutta, another article describes how Jabbar Vaziri is a “Persian film artist, highly

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educated and coming from a very respectable family of Teheran,” and speaks English, Urdu, and French (‘Persian Star for Calcutta’ 1935, 7). Jabbar Vaziri’s knowledge of several languages established her as cosmopolitan and as not merely an actress but an artist. These examples demonstrate how Jabbar Vaziri’s voice proved that she had professional experience, was educated, and came from a good family. Articles in the newspaper indicate the role of sound in establishing an actress’s training and validating her off-screen character. Among other factors, accent provided a key vector through which a star affirmed her respectability and education in the first sound films. As mythologized in films such as Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen’s 1952 film Singing in the Rain, stars with seemingly unattractive or foreignsounding voices tried to straddle the transition between silent and sound films in Hollywood in the 1920s. Yet many actors, whose voices were deemed unattractive or unsuitable, lost their jobs with the coming of the talkies. The way Jabbar Vaziri spoke Persian, in contrast, sonically marked her as upper-class and respectable and not from a questionable background. Through radio and records, women’s voices already had an established and accepted presence in public and private spaces. The sonic stardom that classical singers had accrued prior to and during the emergence of the sound films was drawn upon to construct the visible profession of acting in sound films as a reputable pursuit. While Vaziri was able to establish herself sonically as respectable, however, her voice did not guarantee different treatment within the male-dominated industry. Like Saminezhad, Vaziri faced ill treatment on the part of film personnel, as well as among others she encountered in her offscreen life for having starred in cinema.

Conclusion: The Lor Girl in Iranian and Indian film histories Scholars of the first sound films produced in India often encounter the conundrum of writing a history of missing, destroyed, or otherwise unavailable film texts. As of this writing, for instance, no print of Alam Ara exists. The existence of The Lor Girl and its presence on YouTube provides unique insight into the first sound films in India. While The Lor Girl’s accessibility is useful, its existence potentially leads to a skewed prioritization of the film in the history of Iranian-Indian cinematic exchange. Moreover, access to the film itself is circumscribed given the fact that it is missing scenes (Omid 1984, 26). As such, the example of the first Persian-language films provoke crucial questions regarding how we write film history. Yet The Lor Girl’s importance in Iranian cinema histories – and its near absence historiography of cinema in India – is reflective of how national cinema frameworks limit how we may read the networks and transnational transactions during the early sounds of Iranian and Indian cinemas. As an early sound film, The Lor Girl and Sepanta’s films help us understand what the inclusion of sound meant for female actresses in Iran and India. Golnar’s voice and transformation into a modern woman demonstrate that narrative strategies were complicated by contemporaneous bourgeois gender norms in colonial

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Bombay and modernizing Iran. Consideration of the female actresses’ experiences off-screen lives such as those of Jabbar Vaziri and Saminezhad points to sonic stardom’s role in affirming female stars’ training and respectability in a transnational scope.

References Bhaumik, Kaushik. 2012. “The Script of Gul-e-Bakavali (Kohinor, 1934)”. BioScope 2 (2): 175–207. DOI: 10.1177/097492761200300206. “Big Crowd Outside Bombay Cinema: First Screening of Film Featuring Parsi Women”. 1935. The Times of India, September 17. “Bombay Films for Persia”. 1934. The Times of India, July 16. Burra, Rani, and Mangala Chandran. 1981. Fifty Years of Indian Talkies, 1931–1981. Bombay: Indian Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Dyer, Richard. 2007. “Heavenly Bodies”. In Stardom and Celebrity, edited by S. Holmes and S. Redmond. London: Sage Publications. Ehrick, Christine. 2015. “Vocal Gender and the Gendered Soundscape: At the Intersection of Gender Studies and Sound Studies”. Sounding Out! https://soundstudiesblog. com/2015/02/02/vocal-gender-and-the-gendered-soundscape-at-the-intersection-ofgender-studies-and-sound-studies/. Farrell, Gerry. 1993. “The Early Days of the Gramophone Industry in India: Historical, Social, and Musical Perspectives”. British Journal of Ethnomusicology 2: 31–53. www.jstor. org/stable/3060749. Hansen, Kathryn. 1999. “Making Women Visible: Gender and Race Cross-Dressing in the Parsi Theater”. Theater Journal 51 (1): 127–147. www.jstor.org/stable/25068647. Havens, Timothy. 2013. Black Television Travels: African American Media Around the Globe. New York: New York University Press. “Imperial Film Company’s Bright Future”. 1935. The Times of India, February 19. Jaikumar, Priya. 2006. Cinema at the End of Empire: A Politics of Transition in Britain and India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Jha, Shweta Sachdeva. 2009. “Eurasian Women as Tawa’if Singers and Recording Artists: Entertainment and Identity-Making in Colonial India”. African and Asian Studies 8: 268– 287. DOI: 10.1163/156921009X458118. Mahmood, Hameeduddin. 1985. “Ardeshir M. Irani: Father of the Indian Talkie”. In 70 Years of India Cinema (1913–1983). Bombay: CINEMA India-International. Majumdar, Neepa. 2009. Wanted Cultured Ladies Only!: Female Stardom and Cinema in India, 1930s–1950s. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press. Marashi, Afshin. 2013. “Patron and Patriot: Dinshah J. Irani and the Revival of Indo-Iranian Culture”. Iranian Studies 46 (2): 185–206. DOI: 10.1080/00210862.2012.758474. Mazumdar, Ranjani. 2007. Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Milani, Farzaneh. 2011. Words, Not Swords: Iranian Women Writers and the Freedom of Movement. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Mukherjee, Debashree. 2013. “Notes on a Scandal: Writing Women’s Film History Against an Absent Archive”. Bioscope 4 (1): 9–30. DOI: 10.1177/097492761200483052. Mukherjee, Madhuja. 2012. “The Architecture of Songs and Music: Soundmarks of Bollywood, a Popular Form and Its Emergent Texts”. Screen Sound 3: 10–34. ———. 2017. Voices of the Talking Stars: Women of Indian Cinema and Beyond. Los Angeles: Sage Publications.

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Naficy, Hamid. 2011. A Social History of Iranian Cinema Volume 1: The Artisanal Era, 1897– 1941. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ohanians, Ovanes Gregory, dir. m 1933. Mr. Haji, the Movie Actor. Tehran: Perse Film Studio.. Omid, Jamal. 1984. Abdolhossein Sepanta Life and Cinema. Tehran: Fariyab Company. “Persian Star for Calcutta”. 1935. The Times of India, November 29. Sepanta, Abdolhossein, and Ardeshir Irani, dirs. 1933. Dokhtar-e Lor (The Lor Girl). Bombay: The Imperial Film Company. Thomas, Rosie. 2015. Bombay Before Bollywood: Film City Fantasies. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. “Travelers to Persia: Passports Required”. 1927. The Times of India, June 23. Weintraub, Andrew N., and Bart Barendregt, 2017. “Re-Vamping Asia: Women, Music, and Modernity in Comparative Perspective.” In Vamping the Stage: Female Voices of Asian Modernities, edited by Andrew N. Weintraub and Bart Barendregt, 1–39. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

3 SABITA’S JOURNEY FROM CALCUTTA TO BOMBAY Gender and modernity in the circuits of cinemas in India Sarah Rahman Niazi

The expanding circuits of film production, distribution and consumption in the 1930s accelerated and reinforced the existing industrial networks of Indian cinemas. A  crucial nexus between the cities Bombay, Calcutta, Lahore and Madras was formed in this period.1 The entanglement of film cultures with metropolitan life expanded the frontiers of cinema in India. This intensification of the circuits of cinema transformed Bombay and Calcutta into important sites of film culture. Cinema looked towards newer sites of burgeoning performance in search of fresh and available sources of personnel. The trajectory of many performers overlapped the cinematic cities coalescing and creating a convergence of media circuits. In this chapter, I explore the journey of the ambitious Miss Iris Maud Gasper from Calcutta to Bombay. Iris, whose screen name was Sabita Devi, was one of the most popular actresses in the early years of the talkies. She was part of the constellation of stars who were prided for their ‘Hollywood look’.2 There is very little known about her biographical details; some have described her as Anglo Indian, while others as Jewish/Eurasian.3 These discrepancies are a result of overlaps within hagiographic narratives and industry misnomers that can be ascribed to her interracial origins.4 Recent scholarship has pointed to the lopsided national historiographies that have unevenly engaged with the contribution of Anglo-Indian, Jewish and Eurasian actresses to cinema (Thomas 2005; Ramamurthy 2006; Majumdar 2009; Niazi 2019). This chapter attempts to address the intersections between gender and modernity enabled by the industrial networks of cinema. I mobilize Sabita Devi’s films in order to recuperate her body of work from the debris of archival amnesia. The films contribute to the ongoing discussions on modernity, cinematic work and notions of respectability in the 1930s and 40s. Researchers who have worked on this period are familiar with the uneven nature of the archive and its materials (Hughes 2013; Mukherjee 2013). In the absence of the filmic texts, I rely heavily on the publicity material, interviews, reviews and advertisements that were generated around the films in contemporary journals to piece together Sabita’s film journey.

Sabita’s journey from Calcutta to Bombay  49

FIGURE 3.1 Art

plate of Sabita Devi, Filmland, Vol II, No 83, Puja Special, October 1931

Source: Courtesy of Media Lab database, Department of Film Studies, Jadavpur University

Media convergence: Bombay and Calcutta Bombay and Calcutta were important spaces where public life acquired new cultural, social and technological dimensions at the turn of the century (Bhaumik 2001; Chattopadhyay 2005; Mazumdar 2007; Prakash 2010). These urban cosmopolitan spaces were hybrid grounds for the convergence of media and performance in the twentieth century. Evident from histories of gramophone, theatre and early

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cinema are the ways in which the relationship between various modes of entertainment were mediated in the early twentieth century (Kinnear 1994; Hansen 2016). In Bombay, the early gramophone recordings and the Parsi theatre links suggest that these mediations were not coincidental but careful conglomerations. In the 1930s, the Bombay-Calcutta film circuit was an impressive vortex of opportunities. It attracted a large number of peripatetic labour in search of work. Film personnel were constantly travelling between the two cities in search of better employment and wages.5 Kaushik Bhaumik (2001, 118) has suggested that in this period “Bombay had to consolidate its newly – found gains by allowing regional companies to enter into an active relationship with its production regime” and through access to its distribution networks. While the introduction of sound technologies had resulted in a brief disruption of film production, silent films continued to be produced well into the late 1930s. Bhaumik notes that Bombay’s contribution to the total production of films was reduced to 60 percent in this period, and other ‘regional’ companies were emerging as strong contenders. The term ‘regional’ to describe film companies based in Calcutta is perhaps inadequate as, by this period, film business in Calcutta was expanding and was invested within the discourses that challenged this very myth of Bombay’s centrality to film cultures.6 Both Bombay and Calcutta made persistent attempts to maintain their positions as important hubs for film business. The competitiveness between the two filmic cities lasted for decades to come and each reinvented itself through the mobility of film personnel and the sustained links between various performative genres of the stage and salons. Some successful performers who worked in both cities were Rose,7 Madhuri,8 Jaddan Bai9 and Durga Khote10 among others.

Early Career in Calcutta (1930–33) Sabita Devi made her debut in the British Dominion Films’ Kamaner Aagun/Flames of Flesh (d. Dinesh Ranjan Das) in 1930. The studio was established in 1929, and this was their first production. Her co-stars were Dhiren Ganguly, Ramola Devi and Debaki Bose. In 1930, Sabita Devi appeared in Indian Kinema Arts’ crime film Kantahar/Diamond Necklace (d. Kaliprasad Ghosh) with Durgadas Banerjee. Kaliprasad Ghosh had established Indian Kinema Arts in 1927 with a Marwari businessman Seth Ghanshyamdas Chokhani, who was the proprietor of Minerva. In 1931, British Dominion Films produced Marner Parey/After the Death (d. A.K. Roy) and a short social Takay Ki Ni Hay/Money Makes What Not (d. Dhiren Ganguly). In 1932, Sabita Devi’s film Aparadhi (d. Debaki Kumar Bose) with Pramathesh Chandra Barua was released. Barua was a man of many talents and was one of the shareholders in the British Dominion Films. Some accounts suggest that it was at the behest of Sabita Devi that Barua decided to begin independent film production and set up his own studio Barua Films in Calcutta in 1929. Aparadhi (d. Debaki Kumar Bose) was produced under the banner Barua Films. The 1930s were marked by complex negotiations within the industrial networks of early cinema. The conversion to sound technology was chaotic and uneven,

Sabita’s journey from Calcutta to Bombay  51

and studios in Bombay and Calcutta incurred heavy losses. Barua Films failed to successfully convert despite plans for expansion, and British Dominion Films produced only eight films after which they had to liquidate their assets in 1932.11 The ‘talking pictures’ demanded new conditions of work as talkies were not merely ‘speaking silents’ but were ‘a new art’ with specific technical and aesthetic requirements (B.L. Bedam 1932). The transition to the ‘talkies’ has been understood as a phase of improvement through replacement of technology and film personnel. It was believed that Anglo- Indian/Jewish/Eurasian stars of the silent era like Ermeline, Seeta Devi and Patience Cooper could not sustain their former status in the film industry. Failure at a ‘sound test’ was cited as one of the reasons many studios had to let go of their most valuable stars (Barnouw and S. Krishnaswamy 1980). Apart from the ability to speak fluently in the Indian vernacular, a practical knowledge of music and an appropriate modulation/tone of voice were the most crucial requirement for the ‘talkies’ (Niazi 2019). New ‘singing stars’ like Kanan Bala, Jahanara Kajjan, Shanta Apte and ‘cultured ladies’ like Devika Rani Durga Khote and Sadhona Bose gave a stiff competition to the older stars. Despite such claims, there was enough capital in the market to sustain the careers of silent stars like Sulochana (Majumdar 2009). In June 1932, Filmland gave credit to Seeta Devi, Sulochana and Patience Cooper for having “taken great pains to learn Urdu and Hindi dialogues for appearing in the talkies”. However, the journal urged “Madhuri in Bombay and Sabita Devi in Bengal” to follow suit immediately.12 These demands for improvement were soon abandoned as the July issue of Filmland enthusiastically noted that She (Sabita) is learning Bengali and Hindustani songs and will star in both the versions of talkies. Those who have heard her Bengali songs at the Radio know how her voice suits the microphone. We are eager to see Bengal’s famous screen beauty and artiste talking and singing to her film fans.13 The question of the creolized tongue of the Anglo-Indian actress remained a pressing concern and curiosity for studios and audiences. Even a decade later in 1941, Kawasji F. Kapadia, writing to ‘Editor’s Mail’ in Filmindia, asked “Do Sabita Devi, Madhuri, Yasmin and other Anglo-Indian girls know how to read and write their dialogues in Hindi?”14 While the silent films had established Sabita Devi’s status amongst the leading ladies of the time, the early sound period was a difficult moment of transition for her. The haphazard condition of studios and their inability to successfully transition was the cause for her uncertain visibility in films. Many of the films that she worked on between 1932–33 failed to be released. How do we account for this kind of film labour in the period of unpredictability and transition? Studio news columns in contemporary journals speculated that she was working with Kaliprasad Ghosh for Indian Kinema Arts new production ‘Radha’ in 1932.15 However, the production of the film was disrupted, and in July 1932, Filmland reported that “the prima

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donna of the Bengali screen” has joined East India Film Company and started work on their Urdu talkie ‘King for a Day’.16 In the December 1932 Filmland, East India Film Company announced that it was beginning production with Sabita Devi on a Bengali-Hindi talkie ‘Radha- Krishna’ to be directed by Priyanath N. Ganguly.17 The film was meant to be on the floor after the release of their Tamil-language film Ramayana with Rajlaxmi as Seeta. Some of these films, however, never got completed and were soon abandoned. Rumours began making rounds that Sabita Devi’s contract at East India had expired and there was no inclination on her part to renew the contract. It was believed that she had received a good offer from a “West Indian concern”.18

Bombay dreams: the modern cultured woman Chimanlal Desai, owner of Sagar Movietone, visited Calcutta and offered Ghosh and Sabita Devi a position at the studio (Dharamsey 2013). In 1934, Sabita joined Sagar, and this proved to be a turning point in her career. If the number of films released or salary accruement was a mark of achievement, she was highly successful.19 Her education and respectable background was evoked repeatedly by studios and contemporary accounts. Poems and articles written by her appeared regularly in popular film magazines and strengthened the image of her erudition and cosmopolitan upbringing. In 1931, Filmland published her response to an ongoing debate on the need for “cultured ladies for the screen”.20 Sabita’s response provides her nuanced position on the need for women to join the film business and gives a clear sense of the manner in which the actress participated in and consolidated the drive towards establishing the studios as ‘clean’ working environment that was so important to the 1930s. In the article ‘Should Respectable Ladies join the Films’ by ‘A Lady Artiste’, the author lashed out at the studios to “set their own houses on order” because s/ he believed that film acting is not a bad career to take to, but for the people we come in contact therein. It would require high moral courage and character to withstand the scandal that accompanies the actress in and out of the studio.21 As a rejoinder, Sabita wrote, “I have always been treated with the greatest respect and courtesy  .  .  . and in contributing this article I  am doing so not as propaganda”.22 Her defensive comments on the ‘fine gentlemen’ she worked with, who embodied “the aspirations of the West with those of the East” and held to “the traditions of the East in respect of their attitude to women” reflect the cumbersome binaries of the home and the world at work. By placing her emphasis on the “tradition of the East” as a site of superior values, Sabita aligned herself to the nationalist discourse on women (Chatterjee 2006). Yet, in her other published work she emphasized the need for calibration and camaraderie among stars from the east and

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the west. In the article titled ‘Garbo as ‘Susan Lenox’, she claimed to write “not as a film struck Garbo ‘fan’ but merely as an appreciation of a humble sister artiste”.23 These attempts at solidarity with a transnational order of stars were significant to her star persona and presented the complex articulation of the east/west divide. In the poem ‘If ’ she wrote, “If artist all we strive/towards the building/Of Hollywood within Bengal/If we can strive/wholeheartedly together/We will attain/Our glorious Hollywood”24 These desires for the Hollywood-isation of Bengal ran parallel to constant rumours about her ‘mummy’ taking her away to the west.25 Hollywood was considered by some within the industry as the highest form of recognition; the speculations aligned her ethnic coordinates with an ‘international’ star discourse, which the studios were keen to capitalize on. Sabita Devi’s stardom was crucially tied to the trajectory of the studios that she worked with. In Bombay, her persona was carefully constructed by Sagar Movietone, where the charge of the ‘modern’ was intrinsic to the figure of the ideal educated Indian woman. At Sagar, she acted in films like Grihalaxmi/Educated Wife (Sarvottam Badami 1934), Shehar ka Jadoo/Lure of the City (Kaliprasad Ghosh 1934), Doctor Madurika/Modern Wife (Sarvottam Badami 1935),26 Silver King (Chimanlal Luhar 1935),27 Lagna Bandhan/Forbidden Bride/Acchut Daman (Kaliprasad Ghosh 1936), Village Girl/Gram Kanya (Sarvottam Badami 1936) with Surendra, Kulvadhu/Daughter in law (Sarvottam Badami 1937), 300 Days and After/Teen Sau Din Ke Baad (Sarvottam Badami 1938) and Ladies Only (Sarvottam Badami 1939). Most of the characters she played in these films established her as an ordinary woman with extraordinary travails located within the ‘everyday’ modern. In Lure of the City, Sabita played the character of Sarju. Sarju pines for her father, whom she loses to the seductions of the city. Masquerading as a young boy, Sarju goes to the city looking for him and befriends Kishanlal (Motilal). The publicity spread for the film informs one that Kishanlal is a “millionaire-drunkard” but eventually “corrected by Sarju becomes a loving husband”.28 Sitara plays Nartaki – a dancing girl – the “sign of the polluted atmosphere of the city”. The moral contrast between the urban and the rural is depicted through signs of urban depravity like the dancing girl and the drunkard millionaire in need of correction by the village belle Sarju, who can only access the city through masquerade and ambivalence. In another film Village Girl, Sabita plays Bansari, who must make a similar treacherous journey to the city from the village to bring her errant husband back. Modern urban life as hazardous, scandalous and filled with peril was a recurrent trope during this time (Nandy 2007; Dass 2016). Many studios mobilized the binaries between the urban and the rural to address contemporary agendas of reform. But these morality tales also enabled studios to portray the ‘excesses’ of the cities like car crashes, robberies, murders and extra-marital relationships. The publicity machinery for films at Sagar functioned in exciting ways. In publicity material for Educated Wife, Sabita was dressed in a traditional Indian saree with a film magazine in hand, while the ‘other’ woman played by Swaroop Rani in inset looks seductively into the camera with the telephone receiver in hand. The contrast was all too apparent. Even though education was as much a symbol

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of modernity as the telephone, it was in the way that the two women were positioned within the frame and the way in which the look of the audience was invited to share her/his gaze with the seduction of the ‘other’ woman that the contrast between the modern ‘good’ and the modern ‘bad’ woman was affected. These images reinforced Sabita’s stature as a star with an appropriate and restrained dose of the modern cosmopolitan where the excessive impulses of the modern remained contained. In the film Ladies Only, Sabita Devi plays the character of Sarojini, an educated girl who comes to Bombay to pursue a career in journalism. The story written by Zia Sarhady revolves around three women who belong to different provinces; Sarojini is Gujarati, Asha (Bibbo) is Punjabi and Chhaya (Prabha) is Bengali. The women strike up a friendship, and even though they cannot speak the others’ language, they decide to share a house together. This cinematic multilingual encounter is a great example of efforts by a Bombay studio to appeal to the different regional sensibilities. The film is also a fantastic showcase of the endless possibilities imagined within cities like Bombay for single working women, which contributed to the mythologization of Bombay’s cosmopolitanism.29 Sarojini lands a job at the newspaper office as the editor of the ‘woman’s page’. This worked as a citation to Sabita Devi’s prior efforts as a writer in film magazines and reinforced her cosmopolitan image that the studio was building up. In a contemporary Filmindia review, Baburao Patel vehemently criticized Ladies Only for its poor direction. While he called Sabita’s performance ‘spineless’, he had to acknowledge the appeal of her stardom to fans. He ended the review with his usual dismissive remark about the narrative, “Well, these girls meet, live together, aim together at the male . . . and then the girls walk out together after muttering ‘something’ against the males in general. When it all ends, one feels relieved”.30 Female solidarity in the film is ridiculed as “muttering something”, and one will always remain curious about these ‘mutterings’ and their feminist potentialities for modern audiences. The film stills show the women in gorgeous sarees styled in accordance to their regional affiliations in an apartment with art deco style furniture, chandeliers, telephone, books and magazines. As the impetus of reform and desire for respectability was gaining momentum, studios like Sagar, Bombay Talkies and Ranjit were trying to come up with new ways to balance the drives between the modern cosmopolitan and social reform. Sagar was known to produce mostly social films with an attractive modern production style. In 1939, Chimanlal Desai began negotiating with Yusuf Fazalbhoy of General Studios on a possible merger. Contemporary journals were full of speculation on possible feuds and internal fissures between studio bosses and personnel at Sagar.31 While the exact details remain obscured, Sagar Movietone was replaced by the newly formed National Studio. In 1940, National Studio released its first film, Aurat/Woman, directed by Mehboob Khan.32 As a result of this rift, director Sarvottam Badami who was a long-time collaborator with Ambalal Patel, an erstwhile partner of Sagar Movietone, along with Sabita Devi, formed Sudama Productions. From studio reports in contemporary journals, we can glean that Sabita was one

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of the partners at Sudama and played a key role in its functioning.33 Unfortunately, records on Sudama have not survived, and we have little to fall back on to understand the functioning of the studio. There is, however, publicity material in film journals and newspapers, which aid in constructing a filmography of the studio. Under the Sudama banner with Sarvottam Badami as director, Sabita Devi produced and acted in films such as Aapki Marzi/As You Please (1939), Chingari (1940), Sajni (1940) and Holiday in Bombay (1941). Sudama’s first film As You Please with Motilal was a moderate success.34 But Chingari and Sajni fared rather poorly at the box office. In a review for Chingari, Patel praised Sabita’s performance but criticized Sudama for its star centred publicity.35 In the column “Bombay Calling” that Patel wrote under the pseudonym of Judas, he quibbled that “Sabita’s name appeared in bold headlines, while the names of the two pictures were too inconspicuously displayed to catch the eye”.36 This reasoning is unusual considering that previously Sagar’s publicity campaigns were centred around Sabita’s star persona and had succeeded in mobilizing her urban charm. It is crucial to point out that Filmindia did not carry a single advertisement for either films and even their studio news column ‘Pictures in Making’ was conspicuously silent on the happenings at Sudama Productions. The sparse coverage of Sudama’s activities in Filmindia can perhaps be linked to Patel’s insinuation that Sudama held an “imaginery [sic] grievance” and consciously avoided sending advertisements to his ‘important’ journal.37 While there is very little to verify this claim, the other possibilities point to Sudama’s limited budget for publicity as they only sent advertisements to local newspapers. In his review of Sajni, Patel claimed that Sabita’s “one-time glorious career” as an actor had reached an end and her new role as a producer was contentious; he wrote, “If Sabita, who is herself a partner in production, lacks the moral courage to face this problem squarely, let her join some other company as an employee instead of heading for a certain suicide this way”.38 Patel’s tirade against Sabita did not end there; he questioned the ‘huge’ salaries received by stars like her and considered them “disproportionate with their merits”.39 One is unsure of the outcomes of Sudama Productions, but their films’ inability to do business, accentuated by the challenges to film production during times of war like high costs and the crisis of procuring raw stock, among others, led to the closure of the studio.40 After Sudama, Sabita worked as a freelance artist. Her long association with Badami continued, and in 1942 they worked together in Minerva Movietone’s Prarthana/Prayer. The film was released in January  1943 in Bombay. The music was composed by Saraswati Devi and had the silent era Madan Theatres’ star Jahanara Kajjan.41 The story revolved around Seth Ramdas and his daughter Paro (Sabita Devi) who fall on hard times in the city. In the same year, Sabita appeared in Fazli Brothers’ Fashion (d. S.F. Husnain).42 Filmindia covered the studio’s production plans in close detail; a fire at Famous Cine Laboratories threatened to damage the film completely, but the studio was able to recover the film and use the incident for publicity.43 Fashion sat neatly in the genre of socials that depicted the corruptions of urban city life and addressed “the superficial

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glamour of the gaiety goods the West brings along in its train for civilizing the East”.44 This narrative of the seductions of urban life was not new to Sabita’s oeuvre of films; however, contrary to her image as the traditional virtuous wife Bansari or dutiful daughter Sarju or Paro, in Fashion, Sabita plays the glamorous and Westernized Farida, who seduces Yusuf (Chandramohan). Sardar Akhtar plays the role of Yusuf ’s dutiful wife Razia, who remains steadfast in her devotion and eventually makes Yusuf see the right way. This inversion of Sabita’s image from her usual ‘type’ casting indicates that the studio no longer viewed her as a leading star or was attempting to diversify as Sardar Akhtar was emerging as an important star in the period. In 1945, Sabita Devi worked in Murli Movietone’s Amrapali (d. Nandlal Jaswantlal). The film was based on the novel by Ramachandra Thakur narrating the story of the romance between the King of Magadh, Bimbisar (Prem Adib) and the courtesan Amrapali.45 In 1947, Sabita starred in National Studio’s Sarai ke Bahar (d. Krishan Chander). Despite fewer film releases, the publicity for the film highlighted the presence of Sabita as the main star amidst a cast of “new finds”.46 Krishan Chander had acquired a steady reputation as a Progressive Urdu writer from Punjab, but the film received critical reviews, as the film’s narrative involving the rape of a woman and her eventual move to a brothel was viewed as “morbid and lascivious”.47 Post-Independence the industry was in another state of flux, and by the late 40s coverage on Sabita Devi in film journals was far and infrequent. Filmindia did not shy from making chauvinistic and ageist remarks about Sabita’s appearance on screen, and other hagiographic records called her a “fading star”.48 Her journey from Calcutta to Bombay faded into historical obscurity, as did her legacy within the networks of Indian cinemas and its modern impulses.

Conclusion The industrial networks of cinema in Bombay and Calcutta were deeply impacted by the coming of sound technology in the 1930s. This period of precarity reconfigured the existing constellation of stars, which interestingly coexisted with the demands for expansion of the limits to participation. Despite entrenched studio systems that contractually bound film personnel to businesses, the shift in technology created possibilities for mobility between the various film circuits. Sabita Devi’s journey from Calcutta to Bombay enables us to see how successes and failures recalibrated and shaped star discourses. In many of her films, Sabita Devi’s mixedrace background was clearly coded by the studios in ambivalent terms to capitalize on her charms as the cosmopolitan ‘modern’ woman. Her persona as a Bengali star was realigned to a transnational order of stardom at Sagar Movietone. Her films enabled the process through which actresses were re-fashioned as ‘modern’ but neatly placed within the framework of the ‘new’ nation in the making. The chimera of the ‘modern’ woman wrapped up in traditional garb was a powerful force to reckon with, and studios continued to recycle these images through the history of early sound in India.

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Histories of film have a penchant for mobilizing film journals in attempts to enrich and expand the contours of our understanding of the many cinemas of India. For the early talkies, often in the absence of film texts, the film journals have been a useful archive to tap into the complexities of film production, consumption and most significantly star careers. However, as the case of Sabita’s troubled relationship with Filmindia reveals, the film journals were fraught with partisan biases that privileged certain stars as opposed to others. Through careful readings and juxtapositions of multiple archival materials is it possible to reclaim forgotten star narratives and unravel the prejudices that women encountered when they realigned their place in the industry from film stars to film producers. The history of women’s participation in cinema is in need of mediations that call out the deepseated misogyny of Patel’s Filmindia and tenaciously revise modes of engagement with film archives and their attempts to omit, obliterate and obfuscate.

Notes 1 Nitin Govil (2015) has demonstrated important connections between cities like Los Angeles and London with Indian cities that were important locations for consumption of Hollywood and British films. 2 Other stars in this category were Sulochana and Patience Cooper. 3 “Sabita Devi is of an Anglo-Indian parentage and born in Calcutta”. (Filmland, 18 June 1932, Volume 3 No. 114, 22). “Sabita Devi was born in Nov 1914 in Calcutta to Anglo-Indian parents”. (Filmi Pariyan, 139). “Sabita is not married. Her father died recently but her mother is alive. She has one sister and one brother”. (Filmindia, January 1939, Vol. 5 No. 1, 17). 4 Priti Ramamurthy (2006) has argued that ambiguities around ethnicity and fluid religious affiliations of minority groups was one of the causes for this lumping together of labels. 5 Due to the paucity of space I limit my discussion to Bombay and Calcutta. I do not wish to discount the importance of Lahore and Madras in this circuit, which had become exciting centres for film production. Stephen Putnam Hughes’ (2007) work on Madras provides significant insights these interactions. 6 Sharmistha Gooptu (2011, 36) made a persuasive argument and demonstrated the ways in which New Theatres Ltd became a prototype of the ‘national’ cinema while keeping true to its “distinctive ethos of cultured Bengaliness”. Also see (Mukherjee 2017). 7 Rose started as an actress with Madan’s Corinthian Theatre in Calcutta in the 1930s. She also acted in a number of Madan films like Naqli Doctor (J.J. Madan 1933) in which she appeared alongside Patience Cooper, Alladin and the Wonderful Lamp/Tilismi Chiragh (1933) and Zehree Saanp (J.J. Madan 1933) with Jahanara Kajjan and Patience Cooper. Later she went to Bombay and joined the Imperial Film Co. (Niazi 2011, 23). 8 Madhuri (Beryl Classen) worked with Ranjit in Bombay in the 1930s. In 1940, she acted in Pagal (d. A.R Kardar) for Ranjit Movietone, Bombay and also in Calcutta on the social Qaidi/The Prisoner (d. M.F Hasnain) for Film Corporation of India (Niazi 2011, 48–49). 9 Jaddan Bai led a peripatetic lifestyle and travelled to different states to perform as a musician. In 1932, she joined Playart Phototone, Lahore. After a brief stint in Calcutta, she moved to Bombay and set up her production house Sangit Movietone in 1934. (Niazi 2011, 56–97). Also see (Mukherjee 2015, 70–81). 10 Apart from her prolific career at Prabhat Film Co., she acted in four films in Calcutta: Rajrani Meera (1933), Seeta (1934), Inquilab (1935) and Jeevan Natak (1935) (Khote 2007, 66; Niazi 2011).

58  Sarah Rahman Niazi

11 “This week we announce with regret that British Dominions Films Ltd. have at last gone into liquidation”, ‘Editor’s Own’ in Filmland, August 1932, Vol. 3 No. 121, 2. 12 Editorial, Filmland 18 June 1932 issue, Vol. 111 No. 114, 2. 13 ‘Notes and News’ in Filmland, July 1932, Vol. 3 No. 119, 14. 14 Filmindia, Sept. 1941, Vol. 7 No. 9, 23. 15 ‘Notes and News’ in Filmland, June 1932, Vol. 3 No. 112, 13. 16 Apparently, the film was based on the life of a Persian king. ‘Notes and News’ in Filmland, July 1932, Vol. 3 No. 119, 14 and ‘Notes and News’ in Filmland, December 1932, Vol. 3 No. 132, 11. 17 ‘Notes and News’ in Filmland, December 1932, Vol. 3 No. 132, 11. The film was eventually released in 1933 and was directed by P.N. Ganguly and Tulsi Lahiri. 18 Filmland, July 1933, Vol. 4 No. 163, 27 19 As a lead performer, Sabita Devi acted in three to four films per year and was paid 2,000 per month. Filmindia, December 1938, Vol. 4 No. 8, 22. 20 For debates on respectability and actresses, see (Bhaumik 2001) and (Majumdar 2009). 21 Article reproduced in (Samik Bandopadhyay 1993, 108). 22 ‘Why Shouldn’t Respectable Ladies Join the Films’, Filmland, 7 November 1931. Article reproduced in (Samik Bandopadhyay 1993, 111). 23 Filmland 11 June 1932, 4. 24 Sabita Devi, ‘If ’ in Filmland July 1932, Vol. 3 No. 116, 14. 25 Sabita’s mother played an important role in her film career. Much like the filmi mummies of today, she shrewdly managed her daughter’s career and was present at the studios to keep an eye on the happenings. ‘Howlers of the Month’ in Filmindia, August 1938, Vol. 4 No. 4, 56. 26 In this morality tale, Sabita’s character advocates the use of contraception for birth control (Rajadhyaksha and Willemen 1994, 262). The film’s advertisement celebrated the coming together of “two Great Stars Sabita and Moti”. Filmindia, 30 June 1935, Vol. 1 No. 3, 33. 27 This was a stunt film with Motilal as Ajit the Silver King, and Sabita plays the character of Princess Krishna. (Rajadhyaksha and Willemen 1994, 264). 28 Rangbhoomi, 29 July 1934, Yr. 3 No. 18 (translations mine). 29 Asha is a society girl who is an accomplished singer, and Chhaya is a schoolteacher. 30 “Round the Town”, Filmindia, April 1939, Vol. 5 No. 4, 54. 31 In a January issue of Filmindia, in the column “The Editors Mail”, Baburao Patel was asked “Does Sabita Devi intend to desert Sagar Film co.?” Patel wrote, “There have been rumours that she intends joining some one else or even producing her own pictures in association with Mr. Badami”. In Filmindia, January 1939, Vol. 5 No. 1, 17. Also, see K. A. Abbas’ report on the rise and fall of studios in ‘An Eventful Year’ in Filmindia, December 1939, Vol. 5 No. 12, 44–46. 32 Virchand Dharamsey (2013, 30) suggests that Aurat was the “last film conceived at Sagar”. However, he erroneously dates it to 1941. When the film released in 1940, it was under the banner of Sagar and National Studio, with the Sagar emblem occupying a smaller space in the frame. See the film’s opening sequence with the studio banners. 33 “Why did Sabita leave Sagar?” Baburao Patel responded, “To start her own production company. She seems to be following in the footsteps of Miss Gohar”. See “The Editors Mail” in Filminidia, March 1939, Vol. 5 No. 3, 15. 34 The film was nominated for the Best Picture of 1939 award by the Film Journalists’ Association. Filmindia, February 1940, Vol. 6 No. 2, 33. 35 ‘Badami becomes “Chhota” Barua! Poor publicity kills audience support’ in Filmindia, June 1940, Vol. 6 No. 6, 17. 36 ‘Bombay Calling’, Filmindia, September 1940, Vol. 6 No. 9, 8–9. 37 ‘Sabita Fails to draw in “Sajni!” Star of Yesterday Becomes A Back- Number To-day’ in Filmindia, September 1940, Vol. 6 No. 9, 52. 38 Ibid. 39 Sabita Devi was drawing Rs. 3,000 per month. Filmindia, September 1940, Vol. 6 No. 9, 8–9.

Sabita’s journey from Calcutta to Bombay  59

40 Like Sudama, many other studios had to shut down. ‘Bombay Calling’ in Filmindia, August 1943, Vol. 9 No. 8, 14. 41 “ ‘Prarthana’, A Good Theme Gone Waste! Kajjan’s Sparkling Performance” in Filmindia, March 1943, Vol. 9 No. 3, 67–71. 42 Fazli Brothers had set up their studio in Calcutta initially but moved to Bombay in 1942. ‘Silent and Smiling Hasnain Speaks!’ in Filmindia, December 1942, Vol. 8 No. 12, 45–51. 43 Filmindia, August 1943, Vol. 9 No. 8, Ad page (unnumbered). 44 Filmindia, May 1944, Vol. 10 No. 5, 47. Also see (Vasudevan 2015). 45 “ ‘Amrapali’ is a beautiful waste of a film: Artistic picture with no story” in Filmindia, January 1946, Vol. 12 No. 1, 73–74. 46 Filmindia, January 1947, Vol. 13 No. 1, 26. 47 “ ‘Sarai-ke-Bahar’ – Is Broth from A Brothel!” in Filmindia, July 1947, Vol. 13 No. 7, 69–70. 48 Filmindia, January 1946, Vol. 12 No. 1, 74 and Filmindia, July 1947, Vol. 13 No. 7, 70. Filmi Pariyan (1936, 139) called her a “dubta sitara/fading star”.

References Bandopadhyay, Samik, ed. 1993. Indian Cinema: Contemporary Perceptions from the Thirties. Jamshedpur: Celluloid Chapter. Barnouw, Eric, and S. Krishnaswamy. 1980. Indian Film. New York: Oxford University Press. Bedam, B.L. 1932. “The Indian Talkies”. Filmland, 11. Bhaumik, Kaushik. 2001. “The Emergence of the Bombay Film Industry, 1913–1936”. PhD diss., Oxford University Press, Oxford. Chatterjee, Partha. 2006. “The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question”. In Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History, edited by Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, 233–253. New Delhi: Zubaan. Chattopadhyay, Swati. 2005. Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism and the Colonial Uncanny. London: Routledge. Dass, Manishita. 2016. Outside the Lettered City: Cinema, Modernity, and the Public Sphere in Late Colonial India. New York: Oxford University Press. Debashree Mukherjee. 2015. “Screenwriting and Feminist Rewriting: The lost films of Jaddan Bai (1892–1949)”. Women Screenwriters: An International guide, edited by Jill Nelmes and Jule Selbo, 70–81. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Dharamsey, Virchand. 2013. “Towards New Genealogies for the Histories of Bombay Cinema: The Career of Sagar Film Company (1929–40)”. Marg 64 (4): 22–31. Gooptu, Sharmistha. 2011. Bengali Cinema: ‘An Other Nation’. New York: Routledge. Govil, Nitin. 2015. Orienting Hollywood: A Century of Film Culture Between Los Angeles and Bombay. New York: New York University Press. Hansen, Kathryn. 2016. “Mapping Melodrama: Global Theatrical Circuits, Parsi Theater, and the Rise of the Social”. BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 7 (1): 1–30. Hughes, Stephen Putnam. 2007. “Music in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Drama, Gramophone, and the Beginnings of Tamil Cinema”. The Journal of Asian Studies 66 (1): 3–34. ———. 2013. “The Production of the Past: Early Tamil Film History as a Living Archive”. BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 4 (1): 71–80. Khote, Durga. 2007. I, Durga Khote: An Autobiography. Translated and edited by Shanta Gokhale. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Kinnear, Micheal. 1994. The Gramophone Company’s First Indian Recordings [1899–1908]. Bombay: Popular Prakashan.

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Majumdar, Neepa. 2009. Wanted Cultured Ladies Only! Female Stardom and Cinema in India, 1930s-1950s. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Mazumdar, Ranjani. 2007. Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mukherjee, Debashree. 2013. “Notes on a Scandal: Writing Women’s Film History Against an Absent Archive”. BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 4 (1): 9–30. Mukherjee, Madhuja. 2017. “Rethinking Popular Cinema in Bengal (1930s–1950s): Of Literariness, Comic Mode, Mythological and Other Avatars”. South Asian History and Culture 8 (2): 122–142. Nandy, Ashis. 2007. An Ambiguous Journey to the City: The Village and Other Odd Ruins of the Self in Indian Imagination. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Niazi, Sarah Rahman. 2011. “Cinema and the Reinvention of the Self: Women Performers in the Bombay Film Industry (1925–1947)”. M.Phil diss., Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. ———. 2019. “White Skin/Brown Masks: The Case of ‘White’ Actresses from Silent to Early Sound Period in Bombay”. Culture Unbound 10 (3): 332–352. DOI: 10.3384/ cu.2000.1525.2018103332. Prakash, Gyan. 2010. Mumbai Fables: A History of an Enchanted City. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rajadhyaksha, Ashish, and Paul Willemen. 1994. Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Ramamurthy, Prithi. 2006. “The Modern Girl in India in the Interwar Years: Interracial Intimacies, International Competition, and Historical Eclipsing”. Women’s Studies Quarterly 34 (1–2): 197–226. Ramnagri, Gauhar. 1936. Filmi Pariyan. Lahore: Prem Shastri Book Depot. Thomas, Rosie. 2005. “Not Quite (Pearl) White: Fearless Nadia, Queen of the Stunts”. In Bollyworld: Popular Indian Cinema Through a Transnational Lens, edited by Raminder Kaur and Ajay J. Sinha, 35–69. New Delhi: Sage Publications. Vasudevan, Ravi. 2015. “Film Genres, the Muslim Social, and Discourses of Identity c. 1935–1945”. BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 6 (1): 27–43.

4 TRAVELS OF THE FEMALE STAR IN THE INDIAN CINEMAS OF THE 1940S AND 50S The career of Bhanumathi Uma Maheswari Bhrugubanda

The frame of traffic between film industries within India opens up a new and interesting dimension of the extraordinary career of P. Bhanumathi (later Bhanumathi Ramakrishna), who was a well-known actress, singer, music composer, writer, director and studio owner. The broad details of her career are well-documented in popular Telugu1 and Tamil accounts of South Indian film history, but there are hardly any critical scholarly studies on this fascinating figure. In her career that began in 1939 and continued into the 1990s, it is possible to glimpse the dramatic and significant shifts that occurred in the first few decades of the talkies in India both on screen and off screen. Film scholars have noted the emergence of the male star in the 1950s and his role in the consolidation of linguistic nationalisms and politics in South India (Prasad 2014; Srinivas 2013). However, less scholarly attention has been paid to the female stars of the period who had successful multilingual careers and who, through that simple fact, disrupt the hegemonic narratives of language specific cinema histories in India. Actresses like Bhanumathi, Anjali Devi and Savithri, to name the three most prominent, acted in both Tamil and Telugu films. And, as we will see, Bhanumathi had a brief but significant Hindi film career as well. Besides this, Bhanumathi and Anjali Devi also headed film production companies – Bharani Pictures and Anjali Pictures respectively – and produced in and acted in many successful bilingual and some trilingual films as well. As the editors of this volume have pointed out, there is a need to document and theorize “the industrial traffic of actors, authors, technicians, technologies, genres, styles, and networks in local and global contexts that have shaped cinemas in India”. I locate my study of Bhanumathi within that larger framework, and in this chapter, I  will focus on the early career where she enjoyed unprecedented success first as a South Indian star and then briefly as a pan-Indian female star. Following from the idea of traffic, I take up the related ideas of travel and mobility

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to think about Bhanumathi’s career and also to point to the interesting ways in which travel/movement/mobility figure both in the film texts themselves and in the off-screen career of this female star. I examine three films in particular, first, Swargaseema, one of the highly acclaimed social films in Telugu film history, made in 1945 by B.N. Reddi for Vauhini Pictures. The success of Swargaseema established Bhanumathi as a major star in the South Indian industry. The second film I analyse is a Hindi-Telugu bilingual, Mangala (1951), produced and directed by S.S. Vasan of Gemini Studios, which laid the ground for her all-India popularity – and then finally a trilingual Tamil-Hindi-Telugu film, Chandirani, made in 1954 by Bharani Pictures – Bhanumathi’s own studio – and which she herself directed. This chapter will move between an analysis of the film texts and the details of each film’s production history gleaned mainly from Bhanumathi’s autobiographical work, Naalo Nenu. This work also helps us gain an understanding of how Bhanumathi narrativizes her trajectory as a female film star and the career choices she made. It is hoped that this chapter will allow us to survey the busy traffic between different industries, mainly Madras, Bombay and Calcutta in the decade between 1945 and 1955 as well as momentous changes occurring in the careers of female film stars through the example of Bhanumathi.

From the village square to the modern stage: Vauhini’s Swargaseema (1945) In the landmark film Swargaseema, Bhanumathi played a character whose gradual transformation from dancing girl Subbi to seductive stage star Sujatha showcased her versatility as an actress and her singing and dancing talents. This versatility and ability to play innocent rustic girl to sophisticated seductress, besides of course, being able to sing and dance decisively, established her position as a star in the Madras industry. And as she recounts in her autobiography, Swargaseema also dispelled in her own mind the great reluctance she had until then to pursue a full-time career in films. Swargaseema (Home is Heaven) is a classic melodrama where the modern nuclear family is presented to us as the very epitome of a companionate marriage. Murthy (Nagaiah) is a writer and the editor of a nationalist cultural magazine. His wife, played by Kannada actress B. Jayamma, is the perfect housewife; a romantic companion to her husband, she plays the veena (Indian lute) and sings along with him as they relax at home but is also a responsible and loving mother to her two little children. This perfect familial situation is shattered with the arrival of Sujatha, a stage actress who seduces Murthy into first writing a play for her company and then slowly neglecting his family and job and joining her as a co-actor on stage. After the spectacular success of the play, Murthy leaves his wife and children altogether and begins to live with Sujatha as they tour many towns and cities with the play.2 As Murthy’s obsession with Sujatha and the stage grows, he abandons his family completely, refusing to meet them even when they make an arduous train journey to meet him in the new city where he now lives with Sujatha. The film

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FIGURE 4.1 

Bhanumathi as village dancer Subbi in Swargaseema

Source: Courtesy of K. Balaram, Mai Books

FIGURE 4.2 

Bhanumathi as glamorous stage actor Sujatha in Swargaseema

Source: Courtesy of K. Balaram, Mai Books

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suggests that Sujatha’s hold over him is now absolute. However, during one of the performances, there is an accident, and Murthy is grievously injured. It is now his turn to be abandoned. Sujatha abandons him in the hospital and finds another man, a new theatre enthusiast and collaborator with whom she begins working on a new theatrical production. Unlike Murthy’s neo-classical play, Rishyasrunga, the tale of seduction of the Sage Rishyasrunga, the new production is a neo-folk-dance spectacle called Gajulapilla (The Bangle Girl). Although Murthy is gradually cured of the head injuries he sustained, Sujatha has no use for him anymore. Murthy’s descent is complete. Broken and completely distraught, he returns home only to find his dream home has been shattered. His wife and children don’t live in their old home any longer. He becomes a wandering seller of cheap musical instruments searching for his family. His impoverished wife had, in the meantime, moved to a rented house in a humbler part of town, where she now lives with her two children, supporting the family with meagre earnings from tailoring work. The song “Gruhame kada Swargaseema” (“Home is Heaven”), which the couple had sung in better times, becomes the aural device that reunites the family when her son plays the tune one day and an astonished Murthy who happens to pass by hears it and discovers that his wife and children are loyally awaiting his return. Sujatha is forgotten; the swargaseema is restored. As Kiranmayi Indraganti remarks in her article on this film: Swargaseena achieved three objectives with its success by welcoming Bhanumati into the fold of Vauhini, giving her all the freedom that encouraged her to perform and showing the top personnel’s interest in encouraging ‘family women’ to come into the film industry. In emphasising Bhanumati’s singing talent through glamorous visuals, they successfully tapped into a new area of people’s fascination with socially relevant entertainment, driven by star value and musical ingenuity. In defining their stand on the moral redemption of the characters in the film, the makers of Swargaseema ensured that the nonglamorous and sidelined character of the wife emerged as the winner in the end to restore peace and balance in the heavenly abode, thus echoing the nationalist sentiments of the role of women to protect peace and balance in society. (Indraganti 2013, 50) Indeed, the film managed to fashion Bhanumathi into a marketable star even as the film’s narrative itself denounced the role of the actress she played as manipulative and ruthlessly ambitious. For the purpose of this chapter, I wish to foreground three parallel (and at times intersecting) instances of literal and metaphoric mobility/traffic in the film text and its production context. One is, of course, the journey of the film’s character, Subbi, the village dancing girl to the town and later the city and her transformation into a popular actress on the modern stage and subsequently into a seductive and manipulative star. Much of the film’s visual appeal lies in presenting this journey

Travels of the female star  65

and transformation in intimate detail. As The Encyclopedia of Indian cinema comments, “The film can be read as a comment on the star-manufacturing process in Telugu cinema with Bhanumati supported by Bartley’s constantly moving camera, expertly modulating the gradual shifts in gesture, speech accent and make-up as the village beauty is transformed into a ‘sexy’ star” (Rajadhyaksha and Willemen 1999). The second instance of mobility is the behind-the-screen story of the actress, Bhanumathi herself. Convinced of his daughter’s immense musical talent, it was her father Venkata Subbayya’s desire to make her a star in the gramophone industry. However, it was the emerging field of cinema that beckoned her. Bhanumathi narrates her travel to Calcutta in the late 1930s where Telugu talkies were being shot at that time. Her first film, Varavikrayam (1939), was shot in Calcutta, and her father accompanied her there and acted as guide and guardian. Later Telugu film production moved to Madras, and so did Bhanumathi. However, she decided to withdraw from the film world after her marriage with Ramakrishna, whom she met and fell in love with when he was an assistant director on one of her films, Krishna Prema (1943). In her memoirs, Naalo Nenu, Bhanumathi recounts, in great loving detail, the carefree and joyous time she and her husband enjoyed after their wedding when they set up house in Madras. A good part of the romance of the time stems from the pleasure of watching Hollywood films running in Madras theatres. She mentions one particular day when they watched three films in a row beginning with a matinee at the Casino theatre. Bhanumathi says that she cannot recall the name of the film, but the heroine of the film left a lasting impression on her. I was dazzled by her beauty. I thought to myself, do such beautiful people really exist in this world? I really liked the movie but more than the film, I liked the heroine and her performance. Her name was Ingrid Bergman . . . I said to my husband, I will watch only her films from now on. (Ramakrishna [1993] 2000, 145–146) After this film, they proceeded to watch the evening show at New Elphinstone theatre and the night show at the Globe theatre. While Ramakrishna, her husband, wanted to watch Hollywood films to learn the technique of filmmaking, Bhanumathi was modelling herself on the Hollywood actresses. Although she decided to quit films and enjoy a quiet domestic life, she says it was the persistence of B.N. Reddi and Vauhini Studios that brought her back to the screen with a major role in Swargaseema. This second instance of her journey back to the screen intersects with another kind of movement, which is the circulation of Hollywood films in India and the “inspiration” they provided. Narrating the film’s story and her character in the film, B.N. Reddi apparently stressed two things; one was the transformations the character undergoes in the film and the scope it offered Bhanumathi to showcase both her acting and singing talents, and the other was that they wanted to create a “polished vamp” on the lines of Rita Hayworth in the American film Blood and Sand (1941) directed by Rouben Mamoulian.

66  Uma Maheswari Bhrugubanda

FIGURE 4.3 

Rita Hayworth

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Reddi suggested they watch the film Blood and Sand together to give her an idea as to how she should play the role of Sujatha. While it is a known fact that Indian cinema has always borrowed from Hollywood, this episode is a concrete example of how Hollywood provided the model for presenting a visually appealing female figure on screen.3 Further, Bhanumathi recounts that the most popular song in Swargaseema, “Oho Pavaruma”, was inspired by a song sung by Hayworth in Blood and Sand. Swargaseema thus presents us with an interesting dialectic, the fascination with Hollywood and the inspiration it provided intersects with  – or rather moulds – the narrative of a local female performer’s journey from the village

Travels of the female star  67

FIGURE 4.4 

Bhanumathi in Vauhini Sankranthi Fancy Dress Event in 1952

Source: Vijayachitra

performative space to the proscenium stage in the modern city space. Film as the new medium subsumes the modern stage, absorbs it and re-presents it. Marcus Bartley’s masterful camerawork and B.N. Reddi’s skillful direction heralded the arrival of a new idiom of cinematic melodrama that was to provide the model for many later films. A photograph from 1952 that features Bhanumathi along with producer B. Nagi Reddy, actress Shanta Kumari, and the comedian Balakrishna is a telling one. The occasion is a fancy-dress event organized as part of the Sankranthi festival celebrations at the Vijaya-Vauhini studios. Nagi Reddy is dressed as a policeman and Balakrishna is wearing a ladies’ frock with a hat and handbag while Shanta Kumari is dressed as a Lambada tribal woman with colourful skirt and blouse and jewellery. Bhanumathi, not so surprisingly, appears here as an ushrette in an American movie theatre. Her shoulder-length hair along with her knee-length skirt and blouse with her vending tray slung from her shoulders in the front complete her attire and signal Hollywood as the primary visual source of glamour for an actress. As argued earlier, the success of Swargaseema transformed Bhanumathi into a star, a star around whom the industry and the film market could be organized. The films in the decade following Swargaseema’s success seek to build on her stardom through narrative strategies that involve doublings of various kinds – elaborate masquerades and plotting (that sometime severely stretch narrative credibility) in which she is transformed from being a proud peasant girl into seductive and exotic dancing girl

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as in Mangala (1951) or the star performing twins separated at birth, one a meek princess -– Rani – and the other a brave and carefree forest girl as in Chandirani (directed by Bhanumathi herself in 1954). As is well known, an important element of stardom is the capacity for masquerade, which is perhaps why we find only stars, not just accomplished actors, often performing double or triple roles.

From seductress to virtuous wife in Telugu and Hindi: Gemini’s Mangala (1951) Produced by Gemini Studios, Mangala was a bilingual production in Telugu and Hindi, which sought to build on Bhanumathi’s popularity. Madras-based Gemini Studios headed by S.S. Vasan had already established itself as a successful studio and production company making films in Tamil, Telugu and Hindi. By 1951, it had already produced successful films like Nandanar (1942), Mangamma Sabatham (1943) and Chandralekha (1948), an extravagant dance spectacle. Uday Shankar’s acclaimed dance film, Kalpana (1948), was also shot in Gemini studios. In 1949, S.S. Vasan made the trilingual hit, Apoorva Sahodarargal (Tamil)/Nishaan (Hindi)/Apoorva Sahodaralu (Telugu), and Bhanumathi was the female lead in all three languages. Therefore, Mangala repeated the successful combination of Bhanumathi, the star, and Gemini Studios, a successful production company.4 Bhanumathi, who mentions that her monthly salary at the time of Krishna Prema in 1943 was Rs. 2,000 per month,5 was now offered a whopping one lakh rupees for both Telugu and Hindi versions.6 Mangala was in fact a remake of the successful Gemini film, Mangamma Sabatham in which the early female star, Vasundhara Devi (mother of star of later years, Vyjayanthimala)7 had played the role of Mangamma, and the actor, Ranjan, played the dual role of the prince who wrongs Mangamma and the role of her son, who avenges his mother’s humiliation by whipping his father, the king, in his own durbar. The story was apparently based on a well-known folk tale of an ordinary peasant woman’s revenge against the local prince. However, the film historian and columnist Randor Guy says that Acharya (or T.G. Raghavachari), the director of the film was a devotee of Hollywood cinema and a particular fan of Carmen Miranda, the Brazilian singing star who became famous on Broadway and later Hollywood in the 1940s (2007). Therefore, Mangamma’s gypsy dances in the film were modelled on Miranda’s dances. In fact, Guy states that Acharya and Rajeswara Rao (music) lifted some of Carmen Miranda’s hit numbers such as “I . . . I . . . I . . . like you very much”, “Mama ye Quero” and “Down Argentine Way”. Those were sung by Vasundhara. She also danced to the songs in the sequence in which she comes in disguise. Acharya invested this song and dance scene with subtle touches of eroticism, which rocked the movie goers of the 1940s. (Guy 2007)

Travels of the female star  69

Banking on Bhanumathi’s singing and dancing skills, S.S. Vasan remade Mangamma Sabatham as a Telugu-Hindi bilingual, Mangala, in which she plays the eponymous heroine. Ranjan reprised his dual roles in this version of the film. In the narrative, when Mangala rebuffs the advances of the haughty womanizing prince, he vows to marry her and keep her a prisoner in his palace. She in turn challenges that she would bear his son and teach him a lesson by humiliating him in his own royal court. This plotline warrants an elaborate subterfuge on her part. Aided by her father, she manages to create a tunnel that allows her to escape from her palace prison. Using this escape route, she disappears every day for some time and learns dancing from a group of street performers. Once she becomes adept at dancing, she gains audience with the prince and then seduces him. This turn of events allows the star to showcase her singing and dancing talents and her successful skills of seduction and deception. The film Mangala is quite faithful to its original, Mangamma Sabatham, in many respects. The sets and costumes are more ornate, but apart from that it replicates the gypsy songs, dances and mise en scène, too. However, the visual quality of the entire film is enhanced by cinematographer Kamal Ghosh, a nephew of Debaki Bose who worked with New Theatres in Calcutta before moving to Chennai and joining Gemini Studios. It is worth noting that while earlier the entire cast and much of the crew of a film had to move to Calcutta to shoot a film, we now see skilled technicians moving between and working in different film industries in the country.8 In Swargaseema, as we have seen, the hero returns to his lawful and virtuous wife, played by Jayamma, once he is disillusioned with the actress, Sujatha (Bhanumathi), who had used him merely as a steppingstone to success. In the film Mangala, it is Bhanumathi herself who essays the roles of both wife and seductress. In the beginning of the film she is the young, beautiful and proud peasant girl, who later masquerades as the attractive dancing girl who by the end of the film is transformed into the mature, virtuous wife. In a final declamatory scene, she expresses righteous indignation at the injustice against womankind even as she successfully executes her plan of revenge. So, through these character switches, the film allows Bhanumathi to present the full spectrum of her talents. As she herself claimed, she became the first female star from the South to have made a successful foray into Hindi cinema.9 Though she sang a couple of songs in the Hindi version too, Shamshad Begum and Geeta Dutt also lent their voices to her for other songs in the film with playback singing being an established practice by then in Hindi cinema.10 The success of the films Nishan and Mangala made her an All-India star. Bhanumathi recalls that Nishan ran for 25 weeks in North India. She also recalls that in 1954 she was invited to the first National Film Awards ceremony in Delhi along with other luminaries from the Madras industry like A.V. Meiyappan, S.S. Vasan and others. After attending the function in Delhi, she describes their tour of some of the main cities in the North like Agra, Vrindavan and Mathura. She says in Mathura she was recognized by many ordinary people, and both men and women soon gathered around her

70  Uma Maheswari Bhrugubanda

FIGURE 4.5 

Bhanumathi with Dilip Kumar and NTR on the sets of Chandirani

Source: Vijayachitra

saying “Mangala Aayi, Mangala Aayi” (Mangala is here, Mangala is here!). She says that the same recognition and adulation greeted her in Agra when she visited the Taj Mahal too. Those who had seen me in Gemini’s Nishaan and Mangala recognized me and gathered around me. Aren’t you a film star?! How come you are so simple?! Aren’t you very busy? How do you get the time to travel around? Each had a different question for me. I sighed and thought to myself – “now I can’t travel in North India too without being noticed”. (Ramakrishna [1993] 2000, 187–189) The Bharani Studios Tamil and Telugu film, Vipranarayana, which was directed by her husband, Ramakrishna, and in which she played the female lead role, won the Best Feature Film in Telugu at the 2nd National Film Awards the following year in 1955.

A tri-lingual of her own: Bharani’s Chandirani (1953) Bhanumathi and P.S. Ramakrishna had set up their own film production company, Bharani Pictures, in 1947 and later Bharani Studios in 1950. Their first film was Ratnamala (1947), based on a story that Bhanumathi herself developed and in which, unsurprisingly, she played the main lead. This was followed by two other

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successful Tamil and Telugu bilingual film productions – Laila Majnu (1949) and Prema/Kadhal (1951) in which A. Nageswara Rao acted as her co-star. Thereafter, following the example of Vasan and Gemini, Bharani Studios began work on a trilingual film, Chandirani, for which Bhanumathi not only wrote the story but also took up direction besides playing the twin characters of Rani and Chandi. The twins are daughters of the king, and their mother, the queen, is poisoned by the scheming minister who seeks to take over the throne. The news of his wife’s death drives the king insane, and he is soon imprisoned by the minister. Loyalists of the king stealthily remove one of the twins, Chandi, and send her away to be raised in the forest. There she grows up to be a fearless young woman skilled in the arts of horse riding and sword fighting. Indeed, the introduction scene is clearly staged as a star introduction, the kind that is oftentimes reserved for a male star in later years. The élan and amused nonchalance with which she dismisses her male opponent in a sword fight marks her entry on screen. The infant, Rani, who remains in the palace, is named the ruler, but since she is too young to rule, it is the minister who takes over the throne as a proxy ruler. And she grows up to be the demure princess. The minister plans to marry her off to his own son, to ensure that power remains in his hands. The son is a foolish fellow played by ace comedian of the time, Relangi. The double role allows the Bhanumathi to switch characters, to shift from helpless and demure princess to fearless and aggressive forest girl in a matter of seconds, in a virtuoso display of acting talent.11 Furthermore, given the control over the film that Bhanumathi enjoyed by virtue of being the director and part producer, the film has an unusual climax where the female protagonist plays an agential role in the narrative. In her role as Chandi, Bhanumathi rouses the people to revolt against the minister who has usurped the throne and established his tyrannical rule. In a long and powerful monologue, she berates the people for their passivity and leads them into battle from the front. She takes on the villain in the final fight, while NTR, the male protagonist of the film, is trapped in prison, along with the princess, Rani (also played by Bhanumathi) and the old king. The super hit film, Patalabhairavi (K.V. Reddi), released in 1951, a good two years before this, had already established NTR as a “hero”,12 despite which Chandirani chooses to make him a spectator to the climactic confrontation and establishes Bhanumathi as the undisputed protagonist of the filmic narrative. However, in the very next year in 1954 there is a shift that makes the male star central to film narratives. The bi-lingual production, Malaikkallan and Aggiramudu, confirmed the star status of M.G. Ramachadran (popularly known as MGR) in Tamil and N.T. Rama Rao in Telugu respectively.13 Bhanumathi played the female lead in both these films; however, her role is that of a woman who is kidnapped by the hero in disguise ostensibly to save her from some real kidnappers. The film’s narrative is structured around the male hero who displays a variety of accomplishments – he is a legendary thief, a Robin Hood kind of figure who is skilled in fighting, a master of disguise but is also kind and generous to the poor. In Tamil, the dialogues of the film were written by M. Karunanidhi14 and became extremely

72  Uma Maheswari Bhrugubanda

popular securing star status for M.G. Ramachandran. Bhanumathi has no scope to display her formidable skills. Her role is severely truncated, and the narrative agency has decisively shifted to the male hero with a link firmly established between the land, Tamilnadu and Telugunadu, the Tamil and Telugu languages, and the male hero. Without naming any particular film, Bhanumathi too rues the contemporary shift towards the male protagonist. In her memoirs, she remarks that in the midfifties many things began to change in the industry. The way in which films were made began to change slowly during those years. In the place of heroine-oriented films which were made until that point, gradually the films became hero-centred. With this the heroes became very busy and their call-sheets would often “clash”. Film production slowed down and began to move at snail pace like the Renigunta Express. Each film began to take three to four years. (Ramakrishna [1993] 2000, 202) Indeed, in later years, Telugu stars N.T. Rama Rao and A. Nageswara Rao, both set up their own studios in Hyderabad, Ramakrishna Studios and Annapurna Studios respectively, and helped to gradually move the Telugu film industry from Chennai to Hyderabad. Bharani Pictures remained in Madras and only made films that featured Bhanumathi in a prominent role.15 However, many of its films were not commercially successful. With Missamma/Missiamma (Tel/Tam, L.V. Prasad 1955a, 1955b) the new actress, Savithri established herself as the virtuous heroine of Tamil and Telugu cinema, but Bhanumathi continued to play a set of unusual female characters that created and sustained the no-nonsense, assertive, and even cantankerous persona that slowly emerged as her on-screen and off-screen persona. In Tenali Ramakrishna (1956), she plays the spy who seduces and keeps the king under house arrest leading to a crisis in the kingdom. In 1965, she played the role of a lower-class street singer who turns out to be the illegitimate child of a respectable upper-class man in the film, Anthasthulu that was directed by V. Madhusudana Rao. In 1966, she played the female warrior, Nayakuralu Nagamma in the film Palnati Yuddham. She continued to act and even direct films occasionally well into the 1990s.

Conclusion: regulating and redirecting gender roles in the 1950s Madras film industries A rich and interesting body of work that focuses on early female stars has been emerging in recent years. The work of film scholars like Neepa Majumdar (2009, 2015), Debashree Mukherjee (2013), Madhuja Mukherjee (2017, 2019) and Bindu Menon (2017) has given us fresh insights into both the travels and travails of female stars as they succeeded in, or at times failed to, negotiate with the film industry, their families and larger society in general. A  larger study is warranted on the career of Bhanumathi, the significant body of films she has left behind and her

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own autobiographical and fictional writings in order to gain a fuller understanding of the gender question in early Indian film history in all its complexity. This chapter is merely a first step toward that larger project. However, from the foregoing discussion of three key films in the most successful decade of her career, it is evident that Bhanumathi enjoyed the relative privilege of coming from a ‘respectable’ family, had the support of her father who nurtured her talent and acted as her guardian in the initial years of her career. Later she had the full support of her husband, Ramakrishna who was a filmmaker himself. We can conclude that Bhanumathi’s stardom is created and sustained not only by her multiple talents but also by the ownership of a production company and studio and the partnership of a husband who is a producer, director and editor. Women in cinema of that time were forging new identities and new networks through marriage. While Bhanumathi’s acting and singing talents were widely appreciated, her professional acumen enabled her to build institutional support structures that supported her writing and directorial skills too. Needless to say, it is not merely talent, hard work or luck that sustains stardom, it is material structures that nurture and enable it to flourish. Another significant factor to consider is that the best years of her career, from the mid-forties to the mid-fifties, were also the time when Madras was a major production centre attracting talent from all over South India besides of course, creating films that could be marketed in South India as well as in the North. In his book on Madras Studios, Swarnavel Pillai gives the example of the 1941 Telugu film, Boo Kailash – “the film was in Telugu, produced by a Tamilian; the artists were Kannadigas and the director, the Marathi-speaking Sunderlal Nadkarni. Only the writer Balijepalli Lakshmikanta Kavi was proficient in Telugu”. Quoting the film scholar, Venkatesh Chakravarthy, he further argues that this film was emblematic of the spirit of integration in the South Indian film industry from the mid-1930s onward till the late 1970s, when shooting in studios was the norm and most films in all the major South Indian languages – Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam – were produced in Madras” (Pillai 2015, 107). While this argument is broadly true, we also need to account for the significant number of Hindi productions from Madras and the circulation of film stories, plots, music, songs, actors, and technicians across the different languages and production centres within India besides, of course, the “inspirations” drawn from Hollywood. And of special interest to us is another detail that Pillai mentions in his work. In the context of the separate Andhra movement that was gaining ground, he cites an article in a Tamil film magazine. The popular film magazine, Guntoosi, in its November 1949 edition, carries an editorial on the “Telugu-Tamil” issue that is about the decision of the State Congress committee to separate Andhra state from Madras Presidency. Guntoosi, however, points to the contribution of actresses from other states to the Tamil film industry: Kannamba, Bhanumathi, Anjali Devi, Rajamma, Varalakshmi, Vasundhara, Pushpavalli, Suryaprabha, Jayamma, Malathi, Shantakumari, Krishnaveni, Suryakumari, and Balasaraswathi; very few actresses

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like T.P. Rajakumari, Madhuri Devi and B. S. Saroja were from Tamil Nadu. “As far as art is concerned there should be no discrimination based on caste, religion or language.” (Pillai 2015, 194) Guntoosi was pointing to the centrality of female actors to the Tamil cinema industry but also signalling their mobility across different language film industries operating in Madras. We can also add that at least half the women named were also producers; they were partners in film production along with their husbands (Prasad 2015). In 1949, when the article was written, the film industries had not yet begun to fully engage in the consolidation of linguistic identities as political identities. That happened gradually. As mentioned earlier in this chapter, male actors, especially “heroes” began to slowly restrict themselves to their particular language cinemas while actresses continued to work across different languages. This enabled the male heroes to emerge as representatives of the linguistic and political community (Prasad 2004, 2014; Srinivas 2006, 2013; Bhrugubanda 2018). Bhanumathi’s career allows us to gain a better understanding of the gradual shifts within the industries in each decade. It shows us the new avenues that opened up for female stardom in the 1940s and their gradual decline in the 1950s. It allows us a glimpse into the re-articulation of the gender question as the industrial traffic between the major film production centres of Indian cinemas began to be redirected and regulated in new ways.

Notes 1 See Indraganti Janakibala’s Telugu book on Bhanumathi titled Yashaswini. 2 One of the cities they visit as part of the tour is Bangalore as evidenced by the Kannada advertisement of the play on a huge hoarding that appears in one of the montage sequences in the film. Needless to add, the popularity of stage plays, and the travelling drama troupes that catered to the public demand point to the new networks of entertainment and the movement of artists. 3 Madhuja Mukherjee’s essay on the 1930s Bengal cinema gives us a similar example of the many comparisons between Kanan Bala and Greta Garbo in the popular press of the time. See pp. 17–21 in (M. Mukherjee 2019). 4 For more details on the history of Gemini Studios, see pp. 149–174 in (Pillai 2015). 5 Debashree Mukherjee states, [J]udging from trade journals, autobiographies, and government surveys, it is evident that cinema acting was a highly lucrative profession for women. In 1942 the leading heroines of the day averaged an income of Rs. 2,000 to 3,000 per month. This was a time when a French chiffon saree cost Rs. 9, a brand-new imported Studebaker cost Rs. 6,000 and an average salaried person made Rs. 200 a month. And more interesting was the fact that at least until the 1940s, top billed actresses were often drawing higher salaries than their male-counterparts. (D. Mukherjee 2013, 37–38) 6 7 8 9

See p. 104 and p. 184 in (Ramakrishna [1993] 2000). See Usha Iyer’s chapter “Bringing Bharatanatyam to Bombay” in this volume. See Madhuja Mukherjee’s chapter “Arriving at Bombay” in this volume. She acted in five Hindi films in all – Rani, Shamsher, Nishaan, Mangala and Chandirani.

Travels of the female star  75

10 Bhanumathi’s dialogue portions of the film were also dubbed by someone. However, the dubbing artist is not credited in the film, and Bhanumathi too does not mention this detail in her own writing. But Bhanumathi does give some interesting details of her singing and dubbing career. Despite being one among the last successful singing heroines, with the arrival of playback technology, she had to learn to dub and lip-sync her own dialogues and songs in her films. For a detailed and interesting account of playback singing in South Indian cinema, see (Indraganti 2016). 11 Later successes like Seeta Aur Geeta starring Hemamalini (Ramesh Sippy 1972), Ganga Manga (Tapi Chanakya 1973) and Vani Rani – both films starring Vani Sri (Tapi Chanakya and C.V. Rajendran 1974) – and Chaalbaaz starring Sridevi (Pankaj Parashar 1989) used the template of identical twins separated at birth and featured a female star to guarantee box office success. 12 See (S. V. Srinivas 2009) for a detailed discussion of the film Patalabhairavi as a key film in establishing the centrality of the male hero in Telugu cinema. 13 Both MGR and NTR went on to have successful political careers and became Chief Ministers of their respective states. For detailed and interesting theorizations of the film and politics connections, see Pandian 1992; Srinivas 2006, 2013; Prasad 2004, 2014; Bhrugubanda 2018. 14 M. Karunanidhi was a popular screen writer who entered politics and was Chief Minister of Tamilnadu for five terms between 1969 and 2011 representing the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) party. He died in 2018. 15 Many early actresses were also producers. For example, Kanan Bala nee Devi. Also see Sarah Niazi’s chapter in this volume which discusses how Sabita Devi turned to film production.

References Acharya, dir. 1943. Mangamma Sabatham (Tamil). Madras: Gemini Studios. ———, dir. 1949. Apoorva Sagodharargal (Tamil). Madras: Gemini Studios. Babu, H.V., dir. 1943. Krishna Prema (Telugu). Madras: Star Combines. Bhanumathi, dir. 1953. Chandirani (Telugu). Madras: Bharani Studios. https://www.you tube.com/watch?v=vsug58kN1b0 Bhrugubanda, Uma Maheswari. 2018. Deities and Devotees: Cinema, Religion and Politics in South India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Guy, Randor. 2007. “Blast for the Past: Mangamma Sapatham”. The Hindu Cinema Page, November  23. https://archive.is/20171007021201/www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/ tp-features/tp-cinemaplus/blast-from-the-past/article3024037.ece [Accessed December 6, 2018]. Indraganti, Janakibala. 2006. Yashaswini: Bhanumathi Jeevita Kadha [Telugu]. Secunderabad: Mai Books. Indraganti, Kiranmayi. 2013. “Bhanumati and a Heavenly Abode of Stardom”. Deep Focus Cinema 1 (IV): 40–50. ———. 2016. Her Majestic Voice: South Indian Female Playback Singers and Stardom, 1945– 1955. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Madhusudan Rao, V., dir. 1965. Antasthulu (Telugu). Madras: Jagapathi Art Productions. Majumdar, Neepa. 2009. Wanted Cultured Ladies Only! Female Stardom and Cinema in India, 1930s-1950s. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. ———. 2015. “Gossip, Labour and Female Stardom in Pre-Independence Indian Cinema: The Case of Shanta Apte”. In Doing Women’s Film History: Reframing Cinemas, Past and Future, edited by Christine Gledhill and Julia Knight, 181–192. Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Mamoulian, Rouben, dir. 1941. Blood and Sand (English). Los Angeles: Twentieth Century Fox.

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Menon, Bindu. 2017. “Affective Returns: Biopics as Life Narratives”. Biography 40 (1) (Winter): 116–139. Mukherjee, Debashree. 2013. “Notes on a Scandal: Writing Women’s Film History Against an Absent Archive”. BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 4 (1): 9–30. Mukherjee, Madhuja, ed. 2017. Voices of the Talking Stars: Women of Indian Cinema and Beyond. New Delhi/Kolkata: Sage Publications/Stree. ———. 2019. “When Was the Studio Era in Bengal: Transition, Transformations and Configurations During the 1930s”. Wide Screen (Subaltern Media) 8 (1) (January): 1–27. Murugadasa, dir. 1942. Nandanar (Tamil). Madras: Gemini Studios. Pandian, M.S.S. 1992. The Image Trap: M.G.Ramachandran in Film and Politics. New Delhi: Sage Publications. Pillai, Swarnavel Eswaran. 2015. Madras Studios: Narrative, Genre and Ideology in Tamil Cinema. New Delhi: Sage Publications. Prasad, L.V., dir. 1955a. Missamma (Telugu). Madras: Vijaya-Vauhini Studios. ———, dir. 1955b. Missiamma (Tamil). Madras: Vijaya-Vauhini Studios. Prasad, M. Madhava. 2004. “Reigning Stars: The Political Career of South Indian Cinema”. In Stars: The Film Reader, edited by Marcia Landy and Lucy Fischer, 97–114. New York/ London: Routledge. ———. 2014. Cine-Politics: Films Stars and Political Existence in South India. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan. ———. 2015. “Film History as Cultural History”. Journal of the Moving Image 13 (December): 13–29. Pullayya, C., dir. 1939. Varavikrayam (Telugu). East India Film Company. ———, dir. 1949. Apoorva Sahodarulu (Telugu). Madras: Gemini Studios. Raghavan, V.S., dir. 1957. Sarangadhara (Telugu). Madras: Minerva Pictures. Rajadhyaksha, Ashish, and Paul Willemen. 1999. The Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema. New York: Routledge. Ramakrishna, dir. 1949. Laila Majnu (Telugu and Tamil). Madras: Bharani Pictures. ———, dir. 1952. Prema (Telugu). Madras: Bharani Studios. ———, dir. 1954. Vipranarayana (Telugu). Madras: Bharani Studios. Ramakrishna, Bhanumathi. 1993 (2000). Naalo Nenu [Autobiographical Musings]. Vijayawada: Sri Manasa Publications. Ranga, B.S., dir. 1956. Tenali Ramakrishna (Telugu). Madras: Vikram Productions. Reddi, B.N., dir. 1945. Swargaseema (Telugu). Madras: Vauhini Pictures. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=mrLjQSCHKGc Shankar, Uday, dir. 1948. Kalpana (Hindi). Madras: Gemini Studios. Srinivas, S.V. 2006. “Stars and Mobilization in South India: What Have Films Got to Do with It?” Post Script [Sp. Issue on Indian Cinema] 25 (3): 29–47. ———. 2009. “Telugu Folklore Films: The Case of Patala Bhairavi”. Deep Focus IX (9). ———. 2013. Politics as Performance: A Social History of the Telugu Cinema. Ranikhet: Permanent Black. Sriramulu Naidu, S.M., dir. 1954. Malaikkallan (Tamil). Madras: Pakshiraja Studios. ———, dir. 1954. Aggiramudu (Telugu). Madras: Pakshiraja Studios. Vasan, S.S., dir. 1948. Chandralekha (Tamil). Madras: Gemini Studios. ———, dir. 1951. Mangala (Hindi). Madras: Gemini Studios. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=oQY49d-jiio

5 BRINGING BHARATANATYAM TO BOMBAY CINEMA Mapping Tamil-Hindi film industry traffic through Vyjayanthimala’s dancing body Usha Iyer

Early on in The Saroj Khan Story, Nidhi Tuli’s 2012 documentary on the famed Hindi film choreographer, we are presented an interview with one of Khan’s favorite dancer-actresses, Vyjayanthimala, who reminisces about dance in Hindi films of the late 1940s: I noticed they had light movements, more of facial expressions, not much of hand movements, not much of footwork, or something that had to do with classical or our rich folklore, which got incorporated when I started with my first film, Bahar. In her autobiography as well, the dancer-actress calls attention to the impact of her classical-dance-trained body on Bombay cinema, remarking that after the success of her films, Bahar (M.V. Raman 1951) and Nagin (Nandlal Jaswantlal 1954), “semi-classical dance became an integral part of every Hindi film heroine’s credentials” (Bali and Sabharwal 2007, 45).1 Through the 1930s and 40s, dancer-actresses like Sadhona Bose, Sitara, Azurie, and others had included elements of Kathak, Manipuri, and Rabindra Nritya in their dance numbers. The nine-year-old Kumari Kamala (later, Kamala Laxman) performed Bharatanatyam-style dance items in the 1943 Hindi films, Kismet (Gyan Mukherjee), and Ram Rajya (Vijay Bhatt). However, it was with the South-Indian actress Vyjayanthimala’s ascension to national, “all-India” stardom that Bharatanatyam became a definitive part of the idiom of Hindi film dance. Her training in Bharatanatyam as well as Tamil cinema’s deployment of the dance form to signify the “classical” introduced a new gestural repertoire to Bombay cinema, which in turn influenced costume (the hybrid “amrapali” costume in Hindi films),2 mise en scène (gopuram temple dome backdrops for stage dances), and the very narratives (featuring middle-class female protagonists trained in classical dance). This chapter considers the influence on the Bombay film industry of Vyjayanthimala, examining a set of Hindi films from the 1950s that were

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remade from Tamil, produced by a Madras studio, or involved Madras film industry professionals. Studying the introduction of Bharatanatyam into Bombay cinema through the figure of Vyjayanthimala enables an examination of the discursive constructions of “national” vs. “regional” cultures and bodies, north vs. south India, and shifting definitions of cinematic spectacle. The star body and the dance form that Vyjayanthimala came to signify enable us to trace the idioms and spectacular imaginations that the Madras studios brought to Bombay cinema, as well as the developing hierarchies between film industries and their claims as national cultural products. It is not, for example, until Devdas (Bimal Roy 1955) that Vyjayanthimala is considered a “serious” actress in the Bombay film industry; her work with the acclaimed Bengali filmmaker was marked as a departure from her dance-filled “light entertainments” that were produced by South Indian studios and Tamil directors like M.V. Raman, often featuring Kishore Kumar as the comic dancing hero.3 Much is made of Vyjayanthimala’s ability to learn Hindi quickly and speak it well: “I was the only artiste from the South who didn’t dub her dialogue as I had studied Hindi at the Hindi Prachar Sabha” (Bali and Sabharwal 2007, 49). However, in press coverage of the early 1950s, we also encounter the ridicule of her “dancerly” (i.e. Bharatanatyam-style) gestures, revealing the gaps and ruptures between the Tamil screen body and idealized constructions of an all-India, i.e. North-Indian, femininity in Hindi cinema. During the making of Nagin, her first film outside the Madras studios, Vyjayanthimala recounts being tearful at the director Nandlal Jaswantlal constantly calling her “idli” (a fluffy, round South-Indian rice cake), complaining that she had “baby fat,” and asking her to keep her large South-Indian eyes half-closed for a “dreamy look.” The debutante Bengali hero, Pradeep Kumar, also reportedly bristled at being called “roshogulla” (a white, round Bengali sweet) (Bali and Sabharwal 2007, 59). How are these non-North-Indian screen bodies molded to become stars of the purportedly all-India Hindi film, and how do they change the contours of Hindi film stardom in turn? Narrating the story of Tamil-Hindi film industry relations through dancer-actresses, choreographers, and dance forms produces a corporeal history of industrial networks through the clashes and negotiations of bodies and their comportments. An intermedial star like Vyjayanthimala, steering careers in stage dance and film performance, carries movement vocabularies across media and alters representational regimes when she moves between film industries. Bringing to the Bombay film industry the labor networks developed around a Bharatanatyamtrained star body, including traditional nattuvanar gurus, rigorous dance rehearsals, particular costume design, and art direction aesthetics, Vyjayanthimala’s dancing body is a rich site for mapping techno-corporeal nodes of industrial traffic.4

Bharatanatyam in 1950s Tamil cinema Vyjayanthimala learned Bharatanatyam from the age of eight under the tutelage of the nattuvanars, Guru Vazhuvoor Ramiah Pillai and later Guru Dandayudapani

Bringing bharatanatyam to Bombay cinema  79

Pillai from the famed Thanjavur school of dance. It was at one of her Bharatanatyam recitals that the film director, M.V. Raman and A.V. Meiyappa Chettiar, founder of the leading Madras studio, AVM Productions, approached her for her first movie role in the Tamil film, Vazhkai (A. V. Meiyappan and M. V. Raman, 1949). “The sole demand in this maiden film was my skill as a dancer. The whole script revolved around dancing, and there were four dance sequences, both classical and folk,” Vyjayanthimala recounts (Bali and Sabharwal 2007, 39). The film was subsequently released in Telugu as Jeevitham and remade in Hindi as Bahar in 1951. In interviews as well as in her autobiography, Vyjayanthimala presents Bahar as a defining moment in the evolution of Hindi film dance: “Bahar took the entire North by storm. . . . This film became a trendsetter paving the way for dance with a definitive form in Hindi cinema” (Bali and Sabharwal 2007, 45). The box-office success of the Hindi-language Bahar, Vyjayantimala notes, made her a “national star overnight,” (Bali and Sabharwal 2007, 47) even as her Bharatanatyam-trained star body was constantly inflected as resolutely South Indian in descriptions of her as, for instance, “the southern sensation with twinkle toes” (Janaki 2010, 10). AVM’s multilingual remakes distributed a particular Tamil film aesthetic to other regions even as they circulated a narrative of cultural nationalism. Most strikingly, a number of song-and-dance sequences in AVM films of the period use a map of undivided India as the backdrop to Bharatanatyam-influenced dance performances, set to patriotic songs, sung by acclaimed Carnatic vocalists. Swarnavel Eswaran Pillai discusses how Meiyappan brings together in Nam Iruvar (A.V. Meiyappan 1947) the social reformer Subramania Bharathiar’s poetry; the legendary Carnatic vocalist, D.K. Pattammal; choreography by the nattuvanar Vazhuvoor Ramaiah Pillai; and Kumari Kamala’s athletic Bharatanatyam skills to capitalize on the nationalistic zeal for freedom in early 1947. In Vazhkai, released two years after Nam Iruvar, Meiyappan repeats this strategy in the dance number, “Bharata samuthayam vaazhgave,” composed by Bharathiar and sung by Pattamal. Vyjayanthimala, variously attired in military-style riding breeches, a Tamil half-sari, and Indian National Congressstyle khadi suit and Gandhi cap, marches and dances in front of the stage backdrop of a map of undivided India in a recognizably Bharatanatyam-influenced movement vocabulary. In her next Tamil film, Penn (1954), also produced by AVM and directed by M.V. Raman and remade as Sangham in Telugu and Ladki in Hindi, Vyjayanthimala’s dancing skills are once again showcased in three luminescent dance numbers. Halfway through the film, her dancing, horse-riding, sportswoman character, Rani, travels to Colombo to participate in a sports tournament, where she happens to injure her foot. Along with her parents, she attends a famed European dancer’s flamenco-inspired performance. When challenged to prove that Indian dance is as admirable as Western dance forms, the outraged, patriotic Rani proceeds to perform a medley of Indian dance forms to the song “Bharata naatukinnai.” Once again, against the backdrop of a map of undivided India, Rani declaims the eminence of the newly independent nation, proficiently performing routines from the Manipuri and Bharatanatyam classical dance forms, choreographed by her nattuvanar

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guru, Dandayudapani Pillai. The sequences feature Northeast- and South-Indian temple dome backdrops and dance costumes, mobilizing and fixing the iconography of the recently anointed states of Manipur and Tamilnadu. Bharatanatyam acquires this status as a respectable cultural form in Tamil cinema from the 1940s as a result of multiple factors: the sanskritization or gentrification of Sadirattam, the traditional dance performed in temples, royal courts, and salons across South India; the marginalization of traditional devadasi performers and the

FIGURE 5.1 Vyjayanthimala

dances before a map of undivided India in Penn (M. V.

Raman 1954) Source: Courtesy of Media Photo Stills

Bringing bharatanatyam to Bombay cinema  81

appropriation of their cultural practices as Bharatanatyam gains middle-class respectability; and the Sangeet Natak Akademi’s canonization of Bharatanatyam as one of the foremost classical dances of India.5 From the 1930s onwards, the textual “rehabilitation” of Sadirattam as Bharatanatyam by upper-caste cultural revivalists like Rukmini Devi Arundale and E. Krishna Iyer on the basis of codified norms suggested by the Natyasastra, the Abhinaya Darpana, and other ancient treatises enables the dance form to acquire “national” status as a symbol of Indian heritage.6 The processes of nationalism, state patronage, and upper-class and -caste sponsorship selectively legitimize certain regional artistic forms as “national” and therefore “classical” (Shah 2002, 126). Bharatanatyam’s stature as a classical dance results in its deployment by Tamil cultural elites trying to engage with the cinema in the 1940s. M.S.S. Pandian outlines the strategies of the adoption of realism, the ideology of uplift, and the deployment of binaries such as classical vs. non-classical, high vs. low culture as providing the Tamil elite with a new language to engage with the medium of cinema (1996, 950). Accordingly, Bharatanatyam and Carnatic music are authorized as high culture and contrasted against the low cultural forms of Company Drama and Therukoothu (folk street theatre). Pandian remarks on the cultural critic Muktha Seenivasan’s praise for the upper-caste dancer-actresses of Tamil cinema of the 1950s and 60s  – Kumari Kamala, Vyjayanthimala, and the Travancore sisters, Lalitha-Padmini  – as ushering in “astonishing progress” into dance in Tamil cinema (1996, 954). Davesh Soneji notes in his nuanced account of devadasi cultural labor in South India that, while most of the earliest female stars of Tamil cinema  – T.R. Rajakumari, Sayi-Subbulakshmi, S.P.L. Dhanalakshmi, N. Rajalakshmi, Tiruvelveli Papa, among others  – came from devadasi families, with the embourgeoisement of dance and cinema in the 1940s and 50s, “women from devadasi families could simply no longer ‘make it’ in the world of cinema, just as they could not in the new world of dance” (2011, 22). Many artists from the Isai Velalar community (to which the female devadasis and the male nattuvanars belonged) had transitioned into the movies from Company Drama and had played a central role in defining music and dance as the central spectacular attractions of the Tamil film (Baskaran 2013, 39). The cultivation of new taste habits among the elites of Madras required that female artists of this performing community especially be rendered invisible on the stage and in the movies. The sanskritization of dance around the same time as the rise of the Tamil sound film reveals thus the caste politics of Bharatanatyam on screen and its relationship to other dances in Tamil cinema. Indeed, it may be argued that on-screen Bharatanatyam by upper-caste dancer-actresses played as significant a role in the gentrification of the dance form as the Kalakshetra Foundation did. Kamala Laxman’s dance in Nam Iruvar, for instance, was hailed as ushering in a cultural revolution. “Dance schools sprouted all over and Bharatanatyam acquired respectability” declares one review of the film (Guy 2002). Dancer-actresses like Kamala Laxman, Vyjayanthimala, and the Travancore sisters were part of the early generations of upper-caste, non-devadasi women trained in Bharatanatyam. Through the concerted marginalization of traditional female performers, public dance performance by upper-class

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and -caste women was de-stigmatized and even allowed for their promotion as ideal national-cultural bodies, often imbricated with the playback singing of Carnatic exponents such as D.K. Pattamal and M.L. Vasanthakumari to produce a dual star text of unassailable classical pedigree.7 However, the path to securing their position as the first generation of upper-class and -caste dancer-actresses is strewn with many on- and off-screen negotiations that point to the continuing sense of threat posed by the performing woman well into the 1950s and 60s. To allay elite anxieties around public dance performance, on-screen Bharatanatyam in Tamil cinema of the period figures classical-dance training and performance as an attribute of the modern, upper-class and -caste Tamil woman. In most of her Tamil and Hindi social films from the 1950s that feature Bharatanatyam performances, Vyjayanthimala plays a modern, college-educated, do-gooder girl who dances at events such as college festivals or shows organized by women’s organizations or as a teacher of dance and music at kala kendras or cultural centers. Significantly, she rarely dances for money, and venues such as cultural festivals figure her performances as unpaid and non-professional to distance them from the professional, paid performance of the devadasi. In Vazhkai, Vyjayanthimala’s wealthy father encourages her to attend dance performances and says approvingly at one point, “in my days, natyam (dance) only happened in the kovil (temple). Nowadays,

FIGURE 5.2 Vyjayanthimala

in her debut film, Vazhkai (A. V. Meiyappan and M. V.

Raman 1949) Source: Courtesy of Media Photo Stills

Bringing bharatanatyam to Bombay cinema  83

all girls are born with anklets on their feet.” The house help enthusiastically agrees, “there isn’t a house without dancing in it.” Only the negatively-coded characters in the film frown upon music on the radio or dancing on stage. Through the wealthy, modern girl who is trained in Bharatanatyam, alongside horse-riding and other physical sports, films like Vazhkai and Penn negotiate the status of dance in the elite cultural imaginary and include a sanskritized Bharatanatyam in the enterprise of constructing the modern South Indian woman. In these early films, rather than being figured as nurturing women who dream of being mothers, Vyjayanthimala’s characters are carefree, sporty, outspoken (declared feminists even!); they drive cars and read serialized fiction in magazines, dress in drag, poke fun at the hero, and perform Bharatanatyam on stage. The project of securing respectability for public performance by women, which defined much of the discourse around dancing and film-acting through the first half of the twentieth century, is negotiated in these films through the Vyjayanthimala star text.

Bringing Bharatanatyam to Bombay cinema Attending to Vyjayanthimala’s Hindi films of the 1950s enables an exploration of the national and sub-national politics of including Bharatanatyam in the so-called all-India Hindi film. In the Hindi version of “Bharata naatukinnai,” “Mere watan se accha koi watan nahi hai” from Ladki, it is worth noting that the interludes featuring the classical dance styles of Manipuri and Bharatanatyam are encased within an “allIndia” figuration where the backdrop is a map of undivided India, the character sings in Hindi, dances a hybrid film dance connoting “Indian dance,” and wears the increasingly “all-India” sari in the Nivi style from Andhra Pradesh. The Hindi version leaves out the opening sequence of the original Tamil number in which Vyjayanthimala’s character, Rani, performs a Bharatanatyam-style namaskaram or opening invocation to Nataraja. The Manipuri and Bharatanatyam interludes feature nritta or “pure dance” segments (with no sung lyrics) that show off the physical skills of the dancer and serve as alankara (ornamentation), set to percussive instrumentation and rhythmic enunciations. The enveloping structure, on the other hand, is built around expressive nritya and natya elements synchronized to the playback singing of the by-now “all-India” female voice of Lata Mangeshkar, articulating the central patriotic theme of the song.8 The sequence thus seems to set up centre and periphery relations so that these particular classical dance forms are coded as regional, signaled by a change of costume, backdrop, and movement vocabulary from the national centre, even as they must be invoked to argue for the cultural value and variety of Indian performing arts. One may also read the particular invocation of Bharatanatyam and Manipuri as an attempt to include the fraught political territories of south and northeast India that refused to easily blend into a North-Indian and Hindi-dominated imagination of the nation. Comparing Vyjayanthimala’s Bharatanatyam-influenced dance routines in Tamil and in Hindi cinema makes evident the work that the Hindi film has to do to accommodate this South-Indian dancing body. It foregrounds differences in genre

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and hence in the spectacular imaginations of the two film industries. In Tamil costume dramas like Marma Veeran (T.R. Raghunath 1956), Vanjikottai Valiban (S.S. Vasan 1958b, released in Hindi as Raj Tilak), Parthiban Kanavu (D. Yoganand 1960), and Chittoor Rani Padmini (Chitrapu Narayana Rao 1963), Vyjayanthimala’s Bharatanatyam skills are put on resplendent display, while in Hindi socials like Pehli Jhalak (M.V. Raman 1955), New Delhi (Mohan Segal 1956), Aasha (M.V. Raman 1957), and others, the narrative labors to accommodate the South-Indian dance form. In New Delhi, for instance, Vyjayanthimala’s character, Janaki Devi, is a Tamil teacher of music and dance. This character sketch sets up her stage performance of the allaripu item from the Bharatanatyam repertoire, choreographed by the nattuvanar, V.S. Muthuswami Pillai. The allaripu item, bearing all the signs of newly coded South-Indian classicism, transitions quite inexplicably to a Kathak-influenced hybrid film dance with background dancers, choreographed by the Kathak-trained dance master, Hiralal, to the Hindi song “Murali bairan bhayi,” suggesting that a South-Indian Bharatanatyam item can only occupy so much screen time in an Urdu-Hindi film. In contrast to the Bharatanatyam nritta segment that bookends this dance number, the rest of the sequence is marked, like in “Mere watan se accha,” by expressive nritya and natya elements. In both films, Bharatanatyam is markedly set off from the idiom of Hindi film dance, limited to the space of the stage with the temple gopuram backdrop, the performer in the traditional Bharatanatyam costume, set to rhythm rather than song, featuring no background dancers, and thus clearly figured as a solo classical dance performance. It should come as no surprise that Bombay cinema, with its antecedents in Urdu-Hindi theater, music, and poetry should privilege North-Indian Kathak over South-Indian Bharatanatyam or that Vyjayanthimala be regarded as a “serious” Hindi film actress only with her role as a Kathak-dancing tawaif (courtesan) in Devdas and in Sadhna (B.R. Chopra 1958).9 However, these dissonances in Bombay cinema’s employment of the two dance forms point as well to ideological and generic figurations that emerge from the interactions between the Madras and Bombay film industries. The Urdu-Hindi courtesan film, in charting the typically tragic narrative of the tawaif seeking respectability through heterosexual matrimony, has a different moral trajectory and relationship to dance than the Tamil costume drama. In the three films in which Vyjayanthimala plays a Kathak-dancing courtesan – Devdas, Sadhna, and Sunghursh (H.S. Rawail 1968) – she is eventually “rescued” from a life of professional performance. In the Hindi-language, Madras studio-produced “light comedies” and in the Tamil costume dramas she stars in all through the 1950s, on the other hand, there is no moral imperative for the dancerprotagonists to give up dancing. The South-Indian mythological, historical, and costume drama genres feature extravagant Bharatanatyam-based dance numbers. We can find the antecedents to Tamil cinema’s unabashed celebration of cinematic spectacle in S.S. Vasan’s Chandralekha (1948), a lavish commercial production that would change the way films across the country were made, especially the scale on which song-and-dance sequences were produced. This dance spectacular’s breathless series of attractions, especially its famous drum dance sequence, significantly

Bringing bharatanatyam to Bombay cinema  85

influenced the Bombay film formula. The Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema notes that Chandralekha “became a landmark in the codification of an Indian mass entertainment ideology after Independence” (1999, 310). The first attempt by a Madras studio – Vasan’s Gemini Studios – to capture an all-India audience, Chandralekha’s success at the national box office “taught Hindi filmmakers the way to do real big business with films” (Rangoonwala 1979, 7). The film and the studio aggressively redefined entertainment and the popular “mass film” through a certain will-tospectacle that included dance as a central cinematic attraction, unencumbered by narrative motivation. Read in this light, the inclusion of the Bharatanatyam item in the Hindi film as a pure dance attraction with little or no narrative purpose, unlike the Kathakinfluenced hybrid dance set to song, takes on a different valence. Rather than be integrated into the film’s narrative with its concomitant normative trajectories, the Bharatanatyam item stands out as a dazzling outlier attraction that highlights skillbased nritta moves. These, in turn, call for deep spectatorial engagement with the specific somatic qualities of dance performance, including angasuddha (clarity and firmness in the rendering of line), tala suddha (precision in relation to beat), lasya (grace), and tandava (vigor, strength, and speed of footwork and other gestures). The Bharatanatyam-trained South-Indian dancing bodies of Vyjayanthimala, Padmini, Kamala Laxman, Sayee, and Subbulakshmi, among others, with their crisp adavus (particular combinations of hand and feet gestures), set to rhythm-based, percussive music, bring to Bombay cinema new imaginations of cinematic spectacle and of female public performance. The inclusion of the Bharatanatyam item is testimony to the impact of the Tamil film industry, whether through stars such as Vyjayanthimala, studios such as AVM Productions and Gemini Studios, directors like M.V. Raman, and nattuvanar choreographers including V.S. Muthuswami Pillai and Dandayudapani Pillai.10 While through the 1930s Tamil films were produced in the big film centers of Bombay and Calcutta, by the 1950s, many Hindi films began to be produced by Madras studios. Bahar was the first Hindi film to be shot in Madras, bearing the imprint of many of the Madras film industry personnel, and carrying the Tamil cinema’s spectacular imaginations to the Bombay film industry.

Becoming a national, all-India actress Until the mid-1950s, Vyjayanthimala’s star body was emphatically marked as South Indian and as a primarily dancing body, with her Bharatanatyam items fusing these two aspects of her star text. The first four years of her career in Hindi cinema were dominated by dance films, which earned her a reputation as mainly a dancer with meager acting abilities. Reviews of her early films foreground this prejudice through the repeated question: is she a “proper” Hindi film actress or merely a skilled dancer from the South? To transcend her identity as a South-Indian danceractress, she had to demonstrate both her proficiency in other dance forms as well as her non-dancing histrionic abilities. In the 1955 film, Pehli Jhalak, Vyjayanthimala’s character, Devi  – a model of the ideal modern Indian woman who is

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both college-educated and trained in indigenous cultural forms – performs a range of dance forms at the “Women’s Progressive Society,” starting with the Dandayudapani Pillai-choreographed Kathak number, “Unchi unchi dukaan,” followed later by a Hiralal-choreographed Lavani number, “Acchi surat hui ya museebat.”11 In another Hiralal-choreographed Kathak-influenced number, “Na maro najariya ke baan,” Vyjayanthimala performs the “dancing double role” of the celestial lovers, Radha and Krishna, her remarkable gestural repertoire proliferating across the stage. This dance number ends with a montage of newspaper headlines that alliteratively announce, “Madras goes mad over Devi,” “Calcutta goes crazy over Devi,” “Agra applauses [sic] Devi,” “Delhi is dazzled by Devi,” projecting the national appeal of the dancing star across critical cultural centers. In the latter half of New Delhi, released a year later, the Tamil Janaki Devi play-acts as Mohini, a girl from Punjab, who performs the folk dance form of Gidda to the song, “Tum sang preet lagai.” Before the electrifying dance performance, Mohini/Janaki tells her uncle, “you won’t be able to tell it is a Tamilian dancing on stage.” Vyjayanthimala’s adept performance of both the classical, geometrical alarippu item choreographed by the nattuvanar Muthuswami Pillai and the Hiralal-choreographed vigorous folk dance moves of Gidda render her body as the ground for the reconciliation of classical and folk dance binaries, North- and South-Indian cultural and linguistic divides, reinforcing the film’s message of national integration, while extra-textually hailing her as a national Hindi film actress, not merely a regional South-Indian one. In 1955, when Bimal Roy cast Vyjayanthimala in the role of the courtesan, Chandramukhi in Devdas, for the first time she came to be taken seriously as an actress, reflected in her nomination for the Best Supporting Actress at the Filmfare Awards (which, significantly, she declined to accept). Devdas marks her transformation from dancer to actress within and outside the diegesis. Chandramukhi gives up dancing and becomes a jogan (female devotee), devoted to one man. Extra-textually, the award nomination and the opportunity to work with a respected Hindi film director (from a Calcutta and not a Madras studio, indicating further hierarchies of taste) and an A-list hero like Dilip Kumar (not her usual on-screen companion, the comic Kishore Kumar) “elevated” Vyjayanthimala from a dancer-actress of South-Indian origin to a national film star with pan-Indian appeal. A popular magazine notes of her career trajectory, “In the wake of ‘Devdas’ came films like ‘Naya Daur,’ ‘Sadhana,’ ‘Madhumati’ and ‘Paigham’ rounding out Portrait No. 2 as the heroine who could no longer be shrugged off casually as a ‘dancing star’ ” (“Vyjayanthimala” 1966, 5). Vyjayanthimala’s three ensuing Filmfare Best Actress awards were for Sadhna, Gunga Jumna (Nitin Bose 1962), and Sangam (Raj Kapoor 1965), all highlighting her acting abilities rather than her trademark dance numbers. Not surprisingly, in these “serious” films, she does not play a Tamil character but is mostly a generic North-Indian character, who, naturally, does not perform Bharatanatyam. This tradeoff also meant that her authorial control over the narrative was diminished, as her performative repertoire was subsumed into the conventional narrative trajectory of the male-centric Hindi film. She was never quite as luminously in charge as in her dance-centric films such as Ladki, Nagin, Aasha, or New

Bringing bharatanatyam to Bombay cinema  87

Delhi once the ecstatic excess of her dancing body was circumscribed by narratives driven by the hero’s goals.

Bharatanatyam and the production of a Hindu star text Through her film career and later, continuing to the present day, Vyjayanthimala continued a parallel professional career in classical Bharatanatyam performance, which distinctly influenced her cinematic star text. Praised as “a hardcore traditionalist, avoiding dilution, modernity and experimentation” (Janaki 2010, 18), the dancer-actress, through the diligent separation of her film dance and Bharatanatyam vocabularies, embodied the intractable hierarchies between the popular and the classical. Her Bharatanatyam training constructed her as an icon of national culture as she was conferred prestigious national awards such as the Padma Shri and the Sangeet Natak Akademi award. In 1959, after a performance in Paris for UNESCO, the French newspaper, La Revolution, declared: “This diamond-decked goddess of Indian dance finds Paris at her feet” (as quoted in “A  Life dedicated to Dance” 2010, 11). This comparison of Vyjayanthimala’s Bharatanatyam-costumed body to a Hindu goddess has its roots in the sanskritization of Bharatanatyam along Orientalist and nationalist articulations of culture and tradition as enshrined in a particularly Hindu iconography of mythic heroines and dancing women. In the canonization of classical dance forms over the 1950s and 60s, Bharatanatyam was constructed as a purely Hindu form in its lineage while Kathak was accorded a more checkered genealogy as a Hindu courtly and temple dance form “corrupted” by the importation of Persian dancing girls by the Mughals (Khokar 1984, 134). The acclaimed Kathak dancer, Shovana Narayan, laments the difference in popular Hindi cinema’s representation of the two dance forms: “over the years, it became easy to portray licentiousness with a ‘mujra’ that was identified incorrectly as Kathak and anything religious with Bharatanatyam” (2016). In contrast to Vyjayanthimala’s Tamil Brahmin roots and an image markedly imbricated in popular Hindu iconography, the star text of the Tamil Muslim dancer-actress Waheeda Rehman, also trained in Bharatanatyam, did not carry the same “classical” connotations. She recounts that when, as a fifteen-year-old, she and her sister performed a Bharatanatyam recital before the distinguished politician, C. Rajagopalachari, he commented, “it’s surprising how good your Bharatanatyam abhinaya [facial expression] is despite you being Muslim girls” (Baaje Payal 1998). Her dance guru, Tiruchandur Meenaxi Sundaram Pillai, initially refused to teach her because of her religious background. She quotes him as saying, “She won’t be able to express our varnams [musical compositions]. How will she do abhinaya” (Baaje Payal 1998)? Even though Rehman debuted as a dancer in the Telugu film, Rojulu Marayi (Tapi Chanakya 1955), her initial career in the Hindi film industry was dominated by dramatic roles featuring few dance-heavy numbers. Her abhinaya was always praised, as for instance, when the director, Guru Dutt, commented on her performance in the song “Jaane kya tune kahi” (Pyaasa 1957): “She did the song well because she is a dancer. She knows how to give silent expressions” (Kabir

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2014, 38). Not until the 1960s, well into her acting career, did Rehman play a dancer-protagonist in films like Roop ki Rani Choron ka Raja (H.S. Rawail 1961), Guide (Vijay Anand 1965), and Teesri Kasam (Basu Bhattacharya 1966). “Many people didn’t know that I am a trained dancer because they felt I didn’t behave like one,” she remarks (Kumar 2012), suggesting that the cultural iconography of a Bharatanatyam dancer did not accommodate an actress of Muslim lineage, who spoke Urdu and did not conform to the physical appearance of a Hindu goddess.

Conclusion – corporeal histories of industrial networks Mapping Tamil-Hindi film industry traffic through the dancing body of Vyjayanthimala and the dance form of Bharatanatyam illuminates how certain movement vocabularies engender specific types of cinematic narratives, genres, and industries. While, in her Tamil films and in her early Hindi films, especially those produced by South-Indian studios, we may see frequent and more “authentic” performances of codified Bharatanatyam, the effect of Vyjayanthimala’s dancing body on Bombay cinema is enduring. Indeed, Bharatanatyam has become shorthand for classical dance in Hindi cinema and a defining attribute of many other South-Indian actors in the Bombay film industry, including Hema Malini, Jayaprada, Sridevi,

FIGURE 5.3 Mapping

corporeal nodes of industrial traffic through Vyjayanthimala’s dancing body

Source: Digital art by Madhuja Mukherjee, 2020

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and Kamal Hasan. In a delightfully self-reflexive scene from the 1957 film, Aasha, that I like to think of as Vyjayanthimala and M.V. Raman cocking a snook at the Bombay film industry, Vyjayanthimala’s character, Nirmala, auditions for a role at Deepak Theaters. The first question posed to her is by the dance master, who asks if she knows to dance, an inside joke if ever there was one. In response, Nirmala recites a sollukattu, a set of rhythmic syllables marking an arrangement of dance steps in Bharatanatyam. The dance master derisively responds that this is not dance and instead enunciates Kathak bols or rhythms, which Nirmala complements with an elegant chakkar or spin from the Kathak lexicon. Satisfied that she can perform the right kind of dance, the auditioners then ask her to sing, to which she responds with a rendition of “Barsaat mein tak dhina dhin” from the hit 1949 film, Barsaat (Raj Kapoor). Thickly laying on the self-reflexive humor about Vyjayanthimala’s star text, the director retorts, “You have passed the dancing and singing test, but what about acting?” She dresses in drag as a clownish vagabond and performs a scene from Awara (Raj Kapoor 1951). The dance director peevishly insists that she perform a feminine role, a “zanana namuna.” When the director asks him to clarify what that means, he says with a gestural flourish, “like Vyjayanthimala,” and all three men conducting the audition swoon at the mention of the star’s name. Nirmala frowns and says, “that might be a little tough,” but emerges in a “tribal” costume, singing and dancing to the hit song, “Tan dole mera man dole” from Vyjayanthimala’s 1954 film, Nagin. Finally satisfied with her performative range, the audition committee regretfully informs her that they are looking for an old woman to play the role. Nirmala returns in disguise, gets the part, and then reveals her true identity. In response to their enthusiastic offer of a job with the theater, she emphatically stipulates that she will choose the plays to perform in and the characters she will play. This five-minute scene may be read as a comically subversive encapsulation of Vyjayanthimala’s twodecade-long career in the Tamil and Bombay film industries, foregrounding cultural differences, the role of the heroine in the production of cinematic spectacle, and the authority that a dancer-actress like Vyjayanthimala may secure through her many negotiations of the categories of classical and popular, dancing and acting, region and nation. The end of the scene is a triumphant declaration of the authorship she wielded in her early films on account of her dancing skills, engendering a distinctive mode of performance, with altered relations between spectacle and narrative.

Acknowledgments I am deeply grateful to Swarnavel Eswaran Pillai for sourcing Figures 5.1 and 5.2, and to Madhuja Mukherjee for creating the artwork in Figure  5.3. Part of this chapter appears in Usha Iyer’s Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema (Oxford University Press, 2020).

Notes 1 Semi-classical dance borrows movements and gestures from classical dance but renders them in a popular idiom by making them less strictly codified and easier to perform.

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2 The amrapali costume was named after Vyjayanthimala’s costume in the film Amrapali (Lekh Tandon 1966). It became the default Bharatanatyam or broadly “classical dance” costume in Hindi film dance. 3 Some of these Hindi films are AVM Productions’ Bahar and Ladki (M. V. Raman 1953), Pehli Jhalak (M.V. Raman 1955), Aasha (M.V. Raman 1957), and New Delhi (Mohan Segal 1956). 4 The nattuvanar is the hereditary male musician and choreographer in the Sadirattam tradition that precedes and is gentrified into Bharatanatyam. See Soneji 2011. 5 The devadasis are traditional temple and court dancers often belonging to the Isai Velalar community in South India. 6 For more on sanskritization, the anti-nautch movement, and the performance cultures of the devadasis, see Soneji, Meduri, and Srinivasan. 7 See Majumdar for a discussion for the dual star text produced through the combination of the playback singer and the on-screen performer. 8 These terms draw from the medieval performance treatises, the Natya Shastra and the Abhinaya Darpana. Nrtta refers to “pure dance” movements that demonstrate the dancer’s skills. Nritya is expository dance meant to convey a narrative through abhinaya or expression. Natya includes the spoken word and other conventions of the stage (Khokar 1984, 58). 9 Like the devadasis in southern India, tawaifs were lower-caste traditional performers and courtesans in northern India. 10 AVM films featuring Bharatanatyam include Bahar, Ladki, Shiv Bhakta (H.L.N. Simha 1955), and Chori Chori (Anant Thakur 1956) while Gemini Studios’ Hindi-language films with Bharatanatyam-influenced items include Mr. Sampat (S.S. Vasan 1952), Raj Tilak (S.S. Vasan 1958a), and Paigham (S.S. Vasan 1959). 11 Lavani is a folk dance form from the western state of Maharashtra, characterized by erotic themes and sensuous dance moves. Hiralal’s choreography here effaces the more raunchy elements of the dance form.

References Anand, Vijay, dir. 1965. Guide. New Delhi, India: T-Series, 2011. DVD. “Baaje Payal: Episode on Waheeda Rehman”. 1998. In Baaje Payal. Television. New Delhi: Doordarshan. Bali, Vyjayanthimala, and Jyoti Sabharwal. 2007. Bonding . . . A Memoir. New Delhi: Stellar Publishers. Baskaran, Theodore S. 2013. The Eye of the Serpent: An Introduction to Tamil Cinema. Chennai: Westland Books. Bhatt, Vijay, dir. 1943. Ram Rajya. India: Prakash Pictures. Bhattacharya, Basu, dir. 1966. Teesri Kasam. Mumbai, India: Shemaroo Entertainment, 2010. DVD. Bose, Nitin, dir. 1962. Gunga Jumna. India: Mehboob Studios, Filmistan Studios. Chanakya, Tapi, dir. 1955. Rojulu Marayi. Cary, NC: SV Entertainments. DVD. Chopra, B.R., dir. 1958. Sadhna. New Delhi, India: Moser Baer Entertainment Limited, 2010. DVD. Dutt, Guru, dir. 1957. Pyaasa. India: Eros Entertainment, 2010. DVD. Guy, Randor. 2002. “She Danced Her Way to Stardom”. The Hindu, January 7. Janaki, S. 2010. “Vyjayantimala Bali: A Many-Splendoured Voyage of Self-Discovery”. Sruti 311 (August): 9–19. Jaswantlal, Nandlal, dir. 1954. Nagin. India: Ultra. DVD. Kabir, Nasreen Munni. 2014. Conversations with Waheeda Rehman. New Delhi: Penguin Books. Kapoor, Raj, dir. 1951. Awara. Mumbai, India: Shemaroo Entertainment, 2000. DVD.

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———, dir. 1965. Sangam. Mumbai, India: Shemaroo Entertainment, 2004. DVD. Mukherjee, Gyan, dir. 1943. Kismet. India: Eagle Entertainment. DVD. Khokar, Mohan. 1984. Traditions of Indian Classical Dance. New Delhi: Clarion Books. Kumar, Anuj. 2012. “Queen of Hearts”. The Hindu, July 28. “A Life Dedicated to Dance . . . Vyjayanthimala Bali”. 2010. Samudhra 8 (6) (April): 4–11. Majumdar, Neepa. 2009. Wanted Cultured Ladies Only! Female Stardom and Cinema in India, 1930s-1950s. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Meduri, Avanti. 1996. “Woman, Nation, Representation: The Sutured History of the Devadasi and Her Dance”. PhD diss., New York University, New York. Meiyappan, A.V., dir. 1947. Nam Iruvar. India: A.V.M. Productions. Meiyappan, A.V., and M. V. Raman, dirs. 1949. Vazhkai. India: A.V.M. Productions. Narayan, Shovana. 2016. “Kathak: An Imperial Legacy of Theater and Rhythm”. Qrius, June 20. Pandian, M.S.S. 1996. “Tamil Cultural Elites and Cinema: Outline of an Argument”. Economic and Political Weekly, 950–955. Raghunath, T.R., dir. 1956. Marma Veeran. India: Jubilee Films. Rajadhyaksha, Ashish, and Paul Willemen. 1999. Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema. London: British Film Institute. Raman, M.V., dir. 1951.  Bahar. New Delhi, India: Moser Baer Entertainment Limited, 2010. DVD. ———, dir. 1953. Ladki. New Delhi, India: Moser Baer Entertainment Limited, 2012. DVD. ———, dir. 1954. Penn. India: A.V.M. Productions. ———, dir. 1955. Pehli Jhalak. Mumbai, India: Ultra Distributors, 2004. DVD. ———, dir. 1957. Aasha. Concord, CA: Samrat International, 2001. DVD. Rangoonwala, Firoze. 1979. “Chandralekha”. Picture Post, February 6–8. Rao, Chitrapu Narayana, dir. 1963. Chittoor Rani Padmini. India: Sindhoor Pictures. Rawail, H.S., dir. 1961. Roop ki Rani Choron ka Raja. India: Rahul Chitra. ———, dir. 1968. Sunghursh. India: Rahul Theatres. Roy, Bimal, dir. 1955. Devdas. Mumbai, India: Shemaroo Entertainment, 2010. DVD. Segal, Mohan, dir. 1956. New Delhi. Springfield, VA: Baba Digital Media, 2001. DVD. Shah, Purnima. 2002. “Where They Danced: Patrons, Institutions, Spaces: State Patronage in India: Appropriation of the ‘Regional’ and ‘National’ ”. Dance Chronicle 25 (1): 125–141. Simha, H.L.N., dir. 1955. Shiv Bhakta. India: A.V.M. Productions. Soneji, Davesh. 2011. Unfinished Gestures: Devadasis, Memory, and Modernity in South India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Srinivasan, Amrit. 1984. “Temple ‘Prostitution’ and Community Reform: An Examination of the Ethnographic, Historical and Textual Context of the Devadasi of Tamil Nadu, South India”. PhD diss., Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Thakur, Anant, dir. 1956. Chori Chori. India: A.V.M. Productions. Tuli, Nidhi, dir. 2012. The Saroj Khan Story. DVD. New Delhi: PSBT and Films Division of India. “Vyjayanthimala”. 1966. Star and Style, June 15, 4–5. Vasan, S.S., dir. 1948. Chandralekha. India: Gemini Studios. ———, dir. 1952. Mr. Sampat. India: Gemini Studios. ———, dir. 1958a. Raj Tilak. India: Gemini Studios. ———, dir. 1958b. Vanjikottai Valiban. India: Gemini Studios. ———, dir. 1959. Paigham. India: Gemini Studios. Yoganand, D., dir. 1960. Parthiban Kanavu. India: Jubilee Films.

PART II

Networks of circulation, production, and imaginings

6 FILM EXHIBITION IN HYDERABAD IN THE 1930S The case of Moti Mahal cinema and film circulation C. Yamini Krishna

Cinema as a network of relationships Moving pictures, a new technological marvel of the late nineteenth century, travelled to different cities in search of the audience, its market. Market is an intrinsic part of the story of film. Travelling cinemas from across the world moved through the existing transport networks such as railways, exhibiting films in all possible venues (Hughes 2006). This retelling helps us reconsider film as a part of the transport network and a larger socio-cultural history1 of the place. Several studies over the last decade have examined film using newer methods; for example Sudhir Mahadevan’s (2010) work on the travelling showmen uses media archaeology to complicate the understanding of film as an institutional practice. Studies like that of Bhaumik (2001), Chatterjee (2011) and Madhuja Mukherjee (2009, 2017) have worked towards adding nuances to understanding film viewing practices and argued for their significance in the public cultures of the time. Contributing to this shift in approach to film studies from textual analysis to studying film as a historical object, I argue for study of film as a network of production relations inclusive of production, distribution, exhibition and allied commercial activities. Using this approach, I am interested in studying the history of the city through studying film. Understanding cinema as a network brings up several new ways of examining film not limited to the study of its production or a specific production centre. In this chapter I  study the exhibition practices of Hyderabad through the case of burning down of a particular cinema called Moti Mahal Cinema in 1936. The relationship between cinema and modernity has been convincingly argued by scholars like Ravi Vasudevan (1995), Manishita Dass (2016) et al. Dass (2016) has examined the space of cinema to discuss the question of how modern public was imagined. Drawing from these studies, I  use film exhibition practices as an entry point to understand the princely city of Hyderabad. Questions like what kind of people

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visited the cinemas, what were the conditions under which they watched films and who operated the cinemas are also questions of social constitution of the city space. These questions enable us to understand the subject of modernity of the princely city of Hyderabad. Urban studies and, to a certain extent, film studies, has concentrated its research mostly on the colonial cities. The questions of how film operated in the princely city and what the place of film in the princely modern was have not been discussed widely. The difficulty in accessing archival resources of the princely states could be one of the reasons for this gap. This chapter attempts to bridge the gap by focusing on film cultures in the princely modern city.

The princely city of Hyderabad At present, Hyderabad is an important production centre and is home for the Telugu film industry. This industry was established in the city through the efforts of the government of Andhra Pradesh starting from the 1960s. This chapter is interested in the period before the establishment of the Telugu industry and the formation of the linguistic state of Andhra Pradesh. It is interested in understanding how film operated in the princely capital city of Hyderabad. I argue for Hyderabad’s significance in understanding the early film cultures. Hyderabad city was the capital city of princely state of Hyderabad. It was ruled by Mir Osman Ali Khan Bahadur from 1911 until its annexation into India in 1948. The British Residency and garrison were located in Secunderabad. The British Resident played advisory role to the Nizam. The cantonment and parts of Secunderabad were under the jurisdiction of the British. Eric Beverley (2015) characterizes Hyderabad state as patrimonialist modern state embedded in internationalist Muslim networks. He terms patrimonialism as a bond of benevolence on part of the ruler and voluntary compliance on part of the ruled. He uses the terms sub-imperial or minor states to describe princely states like Hyderabad. He points out that these states existed in the vast grey area between self-determination and colonization and negotiated their sovereignty. He argues that the British used the blanket term ‘princely state’ and propagated the idea that they were backward; this served to legitimize colonial rule. Hyderabad offered alternative imaginations of modernity and continuously negotiated its sovereignty with the British. The princely states presented themselves in political sophistication to raise their stature in negotiation with the British. Beverley notes that the urban development of Hyderabad has to be understood in the context of contestations between the British and the Nizam. Cinema in Hyderabad operated on different paradigms than that of the colonial cities. It combined influences of the Nizamian culture, the British Residency and wider cultural networks. It thus holds a potential to fill certain gaps in existing understanding of film history before 1947. Though there was some amount of film production in Hyderabad in the 1920s–30s, it was not comparable to that of Bombay or Madras in terms of volume. Feroze Rangoonwala’s (1970) filmography lists about ten films made in Hyderabad in 1920s and 30s by Dhiren Ganguly’s Lotus

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Film Company,2 National Film Company and Eastern Films Limited. However, in this chapter I focus my discussion on exhibition and film networks of 1930s to emphasize on the city-cinema dynamics. Stephen Hughes (2010) has argued about the importance of locating early decades of cinema as an extension of the earlier performance practices. Speaking about Madras he has noted that the first film exhibitors introduced cinema to Madras as a form of European entertainment. He discusses the advertisement of a travelling cinema from Madras mail on 2 September  1896, which describes the travelling show of S.C. Eavis whose main attraction was a steam powered amusement ride of mechanized boats, but other attractions included “Edison’s latest phonograph or the talking machine” and “the marvelous kinetoscope (sic) or living pictures” (2010, 152). Hughes notes that this show came to Madras from the cantonment town of Secunderabad. Moving pictures thus had made their entry to Secunderabad as early as 1896, around the same time as the exhibition of Lumiere’s films in Bombay. Curiously, another instance that Hughes discusses in his paper also had Hyderabad connection. Hughes writes about Stevenson’s cinematograph exhibition in Madras in December 1896. He argues that Stevenson was far more significant to the early exhibition of film in South India than Lumiere. Stevenson sourced several of his moving pictures from British distributors. Hughes presents the evidence from the reports of Madras mail that Stevenson exhibited his shows in Hyderabad in 1897 (Hughes 2010, 157). Hyderabad and Secunderabad featured commonly in the circuit of the travelling picture shows. In a report published in The Stage titled “India and farther. A record of experiences, sight, and adventures met by a certain performance company during a tour through India and other eastern countries,” the following description of the performance tour is found Our next station of importance was Secunderabad, a very large place, only three miles distant from Hyderabad, in the Deccan, the home of the great Nizam, on whose state Railway you are obliged to travel for some sixty miles before reaching Secunderabad.  .  .  . Trimulgherry is the suburb of Secunderabad, where the British lines are. There are plenty of regiments here, both European and native. Consequently plenty of regimental theatres, besides a splendidly appointed one in town. A good company can make a good long stay here if desirable. (The Stage, 2 June 1898) This company goes from Rangoon to Madras by sea and then to Bangalore, Kolar gold fields on Mysore estate and then to Secunderabad. When we begin to look at cinema from the perspective of exhibition, places like Hyderabad, Secunderabad and Mysore emerge as important nodes in the network. For instance, in the previous description, Secunderabad is described as a place that can give good run for a performance company. The audience was comprised of both the locals and the British. These nodes thus present important intersections not just in terms of

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the cinematic network but also in terms of the audience composition; they thus demand significant attention in understanding the networks of cinema. For the city of Hyderabad these performances and talkies enhanced its stature as a modern city. A note on the amusements in the city of Hyderabad from 1936 says the following: Hyderabad is well provided with places of amusement; no matter, whether, the tourist goes north, south, east or west, he will find within the compass of an easy excursion innumerable places of beauty and historic interest. For indoor amusements, the city is not lacking in up-to-date talkie houses. (The Hyderabad Directory 1936) By the 1930s cinema was given a position of being an important amusement for the city dwellers along with being a tourist attraction. In 1936, there were 9 permanent cinemas in Hyderabad and 8 permanent cinemas in Secunderabad. The cinemas in Hyderabad were located in Kachiguda, Abid Road, Sultan Bazaar market, Chadarghat Bridge, Nayapool and Putli Baudi. These were in the proximity of the market areas. The Secunderabad cinemas were located in Oxford Street, Bolton Road, Market Street, St. Mary’s Road, Nagannadevdi, Hill Street and Trimulgherry. Except from the one in Trimulgherry, all the others were in the town area of Secunderabad; Trimulgherry was the garrison area (The Hyderabad Directory 1936). While these were the permanent cinemas, there were also travelling tent pictures that operated for limited period. Moti Mahal Cinema and Royal Cinema were located in close proximity to each other in the Sultan Bazaar area. The newspaper advertisements from the period indicate that a variety of films in Hindustani, English and Telugu were screened in cinemas across Hyderabad and Secunderabad. There was no strict division among cinemas in terms of language of the films; theatres screened films according the market they catered to. Secunderabad, with close proximity of cantonment, had different viewing practices. Describing Secunderabad, Cyril Jones, a Railway official, writes Adjoining Hyderabad city was an enclave of British territory, Secunderabad. It included a military cantonment at Bolarum and the railway colony at Lalaguda. Typical of a larger station in British India it was spaciously laid out residential area with tree lined avenues between whitewashed bungalows set in large gardens. A club, a church and shops selling European goods provided the necessary amenities. (Jones 1991, 30) Film viewing was an important recreational activity in the cantonment. The military personnel visited cinema regularly. There were about five cinemas in the Secunderabad town close to the garrison, and they were accessible to the cantonment.

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These cinemas screened Hollywood films catering to the taste of Europeans and elites. Secunderabad had the railways, which employed Europeans and Anglo Indians. It also had a migrant Tamil population who worked for the British. The town was known to have good audience for Telugu films. Hyderabad city was (continues to be) an important market for Hindustani films. Moti Mahal Cinema screened both Hindustani films and English films. Some of the film advertisements of the period also give us insights into distribution networks. Evidence indicates that the distribution companies worked across different languages. For example, a Calcutta company could distribute Telugu film, or the booking office of a Telugu film could be in Kolhapur. The distribution networks were not just connected to Madras – which was the prominent production in South India – but also to Calcutta and Kolhapur. The Nizam state had parts of current-day Maharashtra under its rule, and Kolhapur was in much closer proximity to the Nizam state than Madras. With this broad understanding of the distribution of cinemas in Hyderabad and Secunderabad and the distribution networks that connected to the cities, I examine the case of burning down of a hall called the Moti Mahal Cinema to address two questions: a) what were the film exhibition practices and networks, and how did they operate in the princely city? and b) what were the social relationships in which film was embedded in the princely city?

The burning of Moti Mahal cinema Moti Mahal Cinema3 was a cinema in Residency Bazaar of Hyderabad, which burnt down on 14 June 1936, causing the death of 12 women and 2 children. The incident is significant in the cinematic history of Hyderabad for initiating one of the early legislations on cinema in Hyderabad, i.e. The Cinematograph Act. The incident was widely reported across the world. The Press newspaper of New Zealand reported it as “Many deaths in cinema fire” (The Press, 17 June 1926), and The Daily News of Australia reported it as “Theatre Fire And Panic Kill At least Twenty”(The Daily News, 16 June 1936). It is also a significant event in the public memory of the city. The book Hyderabad Nadu Nedu (Sastry 2008) published in 2008 mentions the fire accident of Moti Mahal Cinema as one of the first such accidents in the country. A committee was set up by the Nizam to investigate the causes of the incident and to suggest the way forward to prevent such events. The committee report suggested the establishment of a cinematograph act in the Nizam state; this later took the shape of the Cinematograph Act of 1936. The committee report is a detailed document investigating the reasons for the fire. It documents the architecture of the cinema and the testimonies of the cinema staff, police, audience, fire brigade, general public and experts. The committee report provides insights into the prevailing cinema culture of the time in Hyderabad. It helps us understand the flow of capital, labour and films across different geographies in the 1930s. In the following section I present the details of the report.

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The committee and the witness for investigation The Nizam appointed a committee comprising S.T Hollins, Director General of Police; Nawab Rahmat Yar Jung Bahadur, Commissioner of Police; Nawab Zain Yar Jung Bahadur, Municipal Commissioner and State architect; Sripat Rao, Advocate and Nawab Bahadur Yar Jung Bahadur, Director of Electricity Department for investigation of the fire. The committee had 8 public sittings in Sultan Bazaar police station, which was close to the cinema and recorded the evidence of 55 witnesses. The report notes that the testimonies of pardah4 ladies were recorded at their homes. The report was drafted on 27 June 1936 and approved on 28 June. Examining the constitution of the committee gives us important insights into the mode of operation of the Nizam government and the status of cinema in the Nizam state. The presence of director of electricity in the committee was to investigate the role of electrical failure in the disaster. The state architect was present to investigate the structure of the cinema. The committee was constituted of bureaucrats who were considered experts in the field. The report was addressed to S.T. Hollins, Director General of Police of Hyderabad Deccan from the government through its secretary of Judicial, Police and General departments, Nawab Zoolcadar Jung Bahadur. The report clearly stated the procedure of investigation and the outcomes of each phase and substantiated it with evidence. The details of the witnesses5 represent the wide range of people who through different means became connected with the cinema. In some cases, the names and descriptions are indicators of their social class. For example, Mary Samuel, who was employed as the gatekeeper of the cinema, was described as Indian Christian, and Edward Ruthamma, who worked as ticket collector, was described as Christian, Scottish S.P.G. Mission. These descriptions presumably refer to their church affiliations but could also indicate the caste status. Indian Christians are natives converted to Christianity and are generally considered lower in the hierarchy, and the Muslim bureaucratic class held important positions of authority. Moti Mahal Cinema, located in the Residency Bazaars, was built by Seth Lalji Meghji in 1920 as Prem Theatre; it was later converted to a cinema in 1932 by Rai Bahadur Seth Hardat Rai Motilal Chambaria of Calcutta with the permission of Residency Bazaar authorities. The cinema was under the control of Residency Bazaar authorities until 1933 when it was rendered to the control of Hyderabad state. The report notes that the cinema was inspected only once under the Nizam state, at the time of rendition. It was with this rendition that Moti Mahal Cinema came under the jurisdiction of the Nizam government. The Residency Bazaars had procedures of regular examination of the public entertainment houses that were not as stringent in the Nizam government. The control of the cinemas was adhoc and did not follow a particular procedure. The incident of the fire called attention to this gap, the committee noted “that the fire in the Moti Mahal Cinema was rendered possible by the non-existence of a Cinematograph Act in the State and by the absence of suitable rules for control of cinemas” (Committee Report 1936, 11). This also indicates that the cinemas in the British-governed region and the Nizam

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region operated under different parameters. The untoward incident of the fire in the cinema worked towards establishing a procedure of monitoring the entertainment spaces, and this regularization was led by the bureaucrats and experts. Eric Beverley’s argument on the role of Western-educated bureaucrats helps in understanding the approach taken by the Nizam government in the choice of individuals for the committee. Beverley argues that the bureaucrat intellectuals whom he terms as the Deccani letrados carried out the modernization project in Hyderabad. He notes that they mediated between the political languages linked to Muslim rule in Deccan,6 the cosmopolitan language of Persian statecraft and the global modernity. They played a central role in determining the nature of the modernity in Hyderabad state. Some of them were locals who had received Western education; some of them were Europeans employed by the Nizam. Thus, the modernity of Hyderabad had a wide range of influences that was not limited to the British. The predominance of the Muslim bureaucrats in the committee is indicative of the high social status enjoyed by them. The ownership and operation pattern of the cinema is telling regarding the prevailing working relationships of that time. Prem Theatre was converted to Moti Mahal Cinema with permission from the Residency authorities. This informs us how cinema usually acquired its exhibition spaces from existing theatrical spaces. Some changes were made to the theatre to convert it to a modern cinema; the manager’s office and operator’s room were newly built. The owner of the space, ‘Seth’ Lalji Meghji, seemingly belonging to the local trader elite, Meghji, leased out the space to be operated as cinema at Rs 900 per month for the initial two years, which was extended for another 5 years at the rate of Rs.1,200 per month. The high rent indicates that the film exhibition must have been a profitable business. The conversion of the space to cinema happened through the intervention of Rai Bahadur Seth Hardat Rai Motilal Chambaria of Calcutta. The titles associated with the name indicate that he also belonged to the trader/feudal community operating in Calcutta. The cinema was named after him as ‘Moti Mahal’. The leasing of the theatre by a Calcutta Company is indicative of the wide networks in which the film exhibition companies operated and the significance of Marwari businessmen in early film business. The Moti Mahal Company of Calcutta leased out three cinemas, Moti Mahal Cinema, Zamrud Mahal Talkies and Manohar Talkies from the local owners and operated them as cinemas. It had an office in Zamrud Mahal, which received films from distributors and agents. Films were sent to the cinemas directly, and the assistant manager kept a dispatch report. The production relations around the cinema present a glimpse of one of the several ways by which cinema operated in the 1930s. Seth Motilal, belonging to the business community of the colonial city of Calcutta, used the colonial networks to expand his business. Moti Mahal Cinema was initially under the control of the Residency Bazaars and thus worked within the colonial network. The company operated through the General Manager Mr. Bhagat, who had been the representative of the company in Hyderabad for four years. There were two assistant managers, Mr. Ramdevas and Mr. Maha

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Singh; both were employees of Moti Mahal Talkies, Calcutta. Mr. Ramdevas had been working in Hyderabad for two years, and Mr. Maha Singh had four years of experience in film business. The film operator of Moti Mahal cinema, Mr. T.M. Bhagat, had 9 years of experience in cinema work. Charandas, the assistant operator in Moti Mahal cinema, had studied his profession at Dayal Bagh, Agra. Thus, it can be thought that employees were trained in colonial centres like Calcutta and moved to other cities to manage the cinemas. The technical staff was also trained and had considerable experience in working with machines. Hyderabad, connected by the railway, was a reputed destination among performing companies. Presumably, these prompted the interest of film businessmen from colonial cities like Calcutta to expand their film business in Hyderabad. Chambaria’s three cinemas were located in three centres of Hyderabad and Secunderabad: Moti Mahal in Sultan Bazaar or Residency Bazaar; Zamrud Mahal in Abid Road – a busy commercial centre – and Manohar Talkies in Secunderabad. Moti Mahal screened Hindustani and English films; Zamrud Mahal mostly screened Hindustani films and Manohar Talkies screened Telugu films. Thus, Seth Chambaria’s company seemed to be catering to different audience clusters existing in the two cities based on area of operation and language. Mr. A.S. Nainie, a senior inspector of the railway bus service, appeared before the commission as an expert witness. He had done a correspondence course in electrical engineering from Bioscope Company, Shaftsbury, London; he was also a student of Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore and was employed by Madan Company, Calcutta for 11 years, first as a silent film operator and then as an installing engineer of talkie films. His educational background and his experience with working in a film company established him as an expert in operating technique. He was called upon by the committee to examine the machines to ascertain the damage to them. The incident gathered ‘experts’ from colonial centres, and they were entrusted with the responsibility of devising the operational procedures to avoid such incidents in the future. Mr. Nainie, the expert witness, testified to the committee that There is an Act in force in British India to regulate all this procedure. If there is no Cinema Act in force in this State, managers who are trained in British India are under moral obligation in the state to take every precaution for safety of the members of the public who visit the cinema. (Committee Report 1936, 17) Experts on account of their training received from British India seemed to gain the authority and the moral responsibility to look after the public in cinema spaces. British training was held in high regard in the princely states and their processes were taken as references to formulate their own processes. The importance given to training and apprenticeship can also be seen in other professionals involved in the incident. Mr. S.R.M. Naidu, the fire master

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of the Hyderabad fire brigade, was a mechanical and electrical engineer trained in England. He had received fire drill in Singapore and was also a boy scout for many years. Mr. Syed Mohammed Pasha, Fire Brigade Mechanic, had 23  years of experience in the fire brigade and had learnt fitter’s work from several firms in Hyderabad. The firemen Ali Khan and Syed Ahmad had several years of experience in the fire brigade. Their training set them apart as experts. Police authorities were mostly from the educated Muslim community. From the previous evidence, we see that there were two forms of authority in the Nizam’s state: authority from one’s social class/caste by lineage and authority from one’s education and experience. I describe the first kind of authority based on lineage as patrimonial authority. Training from colonial centres, which were thought to be centres of skill development, presented an alternative power structure to the authority derived from patrimonial networks; I define his authority as the professional authority. The technical professions associated with cinema operation seem to draw the authority of the second kind by virtue of their training from other colonial centres or England. Both these forms of authority did not conflict each other but coexisted in the Nizam state. Some administrative positions in the Nizam state were bestowed because of the lineage and a few others based on education and training. The bureaucratic intellectuals represented professional authority, but they often also came from reputed families. Cinema, as a modern technological invention, was the site for both these authorities to work together. The decision-making authority was in the hands of the committee dominated by bureaucrats, but the committee consulted experts who were trained in technical aspects of film. While investigating the case, the committee questioned men who were in the cinema during the incident to ascertain which of them had helped women and children without running for his own life. The committee seems to have had an idea of ‘honour’ that the men were to exhibit in caring for others (particularly women and children) beyond themselves. The committee was disappointed that very few men rescued their own wives and children let alone others; the report said “All honour, therefore, to those men who entered the building and assisted in rescuing the wives and children of others” (Committee Report 1936, 15). This idea of honour can be traced in the patrimonial etiquette as well as in the British idea of a gentleman. A man of authority in a princely state was to put the welfare of others over himself. A gentleman was expected to be chivalrous and save women and children. The authorities, both patrimonial and professional, converged on certain points on how a modern individual (man) should behave.

Audience and film viewing habits There were about 600 people in the cinema when the fire broke out. Most of them were seated on the ground floor. References to a wide range of ticket prices is found in the evidence of the audience, there were tickets of 4 anna, 6 anna, 8 anna, 10 anna, 1 rupee and 2 rupee denominations. The different classes were referred to as first class, second class, royal box and reserved seats. The cheapest seats were in

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the front, and the more expensive ones were at the back. The best seats were the two rows of sofas in front of the boxes. The box seats had a curtain in the front. The first-class and box seats were on the tiers. There was a separate gatekeeper for the first class, royal box, sofa tickets and reserved seats. The evening shows were screened at 6.30 pm and 9.30 pm. The composition of the audience shows considerable numbers of Hindu and Muslim audience members, widely distributed across all classes. Cinema thus seemed to have been popular among different classes of both religions. There was a separate pardah section for women, but there were also women seated in the non-pardah section. There were 52 women and children in the pardah section and 7 in the non-pardah men’s balcony. There were Mahratta and Parsee ladies in the balcony. Some of the women testified that they had come to the film accompanied by a man or child; one lady mentioned that she had come with her husband but the husband had gone to watch another film in the nearby Royal Talkies as she watched film in Moti Mahal Cinema, an indication of emerging preferences in cinema. There was a restaurant in the cinema, and there was provision for ordering food and drinks during the interval. The cinema premises had motor sheds, and the nearby bicycle repair shop allowed the bicycles to be parked for small fee.

The fire and the recommendations Newspaper reports of Golkonda Patrika (18 June  1936), Andhra Patrika (15 June  1936) and the evidence present the different reasons that were speculated to be the causes of the fire. Smoking of cigarettes in the cinema, storing of films carelessly and the electric wiring were among the important causes examined. The film College girl7(1935), which was playing during the fire, was known to have been broken, which was also thought to be the reason for the fire. The committee concluded that the fire had started in the lumber room due to the carelessness of someone who had entered the room. They note that the fire was not due to the wiring but because there was a large number of films stored carelessly, which they termed as a criminal practice. The committee opined that the primary reason for such an event was the absence of Cinematograph Act. The recommendations based on the case became pointers for the Cinematograph Act of 1936 in Hyderabad. The committee recommended the appointment of a committee to draft the act for the city and the dominions, the appointment of electric inspector for regular inspection of electric wiring and installations of cinema across the state, reorganization of fire brigade under the control of the commissioner of police, establishment of four fire stations in the city and provision of sufficient hydrants, training in methods of controlling fire for the police and cinema employees, conducting fire drills every week, public education in handling fire through educational films and maintenance of first aid in cinemas. The Nizam state did not monitor its exhibition spaces as closely as the Residency did, and it is the unexpected event of the fire that ensured the rethinking on safety norms of public spaces and exhibition spaces in the city and their regulation.

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The networks of cinema Through the previous evidence the networks of cinema can be thought of not only in terms of the industrial planes of production, distribution and exhibition but also in terms of people it brought together, i.e. the flow of labour and trained professionals. These aspects relocate cities like Hyderabad and Secunderabad as important markets for cinema. Cinema came to Hyderabad as one of the wares of modernity, and the princely city offered conditions for it to prosper. The princely cities had paying public who embraced cinema. When studied as an object of history, cinema presents the socio-cultural history of the place. Through the study of the fire in Moti Mahal Cinema I  have illustrated that cinema became a part of the city as an emerging social space in the early twentieth century. Cinema adapted the existing performance spaces and transformed them into a modern exhibition spaces. The space of cinema was an intersection of new commercial enterprises and the existing social hierarchies. In terms of the city space, cinema was a hub for commercial activities such as shops, canteens and parking spaces around the hall. Moti Mahal Cinema drew capital through the trader network connected to Calcutta (Seth Chambaria) using the colonial transport network of railways. In terms of the space, the local owners (Seth Lalji Meghji) saw cinema as a rent-earning proposition. The distribution network of film extended across Madras, Calcutta, Kolhapur and other important film producing centres. Cinema also mobilized a wide network of labour; the colonial centres emerged as training grounds for film personnel and supplied labour to other cities. Film operators and projectionists trained in colonial cities like Bombay and Calcutta found employment in cities like Hyderabad. Film personnel moved across colonial India and princely India for employment. The emergent public sphere of the princely city had men and women of diverse caste and class backgrounds interacting with cinema as workers and viewers. Cinema intersected the patrimonial networks and professional networks in the Nizam state. The existing patrimonial authority and the emergent professional authority worked together to produce the modern site of cinema. The modern space of cinema drew lineages of etiquette from both the princely state and the British, thereby defining the modern man. Men were expected to be gentlemanly or generous (noble) and consider the welfare of women and children above themselves.

Notes 1 M. Madhava Prasad (2015) has argued that film history is cultural history. 2 I have discussed Dhiren Ganguly’s Lotus Film Company in detail in (Krishna 2019). 3 Report of the Committee appointed to inquire into the Fire in the Moti Mahal Cinema on the night of June 14, 1936. 1936. Telangana State Archives. Henceforth referred to as Committee Report. 4 The practice of covering the face with veil was followed amongst Muslim and upper-caste Hindu women. Here pardah ladies refers to women practicing pardah. 5 Evidence was collected from Bhagat, General Manager of Moti Mahal talkies; Ramdevas, the assistant manager of the cinema; Mahasingh, the assistant manager of the cinema; T.M.

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Bhagat, Operator; Muhammad Zaman, Circle Inspector, S.R.M. Naidu, Head of the Hyderabad fire brigade; Charandas, the assistant operator; Abdul Halim, Sub-inspector; Narsimha, restaurant employee at the theatre; Ghulam Mahmood, Assistant Commissioner of city police; Mary Samuel, door-keeper; Laxmiah, constable; A.B. Pennington, Resident Engineer for Secunderabad electric supply; A.S. Nainie, expert witness on film operation; Muhammad Pasha, fire brigade mechanic; Shiv Pershad, Constable; Edward Ruthamma, door-keeper; Mohd. Ali Khan, Foreman of the fire brigade; Syed Ahmed, fireman; Kesar Singh, gatekeeper; Mumtaz Husain, theatre employee; Syed Imam, cycle repairer; Lazarus, wireman; Lachman Rao, theatre employee, S.M.H. Sufi, Deputy Director General of District Police; Ram Lakshman, shift engineer of power house; audience: Hanuman Pershad, Rup Narayan, Syed Liakat Ali, Balu Bhai, Obal Reddy, Gokal Das, Abdul Samad, Ghulam Rabbani Khan, Chidambar Das, Muhammad Abdul Ali, Muhammad Akbar Khan, Hasan Ali, Waizulhaq, Muhammad Karimuddin, Venkatswami, Must Ashraf-unnisa-Begum Saheba, Must. Iftikhar-Unnisa-Begum Saheba, Ramchander Naik, Mohammed Abdul Raoof, Syed Iqbal Ahmed, Must. Fazlunnisa Begum, Jamnabai, Abu Turab, Zohara Banu Begum, Mir Ali Hussain and witnesses who were present around the cinema: Haridas, Mirza Ghulam Raza, Keshavalu. 6 The territory to the south of Vindhya mountain range is the Deccan plateau. Here the Muslim rule of the Deccan refers to the Asaf Jahi dynasty headed by the Nizam. 7 The report itself doesn’t mention anything about the film apart from the name. Around 1935, this is the only version of College girl that I found in the filmographies.

References Beverley, E.L. 2015. Hyderabad, British India, and the World: Muslim Networks and Minor Sovereignty, c. 1850–1950. Cambridge University Press. Bhaumik, Kaushik. 2001. “The Emergence of the Bombay Film Industry, 1913–1936”. PhD diss., Oxford University Press, Oxford. Chatterjee, Ranita. 2011. “Journeys in and Beyond the City: Cinema in Calcutta, 1897– 1939”. PhD diss., University of Westminster, London. College Girl. H. Jayant Desai. 1935. Dass, Manishita. 2016. Outside the Lettered City: Cinema, Modernity, and the Public Sphere in Late Colonial India. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hughes, Stephen P. 2006. “Urban Mobility and Early Cinema in Chennai’ ”. In Chennai Not Madras: Perspectives on the City, edited by A.R. Venkatachalapathy. Mumbai: Marg Publications. ———. 2010. “When Film Came to Madras”. BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 1 (2): 147–168. The Hyderabad Directory.1936. Telangana State Archives. Jones, C. 1991. Memoirs of Cyril Jones: People, Society, and Railways in Hyderabad. South Asia Books. Krishna, Yamini C. 2019. “Film in the Princely State: The Lotus Film Company of Hyderabad”. Wide Screen 8 (1). Mahadevan, S. 2010. “Traveling Showmen, Makeshift Cinemas: The Bioscopewallah and Early Cinema History in India”. BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 1 (1): 27–47. Mukherjee, M. 2017. “Inside a Dark Hall: Space, Place, and Accounts of Some SingleTheatres in Kolkata”. South Asian History and Culture 8 (2): 269–283. ———. 2009. New Theatres Ltd: The Emblem of Art, the Picture of Success. New York: National Film Archive of India, Government of India, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. Prasad, Madhava M. 2015. “Film History as Cultural History”. Journal of Moving Image 13.

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Rangoonwala, Firoze. 1970. Indian Filmography: Silent and Hindi Films (1897–1969). Bombay: Rangoonwalla-J. Udeshi. Report of the Committee Appointed to Inquire into the Fire in the Moti Mahal Cinema on the Night of June 14, 1936. 1936. Telangana State Archives, New Delhi. Sastry, S.L. 2008. Hyderabad Nadu Nedu. Hyderabad: Sastry. Telugu. Vasudevan, R.S. 1995. “Film Studies, New Cultural History and Experience of Modernity”. Economic and Political Weekly, 2809–2814.

7 ARRIVING AT BOMBAY Bimal Roy, transits, transitions, and cinema of intersection Madhuja Mukherjee

I am thinking of an iconic scene from popular Bombay cinema – repeated film after film – in which the (male) protagonist, armed with a small trunk, arrives at the big city, especially at Bombay’s Victoria Terminus Station, to brave the new and perilous world. “Arriving at Bombay” thus is a metaphor of the multivalent movement across locations, which this chapter accentuates. If place is a quilted field (as chapter six illustrates), then arriving and suturing of multiple strains is prerequisite to such formations. The purpose of this chapter – and the volume – is to throw light on a neglected yet obvious aspect of Hindi film production: its location within a complex web of international and intra-national movement of peoples, objects, material, skill, industrial practice, media forms and capital. Within this frame of “Industrial Networks and Cinemas of India” I  focus on the career and films of Bimal Roy, well known for his landmark “social reform” narratives such as Udayer Pathe (Bengali 1944), Do Bigha Zamin (Hindi 1953), Sujata (Hindi 1959), Bandini (Hindi 1963) etc. I consider Bimal Roy’s professional life, varied experiences and equally diverse set of films as distinctive examples of the shifting terrain we hope to explore. For instance, Roy had started his career in Calcutta with the renowned New Theatres Ltd., as a cinematographer and filmmaker, and he later migrated to Bombay in the context of the Second World War and weakening of the studio system in Calcutta.1 Prior to becoming an influential filmmaker, Roy was associated with the making of “newsreels” for the (British) state, some of which was produced by the New Theatres Ltd.2 After he set up Bimal Roy Productions he continued to produce so-called social reform films. Yet, his most popular films to date remain the epic saga of love and suffering, namely Devdas (1955), as well the reincarnation story of “Madhumati” (1958), which was penned by the exceptional filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak and functioned within the enduring melodramatic fold.3 Additionally, Roy did not shift to Bombay unaided. The first contingent from Calcutta who accompanied Roy and arrived at Bombay during 1950 included filmmaker-editor Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Asit Sen (actor and Roy’s assistant) and

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Nabendu Ghosh (writer).4 Art director Sudhendu Roy, cinematographer Kamal Bose, actor Nazir Hussain and the maverick music composer Salil Chowdhury joined the team later (around 1952). Roy was initially associated with the Bombay Talkies, primarily because of his closeness with the popular actor Ashok Kumar; however, he soon launched Bimal Roy Productions with his magnum opus Do Bigha Zamin in 1953. Moreover, Roy was connected with the league through other networks such as the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA). Such networks, as certain researches on the Bombay and Calcutta scene have shown, were well established since the early years of industrial drifts.5 Such migration of eminent filmmakers from Calcutta and elsewhere (for instance, the setting up of Raj Kamal studios in Bombay by the most distinguished filmmaker of the period, namely V. Shantaram, after he parted ways with Prabhat Film Co, in 1942) show the transformative aspect of the (war) period and hint at the fashion in which a wide range of technical experiences, know-how, devices, narratives, stylistic bends, cultural practice and ideological values traveled and got intertwined. By this time Bombay had become an exciting place for a range of artistic and political collaborations. Various groups and associations were set up in Bombay, which included the Progressive Writers Association (in 1936), the Indian People’s Theatre Association (in 1944) and the Progressive Artists Group (in 1947); moreover, in 1943 the headquarters of India’s Communist Party was shifted from Lucknow (Central India) to Bombay. As a matter of fact, by the mid-1940s there was a flamboyant group of Left-wing artists and writers who contributed to the social life of Hindi cinema.6 Besides, the precipitous economic growth in and around Bombay led to a steady migration toward the city; just as a variety of small-scale industries burgeoning in and around Bombay suburbs generated larger scope for film production and circulation of films, compared to cities like Calcutta, which suffered a series of adversities following the Second World War (1939–45), famine (1943), riots (1946), and Partition (1947). Similarly, there was a substantial traffic between undivided Punjab, Bombay and Bengal as well as Madras provinces. For instance, some of the most remarkable actors, writers, performers and music composers of the period came from Punjab, and this included outstanding figures like Jaddan Bai (singer, composer, actor, director, producer), A.R. Kardar (producer-director) Rafiq Ghaznavi (singer) and the music director Ghulam Haider.7 However, they did not arrive at Bombay as the crow flies. Kardar, for instance, first travelled to Calcutta, then shifted to Bombay during the late 1930s, and Jaddan Bai trekked a long route from Punjab to the central provinces (Allahabad) to Calcutta before she reached Bombay. It is now recognized that filmmakers and technicians from Bengal, namely Sailen Bose (cinematographer of Balayogini [K. Subramanyam 1937] Thyaga Bhoomi [K. Subramanyam 1939]) and Kamal Ghosh (cinematographer of Chandralekha [S.S. Vasan 1948]) and others were part of the Tamil film industry as well as of landmark Tamil films.8 Clearly, such a catalogue is elaborate and persistent; moreover, the footprints of such traffic produced on the landscape of popular cinema demands further research and rethinking. The purpose of the chapter, thus, is not only to explore what may be described as “cinema of transition”; rather, the objective is to closely

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examine the processes, functions and moment(s) of such transitions, through Bimal Roy’s films, in order to discern the import of such movement and the manner in which the Bombay film industry emerged as a principle site of cinematic transactions. A thorough study of such courses shows how, while the inflow and outflow between Bombay, Calcutta and Lahore were vibrant during the 1920s and the 1930s, the Calcutta studios especially experienced a major blow in the face of an unprecedented political catastrophe during the 1940s. It is in this context of the “flow” that I read Bimal Roy’s variable style – by deriving from and developing the debates around “cinema of transitions” – and recast it as “cinema of intersection”.9 “Transitional cinema” is an established notion with regard to American films, which expose the remarkable shifts during the early teens of the last century and reveal the changes of representational norms and formal techniques, as well as alterations of the modes of address. Tom Gunning, Ben Singer and others alerted us to the problems of imagining “transitional cinema” as a cinema attempting to arrive at a certain point and attaining maturity. A critical reframing shows that such “transitional” form, truly, is not a cinema about transition; rather, it unpacks  – through its narratives and formal explorations  – the continuities as well as the changes and accentuates the multiple courses of alteration. This in turn, shifts our locus of study from a specific period or genre and directors to what I describe as “cinema of intersection”.

Popular forms and bricolage Madhava Prasad’s (1998) influential work Ideology of Hindi Film underscores the corelations between political crises of the Indian nation-state during the 1960s–1970s and the formal contours of Hindi films. In Part II of the book, Prasad locates two types of “Middle Class Cinema”, which were dominant during the 1970s. The first category, he proposed, grew under the influences of the progressive slant of the “Socials” and the second, he argued, drew heavily from New Theatres’ (Calcutta) style of “reality effect”. Moreover, Prasad asserted that such types of films, dealing with middle class identity and predicaments, had a dependency “on Bengali culture for its narrative and iconographic material as well as filmmaking talent . . . the industry found in those narratives a ready supply of ‘difference’ which could be re-presented” (Prasad 1998, 164–165). In context of such expansive discussions, I particularly study the “Bengali” tropes and consider its travels and the conditions of (re)production, as well as examine the ways in which such iconography circulated across multiple industrial setups.10 Relatedly, Prasad’s article on “Genre Mixing as Creative Fabrication” (Prasad 1998, 78) delves into how popular cinema of the period was a product of “bricolage”. Analyzing Kalapani (Raj Khosla 1958), Prasad shows in what ways it reinvented the Bengali language film Sabar Upore (Agradoot 1955), and argues that: The loss of thematic and iconic integrity that the Bengali “social” genre undergoes in the hands of the Bombay film industry has many causes. . . .

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The result was the creation of a new form which, in spite of the “nationalization” of the Hindi film industry in Bombay, would henceforth and for a long time retain these regional features.11 In addition, it must be noted that the influences of Marathi films (such as Manoos [V. Shantaram 1939] or even a later films like Pandu Hawaldar [Dada Kondke 1975]) on Hindi language cinema and the national market are palpable.12 I contend that such propositions do not merely highlight the impact of varied and “regional” styles on the all-pervasive Hindi cinema; rather, as I have discussed elsewhere (2016), such networks emphasize the problems of “regional” and “national” cinema frameworks and, hence, demand a more thorough and multiplanar historiography of Indian cinemas. Rachel Dwyer, for instance, writes about the ambiguities of Roy’s films and affirms that: Bimal Roy’s cinema needs to be seen in the wider context within the Indian film industry. It is not only in contrast to the Punjabification of the Indian film industry and Indian popular culture in North India, but also to other types of cinema, as well as the methods of cinemas made in regional Indian languages. The lineage of Bimal Roy’s work goes back to nineteenth-century Bengal, in particular the already urban hybrid culture which had by that time mixed and assimilated Western literature and education and had begun to shift to the metropolis and a new India. (Dwyer 2017, 172) My concern, likewise, is not simply to demonstrate the shifting and the dissolving tracks; rather, I wish to draw attention to the problems of Indian cinema historiography and the manner in which our readings have been circumscribed by the studies of specific modes, locations, languages, regions and authors. Indeed, Bimal Roy’s films – Do Bigha Zamin, Devdas, Sujata, Parakh (1960) and Bandini – and their accounts of production point toward newer readings.

A cinema of intersection “Cinema of intersection” may be examined through a series of cinematic possibilities which developed in the context of such dynamic networks and through the films which carried signs of multiple cinematic forms, idioms and contexts. For instance, a close reading of a 1943 film (credited as New Theatres Production, apparently made by Bimal Roy) that “documented” the “Famine in Bengal” inaugurates a wide range of speculative propositions.13 Opening with an image of undivided Bengal, which is superimposed with images of empty vessels, the film and its voice-over – in Punjabi – appeals to its viewers to help (“maddat koro”) the starving population of Bengal. Produced by New Theatres Ltd., under the supervision of Eastern India Film Advisory Board, the film is now made available via British Pathe. Indeed, it’s a call (“pukar”) of Bengal (titles in Hindi and Urdu), which

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channelizes disparate documentary material and shots (of starving people, places, of social work done by British soldiers) alongside certain performative scenes, involving the social workers. The quick intercutting between close shots of hands, faces, vessels, burning pyres and shots of crowds scrambling for food, as well as children picking up leftovers from the trashbin, juxtaposed with certain low angle shots of workers (women) passing by, creates a heightened dramatic tension. Such a narrative mode clearly works through multiple registers and resonates with the British documentary style,14 as well as with the narrative films of the period, including Roti (Mehboob Khan 1942) and with a host of newsreels and documentaries created by the studios for British propaganda. Moreover, there are the two disparate scenes in Famine in Bengal, involving a certain woman/actor, which demand further elaboration. In the first instance, she is shown – in loose hair and a simple bordered sari – smiling and collecting funds for the victims on the streets, and thereafter, at a later point, donning the same attire, and still smiling gently, she is seen inside an undefined interior. In this shot, squatting on the floor, as she begins to eat a lot of rice, she quickly stops and eventually gives it away (next shot) to the needy and the poor. Besides the question of reenactment in British propaganda films, which was not uncommon, I wish to draw attention to the style of narration that clearly preceded the narrative address of Roy’s Udayer Pathe (1944) – in which such feminine iconography is central to the narrative. For example, in Udayer Pathe, the female protagonist Gopa (played by Binata Bose), the daughter of the mill-owner, is initially shown dressed in finery. Later, as she gets romantically involved with Anup (an author and leader of the workers) and politically engaged with the workers, she quickly changes to more simple and plain clothes. In a particular scene, sitting before the dressing table, Gopa recognizes her true self, and thereafter Anup (mis)recognizes her as one from his own class. The visual imagery of Binata Bose clearly shadows the iconic image of the social worker in Famine in Bengal.15 Similarly, Tins of India (also produced by New Theatres in 1941), in which Roy has been credited, opens with (low-angle) long shots of a rural landscape and foregrounds a tree and a bullock car. Such framing and the voice-over reinstate that this is “real India” (where Kerosene tins are utilized for multiple purposes). Entailing an engaging documentary style, such as sharp and rhythmic intercutting, Tins of India in fact, illustrates the knotty genealogies of the Indian “Socials”.16 Speaking in a Conference on “Partition of India: Contemporary Perspectives” during March  2018 (organized by Department of Film Studies, Jadavpur University), Ravi Vasudevan pointed out the “Configurations of Partition: from the Indian newsreel archive, c. 1943–1952” and emphasized the manner in which the colonial Government invested in war propaganda documentaries.17 Vasudevan presented a detailed reading of the assemblages of shots, studying it “as a mode of enunciation” and as a form that “separates, segments, and sequences and renders” the public, peoples and disparate communities through an episodic structure. Indeed, while we predominantly study narrative cinemas through the history of narratives forms and follow the familiar family tree so to speak, the International

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FIGURE 7.1 

Udayer Pathe and shadow of famine

Source: Digital art by Madhuja Mukherjee 2020

FIGURE 7.2 

Intersecting landscapes

Source: Digital art by Madhuja Mukherjee 2020

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Conference on “Film Cultures: Historical Perspectives” organized by Department of Cultural Studies, EFL University, Hyderabad, during October 2011, as well as presentations by Colin MacCabe and others, alongside the extensive screenings of “Colonial Film Packages”, signposted a remarkable possibility of re-reading the Hindi “Social” film through a new lens and thereby examine the influences of British documentary its framing and editing style, as well as application of sound and music, within such narratives. For instance, Social Realist films are associated with the portrayal of the everyday of the commoner. Often deploying unknown actors and a wide range of characters, settings and actions, Social Realist films are frequently episodic and cyclic. Briefly, Social Realist films explore realistic narrative modes, and to borrow from Hallam and Marshment (2000, 103):18 The films considered here emphasise the containment of the characters within tightly inscribed socio-economic and geographical boundaries. Social realism, in this context, is less a set of specific formal attributions than an attempt to re-view existing mediated associations between social-situatedness and personal identity through a focus on the lives of characters circumscribed by marginality. In fact, in a particular sequence in Udayer Pathe, in which Souren (the owner of the factory) celebrates his successful novelistic venture (which he has plagiarized), in a plush restaurant, the shots of celebration are intercut with shots of a laborers’ meeting. As the workers unite, a mother beats up her son for having all the water in which rice was cooked (“phan”). In the introduction to the book Nabanna: A Play in Bengali, the exceptional IPTA actor, Tripti Mitra, reminisced how there would be a rush for the “rice-water” during the hard times. Such sufferings are transformed and narrated in Udayer Pathe, which I argue was drawing heavily from various cinematic practices, including British propaganda films such as Famine in Bengal, as well as the landmark IPTA play Nabanna (Bijon Bhattacharya 1944, republished in 2000). After its release, Udayer Pathe created a kind of a hullabaloo amongst its viewers, for its unique narrative technique, characterization, dialogues and music. Remade as Hamrahi in Hindi (also see chapter nine), Udayer Pathe was Roy’s first directorial venture. Nabendu Ghosh (2017, 9–10), the writer, recollects his memory of watching the film and writes how, at the time when he lived in Rajshahi (in present day Bangladesh): One day, in early 1945 a new Bengali film was released in this theatre. . . . Eager, in fact, impatient, cine goers stood for long in serpentine queues to buy tickets. . . . I joined the serpentine queues one day and after a frustrating week, got a ticket for the matinee show of Udayer Pathe. It proved to be a ticket to a new experience of enlightened entertainment. . . . Houseful signs

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were breaking all previous box office records. People around were quoting the film’s crisp, witty dialogues. Undoubtedly, the scene was opening up with newer forms of assertions, which was drawing from the contexts of the War and its cultural ramifications in India and was thus shifting the base of popular Socials. Furthermore, around the same period, IPTA launched Dharti Ke Laal (K.A. Abbas 1946), while Chetan Anand released his celebrated film Neecha Nagar (1946). If Maxim Gorky’s Lower Depths (1902) inspired Neecha Nagar, Bijon Bhattacharya’s writings, including Nabanna, as well as Krishan Chander’s story were inspirational for Dharti Ke Laal, though the film was also motivated by the French and Spanish Popular Front cinemas. Therefore, by tracing such elaborate pre-histories of Bimal Roy’s works and the characteristics they transported to Bombay, I wish to stress the possible and manifold pre-histories of the Hindi Socials and map its diverse itineraries.

Itineraries of realism I have discussed elsewhere how New Theatres’ style of “Literary” films did not simply signify adaptation of literary texts.19 Rather, “literariness” was a specific narrative strategy; explorations of complicated plotting and characterization and, hence, attempted to visualize the “interiority” of the characters. While there were obvious overlaps with the melodramatic mode, “literary” films particularly focused on realistic detailing of settings, costumes, and fidelity and verisimilitude of the everyday. More important, the “interiority” of the characters was a literary characteristic that New Theatres aspired to transport into films. In Udayer Pathe, the “literary” style is also explored through the protagonist’s identity – Anup “Lekhak” (literally unique author) – and via his pronounced speech and diction. Anup Lekhak works in a factory and writes revolutionary speeches for his employer Souren. His boss’ sister Gopa and his sister Sumita are best of friends. In the course of events, Anup and Gopa get emotionally involved, and, en fin, she leaves parental security to move on with Anup toward the path where the “new sun” will rise (or toward “udayer pathe”). In the film, Anup’s speeches achieve significance through the manner of speaking. Indeed, speech becomes an important element of narrative progression as dialogue-cutting points become dominant in the film. In Udayer Pathe the character of the author and the “literary” style speak to each other and expand the “literary” model. Yet, there were other influences that were infused with such prototypes. For instance, following the sequence in which as the workers unite and a mother beats up her son for having all the “rice water” (discussed earlier), a song underlines the intricacies of Roy’s style. As Anup and Gopa walk home after the workers’ meeting they reach at a location, which is typically designed as a romantic setting (with a studio moon, flowers and moonlight). While, Bimal Roy was praised for his craft and his capabilities in replicating a moonlight effect and mist; curiously,

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the performances and the dialogue present an edgy intercession with the romantic melodramas of the period. Therefore, standing in midst of a romantic setting, Anup somewhat uncomfortably submits that the situation is appropriate for a song. Moreover, as Gopa breaks into a rabindra-sangeet (or a Rabindranath Tagore song) while lying on the ground by the pond, the conflicts between a partly Social Realist and partly “literary” style, which were laced by melodramatic or romantic scenes and musical arrangements, throw light on the many trajectories of popular cinema. In his unpublished dissertation Moinak Biswas illustrates the many tracks of realism in India cinema and highlights how these draw from classic realist texts, as well as from neo-realist films.20 He underlines how such stylistic forms evolve not only through characterization but also via the unfolding of cinematic time. Regarding Indian novels, Meenakshi Mukherjee has elaborated upon the manner in which realism takes shape through multiple registers of historical time and mythical imagination, and thus, the Social Reformist trail often blends with fantasy elements. Nevertheless, what Mukherjee defines as a problem is “actually the typical case” (Biswas 2002, 16), considering multiple modes persist “side by side” (ibid. 18). In fact, the interjection between realism and melodrama – or even of documentary footage and theatrical performances – are evident in a classic film like Chinnamul (Nemai Ghosh 1951).21 Clearly, at the time Bimal Roy joined Bombay Talkies, he effectively brought together two or three kinds of approaches. For instance, the opening shots of the film Sujata also demonstrate such a complicated style. Note, the film opens with shots of a clothesline, revealing gently an ordinary day, clothes fluttering in the wind, followed by a shot of a cradle in an empty verandah, followed by a long shot of a decorated house, cut to a close up of a face of child and cut to clothes being ironed. It is only after such an evocative series of shots that the narrative of the Dalit girl begins. Hence, following the introduction of the characters and the setting, a coincidence brings in an orphan child, who would be (later) called “Sujata” – born from good parents. This transition from realistic depiction to a melodramatic image/sound/episode thus became a remarkable style of Bimal Roy and of a range of other films (especially produced by his associates).22 In a similar vein, a film like Do Bigha Zamin brings together disparate narrative and visual styles, including New Theatres’ “literary” trope and “reality effect”, which easily blend with the “melodramatic mode”, as well as with the British documentary style. While eminent filmmaker Tapan Sinha (2017, 23) writes how Roy had used a new Arriflex camera and shot on the streets of Calcutta, the scenes that mark the entry of Shambhu and his son into the city, as well as those which present the climactic race of hand pulled rickshaws are engaging examples of “intersection”.23 For instance, as Shambhu and his son Kanhaiya enter the city, the magnitude of the big city, of the enigmatic Howrah Bridge, cars, buses, streets with people (and even cows) engulf them. Walking around the city, in the following scene Shambhu, tailed by his son Kanhaiya, rests near the famous Vitoria Memorial. Thereafter, as Shambhu goes to get some food, their little bundle gets stolen – through a series of dramatic events – and because of Kanhaiya’s imprudence.

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Similarly, the slum in which Shambhu and Kanhaiya take refuge is set up inside the studios. Involving typical characters and detailing, the scenes set in the slum recount the New Theatre’s style “reality effect”; nonetheless, the scenes in which Shambhu’s wife, Parvati, finally lands in the city are particularly melodramatic. Thus, upon arrival Parvati is immediately tricked by a goon, who initially locks her up in a room, then attempts to steal and rape her. Struggling to escape, Parvati meets with an accident, and eventually it’s Shambhu’s rickshaw that takes her to the hospital. Clearly, a non-linear narrative structure, directed by a pattern of misrecognition followed by recognition, along with a range of coincidences and various kinds of (visual and aural) “excesses” spike such realistic films, which were apparently motivated by Shoe Shine (Vittorio De Sica 1946) and Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica 1948). Likewise, the song “Dharti kahe pukar ke” that narrates Shambhu’s departure from the rural to the urban conjures a deep sense of loss through the lowangle shots of Shambhu, juxtaposed with imageries of farmers holding a bunch of crop, just as the evocative music by Salil Chowdhury accentuates the crisis. Through a close-reading of Roy’s style of narration, I  propose that this may be categorized as a “cinema of intersection”, which operated in tandem with the much-discussed “Melodramatic Mode of 1950s” and other tropes.24 Moreover, “transitional” form (discussed earlier) is not limited to a cinema about transition or in transition, though it is also about journey, shifts, mobility and films that retain formal traces of disparate periods. Transition is not merely a thematic, even when transitions are often plotted through images of travels; separation; long shots of characters walking away; shots of roads, cars, trains, rail tracks and various other iconography of modernity and movement and also elaborated through “directionality of movements” (Biswas 2002, 102) or bodily movements. Furthermore, a film like Do Bibha Zamin produces a series of transitional spaces – the lost land, the city that slips away and is unapproachable, as well as through Shambhu’s and Kanhaiya’s many passages through the city and their partial return. I, however, argue that such stylistic “transitions” are interminable and flow from one historical moment to the other or leak from one text to the other and are a common fixture of Indian cinemas of then and now. Moreover, while “transition” and transfiguration of themes and forms are likely to take place over a period of time, my ideation of cinema of “intersection” is not about a cinema of a certain time; rather it concerns a specific practice and conditions and deals with the texts and contexts of transactions, as well as the transmutations that unfold through multiple registers. Additionally, what appears to be a stylistic split is at the core of such films and may be read in the light of the ideological crisis of the Indian middle classes. Such cinema of “intersection”, hence, presents the continuities as well as newer formations and facilitates us to examine the processes of alterations that emanate via the meandering courses and multiple detours and are not confined to any definitive genealogy or gradual generic formation. I wish to emphasize that “cinema of intersection” draws out a critical map of the dilemma of social transitions, just as it negotiates the manifold transformations of the narrative styles. Do Bibha Zamin, for example, questions the fluctuations of

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the under-class and caste or Shambhu Maheto’s life and the routes he takes from his dwellings in the rural settings to the Calcutta slums and outlines the multiple courses and manifold narrative articulations that range from realist depiction of Calcutta streets to melodramatic situations and from recognizable propaganda imageries to the lyricisms of musicals. In addition, one may revert to Roy’s 1941 film, Tins for India, which is now available via the Colonial film archive. The close reading of the film displays how it was rooted in a particular style of filmmaking that emerged from British documentary practices, typically held together by dramatization of the situations and creation of stylized images, through the borrowing of poetic imageries and uses of powerful music as well as via a specific polemical approach toward the subject. It may be argued that the British documentary style and the narrative address of newsreels, with which Roy and others were associated, produced significant imprints on narrative cinema. In connection to this, I highlight that Roy’s style of film making, for instance the staging of a scene, editing and creation of evocative soundtrack, to a great extent, matured via such cultures and practices of (British) documentary filmmaking. One may also consider Roy’s framing (low-angle panoramic shots), uses of (natural) light, figural movement and rhythmic cutting as a continuation of an arguably disparate formal (documentary) trope. Besides, as discussed so far, Roy was also drawing from the residual studio style of storytelling, subjects of social reform and, hence, entering into a dialogue with the contestations of the post-Independence India. My purpose here is not to merely show how disparate forms co-existed or intersected with each other – rather, I wish to draw attention to certain problems of film historiography and read the melodramatic mode through a prismatic lens and, thereby, revisit the hybridity via multiple and fragmentary registers and consider the traces of such bricolage within the texts.

Recasting cinematic memory Roy’s Madhumati, drawing heavily from the “gothic-horror-noir” film (all combined into one) Mahal (Kamal Amrohi 1949),25 opens with the character of Dev, who arrives at a deserted mansion and encounters his past as well as his future. The film, shot by Dilip Gupta, who had also started his career with New Theatres, continues to induce reinvention of its style and the plot. Gupta was one of “firsts” to have obtained training in Hollywood, as is evident in Madhumati, which explored low-key lighting.26 The movement of the figures in the dark and the creation of fog, mist and typical landscape imageries, alongside static shots of the natural abundance, make Madhumati a play of (natural) light and darkness (of interior spaces). The mansion in Madhumati, a storehouse of memory, gradually seduces Dev to recall his past life  – when, he, as Anand, had fallen in love with the girl from the hills, namely Madhumati. More important is the play of mise-en-scène that makes such reminiscence possible. For instance, the presence of an obscure night guard, the lantern, the storm, rain, and the painting (of the murderous plantation owner) trigger a series of recollection and events. While, the stylistic similarities

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with Mahal’s opening sequence is telling, a fantastic tale of coincidences laced by myriad violent incidents, Madhumati was a decisive departure from the Social Realist themes of Bimal Roy’s films (even though several review articles emphasize its realistic detailing).27 Nevertheless, what has been ignored is the fact that Roy was a part of Mahal’s technical team, and hence, Madhumati appears to be as much his memory of cinema of the 1930s–1940s, as is Devdas (1955).28 Furthermore, the elusive figure of Madhumati – also a name of a river in Bangladesh – and the social and physical violence imparted on her, resonate with Ghatak’s own Subarnarekha (1962). Such films highlight the meandering courses of film forms and narratives and transit through the labyrinth of times. I have illustrated elsewhere how, while adapting the classic text Devdas (Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay 1917), Roy had effectively reworked Pramathesh Barua’s Devdas (1935), with which he was associated as a cameraman. Moreover, as argued earlier in this chapter, Roy’s style and thematic – vacillating between realism and melodrama, documentary re-presentation and stylized narration, social reform themes and reincarnation story  – become a channel via which one can explore the densities and the varying contours of Hindi popular cinema. The ending of Madhumati, therefore, becomes intriguing within such framework. For instance, the return of the ghost (Madhumati) in guise of Madhavi (her living look-alike) to seek justice for the attempted rape and murder/accidental death speaks to the last sequence of Mahal in which Asha finally confesses to have performed as Kamini – the ghost and was further reinvented through the Bollywood blockbuster Om Shanti Om (Farah Khan 2007). It is the ambivalence of such ghost stories set in gothic mansion, which are partly horror and partly a romantic melodrama, shot in a haunting noir style, that indicates newer understanding of popular narrative forms. More important, such stylistic wavering stresses upon the fact that Roy and others were not merely bringing “Bengali” strokes to Bombay; rather, on their way they had imbibed several features of the Bombay Socials and early Noir and hence produced immensely tricky narrative modes. In conclusion, one may suggest that such intricate and byzantine tracks of popular cinema and cinematic articulations become further apparent as we analyze the soundtrack of Madhumati. Kishore Chatterjee (2017, 88–89) asserts that the song “Bicchua” from the film is a combination of “folk tunes and Mozart”. Chatterjee argues that: Salil Chowdhury [the renowned composer] had studied Mozart’s allegros. . . . I find the kind of contest and interaction or struggle between the soloist and the chorus that recurs in in a Mozart concerto. . . . The fegue in Mozart’s Jupiter symphony finale is present in the faster portions of the song. I would urge the readers to listen to Mozart’s Haffner serenade and his Jupiter symphonies and then go back and listen to Salil’s ‘Bichhua’. I have discussed elsewhere how another of Salil Chowdhury’s remarkable compositions, “Itna na mujhse se tu pyaar bada” from the film Chhaya (Hrishikesh

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Mukherjee 1961), as well as its other renditions, were inspired by Mozart’s Symphony No.40 in G minor, KV. 550. Furthermore, Chowdhury belonged to the pulsating political-cultural practice of Indian People’s Theatre Association. At the time he (trained in Indian classical music) refabricated “Western” compositions, uses of clarinets, strings or flutes etc. were integral aspects of Indian cinema soundtrack.29 Chowdhury’s music for Madhumati, hence, accentuates a longer and complex pattern of genre-mixing.30 Effectively, what the “Bengali” contingent was probably transporting to Bombay was a modern imagination, which was hybrid at its core. Such applications show that the “regional”, “national” and “transnational” are not self-contained categories and invite us to study popular films as “cinema of intersection”, which are forever (re)forming, mutating and in a state of flux. I have discussed elsewhere how Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s film Guddi (1971), in fact, narrativizes such movement between multiple cinematic trajectories and conjunctions, just as it deals with fandom, the star-system, and the conditions following the collapse of the studios.31 In a particular scene, Dharmendra, playing Dharmendra, standing in front of an old dilapidated film studio, recalls how Roy’s Bandini, Do Bigha Zamin and Madhumati were shot in the same place. As the character/actor emphasizes history and forgetting, in this context, it must be noted that Roy did not actually own any studio. Rinki Roy Bhattacharya retells how it was Mohan Studios from where they operated and the ways in which Mohan Studios was a place where the cast and crew of Bimal Roy Productions regularly met. Such misrepresentations, nonetheless, point toward the multifaceted traits of film history and the networkings this volume aspires to problematize. Additionally, they raise questions vis-à-vis multi-nodal sources, fragmentary material and possible methods of doing film histories and underscore the functions of the current project. Also, it reveals how popular cinema often recalls its multivalent historical past – as in case of the application of the song “Aaja re” from the film Madhumati in Guddi – and thus bears traces of multiple transmutations.

Notes 1 See Madhuja Mukherjee unpublished dissertation. 2 See Madhuja Mukherjee New Theatres Ltd. 3 Note, besides his exceptional directorial projects, Ghatak wrote the screenplay of Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Musafir (1957). 4 See Rinki Roy Bhattacharya and Anwesha Arya edited Bimal Roy, The Man Who Spoke in Pictures. 5 See Madhuja Mukherjee “When was studio era in Bengal” and Ravi Vasudevan “Geographies of the cinematic public”. 6 Also see Manto’s Stars from Another Sky. 7 Also see Kaushik Bhaumik unpublished dissertation. 8 See Sundararaj Theodore Baskaran The Eye of the Serpent: An Introduction to Tamil Cinema. 9 See Charles Keil and Shelley Stamp edited American Cinema’s Transitional Era. 10 Also see Madhuja Mukherjee “Forking Paths of Indian Cinema”. 11 Also see chapter 4 and 5 for a discussion on liaison with the industries located in the South of India. 12 Also see Hrishikesh Ingle “Multiplex Exhibition and the New Marathi Cinema”.

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1 3 See Bageshwar Jha B.N. Sircar A Monograph. 14 Also see Philip Woods “From Shaw to Shataram”. 15 Binata Bose’s casting thus was not only unconventional; moreover, it became a point of intense debates. 16 See Ravi Vasudevan “The Melodramatic Mode and the Commercial Hindi Cinema”; Kathryn Hansen “Mapping Melodrama”; Madhava Prasad “Film History as Cultural History”. 17 Also see Vasudevan’a articles “A  British documentary film-maker’s encounter with empire: the case of Alexander Shaw (1938–1942)” and especially Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe edited Film and the End of Empire. 18 For an extended reading see Film Theory, Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies, Vol. 4. 19 See Madhuja Mukherjee “Rethinking Popular Cinema in Bengal”. 20 See Neepa Mujumdar “Importing Neorealism”. 21 Also see Moinak Biswas “The City and the Real”. 22 Also see my discussion on Bandini’s sound track in “The Architecture of Songs and Music”. 23 On application of Arriflex see Madhuja Mukherjee “The Story of Arri”. 24 Also see Rosie Thomas Bombay before Bollywood and Valentina Vitali Hindi Action Cinema. 25 See Rachel Dwyer “Bombay Gothic”. 26 See Rinki Roy Bhattacharya’s Bimal Roy’s Madhumati. 27 Ibid. 28 Madhuja Mukherjee “Remembering Devdas”. 29 See Madhuja Mukherjee “The Architecture of Songs and Music”. 30 Also see Sangita Gopal and S Moorti edited Global Bollywood. 31 For a longer discussion on the subject see Madhuja Mukherjee “Forking Paths of Indian cinema”.

References Amrohi, Kamal, dir. 1949. Mahal. India: Bombay Talkies Ltd. Barua, Pramathesh, dir. 1935. Devdas. India: New Theatres Ltd. Baskaran, S.T. 2013. The Eye of the Serpent: An Introduction to Tamil Cinema. Chennai: Tranquebar Press. Bhattacharya, Bijon. 2000. Nabanna: A Play in Bengali. Calcutta: Proma. Bhattacharya, R.R., ed. 2009. Bimal Roy: The Man Who Spoke in Pictures. New Delhi: Viking. ———. 2014. Bimal Roy’s Madhumati: Untold Stories from Behind the Scenes. New Delhi: Rupa. Bhattacharya, R.R., and Anwesha Arya., eds. 2017. Bimal Roy, The Man Who Spoke in Pictures. Gurgaon: Penguin Books. Bhaumik, Kaushik. 2001. “The Emergence of the Bombay Film Industry 1913–1936”. Unpublished PhD diss., Oxford University Press, Oxford. Biswas, Moinak. 2002. “Historical Realism: Modes of Modernity in Indian Cinema 1940– 60”. Unpublished PhD diss., Monash University, Melbourne. Chatterjee, Kishore. 2017. “Mozart and Madhumati”. In Bimal Roy, The Man Who Spoke in Pictures, edited by R.R. Bhattacharya and Anwesha Arya, 88–91. Gurgaon: Penguin Books. Dwyer, Rachel. 2011. “Bombay Gothic: 60 Years of Mahal”. In Beyond the Boundaries of Bollywood: The Many Lives of Hindi Cinema, edited by Rachel Dwyer and Ferry Pinto, 130–155. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. ———. 2017. “A Different Kind of Hindi Cinema”. In Bimal Roy, The Man Who Spoke in Pictures, edited by R.R. Bhattacharya and Anwesha Arya, 164–173. Gurgaon: Penguin Books.

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Ghosh, Nabendu. 2017. “My Film Guru”. In Bimal Roy, The Man Who Spoke in Pictures, edited by R.R. Bhattacharya and Anwesha Arya, 9–17. Gurgaon: Penguin Books. Gopal, S., and S. Moorti, eds. 2008. Global Bollywood. Travels in Hindi Song and Dance. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press. Grieveson, Lee, and Colin MacCabe, eds. 2011. Film and the End of Empire. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Hallam, Julia, and Margaret Marshment. 2000. Realism and Popular Cinema. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hansen, Kathryn. 2016. “Mapping Melodrama: Global Theatrical Circuits, Parsi Theater, and the Rise of the Social”. BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 7 (1): 1–30. Ingle, Hrishikesh. 2015. “Multiplex Exhibition and the New Marathi Cinema”. Journal of the Moving Image 13: 30–63. Jha, Bageshwar. 1990. B.N. Sircar A Monograph. Calcutta: NFAI, Pune, in association with Seagull Books. Keil, Charles, and Shelley Stamp, eds. 2004. American Cinema’s Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions, Practices. Berkeley, CA/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press. Majumdar, Neepa. 2012. “Importing Neorealism, Exporting Cinema”. In Global Neorealism: The Transnational History of a Film Style, edited by Saverio Giovacchini and Robert Sklar, 173–198. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Manṭo, Saʻādat Ḥasan, and Khālid Ḥasan. 1998. Stars from Another Sky: The Bombay Film World in the 1940s. New York: Penguin Books. Mukherjee, Hrishikesh, dir. 1961. Chhaya. India: AVM Productions. ———, dir. 1971. Guddi. India: Rupam Chitra. Mukherjee, Madhuja. 2008. “The New Theatres Ltd.: ‘The Cathedral of Culture’ and the House of the Popular”. Unpublished PhD diss., Jadavpur University, Kolkata. ———. 2009. New Theatres Ltd.: The Emblem of Art, the Picture of Success. Pune: National Film Archive of India. ———. 2011a. “The Story of Arri: Imagined Landscapes, Emergent Technologies and Bengali Cinema”. Journal of the Moving Image 10: 61–80. ———. 2011b. “Remembering Devdas: Travels, Transformations and the Persistence of Images, Bollywood-Style”. Topia, Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 26: 69–84. ———. 2012. “The Architecture of Songs and Music: Soundmarks of Bollywood, a Popular Form and Its Emergent Texts”. Screen Sound Journal 3: 9–34. ———. 2013. “Travels of Musical Notes: Memories of Mozart and ‘Jay ho!’ ” IASPM 2011 Proceedings, 177–184. ———. 2016. “Toward a New Frame for Regional Films: Manbhum Videos and the Other Side of (Indian) Cinema”. BioScope: South Asia Screen Studies 7 (1): 58–79. DOI: 10.1177/0974927616635939. ———. 2017. “Rethinking Popular Cinema in Bengal (1930s–1950s): Of Literariness, Comic Mode, Mythological and Other Avatars”. South Asian History and Culture 8 (2): 122–142. DOI: 10.1080/19472498.2017.1304088. ———. 2018. “Forking Paths of Indian Cinema: Revisiting Hindi Films Through Regional Networks”. In The Routledge Companion to World Cinema, edited Rob Stone et al., 213– 224. London/New York: Routledge. ———. 2019. “When Was the ‘Studio Era’ in Bengal: Transition, Transformations and Configurations During 1930s”. Widescreen Journal 8 (1). http://widescreenjournal.org/ index.php/journal/issue/view/10. Mukherjee, Meenakshi. 1994. Realism and Reality, The Novel and Society in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

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Prasad, M.M. 1998. Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. ———. 2011. “Genre Mixing as Creative Fabrication”. BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 2: 69–81. Roy, Bimal, dir. 1944. Udayer Pathe. India: New Theatres Ltd. ———, dir. 1953. Do Bigha Zamin. India: Bimal Roy Productions. ———, dir. 1955. Devdas. India: Bimal Roy Productions. ———, dir. 1958. Madhumati. India: Bimal Roy Productions. Sinha, Tapan. 2017. “A Pioneer”. In Bimal Roy, The Man Who Spoke in Pictures, edited by R.R. Bhattacharya and Anwesha Arya, 20–24. Gurgaon: Penguin Books. Thomas, Rosie. 2014. Bombay Before Bollywood: Film City Fantasies. New Delhi: India Orient BlackSwan. Vasudevan, Ravi. 1989. “The Melodramatic Mode and the Commercial Hindi Cinema: Notes on Film History, Narrative and Performance in the 1950s”. Screen 30 (3): 29–50. ———. 2000. “The Politics of Cultural Address in a ‘Transitional’ Cinema: A Case Study of Indian Popular Cinema”. In Reinventing Film Studies, edited by Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams, 130–164. London: Arnold. ———. 2002. “Shifting Codes, Dissolving Identities: The Hindi Social Film of the 1950s as Popular Culture”. In Making Meaning in Indian Cinema, edited by Ravi Vasudevan, 99–120. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. ———. 2010. “Geographies of the Cinematic Public: Notes on Regional, National and Global Histories of Indian Cinema”. Journal of the Moving Image 9: 94–117. ———. 2011. “Official and Amateur: Exploring Information Film in India, 1920s-1940s”. In Film and the End of Empire, edited by Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe, 73–94. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Woods, Philip. 2001. “From Shaw to Shantaram: The Film Advisory Board and the Making of British Propaganda Films in India, 1940–1943”. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 21 (3): 293–308. DOI: 10.1080/01439680120069425.

8 CIRCUMAMBIENT GEOGRAPHIES OF CINEMA The Shaw Brothers’ Malay film production studios in mid-century Singapore Peter J. Bloom

The role of regional producers and filmmakers in mid-century Singapore points to a migratory pattern of film production, financing, and exhibition. In the immediate post-World War II era, Anglophone-speaking filmmakers, particularly from South Asia, were hired by Singapore-based producers to direct films with regional appeal in the Malay archipelago of Southeast Asia.1 In the aftermath of the Japanese occupation (1942–45), Malaya (consisting of present-day peninsular Malaysia and Singapore) returned to the fold of British sovereignty in 1945, and Singapore resumed its role as nodal point of the British shipping and communications empire.2 This contribution emphasizes networks and cross-pollinations within the terms of circumambient geographies of cinema. Intersecting circuits of film production and reception point to the constructed nature of Malayan national identity. With the return of the British administration in 1945 and restoration of direct rule over the Straits settlements (which included Singapore, Penang, and Melaka), a context for regional circulation and commerce reemerged. Though motivated by renewing an export infrastructure of extraction for alluvial tin mining and a plantation economy of rubber that supplied the American auto industry, renewed opportunities for entertainment attractions drew on regional musical talent, theatrical performance, and development of local film production that advanced in step. The burgeoning export economy of Malaya now under British authority became one of the most important sources for US dollar exchange that helped sustain the sterling area and the fortunes of the British Exchequer. It also stimulated a new context for film production with the renewal of the Shaw Brothers’ entertainment enterprise, whose Southeast and East Asian empire of film exhibition and production resumed with the re-occupation and expansion of their production facilities in Singapore. During the interwar period, Run Run Shaw and his brother Runme developed an extensive circuit for theatrical productions and film exhibition in Malaya that featured Cantonese films produced by their family owned production company

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that began in Shanghai and continued in Hong Kong. It was initially known as Tianyi Film Company, then Unique Film Productions Hong Kong Studio, and it continued to spawn numerous companies under their control. Stephanie Chung Po-yin has described the Shaw Brothers’ interwar model of film production as “front shop-back factory” in that it primarily featured Cantonese opera talent in films produced in Hong Kong that were then exported on the Malayan circuit (Chung Po-yin 2003, 5). Their theatrical holdings and exhibition contracts in Malaya were enhanced upon establishing close ties with MalayChinese business families in Penang whose patronage, in turn, provided valuable access to exhibition venue ownership. The profitability of these investments led to well-developed income streams that later culminated in further consolidation of film production in Hong Kong starting in 1957 with the construction of Movie Town on 46 acres in Kowloon Bay. Once completed in the 1960s, it became the largest privately owned film production studio.3 While the Shaw Brothers’ transnational entertainment enterprise had always relied upon British imperial circuits of trade dating back to 1924 in Shanghai, an expanded context for geographical flexibility in film production and exhibition briefly coalesced during this so-called Golden Age of Malay Cinema. The Shaw Brothers’ Malayan Film Production (MFP) Studios was established in 1947 after their Hong Kong production base faced a series of setbacks, at which time Run Run Shaw (1907–2014), the youngest of the five Shaw Brothers, returned to Singapore with a new vision for extending their holdings in theatrical exhibition and film production. The Shaw Brothers’ MFP became the leading film studio in Singapore from the end of the postwar period until 1957 and drew on an extensive pool of directors and technicians from South Asia and the Philippines along with well-known Malay actors from Indonesia. It is within this context that I focus on the role of South Asian directors, accenting the role of the Bengali-born filmmaker Phani Majumdar (1911–94), who became integral to the Shaw Brothers operation in Singapore just prior to its pivot back to Hong Kong starting in 1957. Majumdar’s films and legacy as the “official creative head of the studio” from 1955–59 marks a period of transformation and regional integration in multicultural Malaya (Barnard 2008, 166). Majumdar’s role also demonstrates how an overlapping regional context for film production and exhibition were a shared context throughout South and Southeast Asia. National identity formations found footing in relation to Malay cinema produced in Singapore. It is within this emerging popular context, however, that I consider conflicting perspectives regarding the autonomy of cinema during the transition toward Malayan independence in 1957. Just as the history of regional population movements from China and the Madras Residency (present day Tamil Nadu) reshaped the demographics of Malaya in the twentieth century, it also marked a cosmopolitan cultural context for musical performance as well as film production and exhibition. In fact, a key feature of the Shaw Brothers’ financial interest in Malaya was anchored by an extensive film exhibition network. In many cases, they established lucrative leasing contracts, particularly with the increasingly established

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Malay bangsawan theatrical venues within a circuit of second- and third-run theaters that presented a variety of American, British, Cantonese, Indian, Malay, and Mandarin films. Regional and urban contexts served as staging grounds for cultural negotiation that evolved from traveling theater, known as Teater Parsi. It is a context that allows us to query the essential regional context for cosmopolitan circumambulation and the advent of Malayan cinema, which drew on a set of production paradigms underfoot in the evolution of Indian cinema.

Teater Parsi, bangsawan, and sandiwara The influence of Teater Parsi throughout South and Southeast Asia has been described in the work of Anuradha Kapur (1993) and Kathryn Hansen (2001, 2003), among others. It is worth recalling that these traveling theatrical troupes actively developed a technological dimension to theatrical performance by the late nineteenth century that contributed to cinematic storytelling conventions and a cabinet of special effects in the years to follow. Parsi theater not only refers to the Parsi entrepreneurs and performers in Bombay and Lucknow by the mid-nineteenth century but to adaptive forms of storytelling that drew on various genres of Persian storytelling including the oral dastaan tradition, romance narratives known as masnavi, as well as synoptic tales drawn from the Shahnameh Persian epic. As Ravi Vasudevan explains, these sources were adapted with North Indian musical accompaniment and translations into Urdu. In addition, scriptwriting conventions were developed that reached a wider public both in Bombay and throughout North India (Vasudevan 2010, 35). Teater Parsi was not only essential to developing a context for mixing dialogue and music as part of an operatic narrative address but initiated modes of cinematic spectacle through an active engagement with stagecraft. The mobility of these theater troupes meant that productions would be adapted to audiences in a wide array of theatrical venues around the world and a system of patronage that included commissions by the British Army. Mohamed Effindi Samsuddin and Bujang Rahmah have described the late nineteenth-century origins of bangsawan, a type of commercial, entertainment-oriented Malay “opera,” as derived from the performance of a traveling Teater Parsi troupe that was commissioned to entertain South Asian troops serving in the British Army based in Penang (Malaya). The stage property created for these performances were purchased in 1880 by a wealthy Indian Muslim, Mamak Pushi, who adapted it linguistically from a Hindi language performance into Malay and renamed it bangsawan, meaning “of the aristocratic class” in Malay, to “reflect the lofty tales of kings and princes that made up the early repertory” (Effindi Samsuddin and Rahmah 2013, 123). The troupe’s repertoire and performances expanded to the Straits settlements of Melaka and Singapore and became popular in other Malay states as well as parts of Sumatra and Jakarta, where it also became adapted to Dutch Indonesian stamboel popular theater. The indigenization of bangsawan became well known as a commercial form of popular entertainment by the 1920s and 30s, akin to vaudeville, such that performers achieved local celebrity status. In the postwar period, however, sandiwara

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(“theatrical production” in Malay) emerged as a new, more realistic form of theater as the popular appeal of bangsawan diminished. Sooi-Beng Tan explains that this new theatrical format emphasized scripted plays with realistic settings and costumes, which were more conversant with philosophical and nationalist conceptions of Malay identity entailing the staging of hikayat tales that drew on Malay historical epics, like Hang Tuah, Laksamana Bentan, Datuk Laksamana Sekam, and Kris Melayu (Tan 1989, 252). The shift from a more capacious engagement with an eclectic array of popular attractions under the umbrella of bangsawan, widely exhibited in theme parks and theatrical venues, shifted toward increasingly ethno-nationalist sandiwara theatrical idioms that were later adapted to Malay cinema. Jamil Sulong (1926–2014), among the first generation of Malayan filmmakers who worked closely with Phani Majumdar in Singapore, explains that the Shaw Brothers did not produce Malay films based on the bangsawan repertoire per se after World War II but mostly relied on sandiwara adaptations. This was in spite of the fact that bangsawan artistes provided the backbone of talent for Malay films. In fact, the rival production company, Cathay-Keris, led by Ho Ah Loke (1901–82), directly adapted bangsawan stories precisely because of their popular appeal at the suggestion of some of the best known bangsawan stage actors like S. Kadarisman (1922–89) who starred in many of these films during the 1950s (Sulong 1989, 57, 60). Leila Majnun (1934), reputed to be the first Malayan film, was based on a mainstay of the bangsawan repertoire adapted from Parsi theater. The film was produced by an Indian film crew and led by the Calcutta-born director Balden Singh Rajhans (aka B.S. Rajhans, 1903–55) with an “all Malay cast,” which was likely to have included Indonesian actors given their prominence on the bangsawan circuit.4 The film featured Arabian and Egyptian dance numbers and promoted itself by featuring the well-known bangsawan actor Syed Ali bin Mansoor and singer Fatima Benti Jasman, known for her HMV gramophone recordings. Produced by Run Run Shaw, it was exhibited on the Shaw circuit of film theaters and initiated Shaw’s involvement with Malay language cinema. As Timothy Barnard has explained in the most comprehensive discussion of MFP, Shaw produced eight films in Singapore prior to the Japanese invasion in 1942 other than Leila Majnun; they have been attributed to Wan Hai Ling and Miss Yen in the genre of “household” love stories (Barnard 2008, 155). The Shaw Brothers’ website details its own history, and vaguely refers to these films as an early failed attempt. Rajhans left for Bombay after making Leila Majnun but returned to Singapore after the Japanese occupation to make seven films with Shaw until 1949, starting with Seruan Merdeka [Call of Freedom] (1947). It was also upon his return that he discovered P. Ramlee (1929–73) in 1948 when he was singing with his band at a show held at Bukit Mertajam in Penang and invited him to join MFP in Singapore (Harding and Sarji 2002, 14). Ramlee later became the best-known Malayan film star, singer, songwriter, and director of the era. Many South Asian directors contributed to the large number of productions completed at MFP from 1947–67, and the extent of it was partially depicted in Singapore (dir. Shakti Samanta, prod. F.C. Mehra for

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Eagle Films, 1960), conceived as an homage to this era, which reached its peak in 1952 when thirteen Malay language films were produced in the expanded two-unit MFP production facility at Jalan Ampas (Barnard 2008, 157).

South Asian cinematic contexts One of the most surprising aspects of these filmed melodramas in Malaya (from the early 1950s–1960s) is their very close relationship to the emergence of Indian sound cinema and the playback song idiom. Historically, the scale of Indian talkies expanded dramatically in the 1930s such that the annual production of Indian language films went from 27 in 1931 to 233 in 1937 (Barnouw and Krishnaswamy 1980, 176). The very expansion of this economy for production at first became a locus for experiment and adaptation within India itself, but it also had a significant impact on regional exhibition. In Malaya, Indian directors were most often employed to lead the filmmaking effort, often assisted by Chinese and Indian technicians who shot and recorded Malay bangsawan actors and singers performing stories along with sandiwara plays (Barnard 2008, 156). Within this framework, popular Indian film plots were translated with music derived from Indian playback songs among other sources, including American popular ballads. This form of hybridity in the production process may in fact be considered a continuation of Malayan bangsawan tradition in its cosmopolitan capaciousness. Within the context of India itself, some of the most significant regional language cinemas, including Tamil and Telegu productions, were initially produced in Bombay and Calcutta with directors, technicians, and actors who often did not speak the language of the production. These Indian films developed from processes of segmentation and adaptation that became aligned with regional independenceera nationalist sensibilities and later adapted by savvy producers like Run Run Shaw, Loke Wan-Tho (1915–64) of Cathay, and Ho Ah-loke of Keris. The blurred boundaries for Indian regional cinema are critical for understanding why so many of the early filmmakers that were recruited by Shaw and Cathay-Keris were Indian nationals from Bombay and Calcutta but also Madras, given the advent and popularity of Tamil language cinema and playback songs. The emerging context became associated with postwar nationalist politics for which the linguistic vernacularization of cinema was an important staging ground for popular forms of national mobilization efforts. The Shaw Brothers’ production company, first established in Singapore as early as 1938, whose business interests were partially confiscated during the Japanese occupation, also loaned equipment and supported the establishment of the Malayan Film Unit in the immediate aftermath of the Japanese surrender in 1945. The close relations between the Shaw Brothers and Cathay with the Malayan Film Unit and Radio Malaya remains an important feature of their intertwined interests during the late colonial and early independence era. Not only are the presumed linguistic and ethnic boundaries between the various early cinema cultures of India more porous and contested than adequately recognized, but the refinement and expansion of Indian sound film production became

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a marked mode of production by the early 1940s (Hughes 2010, 214, 222). William van der Heide contends that the success of MFP was based on the dominant presence of Indian directors. As he writes, 107 of the 156 feature films produced in Malaya during the 1950s were made by Indian directors; in addition, all of these Indian filmmakers were initially employed at the Shaw Brothers MFP studio even though some transferred to Cathay-Keris and later migrated to Merdeka studio in Kuala Lumpur in the decade to follow (van der Heide 2002, 134). P. Ramlee and Jamil Sulong were among the first Malayan filmmakers during this period, but their exposure to filmmaking was primarily derived from their work with Indian directors and respective crews. This type of production set-up, van der Heide contends, may be considered an extension of an existing system of production in South Asia. The reliance of Malayan cinema on certain paradigmatic elements in the evolution of Indian film has a well-documented basis, particularly given Sulong’s contention that Indian films appealed to a large swath of the Malay population in addition to first- and second-generation Tamil migrants. As a result, we cannot claim that Malayan cinema during the 1950s fits into a narrow ethno-national paradigm but instead a cosmopolitan one. Furthermore, there were practical considerations that Tamaki Matsuoka Kanda has described. This included the high quality of Indian cinema by the early 1950s that was well known among producers, the low relative cost of hiring Indian directors, and ability of Indian nationals to communicate in English with Singaporean staff (Kanda 1995, 50; also, Guneratne 2003). Nonetheless, Adil Johan contends that a distinctly Malay cosmopolitan aesthetics is a more essential line of inquiry in lieu of a search for origins or emphasis on a genealogy of influence. In his view, Malay cosmopolitanism is best understood through a focus on film songs that were scored by Malay film composers such as Kassim Masdor (1938–2014), who was the musical director at Shaw Brothers, along with P. Ramlee who also wrote his own songs (Johan 2018, 30). Johan takes issue with the claim that the aesthetic and narrative dominance of Indian cinema was integral to the Golden Age of Malay Cinema because it undermines an underlying aesthetics of Malayan cosmopolitan consciousness. However, Indian cinema itself during this period remained an indeterminate set of practices, particularly given its adaptation to other linguistic and cultural settings particularly in the diversified context in India itself. Monak Biswas has suggested that an emerging “cinematic dynamic” in Bengali and Hindi cinema occurred in the wake of a crisis in the Indian studio system by the 1950s that Madhuja Mukherjee has further developed (Vasudevan 2010, 51; Mukherjee 2018). Debates about relative national influences are more usefully redirected toward a better understanding of contingent political arrangements and acts of circulation, which had a more significant impact on the filmmaking process in Malaya. That is, an underlying cosmopolitan context took root and contributed to the production and reception of cinema as a composite context for media transmission. It may be understood as a modular conception, following Anna Morcom’s description of Hindi film narratives that reference an assemblage of prefabricated parts or simply a cinema of attractions (Morcom 2007, 60). Nonetheless, Johan’s emphasis on filmed music is

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significant because of the well-established context for Malay composers, singers, and musicians who adroitly adapted their work to cinema. Further, dance numbers and melodies that relied on Malay vernacular forms, such as joget and ronggeg, lead us to consider how the interaction between song and dance evokes popular affect that marks these films as distinct from other regional productions. A tension between narrational contexts for melodrama and popular conceptions of iconicity in these films that were influenced by Indian cinema enabled an ambiguous context for engineering consensus in the transition from British rule to Malayan independence. The Singapore-based film producers of the era were part of an intersecting regional community of Straits Chinese producers and distributors in search of new markets. The interest in producing films and creating a more robust star system for Malayan audiences during the postwar era was adapted to the shifting politics of Malayanization. The iconography of figures like P. Ramlee were often associated with travel, either on the tarmac being greeted by fans or traveling abroad in support of the Malayan Special Forces as was the case with Normadiah, the female singer and frequent co-star in P. Ramlee films and recorded duets.

The film production context for Indian filmmakers in Malaya It was the experienced Indian filmmakers, however, who greatly contributed to establishing a reliable system of film production, such as Phani Majumdar. He was instrumental in establishing a system of production at Shaw’s MFP studios in Singapore and directed Hang Tuah in 1956 among other films in the years to follow. Majumdar’s command over contemporary filmmaking practices allowed him to develop an effective repertoire of melodramatic elements that were recognized by Run Run Shaw and conveyed to staff that he trained while based in Singapore at MFP from 1955–59. Previously, he moved from Calcutta to Bombay in 1941 where he directed films as a well-known freelancer at Bombay Talkies, New Theatres, Ltd. Calcutta, among other production houses. Critically, producers were well acquainted with his working methods and his films that included Tamasha (prod. Bombay Talkies, 1952), Baadbaan (prod. Bombay Talkies, 1954), and Dhobi Doktor (prod. Bimal Roy, 1954) (Rajadhyaksha and Willemen 1993, 132–133). As Ashish Rajadhyaksha among others have noted, the technical and aesthetic quality of these productions was pioneered at some of the major Indian studios, including New Theatres, Prabhat Film Co., and Bombay Talkies, which started to develop dynamic effects in camera movement, cutting rhythms, and expressive lighting design (Rajadhyaksha 1987). As Vasudevan has pointed out, it soon became manifested as a form of “expressionism” that relied on a “horizontal axis of the family narrative” that relied upon flat lighting and tableau shots that denied a context for connective blocking (Vasudevan 2010, 51). Majumdar’s immediate predecessor at Shaw was the Tamil-born director Balakrishna Narayan Rao (aka B.N. Rao, 1908–unknown), who directed nine films for Shaw’s MFP before moving onto Cathay-Keris in 1956 with a more competitive salary to make twelve more

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features before returning to India, including the cult Pontainak vampire-genre film trilogy.5 Kanda has suggested that Majumdar was recommended to Run Run Shaw by Baburao Patel (1904–82), the well-known Indian film critic and publisher of the influential English-language film trade magazine Filmindia (Kanda 1995, 48). Patel was an important figure in the management and shaping of a critical high-brow context for Indian cinema and was known among an international circuit of producers and filmmakers.6 There is an extensive genealogy to be drawn out regarding Phani Majumdar’s role in the history of Indian cinema prior to and after his work with the Shaw Brothers in Singapore that has been described by others (including Mukherjee 2007, 2017), but his involvement in shaping the persona of P. Ramlee relates to his earlier work as director of Street Singer (prod. New Theatres, Ltd. Calcutta, 1938), which featured Kundan Lal Saigal (aka K.L. Saigal, 1904–46). In particular, Saigal’s song “Babul Mora” from Street Singer was an immediate popular hit, and the song itself remains a staple of Hindi film songs. Majumdar’s involvement in shaping Saigal’s persona followed that of his mentor P.C. Barua (1903–51), who was initially trained at Elstree in Britain. While limited documentation exists regarding the shaping of Saigal’s onscreen persona, Majumdar became adept at shaping performers for mass audiences in this studio-driven context. Most of the commentary about Saigal has focused on the quality of his voice, which is often depicted as a softer, narrower, crooning style well adapted to the microphone and poetic bending of syllables into musical curves in patterns associated with the thumri and ghazal idioms (Morcom 2007, 65; Rajadhyaksha and Willemen 1993, 189). Incidentally, some of these features, particularly the crooning style, may also be used to describe Ramlee’s singing style as well. While based in Singapore from 1955–59, Majumdar made eleven films including Hang Tuah (1956), his best-known production, among other well-known films, including Anak-ku Sazali (Sazali’s son, 1956) and Rumah Panjang (Long House, 1957). As an adaptation, the national Malay epic, Hang Tuah, was conceived, adapted, and produced to celebrate the advent of Malayan Independence in 1957. The story remains an important point of reference along with the renown of the lead actor, P. Ramlee. Hang Tuah was released in January 1956 to great acclaim on the festival circuit and was featured in the first-run Shaw Brothers theaters, including its flagship Capitol Theater, among other significant venues throughout their regional network of nearly 130 theaters. Needless to say, it was an unusual locally produced prestige color production that was widely exhibited in Malaya; however, it was part of an effort that facilitated the symbolic orchestration of Malayan independence largely produced by its cosmopolitan managerial elites.

Hang Tuah as the construction of Malayan national spectacle Hang Tuah has been widely commented upon because of its contribution to the rhetorical construction of a national historical hero. Several commentators have noted that the cinematic representation of Tuah was a less popular avatar of Malayan

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national sympathies than his rival Hang Jebat, who was his initial compatriot along with four others (Khoo 2006, 22–55). Jebat came to represent a context for independence as associated with social justice and individual rights against feudalism. The well-known fight sequence between the two figures at the end of the film has been etched into the popular imagination. In fact, P. Ramlee (as Hang Tuah) and Ahmad Mahmood (as Hang Jebat), the lead members of the cast, restaged the fight scene in historical costumes on a wide array of occasions, including political rallies, conventions, literary gatherings, and as a short dramatic playlet in a bangsawan theatrical setting. As an anthropologist of the era claimed, invariably the audience cheered Hang Jebat as the truly heroic figure in sacrificing himself to Hang Tuah (Josselin de Jong 1965, 146). In the well-known fight sequence, Hang Tuah defeats Hang Jebat thanks to the mystical agency of the Taming Sari dagger, given to him by Jebat in the same sequence as an act of self-sacrifice. This episode is set up with the knowledge that the Sultan issued a public death sentence against Hang Tuah. Neither Jebat, nor Tuah’s love interest Melur, were aware that Tuah was kept in hiding by the high court official charged with carrying out the sentence. Jebat’s resulting rebellion against the Sultan was aimed at avenging the injustice of Hang Tuah’s death sentence issued on the basis of being framed by a corrupt visiting Javanese court official. Tuah miraculously reappears to everyone’s surprise and defeats Jebat, who had since run amok and already killed many of the Sultan’s warriors. Hang Tuah’s later melancholic demeanor leads him to question his own conduct, asking whether he did the right thing by killing Jebat and upholding the rule of the Sultan. As Tuah says in the final sequence of the film, If I release all my tears for but once, it would not be able to wash away the flow of blood from the bodies of Melur and Jebat. They have sacrificed their lives because of my death. In truth, I was alive. (translated by Johan 2014, 304) The film is based on a fifteenth-century epic first recounted a century later in the Malay Annals and then adapted as the Romance of Hang Tuah (Hikayat Hang Tuah) in the eighteenth century. The adaptation of historical tales as national allegory was transposed to the sandiwara storytelling context. Crucially, the English language adaptation was written by Mervyn “Mubin” Sheppard (1905–94), the chief British Information officer in Malaya from the end of the Japanese occupation until independence. He was also a keen Orientalist scholar who converted to Islam and remained in Malaya after independence. The English version of the story was adapted by Majumdar in close consultation with Sheppard and then translated into Malay by Buyong Adil (1907–76) and Jamil Sulong. Sheppard was actively involved with the production, and the film was aligned with propaganda directives that informed the industrial films produced by Malayan Film Unit that Sheppard initiated a decade earlier in 1946.7 The political significance of the film explains its robust production budget of nearly three times that of a typical MFP

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production. Its strategy of exhibition was largely the effect of a tactical and political conjuncture between the ongoing Malayan Emergency and the careful orchestration of independence in 1957 by Malayan elites in close collaboration with the British colonial administration. Hang Tuah featured P. Ramlee as titular hero, and the film soundtrack includes an array of songs featuring Ramlee’s performance within a popular entertainment vernacular. One of the best-known song-and-dance numbers in the production, “Joget Pahang,” features Hang Tuah’s seduction of the Pahang princess, Tun Tijah (Zaiton). She was already promised to a prince from another kingdom, but Tuah convinces her to marry Sultan Mahmud of Melaka instead. This narrative strand is cast as a political act in which her self-proclaimed love for Hang Tuah and, by extension, the Sultanate of Melaka, becomes metonym for independent Malaya. In the film, the theme of love as an act of sacrifice takes the form of the song, “To Sacrifice Anything at All” (Berkorban Apa Saja). It is performed at two key moments in the film. Once again, it deploys a playback format already well defined by Indian features that drew on the power of melodic mobilization and refrain. Kassim Masdor, the film song composer, claimed that at least five songs were included in any given feature film and insists that it was key to the success of their films throughout the 1950s, developing on parallel footing with Indian feature films of the period that was part of its transnational character and appeal to audiences.

Conclusion Majumdar’s role at the MFP studios was based on his experience as a capable and significant director within the decentralized culture of Indian film production. His work contributed to transnational filmmaking as interrelated sets of production practices, labor arrangements, and aesthetic appeal. Significantly, Indian filmmakers directed a majority of the films produced in Malaya at the height of the mid-century studio system in Singapore. They relied upon Malayan screenwriters, composers, actors, and technicians who later became leading directors. The context for this apprenticeship system was an extension of an existing circumambient regional system that the Shaw Brothers were keen to develop within a cost-efficient and distribution-centered system that exponentially expanded in Hong Kong by the 1960s. The emphasis on the migration of Parsi Theater to bangsawan as a popular Malayan idiom of performance is significant because it provides a context for popular films, their reception, and exhibition contexts. The polyglot nature of the interwar period in which various communities spoke a wide range of languages and dialects was reflected in the songs, jokes, and spectacle within the bangsawan repertoire. The national conception of Malaya in the postwar period sought to streamline and obscure the richness of this legacy. The “Golden Age of Malay Cinema” has been used by the Shaw Brothers to describe their production output during the 1950s, which, in turn, contributed to the shaping of national identity during this transitional era. South Asian filmmakers contributed to a style of filmmaking culture in Malaya that became integrated into a striving toward national consolidation.

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The Shaw Brothers’ enterprise facilitated an expansion of performance cultures, linguistic contexts, and genres largely in the service of an expansive exhibition circuit. This leads us to assert that figures like Phani Majumdar were instrumental in facilitating an expanded representational context that supplemented a nationalizing ethos while contributing to a model of popular support that was carefully managed from above. In other words, circumambient geographies of cinema led to a politically negotiated public sphere of national history under which British interests coalesced with the assertion of Malayan independence and were given expression as an emergent stylistic context for national film culture. This contribution demonstrates yet another fold in the regional and transnational industrial networks, geographies, and context for film production in South and Southeast Asia. It demonstrates how the acquisition of technique was part of an international and regional context by pointing to the circulation of production and exhibition methods. From this perspective, Phani Majumdar’s role as an influential filmmaker in orchestrating the spectacle of Malayan independence in Hang Tuah leads to a more nuanced understanding of how a carefully constructed national literary source was adapted. The work of cinema as a popular industrial art and theatrical experience is multilayered in its production and presentation. It also leads us to consider how industrial transnational networks are formative in countering and attempting to consolidate claims about national identity.

Notes 1 The Malay Archipelago, or Maritime Southeast Asia, refers to contemporary Brunei, East Timor, Indonesia (not including Western New Guinea), Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore. 2 Malaya refers to both contemporary Singapore and peninsular Malaysia. Sovereignty of Singapore as independent of Malaya was established in 1965 at which time Malaya was renamed Malaysia. This was eight years after Malayan independence from Britain in 1957. East Malaysia (consisting of present-day Sabah, Sarawak, and Labuan), previously known as British North Borneo, was incorporated into Malaya in 1957 and then became part of Malaysia in 1965. 3 The Shaw Brothers website describes these developments in significant detail. However, the extensive text in the “About Shaw” section is primarily conceived as a promotional vehicle with many inconsistencies and without a listed author. Viewed on 25 January 2019 at: 4 Leila Majnun, like many other early Malay films of the interwar period and afterward, is considered lost. Sooi-Beng Tan lists several other Malay film titles produced by Shaw during the interwar period that she found in newspapers, which include Mutiara, Ibu Tiri, Bermadu, and Tiga Kekasih (Tan 1997, 10). The underlying storyline in Leila Majnun has been repurposed many times in Indian cinema, most notably in Kismet [Fate] (dir. Gyan Mukherjee 1943). For further discussion, see Dissanayake 2012, 202. 5 For limited discussion of the Pontainak genre, see the webpage Ghetto Singapore: Stories of our Singapore, “B.N. Rao – Man behind the Pontianak.” The Indonesian actress Maria Menado was the key figure in the success of the Pontianak trilogy. Accessed January 19, 2019. www.ghettosingapore.com/b-n-rao/ 6 Khan, Taran N. 2015. “A kick in the pants: Of a writer and a magazine that brought drama to film criticism.” himalmag.com. [Interview with Baburao Patel, editor of Filmindia]. Accessed January 19, 2019. https://himalmag.com/baburao-filmindia-taran-khan-column/

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7 Sheppard, M. C. ff. 1956. “The Birth of the Malayan Film Unit.” Malayan Film Unit Tenth Anniversary. Griffin Inn, Kuala Lumpur (November  26), page 7. Arkib Negara Malaysia [National Archives of Malaysia], 2007/0043079.

References Barnard, Timothy. 2008. “The Shaw Brothers Malay Films”. In China Forever: The Shaw Brothers and Diasporic Cinema, edited by Poshek Fu, 154–173. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Barnouw, Erik, and S. Krishnaswamy. 1980. Indian Film. New York: Oxford University Press. Chung Po-yin, Stephanie. 2003. “The Industrial Evolution of a Fraternal Enterprise: The Shaw Brothers and the Shaw Organization”. In The Shaw Screen: A Preliminary Study, edited by Ai-ling Wong, 1–18. Hong Kong (China): Hong Kong Film Archive. Dissanayake, Wimal. 2012 (1993). “The Concepts of Evil and Social Order in Indian Melodrama: An Evolving Dialectic”. In Melodrama and Asian Cinema, edited by Wimal Dissanayake, 189–204. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Effindi Samsuddin, Mohamed, and Rahmah Bujang. 2013. “Bangsawan: Creative Patterns of Production”. Asian Theatre Journal 30 (1): 122–144. Guneratne, Anthony R. 2003. “The Urban and the Urbane: Modernization, Modernism and the Rebirth of Singaporean Cinema”. In Theorizing the Southeast Asian City as Text, edited by Robbie B.H. Goh and Brenda S.A. Yeoh, 159–189. Singapore: National University of Singapore Press. Hansen, Kathryn. 2001. “Parsi Theater, Urdu Drama, and the Communalization of Knowledge: A Bibliographic Essay”. Annual of Urdu Studies 16: 43–63. ———. 2003. “Languages on Stage: Linguistic Pluralism and Community Formation in the Nineteenth-Century Parsi Theater”. Modern Asian Studies 27 (2): 381–405. Harding, James, and Ahmad Sarji. 2002. P. Ramlee: The Bright Star. Selangor, Malaysia: Pelanduk Publications. Hughes, Stephen Putnam. 2010. “What Is Tamil About Tamil Films?” South Asian Popular Culture 8 (3): 213–229. Johan, Adil bin. 2014. “Articulating a Nation-in-the-Making: The Cosmopolitan Aesthetics of Malay Film Music from the 1950s to 1960s”. PhD diss., King’s College, University of London, London. ———. 2018. Cosmopolitan Intimacies: Malay Film Music of the Independence Era. Singapore: National University of Singapore Press. Josselin de Jong, P.E. 1965. “The Rise and Decline of a National Hero”. Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 38 (2) (December): 140–155. Kanda, Tamaki Matsuoka. 1995. “Indian Film Directors in Malaya”. In Frames of Mind: Reflections on Indian Cinema, edited by Aruna Vasudev, 43–50. New Delhi: Rajkamal Electric Press. Kapur, Anuradha. 1993. “The Representation of Gods and Heroes: Parsi Mythological Drama of the Early Twentieth Century”. Journal of Arts and Ideas 23 (4): 85–107. Khoo, Gaik Cheng. 2006. Reclaiming Adat: Reclaiming Malaysian Film and Literature. Vancouver, BC: UBC Press. Morcom, Anna. 2007. Hindi Film Songs and the Cinema. Hampshire: Ashgate. Mukherjee, Madhuja. 2007. “Early Indian Talkies: Voice, Performance and Aura”. Journal of the Moving Image 6 (December): 28. http://jmionline.org/article/early_indian_talkies_ voice_performance_and_aura [Accessed January 26, 2019].

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———. 2017. “Rethinking Popular Cinema in Bengal (1930s–1950s): Of Literariness, Comic Mode, Mythological and Other Avatars”. South Asian History and Culture 8 (2): 122–142. ———. 2018. “Forking Paths of Indian Cinema: Revisiting Hindi Films Through Regional Networks”. In The Routledge Companion to World Cinema, edited by Rob Stone, Paul Cooke, Stephanie Dennison, and Alex Marlow-Mann, 213–224. London: Routledge. Rajadhyaksha, Ashish. 1987. “Neo-Traditionalism: Film as Popular Art in India”. Framework 32 (133): 20–67. Rajadhyaksha, Ashish, and Paul Willemen, eds. 1993. Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema. London: British Film Institute. Sulong, Jamil bin. 1989. “Bangsawan’s Influence on Malay Film”. In Cintai Filem Malaysia [Love Malaysian Film], edited by Perbadanan Kemajuan Filem Nasional [National Film Development Corporation of Malaysia, aka FINAS], 56–60. Hulu Klang, Malaysia: Ampang Press Sdn. Tan, Sooi-Beng. 1989. “From Popular to ‘Traditional’ Theater: The Dynamics of Change in Bangsawan of Malaysia”. Ethnomusicology 33 (2): 229–274. ———. 1997 (1993). Bangsawan: A Social and Stylistic History of Popular Malay Opera. Penang, Malaysia: The Asian Centre. van der Heide, William. 2002. Malaysian Cinema, Asian Film: Border Crossings and National Cultures. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Vasudevan, Ravi. 2010. The Melodramatic Public: Film Form and Spectatorship in Indian Cinema. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

9 FILMFARE, THE BOMBAY INDUSTRY, AND INTERNATIONALISM (1952–1962) Anustup Basu

Introduction The periodical Filmfare, as scholars and aficionados of Indian cinema well know, was launched in 1952 with a particularly high-minded declaration – that it was the first attempt at serious film journalism in India (“Introducing Ourselves” 1952). During the first decade of its existence, this Times Group publication attempted to define a popular-pedagogic method of talking films that could be part of a Nehruvian developmentalist ecology. Much in the spirit of a brave new non-aligned internationalism, it imparted a cosmopolitan fervor to the question of film. The cinema for the new republic had to be not just a cinema for the nation but also, irresistibly, an Indian Cinema in the world. This desire had become especially strong after the screening of Bicycle Thieves and Rashomon in the first International Film Festival in 1951. Seen in that light, Indian cinema had to acquire key ambassadorial qualities. It had to be a scrupulous presentation of the ‘true’ nation and break new frontiers in world film, much like postwar Japan or Italy. It is not that the nationalist bourgeois interest in film began with Filmfare, but it was this publication that systematized it in the long run.1 This chapter is about certain industrial networks of cinema – Asiatic as well as worldly – that were reported and speculated about in the Filmfare pages in an hour of high developmentalist optimism. These, for the large part, were eventually aborted. Yet, a tracing of these possibilities – wild or entirely practicable – gives us a greater insight into an Anglophone, urban middle-class quest for cultural hegemony over mass film that, like the Nehruvian ideology itself, assumed, in time, a passive-bureaucratic form rather than a populistrevolutionary one. This was an elite project of cultural constructivism. It had a wide, almost breathtaking armature of concerns during the first decade of the journal’s existence. It involved soliciting viewpoints on the state-of-the art from a range of personalities at home and abroad, from Raj Kapoor to Fritz Lang, Satyajit Ray, John Huston,

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or Andrej Wajda. It meant covering formal and aesthetic developments in major industries across the world as well as upcoming but relatively distant ones like Hungary, Mexico, or Greece. Prominent directors like Satyen Bose and B.R. Chopra were recruited to cover Film Festivals like Berlin or Venice. There was a general imperative laid on industry leaders to explore and report back, educate, institute, and ensure a temperate moral assimilation of the wonders of the world. In 1953 Kishore Sahu penned his thoughts on Gevacolor and new technologies of the wipe, the dissolve, and special effects procured from Paris while making Mayurpankh (1954). In 1956 Kamini Kaushal, member of the Film Delegation to China in 1955, submitted her reconnaissance of the Changchun Film Studio. On returning from the Moscow Festival in 1959, Bimal Roy weighed in on the latest Russian technological innovation called Circorama in which a film could be projected on six circular screens (see Sahu 1953; Kaushal 1956; Roy 1959). To explore foreign markets for Indian films, Filmfare solicited views from figures as diverse as Eric Johnston, President of the Motion Pictures Association of America; eminent British producer Alexander Korda; or Dr. Edward Hais, a film curator from Czechoslovakia.2 At home, film personages were deemed to be permanent attaches to an ongoing national-cultural mission, welcoming visitors as diverse as the Queen of England, the Egyptian president Nasser (the honorable Chief Guest at the Seventh Filmfare Awards), or the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. I would like to place the cosmopolitan spirit and a concomitant desire for industrial networking in this wider basin of political, aesthetic, and technological concerns of the fifties. This was an overall process of curing a rustic cinema with limited stewardship of the educated middle classes of its own shamefacedness and bringing it in line with a Nehruvian national destining. In and of itself, vernacular approximations of the wonders of the imperial bazaar or Hollywood were not new. The works of Priya Jaikumar (2007), Kaushik Bhaumik (2001), and Nitin Govil (2015), among others, reveal fascinating terrains and complex mergers in this regard. The fifties, however, arrived with fresh bullet points of anxiety, imperative, and hope. This was a stance of industrial networking tempered by a novel spirit of the ‘third way,’ mixing a Bandung internationalism with nation-building in line with what Nehru declared to be a “socialistic pattern of society” in the Avadhi Congress. In this climate, a respectable Indian cinema in the world was needed for a variety of reasons: as an antidote to state suspicion and apathy toward film as an institution, to overcome a general culturalist and moral abomination of the Gandhian kind, and for the financial reconsolidation of the industry in the wake of wartime speculation, draconian taxation, censorship, and other adversities. The desire for a new template of art and ethical mission drew from the desire to create a fresh sense of viewership coterminous with a novel sense of citizenship.

K.A. Abbas and the question of a cosmopolitan cinema: perils and possibilities The Filmfare pages present an archive that illuminates the clamor around this desire for a new horizon of art, recognition, and a cautious, calibrated networking with

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other cultures and capitals. They do so in terms of the standards invoked, the aesthetic categories summoned, the catalyzing powers solicited, unifying measures demanded, and the terms of reference regularized to celebrate or to lament. It was, overall, a metropolitan diagnostic process. To illustrate some of its resonant themes of reconstruction and worry, I will glimpse at two articles on the state-ofthe-art penned by the filmmaker, writer, and left-wing intellectual K.A. Abbas. The first one appeared in the inaugural issue of Filmfare itself and the second one a decade later, in 1961 (Abbas [1952, 1961]).3 They roughly bookend the period I am trying to survey. The essays share certain nodal points of engagement, the first in a spirit of impending danger in the beginning of the fifties and the second in terms of a relatively calm acceptance of that decade’s legacy in hindsight. Between them, among other things, they illuminate the need for worldly inspirations to cure entrenched evils in Indian film as well as mark the measures of caution needed in such exchanges with foreign capital and metropolitan cultures. In that spring of 1952, with the experience of the Film Festival behind him, Abbas identified four major impulses in Indian cinema. The first was a terrain of earthy, socially committed, and ‘literary’ cinemas coming from Calcutta and the Marathi industries in Pune and Kolhapur. That would be New Theaters in the east and Prabhat and Hans Pictures in the west. The second trend was that of a Hollywood style ‘carpentered screenplay’ of assembled attractions. This hailed from Punjab, with Moti Gidwani’s Khazanchi (1941) – a rather ‘crude’ adaptation of Hollywood’s The Way of all Flesh (Louis King 1940) – being a prime specimen. The third template was that of the spectacular ‘million rupees costume fantasy fixed by the southern industry in Madras, of which the stellar example undoubtedly was S.S. Vasan’s monster hit Chandralekha (1948). Lastly, there was a progressive realist tradition inspired by the IPTA, which improved upon the socially committed New Theaters-Saratchandra literary form in Calcutta. IPTA socialist realism had merged with a left-wing cosmopolitan vein of Bombay via films like Bimal Roy’s Humrahi (1944) and Abbas’ own Dharti ke Lal (1946). In 1952, Abbas was hopeful that the exposure to world cinema accorded by the recently concluded film festival would enrich this fourth front. The twin dangers on the other hand were that in the twilight of the big studios – with the inherited culture of wartime speculation and adventurism – Hollywood ‘carpentry’ and Vasan’s ‘pageants for the peasants’ would overwhelm good, artistic intentions. Abbas, in that vein, wondered if Indian cinema was going the Egyptian way in becoming a client culture of Hollywood. He was writing at a moment when the success of Renoir’s The River had attracted a ‘stream’ of Hollywood producers to Indian shores. Rod Amateu’s American-British production Monsoon had just been completed; a film called Jungle was being shot in Madras and other similar ‘exotic’ pictures were reportedly being developed. Between the Americanization of urban life and the siege of homegrown folklore, there was the clear and present peril of the screen being filled with a thousand Gunga Dins born of rustic superstition or Western orientalism. These anxieties and aspirations remained broadly consistent in the Filmfare pages of the first decade. This would be a period of ‘settling’ between artistic

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experimentations and hard-nosed business realities, as a far more sedate and battlehardened Abbas would realize in 1961. Things had not taken an ideal path in the intervening period, but they were not so bad either. In the post-studio era, Indian cinema had followed the same path of balancing art and commerce on the lines of Bombay Talkies and Ranjit Movietones. A southern behemoth like AVM had made the award-winning children’s film Hum Panchi Ek Daal Ke (P.L. Santoshi 1957) along with crowd pleasers like Ladki (M.V. Raman 1953); Raj Kapoor had produced a Jagte Raho (Sambhu Mitra and Amit Maitra 1956) with money-spinners like Barsaat (Raj Kapoor 1949). Abbas himself had penned blockbuster screenplays like Awara (Raj Kapoor 1951) and Shree 420 (Raj Kapoor 1955) in between his socially committed directorial ventures like Munna (1954). In 1957 he had mounted the ambitious Hindi-Russian Pardesi (1957) in collaboration with Mosfilms, featuring an international cast and crew. The shift in cognitive framework impelled by the 1951 Indian International Film Festival and the subsequent commercial release of Rashomon and Miracle in Milan had triggered a Do Bigha Zamin (Bimal Roy 1953), Abbas’ own Rahi (1953), and, indeed, Satyajit Ray’s famous Apu trilogy (Abbas 1961). Meanwhile, the general form of recreational cinema had settled into what Ashish Rajadhyaksha (1986, 1994) has called an epic melodramatic format comprising of a loose string of attractions, with the master genre being what Madhava Prasad (1998) identified as the Feudal Family Romance. It was not the Brechtian fighting popular that Abbas probably craved but was marked decidedly by a “slight upward curve” compared to the crass commercialism of the war years. The populist folklore of AVM and Gemini had not eviscerated the socially conscious film, and there had been no continuous incursion of American or British capital into the Indian film scene following projects like Bhowani Junction (George Cukor 1956) or Harry Black and the Tiger (Hugo Fregonese 1958).4

Internationalism and Bombay cinema of the fifties I will eventually argue that compared to the early years of the fifties marked by a heady republican optimism, the Indian film industries would take a pronounced inward turn in the early sixties. But before that, let us come to certain networking possibilities that were initially welcomed in the spirit of a wider postwar developmental humanism. These cosmopolitan hopes were either lost or severely curtailed by the end of the decade. Some of these lines of exchange will be outside the scope of this chapter, like the early connections between the birth of Sinhalese cinema and the Madras industry, the south’s regular forays into the film worlds in south east Asia, Bengal’s aborted ventures with Burma, or the work of directors like Phani Majumdar and Satyen Bose with the Shaw Brothers in Malaysia. And then, of course, there was Pakistan and the matter of addressing, in the aftermath of caution following primal violence, the severance of linguistic and cultural worlds after Partition. On those fronts too, both in the Punjabi-Urdu west and the Bengali east, it would be a story of progressive loosening of ties in the wake of geo-political realities. Filmfare would assiduously cover Lahore and Dhaka as two of the ‘Film

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Centers’ (as it would Colombo and Rangoon) pertinent to an unfolding civilizational complex of cinema. The periodical would assiduously track and encourage promising yet ultimately aborted ventures like the mega film planned by Filmistan and Pakistaln’s Eastern Studios in 1956 starring neighboring superstars Dilip Kumar and Santosh Kumar (“Film Letter from Pakistan” 1956). It would lament growing cultural and political distance with Pakistan as well as celebrate new ties with Saudi Arabia, Hong Kong, or Iran from the vantage point of an Asiatic responsibility toward representation, reconstruction, and amity in the wake of decolonization. Film – as a 1961 editorial pointed out – could do more for universal welfare than most professional diplomats could dream of. They were crucial channels of understanding in an otherwise alienating dispensation of modern geo-politics and its grand partitions of hitherto organic linguistic and cultural worlds: India and Pakistan, both parts of what was only recently a composite whole, today know very little about each other. Probably it would not be an exaggeration to say that people in India and in Pakistan are better informed – thanks to foreign films – about many of the ways and manners, about many daily problems and pastimes of western countries, than they are about their neighbors. (“A Sensible Scheme” 1961) The West presented a different range of potential and perils, including India becoming a dumping ground for Hollywood, incursion of foreign capital endangering the nation’s cultural sovereignty, and false representation or exoticization. These points of caution apart, there was great interest, especially after Renoir’s sojourn during the making of The River, in masters of world cinema and foreign units working in India. It was expected that these collaborative ventures would inject fiscal discipline and technical nous in Indian production cultures, lead to wider exposure, and even impart an Indian inflexion to global cinematic trends in the fullness of time. Such experiences would smarten self-trained Indian technicians, alert them to the latest trends in camera technology or special effects, and widen Indian cinematic horizons in terms of professional finesse as well as artistic innovation. International collaborations could also, in time, add a sheen to plebian genres like the thriller or costume spectacular, diminish shoddily mounted miracles in the mythological, and improve audience tastes. Foreign production interest in India would eventually install a permanent gateway for greater exports of Indian films. The fifties were full of prestige projects that were enthusiastically announced from time to time in the Filmfare pages. Very few of them were realized. 1952 began with reports of Orson Welles coming to India to film the Biblical epic Salome the Dancer, Hollywood’s Gabriel Pascal planning a three-million-dollar epic on Gandhi scripted by Aldous Huxley, and Raj Kapoor producing and directing a film on the wartime friendship between an Indian and an Italian written by Cesare Zavattini.5 In 1953, there were plans for an ambitious international production on

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the life of Nawab Wajid Ali Shah, starring Ashok Kumar and based on a screenplay by Mulkraj Anand, which was to be helmed by the British filmmaker Herbert Marshall.6 The same year there were production reports of the Indo-French Last Judgment – directed by Henri Decoin, starring Nalini Jayant and Bharat Bhushan – and plans for an ambitious Raj Kapoor project on the life of the mountaineer Tensing Norgay.7 In 1954, Black Leopard of Bengal, an Indo-Japanese feature on the life of the revolutionary Rashbehari Bose was announced.8 20th Century Fox was planning a blockbuster on Alexander the Great, with actors like Victor Mature and Richard Burton in starring roles.9 Around this time, Alexander Korda was making repeated visits to launch two bilinguals: Taj Mahal and Tiger! Tiger! His appointed directors for the first film – Fritz Lang in 1953 and then David Lean the following year – also visited the Bombay industry for pre-production duties.10 Lean was to return in 1955 with a different, also ultimately aborted, project called The Wind Cannot Read.11 There were also persistent rumors that Cecil B. De Mille himself was interested in an epic on the Krishna myth and producer Raoul Levy (And God Created Woman) wanted to shoot a film on Marco Polo in Indian locations.12 Otto Preminger visited Nehru in the middle of the decade for yet another project on Gandhi contracted to Columbia, around the same time John Huston was scouting locations for his Bogart starrer The Man Who Would be King.13 These peregrine possibilities apart, there were brave new domestic aspirations to enter the world stage. It was also an existentialist question; making forays into the world market was seen as the only way to bring the industry out of a protracted slump when it was clear that the domestic exhibition sector would not be allowed to grow. It was not just stalwarts like Kapoor or Mehboob Khan who were interested in foreign collaborations and overseas distribution. Relatively lesser-known or obscure filmmakers like A.R. Kardar, I.S. Johar, or Virendra Desai were also advancing in this direction. Quite early, in 1953, Filmfare declared: Announcements have been tumbling over one another in recent weeks of our producers planning English versions of their various Hindi pictures. One or two have announced French and Italian versions and one supposes, with all the new resurgence of Middle East nationalism and of friendship with Japan and China, we shall soon be hearing of Arabic, Japanese and Chinese versions. Why not? We are out to capture the world market and we may go for it the biggest way possible. (“The Fortnight in Films” 1953, 6) This statement came in the wake of Raj Kapoor’s legendary success with Awara in the Soviet Union, East Europe, and the Arab world, Do Bigha Zamin’s accolades abroad, and the commercial release of Mehboob Khan’s Aan (1952) in the UK and parts of Europe. In the next couple of years, Mehboob ripened ambitions for his own international co-production on the Taj Mahal legend with Hollywood producer Mike Todd.14 Meanwhile, by 1955, Filmistan had launched its first, ultimately ill-fated, international project Bombay Flight 417 starring the Egyptian-born

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Hollywood actor Alexander D’Arcy.15 By 1956, Chetan Anand was working on an Indo-French bilingual called Anjali and planning an even more ambitious project on the Chinese traveler Huen Tsang with China and Russia.16 In 1959, during his visit to the Moscow Film Festival, Bimal Roy was in negotiations with Mosfilms about a story based on the Bhilai Steel Plant; he was also deliberating a project on Cleopatra with the Egyptian star Magda in the title role (Roy 1959, 29). At the first glance, these may seem idle counterfactual queries since the projects never came to fruition. Yet the idea here is not to bewail missed encounters. It is to acknowledge a range of historic possibilities that congealed and then extinguished themselves or forked in unexpected directions, both for entirely material reasons. Abandoned projects or unfilmed screenplays are rarely admitted into core operations of cinema studies. Eisenstein’s Das Capital or Bezhin Meadow, Orson Welles’ project on Don Quixote, or the few reels of Ghatak’s Koto Ojanare do not nearly attract as much critical attention as, say, Schubert’s unfinished symphony, Kafka’s novels, or The Death of Marat. Perhaps we tend to impose an industrial imperative of completion and exhibition when it comes to cinema. However, that does not necessarily mean that the archive of rendered films exhausts a wider imaginative horizon of the cinematic and the thinking and desiring in the world that comes with the cinematic. I acknowledge these lost filmic possibilities of the high Nehruvian era as matters of genealogical pertinence. Part of this inquiry is also to explore whether there actually were sustainable grounds for such commercial as well as aesthetic solicitations. The point is not whether Todd’s tragic plane crash ended Mehboob Khan’s Hollywood dreams. The task of counter-history is to first recognize that these desires existed – sometimes urgently so – and then ask whether a historical merger between the Hollywood analytic and the epic melodrama Khan mastered in was possible at all between the worlds of post-McCarthy America and Nehru’s India. After the initial euphoria, in 1958 Filmfare cleared the air about Khan’s Taj Mahal. The American collaborators wanted foreign actors, an American actor, and “the least acceptable of all” conditions, an American director. Besides, the costs of “filming and publicity in India would be considerably out of normal proportion to the returns expected in both markets.”17 The channels of industrial networking here  – with Hollywood, the Soviet Union, the UK, France, or Japan – were opened by a desire for cultural exosmosis across the commercial spectrum, not just the artistic or the esoteric. For a good part of the fifties, Hindi cinema covered a breathtaking spectrum of genres that were decidedly of ‘foreign’ inspiration: the Arabian Nights style fantasy (Alif Laila, 1953 or Halaku, 1956), the Zorro or Robin Hood-inspired swashbuckler (Nishan Danka, 1952 or Bade Sarkar, 1957), the Roman peplum (King Kong, 1962 or Samson, 1964), the pirate adventure (Baaz, 1953, Pyara Dushman, 1956), the Western (Sipah Salar, 1956), the Tarzan picture (Zimbo, 1958) or even the sci-fi film (Mr. X, 1957). It would perhaps be fair to say that top-drawer Bombay products from the mid-sixties would not present such a broad and thick range of affiliations. The sensationalist genres, Ruritanian romances, and costume spectaculars would certainly survive in later decades but deeper into the poverty-row territory. Such

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films would rarely feature top stars like Dilip Kumar or Geeta Bali or be helmed by directors like Guru Dutt (Baaz) or Mehboob Khan (Aan). The genre pictures apart, there were adaptations from world literature classics that appeared with a frequency that would not mark Bombay cinema of the later decades.18 During this period, Bombay was also responding to De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves with Vasant Joglekar’s Kaarigar (1958) or Josef von Sternberg’s Der Blaue Engel with Anant Mane’s Kalakar (1954). These assemblages were overdetermined by a particular cast of epic melodrama as master principle of nationalist address and absorption of foreign narratives. However, this dominant form itself would not be absolutely secured before the advent of the color-Hill station feudal family romance musicals of the sixties. The early part of the fifties, at least, was a time of flux between spectacle and decorative touches of ‘realism’ inspired by Hollywood, the Soviet Union, or Italy. It was an age of final settlements between hoary energies of what Kaushik Bhaumik has called the bazaar cosmopolitanism of the empire, Parsee theater and the qissa-dastaani tradition, and a caste Hindus ethnoscape of public visibilities and sounds (Bhaumik 2001). In this dynamic state, a desired internationalism for pecuniary benefits as well as artistic recognition took many curious forms. The editorial of July 8, 1955, for instance, declared that the Indian reformist social would never be acceptable to foreigners (“The International Market” 1955). The text reasoned that a fundamental gulf between the perceptual world of the materialist West and a unique Indian complex of “beliefs, habits, prejudices, and predilections” foreclosed that possibility. The interesting suggestion here was that the Indian industry could achieve a metropolitan market and invite foreign partnerships by a technical upgradation of lesser genres like the biographical, the mythological, or the history/legend template. Foreigners could be charmed by grandly mounted stories of men like Gandhi, Buddha, Akbar, or Ashoka; just the lore tradition of Rajputana alone could furnish material to rival or outstrip Ivanhoe, Prince Valiant, or The Knights of the Round Table. A  crucial matter in this project of upgrading to “requisite standards of presentation and technique” would be absolving the genres of the strong cinematic impress of the rustic modes – the Parsee Theater, the Nautanki, or the Ram Lila. Exposure to world markets would automatically discipline the Indian producer, cure propensities toward hybrid song and dance, florid dialogue, supernaturalism, and other vices. Conversely, it was also assumed that no radical transvaluation of values – in terms of class hierarchies, gender roles, or the general invisibility of caste – was quite thinkable when it came to the ‘social’ that ruled the domestic scene. The key to charming audiences abroad, as an upright 1956 editorial put it, was to present a ‘true’ India beyond orientalist predicates of “enchantment, mystery, and wonder” as well as recidivist items of a feudal past (“Lessons from a Master” 1956, 3). The invitation was to call the present to judgment by wrapping legacies of the bygone into futuristic promises and merging essences with transformational desires, all under the auspices of a principled realism. In that vein, Indian cinema had to be resolutely national  – that is in line with a Nehruvian reason of the

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state  – before going international. This was a righteous resolution, so much so that no existent Bombay industry product at that point in late 1956 was viewed to have matched these standards. Even Raj Kapoor’s Awara – blockbuster hit at home and a sensation abroad – did not “fit the bill” as Filmfare conceived it. This text, understandably, was written a few months after Pather Panchali stormed Europe and Cannes in May 1956.

Conclusion Let me conclude by making some provisional distinctions between the various modes of internationalist networking or desires in that direction. I do so with the obvious caveat that the propositions fielded in this context by various individuals and interest groups of the industry (the Bombay-Madras-Calcutta triangulation being the major front) did not present a uniform vision of aesthetic or industrial worldliness. Imperial Hollywood was a special bone of contention in this mix of artistic and commercial ambitions. Nevertheless, on the whole, American cinema had to inspire production discipline, a certain bourgeois economy of dialogue and melodramatic expression, and efficient cause-effect narration. A similar discipline was needed to rationalize the flow of capital in an industry beset by the adventurist legacy of the war-time forties, by which an endless stream of fly-by-night producers visited it like gamblers to a casino. Most importantly, one had to learn technical virtuosity from the Hollywood machine, much in line with the prevailing national spirit of a Nehruvian insistence on a scientific temper, industrial progress, and technological nous. The Bombay internationalism of Filmfare was propelled by desires to be part of this destining process and transformational ecology. It was to absolve the medium from the specter of vice that allowed state and society to view it as infantile and immoral, censor it with a perpetual stance of disapproval and suspicion, and tax it at a rate greater than prostitution or horse racing.19 Apart from Hollywood and the template of socialist realism that came via IPTA (Indian People’s Theater Association), Italian neo-realism, for a good part of the fifties, was seen to be an exemplary ‘plain filming, high thinking’ style suited to Indian budgetary realities. It was also deemed ideal for a reconstructive visual anthropology of the nation. Japan too was a constant point of reference, especially because it was perceived to be a culture similar to India. As Kobita Sarkar once put it, this was not a question of importing the violent Samurai tradition into a Pacific and Gandhian India (as was done with the American Western or the Roman Peplum, for example). However, the Japanese example could inspire one to search for a similar Asiatic mode of cinematic expression tied to the Indian cultural genius. That is, the manner in which Kurosawa, for example, uses a modernist psychology and affection machine to transcode the hard, ‘depthless’ edifices of traditional representation. If such transcoding of Kabuki and Noh was possible, why could the same not be done to the Ram Leela or Parsee Theater? (Sarkar, “Patterns of Violence” 1960). Japan was of interest for another reason. It was an opinion frequently expressed in Filmfare that the Indian filmdom had to be organized along Japanese

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lines. It had to be consolidated into five or six major corporations to end speculation and the tyranny of top actors. Japanese films were made with modest budgets; the industry apparently had no star system and had 7,000 theaters. The films were technically excellent; great advances had been made in color, and hundreds of films were exported annually. In 1955 S.S. Vasan pointed out that a reduction of 29% in Japanese entertainment tax had resulted in a 59% increase in revenues.20 The end of the fifties offered diminishing possibilities in terms of foreign markets and critical accolades abroad, at least for the Bombay industry. Following Do Bigha Zamin’s citation at Cannes (1954) and competitive award at Prague, Jagte Raho’s Grand Prix in Karlovy Vary in 1957, or Mother India’s (Mehboob Khan 1957) Oscar nomination in 1958, there had been no major success in terms of artistic recognition. It was more or less clear, especially after the explosion of the French Left Bank and with the early winds of a global counterculture, that there would be no ‘Indian Wave’ in world cinema any time soon, at least one that would have Bombay as vanguard. Meanwhile Aan’s (Mehboob Khan 1951) commercial opening at the Rialto in London and the circuit releases of Boot Polish (Prakash Arora 1954) and Pather Panchali (Satyajit Ray 1955) in America would not consolidate a Western market for Indian cinema in general. As early as 1958, Filmfare was declaring that the once promising market in the Soviet Union, inaugurated by Raj Kapoor’s Awara, had also disappeared due to governmental bureaucratization, exhibition bottleneck at home, and lack of distribution facilities abroad complemented by draconian foreign exchange regulations (“Earnings Abroad” 1958). The enthusiasm surrounding foreign collaborations traced an upward gradient and peaked during the heady years of the mid-fifties. It began to ebb after the industry was more-or-less ignored in the Second Five-year Plan. There was perhaps an inevitable sense of disenchantment that came with the realization that cinema would not be in the top list of priorities in the development schema or even in plans to present an artistic or literary India to the world. Films and film folk, with rare exceptions like Ray, would not be viewed as ideal cultural ambassadors. There was thus a gradual existentialist acceptance of industrial realities that were there to stay. The government would not accord industry status to the film world for the next four decades. Draconian tax rates would not diminish in a hurry. There would be no fresh incentives to expand the exhibition sector, and as it became clear during the raw stock and carbon import crisis of the late fifties and early sixties, there would be a perpetual scarcity of foreign currency when it came to cinema. The state would turn feature filmmaker in earnest with the institution of the Film Finance Corporation in 1961 but in a direction different from what the mainstream Bombay industry had anticipated for over a decade, ever since the Patil Report of 1951. On the brighter side, it was assumed, despite occasional scares, that cinema would not be nationalized. The retraction of a horizon of internationalist aspirations was an essential part of this ‘settling.’ The Indian government would not, in earnest, promote Indian films in foreign markets. Prohibitive taxes on the entry of exposed film would

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further discourage overseas distribution. Meanwhile, it became apparent that infrastructural deficiencies, logistical problems, money-exchange matters, and red tape in general would deter foreign units from shooting in India or collaborating with Indian firms on projects. The greatest problem was that of a general nationalculturalist and state suspicion of cinema as a whole and the punitive arbitrariness of policy that came with that. It will remain a matter of conjecture whether this attitude was deepened by events like the disappointing results of Rossellini’s India: Matri Bhumi and his personal scandal or the fact that, after early high-minded statements in the Filmfare pages, Fritz Lang would make two of the worst films of his career in The Tiger of Eschnapur (1959) and The Indian Tomb (1959). The point, however, was that this punitive arbitrariness would be a permanent roadblock in the way of creating both an Indian distribution market abroad as well as a growing bourgeois cinematic exhibition sector at home with a sufficient number of high-end theaters to foster a mass cosmopolitan aesthetics that would, for instance, make a Hollywood-Mehboob Khan Taj Mahal a feasible commercial proposition. A  1958 editorial (“Pioneering Work”) pointed out that the entire overseas distribution sector for Indian films was monopolized by four or five firms who sold them at a nominal profit, often to foreign nationals who were close relatives of the Indian exporters. The question of tariffs on repatriated prints, taxation rates, and other factors ensured that very little profit accrued in foreign markets was remitted to India. On the other hand, as a 1962 editorial pointed out (“No Place for Film Culture”), efforts by the Indian Federation of Film Societies to expose Indian audiences to international tastes in cinema were nullified by similar factors. To screen a film like Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Day of Wrath (1943) for example, the society had to obtain foreign exchange of about INR 400, pay customs duties of about 4000, a censorship fee of about 400, and entertainment tax for each showing amounting to about 7,000 rupees. The industrial cosmopolitan networks devoutly wished were thus aborted before they were built. There was very little incentive for Indian producers to make films with an eye on foreign markets, that is, at the expense of local mass appeal. Makers from Hollywood or elsewhere could not look forward to a robust distribution-exhibition sector for Anglophone urban audiences to make collaborations viable. The gradual diminishment of a particular internationalist sensibility – both in terms of a desire to impart a worldliness to Bombay cinema as well as to present a cinematic India to the world – was perhaps part of an erosion of the Nehruvian ethos itself, beginning with the agrarian crisis and the border war with China in the winter of 1962 and then continuing with further conflicts with Pakistan and rising domestic intrigue and unrest. The Cosmopolitan Bombay that Abbas viewed in 1951 would now be the Bombay in the aftermath of the linguistic riots that accompanied the birth of the state of Maharashtra and the beginnings of the Shiv Sena. In this ecology of change and disenchantment, the optimistic and urgent internationalism of the fifties would ebb in the Filmfare pages. That is, international reportage would be isolated from the aspirational modes of Bombay

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film. This would be a relatively quiet settlement, without much ostensible ceremony or lament. The high-minded excitement over impending projects helmed by a Lang, a Huston, or a Welles would give way to occasional C-grade films like Tarzan Goes to India (John Guillermin 1962) or the early arthouse cinema of Merchant Ivory or Conrad Rook’s Siddhartha (1972) that were increasingly ‘parallel’ to Bombay’s industrial priorities. These would intersperse another plethora of scuttled projects like Krishna Shah’s Love and Karma, Fritz Lang’s Moon of Dassehra, the 70mm Alexander and Chanakya, and, indeed, Satyajit Ray’s The Alien starring Marlon Brando and Peter Sellers. Meanwhile, especially after the English version of Dev Anand’s Guide (Tad Danielewski 1965) failed to be released in USA or Europe, the Bombay industry would curb the transcultural aspirations that marked aborted attempts by Chetan Anand, Mehboob Khan, or Bimal Roy in the previous decade. Transactions with the wider world would be limited to importing decorative Technicolor vistas, moral landscapes (Manoj Kumar’s Purab Aur Paschim, 1970), and attractions like the entire Russian circus in Raj Kapoor’s Mera Naam Joker (1970).

Notes 1 For an incisive account of Indian film journalism of the 30s and 40s in India, see Mukherjee 2013; Majumdar 2009; Bhaumik 2001. 2 Eric Johnston (1958) suggests methods to market Indian films in the US. Hais (1958) reveals that Czechoslovakia had by then acquired nine films for exhibition: Do Bigha Zamin (Bimal Roy 1953), Awara (Raj Kapoor 1952), Rahi (K.A. Abbas 1952), Munna (Abbas 1954), Shree 420 (Kapoor 1955), Jhansi ki Rani (Sohrab Modi 1954), Devdas (Roy 1955), and Jagte Raho (Sambhi Mitra, Amit Moitra 1956). There were talks for international co-productions. See also Korda (1953). 3 See Mukherjee (2013) for an overall impression of Abbas’s journalistic career. 4 It is interesting that Abbas should mention Bhowani Junction in this context. The film was shot in Pakistan. 5 See Filmfare (hereafter FE), 1956, 1 (5): 4 for the Welles reference, FE, 1952 1 (10): 9–10 for Pascal and Huxley, and FE, 1952, 1 (13): 6 for Kapoor and Zavattini. 6 FE, 1952, 1 (12): 6. The film’s Mahurat (official commencement of shooting) was reported in FE, 1953, 2 (16): 35. 7 FE, 1953, 2 (5): 7 for the Last Judgment reference. See FE, 1953, 1 (17): 6. 8 FE, 1954 3 (26): 7. 9 FE, 1954, 3 (6): 8 and FE, 1954, 3 (20): 7. 10 FE, 1954, 3 (6): 8 and FE, 1954, 3 (4): 10–11. 11 FE, 1954, 4 (17): 15. 12 See FE (1953) 2 (9): 9. 13 See FE (1955) 4 (1): 11 for Preminger and FE (1954) 4 (4): 6 for Huston. 14 See Sylvia Norris (1958). The meeting between Khan and Todd took place on the 21st of March, 1958, the very day Todd, producer of the Oscar winning Around the World in Eighty Days (1956), innovator of widescreen formats, and husband of superstar Elizabeth Taylor, would board the flight bound for New Mexico that would crash and end his life. 15 FE, 1955, 4 (11): 7 and FE, 1955, 4 (14): 24–27. 16 FE, 1955, 4 (15): 9 17 FE, 1958, 7 (25): 13. 18 One could mention Shakespeare [Kishore Sahu’s Hamlet (1950) apart from numerous adaptations of Romeo and Juliet or Comedy of Errors], Gogol [Chetan Anand’s Afsar (1950)

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based on The Inspector General, Amar Kumar’s Garam Coat (1955) on The Overcoat], Flaubert [Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Anuradha (1960) based on Madam Bovary], Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre [R. C. Talwar’s Sangdil (1952)], or even Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment [Ramesh Saigal’s Phir Subah Hogi (1958)]. 19 See editorial titled “Invidious Tax,” 1954. It points out that, due to high taxation, film makers are afraid to experiment and raise standards by exploring realist themes and documentary techniques. Horse racing is taxed only at 12 to 12.5 %, compared to entertainment tax, which could be up to 70%. 20 See “Axe the Tax,” 1955 on Vasan’s presidential address in a General Meeting of the Film Federation of India in Bombay.

References Filmfare Editorials and Reports “Axe the Tax”. 1955. Filmfare 4 (8): 15. “Editorial: Earnings Abroad”. 1958. Filmfare 7 (26): 3. “Editorial: The International Market”. 1955. Filmfare 4 (14): 3. “Editorial: Introducing Ourselves”. 1952. Filmfare 1 (1): 3. “Editorial: Invidious Tax”. 1954. Filmfare 3 (10): 3. “Editorial: Lessons from a Master”. 1956. Filmfare 5 (19): 3. “Editorial: No Place for Film Culture”. 1962. Filmfare 11 (20): 3. “Editorial: Pioneering Work”. 1958. Filmfare 7 (25): 3. “Editorial: A Sensible Scheme”. 1961. Filmfare 10 (1): 3. “A Filmletter from Pakistan”. 1956. Filmfare 5 (19): 31. “The Fortnight in Films”. 1953. Filmfare 2 (8): 6–9.

Books and Essays Abbas, K.A. 1952. “Indian Films in Fifty-One”. Filmfare 1 (1): 21–24. ———. 1961. “Gods, Kings, and Tramps”. Filmfare 10 (22): 28–31. Bhaumik, Kaushik. 2001. “The Emergence of the Bombay Film Industry, 1913–1936”. Unpublished PhD diss., Oxford University Press, Oxford. Govil, Nitin. 2015. Orienting Hollywood: A Century of Film Culture Between Los Angeles and Bombay. New York: New York University Press. Hais, Edward. 1958. “Indian Films in Czechoslovakia”. Filmfare 7 (1): 19–23. Jaikumar, Priya. 2007. Cinema at the End of Empire: A Politics of Transition in Britain and India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Johnston, Eric. 1958. “Breaking the Barriers”. Filmfare 7 (1): 11–13. Kaushal, Kamini. 1956. “China Diary”. Filmfare 5 (3): 19–23, 27. Korda, Alexander. 1953. “The Cinema Faces Two Revolutions”. Filmfare 2 (3): 10–13. Majumdar, Neepa. 2009. Wanted Cultured Ladies Only! Female Stardom and Cinema in India, 1930s-1950s. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Mukherjee, Debasree. 2013. “Creating Cinema’s Reading Public: The Emergence of Film Journalism in Bombay”. In No Limits: Media Studies from India, edited by Ravi Sundaram, 165–198. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Norris, Syvia. 1958. “Mehboob Khan in Hollywood”. Filmfare 7 (12): 17–21. Prasad, M. Madhava. 1998. Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

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Rajadhyaksha, Ashish. 1986. “Neo-Traditionalism: Film as Popular Art in India”. Framework 32–33: 21–67. ———. 1994. “The Epic Melodrama: Themes of Nationality in Indian Cinema”. Journal of Arts and Ideas 25–26: 55–70. Roy, Bimal. 1959. “Moscow Film Festival and After”. Filmfare 8 (25): 29. Sahu, Kishore. 1953. “Thoughts on Making a Colour Film”. Filmfare 2 (19): 9–10. Sarkar, Kobita. 1960. “Patterns of Violence”. Filmfare 9 (20): 27–29.

10 TRAVERSING THE EVIL WITHIN (1970) Transnational aspirations, stardom, and infrastructure in a cold-war Asia Pujita Guha

Introduction R.K. Narayan’s novel The Guide inspired a Broadway play in 1968 (starring Zia Mohyeddin as the Guide) and two film adaptations in English (1965) and in Hindi (1965) with Dev Anand as the eponymous protagonist. The English version of The Guide (1965), penned by the Nobel Laureate Pearl S. Buck and directed by Ted Danielewski – like the Hindi version – starred Waheeda Rehman as Rosie, the Guide’s romantic interest. Differences over ethnic representation, sexual codes, and morality forced Chetan Anand, who was directing the Hindi version, to quit the project even as Dev Anand began to fast track the Hollywood release. As Vijay Anand replaced his elder brother Chetan Anand midway through the production, a singularly transformed film emerged. The Hindi version not only removed the English version’s post-coital scenes but also diluted the overtones of adultery between Raju and Rosie, who, when the film begins, is married to a workaholic archeologist (ibid). The Hindi version also incorporated a redemptive end for Raju, all the while weaving songs into the narrative. As Dev Anand recollected, “It meant doing the same film twice, for two diametrically opposite tastes, the eastern and the western” (quoted in Ramnath). This attempt to bridge the seemingly disparate worlds, however, fell through. The Guide turned out to be a failure in America. Bosley Crowther, a film critic with the New York Times, noted that, while the film projected a colorful collage of modern India, it seemed remote from the gaudy English-speaking characters performed by Miss Rehman and Mr. Anand, the romance contrived, and the film clumsy and artless overall (Crowther 1965). Despite the failure, Dev Anand received an invitation from David O. Selznick to star in a Hollywood production opposite the American actress Jennifer Jones (Ramnath 2019). Sadly, Selznick died of a heart attack in June 1965, and the prospect died with him. In 1970 Dev Anand made one last attempt at international

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fame by starring in an Indo-Filipino-Hollywood drug-smuggling drama called The Evil Within. The movie, in which Anand played an Interpol agent, wasn’t released either in India or in America. A dubbed version released in the Philippines, while the English version found its way to the Fox Movie Channel. This elaborate enumeration of Anand’s failed attempts at a transnational career and The Evil Within’s failed theatrical life point to the chapter’s first theoretical premise  – failure. My imagination of failure heavily borrows from media archaeology (or generally from Foucault’s archeological framework) in that it refuses to see media history merely as linear sequences of innovation and obsolescence relentlessly driving toward technological progress. Media archaeology is the alternative to this dominant writing of media history, turning to failed projects, wayward shards of experimentation, or even non-linear historical writing that chaotically slides between the past and present (Kluitenberg 2011, 51). Methodologically, failed histories therefore emerge as a key site of intervention, a topos to think through unrealized, impossible desires or their mediation thereof. Failed histories point to a regime of expectations or public imaginaries that remain unmaterialized: an uncovering of historical virtualities that never actualized. This chapter, therefore, turns to the failed history of The Evil Within to excavate the impossible desires that lie at the heart of this production, namely the fulfillment and the realization of a truly transnational film production culture across South and Southeast Asia, mediating crews, practices, and ideas. Transnational productions became more and more common between Hollywood and Europe/Asia as the studio system collapsed in the late 50s (Czach 2013). However, the routes that The Evil Within traverses shows alternative circuits of transnational film production that sidestep, if not displace, the role of Hollywood or Europe as the sole measure of imagining global co-productions; even though these collaborations were operative in a Cold War Asian context and were often aided by Hollywood imaginaries. Following this trail of curiosity, this chapter sets up a biography of The Evil Within and in doing so situates Dev Anand’s career trajectories within a complex map of media networks and imaginaries in Cold War Asia. In The Evil Within, Dev Anand plays an Interpol special agent Dev Varma, who with Rod Stevens (Rod Perry) finishes off a dreaded opium syndicate operating out of Burma. The film intriguingly passes off Rajasthan as Burma. Shot in the alleyways of Jaipur and Udaipur, it renders Rajasthan as an exotic other “participating in Hollywood’s Orientalist construction of Asia in the 1950s” (Meuuf 2013, 32). To interpret the film solely within the framework of Orientalism, however, oversimplifies the many faceted histories of Asia in the late 60s and early 70s that the film was entangled in: both on and off screen. The chapter looks into the variegated circuits, idioms, infrastructures, and narratives the film found itself jostling with: traversing the spy thriller genre of the 1960s, gender and national idioms defined against the shadow of the Cold/Vietnam war, and the Hollywood production ethos that emerged with the post-War decline of the traditional studio system. Before I go into the biography of networks that enmeshed The Evil Within, I find it necessary to define the political context of network analysis and then think how we might tackle it (our second theoretical premise). The familiar media parable

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is that the network emerged as both an intuitive analytic and material framework against the rigid vertical organizations of the bureaucracy (including the film studio), a move concomitantly mirrored in the contemporary emergence of distributed media technologies (Levina 2017). As we critique this presentist argument and historicize the network (see Introduction), it becomes imperative to delineate the network’s historical conditions. We must ask who constitutes the network, its actants and protocols, nodes and edges, its textures in a specific space-time. Further still, writing at a moment in history when networks are spoken in relation to fake news, mob affect, and the increasing verticalization of empires that control and determine our biopolitical lives (Facebook, Google, Amazon. and Apple as the Big Four), it becomes imperative to talk about capital as it is invested in the network (ibid). Even as network infrastructures begin to mimic erstwhile vertical organizations, capital movement in the network imaginary remains fluid and anarchic; yet it extracts value, time, attention, labour and efficiency off its participants. As I posit toward the end, this capitalist network imaginary arrives, through a film like The Evil Within, with Hollywood’s fluid, neoliberal, efficient production ethic overriding the vertical, often inefficient organizational structure of the Hindi film industry.

Networking a cold-war Asia “If Alain Delon from France, Marcello Mastroianni from Italy and Omar Sharif from Egypt could all become international stars there is no reason why Dev Anand from India cannot be one”, said the flamboyant producer Rolf Bayer on the sets of The Evil Within (Reuben 1971, 18). Bayer was not merely comparing these stars for their talent; he was trying to cash in on a particular zeitgeist – Dev Anand was poised to join the scores of international faces filling up Hollywood in the late 60s and 70s (Czach 2013, 104). With the demise of the classical studio era, Hollywood desperately tried out alternative modes of production and stardom, enticing European (and some Asian) filmmakers and actors to come to America to make edgier films reflective of the 1960s youth culture (ibid, 105). Bayer sought to place Anand in a Hollywood populated by the likes of Sophia Loren, Alain Delon, Brigette Bardot, Omar Sharif, and Bruce Lee. Ironically, though, throughout his career beginning the late 40s, Dev Anand’s stardom had been tied to the tropes of Hollywood genre cinema. First, Anand was indebted to the romantic aura of Gregory Peck, from whom it is largely believed that he copied his gestures. And in the 60s, Anand acted in a spate of crime and espionage dramas that crisscrossed Hitchcockian thrillers and the emerging cold-war spy genre (Allen 2006, 215–241). In fact, Filmfare awarded him the epithet of “The Biggest Practicing Bond on this side of the Suez”, who consistently put “cloak and dagger business” and “enchanting props like hats and scarves” on show (“Dev Anand: ‘After You Bond!’ ” 1970, 20). However, unlike James Bond’s suave act, Anand’s sleuthing also had a slapstick, tongue-in-cheek quality like the Pink Panther films. Says Richard Allen, “If Dev Anand’s persona drew on the (English-American) Grant, he also resembled Jean Gabin with his cocky hat (or beret) and earthiness” (2006, 238). Anand’s films

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radiated, thereby, a continental (i.e. French) sense of film style and chic with “modern haute couture, sophistication, and a certain modern sexual license” (ibid). Despite Anand’s initial setbacks (mentioned earlier), by the end of the decade, Rolf Bayer, the American expat producer in the Philippines, came in with a perfect deal to relaunch Dev Anand’s international career. Alternately titled The Evil Within/Inside Out/Passport to Danger/Flower of Evil, this film was to be distributed by 20th Century Fox  – hence the promise of an international release  – and an opportunity to work with an equally global crew. Bayer brought in Filipino director Lamberto V. Avellana and Vietnamese star Kiều Chinh from their previous collaboration Destination Vietnam. Though Avellana had acquired throughout the 1940s and 50s a reputation as a realist filmmaker propagating anti-Communist ideologies, in the 60s he had moved on to the espionage genre. Echoing the Filipino spy series Tony Falcon or Agent X-44, popularized by its lead star Tony Ferrer (Hawkins 2008), Avellana’s films often espoused the supremacy of state sponsored spy-figure, with his suave hyper-masculinity executing the state’s cold-war rhetoric (Benitez 2010). Thus, in this Indo-Filipino co-production, Dev Varma (Anand’s eponymous character) echoed both Anand’s own sleuth films back in India and the cold-war Tony Ferrer imaginaries cultivated by Avellana. Anand’s narrative in The Evil Within is set in the border regions of Burma (though the film uses Rajasthan as a proxy) referencing the infamous Golden Triangle opium trade of the Cold War period. The Golden Triangle refers to the area where the borders of Myanmar, Laos, and Thailand meet at the confluence of the Ruak and Mekong Rivers: one of the most prolific opium-producing areas in the world. Historically, scholars have argued that while the Golden Triangle refers to a geographic location, it has always been made operative as a networked infrastructure: a transnational operation of protocols, people, and architecture that make the global circulation of opium possible. It is “a dyadic cartwheel network” activated and securitized at different points, its wealth accumulating across topological frictions and precarity thanks to a fluid organization that modulates with political uncertainty (Chin and Zhang 2015, 9). It is, I suggest, not a mere coincidence that a film, itself born within a Cold War infrastructural network, speaks to another contemporaneous Cold War network entangled with American geopolitical interests: the Golden Triangle. Not reduced to plot mechanics, the film painstakingly details the opium infrastructure sprawling across the hilly desert landscape of the Golden Triangle – focusing on tribesmen who produce, store, carry, and distribute the illicit drug. Opium in the film becomes a potent currency, exchanging hands and permeating the air. It travels from hipster parties by the beaches to the hallowed corridors of the Udaipur palace – inducing in its consumers a vaporous catatonic stupor. Here escapes are forged by feeding the unsuspecting guards opium or themselves faking opioid stupors, which are commonplace techniques to escape the roving eye of Dev Varma and Kamar Souria (the Burmese opioid heirloom and arch nemesis to Anand played by Kieu Chinh). The real and reel worlds of cold-war networks bleed as well in Kamar Souria’s portrayal, which echoes the colorful life of Olive Yang, a Chinese-Burmese drug-cultivating warlord princess who frequently

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donned men’s clothes (like Souria) and reportedly fell in love with her brother’s romantic interests (in the film, Souria shares a fatal lesbian relationship with Amal, the love interest of Kamar, played by Tita Munoz) (Paluch 2017). While the film admits no historical references, Dev Varma’s dangerous, flirtatious relationship with Kamar Souria echoes the CIA’s and Interpol’s proximity to and complicity within the Golden Triangle drug empire. The film, thus, relays the Golden Triangle as an ever shifty setup relaying between the state, intelligent forces, and drug networks in transnational contexts, rendering the network as a narrative strategy that mobilizes and sutures disparate spaces and places, players and forces within a Cold War Asia. The project was publicized as having been entirely shot on locations across India (the Udaipur palace in Rajasthan), Vietnam, Hong Kong, and the Philippines (“Miscellenea” 1970, 6, 7). It was slated to be released across 42 countries (Reuben 1971, 19) with its post-production completed in the Far East Studios in Japan and sound processed in Japan’s Aoi studios. Its cast included Rod Perry (the well-known protagonist from the TV series SWAT, who also sings the film’s title song), Filipino actress Tita Munoz, Zeenat Aman in her debut international role, and American exploitation star Allen Fritzpatrick as a serial killer within the opium empire. The film was to be shot by Anand’s regular cameraman Fali Mistry, who also shot The Guide. Such was the internationalist premise of this film – an agglomeration of disparate national entities/icons, a distributed network loosely framed within an imagined whole. With its location shooting in India and the mobilization of an Indian crew and press, The Evil Within was a co-production in a processual sense. As a “co-production” it sought to account for a field of exchange where labor was traded and contributions made, the “collaboration traveling and communicating across national boundaries” (Hawkins 2008, 155). While costs were shared between Bayer and 20th Century Fox in India, it involved negotiation and cooperation that “transpired regardless of who was funding the picture” (ibid). In The Evil Within, while Filipinos had the decisive hand, serving as directors and screenwriters and starring in lead roles, Indians also actively contributed as extras, technicians, production controllers, and brokers by providing labors both credited and uncredited. The Evil Within, as its networked anatomy lays bare, was an attempt at transnational co-production that could not squarely fit into any regional or geopolitical context of its time. While this was operative during a cold-war Asia where ties between the Philippines, South Vietnam, and America were quite intimate, this film itself mobilized South and Southeast Asian connections that one could not square off so easily between either cold-war binaries or even alternative political alliances like the Bandung movement (Basu, in the same volume). It was a singular assemblage that interfaced existing geopolitical networks without exactly aligning with it. Such a “un-alignment” not only points to the degree of autonomy of film histories vis-à-vis molar geopolitical frameworks but also to the fact that production histories are often piecemeal enterprises: ad-hoc and itinerant, its actants often scavenging through existing resources to create something. Considering Bayer was not a regular producer – he stopped producing after The Evil Within – and that rampant fly-by-night productions were commonplace in Philippines in that era,

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The Evil Within was a fragile unstable network, with Bayer mobilizing earlier connections with Avallena and Chinh and grafting it onto newer connections with Anand and Mistry. My references to itinerancy and un-alignment do not merely bring up notions of failure and incompletion to explain The Evil Within’s forgotten status in public memory. On the contrary, I bring up questions of un-alignment and itinerancy to speak of how the question of failure is built into the film’s networked biography. Failure, as I read it, is not merely the opposite of success but the degree of defiance or difference from norms and standards considered as ideal. Taken to its logical conclusion, failure is the embodiment of defiance itself – an unbecoming of rules, unruliness (Halberstam 2011). The Evil Within, then, embodies a failure to remain within and align with national or regional geopolitics and production networks or even to stabilize into set systems and routes, as it were. Most importantly, it is a failure or refusal to engage with Hollywood as the central locus or mediating function of large scale commercial transnational film production. The Evil Within is a failure that imagines a transnational network between nodes in the Global South, which, while seeking the assistance of Hollywood, remains ungoverned by Hollywood might. At its helm were Asian directors and a cast and crew that operated with a certain deft autonomy in their aesthetic and industrial demands and could mobilize large industrial capital. This sidestepping of Hollywood also points to the fact that The Evil Within itself only interfaced with “fringe” players from Hollywood itself: actors on the B-circuit, Blaxploitation stars, and Bayer, an American on the “fringes” of the American empire in its former colony, the Philippines. It is, therefore, with a return to failure that we excavate a moment in film production that imagined alternate production routes, sidelining dominant Hollywood narratives, with an Asian crew and cast at the helm of operations. It is interesting, then, to think about failure at a moment when an Asian film has gained American predominance, a “success”, as it were (aka Parasite’s success). A  turn to failure pulls up not only a longer genealogy of Asia and Hollywood transnational film networks but also articulates a potency for industrial domination that was being set into motion with co-productions with The Evil Within in the late 60s (though not to argue this was the first or a singular example of that effort.)

Infrastructure and the import of Hollywood In The Evil Within, Kiều Chinh was both the foreign imported sexpot – an object of desire for Dev Varma in the film – but also figured outside of it, the film’s archvillain. Throughout the film’s production process Chinh acquired equal billing with Dev Anand, appearing as the film’s female lead in Indian press. Her appearances shifted between her bikini-clad centre-spreads – of which there was one in Filmfare (“Stars Shooting” 1971, 37–38) – to her more official status as a cultural diplomat for Vietnam, which largely defined her stay in India. A certain officiousness always marked her presence – from dinner at the Udaipur Maharaja’s palace (the primary location for the film) (Bhatia 2011, 49) to formal photo-ops in front of the Air India Maharaja (“Film Folk-us!” 1970, 49; MacDonald). At the Filmfare Awards of

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1971 ( “A Touch of Pageantry” 1971, 11–17), alongside John Grierson, Chinh was the honorary guest, appearing in a silken Áo dài (the narrow longform tunic representative of “Vietnamese culture”), her hair tied up in a neat bun. There, she presented the Best International Film Award to Richard Attenborough’s epic drama, Oh, What a Lovely War!: a Hollywood musical that critiqued America’s role in the First World War. Filmfare captioned this as “Irony Unintentional” (“A Touch of Pageantry” 1971, 17). With the Vietnam War hovering in public discourse, a Vietnamese actress felicitating an anti-war American film could only perhaps be read as a paradoxical twist to history: an acknowledgement of America’s efforts to deescalate the war back in her country. Amidst scripted speeches and formal dinners, cold war politics had seeped into Filmfare awards, and even personal interviews with Chinh were not devoid of it. Amidst her praise for Indian hospitality and its vivacious culture, she recollected briefly how the ensuing war had forced her to move from Hanoi to Saigon in the wake of the nation’s partition between communist and non-communist blocs (“Miscellenea” 1971, 13; The Learning Network 2012).1 The Indian media ecosystem could not separate Kiều Chinh’s stardom from her status as cultural diplomat from Vietnam, even as it telescoped the contemporary narrative of the Vietnam war into the domain of the personal. Even as Filmfare created the perfect anti-war tableau with Chinh handing Attenborough the award, her experience of displacement mitigated through war had to be mediated by personal narratives of loss and exit in personal interviews only. Chinh’s presence was therefore simultaneously public and personal: a performance on behalf of the state yet devoid of embodied expressions of lives caught in war. As a node in a fractious infrastructural network, Chinh’s identity was in flux; mutating, shape-shifting across industrial contexts. It fluctuated between performances on behalf of the nation-state, that is, cultural diplomacy as enacted through official appearances on one hand and affective performances of the self through narratives of migration and exile on the other. However, mediating between the state and the self was Chinh’s articulation of her role as a catalyst in the industry: of the infrastructural changes she could mobilize within Saigon’s fledgling film industry. Quickly glossing over her personal tragedy in the Times of India interview, Kiều Chinh mentioned that she was planning a South Vietnam film festival in India with P.V. Prabhu, the country head of 20th century Fox (ibid). She saw The Evil Within as a move within a larger flow of personnel between South Vietnam and India – many of whom, after being trained in Bombay, went back and started a vibrant film industry in Vietnam. She pointed out that the cameraman of the Chinh starrer Từ Sàigòn tới Điệnbiên Fủ (From Saigon to Dien Bien Phu) had been trained under Fali Mistry (a close associate of Dev Anand and cameraman of The Evil Within). She declared further that stardom was a rarity back home, the star a cog within Saigon’s 30 studios and 100-odd producers. Through her interviews, Chinh made visible the infrastructural network within which she found herself: the architecture of people, protocol, and technologies that made circulation of films and ideas possible (Larkin 2013, 327–343). Far from merely undertaking the exchange of cultural symbols, both Chinh and Prabhu discussed the material networks (such as the

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South Vietnam film festival) engendered by the migration of people and technologies. Prabhu explained how The Evil Within would benefit India infrastructurally, and all the “blocked funds” that had been reserved could now be spent in financing the film (about Rs. 50 lakhs, out of a repository of Rs. 5.5 crores) (“Dev Anand Angrezi Film ‘Inside Out’ ke Nayak” 1970, 17). “Blocked funds” was the industry term for the percentage of Hollywood profits that could not be repatriated into America, hostage to India’s pressing requirement for foreign currency reserves and capital (Govil 2015, 80–81). Facing accumulating blocked funds, Hollywood companies operating in foreign countries like India turned to co-production with local film producers and funded overseas location shootings. As Prabhu made clear, The Evil Within fitted within this modus operandi, opening up opportunities where both reserved blocked funds and those generated from the film could be used in turn for financing and maintaining film theatres in India (amongst other possible uses): a perfect feedback cycle of creativity and bureaucracy. Hollywood’s use of blocked funds to subsidize production and exhibition within India was a wider discourse on “friendship at a moment when the West desperately sought Indian cooperation in the Cold War”, a sweetener for its offshore alliances (ibid, 83). Apart from the use and generation of blocked funds, The Evil Within brought about a direct encounter with the Hollywood mode of production itself. Not so much a direct encounter with Hollywood-based crew and labour – but an indirect encounter with its production ethic conveyed through the Filipino film crew. In Philippines, the fall of the studio system had by then already generated the quickie: an efficient, small-scale production model that could produce films practically overnight – a system that would later transform into the pito-pito formula (pito referring to seven, seven days for shooting and seven days for editing) in the 80s and 90s. If on, one hand, the quickie indexed a post-industrial, post-studio setup, on the other hand, it intensified Hollywood’s ethics of efficiency and speed. Through the studio era, Hollywood had created a specific division of labour, a standardization of craft and its practitioners. Hollywood was “business filmmaking” – neither artisanal nor inefficient productions with inordinate delays and astronomical overhead costs (Reuben 1971, 13). Such was its aura as a repository of techne that it could triumph over both Third World sluggishness and the cultural fetish for the individual star. Hollywood efficiency, thus, was not only an on-set time-bound affair but, as reporters noted, was also a way of living, a life ethic. At a time when Hollywood releases were regulated in India and direct co-productions unheard of, The Evil Within became a node for Hollywood production ethics to bleed into a Hindi film industry widely imagined as the site of failed, inefficient production ethic. It was through a transnational network of Global South co-productions that managerial filmmaking entered India and set the course for a neoliberal production imaginary. A neoliberal production ethic is often characterized as a capitalism of the rhizomatic order: piecemeal, connected, characterized by leaks, flows, and connectivity. It is an itinerant network that works with actants who behave “strategically and constantly look out for opportunities to enhance his or her social capital by making connections, always more connections, on which he or she can market

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his or her human capital, network and personality” (Vandenberghe 2008, 881). In The Evil Within, the key figure auguring the transition of Indian film culture to its neoliberal ethic was production controller Yash Johar. Even the star, Dev Anand, could not escape it, jauntily waking up dreary-eyed reporters at six am (ibid). Hollywood’s efficiency, as articulated by film journalists in India, was a networked, well-regulated, infrastructural affair  – complete with rigorous pre-shoot planning, hair and make-up schedules, and the distribution of scripts in advance for the cast and crew to prepare well beforehand. Such was their ruthless planning and mathematical precision, it was said, that even infrastructural breakdowns, such as the halt of a shoot due to aberrant cloudy weather, could be counteracted with the use of on-site lights and generators: a novelty during difficult outdoor shoots in the deserts of Rajasthan. Retakes were thus few and far in between, especially with the action captured on multiple cameras/angles simultaneously. Production for the film was wrapped up in 31 days flat: a fact that reporters credited to Rolf Bayer, “who appeared to stand on guard, with nothing missing his eagle eye” (Reuben 1971, 14). His attitude, they observed, “was strict and it was easy to see that he took his work in deadly earnestness” (ibid). Efficiency in this vision lay not in mammoth, unwieldy production systems but in a “producer driven unit system of production” helmed by a hands-on producer-manager always there on set and a new star-figure on the horizon: the production controller (Steinhart 2019, 71). The production controller’s prominence emerged at a time when Hollywood, through collaborations and co-productions, was moving into a post-Fordist model of “flexible specialization” (Christopherson and Storper 1989, 331–347). In both America and the Philippines, the vertical studio model had disintegrated, leading to the mushrooming of small producers and “package unit” systems where labor was contracted on a project by project basis (Steinhart 2019, 94). Traditionally, the production controller took care of pre-production arrangements, negotiated and updated studio bosses, and oversaw everyday production affairs (Steinhart 2019, 97–99). However, the spate of outdoor offshore location shooting in the 60s meant that the production controller became the first site of contact: procuring local labour, talent, and administrative clearances for the incoming foreign crew. Yash Johar, who controlled production for The Evil Within, had by 1970 become a frequent collaborator and production manager at Dev Anand’s Navketan studios and had also over the years “specialized in organizing and managing location shooting for visiting film units from abroad” (Reuben 1971, 18). Johar’s stardom was linked to his ability to imbue and adopt the Hollywood mode of filmmaking, his charisma linked to his “indefatigable, resourceful and hardworking” manner (Reuben 1971, 18). It is then hardly a historical coincidence that he would establish India’s foremost neoliberal studio setup, Dharma Productions. Nevertheless, as reporters noted, ruthless efficiency did not take away Johar’s amiable personality. He was the proverbial Father Christmas on set – potbellied, generous, ageing, with silvery bushy sideburns. Care became a primary work ethic for Johar. He managed to find time for journalists, feeding them well, personally herding them out to the locations before shoot began. Johar’s personality thus sought to bridge the ruthless,

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neoliberal efficiency epitomized by Hollywood and the filial, affective relationship embodied by the erstwhile Bombay studio patriarch.

Conclusion This close association with Hollywood did not proceed without its fair share of trials and tribulations. The two-year ban on BBC for exhibiting Louis Malle’s scathing documentary series on India – one that the government felt was a deplorable portrayal of the nation – was looming on the horizon. The sets of The Evil Within were regularly visited by government officials who monitored the film’s representation of the nation on screen, trying, as they said, “to lock the stables after the horses had left it” (Reuben 1971, 19). While shooting proceeded uninterrupted, the release of the film was banned on similar grounds. The censors refused to clear a film that showed opium smuggling within the confines of the Indian landscape (Anand 2019). Thus, the film was never released either in India or in the US (though it made it to the Fox movie channel), and only a dubbed version of it was released in the Philippines. With such a limited release, Dev Anand’s dreams of international stardom melted in thin air. In its recent resuscitation on the internet, viewers have speculated upon The Evil Within, illuminating reasons for the failure of Dev Anand’s transnational stardom. “The actor was fluent in English,” rued film reviewer Mondo70, “earning a college degree in English lit, but his delivery was blandly urbane, almost more philosophical than witty, and he was probably too old for his action-romance role by this time” (Wilson 2012). Another reviewer commented on Anand’s stiffness in the sensual scenes, kissing Kieu Chinh and Zeenat Aman rather bluntly (Mondal 2016). The failure of Dev Anand’s transnational career apparently lays bare the fact that stardom is not merely made up of signs and images but is built around the material coordinates of gestures and mannerisms (his diction and command of English in particular) and the star’s bodily presence (his stiffness in sensual scenes and his aging body in action sequences). Transnational star mobility is thus not only about the travels of star images but also about “how actual star bodies cross borders” (or fail to do so), encountering ethnic and national constraints (Czach 2013, 96). Anand’s failure essentially revealed his inability to transpose from the local to the global, overcoming cultural demands, performative habits, and linguistic specificities. Both in the case of The Guide and The Evil Within, this failure became apparent because of Anand’s command over English that was laden with an extra patina of sophistication: unreal and almost elocutionary. This added to the fact that he was clearly ageing by then, unfit to be playing a secret agent: his slight slouch and pompadour hair more distractions than productive. In 1970, the year The Evil Within was produced, Dev Anand’s Johny Mera Naam was, however, released, going on to becoming a major hit in the country. Similar to The Evil Within, Anand essayed an undercover cop out to bust a smuggling racket. This alteration between success (Johnny Mera Naam has also maintained critical success over the years), and failure meant that Anand, transitioning into the 1970s, was a thriving vernacular star, who

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found he was unable to relocate beyond the locatedness of his origin. Vernacular stardom, as Alexandra Schneider and Vinzenz Hediger describe, is a “regionally specific form [of stardom] drawing power in film actors’ dependence upon a variety of factors such as language, genre, role, and interaction and coordination of cinema with other mass media” (Schneider and Hediger 2009, 66). Among other things, vernacular stars lack “an element of distance” characteristic of transnational movie stars and are closer to their originary contexts, unable to produce a disruption with their umbilical cord (ibid). Following Miriam Hansen’s use of the term vernacular (in vernacular modernism) to describe the local inflection of a transnational phenomenon such as modernism, vernacular stardom emerges through an overt local inflection of star performativity: a regional argot of the star image too rooted in contexts such as language, genre, or even the medium. In its located form of stardom, Johnny Mera Naam drew upon Dev Anand’s established domestic career, his familiarity and command over Hindi, and his repeated portrayals of tongue-incheek, flirtatious sleuth figures: performative traits that clearly proved a hindrance in the international circuit. While Anand’s vernacular stardom continued to thrive, his transnational aspirations withered away to dust. He continued to transplant a bit of Hollywood into India – sustaining his vernacular stardom – but was unable to relocate himself to the seeming expanse of transnationality, relegating it to the domain of failure, as it were.

Note 1 Chinh here is referring to Operation Passage to Freedom, a 300-day window that allowed practicing Buddhists, Christians, and gentrified families to resettle from North to South Vietnam (The Learning Network 2012).

References Allen, Richard. 2006. “To Catch a Jewel Thief: Hitchcock and Indian Modernity”. Hitchcock Annual 15: 215–241. Anand, Vijay, dir. 1965. Guide. India: Navketan International Films. Anand, Dev. 2019. Romancing with Life: An Autobiography. Narrated by Derek Denzel. Delhi: Amazon Audible. Avellana, Lamberto V., dir. 1970. The Evil Within/Passport to Danger/Inside Out. Aarbee Productions. Benitez, Francisco. 2010. “Filming Philippine Modernity During the Cold War: The Case of Lamberto Avellana”. In Cultures at War: The Cold War and Cultural Expression in Southeast Asia, edited by Tony Day and Maya Hian Ting Liem, 21–44. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publication. Bhatia, Sidharth. 2011. The Navketan Story: Cinema Modern. New Delhi, Harper Collins India. Chin, Ko-Lin, and Sheldon X. Zhang. 2015. The Chinese Heroin Trade: Cross-Border Drug Trafficking in Southeast Asia and Beyond. New York and London: New York University Press. Christopherson, Susan, and Michael Storper. 1989. “The Effects of Flexible Specialization on Industrial Politics and the Labor Market: The Motion Picture Industry”. Industrial and Labor Relations Review 42 (3) (April): 331–347.

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Crowther, Bosley. 1965. “Pearl Buck Is Adapter of Scenic ‘Guide’ ”. The New York Times, February 10. www.nytimes.com/1965/02/10/archives/pearl-buck-is-adapter-of-scenicguide.html. Czach, Liz. 2013. “The Transnational Career of Geneviève Bujold”. In Transnational Stardom: International Celebrity in Film and Popular Culture, edited by Russell Meeuf and Raphael Raphael, 95–114. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Danielewski, Tad, dir. 1965. Guide. USA: Stratton Productions. “Dev Anand: ‘After You Bond!’ ” 1970. Filmfare, October 22. “Dev Anand Angrezi Film ‘Inside Out’ ke Nayak”. 1970. Madhuri, October 22. “Film Folk- US!” 1970. Star and Style, December 25. Govil, Nitin. 2015. Orienting Hollywood: A Century of Film Culture Between Los Angeles and Bombay. New York: New York University Press. Halberstam, Judith. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Hawkins, Micheal Gary. 2008. “Co-Producing the Postcolonial: U.S.-Philippine Cinematic Relations, 1946–1986”. Unpublished PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles. Kluitenberg, Eric. 2011. “On the Archaeology of Imaginary Media”. In Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, edited by Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, 48–69. Berkeley, CA/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press. Larkin, Brian. 2013. “The Poetics and Politics of Infrastructure”. Annual Review of Anthropology 42: 327–343. The Learning Network. 2012. “April 30, 1975 | Saigon Falls”. New York Times, April 30. https://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/30/april-30-1975-saigon-falls/. Levina, Marina. 2017. “Network”. In Keywords for Media Studies, edited by Laurie Ouellette and Jonathan Gray. New York: New York University Press. MacDonald, Tammy. “The Evil Within 1970s Still Photos”. Flickr. www.flickr.com/ photos/9078758@N08/sets/72157645636601008/ [Accessed July 20, 2018]. Meuuf, Russell. 2013. “John Wayne’s Japan: International Production, Global Trade, and John Wayne’s Diplomacy in the Barbarian and the Geisha”. In Transnational Stardom: International Celebrity in Film and Popular Culture, edited by Russell Meeuf and Raphael Raphael, 31–52. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. “Miscellenea”. 1970. Times of India, September 20. ———. 1971. Times of India, April 25. Mondal, Sayantan. 2016. “From Dev Anand’s Back Catalogue, the Indo-Filipino Movie About an Evil Princess and Opium Smuggling”. Scroll, August  16. https://scroll.in/ reel/813312/from-dev-anands-back-catalogue-the-indo-filipino-movie-about-an-evilprincess-and-opium-smuggling. Paluch, Gabrielle. 2017. “The Female Warlord Who Had C.I.A. Connections and Opium Routes”. New York Times, July  21. www.nytimes.com/2017/07/21/world/asia/burmese-warlord-olive-yang.html. Ramnath, Nandini. 2019. “ ‘The Guide’ in English: The Story of Dev Anand’s Abortive Attempt to Storm Hollywood”. Scroll, February  3. https://scroll.in/reel/911745/devanands-guide-the-back-story-of-the-english-version-is-far-more-interesting-than-themovie. Reuben, Bunny. 1971. “Filming American Style”. Star and Style, March 19. Schneider, Alexandra, and Vinzenz Hediger. 2009. “Functionaries with Hearts of Gold: TV Comedians as Vernacular Movie Stars in Switzerland”. In Stellar Encounters: Stardom in Popular European Cinema, edited by Tytti Soila, 65–72. New Barnet, Herts: John Libbey. “Stars Shooting”. 1971. Filmfare, April.

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Steinhart, Daniel. 2019. Runaway Hollywood: Internationalizing Postwar Production and Location Shooting. Berkeley, CA/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press. “A Touch of Pageantry”. 1971. Filmfare, May 7. Vandenberghe, Frederic. 2008. “Deleuzian Capitalism”. Philosophy and Social Criticism 34 (8): 877–903. Wilson, Samuel. 2012. “DVR Diary: The Evil Within”. Mondo70: A Wide World of Cinema, August 25. http://mondo70.blogspot.com/2012/08/dvr-diary-evil-within-1970.html?s howComment=1406747897544#c7472624366902108325.

PART III

Media geographies, agencies, and technologies

11 HABITS AND WORLDS Malayalam cinema’s travels with the gulf Ratheesh Radhakrishnan

1985: The Malayalam language comedy, Akkare Ninnoru Maaran (The Groom from the Other Bank, dir. Girish, ANM hereafter) is set in rural Kerala.1 The local rich man, Thankappan Nair, intends to give his daughter’s hand only to a Gulfukaran – a man employed in the Persian Gulf.2 His nephew Achuthan, his daughter’s suitor according to caste custom, holds a grudge against him for usurping the property on which his mother had equal rights. Nair, like his extra-filmic caste peers, is ready to disregard custom in a new aspirational world, one that now promises wealth that originates akkare, literally, ‘the other bank’. Achuthan gets an offer to go to the Gulf. The visa costs a princely 8,000 rupees. After Nair refuses to help and humiliates him, Achuthan hatches a plan with his friends. He spreads the news that he is going to the Gulf and hides in a lodge, not too far from his village. To add credence to his story and to publicize his prosperity, he recruits the owner of the lodge, Alikoya, who hopes to become a film star, to meet his uncle in the guise of an Arab man, wearing a ‘kandura’ and a white ‘keffiyeh’. The meeting is the comic highpoint of the film, re-appearing in recent times, extracted in comedy shows and on YouTube, parodied and memed. Alikoya speaks gibberish with Arabic sounds and words thrown in, and the Malayalam translation is offered by Achuthan’s friend Pavithran. According to Pavithran’s imaginative translation, Achuthan saved the Arab man’s life and is now the manager of most of his business concerns. The latter intends to start businesses in India, to be overseen by Achuthan. Achuthan has forgiven his uncle and speaks highly of him. The masquerade falters toward the end when an over-excited Alikoya responds to Nair in Malayalam. But the friends save the show, and the charade is successful. The comic strain of the sequence comes from many elements; significant among them is the style of body humor that was being reimagined and put to new uses at that time in Malayalam cinema.3 The appearance of a Malayali in the kandura marks out the comic body in the frame.

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2007: Chinese origin Chu Min and Mukundan, a Malayali, meet in Dubai. The two characters from the Malayalam language film Arabikatha (Arabian Tale, dir. Lal Jose) are in Dubai hoping to extricate themselves from their dire economic conditions. In Malayalam cinema and in Kerala’s popular discourse, ‘Persian Gulf ’ and ‘Communism’ are indexical of economic and political aspiration respectively, making possible a convincingly narrated shared destiny for these characters. While they do not speak each other’s language, they are additionally disadvantaged by their lack of proficiency in English. The lack of English, the currency of exchange in capitalist Dubai, configures this narrative: the first encounter between the two characters is facilitated by cinema  – as narrative and as an object. Mukundan, having lost his job, encounters Chu Min in a park where she sells pirated DVDs, mostly of Malayalam films. She attempts to entice Mukundan into buying the DVDs. More important than the content of the DVDs (the film with its aesthetic logic, stars and so on) is the object itself – the DVDs that Chu Min thrusts into Mukundan’s hands, an act that results in their fates intersecting forever. These two films, released 22  years apart, are nodes in the history of Malayalam cinema’s encounter with the Persian Gulf. Curiously, the actor Srinivasan, an emerging comedian in 1985, a celebrated actor-screenwriter-director by 2007, played the roles of both Alikoya and Mukundan. While the economic consequences of migration from Kerala to the Persian Gulf have been of interest to social scientists, the aesthetic field that migration opens up is yet to garner the attention it deserves. As a consequence, the subject of these inquires has mostly been an economic one, placed in the temporality of regional development, within a capitalist frame. Scholars have argued that the famed ‘Kerala Model’ of social welfare without production was sustained by the remittances from the Gulf (Jeffrey 1992, 217–219; Tharamangalam 1998). This chapter, while focusing on the configuration of on-screen object relations and industrial networks of cinema, engages with the aesthetic consequences of the region’s encounter with the Gulf and the disjuncture that it creates in the visual regime of the regional modern. How does this aesthetic experience foreground and re-organize the multiple temporalities that form our contemporary? From the macro – the economic, the developmental – the chapter scales back our attention to the gradual via ephemeral traces – fleeting images of fast fading newness of objects and affects that they leave behind. The reorganization of an ‘object-world’ effected by an encounter with the Gulf is commonly understood in representational terms  – indicating the consumerist turn in Kerala. In contrast, I  suggest that the films in question are indicative of the encounter between multiple temporalities of the region. The focus here is on the objects, the kandura and DVDs among them, that are transacted and deployed on and off screen and the visual and aural consequences of these transactions and deployment. Further, the paper argues that masquerade, a modality of being in transit, constitutes habitation, outside oppositions such as universal/particular, migrant/native, cosmopolitan/vernacular. It examines the role of cinema, both as the domain of configuring subjective experience and as an object of transaction, in visibilizing the ‘worlds’ of a non-integrated subject of the region, formed

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simultaneously within discourses of national sovereignty and multiple geographies that are temporalized as past and the future. Instituted through the governmental logic of the nation state, regional formations are distinct entities not necessarily in opposition to the homogenous empty time of the nation. In what follows, I hope to make sequences from films open out to sequences from other films disavowing textual unity to individual film texts. This follows a methodological imperative that approaches cinematic texts as foundationally non-integrated objects, which often collapse under the weight of scholarly conceptual impositions that attempt to integrate them. From the late 1970s, the mise-en-scène of Malayalam cinema underwent a shift in its constitution of a regional ‘object world’, with a number of new objects populating it. In an earlier iteration, focusing on the macro shift in the film industry and textual practices in the context of remittances from the Gulf, I described this shift as follows: Opulent sets of huge colourful bungalows and winding stairways, people wearing colourful ‘modern’ costumes, song and dance sequences picturised in sets suggesting five-star hotels and bars, melodramatic acting styles and garish make-up represented the excesses of the new economy that was being thematised without being named. (Radhakrishnan 2009, 220) Within a linear understanding of what constitutes the region and its subject, the recognition of this shift would indicate an integration of the Malayali, the subject of the region, into a new consumer economy. Instead, I argue that a new grammar of what Sara Ahmed (2006) calls “orientations” is foregrounded in these films creating an affective register as the site for the refashioning of the subject of the region and for the region itself. For Ahmed, orientations involve different ways of registering the proximity of objects and others. Orientations shape not only how we inhabit space, but how we apprehend this world of shared inhabitance, as well as “who” or “what’ ” we direct our energy and attention toward. (3) Malayalam cinema of the time painstakingly put together a new world of objects, gestures and affects, thus re-orienting the horizon of desire of the subject, reconstituting it. Ahmed suggests that orienting involves a pedagogy. To be oriented is to be at home, or, to put it differently, it is the generation of habits, of involuntary modalities of being. “ ‘[O]rientations’ depend on taking points of view as given” (14). Following her suggestion that the question of orientation becomes pertinent only in moments of disorientation (5–6), I  argue that Malayalam cinema of the 1980s created the condition for such a disorientation and re-orientation, effecting a disjuncture in the aesthetic regimes of the region.

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Objects, bodies, reorientations Let’s return to the sequence from ANM that we began with. Alikoya in the kandura presents us with an instance of intense disorientations, in terms of language and mistranslation, bodily comportment and habits.4 The costume makes Alikoya overperform. At one point, Alikoya, wearing the kandura, lurches at Nair in an unprovoked sudden movement caused by excessive delight and laughter, throwing Nair out of his chair. This is a breach in the codes of bodily conduct within the social universe of the film, as intimate physical contact is not the norm in the region. Tom Gunning (2010), discussing Chaplin, points to how the ensemble of the performing body – parts that are real and fitted, make-up and costumes create an excess that refuses to be contained. Gunning’s suggestion that “Chaplin’s natural ‘body in process’ provokes laughter because of his violation of social taboo, breaching the codes of repression that had been imposed with the growth of middle-class propriety in bourgeois culture” (240) is pertinent to understand the temporary release of the bodily restraint that we witness in Alikoya. Alikoya’s act provokes an excessive and uncontrollable laughter from Pavithran, who is translating, throwing the frame out of orbit. The radical alterity of the kandura is a necessary condition for this moment to pass without a violent response from Nair; the spectators, laughing, are in on the gag. The regime of bodily restraint that is being disrupted here has a history that dates back to late 19th-century Kerala when, as Udaya Kumar (2016) demonstrates, genres of writing were engaged in crafting the bodily grammar of the modern subject in the region. The surface of the body of the modern subject, tasteful with the right clothes and adornments and a restrained disposition, was indicative of its interior world and was the founding of an aesthetic regime within which taste is negotiated. It is these normative modes of bodily habitation that are put to crisis by the presence of the kandura in ANM. A further elaboration of this could be seen in Visa (dir. Balu Kiriyath 1983), involving a different piece of clothing, the ‘nightie’. In Visa, we get an elaborate sequence featuring objects, following the return of the Gulfukaran. About ten minutes long, the sequence introduces us to a spectrum of objects: watches, perfumes, clothes, flasks, photo frames, alcohol and a VHS tape – taken out of a suitcase like a magician from his hat by the Gulfukaran and displayed for the benefit of his wife. In a telling moment, the hero takes out a satin night gown – or ‘nightie’ as it is known – and offers it to his wife, a new sartorial import from the Gulf.5 She demurs initially. For her, wearing a nightie is an act of immodesty, an improper conduct within the norms of middle-class decency. The husband insists and deploys the language of desire, encouraging her to wear the nightie. She reluctantly takes it and leaves the frame and the room. He gets out of the bed and switches on the television and the VCR – the latter a recently introduced and rare object  – and inserts a VHS tape. A  music video of an ABBA song, a practically unknown genre then, starts playing. The music and the music video, new imports from the Gulf, are proxies for what we do not see – the wife changing into a nightie. Soundscape and new technologies stand in for the exiled visual as a conduit of desire. As the wife appears wearing the nightie,

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the camera that the husband had set up clicks automatically, to her shock. Now that she has worn the nightie, she opens up to her husband (and to the spectator) of her desire and longing, initiating acts of intimacy. One takes “a position upon [objects], which in turns gives [one] a position”, writes Sara Ahmed (27–28). But the scene is far from over. In the post-coital morning, the husband plays her an audio tape in which he had stealthily recorded their amorous conversations from the night before. The sequence re-organizes and makes available for public scrutiny the private; it also functions as an instruction manual of the new ‘object-world’. The hidden private, the unsaid of desire, is generated and displayed through a play of new sounds and images and a new network of bodies, emotions, gestures and objects. This assemblage foregrounds the non-regional/national infrastructure that constitutes the contemporary from an elsewhere, unhinging the regional subject, making her confront desire, demanding ‘re-orientation’. This moment in Visa foregrounds the disjuncture that opens up many, albeit fleeting, possibilities for re-orientation, including that of the gender order. Here, we encounter what I  call an ‘objectdesire-economy-pedagogy-subject’ complex. The ‘object-desire-economy-pedagogy-subject’ complex appears for the first time in Swayamvaram (One’s Own Choice, dir. Adoor Gopalakrishnan 1972), in the character ‘smuggler’ Vasu. We first encounter Vasu as a patron of the neighborhood sex worker, linking his economic engagement with his moral compass. This inaugurates the aesthetic delegitimization of the Gulf economy, a narrative trope with a sustained and long trajectory in Malayalam cinema.6 At one point, Vasu offers the protagonist Viswam a watch: “A nice thing has come. It’s a ‘made in. . . . ’ You can pay later”, he tells him; “made in . . .” indicating a foreign product. The shots of this transaction are lit such that the watch shines through in the dark, creating an aura, elevating its status from being a mere watch to an object of desire and excess. The watch appears in multiple films through the next three decades of Malayalam cinema, indexical to the world elsewhere. In many films, we encounter small-time smugglers engaging in the sale of watches. It existed as part of an economy of commerce and of gift giving and in many instances involved pedagogy – how to do, and how to be with, an elaboration of which we encountered in the discussion of the sequence in Visa. In the sequence from Visa we saw how the soundtrack, coming from visible objects on screen  – the television, the VCR and the tape recorder  – indicate a relationship with invisible bodies that are in the act of being re-oriented through dress. But objects do not always operate with the logic of the visible. A  watch in ANM introduces another layer to this already embedded visual and cognitive world, similar to the music video in Visa. Thankappan Nair, searching for a Gulfukaran for his daughter, meets one of them early in the film. The conversation that follows is interrupted by an incessant beeping sound that startles Nair. His reaction is similar to what happens when Alikoya jumps on him. The Gulfukaran explains that the source of the beep is his watch, which sounds an alarm every half an hour. This sonic disorientation initially frightens Nair. But the explanation impresses him, adding to his already existing fascination with the possibilities opened up by

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the Gulf. Here, unlike in Swayamvaram where the deployment of light and shadow reify the object investing it with moral value, the watch in ANM, like the nightie in Visa, is quickly integrated into the mise-en-scène and engaged through a pedagogic act, aided by a careful use of sound. The distinction proposed by Michael Chion between acousmatic and ‘visualized’ sounds is useful (Chion 1994, 71–73). Chion characterizes cinematic sound that is not immediately linked to its source as acousmatic and suggests that it implies a certain amount of mystery. More acousmatic than ‘visualized’, the sounds in the previously discussed films can be located either after the fact, in its source (the TV, the watch), or in the visual universe in which the film sets itself up (the woman changing clothes) signaling to as yet invisible and immaterial sources elsewhere. If in Visa the narrative delinks and relinks sound with body, in ANM the sound is initially without source. Unlike in Chion’s argument where the acousmatic is a formal category that aids genres such as mystery films, horror etc., in these films, the acousmatic indicates desire located outside the frame and outside the diegetic universe the film and its spectator inhabit. In both films, the domain of desire, yet to be incorporated into the established order of things and their orientations, makes disorientation the structuring principle of its aesthetics.

Region and its subjects In Akkare (The Other Bank, dir. KN Sasidharan 1984), the government clerk Gopi, after encountering a few young Gulf returnees in the village, desires to go there himself. His meetings with these young men bring him into contact with various objects that originate in the Gulf. The first encounter happens as Gopi’s official jeep breaks down. Johnny, heading home from the airport, having just come back from the Gulf, offers to take him along. The car that Johnny travels in, contra the broken-down jeep, is the space from where Gopi’s desire is launched. A pack of imported cigarettes function as the token of the exchange between them. The line of objects from the Gulf creates chaos in Gopi’s life, the last of which is a spray for enhancing sexual prowess, mistaken by his wife initially as a body spray, which wreaks havoc. The film proceeds as Gopi, following the advice of these men, attempts to learn a series of skills including typewriting and tailoring, eventually losing his standing in his social universe. The film ends with him, now expelled from his job, employed as a porter at the local bus stand, carrying other people’s luggage, especially the bags of those who have arrived back from the Gulf. The film suggests that the young men migrate because of hardships in the village, unlike Gopi, who is employed, confirming available sociological insights on migration that early migrants were mostly unskilled laborers.7 Gopi is a figuration of the subject of new desires fashioned by migration. The fact that the film does not move out of the village to tell its tale results in an imagination of the region as a palimpsest, where multiple temporalities organized around multiple desires are embedded. Gopi, his wife – who is equally fascinated by the objects that arrive from akkare – and the young men who return from the Gulf inhabit multiple worlds that cannot

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cohere into a singular ecosystem, creating this palimpsest. While Gopi exists in the dominant time of the region – the unmoving broken jeep its metaphor – the wife lives in a dream world populated by objects, and the men exist in the time of the transnational movement of labor (where we saw Chu Min and Mukundan meet in Arabikatha). It is significant that the different levels and forms of labor – lower bureaucracy, the habitat of the upper-caste middle-class and physical labor in the case of the Gulf migrant – encroach into each other’s worlds in the film. The film thus is a critique of the subject of the region – as exemplified by Gopi – but also of the desires that migration has engendered. The new objects and subjectivities that are formed through this history rupture the fabric of Malayali modernity, a temporal order founded on excessive pride of the Malayali’s own tasteful aesthetics related primarily to literature and cinema by opening it up to multiple ‘worlds’.8 In the realm of aesthetics, the moment foregrounds the allure of kitsch within modernity. New architectural forms with unusually bright and ‘garish’ colors (denigrated as tasteless), for example, started mushrooming in Kerala, altering its landscape. This included cinema halls, shopping centers and, of course, houses. Vivek Vilasini’s photography project Housing Dreams (2012) – large scale photographs of brightly painted houses in Kerala – captures this ruptured temporality by marking these houses simultaneously as material objects made of concrete and as colorful dream objects. His photographs produce a collage-like effect, the bright-colored houses appearing as images arranged around lush, green images of landscapes. They create an otherworldliness in a familiar world where these images break open the linearity of modern time, rupturing the image order of the region.9 The effect of verisimilitude that is one of the properties of these non-staged photographic events forces the viewer to acknowledge the different possibilities of ‘worlding’ that are available. What appears to be dissonance here is in fact the mainstay of the contemporary, or of the image’s contemporaneity, which, as Giorgio Agamben (2009) reminds us, is a “relationship with time that adheres to it through a disjunction and an anachronism” (41) forcing the viewer to encounter the eccentricity of one’s own temporality. An instance of contrast where such a rupture is resisted is in the film Varavelpu (The Welcome, dir. Sathyan Anthikkad 1989). The hero, an uppercaste Hindu returning from the Gulf, invests his money in buying a bus to be used for public transport. This enormous object, linked to the Gulf through the capital invested, is integrated into the local financial and aesthetic economy, foreclosing any possibility of rupture and ensuring that the dissonances are made invisible.10 This coincidence of objects and its resultant disappearance from view effects the continued salience of singular linear temporality in the modern, in its ideologically dominant form. For Agamben, “[T]hose who coincide too well with the epoch, those who are perfectly tied to it in every respect are not contemporaries, precisely because they do not manage to see it” (41). At this point, in connection with this argument about the hegemony of the homogenous time of the region, let’s get back to the lineage of the kandura that starts appearing in ANM. Let’s quickly trace the trajectory of this dress in Malayalam cinema, as it is, in time, incorporated into the meaning-making apparatuses of the dominant discourse of the region.

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Nadodikattu (The Gypsy Wind, dir. Sathyan Anthikkad 1987), could be seen as a continuation of the regime of transactions that begin with Swayamvaram. The apotheosis of the figuration of the illegal middleman, inaugurated by ‘smuggler’ Vasu, is Gaffoor in Naadodikattu, who transacts in human beings by helping them to illegally migrate to the Gulf.11 The actor Srinivasan (once again) and the thenemergent superstar Mohanlal play young unemployed men who, at a point of despondency, decide to leave for the Gulf. Gaffoor promises to send them to the Gulf in a dhow, which, according to him, though bound to California, can be routed through Dubai. He tells them that, once they reach the Dubai coast, they have to wear a kandura to blend in and know enough Arabic, which would be to say “Salaam aleikkum” and “Va aleikkum as-salaam”. On the dhow, as the coast becomes visible, they are asked to jump into the sea and swim. Reaching the beach, they quickly change into the kandura. After some misadventures, they reach the city, only to realize they are in Madras (now Chennai) on the east coast of India. In the city, unlike in Achuthan’s village, they are first mistaken for smugglers who are incognito and later for detectives who are incognito. The ‘smuggler’ – the harbinger of black/illegal economy with Gulf links – and its counterpart, the detective/ policeman, were figures that were familiar in the narrative of urban development after 1970s. Kandura, intended as a device to blend in, now makes the two men and their aspirations stand out as sore thumbs, read by the film’s universe, not just by the spectators as in the case of ANM, as constituting masquerade. In 2007, we see Srinivasan in Dubai. In Arabikatha, he plays a Communist activist, “Cuba” Mukundan, who ends up in Dubai to earn money to ameliorate himself from the debts his father had accrued. The kandura appears in Arabikatha prominently only in the latter half of the film, closer to the end, when we see Mukundan, after a period denoting a transformation that is unsignified in the text, as a laborer in a farm in the desert, somewhere in the Emirates. He explains that he has turned the desert into a farm and that he finds peace and equality “among the cattle and the trees”. The disciplining of the body to produce a subject of labor involves becoming comfortable in a kandura, now refigured as a no-frills unmarked dress. The kandura gets re-integrated to its original place – not Kerala, not capitalist Dubai but in the desert of pure labor. It disappears from view, integrated into the newly imagined visual regime, as it becomes the authentic habitat of precapitalist labor. From something that was always at the risk of slipping off, making for an unstable performing body, the kandura, the performative piece of clothing, is turned into a ‘habit’, a “choreographic tool” as Erin Manning (2016) calls it, that “directs our movement, organizes our time, makes experience predictable” (89), from masquerade to bodily integration. In ANM, the kandura is visible, on the surface, in disjuncture with the region and hence at odds with the subject, while in Arabikatha, it is invisible and hence reflects the subject’s truth. Arabikatha, however, doesn’t end in the desert. Mukundan returns to Kerala after having inhabited the kandura. He wears a shirt and trousers and re-enters Kerala in torrential rains. The experience of the Gulf will only be considered transient, washed away by rains, by authorized narratives of the region

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such as Arabikatha, invested as it is in crafting the authentic Malayali. A detailed analysis of the last sequence, one I have attempted elsewhere, suggests that, for the subject of the region that Mukundan is, the kandura as habit is but a bad dream to wake up from.12 Unlike a Mukundan, Achuthan, who pretends to be a Gulfukaran returning with appendages such as sunglasses and carrying heavy (often empty) suitcases, Alikoya and the two unemployed youth in Madars recognize the kandura as masquerade. For them, being a subject of the region is itself a masquerade, one that can only be visibilized through the encounter with habits of the Gulf, the traces of which endure. Arabikatha provides us with the grounds for engaging with this history in aesthetic and visual terms but imagines the region and its visual universe in normative terms, with the Gulf refigured as a no man’s land, not of habitation but of transformation and return. The figures who do not physically travel and the ones who return with the traces of their travel in the ‘object-desire-economy-pedagogysubject’ complex, unlike Mukundan, present a palimpsestic region where multiple temporalities that constitute the contemporary can be unfolded.

Prints, tapes, travels VHS tapes and DVDs point to another circuit of transaction, where new imaginaries and ‘real’ material transactions create networks that rework the geographical and cultural maps of the subject of modernity. The transaction of cinema started in the early 1970s with the export of Malayalam cinema to the Gulf in the wake of migration following the oil boom. In Arabikatha, Cuba Mukundan meets Chu Min over a conversation about cinema, as she is selling pirated DVDs. The material object of the video disk is the currency of conversation, along with a few other objects of consumption, between a Malayali and a Chinese, who meet in Dubai, both engaging in remittance economy and Communism, as explored by Dubaibased artist Lantian Xie in his video installation and performance piece Speech Acts for Two Screenings (2017). Malayalam cinema’s encounter with the Persian Gulf in the early 1970s, initially as a new exhibition sector and soon as a source of capital, was more decisive for its future than is often acknowledged. Between 1975 and 1990, production figures shot up; production companies having direct links with repatriations from the Gulf emerged during the time to produce mainstream productions, and the number of cinema halls increased during this time, the latter as part of massive investments in real estate. We have already seen the impact it had on the body of the films of the time. While the object-world that we examined was narratively linked to the Gulf migrant only in the early 80s, the earliest impact of the Gulf was a direct result of remittances by the late 70s itself. Budgets of films went up, multi-starrers were being produced and the frames became richer (Radhakrishnan 2009, 219–220). As the illegal economy was making its way to the screens in the case of mainstream industry in late 70s, there were mounting anxieties in film magazines about the new cinemasmuggler nexus that is alleged to have replaced the cinema-moneylender nexus, indicating a shift of focus from Madras to Bombay, from land-based transactions to

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sea-based ones. It was not just in the field of the popular that the Gulf was leaving its traces. Films by FTII graduates such as Ashwathama (dir. K.R. Mohanan 1978) and Swapnadanam (Journey Through a Dream, dir. K.G. George 1975) had direct and indirect links to capital from the Gulf. The first Malayalam film shot on location in the Gulf was the FTII-graduate-directed Vilkkanundu Swapnangal (Dreams for Sale, dir. M. Azad 1980) – the shooting of the film took place in 1979. Malayalam cinema was available in the Gulf from the late 1960s at the very least. An article that appeared in the magazine Gulf Malayali in July 1979 provides a picture of the presence of Malayalam cinema in the region. It lists cinema halls in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Sharjah that show Malayalam films. For distributing Malayalam films in Gulf, it costs rupees 40 to 50 thousand for black and white and rupees one lakh for color, for a five-year period . . . we are referring mainly to screenings in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Sharjah, as collections from other parts of the Gulf is miniscule. In such places, films screen just for a day. (Suresh 1979, own translation) One reads complaints about interpolations in cinema and the desire for reform in Malayalam magazines that come of the Gulf in the late 1970s. Subtitling, which was a rare but existent practice, was made compulsory in 1977, and the author suggests that this has had an adverse effect on Malayalam cinema exhibition, as it causes delays. This was before video. The celluloid prints that left the Kerala coast returned to the region by the mid-1980s in the form VHS tapes, with Arabic and English subtitles. Their point of origin was clear: “Thomson Videos, PO Box 6419 Dubai” or “A Video Rafa Presentation, Par Dubai” many a VHS tape declared its source. Such transformation of invisible material of cinema, celluloid, to one that could be held in one’s hand, the magnetic tape and the possibilities of domestic consumption it opened up had an effect on production practices and film narratives. The tapes travelled not only back to Kerala. It was only after the advent of VHS tapes that Malayali expatriates in Saudi Arabia could access cinema in Malayalam, initially smuggled from other countries (Salaam 2005). The time of these transformations was also when new spectatorial engagements with cinema emerged, which would become the foundation for a dynamic cinematic public in Kerala, centered around varying forms of exhibition and consumption practices. These, emerging out of popular modes of engagement such as cinema halls and of state and civil society initiatives such as film societies, were accelerated with the advent of digital formats and the access this provided.13 In the field of production, the most striking development has been the success of ‘Islamic home films’, a “home film industry [that] emerged in the . . . late 1990s, and flourished in the 2000s with about 200 productions”, boasting of “a wide network of circulation in about four districts in Kerala, and six countries in the Middle East, with an average viewership of 500,000 people” (Menon and Sreekumar 2016, 6; Karinkurayil 2019). The many loops between the countries of

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the Persian Gulf and Kerala create ever-new forms of engagement, which include filmmaking, labor practices and affective engagements that reshape the geographies of the mind.

Horizons of the region Commenting on the long-term history of the southwestern coast of present-day India, Dilip Menon suggests that the receding image of the sea is central to the historiographical imagination of the nation/region (India/Kerala). He demonstrates how a sea-bound orientation of the region gave way to one that, at the expense of the sea, turned to the land (Menon 1999, 2005). One has to think with this perspective to grasp the new geographies of the mind that the Persian Gulf engenders for the subject of the region, the ‘Malayali’. The ubiquitous term akkare, which appears in a number of film titles in the 1980s and 1990s, literally means ‘the other bank’, in some instances, ‘beyond’. A  popular Malayalam song from Chemmeeen (Shrimp, dir. Ramu Kariat 1965) talks about those who go to the akkare of the ocean (kadalin-akkare) to fish, with an implication that they come back rather than merely aspire for some other place, spiritual or material. ‘The other bank’ denotes an immediate sense of proximity, which is material in nature and is accessible. The common use of the term akkare to refer to the Persian Gulf is telling – creating a sense of ‘worlds’ that are closer to each other and contiguous, one that is imaginable and materially available. This re-inscribes water not as the limit of the world but as something that indicates multiple worlds, desired and accessible. This allows the subject to inhabit multiple temporalities through an affective engagement. Artefacts such as VHS tapes, smuggled goods, home videos and Vilasini’s photographs of colored houses, a kaleidoscope where these affects are writ large, provide us with a glimpse into the ‘worlds’ of the Malayali in the contemporary. The attempt in this chapter was to think through various objects from dress to electronic equipment to vehicles to houses that re-organized the aesthetics of Malayalam cinema since the 1970s and about cinema itself as an object of transaction that tell us about the multiple modalities of inhabiting the region. One of the conditions that enables the reimagining of the dominant narratives about Kerala has been the material practices resulting from encounters with the Gulf. These practices engender a centrifugal force that, anchored in the governmental practices of the modern state, promises its rupture and reformulation. It is in the lives of those for whom the sea continues to carry a promise, such as the characters in the films discussed and the migrants who appear as the data for social science research, who are often denigrated for their cultural and aesthetic tastes, including their often fanatic love for popular cinema, that these practices and their force are discernable. There is a larger object world that carries the material and affective traces of these wide-ranging shifts yet to be unearthed – contained in ephemera such as letters, songs, photographs, moving images and personal belongings. One will have to turn to this archive of the everyday, hidden away in the crannies of official narratives in a constant dialectic of containment and excess, to re-territorialize the ‘worlds’ of the

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region and its subject. It is only in practices of masquerade and becoming an object among objects of transactions that we make ourselves visible as subjects, always in transit, as migratory, even while immobile.

Notes 1 Kerala is on the southwestern coast of India, an administrative unit formed in 1956 based on of its dominant language, Malayalam. The people of Kerala are referred to as ‘Malayalis’. 2 ‘Persian Gulf ’ denotes, primarily, the GCC countries: Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates but also includes Iraq. It combines a mythical imagination (Persia) of the Middle East and ‘the Gulf ’ from everyday language. 3 Significant here are the films by Priyadarshan, often written by Srinivasan, featuring an ensemble of actors – Menaka, Lissy, Sukumari, Mohanlal, Shankar, Mukesh, Jagadeesh, Srinivasan, Jagathy Sreekumar, Nedumudi Venu etc. Priyadarshan’s first credited film as director was Poochakkoru Mookkuthi (A Nose Ring for the Cat 1984), purportedly based on Charles Dickens’s play The Strange Gentleman (1836), remade in Hindi as Hungama (Mayhem 2003). Girish, director of ANM, was an associate to Priyadarshan. 4 Sulayman Khalaf provides a discussion of the changing meanings of the Emirati dress for men and women, the nuances of which are not present in their invocation in Malayalam cinema. The kandura, Khalaf writes, was seen in the 1970s and 80s as the costume of the oil-rich traditional elite, figured in contra-distinction to the modern futuristic Dubai. It was refigured in the 1990s as national dress – the regalia of the modern Emirati, the rightful citizen of the global city of Dubai (Khalaf 2005). 5 There is enough anecdotal evidence to suggest that the ‘nightie’ entered the Malayali life world via the Gulf. The prevalence of abaya as a commonplace costume for Emirati women appears to have a direct link to the popularity of the ‘nightie’, a dress that goes back to Victorian nightgowns. 6 For a linear history of Gulf narratives in Malayalam cinema, see Radhakrishnan 2009. In the 1990s, films that attempted to re-imagine the crumbling Hindu upper caste feudal world consistently invoked the ‘illegitimacy’ of the mobility that the Gulf has provided for socially marginal figures. 7 The economic and sociological aspects of Gulf migration have been the subject of numerous studies. See, for example, Zachariah et al. (2002). For fictional accounts, see Benyamin (2012) and Unnikrishnan (2017). 8 The terms ‘world’ and ‘worlding’ are used in this text in its relation to ‘temporality’. Pheng Cheah writes, World . . . is originally a temporal category. Before the world can appear as an object, it must first be. A world’s unity and permanence is premised on the persistence of time. We are only in a world, we are only worldly beings, if there is already time. Because it opens a world, temporalization is a force of worlding. (Cheah 2014, 303) 9 Vivek Vilasini’s work appears to be engaged in an effort to create temporal disjuncture, even though it is often presented and understood as cosmopolitanism. 10 In Akkare-Akkare-Akkare (Beyond the Other Bank, dir. Priyadarshan 1990), the ‘thing’ (saadanam) is turned into a pure symbolic currency for exchange, without a referent. Here, the two bumbling police detectives, in the US to investigate a case, are instructed to say, “We have the ‘thing’ ” (saaadanam kaiyyilundu) as a code at the airport so that their contact can identify them. This leads to a hilarious sequence with the two men roaming around the airport loudly chanting “saadanam kaiyyilundu”, resulting in being mistaken as fellow smugglers by an international drug gang – underlining the illegality of things that are not subjected to proper human transactions including the use of referential language.

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11 Illegal migration is central to any story of the relationship between Kerala and the Persian Gulf, as elaborated in Pathemari (Dhow, dir. Salim Ahamed 2015) and in a number of personal memoirs that have appeared in print. 12 For an analysis of Arabikatha and the concept of ‘region’, see Radhakrishnan (2016). 13 The revival of cinephilic engagement in Kerala in the late 90s and early 2000s with the arrival of digital is often traced back to filmmaker C. Sharatchandran, who returned after a stint in Riyadh with digital equipment and tapes. The annual VIBGYOR documentary film festival can be traced back to Sharatchandran’s early initiatives in exhibiting films on a digital format under the name ‘Nottam: Touring Festival’. He was also one of the earliest in Kerala to shoot films on VHS.

References Agamben, Giorgio. 2009. What Is an Apparatus? And Other Essays. Translated by David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Ahamed, Salim, dir. 2015. Dhow [Pathemari]. Allens Media. Ahmed, Sara. 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Anthikkad, Sathyan, dir. 1987. The Gypsy Wind [Nadodikattu]. Casino International. ———, dir. 1989. The Welcome [Varavelpu]. KRG Movie International. Azad, M., dir. 1980. Dreams for Sale [Vilkkanundu Swapnangal]. Marunadan Movies. Benyamin. 2012. Goat Days. Translated by Joseph Koyippally. New Delhi: Penguin Books. Cheah, Pheng. 2014. “World Against Globe: Toward a Normative Conception of World Literature”. New Literary History 45 (3): 303–329. Chion, Michel. 1994. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. Translated and edited by Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press. George, K.G., dir. 1975. Journey Through a Dream [Swapnadanam]. KK Films Combines. Girish, dir. 1985. The Groom from the Other Bank [Akkare Ninnoru Maaran]. Sooryodaya Creations. Gopalakrishnan, Adoor, dir. 1972. One’s Own Choice [Swayamvaram]. Chitralekha Film Co-operative. Gunning, Tom. 2010. “Chaplin and the Body of Modernity”. Early Popular Visual Culture 8 (3): 237–245. Jeffrey, Robin. 1992. Politics, Women and Well-Being: How Kerala Became ‘A Model’. New York: Oxford University Press. Jose, Lal, dir. 2007. Arabian Tale [Arabikatha]. Microcoms Entertainment. Kariat, Ramu, dir. 1965. Shrimp [Chemmeeen]. Kanmani Films. Karinkurayil, Mohammed Shafeeq. 2019. “The Islamic Subject of Home Cinema of Kerala”. BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 10 (1): 30–51. Khalaf, Sulayman. 2005. “National Dress and the Construction of Emirati Cultural Identity”. Journal of Human Sciences 11: 230–267. Kiriyath, Balu, dir. 1983. Visa. Priya Films. Kumar, Udaya. 2016. Writing the First Person: Literature, History, and Autobiography in Modern Kerala. Ranikhet: Permanent Black, Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla and Ashoka University. Manning, Erin. 2016. The Minor Gesture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Menon, Bindu, and T.T. Sreekumar. 2016. ‘ “One More Dirham”: Migration, Emotional Politics and Religion in the Home Films of Kerala’. Migration, Mobility, & Displacement 2 (2): 4–23. Menon, Dilip M. 1999. “Houses by the Sea: State-Formation Experiments in Malabar, 1760–1800”. Economic and Political Weekly 34 (29): 1995–2003.

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———. 2005. “Things Fall Apart: The Cinematic Rendition of Agrarian Landscape in South India”. The Journal of Peasant Studies 32 (2): 304–334. Mohanan, K.R., dir. 1978. Aswathama. Mohan Muhammed Films. Priyadarshan, dir. 1984. A Nose Ring for the Cat [Poochakkoru Mookkuthi]. Sooryodaya Creations. ———, dir. 1990. Beyond the Other Bank [Akkare-Akkare-Akkare]. GP Films. ———, dir. 2003. Mayhem [Hungama]. Venus. Radhakrishnan, Ratheesh. 2009. “The Gulf in the Imagination: Migration, Malayalam Cinema and Regional Identity”. Contributions to Indian Sociology 43 (2): 217–245. ———. 2016. “The ‘Worlds’ of the Region”. Positions: Asia Critique 24 (3): 693–719. Salaam, N.K. 2005. “Beyond the Seven Seas: Film Viewing of Saudi Malayalis” [Ezhaamkadalinakkare: Saudi Malayaliyude Cinemakazhchakal]. Pachakuthira 2 (5) (December): 13–15. Sasidharan, K.N., dir. 1984. The Other Bank [Akkare]. Sooryarekha Films. Suresh 1979. “Malayalam Cinema in the Gulf ” [Gulfil Malayalacinema]. Gulf Malayali Magazine 1 (8) (July): 25–26. Tharamangalam, Joseph. 1998. “The Perils of Social Development Without Economic Growth: The Development Debacle of Kerala, India”. Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 30 (1): 23–34. Unnikrishnan, Deepak. 2017. Temporary People. Brooklyn, NY: Restless Books. Vilasini, Vivek. 2012. Housing Dreams. http://vivekvilasini.com/portfolios/gallery-4/ [Accessed July 24, 2018]. Xie, Lantian. 2017. Speech Acts for Two Screenings. https://vimeo.com/lantianxie [Accessed February 12, 2019]. Zachariah, K.C., K.P. Kannan, and S. Irudaya Rajan, eds. 2002. Kerala’s Gulf Connection: CDS Studies on International Labour Migration from Kerala State in India. Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala: Centre for Development Studies.

12 CELLULOID VISIONS IN A VIDEO FRAME Bhojpuri cinema between insurrections and catharsis Akshaya Kumar

For most of the twentieth century, film production in India has been confined to three major centers – Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata. The regionalist overtones of the eventual split of distribution territories in peninsular India had much to do with the slow recasting of the political map from presidencies and princely states into new political-administrative regions as states (Srinivas 2013; Prasad 2014). In the north, particularly in the Hindi-speaking states, no corresponding reorganization took place in the political realm. Mumbai-based production of Hindi melodramas thus held together the celluloid fantasy of a formal political unit, where the formal vocabulary of an aesthetic constellation marked by heterogeneous mode of production would overlap with the political landscape of the Hindi-speaking nation (Prasad 1998), even if with distinct Urdu pronunciations. It is only after the coming of digital video films that the Hindi-speaking landscape of cinema in north India is beginning to hold on to differential constellations. While films in Haryanvi or Santhali may be produced and distributed locally via media bazaars or pavement vendors, the Bhojpuri films that I mainly discuss in this chapter sit on a bridge between Mumbai and the Bhojpuri-speaking region (see Kumar 2018). The celluloid era of Hindi cinema remains the key reference point for films in Bhojpuri, often overlaid with distinct regionalist overtones, even if inconsistently. In this chapter, therefore, I look at industrial networks of north India via the moorings of the film form. As I would argue, regardless of the industrial networks, the film form across the video industries upholds the deep memory of celluloid (see Rajadhyaksha 2009). The destiny of Bhojpuri film industry is as closely tied to its Hindi counterpart as that of the Bhojpuri language is to Hindi. To that extent, the rise of Bhojpuri cinema is also tied to the ‘Bollywoodization’ of Hindi cinema (Rajadhyaksha 2003), implying the emergence of a vast culture industry in which the box office played an increasingly smaller part. Bhojpuri films were not constitutive

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of this culture industry, but they were endorsed by the set thus ejected out of the reorganization of Mumbai-based media industry. The mutual intelligibility of Hindi and Bhojpuri also affirms an infrastructural bond, as the two industries have found themselves entangled over last two decades (Kumar 2016b). As workingclass migrants (construction laborers, rickshaw pullers, coolies or autorickshaw and taxi drivers), the Bhojpuri-speaking population travels in search of work from Srinagar to Chennai and Ernakulam, from Kohima to Gujarat. The emergence of Bhojpuri cinema around such clusters across India, however, is not merely an effect of the presence of Bhojpuri-speaking communities, as we shall establish later. Yet, this widespread presence gives Bhojpuri a spatial and numerical scale that is unavailable to any of the other vernacular media industries.1 The scale brings in the ‘mass audience’ of considerable variety, larger budgets to spread over a much larger market but also the control over distribution via standardization of the film product. As a key tendency of industrial popular cinema, while the scale enables access and spread, it also forbids any deviation from what is understood to be the popular (Kumar 2018a). However, Bhojpuri film production only followed from the massive success of vernacular music all across north Indian ‘dialects’, beginning in the 1980s with the emergence of audiocassettes (Manuel 1993). The lives of musicians, singers, lyricists, performers and the transition from cassettes to VCDs and live concerts have been discussed in fascinating detail elsewhere (Tripathy 2012; Manuel 2012). The rise of the film industry stationed in Mumbai - unlike music production, spread across Delhi, UP and Bihar - began in the year 2004 with the ‘third phase’ of Bhojpuri cinema starting with Sasura Bada Paisawala (Ghosh 2010). During 2004–08, then, Bhojpuri film began to enter new territories across Punjab, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Delhi, UP and Bihar. The single-screen economy was rapidly conceding ground to the Bhojpuri trade. The Hindi film infrastructure was struggling to stay afloat via re-runs of the old films, soft-porn morning shows and C-circuit films (Srinivas 2003). Simultaneously, VCD circulation also picked up, with rampant counterfeit copies. The problem, however, was: how to fetch the middle classes to patronize Bhojpuri films, in the theatres they had never visited to even watch a Hindi film, so as to constitute a stable Bhojpuri public? I discuss elsewhere in detail the historical and geographical imperatives that shape this rift between respectable and defiled spaces in India, via a careful negotiation with gender and class as key determinants (Kumar 2016a). With the arrival of the multiplexes across metropolitan India, melodramas became more exception than norm (see Athique and Hill 2010; Kumar 2013). While comedy, thriller, horror and crime dramas began to alter the genre landscape of Hindi cinema considerably, melodrama continued to survive as an amputated mode, never quite sure of the ground beneath its feet in the multiplex-mall economy. I  have recounted elsewhere how melodrama as a mode faced its toughest challenge between 2005–15 on account of corporate capital, genre segmentation, animated visuality and competing performative sovereignty2 (Kumar 2017). The conflict between the desire and potential of Bhojpuri cinema, I argue in this chapter, also played out over the film form. The Bhojpuri

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film sought continuity with the celluloid memory of the Hindi film form, which was gradually disappearing.

The melodramatic ‘social’, scale and genre To those familiar with the Hindi film form, Sasura . . . was distinctly reminiscent of what Prasad (1998, 30) calls the ‘feudal family romance’. Analyzing the narrative structure of a form that emerged during the 1950s and remained unchallenged until the early 1970s, Prasad writes that the form included ‘a version of the romance narrative, a comedy track, an average of six songs per film, as well as a range of familiar character types. Narrative closure usually consisted in the restoration of a threatened moral/social order by the hero’ (1998, 31). The form, he maintains, was flexible enough to suggest that the ‘heteronomous conditions under which the production sector operates are paralleled by a textual heteronomy whose primary symptom is the absence of an integral narrative structure’ (1998, 44–45). This porous form of ‘socials’ resisted the genrefication of Hindi cinema and was identifiable only in its ‘contemporary reference’ (1998, 136). The dominance of songs in the ‘social’ marked it as an intermediate form in which cinema’s links with the stage are worked out and in which ‘pre- and extra-cinematic skills and languages are put on display’ (1998, 136). Prasad read it as ‘a symptom of the continued dependence of the cinema on the resources of other cultural forms’ (1998, 136). The Hindi ‘socials’ provided a framework by which new elements could be added and older elements such as the musical or action strands could get a complete overhaul without destabilizing the overall design. The dependence of Bhojpuri cinema on the resources of other cultural forms is huge. The clear visibility of drawing upon those resources via the ‘social’ allowed Bhojpuri cinema to establish its continuity with both pre-existing traditional cultural forms (nautanki, stage singing concerts etc.) as well as Hindi cinema, even as the latter sought to reinvent itself through new genres and shorter runtimes. In the two earlier phases of Bhojpuri cinema that ended around the early 1990s, a large majority of actors were drawn from the second rung of the Hindi film industry without any star iconography. The new Bhojpuri ‘social’ rendered the star as the sublimated heroic response to all the prevailing social ills. This was, however, limited to male stardom, as is the norm across South Asian cinemas. Sasura . . . was emblematic of the reformist melodrama form, which became the mainstay of Bhojpuri cinema for many years. It re-produces the ‘social’ in scale and structure. The film features Manoj Tiwari, a very popular singer-performer of the time, as an outstanding figure of mobility – the rarest attribute in the film-text. He belongs to the city as well as the village; he speaks English, Hindi, and Bhojpuri; he wears shirt-pants as well as dhoti-kurtas; he submits when he could have revolted; he revolts when he could have submitted. But both the major conflicts staged within the film – against the arrogant urban woman, and against the rich and powerful father-in-law – are resolved by the reformation and taming of the characters. Tiwari commands the restoration of

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the moral order, as the defaulters submit to him and reform themselves without letting the conflict spill over. The celluloid vision of Bhojpuri cinema was not a mere manifestation of low budgets and poorer technologies; it was also an act of mourning the loss of what Ganti (2012) calls the ‘universal hit’ – one that is loved by ‘the aunties and the servants’ both. The decoupling of box-office numbers and cross-class coalition was a trend affected after the advent of the multiplex-mall, while the site of mourning such a loss was firmly stationed within the single-screen theaters, which Bhojpuri cinema took over from Hindi melodramas. The Bhojpuri film celebrated the recovery of a disappearing mode of filmgoing – large single-screen theatres with a capacity crowd roaring to applaud key moments within the narrative and soaking themselves in the communal pleasure of cinema. This celebration was, at the same time, a communal act of mourning the loss of ‘our film’ – a film of which we, the viewers, are the intended addressees. This is where the success of Bhojpuri cinema lay. At a time when the mainstream visual culture of film, advertising and television had abandoned the masses, as if they were only the unintended addressees, the Bhojpuri film restarted the conversation. The content of the conversation mattered less than its formal constitution and the mode of address. Also, the VCDs could not restore what was lost in the large single-screen theatres. The celluloid vision of Bhojpuri cinema, therefore, was a key pivot for its attraction, for its recall of a lost order. The question of identity  – Bhojpuri cinema as representative of a Bhojpuri political community – found a soft expression under relatively porous categories of ‘rural’, ‘north Indians’ and ‘subaltern’. This was also on account of the absence of a cohesive political entity to represent the Bhojpuri people, who are distributed across eastern UP, western Bihar, Jharkhand and Nepal. Also, the Bhojpuri films’ popularity in Delhi and Mumbai was on account of their openness to other working-class migrants – whether speakers of Awadhi, Maithili, Magahi or other neighboring languages. The political consolidation around the aesthetic form was not so firm. This changed with the arrival of Nirahua Rickshawala (2007). With the film was born the first Bhojpuri action star – Dinesh Lal Yadav. When Yadav was introduced in Bhojpuri cinema as an audacious rickshaw puller, who has ‘Nirahua Rickshawala’ written behind his rickshaw, it marked a decisive shift. Unlike his predecessors, Nirahua was lean, young and quick with his moves. His flying and revolving kicks ensured that most of the conflicts in the film were resolved by force, through an elaborate fight sequence. In Nirahua . . . the reformist project and the melodramatic scale are retained, but action sequences help the narrative organization. In both the films, the protagonists have lost their fathers before the respective screenplays begin. They are figures of absolute authority within their respective families, who would submit to the mother and the sister-in-law on key occasions, nonetheless. The primary conflict in both the films is between the female protagonist’s family and the hero. The reformation of the feudal order that her family is an archetype of takes place via a change of heart at the very end. This restores the order by foregrounding the possibility of reform within the traditional feudal order, without disturbing the order itself.

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Yet, the contest between scale and genre is forced to reconcile with a new texture of melodrama where it retreats from the foreground to the background. As a host form, the heterogeneity of the melodramatic ‘social’ is accommodating and porous. Action cinema, however, works best when a single-track narrative is driven toward the resolution in a racy and tight edit. The challenge in action-melodramas, then, is to reconcile a meandering, heterogenous and porous form with its intense, linear and purposive counterpart. The standard tactic in Bhojpuri cinema is to soak the screenplay in songs, romances and comedy tracks to interrupt and delay the resolution. These tactics maintain the meandering non-linear scale for Bhojpuri films, which hold the melodramatic ‘social’ as a steady reference point convergent with the popular memory of Hindi cinema. Even if the conditions of reception and circulation – in rundown theatres with a sparse audience or on VCDs/DVDs or mobile phones  – depart significantly from the idealization of crowded single-screen theatres where memorable Hindi melodramas once played, the film form continues to replicate and recall a moment long since over. How does one explain this? In order to understand the persistence of celluloid in the time of video films, one would need to locate and unpack the video moment more closely.

When was video? Is there any way in which we could separate the times of celluloid and video? In terms of the technological chronology, perhaps we could be somewhat specific, but in an aggregated sense, particularly from the vantage point of the audience/ user, the segregation remains difficult to hold on to. I would like to offer, as a way of response, four key moments in the history of video to grapple with the question of beginnings. Each of these beginnings marked a decisive shift and reconfiguration of production-distribution-exhibition dynamics. First, the emergence of VHS technology and the rise of video toward a domesticated middle-class filmic experience. Second, the time of cable and satellite television, personal computers, VCDs and music videos. Third, the gradual appearance of video-based small industries, which began to indulge in narrative cinema circulating on VCDs. Fourth, the consumption of film and music as mobile ‘downloads’. The emergence of Bhojpuri cinema followed from the second moment, but each of these four moments led to the widening of the orbit within which the users/audiences could intervene in the process of media consumption and, by extension, alter its scale and genre. On a closer look, it could be argued that the first moment did not significantly alter the pre-eminence of celluloid. The moment only instantiated a way of consuming a celluloid product in the video format. The sanctity of scale and its vital role in shaping the experience of the melodramas remained unaltered. It was primarily on account of the ‘discomfort’ of visiting a crowded, often filthy, film theatre that the VHS provided much-needed escape. Sure, it was also a common

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practice across rural and small-town India that several families, or an entire village, would get together for a night-long three-film session run on a hired television set and videocassettes. But even in such cases, the celluloid experience of the melodramas was only being hosted elsewhere, in conditions awkwardly simulating the film theatre. The second video moment expanded the orbit of media consumption remarkably. Film, as well as film music, began to lose its pre-eminence in the media market, as auxiliary and parallel forms began to proliferate and undercut it. In this phase, celluloid itself conceded a lot of ground. The VCD players, cable television and computers began to undercut the film theatre as the privileged site of cinema. The expansion of satellite television channels also meant that relatively new films were increasingly watched on television. With the parallel growth of advertising and the increasing dependence of television programming on advertising revenues, relatively new releases packed with advertisements could be seen on television as well. This is certainly the phase in which scale, genre, devices and target audience were reconfigured in relation with one another, and, therefore, new constellations emerged. Melodrama as a form could no longer hold its unchallenged status. It became increasingly evident that the persistence of the form was also indicative of the singularity of the means of its production and consumption. It may also be added that even though melodrama, as a sign system, cultivates its audience and builds upon their deep identification with it, its affective consolidation remains fragile with respect to conditions of reception. The absence of a captive audience in a controlled space ridiculed this fragility. Stop-start viewing patterns required a sturdier text, a robust form that was elastic enough to hold the interest of those who were unwilling to carry the burden of melodrama’s deep time. Therefore, the fading away of melodramas follows from this second video moment. Indeed, daily soaps on satellite television exploded in popularity at this very moment when the melodramatic mode was rehabilitated from the film theatre to the domestic confines, resulting in some of the most popular and loud television soaps, including Kahani Ghar Ghar Ki (2000–08) and Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu thi (2000–08). By the third video moment, melodrama re-emerged in a variety of forms across the vernacular cinemascape. Apart from Bhojpuri films, VCD-based film production began to deploy the language of Hindi film melodrama, replete with songs and dances as the main attractions. Whether this is so because of the centrality of Hindi cinema and its pre-eminence in South Asia on account of production and advertising budgets, distributive infrastructure and capacity to tap into a variety of networks, or on account of the fact that the various pre- and extra-cinematic resources that Hindi cinema drew upon also resonate with other smaller industries, is an open question and requires further investigation.3 I have, however, explored the analytics of popular cinema’s formal dwelling elsewhere to argue that such a re-emergence can be best explained on account of the fragmentation of masculine sovereignty and star performativity in genre cinema, responding to which vernacular masculinities reclaim sovereign performativity in the foreground (Kumar 2017). But this re-emergence of classical melodrama in VCD films, often with a distinct

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rural vintage – such as the popular Haryanvi films Dhakad Chhora (2004) and Asar (2007 – also began to consolidate a melodramatic imaginary fragmented across provincial afflictions. Bhojpuri as well as Haryanvi films would thus reminisce about the melodramatic worldview of romance in a feudal family, akin to the classical Hindi melodramas (Prasad 1998). Even if the everyday mannerisms, linguistic inflections and lived topographies varied, the VCD films increasingly established that they were parts of an imagined unity held together by Hindi melodramas, only forced to confront their geographical and linguistic bearings after the genrefication of Hindi cinema (Prasad 2011). Yet, as a porous form, melodrama continues to provide the host layer, which supports the overlaying of the scaffolding. This host layer is marked by its stress on distinctly moral questions, the primacy of memory as an essential lubricant for narrative progression and a deliberate mixing of the private and the public so as to implicate the audience into the moral framework and invoke their own individual and collective memories. The scaffolding could use the romantic, comedy and action tracks in varying proportions to adjust the emphases. The host layer marks a continuity with the deep memory of celluloid, the habituation of the audience with a certain scale and a mode of address. And the scaffolding is marked by the departures – anticipating a particular audience and configuring the narrative ingredients accordingly. In Malegaon films,4 for example, the first layer is borrowed from a particularly popular Hindi film text, and the second layer is that of parody – in which affective stress is inverted and provincialized. Even though the layering structures and the re-emergence of melodrama may suggest the persistence of celluloid cinema in this case, the VCD cultures had themselves emerged out of a distributive decentralization, from the masses to the community. The celluloid memory was being re-territorialized in this third video moment. As a result, the questions of scale and genre were re-negotiated across the sub-regional geography in peculiar, contingent and discontinuous ways. The fourth video moment further amplified this inconsistency. With the growing relevance of mobile ‘downloads’, the mobile phone slowly became the preeminent device for the consumption of music as well as films. Bulk data transfers on microSD cards for a modest price would allow cheap ‘Chinese’ mobile phones to provide a highly personalized and inexpensive mode of consumption. Not only does the stop-start mode of usage become unavoidable, the films and music videos are both arrested by the video imperative. Quite literally now, media are reduced to data, uploaded and deleted from a card, which becomes a prized individual possession. In moving trains or buses, while at work or when sitting idle as a vendor, the mobile phone aids the storage and consumption of media. Since the separation of sites and commodities is no longer substantial, one could watch a Bhojpuri or Haryanvi film with limited understanding of the language, out of sheer curiosity. Increasingly, therefore, a much larger pool of audiences is now a part of the audience catchment via mobile phone consumption. Without owning a Haryanvi film VCD or walking into a rundown film theatre playing a Bhojpuri film, one could overcome the barriers of social indices that earlier trapped the captive audience in

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a film theatre or in other forms of communal viewing. The fragmented worlds of vernacular inflections have therefore witnessed substantial spillover and consolidation on account of private viewing platforms.

Insurrections and catharsis One would have imagined, however, that these moments in the history of video would decisively sabotage not only the reign of celluloid but also melodrama, for it would work against the heteronomy of the form, which drew its strength from the scale of projection and enclosing of visual experience. Yet, the stop-start mode of distracted experiences has indeed effected louder and more effects-laden visual cultures saturated in attention-sucking cesspools, without quite pronouncing the death of melodrama. Instead, very often, the VCD films alert us to a direct and deliberate reminiscing on Hindi melodramas of yore, which ruled the single-screen theatres well into the 1990s. The breakthrough Haryani film, Dhaakad Chhora (2004), for example, could be seen as a remake of one of the 1990s Hindi films such as Qayamat se Qayamat Tak (1987), where the lead couple belongs to warring families. Here, a volatile Hindu schoolboy falls in love with his Muslim classmate, and once the romance goes public, it leads to violent disputes between the families before they eventually reconcile after a public debate held among the villagers. The mise-en-scène of the film contains rich granular details of village life, with longer cuts, bareness of shot design and clear stress upon rustic mannerisms and moral appeals. A more recent Haryanvi film Dhouns (2006 features the protagonist in a double role, split between a docile villager and a dashing semi-urban bully. The former is killed halfway through the film before the latter is sent by the gang of villains to extract further damage via deception. Predictably, he turns the tables on them and restores order before finding his counterpart alive as well. Modeled on numerous Hindi films fiddling with the idea of opposite-natured duplicates, as in Chalbaz, Ram aur Shyam, and Kaho Na Pyar Hai, the film foregrounds rural lives – bullock carts, buffaloes, farming, open wide verandahs and courtyards – as the domain of all familial activity. In one of the key sequences where the protagonists are introduced to each other, the standard protection ritual is performed. A bunch of lumpen men try to molest the urban woman dressed in a distinctly ‘urban’ attire – T-shirt and trousers – when the male protagonist jumps in and saves her before dropping her home on the bullock cart. The choice of a trolley bag and the outfit of the female protagonist straightaway establish the woman’s discomfort with the complexities of rural life. A nearly identical sequence introduced both Manoj Tiwari and Dineshlal Yadav Nirahua to Bhojpuri cinema in the films discussed earlier. The former lectures the woman on her bad behavior at the very outset in Sasura Bada Paisawala when he goes to pick her from the railway station in a tonga, while the latter protects his counterpart from misbehaving men and brings her to the village on his cycle rickshaw in Nirahua Rickshawala. In these introduction rituals, the introduction to the village, the landscape and its travails converges with the introduction to

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the women’s respective protectors and lovers. In effect, all these films engender the vocabulary of antagonistic binaries - inside versus outside, nativity as opposed to alienation. While thus making an argument for morally superior provincial inflections, they also address their own alienation with Hindi popular culture by supplementation. Melodrama, in this process, becomes that umbilical cord via which the vernacular and the hegemonic tonalities could yet communicate. In order to understand the entanglement of scale, form and industry within the shift from the uncontested pre-eminence of celluloid to that of digital video, let us briefly look at the other end of the spectrum: web series. Elsewhere, I have analyzed a decade-long trajectory of The Viral Fever (TVF) to argue that: Marked by irreverence, informality and witty commentary, the early TVF videos made their mark by establishing a witty re-appropriation of the membrane of the popular. They drew upon a vast variety of popular content to repurpose it, as an insurrection upon the cathartic mainstream of Indian media content, as a youthful outside to the familial domesticity addressed by television. They projected a humourous dissent and celebrated the freedoms of worldwide web, rapidly building an intimate bond with their target demographic. In the following years, however, the upscaling mandated by the search for a revenue model witnessed TVF being rehabilitated within a cross-promotional ecosystem. Apart from endorsing brands and celebrities, they also moved to an independent streaming platform and released [several web-series].  .  .  .  [T]he insurrectionary challenge TVF posed to television reached its limits and eventually reconciled with the cathartic ‘mainstream’ through a series of transactions between advertisers, platforms and content producers . . . setting aside the promised direct assault upon television. (Kumar 2019, 202) Much of the digital boom feeding similar web series freely available for streaming is thus supported by cross-promotional entanglements of advertorial and dramatic imperatives. Yet, the desire for scale commands the insurrectionary tendencies of digital media to re-negotiate their contract with the cathartic imaginaries of which film melodrama would be the mainstay. The sophisticated data-mapping available in the consumer analytics of viewing platforms may map the demographic as well as psychographic footprint of their viewers, but addressing the ‘mass audience’ remains a step into the unknown. The desire for scale invariably foregrounds the task of imagining the unknown audience. As these industries were shaped by the third video moment, they drew upon melodramatic ‘socials’ as a way of targeting the widest catchment of ‘mass audience’. The provincial/sub-regional insurrections therefore remained tethered to the cathartic imaginaries, still addressing an unknown mass audience instead of an already marked niche. What, however, connects these masses with the melodramatic mode, whether in television, the Internet or cinema? Why is catharsis the pre-eminent vessel in which mass media is poured to be served to the abstract universal audience? Before

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concluding, I would like to offer a possible answer to the question. The Hindi film form most associated with celluloid, which Prasad called ‘feudal family romance’, also marked cinema’s distinct endorsement of social mobility, even if exclusively for the subaltern male protagonist. The splinters of this formal contract, the adequation of which was fully rendered in the aesthetics of Hindi melodramas, gave shape to the insurrectionary forms. The aesthetic navigation of social mobility was, after all, one of the great promises of cinema in a deeply fragmented society. It is this fragmented whole that the melodramatic ‘social’ consolidated – by giving it an apparent totality to signify the Indian society. While this totality was always marked by a north Indian, upper-caste, heteronormative family, it still upheld the principle of an abstract universality as the promise of celluloid. In vernacular media in general and Bhojpuri cinema in particular, we witness a fragile but labored attempt to rejoin that promise of social mobility. The losses one incurs upon oneself in the process of making a claim for that promise signify the social that does not exist as an everyday reality but must be summoned as a moral horizon of the fragmented polity. What sub-regional ‘dialects’ of vernacular media struggle the most with, after all, is the unstable political-administrative bracketing of regions in north India. Not only is there no Bhojpuri-speaking region identifiable as a political unit; even Haryanvi films address several districts of western Uttar Pradesh just as much. Similar patterns can be mapped in eastern India where Santhali, Rajbangsi and Manbhum videos have a remarkable spillover across regional as well as national borders (Mukherjee 2016). Most linguistic constellations of vernacular media, then, spill over identifiable political units. While this means that the films often uphold rural India as the kernel of vague moral traditionalism, once production-distribution units scale up and take the form of an ‘industry’, they are compelled to self-identify. This is akin to the problematic Anderson (1998) addresses in his formulation of bound versus unbound serialities. The contest between state-led bound serialities as opposed to self-identified unbound serialities thus also comes to the fore in the emergence of vernacular media industries. Bhojpuri film industry, in particular, struggles with the industrial imperatives of stardom, theatrical distribution and much higher budgets than its vernacular media counterparts.5 The unbound serialities of Bhojpuri cinema are identified as Bhojpuri brothers, the people of UP and Bihar, and the north Indians – ad-hoc categories launched toward the agitated, libidinal aesthetics of social mobility.

Conclusion This chapter has delineated the infrastructural, political, aesthetic and technological trajectories of vernacular media industries, particularly that of Bhojpuri cinema. However, the case of Bhojpuri cinema lies at a point of inflection  – stationed in the suburbs of Mumbai, recalling the Hindi cinema of yore, it occupies the same old single-screen theatres that were abandoned by the Hindi film industry throughout the 2000s. Even as Bhojpuri cinema belongs to a ‘regional’ orientation, it does not necessarily mean having to walk into a ‘cultural’ territory

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of relatively autonomous but exceedingly local purchase. Instead, as I  have argued in this chapter, the journey from celluloid toward video or from film toward digital media has been marked by various interpenetrations of platforms and tendencies. While mainstream cinema, aided by the multiplex economy, went in search of new genres and aesthetics, its cathartic cache  – the melodramatic mode  – was rehabilitated within parts of television. However, the vernacular media economies began their quest in the exact opposite direction, toward celluloid melodramas. The insurrections made possible by portable technologies of production, distribution/circulation and consumption/exhibition have thus renegotiated their contract with the shared cathartic affect that had been the locus of cinematic pleasure for the longest time. Vernacular media must therefore be understood as ways of collectively rehabilitating the catharsis, which signified cinema in north India and the loss of which has multiplied the depth of the wound – the multi-sited insurrection upon popular culture thus goes in search of its celluloid bearings to rediscover the aesthetics of social mobility, tethered to an idea of abstract universal community, however fragmented it may be on the ground. Bhojpuri cinema is indeed the most formidable industrial constellation that traverses this middle ground between celluloid and video and perhaps the loudest when it comes to staking its ‘regionalist’ claim. But the region of Bhojpuri cinema remains suspended between insurrections and catharsis, splintered along the circuits of labour migration. The industrial networks and site-specific technologies are then much better indicators of the popular basis of vernacular media than are straightforward claims about regionalist representation.

Notes 1 Vernacular could refer to the languages that do not qualify in the eighth schedule of the Indian constitution but are instead listed as ‘mother tongues’ and commonly termed dialects. Several vernacular media industries have emerged in the last two decades across north India, particularly in Marwari, Chattisgarhi, Santhali, Khari Boli, Maithili and Haryanvi. 2 Leaving aside filmmakers such as Sanjay Leela Bhansali and Rajkumar Hirani, melodrama’s re-modulation in the new millennium more often than not has been hedged with an ironic ventriloquizing, as in Om Shanti Om (2007). On one hand, it is deployed as the routine garnish in films like Dil Chahta Hai (2001) and Vicky Donor (2012); on the other hand, popular cinema has cross-bred it with irony, treating it as a leftover affliction of yesteryears. 3 To the extent that aesthetic and political forms arbitrate each other, they also persist across contiguous polities already assimilated under differential composites of melodrama and realism – ‘both complementary and contradictory aesthetic expressions of a single social form’ (Prasad 2001). Also, given that genres are ‘modes of address or delivery designed to regulate the circulation of meaning on the basis of given (hierarchical) social relations’ (Vitali 2008), their spread across political borders would also be subject to the persistence of hierarchical social relations. 4 Such as Malegaon ke Sholay, Malegaon ki Lagaan, Malegaon ki Shaan and many more films made in Malegaon, a small town in Maharashtra.

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5 See Kumar (2018) for an elaborate discussion on the challenges faced by a Bhojpuri ‘art’ film, which sought distribution outside the mainstream industrial vocabulary, only to realize how formidable the fortification around the standard industrial product of Bhojpuri cinema was.

References Akhtar, Farhan, dir. 2001. Dil Chahta Hai. India: Excel Entertainment. Ali, Asif, dir. 2006. Dhouns. YouTube. Posted by Haryanvi Videos, April 3, 2017. www. youtube.com/watch?v=7IHYNLmuPLs. Anderson, Benedict. 1998. The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World. London: Verso. Athique, Adrian, and Douglas Hill. 2010. The Multiplex in India: A Cultural Economy of Urban Leisure. New York: Routledge. Chaudhary, Dinesh, dir. 2004. Dhaakad Chhora. India: Rajlaxmi Movies. ———, dir. 2007. Asar. YouTube. Posted by Haryanvi Videos, April  5, 2017.  www. youtube.com/watch?v=3wG3dD0Ktsk&t=1s. D., K., dir. 2007. Nirahua Rickshawala. India: ANKK Media Arts. Ganti, Tejaswini. 2012. Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ghosh, Avijit. 2010. Cinema Bhojpuri. New Delhi: Penguin Books. Khan, Farah, dir. 2007. Om Shanti Om. India: Red Chillies Entertainment. Khan, Mansoor, dir. 1987. Qayamat se Qayamat Tak. India: Nasir Hussain Films. Kumar, Akshaya. 2013. “Provincialising Bollywood? Cultural Economy of North-Indian Small-Town Nostalgia in the Indian Multiplex”. South Asian Popular Culture 11 (1): 61–74. ———. 2016a. “Bhojpuri Cinema and the ‘Rearguard’: Gendered Leisure, Gendered Promises”. Quarterly Review of Film and Video 33 (2): 151–175. ———. 2016b. “Bhojpuri Consolidations in the Hindi Territory: Infrastructure, Aesthetics and Competing Masculinities in North India”. BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 7 (2): 189–206. ———. 2017. “Animated Visualities and Competing Sovereignties: The Formal Dwellings of Hindi Cinema”. Social Text 35 (3): 41–70. ———. 2018a. “Deswa, the Film and the Movement: Taste, Industry and Representation in Bhojpuri Cinema”. Contemporary South Asia 26 (1): 69–85. ———. 2019. “Insurrectionary Tendencies: The Viral Fever Comedies and Indian Media”. In Digital Transactions in Asia: Economic, Informational, and Social Exchanges, edited by Adrian Athique and Emma Baulch, 192–204. Abingdon: Routledge. Manuel, Peter. 1993. Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2012. “Popular Music as Popular Expression in North India and the Bhojpuri Region, from Cassette Culture to VCD Culture”. South Asian Popular Culture 10 (3): 223–236. Mukherjee, Madhuja. 2016. “Toward a New Frame for Regional Films: Manbhum Videos and the Other Side of (Indian) Cinema”. BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 7 (1): 58–79. Prasad, M. Madhava. 1998. Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. ———. 2001. “Melodramatic Polities?” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 2 (3): 459–466. ———. 2011. “Genre Mixing as Creative Fabrication”. BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 2 (1): 69–81.

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———. 2014. Cine-Politics: Film Stars and Political Existence in South India. Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan. Rajadhyaksha, Ashish. 2003. “The ‘Bollywoodization’ of the Indian Cinema: Cultural Nationalism in a Global Arena”. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 4 (1): 25–39. ———. 2009. Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid: From Bollywood to the Emergency. New Delhi: Tulika Books. Sircar, Shoojit, dir. 2012. Vicky Donor. India: Rising Sun Films. Srinivas, S.V. 2003. “Hong Kong Action Film in the Indian B Circuit”. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 4 (1): 40–62. ———. 2013. Politics as Performance: A Social History of the Telugu Cinema. Ranikhet: Permanent Black. Tripathy, Ratnakar. 2012. “Music Mania in Small-Town Bihar: Emergence of Vernacular Identities”. Economic and Political Weekly 67 (22): 58–66. Vitali, Valentina. 2008. Hindi Action Cinema: Industries, Narratives, Bodies. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

13 MIXING INDUSTRIAL ELEMENTS, GENERATING SEXUAL AGENCY IN AIYYAA Nilanjana Bhattacharjya and Monika Mehta

Introduction In 2012, when the Bollywood film Aiyyaa was first released, it was deemed a critical and popular failure (Times of India 2016; Zore 2012). Although it featured the A-list if slightly vintage star Rani Mukerji as its lead, neither audiences nor critics knew what to do with the film’s references to Tamil and Telugu cinemas, Bombay films from the 1990s or the film’s narrative, which focused on a young Maharashtrian woman pursuing an attractive but mostly silent young Tamil man as her object of desire. Our first conversations around this film connected the woman’s pursuit of this Tamil man with references to Telugu and Tamil film industries within the film. Subsequently, we started to notice that other film industries outside Bollywood are also represented within the film – and began to recognize how all of these elements contribute to an unconventional narrative that foregrounds female desire. Our chapter that arises from this series of conversations investigates how diverse industrial and narrative elements in Aiyyaa (Kundalkar 2012) generate female sexual agency – rarely acknowledged within most mainstream Indian films – and situate the film simultaneously within mainstream Bombay cinema and the hatke (different) film. Produced jointly by the gargantuan Viacom 18 and the iconoclast director and producer, Anurag Kashyap, Aiyyaa was promoted as hatke cinema. In making Aiyyaa, the Marathi filmmaker Sachin Kundalkar extended one of the stories of his National Award-winning film, Gandha (Kundalkar 2009), Lagnaachya Vayachi Mulgi/A Bride to Be. Aiyyaa’s cast brings together actors across various Indian film industries, television, and theatre, but the casting of Rani Mukerji in the star role constructs a structural hierarchy that privileges Bombay cinema even as secondary characters associated with Marathi, Kannada, Malayalam, and Tamil cinemas challenge that hierarchy. The disparities between the productions of Gandha and Aiyyaa

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as well as within the making of Aiyyaa demand a more nuanced critical vocabulary. Neither hatke nor “indie” cinema alone capture these differences. Hence, we call for distinguishing hatke Bollywood or indie Bollywood (e.g. Aiyyaa) from regional indies (Gandha). An uneven intermixing is not only visible at the site of production but also the filmic narrative. The film’s multilingual and multiethnic world propels the plot and the songs. In Aiyyaa, the Maharashtrian Meenaxi (Rani Mukerji) is besotted with the Tamilian Surya (Prithviraj) and chooses him over her blander, arranged Maharashtrian marriage partner, Maadhav (Subodh Bhave). Her sexually charged and romantic desires are vividly imagined in the song sequences, which in combining visual cues and choreography from Marathi, Tamil, and Bombay film industries, produce a complex articulation of female desire that defines Aiyyaa’s unconventional relationships to hatke, regional indies, Bollywood, and regional film and television industry. We track the operations of gender and sexuality, the staging of ethnicities, and industrial configurations and conventions in the filmic text as well as at the sites of production and marketing. The film’s narrative and song sequences center female desires and her efforts to make those desires come true. This plotline is certainly unusual for a Bombay film. Given this, one could call Aiyyaa a hatke (different) film since it offers an innovative plotline, different from the Bombay norm. On closer examination, we see that the representation of desire and agency in Aiyyaa relies on carefully staged and mounted song sequences, a staple of Bombay films but one entirely absent in Gandha, a regional indie. The lead Bombay female actress Rani Mukerji and the female Bombay choreographer Vaibhavi Merchant actively define the shape of Aiyyaa. Moreover, industrial and ethnic hierarchies both within and outside the film are also critical for the production of female desire and agency. Within the film, female characters dominate, driving the plot as they pursue their desires while male characters are secondary. Yet, Aiyyaa’s and Gandha’s direction, funding, and distribution structures affirm the power of the male auteur and demonstrate that trajectories of masculine homage and authorship continue in indie Bollywood as well as regional indies.

Hatke in context: tracing Aiyyaa’s industrial contours The term hatke emerges and gains circulation in Bombay cinema in the early 2000s. In industry rhetoric, film reviews, audience comments, and some scholarly analyses, hatke is often positioned against standard “Bollywood” fare (Dwyer 2011; Kumar 2013; Paul 2013; Devasundaram 2016). These discussions focus largely on identifying the features of hatke films: inventive story-telling conventions, realism, “risky” themes, multilingualism, and the use of “real” locations, diction, and dialect specific to the place as well as the lack of lip-synched songs. Some analyses also gesture to the congruent emergence of hatke and the multiplex as well as the use of non-professional actors. In India’s New Independent Cinema, Ashvin Immanuel Devasundaram goes beyond analyzing the narrative of hatke

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productions and explores their industrial contours as well as their encounters with state censorship. He rightly points out that hatke or Indian Indie cinema is not necessarily positioned against the “Bollywood Behemoth” but rather points to its “re-orientation”(Devasundaram 2016, 65): The blurring of funding and production boundaries between Bollywood and new Indian Indie has led to Bollywood producers and the associated production companies being increasingly cognisant of future economic opportunities and symbolic capital associated with the new Indies. (Devasundaram 2016, 63) Hatke, according to Devasundaram’s research, does not function as a collective industrial configuration – or as a conventional stylistic genre. Rather, it operates as single ventures that adopt diverse strategies for production and circulation. For instance, indies such as Peepli Live (Rizvi 2010), Dhobi Ghat (Rao 2013), Gangs of Wasseypur (Kashyap 2012a, 2012b), and The Lunchbox (Batra 2013) have formed alliances with corporate production houses to access greater funding and wider distribution (Devasundaram 2016, 74). Because any such alliances with powerful corporations are hierarchical, they conflict with the hatke’s film outsider profile. In the case of Peepli Live, UTV Motion Pictures and producer Aamir Khan Productions’(AKP) “aggressive corporate-model of marketing” and desire to use Bombay stars to increase the film’s commercial success differed from the director Anusha Rizvi’s “commitment to directorial autonomy (Devasundaram 2016, 90–91, 210).” Despite UTV and AKP’s concerns, Rizvi stood firm on using a theater actor, Omkar Das Manikpuri, for the main character’s role. While Rizvi won this argument, this example points to divergent views and ways of working and suggests how in such circumstances the director does not always triumph. Moving away from such unequal partnerships, the directors of Gandu (Mukherjee 2010), I Am (Onir 2010), and Lucia (Kumar 2013) have employed new tactics for producing and distributing their films such as crowdfunding via social media, blogs, and websites and circulating films on online platforms. In the past few years, films including Aiyyaa, B.A. Pass (Bahl 2012), Fandry (Manjule 2013), Lens (Radhakrishnan 2015), Masaan (Ghaywan 2015), Lust Stories (Akhtar et al. 2018), Parched (Yadav 2015), Sairat (Manjule 2016), and Unfreedom (Kumar 2014) have increasingly appeared on Netflix, pointing to new collaborations and avenues for distribution (Bhattacharjya et al. 2019).1 Our chapter builds on and extends the current scholarship on hatke, exploring regional hierarchies, gendered industrial relations, and authorship. Both ethnographic and archival research has been critical to excavating industrial histories. Along with these valuable methods of inquiry, the filmic text also offers an opportunity to examine industrial configurations. The opening credits of Aiyyaa provide important insights into industrial labor and hierarchies, state regulation, and corporate alliances. They make visible a specific mode of production at a particular time and are thus important venues for discussing industrial differences and the division of labor (Mehta 2019). On US Netflix, the credits

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open with a rectangular red box naming T-Series as the music collaborator. The presence of T-Series, a giant music company, which leads in film music production but also produces films, signals that Aiyyaa employs Bombay industry conventions in privileging film music, and the appearance of lyricist and playback singers later in credits and the choreographer in the film’s closing acknowledgements consolidates this view. Viacom 18 in bold blue and red appears next, ensconced in a visual and aural intergalactic display, which, in turn, births Viacom’s multicolored Indian subsidiaries including Colors, MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, and MTV and closes with Viacom 18 Motion Pictures. This spectacular display of Viacom 18’s conglomerate power is tailed by an artsy black and white visual design of Anurag Kashyap Films Pvt. Ltd (AKFPL) that occupies a fraction of Viacom 18’s screen time, easily establishing Viacom 18 as the more powerful partner in this coproduction. These formal production credits are followed by informal “Thanks” and “Dedication” to individuals who have assisted with this project and more generally supported the filmmakers. As the black screen opens to an enclosure in a mountain, the background film music transports us to Bombay film actress Madhuri Dixit’s blockbuster Tezaab/ Acid (Chandra 1988). Entering the frame, Rani Mukherji repeats Mohini’s (Madhuri Dixit) fiery dialogues to her off-screen father. Even if Aiyyaa mobilizes and relies on Bombay film conventions and its associated industrial practices, Mukherji’s oversized sunglasses as well as the mounted film camera announce the film’s self-reflexivity. Subsequently, Mukherji reenacts song sequences from 1980s Bombay films – Tezaab, Chaalbaaz/Trickster (Parashar 1989) Mr. India (Kapur 1987), and Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak/From Judgment Day to Judgment Day (Khan 1988). These songs are indelibly associated with those films’ iconic female stars: Madhuri Dixit, Sri Devi, and Juhi Chawla. As the visuals pay tribute to these female stars, the credits display Rani Mukherji’s name in a prominent, sparkling pink-colored and gold-lined font, after which the male star Prithviraj’s name follows in a similar font and color-scheme. In smaller font, the credits then list industrial personnel collaborators as well as production houses. It is worth noting that in the opening credits female industrial labor is limited to acting and playback singing. Both Viacom and AKFPL or Anurag Kashyap feature three times as producers in 5 minutes and 19 seconds of credits, underscoring their importance. Viacom 18 was founded in 2007 as a joint venture between Viacom – a US multinational conglomerate that has under its wing Paramount Pictures, MTV, Nickelodeon, and Comedy Central – and Network 18, an Indian media company, which initially was invested in news but subsequently with its transnational partnerships has expanded into entertainment. Since 2009, Viacom 18 Motion Pictures, Viacom’s film wing, has distributed, produced, and/or co-produced films of varying genres and budget. This portfolio includes films identified as hatke and Bollywood. For example, in 2012, along with Aiyyaa, they backed hatke films including Players (Burmawalla and Burmawalla 2012), Kahaani (Ghosh 2012), Blood Money (Mahadkar 2012), Bittoo Boss (Babul 2012), Department (Varma 2012), Gangs of Wasseypur  – Part 1 (Kashyap 2012a), Gangs of Wasseypur – Part 2 (Kashyap 2012b), and OMG: Oh My

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God! (Shukla 2012). Prior to Aiyyaa, they had worked with Kashyap as distributors of Shaitan (Nambiar 2011) and co-produced Gangs of Wasseypur. Despite Aiyyaa’s underwhelming performance at the box office, in 2014 Viacom 18 Motion Pictures worked with Phantom Films, another collective in which Kashyap is a partner, to release a box-office winner, Queen. This line-up as well as the partnerships underscore that, like most major entertainment corporations, Viacom 18 Motion Pictures is committed to having a diverse portfolio, and hatke films are part of this logic. Viacom 18 Motions Pictures functions like US majors that have had their “independent” subsidiaries. Both our reading of Aiyyaa’s credits and Viacom’s profile show that Aiyyaa as hatke is not working against Bollywood but rather represents an extension, an advancement of what Rajadhyaksha calls the Bollywoodization of the Bombay film industry (Rajadhyaksha 2003). A key feature of producing hatke cinema is the circulation of indie directors at high-profile film festivals and their self-presentation as cosmopolitan directors, whose references and alliances are with transnational male auteurs. Kashyap best embodies this, functioning as a key mediator between Bollywood, regional, and international cinema. Both within and beyond India, he, like Tarantino, positions himself as a patron of “off-beat” cinema, although his discoveries are limited to India as opposed to Tarantino, who has brought Taiwanese, Japanese, or Hong Kong filmmakers to the attention of global Hollywood audiences. In promotional interviews of Aiyyaa, Kashyap claims that Kundalkar’s work was languishing, unscreened – despite Kundalkar having won several national awards – until Kashyap himself found it and encouraged Kundalkar to develop Aiyyaa. The narrative that Kashyap “discovers” in Kundalkar alerts us to the industrial hierarchies at play in hatke cinema. What term(s) do we employ to capture this disparity? Devasundaram uses the term “Indian Indie cinema” to describe “art” films in this new formation and argues that they transcend the boundaries of regional commercial cinemas, which are only released within a state or a region. In contrast, our upcoming analysis shows how regional inequity as well as regional pride define such films. Given the regional and industrial disparities, we suggest distinguishing what we call “indie” or “hatke” Bollywood from “regional indies” whose critical acclaim may result in their circulating beyond a given region. National accolades, reviews, and scholarly literature situate Kundalkar’s Gandha within the Marathi New Wave (or what we call “regional indies”), which is celebrated for bringing both fame and revenue to Marathi cinema. Marathi cinema has a complicated and fraught relationship with Bombay cinema because they operate in the same state – Maharashtra – and vie for the same exhibition spaces and audiences. Since more Maharashtrians speak and/or understand Hindi, the threat of Bombay cinema is even greater than in “South India” (Ganti 2008). Proponents of Marathi cinema feel that Bombay cinema has suffocated them. Those pursuing an ethno-national account of Marathi cinema revisit “Indian” history to show how Phalke, Shantaram, and Prabhat Studios were Maharashtrians whose ethnicity has been erased in favor of a “national” history that privileges Bombay cinema. Shwaas (Sawant 2004) is marked as the beginning of the Marathi New Wave. Interestingly,

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the emergence of the new wave coincides with the advent of hatke cinema. Similar language  – everyday stories of marginalized peoples, innovative cinematic techniques, attention to local specificities – is used to describe hatke and this “new” Marathi cinema. The rise of the Marathi new wave is attributed to the Maharashtrian state’s subsidizing these films’ production, better marketing and distribution, and the emergence of young directors making “innovative” films with fresh themes (Gangar 2013). Along with corporate alliances and new modes of production and circulation, the regional state is clearly a significant player in the development of the Marathi New Wave. Akin to hatke cinema, the figure of the male auteur has been critical to the circulation of Marathi new wave cinema, where reviews consistently focus on the “genius” of these directors. In the credits of Gandha, Sachin Kundalkar notes that Aiyyaa is his “creative tribute to Wong Kar Wai and Pedro Almodovar. The masters of new world cinema.” His tribute underscores the importance of male homage to global male auteurs as a key component of this new wave in as much as it shows how regional and indie cinema bypass the “Bollywood Behemoth” via invocations of the global (Devasundaram 2016). While we concur with Devasundaram’s observation that there has been an increase in participation by female directors including Kiran Rao, Anusha Rizvi, Anjali Menon, Konkona Sen Sharma, and Geetu Mohandas, we wish to underscore how masculine citational practices reproduce exclusively paternal genealogies, ones where only fathers are required (Devasundaram 2016, 141). In the past decade and a half, Marathi new wave’s success has attracted the attention of several new investors. Many “Bollywood” personnel as well as actors who have worked in both Marathi and Bombay cinema – such as ABCL (Amitabh Bachchan), Priyanka Chopra, Shreyas Talpade, and Ritesh Deshmukh – have begun to produce Marathi films in order to tap into a flourishing industry and market. More recently, Karan Johar’s Dharma Productions helped in producing the Marathi language Bucket List (Deoskar 2018), which starred Bombay’s cinema hit queen, Madhuri Dixit. In addition to producing films, remaking has been another key industrial strategy deployed by Bombay cinema, along with several other industries, to mine and multiply Marathi cinema’s success. For example, Sairat’s (Manjule 2016) phenomenal success generated a slew of remakes in various Indian industries as well as an Indian and Bangladeshi joint production. For Bombay cinema in as much as Hollywood and other commercial industries, remaking has been a relatively reliable strategy for generating funds and potential revenue. Given this context, Viacom’s decision to finance this film become clearer. Both the success of Hindi remakes of successful Tamil and Telugu films in the 2000s as well as the prestige and box-office performance of Marathi films and their successful replication in other industries likely influenced Viacom’s decision to green-light Aiyyaa. For Kashyap, this “remake” provides an opportunity to build his reputation as a cultural arbiter by introducing an “innovative” Marathi filmmaker. When Aiyyaa is initially marketed, Kashyap presents himself as a hands-off creative producer, leaving things to Kundalkar and Rani Mukerji. Kashyap’s comments suggest that Mukerji was not only the film’s leading actress but also a co-author.

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This is confirmed in the making of song sequences and videos where Mukerji and Aiyyaa’s choreographer, Vaibhavi Merchant, are shown discussing and directing the song moves, while Kundalkar sits literally and figuratively in the back. Meanwhile, Prithviraj is mainly characterized as the ‘hottie’ who does films in the “South.” The condensation of multiple states in south India to the “South” on the one hand is part of Bombay’s cinema’s myopic characterization of these industries. On the other hand, the casting of Prithviraj and Kishori Bilal, who plays his mother, as well as the visual and aural staging of “Dreamum Wakeupum,” point to the importance of the “South” both as a recognized market and as a resource for a new and successful cinematic idiom (T-Series 2012). Despite a collection of diverse attractions, Aiyyaa failed at the box office. Viacom 18 and Mukerji blamed the failure on Kundalkar as they alleged that the version he sent to the theaters was not the one they had approved. Regardless of this charge’s veracity (more power to Kundalkar if it is true), it does reveal that there were significant differences among the stakeholders, and, therefore, potentially divergent and competing authorial imprints.

Industrial imprints in Aiyyaa’s song sequences The industrial narrative laid out thus far suggests heavy-handed Bollywoodization and strategic appropriation of the regional. While this logic is present in the song sequences as well, the insertion of the regional impacts the narration of desire in the film and in the Bollywood song sequences, where the latter propels the integrative choices in the former. As Aiyyaa engages with regional industrial configurations within television and film, its narrative would seem to exemplify the hatke film, but its song sequences – in their assertion of conventions from mainstream Bollywood – consistently interrupt and undermine the hatke film genre. It should also be noted that most of the song sequences in the film are set within the protagonist Meenaxi Deshpande’s dreams and fantasies. In her earliest dreams, Meenaxi wanders around alone in open, fragrant spaces free from the reality of her actual life, where she is trapped in her Maharashtrian Brahmin family’s house in Pune and bombarded by her family’s constant demands, their efforts to marry her off, and the repellent odor of the garbage dump nearby. In the opening credit sequence, Meenaxi’s dream reconfigures her identity as 1990s and 2000s screen stars Sridevi, Juhi, and Madhuri on a Bombay film set where she is calling the shots, but the odor of the garbage dump keeps disrupting her dream until it wakes her and returns her to reality. The second song sequence, “Sava Dollar (Lavani),” gestures toward regional identities even as it is overwhelmed by Bollywood. In a dream, Meenaxi appears dressed in the nine-yard sari and the traditional ornaments associated with the Maharashtrian folk dance, the lavani, but she performs the song with a troupe of backup dancers in an opulent setting – a recognizable stylization of a lavish Bombay song and dance sequence. She promises film producers that if they make her a star, she will make them money. She goes on to fantasize about starring with superstar actors, winning industry awards, fueling gossip via her secret romances with

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top stars, endorsing products in television advertisements, appearing on celebrity talk shows, and, most importantly, having money of her own and the ability to make decisions about her own life. The fact that these are pictured on the already established Bollywood star actor Rani Mukerji is tongue-in-cheek, as knowing audiences wink at the lyrics’ references to Mukerji’s offscreen stardom narrative, especially her well-known reluctance to confirm her longtime relationship with established Bollywood film director Aditya Chopra until she married him. Meenaxi’s earthy singing voice, provided by Sneha Khanwalkar, is tinged with a rural twang – an allusion to the actual lavani’s established association with lower and scheduled caste people in rural areas. In portraying herself as a dancer, Meenaxi liberates herself from her own caste’s social stigma around female dancers – namely their association, at times, with prostitution  – and perhaps from the traditional demands of marriage (Rao 1985; Rege 2002).While some forms of lavani currently receive state support from the Maharashtrian government, those forms often depart from the more ribald choreography and lyrics recently appropriated into several recent Bollywood films as sensational item numbers that do not necessarily serve to assert Maharashtrian identity and culture (Johari 2012; Rao 1985; Rege 2002). Meenaxi’s voicing of her own desires and suggestive dancing in this fantasy space (as well as in the credit sequence) allow her to enter spaces within which she would ordinarily be an outsider. Yet that sequence’s reflexive commentary on the Bollywood industry and focus on Meenaxi as a subject of her own making as opposed to a sexualized object depart from the conventional item-girl framework. The sequence “Dreamum Wakeupm,” which offers a representation of 1980s and 1990s Tamil and Telugu film songs, provides another occasion to stage Meenaxi’s desires. The song begins as Meenaxi falls asleep while secretly watching Telugu film sequences on “Midnight Masala” late at night. The young Tamil migrant teawalla boy at the art college where she works has recommended this late-night television show as the most effective means for her to learn Tamil and more closely connect to the mysterious, attractive, and fragrant painting student Surya Iyer. As a novice, Meenaxi mistakes Telugu for Tamil. This error underscores how “South India” figures as a singular (foreign) entity both in Bombay cinema and the North Indian imagination, even within in the closing credits where N. Ramachandran is referred to as “Dialogue Writer (South Indian).” Here, television is defined as a key medium for accessing the regional, especially for migrants, and this gesture to television along with the relative absence of theatrical venues for viewing Tamil, Telugu, Kannada or Malayalam films in North Indian locales underscores the multiplex’s inability to fulfill its promise to provide a truly diverse menu of Indian films. “Midnight Masala” was a late-night segment aired on Surya TV, a Malayalam cable television channel; this segment featured Malayalam soft-porn films. Drawing our attention to this segment, Darshana Mini observes that “masala (spice)” refers to “the spicy scenes that would not be telecast during primetime.” While men have often been imagined as the viewers of such films, Mini astutely points out that, within the home, the television channel might have also had female viewers (Mini 2019) While the Tamil, male tea-seller who points Meenaskhi in the direction of

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“Midnight Masala,” reinforces the presumed viewership of such shows, Meenaxi as a Brahmin, Maharashtrian female is an entirely unexpected viewer of this segment; “Midnight Masala” becomes both a site of pedagogy – learning Tamil – and the venue for sexual entertainment and pleasure. In a delicious double-gesture, Surya as the Malayalam cable channel and Surya as the embodied character played by the Malayali actor Prithviraj Sukumaran become conduits of sexual pleasure and desire. In this sequence, Meenaxi imagines herself as a 1980s Tamil film star, and her stylized erotically charged choreography – with an emphasis on thrusting – links her to such “South Indian” B-grade film stars as Silk Smitha, whose Bollywood biopic The Dirty Picture (Luthria 2011) had been released to great acclaim only a few months before. In this sequence, Meenaxi no longer imagines herself as alone but instead casts herself in a love duet with the object of her desire, Surya. Surya is scantily clad, as is she, and they frolic in intimate proximity along with an extensive cast of background dancers on an elaborate gigantic set that evokes 1980s Tamil song-and-dance sequences. Some of Aiyyaa’s viewers and critics compared this song sequence to The Dirty’s Picture’s “Ooh La La,” and this relationship was likely intended. The two songs share not only sensual choreography but also their filming location – Ramoji Film City in Hyderabad, a key location for shooting commercial Telugu and Tamil films and, more recently, an important venue for Bombay films as well as some international films. One could read this sequence as an homage to the Tamil and Telugu film industries, but its nonsensical, mock-Tamil lyrics establish that the sequence transmits Meenaxi’s own limited, superficial conception of those industries as opposed to their reality. In this sequence, Meenaxi conflates Surya with her clandestine consumption of late-night “South Indian” television and films, her sexual desire for Surya, and, most significantly, her escape from the actual circumstances of her life in which her family has arranged for her to marry a pleasant but uninspiring Maharashtrian young man appropriate to her caste. (In another scene, while she is awake, she considers what name she will choose if she marries Surya – Meenaxi Iyer, M. Iyer, but she finally settles on Meenaxi Deshpande Iyer – an integration of her Maharashtrian identity and her marriage to a Tamil man.) The actor playing Surya, Prithviraj, is primarily associated with the Malayalam film industry but also acts in Telegu and Tamil films and, as a result, provides, along with the filming location, a concrete connection to the monolithic entity of “South Indian” film industries. So many of the songs in Aiyyaa extend beyond conventional boundaries of geography and genre. In the song “Mahek Bhi,” Meenaxi is awake but daydreams as she wanders around the art school where she works in search of Surya. This quiet song, focusing on Meenaxi’s facial expressions as she sniffs the air for fragrant traces of Surya, reveals her sensual pleasure. The song was shot at none other than the esteemed J.J. School of Art in Mumbai – one of the oldest art schools in India, dating back to 1857. While some scenes in the film including those set in Meenaxi’s home are shot in Pune, the filmic narrative’s incorporation of this school within the geography of Pune reclaims it from Mumbai, the domain of Bollywood. Another song, “Aga Bai,” another sensual fantasy, is set within a stylistically Orientalized

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historical setting, an underground passage dimly lit by faux-ancient Egyptian candelabras with belly danced influenced choreography. It does not connect to any particular film industry, of course, but it does connect to a long filmic history of the European exoticization of Arab and Asian cultures – and as such represents another conflation of Meenaxi’s desires with exoticized representations of the other. The final song is the film’s one ensemble number, depicting Meenaxi’s engagement to Surya, and it speaks to the integration of two unlikely worlds via Surya’s playing the mridangam (an instrument associated with Carnatic music in southern India), Meenaxi’s briefly attempting some stylized Bharatnatyam dance, and the song’s title, “Wakda” – crooked or unusual, in Marathi. Amitabh Bhattacharyya’s lyrics state that “this hasn’t been seen before, and that everybody is surprised, that what’s unfolding is indeed a bit unusual and ‘wakda’ ” – or in the film’s own language, a reclaiming of the term “hatke” within this Marathi world that is in turn contained with a new formulation of Bollywood the allows for the incorporation of such diverse regional influences and the integration of women’s desire and subjectivity. The focus on women’s desire in this film may be read in multiple ways, especially if one compares the plot of Aiyyaa to scenes from a Marathi novel Cobalt Blue, written by Aiyyaa’s director in 2006 – six years before Aiyyaa’s release. In the novel, a young man and his sister both fall in love with a male boarder at their house (Kundalkar 2016). The young male boarder is a painter, and the young man and his sister both begin respective affairs with the boarder. The young man expresses his desire for the boarder through his recounting sensory experiences – the sight of the colors of paint and the fragrance of the boarder’s body. Certain passages from the novel prefigure similar scenes visually depicted in Aiyyaa. In one scene in Aiyyaa, Meenaxi hides as she watches Surya painting, and in another, she steals and caresses one of Surya’s shirts smeared with blue paint – both of which evoke the following passage in the novel: I used to sit in the room upstairs for no reason for days. I used to look at you without your knowledge. I used to see you squeeze the colours out of the tubes on the palette, while in the balcony when you were drying your clothes on the line, while you were wiping your hands wet with colour on your own t-shirt that you had put on, while you were removing the hot milk pot from the hot plate and while you were sucking your own scorched thumb. I used to think shall I ask him whether he wants a relationship. (Kundalkar 2016) In another scene in the novel, the young man describes how he indulges in the scent of the man he loves: And when you entered the room you said, “There’s a tempting scent in this room! You must be sneaking out here to smoke cigarettes, don’t you?” I realised then that all those scents were a fiction of my imagination. There

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was nothing real. And then you brought all those exotic scents with you. The scent of rum, of cigarettes, of your body, of hot macaroni and of herbal incense – the most favorite of mine. And that scent of you! You had a scent which I remember even now. (Kundalkar 2016) In the film, the sight and smell of Surya ignite Meenaxi’s desire for him. The unmistakable connections between the two films suggest that Gandha and Aiyyaa translate a gay man’s desire for another man into that of a heterosexual woman’s desire for that same man – both of which remain similarly “wakda,” crooked and unusual – or queer, in Indian cinema.

Cinema and locations The focus of this edited collection, networks of cinemas of India, invites us to reflect upon the relations between cinemas and locations. Meenaxi’s family’s house is a key site where questions of desires and location intertwine, and, significantly, it remains the only space in the film that replicates the aesthetics of the Marathi New Wave as depicted in Gandha. Initially, only Brahmin Maharashtrian suitors enter the home where her parents exhibit Meenaxi as a potential bride – but they follow a schedule that quotes the screening times for the local cinema theater, before the multiplex-era. Later her parents’ favorite suitor will attempt to talk to her about 1980s Hindi art films starring Deepti Naval and Farooq Sheikh, about whom she knows nothing. The posters of Bollywood stars in Meenaxi’s bedroom, the television, and a translation of Alice in Wonderland are the only ways inside the house through which she can access the possibility of desire, and all of these must be consumed in solitude. The boundaries of the house break down finally once her zany coworker from the diaspora, her brother’s girlfriend, and Surya enter this domain for the final scene in the engagement. Meenaxi’s spatial horizon as well as emotional possibilities expand once she begins desiring Surya: she enters and factories and unfamiliar neighborhoods far from her own home while pursuing him and starts to sense how people from different social and cultural backgrounds also inhabit Pune. In the film, Meenaxi’s active looking – at times stalking Surya, at times being a peeping Tom, and at other times noticing every detail about the environment around her and its beauty – all construct her as an agent, a subject of desire rather than its object. The film focuses on the male body as the object of desire; hence, it is also wakda as it changes the conventional terms of the object and the subject of the gaze. This is partly accomplished through the fact that many of the song sequences allude to recognizably dated genres and conventions – whether it is 1990s Bombay cinema, 1980s Tamil films, or 1990s and 2000s celebrity gossip. None of the song sequences set in the past can encompass the union of North and South, which is only accomplished through the final song, “Wakda,” during the engagement scene. These histories of female representation, when they are referred to, always enable her to occupy the

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dominant position in ways that skew a more accurate representation of the past to better serve her desires. The songs propel her agency and desire in the narrative, and with each song her desire and actions increase. Unlike most Bombay film heroines, her desires are not restricted to the song sequence but instead permeate and then propel the narrative. Pune, where Aiyyaa’s narrative is set, is a rich national and regional site of cultural production; it also fits with the small-town representation that has become a feature of contemporary Bombay cinema. Both the prestigious Film and Television of Institute of India and the National Film Archives of India are located in Pune. This city also serves as the seat of Marathi art and theatre and the site from which the Marathi New Wave emerges – as well as a destination for many Tamil migrants, such as the tea seller and Surya’s family. Pune, however, is not the only site where the film was shot. The closing credits reveal that Aiyyaa was filmed in Lonavala, Mumbai, Bhor Wada, Yash Raj Studios (Mumbai), and Ramoji Film City (Hyderabad); at each site, there was some variance in the production crew. Through Aiyyaa’s setting in Pune; its filming in varied locations; its staging of Bombay, Tamil, and Telugu cinemas; and gesture to diverse cinemas via the different actors, we also see not just Bollywood provincializing to reach new markets but also Bollywood being provincialized. This multiplicity makes visible the incoherence of national cinema as framework.

Note 1 These films were produced and distributed in different industrial contexts.

References Akhtar, Zoya, Dibakar Banerjee, Karan Johar, and Anurag Kashyap, dirs. 2018. Lust Stories. India: RSVP and Flying Unicorn Entertainment. US Netflix. Babul, Supavitra, dir. 2012. Bittoo Boss. India: Viacom 18 Motion Pictures. Bahl, Ajay, dir. 2012. B.A. Pass. India: Filmybox n Tonga Talkies. US Netflix. Batra, Ritesh, dir. 2013. The Lunchbox. India: Reliance Home Video  & Games. US Netflix. Bhattacharjya, Nilanjana, Anupama Kapse, Monika Mehta, and Meheli Sen. 2019. “Lust Stories: A  Dossier”. Film Quarterly, April  27. https://filmquarterly.org/2019/04/15/ lust-stories-a-dossier/. Burmawalla, Abbas, and Mustan Burmawalla, dirs. 2012. The Players. India: Burmawalla Partners. Chandra, N., dir. 1988. Tezaab. India: N. Chandra. Deoskar, Tejas Prabha Vijay, dir. 2018. Bucket List. India: DAR Motion Pictures, Dark Horse Cinemas and Blue Mustang Creations. US Netflix. Devasundaram, Ashvin Immanuel. 2016. Indias New Independent Cinema: Rise of the Hybrid. New York: Routledge. Dwyer, Rachel. 2011. “Zara Hatke! The New Middle Classes and the Segmentation of Hindi Cinema”. In A Way of Life: Being Middle-Class in Contemporary India, 184–208. London: Routledge.

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Gangar, Amrit. 2013. “Marathi Cinema: The Exile, Factory, and Fame”. In Routledge Handbook of Indian Cinemas, 72–87. London: Routledge. Ganti, Tejaswini. 2008. “Mumbai Versus Bollywood: The Hindi Film Industry and the Politics of Cultural Heritage in Contemporary India”. In Global Bollywood, 52–78. New York: New York University Press. Ghaywan, Neeraj, dir. 2015. Masaan. India: Drishyam Films, Phantom Films, Macassar Productions & Sikhya Entertainment. US Netflix. Ghosh, Sujoy, dir. 2012. Kahaani. India: Boundscript Motion Pictures. US Netflix. Johari, Aarefa. 2012. “Lavani Show Seeks to Bring More Respect to Long-Tainted Art Form.”  Hindustan Times, June  14. https://www.hindustantimes.com/mumbai/lavanishow-seeks-to-bring-more-respect-to-long-tainted-art-form/story-clNY2zeuSDbcRI UlOnWAqJ.html. Kapur, Shekhar, dir. 1987. Mr. India. India: Boney Kapoor. Kashyap, Anurag, dir. 2012a. Gangs of Wasseypur. India: Cinelicious Pics. ———. 2012b. Gangs of Wasseypur. India: Anurag Kashyap Films; Jar Pictures; Pigment Motion Pictures 5014. Khan, Mansoor, dir. 1988. Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak. India: Nasir Hussain Films. Kumar, Akshaya. 2013. “Provincialising Bollywood? Cultural Economy of North-Indian Small-Town Nostalgia in the Indian Multiplex”. South Asian Popular Culture 11 (1): 61–74. DOI: 10.1080/14746689.2013.764642. Kumar, Pawan, dir. 2013. Lucia. India: Pawan Kumar. Kumar, Raj Amit, dir. 2014. Unfreedom. India: Dark Frames and 69 Productions. US Netflix. Kun․d․alkar, Sachin, dir. 2009. Gandha. YouTube. Posted by Rajshri Marathi, January  15, 2011. www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWC2hQ-rrVg&feature=plcp. ———. 2012. Aiyyaa. India: Viacom 18 Motion Pictures. US Netflix. ———. 2016. “Translation Tuesday: Cobalt Blue by Sachin Kundalkar – Extract.” Translated by Jerry Pinto.  The Guardian, August  2. https://www.theguardian.com/books/ series/guardian-books-network. Luthria, Milan, dir. 2011. The Dirty Picture. India: Balaji Motion Pictures. US Netflix. Mahadkar, Vishal, dir. 2012. Blood Money. India: Viacom 18 Motion Pictures. Manjule, Nagraj, dir. 2013. Fandry. India: Holy Basil Productions. US Netflix. _____, dir. 2016. Sairat. India: Aatpat Production, Essel Vision Productions and Zee Studios. Mehta, Monika. 2019. “Analyzing Credit Sequences.” In Writing About Screen Media, 163– 168. London: Routledge. _______. n.d. “Affective Logics: Re-Making Fidelity and Homosociality in Kaante.” In Blackwell Companion to Indian Cinema. London: Blackwell. Mini, Darshana Sreedhar. 2019. “The Rise of Soft Porn in Malayalam Cinema and the Precarious Stardom of Shakeela”. Feminist Media Histories 5 (2): 49–82. DOI: 10.1525/ fmh.2019.5.2.49. Mukherjee, Qaushiq, dir. 2010. Gandu. India: Artsploitation Films. US Netflix. Nambiar, Bejoy, dir. 2011. Shaitan. India: Anurag Kashyap Films. US Netflix. Onir, dir. 2010. I Am Onir. India: Times Music. US Netflix. Parashar, Pankaj, dir. 1989. Chaalbaaz. India: Poornachandra Rao Atluri. Paul, Arunima. 2013. “ ‘They Point Guns for Money, We Run the Country!’ Provincial Modernities in Hatke Cinema”. Studies in South Asian Film Media 5 (2): 113–130. DOI: 10.1386/safm.5.2.113_1. Radhakrishnan, Jayprakash, dir. 2015. Lens. India: Glowing Tungsten. US Netflix. Rajadhyaksha, Ashish. 2003. “The Bollywoodization of the Indian Cinema: Cultural Nationalism in a Global Arena”. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 4 (1): 25–39. DOI: 10.1080/1464937032000060195.

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Rao, Kiran, dir. 2013. Dhobi Ghat. India: Aamir Khan Productions. US Netflix. Rao, Kristin Olson. 1985. “The lāvan․ī of Maharashtra: A Regional Genre of Indian Popular Music”. PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles. Rege, Sharmila. 2002. “Conceptualising Popular Culture: ‘Lavani’ and ‘Powada’ in Maharashtra”. Economic and Political Weekly 37 (11): 1038–1147. Rizvi, Anusha, dir. 2010. Peepli Live. India: UTV Motion Pictures. US Netflix. Sawant, Sandeep, dir. 2004. Shwaas. India: Kathi Arts. Times of India. 2016. “Aiyyaa Movie Review {2.5/5}: Critic Review of Aiyyaa by Times of India”. The Times of India, February 9. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/entertainment/hindi/movie-reviews/aiyyaa/movie-review/16768189.cms. T-Series. 2012. “Making of Dreamum Wakeupum | Aiyyaa | Rani Mukerji & Prithviraj Sukumaran”. Youtube video, 5.51, Posted September 27, 2012. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=CbT_qyUKvpQ. Varma, Ram Gopal, dir. 2012. Department. India: Viacom 18 Motion Pictures. Yadav, Leena, dir. 2015. Parched. India: Ajay Devgn Films. US Netflix. Zore, Prasanna D. 2012. “Review: Aiyyaa, What a Letdown!” Rediff. Rediff.com, October 12. www.rediff.com/movies/review/review-aiyyaa-what-a-letdown/20121012.htm.

14 BLURRING THE BOUNDARIES BETWEEN HOLLYWOOD AND BOLLYWOOD The production of dubbed films in Mumbai Tejaswini Ganti

“Oh no, what am I going to do with this Spanish!” Payal lamented in Marathi. I was in LG Studios, a dubbing studio in Mumbai, in August 2016, observing how Hollywood films were dubbed into Hindi. On that particular day, we were previewing a shark-survival film prior to the commencement of the dubbing process. The film about an American woman who journeys to a secluded beach in Mexico to surf and then is stranded on a rock only 30 yards from the shore because of a great white shark has some initial portions where characters speak in Spanish, and part of the movie’s humor is based on the fact that the protagonist doesn’t understand them. Payal, the dubbing director, was initially flummoxed by the Spanish portions, for if these portions were dubbed into Hindi, then the gist of the interactions and mutual incomprehensibility would be lost. The first solution suggested by Payal’s boss was to make the Spanish-speaking characters rustic Punjabi speakers – “thet, dehati types” in her words (authentic, country bumpkins) that the protagonist would have a hard time understanding. A couple of weeks later, when I asked Payal how the film turned out, she informed me that they decided against dubbing the Spanish portions into Punjabi and settled on Goan Konkani instead. After all, how would surfers speaking in thet Punjabi be plausible? Based on fieldwork in a dubbing studio in Mumbai, and interviews with voice artists, script writers, dubbing directors, and local executives of Hollywood studios in India, this chapter complicates nation-bounded understandings of film industries, specifically that of “Bollywood” and “Hollywood,” and challenges any simplistic notion that dubbed films are mere “translations” of the Hollywood originals, by detailing the linguistic and cultural expertise articulated and deployed by script writers, dubbing directors, and voice-artists. Since 1994, when Jurassic Park was dubbed into Hindi and enjoyed unparalleled commercial success for a Hollywood film in India, the number of Hollywood films dubbed into Hindi and released in the Indian market has been steadily increasing. All of the major animated, action,

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superhero, thriller, and science fiction films are now released theatrically in India in dubbed Hindi versions. In addition to Hindi, many of Hollywood’s large franchise or tent-pole films get dubbed into Tamil and Telugu as well. According to the 2017 Media and Entertainment Industry Report published by the consulting firm, KPMG, nearly 40 percent of English-language releases have been dubbed into at least one Indian language (KPMG 2017). According to the same KPMG Report, the gross collections of Hollywood films in India in 2016 grew about 10 percent from the previous year, and the box-office collection of the top 10 highest grossing Hollywood films had totaled about $108.8 million as compared with $99.5 million from 2015 (Bhushan 2017). Much news was generated in the Indian and international media in 2016 when Disney’s The Jungle Book, released on April 8, became the highest grossing Hollywood film ever in India – earning an estimated $38.2 million across 1,640 screens, with 58 percent of these revenues being generated from the dubbed versions in Hindi, Telugu, and Tamil (Bhushan 2016; Busch 2016; Cain 2016; Jha 2016; KPMG 2017; Ramachandran 2016; Rapoza 2016). Dubbing allows Hollywood studios to broaden their audience base in India, which leads to increased overall revenues from the Indian market. Several high-profile Hollywood films released in India have received a significant proportion of their revenues from dubbed versions. Recent examples in addition to The Jungle Book include Captain America: Civil War, where 41 percent of its revenues were from its dubbed versions, and Avengers Age of Ultron, where it was 45 percent (KPMG 2017). Dubbed Hollywood films are often characterized by the Indian and international press as threats to the Mumbai-based Hindi language film industry better known as “Bollywood” (Bhushan 2017; Chatterjee 1999; Sehgal 2010; TNN 2015). For example, a great deal of news and commentary about The Jungle Book, which was released a week earlier in India than in the U.S., in order to avoid a clash with Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan’s film, Fan, pointed out how the former was more commercially successful than the latter (Jha 2016; Ramachandran 2016; PTI 2016). In fact, the dubbed version of The Jungle Book went on to earn more than many Hindi films and was classified as a “Super-Duper Hit” in the trade magazine Film Information’s 2016 box-office report, with only two other films surpassing it in terms of box-office outcome (Film Information 2017, 9). Examining the production process of dubbing, however, reveals a much more complex picture. Not only do Hollywood majors rely on local companies in India to carry out the translation and dubbing of their films, but increasingly for their Hindi versions are eager to utilize Bollywood stars for the dubbing and employ established screenwriters from the Hindi film industry to write the dub scripts. In the case of The Jungle Book, successful Hindi film screenwriter Mayur Puri was hired to write the Hindi script and popular actors Priyanka Chopra, Irrfan Khan, Om Puri, and Nana Patekar to do the voices of key characters in the film. While initially more English than Hindi versions were released theatrically in India, by the third week, the ratio of Hindi to English had flipped, with more Hindi versions playing in theatres. With the dubbed Hindi version doing more business than the

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English original and the screenwriter and actors being from the mainstream Hindi film industry, the question arises, is the Hindi version of The Jungle Book a Hollywood film or a Bollywood film? I argue that dubbing comprises an industrial network that blurs and makes porous the boundaries between Bollywood and Hollywood.1 The decision to dub a particular film for theatrical release is taken in India by the Indian executives of the Hollywood majors headquartered in Mumbai, who then hire a local dubbing studio to carry out the scripting, dubbing, and sound mixing of the film, which typically costs between 700,000 to one million rupees. All of the personnel doing the labor – from the scriptwriters to voiceover artists, dubbing directors, and recording engineers – are located in Mumbai and also frequently work in the mainstream Hindi film industry. Finally, the same distributors and exhibitors who distribute mainstream Mumbai-produced/Bollywood films also distribute and exhibit the Hindi-dubbed Hollywood films. In fact, since dubbed films are part of the same distribution and exhibition apparatus as mainstream Hindi films, the release schedule of dubbed Hollywood films is now calibrated with the release schedule of Bollywood films and vice versa, so that high-profile Hindi film producers avoid releasing their films on the same date as a heavily anticipated Hollywood film, which would be dubbed into Hindi, and Hollywood studios avoid releasing their high profile projects opposite a heavily anticipated Hindi film. During my fieldwork, I  noticed dubbing professionals go to great lengths to make a Hollywood film seem as familiar as possible through the use of local idioms and cultural references, sometimes radically departing from the original script. I would like to suggest that we think of these Hindi dubbed Hollywood films as a remake or even another type of Hindi film, as a part of the diverse agglomeration that comes under the category of “Indian cinema.” The production of dubbed films requires us to expand our conventional understanding of remakes beyond plot and narrative and take into consideration factors such as translation, language, voice, labor, distribution circuits, and exhibition infrastructure. I focus on three points in this chapter. First, I point to the significant resemblance between dubbing professionals’ and Hindi filmmakers’ audience imaginaries. By audience imaginaries, I am referring to the discursive production of audiences by the film industry – how makers perceive and think about their audiences and not the actual people who go to see films who are infinitely more complex than filmmakers’ characterizations. Then, I detail the variety of ways that writers and dubbing directors transform Hollywood films in their efforts to adapt them to a Hindi linguistic and cultural context, which includes an intertextual reliance on the songs, characters, and dialogues of Bombay cinema. Finally, I  argue that the phenomenon of dubbed-into-Hindi Hollywood films calls into question the conventional methods of constructing difference along national boundaries and problematizes the very notion of nation-state bound categories of industry and cinema.2 National categories such as “Indian cinema” or the “Indian film industry” have very little resonance in the world of dubbing. What I discovered in Mumbai was that dubbing professionals often regarded the Telugu and Tamil language

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films produced by the southern Indian film industries, which are more frequently dubbed into Hindi, as challenging to adapt and dub as they did Hollywood films. In other words, being from another part of India did not render these films as more familiar, but rather they were considered equally alien as Hollywood films.

Audience imaginaries When I asked executives of the Indian divisions of the Hollywood majors such as Disney, Fox, Universal, and Warner Bros. about who decides which films should be dubbed into Hindi for the Indian market, they all said that they make that decision in India, rather than it being decided for them in Los Angeles. When they spoke of their criteria for deciding which films to dub for theatrical release, these executives expressed audience imaginaries that created a clear hierarchy of film taste and viewing preference based on geographic location and linguistic ability, similar to audience classifications expressed by members of the Hindi film industry (Ganti 2012). According to the three executives at Disney India whom I had interviewed, anything that was “a little intelligent, thinking, or (had a lot of) dialogue” would never get dubbed for theatrical release, as such films would be “limited to three or four main cities,” and only people who knew English would want to see them. These three individuals explained that films with too much dialogue would be hard for Hindi-speaking audiences to relate to and hence would not be commercially successful. When dubbing professionals spoke about the challenges of translating scripts from English to Hindi, they represented the audiences for these films as working class with very little understanding of English, which was highly reminiscent of Bollywood filmmakers’ descriptions up until the mid-2000s of the “masses” as the main audiences for Hindi cinema (Ganti 2012). For example, one voice-over artist asserted, “The main audience going to theaters to watch these films – autorickshaw drivers, workers, challenge is to make the film understandable to them.” The underlying assumption is that those who only know Hindi are unable to grasp complex concepts and vocabulary. Referring to science fiction and films set in space, Divya Acharya, a dubbing director at Sound & Vision India, explained that they have to cater to audiences from the “interiors,” who may not know English very well, which meant, “we want to keep it simple; we don’t want to use sci-fi language; if it’s too much, maybe term it and explain it, or not use it at all, and twist it in a way that it becomes simpler” (Interview, July 29, 2016). Asserting that while Hollywood films in English are made for a wide Englishspeaking audience who encompass a broad range of socioeconomic strata, the head of Sound & Vision India, Mona Ghosh Shetty, explained that in India she had a different target audience. She said, “We find that the kind of people we’re dubbing for is not the same people that the film was made for, because there are literacy issues, as they may be of a poor economic background” (Interview, August 8, 2014). Abul Ansari, a dubbing director who had been working at Sound & Vision for nearly a decade, described that they were dubbing Hollywood films not for educated people who

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would in any case watch the films in the original English, but for people who were very unfamiliar with English – so unfamiliar that they barely knew of its existence. The main assumption in these comments was that viewers who were fully bilingual in both English and Hindi would never see the dubbed version of a Hollywood film, and that watching a dubbed film was out of necessity, not choice or preference for Hindi. Voice artist Sanket Mhatre who frequently voiced for Matt Damon, Ryan Reynolds, and Brad Pitt acknowledged, “It’s still not cool to watch dubbed films, or dubbed TV shows, because that kind of puts you in the category of an uneducated person” (Interview, August 6, 2016). In addition to sharing the trope of the “uneducated masses,” prevalent in Bollywood, dubbing professionals also expressed a desire to appeal widely and garner the broadest possible audiences, which was reminiscent of the goals articulated by members of the Hindi film industry in the late 1990s (Ganti 2012). For instance, Hindi film screenwriter Mayur Puri, who began writing dub scripts in 2015 for Disney films such as The Jungle Book, Captain America: Civil War, Finding Dory, Angry Birds, and Avengers: Infinity War, asserted, You have to become that coal miner from Bihar; you have to become that housewife in Delhi; you have to become that school student in Pune; you have to become the rikshaw-wallah in Chennai. How they will understand this movie? How will I make it relatable to them? It has to tick check-boxes for all of them . . . that’s the biggest challenge. (Interview, August 1, 2016) The audience imaginaries, in terms of class composition, educational background, and regional diversity, expressed by dubbing professionals and representatives of Hollywood studios in India are remarkably similar to the Hindi film industry’s audience imaginaries. In the next section, I discuss how dubbing professionals take up the tricky challenge of localizing Hollywood films in order for them to appeal widely.

Localization The Disney executives who decided to have The Jungle Book dubbed, spoke at length about their decisions and strategies for the film as well as their general brief for films they choose to dub. They mentioned that when they brief a writer about adapting a Hollywood film, they tell him that it should “be more like a Hindi film” with “localized humor” as the “local connect is very important.” Hence, their choice of writer is crucial to the localization process, which is why, for The Jungle Book, they chose to go with Mayur Puri, an established screenwriter from the Hindi film industry known for his flair for comedy, rather than a conventional dubbing script writer. Referring to the scripting discussions, one of the executives stated, “We treated it pretty much like a Hindi movie narration. How do we treat Baloo, how do we treat Bagheera, how do we treat Mowgli?” Another one elaborated upon

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their efforts at local detailing such as deciding to render Baloo the bear as a stereotypical Punjabi through his speech and vocal mannerisms. When I asked the Disney executives how they managed to localize a film such as Captain America, which seemed like a quintessentially American story, one of the executives described Captain America as having a “universal plot” of “good vs. evil.” She continued, It was really taking that and seeing how we relate to it as Indians, which we do. I mean all of our stories right from Ramayan and Mahabharat etc. are all about good vs. evil and that resonates well. So, it’s finding that local connect in whichever story. (Interview, August 8, 2016) Figuring out the “local connect” was frequently referred to by dubbing professionals as a “transcreation” rather than a “translation,” as script writers felt that a literal translation could never be successful either linguistically or culturally. Mayur Puri spoke at length about how it was more important to “translate emotions,” by which he meant the intentions of the original screenwriter, than to translate words. He gave two examples from The Jungle Book. The first was a scene between Mowgli and Baloo the bear where Baloo asks Mowgli to climb up a steep cliff to fetch honey for him. Mowgli’s response in the English version is “Are you kidding me?” For Puri, this line communicated that the writer wanted to portray Mowgli as a savvy, wise-cracking kid rather than an innocent babe-in-the woods. He then explained how he decided to write that line in Hindi, I realized that they’re trying to make Mowgli cool, like a guy that kids today would identify with. When I’m translating that in Hindi, the easiest way to do that is to say, “Do you think I’m a kid?” and the translation would be “baccha samjha hai kya?” which people use in colloquial language, but then I  wanted to go a step beyond that. I  wanted to make him even smarter. I wanted to have that sense of repartee, so what I’ve written actually is “Subah se koi mila nahi kya?” “Haven’t you found anyone else since the morning?” Now this is a colloquial term that we use, that we say when somebody is trying to pull a fast one on you: “Do you think I’m an idiot?” “Haven’t you found anybody else to fool today?” Now, this is a very slang thing; this is a very cool thing to say in the Indian perspective. (Interview, August 1, 2016) Puri’s second example had to do with the term “red flower,” which was the way the animals referred to fire. In the film, the animals speak of the threat that humans pose to the jungle because of their possession of the red flower. Commenting that the term evoked a sense of mystery, beauty, and fear from the animals’ perspective, Puri pointed out that if he literally translated the term as “lal phool” in Hindi, the effect would be the opposite, since lal phool was too generic and ordinary. He said, “Lal phool is used for many flowers – there is no threat!” Therefore, in his treatment

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note for Disney outlining his ideas for the translation, he suggested, “rakht phool,” as rakht means blood. Puri asserted, Now that creates a feeling of mystique . . . when you say “rakht phool” an Indian will have the same sense of mystery, same sense of beauty, and at the same time a sense of threat and awe. All these things will come to your mind when you say “rakht phool” or blood flower, but not red flower – red flower will be comical for us. (Interview, August 1, 2016) Puri surmised that the Hindi version’s success was because Disney India had given him the freedom to adapt the film as he saw fit. He said, The reason why the Hindi version of Jungle Book became more popular than the English version was that the word-of-mouth was so good. Everybody was saying, “This movie, you gotta watch it in Hindi, because the Hindi dialogues are damn funny, they are very good!” (Interview, August 1, 2016) Another film continually brought up as an example of very successful localization was Deadpool, a satirical take on the superhero genre of films based on a Marvel character of the same name. Mayank Jain, who had written the dub script for Deadpool was very proud of the way the Hindi version turned out, especially given that the source material posed a lot of challenges in terms of profanity and sexually explicit dialogue, which he knew would never pass the Censor Board if they tried to replicate it in Hindi. Jain stated, My entire idea is to make the Hindi better than the English, because I’ve been paid for that. So, then I look at it as a Hindi product. I’m very confident saying that sometimes our English Hindi movies are better than the English. (Interview, August 5, 2016) The dubbing director of the film, Kalpesh Parekh, who relayed how he really enjoyed dubbing Deadpool, mentioned a number of places where they took many “creative calls” to adapt the material in order to avoid all of the problematic elements, but still stay true to the film’s irreverent humor and entertaining nature. He stated, “If you watch and compare Deadpool in English and in Hindi, then you’ll realize how each one is distinct” (Interview, August 1, 2016). Sanket Mhatre, who voiced the character of Deadpool in Hindi, reinforced Parekh’s point in his interview. Referring to a specific scene where after a major shoot-out Deadpool inhales the smoke emanating from his gun and quips, “Tonight I’m definitely touching myself,” Mhatre asserts, Now that’s not gonna happen in Hindi, so we had to work around it, we went back and forth, and finally what we decided was, “Aaj main apni bandook

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ki nalli saaf karoonga” (Today, I’ll clean the barrel of my gun), which is like an innuendo. (Interview, August 6, 2016) About the process of dubbing, Parekh explained, “Once you dub a Hollywood film into Hindi, it’s not the same. You’re almost creating a new film. It’s as if you’re directing a new film because you have to think about everything from scratch” (Interview, August 1, 2016). Stating that while earlier films “looked and sounded dubbed,” Acharya explained that currently the aim is to make dubbed content appear as natural and conversational as possible. She detailed how much effort dubbing professionals undertake to erase the traces of dubbing, We pay close attention to the closed lips: p-ph-b-bh. Wherever there is a close-up shot and somebody has said a word in closed lip, we try to match it with an equivalent in our language where there is a closed lip. Like if somebody is in danger and he says, “Please!” We can say “bachao!” [help!] there because it’s a closed lip. If it’s a close-up shot, we try as much as possible to match those closed lips so that it looks more natural, as if the person has said that, the very thing that has been dubbed. (Interview, July 29, 2016) While Acharya spoke of effacing the traces of dubbing in terms of lip synchronization, Shakti Singh, a veteran voice artist who has been the Hindi voice for Jeff Goldblum, George Clooney, Morgan Freeman, Anthony Hopkins, Daniel Craig, and many more, spoke of the importance of erasing the traces of English. He discussed how it was absolutely critical that one did not speak Hindi as if it were English. In other words, the goal was to make the dialogue so effortless and seamless that audiences would forget that the film was ever in English. He said, It should not occur to you that the film was also in English. It should appear to you that this person is actually speaking in Hindi and after watching for a little while you’ll even forget that this person is white. It will appear totally plausible to you that “Yes, this person is able to speak Hindi.” It is absolutely necessary to keep this in mind, that people are convinced. (Interview, August 6, 2016) Singh discussed further how he always attempted to bring whichever film he was working on closer to a Hindi sensibility in order to reduce that sense of rupture and disjuncture posed by dubbed films. One of the main strategies to make a dubbed film appear more familiar is to cite and make references to popular Hindi films. Divya Acharya who had supervised the dubbing of Ice Age 5 discussed how older Hindi movies are an important resource for dubbed films. She said, “We go back to our movies and use their dialogues, which are very popular.” She related two specific examples from Ice Age 5.

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The first example was how they used a popular song, “Yuhi kat jaayega safar saath chalne se,” (When we are together, our journey will go by in a flash) from the film Hum Hain Rahi Pyar Ke (Mahesh Bhatt 1993) as a template for a song that in the English version was a camping song. She said, We had special notes mentioning that the song he’s singing is a camping song, so we had to come up with a Hindi song which fit the criteria best. Ok, they’ve been displaced from their home, have been living like nomads, hunting for a safer place, then we used this song because it was the closest to the emotion here. (Interview, July 29, 2016) Since they did not have rights to the actual Hindi film song, they ended up changing the lyrics to avoid any potential future litigation by the film’s producers. However, by keeping the same tune, the reference to the original film song was still maintained in the film, thus making it highly relatable. The second example from Ice Age 5 was a dialogue from an earlier Hindi film. Acharya elaborated, Shangri-Lama is very upset with Sid and he calls him “nincompoop,” and a few more expletives, so to match that we went back to an old Hindi movie, Jaane bhi do Yaaron – and used the dialogue, “durachari, brashtachari, bol sorry!” It fit perfectly on his expressions. We used that Hindi movie line because it is such a famous movie, it’s a cult movie, people know that particular scene, so it is relatable and it is funny in its own right, so we used that instead of what was being said originally. (Interview, July 29, 2016) Such examples of mining older Hindi films for material points to the relative freedom that Indian representatives of Hollywood studios have in terms of creative decision-making with respect to dubbing. When I  asked the Disney India team whether they have a fair bit of autonomy over creative decisions, one of them exclaimed, “We made a song. A song!” (for The Jungle Book) as a way of indexing their level of autonomy. Another locally generated strategy increasingly undertaken by the Indian representatives of Hollywood studios is to hire Hindi film stars as the lead voices for a dubbing project. Recent examples include superstar Amitabh Bachchan voicing for the titular character in Spielberg’s BFG, along with Parineeti Chopra and Gulshan Grover also voicing key parts; Arjun Kapoor voicing for Buck, the weasel, in Ice Age 5, Varun Dhawan as Captain America in Captain America: Civil War, Tiger Shroff as Spiderman/Peter Parker in Spiderman: Homecoming, and Ranveer Singh as the titular character in Deadpool 2. S. Kumar, the head of distribution for 20th Century Fox, stated that Hindi film stars were primarily hired for their PR value. He said, “We get a lot of mileage on the media so that helps a lot. It increases

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the reach” (Interview, March 8, 2018). When I asked executives at Disney India about their reasons for choosing popular Hindi film star Varun Dhawan to provide the voice for Captain America in Captain America: Civil War, they listed his “huge following with kids” and his “incredible mass appeal.” There are numerous promotional videos airing on YouTube where film stars discuss their experiences dubbing for a particular film combined with footage of them in the dubbing studio. The Indian news media also reports heavily on film stars who have voiced for Hollywood films. Therefore, executives of the Indian affiliates of the Hollywood majors attempt to market Hollywood content through Bollywood’s star-centric frameworks. For them, a Hindi film star adds value in terms of name recognition, publicity, and fan mobilization.

The alienness of South Indian films Thus far, I have focused on the ways that dubbing professionals and studio executives in Mumbai attempt to adapt and make Hollywood films more familiar. In this sense, dubbing Hollywood films into Hindi can be viewed as another instance of remaking Hollywood, which has had a long history in India (Ganti 2002; Smith 2017). However, there is a much longer history of the Hindi film industry remaking films from the southern Indian film industries (Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam) as well as a more prolific practice of dubbing Tamil and Telugu language films into Hindi, which are primarily released on satellite television (Murthy 2013). In this section I want to discuss how dubbing professionals working in Mumbai regard films in Telugu or Tamil, which they broadly lump together and refer to as “South” films, as a way of interrogating nation-bounded categories of intelligibility and cultural affinity. Most of the dub script writers and even the dubbing directors in Mumbai are not fluent or even knowledgeable of Tamil or Telugu and hence rely on English subtitles to write the Hindi version – so there are even more levels of mediation and translation happening with the dubbing of Tamil and Telugu films into Hindi compared to the dubbing of Hollywood films. Mayank Jain, a writer who has been writing dub scripts for over a decade, was up front about not knowing any South Indian language and working with English subtitles. He said, Telugu and Tamil are like German and French to me. I’ll be very blunt, because when you don’t know a language, you don’t know a language. If it’s German, Spanish, French, Telugu, Tamil, or Malayali – all are the same to me. (Interview, August 5, 2016) Dubbing directors who regularly worked on dubbing Tamil and Telugu films into Hindi mentioned that the most important factor was to focus on the entertainment value rather than a faithful translation of the original dialogues. South Indian films are also often viewed as exhibiting customs and norms that are seen as alien to Hindi-speaking audiences and dubbing professionals spoke of

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localizing South Indian films in a manner similar to the way they spoke about Hollywood.3 For example, when I asked Divya Acharya what were the challenges or obstacles posed by the vocabulary, idioms, or slang of Hollywood films, I was surprised when her answer included a discussion of South Indian films as well, specifically the practice of cross-cousin marriage. She said, We have to first Indianize or localize the jokes, and in South movies there is a custom that sister and brothers’ children can get married; that does not happen here. There are many South movies where there’s a brother and a sister and their kids marry – so we have to change the storyline. We have to show they are not real brothers and sisters, probably best friends’ kids who have lived together like a family, so now they can get married to each other. (Interview, July 29, 2016) Additionally, South Indian films are often represented by dubbing professionals as exhibiting a very different aesthetic and aural “sensibility” than Hindi films, which requires its own adjustments. Manoj Muntasir, a lyricist and scriptwriter for the Hindi film industry, who wrote the Hindi dialogues for the dubbed version of the Telugu blockbuster films, Baahubali 1 and Baahubali 2, discussed how he went about adapting the films for a Hindi audience. He said, Tamil and Telugu cinema are a little loud, while we are a little more subtle, Hindi cinema. I always knew that if I kept the same loud expressivity of the original in Hindi, then it would really seem out of place. I really toned it down a lot. Even then the film appears pretty loud in Hindi, because I cannot change the scene, I can only tone down the language. (Interview, August 8, 2016) What Muntasir was referring to was bombastic dialogue and a hypertheatrical way of performing those dialogues. Muntasir gave a few examples of how he modified the dialogue in Hindi to be less over-the-top from his perspective. Speaking about a particular scene in the film where a weapons dealer comes to the kingdom trying to sell his wares and he starts to expound upon the properties of a particular sword, Muntasir said, So, he’s talking about the sword in a very, very over-the-top manner. Okay, it was mandatory to glorify the sword, but I found that he was being quite excessive about it. After all it’s just a sword at the end of the day – so I totally toned it down so that people don’t feel like, ‘Hey man just shut up, enough about the sword!’ (Interview, August 8, 2016) Muntasir mentioned how some of the romantic scenes, which had dialogues of the sort that he characterized as “I’ll-pluck-the stars-and-moon-from-the

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sky-and-lay-them-at-your-feet and all that stuff,” would be “very passé” for a Hindi audience. He elaborated, We have to understand that even if we are making a period film, the audience is a 21st century audience. I really had to tone down the romantic scenes a lot, so that they seem real and believable to a Hindi audience. At times, you will find that there is absolutely no similarity between the Telugu and the Hindi dialogues. (Interview, August 8, 2016) Muntasir’s comments about the incommensurability between Hindi and Telugu as cinematic languages is echoed in another register by one of the Disney executives discussing how they plan their release strategies for domestically produced Hindi films.4 Discussing the Tamil market, the executive said, “we are also aliens there,” and hence one had to make sure not to release a Hindi film in the southern Indian states at the same time as highly anticipated Tamil or Telugu films.

Conclusions Studying the production of dubbed films illustrates how the world of dubbing constitutes an industrial network that connects a range of sites, people, technologies, narratives, and languages and produces new cinematic geographies.5 As a category, “Indian cinema” has always been problematic  – because unlike other national cinema categories, it does not correspond to a single language. While scholars have acknowledged the tremendous multiplicity of filmmaking practices and traditions in the subcontinent, the question of language – not cinematic language but the actual language in cinema – remains to be studied in greater depth. Language plays a critical role in the political economy of media industries, whether via the earmarking of subsidies for filmmaking in specific languages, the promotion of a particular dialect as a normative standard in advertising (Davila 2001), the daily translations undertaken by news agencies (Davier 2014), or film studios’ local-language production strategies (Donoghue 2014). Additionally, as researchers across many media worlds have demonstrated, language is a category of sociopolitical identity, form of labor, set of commodified skills, and object of market exchange (Irvine 1988). A focus on language and translation through the process of dubbing helps to challenge conventional nation-bounded categories of film industries and highlights the instability of categories such as Hollywood, Bollywood, or even Indian cinema.

Acknowledgments Fieldwork in Mumbai was supported by an American Institute of Indian Studies Senior Short-Term Fellowship. I would like to thank Abul Ansari, Divya Acharya, Mona Ghosh-Shetty, Mayank Jain, S. Kumar, Sanket Mhatre, Kalpesh Parekh,

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Manoj Muntasir, Mayur Puri, Shakti Singh, and the team at Disney India for their insights and input, which made this chapter possible. I am really grateful to Anupama Chopra, Datta Dave, Amit Khanna, Shyam Shroff, Anjum Rajabali, and Siddharth Roy Kapur who helped to facilitate crucial introductions and contacts within the dubbing world. Finally, a sincere thanks to Madhuja Mukherjee and Monika Mehta for their feedback on earlier versions of this chapter and for conceptualizing the conference panel that was the genesis of this volume.

Note 1 For a much longer history of interaction between Hollywood and the Hindi film industry see Govil (2015). 2 For a discussion about the idea of national cinema see Higson (1989). 3 See Srinivas (2008) for a discussion of “nativity” or nativeness – a key category within Telugu [and Tamil] cinemas, which has to do with the on-screen representations of customs, practices and locations that exemplify cultural specificity. 4 In August 2016, Disney was still involved in producing Hindi films by Bollywood directors as a consequence of having bought UTV. Disney pulled out of domestic Hindi film production by 2017. 5 See Srinivas (2003, 2008) for a fascinating discussion of the interaction between the Telugu film industry and Hong Kong cinema – including the dubbing of Hong Kong films into Telugu in the 1990s – which comprises its own sort of industrial network.

References Bhushan, Nyay. 2016. “India Box Office: ‘Jungle Book’ Becomes Top Hollywood Release Ever”. The Hollywood Reporter, April 20. ———. 2017. “Hollywood Film Revenue in India Rises 10 percent, Boosted by Dubbed Versions”. The Hollywood Reporter, March  21. www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/ hollywood-film-revenue-india-rises-10-percent-boosted-by-dubbed-versions-987585. Busch, Anita. 2016. “ ‘The Jungle Book’ Becomes Highest-Grossing Hollywood Release Ever in India”. Deadline Hollywood, April 21. Cain, Rob. 2016. “ ‘Jungle Book’ Rocks India’s Box Office with Second Best Debut Ever for a Hollywood Film”. Forbes, April 9. Chatterjee, Saibal. 1999. “The Dubbing Rub”. Outlook, March 1. Davier, Lucile. 2014. “The Paradoxical Invisibility of Translation in the Highly Multilingual Context of News Agencies”. Global Media and Communication 10 (1): 53–72. Davila, Arlene. 2001. Latinos, Inc. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Donoghue, Courtney Brannon. 2014. “Sony and Local-Language Productions: Conglomerate Hollywood’s Strategy of Flexible Localization for the Global Film Market”. Cinema Journal 53 (4): 3–27. Film Information. 2017. “Classification: 2016”. January 7: 9. Ganti, Tejaswini. 2002. “And Yet My Heart Is Still Indian: The Bombay Film Industry and the (H)Indianization of Hollywood”. In Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain, edited by L. Abu-Lughod, F. Ginsburg, and B. Larkin, 281–300. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. ———. 2012. Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Govil, Nitin. 2015. Orienting Hollywood: A Century of Film Culture Between Los Angeles and Bombay. New York: New York University Press. Higson, Andrew. 1989. “The Concept of National Cinema”. Screen 30 (4): 36–46. Irvine, Judith. 1988. “When Talk Isn’t Cheap: Language and Political Economy”. American Ethnologist 16 (2): 248–267. Jha, Lata. 2016. “The Jungle Book Crosses Rs140 Crore Mark in India”. Livemint, April 27. KPMG. 2017. Media & Entertainment Industry Report: Media for the Masses: The Promise Unfolds. New Delhi: Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI). Murthy, C.S.H.N. 2013. “Film Remakes as Cross-Cultural Connections Between North and South: A Case Study of the Telugu Film Industry’s Contribution to Indian Filmmaking”. Journal of International Communication 19 (1): 19–42. Press Trust of India. 2016. “Shah Rukh’s Fan Forces Jungle Book to Change Its India Release Date”. Hindustan Times, February 17. Ramachandran, Naman. 2016. “Localization Makes ‘Jungle Book’ a Hit in India”. Variety, April 21. Rapoza, Kenneth. 2016. “What Indians Are Really Saying About Disney’s ‘The Jungle Book’ ”. Forbes, April 10. Sehgal, Nutan. 2010. “Hollywood Reaches Out to India”. Tribune India, April 25. Smith, Iain Robert. 2017. The Hollywood Meme: Transnational Adaptations in World Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Srinivas, S.V. 2003. “Hong Kong Action Film in the Indian B Circuit”. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 4 (1): 40–62. ———. 2008. “Missing in the Original: Twin Dragons Remade in India”. Journal of Moving Image. Department of Film Studies, Jadavpur University. TNN (Times News Network). 2015. “Hollywood Is Turning Out to be Bollywood’s Biggest Competitor”. The Times of India, June 17.

15 MAKING-OF VIDEOS Of placeless studios and pioneering music directors Pavitra Sundar

This is a chapter about making-of videos, short features that showcase the process of composing and producing film songs. The emergence of this genre speaks to critical transformations in the film and music business in the last twenty years. It marks a post-liberalization moment when media paratexts abound on radio, television, and, crucially, the internet (Gray 2010; Mehta 2017b, 128). Star interviews, award shows, reality shows, and other paratexts work in conjunction with films to generate revenue and appeal to a broad public (see, for example, Desai-Stephens 2017; Mazumdar 2012; Mehta 2017a, 2017b). Yet, it would be a mistake to dismiss the making-of genre (or any other paratext) as mere marketing blitz. A close reading of common tropes of making-of videos demonstrates how the genre visualizes the industrial traffic that has sustained filmmaking in India for years and decenters Bombay cinema in the process. Homing in on the scene of recording, making-of videos construct the space of the studio and the figure of the music director as important nodes in cinematic networks. The production of contemporary film music requires these nodes: it is through them that the cross-regional traffic of people, sounds, and languages passes. By figuring studios as important but isolated, un-locatable entities, the genre amplifies the work that goes on inside recording studios and the people at the center of the projects. Two music directors enjoy starring roles in this chapter: A. R. Rahman and Sneha Khanwalkar. Although grounded in South and North Indian contexts respectively, Rahman and Khanwalkar traverse geographical boundaries in crucial ways. Their boundary crossings inspire my own methodological meanderings. I move across linguistic and industrial contexts, using making-of videos of Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, and Marathi songs as my examples. The aim is not to flatten the heterogeneity of filmmaking in India but to challenge the hegemony of Bombay cinema without recourse to a regional cinemas framework (whereby the “regional” is inadvertently cast as peripheral or “other”). I  argue that in its celebration of

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the recording studio as a technologically sophisticated, placeless, and multilingual venue, the making-of genre makes visible the vast and heterogenous webs that constitute Indian film and music industries. The networks that come into view are “social” in two senses of the term: they involve connections and collaborations between diverse film personnel, and they are structured by (and replicate) social ideals and hierarchies of our times. My comparative analysis clarifies not just the differential social positions of my two star music directors  – differences of gender, ethnicity, and religion, for example – but also the discourses about – and critiques of – the film-music industry that their respective making-of videos generate. I argue that the making-of genre lays bare the existence of pan-regional, pan-linguistic industrial networks as well as the gendered power structures and assumptions that continue to power the cinemas of India.

Paratexts of aural stardom Straddling the genres of documentary and commercial advertisement, making-of videos purport to offer a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of film songs. As Monika Mehta notes, film songs may themselves be considered paratexts, given their extra-cinematic circulation (Mehta 2017b, 137). Making-of videos are thus paratexts of paratexts. Lasting anywhere from one to twenty minutes, these shorts weave together location footage from composition, recording, and shooting sessions; interviews of key personnel; and fragments of the completed song sequence. The videos take different forms depending on the platforms on which they circulate. For example, they may appear in the “Extras” section of a DVD, on television shows and websites promoting the film, or on YouTube and other digital venues. They may be stand-alone features or part of a broader narrative about the making of the film. Making-of videos rarely use an authoritative voice-over, relying instead on the music and the talking heads’ comments for a connective thread. Thus, while they purport to de-mystify the process of film-song production, what they do in fact is celebrate that process.1 The star of most making-of videos is the music director. The man  – and it usually is a man – is inevitably interviewed in front of a soundboard. Even when making-of videos focus on the shooting of the song sequence (rather than the music recording session), interviewees tend to identify the music director as the most important person in the life of the song. Collaborators applaud his musical and technological skills and share anecdotes about the composition and filming process. Making-of videos are thus paratexts not just of songs but of aural stardom.2 As “important venues for ‘seeing’ the aural star [whose work] is only audible in film,” they enhance the visual stardom of music directors and, to a lesser extent, that of playback singers (Mehta 2017a, 69). They accord these behind-the-scenes actors visibility, shed light on their work habits and skills, and confirm their genius in the eyes of their peers. In underscoring the importance of the music director, the making-of genre reifies a shift in film-music production that came about in the early 1990s, from

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analog to digital technology. This was not simply a technological shift but a much broader transformation of cultural, artistic, and industrial practices (Booth 2008). It affected the roles of (and thus the relationships between) musicians, technicians, and other personnel. While music directors and playback singers had long enjoyed a leading role in the making of film songs, the 1990s saw the former attain much greater prominence. Distinctions between composition, arranging, and recording gave way as new digital recording and mixing consoles allowed music directors (and/or engineers) to perform all of these tasks (Booth 2008, 84).3 Gone are the days when an entire ensemble of singers and instrumentalists rehearsed a song together and recorded the piece in a single take. It is the rare making-of video that presents the recording session as a synchronized and collective endeavor (see, for example, “Mona Darling” from the Marathi film Jaundya Na Balasaheb [Girish Kulkarni 2017] [Shreya Ghoshal Fans Club 2017]). Most often, we see the vocalist singing the same line over and over, with the music director either nodding in approval or suggesting an alternate version. “Nice, nice. . . . One safety, ok? This was good” A. R. Rahman tells Alia Bhatt in the “Sooha Saha” making-of video for Highway (Imtiaz Ali 2014), coaxing her to sing the same line again (Highway The Film 2014). This moment illustrates a practice common in film-music production today: music directors record multiple versions of a single line, so they have an array of options to pick from when “punching” (or splicing) the song together. Many making-of videos are also peppered with references to Auto-tune (software used to correct vocal pitch), another subtle indication that much of the work of song-making is technological and happens once the recording session is complete.

A. R. Rahman, the quintessential music director The poster child of this transformation in film-music production is A. R. Rahman. In the early 1990s, a number of sound technicians and film studios revamped their equipment and production practices. But it is Rahman who is widely regarded as having raised the bar, demonstrating with Roja (Mani Ratnam 1993) that an altogether new sound was possible with a different set of processes and equipment. Rahman’s musical proficiency and technological prowess have always been understood as intertwined. Consider the making-of video of “Enga Pona Rasa” for the Tamil film Maryan (Bharatbala 2013; Sony Music India 2013). The setting is Rahman’s home studio, where the maestro sits at a desk that holds a screen, a tablet, headphones, and a laptop. He swivels from one keyboard to the next as he works out his musical ideas, often handling the laptop and piano at once. He frequently uses his phone to record and play back an idea. His collaborators sit across from him, with just a notebook or a guitar in hand. Rahman is not often portrayed in a music sitting such as this one. Making-of videos typically show him at a large soundboard, adjusting the levels in the mix or speaking with an interviewer about his process. It is all the more striking, then, that even when he is jamming with colleagues, his technological and musical instruments are cast as equivalent entities.

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Understanding Rahman’s tight association with technology requires but a glance at representations of other music directors, especially those who worked in Bombay cinema prior to Rahman’s arrival. In making-of videos for the Hindi romcom Dum Laga Ke Haisha (Sharat Katariya 2015), Anu Malik clasps a harmonium, regardless of whether he is rehearsing with singers or speaking into the camera (see Yash Raj Films 2015, 2016). While Rajesh Roshan presides over the recording session for Kaabil (Sanjay Gupta 2017) seated at a soundboard, he does not seem to be using it at all; pages with song lyrics are strewn across the console, and he barely looks down at them (Tollywood Box Office 2017). Even when Rahman is shown directing singers in this manner, his attention never wavers from the recording and editing apparatus in front of him. One of the ways in which Rahman revolutionized film-music production is by working not with singers so much as fragments of their voices: To record a song, singers [are] invited to sing in a basic key, with freedom to improvise and sing as many variations as they pleas[e]. Rahman then use[s] this sonic material to assemble a song through an intense process of editing and layering of musical tracks. (Jhingan 2015, 73–74) Many playback singers speak of how they record what they think Rahman wants based on his sparse instructions. They send him the tracks and he makes what he will out of those fragments. Rahman’s making-of videos amplify the fragmented nature of the process by presenting him as an individual genius who prefers to work by himself. Singers are rarely visible in behind-the-scenes footage of Rahman. We see him interacting with his technological toys far more than with musicians. He thus sidesteps the sociality associated with the music-sitting sessions of an older generation of music directors in Bombay and many of his contemporaries. For example, in the Kaabil song-recording sessions, Rajesh and Rakesh Roshan are treated like the stars they are in the Hindi film world, with several people following and catering to them (Tollywood Box Office 2017). Music director Anu Malik also has an entourage for the rehearsals for Dum Laga Ke Haisha (see, for instance, Yash Raj Films 2016). During the recording of “Mona Darling,” music directors AjayAtul mouth the lyrics and gesticulate wildly to communicate their instructions and approval to the musicians (Shreya Ghoshal Fans Club 2017). Actors and other staff join in the fun, singing along and swaying with pleasure. By contrast, Rahman’s studio sessions are serious, intense affairs. The space is usually not brightly lit: monitors, table lamps, and recessed lighting shed small pools of light, creating a focused atmosphere (see, for instance, Big Home Video 2009). Even when an assistant is seated next to him, Rahman is typically the only person in the frame. He famously works through the night, going to bed only after his morning prayers. Rahman’s quiet, introspective ways bolster his image of being “different,” as singer Arijit Singh puts it (SpotboyE 2016).

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While Rahman’s solitary work habits set him apart from his peers past and present, his technologically oriented, studio-based practice has become the norm across India. Regardless of the language of the film and the personnel involved, making-of videos center the space of the studio and the figure of the music director. That these elements are readily identifiable tropes of the genre tells us that, although Rahman is still regarded a musical auteur, his methods are widely emulated. The very existence of the genre confirms his profound influence on the film-music business and its place in the public imagination.

Placelessness, multilinguality, and the recording studio Exploring the question “What do recording studios do?” Elliot Bates argues that studios must be understood simultaneously as acoustic environments, as meeting places, as container technologies, as a system of constraints on vision, sound and mobility, and as typologies that facilitate particular interactions between humans and nonhuman objects while structuring and maintaining power relations. (Bates 2012) That is, studios are not inert spaces, disconnected from what happens in them. Studios enable certain kinds of work, certain kinds of collaborations, certain relationships and hierarchies and not others. By training our attention on the space of the studio, making-of videos make visible the ideologies and power relations undergirding film-music production today. In the making-of genre, the recording studio figures as a special, technologically packed space. The relentless emphasis on screens and mics, buttons and knobs, blinking lights and graphs represents the work that goes on in the studio as highly specialized. Practically every making-of video includes shots of the soundboard controls moving by themselves, without any apparent human intervention.4 Such representations give technology a magical aura. The videos also suggest parallels between musical and technological knowledge by cutting between images of (mic’ed) musical instruments in the recording booth and various recording and monitoring devices in the control room. Recording studios in India tend to be small, cramped spaces. In making-of videos, they appear as a few internal rooms, separated (and connected) by glass panes. The music director sits in front of a large mixing console in one room, instructing the singer and recording her voice. The other room is the recording booth, where the singer performs. The audio track sometimes switches between just the singers’ vocals and the complete mix to show what people in different rooms hear. The framing of the shots is claustrophobic. The tightness of these spaces necessitates the use of medium shots and close-ups, which emphasize the technological and musical instruments. In the making-of video for “Sooha Saha,” director Imtiaz Ali crouches on the floor beside the recording console; A. R. Rahman stands on

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the other side, leaning toward the window that separates their room from the recording booth where Alia Bhatt sings (Highway The Film 2014). The studio in which Shreya Ghoshal and Vinod Yajamanya record “Padipothunna Nee Mayalo” for the Telugu film Titanic (Raja Vamsi 2016) seems big enough for just the two of them (Aditya Music 2016). In these and all other making-of videos, the world outside is kept out of the two interlocking spaces of the control booth and recording booth. No external doors or windows to point to an “elsewhere.” When stars arrive, they are usually pictured inside the building, not on the road or the compound outside. Shots of the music director and singer at work typically cut to other internal spaces, where talking heads gush about the music or their peers. The only exterior space, thus, is “the space of the song” – that is, scenes of the songs being picturized or fragments of the song sequence as it appears in the film (Dyer 2012).5 None of this is surprising from an acoustic design standpoint: studios and rooms within studios need to be isolated in order to prevent “undesirable” sounds from traveling in or out. This isolation makes the recording studio a counterintuitive space to study the traffic in ideas, sounds, and people. And yet, the way physical barriers are rendered – or not rendered, as the case may be – in this genre sheds light on the industry’s imaginary. We learn that film songs can only be created in the studio and that the equipment and the aurally isolated space of the sound booth are crucial for music-making. The studio emerges as the hallowed locus of creation. Even as making-of videos paint the studio as a unique and uniquely important space, they work hard to emphasize its placelessness (Relph 1976). Sound professionals know well that studios tend to have a distinct sound. Recorded sounds bear the imprint of the spaces in which they were recorded (Bates 2012). However, making-of videos never emphasize the studio’s aural signature. Indeed, in these videos, studios appear virtually indistinguishable from one another. There are no visual or aural cues that indicate that the sound of this particular studio is somehow remarkable. Making-of videos do not lavish attention on the acoustic treatments or the design of the studio – they do not ask “what does this room sound like?” Instead, they obsess about the music director at the soundboard. The distinctiveness of the music is thus rendered a function of the people involved in the project, not the specific space. Placelessness is also established by omitting geographical markers. Making-of videos rarely name the studio or the city in which it is located. If they do, they quickly cut to interior spaces where there are few visual cues to moor the studio in a recognizable location. In rendering the recording studio placeless, the making-of genre aligns it with airports, malls, and theme parks, which, in geographer Edward Relph’s early formulation, are “labyrinth[s] of endless similarities,” shorn of history and a sense of belonging (Relph 1976, 141). But the genre also recalls Doreen Massey’s theorization of place as “articulated moments in networks of social relations and understandings” (Massey 1994, 154). Place is but a “meeting place” where flows of people, objects, and ideas intersect. It is as a node in a global, interconnected network (154). Applying Massey’s feminist reformulation of place to making-of

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videos, we see that even as the recording studio appears to shut out the outside world, it is clearly constituted by that outside. The social relations and transactions that shape the work that goes on inside the studio stretch far beyond that placeless location. When foreign musicians travel to India  – as R&B star Akon did to record “Chammak Chhallo” for the Hindi film Ra-One (Anubhav Sinha 2011) – makingof videos typically include shots of them at an Indian airport, garlanded and surrounded by a crush of people (T-Series 2011). This representation is in sharp contrast to the one for “Dagabaaz Re,” a song from Dabangg 2 (Arbaaz Khan 2012) featuring Rahat Fateh Ali Khan. The Pakistani (and Pakistan-based) qawwal and playback singer is greeted enthusiastically and given star treatment when he arrives in the studio (T-Series 2012). But it is unclear whether he had to cross any borders: no airports, no outdoor shots indicate that he or anyone else on the production team traveled far for the recording. This representational choice to only mark the arrival of Western collaborators suggests that the distances South Asians travel within the subcontinent does not matter. When there are divides that cannot be traversed physically, technology comes to the rescue. In talking-head interviews, we get frequent references to phone calls. For example, Aamir Khan tells of how Ashutosh Gowariker, director of the Hindi blockbuster Lagaan (2001), sought his approval for a tune by playing it over the phone (Bhatkal 2004). (That tune would eventually become “Ghanan Ghanan.”) In a more recent making-of video, singer Shakthisree Gopalan talks of how Rahman called her late one night inviting her to his studio for a composition/jam session (Sony Music India 2013). Since “that’s not something you say no to,” both she and guitarist Keba showed up, and their work that night led to the hit song “Enga Pona Rasa”. Some making-of videos such as the one for “Aye Mr. Minor” from the Tamil film Kaaviyathalaivan (Vasanthabalan 2014) show Rahman speaking with collaborators on video chat about the sound and mood of the song (Sony Music India 2014). Thus, while making-of videos do not depict movement and travel explicitly, it quickly becomes evident that film-song production takes place across great gulfs in time and space. Another gulf that industry personnel regularly traverse is that of language. Interviews with filmmakers and musicians frequently involve codeswitching. For example, director Bharatbala’s comments about “Enga Pona Rasa” are primarily in Tamil, with occasional turns to English; in the same video, musicians Shakthisree and Keba speak mostly in English (Sony Music India 2013). Only rarely do making-of videos provide subtitles, on the assumption that those who seek these paratexts are comfortable with the multiple tongues in play.6 Singers also move between languages during the recording process. Making-of videos sometimes draw attention to song sheets, where lyrics may be spelled out in a different script than what is typical for a particular language. For instance, we see Tamil lyrics written in Roman script in the “Enga Pona Rasa” and “Aye Mr. Minor” videos and Marathi lyrics in Roman and Nagari scripts in the one for “Mona Darling” (Sony Music India 2013, 2014; Shreya Ghoshal Fans Club 2017).

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Making-of videos reveal other acts of translation as well. In what looks like an informal video about the making of “Kaise Mujhe Tum Mil Gayi” for Ghajini (A. R. Murugadoss 2008), we listen in on conversations that suggest that not all personnel are comfortable in Hindi, the language of the song lyrics (Big Home Video 2009). The crew includes A. R. Rahman, who understands Hindi but rarely speaks it, relying instead on English and Tamil; Murugadoss, director of action films in Tamil and other languages; Aamir Khan, star of the Hindi version of the film; Hindi lyricist Prasoon Joshi; and Benny Dayal, a Malayali singer born and raised in the UAE who got his first break singing in a Tamil film scored by Rahman. The Hindi speakers offer corrections to Dayal’s pronunciation and explain what various words mean; Khan also resorts to metaphor and hyperbole to describe the pathos in this romantic song. English is clearly the lingua franca of this recording studio, but it proves insufficient for certain ideas. At one point, Murugadoss, who has so far been speaking to Khan in English, appeals to Rahman in Tamil to communicate what he means. Rahman responds by singing the line in an open, soaring fashion to demonstrate the feeling Murugadoss wants to evoke. A similarly uneven process of translation plays out as music director duo Vishal-Shekhar try to explain the connotations of “Chammak Chhalo” to Akon: “Not sexy . . . it’s naughtily . . . sexy” – “like a tease” – “Go-go dancer?” – “country girl” – “rural girl” – “small-town hottie” – “Village hottie!” (T-Series 2011). Other instances of linguistic creativity and flexibility emerge in the talking-head interviews. Singer Arijit Singh says that A. R. Rahman introduced him to a tune using a voice track and lyric sheets with dummy lyrics: “He composes in gibberish language” (SpotboyE 2016). Aamir Khan concurs in the Ghajini video, saying that even though Rahman’s scratch tunes do not include words, they communicate powerful emotions: “woh jo original scratch tunes jo the, [unclear] usmein alfas nahi the . . . ek dard aur pain tha” (Big Home Video 2009). The use of nonsensical sounds is part of music director Sneha Khanwalkar’s composition process as well. In her case, alliterative, onomatopoeic sounds are tied to the places where she records and the kind of local ethos she wants to recreate. For example, upon learning that musicians use a spoon to beat out the rhythm of a song on the side of a drum, she incorporated that sound – the syllables “tak tak” – into the lyrics (Viacom18 Studios 2012a). These diverse acts of translation point to something fundamental to film production in India: artists and technicians cross linguistic and regional boundaries constantly. They are not expected to speak the language of the films on which they work.7 The nonchalance with which making-of videos treat these moments suggests just how porous industrial and regional borders are when it comes to filmand music-making. These utterly common linguistic border-crossings do not rupture the placelessness of the recording studio; they enhance it. They make audible (and visible) the pan-regional networks and hierarchies that sustain the work that happens inside the studio. I have been arguing so far that the making-of genre presents recording studios as unremarkable spaces – small, cramped, indistinguishable. So proficient are the

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music director and singers that they are not fazed by having to work under such constraints. So powerful is the technology that great music can be produced despite spatial limitations. Such a celebratory narrative enhances music directors’ (and singers’) star status, but it glosses over much that is central to music production. The spatial separation of the singer and the music director (via their placement in the recording and control booths respectively) and the erasure of all other musicians from the scene suggest a very particular division of musical labor. By virtue of its short length and tropes, the making-of video drastically compresses the space and time it takes to produce film songs. It highlights the technology that facilitates transactions between different locales but disregards the geographical and linguistic distances people have to span (particularly within India) for this work to happen. Thus, we might read the making-of genre as devaluing the time, effort, and energy it takes to travel across South Asia and to make music. We might also read it as an over-valuing, an idealization, of the space of the recording studio. While the panregional, pan-linguistic networks that produce film songs come into view, two nodes in those networks – the studio and the music director – and the technological sophistication of both nodes are treated as all important. The visual rhetoric described earlier stays consistent no matter the language or stars involved in the project. The fact that A. R. Rahman’s pioneering practices now appear as generic elements of making-of videos speaks not just to the man’s outsized influence but also to the waning hegemony of Hindi cinema. The makingof genre takes up a critique of Bombay cinema implicit in Rahman’s practice. In his own quiet way, Rahman has always refused the notion – always more of a notion than a reality – that Bombay is the center of all things film in India. He insists on working in his home studio in Chennai. Stories abound of star filmmakers (everyone from Mani Ratnam to Aamir Khan) having to visit the budding music director at his studio. Bombay filmmakers used to grumble about being forced to fly “all the way down” and to adjust to his night-owl ways. Rahman’s work – and working with Rahman – entails a decentering of the time and space typically associated with Hindi cinema. The placelessness and multilinguality evident in making-of videos does similar work. These tropes may seem contradictory: one dispenses with markers of place, the other gestures to the many (social and physical) places to which film and music personnel are linked. Yet, together, they draw attention away from Hindi and from Bombay. In the making-of genre, Hindi film songs seem no different than Tamil, Telugu, or Marathi ones. They are all produced using the same processes and in the same kinds of spaces. The technological sophistication and multilingual ethos depicted in making-of videos makes the studios’ physical location unimportant. Whether the recording happens in Chennai, Hyderabad, or anywhere else has no bearing, the genre suggests, on the making of the film song.

Sneha Khanwalkar’s musical travels And yet, place matters. The representation of placelessness in the making-of genre ignores the fact that gender and other vectors of identity and privilege shape one’s

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ability to inhabit and navigate different spaces. The placeless recording studio belies the masculine culture of film and music production. Such a gendered critique becomes visible in making-of videos featuring Sneha Khanwalkar, a music director who has revolutionized the Hindi film-music industry in recent years. Khanwalkar routinely works outside Bombay studios, traveling the country to record interesting timbres, textures, and melodies.8 In her making-of videos, she speaks at length of her belief that different regions are home not only to different genres but to distinct vocal timbres. We see the people she meets and the informal rehearsal sessions she conducts – in their villages, in their homes, on the streets, and in small-town recording studios. She often works in makeshift venues, not isolated acoustic spaces. In one memorable video about “Bhoos ke Dher” from Gangs of Wasseypur (Anurag Kashyap 2012), Khanwalkar has a theater group rehearse while walking down the street to the recording session (Viacom18 Studios 2012b). Such ad hoc moves are also on display in the MTV show she hosts, Sound Trippin.9 The foregrounding of Khanwalkar’s itinerant music-making does not mean that the studio and technologies associated with studio work are unimportant to her. She may not cart her singers all the way to Bombay, but she does record them in studios in Chandigarh, Patna, and other cities close to their homes. Thus, her practice does not dispense with the recording studio so much as multiply the venues for making and recording music. Her videos undermine the notion that the studio is the most important site for film-song production. They make visible the casting and rehearsal process, not just the time and space of recording. Moreover, her praxis is so fundamentally about travel that it simply cannot sustain the placelessness typical of the making-of genre. Khanwalkar’s travels break gendered expectations in several ways. She challenges middle- and upper-class norms of femininity by traveling far and wide, to unfamiliar places. Notwithstanding the long history of women of all classes (in India as elsewhere) traveling for both work and pleasure, the idea that elite women ought to limit themselves to respectable domestic pursuits and spaces remains a powerful one. Khanwalkar is clearly accompanied by a team of people, but the camerawork and interviewees’ comments draw attention to her confident meanderings, never casting her as dependent on her colleagues. Some of the spaces through which Khanwalkar moves are exclusively male public spaces. In the making-of video for Oye Lucky, Lucky Oye (2008), the film that brought her into the limelight, director Dibakar Banerjee and Khanwalkar repeat the origin story of “O Raja ki Raaj Dulhari” (desisarpanch 2009). When Banerjee set her the task of finding a tune he had heard ten–fifteen years ago, she did not think twice: “So, I just left, ya,” she says of her “random” quest for the ragini folk song. She found not just the tune but the singers she wanted in an all-night, all-male ragini festival in Haryana. The precariousness of her position as a woman in that space is muted but still audible in her description: “only men . . . full in their party mode . . . they were drinking.” She gushes about the “larger than life” sound of the matkas (earthen pots) at the festival, before pivoting to the singers she recruited. These quick rhetorical moves limit the ambivalent situation Khanwalkar finds herself in and put her back in charge – of the narration, if not the scene of the festival.

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It is precisely the move out of the studio that allows Khanwalkar to “destabilize the highly masculinized industrial structures of the film industry” (Jhingan 2015, 85). Importantly, it is not the mixing console but the portable microphone and recorder that are her trademark devices. This produces a very different image than that of Rahman, who is rarely pictured without a synthesizer or a soundboard. Jhingan’s observation about Sound Trippin applies equally to Khanwalkar’s makingof videos: The female anchor’s body is no longer the focal point for the ocular gaze of the camera. . . . By drawing attention to the act of listening and recording, Khanwalkar frames herself as a dynamic listening body. The microphone becomes a prosthetic extension of Khanwalkar’s body, upholding an enhanced form of being and knowing. (Jhingan 2015, 77) It is through listening – and technologies of listening such as the recorder – that Khanwalkar rewrites what a music director looks like and what “he” does. It is not just her presence as a woman but her methods that are significant. Complicating this gendered critique of the film-music industry, however, is the fact that Khanwalkar’s travels align her with the “sound collector,” a key figure in the history of ethnomusicology (Kheshti 2015). In the early twentieth century, white women trained as comparative ethnologists were employed by the Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE) to gather sound bytes of indigenous tribes thought to be “disappearing.” Marginalized in their academic careers, these women sought agency and upward mobility in the labor of “capturing” black and brown bodies in sound. Contemporaneous accounts and photographs suggest that their recordings were not chronicles of everyday linguistic and musical acts so much as staged performances directed by the musicologists. Through their work of listening, staging, recording, cataloguing, and archiving, these women produced versions of otherness that suited both themselves and the colonial project of modernity. Well before BAE sound collectors traveled around the U.S., Western travelers (including musicians and music historians) journeyed to South Asia to capture the sounds of Indians on that subcontinent (Bor 1988).10 The roots of ethnomusicology lie in these diverse colonial ventures, and women played a key role in the discipline from its early years. So, while Sneha Khanwalkar may be one of just a handful of women music directors in Indian film history, there are other genealogies that help frame her work. That she uses the term “field” to describe the places she visits is a sign of her ethnographic orientation. Ethnographers now take as a given that the “field recording” is a mediated text that emerges in interactions between differentially positioned subjects. Rigid ideas about self and other (about foreigners and natives, insiders and outsiders) and the boundedness of cultures have given way to more complex understandings of global contexts and circulations (Koskoff 2014). These interventions clarify that neither the BAE sound collectors nor contemporary

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scholars – nor indeed Khanwalkar – are (or were) simply capturing “real” sounds that await(ed) them in the field.11 Nonetheless, there persists in the making-of videos and broader discourse about Khanwalkar the distinct sense that she is a brave young woman journeying to distant lands to “discover” unusual sounds. Here is director Dibakar Banerjee offering high praise for Khanwalkar in the Oye Lucky, Lucky Oye making-of video: Sneha has that ear for rawness and intensity. And Sneha has this tremendous enthusiasm to just take a backpack, and go into a jungle, or some village, or some god-forsaken back-of-the-beyond [place] anywhere and get inside the musical soul and the root of that area and come out with melodies. (desisarpanch 2009) Likewise, Jhingan speaks of how Khanwalkar travels to the “interiors” (meaning a village) and “brings together unexplored spatialities, voices, bodies and machines” (Jhingan 2015, 75, 71; my emphasis). Khanwalkar herself discusses her work in similar terms. Such descriptions cast her as an exceptional figure who defies gender norms. But they say little of the privilege that allows her to access different spaces. Her confidence and extroverted nature, not to mention her fluency in Hindi and English, render her collaborators  – be they accomplished music professionals (hereditary musicians, longtime AIR artists) or people with no apparent musical experience – as “other.” She is the savvy cosmopolitan traveler. She is the one with caste, class, and regional privilege. They are the provincial folk musicians. Their speech is marked as accented, not hers. (By contrast, A. R. Rahman’s consistent use of English never lets him shake off his otherness vis-à-vis the Hindi film industry.) Moreover, Khanwalkar stages songs as carefully as the BAE song collectors did. She is very particular about the voices she picks. She rehearses extensively with the singers and provides lots of hands-on guidance. She sets the mood at the recording sessions with her cheering, clapping, and unabashed praise. But none of this work of producing otherness aurally diminishes her reputation as a collector of cool sounds. Thus, while her makingof videos lay bare the gendered underpinnings of the placeless recording studio and decenter Bombay as the site of film-music production, they paper over the extent to which her caste and class privilege facilitate her work and thus her entry into the male-dominated industry.

Conclusion Emerging two decades after A. R. Rahman, Sneha Khanwalkar extends the critique of the Bombay film and music industry that the former initiated. The two music directors are positioned differently due to their gender, ethnicity, and compositional practices. Making-of videos cast Rahman as an individual star, the wunderkind working by himself into the wee hours on his computer. Khanwalkar, meanwhile,

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is rendered a young woman “backpacking” for interesting sounds. Both are at the center of cross-regional traffic. While the methods and technologies they use differ, they are both critical nodes in the networks that sustain the cinemas of India. The many linguistic transactions that occur in the “placeless” recording studio and out in the “field” undercut the privileged position that Hindi and Bombay have long enjoyed in the cinematic imagination of South Asia.

Acknowledgments I am grateful to Monika Mehta and Madhuja Mukherjee for organizing a fantastic ACLA seminar for which I first wrote this piece and for their subsequent feedback.

Notes 1 My primary evidence in this chapter comes from making-of videos commissioned by production companies. However, the tropes I identify are evident across various instantiations of the genre, including some that look like informal home videos shot by staff and fans present in the studio and others that are akin to the longer, more polished form of the making-of documentary (Hight 2005). 2 In invoking the term “aural stardom,” I am relying on Neepa Majumdar’s (2001) key formulation unpacking the politics of embodiment in Lata Mangeshkar’s voice. I am also building from Mehta’s (2017a) insights regarding the greater visibility accorded to music personnel in the post-liberalization period and the interconnections between aural and visual performance in paratexts like award shows. 3 While singers feature prominently in these videos, instrumentalists do not. Their virtual absence is a sign of their diminished position in this new era of film music. 4 A similar fetishization of recording technology is evident in the Classic Albums documentary series, inaugurated in the early 1990s to canonize particular pop and rock albums (Williams 2010). 5 Space constraints keep me from exploring the contrast between the placelessness of the recording studio and the constructions of place within the space of the song. Both, it seems to me, are carefully crafted “artificial geographies,” as Kuleshov would have it. 6 This is quite different a representational strategy and address than the multilingual “Jabra Fan Anthem,” the paratextual song (related to the Hindi film Fan [Maneesh Sharma 2016]) released in multiple languages (Mehta 2017b, 138–140). 7 As I discuss elsewhere, film personnel have worked across industrial and linguistic borders in India for decades (Sundar 2015, 30–31). This is true not just of people working behind the scenes but also of on-screen stars. Dubbing is a very wide-spread practice, particularly in the cinemas of South India, which regularly employ north Indian actresses (who do not speak Tamil, Telugu, or Kannada) and release films in multiple languages (Ganti 2016; Nakassis 2015). See also Ganti (this volume). 8 Shikha Jhingan identifies “the interface among mobility, technology, and gender” as one of the most important aspects of Khanwalkar’s work. While I address many of the same themes and texts Jhingan does, my interest is not so much in Khanwalkar’s interventions as what media representations of her reveal about institutional networks and hierarchies that support film-music production today (Jhingan 2015, 74). 9 Combining the format of a making-of video and a travel show, Sound Trippin has her traveling to a different Indian city in each episode. She creates a new song from distinctive musical phrases, voices, and sounds culled from the location. 10 Thanks to Shalini Ayyagari for pointing me to this and other pertinent ethnomusicological sources!

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11 Jhingan insists that Khanwalkar’s approach to space is not about claiming the ‘real,’ but about approaching it as a plural category that is constantly being produced through this sensory engagement. Moreover, her work foregrounds the performative and processual nature of technology. (Jhingan 2015, 78) This is certainly the case in Sound Trippin, where we see Khanwalkar and her colleagues tweak andmix sounds recorded during their daily excursions.

References Aditya Music. 2016. “Shreya Goshal Singing Padipothunna Nee Mayalo ||Titanic Movie songs|| Rajeev Saaluri, Yamini Bhaskar”. YouTube video, 4:40. Posted April 28, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsGnDs6BmBI. Bates, Eliot. 2012. “What Studios Do”. Journal on the Art of Record Production 7 (November). http://arpjournal.com/what-studios-do/. Bhatkal, Satyajit, dir. 2004. “Chale Chalo  .  .  . The Lunacy of Film-making”. Mumbai, India: Aamir Khan Productions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUJMRD_-c_c. Big Home Video. 2009. “Making of Kaise Mujhe  – Ghajini Song  – Part II”. YouTube video, 9:27. Posted March  24, 2009. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XhY4096 BBs&list=RD_XhY4096BBs&start_radio=1. Booth, Gregory D. 2008. Behind the Curtain: Making Music in Mumbai’s Film Studios. New York: Oxford University Press. Bor, Joep. 1988. “The Rise of Ethnomusicology: Sources on Indian Music c.1780 – c.1890”. Yearbook for Traditional Music 20: 51–73. https://doi.org/10.2307/768166. Desai-Stephens, Anaar. 2017. “Tensions of Musical Re-Animation from Bollywood to Indian Idol”. In Music in Contemporary Indian Film: Memory, Voice, Identity, edited by Jayson Beaster-Jones and Natalie Sarrazin, 76–90. New York/ London: Routledge. desisarpanch. 2009. “Oye Lucky, Lucky Oye music – The Making”. YouTube video, 4:53. Posted January 23, 2009. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HmwGXlIlq8. Dyer, Richard. 2012. In the Space of a Song: The Uses of Song in Film. New York: Routledge. Ganti, Tejaswini. 2016. “ ‘No One Thinks in Hindi Here’: Language Hierarchies in Bollywood”. In Precarious Creativity: Global Media, Local Labor, 118–131. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Gray, Jonathan. 2010. Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts. New York: New York University Press. Hight, Craig. 2005. “Making-of Documentaries on DVD: The Lord of the Rings Trilogy and Special Editions”. The Velvet Light Trap 56 (1): 4–17. https://doi.org/10.1353/ vlt.2006.0006. Highway The Film. 2014. “The Making of Sooha Saha With Alia Bhatt, A.R. Rahman & Imtiaz Ali”. YouTube video, 1:41. Posted January 18, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=XD_sJ23X6dY Jhingan, Shikha. 2015. “Backpacking Sounds: Sneha Khanwalkar and the ‘New’ Soundtrack of Bombay Cinema”. Feminist Media Histories 1 (4): 71–88. Kheshti, Roshanak. 2015. Modernity’s Ear: Listening to Race and Gender in World Music. New York: New York University Press. Koskoff, Ellen. 2014. “Out in Left Field/Left Out of the Field: Postmodern Scholarship, Feminist/Gender Studies, Musicology, and Ethnomusicology, 1990–2005”. In A Feminist

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Ethnomusicology, 168–179. Writings on Music and Gender. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Majumdar, Neepa. 2001. “The Embodied Voice: Song Sequences and Stardom in Popular Hindi Cinema”. In Soundtrack Available: Essays on Film and Popular Music, edited by Pamela Robertson Wojcik and Arthur Knight, 161–181. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Massey, Doreen. 1994. “A  Global Sense of Place”. In Space, Place, and Gender, 146–156. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mazumdar, Ranjani. 2012. “Film Stardom After Liveness”. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 26 (6): 833–844. Mehta, Monika. 2017a. “Authorizing Gesture: Michi Music Awards and the Re-Calibration of Songs and Stardom”. In Music in Contemporary Indian Film: Memory, Voice, Identity, edited by Jayson Beaster-Jones and Natalie Sarrazin, 61–75. New York/London: Routledge. ———. 2017b. “Fan and Its Paratexts”. Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 58 (1–2): 128–143. Nakassis, Constantine V. 2015. “A Tamil-Speaking Heroine”. BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 6 (2): 165–186. Relph, Edward. 1976. Place and Placelessness. London: Pion. Shreya Ghoshal Fans Club. 2017. “Mona Darling Song Making || Shreya Ghoshal || Sonu Nigam|| Recording in Studio”. YouTube video, 4:45. Posted February 10, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wZIcs1n-3U. Sony Music India. 2014. “Kaaviyathalaivan – Making of Aye Mr. Minor | A.R. Rahman | Siddharth”. YouTube video, 1:01. Posted August 5, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=CGV6XbJhYrY. ———. 2013. “Maryan – Making of Yenga Pona Rasa feat. AR Rahman, Bharatbala, Shakthisree, Keba”. YouTube video, 20:36. Posted July 13, 2013. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=PSswZZmKkdM. SpotboyE. 2016. “Arijit Singh Shares His Work Experience with AR Rahman | Soundtrack”. YouTube video, 1:16. Posted October  6, 2016. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=E7UjZpPdKnk. Sundar, Pavitra. 2015. “Language, Region and Cinema: Translation as Politics in Ek Duuje Ke Liye”. Studies in South Asian Film & Media 7 (1–2): 25–43. T-Series. 2012. “Dagabaaz Re Song Making | Dabangg 2 | Salman Khan, Sonakshi Sinha, Rahat Fateh Ali Khan”. YouTube video, 5:28. Posted November 2012. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=PhKFnX38zoE. ———. 2011. “  ‘Chammak Challo Song Making’ Feat. Akon, Vishal  & Shekhar”. YouTube video, 7:18. Posted September  30, 2011. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=CAHagot7RIQ. Tollywood Box Office. 2017. “Audio Making of ‘Kaabil Hoon’ Song | Kaabil | Hrithik Roshan, Yami Gautam | Jubin Nautiyal, Palak”. YouTube video, 3:16. Posted January 5, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzZbxykyxfw. Viacom18 Studios. 2012a. “Making of Taar Bijli Se Patle | Gangs of Wasseypur II | Sneha Khanwalkar”. YouTube video, 6:05. July 30, 2012. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=abE9JZt0xoU. ———. 2012b. “Making of Bhoos Ke Dher | Gangs of Wasseypur | Anurag Kashyap | Sneha Khanwalkar | Varun Grover”. YouTube video, 7:13. June 18, 2012. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=yZ6yfdp6w00. Williams, Alan. 2010. “ ‘Pay Some Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain’ – Unsung Heroes and the Canonization of Process in the Classic Albums Documentary Series”. Journal of Popular Music Studies 22 (2): 166–179.

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Yash Raj Films. 2015. “Making of the Song – Tu | Dum Laga Ke Haisha | Ayushmann Khurrana | Bhumi Pednekar”. YouTube video, 4:25. Posted March 10, 2015. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wlByam4ywg. ———. 2016. “Composing Moh Moh Ke Dhaage – Dum Laga Ke Haisha | Anu Malik | Papon | Monali Thakur”. YouTube video, 6:35. Posted April 1, 2016. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=BU8MYgTkP9U.

16 LOCATING MOLLYWOOD Video industries, inter-regional media networks and the “located mobility” of Malegaon films Ramna Walia

The rhythmic rasping of textile loom machines intercuts the sound of the evening azaan. Against the setting sun, a dusty room is lit up by a yellow lamp as the diegetic sound of the machines grow louder. The camera cuts to a crowd of men standing against the gated entrance of a cinema hall. Back in the textile mill, the gyrating machines stop and the grating noise dissolves. The lights are turned off. A bell bellows, and we see the crowd of men outside the cinema hall horde through the gates, jumping up the barriers, pushing each other, and running to get the seat in a dimly lit screening room. The day’s labor has come to an end, and now it is time for an evening of leisure – unwinding with a film in a small theatre – to experience a life starkly different from the exhausting work at the textile mills. The projector lights up the screen in slow motion, and we see glimpses of the 1990s hit film, Khalnayak (Subhash Ghai 1993). The flaming red neon on screen saturates the screen. Local artist Shakeel Bharti’s voiceover interjects the surreal visual image as he informs the viewer about the town of Malegaon and its love for film. Next, we see a montage of popular film stars’ faces plastered across the everyday rhythms of the town – from the signboards at the local juice shops, on kites on sale at the roadside vendors, hair cut menus at the barber shops, calendars with magazine cutouts, to film posters sold across pavements. These opening scenes of Faiza Ahmad Khan’s Supermen of Malegaon (2012), a prominent documentary film, set up the origin story of the Malegaon film industry through an elaborate juxtaposition of the tedious labor, cine-desires, and the visual sprawl of everyday life in small-town India. In Khan’s film, nestled between this space of work and leisure, is Malegaon film. The Malegaon film industry entered the popular press discourse with Khan’s documentary. However, there are at least four other documentary films that have narrated the story of Malegaon’s industry- a short film by Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (2003), Nitin Sukhija’s PSBT film Malegaon ke Sholay (2005), Ruchika Negi’s Malegaon Times (2010), Sudhir Kasabe’s Malegaon Talks (2012). In

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the early 2000s, two other documentaries, produced by The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and Public Service Broadcasting Trust (PSBT), were some early to set the tone of popular discourse. In Nitin Sukhija’s film, Malegaon Ke Sholay (trans. Malegaon’s Sholay:2005), Sukhija tells the story of Malegaon’s video films that began with a local spoof of Bombay cinema’s magnum opus, Sholay. (trans. Embers; Sippy 1975).1 Such is the status of the film that, according to director Shekhar Kapoor, “Indian film industry can be divided into Sholay BC and Sholay AD.” (Kapoor qtd. in Chopra 2000, 195) Shaikh Nasir’s Malegaon ke Sholay, is a low budget, handicam shot, VHS to VHS edited spoof of the original, made on a modest budget of $1,000 with hired local contractual textile workers, some of whom also worked as artists (comedians, poets, stage actors) in their part-time. The film ran for two months in Nasir’s video parlor2 and made a profit of $5000.3 The documentary also shows the make-shift economy of production and exhibition of Malegaon’s various spoofs of old and new films from Bombay cinema – from the 1980 hit, Shaan (Sippy 1980) to the more recent blockbuster, Lagaan (Gowariker 2001), India’s official Oscar entry. Like Khan’s documentary, Sukhija’s documentary is an important material document that became the source text for both documentary film network as well as the popular media discourse on Malegaon films – particularly in lending it the framing discourse on subaltern cinephilia. A year after Sukhija’s documentary circulated in film festival circuits, India’s national daily, The Times of India, ran a half-page-long feature piece, titled, “Once Upon a Time in Malegaon,” (2006) which told the story of volatile social and political life of a town where “young impoverished men (who) used to find hope in a quaint film spoof industry” (Joseph:15). The article points to the second framing device that emerges in the Malegaon story, one of hope and escape in the face of communal tension. It is critical to note that when documentary filmmaker, Faiza Ahmad Khan, reaches Malegaon in 2008, to make a documentary film on Malegaon video film culture, it has been hit by another series of bomb blasts. Khan’s film, Supermen of Malegaon, (2012) documents the making of Malegaon’s new aspiration – a spoof of Hollywood’s classic superhero film, Superman (1978) called Ye Hai Malegaon Ka Superman (Trans. This is Malegaon’s Superman 2008). The film uses the escalating tensions between Hindu and Muslim communities along the two sides of the river as a backdrop to set up Shaikh Nasir as the protagonist and his film as a subaltern cinephile’s new escapist spoof. While documenting the making of the Nasir’s spoof, Khan’s film navigates the site of the video parlor, local shops, and family homes in Malegaon that come to form “Mollywood,” an informal film industry based in Malegaon. The workerartists reiterate throughout the narrative of the documentary the desire for brand Malegaon as Khan mobilizes a fascination for Bombay cinema in Malegaon’s everyday life. Khan’s film became a success in the film festival circuits. Bombay film industry’s filmmakers and producers took note. In 2010, Indian comedy TV channel Sab TV created a silent comedy series called Malegaon ka Chintu (2010, trans. Malegaon’s Chintu) and Chintu Ban Gaya Gentleman (2011, trans. Chintu has become a Gentleman), directed by Sheikh Nasir and produced by Deepti Bhatnagar. On

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the other hand, Ye Hai Malegaon Ka Superman got an official release with Bombay filmmaker-producer and poster-boy of independent cinema Anurag Kashyap and film producer Sunil Bohra repackaging the film for an official release. In a commemorative effort to support grassroots cinema of India, the Directorate of film festivals of India 2009 with a special feature on Malegaon films under the category of “Spoof Cinema” with Sheikh’s films, Gabarbhai MBBS and Ye hai Malegaon Ka Superman. A local NGO organized a spectral double of Bollywood’s most prestigious award show, Filmfare awards, in order to honor the local artists working in the industry. While the mainstream press and Bombay cinema basked in the narrative of Malegaon’s cinephilia, Khan’s documentary went on to get a multiplex release in India’s largest multiplex chain corporation, PVR theatres. The success of Supermen of Malegaon rechanneled Nasir’s first film Malegaon ke Sholay back into circulation. At the time of its release in the early 2000s, the film had a limited local market; it would be erroneous to assume the limits of its reach. Besides neighboring towns in Nasik – like Dhule and Jalgaon, in 2011 Nasir’s film was screened at the Festival of Emerging Cinemas in Mumbai. The official report (2011) on the festival, organized by the International Association of Women in Radio and Television, argued that the screening of the film, among other similar selections of short fiction, music videos, and documentaries from regions like Leh, Niyamgiri, Ranchi and Imphal was an “experiment.” The festival posited itself as “a platform for dialogues between the different Indias that coexist, but usually do not interact with each other.” (Ibid) This journey from a single video parlor and locally produced VCD sales to national film festivals was primarily facilitated through documentary film circuit with little engagement with the location of Malegaon. Chastened “Mollywood,” the industry was purely constructed in relation to Bombay cinema. The explosive account that emerged in popular discourse thus presented Malegaon as Bombay cinema’s cinephilia-driven spoof double. In Bombay cinema’s rise as the globally circulating brand as Bollywood, the socio-economic disparities within various other media industries, differentials of

FIGURE 16.1 A shooting

still (L) and River Mausam that divides Hindu merchants on the left and Muslim weavers on the right (R)

Source: Personal photographs

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infrastructure, and muddied networks of production, distribution and consumption became organized by spaces of international film festivals, annual corporatefunded conferences, elaborate national and international award ceremonies and the expansion of the multiplex. The traditional methods of operation associated with Bombay cinema  – oral transactions, risky economics, on-the-fly style of shooting and a parochial structure of the industry – soon gave way to new principles of organization around the official christening of the Indian film industry as an industry.4 The industry status reduced customs and excise duty, thereby reducing the cost of the raw material. In October 2000, The Industrial Development Bank Act of 2000 further drove in foreign investment and corporate funds. Foreign media giants like Fox studios, Disney, Viacom, Endemol, etc. could collaborate with Indian entertainment companies like Dharma Productions, Network 18, Red Chillies Entertainment, etc. as Indian corporate titans like Reliance could invest in media conglomerates outside its territories that eventually facilitated an easy flow of organized capital. By 2008, for instance, Reliance Big Entertainment, a unit of industrialist Anil Ambani’s ADA Group, signed a $1.2-billion deal with DreamWorks SKG, besides seven similar deals with other Hollywood production houses.5 A part of maintaining this new financial clout and industrial backing meant a rigorous consolidation of its markets, both within the country as well as outside it. In a similar vein, Indian corporates like Reliance Big Entertainment and Reliance Industries acquired a number of domestic and international production and distribution companies. In October 2018, for instance, Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) acquired controlling stakes in Hathway Cable and Datacom to dominate India’s digital cable TV and Broadband services (Lagathe 2018). In December  2018, RIL acquired the music company Saavn, which boasts of a library of 45 million songs across the entertainment industries.6 With such acquisitions and mergers, as Bombay cinema furiously restructured its entrepreneurial assembly that was more organized and globally viable, a new industrial narrative of professionalism emerged of out Bombay – written scripts, legal contracts, standardized salaries, and so on. At close quarters, the Marathi-language film industry was consolidating its market with expanded budgets and entry of corporate players. The informality, leaky financial deals, and undocumented transactions didn’t fit this new avatar of Indian media industries’ narrative of financial rectitude and industrial order. This positioning of Bombay as the power center of Indian media industries underplays the continuing role of informality in their day-to-day functioning and the continued dominance of family run studios and companies like Dharma Productions, T-series, Rajshree Productions, Yash Raj Films, and so on. Moreover, the cascades of micro-histories and niche markets, including B- and C-grade cinema produced in the peripheries of Bombay’s glittering A-film circuit, got further diminished in Bombay cinema’s global ascent as the international face of Indian cinema. In appropriating Malegaon film as a cinephilic fan practice, Bombay cinema reveals a fear of miscegenation and a derivative status for an industry that deviates from institutional conditions of a standardized media industry. If Malegaon lies at the peripheries of the global-national categories, where does Mollywood fit?

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Media scholarship on video circuits (Liang 2009; Tiwary 2015; Neves and Bhaskar 2017) has presented Malegaon outside this global-national framework as the romanticized narrative of piracy, local practice, and the cinema of the subaltern. Lawrence Liang in his article, “Piracy, Creativity and Infrastructure: Rethinking Access to Culture,” (2009) begins with a prologue on the Malegaon film and shows that desire and subjectivity shape the relationship between local film piracy and infrastructure. Liang argues that the question of access in the Asian context needs to go beyond developmentalism and rather see the poor as producing subjects. (Liang: 26). Like Jacques Ranciere’s (1989) subaltern subjects of the nineteenth-century factory workers in France who toil during the day in the factory and at night write poetry, philosophy and other intellectual pleasures reserved for the upper-class intellectuals, Liang argues that the aspirations of Malegaon film are an act of disobedience of their socio-economic position. In their discussion on the circulation and regulation of Mewati videos through MicroSD cards in a region southwest of Delhi, Rahul Mukherjee and Abhigyan Singh look at “technological networks” that emerge out of marginalized regions. They argue that the “subaltern-popular” media networks, like the informally produced Mewati videos, assert “identity and political claims of a marginalized community. (Mukherjee and Singh 2018, 134). In a similar vein, Ishita Tiwary’s work on the intersection of Malegaon film with formal industries of TV and film in Bombay again draws on Ranciere’s construction of worker-intellectual as a political subject. Tiwary uses this framework to show how Malegaon retains its locality while it gets coopted into formal media industries. Both Liang and Tiwary make critical contributions to redressing subjectivities that lie outside formal media industries. And while this scholarship has facilitated debates around informality, amateur video film cultures that lay outside the media capital framework inadvertently put Malegaon in another center/periphery relation. Moreover, they draw on the existing documentary films as their primary source material to understand the Malegaon phenomenon, and these films, as I demonstrated earlier, constructed Malegaon’s practice as cinephilic and aspirational. Other works on video cultures have focused on the global emergence of “alternative” practices and have focused on the “digital turn”7 or “technomodernity” (Neves and Sarkar 2017, 6) as the starting point. This seems to offset the material conditions, socio-economic frameworks, and specificity of cultural-linguistic considerations that their located-ness engenders and nurtures. For documentary filmmakers, thus, the Malegaon story virilized a peripheral practitioners’ tale of marginality, much like the documentary film circuit in India. For the Mumbai film fraternity and TV industry, Malegaon was the epitome of their mounting influence, emblematized in the heady mix of fandom and cinephilia of Malegaon films. Its informality, one can argue, mimics the phantom past of pre-globalization, pre-liberalization Bombay cinema’s tryst with oral contracts, hand-written scripts, make-shift production practices, unregulated markets, unlicensed exhibition spaces and low aesthetics.8 In labeling Malegaon as a spoof industry, industries in Mumbai could reiterate their new “formalized” avatar in

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a post-corporatization phase of film Industries in India. For media scholars like Liang and Tiwary, Malegaon represented Jacques Ranciere’s subaltern subjects, a Marxist construction of industrial imprisonment of the urban poor and their intellectual labor. While the documentary films have lent visibility to alternative media practices that lie outside the formal legal channels, it would be rather myopic to link this visibility to legibility. What emerged in this fascination was Malegaon’s incongruous place in Indian media ecology. The discourse on Malegaon within industry (documentary, TV industry, Bombay cinema), press and scholarship seems to either fetishize its granular aesthetic, coopt its narrative to consolidate the status of mainstream industries or read it as a symptom of participatory and download culture at the digital turn. So, on the one hand, it is a symptom of global condition, amorphously linked to the rise of video revolutions in Africa, Latin America and Asia, while on the other hand it is too small, plebian and local to be studied in its totality. The crisis of scale and reticulate structure of media industries in India thus warrantees an inquiry into omnifarious media networks that defy the scaler framework. Is Malegaon a local or regional film industry? Moreover, is Malegaon an industry or a video film network that lies outside the global-national-regional identity? Malegaon’s incongruous position calls for an exigency for new spatial framework that can facilitate a more nuanced understanding of the complex relationship between media practices and region. In this chapter, I argue that the digital tracks of these video circuits sustain and nurture networks of trade and performance that narrate an enduring tale of networks of sociality and interlinked grids. While video and digital proliferation has revealed discernable alternative economies of production, distribution, and exhibition, industries like Malegaon have historically relied on old trade routes, river systems, performance cultures, the household economy of operations, and a network of small entrepreneurs. During my fouryear long inquiry, the Malegaon’s story that I encountered is far more complicated and reveals lapses in our writing of media history through deductive models of binaries – industry/practice, formal/informal, corporate/bazaar and so on. Malegaon is more than a kitschy doppelganger of Bombay cinema, and it is far more complex than a subaltern subject of history. The problem with these narratives is that, while questioning and displacing past models (like national cinemas, third cinema, post-colonial film, and so on), we try to provide a new center. Instead, Malegaon industry points to a complex industrial cluster with different spatial patterns – from inter-city relationship within Maharashtra, between Nasik district and Mumbai and Pune and neighboring states of Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh, as well as multiple transnational connections with Pakistan and Dubai. These are parallel constellations that are at once transregional, translocal and transnational, media cultures that are at once film, performance and trade. Malegaon film industry thus reveals itself as a mongrel media culture that is intertwined in multiple networks that warrant a study of its local conditions and place in India’s media ecology that disrupts the perceived categories of media industries and the notion of boundarykeeping within the category of “region.”9

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Crisis of scale: from the location of Malegaon to its located mobility Media scholars working on India have for long struggled with fuzzy categories, informal source material, and incommensurable theoretical and methodological frameworks in the complex terrain of film cultures in India. Given these challenges of the field and a global profile for Bombay film industry as national cinema, decolonizing the field of inquiry regarding region is urgent. The categories of national, regional, and local have been one of the dominant frameworks in the study of India’s many media industries. However, an understanding of Malegaon at the far end of a fixed global-national-regional-local paradigm, as the popular, industrial and scholarly discourses have done so far, does not capture the constant bordercrossings of the scaler imagination that Malegaon embodies. Cinema in India has its origins in multiple centers across the country. Often these centers were compartmentalized along state lines. For instance, Marathi language films cater to the Marathi-speaking audience in the state of Maharashtra, Bengali cinema from the state of West Bengal, Malayalam in Kerala, and so on. Early film scholars like Yves Thorval and S. Chatterjee writing on cinemas of India often followed this state-wise categorization and saw linguistic and geographical boundaries running parallel to this organization of film industries. In the writing of industrial histories, much of the scholarship focused on popular Bombay cinema, the Indian New Wave, indie film, and the diaspora. While the framework of nation-state (Chakravarty 1993; Prasad 1998 et al.), was probed and expanded to accommodate linguistically and geographically diverse media industries in India (Vasudevan 2010; Gooptu 2010; Srinivas 2003; Hughes 2007; et al), the term “industry” continues to be studied along the frontiers of capital intensive, broadly urban media centers like Kolkata, Hyderabad, and Chennai. The mechanics of media capitals and a geo-national lens thus lingers within the pre-conceived ontologies of “region” in regional cinemas. Recent scholarship on regional cinemas has questioned the homogeneity between regional borders and linguistic and ethnic identities (Ratheesh 2016; Hughes 2007). While on the one hand regional cinema in urban centers like Pune and Hyderabad has been lauded for its dynamism and as aspirational sister-industrial center to Bombay, regional industries in states like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh have often been stomped by narratives of stagnation and marginalized as a vulgar rendition of B-grade aesthetics of Bombay cinema. In his discussion on Bhojpuri cinema, Akshaya Kumar (2014) for instance argues that in Bhojpuri cinema one witnesses direct and indirect “mixing of imaginaries, refracting the sense of one’s location, through several discursive regimes of subject positioning . . . [at once] regional, national as well as international belonging.” (Kumar: 185) This positioning of Bhojpuri cinema at once at multiple locales emerges as a vernacular voice to regions far beyond its geographical center. Kathryn Hardy (2015) places Bhojpuri cinema thus in “cartographies of mobility and belonging,” with the region that is constantly on the move. (Hardy: 147) One can understand cinema outside of traditional national and regional boundaries to that of social imaginaries, ties of kinship

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and cultural forms such as the bazaar, which includes a more hybrid and complex socio-linguistic structure. Madhuja Mukherjee (2016) in her study of Manbhum videos in marginalized sections of Purulia and Bankura districts in West Bengal and its circulation across Indian and Bangladeshi borders argues for a new understanding of “regional cinema” in India. Mukherjee argues that such video circuits speak to the larger political conflicts and a long history of marginalization. Mukherjee’s unraveling of cross-regional circulation from the states of Assam, Jharkhand and Odisha points to similar networks that primarily congeal around regional and linguistic identities. Hasan’s (2011) work shows how art filmmakers in Manipur, North-East India, used cheap digital technology while local music videos populate the commercial markets in Manipur. In a similar vein, Neikolie Kuotsu (2010) has studied the role of digital technologies in shaping media culture in the north east of India by looking at the popularity of South Korean films and their travels to the region. This body of work is critical within Indian media studies as it points to different clusters of media constellations, each informed by its location, mobile in its reach, cross-bred and hybrid in identity. Then how does one study a slippery media object that is constantly mobile, multiple, and dispersed across borders of a geographical location? Michel Foucault (1967) in his influential lecture on heterotopias deals with a similar conundrum. In the lecture, Foucault argues the importance of the site and its emergence as the key problem in a time of spatial disruptions. He argues that these disruptions have infinitely opened up location to a set of relations that intersect at multiple sites. Foucault surmises that we need to de-sanctify our understanding of space as inviolable oppositions (public/private, formal/informal, etc.) He proposes, instead, the concept of heterotopia, where “a thing’s place was no longer anything but a point in its movement. . . . The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible” (Foucault 1967, 2–6). Foucault’s conceptualization of heterotopias is a useful framework to understand incommensurability of territoriality within cultural geography and offers a way to study fragmentation and spatial disruptions, media clusters, and migrating media that are fraught with complexities (O’Regan 2011; Creswell 2014; Falicov 2012). Malegaon’s grand narratives as seen in the documentaries and popular discourse oversimplify such complexities and instead focus on the incompatibility of its place in relation to the power center – Mumbai. In Malegaon, we are faced with a very complex landscape. It’s a place with a labyrinthine street map, low-rise horizontal buildings, dense economy of commercial activity, and small manufacturing units with rail connectivity linked to the highway that connects it to neighboring regions. Divided by a river, Mausam, the town is split between the middle-class Hindu Marathi merchant class on the one side and the poor Muslim migrant population on the other side of the river. The underlying communal tension seethes below everyday trade links between the two sides. Multiple riots during the 1990s and early 2000s, as well as two bomb blasts in Malegaon in 2006 and 2008, have made Malegaon a battlefield of India’s fractured

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nationalistic image (Ali 2001). Malegaon has witnessed multiple surges of immigrants from Hyderabad (Telangana), Surat (Gujarat), Varanasi, Meerut, Awadh (Uttar Pradesh) and Mumbai (Maharashtra) over decades.10 Working-class migrant settlers with a vast number of settlers’ linguistic and cultural roots in the North Indian state of Uttar Pradesh allows penetration of a variety of languages to coexist in Malegaon. Urdu is predominantly the language of literacy for the weavers and small-business owners and is widely used in popular press including its local daily, Diwan-e-Aam (trans. Hall of People) and Tarjuman-e-Urdu (trans. Urdu Spokesman). Among the Marathi-speaking side, the regional newspaper, Lokmat (trans. People’s Opinion) circulates widely. In Malegaon, a mix of Hindi, Urdu, and Ahirani dialect of Khandeshi language is spoken. Khandeshi language is widely spoken in the town’s neighboring districts of Jalgaon, Dhule, Nandubar, Shirpur and Pachora in Maharashtra – as well as the Burhanpur district in Andhra Pradesh – and functions as a wide-ranging linguistic brand and regional identity. The Bombay-Agra highway, Central railway line and Tapti river valley railway system have played a central role in ferrying the workforce from across regions within Maharashtra and neighboring states. This link between travel and trade is key to studying how a small town like Malegaon relies on trade and river systems that extend its identity from a bound locality to the broader socio-economic history of the region of Khandesh. Within less than a mile of the distance between the two sides of Malegaon, the patterns of media ecology change drastically. The Marathi film posters and signage disappear and Bhojpuri film posters, dubbed South Indian films and cinema halls that screen low-grade films that travel from the by-lanes of Mumbai’s sleazy underground film circuits in Grant Road and Lamington Road replace it. In the video parlors, pirated copies of Bollywood and Hollywood films are screened along with black-and-white Hindi films, dubbed contemporary films from India’s various industries, as well as commercial Pakistani plays of the 1990s. Documentary filmmaker Ruchika Negi talks about Malagaon’s unique position in the current mediascape and calls the town the one that simultaneously belongs to “pre-modernity” and “post-modernity” (Personal Interview: 2016).

FIGURE 16.2 A street

wall, Camp area, Malegaon (L), and poster outside single-screen theatre, Upkar (R)

Source: Personal photographs

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Any attempt to narrativize a teleological story of Malegaon reveals the location’s inability to be contained and bound. In an effort to capture the dispersion of Malegaon’s media network, one has to adopt a theoretical framework that provides specific evidence that can be tracked well beyond Malegaon’s fixed geographical territory. The mobile networks of material practices that link Malegaon to neighboring towns of Dhulia, Jalgaon as well as media industries in Mumbai and Pune pose a challenge of rescaling this location continuously to reveal a complex and muddied media environment using the critical analytic of “located mobility,” a simultaneous fixity of geographic located-ness that is used to re-map terrain through a study of mobilities triggered by it.11 I use the paradigm of mobility to register an emphasis on the materiality of media through relational spatialities that avoid “dichotomized categories of here/there, near/far, personal/private, inner/ outer or presence/absence” (Richardson 2007, 202). The term mobility here then refers to both virtual and physical movement that create a circuit of old and established routes with overlapping practices, agents, texts and spaces. If we study Malegaon as a site that activates and renders legible a broad spectrum of linguistic and narrative codes, screening practices and workforce, a hyperlocal place then exceeds the confines of location that reveals a more a discernable network. Mobility is an indicative word here that reveals identifiable movement of film texts, labor, capital and networks activated by regional links, trade routes and infrastructure, taking us to Mumbai B-circuits and packaging companies in Nasik, Pune, and Mumbai while also navigating sites such as video parlors, unauthorized manufacturing units in slums, and duplication factories and underground black markets. At the same time, we see the circulation of Bhojpuri films and dubbed Telegu-language films through local cable. The Bombay-Agra highway, Central railway line, and Tapti river valley railway system have played a central role in ferrying the workforce from across regions within Maharashtra and neighboring states. In Mumbai, local vendors don’t sell Malegaon films; they sell Khandeshi films – both are made in Malegaon but sell under two different brand names as they travel. The Khandesh region has historically covered today’s Jalgaon, Dhule, and Nandurbar districts of Maharshtra but also has links with Burhanpur district of Madhya Pradesh. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in this region the bifurcations were calculated in terms of lineage units; under British rule they were administrative constituencies and regional districts in post-independence India. The region in India is a malleable category with shifting spatiality that is both historically rooted and mobile. Historian Doughlas Haynes (1999) in his study of market formation in nineteenth-century Khandesh has shown that in Khandesh there was a substantial horizontal movement of goods, neither purely local nor originating in a single metropolitan center, managed to flourish. Trading networks crisscrossed western India, linking Khandesh with . . . other places of production in the larger region” (Haynes 1999, 297). Moreover, Haynes contends that we see how local bazaars with trade settlements allowed for an intersection of nomadic performance cultures and local religious fairs (local jatras) and drew people in huge numbers. This established a long-lasting relationship between trade and performance cultures in

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the Khandesh region that is evident in the scope of its market across districts. These networks reveal that Malegaon has a more schizoid history of sub-cultural practices that include many alternative practices that range from local advertisements, music videos, radio shows and cassette remixes, public-awareness campaigns, and other public events of poetry, dance, and stand-up comedy. These networks defy the logic of industrial formation that guide the entertainment industrial complex, and thus an attempt to establish a one-way aspirational scale between Malegaon and Mumbai obliterates the multiple mobilities afforded by it. In their seminal editorial titled Mobilities, Immobilities and Moorings, Kevin Hannam et al. (2006) remind us that the shift from self-enclosed territories to tangled, polymorphic and multi-scalar geographies are enabled by mobility systems of trade, travel, tourism and migration. (Hanman et al, 2) One of the major critiques of defining cinema (and media in general, by extension) along fixed regional and linguistic lines is industrial convergence, history of migration, and uneven ways in which global flows manifest themselves in media practices. For Appadurai, mobility is one of the critical links that allow the emergence of new “diasporic public spheres.” As interactions become more protean, cultural exchanges become more decentralized and less tied to “large scale economies. . . [and instead, shift] towards smaller-scale accretions of intimacy and interest” (Appadurai 1996, 28). Looking at the mélange of ecologies traversed by Malegaon film, the mobility paradigm acknowledges the connections between intimate and micro-geographies of a household economy of production to shady talkies and MiscoSD card sellers in Mumbai’s Grant Road, intermediate market centers in Dhule or Jalgaon in the Nasik District, mushaira (poet congregations) networks in neighboring districts, equipment bought during leisure holidays in Malaysia and nataks (plays) in Gujarat. Simultaneously, we also witness industrial networks of studios housed in YouTube channels and relationships with global media distribution companies like Venus and Ultra that acquire these films for their “regional content” on social media. The Malegaon story thus doesn’t emerge out of the digital turn; it expands its breadth and becomes partially more visible. When we hold the lens of regional framework closer, one begins to notice that the hegemony of formal circuits of production, distribution, and exhibition get reconfigured in a regional context while the complex circuits of film cultures like Malegaon get reduced to a cinephilic local fan culture. National, regional and local medias thus cannot simply be studied as an administrative unit designed alongside the location of the industry and linguistic and cultural parallels but the one that is also constantly in flux. Within such a scalar framework, the infrastructure of cinematic production and dissemination channels often mimic a hierarchal aspirational order for a mammoth organizational setup and reach. Many proposed film cities are in various stages of planning – in cities like Patna, Pune, Lucknow and Ahmedabad. The economies of production and media practices that lie outside such infrastructurally sound projects, state sponsored incentives, or definitive boundaries point to a sustained investment in alternative media hubs besides Mumbai with the traditional understanding of industrial construction. Industrial constellations like Malegaon that are at once global, sub-regional and sub-local warrant new terms of understanding production, circulation and exhibition histories of media.

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Conclusion In the last two decades, with new markets, players and studios emerging on the horizon, industrial stakes have been redefined, and media platforms have multiplied. With the growing corporate investment in regional markets and emergence of new digital platforms like Netflix, Amazo and Hotstar, content of different languages is reaching a wider audience, no longer purely segregated into separate channels with logistics of regional access as a determining force. Instead, we see a dual process of ordering and disordering – content is present on the same layout, often a click away from Hindi language content and “suggestions” bleeding into one another, based on viewing patterns of genre choice, stars, production house, etc. On the other hand, we see that region continues to be a leaky category that could, for instance, be cross-listed as an art film category. Historically, what is categorized as regional cinema has always been porous, with constant inter-industrial traffic of stars, infrastructures, and narratives. However, the digital space of the platforms and a bleeding layout provides a visual map of an intertwined network that challenges the global-national-regional-local identities of media industries outside the overwhelming cosmopolitanism of dominant industries. Malegaon occupies a curious position where it aligns with different players in the field while exceeding the confines of cartographical excavation of its film culture. Walter Mignolo and Madina Tlostanova’s seminal work “Learning to Unlearn: Decolonial reflections from Eurasia and the Americas” (2012) foregrounds the fraught dichotomies of West/East, First World/Third World and colonizer/colonized. The question of how and why certain bodies of knowledge begin to erase their geo-political bodies to become universal seems to stem from our inability to acknowledge unequal and multiple registers. The manifold and overlapping economy of media cultures in India mandate that we rethink binary and linear models and groupings. Any attempt to fill in the exclusions of other film cultures posits another challenge of establishing a national-regional-local flow, replicates the power bloc model and discounts the simultaneous flows among various film cultures. At the heart of my inquiry then is the aim to discount critical border thinking that creates equally territorial epistemologies of national/regional/local. The interdisciplinary approach of the project and multi-sited mobilities afforded by Malegaon film reveals a critical disciplinary disobedience that unveils the conceptual incommensurability of the terms in which our inquiries are defined and narrated.

Notes 1 The official name of the city of Bombay to Mumbai was adopted in the year 1995. Throughout this chapter, I use the term Mumbai to refer to the city and Bombay cinema to refer to the cinema produced in Mumbai as an industrial and cultural referent. 2 A video parlor is a small license-run establishment that provides entertainment through exhibition of video films, usually to an audience of 100 or below. 3 DNA 2011; See, www.dnaindia.com/entertainment/report-malegaon-ka-film-industry1495032 4 Media scholar and anthropologist Tejaswini Ganti (2012) argues that the neoliberal economic changes that led to this overt sanitization of the Bombay film industry looks

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very different in the everyday practices and processes that continue to be antithetical to industries such as Hollywood and remain unique. 5 See, www.livemint.com/Consumer/pXOahNWOIxuzdw7fpiz3TL/India8217s-RelianceEntertainment-in-Hollywood-deal.html 6 See, www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/jiomusic-and-saavn-unite-to-launchjiosaavn-app-music-free-for-90-days-1402195–2018–12–04 7 The term “digital turn” is a nod to J. Gee’s (2000) term “social turn” in Literary Studies. It refers to the growing role of communication technology in a globalizing economy and a move away from analogue technology. 8 Pre-liberalization Bombay cinema was dominated by a parochial and largely informal industrial structure that was controlled by a few big, family run studios, the use of black money, oral transactions and links with underground criminal networks. 9 I use the term “mongrel” to highlight to the hierarchal displacement of Malegaon among formal channels of media centers, despite a prima-facie celebration of its spoof industry. 10 According to Concerned Citizen’s Inquiry Report (2001) on Malegaon riots, the volatile socio-cultural fabric of the town is entrenched in its history of numerous phases of migration. Today the administrative district of Malegaon includes 150 villages and 2 towns. For full report, see, www.pucl.org/reports/Maharashtra/2001/malegoan-con cerned.htm 11 The term “located mobility” comes from Kat Jungnickel’s essay (2007) on use of computers and wireless access in domestic space in Australia. In her essay, Jungnickel defines the term in terms of flexibility afforded by internet technologies to move with people both inside and outside the space of the home. Extrapolating this term from the technological roots, I employ this term to argue that technology is one of the many symptoms of physical routes and channels that have historically afforded objects and bodies movement.

References Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization Volume 1. University of Minnesota Press. Chakravarty, Sumita S. 1993. National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema, 1947–1987. Austin: University of Texas Press. Chopra, Anupama. 2000. Sholay, The Making of a Classic. Penguin Books India. Engineer, Asghar Ali. 2001. “Malegaon Riots: Unlearnt Lessons from the Past”. Economic and Political Weekly 36 (48): 4458–459. www.jstor.org/stable/4411408. Festival of Emerging Cinemas: Connecting Indias: A Report. 2011. http://iawrtindia.blogs pot.com/p/report-on-festival-of-emerging-cinemas.html [Accessed April 1, 2018]. Foucault, Michel. 2008. “Of Other Spaces* (1967)”. In Heterotopia and the City. London: Routledge, 25–42. Ganti, Tejaswini. 2012. Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry. Durham, DC: Duke University Press. Gee, J. (ed.). 2000. The New Literacy Studies: From “Socially Situated” to the Work of the Social. London: Routledge. Gooptu, Sharmistha. 2010. Bengali Cinema: “An Other Nation” Volume 34. Routledge. Hannam, Kevin, Mimi Sheller, and John Urry. 2006. “Mobilities, immobilities and moorings”. Mobilities 1, no. 1 (2006): 1–22. Hardy, Kathryn C. 2015. “Constituting a Diffuse Region: Cartographies of Mass-Mediated Bhojpuri Belonging”. BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 6, no. 2 (2015): 145–164. Haynes, Douglas E. 1999. “Market Formation in Khandesh, c. 1820–1930”. The Indian Economic & Social History Review 36 (3): 275–302.

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Hasan, Daisy. 2011. “Talking Back to ‘Bollywood’: Hindi Commercial Cinema in NorthEast India”. In South Asian Media Cultures: Audiences, Representations, Contexts, 29. Hughes, Stephen Putnam. 2007. “Music in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Drama, Gramophone, and the Beginnings of Tamil Cinema”. The Journal of Asian Studies (2007): 3–34. “India’s Reliance Entertainment in Hollywood Deal”. 2008. Live Mint, May  19. www. livemint.com/Consumer/pXOahNWOIxuzdw7fpiz3TL/India8217s-Reliance-Enter tainment-in-Hollywood-deal.html. Joseph, Manu. 2006. “Once Upon a Time in Malegaon”. The Times of India, September  10. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Once-upon-a-time-in-Malegaon/articleshow/1973681.cms [Accessed March 10, 2018]. Jungnickel, Kat. “Domestic Space and Interfaces for Located Mobility”. Electronic Document. http: www.studioincite.com/locatedmobility/intro.htm [Accessed March 10, 2018]. Kasabe, Sudhir, dir. 2012. Malegaon Talks. Orange Music. YouTube. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=4m4xIaX0vg8; Accessed on September 20, 2020. Khan, Faiza, dir. 2012. Supermen of Malegaon. 2012. Junglee Home Video. DVD. Kumar, Akshaya. 2014. “The Aesthetics of Pirate Modernities: Bhojpuri Cinema and the Underclasses”. In Arts and Aesthetics in a Globalizing World, 185–203. Kuotsu, N. 2010. “Korean Wave in North East India: Rethinking Regional Film Culture”. Unpublished diss., Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Lagathe, Gaurav. 2018. “Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Set to Get Controlling Stake in Hathway, DEN”. The Economic Times, October 16. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/ industry/telecom/telecom-news/mukesh-ambanis-reliance-set-to-get-controllingstake-in-hathway-den/articleshow/66230504.cms [Accessed November 18, 2018]. Liang, Lawrence. 2009. Piracy, Creativity and Infrastructure: Rethinking Access to Culture. Lobato, Ramon. 2012. Shadow Economies of Cinema: Mapping Informal Film Distribution. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Madina, Tlostanova, and Walter Mignolo, eds. 2012. Learning to Unlearn. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 31–79. Mahanti, Amit, and Ruchika Negi, dirs. 2010. Malegaon Times. Vimeo. https://vimeo. com/76142105 Mukherjee, Madhuja. 2016. “Toward a New Frame for Regional Films: Manbhum Videos and the Other Side of (Indian) Cinema”. BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 7 (1): 58–79. Mukherjee, R., and Abhigyan Singh. 2017. “MicroSD-ing  ‘Mewati Videos’: Circulation and Regulation of a Subaltern-Popular Media Culture”. In Asian Video Cultures: In the Penumbra of the Global. Duke University Press. Nasir, Personal Interview, July 2016. Neves, Joshua, and Bhaskar Sarkar (eds.). 2017. Asian Video Cultures: In the Penumbra of the Global. Duke University Press. Radhakrishnan, Ratheesh. 2016. “The ‘Worlds’ of the Region”. Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 24, no. 3 (2016): 693–719. Rancière, Jacques. 1989. The Nights of Labor: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. “Report” Festival of Emerging Cinemas: Connecting Indias. 2011. http://iawrtindia.blogs pot.com/p/report-on-festival-of-emerging-cinemas.html [Accessed April 1, 2018]. Richardson, Ingrid. 2007. “Pocket technospaces: the bodily incorporation of mobile Media”. Continuum 21, no. 2 (2007): 205–215. Sukhija, Nitin, dir. 2005. Malegaon ke Sholay. Public Service Broadcasting Trust. DVD.

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Srinivas, S.V. 2010. “Making of a Peasant Industry: Telegu Cinema in the 1930s-1950s”. BioScope: South Asia Screen Studies 1 (2): 169–188. Tiwary, Ishita. 2015. “The Discrete Charm of Local Practices: Malegaon and the Politics of Locality”. BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 6 (1): 67–87. Vasudevan, Ravi. 2010. “Geographies of the Cinematic Public: Notes on Regional, National and Global Histories on Indian Cinema”. Journal of the Moving Image 9: 94–116.

INDEX

20th Century Fox 11, 142, 154–155, 157, 216 300 Days and After 53 Aapki Marzi 55 Aasha 84, 86, 89, 90n3 abaya 178n5 ABBA 12, 170 Abbas, K.A. 11, 58n31, 115, 138–140, 147, 148nn2–4 Abedin Syed Vaheuddin, Syed Zaimul 27 Abu Dhabi 176 Acharya, T.G. 68 acousmatic 172 adaptation 29, 35, 115, 127–129, 131–132, 139, 144, 148n18, 151 Afghanistan 23 Aggiramudu 71 Ahamed, Salim 179n11 Aiyyaa 5, 13, 194–200, 202–205 Ajay-Atul 225 akkare 167, 172, 177 Alam Ara 23–24, 37, 45 Ambar, Malik 30 Amrapali 56, 77, 90n2 analog 224, 250n7 Anand, Chetan 115, 143, 148, 151 Anand, Dev 11, 148, 151–154, 156–161 Anjali Devi 61, 73 Anjali Pictures 61 Annapurna Studios 72 Anthasthulu 72 Anthikkad, Sathyan 173–174

Aparadhi 50 Apoorva Sahodarargal 68 Apoorva Sahodaralu 68 Arab 40, 142, 167, 203 Arabian Nights films 31 Arabikatha 168, 174–175, 179n12 Ardheshir Talati, Sorabji 27 Ashwathama 176 Atmanand Film Lab 25 audience 12, 15, 31, 35–38, 40–42, 51, 54, 69, 85, 95, 97–99, 102–104, 126, 130–133, 141, 144, 147, 182, 185–187, 189, 194–195, 198, 201, 209–212, 215, 217–219, 244, 249 aural stardom 36, 223, 234n2 Aurat 54, 58n32 Avengers: Age of Ultron 209 AVM Productions 8, 79, 85, 90n3 Awara 2, 10, 89, 140, 142, 145–146, 148n2 Baahubali 1 & 2 218 Bahadur, Mohammed Yakut Khan III 23, 96 Bahar 77, 79, 85, 90n3, 90n10 Bai, Jaddan 2, 50, 57n9, 109 Bai, Ratan 6, 43 Bala, Kanan 43, 51, 74n3, 75n15 bangsawan 126–128, 132–133 Bandung 10, 138, 155 Bantu tribe 30 bazaar 138, 144, 243, 245 B-circuits 247 Begum, Fatma 7, 21, 23–24, 26–27, 30–31

254 Index

Bergman, Ingrid 65 Bhanumathi 8, 61–62, 63, 64–73, 67, 70, 74n1 Bharani Pictures 61–62, 70, 72 Bharani Studios 70–71 Bharatanatyam 8, 77–86 Bhat, G.N. 25 Bhojpuri cinema 12, 181–185, 188, 190–191, 192n5, 244 Bihar 12, 182, 184, 190, 212, 244 bilingual films 61, 71 Bimal Roy Productions 108–109, 120 Blood and Sand 65–66 Bollywood 2–3, 11–15, 119, 194–205, 208–212, 217, 219, 220n4, 240, 246 Bombay 2, 10, 31, 44, 48, 53–54, 57n5, 57nn7–8, 59n42, 85, 108–111, 142, 146–147, 195, 200 Bombay cinema 8, 12–14, 30, 41, 44, 77, 78, 83, 84, 85, 88, 108, 144, 147, 194, 195, 198–199, 201, 204, 205, 210, 222, 225, 230, 239–244, 249n1, 250n8 Boo Kailash 73 border 28, 40, 147, 154, 229, 249 Bose, Debaki 2, 50, 69 Bose, Nitin 2, 57n1, 86, 138 boundary 222 British 7, 9, 10, 37, 43, 50, 51, 57n1, 58n11, 96, 97–101, 108, 111–112, 114, 124, 125, 126, 130, 132–134, 134n2, 138, 140, 142, 247 British Documentary 112, 114, 116, 118, 121, 102 British India 2, 7, 21 British Residency 96 Bulbul-e-Parastan 24, 31 Bureaucrat 101 Burma 2, 140, 152, 154 Burqa 31 Calcutta 2, 6–7, 9, 10, 29, 35–36, 42–45, 48–52, 56, 57n3, 57n5, 57n8, 57n9, 59n42, 62, 65, 69, 85–86, 99–102, 105, 108–110, 116, 118, 127–128, 130–131, 139 cantonment 9, 96–98 Captain America: Civil War 209, 212–213, 216–217 caste 14, 27, 30, 74, 81–82, 90n9, 100, 103, 105, 118, 144, 167, 173, 178n6, 190, 201, 202, 233 celluloid 1, 15, 22, 28, 176, 181, 183–191 Ceylon 2 Chandirani 62, 68, 70, 70, 71, 74n9

Chandravali 24 Chemmeeen 177 Chingari 55 Chinh, Kiều 154, 156, 157, 160–161 cinema of Intersection 10, 110, 111, 117, 120 Cinematograph Act of 1936 9, 36, 97, 99, 100, 104 circuits 3–8, 11, 15, 48, 56, 124, 125, 152, 191, 210, 239, 242, 243, 245–248 circulation 6, 9, 11, 12, 43, 65, 73, 109, 124, 129, 134, 154, 157, 176, 182, 185, 191, 195, 196, 198, 199, 233 class 9, 12, 24, 30, 36, 44, 100, 103, 104, 105, 110, 112, 118, 126, 137, 144, 170, 173, 182, 184, 185, 211, 212, 233 Cold War 153, 154, 157, 158 Cold War Asia 11, 151–152, 155 colonial 6, 9, 11, 21, 32n2, 36, 37, 40, 41, 45, 96, 101–103, 105, 112, 114, 118, 128, 133, 232, 243 colonial city 101 colonial film archive 118 communism 168, 175 corporeal 78, 88, 88 cosmopolitanism 5, 54, 129, 144, 178n9, 249 costume 8, 37, 77, 78, 83, 84, 89, 90n2, 139, 141, 143, 170, 178n4 costume drama 84 dance 8, 31, 41, 68, 78–89, 203, 248 Darkhast 26 Deadpool 214 desire 6–7, 12, 36, 54, 65, 152, 156, 173, 177, 203, 212, 238, 242 Devadasi 80, 81, 82 Devdas 78, 84, 86, 108, 111, 119, 121n28, 148n2 Dharti Ke Laal 115 Dhawan, Varun 216, 217 digital 1, 2, 4, 12, 14–15, 22, 113, 176, 179n13, 181, 189, 191, 223, 224, 241–245, 248, 250n7 Dilip Kumar 70, 86, 141, 144 disjuncture 168, 169, 174, 178n9, 215 Disney 211–216, 219, 220, 220n4, 241 Disney India 211, 214, 216, 220 distribution 1, 2, 4, 7, 9, 13, 15, 25, 28, 38, 42, 48, 50, 95, 99, 105, 133, 142, 146, 147, 159, 181, 182, 185l, 190–192, 195, 196, 199, 210, 216, 241, 243, 248 Do Bigha Zamin 108, 109, 111, 116, 120, 140, 142, 146, 148n2

Index  255

Doctor Madurika 53 documentary 4, 77, 112, 114, 116, 118, 119, 121n17, 149n19, 160, 179n13, 223, 234n1, 238, 238, 240, 242, 243, 246 downloads 185, 187 Dubai 168, 174, 175, 176, 178n4, 243 dubbing 2, 5, 13, 75n10, 208–212, 215–220, 234n7 Duniya Kya Hai 24, 29, 30 DVD 233 East India Film Company 35, 52 elite 43, 44, 81–83, 101, 137, 178n4, 231 Ethiopia 30 exhibition 3, 4, 9, 14, 15, 195, 97, 99, 101, 104, 105, 120n12, 124, 125, 128, 133, 134, 142, 143, 146, 147, 148n2, 158, 175, 176, 185, 191, 198, 210, 239, 242, 243, 248, 249 Famine in Bengal 111, 112 fan 13, 53, 68, 209, 217, 234n6, 241, 248 fashion 55, 56, 64, 109, 229 Fatma Film Corporation 24 female stardom 7, 35, 36, 74 female stars 1, 6, 7, 8, 35, 46, 61, 72, 81, 197 feminist historiography 7 Film and Television Institute of India 205 Filmfare 10, 86, 137–143, 145–146, 147, 148n5, 150, 157, 240 film festival 10, 137, 139, 140, 143 Filmindia 51, 54–57, 58n14, 58n19, 58n26, 58n30, 58n31, 58n34, 58n35, 58n37, 58n39, 59n41, 59n41, 59n42, 59n43, 59n44, 59n45, 59n46, 59n47, 59n48, 131 Filmistan 141, 142 Filmland 8, 49, 51, 52, 57n3, 58n11, 58n12, 58n13, 58n15, 58n16, 58n17, 58n18, 58n22, 58n23 film societies 147 film viewing 98 fire 99, 103, 105n3 Five-year Plan 146 folklore films 77, 140 forgery 26, 27 Gandhar 23 gandharva 31 Gangavataram 30 Ganguly, Dhiren 9, 50, 52, 58n17 Gasper, Iris Maud 7, 48

Gemini Studios 8, 62, 68, 69, 74n4, 85, 90n10 gender 6–9, 13–15, 36, 39–41, 48, 72–74, 144, 152, 171, 182, 189, 195, 223, 230, 233, 234n8 genre 3, 5, 12, 14, 31, 55, 83, 110, 120, 127, 134n4, 140, 144, 152, 153, 154, 161, 170, 182, 183, 185–187, 196, 200, 202, 214, 222, 223, 226, 227, 230–231, 234n1, 249 geography 14, 15, 187, 202, 245 Ghosh, Kamal 2, 31, 50–53, 69, 109, 114, 116, 182, 197, 211, 219 Giri Narsinghji Gyan Bahadur, Raja Dhanraj 23 Golden Triangle 154, 155 Gopalakrishnan, Adoor 171 Grihalaxmi 53 Guddi 120 guide 8, 11, 65, 88, 148, 151, 155, 160, 248 Gujarati 23, 30, 37, 54 Gul-e-Bakavali 24, 31, 35 Gulf 4, 12, 144, 167–177, 178n5, 178n6, 178n7, 178n11, 228 Gulf Malayali 176 Gulfukaran 167, 170, 171, 175 Guntoosi 73, 74 habits 81, 103, 144, 160, 167, 169, 170, 171, 175, 223, 226 Habshi 30 Hang Jebat 132 Hang Tuah 127, 130, 131–134 Haryanvi 181, 187, 188, 190, 191n1 hatke 13, 194–200, 203 Hayworth, Rita 65, 66 Heer Ranjha 24 heroine 43, 65, 69, 72, 86, 89 heterotopia 245 Hindi 8, 10, 29–30, 34, 51–52, 61–62, 68–69, 77–79, 83–86, 88, 90nn2–3, 108–111, 114–115, 129, 140, 142, 151, 181–187, 190, 211, 218, 230 Hindi cinema 8, 10, 29, 69, 78, 79, 83, 85, 88, 109, 111, 121n16, 129, 143, 181–187, 190, 211, 218, 230 Hindi film industry 78, 87–88, 111, 153, 158, 183, 190, 209–212, 217–218, 220n1, 233 historiography 7, 21, 27, 31, 32n1, 32n3, 43, 45, 111, 118

256 Index

Hollywood 2, 5, 13, 53, 65–66, 138, 141, 143, 147, 152–153, 156, 158, 208–210, 212, 215, 218, 220n1, 241, 250n4 Home films 176 Hong Kong 11, 125, 155, 198, 220n5 Hum Hain Rahi Pyar Ke 216 Hungama 178n3 Hussein, A. 25 hybridity 118, 128 Hyderabad 9, 23, 27, 72, 95–106, 202, 205, 230, 244, 246 Ice Age 5 215, 216 Imperial Film Company 35, 37–39, 57n7 Indian cinema 3, 21, 31, 46, 65, 66, 75n10, 85, 111, 120, 120n10, 121n31, 126, 140, 219, 241 Indian Cinematograph Committee Report (1927–28) 9, 36 Indian female stars 61 Indian People’s Theatre Association 109, 120 Industrial networks 7, 8, 9, 14, 48, 50, 56, 78, 88, 108, 134, 137, 168, 181, 191, 223, 248 Industrial traffic 7, 26, 35, 36, 39, 40, 61, 78, 88, 222, 249 industry 14, 27, 29, 31, 36, 40, 43, 67–68, 85, 88, 111, 146, 182, 201, 209, 218, 228, 241, 242–243 informality 189, 241, 242 infrastructure 5, 37, 124, 151, 154, 156, 171, 182, 186, 210, 241, 242, 247, 248 instruments 64, 224, 226 intellectuals 37, 101, 103, 242 interwar period 124, 133, 134n4 Iran 6, 35–46, 141 Irani, Ardeshir 23, 24, 35, 37, 38 Jaan, Gauhar 43 Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron 216 Jabbar Vaziri, Fakhrozzaman 36, 44–46 Janakibala, Indraganti 74n1 Jose, Lal 168 Joshi, Manilal 229 Journalism 54, 137, 148n1 Kadhal 71 Kalpana 8, 68 Kamaner Aagun 50 Kapoor, Raj 2, 10, 86, 89, 137, 140–142, 148n2, 216, 239 Kandura 167, 168, 170, 173–175 Kantahar 50

Karunanidhi, M. 71, 75n14 Kathak 77, 84–89 Kerala 12, 167, 168, 170, 173, 174, 176, 177, 178n1, 179n11, 179n13 Kerala model 168 Khan, Aamir 196, 228–230 Khan, Faiza 238–239 Khan, Mehboob 2, 23, 30, 31, 40, 54, 77, 96, 103, 106, 112, 119, 134n6, 142, 143, 144, 146, 147, 148n14, 196, 197, 209, 228, 229, 230, 239 Khandesh 246–248 Khanwalkar, Sneha 14, 201, 222, 231–233 Kolhapur 9, 99, 105, 139 Krishna Prema 65, 68 Kulvadhu 53 Kundkalkar, Sachin 13, 200 labor, labour 36, 78, 81, 133, 155, 159, 173, 174, 177, 196, 197, 210, 219, 230, 232, 238, 243, 247 Ladies Only 53, 54 Lagna Bandhan 53 Lahore 7, 48, 57n5, 57n9, 110, 140 Laila Majnu 71 language 2–3, 35, 44–45, 72, 84, 111, 128, 170, 178nn1–2, 181, 210–211, 219, 234nn6–7, 246, 249 Leila Majnun 127 liberalization 3 Lissy 178n3 listening 232 local 2–3, 13, 38, 44, 98, 160, 212, 238, 244, 246, 249 located mobility 244, 247, 250n11 location 2, 5, 9, 111, 154, 159, 244–245, 247 Lumiere, Auguste and Louis 21 lyricist 182, 197, 218, 229 Madhumati 86, 108, 118–120 Madras 2, 8, 10, 57n5, 97, 174–175 Madras film industry 72, 85 magazine 8, 10, 30, 32n4, 131, 134n6, 209, 238 Maharashtra 15, 90n11, 99, 244, 246–247 Majumdar, Phani 5–6, 10, 125, 134, 140 making-of videos 222–233, 234n1 Malaikkallan 71 Malayalam 6, 73, 167–168, 176–177, 179n1, 178n4, 178n6, 201–202, 244 Malayalam cinema 12, 167–169, 171, 173, 175–177, 178n4, 178n6

Index  257

Malayali 12, 167–169, 173, 175–177, 178n1, 217, 229 Malayan Film Production studios (MFP) 125, 127–130, 132–133 Malay cinema 125, 127, 129 Malegaon 2, 6, 9, 14–15, 187, 191n4, 238–249, 250nn9–10 Mallik, Anu 225 Mamoulian, Rouben 65 Manbhum 190, 245 Maneklal, Babubhai 25 Mangala 62, 68–70, 74n9 Mangamma Sabatham 68–69 Marathi 2, 5, 13, 15, 30, 32n2, 37, 139, 194–195, 199, 203, 222, 224, 228, 230, 241, 244–246 Marathi New Wave 198–199, 204–205 Marner Parey 50 Masdor, Kassim 129, 133 masquerade 53, 67–69, 167–168, 174–175, 178 Mayur Puri 209, 212–213, 220 media capital 4, 242, 244 media forms 3–5, 15, 108 media platforms 249 Meiyappa Chettiar 79 Meiyappan, A.V. 69, 79, 82 melodrama 4, 10, 12–13, 29, 62, 67, 108, 115–119, 128, 130, 140, 143–145, 169, 181–190, 191nn2–3 Menaka 178n3 Messrs. Samant and Co 26 Mhatre, Sanket 212, 214, 219 Middle East 7, 35, 37, 142, 176, 178n2 Midnight Masala 13, 201–202 migrant 12, 15, 42, 99, 129, 168, 172–173, 175, 177, 182, 184, 201, 205, 245–246 migration 12, 28, 109, 133, 157–158, 168, 172–173, 175, 178n7, 179n11, 191, 248, 250n10 Milan Dinar 24 Miranda, Carmen 68 Missamma 72 Miss Padma 2 Mistry, Fali 155–157 mixing 120, 126, 138, 187, 210, 224, 226, 232, 244 mobile phone 185, 187 mobility 12, 21, 28, 41, 50, 56, 62, 64–65, 74, 117, 126, 160, 178n6, 183, 190–191, 226, 232, 234n8, 244, 247–248, 250n11 modernity 8, 15, 41–42, 48, 54, 87, 95–96, 101, 105, 117, 173, 175, 232 Mohanlal 174, 178n3

Mollywood 239, 240 Mother India 2, 146 Moti Mahal Cinema 95, 98–102, 104–105 movement 1, 4, 6–8, 11, 28, 65, 73, 74n2, 77–79, 83, 88, 90n6, 90n8, 108, 110, 117–118, 120, 130, 153, 170, 173–174, 245, 247, 250n11 Mr. Haji, the Movie Actor 38–39 Mukesh 178n3 Mukherjee, Hrishikesh 108, 119–120, 120n3, 149n18 Mukherji, Rani 197 multilingual, multilinguality 4, 8, 14–15, 54, 61, 79, 195, 223, 226, 230, 234n6 multiplex 12, 182, 184, 191, 195, 201, 204, 240–241 Muntasir, Manoj 218–220 Murugadoss 229 music 2, 14, 38, 40–41, 51, 55, 61, 64–65, 68, 73, 81, 81–84, 109, 114, 116–118, 120, 124–126, 128–131, 144, 157, 170–171, 182–183, 185–187, 197, 203, 222–233, 234nn8–9 Mysore Pictures Corp Ltd. 27 Naalo Nenu 62, 65 Nabanna 114–115 Nadodikattu 174 Nagaiah 62 Nandanar 68 Naseeb ni Devi 24 Nasik 9, 240, 243, 247–248 Nasir, Shaikh 239–240 nation 1, 8, 28, 32, 37, 56, 79, 83, 89, 137, 145, 160, 169, 181, 208 national 1–8, 11, 28, 35–38, 41, 45, 48, 57n6, 77–79, 81–83, 85–87, 111, 120, 124–125, 128–129, 131–134, 138, 144–145, 152, 155–156, 160, 169, 171, 178n4, 190, 198, 205, 210, 219, 220n2, 239–244, 248–249 national cinemas 5, 11, 243 National Film Archive of India 27 National film awards 69–70 Nedumudi Venu 178n3 Nehruvian 137–138, 143–145, 147 network, networks 3–4, 9–11, 15, 36, 95, 97–98, 101–102, 105, 125, 131, 152–159, 176, 197, 210, 219, 220n5, 227, 239, 243, 247, 249 newspaper 25, 30, 36, 38, 45, 54–55, 86–87, 98–99, 104, 134n4, 246 New Theatres Ltd. 2, 6, 57n6, 108, 111, 130–131

258 Index

Ninnoru Maaran Arabikatha, Akkare 167– 168, 173–175, 179n12 Nishaan 68, 70, 74n9 Nizam 9, 23, 96–97, 99–101, 103–105, 106n6 Nottam: Touring Festival 179n13 objects 2, 4, 9, 12, 108, 168–173, 175, 177–178, 226–227, 250n11 Ohanians, Ovanes 38 orientalism 139, 152 Orientalist films 31 Pakistan 2, 4, 37, 140–141, 147, 148n4, 228, 243, 246 para-texts, paratexts 1, 222–223, 228, 234n2 pardah 100, 104, 105n4 Parsi Theater 31, 39, 41, 126–127, 133 Patalabhairavi 71, 75n12 Pathemari 179n11 Pather Panchali 10, 145–146 patrimonialism 96 Pawar, G.P. 29 Pawar, Lalita 29 pedagogy 169, 171, 175, 202 Persian 6–7, 35–39, 42, 44–45, 87, 101, 126 Persian Gulf 167–168, 175, 177, 178n2, 179n11 Phalke, Dadasaheb 23 place 2–5, 9, 12–13, 37, 39, 57, 95–98, 105, 108–109, 112, 120, 138, 153, 155, 174, 176, 195, 214, 216, 218, 226–227, 230–232, 234n5, 243, 245, 247 placelessness 226–228, 230–231, 234n5 platforms 2, 188–189, 191, 196, 223, 249 playback 2, 10, 69, 75n10, 82–83, 90n7, 128, 133, 197, 223–225, 228 Poochakkoru Mookkuthi 178n3 Poona, Pune 2, 7 Portuguese 30 post-liberalization 2, 222, 234n2 Prabhat Film Company 29 Prasad, L.V. 72 Prema 71 princely city 9, 95–96, 99, 105 princely modern 96 princely states 96, 102, 181 print culture 175–177 Priyadarshan 178n3, 178n10 production 3–4, 9–11, 13–14, 22, 24, 26, 29–30, 36–40, 42, 48, 50, 52, 54–55, 57n9, 61–62, 64–65, 68, 70–74, 75n15,

84–85, 89, 95–96, 99, 108–109, 124–134, 141–142, 145, 151–156, 158–159, 168, 175–176, 181–183, 185–186, 194–197, 199, 205, 209–210, 219, 220n4, 223–226, 228–231, 233, 234n1, 234n8, 239, 241–243, 247–249 public 3, 9–10, 23, 36–37, 41, 45, 49, 74n2, 81–83, 85, 95, 99–100, 102, 104–105, 112, 126, 132, 134, 144, 152, 156–157, 171, 173, 176, 187–188, 222, 226, 231, 248 Punjab 2, 10, 56, 86, 109, 139, 182 Puri, Mayur 209, 212, 213, 214, 220 Qajar Dynasty 40 Qarun’s Treasure 40 Queer 204 radio 45, 51, 83, 128, 222, 240, 248 Rahman, A. R. 2, 7, 222, 224–226, 228–230, 232–233 railways 9, 95, 99, 105 Raja Harishchandra 23 rakshasi 30 Ramachandran, M.G 72, 201, 209 Ramakrishna, P. 61, 65, 70, 72, 73, 74n6 Ramakrishna Studios 72 Rama Rao, N.T. 72 Ramlee, P. 127–133 Ramu Kariat 177 Randor Guy 68 Rangbhoomi 58n28 Rangwalla, M. 25 Ranjan 50, 68, 69 Rao, A. Nageswara 71, 72, 84, 130 Rathod, Kanjibhai 24 Ray, Satyajit 10, 137, 146 Razak 25 realism 4, 10, 81, 114–116, 119, 139, 144–145, 191n3, 195 reality effect 110, 114, 116–117, 190, 200, 202, 222, 230 recording 6, 14, 43, 210, 222–233, 234n5 recording studio 14, 223, 226–231, 233–234, 234n5 Reddi, B.N. 62, 65–66 Reddi, K.V. 71 region 5, 21, 28, 37, 89, 100, 101, 168–170, 172–178, 179n12, 181, 190, 191, 198, 242–249 regional 1, 3–5, 10–12, 14, 36, 44, 50, 54, 78, 81, 83, 86, 111, 120, 124–126, 128, 130–134, 155–156, 161, 168, 169, 171,

Index  259

187, 189–190, 195–205, 212, 222–223, 229, 233, 234, 238, 243–249 Rehman, Waheeda 40, 87, 88, 151 Reliance Films 25, 129, 210, 241, 250n4 remake 68, 188, 199, 210 Robins, Kennith 31 Roshan, Rajesh 225 Roy, Bimal 2, 10, 50, 78, 86, 108, 109, 111–112, 115, 116, 118–120, 120n4, 121n26, 130, 138, 140, 143, 148, 148n2, 220 Sabita Devi 2, 7, 48, 49, 50–52, 54–56, 57n3, 58n19, 58n31, 58n39, 75n15 Saigal, K.L. 131 Sajni 55, 58n37 Salaam Mumbai 40 Samant, Nilkanth Pandurang 26 Saminezhad, Ruhangiz 35, 36, 40, 42–46 Sampat Pandye, Ramkhilavan 26 Sandiwara plays 126–128, 132 sanskritization 80, 81, 87, 90n6 Sarai ke Bahar 56, 59n47 Saraswati Film Labs 25 Sasidharan, KN 172 Sasura Bada Paisawala 182, 188 Saudi Arabia 141, 176, 178n2 Savithri 61, 72 sea 97, 174, 176, 177 Secunderabad 9, 96–99, 102, 105, 106 Sepanta, Abdolhossein 35, 37, 40 Seth Hardat Rai Motilal Chambaria, Rai Bahadur 100, 101 Seth Lalji Meghji 100, 101, 105 sexuality 6, 195 Shahazada, Barbak 30 Shakuntala 24, 25 Shankar 8, 178n3 Shantaram,V. 2, 27, 29, 31, 109, 111, 198 Sharatchandran 179n13 Sharjah 176 Shaw Brothers 10, 124–125, 127–129, 131, 133, 134n3, 140 Shehar ka Jadoo 53 Shehazadi 23 Sherwani, N.A. 26 Sholay 191n4, 238–240 Siddi 30 Siddi Hyder Khan, Nawab 30–31 Silver King 53, 58n27 Singapore 10, 103, 124–133, 134n1, 134n2, 134n5 Singh, Ranveer 216 Singh, Shakti 215, 220

singing actresses 62 Singing in the Rain 45 single-screen theatres 184, 185, 188, 190 slaves 30 sociality 14, 191, 225, 243 socials 55, 84, 110, 112, 115, 119, 183, 189 song 13, 29, 64, 66, 68, 79, 83–87, 89, 115–120, 128, 130–133, 144, 155, 169, 170, 177, 195, 197, 200–205, 215–216, 224–225, 227–233, 234n6 song sequence 200, 202, 205, 223, 227 sonic stardom 36, 37, 42, 45 sound 1, 5, 7, 11, 15, 32n7, 35–45, 50–51, 56, 81, 114, 116, 121n22, 128, 155, 171–172, 211, 224, 226–232, 234n9, 235, 238, 248 soundtrack 1, 118–120, 133, 171 South Asia 5, 7, 11, 27, 35, 37, 124, 125, 129, 186, 230, 232, 234 Southeast Asia 124–126, 134n1, 152 South Indian cinema 75n10 (Soviet) Russia 143 spectacle 37, 39, 64, 68, 78, 84, 85, 89, 126, 131, 133, 134, 144 spoof 14, 239, 240, 242, 250n9 Sreekumar, Jagathy 176, 178n3 srinivasan 178n2, 90n6, 168, 174 stamboel popular theater 126 stardom 5–8, 35–37, 42, 44, 45, 53, 54, 56, 67, 68, 73, 74, 77, 78, 153, 157, 159, 160, 161, 183, 190, 201, 223, 234n2 stars 1–2, 6–8, 13, 35–36, 43, 45–46, 48, 51–53, 55–57, 61–62, 68, 72, 78, 81, 84–85, 144, 153, 156, 161, 168, 196–197, 200–202, 204, 209, 216–218, 225, 227, 230, 234n7, 238, 249 star text 82, 83, 85, 87, 89, 90n6 state of Sachin 30 Subah-O-Shaam 40 subtitles 12, 176, 217, 228 Sudama Productions 54, 55 Sukumari 178n3 Sulong, Jamil 127, 129, 132 Sultana 22, 23–27, 133 Superman of Malegaon 239, 240 Surat 23, 86, 246 Swapnadanam 176 Swargaseema 62, 63, 64–69 Swayamavaram 171, 172, 174 sync–sound 7 tableau 135, 157 Takay Ki Ni Hay 50

260 Index

talkies 2, 7, 24, 25, 28, 35, 36, 38–40, 44–45, 48, 51, 54, 57, 61, 65, 98, 101, 102, 104, 105n5, 109, 116, 128, 130, 140, 205, 248 Tamil 2, 8, 13, 52, 61–62, 68, 71–74, 77–79, 81–82, 84–88, 91, 128, 194, 201–202, 205, 209–210, 217, 219, 224, 228–230 Tamil cinema 8, 74, 77, 78, 80, 81–85, 120n8, 194, 220n3 Tamil films 70 Tamil nationalism 79 Tawa’if, Tawaif 43 technology 5, 7, 13, 14, 32n7, 36, 50, 51, 56, 75n10, 141, 185, 224–230, 234n4, 235n11, 245, 250n6, 250n7, 250n11 Tehran 35, 38, 39, 44 television 13, 170, 171, 184–186, 189, 191, 194–195, 200–205, 217, 222–223, 240 Telugu cinema 65, 72, 75n12, 194, 205, 218 Telugu films 5, 8, 15, 61, 62, 65, 70, 72, 87, 96, 99, 102, 199, 201–202, 217, 219, 220n5, 227 Telugu nationalism 5, 61 Tenali Ramakrishna 72 The Evil Within 11, 151–160 The Goddess of Love 24, 25 The Jungle Book 209, 210, 212, 216 The Lor Girl 7, 35–43, 45 The River 30, 139, 141, 239, 245 The Strange Gentleman 178n3 The Times of India 25, 26, 33, 38, 157, 239 Tins of India 112 Tiwari, Manoj 183, 188 Thomson Videos 176 traffic 74 translation 7, 13, 14, 29, 58n28, 126, 167, 170, 176, 204, 208–210, 213–214, 217, 219, 229 trans-national, transnational 3 trans-regional 36 travel 2, 6, 14, 19, 31, 36, 37, 39, 50, 57n9, 61, 62, 65, 70, 72, 74n2, 79, 95, 97, 98, 109, 110, 117, 126, 130, 143, 154, 155, 160, 167, 172, 175. 176, 182, 227, 228, 230–233, 234n9, 245–248 trilingual films 61, 62, 68, 71 Udayer Pathe 108, 112, 113, 114–115 Uday Shankar 8, 68

Varavelpu 173 Varavikrayam 65 Vasan, S. S 8, 62, 68, 69, 71, 81–85, 90n6, 90n10, 109, 139, 144, 146, 149n20, 168, 174, 178n3, 228 Vasundhara Devi 68 Vauhini Pictures 62 Vazhkai 79, 82, 83 VCD 12, 182, 184–188, 240 Veer Abhimanyu 24 vernacular 12, 128, 130, 133, 138, 160, 161, 182, 186, 188–191, 191n1, 244 VHS tape 170, 175–177 Viacom 194, 197–200, 229, 229, 231, 241 VIBGYOR 179n13 Victoria Fatma Film Company 25, 26 video 1–2, 4, 12, 14–15, 175, 181, 185, 187, 190–191, 200, 222–224, 226, 230, 233, 242, 246–247 video circuits 4, 15, 242, 243, 245 video culture 242 video parlours 12 Video Rafa 176 Vietnam 11, 152, 154–158, 161n1 Vijaya-Vauhini Studios 67 Vilasini, Vivek 173, 177, 178n9 Vilkkanundu Swapnangal 176 Village Girl 53 Visa 167, 170–172 Vishal-Shekhar 229 visual stardom 223 vocal 79, 213, 224, 226, 231 voice 5, 13, 36, 40, 41, 44–46, 51, 69, 83, 111, 112, 131, 201, 208–212, 214–217, 223. 225, 226, 229, 233, 234n2, 234n9, 238, 244 Vyjayanthimala 8, 68, 77–79, 80, 82, 83–88, 88, 89 water 114, 115, 177 website 196, 223, 32n8, 127, 134n3 West Asia 10, 15 worlding 173, 178n8 Xie, Lantian 175 Yajamanya, Vinod 227 Yaksha 31, 32n4, 58n26, 58n27, 65, 130, 131, 140, 181, 198 YouTube 45, 167, 217, 223, 248 Zubeida 23, 24